http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-10/03/c_133690478.htm

One need look no further than China's railways to see the enormous development of the country since its foundation on Oct. 1, 1949. At the 65th anniversary of that formative moment, every Chinese citizen has access to a modern train service. In 1949, the nation's railways extended only 22,000 km, with half the track in poor condition. In comparison, the mileage had expanded to 100,000 km by 2013. More than 10,000 km was high-speed infrastructure, and another 12,000 km was under construction at that time...Train track mileage is not the only data that makes clear the positive changes in China since 1949. In 2010, China overtook Japan to become the world's second-largest economy. China is the world's top goods trader. The nation also ranks third in global investment...

Behind the huge economic achievements made especially since the reform and opening-up policy was introduced in 1978, the nation has made huge, unprecedented strides in providing basic education and welfare for its population of 1.3 billion, the world's largest.

Sixty-five years ago, a shocking 80 percent of the population were illiterate, but by 2008, free nine-year compulsory education programs were fully implemented across the country. This year, 7.27 million university students will graduate, marking a historical high.

Nutritious meals are being provided to students from poor families with billions of yuan budgeted each year by the government.

About 32.29 million rural students have benefited from the 46.23 billion yuan (7.52 billion U.S. dollars) in subsidies the central government has allocated since 2011, when it launched the nutrition improvement program. Also, more than 10 million university students have completed their studies after being granted student loans under programs adopted since 1999.

The 660 million people that China has lifted out of poverty since 1981 account for more than 70 percent of the world's total.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has worked hard to provide basic healthcare for its people, with over 95 percent of the population covered by different sorts of healthcare programs by 2011.

However, there remain problems among the achievements, and they must be dealt with increasingly urgently. The issues include restraints on future development from the environment and resources, wide gaps between the wealthy and the poor, industrial overcapacity and imbalanced regional development.

Meanwhile, the Chinese economy must also brave challenges imposed from an economic slowdown after a boom over the past decade, as employment and structural control are key agendas for the government.

In order to cope, the Chinese leadership has showed political courage in pushing comprehensive reforms, including fighting corruption. Overhauls of administrative management, fiscal and financial systems are steadily being carried out as well.

There is no doubting the truth of Chinese President Xi Jinping's assertion that today's China is nearer to its great goal of rejuvenation than at any period in history.

http://ourfuture.org/20140930/reagan-set-up-the-death-of-the-middle-class-but-china-was-the-clincher?utm_source=pmupdate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20141003

Our 2010 Reagan Revolution Home To Roost series, especially the post Reagan Revolution Home To Roost — In Charts described the beginning of the great decoupling of the American economy from the middle class...DAVE JOHNSON


The summary:


Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then.


Working people’s share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down.


This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top.


And forced working people to spend down savings to get by.


Which forced working people to go into debt. (total household debt as percentage of GDP)


The Reagan Revolution hit us hard, but a lot of hardship hit the fan right around the year 2000. The benefits of our economy had already been going more to a few at the top than to the rest of us, but something happened in 2000 to make that trend seriously accelerate. After 2000 literally everything was going to a few at the top, with things just getting worse for the rest of us

So what happened? Edsall spoke with Paul Beaudry, an economist at the University of British Columbia, “whose research showing that high-skill job growth came to a halt around 2000 has successfully forced a major change in the debate over employment.”


What happened was trade, especially with China, and the outsourcing of American jobs. Combined with “advances in technology and automation,” 2000 was an “inflection point.”

MORE

http://ourfuture.org/20141002/7-revelations-from-those-secret-goldman-sachs-tapes

The secret Goldman Sachs tapes released this week by ProPublica and This American Life are attracting a lot of attention, and rightly so. They were clandestinely recorded by Carmen Segarra, an investigator for the New York Federal Reserve Bank who was eventually fired – either for being uncooperative or, as she says and the tapes suggest, for attempting to be a strong regulator...Financial cases can seem complicated, especially in situations when there are multiple parties involved. But the reality that is revealed in these tapes is clear enough, and can be summarized in seven takeaways:

1. The New York Fed’s investigators are surprisingly fearful and defensive.

They’re called “regulators,” although the proper title for the Fed officials who monitor America’s banks is “supervisor.” When it comes to protecting our economy, they’re the cops on the beat. One of the striking things that these tapes make clear is that, rather than being forceful and assertive – in other words, rather than “supervising” – the Fed’s staff is defensive, diffident and afraid to antagonize the bankers they oversee...The tapes suggest that Mike Silva, Segarra’s boss, wants to do a good job. But he is constantly worried that Goldman Sachs executives might be upset or angered if Segarra or another member of his team becomes too aggressive...This seems to reflect a culture that comes from higher up in the New York Fed. It’s a culture of submissiveness, not authority. As we will see, there are reasons for that.

2. “Regulatory capture” is real – and even worse than we thought.

Police officers aren’t known for negotiating their choice of words with the citizens they meet or arrest. But these tapes show that Mike Silva and other Fed officials are constantly negotiating the language in their own reports with the bankers they oversee. This, and the fear that Fed officials display on these tapes, is a conspicuous example of “regulatory capture,” a phenomenon in which the officials who oversee the banks become “captured” by the culture, values and opinions of the bankers they’re supposed to regulate. Much of that capture is due to the fact that the only well-paying jobs available to ambitious regulators are frequently with the banks themselves. It can also be caused by the human tendency to please those with whom we work.

3. “Embedded” regulators face special challenges.

The problem becomes even worse when regulators or supervisors are “embedded” in the institutions they supervise, as Carmen Segarra was. They go to work, not in their own organizations, but in the offices of the banks they supervise. Most of the people they encounter throughout the day – in the elevator, at the coffee machine, the washroom – are employed by the institution they’re expected to investigate with a skeptical eye. One Fed supervisor told a consultant that he had only been working in this way for three weeks when “I saw the capture set in.” He was talking about himself. The tapes show that investigators like Carmen Segarra were rarely given reinforcement, encouragement, or a sense of team spirit. They were not provided with the emotional and logistical resources that might have helped counteract their isolation, loneliness and identification with the subjects of their investigations.

4. Self-policing doesn’t work.

One of the great flaws in our bank regulatory system is its reliance on Wall Street institutions to police themselves and voluntarily report misbehavior to the proper authorities. The massive crime wave that led to the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated rather conclusively that these institutions are, as a rule, somewhat disinclined to do so. This self-policing policy almost inevitably leads to the kind of diffidence displayed by Silva and other regulators. As one unidentified man says on the tapes:



“We don’t need to.”

If the regulators themselves don’t think that disclosure is a requirement for bankers, why would the bankers themselves?

5. The Fed’s governance structure is broken.

All of the country’s financial agencies suffer from “regulatory capture,” but the Federal Reserve has another problem. The Fed and its branches, which were created by the United States government, is run by boards largely composed of bank executives and their corporate allies. And the Fed isn’t just an oversight agency. As a central bank, the Fed is a governmental institution that provides banks with vast financial resources – supposedly in return for compliance with government policies. But when bankers sit on its boards, it has powerful incentives not to look very carefully at its level of compliance. Jamie Dimon, CEO of scandal-ridden JPMorgan Chase, sat on the Fed board that made the hiring and pay decisions for the its senior officials while Carmen Segarra was employed there.

6. Senators Warren and Brown are right. We need public hearings.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown reacted to the Segarra tapes by calling for public hearings into the New York Fed’s actions. “It’s our job to make sure our financial regulators are doing their jobs,” said Warren, who added:



They’re absolutely right. And while they’re at it, they should take a look at some of the other regulators, too. There is nothing in their record to inspire confidence.

There’s one final lesson to be learned from the release of these tapes:

7. Goldman Sachs is still run by dicks.

Pardon my language, but I think you’ll agree it’s justified....MORE

BONUS! VIDEO DISCUSSION AT LINK

China Grove by The Doobie Brothers:

Granted, it's about a place in Texas by the same name, but still, China.

http://ourfuture.org/20140917/the-myth-that-sold-the-financial-bailout?utm_source=pmupdate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140926

Monday SEPTEMBER 15TH marked the sixth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The investment bank’s bankruptcy accelerated the financial meltdown that began with the near collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008 (saved by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan) and picked up steam with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going under the week before Lehman’s demise. The day after Lehman failed, the giant insurer AIG was set to collapse, only to be rescued by the Fed.

With the other Wall Street behemoths also on shaky ground, then–Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ran to Capitol Hill, accompanied by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner. Their message was clear: The apocalypse was nigh. They demanded Congress make an open-ended commitment to bail out the banks. In a message repeated endlessly by the punditocracy ever since, the failure to cough up the money would have led to a second Great Depression.

The claim was nonsense then, and it’s even greater nonsense now.

To be sure, without the helping hand of the government, most of the major Wall Street banks would have quickly collapsed. There was a full-fledged run on the big five investment banks. With Bear Stearns and Lehman already having faced bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were certain to follow suit in the very near future. Citigroup and Bank of America were also bound to fail, by anyone’s calculations. At best, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo might have survived, but even these two relatively healthy banks could well have been caught up in the maelstrom. This would have meant the demise of Wall Street as we know it. But would it have meant a second Great Depression, defined as a decade of double-digit unemployment? This is where the hand waving gets fast and furious. After all, we all know that the first Great Depression began with a chain of bank collapses. How could this bank crisis have ended any differently?

Well, for those who have followed economic developments over the last 80 years, it should be easy to see how it would have ended differently. First, unlike the days of the first Great Depression, we have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This is a huge deal because the FDIC is set up to quickly take over a failing bank as part of its routine practices. Typically it goes into a teetering bank on a Friday evening after closing and spends the weekend working over the bank’s books. On Monday morning the bank is open for business as usual, either as part of a merger worked out by the FDIC or under the FDIC’s temporary management. Either way, business can proceed as usual, with the customers for the most part able to make transactions as if nothing had happened.

The FDIC doesn’t cover the investment banks, nor does it help other financial institutions that were caught in the chaos created by the collapse of the housing bubble, but it would ensure that we kept a system of payments in order so the country would be able to conduct its business. The collapse of the investment banks and the loss of wealth by those who had lent them money or had made uninsured loans to FDIC insured banks would have made the immediate downturn worse than what we saw in 2008 and ’09. There is no reason, however, to believe this would have condemned us to a decade of stagnation. For we know the other big secret to avoid another Great Depression: Spend money. President Franklin Roosevelt did this to some extent with the New Deal, which brought the unemployment rate down to the single digits by 1936. However, it was the massive deficit spending associated with World War II that finally got us of the Depression.

While the attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 produced the consensus for going to war, the only thing preventing us from having large-scale spending for infrastructure, health care, education and other domestic purposes a decade earlier was politics. If there had been political support for massive spending in these areas, the Depression could have ended in 1931 instead of 1941.
The same situation would have applied in 2008 and ’09. The promulgators of the second Great Depression myth are implicitly claiming that we never would have had any major stimulus in response to an economic collapse even greater than the one we saw. That is an incredibly strong, unjustified assumption. After all, do we really think that Republican members of Congress would insist that they would never support stimulus even in the face of double-digit unemployment? President George W. Bush pushed through the first round of stimulus in February of 2008, when the unemployment rate was just 4.7 percent. It is ridiculous to imagine that Congress never would have agreed to a stimulus package of spending and tax cuts that could have gone far toward bringing the unemployment rate down toward more normal levels. It would imply a Republican Party far more out of touch with reality than the one we saw in Congress in 2008 and one that would continue to get elected in the face of double-digit unemployment.

The second Great Depression mythologizers — including Geithner, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and the editorial board of The Washington Post — assume they can say whatever they want and that people will accept it because they are important people whose conventional wisdom is rarely, if ever, challenged. They even managed to retain their authority after failing to see the economic threat posed by the housing bubble. The bottom line is that for these people, the goal was saving Wall Street — full stop. Whether the rest of the country suffered was beside the point. As a result of the hysteria they promoted, they prevented the market from correcting this horrible source of waste and the upward redistribution of income that continues to act as an enormous drag on the economy. The fact that many of the promulgators of the second Great Depression tale had close ties to Wall Street may go a long way toward explaining their behavior.

http://ourfuture.org/20140917/senate-republicans-filibuster-equal-pay-for-women-again?utm_source=pmupdate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140919



Republicans in the Senate on Monday SEPTEMBER 15TH unanimously filibustered the Paycheck Fairness Act. Did you see this on the news? Did you hear about it on the radio? Did you read about it in your local paper? There is an election coming and accurate, objective information is essential for democracy to function.

The Paycheck Fairness Act “amends the portion of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) known as the Equal Pay Act to revise remedies for, enforcement of, and exceptions to prohibitions against sex discrimination in the payment of wages.” It “revises the exception to the prohibition for a wage rate differential based on any other factor other than sex. Limits such factors to bona fide factors, such as education, training, or experience.” To sum up, it would put in place measures to ensure that women will be paid the same as men if they do the same work.

The vote was 52-40 in favor, but it was killed because it was filibustered by Republicans. Among the few outlets that even bothered to report that the bill was before the Senate, few reported that there was a Republican filibuster to kill the effort.

What Information Do Voters Get To Help Them Decide?

Politico at least reported that there was a vote:

“Senate blocks pay equity bill.”

“Senate Republicans rejected a measure written by Senate Democrats aimed at bridging differences in pay between men and women.

The Paycheck Fairness Act fell short 52-40, failing to clear a 60-vote procedural vote hurdle on Monday evening, the third time the measure has failed since spring of 2012.”

So women should be angry at “the Senate”? It “failed to clear” a “procedural vote hurdle.” What information do voters get from this, to help them decide who to vote for and against? But wait, it gets better. After April’s Republican filibuster of this bill Politico had the headline: “Senate GOP blocks pay equity bill.” This time they took out “GOP”.

Others

The Hill: “Senate GOP blocks Paycheck Fairness Act for the second time” (Actually it was the fourth time. See Feministing: “For the 4th time, Senate Republicans vote against equal pay.”)

MSNBC: “Republicans block Paycheck Fairness Act yet again.”

Talking Points Memo: “Senate Republicans Filibuster Equal Pay For Women Bill.”

Think Progress: “Republicans Unanimously Block Equal Pay Bill.”

The Huffington Post: “Paycheck Fairness Act Blocked Again By Senate GOP.”

Salon: “GOP blocks Paycheck Fairness Act — but that’s OK because the pay gap just improved by 1 cent!“

Except for The Hill, these are by and large “progressive” oriented sites. Almost no one else reported it at all.

http://ourfuture.org/20140930/nuclear-weapons-what-could-we-get-if-we-invested-1-trillion-elsewhere?utm_source=pmupdate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140930



President Obama campaigned on an anti-war platform and has talked convincingly about moving gradually towards a world that is free of nuclear weapons, yet a new report shows that nearly half (45 percent) of the 16,300 nuclear weapons on earth belong to the United States. That includes a stockpile of nearly 4,800 right in our own backyards, in the United States itself.

In addition to the security threats posed by nuclear proliferation, all these weapons come at a real cost. The U.S. is currently set to ramp up spending on its nuclear arsenal in order to operate, sustain and modernize the “nuclear triad” of ballistic submarines, land-based intercontinental missiles, and long-range bombers. Over the next 10 years, this project is estimated to cost the federal government about $355 billion, according to a recent Congressional Budget Office report. And other experts project that over the next 30 years, spending on things like modernizing facilities, buying replacement systems and upgrading existing weapons could top $1 trillion.

Not only does this increased spending undermine President Obama’s own global non-proliferation efforts that began in 2009, it’s also a significant long-term financial investment in weapons that don’t even respond to today’s threats. Meanwhile, pinched federal spending and deficit hawking continues to stall progress on domestic initiatives like education, the economy and jobs programs that Americans consistently say should be the nation’s top priority.

What would happen if, instead of building our nuclear arsenal, we invested those dollars on domestic initiatives like clean energy, infrastructure improvements, education, or health care? For $1 trillion, here are a few alternative things we could do for future generations:

Invest in the education sector, which could create 26.7 million jobs;
Double our nation’s nutrition assistance budget over the next five years;
Power every household in the nation with wind energy for the next nine years;
Double current Head Start enrollment for the next 55 years; or
Provide every American currently living below the poverty line with free health care for the next seven years.

Back in 2009, President Obama was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his support of nuclear disarmament (something the National Priorities Project knows a little bit about, as the organization is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize this year for our work on U.S. military spending). Let’s ask him to earn his right to keep it by not spending hundreds of billions of dollars into more nuclear weapons we don’t need, and instead investing here at home.

AH, BUT AS THEY SAY IN THE BOG, WE MUST LOOK FORWARD...TO CONTINUING WASTE AND DANGER FROM OUR WAR FOOTING

http://ourfuture.org/20141002/government-spending-cuts-and-ebola-and-secret-service?utm_source=pmupdate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20141002

Republicans “saved money” by cutting the government’s budget for various health agencies … because “government spending” is always bad. The February 2011 Food Safety News reported, “FDA, FSIS, CDC Face Cuts in House GOP Budget“:



The next month, Mother Jones published, in “Death By a Single GOP Cut?“:



Fast-forward to September 9, 2014, and this headline from The Hill: “GOP cuts funding request to fight Ebola.”



A few recent headlines…

HuffPo, Agency Leading Ebola Response Has Had Budget Cut Nearly $600 Million Since 2010.

Mother Jones, Budget Cuts “Eroded Our Ability to Respond” to Ebola, Says Top Health Official.

Details at Blue Nation Review, Ebola, Enterovirus D68 – Remember When GOP Slashed the CDC?



You know the drill. Government is bad … government spending is a waste … We the People and accountability and transparency lead to cumbersome bureaucracy … Corporations always do everything better and more efficiently than a “collectivist” We the People approach – a k a democracy.

Because one-dollar-one-vote “market solutions” like pay lanes on highways are better than one-person-one-vote democracy like carpool lanes. Like letting private companies decide which vaccines and drugs and antibiotics should be developed, based on what makes them the most profit in a given quarter.

Apparently Republicans think the rich “job creators” don’t get contagious diseases and infections. I guess only the rest of us “takers” can get sick.

MORE--ON WHITE HOUSE SECURITY CUTS--AT LINK

THE IMPLICATIONS OF THIS VIDEO VIS A VIS CURRENT EVENTS LEAVES ME RATHER QUEASY...

THIS ONE, ALSO

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/03/1334013/-Germany-just-eliminated-tuition-while-Americans-are-drowning-in-1-2-trillion-student-loan-debt?detail=email

Written by an American MBA expat living in Germany.

Germany has just joined other nations of the Continental European Union to eliminate all university tuition, as a human right. This comes in addition to the fact that all countries in the European Union as a human right have some type of medical access for all of its citizens, yet on these benchmarks the United States continues to lag far behind in creating a separate and unequal state mired in a wage slave economy emanating out of a history of chattel slavery of which the $1.2 trillion dollar student loan debt slavery economy has become an intricate mechanism to keep the American working class impoverished, along with the concurrent effects of medical bankruptcy, (which accounts for most bankruptcies) and underwater mortgages in which there is no bailout in sight in an economy and state where only Wall Street banksters received bailouts, because as they own almost everything in the economy they are considered to be too big to fail by the best government money could buy through the power of its K Street lobbyists.

Imagine as the American federal government doesn't honestly give a big enough rat's ass about you or your kids to offer you a tuition free university education, but the German government does care enough about your family as a human right to give you a free university education, even if you've never been to Germany and never paid any taxes to the German government, all you got to do is come to Germany. Oh by the way, you also get access for yourself and your family members to a student health medical plan which has no deductibles, and doesn't have pre-existing conditions, and that is the difference between a government working for working class people, as opposed to the best government money can buy, who works overwhelmingly for the 1%.

Hope your weekend goes well.

I am in the midst of a 3 day yard sale event...and it's raining. I stand by the yard sale sign in the rain with a list of the participating addresses....and people just pass me by.

Then they turn around after driving through the place, and ask for the list. Who says the frontier spirit is gone?

Sunday we make lasagna to celebrate...come on over for a piece!

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/09/30/1333301/-One-Of-Those-Hard-Choices-That-Would-Screw-Low-Wage-Workers?detail=email



In a nutshell the White House/Dept. of Labor is considering not implementing a new wage and hours rule concerning home healthcare workers that was supposed to begin in 2015. This is bringing some long overdue basic wage law concerning overtime to a segment of the labor market that has long been wrongly excluded from such protections. This group of workers is excited about the forthcoming positive economic changes that are about to enter their lives.

So sorry, unprotected and overlooked worker bees who are in the trenches actually caring for the nations home-bound, disabled and/or elderly population, but the Obama Labor Department may put your little bit of economic justice on hold because an industry lobbyist has enlisted a Republican Senator to put "pressure" on the Labor Department to delay the implementation of the rule.

The Labor Department is also hearing from the National Association of Medicaid Directors who, along with the industry, would prefer not paying people under the new standards for another year and a half. According to the article, this group says they don't have the "tools" necessary to comply with the rule.

Oh really? What special tools are required to pay people overtime? Dear Medicaid Directors - you can use the same departments and staff and clocking in and out mechanisms you are using right now. But when the hours go over certain constraints, you pay the people by their hours times 1.5. See how easy that is? Didn't your Director position require basic third grade arithmetic?

Labor Department at this stage is apparently only considering this unconscionable delay. Let's add our voices to this deliberation over denying people of pay for time earned:

Labor Department! Stop considering it. Do what you said you would do and ensure the wage and hour compliance these workers are entitled to....

agency reimbursements more meaning they could not afford to give raises of more than a few cents. But hey, we can live on $10 an hour part time as needed no benefits right?

It is amazing how the government manages to continue selling Brooklyn Bridges to a gullible public. Americans buy wars they don’t need and economic recoveries that do not exist.

The best investment in America is a highly leveraged fund that invests only in large cap companies that are buying back their own stocks. Many of the firms repurchasing their stocks are borrowing in order to push up their stock prices, executive “performance bonuses,” and shareholders’ capital gains. The debt incurred will have to be serviced by future earnings. This is not a picture of capitalism that is driving the economy by investment.

Neither is consumer spending driving the economy. The US Census Bureau’s 2013 Income and Poverty Report concludes that in 2013 real median household income was 8 percent below the amount in 2007, the year prior to the 2008 recession and has declined to the level in 1994, two decades ago! Even though real household income has not regained the pre-recession level and has declined to the level 20 years ago, the government and financial press claim that the economy has been in recovery since June 2009.

Neither is an increase in consumer debt driving the economy. The only growth in personal debt is in student loans....

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/03/illusionary-growth/

http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dealbook/2014/10/03/hackers-attack-cracked-10-banks-in-major-assault/?emc=edit_th_20141004&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=67594617

The huge cyberattack on JPMorgan Chase that touched more than 83 million households and businesses was one of the most serious computer intrusions into an American corporation. But it could have been much worse.

Questions over who the hackers are and the approach of their attack concern government and industry officials. Also troubling is that about nine other financial institutions — a number that has not been previously reported — were also infiltrated by the same group of overseas hackers, according to people briefed on the matter. The hackers are thought to be operating from Russia and appear to have at least loose connections with officials of the Russian government, the people briefed on the matter said.

It is unclear whether the other intrusions, at banks and brokerage firms, were as deep as the one that JPMorgan disclosed on Thursday. The identities of the other institutions could not be immediately learned.

The breadth of the attacks — and the lack of clarity about whether it was an effort to steal from accounts or to demonstrate that the hackers could penetrate even the best-protected American financial institutions — has left Washington intelligence officials and policy makers far more concerned than they have let on publicly. Some American officials speculate that the breach was intended to send a message to Wall Street and the United States about the vulnerability of the digital network of one of the world’s most important banking institutions.

“It could be in retaliation for the sanctions” placed on Russia, one senior official briefed on the intelligence said. “But it could be mixed motives — to steal if they can, or to sell whatever information they could glean.”

GEE, YOU THINK SO? MORE AT LINK

I have to think that modern China gets the WORST of both worlds:

the regimentation and coercion of fascism
the pollution and inequality of Crony Capitalism

And I fear that Hong Kong will see all its guaranteed protections stripped away. It's rather like the Middle Book of the Lord of the Rings....too depressing to read or contemplate.

Yesterday (Date of publication: October 1) Bloomberg ran a piece saying that the Russian Central Bank was considering imposing capital controls.

As a result of the story, the ruble came under heavy selling pressure and the central bank was forced to intervene for the first time in months in the currency market.

Over-night the Central Bank have not only rubbished the claims as pure lies but have opened an investigation into market manipulation. The Russian government has also come out and said that capital controls are completely off the table, and yet, the western media continues to run stories of how Russia is considering imposing them.

There was an excellent piece last week by a colleague of mine on this site on why Russia is bringing in new legislation against foreign media.

Complete story at: http://russia-insider.com/en/business_opinion_media_watch/2014/10/01/09-08-21pm/bloomberg_lied_about_ruble_and_manipulated_market

The Bloomberg article here... http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-30/ruble-slides-past-intervention-level-on-capital-control-concern.html

My commentary:

The Russian Duma recently passed a law stipulating that any major media outlet cannot be more that 20% owned by foreign interests. While there's no outrage currently in the US media about this (you know, Putin is restricting freedoms or some such nonsense), in reality foreign controlled media is just another way for the west to destabilize countries that don't do what they're told when they are told to do it.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/26/russia-limit-foreign-ownership-media

Now Ukraine? Ukraine has imposed capital controls.

How are you, Matt?

THAT'S WHAT WE ARE AFRAID OF. HAVEN'T THEY DONE ENOUGH?

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/28/detroit-demolish-ruins-capitalists-abandoned-buildings-plan?CMP=ema_565

Detroit is knocking down 200 houses a week, with 40,000 to go and $1bn in the program. The city’s controversial plan aims to bring more wealthy investors but critics say will drive out black residents...Shervonne Colvin is ecstatic. This spring, one streetlight was turned back on at the end of her block. Last month, almost one third of her block was razed to the ground by demolition trucks.

That would hardly excite most city dwellers, but Colvin doesn’t live in just any city. She lives in Detroit, where municipal neglect has become customary. Detroit has been the unwitting star of a photo subgenre christened “ruin porn”, with fans in all corners of the world – except in its native hometown. Two years ago – the same year Forbes named Detroit the most dangerous city in America – local media reported that abandoned homes had become dumping grounds for dead bodies.

Good riddance to that, say residents.

“It makes me feel like the city is doing something, that they are paying attention. For years we felt like we’d been forgotten. We were frightened to walk down the street. It felt like a third world country out here,” Colvin says.

For the first time in 15 years, the 54-year-old resident of north-west Detroit, a former educator and cosmetologist, says she feels like she is a part of the city again. Her block in northwest Detroit has been gone for years now. She says the only reason she has stayed is because her husband refuses to go.

LONG AND READ-WORTHY VISION OF A DYSTOPIAN FUTURE...FOR ALL CITIES. DETROIT IS THE PROTOTYPE.

It has been empty for 2+ years. It actually was not in bad shape but the bank had held the price up way above what it was worth until last week (plus the upgrade costs). It is on a street with a bus line, a block from a school and just off a parkway.

I got the list St Paul required to occupy the property and there were things to replace on the list that were not critical but in order to keep people from buying it for $50k slapping a coat of paint on it and flipping it they also made it impossible for me to buy and fix, critical first, upgrades while I lived there.

The house and garage are side by side and take up most of the lot so if they tear it down whatever goes in there will be the same size and either no garage or no back yard cause the lot is not deep.

If I were able, I would have done it anyway but even contracting out work you have to be there every day and I cannot possibly do that.

Location, location, location.

Dayton, Ohio too

Very sad to see blighted neighborhoods.

I'm not a Planetary Scientist, so I'm just as smart as people who aren't Climate Scientists.

that everything goes haywire, mechanical breakdowns pop up and communications get crossed.

I think I must have been born during Mercury retrograde...those are the only 9 weeks of the year that I can accomplish stuff.

I thought you said Mars. That explains everything now.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's what the USA did in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Different methods, same end result...



Today, the Ukrainian Central Bank announced changes to foreign exchange laws in a bid to help oligarchs while hurting the average Ukrainian.

The limit on company's foreign exchange holdings has been altered to allow 25% of revenues to be held in non-hryvina denominated currency from a prior 0%. At the same time the Central Bank cut the maximum an individual citizen of Ukraine is allowed to transact to 3,000 hryvina (around 230 dollars) from 15,000.

The move is all too reminiscent of Yeltsin's decision to default and devalue the Russian Ruble in August 1998. The previous 12 months had seen the Russian Central Bank paying out 27 billion dollars to defend the currency (around 6% of GDP at the time). What they were really doing was letting many of the well-connected convert their Ruble holdings ahead of the devaluation.

The Ukrainian Central Bank has so far lowered its foreign currency reserves from 20 billion to 15 billion in the past 9 months. This is on top of 1 billion dollars of IMF money and 1.5 billion of World Bank money which has been injected, implying that they have spent 7.5 billion propping up the currency, equivalent to about 8% of GDP. This is if we trust their excel spread-sheet from August, I would not be surprised if we discover five years later that the real amounts were much larger owing to theft.

Complete story at - http://russia-insider.com/en/ukraine_business/2014/09/22/10-41-21pm/default_and_devaluation_loom_ukraine_bails_out_oligarchs_and

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ECONOMY_WHY_NO_PAY_RAISES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-10-03-15-31-26

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Where are the pay raises?

Employers in the United States are hiring at a brisk pace. Unemployment has sunk to a nearly healthy rate. Jobs are being filled across a range of industries.

Yet the September jobs report released Friday contained a puzzling fact: Paychecks still aren't growing.

Economists regard stagnant wages as a red flag for the 5-year-old recovery. Robust job growth has typically fueled rising wages. And without higher pay, workers have less money to spend and save - and that, in turn, keeps the economy from strengthening further.

Whatever meager pay raises most workers have received in this recovery have been all but eaten up by low inflation. The average hourly wage for non-management workers has remained $20.67 for two months. It's risen just 2.3 percent year-over-year, just slightly above inflation.

It just might be the pivotal challenge for families as well as for the economy. The size of a paycheck shapes budgets for consumers, whose spending accounts for most of the U.S. economy's activity.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_GULF_OIL_SPILL_RESTORATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-10-03-19-17-23

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Officials approved plans Friday to spend $627 million on 44 projects meant to aid recovery from the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but environmentalists are fuming that $58 million will go to an Alabama beachfront hotel they say will hurt rather than help the Gulf.

BP PLC provided $1 billion in 2011 as a coastal restoration down payment following the Deepwater Horizon spill. The money is meant to restore the environment or improve public access to the Gulf.

Trustees, including the five Gulf states and four federal agencies, had to reach consensus on the plan. Two earlier phases totaling $71 million were already approved, and BP will likely have to pay more after environmental fines are levied.

The single biggest sum, $318 million, will go to restore land and marsh on four barrier islands off Louisiana's rapidly eroding coast: Chenier Ronquille, North Breton Island, Shell Island and Whiskey Island.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MERCEDES_UNION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-10-03-19-16-11

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) -- The United Auto Workers union said Friday it is forming a local aimed at representing the Mercedes plant in Alabama in a move mirroring its efforts with fellow German automaker Volkswagen in Tennessee.

UAW President Dennis Williams was joined by top labor officials at Mercedes parent Daimler AG and the German union IG Metall to announce the new effort to organize the plant, which is the company's only factory worldwide without labor representation.

"It's time for the committed and hard-working employees (in Tuscaloosa) to have the same representation that Daimler employees enjoy around the world," Williams said. "It's the right thing to do."

The UAW made a similar move at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after narrowly losing a union vote in a contentious February election. The union has said it has reached a "consensus" with VW that it will recognize the UAW there without another vote once they sign up enough workers.

Volkswagen has said there is no formal agreement.

my musical library is rather limited.

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/eric-holder-reason-robert-rubin-isnt-behind-bars?akid=12321.227380.4eL9U4&rd=1&src=newsletter1021678&t=24

As a result, the Wall Streeters who profited most from illegal acts in the bubble years got to keep their haul...The big news item in Washington last week was Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to resign. Undoubtedly there are positives to Holder's tenure as attorney general, but one really big minus is his decision not to prosecute any of the Wall Street crew whose actions helped to prop up the housing bubble. As a result of this failure, the main culprits walked away incredibly wealthy even as most of the country has yet to recover from the damage they caused...Just to be clear, it is not against the law to be foolish and undoubtedly many of the Wall Streeters were foolish. They likely believed that house prices would just keep rising forever. But the fact that they were foolish doesn't mean that they didn't also break the law. It's likely that most of the Enron felons believed in Enron's business model. After all, they held millions of dollars of Enron stock. But they still did break the law to make the company appear profitable when it wasn't.

In the case of the banks, there are specific actions that were committed that violated the law. Mortgage issuers like Countrywide and Ameriquest knowingly issued mortgages based on false information. They then sold these mortgages to investment banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs who packaged them into mortgage backed securities. These banks knew that many of the mortgages being put into the pools for these securities did not meet their standards, but passed them along anyhow. And, the bond-rating agencies rated these securities as investment grade, giving many the highest possible ratings, even though they knew their quality did not warrant such ratings. All three of these actions -- knowingly issuing mortgages based on false information, deliberately packaging fraudulent mortgages into mortgage backed securities, and deliberately inflating the ratings for mortgage backed securities - are serious crimes that potentially involve lengthy prison sentences. Holder opted not to pursue criminal cases against the individuals involved. In the last couple of years Holder did bring civil cases against these banks that led to multi-billion settlements. These settlements won big headlines that gave the appearance of being tough on the banks.

If we look at the issue more closely the rationale for these settlements gets pretty shaky. When Bank of America or J.P. Morgan has to pay out several billion dollars in penalties in 2013 or 2014, the people being hit most immediately are current shareholders and to a lesser extent top management. Since stock turns over frequently, the overlap between the group of people who hold these banks' stock today and the people who benefited from the profits racked up in the bubble years will be limited. This means for the most part the fines are hitting people who did not profit from the wrong doing. The same story holds for the top executives. Insofar as these are different people from those in charge in the bubble years (this is mostly the case), they can rightly tell their boards that they should not be held responsible for the wrongdoing of their predecessors. As a result, boards are likely to compensate top management if they fail to hit bonus targets due to the fines. This just means more of a hit to current shareholders. So the people who profited from criminal acts get to keep their money, while Holder can boast about nailing people who had nothing to do with the crime.

Had Holder treated this as a normal criminal matter he would have looked to build cases from the bottom up. This means finding specific examples of mortgage agents issuing obviously fraudulent mortgages, cases where these mortgages got bundled into securities at investment banks, and then marked as investment grade by the rating agencies. The people involved would then be pressed to say whether they are either buffoons or crooks. Most probably would not pass as the former. The next question is why they decided to break the law. When you get people to admit that they were acting on instructions from their bosses, you then ask the bosses whether they want to spend many years in jail or would prefer to explain why they thought it was a good idea to commit fraud. (This is the pattern the Justice Department is pursuing in going after illegal campaign contributions to Washington Mayor Vincent Gray.) We can never know this pattern of prosecution would have nailed big fish like Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein or Citigroup's Robert Rubin. We do know that Holder never even tried. As a result the Wall Streeters who profited most from illegal acts in the bubble years got to keep their haul. This is the message that bankers will take away going forward. This virtually guarantees ongoing corruption in finance.

Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer" and the more recently published "Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of The Bubble Economy." He also has a blog, Beat the Press, where he discusses the media's coverage of economic issues.

http://www.alternet.org/world/why-showdown-islamic-extremists-war-pentagon-was-hoping?akid=12303.227380.TP4DRj&rd=1&src=newsletter1021135&t=6

As the U.S. escalates its bombing campaign against ISIS (or IS or ISIL), U.S. officials seem to have found an enemy we can all love to hate and fear. ISIS beheads hostages, conducts brutal ethnic cleansing and has links to Al-Qaeda. DC power players have eagerly embraced a small war made to order to restore America's wounded military pride after the first Iraq debacle. The contrived nature of the narrative presented by U.S. officials was evident from the outset if one cared to look behind the propaganda screen. As the U.S. bombing campaign began, German Left Party MP Ulla Jelpke told a press conference in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) on August 11th that the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar were rescued by the Kurdish PKK, who the U.S. government classifies as "terrorists." Refugees told Jelpke that they were saved by "Allah and the PKK," not by U.S. bombing. Ulla Jelpke hailed the PKK as the most effective force fighting ISIS and other jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and she condemned Turkey for its role on the other side, providing bases, training and support to the jihadis. Even as Turkey has kept its border with Syria open to a flood of fighters and weapons, it has closed it to shipments of food and humanitarian supplies to Rojava, now home to thousands of Yazidi refugees. As Jelpke said, "If the US government and its allies are going to wage a serious struggle against ISIS, they must first end the support for the jihadis coming from Turkey and the Gulf states."

At the same time, journalist Judit Neurink, who has spent the past 5 years training local journalists in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, told Belgium's De Standaard newspaper that reports of ISIS massacres were exaggerated and based mainly on rumors. De Standaard asked, "Is the United States' bombing based on a false hypothesis?" She replied, "Yes. The US is bombing because the battle was approaching too close to Erbil, where a small American base lies. The Yazidis are useful to add a humanitarian sauce. Indeed there are also Christians fleeing. But if you act only for the Christians, other religious communities in the world would attack you. Now this Yazidi tragedy suited the Americans politically and the stories are exaggerated. Terrible things happen and have happened, that's a fact. But we have no numbers, no details." But the Yazidis served their purpose for U.S. propaganda. The line was crossed, the bombing was under way and the United States was at war in Iraq… again. It would be naive to think that U.S. intelligence agencies knew less of the real picture than Jelpke and Neurink. But the domestic propaganda campaign has succeeded and a majority of Americans tell pollsters they approve of the bombing. The U.S. is building a "coalition of the willing" on a similar basis, persuading allies of the political benefits of aligning with U.S. policy. But the U.S. coalition excludes all three forces that are best placed to resist and marginalize ISIS: the Syrian Army; the PKK; and Iraq's Sunni tribes.

After initially helping to drive out Iraqi government death squads, ISIS has outlived its purpose to Sunni Arab tribal leaders in northern and western Iraq. Most Sunni Iraqis don't want to be part of a fundamentalist Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, where 19 people were beheaded in August for offenses ranging from witchcraft to drug possession. Most Iraqi Sunnis just want civil and political rights in their own country, Iraq. But they justifiably fear the return of Shiite death squads more than they fear ISIS. After Shiite militiamen killed 70 people at a Sunni mosque in Diyala province on September 22nd, a reporter for the Guardian embedded with a group of militiamen in Diyala reported, "For these men, the Sunnis as a whole are the enemy, regardless of whether they are ISIS supporters or not." One militiaman told the Guardian that they do not kill women, children or old people, implying that adult men are a different story, but another told the Guardian, "When I liberate an area from ISIS, why do I have to give it back to them? Either I erase it or settle Shia in it." Another added, "If it's for me, I will start cleansing Baghdad from today."

What all the forces resisting ISIS really need from the U.S. and its allies is to call off the U.S.-backed Iraqi government's death squads, and to end our funding, arming and support for ISIS' allies in Syria. Instead Congress has voted to provide more weapons and training to jihadis in Syria. Meanwhile the U.S. bombing campaign is enhancing ISIS' prestige, helping it to attract an estimated 6,000 new recruits since August. If the goal of U.S. policy was to make a dire situation worse for the people of Syria and Iraq, it's hard to see how we could do a better job of it...Like the current bombing campaign, the short-lived victory over Iraq in 1991, which ultimately led to the present crisis, was designed with another, distinctly political, purpose in mind: to save the Cold War U.S. military from the threat of substantial disarmament. On the basis of that war, U.S. officials adapted their Cold War military machine from the nominally defensive purpose that had justified building it in the first place to a force that aspired to "full-spectrum dominance" of the entire planet, based on huge investments in surveillance and weapons technology. But instead of being a force for stability and security as U.S. leaders claim, the U.S. post-Cold War military has achieved the exact opposite, depriving millions of people in dozens of countries of whatever stability and security they previously enjoyed, at the cost of more than $10 trillion dollars to U.S. tax-payers...

MORE HISTORY, ANALYSIS AND INCONVENIENT TRUTHS AT LINK

Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." Davies also wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, "Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader."

http://www.alternet.org/economy/walmart-wants-be-bank-americas-poor-which-really-crappy-idea?akid=12308.227380.G4avte&rd=1&src=newsletter1021271&t=4

The FDIC estimates there are 10 million people living in the U.S. who do not have a bank account — that’s one out of every 13 households. Nearly 33 percent of people living in Starr County, TX can’t write a check. In one census district in Savannah, GA, over 42 percent of residents are unbanked. The unbanked are usually poor, often minorities, and find themselves shunned by banks that can’t make money off them. Typically, they end up turning to predatory check cashers and payday lenders. Many also feel a great sense of social division between themselves and those who have bank accounts. The crash of 2008 exacerbated America’s growing problem of the unbanked, as many people faced financial ruin and the U.S. saw an increase in distrust of the banking industry. Some people have turned to credit unions, but these institutions generally do not actively recruit lower-income clients, many of whom may be unfamiliar with their services. There is a quite reasonable way to address the issue of the unbanked, namely, public banking. As Elizabeth Warren has noted, bringing back public post office banks is a particularly good strategy, since the physical and operational structure already exists, and low-income people are comfortable with post offices, which they can usually access easily. But of course, that idea does not fill the coffers of a giant corporation. Enter Walmart.

For years, big retailers smelling opportunity have been trying to figure out ways to offer banking services to low-income people as a way of boosting in-store sales. Walmart has been pushing hard to get into the banking business, but the retail goliath has been held back from obtaining a U.S. bank charter by a combination of banking industry players, union leaders, activists, political opponents, and experts who have warned that allowing Walmart to bank is a dangerous abandonment of the separation of banking from other forms of commerce, and that it opens the door to too-big-to-fail issues and potential taxpayer bailouts. Walmart has been denied a charter, which would give it protection from the FDIC, but executives have found the chance to make money by providing financial services to a captive market of struggling, relatively unsophisticated shoppers just too tantalizing to abandon. Gradually, Walmart expanded services to customers that did not require a charter. For example, it created “money centers” where people could do things like cash checks or purchase prepaid debit cards ( see complaints about these cards on Ripoff Report).

Last week, Walmart won a major victory in its quest to become a bank by partnering with Green Dot to roll out starter checking accounts. Proclaiming its desire to assist low-income America, Walmart announced that the accounts will have no overdraft fees or minimum account balances. Any adult customer who passes an identity-verification screening can get an account, without a credit check or any other form of screening. Of course, when you read the fine print, all of this is not exactly free: to open an account, you have to buy a $2.95 “starter kit” from Walmart. There's also a minimum deposit of $20 required. A visit to an out-of-network ATM will get you a $2.50 charge, and customers who do not keep a balance of $500 a month will get hit with a fee of $8.95. This last bit is especially worrying: if you suddenly lose your job, you can quickly rack up burdensome fees. Is it better than what the big banks offer? Yes, but let’s not think for a moment that Walmart has interest in anything but the bottom line. Walmart is the company that famously mooches off the U.S. taxpayer by dumping upon us the costs of healthcare and other social services its poorly paid employees can’t afford. It's the company that regularly violates the rights of its workers by locking them in stores overnight, stealing their wages, engaging in sex discrimination, and denying meal breaks. It's the company that took corruption to spectacular heights when it decided to bribe its way into Mexican markets.

As Demos senior fellow Wallace Turbeville has observed, there’s a big difference between Walmart and the U.S. post office: Walmart has incentives to squeeze disadvantaged customers who have little bargaining power. The post office has a huge geographical advantage over Walmart: there are 31,000 USPS locations and offices compared to Walmart’s 4,807 in the U.S., and for people living in rural areas, the post office is particularly convenient. Many other countries have post office banking, including Japan, Switzerland and the UK, and in fact, the USPS offered savings accounts until 1967 (deposits peaked at nearly $3.4 billion in 1947). Plus, people actually want to bank at the post office: Senator Warren’s endorsement of the idea was followed by a poll showing broad public support, with 74 percent of 1,000 adults surveyed reporting that they had at least a “somewhat favorable” opinion of the notion. To offer bank-like services, including check cashing, bill payment and loans, the post office would not need a banking charter. What’s standing in the way of post office banking products is mostly political. Unfortunately, congressional approval would be required in order for the idea to move forward. Republicans bent on strangling the public sector stand in violent opposition, along with members of both parties who receive money from the banking industry, and naturally, Walmart.

Lynn Parramore is an AlterNet senior editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of "Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture." She received her Ph.D. in English and cultural theory from NYU. She is the director of AlterNet's New Economic Dialogue Project. Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore.

Or to make Walmart richer?

I am holding a lasagna class/dinner--so this is a "wrap" for the Weekend.

Stay out of trouble, and we'll meet on the SMW!

Arrivederci!