but my computer didn't know that...sigh. And my mother is still in limbo.

That kid in the cartoon won't be a scientist, he will be an accountant for a Ponzi scheme! Like the Federal budget proposal put forth by the GOP, or COP 21, or the equivalent.

You mean like a Congressman?

I'll believe anything you pay me to believe!

http://robertreich.org/post/135202830270

The great American middle class has become an anxious class – and it’s in revolt. Before I explain how that revolt is playing out, you need to understand the sources of the anxiety. Start with the fact that the middle class is shrinking, according to a new Pew survey. The odds of falling into poverty are frighteningly high, especially for the majority without college degrees. Two-thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Most could lose their jobs at any time. Many are part of a burgeoning “on-demand” workforce – employed as needed, paid whatever they can get whenever they can get it. Yet if they don’t keep up with rent or mortgage payments, or can’t pay for groceries or utilities, they’ll lose their footing.

The stress is taking a toll. For the first time in history, the lifespans of middle-class whites are dropping. According to research by the recent Nobel-prize winning economist, Angus Deaton, and his co-researcher Anne Case, middle-aged white men and women in the United States have been dying earlier. They’re poisoning themselves with drugs and alcohol, or committing suicide. The odds of being gunned down in America by a jihadist are far smaller than the odds of such self-inflicted deaths, but the recent tragedy in San Bernadino only heightens an overwhelming sense of arbitrariness and fragility.

The anxious class feels vulnerable to forces over which they have no control. Terrible things happen for no reason. Yet government can’t be counted on to protect them. Safety nets are full of holes. Most people who lose their jobs don’t even qualify for unemployment insurance. Government won’t protect their jobs from being outsourced to Asia or being taken by a worker here illegally. Government can’t even protect them from evil people with guns or bombs. Which is why the anxious class is arming itself, buying guns at a record rate. They view government as not so much incompetent as not giving a damn. It’s working for the big guys and fat cats – the crony capitalists who bankroll candidates and get special favors in return.

When I visited so-called “red” states this fall, I kept hearing angry complaints that government is run by Wall Street bankers who get bailed out after wreaking havoc on the economy, corporate titans who get cheap labor, and billionaires who get tax loopholes. Last year two highly-respected political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, took a close look at 1,799 policy decisions Congress made over the course of over twenty years, and who influenced those decisions. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

It was only a matter of time before the anxious class would revolt. They’d support a strongman who’d promise to protect them from all the chaos. Who’d save jobs from being shipped abroad, slam Wall Street, stick it to China, get rid of people here illegally, and block terrorists from getting into America. A strongman who’d make America great again – which really means make average working people safe again.

It was a pipe dream, of course – a conjurer’s trick. No single person can do this. The world is far too complex. You can’t build a wall along the Mexican border. You can’t keep out all Muslims. You can’t stop corporations from outsourcing abroad. Nor should you even try. Besides, we live in a messy democracy, not a dictatorship.

Still, they think maybe he’s smart enough and tough enough to pull it off. He’s rich. He tells it like it is. He makes every issue a test of personal strength. He calls himself strong and his adversaries weak. So what if he’s crude and rude? Maybe that’s what it takes to protect average people in this cruelly precarious world.

For years I’ve heard the rumbles of the anxious class. I’ve listened to their growing anger – in union halls and bars, in coal mines and beauty parlors, on the Main Streets and byways of the washed-out backwaters of America. I’ve heard their complaints and cynicism, their conspiracy theories and their outrage. Most are good people, not bigots or racists. They work hard and they have a strong sense of fairness. But their world has been slowly coming apart. And they’re scared and fed up.

Now someone comes along who’s even more of a bully than those who for years have bullied them economically, politically, and even violently. The attraction is understandable, even though misguided. If not Donald Trump, then it will be someone else posing as a strongman. If not this election cycle, it will be the next one.

The revolt of the anxious class has just begun.

Highly unlikely, but if you say so...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-10/imf-policy-change-pushes-ukraine-russia-to-resolve-bond-dispute

Ukraine will need to negotiate in "good faith" with Russia over a $3 billion bond due this month if it wants to continue receiving a loan from the International Monetary Fund under a policy change the institution laid out this week. The IMF’s executive board approved a policy change on Dec. 8 that will allow lending to countries that default on debts to sovereign creditors. The change clears the way for the Washington-based fund to continue lending to Ukraine if it fails to repay a $3 billion bond Russia bought from the government of former Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych in 2013. But under the new policy, the debtor country will be expected to make "good-faith efforts" to restructure the debt, according to an IMF policy paper released Thursday that lays out the details of the shift. This may mean Ukraine will have to overcome its frosty relations with Russia to try to reach a bilateral agreement over the debt.

The new policy also pushes Russia to the negotiating table, by trying to prevent IMF loan programs from being held up by "holdout" creditors. Sovereign lenders would be expected to accept offers consistent with the IMF’s assessment of a borrower’s debt sustainability and financing needs. Until now, Ukraine has asked Russia to accept restructuring terms agreed to by its commercial creditors in October, a proposal the government in Moscow has refused.

"Generally, we want debts to be paid on time," IMF General Counsel Sean Hagan told reporters on a conference call Thursday, in which fund officials declined to comment on the Ukraine-Russia dispute. "We want to try to avoid arrears."

The new policy sets a number of conditions on the fund’s ability to lend into arrears, including that prompt IMF support be "essential" and the borrower be pursuing "appropriate" policies. It also requires that lending into arrears not jeopardize the IMF’s ability to execute other bailouts. The decision to lend into arrears will be made by the IMF’s 24-member executive board, which represents the fund’s 188 member nations. In weighing whether a debtor is acting in good faith, the board will look for evidence the country has approached its official creditor, either bilaterally or through a group of official creditors, and has offered to engage in "substantive" dialogue, among other things. Specifically, the IMF said in the paper that the debtor "should be willing to engage with official creditors independently from private creditors." That may present difficulties for Ukraine, which has urged Russia to accept the deal it offered private creditors. Even with the policy change, other hurdles remain for Ukraine to obtain additional disbursements of the IMF bailout loan soon. Local wrangling over taxes has reduced the chances that any more payouts will occur this year.

The IMF changed its arrears policy in 1989 to allow countries borrowing from the fund to continue receiving loan installments even if they miss payments to commercial creditors. But the fund’s executive board left in place its policy of not tolerating official arrears, despite a recommendation by staff that exceptions be allowed.

and yet, gas prices are higher this week...for Hannukah, perhaps?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-14/never-mind-35-the-world-s-cheapest-oil-is-already-close-to-20

As oil crashed through $35 a barrel in New York, some producers were already living with the reality of much lower prices.

A mix of Mexican crudes is already valued at less than $28, an 11-year low, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Iraq is offering its heaviest variety of oil to buyers in Asia for about $25. In western Canada, some producers are selling for less than $22 a barrel.

“More than one-third of the global oil production is not economical at these prices,” Ehsan Ul-Haq, senior consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies Plc, said by e-mail. “Canadian oil producers could have difficulty in covering their operational costs.”





more

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2015/12/feds-are-in-town-to-save-rahm-not-to.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mikeklonsky+%28SmallTalk%29

"The Department of Justice is coming in," Emanuel said. "We welcome it, accept it and need it. It's in our self-interests as a city." -- Tribune

Boy, that was easy. Three days earlier, Rahm had made clear that he didn't didn't want no stink'n feds sticking their noses into his business. Now he's breathing a sigh of relief that Lynch has promised "not focus on individuals" but rather to "improve the system."

Rahm had no choice but to face reality after a come-to-Jesus meeting with party and White House heavies. His approval rating is now at an all-time low of 18%. To put that in perspective, that's lower than the 20% Gov. Rauner, the most hated pol in Chicago, polled last fall. As I recall, Mayor Daley was down to 31% in 2010, when he declared his intention not to seek a seventh term, clearing the way for Emanuel to take over.

Yes, Obama's cavalry is coming in to supposedly clean-up Rahm's racist and corrupt police department. The FBI has already been in town for months, trying to clean-up Rahm's no-bid-contract scandal at CPS. When is the last time you heard mention in the media about that? It appears that the best way to take a scandal off the front pages is to have the feds investigate it.

Neither the police department nor the school system are entities unto themselves. As the Tribune's John Kass notes:



But the real purpose of this latest investigation, made clear by A.G. Loretta Lynch herself, is to save the system -- not to bury it. To "rebuild trust" and head off seemingly inevitable "civil unrest". There's little mention of "justice" coming from the Justice Dept. But sooner or later, all roads will lead to Rome Rahm. Thus, the growing pressure on him to resign before that happens.

http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/12/plunging-commodities-interfere-with-the-new-world-order/

Anglo American, a British company, and one of the world’s biggest miners, and a ‘producer’ (actually just a miner, how did those two terms ever get mixed up?!) of platinum (world no. 1), diamonds, copper, nickel, iron ore and coal, said today it would scrap dividends AND fire 85,000 of it 135,000 global workforce (that’s 63%!). Anglo is just the first in a long litany line we’ll see going forward. Commodities ‘producers’ are being completely wiped out, hammered, killed, murdered. They’ve been able to hedge their downside risks so far, but now find they can’t even afford the price of the hedges (insurance) anymore. And then there’s all the banks and funds that financed them.

And they’ve all been gearing up for production increases too, with grandiose plans and -leveraged- investments aiming for infinity and beyond. You know, it’s the business model. 2016 will be a year for the record books.

Just check this Bloomberg graph for copper supply and demand as an example. How ugly would you like it today?



And what’s true for copper goes for the whole range of raw materials. Because China went from double-digit growth to shrinking imports and exports in pretty much no time flat. And China was all they had left.

Iron ore is dropping below $40, and that’s about the break-even point. Of course, oil has done that quite a while ago already. It’s just that we like to think oil’s some kind of stand-alone freak incident. It is not. With oil today plunging below $37 (down some 15% since the OPEC meeting last week), it doesn’t matter anymore how much more efficient shale companies can get. They’re toast. They’re done. And with them are their lenders. Who have hedged their bets too, obviously, but hedging has a price. Or else you could throw money at any losing enterprise.

But there’s another side to this, one that not a soul talks about, and it has Washington, London and Brussels very worried. Here goes:

These large mining -including oil- corporations most often operate in regions in the world that are remote and located in countries with at best questionable governments (the corporations like it like that, it’s how they know who to bribe to be able to rape and pillage).

The corporations de facto form a large part of the US/UK/EU political/military control system of these areas. They work in tandem with the CIA, MI5, the US and UK military, to keep the areas ‘friendly’ to western industries and regime.

This has caused unimaginable misery across the globe, in for instance (a good example) the Congo, one of the world’s richest regions when it comes to minerals ‘we’ want, but one of the poorest areas on the planet. No coincidence there.

Untold millions have died as a result. ‘We’ have done a lot more damage there than we are presently doing in Syria, if you can imagine. And many more millions are forced to live out their lives in miserable circumstances on top of the world’s richest riches. But that will now change. Thing is, with the major miners going belly up, ‘our’ control of these places will also fade. Because it’s all been about money all along, and the US won’t be able to afford the -political and military- control of these places if there are no profits to be made.

They’ll be sinkholes for military budgets, and those will be stretched already ‘protecting’ other places. The demise of commodities is a harbinger of a dramatically changing US position in the world. Washington will be forced to focus on protecting it own soil, and move away from expansionist policies. Because it can’t afford those without the grotesque profits its corporations have squeezed out of the populations in these ‘forgotten’ lands. That’s going to change global politics a lot.

And it’s not as if China will step in. They can’t afford to take over a losing proposition; the Chinese economy is not only growing at a slower pace, it may well be actually shrinking. Beijing’s new reality is that imports and exports both are falling quite considerably (no matter the ‘official’ numbers), and the cost of a huge expansion into global mining territory makes little sense right now.

With the yuan now part of the IMF ‘basket‘m Beijing can no longer print at will. China must focus on what happens at home. So must the US. They have no choice. Other than going to war. And, granted, given that choice, they all probably will. But the mining companies will still be mere shells of their former selves by then. There’s no profit left to be made. This is not going to end well. Not for anybody. Other than the arms lobby. What it will do is change geopolitics forever, and a lot.

All schools are closed, roads are deep in snow and visibility at about a hundred yards.

"I don't need to clean my windows. I don't need no snow tires."

some drizzle, lots of gray and windy. It looked like snow today, but they are saying Friday.

Guess we won't have daffodils for Xmas.

I'm getting new doors, all tightly sealed against infiltration, though! With glass to let some light into my cave. It would have been better if the carpenter had come by when it was 60F, though.

Rich people getting pissed at rich people.

LOS ANGELES — The most notorious new house in Los Angeles hangs from a Bel Air hillside, high above the sprawl and smog, unfinished and unloved.Outraged neighbors call it “the Starship Enterprise,” and in truth it looks like nothing so much as an earthbound space station of curved glass and steel, draped in scaffolding and tarpaulin, roughly 30,000 square feet and nearly 70 feet high.

That height, roughly twice the legal limit, is among a litany of violations that have stalled construction at 901 Strada Vecchia for more than a year. Without the city’s permission, workers tore down the original house and leveled the hillside. Though the site is in an “earthquake-induced landslide area,” subsequent inspections found “unsecured open excavations” and other perils. Inspectors also uncovered a host of features, unapproved though befitting a house with an aspirational price tag of $100 million, among them underground bedrooms and an IMAX theater.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/a-mansion-a-shell-company-and-resentment-in-bel-air/ar-BBnym3U?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=iehp

state of emergency .

For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?

To find out, all it takes is a prick of the finger, a small letting of blood. But if the tests come back positive, the potentially severe consequences are far more difficult to discern.

That’s how lead works. It leaves its mark quietly, with a virtually invisible trail. But years later, when a child shows signs of a learning disability or behavioral issues, lead’s prior presence in the bloodstream suddenly becomes inescapable.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in-flint-mich-there%e2%80%99s-so-much-lead-in-children%e2%80%99s-blood-they%e2%80%99ve-declared-a-state-of-emergency/ar-BBnzEbx?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=iehp

And higher levels of lead in the blood have been tied to a higher propensity for violent actions and criminal behavior.

But then I read the article and it’s outrageous. A classic example of how the poor and middle class have to pay the price to make someone at the top rich.

He deserves to. He's all gungho on putting in Emergency Managers who do crimes like this, when a city is in financial distress.

I hear he is thinking of running for Senate. Hopefully this will kill that and any future Presidential ambitions, not that the media will bring it up.

And so f**n hypocritical; they want to criminalize abortion, or jail someone that smokes pot when pregnant (not something I recommend or support during pregnancy), but hey if some lead or other toxins from the water gets into a pregnant woman, or young children and into the way of their corporate or gutting government agendas, then “Crickets”.

I’m betting there’s a racial component here as well

Only cities occupied by the black people get shafted in Michigan. Every single one of them.

I was incredulous that Ben Carson came here to campaign. He was born in Detroit. He knows the score, unless he's so mentally addled as to have forgotten, or maybe he thinks black people will put him in the White House. The same mental illness that makes Hillary think that women will put her in the White House, just because of a superficial commonality.