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Sorry to say, impeachment is not an option. Repubs are too fearful of being labelled racists. And you're right frontman Reid will quash anything embarrassing to the dems. Just a couple of years left then we have to defeat Hilary. Another 4 years of the current mess will destroy America from within.
...........al
I spent a lot of time in the Mekong Delta. It wasn't neither fun nor pretty. I never expected a ticker tape parade but the looks and words from some of my fellow Americans do not haunt but are burned into memory to this day. Most Nam vets had no choice whether to go or not. A corrupt government and a generally hostile public tore the fabric of society into shreds. The corruption continues but thankfully the public has turned hostility from vets to the real villain ie the government. One final note, Hanoi Jane should rot in hell for what she did. JMHO
............al
In North Dakota, Walmart employees start at $17.40/hr
2 quick comments before the article-
1. I am aware that this area of the country is in an extraordinary economic boom at the present time. I saw the same right here in Bradford county, PA a few years ago with the natural gas boom.
2. Is it any wonder why corporate America and the chamber of commerce want to flood the country with millions of low wage workers? How much has Walmart and the Waltons given to Obama and his minions of miscreants over the years?
Posted by Faith Braverman • 11 Jun 2014
WILLISTON, NORTH DAKOTA–Mark J. Perry, an acclaimed economics professor and writer, recently took a trip to Williston, North Dakota. Despite its remote location, the city is in the midst of an economic boom after the Bakken oil fields began gushing shale oil.
Bakken produces one million barrels of oil per day, making it one of the top ten oil fields in the world. In return, the city’s unemployment rate has dwindled to 0.9%. Dr. Perry took a picture of Walmart starting salaries, and explained the economic ramifications this has on the minimum-wage debate
1. Walmart pays wages that reflect the economic conditions in a local market based on the supply and demand realities of the local labor market. In other words, Walmart can’t really set wages independent of market forces and it’s really at the mercy of the market in every local community. If Walmart offered the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour in the Bakken area, it wouldn’t be able to staff its stores.
2. The fact that Walmart is paying almost 2.5 times the minimum wage in Williston, ND is evidence that a single, national minimum wage for every city, county, labor market in the country can’t possibly make sense. Even proponents of the minimum wage have to agree that a single national minimum can’t be optimal for every labor market in the country. In that case, they would logically have to support thousands of minimum wages tailored to thousands of local communities, or maybe even more logically agree that minimum wages are unworkable.
3. You probably won’t be hearing anybody calling for a $15 per hour “living wage” in North Dakota, since the entry-level wages at Wal-Mart there are already above that.
4. The energy sector is the strongest sector of the US economy, and is bringing wealth, prosperity, and high-paying jobs to places like western North Dakota and south-central and western Texas.
5. Of course, what we also have here is a huge hole blown in the “we need minimum wage because businesses won’t pay good wages” argument.
Dr. Perry points out that Obama has decided not to visit “the most prosperous part of the most prosperous state in the nation” this week. Rather, Obama has decided to pay the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation a visit, where the unemployment rate is 86%.
“When Obama lectures the Native Americans this Friday about jobs and economic development in their part of North Dakota, perhaps he should mention that there’s a labor shortage only a few hundred miles away, with hundreds, if not thousands of immediate openings for high-paying jobs in the oil patch.”
Read more at TLR: In North Dakota, Walmart employees start at $17.40/hr | The Libertarian Republic http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/north-dakota-walmart-employees-start-17-40hr/#ixzz34R6lWKt2
12 Numbers About The Global Financial Ponzi Scheme That Should Be Burned Into Your Brain
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/12-numbers-about-the-global-financial-ponzi-scheme-that-should-be-burned-into-your-brain
By Michael Snyder, on June 11th, 2014
The numbers that you are about to see are likely to shock you. They prove that the global financial Ponzi scheme is far more extensive than most people would ever dare to imagine. As you will see below, the total amount of debt in the world is now more than three times greater than global GDP. In other words, you could take every single good and service produced on the entire planet this year, next year and the year after that and it still would not be enough to pay off all the debt. But even that number pales in comparison to the exposure that big global banks have to derivatives contracts. It is hard to put into words how reckless they have been. At the low end of the estimates, the total exposure that global banks have to derivatives contracts is 710 trillion dollars. That is an amount of money that is almost unimaginable. And the reality of the matter is that there is really not all that much actual "money" in circulation today. In fact, as you will read about below, there is only a little bit more than a trillion dollars of U.S. currency that you can actually hold in your hands in existence. If we all went out and tried to close our bank accounts and investment portfolios all at once, that would create a major league crisis. The truth is that our financial system is little more than a giant pyramid scheme that is based on debt and paper promises. It is literally a miracle that it has survived for so long without collapsing already.
When Americans think about the financial crisis that we are facing, the largest number that they usually can think of is the size of the U.S. national debt. And at over 17 trillion dollars, it truly is massive. But it is actually the 2nd-smallest number on the list below. The following are 12 numbers about the global financial Ponzi scheme that should be burned into your brain...
-$1,280,000,000,000 - Most people are really surprised when they hear this number. Right now, there is only 1.28 trillion dollars worth of U.S. currency floating around out there.
-$17,555,165,805,212.27 - This is the size of the U.S. national debt. It has grown by more than 10 trillion dollars over the past ten years.
-$32,000,000,000,000 - This is the total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).
-$48,611,684,000,000 - This is the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts.
-$59,398,590,000,000 - This is the total amount of debt (government, corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system. 40 years ago, this number was just a little bit above 2 trillion dollars.
-$70,088,625,000,000 - This is the total exposure that JPMorgan Chase has to derivatives contracts.
-$71,830,000,000,000 - This is the approximate size of the GDP of the entire world.
-$75,000,000,000,000 - This is approximately the total exposure that German banking giant Deutsche Bank has to derivatives contracts.
-$100,000,000,000,000 - This is the total amount of government debt in the entire world. This amount has grown by $30 trillion just since mid-2007.
-$223,300,000,000,000 - This is the approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.
-$236,637,271,000,000 - According to the U.S. government, this is the total exposure that the top 25 banks in the United States have to derivatives contracts. But those banks only have total assets of about 9.4 trillion dollars combined. In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 25 to 1.
-$710,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 - The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives contracts generally fall within this range. At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives exposure to global GDP is about 21 to 1.
Most people tend to assume that the "authorities" have fixed whatever caused the financial world to almost end back in 2008, but that is not the case at all.
In fact, the total amount of government debt around the globe has grown by about 40 percent since then, and the "too big to fail banks" have collectively gotten 37 percent larger since then.
Our "authorities" didn't fix anything. All they did was reinflate the bubble and kick the can down the road for a little while.
I don't know how anyone can take an honest look at the numbers and not come to the conclusion that this is completely and totally unsustainable.
How much debt can the global financial system take before it utterly collapses?
How recklessly can the big banks behave before the house of cards that they have constructed implodes underneath them?
For the moment, everything seems fine. Stock markets around the world have been setting record highs and credit is flowing like wine.
But at some point a day of reckoning is coming, and when it arrives it is going to be the most painful financial crisis the world has ever seen.
If you plan on getting ready before it strikes, now is the time to do so.
steviee- thanks for posting Jim Willie's comments. IMHO he usually has a good grip on things to come.
..........al
The Bergdahl swap: a full-blown Obama scandal in less than 48 hours
http://www.humanevents.com/2014/06/03/the-bergdahl-swap-a-full-blown-obama-scandal-in-less-than-48-hours/
By: John Hayward
6/3/2014 09:36 AM
As one of the characters in “Anchorman” observed of its bloody brawl between news teams: Boy, that escalated quickly. I mean, that really got out of hand fast.
Two days after President Obama broke the law to arrange an insanely reckless swap of five incredibly dangerous Taliban terrorists for captive American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, virtually every aspect of the deal has blown up in Obama’s face, and the whole thing has soured into another five-star scandal for an Administration riddled with them. Maybe it’s the accumulated weight of Obama fatigue, or the sheer stupidity and arrogance the President displayed in this particular abuse of power, but even people who stood by him through Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS scandal are asking: What the hell was he thinking? What did the White House think was going to happen here?
I think the Administration’s crucial error was expecting the military to shut up and let them write the story. That didn’t happen. Troops who served with Bergdahl have been speaking out, and they’re not mincing words. They’re especially angry about the lives lost in search missions conducted after Bergdahl walked away from his post. ”I was pissed of then, and I am even more so now with everything going on,” former Sgt. Matt Vierkant told CNN. ”Bowe Bergdahl deserted during a time of war, and his fellow Americans lost their lives searching for him.”
“Any of us would have died for him while he was with us, and then for him to just leave us like that, it was a very big betrayal,” said former Sgt. Josh Korder, who CNN notes “has the names of three soldiers who died while searching for Bergdahl tattooed on his back.”
The wife of Army Master Sergeant Mark Allen, wounded in the search for Bergdahl and no longer able to speak, called Bergdahl a “traitor” on her Facebook page. The mother of 2nd Lt. Darryn Andrews told the Army Times, “It gets really hurtful when I think, this guy was worth my son’s life? My son who was patriotic? Who was a true soldier? Who defended his country with his life? This guy was worth that? I don’t think so.”
Another soldier who was involved in the search, Nathan Bradley Bethea, wrote a column for the Daily Beast in which he declared, “He is safe, and now it is time to speak the truth. And that truth is: Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unite died trying to track him down.” Bethea, along with some of the soldiers interviewed by CNN, say they were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements against disclosing information about Bergdahl’s capture or the rescue efforts… a highly unusual measure that the Examiner recalls was also employed after Benghazi.
An image of six soldiers who died searching for Bergdahl has been spreading across the Internet like wildfire:
Fox News reports the Pentagon is “reviewing” claims that all six of these men died during efforts to rescue Bergdahl, but it’s supposedly “impossible” to “confirm right now whether anybody’s death was directly linked to the hunt.” Really? There’s no way to instantly look up the details of the missions these six men died on, and confirm that one of the mission objectives involved rescuing Sgt. Bergdahl? Insulting the intelligence of the American people is only going to enrage them more – particularly the loved ones of the troops injured and killed on these missions, as quoted above – and it makes Team Obama’s incompetence swell to epic proportions. It never occurred to any of the teenagers who run this White House to do a little research in advance on the man they were proposing to trade five deadly terror masterminds for?
As Senator Ted Cruz pointed out, the lives lost in capturing the five Taliban officers who were traded for Bergdahl should also be added to the total. Cruz also said military force could have been used to rescue the captive American without giving up those Taliban leaders… a claim bolstered by new information pouring out of the Pentagon, as you’ll see in a moment.
As I said earlier, the Obamanoids clearly assumed the entire U.S. military apparatus would roll over for them and help sell their preferred political narrative. They didn’t bother with a lot of hard thinking about how difficult that narrative might be to sustain.
Twitchy reports that a White House petition drive to punish Bergdahl for desertion is under way. Not much chance of that, folks. It would end the Obama presidency, assuming some of the terrorists he just released haven’t pulled off fatal attacks on Americans and ended it already.
The White House narrative that Bergdahl was captured on the battlefield and served with distinction – lies peddled by none other than Benghazi mouthpiece Susan Rice on the Sunday shows – has completely collapsed. Literally no one believes that… inconveniently including the Pentagon, which the Washington Times reports has considered Bergdahl a deserter for years:
The Pentagon on several occasions had ground-level intelligence on where ArmySgt. Bowe Bergdahl was being held captive at various times — down to how many gunmen were guarding him — but special operations commanders repeatedly shelved rescue missions because they didn’t want to risk casualties for a man they believed to be a “deserter,” sources familiar with the mission plans said.
Commanders on the ground debated whether to pull the trigger on a rescue several times in recent years, according to one of the sources, a former high-level intelligence official in Afghanistan, who said the conclusion each time was that the prospect of losing highly trained troops was too high a price to pay for rescuing a soldier who walked away from his unit before being captured by the enemy.
In more recent times, special operations commanders apparently knew where Bergdahl was being held, but did not seek approval for a rescue mission because they knew a deal to obtain his release was under way. They wanted a much better deal than the ludicrous arrangement Obama struck, which special-ops officers were reportedly “appalled” by:
The aide said military officials in Afghanistan spent recent months pushing for a stronger deal than was ultimately struck, but were “superseded” by the White House and State Department. The aide would not comment on what the parameters of a “stronger” deal may have looked like, beyond saying they would have involved the Pakistani government.
The former intelligence official who spoke with The Times corroborated that assertion but declined to offer further details, saying only that the deal turned out the way it did because “the administration wanted to close the door on this no matter what the price was.”
Separately, the former official said, “Military commanders were loath to risk their people to save this guy. They were loath to pick him up and because of that hesitancy, we wind up trading five Taliban guys for him.
“The mentality was, ‘We’re not going to lose more of our own guys on this,” the former official said.
A Pentagon source quoted in the Washington Times piece says “I know for a fact that we lost soldiers looking for him,” which is going to make today’s absurd claims that the Pentagon can’t confirm or deny those fatalities blow up in the Administration’s face, just like every other aspect of this story has.
According to a bombshell report by James Rosen at Fox News, many in the intelligence community “harbor serious outstanding concerns not only that Bergdahl may have been a deserter but that he may have been an active collaborator with the enemy,” and have compiled a “major classified file” on him.
Bergdahl’s own writings are becoming public knowledge, and they sure don’t make trading five Taliban masterminds for his release look like a better deal. From the UK Daily Mail:
[color=red] He buried himself in books about Zen meditation, the writings of Aristotle and a book called Three Cups Of Tea, about a crusade to educate girls in Afghanistan. He told a friend that if their first tour of duty in Afghanistan was ‘lame’, he was going to ‘walk off into the mountains of Pakistan’.
Members of his unit, part of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, say his manner became odder when they reached eastern Afghanistan’s remote Paktika region. ‘He spent more time with the Afghans than he did with his platoon,’ said a comrade.
He told some of them he wanted to walk to India. His father admitted to military investigators that his son became ‘psychologically isolated’.
In letters and emails home, Bergdahl made his disillusionment clear. ‘I feel ashamed to even be American,’ he wrote. ‘The horror of the self-righteous arrogance that they thrive in. It is all revolting.’
In an uncanny echo of [the television series] Homeland, Bergdahl was particularly affected by seeing an Afghan child fatally run over by a U.S. armoured vehicle.
‘We don’t even care when we hear each other talk about running their children down in the dirt streets with our armoured trucks,’ he complained in a final email sent three days before he disappeared. ‘I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.’[/color]
The Daily Mail mentions Taliban claims that Bergdahl had thrown in with his captors and was teaching them “how to make bombs and set ambushes,” claims which are probably addressed in that big classified file James Rosen wrote about. I certainly wouldn’t take anything the Taliban says at face value. I also wouldn’t spring five of their top commanders from Gitmo.
The accumulated weight of these revelations – combined with the illegal means Obama used to make the deal, criticized as such by a growing number of legal analysts, including liberals Jonathan Turley and Jeffrey Toobin – and the harrowing danger represented by releasing those five terrorist big shots, have combined to make this a “perfect storm” scandal for the Administration… whose ham-fisted efforts at spin control are making things worse by the hour. They doubled down by pushing false narratives about Bergdahl that have only served to infuriate critics. Obama, apparently under the delusion that his media allies have erased Benghazi from the public mind, is trying to make tough-guy statements about how he’ll leave no one behind… the last remnants of his original political strategy, which involved setting a bear trap for Republicans by making a crazy illegal deal, and slandering them as unpatriotic and unconcerned about the welfare of American troops when they objected.
And when the slimeballs Obama released claim their next victims, the other shoe is really going to drop. The best reason to hope they won’t reappear in the Afghan theater any time soon is that the Taliban wants to keep Barack Obama in office, and they know a massive terror attack featuring any of guys they just got back from him would finish him off. That isn’t stopping them from doing touchdown shuffles all over their benighted land, celebrating their victory over Obama, and the way the White House has legitimized them as a valid government by striking this deal with them. From NBC News:
The Afghan Taliban are celebrating the release of their five top commanders — who were swapped in exchange for American Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl after being held in Guantanamo Bay for 12 years — serving their guests with sweets and goats cooked in rice.
“This is a historic moment for us. Today our enemy (for the) first time officially recognized our status. I can’t explain how our people are happy and excited over this unbelievable achievement. Today we reached our destination,” a senior member of the Afghan Taliban told NBC News exclusively from a hideout in Afghanistan.
[...] He said the release of the top five commanders was great news that spread like wildfire among their fighters.
“Our leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, after a long time, heard a very good news. He is so happy and anxiously waiting to see his senior commanders,” the Taliban commander said.
Omar on Sunday released a rare statement calling the prisoner exchange a “great victory” for the Taliban.
According to the commander who spoke to NBC News, the release of Mulla Fazal Akhund, Noorullah Noori, Abdul Haq Waseeq, Khairullah Khairkhwa and Mohammad Nabi will boost the morale of their fighters.
“Once we confirmed the arrival of our five heroes back in Qatar, celebrations started everywhere in Afghanistan and the neighboring Pakistan. It’s nonstop. The guests were first served with sweets and green tea but now there are official celebrations on behalf of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (official name for the Afghan Taliban),” he said.
Back in the United States, hearings on the newest Obama scandal already been announced by the House Armed Services Committee, and there is word the Senate may follow suit. It is good to have any missing American home… but it matters if the President’s actions in securing his release were legal, what price was paid for him, and how he became a captive in the first place. Evidently Team Obama thought all of those considerations were either irrelevant, or bait for the political bear trap they were trying to set for Republicans. If one of Obama’s objectives was to knock the VA scandal out of the news… mission accomplished, I guess.
Update: And this isn’t just an Obama scandal, as Benghazi Clinton has now become directly involved. Jake Tapper of CNN wonders if Obama was briefing her about the Bergdahl swap, getting their political narratives in harmony, even as he was breaking the law to avoid notifying Congress.
Update: It occurs to me that one reason this scandal is turning into a mushroom cloud so quickly is that all of the Obama talking points were written to cast objections as nothing but ankle-biting from Republicans… but military personnel and their families have been among the first and strongest critics. That leaves Obama’s talking-points robots dispensing obsolete political snipes that hit the military community like insulting slaps to the face, sound irrelevant to those who have tough questions about the wisdom of letting those Gitmo detainees go, and pique the interest of reporters who can clearly see the Administration’s stories don’t line up. The White House is down to having arguments with itself, in public, about whether the Taliban are terrorists or a legitimate government. Even torpid media sharks who prefer not to bite Barack Obama can’t doze off when there’s this much blood in the water.
Update: What could make this story even worse for Obama? If this afternoon’s rumor that Bergdahl renounced his American citizenship holds up, it should do the trick. Here’s the relevant passage from the report at Fox News:
“Yes, I do believe he deserted, without a doubt in my mind,” Cody Full told Megyn Kelly Monday. “He did not serve the United States with honor. We all took an oath — he violated his oath when he deserted us and put other Americans in jeopardy.”
Sources who had debriefed two former members of Bergdahl’s unit told Fox News Bergdahl left behind a note the night he left base in which he expressed disillusionment with the Army and being an American and suggested that he wanted to renounce his American citizenship and go find the Taliban. U.S. military officials would not confirm the existence of the letter, but if it does exist, it would likely be part of the original file on the investigation into Bergdahl’s disappearance.
Some of Bergdahl’s activities prior to his disappearance, including reportedly mailing his gear home, indicated premeditation, according to Full, a 25-year-old former infantryman now living in Houston. It bothers them that a soldier they believe betrayed his comrades, possibly leading to their deaths in subsequent rescue efforts, could be seen as a hero.
“I just don’t want to see him hailed as a hero and I just want him to face the consequences of his own actions and possibly face court-martial for desertion,” Gerald Sutton, a 31-year-old Michigan college student who left the military in 2012 after serving with Bergdahl in Afghanistan, told Kelly.
Update: Here’s an example of what I meant about Democrat talking-points robots going right off the rails, because their White House-issued talking points assumed the blowback would be a political story about Republican politicians grousing, rather than members of the military community: Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) saying on Twitter, “Really sad to watch Obama haters attack this kid who CHOSE to fight to protect the rest of us, just to score political points.”
Murphy’s like the lone Japanese soldier still holding out on an island in the Sixties because he thought World War 2 never ended. Jim Geraghty at National Review does a good job of explaining how just about every word in his Tweet is either dishonest or painfully stupid.
Update: Think Obama’s hit rock bottom yet? There’s no way this story could get any worse for him? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on the released Taliban prisoners: “I’m glad to get rid of these five people.” Assuming you’re reasonably sane, that whooshing noise you just heard was the air leaving your lungs.
Update: The Bergdahl scandal might have just gone nuclear, as Jake Tapper at CNN interviews Sgt. Evan Buetow, the leader of Bergdahl’s team in Afghanistan… who says intercepted radio chatter from shortly after Bergdahl’s disappearance had him attempting to make contact with the Taliban. ”I heard it straight from the interpreter’s lips as he heard it over the radio,” Buetow said. ”There’s a lot more to this story than a soldier walking away.”
The Secretary of the Army has announced a “comprehensive, coordinated review” of Bergdahl’s case, which seems like the sort of thing that should have been done before we traded five high-ranking Taliban officers for him. The pressure exerted on military officials by the Obama White House to make sure that comprehensive, coordinated review comes out the “right” way will be enormous. But what if it doesn’t, and Bergdahl is confirmed as a deserter, or maybe even a traitor? This is starting to look like an existential crisis for the Democrat Party. There’s no way endangered 2014 candidates can distance themselves from Obama by merely tut-tutting his poor judgment and lackluster respect for the rule of law, not if the worst suspicions about Bergdahl are confirmed.
As many Americans are living paycheck to paycheck in this current recession/depression the deductibles take a big chunk out of a single paycheck. IMHO as time goes by and more Obamacare enrollees become painfully aware of what deductible and co-pay means the number of "happy customers" will dwindle substantially. If the main stream media ever starts high lighting how to avoid the penalty for not enrolling, more and more will opt out leaving the really sick with sky high premiums. One of the favorite ways to help contain premium costs is to cut fees paid to doctors and hospitals.Would more practitioners opt out? My guess is yes. This is just one possible scenario of many. For every negative tale of Obamacare there is a positive I'm sure. Time will tell which out weighs the other.
..........al
Hey basserdan, loved your cartoon on the billionaire's club. It says more than the thousands of words I have written trying to portray in what is really happening in the USA. When will we wake up?
.............al
Ayock- I dare say you do raise good points. But again so do conservatives. The problem is, what do we the people do about it? Corruption and cronyism rule the day in DC. It resounds with both major political parties. Short of a major revolution, what can we do to make lawmakers answerable to us rather than the monied interests that control everything from the agenda to the actual written laws that are passed? I'm sure I'm not the only one frustrated by the canned responses I get from my senators and representative when writing about my concerns and seeing nothing being done to address them.
...........al
basserdan- I'm in total agreement with an investigation. Reid has an odor of corruption you can smell miles away. I wouldn't doubt Obama being a part of this either. Trouble is, all we see coming out of Issa and his investigations are a lot of smoke and hot air. Seems like nothing substantive ever gets done. I'd be far more a believer if I saw the handcuffs come out and be utilized. Then again we have to depend on Holder's highly politicized DOJ to prosecute. We know how far that would go. Oooops, I guess I'll be called a racist now for expecting Holder to do his job that we pay him for doing and being critical when he doesn't.
.........al
College Loans Tough? Rubio Will Screw You Harder!
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker
What's "conservative" about indentured servitude?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a possible 2016 White House contender, unveiled legislation on Wednesday to broaden the use of financial vehicles known as "income share agreements" that students can use to fund their higher education costs.
Under the agreements, which are marketed as an alternative to traditional student loans, private investors or organizations provide students with financing for their education costs in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings.
In other words rather than address the reason that college credit hours have gone up 600% faster in cost than the minimum wage has risen, taking college from something you could buy with a minimum-wage job in the summer to something you can't, what Rubio wants to do is add more and more ways for you to destroy your financial future.
This is "conservative"?
Like hell.
The entire reason we have such a problem with college costs in the first place is that the government made "free money" the order of the day. By grossly-expanding the ability to borrow beyond Stafford loan limits and Pell Grants (which by themselves had ratcheted up costs!) the spiral was on.
The free market -- or if you prefer conservative -- solution is to remove the special privileges that these loans "enjoy." Specifically, return them to the same status as any other unsecured debt -- like a credit card.
Now lenders have a reason to prospectively monitor students and only extend credit that makes sense on a semester-by-semester basis. If the terms are too onerous then the students can default and declare bankruptcy. There is a natural check and balance here -- students will have little reason to do that provided the amount of money borrowed and terms of payment are rational, as the impact of a bankruptcy on one's life is quite material.
By the same token if the amount borrowed is outrageous and the compensation available after doing so small, the incentive to declare bankruptcy and (legally) avoid the debt is quite large in relationship to the harm done by undertaking this course of action.
The original push to make bankruptcy unavailable came from the outrageous amount of debt that was taken on by some medical students, who (quite-rationally) decided that the harm done by a bankruptcy was small in comparison to the economic advantage of doing so. The answer to this "problem", rather than allowing the market to work (which would have dramatically cut the cost of said education as support for that outrageous level of cost would have disappeared) was to make doing that illegal.
Note that corporations evaluate this decision path every single day, and many do indeed strategically default -- or threaten to do so in order to secure better terms. This is good, not bad, as it keeps the balance between that which one can borrow and that which one demands for a given good or service.
If either party tries to exploit the other then the bankruptcy court provides the answer; you avoid the debt, but your assets are taken and liquidated, such as they are. This prevents lenders from letting you borrow money for which there is no rational means of repayment, because the risk of that happening lies with them.
That's how it should be and indeed that risk is exactly why borrowing money costs something (known as "interest"); in part you are paying a fee against the possibility that you will not be able to (or choose to) pay and the lender will suffer a loss.
Markets only work when they're allowed to. When we pass special laws allowing certain people to evade the market's discipline on bad behavior then we got more bad behavior.
In this case what we've done over the last 30 years is destroy any resemblance of decency and honesty when it comes to college financing and cost.
Rubio's plan is in fact not half-baked -- it's actively malicious.
I can understand her need for body guards. After the untimely demise of many JP bankers recently, she could well be next on the hit list. Just sayin'
...........al
Shocking Allegations Show Harry Reid, Chinese Company Behind Nevada Ranch Standoff
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=100484444
I can't stand the sight of him. He does need to go away and with a hopefully repub takeover of the senate in Nov we will see become relegated to the obsolete. The costs of his undying loyalty to president and party has been enormous to everyone else. Fire Reid, impeach Holder, jail Lerner, expose Hilary, impeach Obama all have the beginnings of a good start.
........al
Heartbleed: What You Need to Know
News broke this week of a wide-reaching security vulnerability known as the Heartbleed bug. Heartbleed affects OpenSSL, used by a majority of the web to securely send data. In short, we want you to know that LastPass is safe from Heartbleed. For more details on the bug and to follow our recommendations, please see our blog post.
http://blog.lastpass.com/2014/04/lastpass-and-heartbleed-bug.html
Heartbleed: What You Need to Know
News broke this week of a wide-reaching security vulnerability known as the Heartbleed bug. Heartbleed affects OpenSSL, used by a majority of the web to securely send data. In short, we want you to know that LastPass is safe from Heartbleed. For more details on the bug and to follow our recommendations, please see our blog post.
http://blog.lastpass.com/2014/04/lastpass-and-heartbleed-bug.html
Shocking Allegations Show Harry Reid, Chinese Company Behind Nevada Ranch Standoff
Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/shocking-allegations-link-harry-reid-nevada-ranch-standoff/#fLkFXEImm5MmVyLC.99
As a family in Clark County, Nev. continues to face an onslaught of heavily armed federal agents determined to kick them off of their ranch, reports have surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be behind the entire ordeal.
The ranch, which has been in Cliven Bundy’s family for more than a century, is ground zero for a growing showdown between federal authorities and individual rights activists. Despite attempting to silence protesters by limiting them to so-called “First Amendment areas,” law enforcement personnel, legislators, and militia members are heading to the site in droves to express their outrage over the Bureau of Land Management’s show of force.
In an apparent effort to cover its tracks, the BLM has reportedly removed documents from its website showing that the move to kick the Bundys and their cattle off of the land was at least in part due to the fact that their presence impeded development of solar energy on the land.
Reid and his eldest son, reports indicate, were integral in the support and/or implementation of a $5 billion solar plant being built in the county by a Chinese company.
Officially, the federal agency has suggested they are only after Bundy because his cattle are a threat to an endangered species of tortoise. That narrative, however, fell apart in the opinion of many critics when it was revealed the agency itself has engaged in the widespread slaughter of the animal.
The recent allegations of Reid’s hand in the Bundy attack are bolstered by the fact that his former senior adviser also served as the director of the BLM. According to reports, Reid successfully redrew the endangered tortoise’s protected habitat to benefit a donor, indicating his concern is more about his political and financial future than the well-being of this reptile.
As Bundy confirmed, he is far from the only rancher intimidated by the BLM. He is, however, the last one left fighting. According to a statement he made recently, there were 52 other ranchers in the vicinity of his property at one point – and they are all gone.
He has promised to continue fighting for his right; and, thankfully for his family, plenty of other Americans are joining in the cause, and you can too Like the page!
Shocking Allegations Show Harry Reid, Chinese Company Behind Nevada Ranch Standoff
Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/shocking-allegations-link-harry-reid-nevada-ranch-standoff/#fLkFXEImm5MmVyLC.99
As a family in Clark County, Nev. continues to face an onslaught of heavily armed federal agents determined to kick them off of their ranch, reports have surfaced that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid might be behind the entire ordeal.
The ranch, which has been in Cliven Bundy’s family for more than a century, is ground zero for a growing showdown between federal authorities and individual rights activists. Despite attempting to silence protesters by limiting them to so-called “First Amendment areas,” law enforcement personnel, legislators, and militia members are heading to the site in droves to express their outrage over the Bureau of Land Management’s show of force.
In an apparent effort to cover its tracks, the BLM has reportedly removed documents from its website showing that the move to kick the Bundys and their cattle off of the land was at least in part due to the fact that their presence impeded development of solar energy on the land.
Reid and his eldest son, reports indicate, were integral in the support and/or implementation of a $5 billion solar plant being built in the county by a Chinese company.
Officially, the federal agency has suggested they are only after Bundy because his cattle are a threat to an endangered species of tortoise. That narrative, however, fell apart in the opinion of many critics when it was revealed the agency itself has engaged in the widespread slaughter of the animal.
The recent allegations of Reid’s hand in the Bundy attack are bolstered by the fact that his former senior adviser also served as the director of the BLM. According to reports, Reid successfully redrew the endangered tortoise’s protected habitat to benefit a donor, indicating his concern is more about his political and financial future than the well-being of this reptile.
As Bundy confirmed, he is far from the only rancher intimidated by the BLM. He is, however, the last one left fighting. According to a statement he made recently, there were 52 other ranchers in the vicinity of his property at one point – and they are all gone.
He has promised to continue fighting for his right; and, thankfully for his family, plenty of other Americans are joining in the cause, and you can too Like the page!
Gold and bail-ins
By Alasdair Macleod
Posted 11 April 2014
I am often asked whether or not western governments are likely to confiscate gold, and my answer has invariably been on the lines of "unlikely at the moment, because so few people own gold". However given low stock levels in western vaults and that bail-ins are on the agenda the answer to the question should be reconsidered.
I first wrote about the new bail-in provisions after the Cyprus debacle last year. What it means for depositors is succinctly summarised in a current UK Government consultative document on the subject:
"Bail-in involves shareholders of a failing institution being divested of their shares, and creditors of the institution having their claims cancelled or reduced to the extent necessary to restore the institution to financial viability. The shares can then be transferred to affected creditors, as appropriate, to provide compensation."
On the face of it anyone with an unallocated gold account is at risk. In the past this risk has been dismissed, given that the Bank of England with or without the assistance of other central banks always bails out bullion banks in trouble. However, the ability of western central banks to bail out bullion banks in the future is compromised by the emptiness of their vaults, much of their gold being out on lease. Furthermore, because leased gold is still their legal property, they will have first call, leaving unallocated gold accounts with nothing.
This means that next time there is a market hiatus in gold bullion banks will probably be forced to renege on their gold obligations to customers, settling in currency-cash if they can. Since bullion banks are mostly divisions of larger commercial banks, a failure in the gold market is likely to spill over into a wider banking crisis, and it becomes a moot point whether the solution is bail-in, bail-out, or systemic collapse.
The truth is that western central banks have created a monster out of their long-term management of the gold price. For the last thirty years they have been leasing monetary gold in increasing quantities, all of which has disappeared into the anonymity of Asia. Bullion banks know from experience that every time they get into trouble they can expect to be rescued, a liability for central banks that can no longer be discharged with certainty. So where does that leave bank customers with allocated accounts, or gold such as ETF stocks held for them in custody?
In theory they should be completely ring-fenced. Allocated and custodial gold is clearly the property of customers. But it would be naïve to think that customers' clearly identified gold is safe in the chaos of a widespread financial crisis. And then there is the well-established precedent that allows any government to seize its citizens' property by declaring the action to be "in the national interest". It is even written into European Human Rights legislation.
We normally go through life not worrying about these things, dismissing them as scare-mongering. But the disappearance of the west's monetary gold into Asia, whichever way you look at it, makes the unimaginable seizure of privately-owned gold by the state considerably more likely.
http://www.goldmoney.com/research/analysis/gold-and-bail-ins?gmrefcode=gata
Thanks for the video. I've been a fan of Trey Gowdy for a long time. He tells it like it is. Too bad he's almost a lone voice, but he's carrying a banner worth flying.
..........al
Newhampsha- good post and a good strategy. You have to hope it resonates with independents. After all Hilary will be pandering to the 47%ers scaring them saying the republicans only want to take away the freebies they are getting now. IMHO while Obamacare may be a big factor in the 2014 elections, 2 years later it may become a non issue, "may" being the key word. Obama's malfeasance has given the republicans many footballs to run with. Based on what I have seen so far they are more adept at fumbling rather than running with them. I see republican majorities in both houses of congress after the election this year (good riddance Harry Reid),but at least one will not have a veto proof majority. Even so gridlock will continue. And my philosophy is gridlock is good, the less they do in DC the better off we the people are. Of all the republicans jockeying for a possible presidential bid, as of right now I only see Rand Paul or Ted Cruz as the only ones able to give Hilary a good run. They may not have the full support of their fellows in DC but they both have popularity with the general population. Romney is making waves but a 1%er with his history has little chance of beating Hilary. Again this is all IMHO and may change as time goes on.
............al
basserdan, thanks for the article. I agree we will probably never see it here. As the article pointed out, entrenched interests that would be harmed by the purchase of far less fuel at the pump will not allow that to happen. IMHO that should be far more important to Americans than the car's initial development. After all we have the greatest political system money can buy.
..........al
2016 Wishes - A President Who Doesn't Kiss Wall Street's Rear-End
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-04-04/guest-post-2016-wishes-president-who-doesnt-kiss-wall-streets-rear-end
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Is there any hope that we might actually elect a president with the mandate and courage to take down Wall Street instead of kissing its rear end in humiliating obeisance?
The 2016 presidential election may be far away to those obsessed with the news cycle, but it's not too early to express one single hope: that we finally elect a president who doesn't kiss Wall Street's rear end every single day for four/eight years running. It's not difficult, folks; it's either/or. Either the President is willing to take down Wall Street or he/she is kissing Wall Street's rear end. There is no middle ground.
Either the next president issues an executive order (or whatever it takes) to enact these four administrative rules, or he/she is kissing Wall Street's rear end every single day of his/her administration.
1. Every position in any tradable security or financial instrument must be held for a minimum of one minute.
2. A transaction fee payable to the U.S. Treasury will be levied on every order when placed, regardless of whether it executes or not or if it is cancelled, of all tradable securities and financial instruments, including those privately exchanged: $1 for every transaction of less than $100,000 in value, $10 for every trade over $100,000 but less than $1 million, $100 for every trade over $1 million but less than $10 million, and $1,000 for every trade over $10 million.
3. All tradable securities and financial instruments must be marked to market at the close of every trading day. This includes derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, etc.
4. All transactions must be transacted on public exchanges with a transparent bid/ask.
Order the F.B.I., SEC and other law enforcement agencies of the Federal government to prioritize enforcement of all existing securities and banking regulations.
Just four easy-to-understand simple rules. Without these rules, Wall Street remains the Monster Id of American ambition, a vast legal looting machine parasitically sucking the U.S. economy dry and distorting not just financial markets but the political process and the incentives and values that motivate every participant.
Here's a brief history of the past two presidencies. The chickens finally came home to roost for Wall Street and the banks in 2008, and President Bush had a golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to expose Wall Street and the banks to real capitalism, i.e. you're insolvent, you go bust, your assets are auctioned off.
Instead, he obediently bent down and kissed Wall Street's rear end, approving trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts. Oh dearie-dear, the ATMs might not work? Really? Then why does the FDIC have the power to take over busted banks and keep them operating while their assets are liquidated in an orderly fashion?
It was never about debt-serfs not being able to get cash from ATMs. It was always about saving the gargantuan fortunes of financier skimmers, scammers, parasites and predators.
President Obama entered office with a mandate to take down Wall Street and the Too Big to Fail banks. He also refused to expose Wall Street and the banks to real capitalism. He too has bent down and kissed Wall Street's rear end every day of his presidency.
It's not complicated, people. Either enact these four simple rules or remain on your knees kissing Wall Street's rear end. Either the parasites and predators have a free hand, and the incentives for corruption and legal looting remain firmly in place, or Wall Street is taken down by enforcing four simple rules--rules that have no impact on legitimate, productive companies and investors in those companies. These four rules would only impact financier skimmers, scammers, parasites and predators.
Is there any hope that we might actually elect a president with the mandate and courage to take down Wall Street instead of kissing its rear end in humiliating obeisance? The only way such a miracle could occur is if the voters demand it. Sadly, most voters are as morally blind as the people they elect; either they're complicit in the rigged casino (i.e. they're hoping to share in the spoils via their pension, IRA, 401K, etc.) or the corruption and rot has seeped so deep that the nation's moral compass is spinning aimlessly.
Dianne Feinstein: “All vets are mentally ill and government should prevent them from owning firearms”
The LA Times Burt Prelutsky Writes About Feinstein,Pelosi,Boxer and Waters -
“Frankly, I don’t know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I’m not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we’re Number One. There’s no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on ‘Macbeth’. The four of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab. You don’t know if you should condemn them for their stupidity or simply marvel at their ability to form words.”
– Columnist Burt Prelutsky, Los Angeles Times
- See more at: http://stevereports.com/2013/04/the-la-times-burt-prelutsky-writes-about-feinsteinpelosiboxer-and-waters/#sthash.1Lotsfry.dpuf
California senator, alleged mobsters netted in American Hustle-style FBI sting
Does this say anything about the hypocrisy of anti gun democrats?
.........al
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/03/27/california-senator-netted-in-american-hustle-type-fbi-sting/
Call it “American Hustle” gone West. An elaborate FBI sting culminated this week after two undercover officers -- who posed as East Coast Mafia members -- helped take down 26 Californians, including an influential state senator with alleged ties to an Asian mob.
State Sen. Leland Yee, an outspoken Democrat who is a gun control and open government advocate, was arrested Wednesday on charges he conspired to traffic in firearms and traded favors in Sacramento for bribes. He was allegedly taking bribes from men who turned out to be FBI agents.
Yee, who was running for secretary of state and currently represents half of San Francisco, was being held on $500,000 bail after appearing handcuffed and shackled in federal court. He reportedly withdrew from the secretary of state race on Thursday.
He was charged with six counts of depriving the public of honest services and one count of conspiracy to traffic in guns without a license.
The criminal complaint contained dramatic details about Yee's alleged efforts to connect an undercover agent with a firearms dealer. It described a January 2014 meeting where the senator told the agent that the arms business was not for "the faint of heart." The arrangement developed, with Yee and others allegedly working to connect the agent with high-powered weapons -- including shoulder-fired missiles and automatic weapons -- from a Muslim rebel group in the Philippines.
"Do I think we can make some money? I think we can make some money," the senator allegedly said in one of the meetings.
The deal was supposedly worth between $500,000 and $2.5 million.
Despite his stances on gun control, Yee allegedly described himself as "agnostic" in these dealings.
"People want to get whatever they want to get. Do I care? No, I don't care. People need certain things," he said, according to the complaint.
Court documents say he was just one of more than two dozen people caught up in the five-year federal probe. Initially, agents were interested in going after Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a notorious gangster who ran a Chinese criminal organization with ties to Hong Kong.
According to the FBI’s 137-page complaint, Chow and five other defendants laundered $2.3 million for undercover agents between March 2011 and December 2013. According to the FBI, the defendants were told the money came from crimes like illegal gambling, drug dealing and marijuana growing.
Chow, who was previously convicted on gun charges, was recently celebrated by the Chinese community in the area as an example of successful rehabilitation. He has been praised in recent months for his work in the immigrant-heavy community.
Most of the suspects netted in the FBI investigation are linked to the Chinatown brotherhood association that Chow heads known as Ghee Kung Tong. The group’s headquarters were raided Wednesday and members were charged with trafficking in illicit guns, liquor and cigarettes.
The FBI report says undercover agents infiltrated the Chow’s group so effectively that one agent, while posing as a member of La Cosa Nostra, was “inducted” as a consultant.
Mark Hedlund, spokesman for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, confirmed that the FBI searched Yee's office on Wednesday.
Steinberg said he had no comment and did not know anything about the investigation.
Yee is the third Democratic senator to face charges this year. Sen. Rod Wright was convicted of perjury and voter fraud for lying about his legal residence in Los Angeles County, and Sen. Ron Calderon has been indicted on federal corruption charges. Wright and Calderon are taking a voluntary leave of absence, with pay, although Republicans have called for them to be suspended or expelled from the Legislature.
He is best known publicly for his efforts to strengthen open records, government transparency and whistleblower protection laws, including legislation to close a loophole in state public records laws after the CSU Stanislaus Foundation refused to release its $75,000 speaking contract with former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2010.
Yee's arrest came as a shock to Chinese-Americans who see the senator as a pioneering leader in the community and a mainstay of San Francisco politics, said David Lee, director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee.
"People are waiting to see what happens, and they are hoping for the best, that the charges turn out not to be true," said Lee, whose organization just held a get-out-the-vote event with Yee and other Chinese-American elected officials last week.
For his efforts to uphold the California Public Records Act, Yee was honored last week by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, which awarded him its public official citation for his efforts last year to maintain the requirements of the California Public Records Act.
Yee has at times clashed with fellow Democrats for casting votes of conscience, refusing to support the Democratic budget proposal in 2011 because of its deep cuts to education, social services and education. He also opposed legislation by a fellow Democrat, Assemblyman Paul Fong of Cupertino, that banned the sale of shark fins used for Chinese shark fin soup, saying that it unfairly targeted the Chinese-American community.
Yee served in the California Senate since 2006 and his district represents both San Francisco and San Mateo County. He previously was a member of the California Assembly, and is the first Chinese American elected to the California State Senate.
Yee is among three Democrats running this year for secretary of state, the office that oversees elections and campaign finance reporting. He lost a bid for mayor of San Francisco in 2011.
A man was charged last year for threatening Yee over legislation that he proposed to limit rapid reloading of assault weapons. The bill would have prohibited the use of devices that allow users to swiftly reload military-style assault weapons. Lee also authored legislation that that would have required the state to study safe storage of firearms.
Chow acknowledged in an unpublished autobiography that he ran prostitution rings in the 1980s, smuggled drugs and extorted thousands from business owners as a Chinatown gang member, KGO-TV reported two years ago.
In 1992, Chow was among more than two-dozen people indicted on racketeering charges for their alleged involvement in crimes ranging from teenage prostitution to an international drug trade mostly involving heroin.
He was later convicted of gun charges and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He spent 11 years in prison and was released in 2003 after he cut a deal with the government to testify against another high-ranking associate, Peter Chong. Chong was later convicted of racketeering.
But Chow told KGO-TV in a 2012 interview that he had changed and was working with at-risk children in San Francisco.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California issued a statement in 2012 recognizing Chow as a former offender who had become an asset to his community, the Sacramento Bee reported. Chow was also praised by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee for his "willingness to give back to the community," the Bee reported.
Let food prices keep rising like that and next the wonderful bureaucrats in DC will remove food from the CPI. Save b ig bucks in COLA payments.
And btw, nice article on integration of medical services and insurance.
.......al
Disgusting: Clinton Snared In Pedophile Ring
Will having friends in high places exempt him from the rule of law?
According to former child sex slave Virginia Roberts and a class action lawsuit against convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, former President Bill Clinton was present during sex parties involving up to twenty underage girls at Epstein’s secluded island in the Caribbean. That flight records show Clinton was flown on numerous occasions to the island on Epstein’s private jet. Clinton had a close relationship with an employee of Epstein’s who compiled thousands of photos of nude young girls posed in lewd positions. And these photos were used as a catalog for Epstein to loan out his girls to powerful politicians and British royalty, including Bill Clinton.
According to the lawsuit:
…Clinton was friends with an unnamed woman who “kept images of naked underage children on her computer, helped to recruit underage children for Epstein… and photographed underage females in sexually explicit poses.”
While Epstein was indicted and jailed for his pedophilia, Bill Clinton oddly has remained unscathed, more than likely by having friends in high places.
If Bill Clinton is in fact a pedophile, will the American people demand that he be put away for a very long time so that he can’t hurt any more children? Or will having friends in high places exempt him from the rule of law?
Time will tell.
Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/clinton-snared-pedophile-ring/#8lLVKC2qErPRYfTO.99
Fortune 100 Got $1.2 Trillion of Crony Capitalist Subsidies – Welfare for Corporate America
by Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkreig
One of the primary topics on this website since it was launched has been the extremely destructive and explosive rise of crony capitalism throughout the USA. It is crony capitalism, as opposed to free markets, that has led to the gross inequality in American society we have today. Cronyism for the super wealthy starts at the very top with the Federal Reserve System, which consists of topdown economic central planners who manipulate the money supply and hence interest rates for the benefit of the financial oligarch class. It then trickles down through lobbyist money into the halls of Washington D.C., and ultimately filters down to local governments and then the average person on the street gaming welfare or disability.
As such, we now live in a culture of corruption and theft that is pervasive throughout society. One thing that bothers me to no end is when fake Republicans focus their criticism on struggling people who need welfare or food stamps to survive. They have this absurd notion that the whole welfare system doesn’t start with the multinational corporations and Central Banks at the top. In reality, it is at the top where the cancer starts, and that’s where we should focus in order to achieve real change.
http://sgtreport.com/2014/03/fortune-100-got-1-2-trillion-of-crony-capitalist-subsidies-welfare-for-corporate-america/
JPM’s Top Commercial Bankruptcy Lawyer Dead in a Minivan Hit & Run
http://www.silverdoctors.com/another-jpm-banker-dead-in-a-minivan-hit-run/
March 27, 2014 By The Doc
The banker suicide saga has just reached a new level as a top level JPMorgan attorney has been exterminated in a hit & run incident involving a minivan.
JPM attorney Joseph Giampapa was killed over the weekend when he was struck by a minivan in a hit and run incident. Giampapa was reportedly hit and thrown 150 ft and was pronounced dead at the scene. No charges have been filed.
It gets better: Giampapa was JPMorgan’s top commercial bankruptcy lawyer (SVP).
Somehow we suspect the incident was not inflicted by a soccer mom.
The JP Morgan outside counsel manual, listing Giampapa as their Commercial Bank Bankruptcy SVP:
Commercial Bank Bankruptcy & Workout
Joseph Giampapa, SVP and Associate General Counsel
(614/248-6056)
http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/document/Annex_I_US_BasedGeneralCounselPracticeGroupsandManagers_7012013.pdf
Giampapa’s legal profile:
http://www.martindale.com/Joseph-A-Giampapa/1445173-lawyer.htm
The Columbus Dispatch’s coverage of the incident:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/03/23/cyclist-56-struck-by-minivan-in-piqua.html
Recall that Jim Willie informed SD readers several weeks ago that international bankers are dropping like flies to prevent details on massive FOREX fraud from reaching investigating authorities, and that European banking source “V” stated that the banker hit list includes top level banking executives, and also stated that suicided JP Morgan bankers Ryan Henry Crane & Gabriel Magee knew each other and had uncovered something.
Perhaps Giampapa had also uncovered too many secrets.
SHOCKING Leaked DHS Drill: Military, Veterans, Capitalists Are The Enemy
A shocking DHS document, leaked on March 24, 2014 by InfoWars, reveals who Barack Obama’s real enemy is: the military, veterans, the National Guard, and those who eschew Obama’s brand of democratic socialism. The 160-page document describes a drill going on this very minute, dubbed “Capstone Exercise 2014: Scenario Ground Truth,” whereby a fictitious anti-government group—whose stated ideology happens to match exactly that of the Tea Party—wages a cyber attack against the U.S. government after martial law has been declared in the wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami. Conspiring with this group—named Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny—are elements of the military, veterans, and the National Guard.
The top secret document, mandated to be locked up and only seen by DHS agents—marked on every single one of its 160 pages that it should be seen by “Trusted Agents Only”—is a blueprint for what Obama is planning: Martial law and a declaration of war on the American people.
The two key passages are the following. Read this carefully, watch Western Center for Journalism’s exclusive video, and get to work impeaching the enemy of America, Barack Hussein Obama.
Cyber attacks are expected throughout the exercise by members of anti-government organizations, such as Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny and individuals sympathetic to their cause. (Page 5)
While some Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny members are capable of conducting adverse cyber operations, the greatest threat is current government employees sympathetic to their cause…[Also included] are employees within U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, National Guard, and Defense Information Systems Agency that may support Free Americans Against Socialist Tyranny doctrine…Free Americans against Socialist Tyranny sympathizers may include both former and current members of the military……Recent reductions in force and early separation requirements have raised concern for disgruntled military and Department of Defense civilians… (Page 125)
If this isn’t the smoking gun that will bring down the Obama regime, nothing will.
Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/shocking-leaked-dhs-drill-military-veterans-capitalists-enemy/#LWxthPP0bwJOqtF2.99
ksquared- true story
I lived in Toms River for 20 years before retiring and heading for the hills. Many years ago a private contractor for school transportation sent a proposal before the TR school board saying he could save $5 million a year on transportation costs. They didn't even give him a hearing on the proposal. Why ? It seems that the members of the school board all had relatives making nice bucks driving school buses for the town. They would have all either been fired or start working for a new boss for less. Guess in a way I can't blame them, but as a taxpayer I was outraged. I say good riddance to the near bankrupt state of NJ.
...........al
Glad to help. eom
ONEBGG- fwiw I use startpage for a search engine. It's supposed to be totally anonymous.
https://startpage.com/eng/
https://startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html
.............al
Subject: COMPLAINT: Treatment of captive insurgents.
A Canadian female liberal wrote a lot of letters to the Canadian government, complaining about the treatment of captive insurgents (terrorists) being held in Afghanistan National Correctional System facilities. She demanded a response to her letter. She received back the following reply:
National Defense Headquarters
M Gen George R Pearkes Bldg, 15 NT
101 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa ON K1A 0K2
Canada
Dear Concerned Citizen,
Thank you for your recent letter expressing your profound concern of treatment of the Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists captured by Canadian Forces, who were subsequently transferred to the Afghanistan Government and are currently being held by Afghan officials in Afghanistan National Correctional System facilities.
Our administration takes these matters seriously and your opinions were heard loud and clear here in Ottawa. You will be pleased to learn, thanks to the concerns of citizens like yourself, we are creating a new department here at the Department of National Defense, to be called 'Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers' program, or LARK for short.
In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided, on a trial basis, to divert several terrorists and place them in homes of concerned citizens such as yourself around the country, under those citizens personal care. Your personal detainee has been selected and is scheduled for transportation under heavily armed guard to your residence in Toronto next Monday
Ali Mohammed Ahmed bin Mahmud is your detainee, and is to be cared for pursuant to the standards you personally demanded in your letter of complaint. You will be pleased to know that we will conduct weekly inspections to ensure that your standards of care for Ahmed are commensurate with your recommendations.
Although Ahmed is a sociopath and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his 'attitudinal problem' will help him overcome those character flaws. Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. We understand that you plan to offer counselling and home schooling, however, we strongly recommend that you hire some assistant caretakers.
Please advise any Jewish friends, neighbours, or relatives about your house guest, as he might get agitated or even violent, but we are sure you can reason with him. He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless in your opinion, this might offend him. Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We advise that you do not ask him to demonstrate these skills either in your home or wherever you choose to take him while helping him adjust to life in our country.
Ahmed will not wish to interact with you or your daughters except sexually, since he views females as a form of property, thereby having no rights, including refusal of his sexual demands. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him.
You also should know that he has shown violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the dress code that he will recommend as more appropriate attire. I'm sure you will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the burka over time. Just remember that it is all part of 'respecting his culture and religious beliefs' as described in your letter.
You take good care of Ahmed and remember that we will try to have a counsellor available to help you over any difficulties you encounter while Ahmed is adjusting to Canadian culture.
Thanks again for your concern. We truly appreciate it when folks like you keep us informed of the proper way to do our job and care for our fellow man Good luck and God bless you.
Cordially,
Gordon O'Connor
Minister of National Defense
Ayock
Good analysis. Housing is regional and local. I don't know how much student debt affects it, but it does not surprise me that cash full institutional buyers are buying up as fast as they can. Real property is wealth and historically speaking grows faster than interest at a bank. IMHO and many will disagree with me, real estate and housing will go through a big bust cycle. My reasoning is simple. The jobs to support ever growing housing and real estate are no longer here, nor are they returning any time soon. Cast blame wherever you want but off shoring of our good paying jobs has been supported by both major political parties. Most jobs being created are low wage. Housing including rentals must come down to where the majority of the working class can afford them. If not they will sit vacant as owners will still have to pay taxes and are receiving no financial benefit. Never mind the growing number of squatters in higher population density areas. Perhaps my logic is too simple, but I can see no other way at this point in time.
.........al
Game Is Rigged, Trust Is Waning, Gold Is Gaining
By Nick Hodge 2014-03-19
Is the game rigged?
Of course the game is rigged.
If you didn't learn that with derivatives and sub-prime... and the subsequent bailouts... you should've learned it with LIBOR or the rigging of FOREX or the laundering of money by HSBC or the admission by Andrew Huszar, the man charged with implementing QE, that it does nothing to fix a structurally unsound U.S. economy, but instead is a tool to enrich the already uber-wealthy.
If none of that did it for you, Wall Street's biggest pitchman, Jim Cramer, was out last month with a sobering thought:
Cramer Says Game Is Rigged “If anyone thinks the little guy can compete with the big guys... you're a sucker.”
You're looking at 10%–15% losses, consistently, every time the flow of stimulus is halted.The most telling sign the game is rigged is how the market responds whenever there's talk of tapering the rigging, of ending the 'quantitative easing' that has been pumping phantom dollars into the system for the last five years.
It happened in June 2013, when the DOW shed almost 700 points on mere whispers of "winding down" the flow of money.
It shed another 1,200 points in February 2014 as the Fed underwent a changing of the guard and "taper talk" continued.
The picture that paints isn't a pleasant one.
It's an image of a gradually inflating stock market, powered entirely by an unstoppable stream of fresh, crisp $100 bills, each one slightly less valuable than the one that came before it.
In any normal environment, this would be the sort of thing that adds value to precious metals.
But that can't happen when gold is rigged, which many have speculated is the case for some time. Now gold-rigging is not speculation but fact.
A paper out in February by New York University's Stern School of Business Professor and Managing Director at Moody's Investors Service Rosa Abrantes-Metz found that:
“The structure of the benchmark is certainly conducive to collusion and manipulation, and the empirical data are consistent with price artificiality. It is likely that co-operation between participants may be occurring.”
At the center of it are banks that have already been caught rigging other markets, like Deutsche Bank, HSBC, and Societe Generale.
Mortgages were rigged. Interest rates are rigged. FOREX is rigged. Stock trading is rigged. Gold is rigged.
Got it?
Recent Evidence: Results of Rigging
I've shared with you over the months some of the results of this rigging already by way of broad economic statistics and opinion polls.
But there are a few other things I need to shed light on so you can fully appreciate how there's no way this can come to a fruitful end.
You see, this abandonment of the principles that once made the American system great is affecting people of all ages.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York admits that almost half of recent grads are “underemployed,” working at a low-wage job that doesn't require a degree. Yet they still have to pay off an average student loan debt of $20,000 apiece.
About eight million people are working part-time because they can't find full-time work.
Older generations are no better off, with nearly 27% of those aged 65-74 still in the workforce — an increase of 30% in a decade. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that will rise another 18% by 2022, at which point a third of American seniors will be in the workforce trying to make ends meet.
And what do you get for working more and more in this New America? Less and less, of course. The portion of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) being paid to workers is 42.6%. That's an all-time low, while corporate profits are at an all-time high.
The number of workers in the retail sector now outnumbers those in the manufacturing sector for the first time. They're flipping burgers instead of framing houses.
While only 21% of the jobs lost during the recession were low-wage jobs... over half the jobs created since then have been low-wage. Conversely, 60% of the jobs lost were middle-income jobs... but only 22% of new post-recession jobs are middle-income.
The top three U.S. employers in 1960 were General Motors, Ford, and AT&T.
Today it's Wal-Mart, Yum! Brands (Taco Bell/KFC), and McDonalds.
And these new trends are expected to continue for the next decade, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasting the creation of 8.8 million jobs that require a high school diploma or less and only 3.1 million new jobs requiring college education.
As more people asking if you'd like fries with that have a college degree... where are the former fry-askers going to go?
What is the end result of all this recent financial rigging and market manipulation?
As Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz recently penned in the New York Times:
“... trust is becoming yet another casualty of our country’s staggering inequality: As the gap between Americans widens, the bonds that hold society together weaken. So, too, as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.”
It's the erosion of trust that's the ultimate result of everything that's ensued since 2008. And that's going to have serious implications.
What Happens When the Trust Goes?
A couple things...
One is the response of the people, as evidenced ever since that man set himself on fire in Tunisia, setting off the Arab Spring. You can see the same thing in Egypt, Turkey, and most recently in Venezuela and Ukraine.
Ukraine and Venezuela March 2014
People are rising up as their trust in their leaders and political systems disappears.
It's not hard to see similar sentiments surfacing in the U.S. Last month, USA Today even ran an op-ed by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, entitled “Americans Rising Up Against Government,” which concluded:
Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they've begun.
So that's the first thing. Citizens get fed up and start to fight back.
The second thing, which I think has more immediate consequences, is that our debt holders lose trust in our ability to pay them back.
This is happening now, and it threatens the very foundation of the U.S. dollar, which gets its value from trust and nothing else.
For example, at the beginning of December 2013, China held $1.317 trillion in U.S. Treasuries. By the end of the month, it only held $1.269 trillion, meaning it dumped some $48 billion in U.S. paper in one month. That's the second-largest amount ever.
If China's dumping the U.S. dollar... what is it buying?
You'll Never Be On The Inside!
The answer, of course, is gold. A lot of it.
In fact, last year, China was crowned the world's largest gold market for the first time... taking advantage of depressed prices to stock up.
Chinese consumers bought 1,066 tonnes of gold in 2013 — the most gold demanded by one country's consumers ever.
China was also the world's top miner, producing 437 tonnes last year. It also imported 1,108 tonnes, a 33% rise in one year. China's Loading Up on Gold
And they’re not even close to finished.
How much gold are they going to buy?
Here's an example...
The U.S. holds 76% of its foreign reserves as gold.
For the Chinese, who hold $3.4 trillion in foreign reserves, they'd need some 58,000 tonnes, or about one-third of the total gold ever mined in the history of the world, to match that 76% ratio...
They can either watch the value of their dollars erode along with the trust that backs it, or they can go on a massive gold-buying spree.
And so far, they're opting for the latter.
The Wall Street Journal reported this month that China is now the biggest driver of gold prices, noting:
China alone can take up the equivalent of half of the global gold mine output, while a possible recovery in Indian demand could also act as a boost for the yellow metal as long as the Indian authorities reduce import tariffs on gold.
The future of the U.S. is so bleak that our largest holder of debt is cutting its losses and trading in that debt for gold as fast as it can.
Got it?
Call it like you see it,
Nick Hodge Signature
Nick Hodge
http://www.outsiderclub.com/game-is-rigged-gold-is-rigged/861
Stick A Fork In The "Housing Recovery" (Spoiler Alert: Blame Record Student Debt)
The chart below from Bank of America - showing the progression of first-time US homebuyers in recent months - should scare everyone who still believes that there is some sort of "housing recovery" in the US.
What this chart tells us is that an increasingly greater amount of existing homes is being sold not to people who want to live in them, but speculators who are merely seeking to flip to a greater fool, or worse, to Chinese and Russian olilgarchs who are simply seeking a place where to park hot money or simply launder other ill-gotten cash.
The NAR essentially confirmed this (something Zero Hedge readers have known for nearly a year), when it reported that "all-cash sales comprised 35 percent of transactions in February, up from 33 percent in January and 32 percent in February 2013. Individual investors, who account for many cash sales, purchased 21 percent of homes in February, compared with 20 percent in January; they were 22 percent in February 2013. Seventy-three percent of investors paid cash in February.
Read that last sentence again: 73% of investors, i.e. speculators who now account for a greater portion of total purchasers than first time home buyers, paid cash!
So what explains this collapse in the traditional housing pathway, where people buy houses to live in them? Simple. Record debt. Only not the credit card debt variety which historically was the biggest impediment to large purchases and was among the reasons for the 2007 credit bubble pop. This time it is all student debt.
NAR President Steve Brown, co-owner of Irongate, Inc., Realtors in Dayton, Ohio, said student debt appears to be a factor in the weak level of first-time buyers. "The biggest problems for first-time buyers are tight credit and limited inventory in the lower price ranges," he said. "However, 20 percent of buyers under the age of 33, the prime group of first-time buyers, delayed their purchase because of outstanding debt. In our recent consumer survey, 56 percent of younger buyers who took longer to save for a downpayment identified student debt as the biggest obstacle."
Brown notes the survey results are for recent homebuyers. "It’s clear there are other people who would like to buy a home that are not in the market because of debt issues, so we can expect a lingering impact of delayed home buying," Brown added.
As a reminder, in Q4 student debt rose to a record $1.08 trillion, and continues to rise at a breakneck pace.
But... but... what happened to the whole "the US consumer has deleveraged and can't wait to go on a spending spree" fable again?
Source: Bank of America, NAR
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-20/stick-fork-housing-recovery-spoiler-alert-blame-record-student-debt
Good article, but the few voices in congress that say anything are far out shouted by the vast majority that are almost literally on the payrolls of these corporations thru campaign contributions. That includes both democrats and republicans.
........al
Is “Dr. Copper” Foreshadowing A Stock Market Crash Just Like It Did In 2008?
Is the price of copper trying to tell us something? Traditionally, "Dr. Copper" has been a very accurate indicator of where the global economy is heading next. For example, back in 2008 the price of copper dropped from nearly $4.00 to under $1.50 in just a matter of months. And now it appears that another big decline in the price of copper is starting to happen. So far this year, the price of copper has dropped from a high of $3.40 back in January to a price of $2.95 as I write this article, and many analysts are warning that this is just the beginning. By itself, this should be quite alarming to investors, but as you will see below there are a whole host of other signs that a stock market crash may be rapidly approaching.
But before we get to those other signs, let us discuss copper a bit more first. I cannot remember a time since 2008 when there has been such an overwhelming negative consensus about where the price of copper is heading. The following is from a CNBC article that was posted this week...
Cascading copper prices have multiple root causes that lead to one conclusion: The anticipated global economic recovery may not be all it's cracked up to be.
Consequently, analysts are in virtual unison that the extended-term trajectory is lower for the metal often used as a growth barometer. Copper futures are off more than 12 percent in 2014 and 7 percent over just the past three days, though they rose less than 1 percent in Wednesday trading.
A slowdown in the global economy, forced selling by Chinese banks and technical factors have converged in multiple calls for more weakness in a commodity known by traders and economists as "Dr. Copper" for its ability to accurately make economic prognoses.
Of course there are some out there that are trying to claim that "this time is different" and that the price of copper is no longer a useful indicator for the global economy as a whole.
We shall see.
Meanwhile, there are lots of other signs that the financial markets are repeating patterns that we have seen in the past. For instance, the level of margin debt on Wall Street just soared to another brand new record high...
The amount of money investors borrowed from Wall Street brokers to buy stocks rose for a seventh straight month in January to a record $451.3 billion, a potential warning sign that in the past has coincided with irrational exuberance and stock market tops.
We saw margin debt spike dramatically like this just prior to the crash of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and just before the great financial crisis of 2008. Just check out the chart in this article.
Shouldn't we be alarmed that it is happening again?
If you listen carefully, there are many prominent voices in the financial world that are trying to warn us about this. Here is one example...
"One characteristic of getting closer to a market top is a major expansion in margin debt," says Gary Kaltbaum, president of Kaltbaum Capital Management. "Expanding market debt fuels the bull market and is an investors' best friend when stocks are rising. The problem is when the market turns (lower), it is the market's worst enemy."
And of course margin debt is far from the only sign that indicates that we are in a massive stock market bubble that is about to crash. The following is a list of 10 signs that comes from a recent article by Lance Roberts of STA Wealth Management...
I was recently discussing the market, current sentiment and other investing related issues with a money manager friend of mine in California. (Normally, I would include a credit for the following work but since he works for a major firm he asked me not to identify him directly.) However, in one of our many email exchanges he sent me the following note detailing the 10 typical warning signs of stock market exuberance.
(1) Expected strong OR acceleration of GDP and EPS (40% of 2013's EPS increase occurred in the 4th quarter)
(2) Large number of IPOs of unprofitable AND speculative companies
(3) Parabolic move up in stock prices of hot industries (not just individual stocks)
(4) High valuations (many metrics are at near-record highs, a few at record highs)
(5) Fantastic high valuation of some large mergers (e.g., Facebook & WhatsApp)
(6) High NYSE margin debt
Margin debt/gdp (March 2000: 2.7%, July 2007: 2.6%, Jan 2014: 2.6%)
Margin debt/market cap (March 2000: 1.8%, July 2007: 2.3%, Jan 2014: 2.0%)
(7) Household direct holdings of equities as % of total financial assets at 24%, second-highest level (data back to 1953, highest was 1998-2000)
(8) Highly bullish sentiment (down slightly from year-end peaks; still high or near record high, depending on the source)
(9) Unusually high ratio of selling to buying by corporate senior managers (the buy/sell ratio of senior corporate officers is now at the record post-1990 lows seen in Summer 2007 and Spring 2011)
(10) Stock prices rise following speculative press releases (e.g., Tesla will dominate battery business after they get partner who knows how to build batteries and they build a big factory. This also assumes that NO ONE else will enter into that business such as GM, Ford or GE.)
All are true today, and it is the third time in the last 15 years these factors have occurred simultaneously which is the most remarkable aspect of the situation.
And for even more technical indicators such as these, please see Charles Hugh Smith's excellent article entitled "Why 2014 Is Beginning to Look A Lot Like 2008".
So do all of these numbers and charts actually prove that something is about to happen?
Not necessarily.
But if we do not learn from the past then we are doomed to repeat it.
At this point, even representatives from the big Wall Street banks are warning about the "euphoria" on Wall Street...
The stock market entered "euphoria mode" late last year and has remained there, except for a week in February, as "speculative froth" bubbles around the market's hottest sectors, Citi's chief equity strategist told CNBC on Tuesday.
And even market cheerleader Jim Cramer is warning that the stock market is now exhibiting "top behavior"...
The parabolic moves of stocks such as Plug Power and FuelCell Energy have the stock market exhibiting "top behavior," CNBC's Jim Cramer said Wednesday.
Cramer said he has tracked the fuel cells stocks since his days as a hedge fund manager. Runups in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae also had him worried.
None of what you just read above guarantees that the stock market will crash this week, this month or even this year.
And nobody knows the exact date when the next stock market crash will happen.
But one thing is for certain - this massive stock market bubble will burst at some point, and when it does our economy is far less equipped to handle it than it was the last time.
Based on my research, I am entirely convinced that the coming economic crisis is going to be substantially worse than the last one, and that is very bad news for the United States.
So what do you think?
Do you agree or do you think that I am nuts?
Please feel free to share your opinion by posting a comment below...
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/is-dr-copper-foreshadowing-a-stock-market-crash-just-like-it-did-in-2008