I do believe the "entitled" population is closer to 49-50%. It makes a sad case for liberals when 20% of the entitlement population disapproves of an ultra liberal president.

...........al

Ayock

I sincerely hope that you are right and all the rumors floating around about CIA gun running through Bengazi are wrong. It would not look good if our gov't was running guns through Bengazi to the same peoples now running amok in Iraq. I trust congressman Gowdy to get to the real truth.

..........al

Obamas Go on 12-Day Martha's Vineyard Vacation Amid Global Crises

Amid multiple crisis of foreign conflicts detrimental to American interests, unsecured borders allowing free flows of illegal immigrants into the country, and so many "phoney" scandals plaguing his administration it is time for another tax payer financed vacation to a place where 99% of the population could ill afford to go.

........al

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/08/08/Obamas-Go-on-12-Day-Martha-s-Vineyard-Vacation-Amid-Global-Crises

Amid an international ebola health emergency, U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, and the illegal immigration crisis surging on the southern border, President Barack Obama leaves on Saturday for a lavish Martha's Vineyard twelve day vacation at the 8,100-square foot mansion of Democratic Party donor Joanne Hubschman.

The timing of Obama's swank vacation has even the president's supporters worried.

"Even some of Obama's most ardent supporters are questioning the wisdom of this summer's sojourn as war roils Gaza and a wave of families and children are crossing the southwestern US border illegally," reports the Boston Globe.

The White House announced Thursday that Obama will briefly interrupt his vacation by returning to Washington on Sunday, August 17, for a few meetings and then jetting back to the Massachusetts island retreat on August 19 to continue his vacation until August 24th.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said there is no need to worry that Obama is disengaged from the duties of his office because he travels with "an array of communications equipment" that enable him to carry out his presidential duties..

"He travels with an array of communications equipment and national security advisers that will allow him to perform all of the functions that are required of America's commander in chief," said Earnest."

Obama has vacationed at the wealthy Martha's Vineyard retreat every year of his presidency save 2012 when he was busy campaigning for re-election.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds Obama hitting a new all-time low approval rating of just 40%.

Reportable Bullion Transactions Infographic

http://www.jmbullion.com/reportable-bullion-transactions-infographic/

Not to be contrary as I agree totally that we as a nation are doomed by this debt situation- under the constitution all spending bills must originate in the house of representatives. Ever since the Reagan administration and the false promises of Keynesian economics the house has been back and forth under control of both political parties. Yet despite all the rhetoric neither has done anything to control spending or reduce the debt.

..........al

Ayock- I have to disagree. Myself along with many others want to know what was really going on in Bengazi. Rumors run rampant about guns and the CIA. I sincerely hope they get to the bottom of everything and put all rumors to rest one way or another. I think we the people have every right to know.

........al

Silver: Something Doesn’t Add Up

One of the first things you learn when studying economics is the law of supply and demand, defined as follows: “In a competitive market, prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand: an increase in supply will lower prices if not accompanied by increased demand, and an increase in demand will raise prices unless accompanied by increased supply.” This is ECON 101 and it’s a fairly simply concept to grasp.

Now let’s take a look at the silver market with this concept in mind. With regard to physical demand, we see that silver has been incredibly strong both on an absolute and relative basis.
Over the past 12-18 months we’ve witnessed the following:



An 82% decline in silver stocks on the Shanghai Futures Exchange
India importing a record amount of silver in 2013
Silver Eagles outselling Gold Eagles at a record pace of 87.5 to 1 ounce basis
Annual Canadian Maple Leaf sales shattering an all-time record in 2013
COMEX warehouse eligible silver sitting at a 52-week low

So we can see that demand for physical silver is booming around the world. Has this demand been accompanied by an increase in supply? Let’s take a look.

According to the Silver Institute, the worldwide supply of silver has been flat over the past 10 years and in a steady decline over the last four. I made this quick graph of their supply data for your viewing pleasure.





Not exactly a production boom I guess you could say. So it’s easy to see that silver supplies have been in a very clear downtrend since 2010 and essentially unchanged year-over-year since 2004.

Now, on to the title of this post: Something doesn’t add up. I hope that I’ve shown that demand for silver, particularly over the last 18 months has not only been strong, but to the “point of breaking records” strong. I’ve also demonstrated that silver supply has been steady-to-slightly-declining over the same period.

According to our law of supply and demand, there should be a rise in the price of silver based on the factors above. HOWEVER, we have seen exactly the opposite. The price of silver has puked (as our friends at Barclays so eloquently stated) from $50/oz in 2011 to its current price of $20.50/oz. I guess the silver market has done the impossible and figured out how to violate the single most
enduring concept in the field of economics.

What were the first four words in that definition again?


http://www.silverdoctors.com/silver-something-doesnt-add-up/

Without government handouts, 70 million Americans would be starving in the streets right now


(NaturalNews) Economic conditions in the United States have become so dire for Americans that tens of millions would literally be starving in their homes or on the street were it not for taxpayer-funded support and benefits programs, according to new data.

This comes amid endless talk of America's "economic recovery" following the near-collapse of the U.S. economy in 2007-2008, a calamity that was caused by Washington's ceaseless meddling and social engineering that was the subprime lending debacle.

Today, home sales -- the quintessential indicator of American success -- have fallen to record lows; more people are out of the workforce than at anytime in the last five decades, and consumers are too strapped for cash to spend enough money to revive the economy. By any real measure, then, the boom times of old for America are long gone and, as some pessimistically speculate, perhaps for good.

As noted by the website SHTFPlan:

According to the HHS, nearly half of all Americans are now dependent on some form of government benefit just to put food on the table. And of our population of 310 million, nearly one in four receive welfare benefits.

That's over 70 million people who, if the government safety nets broke down due to lack of funding or a monetary crisis, would be starving on our streets right now.

Nearly half of all Americans receiving some kind of assistance

Those numbers are incredibly shocking, and what's more, they seem to indicate a continuing downward trend that does not look to be improving anytime soon. And historically, in any nation, when people are left with few other options, civil unrest and violence take root.

CNS News lays it out further:

According to the 2014 version of a report that the Department of Health and Human Services is required by law to issue annually, the percentage of Americans on welfare in 2011 was the highest yet calculated. The data for 2011 is the most recent in the report.

...

By this measure, according to the report, 23.1 percent of Americans were recipients of welfare in 2011. Since 1993, the earliest year covered by the report, that is the highest percentage of Americans reported to be receiving welfare.

A startling 38 percent of all children 5 and under in the United States were welfare recipients in 2011, according to the report.

There's more bad news that is completely shocking.

When the department added in recipients of non-means-tested government programs like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and veterans benefits, the total number of Americans receiving some form of taxpayer-funded assistance in the fourth quarter of 2011 rose to an astounding 151,014,000 people, or 49.2 percent of the total population.

Talk about unsustainable.

'The end of the world as we know it'

Understand that these figures were from more than two-and-a-half years ago, and while the "official" unemployment rate has dropped, it has mostly done so because more and more people have simply dropped out of the workforce. And why are they dropping out? Because they are getting unemployment benefits instead: another taxpayer-funded endeavor.

"Thus, in all likelihood, we are well over the 50% mark," reports SHTFPlan. "This means that without government assistance that may include social security, welfare, unemployment or other social services, at least one in two Americans would not be able to pay their rent, buy food, or keep their utilities turned on.

"The end of the world as [we] know it is happening right now.

"What's worse is that... those in the upper echelons of our government know it."

How do we know that? Because as the nation's productive class shrinks and its non-productive class grows, the federal government is wargaming economic collapse scenarios, buying tens of thousands of new weapons and hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition.

There is a storm brewing on the horizon -- it could be economic; it could be some government conspiracy; it could be due to widespread anger over what is happening along America's southwest border -- but something "just doesn't feel right," as they say. It's worth your family's safety to at least consider the the possibilities. http://www.naturalnews.com/046309_government_handouts_mass_starvation_economic_collapse.html#ixzz39WnDyvih

The Subprime Economy is Back—But It Never Really Left

- See more at: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/08/03/the-subprime-economy-is-back-but-it-never-really-left/#sthash.jSu56gEJ.dpuf


Tapped Out in the New Subprime Economy

Tapped Out in the New Subprime Economy

Remember the sub-prime economy?

It’s back, but it’s different this time. Well, sorta different. And you may be affected by it in all kinds of ways.

The new sub-prime economy is a direct result of the catastrophic financial ruin caused by the old sub-prime mortgage crisis. Wall Street’s biggest money has figured out how to profit off of people deep in debt and unable to climb out because of the still-limping economy.

So, after pushing people to the margins with exotic financial instruments, Wall Street is now profiting off the increasingly marginal existence of many Americans. With more and more people renting their homes, the median household now 20% poorer today than it was in 1984, and almost half of all Americans now living paycheck to paycheck, the sub-prime economy has shifted away from big-ticket mortgages to profiting off the banalities of everyday life.

The numbers don’t lie: 35% of Americans—roughly 77 million people—have an outstanding debt currently being pursued by a collection agency, according to a new study by the Urban Institute. Although the individual amounts of delinquent debt range from as little as $25 to over $125,000, the national average is a staggering $5,178.

That’s a lot of bad debt in the system, and there are rich pickings in all of it.
If Sisyphus had bills …

If Sisyphus had bills …

Maybe that’s why the study was funded by Encore Capital Group—the country’s largest publicly-traded buyer of defaulted debt—and co-authored by its very own think-tank, the Consumer Credit Research Institute. The latter, founded in 2011, describes its work as a “ground-breaking effort to develop new knowledge about low- and moderate-income consumers” using techniques borrowed from economics, statistics and psychology.

The first go-round on the subprime roulette wheel was fueled primarily by the post-9/11 “go-go” housing boom. The middlemen of Manhattan systematically used predatory lending to ensnare hundreds of thousands of hopeful American Dreamers into an adjustable-rate, no-money-down, balloon-payment nightmare. So they made money handing out subprime mortgages like Halloween candy, bundled that risky, unsustainable debt into exotic financial instruments, and profited again by betting they’d fail.

But that was then, and things are supposed to be different now, right?

Now the financial system is supposed to be chastened. It is, according to its staunchest critics, wholly and restrictively regulated by Dodd-Frank. In fact, Dodd-Frank is so restrictive, they say, that it has impeded the “recovery” and needs to be loosened. That’s despite the fact that many key rules still haven’t been written and despite the omnipresence of corporate banking interests at every step of the rulemaking process.

Things are different now. This new sub-prime bubble is not being inflated by predatory lenders targeting would-be homeowners. Even though the real estate market is improving in places like San Francisco, New York and Washington, D.C., homeownership is at a 19-year low, with more people opting to rent because of tighter finances.

Hedge Funds, Hedge Hogs

Well-positioned hedge funds gobbled up tens of thousands of homes left vacant by the bursting mortgage bubble. Sometimes entire neighborhoods were purchased by those firms, who—unlike Lehman Brothers—were not broken by the crash. Like JP Morgan hoarding the devalued financial assets of its failed competitors, hedge funds saw the sudden surge in low-cost real estate as a buying opportunity.

The Blackstone Group—one of the world’s largest hedge funds—went on a two-year buying spree that transformed it into “America’s largest landlord” with over 40,000 houses in its profitable inventory.

And that’s where bad debt is accumulating—in the day-to-day struggle to make ends meet.

To wit, the Urban Institute’s study focused on collections of non-mortgage bills. These include credit card bills, medical bills, and utility bills that are “more than 180 days past due and have been placed in collections.”

A good example of the financial jeopardy many face is in Detroit. That’s where the median household income is less than half the national average—and where tens of thousands couldn’t afford to pay their water bills.
Detroit Goes Dry

Detroit Goes Dry

The bankrupted city decided to do something about chronic delinquencies—they began shutting off people’s water. As the pace of the shut-offs sped up, the city paid $6 million to a private contractor to make sure the taps ran dry. So far, some 100,000 have been without water at times.

This is exactly the sort of compromised position many find themselves in with this new economy. And it’s where predatory lending is taking its toll, targeting the desperate with high-risk, high-interest and, therefore, high-reward loans that epitomize Wall Street’s unending “search for yield.”

Bad Credit? We Can Help You Make It Worse

And what a yield lending to subprime customers earns. The “Payday Loan” industry still gets away with interest rates as high as 700 percent, a story WhoWhatWhy reported in March. That kind of loan puts many people into a modern form of sharecropping, accruing debt faster than they can pay it off.

The $3 billion-a-year industry is finally being scrutinized by federal regulators at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Even so, the underlying business model is being profitably recycled.

Take, for example, the entry of banks and private equity firms into the used car business.

They identify distressed and marginal candidates for risky, high-interest loans on cars that all too often end up being lemons, according to the New York Times. After searching for potential customers with low credit scores, banks like Capital One and Wells Fargo work with dealers who send them “certificates” redeemable for a “no credit, no problem” loan. That traps the less financially savvy customers into long-term loans that eventually triple or quadruple the cost of the car—or worse.
New victim targeted: rank and file of the U.S. Military

New victim targeted: rank and file of the U.S. Military

A little-known company called USA Discounters has opened another front of the high-interest assault, targeting the rank and file of the U.S. military.

USA Discounters leverages the low-wage position of active-duty military families into high-yield loans for mundane household items like TVs and washers and dryers. Despite their name, the company sometimes charges double the normal retail price for items, and gives customers credit on terms that can quickly turn unfavorable.

And that’s really what the subprime economy is now—easy money at the lowerend of America’s wealth gap. And the lower end is growing.
- See more at: http://whowhatwhy.com/2014/08/03/the-subprime-economy-is-back-but-it-never-really-left/#sthash.jSu56gEJ.dpuf

Silver: Something Doesn’t Add Up

One of the first things you learn when studying economics is the law of supply and demand, defined as follows: “In a competitive market, prices are determined by the interaction of supply and demand: an increase in supply will lower prices if not accompanied by increased demand, and an increase in demand will raise prices unless accompanied by increased supply.” This is ECON 101 and it’s a fairly simply concept to grasp.

Now let’s take a look at the silver market with this concept in mind. With regard to physical demand, we see that silver has been incredibly strong both on an absolute and relative basis.
Over the past 12-18 months we’ve witnessed the following:



An 82% decline in silver stocks on the Shanghai Futures Exchange
India importing a record amount of silver in 2013
Silver Eagles outselling Gold Eagles at a record pace of 87.5 to 1 ounce basis
Annual Canadian Maple Leaf sales shattering an all-time record in 2013
COMEX warehouse eligible silver sitting at a 52-week low

So we can see that demand for physical silver is booming around the world. Has this demand been accompanied by an increase in supply? Let’s take a look.

According to the Silver Institute, the worldwide supply of silver has been flat over the past 10 years and in a steady decline over the last four. I made this quick graph of their supply data for your viewing pleasure.





Not exactly a production boom I guess you could say. So it’s easy to see that silver supplies have been in a very clear downtrend since 2010 and essentially unchanged year-over-year since 2004.

Now, on to the title of this post: Something doesn’t add up. I hope that I’ve shown that demand for silver, particularly over the last 18 months has not only been strong, but to the “point of breaking records” strong. I’ve also demonstrated that silver supply has been steady-to-slightly-declining over the same period.

According to our law of supply and demand, there should be a rise in the price of silver based on the factors above. HOWEVER, we have seen exactly the opposite. The price of silver has puked (as our friends at Barclays so eloquently stated) from $50/oz in 2011 to its current price of $20.50/oz. I guess the silver market has done the impossible and figured out how to violate the single most
enduring concept in the field of economics.

What were the first four words in that definition again?


http://www.silverdoctors.com/silver-something-doesnt-add-up/

Another Settlement – JP Morgan Receives Slap On The Wrist Despite Years Of Fraudulent CFTC Data



Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been long viewed as one of the most corrupt of American institutions – and that’s saying a lot. Putting aside all the accusations with regard to silver manipulation in recent years, the most stunning controversy occurred back in 2010 when a retiring judge accused the other remaining judge of being a total bought and paid for Wall Street crony.

The retiring judge was George Painter, who accused fellow judge Bruce Levine of not once ever ruling in favor of an investor in his 20 years on the bench. Not only that, but he claimed this was the result of a promise Levine made to Wendy Gramm, the former head of the CFTC and the wife of Phil Gramm. Phil Gramm was the Congressman who spearheaded the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, which is seen by many (including myself) as one of the most catastrophic pieces of legislation in American history since it laid the groundwork for the financial crisis of 2008, as well as the continued cancerous permanence and power of TBTF banks. FiredogLake covered the CFTC controversy in 2010:

An Administrative Law Judge at the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), George Painter, revealed in his retirement letter that a colleague of his, Judge Bruce Levine, has never awarded a case in favor of a plaintiff in 20 years on the bench. He traces this back to a deal Levine made with Wendy Gramm, the former head of the CFTC and the wife of Phil Gramm (R-Enron and UBS). Indeed, the numbers check out, at least for the time period we know about; Judge Levine has never decided in favor of a plaintiff, i.e. never decided in favor of an investor crying mistreatment or fraud by a commodity dealer or major broker in commodity futures and derivatives trading.



Here’s why Painter accused Levine of this misconduct: there are only two Administrative Law judges at the CFTC. “If I simply announced my intention to retire,” Judge Painter says in his letter, “the seven reparation cases on my docket would be reassigned to the only other administrative law judge at the commission, Judge Levine. This I cannot do in good conscience.” He wanted his docket to transfer to an admin law judge at the SEC or FERC instead.

Well it appears nothing has changed at the CFTC. Less than two weeks ago we learned that former CFTC commissioner Scott O’Malia, who had fought hard against any new rules intended to reign in Wall Street practices, was leaving the CFTC to head one the biggest bank lobbying groups in the world, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA). This is the exact lobbying group that had been pressing against new CFTC rules. Reuters reported that:

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association said on Wednesday that Scott O’Malia, a Republican who often voted against new CFTC policy in the wake of the financial crisis, will become the trade group’s next chief executive. O’Malia will start his new job as of Aug. 18, ISDA said. The news came only days after O’Malia said he planned to leave the CFTC as of Aug. 8.

There is just zero shame at this point.

A staffer for Republican Senator Mitch McConnell – now the Senate Minority leader – from 1992 to 2001, O’Malia focused on energy policy during much of his career.

Links to Mitch McConnell. No surprise there.

ISDA is a global lobby group for non-listed derivatives, counting the world’s largest investment banks among its members, and has frequently fought regulatory efforts to reform the market after the financial crisis.

Moving along to today’s story, we learn that the CFTC will impose a meager $650,000 fine on JP Morgan, despite years of warnings about fraudulent data reports. The CFTC announced that:

Washington, DC - The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) today issued an Order filing and simultaneously settling charges against J.P. Morgan Securities LLC (JPMS), a wholly-owned subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a CFTC-registered Futures Commission Merchant (FCM), for submitting inaccurate reports to the CFTC relating to the required reporting of positions held by certain large traders whose accounts are carried by JPMS. The reporting violations occurred despite the CFTC notifying JPMS of numerous errors in its reports. The CFTC Order requires JPMS to pay a $650,000 civil monetary penalty to address its unlawful conduct. The reports are known as the “large trader” reports and are used by the CFTC in order to evaluate potential market risks and monitor compliance with CFTC requirements.

These reports are also used by investors to make judgments about markets, so just imagine how much money other firms or even individual investors may have lost using JP Morgan’s fraudulent data? I’m sure it was far more than $650k. As the CFTC itself notes:

CFTC Director of Enforcement Aitan Goelman commented: “The large trader reports are vital to the CFTC’s role in monitoring market behavior and are important to members of the public, many of whom rely on that information in forming trading strategies. Therefore, submission of accurate and reliable data to the CFTC is essential. The CFTC will be vigilant in enforcing these rules in order to ensure the integrity of the regulatory structure and to maintain transparency in the markets.”



The CFTC Order specifically finds that since at least 2012, the CFTC was notifying JPMS about errors in its large trader reports, which increased in frequency throughout the year. In December 2012, the CFTC notified JPMS that the on-going problems were unacceptable. JPMS, relying on its third-party vendor that generated the reports for JPMS, assured CFTC staff that the problems would be resolved on or before the end of January 2013. However, JPMS continued to submit large trader reports that contained hundreds of errors throughout the period from February 1, 2013 to February 2014.

So the CFTC claims it will be vigilant. Like, for example, allowing JP Morgan to continue to issue fraudulent reports for well over a year despite repeated warnings, and then ultimately settle for a dollar amount that is probably equivalent to the Dimon family’s annual budget for toilet paper? Yeah, that’ll show ‘em who’s boss.

You gotta love American justice. In the same week that an NYPD officer’s illegal and fatal chokehold was ruled a homicide (incredibly the man who shot the video has now been arrested), JP Morgan gets off with another slap on the wrist. As Glenn Greenwald noted, it’s Liberty and Justice for Some.

For more articles on the trend of harsh and disproportionate punishment for average citizens, yet immunity for banksters and other powerful figures, read:

The “Nanny States of America” – Mother Arrested for Allowing 7-Year-Old Son Walk to Park Alone

Connecticut Man Arrested for “Passive Aggressive” Behavior to a Watermelon

New Jersey Threatens to Take 13-Year-Old Student From His Father Due to “Non-Conforming Behavior”

Hyper-Sensitive Illinois Mayor Orders Police Raid Over Parody Twitter Account

Charleston Man Receives $525 Federal Fine for Failing to Pay for a $0.89 Refill

Video of the Day – Thuggish Militarized Police Terrorize and SWAT Team Iowa Family

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-04/another-settlement-%E2%80%93-jp-morgan-receives-slap-wrist-despite-years-fraudulent-cftc-dat

Central-Planners Fail To Herd Money Market Funds Into Overpriced Stocks



After years of deliberations and relentless scheming on how to make the multi-trillion money market funds less attractive, two weeks ago the SEC finally passed, with much industry pushback in a close 3 to 2 vote, regulation that among other things implemented gates on various money market funds, a move which both we and SEC commissioner Kara Stein explained would accelerate the exodus of funds out of MMFs and increase the risk of financial instability in a rickety, house of cards, system. Of course, forcing money flows out of MMFs and into risky assets was the goal of "regulators" and the Fed all along - after all someone has to come in and pick up the baton from a Fed which is no longer in the business of injecting nearly $100 billion in the stock market every month: what better replacement than a forced reallocation out of the $2.6 trillion money market industry.

“We’re definitely worried about breaking the buck,” Verett Mims, assistant treasurer at Chicago-based Boeing, said in a telephone interview on July 30. “That’s our biggest problem, the notion of principal preservation.”



The state of Maryland may also refrain from investing in prime money-market funds as a result of the floating-price rule, according to its treasurer, Nancy Kopp.



The changes “make these money market funds less usable, if not usable at all as investment vehicles,” she said in a July 22 conference call organized by the Chamber of Conference.

Sadly for the central planners, while they succeeded in the first part of their plan, namely getting investors to flee from money market funds, they failed in getting the money to flow into the desired asset class: stocks. Instead, money market funds are rushing at an unprecedented pace into that other most hated by the Fed, after precious metals of course, asset: Treasurys. Most hated because declining yields disprove all the propaganda about an improving economy as they do, or at least did, imply deflation down the road: hardly the stuff robust 3%+ recoveries are made of.

As Bloomberg reports, "one of the biggest winners in the push to make money-market funds safer for investors is turning out to be none other than the U.S. government." Actually, no, because the fate of the US government is now far more closely linked to the stock market ponzi than it is to the bond market, which after all the Fed can monetize directly. Allowing Yellen to legally buy stocks in the open market (as opposed to through Citadel) however, would require changing the Fed's charter.

Rules adopted by regulators last month will require money funds that invest in riskier assets to abandon their traditional $1 share-price floor and disclose daily changes in value. For companies that use the funds like bank accounts, the prospect of prices falling below $1 may prompt them to shift their cash into the shortest-term Treasuries, creating as much as $500 billion of demand in two years, according to Bank of America Corp.

Some examples include Boeing and the state of Maryland who are already looking to make the switch to avoid the possibility of any potential losses. Bloomberg notes that "with the $1.39 trillion U.S. bill market accounting for the smallest share of Treasuries in six decades, the extra demand may help the world’s largest debtor nation contain its own funding costs as the Federal Reserve moves to raise interest rates." Well, yes: but that's not what the Fed wants - it would much prefer modestly rising rates if that means soaring stocks to keep the equity bubble inflated. After all pundit after pundit keeps pounding the table on the "bond bubble", which of course means that the real bubble is in stocks.

“Whether investors move into government institutional money-market funds or just buy securities themselves, there will be a large demand” for short-dated debt, Jim Lee, head of U.S. derivatives strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s capital markets unit in Stamford, Connecticut, said in a telephone interview on July 28. “That will lower yields.”



He predicts investors may shift as much as $350 billion to money-market funds that invest only in government debt.

Bank of America, which also has hated Treasurys as an asset class since mid-2013, also chimes in:

Investors using prime funds to manage their idle cash may find floating prices an unnecessary risk when differences in fund rates are so minimal, said Brian Smedley, an interest-rate strategist at Bank of America in New York. He estimates about half the $964 billion held in institutional prime funds will flow into those that only invest in government debt and yield about 0.013 percentage point less, before the new rules become fully effective in 2016.

With demand set to surge, supply of high quality collateral, aka Treasurys, continues to decline:

As more companies opt for the safety of government debt, the supply of Treasury bills stands to decrease further. With the Obama administration projecting the deficit will narrow to a six-year low of $583 billion, the Treasury Department has pared its issuance of the short-term debt.



U.S. government securities due in four weeks to one year account for just 11.5 percent of the $12.1 trillion market for Treasuries, the smallest proportion in data compiled by Barclays Plc going back to 1952. As recently as 2008, bills accounted for more than third of the total.



This lack of supply, coupled with the money-market fund shift, mean short-term rates will remain low, Deborah Cunningham, the head of money-market funds at Pittsburgh-based Federated Investors Inc., which oversees $245 billion in short-term securities, said in a July 31 telephone interview.

It also means that the latest self-fulfilling prophecy, namely that MMF cash will flow into bond funds, will be actualized, much to the chagrin of the Princeton economics department.

Those curious what recent MMF regulation change means for various asset classes are encouraged to skim the following table from JPM:

But before we declare victory over central planning, don't forget that the "regulators", the Fed and the SEC, are already contemplating the next step: recall that as we reported in June, "the Fed is preparing to impose "exit fee" gates on bond funds, in what, the official narrative goes, is an attempt to prevent a panicked rush for the exits. Of course, this is diametrically opposite of what the truth is."

Here one should clearly ignore here what the Fed itself said about the "logic" behind such an action, and how that too will ultimately backfire.

Our results have broader policy signicance. Rules that provide intermediaries, such as MMFs, the ability to restrict redemptions when liquidity falls short may threaten financial stability by setting up the possibility of preemptive runs. Much of the wider policy signicance of that risk is beyond the scope of this paper, since our model does not incorporate the large negative externalities associated with runs on financial institutions, including MMFs. But one notable concern, given the similarity of MMF portfolios, is that a preemptive run on one fund might cause investors in other funds to reassess whether risks in their funds are indeed vanishingly small.

And why worry about "backfiring" when the Fed already knows it is all in and any diversion from the herding path will merely result in the systemic reset arriving that much faster.

The bottom line is simple: the Fed will continue herding investors as long as it takes: first out of the money market funds, then out of bond funds, until the only possible investment product remains triple digit P/E stocks, and everyone is all the biggest market ponzi bubble of all time.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-08-05/central-planners-fail-herd-money-market-funds-overpriced-stocks

The dollar's 70-year dominance is coming to an end
Within a decade, greenback's could be replaced as the world's reserve currency
A share trader takes a phone call as he is seen behind a false one dollar bill at the German stock exchange in Frankfurt
The dollar is currently boosted by being a reserve currency

By Liam Halligan

5:30PM BST 19 Jul 2014


In early July 1944, delegates from 44 countries gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A three-week summit took place, at which a new system was agreed to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the Second World War.

The US was already the world’s commercial powerhouse, having eclipsed the British Empire several decades earlier. America was also on course to be among the victors of “Europe’s conflict”, even though its economy was largely unscathed by war. As such, Bretton Woods was US-dominated and produced a settlement largely on US terms.

Seventy years ago this week, that fateful summit ended. Its close marked the moment the dollar’s unquestionable supremacy was secured. Since then, global commerce has been conducted largely in dollars and leading economies have held the greenback as their primary reserve currency.

The same system remains intact today, with the lion’s share of commercial settlements worldwide still clearing the US banking system – even if the parties involved have nothing to do with the States.

The dollar’s hegemony continues to be cemented, meanwhile, by the operations of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Founded at Bretton Woods, they’re both Washington based, of course, and controlled by America, despite some Francophone window-dressing.
Related Articles


The advantages this system bestows on the US are enormous. “Reserve currency status” generates huge demand for dollars from governments and companies around the world, as they’re needed for reserves and trade. This has allowed successive American administrations to spend far more, year-in year-out, than is raised in tax and export revenue.

By the early Seventies, US economic dominance was so assured that even after President Nixon reneged on the dollar’s previously unshakeable convertibility into gold, amounting to a massive default, dollar demand kept growing.

So America doesn’t worry about balance of payments crises, as it can pay for imports in dollars the Federal Reserve can just print. And Washington keeps spending willy-nilly, as the world buys ever more Treasuries on the strength of regulatory imperative and the vast liquidity and size of the market for US sovereign debt.

It is this “exorbitant privilege” – as French statesman Valéry Giscard d’Estaing once sourly observed – that has been the bedrock of America’s post-war hegemony. It is the status of the dollar, above all, that’s allowed Washington to get its way, putting the financial squeeze on recalcitrant countries via the IMF while funding foreign wars. To understand politics and power it pays to follow the money. And for the past 70 years, the dollar has ruled the roost.

This won’t change anytime soon. Something just took place, though, which illustrates that dollar reserve currency status won’t last forever and could be seriously diluted. Last week, seven decades on from Bretton Woods, the governments of Brazil, Russia, India and China led a conference in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza to mark the establishment of a new development bank that, whatever diplomatic niceties are put on it, is intent on competing with the IMF and World Bank.

It’s long been obvious the BRICs are coming. The total annual output of these four economies has spiralled in recent years, to an astonishing $29.6? trillion (£17.3?trillion) last year on a PPP-basis adjusted for living costs. That’s within spitting distance of the $34.2?trillion generated by the US and European Union combined.

America’s GDP, incidentally, was $16.8?trillion on World Bank numbers, and China’s was $16.2?trillion – within a whisker of knocking the US off its perch. The balance of global economic power is on a knife-edge. Tomorrow is almost today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/10978178/The-dollars-70-year-dominance-is-coming-to-an-end.html

I LOVE MATHEMATICS

IT ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH
AND IT ALWAYS TELLS IT THE SAME WAY


The odds of a ticket winning the Florida lottery are 1 in 22,957,480.

The odds of a ticket winning the Powerball is 1 in 175,223,510.

The odds of a ticket winning Mega Millions is 1 in 258,890,850.

The odds of a disk drive failing in any given month are roughly one in 36. The odds of two different drives failing in the same month are roughly one in 36 squared, or 1 in about 1,296. The odds of three drives failing
in the same month is 36 cubed or 1 in 46,656.

The odds of seven different drives failing in the same month (like what happened at the IRS when they received a letter asking about emails targeting conservative and pro Israeli groups) is 37 to the 7th power = 1
in 78,664,164,096. (that's over 78 Billion) In other words, the odds are greater that you will win the Florida Lottery 342 times than having those seven IRS hard drives crashing in the same month.


No link, rec'd in an email

Need a little help here-

There must be something wrong with my impressions and values of right vs. wrong.

Obammy gives away 5 high in the chain of command taliban terrorists for an alleged deserter. I'm saying alleged as it has not been proven BUT my opinion is firmly in the court of his former comrades in arms. Anyone that has ever been in a combats arms unit would know these men would not banter the word deserter around lightly.

Yet this same president allows a decorated veteran that made a wrong turn languish in a Mexican prison for over 3 months now. I'm reasonably certain that one phone call to the president of Mexico would have secured his immediate release. Did he ever try?

I find this very troubling. Is something wrong with me?

..........al

When I read the title of your post my first thought was -I didn't know Hilary went anywhere. Then I read the whole post.

............al

"Private" SWAT Teams Are Coming for Gun Owners

Two Chilling Developments for Militarized Police
By Adam English 2014-07-08

A little over a year ago, the Fourth Amendment was conveniently forgotten to capture an unarmed 19-year-old.

Early on April 19th, an order was sent out for Watertown, Mass. residents to shelter-in-place. Innocent people were forced out of their homes at gunpoint as door-to-door searches were conducted.

One resident had an assault weapon trained on him for looking out the window.

It was the largest shutdown in an American city since the 1965 Watts Riots in L.A. Ultimately, it was pointless.

Police and Guardsmen eventually cornered and captured one of the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, due to a far less dramatic — and far more reasonable — way to handle crime.

A guy saw the cover was off his boat. He checked it out, saw a guy in there, and called it in two hours after the lockdown ended.

As bad as it is for the Fourth Amendment to have 9,000 cops and National Guardsmen canvas a city and force people out of their homes for warrantless searches at gunpoint, it gets worse thanks to a recent ACLU investigation.

A large number of “private corporation” SWAT teams armed with re-purposed gear from the Department of Defense participated in the carte blanche violation of Fourth Amendment rights in and around Boston.

Yet it gets even worse in light of a recently rejected Supreme Court case.

We're at the point where these “private corporations” can violate your Fourth Amendment rights based solely on whether or not you exercise your Second Amendment rights.

False Intentions

Back in 1972, there were only a few hundred paramilitary drug raids per year in the U.S.A. Since then, the numbers have jumped at a rate far in excess of crime rates. 2001 saw 40,000 SWAT team raids, and 2013 saw 80,000.

In a June 14th release, appropriately named “War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” the ACLU released the conclusions of a year-long study.

Flush with DHS funding and re-purposed surplus gear from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, local police forces have dramatically ramped up of the use of military tactics on civilian suspects for increasingly dubious reasons.

“No-knock” raids are now the norm, along with night time raids that are reminiscent of searches conducted throughout the occupation of Iraq.

As the ACLU report notes, these tactics are beyond heavy-handed and completely unnecessary:

62% of the SWAT raids surveyed were to conduct searches for drugs.
Only 7% of SWAT raids were “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
Just under 80% were to serve a search warrant, meaning eight of every 10 SWAT raids were to investigate someone still only suspected of committing a crime.
In at least 36% of the SWAT raids studies, no contraband of any kind was found. This figure could be as high as 65% due to incomplete police reports on these raids.
65% of SWAT deployments resulted in some sort of forced entry into a private home, by way of a battering ram, boot, or some sort of explosive device. In over half those raids, the police failed to find any sort of weapon, the presence of which was cited as the reason for the violent tactics.
Of the SWAT raids the ACLU studied in which police cited the possibility of finding a weapon in the home, they actually found a weapon just 35% of the time.

Bringing up the Watts Riots shows how far mission creep has gone. One of the earliest and most prominent SWAT teams was formed in L.A. in 1967 by Inspector Daryl Gates, who would go on to become the chief of police.

The intention was to respond to and manage critical situations involving shootings while minimizing police casualties, or provide security in times of civil unrest. In other words, the intent was to respond to existing scenarios, not speculate about the potential for a suspect to be armed.


Use the 2nd, Lose the 4th

And boy, do police like to cite the mere potential to be armed as justification for busting down doors without announcing they are police.

In fact, one such case almost made it to the Supreme Court, which decided it would refuse to hear it.

Texas police obtained a search warrant for John Quinn’s home based on information that Quinn’s son might possess drugs. The warrant did not authorize police to enter the residence without knocking and announcing their entry.

Nevertheless, based solely on the suspicion that there were legal firearms in the Quinn household, the SWAT team forcibly broke into Quinn’s home after he had gone to bed and proceeded to carry out a search of the premises.

During the raid, Quinn was shot by police because he had reached for his lawfully-owned firearm, thinking that his home was being invaded by criminals.

Lower courts rejected Quinn’s objection to the “no-knock” entry on the grounds that, because police had information that guns were present at the residence, they were justified in making a forced and unannounced invasion into Quinn’s home.

By refusing to hear the case, the Supreme Court tacitly supported gun ownership and possession as grounds for police to evade the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment and improperly limit the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Going Private

This brings us full circle to how private corporations can effectively use your Second Amendment rights against you to circumvent the Fourth Amendment.

To complete its report, the ACLU filed standard information requests to SWAT teams across Massachusetts.

As it turns out, About 240 of the 351 police departments in the state belong to what are being called “law enforcement councils” (LECs).

These LECs are directly funded by several police agencies in an area and overseen by an executive board. Virtually all of these boards only consist of police chiefs from member police departments.

Some of these LECs have also incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. Here is where it gets bad.

You see, these LECs operate SWAT teams for their members while refusing to release any data on their operations because they exist on paper as private corporations.

These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who wear badges, carry military gear, and show up to drug busts with APCs.

They raid private residences, are protected by the law, and have the power to detain, arrest, injure, and kill.

They collect paychecks funded by taxpayers, and only have their jobs and privileges because the law authorizes governments to maintain police forces.

Yet, because they're incorporated, they claim to be immune from Massachusetts's open records laws. They want to enjoy the privileges and power derived from laws for the public good, but refuse to bear the responsibility to prove they are acting on the public's behalf.

The state’s residents aren’t permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they’re used for, what sort of training they get, or who they’re being used against.

What we can infer is that they are acting just like SWAT teams around the nation. That means heavy-handed night time raids to seize some kid's dime bag.

Private, corporate SWAT teams are now justified in ignoring the terms of a warrant, busting down your door, and violating the Fourth Amendment. All based on an occupant exercising his or her Second Amendment rights.

And if the Massachusetts police get away with it and set a new precedent, you can be sure LECs will be nationwide as soon as possible. No one would ever know how bad the problem becomes.

Take Care,

Adam English

http://www.outsiderclub.com/private-swat-teams-are-coming-for-gun-owners/1063

Eric Holder Just Sued Another State, And The Reason Why Will Blow Your Mind
Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/eric-holder-just-sued-another-state-reason-will-blow-mind/#MSHGrAkU7oXpydEQ.99

I guess he is so busy worrying about things like this that he has no time to investigate the IRS, Bengazi, Veterans Administration, Lois Lerner and on and on the rest of the "phony" scandals. And don't forget the investigation of Black Panther intimidation at the polls in Philadelphia that he called off causing the 2 lead attorneys to resign in protest.

..........al

While states across the nation are looking for ways to combat rampant reports of voter fraud, North Carolina decided to implement some commonsense regulations requiring individuals to present identification prior to casting a ballot.

Included in the new law is a reduction in the allotted period of early voting to 10 days and the elimination of same-day voter registration.

Although the requirements apply to all North Carolinians equally, a number of race-obsessed activists – including Attorney General Eric Holder – contend that the law is somehow discriminatory.

“The state legislature took extremely aggressive steps to curtail the voting rights of African-Americans,” Holder said late last year.

His comments came as he announced the Justice Department’s latest lawsuit against a U.S. state.

“This is an intentional step to break a system that was working,” he alleged; “and it defies common sense.”

This administration, it seems, not only believes a system that allows – if not encourages – fraud is perfectly functional, but cannot fathom why a state would be interested in combating such misbehavior.

A clear majority of states have laws on the books with similar requirements, many of which have faced accusations of racism despite the fact that residents of all ethnicities must provide an ID to vote.

Several attorneys, representing the DOJ, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the League of Women Voters, showed up in Winston-Salem Monday to demand a preliminary injunction regarding certain aspects of the law.

NAACP President Rev. William Barber called the law “a full assault on the franchise of voting,” while Irving Joyner, a lawyer representing the organization, made it clear where his client’s loyalties lie.

“Our focus is on the turnout of African-Americans,” he said, disregarding empirical evidence showing the new law has had no impact on poll traffic.

As Republican Sen. Bob Rucho explained, reports show that there was no drop in voting during the primary season, adding the law was designed to be fair to everyone. Its requirements, he noted, were implemented over time to allow all voters to comply.

“There was no voter suppression,” he concluded. “Actually, we had some good turnouts for a primary election.”

Read more at http://www.westernjournalism.com/eric-holder-just-sued-another-state-reason-will-blow-mind/#MSHGrAkU7oXpydEQ.99

Zepp-LaRouche: The Greed of the Vulture Funds Will Backfire, There Is A Limit To the Tyrant's Power

July 6, 2014 • 10:40AM

By Helga Zepp-LaRouche


The unbelievable scandal around the attempt of the United States to enforce the lunatic demands of the vulture fund NML Capital of Paul Singer against Argentina—with a profit-rate of 1,608% (!) in only six years—is the proverbial last drop which brings the barrel to overflowing. Unlike those many thousands of times when in the past the megaspeculators have wrought suffering and death upon millions of people, and gone away unpunished, this time the U.S. administration, the American Supreme Court, and the afore-mentioned vulture fund have been hit with an obviously unexpected, implacable resistance. All of Central and South America are standing unified behind Argentina, and are saying "No!"

The tremendous audacity with which the vulture funds, with the help of the American courts, are trying to collect the perverse demand for a profit of 1,608% (for junk bonds, which they had purchased at the time of Argentina's insolvency for $48 million, and for which they now want to be paid at the full nominal value of over $833 million, although this would nullify the successful restructuring of the debt by 93% of the remaining creditors and throw Argentina once again into bankruptcy), highlights the character of the system. This system of globalization is nothing more than a gigantic Madoff swindle, a fraudulent Ponzi pyramid scheme, and nothing would be more absurd than to dignify the demands of the hedge fund, like those of the former claims. One might as well agree to a not-guilty verdict for a patricide, just because he pleads that he is an orphan.

The chorus of Latin American foreign ministers, which rallied in full solidarity behind Argentina at the emergency summit of the Organization of American States, was the opening chord of a new composition of a different world financial and economic order, which has to emerge right now. The acting foreign minister of Guyana, Robeson Benn, hit the nail on the head, when he challenged his colleagues to appeal to the American Congress with the demand that they reinstate the Glass-Steagall two-tier banking system, without whose repeal such excesses never could have happened. The vulture funds and their "modern piracy" must be stopped with effective re-regulation of the banking system. These funds have destroyed the well-being and desired progress of all countries with their actions, as you can see now with the example of Argentina. Therefore there is a "moral responsibility of all stakeholders, including the American people and their government, to ensure that countries such as Argentina, which has made significant strides in improving their debt situation, [do not have to adopt measures] which threaten the progress that has been achieved."

"I would like to pose the question, perhaps, as to whether we should not, out of this imbroglio, re-look at the overall question of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 in the United States, which related to the activity of the banking system, the international financial institutions, mainly resident in the United States and in the United Kingdom. President Roosevelt, of the United States of America, established a banking act, signed off on the Banking Act of 1933, which set up firewalls between the activities of the banks, and on the questions of speculation in the financial system. There is, perhaps, the need now to take a look at putting back in place important sections of the Glass-Steagall Act which was repealed in 1999," Benn further explained.

After Wall Street has employed a whole host of lobbyists and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in bribe money, PR campaigns, and so forth, to stop the reenactment of Glass-Steagall, the genie is now again out of the bottle, and this time for good. Practically all of the foreign ministers of the OAS, minus the U.S. and Canada, naturally, emphatically made the argument that the interests of the murderous speculators should not be placed ahead of the interests of human life. The basic assertion of Pope Francis, which he presented in his Apostolic Letter "Evangelii Gaudium"—that the current world financial system is one that kills—stood plainly before them. Its name was NML Capital.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua described in detail the exploitation which had been carried out by such murderous vulture funds in Africa, and which have led to the death of millions of people. He described how, for example, Paul Singer's Elliott Management, the owner of NML Capital, which is using Argentina, likewise sued Congo Brazzaville for $400 million, a debt which they had bought for $20 million.

"How many lives could be saved with $400 million?" he asked. "How many people could eat with that sum of money?" He went on to list how many doses of anti-malaria, pediatric hepatitis a, oral polio, and pediatric pneumonia vaccines could be purchased with $400 million. He listed how many tons of powdered milk, rice, or beef might also be purchased with that amount "to feed the people of the world.... $400 million would make a huge difference in world efforts to put an end to hunger," he said. "Who thinks they have the right to deprive people of the right to food, health, integral development—to life itself?" Thus he cut to the chase. NML today has over $30 billion at its disposal, although it originally had been founded with only one million.

Argentina Foreign Minister Timerman declared that Argentina would not be alone on the coming Monday, at the meeting with the so-called "Special Master" appointed by Judge Griesa, who is supposed to preside over negotiations on the debt. "Not only will we be accompanied by all of you, but also by the faces, and the ghosts of all the victims of the vulture funds—and the countries that protect them" (emphasis added). In the words of Timerman resonated a higher law, natural law, to which Friedrich Schiller, in his poem "The Cranes of Ibykus" had given expression so powerfully, with the entrance of the chorus of the Erinyes, and had described the fate of the murderers:

"So tiring never, him we follow,
Repentance ne'er can us appease.
Him on and on until the Shadow
And give him even there no ease...."

The story of Argentina will not end with the meeting on July 7 with the "special master" in New York. On July 15 there will be a meeting in Brazil of the five BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) with the heads of state of the CELAC states (Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba and Caricom), a meeting which, according to Chinese Ambassador to Brazil Li Jinzhang, will initiate a new phase of Chinese-Latin American cooperation.

On July 15-16 the meeting of the BRICS heads of state will occur in Fortaleza and Brasilia, in which the heads of state of all the Latin American countries will also participate. On the agenda will be, among other things, the deepening of cooperation and formalization of the relationship between the Eurasian Economic Union, the Customs Union and Mercosur. In addition President Putin and State President Xi Jinping will have numerous bilateral meetings. President Putin will have a state visit to Argentina before, State president Xi Jinping immediately after the BRICS meeting. Many formal agreements are expected to be signed, for example, for a BRICS Development Bank and a foreign exchange reverse pool. Already in the run-up to the summit several trade and cooperation agreements have been reached, which will no longer be transacted in dollars, but in national currencies. One can assume from that, that the question of a new financial system and a just new world economic order will be on the agenda at all these meetings.

The contrast between the geometry of the trans-Atlantic sector and the European-Pacific sector couldn't be clearer. The region which is dominated by the British Empire—therefore London, Wall Street, NATO and the EU—has not much more to offer than military confrontation against Russia and China, and the dicatorship of brutal austerity to the benefit of the bankers and murderous vulture funds. Russia, China, India and Brazil have come together into a new alliance of sovereign Eurasian and Latin American states, who are cooperating in their common economic, political and cultural interests, and a common perspective for a better future holds them all together.

It is in the interest of all states on this planet, including Germany and the United States itself—bearing in mind the commitments of the American Revolution and Constitution—to collaborate around this idea of the future, and to break the tyrannical power of the British Empire once and for all.

http://larouchepac.com/node/31228

Boycott Google? YES!!!

https://startpage.com/eng/

..............al

How Many Times Will You Be Lied To?

The apparent answer, when it comes to our government and the people's tolerance of it, is infinite.

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

That's not news.

The various intelligence-gathering agencies in the US have been snooping around and gathering full Internet-related content since at least the mid-1990s. And no, there has been nothing "targeted" about it either. Not then, and not now.

This, again, is not news.

What's news is that the NSA has claimed, repeatedly, that Snowden did not have access to the full data dumps they allegedly claimed they weren't collecting.

They lied. Again. And this is now proved because The Post has them.

Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge.

smiley

Oh, you really believe that the NSA obeyed the law before Section 702? They haven't followed it since, so what would lead you to believe they had been following it before? Exactly how dumb are you over there at The Post, say much less the rest of the American public?

There is simply no respect for the law among the US Government because there is never any consequence when they get caught breaking it. Just like there is no consequence on Wall Street among HFT firms, or among big banks (Money Laundering for $1,000, Alex!) and more.

You and I, as ordinary citizens, either obey the law or we risk long prison sentences. Not so for the NSA, the government generally, and the privileged few in places like Wall Street and the SEC.

They break the law all the time and there is zero deterrent; anyone who thinks that leveling a fine against a firm is going to stop them is nuts. That is simply passed on to the next customer and business continues.

Look folks, if you care about actually making progress in terms of "equality" or for that matter simply putting a halt to the destruction of your personal liberty and economic well-being the place to focus your attention is on the rampant violations of the law, whether given via sanction to do so in "special exceptions" (such as exists for the NSA along with certain industries like the medical and banking businesses) or simply by willful blindness when it comes to enforcement.

Until and unless the people of this nation rise and demand that this crap stop there will be no progress. You will continue to have dudes watching over your every move whenever and wherever they want, including the intimate details of your private life. Your cellphones will betray you and the "smart" devices in your home will have their data siphoned off so some leering pervert can vicariously sleep with your boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband or daughter while every detail of your life is analyzed by someone who you hope is simply looking for terrorists -- and not attaching a toe tag in advance for you to take your trip into the shower.

It's easy to get outraged by this sort of thing but really in the grand scheme of things it's almost immaterial.

We should, in this country, be ridiculously prosperous compared to where we are. It is a trivial exercise in arithmetic to show that the Federal Government could end poverty in America tomorrow, pay down our national debt and thus guarantee a roughly 3% annual increase in everyone's buying power (that is, standard of living) even with zero wage gains and cut all Federal taxes by about a third.

It is also a trivial exercise in arithmetic to show that if we ended the monopoly and price-fixing scams in just one industry -- the medical industry -- we would instantly and permanently end deficit spending in the United States at a Federal level, produce the same sort of national debt paydown and annual increase in everyone's buying power and at the same time permanently resolve the State and Local budget disasters that are all centered around retiree health care -- that is, embedded pension costs. We would also eliminate overnight the need for "Health Insurance", Medicare and Medicaid!

Arithmetic just is folks; it is not complicated, it is not able to be argued with. The Federal Reserve is a common whipping boy for people like Ron Paul but I charge that his screaming (and those of others) is intentionally misplaced and intentionally designed to mislead, because The Fed is a creation of Congress and as a chartered entity Congress has the right to alter or abolish it any time it would like to. Further, Congress set forth and approved a mandate in its operating charter that it has never enforced -- not once over the space of more than 100 years.

Yes, NSA spying is bad. But it pales beside the damage done to you as Americans in the monetary and credit realm, never mind that done to you by the health "industry."

I just can't get worked up about the NSA any more.

Not until we, the people, get worked up enough about the general level of fraud, lie and scam that underpins the entire economic landscape in the United States.

Let me know when you're mad enough to demand that this crap stop and mean it.

Until then enjoy the spooks watching you **** your paramour of the day.

After all, once you sit silently for being screwed in the ass what's another quarter of an inch, given that you already consented?

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker

Listen in new world order according to Ovomit!

Video only 19 seconds long. It may well have been recorded to be taken out of context, I don't know. It is still chilling to hear we are incapable of taking care of ourselves.

.........al

'Prepare for the Return of US Inflation': JPMorgan, Others See Global Prices Spiking

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.moneynews.com/Economy/jpmorgan-inflation-prices-economy/2014/06/24/id/578872#ixzz35bapPBms




Tuesday, 24 Jun 2014 07:47 AM



The era of slowing global inflation looks to be over.

Three years of worldwide disinflation is ending, in the eyes of economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. Their estimates show global consumer prices accelerated 2.65 percent in May.

That’s the fastest pace since April 2012 and the level they’d targeted for the end of 2014. It marks a 0.6 percentage point jump since February, when the 2 percent rate was the lowest since November 2009.

Editor's Note: 5 Signs Stock Market Will Collapse in 2013

It’s not just food and energy costs. Inflation excluding those more volatile measures was still 2.1 percent in May. The hunch at the biggest U.S. bank is that companies are regaining pricing power as manufacturing strengthens, said David Hensley, an international economist at JPMorgan in New York.

The analysis may surprise those investors who spent the year pushing up bond prices. It may also grate on economists such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, bemoaned “inflation hysteria” on Wall Street.

“We definitely have seen the turn,” said Hensley in an interview. “It would be an abrupt swing to go to worrying about the inflationary upside, but we may be seeing that shift taking place.”

Like JPMorgan, Societe Generale SA economist Aneta Merkowska told clients last week to “prepare for the return of U.S. inflation.”

Yellen Challenge

She predicts Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will face consumer-price gains outside of food and energy of 2.3 percent by the end of the year. Import prices are bottoming, slack is eroding and housing and health-care costs are bouncing, she wrote in a report.

That could put the Fed behind the inflation curve, she said. Waiting to the middle of next year to raise their benchmark rate — as markets and officials have indicated is likely — would spell an unusually late start to tightening given the core rate may exceed 2.5 percent by then.

The Fed raised rates in 2004 and 1999 when inflation was closer to 2 percent, said Merkowska, who predicts the Fed funds rate will be at 2.5 percent by the end of 2016, higher than the market bets.

Krugman’s hysteria accusation is hyperbolic itself given investor measures of inflation expectations do not suggest panic about prices, according to Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro Research LLC in New York.

While faster wage growth has yet to materialize in the U.S., unemployment has fallen quicker than expected, banks are boosting lending and rents and medical care are becoming costlier, he told clients in a report.

“In the investment business it is much better to be prepared than surprised,” said Dutta.

Does USDA Need Submachine Guns? Republicans Look to Demilitarize the Government

And I hope they are successful............al

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/06/24/does-usda-need-machine-guns-republicans-look-to-demilitarize-the-government/

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and other House Republicans are proposing steps to take heavy weaponry out of the hands of federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose Office of Inspector General has put out a bid to buy submachine guns.

Stewart’s Regulatory Agency De-militarization Act looks to scale back a 2002 law that gave most Offices of Inspector General the authority to carry weapons and arrest people. But Stewart said that is prompting agencies to develop “SWAT-like” teams to handle situations that should be reserved for law enforcement agencies.
federal govenrment weapons submachine gun

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General has put in an order for submachine guns. That has Republicans looking to demilitarize the government. (AP Photo/St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christian Gooden)

Stewart noted that last May, USDA’s OIG put out a bid to buy submachine guns. The solicitation said the OIG is looking for a very specific type of weapon:

“Submachine guns, .40 Cal. S&W, ambidextrous safety, semi-automatic or 2 shot burts trigger group, Tritium night sights for front and rear, rails for attachment of flashlight (front under fore grip) and scope (top rear), stock-collapsilbe or folding, magazine – 30 rd. capacity, sling, light weight, and oversized trigger guard for gloved operation.”

“I understand that federal agents must be capable of protecting themselves,” Stewart said Monday. “But what we have observed goes far beyond providing necessary protection.”

Stewart noted that the Food and Drug Agency and the Department of Education also have law enforcement teams to conduct raids, and said this shows the government has gone too far.

As examples, Stewart noted that in 2010, armed FDA officers raided a grocery store suspected of using raw milk. In 2011, the Department of Education’s OIG forcibly entered the home of a man suspected of student aid fraud.

In addition, Environmental Protection Agency officers in 2013 raised an Alaska mining operation suspected of violating the Clean Water Act.

“When there are genuinely dangerous situations involving federal law, that’s the job of the Department of Justice, not regulatory agencies like the FDA or the Department of Education,” he added. “Not only is it overkill, but having these highly-armed units within dozens of agencies is duplicative, costly, heavy handed, dangerous and destroys any sense of trust between citizens and the federal government.”

Stewart’s bill would repeal the 2002 grant of authority to Offices of Inspectors General, which was done under the Homeland Security Act.

It would also prohibit federal agencies from buying machine guns, grenades and other weapons, except for agencies like the FBI and U.S. Marshals that have used these weapons.

The bill would also require the Government Accountability Office to report to Congress on all federal agencies that are undertaking military training and using weapons.

“The militarization of agencies is only a symptom of a much deeper and more troubling problem within Washington – that the federal government no longer trusts the American people,” Stewart said. “When all of us feel that we are no longer seen as citizens but as potential dangerous suspects – a relationship of trust is impossible.

“I’m working to restore and rebuild trust – beginning with this effort to defund paramilitary capabilities within federal regulatory agencies.”

A 16-year-old made a plugin that reveals where politicians get their cash

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greenhouse-browser-plugin-political-donations/?headline=4&utm_content=A%2016-year-old%20made%20a%20plugin%20that%20reveals%20where%20politicians%20get%20their%20cash&utm_medium=ppc&utm_source=outbrain&utm_name=outbrain%20default&utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=default



By Mike Wehner on June 23, 2014 Email

In the volatile political landscape of the United States, getting a straight answer out of a politician is virtually impossible, so don’t expect even the most trustworthy elected official to talk about who is stuffing their campaign coffers. If you want that information, you could spend the next week poking around on campaign finance websites, or you could just install Greenhouse, a browser plugin crafted by a kid who can’t even vote yet. Its creator, 16-year-old Nicholas Rubin, is helping add some much needed transparency to the folks bankrolling the U.S. political machine.

After installing the plugin on Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, Greenhouse will highlight the names of any members of Congress no matter what webpage you’re on. When you hover your mouse of the highlighted name, a list pops up showing the elected official, their political affiliation and state, and a full list of their biggest contributors, as well as dollar amounts. The pop-up also shows what percentage of the official’s donations were $200 or less, and which campaign finance measures they supported.

The data Greenhouse uses is pulled from OpenSecrets.org, and includes dollar figures from each politician’s most recent election cycle. There is, of course, the possibility that the lobbies that funded a congressperson’s last election aren’t necessarily the same ones currently contributing, but the chances are pretty good.

Greenhouse is an invaluable tool for deciphering the motivations behind the actions of Congress, and poking around on a political website is particularly eye-opening if you happen to have the plugin enabled. For example, I brought up an article on the recent failed bipartisan energy efficiency bill that was shot down via filibuster, with Senator John Cornyn playing a major role in its defeat. A quick mouse hover over Cornyn’s name revealed the likely cause: a campaign contribution of over $1 million from the oil and gas lobbies. What a coincidence!

A 16-year-old made a plugin that reveals where politicians get their cash

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/greenhouse-browser-plugin-political-donations/?headline=4&utm_content=A%2016-year-old%20made%20a%20plugin%20that%20reveals%20where%20politicians%20get%20their%20cash&utm_medium=ppc&utm_source=outbrain&utm_name=outbrain%20default&utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=CPC&utm_campaign=default



By Mike Wehner on June 23, 2014 Email

In the volatile political landscape of the United States, getting a straight answer out of a politician is virtually impossible, so don’t expect even the most trustworthy elected official to talk about who is stuffing their campaign coffers. If you want that information, you could spend the next week poking around on campaign finance websites, or you could just install Greenhouse, a browser plugin crafted by a kid who can’t even vote yet. Its creator, 16-year-old Nicholas Rubin, is helping add some much needed transparency to the folks bankrolling the U.S. political machine.

After installing the plugin on Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, Greenhouse will highlight the names of any members of Congress no matter what webpage you’re on. When you hover your mouse of the highlighted name, a list pops up showing the elected official, their political affiliation and state, and a full list of their biggest contributors, as well as dollar amounts. The pop-up also shows what percentage of the official’s donations were $200 or less, and which campaign finance measures they supported.

The data Greenhouse uses is pulled from OpenSecrets.org, and includes dollar figures from each politician’s most recent election cycle. There is, of course, the possibility that the lobbies that funded a congressperson’s last election aren’t necessarily the same ones currently contributing, but the chances are pretty good.

Greenhouse is an invaluable tool for deciphering the motivations behind the actions of Congress, and poking around on a political website is particularly eye-opening if you happen to have the plugin enabled. For example, I brought up an article on the recent failed bipartisan energy efficiency bill that was shot down via filibuster, with Senator John Cornyn playing a major role in its defeat. A quick mouse hover over Cornyn’s name revealed the likely cause: a campaign contribution of over $1 million from the oil and gas lobbies. What a coincidence!

It's why I stay independent. It's why I support gridlock. When either party gets in control of everything they will reward all their friends at our expense. And yes I also think they all bow before the same gods.

.........al

As long as the repubs let him get away with it he will continue to flaunt and outright break the law. I'm sure many in congress are no better and are afraid to raise hell as they themselves might be exposed. How much dirt and on whom is being stored in NSA computers?

...........al

I've supported sheriff Joe since the beginning. Problem is no one in the repub party seems to want to do anything to support his efforts. Just think, if Obama was proven to be ineligible to hold the office, everything including Obamacare that he signed would become null and void. We can only dream at this juncture.

..........al

Hate to be disagreeable, but not if the repubs put up someone worth voting for. We can't lose sight of Romney's "47%". It may have been a gaffe at the time but was totally true. Best that could happen this year is repub control of the senate. Gridlock is good. The less they do the better of we are.

.......al

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