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Diplomats and Court Jesters
By Becky Akers
Published 04/21/10
It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: a Qatari diplomat flying from DC to Denver grabbed a smoke in the lav. Nor was the punchline any funnier when Qatar's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs announced on Thursday that 27-year-old Mohammed al Modadi, now recalled, "will be disciplined." I daresay none of us will lose any sleep over a diplomat's troubles, but in fairness we should admit that Mohammed wasn't at fault. The US government created each of the circumstances leading to the brouhaha aboard United Airlines Flight 663.
Let's first ask what Mohammed is doing in the U.S., anyway. Don't the Feds guard our borders? Indeed, they vigilantly protect us from less influential immigrants whose governments persecute, torture, or otherwise prey on rather than employ them. Precisely because they don't collect a paycheck from their nation's rulers, these folks actually own skills American employers covet. Yet Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) plot to punish said employers and the immigrants they hire instead of well-connected jokers like Mohammed. What, we've got too many agricultural workers but not enough useless diplomats?
Then there's the reason for Mohammed's flight. He was on official diplomatic business, such as it is: his monthly visit with Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a fellow Qatari and a legal US resident whom the Feds imprison in Denver.
Our rulers have incarcerated and tortured Ali since 2001 as a "sleeper agent" for al Qaeda. Or so they alleged until after his arrest, when even they seem to have realized how flimsy their proof was. They switched to charges of credit-card fraud instead. Ali steadfastly denied all guilt. "But, in June 2003, shortly before his trial was scheduled to commence, and on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence, President Bush signed a one-page order declaring Ali an 'enemy combatant' and directing his transfer to a Navy Brig in South Carolina. . ." There "he was held incommunicado . . . in solitary confinement" until 2009, habeas corpus being merely a quaint option at this point in the American Empire. He did not see "his family during these six years, and [spoke] to them only a couple of times."
The Supreme Court finally intervened, remanding Ali's case to a lower bench in Peoria, Ill. By returning "the accused" to "the State and district wherein the crime [was] committed," the Feds at last obeyed one Constitutional command: when they arrested Ali in 2001, he was a graduate student at Peoria's Bradley University. The years of torture and isolation from his family took their toll, however, and the man who had insisted on his innocence agreed last year to "cut a plea agreement. . ., which involved jail time" of fifteen years, with credit for those served.
The Feds aren't content to torment only Ali. They also "detained" his brother for seven years at Gitmo without charging him. The injustice and tyranny these men suffered ought to enrage us as much as the evisceration of the Constitution. Otherwise, our smokin' diplomat might never have taken to the skies that wacky Wednesday.
Once aboard, however, he craved a smoke mid-flight and snuck one in the john.
Grown adults skulk like Billy Joe Jr. with his first Marlboro under a government that lusts to see us naked at airports yet shudders with a horrified Puritanism at tobacco (and at alcohol, foods that taste good, or drugs it bars Big Pharma from manufacturing). Politicians save us from ourselves by stripping us of our property rights so that they, rather than the owner of the aircraft, restaurant, theater, shop, or office, can decide whether we'll smoke. Then they pervert that pleasure into a crime.
And so Mohammed emerged from the can to confront a flight attendant. Who naturally snitched to an air marshal (note to Mohammed: next time, choose a plane with an Underwear Bomber. Those tend to lack marshals). So did the passenger next in line for the washroom, who found therein Mohammed's bag of tobacco.
The marshal "then approached Mr. Madadi at his seat in the first-class section. . ." Mohammed, being a diplomat, lied. He denied smoking, though he "acknowledged that the bag contained tobacco for his pipe." Apparently believing himself to be in a country that honors the inalienable right to speak freely, he joked about setting his shoes on fire.
Given the lunacy of the TSA in general and its air marshals in particular, that was dumb. But far dumber — and stunningly malicious -- was the marshal's deliberately confusing tobacco smoke's distinctive aroma for that of a fuse burning towards a shoe-bomb. "Within a few minutes," the New York Times reports, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had taken aim at Mohammed, the 162 innocents aboard his plane, and indeed, the other 4900 flights airborne at that time via an "alert": "Attention all aircraft, this is an advisory. Be advised, a U.S. air carrier has reported a passenger has attempted to ignite his shoes on fire. . . .All pilots are to maintain extra vigilance and report any anomalies immediately..."
A couple of F-16s materialized to "safely escort the jet to the airport," as the credulous FOX News put it. That seems a bit of overkill, so to speak and to say the least, since fighter jets are ready to blow planes out of the skies on which suicide bombers are supposedly scheming to do exactly that.
Once the flight with its terroristic smoker landed, cops swarmed from the usual agencies to manhandle and insult those inside. "Passengers say they were kept on the plane for nearly an hour after it landed and then were questioned at a fire station at the airport. Mei Turcotte, 26, of Kalispell, Mont., . . .was angry about having to stay at the airport to be questioned over something so minor. . . .'They made this into something that was ridiculous.'"
And why not? The TSA isn't wasting its own money when it sounds the alarm for F-16's at $10,000-$15,000 per hour, let alone the expenses the airlines incur. Such irresponsibility will continue as long as bureaucracies control aviation. They have every incentive to exaggerate "emergencies"; how else can they convince us we "need" them?
Contrast that with airlines liberated from government's stranglehold: they would resolve actual emergencies as efficiently and conveniently for their customers as possible. Just as a supermarket doesn't portray a broken bottle of ketchup in Aisle 3 as a bloodbath and call the SWAT team, so no airline would a twist a guy's enjoying his pipe into a threat against the "Homeland."
It takes government for a farce that monumental.
Copyright © 2010 Campaign for Liberty
The Slippery Definition of Extremism
By James Bovard
Published 04/21/10
Americans are once again hearing of the perils of extremism. But the definition of this offense is slippier than a politician's campaign promise. The definition of extremism has continually been amended to permit government policies that few sober people previously advocated.
Prior to 2000, anyone who asserted that the Census Bureau was deeply involved with the roundup of Japanese-Americans for internment camps in 1942 was considered an extremist. The Census Bureau spent 60 years denying its role but finally admitted its culpability ten years ago after academics uncovered undeniable proof. Regardless of the Census Bureau's past abuses or perennial deceit, only extremists believe that their answers to this year's census could ever be used against them.
Prior to September 2001, anyone who suggested that the U.S. government lead a crusade to "rid the world of evil" would have been labeled both an extremist and a loon. But when George W. Bush promised exactly that three days after 9/11, the media cheered and his approval ratings soared.
Prior to November 2001, anyone who suggested that the president had the power to suspend the right of habeas corpus and perpetually detain anyone he accused of serious wrongdoing would have been considered an extremist. But Bush's executive decree on enemy combatants made this the law -- or at least the policy -- of the land.
Prior to 2002, anyone who suggested that the U.S. government create a Total Information Awareness database of personal information on tens of millions of Americans would have been considered an extremist. But federal spy agencies rushed forward with exactly such plans, and the feds have stockpiled far more data on citizens.
Prior to April 2004, anyone who asserted that the U.S. military was torturing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan was seen as an anti-American extremist. The leaking of the Abu Ghraib photos and official reports on abuses at Guantanamo and elsewhere proved that the extremists' worst fear had become national policy. And when Congress effectively ratified Bush's torture policies in the 2006 Military Commissions Act, "extremists"came to connote people who believed that American democracy had utterly disgraced itself.
Prior to the war on terror, anyone who advocated using tortured confessions in judicial proceedings would have been considered an extremist and perhaps also a medievalist. But the Justice Department and Pentagon effectively claimed a right to use confessions regardless of how they were acquired.
Prior to late 2005, anyone who asserted that the National Security Agency was routinely and massively illegally wiretapping Americans' phone calls and email without a warrant was considered paranoid -- as well as an extremist. Within weeks of the New York Times' exposing the government's warrantless surveillance apparatus, Republican congressmen stood and cheered during Bush's State of the Union address when he boasted of his intrusions.
Prior to recent years, anyone who suggested that Uncle Sam should be able to take naked snapshots of all airline passengers would have been considered a lunatic, as well as an extremist. But the Transportation Security Agency, with its Whole Body X-ray systems, is doing exactly that in many airports around the nation. And the TSA's promises that such photos will not be stored or abused are as credible as TSA's earlier promises that no one would be delayed more than 10 minutes waiting in airport checkpoint lines.
Prior to the post-9/11 era, if someone suggested that the federal government should bloat its Terrorist Watch List with more than a million names, the person would have been considered a fool and an extremist. But this is exactly what the feds have done -- and that is part of the reason why the watch lists have become almost useless as well as a peril to scores of thousands of innocent Americans.
Prior to this decade, only extremists believed that the president should be permitted to order the assassination of American citizens -- with no attempt to arrest or try the suspected wrongdoer. Yet, President Obama recently officially made this the national policy.
Time and again, the U.S. government has adopted policies that only extremists advocated a few years earlier. And yet, no one is supposed to think that the government has become the biggest extremist of them all.
Copyright © 2010 Future of Freedom Foundation
As crooked as all this is I bought GS calls. :)
Ain't no fricken way I'm getting any chip put in me. I'd rather be dead. End of story.
LMFAO. Find me a tall building.
LOL My calls are crispy toast today.
We knew it was coming...just a matter of when.
Well...come get me.
Just scratching my head here. LMFAO Ain't actin normal for sure.
I'm thinking they are pushing it down for the funds to buy and the shorts to cover. Got 5 weeks this period. Holding my calls still LOL.
$2 instead of .11c, doubled divi's and they tank it? Sumthin fishy here methinks.
FCX &$#@%$#@#@$&
LMFAO great siggy :)
Morning Stuffy :)
Just got my wake up call with the FCX earnings news.
Sun O beach. Happy I held some. LOL so far it's not gapping up like you would think though..what up with that?
Funny market...dumped my 34 calls for HAL when they came out with a 46% loss....then they gapped up and ran....
LMFAO is FCX gonna tank now?
An Economy of Liars
When government and business collude, it's called crony capitalism. Expect more of this from the financial reforms contemplated in Washington..
By GERALD P. O'DRISCOLL JR.
Free markets depend on truth telling. Prices must reflect the valuations of consumers; interest rates must be reliable guides to entrepreneurs allocating capital across time; and a firm's accounts must reflect the true value of the business. Rather than truth telling, we are becoming an economy of liars. The cause is straightforward: crony capitalism.
Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century Victorian essayist, unflatteringly described classical liberalism as "anarchy plus a constable." As a romanticist, Carlyle hated the system—but described it accurately.
Classical liberals, whose modern counterparts are libertarians and small-government conservatives, believed that the state's duties should be limited (1) to provide for the national defense; (2) to protect persons and property against force and fraud; and (3) to provide public goods that markets cannot. That conception of government and its duties was articulated by the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the U.S. Constitution.
.Modern liberals have greatly expanded the list of government functions, but, aside from totalitarian regimes, I know of no modern political movement that has shortened it. While protecting citizens against force, both at home and abroad, is the government's most basic function, protecting them against fraud is closely allied. By the use of force, a thief takes by arms what is not rightfully his; he who commits fraud takes secretly what is not rightfully his. It is the difference between a robber stealing brazenly on the street and a burglar stealing by stealth at night. The result is the same: the loss of property by its owner and the disordering of civil society. And government has failed miserably to perform this basic function.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704508904575192430373566758.html
No mention of the Governments announcement to sell 7.7 billion shares this year. Curious.
Citi options become crowd favorite
CHICAGO (Reuters) - There are active names in the options market and then there is Citigroup Inc (NYSE:C - News).
The New York-based bank has dominated options activity more than any other single equity option this past week as many investors bet its shares would keep rising.
It is the most actively traded single stock equity option this year so far and was the busiest in 2009 as well, according to the Options Clearing Corp.
"Considering how the general option volume has been light, some brokers are saying 'Citi option volume is paying the bills,'" said Henry Schwartz, president of option analytics firm Trade Alert.
OUTPERFORMANCE EXPECTED
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Citi-options-become-crowd-rb-46600061.html?x=0&.v=1
LOL I would bet there are a few who will argue that on Wall Street AND the Government.
And let us not forget that GS knew about the charges AT LEAST 6 months ago if not more.
And the curious purchase of those worthless out of the money puts on expiration day around 30 minutes before the news came out.
Haven't heard a word about those since that one slip up on Friday.
Probably never be investigated either.
Timing of the GS Charges Is Suspect
By Investor's Business Daily
Financial Reform: It may well be that Goldman Sachs is guilty of what it's been charged with. But no one will know until the law takes its course. We do think, however, that the timing of the charges is highly suspect.
Was it just a fluke that SEC charges against Wall Street's best-connected and most-aggressive investment banking house came down just as financial reform is about to take center stage in Congress? In politics, unlike the real world, such coincidences don't happen.
Since last year, the White House and congressional Democrats have attempted to blame the 2008 financial meltdown on Wall Street, though history shows it was government regulatory incompetence that was almost entirely responsible for the debacle.
That's why it seems strange that these charges would emerge right now - unless, that is, Democrats need an arch-villain, someone who can be made to look especially bad in the public eye.
Goldman Sachs fits the bill. The company's swagger, its aggressive style and its success in minting Treasury secretaries - including Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson - for both political parties give it a public profile second to none.
Whether Goldman is "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity," as Rolling Stone colorfully put it, or just another big bank that lost money and now finds itself charged with fraud, is open to question. What isn't open to question is that the charges against the company make the financial reform bill about to be presented in Congress more likely to pass.
And that's not just our opinion.
"(The fraud charge against Goldman) reinforces the need for much of what we were doing," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
"Targeting GS, given the flurry of anti-Wall Street press that has centered around that firm, offers the publicity that the administration needs at this critical juncture," wrote Roger Freeman, a bank analyst for Britain's Barclays, in a note to clients.
If so, it's a pity. No matter how you feel about Goldman, the fact is the financial reform bill backed by disgraced and soon-to-retire Sen. Chris Dodd is a dud. This bill would make our financial system more fragile, not less, and more likely to experience another earth-shaking meltdown like the one that took place in 2007 and 2008.
For instance, the bill institutionalizes the doctrine of "too big to fail," a major reason why American taxpayers will be paying off the $700 billion TARP bailout fund for decades to come. Under Dodd's bill, every financial institution that might have a "systemic" impact if it failed would be given the too-big-to-fail treatment.
This is an invitation to bailouts without end. It even sets up a $50 billion special "fund" to bail out future "too-big-to-fail" failures, giving large, sloppy, poorly run companies a competitive edge over small, entrepreneurial and innovative companies.
Worse, the Dodd bill's presumption that Wall Street is to blame for the meltdown gets it all wrong. In fact, and as we've explained many times, government is to blame.
The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was used as a bludgeon to force private banks to lend to unworthy borrowers. Politicized GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became the chief funding mechanism for this corrupt housing policy and its bad loans.
The very same people who caused the problem in Congress today point fingers at Wall Street while pushing more of the same.
Today, even as we "reform" Wall Street, government-run Fannie and Freddie, with losses totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, stand untouched by the Dodd bill. And the CRA, which is at the heart of the mortgage collapse, remains in effect.
Dodd's bill, if passed, won't solve our financial problems. But it will plant the seeds for our next major meltdown.
April 19, 2010, 8:59 pm You’re Welcome, Wall Street
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
In a 1964 concurring opinion deciding Jacobellis v. Ohio, Associate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote about “hard-core pornography” and his struggle to define it: “Perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”
Using Potter’s indisputable logic, it’s hard not to see something obscene in how Wall Street reaped massive profits and bonuses in 2009 — and continues to do so, as is clear from Monday’s announcement by Citigroup that it had earned $4.4 billion in the first quarter of 2010, which was even more than earned by Bank of America ($3.2 billion) and JPMorgan Chase ($3.3 billion) in the same period — merely 18 months after trillions of dollars of American taxpayers’ treasure was used to save a financial system brought to the precipice by Wall Street’s greed and irresponsible risk-taking. Goldman Sachs, which is facing a civil fraud suit filed by Washington regulators, is expected to report robust earnings Tuesday morning as well.
How did this happen at the same time Main Street continues to suffer from an unemployment rate of almost 10 percent and from the worst recession in generations? Partly, this resulted from the original strategy of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to first fix the banking system and then worry about repairing the wider economy. Hence, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program arrived in September 2008, followed by, in February 2009, the $787 billion stimulus program, or American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The benefits for Wall Street started with the extensive de-leveraging that continues the world over in the wake of the financial crisis (it caused) by helping companies raise new equity and refinance existing debt. The Wall Street firms that survived the crisis reap billions of dollars in fees for this sort of work. Mostly, though, Wall Street is making money by taking advantage of its rock-bottom cost of capital, provided courtesy of the Federal Reserve — now that the big Wall Street firms are all bank holding companies — and then turning around and lending it at much higher rates.
The easiest and most profitable risk-adjusted trade available for the banks is to borrow billions from the Fed — at a cost of around half a percentage point — and then to lend the money back to the U.S. Treasury at yields of around 3 percent, or higher, a moment later. The imbedded profit — of some 2.5 percentage points — is an outright and ongoing gift from American taxpayers to Wall Street.
You’re welcome.
And now for the truly obscene part. By keeping interest rates so stubbornly low — and by remaining committed to doing so — the Fed is crushing the rest of us, especially senior citizens on fixed incomes and those who have rediscovered saving in order to have some peace of mind.
For instance, despite my bank calling it a “premier platinum savings” account, I am getting a measly 0.15 percent interest rate. On my “premier platinum checking” account, the interest rate is 0.01 percent. In an essay in The Wall Street Journal recently, Charles Schwab pointed out that there is more than $7.5 trillion in American household wealth stored in short-term, interest-bearing checking, savings and CD accounts. (The average interest rate for a one-year CD is 1.3 percent.)
Our savings is another source of virtually free capital for banks to use to lend out at much higher rates. These anemic yields are a “potential disaster striking at core American principles of self-reliance, individual responsibility and fairness,” Mr. Schwab observed correctly.
Sure seems to be working for Wall Street, though. At $140 billion in compensation and benefits, the 2009 paychecks on Wall Street were the best ever. While several top executives named in public filings may have tried to minimize their 2009 compensation after so much populist rage, they could only take this charade so far.
Hedge fund managers did even better. The top 25 earned a total of $25.3 billion in 2009 — an average of $1 billion each — with the lowest paid hedge-fund manager receiving $350 million. Topping the list was David Tepper, of Appaloosa Management. He made $4 billion last year. “We bet on the country’s revival,” Mr. Tepper said in an interview with The Times.
Let’s be clear about one thing: The American people made a bigger bet on the country’s revival than did Mr. Tepper. But we are still waiting for our payoff. Surely Justice Stewart could see that the tax on American savers and the corresponding subsidy to hedge-fund managers, bankers and traders is nothing less than hard-core pornography.
LOL It's OK, I can handle the blame as long as I have some of his jerky. :) Great stuff it is too. I especially like the BBQ.
LOL yes I know. But it was a decent show. How else to educate the masses who haven't a clue? Have to ease them into it. I thought tonight was a start. And the Nug was on. :)
New Face of Foreclosure - The Unemployed:
The Treasury Department estimates 6 million home loans nationally are at least 60 days delinquent on payments, but through the end of March, the government reported that only 230,801 Americans had modified their loans through the Making Home Affordable program.
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=6142a2cf0116b709f6c6e422c2e59d33
Fraudulent Foreclosures Across The Country:
In courtrooms across the country, judges are foreclosing on homes based on improperly prepared documentation, some of which may even be fraudulent.
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/40770
Under-fire Goldman Sachs reveals 90% jump in profits:
Just days after US regulators began a $1bn (£650m) fraud action against the firm, Goldman revealed a leap in quarterly profits from $1.8bn to $3.5bn and disclosed that it was setting aside $5.49bn to pay its employees.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/20/goldman-sachs-profits-bonuses
Farm Workers Fight for an Extra Cent and Human Rights:
Chanting "No more slaves! Pay a living wage!", hundreds of farmworkers, students and others marched 22 miles through central Florida for three days, calling on the Publix supermarket chain to pay an extra penny to the impoverished workers who pick their tomatoes.
http://ipsnorthamerica.net/news.php?idnews=3006
The death of the American Century: The dream is dying.
It was this: a belief that the world has a special love for Americans, for our earnest innocence and gawky immediacy, for our willingness to share the obvious truth and light of democracy with people still struggling in the darkness of history, for our random energy, syncopated music and lopsided, baseball-playing grins.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/19/AR2010041903936.html
Church in worst credibility crisis since Reformation, theologian tells bishops:
Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0416/1224268443283.html?via=rel
Anderson Cooper and Class Solidarity
You cannot man the barricades with a mouth full of Cheetos
By Joe Bageant
April 20,2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Class solidarity was such a good idea. It really was. Obviously, most of the people who need solidarity are in the world's laboring classes. After all, the rich have more than enough solidarity already, as was recently demonstrated by their successful execution of the greatest global financial heist in history. Oh sure, we'll see some state sponsored mock show trials of a few of them -- they always throw a few of their own out of the sleigh to the wolves during their escapes. The big heist was big news. Working Americans will be applying Preparation H to their keisters for a long time to come.
But the ultimate accomplishment of the already rich, the newly rich and the corporate rich, has been their global solidarity on the corporate/financial front. It's been a long run up to globalism, but the rich have great patience. As an American, all my life I've heard their chief mouthpiece, the president of the United States, beginning with Eisenhower, right on up through Kennedy, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Bush, and now Obama, sing the same song. Which goes moreover like this:
"Trade is the road to peace. Commerce and business know no national boundaries. They link nations together on productivity, creating jobs and peace across the world."
It sounded good at the time. Who would have thought that the people enjoying all this harmony and peace brought about through globalization would be enjoying it in a one big happy planetary work gulag? And if they are not doing so at the moment, they will be as soon global capitalism, under the watchful solidarity of the rich, bears full fruit.
Thanks to globalization, the American, Australian and European working classes are on their way to extinction, in terms of their traditional rights, and quality of life. Just like the workers being poisoned to death by circuit board toxins in Guiyu, China, their fates will be determined by global capital, either by default or by bitter struggle against it. We are not seeing much of the latter and are not likely to, until it is too late, which it may already be. After all, you cannot put up much of a struggle against global capital when you worship it a creed and are addicted to commodities too.
Oh yeah, I forgot. We're gonna "develop" and "stimulus" our way out of what is happening now -- which is that we are fast becoming a slave labor workhouse planet. Now let me see here -- hmmm -- who is in charge of development? Oh yeah, the global financiers.
There is no way the world's working people can win in the long run, which is getting pretty damned short, or even survive, except by joining the worker struggles, of China, Asia and Africa and India. The idea that American workers are the same as the Asian and Latin American and African working people goes down hard in American gullets. (I'm no expert, but it looks to me like the Euros and the Aussies and the Canadians are snotty that way too. In fact, now that I am meeting dozens upon dozens of Canadians from all walks of life, they are looking worse than Americans.)
But for Americans, it does not go down at all. As a people, they'll never ever accept that fact, because they'll never know it for at least two reasons. (1) They are too over worked and undereducated to find out for themselves, and (2) American corporate media machinery will never let them hear of it. Americans are screwed, blued and tattooed.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25276.htm
Wall Street Culture of Greed Under Attack
By Linda McQuaig
Unsuspecting investors lost billions, while the hedge fund manager, John Paulson, personally walked away with $1 billion.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25269.htm
When will integrity and honor have a place in the world again?
I'm still hoping 2012 isn't bullshit and the vermin will be washed off the planet.
I'm sure at least half if not more of this 22% are on government assistance also.
Americans Down on Federal Government
By Steven Thomma
Just 22 percent say they trust the government almost always or most of the time, among the lowest in a half century of polling.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25266.htm
===
Bankrupt Empire
By Doug Bandow
The FDIC shut down a record 140 banks last year and is running low on cash. Last year the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation figured its fund was running a $34 billion deficit. Federal pensions are underfunded by $1 trillion. State and local retirement funds are short about $3 trillion.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25262.htm
===
There will be another war.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25273.htm
"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions." --Thomas Jeffersonto John Tyler, 1804
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"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." -- Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.
LOL Off with their heads.
Glen Beck had a decent show tonight. It's a start.
A must read for all.
http://zapatopi.net/afdb/
An Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB) is a type of headwear that can shield your brain from most electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carriers. AFDBs are inexpensive (even free if you don't mind scrounging for thrown-out aluminium foil) and can be constructed by anyone with at least the dexterity of a chimp (maybe bonobo). This cheap and unobtrusive form of mind control protection offers real security to the masses. Not only do they protect against incoming signals, but they also block most forms of brain scanning and mind reading, keeping the secrets in your head truly secret. AFDBs are safe and operate automatically. All you do is make it and wear it and you're good to go! Plus, AFDBs are stylish and comfortable.
What are you waiting for? Make one today!
The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they're about to do it again
By Matt Taibbi
Apr 05, 2010 3:58 PM EDT
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
(Long but very informative artcle)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/;kw=[3351,11459];jsessionid=2049A274F095F3011DE8362091478785
April 16, 2010
The Constitutionalist Revolt In the U.S.
By Larry Kudlow
So much is being written in the mainstream media about who the tea partiers are, but very little is being recorded about what these folks are actually saying.
We know that this is a decentralized grassroots movement, with many different voices hailing from many different towns across the country. But the tea-party message comes together in the "Contract from America," the product of an online vote orchestrated by Ryan Hecker, a Houston tea-party activist and national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots.
With nearly 500,000 votes recorded in less than two months, this Contract forms a blueprint of tea-party policy goals and beliefs.
Of the top-ten planks in the Contract, the number-one issue is protect the Constitution. That's followed by reject cap-and-trade, demand a balanced budget, and enact fundamental tax reform. And then comes number five: Restore fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government in Washington.
Note that two of the top-five priorities of the tea partiers mention the Constitution.
Filling out the Contract, the bottom-five planks are end runaway government spending; defund, repeal, and replace government-run health care; pass an all-of-the-above energy policy; stop the pork; and stop the tax hikes.
What's so significant to me about this tea-party Contract from America is the strong emphasis on constitutional limits and restraints on legislation, spending, taxing, and government control of the economy. Undoubtedly, the emphasis is there because no one trusts Washington.
As I read this Contract, tea partiers are reminding all of us of the need for the Constitution to protect our freedoms. They're calling for a renewal of constitutional values, including -- first and foremost -- a return to constitutional limits on government. The tea partiers who responded to this poll are demanding a rebirth of the consent of the governed. The government works for us, we don't work for it.
All this makes me think of President Reagan, who never quite succeeded in gaining a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget, or for limits on spending, or for a two-thirds congressional majority for any new tax hikes. But throughout his presidency, and for many years before, the Gipper argued for constitutional limits on government, especially government spending.
And now this message is being echoed perfectly in the tea-party Contract from America. In effect, it picks up where Reagan left off.
The tea partiers, whom I call free-market populists, desire a return to Reaganism. In particular, their demands for a balanced budget (third plank), for restoring fiscal responsibility (5th plank), for ending massive government spending (6th plank), and for stopping the pork (9th plank) all underscore the populist revolt against runaway government spending, and therefore runaway government power.
There are mentions in the Contract of tax reform and stopping tax hikes. But it is pretty clear to everyone nowadays that the massive run-up in spending of recent years will inevitably result in an equally massive tax-hike movement -- that is, unless the spending is strictly curbed and reduced.
Yet the tea partiers don't trust Congress to do this, so they want to bring in constitutional restraint.
A recent survey by the Brookings Institution spells out this spend-and-tax problem with great clarity. Under current spending trends, tax-the-rich efforts to bring the deficit to just 3 percent of GDP -- not balance, mind you, but 3 percent deficit -- would require a nearly 80 percent marginal tax rate on the most successful earners. And if taxes are raised across-the-board, the marginal rate would rise to nearly 50 percent for the top earners, with state and local tax burdens bringing it up to 60 percent. Otherwise, a European-style value-added tax (VAT) would become necessary.
The tea partiers know this and they don't like it one bit. And so, at bottom, they have formed a constitutionalist movement to revolt against big government and big taxes -- and oh, by the way, to stand against big-government control of large chunks of the economy, such as energy and health care.
Harking back to the Founders' principles of constitutional limits to government is a very powerful message. It's a message of freedom, especially economic freedom. The tea partiers have delivered an extremely accurate diagnostic of what ails America right now: Government is growing too fast, too much, too expensively, and in too many places -- and in the process it is crowding out our cherished economic freedom.
It's as though the tea partiers are saying this great country will never fulfill its long-run potential to prosper, create jobs, and lead the world unless constitutional limits to government are restored.
Now, as the tea partiers rally across the country, the big question is only this: Will the political class get it?
Could the 11,000-Point Dow Make Us All Miserable?
If a group of predictive theorists are to be believed, the market's about to nosedive — and Americans will get very, very angry... about everything. So is it B.S., or might a national malaise take down Obama?
By John H. Richardson
For decades, stock investors have known that hemlines track stocks — that short skirts mean good times. That's always been my philosophy, for sure. But there's definitely a dark side to ponder: Did you know that bear markets tend to trigger wars? That the size of a war almost always correlates with the size of the bear market that preceded it? That the use of words like "we" and "they" appear to increase as economic trouble approaches? That the popularity of horror movies increase as economic trouble approaches? (Seriously: Check out this report and see how Night of the Living Dead, released at a market peak in 1968, was followed by steady erosion in stocks accompanied by the mood music, as it were, of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and finally, in 1980, at the grim bottom of the '70s recession, by Friday the 13th).
These statistics come courtesy of the Elliott Wave theorists, a cult of chart obsessives who try to predict the stock market by following trends in social mood — most recently, in an article in The Socionomist (the Elliott Wave newsletter) that follows the current growth of secessionist sentiment — the militias, the tenthers, the birthers, the federal-reserve haters, the fad for nullification of federal laws. A recent Rasmussen poll found the gap between the government and the people as big as the one that preceded the Revolution — just 21 percent of voters now believe that our government rests on the consent of governed, which is a founding principle of our country. To help track all this, the Socionomist article includes the first-ever index of secessionism as it corresponds to dips in the stock market — which is, it turns out, pretty damn close.
The bad news is that the theorists think civil war is a "distinct possibility."
I talked to Alan Hall, the Elliott Waver who wrote the study. Pointing to one of his charts, he showed a downward line that ended in the American Revolution, another leading to the Civil War, another just before World War II, and so on. The disturbingly Spock-like conclusion is that there's little rationality to any of this: We can analyze our misery in terms of our faith or political preferences, but really we are much more like a herd of gazelles or a flock of swallows, tooling happily (or miserably) along in one direction until a few gazelles and swallows start to peel off. Let's head over to that cliff, guys! Last one in is a rotten egg! And suddenly the herd turns.
"We think what is going on is that crowd behavior is not random — it's patterned," Hall said. "And we think we know what the pattern is: waves of optimism and pessimism generate social events."
In other words, the intuitive popular idea that economic conditions generate moods is exactly wrong. "If that was the case," he said, "then stock-market downturns would follow economic downturns, and they don't — every major economic downturn follows the stock-market downturn."
That's why skirts were short in the 1920s: The good mood raised the hemlines. But the mania kept building and building, adding beads and ruffles and silk stockings until America threw that sluttish flapper down on the bed and —
Sorry, my editor blocked that metaphor. Point is, the go-go years of the '90s were a similar phenomenon. "We think there was a major peak in social mood in 2000," Hall said, "and the rally in 2007 was a very strong bear-market rally."
That was followed by the First Dip. Now we're in another rally. The stock market is booming, and retail sales are up. So why don't we feel better?
According to Hall's charts, it's because we're headed for a second dip, as the general slide into pessimism accumulates inertia, which leads to increased feelings of anger, fear, and polarization — and a general "throw the bums out" sentiment. "There's a pretty strong case that bear markets tend to track with incumbents losing their seats," he told me. "Obama rode that mood in, but now that he's in office his popularity has continued to decline."
During the Second Dip, Hall's charts suggest, the pressure of gloom gets so big that violent and secessionist impulses can break out of control. Although this could take years or even decades, he sees one ominous leading indicator: "We've got rising valuation right now in a period of declining psychology — that's a warning sign."
Again, this isn't really because of anything Obama has done. "Mood decline creates the bear market," he says.
People do hate this theory, Hall admits. Nobody wants to think that he's engaged in "pre-rational survival behavior," that he's no smarter than a gnu on the Serengeti, that rumors and movies and hemlines and even politics are just our way of sniffing the wind — that history itself is just a glorified herding pattern. But he insists that the more you study the data, the more obvious it becomes. And there's real personal danger in falling for temporary shifts of mood. "Right now, a lot of people think the government has rescued us and we're working our way out of it," Hall says. "We don't think that's the case. We think the government will ultimately fail because the tremendous positive social mood has generated a huge amount of debt we can't service any more. It's largely dependent on confidence, and confidence is waning."
The whole thing is like a bad romance. "You get into this love affair with stocks and you get your guts ripped out and you're on the floor and you get better and ready to date again and boom, you're in love again — we think that's the mood right now," Hall says. "But our studies suggest we're headed for a major deflation."
That sounds even worse in the context of romance than it does in economics.
So the overt rebels like the Tea Parties are just one symptom among many, Hall and his fellow wavers suggest. Here are some other things to watch for: Our leaders will become less sunny. Our arts will become darker. Even environmentalism is already becoming less popular, which can lead to scary consequences. "A lot of our major accidents like Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez happened during commodity bear markets," he reminded me.
The irony is, despite all the talk of freedom and small governments, all this fear tends to lead to a rise in authoritarianism, which can find ultimate expression in left-wing collectivism just as easily as in right-wing movements. After all, Hall says, "government is the biggest herd." The real lesson, he said, is this simple: "We definitely have a penchant for trying to control others when we get fearful — we do it under the guise of science and then take it to great extremes. Things that sound great, like we're going to save the planet, turn into nightmares."
That, my friends, is when caveat emptor becomes caveat emperor.