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An interesting article from a more interesting person who I respect:http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22808.htmComment: You can’t build a Nation on Larry Summers or Geithner’s bullsh*t, or any’body else’s variety of fertilizer so the inevitable conclusion is that as the USA predominate and preferred tool for combating its er, instabilities, is bullsh*t and theft, then expect the worst.You may find this rather earthy as well:http://www.theinternationalforecaster.com/International_Forecaster_Weekly/Financial_Bailout_Plan_Keeps_Zombie_Banks_AliveOh, almost forgot: Latvia – comment: goneHo humHo hum

From Yuri Zarakhovich at Asia Times:All over Russia, people are staging strikes or protesting through hunger strikes against unpaid wages and rising unemployment. In desperation, construction workers in the Kurgan region in Siberia made an ironic appeal to US President Barack Obama. They said that their overdue back pay was explained by their bosses in terms of the collapse of US mortgages. Hence, Obama ought either to admit that the US is at fault and pay them, or, alternatively proclaim the Kurgan workers’ bosses as “slanderers and America-haters”.

http://verbewarp.blogspot.com/2005/02/it-is-now-year-2015.html.comment: excuse the warp. it is somehow contagiouslike silence and certain dissonance that is sweeterthan harmony and conformity, like distortion, artistically embracedand presented to reflect the, closer to, truth. very non linear.get used to it!.”It is a time to reconsider; a time for reflection; a time to revalue ones past; ones past beliefs; ones past actions, within a framework of self-forgiveness of oneself; it is time to move on in a framework of energy, vitality, compassion, intuition and intellect. It is time to smell the roses.” pjb..”That Feel”(Keith Richards/Tom Waits).Well there’s one thing you can’t loseIt’s that feelYour pants, your shirt, your shoesBut not that feelYou can throw it out in the rainYou can whip it like a dogYou can chop it down like an old dead treeit always sees youWhen you’re coming into townOnce you hang it on the wallYou can never take it down.But there’s one thing you can’t loseAnd it’s that feelYou can pawn your watch and chainBut not that feelIt always comes and finds youIt will always hear you cryI cross my wooden legAnd I swear on my glass eyeIt will never leave you high and dryNever leave you looseIt’s harder to get rid of than tattoos.But there’s one thing you can’t loseIt’s that fee ee e eelBut there’s one thing you can’t loseIt’s that feel…..You can throw it off a bridgeYou can lose it in a fireYou can leave it at the altarIt will make you out a liarFall down in the streetYou can leave it in the lurchWell you say that it’s gospelBut I know that it’s only church.But there’s one thing you can’t loseAnd it’s that feelIt’s that feel.There’s one thing you can’t loseand it’s that feel .There’s one thing you can’t loseand it’s that feel …………………………………………………but the question we ask..”what does that have to do with the price of tea in china?”.strange response….Last show and deathAt the start of the play Genesius lay down on the stage as if sick. Two other actors asked what ailed him. Genesius said he felt a great weight that he wanted removed. Hence, two other actors, dressed as a priest and exorcist, were called in. They asked what the protagonist wanted. He replied, “A baptism.” Thereupon, he said, he saw a vision of angels bearing a book with all his sins inscribed. The actor portraying the priest asked him: “My child, why did you send for me?”At this point, Genesius claimed to actually see angels and asked to be baptized himself onstage. Enraged, Diocletian had him turned over to Plautia, prefect of the praetorium, who tortured him in an effort to force him to sacrifice to the pagan gods. When Genesius persisted in his faith, he was beheaded.He is known as the patron saint of actors, comedians, clowns, dancers, theatrical performers, musicians, attorneys, barristers, lawyers, printers and stenographers, and is invoked against epilepsy..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesius_of_Rome.more useless history, per se. fitfully.barnacle briny ……

g,…buried in the depths of your mind and what youare, or are not, willing to do to capture your veryown fate from the demands of the authoritiesdictating your past, present and future.so much thought. how do you feel? can you losethat feel? if you can, what remains? somethingworth living or dying for? tell me..that is one take on it. obviously, you are freeto take any angle (take) on it you choose.peas.ps. or bury it in the cold ground.pss. it will come down to people talking to people.people comprehending their own feeling and thoughtprocesses as the basis for civilization, something thatis at the root and cannot be lost by any transactionor tragedy.not digital transfers. feeling and comprehension.psssss. granted, it is a mystery for the most part.

What happens to Latvia can have pretty wide repercussions and I’m glad Dr. Roubini is writing about it. On the question of Euroisation: it’s a theoretical possibility, perhaps even a necessity. But it would require more or less equal sacrifice of the three interested parties: West European banks, the Latvian government, and the Latvian people. And Latvia isn’t the most politically sable country at the moment. The EU was in no rush to complete the process with a relatively stable Poland even during the good times. The case of Latvia appears to be an emergency but that doesn’t guarantee that the obstacles can be overcome or, if formal agreement is reached, that it will be more than a stopgap. A difficult, difficult problem for them and also the Hungarians and Ukrainians. Let’s hope that we don’t suffer too much here from the inevitable ripple effects on the banking system. And a political breakdown in these countries could have some really disturbing effects. Is there any role for the US here?

This was on previous thread for only a few minutes: I thought it clairvoyant and am reposting it without PeterJB’s permission. ”How can America compete in emerging world markets if she is morphing into debt and delusion under socialism while China and other sleeping giants are shaking off socialism and communism and morphing into market economies under the rule of supply and demand?”@ Guest on 2009-06-10 10:39:10Indeed, leaving one to ask, are all of this tribe of Western leadership unaware of history? But, you must respond that socialism coupled with fascism is becoming, has become, pervasive throughout the West as the applied political doctrine du jour. Why is this so? And more so, why is it, that the USA leading the rush to the socialism store?Doesn’t it ever strike anyone as strange that every time leadership get into trouble (which is most of the time) they run to money (BIG BUSINESS) for advice and screw everybody else? Leadership in the West is all drawn from the ranks of the “camp followers” or from the nature and behaviours of the criminal elements and as such, permission must always be asked – on bended knees – where this policy is NOT transmitted downwards where it is far more profitable to apologize that to ask permission!The bastion of Liberty is becoming, has become, the anti-Christ of the planet, or the planet’s magnetic field has reversed (it has done so many times).Obviously, socialism appeases the masses that allows leadership to remain as leadership, while fascism allows the supporting bastions of leadership, to harvest from the masses beyond taxation and through a pseudo-inflation er, theft, so as to drip feed leadership. Or, the answer to your question is: Leadership in the West is done but desires to preside over anything and presiding over a complete global collapse is far preferable, a priori, to not presiding!Hanlon’s Razor – but, the good news is that there are answers. Of course, the bad news is that the bad news is preferred!Ho hum

Fed Would Be Shut Down If It Were Audited, Expert SaysCNBC (June 10)–The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet is so out of whack that the central bank would be shut down if subjected to a conventional audit, Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, told CNBC.With $45 billion in capital and $2.1 trillion in assets, the central bank would not withstand the scrutiny normally afforded other institutions, Grant said in a live interview.”If the Fed examiners were set upon the Fed’s own documents—unlabeled documents—to pass judgment on the Fed’s capacity to survive the difficulties it faces in credit, it would shut this institution down,” he said. “The Fed is undercapitalized in a way that Citicorp is undercapitalized.”Grant said he would support legislation currently making its way through Congress calling for an audit of the Fed.Moreover, he criticized the way the Fed has managed the financial crisis, saying the central bank’s target rate should not be around zero.”I think zero is the wrong rate for almost any economy,” Grant said, adding the Fed has “embarked on a vast experiment in moral hazard. Interest rates are the traffic signals in a market economy, and everything’s green. … You have to wonder whether these interest rates are the right clearing rate or rather they are the imposition of a central bank.”Amid a disparity between analysts predicting there will be no rate hikes soon and the fed funds futures indicating tightening by the end of the year, Grant said he thinks the Fed indeed will begin raising rates as inflation creeps into the picture.Fed funds futures have fully priced in as much as a half-point rise in the target rate from its current range of zero to 0.25 percent.”If the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when there’s too much unanimity of opinion, then one begins to worry about this,” he said. “The Fed proverbially has been late.”http://www.cnbc.com/id/31204170/

Michael Lewis: Wall Street Made This Mess And Is Making Fortune Cleaning It Up (VIDEO)June 9, 2009 — Michael Lewis, the former Salomon Brothers trader who wrote “Liar’s Poker” about the excesses of Wall Street during the 1980s, delivered a devastating critique of the financial industry and of the government bailout today on CNN”s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”Lewis thinks that the government’s rescue efforts have only served to postpone a “day of reckoning” for Wall Street:“I think that we are in for another day of reckoning down the road. I just don’t know when it is.“I think that they haven’t even properly evaluated the institutions.“They haven’t been honest about what these institutions have on their books. They’ve had phony stress tests.“So, we’re in a kind of, I think, right now, in a period where there’s a false sense that it’s over, that the crisis is passed. I don’t think the crisis is passed.”Part of the problem, Lewis argues, is that the architects of the bailout are too cozy with the banks which created the financial crisis in the first place, even speculating that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is already looking ahead to a cushy job in the private sector.”…one of the things that’s odd about the current situation is that the people who created the problem are so powerful in deciding what the solution to the problem is going to be. There is a great tradition on Wall Street of making a fortune, creating a mess, and then making a fortune cleaning it up. But to do it on this scale is breathtaking to me.“And it is amazing to me the degree to which, say, Goldman Sachs is intertwined with the Treasury, and how they’re — there don’t seem to be any independent voices in the thick of the decision-making. The decision-making is all being done by people who one way or another might expect to make a lot of money from Goldman Sachs in the future…“So, on a grander scale, if I’m Tim Geithner and I’m the secretary of the treasury, what do you think he’s going to do when he stops being secretary of the treasury? His natural next step is go work in the financial sector. I don’t think he’s actually thinking, “I’ve got to be nice to the people on Wall Street, because they’re going to make me rich on the back end of it.”Further, he believes that regulation has been ineffective because the regulators are conflicted, expressing shock that this cozy connection is considered routine in Washington:“But the directors of the last three — let’s see, three of the last four or four of the last five directors of enforcement of the SEC work for big Wall Street banks now…”And you can just assume, I think, that if you’re a prominent person at the SEC, your exit strategy is to get a lot of money from a Wall Street firm. And nobody says anything about it. That’s the amazing thing.“It’s not even thought scandalous. It’s just thought normal. It’s like a natural career — a step in a financial career.”Lewis believes that two principal causes of the crisis were that the ratings agencies were weak and that credit-default swaps were unregulated.But even if proper regulation is brought to bear on Wall Street, Lewis remains pessimistic. As “a natural cynic,” he adds that really smart people in positions of privilege will find ways to get around the new rules.”Lewis expressed his shock at the scale of the current crisis, saying that when he wrote his book, he thought “it was the end of something,” and he was determined to capture that era in print because he assumed that people 15 years later would hardly believe what had happened during that previous crisis.”And I turned out to be completely wrong.”In fact, it was just the beginning of a long era in Wall Street, culminating in the “point of madness,” as Lewis describes it, describing his experience at Salomon Brothers where revenues were increasingly being generated by risk-taking and proprietary trading.Lewis described the internal logic at the big Wall Street firms, where top executives are pressured to make the riskiest moves because those are the ones that were generating the most money:“The logic of it, internal to the Wall Street firms, is that if I’m the CEO of Citigroup or Merrill Lynch, and the vast majority of my revenues are coming out of this subprime mortgage machine, and I just shut it down, unless I’m incredibly lucky in the timing of it, it’s going to look like I’ve just jettisoned my single most important business. My competitors are all going to be earning fantastic returns on their capital, and I’m going to be out of it. And I’ll probably be out of a job.”Meanwhile, all the guys who are going along with it are getting paid huge sums of money at the end of every year. The efficient strategy for the individual trader was to ignore his reason and participate in the madness.”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/07/michael-lewis-wall-street_n_212340.html

[California’s] revenues from personal income taxes tumbled by 39.3 percent in May from a year earlier while revenues from corporate taxes fell by 52.1 percent and revenues from sales taxes sagged by 7.6 percent, according to a report released by Controller John Chiang.[R]evenues in May fell by $1.14 billon, or 17.7 percent, from a year earlier.http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE55974820090610?rpc=28

Latvia’s devaluation would certainly be harsh but effective medicine. After the resulting crash and domestic dislocation, the economy would offer those with capital to invest many attractive opportunities in the liquidations. Perhaps Russians will buy up the assets liquidated by the Swedes as the rebalance against dollar reserves, and once again imprint their authority on the unfortunate Latvians.As for the future, euroisation might be better approached through a currency board – fixing the lat to the euro practically rather than politically, as has already been done for Estonia and Lithuania. When stabilised, the lat could be discontinued.

If you are sittin in a tank you couldnt see the reality.

“Rather than deprive yourselves of material goods and credit that lubricates your economies and the benefits of division of labor, you could stop giving them your money by outlawing anyone’s having over a certain amount that is democratically mandated – say a few millions? I think that’s a far better solution. What do you think of that idea? Anybody?”@ Fairy Nuff on 2009-06-10 16:27:031. No man can be or should be trusted2. No man’s potential should be constrained in terms of social benefit3. There are two economies; 1. the real and 2 the secondary being the alter ego of the former. They should be connected but the real economy must remain inviolate.4. The structure and organizations of this socio-economic relationship must be hard-wired and not permitted to lie with the opinions of ideologists or idealists5. To be housed is civilization (RyskAmp)6. Drop the tax burdens (real stimulus – see Mish)and reduce government spending dramatically.7. Drop imposition and aggression8. Kick out most of the bureaucrats and tell them to get jobs and work for a change9. Delete all large banks to be replaced by many personalized small banquettes within a hard-wired infrastructure that is to say, real infrastructure.10. Create a society of values where people mind their own business and keep their hands out of the pockets of others.There is more; much more.Ho hum

Dollar’s Reserve Status May Deteriorate, Roubini Sayshttp://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a9PLmUfhX3v0#une 11 (Bloomberg) — The dollar’s status as the world economy’s sole reserve currency may deteriorate, said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economics professor who predicted the financial crisis.“We may see complementary reserve currencies,” Roubini said at a conference today in Athens. While it’s “not going to happen overnight,” the development “will diminish the role of the dollar over time.”The dollar’s status has come into question as leaders of Brazil, Russia, India and China discuss substituting other assets for their dollar holdings

increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.Myopic, and stupid! This is one area where I DO think Ron Paul is nuts: just because government can use global climate change to manipulate people (something that Paul fears, and I agree with the concern), doesn’t mean that the premise isn’t valid!It’s an undeniable fact, one that’s not likely commented on, that the REAL issue is the increased levels of CO2 in the oceans! We’re all hung up on what’s in the air, but it’s what’s in the water that has the bigger impact.Mark

I thank you kindly for the response, PJB, but frankly don’t understand what you’re saying. I’d like to ask directly whether you favor or oppose an upper limit on personal wealth…and whether you’d favor or oppose people having the opportunity to vote an upper limit to personal fortunes.(No one ever voted to have no limits – that’s just become the universal default option through ignorance, passivity, and manipulation.)

http://suddendebt.blogspot.com/Brief and very interesting evaluation of deflation vs. inflation debate. Sudden Debt sees slow and gradual deflation as a inevitable outcome.

Wootton notes that the changes his team saw were linked with growing levels of atmospheric CO2, but he readily acknowledges that the global-warming gas might not be the main culprit in this surge in acidity. Instead the acidification the researchers observed could have resulted from a nearby upwelling of deep ocean water loaded with carbon, so the results might not apply to the oceans as a whole.

In Chilling Stars the above issue is discussed. As the Unstoppable Global Warming, every 1500 years (another good book to read) continues – more and more CO2 and methane is being released from the ocean depths.BTW, what is your science background Mark?

When everybody starts pouring their money into commodities what do you expect? We are screwing ourselves and all other humans who depend on these items for their own well-being by speculating on these essentials – they should be taken off the Casino table – Oil, Food, metals, etc.Now there is REAL CHANGE Obi could try to implement.

Ron Paul doesn’t want government involved in anything. While I agree with many of his positions, he’s not right on all of them.I think that a monkey could figure this stuff out. Humans are unlocking CO2 at rates that wouldn’t naturally occur: deforestation (burning vegetation and releasing CO2 from the soil, as well as pumping and burning fossil fuels).Sure, there are natural occurrences that have and will occur, but that doesn’t absolve us from identifying our impacts and what we can do to mitigate them.I’m reminded of a comment made by Jack Kemp (I believe), that Dr. Albert Bartlett references in his presentation Arithmetic, Population and Energy, that humans have no impact on the environment. Anyone who makes this claim should be forced to spend time in Haiti.Mark

An engineer is not a scientist. An engineer uses science (the Greek word for knowledge) to do engineering work such as modeling.There are hundreds of Wilkipedia articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_climate_change_articles on climate change with thousands of authors.May I suggest a little more science is in order rather than opinion books or more engineering.

BRIC is rapidly planning to stabilize the world reserve currency/US dollaragainst the will of the USA (but not Germany’s Dr. Merkel I am sure)the campaign is moving on all fronts around the worldChina: “the dollar will not collapse”…10-year treas. note SHOT UP to 4%Russia/Brazil: “diversify out of the dollar”the bankers of USA do not willingly want to relinquish their world powerso we can expect every day more (economic)shots being firedmaybe today we’ll see the 30-year bond rate shooting up————BRIC wants the USA/and its dollar to stabilize not devalue…a weak dollar means USA buys less oil, and goods made in other countries(it’s not only to maintain value in their dollar holdings)China especially with its strong (and smart) coherent govt cannot trustpolitician-buffoons in Washington DC to CUT SPENDINGLatvia is a democracy -the Prime Minister of Latvia says “Really, there is a feeling we could be at the bottom of the crisis, that it is not getting worse.”Dr. Roubini scoffs at this…”Draconian cuts in public spending will be required if Latvia is to improve the current account.”already, the Govt cut public salaries 15% and then 20% more, and soon 15% moresalary of $100 is cut to $58100 -15% = 85 -20% = 68 -15% = 58would our postal service continue if our mail carriers suddenly made so much lesssample salary of $50,000 = 29,000would the Postal Union go out on strike?China understands that the USA Govt is a child on the pleasure principle”I want this and I want that”I can trust China to see us through the mess our politicians are makingChina will not permit our Govt to destroy the US Dollar

thanks for juxtaposing – it puts things in sharp focusChinese leader(s) will meet with Pres. Obama June 27and I believe they are giving the GB (Government of Bankers)a taste of interest rates shooting up and a rapid moving on all fronts toreplace the US dollar (and its Govt) dominating the world

The last frontline special about this crisis was dissapointing and superficial. Are they going to use this one to say that the American Banking system is being “nationalized”. Bullpuckey! The American Government has been formally PRIVATIZEDand the megabankers are our masters. I cannot believe how much media excrement the American People are able to tolerate. We are now in a formal financial state as oppossed to the informal indirect financial state of the past.The Main Street economy is spiralling out of control and the bankers will come back to dotheir next operetta and loot some more with aguaranteed creative script. This is not going to stop until the people march on Washington and askto take the government back from the banks. It won’t happen until unemployment hits the 15% government threshold which will really be 25%.Don’t worry about the dollar and treasuries, theTPTB will have a new asian crisis in Eastern Europe and money will be looking for a safe haven.The North Korean will create a crisis soon, andthe Pakistani will have a governmental problem.Money will flood into treasuries just to avoid global asian instability. He who has the ICBMsmakes the rules. Obviously the owner of ICBMs also is controlled by those with the financialdigital bits that act as gold. This was the history of the 20th century and will continue torepeat until the people catch on!

Must read:裸選桑拿之我見試過２次，一在樟仔，一在黄江(因皇崗有直巴到上述兩地，我去皇崗較直接)。1.每次４條女，一入房就打開大衣，看了3轉，亦不好意思再看下去，怕被人罵混吉。但真的很過引。($488全包)2.在一間房隔玻璃看(似差佬認人)，她們看不到你，那次剛巧有其他人在揀A牌($500全包)，樣靚啲，高啲但波細(可能大波已給人揀了)。每次5个人，只穿Ｔ-BACK ，還會走近窗前讓你看清楚。我揀B牌($400全包)，看了3轉，共看了15對波波，很有AV FEEL，而且一定不會学有次揀了个波大(但除衫後就變了DORLIN，又有肚腩)。所以裸選應該成為莞式揀女趨勢。

TAKE HEART GUESTWhen “overpopulation” goes back in to our high school world history books again [it will] and the corporate and extremist fringe groups lose their grip on our economy against populist will; what comes around, goes around. I’m already starting to hear more common sense on global warming’s root cause: “overpopulation”.America should set the environmental example to demography sanity with real science again [depopulation ASAP]. When politicians with banksters/media made depopulating America a “Hate Crime”, I knew they’d shown their real greed and brainlessness. Its political Koolaid right now.Thank God for Earthday!

Be gentle, Morbid.Don’t you think that the use of “Guest” as a moniker gives Guest all of the expert background and credential that one needs to shout out here in the blogosphere?I presume that Guest is a rising star and may soon appear on Cable News.

Hey, but stocks goin greeeeeeeeeen.So what.Thsi suckersgame is so boring.

I have a friend who is with the Coast Guard in NC, his wife is an ER Nurse. They are hell bent on returning to San Diego next month where they own a (mortgage still) smaller house than the one they currently live in NC. They have been renting their CA home for 4 years. Their son is 9, they in their 30′s. Can’t sell their home here in NC, and no renters yet. I told them maybe they shouldn’t be in such a hurry to sell the NC house (which they bought for 250K two years ago, and no offers at 200K)…in case they have to come back…since CA has become a basket case since they were last there 4 years ago. Am I off base here?

Nothing like getting screwed and not enjoying it.

Starving those at the bottom is stupid, when it’s those at the top whose resource/pollution footprint is – what – thousands of times bigger?

Tough to say… Calif has been juggling this hot potatoe for over a year. there are announced devasting cuts in education, state employee jobs, Cal Trans, welafre programs, health insurance programs, etc… I beleive the FED will arrange some sort of borrowing for calif to help. they cannot afford the state to go bankrupt, in spite of what they have said that no help is coming. this has been month to month since January, but as the state controller said the problem is now 5 times larger than it was when they thought thy solved it in February. The bottom line is Calif is bankrupt, Tax revenue reciepts are falling off at a faster pace than they have accounted for. in addtion the housing market is no where close to bottoming out here. Foreclosure are mounting and california is hlding 58% of all option ARMS hitting over the next three years that are going to cause more foreclusres/defualts.California has so many problems with millions unemployed, millions with no health insurance, millions facing foreclosure and there seems to be no plan in place to solve them either by calif of the Fed.its hard to say what will happen- food lines? health care lines? tent citites? shortages? NO JOBS? it will probably be all of that increasing in waves of seriousness over time.All i know is Calif is an indicator of what will happen accross most stateand local goverenments. some states ar enot far behind, liek forida, the Auto states…Maybe tohers can chime in with more specific horrific things that may happen to california. All i know its a disaster already and getting worse and it does seem that people living here ar ein denial still to what is going on.of all the devasting cuts that bothers me are edcuation cuts in k-12 and at the state universitys. this goes counter and directly agianst Obama wanting to help/fix education in this country. msot school districts and boards are incapable of dealing with the cuts about to be imposed on them and ferocity and frequency at which the numbers change.

an interesting piece on what happens if the stock market “rally” continues:http://seekingalpha.com/article/142539-can-rising-stock-markets-serve-as-a-confirmation-of-a-crashing-economy#comments_header

so if retail sales is 70% of the us economy and it is down almost 10% would’nt that indicate that US GDP will follow close to that decline?

WHO Declares Level 6 – PandamicThe only trouble, in my opinion, is that WHO lacks a category 7 level in their model – what to do if it progress to an extinction event.

Billy Gates is a large supporter of the Doomsday Seed Vault. I just wonder if they remembered to place in that vault the sperm and eggs of humans – the most evolved ones of course.

Yeah, that’s the problem with OUR PhDs. Their advises tend to be always on the Malthusian side. Who pays the piper? Yes, sir!

Not only Latvia.Our arabian friends are also in deep s’#t:Signs of a new financial storm for September coming from Dubai and Saudi Arabiaby Maurizio d’OrlandoDubai calls on the Rothschild bank for help, perhaps out of desperation. In Saudi Arabia a Saad Group company defaults. US, European and Asian banks are struggling. The end of Ramadan in September might mark the start of an economic depression worse than that of the 1930s.Milan (AsiaNews) – Rothschild’s Dubai office has been retained by Dubai’s Department of Finance for advice on the US$ 10 billion financial support fund (FSF) the emirate raised on the bond markets.Nakheel, the property development arm of Dubai World, was the first to benefit, but is likely to be the last of its kind because funds will be handed out on the basis of two criteria: urgency and strategic importance.In fact government-related corporations deemed essential for the long-term development of Dubai’s economy will be eligible for FSFs. They include firms involved in infrastructure, transportation (ex. the Metro and Maktoum airport projects), aviation, ports, shipping and tourism. Banking might be included and the Rothschild guidelines might be flexible with regard to real estate.This said Rothschild is not getting directly involved but will act through commercial banks in which it has equity or has connections with, like JP Morgan and other ones. Moreover, through the same commercial banks, Rothschild has a say, and a powerful one, over the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY).By law the latter plays a key role in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and thus has a crucial role in making key decisions about interest rates and the US money supply.Through the FRBNY Rothschild is in a privileged position to influence US monetary policy and shaping US monetary supply, crucially important since the US dollar remains the main reserve currency in the world.Dubai’s choice is also part of a ongoing dispute between the Saudis and the Emirates over the location of the single central bank of the Gulf States and what direction to give it.The United Arab Emirates (UAE), especially Abu Dhabi, has recently put the brakes on the whole thing, and in the short run no solution seems to be in sight.The Saudis are considered too close to the United States and thus indirectly to Israel. Gulf States, especially the UAE, favour a Euro-Asian axis that runs from China to Russia that includes Germany, a relationship best illustrated by Opel’s sale to the Austro-Canadian Magna group, which stands in for the Russian state bank Sberbank.The Rothschild family has have been closely associated with the Zionist Movement. The 1917 Balfour Declaration was in fact addressed to Lord Rothschild in which the British government committed itself to the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.By choosing this banking group, Dubai is distancing itself from the other emirates, perhaps out of desperation.But the Saudis too are facing their own serious problems. The Saad Group, which is linked to The International Banking Corp (TIBC) and the Ahmad Hamad Algosaibi & Brothers Co, is in difficulty.Saudi Arabia’s central bank has frozen all the accounts of Saad chairman, Saudi billionaire Maan al-Sanea, who owns 2.97 per cent of the HSBC Holdings Plc, Europe’s largest bank based in London.Once known by its full name of Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp., HSBC Holdings Plc is also one of Asia’s main banks.The decision by Saudi Arabia’s central bank comes after an Algosaibi-owned company defaulted on a billion dollar debt.Maan al-Sanea’s Saad Investment Co. had also received a US$ 2.82 billion loan from a group of 26 European, US, Asian and Arab banks in 2007.Such troubles might be a sign of more bad things to come for the banks, especially those in Europe and to a lesser extent in Asia.Conversely, although US banks were hit by the subprime credit crisis in real estate, they are not that involved in emerging markets and eastern Europe.As in the spring of 2008 when the first signs of the coming September financial storm were visible, today’s signs, albeit not front page news, might herald another major storm this fall.But this year’s crisis could be worse than last year’s because of the multiple points of origin. In addition to the weak situation of the US Federal Reserve, whose financial commitments in support of the US banking system are equal to the total US GDP, European banks could go in tilt because of their exposure to emerging markets whilst those of Asia (especially Japan’s and China’s) could suffer because of Asian economies’ heavy reliance on now declining exports.As for Dubai real estate values in the city-emirate have dropped by 50 per cent since before the crisis[i]; insolvencies here and across the Gulf region are rising.At the same time two contradictory trends appear to be coming together. On the one hand, we see that “creata ex nihilo”[ii] e-money might lead to hyper-inflation; on the other, collapsing prices in real goods could lead to deflation and an economic depression worse than that of the 1930s.Indeed in Dubai many expect the next storm to hit at the end of Ramadan, 21 September.http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=15402&geo=&theme=&size=A

Enough of all the whinning and snivelling. Eastern Europeans funded their mortgages in so called hard currencies because the rates, on the surface, were much, much cheaper. The mortgagees gambled and lost. They clearly mis-read the implications of being long assets in a weak currency, funded with liabilities in a strong currency. The got caught in their own version of the Yen carry trade. Plain old greed.

Someone seems to be in need of lots of toilet paper…10 y US 3.84%30 y US 4.68%”The government received strong demand, with bidders offering 2.68 times the amount of debt being sold, the highest in a year.”(marketwatch)Very unpleasant, those days with diarrhea, but gives some relief…

agree! By continuing our addiction to credit, borrowing and consumerism we have allowed ourselves to become enslaved to these institutions: the solution, so simple in theory, but not in practice, is to greatly reduce and ultimately stop handing them our money; without it, they lose power, control and we gain it back! We must strive towards self sufficiency, support local businesses and keep control on a local level away from the bureaucrats, politicians and crooks. Yet just like an alcoholic with excuses on why he drinks, most people will have a million reasons why this won’t work and will continue letting big business and govt run their lives into perpetual slavery, without even realizing it.

Didn’t Roubini predict $20 Oil earlier this year?

This is a very good sign that the confidence in the US government and the nation‘s economy is being steadily rebuilt. This can certainly be considered as a nice green shoot. Obviously this confidence is having a contagious effect on the stocks, which are on the way up.Let’s hope it will stay the course.

The tipping point has already arrived for the counted 6.7 million jobless and the countless millions of others reduced to menial labor and government make-work. Unfortunately, most of these unfortunates tripped over someone else’s mess, namely that of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley. Congress, Bernanke and Paulson and Geithner, of course, have turned a blind eye to the collateral damage, at the same time feeding and abetting the perpetrators.But you are right. The American people are at the point of no return. Either Americans restore individual sovereignty now, clean out the filth in the Congress, abolish the Fed and install representation of, by and for the people—or they will live in a collectivist state where government officials and central bankers are the rulers of the people rather than their servants.Debt has to be repaid–with value, not more debt.. The world’s moneylenders have pushed the depth of debt deeper than ever in history, all the while encouraging individuals to add their personal debts to the load. If the borrowing and printing should stop immediately no one knows for sure how long it would take for present and future generations to pay it back.The problem is that even amongst the leading moneylenders, not one knows what’s on the books of the others. Hence, the lack of interbank activity. All they know at the moment is that their best approach is to seize the value of property and labor from the taxpayers to postpone their own insolvencies.But it isn’t going to be solved without massive pain, even if they stop the wealth transfer. Should the American people establish a government to begin solving the crisis now, we still would have hard roads ahead. But if the bankers persist down this road of crippling debt, as is likely, America is headed for an environment of depressions, anarchy, political upheaval, a world of nation failures and perhaps even worse.You can’t debauch the world’s world reserve currency to the point of worthless paper without destroying standards of living around the globe. This crisis begs for monetary sanity, for the restoration of a stable medium of exchange barter, for a return to some permanence, to some dependable source of income and of value. Present banker operations at the Fed are removing the value from the nation’s savings accounts, properties, resources, labor contracts, and business plans in general.A robbery of this magnitude, if not put right, will destroy economic life and freedom as we have known it, in America.

As for me, I’m getting financially seasick from this constant economic churning perpetrated by the Fed. No two days are the same: no economic landscape lasts more than a few hours. How can a person hold down a job, unable to track his financial well being minute by minute, and still hold onto the knowledge that he won’t be financially wiped out by the time he gets home? Do you buy now, later, never; do you invest today, pull out tomorrow. If you leave your computer screen for 5 minutes will some insider or Fed announcement wipe you out? How can a person even bid on a house with any idea what the interest rate will be next day in relation to the asking price determined when rates were low? When will this financial nightmare end?NEW YORK, June 11, 2009 (Reuters) — Mortgage rates leaped with bond yields in the past week to the highest since November, erasing strides made by a massive government program to help revive U.S.In late November, the government announced Federal Reserve programs to buy enormous amounts of mortgage-related debt to reduce loan rates and stabilize the hardest-hit housing market since the Great Depression.The programs were later deepened, putting the Fed on track to absorb up to $1.45 trillion in mortgage bonds and agency notes as well as up to $300 billion in Treasury securities.Average 30-year fixed mortgages jumped 0.30 point to 5.59 percent, the highest since the week ended November 26, Freddie Mac said on Thursday.That is more than a 7/8 point spike just since April, when the rate touched down to 4.78 percent — the lowest since Freddie Mac began tracking it weekly in 1971.Bond yields are a peg for setting home loan rates.After falling sharply, bond yields soared over the past few weeks on economic reports that were not as weak as expected. The promise of record Treasuries issuance to fund various federal rescue programs has also pressured yields higher.Mortgage rates, in response, swung swiftly from record lows back to rates seen prior to the federal interventions.Home purchase activity has been fairly stagnant during this period, based on data from the Mortgage Bankers Association.Mortgage rates remain lower than a year ago, when the 30-year loan averaged 6.32 percent.But refinancing, which is highly sensitive to rate shifts, has fallen to the lowest levels since November.Lenders charged an average of 0.7 percent on loans in the past week, unchanged from the prior week.http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5535ao-us-usa-mortgages-rates/

meant to say “or some other…”

The average consciousness of a nation elects their leadersBamelot and the HOPIUM covered lollypops are in. Thank you for sharing your Third World evidence for this new transformational state of affairs.Devolutionists win.

I hear that RAPE is also not an enjoyable experience.

Oh My!Famous Star (Betelgeuse) Is Shrinking, Puzzling AstronomersIt is, they say, 600 light years away. If it is ready to explode the gamma rays could lead to cloud formation that will trigger global cooling on Earth – something documented in Chilling Stars. How is that for a direct experience of science connecting the dots and not the Al Gore’s of the planet talking about Inconvenient Truths. Oh My!

Industrial Production Is in Depression. The Federal Reserve reported that seasonally-adjusted April industrial production fell by 0.5% (down 0.3% net of revisions) for the month, after a revised 1.7% (previously 1.5%) decline in March. The year-to-year decline in activity held at 12.5% for April, versus 12.5% (previously 12.8%) decline in March. Such remained the weakest showing for the series since war-time production was shut down after World War II.With annual change down 12.5% and with a peak-to-trough (April is the short-lived current trough) contraction at 16.0%, the industrial sector of the economy (including manufacturing, mining and utilities) is in a depression. A depression is defined (SGS) as a recession where the peak-to-trough economic contraction exceeds 10%.http://www.shadowstats.com/article/flash-update-2009-05-15

How about not killing? Should we keep people from killing eachother?

thanks for this postDr. Roubini repeatedly says “it’s not going to happen overnight”…it’s not a question of if, but only of how soonworldwide planning for this development cannot be soon enough for China who wants to ensure the stability ofthe US dollar – and global business – at the necessary expense of the dollar to somedegree

g,no, thanks for asking. patient perhaps.

ppsPetenot one second of news on California’s budget-going-bust has been on TVNADA!

Killing: @ Jason BYou will never stop people killing each other, but you could stop governments, er leadership from promoting, educating, organizing, perpetuating, utilizing, usurping, etc., etc., killing or at least minimize the leadership lust for blood by making it more difficult or better, making it more profitable not to kill.It may interest you to know that the USA is well known as the most murderous society on the Planet and it is said that American’s just kill for the sake of killing. Interesting, non?Multiplicity is existence and therefore reeks of risk albeit in infinite possibility. Only unity can provide you with a risk free habitat and that’s a dead end, for now.What I have, will, do, post(ed) here are purely that: posts, and not some complete white paper covering all possible issues; that comes later, after I’m dead.Want the full blown version?Ho hum

So, what is your point?Isn’t the real experience enough for you?

Professortoday we had the joy to listen to you here in Athens, Greece”This year, KPMG has the honor and pleasure to welcome, as key-note speaker of the 8th CFO Forum, world renowned Stern School of Business professor, Nouriel Roubini – the man who foresaw the financial crisis in 2006.”Dear ProfessorUnfortunately I was not able to be thereAllow me to make the following question to you because mysteriously none of our journalists here in Greece made it today (and it was a great opportunity though – I checked all the media wo success)In your article of March 14th you mentionned a lot of things with some strong enough arguementshttp://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/255995/reflections_on_the_latest_dead_cat_bounce_or_bear_market_suckers_rallyThe conlusion was clear enough”So, in conclusion and caveat emptor for investors: Dear investors, do enjoy this dead cat bounce and bear market sucker’s rally; most likely most of you will jump the ship as soon as this rally loses its steam; and your attempt to jump ship will make the next round of the bear market bust even faster. Today short-selling covering is leading to a more pronounced bear market rally; at some point in the future the capitulation of investors trying to sell their equities at the peak of the latest bear market rally will make the next round of the bear market bust faster and more pronounced. So, don’t wait too long until you jump ship while the financial Titanic hits the next financial iceberg: you may get squeezed and crashed in the rush to the lifeboats.”Professor, on behalf of all the greek journalists who missed to ask you todayDo you still have the same thoughts like those of March 14th?A Production EngineerGreetings from Athens

I meant the joy AND honour

Brilliant piece, Peter. Hitting the nail right on the head.

I’d like to see them in as provided in the regular discourse of the media.Mark

Morbid, you seem like a worthy candidate, why don’t you offer to donate?

Not sure Morbid; Do you mean The CDS Casino?Wally (Wall Street) goes to Smallville (Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush Administrations) and talks to the mayor about opening a casino in town. The mayor thinks it is a fantastic idea. Wally says there are a couple of preconditions though, he wants the casino to have special tax breaks for the players and no regulation or interference whatsoever in whatgoes on inside the casino. Fair enough, the mayor and the city council are glad to oblige. In fact, he and a lot of local people want to play too through player-representatives (hedge funds). The mayor and his friends are going to make a killing on the casino coming to town. They want him to run for Governor next term.The casino Wally is setting up is very different from the traditional casino in that there is no “House” to cover the bets. The role of the traditional casino “House” is taken up by the other party to each bet made at any table (transaction) in the casino. The “House” (Wall Street) is providing the facility and the playing field for the players, who are mostly known to each other and the House anyway. A critical feature of the casino is that bad or good bets at the crap table are covered by another player at the crap table, not the House. Those are the rules. The volume of action in the casino is only limited by the number of IOUs other players are willing to accept. The IOUs are payable in US dollars.The players adore this game. They walk in with $100 and can buy $5,000 worth of IOUs (chips), “nominally” issued by the House, but only as a custodian for the players; like a private clearing house. The chips are the IOUs (derivatives, CDS contracts, MBSs, etc.) while a player is involved in the game. Winners and losers are made every minute by the action at the various tables, which differ only in the type of game (cards, dice, roulette, slot machine, etc.), not in the substance of an IOU exchanging hands for the right to play.One day, one of the “high-rollers” at the casino has a few of his IOU’s called-in by other players and whoa! He doesn’t have the money to cover his IOUs! In fact, it turns out he has big losses already in the game. He starts trying to collect on some IOUs he holds and finds that some of them aren’t any good. He was having so much fun playing the game and making so much money for himself and his staff on a current basis, in terms of fees and reporting profits to his friends and shareholders, that that there was no need to think about these details. The casino had everything going for it, political cover, it’s own bank creating money, albeit phantom money, private exchange, and a host of “brilliant”, credible players with deep pockets.Now Wally has a problem. Other players are lined-up outside his office wanting to collect on some of their IOUs. Wally doesn’t have the money, he’s just the casino facilities operator he tells them. “I”m just the clearing house taking a cut. You knew what you were doing when you gave and took those IOUs”, he tells them. But they shout, “You have the power and wherewithal to cover us!” Some of us have more IOUs going the wrong way and didn’t balance our IOU portfolios, and unpaid IOUs will only make the problem worse! Your reputation is on the line and you are in this too Wally”, they plead. So, Wally goes to the mayor of Smallville and suggests that Smallville’s citizens need to cover the bets made by the players at the casino. After all, they benefited too, Wally argues. Wally brought in lots of money to Smallville’s town council and other politicians. Funds flowed to Smallville and its environs and they also put a lot of money into the mayor’s upcoming run for Governor.The mayor doesn’t like it because he knows it is going to be hard to spin to the citizens of Smallville, but the alternatives as explained to him, are bleak indeed. “What else can I do?” he mumbles to himself constantly. The town’s economy has become dependent on Wally’s business. The local economy will collapse since some of the local commercial banks are carrying some of the high-rollers IOUs. The political pressure is enormous from Wally and his influential friends. The mayor goes along again. “What else can I do? File a law suit? Against whom? For what?”, he tells his staff and neighbors.Finally, an aide in the mayor’s office exclaims, “Wait a minute! Why can’t the casino patrons get together and cross-eliminate all these bets? Net them out, gains against losses? It’s all IOUs anyway. It doesn’t matter how many times removed any particular IOU is from one another. They are all holding IOUs transacted at the casino! They put them all together in a big pot and compress them down to the nub, eliminating all of the debits and credits. The last players holding the IOU in excess of someone’s else ability to pay take the netted-out loss. That way, the largest players in the game that are still around take their losses. How do we know they don’t also have astronomical profits from the casino? And even if they don’t, what can they do, sue us to cover their losses? We didn’t know anything about their gains and losses. If anyone is going to be sued they will sue each other over not paying their respective IOUs after compressing them to the nub. Why should we and our citizens vouch for the action at the casino?”Another said, “Even Wally had friends who weren’t patrons of the casino, but most of his friends were regulars.”Then, another of the mayors aides said, “I get it. They created a type of currency with these casino chips that were convertible into Smallville dollars.” Another said, “Now if only the City Council could understand, but they are only listening to Wally and his friends.”The citizens of this Republic need to understand this. In fact, it is the duty of those of us who do understand it to explain it to them. The substance of the above metaphor accurately reflects the details, regardless of Wall Street lawyers holding up 500-page CDS contracts. That is Wall Street spin. You see, Wall Street lawyers made a fortune in this market as well. And in case you weren’t informed, we are too stupid to understand what these “brilliant people” have “created” for our benefit. The “brilliant” people on Wall Street, the likes of Secty. Paulson, the progeny of numerous university business school professors, the main-stream press, et al, is just drivel. Wall-street spin, or as David Reed would say, “failed physicists.”The remaining investment banks and other players want you and I to cover their IOUs and keep the casino in business. If that isn’t brazen enough, we don’t even get a tax subs idy like they did on their profits, and still are getting!The correct response of the mayor of Smallville is simple, if someone could inform him and he had any integrity. Let the casino players unsort (“net out”, or “compress”) the pool of IOUs and sue each other over non-payment of their 500-page CDS contracts. Their shareholders, hedge fund participants and other investors would take the compressed losses, however much it might turn out to be. $1 trillion? $2 trillion? $5 trillion? The shareholders and investors of the regulated and non-regulated financial institutions around the world can absorb those numbers without burdening the already harassed citizens of Smallville. Just Alan Greenspan. If the citizens of Smallville understood that, maybe the mayor would change his mind since he is running for Governnor next year. Maybe he would find the strength to do the right thing, to do his duty by his fellows. The Smallville banks that participated at the casino have to be compressed as well, and some will fail. That’s unpopular in some circles of Smallville. Perhaps many will fail, so what? Won’t they likely fail anyway? Wasn’t the value proposition that Wally came to Smallville with in the first place exactly that, i.e., the IOUs were an elegant, fool-proof way of “spreading the risk” on losses and of collecting on the IOUs? Yes, that’s exactly what the physicists, mathematicians and high-rollers that came with Wally to pitch the mayor had said. They said it over and over again as the casino was operating 24×7.On the contrary, Wally, the mayor and all of their friends in the media frightened the citizens of Smallville into believing that they had to incur further indebtedness and pledge what remains of their vanishing wealth to cover the outstanding IOUs at the casino. No compression is necessary as long as a few of the high-rollers avoid scrutiny and prop-up the IOU market (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, certain purchased entities of other bankrupt high-rollers), because Wally and the mayor now have everyone convinced that the high-rollers bets need to be made whole, or they will suffer too, even worse. They have been heard to say, “We are all in this together.” Yes, but only those who played at the casino, not those who did not.Charles BrownJanuary 24, 2009 12:57:07 PM PST

Thanks for the kind thought. But I would not like to continue the human experiment any further – it is such a disaster.I say, let EVOLUTION do its thing.

Who gets to benefit from that confusion? yeah you guessed it. Hedging against all odds is underway.

Morbid, that one did the e-mail circuit about six months old. Shame on you!

Really? I only just got it last week.

sorry meant to say that it might had exploded 600 light years ago. That means we are looking at that star as it was 600 light years ago. So if the gama ray burst is headed our way we wont know untill it had already hit us. Light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach earth so whenever we look at sun we see the sun as it was eight minutes ago. Light is the speed limit of the universe but beacause of that speed we are able to look in the past.

you say that whats contained in us constitution was never heard of before or after its conception in any other part of the world. These same ideas have existed in different parts of the world through out history. In recent history though these ideas were practiced mostly in us. US if an infant compared with other old parts of the world and they have experienced all kinds of ideas and systems over time.

Can anyone explain why China would be stocking up to such an extent?”China Fills Its Pantry With Global Commodities”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/business/economy/11commodity.html?_r=1&emWhy would this be a worthwhile strategy? Are they expecting supply interruptions? If the dollar continues it’s slide, does the yuan sink in relative value also? Thanks for your insights.

p.s. Where’s London Banker when we need him?

See Giraf’s comments earlier on this thread.I think they think that commodities are a better alternative to dull old U.S. government bonds. (Unfortunately, they don’t seem to have learned about the beatings CALPERS and other large institutional investors have taken in that would be “asset class”). Worst case scenario is that they can use all this stuff when the global economy picks up in 5 to 10 years time. In the meantime, it boosts their case for “another reserve currency”.

Enjoy Barry Ritholtz audio.http://thehousinghelix.com/2009/06/11/interview-barry-ritholtz-bailout-nation-fusion-iq-the-big-picture-blog/

What? We have an obligation to entertain? If you want entertainment see LB’s videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NWFA6g2x-4&feature=player_embedded

Yeah, I love his Green Shoots at the start and at 4:15 his printer pinata with “better than expected”. It is just hilarious.

The best is at the very end — “They could have dropped an Atomic Bomb on America and we would be better off!”

We have medication for you blind barnacle. It will take away the voices and you can relax.

d,from your lips to my ears (another indication of insanity?). relax. thank you for using thatword. if you read through this blog from last august to todayyou will find that particular word used exactly once. yes, by you.think about it, you may have lost your mind!again, thanks for the use of the word. i used to use it frequentlymyself.i’m not a big fan of medications, though i know some peoplemake out well with them.

wasps??—————————————now we know why NIkkei Breach 10k today, Free Sushi from the skyTalk about Good Omenhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5491846/Sky-rains-tadpoles-over-Japan.htmlSky ‘rains tadpoles’ over JapanResidents, officials and scientists have been baffled by the apparent downpour of tadpoles in central Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture.Clouds of dead tadpoles appear to have fallen from the sky in a series of episodes in a number of cities in the region since the start of the month.Upon further exploration, he found more than 100 dead tadpoles covering the windshields of cars in an area measuring 10 square metres.Dead tadpole downpours were also reported by local officials 48 hours later in the city of Hakusan in the same prefecture.

The Power of Genetics!So during a time when consumer confidence has hit record lows, and businesses short on credit are ratcheting things down, Paulson wants Portland taxpayers to spend at least $80 million the projected cost of the two stadium projects on his business venture?via Merritt Paulson « Free Andy LaRoche.So a colleague just forwarded this to me — it would be hilarious if it wasn’t so disgusting. Apparently Merrit Paulson, the demon spawn of national hero Hank Paulson, has managed to sucker the city of Portland into giving him $80 million in taxpayer money to help him finance, of all things, a pro soccer stadium.It’s bad enough when mega-rich jerks like Paulson steal money from taxpayers to finance their vanity sports projects; even the bailout isn’t as big a ripoff as the stadium game, which allows monsters like the Steinbrenner family to take money from firefighters and teachers to help subisidize Alex Rodriguez’s $30 million salary, his nights out on the town with Madonna and Kate Hudson. But when it’s Henry Paulson’s son and he’s taking taxpayer money to fund not football, not baseball, but professional soccer, this just flat-out crosses the line. What’s next? Public funding for a store selling French ribbed turtlenecks? Subsidy for a Belgian man-purse factory? As business ventures of idle rich offspring go, this has to rank somewhere near JFK Jr.’s plans to mass-produce hand-made kayaks.At what point are we going to stop handing taxpayer money to people who don’t need it? Is this ever going to end?http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/11/the-power-of-genetics/

Nor military… As a matter of fact, the Hummer is the quintessential communist vehicle- worthless, but has the appearance of being useful!Mark

another interesting fact is that time(space time) is not constant its relative( thanks to einstien). So faster one travels slower the time pases( thats why astronauts who spend time in the space station come back little bit younger because of great speeds at which space station orbits the earth) but when speed of light is reached the time stops( remember its relative). So if a(humanoid) can manage to travel at the speed of light time will stop for the traveller ( best way of staying young for a extremly long time but not for eternity because even the photons”light” fade away). So if one starts out on a cosmic journey through the cosmos from earth at the speed of light and lets say come back after thousand years it would be for the traveller as if he had returned same moment he had left, eventhough thousand years would have passed for the earthlings. But the biggest hurdle in that is einstien’s equation E=MC2 which means when mass travells at the speed of light it converts into energy.:)

Stiglitz nails it.Break the Banks, for the Good of the PeopleBailing out the big US banks has done nothing to improve them[Excerpt:]America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance, and now to cars, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of long-standing corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the Government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks; there is no evidence that these behemoths deliver societal benefits that are commensurate with the costs they have imposed.This raises another problem with America’s too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-be-restructured banks: they are too politically powerful. Their lobbying efforts worked well, first to deregulate, and then to have taxpayers pay for the clean-up. Their hope is that it will work again to keep them free to do as they please, regardless of the risks for taxpayers and the economy. We cannot afford to let that happen.[End Excerpt]Mark

a piece of useless idea from an old stuff

And thank YOU for YOUR contribution.Mark

Excellent post Mark. I will be handing this out to those who will accept it!

you have forgot my use of ‘relax’, Dear Blind One…and you have forgot so you can remember…because life is a cycle of remember and forget…there is no remembering without forgetting…the prodigal son could not re-arrive to find his father’s love had he not left to go get dirty in the world…so because we forget we can remember…because we depart we can re-arrive…because we know rainy day we can know sunny day…because we fall we can rise…everything is recognized through its opposite…Creatorness had only the alchemy of opposites with which to create this imperfect finity (the world) from the perfect infinity (existence existing)…God said my name is I AM, not I am this or that…AM = IS = Existence…God’s scientific name is Existence…Eternally existing”Fall if you but will, rise you must” “Begin to forget it, it will remember itself from every sides” (JJ FW)Existence existing eternally (and, thanks to our being here, knowing it exists) – is all there is. Relax, you’re soaking in it!Welcome to the Eternal Happydance of the Dance-happy Atoms! Take heart, for Ultimately, nothing can be wrong in the Universe. The river of Life is flowing safely between its banks.It’s not about what the baby is building with his blocks: he will build and then knock down his building with squeals of glee. It IS about the baby building, Baby!Let’s dance, Baby! The Daffodil Revolution has begun!

tee hee…Paul has forgotten EVerything…

cds auction settlement thingy….tying it all together.. it has rained for a week here, ny, withelectrical storms the last two nights to raise the dead. even zombies?beetlejuice and toads from the sky.. so here is this..”Earth Died Screaming”(Tom Waits).Rudy’s on the midwayAnd Jacob’s in the holeThe monkey’s on the ladderThe devil shovels coalWith crows as big as airplanesThe lion has three headsAnd someone will eat the skin that he shedsAnd the earth died screamingThe earth died screamingWhile I lay dreaming of youWell hell doesn’t want youAnd heaven is fullBring me some waterPut it in this skullI walk between the raindropsWait in Bug House SquareAnd the army antsThey leave nothin’ but the bonesAnd the earth died screamingWhile I lay dreaming of youThere was thunderThere was lightningThen the stars went outAnd the moon fell from the skyIt rained mackerelIt rained troutAnd the great day of wrath has comeAnd here’s mud in your big red eyeThe poker’s in the fireAnd the locusts take the skyAnd the earth died screamingWhile I lay dreaming of you

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601009&sid=aEtmT9TQxbzwjapan, like China, scared of their steady-bleeding treasury holdings. I doubt they be able to add more treasury to their holding during their shrinking trade surplus and Fed’s Quantitative Easying. more pain come to treasury holders.

The Banking Cartel bought stockmarket in March, pushed it up, took its profits over the last weeks and passed the hot potatoe stocks to pension funds and other loved ones. They pay off the TARP money(stock market casino chips) and stocked the profit in UST 10 >3.5% and UST 30 >4.5%.Let sell off happen. Flight to safety. Treasuries rise. Take profit.Rince..repeat?

Nature Hates a Fraud: Cheating Wasps Get Beat Up”Wimpy wasps with spotty faces, who are signaling that they are strong, get beaten up by their opponents,” study leader Elizabeth Tibbetts of the University of Arizona told LiveScience. The behavior “prevents cheaters from prospering,” she said.Just heard that AIG logos are removed everywhere.Not without reason, it might be a little edgy these days to park a Ferrari and step out with an AIG logo somewhere.It’s a small world, sometimes things appear as simple as they are. Wasp justice works. Human’s? Well, don’t be blind for the facts.http://www.livescience.com/animals/041110_fakes_nature.html

The thinking among the elite maybe that too many pensioners with free time may lead to revolution. Work is good.

Wow, a German company is planning to add another hotel in Atlanta. Office vacany is climbing, bix travel is down, CRE is falling off a cliff (calculatedrisk.com).http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2009/06/15/story5.html?ana=e_phMaybe the green shoots are real. Maybe it’s not earnings after all, but investor confidence that puts the economy on solid ground. The market surely knows that more bandruptcies, more bank failures, more foreclosures and consumer defaults are on track for 2009-2010. S&P at 666 was way oversold? Nouriel needs to show his S&P P/E ration numbers again, explaining that the “rational” level of the S&P should be 600-700. The market certainly appears to be irrational right now. I hear other experts, like former bear Jeremy Grantham, saying that the P/E ratio is about right. Who knows?

I was involved in a Stadium Development project in Petaluma CA three years ago with good old Merrit. He Said how much him and his family loved the area and wanted to move there. within 3 months he stiffed everyone and left for Portland. Just like his father, going around stiffing people.

Banks have started repaying their debt to the government much sooner and faster than I ever could expected.How did they earn so much money so fast? I am assuming they are paying back from profits.Would someone please help me understand this?Thanks

Some of the banks didn’t need the cash in the first place. It was forced on them to avoid the stigma for the banks that actually needed it. JPM is a likely example of a bank not needing the dough, while WFC may be one that did. By giving every one of the majors money, the Treasury kept it secret who was in trouble and who was not.Clearly, all the banks would like to pay back the money because “the conditions” cramp their style. According to what I’ve read, however, is that only 9 are in a sound enough position to do so.Which begs the question: “Should you keep any of your money in the banks that aren’t in a position to repay TARP funds?”

Thanks Giraf

It happens periodically to some users, but this part of the site has always remained free. I assumed that those notices were only in reference to having access to the paid sections of the site?

I find it interesting that California is now predicting a “meltdown” in less than 50 days (clearly as a result of not tackling real budget problems over the last 12-24 months). But in fact our dear state of CA is now so far behind the ballgame, that’s it’s almost impossible to see how they can ever catch up. We are already moving into the new period where option-ARM’s and variable rate mortgages are starting to spike up payments. This process will directly impact CA – California is right in the crosshairs for this problem (so much so … that I’m thinking of pulling money from a major bank based in this state). Even if the state legislators actually worked out a real balanced budget today, there is every reason to think they will face another crisis going into the following fiscal year.How long before the stock market (and credit markets) start to seriously price in the “demise of the California economy” ???PeteCA

And to think … all this time I was worried about a gigantic earthquake pushing California into the ocean. But it turned out that the real threat – was huge numbers of Californians going out and buying houses that they couldn’t possibly afford.What can I say about the dearly beloved residents of my own state?I will only quote Shakespeare … “I have taken a viper to my breast” !!!PeteCA

It’s just an effort to boost the salaries they are paying to their own execs.I mean, you gotta’ understand the humiliation we’re talkin’ about.Getting a repo notice from your friendly local Lamborghini dealer …is just too much to bear.:-)PeteCA

need to trash dollar and treasury market for SP500 to go above $1000. Fed/Ben needs to come in with more liquidity!! equity market rally to sun!! eiya!!!

Mmmmm, love the smell of poetic justice first thing in the morning..

Looks the PR war has begun. Now the Administration wants to pretend to be tough on the Fed.EXCLUSIVE: Obama Takes on the Federal Reserve – Thursday, 11 June 2009Obama is about to take on the private banking system known as the “US Federal Reserve” that since its dubious creation in 1913 has had complete control over the printing of all US money in what many detractors have long stated was in great violation of the American Constitution.Almost unknown to the American people, the Federal Reserve Bank is comprised of 12 branches that are private corporations whose ownership is shrouded in the veil of secrecy and is the largest holder of United States debt said to be in excess of over $4 Trillion.Fueling Obama’s growing anger over the Federal Reserve Bank, the reports continue, has been their arrogant refusal to reply to the many questions being asked of them by the United States Congress over what has happened to over $8 Trillion of US taxpayer money, and which caused US Lawmakers to take the unprecedented step of issuing a subpoena yesterday to force the Federal Reserve to turn over internal documents related to Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.The Federal Reserve Bank, in a desperate bid to hold on to its power over the Untied States, has hired one of Washington D.C.’s top lobbyists, Linda Robertson, who curiously, headed the Washington lobbying office of Enron Corporation which became one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in US history after they cheated investors out of a staggering $11 billion.More ominously though, with Obama’s plan to take on the Federal Reserve Bank he becomes only the second US President to attempt to break this insidious creatures stranglehold over the United States after President John F. Kennedy, on June 4, 1963, signed Executive Order No. 11110 to strip the Federal Reserve Bank of its power to loan money to the government at interest.On that day President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order No. 11110 that returned to the US government the power to issue currency, without going through the Federal Reserve. Kennedy’s order gave the Treasury the power “to issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars [photo 3rd on left] in the Treasury.” This meant that for every ounce of silver in the US Treasury’s vault, the government could introduce new money into circulation. In all, Kennedy brought nearly $4.3 billion in US notes into circulation.Five short months later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and upon assuming office, newly sworn in President Lyndon Johnson recalled all of the US notes Kennedy had put into circulation and making President Ronald Reagan the next to challenge the power of the Federal Reserve, but which abruptly ended with his near assassination on March 30, 1981 by the hand of the son of former CIA Director, and then Vice President, George Bush’s closest friend and oil business backer John Hinckley Sr.President Reagan had pitted himself against the Federal Reserve over their refusal to lower the crushing interests rates they had imposed upon the American people during the US recession of 1980-1982 which was their greatest since the Great Depression, but after his near death quietly signed into law on September 13, 1982, H.R.6128 which became Public Law No: 97-258 that was written on the behalf of the Federal Reserve by little known US Congressman Peter Wallace Rodino Jr., with no co-sponsors, and made it illegal for any future American President to print money for the American people.But, according to Russian legal experts, even though Public Law No: 97-258 does appear on its surface to constrain President Obama; President Kennedy’s Executive Order No. 11110 has never been repealed by any American President making a showdown “inevitable” between Obama and the Federal Reserve before the US Supreme Court, and which Obama has recently nominated US Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor to America’s highest court where she will become the 6th Roman Catholic Justice and giving the Vatican near total control of US monetary policy.And, in this epic battle between the Vatican backed Obama and the Rothschild backed Federal Reserve, we can plainly see that the 1849 secret agreements between these two monstrous powers that have enslaved the West is nearing its catastrophic end, and with no clear winner to be seen but an entire World being destroyed in its titanic aftermath.In what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu considered a “threat”, the US stated to Israel this week that “We are going to change the world. Please, don’t interfere.”, the American people have not even been told.This cannot be said of Putin, however, who immediately upon learning of Obama’s “battle” with the Federal Reserve joined China and Brazil and ordered Russia’s Central Bank to begin divesting itself of US Federal Reserve holdings and replace them with International Monetary Fund bonds as the United States is about to be crushed with what London’s Fleet Street News is calling “The Triple Crown of Financial Catastrophes”.The US Media has continued to be silent on this and numerous other issues.

“the errors God delivered us to SO HE COULD SHOW US WHAT MERCY IS…SO HE COULD SHOW US HIS MERCY.”Ihis statement is not correct in my opinion. Over the years people have changed the correct understandig. The difficulties and chellenges that God delivered us are to test us(although God is all merciful but God is also just)so he could part rightiuos from the sinners and people will be held accountable for their actions and there will be reward and punishment. To morbids point we are all responsible for our own actions in the given world so if you are doing your part to better it you dont need to worry about its existence or extinction.

The star is 600 Light years away meaning its at a distance that light takes 600 years to cover. So lets do some mathspeed of light = 186000 miles/seconddistance light travels in one year = aprox 6 trillion miles600 light years = 3600 trillion miles from earth

there is no mother or father to god. God is a entity of its own. God dont begets nor is he begotten. Everthuthing else comes from the ancient myths and roman gods.

Guest, come on!>>I am assuming they are paying back from profits.<It has been a whole host of everything BUT profits – accounting games, Congress Games (mark to market accounting changes), coversion of debt to equity (Citigroup looks so good now with over 23B shares), pay outs from AIG to GS of over $10B of taxpayer monies that will never be paid back, etc!Bigger issue is that with what is going to hit most of them, in the future, from defaults in morts and credit cards they will be asking for more help down the line!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFbrnFzUc0U. 7 minute video.the problem of consciousness.Friday, June 12, 2009 2:00 pmArtsnonfiction with harry alleninterview with roger penrose”the road to reality”http://archive.wbai.org/.1 hour audio.

l,so can we conclude from ‘nature hates a fraud’ and ‘cheaters rule’that man’s rulers, cheaters, reciprocally hate nature?but they are of and a part of nature so do they then hatethemselves but have the good sense to spare themselves andtake it out on others. ?is this dynamic going to figure into the next bubble, here we go?

i can manage it with my WS partners

It’s worth noting that Britain lost its superpower status and reserve currency dominance with Britain “waived the rules”.

If the Fed’s books, which don’t exist, were ever opened to public scrutiny, which they won’t be, I’d bet the farm that the whole $11 trillion enchilada went primarily to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase (Rockefeller/Rothschild). Follow the money, the power and the glory.In short, World, meet your masters.Didn’t many analysts predict JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs would emerge from the bank collapse as the big winners—becoming megagiants?If you own the Federal Reserve the way Goldman owns the Fed, you can design your own confidence tricks: print the cash, dole out the credit, collapse the system, gain the confidence of the toadies you wish to defraud, ie the Ken Lewises, foist off your mistakes such as ol’ Merrill Lynch, then move in and buy up the assets on the cheap—J.P. Morgan Buys Bear in Fire Sale; WaMu Is Seized, Sold Off to J.P. …Didn’t former Bear Stearns Chief Executive Alan Schwartz join European investment bank Rothschild after deciding not to take a role at JP Morgan Chase?Wasn’t Schwartz’s long-time associate, Richard Metrick, who formerly was a Bear senior managing director, also taken on at Rothschild?Didn’t Schwartz skyrocket to Wall Street fame advising on large M&A deals, such as Disney’s 1996 acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC Inc for $19 billion?Aren’t they all just one happy family?And on that note, during this week’s command performance by Ben Bernanke playing to a full U.S. House in his greatest role as bank swindler par excellence—also featuring Merrill’s own John A. Thain of rug fame and alumnus of Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange—we dedicate this ode to Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America in his new role as scapegoat:GOLDMAN GOT THE GOLDMINE; I GOT THE SHAFT (originally SHE GOT THE GOLDMINE; I GOT THE SHAFT). Sing along and be creative!(T. DuBois)Jerry Reed – 1982Well, I guess it was back in sixty-threeWhen eatin’ my cookin’ got the better of meSo I asked this little girl I was goin’ withTo be my wifeWell, she said she wouldSo I said, “I do”But I’d-a said “I wouldn’t” if I’d-a just knewHow sayin’ “I do” was gonna screw up all my o’ my lifeWell, the first few years weren’t all that badI’ll never forget the good times we had’Cause I’m reminded every monthWhen I send her the child supportWell, it wasn’t too long till the lust was goneAnd I’ll admit I wasn’t too surprisedThe day I come home and found my suitcaseSittin’ out on the porchWell, I tried to get in, she’d changed the lockThen I found this note stuck on the mailboxIt said, “Goodbye, turkey…….My Attorney will be in touch”So I decided right then and thereI was gonna do what’s right,Give her her fair share, but, brother,I didn’t assay it was gonna be that muchShe got the goldmine (She got the goldmine)I got the shaft (I got the shaft)They split it right down the middleAnd then they gave her the better halfWell it all sounds sort o’ funnyBut it hurts too much to laughShe got the goldmineAnd I got the shaftNow listen, you ain’t heard nothin’ yetWhy, they gave her the colour television setThen they gave her the houseThe kids and both o’ the carsSee, well then they start talkin’ ’bout child supportAlimony and the cost o’ the CourtIt didn’t take me long to figure outHow fond of attorneys I wasI’m tellin’ ya they have made a mistake’Cause it adds up to more than this cowboy makesBesides, everything I ever had worth takin’They’ve already took!While she’s livin’ like a queen on alimonyI’m workin’ two shifts,Eatin’ baloney, askin’ myself”Why didn’t you just learn to cook?”They give her the goldmine (She got the goldmine)They give me the shaft (I got the shaft)They said they’re splittin it all down the middle,But she got the better halfBut it all sounds mighty funnyBut it hurts too much to laughShe got the goldmineI got the shaft(Guitar Solo)Well, she got the goldmine (She got the goldmine)I got the shaft (I got the shaft)They split it all down the middleAnd then they give her the better halfWell I guess it all sounds funny (Ha-ha-ha-ha)Just hurts too much to laughShe got the goldmineI got the shaftHuh-hah, they ain’t kiddin’I got the shaftBut I don’t have to worryAbout totin’ a billfold no moreHa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha,I let my wife tote itI’m gonna be carryin’ food stampsYou get it, Judge?Ha-ha, that’s not funny, huh?Contempt of Court?What d’ya mean?Listen, Judge…..I was just kiddin’…..I mean……..

Do people demand a really just system? Well, we’ll arrange it so that they’ll be satisfied with one that’s a little less unjust … They want a revolution, and we’ll give them reforms — lots of reforms; we’ll drown them in reforms. Or rather, we’ll drown them in promises of reforms, because we’ll never give them real ones either!! – DARIO FO, Accidental Death of an AnarchistIt’s always played this way, let the big boys scam everyone until the masses complain, then pretend like you’re out to “FIX” things. The “fixing” will be to reshuffle the deck such that people no longer are able to follow the track; this allows the new game to start while the masses believe that things have been cleaned up: rinse and repeat…TPTB don’t actually contribute, this is the only way that they can stay on top without contributing- BS-ing everyone into believing that they have to be led!Mark

Excellent Op-Ed in the NYT.The Economy Is Still at the BrinkSome excerpts:

Six months ago, nobody believed that our banking system was well designed, functioning smoothly or properly regulated — so why then are we so desperately anxious to restore that model as the status quo? Nearly every new program emanating these days from the Treasury Department — the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, the Public Private Investment Program, the “stress tests” of major banks — appears to have been designed to either paper over or to prop up a system that has clearly failed.Instead of hauling out the new drywall to cover up the existing studs, let’s seriously consider ripping down the entire structure, dynamiting the foundation and building a new system that rewards taking prudent risks, allocates capital where it is needed, allows all investors to get accurate and timely financial information and increases value to shareholders and creditors.[...]Why is so much effort being put into propping up those at the top of the economic pyramid — the money-center banks, the insurance companies, the hedge funds and so forth — when during a period of deflation like the one we are in, any recovery will come only by restoring the confidence of the people down at the bottom of the pyramid?Confidence will return only when jobs can be found and mortgage payments are made. Even if Mr. Obama’s claim is true that his $780 billion stimulus package “saved or created” some 150,000 jobs, we seem a long way away from the point where those struggling to get by will feel like spending again. What happens when people buy a car once every 10 years instead of once every two or three, especially now that we taxpayers own such a big percentage of the American auto industry?Instead of promising the imminent return of good times, why isn’t Mr. Obama talking more about the importance of living within our means and not spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need? We used to be a frugal nation. The president should be talking about kicking our addictions to easy credit, to quick fixes and to a culture of more is better (and Congress’s new credit-card legislation, while perhaps eliminating some of the worst aspects of that industry, certainly didn’t send the right message about personal finance).Gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s, cigarette boats, no-income mortgages and private jets should be relegated to the junk heaps of history, or better yet, put in a museum dedicated to never forgetting the greed and avarice that led us so far astray.Why is the morphine drip still in the veins of the financial system? These trillions in profligate federal spending are intended to make us feel better again even though feeling pain, and dealing with it responsibly, would be healthier in the long run. It is time to stop rescuing the banks that got us into this mess. If that means more bank failures on a grander scale or the dismemberment of Citigroup, so be it. Depositors will be protected — up to $250,000 per account — but shareholders, creditors and, sadly, many employees will, for the long-term health of the system, need to feel the market’s wrath.Mark

Stiglitz:”The economic crisis,created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have. Perhaps it is true that the world is heading toward the end of history, but it is now sailing against the wind, on a course we set ourselves.”http://www.fullermoney.com/content/2009-06-12/VanityFair_Stiglitz_WallStreetsToxicMessageJul09.pdfHo hum

A BLESSING In Disguise?Since I believe the population on the planet should be no larger than 0.5 billion for sustainability to say nothing about a sustainable social fabric – maybe all this was meant to be. We learn from our experiments – some are just more troubling than others.

More on Malthus:http://desip.igc.org/malthus/principles.html

Is this the same Fed fighting President who promised Americans 6 million new jobs?

Never ocurred to you that the Jews managed to monopolize the status of genocide victims?

And this has to do with this blog how?Mark

As it turned out, it was quite a small auction, only $549 million CDS. Thought it would be in the billions, but the debt for equity swap may have had a larger netting effect than I expected. So much for getting a good pull-back. Oh well, there are more coming up soon on the calendar.

I’d rather say they don’t understand nature, especially not their own nature. No hate. Rather ignorance. This will figure into the next bubble, here we go.

ps,parochial time is a prison, mostly has been but doesnot have to be. this is the the first step. imho.just a hunch…peas.

What do you think is the cause of a hopeless and ruinous war in Afghanistan?

I have a feeling that this isn’t what the poster had in mind…Regarding “global warming,” (not sure why it popped up under this post) yes, it HAS occurred before, before humans pumped a single drop of oil. If you take sequestered CO2 and you release it you are INCREASING the amount that’s in the (above ground) environment. People can argue the point about whether this does or doesn’t _cause_ something, but one thing is clear: there’s a saturation point at which CO2 is NOT conducive to human life; so, intentionally increasing something that is NOT healthy is not exactly a way to ensure the propagation of our species.As far as population control goes, generally it’s something externally imposed. I don’t see it being any other way for humans: perhaps the statement that “it’s in god’s hands” is the way out from making tough decisions.But yes, rethinking our economic strategy is essential. I’d opine that the entire concept should be tossed: try applying this concept to any other population of species and it starts to look pretty as silly/unnatural as it is.Mark

Trying to prosper in a world of massive competition.We Didn’t Start The Fire

Correction, it seems this star is only 427 light years away. Hard to get accurate information anymore.

So many questions…Answered!Are there really wealthy and powerful Elite Socialist forces at work behind the scenes in government and banking? Is Communism being ushered into America? Is it Fascism being enthroned? Is it larger than just America? Is it Global “New World Order” government the elites seek? Are the Jewish wealthy controlling the banks and media, and do they reign supreme, or are Jews being scapegoated to prevent the public looking at the Anglo-Saxon Pilgrims? How can a person know? Can a person know for sure? What do these elites we call The Powers That Be, really believe and really support? Who are they? How are they connected? How much is being hidden from us? We know there is very great power “at the top of humanity’s economic pyramid”, and we know it is the power to influence things to their benefit that the money-giants want – but through just which strategy do they intend to keep and escalate their power to influence the globe’s countries, economies, media, education, leadership, policies, trajectories?All the confusing “point, counterpoint” talk about who at the top believes what – is it adding to your frustration? Would you like to read an excellent primer to help you get beyond all the competing propaganda including the very biggest; the propaganda by omission of relevant facts…a page to get you beyond all the mis-information and dis-information and corporate-owned-media spin, and to help you sort the “isms and ologies” and the players and their aides? Would you like an intensively sourced, all-on-one-page journey through little-known historical facts that will enable you to understand what’s going on – by looking at what’s gone on before that you aren’t yet aware of? Are you confused, and sick to death of watching events play out that you can’t make sense of, and sick also of being less and less clear about who, if anybody, is telling you the un-spun full truth?Then this is for you:a href=”http://www.isgp.eu/organisations/Pilgrims_Society02.htm”>Read HereYes. It’s one very long page of reading, but would you rather spend a lifetime still not knowing when you’re being duped, thereby possibly allowing your enemy to have and maintain an outpost in your own head?I offer here only a snippet, one that dives you into the middle of the sordid history of our interconnected moneylenders of all stripes, the oppositions and the collusions, the industrialists, politicians and governments, intelligence agencies, mass media, and wars. As strongly as I can, I encourage everyone to read the whole page. It is a tremendous education – and one hell of an eye-opening account of banker political gangsterism in the past and its ongoing results. I encourage all to note how well-sourced, verified, and documented this information is, and how the author plainly labels anything that is only speculation on his part or speculation coming from others, for what it is: you will not be confused as to what is verified and what isn’t. The snippet starts here:“FDR had been elected president of the United States in 1933 when the Great Depression was at its worst. About 25 percent of the population was out of work with millions living on the streets. Roosevelt immediately introduced his far reaching New Deal program, which included the crippling of stock speculation, the setting up watch dog agencies for banks, and the introduction of large scale construction projects for the unemployed. The New Deal further established a national minimum wage, limited a regular workweek to 40 hours, abolished child labor, introduced social security, supported the homeless, and prevented employers from hindering unionization. To finance these projects Roosevelt had to take the United States off the gold standard.Needless to say, the big interests were horrified with this New Deal program. Almost immediately they began to make plans to get rid of Roosevelt; plans which were exposed in detail by General Smedley Butler before the 1934 McCormack-Dickstein Committee.Butler detailed how in July 1933 he had been approached by Gerald C. MacGuire, a Wall Street bond salesman with a position in the American Legion. MacGuire and his financiers had devised a whole scheme through which Butler would be able to make a speech to the American Legion in favor of the gold standard. The excuse MacGuire gave was that he and his associates didn’t want the veterans of World War I to receive the bonus they had been promised by Congress to be handed to them in devaluated currency at some point in the future. Butler knew that something was wrong here, but tried to play along for a while, leading to MacGuire giving him certain details of who were behind the scheme.It turned out that behind MacGuire were men as Grayson M. P. Murphy, head of the family’s brokerage firm at which MacGuire was employed and also director of the Guarantee Trust; Robert S. Clark, a wealthy banker whom Butler had known in the past; James H. Perkins, chairman of the Rockefeller’s National City Bank; men from the Morgan Bank; and John W. Davis, chair of Davis, Polk and Wardwell, chief attorney of J. P. Morgan & Co. and founding president of the Council on Foreign Relations. [116] And important for this article: Murphy’s son was a Pilgrim, Davis was president of the Pilgrims, the men heading the Morgan Bank were Pilgrims, and Perkins almost certainly was another Pilgrim.In the end Butler refused to make one or more speeches in favor of the gold standard, but by flooding a meeting with telegrams the bankers still managed to have the American Legion adopt a formal resolution in favor of returning to the gold standard. Roosevelt would not allow himself to be pressured by the legion however; the United States remained off the gold standard.During late 1933 and and early 1934 Butler didn’t hear anything from MacGuire, who until then had regularly contacted him. In the spring and summer of 1934 Butler did receive two cards from MacGuire: one from France; the other from Berlin, making Butler wonder what MacGuire was up to this time. In August 1934 MacGuire approached Butler in person again, the reason being that “his group” still considered the general the only person who effectively could rally hundreds of thousandsof veterans behind him towards a common goal. The “Morgan group” had reluctantly agreed, even though they really preferred the less-popular Douglas MacArthur. During this latest conversation MacGuire explained to Butler what he had been doing in the past year. It turned out that by this time more was in the planning than just the return of the gold standard.According to MacGuire, after the American Legion’s gold standard resolution had been rejected by Roosevelt, his financial backers had sent him to Europe to study the veterans paramilitary organizations of France, Germany and Italy. MacGuire appeared to be quite fond of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and Hitler’s SA and SS, but stated that he instead had recommended to his backers that the model of the French far-right league the Croix de Feu be adopted for an American version of these paramilitary veterans’ forces. According to MacGuire, the press would announce the creation of this “superorganization” in two or three weeks. He further hinted that its founders would include some of the most important men in the United States and that former New York Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith – who had become an employee of the Du Pont family – would be among these founders.At that point Butler had already concluded that a lot of what MacGuire had told him was true, not the least because the many predictions MacGuire made had a tendency to come true. This latest prediction was no exception. Two weeks after his discussion with MacGuire, newspapers reported on the founding of the American Liberty League.Investigative author Jules Archer, who documented the whole affair in great detail, wrote: “Butler’s eyes widened when he read that the treasurer of the American Liberty League was none other than MacGuire’s own boss, Grayson M.-P. Murphy, and one of its financiers was Robert S. Clark. Heading and directing the organization were Du Pont and J.P. Morgan and Company men.Morgan attorney John W. Davis was a member of the National Executive Committee-the same Davis that Clark had identified as author of the gold-standard speech MacGuire had tried to get Butler to make to the American Legion convention in Chicago.”Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Hutton Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society, was a generous patron, along with other members of the Pew family, of extremist right-wing causes. Other directors of the league included Al Smith and John J. Raskob.”Two organizations affiliated with the league were openly Fascist and antilabor. One was the Sentinels of the Republic, financed chiefly by the Pitcairn family and J. Howard Pew. Its members labeled the New Deal “Jewish Communism” and insisted “the old line of Americans of $1,200.00 a year want a Hitler.”"The other was the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, which the conservative Baltimore Sun described as “a hybrid organization financed by northern money, but playing on the Ku Klux Klan prejudices of the south.” Its sponsor, John H. Kirby, collaborated in anti-Semitic drives against the New Deal with the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the first Silver Shirt Squad of American storm troopers.”"The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League,” the New York Post subsequently charged, “are in turn spawning fascism.”" [117]After reading about the founding of the American Liberty League, Butler decided to have someone come in and confirm his story. He contacted an old friend, Paul Comly French, an investigative journalist for the Philadelphia Record whose articles also appeared in the New York Post. After the blessing of Philadelphia Record city editor Tom O’Neil, French began his effort to confirm Butler’s story. Butler at some point introduced French to MacGuire, leading to a two hour discussion between the latter two without Butler being present.Butler and French were invited to testify to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee on November 20, 1934. Judging from French’s testimony, MacGuire had been more forthcoming to French than he had ever dared to be to Butler. French testified:”We need a fascist government in this country, he insisted, to save the nation from the Communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”"During the conversation he told me he had been in Italy and Germany during the summer of 1934 and had made an intensive study of the background of the Nazi and Fascist movements and how the veterans had played a part in them. He said he had obtained enough information on the Fascist and Nazi movements and of the part played by the veterans, to properly set one up in this country…”He [MacGuire] had a very brilliant solution of the unemployment situation. He said that Roosevelt had muffed it terrifically, but that he had the plan. He had seen it in Europe. It was a plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks-enforced labor. That would solve it overnight, and he said that when they got into power, that is what they would do; that that was the ideal plan.”He had another suggestion to register all persons all over the country, like they do in Europe. He said that would stop a lot of the Communist agitators who were running around the country.” [118]Butler and French were also supported by the testimony of James Van Zandt, head of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. After having been given information by MacGuire, Butler had warned Van Zandt that he too would probably be approached by the fascist plotters. At the hearing Van Zandt testified that this had indeed been the case, and that he had seen some of the data on fascist organizations MacGuire had taken back with him from Europe. Van Zandt further testified that not only he himself, Douglas MacArthur and Hanford MacNider had been approached (as Butler had stated), but also Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., a founder of the American Legion. MacArthur and Roosevelt would vehemently deny that they had been approached by any coup plotters, but this actually means very little. MacArthur would later become a close associate of the anti-communist cult leader Sun Myung Moon, while his cousin – another Moon associate – would become deeply involved in the darkest aspects of the fascist international.Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.’s family were also extreme right wing anti-communist crusaders who supported the post war Nazi networks and rose to top positions in the CIA. For more information about MacArthur and his cousin MacArthur II, read PEHI’s ‘Beyond the Dutroux Affair’ (now ISGP) article. For more information on the descendants of Theodore Roosevelt, read on.When questioning Gerald MacGuire in front of their committee, John McCormack and Samuel Dickstein found out he couldn’t present an alibi on numerous occasions. The committee additionally found evidence that MacGuire had written detailed reports on Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s Brownshirts, the French Croix de Feu and a related fascist group from the Netherlands to Robert Clark and Clark’s attorney, Albert G. Christmas. But even though the initial hearings and investigation clearly showed their had been a fascist coup in the making in the United States, the committee would fail to subpoena the powerful bankers and industrialists mentioned during the hearings. In the weeks following the testimonies of Butler, French, Van Zandt and MacGuire, the committee asked to be renewed in order to continue the investigation. The House of Representatives decided to let the committee expire instead, shutting it down in January 1935. The whole affair would soon be forgotten. Many years later, during an interview with Jules Archer on September 17, 1971, John McCormack would summarize the view of the committee at the time:”There was no doubt that General Butler was telling the truth. We believed his testimony one hundred percent. He was a great, patriotic American in every respect.”"Millions were at stake when Clark and the others got the Legion to pass that resolution on the gold standard in 1933. When Roosevelt refused to be pressured by it, and went even further off the gold standard, those fellows got desperate and decided to look into European methods, with the idea of introducing them to America. They sent Macguire to Europe to study the Fascist organizations.”"The way I figure it, we did our job in the committee by exposing the plot, and then it was up to the Department of Justice to do their job-to take it from there. I have no knowledge why the Attorney General did not pursue this matter except that most likely it was deemed politically inadvisable.” [119]In line with some of the rumors in the days of the committee, McCormack stated in his biography that he suspected that President Roosevelt himself had supported the cover-up. A public prosecution of the nation’s most powerful men would have added tremendous burdens to Roosevelt’s already overcrowded schedule (not to mention the doom it may have spelled to the nation’s economy). The affair could also have split Roosevelt’s own party, as a number of leading Democrats were allied with the fascists. McCormack reasoned that it may have been enough for Roosevelt to thwart the plot and keep the suspects under surveillance…”

The current military action by the United States in Afghanistan was in direct response to a coordinated terrorist attack on American soil in which thousands of innocent people were killed. The perpetrators of these attacks were welcomed as guests, protected, and allowed to train in Afghanistan by an intolerant theocratic government, and continued to fight actively against the United States from in and around Afghanistan, funded by the production of opium poppies and other black market sources harmful to western societies, and destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power. It is for this reason that the current military efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are being undertaken and supported not only by the United States, but by a broad coalition of nations throughout the world who view this as a just effort necessary to foster international peace.This is not to say that the United States and other western powers are not at fault for engaging in unfair and anti-democratic intervention in the affairs of other countries in the past. For instance, I personally find it deplorable that the United States undertook to overthrow democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, install Shah Reza Pahlavi, and train his secret police, the SAVAK, to terrorize the Iranian people. In my view, the United States was wrong in the 1980s to supply weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein for use against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, and was again wrong to invade Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of a threat of nuclear weapons development and deployment against the West. Nonetheless, two wrongs don’t make a right, as we say in America. I am far from convinced that the work of the international coalition in Afghanistan is hopeless or that it will prove ultimately ruinous; indeed, I believe it is necessary and worthwhile as being in the interests of international justice and stability.SWK

The current military action by the United States in Afghanistan was in direct response to a coordinated terrorist attack on American soil in which thousands of innocent people were killed. The perpetrators of these attacks were welcomed as guests, protected, and allowed to train in Afghanistan by an intolerant theocratic government, and continued to fight actively against the United States from in and around Afghanistan, funded by the production of opium poppies and other black market sources harmful to western societies, and destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power. It is for this reason that the current military efforts to stabilize Afghanistan are being undertaken and supported not only by the United States, but by a broad coalition of nations throughout the world who view this as a just effort necessary to foster international peace.@ Hassan i Sahhah:This is not to say that the United States and other western powers are not at fault for engaging in unfair and anti-democratic intervention in the affairs of other countries in the past. For instance, I personally find it deplorable that the United States undertook to overthrow democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, install Shah Reza Pahlavi, and train his secret police, the SAVAK, to terrorize the Iranian people. In my view, the United States was wrong in the 1980s to supply weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein for use against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War, and was again wrong to invade Iraq in 2003 under the pretext of a threat of nuclear weapons development and deployment against the West. Nonetheless, two wrongs don’t make a right, as we say in America. I am far from convinced that the work of the international coalition in Afghanistan is hopeless or that it will prove ultimately ruinous; indeed, I believe it is necessary and worthwhile as being in the interests of international justice and stability.SWK

See identical post above. This was supposed to have followed a comment by Hassan i Sabbah.SWK

AND SWK, not SWJ…SWK

Deflation, not inflation, is the real enemyBy Mike WhitneyOnline Journal Contributing Writerhttp://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4796.shtmlJun 12, 2009, 00:20….”Seductive interest rates, lax lending standards and nonstop public relations campaigns, persuaded millions of people that they could live beyond their means by simply filling out a credit application or fudging a few numbers on a mortgage loan. These are the real victims of Wall Street’s speculative bubble-scam. For many of them, the agony of losing their home, or their job, or filing for personal bankruptcy will be felt for years to come. At the same time, the experience will keep many of them from getting in over their heads again. The same phenomenon occurred during the Great Depression. The pain of losing everything shapes behavior for a lifetime, which is why the savings rate has spiked so dramatically in the last few months. There’s been a tectonic shift in attitudes towards consumption and there’s no going back to the pre-bubble era.If Harrison is right, our decades-long spending-spree is over and people will be looking for ways to live more modestly, pay-as-they-go and avoid red ink. This is good news for the economy’s long-term strength, but bad for short-term recovery. Deflation will persist even while savings grow and consumption comes more into line with personal income. The dollar will fall hard if Bernanke continues to load up on Treasuries, but with a few slight adjustments, he should be able to avoid a full-blown currency crisis. Thus, Zimbabwe-type hyperinflation is unlikely; the ongoing slowdown should keep inflation in check.”

Giraf:Past performance is no guaranty of future results, as they say. There has never been a coalition of states working in a coordinated fashion in Afghanistan with the goal of democratizing and stabilizing its regime to ensure its independence. Past “occupying forces” have been single states attempting to impose their rule on Afghanistan in competition with one another (like Germany and the Soviet Union did with Poland in the 1930s and 1940s).Moreover, historically, there have been many long-standing occupying forces in Afghanistan. The Achaemenid rule lasted 200 years. The Shahi and Sahi ruled what is now Afghanistan from the third century until the ninth century. The Mongols controlled Afghanistan for three hundred years.SWK

Perhaps the US should try democratizing their own regime before trying to impose the Hegelian ideal upon medieval tribes for whom Holy War is not over.

I might add, parenthetically, that when you made your comment, you had no idea whether I had ever served in the military or not, or served in Afghanistan or not. One of these days, you might make that assumption to the wrong person.SWK

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4791.shtmlFear is eroding American rightsBy Paul Craig RobertsOnline Journal Contributing WriterJun 11, 2009, 00:21The power of irrational fear in the US is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel Lobby, the military/security complex, and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America.Americans are at ease with their country’s aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, which has resulted in a million dead Muslim civilians and several million refugees, because the US government has filled Americans with fear of terrorists. “We have to kill them over there before they come over here.”Fearful of American citizens, the US government is building concentration camps apparently all over the country. According to news reports, a $385 million US government contract was given by the Bush/Cheney Regime to Cheney’s company, Halliburton, to build “detention centers” in the US. The corporate media never explained for whom the detention centers are intended.Most Americans dismiss such reports. “It can’t happen here.” However, in northwestern Florida, not far from Tallahassee, I have seen what might be one of these camps. There is a building inside a huge open area fenced with razor wire. There is no one there and no signs. The facility appears new and unused and does not look like an abandoned prisoner work camp.What is it for?Who spent all that money for what?There are Americans who are so terrified of their lives being taken by terrorists that they are hoping the US government will use nuclear weapons to destroy “the Muslim enemy.” The justifications concocted for the use of nuclear bombs against Japanese civilian populations have had their effect. There are millions of Americans who wish “their” government would kill everyone that “their” government has demonized.When I tell these people that they will die of old age without ever seeing a terrorist, they think I am insane. Don’t I know that terrorists are everywhere in America? That’s why we have airport security and homeland security. That’s why the government is justified in breaking the law to spy on citizens without warrants. That’s why the government is justified to torture people in violation of US law and the Geneva Conventions. If we don’t torture them, American cities will go up in mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney tells us this every week.Terrorists are everywhere. “They hate us for our freedom and democracy.” When I tell America’s alarmed citizens that thttp://www.rgemonitor.com/roubini-monitor/257052#175604he US has as many stolen elections as any country and that our civil liberties have been eroded by “the war on terror,” they lump me into the terrorist category. They automatically conflate factual truth with anti-Americanism.”…etc…..comment. fear is also altering and diminishing the populations capacityto experience “time” in a natural way, a universal way, or even a global way.notice the collapse of trade due to fear and commensurate greed, fraud etc.the fear is state created and it is the thing that will destroy the veryones who implemented it as a tactic. that is the product of insane fear asopposed to respect.

Bernie Sanders on “Brunch with Bernie” talked about the rise in gas prices yesterday with Thom Hartmann.The price of oil and gasoline is on the rise and Sanders, I-Vt., sees the power of Wall Street speculators, specifically Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, behind the price jump.He’s calling on federal regulators to investigate the rapid rise in commodity price and to “end that speculation,” including imposing strict speculation limits on Goldman and Morgan Stanley, increasing margin requirements and suspending trading.The rising oil costs are being passed on to the public through fuel prices.Essentially, what Bernie said, and I paraphrase:You know, Tom, when we were in school we learned that under market supply and demand when supply goes down, price goes up; and when supply goes up, price goes down.So recently we’ve heard that the supply of oil is at an all time high, and that demand is at an all time low. So what’s happened to the price? It’s gone up, the opposite of what you’d expect. Why? Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.Bernie compared Wall Street speculators the likes of Goldman and Morgan to greedy heroine addicts.But will Congress do something to limit the power of these speculators?Unfortunately, the government has been running interference for monopolies such as Goldman and MS that prohibit competition–for the powerful bankers that use their government credit cards to create and control markets.But, fortunately, the American government still serves at the pleasure of the people. When it gets to the point of conspicuous abuse of the public such as this, then the politicians who fear for their jobs not only fear the monopolies, they begin to fear the people.You get public pressure when you get massive abuse. And what could be greater abuse at the moment than the people losing their jobs and people worried about their jobs than these government-protected monopolies forcing up the prices of utilities and energy?

Thanks for that post, Guest station. Very interesting.SWK

The Secretary of State of the United States has visited Israel many times in her various official capacities and I noticed that on her most recent visit as in previous visits her first stop was at the Holocaust Memorial. Isn’t it time for a representative of the United States to begin with some other theme? Am I wrong or does this consistent theme after 65 years in an independent nation such as Israel bind other nations to a mandatory political homage, as vassals pledging fealty to their feudal obligations? Doesn’t Israel have anything else to say to the world; does it not have any other points of interest for the U.S. power brokers to visit? The U.S. has no choice to go elsewhere, to skip the monument. To do so would engage the reflexes of the Abe Foxmans around the world renting garments and tearing hair and crying, “Oh, my gosh, it’s happening again!”What is it with the people that they can’t stand discussion; that, always, they have to be better?Has Hillary ever visited Israel’s holocaust memorial in Gaza? Has Hillary ever paid homage to Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist deliberately run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003, protesting its use to destroy Palestinian houses in Rafah?Has anyone here ever heard Billy Bragg sing: “The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie”?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WME495PWWJE

CALIFORNIA IS HORRIFYINGYet States like Wash St, with about 1/6th the population have about 1/2 the budget deficit of California.Why isn’t Wash St on the news with a crisis budget defict far worse than California’s?That state has a progressive governor and California doesn’t? Boeing and Microsoft will magically solve it without budget cuts and mass taxation; even though they’re butcher axing employees and their stock has horrifyingly plummetted YOY? Or about about this other lame brain guess: we can take it out of all the rich Seattle home owners’ hide [most are Progressive Democrats that asked for the budget increases in the first place] using their like million dollar Seattle shacks’ equity? Ohhhhh….I forgot about a third of these mortgages are upside down….LOL

Being retired – I sure hope this deflation business is the outcome. Otherwise we will be in the poor house in short order – along with the other 80 million baby boomers in line to retire in the next 20 years.

of course deflation is best scenario. it reward the saver and punish reckless spender. but obama and democrats, their massive spending will guarantee massive borrowing, printing, and taxing capital investment in USA. on top of that, helicopter Ben will not stop dropping money from thin air.

In India, the government has used measures such as giving away free transistor radios to men who agree to have vasectomies. It is a voluntary program of population control befitting a democratic society. China’s more coercive measures are effective to a point, but hardly a touchstone against which we should measure our own human rights policies.SWK

Betelgeuse UpdateNearby Star May Be Getting Ready to Explode

Red giant stars are thought to have short, complicated and violent lifespans. Lasting at most a few million years, they quickly burn out their hydrogen fuel and then switch to helium, carbon and other elements in a series of partial collapses, refuelings and restarts.Betelgeuse, which is thought to be reaching the end of its lifespan, may be experiencing one of those collapses as it switches from one element to another as nuclear-fusion fuel.Betelgeuse’s rotation axis has an inclination of about 20° to the direction of Earth. Since its rotational axis is not toward the Earth, Betelgeuse’s supernova would not cause a focused gamma ray burst in the direction of Earth large enough to damage its ecosystem even from a relatively close proximity of 520 light years.It radiates mostly infrared wavelengths, so that only 13 percent of its radiant energy is emitted in the form of visible light.Betelgeuse, or Alpha Orionis, is now estimated to be located around 430 +/- 100 light-years from Sol – based on a HIPPARCOS Plx= 7.63 +/- e_Plx= 1.64 mas

Does anyone have a link to a blog with a discussion forum on Betelgeuse – I can’t seem to find one.Note that this star can be between 530 or 330 light years away – a large uncertainty in its location for some reason.

I share the view. The most important line in your comment was “There’s been a tectonic shift in attitudes towards consumption…”. The game is over.Obama and Helicopter Ben are just p***ing into the wind. When the Chinese run out of places to store all the “stuff” they’ve been accumulating for the last six months, the commodity boom and the infaltion scare will collapse.

Correction.Have you died? I think notWill you?

Let’s see, China is buying gold, the oily Arabs are buying gold now the Japanese are dumping Bonds. Hmm…$134 Billion In U.S. Bonds found in false bottom suitcase that Japanese were trying to get into SwitzerlandJapan’s Interior minister has resigned. And here is the key, most clear evidence that these two Japanese men were on official diplomatic business – likely to dump US bonds:The men carrying the bonds had a Japanese passport. Secondly, they were not arrested. Under Italian law anyone in possession of counterfeit cash or bonds worth more than a few tens of thousands of euros must be arrested. By comparison the value of the seized counterfeit bonds is equal to 1 per cent of the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP).http://newsusa.myfeedportal.com/viewarticle.php?articleid=346http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=15505

Just doing my part to support the world-wide Jewish conspiracy against everything, AJ….SWK

Excellent, if not morbid, points Morbid!Mark

Good ol’ Smedley Butler. My kind of guy!I strongly encourage people to read his War Is A Racket.Mark

Years ago I had argued about wagering on oil prices going up, that it wasn’t a smart thing to do. The reason was that the issue is about affordability, not necessarily price; if, for instance, oil prices at $100/bbl might seem high, while at $30 they might not; but… if one was unemployed, THEN $30/bbl would be high! (yes, there’s the broader issue of costs within the greater economy, but if the unemployed stayed unemployed then it could still potentially be worse than $100/bbl oil [and being employed]).I absolutely agree that people will end up having to live more on the pay-as-you-go model: I pretty much always have. This I applaud. I don’t believe, however, that there will be any long-term strength in a model that is predicated on growth.Mark

Let go of the shore! Reduce consumption of things that THEY have control of: money (esp credit) and oil! You/I/We hold the key!Mark

I prefer this site (page):Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash (Breaking News)Mark

Maybe this is what will be the catalyst behind the Mayan’s 2012 event(s)?Mark

LOL!Mark

OK folks, inflation or deflation?De-Dollarization: Dismantling America’s Financial-Military Empire :-The Yekaterinburg Turning Point

Even without capital controls, the nations meeting at Yekaterinburg are taking steps to avoid being the unwilling recipients of yet more dollars. Seeing that US global hegemony cannot continue without spending power that they themselves supply, governments are attempting to hasten what Chalmers Johnson has called “the sorrows of empire” in his book by that name – the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order. If China, Russia and their non-aligned allies have their way, the United States will no longer live off the savings of others (in the form of its own recycled dollars) nor have the money for unlimited military expenditures and adventures.US officials wanted to attend the Yekaterinburg meeting as observers. They were told No. It is a word that Americans will hear much more in the future.

What happened vis a vis inflation/deflation when the Soviet Union collapsed?I see the USD’s value plunging along with the amount of it in circulation.Mark

Calculating the distance of these stars is a very tricky process. Basically its a good guess nothing concrete thats why there are so many different numbers. We know less about the universe than we are led to beleive.

Sandra Navidi from RGE said in an interview with n-tv, a german news channel, that they(RGE) assume that gold in the middle and longterm sight would go up.Particulary the hedgies changed strategie from cash to gold.http://www.teleboerse.de/1159893.html

Hmmm I just lost my last post on this issue. The CIA must be intercepting.I haven’t really followed up on the story. First, were the bonds counterfeit or genuine? I think implications are drastically different.If counterfeit, then a whole host of intents pop into mind. Was this a deal between shady characters, the recipients of the bogus bonds about to get stung or stiffed? Blackmail? Extortion? Weapons purchase? Or simply a probe to test the real market (black market) demand and thus determine the real value of the bonds? If the big financial firms could peddle toxic CDS/CDO’s etc then why not govts?If the bonds are bogus, then why weren’t the carriers arrested if they didn’t have diplomatic immunity, or did they but this is being kept secret by Japan.Why go through the back door via Italy/ Why did they not go from Tokyo/Osaka/Nagoya direct to Zurich. False bottom suitcase suggests the intent to smuggle, or at least give that impression. Some big firm in Japan placing huge bets on shorting the US dollar send two “officials” who conveniently get caught– remember how the Japanese diplomats were in the dark until they received the last of 14 transmissions, but before they could type them up and deliver to the US, the bombing at Pearl had begun.But if the bonds were real and the Japanese govt has authorized, then what more do the Japanese know…or fear about the US debt.

A little riddle. Contrary to what NR wrote somewhere above (and BB too sometime ago), there cannot be a global glut of savings over investment, as by definition savings=investment.But how is it possible that when consumers increase their savings, businesses instantly increase their investment by the same amount?

Economics is riddled with fallacies, especially fallacies of composition and accounting fallacies.

Second last line should have read “pair of scisors” not “paper of scissors”

What percent change do you need to classify a move in a particular security as a sell-off?

Mark:Your opinions respecting international coalitions are not backed up by anything factual or legal. I must assume you are ignorant of both history and international law. The coalition in Afghanistan is not a product of coercion, but of voluntary treaty obligations. You are simply spewing nonsense here.The coalition (the International Security Assistance Force or ISAF) is not coercive by any means. It was established in the aftermath of 9//11 by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1386 (see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_1386) on 20 December 2001 as a NATO-led mission in accordance with the Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions (the Bonn Agreement). The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in response to the 9/11 attacks effectively ended a 20-year-long civil war in Afghanistan, and there was no central government with territorial control of the country, so these measures were put in place by the international community pursuant to various treaties to re-establish and stabilize a government for Afghanistan. The current work of the coalition in Afghanistan does not contravene international law, but is a direct product of it.If you think the United States is a morally bankrupt government, you’re entitled to do so and to express that view in this forum; however, comparing the illegal Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan to the legal invasion of Afghanistan by the U.S. (the use of force was authorized in this case under well-established principles of international law) and the legal occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and other members of the ISAF is ludicrous. Your shallow “sound-bite” arguments are conclusory in nature, involve no substantive analysis of the facts or the law, and appear to be nothing more than the product of your own uninformed point of view.Your appeal to the numbers of people in the U.S. who believe the events of 9/11 were “somehow known in advance or abetted by the US government itself” is facially specious. First, I question whether your assertion of what percentage of the U.S. population believes this is accurate. That aside, though, empirical truth is not a product of democratic voting. The sun does not revolve around the earth, despite the fact that this view was embraced as the truth for many years before, and even after, Copernicus and Galileo Galilei established otherwise. Your argument is wholly illogical.I find your supercilious ad hominem attack to be particularly offensive. It is evident from your statement about “hardcore Christians and Jews” that you look down on people of religious faith, and deem them incapable of rational thought and judgment. My religious beliefs have no bearing whatsoever on the merits of my arguments or comments on this blog. That being said, while I don’t even know what you mean by the term ‘hardcore Christian,’ I have indicated in one or more previous threads on this blog in the past year or so that I am an Episcopalian, and my own personal religious views might surprise you. My position on Afghanistan, however, is not predicated on my religious beliefs or affiliations, but on the facts as I understand them to be and my background and training in international law (as I have also revealed in previous threads on this blog during the past year or so, I hold an advanced law degree in International and Comparative Law which I earned in London and have taught international relations and public international law to both undergraduates and law students).Frankly, you just come across as a hopeless little pissant who gets his rocks off by clinging to some fantastic conspiratorial paradigm of reality and chanting anti-U.S. slogans. It’s pathetic, really. I know you’re smarter than that, and it’s evident that you have a genuine desire to help bring about social, political, and economic justice in the world. I suggest you engage in some critical self-reflection and redouble your efforts to educate yourself on these issues.SWK

Mark:I am not an apologist for war in general. More often than not, I object to U.S. military intervention abroad. I am simply asserting what I understand to be the facts and the law that validate the current efforts of the U.S. and its coalition partners in Afghanistan, and noting inconsistencies, lack of logic, and unsupported statements in your arguments.SWK

Here’s another good movie plot based on the personal account of the well-respected grandfather of a long-time and close friend:In the 60′s, Bud lived near the beach in a small northern Oregon coastal town. After a large storm one night, he took a flashlight and walked the beach looking for Japanese glass fishing floats, of which he had collected hundreds over the years while beach combing after storms.He wasn’t far from the well-lit street lights that illuminated the beach below, when he noticed a small rubber raft come ashore with one man inside. He didn’t move, but just watched, curious who and why someone would be so daring to be out in the ocean, in such a small vessel, in the dark, and alone.The man stepped out of the raft, deflated it and carefully folded it, then removed his wet suit, revealing a well-dressed suited man. He gathered up all his belongings and walked across the beach, up the steps to the street, and disappeared.Could it have been a Russian spy? Who’s to say, but sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.

Every blog needs a straight man.

Trust me.We are fine.

I try to do my part. SWK

401K

Michelle on 2009-06-14 11:59:30Maybe they were filming a James Bond sequel.

The coincidence theorist’s guide to 9/11Happy coincidenting!That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we’re talking about.That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there’s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!That Jonathan Bush’s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it’s still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.That George Bush’s brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osama’s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things – one of those crazy things.That Osama bin Laden is known to have been an asset of US foreign policy in no way implies he still is.That al Qaeda was active in the Balkan conflict, fighting on the same side as the US as recently as 1999, while the US protected its cells, is merely one of history’s little aberrations.The claims of Michael Springman, State Department veteran of the Jeddah visa bureau, that the CIA ran the office and issued visas to al Qaeda members so they could receive training in the United States, sound like the sour grapes of someone who was fired for making such wild accusations.That one of George Bush’s first acts as President, in January 2001, was to end the two-year deployment of attack submarines which were positioned within striking distance of al Qaeda’s Afghanistan camps, even as the group’s guilt for the Cole bombing was established, proves that a transition from one administration to the next is never an easy task.That so many influential figures in and close to the Bush White House had expressed, just a year before the attacks, the need for a “new Pearl Harbor” before their militarist ambitions could be fulfilled, demonstrates nothing more than the accidental virtue of being in the right place at the right time.That the company PTECH, founded by a Saudi financier placed on America’s Terrorist Watch List in October 2001, had access to the FAA’s entire computer system for two years before the 9/11 attack, means he must not have been such a threat after all.That whistleblower Indira Singh was told to keep her mouth shut and forget what she learned when she took her concerns about PTECH to her employers and federal authorities, suggests she lacked the big picture. And that the Chief Auditor for JP Morgan Chase told Singh repeatedly, as she answered questions about who supplied her with what information, that “that person should be killed,” suggests he should take an anger management seminar.That on May 8, 2001, Dick Cheney took upon himself the job of co-ordinating a response to domestic terror attacks even as he was crafting the administration’s energy policy which bore implications for America’s military, circumventing the established infrastructure and ignoring the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, merely shows the VP to be someone who finds it hard to delegate.That the standing order which covered the shooting down of hijacked aircraft was altered on June 1, 2001, taking discretion away from field commanders and placing it solely in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, is simply poor planning and unfortunate timing. Fortunately the error has been corrected, as the order was rescinded shortly after 9/11.That in the weeks before 9/11, FBI agent Colleen Rowley found her investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui so perversely thwarted that her colleagues joked that bin Laden had a mole at the FBI, proves the stress-relieving virtue of humour in the workplace.That Dave Frasca of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit received a promotion after quashing multiple, urgent requests for investigations into al Qaeda assets training at flight schools in the summer of 2001 does appear on the surface odd, but undoubtedly there’s a good reason for it, quite possibly classified.That FBI informant Randy Glass, working an undercover sting, was told by Pakistani intelligence operatives that the World Trade Center towers were coming down, and that his repeated warnings which continued until weeks before the attacks, including the mention of planes used as weapons, were ignored by federal authorities, is simply one of the many “What Ifs” of that tragic day.That over the summer of 2001 Washington received many urgent, senior-level warnings from foreign intelligence agencies and governments – including those of Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, Egypt, Israel, Morocco, Afghanistan and others – of impending terror attacks using hijacked aircraft and did nothing, demonstrates the pressing need for a new Intelligence Czar.That John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial aircraft in July 2001 on account of security considerations had nothing to do with warnings regarding September 11, because he said so to the 9/11 Commission.That former lead counsel for the House David Schippers says he’d taken to John Ashcroft’s office specific warnings he’d learned from FBI agents in New York of an impending attack – even naming the proposed dates, names of the hijackers and the targets – and that the investigations had been stymied and the agents threatened, proves nothing but David Schipper’s pathetic need for attention.That Garth Nicolson received two warnings from contacts in the intelligence community and one from a North African head of state, which included specific site, date and source of the attacks, and passed the information to the Defense Department and the National Security Council to evidently no effect, clearly amounts to nothing, since virtually nobody has ever heard of him.That in the months prior to September 11, self-described US intelligence operative Delmart Vreeland sought, from a Toronto jail cell, to get US and Canadian authorities to heed his warning of his accidental discovery of impending catastrophic attacks is worthless, since Vreeland was a dubious character, notwithstanding the fact that many of his claims have since been proven true.That FBI Special Investigator Robert Wright claims that agents assigned to intelligence operations actually protect terrorists from investigation and prosecution, that the FBI shut down his probe into terrorist training camps, and that he was removed from a money-laundering case that had a direct link to terrorism, sounds like yet more sour grapes from a disgruntled employee.That George Bush had plans to invade Afghanistan on his desk before 9/11 demonstrates only the value of being prepared.The suggestion that securing a pipeline across Afghanistan figured into the White House’s calculations is as ludicrous as the assertion that oil played a part in determining war in Iraq.That Afghanistan is once again the world’s principal heroin producer is an unfortunate reality, but to claim the CIA is still actively involved in the narcotics trade is to presume bad faith on the part of the agency.Mahmood Ahmed, chief of Pakistan’s ISI, must not have authorized an al Qaeda payment of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta days before the attacks, and was not meeting with senior Washington officials over the week of 9/11, because I didn’t read anything about him in the official report.That Porter Goss met with Ahmed the morning of September 11 in his capacity as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has no bearing whatsoever upon his recent selection by the White House to head the Central Intelligence Agency.That Goss’s congressional seat encompasses the 9/11 hijackers’ Florida base of operation, including their flight schools, is precisely the kind of meaningless factoid a conspiracy theorist would bring up.It’s true that George HW Bush and Dick Cheney spent the evening of September 10 alone in the Oval Office, but what’s wrong with old colleagues catching up? And it’s true that George HW Bush and Shafig bin Laden, Osama’s brother, spent the morning of September 11 together at a board meeting of the Carlyle Group, but the bin Ladens are a big family.That FEMA arrived in New York on Sept 10 to prepare for a scheduled biowarfare drill, and had a triage centre ready to go that was larger and better equipped than the one that was lost in the collapse of WTC 7, was a lucky twist of fate.Newsweek’s report that senior Pentagon officials cancelled flights on Sept 10 for the following day on account of security concerns is only newsworthy because of what happened the following morning.That George Bush’s telephone logs for September 11 do not exist should surprise no one, given the confusion of the day.That Mohamed Atta attended the International Officer’s School at Maxwell Air Force Base, that Abdulaziz Alomari attended Brooks Air Force Base Aerospace Medical School, that Saeed Alghamdi attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey merely shows it is a small world, after all.That Lt Col Steve Butler, Vice Chancellor for student affairs of the Defense Language Institute during Alghamdi’s terms, was disciplined, removed from his post and threatened with court martial when he wrote “Bush knew of the impending attacks on America. He did nothing to warn the American people because he needed this war on terrorism. What is…contemptible is the President of the United States not telling the American people what he knows for political gain,” is the least that should have happened for such disrespect shown his Commander in Chief.That Mohammed Atta dressed like a Mafioso, had a stripper girlfriend, smuggled drugs, was already a licensed pilot when he entered the US, enjoyed pork chops, drank to excess and did cocaine, was closer to Europeans than Arabs in Florida, and included the names of defence contractors on his email list, proves how dangerous the radical fundamentalist Muslim can be.That 43 lbs of heroin was found on board the Lear Jet owned by Wally Hilliard, the owner of Atta’s flight school, just three weeks after Atta enrolled – the biggest seizure ever in Central Florida – was just bad luck. That Hilliard was not charged shows how specious the claims for conspiracy truly are.That Hilliard’s plane had made 30-round trips to Venezuela with the same passengers who always paid cash, that the plane had been supplied by a pair of drug smugglers who had also outfitted CIA drug runner Barry Seal, and that 9/11 commissioner Richard ben-Veniste had been Seal’s attorney before Seal’s murder, shows nothing but the lengths to which conspiracists will go to draw sinister conclusions.Reports of insider trading on 9/11 are false, because the SEC investigated and found only respectable investors who will remain nameless involved, and no terrorists, so the windfall profit-taking was merely, as ever, coincidental.That heightened security for the World Trade Centre was lifted immediately prior to the attacks illustrates that it always happens when you least expect it.That Hani Hanjour, the pilot of Flight 77, was so incompetent he could not fly a Cessna in August, but in September managed to fly a 767 at excessive speed into a spiraling, 270-degree descent and a level impact of the first floor of the Pentagon, on the only side that was virtually empty and had been hardened to withstand a terrorist attack, merely demonstrates that people can do almost anything once they set their minds to it.That none of the flight data recorders were said to be recoverable even though they were located in the tail sections, and that until 9/11, no solid-state recorder in a catastrophic crash had been unrecoverable, shows how there’s a first time for everything.That Mohammed Atta left a uniform, a will, a Koran, his driver’s license and a “how to fly planes” video in his rental car at the airport means he had other things on his mind.The mention of Israelis with links to military-intelligence having been arrested on Sept 11 videotaping and celebrating the attacks, of an Israeli espionage ring surveiling DEA and defense installations and trailing the hijackers, and of a warning of impending attacks delivered to the Israeli company Odigo two hours before the first plane hit, does not deserve a response. That the stories also appeared in publications such as Ha’aretz and Forward is a sad display of self-hatred among certain elements of the Israeli media.That multiple military wargames and simulations were underway the morning of 9/11 – one simulating the crash of a plane into a building; another, a live-fly simulation of multiple hijackings – and took many interceptors away from the eastern seaboard and confused field commanders as to which was a real hijacked aircraft and which was a hoax, was a bizarre coincidence, but no less a coincidence.That the National Military Command Center ops director asked a rookie substitute to stand his watch at 8:30 am on Sept. 11 is nothing more than bad timing.That a recording made Sept 11 of air traffic controllers’ describing what they had witnessed, was destroyed by an FAA official who crushed it in his hand, cut the tape into little pieces and dropped them in different trash cans around the building, is something no doubt that overzealous official wishes he could undo.That the FBI knew precisely which Florida flight schools to descend upon hours after the attacks should make every American feel safer knowing their federal agents are on the ball.That a former flight school executive believes the hijackers were “double agents,” and says about Atta and associates, “Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose,” and was visited by the FBI just four hours after the attacks to intimidate him into silence, proves he’s an unreliable witness, for the simple reason there is no conspiracy.That Jeb Bush was on board an aircraft that removed flight school records to Washington in the middle of the night on Sept 12th demonstrates how seriously the governor takes the issue of national security.To insinuate evil motive from the mercy flights of bin Laden family members and Saudi royals after 9/11 shows the sickness of the conspiratorial mindset.Le Figaro’s report in October 2001, known to have originated with French intelligence, that the CIA met Osama bin Laden in a Dubai hospital in July 2001, proves again the perfidy of the French.That the tape in which bin Laden claims responsibility for the attacks was released by the State Department after having been found providentially by US forces in Afghanistan, and depicts a fattened Osama with a broader face and a flatter nose, proves Osama, and Osama alone, masterminded 9/11.That at the battle of Tora Bora, where bin Laden was surrounded on three sides, Special Forces received no order to advance and capture him and were forced to stand and watch as two Russian-made helicopters flew into the area where bin Laden was believed hiding, loaded up passengers and returned to Pakistan, demonstrates how confusing the modern battlefield can be.That upon returning to Fort Bragg from Tora Bora, the same Special Operations troops who had been stood down from capturing bin Laden, suffered a unusual spree of murder/suicides, is nothing more than a series of senseless tragedies.Reports that bin Laden is currently receiving periodic dialysis treatment in a Pakistani medical hospital are simply too incredible to be true.That the White House went on Cipro September 11 shows the foresightedness of America’s emergency response.That the anthrax was mailed to perceived liberal media and the Democratic leadership demonstrates only the perversity of the terrorist psyche.That the anthrax attacks appeared to silence opponents of the Patriot Act shows only that appearances can be deceiving.That the Ames-strain anthrax was found to have originated at Fort Detrick, and was beyond the capability of all but a few labs to refine, underscores the importance of allowing the investigation to continue without the distraction of absurd conspiracy theories.That Republican guru Grover Norquist has been found to have aided financiers and supporters of Islamic terror to gain access to the Bush White House, and is a founder of the Islamic Institute, which the Treasury Department believes to be a source of funding for al Qaeda, suggests Norquist is at worst, naive, and at best, needs a wider circle of friends.That the Department of Justice consistently chooses to see accused 9/11 plotters go free rather than permit the courtroom testimony of al Qaeda leaders in American custody looks bad, but only because we don’t have all the facts.That the White House balked at any inquiry into the events of 9/11, then starved it of funds and stonewalled it, was unfortunate, but since the commission didn’t find for conspiracy it’s all a non issue anyway.That the 9/11 commission’s executive director and “gatekeeper,” Philip Zelikow, was so closely involved in the events under investigation that he testified before the commission as part of the inquiry, shows only an apparent conflict of interest.That commission chair Thomas Kean is, like George Bush, a Texas oil executive who had business dealings with reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mafouz, suggests Texas is smaller than they say it is.That co-chair Lee Hamilton has a history as a Bush family “fixer,” including clearing Bush Sr of the claims arising from the 1980 “October Surprise”, is of no concern, since only conspiracists believe there was such a thing as an October Surprise.That FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds accuses the agency of intentionally fudging specific pre-9/11 warnings and harboring a foreign espionage ring in its translation department, and claims she witnessed evidence of the semi-official infrastructure of money-laundering and narcotics trade behind the attacks, is of no account, since John Ashcroft has gagged her with the rare invocation of “State Secrets Privilege,” and retroactively classified her public testimony. For the sake of national security, let us speak no more of her.That, when commenting on Edmond’s case, Daniel Ellsberg remarked that Ashcroft could go to prison for his part in a cover-up, suggests Ellsberg is giving comfort to the terrorists, and could, if he doesn’t wise up, find himself declared an enemy combatant.I could go on. And on and on. But I trust you get the point. Which is simply this: there are no secrets, an American government would never accept civilian casualties for geostrategic gain, and conspiracies are for the weak-minded and gullible.http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/08/coincidence-theorists-guide-to-911.html

@ Some of the banks didn’t need the cash in the first place.This implies fiscal health OR just more propaganda/rubbish.If any of these big banks were truly healthy back in 2007/2008, then they all should have been left to their own fate. (then and now)The great hypocrisy of Wall Streeters is that out of one face they are crying for fiscal rescue under the threat of systemic collapse (that they manufactured) AND from the other face they are telling you they are healthy.Then, Giraf since they are healthy, let’s have the Govt and the FED cancel all corporate welfare (TARP, TALF, PPIP, Maiden Lane i, ii & iii, etc.) to the banks & brokerages pronto.Then we can begin the process of true reconciliation in this nation whereby the Govt and Central Bank backstop the people of this nation in lieu of corporations and thus restore the REAL economy to its senior and protected stature at the expense of the shadow economy that many are still clinging to.

Alright class, what could possibly be going on today that would cause the sell-off in precious metals, oil, global stock markets, and a rise in the USD?One shiny gold star for the correct response!Hide replies Reply to this comment By Michelle on 2009-06-12 07:14:02Michelle,What percent change in price equates to a sell-off?

This is too much. Soros made $2.9 billion in 2007 off of CDSs and another billion or so in 2008. I guess he has nothing to bet against these days so it’s…Soros slams ‘instruments of destruction’“Some derivatives ought not to be allowed to be traded at all. I have in mind credit default swaps. The more I’ve heard about them, the more I’ve realized they’re truly toxic,” Soros told a banking conference. (BWaHaHaHa)http://money.cnn.com/2009/06/12/news/economy/soros_swaps.reut/index.htm?postversion=2009061206

Just finished watching the DVD. At the end, my wife asked me what bank that equated to in the real world. I said “How about GS?”

nah, it is hard to imagine we are in recession, when FED and Gov are blowing another debt bubble (gov spending). For deflation to happen, the world need to force FED to stop printing and to force Treasury to stop issuing debt. For that to happen, DOLLAR must die, otherwise, recession/deflation will not be able to run its course.

SWK,Point me towards a picture that actually shows plane debris in the Pentagon on 9/11.

inflation, just look at college tuition and medical expense. doctor visit almost $200, blood test almost $300. prescription drug couple more hundred/month. medical expenses force insurance cost to go up.

SCO is the group to watch. The future.

The tail pieces should have fallen to the ground somewhere near the impact site.Before 9/11 there had not been a single explosion where an explosion has absolutely completely oblitarerated a passenger airplane.

I come from Sweden, and know a little of the Latvian crizis.Sweden had a banking crizis around 1990. Then the Swedish government got the control of three of the four largest banks.Last week ,Bo Lungren, chief of “riksgälden”, which handles finacial issues, said that he is prepared to take over the control of swedish bank if it is nessesary. Actually he did take control of a small investmentbank “Carnegie” some months ago.The swedish banks have assets of around 400 billion swedish crowns (around 60 billion dollar). Swedich banks have around 2/3 of market in the three baltic states, and have lent around 40 billion euro.Sweden have an historical and military stragetic interest in the baltic countries, and is prepared to help the region. The whole region is around 1/10 of the size of the swedish economy.In the scandinavian countries, it is political impossible to let russian take control och the Baltic region. Acually russia wanted to assist iceland in there economical meltdown, and after that Iceland very fast got loans from the Scandinavian countries.Our finance minister has said that the swedish banks are going to pay for the baltic states and if nessesary the swedish government.A agree in all aspects the conclusions of the article but want to add that Swedish government knows what is nessesary to do and have detailed plans for it.Sweden is highly dependent of export, and the plan seems to be to try to deal whith the baltic crizis, when the global economy has improved, and the swedish export has improved.The latvian export industry and economy, cannot be rescued by adjusting the currency anyway, the most important issue right now is to not let russian interests take control, and let the swedish government take control over the banks, in a controlled way to save money for the swedish taxpayers while there still is money left in the banks.Then the swedish government will have massive wright down of the loans to the latvian people, else there is risk that they wont pay the money anyway and be forced into reunion whith russia.

Sorry SWK, but in the end your beliefs of the “facts” will be proven wrong.Again, I suspect that there’s a hidden bias that you’re not willing to disclose. I’ve been exposed to a lot of information and people regarding all this crap, I’ve seen it all and I’m pretty certain that your position is cased in some ugly dogma. Usually I run across this in Evangelical types that have never served: kind of like the group of chicken hawks that precipitated these drummed up wars.Mark

Cool, now we can ALL be winos I’m seeing an increasing number of cars piled with personal artifacts: people living out of their cars. Police shootings (in my community) are increasing, as are assaults. But hey, let the wine flow! Mark

So, should we look to short the earth? Mark

Yeah, it’s like other back alley activities (e.g. drugs), it’s usually related to bad stuff. Doesn’t bode well for the USD…Mark

How about “sustainable economic growth?”And from that base/fundamental, all else is surely a fallacy…Mark

Hey, don’t pick on SWK, he’s (a very important- just ask him) attorney! Attorneys aren’t required to understand physics! (they rely on experts, like those presenting for, excuse me, TO the 9/ll commission)But really, I had thought that the REAL law was about “THE PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.” Did I miss the trial; you know, the trial where the accused actually have representation?What am I thinking, why would I want to defend some system that allows torture?Once upon a time it was illegal to speak of the world being anything other than flat. Point: physics trumps man’s laws.Mark

Why wouldn’t the tail section have gone inside the structure, like the rest of the fuselage? The thing was flying at 400-500 mph at impact. If fact, didn’t we see the second plane disappear into the second tower or was that fake video?

We don’t have to resort to any speculation at all. Physics provides enough of the evidence.And what exactly is the temperature required to vaporize aluminum?SWK, in service to the law and to country (not govenment, not nation), as an attorney maybe you could pursue the release of real video of what hit the Pentagon building. I would be happy to contribute financially to this work, and I’m sure that others would as well.Mark

More strength through exhaustion:Aluminum’s Biggest Shutdown Since 1982 Signals Gain Sure, some people are making money, but clearly, this is just added weight that this is all a big downward spiral.Mark

Several guests above have commented on the significance of art in bringing concepts to light. “The International” has been mentioned and it is worth watching. Why would a bank sell weapons, when there is not that much profit? Because it is a method of control of debt. Both sides of all conflicts have been financed by the same banks on both sides. Look at all the wars in the 20th century and you will find both sides financed by same bankers. The bankers need to increase the debt of nation states, because debt and compound interest is their business. What nation state function creates the most debt? Military expenditures. What happens when banks run short of military contracts? They create an international asset inflation to create further debt instruments, i.e. an international real estate bubble and then they prick the bubble and everybody is in debt to them and they have control. Debt is the most effective method of political and economic control.Let me issue the debt for a country and I am the sovereign. Do we have to be beat over the head to understand what has been going on and where this is heading. The levels of sovereign debt now experienced and the subtle conditionalities that will be applied to the extension of the IMF and World Bank loans will give the bankers the equivalent of an informal sovereign status that preempts nation-state action.The nation states are subservient when they are in debt. The banking interests need debt and decentralized nation-state power to control the wholeeconomic system. They have a de-facto world sovereignty with this present debt crisis.

Intersing read.. whole article link below…Depression Porn: How Banks Are Gaming The Real Estate MarketUS Stocks Gain On Report Of Pending Home Sales . . . Pending Home Sales Rise the Most in Over Seven Years . . . Consumer Confidence Spurs Broad Gain . . .You see the same bullshit headlines churned out everywhere you turn. Yes sir, we’re supposed to believe the recession is over, recovery is underway and prosperity is just around the corner. We need to go out and fulfill our patriotic duty, which means buying things, preferably houses. That’s what smart investors would do, we’re told. And judging by the polls, Americans are starting to believe it.http://exiledonline.com/depression-porn-gaming-the-real-estate-market/all/1/

Sean Corrigan, chief investment strategist at Diapason Securities provides us with the following list of ‘then and now’ observations:Then…DOW ‘29: FELL 48% RALLIED 48% FELL 78%NASDAQ ‘00: FELL 40% RALLIED 40% FELL 81%TOPIX ‘89: FELL 48% RALLIED 37% FELL 65%UST YIELDS ‘81: FELL 34% RALLIED 34% FELL 85%US HOUSEBUILDERS ‘05: FELL 47% RALLIED 45% FELL 82%Abu Dhabi ‘05: FELL 26% RALLIED 26% FELL 55%GOLD ‘80: FELL 43% RALLIED 46% FELL 65%SILVER ‘80: FELL 67% RALLIED 61% FELL 75%CRUDE ‘90: FELL 32% RALLIED 29% FELL 51% (+)Now…SHANGHAI COMP ‘08:FELL 73% RALLIED 70% …….NDX ‘08: FELL 50% RALLIED 48% …..MSCI MACHINERY ‘08: FELL 64% RALLIED 60%…JPYAUD ‘08: FELL 47% RALLIED 46%…GSCI ENERGY ‘08: FELL 71% RALLIED 71%…DCI METALS ‘08: FELL 55% RALLIED 55%…DCI AGRI ‘08: FELL 50% RALLIED 46%….

The banking interests need debt and decentralized nation-state power to control the whole economic system.Actually I think that this is incorrect. I think that they have control/power exactly because they have access to centralized nation-states. These entities are empowered by natino-states (think subsidies, think current bailouts).When you have a focal point it’s easier to attack. What would lobbyists do if they had to attack in all 50 U.S. states rather than just one central location?Fundamentals, power corrupts…Mark

A “Doh” reminder:If an index is at 100, drops 50%, then it has fallen to 50. If it then rallies 50%, it is onlyback to 75.If jobs keep dropping 100,000 a month, this becomes a greater percentage job loss each month.

June 15 (Bloomberg) — Commercial banks in the 16-nation euro region may lose a further $283 billion by the end of next year as the financial crisis forces them to write off bad loans, the European Central Bank said.“Hard-to-value assets have remained on bank balance sheets and the marked deterioration in the economic outlook has created concerns about the potential for sizeable loan losses,” the Frankfurt-based ECB said in its June Financial Stability Report today.http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a9OppHNsK.I4And when will “honest mistake” Timmy give some serious numbers instead of living up to his nickname?