think about this and what it implies… The British Govt knows thier Average Joe Limes are pissed..that and they are an insolvent gov’t… this will soon be coming to to the US.Britain To Tax Banker Bonuses At 50%, Will US Bankers Now Drop Market Preemptively To Show Who Is In Charge?Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/09/2009 09:04 -0500Excess Profits TaxIn his pre-budget report, British Chancellor Alistair Darling said that he will now levy a 50% tax on banker bonuses. The new tax will be effective from today until April 5.The tax will hit virtually all financial companies, including subsidiaries of foreign banks . Thus a Goldman banker working in London will suddenly be faced with a much higher marginal tax rate that his associate in New York. This will either generate much transatlantic resentment, or expect a comparable move to the replicated by the IRS with the President’s blessing, who has already lost control of the unemployment picture, so the last thing he can do to regain some popularity is to take Main Street’s outcry direct to the southern tip of Manhattan.Yet even as the likelihood of a copycat tax in the U.S. is increasing, the question is do the domestic trading desks now drop the market and show the administration who is really in charge? Because even the President’s working group can not survive a concerted attack from every single financial entity in the world. And bankers are nothing if not efficient at marking their territory in the protection of take home pay. If that requires a 200 point drop in the S&P, so be it.

The Science is not settled when >31k scientists don’t concur with the wisdom being reported by the Lamestream Media …http://www.petitionproject.orghttp://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/science_isnt_settled.htmlThe Forecasts should, at a minimum, be taken with a grain of salt rather than used as a serious basis for planning the lives of nearly 7 billion people …Copenhagen climate summit concerns not justified by scientific forecastingThere is ample evidence that the underlying data has been, to be polite, manipulated and that the conclusions to which the world has jumped are a fraud ….http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/worst_scandal.htmlFinally, if it were such a serious issue of such urgency, why didn’t our rockstar leaders meet via telecon or the internet to kick off the brave new world with the brave new technologies that will be required???Follow your leaders, sheep!

News Flash to CNN- most of us think this is the beginning of a DEPRESSION or we are laready in one…That will last yearsWhat recovery? Most still see recessionCNN survey finds 84% believe the economy is still in a recession, and that pessimism is growing despite improved economic readings.See all CNNMoney.com RSS FEEDS (close) By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com senior writerLast Updated: December 8, 2009: 10:10 PM ETAre things really getting better?Last quarter, the economy grew by the largest amount since the summer of 2007, but there are signs that things are still getting worse.NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Economists are in broad agreement that the Great Recession is over. The American public strongly disagrees.In a poll of more than 1,000 Americans conducted late last week by CNN/Opinion Research Corporation, 84% of those surveyed believe that the economy is still in recession.That’s a slight improvement from the 87% who believed there was still a recession in the September survey, but it is almost the opposite view of the nation’s economists.An official declaration of an end to the recession that started in December 2007 won’t be made until next year at the earliest by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But recent economic readings and surveys of economists all point to a U.S. economy that is growing again.The economy grew at a 2.8% annual rate in the three months ending in September, according to the latest reading on gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation’s economic activity.While the economy continues to lose jobs, the number of jobs lost in November fell to 11,000, the smallest amount of any month since the start of 2008, while the unemployment rate improved to 10% from 10.2%. And a survey of 43 top economists by the National Association of Business Economists in October found 81% agreed that the recession was over.0:00 /4:42Ten years for job recoveryThe survey was taken ahead of that latest jobs reading. It comes as President Obama announced Tuesday that he wants Congress to redirect a certain portion of leftover Wall Street bailout funds toward new job creation measures, including building roads and bridges, “weatherizing” homes to reduce energy bills and lending to small businesses.Recovery ‘only an economist can love’But even economists understand why the general public doesn’t share economists’ view of current conditions. Mark Vitner, senior economist with Wells Fargo Securities, said this has so far been a recovery that only an economist can love, given continued job losses and tight credit conditions.”I think the end of the recession and beginning of the recovery is very difficult for Main Street America to see,” he said. “The bad news isn’t coming out as frequently, but there really hasn’t been much good news. We’re stuck in some sort of economic purgatory.”Vitner said part of the disagreement between economists and the public view of the economy is a difference in how recession and recovery are defined. Economists believe a recession is over and a recovery begins when the economy has hit bottom.”If you fall into a hole, the time that you’re falling is the recession. Once you hit the bottom, the recession is over. But you’re still in the hole,” said Vitner. “Most non-economists think the recovery doesn’t begin until you’re out of the hole.”In fact the survey backs up that disconnect between economists’ and the public’s views.It found 46% of those surveyed believe that conditions have stabilized and are not getting any worse. But that plurality also believes that means the economy is still in recession.Economic conditions of those answering the poll also affect the results.”The recession has hit blue-collar families the hardest,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “More than half of whites who never attended college say economic conditions are still in a downturn. Most whites who attended college say things have stabilized or are starting to get better.”Few gains seen, more worries aheadVitner said that any improvement in the economy so far has produced very modest gains for the average household, as well as the broader economic measures. So people are likely to feel like there’s a recession for quite some time.”The hole is a very big hole this time and the recovery is very modest so it might take us a number of years to get out of the hole,” he said.While economists are typically getting more optimistic, the poll found evidence the public is getting more pessimistic.The poll found only 15% believe the economy is starting to recover from the problems it faced in the past year or so, down from 17% who saw improvement in the previous poll in September. And it found 39% believe the economy is still in a downturn and conditions are continuing to worsen, up from 36% who believed things were getting worse in September.And many Americans are still worried things could get a lot worse.Asked about a risk of another depression, the poll found 43% believing that was somewhat or very likely, a bit worse than the 41% who thought that in a survey in the middle of summer, although well below the 59% who feared another depression when asked in early October of 2008.The survey described a depression as a period when roughly one out of four workers were unemployed, banks fail across the country and millions of ordinary Americans were temporarily homeless or unable to feed their families.Asked in general terms how well things are going in the country today, the outlook is more negative than the previous reading for the first time since President Obama took office in January, with 66% saying things are pretty or very bad, up from 63% among those asked that question on Oct. 30 and Nov. 1. Still, that is better than the 79% who believed things were pretty or very bad a year ago.– CNN Wires and CNN Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report

So here we go agian, staring at a 2 Trillion Dollar deficit for 2010… What ahs been fixed? Wait until spring and tax season and all the states fall off the cliff with their lack of revenue…U.S. already $292 bln in the red this year – CBOWed, Nov 18 2009WASHINGTON, Dec 4 (Reuters) – The U.S. government racked up a gaping shortfall in the first two months of this fiscal year after posting a record budget deficit last year, congressional analysts said on Friday.BondsIn October and November, the government spent $292 billion more than it took in, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.That was even worse than the same period last year, when the government was on its way to posting a record $1.4 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.The federal budget has been battered by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as tax revenues have plunged and spending on safety-net programs like unemployment insurance have skyrocketed.The budget deficit was $176.4 billion in October, according to Treasury Department records, and the CBO estimated the deficit for November will have come in at $115 billion.The CBO gave its figures in billions of dollars and said numbers may not add up to the totals because of rounding.Receipts totaled $132 billion in November, the CBO estimated, down 9 percent from the same month last year. That was partly due to new legislation that gives increased tax write-offs to corporations.Outlays were down $23 billion from a year earlier, the CBO estimated, as the government spent less on federal programs to stem the financial crisis. (Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by John O’Callaghan) Reuters Messaging: andy.sullivan.reuters.com@reuters.net))

MM, as I stated yesterday the food stamp usage is growing at ~750K per month. It is also funny that it took them roughly 80 days to report Q3 numbers.In California the unemployment payments are now up to 92 weeks!Recession my A$$!

The credit crisis is taking an interesting turn. Dubai, Greece, Spain. Who will be next?Stocks Drop Worldwide a Fifth Day as Spain’s Outlook Is Reducedhttp://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a3G.M4KZuQX4&pos=4

Japan is heavy in the mix. They are #2 in GDP production world wide. And things do not look good with their debt at 200% of GDP!Greece is one thing … Japan defaulting is a completely different issue.

Anyone has a xmas shopping season update?

http://www.businessinsider.com/top-10-international-catastrophes-2009-12

Have some fun follow the links through the slide presentations all the way to gold.

print digital dollar, print print print!!!

http://www.proshares.com/funds/szk_index.html

A good one from Kass.

http://www.thestreet.com/story/10641758/1/kass-a-couple-of-concerns.html?kval=dontmiss

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/albert-edwards-here-comes-next-leg-bear-marketLook at the last chart (LEI and and ECRI’s WLI) seem ready to start nosediving. I started speaking about diz almost a month ago… However, the evidence is not conlcusive yet.

Obviously you are an anthropogenic climate change skeptic…. You can’t even check your OWN sources…never mind those that actually UNDERSTAND the subject.Let me help you:Petition Project, by OISMScience and Public Policy InstituteAnd forecastingprinciples.com was founded by J Scott Armstrong

US Oct freight index lowest for Oct since 1996Wed Dec 9, 2009 11:30am ESTWASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) – The U.S. Freight Transportation Index fell in October to its lowest level for October since 1996, as industry shipments decreased for two months in a row.Shipments suffered their biggest October year-on-year decline, falling 10.5 percent, since the department began calculating the index 20 years ago.The Freight TSI measures the month-to-month changes in freight shipments in ton-miles, which are then combined into one index.The index measures the output of the for-hire freight transportation industry and consists of data from for-hire trucking, rail, inland waterways, pipelines and air freight.

Shortly after Jones’s remarks, we could read in the Wall Street Journal: “Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al-Qaida is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. … For Arab youths who are al-Qaida’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.” [8]From all of the above is it not reasonable to conclude that the United States is willing and able to live with the Taliban, as repulsive as their social philosophy is? Perhaps even a Taliban state which would go across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has been talked about in some quarters. What then is Washington fighting for? What moves the president of the United States to sacrifice so much American blood and treasure? In past years, US leaders have spoken of bringing democracy to Afghanistan, liberating Afghan women, or modernizing a backward country. President Obama made no mention of any of these previous supposed vital goals in his December 1 speech. He spoke only of the attacks of September 11, al Qaeda, the Taliban, terrorists, extremists, and such, symbols guaranteed to fire up an American audience. Yet, the president himself declared at one point: “Al Qaeda has not reemerged in Afghanistan in the same numbers as before 9/11, but they retain their safe havens along the border.” Ah yes, the terrorist danger … always, everywhere, forever, particularly when it seems the weakest.How many of the West Point cadets, how many Americans, give thought to the fact that Afghanistan is surrounded by the immense oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea regions? Or that Afghanistan is ideally situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of Europe and south Asia, lines that can deliberately bypass non-allies of the empire, Iran and Russia? If only the Taliban will not attack the lines. “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south …”, said Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs in 2007. [9]Afghanistan would also serve as the home of American military bases, the better to watch and pressure next-door Iran and the rest of Eurasia. And NATO … struggling to find a raison d’être since the end of the Cold War. If the alliance is forced to pull out of Afghanistan without clear accomplishments after eight years will its future be even more in doubt?So, for the present at least, the American War on Terror in Afghanistan continues and regularly and routinely creates new anti-American terrorists, as it has done in Iraq. This is not in dispute even at the Pentagon or the CIA. God Bless America.http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16470

Sorry for the block of text. For some reason, my paragraph indentations never seem to make it to the blog site.Wild Bill

The US needs Central Asia to remain destabilised.If there were peace in Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan then oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia would deliver cheap energy to India and other Asian countries.All potential pipeline projects in the region are being blocked by the US.USA is ready to pay with blood for access to ‘cheap’ oil and gas. We can’t let oil flow in the other direction.

We would condemn future generations to a lower standard of living? Think of DDT and the millions of people who have died because it is no longer used.Thanks, BTW Guest, for putting more rigour into my links than I did. I was in a hurry … something about climate change that does that to people.

Nonsense. Oil will flow to the highest bidder. What you don’t need is China or India marching in and taking it, and that is why you will see a large US presence in the region for years. Terrorism is just the pretext.

California Debt May Be Half a Trillion DollarsLook Out Below

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5354.shtmlRamping up Afghanistan war to control Caspian oil and gas transport routesBy Jerry MazzaOnline Journal Associate EditorDec 8, 2009, 00:28The 800-pound gorilla standing in the auditorium at West Point is still waiting for an answer to why Obama made his surge-speech for 30,000 more troops and $30 billion to pay for them. That gorilla wonders “why” Obama pitched so hard for the US to stay and surge through Afghanistan and Pakistan. The reasons given were that the Afghanistan Taliban and Al Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden were the people that attacked us on 9/11, which was an iteration of George W. Bush’s reasons for the War on Terror. They are as phony now as the day Bush promised to smoke out Bin Laden.But, here are Obama’s actual words, pointed out by Christopher Bollyn on page 2 of his article, Why Afghanistan?……Additionally the infamous Blackwater, now called Xe, is at work for the CIA, which is spearheading the covert Pakistan war, and this all costs money, big money. So, fortunately, the agency still has the opium crop to cover the shortfalls in budget or cash, and the so-called 2010-11 pull-out mandate is already up in smoke, according to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Thus, the real reasons for this surge have to be McChrystal clear even to a blind man or Congress. The hope is that seeing-eye dogs like Bollyn, now living in writer’s exile, and Craig Murray, the UK’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan, and even my humble self and other writers, can be of assistance…….http://www.rebelnews.org/opinion/war/118650=why-afghanistan.Why Afghanistan?By Christopher BollynEvery war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil. – Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007)The discovery of pieces of an extremely explosive form of super-Thermite in the dust of the World Trade Center is of profound importance because it is evidence of the actual nano-Thermite used to demolish and pulverize the Twin Towers. The red-gray chips found in the dust by Dr. Steven E. Jones of Brigham Young University disprove the government claims about what caused the destruction of the three towers on 9-11. Fragments of the nano-composite explosive were analyzed by an international team of nine scientists and the evidence presented in a peer-reviewed paper in March 2009….

A la Dec 7, 1941 as a planted catalyst for US entry into WWII, according to the conspiracy theorists (which I have paid no attention to) it seems that the US knew an attack on the Trade Center was forthcoming, could have had super Thermite implanted well in advance, to be detonated at a “convenient” time (when the terrorists actually got around to pulling off their attack) to enhance the effects.Who conveniently/inexplicably did not show up for work at the Trade Center that day, or who was conveniently on assignment or vacation that week? It would be interesting to see the details.Same way in WWII, the carriers were conveniently out to sea and not at Pearl. The US certainly was aware that the attack was forthcoming, and would sacrifice battleships and destroyers and other “non-essentials” , but not the aircraft carriers, which would be vital to the actual defense of the US.I used to think such a theory was too far fetched, but now I wonder.

Could it be this is their last gasp to get thier hands on as much as possible before they all go under?they will never get naother bailout, so are they throwing in the towel?Either way the are one GReedy Industry and all at the expense of Average Joe american. IMO they are not americans, they are Crimminal thieves!Bailout Refund Is All About Pay, Pay, Pay ANDREW ROSS SORKINPublished: December 7, 2009Strike up the band!Davis Turner/Bloomberg NewsBank of America is looking for a replacement for Ken Lewis, its chief executive, and is paying back $45 billion in bailout money.Bank of America is paying back $45 billion in taxpayer-provided bailout money, and the government now says it expects to get back $200 billion in those funds faster than it imagined. The banks are getting back on their feet, the markets have stabilized, even unemployment isn’t as bad as many feared.Great news, right?Sorry for a little rain on this parade, but take a moment to consider why Bank of America was really in such a rush to pay back the money it borrowed from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.Sure, its business had improved, somewhat. But there was another reason why the bank locked horns with Sheila C. Bair, chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who was against the plan because she did not think the firm was healthy enough, according to people briefed on the conversations.Bank of America was simply desperate to get out from under the thumb of government, and rid itself of the scarlet letter tainting its public image.With Bank of America trying to recruit a new chief executive to replace retiring Ken Lewis, the firm needed to repay the bailout money to offer a competitive compensation package.Indeed, people inside the Treasury told me that the No. 1 reason offered by the firm during weeks of back-and-forth — even when it was discussed indirectly — was compensation. Bank of America was so desperate, in fact, that it diluted its own shareholders by selling new shares worth $18.8 billion to replace some of the funds it is returning.Just read the notes from research analysts the day that Bank of America announced the $45 billion payment.Virtually none of them focused on the idea that there was a sign of strength at the firm; instead they focused, as Morgan Stanley did, on how “it eliminates the competitive disadvantage relative to peers who had already repaid TARP.” External candidates may be “more likely to talk” now that the bank is no longer restricted by the pay czar.That may be all well and good, but what about the health of the bank — and any continuing risks to the system? Wasn’t the purpose of the bailout program to put the financial system on a much steadier foundation? And wasn’t repayment supposed to be based, at least in part, on banks beginning to lend again?Joseph Tibman, author of “The Murder of Lehman Brothers” noted on his blog that at Bank of America, its loans fell from $942 billion to $914 billion from the second to the third quarter. It also lost $1 billion in its third quarter. That’s not to say it isn’t healthier than it used to be — it’s all relative.The rules for repayment seem to be squishy, and worse, are likely to create a two-tier system. While most of the biggest banks have been able to repay their bailout money — with the notable exceptions of Citigroup and Wells Fargo many community banks, holding bad commercial real estate loans, are still carrying the taint of being obligated to the government.They will likely now press to return the money as quickly as possible too, perhaps too quickly.“Financial markets demand clarity and certainty,” said David Nason, a former Treasury staff member who created the Troubled Asset Relief Program under President George W. Bush, and who is now a managing director at Promontory Financial Group. “Until they have that, there will be a drumbeat of questions as to what TARP repayments mean for the strength of particular institutions and of the banking system in general.”Just seven months ago, Treasury officials would have probably laughed if you told them banks would be rushing to repay. Remember those stress tests that had all of Wall Street stressed out for months about whether they’d pass and what it would all mean? By the way, what do all these repayments say about Treasury’s ability to make reliable forecasts? Just asking.Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency that didn’t exactly cover itself with glory with its prognostications, recently wrote a remarkably candid research note that suggested the $45 billion repayment didn’t really matter, because if the bank got in trouble again, taxpayers would be there with another bailout.“We consider BofA to be highly systemically important and therefore continue to believe that BofA would receive extraordinary government support if necessary,” it said. But, it added, “we do not believe such support will be needed.”Let’s hope S.& P. is right this time around.

Does anyone actually think they have a chance a decent life the next 50 years living in the US! think again if you do with stuff like this below…Last-Minute Ammendment To Reform Bill Is A Huge Subsidy To Big BanksWilliam Greider|Dec. 10, 2009, 9:23 AM | 61 |(This guest post originally appeared at NewDeal2.0)The sales pitch for financial-reform legislation pending in the House claims it would put a stop to “too big to fail” bailouts for the leading banks. The reality is the opposite. The federal government would instead be granted unlimited authority to spend whatever it takes to prop up the big boys when they get in trouble. Only in the next crisis, Congress won’t have to be asked for the money. The financial rescues will be funded by the secretive Federal Reserve, not the Treasury, with money the Fed itself creates.And the emergency lending could be pumped into any financial institution in trouble–not just behemoth commercial banks but investment houses like Goldman Sachs, insurance companies, hedge funds or any other pools of private capital whose failure regulators believe would threaten the system.This sounds nutty and it is. A permanent security blanket for big boys of finance will further inflame public opinion. Only the public isn’t likely to know. The crucial terms for Fed financing are set by an innocuous-sounding amendment offered by Representative Brad Miller of North Carolina. Any financial holding company designated as a “systemic risk” and subject to stricter regulatory standards “shall have the same access to the discount window lending of an appropriate Federal Reserve Bank as is available to a member bank of each Federal Reserve bank.”This last-minute amendment, if included on final passage, solves a huge problem for the Obama administration–how to pay for the next bailout if another financial calamity unfolds. In the House banking committee, the administration’s legislation originally sought unlimited authority for the Treasury and the president. But committee members choked on the implications after Representative Brad Sherman of California denounced it as “TARP on steroids.” TARP was the original $700 billion bailout jammed through Congress last year. Citizens are still angry and some members of Congress who voted for TARP are likely to lose their seats.Solution? Let the Fed do it behind closed doors. The Federal Reserve’s discount lending to commercial banks is normally not disclosed to the public since it might signal the bank is in trouble and undermine investor confidence. That secrecy can hardly be sustained in another crisis, however, since financial markets will swiftly figure out which financial firms are the lucky winners in the Fed’s fail-or-flourish lottery.The so-called reform legislation has many other problems–too many to clean up at this stage in the legislative process–but somebody should start right now to raise a righteous stink about the core provisions. As I have been writing for months, putting the Federal Reserve in charge as super-regulator is the path that leads to the corporate state. A limited circle of privileged players would enjoy a permanent line of credit from Washington, while their competitors in business and finance would struggle at great disadvantage. This top-down economy would combine the worst qualities of both socialism and capitalism. Unfortunately, the hybrid nature of the monstrosity may not become clear, even to members of Congress, until the next crisis, when it will be too late.

Probably peer reviewed by the same people who peer reviewed the papers on climate change.Look, conspiracy theories are often easier to follow and often far more interesting than the truth. What you suggest with the last blurb is that there is a whole lot of evil in our government over the last decade.I will buy it that there is a lot of stupidity and some evil, but for the entire system to be so rotten that 3000 of our own were butchered and covered up is just a bit too much to fathom.If that were indeed the case, then we have a bigger problem than Afghanistan.

This would actually lead to the next crisis. We are doomed.

NO JOBS- check the last sentence out and it tells you all you need to know. Also approx 8 million have now exhausted all benefits and are totally unemployed with no income from anywhere. How long before they become a big problem for local, state and fed govt’s, not to mention thier impact on local law enforcement agencies…. So we now have almost 16 million totally unemployed (which affects about 42 Million Americans using avg household size). Thats 42 million people bascially not spending, not paying taxes… add the other 15 million plus of underemployed and you get about 85 million people basically not spending. By my math thats about 28% of all americans. That would jive with the 25-35% decrease most local, state and fed govt is seeing in reduced revenues. The entire thing is goign to collapse, just a question fo when?Emergency Jobless Insurance Claims Surge By Most Ever In Prior WeekSubmitted by Tyler Durden on 12/10/2009 09:16 -0500AdministrationCompensationContinuing ClaimsDOLEmergency Unemployment CompensationInitial ClaimsJobsUnemploymentThe number you won’t hear mentioned anywhere in the Mainstream Media: 327,729. That is how many people shifted to Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs in the last week alone, hitting an all time record high of 4.2 million! So as everyone is focused on the benign picture of initial claims in the last week which was “only” 474,000, the number of people rolling off continuing benefits has exploded and is now a stunning 592,579 only in the last two week. Look for this number to keep going into the stratosphere as the 6 month continuing claims cliff keeps getting hit by more and more people who are unemployed and keep looking not only for believable change, but actual jobs to go with it.And here is the chart that the administration would love to keep under lock and seal: the cumulative number of people on Emergency Insurance. At this rate those collecting EUC will surpass those on continuing claims (5.5 million) within a month.http://www.zerohedge.com/article/emergency-jobless-claims-surge-most-ever-prior-week

this is funny, but bascially true of how Average Joe American pays for the PTB to have it all…How To Make The World’s Easiest $1 BillionHenry Blodget|Dec. 10, 2009, 11:02 AM | 473 |4With all the banks paying back the TARP money, some folks are assuming that the great Wall Street bailout is finally coming to an end.But of course it isn’t!Taxpayers are still guaranteeing all big bank bonds (Too Big To Fail) and subsidizing huge bank earnings and bonuses with absurdly low interest rates.But instead of bellyaching about it, you might as well just smile and cash in. After all, that’s what Wall Street’s doing.So here’s how to make the world’s easiest $1 billion:STEP 1: Form a bank.STEP 2: Round up a bunch of unemployed friends to be “bankers.”STEP 3: Raise $1 billion of equity. (This is the only tricky step. And it’s not that tricky. See below.*)STEP 4: Borrow $9 billion from the Fed at an annual cost of 0.25%.STEP 5: Buy $10 billion of 30-year Treasuries paying 4.45%STEP 6: Sit back and watch the cash flow in.At this spread, you should be earning at least 4% per year on your $10 billion of capital, or $400 million. Sure, there’s some risk that the Fed will grow a backbone and raise short rates, but there’s not much risk. (They have an economy to fix and banks to secretly recapitalize). And in any event, if the Fed raises short rates, making your $1 billion will just take a bit longer. (And if they REALLY raise rates, causing you to actually lose money, it will be someone else’s problem.)You’ll have made $400 million in a single year! So pay yourself a fat salary for all your hard work. And pay your “bankers” fat salaries for all their hard work (But don’t worry–your bankers won’t actually have to do anything. You’ll just need one of them to borrow the money from the Fed and buy the Treasuries, which he will be able to do part-time.) At the end of the year, celebrate. It’s bonus time!Don’t be greedy. Pay yourself and your bankers the industry-standard compensation ratio of 50% of revenue. Your revenue was $400 million, so that creates a $200 million bonus pool. Pay each of your unemployed friends bankers, say, $1 million. And give yourself the rest for being such a smart entrepreneur and creating all the jobs and value.Now, you’ve already made at least $150 million, so it doesn’t really matter what happens next. But you’re in this for the world’s easiest $1 billion, right?So proceed to Step 7.STEP 7: Go public. After bonuses, your bank will be earning about $200 million a year, your capital ratio will be super-strong (10% equity-to-debt!), and your balance sheet will be clean as a whistle (all risk-free Treasuries!). So you ought to be able to persuade investors to pay you at least 20-times earnings, or a valuation of $4 billion. Sell 25% of the company for $1 billion.STEP 8: Use your $1 billion of new equity to borrow another $9 billion at 0.25% from the Fed. Buy another $9 billion of Treasuries. Collect another $400 million a year. Pay yourself and your team bonuses that are twice as large as last year’s. You deserve it! And you’re now about $500 million to the good.STEP 9: Wait for your stock to double or triple, which won’t take long given your amazing growth trajectory and clean balance sheet. When your market cap hits $10 billion, sell another 10% of the company for $1 billion. Now you’re really ready to grow.STEP 10: If you want to get fancy and get nice profiles written about you in business magazines, start buying branch networks from defunct banks (the FDIC will pay you to take them) and start making actual loans. Also, start hiring trading desks to gamble on things more exotic than Treasuries. Yes, all this sounds risky, but just remember–the risk isn’t yours, and you’re already $500 million to the good.STEP 11: Sell $500 million of your stock to a “strategic investor” and let the rest ride. Don’t worry, if your traders and loan officers turn out to be idiots or the Fed suddenly raises rates, the taxpayers will handle it. And you’ve already made your $1 billion.So, congratulations, you’re now a billionaire! Now all there is left to do is celebrate!——————————————————————————–* If you’ve been paying attention, you will note that the only potentially tricky step in this process is the “raise $1 billion of equity.” Where, exactly, are you going to get $1 billion of equity? Well, you will have to do some selling there.Basically, you’ll have to tell a few investors about your awesome new business plan (see above) that will earn them returns of at least 20% on their equity from Day 1. A 20% return on equity is a lot, especially when the return is largely risk free. So you should have no problem raising that $1 billion of equity.Given the government’s desperate desire to get banks to start lending again, you might also want to try to hit up the government for some funds. The pitch will be simple: Old banks aren’t lending because they’re hiding embedded losses and need to protect their balance sheets. You don’t have that problem. You’ll use the equity to LEND. (And you will use it to lend! You don’t have to say that you’re going to lend it to the US government. None of the other banks are saying that.)

Solar variations are one factor effecting climate. As there has been no positive trend in any solar index since the 1960s (and a negative trend more recently), solar forcing cannot be responsible for the recent temperature trends. The difference between the solar minimum and solar maximum over the 11-year solar cycle is 10 times smaller than the effect of greenhouse gases over the same interval.Volcanoes emit around 0.3 Gigatonnes of CO2 per year. This is about 1% of human CO2 emissions which is around 26.4 Gigatonnes per year.As for sequestration, the technology is essentially “vaporware” and there is a problem with access to carbon fuels as we progress…The western lifestyle is coming to a close…

“Goldman Sachs Puts Bonuses In Restricted Stock, Not Cash”finally something that at least makes a little bit of sense…

Your numbers on volcanos are fine but the models don’t allow for sufficient radiation blocking caused by volcanic particulates. I also soaw no mention of temperature variations inconsistant with current climate models.

After reading my post maybe I should heed my own advice??

And we just continue to lie to ourselves, as taught by the corporately-controlled educational system and government.The deniers either are direct profiteers or, perhaps, the result of poor past judgment (or both?), like exposure to DDT…Be that as it may, in the end the earth will recycle us all in one big glacial tilling.

Thanks for the request, my blog above had a bit of an admin error [Update above, 42% decrease, not 44%]…you’re right, it pays to see it writing.DEPOPULATION CURES GLOBAL WARMINGYE OF LITTLE FAITH: So you don’t trust ole softie’s gut feel projections.Here’s the 2006 oil barrels per day data [147] and it hit $100/barrel that year:http://www.dawn.com/2006/03/27/ebr7.htmCompare that to the 2009 projection URL of 85 at $70/barrel, and golly gee willerkers….we’re using 42% less projected oil today in 2009 than 2006………no wonder them darn freeways seem empty….LOLMaybe we don’t need all them hybrids and smart cars after all? All we needed was the equivalent of depopulation to solve global warming, a good ole fashion economic crisis? LOLThe rest of the URL:http://overpopulation-softwarengineer.blogspot.com/

Thanks again, I reread the backup and its 146 million bbls/day projected world use for 2006.That makes the 85 million bbl/day for this year a 41% estimated drop in consumption….I’ll correct my blog record.

Turning private debt into public debt. Was there ever any doubt that it would be any other way?

From a failed rocket launch… But, enough failures and economic disaster, which will lead to societal collapse, brings the same result

Wasn’t it minds like yours telling us back in the 50s that today we’d all have flying cars?Pure escapism. Rather than learning to live here on this planet we’re going to trash it so that we can go elsewhere, which could never happen.Do you feel lucky?

Or manufactured by Enron types?If you’d stop waving the flag long enough perhaps you could do some research into why this isn’t as preposterous as you’d like to Think that it is.On your side of the debate is less than a dozen box-cutter-wielding cave-dwellers taking down the entire USA security apparatus.On the other side lies government documents such as Operations Northwoods (scuttled for the Bay of Pigs fiasco instead). There’s Tonkin; and, Pearl Harbor wasn’t so squeaky clean. We don’t have any problem believing that other governments fabricate panic within their citizenry in order to justify control/change (speaking of- there’s PNAC’s famous document): Germany’s Reichstag fire. Why the US government should be the only government exempt from greed and corruption is beyond reason.Yes, it’s much bigger than Afghanistan, though it’s not an Afghanistan problem, it’s a US and and western society’s problem, namely the dwindling of oil reserves (which is why world growth is stalling).Unlike the lunatic minds of the Vietnam era, the actions of the US government over the last decade-plus (depends on how far back you want to reach on the oil issue), it all makes perfect sense. It really is that big of an issue such that people are willing to undertake what would otherwise be totally insane actions. Consider what the US would look like if everyone, all those armed with those millions of personal weapons, discovered that the “American Way of Life” was at an end: rather than risk internal revolt you create an external enemy (eventually, however, this facade wears out). All empires end. We can either concede this fact, or we can continue to make up stories as to how good we are (as we justify slaughtering people around the globe).

I have an idea! Let’s just walk away from all these bozos, leave them to scribble on paper and exchange it between themselves and let them feel good about it.The majority of stuff that big business does is, or will be, worthless, just like the USD.

Perhaps the best comprehensive summation of the entire situation yet!The Devil and Mr. Obama(don’t let the target audience dissuade you from reading the whole thing!)

Maybe he meant that forecasts were for 146 million bbls/day? I seem to recall an overly optimistic (read “unrealistic”) projection like this for 2030.

My hedge is working like a charm. My dividend stocks moving up nicely and the ultra shorts behaving well, specially, TWM. I have to fine-tune my holdings. Will likely replace SDS and QID by TWM (Ultra short Russell 2000 which is breaking down dramatically). In retrospect shorting the S&P500 and the Nasdaq 100 was kind of dumb as the stocks there are high caps. It looks like for a while it is gonna by like in the 70s :nifty-fifties time! Market action doesn’t look good at all.

IMHO, we will see increased layoffs starting in January, when shoppers slam their wallets shut after Christmas and the realization sinks in that things simply are not getting better for middle America. Hope I am wrong.Independent Contractor

failed “BULAVA” rocket launch which by the way is able to carry MIRV (multiple nuclear warhead)across 6-10k KM range.WOW what a RELIEF…

i WOULD NOT bet on itHAhahahahaha

Excerpt:

But at least the recession is over. This, according to Obama’s monetary point man, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. For British readers unfamiliar with the US system, the Federal Reserve is not a government agency, despite its agency like name. “The Fed” is an offshore private banking cartel that decides just how much bogus currency can be printed and circulated profitably for bankers without wrecking their Ponzi schemes. And the chairman of that august body has announced that the recession is over. Well halleluja! We can quit rolling our own cigs and buy ready mades, and run recklessly through the Dollar Store scooping up dented canned goods and cheap Chinese tube socks.That makes us luckier than the three and a half million Americans, most of whom led normal lives a few of years ago, who are now homeless. That includes one million school children sleeping in tents, shelters and other makeshift arrangements, and trying to look presentable each morning at schools that have not even the mercy to let them use the school showers. By the administration’s own calculation, the number of homeless and people out of work will continue to escalate at least into the next year. Home foreclosures, and therefore homelessness, “has not topped out yet,” says Obama.But Bernanke has announced that the recession is over. So there you have it. A grateful nation breathes a sigh of relief. And besides, he is right about it being over. The recession is over for the most important members of a capitalist society, the oligarchs and banksters, who have made fortunes off this recession, thanks to our unique economic system, and may now return to their standard garden variety usury.Economic systems are merely belief systems. I didn’t say that. Keynes said that. For instance, if the early Assyrians believed a shekel was worth a jar of wheat, then it was worth a jar of wheat. American style capitalism eventually stretched belief to the absolute limits of fantasy to the snapping point, as regards general credulity. Nobody abroad still believes the dollar is worth folding up and sticking in a wallet, certainly not worth exchanging for a good old fashioned shekel. However, be it shekels or dollars or euros, there is no economic system at all if there is no production. And there is no production if there are no jobs. Hence the obsession with unemployment rates.The U.S. Ministry of Truth has announced that our unemployment rate is at 10%. I’ve yet to meet an American who does not know the official unemployment rate is a complete fiction. One half of the unemployed — the half that has been unemployed for more than one year — are simply erased from the official count. Poof! The real rate is somewhere around 20%. But if we acknowledged that, we’d have to admit to being on par with Europe’s unemployment rate. And by diddle damned we can never do that. Every American fully understands that the purpose of life is to hang onto one meaningless job or another, two of them if possible. And by the state’s official numbers more Americans have a white knuckled grip on life’s purpose than any of those pussy socialist European nations with their free healthcare, low infant mortality rates and ridiculously long vacations.But the bad news, which the Obama administration openly acknowledges, is this: Unemployment will in all likelihood go higher. And nobody on earth knows how to reduce it (although no one in the administration is about to acknowledge that). The factories are all but gone and they are not coming back. Not unless American workers are willing to work 13 hours a day for two Chinese yuan an hour, which is about 31 cents. What US factories remain are laying workers off due to high interest rates, and waiting for a lower interest rate policy before deciding if it is feasible to call any workers back into production.During their wait they can watch hell freeze over. Banks know a fatter hog when they see it. And that hog is the consumer credit business (nobody has figured out yet that consumers need paychecks before they can consume anything, on credit or otherwise ). To that end the Federal Reserve has logically set a low interest rate policy. And in true accordance with banking logic, the banks took the Fed’s money, then raised the annual percentage rate (APR) on credit card purchases and cash advances and on balances that have a penalty rate because of late payment. Next they raised the late fee. What the hell? If Americans are on the ropes, struggling to make their payments on time, then the logical thing to do is to stick it to them. Bleed ‘em for all they’re worth. It’s an American free market tradition. We the people do not complain. We expect no mercy. America is a business and the American concept of business is pure ruthlessness.A Deutsche Bank analyst tells me a near term worst is yet to come. Bank failures and home foreclosures have not peaked. A commercial real estate bust is coming down the pike. He says that, while there will be some minor periodic upswings, the fraudulent value of the dollar is now evident as it falls against every other currency, even the Russian ruble (13%), except those unlucky enough to be pegged to the US dollar. As former Assistant Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts says: “What sort of recovery is it when the safest investment an American can make is to bet against the US dollar?” My Deutsche Bank friend, who is younger and has a family to think about, has taken what he considers more appropriate action. He’s buying gold and moving to an undeveloped Central American country.But Mr. Bernanke assures us that the worst is indeed over. Despite the outside world’s serious doubts, but Bernanke’s announcement just might fly in the U.S. We believe whatever our Ministry of Truth tells us. We believed that debt was wealth, didn’t we? And we believed in WMDs, and have come to believe warfare is a prerequisite to peace.

http://www.businessinsider.com/paper-tiger-may-quit-golf-to-save-his-marriage-2009-12Is this a #!@&!g joke?

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.”Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.Then he got elected.What’s taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy.What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?Whatever the president’s real motives are, the extensive series of loophole-rich financial “reforms” that the Democrats are currently pushing may ultimately do more harm than good. In fact, some parts of the new reforms border on insanity, threatening to vastly amplify Wall Street’s political power by institutionalizing the taxpayer’s role as a welfare provider for the financial-services industry. At one point in the debate, Obama’s top economic advisers demanded the power to award future bailouts without even going to Congress for approval — and without providing taxpayers a single dime in equity on the deals.How did we get here? It started just moments after the election — and almost nobody noticed.’Just look at the timeline of the Citigroup deal,” says one leading Democratic consultant. “Just look at it. It’s fucking amazing. Amazing! And nobody said a thing about it.”Barack Obama was still just the president-elect when it happened, but the revolting and inexcusable $306 billion bailout that Citigroup received was the first major act of his presidency. In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama’s election.That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama’s chief advisers during the campaign, didn’t make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama’s policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party’s platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive “a Nobel Prize — for evil.”But come November 5th, both were banished from Obama’s inner circle — and replaced with a group of Wall Street bankers. Leading the search for the president’s new economic team was his close friend and Harvard Law classmate Michael Froman, a high-ranking executive at Citigroup. During the campaign, Froman had emerged as one of Obama’s biggest fundraisers, bundling $200,000 in contributions and introducing the candidate to a host of heavy hitters — chief among them his mentor Bob Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Froman had served as chief of staff to Rubin at Treasury, and had followed his boss when Rubin left the Clinton administration to serve as a senior counselor to Citigroup (a massive new financial conglomerate created by deregulatory moves pushed through by Rubin himself).Incredibly, Froman did not resign from the bank when he went to work for Obama: He remained in the employ of Citigroup for two more months, even as he helped appoint the very people who would shape the future of his own firm. And to help him pick Obama’s economic team, Froman brought in none other than Jamie Rubin, a former Clinton diplomat who happens to be Bob Rubin’s son. At the time, Jamie’s dad was still earning roughly $15 million a year working for Citigroup, which was in the midst of a collapse brought on in part because Rubin had pushed the bank to invest heavily in mortgage-backed CDOs and other risky instruments.Now here’s where it gets really interesting. It’s three weeks after the election. You have a lame-duck president in George W. Bush — still nominally in charge, but in reality already halfway to the golf-and-O’Doul’s portion of his career and more than happy to vacate the scene. Left to deal with the still-reeling economy are lame-duck Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former head of Goldman Sachs, and New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, who served under Bob Rubin in the Clinton White House. Running Obama’s economic team are a still-employed Citigroup executive and the son of another Citigroup executive, who himself joined Obama’s transition team that same month.So on November 23rd, 2008, a deal is announced in which the government will bail out Rubin’s messes at Citigroup with a massive buffet of taxpayer-funded cash and guarantees. It is a terrible deal for the government, almost universally panned by all serious economists, an outrage to anyone who pays taxes. Under the deal, the bank gets $20 billion in cash, on top of the $25 billion it had already received just weeks before as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. But that’s just the appetizer. The government also agrees to charge taxpayers for up to $277 billion in losses on troubled Citi assets, many of them those toxic CDOs that Rubin had pushed Citi to invest in. No Citi executives are replaced, and few restrictions are placed on their compensation. It’s the sweetheart deal of the century, putting generations of working-stiff taxpayers on the hook to pay off Bob Rubin’s fuck-up-rich tenure at Citi. “If you had any doubts at all about the primacy of Wall Street over Main Street,” former labor secretary Robert Reich declares when the bailout is announced, “your doubts should be laid to rest.”It is bad enough that one of Bob Rubin’s former protégés from the Clinton years, the New York Fed chief Geithner, is intimately involved in the negotiations, which unsurprisingly leave the Federal Reserve massively exposed to future Citi losses. But the real stunner comes only hours after the bailout deal is struck, when the Obama transition team makes a cheerful announcement: Timothy Geithner is going to be Barack Obama’s Treasury secretary!Geithner, in other words, is hired to head the U.S. Treasury by an executive from Citigroup — Michael Froman — before the ink is even dry on a massive government giveaway to Citigroup that Geithner himself was instrumental in delivering. In the annals of brazen political swindles, this one has to go in the all-time Fuck-the-Optics Hall of Fame.Wall Street loved the Citi bailout and the Geithner nomination so much that the Dow immediately posted its biggest two-day jump since 1987, rising 11.8 percent. Citi shares jumped 58 percent in a single day, and JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley soared more than 20 percent, as Wall Street embraced the news that the government’s bailout generosity would not die with George W. Bush and Hank Paulson. “Geithner assures a smooth transition between the Bush administration and that of Obama, because he’s already co-managing what’s happening now,” observed Stephen Leeb, president of Leeb Capital Management.Left unnoticed, however, was the fact that Geithner had been hired by a sitting Citigroup executive who still had a big bonus coming despite his proximity to Obama. In January 2009, just over a month after the bailout, Citigroup paid Froman a year-end bonus of $2.25 million. But as outrageous as it was, that payoff would prove to be chump change for the banker crowd, who were about to get everything they wanted — and more — from the new president.The irony of Bob Rubin: He’s an unapologetic arch-capitalist demagogue whose very career is proof that a free-market meritocracy is a myth. Much like Alan Greenspan, a staggeringly incompetent economic forecaster who was worshipped by four decades of politicians because he once dated Barbara Walters, Rubin has been held in awe by the American political elite for nearly 20 years despite having fucked up virtually every project he ever got his hands on. He went from running Goldman Sachs (1990-1992) to the Clinton White House (1993-1999) to Citigroup (1999-2009), leaving behind a trail of historic gaffes that somehow boosted his stature every step of the way.As Treasury secretary under Clinton, Rubin was the driving force behind two monstrous deregulatory actions that would be primary causes of last year’s financial crisis: the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (passed specifically to legalize the Citigroup megamerger) and the deregulation of the derivatives market. Having set that time bomb, Rubin left government to join Citi, which promptly expressed its gratitude by giving him $126 million in compensation over the next eight years (they don’t call it bribery in this country when they give you the money post factum). After urging management to amp up its risky investments in toxic vehicles, a strategy that very nearly destroyed the company, Rubin blamed Citi’s board for his screw-ups and complained that he had been underpaid to boot. “I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more,” he said.Despite being perhaps more responsible for last year’s crash than any other single living person — his colossally stupid decisions at both the highest levels of government and the management of a private financial superpower make him unique — Rubin was the man Barack Obama chose to build his White House around.There are four main ways to be connected to Bob Rubin: through Goldman Sachs, the Clinton administration, Citigroup and, finally, the Hamilton Project, a think tank Rubin spearheaded under the auspices of the Brookings Institute to promote his philosophy of balanced budgets, free trade and financial deregulation. The team Obama put in place to run his economic policy after his inauguration was dominated by people who boasted connections to at least one of these four institutions — so much so that the White House now looks like a backstage party for an episode of Bob Rubin, This Is Your Life!At Treasury, there is Geithner, who worked under Rubin in the Clinton years. Serving as Geithner’s “counselor” — a made-up post not subject to Senate confirmation — is Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist of Citigroup, who advised Citi back in 2007 that the upcoming housing crash was nothing to worry about. Two other top Geithner “counselors” — Gene Sperling and Lael Brainard — worked under Rubin at the National Economic Council, the key group that coordinates all economic policymaking for the White House.As director of the NEC, meanwhile, Obama installed economic czar Larry Summers, who had served as Rubin’s protégé at Treasury. Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin’s Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like “Walmart: A Progressive Success Story” — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them,” Obama declared.A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal. “The president has said we will look at all of our options, but I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement,” U.S. Trade Representative Ronald Kirk told reporters in a little-publicized conference call last April.The announcement was not so surprising, given who Obama hired to serve alongside Furman at the NEC: management consultant Diana Farrell, who worked under Rubin at Goldman Sachs. In 2003, Farrell was the author of an infamous paper in which she argued that sending American jobs overseas might be “as beneficial to the U.S. as to the destination country, probably more so.”Joining Summers, Furman and Farrell at the NEC is Froman, who by then had been formally appointed to a unique position: He is not only Obama’s international finance adviser at the National Economic Council, he simultaneously serves as deputy national security adviser at the National Security Council. The twin posts give Froman a direct line to the president, putting him in a position to coordinate Obama’s international economic policy during a crisis. He’ll have help from David Lipton, another joint appointee to the economics and security councils who worked with Rubin at Treasury and Citigroup, and from Jacob Lew, a former Citi colleague of Rubin’s whom Obama named as deputy director at the State Department to focus on international finance.Over at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is supposed to regulate derivatives trading, Obama appointed Gary Gensler, a former Goldman banker who worked under Rubin in the Clinton White House. Gensler had been instrumental in helping to pass the infamous Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which prevented deregulation of derivative instruments like CDOs and credit-default swaps that played such a big role in cratering the economy last year. And as head of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, Obama named Peter Orszag, who served as the first director of Rubin’s Hamilton Project. Orszag once succinctly summed up the project’s ideology as a sort of liberal spin on trickle-down Reaganomics: “Market competition and globalization generate significant economic benefits.”Taken together, the rash of appointments with ties to Bob Rubin may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in the history of government. “Rather than having a team of rivals, they’ve got a team of Rubins,” says Steven Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. “You see that in policy choices that have resuscitated — but not reformed — Wall Street.”While Rubin’s allies and acolytes got all the important jobs in the Obama administration, the academics and progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles. Kornbluh was rewarded for being the chief policy architect of Obama’s meteoric rise by being outfitted with a pith helmet and booted across the ocean to Paris, where she now serves as America’s never-again-to-be-seen-on-TV ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Goolsbee, meanwhile, was appointed as staff director of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, a kind of dumping ground for Wall Street critics who had assisted Obama during the campaign; one top Democrat calls the panel “Siberia.”Joining Goolsbee as chairman of the PERAB gulag is former Fed chief Paul Volcker, who back in March 2008 helped candidate Obama write a speech declaring that the deregulatory efforts of the Eighties and Nineties had “excused and even embraced an ethic of greed, corner-cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system.” That speech met with rapturous applause, but the commission Obama gave Volcker to manage is so toothless that it didn’t even meet for the first time until last May. The lone progressive in the White House, economist Jared Bernstein, holds the impressive-sounding title of chief economist and national policy adviser — except that the man he is advising is Joe Biden, who seems more interested in foreign policy than financial reform.The significance of all of these appointments isn’t that the Wall Street types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former employers. It’s that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants. “Bob Rubin, these guys, they’re classic limousine liberals,” says David Sirota, a former Democratic strategist. “These are basically people who have made shitloads of money in the speculative economy, but they want to call themselves good Democrats because they’re willing to give a little more to the poor. That’s the model for this Democratic Party: Let the rich do their thing, but give a fraction more to everyone else.”Even the members of Obama’s economic team who have spent most of their lives in public office have managed to make small fortunes on Wall Street. The president’s economic czar, Larry Summers, was paid more than $5.2 million in 2008 alone as a managing director of the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and pocketed an additional $2.7 million in speaking fees from a smorgasbord of future bailout recipients, including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. At Treasury, Geithner’s aide Gene Sperling earned a staggering $887,727 from Goldman Sachs last year for performing the punch-line-worthy service of “advice on charitable giving.” Sperling’s fellow Treasury appointee, Mark Patterson, received $637,492 as a full-time lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, and another top Geithner aide, Lee Sachs, made more than $3 million working for a New York hedge fund called Mariner Investment Group. The list goes on and on. Even Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who has been out of government for only 30 months of his adult life, managed to collect $18 million during his private-sector stint with a Wall Street firm called Wasserstein-Perella.The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. “You can’t expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street,” says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama’s first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. “Credit is the lifeblood of the economy,” he declared, pledging “the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money.”http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16488

And importantly, WFCs?

Economic consensus is by definition an oxymoron. You would be very correct to run.

No, that’s not it. The “debt” & “bills” Hoyer mentions are the promises they have made to various constituencies. The Public Debt that they are authorising is simply the means to raise the cash to deliver on those promises.

It’s a black hole from our friends at CERN. We just don’t know we’re finished because we’re too close to the event horizon and essentially living out our reality while outside the system we are surely destroyed. It must have been global warming that did us in while we were being sucked into the black hole.

Recovery my butt… as most here have been saying, there is no recovery… anyone thats going to 70% off is fighting to stave off going out of business in early 2010!Stores’ Dilemma: To Deploy Discounts Now or Hold the Line .ArticleComments (11)By ELIZABETH HOLMESWho will blink first: retailers or shoppers? Chain-stores are holding bigger markdowns in reserve trying to gauge how long shoppers will wait for better deals to emerge.The standoff, which experts say could be decided in favor of shoppers as soon as this weekend, could help determine whether or not this holiday season marks the second year in a row of sales declines.View Full ImagePolarisStore visits are declining as customers wait for price cuts. A lone shopper walks through a Memphis department store late last month..Nine of 10 people waiting to finish their holiday shopping are doing so to get discounts of at least 50%, according to a survey released Thursday by UBS and market researcher America’s Research Group Ltd. A third of respondents said they are holding out for a 70% discount.Retailers are reluctant to hit the panic button. So far, they have avoided drastic price cuts by hewing to carefully planned promotions and limiting inventories. But if shoppers aren’t out in force this weekend, many mall-based clothing retailers have arranged contingency plans for additional sales and markdowns.”If we don’t have to do it, believe me, we’re not going to do it,” said Kay Krill, chief executive of women’s clothing chain AnnTaylor Stores Corp. Its Ann Taylor and its Loft outlets have discount banners “ready to go” should consumers need an incentive to shop, she said.The first week of December, typically a lackluster time in the wake of Black Friday, was particularly slow. Sales for the week ended Dec. 5 fell 18% from the prior-week period, which included Black Friday, according to market researcher ShopperTrak RCT Corp. Last year, when the recession was in full force, sales fell a lesser 14%, according to the firm, which compiles shopping traffic at malls and uses sales statistics, as well as Commerce Department figures, for its estimate.”After solid traffic the first couple of days, it looks like the middle of August out there,” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis for retail watcher NPD Group.Sales this season got off to a slow start in November, inching up just 0.7% over the prior-year period, according to market researcher Retail Metrics Inc. November mall traffic fell 6.1% over the year-ago period, according to ShopperTrak. Experts report similar trends for December..Many of the promotions offered in the mall during the past week were carried over from Black Friday. High-priced teen retailer Abercrombie & Fitch Co. gave shoppers who spent $100 or more $25 gift cards, which expire at the end of January, the end of the retailer’s fiscal fourth quarter.Gap Inc.’s namesake stores offered buy-one, get-one free sweaters on Black Friday. Last weekend, it expanded to all tops from sweaters.Sluggish sales in the first week of December have some experts saying that inflection point is near. This weekend, one of just two before Christmas, “is going to be a key weekend,” said Roxanne Meyer, a UBS retail analyst. “If we don’t see a nice pickup after this weekend, you could start to see them pull the trigger.”Waiting for discounts is a lesson consumers learned well last year, when a sharp drop in spending and a glut of inventory forced retailers to dramatically mark down their wares. Heinz Titze, a father of three from Rolling Meadows, Ill., shopped three days before Christmas last year for his wife and found plenty of bargains at women’s clothing stores in the mall. He plans to do the same this year.”If I can get a whole outfit for $50 next week compared to $100 this week, I’ll definitely take advantage of it,” Mr. Titze says. “Why wouldn’t I?”During Black Friday, Aeropostale Inc. offered 50% to 70% off all of its merchandise. Last weekend, the teen retailer switched to an item-specific promotion. But on Thursday, it reinstated the blanket discount.A Gap spokeswoman called its expanded discounts “strong calls to action.” Last month, Chief Executive Glenn Murphy said the company wouldn’t sit on its hands. “We’ve now built good contingency plans to make sure we react to the customer,” he said on a call with analysts

New Thread.

Update: 84-86 million barrels/day from 2004-2009

And think about what it means to be civilians over there. Far more of Them have died; plus, almost everyone is living with the loss of a loved one.

It’s an IOU, a promise that future generations will pay for today’s bankster party…

WRONG! Obama was never “the people’s” candidate. If one were to go back and listen to what he was saying during elections they’d see that he provided NO programs for fighting corporate lobbyists (defense, pharmaceutical, insurance and others).