Not a tinfoil hat story, but an ever increasing intrusion upon your privacy….
Comments »Monthly Archives: March 2012
Richard Branson Requests Mary Jane @ White House
Yesterday’s Oil Spike is No Doubt the Result of an 8 to 6 Israeli Vote to Attack Iran
Money Velocity: Damned if You Do; Damned if You Don’t
Here is a great piece on where money sits, where it is flowing, and where it might end up. The problem is the consequences for the investor is dire either way.
Comments »Sources ID Soldier Suspected in Afghan Massacre
U.S. military sources tell Fox News the American soldier accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians last weekend is Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
He arrived at the maximum-security military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas Friday, Fox News confirms.
Military officials have declined to identify the suspect publicly, insisting that it is usual procedure to keep a suspect’s identity secret until he is officially charged. They have maintained that stance even after a hearing for the detained soldier Tuesday found probable cause to continue holding him, and he was sent from Afghanistan to a detention facility in Kuwait.
he soldier was being flown Friday to the U.S. military’s only maximum-security prison, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, sources said. The move to the U.S. does not necessarily mean an announcement of formal criminal charges is imminent, a defense official told The Associated Press.Bales is a 38-year-old staff sergeant, husband, father of two young children and a veteran who was in the midst of his fourth tour in a war zone.
John Henry Browne, a defense attorney from Seattle, confirmed his client’s identity.
Bales was featured in a brief article in a September 2011 military newsletter detailing a training exercise at Fort Irwin meant to simulate efforts to establish relationships with Afghan village residents.
“How’s the security affecting your family?” the article quotes Bales asking a village elder. The elder replies it’s “much better than yesterday.”
Another article, from 2009, quotes Bales describing a particularly intense firefight in Iraq: “It was like a match lit up,” Bales said. “It looked like a toy with a candle lit.”
Browne said the sergeant is originally from the Midwest but now lives near Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. His children are 3 and 4.
The sergeant’s family says they saw no signs of aggression or anger. “They were totally shocked” by accounts of the massacre, Browne said. “He’s never said anything antagonistic about Muslims. He’s in general very mild-mannered.”
Browne, who said he has met with the family and talked with the suspect, cited a need to protect family members in declining to release the soldier’s name.
Reporters swarmed Bales’ neighborhood in Lake Tapps, in Washington state on Friday night in the rural community, a wooded area filled with pine trees about 20 miles northeast of the base.
Kassie Holland, who lives next door, said she would often see Bales playing with his two kids and the family together at the modern split-level home.
“My reaction is that I’m shocked,” she said. “I can’t believe it was him. There were no signs. It’s really sad. I don’t want to believe that he did it.”
“He always had a good attitude about being in the service. He was never really angry about it. When I heard him talk, he said, it seemed like, yeah, that’s my job. That’s what I do. He never expressed a lot of emotion toward it.”
The soldier, said to have received sniper training, is assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, of the 2nd Infantry Division, which is based at Lewis-McChord and has been dispatched to Iraq three times since 2003, military officials say.
Read the rest here.
Drinking With Bob: ‘We Need a Revolution’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pNNTBF_4ns&feature=g-all-lik&context=G2dae680FAAAAAAAAJAA
Comments »Goldman Person Leaked Apple, Intel Secrets: Lawyer
By Grant McCool
NEW YORK | Fri Mar 16, 2012 7:30pm EDT
(Reuters) – A person at Goldman Sachs Group Inc, who has not been identified or charged in a broad U.S. insider-trading probe, was caught on a wiretap leaking secrets about Intel Corp and Apple Inc, a lawyer for accused former Goldman board member Rajat Gupta said in court on Friday.
Lawyer Gary Naftalis, in a heated exchange with U.S. prosecutor Reed Brodsky during a pre-trial hearing, said the Goldman person leaked confidential information about the two companies to Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group hedge fund founder convicted of insider-trading charges last year.
Gupta, the best-known corporate executive accused in a sweeping prosecution of insider-trading at hedge funds in recent years, denies criminal charges that he tipped Rajaratnam with Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble Co secrets between 2007 and 2009. His trial is scheduled to begin in May.
“In a letter he (Brodsky) said the government had a person who provided confidential information to Raj Rajaratnam about Apple and Intel,” Naftalis said. “There is also wiretap evidence, substantial evidence of another source at Goldman Sachs.”
Naftalis told U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff the defense believed “there is a much more circumstantial case that person should be sitting in the box rather than us.”
Read the rest here.
Comments »Oil Shoots Up $2 After Announcing the Release of The Strategic Oil Reserve
Documentary: “I Am Fishead” Are Corporate Leaders Egotistical Psychopaths ?
Enjoy your green beer weekend!
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MWpxH-RlFQ 450 300]“It is a well-known fact that our society is structured like a pyramid. The very few people at the top create conditions for the majority below. Who are these people? Can we blame them for the problems our society faces today? Guided by the saying “A fish rots from the head”we set out to follow that fishy odor. What we found out is that people at the top are more likely to be psychopaths than the rest of us.
Who, or what, is a psychopath? Unlike Hollywood’s stereotypical image, they are not always blood-thirsty monsters from slasher movies. Actually, that nice lady who chatted you up on the subway this morning could be one. So could your elementary school teacher, your grinning boss, or even your loving boyfriend.
The medical definition is simple: A psychopath is a person who lacks empathy and conscience, the quality which guides us when we choose between good and evil, moral or not. Most of us are conditioned to do good things. Psychopaths are not. Their impact on society is staggering, yet altogether psychopaths barely make up one percent of the population.
Through interviews with renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo, leading expert on psychopathy Professor Robert Hare, former President of Czech Republic and playwright Vaclav Havel, authors Gary Greenberg and Christopher Lane, professor Nicholas Christakis, among numerous other thinkers, we have delved into the world of psychopaths and heroes and revealed shocking implications for us and our society.”
Comments »A Look @ Our Presidential Candidates: Romney vs Paul
[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLWnB9FGmWE 450 300] [youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYIP8lGBtFQ 450 300]
Comments »The media and gas prices: 2008 vs 2012
Read here:
Comments »It happens every spring. The players take their positions for the big game. The fans start screaming as the huge numbers on the board go up and up and up.
No, it’s not college basketball. It’s a madness of a different kind, as anchors and reporters manipulate coverage of one of the necessities of American life for maximum political gain.
It would be humorous if it weren’t so insane. But for the mainstream media it’s become almost a game. They scored points blaming Bush and now rack them up defending Obama. Nowhere is that more apparent than with gas prices.
So here we are again, with prices shooting skyward and a president and an energy secretary who have both previously said they supported high gas prices.
Stephen Chu, you’ll recall, said, “somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Now he’s backed off that position, at least “officially.” And then it was President Obama telling CNBC’s John Harwood “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment” to gas prices.
So it’s not like the American public should feel confident that the folks running things “feel your pain,” as President Clinton used to say. And it’s not like the media deliver even vaguely consistent reporting.
Back in May, 2008, in the week before gas prices spiked to $3.80, the major networks did 57 separate stories and briefs on the issue. In 2012, under the same circumstances, the networks did just 26 stories – less than half.
But with a Republican president in the White House, ABC, CBS and NBC delivered stories on driving cars with vegetable oil instead of gas, so-called “hypermiling” (an ioditic way to maximize mileage by coasting while in traffic), and a gas giveaway to those who prayed at the pump.
Every story was hyped.
The gallons and gallons of coverage were laced with numerous customer complaints saying, with apologies to Jimmy McMillan, the gas price is too damn high.
On May 15, 2008, CBS “Evening News” did an “Eye on the Road” report that gas prices were forcing the city of Louisville to make cuts and “half the city’s public pools will be padlocked this summer leaving these little girls high and dry.” ABC News financial correspondent Bianna Golodryga even included a clip in her story from a protest song that complained about high gas prices. “♪♫ ♪ Price gouging, so we’re shouting, who’s jacking up the cost of fuel ♪♫ ♪,” sang Jay Weinberg in the video, who claimed to be fighting the cost of gas with his songs and Web site.
But the tune they’re singing this time around is definitely not the same in 2012.
Not only are the stories fewer, but now journalists are defending the president.
CBS’s Charlie Rose told viewers on March 13, 2012, that, “the president has a point, doesn’t he? There’s little that he can do necessarily to – in the short term – to affect gas prices, and gas prices hurts his political chances.” His colleague Bob Schieffer agreed, saying “Well, that’s right on all counts, Charlie.”
ABC’s “World News with Dianne Sawyer” ran an upbeat economic story comparing the economy to the patient in the game of “Operation.” Dan Harris mentioned how gas prices had held back the recovery before, but, added, “tonight, there is true optimism that our patient is healing.”
It’s not just the networks either.
Naturally, high gas prices always draw the left out to admit that they like it this way. Howard Gleckman, a resident fellow at The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor headlined: “Gas prices should be higher.” In it, he argued “we ought to be raising taxes on fossil fuels. A lot.”
He also cited others who felt the same way, including former Bush aide, now working as a Romney adviser, Gregory Mankiw, who recently wrote that “a tax exceeding $2 a gallon makes sense.” It’s now just 18.4 cents.
Politico’s Alex Burns went positively apoplectic about voters who might be upset with Obama’s anti-energy policies, calling them “Forrest Gump-like.” He added that, “to reassess a president’s performance in the context of a short-term increase in gas prices is more of a tantrum-like response to a new feeling of discomfort over which the president has relatively little control.”
That’s the true media spin of 2012 – high gas prices aren’t the president’s fault. Even though The Washington Post recently noted that candidate Obama was happy to blame then-President Bush for high gas prices. “And during the 2008 presidential race, Barack Obama said in a campaign speech that ‘here in Ohio, you’re paying nearly $3.70 a gallon for gas — 21/2 times what it cost when President Bush took office.’”
What all of this spin ignores is what Newt Gingrich tried to teach the media morons – that the president sets a tone and the markets follow.
If Obama pushed for more drilling, more exploration, opened the ANWR, approved the Keystone pipeline and more, he’d force speculators to react. Oil prices might not plummet, but the the market would look a lot different.
But the Obama administration is pro-high prices, pro-gas taxes, against new drilling, against the pipeline and more. And it’s about time for the media to Tell The Truth why you are paying nearly $4 a gallon. It’s time to end the madness.
ANGELICA HUSTON: US RETURNING TO ’DARK AGES
You Can Not Ignore the Data….China is Crashing Full Retard Style
(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY China’s economy is now in bad enough shape that Beijing can’t hide it anymore.
The cause is the air rushing out of its housing bubble and, just as in the U.S., taking everything down with it.
“If you look at the Chinese data, you should stop debating about a hard landing,” said Adrian Mowat, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) chief Asian and emerging-market strategist. “China is in a hard landing. Car sales are down, cement production is down, steel production is down, construction stocks are down. It’s not a debate anymore, it’s a fact.”
What’s especially scary is that if the official data is showing a downturn, then the reality is certainly much worse. Economic statistics from the People’s Republic are notoriously unreliable. They are produced to serve political ends, a fact acknowledged by no less than Vice President Xi Jinping, who is expected to be the nation’s next leader.
Bloomberg recently added up all the debt disclosed by China’s 231 local government financing companies through Dec. 10. It found they had borrowed $622 billion. This is more than the European bailout fund and dwarfs the amount reported by the government and Chinese banks. While that is bad, it gets worse: There are 6,576 such entities in China, according to the National Audit Office. That audit office put the total debt for all those entities at $759 billion. This means 231 borrowers — or 3.5 percent of the total number — are responsible for more than three-quarters of the overall debt. If you believe that …
The whimsical nature of official Chinese data explains why markets reacted so badly when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said 2012 GDP growth would be 7.5 percent instead of the 8 percent it has been for the previous seven years. China always hits or surpasses its numbers because it makes them up. (The official China Daily newspaper offered a priceless explanation for Wen’s announcement: “By decelerating its GDP growth to 7.5 percent, the slowest since 2005, the Chinese government aims to promote the quality of its economic growth.”)
So, what does it mean when even the made up number has to be lowered? Nothing good….”
Comments »Jobless Numbers Suggest the Economy is Growing Faster Than We Think
Economists are scratching their heads over the recent failure of a textbook economic law: In order for the unemployment rate to be where it is today, our economy should be growing faster than it is.
FORTUNE — Lately the improving jobs picture has stumped many Wall Street economists, who say the labor market seems to be doing better than what the pace of economic growth would suggest.
Goldman Sachs (GS) and a few other Wall Street firms forecast annualized GDP growth of less than 2% this quarter. And yet, the unemployment rate in January dropped to 8.3% – the lowest level in three years. The decline goes against Okun’s Law, which economists have historically relied on to forecast what the job market might look like given how quickly (or slowly) the economy is growing. As a rule of thumb, Okun holds that year-on-year economic growth of 2 percentage points above the trend — widely considered 2.5% — is needed to lower unemployment by one point. And vice versa.
Since the Great Recession, the unemployment rate has defied the law.
James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington DC-based think tank, has laid out three instances: In 2009, the unemployment rate edged to 10% following a 3.5% drop in GDP. But under Okun, unemployment should have risen higher to 10.4%.
At the end of 2010, the unemployment rate fell to 9.4% from 9.9% the previous year. But given that the 3% rise in GDP was barely above trend, the jobless rate should have stayed flat. And in 2011, when GDP rose a point below trend to 1.7%, Okun would have predicted that unemployment would rise to 9.9%. However, it actually fell to 8.5% from 9.4%.
All this has made many wonder if the economy is doing better than what the data currently shows or if unemployment seems artificially low.
It could be that today’s GDP statistics are wrong. The economy might actually be growing much faster than we think, which wouldn’t be too surprising since it’s not unusual for growth statistics to get revised years later as economic data comes in. In a research note to clients on Monday, JP Morgan (JPM) economist James Glassman pointed to the 2008-2009 recession in which GDP was significantly revised downward last year.
“At the time employment trends were much weaker than the impression left by the real GDP trends,” he noted. “That was three years after the fact. With the economy now recovering, there is a high probability that preliminary estimates of national output eventually will be revised up.”
Certainly that could happen, but that still doesn’t capture the whole jobless picture.
The unemployment rate is also influenced by the labor participation rate – that is, the percentage of working-age persons who are employed as well as unemployed and searching for work. While labor participation has been stabilizing recently, it has declined considerably over the years. AsFortune pointed out last week, the drop might have less to do with discouraged workers giving up their job hunt (as economists widely believe), but also the flux of aging baby boomers retiring and leaving the labor pool altogether…..”
Comments »Moody’s Zandi: Fed Will Have to Raise Rates Due to Inflation
“Can the Fed stick to its promise to keep interest rates at virtually zero through late 2014? A growing chorus of voices warns not to bet on that outcome, which has major implications for the bond market and for U.S. spending policy during an election year.
The Consumer Price Index was up 0.4 percent. Annualized, that’s inflation of 2.9 percent, well above the Fed’s target of 2 percent. Core inflation, which leaves aside volatile food and energy costs, was up 0.1 percent in February.
Even so, core inflation exceeds the annualized target, hitting 2.2 percent.
“Inflation will be higher than they think,” Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics chief economist, told CNBC, referring to the Fed’s rate-setting committee, the FOMC.
“They said they’ll start to raise rates late 2014, but they’ll be unable to stick to that commitment. They’ll be under pressure to start tightening sooner.”
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker agrees. He wrote on the bank’s web site that the Fed would like have to raise interest rates in 2013 to hold off inflation. “My current assessment is that an increase in interest rates is likely to be necessary some time in 2013,” Lacker wrote….”
Comments »Democrats trying to pressure Fannie, Freddie into loan forgiveness
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Comments »A top regulator’s unbending refusal to use troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to rescue underwater homeowners is whipping up a growing protest from liberal lawmakers and advocacy groups — some of whom are now calling on President Obama to fire him.
The little-known Washington official, Edward DeMarco, is under pressure by the left to reduce mortgage principals for struggling borrowers. Nearly 20 Democrats in Congress along with groups like MoveOn.org have launched somewhat of a campaign against the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Their solution would presumably help thousands of families, but at taxpayer expense.
And DeMarco has suggested it just wouldn’t be fair to use government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to clear the way for a multi-billion-dollar homeowner bailout. In a recent letter, he said foreclosure prevention programs have already added to American taxpayer loss and destabilized neighborhoods.
But the lawmakers and advocacy groups allege he’s standing in the way of a robust housing recovery, and want him to either relent to their demands or step down. Absent that, some are calling on Obama to fire him.
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Financial Service Committee, recently joined the ranks of those calling on DeMarco to step down.
The lawmakers specifically want DeMarco to agree to write down principal amounts for struggling homeowners. The Van Jones-backed Rebuild the Dream, which is circulating a petition supposedly signed by 90,000 people, calls DeMarco the “number one obstacle to solutions for struggling homeowners” and a “right-wing ideologue” who sides with Wall Street.
A House aide with the Progressive Caucus, whose members are pressuring DeMarco, told FoxNews.com that the strategy is to get him to “write down the loans or get out of the way.”
