WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress is putting the finishing touches on a sweeping $1 trillion-plus spending bill wrapping together the day-to-day operating budgets of 10 Cabinet departments with funding for the war in Afghanistan.

The catchall measure has been drafted by the powerful Appropriations committees behind closed doors. It cuts environmental programs and foreign aid, while limiting the Pentagon to just a 1 percent budget hike.

The measure implements this summer’s hard-fought budget pact between President Barack Obama and GOP leaders, essentially freezing agency budgets, on average, at levels enacted in April for the recently completed budget year. Disaster money and war funding are getting some additional leeway.

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As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to evolve, protestors have employed a myriad of ways to get their populist message across. There were the various occupations of public spaces, starting with Zuccotti Park; there was also Occupy Friday, a boycott of big retailers like Target (TGT), Sears (SHLD) and Macy’s (M) on Black Friday and a similar Occupy Christmas planned for later this month.

The latest method of protest that Occupy Wall Street activists have come up with is a plan West Coast port blockade. On Monday, protestors on the West Coast are planning to shut down all ports along the West Coast in an effort to disrupt the businesses of the big companies like EGT (of which Bunge Ltd (BG) is the largest partner), Goldman Sachs (GS), Walmart (WMT) and Maersk that do business at the ports. Blockades are planned in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Anchorage, among others.

According to the movement’s website, one key reason, besides the movement’s central message of fighting corporate power, behind this planned blockage, was to demonstrate solidarity with the workers at the port.

Coordinating incentives to push high risk mortgages, packaging loans to hide the nature of toxic risk, rating the SIVs, pushing the SIVS on mom, pop, pensions, and then betting against the SIVs with CDS was not illegal ?

Perhaps individually this may be the case, but there had to be coordination, collusion, agreement, etc which allowed this to occur for so many years.

By having FRE and FNM take on the paper it actually enabled Wall St to continually play the game.

Oh and let’s not forget the banks payed more money for favorable ratings on their toxic asset vehicles.

Furthermore,  all the whistle blowers were fired, black listed, excommunicated, and ignored.

The RICO ACT explains the crime committed & Danny Schechter does a good job of showing how it was pulled off.

Full article

Al one can say is DAMN !

President Obama’s popularity is plummeting, with more U.S. voters disapproving of his job than approve it, according to a recent poll.

More than half of U.S. voters believe he is performing badly in his role as the country’s leader compared to 48 per cent last month.

And although Obama has predicted unemployment will continue to drop, nearly all voters – 94 per cent – say the economy is in bad shape.

Unpopular: Obama, pictured speaking about jobs during a tour of a building renovation near the White House earlier this month, is losing favour among voters

He announced during a television interview that the number of people out of jobs could drop to eight per cent by next year’s election – the lowest since he moved into the White House in 2008.

‘I think it’s possible,” Obama told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview set to air on Sunday.

Read more: http://trade.cc/oxt

by Tom Steward

It’s that time of year again.  Thousands of Minnesotans begin implementing evacuation plans to temporarily relocate somewhere south and warm.  Before embarking, many make a preemptive appointment in a tanning facility to ramp up their exposure to ultra violet (UV) rays in advance. This winter, however, traveling tanners will have to look harder for a place to catch some rays — and not just in the frozen north.

Fourteen percent of indoor tanning facilities in Minnesota have gone out of business since 2009, according to the Indoor Tanning Association (ITA).  The number of professional indoor tanning salons registered with ITA in Minnesota has plummeted from 477 to 419 in less than two years. In the industry’s view, it’s no coincidence the store closures and layoffs came so soon after the federal government targeted tanning salons for tax hikes. “Once again we have our government trying to control our behavior,” said John Overstreet of the Indoor Tanning Association.  “You can’t just pick out an industry because someone views them some way and try to tax them into submission. That’s just crazy.”

While the economic downturn has undercut consumers’ discretionary spending, the industry places more blame on the ten percent excise tax imposed as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  The one—two punch of the untimely health care act tax and sour economy wiped out 16 percent of tanning parlors nationwide — a loss of 3,100 businesses and 24,000 jobs.  Three-quarters of tanning operations are owned by women which is three times the national average for other businesses.

“Basic economics tells you that you can’t tack ten percent on your prices without affecting demand. They’ve seen people cancel their packages, it’s definitely impacted demand and the number of customers and profitability of these businesses,” Overstreet told the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota. The tanning tax took effect in July 2010, the first tax imposed under the Obama administration’s health care reform legislation with 81 new IRS agents to enforce it. Congress estimated the excise tax on the estimated 25,000 professional tanning salons in business back then would generate $2.7 billion in revenue over ten years. The tax has raised about $37 million in the first half of the current fiscal year, putting it on course to generate less than half the $200 million in revenue projected by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation for the first full year of collections.

Read the rest here.

ens of thousands of Russians turned out in central Moscow and across the country Saturday to protest what they believe were rigged parliamentary elections.

United Russia, the party of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, suffered big losses in the election, but retained its parliamentary majority. On Saturday, protesters chanted “Putin out,” according to a correspondent from state-run RIA Novosti news agency.

Between 20,000 and 25,000 protesters had gathered in the capital, Moscow, Ria Novosti said Saturday, citing police. There have been no reports of unrest and security has been tight.

READ THE REST HERE 

By Carl Levin in The Daily Caller

__________

Unless the bastards come after me again, this is my last column on a national disgrace.

So let me be absolutely clear about who the bastards are: The New York Times, Senator Carl Levin and their 40 Democratic allies in the House of Representatives. The disgrace in question: The Times’s April 2008 “exposé” alleging conflicts of interest and wrongdoing by the retired military analysts often featured on television newscasts before and during the Iraq War.

I was one of those analysts. In fact, I wrote a first-person history of the Pentagon briefing program in a 2006 book, Warheads. After the Times article was published, I repeatedly argued that the story was perversely unfair, misleading and badly slanted. Among other defects, it omitted the “small detail” that Warheads had even been published, immediately raising fundamental questions of inaccuracy, even plagiarism.

What was far worse: Solely on the basis of The Times’s article, Senator Levin and 40 House Democrats promptly demanded investigations: by the Pentagon inspector general, the Federal Communications Commission and the General Accounting Office. None found any of the wrongdoing alleged by The Times in the article for which it was subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

This ignominy finally came full circle last week in a Washington Times article by Rowan Scarborough, one of the only journalists courageous enough to follow this story through to its wildly improbable conclusion. Scarborough had watched in 2009 while Senator Levin leveraged his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the Pentagon IG for a re-investigation. Surely the IG must have overlooked wrongdoing by the previous administration, the chairman’s reasoning went, but with Barack Obama now in power, go back and look even harder!

Pentagon inspectors general follow orders but don’t compromise their integrity. In September 2011, Scarborough reported that, its two-year re-investigation complete, the DOD IG was about to report that Pentagon officials and retired military analysts had complied with all laws and regulations. Having provided lengthy sworn statements to each of those investigations, I kept asking DOD IG public affairs officers when the final report would be released, receiving increasingly evasive replies.

Scarborough eventually uncovered and reported the shocking truth: Senator Levin directly intervened in the investigation in order to influence the wording of the final IG report. This was the political equivalent of jury-tampering but, for a while, it seemed like Senator Levin’s misconduct would go un-noticed. But then, Congressman Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced his intention to examine Senator Levin’s meddling. The DOD IG’s final report was issued last week, reported appropriately enough by Rowan Scarborough.

Read more: http://trade.cc/ost

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has warned that the federal budget cuts could be “devastating” for the Pentagon. (Jonathan Ernst – Reuters)

With deeper budget cuts looming, the Pentagon is starting to cut back by trimming the Defense Department’s civilian workforce.

The Army said Thursday it is moving forward with plans announced in July to cut about 8,700 positions, using a mix of early retirement offers, buyouts and attrition to trim the jobs by the end of the fiscal year in late September.

“Army commands and agencies are continuing to take necessary actions to reduce their civilian on-board strength to meet funded targets established by the secretary of defense and reflected in the President’s budget,” Thomas R. Lamont, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, said in a statement. “To the maximum extent possible, the Army will rely on voluntary departures to achieve these manpower reductions.”

The cuts will come in 37 states at 70 different locations across eight commands and agencies with nearly 90 percent of the cuts taking place within the Installation Management Command, Army Materiel Command and the Training and Doctrine Command. Most of the cuts are likely to occur in Virginia and Texas, where most of the DOD’s civilian workers are located.

In addition to eligible workers who retire, commanders will be able to use voluntary early retirement offers and buyouts to cut jobs, the Army said.

The failure of the bipartisan debt supercommittee means the Pentagon budget could be cut by a total of $1 trillion over the next decade — what defense leaders warn is a “huge” cut that would amount to a 23 percent reduction in the defense budget, resulting in furloughs and layoffs of “many” civilians and a reduction in the size of the military. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has warned that the cuts could be “devastating” for the Pentagon, creating a “substantial risk” that the country’s defense needs might not be met.

SOURCE 

STORY HERE

(CNN) — Almost half of German people believe that their country’s economy would be in a better position today if it hadn’t joined the euro, according to the findings of a survey commissioned by CNN.

About the same number of Germans is also opposed to a more tight-knit “United States of Europe,” along lines favored by their leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel. The concept enjoys stronger backing in poorer countries such as Spain and Greece, the study found.

The research conducted by ComRes and released on a day that saw European leaders agree to strengthen financial ties to ward off financial crisis, shows opinions broadly divided along lines of national wealth across the continent.

WASHINGTON – House Republicans are on a collision course with the White House and potentially the Senate over an emerging proposal to extend the payroll tax cut, teeing up a protracted debate that could keep lawmakers in Washington for the holidays as they try to avert a Jan. 1 tax increase.

The Senate on Thursday afternoon rejected rival Democratic and GOP plans for extending the cut. The failure was expected, cueing the House to step in with a new plan.

Details of that proposal, expected to be unveiled in full on Friday, suggest its Republican authors are preparing for a showdown with President Obama. The bill includes a controversial provision to move along the construction of an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas — the Obama administration recently put that project on hold until after the 2012 election, citing environmental and safety concerns.

The provision pertaining to the Keystone pipeline helped sweeten the deal for House conservatives skeptical of a payroll tax extension.

BOSTON (MarketWatch) — If you want to understand the latest Franco-German proposal to “save” the euro, imagine this.

Imagine the governments of China and Japan demanding they be given the legal right to override the U.S. budget’s legislative process if needed, and to impose tax hikes and spending cuts on the American people as needed.

After all, China and Japan are our biggest creditors. The U.S. government owes them trillions. We’re not quite as deeply in debt as a share of our economic output, as Europe’s naughtiest Nellies. But we’re not far behind either.

Markets rallied this week on hopes that the leaders of the European Union will at long last solve the region’s budget crisis. Center stage is the new proposal from Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. They want to turn Europe into, effectively, a federal government, with the power to impose budget discipline on wayward members.

Their proposal is preposterous. Anything can happen in this life, but it would be remarkable indeed if this idea got off the ground. Anyone pinning their hopes that this will solve the crisis needs to think it through.

Why would the Portuguese accept the right of Germany to impose budget cuts on their country? Why would the Greeks?

Would we accept that role for the Chinese and the Japanese, the biggest holders of Treasury debt? How would you feel if you opened the paper to be told that the new Sino-Japanese “Fiscal Stability Commission” in Washington had just slashed your grandma’s Social Security checks by one-third, scaled back federal highway repairs, and that it would impose a 10% national sales tax?

That is, after all, effectively what is being offered to the people of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland.

It’s absurd. There is no reason why these countries should have to surrender sovereignty. They can simply, where necessary, default. A default by, say, Louisiana would not destroy the dollar. Neither did the bankruptcy of Enron or Lehman.

The British look smarter and smarter for staying out of the euro area in the first place. Prime Minister John Major, and then, later, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, each took the decision to keep the British pound free. At the time fashionable opinion predicted disaster for the Brits. So much for that.

(Predictably, fashionable opinion now says the Brits look “isolated” for staying out. Really, you couldn’t make it up).

It has long been clear the Franco-German duo wanted to use their shared currency to bludgeon the continent into something closer to a federal system.

Any investor pinning their hopes on this bird flying needs to be aware it looks a lot more like a turkey than an eagle.

This week’s meeting of European leaders already marks the fifth “summit” to solve the region’s debt crisis since early 2009.

My favorite comment this time: “After a series of ‘final’ summits, it would be nice this time to have a real ‘final’ summit.” That was from Standard & Poor’s chief European economist, appropriately-enough named Jean-Michel Six. What’s the betting Mr. Six will be attending Summit No. Six in the new year?

BRUSSELS (AP) — The leaders of the 17 countries that use the euro, plus six others, have tentatively agreed to a new treaty that enforces stricter budget rules seen as crucial to solving Europe’s debt crisis and holding the currency-bloc together.

The effort by Germany and France to persuade all 27 European Union countries to agree to treaty changes failed, in large part because of Britain’s refusal to give up some powers.

Following marathon all-night talks, the 23 decided to back a new treaty with strict oversight over national budgets, as they try to convince markets that the euro has a future. An agreement on fiscal discpline is considered a critical first step before the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others would commit more financial aid to help countries like Italy and Spain, which have large debts and unsustainable borrowing costs.

ECB President Mario Draghi praised the tentative deal as a good result for the eurozone.

The immediate market response was lukewarm, with stock markets in Europe fairly steady — the Stoxx 50 of leading European shares was trading 0.1 percent lower while the euro was down 0.1 percent at $1.3336.

Markets may be worried that the failure of the EU to get unanimous support for more stringent budgetary rules may rattle the foundations of a union created to foster peace and prosperity across Europe following World War II.

Even after Friday’s long-awaited deal, watched by governments and markets worldwide, the European leaders have huge hurdles still ahead. They are meeting again later Friday to work out what exactly their new treaty will contain and how violators of its strict budget rules will be policed. They want it written by March.

Britain, which doesn’t use the euro, led the push against a revised treaty tying all 27 EU countries to tighter fiscal union. The others that didn’t sign on were Hungary, the Czech Republic and Sweden.

Britain’s leaders argued that the revised treaty would threaten its national sovereignty and London’s esteemed financial services industry.

Most EU countries had pushed for an EU-wide accord to avoid a split, but Germany and France, the eurozone’s biggest economies, quickly made clear that a deal among the 17 euro countries and whoever else wanted to join was better than nothing.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid the blame at the feet of British Prime Minister David Cameron.

“David Cameron made a proposal that seemed to us unacceptable, a protocol to the treaty that would have exonerated the United Kingdom from a great number of financial service regulations,” Sarkozy said shortly before dawn, after what he called a “difficult” dinner meeting had dragged through the night.

Cameron defended his stance.

“What was on offer is not in Britain’s interest so I didn’t agree to it,” he told reporters in Brussels.

“We’re not in the euro and I’m glad we’re not in the euro,” he said. “We’re never going to join the euro and we’re never going to give up this kind of sovereignty that these countries are having to give up.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtHgOzGXXAU&feature=g-all

And he lit all the candles.

Full Article

In a dance as intricate and gay looking as I’ve ever seen, Eric Holder is busy talking about the long lasting negative ramifications of the gun running scandal his department approved while at the same time denying he knew anything about it despite us having already seen memos that inform us he knew exactly what was going out. The hypocrisy is so thick it’s sickening.

WASHINGTON – Attorney General Eric Holder suggested Thursday that weapons lost during the course of the failed “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation will continue to show up at crime scenes in the U.S. and Mexico “for years to come.”

Holder, in testimony on Capitol Hill that comes as the congressional investigation into the program expands, decried the “gun-walking” tactic used in the operation as “inexcusable” and “wholly unacceptable.” But a day after an influential senator called for the resignation of one of Holder’s top deputies over the scandal, Holder denied department leaders played any role in the crafting of Fast and Furious.

He continued to assert that top Justice officials were not told about the “inappropriate tactics” until they were made public.

Still, the top law enforcement official in the country conceded that, as a result of Fast and Furious, guns lost by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives remain in the hands of criminals.

“Although the department has taken steps to ensure that such tactics are never used again, it is an unfortunate reality that we will continue to feel the effects of this flawed operation for years to come,” he said. “Guns lost during this operation will continue to show up at crime scenes on both sides of the border.”

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Americans split on almost every important issue facing Washington, but they agree on this much: Republicans and Democrats share blame for the failure of the Congressional “super committee,” and the resulting automatic budget cuts are unacceptable.

In CNBC’s new All-America Economic Survey, a robust 62 percent majority blamed the two parties equally for the committee’s inability to reach a compromise on $1 trillion to $2 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 10 years. That includes more than 70 percent of Republicans and independents, though nearly half of Democrats and a majority of Occupy Wall Street supporters blame Republicans in particular.

Moreover, Americans overwhelmingly reject the consequences of that failure – $1.2 trillion in automatic budget cuts, divided equally between military and non-military programs. In the legislative deal Democrats and Republicans struck to create the super-committee, those cuts were intended to be so unpopular that they would force super committee members to reach a bi-partisan deal.

The survey shows that Washington got it half right – the part about the unpopularity of automatic cuts. Just 16 percent of Americans favor proceeding with the cuts, which are due to take effect in January 2013. Some 25 percent prefer an alternative plan with deeper budget cuts.

A 43 percent plurality favors an alternative plan containing fewer budget cuts. In a reflection of the limited appetite for cutting defense at a time when the nation is at war, even a 39 percent plurality of Republicans prefer fewer cuts than the automatic reductions call for.

That broad opposition to the automatic cuts underscores the opportunity Congress has over the next year to devise a new deficit-reduction plan.

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Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator for the Financial Times and long time critic of the Eurozone is optimistic that something tangible will emerge from the crucial, critical, and “endlessly hyped” two-day summit between EU officials commencing today. Alas, tangible and effective are wholly different concepts.

Wolf says the options are simple: the Eurozone can do the bare minimum to ward off economic chaos or come up with a maximal, comprehensive solution that is obviously never going to happen. The half-baked option, according to Wolf, is to “give enough cover, in terms of longer run discipline and longer run reform… to allow the ECB to start intervening in government bond markets in a much more aggressive way”.

By way of translation, Wolf’s idea is akin America’s method for cutting our budget. First you posture, yell, argue and point fingers. Next you refuse any meaningful compromise in the now, leaving the hard decisions to your political successors. Finally you chuck money at the problem in a fiscally reckless manner designed to do nothing more than buy time.

Barring a wild modification of human and political nature this bare-boned solution is what’s going to be detailed for us Friday afternoon. The problem with merely prolonging the crisis is that ultimate success is entirely reliant on an economic recovery in Europe to enable member nations to buy things from one another even as half of the Eurozone is facing mandatory austerity measures.

In short, the idea is to give countries less and hope they buy more while somehow not incurring more debt. It’s an idea akin to he ECB becoming a Federal Reserve cover-band playing tired versions of America’s failed policies. Regardless, Wolf says it’s the Eurozone’s only hope.