When Wall Street is hurting, money's never a problem. But when the states are on the brink of default and 14 million workers are scrimping to feed their families, there's not a dime to spare. Explain that to your kids.
As horrific as the gulf environmental catastrophe is, an even more intractable and cataclysmic disaster may be looming. The yet unknowable costs associated with clean-up, litigation and compensation damages due to arguably the world's worst environmental tragedy, may be in the process of triggering a credit event by British Petroleum (BP) that will be equally devastating to global over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. The potential contagion may eventually show that Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns were simply early warning signals of the devastation lurking and continuing to grow unchecked in the $615T OTC Derivatives market.
Now credit has been cut to BP. Counter-parties will not accept their name beyond one year in duration. This is unheard of. A giant is on the ropes. If he falls, the very earth may shake as he hits the ground. As we are beginning to see, the Western pension structure, financial trading and global credit are all inter-twined. BP is central to this, as a massive supplier of what many believe(d) to be AAA credit. So while we see banks roll over and die, and sovereign entities begin to falter… we now have a major oil company on the verge of going under. Another leg of the global economic "chair" is being viciously kicked out from under us." More...
What is the invisible force that's suddenly gutting the housing market, driving consumer confidence into a sinkhole, and killing the recovery that Washington was so avidly touting just a few months ago?
Bernanke won't say. But the answer is clear: The recovery had very little substance to begin with. Rather, it was, in essence, a mirage — a dead cat bounce bought and paid for by Washington's massive bailouts, stimulus programs, and money printing.
Put another way, the recession never really ended. Yes, we saw some growth in GDP. And yes, thanks to that growth, some companies are still reporting better earnings — the news that spurred a rally in the stock market last week. But at the core of the economy, the fires that started the recession are still burning intensely. More...
How does one decrease the cost of labor in America?
Well first, you have to bust the unions. Check.
Then you have to create a pressing need for people to work - perhaps give them easy access to credit and then get them to go so deeply into debt that they will have to work until they die to pay them off. Check.
It also helps if you push up the cost of living by manipulating commodity prices. Check.
Then, take away people’s retirement savings. Check.
Lower interest rates to make savings futile and interest income inadequate. Check.
And finally, threaten to take away the 12% a year that people have been saving for retirement by labeling Social Security an "entitlement" program - as if it wasn’t money Americans worked their whole lives to save and gave to the government in good faith. Check. More...
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
Northwestern University's Gregory Ryskin, a bio-chemical engineer, has a theory: The oceans periodically produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas. He has documented the scientific evidence that such an event was directly responsible for the mass extinctions that occurred 55 million years ago. [4]
Many geologists concur: "The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide..." [5] More...
As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. "These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself," according to sources cited by Reuters. The "flow team" of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil.
Like-for-like, methane is 23 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide or CO2 at trapping solar radiation, as recognised within the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Methane is far more reflective and calculated over a period of 20 years, as opposed to 100 years, its radiative force is 72 times that of CO2 emissions. This makes vast releases of methane very powerful "positive feedback" loops that accelerate global warming.
Scientists have been discussing a number of scenarios of methane escaping from the ocean floor for some time. The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas -- primarily methane -- could be a cause of past, present and future climate chaos. It is believed that the release of trapped methane is a main factor in the global warming of 6°C that happened during the end-Permian extinction. "Methane Driven Oceanic Eruption" also predicts this will greatly affect available oxygen content of the atmosphere. As temperature rises, the permafrost is likely to melt. The methane released from beneath the permafrost could increase temperatures further, melting the permafrost faster, releasing even more methane, and so on. It is feared that such a scenario would accelerate Global Warming to the point where nothing humankind could do would reverse the problem. More...
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low.
There are also a growing number of employed people who, despite having a job, are still living in poverty. There are at least 15 million workers who now fall into this rapidly growing category. $32,390 a year is not going to get you far in today’s economy, and half of the country is making less than that. This is why many Americans are now forced to work two jobs to provide for their family to hopefully make ends meet.
The mainstream news media will numb us to this horrifying reality by endlessly talking about the latest numbers, but they never piece them together to show you the whole devastating picture, and they rarely show you all the immense individual suffering behind them. This is how they “normalize the unthinkable” and make us become passive in the face of such a high casualty count. More...
This video shows how financial class insiders in One West Bank use the assets of IndyBank (which the FDIC sold to One West) and loss guarantees by the FDIC to make hundreds of thousands of dollars on every home they foreclose on. No one wonder these banks are not interested in modifying loan terms. These greedy people are making millions throwing people out into the streets.
Well, we had another flash Crash yesterday, just like the one on May 6, 2010. The only difference is, this time the stocks in question went up instead of down.
In case you missed it, Washington Post’s stock went from $458 to $900 per share in the blink of an eye. All the orders at $900 were cancelled and the market authorities did the usual, “move along folks, nothing to see here,” bit.
The culprits in both incidents (May 6 and yesterday) were High Frequency Trading Programs (HFTPs).
The HFTP industry (and lobbying efforts), always defend their actions by stating that they provide liquidity or make sure the markets are efficient or other nonsensical arguments that fall apart the minute you spend more than 10 seconds thinking about them. More...
The appearance of progress on some issues overshadowed the underlying deterioration of societal institutions and practices. Social Security was “saved” by Alan Greenspan and his commission. Essentially he manipulated the CPI calculation downward, screwing future generations of seniors out of their rightful payouts. Politically difficult decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid were deferred to sometime in the distant future. With oil prices averaging $20 per barrel through the 1980s and 1990s, a coherent long-term energy strategy seemed unnecessary to the next election cycle politicians who control this country. The deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry gave them many of the capabilities of banks, without the same regulations as banks. Imprudent real estate lending, fraud and insider transactions by S&L executives, protected by high powered Washington politicians, led to the first financial crisis. The failure of 747 thrifts and losses of $160 billion to the taxpayer can be attributed to lax oversight and fraud.
The United States has experienced a three decade long “expenditure cascade”. An expenditure cascade occurs when the rapid income growth of top earners fuels additional spending by the lower earners. The cascade begins among top earners, which encourages the middle class to spend more which, in turn, encourages the lower class to spend more. Ultimately, these expenditure cascades reduce the amount that each family saves, as there is less money available to save due to extra spending. Expenditure cascades are triggered by consumption. The consumption of the wealthy triggers increased spending in the class directly below them and the chain continues down to the bottom. This is a dangerous reaction for those at the bottom who have little disposable income originally and even less after they attempt to keep up with others spending habits. The personal savings rate was 12% in the early 1980s and declined to negative 1% by 2005. The expenditure cascade couldn’t have occurred without easy access to debt. The question that must be asked is, who benefits from debt and who pays? More...
This video shows how the nation and the world have been enslaved in the web of the central banks including our own, the Federal Reserve. These criminals were directly responsible for the wars, assassinations and attempted assassinations of presidents and other world leaders.
Eisenhower and Kennedy both warned us of them and yet the nation chose to ignore their warnings. Double-click on the video icon to view full size.
We write this letter concerning the worst man-made, and ongoing, environmental catastrophe of the modern era, and perhaps the worst calamity the entire hemisphere has ever seen.
We are truly perplexed why the US Federal Government has not taken complete command and control of the disaster area known as the Gulf of Mexico. It is, after all, full of oil and dispersants and corpses of every sort and kind. A foreign multi-national corporation (BP) was allowed to conduct the most risky and highly experimental deep-sea drilling for oil and gas without proper permits, federal oversight and regulatory regimes that would have prevented this avoidable event.
We all know the facts surrounding this event. (i.) BP was given the green light to conduct extremely dangerous drilling techniques in order to supply the fuel necessary to run the US military. (ii.) That the Military-Industrial Complex empowered BP, as it has other US Oil & Gas Companies, to drill and drain every reservoir of oil and gas discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. (iii.) That the Departments of Interior, Energy, Homeland Security and EPA collaborated at the very highest levels of government to see to it that federal laws, state statutes and departmental rules and regulations were conveniently suspended or broken in order to facilitate this oil and gas exploration and extraction. Basically, we are stating that treason was committed against these United States of America by the very entities that are tasked to protect it. More...
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” [1]
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.”[2] Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico. More...
You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country.
It was at this meeting that the Federal Reserve was conceived by the banking cartel, as they devised a plan to protect its member banks from competition and convince Congress and the American public that this cartel was an agency of the United States government.
The creation of the Federal Reserve will undoubtedly go down as one of the biggest tragedies in American history. After all, the government handed over the right to print the nation’s currency AND charge interest to a private, for-profit corporation with foreign stockholders. The Federal Reserve was given the right to simply print massive sums of money out of thin air and then charge the American taxpayer interest on that money. More...
Do you remember swaps, those frequently risky and opaque derivatives that nearly brought down the global economy in 2008? They're used for insurance and for gambling, but despite having a notional value estimated at $450 trillion, some of the most dangerous swaps remain totally unregulated, even two years after the financial crisis.
But first, it's important for us to recognize just how crazy and dangerous the swaps market currently is. For example:
No one has any idea what they are worth. Imagine if there were no stock exchanges, and the vast majority of stocks traded over the counter. Five banks -- Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Citigroup (NYSE: C), and Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) -- cornered the market, and only they had access to stock prices.
So in order to buy shares of Microsoft, instead of just looking up its $26 price, you would have to call up Goldman Sachs and ask how much Microsoft will cost you. Goldman offers to sell you Microsoft at $30 per share, offers to buy shares from another customer at $20 per share, and pockets $10 for every share of Microsoft traded. That's basically how the anti-competitive swaps market works. It's an economically inefficient system that benefits too-big-to-fail banks by allowing them to rip off their customers. More...
We have less than a month to go before the Congress votes on financial reform. Ironically, the deadline seems to be July 4th, our independence day, an occasion that will likely usher in ever more dependence on Wall Street despite appearances.
Matt Taibbi reports real reform is a goner, “The financial-services industry has reportedly flooded the Capitol with more than 2,000 paid lobbyists; even veteran members are stunned by the intensity of the blitz. "They're trying everything," says Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. Wall Street's army is especially imposing given that the main (really, the only) progressive coalition working the other side of the aisle, Americans for Financial Reform, has been in existence less than a year – and has just 60 unpaid "volunteer" lobbyists working the Senate halls.”
Not only are scammers getting off free; they are being overpaid in the process--- allowed to keep their gargantuan bonuses and obscene salaries. More...
Our government has committed $12,200 Billion in bailouts, guarantees, and backstops to the very same people who created this economic mess. Most of this money has not found its way to Main Street but instead has lined the pockets of the Wall Street types. Part of this was the $700 Billion TARP program. This video explains how instead of TARP, we could have used this money to LEVERAGE productive endeavors on Main Street that would have both employed our people and helped to reduce the federal deficits. Video...
Recent Headlines:
$140 billion! Record Payday for Wall Street
Goldman Sachs 2009 Bonuses Could Buy Insurance for 1.7 Million Families
50 Million Americans Live in Poverty
Paraphrasing a very insightful quote: ‘The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Goldman Sachs, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such a magnitude entails is left out of the mainstream media, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.
Think about the fact that your paycheck should be significantly higher, as it would be if CEOs weren’t taking an astonishing record of $500 for every one dollar you make. Due to unregulated greed the US now has the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world, no other country is even close.Every time you skip a trip to the doctor, to the dentist, to the food store, even to a social event that could bring you a little stress relief, you should think about these thieves on Wall Street. Every time you skip something that you need, think about the billionaires on Wall Street… because they have YOUR MONEY!
The facts are that $30,000 per person is unaccounted for - that’s $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the US - which means if you have a family of five, your family has lost $150,000 to Goldman Sachs. While you stress out and struggle, they have your money, and it’s sitting in their banks, sitting in their vaults, flipping in their markets, collecting interest… and dust. More...
Day after day, bankers have been paraded before Congressional committees regarding their role in the financial crisis which brought the financial system to the edge of the abyss on September 18,2008. Every one has claimed that they were not responsible in any way for the disaster. They blame once in a lifetime circumstances that no one could have anticipated. It was a perfect storm and they had no way of knowing. These Harvard MBA Wall Street geniuses, who collected compensation in excess of $100 million each before the collapse, had no idea what was going on within their own firms. Ignorance and stupidity is no excuse for losing a trillion dollars.
The truth is that the CEO’s of all the Wall Street banks encouraged a casino culture of greed and gambling. The generation of fees became the sole driving incentive for every firm. It started with collateralizing subprime mortgages into packages of mortgage backed securities. Then they created Credit Default Swaps as insurance on these mortgages. When they ran out of chumps to put into houses, they created side bets with Credit Default Obligations that didn’t require an actual homeowner. More...
Hats off to the Wall Street financial syndicate. They arranged a 1000-point stock market descent precisely on the day (May 6th) the Financial Regulatory bill had a key provision being scripted for auditing the US Federal Reserve. The US Senators blinked, watered down the provision, and will force an audit but only for certain TARP-related events. At least it is a foot in the door to the corrupted halls. The Flash Crash, as it is known, has turned the US stock market even more into a round robin competitive backyard for Wall Street firms, where 73% of the NYSE trading volume used to be derived from their computer program trades. Figure even more now. The US stock market has become the butt of jokes. Miraculous recoveries after 3:30pm are standard these days, like Tuesday.
The most striking and predictable aspects of the Fin-Reg Bill are how the USFed has even more power than before. The original plan was to limit its power. So again, hats off to the syndicate. They took the honorable motive to limit syndicate powers and to audit the USFed, and turned it into even more USFed powers, like the rod to dissolve any financial firm that endangers the US financial system. Or should it be said endangers the syndicate? Goldman Sachs bribery to the US Congressional members must have played a prominent role. That is the capitalism at work in the United States. More...
So here’s how it is: They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations.
These are extraordinary numbers given the normal tendency of corporate money to flow to the party in power. Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in “a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury” toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What’s going on?
One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. Furthermore, health reform will in part be paid for with surtaxes on high-income individuals. All this will amount to a significant financial hit to C.E.O.’s, investment bankers and other masters of the universe.
Now, don’t cry for these people: they’ll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they’ll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s. Yet the fact that the tax increases they’re facing are reasonable doesn’t stop them from being very, very angry. More...
Stunning Statistic of the Week:
Number of lobbyists representing opponents of strong derivatives reform in the congressional debate over financial reform: 903.
Number of lobbyists representing pro-consumer reforms during the same time period, since the beginning of 2009: 79.
Today one man can do the work that a hundred men used to do. Not only that, but today American workers literally have to compete against workers from all over the globe. Global corporations often find themselves having to choose whether to build a factory in the United States or in the third world. But in the third world workers often earn less than 10% of what American workers earn, corporations are often not required to provide any benefits to workers, and there are usually hardly any oppressive government regulations. How can American workers compete against that?
All of this free trade has been very hard on American workers as factory after factory has closed, but it has allowed the big corporations to get exceedingly wealthy. The top executives at the big global corporations are certainly enjoying all of this free trade. Their salaries have soared. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has ranged between 300 to 500 to one.
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.That is what globalism is all about.The elite make out like bandits as they exploit third world labor pools, while the American middle class finds itself slowly being crushed out of existence. More...
Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives—operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe.
After transferring trillions of dollars of bad debt or toxic assets from the books of financial speculators to those of governments, global financial moguls, their representatives in the State apparatus and corporate media are now blaming social spending (in effect, the people) as responsible for debt and deficit!
Spending on national infrastructure, both physical (such as roads and schools) and social infrastructure (such as health and education) is key to the long-term socioeconomic developments. Cutting public spending to pay for the sins of Wall Street gamblers is bound to undermine the long-term health of a society in terms of productivity enhancement and sustained growth. A most outrageous aspect of the debt burden that is placed on the taxpayers’ shoulders since 2008 is that most of the underlying debt claims are fictitious and illegitimate: they are largely due to manipulated asset price bubbles, dubious or illegal financial speculations, and scandalous conversion of financial gamblers’ losses into public liability. More...
To view previous articles, select a topic from the links below or from the menu bar at the top of this page.
Disclaimer: Nothing contained anywhere on this site constitutes advice or recommendations on any type of investments. This information is provided for people to read and be aware of our economic, social, political, media, and judicial environment. Any actions taken or purchases of any type investment are at the sole discretion of the reader.
As horrific as the gulf environmental catastrophe is, an even more intractable and cataclysmic disaster may be looming. The yet unknowable costs associated with clean-up, litigation and compensation damages due to arguably the world's worst environmental tragedy, may be in the process of triggering a credit event by British Petroleum (BP) that will be equally devastating to global over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. The potential contagion may eventually show that Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns were simply early warning signals of the devastation lurking and continuing to grow unchecked in the $615T OTC Derivatives market.
What is the invisible force that's suddenly gutting the housing market, driving consumer confidence into a sinkhole, and killing the recovery that Washington was so avidly touting just a few months ago? 
How does one decrease the cost of labor in America? 
Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.
As much as one million times the normal level of methane is showing up near the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, enough potentially to create dead zones in the water. "These are higher levels than we have ever seen at any other location in the ocean itself," according to sources cited by Reuters. The "flow team" of the US Geological Survey estimates that 2,900 cubic feet of natural gas, which primarily contains methane, is being released into the Gulf waters with every barrel of oil. 
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national median wage was only $32,390 per year in 2008, and median household income fell by 3.6% while the unemployment rate was 5.8%. With the unemployment rate now at 10%, median income has been falling at a 5% rate and is expected to continue its decline. Not surprisingly, Americans’ job satisfaction level is now at an all time low. 
Well, we had another flash Crash yesterday, just like the one on May 6, 2010. The only difference is, this time the stocks in question went up instead of down.
The appearance of progress on some issues overshadowed the underlying deterioration of societal institutions and practices. Social Security was “saved” by Alan Greenspan and his commission. Essentially he manipulated the CPI calculation downward, screwing future generations of seniors out of their rightful payouts. Politically difficult decisions regarding Medicare and Medicaid were deferred to sometime in the distant future. With oil prices averaging $20 per barrel through the 1980s and 1990s, a coherent long-term energy strategy seemed unnecessary to the next election cycle politicians who control this country. The deregulation of the Savings & Loan Industry gave them many of the capabilities of banks, without the same regulations as banks. Imprudent real estate lending, fraud and insider transactions by S&L executives, protected by high powered Washington politicians, led to the first financial crisis. The failure of 747 thrifts and losses of $160 billion to the taxpayer can be attributed to lax oversight and fraud. 
We write this letter concerning the worst man-made, and ongoing, environmental catastrophe of the modern era, and perhaps the worst calamity the entire hemisphere has ever seen. 
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
You really have to hand it to the banksters. As was painstakingly detailed in the book Creature from Jekyll Island, the banking elite devised a brilliant plan in November of 1910 on Jekyll Island in which to take over control of the United States, steal the wealth from the taxpayers and the resources from the country. 
Do you remember swaps, those frequently risky and opaque derivatives that nearly brought down the global economy in 2008? They're used for insurance and for gambling, but despite having a notional value estimated at $450 trillion, some of the most dangerous swaps remain totally unregulated, even two years after the financial crisis.
Recent Headlines:
Day after day, bankers have been paraded before Congressional committees regarding their role in the financial crisis which brought the financial system to the edge of the abyss on September 18,2008. Every one has claimed that they were not responsible in any way for the disaster. They blame once in a lifetime circumstances that no one could have anticipated. It was a perfect storm and they had no way of knowing. These Harvard MBA Wall Street geniuses, who collected compensation in excess of $100 million each before the collapse, had no idea what was going on within their own firms. Ignorance and stupidity is no excuse for losing a trillion dollars. 
Hats off to the Wall Street financial syndicate. They arranged a 1000-point stock market descent precisely on the day (May 6th) the Financial Regulatory bill had a key provision being scripted for auditing the US Federal Reserve. The US Senators blinked, watered down the provision, and will force an audit but only for certain TARP-related events. At least it is a foot in the door to the corrupted halls. The Flash Crash, as it is known, has turned the US stock market even more into a round robin competitive backyard for Wall Street firms, where 73% of the NYSE trading volume used to be derived from their computer program trades. Figure even more now. The US stock market has become the butt of jokes. Miraculous recoveries after 3:30pm are standard these days, like Tuesday. 
So here’s how it is: They’re as mad as hell, and they’re not going to take this anymore. Am I talking about the Tea Partiers? No, I’m talking about the corporations. 
