EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS: NATIONALIZE THE FEDERAL RESERVE! « Culture of Life News 2
This is a photo of a very fancy restaurant in Manhattan where the ceiling collapsed right after I shot this picture. The staff wanted us to stay while ceiling pieces kept falling and white dust covered everything! I ordered everyone out and literally forced them to close it down! This is exactly like the bankrupt bankers don’t want us to talk about nationalizing them while at the same time, these gnomes are nationalizing the RISKS of lending! Bank stocks are now penny stocks while the bankers pretend, they are a viable business. Today, we get to see videos of Ron Paul and Kucinich calling on Congress to nationalize the FEDERAL RESERVE itself. Of course, the House is empty. And as riddled with corruption from bank lobby ‘donations’ as a house is riddled by termites.
Gone in 60 Days: Citi and Bank of America Won’t Live to See May | Charting Stocks
Citigroup (C) and Bank of America (BAC) won’t live to see May. The government will take them over within the next 60 days. The announcement may come as soon as tomorrow evening.
If there’s one thing our readers know, it’s that ChartingStocks.net has made some bold calls in the past which seemed controversial and highly unlikely at the time.Our January 2007 post warned of the coming stock market crash at a time when the market was making new all time highs. In February 2007 we warned about the breakdown of the brokerage stocks and singled out Bear Stearns (Trading at $160), Merrill Lynch (Trading at $87), and Morgan Stanley (Trading at 78). In September 2007, we warned of a selloff in the coming weeks. The market peak and decline began 4 weeks later.
We’re going to make another bold prediction. Bank of America and Citigroup won’t live to see May. The two banks will be nationalized in the coming weeks, and we think that the announcement can come as soon as tomorrow evening (Friday evenings are when major bank announcements and failures occur).
All the biggest banks are the biggest bankrupts. The futility of trying to keep a bankrupt bank lending while the bankrupt bank has to borrow is pure insanity. We cannot do this. It is the definition of a ‘black hole.’ Money goes in and nothing comes out. On top of this, the futility of running a system in the red in order to run banks that are in the red, is becoming increasingly obvious.
There are only a very few creditor nations and the two biggest are in Asia: China and Japan. Neither nation wishes to lend our government trillions of dollars unless we do things their way. And since both are major trade rivals, Japan is the world’s #2 economy and China is the world’s #3 economy, the ultimate price we pay for the loans to bail out our bankrupt banks will be opening the door to Asian export powers here in America. Already, we are the major reason both nations are trade export giants.
Both want to restart the very lopsided trade with the US and both are using our need for their sovereign wealth lending to insure our trade with both remains extremely lopsided.
Fannie Mae Rescue Hindered as Asians Seek Guarantee
Asian investors won’t buy debt and mortgage-backedsecurities from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac until they carry explicit U.S. guarantees, similar to those given on bonds issued by Bank of America Corp. orCitigroup Inc.
The risks are too great without a pledge that the U.S. will repay the debt no matter what, according to Hideo Shimomura, chief fund investor in Tokyo for Mitsubishi UFJ Asset Management Co., and other bondholders and analysts in Japan, China and South Korea interviewed by Bloomberg. Overseas resistance may hamper U.S. efforts to hold down home-loan rates and shore up the nation’s largest mortgage-finance companies.
Even after President Barack Obama vowed on Feb. 18 to sink as much as $400 billion of capital into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, double the original commitment, “there is still a concern that there is no guarantee” from the government, said Shimomura, who oversees $4 billion in non-yen bonds for the arm of Japan’s largest bank.
The entire effort to drop home lending rates in the teeth of mass-defaulting on previous home loans will fail. True, the rates have dropped. But this cost our government nearly $2 trillion dollars. Our Treasury and the Federal Reserve had to suck down immense amounts of bad debts. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What the hell happened, anyway, in the first place?’
This question is not being asked by anyone in DC. The only question is, ‘How can we protect the high cost housing caused by the bubble so no one loses money with this bubble deflating?’ History has a very stern answer to that question: ‘No, you can’t reflate bubbles, they are bad and the losses must happen or you will never see prosperity again.’
There is only one way a bubble’s effects can be retained: by devaluing the currency until it loses over 50% of its value and then, the prices will match real wages again. Of course, this means raising wages very fast until people living in $500,000 shanties in California will be making $150,000 a year, working as stoop labor in fields or patching holes in highways, etc. In other words, the dollar has to be even more meaningless.
This is bad, all around. Preserving the currency leads to greater strength tomorrow. Devaluing and weakening a currency leads to a spiral downwards whereby the government collapses, the economy misallocates resources badly and we have social chaos. The US $ is the world’s fiat currency. The world tolerated us negotiating dollar devaluations in the past only because they were so very eager to keep exporting to us. They still will allow this but only if they own our Treasury and control the Federal Reserve.
Then, when the time is ripe, they will apply the brakes on our inflationary system. This is, after all, the Chinese 50 year plan! Hillary Clinton toured Asia this week and will come home with more plans to sell our future to China and Japan in exchange, we get to buy ridiculously overpriced homes with ridiculously underpriced mortgages.
http://www.bizjournals.com/dayton/stories/2009/02/16/daily81.html
BofA, CitiGroup say nationalization not neededAmid speculation about the nationalization of banks, executives of the two banks most cited for that fate are saying it isn’t necessary.
Bank of America Corp. and CitiGroup are struggling amid the financial meltdown that has crippled the country for over a year. Bank of America bought mortgage lender Countrywide and brokerage Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and has experienced indigestion with their bad debt. Citi itself ran into problems last year when its highly leveraged investments in home loan securitizations started collapsing.
Ken Lewis, chief executive of Bank of America, told his senior team that the bank is not being seized by the government, despite increasing calls for action by politicians and pundits in Washington, D.C., and articles in the international press.
Nationalization of troubled banks would allow for a “swift and orderly” restructuring, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told the Financial Times of London in an interview this week.
Greenspan should be arrested. He created this stupid housing bubble. Now, he wants to nationalize the banks. How about nationalizing the biggest banks of them all: the Federal Reserve banks? Eh? Why isn’t the news about that? Well, both Ron Paul and Kucinich have been talking about this in Congress. To an empty House. The leadership of both parties utterly reject this because the leadership of both parties works for the same guys who are bankrupting the banks.
YouTube – Ron Paul: What if the People Wake Up?
YouTube – Dennis Kucinich States His Intention To Put The Federal Reserve Under Government Control
YouTube – Dennis Kucinich – Federal Reserve no more federal than Federal Express
After this brief message from the far fringes of our political estate, back to the ruling elites: the NYT is the paper they cling to for transmitting messages to the masses. They constantly try to explain to us, how we are to do business and run our banking system. The NYT is all for cleaning up small messes but is extremely allergic to cleaning up the Big Messes. This is why neither Ron Paul nor Kucinich ever appear on those pages.
Krugman is OK since he is a little cleaner-upper who never mentions the Jewish Mafia, for example. Good puppy! He can pretend to be blindsided by obvious con men who run around in the same exact social circles in Manhattan as he. I used to run around in these same exact circles when I lived in the City, too. So I know that these things are not so mysterious to inquisitive minds.
Anyway, the NYT is trying to explain how lending works while not mentioning the Federal Reserve, the Rothschilds, Jekyll Island or anything. I read old NYT stories and trust me, the Victorian reporters were very intent on these sorts of things which is why the creators of the Federal Reserve had to go to great lengths to elude reporters. Unlike the Bilderbergers today who flaunt their secrecy while the publishers and owners of our media attend these super-secret enclaves! Grinding my teeth, of course, as I mention this.
Anyway, the Bilderberg conspirators want us to understand what went wrong and how to fix it [ie: give the Bilderberg gang all our future tax moneys]:
Breaking a Barrier to Lending – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com
Now, let’s have the names of the ‘investors’ who will pay 8% while we taxpayers have to lend 92%? Well, if we wish to see these names, all we have to do is ask the NYT, whose owner always goes to these secret Bilderberg meetings, to cough up the list of names of co-conspirators! HAHAHA.
Note that WE ARE THE REAL BANKERS but the guys who get ALL THE PROFITS are the ones who ‘capitalize’ this stupid thing by putting down less than the traditional 10% of capitalization for funding lending.
Actually, looking at that graph above, it looks an awful lot like a story about germs. The little house shapes are bacteria and the round circles are the hosts. This illustrates not how lending works but how we pass diseases from one host to the next!
I notice that the NYT cartoon above has no mention as to who the ‘investor’ is. The ‘owner of the loans’ is in the previous story. Now, I could prove this easily by referring to ‘Bloomberg News’ so why can’t the NYT do this, too? HAHAHA. The owners of the Times would be savaged at the next Bilderberger tea party! Yup. Explaining things properly is Verboten.
This is certainly telling the truth. If these stupid loans to people who are paying way, way too much for housing, are not paid back, the infester investors take little to no losses while we all lose, big time. Do we control who gets these loans?
HAHAHA. Nope. The bankrupt bankers who bankrupted us by handing out loans to a bunch of dead beats will get to decide, who gets a loan! A loan, paid for by solvent people. Solvent people who refuse to give their hard-earned savings to banks because the stupid bankrupt bankers want our central bank which is the most odious of them all, to have super-low interest rates for savers! While creating oceans of inflation by debasing the currency via wild lending to a bunch of dead beats who can’t pay off their loans! Sheesh!
The US has become the Japanese carry trade due to our ZIRP banking system. The rich ‘investors’ will NOT be using CAPITAL to buy the 8% basis of these government-sponsored loans. No, they will BORROW this money from the Federal Reserve and then CARRY it to the Treasury and TRADE it for higher-interest bonds backing US housing loans! See how easy this is to figure out!!!!
This is our version of the Japanese carry trade only it is a vampire trade that has our own rulers sucking our blood.
Lending Locked, U.S. Tries Trillion-Dollar Key – NYTimes.com
Largely hidden from view is a vast financial system that serves as the banker to the banks. And, like many lenders, this system is in deep trouble. The question is how to fix it.
Most banks no longer hold the loans they make, content to collect interest until the debt comes due. Instead, the loans are bundled into securities that are sold to investors, a process known as securitization.
But the securitization markets broke down last summer after investors suffered steep losses on these investments. So banks and other finance companies can no longer shift loans off their books easily, throttling their ability to lend.
The result has been a drastic contraction of the amount of credit available throughout the economy. By one estimate, as much as $1.9 trillion of lending capacity — the rough equivalent of half of all the money borrowed by businesses and consumers in 2007, before the recession struck — has been sucked out of the system….
The market for new securities backed by mortgages and other types of loans has collapsed. Last year, investors bought $313.9 billion of these securities, down from $1.6 trillion in 2007 and $2.1 trillion in 2006, according to Dealogic…
Simon Johnson, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said many people might take a dim view of the TALF program because it provided government subsidies to investors like hedge funds. Investors who borrow from the Fed could enjoy annual returns of 20 percent or more.
“The TALF,” he said, “raises a lot of questions.”
HAHAHA! The article ENDS with this IMF economist saying, the TALF is ‘raising a LOT of questions.’ OK: if I were interviewing this dude, would I end the story on that statement???
This is where a flood of questions would start, not end! I would demand to know what this guy’s questions about the TALF really are. Here, we have proof of my contention that the NYT will give us only so much information and then, like the Palestinians in Gaza, we suddenly find a huge wall with watch towers in the way and we can’t get past it or we get shot.
So we have to tunnel. Thank the gods for the web! We can find this information elsewhere.
With Cash to Spend, China Starts Investing Globally – NYTimes.com
Beijing said on Friday that one of its big state-owned banks, the China Development Bank, agreed to lend the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras $10 billion in exchange for sending China a long-term supply of oil.
That investment came after similar deals were signed this week with Russia and Venezuela, bringing China’s total oil investments this month to $41 billion.
China’s biggest aluminum producer also agreed earlier this month to invest $19.5 billion in Rio Tinto of Australia, one of the world’s biggest mining companies. And last Monday, the China Minmetals Corporation bid $1.7 billion to acquire OZ Minerals, a huge zinc mining company, also in Australia.
Flush with cash and eager to take advantage of weak commodity prices, China is once again on the hunt for global energy and resources to power its growing economy. But this time, China is being welcomed as an investor overseas.
President Hu Jintao of China was traveling this week on his “Friendship and Cooperation Tour” in Africa, where China has substantial interests in resources and mining. Vice President Xi Jinping was visiting South America, meeting with the leaders of Brazil and Venezuela and signing cooperation agreements on oil and minerals.
People who don’t understand the nature of wealth cannot see how the Chinese can be part of this collapsing economic mess and STILL be able to buy things! Well, they have this thing Karl Marx called ‘capital’. And they have ‘labor’ and land. And are firm believers in the Pyramid of Wealth, that cartoon I drew yesterday. Land, water, grain, animals and gold: combine this with labor and you have wealth. The wealth from trade profits is now being used to buy up all the systems the Chinese feel they need for the next stage of the great 50 year plan.
The end goal of this plan is for China to be the world’s #1 economy and political power with the US in hock to China. All the plans to bail out the stupid people who paid too much for their shanties or mini-mansions in exurbia are destructive for the US people. We have to cut to the chase: we cannot live beyond our means anymore. If we do, when the day of doom arrives and we discover the world’s banking power, China, is now demanding we kow tow to the Dragon Throne, it will be due to this bail out.
We have to resist bailing out from a housing bubble by having bystanders, namely, myself and others who didn’t play the hyper-real estate games, to bankroll maintaining ridiculous house prices. I have a belief that is very strong: any building today that has a price tag bigger than what I sold my mansion for in New Jersey which is one of the highest income states in America, that house is overpriced. Namely, a little suburban hick-hole should NOT be priced at above $300,000.
The mansion I sold was huge. It had huge grounds that were groomed. A 6 foot hedge that was 700′ long. It has 12 pillars so big, you could barely put your arms around them. It had stained glass windows, a brick carriage house that was two stories tall and had a slate roof as did the mansion which was three stories tall. I could go on and on about the details of this immense place that drove me nuts, it was too bid and required staff to run.
The point is simple: there is no way in hell that housing is ‘more valuable’ in 2005 compared to my mansion when I sold it in 1989. This is just impossible. A 2,000 sq ft house on a an eight of an acre in a cookie-cutter neighborhood in central California or non-oceanfront Florida is just not the equivalent of a 6,000 sq ft mansion on more than an acre of prime land near Manhattan! And these cheap, little, poorly-built houses were selling for well over $300,000, often for half a million dollars!
I can’t tell everyone how much that astonishes me. It was ridiculous back then and impossible to retain today. At the opposite end, the real mansions were going for $5 to $50 million which is also every bit as ridiculous. These white elephants will now be unsellable at any price. Just like after previous bubbles leading to depressions.
Only by turning these things into schools or other purposes, can they survive, barely. I was able to live in a mansion only by aggressively filling it with residents who paid me for living with me. So I didn’t lose money, maintaining it. On the other hand, the rich need to be rich to keep these huge things going, they are very serious money drains.
The NYT had stories the other day about people who want to sell their houses at inflated prices. They all wanted to live ‘smaller’ due to high taxes and overhead. But could find no one who wanted this immense financial burden. Well, duh! The only way to make these houses affordable again is for their prices to drop!
And I have lost money on houses! Once, I lost $100,000! That was a lot of loot, BACK THEN. Today, not so much loot. I didn’t weep and wail and demand the government bankrupt our future so my house could be sold for more! Back when I paid 9.45% for a mortgage, I didn’t demand the government subsidize my borrowing for house buying. This is how markets work: you make money sometimes, but sometimes you lose! That’s life.
The system everyone who is bankrupting us want, is one where they always win no matter what while manipulating the system to give them artificially cheap loans so they can SPECULATE while having no risks. How disgusting is that?
Michael Kinsley – Recession Economics – How Do We Repay the Stimulus Spree? – washingtonpost.com
There has been less emphasis on what we, as individuals, should do. President Obama ducked the question at his news conference last week. But logic suggests that we should be gluing those credit cards back together. The government is actually going to pay us to buy a new house or car. Borrow and spend, borrow and spend is what got us into this mess. Apparently, borrow and spend will get us out of it.
It sounds too good to be true, but it is true. By now we all know about the “paradox of thrift”: If everyone stops spending because times are bad, times get even worse. An economist writing in the New York Times the other day addressed the wonderfully inverted problem of people who feel guilty about not spending enough. His advice: Don’t feel guilty about saving money, because it’s the government’s job, not yours, to make sure that we spend enough. But what if you don’t feel guilty about reckless borrowing and spending? What if you actually enjoy it? This has been a more common attitude in recent years. Is it still okay? Or does the medicine have to taste bad to be any good?
We ran up debts in good times. The ‘gooder’ the time, the more we ran up debts. When the debts became too great, we decided to ZIRP everything so we can continue to run up even bigger and bigger debts while being increasingly unable to pay the principal of this borrowing! And this will destroy our entire nation, utterly and totally, unless we stop.
Not borrowing in bad times makes them worse. But the ONLY thing that prevents this is for us to tax ourselves and NOT borrow a lot in good times. This means, no bubbles due to easy credit in a hot market. As markets heat up, interest rates are supposed to go up, not down. Greenspan knew this when he dropped rates below the rate of inflation and kept it there as lending raced ahead due to the Japanese carry trade.
Now, we have the US carry trade. This is very bad in the long run. Look at Japan! Not exactly a good role model. And we are ass-backwards. The Japanese carry trade supported Japanese industrial exports. Ours supports hyper-high housing prices and imports. This is suicidal.
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One of our “dear leaders” has had a revelation from the ghost of olde Karl Marx !
The trouble here is that the “monied class” has pissed away its (and the nations)
wealth worse than any Billy Bob in the Soggy Bottom Mobile Home Estates. Zbiggie’s “National Solidarity Fund” now resides in China due in no small part to all his global trotting maintaining our expensive war machine over the years.
Not only do our emperors have no clothing but they are masturbating in public.
They should be required to register as sex offenders and sent to McNeil Island
where they can jerk off in their cells looking at old back issues of Fortune
Magazine or Barrons.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You also talked about the possibility of class conflict.
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: I was worrying about it because we’re going to have millions and millions of unemployed, people really facing dire straits. And we’re going to be having that for some period of time before things hopefully improve. And at the same time there is public awareness of this extraordinary wealth that was transferred to a few individuals at levels without historical precedent in America . . . And you sort of say to yourself: what’s going to happen in this society when these people are without jobs, when their families hurt, when they lose their homes, and so forth?
We have the government trying to repair: repair the banking system, to bail the housing out. But what about the rich guys? Where is it? [What are they] doing?
It sort of struck me, that in 1907, when we had a massive banking crisis, when banks were beginning to collapse, there were going to be riots in the streets. Some financiers, led by J.P. Morgan, got together. He locked them in his library at one point. He wouldn’t let them out until 4:45 AM, until they all kicked in and gave some money to stabilize the banks: there was no Federal Reserve at the time.
Where is the monied class today? Why aren’t they doing something: the people who made billions, millions. I’m sort of thinking of Paulson, of Rubin. Why don’t they get together, and why don’t they organize a National Solidarity Fund in which they call on all of those who made these extraordinary amounts of money to kick some back in to [a] National Solidarity Fund?
A bit later, Zbig made his fears explicit.
BRZEZINSKI: And if we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots!
The Bank Lobby combined with the Real Estate Lobby: together these two incestuous entities have lain in each others arms, conceived and birthed a marionette, one Timothy Geithner, whose tunes are called by “These Invisibles”, corrupt, gluttonous individuals whose names ought to be plastered across all the newspapers as well as all the internet sites that exist.
I always find it amusing when people talk of an “emerging” class-conflict in America as though the elite haven’t been conducting a savage war on the poor for over 60 years. What does one make of the utter destruction (with state assistance) of the labor movement, welfare “reform”, and tax policies primarily to the benefit of the top 1% of earners? Too funny.
Yes Coldtype , “class warfare”, to these overbred sociopathic simpletons , is always something that mysteriously appears in the lower orders of society and attacks the “good” people of our country’s leaders. They, our leaders, have such impeccable manners, civility, and most importantly a good vocabulary where by their deeds can be
sugar coated with their megaphone–the media. Instead of having to say, “we must
crush the incomes of these overpaid trailer trash idiots”, they can say such things
as “liberating the markets” or “lowering prices” “laissez faire” etc etc.
In the end, their vaunted analytical-intelligent abilities creates an hermetically
sealed,self-referring, and sanitized world that becomes so fragile, a pinprick will burst it.
POP GO THE WEASALS, ha ha.
Gary:
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Loved your “POP GO THE WEASELS.”
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Yes, I once worked for a short while in a factory cutting sheet metal…The owners and managers came through and seldom looked us workers in the eye or even spoke or nodded good day to us…all communication was passed on by lower level supervisors who then passed it on through slimy, weaselly, little “straw bosses.” Of course, these straw bosses weren’t smart enough to know they would never be promoted…they just did the dirty work of pushing the workers around.
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After college, for a short time, I worked in an engineering department…I identified problems with the machinery by observing operations…I was not supposed to converse with the workers, but I had once been a worker myself, and I understood their problems. Once I identified a series of machine malfunctions that was causing a certain worker to work herself into exhaustion. I told my superior and he told me to keep quiet because if her productivity improved, all workers would have to be given increased pay. The next time I worked with this lady, I follwed her,making small adjustments to the machines myself as I walked along. Soon, they were running smoothly, and she was amazed that she was able to take a break. Then, I took her aside, and showed her how to jimmy the machines to keep them running, and warned her to keep quiet. Well, her production did improve, and my supervisor viewed me with suspicion from that point on. I soon changed jobs.
This middle manager hated workers so much that he was willing to sacrifice the woman’s health and production in order to keep wages down….and that was mean, arrogant and stupid.
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Capitalists hate and resent every penny they pay labor…I don’t really understand how some humans can place themselves apart from the rest of the human race and arrogantly crush the hopes and dreams of others, for a few extra bucks to waste on frivolities. What is there to gain from this? I can only conclude that these individuals have misguided perceptions of their own humanity in relation to others…and are sociopathic to a large degree.
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Part of our dilemma is the education system. Elitism and arrogance runs rampant in the teaching faculties of many high schools and universities.
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I once taught high school technology. Since my course was considered vocational, my classes were viewed as unimportant by elitist academic teachers, counselors and administrators. My students often told me about degrading remarks that their academic teachers had made about vocational courses. I then asked my students how many people they knew who made their living writing and publishing English poetry, or how many times they saw their parents use the Pythagorean theorem or analytical calculus.
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Not that I’m any kind of rocket scientist, but I often conversed with those smug, dilettantes, and believe me, aside from their one field of expertise, they were nearly helpless and hopeless in many matters…and many would not have made it very well in the competitive, practical world where most of us live.
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Gary, that is part of our problem…arrogance in managerial positions and degradation of honest labors, all for profits. Our youth come to believe that becoming an elite is all that counts, and they soon come to believe these petite bourgois teachers and entertainers who project a life of luxury and pleasure to be had for the taking…driving a Beamer or Benz, with a couple of skanky women or gigolo’s hanging breathlessly onto their arms, living conspicuously, and largely…and this is their view of ideal life success. They are misguided and mistaken.
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This is a phony, unreasonable life view, and this is what leads to the kinds of problems we are experiencing in our nation today. This is not reality at all, it is foolish human stupidity, being passed on from generation to generation…and all rational practicality is lost, and many elites and leaders don’t have a clue what went wrong or even what is missing.
The beauty of a housing bust is that if you allow the bubble to burst, owners get hurt
If you do not, renters and consumers get hurt
It’s a double whammy, and no doubt was planned as such
I once taught machine shop at a technical school. Wonderful students! Loved almost all of them.
Elaine:
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It does not surprise me that you once taught machine shop (I once took some machine shop courses..can run a lathe or a mill or surface grinder)…you are always interested in the practical side of things..and are on-target with these observations too.
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You are right, these vocational kids are the some of the best kids you can meet, and most grow up to become the people who work hard and hold things together while some others are sometimes like alley cats chasing their tails as they rage after life success.
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When I first started teaching, I was taught to give my best efforts to the brightest students. However, after several years, and a few bad experiences with these so-called “bright” kids, who had sociopathic tendencies, and who manipulated others for their own pleasure, I came to a different view.
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I asked myself, why make them smarter so they can become a lawyer or politician and use their intelligence to cheat and rob me in my old age. If the kid was bright and reasonable, I did my best, but, overall, I preferred average kids who obeyed instructions and worked hard…salt of the earth…good people…came to love them…and also most of the less than bright too.
When I was younger I lived in Fairfield Connecticut, and I often found myself off the beaten path, so to speak. Finding myself on the beach when, out of 50,000 people who could be there, I was the only one there, was a very frequent occurrence. I seemed to have a knack for getting into peculiar situations, seeing things that probably were not expected to be seen. So I came to know a lot of different kinds of people.
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Human arrogance is a tremendous “force.” It comes in a vast variety of flavors. For example, academic arrogance. Gary said” Not that I’m any kind of rocket scientist, but I often conversed with those smug, dilettantes, and believe me, aside from their one field of expertise, they were nearly helpless and hopeless in many matters…and many would not have made it very well in the competitive, practical world where most of us live. I’ve live with such people. I shared an apartment with one guy who was just about to get his PhD in English. When we eventually move out, he unplugs the refrigerator, with the freezer full of thick ice. It had not occurred to him that the ice would melt and damage the floor. These people need to make a lot of money, since more often than not, they have no common sense, and other people have to fix all the stuff they wreck.
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The further you move up the pyramid (one guy called it the “down the inverted pyramid”), the more dysfunctional they get. I’ve even known some people who were certainly in the tiny (less than 1,000 of them in the U.S.) billionaire class. People who’s names are probably printed on products at your house (and no kidding). They were generally intelligent, but there was more than a hint of insanity hovering about them.
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One of them drove around an old flatbed mini-truck, with no license plates. Just their name painted on the side door! Cops always looked the other way. One time I tried to post one of my stranger stories about one of these folks at Raw Story, and it was just deleted, even though there would be absolutely no way to identify who I was discussing. I always resisted arrogance, and I think it is actually the foundation of narcissism, leading to sheer madness.
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These days, people no longer treat me arrogantly. Certainly not because of fear. Maybe I’m just too old to bother with. Possibly they can see that with me, it’s just a lost cause. Shit, even the Scientologists don’t give me any of it anymore. I’m not sure why, really.
Wait, David! I was once a bright brat! It is a wonder that any teacher put up with me, frankly. Most teachers made a truce: they would allow me to go to the library most of the day and there, I read books. I loved the librarians.
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On the other hand, I was NOT allowed to take machine shop or mechanical drawing or ANYTHING. It was ILLEGAL. So, staring in 1964, I worked on my lawsuits. While in high school. I filed one suit after another and won all of them…by the time I was well into college. I am happy other girls got to do what I was forbidden.
Blues, I grew up inside the ‘ruling elites’ and they are INSANE. Totally insane. Power makes for madness.
Its funny how this post is about some place in Manhattan falling into disrepair
I had looked at a doco on the history of NYC and in the early 20s skyscrapers are going up at the speed of 1 level per day
Construction of something like the Empire State now would take months and months
Case in point – twin towers – still not rebuilt after 2001
No sane human would ever work on that site of terror, untold conspiracy of crimes and many, many dead people haunting it. The original WTC was pretty nasty. I knew it very well, my ex-husband worked there.
Elaine:
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I had almost forgotten…you are so right. When I attended high school, (graduated in 1963), girls were forced to take home economics courses and boys were allowed shop…very sexist…glad you stood up and fought the system.
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This ideal that (girls couldn’t do shop type things) was still ingrained in school adminstrators somewhat even when I started teaching in 1978..,but gradually, girls came to shop type courses. I found most of them enjoyable to teach, much brighter and more cooperative than boys at that age. Boys hormones were going wild…of course considering the way girls looked at that age, boys had good reason for wild hormones…Ah great memories…takes me back a bit to my youth in the late 1950s and early 60s.
The only thing I really hated about those days were girls’ hairdos. In the late 50s and very early 60s, girls were forced to endure those combed down hair on the tops of their heads with a silly looking row of rolled curls around the sides and back…This was really ugly…some cruel sadist who hated women designed that hairdo.
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I guess that was a conservative reaction against early 1950s Betty Page style bangs (bangs were seen as being a bit radical in the 1950s)…but Betty Page style bangs were much prettier than the later hairdo mentioned above…the later style made girls look terrible and unattractive…which was the intent of Eisenhower conservatives.
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I was so glad when the beehive hairdos, and later, the hippie hairdos came along in the 1960s and 1970s. These made girls look pretty again. I remember mini skirts too…interesting!
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I remember the high school uniform for us boys when I went though 1959-63…long sleeved white shirt with sleeves rolled up to forearms. Black tight legged slacks and black loafers. Some still had a crew cuts, but I had big ears so I wore my hair long on the sides and combed up on top, with a short duck tail…James Dean style….Made me look like a pimple faced, bandy legged spider, but the girls didn’t seem to mind…I weighed 129 lbs. solid muscle, but I was too stupid to read girl language and flirting in those days…so I missed a lot of nice relationship opportunities. Good thing too. I couldn’t have stood it if I had known…
Ah! down memory lane…..gonna stop now.
Elaine: I see a play on the big (small?) C. At a dollar and change ($1.95 as of Friday’s close) it has great upside potential. Why am I saying this? I’ve l;ost it, right? LOL.
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Simply because the people in power, the Fed, Treasury, the banksters, politicians, and playmakers are showing no remorse whatsoever. That is very clear. They are going to continue playing this rigged game until they cannot anymore. They are playing the denial, containment and extension of misery game. To Big To Fail is their mantra.
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Further, the other majors (Asia in particular) will buy time to decouple, reset, and reengineer their financial systems, and gear it towards a new world fiat currency regime. My prediction, no collapse. The unwinding will take another two years. So you have that much time to position and prepare.
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Having said that, after two years Uncle Sam will have to pay the Piper. It will be managed by a new IMF-WB regime. And a lot of America will have been sold and bought by Asian and Middle Eastern investors.
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The U.S. will never recover to its past glory, at least not in the next 50 years. It will most probably be No. 4 in the world if lucky, and No. 5-7, if not.
the federal reserve is just a think tank for investment banks… if the government took it over you would just introduce more politics into the levers of control and that could really get things goin’ sideways
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOO5ofUk4xI&NR=1
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it looks bad on paper
BTW, the Swiss have found their cojones, they are now threatening to repatriate all their gold stored in the US, and ban the sale of US funds in their country, because of the the US pressured UBS to pay a fine and divulge the names of 250 American depositors. Read @ http://tinyurl.com/c7pt9a
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Interesting development. I’d love to see the list of 250 and stack them up against the elite and see what story that tells…
Gun runners, drug lords and dictators all loved Swiss silence.
“So, staring in 1964, I worked on my lawsuits.”
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So… you’ve always been easy to get along with!
Elaine, even if the Federal Reserve were nationalized, nothing would change unless Bernanke is arrested and Poole is placed in charge.
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Oh, and arrest Geither, too. http://market-ticker.denninger.net/archives/820-Citibank-Government-Stake-To-Increase.html
Simon, when the bubble bursts, the renters still get hurt. This is because, since the banking gnomes want the houses vacant, the foreclosed-upon must seek housing in the rentals that already exist.
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And with this spectacular bubble-burst, the housing stock gets hurt, too — by vandalism.
Congress won’t excercise its oversight responsibilities over the Fed because then Congress would be culpable for the Feds misdeeds. Congress would have to do too much explaining to do. Besides, if you want a cushy, high paying banking job when you leave Congress, you are going to let the tieves from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan run the Fed. This is what Phil Gramm did. The Texas Republican shoved the Financial Modernization Act of 1999 through Congress and then went to work for UBS. Absolutely disgraceful. I would put Gramm high on my ‘must be arrested list’. Put Gramm in an orange jumpsuit and a cell at a maximum security prison. We’ll see who the whiner is then.