The previous story was very long, as usual.  I left out the business about how GE is now divesting itself of all the manufacturing, profit businesses due to its stupid lending such as the loan it gave the DC welfare queen.  Also, there is Derivative Beast news as well as news about how a German banking person played money games with money saved by others to make herself look generous and goodly.  Bad morals run rampant.  It is theft to take other people’s money and move it (even for one day!) to a total stranger’s account.

Is GE Having a Yard Sale? – Forbes.com

Still on the block, some analysts say, are GE’s appliance, lighting, industrial controls and water chemicals businesses. GE’s Eisele says the appliance business is off the market and she isn’t aware of plans to sell the others. If they do go out for bid, Heymann says they might fetch $13 billion to $15 billion. “These businesses have been, shall we say, rode hard,” says Heymann. “They were run with a focus of minimizing invested capital and maximizing return on capital.”

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In other words, they didn’t put up any money of their own, they used their CREDIT to create profits based on the appearance of having ‘capital’.  But they had no capital.  They had debts.  Lots of debts.  And since the US has decided that debt is wealth, this didn’t bother GE much at all, nay, they boasted about how rich GE was thanks to these funny money borrowing games which involved them lending money based on their own debts, not capital.  Whew.  And now, they have to sell all the furniture and flat screen TV to pay for the mess this debt created.

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Standard & Poor’s analysts are less worried about GE. They took the company’s credit ratings down a notch to aa earlier this year but think the nonfinancial side can generate, after all other obligations, $2 billion in cash for 2009 and more than that next year. GE also has $61 billion in cash on hand, but most of that is earmarked to pay off maturing debt over the next two years.

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GE’s cash pool is the same size as the Dubai World debt mess! HAHAHA. and did GE use this money pool to make US jobs making US goods for world and US sales? Nope. This money was the capitalization for the GE lending to DC welfare queens and Donald Trumps of the world. Who, in turn, didn’t even bother to pretend to pay for anything. Ick. The DC welfare queen particularly irks me because she has no excuse. I was poorer than her when we lived in a tent for ten years and this broad can’t even park herself in a state-paid hotel without whining?

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And I raised my son in a tent complex because of my husband’s health problems, not because we did stupid things! Well, GE funded pure garbage and now is forced to divest all important, PROFITABLE parts to aliens to keep alive. And we know who is buying up GE’s capital producing parts. The same people who let us overspend all the time, let us go into collective debt. Our darling trade rivals.

. The big problems are embedded in the real estate portfolio, which includes $61 billion in non-U.S. residential mortgages, mainly in the U.K. and France. It classifies $4.8 billion of them as “nonearning,” yet it has only $975 million in loan-loss reserves. There’s another $45 billion in commercial real estate loans, with $1 billion in reserves. Goldman Sachs, hardly known as an unsophisticated lender, has marked its commercial real estate loan portfolio down 30%.

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YIKES!  GE’s putrid portfolio just for the UK and France is bigger than Dubai Dupe World’s debts??? HAHAHA.  And worse, this debt load happens to exactly match the money fund used by GE to keep out of bankruptcy, itself.  And its commercial real estate is down 30%, on top of all this?  We know where GE will go to protect itself and it ain’t AIG or Goldman Sachs or any other fake operation.  They will force us, just like RBS forced England, to pony up and make the deals good.

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Finally, GE owns $32 billion (book value) in real estate, much of it office buildings in cities like Paris, London and Chicago. It added $14 billion of that in 2005 and 2006 and says the whole portfolio might be worth 15% less than book value now. Maybe so, but brokers Jones Lang LaSalle say commercial real estate values are down 43% from their 2006 peak. Eisele said GE has stated as recently as the end of the third quarter that the risks in the real estate business “are understood and manageable.”

The consumer society was based on ever-expanding sales thanks to ever-easier credit thanks to rising real estate values thanks to easy lending by banks thanks to handing out impossible loans to faux buyers funded by criminal real estate vultures selling to prisoners in Colorado, illegal aliens working off the books and welfare queens with no hope of ever earning any income.  Naturally, all of this crashed to earth when no one bothered paying the loans which ruined bond sales since no one wants to buy bonds that instantly go into default.

German banker admits transferring money from rich to help poorer clients | World news | The Guardian

The woman knew most of the clients of her small rural branch and had access to their accounts, German TV station WDR reported. That’s how she discovered that some of her richest customers – some with six-figure balances – had not touched their accounts in years. Meanwhile, others were drowning in debt. “Customers asked me if I could help them. They couldn’t get credit in a conventional way,” the woman told the court, adding that she found her actions unbelievable now. “I can’t understand it any more. I must have had helper syndrome.”

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Out of sympathy, she began to move money about, ostensibly to “lend” from the rich to the poor for a short period. The authorities finally cottoned on when she broadened her reach, subsidising a small taxi firm in addition to her private clients.

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The woman could have faced a four-year prison sentence, but the court decided on leniency as she had confessed immediately and did not profit personally.

Banks must be moral institutions.  Their job is to protect the CAPITAL placed there by outsiders.  They can make this capital profitable by lending to responsible people, not welfare queens and Donald Trumps, but they also must do this with permission of the capital givers.  The deals made by this woman were illegal.  She was removing money from accounts and giving them…FREE…for others to use.  During this time, the accounts made no profits for the owners of the accounts.  On the other hand, all ZIRP systems are theft.

As I keep yelling about!  The Japanese banking system has warped global banking systems now for over a decade!  And now, the biggest system of them all, the US, is running a ZIRP system whereby my savings earn no money for me but funds the lending system of this nation which is a bunch of people stealing my capital for themselves while I gain absolutely nothing so why save money?  BUY GOLD!  This is the only sensible thing to do when in a ZIRP system like ours.  Of course, consumers pay very high rates to banks.  Which, in turn, are NOT shared with me even though I am part of the people who capitalize these same banks lending a high rates.  Rats.

And this kills banking systems.  Many billions of dollars are no longer flowing into savings due to ZIRP.  They flow into gold markets.  And this is bad news for banking systems.  Can’t be sustained.

Credit Default Swaps Are So Huge That They Can’t Be Banned

Despite regulatory threats on the horizon, the outlook for the credit default swaps (CDS) market remains bright. While the CDS market’s notional value of outstanding contracts fell 14% in 2009, it’s still at massive $36 trillion of notional value….

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…Despite the regulatory risk, recent data supports this view that the credit default swaps market will continue to grow. For example interdealer broker ICAP’s recent interim results showed that the company’s credit-related trading revenue 37% year over year, despite all the scorn….the end it isn’t crazy that bondholders might want to purchase insurance against default. Given the gigantic size of the global bond market and today’s technology, someone will find a way to meet this massive need. Thus less regulation would be better than more, since it would keep these markets onshore and under closer supervision.

This Business Insider article is so dumb.  So, the Derivatives Beast is immense?  We should make it bigger!  Huh???  Insane.  Of course, keeping uncontrolled betting casinos open so we can supervise them…while not applying any rules or supervision….is circular logic.  That is, what is the point of observing these con games up close if we have no intention of controlling or stopping them?  $36 trillion in ‘notational’ debt is insanity.  This is not ‘value’…there is nothing of value here…these are IOU promises to make debts good if they go into default.

World markets plunged when Dubai Dupe World basically declared bankruptcy.  No one will make Dubai’s debts good.  Except the main central bankers in order to save the lunatics who created the Derivatives Beast!  Which will pay NOTHING for the debts it insured against Dubai debts defaulting!

China State Construction nets $100m US subway deal

China State Construction Engineering Corp, the largest contractor in China, has bagged a subway ventilation project worth about $100 million in New York’s Manhattan area, marking the construction giant’s third order in the United States’ infrastructure space this year.

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The contract was given to China Construction American Co, a subsidiary, the Wall Street Journal quoted a source as saying.

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“The new project, along with the $410-million Hamilton Bridge project and a $1.7-billion entertainment project it won earlier this year, signals China State Construction’s ambition to tap the American construction market,” said Li Zhirui, an industry analyst at First Capital Securities.

As for Obama’s pathetic US debt spending (courtesy of China!) fixing our economy: the Chinese get the contracts!!!  All our trade rivals will get the contracts.  And we get more debts.  We can get low level jobs with these projects.  But we get no PROFITS from it.  And so things go from bad to worse.  Imagine if the New Deal projects all bankrolled German or Japanese corporations?  Then, WWII would have been a tad different.

Absolutely no surprise to me, Dubai is going more bankrupt than Iceland.  The global funny money credit game was tons of fun for pirates, gnomes, wizards, the Queen of England and US homebuyers with no incomes or legal standing.  But it has been a total catastrophe for the rest of us.  Savers in particular, have been hammered by this careless, insane lending spree.  Now, part 2 of the Great Depression II enters the scene with the massive default of the entire Dubai business taking down Abu Dhabi.

Here is just a list of all the news stories from around the world showing clearly that this collapse is rattling virtually all major markets:Ω

CANADA STOCKS-TSX falls as Dubai debt concerns rattle banks Reuters - Yan Ng -TORONTO, Nov 26 (Reuters) – Toronto’s main stock index slumped 200 points on Thursday as debt concerns in Dubai ripped through financial …

Dubai Royal Reassures Investors On Dubai World Debt Woe Wall Street Journal

Mexico peso knocked off 1-year high by Dubai fearsReuters - ‎MEXICO CITY, Nov 26 (Reuters) – Mexico’s peso sank by the most in a month on Thursday and stocks tumbled as news of debt problems in Dubai that could hit …

FOREX-Yen surges as Dubai woes put investors off riskReuters - Kaori Kaneko, Hugh Lawson - ‎Dubai struggled to ease fears of debt default on Thursday after its move to delay repayments at two flagship firms shook confidence in the Middle East as a …

Japan Stocks Drop as Dollar Weakens Below 85 Yen, Oil Declines Bloomberg

Australia’s CBA says no comment on Dubai reportReuters - Morag MacKinnon, Mark Bendeich - AX), declined on Friday to comment on a report that it had an exposure to Dubai World, a conglomerate at the heart of the emirate’s debt problems. …

European Banks May Have $40B Dubai Exposure Wall Street Journal

Pound Falls Broadly on Dubai New York Times

Seoul shares seen lower on Dubai worriesReuters - SEOUL, Nov 27 (Reuters) – Seoul shares may open lower on Friday amid deepening concerns about Dubai’sdebt problems, which hit European markets overnight …ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ

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This is classic ‘Great Depression’ news very much akin to all previous credit bubble depressions.  The 1878 collapse of the Austro-Hungarian credit bubble caused a similar domino-falling effect.  Certainly, the German refusal to pay reparations popped the WWI credit bubble, belatedly and most hideously, causing a global collapse of all banking systems including even in the US.

This credit bubble had to be one of the stupidest ones ever.  Most of what it built in most countries was utterly useless, frantic, often very ugly housing schemes.  It did build factories in Communist nations!  The former communist nations that were occupied by the Soviets didn’t build factories, they aped the West and built useless excess speculative housing ventures.  After 9/11, the US was already in a post-Wall Street bubble popping with the Dot. com collapses.

So what did we do when we went to war, too?  Why, we decorated our homes, went shopping and played the asset inflation valuation game as the US government pumped an extra $5 trillion in free funny money from the government…all paid for by selling bonds to Asia and Caribbean pirate banking operations using Queen Elizabeth’s protections to avoid taxes and regulations!  On top of all this, Japan enjoyed huge industrial profit growth and rising export markets while running their ZIRP banking system.  This, in turn, fueled the credit bubble with the Japanese carry trade scheme.

On top of this, the US wars and warmongering against Iran drove up oil prices. I was very gloomy back in 2005 and said that American never does well when oil prices go up.  Yet, it seemed as if we could have rising oil prices and a housing boom at the same time. This was thanks to all the free credit extended by Asia during this time, in hopes that this credit would be spent on buying Asian trade goods. And yes, it worked like a charm.

So America went very deep into debt, making big, pretty, decorated houses and we had cosmetic surgery and went on vacations and bought fancy clothing….while at war and while running vast trade, government and personal deficits.  That is, we partied, we killed and we spent money like drunk sailors on shore leave.  Dubai is interesting since it is the Las Vegas of the Arab world.  It is where strict Muslims go to sin.  It is the honey pot for fun and games.  Dubai is part of the Arab Emirates and it is very interesting to me that the Arab Emirates is also where Doha is and this is the place our rulers choose to negotiate insane, dangerous and stupid free trade treaties!

According to Wikipedia, Forbes magazine declared Abu Dhabi the world’s richest city back in 2007.  This is typical of Mr. Forbes and his crew of ‘experts’: they can’t figure out the difference between ‘rich’ and ‘deep in debt’!  I once had a very ‘rich’ neighbor on this mountain in NY, he had a private jet.  A very expensive young goddess trophy wife.  He was very short, she towered over him.  He had a mansion and owned many properties all over the place.  Drove a fancy imported German car and a fancier Italian sports car.  His children went to top schools.

He also went bankrupt.  And his trophy wife dumped him, his kids had to drop out of school, he lost even his mansion, his fancy cars.  And then, after breaking the law here, he ran off and I never saw him again.  This is typical: during easy credit times, the Donald Trumps of the world do really great.  Then, they can’t keep getting more and more easy credit, they collapse since these are basically credit ponzi schemes.  That is, new debts pay off old debts over and over again.  During which, the whole ball of debts increase in size.  The longer this goes on, the bigger the snowballing debts.

Dubai Debt May Be Higher Than $80 Billion, UBS Analysts Say – Bloomberg.com

“Perhaps Dubai’s debt includes sizeable off-balance sheet liabilities that imply a total debt burden well above the $80 billion to $90 billion markets have estimated so far,” real estate analyst Saud Masud wrote in a note yesterday. “This could imply that the debt issued by Dubai in recent weeks is insufficient to meet upcoming redemptions.” .

Dubai, which has said it will raise as much as $20 billion selling bonds to repay borrowings, said on Nov. 25 that state- run Dubai World, with $59 billion of liabilities, would ask creditors for a “standstill” agreement as it negotiates to extend debt maturities.

I highly recommend watching this new show, Bank of Mom and Dad – Hulu.  It is both hilarious and disgusting.  The anger I feel, watching it, comes from the fact that when I was a young woman, I couldn’t be a stupid bimbo.  I lived in very nasty places (and fixed them up and stitched whole neighborhoods back together so they would not be slums anymore) in order to make do during economic hard times.  I worked even when I had children and had a husband with cancer who also worked even as he suffered from it (he survived and we are happy he survived!).

These idiots on the show got easy credit and used it to make themselves look ‘pretty’.  But not to get married!  Nope, out of pure vanity for themselves.  I didn’t look ‘pretty’ at all when I was struggling to survive, raise children and care for a husband who was very weak and ill.  But over time, we all became stronger and wiser and grew up and did many things while not accumulating a mountain of debt (all our housing is debt free after age 55).  When people get easy credit, they go crazy and buy stupid things because it is ‘free funny money’ so why sweat the details?

This is true of entire nations!  The US debts we sell to Asia are all ‘funny money’ supreme.  And our government doesn’t take any of these debts even slightly seriously.  Both political parties spend like fiends.  Both cut taxes irresponsibly and hand out goodies like the recent IRS freebies which fueled instant inflation in food and fuel prices.

Dubai World should be renamed ‘Dummy World’.  And yes, it perfectly expresses the mess the entire planet earth is in thanks to this ridiculous credit bubble.  If Dubai World alone has $60 billion in debt, it is easy to guess that the entire Arab country has over $100 billion in debts.  Here is the last IMF report from October 4th,  on the United Arab Emirates: https://www.imf.org/External/AM/2009/imfc/statement/eng/are.pdf

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Like other EMDCs, countries in the Middle East region have experienced varying repercussions. Growth decelerated across the board, but more sharply in oil producing countries, due to the collapse in oil prices and cutbacks in production. Other countries faced sharp contractions in worker remittances, tourism, and foreign direct investment.

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Interlinkages with global financial markets were limited for the most part, but real estate and equity market corrections have exacerbated the downturn in some countries. After slowing to about 21⁄4 percent in 2009, growth is expected to pick up in 2010 but will depend on the pace of the global recovery. Inflation has subsided, returning to single digits for the region as a whole. Public policies were directed to supporting demand, in many countries using the financial surpluses accumulated during the boom years. The strategy provided support to nonoil activity with spillovers to non-oil producer countries in the region. Financial institutions have broadly proven their resilience to external stresses but supervisors should remain alert to further spillovers.

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This is exactly the same sort of myopic, stupid analysis seen in the US.  That is, it is all about wishful thinking!  Financial institutions did NOT prove ‘resilient’.  They were totally messed up and became instantly non-functional when the Japanese carry trade suddenly vanished. Instead, they kept themselves afloat by raiding the world’s biggest government borrowing systems: the central banks of Japan, Europe and the US.

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The Fund’s critical role in mitigating crises has been reaffirmed in recent months. Significant achievements since the Spring meetings attest to the Fund’s vital role. The trebling of loanable resources, reform of its GRA and LIC facilities, and further streamlining of conditionality have enhanced its crisis response. Fund programs to EMDCs have helped avert a major collapse in a number of countries or greatly diminished potential distress in others.

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So, this credit bubble is being fixed by trebling the few systems granting loans!  In other words, the credit bubble is being kept alive.  And of course, the Derivatives Beast, the great, dark, hulking monster in the banking closet, continues to grow.  And is behind the creation of easy lending.

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Notwithstanding strengthened macroeconomic management and reduced debt burdens of LICs, many countries continue to have fragile debt situations. Concessional financing therefore remains critical, and careful consideration is needed when applying the proposed new debt sustainability guidelines that introduce some flexibility to allow for new forms of financing. In this regard, the recent agreement on use of resources linked to gold sales would contribute to the Fund’s concessional lending capacity. The Fund should continue to review and enhance its engagement with emerging market and developing countries, and to carry out its surveillance and deliver financial support in an even handed way.

This report goes on and on and on and doesn’t mention any specifics and certainly makes no mention of dumb Dubai Dupe World.  The assumption that the credit crisis is finished is particularly foolish.  No economic collapse is ever done unless all parties finally realize, there is no hope and nothing can be saved. Then, facing reality, people start all over again and we hope, learn a lesson.  Unfortunately, the lessons are not learned because people love credit bubbles, love funny money and want desperately to live in a funny money world with no responsibilities.

The collapse of Dubai is significant since many corporations depended on the deep borrowing pockets of Dubai to fatten their bottom lines.  No building project was too exotic or too expensive!  The handing out of bribes to all and sundry kept the Dubai population rolling in dough.  Since all projects had to have Dubai representation, they were there with hands out, hoping for more and more money and no one cared since the credit for all this was bankrolled on higher oil profit expectations.

As I noted, the US always gets into economic trouble if oil shoots up in price.  We get bled white so we can drive very big gas guzzlers as fast and far as possible.  When this ends, we literally crash into a brick wall.  And when we crashed, the oil profits also crashed.  And so the funding system ended very abruptly, too.  The IMF credit began to collapse, too.  So they came up with a scheme to sell gold.

Now, selling gold is very popular and despite many huge entities like banks, selling gold, the price has gone sky high due to many people trying to protect their currency holdings from eroding so they buy and hold gold.  All the pirates and gnomes are buying gold, very frantically, for they know exactly how bad things are: they are the cause of all this. And they are not wishful thinkers, they are LOOTERS.  So they translate all their vile profits from giving away reckless credit, into gold.  While the debtors who owe these guys money, go bankrupt.  Note that the biggest banking pirates are seeing record profits while they palmed off all their bad lending to central banks and governments.

Same with Dubai: the governments of that region are picking up the pieces.  All the profits from high oil prices are going down the tubes.  They won’t be building immense towers to nowhere.  The race to build the highest Tower of Babel has ended with a whimper and perhaps, a bang once the terrorists get their way.  That is, these buildings are doomed.  The social and economic instability of the region is rising, not falling and the chances of these towers being destroyed is very high.  Especially since non-Muslim aliens are often the owners of the apartments, etc in these things.

The Washington Post as a stupid sob story, by the way, of a welfare queen who wanted to live the big life by lying and cheating everyone only she was also cheated by others who cynically used her as a tool to get money from the biggest bankers on Wall Street who are all chiselers and cheaters, themselves.  This round robin den of thieves then dumped this mess into our laps with the TARP and Maiden Lane deals:

Fallout: In the real estate boom, one mother took a chance on American dream — and lost big – washingtonpost.com

At first it all seemed straightforward. Papers were read and presented, most of which White did not try to decipher. The type of financing that had started it all would later come to be known as a liar’s loan because it required no proof of income. Across the country, thousands and thousands of such loans were made. White’s papers cited income of $163,320 a year, even though she says her 2005 income-tax earnings were less than $15,000 and she relied at times on food stamps.

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The same papers showed how much she had in her bank account. The total was $14,026, appearing to reflect two deposits made the day before the closing, when a $7,000 check from Zhang’s husband was deposited into White’s account at 12:20 p.m., which was one minute after $6,000 in cash was added….

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…”Please let this be something I can afford,” she said to herself. She was pretty sure she could afford $2,000. She told herself that if her day-care business did well, perhaps she could afford $2,500. If it was $2,800, she would struggle. Here, now, came reality: $5,635 a month.

This is Dubai World, big time. Multiply this insanity by 100 million idiots and we get the world banking crisis.  Of course, the Derivatives Beast loved people on these ARM loans at high interest rates!  And the OTC markets loved packaging these fake deals.  Many, many loans made in 2006 failed by 2007 with virtually no attempt at paying off the loans, not even 2 months payments.  Many of these loans were like the one in this story above: the operators expecting to defraud the system paid the first 2 months for the ‘borrower’ and then let the whole thing fall into default.  The con artists got their fees and profits all down the line, the first 2 months.  Then, the debt’s default was some other party’s problem!

Many people commenting on this story in the WP wanted both the welfare queen (whose punishment was for taxpayers to pay for a new, very nice apartment and pay many of her past bills!) and the real estate people to be arrested.  And I fully agree: this was not a woman who suddenly lost her job (she had none) and who was struck down by disease (when my husband had cancer, I just had to work more hours, etc)—no, she never could pay, made no attempt to pay and conspired with con artists to lie about her ability to pay.

And this is why we need restrictions on lending!  Since lending is based on faith—future payments will restore the balance—letting people borrow in bad faith destroys the entire concept of credit.  Here is another example of bad faith:

Video: Bank gave RBS and HBOS ’secret’ £62bn loan – Times Online

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBOS were secretly kept afloat with £62 billion of emergency Government support at the height of the credit crisis last year, it was revealed today. The Bank of England kept the massive liquidity injections secret until today, when it judged calm had been restored and there was no longer any need for secrecy.

The RBS gave out loans to people like the above welfare queen who got hers from GE which dumped making real manufactured goods and decided to be a fly by night bank offering idiots loans they couldn’t afford to service.  The RBS is the same just like Deutsche Bank or Citigroup or Bank of America, etc.  All of them became hucksters who hustled welfare queens and Donald Trumps, enabling people like all the girls on the Bank of Mom and Dad to spend money on $2000 boots and lip injections.  Here is an example of RBS lending which the people of all of England are now responsible for:

RBS Led Dubai World Lenders, HSBC May Have Most at Stake in UAE – Bloomberg.com

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc underwrote more loans than any institution to Dubai World, the state company seeking to reschedule debt, while HSBC Holdings Plc has the most at risk in the United Arab Emirates, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

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RBS, the largest U.K. government-controlled bank, arranged $2.3 billion, or 17 percent, of Dubai World loans since January 2007, JPMorgan said in a report today, citing Dealogic data. HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, has the “largest absolute exposure” in the U.A.E. with $17 billion of loans in 2008, JPMorgan said, citing the Emirates Banks Association. Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank PJSC may be owed $1.9 billion by Dubai World, making it the largest creditor outside the emirate, said two people familiar with the companies.

Most depressions last at least a decade due to the lengthy process of getting rid of all of these many dumb loans.  Only after everyone finally goes bankrupt, can credit be repaired and this is always, always a very painful process.  Many a nation has tried the Weimar solution of destroying the entire currency in a wild attempt at getting rid of past debts via devaluing the currency. The US is in the middle of trying to do this right now, devaluing the dollar.

Of course, the inflation this causes hasn’t hit here…YET.  But inevitably will which is why pirates here who created this mess are buying gold at a frantic rate.  They all know that Weimar Germans with gold did better than ones with no gold.  So long as they could smuggle the gold out of the country.  Usually, they simply upped and left entirely, themselves, putting the gold in Switzerland, Paris or NYC.

Pelosi says Americans could ‘absorb’ increased deficit if it means more jobs – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room

Americans could be ready to “absorb” increases to the deficit if it means higher employment, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday. As the Congress prepares to put together a new spending package focused on creating new jobs in the U.S., the Speaker said that while it’s a “false choice” to pose the situation facing lawmakers as a balance between jobs and increased deficits, Americans would rather have jobs.

We are using debt to get out of the mess caused by a debt bubble.  This never works.  Anyone reading the history of the Weimar Republic can see this.  Hitler also ran the government in the red to pay for work projects like the Autobahn building spree.  But he fixed this by trying to loot first, the Jews in Germany and then, all his neighbors.  This didn’t work in the long run, not at all.  Word of warning for the US: we can’t bomb some of our biggest creditors.  They can bomb back.

CNSNews.com – Despite Obama’s Repeated Claims That Enacting $787-Billion Stimulus Was Urgent, 78 Percent of Money Remained Unspent by End of Fiscal 2009 Says Federal Auditing Agency

After his election last November and until the $787-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed in February, President Barack Obama repeatedly insisted that it was urgent for Congress to enact his economic “recovery” bill immediately. Yet, by the end of fiscal 2009 fully 78 percent of the federal spending authorized by that bill had not yet taken place, according to the Government Accountability Office….

. ….Over and over again in the weeks before Congress passed the bill, President-elect and then President Obama repeatedly and emphatically insisted that the fate of the U.S. economy rested on getting the bill enacted immediately so that federal funds could be spent to create jobs for Americans.

And most of this boondoggle money wasn’t even used yet?  Typical.  Congress long ago, ceased being serious about anything.  At least since 2000, they are like the welfare queen in the WP story.  Lying about finances, going to the Zhangs for funny money deals, getting money put in the bank account so we can buy stuff from the Zhangs and unwilling to work or pay for even the bare interest rate totals.  The lady in the story, by the way, went out the first month she closed on the house she couldn’t afford and used the cash given to her to pay 2 months bills, on new furniture, new flat screened TV, computers, clothing and so on.

Just like we pocket the money from China and buy more wars, more spending at home.  We are fools and will end up not like the welfare queen who continues to bankrupt all of us but like the Germans after WWII.  This is stupid.  Totally stupid.  We can’t afford to do this.  Congress has to wake up…HAHAHA….fat chance.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good thanksgiving.  Maybe we can eat all the turkeys, next time. There is this immense flock of turkeys just dying to be eaten.

A happy Thanksgiving to everyone!  We had to cancel the family dinner due to the only person in our family who was unable to get the flu shots got sick with the flu (interesting, isn’t it?  The ones who got the shots are healthy!).  In Nepal, Hindus are having a 5 year ceremony where they butcher many animals.  This is done to placate a goddess so she will give them wealth.  This is all about the Cave of Wealth and Death and illustrates my point, how human brains really operate, deep inside.

People think all Hindus are the same.  It is, like many ‘pagan’ religions, as diverse and varied as any other so-called ‘non-pagan’ religions. Personally, I believe that all religions are ‘pagan’.  This is due to the way our brains work: we like thinking paganistic thoughts.  This soothes us and lets us function in a dangerous and disturbing world.  And we certainly know this world is most disturbing, especially when we sleep at night.

Hindu sacrifice of 250,000 animals begins | World news | guardian.co.uk

The world’s biggest animal sacrifice began in Nepal today with the killing of the first of more than 250,000 animals as part of a Hindu festival in the village of Bariyapur, near the border with India. The event, which happens every five years, began with the decapitation of thousands of buffalo, killed in honour of Gadhimai, a Hindu goddess of power….

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…Chandan Dev Chaudhary, a Hindu priest, said he was pleased with the festival’s high turnout and insisted tradition had to be kept. “The goddess needs blood,” he said. “Then that person can make his wishes come true.”

Like in any religious grouping, some Hindi want to stop the slaughter while others revel in the bloody business.  Even when various religions forbid killing even flies, they still find it ludicrously easy to massacre humans over trivial social or religious disputes or differences.  Again: religion and killing are very, very closely associated inside our brains.  That is, the parts of our brains that are most active, if viewed using various scientific tools, are also the parts where the thinking process for murder lies.

I never heard of this particular, bloody goddess before so I was rather curious about her.  And it turns out, getting information online is difficult.  I have some fondness for bloody goddesses since they are often the elder beings worshipped by humans way back when men discovered that women could bleed in synch with the moon and not die or even be harmed whereas if any man bleeds even half as much, he can die.

All ‘primitive’ cultures have many taboos and rules concerning women menstruating which are designed to protect men from the Dark Magic hoodoo of feminine bleeding.  Universally, caves are closely associated in human cultures with the womb.  The river of blood that flows from the womb is also the same place where births happen.  The mental transference of this understanding of blood flows like river/womb like dark cave/birth and rebirth to various constellations in the sky, the sun and the moon, is the early history of all human religions and belief systems.

Generally speaking, most religions move slowly away from the bloody origins of all religions and try to hide it, over time.  For example, in the Bible, the believers in the ‘god’ in that book move from assuming the god wants human sacrifices to a laundry list of various animals this god wants killed on auspicious stellar or astral events to no animals or humans being sacrificed.  But this doesn’t mean the human sacrifices are wrong or unimportant.

For example, the excuse given for ceasing blood sacrifices to the Bible god is simple: a human sacrifice of the supposed ’son’ born via magic from a dark womb, made it unnecessary to have various slaughter fests to keep this particular god happy.  The Hindu goddess in this story intrigued me enough to poke around, hoping to find some more connections to this entire business of the Cave of Wealth and Death.  I split the name of the goddess into two parts:

Gadhi – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gadhi is a village development committee in Rautahat District in the Narayani Zone of south-eastern Nepal. At the time of the 1991 Nepal census it had a population of 1063.

So, the village where this happens is named after half of the goddess’s name.  I looked up in a Sanskrit dictionary the meaning of ‘gadhi’:  Origin and Meaning of the Name Gadhi:  Father of Vishvamitra. So, the name of the goddess is the name of a god with a second word attached to differentiate them.  This often happens in religions: the yin/yang/male/female/dark/light duality is very obvious.  It seems that our brains operate on a duality system and we see this clearly in nearly all human activities.  The either/or process is also how we debate or process data or view panoramas.

This is also why finessing events, information and systems analysis is extremely difficult for the human mind and even with lots of training, is immensely difficult to do.  The first step is to always step back and look at the duality itself and then like with fractals, begin to isolate various dual systems and compare them with opposite dual systems and see if there are even more, unseen dualities.  This sounds insane but it is also the fundamental basis of figuring out complex systems.

Seeing that the male half of this god/goddess group has a name, I looked it up to see what the son did in the hopes this would illuminate the darker doings of the mother/father duo:

Vishvamitra – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brahmarshi Vishvamitra (Sanskrit विश्वामित्र viśvā-mitra “all-friend“) is one of the most venerated rishis or sages of ancient times in India. He is also credited as the author of most of Mandala 3 of the Rigveda, including the Gayatri Mantra. The Puranas mention that only 24 Rishissince antiquity have understood the whole meaning of, and thus wielded the whole power of, the Gayatri Mantra. Sage Vishvamitra is supposed to be the first, and Sage Yajnavalkya the last….

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…Vishvamitra was a king in ancient India, also called Kaushika (“the descendant of Kusha“). He was a valiant warrior and the great-grandson of a great king named Kusha. The Valmiki Ramayana, prose 51 of Bala Kanda, starts the legend of Vishvamitra thus, “There was a king named Kusha, a brainchild of Prajapati, and Kusha’s son was the powerful and verily righteous Kushanaabha. One who is highly renowned by the name Gaadhi was the son of Kushanaabha, and Gaadhi’s son is this great-saint of great resplendence, Vishvamitra. Vishvamitra ruled the earth, and this great-resplendent king ruled the kingdom for many thousands of years.”

If this ‘first sage’ son ‘ruled for many thousands of years’, he sounds an awful lot like he is associated with a Zodiac star cluster.  Since the main animals sacrificed in these modern ceremonies are bulls, I would venture out of line and suggest this ‘first sage’ may have been Taurus.  This is Indra, one of the oldest gods in the pantheon.  And this god has been literally eclipsed by later gods associated with other star groups in the Zodiac.

Indra is also ‘gold’.  The ancient Greek astronomers talked about the ‘golden age’ which they identified as Taurus. There was the silver and brass and iron ages (guess which one we are in!) which were ‘debased’ from the purity of the ‘golden era’ which was thousands of years ago, when Taurus rose in the east on the vernal equinox.  Of course, there are older cycles going back to Virgo, the Virgin (mother).  For many thousands of years, humans pondered the dawn skies and set up rock circles and other devices to help them observe when stars, the moon and the sun rose and set.

So this goddess is associated with the oldest core books in the Rigveta.  Which makes her very irritable and ancient.  I would guess that people kept her cult going for the last 36,000 years.  When it comes to religions, we are of a dual mind: we fear change…you never know about the unknown!….and yet we are restless. When the appearance of the heavens shift and change over time, we have to reset our religious beliefs and this is very disturbing and painful.

So various bits and pieces of older beliefs remain but mutate, are papered over or become temporarily hidden from view after great effort and training is applied.  Generally speaking, displaced gods tend to live on in the minds of the masses long, long, long after the elites and their astronomers ditch the previous gods and goddesses.  This gives all religious a deeper characteristic and more depth and power since it dwells inside of our personal Caves of Wealth and Death.  Here is some more about the magic mage, son of the blood drenched ancient goddess:

Vishvamitra – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On one of his exploits, he and his soldiers took rest in the ashram of Rishi Vasishta. There, his whole army was well fed and taken care of. This caused a doubt in the king’s mind as to how it was possible for this simple ashram to take care of all the arrangements to feed an entire army. He expressed his surprise to the sage. Vasishta replied,

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“O king, this feast that you have partaken with your kinsmen, has been provided by my calf Nandini (sometimes referred as Sabala), who was gifted to me by Indra. You must know that she is the daughter of Indra’s cow Kamadhenu. She provides me with everything I need.”

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More proof that this ancient goddess is connected to Taurus.

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Kaushika was filled with wonder when he heard this. He began to think that possessing this cow would mean a lot to him; after all, the sage did not have to provide food and sustenance for a large army everyday. He expressed a desire to the sage for obtaining Nandini from him. Vasishta was polite, but steadfast in his refusal. He would not be tempted by the offer of untold wealth that was made by Kaushika, for after all who can set a price on a cow, which can readily yield all the riches in the world.

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Anyone attempting to try to understand money must understand this paragraph of this very ancient story.  The Taurus cow (note how Egypt, in this same time frame, also had a very similar divine cow) was the source of all riches!  And that if someone possessed this magical cow, they will be able to multiply whatever it is that is ‘wealth’ until it reaches infinity!

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Note also, that all times kings and rulers want infinite wealth is for what?  War!  So this guy wants the magical infinity cow so he can feed his ever-bigger army so they can conquer and rule the world!  Of course, the sage owning the magical cow connected to the bloody goddess won’t hand it over, because if he did, the magic would blow up, that is, infinity will turn to zero in a lightning bolt.

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The king grew exceedingly angry. He insulted the Brahmarishi with harsh words, and ordered his soldiers to seize the cow, and drive it to his kingdom. By his yogic powers, the great sage Vasishta, called forth an entire army of fierce warriors. They fought the army of Kaushika and defeated it thoroughly. Kaushika was captured and presented before Vasishta. The sage pardoned the king and sent him away with words of advice.

And so ends this particular saga, with a very strange ending indeed!  The defender of the magical infinity wealth cow could create a bigger army than the king’s army and the king was defeated.  And what happened next?

The king was given advice!  HAHAHA.  He had to learn his lesson about the Cave of Wealth and Death and bring this information to future kings and rulers so they would do what?

AVOID INFINITY!  And of course, the entire realm of fairy tales and mythology is chock full of such stories, all of which examine this paradoxical situation of infinity/zero/wealth/death from top to bottom.  An endless pool of lessons and  psychological advice.  The other day, I went to this event in NY where a guy claimed he understood money better than the ‘experts’.  He even wrote a book about this!

And what did he say?  He claimed, we could make money out of thin air!  Duh!  And he figured, since we can do this, why not give everyone $10,000 so the economy could flourish!  And to fix the obvious results which is the utter destruction of the value of the currency being thus abused, he would stop this flood of milk from the magical cow via us all solemnly swearing we will never, ever do this again!

HAHAHA.  I was FURIOUS.  I explained that this was totally insane and that money can’t be used this way because history tells us in no uncertain terms that if we can make money appear magically, we cannot resist the temptation to milk the magical cow forever  to infinity.  It is our human natures to do this.  He thought I was crazy, of course.  ’All money is based on laws,’ he declared.  The point being, a government creating money out of nothing and just handing it out, not collecting taxes and selling bonds and paying interest (all of which restricts money creation!) any government making magic money cannot stop.

That is because it is very popular.  Everyone will want $100,000 and then a million and then a billion and soon, postage stamps cost a trillion dollars like we saw this last decade in Zimbabwe.  Or Weimar Germany. And this takes me to the news: during the entire agony of Zimbabwe collapsing, it virtually never made any headlines at all in the US.  And this is fearful news.  It means, we don’t want to see what happens when the magical cow is captured and milked endlessly.

That is, Zimbabwe is now totally collapsing, people are starving, the electrical system is barely functional at all, there are no real banks anymore, schools are closed, soldiers riot and steal in the streets and the population is trying to flee this monetary hell hole.  Money is for COMMERCE.  It is for settling debts over time and cannot afford to lose faith or value because if this is lost, all business collapses and only gold remains as the final sales mechanism…aside from bullets, of course.

This is our Thanksgiving lesson.  Have fun with the turkeys!

This forlorn, futile ‘decision’ was made long ago and far away. Obama gets to salute endless body bags as the dead are carted home. Welcome to Imperial hell, soldiers dying, bankers stuffing their bags with loot while the US military/industrial complex plunders the public purse. Oh, and national healthcare is communist! We can’t afford it, obviously. Not when we must pay for dead bodies overseas, endless dead. And to think the Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Will this horrid man return it, burning with shame? Or will he fill his goblet with blood and laugh? Shame on him, just shame on him.

The rising disappointment with Obama (and very much, with Clinton) can be seen all over the place.  100% of the antiwar vote went to Obama.  His spitting in our collective faces is most dangerous.  The Democratic party seems to never learn the lessons of history: piss off antiwar people and they will go third party candidate or not vote or push for candidates.  Of course, this means that only pro-war candidates ever get into office.

And this is why the Pentagon gobbles up an immense hunk of the US budget and is directly responsible for US government overspending as well as imperial overreach.  People supporting the idea that our empire is grossly overextended are always shoved aside as imperialists struggle to expand our military empire even as our mercantile empire shrivels to nearly nothing compared to all our major trade rivals.

The ONLY reason for an empire is economic: if the empire causes wealth to flow to the Capitol, to ‘Rome’, then it is good.  When the empire’s costs and trade causes wealth to drain out of the Capitol, then the empire declines and falls.  This storyline has been painfully obvious to historians for at least 1,500 years.  Ask any historian, even ones that are ill-informed and ideological, and they will agree that Rome fell when the military costs were impossible to discharge due to the capitol of the empire losing money at a mad rate.

Tax revenues fell, debts rose, the currency was debased for several hundred years until finally money began to literally vanish and barter replaced it.  The machinery of the bureaucracy ground to a shuddering halt and then the capital of looted by barbarians and Rome fell into penury and destruction of 1,000 years.  So, what is Obama doing today?

Obama Plans 34K More Troops for Afghanistan — News from Antiwar.com

White House officials announced today that President Barack Obama will address the nation on December 1 to unveil his new Afghanistan escalation strategy, putting an end to months of speculation and allowing NATO to approve its own escalation later that week.

Support for this insane war in Europe is nearing rock bottom.  NATO will not be sending massive troops there to die.  They will, as our creditors who own tremendous seas of US debts and dollars, will demand we expose Americans to the firefights while they lounge about in ’safe zones’, sneering at us.

Why US patriots allow this baffles me.  In WWI and WWII, we certainly didn’t tell our allies to sit back and sup tea while we did all the fighting.  Certainly, the Soviets were in no mood to not fight, they were relentlessly eager to destroy the Nazis totally.  And the Brits fought a long battle in both wars, bleeding their own empire white until it died.

But this fiction of ‘NATO’ troops must end.  Either we send them to their own deaths as ruthlessly as our insane military leaders are doing to their own captive personnel or we ditch this stupid and burdensome alliance.  After all, every country in NATO runs a trade surplus with the US.  This, alone, is grounds for chopping off this dangerous appendage.  That is, our ‘provinces’ who ally themselves with us are causing a sea of red ink for our empire.  And they are very eager to keep running trade surpluses with us (this very emphatically includes Japan) so we can cut them off of our massive and expensive military empire and they won’t die.

WE ARE DYING.  Our economy is dying.  Our ability to provide jobs for Americans is dying.  Our main industry is military and our most secure jobs are military.  Our military spending goes up all the time without hinderance and our budget deficit is soaring.  On every meaningful front, we are bleeding badly no less literal bleeding as soldiers are now killed nearly every day in Afghanistan, trying to dominate a people who have thousands of years of refusal to bend the knee to anyone.

Chilcot Iraq Inquiry: Britain ‘knew Saddam Hussein had destroyed WMD’ – Times Online

Intelligence information that Saddam Hussein had dismantled his weapons of mass destruction programme was received by the Foreign Office days before Tony Blair ordered the invasion of Iraq, an inquiry into the war heard today.

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The revelation on the second day of the Chilcot Inquiry will raise fresh questions about the justification for invading Iraq in March 2003.

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The inquiry heard that the Foreign Office did not believe that Iraq had a large number of long-range missiles and that the claim that Saddam could launch a chemical or biological attack within 45 minutes related only to battlefield weapons and not those capable of reaching other countries.

Arrest Blair. Arrest Bush and Cheney. Arrest Powell.  They are obvious war criminals.  The US evades paying the true price of military belligerence because we presently rule much of the planet.  The only reason the Europeans and Japanese happily accept this misrule is very simple: they are profiting from it.  They are not ringing up vast debts to be paid in the future!  They are not seeing a decline in living standards or tax hikes to pay for these wars and occupations!  They are happier than us.

England, riding on the coattails of the US empire for half a century, has been content with the status quo since it allows Brits to strut and fret on the world stage as mini-emperors while not paying for this theatrical production.  The US bankrolls this business while allowing the Queen to continue to live like an empress in many palaces.  And while She protects many small pirate islands that are piratical banking havens used to evade US taxes.

4 U.S. military personnel kids face arrest for putting rope across road › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Police have obtained arrest warrants for four children of U.S. military personnel in Tokyo on suspicion of being involved in an incident in which a woman was seriously injured after being caught in a rope on a road, investigative sources said Wednesday.

.As two of the four boys and girls, aged between 15 and 18, live in the U.S. Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, police will ask the U.S. military to hand them over, according to the sources.

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The woman in her 20s was entangled in the rope, which was stretched across the road in Musashimurayama, Tokyo, as she was riding a minibike on the evening of Aug 13. She collapsed and suffered a skull fracture…The four are suspected of attempted murder, the sources said.

The Japanese do not like our military.  They passively allow us to occupy Japan for more than half a century because we protect Japan from everyone they tried to enslave in the past.  Surrounded by people who love the Japanese underground/manga culture but hate the Japanese imperial government, the cheap solution was to have the US misspend trillions of dollars, defending Japan from these neighbors while Japan merrily goes around Asia, making deals and beating US export corporations.

And while running immense trade surpluses with the US itself.  And on top of this, holding our dollars and debts so they have a stranglehold on our financial systems!  But up close, on the ground, the Japanese people hate the American military and I am guessing, from the way things are going, this is now mutual.  Our troops are not beloved in Iraq.  They are not seen as heroes in Europe.  People put up with our imperial pretensions only if they get vast economic advantages.

This is a goofy way to run an empire. The ONLY reason to keep ANY troops ANYWHERE is if this brings economic benefits to the heart of the empire.  Instead, it has ravaged the US imperial power at home.  Cold calculations have to be made when it comes to stationing troops.  If a nation we have bases at is benefitting financially from the arrangement, we terminate it.  If it profits us, we keep it.

Using this yardstick is very simple and it leads to a major conclusion: virtually no country where we have bases are benefitting us at all.  The debit side of the ledger is too vast and we must let go.  Military adventures work ONLY if they are profitable.  WWII, for example, was extremely profitable for the US.  The Vietnam War was a total military and economic loss and very badly crippled the US domestic situation.

The Gulf War I was also very, very profitable.  It even balanced our trade deficit briefly due to the rich oil sheikhs paying us as their mercenaries.  But all the other wars and occupations have been very bad money losers.  So we are in a very big net loss here and have to cut our losses.  Now, not 100 years from now.

Consumer Spending in U.S. Rises More Than Forecast (Update1) – Bloomberg.com

Another Commerce Department report showed orders for long- lasting goods unexpectedly dropped last month, depressed by a slump in bookings for defense gear.

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The median estimate of 75 economists surveyed called for a 0.5 percent increase in spending after an originally reported decrease of 0.5 percent the prior month. Projections ranged from no change to a gain of 0.8 percent.

This month, ‘consumer spending’ went up again because the Pentagon is now freely spending more money on ‘defense gear’.  Congress just voted more money for these purchases and like under Bush, it was ‘off budget’ special spending….which Obama and the Democrats promised us, they would cease doing, they were not going to copy Bush.  Like during all wartimes, gold continues to shoot upwards, rising another $14.60 in just one day.

Financiers making oodles of loot from our war spending are using our IOU money sold to Asia and Europe and are rapidly turning these into literal gold.  Squirreling away all this IOU debt money into hard metal is a sign that they expect the US dollar to die, very badly, once we give up on our debts and go bankrupt like England or Spain or other previous empires.

US economic indicators mask the death of our empire because much of our industrial base is purely  military and is driven by government spending, not US producing domestic products.  Our chief export industry is selling military stuff.  Japan just asked for and got our top military jets because we are desperate to have some counterbalance to Japanese exports to the US that are rapidly destroying our own native auto industries, for example.

Since all military export products cost US taxpayers tremendous sums to generate, develop and market, our collective benefit is negative.  That is, all of this runs very much in the red on our own government ledgers as well as trade ledgers.  We still, despite being the world’s #1 military exporter on earth, we still run bigger and bigger deficits and selling military stuff to allies who we protect hasn’t fixed our deficit spending at all.

House Democrats Eye War Tax — News from Antiwar.com

Citing increasing concerns about the rising cost of the Afghan War, a group of House Democrats led by Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) have proposed a new tax on personal income. The tax is being pressed forward as part of the “Share the Sacrifice Act of 2010,” which Rep. Obey and others say will ensure that all Americans share the onerous burden of continuing the seemingly endless conflict in Afghanistan…. .

…..House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was among the high profile co-signers of the bill, and said there was serious concern in the Democratic Caucus about how to afford the war, which Rep. Obey estimates could cost another $1 trillion over the next ten years.

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We threw well over one trillion down the rat hole since 9/11 and plan to do likewise, all over again.  This won’t happen in a mere 10 years.  We spent this much in less than 8 years and the betting is, we will be forced to do that again.  This means over a trillion dollars extra will be spent above the assumed rate, over the course of 50 years. Remember, the Pentagon believes we are in a 50 year war here.

History is very clear: empires that get embroiled in 50 or 100 year wars end badly.  For example, the 100 Years War between the Norman British royalty and the Kings of France ended with the British crown losing all its French lands and turning on itself at home with a civil war called ‘The War of the Roses’ which ended the dynasty entirely.

England was able to claw back from that long catastrophe and rebuild but this required giving up forever, the dream of regaining Aquitaine and Normandy.  So, here we are, our demented Democrats talking hysterically about imposing a stupid and worthless tax to pay for a worthless and stupid war.  Why are they doing this????

We are not in a symbolic economic mess here!  We are in a real mess and the real problem is government and trade red ink, no fake gesture can staunch the red ink.  We can’t pretend to pay for wars we can’t afford.  If we can’t pay for these wars, we should simply stop fighting them. We retreated from Vietnam and this had one major effect: it saved us from utter ruin!  Duh!

The GOP cut taxes again and again because they are irresponsible jerks.  The Democrats never raise taxes enough when they are in power.  The ONLY times we get any traction on taxes versus revenues is when Congress hates the President and cuts his spending.  And follow on the heels of a Congress that votes for tax hikes and then lose seats as voters vote them out for doing the sane thing.

Ultimately, it is the US public who lives in fantasyland.  We want to have our spending while not paying for it.  We are like a bimbo in a high-end clothing store, wanting to buy everything and put it on her sugar daddy’s credit card.

AFP: US lawmakers: New tax should pay for Afghan war

The proposal, a heavily symbolic measure seen as having next to no chance of becoming law, would impose a war surtax on income beginning in 2011 — though it would allow the president to delay implementation by one year upon deciding the US economy is too weak to sustain such a tax shift.

This makes this weak, futile tax a total farce.  So many back doors are being left open so the President can evade paying for his stupid Nobel Puke Prize wars, the tax is now meaningless as even a gesture.  Of course, Obama was warned by the ancient Chinese Imperial Dragon to balance the books and cut military spending or pay for it, ourselves.  We still hope the Dragon, anxious to keep decimating our industrial base, will buy our debts.  So we are gambling that, after spending the money via printing presses, this money will be isolated in Asia and not circulate here in the US causing inflation.

ALL WARS CAUSE INFLATION.  All wars destroy currencies.  The only exception are looting expeditions that are successful.  In WWI and WWII, the US bankrolled the winners and won, ourselves.  So we imposed rules and conditions that made our economy stronger.  Even then, the financial collapse of exhausted empires in Europe and Asia still troubled our own economy!  We did NOT like it ONE BIT when empires who owed us money, defaulted.  Well, the Chinese will be of the same mind when they clobber us if we go bankrupt.

Honoring America’s Battlefield Entrepreneurs – Forbes.com

This week, Americans will recognize our veterans by thanking them for their service and sacrifices. But perhaps the best way to appreciate them–particularly those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan–is not just by expressing our gratitude, but by recognizing what they can contribute to our economy back home. America’s vets are an untapped treasure of entrepreneurial energy. If only we would take a page from the country that best leverages its veterans as innovators and leaders: Israel.

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Israel boasts the highest density of start-ups in the world (3,850 total, one for every 1,844 Israelis). It has more companies on the NASDAQ than all of Europe, China, India, Korea and Japan combined. In 2008–a year of global economic turmoil–per capita venture investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China and 350 times greater than in India.

Israel is looting the US.  These entrepreneurial dynamos are the beneficiaries of billions and billions of US gifts from Congress.  Their new businesses are allowed free rein in our own markets.  They now infest our military/industrial complex and suck down vast billions of US IOU tax money.  Can our own soldiers do this?

Where will they get the capital to open military-related businesses?  And what would they be selling?  Per capita venture investments in Israel are the highest on earth because it is also the most subsidized on earth.  We do not have such goodies for our own soldiers.  And many of our soldiers are traumatized or wounded.  And on top of all this, most of these Israeli soldier geniuses are not really soldiers but militias who spend most of their military time terrorizing unarmed Palestinians who can barely fight back by even tossing small rocks, unlike the mountain guerillas of Afghanistan or the well-armed militias in Iraq.

Forbes magazine, like many money magazines in the US, lives in la-la land.  The cures for our imperial ills are always quack remedies.  Instead of fixing the fundamental illnesses assailing our empire (gross over-expansion and overspending) these cures are illusions that enable us to avoid facing reality: we lost our empire and it is now dying rapidly.

Israel offers 10-month West Bank settlement freeze – washingtonpost.com

The freeze would not include east Jerusalem – the area of the holy city claimed by the Palestinians for a future capital…..Even so, the Palestinians say the offer is unacceptable because it does not include east Jerusalem. The Palestinians refuse to reopen peace talks with Israel until it halts all settlement construction.

After the Israeli overlords who own Congress via AIPAC spat repeatedly in Obama’s face, they now slightly relent and make an empty gesture to him, promising to not illegally expand colonies in Palestinian lands…but as a contemptuous slap, they can’t even make it for one year.  They deliberately slap him again, making it 10 months just because they want him to know who is the real boss here.

They also knew the Palestinians would reject this feeble gesture and can then claim that the Palestinians are at fault in these faux negotiations.  The loss of public ‘face’ in this matter is extremely significant.  All our trade allies, all our rivals, all of everyone now looks down on Obama. The Muslim community now actively hates him.  We can’t win any wars in Afghanistan or Iraq if the Muslims there hate us and despise our leaders.  We can’t win them over while allowing Israel to stomp on our own President.

Just the idea of not respecting our own Presidents kills our empire.  We are very, very partisan here at home and the very brief moment when Bush had vast US public support after 9/11 was squandered when he pushed for the Iraq war.  Now, very much divided, the Democrats see not a revolt in the ranks due to Obama’s betrayal of the peace movement but dispirited defeat in the ranks.  Which is very bad for us and won’t save our empire.  Nor will Palin’s sort of goofy wild End of Times warrior Whore of Babylon belligerence save our empire from economic and military destruction.

CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

As that amount continues to increase by $100s of billions, recent reminders that the now estimated $500 billion in Medicare “cost savings” will be taken out of the hide of poor seniors have been relegated to the final lines of press reports. For example: “To finance the expanded coverage Reid [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.] proposed higher taxes as well as cuts totaling hundreds of billions of dollars in projected Medicare payments. Hardest hit would be the private insurance Medicare plans, although providers such as home health agencies would also receive significantly less in future years than now estimated.” (AP/Espo, November 21, ’09). And, “About half of the bill Reid unveiled Wednesday would be financed by curbs in projected Medicare spending. While providers such as home health care agencies would absorb some of that, the biggest blow would fall on private Medicare plans.” (AP/Espo, November 19, ’09).

They are cutting Medicare.  The pathetic thing about the Tea Baggers was how FOX TV and the GOP manipulated them so they were screaming about single payer health being very bad but at the same time, they want to keep government Medicare benefits intact.  This childish desire to have one’s cake and eat it too is a characteristic of  empires that can’t take things seriously anymore.

Obama just came back from a visit with the bankers who happen to be the Dragon of China.  And the unhappy, subdued face of Obama as the Chinese leadership jerked him around (UNLIKE PUTIN who they coddle!) means that Hu and Wen had a very serious and angry conversation with him in private where they badgered him to start paying down debts and cease running more and more in the red.

The Chinese didn’t mind Bush running $500 billion in the red.  Two trillion in the red, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot more than the Chinese trade surplus with the US.  China doesn’t buy US debts that are more than the trade deficit.  Period. Ditto with Japan.  The US is now ‘monetizing’ our debts which is fancy talk for ‘printing up IOUs in the Treasury and palming them off on the Federal Reserve’.  The end of this process is hyperinflation.  This hyperinflation won’t hit us slowly but rather, rapidly.

When Germany went bankrupt after WWI, the hyperinflation didn’t hit the first year.  It hit after 1921.  And then it hammered the economy and totally and utterly destroyed the German Mark in less than 3 years.  This is our fate if we don’t take things more seriously.  We must not just reduce but must eliminate our military empire and erect good tariffs to protect the shattered remains of our industrial base and start all over again. Or we can passively wait until hyperinflation does this for us.  The choice is ours.  No one is putting a gun to our heads…yet.

Thanks to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, the international banking gnomes are rapidly trading paper money—or rather, computer digits—for gold.  This flood of gold flowing into the hands of the gnomes then moves to HSBC which is a European bank with vaults in midtown Manhattan.  Now, they have to move it because it is too much and guess where it is going?  Its a secret!  HAHAHA.  Actually, ask JP Morgan’s Dimon: he runs the Fed gold vaults on Broad Street in Manhattan.

Gold has a very big, physical drawback: it is physical and it is heavy.  And to protect it, you need very elaborate physical systems that require human and electronic guard systems and all sorts of other things.  Its very physicality is what makes it a good ‘money’: it is impossible to make it go to infinity.  The Weimar inflation, for example, was due to Germany cutting the gold peg just as WWI began.  After the war, it was impossible to put the inflation horse back into its stable.  England managed to do this but only by transferring a big load of its own WWI debts to the US and using this mechanism to engineer a very weak return to the gold standard…which collapsed the minute Germany ceased paying reparations.

Gold’s very weight, protection and difficulty in increasing the supply makes it a very difficult item to use as a speculation tool over time.  That is, speculating on paper gold futures is just as fun and fast as speculating on any futures where you don’t have to really take charge of something.  But just like with any commodity, like oil or grain, it has to be taken by someone, sometime, and held somewhere safe where it won’t vanish or degrade or whatever.  And this is the difficulty for the speculators who really don’t like this aspect of any commodity business.

A Mad Rush as Gold Bugs Get the Boot – WSJ.com

Fleets of armored trucks piled with gold bars and coins have been streaming out of midtown Manhattan in one unexpected consequence of the gold craze. Amid gold’s rise — it has gained 32% this year and reached a record on Monday — investors have been loading up on bullion and coins. One big problem now is where to store it. The solution from HSBC, owner of one of the biggest vaults in the U.S.: somewhere else. HSBC has told retail clients to remove their small holdings from its fortress beneath its tower on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The bank …

Gold is now nearing $1,200 an ounce.  Exactly like last year’s mad march to the stratosphere by oil speculators who ran up prices in that sector, the happy game of passing deals from one to the other ended and the price collapsed somewhat (but is now returning upwards again) and the losers were the ones stuck with holding onto the physical oil.  Oil is dangerous, toxic, explosive as well as dirty and heavy.  It requires delicate handling to prevent disasters like storage facilities sinking or rupturing or blowing up.  The longer one holds this stuff, the chance of mischance are serious considerations.  The winners of last year’s oil bidding wars were the ones who bought and then flipped the sales quickly and then ran off before they could get stuck holding any contracts for more than a few days or even minutes.

Just like a flotilla of oil tankers sit offshore of Merry England, waiting desperately for prices to rise above the contract prices enough to turn a profit, so it is with gold: the guys playing the gold games inside of the mega banks have to actually take charge of this metal until they sell it.  And they want to sell high and stick some schmuck with the physical headache of holding the actual gold while the game players run off with the paper money profits.

I suspect this gold is going into the Federal Reserve vaults in NYC because it is done as a free favor by the NY Fed which is PURE INSANITY. We do not use gold as the basis for our currency. But the big time owners of the Federal Reserve do hold gold for themselves (NOT us) and love having us pay for holding this stuff for them.  So they made it totally free.  I think Ron Paul intends to have this business audited, too.  For obvious reasons.

JPMorgan Cuts 2010 Dollar Forecast on Rates, Cash (Update1) – Bloomberg.com

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the second- largest U.S. bank, said the dollar will fall to a record low next year on signs the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates near zero until 2011 and investors seek higher-yielding assets.

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The dollar will weaken to $1.62 per euro in the second quarter, JPMorgan foreign-exchange strategists led by London- based John Normand wrote in the bank’s Global FX Outlook 2010, published today. The bank previously predicted a trough of $1.50 in the first quarter.

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U.S. rates at an all-time low make the dollar attractive to sell in so-called carry trades, in which investors use the greenback to fund purchases of higher-yielding currencies such as the Australian dollar and Norwegian krone. The greenback also weakened this year as central banks increased the percentage of foreign reserves held in euros at the expense of the dollar.

The ‘higher yielding assets’ are gold and oil!  As well as other things. The stupid, hideous, job-killing buy out game has also resumed with the Hershey/Cadbury merger game.  The only result of this business is to reduce choices in the markets for candy coupled with firing lots of workers in both organizations.  A lose-lose situation for the economy but immense profits for the gnomes.  Dying currencies are fun for speculators and a catastrophe for economies. When Germany went into hyperinflation after WWI, the speculators poured into Berlin and to Vienna, too.  And then ruthlessly played the currency exchange game until both capitals saw their money turn totally to nothingness.  Then, the speculators departed the empty banks and the two nations had to try to start all over again.

Obviously, a wild spending US government wasting vast resources on futile wars and futile attempts to control the planet via military dominance, is heading down this road.  We are run by currency speculators and financial gamesters who want to get rich and to hell with the rest of the US people.  Industrialists playing currency games by moving production offshore to avoid taxes and paying for native workers, allowed to reimport production with zero tariffs: these actions are what nations do when they are helpless.  Germany, for example, lost WWI.  And then lost control of its own currency as well as trade.  And many industries that were taken over by hostile foreign powers.  And naturally, went off the economic cliff.

So it will be with the US which has destroyed its own native workforce and industries.  And our media won’t talk about this, of course, since many major media systems are owned by foreigners, too.  The most powerful lobby in Congress lobbies for a foreign power, via AIPAC, for example.  The only thing the free trade/floating fiat currency/low tax system did was enable global speculators to run riot and enrich themselves.  While destroying us.  Let’s go to the Federal Reserve for some information here:

Reserve Requirements – Fedpoints – Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Reserve requirements, the discount rate (the interest rate that Federal Reserve Banks charge depository institutions for short-term loans), and open market operations (the buying and selling of government securities) are the Fed’s three main tools of monetary policy. There is a continual flow of reserves among banks, representing the ever-changing supply and demand for these reserves at individual banks. When the Fed engages in open market operations, it adds to or subtracts from the supply of reserves. The effectiveness of the Fed’s actions result from the reasonably predictable demand for reserves that is created by reserve requirements.

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The Fed changes reserve requirements for monetary policy purposes only infrequently. Reserve requirements impose a cost on the banks equal to the foregone interest on the amount by which required reserves exceed the reserves that banks would voluntarily hold in order to conduct their business, and the Fed has been hesitant to make changes that would increase that cost. (Between 1980 and 1987 reserve requirements underwent a series of changes mandated by the MCA. Requirements on banks that were members of the Federal Reserve System were lowered, while those on nonmember depository institutions were raised gradually from zero to the final levels applied to the member banks.)

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This is a key sentence.  Reserves (including most importantly, gold!) are a COST on banks, not a profit maker.  This is why HSBC is kicking out the gold hoards of the hedge funds and other gnomes.  The Fed wants to make ‘banking’ as cheap as possible.  In this case, cheap=destroy the value of the currency.  Reserves are supposed to exist to PREVENT the destruction of the currency.  Note that the dollar has lost over 90% of its value thanks to the Fed’s refusal to protect the currency at all.

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There have been only a handful of policy-related reserve requirement changes since the MCA was passed in 1980. In March 1983, the Fed eliminated the reserve requirement on nonpersonal time deposits with maturities of 30 months or more, and in September 1983, it reduced that minimum maturity to 18 months. Then, in December 1990, the Fed cut the requirement on nonpersonal time deposits and on net Eurocurrency liabilities from 3% to 0%. In April 1992, it cut the requirement on transaction deposits from 12% to 10%. In announcing its December 1990 move, the Fed noted that the cut would reduce banks’ costs, “providing added incentive to lend to creditworthy borrowers.” Similarly, in announcing its April 1992 cut in reserve requirements, the Fed observed that the reduction would put banks “in a better position to extend credit.” Current reserve requirements are low by historical standards. From 1937 to 1958, for example, the rate on demand deposits was always at least 20% for banks in New York and Chicago, which were “central reserve cities”—a term now obsolete.

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All charts and graphs show that we began to edge ever-so-slightly into trouble when the Fed cut the reserve standards.  This caused the fun times in the 1960’s.  Suburbia expanded tremendously and many people who couldn’t buy big houses, bought bigger and bigger houses.  And the gold hoard in Ft. Knox began to rapidly drain so that 75% of its content was gone by 1968.  The debasing of the coinage began during the very beginning of this cycle, in 1964 onwards with the true metals in pennies, nickels, dimes, etc all being replaced with baser metals like zinc.

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When I was in Europe during the sixties, I was stunned at the poor quality of German coins, for example. They were all cheap metals.  And Germans liked my US coins very much, thank you.  I could make direct deals for buying antiques using my own money compared to using European money.  Boy, are the tables reversed now!  The US was the last nation to keep hold of using silver, etc are money in the coins.  Now, everyone has fake coins.  Which still can’t keep up with the rate of debasement!  Zinc, for example, last year outstripped its face value as a coin.

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Before the passage of the MCA in 1980, only banks that were members of the Federal Reserve System had to meet the Fed’s reserve requirements. State-chartered banks that were not Federal Reserve members had to meet their state’s reserve requirements, which typically were lower. As a result, many banks dropped their Federal Reserve membership, and member bank transaction deposits fell from nearly 85% of total U.S. transaction deposits in the late 1950s to 65% two decades later, weakening the Fed’s ability to influence the money supply. The MCA sought to solve this problem by authorizing the Fed to set reserve requirements for all depository institutions, regardless of Fed membership status.

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THIS WAS A MAJOR WARNING SIGN!  As the states made it easier and easier to make money out of nothing, the ‘control’ of the Fed began to vanish.  Now, we have to understand that much of the funny money making we saw this last decade wasn’t just via state-controlled banks with no restraints but INTERNATIONAL banks doing the exact same thing.

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That is, the Fed let them do it, too!  The dollar has taken an immense beating, thanks to this.  The only way Libra could reset Her scales was to destroy much of this fake funny money made via handing out loans by allowing borrowers to give up and the money then vanished since no one is paying it back.  The Fed ‘fixed ‘ this banking situation by joining the party.  And there we are: all they had left was just interest rate adjustments via buying debts.

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The Fed has long advocated the payment of interest on the reserves that banks maintain at Federal Reserve Banks. Such a step would have to be approved by Congress, which traditionally has been opposed because of the revenue loss that would result to the U.S. Treasury. Each year the Treasury receives the Fed’s revenue that is in excess of its expenses. The payment of interest on reserves would, of course, be an additional expense to the Fed.

 

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And people ask me why Mr. Demon Dimon wants to hop from the Fed to the Treasury???? HAHAHA. It should be very obvious now. But let’s visit that socialist/commie state, China. Whoa! They are practicing TRADITIONAL banking! What we did before 1960. Who would believe? And I guarantee they will haul all of us back to the gold standard for world trade, too, in time.

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China Banks Said to Submit Capital Raising Plans (Update1) – Bloomberg.com

China’s five largest banks submitted plans to regulators for raising money after unprecedented lending eroded their capital, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

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Note what I underlined: this lending is not making capital, it is DESTROYING capital!  And this, in a nutshell, is all about ‘capitalism’.  Capitalism is NOT speculation.  Capital is created via labor joining up with commodities and the using modern technological manufacturing systems, is used in such a way as to profit all parties: the commodity sellers, the workers, the investors and the managers!  Ask the Germans about this.  They are all basically Marxists in this regard, too.

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Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp., Bank of China Ltd., Agricultural Bank of China and Bank of Communications Ltd. told the China Banking Regulatory Commission how they can bolster capital ratios after the watchdog evaluated their finances last week, the people said. Lenders were told to estimate potential deficits in 2010 based on their own loan forecasts and capital ratio targets, they said.

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Bank shares fell in Hong Kong trading today after Bank of China said it’s studying “various options” to replenish capital. The five lenders extended a record 4.7 trillion yuan ($688 billion) of loans in the first nine months, driving China’s economic growth to an annual 8.9 percent rate in the third quarter even as rivals worldwide reined in credit.

Chinese shares plunge Tuesday led by heavyweights, banking stocks_English_Xinhua

The key stock index tumbled while combined turnover surged to 468.94 billion yuan (68.67 billion U.S. dollars) from 327.91 billion yuan on the previous trading day, suggesting profit taking after three trading weeks of small, but volatile, rises. In Tuesday’s trading, losers sharply outnumbered gainers by 838to 50 in the larger Shanghai Stock Exchange, and by 765 to 46 in the smaller Shenzhen exchange.

Whenever wild spending, wild lending and bubble blowing is halted, markets decline.  But to not do this means letting them go out of control and instead of a slow down, you get a Great Depression like Japan and the US have tumbled into.  The refusal to rein in lending is a curse, not a blessing.  The US has been desperate to expand lending this last year and this is a doomed operation so long as we don’t expand PRODUCTION that is labor+materials+tools=profits.  Right now, we are spinning our wheels.  So money flows but look to where it is going: into speculation on gold markets or oil or back overseas again via our trade deficit and our war spending.

Home Prices in 20 U.S. Cities Rise for Fourth Month (Correct) – Bloomberg.com

Home prices in 20 U.S. cities rose for a fourth straight month in September, pointing to improvement in real estate that’s helping the economy emerge from recession.

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The S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index increased 0.27 percent from the prior month on a seasonally adjusted basis, after a 1.13 percent rise in August, the group said today in New York. The gauge fell 9.36 percent from September 2008, more than forecast, yet the smallest year-over-year decline since the end of 2007.

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Rising home sales, aided by government programs and a decline in mortgage rates this year, have helped stem the slump in property values that precipitated the worst recession since the 1930s. Home buying and consumer spending may still be hampered by higher unemployment, which may prompt more foreclosures.

Like with auto sales, this is generated by our government taking on more debt to bankroll borrowing even as the bankers giving these loans are buying and hoarding gold.  This is EXACTLY how the beginning of the Weimar German hyperinflation began.  Right now, our international trade rivals will bankroll our government spending…up to a point.  So we are not being squeezed like Germany was after WWI (there as no sympathy and lots of literal bad blood back then).  But China can put us in exactly this same situation very easily if they deny us more credit and sell off dollars at the same time.  And this is not an opportunity but a trap…for us.

True, England and France paid a price for squeezing Germany in 1920-1924.  It came in the form of WWII.  But this is no comfort for us.  If we launch WWIII, this won’t do us much good (Germany lay in ruins after WWII, after all).  Our housing won’t be worth a hill of beans if we have nuclear war.  On top of this, the US has insisted on building mostly along our shorelines while oceans continue to rise.  Talk about insanity.  Not to mention, the deadly San Andreas fault is ready to spring and is going to inevitably happen any hour now, and this will be very destructive for our economic situation.

The inability to rebuild the WTC and New Orleans after two disasters is an indicator that we are running out of steam.  The fact that many of our industrial cities are now turning into ghost towns is equally alarming.  We built suburbia and abandoned ship when it came to our major hubs.  I remember when huge hunks of NYC were abandoned to rioters, looters and criminals.  Speaking of whom…

Two executed in China over tainted milk – CNN.com

Zhang Yujun was executed for endangering public safety and Geng Jinping was executed for producing and selling toxic food, the Xinhua news agency said.

The Chinese really do punish evil doers.  Of course, not evil doers who have good connections.  But then, good connections can vanish very suddenly in China.  This keeps the system somewhat honest.  And many Americans which that we not put just the Gitmo guys on trial but the other criminals who destroyed our entire banking system on trial, too.  But we won’t see this.  Slaps on the wrists time!

Insurance exec accused of filming naked ESPN hottie to be arraigned

An Illinois insurance executive accused of secretly making nude videos of ESPN reporter Erin Andrews is scheduled for arraignment in a Los Angeles federal courtroom.

. Michael Barrett is set to be arraigned Monday on one count of interstate stalking….Prosecutors say Barrett found hotels in Columbus, Ohio, and other cities where Andrews was staying three times last year. They say he rented an adjacent room, altered the peephole and shot videos of Andrews.

Funny sex-starved gnome story.  He certainly kept everyone very entertained.  Send him to China for re-education. Put pictures of Madame Mao in his cell.

Woman Who Sank Galleon Was Beauty-Queen-Turned-Analyst Insider – Bloomberg.com

Chiesi wore short skirts and low-cut tops, according to people who saw her over the years. One ploy was to go barhopping with a group, and then peel someone off to talk to on the dance floor, says a person who attended conferences with her.

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A blond, blue-eyed former teenage beauty queen, Chiesi used her sexuality to build sources at male-dominated tech companies, says Deborah Stapleton, president of Stapleton Communications Inc., an investor relations company in Palo Alto, California.

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Punishing a goddess for luring gnomes to destruction?  No, that is wrong.  Heh.  They got what they deserved.  She should have been less obvious about it.  Like, she should have not been an executive but been a proper prostitute.  Then, she could have gotten paid under the table and not paid taxes.  See how easy it all is?  Heh.

One of the older entities to own the US banking system and our Treasury is the JP Morgan pirate organization. Older still, are the Rothschilds.  JP Morgan was one of the biggest conspirators in creating the Federal Reserve.  This made is much easier to run things within both the Treasury and this privately held banking consortium so that no one could surpass the bankers who wanted to run things for themselves.  And so it is no shock to hear that Obama is even thinking of installing the head of JP Morgan a the Treasury secretary.  This guy simply shifts himself out of the NY Federal Reserves’ top slot and into the government’s money top slot.

This news, if true, is right along the lines of Obama’s passive/aggressive style of supporting the status quo over all other considerations:

Jamie Dimon seen as good fit for Treasury

As support for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wanes on Capitol Hill amid frustration with the Obama administration’s handling of the economy, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is emerging as a potential replacement. .

Sources tell The Post that a number of policy makers have begun mentioning Dimon as a successor to Geithner, whose standing in Washington has suffered because of the country’s high unemployment rate, the weakness of the dollar, the slow pace of the recovery and the government’s mounting deficit. Last week, Geithner faced a withering attack from some Republican members of the Joint Economic Committee, getting into a testy exchange with one congressman who at one point asked Geithner if he would step down. .

Dimon, meanwhile, has achieved rock star status during the financial crisis, having navigated JPMorgan through the recession and being a go-to guy when Uncle Sam last year needed Wall Street’s help during the collapses of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. .

Furthermore, while many bank chiefs are facing heat over outsize bonuses, Dimon has repeatedly made clear he won’t write fat checks to attract or keep talent.

Most Americans get precious little economics learning while in school.  Indeed, there is very little history at all when we look at things realistically.  The problem with teaching history is, how to keep timelines organized so people don’t mash all sorts of events altogether in one big, gooey ball of ooze.  The other is to understand longterm relationships that run like a spider’s thread, through various events.  As we examine how various corporate or banking entities or empires or dynasties operate, we can understand how influence flows.  And thus, how to change flows.

JP Morgan is a prime example of this force: the original family that founded this dynasty on the bank set up by Hamilton before Burr blew him away in a duel, is interesting for it is part of the story about how NYC grew into a colossus. NYC exploded in size and economic power with the advent of the Civil War.  Processing the flood of credit needed by the Union as well as the many immigrants that were encouraged over to take the place of NY men wishing to avoid the draft, the world gold markets opened up floodgates on Broad Street during the war.

The creation of the ‘greenback’ to pay for war munitions and materials opened the door to using paper, rather than gold or silver, as the official currency of the Treasury.  The close relationship of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was fathered by JP Morgan who happened to own the ‘Bank of New York’ which has, by far and away, the most power within the Federal Reserve as JP Morgan wished when he conspired to create the Federal Reserve.

Federal Reserve System, Jekyll island, History, Aldrich Plan, J. Pierpont Morgan, Historical, Dr. A. Piatt Andrew, Henry P. Davison, National City Bank, Frank A. Vanderlip, Kuhn, Loeb, Co., Paul M. Warburg, Nelson W. Aldrich

The Morgan family was a very powerful dynasty.  For example, Morgan Stanley was founded by the son of the creator of the Federal Reserve, Henry S. Morgan. This guy happens to also be a Bohemian Grove groupie, belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pilgrim’s society, was an OSS agent (like my dad), he also sat on the board of directors of General Electric for a few dozen years, etc.  He oversaw Harvard University, for example.  Now, this little tidbit should clearly show us how the influence of these titans go deep into the very heart of the entire system.  If you want to be a top economics professor, for example, it pays to court the guys who have the final say at the top of the university system.

The grandchildren and great grandchildren of Morgan are all over the map and still very much around, they just don’t work as the head of JP Morgan in Manhattan.  Often, these slots are reserved for hungry newcomers who are willing to put in the hours and take the flack for the Family who continue to pull in the money, quietly.  And often, prefer to do other activities rather than fret about making lots of money in various squirrely ways.  Often, joining charities and dispensing largesse is more relaxing and much better PR than doing the rough and ready business of snatching as much wealth as possible from as many people as possible.

Now, let’s go back to the Bank of NY which is really the heart of the Federal Reserve and which JP Morgan still very much ‘owns’:  Jamie Dimon – Board of Directors – Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The board of directors of our bizarre central bank has several layers and of course, JP Morgan’s representatives always are lodged firmly in the Class A level:

Board of Directors – New York’s Main Office – Federal Reserve Bank of New York

CLASS A elected by member banks to represent member banks Richard L. Carrión (bio) 2010 Chief Executive Officer and Chairman Banco Popular de Puerto Rico Charles V. Wait (bio) 2011 President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board The Adirondack Trust Company Jamie Dimon (bio) 2009 Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer JPMorgan Chase CLASS B elected by member banks to represent the public Jeffrey R. Immelt (bio) 2011 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer General Electric Company Jeffrey B. Kindler (bio) 2009 Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pfizer James S. Tisch (bio) 2010 President and Chief Executive Officer Loews Corporation CLASS C appointed by Board of Governors to represent the public Denis M. Hughes (bio) Chair, 2011 President New York State AFL-CIO Lee C. Bollinger (bio) Deputy Chair, 2012 President Columbia University Kathryn S. Wylde (bio) 2010 President and Chief Executive Officer Partnership for New York City

JP Morgan and General Electric have been intertwined for a long time and so it is no surprise to see this continuing.  Pfizer is also sitting in the Class B level of power here, we see how this works with the way ‘healthcare reforms’ struggle through Congress, with all of Congress rushing to protect Pfizer every step of the way.  And Loews: a gambling house?  HAHAHA.  Yes, a gambling operation!  Shows how far our nation is falling. Yes, a gambling outfit gets to help run our central bank.

The Class C level has a union boss to keep labor silent while they are destroyed and any programs that save them are ruthlessly eliminated and then the president of a major NY university , the law school there.  And of course, a charity lady is included so they won’t be too brutal about stomping on absolutely everything with cruel abandon.

Back to Dimon taking over the Treasury in classic form: from October 8, 2008, there was this little bit of news from Market Watch: Prediction: Obama will pick Dimon to be Treasury secretary. So the news that he might do this is really old news.  The former Class A jerk from the Bank of NY Fed group was Geithner so of course, the next Treasury guy will be from the same cesspool.  For the epicenter of the financial collapse wasn’t some backwater banking system or foreign bank, it was dead center on Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan.  Right in this very spot!  Why Obama imagines these guys can fix anything is just astonishing…except for the corruption issues.  They gave him money to run for office.

Let’s go look at JP Morgan’s data:  J.P. Morgan Chase: The Cuomo Report’s Bonus Breakdown – Deal Journal – WSJ

. TARP funds received: $25 billion. . 2008 earnings: $5.6 billion, or $1.37 a share. . 2008 total bonuses: $8.693 billion ($5.908 billion in cash). . Top four recipients received a combined $74.80 million. . The next four received: $49.18 million. . The next six received: $60.96 million. . Number of individuals that received more than $10 million: 10 . Number that received more than $8 million: 29 . Number that received more than $5 million: 84 . Number that received more than $4 million: 130 . Number that received more than $3 million: More than 200 . Number that received at least $1 million: 1,626 . Total work force: 224,961.

Supposedly, JP Morgan’s boss gave out less bonuses than the jerks at Goldman Sachs.  Well, the amounts are still amazing.  They got $25 billion to keep afloat and gave themselves nearly $9 billion in goodies so they could live rich lives at our expense.  The bonuses should have been $0.  This goes for everyone in the banking investment business: all should have turned in their bonuses not only for 2008 but for the entire period from 2004-2009.  For this was all based on making bad deals that we, the public, had to fix via bankrolling all AIG losses in the derivatives markets!

JPMorgan Chase: Stock price information

America was pitched off the cliff while JP Morgan saw a mere road bump on the road to wealth.  They had a ‘V’ recovery while we go flat line.  This is the entire reason why these pirates should not be given the keys to the Treasury.  They are PIRATES!  They are looters!  They are evil!  Good grief.  How dare Obama even consider for one minute, turning over the Treasury to JP Morgan?

The US financial wizards are managing to totally ape exactly what happened during the Great Depression.  The US public responded by electing a person they hoped would ape FDR only we got a Hoover vacuum cleaner, instead.  More and more, it is obvious that far from preventing a Great Depression, Bernanke’s many moves are simply following the same track as if this is a rail road, not a ship sailing on the ocean of money.

The latest data coming in proves this conclusively.  We are definitely in a Great Depression which was not caused by tariffs and barriers but was caused by a massive global credit bubble collapse.  I always have contended that trade barriers had nothing to do with the economic collapse in 1929 and the fact that we are having an identical situation today including long-range identical expressions of actions, all of this is based on 35 years of ‘free trade’ and indeed, began right when the elites were celebrating the victory of total free trade: tariffs have absolutely nothing to do with global financial collapses.

This startling and obvious fact still eluded many professors, in particular, Bernanke.  All of their rote learning in their youth that tariffs cause global financial collapses, has fallen flat on its face.  Yet, it continues to be the curious model used for explaining the Great Depression.  Here is the latest news from Bloomberg which shows clearly how we are doing exactly what happened before minus the reforms, obviously:

Bills Yielding Zero as Stocks Soar Make 1938 Moment (Update2) – Bloomberg.com

For the first time in seven decades, Treasury bills are paying no interest while stocks continue to appreciate — a divergence in U.S. financial markets that might be perilous if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke didn’t know all about 1938.

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That’s when the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index climbed 25 percent even as bill rates tumbled to 0.05 percent from 0.45 percent. As 1939 began, stocks began a three-year, 34 percent decline after the Fed increased borrowing costs prematurely to stymie inflation that never materialized.

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As money poured into bills, the S&P 500 ended little changed on the week at 1,091.38, up 64 percent from the low this year of 666.79 on March 6. The S&P GSCI Index of 24 commodities rose 46 percent this year, rebounding from last year’s 43 percent slump. Investors in high-yield, high-risk, or junk, corporate bonds earned a record 52 percent this year, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. indexes.

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“A lot of these markets have been driven by excess liquidity and are not necessarily supported by economic fundamentals,” said Thomas Girard, a managing director at New York Life Investment Management who helps oversee $115 billion in fixed-income assets.

The debate over what caused the Great Depression is life and death.  Back when free traders were triumphant, their entire claim was that they were preventing any repetition of the Great Depression since the ideology was, the entire cause of the Great Depression was tariffs and a refusal to trade. We now know that trade had absolutely nothing to do with either the launch of the Great Depression nor with the ensuing mess.

The curious fact that we are seeing the exact same results including the stock market shooting upwards in a mass dead cat bounce and that the monetary effects are identical to the Great Depression…all while we see zero tariffs and barriers except for a very few childish stabs at this by the US…is quite instructive.  Ending this depression will be most difficult if we keep applying the wrong solutions.

So far, from what I see in the news, as I will illustrate below, we see only pro-free trade solutions to this gnawing financial mess.  The US, in particular, plans to export our way out of this Great Depression.  Only we can’t.  It is impossible.  We are stuck in Japan’s ZIRP system.

Now, Japan has always interested me greatly.  As Japan reamed us out in free trade, the vast majority of US economics professors focused nearly totally on China alone.  Unable to understand how Japan could be a major export power while having a major credit-bubble related depression was, to me, key to understanding all depressions.  Japan obviously was not in a depression due to lack of export power!  Japan was THE major export profit power on earth, along with Germany, during the last 20 years!

Yet they still had a grinding, hideous depression at home!  It is painfully obvious to me that high exports do NOT prevent or stop depressions!  Indeed, the greater the export profit=>the greater the depression at home.  And it is also very obvious that the credit bubble that popped was the true cause of the depression, not the state of imports or exports.

Wall Street’s Spin Game – NYTimes.com

Now, the main securities industry trade organization has hired Brunswick, a powerhouse public relations firm, to burnish the banks’ image, and banks are urging their staffs to cut down on conspicuous consumption and are canceling Christmas parties in an attempt to turn the reputational tide.

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In other words, the gnomes must hoard their loot in some dark, hidden place we can’t see. Then, when we are not noticing them anymore, they can haul it all out and party like there is no tomorrow. Of course, this advice means that commerce will continue to decline as the gnomes eat up more and more of available financing, funding only themselves.

. It is a tough brief, even for Manhattan’s skilled public relations industry. Last week, New York State’s comptroller reported that Wall Street profits this year are on track to exceed the record set at the height of the credit bubble. So what to do? Here are some suggestions about making the unloved Masters of the Universe loveable again.

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Ah, what to do!  History is very clear, what can be done.  There can be revolutions, for example.  The US has one of the feeblest socialist systems on earth.  The attempt at healthcare reforms shows clearly how the people with money and power hate social systems which is why these pathetic reforms make things worse, not better.

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Expensive and providing little in the way of sane services and with almost no public health components that might make us collectively healthier, this is proving impossible.  The gnomes will never be lovable, even their wives can’t often stand them in bed, much less, the rest of us.

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These guys see us as sheep to fleece or cannibalize.  This is why healthcare reforms are not aimed at saving our nation, getting us out of debt, competing with trade rivals who have real socialism, no, it is all about preserving the profits of the few at the expense of our entire economic system.

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Another horror here is, right on the heels of all of us saving these gnomes via a very socialist rescue operation, they turn around and give themselves even bigger profits than during the bubble they created!  The Derivatives Beast wasn’t slain, it is now resuming growing and the biggest bankrupt investment banking houses are rolling in dough after being bailed out by our Treasury and Federal Reserve.

. Be humble: Apologize and say thank you. The quickest way for the banks to redeem themselves could be to admit they played a role in the crisis and that their survival depended on taxpayer money….

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HAHAHA! This will not redeem them, this is an admission to committing a crime.

. …The crisis revealed what some people had long suspected: that quite a lot of the whiz-bang financial engineering that Wall Street relied on for profits was worthless.

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The fact is, the crisis is due to the whiz-bang financial engineering being worthless. It was worthless. It was worse than worthless, it ate capital. It was utterly destructive. Madoff was normal, not the exception.

. According to Richard Edelman, a leading New York public relations executive, one of the best things Wall Street could do now is clearly “explain how you make your money and why your business model makes sense for a stakeholder society.”

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HAHAHA. Yes, explain how the gnomes ‘make money’ out of thin air, playing games due to the fact that they own our central banking system and also own Congress and all Presidents, GOP or Democrat. As for this making sense for ’stakeholders’: the US public is the stakeholder of our nation. These guys destroyed our nation, destroyed our sovereignty and ruined our lives. I want them to explain all of this. Before we punish them.

. If they can demonstrate in vivid terms the real role they play in the economy — by helping companies borrow money to grow and create jobs, for example — they might also justify their profits and pay.

ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ

The loans they gave corporations are not given to corporations: these were dumped on top of corporations so these financiers could collect fees and interest on carry trade loans.  This madness was all about piling on debts!  And every debt equalled either firing masses of workers to pay for these loans or offshoring jobs to cheaper labor pools so again, these stupid merger loans could be serviced.

The entire mess we are in was due to TOO MUCH CREDIT that was not PRODUCTIVE but DESTRUCTIVE.  It killed jobs in our sovereign nation.  It didn’t create any jobs here at all. During the entire credit bubble, manufacturing jobs in the US declined.  When the bubble broke, these continued to decline.

US manufacturing jobs declined during hot stock market periods and during bear markets.  US manufacturing jobs declined throughout this stupid credit bubble and it is now painfully obvious that depressions happen when easy credit is used to crush worker’s pay.  The pay for the working and farming classes in the 1920’s declined long before the stock market and lending business bubbles popped.

Now, on to today’s really stupid editorial by Friedman:  Op-Ed Columnist – Advice From Grandma – NYTimes.com

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN . President Obama’s visit to China this week inevitably invites comparisons between the world’s two leading powers. You know what they say: Britain owned the 19th century, America owned the 20th century, and, it’s all but certain that China will own the 21st century. Maybe, but I’m not ready to cede the 21st century to China just yet.

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China won’t ask Friedman for permission when they supersede the US and end up the world’s most powerful empire.

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Why not? It has to do with the fact that we are moving into a hyperintegrated world in which all aspects of production — raw materials, design, manufacturing, distribution, fulfillment, financing and branding — have become commodities that can be accessed from anywhere by anyone. But there are still two really important things that can’t be commoditized. Fortunately, America still has one of them: imagination.

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Friedman is a prime example of an idiot with a very big imagination. He lives in a fantasy world that has virtually no connection with the real world. Nations that live in fantasies tend to collapse. Harsh reality dictates we focus on the nitty-gritty and do real things that really matter.

. What your citizens imagine now matters more than ever because they can act on their own imaginations farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before — as individuals. In such a world, societies that can nurture people with the ability to imagine and spin off new ideas will thrive. The Apple iPod may be made in China, but it was dreamed up in America, and that’s where most of the profits go. America — with its open, free, no-limits, immigrant-friendly society — is still the world’s greatest dream machine.

So, the plan for Friedman is for us to dream up all sorts of nifty things and then China will do the actual physical rendition of our dreams, eh?  HAHAHA.  Our individualist culture of ‘Me, me, me,’ can beat out the collectivist culture of ‘Us, us, us.’  Right?  Designing an iPod meant wages went to a few individuals at Apple.  Not one US worker got a piece of this apple pie.  All the wages that trailed out of this business went to China.

Where it now is being used to buy….CHINESE PRODUCTION.  Now something we are making here and shipping there.  The average Chinese worker in Apple orchards is taking his or her pay home and spending it on his or her own families.  The number of workers doing this in America are zero.  Not one American factory worker is taking home anything at all in this wonderful, imaginative deal.

From my own blog, June 24, 2005:  Culture of Life Financial News: <big>FRIEDMAN CELEBRATES JOB LOSSES</big>

My, having a secure job that won’t be outsourced certainly is fun. One can happily poke a hot poker into the ribs of fellow Americans while utterly protected. The cold blooded antipatriotism of writers like Friedman astonishes me. Do the owners of the NYT view our country this way? One wonders and one suspects. Seems many in Congress think this way, too. Certainly, most of our business owners are like this. They hate America.

I include this very old posting of mine to show us that Friedman has always been very enthusiastic about shipping US jobs abroad.  His wife, by the way, basically went from being a multi-millionaire heiress to bankrupt when her family’s mall operations went too deep in debt and went belly-up.  I have yet to see an editorial by him, explaining all of this.  No, he wants more reverse-merchantilism.  Where we have ‘ideas’ and then export them back home again, after cutting our own workers off from the revenue stream entirely.

Obama Says Asia Trip Focused on Economy and Creating U.S. Jobs – Bloomberg.com

President Barack Obama said he focused much of his recent week-long trip to Asia on exploring ways to increase U.S. exports and thereby create jobs.

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Obama returned Nov. 19 from a trip to Japan, China and South Korea. In his weekly radio and Internet address, he said increased exports to those countries can help the U.S. recover from its highest unemployment rate in decades.

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“Above all, I spoke with leaders in every nation I visited about what we can do to sustain this economic recovery and bring back jobs and prosperity for our people,” Obama said in the address, which was taped in Seoul. “Increasing our exports is one way to create new jobs and create new prosperity.”

ARRRGH.  And this was the miserable end of Obama’s useless trip.  All this journey did was show how helpless and stupid the US really is.  From 1980-2007, US exports grew and grew and grew and grew.  And our trade deficit grew much, much faster.  All the brainiacs who had brilliant ideas were exporting their ideas and importing the final production of these ideas and each time they did this, our trade deficit got worse.

New ideas and more exports will not fix this problem. This should be painfully obvious. We could export all our manufacturing production and this still won’t fix a thing if we import double this production since our brilliant imaginators have moved all the production of their ideas overseas!  The people who have brilliant ideas didn’t get poorer during this depression!  They are doing fine!

The workers are the ones who are facing permanent poverty.  GM and Ford both have huge international markets.  But do we manufacture cars here and then export them?  NO!  Both make cars overseas and then IMPORT them here!  As do all our trade rivals.  Stopping this madness that began with NAFTA seems nearly impossible.  Dobbs, for example, one of the very, very few commentators who talked about all this, jumped off of the conspiracy cliff long ago and was unceremoniously dumped.

So the US public gets pro-free trade propaganda nonstop, with virtually no dissent.  But as things go from bad to worse, agitation will rise and we will see the classic firestorms that accompany all depressions: California Was Among States With Record Unemployment (Update3) – Bloomberg.com and Record number of mortgage loans are delinquent – Nov. 19, 2009 are both very bad news.  The US workforce continues to slide off the economic cliff.  Ideas and imagination don’t help when one is in free fall.  Note my cartoon I did back in 2005 when we were still going up and up and up.

I could plainly see that the keystone to our economy, the financial health of the working class, was going down.  As workers lose jobs, they lose their homes.  How simple is this?  The excess housing due to speculators are no longer the cause of bank foreclosures.  These are solid workers who are losing homes due to losing jobs.

Back to Business – Investment Funds Profit Again, This Time By Paring Mortgages – NYTimes.com

The Fortress Investment Group, a hedge fund in New York, is one of the firms at the forefront of picking through mortgages. Fortress created a $3 billion credit fund in 2008 partly to buy loans from banks like Citigroup, which were under pressure to purge loans to raise cash.

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“They’re going ahead and they are refinancing them and getting their money out right away,” said Roger Smith, an analyst at Fox-Pitt Kelton. “What Fortress is doing is actually good for the borrower.” Congress, however, may not be happy that hedge funds are making money this way, Mr. Smith said.

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Fortress, which declined to comment, typically buys batches of loans and works with other companies to evaluate which ones might qualify for F.H.A., Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac refinancing.

Why the US government doesn’t simply become the landlord itself is due to the anti-socialist ideology that prevents sane, public solutions to obvious problems.  Since the US public is forced to hold the vast majority of mortgages in the first place, it is in the public interest for us, not hedge funds or GS gnomes to profit on changing lending terms, for example. Why have these useless and dangerous middlemen?  Cut them out of the game!

The US could tax these profits from playing these games but these guys own Congress and will not give up any profits to the people of the United States.  Instead, we get stuck with all the losses, all the dangers and all the debts.  Our national debt has gone through the roof and these guys are taking a sledge hammer to the walls.