Disinformation » Economy

A World In Denial

Good German — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:50:34 +0000

Donald Rumsfeld

Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in the New York Times:

Could there be a single phrase that explains the woes of our time, this dismal age of political miscalculations and deceptions, of reckless and disastrous wars, of financial boom and bust and downright criminality? Maybe there is, and we owe it to Fintan O’Toole. That trenchant Irish commentator is a biographer and theater critic, and a critic also of his country’s crimes and follies, as in his gripping if horrifying book, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger.

He reminds us of the famous if gnomic saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, that “There are known knowns… there are known unknowns … there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was “unknown knowns.”

What he means is something different from denial, or evasion, irrational exuberance or excess optimism. Unknown knowns were things that were not at all inevitable, and were easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people chose to “unknow.”

Unknown knowns were everywhere, from Wall Street to Brussels, from the Pentagon to Penn State. Ireland merely happened to offer an extreme case, where “everyone knew.” They just chose to forget that they knew — about the way that Irish banks ran wild, how easy credit fueled a monstrous explosion of property prices and speculative house-building. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister at the time of the rapid economic growth, merely boasted, “The boom is getting boomier,” preferring to unknow the truth that booms always go bust.

Beginning in 2008, the skies were lighted up by financial conflagrations, from Lehman Brothers to the Royal Bank of Scotland. These were dramatic enough — but were they unforeseeable or unknowable? What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea? An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it…

Worker-Owners of America, Unite!

Liam McGonagle — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:17:54 +0000

Gar Alperovitz chimes in on the re-evolutionary convergence of capitalism and socialism into a hybrid paradigm in a recent article in the NY Times:

The Occupy Wall Street protests have come and mostly gone, and whether they continue to have an impact or not, they have brought an astounding fact to the public’s attention: a mere 1 percent of Americans own just under half of the country’s financial assets and other investments. America, it would seem, is less equitable than ever, thanks to our no-holds-barred capitalist system.

But at another level, something different has been quietly brewing in recent decades: more and more Americans are involved in co-ops, worker-owned companies and other alternatives to the traditional capitalist model. We may, in fact, be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing.

Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.

And worker-owned companies make a difference …

The Bank Bailout Was Actually $8 Trillion

JacobSloan — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 17:28:08 +0000

Ah, free-market capitalism — the economic system that works best, provided that one infuses $8 trillion to stave off total collapse. The Atlantic Wire writes:

Remember the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program with which the federal government came to the rescue of faltering banks in 2008? Well, according to a Bloomberg report, that was just a fraction of the financial help the Federal Reserve Bank wound up doling out to troubled lenders. The real total was reportedly closer to $8 trillion, after you add up benefits outside TARP, including emergency loans given at below-market rates:

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

Bloomberg came up with that number after reviewing “29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions.” Bloomberg adds, “The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day.” That’s nearly twice the amount made public in TARP.

A Song For The 99%

majestic — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:47:52 +0000

South African folk singer Brendon Shields offers up a song for our times from his forthcoming album Truth and Recession:

A Ron Paul Economy

majestic — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:53:29 +0000

What would a Ron Paul economy look like? Suzy Khimm connects the dots for the Washington Post:

Ever wonder what Ron Paul’s America would look like? Then read the budget outline that Paul released as part of his 2012 presidential bid. It promises to cut $1 trillion during his first year in office, balance the budget by 2015, withdraw us from all foreign wars and eliminate five Cabinet-level agencies in the process. Economists across the political spectrum say the impact of such drastic government spending cuts would be majorly disruptive and harmful to the economy in the short term.

“At the scale he’s talking about, it’s unlikely you could have an immediate reduction in government without hurtling the economy into recession,” says Kevin Hassett, economic policy director for the American Enterprise Institute and chief economic adviser to John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. Hassett maintains that Paul’s plan for a limited government “would be really positive” in the long run. But he also believes that there would be better means to achieving that end. “I think that you could achieve his long-run objectives with less short-run disruptions,” he concludes.

By reducing the deficit from more than $1 trillion to $300 billion in just a year, Paul’s plan would upend the economy at a time when it’s already fragile, says Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics for Moody’s Analytics. “That much deficit reduction in one year is going to be a huge drag on the economy . . . the reduction in spending is much greater than cuts in taxes,” says Faucher. “We’re seeing that impact in Europe right now, where severe fiscal austerity has caused big problems for the European economy.” While long-term deficit reduction is important, legislators need to make sure that the economy is strong before major cuts take effect, he adds, calling Paul’s plan “much more ambitious” than other Republican proposals to date…

[continues in the Washington Post]

We’re Facing Worst Financial Crisis Ever – Bank Of England

majestic — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:04:48 +0000

When uber-establishment figures like Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England (UK central bank) warn of an impending financial apocalypse, you know things are out of control. The Telegraph has the bad news:

The world is facing the worst financial crisis since at least the 1930s “if not ever”, the Governor of the Bank of England said last night.

Sir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession.

Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.

Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.
“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”…

[continues at the Telegraph]

The Truth About The National Debt

majestic — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:24:44 +0000

A picture being worth a thousand words, ‘n all that…

[Thanks to Aaron Cohen]

Zombie Bankers Feeding On Us

majestic — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:17:39 +0000

This zombie movie short for 97 Percent Owned promotes what looks like a great new documentary about the need to democratize the money supply. Alex Jones fans will especially like the audio – crank it up!

Federal Regulators Sue Big Banks Over Mortgages

Pelliciari — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 18:33:55 +0000

Will the Obama administration finally approach national banks with an iron fist? The New York Times reports:

A bruising legal fight pitting the country’s most powerful banks against the full force of the United States government began Friday, as federal regulators filed suits against 17 financial institutions that sold the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nearly $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities that later soured.

The suits are the latest legal salvo fired at the banks accusing them of misdeeds during the housing boom. Investors fled financial shares Friday amid growing concern that the litigation could last for years and undermine earnings and balance sheets in the process.

The complaints were filed just as the stock market closed Friday afternoon, but with word leaking out of the impending legal action during the trading session, shares of Bank of America fell more than 8.3 percent, while JPMorgan Chase dropped 4.6 percent and Goldman fell 4.5 percent.

[Continues at The NY Times]

Obama Readies Jobs Plan While The Right Plans To Scuttle It In A Country Facing Economic Apocalypse

Danny Schechter — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 02:52:59 +0000

New York, Labor Day Weekend 2011: The magic wand is being readied in the White House as the President and his minions finally unwrap the mother of all jobs plans that will be revealed to the rest of us in a speech next Thursday before the cameras and Congress with the gravitas-packed aura of a State of the Union Address.

Attention, collapsing Economy: you finally have the big man’s attention. Nearly 70 organizations are pressing the President to take strong action.

Please give him a break. He’s been busy tending Empire business — waging GWOT warfare on IraqAfghanistanLibyaYemenPakistanSomalia et al …

Call it the greatest “long war” in American history: an unending and unbelievably expensive intervention justified as necessary to keep us safe.

We can assume that contingency plans for new wars with Syria, Iran and the Republic of Wikileaks are being drafted as we speak.

The challenge this week is to bring together all of the Administration’s sophisticated strategic planning, disciplined focus and ‘get it done’ fervor finally to straighten out this out of control economic mess.

There are jobs to produce and one big job to save.

One hardly expects any sort of mea culpa or acknowledgment that the masters of the economic universe Obama appointed, like Geithner, Summers, Rohmer and Golsbee may not have served us well, i.e., may have blown it big time.

That’s history; Obama now has as a new Ivy League advisor, Alan Kreueger, who was, in fact, an old advisor and Geithner crony.

But, lets not be negative. Forget the past and banish any suggestion of a blame game,

Except, of course, for a clear but unspoken missive for the likes of policy critics Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. To them, the White House says, “Drop Dead!”

What do you they know?

Instead, let’s look ahead at the next media event, a now 7PM barely “prime time” (Prime Time always starts at 8)speech to Congress in which, at last, ‘do something big economic recovery secrets’ that have so far eluded us, will be revealed.

The timing couldn’t be worse. Economist Max Wolff tells us, “For the second time in monthly jobs report history we have created no new jobs. …We continue to see consistent and large job losses at the local government level… It is particularly alarming to see cuts remain concentrated among those who work in public schools.”

The brilliant Eric Jantzen of iTulip.com says. time is up: “attempts to restart the FIRE Economy – the economy oriented around the finance, insurance, and real estate industries – will fail at the expense of the Productive Economy – the economy of goods and services produces that employs over 90% of consumers.

“If policy makers persist with this wrong-headed approach… the result will be persistent high unemployment, a depreciating dollar, rising consumer price inflation, falling home prices, and rising budget deficits.”

And. let’s not talk about our divided Federal Reserve and squeamish Justice Department which has never seen a big bank it is willing to prosecute, not to mention, the deficit buster gang in Congress who won’t provide a single centavo to do what needs doing and should have been done in the first place: a sizable investment plan to stimulate job creation.

That is, alas, a non-starter, but we need to go through the motions anyway; the “experts” on the right gloat that the stimulus failed while the experts on the left counter that it was never really tried. Both are right, but does it matter?

Each day brings new reports of more jobs lost, not found—at banks, in local, state and federal government agencies and manufacturing. When you hear the term job creation, think job destruction.

Why is this happening? The smart folks at the Economic Cycle Research Institute point to structural problems beyond the reach of any President.

Ed Harrison reports on Credit Write Downs: “we are in a decade-long post-credit crisis struggle which will mean high unemployment even if policy makers focused on jobs (which they have not, I would add)…The likely outcome for the next decade is one of sub-par global growth with short business cycles punctuated by fits of recession.”

So, yes, while it may be wrong to blame Obama for forces beyond his control, beyond any President’s control, it isn’t wrong to ask what has taken him so long to make jobs a priority?

Just as justice delayed is justice denied, waiting too long to do what has to be done insures that that we may be beyond the tipping point, too late to get much accomplished, given the political realities and uncertainties in this government killing environment.

Economist Dean Baker thinks this delay may prove fatal. “President Obama’s weak response to the recession over the first two and a half years of his presidency, explains the tidal wave of skepticism facing his widely hyped upcoming speech on jobs after the Labor Day weekend. The list of remedies leaked ahead of time does little to inspire hope.

“At the top of the list of job-creating measures is extending the 2 percentage-point reduction in the social security payroll tax. This provides no boost to the economy, since it just keeps in place a tax cut that was already there, but if the cut is allowed to end at the start of 2012, it will be a drag on growth.”

And at a time of a crisis brought about in part by banks, the golden bullet now being touted is a National Infrastructure Bank. The idea: give investors who already have too much a chance to make even more by bailing out an economy they helped wreck.

Concludes Harrison, “Ocala’s failure to understand where we are in the economic cycle and the relationship to historical precedent has been catastrophic to the conduct of economic policy and critical in his missteps. There is more to Ocala’s misfortune than a bad economy.”

So what can he do? His proposals will be skewered just because he is making them, What buttons can he push when any initiative he takes will be labeled Marxist or worse?

Oddly enough—and perhaps as a sign of the times where the people who are supposed to know what to do don’t, a banker, George Magnus, writes on Bloomberg business news that Karl Marx may actually have had the answer all along.

He says the bearded one taught us, “We have to sustain aggregate demand and income growth, or else we could fall into a debt trap along with serious social consequences. Governments that don’t face an imminent debt crisis — including the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. — must make employment creation the litmus test of policy. In the U.S., the employment-to-population ratio is now as low as in the 1980s. Measures of underemployment almost everywhere are at record highs.”

Concludes Harrison, “What President and Congress do now will only be relevant in the medium-term as the election of 2012 nears. I have repeatedly indicated Republicans will be unlikely to support these current job initiatives. Instead they will focus on trimming government expenditure.”

It sounds like stalemate revisited, paralysis redux.

What no one is talking about is why the jobs are gone—and a good part of the reason has to do with the attacks on unions that fought to protect American workers. As one analyst noted, at least three million of 10.4 missing jobs can be traced to a form of aggressive class war where the “weakened bargaining position of labor was achieved by the growing assertiveness of management in slashing costs to maintain share prices.”

With their work outsourced, factories gone and anti-labor laws restraining their growth, Marx’s faith in the working class going from being a class in itself to a class for itself—and the rest of us—was sabotaged.

So if Marx can’t help us, and Obama is posturing for political reasons, and the Republicans are playing at trench warfare in the interest of big business, and while the US still lacks the kinds of populist movements that are rocking the streets of Europe and even Israel, where can a breakthrough occur?

Calling our superheroes. We need you now more than ever.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com

City Introduces “Sex Tax Meters” For Prostitutes

Pelliciari — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 15:07:48 +0000

Inspectors may be pulling prostitutes off the streets in Germany. Not because they’re trying to lower crime rate, but because they haven’t been paying their income taxes. Via Reuters:

Prostitutes in the German city of Bonn must carry a ticket purchased from a new parking meter-like machine while working the streets or face hefty fines from tax authorities in a scheme launched on Monday night.

In Germany, ladies of the night pay income tax — the level of which varies from region to region — but compliance is difficult to enforce with women seeking business on the street.

Germany’s first “sex tax meters,” from which prostitutes can purchase a ticket for 6 euros ($8.72) per night, will ensure the tax system is fairly implemented, a city spokeswoman said.

“Inspectors will monitor compliance — not every evening but frequently,” the spokeswoman told Reuters.

[Continues at Reuters]

Systems Collapse When The Irrational Is Considered Rational

Danny Schechter — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:23:41 +0000

Photo: Agamisudo (CC)

Oh thank you, Wikipedia, for this definition:

“Irrationality is cognition, thinking, talking or acting without inclusion of rationality. It is more specifically described as an action or opinion given through inadequate reasoning, emotional distress, or cognitive deficiency. The term is used, usually pejoratively, to describe thinking and actions that are, or appear to be, less useful or more illogical than other more rational alternatives.”

And what about this one? Market Psychology? This term is defined in the Investopedia this way:

“The overall sentiment or feeling that the market is experiencing at any particular time. Greed, fear, expectations and circumstances are all factors that contribute to the group’s overall investing mentality of sentiment.”

Q: What do we have when we put the two together?

A: The current madness and market mayhem.

S&P’s downgrade is being blamed for the market panic even though all the business media expected a downgrade and initially minimized its potential impact. The ratings agency blamed the government’s failure to deal with the debt including the stalemate in Congress.

The Republicans, predictably blamed Obama and the Democrats went after the Tea Party as the culprits behind the market plunge. But then, investors who at first denied that a downgrade would be significant overreacted to it by pumping more money into government treasuries adding to government debt.

The Comedy Channel’s Jon Stewart’s sensible reaction: “are you f*cking kidding me?”

Does this make any sense?

We are taught to think of businessmen and their minions as absolute worshipers of objective truth as they allegedly practice “due diligence” to confirm underlying facts and insure that their decisions are based on research and thoughtful decisions.

That’s what we are taught—but is that what they do?

In fact, the “smartest guys in the room” as the Enronians were called proved to be the dumbest, buying into a warped worldview, and then, believing their own hype leading to decisions that brought the house down.

And that’s what happens again and again, over and over, as panic seizes The Street followed by a herd of decision makers making bad decisions.

Paul Farrell has written about this phenomenon on Marketwatch.

He speaks of all the too-greedy-to-fail fatheads running Wall Street? And, unfortunately, Main Street America’s 95 million irrational and self-sabotaging investors

Yes, all of us! We’re Americans. Don’t confuse us with the facts, with reality. We’re the greatest in history, a legend in our own minds. And a rapidly mutating virus is spreading this lethal pandemic far beyond the shores of Lake Wobegon. Yes, folks, the “Lake Wobegon Effect” is hard-wired in America’s brain, an illusion of superiority, a smug arrogance where each knows we are the best, the chosen ones.

Warning: The Lake Wobegon Effect is the single best summary of today’s stock market psychology, high frequency trading, behavioral economics theories and the new science of irrationality … and it’s sucking the life out of America’s soul. Here, listen to more of these arrogant musings surfacing everywhere from deep in our collective brains.

So forget all of our devices, our forever present blackberries, iPhones, iPads and Bloomberg terminals with their enhanced graphics and multiple sources. Alas, there’s no panic button that gives you a quick dose of financial history, perspective or context. Our hi-tech world often leads to repeating low-tech mistakes in a speeded up environment driven byall those dazzling terminals. TVscreens blazing and the pundits buzzing.

Farrell reminds us of a psychological game called “The Invisible Gorilla.”

He calls it “one of the most famous psychological demos ever. Subjects are shown a video, about a minute long, of two teams, one in white shirts, the other in black shirts, moving around and passing basketballs to one another. They are asked to count the number of aerial and bounce passes made by the team wearing white, a seemingly simple task.”

Stop. Test yourself before you read on. What does “The Invisible Gorilla” study tell you about the brains of folks gambling in Wall Street’s casinos? Where billions of shares, trillions of dollars, stocks, bonds, derivatives trade daily? What’s “invisible” to you?”

Institutionalized Irrationality—perhaps even insanity— helped cause the financial crisis as the federal inquiry commission pointed out quoting an appraiser who watched the real estate industry underwrite loans with no collateral over and over again:

“I see a lot of irrationality,” he added. He said he was unnerved because people were saying, “It’s different this time”—a rationale commonly heard before previous collapses.”

Many writers of distinction could see the irrational trumping the rational coming, as I wrote in my book Plunder that came out a month before the 2008 crash.

I quoted Mark Twain, America’s greatest man of letters, He once asked, “Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” (His novella, The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, was written while he was in Europe on the run from creditors.)

Fast forward a century or more as business and political leaders alike try to make sense of a relatively sudden and unexpected market meltdown in the summer of 2007 then again in 2008 and then again this past week.

Ultimately perhaps Twain’s insight will lead to great novels that will capture the corruption of the underlying culture that allowed so many financial manipulations and so much greed, avarice, and irrationality in this era in the way that great writers of economic upheaval in America like Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, or Jack London castigated theirs.

It seems to have always been true, as a friend who watched his multi- ethnic city of Sarajevo implode into a bloody genocidal war in Bosnia years ago confided to me, “Only fiction has to be plausible. Real life has no such constraint.”

As a journalist with perhaps less fictional imagination than I need, I can only try to probe deeply into some of the forces that took our economy down in such an unexpected way at a time when our national leaders were looking elsewhere and thought they saw the only threat to our country coming from terrorists hiding in caves in far away lands.

They – and I include among them, representatives of both parties, and most of our mass media – ignored cries for help from victims of predatory lenders dating back into the 1990s, and, then, for years warnings from David Walker, the Comptroller of our Currency and head of the Government Accounting Office (GAO) that our growing debt burden could lead to a sudden collapse threatening our national security. He had been labeled “Dr. Gloom” for his sobering prognostications. In February, 2008, he stepped down from government, frustrated by his inability to promote changes.

A closer look, usually in times of crisis, offers a window into another kind of financial world, a world of panic and fear, where irrationality is the order of the day, an irrationality that goes by the name of “Market Psychology.”

Forget the bulls or the bears…this is a world of sharks deeply in need of shrinks.

When things go well, the wizards of Wall Street are anointed by the media as geniuses. When they don’t, you get Time Magazine’s condescending putdown of “Wall Street’s mad scientists blowing up the lab again.”

This kind of humor seems out-of-place when we are talking about what many fear has lead to the collapse or at least a severe wounding of the global economy with millions of jobless and homeless victims who believed in the system until it failed them.

And yet, as we saw in the great manufactured budget stalemate in Washington, members of Congress were and still are prepared to trigger a collapse in the name of a naïve but rigid ideology.

Some of us argue with them thinking our facts can refute theirs but at bottom, fanaticism is not neutralized by rational argument. You need countervailing power and a willingness to fight for another vision.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

The Trouble With Too Much Democracy

Pelliciari — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 17:43:23 +0000

Is America’s bigger problem the economic decline or it’s political decay? Andrew Potter writes in Axis of Logic:

The most telling moment of the recent standoff over talks to raise the American government’s debt ceiling came on July 22, when President Barack Obama called a press conference to announce that House Speaker John Boehner had backed out of the negotiations. “I’ve been left at the altar twice now,” Obama pouted. In case the image of the President as a jilted lover was not clear to everyone watching, he added that he had spent the previous day waiting for Boehner to return his phone calls.

The whole affair has left a lot of Americans in a state of bipartisan disgust, with citizens from all points on the political compass cursing out their elected representatives. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to many people that there is something structurally flawed with a system that allows the head of just one legislative house to treat the supposed leader of the free world as his last choice for the senior prom. if there’s anything that needs cursing out it isn’t the elected politicians, but the constitution of the United States.

[Continues at Axis of Logic]

Second Recession In This ‘Double Dip’ Will Be Worse Than First

majestic — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 11:52:17 +0000

There’s no doubt about it, the United States never really recovered from 2008’s crash and burn and the gas frantically poured on the fire by the Obama administration to “stimulate” the economy created nothing more than a spike in corporate profits that were never distributed to the people. What should we do now – start growing vegetables and stockpiling canned goods? Catherine Rampell reports on America’s dubious prospects for the New York Times:

If the economy falls back into recession, as many economists are now warning, the bloodletting could be a lot more painful than the last time around.

Given the tumult of the Great Recession, this may be hard to believe. But the economy is much weaker than it was at the outset of the last recession in December 2007, with most major measures of economic health — including jobs, incomes, output and industrial production — worse today than they were back then. And growth has been so weak that almost no ground has been recouped, even though a recovery technically started in June 2009.

“It would be disastrous if we entered into a recession at this stage, given that we haven’t yet made up for the last recession,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics.

When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available.

Anxiety and uncertainty have increased in the last few days after the decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating and as Europe continues its desperate attempt to stem its debt crisis.

President Obama acknowledged the challenge in his Saturday radio and Internet address, saying the country’s “urgent mission” now was to expand the economy and create jobs. And Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview on CNBC on Sunday that the United States had “a lot of work to do” because of its “long-term and unsustainable fiscal position.”…

[continues in the New York Times]

The Political War Will Continue

Danny Schechter — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:12:09 +0000

As The Dog Days Of Summer Approach, Politicians Rest Before Returning To The Fray

Now that the debt drama is over for the moment, we can all safely retreat in what was once called the “Dog Days Of Summer” and chill out if the volatile weather allows us to. We can think back to that old song, “Summer time and the living is easy.” Even as we all know that for millions “the living” is anything but.

The House and Senate have become ghost-like chambers because all its members, so filled with strident indignation and inflexible talking points just a week ago, are now off on their paid vacations hyping their political war stories to grandchildren.

Imbued with a sense of triumph, the Tea Party is huddling to come up with ongoing tactics to hold the system hostage while the party leaders plan the new “super committee” with 12 chosen acolytes (how Biblical, that number 12!) to map the next round of fiscal blood-lettering.

All the superhero buzz in the movies and cartoons has no doubt influenced their choice of words and the pretense of the super wisdom of a few as a “Joint Select Committee On Deficit Reduction” is empanelled to become the next arena of combat with a chosen elite now dominating a factious process where an organized minority can outflank a slow moving majority.

So much for the appearance of democracy!

The lobbyists are already gearing up for the next battles, as the Times reported, “To figure out how to influence the panel to protect the programs and tax breaks from which they benefit.” The military contractors and health care industry operatives are digging in to defend their turf.

Meanwhile, the deal did not settle any problems and may have made them worse. The Hill newspaper reports, “The Dow Jones Industrial Average has lost more points in the last two weeks than it did after the House initially failed to approve a bailout of U.S. banks at the height of the financial crisis in 2008.”

At the White House, the campaigning is set to go into overdrive with a bus tour of the devastated Mid West. Obama is saddling up to talk up the one need he has been downplaying for years—the need for jobs.

He is retooling as a born again populist to champion the unemployed who may never find jobs again.

He is doing so in the face of new statistics that report the economy in worse shape than it was before the recession.

Some 47 million Americans now qualify for food stamps, up 13 percent from a year earlier. Unemployment is not budging and more and more job seekers are giving up after finding that if they have been out of work for more than six months, they can’t even get interviews for what jobs there are. Youth and minority unemployment are at depression levels. The ranks of the poor rise as those still working are squeezed as never before.

And housing? Eftnews.com reports, “Dragged down by such anchors as a bulging pipeline of foreclosures and a dearth of buyers, it will be many more months — if not years — before a housing market rebound takes hold.”

Yet the Commander in Chief, unlike the people who live in the region, won’t have problems with the cost of gassing up the bus. His “bundlers” are already at work shaking the money tree.

Money News reports:

“A just-released study by the Center for Responsive Politics shows that President Obama is relying more on Wall Street to fund his re-election this year than he did in 2008, according to CNBC, which obtained an advance copy of the report.

Obama and the DNC combined are on pace to far exceed the amounts Obama raised from Wall Street donors in 2008, both in raw dollar amounts and as a percentage of what he raises overall.”

This may be why he has already thrown his progressive supporters, in the words of one dissenting Democrat, “under the bus” because he and his handlers calculate they may not like him now but they will vote for him in the end, or fear more gains by the far right.

Some on the right are reportedly going after the “bundlers” who broke fund-raising records in the Bush Campaign, in essence talking far right while cultivating the old money centrists.

The “experts” predict that even in this time of economic decline, the political pumps will be well primed as the election draws closer and gains steam by sucking the media oxygen out of other stories with a press corpse that loves to cover politics like sporting events rich in polls and conflicting sound bites.

The newspapers are filled with stories about the noveau rich gobbling up luxury goods and high priced cars.

Not everyone is hurting!

Yet an increasing number of these people on all sides are reporting more dissatisfaction with all the politicians.

The National Journal reports on a new poll:

“The survey…revealed a deep lack of faith among the public in Congress’s ability to get things done. When it comes to important problems facing the country, only 7 percent of respondents said they have a lot of confidence that Washington could make progress over the next year and 23 percent said they have “no confidence at all.”

Some liberals may finally be recognizing that their immersion in partisan politics took their eyes off the economic ball with little or no grass roots organizing. It seems clear that as the Tea Party pushed politicians from the right, there was no counterweight or unified effort on the left.

President Obama not only betrayed the activists of the left who championed his candidacy in 2008 but, also, his own legacy as a community organizer. He created, but then deemphasized his “Organizing for America” initiative to activate his base for traditional inside the beltway horse-trading.

He gave up on the “outside game” and let the right pick it up without a fight.

Now we are hearing about all kinds of plans by organizations like MoveOn that became more of a money raising machine than a political movement is joining hands with fired Obama appointee, Van Jones, to build a save the dream movement and express some visible support for the unemployed and millions losing homes and hope.

Former Vice President Al Gore is calling for a non-violent “American Spring” modeled on events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Keith Olbermann, the TV Anchor who left NBC to join Gore’s network Current cautions that “first the public has to get mad.”

Personally, I think the public is mad, but also depressed by the lack of leadership and a sense they can win. Popular calls to hold Wall Street accountable have gone nowhere as Wall Street money keeps politicians in tow and activists tweet each other into distraction. Activists rail at the president online but do little to get in his face and demand another course of action.

This may change in the fall, but I am not holding my breath. It is easier, as we say, “to talk a good game” than play one.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book, The Crime of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Is Apple Holding More Cash Than The U.S.?

Pelliciari — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:21:31 +0000

Photo: TheIronLion

Do US companies have more money than the US government? Recent financial figures show that Apple does. Via BBC News:

Apple now has more cash to spend than the United States government.

Latest figures from the US Treasury Department show that the country has an operating cash balance of $73.7bn (£45.3bn).

Apple’s most recent financial results put its reserves at $76.4bn (£46.9bn).

The US House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill to raise the country’s debt ceiling, allowing it to borrow more money to cover spending commitments.

If it fails to extend the current limit of $14.3 trillion (£8.7tn) dollars, the federal government could find itself struggling to make payments, and risks the loss of its AAA credit rating.

[Continues at BBC News]

Durban South Africa, Friday Night at The Movies: We Can’t Escape The Tensions Around Us

Pelliciari — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:17:14 +0000

Soweto. Photo: Michael Toft Schmidt (CC)

It’s Friday night, and the motorways are packed with cars heading for the mall. Here in Durban, the Gateway Mall is the destination of choice. It’s huge, the biggest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s stuffed with stuff, much of it upscale, calling itself a “theater of shopping.” (It is actually built over what was once a dump.) The parking lots are packed with late model cars, many of them high end.

I have to confess, I was invited there to see America’s latest high culture import, the 3D version of the movie Transformers 3, based on a toy and cartoon, in a modern movie complex with 18 theaters and rows and rows of packed gates where you line up for endless popcorn and soft drinks.

Business was booming; the theater was full. Most of the crowd seemed to be whites and Indians but there were also many blacks now firmly anchored in the consumer life style. As I found out a few years back at this same mall, but in a smaller theater, when I showed my film In Debt We Trust, many South Africans are deeply in debt to their credit card companies with inordinate amounts of money also flowing to their cell phone suppliers.

On the way out, past the beaches, spanking new but underused stadiums built for the World Cup, past the Sun Coast Casino and past the ICC convention center where the International Olympic Committee was still meeting, we drove by what’s called a settlement, a collection of tin shacks where destitute migrants from the countryside and other African states live in squalor. It was a reminder of the deep poverty that co-exists with the affluence of the mall culture.

This is a historical irony because in the dark days of apartheid, whites ruled the cities, and used the pass system and police to make sure that “the blacks,” except, of course, for domestic servants would be out of the city by nightfall.

They destroyed or “removed” black stable black communities to new suburban townships like Soweto against their will. The policy was called ‘forced relocation.”

Now, it’s the whites and affluent blacks who are leaving town for spiffy “planned communities.” When a low-income housing scheme was proposed for the area near the mall, it was actively opposed by affluent residents.

Like in Johannesburg, this city has migrated to the Northern suburbs where the new factories and gated communities are being built. The old neighborhoods like Musgrave are trying to give themselves a face-lift but many flats, houses, and businesses are empty, for rent or for sale.

The redeveloped scenic hills of Durban North and beyond in KwaZulu Natal seem to offer the escape path for the good life. A new billion dollar airport named after Zulu King Shaka was recently opened miles north of the city.

An Afrikaner lawyer tells me that years ago, there was a Jewish dentist in Durban who was so busy you could never get an appointment. His schedule was packed, mostly with fellow Jews. Now, he’s easy to book because large parts of the Jewish community has migrated or fled to New Zealand and Australia, with a few trickling to Israel.

This “transition” happened in central Joburg a decade ago. When I first came here, the City of Gold as it was known, was the center of commerce. Today, the 120 year old Central Business District is, in part, a ghost town, a place for the poor and immigrants.

The action was moved 20 miles north to Sandton, an area now of fantastic shopping centers complete with a Mandela Square, luxury hotels, and thriving busineses. The new multi-billion dollar Gau-Train that runs from the airport doesn’t even have a Johannesburg stop yet. It goes directly to Sandton. Stops at another mall in Rosebank and in Pretoria, and at Park Station in Central Joburg where there will be no connection to working class trains serving Soweto and other black “suburbs.”

The late Gill Scott Heron sang, “what’s the word, Johannesburg!” Today, it’s a word that has become a synonym more for an airport hub (Africa’s largest) than a city. The city is still there but it seems to have disappeared in the consciousness of many who bypass it whenever they can, although it still is home to the Market Theater and many attractions. Locals prefer to call it Jozi.

The social divisions in South African cities were structured and imposed. They didn’t happen naturally, although it was hard to understand that as you whiz by on first world freeways.

In some ways, geography is destiny. The English who eased out the Dutch in the first colonial collision had a keen sense of where they wanted people to live. The whites got the coastline; the blacks were driven into the interior.

Later, when the Afrikaners took over, their system of racial division and profiling pushed Africans further back into reserves set up to better control labor and then into ethnic homelands as part of what they called “separate development.”

The architects of apartheid created a system where whites ended up with 87% of the best land, blacks only 13%, and there’s been little land reform since the outbreak of democracy.

Today something else is going on, landlords and real estate interests encourage blight as a way to drive people to leave for more expensive residences. The blight then lowers real estate values which allows a few to pick up large tracts for a song, and redevelop then.

First the artists and yuppies move in, followed by the middle and upper class. The city planners know this phenomenon well and manipulate it for commercial reasons.

Scholars Bill Freund and Vishni Padayachee recognize the way that planning from on high determines how South African cities have been organized, “These cities have strong traditions of forceful planning from above with considerable capacity to finance change. They witness industrialization, but they are also the site of massive squatter settlements and populations that fall outside the functioning of the “formal” economy.”

Chris Brenner of the University California-Davis explains this is a global phenomenon:

“Cities are fundamentally shaped by inequality and conflict, as different social groups mobilize political and economic resources in an effort to improve their socio-economic circumstances. Rapid globalization and the rise of an information economy, however, are resulting in rapidly changing patterns of employment, economic opportunity and political power.”

These divisions are intensified by policy decisions, and a lack of them, which. in turn, lead to conflict and even violence. A study by the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Center for Civil Society in Durban blamed the rise of xenophobic violence on structural problems many years in the making as property rights were allowed to trump human rights.

These analysts showed that such conflict can be expected in response to blatantly unequal and structural social arrangements that are allowed, if not encouraged, to fester in a stressful environment compounded by poverty and other crises.

As urban analyst David Harvey puts it:

“The response is for each and every stratum in society to use whatever powers of domination it can command (money, political influence, even violence) to try to seal itself off (or seal off others judged undesirable) in fragments of space within which processes of reproduction of social distinctions can be jealously protected.”

The result in Durban was an upsurge of violence.

“May-June 2008 South Africa witnessed the country’s worst-ever outbreak of xenophobic violence: 62 people including 21 South Africans were killed, 670 wounded, dozens of women raped, at least 100,000 people displaced, and property worth of millions of rand looted, destroyed or seized by South Africans and their leaders in the affected communities.”

So here I am in one of the most beautiful corners of the world and yet under the surface, it is seething with conflicts far worse and much scarier than the ones I saw play out in Hollywood’s apocalyptic Transformers 3.

It’s not obvious. To “get it,” you have to scratch deep to see its roots. Politicians will have to do much more to head off the social explosion and ugly violence the experts anticipate and expect sooner rather than later.

News Dissector Danny Schechter has been involved with South Africa since the 1960’s and has made many films here. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

Video: President Obama Says It’s ‘Time To Be A Dick’ (Parody)

Pelliciari — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:10:08 +0000

With news of President Obama’s frustration with the debt talks, here is a parody from Funny or Die of what Obama may really want to say. As he said about the debt talks:

“I have reached the point where I say enough,” and added “I’ve reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this,” according to the Republican aide. After leaving the debt talks, Obama said this confirms the totality of what the American people already believe” about Washington politicians who are “too focused on positioning and political posturing.” (RawStory)

The Final Nail In The Supply Side Coffin

JacobSloan — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:00:59 +0000

Taxes are low and corporate profits are high, but nothing is trickling down to the American worker.

If politicians are going to continue kowtowing to every whim of the rich, can they at least think of a new excuse? Via Salon:

The theory of supply-side economics tells us that if you cut taxes on rich people and corporations, the moguls and businessmen will take their windfall and invest it, creating jobs and accelerating the rate of economic growth. The benefits of a light hand on the upper class, therefore, will “trickle down” to the working man and woman.

Ever since Ronald Reagan first attempted to make supply-side economics a reality and proceeded to inaugurate an era of persistent government deficits and growing income inequality, it has become harder and harder to make the trickle-down argument with a straight face. But we’ve never seen anything quite like the disaster that’s playing out right now.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that corporate profits are looking quite strong for the second quarter of 2011. Even the Journal can’t sugarcoat the basic facts:

While the U.S. economy staggers through one of its slowest recoveries since the Great Depression, American companies are poised to report strong earnings for the second quarter — exposing a dichotomy between corporate performance and the overall health of the economy.

What makes this “recovery” so different? Perhaps the simplest answer is that labor has been broken as a force that can put pressure on management, so there’s little incentive for employers to turn profits into wage hikes or new jobs. Instead, employers are squeezing more out of the workers that they’ve got, and investing in equipment upgrades and new technology instead of human assets — labor productivity has risen sharply since the end of the recession.

Wages are moribund, unemployment is stuck at 9 percent, and the corporate bottom line is doing just fine. You could be excused for thinking that if ever there was time to put the stake through supply-side economics, it would be now. Wall Street and big corporations are doing just fine, but absolutely nothing is trickling down. And yet Republicans are still pushing the same old song and dance, passionately holding the entire creditworthiness of the United States hostage in return for even lower taxes on corporations, adamantly refusing to countenance even the slightest revenue increase to help cushion the hard times for the Americans who are getting a raw deal out of the current recovery.

Democrats come in for their share of the blame, too. The worst economic recovery for American workers in history has happened on Obama’s watch, and he appears remarkably oblivious to it. He may live to regret this oversight.

The Age Of Perpetual Self-Branding

JacobSloan — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:19:21 +0000

Facebook wants to be the place where you feel most yourself, with the most control over how you are regarded. It inextricably intertwines marketing with selfhood, so that having a self becomes an inherently commercial operation.

Writing for n+1, Rob Horning concocts a frightening, fantastic, and thought-provoking essay on how we live today, connecting the reign of “fast fashion” companies such as Forever 21, social media such as Facebook, and 21st century capitalism’s demand that workers market and reinvent themselves endlessly:

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals.

Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce.

Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say—as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear.

How did this happen? By seeming to mitigate the problems that neoliberalism creates by shifting economic risk onto workers, social media has been able to colonize the collective consciousness. Facebook, fast fashion, and the like provide new mechanisms of solace, quantifying our connections and influence (and thereby making them more economically useful to us) while enhancing the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more productive, more self-revelatory. Though we may be only one of a thousand friends in everyone else’s networks, that never seems especially important when we’re in the midst of posting new pictures.

In turning to social media for comfort, we’ve become happily dependent on digital devices, as we have come to rely on the accelerated rate of communication and exchange they facilitate. They offer us chances to articulate, evaluate, and augment who we are while archiving our identity-making gestures as a collection we can later fawn over and curate. The archiving makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it makes it more tenuous. Our identity can never be so strong as to render any particular gesture negligible; it is cumulative at the same time that it is totally discontinuous. This has the effect of allowing everything we do to seem either significant or irrelevant, depending on which view suits our needs. The online repository has gradually become the privileged site of the self, the authorized version that redeems the frustration and desperation incipient with the provisionality of work life, that corrects the errors and discourtesies we commit in our confrontations with the physical world.

Read the full essay at n+1

Are Banksters Too Big To Jail?

Danny Schechter — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:14:37 +0000

Why are we banking on banks to a promote economic recovery? HBO’s “Too Big To Fail” should have been about banksters “too big to jail.”

This week the financial crisis finally went prime time in the form of a big budget HBO docudrama called “Too Big To Fail.”

It was a well-acted docudrama focused on the BIG Men and some women in the banks and in government who tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again up on that wall to prevent a total economic collapse when panic dried up credit and financial institutions faced failure.

Based on the work of a New York Times reporter, it offered a skillfully-made but conventional narrative which, like most TV shows, showcase events but miss their deeper context and background.

We heard all the explanations, save one.

There was greed, ambition, ego and money lust. There were personal rivalries and ideological battles, parochial agendas and narrow self-interest. There was panic on THE Street and in the halls of mighty institutions. In many ways, the program recycled and made an official narrative compelling viewing. In the end, everyone was to blame so no one was to blame.

BUT … what was missing was any notion of intentionality and premeditation, almost no mention of systemic fraud and crime, that one word that sums up what really happened for those millions of Americans who have lost jobs and homes. We never saw victims or felt their pain and bewilderment. We were never shown how a shadow banking system emerged or how the finance industry worked with their counterparts in finance and insurance to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the super rich,

When I was but a precocious lad, my elementary school encouraged students to take out a savings account at the nearby Dime Bank in the Bronx. We were each given a bankbook and taught to put in $.50 a week to show us how to build wealth by being thrifty. It was with a sense of pride that I watched my balance grow.

It may have been peanuts in the scheme of things, but to me, it was the way to plan for the future.

At the same time, in those year I watched TV shows glamorize the bank robbing antics of a man named Willie Sutton who also staged jail breaks wearing masks and costumes. When he was asked why he robbed banks, he responded famously, “That’s where the money is.”

And it still is, except in our era, the banks are robbing us.

That’s because what’s now called the “financial services sector” has gone from about 30 percent of our economy to over 60 percent. Through a process called financialization, they have transformed how all business is done.

Making money from money soon began to surpass making money from making things. What we were never warned about was the danger of getting too deeply in debt, or how the economy was shifting from production to consumption.

Private equity, credit swaps, derivative deals and collateralized debt obligations soon drove the economy. Markets became captives of high performance trading by powerful computers.

When Wall Street became the defacto capital of the country, the bankers accrued more power than the politicians who they bought up with impunity. Their lobbying power deregulated the economy and decriminalized their activities. They killed many of the reforms enacted during the New Deal designed to protect the public. They built a shadow (and shadowy) banking system beyond the reach of the law.

And now, here we are, in 2011, five years after the meltdown of 2007, four years after the crash of 2008 and the passage of the TARP bailout that pumped money into their treasuries at taxpayer expense. Since then, there has been a steady parade of scandals and the disclosures that have come out since every week more banks close and or consolidate and run into problems with regulators.

Take “my” old bank in the Bronx. It has been through as many changes as I have been. A website on bank histories runs it down:

Dime Savings Bank of New York, The
04/12/1859 NYS Chartered Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn
09/10/1930 Acquire By Merger Navy Savings Bank
06/30/1970 Name Change To Dime Savings Bank of New York, The
09/30/1979 Acquire By Merger Mechanics Exchange Savings Bank
07/01/1980 Acquire By Merger First Federal S & L Assoc. of Port Washington
08/01/1981 Acquire By Merger Union Savings Bank of New York
06/23/1983 Convert Federal Dime Savings Bank of NY, FSB
01/07/2002 Purchased By Washington Mutual Inc.
01/07/2002 Name Change To Washington Mutual Bank

And then, of course, some years later, Washington Mutual itself, went bust and was bought up for a song by JP Morgan Chase. Here are some of the latest headlines about the bank now known as WAMU:

WaMu Agrees On Post-Bankruptcy Control — Reuters

WaMu, Shareholders, Biggest Creditors Said to Settle …‎ – Bloomberg

WaMu Shareholders Are Offered $25M-Plus To Drop Claims – Puget Sound Business Journal

On the day I wrote this commentary, the New York Times reported:

“The nation’s biggest banks and mortgage lenders have steadily amassed real estate empires, acquiring a glut of foreclosed homes that threatens to deepen the housing slump and create a further drag on the economic recovery.

All told, they own more than 872,000 homes as a result of the groundswell in foreclosures, almost twice as many as when the financial crisis began in 2007, according to RealtyTrac.”

To whom does the Times turn for expertise on the subject, but a key former operative at Washington Mutual who was with the bank in the go-go era of shoveling out sub-prime mortgages? Now, he gives advice on risk management:

“These shops are under siege; it’s just a tsunami of stuff coming in,” said Taj Bindra, who oversaw Washington Mutual’s servicing unit from 2004 to 2006 and now advises financial institutions on risk management. “Lenders have a strong incentive to clear out inventory in a controlled and timely manner, but if you had problems on the front end of the foreclosure process, it should be no surprise you are having problems on the back end.”

What were people’s homes are now “inventory” to be stockpiled even though it has a negative cumulative effect on economic recovery of the housing market.

The banks that are increasingly despised and blamed for their role in engineering the financial disaster, are now trying to play nice to change their negative image.

Explains the Times:

“Conscious of their image, many lenders have recently started telling real estate agents to be more lenient to renters who happen to live in a foreclosed home and give them extra time to move out before changing the locks.

‘Wells Fargo has sent me back knocking on doors two or three times, offering to give renters money if they cooperate with us,’ said Claude A. Worrell, a longtime real estate agent from Minneapolis who specializes in selling bank-owned property. ‘It’s a lot different than it used to be.’”

So, they are still foreclosing, but with a smile. Is it a ‘lot different than it used to be’?

Just last month, Huffington Post reported:

“Top executives at Washington Mutual actively boosted sales of high-risk, toxic mortgages in the two years prior to the bank’s collapse in 2008, according to emails published in a wide-ranging Senate report that contradicts previous public testimony about the meltdown.”

“The voluminous, 639-page report on the financial crisis from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations singles out Washington Mutual for its decision to champion its subprime lending business, even as executives privately acknowledged that a housing bubble was about to burst.”

The truth is that most of the bigger banks have emerged from the financial crisis stronger than ever, with executives cashing in with higher salaries and bigger bonuses. That old saying about criminals who “laughed all the way to the bank” has to be revised because, in this case, they never left the bank.

More shocking has been the largely passive response by our government and prosecutors. At last, the Attorney General of New York is said to be investigating but none of the big bankers have yet gone to jail or suffered for the scams and frauds they committed. Most of the State officials, who vowed to offer the banks the absence of aggressive federal actions, have backed down.

So what can “we the people” do? We can do nothing and watch more of what’s left of our wealth vanish, or we can join others in demanding a “jailout,” not a bailout.

A well-known international banker was just arrested for a high profile alleged sex crime, but not one of possibly thousands have been prosecuted for well documented financial crimes.

Where are the political leaders and activist groups willing to “fight the power” and demand accountability and transparency on Wall Street?

Why are so many us banking on a financial recovery to bring back jobs and a modicum of justice created by the very people and institutions responsible for the crisis?

And why didn’t I learn about these dangers when I first discovered the wonderful world of banking? Isn’t that what schools are for?

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofo

College Graduates Earning Less

majestic — Thu, 19 May 2011 22:27:15 +0000

Congratulations to all the new college grads out there, but have you thought about how much your expensive new college degree is worth? For 2009-10 graduates who were able to land a job (about half), starting salaries fell 10% versus 2006-8, and it doesn’t look like 2011 will be any better. Catherine Rampell reports for the New York Times:

Employment rates for new college graduates have fallen sharply in the last two years, as have starting salaries for those who can find work. What’s more, only half of the jobs landed by these new graduates even require a college degree, reviving debates about whether higher education is “worth it” after all.

“I have friends with the same degree as me, from a worse school, but because of who they knew or when they happened to graduate, they’re in much better jobs,” said Kyle Bishop, 23, a 2009 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh who has spent the last two years waiting tables, delivering beer, working at a bookstore and entering data. “It’s more about luck than anything else.”

The median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force in 2006 to 2008, according to a study released on Wednesday by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. That is a decline of 10 percent, even before taking inflation into account.

Of course, these are the lucky ones — the graduates who found a job. Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring, when the survey was conducted. That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007. (Some have gone for further education or opted out of the labor force, while many are still pounding the pavement.)…

[continues in the New York Times]

Samoa To Jump Forward In Time By One Day

Pelliciari — Mon, 09 May 2011 21:34:07 +0000

Apia, Samoa. Photo: LukMak (CC)

For better business, Samoa decides to switch time zones. BBC reports:

The South Pacific island nation of Samoa is to jump forward in time by one day in order to boost its economy.

Samoa will do this by switching to the west side of the international date line, which it says will make it easier for it to do business with Australia and New Zealand.

At present, Samoa is 21 hours behind Sydney. From 29 December it will be three hours ahead.

The change comes 119 years after Samoa moved in the opposite direction.

Then, it transferred to the east side of the international date line in an effort to aid trade with the US and Europe.

However, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly become Samoa’s biggest trading partners.

[Continues at BBC News]

Real Rate Of Inflation In U.S. Is Near 10%

majestic — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:46:52 +0000

Paul Volcker

“Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” comes to mind. John Melloy reports for CNBC First Money:

After former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was appointed in 1979, the consumer price index surged into the double digits, causing the now revered Fed Chief to double the benchmark interest rate in order to break the back of inflation. Using the methodology in place at that time puts the CPI back near those levels.

Inflation, using the reporting methodologies in place before 1980, hit an annual rate of 9.6 percent in February, according to the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter.

Since 1980, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has changed the way it calculates the CPI in order to account for the substitution of products, improvements in quality (i.e. iPad 2 costing the same as original iPad) and other things. Backing out more methods implemented in 1990 by the BLS still puts inflation at a 5.5 percent rate and getting worse, according to the calculations by the newsletter’s web site, Shadowstats.com…

[continues at CNBC First Money]

Last Minute Budget Deal Only Postpones More Serious Economic Warfare

Danny Schechter — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 03:55:59 +0000

Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao (CC)

The Capitol Hill battlefield is still for the moment as the Easter holidays approach and the combatants get a break from the heated polemics and overnight bargaining sessions. In a last minute deal, milked by both sides for maximum drama and political advantage, the government will not shut down—at least not now—even as its budget has taken a major whack.

Each side can posture to supporters as a victor. The President, who managed the process from the shadows, posed for photos in the White House after his great compromise of 2011 was announced.

It was a media moment to be relished, as media columnist Howard Kurtz explained on the Daily Beast:

“The White House escaped most of the blame. Once the spotlight shifted from the political gamesmanship to the human impact of a shutdown—soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan not getting checks, passport offices closed, national parks off limits—everyone knew an angry public would start pointing fingers. But blame-shifting is a high art in Washington; now both sides can argue about who brought the country back from the brink.”

Oh, the games, the politicians play in the fight for public perception. But in the reality sphere, what can’t be denied is the actual money involved and who will be hurt.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein cut through the bull to look for the bone.

“The substance of this deal is bad,” he writes, “But the way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse.

The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals

…. Obama bragged about “making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Harry Reid joined him, repeatedly calling the cuts “historic.” … You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery…. The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on.”

Take a breath because this budget fight is only a minor blip in a deeper and protracted war that is just cranking up. As Business Insider notes,

“The fight over whether to shut down the government for a few days is chicken-scratch. It’s low-stakes poker compared to the fight over the debt ceiling, which must be resolved by May 8, in just over a month….

The consequences are way more severe, potentially, than the shutdown of government. At the most extreme, it could lead to default. And if you figure that the market goes into a tizzy at the suggestion of, say, Greece defaulting, then the impact of the US should be easy to comprehend.

There’s no doubt that Boehner doesn’t want a disastrous outcome, but his challenge is in getting his more radical compatriots to come along with him.”

Some like the American Dream blog fear a collapse of the economy in the absence of more fundamental change:

“It is being projected that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050. Of course that will never happen because we will have a complete and total financial collapse in this country long before then if nothing changes.

So the game of attrition and denial continues. In the wings is a proposal from Republican budget maven, Congressman Paul Ryan to cut TRILLIONS in federal spending for various forms of health care. Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls it senseless and cruel.

The myth is that these cutbacks will create new jobs. There is little evidence of that. Many of those hardest hit by joblessness get little attention including minorities and the young. Reports economist Max Wolff, “People under 35 years old are not getting the new jobs we create. Employment, home ownership, and wage increases are bypassing younger Americans. As state and local budgets are cut, education and services for the young are contracting especially sharply.

While this high stakes political battle catches the headlines, the sclerosis in the private economy is downplayed with deceptive gains on the job front.

As for housing, the retirement dreams are being destroyed by the fall in housing value reports Bloomberg news  ”Even if the housing market starts to improve throughout the country in the next few months, and actually begins an upward trend, the damage done to middle class homeownership cant be estimated even by using the most sophisticated algorithms. As a result of changing business models, many Americans looked to the equity in their home as their 401K plans and the foundation for retirement. For many homeowners, equity equaled net worth. With that equity evaporating, and an inability to sell a home even at drastically reduced prices, lives have been so dramatically impacted financially, that a housing recovery, if and when it happens, may not really matter.”

At the same time, the investigations and prosecutions of financial fraudsters move at a glacial pace. Perhaps if prosecutors moved more aggressively, they would take down whole industries built on fraud. What seems clear that this pushing for the highest returns had little interest in ethics or legalities. These are the people who benefit from the Republican fervor for the “free market.”

In his most recent interview with the Financial Times, Ponzi King Bernie Madoff confirmed that while he was responsible, many of his crimes were a response to demands from his biggest clients who wanted more money, no matter how he earned it.

The push for breaking the rules was from above—as it often is.

Says Gillian Tett, “In the flesh, Madoff spins a credible tale of how a renegade entrepreneur conquered Wall Street and was drawn into crime by personalities and forces he could not control. It sounds almost convincing.”

“One of the reasons he called us in,” Tett observed, “was because … he was very keen to explain his side of the story. And he says, as so often with big frauds, that he started off small-scale, essentially trying to cover his tracks in a very small way. He thought he would be able to get himself back on track later on once the markets turned. However, the whole thing began to engulf him. And essentially, it snowballed…”

That snowball is still rolling. The Republicans and the Democrats run from this crime issue even as their budget, justified in pragmatic terms, will be seen as a crime by the public once their checks stop and benefits stop coming.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Medical Marijuana Is Now A $1.7 Billion Market

Pelliciari — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:41:44 +0000

Medical Marijuana shop in Denver, Colorado. Photo: O'Dea (CC)

The medical marijuana market has had a significant growth this year. With seven states who have opened shop and five more states planned to approve medical marijuana outlets this year, cannabis could save many states’ economies. Medical News Today reports:

Medical marijuana is now a serious $1.7 billion dollar market, according to a new report released this week by an independent financial analysis firm that specializes in new and unique markets. Currently, 24.8 million people are eligible to receive a recommendation and purchase marijuana legally under state laws, and approximately 730,000 people actually do.

Ted Rose, editor of the new State of the Medical Marijuana Market 2011 report, comments:

“Medical marijuana markets are rapidly growing across the country and will reach $1.7 billion this year. We undertook this effort because we noticed a dearth of reliable market information about this politically charged business. Hundreds of businesses exist around the country that cultivate and sell marijuana to customers. Many of these businesses emerged in the wake of the Obama Administration’s decision to deprioritize federal prosecutions of individuals and business complying with state medical marijuana laws. The State of the Medical Marijuana Markets 2011 shows which states represent the most active markets, who is making money, and how are they doing it.”

[Continues at Medical News Today]

Treasure Islands: The Murky World Of Offshore Tax Shelters

JacobSloan — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 21:06:47 +0000

New Left Project sits down with author Nicholas Shaxson to talk tax havens — a mammoth system of quasi-legal money-laundering which has a far wider impact than we realize, with a large role in the global drug trade and financial crisis. As it turns out, the biggest “treasure islands” are not the Caymans or Monaco, but places such as the City of London and the U.S. state of Delaware:

There is no common definition of what a tax haven is. Everybody has a slightly different definition. Ultimately what a tax haven provides is escape from the rules and the laws of jurisdictions. Tax havens are also about ‘elsewhere’ – the laws of the Cayman Islands are not designed for the benefit of the 50,000-odd population of the Cayman Islands.

The traditional view is…palm-fringed tropical islands in the Caribbean, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein. Small states. But if you do the analysis of what a tax haven is and what they are selling, you will find that these small islands are generally sideshows to the big event. The biggest tax havens in the modern global economy are big OECD rich country economies – the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland.

The pervasiveness of this stereotype has been one of the great reasons why the offshore system has been invisible. People have always thought of tax havens as sideshows to the main event, whereas in fact they are central to the global economy.

The drug trade makes heavy use of the offshore system. The money now involved is so large that you can’t transport it in suitcases anymore. A suitcase can only hold around $1-2 million, and we are now talking about tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. In terms of the overall scale of what is happening offshore there are various different estimates.

March Madness And The Class War

Danny Schechter — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:53:24 +0000

The term class war has been extricated from the archives of another era, while divisions over the future of the economy have become a battleground in which the adversaries yell at each other, but rarely engage in any discourse with each other in a shared language.

The worse things get, the harder it is for people to agree on what to do.

This is a month known in the USA for the “March madness” college basketball finals, but the madness seems now to be oozing from sports arenas to political capitols.

In the Middle East, all the political turmoil will ultimately impact on a regional economy build on the flow and price of oil, contends author/historian Michael Klare:

“Whatever the outcome of the protests, uprisings, and rebellions now sweeping the Middle East, one thing is guaranteed: the world of oil will be permanently transformed. Consider everything that’s now happening as just the first tremor of an oilquake that will shake our world to its core.”

Back in the once thought of as “stable” United States, the economic crisis has finally spurred a confrontation between right and left with noisy protests following threatened crackdowns on union rights to collective bargaining, and cutbacks on social programs.

Conservatives hype the austerity programs that divided and created chaos in Ireland as the model Americans should be following.

Writes Terrance Heath,

“The irony is that the things that the Heritage (Foundation) praises about Ireland’s economy are what drove it to the brink of extinction … Ireland followed the same tax-cutting, deregulating conservative economic path to its misfortune that led America to its own. That Ireland stands as an example of austerity’s epic failure, makes it even more mystifying that conservatives keep spotlighting the clearest example of the disastrous impact of conservative economic policy.”

Activists in the sweltering heat of Egypt hold up signs praising protesters in Wisconsin while the shivering public workers in the snow of Madison talk about struggling like an Egyptian.

Who would have thunk?

The poet Yeats once wrote that things fall apart when the center doesn’t hold, and his words seem prophetically appropriate to the unraveling now underway in the US with fierce political combat paralyzing the Congress and rhetoric escalating into a realm beyond the rational.

Even as a film won an Academy Award for calling the collapse of the economy an “inside job,” there is no consensus on the causes of the financial crisis.

The debate about what to do, and whether or not to punish wrongdoers, rages on even as the media looks away from the consequences—the armies of permanently unemployed and growing foreclosures.

Politicians only worry about public budgets, not the private pain of their constituents.

An ideological fight over policy footnotes is considered de rigeur but the suffering of those unable to cope with cutoffs of benefits, rising gas and food prices, and growing despair, is considered a “bummer.”

Many Democrats want so badly to move on that they avoid discussions of Wall Street crime and massive fraud. The President sees all that as unproductive because his new focus is to “’win the future.” Believe it or not, that slogan comes from a book by Newt Gingrich.

The White House deliberately stayed away from protests in Wisconsin, later scolding the Democratic Party apparatus after they learned it was urging supporters to back worker protests. For them, such pro-union activism was decidedly off-message reports the New York Times.

And so much for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report with 633 pages of documented analysis about how the system imploded. That was last week’s non-story.

Republicans want to change the subject and have found new theories to divert attention and/or make the debate so complicated that no one except some Ph.D.s can follow it.

And even they have problems doing so.

Fed head Ben Bernanke who ignored calls to stop mortgage fraud when it might have made a difference now says that the crisis was caused by China.

It’s all their fault!
The Chinese meanwhile buy up American debt and keep our system going.

The right conspiracy theorists have a new explanation to amuse themselves with as well: the crisis was caused by terrorists.

The Washington Times, a newspaper owned by the Moonies, reports:

“Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system…”

“Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran.”

That just about throws all the “bad guys” they could come up with into one big barrel of ducks to shoot at. Never mind, that this “revelation” is totally vague and undocumented.

On the left, artists explore apocalyptic themes, not a serious activist response. One new exhibit is called “The Days of this Society” are numbered.

“Inspired by a famous statement by French thinker Guy Debord, proclaiming that THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY ARE NUMBERED, this exhibition plays with the notion that at the beginning of the XXI century one is experiencing a period of fin de siècle, in which the state of affairs is questioned and a collective anxiety is emerging, a situation caused by the feeling of political, economic, and cultural crisis that is permeating the Western world and is creating a social entropy.”

Perhaps there is something in the water or the political ether that precludes any agreement on facts, much less a consensus on what to do about them.

Resolve on punishing mortgage fraudsters has gotten caught up in arcane debate over obtuse contractual language. Even as “pervasive fraud” was documented by the FBI, no one, least of all the regulators, can agree, on who is responsible and what the fines and penalties should be.

It’s clear denial is not just a river in Egypt. Reports the New York Times, “as the negotiations grind on, there are signs that the banks have still not come to grips with the problems plaguing the foreclosure process.”

The newspaper of record does not look at the record to note that big banks may have no interest in coming “to grips” with charges that they defrauded their customers.

All of this “debate” functions like a fog machine to insure that the public doesn’t know what is happening, and to insure that the class at the top is not treated like the class at the bottom as Naked Capitalism.com’s Yves Smith observes:

“It is one thing to point out a sorry reality, that the rich and powerful often get away with abuses while ordinary citizens seldom do. It’s quite another to present it as inevitable.

It would be far more productive to isolate what are the key failings in our legal, prosecutorial, and regulatory regime are and demand changes. The fact that financial fraud cases are often difficult does not mean they are unwinnable.”

Winnable or not, there seems to be rational calculation—even a carefully constructed strategy– behind the increasingly irrational political debate.

Perhaps it’s a form of a calculated lack of “intelligent design” that belongs right up there with classic political strategies in which invented realities and message points become believable they more they are repeated.

George Bush once contrasted a fact-based political order with his preferred faith-based one. That’s why all the exposes of his WMD claims in Iraq rolled off his back and never stuck.

The madness this month is like a chicken that has come home to roost, reminding us again that the only time we can only tell when a politician is lying is when his or her lips start moving.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

U.S. Government Admits To Massive Waste Of Taxpayers’ Money

majestic — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:33:12 +0000

Just to get you even more excited about paying your taxes next month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reports that billions of those tax dollars are wasted every year. Damian Paletta reports for the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. government has 15 different agencies overseeing food-safety laws, more than 20 separate programs to help the homeless and 80 programs for economic development.

These are a few of the findings in a massive study of overlapping and duplicative programs that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year, according to the Government Accountability Office.

A report from the nonpartisan GAO, to be released Tuesday, compiles a list of redundant and potentially ineffective federal programs, and it could serve as a template for lawmakers in both parties as they move to cut federal spending and consolidate programs to reduce the deficit. Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.), who pushed for the report, estimated it identifies between $100 billion and $200 billion in duplicative spending. The GAO didn’t put a specific figure on the spending overlap.

The GAO examined numerous federal agencies, including the departments of defense, agriculture and housing and urban development, and pointed to instances where different arms of the government should be coordinating or consolidating efforts to save taxpayers’ money.

The agency found 82 federal programs to improve teacher quality; 80 to help disadvantaged people with transportation; 47 for job training and employment; and 56 to help people understand finances, according to a draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Instances of ineffective and unfocused federal programs can lead to a mishmash of occasionally arbitrary policies and rules, the report said. It recommends merging or consolidating a number of programs to both save money and make the government more efficient…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

Obama’s Change: More Tyranny and Oppression

judy_hollister — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:52:02 +0000

Has anyone seen a change for the good? Or just more of the same … changes that will only leave us with less rights and money in our pockets. From Nathan Janes of PUPAGANDA.com:

In January of 2009, as the American economy teetered on the brink of economic collapse, the most prominent story within the mainstream media, called “the greatest mystery since Watergate,” was the selection of the Obama family pet. With the election of Barak Obama, many Americans, relieved that “change” was on the way, focused their attention on such trivial matters as the Presidential dog rather than the state of continual economic decline within our country. This phenomenon came on the heels of a successful election campaign where Americans were sold the Obama brand through terrific marketing and public relations. Everyone was buying “hope” and “change” with not only their votes but with their time and energy. The Obama campaign recruited well over 2 million volunteers, a number unprecedented by any other election campaign within US history. Before Obama even won the election, he seemed to be assigned Messianic status, normally associated with royalty and totalitarian leaders. As part of his public relations campaign, celebrities openly pledged “service” to the Obama administration and asked Americans to also become “agents of change.”

Although Obama was to be the administrator of change, much of what his administration would bring would be more of the same. The democratic presidential elect was expected to reverse the assaults to the constitution that occurred over the previous eight years under the republican president. However, under the Obama Administration, warrantless wiretapping, secret arrests, indefinite detention of citizens, and the use of torture have all been expanded. The Obama administration effectively expanded the gains of tyranny and oppression achieved by the previous administration. Obama supported the Banker Bailout allowing bankers to make off with trillions in taxpayer’s money, bankrupting the future of our country for generations to come. His administration doled out taxpayers’ money to Wall Street, causing rampant inflation, a lowering of living standards and the destruction of the dollar. An engineered deconstruction of the economy is occurring; our manufacturing industry, civil liberties, and monetary foundations are all rapidly eroding. America has been reduced from an industrial economy to a service economy selling the goods of other nations.

Within his election campaign, Obama made a number of promises that would soon be broken. Among these, he pledged to end NAFTA and GATT but once in office expanded both. He promised to have the most transparent administration ever but instead many aspects of his presidency have been cloaked in secrecy. Obama’s first official act as president was to seal the release of his personal records with an executive order. He made the names of visitors to the White House private, protecting the identity of those who visit and may influence policy decisions. Obama, a constitutional lawyer, stated that he would not control congress with signing statements the way that his predecessor had. However, Obama has used signing statements on several occasions to manipulate legislation passed by Congress. Since his executive order imposing a two-year waiting period for lobbyists entering his administration, more than 40 ex-lobbyists have populated top jobs in the administration. Obama pledged to wait five days before signing bills passed by Congress to allow review by the public. Since Obama’s election, bills have been rushed through congress and voted on before anyone has an opportunity to read them. Congress was given less than an hour to read the revisions to the 1,070 page Stimulus Bill. Obama stated the Stimulus Bill was so urgent that it had to be passed before Congress could read it. The anti-war candidate in the 2008 election, Obama has extended the war and increased the number of troops involved while also expanding the defense budget. He promised to abolish the Patriot Act only to reinstate it while continuing the Bush administration’s policy of rendition, the arrest of any citizen labeled an “enemy combatant,” and the indefinite detention of citizens without any evidence of crime.

In 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what type of government the Constitution was bringing into existence. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” A republic, a form of government ruled by law, provides for the limitation of government and the protection of the rights of the people. Over the last 50 years, the government system of the US and several other countries has transformed into an oligarchy, rule by a small group of individuals who essentially obtain their power by buying it. Donors of the Obama campaign were a Who’s Who of multinational corporations, Wall Street interests, and banks. The influence that these high-level campaign contributors have on legislators and the president shapes the law of the country and the flow of taxpayers’ dollars. The powerful few shape the minds of the public through the use of covert public relations techniques disseminated by the mass media so that few citizens are aware of the role these individuals play in shaping the situation of us all.

[Continue reading http://www.pupaganda.com/originals/Obamas_change.html">here]