While the government struggles to save one crumbling enterprise at the expense of the crumbling of another, it accelerates the process of juggling debts, switching losses, piling loans on loans, mortgaging the future and the future’s future. As things grow worse, the government protects itself not by contracting this process, but by expanding it. - Ayn RandFor those of you who advocate a generous Welfare State, you should know that general reliance on Government handouts is bankrupting this country. And the rate at which it is doing so is accelerating. Defense spending is also contributing to the demise of our system, but right now the ranks of those who take from those who produce is growing quickly. Obama's Administration has been instrumental in expanding the base of people who suck from the system.
This scenario is very similar to the scenario that unfolded in "Atlas Shrugged." I wanted to link an excellent blog post from Economic Collapse that details just how egregious the situation has become. Caution, only read this if you are prepared to get angry or sick. I read it this morning and I've had a case of stomach flu ever since: LINK
To make matters worse, I'm sure many of you have now heard about the unbelievable spending junket that a GSA conference in Vegas turned into. Apparently the GSA spent close $150 grand on food and drinks and $6300 on commemorative coins for participants. Gee, I guess those coins really help GSA personnel do their jobs. It turns out that the regional commissioner who planned this conference was subpoenaed to testify before Congress and, of course, he invoked the 5th Amendment. He did this even in response to a a basic question about whether he attended. LINK If I lived near this Jeff Neely, I would make sure that I left a big pile of my dog's shit on his front porch every morning. If I were on the House panel that was grilling him, I would have asked him he if patronized a prostitute while he was there and whether or not that cost was expensed.
This is YOUR taxpayer people. It really makes me feel good about getting out of bed everyday early and working late most week nights in order to make a living to pay for my housing and food AND to pay for Jeff Neely's commemorative coin and hooker at a Vegas junket that pissed away close $1 million in taxpayer money.
Thanks Barack!
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/images/sp_en_6.gif)
just thinking: perhaps the civil unrest will not come from the "takers" but from the "producers"
ReplyDeleteMilitary spending should be differentiated from defense spending. We could have a very capable defense without the foreign military bases and "kinetic actions." Subtle difference but important.
ReplyDeleteWe're going down and they're moving up...
ReplyDeleteFree People of the World UNITE: The Use of Gold Dinars and Silver Dirhams GOES VIRAL!
Dean writes, “Suddenly, we see true freedom on a whole new level as more and more people awaken to the nature of “divide-and-conquer” paper currencies!”
Once again we say, take THAT criminal Banksters. Good luck trying to put the genie back in the bottle now.
http://sgtreport.com/2012/04/free-people-of-the-world-unite-the-use-of-gold-dinars-and-silver-dirhams-goes-viral/
Nothing like being a civil servant in California:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-26/nurse-making-269-810-demonstrates-california-s-overtime-binge.html
You can blame it on the welfare state if you want but the biggest winners have been the biggest thieves!
ReplyDeleteRomney’s Lead Economist Urges Policies that will Cause the Next Financial Crisis
Presidential nominees of either U.S. party can secure economic advice from any economist in the world. This makes it all the more amazing and sad that they choose economists with track records of disastrous policy advice. Bill Clinton chose Robert Rubin, George W. Bush chose Gregory Mankiw, Obama chose Lawrence Summers, and Mitt Romney chose Mankiw. Rubin and Summers led the Clinton administration’s efforts to gut financial regulation. Mankiw led the efforts under Bush. Collectively, these efforts created the criminogenic environment that produced endemic financial fraud (“green slime”).
In the context of public finance and financial regulation Mankiw’s praise for such competition demonstrates that he has learned nothing useful from our recurrent crises. This column discusses why competition among governments in financial regulation leads to the criminogenic financial deregulation that produces the epidemics of green slime that drive our financial crises. I have recently explained, in the context of opposing the JOBS Act, why the “regulatory race to the bottom” is an oxymoron designed by regular morons.
Romney’s choice of Mankiw, one of the leading architects of and apologists for the crisis, as his leading economic advisor would be a superb issue for Obama to use in his reelection campaign but for one tiny problem. The Obama administration’s policies on financial regulation are created by the likes of Rubin, Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke. They differ only on the margins from Mankiw. The entire crew of leading economists for the last three Presidents and Romney has proven catastrophically wrong about financial regulation. The remarkable thing is that they do not drop their dogmas even after they engineer multiple crises over the course of three decades. We will soon experience the 30th anniversary of the Garn-St Germain Act of 1982, which set off a renewed “competition in laxity” among the States (principally California and Texas; whose S&Ls, collectively, caused roughly two-thirds of all S&L losses) and produced the criminogenic environment that led to the second phase of the S&L debacle.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/04/romneys-lead-economist-urges-policies-that-will-cause-the-next-financial-crisis.html
SEC charges optionsXpress with short selling scam
ReplyDeleteSAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged Chicago-based optionsXpress and four company officials for engaging in an "abusive" naked short selling scheme. The SEC alleged that the online brokerage and clearing agency specializing in options and futures failed to satisfy its close-out obligations by engaging in a series of sham "reset" transactions which promoted the illusion that the firm had purchased securities of like kind and quantity. "The firm and customer Jonathan I. Feldman engaged in these sham reset transactions in a number of securities, resulting in continuous failures to deliver," said the SEC in a statement. OptionsXpress' former chief financial officer Thomas Stern was also named in the SEC's proceeding along with optionsXpress and Feldman. Three other company officials, Peter Bottini, Phillip Hoeh and Kevin Strine, were named in a separate proceeding.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sec-charges-optionsxpress-with-short-selling-scam-2012-04-16-152130
As Warren Buffett likes to say, “There’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen”.
1st the peanut butter, now the F#@$in jelly...before you know it I'll be eating toast sandwiches ala Max Keiser!
ReplyDeleteWelch’s: 95 percent of grapes in Southwest Michigan destroyed
SAINT JOSEPH, Mich. - For Welch’s grape growers, it was the most devastating frost in Michigan’s history. That’s according to the National Grape Cooperation, better known as Welch’s Foods.
Cold temperatures wiped out 95 percent of all the juice grapes in Berrien, Cass and Van Buren County.
“You know it’s a complete wipeout,” said John Jasper, a surveyor for Welch’s Foods. Jasper said more than 10,000 acres of juice grapes were destroyed Thursday morning across Southwest Michigan.
Jasper had a difficult job Friday. He and two other Welch’s surveyors tried to figure out how many grapes the company could expect this year at harvest. “I went through hundreds of acres before I found a spot that had a live bud,” he said.
“I’ve probably been to 100 farms in the last two days,” said Jasper. “The majority (are destroyed) 95 percent.”
http://www.abc57.com/photo-gallery/Welchs-95-percent-of-grapes-in-Southwest-Michigan-destroyed-147373675.html
Read the whole thing before you start hurling stones....
ReplyDeleteFirst They Come for the Muslims
By Chris Hedges
Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced Thursday in Worcester, Mass., to 17½ years in prison. It was another of the tawdry show trials held against Muslim activists since 9/11 as a result of the government’s criminalization of what people say and believe. These trials, where secrecy rules permit federal lawyers to prosecute people on “evidence” the defendants are not allowed to examine, are the harbinger of a corporate totalitarian state in which any form of dissent can be declared illegal. What the government did to Mehanna, and what it has done to hundreds of other innocent Muslims in this country over the last decade, it will eventually do to the rest of us.
“People who have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and ‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them,” Downs told me when we met last week at Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Downs calls the process of condemning people before they have committed a crime “pre-emptive prosecution.” The concept of pre-emptive prosecution mocks domestic law as egregiously as pre-emptive war mocks the foundations of international law.
“In the past, when the government wanted to do something illegal it simply went ahead and broke the law,” he said. “They rounded up the Japanese during World War II and stuck them in concentration camps. They knew they were breaking the law when they decided to go after the activists with COINTELPRO in the 1960s but they rationalized that they were doing it for a higher purpose. This is different. The government is destroying the legal framework of our country. They are twisting it out of recognition to make it appear as though what they’re doing is legal. I don’t remember that kind of a situation in the past. The opinions of the court are now only lame excuses as to why the courts can’t do justice.”
Downs pointed out that if the government was actually concerned about the rule of law it would prosecute politicians and other prominent Americans who have publicly spoken out in support of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Holy Jihadis), an armed group on the State Department terrorism list that carries out terrorist attacks inside Iran. They include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, and Gen. James Jones, who was President Obama’s first national security adviser. Some of them voiced their backing in speeches for which they were paid lavishly.
“Justice is now justice for corporations,” he went on. “Anybody who interferes with the corporations, who interferes with their profits, who interferes with their rights, will become labeled ‘terrorists.’ They become people we need to get rid of. Judges, politicians and lawyers all feed at the same corporate trough. And that is why their decisions increasingly are corporate decisions.”
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/first_they_come_for_the_muslims_20120416/
Just another system at the end of its timeline...rinse and repeat with the next one...
ReplyDeleteDave there is no financial restraint with these guys. They are partying like it's 1999. To this administration spending the taxpayers money is part of winning the jackpot. Remember when President Obummer said, "I won?" He also said he would cut the deficit in half in his first term. We need to kick his butt back to Chicago and let him pay for his own vacations.
ReplyDeleteWhy isn't he a Ron Paul supporter?
ReplyDeleteTed Nugent Declares ‘I Will Either Be Dead or in Jail’ if Obama Is Re-elected
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/04/17/ted-nugent-declares-i-will-either-be-dead-or-in-jail-if-obama-is-re-elected/?mod=wsj_share_twitter
Waterbury Mayor Reverses Promise, Takes $91,000 Pension
ReplyDeleteWATERBURY—
Waterbury Mayor Neil M. O'Leary has reversed himself, restoring his $91,000 annual city police pension that he promised during his election campaign last year to halt.
The Republican American reports that O'Leary said Monday his $119,000 annual salary is not enough to support his family.
He said he believed he'd be able to afford to live on the salary alone, but has had unexpected financial responsibilities and family obligations.
O'Leary would not detail his family's family expenses, but said he would use his $7,500 a month pension check to pay tuition for his two children and support local charities.
O'Leary defeated then-Mayor Michael Jarjura, attacking his rival for breaking his promise to step aside in 2009. O'Leary told voters last year that when he makes a promise, he keeps it.
http://www.courant.com/community/waterbury/hc-ap-waterbury-mayor-pension-raise-0418-20120417,0,7269450.story
based on yesterday and today it appears that the FED has now gotten the commodities markets to disconnect with the equity markets. EXACTLY what they want.
ReplyDeleteto an extent they have. but they are having problems getting gold and silver lower. the metals/miners are setting up for a big move higher. The Comex paper traders have really washed out the gold o/i and silver o/i is relatively low plus the funds have been buying over the last month.
Deletein reality, the Fed/Govt cares more about the price of gasoline and I've been told that the gasoline stocks have surged and to expect lower gasoline prices soon.
true that..however the basic fundy's of supply and demand left that market long ago. We've had the single largest demand destruction event (for going on three year's now) coupled with Cushing virtually swimming in over-supply yet we're paying close to $4.50 out here in San Diego. Ratio of hard trade vs. paper is something like 1:64k.... The madness continues...
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