Weekend Economists Advent Calendar December 2-4, 2011

[Demeter]

For those unfamiliar with the term:

ad·vent/ˈadˌvent/ Noun:

1. The arrival of a notable person, thing, or event.
   
   
2. The first season of the church year, leading up to Christmas and including the four preceding Sundays.

Synonyms: coming - arrival - appearance

We can look at both definitions this weekend. First, the liturgical one:


An Advent Wreath

"The Advent wreath, or Advent crown, is a Christian tradition that symbolizes the passage of the four weeks of Advent in the liturgical calendar of the Western church. The Advent Wreath is traditionally a Lutheran practice, albeit it has spread to many other Christian denominations.<1><2><3>

It is usually a horizontal evergreen wreath with four candles and often, a fifth, white candle in the center. Beginning with the First Sunday of Advent, the lighting of a candle can be accompanied by a Bible reading and prayers. An additional candle is lit during each subsequent week until, by the last Sunday before Christmas, all four candles are lit. Some Advent wreaths include a fifth, "Christ" candle which can be lit at Christmas. The custom is observed both in family settings and at public church services.

The ring or wheel of the Advent wreath of evergreens decorated with candles was a symbol in northern Europe long before the arrival of Christianity. The circle symbolized the eternal cycle of the seasons while the evergreens and lighted candles signified the persistence of life in the midst of winter. Some sources suggest the wreath—now reinterpreted as a Christian symbol—was in common use in the Middle Ages, others that it was established in Germany as a Christian custom only in the 16th century.

Other evidence suggests that the Advent wreath was not invented until the 19th century.<4> Research by Prof. Haemig of Luther Seminary, St. Paul, points to Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808–1881), a Protestant pastor in Germany and a pioneer in urban mission work among the poor as the inventor of the modern Advent wreath. During Advent, children at the mission school Rauhes Haus, founded by Wichern in Hamburg, would ask daily if Christmas had arrived. In 1839, he built a large wooden ring (made out of an old cartwheel) with 19 small red and 4 large white candles. A small candle was lit successively every weekday during Advent. On Sundays, a large white candle was lit. The custom gained ground among Protestant churches in Germany and evolved into the smaller wreath with four or five candles known today. Roman Catholics in Germany began to adopt the custom in the 1920s, and in the 1930s it spread to North America.<5> Professor Haemig's research also indicates that the custom did not reach the United States until the 1930s, even among German Lutheran immigrants.

In Medieval times advent was a fast during which people's thoughts were directed to the expected second coming of Christ; but in modern times it has been seen as the lead up to Christmas, and in that context Advent Wreath serves as a reminder of the approach of the feast.

More recently, some Eastern Orthodox families have adopted an Advent wreath with six candles symbolizing the longer Christmas fast in Orthodox tradition, which corresponds to Advent in Western Christianity..." Wikipedia



This variation is a Lucia Crown, part of the festival celebrated in Northern Europe...on December 13th. Again, it is most likely a borrowing from medieval times of a pagan tradition.

So, we await the Darkness, and the Light that is to come after, and a Savior, or Redeemer....and since Barack Obama has most impolitely refused the honor, despite considerable coaxing, as the rabbi and Motel said in "Fiddler on the Roof":

Motel: Rabbi, we've been waiting all our lives for the Messiah. Wouldn't now be a good time for Him to come?

Rabbi: We'll have to wait for him someplace else. Meanwhile, let's start packing.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - Enya

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPHh3nMMu-I

We'll be featuring Enya as our Artist, this weekend. She has a certain following...

Birth Name
Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin

Nickname
The Silver Lady

Height
5' 2" (1.57 m)

Mini Biography

Eithne, the fourth youngest of nine children, comes from the small village of Dore (Dobhar in Irish) in the Gweedore (Gaoth Dobhair) region of County Donegal in the northwest of the Republic of Ireland. She now lives in Killiney, a coastal district on the southern outskirts of Dublin The family is very musical and her parents played in a family dance band before settling down. Her father owns a local pub - Leo's tavern in Meenalech (min na Leice) - and her mother Baba taught music in the local school. In 1968, elder brothers Ciaran & Pol, and uncles Padraigh & Noel O Dugain, formed the band "An Clan As Dobhar" to perform traditional Irish music at festivals etc. Changing their name to Clannad, and recruiting sister Maire Brennan in 1973, the band have gone on to international success performing both their own and traditional material. They have recorded a number of albums. Enya joined Clannad in 1980 and, credited under her real name, provided keyboards and (mostly) backing vocals. She appears on their 1982 album "Fuaim". It is often said that she also appeared on their 1980 album "Crann Ull" although she is not listed in the credits. In 1982, Clannad split with their long time manager and producer Nicky Ryan. Eithne, apparently frustrated with being left in the background, left at the same time and, in Ryan's belief that she had talent in her own right, moved to live with him and his wife Roma Ryan and develop her own musical career. In 1985, film producer David Puttnam commissioned Eithne to write music for his film The Frog Prince (1986/II) which was released in 1985. The Titles on The Frog Prince (1986/II) credit music to Enya Ni Bhraonain and the transition of Eithne to Enya had begun. In 1986, BBC-TV began work on a six part documentary series charting the history and continuing cultural influence of the Celts. Enya was signed to write and perform music for the series. "The Celts" (1987) was first shown in 1987 and a selection of its music released under the title "Enya", giving the artist her first album, largely unnoticed at the time. Her 'big break' began in 1987 when she was signed by Rob Dickins, head of WEA Music UK, after he had heard and been entranced by the "Enya" album. WEA's backing made the recording of "Watermark" possible and the album was released in 1988. Although no singles were originally planned, it was the release "Orinoco Flow" (Sail Away) that brought Enya to public attention and resulted in an unexpected chart number one in several countries. She continued the success with her next albums "shepherd Moons" and "The Celts"...Often sings in a mix of Latin and Irish Gaelic.

She adopted the spelling "Enya" in order to avoid having to continually explain how to pronounce her true first name, "Eithne."...Comes from a region in the West of Ireland where the Gaelic language is still spoken. Although Enya can speak fluent English, her first language is Gaelic.

She creates her signature sound by layering as many as eighty tracks of her own voice...The late Pope John Paul II was reportedly a big fan of her music. She was even invited to the Vatican to sing for him.

http://photo.sing365.com/music/picture.nsf/Enya-photo/48256C71003578A24825687800172AD5/$file/enya.jpg



Enya's house on Killiney Hill Road in Dalkey, Ireland.

[Demeter]

1. No Bank Failures--Yet 7:20 PM EST

[Tansy_Gold]

2. First rec! First rec!

And I haven't been on DU all day!

I just got lucky, I guess!

[Demeter]

3. 'Tis better to be lucky, than smart. But you are both, TG

How is the art business?

[Tansy_Gold]

27. You compliment makes me blush

The art business is so-so, but I'm not complaining. I've had a reasonably successful year, better than many of my artist friends. I have a break now, at least until the end of January. I'll know in a few days if I've been accepted into that show.


Chilly enough in AZ that I had to put on jeans today instead of shorts, but sandals are still the mode of the day.

[Demeter]

28. Hah!

I've only worn boots once so far, and no parka yet (because I need to mend it.) Lows in the 20's, and another inch of the concrete-like slush last night, which melted in the glorious sun of day.

Can't deny it, winter is here.

[DemReadingDU]

35. I seem to do lots of mending too

A stitch in time, saves nine.
:)


I still repair small holes in socks. Heck if a toe begins to show thru, I do sew it up. It is amazing how much longer a favorite pair of cutesy socks will last if that tiny hole is stitched up with needle and thread!

Also, it seems every time my 4-1/2 year old granddaughter comes over, she brings me something to repair...a rip in a seam or hole in a skirt, etc. Last week she brought over her doll stroller which needed a piece of elastic to hold the seat onto the frame.

When my kids were growing up, I did show them how to sew on a button and run the sewing machine. My daughter even made a quilt for one of her dolls. But it seems for most 30-somethings nowadays, it is easier to just buy a new outfit than to fix up the older one.

[DemReadingDU]

15. 5th - off to the greatest!

I have some of Enya's CDs
:)

[Demeter]

4. This Enya Tune was the signature or 9/11 mourning

Enya - Only Time (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfYIMyS_dI

[Demeter]

5. Philip Pilkington: A Point of Real Interest in the Latest Fed Minutes

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-pilkington-a-point-of-real-interest-in-the-latest-fed-minutes.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

JK Galbraith, remarkably, regards the Federal Reserve as a largely powerless institution; he dismisses the idea that the Fed can end a recession by cutting interest rates as a “quasi-religious conviction” that “triumphs over conflicting experience.”… Because Galbraith believes monetary policy cannot increase demand, however, he has a sort of Depression-era vision of an economy in which anything that increases spending is good… And so Galbraith is oblivious to the most serious problem facing modern liberalism: reconciling social justice with full employment.

– Paul Krugman

As the above, rather embarrassing quote from Paul Krugman’s review of JK Galbraith’s classic book The Affluent Society shows, neoclassical economists and neoclassically-trained central bankers have long been enamoured with monetary policy – and are generally angered when it subject to questioning. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons, some of these are ideological (monetary policy doesn’t stink too badly of nasty government interference with the Holy Market), some of these are purely functional (the central bank has independent control over rates) and some simply have to do with making economists’ silly toy-models work (monetary policy gives neoclassicals a feeling of power over the economy they would otherwise lack)...Anyway, in the present crisis – just as in the great depression – monetary policy has proved completely ineffective. This has caused some – myself included – to question the real efficacy of monetary policy altogether, but it has others continuing the search for that silver bullet.

While Bernanke et al have been bungling through with hapless and ineffective quantitative easing policies and ‘operation twists’, commentators like Krugman – who cut his teeth getting Japan wrong for years – have come out in support of negative interest rate policies, which essentially means trying to provoke inflation that will cause real interest rates to be effectively negative. These are two sides of the same bad economic model, I’m afraid. They are both based on the same crappy engineering-diagram-cum-economic-model and they both steadfastly refuse to recognise the key lesson Keynes tried to teach us about capitalist economies: namely, that the whole thing is subject to an overarching indeterminacy that cannot be accounted for in a childish toy-model based on equilibrium analysis.

In fact, interest rate policy in the present environment is not simply worthless – it actually worsens the state of the economy to some degree. Why? Because of interest income channels. When the central bank lowers interest rates they assume that people will borrow more. And when Krugman says that we should have inflation outpace the interest rate, he is thinking along the same lines. What these folks never consider is the fact that low interest rates actually act as a net drain on new financial assets entering the economy...If I’m a saver – and there are a LOT of savers out there these days – and the central bank lowers the interest rate or targets a negative real interest rate, I lose interest on my savings. This ‘interest income’ would have added to aggregate demand – that is, total spending power – as it would mean new net financial assets flowing into my bank account and encouraging me to consume more. Instead, my savings sit around idly earning nothing and so I have even less of an incentive to purchase goods and services. The MMTers – especially Warren Mosler – have been pointing this out for years, but to no avail. But now the idea is starting to get play among the VSPs (Very Serious Persons). While most analysts focused on yawn-inducing speculation about the possibility of the Fed running a pointless QE3 program, some more nuanced analysts noticed something of actual interest in the recently leaked Fed minutes. Per the minutes:

It was noted that very low interest rates were negatively affecting pension funds and the profitability of the life insurance industry.

That is not much, of course, but at least it is something. It is, at the very least, a jumping-off point for those of us who are sceptical about the efficacy of monetary policy to get a foot in the door...This is not so much a policy issue as it is a theoretical issue. Monetary policy acts for many analysts as a soporific, putting them to sleep when they should be focusing on real issues. It feeds nicely into their equilibrium models and allows them to sleep a little better at night. Even during the crisis their silly toy-models can yield them hours of fun as they tinker with them to produce higher inflation and lower interest rates. Meanwhile, Rome burns – and Keynes rolls in his grave. Discussions like this can refocus policymakers’ interest in fiscal policy by showing that monetary policy is a bunch of watered-down hooey that is fickle and unpredictable in its effects. In that, we can try to exorcise the neoclassical demon as best we can and bring government policy back to where it was in the three decades after WWII. Here’s hoping.

[Demeter]

6. Michael Hudson: Debt and Democracy – Has the Link Been Broken?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/michael-hudson-debt-and-democracy-has-the-link-been-broken.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Book V of Aristotle’s Politics describes the eternal transition of oligarchies making themselves into hereditary aristocracies – which end up being overthrown by tyrants or develop internal rivalries as some families decide to “take the multitude into their camp” and usher in democracy, within which an oligarchy emerges once again, followed by aristocracy, democracy, and so on throughout history.

Debt has been the main dynamic driving these shifts – always with new twists and turns. It polarizes wealth to create a creditor class, whose oligarchic rule is ended as new leaders (“tyrants” to Aristotle) win popular support by cancelling the debts and redistributing property or taking its usufruct for the state.

Since the Renaissance, however, bankers have shifted their political support to democracies. This did not reflect egalitarian or liberal political convictions as such, but rather a desire for better security for their loans. As James Steuart explained in 1767, royal borrowings remained private affairs rather than truly public debts. For a sovereign’s debts to become binding upon the entire nation, elected representatives had to enact the taxes to pay their interest charges.

By giving taxpayers this voice in government, the Dutch and British democracies provided creditors with much safer claims for payment than did kings and princes whose debts died with them. But the recent debt protests from Iceland to Greece and Spain suggest that creditors are shifting their support away from democracies. They are demanding fiscal austerity and even privatization sell-offs...This is turning international finance into a new mode of warfare. Its objective is the same as military conquest in times past: to appropriate land and mineral resources, communal infrastructure and extract tribute. In response, democracies are demanding referendums over whether to pay creditors by selling off the public domain and raising taxes to impose unemployment, falling wages and economic depression. The alternative is to write down debts or even annul them, and to re-assert regulatory control over the financial sector.

MUCH MORE AT LINK--TODAY'S HISTORY, POLITICS AND ECONOMICS LESSON

AND NOW, IT SEEMS THE BANKERS WANT TO BE THE TYRANTS, TOO!

[Demeter]

7. Enya - Caribbean Blue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1L8uRApYeQ

[Demeter]

8. Mosler/Pilkington: The IMF-ECB ‘Plan’ – Fig-Leaf upon Fig-Leaf

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/moslerpilkington-the-imf-ecb-%E2%80%98plan%E2%80%99-%E2%80%93-fig-leaf-upon-fig-leaf.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

...the ECB, the issuer of the euro, has to ultimately write the check in order to fund the peripheral countries whether they like it or not...The latest Euro fashion is for the IMF to fund distressed sovereigns while being, in turn, funded by the ECB – while all this includes the fashiony gimmick that the IMF guarantees the loans. The end result, of course, is that the ECB writes the check – which is precisely what it takes to make any of these schemes work. In fact, whenever you hear of any of these wacky evasions… er… sensible proposals, you can be safe in the knowledge that it will always work as long as it is the ECB writing the check. But we digress; and so here is how this latest one scheme will function.

When the ECB buys European national government bonds it credits member bank accounts on the ECB’s spreadsheet. Those accounts count as ‘money’ while the bonds did not count as ‘money’ and so, this action is said to be ‘printing money’ – and printing money is bad for some reason or other according to our German friends… and so the ECB undertakes a further step: sterilisation...The ECB offers different euro accounts – which are also just numbers on an ECB spreadsheet – with relatively short maturities that pay interest. This is called ‘sterilisation’ because these deposits don’t technically count as money. Cool, huh?

Now, the German Eurocrats have made it clear that they do not want any of this currency issuing ‘foolishness’ no matter what amount of sterilisation is occurring. So, instead they call up their friends at the IMF...When the ECB buys Special Drawing Rights from the IMF it credits an IMF account with the required euros. This does not count as ‘printing money’. And when the IMF loans those funds on to Italy or whoever, it does not count as ‘printing money’ either even though, when all is said and done, the same euros sit in the same ECB accounts and they effectively come from the same place. How clever. Now stretch your mind’s logical capacity with us for a moment because the IMF was originally set up after World War II to deal with balance of payments issues. And we can kinda sorta say that various European nations suffer from balance of payment issues – so, when the IMF steps in its kinda sorta playing its supposed institutional role.

But here is the really great part: the IMF is already a well-known (and much hated) institution obsessed with imposing austerity on the countries they ‘assist’. This means that they have plenty of experience ruining economies… er… promoting ‘expansionary fiscal consolidations’. With all this experience the IMF will be in a prime position to ignore all the evidence coming out of the Eurozone and continue the drive to force the periphery into depression. Hoorah!

FROM THE COMMENTS:

All you Apocopalypsians really need to do some research on the French Revolution. After all, Its Only F***ing Money. Who cares how they print it, so long as they print enough to keep the food coming in and the trash going out? Do you really think Europe is going to create a depression just so it can congratulate itself on living up to a Treaty? Words and formulas are fine, but food is better. No food and you have people tearing one another to pieces.

COUNTERCOMMENT

...current research on the French Revolution does not corroborate your hypothesis. France had made an art of printing enough (issuing debt sufficient) “to keep the food coming in and the trash going out.” That was how it funded its expansionary wars during the age of divine kingship. The Afghan and Iraqi – whoops, let me try that again. The Seven Years’ and American Revolutionary wars proved too financially burdensome, redirecting all that money for food and trash removal to interest payments on the debt. Your proposal to just keep printing is precisely what led to “people tearing one another to pieces.”

While blowing up the global financial system to effect debt repudiation is not a particularly elegant nor peaceful solution, it does conform to the observable reality that debt that cannot be repaid will not be repaid. Fortunately, the dichotomy of increasing debt endlessly vs. financial Armageddon is a false one. We could do worse than looking in the fertile middle ground between those two positions for realistic options to addressing the current crisis.

[Demeter]

9. Judge Rakoff Whacks SEC Yet Again, This Time Over Citi CDO Settlement

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/judge-rakoff-whacks-sec-yet-again-this-time-over-citi-cdo-settlement.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Judge Jed Rakoff’s latest ruing, nixing a $285 million settlement between the SEC and Citigroup over a billion dollar fund that came a cropper, has broader implications than simply embarrassing the securities regulator (which given the fallen standing of the agency, and low standards in Washington generally, is harder to do than it ought to be). Rakoff has effectively said judges have no business sanctioning settlements in which the accused party admits to nothing.

What has Rakoff’s dander up is that the allegations made by the SEC in its lawsuit were that Citigroup stuffed the fund full of crappy CDO tranches and went short against them, and got investors to buy it by telling them the assets were selected by an independent party. Citi was a typically inefficient looter, earning about $160 million while investors lost $700 million (note that Rakoff had to pry that information out of the parties). Citi is admitting only to negligence when the violations the SEC described its filing and in a related case amount to fraud, or in securities speak, scienter.

Rakoff’s ruling calls the entire process a sham:

Here, the S.E.C.’s long-standing policy – hallowed by history, but not by reason – of allowing defendants to enter into Consent Judgments without admitting or denying the underlying allegations, deprives the Court of even the most minimal assurance that the substantial injunctive relief it is being asked to impose has any basis in fact.

Rakoff’s job is to determine “whether the proposed Consent Judgment … is fair, reasonable, adequate, and in the public interest.” Since Citi admits to essentially nothing, he has no factual foundation for determining the adequacy of the settlement. He also notes that this deal clearly helps the big bank, since it’s a screaming deal if Citi did the bad things the SEC claimed it did in its initial lawsuit, and is a mere cost of doing business if it didn’t. It isn’t obvious to him what the SEC gets, beyond a headline. And he notes it leaves investors worse off, since the SEC has not said whether or not it will give any of its fines to them, plus the settlement means they cannot pursue private securities law claims based on negligence, so they are actually worse off.

The settlement includes injunctive relief, which in this case is to permanently restrain and enjoin Citi from violating certain provisions of securities regulations, and for three years to implement certain internal programs to prevent staff from undertaking this fraud. Rakoff pooh poohed that, noting that the SEC showed Citi to be a recidivist. The New York Times confirmed Rakoff’s dim view:

A recent analysis by The New York Times of the agency’s fraud settlements with Wall Street firms found 51 instances, involving 19 companies, in which the agency claimed that a company had broken fraud laws that they previously had agreed never to breach.

Dealbreaker (hat tip reader Alexis) raises a related issue: why should the SEC file suits when it can just use administrative actions and collect fines and slap wrists that way? Author Matt Levine points out that they get better headlines, and I assume better settlements (more potential for embarrassment makes it even more important for a suit to go away). The New York Times concurred:

Securities law experts said that the ruling presents the agency with a tough dilemma. In future cases, it will have to consider the risk that another judge may be reluctant to approve a settlement given the Rakoff ruling.

But it isn’t as if the SEC can avoid the court system either. As Levine notes:

Bringing lawsuits in the Southern District of New York is a good way to get the SEC’s failings noticed. Bringing SEC administrative actions, announcing big fines with upbeat press releases, and not having them subject to any review, is a good way to sweep them under the rug. The more scrutiny that the SEC gets when it goes to court, the more tempted it will be to handle cases like this on its own.

One thing that might give them pause, though. The SEC has, in the wake of recent expansions of its powers under Dodd-Frank, experimented with moving away from the courts and towards administrative actions when its case against supposed wrongdoers maybe isn’t so hot. It’s already been slapped down for doing so. By Jed Rakoff.

Rakoff announced a trial date of July 16. It’s going to be hard for the SEC to wriggle its way out of this one.

[midnight]

10. Beautiful post.... Thanks for all the info...

[Demeter]

12. Just lighting a candle

while I'm cursing the darkness....always hedging bets...

[Tansy_Gold]

23. Olive oil lamp

[Demeter]

25. That is cool!

Who made it?

[Tansy_Gold]

29. One of my fellow artists makes the fused glass containers

I make the lamps that go inside.

[DemReadingDU]

72. That lamp is so unique! n/t

[Tansy_Gold]

75. My friend Lori does the glass work

We were supposed to have spaces next to each other at the art show last week-end but she had to be out of town. I had one of my lamps burning in that dish to display how they work, and ended up selling almost 50 lamps. Had Lori been there, she probably could have sold 50 of the dishes!

The lamps themselves work in any container (glass, ceramic, metal) that will hold the olive oil and withstand the heat, though to be honest the containers don't get very warm. It's not like a votive cup with a candle in it, because there's no hot wax to heat the container. This dish is fairly shallow, so I put maybe 2 tablespoons (but probably a little less) of oil in it at the beginning of the show at 9:00 a.m. and that lasted, burning all the time, until about 2:30 in the afternoon, just before we started closing down at 3:00.

[Demeter]

11. Matt Stoller: Mortgage Servicers – Getting Away with the Perfect Crime?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/matt-stoller-mortgage-servicers-%E2%80%93-getting-away-with-the-perfect-crime.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Without prosecutions, there’s nothing keeping fraud from becoming a standard business practice. In 2004, the FBI warned Congress of an “epidemic of mortgage fraud,” of unscrupulous operators taking advantage of a booming real estate market. Less than two years later, an accounting scandal at Fannie Mae tipped us off that something was very wrong at the highest levels of corporate America. Of course, we all know what happened next. Crime invaded the center of our banking system. Wall Street CEOs were signing on to SEC documents knowing they contained material misstatements. The New York Fed, riddled with conflicts of interest, shoveled money to large banks and tried to hide it under the veil of central bank independence. Even Tim Geithner noted that Lehman had “air in the marks” in its valuations of asset-backed securities, as the bankruptcy examiner’s report showed that accounting manipulation to disguise the condition of the balance sheet was a routine management tool at the bank. There’s a reason Charles Ferguson got an Academy Award for his work on the documentary "Inside Job".

And yet, no handcuffs. The big news on prosecutions in the traditionally high-powered Southern District of New York are convictions for relatively petty insider trading that are unrelated to the collapse of the economy. The criminal charges could have been filed in the 1980s. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara has brought minor civil suits against banks, but nothing significant, and no criminal indictments for the Ponzi scheme of the last four years. And what happens when this kind of fraud goes unprosecuted? It continues, even today. The same banks that ran the corrupt home mortgage securitization chain are now committing rampant fraud in the foreclosure crisis. Here’s New Orleans Bankruptcy Judge Elizabeth Magner discussing problems at Lender Processing Services, the company that handles 80 percent of foreclosures on behalf of large banks (emphasis added):

In Jones v. Wells Fargo, this Court discovered that a highly automated software package owned by LPS and identified as MSP administered loans for servicers and note holders but was programed to apply payments contrary to the terms of the notes and mortgages.

The bad behavior is so rampant that banks think nothing of a contractor programming fraud into the software. This is shocking behavior and has led to untold numbers of foreclosures, as well as the theft of huge sums of money from mortgage-backed securities investors. Here’s how the fraud works: Mortgage loan notes are very clear on the schedule of how payments are to be applied. First, the money goes to interest, then principal, then all other fees. That means that investors get paid first and servicers, who collect late fees for themselves, get paid either when they collect the late fee from the debtor or from the liquidation of the foreclosure. And fees are supposed to be capitalized into the overall mortgage amount. If you are late one month, it isn’t supposed to push you into being late on all subsequent months. The software, however, prioritizes servicer fees above the contractually required interest and principal to investors. This isn’t a one-off; it’s programmed. It’s the very definition of a conspiracy! Who knows how many people paid late and then were pushed into a spiral of fees that led into a foreclosure? It’s the perfect crime, and many of the victims had paid every single mortgage payment.

A lack of criminal prosecutions means that unethical business practices like this one drive out ethical business practices. After all, why should a bank hire an ethical default servicer that charges a high price for its product when it can pay nothing to one that simply extracts from investors and homeowners?

The joke that is the U.S. Attorney network has become very old and very stale. And unfortunately, because of Attorney General Eric Holder, that joke is on us.

[Demeter]

13. Enya - Orinoco Flow (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTrk4X9ACtw

[Hugin]

32. Thanks for the reminder, Demeter.

This has long been among my favorites from a simpler time. :)

[hamerfan]

87. Indeed, Thanks!

Great link, Demeter. Too many times this tune floats through my head. Great video to go with it.

[Demeter]

14. At Top Colleges, Anti-Wall St. Fervor Complicates Recruiting

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/at-top-colleges-anti-wall-st-fervor-complicates-recruiting/?ref=business

College students seeking jobs on Wall Street have always had hurdles to overcome — grueling applications, endless rounds of interviews and fierce competition for the relatively few available spots at top firms. This year’s Wall Street hopefuls have had a new force to contend with: the wrath of their peers. Banks and hedge funds have long wooed undergraduates from elite colleges with lavish dinners, personalized e-mails and free trips to New York for interviews. It’s all part of an annual courtship ritual known as on-campus recruiting. But this fall, the antibank animus of the Occupy Wall Street movement has seeped onto college campuses. At some schools, anger at big banks has turned the on-campus recruiting process into a crucible of controversy.

“I teach financial markets, and it’s a little like teaching R.O.T.C. during the Vietnam War,” said Robert J. Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University. “You have this sense that something’s amiss.”

Even at universities traditionally considered to be Wall Street feeder schools, student bodies are becoming polarized over recruiting. At Harvard, Dartmouth and Cornell, student newspapers have featured polemic columns that urged fellow students to consider working somewhere — anywhere — outside finance. At Stanford, an opinion column that took aim at Wall Street’s “aggressive, sophisticated and well-funded recruitment system” resulted in “Stop the Brain Drain,” an online campaign that is trying to stem the tide of top students flooding into banks, hedge funds and private equity firms.

“We think it’s really problematic,” said Nathan Gusdorf, 22, a senior at Dartmouth College who is an organizer of the Occupy Dartmouth movement. “There’s a culture here that takes a lot of people and directs them towards jobs in the finance industry. We breed a lot of the technocrats who go on to administer the global financial system.”

LOTS MORE SPECIFICS



Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Emma Jangei, left, Kate Orazem, Avani Mehta and Sarah Cox protested on Nov. 15 outside The Study at Yale, a hotel in New Haven where Morgan Stanley held a recruitment event for students.

[Demeter]

16. Should the Courts Appoint an Equitable Receiver for Bank of America?

http://us1.institutionalriskanalytics.com/pub/IRAMain.asp

The path of economic interest is strewn with casualties, what some analysts call collateral damage. In this issue, we look at the who is looking out for whom and ask the question of whether or not something other than the relatively narrow interests of central government and corporate management need to be taken into account in the greater scheme of restoring confidence in the financial system. -- D.S.

First we send kudos to the Federal Reserve Board for approving the acquisition of a UT based industrial lender by Green Dot Corp, as reported by American Banker. It is long past time for the Fed to encourage the entry of new capital investment and management talent into the banking sector..."Green Dot's dominant partner is Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which is also a shareholder and relies on Green Dot to help run its own prepaid cards," American Banker's Dean Anason reports. Now federal regulators, however, face the near certainty that another large industrial corporation will challenge the non-bank moratorium that has been in effect, illegally, at the FDIC for many years. We repeat our call for Congress to repeal the ownership restrictions in the Bank Holding Company Act.

It is our strong preference to focus on the future and solutions, but we also need an accounting. Thus the continued discussion about the fitting punishment for the wrong doers in the subprime debacle. In their latest review, "Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted?" November 10, 2011, The New York Review of Books, Jeff Madrick and Frank Partnoy review several congressional reports as well as the new book by William D. Cohan, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World. The question the reviewers ask: Should the bankers who helped to create the financial catastrophe we call the subprime debt crisis be held accountable at law? They conclude:

"If serious prosecutions of fraud by Wall Street firms are never brought, the public's suspicion about Washington's policies toward bankers will only grow, as will cynicism about the rule of law as it is applied to the rich and powerful. Moreover, if investing institutions and individuals come to believe that bankers cannot be trusted, the underpinnings of the market will be eroded. Without solid, well-functioning markets, the economy cannot adequately and efficiently allocate capital to high-valued uses and create jobs. Lack of ethics and corrupt behavior will channel the nation's resources to uses that are wasteful and unproductive, as they arguably have for several decades now as too many unethical practices have gone unchallenged."

...But an important and almost equally important issue regarding professional malfeasance is the question of how, in practical legal terms, investors and other creditors pursuing bad actors and organizations for civil money damages. Here the situation is quite clear, but not the way you might think. Even with all of our collective experience and time spent on the housing finance mess, there are new details for investors and professional advisors to discover and evaluate every day...The widespread assumption is that the government, in the case of the SEC and FDIC, pursue such civil claims on behalf of investors, but that is not always or even mostly the case. Investors often unknowingly abandon billions of dollars in potential private tort claims against advisors and other professionals involved in the creation of fraudulent securities, as in the case of the class action litigations involving Bank of America and other large banks. Often times managers and advisors leave on the table big money that ought be pursued on behalf of their clients to offset losses. While the FDIC will aggressively pursue litigation against the officers and directors of failed banks which cause a loss to the deposit insurance fund, they do not directly pursue claims by the bond holders of bank holding companies. Other than making best efforts to maximize the recovery of the estate of a failed bank, FDIC will not pursue equitable relief against parties who may be indirectly responsible for investor losses. Even though FDIC has far greater powers than a bankruptcy trustee and no en pari delicto issues barring its actions as receiver, its basic job is the protection of the FDIC's financial interests...Even though there has been litigation by the FDIC in the WaMu failure, this to recover a deficiency in the failed bank estate created by a victory by the creditors of the bankrupt parent against FDIC, the agency has not gone after officers, directors and other parties for contribution, in part because FDIC did not record a loss on the WaMu resolution.

Another widespread misconception among investors and members of the public is the role of the bankruptcy process when it comes to pursuing claims against bad actors and organizations that benefitted from the sale of fraudulent securities or other assets. Bankruptcy trustees cannot go after the officers and directors of a failed firm such as MF Global, Lehman Brothers or the Madoff bankruptcy estate. In a ruling earlier this year on the litigation brought by Madoff trustee Irving Picard, Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York ruled: "It is settled law that the standing analysis for a bankruptcy trustee asks whether the claim "belongs" to the debtor - in which case the trustee can pursue it - or to creditors - in which case the Trustee cannot." So ask not why there has been no litigation against wrong doers in either the Washington Mutual nor Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Bankruptcy law precludes the trustee from pursing third party claims, no matter how ripe, because the trustee is tied to the estate -- en pari delicto -- and cannot "step into the shoes" of third parties. Instead, ask why there has been no motion by a significant claimant against Bank of America to appoint an "equitable receiver" to manage the claims against the bank short of bankruptcy but also provide the possibility of litigation against officers, directors and other parties such as professionals, trustees and counterparties for malfeasance and fraud. What is needed is a federal district judge with an attitude about fraud and negligence. It is no accident that the trustee in the WaMu bankruptcy has not pursued claims for fraud or malfeasance against the officers, directors or related parties to the parent. Nor has the trustee in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy pursued claims for fraud or malfeasance against former officers and directors, again because the US bankruptcy code precludes it. The bankruptcy trustee represents the estate and cannot be an independent advocate for equity. So, if you are a well-informed member of the public and want to see justice in the case of BAC and other bad actors not yet cleansed via bankruptcy, you most definitely do not want to see the TBTF banks slide into a Chapter 11. A bankruptcy gives CEO Brian Moynihan and colleagues on the BAC board a walk on any past acts for regulatory purposes, above and beyond the normal "prudent man" test applicable under Delaware law. Whether FDIC would pursue any claims depends on the outcome for the banks. But if we use the example of the defunct Stanford Group as a guide, there is another way to attack the resolution of BAC and other large banks without precluding criminal and civil claims against officers and directors...

COMPLEX AND TECHNICAL...BUT VERY IMPORTANT TO READ

[Demeter]

17. Enya - Watermark

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiFTXckh0zU

[Demeter]

18. We will pause now for station identification

see you all in the morning!

[DemReadingDU]

19. Enya - Wild Child

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkk0puI6NfA

[Tansy_Gold]

24. Enya -- Book of Days

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiBwr4U59EI&feature=relmfu






Tansy Gold, an old Celtic soul

[DemReadingDU]

48. I remember the movie, Far and Away

with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, but at that time, didn't realize Enya had composed the music
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104231/

[kickysnana]

20. You are finally in my home musically. Nice choice. n/t

[Demeter]

26. Glad You Like It

Anything else you might enjoy for next week?

[DemReadingDU]

21. Enya - Christmas Secrets

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_9KurUMNf4

[DemReadingDU]

22. Enya - Adeste Fideles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaSPykXrW5Y

[bread_and_roses]

30. I love Enya - what a wonderful theme - and what "the season" means to me

I would love Enya - I put on plainsong when I'm too over-stressed to bear the world - I know Enya is not plainsong - but her music has a similar effect for me - not quite the instantaeneous deep-breath, dropping blood-pressure calm that, say - a Gregorian Chant - evokes. But close. Hard to believe it was way back in the '80's when my sister first introduced me to her.

Speaking of Advent and "the Season" - in our house we celebrate the Winter Solstice - it's my favorite holiday of the year, but despite being a stone-cold atheist, the Christmas story is an integral part of it. We have a paper Advent calendar - with the little windows numbered for the days, that we put up every year - was a gift from a friend when my daughter was little, and even though it's getting pretty shabby, it gives me a smile every year. And every year I give my daughter an angel ornament for Christmas Eve. That started because I always used to call her "angel" when she was little. And, now, my grand-daughter too, and this year the second grand-daughter as well. (I am not a happy g'ma - did not want g'children. I had to suppress a laugh when the wife of a work-mate said to me not long before 2nd g'child's arrival, "I heard you were having another grandchild - I wanted grand-children but it was not to be, evidently." I said - perhaps cruelly, though I didn't mean to be, just honest - "well, we are in the reverse boat - I didn't want any, and here I am." None of which means I don't love them once they arrive. Humans are nothing if not complicated.)

The "Christ-Mass" speaks to me of the preciousness of every child born, that even - or especially! - a child of the poor, a refugee escaping a cruel tyrant, born with only a stable for shelter, is infinite promise and entitled to our love and protection. The Solstice is the promise of life renewed; every newborn child the promise of the possible.

I found the first of the three angel ornaments I'll need this year just before writing this. In honor of the newborn in our midst, for my daughter a beautiful ceramic ornament of a mother with infant in arms, attended by angels. Nothing is perfect - the attendants are cherubs, and I happen to favor the majestic versions of angels that recall their other-worldly-warrior origins. But it is lovely, and apt for this year. Two to go. I take a lot of pleasure in finding them, so there is that to look forward to during Advent.

[AnneD]

100. The Christmas Story is a universal theme.....

Watch the episode of Northern Exposure of the Indian legend of the Raven stealing the sun. I think it won an Emmy.

[Fuddnik]

31. I love Enya.

The first time I heard her, I was browsing in the music store. While I was browsing, they put on one of her albums. I believe it was Shepherd Moons. I ran up to the cashier, and asked, "Who is this? I'll take it!".

Been buying them ever since.

[Tansy_Gold]

50. What??? There's a soft side to you???

Who woulda thunk it??!!!

:evilgrin:


(we luv ya anyway, you old curmudgeon!)

[Demeter]

52. C'mon! Fuddnik is Just a Big Marshmallow, a Softie, a Pushover

Now Po, on the other hand....I hope Enya hasn't scared him off!

[xchrom]

33. good morning --

:donut: great thread! -- i love advent -- the history of it and of course christmas.

[Demeter]

36. Good morning from one insomniac to another

[xchrom]

38. cheers, Dahlink!

:toast:

[xchrom]

34. Truthdigger of the Week: Judge Jed Rakoff {the arrival of a notable person}

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_judge_jed_rakoff_20111202/

There are those occasions when the choice for Truthdigger of the Week is so clear that our tribute practically writes itself. This is one of those times, as this installment is about U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, who consistently demonstrates that he’s game to take on some of the country’s most powerful and corrupt institutions and policies.

Judge Rakoff’s most recent action to grab our attention amounted to a very public, and deserved, embarrassment for both Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission. As we summarized Monday, Rakoff rejected Citigroup’s attempt to evade culpability for swindling customers out of more than $700 million by selling them on bad investments in the mortgage market. Here’s how Forbes explained Citi’s initial offense.

Forbes:

The charges Citi is related to bets made by investors on the housing market that went bad when the bubble collapsed. In the years since the financial crisis, details have come forth about institutions that carefully selected securities in a portfolio, or allowed a client to do so, without notifying investors of the short bets made by those who picked the composition.

Read more

Advertisement
This was bad enough, but strike two for Citigroup happened when the financial giant tried to take an all-too-familiar way out, with the SEC’s complicity, by agreeing to pay a settlement of $285 million and calling it a day. Although the proposed payment is substantially hefty, what this response doesn’t include is an actual admission of guilt.

[Demeter]

37. I agree with the selection

It is gratifying to know there are still a few uncorrupted adults around in powerful positions...and horrifying to realize how few of them there are in toto.

[xchrom]

39. Debt funds needed in all eurozone states - Germany

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/03/uk-germany-eurozone-fimmin-idUKTRE7B203820111203

(Reuters) - Every country in the euro zone needs to set up a special national fund for sovereign debt that is more than 60 percent of gross domestic product, Germany's finance minister told a newspaper.

Wolfgang Schaeuble, detailing a proposal he will make at a European Union summit on December 9, told the Passauer Neue Presse that a total of 500 billion euros (429 billion pounds) would need to go into the German fund.

"We need a redemption fund in every single country of the euro zone," he told the newspaper in comments released on Saturday.

Tax revenues should be used to support the funds, Schaeuble said, adding that Germany would not need to raise taxes to implement the plan.

[Demeter]

40. Money Found in Britain May Belong to MF Global

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/money-found-in-britain-may-belong-to-mf-global/?hp

About $200 million in customer money that vanished from MF Global is believed to have surfaced at JPMorgan Chase in Britain, according to people briefed on the matter. The discovery could be the most significant breakthrough in a monthlong hunt for the missing funds...During MF Global’s last chaotic days, the brokerage firm overdrew an account at JPMorgan, according to another person who is close to the matter. Some investigators now believe the firm used customer funds to patch at least some of the hole, which would have been a significant breach of federal law. MF Global transferred the roughly $200 million in the days before the firm filed for bankruptcy, said the people, who requested anonymity because the investigation was incomplete.

Some investigators suspect that the transfer to JPMorgan was the first major misuse of customer money at MF Global, the commodity brokerage powerhouse once run by Jon S. Corzine, the former Democratic governor of New Jersey. Authorities are also looking into whether JPMorgan initially questioned the source of the cash and sought proof from MF Global that it was complying with regulations, one of the people said. The authorities believe MF Global failed to give JPMorgan full documentation for the cash, the people briefed on the matter said. But the bank’s concerns hardly mattered because the money had already been transferred to the account in Britain. It is unclear whether investigators can recover the $200 million.
...JPMorgan has long been thought to hold some of the money that disappeared from MF Global. As one of MF Global’s primary banks, JPMorgan has been a persistent presence in the firm’s demise and the messy aftermath. The bank loaned to MF Global until its waning days and has been a vocal and tenacious presence as a creditor during the firm’s bankruptcy hearings...Some of the funds MF Global used to shore up its account with JPMorgan may have been legitimately transferred. Firms often keep a cushion of cash to protect customer accounts, which they are allowed to tap with certain restrictions. While the firm ultimately blew through that buffer, it is unclear when that happened and if MF Global intentionally used customer money. Some industry lawyers liken JPMorgan’s role in the MF Global bankruptcy to the bank’s position in the messy collapse of Lehman Brothers, albeit on a smaller scale. As the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan is intimately involved in many large bankruptcies. In 2008, as Lehman Brothers was struggling to survive, JPMorgan officials demanded several billion dollars in collateral to meet margin calls. Lehman acquiesced, severely draining its liquidity...In the case of MF Global, the process is further complicated since the roughly $200 million is believed to be in Britain, which has its own bankruptcy rules.

The transfer came after a relatively routine overdraw of an account MF Global held at the bank, the person close to the matter said. JPMorgan systems picked up the shortfall and sent an automated message to MF Global, said the person, who requested anonymity because the information was private. The firm complied with JPMorgan’s request and transferred the money, the person said. After receiving the money, JPMorgan raised questions about its origins but received few answers. Some investigators suspect that MF Global transferred the customer money to another unit of the firm and mixed it with the company’s capital before sending it to JPMorgan. Such a transaction would have masked that it was customer money. It also would have violated a guiding principle of the futures industry: never mingle customer money with firm money...Neither the firm nor Mr. Corzine has been accused of wrongdoing. The lengthy search is owed in part to shortcomings in MF Global’s recordkeeping .


...For the first time, lawmakers are looking to publicly question Mr. Corzine, who spent five years on Capitol Hill as a Democratic senator from New Jersey. He resigned as head of the firm earlier this month. In addition, they hope to call as a witness MF Global’s chief operating officer, Bradley Abelow, who served as Mr. Corzine’s chief of staff when he was governor of New Jersey. Mr. Abelow and Mr. Corzine have not responded to the request from lawmakers on the House committee, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who was not allowed to speak publicly. It is unclear if the two men will agree to attend. The deadline for a response is approaching. Should Mr. Corzine and Mr. Abelow decline, the committee can subpoena the executives.

[xchrom]

41. Exclusive: MF Global mixed funds, transferred abroad

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/03/us-mfglobal-funds-idUSTRE7B203J20111203

(Reuters) - Regulators investigating the collapse of MF Global have determined that the firm combined money between securities and futures accounts owned by customers, and transferred funds outside the country to at least one entity, a source said on Friday.

"The further we get into (the investigation) the more complex it is ... but we're making progress," the source said, adding that the commingling and transferring of money is making it harder for regulators to determine what money belongs where.

MF Global took futures segregated money and put it into the account for customer securities, essentially mixing futures and securities that were both owned by customers, said an official familiar with the matter.

Until now, it was believed that only customer futures accounts were affected.

[Demeter]

42. Back from China? Harold Meyerson

http://prospect.org/article/back-china

I WOULDN'T GET MY HOPES UP

...in hundreds of cities and towns in the once-industrial Midwest, a ghost not only haunts but dominates North Canton, Ohio. It’s a ghost of brick and mortar, glass and steel, of a smokestack that rises directly across the street from the City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce. The ghost’s name is still painted on the smokestack, four years after the factory beneath it clanged to a halt. “Hoover,” it says—as in Hoover Vacuum Cleaner, a company founded in North Canton in 1908 that was the town’s largest employer, and leading citizen, for one year short of a century. At its height, Hoover’s North Canton empire spread over 17 factories and buildings, one of them a private hospital for local Hoover workers (as many as 7,000 during the company’s flush decades) who took sick or were injured on the job. “This was Hooverville—our own version, not Herbert-Hooverville—a company town,” says Doug Lane, a former city councilor who now heads the Chamber of Commerce. “If the city needed a fire truck, it went to Hoover. If it needed a new school, it went to Hoover.” A city of 17,000 nestled among green hills an hour’s drive south of Cleveland, North Canton was virtually an adjunct of the company. “Boss Hoover,” whose statue rises in the park across from Lane’s office, was also North Canton’s first mayor.

“When I moved here in 1988,” Lane says, “the company still had 4,000 employees in the plants here.” But Hoover no longer controlled its own destiny. It had been purchased in 1985 by a railroad holding company, Chicago Pacific. Over the next two decades, Hoover was resold to Maytag, then to Whirlpool, and in 2006 to Techtronic Industries. The Hong Kong–based conglomerate promptly announced it would relocate the assembly line in the remaining North Canton factory, where employment had dwindled to just 800 workers, to Mexico and El Paso. In September 2007, Hoover left North Canton for good...There was nothing exceptional about Hoover’s abandonment of its hometown. The Hoover complex was one of 54,621 American factories to shutter its doors during the past decade, a time when Chinese exports rose fivefold while the number of Americans employed in manufacturing plummeted from 17 million to 11.5 million. What was exceptional in North Canton happened on September 6 of this year, when Suarez Industries unveiled, with considerable hoopla, a new production facility in one of the abandoned Hoover warehouses. Even more striking, Suarez was bringing back work—the manufacture of EdenPure heaters and air filters—that it had previously done in China, where 80 percent of EdenPure’s products had been made for the past two decades. “We’re going to reverse that ratio,” said Hope Paolini, Suarez’s production manager, as she gave me a tour of the plant one late September day, “to 80 percent here and 20 percent in China.”

Bringing back production from China—reversing, as it were, the economics of globalization—is no small achievement. It invariably entails the substitution of capital for labor. Since no U.S.–based workers come as cheap as their Chinese counterparts, economies of productivity, of more efficient machines and processes, must make up the difference. The economies of productivity in Suarez’s North Canton plant are largely the creation of its chief engineer, Neil Tyburk, a low-tech industrial engineer of evident genius. “Neil re-engineered the Chinese heater,” Paolini said. “It had 192 screws—he got it down to 31.” Through many such redesigns, Suarez was able to greatly reduce the size of its labor force. On the day I visited, the plant, still in start-up mode, employed 80 people; the workforce will rise to 250 when it’s fully staffed—a small fraction of what Hoover once employed, and not a particularly large labor force for a plant that will turn out 10,000 heaters a week.

Paolini says that when Suarez officials told business associates they intended to bring their manufacturing operation back from China and still turn a profit, “we were laughed at. People can’t believe this kind of high-volume manufacturing will return to the U.S.” MORE

[Demeter]

43. Bankers Seize Europe Just Another Goldman Sachs Take Over by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/28/just-another-goldman-sachs-take-over/

On November 25, two days after a failed German government bond auction in which Germany was unable to sell 35 per cent of its offerings of 10-year bonds, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble said that Germany might retreat from its demands that the private banks that hold the troubled sovereign debt from Greece, Italy, and Spain must accept part of the cost of their bailout by writing off some of the debt. The private banks want to avoid any losses, either by forcing the Greek, Italian, and Spanish governments to make good on the bonds by imposing extreme austerity on their citizens, or by having the European Central Bank print euros with which to buy the sovereign debt from the private banks. Printing money to make good on debt is contrary to the ECB’s charter and especially frightens Germans, because of the Weimar experience with hyperinflation.

Obviously, the German government got the message from the orchestrated failed bond auction. As I wrote at the time, there is no reason for Germany, with its relatively low debt to GDP ratio compared to the troubled countries, not to be able to sell its bonds. If Germany’s creditworthiness is in doubt, how can Germany be expected to bail out other countries? Evidence that Germany’s failed bond auction was orchestrated is provided by troubled Italy’s successful bond auction two days later...Strange, isn’t it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy’s, Greece’s and Spain’s bailout, could not sell its bonds.

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt. My opinion is based on the following facts. Goldman Sachs and US banks have guaranteed perhaps one trillion dollars or more of European sovereign debt by selling swaps or insurance against which they have not reserved. The fees the US banks received for guaranteeing the values of European sovereign debt instruments simply went into profits and executive bonuses. This, of course, is what ruined the American insurance giant, AIG, leading to the TARP bailout at US taxpayers’ expense and Goldman Sachs’ enormous profits. If any of the European sovereign debt fails, US financial institutions that issued swaps or unfunded guarantees against the debt are on the hook for large sums that they do not have. The reputation of the US financial system probably could not survive its default on the swaps it has issued. Therefore, the failure of European sovereign debt would renew the financial crisis in the US, requiring a new round of bailouts and/or a new round of Federal Reserve “quantitative easing,” that is, the printing of money in order to make good on irresponsible financial instruments, the issue of which enriched a tiny number of executives....Certainly, President Obama does not want to go into an election year facing this prospect of high profile US financial failure. So, without any doubt, the US Treasury wants Germany out of the way of a European bailout.

The private French, German, and Dutch banks, which appear to hold most of the troubled sovereign debt, don’t want any losses. Either their balance sheets, already ruined by Wall Street’s fraudulent derivatives, cannot stand further losses or they fear the drop in their share prices from lowered earnings due to write-downs of bad sovereign debts. In other words, for these banks big money is involved, which provides an enormous incentive to get the German government out of the way of their profit statements...The European Central Bank does not like being a lesser entity than the US Federal Reserve and the UK’s Bank of England. The ECB wants the power to be able to undertake “quantitative easing” on its own. The ECB is frustrated by the restrictions put on its powers by the conditions that Germany required in order to give up its own currency and the German central bank’s control over the country’s money supply. The EU authorities want more “unity,” by which is meant less sovereignty of the member countries of the EU. Germany, being the most powerful member of the EU, is in the way of the power that the EU authorities desire to wield. Thus, the Germans bond auction failure, an orchestrated event to punish Germany and to warn the German government not to obstruct “unity” or loss of individual country sovereignty.

Germany, which has been browbeat since its defeat in World War II, has been made constitutionally incapable of strong leadership. Any sign of German leadership is quickly quelled by dredging up remembrances of the Third Reich. As a consequence, Germany has been pushed into an European Union that intends to destroy the political sovereignty of the member governments, just as Abe Lincoln destroyed the sovereignty of the American states.

Who will rule the New Europe? Obviously, the private European banks and Goldman Sachs.

DETAILS AT LINK

********************************************

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [e-mail]

[Hotler]

74. ECB puts out a hit on Germany. Don't buy their bonds.

The banksters are moving in on sovereign nations. " Michael, we're bigger than U.S. Steel."

[Demeter]

44. European Banks’ Ratings May Be Lowered by Moody’s as States Reduce Support

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-29/moody-s-signals-possible-downgrade-for-euro-banks.html

Banks in 15 European nations, including the largest lenders in France, Italy and Spain, may have their subordinated debt ratings cut by Moody’s Investors Service Inc. to reflect the potential removal of government support.

All subordinated, junior-subordinated and Tier 3 debt ratings of 87 banks in countries where the subordinated debt incorporates an assumption of government support were placed on review for downgrade, the ratings company said in a statement today. The subordinated debt may be cut on average by two levels, with the rest lowered by one grade, Moody’s said.

Lenders in Spain, Italy, Austria and France have the most ratings to be reviewed as governments in Europe face limited financial flexibility and consider reducing support to creditors, the rating company said. Moody’s has said that a “rapid escalation” of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis threatens the entire region. U.S. President Barack Obama renewed pressure on European leaders to prevent a dismantling of the euro.

“Systemic support for subordinated debt may no longer be sufficiently predictable or reliable to be a sound basis for incorporating uplift into Moody’s ratings,” the company said in the statement...

[Demeter]

45. Crisis in Europe Tightens Credit Across the Globe

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/business/businesses-scramble-as-credit-tightens-in-europe.html?_r=2&hp

Europe’s worsening sovereign debt crisis has spread beyond its banks and the spillover now threatens businesses on the Continent and around the world. From global airlines and shipping giants to small manufacturers, all kinds of companies are feeling the strain as European banks pull back on lending in an effort to hoard capital and shore up their balance sheets. The result is a credit squeeze for companies from Berlin to Beijing, edging the world economy toward another slump. The deteriorating situation in the euro zone prompted the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on Monday to project that the United States economy would grow at a 2 percent rate next year, down from a forecast of 3.1 percent growth in May. It also lowered its economic outlook for Europe and the rest of the world, and a credit contraction could exacerbate the slowdown. In addition, Moody’s Investors Service, the credit-rating agency, on Monday raised the possibility of mass downgrades of European government debt if a forceful resolution to the escalating crisis was not found.

Investors have begun to treat Europe’s big banks as the weak link in the global financial chain because of their huge holdings of bonds issued by debt-laden governments like Italy and Spain. American money market funds have been closing the spigot of money they lend to European banks, forcing them to tighten lending standards and, in some cases, even withdraw financing from longtime customers. To make matters worse, European institutions are simultaneously under pressure from their regulators to hold more capital for each dollar they lend, prompting many banks to reduce their portfolio of loans. Analysts say Europe’s banks could shed up to 3 trillion euros of loans over the next few years, equal to about 10 percent of their total assets. “If your largest banks aren’t able to provide credit, it hinders economic development and contributes to a recession,” said Alex Roever, a fixed-income research analyst at JPMorgan Chase. Air France, for example, typically relied on French banks like BNP Paribas and Société Générale to help it finance about 15 percent of what it spends to purchase airplanes. Now those banks are retreating from making airline loans to save capital. As an alternative, Air France officials say that they started developing closer ties with Chinese and Japanese banks, which have not faced the same pressure as their euro zone counterparts, to help pick up the slack.

Executives of Emirates Airlines, based in Dubai, are turning to the Islamic financing system, as well as to lenders in emerging markets, to help pay for its new fleet as some of the European banks shut off lending. Emirates has ordered 243 aircraft, worth more than $84 billion, from Airbus, Boeing and other aerospace companies. “We were kind of planning for finance from the European banks,” Tim Clark, president of Emirates, told Reuters. “It’s just a bit difficult now.” A failure to secure financing could quickly add up to lost jobs in the United States, Latin America and elsewhere.

.............

It remains to be seen, though, whether even moderate growth can be achieved. Moody’s cautioned that there was an increased chance that more than one country in the euro zone could default. In spite of that warning, investors put their fears aside and sent stocks up Monday by nearly 3 percent in New York. Investors remain hesitant about government bond offerings, though. A tepid auction in Germany last week was particularly unnerving since its economy has long been seen as Europe’s financial bulwark. In Italy, weak demand for bonds pushed yields back above the critical 7 percent threshold, a level that has prompted other government borrowers to seek bailouts. Higher interest rates on government debt quickly translate into higher borrowing costs for European banks, and in turn, for local companies and consumers in need of loans. Meanwhile, those banks’ own costs are also rising because the dollars they need to lend are in short supply. So the banks are tightening their lending standards, squeezing businesses like airlines, shipping companies and exporters of oil, steel and food staples — industries that are critical to the health of the world economy...

[Demeter]

46. 3 Asset Managers Win $254 Million Powerball Lottery

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/connecticut-asset-managers-win-254-million-powerball-lottery/?hp

The lottery is full of rags-to-riches tales. Now the 1 percent has its own feel-good story.

Timothy C. Davidson, Brandon E. Lacoff and Gregory H. Skidmore, three executives at Belpointe Asset Management, an investment firm based in Greenwich, Conn., have won $254.2 million in the Powerball game, the largest jackpot in the state’s history.

“The lottery is all about dreaming, and that runs across all demographics and all people,” said Anne Noble, the Connecticut Lottery’s chief executive.

...The trio formed the Putnam Avenue Family Trust to handle the winnings and decided to take a lump payment of $151.7 million rather than receive the prize in installments. Despite paying a $48 million tax bill, the men are expected to take home more than $100 million, a large sum even by the standards of Greenwich, a millionaire-studded suburb that is home to legions of hedge fund managers and Wall Street executives...

[Demeter]

47. Enya - We are free now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzpW7P83sb4

[bread_and_roses]

49. "Eurozone Catastrophe: How Saving the Euro Could Mean Blood on the Streets"

http://www.alternet.org/story/153297/eurozone_catastrophe%3A_how_saving_the_euro_could_mean_blood_on_the_streets

Eurozone Catastrophe: How Saving the Euro Could Mean Blood on the Streets
By Marshall Auerback, AlterNet
Posted on December 2, 2011, Printed on December 3, 2011

The eurozone story is changing by the hour. Here's what you need to know to understand developments that will impact the entire global economy and potentially cause major social upheaval.

The eurozone is facing two distinct, but related, problems: Problem #1 is a national solvency issue, which only the European Central Bank (ECB) can solve. Problem #2 is deficient "aggregate demand" (a fancy term for the spending power of consumers), which calls for a stronger fiscal policy response to offset declining investment and purchases in the private sector.

... My base view remains that Europe is headed to a blood in the streets outcome. There is no plan B. The game is to just keep raising taxes and cutting spending even as those actions work to cause deficits to go higher rather than lower. So while the solvency and funding issue is likely to be resolved, the relief rally won't last long as the funding will continue to be conditional to ongoing austerity and negative growth. And the austerity looks likely to not only continue but also to intensify, even as the eurozone has already slipped into recession.

From what I can see, there's no chance that the ECB would fund and at the same time mandate the higher deficts needed for a recovery, because the Germans will never allow it. In which case the only thing that will end the austerity is blood on the streets in sufficient quantity to trigger chaos and a change in governance.

I don't post this because I have any idea if his analysis is correct or not - I don't. Some here will. It is the "blood in the streets" prediction that interests me - I keep going back to an article I posted here some weeks ago - that actually described what "austerity" was meaning for the ordinary Greek - ie, no medicine, no heat, etc.

Now, we're all used to reading such stories here - elders freezing, kids going hungry, just "business as usual" here in the good ol' US of A - hell, we had Hugo donating Venezuelan oil to our poor without a blink from the general public. But post-war Europe seems to have developed a different ethic - witness national health care there vs for-profit vampirism here.

So I have to wonder how quietly the European's are going to take more "austerity?"

Also, though I admit to only scanning the article, I don't see any questioning of the "consumer spending" model as the basis of an economy - ? I have become obsessed with noting where this paradigm is questioned and where not.

[Demeter]

51. The Germans Would Be Responsible, Yet Again for Europe's Cataclysm

and THIS is the aftermath of WWI reparations, the gift that keeps on giving, generation after generation.

If it's any consolation, blood in the streets may finally put the Vampire Squid out of business--if not actually, perhaps their paradigm at least.

That Article Is Definitely a Must Read!

[Demeter]

79. Wolf Richter: French Presidential Election – Coup De Grâce For The Euro?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/wolf-richter-french-presidential-election-%E2%80%93-coup-de-grace-for-the-euro.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Amidst a flood of proposals, plans, and rumors to save the euro and the Eurozone, much has been made of the Merkozy couple, the uneasy partnership between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. During his speech today in Toulon, an ancient Mediterranean port town, Sarkozy reemphasized his commitments: the ECB must remain independent, and France and Germany must remain the pillar of stability. “To defend the euro is to defend Europe,” he said. Alas, he may be out of a job by May 2012—and his potential successors to the left and to the right have different ideas...France isn’t doing well. Unemployment, which has been rising since May, breached 9%. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and purchasing power has dropped. Industrial orders plummeted. Layoffs have been announced. Yields are rising. Banks are teetering. Sarkozy had tried to reform the French welfare and tax system. Result: rising income disparity, tax loopholes for the rich, diminished pension benefits for the middle class, reduced subsidies for the poor, etc., and now ugly unemployment trends.

Voters are angry. And the poll numbers that came out today show to what extent (L’Exress, article in French). During the first round on April 22, François Hollande of the Socialist Party would obtain 29.5%, Sarkozy 26%, and right-wing populist Marine Le Pen 19.5%. And this after Sarkozy got a 6-point bump from an anti-nuclear imbroglio on the left that Hollande had trouble squelching. In a face-off during the second round on May 6, Hollande would win by a landslide 56% against Sarkozy’s 44%...If the economy deteriorates further, Marine Le Pen, president of the National Front, might beat Sarkozy in the first round. Media savvy and endowed with a captivating presence, she’d stunned the French political establishment by beating Sarkozy in the polls earlier this year. “Let the euro die a natural death,” she said in August (article in English). And she often speaks out against the rules of the European Union. Should she become president, though unlikely, she’d pull France out of the Eurozone.

François Hollande is more temperate. In trying to appeal to the center while satisfying his diverse constituency on the left, he criticizes Sarkozy but avoids a direct confrontation with Merkel. “It’s Mme Merkel who decides and Mr. Sarkozy who follows,” he said Wednesday (Le Monde, article in French), an observation that found wide resonance. His camp has come up with a five-point plan:

1. Expand to the greatest extend possible the European bailout fund (EFSF)
2. Issue Eurobonds and spread national liabilities across all Eurozone countries
3. Get the ECB to play an “active role,” i.e. buy Eurozone sovereign debt.
4. Institute a financial transaction tax
5. Launch growth initiatives instead of austerity measures.

In his diplomatic manner, he threw down the gauntlet: points 2, 3, and 5 hit a wall of resistance in Germany, which might rather exit the Eurozone than subject itself to them. But he claims that the five measures would be a better solution to the debt crisis than the new European treaty that Merkel and Sarkozy are concocting for the European summit on December 8 and 9. The treaty’s budgetary stability rules would impose strict limits on budget deficits and debt levels. If those are violated, sanctions kick in. If violations are repeated, the European Court of Justice becomes the final arbiter of national budgets...Which Hollande considers an abdication of sovereignty. Instead, he wants a remodeled European commission with a president who should be elected by the populations of all member states. So neither national retrenchment of the kind Le Pen advocates nor the austerity politics that Germany insists on and that Sarkozy supports.

Hollande doesn’t operate in a vacuum. To his left is Arnaud Montebourg, who ran against him in the primary and surged out of nowhere to third place, beating a host of Socialist stalwarts. He is likely to become influential in a Hollande government. And he has come out swinging against Merkel. “Angela Merkel decided to impose the German order on the European Union,” he said (Le Monde, article in French). “She is destroying the Eurozone by imposing on the middle class and on the lower classes the price of the debt that accumulated during the crisis.” He spoke of “German egoism” and “German nationalism” that is “resurging through the policies à la Bismarck of Mme Merkel. She builds confrontation to impose her domination.” His idea to save the Eurozone: “Allow the ECB to do what all central banks in the world are doing: buying debt. The moment has come to confront Germany politically and to defend our values.” Yes indeed, French values. After a series of devaluations since 1945, the French franc was “revalued” in 1960 at 100 old francs for 1 new franc. New notes were printed and confidence was restored. However, from 1960 through 1999, when it was replaced by the euro, the franc lost another 88% of its value—due to France’s habit of monetizing its debt. A fate Germany has assiduously avoided.

[Jefferson23]

53. Good morning Demeter, I know this is old info but considering your

thread involves the impact of the financial sector around the world as 2011 comes to a close..I offer
Joseph Stiglitz, worth a repeat imo.

The film, Around the World with Joseph Stiglitz

In this hard-hitting documentary about the perils and promises of globalization, Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz takes a tour of the world showing us how it can be made to work. Interviews with the president of Ecuador, African tribesmen, South American oil workers, angry farmers in India and the former president of Botswana reveal some of the paradoxes of our day--that while globalization is helping some countries, it has proved a disaster for others. website of the film : http://www.stiglitz-thefilm.com/

[Demeter]

54. It's new to me! Thanks!

And we don't mind repetition, either. There's too much out there to keep it all straight without some reinforcement.

[Demeter]

55. Enya - Amarantine (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQU4DoE1eBg

[Demeter]

56. Family's Eviction Called Off After Occupy Rochester, Other Protesters Plan to "Occupy" Their Home

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/740444/family%27s_eviction_called_off_after_occupy_rochester%2C_other_protesters_plan_to_%22occupy%22_their_home/#paragraph3

Here's a heartwarming story of the 99% (in this case the Steidel family) using nonviolent protest to score a victory against the 1% (Wells Fargo and Freddie Mac):

After the Steidel family received a foreclosure notice in September, Maria Steidel contacted Take Back the Land Rochester, a group that successfully helped another family stave off eviction earlier in the year. Over the past few weeks, Take Back the Land, Occupy Rochester, and other protesters have worked tirelessly to help the Steidels keep their home, calling on Wells Fargo to negotiate with the family. Here's Take Back the Land's account of the some of the many actions that took place:

In the past two weeks, numerous protests and actions were organized to support the Steidels in the fight to keep their home. An impromptu press conference was held just as Rochester Mayor Richards appeared, media in tow, to sign an agreement with Occupy Rochester for our right to camp 24 hours a day.

On November 7, 90 people protested outside Wells Fargo's Rochester offices, demanding they negotiate with the family. Three dozen protesters from Occupy Buffalo also demonstrated in front of the Amherst offices of Steven J. Baum PC, denouncing the controversial foreclosure attorney and calling on state authorities to shut down his office, take away his law license and even put him in jail.

The next step was going to be "occupying" the home -- setting up an encampment on the front yard to "prevent the imminent eviction and draw media attention to the case." But it never came to that:

Harold and Maria received word that they had secured at 30-day suspension of the eviction notice. Furthermore, Freddie Mac announced that they were pulling Steven J. Baum's firm off every foreclosure case they had.

The implications of this move on other families and their cases is unclear. However, Baum's firm was one of the largest handlers of foreclosures in upstate New York, and any uncertainty over the company's legal practices and filings could mean a delay on thousands of foreclosure cases.

Victory! Sometimes the little guy does win. And hopefully other protesters and homeowners will be inspired by these actions and will take matters into their own hands as well.

[Demeter]

58. How Zuccotti Park Became Zuccotti Prison: Creeping American Police State

http://www.alternet.org/story/153235/how_zuccotti_park_became_zuccotti_prison%3A_creeping_american_police_state?page=entire

When I arrived at Zuccotti Prison one afternoon last week, the “park” was in its now-usual lockdown mode. No more tents. No library. No kitchen. No medical area. Just about 30 leftover protesters and perhaps 100 of New York’s finest as well as private-security types in neon-green vests in or around a dead space enclosed by more movable police fencing than you can imagine. To the once open plaza, there were now only two small entrances in the fencing on the side streets, and to pass through either you had to run a gauntlet of police and private security types...The park itself was bare of anything whatsoever and, that day, parts of it had been cordoned off, theoretically for yet more cleaning, with the kind of yellow police tape that would normally surround a crime scene, which was exactly how it seemed. In fact, as I walked in, a young protestor was being arrested, evidently for the crime of lying down on a bench. (No sleeping, or even prospective sleeping, allowed -- except in jail!)

Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg’s police assault on the park, OWS has largely decamped for spaces unknown and for the future. Left behind was a grim tableau of our distinctly up-armored, post-9/11 American world. To take an obvious example, the “police” who so notoriously pepper-sprayed non-violent, seated students at UC Davis were just campus cops, who in my college years, the 1960s, still generally wore civvies, carried no weapons, and were tasked with seeing whether students had broken curfew or locked themselves out of their rooms. Now, around the country, they are armed with chemical weapons, Tasers, tear gas, side arms, you name it. Meanwhile, some police departments, militarizing at a rapid rate, have tank-like vehicles, and the first police surveillance drones are taking to the air in field tests and capable of being weaponized...And keep in mind, when it comes to that pepper-spraying incident, we’re talking about sleepy Davis, California, and a campus once renowned for its agronomy school. Al-Qaeda? I don’t think so.

Still, terror is what now makes our American world work, the trains run more or less on time, and the money flows in. So why should we be surprised that, having ripped Zuccotti Park apart, destroyed books, gotten a rep for pepper-spraying and roughing up protesters (and reporters, too), the NYPD should propitiously announce the arrest of yet another “lone wolf” terrorist. And can anyone be shocked that we’re talking about a disturbed, moneyless individual -- he couldn’t even pay his cell phone bill, no less rent a place to live -- under surveillance for two years, and palling around with an NYPD “informant” who smoked marijuana with him and may have given him not only a place to build a bomb but encouragement in doing so. It was a police-developed terror case that evidently so reeked of coaching even the FBI refused to get involved. And yet this was Mayor Bloomberg’s shining moment of last week, as the NYPD declared his home a “frozen” zone, the equivalent of declaring martial law around his house. And who was endangering him? An OWS “drum circle.” In the United States, increasingly, those in power no longer observe the law. Instead, they make it up to suit their needs. In the process, the streets where you demonstrate, as (New York’s mayor keeps telling us) is our “right,” are regularly transformed into yet more fenced-in, heavily surveilled Zuccotti Prisons.

This may not be a traditional police state (yet), but it is an increasingly militarized policed state in which the blue coats, armed to the teeth, act with remarkable impunity -- and all in the name of our safety from a bunch of doofuses or unhinged individuals that its “informants” often seem to fund, put through basic terror courses, and encourage in every way until they are arrested as “terrorists.” This is essentially a scam on the basis of which rights are regularly abridged or tossed out the window. In twenty-first-century America, “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them. And if you happen to be part of a government in which no criminal act of state -- torture, kidnapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, the launching of wars of aggression -- will ever bring a miscreant to court, only two crimes evidently exist: blowing a whistle or expressing your opinion. State Department official Peter Van Buren, whose new book about a disastrous year he spent in Iraq, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, learned that the hard way. So did former Guantanamo prosecutor Morris Davis when he got fired from his job at the Library of Congress for writing an op-ed. So may we all.

************************************************************

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published in November.

[Demeter]

61. Can an Occupation Movement Survive if it No Longer Occupies a Space? Lessons from Across the Land

http://www.alternet.org/story/153225/can_an_occupation_movement_survive_if_it_no_longer_occupies_a_space_lessons_from_across_the_land?page=entire

The post-occupation movement is taking shape across America. In New York, Occupy Wall Street is mulling next steps now that Zuccotti Park has been politically cleansed. Oakland, Calif., and Portland, Ore., have been evicted. And other occupations are staring at imminent police action, including New Orleans, Detroit and Philadelphia. In Chicago, which has been unable to secure a public space, the Occupy movement is trying to figure out how to sustain a public presence through a harsh winter while staging creative actions that capture attention. And while Occupy Mobile in the conservative stronghold of Alabama was shut down two weeks ago without much attention from the national news media, the local movement has not gone quietly into the night, providing one answer to the question: Can an occupation movement survive if it no longer occupies a space?

The answer, based on my visits to occupation sites around the country, is: “Yes, but …”

Mobilized in Mobile...Three days after being evicted Occupy Mobile was back on the streets. It staged an action at ArtWalk, a monthly event in downtown where galleries open their doors and artists peddle their work on the streets. “About 15 people did a silent protest,” says Carey. “Some people had dollar bills taped over their mouths. I taped a sign over my mouth, ‘First Amendment? Not in Mobile!’ There are well over a thousand people walking around at any time.” Carey says that people usually come to ArtWalk in groups and while “a few people were assholes … dozens of groups initiated discussions with us.” Emily Schuler, a Mobile native and college student, says the Occupy movement made her rethink her place in society, calling it “one of the best things that has ever happened to me.” Schuler says, “I love Mobile, but it’s ultra-conservative.” She explains, “I always felt like the black sheep because I sensed that the way the world was working was not good … There is a lot of pain and suffering. I think it has a lot to do with the way the system works. Because right now it’s profit over people. And it should be people over profit.” To the world-weary in New York, a silent protest and proposition that the American system values “profit over people” may seem prosaic. And it would be prosaic were it not happening in a place like Mobile, Ala., and all over the United States. Dozens of occupiers have told us this movement is an “awakening” for them or for others. One eye-opening aspect of our evening with Occupy Mobile was that none of these people knew each other a month before. The movement has created a new political community virtually overnight....In smaller, conservative cities, the creation of a new community may be success enough for the movement, enabling a new network to consolidate and spread its message without a public encampment. But for larger cities that already have a strong progressive presence, the experience of Occupy Chicago is more relevant — and more sobering.

Chicago: The problem of good intentions...Occupy Chicago is forging ahead with maintaining a public presence despite never having established an occupation in the first place. It’s not for lack of trying. On two consecutive Saturdays in mid-October, Occupy Chicago tried to take Grant Park, known for Chicago’s head-bashing police plying their trade during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

...In New York, Occupy Wall Street actions surge with electricity. No one quite seems in control because everyone is in control. Amoebic blobs of protesters break off and take the streets. Chants are thrown out, and the hive mind picks a winner. It is atavistic, often lacking signs, denied sound systems and shunning permits, but powered by hearts, lungs and passion. Exciting and unpredictable, it attracted greenhorns, drove the cops nuts, paralyzed Bloomberg for weeks and captured the world’s attention. That was why it worked and why the boot came down in the end...In Chicago, the first time protesters tried to take the space on Oct. 15, 175 people were arrested. We were there for the second round of arrests of about 130 people. I talked to Jan Rodolfo, a 36-year-old oncology nurse and National Nurses United staff member. While preparing to be arrested along with other union members and scores of others, Rodolfo said Occupy Chicago needed “a permanent encampment because it allows the movement to grow by creating a central place for people to come. ” Another activist said, “It would have been a big victory for the students, unions and other groups putting their efforts into the movement.”...It wouldn’t have just been a victory; it would have created a different movement. What made occupations in New York City and other cities so successful is that they brought new people into the movement in droves. Chicago has strong networks of activists, unionists and community groups, which are all involved in the Occupy movement. What they were missing was crucial: the people who were previously non-political.

This is a key feature of the movement. The occupation space itself becomes a spectacle that attracts newcomers who behave in unpredictable ways and who broaden the movement by bringing in perspectives that challenge the ideas of experienced organizers. This creates disruptive moments, such as Marine Corps vet Shamar Thomas’ shaming of 30 cops in Times Square. Watching his performance, which has been viewed nearly 3 million times, gives me chills and makes me wince seeing him in combat fatigues, dressing down dumbfounded cops. “How do you sleep at night doing this to people?” he shouted. “You’re here to protect us … If you want to go kill and hurt people, go to Iraq. Why are you hurting U.S. citizens?” The notion of suggesting that someone should go to Iraq, a country tormented by the United States for decades, to hurt people is beyond the pale. But Thomas’ outburst shows how Occupy Wall Street has touched people deeply and allowed them to see the movement as their own, rather than having to sit through weeks of anti-oppression workshops or spend years studying economic, political and cultural theory that few have the interest in or patience for. In an occupation, people bring their own ideas, that can create radical moments — even for radicals...Now there is a daily occupation on Chicago’s Wall Street, in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the headquarters for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade, where lines of protesters snake about creating a ruckus. The police force them to keep moving, so everything has to be on wheels, such as drums and even their donation box....Occupy Chicago will undoubtedly continue, but how can it seize the public’s imagination? Without a sustained public presence it runs the risk of falling into predictable protest patterns that people may dismiss or ignore. Many Occupy Chicago participants contend that the reason Mayor Rahm Emanuel is so hostile to allowing an occupation to take root now is that it could become the nucleus of a much larger movement next May when NATO and the G-8 come to town... And they are almost certainly right. Allowing the occupiers a public space now could allow them to recruit tens of thousands next spring. The image of huge crowds of everyday people confronting legions of cops protecting the conclaves of the rich and powerful who run the world is more powerful than any words. It would draw the battle lines between the 99 percent and the 1 percent in the streets. And it is ultimately in the streets, not in meetings or conferences, where the political struggle will be played out as it has been from the French Revolution more than two centuries ago to the Egyptian revolution today. Holding public space is key.

MUCH MORE AT LINK
***************************************************

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the decline of American Empire for Haymarket Books.

[Demeter]

62. Government Crackdown on Free Speech: Are They Firing Employees for Exercising Their Rights?

http://www.alternet.org/story/153224/government_crackdown_on_free_speech%3A_are_they_firing_employees_for_exercising_their_rights_?page=entire

...As the occupiers of Zuccotti Park, like those pepper-sprayed at UC Davis or the Marine veteran shot in Oakland, recently found out, the government’s ability to limit free speech, to stopper the First Amendment, to undercut the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances, is perhaps the most critical issue our republic can face. If you were to write the history of the last decade in Washington, it might well be a story of how, issue by issue, the government freed itself from legal and constitutional bounds when it came to torture, the assassination of U.S. citizens, the holding of prisoners without trial or access to a court of law, the illegal surveillance of American citizens, and so on. In the process, it has entrenched itself in a comfortable shadowland of ever more impenetrable secrecy, while going after any whistleblower who might shine a light in.

Now, it also seems to be chipping away at the most basic American right of all, the right of free speech, starting with that of its own employees. As is often said, the easiest book to stop is the one that is never written; the easiest voice to staunch is the one that is never raised...It’s true that, over the years, government in its many forms has tried to claim that you lose your free speech rights when you, for example, work for a public school, or join the military. In dealing with school administrators who sought to silence a teacher for complaining publicly that not enough money was being spent on academics versus athletics, or generals who wanted to stop enlisted men and women from blogging, the courts have found that any loss of rights must be limited and specific. As Jim Webb wrote when still Secretary of the Navy, “A citizen does not give up his First Amendment right to free speech when he puts on a military uniform, with small exceptions.”

Free speech is considered so basic that the courts have been wary of imposing any limits at all. The famous warning by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes about not falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater shows just how extreme a situation must be for the Supreme Court to limit speech. As Holmes put it in his definition: “The question in every case is whether the words used… are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.” That’s a high bar indeed.

........................................

Morris Davis got fired from his research job at the Library of Congress for writing AN article and a similar letter to the editor of the Washington Post. (The irony of being fired for exercising free speech while employed at Thomas Jefferson’s library evidently escaped his bosses.) With the help of the ACLU, Davis demanded his job back. On January 8, 2010, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Library of Congress on his behalf. In March 2011 a federal court ruled that the suit could go forward. The case is being heard this month. Someday, it will likely define the free speech rights of federal employees and so determine the quality of people who will make up our government. We citizens vote for the big names, but it’s the millions of lower-ranked, unelected federal employees who decide by their actions how the laws are carried out (or ignored) and the Constitution upheld (or disregarded)...Morris Davis is not some dour civil servant. Prior to joining the Library of Congress, he spent more than 25 years as an Air Force colonel. He was, in fact, the chief military prosecutor at Guantánamo and showed enormous courage in October 2007 when he resigned from that position and left the Air Force. Davis had stated he would not use evidence obtained through torture back in 2005. When a torture advocate was named his boss in 2007, Davis quit rather than face the inevitable order to reverse his position...The Library of Congress does not restrict its employees from writing or speaking, so Davis broke no rules. Nor, theoretically at least, do other government agencies like the CIA and the State Department restrict employees from writing or speaking, even on matters of official concern, although they do demand prior review for such things as the possible misuse of classified material. Clearly, such agency review processes have sometimes been used as a de facto method of prior restraint. The CIA, for example, has been accused of using indefinite security reviews to effectively prevent a book from being published. The Department of Defense has also wielded exaggerated claims of classified material to block books. Since at least 1968, there has, however, been no broad prohibition against government employees writing about political matters or matters of public concern. In 1968, the Supreme Court decided a seminal public employee First Amendment case, Pickering v. Board of Education. It ruled that school officials had violated the First Amendment rights of teacher Marvin Pickering when they fired him for writing a letter to his local paper criticizing the allocation of money between academics and athletics...Morris Davis was fired by the Library of Congress not because of his work performance, but because he wrote that Wall Street Journal op-ed on his own time, using his own computer, as a private citizen, never mentioning his (unrelated) federal job. The government just did not like what he wrote.

MUCH MORE AT LINK

*******************************************************

Peter Van Buren spent a year in Iraq as a State Department Foreign Service Officer serving as Team Leader for two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). Now in Washington, he writes about Iraq and the Middle East at his blog, We Meant Well. His book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), has recently been published. To read about the grilling he’s gotten from the State Department for his truth-telling, SEE LINK

[Demeter]

63. Inside the Student Movement: Undeterred by Crackdown, Activists Around the Country Gear Up

http://www.alternet.org/story/153229/inside_the_student_movement%3A_undeterred_by_crackdown%2C_activists_around_the_country_gear_up_for_bigger_actions_?page=entire

THIS IS A BIT OLD--SO READ IT IN CONTEXT THAT MOST OF THE DISCUSSED ACTIONS HAVE TAKEN PLACE (OR NOT)

One week after arrests and beatings of students at CUNY and pepper-spraying at UC Davis, students planNED bigger actions to fight tuition hikes and policing of education...LAST Monday, WAS not only a day of action against university budget cuts in New York City but also around the country, at places like UC-Davis, where students were violently pepper sprayed during a peaceful protest. Here these same students are courageously calling for a student strike that will shut down the campus and in which rallies and teach-ins about budget cuts, police brutality and non-violent action will replace normal campus activities. At UCLA there are planned protests at the Board of Regents meeting in order to force that body to change their agenda to better reflect student concerns like increasing tuition and decreased funding for the entire UC system. These actions will be done with the solidarity and support of students around the country, from Tufts University in Massachusetts to the rural Kentucky-based Owensboro Community and Technical College. These actions also occur in the context of a global student movement: for weeks in Chile protesters, spearheaded by students demanding more affordable education, have been expressing dissent against President Pinera's capital market reforms. In solidarity with these protests students around Latin America, in Argentina, Columbia, and Peru have come together to demand education reforms and stand in support of the Chilian students. Earlier this month, students in Ireland, Italy and the Phillipines staged massive protests and walk-outs over increased tuition.

...In the context of the Occupy movement, the student movement has taken off. Our movements are connected and stronger because of these connections. They are connected because they are fighting to articulate the same disconnect between power and people and to show the same connections between where our money is spent and where we want it to be spent, they show the connections between dissent and the way this dissent is violently repressed around the country and the world. In New York City and the United States Occupy Wall Street has provided the student movement with inspiration and support. In this way Occupy Wall Street has, as Zoltan Gluck writes here: “already begun to shift the very terrain of other struggles. For student organizing it has provided a whole new framework through which to organize collectively and horizontally.”

And organizing collectively and horizontally we have been: through weekly All-City Student Assemblies and General Assemblies, through a burgeoning student debt refusal movement that is calling for a million students to pledge to refuse their student debt in response to the fact that: “the student debt crisis and the dependency of U.S. higher education on debt-financing from the people it is supposed to serve. (Read more about this campaign here: http://occupystudentdebtcampaign.com/ ) And this has been happening through the very real, urgent and intensifying struggle over the current CUNY budget, a budget that calls for tuition increases every year for the next 5 years alongside cutting adjunct health insurance while simultaneously requesting millions more for security throughout the CUNY system. Fighting against this budget is the way I have translated the space for activism that Occupy Wall Street has opened up into being part of a organized on-the ground protest movement that has very real demands. This is part of how and why I was at Baruch College last Monday November 21st...MUCH MORE AT LINK

************************************************

Manissa McCleave Maharawal is a doctoral student in the Anthropology department at the CUNY Graduate Center and a New York City based activist.

[Demeter]

67. How Do We Know OWS Is Winning? Elites Are Desperate to Suppress It

WINNING? SHOW ME PROOF! UPSETTING THE STATUS QUO? --DEFINITELY!

http://www.alternet.org/story/153172/how_do_we_know_ows_is_winning_elites_are_desperate_to_suppress_it?page=entire

...We are building a global movement, and elites are beginning to mobilize the incredible power at their disposal to do it whatever damage they can – media and scholarship to discredit us, laws and regulations to constrain us and sheer violence to repress us. They are paying their think tanks to undermine us, mobilizing their shock troops to beat and detain us, and whistling to their lap-dogs in the press to tell the stories they want heard.

This is what happens when genuine movements emerge with enough force and potential to be taken seriously by those with power and privilege. This is what happens when movements grow stronger and more diverse. This is what happens when movements take root in the public consciousness. Make no mistake about it: They are fighting us now because we are winning.

In moments like these – when protest becomes resistance and power mobilizes to confront it – it becomes important again to stop and remember why we started fighting in the first place, and what it is we want...We fight because people’s needs really aren’t being met, because there are simple and systemic reasons for that, because it is unacceptable, and because there is an alternative. We fight because we oppose injustice intellectually, but also because injustice makes us sick to our stomachs. We fight because a system in which homeless people freeze outside of empty homes does not deserve to exist, because a system that allows for people to go hungry while there is an overabundance of food is unacceptable. We fight because the economic and social systems governing our lives have proven themselves to be totally incapable of meeting the minimum criteria for a just and humane society, and because we are sure as hell it doesn’t have to be this way. We fight for other people, but also for ourselves – because none of us get to live out our full human potential within the institutions that dominate our lives today. We fight because another world really is possible, and because we demand it for the people around us, our friends, our kids, and ourselves.

The stakes are high. We have a responsibility not only to fight, but to win.

MORE AT LINK

****************************************************

Yotam Marom is an organizer, educator, musician, and writer. He is a member of the Organization for a Free Society, and can be reached at [e-mail].

[Demeter]

78. Occupy Wall Street: A Leader-full Movement in a Leaderless Time

http://www.alternet.org/story/153223/occupy_wall_street%3A_a_leader-full_movement_in_a_leaderless_time?page=entire

The OWS movement is personal democracy in action, where everyone plays a role in shaping the decisions that affect our lives...We looked to Washington to lead us after September 11th. I remember telling my college roommates, in a spate of emotion, that I was thinking of enlisting in the military in the days after the attacks. I expected legions of us -- at the orders of our leader -- to do the same. But nobody asked us. Instead we were told to go shopping.

The times following September 11th called for leadership, not reckless, gluttonous tax cuts. But our leaders then, as now, seemed more concerned with flattery. Then- House Majority Leader and now-convicted felon Tom Delay told us, “nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes.” Not exactly Churchillian stuff. Those of us who did enlist were ordered into Iraq on the promise of being “greeted as liberators,” in the words of our then-vice president. Several thousand of us are dead from that false promise. We looked for leadership from our churches, and were told to fight not poverty or injustice, but gay marriage. In the Catholic Church, we were told to blame the media, not the abusive priests, not the bishops, not the Vatican, for making us feel that our church has failed us in its sex abuse scandal and cover-up.

Our parents’ generation has balked at the tough decisions required to preserve our country’s sacred entitlements, leaving us to clean up the mess. They let the infrastructure built with their fathers’ hands crumble like a stale cookie. They downgraded our nation’s credit rating. They seem content to hand us a debt exceeding the size of our entire economy, rather than brave a fight against the fortunate and entrenched interests on K Street and Wall Street. Now we are asking for jobs and are being told we aren’t good enough, to the tune of 3.3 million unemployed workers between the ages of 25 and 34...

.....................................................


Why this insistence on finding the supposed leaders of Occupy Wall Street? The reason goes beyond a desire to understand the movement's goals, I think, into something more existential. For many traditional political observers..., the notion that a political movement might arise without charismatic leaders is inconceivable. Every previous movement, after all, has had its figureheads. Think of Gandhi, King, Mandela. Or, at the less exalted level of recent times, think of Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton, or Michael Moore on the progressive left, or Sarah Palin, Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin on the Tea Party right. The same question was raised, if you recall, around the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which were often described as "leaderless." A movement can't be leaderless, right? Who would we feature on the front-page? Who would we put on the Sunday talk shows? Who would we negotiate with? Who is the saviour that will rise from these streets?...No, political movements can't be leaderless. The Occupy Wall Street movement is, in fact, leader-full. That is, the insistent avoidance of traditional top-down leadership and the reliance on face-to-face and peer-to-peer networks and working groups creates space for lots of leaders to emerge, but only ones that work as network weavers rather than charismatic bosses...

[Demeter]

57. 'We the People' versus 'We the Corporation': Sentiment Builds for Banning Corporate Personhood

But Tough Road Ahead...

http://www.alternet.org/story/153185/%27we_the_people%27_versus_%27we_the_corporation%27%3A_sentiment_builds_for_banning_corporate_personhood%2C_but_tough_road_ahead.__?page=entire

How far should a constitutional amendment go to roll back corporate rights? And is it possible? Across the country, momentum has been building for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that the democratic rights and freedoms granted to people do not apply to corporations and corporate entities. In November alone, local voters in Colorado, Montana, Maine, Wisconsin and California passed various resolutions to ban corporate personhood. Seven bills have been introduced in the current Congress, including four this month—including amendment proposals. Public interest groups have been gathering petition signatures, all with an eye to the two-year anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling, known as Citizens United, which granted significant new political powers to corporations by ending a century-old prohibition on directly spending money from their corporate treasuries for political campaigns.

A constitutional amendment proposed by Congress must pass House and Senate chambers with two-thirds majorities and then be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The last amendment, passed in 1992, concerned congressional pay and was proposed in 1789. The 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18, passed in 1971, after tens of thousands of youths that age died in Vietnam but could not vote. Though the political equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest, supporters of an amendment to reverse or reign in corporate constitutional rights are not deterred. “We are facing a crisis in American democracy today,” said John Bonifaz, co-founder and director of Free Speech for People, who has been involved with various proposals in Congress. “The question is whether it is ‘We the people’ or ‘We the corporations.’ The response to that crisis has to be a bold vision that will restore democracy to the people. Constitutional amendment fights are the very kind of fights that return us to the basic principles of what we are as a nation.”...The effort to restrain the power of corporations by targeting American democracy's foundational document—the Constitution—is not without critics or controversy, even in progressive circles. There are varying proposed amendments, based on smaller and larger reform visions. There are fears that undoing corporate powers entrenched in federal and state law would harm non-profits and labor unions, and cause other unintended effects. However, what is undeniable is there is broad support—not just in Occupy Wall Street protests but among middle-class Americans as evidenced by mainstream media polls—for tangible steps to restoring the balance of power between big business and individual citizens...

There are two threads among the various amendment proposals. The narrower approach, which Colvin embraces, seeks to address two U.S. Supreme Court rulings, 35 years apart. One allowed for unlimited campaign spending and the other granted excessive power to corporate money in elections. The first of those rulings, Buckley v. Valeo, said spending money in campaigns is speech protected by the First Amendment. Though Buckley said donations to candidates could be regulated, it struck down limits on campaign spending by candidates and by independent groups – limits passed by Congress in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The second ruling, Citizens United, voided a 2002 reform that was Congress’ most recent effort to address the problems of our campaign finance system, but went much further to grant constitutional rights to corporations. It said that not only can corporations spend unlimited sums in elections, but restricting such spending would create “a disadvantaged person or class.” In essence, the Supreme Court in Citizens United, said that corporations have explicit First Amendment protections—the same rights and liberties as citizens. And those speech rights do not just apply to political campaigns. There is ongoing litigation in many federal and state courts where corporations are fighting government regulation by saying they are unconstitutionally being forced to speak by putting warnings on their products.

So there are two schools of thought on how broad or narrow a constitutional amendment proposal should be. Some of the earliest ones simply seek to overturn Buckley by saying Congress and the states have the power to regulate the way money is raised and spent in political campaigns. “If people had the upper-hand in our electoral system, would we still think it necessary to abolish all other corporate constitutional rights. Maybe, maybe not,” said Colvin, who suggested language saying that only citizens can donate to campaigns, that states and Congress could regulate the donations and expenditures, and also institute public financing. But Bonifaz and advocates such as Rep. Jim McGovern, D-MA, who last week introduced amendment legislation to overturn corporate personhood, believe that solely addressing the problem posed by Buckley – of unlimited campaign spending, including, now, unlimited campaign spending by corporations – is not sufficient. (AND I AGREE WITH THEM THERE--DEMETER)“I am on the same page as those who say we must overturn Buckley and have limits on campaign spending. I have led the fight in the courts for that for years,” Bonifaz said. “We must also have a response to the Citizens United ruling. It cannot solely be within the campaign finance frame. The Citizens United ruling is the most extreme extension of a corporate rights doctrine that has been eroding our democracy and our Constitution for 30 years.”

Intended and Unintended Consequences SEE LINK TO CONTINUE






*******************************************************

Steven Rosenfeld covers corporate constitutional rights for AlterNet and is author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

[Demeter]

59. To Conservatives, Climate Change is Trojan Horse to Abolish Capitalism By Naomi Klein

http://www.alternet.org/story/153230/to_conservatives%2C_climate_change_is_trojan_horse_to_abolish_capitalism_?page=entire

Deniers have concluded that fighting climate change can only happen by reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system.

TO CONSERVATIVES, EVERYTHING IS RELIGION! ESSENTIALLY, THEY WANT TO LIVE IN A FACT-FREE WORLD, WITH NO DOUBT, NO DISAGREEMENT, NO DEVIATION, AND NO BAD CONSEQUENCES--FOR THEM!--DEMETER

...It is true that responding to the climate threat requires strong government action at all levels. But real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users. Here is where the Heartlanders have good reason to be afraid: arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation. For hard-right ideologues like those gathered at the Heartland conference, the results are nothing short of intellectually cataclysmic....

1. Reviving and Reinventing the Public Sphere: After years of recycling, carbon offsetting and light bulb changing, it is obvious that individual action will never be an adequate response to the climate crisis. Climate change is a collective problem, and it demands collective action. One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale. That means subways, streetcars and light-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone; energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines; smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy; and a massive research effort to ensure that we are using the best methods possible...The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector...
   
   
2. Remembering How to Plan: In addition to reversing the thirty-year privatization trend, a serious response to the climate threat involves recovering an art that has been relentlessly vilified during these decades of market fundamentalism: planning. Lots and lots of planning. And not just at the national and international levels. Every community in the world needs a plan for how it is going to transition away from fossil fuels, what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent action plan.” In the cities and towns that have taken this responsibility seriously, the process has opened rare spaces for participatory democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share ideas about how to reorganize their communities to lower emissions and build in resilience for tough times ahead...Climate change demands other forms of planning as well—particularly for workers whose jobs will become obsolete as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels. A few “green jobs” trainings aren’t enough. These workers need to know that real jobs will be waiting for them on the other side. That means bringing back the idea of planning our economies based on collective priorities rather than corporate profitability—giving laid-off employees of car plants and coal mines the tools and resources to create jobs, for example, with Cleveland’s worker-run green co-ops serving as a model. Agriculture, too, will have to see a revival in planning if we are to address the triple crisis of soil erosion, extreme weather and dependence on fossil fuel inputs....
   
   
3. Reining in Corporations: A key piece of the planning we must undertake involves the rapid re-regulation of the corporate sector. Much can be done with incentives: subsidies for renewable energy and responsible land stewardship, for instance. But we are also going to have to get back into the habit of barring outright dangerous and destructive behavior. That means getting in the way of corporations on multiple fronts, from imposing strict caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new coal-fired power plants, to cracking down on industrial feedlots, to shutting down dirty-energy extraction projects like the Alberta tar sands (starting with pipelines like Keystone XL that lock in expansion plans)...Only a very small sector of the population sees any restriction on corporate or consumer choice as leading down Hayek’s road to serfdom—and, not coincidentally, it is precisely this sector of the population that is at the forefront of climate change denial...
   
   
4. Relocalizing Production: If strictly regulating corporations to respond to climate change sounds somewhat radical it’s because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been an article of faith that the role of government is to get out of the way of the corporate sector—and nowhere more so than in the realm of international trade. The devastating impacts of free trade on manufacturing, local business and farming are well known. But perhaps the atmosphere has taken the hardest hit of all. The cargo ships, jumbo jets and heavy trucks that haul raw resources and finished products across the globe devour fossil fuels and spew greenhouse gases. And the cheap goods being produced—made to be replaced, almost never fixed—are consuming a huge range of other nonrenewable resources while producing far more waste than can be safely absorbed. This model is so wasteful, in fact, that it cancels out the modest gains that have been made in reducing emissions many times over...In an economy organized to respect natural limits, the use of energy-intensive long-haul transport would need to be rationed—reserved for those cases where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United States is often more energy-intensive than growing it in the South and shipping it by light rail.) Climate change does not demand an end to trade. But it does demand an end to the reckless form of “free trade” that governs every bilateral trade agreement as well as the World Trade Organization. This is more good news —for unemployed workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced with big boxes. But the challenge this poses to the capitalist project should not be underestimated: it represents the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing every possible limit on corporate power...
   
   
5. Ending the Cult of Shopping: The past three decades of free trade, deregulation and privatization were not only the result of greedy people wanting greater corporate profits. They were also a response to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, which created intense pressure to find new avenues for rapid economic growth. The threat was real: within our current economic model, a drop in production is by definition a crisis—a recession or, if deep enough, a depression, with all the desperation and hardship that these words imply...This growth imperative is why conventional economists reliably approach the climate crisis by asking the question, How can we reduce emissions while maintaining robust GDP growth? The usual answer is “decoupling”—the idea that renewable energy and greater efficiencies will allow us to sever economic growth from its environmental impact. And “green growth” advocates like Thomas Friedman tell us that the process of developing new green technologies and installing green infrastructure can provide a huge economic boost, sending GDP soaring and generating the wealth needed to “make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure.” ...BUT... so long as the savings resulting from greater energy and material efficiencies are simply plowed back into further exponential expansion of the economy, reduction in total emissions will be thwarted. As Jackson argues in Prosperity Without Growth, “Those who promote decoupling as an escape route from the dilemma of growth need to take a closer look at the historical evidence—and at the basic arithmetic of growth.” The bottom line is that an ecological crisis that has its roots in the overconsumption of natural resources must be addressed not just by improving the efficiency of our economies but by reducing the amount of material stuff we produce and consume. Yet that idea is anathema to the large corporations that dominate the global economy, which are controlled by footloose investors who demand ever greater profits year after year. We are therefore caught in the untenable bind of, as Jackson puts it, “trash the system or crash the planet.”...
   
   
6. Taxing the Rich and Filthy: About now a sensible reader would be asking, How on earth are we going to pay for all this? The old answer would have been easy: we’ll grow our way out of it. Indeed, one of the major benefits of a growth-based economy for elites is that it allows them to constantly defer demands for social justice, claiming that if we keep growing the pie, eventually there will be enough for everyone. That was always a lie, as the current inequality crisis reveals, but in a world hitting multiple ecological limits, it is a nonstarter. So the only way to finance a meaningful response to the ecological crisis is to go where the money is. That means taxing carbon, as well as financial speculation. It means increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy, cutting bloated military budgets and eliminating absurd subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. And governments will have to coordinate their responses so that corporations will have nowhere to hide (this kind of robust international regulatory architecture is what Heartlanders mean when they warn that climate change will usher in a sinister “world government”). Most of all, however, we need to go after the profits of the corporations most responsible for getting us into this mess. The top five oil companies made $900 billion in profits in the past decade; ExxonMobil alone can clear $10 billion in profits in a single quarter. For years, these companies have pledged to use their profits to invest in a shift to renewable energy (BP’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding being the highest-profile example). But according to a study by the Center for American Progress, just 4 percent of the big five’s $100 billion in combined 2008 profits went to “renewable and alternative energy ventures.” Instead, they continue to pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay and new technologies designed to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels. Plenty of money has also gone to paying lobbyists to beat back every piece of climate legislation that has reared its head, and to fund the denier movement gathered at the Marriott Hotel....

* * *

So let’s summarize. Responding to climate change requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency. We will need to rebuild the public sphere, reverse privatizations, relocalize large parts of economies, scale back overconsumption, bring back long-term planning, heavily regulate and tax corporations, maybe even nationalize some of them, cut military spending and recognize our debts to the global South. Of course, none of this has a hope in hell of happening unless it is accompanied by a massive, broad-based effort to radically reduce the influence that corporations have over the political process. That means, at a minimum, publicly funded elections and stripping corporations of their status as “people” under the law. In short, climate change supercharges the pre-existing case for virtually every progressive demand on the books, binding them into a coherent agenda based on a clear scientific imperative.

More than that, climate change implies the biggest political “I told you so” since Keynes predicted German backlash from the Treaty of Versailles. Marx wrote about capitalism’s “irreparable rift” with “the natural laws of life itself,” and many on the left have argued that an economic system built on unleashing the voracious appetites of capital would overwhelm the natural systems on which life depends. And of course indigenous peoples were issuing warnings about the dangers of disrespecting “Mother Earth” long before that. The fact that the airborne waste of industrial capitalism is causing the planet to warm, with potentially cataclysmic results, means that, well, the naysayers were right. And the people who said, “Hey, let’s get rid of all the rules and watch the magic happen” were disastrously, catastrophically wrong.

There is no joy in being right about something so terrifying. But for progressives, there is responsibility in it, because it means that our ideas—informed by indigenous teachings as well as by the failures of industrial state socialism—are more important than ever. It means that a green-left worldview, which rejects mere reformism and challenges the centrality of profit in our economy, offers humanity’s best hope of overcoming these overlapping crises...

MUCH MORE AT LINK--DO READ IT OVER!

*********************************************************

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002). Read more at Naomiklein.org. You can follow her on Twitter @naomiaklein.

[Demeter]

60. Enya - Amid The Falling Snow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wacyMhxIOd0&feature=related

[bread_and_roses]

81. I can only say YES, YES, YES (n/t)

[Demeter]

64. DOGBERT THE DOOMSDAY PROPHET

[Demeter]

70. A Message of Hope from......Severus Snape?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBsg1urLN7I&feature=related

You take hope where it lies....

[Demeter]

65. Sudden Flash of Insight

Obama and his handlers made a significant mistake when he decided to throw his activist supporters under the bus and drive over them repeatedly, and let his cultists suppress all lesser dissent within the Democratic Party.

They would have been much more successful and in a better position vis-a-vis the next election had they channeled that drive into "safe" directions. But there are NO safe directions when the plan is complete physical and economic warfare against all the people of the world, are there?

I'm going to have to face Reality now...carry on, regardless!

[Hotler]

73. Obama, he could have been so much more.

Our party could have shown more spine.
Reality can be a cruel place.

[Fuddnik]

76. It's all here.

Long, but well worth the time.

http://vimeo.com/20355767

[Demeter]

66. Enya - Journey of the Angels

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVZ79axiVWs&feature=related

[Hotler]

68. Well done. Thank you. eom.

[Demeter]

69. QUIRKY SITE TO VISIT: THE BANK IMPLODE-O-METER

http://bankimplode.com/

[DemReadingDU]

71. Euro doomed from start, says Jacques Delors, architect of Euro

12/3/11 Euro doomed from start, says Jacques Delors
By James Kirkup

The euro project was flawed from the start and the current generation of European leaders has failed to address its fundamental problems, Jacques Delors, the architect of the single currency, declares today.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jacques Delors, the former president of the European Commission, claims that errors made when the euro was created had effectively doomed the single currency to the current debt crisis. He also accuses today’s leaders of doing “too little, too late,” to support the single currency.

The 86-year-old Frenchman’s intervention comes the day after France and Germany took another step towards the creation of a full “fiscal union” within the European Union and David Cameron insisted that Britain must remain a major player in Europe. Mr Delors, who led the commission from 1985 to 1995, played a central role in the process that led to the creation of the euro in 1999. In his first British newspaper interview for almost a decade, he says that the debt crisis reflects a threat to Europe’s global role and even basic Western democratic values.

Mr Delors claims that the current crisis stems from “a fault in execution” by the political leaders who oversaw the euro in its early days. Leaders chose to turn a blind eye to the fundamental weaknesses and imbalances of member states’ economies, he says.

“The finance ministers did not want to see anything disagreeable which they would be forced to deal with,” he says.

The euro came into existence without strong central powers to stop members running up unsustainable debts, an omission that led to the current crisis. Now that the excessive borrowing of countries such as Greece and Italy has brought the eurozone to the brink of disaster, Mr Delors insists that all European countries must share the blame for the crisis. “Everyone must examine their consciences,” he says.

more...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8932647/Euro-doomed-from-start-says-Jacques-Delors.html


The Interview

12/3/11 Jacques Delors interview: Euro would still be strong if it had been built to my plan
It was Jacques Delors whose report produced the plan for what we now call the euro
By Charles Moore

To use that British understatement that Continentals enjoy, one might suggest that it has not been a good year for the euro. And now, some say, only about a week remains to put things right. So who better to question than the man who invented it? In Paris on Wednesday, I called on Jacques Delors.

Mr Delors, who was President of the European Commission from 1985 to 1995, is the only foreign bureaucrat ever to have become a household name in Britain. In 1988, he enraged Margaret Thatcher by coming to address the British TUC on the joys of the European “social dimension”. Her famous Bruges speech later that month was her attempt to stand against the tide of European integration that he represented.

It was Mr Delors whose report produced the plan for what we now call the euro. He was such a demon figure for British eurosceptics that The Sun produced the headline “UP YOURS, DELORS” and invited its readers to turn, face the English Channel and make a rude gesture at him in unison.

more...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8932640/Jacques-Delors-interview-Euro-would-still-be-strong-if-it-had-been-built-to-my-plan.html

[Demeter]

77. Declining Labor Force Participation Leads to Sharp Drop in Unemployment By Dean Baker

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/742467/declining_labor_force_participation_leads_to_sharp_drop_in_unemployment/#paragraph4

The employment rate for women is down 0.7 percentage points from its year-ago level...The Labor Department reported a decline of 315,000 people in the labor market in October. This was the main factor driving a drop of 0.4 percentage points in the unemployment rate to 8.6 percent. The establishment survey showed a weaker-than-expected 120,000 job gain for the month; although this bad news was largely offset by upward revisions of 72,000 to the job growth numbers for the prior two months. The drop in participation was entirely among women and especially black women. (Among married women, employment rose by 194,000, so this was not a case of women as second earners dropping out of the labor force.) Participation numbers among white women fell by 199,000, a decline of 0.2 percentage points. The drop among black women was 164,000, a drop of 1.2 percentage points. These monthly numbers are highly erratic, and it is likely that at least part of this drop will be reversed in future months. Nonetheless there had been a trend of declining participation rates among both white and black women even prior to the November plunge. This suggests that there is a real issue of women losing access to jobs; although the December figures may show some reversal.

Other data in the household survey were mixed. The number of workers involuntarily employed part-time fell by 378,000, its second consecutive large monthly drop. However, the duration measures all increased, with the average duration hitting 40.9 weeks, a new high for the downturn. The percentage of the unemployed who voluntarily quit their jobs fell slightly from the October level, but at 7.6 percent it is still higher than it has been since the very beginning of 2009. This presumably reflects some increase in confidence about job prospects...The picture on the establishment survey is not strong. While the 120,000 job growth reported for November is enough to keep pace with the growth of the labor force, many of these jobs (49,800) were in the retail sector. This growth in this sector was likely inflated by earlier-than-usual hiring for the holiday season as stores put more of a premium on Black Friday sales. Employment in clothing stores jumped by 26,700, or 1.9 percent, in November. If this is the case, retail employment will be unusually weak in December.

There were few other sectors with notable job growth for the month. The temp sector added 22,300 workers, slightly more than the 14,000 average over the last year, but hardly a signal of robust hiring down the road. Restaurants added 32,700 workers, bringing the average over the last three months to 27,300. That is somewhat faster than the average of 17,500 over the last year. Health care added just 17,200 jobs, down from an average of almost 30,000 a month over the last year. Construction employment fell for the second consecutive month leaving it little changed from the year-ago level. Manufacturing employment was virtually unchanged in November. Growth over the last year has averaged 9,000 a month. The government sector shed another 20,000 jobs, with 16,000 of the lost jobs being at the state and local level. The government sector has lost 278,000 jobs over the last year.

Average weekly hours remained unchanged. The average workweek is just 0.1 hour above the year-ago level. This suggests that employers are having no problems finding qualified workers, because if they were, they would be increasing hours per worker. There is also little change in wage patterns with the average hourly wage rising at 1.7 percent rate over the last year.


Job Level Dec 2001 - Nov 2011 versus Trend Job Level Dec 2001 - Nov 2007

The overall employment picture for November looks quite bleak with the weak growth in jobs and the reported drop in labor force participation. However, it is likely that the latter was simply an erratic fluctuation in the data. The establishment survey is by far the more reliable measure. Over the last three months, overall job growth has averaged 143,000. It takes roughly 90,000 jobs to keep even with the growth of the labor force. At this rate, it will take close to 200 months, or 16 years, to make up for the 10-million-job deficit in the economy.

[Demeter]

80. GMAC Mugs Massachusetts for Insisting on the Rule of Law, Suspends Mortgage Lending in the State

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/gmac-mugs-massachusetts-for-insisting-on-the-rule-of-law-suspends-mortgage-lending-in-the-state.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

This move by GMAC, now Ally, is remarkably brazen. GMAC has effectively said that Massachusetts must hew to its demands of how to deal with foreclosures. It announced it is withdrawing from mortgage lending in the state in an effort to bring it to heel.

GMAC may be in a better position to exercise this sort of threat than other banks. Full service banks have broader business lines, so government bodies in the state could retaliate by moving other business (pension funds, cash management, payment services) from them.

This is very similar to the retaliation described in Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment, when Georgia had the temerity to try to pass tough lending laws...GMAC is trying to get other big banks to follow suit. I hope the state and other groups that do substantial financial business with banks (largish churches are also attractive clients) make it clear than any effort to punish the state for enforcing the law will be met by moving their accounts to smaller institutions that respect the law...

The insolence of the securitization industry continues to be astonishing. They act as if they have an imperial right to dictate to governments, and refuse to admit any role in a disaster of their own creation. I hope those of you who do business with Ally close your accounts immediately and tell the bank that it is due to their Mafia style move in Massachusetts.

[Demeter]

82. U.N. Envoy: U.S. Isn't Protecting Occupy Protesters' Rights

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/occupy-wall-street-un-envoy_n_1125860.html

The United Nations envoy for freedom of expression is drafting an official communication to the U.S. government demanding to know why federal officials are not protecting the rights of Occupy demonstrators whose protests are being disbanded -- sometimes violently -- by local authorities.

WELL! I APPRECIATE THE THOUGHT, BUT WHAT CHANCE HAS THE SOCK-PUPPET UN AGAINST ITS ECONOMIC OVERLORD?

Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. "special rapporteur" for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights. "I believe in city ordinances and I believe in maintaining urban order," he said Thursday. "But on the other hand I also believe that the state -- in this case the federal state -- has an obligation to protect and promote human rights...If I were going to pit a city ordinance against human rights, I would always take human rights," he continued. La Rue, a longtime Guatemalan human rights activist who has held his U.N. post for three years, said it's clear to him that the protesters have a right to occupy public spaces "as long as that doesn't severely affect the rights of others." In moments of crisis, governments often default to a forceful response instead of a dialogue, he said -- but that's a mistake. "Citizens have the right to dissent with the authorities, and there's no need to use public force to silence that dissension," he said. "One of the principles is proportionality," La Rue said. "The use of police force is legitimate to maintain public order -- but there has to be a danger of real harm, a clear and present danger. And second, there has to be a proportionality of the force employed to prevent a real danger."

And history suggests that harsh tactics against social movements don't work anyway, he said. In Occupy's case, he said, "disbanding them by force won't change that attitude of indignation."...La Rue said he is in the process of writing what he called "an official communication" to the U.S. government "to ask what exactly is the position of the federal government in regards to understanding the human rights and constitutional rights vis-a-vis the use of local police and local authorities to disband peaceful demonstrations." Although the letter will not carry any legal authority, it reflects how the violent suppression of dissent threatens to damage the U.S.'s international reputation. "I think it's a dangerous spot in the sense of a precedent," La Rue said, expressing concern that the United States risks losing its credibility as a model democracy, particularly if the excessive use of force against peaceful protests continues.

.........................................

"We're seeing widespread violations of fundamental First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights," said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-chair of a National Lawyers Guild committee, which has sent hundreds of volunteers to provide legal representation to Occupations across the nation. "The demonstrations are treated as if they're presumptively criminal," she said. "Instead of looking at free speech activity as an honored and cherished right that should be supported and facilitated, the reaction of local authorities and police is very frequently to look at it as a crime scene." What they should do, Verheyden-Hilliard said, is make it their mission to allow the activity to continue. Using the same lens placed on the Occupy movement to look at, say, the protest in Egypt, Verheyden-Hilliard said, observers would have focused on such issues as "Did the people in Tahrir Square have a permit?"

MORE

[Demeter]

83. A Secret Scandal By Eliot Spitzer

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/11/the_7_trillion_secret_loan_program_the_government_and_big_banks_should_be_punished_for_deceiving_the_public_about_their_hush_hush_bailout_scheme_.html

The government and the big banks deceived the public about their $7 trillion secret loan program. They should be punished...During the deepest, darkest period of the financial cataclysm, the CEOs of major banks maintained in statements to the public, to the market at large, and to their own shareholders that the banks were in good financial shape, didn’t want to take TARP funds, and that the regulatory framework governing our banking system should not be altered. Trust us, they said. Yet, unknown to the public and the Congress, these same banks had been borrowing massive amounts from the government to remain afloat. The total numbers are staggering: $7.7 trillion of credit...one-half of the GDP of the entire nation. $460 billion was lent to J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley alone—without anybody other than a few select officials at the Fed and the Treasury knowing. This was perhaps the single most massive allocation of capital from public to private hands in our history, and nobody was told. This was not TARP: This was secret Fed lending. And although it has since been repaid, it is clear why the banks didn’t want us to know about it: They didn’t want to admit the magnitude of their financial distress. The banks’ claims of financial stability and solvency appear at a minimum to have been misleading—and may have been worse. Misleading statements and deception of this sort would ordinarily put a small-market player or borrower on the wrong end of a criminal investigation.

So where are the inquiries into the false statements made by the bank CEOs? And where are the inquiries about the Fed and Treasury officials who stood by silently as bank representatives made claims that were false, misleading, or worse? Only now, because of superb analysis done by Bloomberg reporters—who litigated against the Fed and the banks for years to get the information—are we getting a full picture of the Fed and Treasury lending. The reporters also calculated that recipient banks and other borrowers benefited by approximately $13 billion simply by taking advantage of the “spread” between their cost of capital in these almost interest-free loans and their ability to lend the capital. In addition to the secrecy, what is appalling is that these loans were made with no strings attached, no conditions, and no negotiation to achieve any broader public purpose. Even if one accepts the notion that the stability of the financial system could not be sacrificed, those who dispensed trillions of dollars to private parties made no apparent effort to impose even minimal obligations to condition the loans on the structural reforms needed to prevent another crisis, made no effort to require that those responsible for creating the crisis be relieved of their jobs, took zero steps towards the genuine mortgage-reform that is so necessary to begin a process of economic renewal. The dollars lent were simply a free bridge loan so the banks could push onto others the responsibility for the banks’ own risk-taking. If ever there was an event to justify the darkest, most conspiratorial view held by many that the alliance of big money on Wall Street and big government produces nothing but secret deals that profit insiders—this is it.

So what to do? The revelations of the secret loan program may provide the opportunity for Occupy Wall Street to suggest a few concrete steps that would be difficult to oppose:

First: Demand a hearing where the bank executives have to answer questions—under oath—about the actual negotiations, or lack thereof, that led to these loans; about the actual condition of each of the borrowing banks and whether that condition differed from the public statements made by the banks at the time.

Second: Require the recipient banks to use this previously undisclosed gift—the profit they made by investing this almost interest-free money—to write down the value of mortgages of those who are underwater. The loans to the banks were meant to solve a short-term liquidity problem, not be a source of profits to fund bonuses. Take back the profits and put them to a public use.

Third: Require the government officials responsible for authorizing these loans to explain why there was no effort made to condition these loans on changes in policy that would protect the public going forward.

Fourth: Ask congress to examine every filing and statement made to Congress by the banks about their financial condition and their indebtedness to see if any misrepresentations were made in an effort to hide these trillions of dollars of loans. Misleading Congress can be a felony, and willful deception of the Congress to hide the magnitude of the public bailouts should not go unprosecuted.

Finally: Demand that politicians return all contributions made by the institutions that got hidden loans. Pressure the politicians who continue to feed from the trough of Wall Street, even as they know all too well how the banks and others have gamed the system and the public.

[Demeter]

84. Enya - Hope Has a Place (To all the people who have ever loved... and lost)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl0q8f8nC8Q&feature=related

[Tansy_Gold]

85. Did anyone ever do a song for those who have loved and won and. . . .

wished they hadn't?


:evilgrin:

[Demeter]

86. How would one even research that?

Ask any divorcee....I Will Survive comes to mind....

I've done both...and still it sucks.

[xchrom]

88. sunday, bloody sunday -- morning

:donut:

[Demeter]

91. Just About Bloody, Too

The papers didn't even arrive until 5 AM. If I didn't have help, I'd be delivering until noon, if not wrapped around a tree with sleepiness.

I've managed to protect my hands from the strain, at the expense of the back and shoulders. The Papers are just too heavy, too full of advertising for ICC (imported Chinese crap), and no news coverage to speak of, about anything.

And it's raining. It's supposed to rain all day and night, then switch over to snow for tomorrow...2 inches.

I have two rehearsals this Sunday, two performances next Sunday...Xmas music. And I'm NOT in the mood--no Christmas spirit to speak of.

I think it's because Thanksgiving was so late this year. And the rain. And the economy. And...

[xchrom]

97. the older i get -- bad weather and lack of sunlight drags on me more & more.

sorry about your shoulders and back -- i can imagine those papers being very heavy now.

take care of your self as best as you can.

[Tansy_Gold]

98. I agree completely

And I'm in an area that gets 340+ days of sunshine a year. We had rain and cold and gloom all day yesterday and i was ready to climb the walls!

Sunshine today, though still cold, but that sunshine makes all the difference. Well, okay, not all, but a lot!

[xchrom]

99. hi miss tansy -- i saw your wonderful stuff up thread --

:hi: just fabulous!

[Tansy_Gold]

107. Oh, thank you, X!

Doing my part to keep the consumer economy booming!

[xchrom]

89. India 'suspends' plan to open up to global supermarkets

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16018664

India's government is reported to have put on hold plans to open up the retail market to global supermarket chains.

Just days after approving long-awaited proposals to raise the limits on foreign investment, a government ally said he had been told the policy was suspended.

The decision to allow chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India has sparked fierce opposition.

Critics fear the move would destroy millions of jobs and businesses.


***ok -- a win for now.

[Demeter]

92. India Doesn't Have Enough Banksters in Government

and/or the banksters don't have enough dirt on their politicians...

[DemReadingDU]

90. Ilargi at TAE: We have a choice to make: either we save the banks, or we save our societies.

12/2/11

Ilargi: It's very simple, but maybe that's the problem. For all I know it's just too simple for people to see.

There's a group of people, and it's tempting to call them the 1%, but they’re not really, since there’s politicians in there too who have no shot at even aspiring to be part of the 1%, and media pundits and economists and what have you, who all together try to save the existing financial system at all cost. A cost that they don't bear: that cost is being paid for by the 99%.

Theirs is just one particular view, one particular idea, of what it takes to get out of the crisis we're in. Nothing more, nothing less: just one idea. But one that prevails over any alternatives to such a radical extent that, from an objective point of view, it can't but boggle the mind.

"If we don't save the banks and the financial system at large, there'll be Armageddon to pay". That's the endlessly repeated prevailing line.

However, if we keep on spending ever more trillions to prevent Armageddon from arriving, surely we must invite it, by the very act of doing exactly that, to at some point come knocking on the back door. After all, you can't spend more and more, and then some, without ever being served with the bill for doing so.

So we’ve had all these rescue missions over the past 5 years. Behemoth-sized amounts of taxpayer money and future taxpayer money have been poured into our economies in this alleged attempt to try and save them.

Now, take a step back and tell me what you see. I'll tell you what I see: a financial system that is in worse shape than ever before during those 5 years. At least half of Europe is flat broke, most banks have lost 50%-80% of their market value, Bank of America, a major bailout recipient, is fast on its way to becoming a penny stock, China sees shrinkage wherever it looks and Japan is rumored to be awkwardly close to the chopping block.

Evidently, something's not working the way it's supposed to.

And here is why: it is becoming clearer by the day that saving the banks is not the same as saving the people, upon whom increasing austerity is unleashed to pay for ... saving the banks.

We have a choice to make: either we save the banks, or we save our societies. Which are falling apart as we speak on account of the costs of saving an already deeply bankrupt financial system.

But we're not even starting to discuss that choice. All choices and decisions are being made -for us- in a one-dimensional vacuum theater by a small group of people who, to a (wo)man, flatly deny that such a choice needs to be made or even exists. Because making that choice doesn't fit their purposes and careers and fortunes and ego's.

Merkel, Blankfein, Sarkozy, Jamie Dimon, Obama, David Cameron, Mario Draghi and Timothy Geithner, they are all servants of the existing financial system, of the existing banks, which are broke but try to hide that from us. At our debilitating expense.

Yes, they've been able to stave off the inevitable until now. But that has only been possible because they have virtually unlimited access to your money, to the wallets of the 99%.

We should grow up and make these decisions ourselves, instead of letting a group of morally severely challenged suits with very vested interests make them for us any longer.

They're leading us straight into Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell. And last I heard, that's definitely not a place to raise your kids.
.
.
.

Following Ilargi's commentary is a 2nd commentary by Ashvin Pandurangi: The Debt Walkers Strike Back

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-2-2011-debt-walkers-strike.html


Edit:
IMO, I think the choice has been made by the elites to save the banks first (by stealing our money). And for now, that plan is working just fine, for the elites. But because societies weren't saved first, eventually there will also bring the downfall of the banks and many of the elites too.

[Demeter]

93. That's what happens when a Faulty Principle Overrides People

People get hurt, get mad, get violent, and the faulty principle gets a war going.

Corporations DO NOT come first. Rule # 1.

[bread_and_roses]

96. yep. (n/t)

[Demeter]

94. Hey, everybody, I'm pooped

See you next weekend...got a topic?

[xchrom]

102. i don't have a topic -- but i'm vibing good wishes at ya for the week!

:toast:

[Demeter]

95. 'Financial terrorists behind EU crisis' Max Keiser on PressTV

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9bbMckQUOM&feature=player_embedded

[Hotler]

104. Shoot them????

Drag them out of their cushy offices and shoot them in the street. Wow!

[DemReadingDU]

109. Spouse wonders why someone hasn't already done this

I think it has to do with the 50 million (that's 1 in 6 Americans) getting food stamps which keep people from getting hungry. When food disappears, there will be hungry desperate people. Desperate people will do desperate things.

[Demeter]

110. It takes a bankster

to shoot a bankster

[xchrom]

101. Modest Bonus Year on Wall St., but Stock Could Yield Fortunes

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/modest-bonus-year-on-wall-st-but-stock-could-yield-fortunes/

Buffeted by lackluster profits and turmoil in the global markets, Wall Street is bracing for one of the worst bonus seasons in recent memory. But in the alchemy of high finance, bankers are hoping to turn the slump to their advantage.

Financial firms are preparing to dole out huge amounts of stock at depressed prices, the value of which could rise substantially in a few years.

“This year is the perfect situation where they can say it is a modest bonus season, but in the end, it could end up making many of them zillionaires,” said Jonathan R. Macey, a professor of corporate law and finance at Yale. ”Not all banks may do well in the long run, but most will.”

[AnneD]

103. Hope for dark times...How can I keep from singing

My life goes on in endless song
Above earth's lamentations,
I hear the real, though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation.

Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear it's music ringing,
It sounds an echo in my soul.
How can I keep from singing?

While though the tempest loudly roars,
I hear the truth, it liveth.
And though the darkness 'round me close,
Songs in the night it giveth.

No storm can shake my inmost calm,
While to that rock I'm clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear their death knell ringing,
When friends rejoice both far and near
How can I keep from singing?

In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging,
When friends by shame are undefiled
How can I keep from singing?

[Hotler]

105. I'm trying to see some hope. I really am.

Sometimes I feel disconnected from my spirituality.

[AnneD]

106. Some gentle advice...

For a troubled spirit,

Never let anyone steal your joy. When they steal your joy, you lose hope.

[bread_and_roses]

108. "RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!"

Alice Walker, "Possessing the Secret of Joy"

[Hotler]

111. Thank you. n/t