Corporate Welfare at the Expense of Everything Else
August 3rd, 2009Via: Solari:
What we are watching price out through the political process is life vs. death. More specifically, the financial value of the life and death of various groups and ages of people vs. the life and death of large banks and corporations.
In a market economy, if a person’s skills become outdated, the theory is that they will be encouraged by their need to generate income to learn new skills or change.
If a large bank or corporation can no longer generate revenues to cover its operations, likewise the theory says that it will change. Management will invent new products and services, cut expenses, renegotiate with creditors through bankruptcy or shut down.
However, in a bubble, the people and the corporations and banks all avoid change by going to the government and coming up with thousands of ways to keep their operations afloat using government funds so they do not have to change– government programs, subsidies, contracts, credit, guarantees, regulations and so forth. This is why I start my case study on how the system really works with that old New Jersey street saying – “Make a law, make a business.”
Changing the laws, however, does not change the real world where fundamental productivity continues to count. So over the last twelve months, after many bubbles, there was not enough for everyone. So we made a decision to shift most, if not all, of our remaining resources to the large banks and corporations.
What this means is that if people do not need the products and services of the banks and corporations, rather than let them die, we are going to use government and central banks to simply take money from people to keep a bank or corporation alive without customers or markets.
So the institutions created to serve markets are deemed to have lives of their own that justify subsidizing them even if the markets are gone. Government can guarantee markets even when customers have no money to buy goods and services and taxpayers can not afford to pay taxes.
Big banks and corporations are guaranteed life. In addition, there is no prison or death penalty for big banks and corporations as a result of their bad behavior, including when it causes the death of people. So their life is infinite.
To pay for this we must take resources from people — with taxes, with fees, with inflation, with lower benefits and with legal and economic warfare. If they do not go along, we can send them to prison or inflict the death penalty.
Hence, an overview of a series of policies is emerging from Wall Street and Washington which is crystal clear.
People will die so that corporations and banks without retail markets, customers or purpose can live richly, although not anywhere near as richly as the invisible forces that hide behind them.
Research Credit: efs
A Scene from a Los Angeles Freeway On Ramp
August 3rd, 2009I like it, but the artist botches the job by using “socialism” as the tagline. When I think of socialism, I think of the Scandinavian countries. While I don’t find those models socialism desirable, by a lot of measures, those countries are pretty good places to live. The U.S., on the other hand, suffers under a state of quasi fascism that was hatched by a corporate oligarchy. What’s the difference? Besides the appearances, which vary widely, U.S. fascism is characterized by a zombie-like quest for corporate profits. The wars and atrocities are by-products. It’s not a racial struggle, either, as is usually the case with fascism. It’s just business. Obviously, it’s more complicated than that, but there’s not a lot to be gained by splitting hairs at this late stage of the game.
Feel free to split hairs in the comments, if you can be bothered. (Your time would probably be much better spent getting clear of the mobs that will kill each other over the bullshit they believe once the state fails.)
Hmm. I would have liked it much better with Hank Paulson as The Joker, but hardly anyone would know who they were looking at. I’d guess that Hank likes it that way.
Via: Wizbang:
Detroit: Feral Houses
August 2nd, 2009Must see.
Via: Sweet Juniper:
I’ve seen “feral” used to describe dogs, cats, even goats. But I have wondered if it couldn’t also be used to describe certain houses in Detroit. Abandoned houses are really no big deal here. Some estimate that there are as many as 10,000 abandoned structures at any given time, and that seems conservative. But for a few beautiful months during the summer, some of these houses become “feral” in every sense: they disappear behind ivy or the untended shrubs and trees planted generations ago to decorate their yards. The wood that framed the rooms gets crushed by trees rooted still in the earth. The burnt lime, sand, gravel, and plaster slowly erode into dust, encouraged by ivy spreading tentacles in its endless search for more sunlight.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
Sibel Edmonds: Bin Laden Worked for U.S. Until 9/11
August 1st, 2009Via: Brad Blog:
“I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban – those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.”
Off Topic: Calculate Digital Roots of Close Prices in EasyLanguage
August 1st, 2009I wanted to plot the digital roots of close prices in MultiCharts/EasyLanguage. For example, a close is 1.29. That is: 1+2+9 = 12, then 1+2 = 3. The result is 3.
It took me awhile to figure out how to implement the modulo operation properly in EasyLanguage, but I did it and I thought I’d share it in case some other maniac out there is looking to do the same thing.
Here, I assign it to a variable:
var0 = 1+MOD(((Close*100)-1),9) ;
Note: I multiply by 100 to get rid of the decimal.
Hat tip to Kardi Teknomo, PhD for his great Digital Root page and tutorials.
CALIFORNIA’S MORTGAGE DEFAULT RATE SOARS TO 9.5%
July 31st, 2009Via: Los Angeles Times:
About 1 in 10 Californians with a home loan is now in default, and there’s growing evidence that the mortgage meltdown is spreading to commercial real estate.
The home mortgage delinquency rate — the percentage of borrowers who have missed several payments and are in the first stage of foreclosure — climbed in June to 9.5% in California and 9.9% in Los Angeles County, according to First American CoreLogic.
The staggering number of home mortgage defaults probably will lead to large numbers of foreclosures through at least this year, housing experts say.
Pushed by Recession, Millions Make Dramatic Job Changes
July 31st, 2009Via: USA Today:
The automotive industry was the only life Ed Wozniak knew. As a teenager, he would take apart vintage cars, soup them up and put them back together in a weekend. His father was a machine repairman, and Wozniak got an apprenticeship doing similar work for Chrysler.
But in late 2007, after he took a buyout to avoid his second layoff in five years, the 17-year veteran had enough. At 35, he started classes at a Michigan university and is now an intensive care nurse earning about $55,000, far less than his former annual pay of $80,000.
“I thought it was always going to be a struggle from here on out, with people cutting back and foreign automakers coming in,” says Wozniak, of Royal Oak, Mich. “It was time to move on.”
Millions of Americans are making dramatic career turnabouts in this withering recession as a range of industries — including those involving cars, finance, real estate and construction — are shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of which analysts say likely won’t return for years, if ever. Meanwhile, fields such as health care, clean energy, computer science and the government are expected to grow robustly in coming years.
The reshuffling has workers in shrinking sectors racing to retool for spots in expanding fields. Transitions can be arduous, often forcing the unemployed to spend thousands of dollars to acquire new skills and take pay cuts in their new slots. And there’s no guarantee of a job.
Recession Worse Than Prior Estimates, Revisions Show
July 31st, 2009Can we get some green shoots in here? What’s that? Tim and Ben said to charge em? Oh ok!
Via: Bloomberg:
The first 12 months of the U.S. recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated, reflecting even bigger declines in consumer spending and housing, revised figures showed.
The world’s largest economy contracted 1.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the last three months of 2008, compared with the 0.8 percent drop previously on the books, the Commerce Department said today in Washington.
“The current downturn beginning in 2008 is more pronounced,” Steven Landefeld, director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, said in a press briefing this week. The revisions were in line with past experience in which initial figures tended to underestimate the severity of contractions during their early stages, he said.
The updated statistics also showed that Americans earned more over the last 10 years and socked away a larger share of that cash in savings. The report signals the process of repairing tattered balance sheets following the biggest drop in household wealth on record may be further along than anticipated.
Spending Slumps
Consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy, decreased 1.8 percent in last year’s fourth quarter from the same period in 2007, exceeding the prior estimate of a 1.5 percent drop. Purchases also began sinking sooner than previously projected, registering their first decline at the start of 2008 rather than in the second half.
Treasuries headed higher after the report, while stock- index futures declined. Benchmark 10-year note yields were at 3.58 percent at 8:51 a.m. in New York, from 3.61 percent late yesterday. Contracts on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index were down 0.3 percent at 979.
Residential construction fell 21 percent during the period, almost 2 percentage points more than previously reported, aggravating what was already the worst slump since the Great Depression.
The Commerce Department also reported today that the economy contracted at a 1 percent annual rate from April through June after shrinking at a 6.4 percent pace in the first quarter, the most since 1982. The decline in the first three months of the year was previously reported as 5.5 percent.
Town Halls Gone Wild
July 31st, 2009Via: Politico:
Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.
On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.
“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”
In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry.
Within an hour of the disruption, police were called in to escort the 59-year-old Democrat — who has held more than 100 town hall meetings since he was elected in 2002 — to his car safely.
Research Credit: BC
Afghanistan: U.S. Surgeons Drafted in as British Medics Exhausted by Casualty Surge
July 31st, 2009Well, nobody said that a turf war over opium was going to be a walk in the park.
Via: Times Online:
The surge in British casualties in Afghanistan has left military surgeons so exhausted that a US surgical team has been drafted in to help.
The British doctors have also been overwhelmed with casualties from other nations, including US Marines, Afghan troops and civilians.
Extra British plastic surgeons have had to be sent to the field hospital at Camp Bastion in central Helmand along with additional X-ray technicians and specialist nurses.
The Ministry of Defence revealed that 57 soldiers had been wounded in action in the first two weeks of this month, the worst casualty figure since British troops deployed to Helmand province in 2006. The previous highest toll of those injured, 46, was in June — but that was for the whole month. In the same two-week period, 15 soldiers were killed.
