Monday, June 10, 2013
Sunday, June 9, 2013
TARP Bailout Funds To Be Used To Throw Out Vacant Michigan Homes
At a cost of about $25,000 each, the $100 million would demolish just 4,000 of Michigan's roughly 50,000 vacant properties. That doesn't make any sense.
Story here.
Author Of Patriot Act Says Obama Is Abusing It
Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin in the UK Guardian, here:
The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law. ... In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as "two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress". But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting. ... The president should immediately direct his administration to stop abusing the US constitution.
To Republicans Like Mike Rogers, These Are Just Words
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Republican Mike Rogers Doesn't Have A Clue How We Feel About The 4th Amendment
Republican Mike Rogers is completely alienated from the original spirit of the Fourth Amendment animating the Tea Party in Michigan and across the country, here this morning:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) had harsh words for the still-unnamed leaker and for the journalist who first reported the NSA’s collection of phone records, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.
“He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works; ne[i]ther did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous,” Rogers said, adding, “I absolutely think [the leaker] should be prosecuted.”
Nolan Finley Of The Detroit News Wants To Junk The IRS, And The Income Tax
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| THIS IS NOT NOLAN FINLEY |
Here:
"[R]eplace the income tax with a national sales tax. You’d pay tax on the money you spend instead of the money you earn. That would eliminate the need for an IRS that audits tax returns, hands out non-profit status and enforces a tax code that is egregiously complex and unfair. If the national sales tax isn’t the answer, then a similar outcome might be achieved by drastically lowering current income tax rates in exchange for eliminating all deductions and credits. With no reason to examine returns, the IRS could be much smaller. Without auditing power, it’d be less intimidating."
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Why not do both? A low flat sales tax and a low flat income tax? We already have one flat tax, called Social Security. And we already pay an average state sales tax of 5+% everywhere. Just abolish the income tax and augment the current flat Payroll Tax with the new one. Business everywhere is already set up to collect that and withhold, so dovetailing that with a corporate flat tax should also be easy to do. Presto. No IRS needed for America's 151 million wage earners and the millions of businesses who employ them.
Herman Cain's more or less revenue neutral 999 plan looks better and better with every passing day of the IRS scandal targeting Obama's political enemies: a flat 9% federal sales tax, a flat 9% tax on all income, and a flat 9% corporate income tax.
A man before his time.
Food Stamp Households Up, Not Persons, Can Only Mean One Thing
Smaller households.
Food stamp recipient numbers surged up again in March 2013 to 47.727 million Americans, but this did not break the record as claimed by Drudge and Zero Hedge headlines.
The record was reached in December 2012 at 47.792 million.
Zero Hedge is making the claim based on the number of households, not the number of persons. The only thing the former statistic might prove is that as the country becomes more single it becomes more poor. Marriage and family is the economic engine of capitalism, and Obama aims to destroy them both. He's succeeding, which is why Rush Limbaugh famously hoped Obama would fail.
Persons on SNAP have been at the 47 million level since August 2012.
Data here.
Obama Biographies Deliberately Omitted That His Mentor Was A Flaming Communist
Including for the Associated Press, and both biographies by John Meacham and David Remnick.
Herbert Meyer, here:
For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign, the Associated Press ran two articles about Obama's life in Hawaii, one specifically about Frank [Marshall Davis]. The AP described him to voters desperate for insight about the Democratic candidate merely as an advocate of "civil rights amid segregation" and a crusader for the U.S. Constitution. The only Frank quote the AP offered its readers -- chosen from decades of vicious, anti-American newspaper columns Frank wrote in Hawaii -- was this: "I refuse to settle for anything less than all the rights which are due me under the Constitution."
Newsweek's John Meacham told readers only that Frank wrote about "civil rights and labor issues." David Remnick, who wrote for The Washington Post, who now is editor of The New Yorker, and who authored The Bridge, which to date is perhaps the most comprehensive biography of our president, managed to completely ignore Frank's communist ideology and told readers only that Frank "wrote fierce columns about the suppression of unions, conditions on the plantation, the power of oligarchic Hawaiian families, race relations." Somehow, this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist failed to notice -- or chose to ignore -- Frank's incendiary, near-treasonous columns blasting Harry Truman and the Marshall Plan, accusing the U.S. of trying to re-Nazify Germany, and defending the Soviet Union at every turn.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Top Secret FISA Order Revealed By Glenn Greenwald Was 80th THIS YEAR
According to William Binney, quoted here:
The National Security Agency’s collection of phone data from all of Verizon’s U.S. customers is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says a former NSA official who estimates the agency has data on as many as 20 trillion phone calls and emails by U.S. citizens. ...
Britain’s Guardian newspaper posted online late Wednesday a copy of the “Top Secret” FISA court order directing telecommunications giant Verizon to hand over “metadata” about every call made or received by all of its customers in the United States. Such metadata include the calling and receiving phone numbers, the time of day and length of the call, and the whereabouts of the two parties.
Mr. Binney noted the order’s serial number, which indicates it is the 80th issued by the FISA court so far this year. The court likely has approved similar orders for the other major U.S. telecom providers, he said, “and they have to be renewed every 90 days.”
NSA Copies Everything Off AT&T Fiberoptic Network In Switching Centers Nationwide
In 2003, according to sworn testimony by a former AT&T engineer, the NSA began building a special room at the company’s switching center in San Francisco and at other AT&T switching centers around the country. Equipment in the room enabled NSA to siphon off a copy of every byte of data running through AT&T’s fiber-optic cable network, according to privacy advocates.
Glenn Greenwald Channels The Utopian Edward Bellamy
From his latest in the UK Guardian, here:
"We followed Wednesday's story about the NSA's bulk telephone record-gathering with one yesterday about the agency's direct access to the servers of the world's largest internet companies. I don't have time at the moment to address all of the fallout because - to borrow someone else's phrase - I'm Looking Forward to future revelations that are coming (and coming shortly), not Looking Backward to ones that have already come."
The US Dollar Has Tanked Since Bernanke Spoke Before Congress On May 22nd
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| THE US DOLLAR BREAKOUT ABOVE 84 HAS FAILED FOR NOW. |
The dollar has fallen 3.15% since May 22nd when Bernanke opened his big yap and went off-script in front of Congress, hinting at a tapering off of QE in the near future.
The dollar closed at 84.35 on May 22nd and closed yesterday at 81.69.
When just words can tank fiat bonds and fiat dollars, isn't it time to pay our respects once again to Article 1, Section 10?
Still Think You Can Predict Bond Market Sell-Off? You're Already A Month Late.
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| NAV of total bond market is already down almost 2% in a month. |
So says James B. Stewart here in The New York Times, who notes Bill Gross of PIMCO fame manages a corporate bond/MBS fund which is already down well over 10%:
The sell-off in fixed income began slowly on May 10, an otherwise uneventful day with no obvious catalyst for any change in sentiment. It picked up steam when Fed sources didn’t step forward to calm markets. Then, in comments to Congress on May 22, Mr. Bernanke said, “We could in the next few meetings take a step down in our pace of purchases.”
That set off alarm bells, in contrast with his prepared text, which gave no suggestion that the Fed’s policy would change so soon. And then, the minutes of the Fed’s May meeting suggested that some Fed governors were prepared to start tapering off bond purchases as soon as the Fed’s next meeting, which will be June 18 and 19. Near-panic selling in some markets ensued.
. . . the simplest and safest approach [may be] simply to park funds in a low-volatility money market fund and accept near-zero returns.
Friday, June 7, 2013
"Americans For A Conservative Direction" Isn't Conservative: It's A Mark Zuckerberg/Jeb Bush BiPartisan Front Group Trying To Ram Immigration Reform Down Our Throats
Breitbart had the story on May 7th, here, and the radio ads from "Americans For A Conservative Direction", which run incessantly during Rush Limbaugh's program, have gone through at least one major makeover which removes the recorded voices of Sen. Rubio and Rep. Ryan.
Wake up people: "Republican" does not mean "conservative", and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame and fan of Barack Obama is the last person on earth I would think of when I'm asked to name a conservative.
You are being manipulated and lulled to sleep in order to pass a bill which will only favor Democrats and hurt Americans looking for jobs.
Republicans who are bipartisan are selling us down the river.
Unemployment Ticks Up To 7.6% In May
Average jobs added per month ticks up to 172,000 from 169,000 in last month's report.
The latest from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is here.
Unemployment in America has been above 7% since December 2008: 54 months. If Obama keeps this up he can beat the original Teflon president's string of 61 months of unemployment at 7% or above from December 1980 through December 1985.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Lying ObamaCare Lies And The Liberals Who Tell Them
ObamaCare will force you to buy more expensive coverage than you willingly do now, according to this Wall Street Journal op-ed, here:
Liberals have spent years claiming that "rate shock" under the Affordable Care Act—the 20% to 30% average spike in insurance premiums that every independent analyst projects—is merely the political imagination of Republicans and the insurance industry. So they immediately claimed victory when California reported last month that the plans that will be available on the state's new insurance exchange next year would be cheaper than they are today.
Except now it emerges that California goosed the data to make it appear as if ObamaCare won't send costs aloft as the law's regulations and mandates kick in. It will, by a lot. And now liberals have suddenly switched to arguing that, sure, insurance will be more expensive but the new costs are justified. Needless to say that was not how Democrats sold health-care reform.
California reported that the rates would range from 2% above to 29% below the current market. "This is a home run for consumers in every region of California," said Peter Lee, the director of the state exchange. "These rates are way below the worst-case gloom-and-doom scenarios we have heard."
"It's not a recovery. It's not even normal growth. It's bad."
The country's tepid growth in its gross domestic product isn't creating enough good jobs to build a strong middle class, according to a UCLA report released Wednesday. ...
Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer . . ..
"It's not a recovery," he wrote. "It's not even normal growth. It's bad." ...
Young adults are facing staggering student loan debt that will force them to put off buying homes until later in life, said senior economist David Shulman.
Outstanding student loans have tripled since 2004, according to Federal Reserve Bank figures. In 2012, public and private student loan levels reached $966 billion.
"Never before have so many young people been saddled with so much non-mortgage debt, and that burden will keep them out of the home buying market for years to come," Shulman wrote.
Honest Liberal Calls This The Worst Consumer Recession In Modern History
Stephen Roach of Yale University, here, points out that the rate of growth in personal consumption is just 25% of what it used to be:
Over the 21 quarters since the beginning of 2008, real (inflation-adjusted) personal consumption has risen at an average annual rate of just 0.9%. That is by far the most protracted period of weakness in real US consumer demand since the end of World War II – and a massive slowdown from the pre-crisis pace of 3.6% annual real consumption growth from 1996 to 2007. ...
[T]he release of pent-up demand in the current cycle amounted to just 3% annualized growth in the five quarters from early 2010 to early 2011. Moreover, the strongest quarterly gain was a 4.1% increase in the fourth quarter of 2010.
This is a stunning result. The worst consumer recession in modern history, featuring a record collapse in durable-goods expenditures in 2008-2009, should have triggered an outsize surge of pent-up demand. Yet it did anything but that. Instead, the release of pent-up consumer demand was literally half that of previous business cycles.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Obama The Marxist Thinks The Middle Class Is His Greatest And Most Dangerous Enemy
"The most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat."
"The greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution."
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Impose a dearth of ammo for their guns, mediocritize their healthcare, impoverish them with unemployment, make them servile with food stamps and disability payments, destroy their incentive to save with artificially low interest rates, spy on them with cameras, wire taps, drones and email intercepts, make it too expensive to travel, or too humiliating, dumb them down with inadequate public school educations, reduce them to the level of the gutter in their speech and morals through ridicule of all standards of public discourse and thinking, and destroy all traditional conceptions in institutions from the Boy Scouts to the US military. Politicize everything, but threaten the wrong politics with the power of the State. Anesthetize with drugs. Make them hate the rich so they stop trying to be so. Meanwhile, party, and spend their money like it's never been spent before.
IRS Casts Wide Net Full Of 88 Employees In Scandal, One Claiming DC In Charge
CNN had the stories here on Friday:
The Internal Revenue Service has told House GOP investigators they have identified 88 IRS employees who may have documents relevant to the congressional investigation into targeting of conservative groups, according to a congressional source familiar with the investigation.
And here on Sunday:
One Cincinnati IRS employee interviewed by the Oversight Committee rejects the White House assertion (that the Cincinnati office was responsible) and points to Washington as being responsible for targeting effort (from 5/30 interview):
Q In early 2010, was there a time when you became aware of applications that referenced Tea Party or other conservative groups?
A In March of 2010, I was made aware.
******
Q Okay. Now, was there a point around this time period when [your supervisor] asked you to do a search for similar applications?
A Yes.
Q To the best of your recollection, when was this request made?
A Sometime in early March of 2010.
******
Q Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search, any more context?
A He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases.
******
Q So as of April 2010, these 40 cases were held at that moment in your group; is that right?
A Some were.
Q How many were held there?
A Less than 40. Some went to Washington, D.C.
Q Okay. How many went to Washington, D.C.?
A I sent seven.
******
Q So you prepared seven hard copy versions of the applications to go to Washington, D.C.?
A Correct.
******
Q Did he give you any sort of indication as to why he requested you to do that?
[…]
A He said Washington, D.C. wanted seven. Because at one point I believe I heard they were thinking 10, but it came down to seven. I said okay, seven.
Q How did you decide which seven were sent?
A Just the first seven.
Q The first seven to come into the system?
A Yes.
*****
IRS' Lois Lerner Speedily Approved Obama's Brother's Charity, Retroactively 3 Years
Story here:
Nevertheless, a month later, the Barack H. Obama Foundation had flown through the grueling application process. Lerner granted the organization a 501(c) determination and even gave it a retroactive tax exemption dating back to December 2008.
The group’s available paperwork suggests an extremely hurried application and approval process. For example, the group’s 990 filings for 2008 and 2009 were submitted to the IRS on May 30, 2011, and its 2010 filing was submitted on May 23, 2011.
Lerner signed the group’s approval on June 26, 2011.
It is illegal to operate for longer than 27 months without an IRS determination and solicit tax-deductible contributions.
How To Destroy The Bourgeoisie: Swell The Proletariat, One Latino At A Time
“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”
-- President Obama, quoted here October 25, 2010
Obama Is Eliminating The Middle Class, But Do You Know Why?
Based on how thorough-going are Obama's attacks on the middle class, I'd say it's all intentional, something the professor would not dare say if he wants to keep his career, so I'll say it for him since I don't have a career to save.
His immigration policy swells the ranks of visa-holders in skill-short areas like engineering as well as the ranks of semi-skilled immigrant workers, frustrating the middle-class aspirations of the working poor born in this country.
His massive expansion of student loans permits universities to jack up tuition . . . Students are graduating encumbered by massive debt and too few marketable skills. Broke and unemployed, they are not marrying and starting families—that shrinks the middle class.
Despite the availability of loans, skyrocketing tuition mandates ever greater family contributions to finance college. This puts higher education further out of reach for many working class families, and fewer low income children are pursuing post-secondary education than in the past—that shrinks the middle class too.
The President has jacked up taxes on families earning more than $250,000. Unfortunately, most businesses in America are either proprietorships or pass through corporations that pay those higher individual, as opposed to corporate, tax rates, raising the cost of investing and expanding businesses—that spells fewer jobs for the middle class and those that aspire to its ranks.
Unable to push through Congress limits on CO2 emissions, President Obama has used executive orders and the EPA to impose limits by fiat. Unfortunately, those raise manufacturing costs, China has no such limits, and all this encourages business to outsource in China—again fewer jobs for the middle class and aspiring middle class.
Free trade agreements that permit trading partners to undervalue their currencies, subsidize exports and artificially under price their products on U.S. store shelves, health care mandates that raise the price of insuring employees instead of controlling costs, unnecessarily cumbersome regulations to run factories, mindless limits on developing U.S. oil reserves, and exporting abundant natural gas to countries that shut out U.S. products with high tariffs all encourage outsourcing, not just in manufacturing but for many supporting services too—yet again, fewer jobs for middle class Americans.
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“The lower middle-class,” in Marx’s words, “has no special class interests. Its liberation does not entail a break with the system of private property. Being unfitted for an independent part in the class struggle, it considers every decisive class struggle a blow at the community. The conditions of his own personal freedom, which do not entail a departure from the system of private property, are, in the eyes of the member of the lower middle-class, those under which the whole of society can be saved.”
And this is the very reason why the lower middle-class masses are the most dangerous enemies of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They represent a very strong section of society. Their special interests are absolutely incompatible with the economic disturbances which are the inevitable accompaniment of transitional periods.
The disturbance of credit cuts the ground from under their feet. They begin shouting for order, for the strengthening of credit, in such a way that every concession to them leads in effect to a complete restoration of the old order. ...
[Marx] wished to separate the Labour movement from all lower middle class elements, because the lower middle class attitude — attachment to the idea of private property, more or less open striving to uphold credit, terror of every fundamental social disturbance — is in practice the greatest internal enemy of the proletariat and the proletarian revolution.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
By 2008, IRS' 40ish Shulman No Longer Considered Himself Much Of A Midwesterner
Mlive.com had the story in 2008, here, capturing the Ohioan's distance from the heartland after years spent at Williams, Harvard and Georgetown, and in New York City:
Shulman, who grew up in Ohio, said Kalamazoo has a "neat downtown. Kalamazoo is a great town," he said. "I like the Midwest. I like down-to-earth people."
Saturday, June 1, 2013
CBS' Money Watch Should Be Crucified For This Erroneous Headline
If the author of the story, here, had bothered to read from the annual report of the St. Louis Federal Reserve to which he refers, and which adjusted the household net worth numbers for population growth and inflation from 2007, he would have observed that the maximum extent of the decline from which we have recovered 45% was something close to 27%. The helpful folks at the St. Louis Fed even provided a nice graph to make it easy to understand.
So, our net worth was never down 55% in the first place, and the anemic recovery we have experienced under Obama has brought us up only 45% from the 27% decline to which we had fallen. The dunderhead, no different from Rush Limbaugh nor any average high school graduate for the last forty years, incorrectly subtracted the 45% improvement from 100 to get 55, which shows he never learned the simplest thing about percentages in school.
As the graph clearly shows, we're still down about 15%, adjusted for population growth and inflation.
Here's the math: What's 45% of 27%? Answer: about 12 percentage points. Subtract 12 from 27 and you get 15 (85 on the graph at the left--add 15 to 85 and you get 100!).
Magic.
Harrisburg PA Securities Fraud Just The Tip Of The Government Bond Fraud Iceberg
"Misleading public statements"? "Incomplete information"? Gee, isn't that the same fraud our elected officials specialize in these days, from an IRS official pleading the Fifth Amendment while asserting she's innocent to a Secretary of State stonewalling with "What difference does it make?" how someone who reported to her died?
Steven Malanga for The Wall Street Journal here:
With Harrisburg, however, the SEC has gone further and charged the city government with "securities fraud for its misleading public statements when its financial condition was deteriorating and financial information available to municipal bond investors was either incomplete or outdated." The SEC says this is the first time the regulator has "charged a municipality for misleading statements made outside of its securities disclosure documents."
The Harrisburg charges are part of a broader SEC effort to scrutinize state and local government issuers in the nation's $3 trillion municipal-bond market. "Anyone who follows municipal finance knows that budgets can sometimes be a work of fiction," says Anthony Figliola, a vice president at Empire Government Strategies, a Long Island-based consulting firm to local governments. "Harrisburg is the tip of the iceberg."
Friday, May 31, 2013
Gold/Oil ratio ends week at 15.14, and gold loses its relative advantage to oil
The edge goes back to oil, which, however, is probably going to keep declining in price, so there's no rush, especially since oil not that long ago had enjoyed an impressive "buy" relative to gold.
TSA Claims All Nude Scanners Now Gone
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| Nice belt! |
Story here:
"[A]s of May 16, all US airports scanners equipped with the ability to produce the penetrating images will now only show a generic outline of a passenger to the operator."
Sorry Charlie, Household Net Worth Remains In Depression: Still 15% Off 2007 Peak
From the newly issued 2012 annual report of the St. Louis Federal Reserve here, taking the nominal figures in the March Z.1 Flow of Funds Release of the Federal Reserve and adjusting them both for inflation and population growth since 2007:
"Clearly, the 91 percent recovery of wealth losses portrayed by the aggregate nominal measure paints a different picture than the 45 percent recovery of wealth losses indicated by the average inflation-adjusted household measure. Considering the uneven recovery of wealth across households, a conclusion that the financial damage of the crisis and recession largely has been repaired is not justified."
Completed Foreclosures Still Running 148% Higher Than Normal
According to Corelogic's monthly foreclosure report, here, completed foreclosure activity is still running at a rate of 52,000 per month in April, down from 62,000 per month a year earlier.
The average monthly rate before the financial panic, however, was 21,000 per month, making the current rate, though improved, nearly 148% higher than was the case in the years between 2000 and 2006.
But don't worry, everyone says things are better now and housing has recovered.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
GDP For Q1 2013 Revised Down To 2.4% From 2.5% In Second Estimate
From the report of the Bureau of Economic Analysis, here:
Real gross domestic product -- the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States -- increased at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the first quarter of 2013 (that is, from the fourth quarter to the first quarter), according to the "second" estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the fourth quarter, real GDP increased 0.4 percent.
To put the second estimate of Q1 2013 real GDP in context, a real rate of growth of 2.4% now is just slightly ahead of the average report of 2.23% during George W. Bush's first term in office. But compared to Barack Obama's first term, it's a world of difference from his performance in his first term with a paltry 0.83% average report.
That said, it used to be the opinion of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, back in July 2009 that we needed 2.5% growth just to keep the jobless rate constant. That's why under Bush it took so long for jobs to recover after 911. And it's why jobs are taking so long to recover now. With growth of just 2.4%, going forward all we can expect is the current level of unemployment. And you can forget about putting the millions who lost their jobs in the recent financial panic back to work in decent jobs, maybe ever.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Price Discovery In Health Care
The past is the future: Doctor in Maine stops taking insurance, cuts prices in half and posts them online.
Story here.
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