STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 5 May 2015

[Tansy_Gold]

[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Tuesday, 5 May 2015[font color=black][/font]

SMW for 4 May 2015

AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 4 May 2015
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Dow Jones 18,070.40 +46.34 (0.26%)
S&P 500 2,114.49 +6.20 (0.29%)
Nasdaq 5,016.93 +11.54 (0.23%)


[font color=red]10 Year 2.14% +0.05 (2.39%)
30 Year 2.88% +0.07 (2.49%) [font color=black]


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[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
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(click on link for latest updates)
Market Updates
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[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]

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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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The Big Picture
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Essential Reading:[/font][/font]
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Matt Taibi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout


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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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LegitGov
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
Charlie Rose talks with Krugman
William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
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[font color=red]Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 [/font][font color=red]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
8/22/12 Doug Whitman, Whitman Capital LLC hedge fund founder, convicted of insider trading following a trial in which he spent more than two days on the stand telling jurors he was innocent
10/26/12 UPDATE: Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta sentenced to two years in federal prison. He will, of course, appeal. . .
11/20/12 Hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma charged with insider trading at SAC Capital Advisors, and prosecutors are looking at Martoma's boss, Steven Cohen, for possible involvement.
02/14/13 Gilbert Lopez, former chief accounting officer of Stanford Financial Group, and former controller Mark Kuhrt sentenced to 20 yrs in prison for their roles in Allen Sanford's $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
03/29/13 Michael Sternberg, portfolio mgr at SAC Capital, arrested in NYC, charged with conspiracy and securities fraud. Pled not guilty and freed on $3m bail.
04/04/13 Matthew Marshall Taylor,fmr Goldman Sachs trader arrested, charged by CFTC w/defrauding his employer on $8BN futures bet "by intentionally concealing the true huge size, as well as the risk and potential profits or losses associated."
04/04/13 Matthew Taylor admits guilt, makes plea bargain. Sentencing set for 26 June; faces up to 20 years in prison but will likely only see 3-4 years. Says, "I am truly sorry."
04/11/13 Ex-KPMG LLP partner Scott London charged by federal prosecutors w/passing inside tips to a friend in exchange for cash, jewelry, and concert tickets; expected to plead guilty in May.
08/01/13 Fabrice Tourré convicted on six counts of security fraud, including "aiding and abetting" his former employer, Goldman Sachs
08/14/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout charged with wire fraud, falsifying records, and conspiracy in connection with JP Morgan's "London Whale" trade.
08/19/13 Phillip A. Falcone, manager of hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, agrees to admit to "wrongdoing" in market manipulation. Will banned from securities industry for 5 years and pay $18MM in disgorgement and fines.
09/16/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout officially indicted on charges associated with "London Whale" trade.
02/06/14 Matthew Martoma convicted of insider trading while at hedge fund SAC (Stephen A. Cohen) Capital Advisors. Expected sentence 7-10 years.
03/24/14 Annette Bongiorno, Bernard Madoff's secretary; Daniel Bonventre, director of operations for investments; JoAnn Crupi, an account manager; and Jerome O'Hara and George Perez, both computer programmers convicted of conspiracy to defraud clients, securities fraud, and falsifying the books and records.
05/19/14 Credit Suisse, which has an investment bank branch in NYC, agrees to plead guilty and pay appx. $2.6 billion penalties for helping wealthy Americans hide wealth and avoid taxes.
09/08/14 Matthew Martoma, convicted SAC trader, sentenced to 9 years in prison plus forfeiture of $9.3 million, including home and bank accounts







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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]

[Demeter]

1. Will the Politics or Economics of Deflation Prove More Harmful? Mark Blyth

http://www.intereconomics.eu/archive/year/2015/2/will-the-politics-or-economics-of-deflation-prove-more-harmful/

Although growth has returned to the periphery of Europe, with Spain, Ireland, Portugal and even Greece posting positive numbers, the rate of growth in their debts still outpaces their rate of GDP growth. That means, for example, that Portugal would have to run a current account surplus at Chinese levels for over a decade to get unemployment down to single figures, and that is simply not going to happen. Indeed, the most recent ECB unemployment projections predict double-digit unemployment out to 2017, regardless of the incipient recovery. Standard macro theory imagines that fiscal contractions are recessionary in the short run, but in the long run the supply side determines the trend rate of growth. What the eurozone has recently shown us is that you can contract so severely on the demand side that the supply side of the economy can be permanently damaged, which may have lowered inflationary expectations to a deflationary equilibrium point. This is extremely dangerous - more so for political than economic reasons.

The politics of periods of inflation and deflation are radically different. Inflation is a class-specific tax, insofar as it hits creditors and the owners of paper assets harder and faster than anyone else, especially at sustained moderate levels. Yes, people on fixed incomes also suffer in such conditions, but given that they are usually pensioners who vote in disproportionate numbers, we can be sure that relief will be forthcoming. An investor's profits know no such relief. Given this, the politics of collective action under inflation are clear. Investors know what they want and mobilize to get it: an end to inflation and the taming of inflationary forces. Labor, on the other hand, quite likes this debt-friendly world and the tight labor markets that it produces. As profits get squeezed, labor's share of national income grows. Think of this as the world in the 1970s, because those were the prevailing economic conditions at the time.

Conversely, the politics of the past 30 years, beginning in the 1980s, has been marked by the efforts of the investment class to construct a creditor-friendly economic order with strong anti-inflationary policies and positive real rates of interest. Their success was made possible by the disciplining of labor domestically and the increased mobility of capital internationally - all of which eventually led to a credit boom that ended badly, from which Europe is still trying to extricate itself. Deflations are different insofar as, regardless of asset profile, one's first best effort to protect oneself leads to second-best outcomes both locally and globally. For example, any one worker taking a wage cut to price herself into a job is locally rational, but it is globally disastrous if everyone tries this, given the aggregate effects on consumption. The same is true at the country level: all countries should not simultaneously attempt to become "more competitive" if they are each other's trading partners and exchange similar goods in a shared currency.

Given this, deflationary periods produce an opposite politics than inflationary ones do. Rather than investor-friendly policies that seek to "bring the market back in and keep the state and labor out", deflations, especially when they begin in already deeply depressed economies, produce broad-based cross-class debtor coalitions that directly challenge creditor interests and their supporting institutions. In such a world, we should expect existing political forces, especially those on the left, to lose vote share and be challenged by upstarts from the left and the right that seek to "bring the state back in and push market forces back out", which is bad for the EMU project and all that flows from it.

Seen in this way, the core creditor countries that are not deflating still operate in line with creditor politics, in which mainstream parties form coalitions to maintain the status quo, even in traditionally majoritarian states such as the UK and Sweden. The debtor countries of the periphery, those to a greater or lesser extent at risk of locking in deflationary expectations, are beginning to operate in accordance with debtor politics, which seeks to challenge the anti-inflationary, pro-creditor policies of the past 30 years. The alternative to such a political shift would be acceptance of the forced economic adjustment through unemployment and prolonged stagnation advocated by the core creditor countries.

Syriza in Greece, the National Front in France, Sinn Fein in Ireland, UKIP in the UK, the SNP in Scotland, and Podemos in Spain are then more similar than different. They are all, regardless of leftist or rightist political stances, at base anti-creditor, anti-market populist movements. They constitute a threat, not just to macroeconomic stability, but to the very idea of Europe as it has been constructed over the past 30 years. When the National Front and UKIP on the right say they want out of the euro, they are not kidding. And while Syriza and Podemos say that they want to remain in the eurozone, the policies of the creditor bloc, which assert that "you must pay your debts even if you are insolvent", may well push these leftist parties towards the exit, too. Given all this, what Greece represents is not an economic threat to the euro so much as a political threat.

First of all, the eurozone leadership has effectively told the Greek people that more of the same policy is the only tonic available, regardless of whom they vote for. Instruments such as GDP-linked, infinite maturity or Brady bonds, as well as new haircuts, all of which are quite sensible and which have been utilized in every other debt workout in modern history, are not going to be used here for fear of spreading the demands for debt relief and fanning the flames of debtor-friendly populism elsewhere in the eurozone.

Second, Greece is insolvent. No amount of liquidity and "extend and pretend" is going to change that. So the continuation of the current regime is merely debt servitude, which is politically unsustainable. Given current maturity profiles, it is not the percentage of GDP paid in interest per year that matters (2.2 percent versus 5 percent for France). What matters is the effect that this debt overhang and the deflationary expectations engendered by these policies have on the real economy and on the polity if they become embedded.

Third, demography matters for debt sustainability, because it affects the underlying rate of growth. The Southern euro countries are particularly old, with an average age of 41.9 years, and migration has made this worse. Thomas Piketty has calculated that long-term growth rates for Europe going forward will settle at around 1.2 to 1.4 percent a year. With double-digit unemployment almost everywhere, bringing deflation to a halt, changing expectations, and increasing investment levels with growth rates that low may not happen as easily as some think.

In sum, the rather casual approach to deflation in the periphery that the leading European institutions seem to have at the moment belies the clear political risk that they generate. Part of recognizing that risk lies in remembering the economist Abba Lerner's dictum that economics has become queen of the social sciences by choosing "solved political problems" as its domain of operation. Given that the eurozone is far from being a "solved political problem", we should perhaps be more worried about the politics, and less about the economics, than we are at present.

[Demeter]

2. Costas Lapavitsas: The Syriza strategy has come to an end

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1967-costas-lapavitsas-the-syriza-strategy-has-come-to-an-end


In a joint interview with German daily Der Tagesspiegel and ThePressProject International, Syriza MP and economist Costas Lapavitsas says that the time has come for Greece and its partners to understand that “they are flogging a dead horse”.

What’s your opinion on the negotiations so far? How is the government doing?

The Syriza strategy has been - and it remains - that a change in the political alignment of forces in Greece, in Europe, or generally, would act as a catalyst in the Eurozone. This strategy has now come to an end. The real question is how long it will be before people understand it. I was always extremely skeptical of it. I always argued that it isn’t just about political alignment, there are institutional mechanisms and the logic of the monetary union. And those who believe that a simple change of politics is enough to transform this, were mistaken and I think this has been confirmed. What we’ve seen is that the institutional framework of the Eurozone and the ideological machinery attached to it are not susceptible to arguments that come from electoral realignments. So the agreement of the 20th of February at the Eurogroup reflects that.

Do your party members notice that this strategy has come to an end?

Syriza is a big organization which has grown very rapidly. It reflects society. It isn’t some kind of traditional party of the left, and therefore there is a variety of opinions and of political conscience. I think that the leadership of the party knows that it has a very tough choice ahead of it: Do we persevere with the programme that we proclaimed to the Greek people? Or do we submit to what the institutions, the Brussels Group, the troika, whatever you want to call it, want us to do? These two things are incompatible.

So there is no middle way?

There is no middle way. The Eurozone will not allow it. Do I think the leadership was surprised? Yes, I suspect they were to a certain extent. Because my reading of the situation is that the leadership genuinely believed that you could change the political alignments, you could change electoral arithmetic, and on this basis change Europe, change European policies.

So what should the Greek government do in your opinion?

Greece needs to consider the true alternative path which is to leave this failed monetary union. It is clearly the only way that was there from the beginning – which is basically exit. If you are going to apply such a programme, as Syriza has proclaimed, which is not radical – Syriza’s programme is just moderate Keynesianism -, you need to think seriously of how you are going to get out of the confines of the Eurozone.

MORE--LOTS MORE....THIS GUY HAS BEEN THINKING

[mother earth]

7. Excellent interview. Of course he is absolutely right:

But Germany has also been systematically living below its means, and this is how exports are generated, not because of technology, productivity and all that. That’s why it is so successful.

"Beggar Thy Neighbor" as Galbraith has pointed out many times is exactly why Germany is the strongest economic force in the EU.
Although, CL says its not neoliberalism, may as well be, same oligarchy, same banking gangsters and rigged systems, same failed austerity imposed to deliver more wealth to the wealthy elites, same damned poison going global.

Lapavitsas is incredibly honorable and admirable. He has spoken out about Syriza & yet Syriza knows this man wants what they too want, what is best for Greece. In the end I think Syriza may very well make the cut. It is a difficult thing for all of the reasons Varoufakis has spoken about so eloquently. In the end they will stand by the people, and clearly the troika is crazy, greedy and unreasonable, but will they aid in the demise of the EU? Since that is exactly what the first domino will do, and the other countries that are in the same boat may very well band together. I imagine great things for a united force with a Syriza vision. It just may be this thing can play out for a few more months. When is Spain's election? Tick-tock...a united front can change the course, maybe pave the way for a new beginning, or ending, nobody knows how bad or how good it just might be in the end.

TY, Demeter, I always look forward to this SMW thread, much appreciation to you and all SMW's contributors.

[Demeter]

3. Judge Rebuffs U.S. in Rejecting Extradition of Ukraine Billionaire

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/world/europe/dmitry-v-firtash-extradition.html

In a defeat for the United States, an Austrian judge refused Thursday to order the extradition of Dmitri V. Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire and onetime patron of the country’s ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, siding with defense lawyers who said the American request was politically motivated.

Mr. Firtash, who made his fortune in Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt natural gas industry, has been charged by federal prosecutors in Chicago with racketeering and other crimes. He and his associates are accused of having paid $18.5 million in bribes to officials in India to secure a titanium-mining deal that never materialized.

The ruling, by Judge Christoph Bauer of the Landesgerichtsstrasse Regional Court in Vienna, amounted to a scathing rebuke of the Justice and State Departments, and reflected the diminished credibility of the United States authorities, even in the eyes of a European ally.

Judge Bauer said that he did not doubt the veracity of two witnesses cited by American prosecutors in their filings, “but whether these witnesses even existed,” because the Justice Department repeatedly refused to provide requested information or respond to questions.

MUCH MORE

[Demeter]

4. Revealed In Austrian Court Yanukovich Pressured In2 Union W/EU By Nuland Threat To Imprison Firtash

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41763.htm

By John Helmer, Moscow

A Vienna, Austria, court has ruled that Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, attempted to pressure the President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovich, into accepting Ukrainian association with the European Union (EU) by threatening Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash with arrest, extradition to the US, and imprisonment on allegations of bribery several years ago in India.

The details were exposed for the first time in public in a proceeding in the Landesgerichtsstrasse Regional Court last Thursday (April 30). Austrian judge Christoph Bauer was presiding on the application by the US Government for the extradition of Firtash. The transcript of the proceeding has not yet been issued publicly, nor the official text of the judge’s ruling from the bench.

Judge Bauer rejected extradition, ruling there had been improper political interference by the US Government in the Firtash case. This is a violation, according to Bauer’s judgement, of Article 4, section 3 of the US-Austria Extradition Treaty of 1998. “Extradition shall not be granted,” the proviso declares, “if the executive authority of the Requested State determines that the request was politically motivated.” Read the treaty in full here.

The newspaper version: “Mr. Firtash’s lawyers asserted that an initial request by the United States for his arrest, on Oct. 30, 2013, was directly tied to a trip to Ukraine by an assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, in which she sought to prevent Mr. Yanukovych from backing out of a promise to sign sweeping political and trade agreements with Europe. Ms. Nuland left Washington on the day the arrest request was submitted to Austria. The request was rescinded four days later, said a lawyer, Christian Hausmaninger, after Ms. Nuland came to believe she had received assurances from Mr. Yanukovych that he would sign the accords. From that point, nothing happened in the Indian bribery case, Mr. Hausmaninger [defence lawyer for Firtash] said, until Feb. 26 — four days after Mr. Yanukovych was ousted after months of street protests. The arrest request was renewed then, and the Austrian authorities detained Mr. Firtash two weeks later, the same day the new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, was visiting President Obama at the White House.”

MUCH MORE AT LINK---VERY IIINTERESTING!

[Demeter]

5. The Five-Step Process to Privatize Everything By Paul Buchheit

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41761.htm

Law enforcement, education, health care, water management, government itself -- all have been or are being privatized. People with money get the best of each service...At the heart of privatization is a disdain for government and a distrust of society, and a mindless individualism that leaves little room for cooperation. Adherents of privatization demand 'freedom' unless they need the government to intervene on their behalf. These privatizers have a system:

1. Convince Yourself that "I Did It On My Own"

The people in position to take from society seek to rationalize their actions, and many have accomplished this through the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the author of The Virtue of Selfishness. She rejected community values, saying "Any group...is only a number of individuals...If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject."

Post-Ayn-Rand, in the growing era of neoliberalism, with Ronald Reagan blurting "government is the problem" and Margaret Thatcher proclaiming "There is no such thing as society," once-respected institutions like public education and public transportation were demonized as "socialist" and "Soviet-style." The message has been repeated so often by the business-backed media that the general public began to believe it. Said The Economist with regard to product development, "Governments have always been lousy at picking winners, and they are likely to become more so, as legions of entrepreneurs and tinkerers swap designs online, turn them into products at home and market them globally from a garage. As the revolution rages, governments should stick to the basics...Leave the rest to the revolutionaries."

But as Mariana Mazzucato points out in The Entrepreneurial State, "In reality it is the State that has been engaged on a massive scale in entrepreneurial risk taking to spur innovation." There is much evidence for this, in a multitude of disciplines, especially in technology and pharmaceuticals, both of which have seen corporate research labs diminishing if not entirely disappearing.

In the burgeoning new field of nanotechnology, says Mazzucato, industry cannot justify applications that require 10 to 20 years of development and which demand a coordination of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering, and computer science.

2. Insist that the Removal of Government Will Benefit All People

The removal of government is equated to a vague demand for "freedom" which is hyperbolic if not meaningless. It gained momentum with Milton Friedman, who said: "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." The Cato Institute went on to preach that "Free markets create a future promoting integrity and trust." And Forbes Magazine founder Steve Forbes blustered: "You can't create prosperity without freedom!"

Despite the fact that this 'freedom' has generated the greatest inequality in nearly 100 years, apologists try to convince us that somehow we're all prospering. From the Wall Street Journal: The U.S. economy is on a tear. From a Moody's analyst: Our economy is firing on most cylinders.

Some libertarian "lovers of freedom" go to even greater extremes to defend the benefits of inequality for all of us, claiming that income inequality is Good For The Poor, and even that "Income inequality in a capitalist system is truly beautiful."

3. Ensure that Government Isn't Removed Until You Get Rich

As the well-to-do have complained about government, they've also made sure that government has continued to help them, with a mind-boggling array of deductions, exemptions, exclusions, and loopholes. At least $2.2 trillion per year in tax expenditures, tax underpayments, tax havens, and corporate nonpayment go mostly to the very rich, the most brazen of whom make the astonishing claim that their hedge fund income should be taxed at a much lower rate than a teacher's income. Their tax breaks are augmented by the payroll tax rate limit, which allows multi-millionaires to pay a tiny percentage compared to middle-income earners; by high-risk derivatives that are the first to be paid off in a bank collapse; and by a bankruptcy law that allows businesses, but not students, to get out of debt.

4. Defund Government Until Privatization Seems Like the Only Option

This has happened most notably in education, with a simple formula, according to The Nation: "Use standardized tests to declare dozens of poor schools 'persistently failing'; put these under the control of a special unelected authority; and then have that authority replace the public schools with charters." And, of course, cut funding. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, forty-eight states — all except Alaska and North Dakota — were spending less per student in 2014 than they did before the recession.

It's happening to Social Security, perhaps the most efficiently run system, public or private, in our nation's history. As Richard Eskow notes, "Congress has cut 14 out of the last 16 SSA budget requests. There’s only one rational explanation for that: a hostility toward government itself, combined with the determination to place more public resources in corporate hands through 'privatization.'”

It's happening to police forces, which are going private in neighborhoods and on corporate campuses as public money is disappearing.

5. Remain Ignorant of Any Troublesome Facts

Facts abound of failing private systems, including:

Education: A private system that pays a charter CEO 350 times more per student than the corresponding public school chancellor.

Health Care: The most expensive system in the developed world, with the price of common surgeries anywhere from three to ten times higher than in much of Europe, and with 43 percent of sick Americans skipping doctor's visits and/or medication purchases in 2011 because of excessive costs. Medicare, on the other hand, which is largely without the profit motive and the competing sources of billing, is efficiently run, for all eligible Americans.

Banking: Thanks to private banks, interest claims one out of every three dollars that we spend, and by the time we retire with a 401(k), nearly half of our money is lost to the banks. But the public bank of North Dakota (BND) had an equity return of 23.4% before the state's oil boom. The normally privatization-minded Wall Street Journal admits that the BND "is more profitable than Goldman Sachs Group Inc., has a better credit rating than J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and hasn’t seen profit growth drop since 2003."

Law Enforcement: As public money for police protection is depleted, our communities are being subjected to law enforcement officers who are insufficiently trained, poorly regulated, and often unaccountable to the public for their actions.

Water Management: A water security expert suggested that "One promising solution is to create water markets that allow people to buy and sell rights to use water." But a 2009 analysis of water and sewer utilities by Food and Water Watch found that private companies charge up to 80 percent more for water and 100 percent more for sewer services.

The Environment: According to former World Bank Chief Economist Nicholas Stern, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has seen." Yet Bloomberg reports that "Wall Street firms are investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter."

Government Itself: In a study of outsourcing, the Project on Government Oversight found that in 33 out of 35 cases "the average annual contractor billing rate was much more than the average annual full compensation for federal employees."

Great Individuals Emerge from Cooperative Efforts

Privatization is closely connected to the demand for individualism over cooperation. But the belief that self-centeredness will benefit everyone is backwards. As George Lakoff summarizes: "The Public provides freedom...Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases..."

Paul Buchheit teaches economic inequality at DePaul University. He is the founder and developer of the Web sites UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org and RappingHistory.org, and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at [e-mail].

[Demeter]

6. Broke a sweat today, without even working hard--it's that warm!

Been packing for tomorrow's election...all day long. G'night everyone!