Weekend Economists Seek Psychic Healing May 29-31, 2015

[Demeter]

I ask, and nobody offered, so....

Psychic healing...two words that cover a multitude of sins....



While the common definition involves chakras, and imaging, and whatnot, I prefer to focus on the kind of healing that will take a borderline-personality nation like ours, looking for trouble in all the wrong places (and finding it) and spreading it around to afflict other nations and peoples.

What will it take to heal the American psyche? What broke it in the first place?

Finding Healing When You’re Broken

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/04/29/finding-healing-when-youre-broken/

As her mom, I felt helpless. I couldn’t make her pain go away. I couldn’t fix her broken arm. So I simply put my head next to hers, and told her that I was here, and I wouldn’t leave her. That was the mantra I repeated over and over. And it was enough.

We humans break easily.

And I’m not talking simply about bones. Our feelings get hurt. Our self-esteem is fragile. We hurt each other with words and actions. We bully each other, steal from one another, gossip, verbally abuse, and assault those around us. We hurt ourselves by what we do. We cut or burn ourselves, neglect our health, abuse food and drugs, and engage in reckless behavior.

Others abuse us and neglect us. People who should love us hurt us. Sometimes simply getting through one day to the next takes an incredible amount of courage and strength.

When people come to therapy, they often see themselves as hurting and broken. People don’t come for counseling when they’re feeling great and on top of the world. They come when they’re in pain. When I entered graduate school, I wanted to become a therapist so I could help people who were hurting. I wanted to solve problems, give answers, and make things better, to take away pain. It didn’t take me long to realize that this wasn’t possible. My job was not about fixing, but about guiding, supporting, and listening.

Everyone — everyone — is broken. There is not a human on this earth who has not hurt, who is not damaged, or is not in pain. We don’t hurt in the same way, of course. And some people have suffered traumas that are hard to fathom...

One has to wonder what kind of trauma has broken the spirit of a nation--and especially the rich and powerful of that nation--that the nation would tolerate, nay, cheer on: wars of conquest and pillage and destruction; universal surveillance; slavery and starvation and oppression to the point of having to produce ID to vote!



Or a Nation. Or a World. Or the Human Race.

In order to be fair to other religions, let's add a few more:

[Demeter]

1. Banker jumps to his death from luxury apartment

http://nypost.com/2015/05/28/man-falls-to-death-outside-luxury-building/

An investment banker jumped to his death from the window of his million-dollar apartment in the Financial District on Thursday, sources and authorities said. The 29-year-old man plunged from the 24th floor of the luxury Ocean apartment building at 1 West St. at about 10:40 a.m. and landed on a guardrail near the northbound Battery Park Underpass, narrowly missing a black SUV. The man’s body was mangled by the impact, leaving one of the vehicle’s passengers horrified, witnesses said.

“I went outside, and the woman in the car was screaming, ‘I didn’t know where he came from!’ ” said Hans Peler, 48, a manager at the building’s parking garage.

“It happened right in front of our guy who waves cars in with the flag. He was so shaken up, I told him to go home.”

The gruesome aftermath sent tourists on an open-air bus that was stuck in traffic scrambling for their cellphones to snap pictures of the body, said workers at the building.

“The head hit the railing . . . Half his head is on one side of the railing, half on the other,” recalled Frank Rodriguez, 44, a handyman who was working nearby. “It’s never worth this . . . Life is too precious.”

Sources said the young banker had made several attempts to kill himself earlier in the morning, including cutting his wrists, before making the plunge. The man — whom police did not immediately identify — was from a wealthy family in Westchester County, sources said. He had apparently become very successful on his own.

He owned his apartment in the 36-story Ocean complex, which overlooks The Battery and New York Harbor, and had just returned from a vacation in the Bahamas, sources said.

I REST MY CASE

[DemReadingDU]

27. Name was Thomas Hughes

5/30/15

An investment banker who jumped to his death out of a window of his luxury, million-dollar apartment in Manhattan’s Financial District this week was reportedly hooked on drugs, was struggling financially and suffered from severe anxiety, family said. The victim was identified as Thomas Hughes, who lived on the 24th floor at an apartment building at 1 West St. in lower Manhattan.

Writes the NY Post: “The 29-year-old man plunged from the 24th floor of the luxury Ocean apartment building at 1 West St. at about 10:40 a.m. and landed on a guardrail near the northbound Battery Park Underpass, narrowly missing a black SUV. The man’s body was mangled by the impact, leaving one of the vehicle’s passengers horrified, witnesses said.”

Investigators said Hughes' body was found with recent cuts to both of his wrists. An autopsy showed he had ingested “hundreds” of pills before leaping from his apartment 200 feet up. Drugs, including pounds of cocaine, were found in his apartment; police said no suicide note was left inside, nor online that they know of.

Thomas’ father, John Hughes, said of his son: “Thomas was a happy, jovial, successful, good looking, very sociable individual. At a time when he was under stress he probably resorted to illegal drugs, causing this incredibly poor judgment, is probably the best I can say.”

a bit more...

http://www.examiner.com/article/investment-banker-jumps-to-his-death-banker-jumped-from-luxury-nyc-high-rise

[Demeter]

34. Pounds of cocaine?

Either someone is gilding the lily to totally destroy the young man's reputation, or he was totally destroyed already....

And if I had such a fatuous idiot for a father, I might be tempted to emigrate and change my name, but suicide?

[Demeter]

2. Struggling states band together to keep Obamacare afloat

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/insurance/struggling-states-band-together-to-keep-obamacare-afloat/ar-BBkf9Ty

A handful of states struggling to finance their Obamacare health exchanges are considering teaming up with other states to keep their insurance portals sustainable as federal funds run out this year.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government gave states a collective $4.8 billion to set up and customize their own exchanges for their own state residents. The idea was that the federal government would help prop up the exchanges, and then states would have to make them self-sustainable by this year.

However, a number of states including California and Oregon are having trouble financing their exchanges now that federal funding is drying up. Covered California, for example, is running a deficit of $80 million.

To save on costs, California is reportedly in talks with Oregon, another state struggling to afford its exchange, to merge their exchanges, The Hill first reported....

IT TAKES A TRULY SICK MIND TO CREATE OBAMACARE....I'M JUST SAYING

[Demeter]

3. THEN, TAKE TTP, PLEASE! MICHAEL HUDSON REPORTS

[mother earth]

28. Michael Hudson is always telling it like it is, haven't listened to this one yet, but I'm

sure it won't disappoint.

Fast track for whom, indeed, just like QE for whom, on the people's dime, serving it up for big monied interests.

[Demeter]

4. Washington Protects Its Lies With More Lies By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41977.htm

My distrust has deepened of Seymour Hersh’s retelling of the Obama regime’s extra-judicial murder of Osama bin Laden by operating illegally inside a sovereign country.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/05/11/seymour-hersh-succumbs-disinformation-paul-craig-roberts/

That Hersh’s story, which is of very little inherent interest, received such a large amount of attention, is almost proof of orchestration in order to substantiate the Obama regime’s claim to have killed a person who had been dead for a decade. Americans are gullible, and thought does not come easily to them, but if they try hard enough they must wonder why it would be necessary for the government to concoct a totally false account of the deed if Washington kills an alleged terrorist. Why not just give the true story? Why does the true story have to come out years later from anonymous sources leaked to Hersh?

I can tell you for a fact that if SEALs had encountered bin Laden in Abbottabad, they would have used stun grenades and tear gas to take him alive. Bin Laden would have been paraded before the media, and a jubilant White House would have had a much photographed celebration pinning medals on the SEALs who captured him.

Instead, we have a murder without a body, which under law classifies as no murder, and a story that was changed several times by the White House itself within 48 hours of the alleged raid and has now been rewritten again by disinformation planted on Hersh.

Perhaps the release of book titles allegedly found in bin Laden’s alleged residence in Abbottabad is part of the explanation. Who can imagine the “terror mastermind” sitting around reading what the presstitute London Telegraph calls bin Laden’s library of conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Washington’s foreign and economic policies?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/11619270/Osama-bin-Ladens-bookshelf-featured-conspiracy-theories-about-his-terror-plots.html

Keep in mind that the government’s claim that these books were in bin Laden’s Abbottabad library comes from the same government that told you Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Assad used chemical weapons, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and that Russia invaded Ukraine. There is no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden had these books, just as there is no evidence for any claim made by Washington. In the absence of evidence, Washington’s position amounts to this: “It is true if we say so.” I would wager that the Hersh story was planted in order to gin up renewed interest in the bin Laden saga, which could then be used to discredit Washington’s critics. Notice that the authors in bin Laden’s alleged library are those careful and knowledgeable people who have severely whipped Washington with the truth. The whip wielders are Noam Chomsky, David Ray Griffin, Michel Chossudovsky, Greg Palast, Michael Scheuer, William Blum. You get the picture. You mustn’t believe these truth-tellers, because bin Laden approved of them and had their books in his library. By extension, will these truth-tellers be accused of aiding and abetting terrorism?

Obama claims to have settled the score in mafia godfather fashion with bin Laden for 9/11. But there is no body and not even a consistent story about what happened to the body. The sailors aboard the ship from which the White House reported bin Laden was given a burial at sea report no such burial took place. The SEAL unit that allegedly supplied the team that killed an unarmed and undefended bin Laden was mysteriously wiped out in a helicopter crash. It turns out that the SEALs were flown into combat against the Taliban in an antique, half-century-old 1960s vintage helicopter. Parents of the dead SEALs are demanding to have unanswered questions answered, a story that the presstitute media has conveniently dropped for Washington’s convenience.

Other than 9/11 itself, never has such a major event as bin Laden’s killing had such an enormous number of contradictory official and quasi-official explanations, unanswered questions and evasions. And the vast number of evasions and contradictions arouse no interest from the Western media or from the somnolent and insouciant American public. Now it turns out that Washington has “lost” the bin Laden “death files,” thus protecting in perpetuity the fabricated story of bin Laden’s killing.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/pentagon-orders-purge-of-osama-bin-ladens-death-files-from-data-bank/5342055

Here is Tom Hartman’s interview with David Ray Griffin: Is bin Laden dead or alive:

Here is Philip Kraske’s OpEdNews article on Steve Kroft’s orchestrated “60 Minutes” interview with Obama on the killing of Osama bin Laden:

http://www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=143300

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

[Demeter]

5. Dimon in the rough and tumble: JPMorgan’s boss fires back (YELLS AT STOCKHOLDERS)

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/dimon-in-the-rough-and-tumble---jpmorgan-s-boss-fires-back-172112003.html

If anyone thought Jamie Dimon has mellowed…think again. The Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is lashing out at shareholders, accusing some of them of being lazy. The source of Dimon’s ire: votes at the bank’s annual meeting where more than 1/3rd of JPM investors rejected Dimon’s compensation package and a similar percentage backed of a proposal to separate the Chairman and CEO jobs once he leaves. Dimon used a different investor conference to accuse those shareholders of not doing their own research and just following the recommendations of shareholder advisory services firms Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis & Co. Both of them went against Dimon on the two votes.

Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer says this outburst is the old Jamie Dimon coming back.

“He’s out again,” he laughs. “They kept him under wraps for a while. And they worked very hard to do that. He was outspoken then he got in trouble with the government that sort of went after him.”

Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli adds Dimon was also off the radar for a time in 2014 while he was treated for throat cancer.

“He got sick and people said, I wonder if it’s going to mellow him,” he says. “And it hasn’t.”

Santoli notes Dimon has made it clear many times that he’s against those who say the top positions at the bank should be separated.

“There’s been this nagging issue, not just with Jamie Dimon but with other CEO’s that are considered very powerful, they want to split the job between chairman and CEO,” he notes. “Dimon has fought against that idea.”

But Serwer thinks perhaps Dimon would be better served by getting someone else’s opinion.

“He would benefit, probably, from some other strong voices at that bank,” Serwer argues. “He speaks his mind and that’s great, it’s refreshing, he has a great chairman's letter--but sometimes he’s tone deaf. If there was a chairman there maybe he could have conversations with this person and say, ‘I think these people are lazy and I’m going to say something about it.’ And the chairman might say, ‘Maybe you better keep that to yourself.’”

And according to Santoli, Dimon’s stubbornness might actually be hurting JPM.

“The board has an interest in creating a succession plan," he argues. “And there is a parade of people considered to be potential successors who have gone elsewhere perhaps because they didn’t see a path there.”

But either way, Serwer is glad Dimon is still out there swinging.

“He’s always great to talk about,” Serwer says.

[Demeter]

6. I have to think, in Jamie's case, it's guilt

He knows he's screwed up and screwed over the people, and it's eating him alive.

That's my theory, anyway.

[Demeter]

7. Watch Out: US Wages Are Going To Soar, Explode In The Next Two Decades

YOU SAW IT HERE, FIRST! (AND LAST, NO DOUBT)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/05/29/watch-out-us-wages-are-going-to-soar-explode-in-the-next-two-decades/

The great economic fact of the past couple of decades is that US wages have been pretty miserable: at least, growth in US wages has been pretty miserable ever since the late 1990s. Many explanations have been put forward for this: one that’s very popular is that the 1% and the CEOs have become more greedy and just sucked up all the growth. As if human greed has been absent from the history of our species. Another is that there hasn’t actually been a slow down in wage growth, there’s simply been a divergence of it due to the effects of globalisation. That’s a story that I’m partial to myself. If we add a couple of billion low paid and low skill workers to the global economy those already doing the low pay and low skill work in the rich countries aren’t going to have a good time of it.

However, there’s another intriguing possibility, and that’s that it’s really just to do with demographics:

One of the charts central to our labor shortages work shows that there will be almost no growth in the U.S. working-age population (defined as persons aged 18-64) in the next 15 years (see the blue line in the chart below). This is markedly different from other periods in U.S. history. Even just a decade ago, the working-age population was growing by more than 1% annually, and in earlier periods it grew around 2% per year. This has a major implication for the U.S. labor market. Since we are already at the natural rate of unemployment, a 15-year period with almost no growth in the labor supply is likely to create a significantly tighter labor market and labor shortages across the United States.



Yet, of all of the charts we show in our discussion of evolving labor shortages, the findings revealed in this chart below receive the most pushback. This is especially surprising given that this is one of the predictions about which we are most confident. And, to be clear, the prediction is made by the U.S. Census Bureau, not us.

https://hcexchange.conference-board.org/blog/post.cfm?post=3713

Let’s start right back at the beginning, before greed and globalisation come into it. The most obvious and most important determinant of wages is the interaction of supply and demand for labour. As I mention all too often Karl Marx himself pointed this out: and it’s a tight labour market, one with a shortage of labour as against the amount of labour desired, which leads to wages rising. Simply because employers need to compete with each other for the labour they want and they compete by offering better pay.

So, the prediction is that the US labour market is going to get tighter and that, therefore, wages are going to rise strongly. For, as they point out, all of the people who are going to either leave or enter said labour market have already been born: we really can be pretty sure that there’s not going to be, in 2020, an irruption of 18 (or 25) year olds into the labour market if we can’t see that bulge of 13 (or 20) year olds now.

However, the other point that they make can also help us to explain the loose labour market, and thus low pay rises, of recent years. This I hadn’t known on the simple grounds that I don’t normally pay attention to US demographics:

This last factor is the main component responsible for the slowdown in working-age population growth. In the beginning of the century, there were many more people aged 17 than 64 (see the purple line); in 2000, there were about 2 million more 17 year olds than 64 year olds. However, this gap shrank significantly in 2011, down to roughly 720,000 people, as the first baby boomers, those born in 1946, turned 65. The contribution to population growth of this gap is about 0.4% now, and it will gradually shrink to almost zero in the next decade.

Perhaps part of the confusion, and the main reason for the disbelief, is the well-known fact that the millennial generation is larger than the baby boomer generation. While this is true, it’s critical to note that almost all of the millennials are already in the 18-64 age group. The proceeding generation, Generation Z, is smaller than the millennials. In fact, they are so much smaller that between 2020 and 2030, this generation will be about the same size as the baby boomers turning 65, generating very little growth in the labor force.

There we’ve got the reason for the slow growth of the labour force in the future, and thus the swift growth in wages. But we’ve also got the point that the labour force was expanding faster than the population was these recent years. And, of course, the demand for labour is determined by aggregate demand, something that depends on the size and income of the population, not purely on the size of the labour force. Thus, expansion of the labour force relative to population would be expected to lead to a loose labour market and thus low wage rises. Just as we’re expecting, as the opposite happens, the opposite to happen.

Now, I would be hesitant in the extreme to say that this is the whole story. While I don’t think there’s much room for the greed story I do think there is for the globalisation one as a contributor. But I do think this is part of it as well. The size of the working age population relative to total population is going to be one of the signifiers of a loose or a tight labour market. It’s been loose, purely as a result of those demographics, it’s going to get tight again purely as a result of those demographics. We should therefore not be surprised that wage growth has been weak, nor should we be surprised when it becomes strong real soon now.

AND THAT'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU STARVE THE LABOR FORCE FOR 40 YEARS....POPULATION DOES NOT GROW. IDIOT!

[Demeter]

8. The Biggest Crime You’ve Never Heard Of By Ian Sinclair

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/author/4

They must have known, mustn’t they? How could they not? Perhaps they chose not to know. With the world commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi-run death camps the question of what ordinary Germans knew (and did) about the genocide their government was perpetrating has once again been in the news...Of course, the assumption behind much of the coverage of the liberation of Belsen and other camps is that we, living enlightened lives in contemporary Britain, are lucky to live in a society where horrendous crimes do not happen. And if they did, they would be quickly reported by our free and stroppy media and quickly halted.

But what if our own government has been responsible for genocide-level suffering, without the media raising the alarm and therefore leaving the general public in a state of ignorance? What would this say about our political class? What would it say about the media? And what would it say about us? Unfortunately this isn’t a hypothetical debate but the cold, brutal reality.

To understand this distressing fact we need to return to February 1991 when the US-led coalition kicked Iraq out of Kuwait, which it had illegally invaded in August 1990. According to John Hoskins, a Canadian doctor leading a Harvard study team, the US-led air assault “effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq — electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry and healthcare.” Purportedly to compel Saddam Hussein’s government to give up its weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the UN imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, which lasted until the 2003 invasion. The sanctions regime was enforced by the US and Britain which took the toughest line on compliance.

“No country had ever been subjected to more comprehensive economic sanctions by the United Nations than Iraq,” notes Hans Von Sponeck, the former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, in his 2006 book A Different Kind of War.

“Communicable diseases in the 1980s not considered public health hazards, such as measles, polio, cholera, typhoid, marasmus and kwashiorkor, reappeared on epidemic scales.”

In 1999 the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) estimated that over 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five had died because of a lack of medication, food or safe water supplies. To counter some of the worst effects of sanctions, in 1996 the UN set up the Oil-For-Food Programme, which allowed Iraq to sell oil in exchange for food, medicine and other goods. However, the programme was far from adequate. “At no time during the years of comprehensive economic sanctions were there adequate resources to meet minimum needs for human physical or mental survival either before, or during, the Oil-For-Food Programme”, Von Sponeck notes in his book. In 1998/99, each Iraqi received a food allocation of $49 (£32) — 27 (19p) cents a day – for a six month period. In contrast, the dogs the UN used to help de-mine Iraq each received a food allocation of $160.

In protest at what 70 members of the US congress called “infanticide masquerading as policy,” Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq who ran the sanctions regime, resigned in 1998. Noting the sanctions were causing the deaths of up to 5,000 children a month, Halliday bluntly stated: “We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral.” Speaking to journalist John Pilger, Halliday later explained: “I was instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide — a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.” Halliday’s successor Von Sponeck resigned in protest two years later, asking in his resignation letter: “How long should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?” Later he told Pilger: “I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.” Making a hat-trick, Jutta Burghardt, head of the UN World Food Programme in Iraq, resigned two days after Von Sponeck, describing the sanctions regime as “a true humanitarian tragedy.”

With a few honourable exceptions such as Pilger, Tony Benn and George Galloway, the response of the British political class and media was either to ignore or dismiss the fact sanctions were killing Iraqis on a mass scale.

MORE



Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press. He tweets @IanJSinclair.

[Demeter]

9. How NATO Deliberately Destroyed Libya's Water Infrastructure By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41999.htm

The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under international law and the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is what NATO did in Libya, and the results have worsened today. Numerous reports comment on the water crisis that is escalating across Libya as consumption outpaces production. Some have noted the environmental context in regional water scarcity due to climate change. But what they ignore is the fact that the complex national irrigation system that had been carefully built and maintained over decades to overcome this problem was targeted and disrupted by NATO.

During the 2011 military invasion, press reports surfaced, mostly citing pro-rebel sources, claiming that pro-Gaddafi loyalists had shut down the water supply system as a mechanism to win the war and punish civilians. This is a lie. But truth, after all, is the first casualty of war - especially for mainstream media journos who can't be bothered to fact-check the claims of people they interview in war zones, while under pressure from editors to produce copy that doesn't rock too many boats.

Critical water installations bombed - then blamed on Gaddafi

It was in fact NATO which debilitated Libya's water supply by targeting critical state-owned water installations, including a water-pipe factory in Brega. The factory, one of just two in the country (the other one being in Gaddafi's home-town of Sirte), manufactured pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipes for the Great Manmade River (GMR) project, an ingenious irrigation system transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya's southern desert to about 70% of the population.

On 18th July, a rebel commander boasted that some of Gaddafi's troops had holed up in industrial facilities in Brega, but that rebels had blocked their access to water: "Their food and water supplies are cut and they now will not be able to sleep." In other words, the rebels, not Gaddafi loyalists, had sabotaged the GMR water pipeline into Brega. On 22nd July, NATO followed up by bombing the Brega water-pipes factory on the pretext that it was a Gaddafi "military storage" facility concealing rocket launchers. "Major parts of the plant have been damaged", said Abdel-Hakim el-Shwehdy, head of the company running the project. "There could be major setback for the future projects."

Legitimate military target left untouched in the attack MORE AT LINK


Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a bestselling author, award-winning investigative journalist, and noted international security scholar, as well as a policy expert, film maker, strategy and communications consultant, and change activist. His debut science fiction thriller novel, ZERO POINT, was released in 2014.

The focus of Nafeez's work is to catalyse social change in the public interest by harnessing radical, systemic approaches to understanding the interconnections between the world's biggest problems, while developing and highlighting holistic strategies for social transformation.

[DemReadingDU]

10. The American psyche has been broke so long

that many think this is normal.
Wait until something really gets broken.

[Demeter]

11. May on track to set record for U.S. M&A activity

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/may-on-track-to-set-record-for-us-ma-activity-2015-05-29



U.S. mergers & acquisitions activity is on track for a record month in May, with $241.6 billion of deals already announced, topping the previous record of $225.8 billion announced in May 2007, according to Dealogic data. January of 2000 ranks in third place with $212.7 billion of deals announced, according to Dealogic. Telecoms and technology deals have dominated...The tech train is showing no signs of slowing, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

“While there is no guarantee of a repeat of 2014’s record-breaking buying spree, 2015 is poised to continue the longer-term momentum in technology deals,” PwC’s deals group wrote in a report published Friday.

Telecoms accounted for $92.2 billion, or 38%, of the May total, according to Dealogic, followed by technology with $49.2 billion of announced deals, equal to 20% of the total. Healthcare came in third place with $33.8 billion of announced deals, followed by utility and energy at $19.5 billion.

DETAILS AT LINK

[Demeter]

12. Opinion: The economy actually is not in a recession By Rex Nutting

NOW THERE'S A MAN TRYING TO LIVE UP TO HIS NAME!

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-economy-actually-is-not-in-a-recession-2015-05-29?siteid=YAHOOB

U.S. gross domestic product declined at a 0.7% annual rate in the first three months of the year, according to a government report released today, but don’t think that means the economy is actually contracting. The report doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening in the real economy, where more workers are being hired, incomes are rising, credit is expanding, businesses are optimistic and housing is turning the corner.

It’s notable that gross domestic income — an alternative (and some say preferable) method of measuring the size of the economy — grew at a 1.4% annual pace in the first quarter. In the past year, GDI is up 3.6%, while GDP is up just 2.7%. In theory, the two measures should be equal. On a quarterly basis, GDP is a crude measure of the economy’s health, and we probably ought to stop paying so much attention to these three-month reports. Instead, we should rely more on monthly and even weekly economic data that measure specific parts of the economy to judge how we’re doing. And if we do that, we find that the economy has slowed, especially manufacturing. But most of the economy is still moving forward: Employment is up, incomes are up, lending is up, and more houses are going up.

The economy is growing at a slower pace, but it is not in a recession. Absent a major shock, it won’t be in a recession for quite a while. How do we know? Here are four indicators pointing to growth, admittedly not strong, but positive nonetheless.

Employment is climbing.

Incomes are rising.

Housing is improving.

Banks are lending again, and businesses are borrowing.

DETAILS AT LINK, WITH GRAPHIC PORN

MIND-EXPANDING DRUGS ARE BYOB

[mother earth]

29. Nutting all the way, lol...

[Demeter]

13. Pivot Insanity: Why is Obama Goading China? Mike Whitney

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/29/why-is-obama-goading-china/

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is willing to risk a war with China in order to defend “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea. Speaking in Honolulu, Hawaii on Wednesday, Carter issued his “most forceful” warning yet, demanding “an immediate and lasting halt to land reclamation” by China in the disputed Spratly Islands. Carter said: “There should be no mistake: The United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows, as we do all around the world.” He also added that the United States intended to remain “the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come.” In order to show Chinese leaders “who’s the boss”, Carter has threatened to deploy US warships and surveillance aircraft to within twelve miles of the islands that China claims are within their territorial waters. Not surprisingly, the US is challenging China under the provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a document the US has stubbornly refused to ratify. But that’s neither here nor there for the bellicose Carter whose insatiable appetite for confrontation makes him the most reckless Sec-Def since Donald Rumsfeld.

So what’s this really all about? Why does Washington care so much about a couple hundred yards of sand piled up on reefs reefs in the South China Sea? What danger does that pose to US national security? And, haven’t Vietnam, Taiwan and the Philippines all engaged in similar “land reclamation” activities without raising hackles in DC? Of course, they have. The whole thing is a joke. Just like Carter’s claim that he’s defending the lofty principal of “freedom of navigation” is a joke. China has never blocked shipping lanes or seized boats sailing in international waters. Never. The same cannot be said of the United States that just recently blocked an Iranian ship loaded with humanitarian relief–food, water and critical medical supplies–headed to starving refugees in Yemen. Of course, when the US does it, it’s okay.

The point is, Washington doesn’t give a hoot about the Spratly Islands; it’s just a pretext to slap China around and show them who’s running the show in their own backyard. Carter even admits as much in his statement above when he says that the US plans to be “the principal security power in the Asia-Pacific for decades to come.” China knows what that means. It means “This is our planet, so you’d better shape up or you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt.” That’s exactly what it means. So let’s cut to the chase and try to explain what’s really going on, because pretty soon no one is going to be talking about Ukraine, Syria or Yemen because all eyes are going to be focused on China where our mad-hatter Secretary of Defense is trying to start a third world war.

Here’s the scoop: Washington has abandoned its China policy of “containment” and moved on to Plan B: Isolation, intimidation and confrontation. In my opinion, this is why the powerbrokers behind Obama dumped Hagel. Hagel just wasn’t hawkish enough for the job. They wanted a dyed-in-the-wool, warmongering neocon, like Carter, who is, quite likely, the most dangerous man in the world. Carter’s assignment is to implement the belligerent new policy of incitement and conflict. His actions will prove to the skeptics that Washington is no longer interested in integrating China into the US-led system. Rather, China has become a the biggest threat to Washington’s plan to pivot to Asia. And, just to remind readers how important the pivot is to America’s future, here’s an Obama quote I lifted up from Tom Engelhardt’s latest titled “Superpower in Distress”:

“After a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region….As we end today’s wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and mission in the Asia Pacific a top priority.”

The so called pivot is Washington’s “top priority”, which means that China’s unprecedented ascendency must be slowed and its regional influence curtailed. Thus, the dust up over the Spratly Islands will be used in the same way the US has used other incidents, that is, by demonizing China’s leaders in the media, by assembling a coalition that will publicly oppose China’s activities, by implementing harsh economic sanctions, by launching asymmetrical attacks on China’s currency and financial markets, by excluding China from critical trade agreements, and by inciting social unrest (color-coded revolution) through the support of dissidents living in China. These are the all-too-familiar signs of US meddling directed at “emerging rivals” who threaten US global hegemony. China now finds itself at the top of the list. US powerbrokers know that bullying China involves significant risks for themselves and the world. Even so, they have decided to pursue this new policy and force a confrontation. Why? Why would they embark on a strategy so fraught with danger?

The answer is: They don’t see any way around it. They’ve tried containment and it hasn’t worked. China’s growing like crazy and its regional influence threatens to leave the US on the outside looking in. Carter even admitted as much in a recent speech he gave at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. He said: “We already see countries in the region trying to carve up these markets…forging many separate trade agreements in recent years, some based on pressure and special arrangements…. Agreements that…..leave us on the sidelines. That risks America’s access to these growing markets. We must all decide if we are going to let that happen. If we’re going to help boost our exports and our economy…and cement our influence and leadership in the fastest-growing region in the world; or if, instead, we’re going to take ourselves out of the game.” See? It’s all about markets. It’s all about money. Here’s more from Carter’s speech: (The) ” Asia-Pacific…is the defining region for our nation’s future”… “Half of humanity will live there by 2050″ and that “more than half of the global middle class and its accompanying consumption will come from that region.”….”There are already more than 525 million middle class consumers in Asia, and we expect there to be 3.2 billion in the region by 2030…President Obama and I want to ensure that… businesses can successfully compete for all these potential customers. ….Over the next century, no region will matter more… for American prosperity.” This is why the Obama administration is making a general nuisance of itself in the South China Sea. It’s so the big US mega-corporations will have new customers for their IPADs and toaster ovens. For that, they are willing to risk a nuclear war.

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at [e-mail].

[Demeter]

14. The US And China Can Avoid A Collision – If the US Gives Up Its Empire By John Glaser

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/conflict-us-china-not-inevitable-empire

The problem isn’t China’s rise, but rather America’s insistence on maintaining military and economic dominance right in China’s backyard... To avoid a violent militaristic clash with China, or another cold war rivalry, the United States should pursue a simple solution: give up its empire.

Americans fear that China’s rapid economic growth will slowly translate into a more expansive and assertive foreign policy that will inevitably result in a war with the US. Harvard Professor Graham Allison has found: “in 12 of 16 cases in the past 500 years when a rising power challenged a ruling power, the outcome was war.” Chicago University scholar John Mearsheimer has bluntly argued: “China cannot rise peacefully.” But the apparently looming conflict between the US and China is not because of China’s rise per se, but rather because the US insists on maintaining military and economic dominance among China’s neighbors. Although Americans like to think of their massive overseas military presence as a benign force that’s inherently stabilizing, Beijing certainly doesn’t see it that way. According to political scientists Andrew Nathan and Andrew Scobell, Beijing sees America as “the most intrusive outside actor in China’s internal affairs, the guarantor of the status quo in Taiwan, the largest naval presence in the East China and South China seas, [and] the formal or informal military ally of many of China’s neighbors.” (All of which is true.) They think that the US “seeks to curtail China’s political influence and harm China’s interests” with a “militaristic, offense-minded, expansionist, and selfish” foreign policy.

China’s regional ambitions are not uniquely pernicious or aggressive, but they do overlap with America’s ambition to be the dominant power in its own region, and in every region of the world. Leaving aside caricatured debates about which nation should get to wave the big “Number 1” foam finger, it’s worth asking whether having 50,000 US troops permanently stationed in Japan actually serves US interests and what benefits we derive from keeping almost 30,000 US troops in South Korea and whether Americans will be any safer if the Obama administration manages to reestablish a US military presence in the Philippines to counter China’s maritime territorial claims in the South China Sea. Many commentators say yes. Robert Kagan argues not only that US hegemony makes us safer and richer, but also that it bestows peace and prosperity on everybody else. If America doesn’t rule, goes his argument, the world becomes less free, less stable and less safe.

But a good chunk of the scholarly literature disputes these claims. “There are good theoretical and empirical reasons”, wrote political scientist Christopher Fettweis in his book Pathologies of Power, “to doubt that US hegemony is the primary cause of the current stability.” The international system, rather than cowering in obedience to American demands for peace, is far more “self-policing”, says Fettweis. A combination of economic development and the destructive power of modern militaries serves as a much more satisfying answer for why states increasingly see war as detrimental to their interests.

International relations theorist Robert Jervis has written that “the pursuit of primacy was what great power politics was all about in the past” but that, in a world of nuclear weapons with “low security threats and great common interests among the developed countries”, primacy does not have the strategic or economic benefits it once had. Nor does US dominance reap much in the way of tangible rewards for most Americans: international relations theorist Daniel Drezner contends that “the economic benefits from military predominance alone seem, at a minimum, to have been exaggerated”; that “There is little evidence that military primacy yields appreciable geoeconomic gains”; and that, therefore, “an overreliance on military preponderance is badly misguided.” The struggle for military and economic primacy in Asia is not really about our core national security interests; rather, it’s about preserving status, prestige and America’s neurotic image of itself. Those are pretty dumb reasons to risk war...


SURE ENOUGH! DUMBER THAN A BAG OF $600 HAMMERS!

[Demeter]

15. I'm beat, folks.

BUT! The door of the car now opens and closes--the handle has been replaced after 2 weeks of annoying delay and bumbling and what must be Mercury Retrograde, because I don't think I've built up enough bad karma lately to account for it.

So, kick back and read about the American Disease....

Tomorrow, the search for a diagnosis, and treatment!

[DemReadingDU]

16. Appreciate all the postings today

and all thru the week

[MattSh]

17. Well, I DO have some, but...

we have a graduate in the family. School finished yesterday, and this weekend we'll be doing a good number of those things that graduates (and their parents) do on such occasions.

But it's not really over, not yet. There's still a couple of exams to pass. But we'll tackle that stuff next week.

[Demeter]

25. Congratulations to all!

(you do know, the hurdles don't stop coming...)

[MattSh]

53. Oh, I know...

and it's different hurdles depending on which gang is running the joint.

On a side note, it's an interesting anthropological study in differences between the USA and elsewhere. Here they had one end of the school year ceremony for the whole school, and a separate one for the graduates. At both celebrations, they had a Russian version of a song by Linkin Park (Numb), and I'm thinking "Linkin Park"? Their songs and lyrics do tend to darker themes, though who knows. The Russian version of the song might have all new, bright and cheery lyrics. But when you look into the English lyrics, it actually is an apropos choice for any number of people in school systems everywhere.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/linkinpark/numb.html

[MattSh]

18. The Government Fraudulently Reported April Inflation Numbers | Investment Research Dynamics

The government lies? Who'd have thunk?

There’s no B.S. like the BLS – Dave Kranzler, Investment Research Dynamics

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the Consumer Price Index for April this morning. This Ministry of “Truth” published an inflation report that asserts that consumer inflation rose .1% month over month for April. But a further dissection of the numbers shows that the BLS has the price of gasoline falling 1.7% during April.

This is either a politically motivated act of fraud or complete incompetence on the part of the Government statisticians and data gatherers (the Census Bureau).

In fact, the price of gasoline rose over 12% during April – the fastest monthly rise in history:

As you can see, the price of gasoline rose from $1.77 to $2.00 during the month of April. Either the people running the BLS are complete incompetent idiots or have been given strict orders from above – i.e. the White House – to produce politically friendly economic reports. Let’s call the BLS “The Ministry of Disinformation.”

Complete story at - http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/the-government-fraudulently-reported-april-inflation-numbers/

[MattSh]

19. Moscow to Increase Minimum Wage Again

Maybe I'll post this in GD too. Tweek some people's noses out in the wider world.

The minimum wage for workers in Moscow is set to rise by 1,500 rubles to 16,500 rubles per month. The decision was made by the Government of Moscow in agreement with trade unions and employers, TASS reported on Wednesday.

According to the agreement, the minimum salary will be increased from the beginning of the summer. It will be the third time this year that Muscovites have seen the minimum wage go up, after it was raised to 14,500 rubles/month in January, and 15,000 rubles/month last April.

TASS says the minimum wage defines the minimum amount payable to employees, and does not include additional payments, allowances or bonuses.

Moscow has seen minimum wages grow by 92 percent in the last five years, TASS reported. The minimum wage is important not just from the point of view of providing a basic living standard, but is also used as a metric to help determine the amount of disability benefits paid to those who’re unable to work. In addition, the minimum wage is also used to determine the amount of taxes, fees, fines and other payments.

Complete story at - http://russia-insider.com/en/business/moscow-increase-minimum-wage-again/ri7491

[MattSh]

20. Russian lawmakers propose strengthening penalties for GMO labeling violations | Russian Legal Inform

MOSCOW, May 26 (RAPSI) – Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers introduced a bill which contains penalties of up to two years in prison for violations of labeling of genetically modified foods, Izvestia newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The current legislation only stipulates fines for violations of the GMO labeling rules.

The bill would introduce a fine of up to 300,000 rubles ($6,000) or the amount of the guilty person’s wages for the past two years, or compulsory labor of up to two years, or a prison term of up to two years and, possibly, a subsequent three-year ban on holding certain offices.

Lawmakers also proposed spreading these penalties to producers who regularly violate the GMO labeling rules.

A law adopted in 2007 required producers to label foods that contain over 0.9% of genetically modified organisms. In 2015, a fine of up to 300,000 rubles ($6,000) was introduced for violating these rules.

Discussions on toughening the requirements on the production of genetically modified foods have been underway for several years. The proposal to ban GMOs in Russia has not been supported because it would contradict WHO regulations, Izvestia writes.

In April 2015, the State Duma adopted a government-proposed bill in the first reading to ban the cultivation, planting and breeding of genetically modified plants and animals in Russia, with the exception of those needed for research.

Complete story at - http://www.rapsinews.com/legislation_news/20150526/273795868.html

[MattSh]

21. Thousands of Ukrainians protest Kiev regime’s draconian utility price hikes - World Socialist Web Si

Protests are mounting against decisions by the NATO-backed regime in Kiev to drastically increase prices for energy, water, and other basic necessities. Protesters reportedly set up a mock gallows near government buildings in downtown Kiev this weekend. The protests follow a march on May 16 of an estimated 5,000 people in Kiev to protest the price hikes.

The right-wing government in Kiev is slashing spending on subsidies to basic goods to funnel the money to the Ukrainian regime’s Wall Street creditors and boosting military spending on the war against Russian-backed forces in east Ukraine. As a result, consumer prices for basic necessities are skyrocketing.

On May 1, hot and cold water prices rose by 71 percent. A month before, natural gas prices had increased by 285 percent, passing from just over 1,000 hryvnia (US$48.20) to over 4,000 hryvnia per thousand cubic meters of gas.

Ukrainians were already struggling to pay their utility bills, with one report in January showing that nearly 30 percent of Ukrainians were unable to pay their bills after utility rates rose 35 percent last year and prices for food, transport, and medicine increased between 50 and 200 percent. Now, broad layers of the Ukrainian people are threatened with destitution.

Protesters at the May 16 rally in Kiev carried signs denouncing the government, such as “[Prime Minister Arseniy] Yatsenyuk means poverty for Ukraine.”

On May 21, protesters set tires on fire outside the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev, clashing with police and fighting to gain entrance to the parliament.

Complete story at - http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/25/ukra-m25.html

[MattSh]

22. Ukraine’s Corruption Threatens to Engulf Europe – Crime Observatory Report

Ukraine is the EU's second major failure after Yugoslavia, the report explained. The Maidan, supported by the EU, plunged Ukraine into total social and economic collapse. The EU bears responsibility for turning Ukraine into a failed state. The EU helped corruption to blossom in Kiev, and now it is poised to contaminate Europe.

GENEVA (Sputnik) – The European Union created additional problems for itself by supporting the new Kiev authorities, as they are failing to eradicate corruption in Ukraine, which threatens to have a direct negative effect on European countries, a report by the Organized Crime Observatory (OCO) revealed.

"The positive effect of the EU integration policies is obviously highly questioned: although it may have worked out in certain countries, it was catastrophic in other countries such as Romania and Bulgaria," the Wednesday report says, adding that "Ukraine can be considered as the second major failure of the EU foreign policy after Yugoslavia because the Union was not able to impede the war."

The report, titled "Ukraine and the EU: Overcoming criminal exploitation toward a modern democracy?", was produced with the help of the University Observatory of Security of the University of Geneva, the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TRACCC), and the Basel Institute on Governance.

It presents detailed findings on corruption that still prevails in Ukraine, stressing that "the situation [in the country] is more dangerous for Europe than for the Ukrainians."

Complete story at - http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150528/1022642258.html

Well, what you reap you shall sow, I guess. And the USA is laughing away at Europe's stupidity.

[MattSh]

23. HSBC fears world recession with no lifeboats left - Telegraph

The world economy is disturbingly close to stall speed. The United Nations has cut its global growth forecast for this year to 2.8pc, the latest of the multinational bodies to retreat.

We are not yet in the danger zone but this pace is only slightly above the 2.5pc rate that used to be regarded as a recession for the international system as a whole.

It leaves a thin safety buffer against any economic shock - most potently if China abandons its crawling dollar peg and resorts to 'beggar-thy-neighbour' policies, transmitting a further deflationary shock across the global economy.

The longer this soggy patch drags on, the greater the risk that the six-year old global recovery will sputter out. While expansions do not die of old age, they do become more vulnerable to all kinds of pathologies.

A sweep of historic data by Warwick University found compelling evidence that economies are more likely to stall as they age, what is known as "positive duration dependence". The business cycle becomes stretched. Inventories build up and companies defer spending, tipping over at a certain point into a self-feeding downturn.

Complete story at - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11625098/HSBC-fears-world-recession-with-no-lifeboats-left.html

[MattSh]

24. Going off the reservation a bit for this one...

But I just love righteous rants like this one:

Laurent Brayard: J’Accuse | SLAVYANGRAD.org

I was incredibly lucky to visit for a few days Donbass and Donetsk itself. Thus, I have fulfilled the duty which essentially our government should be obliged to fulfill. Being very limited in my means, with the great support of the people of Donetsk (and not only them), I was able to see firsthand what is happening in this part of Europe which everybody is talking about but which no Frenchman is able to find on a map. I travelled thousands of kilometres to get there, and now I can accuse the French government with greater strength and more right. To remain silent would be criminal—it would be to disgrace my name as a Frenchman. The French Government, I accuse you that you are indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in the Donbass, that you contribute to the hardship and terrible living conditions of its people; I accuse you of involvement in the promotion of deceitful, unjust, dirty and outrageous propaganda, whose victims were millions of people. I accuse you of betraying our French traditions—derived not only from the French Revolution but also from the Ancien Régime—the purpose of which are to support and protect the weak and free them from oppression. Exactly how thousands of national volunteers in year II of the Republican calendar marched across all the Europe to win their own and other peoples’ freedom.

I accuse you, the Government of France, of renouncing independence by throwing her into the gutter called the European Union; I accuse you of no longer using the rights and responsibilities of “the voice of France”, the voice which charges our authorities to use diplomacy and our influence in the world for good purposes, independently and outside foreign spheres of influence which are contrary to the interests of the Nation. I accuse you, the French Government, of lying to the French people through criminal mass propaganda, which for many months in every possible manner undermines and slings mud at the reputation of Russia. This dangerous Russophobic policy, bordering on racial hatred and nationalism, is so terrible for our country that we refused to participate alongside our Russian brothers in the Moscow parade on the occasion of Great Victory Day of May 9, 1945, the victory over Nazism. Meanwhile, we support the Kiev regime, based on neo-Nazis and have already paid it, via the European Union, billions of euros at the expense of French taxpayers. Those funds have gone towards arming and equipping battalions of murderers and rapists, like Azov and Aidar.

I accuse you, the French Government together with all, or almost all, journalists in our country, of participating in a monstrous lie, from which people are dying in the Donbass: this—the myth of Russian Army aggression in Ukraine. I was in Donbass, I drove in there through two checkpoints Novoshakhtinsk and Matveyev Kurgan. If there were 50,000 Russian soldiers over there, as alleged by pro-Ukrainian activists such as the immoral Nathalie Pasternak, whose hands are now stained with blood; if there really were entire divisions, I would certainly have seen hundreds of tanks, trucks, service and supply units. Yet I did not notice any accumulation of Russian troops on the border, hiding whom would be extremely difficult in a region where the landscape consists mainly of Cossack steppe. During the trip, I saw neither soldiers nor regiments nor brigades nor divisions nor the army of the Russian Federation. Everywhere I went, in the cities through which I passed, such as the Cossack city of Antrasit with 54,000 residents, south of Lugansk, I did not encounter any Russian troops. I was able to interview the locals I encountered, and all of them, including those who do not support Novorossiya (and I did come across such people), said that there is no Russian Army in the Donbass. I myself was able personally to confirm this, as throughout the trip I met only republican army soldiers, dressed and armed very diversely.

Complete story at - http://slavyangrad.org/2015/05/26/laurent-brayard-jaccuse-2/

[Demeter]

26. Perry Mehrling: Derivatives Remain a Blind Spot in the TBTF Debate

DERIVATIVES; THE REAL ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/perry-mehrling-derivatives-remain-a-blind-spot-in-the-tbtf-debate.html

Yves here. One of my pet peeves has been the way legislators and regulators have come up with various remedies to the Too Big to Fail problem, like living wills and Dodd Frank Article II resolutions, and have gone into Mission Accomplished mode. We’ve written lots of nitty-gritty posts debunking ideas like these when they were fresh...As we stressed then, dealing with a problem like that of TBTF banks is like disarming a very large, live bomb. It has to be done carefully and in a certain order so as not to create lots of devastation. And as top risk manager Richard Bookstaber stressed in his book, A Demon of Our Design, the first step in reducing risk in a tightly-coupled system is to reduce the tight coupling. Implementing any other type of risk reduction effort will make matters worse. We’ve identified derivatives as the biggest source of tight coupling, which means it needs to be given top priority in “end TBTF” efforts, and needs to be addressed in a informed manner.

This very readable post by Perry Mehring illustrates that the officialdom still has a very long way to go. While they’ve at least included some aspects of derivatives risk in their efforts (like moving many to central clearinghouses), Mehrling exposes the glaring problems in one element of the plan to deal with derivatives that banks intermediate. And Merhling makes a key point: that too much of the thinking about TBTF focuses on solvency of individual institutions. In a system of market-based credit, the authorities feel they must keep financial markets operating. Bear was not bailed out because it was a systemically important institution by virtue of size. It was seen as too important to let fail because it was a critically important player in the credit default swaps market by virtue of being the number three prime broker. Money market funds were rescued not to protect the funds themselves, but because they were a major source of funding in the repo market, which was and remains an critical source of liquidity to the major capital markets trading firms. Similarly, the Administration’s considerable efforts to paper over chain of title issues in the mortgage-backed securities market weren’t to save Bank of America, which was heavily exposed due to its acquisition of Countrywide. It was because it perceived the MBS market to be too big to fail.

BY Perry Mehrling, a professor of economics at Barnard College. Originally published at his website

The word has come down, “Never again!”

On October 14, 2008, the US Treasury announced a plan to recapitalize the US banking system, to the tune of $250 billion, starting with the nine biggest banks who were forced to take the money, whether they wanted to or not. The government got its (our) money back, but that’s not what matters. Private risk-taking for private profit on the upside seems to require private risk-taking for private loss on the downside. And implementation of that principle has been taken to require very substantially increased total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC), starting with larger regulatory capital buffers but including also a second tranche of supplementary capital in the form of “bail-in-able” bonds that can be converted to equity in times of stress. That’s the state of play at the moment. Sounds good, right?

The problem is that derivative contracts, written under the standard ISDA master agreement, give non-defaulting counterparties the right to immediate termination, which in effect puts them at the front of the line relative to other creditors. Just so, when Lehman filed for bankruptcy, their derivative counterparties terminated their exposure, often on terms disadvantageous to Lehman (and hence to Lehman’s other creditors). Just so, a marginally solvent firm became deeply insolvent. Having this experience in mind, regulators want to make sure that the enhanced TLAC is not simply absorbed by this kind of front-of-the-line contract termination, leaving nothing for the other creditors and hence requiring government backstop to ensure ongoing operation. To prevent this, regulators have come up with something called the ISDA Stay Protocol which they have pressured the major dealer banks to sign. Under this protocol, termination rights are delayed by 48 hours. The idea is that this should be enough time to arrange for the (private) recapitalization of a failing bank, which will then present the non-defaulting counterparties with a new healthy counterparty, and so eliminate the need for termination. The idea is to keep the entire book of derivative exposures alive for two days while a bridge is built to transfer that book from the old counterparty to the new one. Sounds good, right?

The problem is that hedge funds, and others who see themselves losing a valuable termination right, are reluctant to sign the protocol, and they have good reasons to be reluctant. From their point of view, the whole point of the termination right is to enable the non-defaulting counterparty to find their own new counterparty, immediately. If your hedge has just disappeared, you need to find a new hedge, ASAP. Two days of limbo, during which you are supposed to trust a new untested resolution process, and after which you will be presented with a new counterparty chosen by someone else, is a very different matter. Most obviously, two days in a stressed market situation is forever. Prices can move, and you can be required to make very large payments, all the while your hedge is frozen in the resolution process; now it is your capital on the line. In effect, what the regulators seem to have in mind is recruiting derivative counterparty capital as a third line of defense. No thanks.

From a money view perspective, what is most troubling about this entire debate, on both sides, is the unrelenting emphasis on solvency, not liquidity, and the consequent (inadvertent?) implicit assumption of efficient markets. Price is not necessarily always equal to value, and market pressure on either sell or buy side can push price pretty far from value. (Don’t trust me on this, listen to Fischer Black.) This is the central message of modern models of the economics of the dealer function. Dealers make money by absorbing imbalances in market demand on their own balance sheet, buying below value when everyone is selling, and selling above value when everyone is buying. Dealers do these trades because they expect them to be profitable when, in course of time, they are able to reverse them. But dealers have in mind always that, in order to reap that profit, they need to be able to survive the course of time. Forty eight hours can be too long. In times of stress, even stress that involves only an individual market or individual counterparty, profit-motivated dealers will be less willing to supply liquidity to the market. As a result, price can be expected to deviate much farther from value than in normal times. Traders know that, and can be depended on to protect themselves ex ante by stepping away from counterparties at the very first sign of trouble, or by finding other trading and clearing venues.


IN OTHER WORDS, TRYING TO FIND A SAFER WAY TO KEEP DOING SUICIDAL PRANKS FOR OBSCENE PROFITS---NOT ACTUALLY CHANGING ANYTHING

[mother earth]

30. Psychic healing? How about some democratic soul searching? One line is appropriately familiar.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/30/search-democratic-soul

In Search of the Democratic Soul
Democrats should be wooing progressives, not scolding them (by Richard Eskow)

A Google search for the phrase "soul of the Democratic Party" yields thousands of hits, because the struggle for that soul has been a perennial subject of debate. I've probably used the phrase myself.

But after a week spent tracking the independent left's political progress, I've become even more convinced that politicians should seek the soul of the country instead. Tap into that, and the rest will follow.

Still, the debate over the Democratic soul continues. Political strategist Robert Creamer said this week that progressives have already won it. He dismisses the notion of a split between the party's "Hillary Clinton" and "Elizabeth Warren" wings, and says Democrats now largely agree on economic problems and their solutions.

"There are still pro-Wall Street, corporatist -- and even socially conservative -- elements in the Democratic coalition," Creamer acknowledges. But, he says, "it's hard to tell the difference between a Clinton speech and a Warren speech when it comes to most economic questions -- and particularly ... the overarching narrative."

Is he right?

Much of his argument rings true. It's true that voters are embracing progressive ideas, and that economic populism has become the dominant tone in Democratic politics. That's a striking victory for the left, as well as a major boost for the party. It was a watershed moment, for example, when virtually all Senate Democrats supported the Social Security expansion proposal introduced by Warren and Sen. Joe Manchin. And it's true that Clinton has adopted economic rhetoric which is Warren-like, at least in tone.

The difference lies in policy specifics, especially on critical economic issues: Warren offers them. So far, Clinton hasn't. Clinton has yet to indicate, for example, whether she supports or opposes the fast-track bill. Or Sen. Bernie Sanders' bill to break up the big banks. Or the proposal to provide four years of publicly-funded higher education. (She does support Obama's tuition-free community college plan.)

Secretary Clinton isn't alone. Many other prominent Democrats are keeping silent on these vital issues. Some continue to push for more military spending. Some supported the "Citigroup amendment" slipped into last December's budget measure, a move which benefited only the biggest banks. Others have joined with Republicans to push economy-killing austerity measures.

The progressive victories are welcome. But as long as these disappointments continue, more Democratic soul-searching is presumably needed.

What isn't needed are more disingenuous, partisan op-eds like Republican Peter Wehner's "Have Democrats Pulled Too Far Left?" Wehner cherry-picked polling data and policies to conclude, rather unsurprisingly, that they have.

He's missing the point. What matters most isn't how people label themselves, or whether they say they "trust" one party more in any given area. The issues matter most. On that score, polls show that Democrats haven't moved far enough to the left.

Large majorities, across the political spectrum, want to expand Social Security, end pro-corporate trade deals, crack down on Wall Street, and raise taxes for corporations and the wealthy. (See PopulistMajority.org for more.)

Who will speak for these voters? To win them, or even get them to the polls at all, Democrats will need to do better on the issues that matter.

Wall Street? Yes, President Obama backed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. But he failed to prosecute bailed-out bankers, even after the worst white-collar crime spree in modern memory -- a spree which continues to this day.

Corporate trade? The president is aggressively pushing a deal which would undermine key Dodd-Frank provisions -- and is disliked by voters from left to right. The president claims it's a "progressive" measure that would improve the lives of workers worldwide. But he's relying on Rep. Paul Ryan to block an anti-slavery amendment, something which wouldn't be needed in a genuinely worker-friendly agreement. And it's another NAFTA-esque job-killer.

Thirteen Democrats voted for fast-track last week. Democrats risk being tarred with this lousy deal for a generation.

And more battles are coming. Where will these Dems stand on the investment needed to repair our crumbling infrastructure -- and the taxes on the wealthy to pay for it?

Where will they stand on the fight over climate change, which will determine the fate of the planet?

Where will they stand on adequate funding for public schools?

Where will they stand on systemic racism and the crisis of our cities?

Where will they stand on our runaway military budget and NSA spying? Remember, Barack Obama was elected as an antiwar candidate.

And where will they stand on overturning Citizens United and ending the legalized corruption which is destroying our democracy?

Voters are looking for politicians who will stand with them -- with action and commitment, not vague rhetorical nostrums. And they're angry, so Elizabeth Warren's anger resonates with them.

Progressive Democrats are often advised not to challenge their party's leaders too firmly, because the Republican alternative is so terrible. "It is vital (for) Dems to figure out how to maintain maximum unity," writes Ed Kilgore, "even as they disagree." Similarly, independent progressives are often told it would be "irresponsible" not to vote for Democrats, even those of the Wall Street variety.

Democrats should be wooing progressives, not scolding them. By appealing to left-wing voters, Democrats will also be winning over the many Republicans and independents who agree with them on a broad range of issues.

The best way to find the soul of the Democratic Party is by seeking out the small-d "democratic" soul instead -- that voice of the majority which so often goes unheard in today's money-driven politics.

It can be found by speaking, in an unwavering voice, for the millions of voters who seek concrete solutions to their problems: stagnating wages, unaffordable education, a disappearing middle-class, racism, war, and crumbling roads and bridges. It can be found by speaking to their needs, their hopes, their idealism -- and yes, their anger.

Democrats who do that will surely find the soul of their party. And they just might find their own.

[mother earth]

31. On that note, a musical interlude, via Jewel...

[Demeter]

36. Perfection

[Demeter]

32. Excellent screed!

[hamerfan]

33. Musical Interlude

American Idiot by Green Day:

[Demeter]

35. When I was an old woman of 32, MTV started

and my Japanese exchange students were fascinated by the videos. I couldn't understand it. But that one makes perfect sense to me....


Glad you could join in, hamerfan!

[Demeter]

37. Apparently, All the Nations of the World Are Wounded

The US is hurting from Vietnam, but also the Civil War, which lingers as a kind of national grudge...

There is an author who wrote of The US national psychology in 1909: free ebook

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE A STUDY IN NATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY By A. MAURICE LOW

https://books.google.com/books?id=LDuZJmzgwTcC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=healing+US+national+psyche&source=bl&ots=JsWiJEiovl&sig=2g2BOgdJHAep2b6NaXecsgKbe1M&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fO5qVav2IMHfoASYyYCoDw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=healing%20US%20national%20psyche&f=false

He blames it all on the Puritans, and I tend to agree...he's dealing with the 19th century

Another author explores the US from the black side, dealing with the 20th century:

Transitions in Consciousness from an African American Perspective: Original Essays in Psycho-Historical Context By Carroy U. Ferguson

https://books.google.com/books?id=wNLQ5ebw2WwC&pg=PA215&lpg=PA215&dq=healing+US+national+psyche&source=bl&ots=yIcm4G8-50&sig=-j4BsfvUd_Nqclg_Uu08XnXzCRw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fO5qVav2IMHfoASYyYCoDw&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=healing%20US%20national%20psyche&f=false

I expect our grandchildren will have essays dealing with the Corporate Takeover for the 21st century.

Are the Irish different? Getting to the heart of the national psyche

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/are-the-irish-different-getting-to-the-heart-of-the-national-psyche-1.2179947

Are the Irish different? There’s a loaded question. Argument begets counterargument: we’re a nation of narcissists cursed with self-obsession born of low self-esteem engendered by generations of colonisation. We’re the best little country in the world: tough, resilient, convivial. We’re a race of drunken clowns who, on the brink of success, can always be relied on to blow it. We’re uncommonly gifted in the realms of music, sport and literature. We’re a clatter of land-mad peasants afflicted with racial famine memories who got suckered wholesale by property developers, builders, banksters and mortgage mafiosi.

No wonder Irish studies are an international industry. Are the Irish Different?, a collection of essays by prominent academics and sociologists, edited by Tom Inglis, a professor at University College Dublin, suggests not that we don’t talk enough about our collective identity but that we’re often found discussing the wrong subjects. Many of these essays cover familiar ground – nationalism, emigration, postcolonialism, Catholicism – but the majority assert that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the Irish condition.
Grim portrait

Certain of these dispatches – Irishness and Nationalisms by Sinisa Malesevic, for one – calmly dismantle the notion that we’re any different from other nations. Others unpack the aspects of our society that are unique: Bryan Fanning’s autopsy of the long-term alliance of Church and State; Tony Fahey’s take on the Irish family (particularly the late arrival of divorce); and Anne Byrne’s study of the Irish single woman, which paints a grim portrait of an age in which a woman in her 30s might marry a drunk rather than risk spinsterdom or hazard a career (an unrealistic prospect in the era of the civil service marriage bar).

Inglis’s own essay, The Irish Body, couches its subject exclusively in terms of the psychological and physical abuse perpetrated in orphanages, industrial schools, reformatories and asylums. It’s worth remembering that corporal punishment was banned in Irish schools only as late as 1982. Is it coincidence that the young entrepreneurs and hip London expats who emerged over the following decade might well have been the first generation of Irish schoolchildren who were not roared at, beaten or told they were worthless on a weekly basis?

But while the Irish clergy and education system were for decades infested with men and women made neurotic – some might say psychotic – by celibacy, the psychotherapist Marie Keenan, in her essay Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church, warns that, after generations of widespread denial and systemic complicity, the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction: “In the aftermath of the disclosures of abuse of countless children by Catholic clergy, we have not so much transcended as inherited a new state of fear and oppression in Ireland. This time it is not the Church hierarchy that is to be feared but rather a new state of fear has been born that is based on an approach to children, families and ‘child protection’ that, far from bringing forth a safer society for children or a new state of well-being for victims of abuse, has rendered all men as suspects and a generation of children denied the love of men.”

MORE

Another free ebook speaks to the African psyche:

https://books.google.com/books?id=OIq-00JsNnYC&pg=PA209&lpg=PA209&dq=healing+national+psyche&source=bl&ots=MYazMuMXgm&sig=3YTkapZLhRHehGDjbg0ofFgtqj0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=S-5qVYn3J5ezoQTUmYOwCg&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=healing%20national%20psyche&f=false

Human Rights and Conflict Transformation in Africa By Lawrence Juma

[Demeter]

38. How to demolish the oligarchy in 3 easy steps Michael Lind

American democracy has been tainted by lobbying and corporate interests. How do we fix it? Blow it all up

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/24/how_to_demolish_the_oligarchy_in_3_easy_steps/

“Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.” That was the motto of Jacksonian democracy. I’m generally not a fan of Jacksonian politics in general, but Jacksonian hostility to “class legislation,” or different policies for different classes and categories of citizens, is an idea that people on left, right and center can embrace. Case in point: We need to replace a bewildering miscellany of tax and economic security programs targeted at different constituencies with a few simple and universal policies that are identical for every Americans, rich, poor and middle class.

Let’s start with health care. Following the passage of the Affordable Care Act, we Americans now have a means-tested program for the poor, Medicaid, divided between the federal government and the states; another means-tested, state-based program for children, SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program); a purely federal system for the elderly, Medicare; employer-based health insurance subsidized by the tax code; a system of tax-subsidized individual health insurance for working-age people purchased through exchanges; and the Veterans’ Administration, a separate system for retired military personnel. And those are only the major public health care programs. That’s right. We have six separate, major American health care programs, with different streams of revenue and based on different systems. Medicaid and Medicare are single-payer, multiple provider. The Veterans Administration is single-payer/single-provider. The ACA exchanges are based on an individual mandate. Medicare and the VA system and the subsidy to employer-provided health insurance provided by the federal tax code are purely federal policies. Medicaid and the exchanges and SCHIP are partly federal, partly state-based....

America’s health care policies are a dog’s breakfast. America’s retirement policies are a dog’s breakfast that a dog barfed up later. We have a universal, federal public defined benefit (DB) system: Social Security. We have federal tax subsidies to employer-based DB pensions. And that’s not all. We have a variety of tax-favored private defined contribution (DC) systems, including IRAs and 401(k)s. Oh, and most public employees—teachers, fire fighters, police—are covered by separate, public DB pension plans—huge pools of state-controlled money frequently raided by state legislators or milked by finance-industry friends of corrupt state governors and mayors. By my count, that’s four distinct major retirement systems in the U.S.

Education? We have public provision: public K-12 and public community colleges and state universities. Outside of this system of direct public educational provision, we have a separate system of federal student loans. And a third system of federal grants. And because three incompatible systems of aiding higher education are not enough—this is America!—we have yet a fourth, completely different system of tax-favored college savings accounts. America’s system of funding higher education is not quite as insanely complicated as our health care and retirement systems. But we’re getting there!

The political scientist Steven Teles calls this kind of baroque public policy “kludgeocracy.” Another way to describe it would be that Rube Goldberg gets elected and promotes various goals—health care, retirement security, educational access—by means of needlessly elaborate contraptions involving candles, levers, and gerbils running on wheels. Who benefits from this complexity? Lobbyists, tax preparers, accountants, and rent-seeking parasites in the private sector who figure out how to game these needlessly elaborate systems to skim money from taxpayers and rate payers. Complexity is the friend of corruption. Simplicity, on the other hand, promotes democracy. So here’s a suggestion, in the spirit of Jacksonian frontier violence as well as Jacksonian democracy: Blow it up.

Blow it all up. Blow up retirement policy, health care policy, and education policy. Replace them with simple, universal, purely federal policies that are the same for everybody, no matter what your income or age or state of residence. Equal rights for all, special privileges for none. Total demolition is not necessary. We can pick one or two of the existing systems in each area and expand them and universalize them, while demolishing the other policies.

Let’s start with health care policy. What should stay and what should go?

In good Jacksonian fashion—“equal rights for all”—we prefer universal programs which treat all citizens of all economic classes identically to means-tested programs based on income. So we will keep Medicare and Obamacare (the exchanges) and get rid of the means-tested programs, Medicaid and SCHIP. It also makes no sense to maintain a separate medical system for retired military personnel, and recent scandals have cast doubt on the argument that the VA is a model of good medical practice. So let’s scrap the VA as well.We could combine universal Obamacare for working-age people with universal Medicare for the elderly. Or we could choose between two universal, lifelong systems: universal, lifelong Medicare or universal, lifelong Obamacare. The main problem with U.S. health care is not on the payer side, but on the provider side—the Big Pharma oligopoly, the hospital oligopoly and the physician cartel use their monopoly power to extort excessive payments from American society. The solution, used even by countries like Switzerland with purely private, individual-mandate systems, is “all-payer regulation”—the conversion of the medical-industrial sector from a group of price-gouging profiteers into a publicly-regulated utility with regulated prices. As long as medical prices are regulated and profiteering drug companies, hospitals and doctors are reined in, then health care will be affordable whether you have lifelong universal Medicare or lifelong universal Obamacare.

Next let’s blow up American retirement policy. Let’s begin by phasing out employer defined benefit (DB) pensions. Your retirement income, like your health care access, should not depend on particular employers. The biggest employer pensions are those of state employees. Many state employees were left out of the Social Security system in 1935 because state public pension systems already existed. That was 80 years ago. It’s the 21st century. All American workers—public and private alike—should be part of a single universal retirement system, independent of particular employers. If we get rid of tax-favored pensions from public and private employers alike, we are left with a public DB pension—Social Security—and various private defined contribution (DC) plans like IRAs and 401(k)s. Most other democracies have a mix of both systems. We can as well. Let’s have a two-tier system: Social Security plus a federal, tax-favored DC plan on top of it (preferably one less easily gamed by sleazy, fee-skimming money managers). The left and right can fight over the relative proportions of Social Security and the tax-favored defined contribution plan. But progressives and conservatives might be able to agree to phase out public and private defined benefit pensions.

Education policy? Here, too, there is a need for incineration, followed by reconstruction.

The student loan system has turned out to be one of the biggest policy errors in American history—saddling students with debt while enriching bankers and indirectly subsidizing bloated university administrations. So let’s get rid of federal student loans. Let’s get rid of Pell grants, too. Pell grants go to students who can’t afford to pay for college. But this misdiagnoses the problem, which is affordability on the provider side, not lack of income on the part of the student. We already have a system of public community colleges and state universities. Why not make admission free to all students who get in, as President Obama has suggested in the case of community colleges? We don’t charge students admission to public K-to-12 education. We pay for it with taxes. Let’s have a taxpayer-funded K-16 system. Most American students go to public institutions of higher education. What about the minority of students who go to private colleges and universities? Wealthy private universities, like Yale and Harvard (I went to the former, and have taught at the latter) could afford free admission for everyone, not just the needy. If their greed leads them to continue to soak middle-class and upper-class students, at least the Ivies and other private universities can provide scholarships for low-income students. Private universities are tax-exempt institutions. They ought to act like charities, not hedge funds or for-profit conglomerates. So here’s an idea: Limit tax-exempt status to private universities with free tuition for all students. If schools want to charge tuition, let them be taxed as for-profit corporations.

We have now, in our thought experiment, blown up and burned down American health care policy, American retirement policy, and American higher education policy. We have then built, upon the smoldering ruins of present-day complexity, a new, simple, universal, purely national system that is the same for every citizen, rich and poor. SUMMARY AT LINK


Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.

[Demeter]

39. Demophobia; or, fear of the rabble

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org/2015/05/demophobia-or-fear-of-the-rabble/

I recently had an interesting conversation with a young friend of mine — ‘young’, in this case, meaning less than half my age. My friend and I started off by agreeing that the recent referendum in Ireland, endorsing same-sex marriage by a rather amazing 60% majority, was excellent and gratifying news. But then my young friend gobsmacked me by saying that he wished this result had been achieved by some other means than a popular vote. Unless I misunderstood him, which is possible, he seemed to believe that a court decision, based ostensibly on some text like the US constitution, would have been preferable, as offering a more secure foundation for the right so obtained than the fickle whimsies of… 60% of the people. In Ireland!

I don’t think my friend is a particularly political guy — at least, the topic has never come up before — but I would be amazed if he were a right-winger. In fact, I would bet he isn’t.

I think what he may have been exhibiting is something very American, namely a dislike and distrust of the rabble, cherished even by many of the rabble themselves (a category to which I certainly belong; perhaps my friend has a trust fund I don’t know about, but I suspect he’s rabble too).

This is a pretty extraordinary phenomenon, when you think about it. Of course it’s not surprising that the ‘founding fathers’ hated and distrusted the people; they were a thoroughly elite body. But it’s pretty remarkable that this mentality has been able to reproduce itself so well for so long, among people who are anything but elite, and have had plenty of opportunities to figure out what the elites are really up to. My friend, for example, has certainly lived long enough to see the Supreme Court in action for a while now, and might have drawn some conclusions about what that sorry row of scarecrows is all about. But unless I misunderstood him, he would be happier with his rights in their custody than in the custody of his fellow-citizens....

[Demeter]

40. Want to know how to make it rain?

For weeks we've been promised rain, but got anything but: wind, heat, cold, frost....

So, this weekend I resolved, and announced loudly, to clean the car now that the doors all open...

I did get half of the carpeting done before the deluge, and that took two hours. (It's a working car, and I haven't cleaned in two years.) I need another two hours to finsih the interior. Given the amount of precipitation, I won't have to do anything to the exterior, although I noticed tiny rust spots on the paint. No doubt there wasn't any salt-protection coating applied 14 years ago, or it wore off by now.

Does anyone know if it's worth getting the paint restored to prolong the life of the car body? This vehicle should be good for another 170K, according to my mechanic, and that should take me at least 6 years, if not longer...


And while I'm waiting for the rain to stop, I'm thinking of my younger daughter, gone to a "camping" wedding...fortunately within reasonable driving distance, so she shouldn't have to actually camp in this weather. Personally, I loathe camping, so I have a personal interest in maintaining at least a basic level of civilization....

[Demeter]

47. It's also back down to 47F at 8:30 am

Last edited Sun May 31, 2015, 09:44 AM - Edit history (1)

sigh. I have to walk the grandpuppy in this. i am actually in the middle of putting winter clothing in storage...

[Demeter]

61. I've turned the furnace back on--and wore a parka to walk the puppy

And it's supposed to be June tomorrow? Prove it!

[Demeter]

41. The Path to Healing a Psyche

I believe the basic principle of Desensitization, used to defuse phobias and trauma would be helpful.

The sufferer talks out the trauma, overlays good experiences to replace the bad, and develops a perspective that is at a distance from the suffering so as to break the linkage between pain and memory.

This can and must be done on a population-wide basis. Think of the Truth and Reconciliation of South Africa...now granted, first came the revolution...I would think the two could come in either order, or simultaneously, but that means changes must be made.

The changes are overdue....

Systematic desensitization

Systematic desensitization, also known as graduated exposure therapy is a type of behavior therapy used in the field of psychology to help effectively overcome phobias and other anxiety disorders. More specifically, it is a form of counter conditioning, a type of Pavlovian therapy developed by South African psychiatrist, Joseph Wolpe. In the 1950s, Wolpe discovered that the cats of Wits University could overcome their fears through gradual and systematic exposure. The process of systematic desensitization occurs in three steps. The first step of systematic desensitization is the identification of an anxiety inducing stimulus hierarchy. The second step is the learning of relaxation or coping techniques. Once the individual has been taught these skills, he or she must use them in the third step to react towards and overcome situations in the established hierarchy of fears. The goal of this process is for the individual to learn how to cope with, and overcome the fear in each step of the hierarchy.

Three steps of desensitization

There are three main steps that Wolpe identified to successfully desensitize an individual.

1. Establish anxiety stimulus hierarchy. The individual must first identify the items that are causing anxiety. Each item that causes anxiety is given a subjective ranking on the severity of induced anxiety. If the individual is experiencing great anxiety to many different triggers, each item is dealt with separately. For each trigger or stimuli, a list is created to rank the events from least anxiety provoking to the greatest anxiety provoking.
   
   
2. Learn coping mechanism or incompatible response. Relaxation training, such as meditation, is one type of coping strategy. Wolpe taught his patients relaxation responses because it is not possible to be both relaxed and anxious at the same time. In this method, patients practice tensing and relaxing different parts of the body until the patient reaches a state of serenity. This is necessary because it provides the patient with a means of controlling their fear, rather than letting it increase to intolerable levels. Usually only a few sessions are needed for a patient to learn the appropriate coping mechanisms. Additional coping strategies include anti-anxiety medicine and breathing exercises. Another means of relaxation is cognitive reappraisal of imagined outcomes. The therapist might encourage subjects to examine what they imagine happening when exposed to the anxiety-inducing stimulus and allowing for the client to replace the imagined catastrophic situation with imagined positive outcomes.
   
   
3. Connect the stimulus to the incompatible response or coping method through counter conditioning. In this step the client completely relaxes and is then is presented with the lowest item that was placed on their hierarchy of severity of anxiety. When the client has reached a state of serenity again after being presented with the first stimuli, the second stimuli that should present a higher level of anxiety is presented. Again, the individual practices the coping strategies learned. This activity is completed until all items of the hierarchy of severity of anxiety is completed without inducing anxiety in the client. If at any time during the exercise the coping mechanisms fail or the client fails to complete the coping mechanism due to severe anxiety, the exercise is stopped. Once the individual is calm, the last stimuli that was presented without inducing anxiety is presented again and the exercise is continued...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_desensitization

Now, current government policy is designed to increase unease, fear and phobia, and irrational responses in the population. I believe this is intentional and diabolical. It is "gaslighting" :

Gaslighting or gas-lighting is a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity. Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term owes its origin to the play Gas Light and its film adaptations, after which it was coined popularly. The term has been used in clinical and research literature.

Etymology

The 1938 stage play Gas Light, known as Angel Street in the United States, and the film adaptations released in 1940 and 1944 motivated the origin of the term because of the systematic psychological manipulation used by the main character on a victim. The plot concerns a husband who attempts to convince his wife and others that she is insane by manipulating small elements of their environment, and subsequently, insisting that she is mistaken or remembering things incorrectly when she points out these changes. The original title stems from the dimming of the gas lights in the house that happened when the husband was using the gas lights in the attic while searching for hidden treasure. The wife accurately notices the dimming lights and discusses the phenomenon, but the husband insists she is imagining a change in the level of illumination.

The term "gaslighting" has been used colloquially since the 1960s to describe efforts to manipulate someone's sense of reality. In a 1980 book on child sex abuse, Florence Rush summarized George Cukor's 1944 film version of Gas Light, and writes, "even today the word gaslighting is used to describe an attempt to destroy another's perception of reality."

Clinical examples

Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing. Thus, some who have been victimized by sociopaths may doubt their perceptions.

Some physically abusive spouses may gaslight their partners by flatly denying that they have been violent.

Gaslighting describes a dynamic observed in some cases of marital infidelity: "Therapists may contribute to the victim's distress through mislabeling the woman's reactions. ... The gaslighting behaviors of the husband provide a recipe for the so-called 'nervous breakdown' for some women and suicide in some of the worst situations."

Gaslighting may also occur in parent–child relationships, with either parent, child, or both, lying to each other and attempting to undermine perceptions. Furthermore, gaslighting has been observed between patients and staff in inpatient psychiatric facilities.

Introjection

In an influential 1981 article Some Clinical Consequences of Introjection: Gaslighting, Calef and Weinshel argue that gaslighting involves the projection and introjection of psychic conflicts from the perpetrator to the victim: "this imposition is based on a very special kind of 'transfer'... of painful and potentially painful mental conflicts."

The authors explore a variety of reasons why the victims may have "a tendency to incorporate and assimilate what others externalize and project onto them," and conclude that gaslighting may be "a very complex highly structured configuration which encompasses contributions from many elements of the psychic apparatus."

Resisting

With respect to women in particular, Hilde Lindemann argued emphatically that in such cases the victim's ability to resist the manipulation depends on "her ability to trust her own judgments." Establishment of "counterstories" may help the victim reacquire "ordinary levels of free agency."...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

[Demeter]

42. Or, as announced by a White House official in 2004

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

[Demeter]

43. Neocons 2.0: The problem with Peter Pomerantsev By Mark Ames

A LONG AND ILLUMINATING READ

http://pando.com/2015/05/17/neocons-2-0-the-problem-with-peter-pomerantsev/

In his opening statement last month before a US Congressional Committee hearing titled “Confronting Russia’s Weaponization of Information,” the Russian-born British author Peter Pomerantsev served his Republican-led audience a piping hot serving of neocon alarmism. Quoting “the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), General Philip M. Breedlove,” Pomerantsev described Russia’s 2014 takeover of Crimea as “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.” To which Pomernatsev added his own chilling warning:

“To put it differently, Russia has launched an information war against the West – and we are losing.”

The hearing was put on by Orange County neoconservative Republican Ed Royce; the purpose of the hearings was to drum up fear about Russia’s “unprecedented” information war on the West — a propaganda battle which obviously exists, but whose dimensions and dangers are being cynically exaggerated — and then convert that fear into budget money for US propaganda and NGOs to subvert Kremlin power.

What made Pomerantsev’s lobbying appearance with the neocons so disturbing to me is that he’s not the sort of crude, arrogant meat-head I normally identify with homo neoconius. Pomerantsev’s book, “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible”, is the most talked-about Russia book in recent memory. His many articles on the Kremlin’s “avant-garde” “information war” and its “political technologists” have been hits in the thinking-man’s press: Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books... His insights into the strategic thinking behind the Kremlin’s “information wars” are often sharp and illuminating; and yet there’s always been something glaringly absent in Pomerantsev’s writings. Not so much what he puts in, but all that he leaves out. Glaring omissions of context, that had me start to question if Pomernatsev wasn’t manipulating the reader by poaching the rhetoric of leftist critical analysis, and putting it to use for very different, neocon purposes . . . as if Pomerantsev has been aping the very sort of “avant-garde” Kremlin political technologies he’s been scaring the Ed Royces of the world with.

And then of course there’s the larger nagging question—what the Hell is a presumed journalist/writer like Pomerantsev, who claims to have been most influenced by literary figures like Christopher Isherwood, doing lobbying the US and UK governments to pass bills upping psychological warfare budgets and imposing sanctions on foreign countries? Where does the independent critical analysis stop, and the manipulative lobbying begin?

* * * *

The term “political technologist” (политтехнолог first appeared in the Russian press in 1996, to describe Boris Yeltsin’s team of American and Russian political spin doctors who stage-managed his campaign to steal the Russian presidential elections that year. The political technologists were given a seemingly-impossible task: make Yeltsin’s pre-ordained election victory look just plausible enough to be hailed by the West as a triumph for democracy, while domestically, imposing on Russians a sense of overwhelming fatalism so complete that they wouldn’t rise up again in arms as they had in 1993. The reason this looked near-impossible on paper was that Yeltsin went into the election campaign with a rating hovering between 3%-5%, reflecting what must be the single most disastrous presidency of the 20th century: Under Yeltsin, Russia’s economy collapsed some 60%, the male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56, millions were reduced to living on subsistence farming for the first time since Stalin as wages went unpaid for years at a time. Russia was on its way to going extinct—but about 3-5% of the population (plus or minus 3%) was making out like bandits. Probably because they actually were bandits.

Enter the “political technologists”—Americans led by Dick Morris’ former partner Richard Dresner, and Russians at advertising behemoth Video International, led by Mikhail Lesin and former KGB spy Mikhail Margelov — who took credit for pulling off a credible stolen election for Boris Yeltsin. Time magazine wound up crediting the Americans with “Rescuing Boris,” which was turned into a B-movie, “Spinning Boris,” directed by “Turner & Hootch”‘s Roger Spottiswoode. The way Dresner and the Americans told it, it was the Americans who first introduced focus groups into the campaign; who invented fake pro-Yeltsin crowds at rallies, rustled out of government-owned factories and coerced into attending pro-democracy Yeltsin rallies; and it was good ol’ USA advisers who took credit for convincing Team Yeltsin to take total control over the Russian media and convert the only cultural unifying medium into a kind of virtual reality apparatus, deployed to brainwash the public into fearing a victory by Yeltsin’s opponent—the cowardly, dumb-as-nails Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov—who, if Russia’s 1996 TV media onslaught was to be believed, would plunge the country into a bloody civil war, leading to GULAGs, cattle wagons, and family members hanging from lamp posts. Every fantastical historical nightmare was exploited and exaggerated to frighten the public into a different mindset, and a totally distorted grasp of reality.

This required taking full control of Russia’s television networks, radio, and media, which until 1996 had been relatively free and chaotic in editorial interests. Key to this was how Yeltsin co-opted the once-independent national network NTV, owned by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, which had been a fierce critic of Yeltsin’s slaughter in Chechnya. That problem was solved by Yeltsin promising to give Gusinsky valuable banking and national TV licenses and other properities; Gusinsky agreed, and he put NTV at Yeltsin’s service, and seconded NTV’s top executive to lead Yeltsin’s TV campaign coverage.

As Dresner had advised it in a memo to the Yeltsin Team:

“It was ludicrous to control the two major nationwide television stations and not have them bend to your will.”

“…Wherever an event is held, care should be taken to notify the state-run TV and radio stations to explain directly the event’s significance and how we want it covered.”

In the end, Yeltsin won by old school fraud — in Chechnya, for example, where Yeltsin’s war had killed 40,000 people and displaced half the population, elections showed 1,000,000 Chechens voted (even though less than half a million adults remained in Chechnya at the time of voting), and that 70% of them voted for Yeltsin, their exterminator. That helped deliver the numbers that the West needed to see—enough for the New York Times to declare it “A Victory for Russian Democracy”—parroting the laughably cheerful assessment of President Clinton and his team. But the more important task of creating domestic acceptance through a new post-Soviet brand of sophisticated, virtual reality propaganda, beamed onto a bewildered Russian viewing public, is what helped ensure that Yeltsin’s stolen election wasn’t followed by unrest. The public was inundated with 24/7 alarmist propaganda about impending bloodbaths should Yeltsin lose; they had no idea that the man they voted for had essentially died from yet another series of massive heart attacks between rounds one and two of voting.

What surprised even Dick Morris’ spin-doctor buddies was how effective they were in fooling the raw Russian public into believing that their crude propaganda efforts, distorting reality to falsely portray opposition candidate Zyuganov as a genocidaire-in-waiting, was not propaganda at all. In the late Soviet times, most Russians knew that the far cruder Soviet propaganda was propaganda—but this was something new, the ability to wildly distort reality, paint your political opponent as the greatest monster in history, and have it accepted as news because it looked much more modern than the crude old Soviet propaganda productions.

As Time magazine wrote:

“What really caused surprise was the public’s reaction to the biased reporting. “We focus-grouped the issue several times,” says Shumate. The results were contained in a June 7 wrap-up memo on TV coverage. Only 28% of respondents said the media were very biased in Yeltsin’s favor–a group that consisted mostly of Zyuganov’s partisans. Twenty-nine percent said the media were “somewhat biased,” but they broke in Yeltsin’s favor. Amazingly, 27% said they thought the media were biased against Yeltsin.

The Russian media was never the same again....

[DemReadingDU]

48. All empires come to an end

no matter how many 'realities' are created

[Demeter]

49. The more Unreality included, the faster the fall

To create a lasting power structure, stick to real things...

[Demeter]

44. Exclusive: Greece owes drugmakers $1.2 billion - and counting

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/05/27/us-greece-pharmaceuticals-idUKKBN0OC23Y20150527

Cash-strapped Greece has racked up mounting debts with international drugmakers and now owes the industry more than 1.1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), a leading industry official said on Wednesday.

The rising unpaid bill reflects the growing struggle by the nearly bankrupt country to muster cash, and creates a dilemma for companies under moral pressure not to cut off supplies of life-saving medicines.

Richard Bergstrom, director general of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, told Reuters his members had not been paid by Greece since December 2014. They are owed money by both hospitals and state-run health insurer EOPYY.

Drugmakers and EU officials are now discussing options in the event Greece defaults on its debt or leaves the euro zone, disrupting imports of vital goods, including medicines....MORE

[Demeter]

45. Only Greece Can End Its 'Groundhog Day' Misery

I PREFER TO DISAGREE WITH THIS IDEA....

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-05-29/only-greece-can-end-its-miserable-groundhog-day-


...If Greek officials want their own happy ending (they get the money and the country doesn't go bankrupt), they must change their behavior. The universe isn't poised to intervene favorably on Greece's behalf.

Greece's Fiscal Odyssey

Instead of behavioral change, Greece just pretends it's on the verge of a solution when that doesn't seem to be true. On Wednesday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said that the country was close to a deal with its creditors and was about to start drafting an accord. That came as a surprise to German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble: "Negotiations between the three institutions and the Greek government still haven’t come very far," he said later that day, adding that he's “always a bit surprised” when Greece says an agreement is imminent.

Moreover, the newspaper Ekathimerini reported that the Tsipras statement was a premeditated effort to stop yet more cash from fleeing the country. Piraeus Bank said Wednesday its deposits had shrunk to 44.6 billion euros as of mid-May, with outflows of 15 percent in the first quarter extended by a further 4 percent since then. If those withdrawals are mirrored across the banking sector, that would suggest there's about 133 billion euros left in Greece's banks, down from 138.6 billion euros at the end of March and 160 billion euros at the end of last year, according to central bank figures. Trying to spoof depositors who are already terrified about capital controls seems like an incredibly risky strategy.

On Thursday, chief government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis said a May 31 deal was on the cards. But that same day, with a June 5 payment of 300 million euros to the International Monetary Fund looming, Managing Director Christine Lagarde warned that "we’re working very hard, but it takes two to tango. Everybody has to be realistic and be focused on not playing a game." She doesn't sound at all convinced that Greece is facing up to the fact that, without at least some additional aid from its lenders, it won't have the 1.6 billion euros it needs to pay all of its IMF bills next month.

More than four months after Tsipras took power, Greece is deeper in the hole than ever. It can't even pay for medicines; it owes international drugmakers more than 1.1 billion euros and hasn't paid some members of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations since December, according to a Reuters report citing Richard Bergstrom, the group’s general director.

The Greek government's coffers were down to less than 800 million euros at the end of March, with a run rate that saw 70 percent of its cash spent in the first three months of the year.

Greece must be running out of sofas to raid for forgotten coins (although admittedly, no one knows for sure how many couches it has). Economist Nouriel Roubini said Thursday he expects "pots of money" to materialize to avoid a Greek default. He didn't specify from where those pots might be unearthed. If he's wrong, June might finally be the month when the Greek film ends badly -- with capital controls, default and sovereign bankruptcy.

[Demeter]

46. The basic truth about broadband that cable companies want to hide

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/31/7137457/broadband-speed-chattanooga-kansas-city-lafayette

The Obama administration wants to find ways to deliver subsidized broadband internet to low-income families. It's a nice idea. But the truth is that poor people have trouble affording all kinds of things — that's the definition of being poor. The striking thing about broadband in America is how bad the value proposition for middle class Americans is.

And a read of the excellent October 2014 "Cost of Connectivity" report from the New America Foundation makes it clear what the solution should be. Start with the good news it offers for the United States: in a handful of cities, Americans are enjoying world-class speeds:

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xsZrHexiioLhUNJ1J_WL1msJxxs=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2411298/speed.0.png

And the prices are pretty darn affordable:

https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/p9DBwcNJe-hNudcEM20eOeahf_Y=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/2411306/price.0.png

This achievement is really impressive when you consider that Chattanooga, Kansas City, and Lafayette aren't even remotely as dense as Seoul or Hong Kong or Tokyo, which get similar speeds. When we put our minds to it in this country, we can do great things. And what works for Chattanooga could work even better in bigger cities like Chicago or Miami. But there's a catch.

The American cities that are delivering best-in-the-world speeds at bargain prices are precisely the cities that aren't relying on Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner, etc. to run their infrastructure. In Kansas City, Google built a state-of-the-art fiber optic network largely just to prove a point. In Chattanooga and Lafayette, the government did it. At the moment, the US federal government could issue 5-year bonds at a 1.58 percent interest rate and make grants to cities interested in following Chattanooga and Lafayette down that path. But it doesn't happen, because while broadband incumbents don't want to spend the money it would take to build state-of-the-art fiber networks, they are happy to spend money on lobbying. And they are very effective at it. The 2009 stimulus bill, for example, provided a grant to the District of Columbia to build a publicly owned fiber-optic network, but the city's not allowed to use it to deliver fiber connections to its residents. In San Antonio, the city-owned electrical utility already built a fiber network but lobbyists got the state legislature to pass a law making it illegal for households to use the fiber. So even though we have the technical ability to deliver cheap, super-fast internet and we have the financial ability to finance the construction, we don't actually have the network. In fact, we're so in hock to the interests of the broadband incumbents that we don't even use all the fiber networks we've already built.

[Demeter]

50. Art Garfunkel - All I Know

All I Know

Song by Art Garfunkel

I bruise you, you bruise me
We both bruise too easily
Too easily to let it show
I love you and that's all I know

All my plans have fallen through
All my plans depend on you
Depend on you to help them grow
I love you and that's all I know

When the singer's gone
Let the song go on

But the ending always comes at last
Endings always come too fast
They come too fast but they pass too slow
I love you and that's all I know

When the singer's gone
Let the song go on

It's a fine line between the darkness and the dawn
They say in the darkest night, there's a light beyond

But the ending always comes at last
Endings always come too fast
They come too fast but they pass to slow
I love you and that's all I know
That's all I know
That's all I know

[Demeter]

51. Sounds of Silence

[Demeter]

52. And of course...

[Demeter]

54. U.S. Households Under Pressure: Stagnant Incomes, Rising Basic Expenses

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.mx/2015/05/us-households-under-pressure-stagnant.html

How do you support a consumer economy with stagnant incomes for the bottom 90%, rising basic expenses and crashing employment for males ages 25-54? Answer: you don't.

Frequent contributor B.C. passed along a sobering set of charts that provide context for How The Average U.S. Consumer Spends Their Paycheck. The basic story is well-known to the bottom 90%: most of the household income goes to taxes, housing, food and transportation, with healthcare and insurance, pensions and retirement contributions rounding out the big-ticket items. (Higher education is, as we all know, paid with student loans by all but the top-tier of families.)

Here's the question this raises: is the sliver that's left enough to support a $17 trillion consumer economy? The answer is obvious: no.

Stagnant household income has a number of systemic causes, including the generational decline of full-time employment (A Rising Share of Young Adults Live in Their Parents’ Home) and the concentration of wage gains in the top 10%. These dynamics are not easily addressed, for the simple yet profound reason that the amount of human labor that generates a meaningful profit in a stagnant, over-indebted, financialized economy is declining.

The only way most enterprises can sustainably earn a profit is to offload costly human labor (with its immense burdens of healthcare, pensions, workers compensation, disability insurance, etc., and the heavy regulatory burdens of workplace rules) and replace it with networked software and smart machines.

The types of human labor that generate hefty profits are increasingly scarce, and as a result entry-level pay and employment are both capped by the high costs of human labor (even at minimum wage) and the relatively meager profits generated by conventional labor.

Most of the big profits are generated not by labor but by financialization, stock buybacks and other financial gaming of debt and leverage.

The few areas of human labor that generate hefty profits are either in the protected fiefdoms of state-enforced cartels, or in financial services (i.e. those playing the financial games with debt and leverage) or those creating the software and machinery that replaces costly human labor.

Here are B.C.'s comments on the data:

Nearly half of disposable income is spent on housing and food.

More than 50% of disposable household income is spent on housing and transportation (overwhelmingly autos).

25% of disposable income is spent on autos and health care.

Two-thirds of gross income is spent on taxes, housing, transportation, and health care.

Millennials, most especially males, coming of age since the mid- to late 2000s do not earn enough to afford the major components of household spending, i.e., taxes, housing, autos, and health care (insurance).

The self-reinforcing feedback effect of lack of gainful employment and after-tax earned income causing insufficient purchasing power for housing, auto transport, and healthcare insurance that then results in lack of growth of demand for same will persist indefinitely hereafter, i.e., permanently, including reducing the rate of coupling, marriage, fertility, household formation, etc.

Here is a chart of housing and vehicle costs, broken down by age group. Note that only the peak-earnings middle groups spend less than 50% on housing and transportation.



The concentration of earnings in the top 10% and 5% is clear: the bottom 50% of households earn a fraction of the top 10%, and the bottom 90% get by with less than a third of the income of the top 5%:



The recent decline in male employment in the peak earning years (ages 25-54) is striking: the employment rate for males ages 25-54 has been stairstepping down for 30 years, but it literally fell off a cliff in 2009:



How do you support a consumer economy with stagnant incomes for the bottom 90%, rising basic expenses and crashing employment for males ages 25-54? Answer: you don't. The media shills, government lackeys and PR-pimps can spin the GDP and other gamed statistics as much as they want, but no amount of statistical gaming will change the stagnation that results from generational declines in employment, flat wages and rising basic household expenses.

[Demeter]

55. Who the Jewish Billionaires Are Backing for 2016 Nathan Guttman

http://forward.com/news/308582/who-the-jewish-billionaires-are-backing-in-2016/

A quick look at the list of top political donors for 2014 reveals a striking fact: At least a third of the most generous 50 mega-givers were Jewish. In fact, contributions from Jewish billionaires and multi-millionaires dominated the top 10 spots on the list. Striking, yet unsurprising. Political activists have known for years that members of the Jewish community are over-represented in the field of political contributions. And now, with the 2016 election cycle beginning to warm up, these Jewish donors are on the minds of all prospective candidates.

The 2014 list represents donors who were active between presidential election cycles. Some gave directly to parties, or candidates, but most of the money went to Super PACs, the main cash vehicle that will oil the wheels of the 2016 presidential campaign.

On the Democratic side, donors are taking a more relaxed approach. With Hillary Rodham Clinton dominating the field, most donors are saving their cash gifts for the actual presidential race. Clinton comes with her own rolodex of major Jewish donors, many of whom funded her 2000 Senate race and her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid. Haim Saban, the Hollywood cartoon billionaire, is their poster child — a devoted backer who has given millions throughout the years and has become part of the Clintons’ inner circle. Saban is not featured on the top 2014 donor list, but all Democratic activists contacted by the Forward mention his name on the top of their 2016 list. But Clinton will also have to win over party donors who backed Barack Obama in his race against her in 2008. Some of them have frowned at her positions as too mainstream for their progressive tastes. Film and music industry mogul David Geffen, for example, took a harsh tone against Clinton during the Obama years, but has now returned to base, promising his unequivocal support.

For Republicans, the race for donors is in full force, with Jewish political contributors in front row seats. Florida Senator Marco Rubio has locked in top Jewish donor Norman Braman, who has reportedly agreed to spend $10-15 million to make sure Rubio is the next GOP presidential candidate. Braman is an example of a new type of Jewish Republican donor, moving from a generous contributor to a mega-donor, one whose early multi-million dollar pledge makes him a top player. Other candidates are still hoping to secure support from major funders. All eyes are set on New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer, one of the GOP’s leading contributors who has thrown a fundraiser for Rubio but not yet committed to help him. And, of course, the top prize — Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who has shown he will use his fortune to support his candidates massively.

Some megaodonors have already made their mark as top tier contributors, while others, like Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, still on the sidelines, are viewed by party insiders as potentially ready to upgrade their status from “major” to “mega” donor, a move that requires adding at least one zero to their total contributions.

PHOTOS AND DETAILS ON THE BILLIONAIRES AT LINK

[Demeter]

56. The Coming Crash & The Recession That Never Ended By Richard Wolff and Thom Hartmann

[mother earth]

62. I highly recommend viewing this video, Wolff touches on lots of issues, I absolutely love

him, Hartmann too.

K & R, Demeter & co.

You work tirelessly.

[Demeter]

57. Cyprus tourism income rises 15% with surge in arrivals

THE OTHER KIND OF MEDITERRANEAN BOAT PEOPLE...

http://news.yahoo.com/cyprus-tourism-income-rises-15-surge-arrivals-163350443.html

Recession-hit Cyprus recorded a 15 percent hike in key tourism revenue in March, the first rise in income this year, official data showed on Friday. Tourism income on the Mediterranean holiday island reached 65 million euros ($71 million) from 56.5 million euros in the same month last year. This was helped by a 25.7 percent surge in tourist arrivals in March, especially from the island’s main market Britain.

Total revenues for January to March increased 4.9 percent from 118.5 million in 2014 to 124.3 million. The average daily amount spent by tourists in March was 69.36 euros, while the average length of stay was 9.6 days. This compares with a lower average daily spending of 69.27 euros in March 2014 on higher average stays of 10.5 days. Lebanese were the biggest spenders in March at an average 143.03 euros a day, while the Greeks were the most frugal at 43.71 euros. Last year, Cyprus tourism generated 2.02 billion euros, a 2.8 percent drop from 2013's 2.08 billion euros. It was the first dip in receipts since 2009.

Following a 10-billion-euro rescue package to save a crumbling economy and insolvent banks in March 2013, Cyprus is expected to return to growth this year after nearly four years of harsh recession. Although revenue from tourism was down last year, the earnings of 2.08 billion euros in 2013 were the best for a decade.

The number of holidaymakers to Cyprus hit a record high of 2.69 million in 2001, spending a record 2.17 billion euros. Income from tourism accounts for around 12 percent of Cyprus's GDP, and is credited for ensuring that Nicosia did not suffer a double-digit recession post-bailout as first feared.

[Demeter]

58. How To Spot a Bogus Statistic

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/how-to-spot-a-bogus-statistic.html

Last week, Bill Gates recommended that over the summer everyone should read the book How To Lie With Statistics. Since that's a book that I've also repeatedly recommended, I thought I give an example of how to use the book effectively.

Earlier today, I ran across an opinion piece using a statistic to suggest that manmade climate change is scientifically controversial. This is a business issue because it will (at the very least) determine government regulation and spending for the decades ahead....In the opinion piece, syndicated columnist Star Parker criticizes President Obama for publicly stating the oft-quoted statistic that "97 percent of scientists believe that climate change is real, manmade and dangerous."

To counter Obama's statistic, Parker cites a different statistic that she feels is "more representative"-a 2012 survey showing that only 52 percent of meteorologists believe that "global warming... has happened and is manmade." Two very different statistics; two very different scenarios. If the 97 percent figure is correct, there's no controversy just consensus. If the 53 percent figure is correct, then there's no consensus just controversy. In these situations, most people pick the statistic that matches their politics. That's not a good idea for a business plan, though, because to make an accurate sales forecast and market projection, you need to know which statistic actually reflects the real world.

The main takeaway of How To Lie With Statistics is that you shouldn't take statistics at face value but instead look at how the data was gathered. To do this you need to 1) do some research and 2) apply some common sense. Fortunately, research is far more easy than when How to Lie With Statistics was originally published. Back then, checking data sources might take months; with Google it takes less than a minute. So here are the facts behind both statistics:

Obama's 97 percent figure comes from a 2013 article in Environmental Research Letters, a peer-reviewed journal. To arrive at that figure, the authors compiled search results from 11,944 abstracts of climate articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This methodology is called meta-analysis and, while it does not guarantee the absence of bias, it is a generally accepted statistical way to measure consensus on scientific issues.

Parker's 53 percent figure comes from a poll of the membership the American Meteorological Society. To arrive at that figure, the authors emailed a questionnaire to 7,197 members, about a quarter of whom responded. This methodology is called a self-selected sample. Because respondents are already interested in the subject, self-selected samples always generate biased results. Such polls are meaningless statistically. To be valid, a poll must take a random sampling.

...Of course, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the climatologists are wrong and the meteorologists (at least the ones who answered the questionnaire) are right....

[Demeter]

59. Germany's Schaeuble offers Varoufakis chocolate euros for his nerves

I'D OFFER SCHAEUBLE A BLUTWURST MADE OF HIS OWN BLOOD

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/31/us-germany-greece-schaeuble-varoufakis-idUSKBN0OG0K420150531?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has offered to give his Greek counterpart some chocolate euro coins as "nourishment for his nerves."

Schaeuble has clashed repeatedly with Yanis Varoufakis over Greece's debt and economic reforms since the leftist Syriza party took power in January, pledging to end austerity and renegotiate the bailout terms.

In an interview with the children's television program "Logo" on German broadcaster ZDF last week, a girl reporter gave Schaeuble a supportive handful of the chocolate coins.

"I'll take a few for my Greek colleague, he also needs strong nerves," Schaeuble replied.

Greece hopes to secure a cash-for-reforms deal with its lenders this week. But after four months of tortuous negotiations no breakthrough is in sight. Without a deal Athens risks default or bankruptcy in weeks.

GASLIGHTING IN ITS MOST SADISTIC FORM

[Demeter]

60. Top asset managers unite to push back on global rules - again

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-asset-managers-unite-push-125959236.html

The world's multi-trillion dollar asset management industry has presented a united front to reject proposals aimed at mitigating risks in the sector, even after they were revised by regulators.

The Group of 20 economies' (G20) task force, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), wants funds above a certain size to face closer, yet-to-be-detailed, scrutiny. Initial FSB proposals were rejected by funds, who argued size alone was not an indicator of risk, and the fund industry has now dismissed a revised set of proposals put out to a public consultation that closed this week.

"Policymakers need to develop a better understanding of asset owners, including why asset owners allocate their assets to a certain market or asset class," BlackRock, the world's biggest asset manager, said in a statement.

Regulators should focus on products and market practices, not the size of funds, BlackRock said. The FSB said it had no comment at this stage. However, it would consider responses received from the industry in conjunction with its work on possible activity-based measures, it said. The sector has been unusually vocal in talking down the FSB plans, arguing it did not play a role in the 2007-09 financial crisis, unlike banks. U.S. securities trade body SIFMA said the FSB should drop its proposals and focus on the sector's activities, like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is doing...BVI, the German funds association, said designating a fund as systemically important should not occur until systemic risks have been convincingly identified and existing requirements proven insufficient. BlackRock put forward several possible measures, such as a better definition of leverage in the sector to improve supervision, further developing a "toolkit" for managing redemptions in funds, and addressing pension underfunding as people live longer.

Regulators have expressed concerns about a potential rush for the exits by investors, such as when interest rates begin rising, triggering high demand for redemptions that funds may find difficult to honour.

"It's not how big you are, it's what you do with it that counts," said Richard Metcalfe, director of regulatory affairs at Britain's Investment Association. "Where systemic risks may arise, they must be neutralised and we will be working closely with policymakers to ensure that an effective approach is adopted for our clients."

RIIGHT....