Weekend Economists: Labor Not In Vain September 4-7, 2015

[Demeter]

King James Bible

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for as much as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.

Is there any phrase in the English language that did not come from the Bible? In any event, even the stoutest atheist can agree that labor in a righteous cause is never wasted, although the fruit of its seed may take generations to come to bear. When he look back into history, we can see the pattern, how one inspired spark bursts into a comforting flame (or a raging wildfire) in ages to come.

When we are in the midst of the planting, as we are today and for the next few years, the outcome isn't certain, nor the timing thereof. But faith that we labor not in vain gets us through.



I found this labor rights blog of interest, and wish to share a bit with you:

LABOR IS NOT A COMMODITY

Supporting Workers at Home and Abroad this Labor Day By Hunter King

Labor Day weekend is a bittersweet marker of the end of summer and the beginning of the school year. It is also a commemoration of labor rights struggles in the United States and a time to reflect on how far we have yet to go. This Labor Day, in addition to enjoying barbecues, picnics, and the beach, let us remember all the workers who don’t get the day off and take time to learn about how workers who are fed up with increasing inequality are standing up to fight back.

http://laborrightsblog.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341bf90b53ef019aff0d1612970b-320wi

Here at the ILRF, we stand in solidarity with workers internationally AND in the United States.

This blog ran for 8 years, but is currently abandoned, or at least on hold...but the material is timeless: http://laborrightsblog.typepad.com/international_labor_right/

One hard worker I wish to focus upon is Ida Tarbell.

Ida Tarbell led the way for female journalists in an era when men dominated the profession. At the turn of the century, journalism was rife with sensationalism. Newspapers competed with each other to see which could print the most outrageous stories. At the same time, corporations were increasingly ignoring laws in the name of profit. A growing number of writers exposed this underbelly of the corruption -and women played a major role.

Female journalists, though few, were originally relegated to "society" events. Such oddities might include riding elephants or brushing a hippopotamus's teeth to provide "gee whiz" feature stories. But as time went on, women left a more substantial mark on newsrooms. Their insightful writing and determination won them acclaim. One of these writers was Tarbell. She worked as an editor for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.

Tarbell moved to Paris in 1891 where she researched and wrote for several American publications. S.S. McClure, editor of McClure's Magazine in which Tarbell published 19 articles, noted: "Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens -all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?.... There is no one left; none but all of us." He hired Tarbell in 1894, and in 1904 she documented the rise of John D. Rockefeller's monopolistic Standard Oil Company and its unfair business practices.

Coined "muckrakers" by Theodore Roosevelt, Tarbell and others unearthed the wrongdoings and abuses by corporations. Muckraking, so named because it uncovered dirt, was a major part of journalism from 1902 to 1912.

But Roosevelt didn't fully support it. Said Tarbell: "Theodore Roosevelt ... had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical press's increasing criticisms and investigations of business and political abuses."

Tarbell and her fellow journalists persisted, which led to reforms, such as anti-trust laws...

http://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0316/p14s3.html

And we see that the trend has come around again....with investigative journalism and whistleblowers, and replacing the fire-breathing newspaper editors, we have the Internet, where every person owns a press, and exercises the freedom of it.

May the anti-trust laws be dusted off, refurbished and strengthened, soon!

[Demeter]

1. And how did the Markets, this Friday? Don't Ask!

DJIA DOWN 272 PTS

Other markets in similar state.


On a positive note, we haven't lost a bank since July 10th. If the Federal Reserve does raise interest rates, I expect that will change, and not for the better.

[Demeter]

18. Two peaches down today

and the last one was incredibly fragrant....I have to make pie again: a real one, this time, not a cooked filling in a graham cracker crust.

[Demeter]

2. Our Forgotten Labor Revolution by Alex Gourevitch

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/knights-of-labor-jim-crow-labor-populism-reconstruction/

In the beginning was the word, the sacred text celebrating the end of arbitrary colonial government and the creation of a constitutional republic. Then there was the redemptive war, a punishment for the original sin of slavery and whose reward was the Union reborn. The new United States declared the primacy of the national state, declared free labor the foundation of its economy, and established national citizenship. Finally, the third deed put a human face on the capitalism that the Civil War unleashed...This, anyhow, is how the standard undergraduate syllabus is arranged. It is how publishing houses organize their books; it is how the typical historical survey punctuates the American story. To be sure, other moments, like the Civil Rights Movement and the Reagan revolution get honorable mentions. But they receive their meaning primarily as decorative fabric stretched across the tripartite scaffolding: the Founding, the Civil War, the New Deal. We are supposed to believe that there is nothing to remember in those historical voids. If we go looking, all that we will discover is a series of errors, like Jim Crow, that we have since corrected.

How then to think about the fall of 1887, when a small group of labor organizers connected to the Knights of Labor, started agitating among sugar cane workers deep in the Louisiana bayou? In August, the Knights started talking to the mostly black cane-cutters who were now working for their former slave masters. They promised higher wages, an end to payment in “scrip” rather than money, and even the hope of running a plantation “on the co-operative plan” instead of under the thumb of a boss. By September thousands had joined the Knights, by October they were ready to stop working if the local planters refused to raise wages, by the first of November they were on strike.

Three weeks later they were slaughtered. With the aid of a judge and state militia leader, white vigilantes disarmed the strikers, corralled them into the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana and unleashed a three-day orgy of violence. “No credible official count of the victims of the Thibodaux massacre was ever made,” writes historian Rebecca Scott, but “bodies continued to turn up in shallow graves outside of town for weeks to come.” Precise body counts were beside the point. The question of who ruled town and country, plantation and courthouse, had been answered. As a mother of two white vigilantes put it, “I think this will settle the question of who is to rule, the nigger or the white man? For the next fifty years. . . .”

Where does an event like this fit in our national history? Who were the Knights? What was their vision of society? What was the threat they posed? These are questions we cannot answer by reference to the “holy trinity” narrative. That is because between Reconstruction and Jim Crow was a forgotten time in which the emancipation of slaves inspired a further movement to emancipate workers from the domination of the labor market. It was a moment of promise and of danger — the promise of freedom, the danger of challenges to class power. If we want to understand our history, rather than just congratulate ourselves about it, we have to abandon the prevailing, comforting narrative of progress that carefully extrudes those moments that do not fit with America’s national image as a self-correcting liberal democracy. Looking back at forgotten labor struggles is therefore not just an exercise in setting the record straight, it is an exercise in emancipating our own thinking from attempts to discipline and control it. Reconstruction and its aftermath is an especially fertile period because it is when the language of liberty began to take new form, but had not yet been thinned out into the libertarian discourses that we know today.

MUCH MORE TO THIS STORY AT LINK

[Demeter]

3. Household Labor, Caring Labor, Unpaid Labor

http://triplecrisis.com/household-labor-caring-labor-unpaid-labor/

Nancy Folbre is a professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of numerous books—including Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint (1994), The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (2001), and Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (2008)—related to household and caring labor. She is the director of the new Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) Program on Gender and Care Work and the author of the blog Care Talk.

Dollars & Sense: You’ve written about the tendency in economics to view household labor (and especially women’s labor) as “unproductive.” Can you explain how this is reflected in conventional macroeconomic measures.

Nancy Folbre: Non-market household services such as meal preparation and childcare are not considered part of what we call “the economy.”This means they literally don’t count as part of Gross Domestic Product, household income, or household consumption.

This is pretty crazy, since we know that these services contribute to our living standards and also to the development of human capabilities. They are all at least partially fungible: time and money may not be perfect substitutes, but there is clearly a trade-off. You can, in principle, pay someone to prepare your meals (as you do in a restaurant), or to look after your kids.

If you or someone else in your household provides these services for no charge (even if they expect something in return, such as a share of household earnings) that leaves more earnings available to buy other things. In fact, you could think of household income after taxes and after needs for domestic services have been met as a more meaningful definition of “disposable income” than the conventional definition, which is simply market income after taxes.

D&S: What is the practical consequence of not measuring household labor and production? Are economic policies and institutions different, especially in their impact on women, than what they would be if household labor were fully reflected in statistics on total employment or output?

NF: One macroeconomic consequence is a tendency to overstate economic growth when activities shift from an arena in which they are unpaid to one in which they are paid (all else equal). When mothers of young children enter paid employment, for instance, they reduce the amount of time they engage in unpaid work, but that reduction goes unmeasured. All that is counted is the increase in earnings that results, along with the increase in expenditures on services such as paid childcare.

As a result, rapid increases in women’s labor force participation, such as those typical in the United States between about 1960 and the mid-1990s, tend to boost the rate of growth of GDP. When women’s labor force participation levels out, as it has in the United States since the mid 1990s, the rate of growth of GDP slows down. At least some part of the difference in growth rates over these two periods simply reflects the increased “countability” of women’s work.

Consideration of the microeconomic consequences helps explain this phenomenon. When households collectively supply more labor hours to the market, their market incomes go up. But they have to use a substantial portion of those incomes to purchase substitutes for services they once provided on their own—spending more money on meals away from home (or pre-prepared foods), and child care. So, the increase in their money incomes overstates the improvement in their genuinely disposable income.

A disturbing example of policy relevance emerges from consideration of the changes in public assistance to single mothers implemented in the United States in 1996, which put increased pressure on these mothers to engage in paid employment. Many studies proclaimed the success because market income in many of these families went up. But much of that market income had to be spent paying for services such as child care, because public provision and subsidies fell short.

MORE ABOUT NON-MONETIZED WORK AT LINK

[Demeter]

4. Labor’s Demise Is America’s Demise: Thoughts for Labor Day By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39549.htm

Labor Day is a holiday that has outlived its time. Like Christmas, Labor Day has become a time-out period. As Christmas has become a shopping spree, Labor Day has become the last summer holiday...The holiday originated in 1887 to celebrate the contribution made by American workers to the strength and prosperity of the United States. The first Monday in September was chosen by President Grover Cleveland to avoid a May date that would keep alive the memory of the previous year’s Haymarket Massacre in which workers striking for an eight-hour day suffered casualties from the Chicago police.

As time passed union leadership became a career rather than a movement in behalf of a cause, but the labor movement in its initial years was reformist. It brought safer working conditions into industry and manufacturing. Unions served as a countervailing power and constrained the exploitative power of capital. An industrial or manufacturing job was a ladder of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society and stabilized the socio-political system with a large middle class. A large and thriving industrial and manufacturing sector provided many white collar middle class jobs for managers, engineers, researchers and designers, and American universities flourished as did their graduates. The labor unions provided the Democratic Party with a financial base in labor that served as a countervailing power to the Republican base in manufacturing and finance. Whether it was a plot or unintended consequence, jobs offshoring wrecked the industrial and manufacturing unions and destroyed the Democrats’ independent financial base. The two-party system that had maintained a reasonable balance was transformed into a one-party system in which both parties were dependent on the same monied interests and thus answered to the same masters...The consequence was the demise of the middle class and rise of the One Percent. Today the US has the most unequally distributed income and wealth of all developed economies and one of the worst in the entire world. Few Americans other than the One Percent have a stake in the American economic and political system.

The imbalance in the distribution of income and wealth cannot be corrected through the tax system. The imbalance is due largely to the loss of the jobs that provided the economic basis for the middle class. Correction requires a retreat from globalism and the return to a largely self-sufficient economy, which the US economy was during its glory decades. Globalism is a scheme for impoverishing First World labor and taking power and influence from the hands of the many and putting them in the hands of the few. The champions of globalism are the champions of America’s destruction.

Today the Republicans are demolishing the public sector unions. These jobs can’t be outsourced, but public schools can be replaced with charter schools, prisons can be privatized, and many public services can be contracted out to private businesses. Public sector unions never had as strong a case for their existence as manufacturing and industrial unions. Moreover, strikes by firemen, police forces, school teachers, and trash collectors undermined public support for public sector unions as did many unpleasant experiences with the licensing bureaucracies of state and local government departments. Nevertheless, public sector unions could serve as a check on ambitious executive and legislative power.

Whether one has a favorable or unfavorable opinion of unions, their demise is also the demise of countervailing power. A system in which there is no countervailing power is a tyranny in which power is unconstrained and unaccountable. The American people have been subdued and turned into a flock of sheep. Will they ever rise again?


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. Labor Day 2028 ROBERT REICH

http://robertreich.org/post/128058937635



In 1928, famed British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would advance so far in a hundred years – by 2028 – that it will replace all work, and no one will need to worry about making money.

“For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

We still have thirteen years to go before we reach Keynes’ prophetic year, but we’re not exactly on the way to it. Americans are working harder than ever...Keynes may be proven right about technological progress. We’re on the verge of 3-D printing, driverless cars, delivery drones, and robots that can serve us coffee in the morning and make our beds. But he overlooked one big question: How to redistribute the profits from these marvelous labor-saving inventions, so we’ll have the money to buy the free time they provide? Without such a mechanism, most of us are condemned to work ever harder in order to compensate for lost earnings due to the labor-replacing technologies.

Such technologies are even replacing knowledge workers – a big reason why college degrees no longer deliver steadily higher wages and larger shares of the economic pie. Since 2000, the vast majority of college graduates have seen little or no income gains...The economic model that predominated through most of the twentieth century was mass production by many, for mass consumption by many. But the model we’re rushing toward is unlimited production by a handful, for consumption by the few able to afford it. The ratio of employees to customers is already dropping to mind-boggling lows. When Facebook purchased the messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion last year, WhatsApp had fifty-five employees serving 450 million customers.

When more and more can be done by fewer and fewer people, profits go to an ever-smaller circle of executives and owner-investors. WhatsApp’s young co-founder and CEO, Jan Koum, got $6.8 billion in the deal...This in turn will leave the rest of us with fewer well-paying jobs and less money to buy what can be produced, as we’re pushed into the low-paying personal service sector of the economy. Which will also mean fewer profits for the handful of billionaire executives and owner-investors, because potential consumers won’t be able to afford what they’re selling.

What to do? We might try to levy a gigantic tax on the incomes of the billionaire winners and redistribute their winnings to everyone else. But even if politically feasible, the winners will be tempted to store their winnings abroad – or expatriate. Suppose we look instead at the patents and trademarks by which government protects all these new inventions. Such government protections determine what these inventions are worth. If patents lasted only three years instead of the current twenty, for example, What’sApp would be worth a small fraction of $19 billion – because after three years anybody could reproduce its messaging technology for free.

Instead of shortening the patent period, how about giving every citizen a share of the profits from all patents and trademarks government protects? It would be a condition for receiving such protection. Say, for example, 20 percent of all such profits were split equally among all citizens, starting the month they turn eighteen. In effect, this would be a basic minimum income for everyone. The sum would be enough to ensure everyone a minimally decent standard of living – including money to buy the technologies that would free them up from the necessity of working. Anyone wishing to supplement their basic minimum could of course choose to work – even though, as noted, most jobs will pay modestly.

This outcome would also be good for the handful of billionaire executives and owner-investors, because it would ensure they have customers with enough money to buy their labor-saving gadgets. Such a basic minimum would allow people to pursue whatever arts or avocations provide them with meaning, thereby enabling society to enjoy the fruits of such artistry or voluntary efforts. We would thereby create the kind of society John Maynard Keynes predicted we’d achieve by 2028 – an age of technological abundance in which no one will need to work.

Happy Labor Day.


JUST ONE THING, MR. REICH. WHY SHOULD THERE BE ANY BILLIONAIRES?

[Demeter]

6. Cooper Union's Free Tuition May Return After Lawsuit Settlement

http://gothamist.com/2015/09/02/free_tuition_cooper_union.php

After years of roiling tension, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman will announce a settlement between Cooper Union's board of trustees and a group of alumni and faculty who sued the school over alleged mismanagement. And free tuition may be back in play.

In 2013, the school announced that students entering in 2014 would start to pay tuition, reversing the explicit wishes of Peter Cooper when he founded the school in 1859. However, critics cited poor fiscal decisions—from its new $100+ million Thom Mayne building to spending $350,000 on a former university president's inaugural celebration to not charging market-rate rent for its Chrysler Building property (yes, the school owns that land!)—as the school's real undoing. The complaints prompted Schneiderman to investigate the school's finances, and Cooper Union's president resigned after the AG's office started its work.

The NY Times described the problems with the new building:

The college began construction after raising less than one-third of the building’s projected $120 million cost. Cooper Union had to take out a $175 million loan. The plan, according to the attorney general, “relied on optimistic assumptions to achieve long-term solvency, including an assumption it could invest $35 million in borrowed funds in the stock market and profit by making returns in excess of the loan’s interest rate.”

Then the market crashed in 2008. The $35 million was lost, and the financial plan collapsed, leaving the college with rising loan payments and deficit spending that threatened its endowment.

Schneiderman said of the deal, "It’s my job to promote and protect New York’s nonprofit sector, but we also have to step in to help institutions like Cooper Union when they face fiscal and governance problems. We’ll continue to monitor the school’s progress to make sure it’s on a path to long-term sustainability — and, I hope, free tuition."

The Committee to Save Cooper Union released these details about the settlement:

The changes dictated by the Consent Decree and cy pres petition [pdf] will enable Cooper Union to find a practical path back to its full scholarship model; give alumni, students, faculty, and staff a powerful role in Cooper’s governance; institute strict oversight of the school’s progress toward its goals; spur a serious effort to balance its budget; and reform its governance.

The confidential investigation by the Attorney General came about as a result of the CSCU’s lawsuit and has culminated in today’s announcement. According to the cy pres, the Attorney General intervened “to safeguard Peter Cooper’s irreplaceable gift to the people of New York.”

The Consent Decree and cy pres provide far more power to the community and genuine oversight than CSCU could have possibly gained with its lawsuit alone. Equally important, we can begin the process of restoring the mission of Cooper Union today—not after years of legal battles and appeals.

The Consent Decree and cy pres include the following provisions:

- Cooper Union’s Board of Trustees, together with the community, will work to return Cooper Union to a high-quality, sustainable, tuition-free model as soon as practical. A special committee of the Board will be dedicated to development of a strategic plan to return the school to its traditional tuition-free policy;
- Alignment of the trust and charter of the school, through the cy pres petition, to reflect the evolution of the institution into its modern form and provide for judicial oversight of the effort to return to a full tuition scholarship model;
- Expansion of the Board to include student trustees (2), additional alumni trustees (2), and faculty and staff representatives (6);
- Establishment of the Council of the Associates of Cooper Union—comprised of the alumni, student, and faculty trustees—with the charge to develop a full plan and proposal for The Associates of Cooper Union.
- Appointment of an independent financial monitor who will be responsible for evaluating and reporting on the financial management of Cooper Union, including compliance with the Consent Decree;
- Transparent disclosure of Board materials, budget documents, and investment results;
- Formation of a board committee to further reform the school’s governance; and
An inclusive search committee to identify the next full-term president.

Cooper Union Alumni Association president Nils Folke Anderson said, "In the spirit of Peter Cooper’s ‘Union,’ the CUAA stands united with the entire community, willing and ready to commence work on the immense challenge before us. We welcome this opportunity to provide additional alumni representation on the Board of Trustees, and pledge to do our part on the road ahead to restore the full scholarship model at Cooper Union.”

The efforts to challenge the administration's positions were the result of years of organizing and protests. Last year, one protester, 2013 graduate Casey Gollan, said of the new students who were the first to pay tuition, "In the past few years, there’s a culture that’s built up. The freshmen that came in this year, a lot of them came in knowing what Free Cooper was, knowing about actions, knowing about the administration, knowing about the lawsuit."

One Class of 2018 freshman said to us, "Even if our class never is given free tuition, the point isn’t about our individual problems. It’s more about the larger story and preserving the legacy of the school."

[Demeter]

7. Total 2015 Job Cuts To Be Biggest Since 2009: Challenger

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-03/total-job-cuts-pace-be-biggest-2009-challenger

...Challenger reported August job cuts, which at 41,186 were a 60% drop from the 115,730 reported last month (the highest since September 2011), which however was driven by a one-time mass layoffs last month in military staffing. Putting August in its correct perspective, the number was 2.9% higher than the same month a year ago, when 40,010 planned job cuts were announced. What is troubling is that this marks the seventh month this year that the job-cut total was higher than the comparable month from 2014. What is worse is that for all the euphoria about initial claims printing at or near record lows, the reality as measured from the bottom-up, is far different and as Challenger notes, so far in 2015 employers have announced 434,554 job cuts: that is up 31 percent from the 332,931 planned layoffs in the first eight months of 2014. What is worst, and what reveals the true picture of the economy, is that with monthly totals averaging 54,319, 2015 job cuts are on track to exceed 650,000 for the year, which would be the highest year-end tally since 2009 (1,272,030).

In other words, not only is the economy no longer growing at its previous pace, but due to the ongoing oil rout, tens of thousands of highly-paid workers mostly in the oil space are getting pink slips just as the Fed is preparing to tighten. Putting a number to that estimate, Challenger says that "since the beginning of the year, oil prices have been blamed for 82,268 layoffs, mostly in the energy sector, but also among industrial goods manufacturers that supply equipment and materials for oil exploration and extraction."

FIGURE 1


Curiously, the biggest culprit for August job cuts was not the energy sector (expect many more layoffs here), but retail. The retail sector saw the heaviest job cutting in August, with 9,601 planned layoffs reported during the month. Most of those were related to bankruptcy of east coast supermarket chain A&P, which is closing more than 100 stores and laying off a reported 8,500 workers by Thanksgiving. The retail sector has announced 57,363 job cuts so far this year, which is a 90 percent increase over the 30,109 job cuts announced by this point in 2014.

“Overall, retail is relatively healthy, but we have seen some big layoffs this year, particularly from long-time players that simply have not been able to keep up with changing consumer trends. These retailers somehow manage to survive, but only through multiple bankruptcies, such as A&P. Earlier this year RadioShack announced 5,400 job cuts,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The industrial goods sector saw the second heaviest downsizing activity in August, announcing 7,949 layoffs during the month. That is the largest number of job cuts for this sector since March, when 9,163 job cuts were announced.

Finally, going back to oil, Challenger was optimistic, however this optimism is misplaced. This is what it said:

“The stream of job cuts related to oil prices appears to be ebbing. The majority of these cuts came in the first four months of 2015, when we saw more than 68,000 layoffs related to oil. Since May, fewer than 14,000 job cuts have been attributed to oil prices,” noted Challenger.

There is a problem: as ConocoPhillips just announced two days ago when it fired 10% of its global workforce, oil companies, which had been betting on an oil rebound, all got flatfooted by the second drop in oil price. This will lead to tens of thousands of more highly paid jobs being pink slipped in the coming months.

“It is too soon to say if we have seen the last of the big oil cuts. As we head into the final months of 2015, there are definitely some red flags that suggest we may see more layoffs from the energy sector, as well as in other areas of the economy. The problems that China is facing could send shockwaves throughout the global economy, including the United States,” Challenger continued.

Finally, one thing that is certain: of all states, Texas continues to bear the brunt of the layoff pain. And if oil continues trading in the $30/$40 range, the pain is far from over.

FIGURE2

GO TO THE LINK FOR THE GRAPHS...THEY HAVE MADE THEM IMPOSSIBLE TO LINK

[Demeter]

13. Muddled U.S. jobs report leaves Fed in a 'jam' watching markets

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/04/us-usa-economy-fed-idUSKCN0R41RM20150904?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

The latest U.S. jobs report was not definitively good or bad enough to help the Federal Reserve decide whether to raise interest rates later this month, leaving the decision hanging on volatility in financial markets over the next couple of weeks.

The economy added 173,000 jobs in August, quite a bit fewer than expected. But employment growth in June and July were revised higher, wage gains last month were better than expected, and the unemployment rate fell to a seven-year low of 5.1 percent.

With global stock and currency markets reeling over the last two weeks, the report is probably the best and last direct reading on the economy as Fed officials weigh whether to hike rates at a much-anticipated meeting on Sept. 16-17.

But the report disappointed those looking for clarity.

"With this jobs report ... the Fed finds itself in a real uncertainty jam when it comes to a September interest rate hike," Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, in Newport Beach, California, said in an email.

"In the run-up to its policy meeting, the Fed will pay even greater attention to global market developments."

MORE

[Demeter]

14. SHOULD I GO OR SHOULD I STAY?

...According to Fed policymakers gathered in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week, not only would the August jobs report need to be decent but market gyrations would need to dissipate for them to act, despite sustained strength in both the labor market and the broader economy.

The Fed is concerned not so much with employment but with the possibility that inflation, which has remained below a 2.0-percent target for a few years, will not rebound any time soon given the downward pressure that China could put on commodity prices and global growth....

[Demeter]

17. Wall St. drops as jobs data leaves Fed-watchers hanging

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/04/us-markets-stocks-usa-idUSKCN0R416Q20150904?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

U.S. stock indexes dropped almost 2 percent on Friday as a mixed August jobs report did little to quell investor uncertainty about whether the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates this month.

Trepidation about the first U.S. rate hike in almost a decade added to worries among investors already on edge about a stumbling Chinese economy and a recent market selloff.

"Markets are confused. It was an okay jobs report, but there's worry about China going into the weekend," said John Augustine, chief investment officer, Huntington Trust in Columbus, Ohio.

Nonfarm payrolls increased 173,000 last month, fewer than the 220,000 that economists polled by Reuters had expected. But the unemployment rate dropped to 5.1 percent, its lowest in more than seven years, and wages accelerated. Many investors viewed those data points as contradictory signals about the urgency to increase interest rates.

"The Federal Reserve finds itself in a real uncertainty jam when it comes to a September interest rate hike," said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz....

[Demeter]

8. Will Uncle Sam Confiscate Gold Again?

NOSTALGIA, ANYONE?

Will Uncle Sam Confiscate Gold Again?

Investors suffered financial losses in recent weeks as stocks globally came under pressure in August and had their worst month in the last three years. In one of the most volatile trading periods since the global financial crisis, August saw a massive $5.7 trillion erased from the value of stocks worldwide. No major stock market was left unscathed and the risk of financial and economic contagion became evident again.

There are growing concerns internationally that in the event of another Wall Street or global stock market crash and a new systemic crisis – a Eurozone debt crisis or another Lehman Brothers collapse – there could be enforced bank closures or extended bank holidays in the EU and U.S. as seen in Greece recently.



In this scenario, deposit boxes and vaults in U.S. banks and financial institutions could be sealed and gold confiscated again.

There is a legal precedent for this. April 5th, 1933 – at the height of the Great Depression – was the day when U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instructed all American citizens to hand over all their gold coins and bars to the Federal Government.

[Demeter]

9. Is a(NOTHER) Global Debt Deleveraging At Our Doorstep?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-03/global-debt-deleveraging-it-our-doorstep

The blogosphere is rife with talk of the “death of the US Dollar.”

The US Dollar will eventually die, as all fiat currencies do. But the fact remains that everyone on the planet has been borrowing in US Dollars for decades, or leveraging up using Dollars and that process needs to unwind.

When you borrow in US Dollars you are effectively shorting the US Dollar. So when leverage decreases through defaults or restructuring, the number of US Dollars outstanding diminishes.

And this strengthens the US Dollar.

With that in mind, it looks as though we are in the early stages of a massive, multi-year Dollar deleveraging cycle. Indeed, the greenback is now breaking out against EVERY major world currency...The fact that we are getting major breakouts of multi-year if not multi-decade patterns against every major world currency indicates that this US Dollar bull market is the REAL DEAL, not just an anomaly.

With that in mind, I continue to believe the US Dollar is in the beginning of a multi-year bull market. And this will result in various crises along the way. Globally there is over $9 trillion borrowed in US Dollars and invested in other assets/ projects. This global carry trade is now blowing up and will continue to do so as Central Banks turn on one another. This will bring about a wave of deleveraging that will see the amount of US Dollars in the system shrink. This in turn will drive the US Dollar higher...Any entity or investor who is using aggressive leverage in US Dollars will be at risk of imploding. Globally that $9 trillion in US Dollar carry trades is equal in size to the economies of Germany and Japan combined.



Indeed, few investors remember that the US Dollar rallied hard in 2008 as a precursor to the meltdown. Is today's US Dollar rally a similar warning?

[Demeter]

10. Why Even the Labor Movement’s Biggest Enemies Should Be Cheering It On Right Now

http://observer.com/2015/09/why-the-wealthy-should-celebrate-labor-day-this-year/

Perhaps a New Deal moment is at hand. Fight for 15, the campaign to raise the minimum wage of fast-food employees, has rocked the country. Hillary Clinton now touts collective bargaining—a subject on which leading Democrats have been silent for years. The National Labor Relations Board has just threatened the “new” U.S. corporate model—it held that big companies could be liable for employees of all the little subcontractors they use. And Scott Walker’s anti-labor populism is losing out to Donald Trump’s populism, which doesn’t target labor. Meanwhile, Ms. Clinton’s primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, is running openly as a socialist. TECHNICALLY, HE'S A DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST....IN THE FDR STYLE


The right to join a union is still a long way from a civil right—that is, one as effective as the rights protected in the Civil Rights Act, with the same kind of penalties. That is truly what labor needs. Meanwhile, stepping off the barricades here, I’d like to make a pitch for labor to those who may regard it as a threat.

First, we need a labor movement just as an instrument of economic policy; we need a right to bargain to keep up a decent level of aggregate economic demand. After all, how has it worked without labor? We go from bubble to bubble, from shock to shock. Sooner or later, many Americans have to take on way too much debt. And while one might scoff at the moment, there is trouble ahead. The young leverage themselves for college diplomas like the way their parents took on mortgages. And even if they weren’t running up debt, there are other danger signs. We have far more children born in poverty than we did 10 years ago. They aren’t going to spend.

How long can this continue without a wage increase?

Second, we need a labor movement to force companies to invest in skills. Look at the workforce we are creating—the freelancing, the temps, the independent contractors. No one is training them—they’re at entry level forever. There is no career ladder to climb. In the end, that means lower productivity and lower growth.

And without a skill-based economy, there will be less innovation, whether or not an occasional Steve Jobs appears. Our idea of innovation now is Uber, but the only true innovation here is just a new and innovative way of exploiting people who have no rights. If Uber is a taste of the “innovation” of the future, this country is going to be a miserably Dickensian and low-wage place...

Read more at: http://tr.im/Tn4Kg

[Demeter]

11. Mortgage lawsuits against BofA, Citigroup and Wells Fargo resurrected

http://www.housingwire.com/articles/34966

Federal appeals court revives Miami’s lawsuit against TBTFs... A U.S. appeals court revived three lawsuits filed by the City of Miami against Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C), alleging predatory mortgage lending practices against minority borrowers.

In a unanimous vote, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s dismissal of the city's claims under the federal Fair Housing Act.

Miami’s lawsuit alleges the three banks engaged in a long-term lending discrimination in its residential housing market programs.

"It is clear that the harm the city claims to have suffered has a sufficiently close connection to the conduct the statute prohibits," Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus wrote.

Other cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Memphis have met with mixed results attempting to bring suits against the lenders for what they call predatory lending targeted at black and Hispanic homebuyers.

The lawsuit in Miami charged that the three banks steered black and Hispanic borrowers toward higher-cost loans....

[Demeter]

12. How the Fed Failed the U.S. on Swipe Fees

http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/how-the-fed-failed-the-us-on-swipe-fees-1076433-1.html

Five years ago, Congress decided to take action on the bloated, price-fixed fees that banks charge merchants every time a customer makes a purchase with a debit card. It ordered the Federal Reserve to bring competition to the market by lowering fees to a reasonable sum.

Unfortunately, the Fed was swayed by heavy bank lobbying as it wrote the rules to implement the new law, settling on language that allows Visa and MasterCard to keep fees that are way too high. Now, according to a Richmond Fed study released in August, only 10% of 420 retailers surveyed reported that their fees had dropped two years after the law went into effect in October 2011. The other 90% saw no change, were uncertain of the impact or actually faced higher fees.

This clearly goes against congressional intent. The survey offers proof that the Fed made a mistake in appeasing big banks and credit card companies.

In fact, even the least efficient banks are making a 500% profit on the fees they charge merchants to process debit card transactions, according to figures the banks report to the Fed and analyzed by the Merchant Advisory Group, a trade association. Our own analysis of the numbers banks report shows thatabout 90% of banks impacted by the rule (the 100 or so with more than $10 billion in assets) areactually making twice that profit margin. By contrast, retailing is among the least profitable industries as merchants struggle to make margins of 1% to 3%.

Moreover, these are just the margins on the rates regulated by the Fed. Most banks aren’t covered by the regulations — and credit cards aren’t covered at all. So, the real profit margins from so-called swipe fees are actually many times higher than 1,000%.

MORE

[Hotler]

20. This......

"The survey offers proof that the Fed made a mistake in appeasing big banks and credit card companies."

Hell! Appeasing the big banks and credit card companies (big banks) is their job.

"500% profit on the fees " If the Fed and and the bankers needed reason to be broken up this is one.

[Demeter]

15. Massachusetts regulator investigates BNY Mellon fund pricing snafu

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/04/us-bnymellon-funds-investigation-idUSKCN0R41UM20150904?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

The top securities regulator of Massachusetts said on Friday he is investigating the computer glitch at BNY Mellon Corp (BK.N) that last month disrupted pricing on more than $400 billion worth of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund assets. Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin said he has asked BNY Mellon and six of the largest fund companies affected how the technical glitch in fund accounting impacted individual investors.

“In the warp-speed of trading these days computer problems can happen,” Galvin said in a press release. "But the fallout that seems only to affect large financial institutions can hit the average investor looking at his and her retirement money.”

BNY Mellon roiled about 5 percent of the U.S. fund industry last month when one of the accounting systems it relies on to generate prices for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds collapsed. The problems lasted a week, but the root cause has not been determined. BNY Mellon declined to comment on Galvin's investigation.

Galvin said his inquiry was initially focused on Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, First Trust Advisors, Guggenheim Investments, Prudential Investments and Federated Investors Inc. Goldman Sachs, Guggenheim and Deutsche declined to comment. Prudential, Federated and First Trust did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The investigation asks that BNY Mellon and the investment companies detail the scope of the problem and type of corrective action that is being taken to address individual investor harm, according to the press release from Galvin's office.

[Demeter]

16. Geneva wealth managers pay defrauded investors to settle Madoff case

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/04/us-swiss-madoff-idUSKCN0R41PW20150904?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

Five former Geneva wealth managers have paid "substantial compensation" to settle criminal complaints brought by clients whose assets they had invested with U.S. fraudster Bernard Madoff, the Geneva prosecutor's office said on Friday. The case was launched in 2009 against five directors of Aurelia Finance, a Geneva-based private bank that prosecutors said had lost up to $800 million of clients' money by investing in Madoff's "Ponzi" scheme, which used money from new investors to pay existing clients.

The five men - Vladimir Stepczynski, Pascal Cattaneo, Olivier Ador, Laurent Mathysen-Gerst and Jean-Marc Wenger - were charged with criminal mismanagement of client money by putting too many assets into a Madoff "feeder fund". All five resigned from Aurelia's board and their assets were frozen.

Prosecutors told a Geneva court at the time that the directors had enriched themselves on management fees, finder fees and commissions paid for fictitious returns that were never verified. The Swiss newspaper Le Temps reported last month that the five defendants had been due in court on Oct. 12.

The financial institutions that lost money in the fraud, through asset management units, include Spain's Santander (SAN.MC), Italy's UniCredit (CRDI.MI) and Swiss-based EFG International. Swiss asset managers were among the biggest investors in Madoff's scheme, with firms based in Geneva particularly hard hit.

[Demeter]

19. See you in the morning...when it should be less awful out there

[MattSh]

21. The Shady, Slimy & Corrupt World Of Taxpayer Funded Sports Stadiums | Zero Hedge

Like pretty much everything in the modern U.S. economy, wealthy and connected people fleecing taxpayers in order to earn even greater piles of money is also the business model when it comes to sports stadiums. Many cities have tried to make voter approval mandatory before these building boondoggles get started, but in almost all cases these efforts are thwarted by a powerful coalition of businessmen and corrupt politicians. Sound familiar? Yep, it a microcosm for pretty much everything else in America these days.

To get you up to speed, here are a few excerpts from an excellent Pacific Standard magazine article:

Over the past 15 years, more than $12 billion in public money has been spent on privately owned stadiums. Between 1991 and 2010, 101 new stadiums were opened across the country; nearly all those projects were funded by taxpayers. The loans most often used to pay for stadium construction—a variety of tax-exempt municipal bonds—will cost the federal government at least $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies to bondholders. Stadiums are built with money borrowed today, against public money spent tomorrow, at the expense of taxes that will never be collected. Economists almost universally agree that publicly financed stadiums are bad investments, yet cities and states still race to the chance to unload the cash. What gives?

To understand this stadium trend, and why it’s so hard for opponents to thwart public funding, look to Wisconsin. Last month, Governor Scott Walker signed a bill to spend $250 million on a new basketball arena for the Milwaukee Bucks. (The true cost of the project, including interest payments, will be more than $400 million.)

Isn’t Scott Walker supposed to be “Mr. Fiscal Conservative?”

The story of what’s happening in Milwaukee is remarkable, if not already familiar. Step one: A down-on-its-luck team is purchased by a group of billionaire investors. Step two: The owners nod to their “moral responsibility” to keep the team in its hometown,while simultaneously lobbying for a new stadium. Step three: The team threatens to abandon its hometown for greener pastures—and newer facilities—in another city. Step four: The threat scares up hundreds of millions of public dollars in stadium financing. Step five: The new stadium opens, boosting the owners’ investment, while sloughing much of the financial risk onto taxpayers. As New York Times columnist Michael Powell wrote, “From start to desultory end, Milwaukee offered a case study in all that is wrong with our arena-shakedown age.”



Complete story at - http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-04/bread-circuses-shady-slimy-corrupt-world-taxpayer-funded-sports-stadiums

[MattSh]

22. End Of Cheap Fossil Fuels Could Have More Severe Consequences Than Thought | OilPrice.com

The characteristic feeling of the post-2008 world has been one of anxiety. Occasionally, that anxiety breaks out into fear as it did in the last two weeks when stock markets around the world swooned and middle class and wealthy investors had a sudden visitation from Pan, the god from whose name we get the word "panic." Pan's appearance is yet another reminder that the relative stability of the globe from the end of World War II right up until 2008 is over. We are in uncharted waters.

Here is the crux of the matter as expressed in a piece which I wrote last year:

The relentless, if zigzag, rise in financial markets for the past 150 years has been sustained by cheap fossil fuels and a benign climate. We cannot count on either from here on out....

Another thing we cannot necessarily count on is the remarkable geopolitical stability that the world experienced for two long stretches during the fossil fuel age. The first one lasted from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the beginning of World War I in 1914 (interrupted only by the brief Franco-Prussian War). The second lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until now.

Following the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq, the Middle East has experienced increasing chaos devolving into a civil war in Syria; the rapid success of forces calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria which are busily reshaping the borders of those two countries; and now the renewed chaos in Libya. We must add to this the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. It is no accident that all of these conflicts are related to oil and natural gas.

Complete story at - http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/End-Of-Cheap-Fossil-Fuels-Could-Have-More-Severe-Consequences-Than-Thought.html

[MattSh]

23. Do your job Muppets...

Last edited Sat Sep 5, 2015, 08:23 AM - Edit history (1)

Oh my. This artist has something to offend just about everybody!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/expd/

[MattSh]

26. For the uninitiated...

That's not a misspelling...

LIBOR

The London Interbank Offered Rate is the average interest rate estimated by leading banks in London that the average leading bank would be charged if borrowing from other banks.

In June 2012, multiple criminal settlements by Barclays Bank revealed significant fraud and collusion by member banks connected to the rate submissions, leading to the Libor scandal.[6][7][8] The British Bankers’ Association said on 25 September 2012 that it would transfer oversight of LIBOR to UK regulators, as proposed by Financial Services Authority managing director Martin Wheatley's independent review recommendations.[9] Wheatley's review recommended that banks submitting rates to LIBOR must base them on actual inter-bank deposit market transactions and keep records of those transactions, that individual banks' LIBOR submissions be published after three months, and recommended criminal sanctions specifically for manipulation of benchmark interest rates.[10] Financial institution customers may experience higher and more volatile borrowing and hedging costs after implementation of the recommended reforms.[11] The UK government agreed to accept all of the Wheatley Review's recommendations and press for legislation implementing them.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor

[MattSh]

24. It Turns out Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Are Distant Cousins

ANTIMEDIA) Author A.J. Jacobs and a team of researchers with genealogy web sites myheritage.com and geni.com have recently developed a family tree showing that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are distant cousins. They share royal blood that runs deep in their family lines.

Jacobs told Extra in a recent interview that “Their 19th great grandfather is King Edward III so there is precedent for ruling a country, it’s in their genes.”

The family tree, which can be seen and verified below (courtesy of myheritage.com/geni.com), is comprised of a long line of aristocracy on both ends.

When you take a close look at how global events have progressed over the ages, you will find that many of the families who dominate politics and economics today have bloodlines that trace back to the feudal lords of the Middle Ages. In Middle Eastern and third world countries, this is painfully obvious because there are still royal dynasties that openly claim it is their birthright to rule over their country. While in the West the aristocrats are a bit less open, the same principle still applies.

Complete story at - http://theantimedia.org/it-turns-out-hillary-clinton-and-donald-trump-are-distant-cousins/



Admit it: You suspected this all along, didn't you? Bigger image at the source...

[Demeter]

25. Mission Accomplished: the Kid has given me her disease

It starts with light-headedness, and the sinuses go into production....and my brain not only hurts, it doesn't work well, either. And today is supposed to be worse than Friday, and Friday I punted.

If there's anything left tonight, I'll squeeze out some more posts, but I'm taking some pain relief and going back to bed...

[Demeter]

47. I tried to go swimming Saturday

and couldn't bear to get wet above the waist...just feel so crummy. Curses!

[hamerfan]

27. Musical Interlude

Sixteen Tons performed by Eric Burdon:

[MattSh]

28. Musical Interlude: Working in a Coalmine

[MattSh]

29. Musical Interlude: The River

[MattSh]

30. Musical Interlude: Joe Hill

Damn, that voice! Paul Robeson.

[antigop]

31. The Top 10 Labor Day songs

http://www.thenation.com/article/top-ten-labor-day-songs/

(Some have already been posted above.)

[Demeter]

32. Dow posts triple-digit drop, caps second worst week in 2015

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-futures-fall-weekly-drop-in-sight-as-jobs-report-looms-2015-09-04?siteid=YAHOOB

U.S. stocks ended Friday’s session sharply lower, as a highly anticipated monthly jobs report intensified the debate about the Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates in September.

Widely seen as the last notable economic report before the Federal Reserve decides whether to raise interest rates at its two-day meeting on Sept. 16-17, the jobs data showed that the U.S. economy added a weaker-than-estimated 173,000 nonfarm jobs last month, while the unemployment rate dropped to 5.1%—marking its lowest level since April 2008.

The employment report began a downbeat day for the market as investors seemed to read the data as signaling that the Fed may soon decide to end its ultraloose monetary policy in two weeks.

“The Fed has been clear about wanting to raise rates this year and at least now they have a green light if they decide to do so,” said Kate Warne, investment strategist at Edward Jones.

Friday’s losses capped another brutal week for the main indexes, which suffered their second-largest weekly losses this year.

The S&P 500 SPX, -1.53% closed 29.91 points, or 1.5% lower at 1,921.22 and fell 3.4% over the week. Among the biggest decliners this week were utilities stocks, which shed 5.2% since, while health-care and financials stocks lost 4.4% and 4.3% respectively.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.66% dropped 272.38 points, or 1.7%, to 16,102.38, recording a 3.3% loss over the week. Among the blue-chip stocks, 29 out of 30 posted weekly losses, with the Dow losing more than 1,550 points over the past two weeks.

The Nasdaq Composite COMP, -1.05% ended the day down 49.58 points, or 1.1% at 4,683.92 and posted a 3% weekly loss. Highflying biotechnology stocks were the biggest losers, with the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF IBB, -0.45% posting a 4.6% weekly decline.

Meanwhile, implied volatility on the S&P 500 as measured by the CBOE Volatility index VIX, +8.55% rose 6.7% over the week, closing at 27.8 on Friday, above the historical average of 20.

[Demeter]

35. Wall Street caps off tough week with a steep loss

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/04/us-markets-stocks-usa-idUSKCN0R416Q20150904?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

U.S. stock indexes dropped more than 1 percent on Friday after a mixed August jobs report did little to quell investor uncertainty about whether the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates this month.

Trepidation about the first U.S. rate hike in almost a decade added to worries among investors already on edge about a stumbling Chinese economy and a recent market selloff.

"Markets are confused. It was an okay jobs report, but there's worry about China going into the weekend," said John Augustine, chief investment officer, Huntington Trust in Columbus, Ohio.

Nonfarm payrolls increased 173,000 last month, fewer than the 220,000 that economists polled by Reuters had expected. But the unemployment rate dropped to 5.1 percent, its lowest in more than seven years, and wages accelerated. Many investors viewed those data points as contradictory signals about the urgency to increase interest rates.

Near-zero rates have allowed the U.S. stock market to almost triple from the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. Many on Wall Street hope recent global market turmoil and worries about China's economy will lead the Fed to hold off raising rates when it meets on Sept. 16-17....MORE

[Demeter]

36. Global concerns may shrink Wall Street's third-quarter estimates

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/05/us-markets-stocks-usa-weekahead-idUSKCN0R428920150905?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

Slowing growth in emerging markets and currency fluctuations in anticipation of a U.S. interest rate hike may push third-quarter revenue and earnings estimates lower this month.

Wall Street expects a 3.4 percent decline in earnings for the S&P 500 .SPX for the quarter. Estimates have already fallen for 9 out of 10 of the benchmark index's sectors so far this year, according to Thomson Reuters data.

S&P revenue is expected to fall 2.8 percent for the quarter, led by steep declines in the energy and materials sectors. As companies tend to revise guidance around the end of the quarter, estimates may become even less optimistic.

"Analysts will likely be pulling in their reins going into the quarterly reports and the pre-announcement season. This could happen fairly quickly," said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Group in Bedford Hills, New York.

MORE

[Demeter]

33. Credit Suisse to pay $288 million in damages in Lake Las Vegas refinancing

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/05/us-credit-suisse-gp-highland-verdict-idUSKCN0R502120150905?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

A district court judge has asked Credit Suisse Group AG to pay $287.5 million in damages to an affiliate of Highland Capital Management, as part of a long drawn breach of contract case.

The judge asked the bank to pay about $211.9 million in damages and restitution and $75.6 million in prejudgment interest on the damages.

The damages are related to the event in which the Zurich-based bank was found to have used inflated appraisals to convince an affiliate of Highland Capital Management in 2007 to refinance the Nevada resort community, which sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy a year later.

A Texas jury found in December that Credit Suisse had fraudulently enticed investors to back a $540 million loan for Lake Las Vegas resort, only to have the borrower quickly default.

Highland Capital Management and Credit could not be reached for comment.

[Demeter]

44. Nomura, RBS liability in U.S. mortgage bond case upped to $839 million

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/nomura-rbs-liability-u-mortgage-001723756.html

Nomura Holdings Inc and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS.L) have agreed to pay up to $33 million (£21.8 million) on top of $806 million that a U.S. judge ordered them to pay for making false statements in selling mortgage-backed securities. The agreement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency was disclosed in court papers filed on Friday in Manhattan federal court and covers legal costs the regulator incurred taking the banks to trial earlier this year.

The FHFA had sued the banks in its role as conservator for mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) and Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB), which had bought $2 billion in securities from them ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. Following a non-jury trial, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan in May found Nomura, the securities' sponsor, and RBS, an underwriter on some of them, liable. Cote awarded $806 million to the FHFA and also awarded the regulator its costs and attorneys fees, sums that Friday's agreement covers.

Under the agreement, the banks will pay $33 million if after an appeal they pay at least $413 million for state law violations asserted by the FHFA. Should that amount shrink to above $272 million, the parties will let Cote decide how much up to $33 million should be paid.

Anything less than $272 million makes the agreement void...

[Demeter]

34. G20 promises transparency on rate moves as global economy disappoints

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/04/us-g20-turkey-idUSKCN0R410920150904?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

SURE THEY WILL

[Demeter]

37. THIS IS FOR YOU, B&R!

[bread_and_roses]

55. "But the sharing of life's glories Bread & roses...

... bread & roses.

Thank you! Seeing that message gave me a real smile, something too rare these days.

More and more, I think the heart of that song is in that one phrase, "the sharing of life's glories."

Thinking of the post above, talking about deriving a minimum income from the patent profits - the problem is, the earth simply cannot sustain production and consumption at the current levels of the West. Especially when so much of it is based on plastics.

Searching for something the other day I came across a title of an article on the "sharing economy" titled something like "my house was trashed my car was wrecked and ..."

I didn't read it but could tell it was about the rise of such services as car share and air b&B ...

And I was thinking, well, the problem is really the concept of "mine." Of ownership.

Related to your question above - "why should there be billionaires?" Why, indeed.

We have mostly forgotten the socialist bent of much of the early labor struggle. And without it, we are left with the scrabbling over scraps we see today.

[Demeter]

60. Eat the Rich and Pay the Poor

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/09/04/eat-the-rich-and-pay-the-poor-direct-cash-payments/?utm_content=buffer9751d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The rich are different from you and me,” a starry-eyed F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have observed to Ernest Hemingway.

“Yes,” replied Hemingway. “They have more money.”

He didn’t remind Fitzgerald that the poor are different, too: they have less money. Hemingway presumably considered this too self-evident to mention, but today many seem to have lost sight of this seemingly obvious fact. Over the last five decades, pundits and policymakers have instead fretted endlessly over the “culture of poverty,” blaming American poverty on everything from the decline of marriage to high rates of substance abuse among the poor. Meanwhile, federal and state governments have spent an estimated $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs, many focused either on addressing the presumed causes of poverty (inadequate job search skills, poor parenting practices, etc.) or on paternalistic efforts to help the needy while at the same time preventing them from behaving disreputably.

Thus, federal law prohibits the use of food stamps to purchase cigarettes — bad for you! — or “hot food,” which is presumably less morally nourishing than food the poor have to cook themselves. Similarly, most states subject the needy to a variety of humiliating and intrusive requirements, from drug testing to criminal background checks, before permitting them to access public assistance. But most anti-poverty programs ignore the obvious: the best way to help the poor is to give them money. That’s it. Give them money — then leave them alone. Don’t give them drug tests; don’t require them to purchase only approved food items, don’t force them to take parenting classes or resume-writing classes or abstinence-based sex education classes.

Just. Give. Them. Money. Preferably, a lot of it: enough to transform their lives.

No, it’s not a crazy idea. On the contrary: it’s been tried already in nations around the world, and international development experts increasingly acknowledge the value of direct, unconditional cash transfers over more indirect and paternalistic anti-poverty programs.

But wait, you say: how can that be? If you just give money to poor people, won’t they squander it? Waste it on drugs or alcohol, fritter it away on wide-screen TVs, blow it on feckless get-rich-quick scams?

ROSA BLOWS THAT ONE OUT OF THE WATER WITH ACTUAL DATA...FROM HOME AND ABROAD

SEE LINK FOR THE REST


Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation. She served as a counselor to the U.S. defense undersecretary for policy from 2009 to 2011 and previously served as a senior advisor at the U.S. State Department.

[Demeter]

61. America’s silent-but-deadly billionaires: How our tight-lipped overlords are waging stealth campaign

America’s silent-but-deadly billionaires: How our tight-lipped overlords are waging stealth campaigns against the middle class

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/05/americas_silent_but_deadly_billionaires_how_our_tight_lipped_overlords_are_waging_stealth_campaigns_against_the_middle_class/

...While billionaires rarely go on the record discussing Social Security and taxes, they work behind the scenes to oppose policies favored by average Americans. Often, there are deep disconnects between what billionaires say regarding policies and which organizations they fund.

The new study examines an even smaller and more insular group than the previous work of Page and Seawright: the richest 100 American billionaires. Together, the billionaires were worth $1,291 billion (more than the entire GDP of Mexico). Obviously, the billionaires weren’t going to sit down for lengthy interviews on policy priorities. Instead, the authors combed through nearly every public statement by the billionaires on two subjects: tax policy and Social Security. The project required a massive amount of work: Lacombe spent nearly 400 hours conducting the related searches. One of the first things the authors find is that even the politically active wealthy rarely take overt public stances. They write, “The Koch brothers (David and Charles) are a leading example of this: they generally combine public silence about policy with large financial contributions to political causes.” Though they intend to contribute nearly a billion dollars to influence the 2016 election cycle, they “generally make only vague political comments, if any comment at all.”

The authors dub this “stealth politics.” Indeed, only 26 billionaires (a quarter) made any statements on tax policy over the last 10 years. Of these, the vast majority of statements came from a small but politically active and visible group: Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and George Soros, who made 65 comments in total. Even those statements tended to be vague and rather brief. More strikingly, only three of the billionaires made statements regarding Social Security. When billionaires do make statements, they appear to be a rather diverse and moderate group. As the chart shows, when speaking on most key issues, billionaires are split pretty evenly (although they tend to favor more carbon taxes, and fewer corporate taxes). But that billionaires were largely silent and moderate doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned with more radical policies.

The billionaires the authors examined were rather active politically. One-third either hosted a political fundraiser or bundled contributions for a candidate (this compares to one-fifth of the top 1 percent of the wealthiest and very few if any average Americans). A whopping 82% of the billionaires in the sample gave to political candidates in 2011-2012, and they gave, on average, $74,982 (that’s $20,000 more than the median household income in the United States)...

MORE

[Demeter]

38. FOR EVERYONE

[Demeter]

39. The Economic Forecast PODCAST John Cassidy, James Surowiecki, Dorothy Wickenden

http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/the-economic-forecast?mbid=nl_090515_Daily_Photo&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=8044943&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=760496615&spReportId=NzYwNDk2NjE1S0

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41. Janet Yellen and the Fed Should Hold Fire By John Cassidy

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/janet-yellen-and-the-fed-should-hold-fire?mbid=nl_090515_Daily_Photo&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=8044943&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=760496615&spReportId=NzYwNDk2NjE1S0

...For months now, they’ve been umming and ahhing about whether to start raising short-term interest rates, which they have kept at close to zero per cent since December, 2008. Last week, Stanley Fischer, Yellen’s deputy, indicated that the Fed wanted to see August’s job figures before making a decision about whether to go ahead with a rate hike later this month.

The Labor Department released the new figures on Friday morning, but they didn’t make the Fed’s job much easier. The headline jobless rate dipped from 5.3 per cent to 5.1 per cent, which is the lowest mark since April of 2008. A year ago, the number of people who were searching for a job but couldn’t find one was about nine and a half million. In August, the figure was just more than eight million. That’s obviously good news, although it doesn’t account for the large number of people who have left the workforce. In August, 62.6 per cent of non-institutionalized people aged sixteen to sixty-five were working or looking for work, compared to 65.8 per cent in August of 2007, before the Great Recession. As I’ve noted many times, the fall in the so-called participation rate has been huge, and there’s still no sign that it is reversing course.

Still, steady U.S. job growth confirms that the long recovery from the slump is proceeding. Since the start of the year, employers have added nearly 1.7 million jobs. August’s payroll figure of a hundred and seventy-three thousand was a bit lower than Wall Street had been expecting, but the month-to-month figures always jump around quite a bit, and it always pays to take a longer view. Since September, 2010, when total employment bottomed out, the U.S. economy has generated about twelve million jobs, the vast majority of them in the private sector. As the White House points out on a regular basis, the recent run of private-sector job creation is virtually unprecedented. On this basis, there appears to be a reasonable argument for the Fed to start raising rates. After all, the policy of keeping interest rates close to zero per cent was introduced as a temporary response to an economic emergency. Now that the emergency is well behind us, isn’t it time for policy makers to start normalizing things? Not necessarily. The Fed’s dilemma is that there is an equally plausible—perhaps more plausible—argument for standing pat.

Under the Federal Reserve Act, the Fed is obliged to pursue two targets: price stability and maximum employment. As the Fed interprets this mandate, its task is to achieve the highest level of employment growth (and G.D.P. growth) consistent with its inflation target of two per cent. Economic theory says that higher rates of employment and lower rates of unemployment eventually lead to higher rates of inflation. At some point, therefore, the Fed, in order to prevent inflation from overshooting its target, will be obliged to tap the brakes by raising rates.

However, the data suggests that we are still well short of reaching the point at which inflation becomes a threat. Indeed, inflation, far from picking up, has been falling sharply. In July, the latest month for which we have figures, the prices paid by consumers didn’t rise at all. Yes, that’s right: there wasn’t any inflation. The consumer price index, which measures the prices of a broad basket of items purchased by people living in urban areas, rose by 0.0 per cent. And July wasn’t an aberration. In the twelve months from July, 2014, to July, 2015, the C.P.I. rose by just 0.2 per cent. That’s one of the lowest rates of inflation we’ve seen in decades...

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42. U.S. Treasury official: G20 sees need to 'double down' against devaluation

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/05/us-g20-turkey-usa-idUSKCN0R50AA20150905?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

There is a shared belief among the members of the Group of 20 leading economies in the need to "double down" against competitive currency devaluation and avoid it in both policy and language, a senior U.S. Treasury official said on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the G20 meeting of central bankers and finance ministers in the Turkish capital Ankara, the official said the final communique from the meeting was expected to address competitive devaluation, where countries attempt to drive down a currency to boost exports.

"You can make policy decisions that lead to competitive devaluation, (or) you can say things that lead to talking down a currency," the official said.

"There is a shared sense that the G20 needs to double down on its principle that competitive devaluation is a bad thing."

MORE

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43. G20 eyes faster economic reforms as cheap credit not enough for growth

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/05/us-g20-turkey-idUSKCN0R50QL20150905?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

Financial leaders from the world's 20 biggest economies agreed on Saturday to step up reform efforts to boost disappointingly slow growth, saying reliance on ultra-low interest rates would not be enough to accelerate economic expansion.

But they also said they were confident growth would pick up and, as a result, interest rates in "some advanced economies" -- code for the United States -- would have to rise.

"Monetary policies will continue to support economic activity consistent with central banks' mandates, but monetary policy alone cannot lead to balanced growth," the communique of the G20 finance ministers and central bankers said.

"We note that in line with the improving economic outlook, monetary policy tightening is more likely in some advanced economies."

The wording defied pressure from emerging markets to brand an expected U.S. rate rise as a risk to growth....

[Demeter]

40. The Most Important Legacy of the Black Panthers By Brandon Harris

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-most-important-legacy-of-the-black-panthers?mbid=nl_090515_Daily_Photo&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=8044943&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=760496615&spReportId=NzYwNDk2NjE1S0

...The initial furor that the Panthers caused cannot be overstated. Less than a year after the armed Panther Patrols emerged, the California governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, put forward by the California State Assembly with the explicit desire to prevent the Panthers from carrying loaded firearms in public. In protest, on May 2, 1967, twenty-six armed Panthers, led by the co-founder Bobby Seale, invaded the State Assembly chamber, with shotguns and pistols drawn. The group’s ranks and prestige exploded in the wake of the incident. The nascent notion of “black power,” first coined two years before by the S.N.C.C.’s Stokely Carmichael, on the back of a truck in the Deep South, had its most visible standard bearer yet.

The Panthers, in the second issue of their newspaper, laid out a ten-point program, one which called for full employment, decent housing, historically conscious education, as well as the end of black imprisonment, service in the armed forces, subjugation to police brutality, and “the robbery by the white men of our Black Community.” Although the men who delivered these messages to the public, largely Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, were mocked by white conservatives such as William F. Buckley and Tom Wolfe, a look at the 1972 Democratic Party platform tells you that their ideas were taken far more seriously by the political establishment (and were far more concrete) than those of the Occupy Movement, two generations later.

Newton and Cleaver were both involved in gun battles with police officers in the late sixties. Cleaver, a literary celebrity for his 1968 memoir “Soul on Ice,” fled to Algeria after his shoot-out, which followed in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and was largely seen as a foolhardy ambush on the police, one which left one of the youngest and earliest members of the Panthers, Bobby Hutton, dead. Newton was initially jailed for his gun battle, which grew out of a mysterious traffic stop, and in short order he became a cause célèbre for much of the American left. (“Free Huey!” is still, just barely, part of the national nomenclature.)

As Nelson tells it, the early-seventies decline of the Panthers was brought about by the outright war waged against them by the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO unit, which frequently raided Panther headquarters and, as in the case of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, assassinated group leaders. Yet decadence and dissension amongst the party’s leadership, and the ascendance of a black middle class with more access to the economic and social mainstream, are perhaps equally to blame for the Panthers’ decline. While the documentary doesn’t give as detailed account of these matters as it does the F.B.I.’s dirty tricks, Nelson doesn’t shy away from the less heroic elements of the Panther story nearly as much as Van Peebles’s “Panther” does. That film places the blame for the group’s demise almost solely on the intransigence of the F.B.I., who allegedly colluded with the mafia and local law enforcement to flood the black community with drugs, necessitating the drug violence and addiction that Van Peebles saw as the real reason behind the continued malaise of black communities in 1995, the year the film was made...

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45. The Minimum Wage: Getting to $15

The debate over the federal minimum wage in the nascent presidential campaign is really two debates: one among Democrats and one among Republicans.

Democrats are divided on how much to raise the minimum, currently $7.25 an hour. Hillary Rodham Clinton has spoken favorably of a Democratic bill for a raise to $12 by 2020. Senator Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, as well as several congressional Democrats, support $15 an hour by 2020. Is $12 adequate to ensure a minimally decent living? Would $15 be economically feasible?

Going to $12 by 2020 would bring the minimum more in line with historical benchmarks, including wage and price inflation. But it is a stretch to believe that $12 an hour in 2020 would provide a minimally decent living. In 14 states and Washington, D.C., the cost of living for one person is already near or above $12 an hour, according to data compiled by economists at M.I.T. In most of the remaining states, one person now requires an hourly wage of $10 to $11 to eke out a living.

Fifteen dollars, phased in gradually, is the better option. It would be adequate and feasible, assuming that policy makers also take steps to raise middle-class wages, which would include tough enforcement of updated laws on overtime, scheduling, worker classification and other labor issues....MORE

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46. Silver Lining to Brazil’s Troubles JOE NOCERA

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/opinion/joe-nocera-a-silver-lining-to-brazils-troubles.html

Of all the BRICS, Brazil would seem, on the face of it, to be in the worst shape...Inflation? It is closing in on 10 percent. Its currency? The real’s value has dropped nearly in half against the American dollar. Recession? It’s arrived. The consensus view is that the Brazilian economy will shrink by some 2 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, “between 100,000 and 120,000 people are losing their jobs every month,” says Lúcia Guimãraes, a well-known Brazilian journalist.

Compounding the economic problems, many a result simply of poor economic stewardship, a huge corruption scandal has swept up both Brazilian politicians and a number of prominent businesspeople. The scandal centers on the country’s biggest company, Petrobras, whose success had been an object of real pride during the go-go years. Although the details are complicated, as its core the scandal is “an old-fashioned kickback scheme,” as The Times’s David Segal put it in a fine story last month — a kickback scheme that has been estimated at a staggering $2 billion. Politicians and members of the business elite alike have been arrested. The country’s president, Dilma Rousseff, who was the chairwoman of Petrobras while much of the scheme was taking place, hasn’t been accused of anything, but her approval rating is in the single digits. People have taken to the streets to call for her impeachment, though there are really no grounds yet to impeach her. Political corruption has long been a fact of life in Brazil, but rarely has it been on such vivid, and nauseating, display.

The double whammy of scandal and recession has created a mood that combines outrage, anguish and resignation. But there is something else, too. “People feel betrayed,” says Guimãraes. Rousseff’s party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) — or Workers’ Party — came to office in 2003 promising, idealistically, to create social programs that would help the poor join the middle class. Between 2003 and 2011, according to one estimate, some 40 million people have climbed from abject poverty to the lowest rung on the middle class.

“The worst thing,” a Brazilian friend of mine wrote in an email recently, “is this feeling of disappointment with the … PT, which brought so much hope to the middle class. I’d call this feeling a kind of political depression.”

And yet, as I look over the BRICS, I think there is more hope for Brazil than some of its fellow members. Admittedly, I am a lover of Brazil, and want to see it succeed, and so was pleased when, as I made phone calls and emails for this column, a surprising silver lining emerged. It is this: For all the pain Brazilians are going through right now, its democracy and its judicial institutions are working.

MORE

[Demeter]

48. Soft Power Raises Exports

http://www.voxeu.org/article/soft-power-raises-exports

By Andrew K. Rose, Professor of International Business, in the Economic Analysis and Policy Group, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

A nation’s hard power is based on its ability to coerce, while its soft power depends on the attractiveness of its culture, political ideals, and policies. This column shows that a country’s soft power has measureable effects on its exports. Countries that are admired for their positive global influence export more, holding other things constant.

Joseph Nye (1990) first discussed ‘soft power’ – a country’s ability to attract or persuade others to do its bidding. Soft power contrasts with a country’s ‘hard power’ or force (Nye 2004). Europeans pride themselves on their soft power; Americans tend to think highly of their hard power.

Whereas hard power – the ability to coerce – grows out of a country’s military or economic might, soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies. It is by no means under government control. Nye considers hard power to stem from a country’s population, resources, economic and military strength, and the like. By way of contrast “[s]oft power is … the ability to attract, [since] attraction often leads to acquiescence … soft power uses a different type of currency (not force, not money) to engender cooperation – an attraction to shared values …” (Nye 2004: 6-7).1 Nye thinks of this as “…the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences … consistent with their own” (Nye 1990: 168)

In recent research, I have taken advantage of a quantitative measure of soft power to show that a country sells more exports to other countries which perceive it to be a force for good, holding other factors constant (Rose 2015). These higher exports can be viewed as a carrot that rewards behaviour admired by others, symmetric to the sticks more commonly used in international commerce. A prominent example of the latter currently is the ‘Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) campaign currently being used by Palestinians against Israel. My results show that global behaviour perceived to be better/worse has a material effect on exports....MORE

WHOODA THUNK IT?

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49. Why Tax Havens Will Be at the Heart of the Next Financial Crisis

http://www.taxjustice.net/2015/09/03/why-tax-havens-will-be-at-the-heart-of-the-next-financial-crisis/

By Nicholas Shaxson, the author of Treasure Islands, an award-winning book about tax havens.

This post examines another excellent in-depth investigation by Reuters into global financial stability issues, and the role of tax havens in this giant game of pain and plunder. The investigation uncovers, among other things, a whole lot of offshore shenanigans, complementing what we (and relatively few others) have been saying for some years now, and it goes right to the heart of what capitalism is — or at least what it has become.

Before reading this, though, see the box “What is a tax haven?” There’s a lot of misunderstanding out there.

What is a tax haven?

Deep offshore

The term ‘tax haven’ is a bit of a misnomer: they aren’t just about tax. We will mostly use the term ‘offshore’ here instead of ‘tax haven’ – what we are talking about is the same basic phenomenon: jurisdictions offering escape routes to financial players elsewhere, helping them avoid taxes or disclosure or financial regulation or whatever other ‘burdens’ of society they don’t like.

In financial stability terms the world of offshore — a world that includes places like Ireland, Luxembourg, Cayman and the City of London – has been where financial services players have been able to escape regulatory barriers at home, taking the cream from risky activities while shifting the risks onto taxpayers via bailouts and other nasties. Offshore was very significantly at the root of the global financial crisis that erupted in 2008 — and on all evidence it will be at or near the epicentre of the next one too. We have written about this many times, and we have fingered London as being especially dangerous for global financial stability. And this comes in the context of the UK just having announced that they will be rowing back on money laundering checks and so on, in the name of ‘cutting red tape.’ (Read it and weep.) As was reported in the Financial Times not so long ago:

“Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative from New York, said there was a “disturbing pattern in the last few years of London literally becoming the centre of financial trading disasters””

Whatever one might think of Congresswoman Maloney, that statement is spot on.

This article looks at two Reuters stories in particular: SEE LINK FOR MORE

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50. The Entitlement of the Very Rich By Dean Baker

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/25488-the-entitlement-of-the-very-rich

The very rich don’t think very highly of the rest of us. This fact is driven home to us through fluke events, like the taping of Mitt Romney’s famous 47 percent comment, in which he trashed the people who rely on Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of government benefits.

Last YEAR we got another opportunity to see the thinking of the very rich when Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, complained at a summit with African heads of state and business leaders that there is even an argument over the reauthorization of Export-Import Bank. According to the Washington Post, Immelt said in reference to the Ex-Im Bank reauthorization, “the fact that we have to sit here and argue for it I think is just wrong.”

To get some orientation, the Ex-IM Bank makes around $35 billion a year in loans or loan guarantees each year. The overwhelming majority of these loans go to huge multi-nationals like Boeing or Mr. Immelt’s company, General Electric. The loans and guarantees are a subsidy that facilitates exports by allowing these companies and/or their customers to borrow at below market interest rates.

As a practical matter, whether the bank is reauthorized or not will have no noticeable impact on the economy. If the government took away the subsidy on this $35 billion in exports, it would probably lead to a decline of between 10 and 30 percent in these exports ($3.5 billion to $10.5 billion), while costing Boeing, GE, and the rest some of their profit margin on the portion they continued to export...

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51. In The West Respect for Truth No Longer Exists By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39441.htm

The Western media have proved for all to see that the Western media comprises either a collection of ignorant and incompetent fools or a whorehouse that sells war for money.

The Western media fell in step with Washington and blamed the downed Malaysian airliner on Russia. No evidence was provided. It its place the media used constant repetition. Washington withheld the evidence that proved that Kiev was responsible. The media’s purpose was not to tell the truth, but to demonize Russia.

THEN we have the media story of the armored Russian column that allegedly crossed into Ukraine and was destroyed by Ukraine’s rag-tag forces that ISIS would eliminate in a few minutes. British reporters fabricated this story or were handed it by a CIA operative working to build a war narrative. The disreputable BBC hyped the story without investigating. The German media, including Die Welt, blared the story throughout Germany without concern at the absence of any evidence. Reuters news agency, also with no investigation, spread the story. Readers tell me that CNN has been broadcasting the fake story 24/7. Although I cannot stand to watch it, I suspect Fox “news” has also been riding this lame horse hard. Readers tell me that my former newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which has fallen so low as to be unreadable, also spread the false story. I hope they are wrong. One hates to see the complete despoliation of one’s former habitat.

The media story is preposterous for a number of reasons that should be obvious to a normal person.

The first reason is that the Russian government has made it completely clear that its purpose is to de-escalate the situation. When other former Russian territories that are part of present day Ukraine followed Crimea, voted their independence and requested reunification with Russia, President Putin refused. To underline his de-escalation, President Putin asked the Russian Duma to rescind his authority to intervene militarily in Ukraine in behalf of the former Russian provinces. As the Russian government, unlike Washington or EU governments, stresses legality and the rule of law, Russian military forces would not be sent into Ukraine prior to the Duma renewing Putin’s authority so to do.

The second reason the story is obviously false is that if the Russian government decides to invade Ukraine, Russia would not send in one small armored group unprotected by air cover or other forces. If Russia invades Ukraine, it will be with a force capable of rolling up the rag-tag Ukrainian forces, most of which are semi-private militias organized by nazis. The “war” would last a few hours, after which Ukraine would be in Russia’s hands where it resided for hundreds of years prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Washington’s successful efforts in 1991 to take advantage of Russian weakness to break apart the constituent provinces of Russia herself.

The third reason that the story is obviously false is that not a single Western news organization hyping the story has presented a shred of evidence in its behalf.

What we witness in this fabricated story is the total lack of integrity in the entirety of
the Western media.

MORE

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52. Jamie Dimon’s $13 Billion Secret The inside story of JPMorgan Chase’s landmark mortgage settlement

http://www.thenation.com/article/jamie-dimons-13-billion-secret/

n the end, the abject fear of Ben Wagner got Jamie Dimon to cave.

For much of 2013, Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of the formidable JPMorgan Chase & Company, was telling anyone who would listen that it was unfair and unjust for federal and state prosecutors to blame him and his bank for the manufacture and sale of mortgage-backed securities that occurred at Bear Stearns & Company and at Washington Mutual in the years leading up to the financial crisis. When JPMorgan Chase bought those two failing firms in 2008, Dimon argued, he was just doing what Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner had asked him to do. Why should his bank be held financially accountable for the bad behavior at Bear and WaMu?

It was a clever argument—and wrong. Dimon’s relentless effort to spin his patriotic story soon collided with the fact that Wagner, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of California, had uncovered evidence that JPMorgan itself was guilty of many of the same greedy and irresponsible behaviors. Piles of subpoenaed documents and e-mails revealed that JPMorgan bankers and traders had underwritten billions of dollars’ worth of questionable mortgage-backed securities that Dimon had been telling everyone had originated at Bear Stearns and WaMu. Worse, the bad behavior had occurred on Dimon’s watch.

The likelihood that the Justice Department would file Wagner’s civil complaint last fall—exposing publicly for the first time the litany of wrongdoing at JPMorgan and threatening to push it off the perch that Dimon had so artfully constructed for it over the years—ultimately brought Dimon to the table. On September 26, just weeks after the Justice Department shared a draft copy of Wagner’s complaint with Dimon, the two sides arranged for a summit meeting between Dimon and Attorney General Eric Holder. By mid-November, the bank had agreed to pay $13 billion in a comprehensive settlement of mortgage-related securities claims with various branches of the federal government and a group of states, led by the attorneys general of New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts and Delaware.

It was the largest financial settlement of all time, and it kept Wagner’s complaint away from the prying eyes of the public. One thing is clear: Dimon’s claim that his own bankers and traders had done nothing wrong in the years leading up to the financial crisis wasn’t true. “The investigators and the lawyers were uncovering very viable evidence,” explains Associate Attorney General Tony West, who headed up the settlement negotiations on behalf of the Justice Department. “I think there was recognition that we had enough evidence there that would support the complaint and would support a robust lawsuit.”

MORE, AND BOY, IS IT UGLY! SHAME ON YOU, JAMIE! YOU BELONG IN AN ORANGE JUMPSUIT!

[Hotler]

73. And I'll ask again.....

Why is it no one has run in to Jamie Dimon in a restroom at an bar, resturant, or county club and if no one was looking just jacked his jaw and left laying under a urnial.

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53. Washington’s Grand Ambition Explains Its Pressures on Russia By Michael S. Rozeff

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/08/michael-s-rozeff/grand-ambitions/

...The sanctions imposed on Russia LAST year by Obama are only the latest steps. These go further. They attempt to isolate Russia and to pressure her on a matter of strategic importance, namely, Crimea. Ukraine is an excuse for Washington’s sanctions agenda as well as a continuation of its earlier anti-Russian policies. By linking the sanctions to Crimean withdrawal, as Obama has done, Washington intends to maintain sanctions as a tool of pressuring Russia indefinitely, knowing that Russia will not withdraw from that strategic and historically connected region under pressure from Washington. Washington has created a permanent bone of contention with Russia over Crimea, and the sanctions will remain as a permanent source of friction. Russia will adapt to them, however, shifting its policies and attention in other parts of the world.

What does Washington want of Russia? Why does it have an anti-Russian policy? At the deepest level, the U.S. government wants global dominance. It wants its system and institutions to be replicated throughout the world. Imperial ambitions are the broadest reasons, and they are fueled by a broad range of quests, from material acquisition to cultural, religious, philosophical and ideological motives. This grand ambition of global dominance explains the U.S. presence globally and its continued attempts to control every region in the world, despite numerous setbacks and continued failures. Achieving this ambition is not possible, but the attempt and striving are part of the U.S. makeup, driving its leadership beyond any rational limits. Defeats mean little in the face of this ambition. They even cause redoubled efforts to succeed.

The U.S. leadership is by and large imbued with a set of beliefs, perceptions and drives that were born and nurtured over a long historical period in which the nation expanded geographically and then began to have pretensions of worldwide leadership. The associated ideas are now deeply entrenched in the minds of American leaders, and this is reflected in the resulting policies. This is now the leadership culture. Dissenting ideas and alternative visions and voices are constantly ignored and marginalized. It is as difficult to alter these drives as it is to alter a person’s personality.

The thing that prevents the U.S. from following through with its ambition is that to achieve it is so costly. The U.S. keeps running into very great obstacles that cost it dearly in this vain attempt. A Vietnam War, a Korean War, an Iraq War, an Afghanistan War, for example, cost fantastic amounts of money, and no victories occur. Yet the expansionist drive is ceaseless...

MORE

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54. There's a real shot the U.S. could grow faster than 2.0%-2.5% in 2015.

HOW? BY CHERRY-PICKING THE DATA? FUDGING THE NUMBERS?

http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=713818&SR=Yahoo

It was yet another tough week for financial markets with a lot of red ink across the board. Most developed equity markets were down around 3%-4%. Emerging markets and China-dependent markets overall were down closer to 5%. A lot of emerging markets' damage occurred on Monday, when a pair of purchasing manager reports out of China was soft. To many of our readers, weakness in the Chinese manufacturing sector is anything but new. Still, the relentless flow of modestly weaker economic data, combined with poorly performing equity markets and the general belief that the Chinese government has lost control of the situation, raised concerns around the world.

Although China is indeed the world's second-largest economy, we believe that investors are overestimating China's impact on world economies, especially developed ones. China is less than 1% of U.S. GDP, 3% of Germany's, and just 6% and 2% of China poster children Australia and Brazil, according to data from Morningstar's Daniel Rohr, CFA, director of our basic materials team.

U.S. bonds were stronger with the 10-year bond yield down to 2.12%, perhaps a safe-haven bet more than anything else. Oil was also soft, down 3% on generally softer news on the world economy. However, most of the generalized commodity indexes were down less than 1%, and we are not quite sure why.

In general, a lot of European economic data was also a lot softerthan we may have hoped with weaker-than-expected reports on Germany's manufacturing sector and France's employment. In addition, the European Central Bank reduced its European growth forecast by 0.1% to 1.4%. It also hinted on Thursday that more quantitative easing was a real possibility, which helped ease some of the pain of poor economic performance.

U.S. data was generally but not uniformly strong with the employment report sending mixed signals....

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56. Plunging 5.1% Unemployment Rate Belies Record Low Labor Participation

massive collections of graphs and discussion on unemployment and what it all means.

http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/plunging-51-unemployment-rate-belies-record-low-labor-participation-5835

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57. China May Never Get Rich By Noah Smith

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-04/china-may-never-get-rich

China is already the world's largest economy by some measures, such as purchasing power parity. It's clear, however, that the country's growth is slowing. Growth dipped from roughly 10 percent to about 8 percent in 2012, and is falling again amid the current slowdown. When the country recovers from its slump, how much more expansion can we expect before it settles down into a nice, slow, steady pace like every other fast-growing "miracle" country eventually does?

That leaves open the big question of how wealthy China will become relative to developed nations such as Japan, France or the U. S. These rich nations occupy what economists call the technological frontier. Economies at the frontier have already exhausted all the cheap and easy opportunities for catch-up growth. They can no longer readily absorb foreign technology, or move unproductive farmers into cities, or use high saving rates to accumulate capital (this latter opportunity disappears because maintaining capital becomes more expensive as you get more of it). Their growth rate is essentially limited to the pace at which the human race invents new technologies. But not all countries at the frontier are equal. Even among rich, slow-growing nations, substantial differences in living standards exist. Japan, South Korea, France, Germany and the U.K., for example, have per capita gross domestic product of only about 75 percent to 85 percent of the U. S. Most economists believe that this gap is caused by differences in institutions, or the broad rules that govern the economy. For example, heavy regulation in Europe or implicit subsidies to unproductive corporations in East Asia, are often cited as holding these economies back from full convergence with the U.S.

So what about China? How good are its institutions? Brad DeLong, economic historian at the University of California-Berkeley, asks this question in a recent article. As is common, DeLong begins by assuming that China's institutions are fundamentally similar to those of the rich countries around it -- Japan, South Korea and Taiwan:

A great deal of China supergrowth always seemed to me to be just catch-up to the norm one would expect, given East Asian societal-organizational capabilities. China had been far depressed below that norm…by the paranoid Mao Zedong.

But thanks to its communist past and its government's resistance to westernization, China's system of property rights looks nothing like the systems in Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan. It might be that China has invented a totally new system that will do just as well as -- or even better than -- the system that successful countries have been using for centuries now. But that's an outside chance. The safe bet is still that China's strange system will hold it back. DeLong writes:

China has had its own system of what we might call industrial neofeudalism...Chinese entrepreneurs have protection via their fealty to connection groups within the party that others do not wish to cross...Such a system should not work...The evanescence of [property rights] should lead [elites] into the same shortsighted rent-extraction logic that we have seen played out over and over again in Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Latin America.

Weighing these factors, DeLong comes to a stark conclusion -- China has only five years of rapid growth left. Since China's per capita GDP is now only about a quarter of the U.S. level, five years of 7 percent growth -- with the U.S. growing at 2 percent -- would leave China at less than a third of America's standard of living by the time it slows down...That almost certainly seems too conservative. We need to take into account the effects of economic agglomeration. Agglomeration means that companies invest where there are large markets, and workers move to where they have job opportunities. This snowball effect, once started, is hard to stop. China's poor property rights will probably hold it back -- as will its large size and resource limitations -- but 30 percent of U.S. per-capita GDP is overly pessimistic. I'd look for China to do at least as well as Malaysia, which now is at about 45 percent of U.S. GDP. That would mean China has more than a decade of 7 percent growth left, once it recovers from its recession. ...

CONTINUES WITH THE GROW OF CHINESE ZOMBIES....COMPARES THEM TO OTHER NATIONAL ZOMBIES

CHINA ISN'T HAVING A RECESSION, IMO, IT'S THE CANARY IN THE GREATER DEPRESSION'S BOTTOMLESS PIT...

[Demeter]

58. The Fed and the Jobs Report By Mohamed A. El-Erian

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-04/the-fed-and-the-jobs-report


The U.S. jobs report for August released Friday didn’t provide the clarity about the state of the nation's recovery that many had eagerly anticipated. For the Federal Reserve, this mixed picture will complicate deliberations over whether to raise rates at its policy meeting on Sept. 16-17.

With 173,000 added positions, job creation in August was the slowest in 5 months and significantly undershot consensus expectations of about 220,000. But that negative economic signal was offset by several other data points in the report -- including the notable fall in the unemployment rate to 5.1 percent, the lowest level since April 2008, the upward revisions to previous months' numbers, the longer hours worked and a pickup in wage growth.

On its own, this report probably wasn't sufficiently decisive to tip the Fed's decision -- one way or the other -- about when to begin its campaign to raise interest rates for the first time in more than nine years. It didn’t provide the kind of strong data that suggests the U.S. economy could easily withstand the adverse impact of weaker global growth and financial market volatility -- a clarity that would have provided clear justification for a hike in September. But nor did the August data clearly signal that such a move would be ill-advised.

Instead, the middling snapshot adds to the uncertainty the Fed must take into account as it weighs the countervailing effects of a healing U.S. economy and the increasingly fragile global economic and financial context...If markets continue to oscillate -- as they did Friday and in recent weeks -- the Fed will be forced to delay a rate hike, unless it wishes to test the robustness of the global financial system and risk damaging fragile and tentative real global economic activity.


IF THE FED RAISES RATES, IN THE ABSENCE OF A DECNT AND EFFECTIVE US JOBS PROGRAM, THE GLOBAL ECONOMY COLLAPSES.

CONGRESS HAS GOT TO GET OUT OF ITS PSYCHOSIS, CAN THE SEQUESTER, AND START INVESTING IN ITS PEOPLE.

[Demeter]

59. CONGEALED GREECE

Lapavitsas: Most in SYRIZA believed dogmatically that the creditors will retreat

http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2015/09/lapavitsas-most-in-syriza-believed.html

Former SYRIZA MP and currently candidate with Popular Unity, Costas Lapavitsas, has described in a recent interview at The Press Project website, how SYRIZA leadership was bound to the euro-currency and didn't want, not even to examine, the possibility of Greece to exit eurozone and return to a national currency.

As he said characteristically, even if Putin had given a 30 billion loan to Greece, SYRIZA leadership would not have left eurozone. As he revealed, most of the SYRIZA members thought dogmatically that the creditors would eventually retreat in the negotiations. He was impressed of how deep this belief was for most of his former partners in SYRIZA.

Lapavitsas is one of the most dedicated to the perception that Greece should return to a national currency, in order to recover gradually and escape from the sadistic catastrophic measures that imposed by the creditors and destroyed the economy for five years.

Lapavitsas also warned that Greece should expect an internal war too by the economic elite who has interests connected with the common currency. Therefore, if Greece decide to leave euro, people should be prepared.

Unfortunately, it has been proved that this dogmatic belief by most in SYRIZA as well as the tactics by the leadership during the negotiations were very wrong...

The Foundations of Greece’s Failed Economy

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/foundation-of-greeces-failed-economy-by-edmund-s--phelps-2015-09

Too many politicians and economists blame austerity – urged by Greece’s creditors – for the collapse of the Greek economy. But the data show neither marked austerity by historical standards nor government cutbacks severe enough to explain the huge job losses. What the data do show are economic ills rooted in the values and beliefs of Greek society.

Greece’s public sector is rife with clientelism (to gain votes) and cronyism (to gain favors) – far more so than in other parts of Europe. Maximum pensions for public employees relative to wages are nearly twice as high as in Spain; the government favors business elites with tax-free status; and some state employees draw their salaries without actually turning up for work.

There are serious ills in the private sector, too – notably, the pervasive influence of vested interests and the country’s business and political elites. Profits as a share of business income in Greece are a whopping 46%, according to the latest available data. Italy came in second at 42%, with France third, at 41%. (Germany’s share is 39%; the United States’, 35%; and the United Kingdom’s, 32%.) Insiders receive subsidies and contracts, and outsiders find it hard to break in. Astoundingly, young Greek entrepreneurs reportedly fear to incorporate their firms in Greece, lest others use false documents to take away their companies. According to the World Bank, Greece is one of the hardest places in Europe to start a business. The result is that competition for market share is weak and there are few firms with new ideas.

This stunted system springs from Greece’s corporatist values, which emphasize social protection, solidarity instead of competition, and discomfort with uncontrolled change. These values may well be beneficial for family life; but, even with the best of intentions, they are a recipe for a static economy and stultified careers...MORE

New obstacle for refugees: the Greek coast guard

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article34176192.html

After facing Syrian government barrel bombs, the repression of Islamic State extremists and their effective expulsion from Lebanon, Syrian refugees trying to reach Europe by sea now confront a new nemesis – the Greek Coast guard, which, they say, is disabling their small craft and setting them adrift in the Aegean Sea.Refugees speak of repeated instances in Greek waters where Greek forces fire guns in the air, shine bright spotlights on their beleaguered boats, and order them to jettison their fuel supplies. Then they move their fast patrol boats alongside and take off at top speed, creating a stern wave that forces the dinghy back to Turkish waters.

“They pointed their weapons at us and told us to dump our gas in the sea,” said Abdul Hamid, 46, a driver from the Syrian town of Salqin in northern Idlib province, who was piloting the small inflatable boat, overcrowded with 60 people, including 12 children a week ago. It was six hours before the Turkish Coast Guard rescued them, he told McClatchy. It was his second such experience, he said. Encountering the Greek Coast Guard is the “biggest risk” in the escape.

Ahmed Abu Abid, 40, an electrician from Damascus, described a similar incident on a different voyage.

“They took away our engine and left us in the middle of the sea,” he said. “The waves were two meters (more than six feet) high.”

His 5-year-old son, paralyzed from the waist down by shrapnel from a mortar round three years ago, recalled his own panic. “I was so afraid they wanted to drown us,” said Zain al Abadin. “I don’t want to go by boat. I want to go by car.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article34176192.html#storylink=cpy

Alexis Tsipras faces shock election defeat as voters on course to punish Syriza at the ballot box

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11844657/Alexis-Tsipras-faces-shock-election-defeat-as-voters-on-course-to-punish-Syriza-at-the-ballot-box.html

Greek voters are set to punish the government of prime minister Alexis Tsipras after polls show his hard-Left Syriza party is on course for a shock defeat in a general election later this month.

Mr Tsipras, who called a snap vote on August 20, has seen his party’s comfortable 15 point lead evaporate in just six weeks, putting the centre-right New Democracy in pole position to lead Greece's fifth government in just four years.

The ascendant conservatives - who support the bail-out and will keep the country in the euro at all costs - edged ahead of Syriza for the first time since May 2014 in two polls this week.

A survey carried out by Metron analysis put ND in the lead with 24pc of the vote, compared to 23.4pc for the incumbent Leftists. A previous poll for Mega TV put them on course for 25.3pc of the vote ahead of Syriza's 25pc....MORE

The poisoned chalice BY James Galbraith and J. Luis Martin

https://opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/james-galbraith-j-luis-martin/poisoned-chalice

Part two of the insider view of negotiations between Greece and the Eurogroup. When is a rescue not a rescue but a seizure of assets?

Luis Martin: Since the outbreak of the Greek crisis in 2010, the European approach has been austerity now and the promise of supply-side policies later; once deficits have been brought under control and structural reforms have been implemented. Five years later, the Greek economy is depressed and debt has skyrocketed. In light of the third bailout Greece is now trying to secure, what is your vision for the Greek economy in the short and medium term?

James Galbraith: First of all, it’s important to distinguish between the public rationale for the policies that have been imposed on Greece, which are as you describe, and the underlying reasons which are quite different. The public rationale is the notion that so-called structural reforms will produce growth. The underlying reason is that the creditors wish to get their hands on as many Greek assets as possible at the lowest possible prices. Once you see that you’ll see that the policies are quite consistent with the reason, though not with the rationale.

What we are going to see now is an intensification of those policies and the liquidation of public and private assets in Greece: public assets which are being auctioned at undoubtedly low prices under the so-called privatization fund, and private assets because the Memorandum provides for accelerated liquidation, basically foreclosures of people’s homes and real estate and of the remaining Greek businesses. Basically that is the direction of policy, and if the Memorandum stays in place that is what we are likely to see.

LM: If you are correct, it would seem that the institutions (the IMF, the EC and the ECB) will have to rescue Greece indefinitely…?

JG: There is no “rescue” going on here. There is no “rescue,” there is no “bailout,” there is no “reform” going on. I really need to insist on this, because these words creep into our discourse. They are placed there by the creditors in order for unwary people to use them, but there is nothing of the kind taking place. What is going on is a seizure of the assets owned by the Greek state, by Greek businesses and by Greek households. There is no sense that this has anything to do with the recovery of the Greek economy or with the welfare of the Greek people. On the contrary, the policy is utterly indifferent to those considerations.

MORE

[Demeter]

62. My grandpuppy is under the weather

He's gurgling and vomited twice...clear yellowish stuff. But he's not dehydrated and not having diarrhea (unlike Friday and yesterday) and he's eating some grass. He's chipper enough...

so I'm waiting to see. Googled all the information I could. The weather's been awful, and he has allergies...

I'm still not feeling so well, myself. Damn this cold! Damn the humidity! No full speed ahead for me today...

Be back later, to tackle Ida Tarbell (unless somebody beats me to it)

[MattSh]

63. Musical Interlude - Victor Jara - Manifiesto

Not sure when else I might be able to post this, so I thought "Why not"?

Víctor Jara - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈβiktor ˈliðjo ˈxaɾa marˈtines]; 28 September 1932 – 15 September 1973)[1] was a Chilean teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist. A distinguished theatre director, he developed Chilean theatre by directing a broad array of works, ranging from locally produced Chilean plays, to the classics of the world stage, to the experimental work of such playwrights as Ann Jellicoe. He also played a pivotal role among neo-folkloric musicians who established the Nueva Canción Chilena (New Chilean Song) movement; this led to an uprising of new sounds in popular music during the administration of Salvador Allende.

Shortly after the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, Jara was arrested; he was tortured under interrogation and ultimately shot dead. His body was later thrown out into the street of a shanty town in Santiago.[2] The contrast between the themes of his songs, on love, peace and social justice and the brutal way in which he was murdered transformed Jara into a "potent symbol" of struggle for human rights and justice for all the victims of the Pinochet regime.[3][4]

Complete story at - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%ADctor_Jara

[Hotler]

64. "Shortly after the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973"

HHhhhmmmmmmm! September 11! Gota love those Necons.
Chilean coup.
United States of America coup.

[Hotler]

65. Too good not to share. .......

"Palin wants to be Trump's energy secretary if he wins."

Palin and Trump have admired each other for years, and Trump has said he would “love” to have Palin, who he thinks is a “really special person,” serve in his potential administration.

Palin, if appointed Energy Secretary, told Tapper she would then shut down the Energy Department.

“It would be a short-term job, but it would be... really great to have someone who knows energy and is pro-responsible development to be in charge,” she explained.

I love you Sarah. Please keep talking.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/palin-wants-to-be-trumps-energy-secretary-if-he-wins/ar-AAe14pH

[kickysnana]

70. Are all those Intl House Hunters Amer refugees from idocracy or CIA operatives?

It could go either way.

[Demeter]

66. I have done nothing today

except track the spread of microbes through my body....exquisitely slowly, inexorably, sickeningly...

And watch the film "Gone Girl" which I can now assure you is every bit as scary, creepy, and intricate as the book. I put my name on the list after reading the book last year, because I thought it would be a very bad film for the Kid. It is not for the average person, for sure, or the immature.

Brr! Watching this film adds to the illness, let me tell you, but the library wait list came up with my name this week...just as well. Without Labor Day, I probably wouldn't have had the time to watch it.

[kickysnana]

71. I unloaded the storage closet to add the dalek power chair, 1" too long.

I did successfully add a headboard to her power bed. PCA no show no call Sunday but our weekday gal did show this morning.

Auntie turned 80 yesterday. Better her than me. All she wanted was the new "Carol Burnett Show Lost Episodes" and some cake today because everyone was at the State Fair on Sat and Sun.

https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei/photos/a.223098324386295.105971.205344452828349/737146872981435/?type=1&fref=nf

[Demeter]

67. Russia’s Anatoly Motylyov: Rise, fall, repeat BANKSTER OUTED

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4eecb666-52eb-11e5-b029-b9d50a74fd14.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3kyC7VLB3?ftcamp=published_links%2Frss%2Fhome_us%2Ffeed%2F%2Fproduct

Anatoly Motylyov was the perfect image of an erudite Russian banker: born into the Soviet elite, he mingled easily with the Kremlin-connected elite and the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church. The 49-year-old banker stayed largely out of the public eye — no yachts, no villas, no lavish parties — and cut an unassuming figure, sporting the glasses and clipped moustache of a 1980s accountant. His focus appeared to be on his billion-dollar banking business, which spanned four Russian commercial banks and seven private pension funds.

Now, following the dramatic collapse of his empire, a different Mr Motylyov is emerging. The man considered to be a low-profile introvert is accused of running one of Russia’s largest ‘vacuum cleaning’ financial operations — sucking in deposits by offering double-digit interest rates and using the money to finance his personal business ventures...In July, Russia’s central bank withdrew the licences of Mr Motylyov’s four commercial banks, including Rossiisky Kredit, Russia’s 45th largest bank by assets; last month it pulled licences for the seven private pension funds he oversaw too. Together Mr Motylyov’s four banks had more than $1.1bn worth of deposits. The pension funds, valued at more than $1bn in April, held the savings of about 1m Russians.

Last week, Russia’s central bank said it had found a $1.5bn hole on the balance sheets of Mr Motylyov’s lenders. Russian law enforcement agencies are looking into potential criminal transactions undertaken by the banks’ management. Mr Motylyov has not appeared at his banks’ offices since July and, according to some Russian press reports, has fled the country to the UK. The businessman could not be reached for comment. The implosion of Mr Motylyov’s banking empire looks to represent one of the biggest bank failures since the Russian economic crisis began a year ago. The majority of the losses incurred by Mr Motylyov’s pensioners and depositors are expected to be covered by the state. Yet some are pointing fingers not just at the banker but also at Russia’s central bank for allowing Mr Motylyov to build up a billion-dollar banking group in the first place.

http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/0fa4ac2e-54c7-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.img

The regulator should have been more proactive, critics say, because Mr Motylyov had overseen the collapse of a bank before. Mr Motylyov ran a large Russian lender called Globex that ran into trouble during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, requiring a bailout of more than $2.5bn. After the bailout, government administrators found that hundreds of Globex’s corporate borrowers were shell companies which authorities said Mr Motylyov had been using to funnel money to his failing real estate ventures. Analysts say there are striking similarities between Globex and Mr Motylyov’s more recent ventures — making it all the more remarkable that the central bank did not act to withdraw his banking licences sooner. “Anatoly Motylyov repeated the same trick twice. The government spent Rbs 87bn on Globex’s sanitation and he wasn’t even sent to prison,” says Maxim Osadchiy, an analyst at CFB Bank in Moscow...Sergei Aleksashenko, Russia’s deputy central bank governor from 1995-1998, described the recent implosion of Mr Motylyov’s banks as a failing on the part of the Russian regulator. “There are people who can be taught and people who cannot be taught,” he says. “This is the only way to explain this situation.”

Over the past year and a half, the central bank has launched a clean-up of the Russian banking sector, withdrawing the licences of more than 140 Russian banks. The strategy is part of a long-planned move to rid the sector of weaker players and so-called pocket banks, which hold the assets of individual businessmen or families, and tend to be a source of money laundering....

MORE

I'M GOING TO GO TO SLEEP AND DREAM OF LLOYD, JAMIE, AND THE REST, STRIPPED OF THEIR BANKSTER LICENSES...

[MattSh]

68. Abby Martin returns to TV with "The Empire Files"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027146800

[Demeter]

69. Apologies, all

This sinus infection has replaced my brains with soggy cotton balls, and my vigor with cooked spaghetti. You are on your own. Of course, you are probably grilling, and swimming and whatnot, getting the most out of Labor Day. I'll just be trying to stay in one piece without too much pain, killing germs and losing another work-free day. Don't mind me.

See you on the threads! And Ida Tarbell can keep until next weekend.

[DemReadingDU]

72. Hope you're feeling better

Between grandkids and cleaning the carpet, the 3-day holiday went too fast.