STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Tuesday, 29 September 2015

[Tansy_Gold]

[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Tuesday, 29 September 2015[font color=black][/font]

SMW for 28 September 2015

AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 28 September 2015
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Dow Jones 16,001.89 -312.78 (-1.92%)
S&P 500 1,881.77 -49.57 (-2.57%)
Nasdaq 4,543.97 -142.53 (-3.04%)


[font color=green]10 Year 2.10% -0.05 (-2.33%)
30 Year 2.88% -0.06 (-2.04%) [font color=black]


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

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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
Marketwatch Data
Bloomberg Economic News
Yahoo Finance
Google Finance
Bank Tracker
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Daily Job Cuts
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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The Big Picture
Financial Sense
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Credit Writedowns
Brad DeLong
Bonddad
Atrios
goldmansachs666
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The Automatic Earth
Wall Street on Parade
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Essential Reading:[/font][/font]
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Matt Taibi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout


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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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LegitGov
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Earmark Database
USA spending.gov
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
Charlie Rose talks with Krugman
William Black: This Economic Disaster
Bill Moyers with Kevin Drum and David Corn
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[font color=red]Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 [/font][font color=red]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
8/22/12 Doug Whitman, Whitman Capital LLC hedge fund founder, convicted of insider trading following a trial in which he spent more than two days on the stand telling jurors he was innocent
10/26/12 UPDATE: Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta sentenced to two years in federal prison. He will, of course, appeal. . .
11/20/12 Hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma charged with insider trading at SAC Capital Advisors, and prosecutors are looking at Martoma's boss, Steven Cohen, for possible involvement.
02/14/13 Gilbert Lopez, former chief accounting officer of Stanford Financial Group, and former controller Mark Kuhrt sentenced to 20 yrs in prison for their roles in Allen Sanford's $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
03/29/13 Michael Sternberg, portfolio mgr at SAC Capital, arrested in NYC, charged with conspiracy and securities fraud. Pled not guilty and freed on $3m bail.
04/04/13 Matthew Marshall Taylor,fmr Goldman Sachs trader arrested, charged by CFTC w/defrauding his employer on $8BN futures bet "by intentionally concealing the true huge size, as well as the risk and potential profits or losses associated."
04/04/13 Matthew Taylor admits guilt, makes plea bargain. Sentencing set for 26 June; faces up to 20 years in prison but will likely only see 3-4 years. Says, "I am truly sorry."
04/11/13 Ex-KPMG LLP partner Scott London charged by federal prosecutors w/passing inside tips to a friend in exchange for cash, jewelry, and concert tickets; expected to plead guilty in May.
08/01/13 Fabrice Tourré convicted on six counts of security fraud, including "aiding and abetting" his former employer, Goldman Sachs
08/14/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout charged with wire fraud, falsifying records, and conspiracy in connection with JP Morgan's "London Whale" trade.
08/19/13 Phillip A. Falcone, manager of hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, agrees to admit to "wrongdoing" in market manipulation. Will banned from securities industry for 5 years and pay $18MM in disgorgement and fines.
09/16/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout officially indicted on charges associated with "London Whale" trade.
02/06/14 Matthew Martoma convicted of insider trading while at hedge fund SAC (Stephen A. Cohen) Capital Advisors. Expected sentence 7-10 years.
03/24/14 Annette Bongiorno, Bernard Madoff's secretary; Daniel Bonventre, director of operations for investments; JoAnn Crupi, an account manager; and Jerome O'Hara and George Perez, both computer programmers convicted of conspiracy to defraud clients, securities fraud, and falsifying the books and records.
05/19/14 Credit Suisse, which has an investment bank branch in NYC, agrees to plead guilty and pay appx. $2.6 billion penalties for helping wealthy Americans hide wealth and avoid taxes.
09/08/14 Matthew Martoma, convicted SAC trader, sentenced to 9 years in prison plus forfeiture of $9.3 million, including home and bank accounts
08/03/15 Former City (London) trader Tom Hayes found guilty of rigging global Libor interest rates. Each fo eight counts carries up to 10 yr. sentence.
08/21/15 Charles Antonucci Sr, former pres. Park Ave. Bank sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and attempt to steal $11MM in TARP bailout funds, as well as $37.5MM fraud on OK insurance company. To pay $54MM in restitution and give up additional $11MM.
09/21/15 Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn apologizes for VW cheating on air quality standards with emission testing avoidance device. Stock drops 20%, fines may total $18B.
09/22/15 Stewart Parnell, CEO Peanut Corp. of America, sentenced to 28 years in prison for selling salmonella-tainted peanut butter that killed nine.





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

[Demeter]

1. The United Nations has a radical, dangerous vision for the future of the Web By Caitlin Dewey

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09/24/the-united-nations-has-a-radical-dangerous-vision-for-the-future-of-the-web/

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=
(United Nations Broadband Commission for Digital Development)


It may not have intended to, precisely, but the United Nations just took sides in the Internet’s most brutal culture war...On Thursday, the organization’s Broadband Commission for Digital Development released a damning “world-wide wake-up call” on what it calls “cyber VAWG,” or violence against women and girls. The report concludes that online harassment is “a problem of pandemic proportion” — which, nbd, we’ve all heard before.

Men who harass women online are quite literally losers, new study finds
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-harass-women-online-are-quite-literally-losers-new-study-finds/

But the United Nations then goes on to propose radical, proactive policy changes for both governments and social networks, effectively projecting a whole new vision for how the Internet could work. Under U.S. law — the law that, not coincidentally, governs most of the world’s largest online platforms — intermediaries such as Twitter and Facebook generally can’t be held responsible for what people do on them. But the United Nations proposes both that social networks proactively police every profile and post, and that government agencies only “license” those who agree to do so.

“The respect for and security of girls and women must at all times be front and center,” the report reads, not only for those “producing and providing the content,” but also everyone with any role in shaping the “technical backbone and enabling environment of our digital society.”

How that would actually work, we don’t know; the report is light on concrete, actionable policy. But it repeatedly suggests both that social networks need to opt-in to stronger anti-harassment regimes and that governments need to enforce them proactively.

Contrary Internet crybabies, online speech in the U.S. is really free, actually https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/08/06/contrary-to-the-internet-crybabies-online-speech-in-the-u-s-is-really-free-actually/

At one point toward the end of the paper, the U.N. panel concludes that “political and governmental bodies need to use their licensing prerogative” to better protect human and women’s rights, only granting licenses to “those Telecoms and search engines” that “supervise content and its dissemination.” In other words, the United Nations believes that online platforms should be (a) generally responsible for the actions of their users and (b) specifically responsible for making sure those people aren’t harassers. Regardless of whether you think those are worthwhile ends, the implications are huge: It’s an attempt to transform the Web from a libertarian free-for-all to some kind of enforced social commons.

This question, of course, mirrors other, larger debates playing out across the culture, including tiffs over academic “trigger warnings” and debates about Reddit’s foggy future. Writing at Breitbart several weeks ago, the conservative columnist Allum Bokhari described a growing social movement that he dubs “cultural libertarianism”: the rejection of any and all limitations on absolute free expression. It’s no coincidence that the “cultural libertarians” Bokhari cites are all leading figures in Gamergate, just as it’s no coincidence that the U.N. report references Zoe Quinn, the first victim of that movement. Well over a year after Quinn’s harassment became international news, we still haven’t answered these fundamental questions about what values the Internet should protect and who is responsible for it.

This U.N. report gets us no closer, alas: all but its most modest proposals are unfeasible. We can educate people about gender violence or teach “digital citizenship” in schools, but persuading social networks to police everything their users post is next to impossible. And even if it weren’t, there are serious implications for innovation and speech: According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, CDA 230 — the law that exempts online intermediaries from this kind of policing — is basically what allowed modern social networks (and blogs, and comments, and forums, etc.) to come into being. As reports like this are making increasingly clear, however, these platforms were developed by people who never imagined the struggles that women face online. We’re using tools that weren’t designed for us; they had other people and values and priorities in mind. Is a reckoning — or at least rebalancing — imminent? The United Nations suggests it has to be. But it certainly won’t look like the model dreamt up in this report. For better or worse, that’s several steps too revolutionary.


Caitlin Dewey is The Post’s digital culture critic. Follow her on Twitter @caitlindewey or subscribe to her daily newsletter on all things Internet. (tinyletter.com/cdewey)

[Demeter]

2. It Is Very Expensive To Be Poor by Pamela Foohey

http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2015/09/it-is-very-expensive-to-be-poor.html

Cash checking fees, prepaid card fees, money transfer fees, cashier's check fees -- all together, the unbanked pay up to 10% of their income simply to use their own money. And when lower-income people face an emergency, they must turn to expensive payday loans, title loans, and tax refund loans. As Mehrsa Baradaran (University of Georgia) writes in her new book, How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy, "indeed, it is very expensive to be poor."

How did this happen? And how might we begin to solve the problem? In her book, Baradaran details how banks and government are and always have been inextricably tied, with the government helping banks and the banks supposedly helping the public in return. But this "social contract" has eroded. The banking sector has turned away from less profitable markets, leaving people with small sums of money to deposit without a trustworthy place to stash their cash, and people in need of small sums of money to borrow nowhere to turn but fringe lenders. Moreover, these people understandably often are uncomfortable dealing with large banks. And the result is that an astonishing large chunk of the American population is unbanked or underbanked.

If the unbanked and underbanked had a trustworthy place to deposit their cash, some of the fees they pay simply to use their money would go away. This alone might allow families to stay financially afloat. Likewise, if they had the option to borrow small sums of money at reasonable rates, temporary financial emergencies may not set so many families up for a lifetime of financial failure. Which leads Baradaran to a proposal that I’m fond of (indeed, I’ve blogged about Baradaran’s thoughts on it before): postal banking.
The best part of the book is that the proof of postal banking’s potential is in the history that Baradaran sets forth. And the history is an interesting and surprisingly quick read. Not only does it set up her argument for postal banking, but through the history she highlights a very important fact about low-income people who turn to fringe lending. They do so because they have to and are very cognizant of the risks. They are not ignorant, and they also are not poor money managers—or at least no less adept than others. In fact, they likely are more adept. As Baradaran notes, both the poor and middle (and even upper) classes must juggle in their financial lives, “but in comparison, the middle class seems to be juggling with beanbags, and the poor are juggling with knives. Dipped in poison.”

Postal banking, even if the post office system only is used to accept small dollar deposits, may represent the best current option to at least provide lower-income people with gloves to protect themselves while they are juggling. And history tells us that it might strengthen our banking system to boot. If you want to know more about this fascinating history and the full potential of postal banking, pick up a copy of Baradaran's book. And if you want even more convincing, watch her discuss the book here:

[Demeter]

3. Greater Fools and Bigger Liars by ilargi

http://www.theautomaticearth.com/2015/09/greater-fools-and-bigger-liars/

The moment we heard that John Boehner would resign, the first thing that came to mind was: the next one will be a Greater Fool and a Bigger Liar. For all of his obvious faultlines, Boehner is human. As was evident for all to see Thursday when the Pope -Boehner’s as Catholic as JFK and Jesus Christ- came to see ‘him’ in ‘his’ Senate. Even smiled reading that the Pope had asked Boehner to pray for him.

But Boehner was really of course just a man who through time increasingly became a kind of barrier between a president and his party on the one hand, and Boehner’s own, increasingly ‘out there’, party on the other. He moved from far right to the right middle just to keep the country going. In essence, that’s little more than his job, but just doing your job can get you some nasty treatment these days in the land of the free.

So now we’ll get a refresher course in government shutdown, though there’s no guarantee that Boehner’s successor will be enough of a greater fool to cut his/her (make that his) new-found career short by actually letting it happen. At least not before December. The government shutdown is a threat like Janet Yellen’s rate hike, one which always seems to disappear right around the next corner, a process that eats away at credibility much more than participants are willing and/or able to acknowledge. Until it’s too late...

READ IT ALL--FREE-RANGING MUSING ON THE FUTURE AND THE ALTERNATIVES

[Demeter]

4. Boehner Exits House of Shards Thomas Schaller

POST-WORTHY FOR THE HEADLINE ALONE!

http://prospect.org/article/boehner-exits-house-shards

The speaker was never master of his own majority....

Liberals and Democrats inclined to rejoice may want to pause, and not only because Boehner’s successor may prove to be an even more difficult adversary. The speaker’s resignation may mark the onset of a new and, believe it or not, potentially more contentious era in congressional politics. The timing of Mr. Boehner’s announcement—after Pope Francis’s visit, before what may be the latest in a series of partisan government shutdowns—makes perfect sense for the Catholic speaker, who was moved to public tears yet again discussing the papal visit. But it’s the private tears Boehner may well have shed during the four-plus years he served as speaker that merit analysis, perhaps even absolution.

To appreciate Boehner’s fraught tenure, it’s important to recall the years preceding Boehner’s 2011 ascension. During the financial crisis in 2008, while George W. Bush was president and Boehner was minority leader, two-thirds of House Republicans bolted on the initial vote on Bush’s proposed Wall Street bailout. Though the vote is sometimes remembered as a failure of Nancy Pelosi, who was speaker at the time, it prefigured troubles to come for Boehner.

Four months later, key congressional leaders met for dinner in Georgetown on the night of Barack Obama’s inauguration to decide how best to regain power. Their conclusion: Obstruct the new president’s agenda, absolutely and at every turn. The strategy seemed wise enough; after all, it worked for Republican Newt Gingrich—who attended that fateful dinner—16 years earlier.

But these Republicans failed to foresee that Tea Partiers would be lighting the party’s return path to control of the House in 2010. Despite professing to be born of opposition to Obamacare and raised on austerity, Tea Party sensibilities were more complex. One need not have read the pre-Tea Party warnings about rising authoritarianism from Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, nor the after-party analyses by Christopher Parker and Matt Barreto that document the movement’s racist and nativist undercurrents, to sense that the Tea Party was a phenomenon at once familiar, yet somehow profoundly different. Behind the tri-cornered hats and Gadsden flags a frightened, white, proto-populist brigade had mustered...

[Punx]

10. No Celebration Here

No sympathy for Boehner either. Regardless of the crap he had to deal with, the man was a crook.

The problem is that the replacement is likely to be someone from the tea party and we will likely see an even more dysfunctional congress.

And who does this serve? The .1 percent. A dysfunctional government won’t be able to interfere with regulation or their wealth accumulation, and as long as that continues it will be tolerated.

‘In chaos they can steal” - Randi Rhodes

[Demeter]

5. Edward Snowden Inspires Global Treaty for Online Privacy

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/edward-snowden-inspires-global-treaty-for-online-privacy-20150924

[Demeter]

6. SYRIZA's Pyrrhic Victory, and the Future of the Left in Greece by Richard Fidler

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/1167.php


In the wake of the September 20 Greek election SYRIZA has once again formed a coalition government with a small right-wing party, ANEL.[1] Both parties lost votes and seats but their standing, like those of most other parties, was not very dissimilar to the results in January, when SYRIZA was first elected.

SYRIZA's 35.46% and ANEL's 3.69%, combined, were sufficient to give them a majority of 155 seats in the 300-seat parliament under Greece's electoral law, which gives 50 additional seats to the party with a plurality, in this case (as before) SYRIZA. However, voter turnout was at an all-time low, 44% of the electorate abstaining although voting is mandatory in Greece. This means that SYRIZA was supported by only 20% of eligible voters.

And this is a very different party, and government, than the one elected in January.

SYRIZA received the highest vote of any party in January on the basis of its promise to end the brutal austerity Greece has suffered in recent years at the hands of its creditors – the other countries that use the euro, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), referred to collectively as the “Troika.” But this time neither SYRIZA nor ANEL could credibly promise opposition to austerity. They are committed to enforcing the harsh austerity terms imposed on Greece in July when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras capitulated to the Troika only days following a national referendum in which 61% of the voters had strongly affirmed their opposition to austerity.

Moreover, SYRIZA will now govern without its left wing, which opposed submission to the new memorandum. The SYRIZA dissidents, previously grouped as the party's Left Platform, joined recently with a number of small anti-austerity parties to found Popular Unity, a self-described “social and political front to overturn the memoranda, predatory austerity, the negation of democracy, and the transformation of Greece into a European colony by means of indebtedness.” However, Popular Unity, with only 2.86% of the popular vote, fell short of the 3% required for representation in parliament.

Troika the Big Winner

Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister in the previous SYRIZA government, accurately described the election result:

“The greatest winner is the troika itself. During the past five years, troika-authored bills made it through parliament on ultra-slim majorities, giving their authors sleepless nights. Now, the bills necessary to prop up the third bailout will pass with comfortable majorities, as SYRIZA is committed to them. Almost every opposition MP (with the exception of the communists of KKE and the Nazis of Golden Dawn) is also on board.

“Of course, to get to this point Greek democracy has had to be deeply wounded (1.6 million Greeks who voted in the July referendum did not bother to turn up at the polling stations on Sunday) – no great loss to bureaucrats in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington DC for whom democracy appears, in any case, to be a nuisance.

“Tsipras must now implement a fiscal consolidation and reform programme that was designed to fail. Illiquid small businesses, with no access to capital markets, have to now pre-pay next year's tax on their projected 2016 profits. Households will need to fork out outrageous property taxes on non-performing apartments and shops, which they can't even sell. VAT rate hikes will boost VAT evasion. Week in week out, the troika will be demanding more recessionary, antisocial policies: pension cuts, lower child benefits, more foreclosures.

“The prime minister's plan for weathering this storm is founded on three pledges. First the agreement with the troika is unfinished business, leaving room for further negotiation of important details; second, debt relief will follow soon; and third, Greece's oligarchs will be tackled. Voters supported Tsipras because he appeared the most likely candidate to deliver on these promises. The trouble is, his capacity to do so is severely circumscribed by the agreement he has already signed.

“His power to negotiate is negligible given the agreement's clear condition that the Greek government must ‘agree with the troika on all actions relevant for the achievement of the objectives of the memorandum of understanding’ (Notice the absence of any commitment by the troika to agree with the Greek government.)”

It was the third promise – to fight the oligarchs who got Greece into this mess in the first place – that was key to Tsipras's re-election, says Yaroufakis.

“Having accepted a new extend-and-pretend loan that limits the government's capacity to reduce austerity and look after the weak, the surviving raison d’être of a leftwing administration is to tackle noxious vested interests. However, the troika is the oligarchs’ best friend, and vice versa. During the first six months of 2015, when we were challenging the troika's monopoly over policy-making powers in Greece, its greatest domestic supporters were the oligarch-owned media and their political agents. The same people and interests who have now embraced Tsipras. Can he turn against them? I think he wants to, but the troika has already disabled his main weapons (for example by forcing the disbandment of the economic crime fighting unit, SDOE).”

MORE

[Demeter]

7. Congress moves on spending bill as shutdown deadline looms

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/28/us-usa-fiscal-idUSKCN0RS20N20150928

The U.S. Congress moved on Monday to rush legislation to President Barack Obama that avoids a government shutdown on Thursday as the new fiscal year starts while setting aside a bitter Republican feud over money for Planned Parenthood.

The Senate kicked off the effort by advancing a measure to extend all previous agency funding levels until Dec. 11, in a bipartisan 77-19 procedural vote. That clears the way for the Senate to pass the spending bill by early Wednesday, sending it to the House of Representatives for passage just in time to beat a midnight Wednesday deadline. The stop-gap spending measure is aimed at buying time for negotiators to reach a longer-term budget agreement that lasts through September 2016.

Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who declared his candidacy on Monday to succeed House Speaker John Boehner, vowed to avoid another shutdown threat in December when the stop-gap funding ends and a federal debt ceiling limit is needed. "We've got to stop these," McCarthy told Fox News when asked if there would be a December funding crisis. "We need to join together, not just in our ideas but in a media plan. So those in America need to join with us. If we are to be successful, we need to be able to fight and win."

Boehner is leaving at the end of October after facing repeated ouster threats from hard-line conservatives who demanded that Congress use the spending extension to cut off federal funds for Planned Parenthood to punish the women's health care group over allegations it sold fetal tissue harvested from abortions. The group, which gets around $550 million annually from the government, has denied any wrongdoing.

Faced with a veto threat from Obama and mixed support among Republicans for a strategy that would likely lead to a shutdown, Boehner said on Sunday the House would pass a funding bill without the Planned Parenthood provisions. But Boehner's successor will likely face similar demands from hard-line conservatives over the December deadlines. Senator Ted Cruz on Monday made a last-ditch effort to try to stop the funding measure and restore the Planned Parenthood provisions. The Republican presidential candidate slammed Republicans leaders for "surrendering" to Obama and Democrats over the issue.

Obama "simply has to utter the word shutdown and Republican leadership runs to the hills," Cruz said.

[Demeter]

8. In other news

I saw a very good rainbow yesterday, after Sunday's lunar eclipse. Things are looking up!



It's a good thing the coughing and sneezing are less, because I've strained a muscle that runs in the region of the stomach. There's nothing I can do about it, aspirin and heat...and STILL some cold symptoms! I am seriously going to rip the head off the person who gave it to my kid, if I ever find them...

Did a full day's labor yesterday, and then collapsed, hence the thin postings...sorry, all.

Have a good Tuesday, regardless!

[Hotler]

9. I think something is up.....

Shell abandons the Artic, Hillary says she is now against the Keystone pipeline, I don't trust them. I think Shell found lots of oil and is hiding it for later and once and if Hillary is elected she will do an about face and let Keystone happen. Companies like Shell just don't sink 5-10 billion into a project and walk away. The PTB are willing to wait to get the pipeline in till they get an ally in office.

[mother earth]

11. Well, she has to talk a good talk to get into the WH where she can better serve big money.

All she has to do is sit back, do a few interviews, a few debates, all scripted and ready to go, and let MSM frame the race. With TPP on fast track, what's left to hold big money back?