GARFIELD ON THE OIL CRISIS YOU GOTTA LOVE GARFIELD 'S EXPLANATION -- TOO CUTE & ALSO TOO TRUE!!! A lot of folks can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in our country. ~~~ Well, there's a very simple answer. ~~~ Nobody bothered to check the oil. ~~~ We just didn't know we were getting low. ~~~ The reason for that is purely geographical. ~~~ Our OIL is located in: ~~~ ALASKA ~~~ California ~~~ Coastal Florida ~~~ Coastal Louisiana ~~~ Coastal Alabama ~~~~ Coastal Mississippi ~~~~ Coastal Texas ~~~ North Dakota ~~~ Wyoming ~~~ Colorado ~~~ Kansas ~~~ Oklahoma ~~~ Pennsylvania ~~~ And Texas ~~~ Our dipsticks are located in DC ~~~Any Questions? NO? Didn't think So.

 

If Only He Had The Slightest Idea How To Do These Things????


As the Republican candidates descend on Obama's home state for next week's Illinois Republican primary, Business Insider dropped by the President's campaign headquarters to see how things are shaping up during the never-ending GOP slog.
Unsurprisingly, the downtown Chicago office is already humming with activity — 300 paid staffers have already set up shop there, and more are expected to roll in as Election Day approaches.
To keep all of those people on the same page, the campaign has distilled Obama's message into simple soundbytes that are prominently displayed in the main workspace.
Virtually everything the President says between now and November will be some version of these four easy paragraphs.
Here's what it says:

Putting Americans back to work is job one. But we have to do more. 

We have to reclaim the security the middle-class has lost by restoring the basic values that made our country great. 

America prospers when we're all in it together; when hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded; when everyone from Main Street to Wall Street does their fair share and plays by the same rules. To create true middle-class security, we can't just cut our way to prosperity. We must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the world. 

We need an economy built to last — that creates jobs of the future and makes things the rest of the world buys — not one built on outsourcing, loopholes and risky financial deals that jeopardize our entire economy and threaten the security of the middle class. 

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-four-paragraphs-spell-out-everything-you-need-to-know-about-obamas-campaign-2012-3#ixzz1pVaOM9U9

 

An Update................

 

To whoever is going to read this…………

I understand that you may be the only person who will ever read this, but I am going to write it anyway to get my complete thoughts organized.  The story comes in four parts.

1) I was a life long Republican and the first president I voted for was Dwight Eisenhower.  But when George Bush said torture was O.K., I quit the party because that is not who Americans are.  Then appears Barack Obama, promising to stop everything I hate about Washington, and I was sold.

I was at a meeting on the day he announced from the court house steps and I wrote the first of a dozen or more $100 checks.

I attended meetings, put up yard signs, and had bumper stickers on both cars that said “Veterans for Obama”.  I wrote letters to newspapers and magazines.  Even got them published in the Los Angeles Times and in The Economist.  I made telephone calls to voters in California, Texas and South Dakota.  I even met him behind the Convention Center in San Diego after holding up signs for TV cameras. On Election Day, I drove little old ladies to the polls.

2) But over the past three years, I have been increasingly disappointed in the reality of Barack Obama’s performance as president.  He has failed to show leadership at every crucial juncture.  If you want to read how a former ardent supporter became disillusioned, read htt://thegreatrecessionconspiracy.blogspot.com from the beginning.

3) I am fully aware of the good stuff he has done.  Bob Gates, Hilary Clinton and Arne Duncan are (was) doing brilliant work.  While this is good, it is not nearly sufficient.

4) At every crucial juncture, Barack Obama has been a complete failure.

    There are six of those crucial points when he had the opportunity to do the right thing for the country, and instead failed us completely.  Here they are;

a)     We spend twice as much on healthcare than any other developed country and we get worse results.  This cost is growing so much faster than either inflation or GNP that U.S. bankruptcy is a foreseeable possibility.  And yet there is absolutely nothing in the bill he signed to even begin to slow that growth.  Absolutely nothing!  Hence, everything else in the bill is worthless.

b)    The Financial Reform bill does absolutely nothing to prevent TBTF in spite of the fact that every non-Wall Street banker in the U.S. knows we are now counting down to the next big explosion.  He is now busy playing kissy face with exactly the crooks who stole $14 TRILLION from the rest us.  First, he bailed out of public financing in the first campaign and pretended that he was happy with checks like mine while Wall Street bankers (same old, same old) were really financing him.  Now he has announced the $1 BILLION war chest for re-election.  This is the guy who was going to get money out of politics.  Disgusting!  And his treatment of Elizabeth Warren (the only person who always tells the truth) is disgusting and cowardly.  Shame on him.

c)     When he had the chance to end the Bush tax cuts, he rolled over and extended them.  The real effect was to take a huge amount of the U.S. wealth and give it the richest 5% of families, create a huge operating deficit, while making all of the rest of us poorer. No civilization has ever survived when a tiny majority controls all the wealth of the country, and that is exactly where we are headed, thanks to Barack Obama (and Bush before him).

d)    Fifteen million Americans are unemployed.  Another fifteen million are underemployed.  That is fully a fifth of the entire U.S. workforce, and he has done absolutely nothing to remedy the problem.  There are no jobs for college graduates and they are moving back into their parent’s homes.  Five to six million Americans have been unemployed for 99 weeks or longer.  They have no incomes.  The longer they stay unemployed, the less likely they will ever work.  We are rapidly creating a subclass of people with no jobs and no future.

e)     Signing the extension of the Patriot Act should have been criminal!  Benjamin Franklin said it perfectly; “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety”.  There is nothing more needed here.

f)      He let the generals screw him completely in Afghanistan.  He took time to listen to all the generals before he decided on a course of action.  The Republicans tried to crucify him for taking his time, but I think it was a perfect action.  He apparently got a promise from the generals that they could end the war is 18 months if he gave them more troops.  But when 18 months was up and it was apparent the generals had screwed him, all he did was fire Petraeus, and nobody else even got chastised.  More kids have died and more billions have been wasted.

And that is why I can no longer support Barack Obama, and I am confessing my error in judgment to everyone who will listen, and especially to the people I convinced to vote for him.

And I have spent a lot of time thinking about what happened, and I can only think of two plausible explanations.

1)     Once he became a millionaire, money became his only consideration, hence Wall Street kissy face.  I could have forgiven him anything if just one Wall Street crook had gone to jail, or even faced prosecution.

2)     He really is not competent to be president.  Understand that I think he is a really bright guy and I would like to have him as a personal friend, just not as the president.

I just don’t know, but I do know that as a country we are deeply in trouble and all the happy talk from Washington does not change that fact.

A Word of Caution................

The happy talk clowns in Washington are telling us that the recession is over because 1) 210,000 new jobs have been created, 2) the unemployment number has not gone up, and 3) new car sales are up.

But before you celebrate remember three facts.

1) We need 250,000 new jobs every month simply to absorb the new people entering the work force.

2) The primary reason unemployment has not increased is that a record number of people have stopped looking for work.  Participation in the work force is now at an all time low, just above 60%.  This is good news and bad news.  Some people have stopped looking for work and gone back to school so that is a good thing for the future.  The bad news is that a record number of people have become permanently unemployed and that is a very, very bad thing.

3)  Automobile owners are now holding their cars for a record 11.1 years, so the uptick in sales probably represents the maximum life of cars on the road.

Two Amazing Facts!!

Newt and some of his wacko pals are screaming that we need to drill more wells to increase our supply of gasoline.

1) There are more operating wells in the U.S. than in ALL the entire rest of the world.  (Read that again!)

2)  This year, we EXPORTED gasoline to the rest of the world, because the major oil companies can make more money selling their surpluses overseas.


Gasoline prices are being set by the Wall Street banks by speculating on future prices.

 

Finally, The Truth About Goldman Sachs Appears One More Time!!

When I wrote The Great Recession Conspiracy three years ago, the subtext was that Goldman Sachs had effectively taken over the U.S. Treasury Department.  Hank Paulson did not create the TARP bill because he was worried about you.  He did it to save Goldman Sachs from bankruptcy. AIG owed so much money to Goldman Sachs that GS would have collapsed if AIG failed.  This is not just my notion.  All kinds of authors have traced out the scenario.

The great tragedy about the resignation letter that is getting all the attention these days is that it doesn't address the problem.  So Micheal's comments in direction are sincerely appreciated.

And if you have thought I was too hard on Obama's Financial Reform Bill, just read No. 2 in Micheal's  list below.

If just one Goldman Sachs employee was even charged with criminal behavior, I would be willing to forgive Obama just about everything else.  But that ain't gonna happen!!  Check Obama's appointees in The Great Recession Conspiracy (sold everywhere ebooks are sold).

 

11 Reasons Why America Would Be A Better Place Without Goldman Sachs

Would America be a better place without Goldman Sachs?  Of course it would.  The "vampire squid" of Wall Street does not care about the future of America.  Sadly, Goldman Sachs apparently does not even care much about their own clients.  What Goldman Sachs is all about is making as much money as humanly possible.  In the end, there is nothing wrong with making money, but there are constructive ways to make money and there are destructive ways to make money.  Unfortunately, Goldman Sachs seems to find the destructive path almost irresistible.  Greg Smith, the head of the U.S. equity derivatives business for Goldman Sachs in Europe, the Middle East and Africa made headlines all over the world on Wednesday when he resigned publicly from Goldman Sachs in a scorching editorial in the New York Times.  Smith said that he could "honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it".  Considering what we know has gone on at Goldman over the past decade, that is very frightening to hear.  So could this be the beginning of the end for Goldman Sachs?  And if it is, will America be a better place when Goldman is gone?

You would think that at some point clients of Goldman would become so sick and tired of the stories of corruption coming out of the firm that they would simply walk away.

Unfortunately, corruption is so endemic on Wall Street that Goldman Sachs really does not seem out of place.  The truth is that a lot of the things that are said about Goldman could also be said about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.

But in recent years Goldman Sachs has truly become a national symbol of what is wrong with our financial system.  As the American people become fed up with institutions such as Goldman, hopefully we will start to see some of them disappear.

The following are 11 reasons why America would be a better place without Goldman Sachs....
#1 Even after all of the negative publicity we have seen in recent years, Goldman Sachs appears to not have learned any lessons.  The following is how Greg Smith described the three ways to get ahead at Goldman Sachs....

"What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym."

#2 Goldman Sachs is one of the too big to fail banks and those banks just keeping getting bigger than ever.  Back in 2002, the top 10 U.S. banks controlled 55 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  Today, the top 10 U.S. banks control 77 percent of all U.S. banking assets.  So if we couldn't afford to let them fail back in 2008 because they were so big, why did we allow them to become even larger?

#3 The Federal Reserve shows great favoritism to big Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs.  For example, between December 1, 2007 and July 21, 2010 the Federal Reserve made 814 billion dollars in secret loans to Goldman Sachs.

#4 Goldman Sachs is at the heart of the derivatives bubble that threatens to throw the entire global financial system into chaos.  At this point, Goldman Sachs has over 53 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
According to the New York Times, the big Wall Street banks completely control derivatives trading.  In fact, the New York Times says that representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup hold a secretive meeting each month to coordinate their domination over the derivatives market....

On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.
The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.

#5 Goldman Sachs was at the very heart of the financial crisis of 2008 which plunged the entire global economy into a very deep recession.  In the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, Goldman Sachs was putting together mortgage-backed securities that they knew were garbage and they marketed them to investors as AAA-rated investments.  On top of that, Goldman then often made huge bets against those exact same securities which turned out to be extremely profitable when those securities crashed and burned.
The following is how the New York Times described what was going on at the time....

"Goldman was not the only firm that peddled these complex securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s — and then made financial bets against them, called selling short in Wall Street parlance. Others that created similar securities and then bet they would fail, according to Wall Street traders, include Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley, as well as smaller firms like Tricadia Inc."

Sylvain Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York, said at the time that he was absolutely shocked by what Goldman was doing....

"The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen"

#6 Goldman Sachs played a huge role in getting Greece, Italy and several other European nations into so much debt.  The following is an excerpt from an article by Andrew Gavin Marshall....

In the same way that homeowners take out a second mortgage to pay off their credit card debt, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase and other U.S. banks helped push government debt far into the future through the derivatives market. This was done in Greece, Italy, and likely several other euro-zone countries as well. In several dozen deals in Europe, “banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books.” Because the deals are not listed as loans, they are not listed as debt (liabilities), and so the true debt of Greece and other euro-zone countries was and likely to a large degree remains hidden. Greece effectively mortgaged its airports and highways to the major banks in order to get cash up-front and keep the loans off the books, classifying them as transactions.

#7 Goldman Sachs is working very hard to help state and local governments sell off our highways, water treatment plants, libraries, parking meters, airports and power plants to the highest bidder.  Much of the time foreigners are the highest bidders for these precious infrastructure assets.
The following is how Dylan Ratigan described what is going on....

On Wall Street, setting up and running “Infrastructure Funds” is big business, with over $140 billion run by such banks as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Australian infrastructure specialist Macquarie. Goldman’s 2010 SEC filing should give you some sense of the scope of the campaign. Goldman says it will be involved with “ownership and operation of public services, such as airports, toll roads and shipping ports, as well as power generation facilities, physical commodities and other commodities infrastructure components, both within and outside the United States.” While the bank sees increased opportunity in “distressed assets” (ie. Cities and states gone broke because of the financial crisis), the bank also recognizes “reputational concerns with the manner in which these assets are being operated or held.”

#8 At the same time that Goldman Sachs is causing all sorts of trouble for everyone else, their employees are making crazy amounts of money.  During 2010, employees of Goldman Sachs brought in more than 15 billion dollars in total compensation.
#9 Goldman Sachs has way too much influence over the federal government.  There is a reason why it is commonly referred to as "Government Sachs".  No matter who is the White House, people that used to work for Goldman and other big Wall Street banks always seem to be crawling around.
Last year, Michael Brenner wrote the following about the composition of the Obama administration....

Wall Street's takeover of the Obama administration is now complete. The mega-banks and their corporate allies control every economic policy position of consequence. Mr. Obama has moved rapidly since the November debacle to install business people where it counts most. Mr.William Daley from JP Morgan Chase as White House Chief of Staff. Mr. Gene Sperling from the Goldman Sachs payroll to be director of the National Economic Council. Eileen Rominger from Goldman Sachs named director of the SEC's Investment Management division. Even the National Security Advisor, Thomas Donilon, was executive vice president for law and policy at the disgraced Fannie Mae after serving as a corporate lobbyist with O'Melveny & Roberts. The keystone of the business friendly team was put in place on Friday. General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt will serve as chair of the president's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

#10 Employees from Goldman Sachs pour way too much money into our national elections.  In 2008, donations from individuals and organizations affiliated with Goldman Sachs donated more than a million dollars to Barack Obama.  This time around they are pouring huge amounts of cash into Mitt Romney's campaign.

#11 Goldman Sachs is still a "vampire squid" as Matt Taibbi once so famously proclaimed in Rolling Stone....

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates."

Once again, there is nothing wrong with making money.
And there is certainly nothing wrong with working in the financial system.
But there is a right way to do things and there is a wrong way to do things.
Goldman Sachs is doing things very much the wrong way, and America would be a better place without them.

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And Here Comes The Evidence!!

From the beginning, this rant has tried to make the point that the United States of America is becoming a more and more sharply divided country, and that is a very, very serious problem.  When this is called to the attention of Republicans, the response is always that you are trying to screw the rich people and they are the ones who create jobs.  Both of those points are demonstrably FALSE, but that fact never seems too occur to them.  Now, serious research evidence is beginning to appear to document these facts.  Here is today's New York Times review of the first book to support the contention of this rant.  When I have time to read the book, I will add my two cents.

Why Some Countries Go Bust

By ADAM DAVIDSON

By his own admission, Daron Acemoglu is a slightly pudgy and fairly nerdy guy with an unpronounceable last name. But when I mentioned that I was interviewing him to two econ buffs, they each gasped and said, “I love Daron Acemoglu,” as if I were talking about Keith Richards. The Turkish M.I.T. professor — who, right now, is about as hot as economists get — acquired his renown for serious advances in answering the single most important question in his profession, the same one that compelled Adam Smith to write “The Wealth of Nations”: why are some countries rich while others are poor? 

Over the centuries, proposed answers have varied greatly. Smith declared that the difference between wealth and poverty resulted from the relative freedom of the markets; Thomas Malthus said poverty comes from overpopulation; and John Maynard Keynes claimed it was a byproduct of a lack of technocrats. (Of course, everyone knows that politicians love listening to wonky bureaucrats!) Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most famous economists, asserts that poor soil, lack of navigable rivers and tropical diseases are, in part, to blame. Others point to culture, geography, climate, colonization and military might. The list goes on.

But through a series of legendary — and somewhat controversial — academic papers published over the past decade, Acemoglu has persuasively challenged many of the previous theories. (If poverty were primarily the result of geography, say, or an unfortunate history, how can we account for the successes of Botswana, Costa Rica or Thailand?) Now, in their new book, “Why Nations Fail,” Acemoglu and his collaborator, James Robinson, argue that the wealth of a country is most closely correlated with the degree to which the average person shares in the overall growth of its economy. It’s an idea that was first raised by Smith but was then largely ignored for centuries as economics became focused on theoretical models of ideal economies rather than the not-at-all-ideal problems of real nations. 

Consider Acemoglu’s idea from the perspective of a poor farmer. In parts of modern sub-Saharan Africa, as was true in medieval Europe or the antebellum South, the people who work the fields lack any incentive to improve their yield because any surplus is taken by the wealthy elite. This mind-set changes only when farmers are given strong property rights and discover that they can profit from extra production. In 1978, China began allowing farmers to benefit from any surplus they produced. The decision, most economists agree, helped spark the country’s astounding growth. 

According to Acemoglu’s thesis, when a nation’s institutions prevent the poor from profiting from their work, no amount of disease eradication, good economic advice or foreign aid seems to help. I observed this firsthand when I visited a group of Haitian mango farmers a few years ago. Each farmer had no more than one or two mango trees, even though their land lay along a river that could irrigate their fields and support hundreds of trees. So why didn’t they install irrigation pipes? Were they ignorant, indifferent? In fact, they were quite savvy and lived in a region teeming with well-intended foreign-aid programs. But these farmers also knew that nobody in their village had clear title to the land they farmed. If they suddenly grew a few hundred mango trees, it was likely that a well-connected member of the elite would show up and claim their land and its spoils. What was the point? 

I encountered another side of Acemoglu’s thesis during what must have been one of history’s great natural economic experiments: post-Saddam Hussein Baghdad. On April 9, 2003, the day the city was captured, one of the world’s most tightly controlled economies suddenly became a free-for-all. Amid the chaos, many former state functionaries turned into entrepreneurs. Nearly every engineer from the ministry of housing, it seemed, had opened his own construction company. Satellite TVs, once illegal to all but a very small elite, were sold on every major street. Under Hussein, only one company (widely rumored to be monitored by the intelligence service) offered Internet access, and it was incredibly bad and expensive. After it was gone, there were so many new Internet companies that I had far more access options then than I do today in Brooklyn. 

Yet the American authorities, who had not planned for this budding free market, all but destroyed it when they gave the bulk of new contracts to large companies outside the country. Often, these outsiders subcontracted to Iraqi firms with close ties to the state’s new political establishment. By the anniversary of the United States invasion, it was clear that economic success would again come from connections and corruption rather than talent and hard work. Today, Transparency International ranks Iraq as one of the most corrupt nations on earth. An Iraqi friend once told me that he had hoped we would teach the Iraqis how to be Americans. Instead, the Americans learned how to be Iraqi. 

Acemoglu, Robinson and their collaborators did not come up with the idea that incentives matter, of course, nor the notion that politics play a role in economic development. Their great contribution has been a series of clever historical studies that persuasively argue that the cheesiest of slogans is actually correct: the true value of a nation is its people. If national institutions give even their poorest and least educated citizens some shot at improving their own lives — through property rights, a reliable judicial system or access to markets — those citizens will do what it takes to make themselves and their country richer. This suggests, among other things, that instead of supporting one-off programs promoting health or agricultural productivity, the international community should focus its aid efforts on deep political and economic change. 

Perhaps just as interesting, “Why Nations Fail” also shows the effects of different economic and political systems over the centuries. The sections on ancient Rome and medieval Venice are particularly compelling, because they show how fairly open and prosperous societies can revert to closed and impoverished autocracies. It’s hard to read these sections without thinking about the present-day United States, where economic inequality has grown substantially over the past few decades. Is the 1 percent emerging as a wealth-stripping, poverty-inducing elite? 

Well, maybe. Acemoglu and Robinson’s frequent collaborator Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, told me that financial firms have so thoroughly co-opted the political proc­ess that the American economy has become fundamentally unsound. “It’s bad and getting worse,” he told me. Barring some major shift in our political system, he suggested, the United States could be on its way to serious economic failure.

Charles Calomiris, an economist at Columbia University, is less worried. But it’s not because he thinks that banks haven’t co-opted our political system. “We’ve never had a good banking system,” he says. “What’s amazing about America is that we’ve been the most successful economy in the world while being crippled by political constraints on the quality of our banking system.” This has been going on since the 1700s, Calomiris says, and he doesn’t see any reason for the United States’ economy to stop growing anytime soon.

Acemoglu and Robinson are on the pessimistic side of optimism about the United States’ chances of a resurgence. Congress, they told me, is too heavily influenced by the wealthy, and the advent of super PACs has only given elites more power. Yet Acemoglu surprised me when he said he was encouraged by the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. While neither has an especially coherent or subtle economic agenda, both show that, however frustrated they might be, large numbers of Americans still believe they can influence the political process to improve their fortunes. Since the future of American economic health lies in its people, Acemoglu explained, as long as Americans believe they can influence the process, they will.

But, he quickly pointed out, what if Americans find their protests have no impact? What if the United States becomes a truly extractive nation, with violent repression of protest or — in some ways, worse — the grudging acquiescence of the beaten-down masses? While many Americans are frustrated by the divisive, often angry public debates over our economic future, we may only be in real trouble at the very moment that they shut up.

Adam Davidson is the co-founder of NPR's Planet Money, a podcast, blog, and radio series heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.”

And you know Simon Johnson is a hero of mine!!