more fake money, please. Gotta build houses

If Quantitative Easing was supposed to be the government
"printing" money to give to banks to save the economy,
then banks should be lending to borrowers who can
use the money to grow the economy.
Well, banks don't do that. They're casino gambler, you see?
So, when the coalition needed to get house builders 
building (it makes the economy look healthy), they
need to lend money to the builders.
So, what did they do?
They had to PRINT UP some more
fake money.
So, my rule remains. I think I'll name it.
The Shangrila or Shakedown Theory

The British public will either be corrupt politicians and/or
bankers,
meaning they'll be rich,
or they (that's you and me, and companies without connections)
will be "supported", more like "life support", by the government.

It's all fake money, but one group is living the
high life, while the rest are debt slaves and
marginalised in "democracy" and "capitalism".

Regal RNC looking for a coronation

I don't really understand US political party rules, but it looks
like somebody is trying to run the Reps from the back room.

The Reps always were a party of money. However, with the
apparent law change, rich guys can really start pulling hard
 on the strings.

What this amounts to is a bunch of back room deals to get
Ron Paul to disappear from everything to do with the
convention, which is now over. They've abrogated the
rights of those who voted for Paul to be heard.

There was a vote that was scripted before the
voice vote was even cast. If you watch this
teleprompter shot, John Boner was told what
to say.

If you see the video, these are some everyday Reps
members who are thoroughly pissed off. I don't
suppose this will lead to a big third-party drive.
It should. And Ron Paul should lead it, just because.

let's cut to the video:


I’ll bet even with this groundswell, Ron Paul will still be
too chicken to run. He probably has been threatened
with death, because if he hasn’t, he’s a complete sell-out,
and the last opportunity to take back the US government
for their people.

The bigger picture, as some see it, is that the RNC has to
find a way to doctor the election, when Mormon Rand
don't have a chance. Benny Nunu needs his romp through
the middle East. And he just showed up the US. Perhaps
he wanted to donate to somebody's campaign.

Third party politics- that's more f$%^&king like it

I've been complaining about the complacent Americans
who are satisfied with blaming Ralph Nader for the
Green God Al Bore's losing the fixed election to
GWB43.

Somebody finally brought the new Green party
campaign to my attention. The new boss is an
eloquent doctor from Mass. and she's causing
a stir about lewd behaviour because her
add used the word to "bullsh*t" to characterise
the words emanating from the backsides of
the Two Animal-based parties (asses and elephants)

Anyway, maybe they'll more than 1%  this time.
If you think you've got a better idea, why don't
you run?


greens on real

Conference

Ad

Boomers! Occupy the Oldtimers' Home

From the Max Keiser Files:
Isn't it wild that we have a democratic system and a media
that are all in cohoots with the Banksters, trying to convince
us that the banks are not responsible for everything
falling appart.
Young folks are trying to Occupy this&that, but the police
are squeezing them out of the democratic public debate,
by taking away their public space.
Businesspeople of the billionnaire club, like Bush-pig
Aussie mining I'm-self-made-with-daddy's-inheritance,
are saying that it's just a question of working harder ,
for less money. So, we were supposed to get some
help from the 1%ers who were being shoved out by
the .01%ers. Not gonna happen.
The next battleground is the baby-boomers. The ones
who changed the world with peace, sex, dope and
rock-like music. Many of them left the muddy fields
of Woodstock and took on the business world,
making their thousands if not millions of bucks.
Now, it turns out that their retirement 'plans' have
been ruined because they cannot cash out their
houses and companies.
The Busters (like me), as with the Gens X and Y,
have no such illustrious track records. The boomers
had all the good jobs (as long as they cut their hair and
didn't smoke weed at their desks) all the good
opportunities and thus all the money. The Left-over
generations have no money to buy the retirees out.

As with the present retirees, they will also find
that their financial nest eggs have shrunk to near
zero, so all their life's work has been stolen by
the bubble economy and the outright theft by the
banksters, particularly over the last 5 years.

Are the boomers gonna take on the banksters,
or are they gonna believe the bullshit emanating
from the media (Wall Street Journal, Economist)
that it's all been a dose of bad fate, and that nobody
can be found to take the blame. Perhaps democracy
is to blame for "redistributing wealth to the people"?

AahAhahAHHAhAhahaha

Well, if they're that stupid, then boomers deserve to be
robbed. If they want to join us in the Occupy
movement, they will be welcome. They can start
to build on their immense financial and political
power to get the changes we need.
Or else, they'll be Occupying the bridges and
overpasses, the parks and the tent cities, with
the rest of us.

Checkitout: Economist  Buttonwood
Democracies and debt
Voters are now facing a harsh truth
Sep 1st 2012 | from the print edition
ALMOST half the world’s population now lives in a democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister organisation of this newspaper. And the number of democracies has increased pretty steadily since the second world war. But it is easy to forget that most nations have not been democratic for much of their history and that, for a long time, democracy was a dirty word among political philosophers.
One reason was the fear that democratic rule would lead to ruin. Plato warned that democratic leaders would “rob the rich, keep as much of the proceeds as they can for themselves and distribute the rest to the people”. James Madison, one of America’s founding fathers, feared that democracy would lead to “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property and for any other improper or wicked projects”. Similarly John Adams, the country’s second president, worried that rule by the masses would lead to heavy taxes on the rich in the name of equality.[How ironic, now that the rich are robbing us-Costick67] As a consequence, “the idle, the vicious, the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend all their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them.”
Democracy may have its faults but alternative systems have proved no more fiscally prudent. Dictatorships may still feel the need to bribe their citizens (eg, via subsidised fuel prices) to ensure their acquiescence while simultaneously spending large amounts on the police and the military to shore up their power. The absolute monarchies of Spain and France suffered fiscal crises in the 17th and 18th centuries, and were challenged by Britain and the Netherlands which, though not yet democracies, had dispersed power more widely. Financial problems contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Nevertheless, with much of the democratic world now in the throes of a debt crisis, it is tempting to ask whether the fears of Madison and Adams have come to pass. Given the rise in inequality in America and Britain over the past 30 years, it is hard to argue that democracies have led to the confiscation of private wealth. Quite the reverse: modern American politicians either need to be wealthy, or need the financial backing of the rich....

Wall Street Journal via Yahoo
'The Economy Stole My Retirement'
Retirements in Peril for Entrepreneurs in Their 60s and 70s Who Can't Sell Their Companies
By Sarah E. Needleman and Emily Maltby |
Thu, Aug 30, 2012 12:50 PM EDT

Danny Sullivan dreams of gardening and spending time with his grandchildren, but that's just a fantasy. Retirement is out of his reach, at least for the foreseeable future.

The 62-year-old founder of a small catering company spends his days helping stock bars with beer and ice, wooing potential new clients and juggling the 20 to 30 different events his firm handles daily.

"I am so tired," he says. "I don't know that I'll ever be able to retire."

The weak economy has been tough for small-business owners across the board, with their total revenue inching up by just 3% since 2007 and declining in fields such as construction (-12%), real-estate services (-3%) and retailing (-2%), according to financial-software maker Intuit Inc. But for entrepreneurs in their 60s and 70s, the consequences have been particularly vexing.

Danny Sullivan has struggled to sell Arguello Catering. (Jason Henry for WSJ)Many of them are stuck in "business purgatory," unable to retire and forced to hang on for a recovery that economists say could still be a long way off.

Mr. Sullivan has struggled to sell Arguello Catering Inc., the Redwood City, Calif., business he started 21 years ago, at a price anywhere near the $850,000 or so he figures he needs to stop working. He reckons that about 70% of his nest egg is tied up in the 25-employee company.

Its annual revenue has fallen to roughly $2 million from $3 million before the recession, Mr. Sullivan says. He has tried, without success, to boost the business's value by branching into new markets, expanding hours of operation and adding healthier menu options. He says he got three offers for Arguello this year, but they were far too low.

Nearly half of the 799 small-business owners surveyed in August by The Wall Street Journal and Vistage International, an executive-mentoring organization, expect to retire after age 65, with 38% saying that their planned retirement date is later than they had predicted five years ago. In addition, 56% said most of their retirement nest egg is tied to their business.

Baby boomers, in many cases, were blindsided by the recession and its effect on their retirement plans, says George Vozikis, director of the Institute for Family Business at California State University in Fresno.


"Boomer entrepreneurs grew up believing in the American dream that you could start a business and eventually sell it for a good return or pass it onto your kids," adds Aaron Chatterji, associate professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, N.C. "Because of the financial crisis and subsequent recession, that is more difficult today."

Judy Lawton, 69, says she would like to sell the small staffing company she started 27 years ago. She figures she needs to sell it for close to $2 million to live comfortably. But her company was hit hard by the job-market slump, and its revenue is down by about 60% from before the recession.
.....more, at WSJ

Jubilee shines and Nobel sh*t

[snapshot:
Keen: economists are the priests (don’t know god, but have a model of god) who legitimise what the king is doing, to make society better]

When discussing Economics, I can't believe that the
corrupt Nobel people can give an award for something
which is untried, outside of a prof's office.

It was Paul Ormerod, one of the Good Fella economists
who said that we are in the financial crisis expressly
because of the world followed Nobel-prize winning
economists' bullcrap.

Well, do you want to know who's the
economists' economist? and the the economist
hiding behind his finger, in shame?

Whose work has been shown to be valuable to society,
like the forewarning of the financial crisis. Whose work
has been a bunch of bafflegab?

Imagine the awards show, hosted by George Osbourne:

Real world economics review- Dynamite award

Greenspan

Bernanke

Freidman

Dynamite

Alan Greenspan has been judged the economist most responsible for causing the Global Financial Crisis. He and 2nd and 3rd place finishers Milton Friedman and Larry Summers, have won the first–and hopefully last—Dynamite Prize in Economics.

They have been judged to be the three economists most responsible for the Global Financial Crisis. More figuratively, they are the three economists most responsible for blowing up the global economy.

Most than 7,500 people voted—most of whom were economists themselves from the 11,000 subscribers to the real-world economics review. With a maximum of three votes per voter, a total of 18,531 votes were cast.  The poll was conducted by PollDaddy. Cookies were used to prevent repeat voting.

Dynamite Prize Citations 

Alan Greenspan (5,061 votes): As Chairman of the Federal Reserve System from 1987 to 2006, Alan Greenspan both led the over expansion of money and credit that created the bubble that burst and aggressively promoted the view that financial markets are naturally efficient and in no need of regulation.

Milton Friedman (3,349 votes): Friedman propagated the delusion, through his misunderstanding of the scientific method, that an economy can be accurately modeled using counterfactual propositions about its nature. This, together with his simplistic model of money, encouraged the development of fantasy-based theories of economics and finance that facilitated the Global Financial Collapse.

Larry Summers (3,023 votes):  As US Secretary of the Treasury (formerly an economist at Harvard and the World Bank), Summers worked successfully for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which since the Great Crash of 1929 had kept deposit banking separate from casino banking.  He also helped Greenspan and Wall Street torpedo efforts to regulate derivatives.

... Revere award

Steve Keen (University of Western Sydney), receiving more than twice as many votes as his nearest rival, has been judged the economist who first and most cogently warned the world of the coming Global Financial Collapse. He and 2nd and 3rd place finishers Nouriel Roubini (New York University) and Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research) have won the inaugural Revere Award for Economics.  It is named in honour of Paul Revere and his famous ride through the night to warn Americans of the approaching British army.

Keen, Roubini and Baker have been voted to be, more than all others, the three economists who if the powers of the world had listened to, the Global Financial Collapse could have been avoided.

More than 2,500 people voted—most of whom were economists themselves from the 11,000 subscribers to the real-world economics review. With a maximum of three votes per voter, a total of 5,062 votes were cast.  The voters were asked to vote for  the three economists who first and most clearly anticipated and gave public warning of the Global Financial Collapse and whose work is most likely to prevent another GFC in the future.

Revere Award Citations 

Steve Keen (1,152 votes)

Keen’s 1995 paper “Finance and economic breakdown” concluded as follows:

    The chaotic dynamics explored in this paper should warn us against accepting a period of relative tranquillity in a capitalist economy as anything other than a lull before the storm. 

In December 2005, drawing heavily on his 1995 theoretical paper and convinced that a financial crisis was fast approaching, Keen went high-profile public with his analysis and predictions. He registered the webpage www.debtdeflation.com dedicated to analyzing the “global debt bubble”, which soon attracted a large international audience.  At the same time he began appearing on Australian radio and television with his message of approaching financial collapse and how to avoid it.  In November 2006 he began publishing his monthly DebtWatch Reports (33 in total). These were substantial papers (upwards of 20 pages on average) that applied his previously developed analytical framework to large amounts of empirical data. Initially these papers analyzed the Global Financial Collapse that he was predicting and then its realization.

Nouriel Roubini (566 votes)

In summer 2005 Roubini predicted that real home prices in the United States were likely to fall at least 30% over the next 3 years.  In 2006 he wrote on August 23:

    By itself this [house price] slump is enough to trigger a US recession.

And on August 30 he wrote:

The recent increased financial problems of … sub-prime lending institutions may thus be the proverbial canary in the mine – or tip of the iceberg – and signal the more severe financial distress that many housing lenders will face when the current housing slump turns into a broader and uglier housing bust that will be associated with a broader economic recession. You can then have millions of households with falling wealth, reduced real incomes and lost jobs…”

In November 2006 on his blog he wrote:

    The housing recession is now becoming a construction recession; and the construction recession is now turning into a clear auto and manufacturing recession; and the manufacturing recession will soon turn into a retail recession as squeezed households – facing falling home prices and rising mortgage servicing costs – sharply contract their rate of consumption.

  

The Five Stages of Collapse

4 years on, it's time to check up on the

Decline of the Fiat Empire

Dmitry Orlov

Friday, February 22, 2008

The Five Stages of Collapse

... For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point. Even if society at the current stage of socioeconomic complexity will no longer be possible, and even if, as Tainter points in his "Collapse of Complex Societies," there are circumstances in which collapse happens to be the correct adaptive response, it need not automatically cause a population crash, with the survivors disbanding into solitary, feral humans dispersed in the wilderness and subsisting miserably. Collapse can be conceived of as an orderly, organized retreat rather than a rout.

For instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union - our most recent and my personal favorite example of an imperial collapse - did not reach the point of political disintegration of the republics that made it up, although some of them (Georgia, Moldova) did lose some territory to separatist movements. And although most of the economy shut down for a time, many institutions, including the military, public utilities, and public transportation, continued to function throughout. And although there was much social dislocation and suffering, society as a whole did not collapse, because most of the population did not lose access to food, housing, medicine, or any of the other survival necessities. The command-and-control structure of the Soviet economy largely decoupled the necessities of daily life from any element of market psychology, associating them instead with physical flows of energy and physical access to resources. This situation, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Collapse, allowed the Soviet population to inadvertently achieve a greater level of collapse-preparedness than is currently possible in the United States.

Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers - the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this - I feel ready to attempt a bold conjecture, and define five stages of collapse, to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it. Rather than tying each phase to a particular emotion, as in the Kübler-Ross model, the proposed taxonomy ties each of the five collapse stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo. Although each stage causes physical, observable changes in the environment, these can be gradual, while the mental flip is generally quite swift. It is something of a cultural universal that nobody (but a real fool) wants to be the last fool to believe in a lie.

Stages of Collapse

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

[GOV SUPPORTS BANKERS UNCERTAINTY. SAVINGS ARE A LOSS. INVESTMENTS ARE EATEN BY BANKERS. LOANS UNAVAILABLE- Costick67]

Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

[SEEING THE SOCIETAL FRAMEWORK FALLING APART. STORES CLOSING-Costick67]

Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

[GREECE IS HERE ALREADY. ALWAYS HAS BEEN. PENSIONS DON’T EXIST. TAXES PILED ON TAXES-Costick67]

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

[STRONG SOCIAL AND FAMILY NETWORKS. ACCUSTOMED TO OCCUPATION- Costick67]

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

[UNLESS LOCALISM REIGNS- Costick67]

Penn, me outta here

I know they're not as bad as the bankers, but since
everybody now has their home Offshoring kit,
they've decided to screw the countries that have
allowed them to open up their shops, with
handouts for the biggest of the businesses.
I'm talking retail and services. Walmart and their
civic barn building bees, paid for by the rubes
who don't know enough to keep Walmart
out of town.

[free lunch is finished. colour me gone]
Another shining golden child of the dot com
era, Amazon, is also screwing the Penn
people by not paying tax on out of state
mailings.

That's besides the offshoring.
Nicholas Shaxson once showed us the post box
that is Boot Drugstore chain, in Geneva. A tax
exile with an office in a box.

part of the blurb on the youtube page:

"Boots was taken over by an American holding company. Shortly after, the long-established British company moved its headquarters to a post office box in Switzerland, so that it can avoid paying UK taxes. Consequently, its tax bill fell from £100million to just £3 million - about 3% of its profits (less than rate of income tax a person on minimum wage pays!)."

You do understand that if a company takes
customer money, and doesn't pay tax, and then sends
profits offshore (which Amazon does), then they
are vaccuuming the wealth of a nation out. That's
mercantilism. Governments are doing nothing
to stop this.
That type of mercantilism was what the big
empires used to do to Africa and other places
they owned. Now it's come home to roost.  

checkit: Denninger

Amazon Is Slowly Losing The Tax War

Yet another domino goes down...

    HARRISBURG, Pa.  -

    Beginning Saturday, Amazon.com Inc. will start collecting Pennsylvania sales tax on orders that are shipped to the state, a spokesman said Wednesday.

    The online retail giant had previously refused to register to collect Pennsylvania's 6 percent levy on its orders. But a spokesman said the company reversed itself because a state directive requiring it takes effect Saturday.

Amazon has had facilities in Pennsylvania for quite a while.  How they've managed to get away with this for the length of time they have is a mystery -- they have six warehouses in the state!

This is, incidentally, one of the improper advantages that Amazon has levered into their position in the marketplace.  Smaller companies who wanted to put a warehouse in PA to cut down shipping costs almost-certainly wound up paying sales tax.  We did back in the 1990s when we had a colocation facility in Wisconsin -- the act of leasing that office was enough to be considered (in the opinion of our counsel) nexus, and thus trigger tax reporting and collection.

Is everything in this economy some sort of scam?