Hitler and Churchill redux

Used to be a time when I would say that we should have let
the Germans run all the trains and car factories in Europe.
But , Hitler wouldn't have been happy with only that.

But I'm beginning to wonder why my ancestors fought these
guys off. We went into the EU, with the intention of
stopping wars, the best intentions. And we've ended up with
a common currency that is being run by bankers, and those
bankers are 'making' the unelected leaders of Europe
call a halt to democracy: van Rumpy, Barosso, Merkel.
Will this lead to war?

Once met a former stagiaire from Belgium who told me
that the EU = whatever Germany, the UK and France want
is what happens. I found it hard to defend, until this week.

And now that the whole thing is coming crashing down,
those three are deciding and nobody seems to be complaining.
It's a troika, dammit!

Now we can see it clearly. Merkel can cancel Sarkozy, but she
can't stop the UK. Luckily for her, Cameron is a twit. Anyway,
the way things are going, Hitler's dream is coming true.

when is an insider also a lobbyist?

When he's an American congressman.

That would be added to the inside info they get from Wall Street,
that are, while not illegal, definetly immoral, and function as
legal bribes.

It's one thing to be against public health care. They are Americans,
after all. It's another thing to sell yourself as a lobbyist
for big Med and get them access to your colleagues, especially
those whose bank accounts need a little massaging.

There are only a few Congressmen who are relatively clean,
though don't say I made them angels:
Bernie Sanders, Vermont
Denis Kucinich, Ohio
Anthony Weiner, former. He was got to. Turpitudes.
Alan Grayson, former. He was got to. GOP money bags and lies
one congresswoman from Cleveland whose name I can't find.

Any others?
Most of the rest are Flushmores.
If they weren't already millionnaires, they became so
by becoming politicians

Mark Twain says it best:
Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.
- What Is Man?

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.
- Notebook #14, Nov. 1877 - July 1878

Don't say I didn't warn you

[this is the Groupon stock price, which has fallen after a fraudulent, insider-job IPO]

[that's my investment portfolio, what's left of it. Where's that banker?]

It looks like the US stock market is built on nothing
but fraud and deceit. From the CME not backing up the
MF Global customers who were stolen from, to the
lack of trials for the '08 crash, this bird is cooked.

Here's a lady who puts it succinctly:

on Financial Sense Website

Ann Barnhardt: Well that is the point of this. We are now living in a lawless, Marxist, Communist, usurped, what used to be a representative republic but is no more. This is no longer a nation of laws....
It is Chris Christy who beat Jon Corzine to become the governor of New Jersey. So yes, this Republican, Chris Christy, was elected in New Jersey—uber liberal, blue state New Jersey—because Corzine financially destroyed this state. And again, this guy Corzine is former head of Goldman. He is not stupid. You have to stop thinking that these people are just misguided or that there is some sort of a difference of opinion on economic theory. These people are nefariously trying to destroy everything in this country. It's called the Cloward-Piven strategy. Go in and destroy and collapse the entire economy, everything and then rebuild a new Marxist, Socialist, fascist state...
Total systemic collapse. Get out! I don’t know how I can be anymore plain about this. I say this over and over and over again and then I get scads of emails saying, well I can’t get out of my 401k. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. Take the penalty and get the hell out of there. What would you rather do? Would you rather pay the 10% penalty or would you rather have it all go up in smoke?

Derivatives: a magic way to hide money

[just ask Monti, a magic GS man]
where’s your money?
Here’s the money.
Where’s your money?
Oops. All gone. Want to play again?

Derivatives can make money disappear, if you want to cry poverty.
and you can make it re-appear if you want to save some money.
That's what Germany did when it needed 55 billion euros.

This was my idea. My blog, about a year ago, had a story
about a derivatives amnesty, because all the players
owe one another the same pot of money. I said they
should all just back out and settle any petty differences
with a cheque or two.

Well, the game is much more cunning than that. Derivatives,
CDOs and CDSs exist to make dark pools and to manipulate the
markets, especially since those dark players can not be
revealed. It's all secret and cloak and dagger.

When they want a crisis, they pull a few strings and BOOM,
we get a crisis.

As Max Keiser says, they always could have done this but now they’re smelling social unrest and just letting the leash out oh so little. As little as possible. Not so that anybody gets encouraged enough to not want to kill all politicians.

CHSmith
Germany "Raises" €55.5 Billion, or 1% Of Its Debt/GDP Ratio, Thanks To Derivative "Accounting Error"Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/28/2011 21:11 -0500
As usual, the most surreal news of the day, perhaps week, is saved for Friday night, when we learn that Germany has magically raised over a quarter of its total EFSF obligation of €211 billion by way of what is essentially magic. The Telegraph reports that "Germany is €55bn richer than it previously thought because of an accounting error at state-owned bank Hypo Real Estate Holding. The mistake at "bad bank" FMS Wertmanagement, happened because collateral for....

Hallowe'en comes home for foreclosure vultures

It's been reported that a foreclosure mill, that was using
fraud to kick out delinquent homeowners and non-deliquent ones,
on behalf of the banks that are wiping out the middle class
in the US, has now been bitten,

by something as innocuous as a Hallowe'en party.

The lawyers and others at Steven J Baum lawyers dressed like
the homeless and lampooned the most unfortunate in society.

The NY Times caught them in the act and reported it. Now,
because of their bruta figura, Freddie Mac (or the other one)
wanted nothing to do with the company (that was breaking the
law anyway- no problem with that) because of the notoriety.

So, since they could no longer break the law in aid of the banks,
they had to close up shop. Note the crying letter that the boss
of Baum sent to the NY Times. I was in tears from the laughter.

and let's not forget, these arse-wipes ARE LUCKY NOT TO BE IN JAIL.

checkitout: Ny Times
Foreclosure Firm Steven J. Baum to Close Down
By PETER LATTMAN
In a photo from a former employee of the law firm of Steven J. Baum, two employees mocked homeowners whose homes had been foreclosed. In a photo from a former employee of the law firm of Steven J. Baum, two employees mocked homeowners whose homes had been foreclosed.
A law firm that had become a lightning rod in the controversy over mortgage-foreclosure practices has shut down, costing 89 employees their jobs.
The Steven J. Baum P.C. law firm, which has offices in Amherst, N.Y., and Westbury, N.Y., has filed papers with government agencies notifying them that it plans to close. It made the filings under a federal law requiring employers to provide notice before mass layoffs.
“Disrupting the livelihoods of so many dedicated and hardworking people is extremely painful, but the loss of so much business left us no choice but to file these notices,” said Mr. Baum in a statement issued on Monday. A firm spokesman said it would have no further comment beyond the release.
Mr. Baum and his colleagues have come under fire for their foreclosure-related legal work. They are one of numerous firms across the country that represent banks and services in trying to foreclose on the millions of homeowners who have defaulted on their loans. Some of these firms’ aggressive, and, in some cases, duplicitous practices, have earned them the moniker “foreclosure mills.”
The Baum firm’s tactics, which included the “robo-signing” of documents, has been among the most criticized. Last year, a state court judge in Brooklyn called one foreclosure filing from the Baum firm “incredible, outrageous, ludicrous and disingenuous.”
Last month, the firm struck a settlement with the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which had been investigating the Baum firm and whether, on behalf of its lender clients, it filed misleading legal papers to expedite foreclosures. The firm agreed to pay a $2 million penalty and vowed change its practices to resolve the case.
“In mortgage foreclosure proceedings, there are no excuses for sloppy practices that could lead to someone mistakenly losing their home,” Preet S. Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement at the time of the settlement. “Homeowners facing foreclosure cannot afford to have faulty paperwork or inadequate evidence submitted, and today’s agreement will help minimize that risk.”
But despite its settlement with the federal government, the firm’s fortunes worsened this month after The New York Times published photos of a Halloween party at the Baum firm showing employees wearing costumes mocking people who had lost their homes.
After those photos surfaced, the mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae cut off the Baum firm, forbidding servicers of their mortgages from using Mr. Baum and his colleagues. That effectively served as the firm’s death knell.
On Saturday, Joe Nocera, The Times columnist who originally wrote about the firm’s Halloween party, published another column about the controversy. In it, he quoted an e-mail that Mr. Baum had sent him last week.
“Mr. Nocera — You have destroyed everything and everyone related to Steven J. Baum PC,” said the letter. “It took 40 years to build this firm and three weeks to tear down.”
“I think that’s what they call shooting the messenger,” Mr. Nocera wrote.

The real people's assembly at St Paul's London

The Occupy movement is spreading to Finsbury and now Hackney.

Thanks to UBS investment in empty buildings, they have shown how
the generosity of greedy bankers leaves lots for the rest of us
benefit from. Their emptiness is the opening of the Bank of Ideas.

This is as close to a vox pop that there is. It is aiming at
the great evils of life
Bankers
City of London Corporation
Deaf, corrupt politicians

Their work bests any official parliamentary assembly:
1 the corp dares to join the debat-
• An extraordinary event took place outside St Paul's on Sunday evening. The Reclaim the City campaign group had arranged for George Monbiot, John Christensen and Fr William Taylor to explain to the Occupation their concerns with the City of London Corporation.

Unexpectedly Stuart Fraser, the policy chairman of the corporation, turned up to debate with us. What was remarkable was how easily Fraser conceded defeat on so many points. In an effort to claim the corporation was a modern, democratic institution – in response to George Monbiot's article (Comment, 1 November) – Fraser said anyone was able to become an alderman. Taylor, a former corporation councillor, pointed out that this was wrong on three counts: you need a liveryman or common councillor/alderman to propose and second you (then you need to pay £30); to be an alderman, you have to be accepted as a justice of the peace; as an alderman you are expected to take your turn as lord mayor, for which you must have around £30,000 of your own money to throw a lord mayor's banquet.

So, if you are poor and/or not well connected, you cannot become an alderman. Fraser conceded all these points. While mainstream politicians are well used to ducking and dodging questions, one got the feeling that councillors in the corporation have not been subject to the regular challenges necessary to hone such skills.
And while Fraser said in his Response column (4 November) that "talk of the City of London being 'an official old boys' network' is wide of the mark", when challenged in a public forum it was clear there are ample grounds for using that label.

Much of the media struggles to see the point of the Occupation. But it felt to many of us freely debating outside St Paul's on Sunday that we were starting to see what real democracy might look like.
Philip Goff
University of Liverpool

2 rebuttal to the Corp
• Stuart Fraser's claim that the City of London Corporation recognises the democratic rights of the 300,000 people who work in the City by giving the vote to their employers is completely absurd (Response, 4 November).
So too is his claim about the "huge diversity" of experience within the corporation's governing council. Most of its members belong to secret societies – the freemasons and the livery companies. Membership of these societies is not open to all, and in the case of the former women are not admitted.
Although the corporation is the smallest local authority in Britain, its public relations department is the largest. Its charitable contributions amount to petty cash when measured against the corporation's vast resources, which have remained concealed to public scrutiny since before the days when witches were burnt at the stake.
Nigel Wilkins
London
Occupy London protesters issue demands to lord mayor

3 the media tries to make people go back to sleep
"oh, yes the Corp will listen to the protesters and we can all go home" NOT!

St Paul's protesters may move soon if demands for more transparency to City of London Corporation are met
* Allegra Stratton, political correspondent
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 8 November 2011 20.06 GMT
Occupy London protesters outside St Paul's have put demands to the City of London Corporation which, if accepted, may prompt them to leave the cathedral area. The camp already planned to move further back on Friday to avoid impeding Remembrance Sunday commemorations, but now conceivably might leave entirely at the weekend.
David Cameron defended the right to protest, but questioned the camp's effectiveness: "Obviously, the right of people to protest is fundamental to our country. The idea of establishing tents in the middle of our city, I don't feel is particularly constructive. I don't think it's particularly constructive in Parliament Square, and I don't think it's particularly constructive at St Paul's."
The document from Occupy London's general assembly is the first set of agreed demands, and raises the renewed possibility of negotiation with the corporation, after previous talks broke down. Bryn Phillips, who helped draw up the demands, said he was meeting the lord mayor to hand over the group's demands, which he regarded as a significant advance.

On Monday night protesters voted for demands that, if they were to be accepted, would open the corporation, the local authority for the area housing the UK's financial centre, to more scrutiny. Those present said that 200 people voted for the document asking the corporation to open itself to freedom of information requests, publish its accounts retrospectively to 2008, and reveal its financial involvements. A third proposal is for a commission, with representatives of the main Westminster parties, to look at reforming the corporation, with the archbishop of Canterbury suggested to chair it.

The Occupy statement says democratic reform is "urgently needed" for an "unconstitutional and unfair" institution. It calls for:

• An end to business and corporate votes in elections, which can outvote residents.

• Removal of "secrecy practices", and transparent reform of institutions.

• Decommissioning of the City of London police, with officers put under the Met.

• Abolition of the offices of lord mayor, sheriffs and aldermen.

• A truth and reconciliation commission to examine allegations of corruption.

Phillips said: "We think that the public will look at our request and think it reasonable. The City just forgot the public."
The prime minister is expected on Thursday to respond to accusations from protesters and Labour that the government does little to help the "other 99%". Cameron is keen to wrest from Ed Miliband use of the soundbite "predator capitalism", which polls well in focus groups and chimes with Cameron speeches in opposition on "ethical capitalism".

system D- the future of small-scale capitalism

If we are increasingly being kept out of the 'better tomorrow through technology' because of bankers and their technology, we'll have to go back to a simpler life. Bartering, fixing, trading, growing food. Surviving by our wits.

That's life in the Third World, where entrepreneurship reigns. If you watch any videos with Ha Joon Chang, you'll see that the Third World doesn't need Harvard grads to sort out their markets. In fact, the Harvard grads are the ones who have taken over and corrupted Th.W governments and taken all the money to the Caymans.

Entrepreneurship is commonplace in poor countries. They just need the West to stop screwing with their economies, which will never happen.

some musical entrepreneurship
[96 degrees]


checkitout: from Foreign policyThe Shadow Superpower
Forget China: the $10 trillion global black market is the world's fastest growing economy -- and its future. BY ROBERT NEUWIRTH | OCTOBER 28, 2011
With only a mobile phone and a promise of money from his uncle, David Obi did something the Nigerian government has been trying to do for decades: He figured out how to bring electricity to the masses in Africa's most populous country.
For More
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to Bazaaristan
photos from the trillion shadow economy
It wasn't a matter of technology. David is not an inventor or an engineer, and his insights into his country's electrical problems had nothing to do with fancy photovoltaics or turbines to harness the harmattan or any other alternative sources of energy. Instead, 7,000 miles from home, using a language he could hardly speak, he did what traders have always done: made a deal. He contracted with a Chinese firm near Guangzhou to produce small diesel-powered generators under his uncle's brand name, Aakoo, and shipped them home to Nigeria, where power is often scarce. David's deal, struck four years ago, was not massive -- but it made a solid profit and put him on a strong footing for success as a transnational merchant. Like almost all the transactions between Nigerian traders and Chinese manufacturers, it was also sub rosa: under the radar, outside of the view or control of government, part of the unheralded alternative economic universe of System D.
You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe.
More...
System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
I like the phrase. It has a carefree lilt and some friendly resonances. At the same time, it asserts an important truth: What happens in all the unregistered markets and roadside kiosks of the world is not simply haphazard. It is a product of intelligence, resilience, self-organization, and group solidarity, and it follows a number of well-worn though unwritten rules. It is, in that sense, a system.

Video games. Our economy is an HFT video game

Money doesn't go clink or crumple any more. It goes beep.

Banks can create money, i.e. debt, at the press of a button. There's got to be something wrong with that. Now that debt is out of control, the governments of the world want to make money even more of an abstract notion.

It'll be extra abstract for us. As in, they got it, and we don't.

I thought "that's the meaning of the following video" as well. Either that or it hints at a better time when women who dared go in public were looking for a good time.
Here's a lady who was made by committe to please old-fashioned guys who think with their boners when they buy music. A sure success. New name, too: Lana Del Rey. Hints of Brazil, without the booty-shaking. She's designed to fill the gap after the loss of Amy Whinehouse, who was an artist.
[Watch the lips. Talking about video games.]

checkitout:
Money has been privatised by stealthThe greatest privatisation in history has gone unnoticed. It's time to take from the banks the power to produce money
o Ben Dyson
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 November 2011 10.47 GMT
It's common knowledge that printing your own £10 notes at home is frowned upon by Her Majesty's police. Yet there's a small collection of companies that are authorised to create – and spend – more new money than the counterfeiters have ever been able to print. In industry jargon, these companies are called "monetary and financial institutions", but you probably know them by their street name: "banks".
The money that they create, effectively out of nothing, isn't the paper money that bears the logo of the government-owned Bank of England. It's the electronic money that flashes up on the screen when you check your balance at an ATM. Right now, this electronic money makes up over 97% of all the money in the economy. Only 3% of money is still in that old-fashioned form of real cash that can be touched.
Hard to believe, isn't it? Martin Wolf, one of the experts who sat on the independent commission on banking, put it bluntly, saying in the Financial Times that "the essence of the contemporary monetary system was the creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks' often foolish lending".
Here's how it works. When you ask the bank for the money to buy a one-bedroom box in London, the money that appears in your account isn't borrowed from some prudent grandmother's life savings. In fact, the bank simply types those numbers into your account, creating brand new money that you can now spend. As other banks do exactly the same, the amount of money in the economy grows and grows. Every new mortgage creates new money, which pushes up house prices just a little more and forces the next buyer to borrow even more from the banks. (A more detailed and fully-referenced explanation of this process is given in the book Where Does Money Come From? published by the New Economics Foundation.)
....Of course, the flipside to this creation of money is that with every new loan comes a new debt. This is the source of our mountain of personal debt – not money that had been prudently saved up by pensioners, but money that was created out of nothing by banks and lent to anyone and everyone. Eventually the debt burden becomes just too high, and we see the wave of defaults that triggered the start of the ongoing financial crisis.
....This brings us to a very simple solution to the financial crisis. Many of the current protesters might be surprised to hear that the answer to our current crisis comes from a former Tory prime minister. Back in 1844, Sir Robert Peel realised that metal coins, which at that time were the only legal form of money, had been superseded by new paper notes issued by banks. These paper notes were lighter and more convenient, and therefore much more popular. Peel's 1844 Bank Charter Act took the power to create paper money away from the banks and placed it back under control of the Bank of England. We should now do exactly the same with the power to create electronic money. My own organisation, Positive Money, has even drafted the legislation that would be required to do this.

Bass is doing the fishing. Kyle, that is

[a'mo get me a piece of that bass]

As he's a hedger, I'd like to stop his kind of shenanigans, but since nobody in power will, let's learn from his wisdom. He saw the Euro imbalances long before the crashes and hedged against them.
Bingo. Ching-ching

Bass also foresaw that countries would bail out their banks. I'm glad he's scoring money on that most stupid of adventures that governments have embarked on.


Play-by-play
8:40 Greek=German debt
10:35 debt rightdowns. German pope, Italian banker
1200 europe is overlevered
1300 mexican standoff

Some other wise ideas below

checkitout: from a Zerohedge story, quoting Bass
"From now on, it seems everything will be deemed to be a liquidity crisis that will be met with more "bailouts" and debt financed spending. This will eventually break traction in a violent way and facilitate severe inflation or even hyperinflation. The one thing the EU taught us this weekend is that paper money will be worth less (maybe much less) in the future." And indeed it will, because more than anything, money is increasingly and rightfully seen as the symbol of the free lunch that Keynesian economics promises, after that "just one final debt hit." Is there much or any hope? Not really, but being prepared while watching the inferno blazes soar higher and higher is the best we can all do.
The all-encompassing summary paragraph:
This weekend, the EU and the IMF effectively went all in with a bad hand in the highest stakes game of financial poker ever played with the world. We believe the agreement released was nothing more than a Potemkin agreement in order to placate bond investors. In the end (and there will be a reckoning for many countries) nations, including the United States, need to dramatically cut spending and get their fiscal balances in order. Unfortunately, our elected officials are on the hamster wheel of electoral cycles and are not able to make tough decisions like this as they would likely not be re?elected without a “sea change” in public opinion towards government spending and deficits.

get your house in order, and every house needs a gun

when the Eurocrats tell Greece to cut its expenses,
that does not mean guns, because France and Germany
have been pressuring Greece (and the US has too)
to keep buying arms, just like I've been saying.

So, I hope those guns get put to good use when
the Eurocrats send in their armies, or the Turks.


checkitout: Independent

Less healthcare, but Greece is still buying guns
Greeks furious at 'intact' arms spending as eurozone
leaders insist on cuts to their public services Roxane McMeeken Athens
Sunday 06 November 2011

As Greece is forced by European leaders to abandon a referendum to allow the people the chance to vote on its latest bailout conditions, the country is preparing for yet another dose of austerity.

The conditions of the next €130bn rescue package will be severe, yet there is an elephant in the room: the extent to which the German but also the French military industries rely on Greece.

The small, crisis-hit nation, whose prime minister, George Papandreou, narrowly survived a vote of confidence on Friday, buys more German weapons than any other country. Some Greeks want to know why it is that France and Germany are demanding cuts in pensions, salaries and public services, but the buying of arms is allowed to continue unabated.

Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at Athens University, says: "When Greek hospitals are running out of bandages, the only bit of the budget not being attacked by the EU and IMF is military expenditure."

Greece is the highest military spender, in terms of percentage of GDP, in the EU. Professor Varoufakis adds: "Greece is a disproportionately crucial customer for the arma-ments industry. In comparison to Greece's size, it's preposterous."

Despite its dire financial straits, the country's military expenditure has risen during the global financial crisis. It spent €7.1bn in 2010, compared with €6.24bn in 2007.

Some 58 per cent of Greece's military expenditure in 2010 went to Germany, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).

The US is the major beneficiary of Greek military expenditure, with the Americans supplying 42 per cent of its arms. In second and third place are Germany, with 22.7 per cent, and then France, with 12.5 per cent.

Professor Varoufakis believes: "The EU and IMF keep giving loans to Greece to stop it going bankrupt, but countries such as Germany need to justify this to voters, hence the demand for spending cuts. But with Greece being such a crucial arms customer, it only takes a phone call to the German government from an armaments manufacturer to ensure that Greece's military budget stays intact."

Greece's defence budget is historically high due to the perceived threat from neighbouring Turkey. Arms companies have benefited by playing the two sides off against each other. Professor Varoufakis says: "Typically, one side buys, say, a frigate, and then the other buys the same frigate – with the only difference being the colour of the paint."

However, critics in Greece argue that, as an EU member, Greece should be guaranteed protection from Turkey by its more powerful allies. Although the EU is not a military alliance, common sense suggests that Greece could reasonably expect support if it was attacked by Turkey.
.....