Weekend Economists Talk Turkey, Thanksgiving Day 2011

[Demeter]

Happy Thanksgiving Day to all our tribe: posters, lurkers, and the bemused who wandered in unknowing....

Since I cannot go a day without studying the political economy (my inbox would explode), here is the holiday version of WEE. I may just continue this thread throughout the weekend, or not, depending on how long it gets and how much happens (and don't think for a moment TPTB won't try to pull something off while we are in the throes of typtophan overdose).

So, we are talking turkey...Now Turkey the nation has been keeping a rather low profile of late. The two trends there have been being shown off as the IMF's greatest achievement, and fighting Kurdish separatists...



http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/turkey/index.html


Turkey is a vibrant, competitive democracy of 79 million people with a thriving economy whose influence in its region has grown as it has moved away from its secular roots under an Islamic-leaning government.

The government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party received a strong mandate in parliamentary elections in June 2011. Supporters credit Mr. Erdogan with elevating Turkey’s profile in the Middle East, turning the country into an increasingly assertive regional player at a time when several of its neighbors are locked in sometimes violent struggles for democracy...

Support of the Insurgency in Syria

Once one of Syria’s closest allies, Turkey is hosting an armed opposition group waging an insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, providing shelter to the commander and dozens of members of the group, the Free Syrian Army, and allowing them to orchestrate attacks across the border from inside a camp guarded by the Turkish military.

In response, in early November 2011, pro-Assad demonstrators in Syria attacked Turkish diplomatic missions in Damascus, Aleppo and Latakia, burning Turkish flags and shattering windows.

On Nov. 21, unidentified gunmen in Syria, described by some witnesses as wearing the uniforms of Syrian soldiers, attacked a convoy of buses carrying Turkish pilgrims home from Mecca, and two of the pilgrims were wounded. They were the first Turkish civilian victims of the mayhem in Syria.

On Nov. 22, 2011, Mr. Erdogan expressed his most blunt criticism yet of Syria’s political repression, when for the first time he urged President Assad to resign. The criticism was not totally unexpected, given Mr. Erdogan’s increasing exasperation with Mr. Assad’s intransigence over the political uprising against him. But Mr. Erdogan’s comments were notable for their explicit language; he likened Mr. Assad to the self-delusional dictators of history who have met violent and messy ends, most recently Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.

Mr. Erdogan has also moved the country further up the road, although sometimes a bumpy one, to European Union membership. His party has brought the country strong economic growth of 8.9 percent, though unemployment remains stubbornly high at nearly 12 percent and income distribution remains uneven.

Turkey still faces a challenge from Kurdish separatist rebels. In October 2011, after months of increasing violence, Kurdish militants killed at least 24 Turkish soldiers and Turkey’s military responded by sending 10,000 troops backed by warplanes into northern Iraq.

The attack came as the country was drafting a new Constitution with greater rights for ethnic minorities, an effort widely perceived as designed to end Kurdish separatist violence that has claimed more than 40,000 lives since the 1980s....



Mr. Erdogan



I have always wondered how the turkey got its name. The turkey is native to the New World, after all...

tur·key noun, plural -keys, ( especially collectively ) -key.

1.a large, gallinaceous bird of the family Meleagrididae, especially Meleagris gallopavo, of America, that typically has green, reddish-brown, and yellowish-brown plumage of a metallic luster and that is domesticated in most parts of the world. So called because it was formerly erroneously believed that it came originally from Turkey from confusion with the guinea fowl, supposed to be imported from Turkish territory. First Known Use: 1555

Any large American gallinaceous bird belonging to the genus Meleagris, especially the North American wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), and the domestic turkey, which was probably derived from the Mexican wild turkey, but had been domesticated by the Indians long before the discovery of
America. (1913 Webster)

Note: The Mexican wild turkey is now considered a variety of the northern species (var. Mexicana). Its tail feathers and coverts are tipped with white instead of brownish chestnut, and its flesh is white. The Central American, or ocellated, turkey (Meleagris ocellata) is more elegantly colored than the common species. The Australian, or native, turkey is a bustard (Choriotis australis). (1913 Webster)

2.the flesh of this bird, used as food.

3.ocellated turkey.

4.Slang .

a. a person or thing of little appeal; dud; loser.
b. a naive, stupid, or inept person.
c. a poor and unsuccessful theatrical production; flop.
5. Bowling . three strikes in succession.

Idiom
6.talk turkey, Informal . to talk frankly; mean business.

Just think: if the Internet had been around in 1555, the turkey might have had a more accurate name...And if the full power of the Internet had been around earlier, we might not have been in the fix we are in now...Post what you've got--this is a potluck feast, after all...

pot·luck/ˈpätˈlək/ Noun:

1. Used in reference to a situation in which one must take a chance that whatever is available will prove to be good or acceptable.
   
   
2. A meal to which each guest contributes food: "a potluck supper".

I won't post any pictures of human turkeys ( definitions 4a and 4b), as I wouldn't want to spoil any appetites...

[xchrom]

1. a very Happy Thanksgiving, Miss Demeter --

:toast: and to all your Tribe as well.

[Demeter]

3. And to you and yours!

Hope you have recovered from last week's indisposition.

[xchrom]

7. Thank you for asking. I'm fine now and looking forward to

A day of food over indulgence.

I hope you're done w/ work today?

[Demeter]

10. Today's paper weighed ten pound, each

all of it advertising...the desperation of retailers is higher than I've ever seen it. The advertising push actually started the Sunday before Veteran's Day, instead of the traditional "Black Friday".

I rather think it will be known as Black Friday for non-joyful reasons, this year...get this! The talk is of "Buyer's Amnesia", in which the instinctual drive to celebrate Christmas with lots of purchases wipes from the consumer's mind such things as unemployment, wage stagnation, inflation, debt load, and any other disincentive to spend, Spend, SPEND!

We shall see...when the truth will out. I'm sure that we will get a lot of chaff and propaganda, first, though. Watch what they do, not what they say...

[xchrom]

33. Wow. That's a lot.

Sigh - there really wasn't a black Friday when I was growing up.

In some ways - pre-boomer folk like my parents - had more sense.

[Demeter]

2. Retailers Push Fed for Yet Lower Debit Fees

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/business/retailers-push-for-yet-lower-debit-fees.html?_r=1

Retailers won a big victory last summer when the Federal Reserve halved the fees that banks and credit card companies were charging them to process debit card transactions. For some retailers, however, that was not enough. This week, trade groups representing retailers, convenience stores and grocers filed a lawsuit against the Fed, asserting that the board’s debit fee rules still allowed banks to capture too much money from debit card purchases. The lawsuit was filed in United States District Court here.

The rule, which went into effect in October, was the subject of fierce lobbying by banks and retailers over what has grown to $20 billion in annual debit card transaction fees. Consumers do not pay the fees directly, but merchants have complained that rising fees in recent years have forced them to raise prices. In a sort of Solomonic decision, the Fed approved a cap of 21 to 24 cents a transaction, down from an average of 44 cents that had been being charged. But the new fee cap was roughly double the 12 cents initially proposed by the Fed before banks and credit card companies pushed to raise it.

Mallory Duncan, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Retail Federation, said in an interview that the main problem with the Fed’s new fee structure was that it allowed banks and card companies to add up to 5 basis points — or five one-hundredths of a percentage point — to each transaction to recover a portion of fraud losses. “The law specifically said that they could recover fraud prevention costs,” but it does not allow for the recouping of actual losses, Mr. Duncan said. Banks can also include in their fees the cost of updates to their processing equipment, he said. That benefits the overall operations of banks and card companies, Mr. Duncan said, but does not directly relate to specific debit card transactions, as the law requires. “The Fed did a very credible job of investigating what the incremental costs of debit card transactions were,” Mr. Duncan said. “But the Fed didn’t follow the law, so everyone’s fees are higher than they should be.”...Mr. Duncan said the Fed’s rule had particularly harmed merchants that handle mostly small-ticket purchases — for example, fast-food outlets, convenience stores and merchants like Redbox, the operator of DVD vending machines. Before the new rules were created, those companies typically paid a fee of 11 to 12 cents on a $5 purchase, Mr. Duncan said. Now, he added, banks have adopted the Fed’s fee structure as a minimum charge on all transactions, meaning that fees on small-ticket items have doubled. That has led some merchants to have to raise prices, retailers say.

Trish Wexler, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Payments Coalition, which represents card companies, banks and other issuers of debit cards, said the lawsuit by retailers was “a matter of greed...Retailers won’t be truly happy until they pay zero to accept cards,” Ms. Wexler said. “They don’t want to pay anything for this system, which produces for them more revenues, more customers and more security.”

Mr. Duncan said the lawsuit was not motivated by greed. “The nature of our business is extremely competitive,” he said. “Our profit margins are probably the narrowest of any industry in America.”

After the new debit fee rules went into effect, some banks, Bank of America most prominent among them, said they would begin to charge customers a monthly fee of about $5 to use debit cards. After an uproar by consumers, the banks backed off the proposal.

Bankers seemed to enjoy using the lawsuit as a reason to chastise retailers. “It is disgraceful that our nation’s big-box retailers are suing the Fed over their own Durbin amendment, which chopped bank interchange revenues in half and provided them a $7 billion windfall in profits annually,” said Frank Keating, president and chief executive of the American Bankers Association, referring to Senator Richard J. Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who championed the debit fee cut through Congress last year as part of the Dodd-Frank law. ”Now these giant retailers are back at the trough seeking more profits from government price controls,” said Mr. Keating, “while their customers search in vain for the savings they promised to pass along but have failed to deliver.”

MORE

[Demeter]

4. Taxpayers pepper-sprayed with...debt. VIDEO COLLECTION

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gumcoQvVuMU

One always peppers the turkeys...although sage is my preferred seasoning.

[Demeter]

5. Robert Reich: "The REAL Public Nuisance" VIDEO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ltxMtS1Frpk

[Demeter]

29. Mic Check! Maddow on How OWS Techniques Are Used to Protest Politicians

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/737526/mic_check!_maddow_on_how_ows_techniques_are_used_to_protest_politicians/#paragraph4

VIDEO AT LINK

[mgc1961]

6. Happy Turkey Day!

[Demeter]

9. Back at ya!

[Demeter]

8. REASONS TO GIVE THANKS LISTED HERE

10 Great Things To Be Thankful For in 2011

1. Occupy Worldwide
   
   
2. Elizabeth Warren
   
   
3. Bernie Sanders (I HAVE MY DOUBTS ABOUT THIS ONE..HE'S A TURKEY, IN MY BOOKS)
   
   
4. Judges Tom Nelson and Aleta Trauger
   
   
5. Governor John Kitzhaber
   
   
6. The (LATEST) Ohio Electorate
   
   
7. Mass Mediators
   
   
8. Equal-Opprtunity Economists
   
   
9. Nissan Leaf
   
   
10. Colonel Ann Wright

FOR DETAILS, SEE LINK

4 Reasons to Give Thanks to Our Oceans (Without Them We're Screwed)

http://www.alternet.org/story/153199/4_reasons_to_give_thanks_to_our_oceans_%28without_them_we%27re_screwed%29?page=entire

1. We give thanks for the air we breathe...

...What is somewhat less well-known is that the army of plants we assume to be doing the work of scrubbing our exhaled CO2 out of our breathing space -- the trees in our towns and cities, the grass in our fields, even the vast forests of the boreal and the equatorial regions -- are really more like the ceremonial guard than the actual workhorse infantry. In actuality, between 70 and 80 percent of the oxygen in our atmosphere is produced not by our neighborly terrestrial trees, ferns and grasses, but rather by algae, phytoplankton and other marine plants in our oceans....


2. We give thanks for the food that sustains us.

The productive nature of the ocean is, while not exactly boundless, bountiful in the extreme. We catch, capture and harvest millions of tons of food from our oceans every year. While some of this is taken in a sustainable and responsible manner, a dangerously large portion is not. This is a significant challenge to our future as a global society, as illegal and unsustainable fishing practices threaten the ocean's ability to sustain us. Estimates suggest that fish provide roughly 40 percent of the total protein for as much as two-thirds of the world's population, and that between one and two billion people -- primarily in coastal areas of Asia -- rely on fish as their primary protein source....

3. We give thanks for support in times of trouble.

There are still a few people out there denying that anthropogenic factors affect our climate. These individuals, known as climate change skeptics, maintain that there are no definitive links between human influences (pollution, deforestation, etc.) and the worrying climactic shift we are witnessing on a global scale. I don't really know how else to put this, so I'm just going to say it bluntly. These people are wrong... Our world is changing, to be sure -- but it would be changing a lot faster and we would be in a great deal more trouble if the ocean didn't have our back. A great deal of the carbon we pump into the atmosphere is absorbed by what are known as "carbon sinks" -- natural repositories that, through various intrinsic processes and features, strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester it. While there are numerous examples of active carbon sinks, the ocean is the largest carbon sink on Earth. It is estimated that somewhere around one-third of all human-based carbon emissions are absorbed by the ocean...

4. We give thanks for mercy and forgiveness.

In spite of all the gifts the ocean bestows upon us, we tend to treat it pretty shabbily. Up until the 1970s, it was legal to dump industrial, nuclear and other toxic wastes into the oceans, and we happily did so to the tune of millions of tons every year. Although this practice is now technically illegal, ocean dumping still occurs. Beyond the intentional disposal of waste, we also barrage the ocean with countless pounds of littered plastics, discarded on roadsides across the planet. Rains lift and carry plastics with them as they congregate in drains and gutters, flowing down to rejoin the oceans that spawned them. Our dependency on plastics (and associated our tendency to discard them the instant they have performed their use) has led to vast swathes of litter choking our oceans. Horrors like the "garbage patch" in the North Pacific Gyre -- a vast area seething with plastic bags, six-pack rings and trillions upon trillions of nurdles -- continue to spread every day. Birds and aquatic mammals literally starve to death with full bellies, their distended guts thick with indigestible plastic waste. Chemical run-off from farms triggers hypoxia in deep water, giving rise to dead zones that extinguish life from enormous tracts of previously productive seabed. Our abuse of the ocean is staggering in scope.

Yet in the face of it all, the ocean manages to struggle on, providing us with food and oxygen, and doing its part to stabilize the climate. Perhaps this is the most important reason to give thanks to the ocean -- for forgiving us our human foibles and soldiering on alongside us as we grow and learn. MORE AT LINK

PLEASE ADD TO THIS LIST ANY GLOBAL, LOCAL, OR PERSONAL THANKS

I'M THANKFUL FOR THE COMMUNITY WE HAVE MADE, OUR CORNER OF DU. WITHOUT IT, I'D PROBABLY BE LOCKED UP, IN JAIL OR THE PSYCH WARD.

[Tansy_Gold]

21. I'm thankful for...

1. My dogs. 'Nuff said.

2. My DU friends and a couple other cyber friends.

3. MY family.


As you may know, we had a terrible tragedy here in the Superstition Mountain area of Arizona last night. Tell your loved ones you love them.




TG

[Demeter]

25. Thanks for Tansy Gold! Next President!

[Demeter]

28. Need a Reason to be Thankful This Year? Look at These Food Justice Wins

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/11/5_food_justice_wins_to_be_grateful_for_this_thanksgiving.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+racewireblog+%28ColorLines%29

Whether you’re sitting down to a Tofurky loaf or a bacon-swaddled Turducken this Thanksgiving, now’s a good time to show some gratitude to the country’s food workers and food justice activists who are fighting to keep communities whole while they keep the country fed.

People of color are most likely to live in poor neighborhoods classified as food deserts, where healthful, affordable food is too far out of people’s reach. At every step of the food chain, from farming and processing to distribution and service, there’s a significant wage gap between people of color and white workers. And in all of these spheres, it’s people of color and immigrants who are most likely to work for the lowest wages in the harshest conditions.

It’s against this backdrop that food workers, immigrant rights activists and local communities have been spurred to fight for safe working conditions for workers and sustainable and community-driven pathways to healthy food access. The resistance is as varied as it is ferocious. Here now, a roundup of some vibrant local projects, a few of 2011’s policy wins, and live campaigns in the ongoing fight for just and humane food access and workers rights. As folks dig in to their Thanksgiving meals this year, take a moment to remember the folks who make our dinner possible....

[Demeter]

36. Giving Thanks for the Occupation, Election, Demonstrations

by: Leo Gerard, Campaign for America's Future

http://www.truth-out.org/giving-thanks-occupation-election-demonstrations/1322072168

This week’s holiday mandates giving thanks. For many Americans, that is complicated by the harsh years since 2008. There’s the bitterness of lost jobs, foreclosed homes and diminished opportunity. There’s the resentment over bailing out Wall Street, then watching banksters grant themselves sensational bonuses while denying Main Street loans to save businesses. There’s the fear generated by county club conservatives demanding draconian cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s hard to muster gratitude while suffering, to feel appreciative while dreading a meaner future.

The past two months, though, produced glimmers of hope -- the occupation, the election and the mid-November demonstrations. These events suggest empowerment of the 99 percent and emergence of change. They’re reason for thanks giving, especially by those formerly in the middle class who will for the first time experience this holiday without the traditional feast.

Change began in September with the launch of Occupy Wall Street. Previously, the disaffected had rallied and protested. The newly-homeless had held signs. The jobless had marched on Wall Street, the epicenter of the economy’s crash. But this was different. These rabble-rousers didn’t protest and go home. They dug in. They offered no end date for their cries for justice. Like the sit-down strikers who inhabited the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich. for 44 days in 1936 and 1937, these protesters are determined to stay as long as necessary.

The New York occupiers’ gumption and message – “we are the 99 percent” -- inspired a movement worldwide. Activists encamped in more than a 1,000 cities. And when police tried to rout them, the occupiers defied the official oppression, just as the sit-down strikers did. Emblematic is the 84-year-old Oakland, Calif. protester who said after police pepper sprayed her in the face that the experience energized her.

Before this movement began, country club conservatives had confined political discussion and concern to government deficits. No one acknowledged the unemployed, the impoverished or the foreclosed on – except to condemn them. The occupations changed this. Suddenly, the media talked of the problem of sharply higher income inequality and wrote about highly profitable corporations dodging taxes. Abruptly, politicians recalled the agony of joblessness and homelessness. Amazingly, there was new emphasis on polls showing massive majorities opposing austerity for the 99 percent and supporting higher taxes on the 1 percent.

For those of us in warm homes, Natalie Merchant’s words send a perfect message to those encamped:

“For your kindness, I’m in debt to you,
And I could never have gone this far without you,
For everything you’ve done,
You know I’m bound – I’m bound to thank you for it.”

On Election Day, the majority put the 1 percent and their purchased politicians on notice. The problem for the 1 percent in a one-person-one-vote democracy is that they’re outnumbered. In referendums on Nov. 8, the majority rebuffed attempts to restrict the ability of citizens to vote and to collectively bargain.

Mainers reversed a Republican attempt to limit balloting. The majority there restored Election Day voter registration – a right they’d exercised without problem for 38 years before the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and GOP governor passed a law eliminating it. The 60 percent vote for reinstatement served as public censure to Republican lawmakers nationwide who have worked to suppress voting.

In Ohio, citizens reversed a Republican attempt to sharply constrict the right of public employees to collectively bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions. Ohio citizens affirmed their belief in unionization as a way to move workers into the middle class. The vote was 61 percent in favor of union rights, a margin that chastened country club conservatives,including Ohio’s GOP Gov. John Kasich, who said afterwards that he would “pause” to reflect because: "The people have spoken clearly. You don't ignore the public.”

To the voters in Ohio and Maine:

“Oh, I want to thank you for so many gifts. . .
I want to thank you for your generosity . . .
I want to thank you, show my gratitude. . .” ~Natalie Merchant

The following week, two demonstrations reinforced the election’s message of hope for the 99 percent. On Nov. 16, two dozen millionaires climbed up Capitol Hill and told Congress they wanted their taxes increased. Really. The following day, on the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’s birth, activists and unionists took to bridges nationwide in demonstrations for jobs.

The rich guys, the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, told Congress to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for the rich to help balance the budget. This group of 200 members of the 1 percent offered a solution very different from the Republican austerity demand that had dominated discourse for months.

Similarly, the protesters who occupied bridges across America sought federal investment in infrastructure to create jobs, which would help relieve the recession. Jobs, not cuts.

To the Patriotic Millionaires and the protesters,

“Oh, I want to thank you, thank you,
Thank you, thank you,
Thank you, thank you. . .” ~Natalie Merchant

Because of them, because of wise voters in Ohio and Maine, because of the Occupiers, there’s reason for gratitude this Thanksgiving.
Creative Commons License

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[Demeter]

42. 5 Things to Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving By Vanessa Ortiz

http://www.nationofchange.org/5-things-be-thankful-thanksgiving-1321892162

1) Leaderless nonviolent movements

2) Arab women front and center

3) People-powered news

4) Technology tools

5) Al Jazeera English

DETAILS AT LINK

[Demeter]

46. Give Thanks to the Ones Who Have Earned It

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/738470/give_thanks_to_the_ones_who_have_earned_it/#paragraph5

This Thanksgiving, let's try to direct our thanks to those who are actually responsible.

Thankful for the food in front of you? Thank the farmers who grew and raised it, the taxpayers who subsidize those farmers, the illegal immigrants who slave - literally - to harvest it, the truck drivers who transport it, the grocers who sell it, and the people at the table who bought it, prepared it, cooked it and served it.

Thankful for your health and that of your family and friends? Thank the doctors, nurses and technicians who keep you healthy. Thank modern medical science, which is brought to us by poorly-paid researchers at public universities supported by tax dollars paid primarily by the 99 percent, and hardly at all by millionaires and billionaires.

Thankful for your job? Thank the taxpayers who fund the economic stimulus of government spending that supports our economy and is the only thing that actually does, in reality, create jobs. Thankful for the technology that makes your life easier and all the cool toys it provides, from smartphones to the cloud to live streaming? Thank government agency DARPA, which really did invent the Internet (with support from congressman Al Gore). Thankful for your home? Thank the skilled and probably unionized workers who built it, and the thousands of public employees - also probably unionized - who provide water and electricity to your home, maintain the roads around your home, and protect your home from fire, floods and criminals.

Thankful for your children? Thank the teachers and principals and janitors who toil thanklessly in the public school system to produce worthy citizens. Thankful for your elderly parents? Thank Social Security and Medicare, and the many public employees providing services to the aged, from Meals on Wheels to nursing home inspections...Thankful to live in the Greatest Nation in the History of the World? Thank the protesters, the rebels, the nonconformists, the communists, the pacifists, the socialists, the Black Panthers, the feminists, the gays, the atheists and every other despised activist who fought to fix what was wrong with this country, and who still fight every day.

[Demeter]

11. HOLIDAY ETIQUETTE TIPS: 5 Rules for Talking OWS With Your Conservative Relatives

http://www.alternet.org/story/153197/5_rules_for_talking_ows_with_your_conservative_relatives_?page=entire

It shouldn't be about scoring points, but finding common ground....For such a discussion it’s vitally important to set realistic goals about what you want to accomplish. It’s probably impossible to change someone’s mind with a short conversation about facts if they have strong emotions about their beliefs. Don’t even try, this is not about winning debate points awarded by some imaginary judge. What is it about then? I’ll address that later.

Here’s some specific suggestions on what to do and what to avoid doing:

• First, DO NOT bring up Obama, Republicans, Democrats, FOX news, or the Super-committee. These are hot button emotional issues that will distract from the issue. Refuse to take the bait if someone else brings them up.
  
  
• Second, don’t bore people by quoting facts, they won’t change any opinions. Rather than lecturing, try doing much more listening. Ask for their honest opinion and then listen to it carefully without criticism. People feel a strong need to be heard, and become more open when that need is met.
  
  
• Third, gently disagree with any unfair stereotyping of the entire movement. For example, “… actually I think only a very small minority of the Occupy movement wants all debts to be absolved. Most of the people I talked to don’t really think that’s a good approach”. You can address the most common “they should all get a job” remark with “…a surprisingly large portion of the people I meet at the Occupy events already do have jobs, they show up at the Occupy events in the evenings and on weekends”
  
  
• Fourth, and perhaps most important, look for common ground in the discussion. Don’t give into the need to argue with everything you disagree with, just let some things pass and instead try to focus on finding areas where there is some emotional commonality. Examples include frustration with the big bank bailouts, and hard working middle class families doing everything they can just to tread water and not fall even further into debt. If you have any personal experiences with someone struggling with unemployment, sharing sympathy for their situation can change the tone of the conversation.

Remember, the goal isn’t to score winning debate points here. If you have relatives who demonize the Occupy movement, perhaps the most important thing you can do is to help humanize the people involved, and get them to see that they might have some common ground with some of their concerns if not their methods. In the process, you may get a much better understanding of concerns and fears of your family members, and they may get to understand yours, even if there is no agreement reached over them. This process can be part of a very rewarding experience that brings everyone a little closer together, which is certainly a very worthy aim for the holidays.

[Demeter]

14. Think 'Securing' OWS Protests is Expensive? Wall Street’s Recession Cost 1.5 Million Times More

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/737989/think_%27securing%27_ows_protests_is_expensive_wall_street%E2%80%99s_recession_cost_1.5_million_times_more/#paragraph3

Today, the Associated Press (AP) has a story where it estimates the costs of police securing for the various ongoing protest occupations across the country. The AP roughly estimates that these occupations over two months in eighteen major cities cost taxpayers $13 million. Right-wing media outlets are already using this number to claim that the protests are too costly to maintain.

But the AP piece does not provide the necessary context to put this number into perspective. $13 million for policing of ongoing protests all over the country for two months is not a particularly large sum. For example, the 2004 Republican National Committee protests, which lasted for a single week and took place in a single location,cost $50 million to secure. A small tea party rally in November 2010 that attracted only a few dozen people cost $14,000, paid for by official congressional money.

The cost of securing these protests against economic inequality and political corruption also pales in comparison to one large figure: the wealth destroyed by Wall Street’s recession. The recession caused by Wall Street’s misdeeds destroyed $50 trillion of wealth globally by 2009, $20 trillion of that wealth in the United States alone. ThinkProgress has assembled the following chart to visualize these comparative costs:



Additionally, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost $13 million every 40 minutes this year, and the multibillionaire magnate Koch Brothers increase their wealth by $13 million every eleven hours.

None of this invalidates a discussion about the costs of securing the protests, but it does put it in context. Additionally, if the Associated Press wants to probe the costs of the demonstrations, it might also ask why police are using such expensive and heavy-handed tactics against demonstrators.

****************

By Zaid Jilani and Brad Johnson | Sourced from Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/special/2011/11/23/375386/wall-streets-recession-cost-more-than-protests/

[snot]

52. I've been wondering about the costs of the NYC Thanksgiving Parade, as another cf.

[Demeter]

24. MORE TIPS: Talking Occupy Wall Street, Super Committee and More Around the Thanksgiving Table

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/737986/talking_occupy_wall_street%2C_super_committee_and_more_around_the_thanksgiving_table%3A_a_guide_to_staying_sane/#paragraph4

Last year we gave you some tips for talking about Obama and the midterm elections with your right-wing family around the cranberry sauce and cornbread http://www.alternet.org/story/148958/5_ways_to_deal_with_your_conservative_relatives_this_thanksgiving%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8?page=entire#.Ts0cc468Osg.twitter
but boy have things changed in a year. The Tea Party is out and mic-checks are in.

Super-Committees, occupations, GOP presidential debates and personhood amendments, oh my! What a landscape of potential landmines awaits us all across the turkey and stuffing.

Fortunately, there are tips for dealing rationally and calmly with opposing views all over the web this year.

From our friends at WorkingAmerica.org, here are the first of several "Turkey Talk Tips." http://www.workingamerica.org/issues/turkeytalktips.cfm


At MoveOn.org, there's a particularly apt guide to combat the top five myths perpetuated by Fox News. http://front.moveon.org/top-5-fox-myths-to-debunk-this-thanksgiving/?id=33178-8892908-jGu%3DRmx



What is the common thread between all these tip guides? Staying clam, using facts and science and trying to combat myths and misinformation with truth instead of emotional rhetoric.

And don't let politics ruin your Turkey-Day fun! Watch this hilarious un-aired SNL sketch about the craziest types of Thanksgiving family behavior and take comfort in the fact that you're not alone. SEE LINK FOR VIDEO

[Demeter]

27. How Occupy Is Transforming Our National Conversation By John Cavanaugh and Robin Broad

http://www.nationofchange.org/how-occupy-transforming-our-national-conversation-1322064428

Shift your gaze for a moment from the lurid headlines of police shutting down Occupy sites in Oakland, New York and other cities to the scene on a sunny day in early November here in Washington, D.C. In front of the grandiose U.S. Treasury Department building, thousands of nurses dressed in red shirts gathered holding high large signs proclaiming: “Heal America: Tax Wall Street” and “Tax Timmy’s Friends” (as in U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner). They and their allies next marched to the Bank of America, then to the Occupy D.C. site, and onward to the corridors of Congress. Their rallying cry: a tax on the speculative trades that dominate Wall Street.

These nurses are one of many reminders of how far we have come since Occupy Wall Street pitched its first tents in Zucotti Park on September 17 and of how much the national conversation has shifted. They remind us how significant have been the successes of the Occupy movement, whatever happens to those tents...

For the thirty years until September 17, the dominant national narrative was framed by the overarching philosophy of free-marketers like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman. Starting around 1980, they successfully sold a story-line that government should step aside, eliminate regulations, and let the “free market” and its large corporations create prosperity for all of us. As for the resulting rise in inequality? Not to worry, their storyline argued, this was not a problem because everyone had a chance to get rich and anyone who did not – well, that was their own fault.

Across the world, for years, millions of people challenged this elite-driven and elite-benefiting “Washington Consensus.” In Brazil, for example, landless workers occupied farmland and ultimately helped elect a government of the 99 percent. Similar movements helped elect governments that challenged the 1 percent in Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador, El Salvador, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

But, in the United States, the dominant story persisted for decades, drowning out the voices of victims and critics — leaving us with a callous national narrative that tolerated obscene wealth among the few, mounting poverty among the many, and an escalating gap between the two.

Tolerated, that is, until Occupy Wall Street.

The signs and chants of “we are the 99%” have broken the spell, liberating the public imagination to unearth the true narrative of what has happened in this country and across the world during the past three decades.

Pay no heed to what the self-serving mainstream pundits of the 1 percent say about the Occupy movement. The reality is this: Occupy has already succeeded. It has succeeded in shaking us as a society out of our hypnosis. Occupy has already succeeded in its role as a social movement in challenging the old, faulty dominant story spread by the 1 percent and replacing it with another one that resonates with what most Americans know to be true.

The truth: The policies and practices of giant corporations and the U.S. government over the past three decades have rigged the system to benefit the 1 percent. The truth: The resulting inequality has grown to grotesque levels not seen since the first “Gilded Age” 100 years ago. Inequality is crushing millions, while destroying our democracy.

Ignore also what the pundits of the 1 percent are telling you about who is at Occupy. The Occupy sites are not filled with partying spoiled rich college kids. There are ordinary people, some who have lost jobs, some who have lost homes, some who cannot find jobs, most who had lost hope. People who are tired of being blamed, tired of feeling alone, and tired of not being heard.

Now, they are being heard and they are not feeling alone.

In choosing Wall Street as its main initial site, Occupy brilliantly changed the narrative to focus on the real villain: a Wall Street that gambled the hard-earned savings of ordinary Americans and precipitated the crash of 2008. A Wall Street that was then bailed out by the 1 percent in the U.S. Congress.

Pay no heed to those pundits who say that Occupy will fail unless it puts forward a specific list of specific demands. This is not the role of a social movement such as Occupy. Rather, if Occupy can keep the spotlight on this new narrative, this gives space, power, and voice to other groups to put forward specific demands on behalf of the 99 percent. Case in point: those nurses who marched with other Occupy supporters on that sunny day in early November to demand the tax on financial transactions of the 1 percent.

Indeed, as the nurses rallied in Washington, three of their leaders joined in a demonstration thousands of miles away in France, pressing leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies including President Obama to embrace this tax. Obama had previously been opposed. But, as IPS fellow Sarah Anderson reported from France: “After the protests, Obama stood up in France at a news conference with the French President Nicolas Sarkozy. And, to our surprise, Obama announced that he was now open to the financial speculation tax.”

In sum: Occupy is successfully shifting the national conversation and, in doing so, it is opening the door to a new realm of possibilities.

************************************************************

John Cavanagh and Robin Broad wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Robin is a Professor of International Development at American University in Washington, D.C. and has worked as an international economist in the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Congress. John is director of the Institute for Policy Studies, and is co-chair (with David Korten) of the New Economy Working Group. They are co-authors of three books on the global economy, and are currently traveling the country and the world to write a book entitled Local Dreams: Finding Rootedness in the Age of Vulnerability. Over the decades, this husband and wife team has worked in a number of countries, including the Philippines.

[Demeter]

12. THE ANTI-THNKSGIVING POV: No Thanks to Thanksgiving

http://www.alternet.org/story/148991/no_thanks_to_thanksgiving?page=entire

We should atone for the genocide that was incited -- and condoned -- by the very men we idolize as our 'heroic' founding fathers...One indication of moral progress in the United States would be the replacement of Thanksgiving Day and its self-indulgent family feasting with a National Day of Atonement accompanied by a self-reflective collective fasting. In fact, indigenous people have offered such a model; since 1970 they have marked the fourth Thursday of November as a Day of Mourning in a spiritual/political ceremony on Coles Hill overlooking Plymouth Rock, Mass., one of the early sites of the European invasion of the Americas.

Not only is the thought of such a change in this white-supremacist holiday impossible to imagine, but the very mention of the idea sends most Americans into apoplectic fits -- which speaks volumes about our historical hypocrisy and its relation to the contemporary politics of empire in the United States. That the world's great powers achieved "greatness" through criminal brutality on a grand scale is not news, of course. That those same societies are reluctant to highlight this history of barbarism also is predictable.

But in the United States, this reluctance to acknowledge our original sin -- the genocide of indigenous people -- is of special importance today. It's now routine -- even among conservative commentators -- to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.

One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, we Americans hear a story about the hardy Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims' first winter. Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it's also true that by 1637, Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the rest were left to assimilate into white society or die off on reservations, out of the view of polite society...



********************************************************

AlterNet originally ran this article on Thanksgiving 2005, and HAS reprinted it on succeeding Thanksgiving holidays...


Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Radical Politics in the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press). He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007).

[bhikkhu]

106. Well, our little microbial friends immigrated too, and massacred the largest majority

...otherwise, its likely our own ancestors (if one is from European immigrant stock) wouldn't have made too much of an impression.

"1491" is an eye-opener on the whole mess - both very readable and very educational.

[xchrom]

13. France and Germany plan changes to EU treaties

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15867847

Germany's Angela Merkel and France's Nicolas Sarkozy are to propose modifications to EU treaties to improve governance of the eurozone.

The announcement came after their first meeting with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti since he took office.

Mr Sarkozy said they would "propose modification of treaties to improve eurozone confidence so there is more integration and convergence".

Mrs Merkel said they would not change the role of the European Central Bank.

[Demeter]

15. Interesting. I Predict Any Changes Will Be in the Wrong Direction

because the Banksters are in charge...

[xchrom]

18. i have posted an article that talks about revolution from the top.

i think we don't realize or we're beginning to realize just how radical the changes are TPTB have created.

and you're right -- they can't fix it -- because it's the same formula -- them that broke it are trying to fix it.
or rather preserve their position of power?

but the 'them that broke it trying to fix it' has to die some how.

[Tansy_Gold]

37. Oh, they could fix it very easily, X

But they won't because they don't want to. For them it's not broken at all. It's just the way they want it, or it will be as soon as they've acquired ALL the wealth and returned to a feudalistic division of wealth -- a handful of all-powerful kinds, a few dozen pretty-powerful artistocrats, and a whole fucking bunch of starving peasants.

TG

[xchrom]

38. The Austrian's won WWII. Nt

[Demeter]

50. The only fix would be the 1% giving up everything that makes them "special"

Money, power, and their high opinion of themselves, their low opinion of everyone else....

That wouldn't be possible, let alone easy, for the Elitists. We have to lend a hand there.

[Demeter]

16. Occupy Homes: Will Taking the Fight to Foreclosed Houses Unleash More Police Violence?

http://www.alternet.org/story/153202/occupy_homes%3A_will_taking_the_fight_to_foreclosed_homes_unleash_more_police_violence?page=entire

I WOULD THINK THAT WAS INEVITABLE...

[Demeter]

17. UC Davis Will Pay Med Bills for Sprayed Students OWS UPDATES

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/737984/occupy_updates%3A_uc_davis_will_pay_med_bills_for_sprayed_students%2C_ows_librarians_speak_out%2C_more/#paragraph4


The most important news thus far is UC Davis' frantic backtracking to save its image, with the latest example being an agreement to foot the medical bills of students injured from pepper spray. As Gawker's Adrian Chen wryly notes:

I don't know, it seems like paying these kids' medical bills for treatment you caused is getting off a little easy, especially considering the civil rights lawsuits UC Davis can expect. They should all get free meals at the student cafeteria, plus one keg of bud light per annum, for the rest of their college career.

.................

--In Washington, DC, those who marched all the way from New York are mic-checking the supercommittee today. From an email: "Members of Occupy Washington, DC and Occupy the Highway (occupiers who walked to DC from NYC) are in the Hart Building protesting the super committee. They are mic-checking the failure of the committee and demonstrating how the deficit problem can be easily solved by taxing the rich and cutting the military. Further they call for rebuilding the economy, creating millions of jobs and strengthening the social safety net. Occupiers are inside and outside the Hart Building.

.......................

--Also in New York, preparations are underway for a massive free "occupied" Thanksgiving; "This Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street is celebrating unity and community with an open feast at Liberty Square. From 2 to 6 p.m. at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) we will meet to share food, stories and inspiration. All members of our global community are invited to break bread with us." There will be donated and prepared meals and a food drive as well.

MORE

[Demeter]

20. Robocops vs Occupy Wall St: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Tactics

http://www.alternet.org/story/153193/robocops_vs_occupy_wall_st%3A_the_rise_of_paramilitary_police_tactics?page=entire

...The tactics vary from city to city, but the most aggressive policing originates in methods developed by law enforcement agencies in Miami in response to large protests against the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement in November 2003. Miami’s approach, in the words of Miami-Dade State Attorney Kathy Fernandez Rundle, created, “a model … for the rest of the world to emulate in the future when these sort of events take place.”..In Miami more than 10,000 demonstrators converged on the downtown area, where a conference of trade ministers from 34 countries met to discuss the FTAA, which many South American nations opposed. Police in riot gear used rubber bullets, projectiles and batons to aggressively clear the streets of protesters. An estimated $8.5 million was spent on security for the FTAA conference and police forces from around the state were pulled in. The ministers didn’t reach any agreement and at least 140 protesters were arrested. Many more were forcibly blocked from assembling.

“Downtown Miami is built on a grid structure, so in terms of city planning it’s almost a gift to law enforcement. They kettled protesters, unembedded press, everyone together into giant squares and would push into them and beat people severely with batons. During all this there were helicopters overhead nonstop,” explains Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, who helped produce an Indymedia film about the FTAA protests and their suppression, titled “The Miami Model.”...“Miami is where the creeping militarization of police tactics vis-à-vis political protest was congealed,” she said in an email. “Not only in numbers but in equipment the Miami police outnumbered us and widely employed militarized strategies to overwhelm people.” The Miami Model, or what former Seattle police chief Norman Stamper dubs “paramilitary policing,” now seems an entrenched framework for dealing with large, often nonconfrontational protest movements. Stamper oversaw the policing of the so-called Battle of Seattle in 1999.

The model was partly a response to the events of Seattle ’99, according to Alex Vitale, associate professor of criminology and sociology at Brooklyn College. Protesters at the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference overwhelmed local police, who responded with an abundance of force and tear gas. The fear of another Seattle was compounded by an alarm about dissent after Sept. 11, according to Vitale. “After 9/11 police forces invested in hardware, body armor and special weapon,” he explains. “In the minds of some people in law enforcement, there was an equating of dissent and terrorism.”

Many local police departments facing Occupy protests have also not seen dissent like this in their streets in recent decades, and don’t know any other approach, Vitale says.

“In places like Dallas and Denver, police are pulling out batons because they don’t know how to deal constructively with dissent,” he adds. MORE

I DON'T THINK "DISSENT" IS A CRIME...NOR SHOULD POLICE "HANDLE" IT. IT IS A CONSTITUTIONAL AND HUMAN RIGHT, AND THERE BETTER START BEING SOME UNDERSTANDING BY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS THAT THEY SUPPRESS DISSENT AT THEIR PERIL OF LOSING ALL THAT THEY TAKE FROM THE PEOPLE, AND MORE.

[stockholmer]

45. [phone]

[snot]

53. Speaking of costs, let's compare the costs of all this policing (including the equipt) to

what the costs would have been if there'd been no policing at all. Like, a few broken windows, at most? I'm sure the worst would have been traffic delays; but those are imposed on us all the time when it suits t.p.t.b.

[Demeter]

54. OLIPHANT: DEMOCRACY, AMERICA'S LEADING EXPORT

[Tansy_Gold]

22. UC Davis, aka the California tax payers. n/t

[xchrom]

19. Portugal hit by general strike against austerity cuts

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-15867149

A 24-hour strike in Portugal has grounded flights and halted public transportation in protest against proposed austerity measures.

Air traffic controllers and workers on Lisbon's metro system were the first to go on strike late on Wednesday.

They were joined by hundreds of thousands of other workers, including teachers and hospital staff.

Parliament votes next week on a deficit reduction plan being imposed as a result of an international bailout.

[Tansy_Gold]

23. :::sigh::: If only. . . . . (n/t)

[Demeter]

26. Patience, Grasshopper

Portugal is at least two years ahead of the US in this process.

[Hotler]

60. As long as our fellow Americans are willing to....

spray each other with pepper spray while standing in line for an XBOX we're not there yet.

[Demeter]

63. Too True, Dat.

[Demeter]

30. Demos Announces Landmark Registration of 1 Million New Low-Income Voters Among The 99%

http://www.demos.org/publication/demos-announces-landmark-registration-1-million-new-99-voters

As public concern grows over deepening economic and political inequality, there’s good news to report in five states: 1 million additional members of the 99 percent have filled out voter registration forms at public assistance agencies since 2007.

This milestone reflects Demos’ work helping five states — Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina, Virginia and Illinois — to fully implement the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), specifically the often-neglected public agency registration requirements, otherwise known as “Section 7”. It is proof that when laws to protect peoples’ democratic rights are put into practice, they can have a major impact on bringing more voices into the political process. If more states follow suit, millions of additional lower-income Americans will have the opportunity to participate in our democracy in coming years.

For the past several years, Demos and its partners have been working with state officials to properly implement Section 7 of the NVRA after finding that many states neglected their obligation to provide voter registration services to applicants and recipients of public assistance benefits. Congress intended these requirements to work in tandem with the more familiar “Motor Voter” provisions of the NVRA, under which voter registration is widely available at motor vehicle offices. By ensuring that eligible individuals from all walks of life could have convenient access to voter registration, the NVRA sought to encourage broad participation in voting...

[Demeter]

31. As the World Crumbles: the ECB Spins, FED Smirks, and US Banks Pillage By Nomi Prins

http://www.nationofchange.org/world-crumbles-ecb-spins-fed-smirks-and-us-banks-pillage-1322058638


... between the advent of the euro in 1999, and 2007, spreads between the bonds of peripheral countries and core ones in Europe were pretty stable. In other words, the risk of any country defaulting on its debt was fairly equal, and small. But after the 2007 US subprime asset crisis, and more specifically, the advent of Federal Reserve / Treasury Department construed bailout-economics, all hell broke loose – international capital went AWOL daring default scenarios, targeting them for future bailouts, and when money leaves a country faster than it entered, the country tends to falter economically. The cycle is set...The US subprime crisis wasn’t so much about people defaulting on loans, but the mega-magnified effects of those defaults on a $14 trillion asset pyramid created by the banks. (Those assets were subsequently sold, and used as collateral for other borrowing and esoteric derivatives combinations, to create a global $140 trillion debt binge.) As I detail in It Takes Pillage, the biggest US banks manufactured more than 75% of those $14 trillion of assets. A significant portion was sold in Europe – to local banks, municipalities, and pension funds – as lovely AAA morsels against which more debt, or leverage, could be incurred. And even thought the assets died, the debts remained.

Greek banks bought US-minted AAA assets and leveraged them. Norway did too (through the course of working on a Norwegian documentary, I discovered that 8 tiny towns in Norway bought $200 million of junk assets from Citigroup, borrowed money from local banks to pay for them, and pledged 10 years of power receipts from hydroelectric plants in return. The AAA assets are now worth zero, the power has been curtailed for residents, and the Norwegian banks want their money back--blood from a stone.) The same kind of thing happened in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Holland, France, and even Germany - in different degrees and with specific national issues mixed in. Problem is - when you’ve already used worthless collateral to borrow tons of money you won’t ever be able to repay, and international capital slams you in other ways, and your funding costs rise, and your internal development and lending seize up, you’re screwed - or rather the people in your country are screwed.

In the IMF paper, the authors convincingly make the case that it wasn’t just the US subprime asset meltdown itself that initiated Europe’s implosion, but the fact that our Federal Reserve and Treasury Department adopted a reckless don't-let-em-fail doctrine. Even though Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed, their investors, the huge ones anyway, were protected. The Fed subsidized, and still subsidizes, $29 billion of risk for JPM Chase's acquisition of Bear. The philosophy of saving banks and their practices poisoned Europe, as those same financial firms played euro-roulette in the global derivatives markets, once the subprime betting train slowed down.

The first fatal stop of the US bailout mentality was the ECB’s 2010 bailout of Anglo Irish bank, which got the lion’s share of the ECB's Irish-bailout: $51 billion euro of ELA (Emergency Loan Assistance) and $100 billion euro of regular lending at the time. After the international financial community saw the pace and volume of Irish bank bailouts, the game of euro-roulette went turbo, country by country. More 'fiscally conservative' governments are replacing any semblance of population-supportive ones. The practice of extracting ‘fiscal prudency’ from people and providing bank subsidies for bets gone wrong has infected all of Europe. It will continue to do so, because anything less will threathen the entire Euro experiment, plus otherwise, the US banks might be on the hook again for losses, and the Fed and Treasury won’t let that happen. They’ve already demonstrated that. It'd be just sooo catastrophic...In the wings, the smugness of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke is palpable – ‘hey, we acted heroically and "decisively" to provide a multi-trillion dollar smorgasbord of subsidies for our biggest banks and look how great we (er, they) are doing now? Seriously, Europe – get your act together already, don't do the trickle-bailout game - just dump a boatload of money into the same banks – and a few of your own before they go under – do it for the sake of global economic stability. It’ll really work. Trust us.’

MORE

[Demeter]

32. Pulling Accounts from the Unaccountable By Amy Goodman

http://www.nationofchange.org/pulling-accounts-unaccountable-1322058815

Less than a month after Occupy Wall Street began, a group was gathered in New York’s historical Washington Square Park, in the heart of Greenwich Village. This was a moment of critical growth for the movement, with increasing participation from the thousands of students attending the cluster of colleges and universities there. A decision was made to march on local branches of the too-big-to-fail banks, so participants could close their accounts, and others could hold “teach-ins” to discuss the problems created by these unaccountable institutions.

Heather Carpenter, according to the federal lawsuit filed this week in New York, is studying to be a certified nursing assistant, working to pay for school as a counselor for mentally disabled people at a group home on Long Island. Her fiance, Julio Jose Jimenez-Artunduaga, is a Colombian immigrant, pursuing the American Dream, working part time as a bartender. They marched from Washington Square Park to a nearby Citibank branch, where she went to the teller to close her account, explaining her frustration with the bank’s new monthly $17 fee for accounts with balances below $6,000...As described in the lawsuit, the teach-in began with participants “announcing the amount of their debt, discussing their student loan experience, and reciting sobering statistics related to the debt of college graduates.” The bank staff called the police, and Julio went outside to avoid any conflict. Heather closed her account and left as well. By that time, a large group of NYPD officers, including Chief of Department Joseph J. Esposito, as well as several plainclothes officers showed up. The police stormed into the bank, locked the doors and began arresting those involved with the teach-in.

Even though Heather was outside, a plainclothes officer identified her as a protester and told her to get back in the bank. She said she was a customer and showed her receipt. To her shock, as documented by video, Heather was grabbed from behind by a plainclothes officer who began forcing her into the bank. She screamed, but within seconds disappeared into the vestibule, surrounded by a dozen cops, where she was roughly handcuffed and arrested. Julio was roughed up and arrested as well—all for closing an account at Citibank. They spent over 30 hours in police custody and were charged with resisting arrest and criminal trespass. A month later, the New York District Attorney’s office indicated it would drop the charges at their court appearances. Heather and Julio still want to see Chief Esposito and the other arresting officers in court, though, for an explanation of the officers’ excessive force and unlawful arrest of the two...Just weeks after their arrest, on Nov. 5, thousands around the U.S. participated in Bank Transfer Day. Kristen Christian was upset with the announcement that Bank of America was going to charge a monthly $5 debit card fee. She created a Facebook event and shared it with her friends. Before long, Bank Transfer Day had 85,000 online supporters.

[Demeter]

34. 13 Political Turkeys for the Groaning Board

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13169

...what a middle-aged round-headed political pundit bows his head and gives thanks for:

Barack Obama. Because no matter what you think of his policies, you got to admire his ability not to get involved in them.

Dick Cheney. 6 Heart attacks and the man still manages to go on a book tour. How does a guy without a heart, have 6 heart attacks? It would be like Rick Perry contracting a brain tumor.

Rick Perry suffered a 53 second brain freeze during a national debate. 53 seconds. It only took the San Francisco Forty Niners 8 seconds longer to score 2 touchdowns last Sunday. The Niners!

Former Democratic New York Congressman Anthony Weiner who escaped the press by entering sexual rehab. "I'm a sexual addict." Yeah. There's another name for that. We call it- Male. The man is simply suffering from a not so atypical case of Y chromosome poisoning.

Newt Gingrich for refusing to go gently into that good night. Even Brett Favre is saying "give it up, old man."

Herman Cain, whose long-form, cross-country, Fox News audition has exceeded all expectations. Roger Ailes must be so proud.

The Occupy Wall Streeters. The 1% dismiss the Occupiers due to questionable hygiene. Just because you smell odd doesn't mean your message is any less true. The fact they can't afford Chanel No. 5 may be part of the point.

Bill Clinton who refuses to go away. God bless him. Although, President Obama might harbor another opinion.

Michele Bachmann. Her Newsweek cover photo made her look spooky so supporters complained they cherry-picked a creepy looking photo on purpose. Then the magazine put the entire photo shoot up online, asking, "which one would you have picked?" And everybody shut up.

The entire Democratic Party, for failing to realize they're in the middle of a war. Republicans attack them with torches and pitchforks and the Democratic response is to introduce legislation to reform pitchfork safety standards.

The entire GOP, which is waging an internal war for it's very soul. The GOP Soul. Short book. Put it on the shelf right next to Great Democratic Leadership Battles.

Sarah Palin. Who refuses to go away. God bless her. Although, Mitt Romney might harbor another opinion. Or two. Diametrically opposed to each other.

Pat Robertson who called the Republican presidential field too extreme. Pat Robertson blasting his party for extremism. That's like having your drug intervention hosted by Lindsay Lohan. And Charley Sheen is driving the van.

You can't make stuff up like this. See, I'm telling you. Life is good. Thankfully yours.

*****************************************************

The New York Times says Emmy-nominated comedian and writer Will Durst "is quite possibly the best political satirist working in the country today." Check out the website: willdurst.com to find out more about upcoming stand- up performances or to buy his book, "The All American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing."

[Demeter]

35. Occupy Wall Street Thanksgiving

http://occupywallst.org/article/occupy-wall-street-thanksgiving/

This Thanksgiving, Occupy Wall Street is celebrating unity and community with an open feast at Liberty Square. From 2 to 6 p.m. at Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) we will meet to share food, stories and inspiration. All members of our global community are invited to break bread with us.

"This is all about supporting the 99%,” said Megan Hayes, an organizer with the #OWS Kitchen working group, and a former high end chef. “So many people have given up so much to come and be a part of the movement because there is really that much dire need for community. We decided to take this holiday opportunity to provide just that – community."

More than three thousand individually wrapped plates will be distributed on Thursday in accordance with New York State Health Code. People in the community have opened their homes to cook meals. Roger Fox in New Jersey will be making 250 meals, Mia Valh and Alia Gee are also making large numbers of meals. A lot of community organizations are involved and Liberty Cafe in East NY donates space for the #OWS Kitchen working group.

Locally owned family business, Texas BBQ will be providing 2,000 of the meals. They are being purchased with donated funds and will be served along with the home-cooked meals from supporters and food from the People’s Kitchen at Occupy Wall Street. The Owners of Texas BBQ are Egyptian and are supporters of the Occupy Movement.

Indigenous voices, religious leaders, food justice activists and leaders from peoples’ movements around the world are speaking on Thursday at Liberty Square. Occupy Thanksgiving is a celebration for the entire New York community. All are invited.

There will also be a can food drive. Donations of cans will go to local food banks and pantries throughout NYC.

[Demeter]

39. The Kid and I Took in the New Muppet Movie

So, it was a hokey, self-parodizing reworking of a lot of tired old Hollywood plots, but through my newly opened eyes, I saw Occupy Wall Street...


Basically, Muppets regroup to raise funds to buy out Mr. 1% Richman (the character's actual name: Richman). And the 99% respond with heart and soul.

It's not as sharp or pointed as other Muppet movies, rather like the stuffing had gone out of one's favorite plush toy, rediscovered in the attic. But if one drops a nostalgic tear in the course of the film, it's dark, no one will notice.

The people cast were a bunch of unknowns, but they did what they could. There were some cameos of known actors, as well.

In all there are worse things to see and do.

[Demeter]

40. Currency Warnings that Europe Ignored by: Paul Krugman

http://www.truth-out.org/currency-warnings-europe-ignored/1321980689

Almost six years ago, the economist Nouriel Roubini wrote a commentary article for his EconoMonitor Web site describing how Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s economy minister, threw a hissy fit when Mr. Roubini suggested that Italy might have problems with its euro membership. And no, I’m not being unfair — read his piece.

In it, Mr. Roubini, who took part in a panel in 2006 in Davos, Switzerland, on the ups and downs of the European monetary union, wrote: “Unlike the other panelists that ignored the topic and spoke instead about all the good things allegedly associated with E.M.U., I took the questions seriously by considering some of the problems and risks faced by E.M.U. and the risks of a breakup, especially for the case of Italy. My remarks caused a stir with Minister Tremonti who interrupted me in the middle of my remarks, went into a temper tantrum and shouted — to the consternation of all participants — to me: ‘Go back to Turkey!’ ”

It was quite something.

What I would say is that this incident exemplified something that was going on all along the march to the eurodebacle. Serious discussion of the risks and possible downsides was simply not allowed. If you were an independent economist expressing even mild concerns about the project, you were labeled an enemy and shut out of the discussion.

In a way, the remarkable thing is that it took until now for disaster to strike...

MORE AT LINK ON WHY THE ATTACK ON WELFARE STATE, AND THE HISTORY OF THE EURO...

[Demeter]

41. How the 99% Won in the Fight for Worker Rights By Andy Kroll

http://www.nationofchange.org/how-99-won-fight-worker-rights-1321885274

MORE DISCUSSION ON OUR FAVORITE CAUSE...

[Demeter]

43. What would happen if an asteroid hit U.S. banks?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/23/us-financial-stress-idUSTRE7AM2NE20111123

Ever wondered what the U.S. economy might look like should there be another Lehman Brothers-style bank collapse? Well, it would not be pretty.

Unemployment could jump to 13 percent, recalling the breadlines of the 1930s. The Dow Jones industrials might plunge 50 percent to 5,668, a level last reached before the dot.com boom in the mid-1990s. At the depths of a brutal year-long recession, output might shrink at an 8 percent annualized rate, wiping out two whole years worth of growth. Anyone lucky enough to have a job or cash left after the carnage could snap up a home at November 2000 prices.
This dire picture is what the Federal Reserve wants U.S. banks to imagine when they test their balance sheets for resiliency against a major economic shock.

So tough is the test that Karen Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, quipped: "The only adverse event the Fed left out is a direct asteroid strike on a major banking center."

It sounds shocking. But it's actually similar to the firestorm that swept through the United States after the shock bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman in September 2008, which ushered in the worst recession since the 1930s. Next time around, however, damage could be even worse because the U.S. economy would enter in a weakened state. It is still healing from the last recession and a second blow could be crippling. Few economists predict a U.S. recession, though uncertainty is rampant. A Reuters poll earlier this month put the risk at 25 percent, down from 30 percent the prior month, and recent U.S. economic data has improved.

The Fed last year began running banks through annual "stress tests" to measure how their balance sheets and capital buffers would cope with conditions in the consensus economic outlook, plus a major shock. On Tuesday it announced details of how it will conduct its round for 2012 release. The latest stress test is tougher than the last -- little wonder, noted Nomorua Equity Research, given Europe sliding back into recession, China slowing, financial markets in turmoil over the euro-zone sovereign debt crisis and an uncertain U.S. fiscal picture. But Richard Bove, a banking analyst at Rochdale Securities, says it is irresponsible to put 31 U.S. banks through a worst-case scenario. A stress test this tough risks forcing banks to prepare for the worst, possibly creating what regulators fear. "They are going to dump loans, they are going to stop lending and they are going to put us into the recession that the government wants to know how they will function within. "This is a really stupid stress test," Bove told Reuters Insider Television.

MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

44. The Supercommittee of the One Percent Goes Down in Flames By Dean Baker

http://www.nationofchange.org/supercommittee-one-percent-goes-down-flames-1322150050

Congress gave us a wonderful Thanksgiving present when we got word that the supercommitee was hanging up its capes. While many in the media were pushing the story of a dysfunctional Congress that could not get anything done, the exact opposite was true. The supercommittee was about finding a backdoor way to cut Social Security and Medicare, and create enough cover that Congress could get away with it...the supercommittee was about turning reality on its head. Instead of the problem being a Congress that is too corrupt and/or incompetent to rein in the sort of Wall Street excesses that wrecked the economy, we were told that the problem was a Congress that could not deal with the budget deficit.

To address this invented problem, the supercommittee created an end-run around the normal congressional process. This was a long held dream of the people financed by investment banker Peter Peterson. Their idea was that it would not be possible to make major cuts to Social Security and Medicare through the normal congressional process because these programs are too popular. Both programs enjoy enormous support across the political spectrum. Even large majorities of self-identified conservatives and Republicans are opposed to cuts in Social Security and Medicare. For this reason, they have wanted to set up a special process that could insulate members of Congress from political pressure. The hope was that both parties would sign on to cuts in these programs, so that voters would have nowhere to go.

However this effort went down in flames this week. Much of the credit goes to the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement. OWS and the response it has drawn from around the country has hugely altered the political debate. It has put inequality and the incredible upward redistribution of income over the last three decades at the center of the national debate. In this context, it became impossible for Congress to back a package that had cuts to Social Security and Medicare at its center, while actually lowering taxes for the richest 1 percent, as the Republican members of the supercommittee were demanding.

Now that the supercommittee is dead, Congress must be forced to address the real crisis facing the country: the 26 million people who are unemployed, underemployed, or out of the labor force altogether. This would not be difficult if we had a functional Congress...


So everyone should enjoy their Thanksgiving knowing that the huge supercommittee turkey is dead. If the 99 percent can keep up the pressure, Congress will return to reality after the holiday.

AND IF THE DANCING SUPREMES TAKE DOWN OBAMACARE, WE THE 99% STAND A CHANCE OF GETTING BOTH OUR ECONOMY AND OUR GOVERNMENT BACK...AND BRINGING AMERICA INTO THE 21ST CENTURY BETTER THAN IT EVER WAS....

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

47. ‘New Yorker’ Magazine Cover Depicts Pilgrims Fleeing Across U.S. Border

The illustration is titled “Promised Land” and it was done by Christoph Niemann, an illustrator, designer and author of Abstract Sunday, a column for the “New York Times Magazine.”

Niemann was born in Germany and moved to New York City in 1997. However, after 11 years he moved back to Berlin with his wife and three sons.


http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/738468/%E2%80%98new_yorker%E2%80%99_magazine_cover_depicts_pilgrims_fleeing_across_u.s._border/#paragraph4

[Demeter]

48. UC Davis Pepper-Spray Incident Reveals Weakness Up Top

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/uc-davis-pepper-spray-incident-reveals-weakness-up-top-20111122#ixzz1eXvBjeJX

...Glenn Greenwald’s post at Salon says this far better than I can, but there are undeniable conclusions one can draw from this incident. The main thing is that the frenzied dissolution of due process and individual rights that took took place under George Bush’s watch, and continued uncorrected even when supposed liberal constitutional lawyer Barack Obama took office, has now come full circle and become an important element to the newer political controversy involving domestic/financial corruption and economic injustice.

As Glenn points out, when we militarized our society in response to the global terrorist threat, we created a new psychological atmosphere in which the use of force and military technology became a favored method for dealing with dissent of any kind....

...Because of the countless decisions we made in years past to undermine our own attitudes toward the rule of law and individual rights. Every time we looked the other way when the president asked for the right to detain people without trials, to engage in warrantless searches, to eavesdrop on private citizens without even a judge knowing about it, we made it harder to answer the question: What is it we’re actually defending?

In another time, maybe, we might have been able to argue that we were using force to defend the principles of modern Western civilization, that we were "spreading democracy."

Instead, we completely shat upon every principle we ever stood for, stooping to torture and assassination and extrajudicial detention...Then finally it became this: “We are defending ourselves, against the citizens who insist on keeping their rights and their principles.”


A MUST-READ POLEMIC! TAIBBI HITS IT OUT OF THE PARK!

[Demeter]

49. The roots of the UC-Davis pepper-spraying GLENN GREENWALD

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/the_roots_of_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying/

The now-viral video of police officers in their Robocop costumes sadistically pepper-spraying peaceful, sitting protesters at UC-Davis (details here) shows a police state in its pure form. It’s easy to be outraged by this incident as though it’s some sort of shocking aberration, but that is exactly what it is not. The Atlantic‘s Garance Franke-Ruta adeptly demonstrates with an assemblage of video how common such excessive police force has been in response to the Occupy protests. Along those lines, there are several points to note about this incident and what it reflects:

(1) Despite all the rights of free speech and assembly flamboyantly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the reality is that punishing the exercise of those rights with police force and state violence has been the reflexive response in America for quite some time. As Franke-Ruta put it, “America has a very long history of protests that meet with excessive or violent response, most vividly recorded in the second half of the 20th century.” Digby yesterday recounted a similar though even worse incident aimed at environmental protesters.

The intent and effect of such abuse is that it renders those guaranteed freedoms meaningless. If a population becomes bullied or intimidated out of exercising rights offered on paper, those rights effectively cease to exist. Every time the citizenry watches peaceful protesters getting pepper-sprayed — or hears that an Occupy protester suffered brain damage and almost died after being shot in the skull with a rubber bullet — many become increasingly fearful of participating in this citizen movement, and also become fearful in general of exercising their rights in a way that is bothersome or threatening to those in power. That’s a natural response, and it’s exactly what the climate of fear imposed by all abusive police state actions is intended to achieve: to coerce citizens to “decide” on their own to be passive and compliant — to refrain from exercising their rights — out of fear of what will happen if they don’t....

MORE, AND VIDEO AT LINK

[Demeter]

51. Well, I'll be seeing you tomorrow

PBD may be setting up SMW for the half-day. But I'll keep this going, too. Good night all!

[westerebus]

55. Happy thanksgiving to the crew.

[xchrom]

56. Hungary's debt downgraded by Moody's to junk status

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15886364

Moody's has cut its rating of Hungarian government debt to junk status.

The ratings agency blamed Hungary's high levels of debt and weak prospects for growth, as well as uncertainty about whether the government can achieve its goals for the economy.

The government said the move by Moody's was part of a series of financial attacks against the country.

Earlier, Standard & Poor's decided not to downgrade Hungary until talks with the EU and IMF had been completed.

[xchrom]

57. Italy forced to pay record interest rates at auction

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15888752

Italy has been forced to pay record interest rates in a 10bn euro ($13bn; £9bn) auction of treasury bills.

The rate of interest for the new debts due to be repaid in six months was 6.504%, compared with 3.535% in the last comparable sale on 26 October.

The rate for two-year borrowing was 7.814%, up from 4.628% last time.

The Bank of Italy stressed that demand for the bonds had been high, with demand for the debts outstripping supply by 50%.

[Tansy_Gold]

58. HAPPY GREY FRIDAY!

It's raining in Apache Junction, which means I won't sit outside this morning at my local non-chain coffee shop. http://www.geckoespressogc.com/

But I will stop by for my daily iced coffee, then I will come home to work on more jewelry for this Sunday's final (probably) holiday season art show.

NO traffic.
NO crowds.
NO mass-produced-in-China and totally unnecessary junk.
NO risks of being crushed, elbowed, tripped, or pepper sprayed by fellow (?) shoppers.

[Demeter]

59. Happy Friday All! Good luck, Tansy!

We'll be back and open for business later today. Right now, I've got to get some (non-commercial) stuff done....

[Demeter]

61. Well, It's Friday Night--and We Are Having Leftovers for WEE

Anything that didn't get posted earlier....this is the place!

amazing how they couldn't even keep the DOW on the upside for half a day and what must have been minimal trading....

[Demeter]

62. No Banks Failed-- Yet

[Demeter]

64. Gold Lures Central Banks

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203611404577043652396383484.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Total central-bank gold purchases in the third quarter more than doubled from the second quarter and were almost seven times higher than a year earlier as countries continued to diversify reserves, according to a World Gold Council report.

At 148.4 metric tons, gold buying among central banks was at the highest since the sector became a net buyer of the precious metal in the second quarter of 2009, according to the quarterly report. Central banks and other official institutions, by comparison, had bought 66.5 tons of gold in the second quarter and 22.6 tons in the third quarter of 2010. "Central-bank buying was a highlight of the quarter. Statistics this year have been remarkable," Marcus Grubb, managing director of investment at the gold council, said in an interview. The report included a significant number of purchases that hadn't been reported publicly and whose buyers couldn't be identified due to confidentiality restrictions, the council said.

"This large number is a surprise," said UBS analyst Edel Tully, who said her own tally of net purchases reported through the World Gold Council and International Monetary Fund totaled just 20.2 tons for the quarter. "This information is very bullish. And no doubt the market will be busy speculating on the identity of such buyers."

..."While one can account for some of the purchases—from Thailand, Bolivia, Russia, etc.—there is an unaccounted amount out there. A clue probably lies in the fact that a lot of buying has been from central banks that have been in surplus, like Asia, Central Asian and Latin America," said Mr. Grubb, who expects the unknown buyers likely will be made public in coming months. Central-bank purchases by developing countries have been increasing in recent years as those nations diversify holdings, partly because of rising foreign-exchange reserves through export-led growth but also, more recently, as a reaction to the sovereign-debt crises affecting traditional reserve currencies like the U.S. dollar. Before 2009, however, central banks had been net sellers of gold bullion for about two decades. The central bank of Russia, a regular buyer from its domestic market, continued its long-term program of gold accumulation during the three-month period. Its third-quarter gold purchases amounted to 15 tons, taking its total holdings to about 852 tons, the council said...

[Demeter]

65. Time Banking: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

http://www.truth-out.org/time-banking-idea-whose-time-has-come/1322059802

...Twenty-five years ago, we started the first experiments with a different kind of money that provided a new way to link untapped community capacity to unmet needs. Because the market fails to value or reward many types of critical work—the work of raising healthy children, building strong families, revitalizing neighborhoods, preserving the environment, advancing social justice and democracy—we felt there should be other ways than market price to place a value on people’s time. There had to be a way to honor, record, and reward that kind of work.

Long before the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Time Bank movement represented a determination to take a stand for a more equitable, inclusive economic order. We wanted to demonstrate that a different kind of money could exist alongside the dollar, generating a different set of exchange transactions. We believed it could generate positive community-building efforts that might remedy or prevent the negative externalities created by the relentless pursuit of monetary profit...Time banking refuses to grant money a monopoly on the definition of value, instead creating a new kind of money originally called “service credits.” That idea became known as Time Dollars, and later, as it spread beyond the United States, TimeBanks. The concept is simple: one hour of help of any kind given to another member earns one time credit, exchangeable for an hour of help in return. One equals one. That’s the math. The IRS has consistently ruled that time banks are not commercial barter organizations, so time credits earned are not treated as taxable income. After 25 years of experimentation, learning, and expansion, the United States has 300 registered time banks. The smallest has 15 members; the largest, 3,000. At present, time banks have enrolled 30,000 members in the United States, 30,000 in the United Kingdom and an additional 100,000 scattered across 34 countries.

Why Now?

With the unemployment rate staying stubbornly high, many people simply don’t have access to traditional jobs or traditional (i.e. monetary) compensation right now—but that doesn’t mean their talent and time should go to waste. Especially as the programs that address our public needs, particularly those of the most vulnerable parts of our society, face cuts, there are plenty of ways to utilize these large reserves of untapped capacity. In the absence of money, a different kind of currency or exchange system—like time banks—just might fit the bill....Given the current state of the economy, the question that everyone asks about time banking is: How can it help us get through this recession? In more ways than you might think. The responses fall into different categories:

One involves direct budget relief: People can get the things they need—like house repair, yard work, child care, elder care, haircuts, carpools, or moving services—directly from members of their community, without money having to enter the picture at all. And time banks offer continued access to many of the things cut first when money gets tight—for example, art, dance, or language classes...Another is the use of time banking to help people build bridges back to the monetary economy. People use time dollars to get help with their job hunt—preparing resumes, practicing interview skills, learning computer skills, or getting support with transportation and childcare. Time dollars can also offer a less capital-intensive way to set up a new small business...There’s also momentum building around an emerging use of time banking that’s less familiar. As governments cut services and programs for the most vulnerable Americans, time banking is moving beyond individuals: institutions are attempting to fill the gaps by enlisting their communities as partners in their work. Four examples reveal the breadth and magnitude of what TimeBank initiatives can do:

• In 27 of the lowest performing elementary schools in Chicago, fifth and sixth graders tutored and mentored second and third graders in an afterschool program that generated improved attendance, higher test scores, and fewer instances of fighting and bullying. Research has long established that peer tutoring by older children consistently generates major gains. Using TimeBanks to sustain it and engage parents as well provides the data needed to prove outcomes.
  
  
• In Washington D.C., for the past ten years, teenagers have earned time credits by serving as jurors in the Time Dollar Youth Court, which hears the cases of peers accused of nonviolent crimes. Offenders may be sentenced to community service, life skills classes, an apology, writing an essay, or duty on the jury. Recidivism rates are less than 10 percent; the Urban Institute estimates that the District saves $9,000 for every offender who goes to Youth Court instead of the traditional system.
  
  
• The National Homecomers Academy enrolls people leaving prison as students on a journey of personal development, learning, and service. Community service includes, for example, helping youth get to school safely across gang or helping reduce violence by teenagers in a mixed ownership-tenant housing development. Nationally, recidivism for persons returning from prison is in the 60-70 percent range within three years. So far, at the National Homecomers Academy, it is zero after a year and one half.
  
  
• In Montpelier, Vermont, the Administration on Aging has invested in a form of time banks called Carebanks. Seniors can get an assurance that informal care and support will be available if they or their families pay regular premiums—in time dollars earned helping build community or helping other seniors. In effect, the program uses time banking to create a new form of extended family. It is too early to project cost savings. But a recent study reveals that, as home-based care gets cut by state governments, hospital costs will likely rise as people are put off preventative care, or end up re-hospitalized due to the lack of transitional care.

Time banking is also getting a boost from new software that will make it easier to log, track, and share hours (the software documents engagement, reliability, punctuality, and trustworthiness). The open-source code is available to individual time banks so they can easily build customized websites. Over 200 separate time banks are now using this open source version. And by next year, it will be on smart phones and tablets, radically expanding access to one’s time bank family.

MORE

[Demeter]

66. America’s Not Broke: Solving the Debt Crisis By Making Nation More Equitable, Green and Secure

MORALLY, AMERICA IS TOTALLY BANKRUPT--THE QUESTION IS, WHO CARES? NOT THE FUNDIE CULTS, THAT'S FOR SURE.

http://www.truth-out.org/americas-not-broke-solving-debt-crisis-making-nation-more-equitable-green-secure/1322061973

VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT AT LINK

[Demeter]

67. We Are the 99.9% By PAUL KRUGMAN

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/opinion/we-are-the-99-9.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general. If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline...Before I get to those policy disputes, here are a few numbers...The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains...Given this history, why do Republicans advocate further tax cuts for the very rich even as they warn about deficits and demand drastic cuts in social insurance programs? Well, aside from shouts of “class warfare!” whenever such questions are raised, the usual answer is that the super-elite are “job creators” — that is, that they make a special contribution to the economy. So what you need to know is that this is bad economics. In fact, it would be bad economics even if America had the idealized, perfect market economy of conservative fantasies.

After all, in an idealized market economy each worker would be paid exactly what he or she contributes to the economy by choosing to work, no more and no less. And this would be equally true for workers making $30,000 a year and executives making $30 million a year. There would be no reason to consider the contributions of the $30 million folks as deserving of special treatment.

MORE AT LINK

So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

[Demeter]

68. Will Greece unravel by Christmas? TODAY'S MUST READ

http://mpettis.com/2011/11/will-greece-unravel-by-christmas/


...In China economists are watching the spectacle in Europe, China’s largest export market, with rising dread. Might European deterioration affect Chinese growth? October and November tend to be very important months for Chinese exports, and so the prospect of a miserable Christmas in Europe is weighing heavily on Chinese exporters....But there isn‘t much China can really do about it. President Hu left the G20 meeting in Cannes Saturday without committing China to very much, merely saying: “We believe Europe has the wisdom and ability to solve the debt problem.” At this point, however, regardless of the amount of wisdom floating around Brussels I think it is pretty unrealistic to expect a happy solution. We’re well past that stage. By now, it seems to me, neither wisdom nor cooperation among world leaders is going to get us out of the debt and currency problems we face. Rather than try to prevent a major disruption the policy goal now should be to engineer as quickly as possible the least disorderly and disruptive unraveling of financial markets in the peripheral countries. And while it may help relieve frustration to excoriate European leaders for having made poor, we shouldn’t assume that there really is a set of “right decisions” that will lead us out of this mess. I think there isn’t.



...Indeed the whole issue of sovereignty has become fuzzy. Since France and Germany have basically exercised direct power over Greek’s electoral politics without assuming responsibility for solving Greece’s domestic problems, I can’t imagine that this won’t stoke even more resentment in Greece. But it’s worse than just an issue of fuzzy sovereignty. Last week something new happened which cannot help but affect the near-term outlook. By openly speculating for the first time on Greece’s leaving the euro, Europe’s leaders have ensured that there is almost no chance now of preventing it from happening, and sooner even than most pessimists expected.

A country CAN leave the euro?

Not that there ever really was much of a chance, in my opinion, to keep Greece in the euro, but I assumed that European leaders would do whatever they could to postpone the day of reckoning until after the major elections this and next year. They would find ways, I thought, even if that meant putting more unemployment pressure on the middle and lower classes in Greece for another year or two. But now I don’t think Europe can postpone Greece’s exit much longer. Statements by France and Germany may have transformed the dynamics of the crisis affecting Greece....By openly acknowledging that Greece could abandon the euro, Europe’s leaders may have set in motion events that will automatically force Greece to leave. Here is the logic. If Greece is ever forced to leave the euro, it will first have to redenominate domestic corporate and household liabilities into the new currency – let’s call it the drachma – or else domestic borrowers will be wiped out by the fall in the value of revenues relative to debt as the drachma immediately depreciates against the euro.

But it doesn’t end there. If a bank’s assets – its outstanding loans – are to be redenominated into drachma, then its liabilities, i.e. deposits, must be redenominated too, or else the balance sheet mismatch will bankrupt the bank. And there is where the problem lies. As soon as any depositor realizes that bank deposits are likely to be redenominated into drachma, he will pull his deposits out of the banks so as to protect the value of his savings. But obviously only a few depositors will be able to do this before forcing the bank into closing. In order to prevent the resulting collapse in the banking system, the only thing Athens can do is to freeze bank deposits long before most depositors have had a chance to cash out. But depositors know this. As the probability of Greece’s leaving the euro rises – and clearly it rose dramatically this past week – anxious depositors eager to prevent their deposits from being frozen and redenominated in a weaker currency know that they will have to speed up their withdrawal of deposits from banks. And of course as anxious depositors withdraw their deposits, the likelihood of a banking crisis rises, and with it the likelihood of Greece’s being forced to freeze deposits and leave the euro.

We are caught, it seems, in one of those self-reinforcing loops that almost always presage a collapse. Rational behavior by individual agents leads towards a catastrophic event the threat of which reinforces the behavior.

I don’t see any way to get out of this loop except with a Bagehot-style intervention – a very unlikely but immediately credible announcement by Germany and France that they are prepared to guarantee all deposits in the Greek banking system. I call it a “Bagehot intervention”, but of course Walter Bagehot would never have recommended bailing out an insolvent borrower....Without a credible intervention this process almost always ends the same way. There is in my opinion a very high probability that within weeks, or months at most, Greece will be forced to freeze bank deposits as a prelude to leaving the euro. Mexico in 1994 and Argentina in 2001 chose the Christmas/New Year holiday season to announce their devaluations. Will Greece follow suit? “If history repeats itself,” footballer Andrew Demetriou once pointed out, “I should think we can expect the same thing again.” And it probably won’t end there. In my opinion the real risk for Europe in that case becomes a contagion of deposit withdrawal, not immediately, but at the first sign of trouble in their home countries. As households from Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portuguese, and other vulnerable countries read every day about hardships faced by Greek families (and those, it will be noted, who trusted the authorities were the worst hit), what will they do?

MUCH MORE GRIMNESS AT LINK

[Demeter]

69. SEE TITLE BELOW

German Bund Action Goes Badly; Bank of America CDS Spread Hit New High; EuroSovereign and US Bank Spreads Widen More. Will the Germans Finally Break Glass?

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/german-bund-action-goes-badly-bank-of-america-cds-spread-hit-new-high-eurosovereign-and-us-bank-spreads-widen-more-will-the-germans-finally-break-glass.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

As our overly-long headline tells you, Wednesday was a really bad day in credit land. Not only has the reality of the severity and seeming intractability of the Eurozone mess started sinking in, but US investors seem finally to be facing up to the fact that a full blown crisis would not be contained and will engulf American banks. If you thought September-October 2008 events were nasty, they could look like a mere trial run for what may be in the offing. The Financial Times coverage on the failure of the Bund auction is suitably grim:

...A senior trader at a US bank said: “We are now seeing funds and clients wanting to get out of anything that is denominated in euros and that includes Bunds because they don’t know what will happen to monetary union. It is not helped by the year-end with most banks not prepared to buy anything.”..

The so-called failure also comes against a trend of poor auctions. It was the ninth auction that failed to meet its target this year, according to the German debt agency. However, demand was significantly weaker this time round.

And on the US banks:

Investors paid record amounts to protect themselves against the risk of default by Bank of America on Wednesday…

“There is again broad risk-averse sentiment stemming from Europe,” said Otis Casey, an analyst at Markit. “We still don’t have a solution there.”…

CDS protection on European financials also rose to fresh highs on Wednesday..

To make a bad situation worse, the banks are in precisely the same mess they were in in late 2008: under credit market pressure, with stock prices too low to make equity issuance an attractive way out. For a garbage barge to sell a lot of equity in a risk-off market is a tall order. Yet no one is pillorying bank managements or regulators for getting their balance sheets in better shape in 2009 or 2010. The banks continued their overly generous pay practices, failed to retain enough earnings, and couldn’t be bothered to sell more stock.

The most troubling sign of the day, however, is that the officialdom seems unwilling to take the steps needed to keep the looming crisis from spinning out of control. As we’ve indicated, the minimum needed measure is for the ECB to signal that it is willing to intervene aggressively. That is not a sufficient as a solution; the underlying problem, that of internal imbalances (meaning Germany’s addiction to running big trade surpluses) needs to be dealt with. But you don’t tell a patient in the throes of a heart attack to lose weight and start jogging. You stabilize him first, and then when he has recuperated enough, start addressing the underlying pathology. Of course, what we did in the US was keep the patient receiving costly hospital care, and allowed him to order in gourmet meals, so he is now 50 pounds heavier...

MUCH MORE GRIMNESS AT LINK

[Demeter]

70. Ireland demands debt relief, warns on EU treaties

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8911146/Ireland-demands-debt-relief-warns-on-EU-treaties.html

Europe's plans for treaty changes to enforce fiscal discipline in the eurozone may fall foul of popular anger in Ireland unless the EU creditor states agree to share more of the pain...The Irish government has suddenly complicated the picture by requesting debt relief from as a reward for upholding the integrity of the EU financial system after the Lehman crisis, though there is no explicit linkage between the two issues.

"We carried an undue burden for protecting the European banking system from contagion," said finance minister Michael Noonan.

"We are looking at ways to reduce the debt. We would like to see our European colleagues address this in a positive manner. Wherever there is a reckless borrower, there is also a reckless lender," he said, alluding to German, French, British and Dutch banks.

Mr Noonan hinted that Dublin is asking for some of interested relief on a €31bn EU promissory noted linked to the Anglo Irish fiasco, among other matters.

Mr Noonan said Ireland's public mood has turned very sour.

[DemReadingDU]

81. Christmas?

The months go by so fast nowadays, can it really be only 1 month until December 25th?

[Demeter]

84. Don't I Know It!

Do you think Greece still has 30 days, though?

Glad to see I'm not just posting for myself...I was wondering.

[DemReadingDU]

87. Greece, 30 days?

Things have been taking way longer than I ever expected, what's another 30-60-90 days? At least it would give a few months for our newly elected mayor to terminate this dishonest police chief before TSHTF.

[Demeter]

88. New Mayor? Congratulations!

Time is no friend, but even the worst situation must respond to the right pressure.

[Demeter]

71. IMF is Lender of Last Resort to Sovereigns

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/11/imf-is-lender-of-last-resort-to-sovereigns.html

Many observers are confused. They cry for the ECB to "man up" and "do what it is supposed to do" and be the lender of last resort. It does have that function for banks, not for sovereigns. The lender of last resort to sovereigns in the IMF.

The IMF has been grasping for new facilities to address the current crisis. Today it announced new precautionary and liquidity facilities, providing funds
for between six and 24 months. The likely candidates in the euro zone are Italy and Spain, while countries in eastern and central Europe would be other potential candidates. The shorter-term (6-months) could be as much as 5 times the country’s IMF quota, with few conditions. This "Precautionary and Liquidity Line" could also be used for longer periods (12-24 months) and would give a country access to 10 times their IMF quota. This would have more conditions attached and would be subject to IMF reviews.

Recall that in late October, Italy was offered a precautionary line of credit from the IMF. Instead Berlusconi opted to "invite" IMF monitors to supervise the implementation of austerity. The IMF also created a new "rapid financing instrument" which seems designed more for those suffering from balance of payments and exogenous shocks. Northern African and the Middle East would be potential candidates. Countries can borrow their IMF quota in full.

Some critics may point to this being the second adjustment of the IMF’s lending facilities in the past fifteen months. While there is some merit in the criticism, the ability the the IMF to act quickly stands in contrast to European officials, who seem to move at glacial speeds. Another criticism is that while many reporters called this a new IMF facility, it simply replaces existing ones. The "rapid financing instrument" is also a product of merging existing instruments to emergency assistance in cases of natural disasters and reconstruction (post-war) conditions...These are still relatively small steps for the IMF and for the scale of the crisis. More will be needed. The IMF does not have the funds if both Italy and Spain wanted to borrow 10x their IMF quotas. This means that the IMF will be going back to the drawing board sooner or later

[Demeter]

72. How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/mark-ames-how-uc-davis-chancellor-linda-katehi-brought-oppression-back-to-greece%E2%80%99s-universities.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

SHE'S ESSENTIALLY AN IMPORTED HIT-WOMAN--MUST READ

...You always expect your monsters to look like monsters and talk like monsters; but the best, most effective vehicles for evil are always these anti-matter humans, these hollow voids, the “nothing person” that the great Russian writer Yuri Trifonov described so mercilessly and perfectly in House on the Embankment.

For more on “Chemical” Linda Katehi, watch this stunning silent protest by UC Davis students ...

VIDEO AT LINK

[Demeter]

73. Trustee Says MF Global May Have Stolen $1.2 Billion in Customer Funds

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2011/11/trustee-says-mf-global-may-have-stolen.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+JessesCafeAmericain+%28Jesse%27s+Caf%C3%A9+Am%C3%A9ricain%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

...The twist here is that the Trustee may be accruing those losses to the customers even where there is some discretion. One would think that the customers should be paid first out of all MF Global creditors. But I suspect that where it is possible, their loss will be subordinated to the unsecured creditors like JPM who have a powerful influence with this Trustee and the courts. The customers of consequence, like the Koch brothers, appear to have been tipped off weeks in advance.

This is the perversity of law without justice.

If that happens, then nothing is safe. If a customer in cash and Treasuries can be robbed, and then be made to stand in line with unsecured creditors, then your 401(k)s are not savings but loans to the custodians of your plans. Now may be the time to exit all arrangements not specifically guaranteed directly by the government, and bring your money home. And better yet if no guarantees are required, and no parties standing between you and your wealth.

If they steal from one unpunished, they can steal from any and all almost at will. You are not an insider, and there is no honor among thieves. You are prey. And what are a few customers, and the stewardship of funds, to a group of financiers intent on taking down whole nations and their Treasuries?

[Demeter]

74. Big Banks Flee Reverse Mortgages, Leaving Industry Void

http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/176_225/reverse-mortgages-wells-fargo-bank-of-america-metlife-1044227-1.html

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp. and other large lenders have long dominated the corner of the mortgage industry that specializes in lending to elderly persons based on the equity in their home. But this year, faced with rising losses, declining house prices and increased regulatory scrutiny of these loans, those companies are walking away.

Wells Fargo, the largest reverse-mortgage lender, said in June that it was ">pulling out of the business after reaching a standoff with federal officials over how to handle delinquent customers. Other top reverse lenders B of A and Financial Freedom Acquisition LLC, a unit of OneWest Bank Group LLC, had said earlier this year that they were pulling out of the market (here and here).

MetLife, the third-largest reverse-mortgage lender in 2010, is currently one major holdout. But in recent months the insurance giant has backtracked on its other banking ambitions and is now trying to sell most of its other banking and mortgage operations — leaving industry members wondering if MetLife's reverse-mortgage business will be the next domino to fall.


{Reverse mortgages are mostly federally-insured loans for people older than 61, who can borrow a lump sum or monthly payments against the equity of their homes. The borrowers must continue paying property taxes and insurance premiums — but they do not have to repay the mortgage principle until they die, sell the home, or fall behind on their monthly tax or premium payments.}

Now as this corner of the industry shrinks and more elderly borrowers fall behind on their payments, big companies are reassessing whether their reverse-mortgage operations are worth the trouble.

[Demeter]

75. Germany's Finances Not as Sound as Believed

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0%2c1518%2c799059%2c00.html

NO KIDDING...WHO'D HAVE THOUGHT IT?

[Demeter]

76. Why France will be forced out of the eurozone

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2011/11/why-france-will-be-forced-out-of-the-eurozone.html

[Demeter]

77. Libertarian Liars: Top Reagan Adviser, Cato Institute Chairman William Niskanen

KOCH BROS. BUDDY, FATHER OF THE AMERICAN DEFICIT...

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/mark-ames-libertarian-liars-top-reagan-adviser-cato-institute-chairman-william-niskanen-%E2%80%9Cdeficits-don%E2%80%99t-matter%E2%80%9D.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

...the recently-deceased William Niskanen, the embodiment of how Reaganomics and the Koch brothers’ libertarian movement were joined at the hip. Niskanen was an advisor to Ronald Reagan throughout the 1970s; a board director for the Koch-founded Reason Foundation; a member and chairman of Reagan’s Council on Economic Advisers from 1981-85; and he moved directly from Reagan’s side back to the Koch brothers’ side, as chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute from 1985 until 2008.

This is a brief story about how the 1% transformed this country into a failing oligarchy, and their useful tools, starting with A-list libertarian economist William Niskanen, Chicago School disciple of Milton Friedman, advocate of the rancid “public choice theory.”...

HISTORY LESSON--BEHIND THE PROPAGANDA

...Now William Niskanen is dead. For all I know, Niskanen may be in Heaven, bouncing on Calvin’s lap. Or maybe–one hopes–he’s dealing with a very Guantanamo-like wrathful god. The only thing we can say for sure is that William Niskanen did everything possible to create a kind of Hell on earth for the 99% of Americans who weren’t as blessed with Koch-funded sinecures as he.

May the bastard writhe in pain.

[Demeter]

78. An Open Letter to the Winter Patriot By Mitch Green

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/an-open-letter-to-the-winter-patriot.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

The following letter reflects my view on the subject of civil disobedience…I offer my opinion as an Army veteran, student of the economy, and critic of an ongoing effort to wage economic war on the vast majority the population. If these words move you, I urge you to consider honestly the consequences if you decide to act.

As the Occupy movement continues to grow in defiance of the heavy-handed police action determined to squelch it, a natural question emerges: What point will the military be summoned to contain the cascade of popular dissent? And if our nation’s finest are brought into this struggle to stand between the vested authority of the state and the ranks of those who petition them for a redress of grievance, what may we expect the outcome to be?

If history is our guide then we know that story all too well. Behind a thin veil of red, white and blue stands a nation that has used its military might to respond forcefully to any public contempt for the very institutions which bind us in exclusion from the liberty those colors evoke. Just as a training collar keeps a dog in check, a highly militarized police force responds mercilessly, sharply, and without hesitation with an array of chemical warfare and thuggish brutality. And where they fail, divisions of soldiers stand ready to deliver a serious and painful lesson to all who demonstrate their unwillingness to wait for democracy.

This has been the history of democracy in America....I call upon my brothers and sisters in the armed forces to ink their pens and help us write these next few, and most important pages in the history of our social life. Soon, it is quite likely that you will be mobilized to aid the police in their effort to contain or disperse what their bosses see as an imminent threat to the sanctity of their authority. As that day draws near, I remind you of these familiar words:

I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

Those that take this oath seriously are faced with a terrible conflict. You must battle internally between the affirmation that you will place your body between the social contract embedded in the Constitution and those that seek its destruction, while maintaining your loyalty to the government you serve and the orders issued by its officers. Sadly, society has placed a twin tax upon you by asking that you sacrifice both your body and your morality. This tax has been levied solely upon you overseas, and soon they’ll come to collect domestically. Your government in its expression of corporate interests relies upon your tenacity to endure, and your relentless willingness to sacrifice. And so you do...Now, more than ever we need your sacrifice. But, I’m asking you to soldier in a different way. If called upon to deny the people of their first amendment right to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievance, disregard the order. Abstain from service. Or if you are so bold, join us. Make no mistake: The consequences for such decisions are severe. You will be prosecuted under the full extent of the law. But sacrifice is your watch word.

Thomas Paine wrote in 1776:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Today we are faced with a new revolution. This time we are fighting to preserve our democracy, rather than to establish a new one. And just as a grateful nation relied upon the Winter Soldier to deliver us from the colonial yoke of oppression, we ask that you aid us in our struggle to be free from the bonds of debt peonage and false representation. In return we will stand in your defense as the elite, who have gained so much from your service, attempt to strip you of your hard won honor.

[Demeter]

79. Former AIG CEO Suing Treasury and Fed Over AIG Bailout

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/former-aig-ceo-suing-treasury-and-fed-over-aig-bailout.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Hubris knows no bounds. AIG’s former CEO Hank Greenberg, who was a significant shareholder of AIG stock via C.W. Starr (which was basically an executive enrichment vehicle) is suing the Treasury and Fed over its rescue of AIG. He has hired litigation heavyweight David Boies, who famously made Microsoft CEO Bill Gates squirm when he put him on the stand in the Microsoft antitrust case.

Based on the report from Gretchen Morgenson, the argument seems to be that AIG got less good terms that Citigroup did, ergo the bailout “discriminated” against AIG.

While the public might similarly enjoy the spectacle of Timothy Geithner, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke through the wringer, and I’m looking forward to reading the actual claim, but this reads like a stretch. The government stepped into a rescue when private sector rescue efforts failed. A team headed by Bob Scully of Morgan Stanley had put together a term sheet and tried raising funds for the floundering insurer, but they could not secure enough money. If my recollection of the Sorkin book Too Big to Fail is correct (I’m on the road and don’t have a copy here), the Fed and Treasury used the same termsheet as the private sector deal (although, as I recall, the amount to be funded also rose as AIG revealed late in the game that it needed an additional $20 billion dollars in addition to its guesstimated $40 billion in CDO losses due to problems in securities lending portfolio). Note also that the AIG CEO came to the government, provided the collateral for the initial loan, and AIG proved to be in worse shape than it initially told the authorities. It’s hard to argue either coercion or unjust enrichment. As we wrote, it was outrageous that the deal was retraded repeatedly, with the terms becoming more favorable each time.

A big issue, per the Sorkin account, was the embarrassingly bad state of AIG’s records. The Wall Street firms involved in the failed rescue were alarmed at was the fact that AIG did not have a good handle at all on its financial exposures....In addition, AIG was known to be in thick with the CIA. Its huge sprawl of offices around the world made it the perfect entity to give employment cover to agents....

...In keeping, I’ve been told AIG was and is DEEPLY insolvent at the subsidiary level from former state insurance regulators. Since you get the money up front and pay out later, insurance is the perfect vehicle for fraud. This is extremely significant, since if true, it means AIG was rotten to the core, not merely insolvent at the parent company level. The alleged problems are in its US property and casualty operations, which have an extraordinary number of cross guarantees, and also make use of the highly suspect “finite reinsurance” with each other...

The intent of this case is clearly to embarrass the officialdom into paying Greenberg to go away quickly. Many of their best defenses cannot be revealed due to their conflict of interest by being a continuing owner of AIG and keen to present the bailout as a success (remember the continuing “paid off the TARP” meme). And Greenberg does have a point in his favor: the way AIG was used as a vehicle to provide funding to other insolvent companies (the now notorious paying off of the Maiden Lane III credit default swaps at par, the payouts on the securities lending portfolio, and the less widely noted way in which entire portfolios of levered credit risks were unwound, purported to provide the big banks with badly needed profits in the first quarter of 2009)...Paulson is interestingly off the hook as the Treasury secretary, since the Treasury secretary was put outside the law in TARP legislation. So I’d assume the Treasury will be able to get itself removed from the case. The Fed will probably seek to have the case sealed. If it succeeds, it might pull out all the dirty laundry on what a mess AIG really is...this is probably an effective extortion game, since senior government officials won’t be keen to spend the time needed to make an adequate defense, or go a few rounds of discovery to let Boies know they would have good case if they went to the mat. After all, one thing Greenberg has observed that the easiest course of action is to roll the taxpayer. He just wants his share.

[Demeter]

80. Examining the big lie: How the facts of the economic crisis stack up Barry Ritholtz

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/examining-the-big-lie-how-the-facts-of-the-economic-crisis-stack-up/2011/11/16/gIQA7G23cN_story.html

The big lie of the financial crisis, of course, is that troubling technique used to try to change the narrative history and shift blame from the bad ideas and terrible policies that created it...Unlike other disciplines, economics looks at actual consequences in terms of real dollars. So let’s follow the money and see what the data reveal about the causes of the collapse. Rather than attend a college-level seminar on the complex philosophy of causation, we’ll keep it simple. To assess how blameworthy any factor is regarding the cause of a subsequent event, consider whether that element was 1) proximate 2) statistically valid 3) necessary and sufficient.

Consider the causes cited by those who’ve taken up the big lie. Take for example New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s statement that it was Congress that forced banks to make ill-advised loans to people who could not afford them and defaulted in large numbers. He and others claim that caused the crisis. Others have suggested these were to blame: the home mortgage interest deduction, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, the 1994 Housing and Urban Development memo, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and homeownership targets set by both the Clinton and Bush administrations.


Here are key things we know based on data. Together, they present a series of tough hurdles for the big lie proponents.

• •The boom and bust was global. Proponents of the Big Lie ignore the worldwide nature of the housing boom and bust. A McKinsey Global Institute report noted “from 2000 through 2007, a remarkable run-up in global home prices occurred.” It is highly unlikely that a simultaneous boom and bust everywhere else in the world was caused by one set of factors (ultra-low rates, securitized AAA-rated subprime, derivatives) but had a different set of causes in the United States. Indeed, this might be the biggest obstacle to pushing the false narrative. How did U.S. regulations against redlining in inner cities also cause a boom in Spain, Ireland and Australia? How can we explain the boom occurring in countries that do not have a tax deduction for mortgage interest or government-sponsored enterprises? And why, after nearly a century of mortgage interest deduction in the United States, did it suddenly cause a crisis?....These questions show why proximity and statistical validity are so important. Let’s get more specific. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 is a favorite boogeyman for some, despite the numbers that so easily disprove it as a cause. It is a statistical invalid argument, as the data show. For example, if the CRA was to blame, the housing boom would have been in CRA regions; it would have made places such as Harlem and South Philly and Compton and inner Washington the primary locales of the run up and collapse. Further, the default rates in these areas should have been worse than other regions. What occurred was the exact opposite: The suburbs boomed and busted and went into foreclosure in much greater numbers than inner cities. The tiny suburbs and exurbs of South Florida and California and Las Vegas and Arizona were the big boomtowns, not the low-income regions. The redlined areas the CRA address missed much of the boom; places that busted had nothing to do with the CRA...
  
  
  
• •Nonbank mortgage underwriting exploded from 2001 to 2007, along with the private label securitization market, which eclipsed Fannie and Freddie during the boom. Check the mortgage origination data: The vast majority of subprime mortgages — the loans at the heart of the global crisis — were underwritten by unregulated private firms. These were lenders who sold the bulk of their mortgages to Wall Street, not to Fannie or Freddie. Indeed, these firms had no deposits, so they were not under the jurisdiction of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp or the Office of Thrift Supervision. The relative market share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dropped from a high of 57 percent of all new mortgage originations in 2003, down to 37 percent as the bubble was developing in 2005-06.
  
  
• •Private lenders not subject to congressional regulations collapsed lending standards. Taking up that extra share were nonbanks selling mortgages elsewhere, not to the GSEs. Conforming mortgages had rules that were less profitable than the newfangled loans. Private securitizers — competitors of Fannie and Freddie — grew from 10 percent of the market in 2002 to nearly 40 percent in 2006. As a percentage of all mortgage-backed securities, private securitization grew from 23 percent in 2003 to 56 percent in 2006...These firms had business models that could be called “Lend-in-order-to-sell-to-Wall-Street-securitizers.” They offered all manner of nontraditional mortgages — the 2/28 adjustable rate mortgages, piggy-back loans, negative amortization loans. These defaulted in huge numbers, far more than the regulated mortgage writers did. Consider a study by McClatchy: It found that more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending. These private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. And McClatchy found that out of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006, only one was subject to the usual mortgage laws and regulations. A 2008 analysis found that the nonbank underwriters made more than 12 million subprime mortgages with a value of nearly $2 trillion. The lenders who made these were exempt from federal regulations. A study by the Federal Reserve shows that more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions. The study found that the government-sponsored enterprises were concerned with the loss of market share to these private lenders — Fannie and Freddie were chasing profits, not trying to meet low-income lending goals.

Beyond the overwhelming data that private lenders made the bulk of the subprime loans to low-income borrowers, we still have the proximate cause issue. If we cannot blame housing policies from the 1930s or mortgage tax deductibility from even before that, then what else can we blame? Mass consumerism? Incessant advertising? The post-World War II suburban automobile culture? MTV’s “Cribs”? Just how attenuated must a factor be before fair-minded people are willing to eliminate it as a prime cause?

I recognize all of the above as merely background noise, the wallpaper of our culture. To blame the housing collapse that began in 2006, a recession dated to December 2007 and a market collapse in 2008-09 on policies of the early 20th century is to blame everything — and nothing.

**********************************************************

Ritholtz is chief executive of FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He is the author of “Bailout Nation” and runs a finance blog, the Big Picture.

[Demeter]

82. Obama Calls On Authorities To Refrain From Violence Against Peaceful Protestors IN EGYPT

http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/obama-calls-on-authorities-to-refrain-from-violence-against-peaceful-protestors/politics/2011/11/19/30468#.TtBCjlYnL5I

MR. PRESIDENT---DON'T CIVIL RIGHTS START AT HOME?

VIDEO AT LINK, IF YOU CAN STAND IT

[Hotler]

100. +100 n/t

[Demeter]

83. Woman Gets Jail For Food-Stamp Fraud; Wall Street Fraudsters Get Bailouts MATT TAIBBI

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/woman-gets-jail-for-food-stamp-fraud-wall-street-fraudsters-get-bailouts-20111117

Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.

Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.

The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate. Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.

He ultimately gave her three years, saying, "The defendant's criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court."

Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street...

[Demeter]

85. Those MF Global MFs!

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/those-mf-global-mfs/

We have a good friend with money tied up in the MF Global debacle.

As of November 1st, he had close to $100K in his “segregated” futures account with no open positions (BR: Not FU money, but real cash nonetheless). He says the MF Global website is shut down and the phones don’t ring when he calls. This guy was a “big swinging Richard” at one of Wall Street’s biggest firms and now trades his own account.

Here is his letter of rebuke to MF Global, which he passed on to us. Can you tell he is a little peeved?

Dear MFGI Correspondence Team:

Since you have been taciturn and uncommunicative – I thought I might lighten the mood, break the ice so to speak.

You do realize that the theft of customer funds is a first. So congratulations, even in the dark days of Hank Paulson and his ummm-how to put this delicately, “… you are all screwed anyway…” policy – none of the Oligarchs had descended to just outright theft. Even Madoff had the class to run a proper Ponzi scheme requiring charisma, finesse and time.

Outright crude theft – well that is indeed a new phase in our culture. It is a progress from infidelity to gang-bang – from the Sublime to the SubSlime. And So, we are now in uncharted waters.

Just for fun, I like to speculate on what the Oligarchs think will happen once they get all the loot and leave the smoldering remains of a once great country – I wonder if they think we are still in a Rudyard Kipling world where the bare-assed natives in Asia and Africa will welcome them as Gods. I bet not many have actually tried to set up a bank account overseas – they will find that no one wants American clients! They will also find that the pittance they looted won’t go too far – maybe a studio apartment on the outskirts of town, a couple of beers and some local hookers – your money is no good here etc etc. Most of all they will be aliens – have to line up to get temporary visitor visas etc

And until they are able to give up their US citizenship – which would be unwise until some other country grants them citizenship on a refugee or other basis – they will have to file US tax returns and report their earnings from all their world wide sources.

In short – if the Oligarchs think they are going to flee to a life of opulence , they will be bitterly disappointed. But they will unfortunately probably have to flee in any event – take your malaria pills along.

[Demeter]

86. What Could Top That Last Post?

Nothing that I can find.

Goodnight, all! Tomorrow we start over...with a topic TBD.

(this is an urgent plea for HELP!)HELP!

Demeter

[bread_and_roses]

89. too late to R - but at least a late K ...

lots of good reading here, thanks!

[Demeter]

90. I'm going to be AWOL Saturday

but that shouldn't stop anyone from posting....

[Demeter]

91. Another terrible day for Europe: Can Europe survive another day like yesterday?

http://ukhousebubble.blogspot.com/2011/11/another-terrible-day-for-europe.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheUkHousingBubble+%28The+UK+Housing+Bubble%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

[Demeter]

92. EU staff threaten strike action over belt-tightening

http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/labour-strike.dl2

[Demeter]

93. Chart of the Day: Euro probability (FAILURE)

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2011/11/chart-of-the-day-euro-probability/?utm_source=Media+List&utm_campaign=ae3fab70c7-RSS_DAILY_MAILCHIMP_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

[Demeter]

94. Eurocarnage Continues

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/eurocarnage-continues.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Reader Antifa had noted in comments that the IMF had expanded access on Thursday to borrowing facilities via a Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL), which would allow “responsible” borrowers to take down five or perhaps as much as ten times their normal allotment. But I don’t agree with his/her hopeful view that this meant the IMF was acting as lender of last resort. Only the ECB, an issuer of euros, can play that role. The IMF gets its budget from member nations, and my understanding in the US is that it comes from the Treasury, not the Fed, which means it is a budgetary item. New spending allocations, particularly to ‘furriners, are not likely to get much traction. China was already approached directly (for the EFSF) and was notably cool on the idea. Why would it lend indirectly, via the IMF, when it and other emerging economies are already unhappy that their voting share is out of line with their economic power? The BRICs have made it clear they want more voting rights as a condition to making bigger contributions. So I don’t see the IMF as an effective force, in general, and even on a stopgap basis given it certain to be insufficient firepower....

[Demeter]

97. Banks Build Contingency for Breakup of the Euro

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/business/global/banks-fear-breakup-of-the-euro-zone.html?_r=1&hp

For the growing chorus of observers who fear that a breakup of the euro zone might be at hand, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has a pointed rebuke: It’s never going to happen.

But some banks are no longer so sure, especially as the sovereign debt crisis threatened to ensnare Germany itself this week, when investors began to question the nation’s stature as Europe’s main pillar of stability.

On Friday, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Belgium’s credit standing to AA from AA+, saying it might not be able to cut its towering debt load any time soon. Ratings agencies this week cautioned that France could lose its AAA rating if the crisis grew. On Thursday, agencies lowered the ratings of Portugal and Hungary to junk.

While European leaders still say there is no need to draw up a Plan B, some of the world’s biggest banks, and their supervisors, are doing just that.

[Demeter]

95. Stocks: Worst Thanksgiving-Week Drop Since ’32

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-25/u-s-stock-futures-decline-as-s-p-500-index-is-poised-for-seven-day-slump.html

[Demeter]

96. Oregonian Buries Lede in Police Overtime Article: Officers are Unnecessary for #Occupiers’ Peaceful

Oregonian Buries Lede in Police Overtime Article: Officers are Unnecessary for #Occupiers’ Peaceful Assembly

http://my.firedoglake.com/teddysanfran/2011/11/25/oregonian-buries-lede-in-police-overtime-article-officers-are-unnecessary-for-occupiers-peaceful-assembly/

Thursday’s Oregonian attempted to answer the “how much is #Occupy costing us, anyway?” question for Portland taxpayers, focusing on Police Bureau overtime. I’m sure we’ll see Parks Department estimates on repair and reseeding and replanting the park campgrounds very shortly as well. For now, though, the paper provides some numbers about sworn officer presence on Mayor Sam Adams’ “Outta the Park!” wee hours street-fair and compares last year’s under-budget overtime expenditure with this half-years’ slightly high usage:

The city budgeted $7.77 million for police overtime in the 2011-12 fiscal year. As of the bureau’s last pay period ending Nov. 9 it has spent more than $3.5 million, Del Gizzi said.

But that figure doesn’t include the full $1.29 million in estimated overtime costs for policing the Occupy Portland movement, covering the bureau’s early planning days Oct. 1 through Monday.

Of course, those overtime expenses were necessary given the scary and unpredictable #Occupation the Portland Police Bureau was faced with, right? For an objective viewpoint, the reporter seeks out Mayoral ex-candidate, Police Chief Mike Reese, to justify his force’s huge overtime presence:

On the following Monday, Police Chief Mike Reese defended the police deployment. “In terms of keeping the peace, it was appropriate, and I don’t know how you put a dollar amount on that,” he said.

Next, though, we learn that a demonstration and march with no police presence turned out to require none after all (my bold):

The high costs stand in stark contrast to last weekend, when the bureau didn’t incur overtime as it changed course and decided not to provide police coverage for Occupy Portland’s march for universal health care, which remained peaceful.

So, the dollar amount Chief Reese can put on police overtime required to keep the peace when #Occupiers peaceably assemble to petition our government for redress of legitimate health care grievances is… ZERO. That makes #OccupyPortland’s point about Mayor Sam’s Deadline Countdown Party without really trying:

Occupy Portland protesters have said the massive police presence was unnecessary and a result of poor police management.

This round, like so many in Portland’s #Occupy debate, goes to the #Occupiers. The police presence, with its skyrocketing “associated overtime” costs, appears to be an entirely self-inflicted wound to the city’s coffers.

When there’s no police presence, marches are peaceful. And city payroll costs can be contained. There’s a lesson here; will Portland civic leaders learn it?

[Demeter]

98. Ex-FBI Chief Named Trustee In MF Global Bankruptcy

IT'S FREEH, THE FASCIST FIXER--HOW IS HE GOING TO DO PENN STATE AND MFGLOBAL AT THE SAME TIME?

http://www.npr.org/2011/11/25/142785325/ex-fbi-chief-named-trustee-in-mf-global-bankruptcy?ft=1&f=1001

Former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has been tapped to be the trustee for MF Global's Chapter 11 bankruptcy case. The U.S. Trustee for the New York region requested court approval for the appointment, according to documents filed Friday.

MF Global and a committee of its creditors asked the court on Monday for permission to name a trustee so that the company can get a binding commitment for financing while it is in bankruptcy and help it recover any funds left over after its customers are paid back. U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Martin Glenn in New York granted the motion the next day and ordered U.S. Trustee Tracy Hope Davis to appoint a trustee for the case. Davis selected Freeh, a former federal judge who served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1993 through 2001. Freeh is now chairman of Freeh Group International Solutions LLC, a global risk-management firm.

Freeh was tapped this week to lead Penn State's internal investigation of a child sex abuse scandal.

In the MF Global case, Freeh must obtain a bond of no less than $26 million as part of his appointment, according to a separate court filing on Friday...Freeh would be charged with reorganizing or liquidating MF Global's assets for the benefit of the company's estates, creditors and other stakeholders.

[Demeter]

99. HE'S NOT THE FIRST TRUSTEE, EITHER

Another court-appointed trustee overseeing MF Global's bankruptcy said Monday that up to $1.2 billion is missing from customer accounts, double what the firm had reported to regulators last month.

That trustee, James Giddens, also said that after he releases about $520 million from accounts that have been frozen nearly all the assets under his control will be distributed.

Giddens previously returned to customers $1.5 billion in collateral for their trading accounts with MF Global. He has a goal of eventually returning 100 percent of all funds to customers, though that could be reduced by the apparent shortfall.

Customers use the accounts for trading derivatives. The value of derivatives is based on the value of an underlying asset, such as interest rates, oil prices or currency rates. MF Global was one of the biggest players in the derivatives market.

[DemReadingDU]

102. Both need stuff to stay covered up

:shrug:

edit
or
To ensure some things don't get uncovered?

[Hotler]

113. This made my think about another fixer....

James Baker III, I asked myself why haven't we seen or heard from him, then I remembered that he only fixes the BFEE stuff.

[DemReadingDU]

101. Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns

11/26/11 Britain's Foreign Office Prepares For Riots In Europe; Sees Euro Collapse "When, Not If"
As every major developed economy hits Bass's Keynesian Endgame, the status quo is set to change dramatically. Nowhere is this climax playing out louder than in Europe and the implicit solution of Germany-uber-alles (while seemingly inevitable though nevertheless lengthy in execution) is likely to not sit well with many of the EMU nations. To wit, The Telegraph today reports that Britain's Foreign Office is advising its overseas embassies to draw up plans to help expats should the collapse of the Euro turn explosive. Almost incredibly, a senior minister has revealed that Britain is now planning on the basis that a euro collapse is matter of time.
more...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/britains-foreign-office-prepares-riots-europe-sees-euro-collapse-when-not-if


11/26/11 Prepare for riots in euro collapse, Foreign Office warns
British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain.
As the Italian government struggled to borrow and Spain considered seeking an international bail-out, British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible. Diplomats are preparing to help Britons abroad through a banking collapse and even riots arising from the debt crisis. The Treasury confirmed earlier this month that contingency planning for a collapse is now under way.
more...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8917077/Prepare-for-riots-in-euro-collapse-Foreign-Office-warns.html

[CatholicEdHead]

103. It really is hitting the fan

Some nondescript Russian site is saying the Euro is gone by Christmas.

[Demeter]

104. Whatever would we have to talk about, if so?

I could use the rest, and the world could use the energy freed up to take down the banksters.

[DemReadingDU]

107. I doubt by Christmas

It took years to get those countries to get on-board with the Euro. I just don't see how how any country could simply transfer back to their previous currency in a few weeks. Besides, they would need to be creating stacks of their own currency in anticipation of the transfer. The only country that is rumored to be doing that is Germany. And that is only a rumor.

With all that being said, I do agree the Euro is toast, and each country eventually will go back to having their own currency. But, IMO, that will take months and months, if not years, to eliminate the Euro.

[Demeter]

105. Hope You All Are Enjoying the Holiday Weekend

I spent 2 hours exorcising the refrigerator this morning. It took half a bottle of wine to get me though. Now all the foul demons and evil spirits are gone! I can find things, and cook again.

And then my friend and I went to the Nutcracker matinee. The Kid wouldn't go--ballet isn't her thing. This was the first slap-stick version of the holiday classic I've ever seen. The pratfalls were flying right and left.

This troupe from Ohio was very athletic, and the choreography was adjusted for it, into high gear. They did a few things with the original moves, like the Grand Pas de Deux. The partnering was superb, although several of the lifts looked like they had been stolen from ice dancing. The child dancers were adorable, and did their own pratfalls, somersaults, cartwheels, flips, round=offs, one and no hand flips, splits, etc. I felt like the Olympics had snuck in.

The costuming and sets were colorful and well=suited. The orchestra was barely adequate. The weather was a balmy 58F.

Now it's time to think papers. And it is of course raining.

Tomorrow is the condo Thanksgiving Dinner. I'll try to add a few posts, but don't expect miracles.

[xchrom]

108. your holiday weekend sounds lovely -- have fun a with the

condo thanksgiving feast! i'll be thinking about you today!

mine is very peaceful -- interrupted by yelling at the dogs.

[xchrom]

109. Hungary’s bitter reunion with the IMF

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1215531-hungary-s-bitter-reunion-imf

Let’s not try to make it look pretty, there’s no point: the fact that we have resumed negotiations with the IMF amounts to a surrender.

There is no other way of describing what has happened, because last summer we called our separation from this organisation the “war of independence” . The surrender is bad news, and a humiliation for those who are fighting for independence.

At the same time, it is particularly infuriating to see how market players acted in a coordinated manner to push the country down this road. Even more strange, the market hysteria based on groundless and far-fetched rumours, which in all likelihood were deliberately disseminated, was amplified by the arrival of the IMF delegation.

In the wake of several months of calm, we have become the new epicentre, as one Wall Street Journal blogger put it, of the crisis that is traversing the Union. While one Bloomberg employee gleefully announced we were going down the drain, two ratings agencies moved to threaten our status and the forint-euro exchange rate sank to a historic low.

[xchrom]

110. My neighbour, the Prime Minister {portugal}

http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/1181181-my-neighbour-prime-minister

If Pedro Passos Coelho were to leave his building by the main entrance (and not via the discreet garage exit to the rear, which he has been using since he became Prime Minister), he would see the real impact of the crisis in the street where he lives in Massamá. The country is angry.

So too are most of the local residents – on the day when a new tax on holiday and Christmas bonuses was announced, some of the locals turned up outside the home of their illustrious neighbour to shout insults.

Just opposite, a hair salon and a restaurant at number 27 Rua da Milharada have closed down. The restaurant, which was unable to attract enough customers, had already changed hands three times over the last two years.

And on this traffic artery bordered by high buildings that look like they might have been made of Lego, so typical of suburban Lisbon, you only have to drop in on some of the local traders to see the scale of the crisis that is threatening the entire street.

[bread_and_roses]

111. Interesting article

- more examples of what "austerity" means. It's not just eating your peas, in the words of our Quisling President.

And isn't this a telling quote?

“He has to obey orders from the troika or the country will go under,” explains the military reserve force lieutenant-colonel

And just who elected them, we ask?

edit because - no doubt due to some mysterious HTML reason (it's in brackets in the original) - the quote leaves out who the "Troika" is: the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission

[xchrom]

112. +1

[xchrom]

114. Italy debt 'problem' would hit heart of eurozone: France

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/italy-debt-problem-would-hit-heart-of-eurozone-france/articleshow/10896047.cms

PARIS: France warned Sunday that any problem with heavily-indebted Italy would affect the very heart of the eurozone. The statement from President Nicolas Sarkozy's office came as an Italian newspaper reported that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) could bail out Italy with up to 600 billion euros ($794 billion).

"If there is an Italian problem, then it is the heart of the eurozone that is hit," the statement said. "It is up to Italy to do what it has undertaken to do."

Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have said a debt collapse in Italy would be "the end of the euro," Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti's press office said Friday.

At a mini-summit with Monti in Strasbourg on Thursday, Merkel and Sarkozy "said they were aware that a collapse of Italy would inevitably be the end of the euro," it said in a statement.

[Demeter]

115. Goldman Sachs Has Taken Over By paul craig roberts

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Goldman-Sachs-Has-Taken-Ov-by-paul-craig-roberts-111125-820.html

...Strange, isn't it. Italy, the largest EU country that requires a bailout of its debt, can still sell its bonds, but Germany, which requires no bailout and which is expected to bear a disproportionate cost of Italy's, Greece's and Spain's bailout, could not sell its bonds.

In my opinion, the failed German bond auction was orchestrated by the US Treasury, by the European Central Bank and EU authorities, and by the private banks that own the troubled sovereign debt.

My opinion is based on the following facts. Goldman Sachs and US banks have guaranteed perhaps one trillion dollars or more of European sovereign debt by selling swaps or insurance against which they have not reserved. The fees the US banks received for guaranteeing the values of European sovereign debt instruments simply went into profits and executive bonuses. This, of course, is what ruined the American insurance giant, AIG, leading to the TARP bailout at US taxpayer expense and Goldman Sachs' enormous profits.

If any of the European sovereign debt fails, US financial institutions that issued swaps or unfunded guarantees against the debt are on the hook for large sums that they do not have. The reputation of the US financial system probably could not survive its default on the swaps it has issued. Therefore, the failure of European sovereign debt would renew the financial crisis in the US, requiring a new round of bailouts and/or a new round of Federal Reserve "quantitative easing," that is, the printing of money in order to make good on irresponsible financial instruments, the issue of which enriched a tiny number of executives...