I think a defining moment of the Tea Party movement happened when Glen Beck decided to take on Teddy Roosevelt. The quote that Beck focused on for his wrath was this: “We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.”

 In Beck’s eyes, and in the eyes of the Tea Party followers, T.R. was speaking about some sort of “socialist utopia”. Apparently real men defend wealth that is dishonorably obtained and then wasted. It’s sort of like defending the right to commit evil. It’s really a hard sell for anyone outside of the cult.

  I don’t use the term cult lightly. The demonization of the word “socialism” (plus the obvious lack of understanding of what the word actually means) and the strict adherence to all things “free market”, not to mention the hyper-patriotic war-mongering, is a throw-back to the Cult of Reagan.

 These people are still fighting the Cold War. This also explains the average age of Tea Party members.

  How much is a life worth? How much would it cost you to run over someone with a car and leave them for dead?

 It’s not a question you will ever have to answer, unless you are very wealthy.

 Martin Joel Erzinger, who manages more than $1 billion in assets for Morgan Stanley in Denver, is being accused only of a misdemeanor for allegedly driving his Mercedes into a cyclist and then fleeing the scene, Colorado’s Vail Daily reports. The victim, Dr. Steven Milo, whom Erzinger allegedly hit in July, suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and, according to his lawyer Harold Haddon, “lifetime pain.”

  But District Attorney Mark Hurlbert says it wouldn’t be wise to prosecute Erzinger — doing so might hurt his source of income.

 Lord knows we don’t want to endanger the critical job of managing wealth for the uber-wealthy.

  The unemployment rate in Indiana is 9.9%, more than 4% less than states such as Nevada. Yet Indiana can see trouble coming in the form of desperate people.

 Armed security guards will be on hand at 36 unemployment offices around Indiana in what state officials said is a step to improve safety and make branch security more consistent…

  Lotter said the agency is merely being cautious with the approach of an early-December deadline when thousands of Indiana residents could see their unemployment benefits end after exhausting the maximum 99 weeks provided through multiple federal extension periods.

  “Given the upcoming expiration of the federal extensions and the increased stress on some of the unemployed, we thought added security would provide an extra level of protection for our employees and clients,” he said.

Desperate people do desperate things. What would you do if you couldn’t afford to put a roof over the heads of your family? What would you do if you couldn’t afford to feed yourself?

The story isn’t 100% accurate because starting December people who have collected just 26 weeks of unemployment can become a “99er”.

  Republicans have made themselves clear: no compromises.

  The GOP has plans that include cutting taxes while stimulating the economy.

 At least that is what they intend to do as long as reality doesn’t get in their way. Let’s face it: reality has not been a problem for the lion’s share of the Republican base. In their minds Obama is a muslim, and a socialist, who wasn’t born in America. And that’s just for starters, facts be damned.

 The thing is that most of America isn’t part of the Republican base. Most of America still lives in the real world. When things get tough that percentage is likely to grow because reality gets harder to ignore.

  That’s bad news for Republicans. There are several events building that are going to rain on their victory parade.

  Rep. Damon Silvers, a member of the independent Congressional Oversight Panel, asked what is probably the most important question facing America today.

 We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.

 Which should we do?

 The question doesn’t sound all that ominous, but it is. In essence we must chose between protecting the TooBigToFail Wall Street banks, or the rule of law.

 That may sound overly dramatic, and I wouldn’t blame you if that was your initial reaction, but surprisingly the choice really is that simple.

  Eighteen months ago William Black was interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS. The subject of the interview was fraud.

WILLIAM K. BLACK – when we look at these liar’s loans, we find 90 percent fraud. 90 percent. And we find that most of the frauds are not induced by the borrower, but they’re overwhelmingly done by the loan brokers.

…

No real questions asked. Certainly no answers checked. In fact, we just had hearings last week about WaMu, which is also a huge player in these frauds. Washington Mutual, which used to make, run all those ads making fun of bankers who, because they were stuffy and looked at loan quality before they made a loan. Well, WaMu didn’t do any of that stuff. And of course, WaMu had just massive failures. And who got in trouble at WaMu? Who got in trouble at Lehman? You got in trouble if you told the truth. They fired the people who found the problems. They promoted the people that caused the problem, and they gave them massive bonuses.

 It wasn’t just low-level employees. Matthew Lee, vice-president of Lehman Brothers, was fired without advanced notice for trying to expose the fraud in his company. It’s what Black refers to as “control fraud”.

 This was all known in the months after the 2008 collapse, yet there hasn’t been a single, solitary executive sent to jail for causing this disaster. So why should anyone be surprised that the fraud on Wall Street has continued to get worse?

  The news media and the political blogs are enraptured with handicapping the political races. No one has time to worry about real issues anymore. This is the silly season, when immigrant nannies and comments from comedians become “important”. When shady television hucksters are inexplicably taken seriously and hold huge political rallies.

 Yet the real world, the one that operates on tangible things that make an actual difference in our lives, keeps chugging along.

  While all of you were busy obsessing about political trivialities, the governments of the world were entering a global trade war. This development entered a scary stage yesterday when Brazil decided not to attend the coming G20 summit.

 However, that was nothing compared to China’s latest move.

 China, which has been blocking shipments of crucial minerals to Japan for the last month, has now quietly halted shipments of some of those same materials to the United States and Europe, three industry officials said on Tuesday.

  “The embargo is expanding” beyond Japan, said one of the three rare earth industry officials, all of whom insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Chinese authorities. They said Chinese customs officials imposed the broader shipment restrictions Monday morning, hours after a top Chinese official had summoned international news media Sunday night to denounce United States trade actions.

  China mines 95 percent of the world’s rare earth elements, which have broad commercial and military applications, and are vital to the manufacture of diverse products including large wind turbines and guided missiles. Any curtailment of Chinese supplies of rare earths is likely to be greeted with alarm in Western capitals, particularly because Western companies are believed to keep much smaller stockpiles of rare earths than Japanese companies do.

 American officials had announced on Friday to investigate if China was violating trade laws by subsidizing their clean energy industry. China responded on Sunday with the statement that Washington “cannot win this trade fight.”

 The war of words ended today. The trade war is on.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

 – Karl Marx

 The world’s leaders gathered in Washington last weekend to try to address the global imbalances that continue to weight on the economies of the world. It didn’t go well.

 The IMF meeting, meant to lay the foundation for some greater co-operation on the co-ordination of national economic policies, instead ended in mutual recrimination. And that has made it harder to reach agreement at the gathering in Seoul next month of the Group of 20 industrialised and developing nations.

 The heart of the disagreement is the “international currency war”, as Guido Mantega, the Brazilian finance minister, called it three weeks ago. The media has focused on the verbal spat between America and China, but the beggar thy neighbor policies are being waged by dozens of nations around the world.

 What I find surprising is that so far the media has failed to recognize how familiar this scenario is.

  The recent unemployment report was a disaster. Another 95,000 jobs vanished, 18,000 jobs after you subtract census workers.

 However, the story doesn’t end there. Like most months, the MSM mostly ignored past revisions, or even tried to spin them as something positive.

 As part of the employment report, the BLS released the preliminary annual benchmark revision of minus 366,000 payroll jobs.

 Disappearing hundreds of thousands of jobs has become a yearly tradition at the Bureau Labor Statistics. Last year the BLS wiped away 902,000 previously reported jobs, another 89,000 jobs in 2008, and another 293,000 jobs in 2007.

 All told the BLS has erased 1.65 million reported jobs in the last four years.

That’s more than twice the number of jobs the Obama Administration claims were created this year.

 What we’ve seen consistently through this entire Depression is the government reporting employment numbers that often come in higher than feared, only to revise them drastically down weeks or months later when no one is looking.

  A generation ago Lyndon Johnson’s secret CIA war in Laos caused liberals to take to the streets in justified moral outrage. That morality, idealism, and liberal values have been replaced by bland pragmatism that threatens to allow another military and political catastrophe.

  The standoff began three days ago when a pair of Apache helicopters attacked a border post inside Pakistan, killing three soldiers.

 But a change of direction may ultimately place a great strain on relations with Pakistan and prove counterproductive, according to retired general Talat Masood.

  “These attacks are very serious for Pakistan. It goes to show [coalition forces] are expanding their zone of conflict and violating Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty,” he says.

  “This war against militants is not just a question of using force – you have to get the whole country to support you. You should not alienate the people in such a way which can be very harmful,” he says, adding that such strikes have the power to “destabilize” Pakistan.

 The lesson from the wars in south-east Asia was that bombing unstable countries has unintended and disastrous consequences. It appears we are determined to learn that lesson all over again.

  The new weekly unemployment numbers came out Thursday, and on the surface they didn’t look bad. Initial claims, continuing claims, and extended benefits were all down.

 It looks like a win-win…until you start thinking about it.

   Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega spilled the beans on Monday when he committed the cardinal sin of telling the truth.

 “We’re in the midst of an international currency war,” Mr. Mantega said. “This threatens us because it takes away our competitiveness.”

  “The advanced countries are seeking to devalue their currencies,” he said, mentioning the United States, Europe and Japan in the context of what he portrayed as an intensifying trade competition.

 All over the world nations are in a race to the bottom with their currencies. The objective is to gain trade advantage over competitors. In other words this is a global trade war, one that is being done by destroying people’s savings.

  In all, about 2/3rd of the global economy is in the process of debasing their currencies. Nothing has happened like this since the 1930s.

 It’s a return to global beggar thy neighbor economic policy that proved so hopelessly flawed in the Great Depression.