Category: Economy

  Fraud traditionally occurs behind closed doors. The larger the fraud, the more chances of its existence leaking out to the public. Only after the scheme has blown up does the media report it.

   Fraud has a short lifespan once it is subject to the harsh rays of sunlight. It is only a matter of time before the lies on which it is built come crumbling down.

 Last week a massive case of fraud was exposed to the light, but because it hasn’t imploded yet the mainstream news media isn’t reporting it. In fact, the media seems to want to ignore the facts.

  Why? Not because they question the facts, but simply because of the subject of the fraud – precious metals.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

Hypocrisy

Dave Granlund, Politicalcartoons.com, Buy this cartoon

  The critics of Health Care Reform have a point – its expensive. At least $940 Billion worth of expensive over a 10 year period, maybe more. Sure, almost all of it is off-set by taxes and fees.

  But what if I was to tell you that I knew of a way to pay for it, and more, without raising taxes or making any cuts at all?

 It sounds too good to be true, right?

And yet its still true. The trick is hidden in a GAO report from three weeks ago that didn’t get any media attention.

 Improper Payments: Federal entities reported estimates of improper payment amounts that totaled $98.7 billion for fiscal year 2009, which represented about 5 percent of $1.9 trillion of reported outlays for the related programs.

That’s nearly $100 Billion in payments that should not have been made, and $26.2 Billion more than last year. Or to put it another way, that’s more than one year of the cost of health care reform right there.

[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.

The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

The sorcerer’s description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.

When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.

In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.

The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.

After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.

The Teachings of Don Juan

by Carlos Castaneda

  Mark Twain once said, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

I wonder what Twain would think if he looked around America today?

 When unemployment rates hit crisis levels during the early 1930’s, the unemployed took to the streets and demanded relief aid from the government.

 Today the unemployed are again taking to the streets, but their demands are somewhat different.

 At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.

  The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less – though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.

Crossposted at Daily Kos

THE WEEK IN EDITORIAL CARTOONS

This weekly diary takes a look at the past week’s important news stories from the perspective of our leading editorial cartoonists (including a few foreign ones) with analysis and commentary added in by me.

When evaluating a cartoon, ask yourself these questions:

1. Does a cartoon add to my existing knowledge base and help crystallize my thinking about the issue depicted?

2. Does the cartoonist have any obvious biases that distort reality?

3. Is the cartoonist reflecting prevailing public opinion or trying to shape it?

The answers will help determine the effectiveness of the cartoonist’s message.

:: ::

David Fitzsimmons, Arizona Daily Star, Buy this cartoon

  When a government plans to do something unpopular, they try to hide it.

For instance, when the Democrats decided last month to renew the draconian Patriot Act, they hid it in a medicare reform bill. They originally tried to hide it in a Pentagon funding bill.

  It turned out to be a very successful strategy because it was almost totally ignored by the major media. In fact, it was so successful that last week Congress slipped in what might be the most ominous law of the year.

By Stacy Sanders, the Director of the Elder Economic Security Initiative, WOW

This week, with health care reform passed, the New York Times speculated that Social Security, “the other big entitlement program,” would be the next big program to “tackle,” specifically within the context of reducing the nation’s debt. Reports followed that suggest the program is in crisis, despite the fact that predictions show Social Security can pay benefits in full until 2037.

With thirty years to attend to the program’s ability to pay benefits, there’s little evidence to suggest that Social Security is in trouble. On the contrary, there is real data that shows its beneficiaries, particularly older women, are in crisis. Though never intended to be the only source of income in retirement, many find themselves solely reliant upon Social Security as they age. In fact, Social Security provides more than 90 percent of income to three out of ten retired elders. And, due to time spent out of the workforce for caregiving and lower lifetime wages, women are even more dependent on Social Security.

Last year, the average annual Social Security payment was only $11,316 for an older woman. According to the Elder Economic Security Standard™ Index (Elder Index), a new measure of what it costs to age in place, a single elder who rents needs $20,248 to make ends meet, almost twice the average annual Social Security payment for women. Developed by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW) and the Gerontology Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the Elder Index is a bare-bones measure of basic needs in retirement.

The data shows that, for older women, Social Security provides a life line. It offers a secure, reliable and necessary income base in retirement. But, those who rely only on Social Security must make difficult sacrifices – such as choosing between groceries and essential medications or going without heat.

As Congress and the Administration take up the nation’s deficit, they ought to consider the real, day-to-day crisis of our nation’s older women. Doing so means making responsible choices to safeguard and strengthen Social Security benefits while addressing its long-term stability.

Cross posted from the National Elder Economic Security Initiative

  There is no stopping it this time.

Last month Senator Jim Bunning created a stir with his stand against extending unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed through borrowing. After a lot of political grandstanding, it ended after a couple days when both sides agreed to a temporary 30-day extension.

 The 30-days are almost over and nothing has been accomplished. D-Day is approaching for the unlucky millions of long-term unemployed.

 As many as 130,000 Californians are expected to exhaust their unemployment benefits within the next three weeks, based on estimates from the state Employment Development Department. About 3,300 already have fallen off the unemployment rolls.

 That’s 130,000 in just one state. The effects over the entire country will be catastrophic.

  Most people are under the false assumption that the taxpayer bailout of Wall Street banks began and ended with TARP. They couldn’t be more wrong.

  The Wall Street bank bailout began with Federal Reserve subsidies in December 2007, and has continued in one form or another right up to now.

 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is nearing a deal that would allow it to benefit from a tax refund of as much as $1.4 billion, becoming the latest company to tap a little-noticed plank in an economic stimulus bill.

  That law let companies apply losses from 2008 or 2009 against taxes paid in the previous five years, instead of the previous two years.

  While the Senate and House have debated the health care reform endlessly, fighting tooth and nail at every step, all the while being broadcast on network television, the financial reform bill is quietly moving along under the radar. On the same day that Senator Dodd proposed his sweeping reform bill, it passed committee.

 “The bill that finally passes on the floor will be a much more business-friendly bill,” Miller said today. “They won’t get a bill done until Dodd and Shelby agree on the compromise, but Republicans do want to get a bill done this year. So there’s incentive for both sides to come to agreement.”

 The fact that the bill is going to be watered down even more is a sad statement to an on-going tragedy.

If you were glued to the reports on the Health Care debate and vote last night and didn’t switch over to 60min you might want to listen to Andy.

He hits a number of true buttons in this short take, especially as one looks at the job openings, most are for paper pushers, and not a whole hell of alot of those, not for those who actually do the work that keeps those pushing papers or working in their cubes on their computers!