-Libertarian Republican
-Bush did not second guess the Fed, and Alan appreciates that.
-Republicans are at fault for fiscal imbalances.
-Bush should have veto'ed various bills.
-Iraq couldn't have happened unless there was oil there b/c Saddam was then able to accumulate wealth and he theorizes that Saddam was able to conquer the oil fields of neighbors. (This is funny because basically Saddam was neutered in prior war under Bush I.)
-We didn't invade Iraq for the oil (even though the oil lobby was active all over the Bush administration during his time during the war). For fuck sake, Cheney was the CEO of an oil company. He orchestrated the Iraq war, apparently, and for good reason: Oil.
-Market economies don't happen if you remove central planning. (Market economies don't happen if you have them either. All this bail-out and stimulus IS being centrally planned!)
-Greenspan was interested in creating a Central Bank in Iraq no matter what kind of fraud appeared. (Greenspan's theory is that markets will take care of fraud. Madoff and Iraq shows that fraud can still prosper. Once the money leaves the Fed, what happens doesn't really matter. They stole the value already.)

(break)

-Greenspan calls Krugman a historical revisionist. He _has_ been consistent on tax cut policy. It is dependent upon a budget surplus.
-Privatize Social Security! because retirement income from Social Security will be much smaller. The private sector retirement income will increasingly grow. "Private Savings or working or whatever" (Awesome. Social Security has a surplus of $2.5 trillion today and will pay out 100% until 2037. After this, it will pay out 75%. But Republican spent it. Cenk Uyger got them to admit it, lol.)
-"Ideology is not what I hold. I try to learn what are the facts and I let my opinions judged on the facts not by some pre-conception, which is what ideology means." ROFL. This is what nearly every economist says, only, they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated into Keynesian economics that these people cannot question the planks of Keynesianism.
-The Housing Bubble is global and thus it MUST be global forces created the bubble. (Alan, the housing bubble came, in part, from you. You are that global force.) We should keep the sub-prime market. (Despite the known toxicity)
-We tried to get the interest rates up but failed
-Populism - a short term feel-good policy but no long term growth comes from economic populism. Greenspan is against populism.
-When Alan joined the Fed in the Reagan Administration, CEOs made 40x the workers. When he left it was 400x. Isn't this in part a cause of the rise of populism.
-Skilled labor is under extraordinary demand. Our schools are failing so we don't have the labor supply of technical jobs. (Um, does this make sense to you? It doesn't make any sense to me. I thought this was, in part, due to Republicans tax cuts for the rich as a solution for EVERYTHING and Trickle Up Reaganomics)
-He thinks the USA is still in a capitalist system. Capitalism has made more economic wealth in the last 7-8 years around the world using a market based policies (um, does this mean policies are for sale?) (Implementing capitalism in America would mean not having the Federal Reserve, no more bail-outs, nr stimulus, no political speech for corporations, no corporate lobbying, etc. The monetary/government system, as it stands today, is called Fascism: the merging of government and corporations.)
-Definition of Crony Capitalism: 44:45 by Alan Greenspan. All systems have some level of crony capitalism but the question is if it's the dominate force. We need our crony Capitalism because the government doesn't do what the contractors do (like make stuff)

Greenspan needs to stop drinking his own piss kool-aid.

He explains why the CPI was created, how it's being twisted today, and possible reasons why. The CPI also excludes housing, food, and energy. Wages aren't keeping up with the manipulated inflation numbers let alone keeping up with real inflation.

This is an ongoing downturn. There is nothing on the horizon to fix the systemic problems. It's been a recession since Q1 2007. We have not had any recovery. Payrolls are flat or negative. Past numbers will be revised away in the future.

Unemployment is skewed by the definition of "unemployed."

The economy hasn't grown any since 2000 but a massive amount of debt/money/debt-money has been created.

June, the trade deficit widened sharply to $49.9 billion, up 18% from May's $42.0 billion level, on a surge of imports of a widespread number of goods.

The result has a profound effect on the growth outlook because it led the government to slice its estimate for second quarter gross domestic product by 3.4 percentage points, the largest negative contribution from trade since 1947.

The June report seemed to ask more questions than it answered. For one thing, the surge in imports didn't square with the sense that the economy had hit a soft patch and consumers were reluctant to spend money.

Another puzzle was that the imports didn't seem to show up anywhere. At least they were not where they would typically be found: either in inventory data if they ended up on store shelves, or in the sales reports.

In other words, imports, like a missing sock between the washer and the dryer, have simply disappeared.

Have imports ever disappeared like this before?

We aren't just importing things that disappear. We are exporting inflation. Why does the MSM never mention that? We continue to trade nothing for something and the world goes along. Some day, the world will realize the ponzi scheme that is the Federal Reserve Note and stop doing business with us. There is a higher risk of war when this happens.

Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, was giving what was billed as her "valedictory" before she returns to teach at Berkeley, and she used the swan song to establish four points, each more unnerving than the last:

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be. She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad. The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things.

What she did have was a binder full of scary descriptions and warnings, offered with a perma-smile and singsong delivery: "Terrible recession. . . . Incredibly searing. . . . Dramatically below trend. . . . Suffering terribly. . . . Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . . Economic nightmare."

Anybody want dessert?

If this is who is running our country, we should be really, really scared.

She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be
The economic collapse will be really bad... possibly ending like the Weimar Republic because the system is designed to fail, utterly. It's only a matter of time before the props are seen for what they are.

The exponential is exponential

She still doesn't understand exactly why it was so bad
This is easy. The US monetary system is a ponzi scheme and the value is being called upon at a time when we need it but the banking system has stolen.

The response to the collapse was inadequate. And she doesn't have much of an idea about how to fix things.
Correct and, wow, she's an idiot. Anything short of bringing our monetary in line with our Constitution is inadequate. This means getting rid of the privately owned and operated Federal Reserve and, short of amending the Constitution, returning to the gold standard. I am a fan of amending but it also needs to be a properly designed monetary system where money is value instead of being debt with interest rates. Debt is not money and we currently are treating it like money.

This time this recession won't be the same.

More ominously, some Fed officials fear the central bank is already "pushing on a string" and does not have the means to revive the economy. Whether or not they are right, this comes as a psychological shock for investors schooled by the "Greenspan Put' into thinking that there is a deus ex machina in the wings.

What goes up must go down... especially in a world being depleted of resources faster than ever.

Goldman Sachs said the yen was now overvalued by 20pc, or two "standard deviations" out of kilter

This is the most interesting aspect of this article. This implies that Goldman's algorithms for calculating prices aren't working any more. This has several very important meanings.

• The High Frequency Trading Algorithms used by the banks aren't or can't take into account macro economic trends.
• Their algorithms are much less effective at controlling the market now.
• Most importantly, the markets have broken out of long and old trading patterns.

Add in that their algorithms have known bugs or purposeful defects, as was demonstrated by the Flash Crash, and this is a recipe for disaster. Now, anything could happen.

Here is a good example of the problem:Demonstrating An HFT Algo Gone Apeshit

Well, today we just experienced another mini flash crash, after some algo went apeshit and decided to hit every bid on the way down, all the way to 0.0001 (gotta love that sub penny quoting just above zero). Below we show how this algorithm pushed the stock price of Core Molding from its normal price of $4.12 all the way down to $0.0001 in the span of one second, after an HFT program went ballistic, and would have kept on hitting the subpenny $0.0001 bid in perpetuity. It must have been swell to be a CMT holder: one second your stock is worth $4.12, the next, it is worth $0.0001 (and no, not $0.0000, how else will the computers game the NBBO in subpenny increments).

Can we stop them now? The case just needs to be completely read through by the Supreme Court and all the logic built upon that what people think of as that case can be thrown out.

It should be killed on economic grounds alone. Just wait and see what the employment numbers in Michigan do when that money is sucked out of the state economy to feed the national and international money vampires.

Reposted from qbit.cc:
Toll privatization scheme in Michigan HB 4961 amounts to a tax paid directly to private corporations, without representation

Update (May 26/ 2010 7pm) This bill has passed the house, 56-51 and is going to the Senate.

Michigan House Bill 4961 [pdf] boils down to Taxation without Representation – turning the State’s right to levy taxes over to private international corporations, essentially ceding sovereignty over critial infrastructure. The corporations will be able to levy highway tolls without oversight or regulation on US citizens, should this bill pass.

At an absolute minimum it allows the creation of a single high occupancy toll lane. After the next repaving of an entire highway, tolls can be collected on all lanes.

Now that the financial elite have tanked our economy, they’re trying to buy up our infrastructure and property using their international corporations that operate above the law.

Some important exerpts from the bill:

… to abolish the office of state highway commissioner and the commissioner’s advisory board and to transfer their powers and duties…

TO PROVIDE FOR PUBLIC-PRIVATE TRANSPORTATION FACILITIES; TO AUTHORIZE PUBLIC-PRIVATE AGREEMENTS RELATING TO … TOLLING, OPERATING, OR MAINTAINING A PUBLIC-PRIVATE TRANSPORTATION FACILITY

[allow private corporation to tax the use of public "transportation facilities" ... but what constitutes a transportation facility?]

“TRANSPORTATION FACILITY” MEANS ANY NEW OR EXISTING HIGHWAY, ROAD, BRIDGE, TUNNEL, OVERPASS, RAMP, INTERCHANGE, FERRY, AIRPORT, VEHICLE PARKING FACILITY, VEHICLE TRANSPORTATION FACILITY, PORT FACILITY, LOCKS FACILITY, RAIL FACILITY, INTERMODAL OR OTHER PUBLIC TRANSIT FACILITY, OR ANY OTHER EQUIPMENT, ROLLING STOCK, SITE, OR FACILITY USED IN THE TRANSPORTATION OF PERSONS, GOODS, SUBSTANCES, VEHICLES, …

[Wait for it, wait ....]

INFORMATION, OR MATTER OF ANY KIND…

[data cables are included in "transportation facilities?!" This bill would allow sale and private taxation of network (internet/data) infrastructure as a "transportation facility" based on "congestion." Data cables are already leased by big cable/telcos so what does this mean for them?]

… INCLUDING THE SALE OF REVENUE BONDS …

[turn the business holdings into a fiat financial market; enable fractional lending based on expected future revenue, destabilizing the business]

…

“INSTRUMENTALITY OF GOVERNMENT” MEANS A LEGAL PUBLIC ENTITY CREATED OR EMPOWERED TO CARRY OUT FUNCTIONS COMMONLY CARRIED OUT BY UNITS OF GOVERNMENT

…

THE AGREEMENT SHALL PROVIDE THAT THE OWNERSHIP OF A TRANSPORTATION FACILITY WITHIN THIS STATE SHALL BE VESTED IN AN INSTRUMENTALITY OF GOVERNMENT AND THAT TITLE TO THE TRANSPORTATION FACILITY SHALL NOT BE ENCUMBERED

[the corporation will have complete "unencumbered" control]

…

NO PROVISION OF A PUBLIC-PRIVATE AGREEMENT SHALL ALLOW THE PUBLIC TO BE DEPRIVED OF THE USE AND BENEFIT OF A TRANSPORTATION FACILITY EXCEPT AS NECESSARY TO IMPLEMENT TOLLS OR OTHER CHARGES …

[the corporation has the authority to deny access if you don't pay the toll]

A TOLL MAY BE IMPOSED ON A HIGHWAY ONLY IF IMPOSED FOR THE USE OF NEW HIGHWAYS, OR THE USE OF EXPANDED HIGHWAY CAPACITY BEYOND HIGHWAY CAPACITY IN PLACE ON THE EFFECTIVE DATE OF THE AMENDATORY ACT THAT ADDED THIS SECTION.

[tolls may be levied for any expansion or heavy traffic (?)]

TOLLS AND OTHER CHARGES IMPOSED FOR THE USE OF A TRANSPORTATION FACILITY ARE NOT SUBJECT TO REGULATION BY ANY OTHER GOVERNMENTAL AGENCY.

[the tolling will not be regulated by the government]

NOTHING IN THIS SECTION SHALL BE CONSTRUED TO ALLOW THE CONVERSION OF ANY NONTOLL OR NONUSER-FEE LANES EXISTING ON THE EFFECTIVE DATE … WITH THE EXCEPTION OF A HIGH-OCCUPANCY VEHICLE LANE THAT MAY BE OPERATED AS A HIGH-OCCUPANCY TOLL LANE FOR VEHICLES NOT OTHERWISE MEETING THE REQUIREMENTS FOR USE OF THAT LANE.

At a minimum, if this passes, the corporation(s) will create high occupancy toll lanes. Initially this allows them to just take one lane and turn it into a private toll lane. If we let this pass, how easy will it be to expand it to 2 “managed lanes,” or 3, or the whole highway?

When the highway needs repaving, will the private company dictate who gets the contracts? And how do we select which private company gets to take control in the first place? Well, anything goes according to this:

ANY COMPETITIVE SELECTION PROCESS THAT THE DEPARTMENT DETERMINES TO BE APPROPRIATE OR REASONABLE … USING A COMPETITIVE SELECTION PROCESS WHEN TO THE EXTENT PRACTICABLE

….

INFORMATION SUBMITTED UNDER SUCH A PROMISE OF CONFIDENTIALITY SHALL NOT BE SUBJECT TO DISCLOSURE UNDER THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT

[The bidding process will be competative to the extent that the government determines is "reasonable," but you'll never know because whatever we say is "private negotiations" will be exempt from FOIA requests]

A newer version of the bill (pdf) has been released that is substantially the same but provides for “public hearings” to receive user input; amounting to no real oversight or accountability.

THE COMMISSION SHALL CONDUCT A PUBLIC HEARING AT LEAST ONCE EVERY 5 YEARS TO RECEIVE PUBLIC COMMENT AND INPUT WITH REGARD TO THEN EXISTING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION FACILITIES ….

After the next repaving, all highway lanes can be turned into toll lanes. Signing this bill will inevitably turn our Michigan highways into private revenue streams for multinational corporations, not to mention ports, rail, and network infrastructure. This is infrastructure we’ve already paid to build, and need to maintain ourselves in order to sustain the local economy by hiring local workers and companies.

People from Michigan, it is absolutely critical that we reject this bill. We can not let them hand our infrastructure over to international corporations as many other states have. In the long run Michigan will lose on this deal in a big way.

They mean business and will do whatever is necessary including paying off our elected officials. Call your representatives and let them know we’re watching!

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

From MI Rep Paul Opsommer:

OUT-OF-STATE MEDDLING WORSENS HB 4961

May 24, 2010

State Rep. Paul Opsommer today criticized Canadian and Ohio officials for pushing legislation that would allow the Michigan Department of Transportation to toll virtually anywhere in Michigan.

“At the end of the day, whose law is this anyway?” asked Opsommer, R-Dewitt. “Canada’s understandable need to be part of border discussions is now being eclipsed by their off-base efforts to support the Ontario pension fund, and now we have resolutions being introduced involving the Ohio Legislature as well. If we pass laws in Michigan that give MDOT unilateral tolling power in our state it should be because that is what the Michigan Legislature feels is right, not because of pressure from other states or countries.”

Opsommer made his comments in response to a recent news story that officials in Ohio are advocating for their resolution SR 223 in support of the Detroit River International Crossing. The bill in Michigan that would allow for that, HB 4961, would also give new power to MDOT at the expense of the Legislature. HB 4961 is also criticized for allowing “instrumentalities of government” from other countries and states to enter into contracts that could potentially determine the tolling rates and eminent domain decisions taking place in Michigan.

“It has been a conscious decision by MDOT to wrap the DRIC bridge up into broad public-private partnership legislation that would not only allow for the DRIC but would cause the Legislature to give up its authority to statutorily authorize tolling anywhere else in the state,” Opsommer said. “I don’t know if this is because the governor wants to use the bill as leverage to keep Canada happy with the DRIC, or if she simply wants to have the unilateral ability to impose tolls on taxpayers with no other checks and balances, but either way it’s wrong.”

The Ambassador Bridge, Blue-Water Bridge and all other tolled facilities in Michigan received their tolling authority through stand alone bills authorized by the Legislature. Opsommer cited a recent letter from the attorney general’s office that concurs that MDOT currently only has the ability to toll where the Legislature has given its formal approval.

“Whether tolling is done directly by MDOT or a private contractor, you want someone who has been elected by the people determining where to use that tool,” Opsommer said. “In cases where it is being done by a private contractor who is using toll rates not just to break even but also to create profits, I would think you would want to keep voter accountability even more. If toll rates go unfairly through the roof, who are taxpayers supposed to turn too? The Legislature will be powerless at that point; it would actually be players from outside of the state who would have the final word.”

Opsommer also pointed to international pressure from Canada as having an unfair influence on the process.

“If it wasn’t for the fact that the main potential investor in all of this, the Ontario pension fund OMERS, was recently granted expanded powers by the Canadian government to provide investment management services I am not sure we would even be here,” Opsommer said. “We shouldn’t be making decisions on tolling Michigan taxpayers based off of the financial needs and a quest for high returns by a Canadian pension fund. The DRIC and HB 4961 should be treated as two entirely separate issues.”

The National Motorists Association has endorsed a substitute version of HB 4961 that would ensure the Michigan Legislature still retained its tolling authority over MDOT and other instrumentalities of government from outside of the state.

“It is essential to not pass any version which does not provide for specific legislative approval for any public-private partnership that will involve direct tolling for the users,” said Jim Walker of the National Motorist’s Association. “Should the H-6 unfortunately pass in the House, I hope the Senate will have the courage to fix this issue.”

So, Just like Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story, Oliver Stone has lost focus on the individual: What you can do in your own life to at least try to combat these evil forces. There are two kinds of actions to be taking right now.

1. Corrective Actions to change society so it doesn't happen
2. Damage Control Actions to minimize your own risk should something happen

The problem isn't capitalism. Capitalism is actually a very fine system. It works wonders when it is actually real. Our system we have today is not capitalism: it's fascism. It's government for and by corporations. banks and large corporations have so much power that they have taken over. They can manipulate markets and governments and thus you and me. So the question is, how many of the problems does Stone touch upon? The banks? monetary policy? constitutionality? capitalism? corporatism? cronie-democracy? the one party system (Republicrats)? fascism?

The Federal Government is way way out of line. They have taken so much liberty when the founders of the nation intended the Federal Government to be extremely limited and have each state govern itself.