Weekend Economists "Not Dead Yet!" March 21-23, 2014

[Demeter]

As proof of life, I offer 27 (count 'em) battered, blooming snowdrops; the ice has melted, even the 4 feet accumulated over the daffodils has subsided (although, there aren't even the tips of daffodils showing, yet). There may be a few late blooming smowdrops coming along in the next week...but that's a healthy start, considering it was 18F this morning and 18 below not that much farther back in time.

This little youtube clip from Monty Python in many ways touches on so many themes of modern economics: crappy jobs, the devaluation of the elderly, the cheapness of life and lack of public services like sanitation, and for contrast, the wealthy, untouched by the shit that plagues the 99%, and of course, the PLAGUE!

This is a roundabout way of revealing the weekend's theme: what is a plague? And what do we do about them?

Person wearing a hat, a mask suggestive of a bird beak, goggles or glasses, and a long gown. The clothing identifies the person as a "plague doctor" and is intended as protection. Descriptions indicate that the gown was made from heavy fabric or leather and was usually waxed. The beak contained pungent substances like herbs or perfumes, thought at the time to purify the air and helpful in relieving the stench. The person also carries a pointer or rod to keep patients at a distance. (Library of Medicine)

Plague lab, San Francisco. (Library of Medicine)

The term "plague" gets tossed about rather loosely, today and in the past. But the CDC (Center for Disease Control) has a specific affliction in mind:

Plague has a remarkable place in history and has had enormous effects on the development of modern civilization. Some scholars have even suggested that the collapse of the Roman Empire may be linked to the spread of plague by Roman soldiers returning home from battle in the Persian Gulf in 165 AD. For centuries, plague represented disaster for people living in Asia, Africa and Europe; and because the cause of plague was unknown, plague outbreaks contributed to massive panic in cities and countries where it appeared.

Numerous references in art, literature and monuments attest to the horrors and devastation of past plague epidemics. We now know that plague is caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis that often infects small rodents (like rats, mice, and squirrels) and is usually transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected flea. In the past, black rats were the most commonly infected animals and hungry rat fleas would jump from their recently-dead rat hosts to humans, looking for a blood meal. Pneumonic plague, a particular form of plague infection, is instead transmitted through infected droplets in a sick person's cough.

Three Major Plague Pandemics

The Justinian Plague

The first recorded pandemic, the Justinian Plague, was named after the 6th century Byzantine emperor Justinian I. The Justinian Plague began in 541 AD and was followed by frequent outbreaks over the next two hundred years that eventually killed over 100 million people (Khan, 2004) and affected much of the Mediterranean basin--virtually all of the known world at that time.

"Black Death" or the Great Plague

The second pandemic, widely known as the "Black Death" or the Great Plague, originated in China in 1334 and spread along the great trade routes to Constantinople and then to Europe, where it claimed an estimated 60% of the European population (Benedictow, 2008). Entire towns were wiped out. Some contemporary historians report that on occasion,there were not enough survivors remaining to bury the dead (Gross, 1995). Despite the vast devastation caused by this pandemic, however, massive labor shortages due to high mortality rates sped up the development of many economic, social, and technical modernizations (Benedictow, 2008). It has even been considered a factor in the emergence of the Renaissance in the late 14th century.

Modern Plague

The third pandemic, the Modern Plague, began in China in the 1860s and appeared in Hong Kong by 1894. Over the next 20 years, it spread to port cities around the world by rats on steamships. The pandemic caused approximately 10 million deaths (Khan, 2004). During this last pandemic, scientists identified the causative agent as a bacterium and determined that plague is spread by infectious flea bites. Rat-associated plague was soon brought under control in most urban areas, but the infection easily spread to local populations of ground squirrels and other small mammals in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. These new species of carriers have allowed plague to become endemic in many rural areas, including the western U.S.

However, as a bacterial disease, plague can be treated with antibiotics, and can be prevented from spreading by prompt identification, treatment and management of human cases. Applications of effective insecticides to control the flea vectors also provide assistance in controlling plague.

Recent Outbreaks

The most recent plague epidemics have been reported in India during the first half of the 20th century, and in Vietnam during wartime in the 1960s and 1970s. Plague is now commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, areas which now account for over 95% of reported cases (Stenseth, 2008).

Plague as a Weapon of War

As a highly contagious disease with an extremely high mortality rate if left untreated, Yersinia pestis has been used as a weapon of biological warfare for centuries. Some warfare strategies have included catapulting corpses over city walls, dropping infected fleas from airplanes, and aerosolizing the bacteria during the Cold War (Stenseth, 2008). More recently, plague raised concern as an important national security threat because of its potential for use by terrorists.

Yeah, I'll bet. The only "terrorists" that will be using the Black Death will be the ones delivering it by drone....using drone jockeys in the desert West.

That's my topic, and I'm sticking to it. What plagues you, this weekend?

[Demeter]

1. No Bank Failures as of 7:30 PM

I'm wondering if it's worth tracking this any longer...the Fed Reserve is doing its best to be sure that no banker goes hungry (although there still seem to be too many suicides amongst the banksters-in-training).

Just dreaming about one or more of the Big Six (or even the Top 20) going down....

[Demeter]

2. William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than the Mob: The Insurance Industry Is Organized Crime

ONE MAN'S PLAGUE...IS EVERYONE'S PLAGUE

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/22279-william-rivers-pitt-worse-than-the-mob-the-insurance-industry-is-organized-crime



We got accountants playin' God
and countin' out the pills
Yeah, I know, that sucks - that your HMO
Ain't doin' what you thought it would do
But everybody's gotta die sometime...

- Steve Earle



Nothing so thoroughly dominated the American political landscape over the last year more than the Republican assault on the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known now as "Obamacare." The GOP's eternal refrain that "Government is the problem" was used as a battering ram against the law, and House Republicans have voted to repeal or denude it exactly fifty times as of today. Ted Cruz and his cohort of wreckers shut down the government over it, and the Tea Party base broke out their Sharpies to make gloriously stupid protest signs that read "Government Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare."

Amusing as all this was, the dark underbelly of it all is dangerously wrong. Yes, the ACA exchange website rollout was a train wreck, and yes, a small segment of the population has had problems with the new law. This is not in dispute. Websites can be fixed, however, and problems can be solved. None of this holds a candle to the awesome misery and financial pain inflicted upon the populace by the holy and sainted world of private business, known in this instance as the insurance industry.

My own saga with these broad-daylight thieves began in late summer, when I moved my family to New Hampshire. We were living in Boston before the move, and had health insurance through my wife's employer. My wife has Multiple Sclerosis, and one of the big reasons we felt comfortable about moving was that, if she changed jobs after the move, she could not be denied health insurance due to her pre-existing condition, thanks to the ACA....

BEST-LAID PLANS, AND ALL THAT...HIS STORY CONTINUES AT LINK

[Warpy]

3. I would be a poor weapon since it's easily killed by cheap penicillin

That particular bug is a very slow mutator and old antibiotics remain effective against it provided the person goes to the ER at the first sign of difficulty breathing.

I live in a plague state with several rodent vectors. Most cases are transmitted by cats and dogs allowed to roam and most cases are not pneumonic.

It's a very great reason to keep the cats indoors and to discourage rodent infestations through good sanitation and blocking access points.

This year has been terrible for rodents, a wet fall stepping up their breeding. I've got a high body count in my house.

[Demeter]

4. The Most Important Economic Chart

http://houseofdebt.org/2014/03/18/the-most-important-economic-chart.html

If you must know only one fact about the U.S. economy, it should be this chart:



The chart shows that productivity, or output per hour of work, has quadrupled since 1947 in the United States. This is a spectacular achievement by an advanced economy.

The gains in productivity were quite widely shared from 1947 to 1980. Real income for the median U.S. family doubled during this time just as output per hour of work performed doubled. The rising tide was lifting all boats...However, what we want to focus on today is the remarkable separation in productivity and median real income since 1980. While the United States is producing twice as much per hour of work today compared to 1980, a small part of the gain in real income has gone to the bottom half of the income distribution. The gap between productivity and median real income is at an historic all-time high today.

So where are all of the gains in productivity going? Two places:

First, owners of capital are getting a bigger share of GDP than before. In other words, the share of profits has risen faster than wages. Second, the highest paid workers are getting a bigger share of the wages that go to labor. The net result is that families at the higher end of the income distribution have received more of the income produced by the economy since the 1980s. The latter fact has been documented meticulously by the brilliant research of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez.

The widening gap between productivity and median income is a defining issue of our time. It is not just about inequality – important as that issue is. The widening gap between productivity and median income has serious implications for macroeconomic stability and financial crises.

[Demeter]

5. Why Income Inequality Is Going to Get Catastrophically Worse By Nomi Prins

http://www.alternet.org/economy/inevitability-income-inequality?akid=11602.227380.Fql7vS&rd=1&src=newsletter971084&t=10

Nomi Prins is a journalist and senior fellow at Demos. She is the author, most recently, of "It Takes a Pillage" and "Black Tuesday."

Inequality is endemic to the core structure of an America that operates more as a plutocracy than a democracy...In his new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” economist Thomas Piketty argues that worsening inequality is inevitable in a mature capitalist system, based on his analysis of 200 years of data. But inequality isn’t just an evolving condition like a crippling allergy that comes and goes, or just grows, enumerated by horrifying statistics. Nor is it just the result of a capitalist-utopian idea of free markets in which everyone gets a fair shot armed with equal information (which simply don’t exist in the real world, where markets are routinely gamed by the biggest players). Inequality is endemic to the core structure of an America that operates more as a plutocracy than a democracy. It is an inherent result of the consolidation of a substantial amount of both financial power and political influence in the hands of a few families.

In my upcoming book, “All the Presidents’ Bankers,” I trace the lineage of the banking and political families and their associates who have had the most combined influence on American policy. Inequality of income or wealth is a byproduct of the predisposition and genealogy of this coterie of America’s power elite. True, being born into wealth means having a greater chance of accumulating more of it — but take it a step further. Expanding on the adage of “it takes money to make money,” we get a much better idea of why inequality is so rampant: Because aside from income and wealth issues, it takes power to keep power.

By nature of the construct and self-reinforcing behavior of a small circle of American families and their enterprises — particularly over the past century since financial capitalism replaced productive capitalism as the means to expand power, wealth and influence — a comparative handful of families and their connections run Wall Street and Washington collectively. They run America as two sides of one political-financial coin, not as divided factions but as co-influencers of policy through public and private office.

There have been times during the past century when the specific individuals commanding this joint effort paid credence to the public interest, or were imbued with more humility. During those times, levels of inequality happened to decrease. At other times, the power elite solely promoted private gain, as from WWI through the crash of 1929, and since the 1970s, particularly since the 2008 crisis. At those times, inequality happened to grow. This is not to imply that the moods of the elite were the sole arbiters of the direction of inequality, but that whatever the direction of these levels, general economic health is more dependent on the actions of this long-term, tightknit and concentrated few than on the ideal of a democracy. In this environment of such power inequality, economic inequality is unavoidable — and unsolvable...

I WOULDN'T BET ON THAT....WHAT CANNOT CONTINUE, WILL NOT CONTINUE.

[Demeter]

6. I'm just plagued with curiosity! What will hamerfan find for our soundtrack?

[hamerfan]

15. Me too! I mean, Musical Interlude

Black Death Song by Social Studs:

[Demeter]

41. Catchy tune!

the lyrics need work, though. I can see myself singing this as I deliver the Sunday paper...in the dark, on empty streets, sleep-shaken homeowners wondering what the hell that noise is....

And the vocalist is borderline-tone deaf.

Excellent find, hamerfan!

[Demeter]

80. I found out where this came from: Plague! the Musical Makes American Debut In West Rutland

http://digital.vpr.net/post/plague-musical-makes-american-debut-west-rutland

When Bubonic Plague hit England in the mid 14th century, half the population perished. It was not a pleasant time - which is why it’s hard to imagine another topic less suited to a musical comedy. But Plague! the Musical makes its American debut this weekend (October, 2013) in West Rutland, and the Marble Valley Players’ director, who’s overseeing a cast of about thirty adults and teens, says it’s a hoot.

Martin Bones was born in England and says he’s always been fascinated by the history of the Plague. He says he was on YouTube trying to find a BBC special about it a few years ago when he came across something else.

“So I put in Bubonic Plague and about 10 hits down was this scene from a song called “Its Bubonic,” and I thought that looks like fun. So I started listening to it. I fell in love with the song,” says Bones, “and began looking into the show and eventually found out it wasn’t published anywhere, so I literally emailed the writers and said, ‘Hey have you considered letting anyone else do it and can I do it?’”

Plague! The Musical is an offbeat comedy written by Dave Massingham and Matt Townend. It’s kind of a cross between Little Shop of Horrors, Faust and Beetlejuice, with a heavy dose of Monty Python for laughs. Plague’s website boasts that it’s the first musical to base an entire love song around a recorder-playing twelve-year-old with a kidney disorder.

Martin Bones laughs at that, “It’s the British sense of humor. It’s hilarious because it’s so awful,” he says. “One of my favorite things about it is that it had no socially redeeming value. It really is just fun. It pokes fun at the plague, it pokes fun at the surroundings of the plague it pokes fun at other musicals.” Bones says “the whole thing is a really hilarious satirical piece of work.”

The story begins in London just before the plague. It centers on a young man named Clive who takes a job with a down-on-his luck undertaker. When Clive falls for Isabella, the beautiful daughter of an alchemist and the undertaker’s arch enemy. . . . Clive becomes caught between those who would profit from death and those trying to end it forever.
Throw in some rats, druids and 11 original songs and, well, you get the idea.

“Basically everyone is singing and dying,” laughs Rutland’s Taylor Ampatiellos, who plays Clive.

He rattle off lyrics like, “Get your coffins while they’re hot and you are still warm.”

Katherine Bullock, of Shrewsbury, who plays Isabella, says you can’t help but like the lyrics of It’s Bubonic. She rattles off a couple versus, “It’s not pleasing, leaves you sneezing in the most alarming way. . . . and it’s outrageous, quite contagious and we hope that it will go away.”

Taylor Ampatiellos says, “People will go home singing the music and then having it in their heads and then complaining the next day about the songs not leaving their heads ‘cuz it is so catchy. The songs are brilliant,” he adds, “the rhymes and the way that they incorporate the story into the songs is just perfect.”

Performed for the first time at the popular Fringe performing Arts Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2008, Plague! the Musical won that year’s Pick of the Fringe Award. Since then it’s been performed in London and Germany, but not yet in the United States.

Martin Bones lives in Bridgewater, but says thanks to Facebook and emails, he’s become good friends with Dave Massingham and Matt Townend, the show’s writers. “They definitely are happy somebody else is doing it,” says Bones. “As Matt put it, it’s really an homage to all the things they loved growing up and it’s best done in a small community group and it’s best done with lots of love, as opposed to lots of flair.”

[Demeter]

7. Privacy Update by North Pole (no-longer-private email)

The wave of commercial backlash against the surveillance society is starting to show. Both Microsoft and Yahoo make the news as they react to the fears of their customer base around the world. I think the ‘big three’ must already see the direction of the future; and it doesn’t include anyone already outed as an NSA collaborator.



First, Mr. Bill’s company, Micro$oft:

Microsoft tightens privacy policy after admitting to reading journalist's emails-theguardian

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/21/microsoft-tightens-privacy-policy-journalists-emails

After outrage from privacy campaigners, the tech firm will now seek legal advice before examining the contents of customers’ inboxes...

Microsoft has tightened up its privacy policy after admitting to reading emails from a journalist’s Hotmail account while tracking down a leak. The new rules prevent the company from snooping on customers’ communications without first convincing two legal teams, independent of the internal investigation, that they have evidence sufficient to obtain a court order were one applicable...The company did not apologise for the search.

/…/

The initial search occurred in September 2012, when the company was attempting to discover who had handed an anonymous blogger the source code to Windows 8, its then-upcoming operating system. It discovered that the blogger was using a Microsoft Hotmail email address, and that they had used it to send the code to a third party. “After confirmation that the data was Microsoft’s proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012 Microsoft’s office of legal compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger’s Hotmail account”, said FBI agent Armando Ramirez III in court papers filed Monday.

The company’s user agreement reserves the right to carry out such searches, even after the changes Frank announced. “We may access information about you, including the content of your communications, to protect the rights or property of Microsoft,” it reads. The news of the search sparked immediate reaction following the Guardian’s report on Thursday. Parker Higgins, an activist for San Francisco-based pressure group EFF, wrote that the decision was a “very bad move” and that he was “reeling from this Microsoft story. Journalists need to be wary of government and corporate espionage. Knowing your source’s ID is a liability.”

Microsoft has taken a further PR hit due to the fact that email privacy has been a key weapon in its fight against Google’s dominance of the sector. In the company’s “Scroogled!” campaign, it emphasises that “Outlook.com (the service which replaced Hotmail) prioritises your privacy… Your email is nobody else’s business.” It even offers a petition asking customers to “tell Google to stop! Let them know they shouldn’t go through your email”.

/…/

Nothing dramatic from these guys. Rub one hard enough, you’ll find the soul of an NSA spook lives under their façade too. Then, over the ocean there’s this:

Theresa May warns Yahoo that its move to Dublin is a security worry

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/20/theresa-may-yahoo-dublin-security-worry

Internet firm is known to be unhappy about snooping and would be under no obligation to hand over material under Irish laws...

Theresa May summoned the internet giant Yahoo for an urgent meeting on Thursday to raise security concerns after the company announced plans to move to Dublin where it is beyond the reach of Britain's surveillance laws. By making the Irish capital rather than London the centre of its European, Middle East and Africa operations, Yahoo cannot be forced to hand over information demanded by Scotland Yard and the intelligence agencies through "warrants" issued under Britain's controversial anti-terror laws.

Yahoo has had longstanding concerns about securing the privacy of its hundreds of millions of users – anxieties that have been heightened in recent months by revelations from the whistleblower Edward Snowden. In February, the Guardian revealed that Britain's eavesdropping centre GCHQ intercepted and stored the images of millions of people using Yahoo webcams, regardless of whether they were suspects.

The data included a large quantity of sexually explicit pictures. The company said this represented "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

The home secretary called the meeting with Yahoo to express the fears of Britain's counter-terrorism investigators. They can force companies based in the UK to provide information on their servers by seeking warrants under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, 2000 (Ripa).The law, now under review by a parliamentary committee, has been widely criticised for giving police and the intelligence agencies too much access to material such as current emails and internet searches, as well as anything held on company records. However, the Guardian has been told that Charles Farr, the head of the office for security and counter-terrorism (OSCT) within the Home Office, has been pressing May to talk to Yahoo because of anxiety in Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism command about the effect the move to Dublin could have on their inquiries.

Farr, a former senior intelligence officer, coordinates the work of Scotland Yard and the security service MI5, to prevent terrorist attacks in the UK. "There are concerns in the Home Office about how Ripa will apply to Yahoo once it has moved its headquarters to Dublin," said a Whitehall source. "The home secretary asked to see officials from Yahoo because in Dublin they don't have equivalent laws to Ripa. This could particularly affect investigations led by Scotland Yard and the national crime agency. They regard this as a very serious issue."

The move to make Dublin the centre of its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) was announced last month and will take effect from Friday. In a statement at the time, Yahoo said Dublin was a natural home for the company and that it would be incorporated into Irish laws. The firm insisted the move was driven by "business needs … we believe it is in the best interest of our users. Dublin is already the European home to many of the world's leading global technology brands."

However, the firm has been horrified by some of the surveillance programmes revealed by Snowden and is understood to be relieved that it will be beyond the immediate reach of UK surveillance laws. Following the Guardian's disclosures about snooping on Yahoo webcams, the company said it was "committed to preserving our users trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services." It said GCHQ's activity was "completely unacceptable..we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law."Explaining the move to Dublin, the company said: "The principal change is that Yahoo EMEA, as the new provider of services to our European users, will replace Yahoo UK Ltd as the data controller responsible for handling your personal information. Yahoo EMEA will be responsible for complying with Irish privacy and data protection laws, which are based on the European data protection directive."

Emma Carr, deputy director of Big Brother Watch, said: "It should not come as a surprise if companies concerned about maintaining their users' trust to hold their information start to move to countries with more rigorous oversight processes, particularly where courts oversee requests for information." Surveillance laws have a direct impact on our economy and Yahoo's decision should be ring an alarm in Parliament that ignoring the serious questions about surveillance that are being debated around the world will only harm Britain's digital economy."

Under Ripa, a warrant can be issued for an investigation that has implications for national security, or might lead to the prevention or detection of serious crimes. Warrants to seek the retention of communications data can be issued by specified officers within police forces and the intelligence agencies. More intrusive surveillance techniques can require the signature of a cabinet minister. From Friday, investigators may have to seek information by using a more drawn out process of approaching Yahoo through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between Ireland and the UK. A Home Office spokesperson said: "We do not confirm the details of private meetings."

If things get really bad, I’m pulling the plug and going back to fountain pens and visiting cards, myself. I like the way Yahoo didn’t give any warning, either. Just quietly packed up, pulled the plug, and left town. That’s what you call a ‘fait accompli’. I can just imagine all those hard line, paranoid security types sitting around a meeting table. wondering what to do now.

It’s not like they can order them to come back, after all.

Should have thought of that a long time ago, I guess. Oh well.


North Pole is, well, it really ought to be South Pole now, a...well, it's my brother, who is more in touch with the whole shebang than I.

[Demeter]

9. The Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act--PETITION TO SIGN BY ALAN GRAYSON

After countless revelations about the NSA's rampant domestic surveillance of innocent people, a group of experts, hand-picked by the President himself, have issued a report with specific recommendations to rein in the NSA. The Review Group carefully analyzed the NSA's activities, and recently proposed changes that would protect our personal privacy, at no expense to our national security.

These proposals were presented as a coherent, comprehensive plan - and they should be treated as such. The President gave a speech recently and announced that he would accept a few of these proposals, but not all of them. That's not good enough. No one - not the President, nor the Defense Department, nor the so-called "Intelligence Community" - should get to cherry-pick which proposals they'll actually implement. The Review Group set forth a global program, not a menu.

We shouldn't have to trade our privacy and freedom for our safety. And we don't. The Review Group's recommendations proved that point, and showed us the way forward.

The Review Group's program is a serious start to reining in the spying-industrial complex. But without our support, that program will suffer crib death.

The spying-industrial complex will never reform itself. They never met a byte they didn't like, or want. That's why I've introduced the "Big Brother Is Not Watching You Act" - to curb the NSA's infatuation with spying on innocent Americans. My one-page bill directs the President to implement each and every one of the Review Group's 46 recommendations, within one year or less. Not just a few. Not half. Not even most. All of them.

If you agree, then please sign your name on our petition at MindYourOwnBusinessAct.com, and I'll deliver your signatures to the White House. Together, we'll tell the President that we demand real reform of the spying-industrial complex, and we won't accept anything less.

Why? Because we are human beings - free, autonomous men and women who cherish our privacy, and respect the privacy of all others. We are not cattle.

Courage,

Rep. Alan Grayson

P.S. Please, please, please forward this to your friends, family, co-workers, and anyone else who is sick of the NSA's ubiquitous and unnecessary surveillance of innocent people. Urge them to sign the petition, and share it on Twitter, Facebook, everywhere. There is strength in numbers.


http://mindyourownbusinessact.com/?refcode=032114national

[Demeter]

8. Stephen Henderson: Detroit must make it easier for families to live here

http://www.freep.com/article/20140321/OPINION05/303210018/detroit-crime-families-turnaround-bankruptcy

Dispatches from a city unraveling …

A friend’s car was stolen this week while parked outside her home in Lafayette Park, near downtown Detroit. It was recovered, but needed repairs, so she had a rental — for a day. Thieves lifted that, too.

The Detroit Public Schools, entering their fifth year under emergency management, are projecting a $120-million deficit for this year, $39 million more than expected. The city’s steady loss of children continues to suck money out of the system.

Lansing lawmakers agree to a scrapping bill, but strip out a three-day waiting period for the hottest illegal scrap metal items.



They’re disparate points on a map of Detroit misery that seems to get redrawn nearly every day. But all these incidents highlight one of the biggest things holding the city back: livability. Middle-class livability, to be precise. When it’s this hard for people who have choices about where they live to keep their property safe, or get their kids educated (not to mention the high costs from elevated taxes and outrageous insurance rates), it’s impossible for a city to thrive or rebuild around them.

I write a lot about the momentum we’ve got going in downtown and Midtown. And I’ve written several times about the disconnect between that resurgence and the city’s poorest residents — those who live in neighborhoods that are increasingly isolated, starved for services and jobs and opportunity. But middle-class families are the glue between those two extremes. They’re the lifeblood of any community — the ones who pay most of the taxes, whose kids populate and normalize the schools. They’re also the ones whose mobility makes it possible to run for something better if Detroit fails them.

Families won’t, and in some cases, can’t, put up with this stuff. They don’t have to stay — and they haven’t. The option to live elsewhere, even places that are only marginally safer with public schools that are incrementally better, is just too overwhelming. We can talk all we want about moving forward in Detroit. It won’t mean much until we can attract and retain the kinds of families — black, white, whatever race — that helped build the city’s sense of community and stability in the first place.

I hear every day about families who’ve decided Detroit doesn’t work for them. But there are also stats that help illustrate how stark the problem is. A recent Brookings Institute report on income equality was notable for the gaps that have widened between rich and poor in most major American cities. Detroit had the lowest average household income at both ends of the scale. We have the poorest poor, and the least-well-off middle- and upper-class residents... The city has to be livable for people to stay. I get reminded every day of how far we are from that being true. This week was particularly troubling in my little world, and makes me worry — even more than normal — about where we’re headed.



Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor for the Free Press.

[Demeter]

10. Summarizing Yellen's First (Disastrous) Press Conference by Tyler Durden

"Miss me yet?"



TALK ABOUT PLAGUES....

"That will be $250,000 for the first 60 minutes, and $250,000 for every subsequent 60 minutes."

Why disastrous? Here is the statement that sent stocks reeling:

“So the language that we used in the statement is considerable period. So I, you know, this is the kind of term it’s hard to define. But, you know, probably means something on the order of around six months, that type of thing.”

Everything else was just Yellen rereading James Joyce's Ulysses. The key points from Bloomberg:

*YELLEN: CHANGE IN FED GUIDANCE IS NO CHANGE IN POLICY INTENT
*YELLEN SAYS SPENDING, PRODUCTION DATA IN LINE WITH EXPECTATIONS
*YELLEN SAYS LABOR MARKET CONTINUES TO IMPROVE
*YELLEN SAYS FINANCIAL CONDITIONS CONSISTENT WITH FOMC AIMS
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC EXPECTS INFLATION TO MOVE GRADUALLY TOWARD 2%
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC TO ENSURE POLICY CONSISTENT WITH DUAL MANDATE
*YELLEN REITERATES FED ASSETS TO CONTINUE TO EXPAND
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC DECISION CONSISTENT WITH PRIOR STATEMENTS
*YELLEN REITERATES QE IS `NOT ON A PRESET COURSE'
*YELLEN REITERATES QE FUTURE HINGES ON PERFORMANCE OF ECONOMY
*YELLEN SAYS LABOR MARKET IMPROVEMENT FASTER THAN ANTICIPATED
*YELLEN SAYS FED GUIDANCE BETTER REFLECTS CURRENT CONDITIONS
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC TO BASE ASSESSMENT ON WIDE RANGE OF DATA
*YELLEN SAYS RATE LIKELY TO STAY LOW FOR LONG AFTER QE ENDS
*YELLEN: FOMC WILL TAKE `BALANCED APPROACH' ON MANDATES ON EXIT
*YELLEN SAYS MANY ON FOMC SEE `RESIDUAL IMPACT' OF CRISIS
*YELLEN SAYS MUCH NEEDS TO BE DONE ON JOBS, INFLATION
*YELLEN REITERATES NEED FOR `HIGHLY ACCOMMODATIVE POLICY'
*YELLEN SAYS FORWARD GUIDANCE HAS BEEN EFFECTIVE
*YELLEN SAYS FORWARD GUIDANCE HAS `VERY USEFUL IMPACT'
*YELLEN SAYS GUIDANCE CHANGE WILL PROVIDE MORE INFORMATION
*YELLEN SAYS GUIDANCE WILL BE QUALITATIVE
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC `NOT CLOSE' TO ACHIEVING FULL EMPLOYMENT
*YELLEN: FOMC TO LOOK AT `MANY MORE THINGS' THAN JOBLESS RATE
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC FULLY COMMITTED TO 2% INFLATION OBJECTIVE
*YELLEN SAYS INFLATION LIKELY TO GRADUALLY MOVE TOWARD 2%
*YELLEN: FOMC ASSESSMENT OF ECONOMY ALMOST IDENTICAL TO DECEMBER
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC STATEMENT PRIMARY FORM OF GUIDANCE
*YELLEN REITERATES NEXT FALL LIKELY TIME FOR ENDING QE
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC FORECAST `DOTS' WILL FLUCTUATE
*YELLEN SEES NEED NOT TO READ TOO MUCH INTO FOMC FORECAST `DOTS'
*YELLEN SEES POSSIBILITY FOR `SHALLOWER GLIDE PATH' FOR RATE
*YELLEN SAYS GROWTH HAS BEEN DISAPPOINTING FOR MANY YEARS
*YELLEN SAYS MANY FOMC PARTICIPANTS SEE HEADWINDS FROM CRISIS
*YELLEN: UNDERWATER MORTGAGES, FISCAL POLICY GROWTH OBSTACLES
*YELLEN SAYS PATH TO `NORMAL' INTEREST RATES MAY BE GRADUAL
*YELLEN SAYS WEATHER HAS WEAKENED ECONOMY IN FIRST QUARTER
*YELLEN SAYS MOST ON FOMC SEE WEATHER WEAKNESS DISSIPATING
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC PROBABLY `OVER-DID' OPTIMISM IN JANUARY
*YELLEN SAYS `THE BUCK STOPS WITH ME' ON POLICY
*YELLEN SAYS SHE `KEENLY' FEELS `WEIGHT OF RESPONSIBILITY'
*YELLEN SEES NO `RADICAL CHANGES' IN FED OPERATIONS
*YELLEN: FOMC HASN'T FACED TRADE-OFF ON INFLATION, EMPLOYMENT
*YELLEN:FOMC EVENTUALLY MAY FACE TRADE-OFF ON PRICES, EMPLOYMENT
*YELLEN:SEES CONSIDERABLE PERIOD BETWEEN QE END, FIRST RATE RISE
*YELLEN SAYS FIRST MAIN RATE INCREASE WILL HINGE ON ECONOMY
*YELLEN SAYS INFLATION CONSISTENTLY BELOW 2% WARRANTS LOW RATE
*YELLEN SAYS QE TAPER DEPENDS ON IMPROVEMENT IN LABOR MARKET
*YELLEN: QE TAPER NEEDS EVIDENCE INFLATION MOVING UP `OVER TIME'
*YELLEN REITERATES SHE LOOKS AT SEVERAL GAUGES OF LABOR MARKET
*YELLEN SAYS LONG TERM UNEMPLOYMENT BEEN `EXCEPTIONALLY HIGH'
*YELLEN SEES CYCLICAL COMPONENT IN FALLING LABOR PARTICIPATION
*YELLEN SAYS SHE ALSO TRACKS LABOR MARKET TURNOVER
*YELLEN SAYS `QUIT RATES' BELOW PRE-RECESSION LEVEL
*YELLEN SAYS HIRES RATE IN LABOR MARKET IS EXTREMELY DEPRESSED
*YELLEN SAYS `HIRES RATE' ALSO `EXTREMELY DEPRESSED'
*YELLEN SAYS WAGE GROWTH HAS BEEN VERY LOW
*YELLEN SAYS WAGE INFLATION BELOW NORMAL AT 2%
*YELLEN SAYS U.S. `LIVED THROUGH A DEVASTATING FINANCIAL CRISIS'
*YELLEN SAYS CRISIS TOOK A HIGH TOLL ON U.S. CITIZENS
*YELLEN SAYS CRISIS MADE BUSINESSES VERY CAUTIOUS
*YELLEN SAYS FISCAL POLICY HAS POSED HEADWIND TO RECOVERY
*YELLEN SAYS FED WILL TRY TO COMMUNICATE CLEARLY ON POLICY
*YELLEN SAYS RECOVERY HAS BEEN `DISAPPOINTING'
*YELLEN SAYS FED WILL TRY TO BE STEADY, TRANSPARENT ON POLICY
*YELLEN: FED WILL TRY NOT TO BE CAUSE OF MARKET INSTABILITY
*YELLEN SAYS RATE OF HOUSEHOLD FORMATION BEEN `VERY DEPRESSED'
*YELLEN EXPECTS HOUSING ACTIVITY TO PICK UP `LATER ON'
*YELLEN SAYS FOMC `COMMITTED TO THE SAME SET OF GOALS'
*YELLEN SAYS STRENGTHENING FINANCIAL SYSTEM WORK IN PROGRESS
*YELLEN SAYS `HIGH PRIORITY' TO RESOLVE `TOO BIG TO FAIL'
*YELLEN SAYS IMPORTANT TO ASSESS ANY POTENTIAL STABILITY THREATS
*YELLEN SAYS BERNANKE HAD GOOD AGENDA, IT'S ONE SHE SHARES
*YELLEN SAYS SHE SHARES AGENDA PURSUED BY BERNANKE
*YELLEN SAYS DIRECT BANKING LINKS TO RUSSIA, UKRAINE NOT LARGE
*YELLEN SAYS FED MONITORING VERY CLOSELY UKRAINE CRISIS
*YELLEN DOESN'T SEE GLOBAL FINANCIAL REPURCUSSIONS FROM UKRAINE
*YELLEN NOT SEEING BROADER GLOBAL FINANCIAL IMPACT OF UKRAINE

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-19/summarizing-yellens-first-disastrous-press-conference

[Demeter]

11. When I think about the ACA, that amzing POS

the most bogus thing about it is the "penalty clause". The tough part is figuring out which is the worse penalty: paying for a defective product, or having the IRS dun you for not being a sucker.

[DemReadingDU]

66. and what happens if one can't make the payments to the ACA

I assume you would be cancelled. So we are back at the beginning. No insurance, so might as well just pay the penalty, or IRS, from the beginning?

[Demeter]

75. This plan is the Anti-Rube Goldberg

It's designed to fail, IMO.

[Demeter]

12. The Russia “Sanction Spiral” Elegantly Spirals Out of Control

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-03-21/russia-%E2%80%9Csanction-spiral%E2%80%9D-elegantly-spirals-out-control



Attorneys with the SEC’s Investment Management Division are exhorting managers of registered investment funds, such as your mutual fund, to disclose their holdings in Russia and warn of the risks associated with them, now that the Crimean debacle has turned into a magnificent sanction spiral. “Several people familiar with the matter” had been talking to Reuters. The SEC is apparently fretting that the funds aren’t truthful with investors and aren’t even thinking about how to respond to the possible outcomes of the crisis. Investment Management Division Director Norm Champ, when contacted by Reuters, didn’t even deny it. “We want to be proactive,” he said. The Division contacted asset managers on other occasions when civil unrest erupted or when things threatened to blow up; it wanted to make sure managers weren’t omitting or misrepresenting material information – for example, during the uprising in Egypt in 2011, when the Cairo stock market simply shut down. But this time it’s different: the lawyers at the Investment Management Division were joined by another group of SEC lawyers who focus on risk examinations.

Would the White House be trying behind the scenes to give investors second thoughts about plowing money into Russia? Would it be trying to demolish Russian stocks, bonds, and the ruble? Naw.

The efforts by the SEC, which started “over a week ago,” were accompanied by a White House announcement that 5 million barrels would be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. WTI tanked. Russia, a huge energy exporter, depends on its oil and gas revenues, and knocking down the price of oil could wreak havoc on the Russian economy. It was a declaration that commodities would be used as a weapon against the Putin Regime. Then on Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney launched another attack on the Russian markets at a press briefing. In light of the sanctions the US and the EU were slapping on Russia, its economy would pay the price, he said. “I wouldn’t, if I were you, invest in Russian equities right now, unless you’re going short.”...Not to be left out, Standard & Poor’s slammed Russia by lowering its outlook to Negative from Stable. “In our view, heightened geopolitical risk and the prospect of US and EU economic sanctions following Russia’s incorporation of Crimea could reduce the flow of potential investment, trigger rising capital outflows, and further weaken Russia’s already deteriorating economic performance.”

...Shaken to its roots by these threats, Russia annexed the Crimea and picked a new target: Estonia. A Russian diplomat told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday that Russia was “concerned” by the treatment of the ethnic Russian minority “in Estonia as well as in Ukraine” ... even while Vice President Joe Biden was in Lithuania to calm tattered nerves in the Baltics and the EU.....The “Putin Doctrine” was what SPD parliamentary leader Thomas Oppermann, who is part of Germany’s governing Grand Coalition, was fretting about. Under that doctrine, Russia could intervene if ethnic Russians were perceived to be in danger outside Russia. It would give Russia an automatic right to intervene anywhere, he said. “Such a right does not exist, and such a right cannot exist.”




The Sanction Spiral works in a myriad ways and performs, as we can see every day, outright miracles. It spirals elegantly higher and higher and takes on grotesque forms. And by the looks of it, no one at the top has a clue how to back out of it. Yet stock and bond markets in the US and Europe, stuffed to the gills with central-bank liquidity and intoxicated by free money, the only thing that really matters anymore these crazy days of ours, are blissfully ignoring the entire drama, and what may eventually come of it. The first official warning shot was fired. Not by a Putin advisor that can be brushed off, but by Alexey Ulyukaev, Russia’s Minister of Economy and former Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank. A major escalation. Read.... Kremlin: If The US Tries To Hurt Russia’s Economy, Russia Will Target The Dollar System SEE BELOW

[Demeter]

13. Kremlin: If The US Tries To Hurt Russia's Economy, Russia Will Target The Dollar

http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2014/3/15/kremlin-if-the-us-tries-to-hurt-russias-economy-russia-will.html

From the economic point of view, everyone should get ready for tough actions from Moscow. Sergei Glazyev, the most hardline of Putin’s advisors, sketched the retaliation strategy: Drop the dollar, sell US Treasuries, encourage Russian companies to default on their dollar-denominated debts, and create an alternative currency system (reference currency) with the BRICS and hydrocarbon producers like Venezuela and Iran.

Some of it is already happening

Washington’s decision to release a minuscule 5 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve caused the price of oil to tank – a direct attack on the main revenue source of the Russian government, and a sign that Washington is willing to hit where it hurts the most. Russia instantly retaliated, it seems. Suddenly, there was a mysterious mega-plunge of $104.5 billion in US Treasuries held in custody by the Federal Reserve during the reporting week ended March 12. It brought the balance down to $2.86 trillion. These securities are owned by foreign countries. As of the US Treasury’s December statement, the most recent available, the Fed held $138.6 billion in Treasuries that belonged to Russia – down by $22.9 billion from a year earlier. The mega-plunge of $104.5 billion? No data is available yet to confirm these securities belonged to Russia. And if they did, it’s unlikely that Russia dumped them on the market, but it could have transferred them to another banking center, such as Luxemburg, to get them out of reach of the US government, and be able to dump them at an opportune moment.

Getting out from under the dollar

Russia has been palavering with other countries about initiating alternatives to the dollar. Formal plans emerged from the Kremlin last May on how Russia wanted the BRICS to dismantle the dollar system. So now it was Ulyukaev, an official heavy-weight, who said that Russia would work on increasing the volume of international trade denominated in national currencies, thus bypassing the dollar (translation by Mândrăşescu):

“Why should we have dollar contracts with China, India, Turkey?” he said. “Why do we need this? We must have contracts in national currencies. And this applies to energy and other spheres.” The focus would be on Russian oil and gas companies. “They must be braver in signing contracts in rubles and the currencies of partner-countries,” he said. “I think now there is an additional impetus to finally finish this job.”

And the “currency reserve policy” would need some adjustment with maximum focus on “local currencies”; it was the normal way, he said. In Mândrăşescu’s analysis, Ulyukaev was outlining an attack on the petrodollar system and the enormous advantages it confers on the US, with the goal of creating parallel petro-currencies...

[Demeter]

14. Rachel Maddow addresses this, too

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/oil-corporations-key-to-leverage-over-russia-198496835575

[MattSh]

17. Petrodollar Alert: Putin Prepares To Announce "Holy Grail" Gas Deal With China

If it was the intent of the West to bring Russia and China together - one a natural resource (if "somewhat" corrupt) superpower and the other a fixed capital / labor output (if "somewhat" capital misallocating and credit bubbleicious) powerhouse - in the process marginalizing the dollar and encouraging Ruble and Renminbi bilateral trade, then things are surely "going according to plan."

For now there have been no major developments as a result of the shift in the geopolitical axis that has seen global US influence, away from the Group of 7 (most insolvent nations) of course, decline precipitously in the aftermath of the bungled Syrian intervention attempt and the bloodless Russian annexation of Crimea, but that will soon change. Because while the west is focused on day to day developments in Ukraine, and how to halt Russian expansion through appeasement (hardly a winning tactic as events in the 1930s demonstrated), Russia is once again thinking 3 steps ahead... and quite a few steps east.

While Europe is furiously scrambling to find alternative sources of energy should Gazprom pull the plug on natgas exports to Germany and Europe (the imminent surge in Ukraine gas prices by 40% is probably the best indication of what the outcome would be), Russia is preparing the announcement of the "Holy Grail" energy deal with none other than China, a move which would send geopolitical shockwaves around the world and bind the two nations in a commodity-backed axis. One which, as some especially on these pages, have suggested would lay the groundwork for a new joint, commodity-backed reserve currency that bypasses the dollar, something which Russia implied moments ago when its finance minister Siluanov said that Russia may refrain from foreign borrowing this year. Translated: bypass western purchases of Russian debt, funded by Chinese purchases of US Treasurys, and go straight to the source.

Here is what will likely happen next, as explained by Reuters:

Igor Sechin gathered media in Tokyo the next day to warn Western governments that more sanctions over Moscow's seizure of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine would be counter-productive.

The underlying message from the head of Russia's biggest oil company, Rosneft, was clear: If Europe and the United States isolate Russia, Moscow will look East for new business, energy deals, military contracts and political alliances.

The Holy Grail for Moscow is a natural gas supply deal with China that is apparently now close after years of negotiations. If it can be signed when Putin visits China in May, he will be able to hold it up to show that global power has shifted eastwards and he does not need the West.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-21/petrodollar-alert-isolated-west-putin-prepares-announce-holy-grail-gas-deal-china#comment-4577091

[MattSh]

16. Why the big split between East and West Europe? The Black Plague had something to do with it.

Why Nations Fail (further notes from Acemoglu and Robinson's)


According to the authors, the "fate" of European economies was decided as early as a precise year in the 14th century: the Black Deathplague of 1347. Now that is something that history teachers failed to tell us (at least mine had no idea about "applied history&quot .

The plague hit and quickly wiped out about half the English population. Such catastrophes can have a huge effect on the institutions of society. Perhaps understandably, scores of people went mad. Boccaccio noted that “some maintained that an infallible way of warding off this appalling evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking, gratify all one’s cravings whenever the opportunity offered, and shrug the thing off as an enormous joke … and this explains why those women who recovered were possibly less chaste in the period that followed.” Yet the plague also had a socially, economically, and politically transformative impact on medieval European societies.

(...) The massive scarcity of labor created by the plague shook the foundations of the feudal order. It encouraged peasants to demand that things change. At Eynsham Abbey, for example, the peasants demanded that many of the fines and unpaid labor be reduced. They got what they wanted, and their new contract began with the assertion “At the time of the mortality or pestilence, which occurred in 1349, scarcely two tenants remained in the manor, and they expressed their intention of leaving unless Brother Nicholas of Upton, then abbot and lord of the manor, made a new agreement with them.” He did.

What happened at Eynsham happened everywhere. Peasants started to free themselves from compulsory labor services and many obligations to their lords. Wages started to rise.

The attempt by the English state to stop the changes of institutions and wages that came in the wake of the Black Death didn’t work. In 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt broke out, and the rebels, under the leadership of Wat Tyler, even captured most of London. Though they were ultimately defeated, and Tyler was executed, there were no more attempts to enforce the Statute of Laborers. Feudal labor services dwindled away, an inclusive labor market began to emerge in England, and wages rose.

The plague seems to have hit most of the world, and everywhere a similar fraction of the population perished. Thus the demographic impact in Eastern Europe was the same as in England and Western Europe. The social and economic forces at play were also the same. Labor was scarce and people demanded greater freedoms. But in the East, a more powerful contradictory logic was at work. Fewer people meant higher wages in an inclusive labor market. But this gave lords a greater incentive to keep the labor market extractive and the peasants servile. In England this motivation had been in play, too, as reflected in the Statute of Laborers. But workers had sufficient power that they got their way. Not so in Eastern Europe. After the plague, Eastern landlords started to take over large tracts of land and expand their holdings, which were already larger than those in Western Europe. Towns were weaker and less populous, and rather than becoming freer, workers began to see their already existing freedoms encroached on.

The effects became especially clear after 1500, when Western Europe began to demand the agricultural goods, such as wheat, rye, and livestock, produced in the East. Eighty percent of the imports of rye into Amsterdam came from the Elbe, Vistula, and Oder river valleys. Soon half of the Netherlands’ booming trade was with Eastern Europe. As Western demand expanded, Eastern landlords ratcheted up their control over the labor force to expand their supply. It was to be called the Second Serfdom, distinct and more intense than its original form of the early Middle Ages. Lords increased the taxes they levied on their tenants’ own plots and took half of the gross output. In Korczyn, Poland, all work for the lord in 1533 was paid. But by 1600 nearly half was unpaid forced labor. In 1500, workers in Mecklenberg, in eastern Germany, owed only a few days’ unpaid labor services a year. By 1550 it was one day a week, and by 1600, three days per week. Workers’ children had to work for the lord for free for several years. In Hungary, landlords took complete control of the land in 1514, legislating one day a week of unpaid labor services for each worker. In 1550 this was raised to two days per week. By the end of the century, it was three days. Serfs subject to these rules made up 90 percent of the rural population by this time.

Though in 1346 there were few differences between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of political and economic institutions, by 1600 they were worlds apart. In the West, workers were free of feudal dues, fines, and regulations and were becoming a key part of a booming market economy. In the East, they were also involved in such an economy, but as coerced serfs growing the food and agricultural goods demanded in the West. It was a market economy, but not an inclusive one. This institutional divergence was the result of a situation where the differences between these areas initially seemed very small: in the East, lords were a little better organized; they had slightly more rights and more consolidated landholdings. Towns were weaker and smaller, peasants less organized. In the grand scheme of history, these were small differences. Yet these small differences between the East and the West became very consequential for the lives of their populations and for the future path of institutional development when the feudal order was shaken up by the Black Death. The Black Death is a vivid example of a critical juncture, a major event or confluence of factors disrupting the existing economic or political balance in society.

A critical juncture is a double-edged sword that can cause a sharp turn in the trajectory of a nation. On the one hand it can open the way for breaking the cycle of extractive institutions and enable more inclusive ones to emerge, as in England. Or it can intensify the emergence of extractive institutions, as was the case with the Second Serfdom in Eastern Europe.

Understanding how history and critical junctures shape the path of economic and political institutions enables us to have a more complete theory of the origins of differences in poverty and prosperity. In addition, it enables us to account for the lay of the land today and why some nations make the transition to inclusive economic and political institutions while others do not.

==

(...) The kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, for example, was ruled by an elite class called the Szlachta, who were so powerful they had even introduced elections for kings. This was not absolute rule as in France under Louis XIV, the Sun King, but absolutism of an elite, extractive political institutions all the same. The Szlachta ruled over a mostly rural society dominated by serfs, who had no freedom of movement or economic opportunities. Farther east, the Russian emperor Peter the Great was also consolidating an absolutism far more intense and extractive than even Louis XIV could manage. [The map] provides one simple way of seeing the extent of the divergence between Western and Eastern Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It plots whether or not a country still had serfdom in 1800. Countries that appear dark did; those that are light did not. Eastern Europe is dark; Western Europe is light.

Yet the institutions of Western Europe had not always been so different from those in the East. They began, as we saw earlier, to diverge in the fourteenth century when the Black Death hit in 1346. There were small differences between political and economic institutions in Western and Eastern Europe. England and Hungary were even ruled by members of the same family, the Angevins. The more important institutional differences that emerged after the Black Death then created the background upon which the more significant divergence between the East and the West would play out during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

map: Serfdom in Europe in 1800

[Demeter]

18. That is positively fascinating!

This may also explain why the West knows so little about Central Europe. I'm 4 generations from Poland, and my ancestors had no way to convey what life in the old country was like...except that by working in a silk mill, my great-grandmother had money! She had no hope of inheriting anything in Poland...but Detroit's auto industry drew all my ancestors from all parts of the dispersed and annexed Poland together in a city that at one point had more Poles than Warsaw, with churches and schools and entire neighborhoods that spoke Polish and had no need to learn English....and all before the immigration barrier slammed down...

...Congress passed a literacy requirement in 1917 to curb the influx of low-skilled immigrants from entering the country.

Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, followed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which was aimed at further restricting the Southern Europeans and Russians who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s. This ultimately resulted in precluding the all "extra" immigration to the United States, including Jews fleeing Nazi German persecution.

The Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas for European immigrants so that no more than 2% of the 1890 immigrant stocks were allowed into America...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_United_States#Immigration_1850_to_1930

I hope you can post some sources for further information on your thesis, whether in print or online, Matt. I think understanding this cultural divide is vital to the survival of the USA.

[MattSh]

70. Not exactly my thesis though...

This was passed on to me, unattributed, a while back. Luckily, I was able to track it down 2.5 years later.

After a day away today (after all, it likely topped 70 today), I remember that I tried to track this down and found the original source.

It's from a book "Why Nations Fail" by Darron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Specifically, chapter 4. As indicated in the first line of the post!

I really should go and read more of the book.

[Demeter]

20. Furthermore....

By destroying the Rule of Law, the sanctity of contracts for all but the powerful, public education on every level, labor rights and protections, basic privacy and basic democracy, the USA throws away its only advantage in the world of nations...the attraction that brought so many people from every other nation on earth to this side of the world.

The destruction of the labor market has already reversed immigration from Mexico. It's not that Mexico has become the new heaven on earth for its people, it's that there's no percentage in struggling to cross the border....

For first time since Depression, more Mexicans leave U.S. than enter

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/for-first-time-since-depression-more-mexicans-leave-us-than-enter/2012/04/23/gIQApyiDdT_story.html



A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.

It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent...

SEE ALSO THEIR SOURCE:

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migration-from-mexico-falls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/

[Demeter]

19. I had hoped to discuss a variety of disasters all given the "plague" designation

but perhaps there's enough about the Black Death to keep us busy...

[Demeter]

21. Global systemic crisis-escalation in the US reaction for survival: trigger a cold war to make it ea

Global systemic crisis-escalation in the US reaction for survival: trigger a cold war to make it easier to annex Europe

http://www.leap2020.eu/GEAB-N-83-is-available-Global-systemic-crisis-escalation-in-the-US-reaction-for-survival-trigger-a-cold-war-to-make-it_a15801.html

Layout of the full article:

1. BUILD A TRAP TO DIVERT EUROPE AWAY FROM ITS OWN DESTINY
2. MASS ATTACKS ON EUROPE
3. CAUSE A NEW IRON CURTAIN TO FALL ON EUROPE
4. FORCE EUROPE TO CHOOSE SIDES
5. FIND THE INTRINSIC RESOURCES IN EUROPE TO FREE ITSELF FROM THE TRAP - Eight strategic recommendations



BUILD A TRAP TO DIVERT EUROPE AWAY FROM IT’S OWN DESTINY

When, in November 2013, Russia asked the EU for tripartite negotiations on the Ukraine’s free trade agreements with its two neighbours in order to find areas of common ground for all parties directly concerned (1), what was at stake was stability, integrity and independence for the Ukraine and that it should remain as the natural link between Europe and Russia.

But neither Baroness Ashton, nor Mr. O’Sullivan (2), in charge of the European External Action Service, nor Mr. Fule who, at the head of the Directorate General for Enlargement, spends his time trying to integrate everything that moves in Eastern Europe (3), didn’t want that. On the contrary, they have forced the Ukraine to “choose sides” (4), thus creating the conditions subsequent to the inevitable events which we know: the Ukraine has in fact chosen… and the country, logically, has entered a dramatic and bloody process of decision which is only just begun. Baroness Ashton and Mr. O’Sullivan have literally set a trap for the Ukraine… and Europe.

Five months later and the damage is huge: over 100 dead (5), the Ukraine is left with an unelected government brought to power by extreme right-wing factions (6), relations between the EU and Russia are broken, the Ukraine and Russia are on the verge of a war that isn’t far from being a war between Europe and Russia (7), the Russian military have retaken control of their Crimean assets, the US fleet is cruising in the Black Sea waters (8), the US army has set itself up in Europe again (in Poland, Lithuania and Romania (9)), the media, excited by blood, are a pure propaganda machine determined to push politicians and citizens into war, the EU-Ukraine free trade Treaty is about to be signed, against Russian interests, by Washington and a non-elected Ukrainian government (10) (if the same method is used for the TTIP, Washington and Baroness Ashton will have signed it in April at the latest), the West is preparing to deny the legitimacy of the Crimean referendum which will aggravate the crisis and continue to ask questions on the West’s democratic struggle… (11)

From a European point of view, what a significant political and diplomatic failure! Working to rebuild the Iron Curtain in 2014 and isolate Europe from all the current dynamics in these famous emerging countries to which Russia binds us, just as the Ukraine binds us to Russia (12).....

MUCH MORE AT LINK

PNAC AND THE IDIOCRACY OF WASHINGTON WILL DRIVE THIS NATION OFF THE CLIFFS ONTO SHARP ROCKS OF THEIR DESTRUCTION. A TURNING POINT FOR THE PEOPLE APPROACHES.

[Demeter]

22. Bilderberg Secrets EXPOSED - What Are They Planning Next?

http://humansarefree.com/2014/03/bilderberg-secrets-exposed-what-are.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HumansAreFree+%28Humans+Are+Free%29&utm_content=FaceBook#sthash.3MYuR5cw.dpuf

A Review of Daniel Estulin's book

For over 14 years, Daniel Estulin has investigated and researched the Bilderberg Group’s far-reaching influence on business and finance, global politics, war and peace, and control of the world’s resources and its money.

His book, “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group,” was published in 2005 and is now updated in a new 2009 edition.

He states that in 1954, “the most powerful men in the world met for the first time” in Oosterbeek, Netherlands, “debated the future of the world,” and decided to meet annually in secret. They called themselves the "Bilderberg Group" with a membership representing a who’s who of world power elites, mostly from America, Canada, and Western Europe with familiar names like: David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Lloyd Blankfein, George Soros, Donald Rumsfeld, Rupert Murdoch, other heads of state, influential senators, congressmen and parliamentarians, Pentagon and NATO brass, members of European royalty, selected media figures, and invited others – some quietly by some accounts like Barack Obama and many of his top officials. Always well represented are top figures from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), IMF, World Bank, Trilateral Commission, EU, and powerful central bankers from the Federal Reserve, the ECB’s Jean-Claude Trichet, and Bank of England’s Mervyn King.

For over half a century, no agenda or discussion topics became public nor is any press coverage allowed. The few invited fourth estate attendees and their bosses are sworn to secrecy. Nonetheless, Estulin undertook “an investigative journey” that became his life’s work.


He states:

“Slowly, one by one, I have penetrated the layers of secrecy surrounding the Bilderberg Group, but I could not have done this withot help of ‘conscientious objectors’ from inside, as well as outside, the Group’s membership.”

As a result, he keeps their names confidential...


Whatever its early mission, the Group is now “a shadow world government threaten(ing) to take away our right to direct our own destinies (by creating) a disturbing reality” very much harming the public’s welfare. In short, Bilderbergers want to supplant individual nation-state sovereignty with an all-powerful global government, corporate controlled, and check-mated by militarized enforcement.

Bilderberg Objectives

The Group’s grand design is for “a One World Government (World Company) with a single, global marketplace, policed by one world army, and financially regulated by one ‘World (Central) Bank’ using one global currency.” Their “wish list” includes:

– “one international identify (observing) one set of universal values”;

– centralized control of world populations by “mind control” in other words, controlling world public opinion;

– a New World Order with no middle class, only “rulers and servants (serfs),” and, of course, no democracy;

– “a zero-growth society” without prosperity or progress, only greater wealth and power for the rulers;

– manufactured crises and perpetual wars;

– absolute control of education to program the public mind and train those chosen for various roles;

– “centralized control of all foreign and domestic policies;” one size fits all globally;

– using the UN as a de facto world government imposing a UN tax on “world citizens;”

– expanding NAFTA and WTO globally;

– making NATO a world military;

– imposing a universal legal system; and

– a global “welfare state where obedient slaves will be rewarded and non-conformists targeted for extermination.”

IF YOU WANT A SPECULATIVE FICTION THAT DEALS WITH THIS, READ KAGE BAKER'S "COMPANY" SERIES OF NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES...

[snot]

98. "non-conformists targeted for extermination."

[Democracyinkind]

55. A glimpse into the mindset that informs the European elite's strategy in the Ukraine

This is the kind of shit that informs them. By invoking and channeling the long dead master of expansionist imperialism in the East (Halford McKinder), James Rogers gives a glimpse into how narrow-minded European geo strategy still is. This is the kind of madness that has brought war to Europe in the 20th century, and if not countered, will provoke many more wars in the 21st.

(...)

In other words, Eastern Europe is the gateway between the vast resources of Asia and the dense and technologically advanced populations of Europe. This means that it will either be controlled by imperial despotism in the form of Russia, or by democratic civilization in the form of Europe. Due to its geo strategic location, who gains access over this crucial zone will also gain influence over the entire Eurasian supercontinent. When Eastern Europe is controlled from Moscow, Europeans – and by extension, North Americans – will be held captive, as they were for much of the Cold War. When Eastern Europe is shaped by Brussels (as well as London, Paris and Berlin) – and by extension, Washington – Russia will be weakened and rendered relatively harmless, as it was for much of the 1990s and 2000s.

(...)

http://www.europeangeostrategy.org/2014/03/letter-prof-sir-halford-mackinder-european-leaders-russias-invasion-ukraine/

The rein of a reactionary crypto-fascist such as Putin depends on such views being dominant on the European side. The day on which Europe relegates this kind of thinking to the dustbin of history will be they on which Europe enables the people of Russia to regain control of their country. This new era of scarcity can either be managed by endless wars over the last scraps, or by a cooperative revolution of the people, by the people and for the people. If we do not overcome our tendency to orientalize the Russian people, the former path is guaranteed.

[Demeter]

23. Forget Russia Dumping U.S. Treasuries … Here’s the REAL Economic Threat

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-03-21/forget-russia-dumping-us-treasuries-%E2%80%A6-here%E2%80%99s-real-economic-threat

Russia threatened to dump its U.S. treasuries if America imposed sanctions regarding Russia’s action in the Crimea. Zero Hedge argues that Russia has already done so.

But veteran investor Jim Sinclair argues that Russia has a much scarier financial attack which Russia can use against the U.S. Specifically, Sinclair says that if Russia accepts payment for oil and gas in any currency other than the dollar – whether it’s gold, the Euro, the Ruble, the Rupee, or anything else – then the U.S. petrodollar system will collapse:

Indeed, one of the main pillars for U.S. power is the petrodollar, and the U.S. is desperate for the dollar to maintain reserve status. Some wise commentators have argued that recent U.S. wars have really been about keeping the rest of the world on the petrodollar standard. The theory is that – after Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, which had made the dollar the world’s reserve currency – America salvaged that role by adopting the petrodollar. Specifically, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia agreed that all oil and gas would be priced in dollars, so the rest of the world had to use dollars for most transactions.

But Reuters notes that Russia may be mere months away from signing a bilateral trade deal with China, where China would buy huge quantities of Russian oil and gas.

Zero Hedge argues:

Add bilateral trade denominated in either Rubles or Renminbi (or gold), add Iran, Iraq, India, and soon the Saudis (China’s largest foreign source of crude, whose crown prince also happened to meet president Xi Jinping last week to expand trade further) and wave goodbye to the petrodollar.

As we noted last year:

The average life expectancy for a fiat currency is less than 40 years.

But what about “reserve currencies”, like the U.S. dollar?

JP Morgan noted last year that “reserve currencies” have a limited shelf-life:



As the table shows, U.S. reserve status has already lasted as long as Portugal and the Netherland’s reigns. It won’t happen tomorrow, or next week … but the end of the dollar’s rein is coming nonetheless, and China and many other countries are calling for a new reserve currency.

Remember, China is entering into more and more major deals with other countries to settle trades in Yuans, instead of dollars. This includes the European Union (the world’s largest economy) [and also Russia].

And China is quietly becoming a gold superpower…

[xchrom]

24. Euro too strong for exporters - EU's Van Rompuy

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/21/uk-eu-euro-vanrompuy-idUKBREA2K1ZE20140321

(Reuters) - The euro exchange rate is too strong for euro zone exporters, the president of the European Council said on Friday.

Herman Van Rompuy, who represents European Union governments in Brussels, also said the economic aspects of the euro crisis, such as low growth, persisted, although the threat to the common currency's existence had passed.

"The existential threat on the euro, that is over ... We've seen it on the financial markets. There is much more convergence also in the spreads (on euro zone government bond yields)," he said at an event organised by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think-tank.

"We see it also in the exchange rate. The euro is even too strong for our exporters. The euro even became, with the crisis in the emerging countries, some kind of safe haven. So I say often the existential threat is behind us but the problems are not over," he said.

France's Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault made similar comments last week when he was quoted as saying that the euro was "a bit" overvalued, but that this should not discourage France from making efforts to regain competitiveness.

[Demeter]

33. SELL! SELL! SELL!

Whenever I read nonsense like that coming from an official source, I head for the hills....

[xchrom]

25. U.S. swaps regulator gives EU firms more time to meet rules

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/21/uk-derivatives-regulations-idUKBREA2K21R20140321

(Reuters) - The U.S. derivatives regulator on Friday gave European trading platforms more time to register and meet strict new rules to make the market more transparent, in anticipation of comparable rules abroad.

The delay was issued by the agency in a so-called no-action letter after an agreement the Commodity Futures Trading Commission struck with the European Union in February, which will in practice affect firms in London only.

The CFTC at the time said it expected the UK's Financial Conduct Authority to have rules comparable to its own in place by March 24, and that foreign companies would be granted relief from its rules, if they so requested.

The platforms to trade swaps now have until May 14 to register, or so much earlier as the agency finds they have signed up with a European regulator with comparable rules.

[xchrom]

26. As Fed eyes eventual exit, policymakers spar over interest rates

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/22/uk-usa-fed-idUKBREA2K1WW20140322

(Reuters) - Two top Federal Reserve policymakers staked out diametrically opposite views on Friday about whether the U.S. central bank should be willing to risk higher unemployment in order to head off a potential financial crisis.

One Fed Board member, Jeremy Stein, said that it should. The other, Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, disagreed.

The two former economics professors debated in the jargon-laden lingo and polite tones of lifelong academics at a conference held in the Fed's Washington headquarters.

But it suggested the real-life tensions that loomed as Janet Yellen ran her first policy-setting meeting earlier in the week, in the Fed building across the street.

[Demeter]

27. The Plague Informs and Shapes Our World View (QUOTATIONS)

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.---Wilhelm Reich

War is the greatest plague that can afflict humanity, it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.--Martin Luther

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.--George Washington

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.--Ludwig von Mises

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.--Daniel Berrigan

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.--Napoleon Bonaparte

If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.--Henry Fielding

We are a plague on the Earth.--David Attenborough

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.--William Safire

[xchrom]

28. Venezuela says street protests have caused $10 billion in damage

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/22/uk-venezuela-protests-idUKBREA2L02W20140322

(Reuters) - Venezuela's president said on Friday that street protests for the past month have caused at least $10 billion in damage, accusing hardline foes of carrying out terrorist acts to sabotage public assets.

President Nicolas Maduro did not say how the government arrived at that figure from the clashes between demonstrators barricading roads, pro-government radicals and security forces that have killed at least 31 people.

"The minority who want a coup have done so much damage to the country ... they burnt a public university where hundreds of young people studied," he said in a nationally televised speech.

"This isn't protest. It's vandalism. It's terrorism."

[Demeter]

29. Albert Camus wrote a book he called "The Plague"

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2058116-la-peste

This link provides a number of (translated) quotes from his work. I have not read it, and based on the quotes, I am not likely to read it either. but many have a high opinion of the man and his literature...

[xchrom]

30. BoJ will continue its monetary easing programme - Kuroda

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/21/uk-japan-kuroda-idUKBREA2K1FW20140321

(Reuters) - Bank of Japan will continue to pursue its massive monetary easing programme, with the Japanese economy only halfway to achieving its 2 percent inflation target, the central bank's governor said on Friday.

The BoJ began an intense burst of monetary stimulus in last April, pledging to buy assets aggressively to accelerate consumer inflation to 2 percent in roughly two years, in a country mired in deflation for 15 years.

"Japan's economy has been following a path toward achieving the 2 percent price stability target as expected, and we are halfway there," Haruhiko Kuroda said in a speech. "Of course, we are only halfway there and will steadily pursue the QQE (quantitative and qualitative monetary easing)."

Since last year, the BoJ has stood pat despite market expectations of more stimulus to cushion the impact from a sales tax hike that takes effect in April. It has argued that the current ultra-loose policy is enough to keep the economy on track to meet the price target.

[Demeter]

31. Plague (with a Capital P)

http://uhavax.hartford.edu/bugl/histepi.htm#plague

Arguably the ultimate scourge of mankind (and over 100 species of animals) was the so-called Black Death. The generic "plague" (with a lower case p) has entered the language as a descriptor for any deadly epidemic disease. Plague (with an upper case P) is caused by Yersinia pestis, a rod-shaped, Gram negative bacterium. As few as one bacterium is an infective dose! This electron micrograph is from Dennis Kunkel's webpage, which is definitely worth many a visit.

http://www.pbrc.hawaii.edu/~kunkel

Its reservoir consists of the fleas (the Indian rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopsis, of which only adult females feed on hosts. X. cheopsis is fairly hardy and can survive for 6 to 12 months off a host in dung, an abandoned rodent's nest, textile bales, and on rodents, such as prairie dogs, rats, squirrels, gerbils, field mice, etc. The micrograph of the flea was made at the University of Queensland in Australia.



The following picture was obtained from the CDC website. It has been illuminated from the rear so that you can see that the flea's gut is filled with blood after drawing a meal from a host.



Y. pestis is enzootic; meaning it is endemic to these rodents (the reservoir), and can even survive in their burrows after an epizootic (an epidemic arising from a transfer of disease from animals).

Black rats (Rattus rattus-which were common in ancient times, but have since been supplanted by the larger and more aggressive brown rats, Norvegicus rattus) rarely move more than 200 meters from their nest and are good climbers, hence their adaptability to the thatched roof homes of either the Middle Ages, present day rural Africa, or parts of the Asian subcontinent. Normally the fleas live on the rodents in a form of equilibrium, but sometimes that equilibrium is upset when the organism multiplies rapidly in the flea's gut, eventually blocking the lumen (the space within its gut) so that the flea regurgitates infected material as it attempts to feed. This infects the rodent and it contracts a form of the fatal disease called murine or silvatic Plague. When infected, rats are asymptomatic until near death, whereupon they swell up (because the Y. pestis grow so rapidly and in such large numbers that they block the biliary duct) and stagger as if intoxicated. The fleas then leave their dying hosts and seek residence in the nearest warm-blooded animals. Considering that fleas can jump several feet, "nearest" is a relative term.

One to six days after a human receives a flea bite, the lymph nodes in the armpit (axilla) and groin become very tender and swollen (as large as an egg [They range from 1 to 10 cm in diameter.]). These very painful swollen areas are called buboes (from the Greek bubo, meaning groin). The buboes may suppurate, i.e., break and discharge a particularly fetid pus. Each of the buboes shown below are on children (to give you a perspective of size).



Sometimes the original bite site becomes infected and suppurates. It is not rare for the area of the bite to become gangrenous and necrotic, i.e., the tissue dies. Other symptoms include restlessness, staggering gait, mental confusion, prostration, delirium, rapid pulse, nausea, aching of the extremities and back, and a high fever (at least 40° C = 104° F). Then one of two avenues is followed. If the fever breaks, there is usually remission and the immune system has gained the upper hand over the pathogen, which it then proceeds to destroy and expel. If the fever doesn't break, the infection spreads to the blood, causing septicemia and death. This is the course of bubonic Plague.

In some cases the microbe can proceed directly to the blood stream and this septicemic Plague can occur before the formation of buboes and results in death before a diagnosis can be made. Some scientists feel that this form of Plague can even be carried by either the common human flea or the body louse. In septicemia, blood vessels break and leak under the skin causing a dark rash as the blood dries (hence the name Black Death which was given in the 1500s).

For both bubonic and septicemic Plague, there is hemorrhagic illness (bleeding), multiple system failure, and death. All of this occurs within three to seven days. The mortality rate for untreated bubonic Plague is about 50-75% and 100% for septicemic Plague.

As it rages throughout the population, Plague can change to a more virulent form and enters the lungs, whereupon the victims initially cough up a blood-spotted mucus and then graduate to coughing bloody froth, all the while spreading the disease by aerosol droplets. This pneumonic Plague has a 100% mortality rate, if untreated, and death can occur in a matter of hours. Small children having the Plague frequently went into convulsions, wherein their bodies jerked about uncontrollably prior to death-not a pleasant sight.

Streptomycin, gentamicin, and tetracycline are treatments of choice for all three varieties of Plague. Penicillin has no effect. Medication must be given within the first 18 hours of infection to be completely effective.

Quarantine (from the Italian quarentina, meaning forty days [based on no scientific reason, but rather on the number of days the bible said Christ spent in the wilderness] for the time of isolation of ships entering harbor which were suspected of carrying some form of contagion) is only somewhat effective at the outset of an outbreak. In the fourteenth century, Milan, Florence, and Venice employed quarantines with a vengeance. The homes of sufferers were sealed—well and sick left to die for lack of food and water. Of course, the human residents of such dwellings were constrained, while the rats could come and go as they pleased. Even rats aboard docked quarantined ships had easy egress, because they could climb down the mooring ropes and onto the docks.

The major Plague epidemics occurred in 540 at Pelusium, Egypt, reached Constantinople in 542 and spread into Europe and Asia (the Plague of Justinian) in the following decade; 14th century Europe, following the caravan routes, it was in the lower Volga River basin in 1345, the Caucasus and Crimea by 1346, Constantinople by 1347, Alexandria in the autumn of 1347, Cyprus and Sicily in that year, Italy by winter 1347, Marseilles by January of 1348, Paris in spring 1348, followed by Germany and the Low Countries in that year, Norway in May 1349, eastern Europe by 1350, and finally Russia in 1351, but smaller outbreaks continued for about 200 more years; Austria in 1711; the Balkans from 1770-1772. The last major pandemic ran from 1855-1896 worldwide, but mostly in China and India, wherein more than 12 million died. Manchuria in 1910–1911 witnessed about 60,000 deaths due to pneumonic Plague with a repeat in 1920–1921; and a minor outbreak occurred as recently as the summer of 1994 in Surat, India closely following an earthquake in September 1993.

From 1150-1200 there was a major warming throughout Europe. This, coupled with the rise of the mercantile class, led to improved diet and greater population growth. By 1340, Europe was significantly overpopulated. This was followed by the so-called Little Ice Age, which ended by 1351. The resulting climate was colder and wetter than normal. With population higher than it had been in some time, and crop yields reduced, per capita caloric intake fell precipitously, general health declined, and the pest population increased. Not a welcome combination of circumstances.

There are several theories to explain the onset of Plague, but they all agree that a major source was China, Mongolia, and Hunan province, in particular. The nomadic tribesmen that populated the region seemed to know instinctively that something was amiss. A series of customs arose designed to keep the microbe in check. Trapping marmots (a host for X. cheopis) was taboo; marmots could be shot at a distance only; slow-moving animals were to be avoided; furs of certain rodents could not be used.

Around 1330 Plague affected the local residents of the Orient and following the elaborate trade routes, established in the previous two centuries, made its way west. By 1345, it was in the lower Volga; by 1346 Astrakhan, the Caucasus, and Azerbijian; by 1346 Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire; late autumn 1347 Alexandria, Egypt and southward along the Nile; India and what is now the middle east were next to be depopulated by the, soon to be ubiquitous, flea and its internal traveling companion.

During the summer of 1347 Genoese merchants and their families were living in the city of Kaffa on the Black Sea, in the Crimea, when it was subjected to a siege by Tartars. As the effects of the prolonged siege seemed to be overcoming the resistance of the residents, an outbreak of disease decimated the Tartar forces. In a fit of rage, the remains of the departing army are rumored to have catapulted corpses of the disease victims into the city. The merchants hastily departed the city in twelve vessels and set sail for Italy. October 1347 found the Genoese fleet outside the port of Messina, Sicily and the crews, or what was left of them, were found to be dying of some unknown malady. Michael of Piazza described the arrival of the sailors as "sickness clinging to their very bones." City officials sealed the vessels for two days—but, of course, this had little effect on the rats, and their accompanying fleas, who easily descended the mooring lines—and then dispatched them to their home port. Within two months nearly half of the population of Messina was dead. The disease soon spread throughout the ports of Italy and reached the inland cities by early spring; in most cases halving their populations. Reports of another Genoese merchant ship carrying the disease to Marseilles came in January 1348. By that summer, the Plague reached Paris. It then spread east to Germany and north to England, reaching London in December 1348. During this time it came to be known by the names: the Great Dying, das Grosse Sterben, the Plague of Justinian, and Magna Mortalis.

At that time, the population of England was estimated to be about four million, yet within a mere two and a half years about one third of them had died. Fully one third of the residents of Florence died in the first six months and 45%-75% in a single year. Venice lost 60% of its populace over the year and a half that the epidemic raged. Death was so rampant that the pope had to consecrate the Rhone River so corpses could be dumped into it. The death toll throughout Europe was at least 25 million out of a total population of 40 million. (In warmer months and in southern Europe, at this time, there was at least one family of black rats per household and an estimated average of three fleas per rat.)

Clergy were especially hard hit; 50% of the English clergy died; in Montpellier, of 140 Dominican friars at the outset, only seven survived; one third of the cardinals went to their eternal reward. Their numbers were slow to recover, taking several generations and some orders remained depleted until well into the seventeenth century.

This outbreak of Plague was accelerated by a total absence of sanitary procedures and lack of knowledge. For instance, the dead were heaped in piles, whereupon rats and dogs fed on the corpses and the cycle was extended. Homes were more like sties than what we would associate with buildings fit for human habitation. Roofs and walls were made of straw; floors were dirt; animals were kept inside. The streets, if that's what you could call them, of cities were barely wide enough for a single cart to pass, and they were perpetually covered with mud, garbage, and excrement. For lack of heated water, people rarely bathed and fleas were commonplace. When St. Thomas à Becket was prepared for burial in England in 1170, he was found to be wearing (from the outside in) (i) a large brown mantle, (ii) a white surplice, (iii) a coat of lambs' wool, (iv) a woolen pelisse, (v) another woolen pelisse, (vi) the black robe of the Benedictine order, (vii) a shirt, and (viii) a tight-fitting suit of coarse hair-cloth covered on the exterior with linen. During preparation for burial the cold English air stimulated so many of the critters occupying his hair suit that it "boiled over with them like water in a simmering cauldron."

Simple children's' rhymes illustrate some profundities associated with the times, e.g.,

Ring around the rosies,

A pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes!

We all fall down.

Rosies are rosary beads, presumably to gain divine intercession against this mysterious enemy. Most Plague victims emitted a rather strong and rather objectionable odor, so flowers (posies) were carried to mask the smell. Ashes are all that was left of a burnt corpse. Of course, to fall down means to die. Sometimes the second last line is replaced with "A Tishoo, a tishoo," meaning the sneezes of the victims of pneumonic Plague. To be sneezed on by them was a sure death sentence for all but the hardiest souls. [There is some debate about the relevance of this to Plague because the first printed version of this rhyme appeared in 1822, over 150 years after the last major outbreak in the British Isles.]

Throughout Europe, many areas were abandoned. Agriculture came to a virtual standstill as farmers fled or died in their fields. Consequently, food shortages compounded the problems of society. Governments ground to a halt as bureaucrats died. No civil authority remained and crime was rampant. Station in life was not an indicator of immunity. Plague attacked merchants and peasants with equal voracity. Only the very rich could afford to move to protected environs far from the disease and even that was no guarantee of survival.

Everyone feared the spreading contagion and no efforts were spared to avoid its fatal embrace. "Kinsmen held aloof, brother was forsaken by brother, oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been strangers," wrote Boccacio in his preface to the Decameron. The pope's physician, Guy de Chauliac characterized the period as one where "Charity is dead." What more can be said?

Unaware of the cause of the disease (or even the rudiments of Germ Theory), people took to

burning incense,

dipping handkerchiefs in aromatic oils,

ringing church bells and firing cannons,

wearing talismans,

bathing in human urine,

placing "stinks" (dead animals) in their dwellings,

bleeding via leeches and bloodletting,

drinking the pus extracted from a suppurated bubo (Total Yuck!),

applying dried toads to relieve the pain of the buboes by absorbing the "poisons,"

drinking liquid gold or powdered emeralds (only for the very rich, of course), and

joining groups of flagellants.

The "order" of flagellants, also called the Brethren of the Cross, (initially active in the late 1200s) was re-formed in Germany in 1348 and initially blessed by the pope. It forbade its members from bathing, washing their heads, shaving, sleeping in a bed, having any contact with the opposite sex, or even changing their clothes during a procession without permission of the "Master". Washing of hands was allowed, but only once a day and that had to be done when kneeling. Each member had to donate funds to cover the cost of their food for the duration. As if to satisfy the ascetic needs of a squeamish populace, the groups went from town to town and whipped themselves with scourges, i.e., sticks with three or four leather tails with large knots containing sharpened iron spikes. They continued until the blood ran and even when the spikes stuck in the skin and had to be torn out. Many of them died of infections of these open wounds. They formed in bands of 50 to 300 and moved in pairs with men in the front and women in the rear of this serpentine procession. Each group's "Master" heard confessions, imposed penances, and granted absolution—all to the total horror of the local clergy, who had enjoyed an absolute monopoly (and accompanying fees) over such practices for centuries. Each procession lasted 33⅓ days, the number of years Christ was said to have spent on earth. During their travels through Germany and the Low Countries they preached anti-Semitism. Their asceticism had no effect on the state of the epidemic and their personal hygiene may have helped to carry Plague from village to village. Eventually, in October of 1349, the pope ordered the military arm of the church to force the groups to disband.

Upon commission of the pope in 1348, a group of learned men (and at that time only men were deemed capable of being educated and hence, learned) of the medical faculty at Paris concluded that the disaster was a result of a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius at 1:00 p.m. on March 20, 1345. This caused hot, moist conditions, which forced the earth to exhale a virulent sulfurous miasma. So much for the Age of Aquarius!

The horror and fear faced by medieval people confronted with the bizarre and almost totally unknown symptoms of Plague is inconceivable to us today. To those who believed in spirits and devils (that was most of the people of the time), this infestation was a scene from their worst nightmares; one in which they were completely unable to effect relief, no less a cure. It was as if all the monsters of their psyches were being unleashed for reasons they could not comprehend. When your worldview is limited, your options in the face of calamity are even more limited. Any explanation is believable. The pope declared that it was not divine punishment for the sins of the world, but local clergy gave that as the only reason for such horrors. As a referent, you may want to look at a copy of the leftmost part of the triptych of Heironymous Bosch's the Garden of Earthly Delights.

As with most mysterious, unknowable, and uncontrollable tragedies, the thin veneer of human rationality is peeled back to expose a dark undersurface capable of incomprehensible horrors and unimaginable evil. People sought to blame others; scapegoating was in season; xenophobia was the norm—all strangers were suspected of spreading disease. As had happened before and since, Jews were the targets of choice (even though they died of Plague at the same rate as others). Rumors of their having poisoned wells ran rampant. There were pogroms and massacres. The rabble was loose. Zurich expelled all its Jews and closed its gates to them. On a single day in 1349, 2000 Jews were burned to death by a mob in Strausborg. Even officialdom entered the fray. The canton of Basel gathered all 4500 of its Jews in a specially built structure on an island in the Rhine and burned them to death, after which the town fathers passed a law forbidding Jewish residence in the canton for 200 years. The largest Jewish community in Europe was in Mainz, Germany where at least 6,000 Jews were incinerated after they fought and killed 200 of an attacking mob. Pogroms also occurred in Baden, Brussels, Burren, Dresden, Eisenach, Erfurt, Freiburg, Gotha, Landsberg, Lindau, Memmingen, Solothurn, Speyer, Stuttgart, Ulm, Worms, and Zofingen. There were over 350 separate recorded massacres of Jews during the years of the Plague.

The approach of a group of flagellants frequently incited townsfolk to embark on pogroms and when they didn't, the Brethren proceeded posthaste to the Jewish quarter where they murdered and looted with a viciousness, ferocity, and completeness that foretold the Final Solution of the Nazis in the twentieth century. Western Europe killed or expelled the Jews even as Pope Clement VI issued papal bulls forbidding plundering and killing them. As if on cue, local clergy either instigated anti-Semitic actions or failed to stop them, likely because properties of the Jews reverted to the Catholic Church upon the death of the families. What the Church lost in clergy and followers, it gained in tangible assets.

Eastern Europe, relatively unscathed by the Plague, tolerated the Jews. King Casimir of Poland offered to protect them. Some say it was because he had a Jewish mistress, but it is more likely that his country needed the skills they possessed. A return of the Jews to their former lands in western Europe was slow.

Once it ebbed, by the end of 1351, the Plague left Europe with a sizable shortage of workers and helped to destroy the feudal system when labor found itself in a seller's market. Abandoned homes were taken over by complete strangers, as there was a default redistribution of wealth.

The most generally agreed upon mortality figure was that one in three people were killed by the Plague—a total loss of well over 20 million in Europe and perhaps as many as 40 million worldwide.

[As with all things ancient and historical, there remains room for controversy. Scott & Duncan wrote Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historic Populations wherein they claim that the medieval plague was not due to Plague at all, but rather to some form of hemorrhagic viral disease. S. Cohn disagrees with those authors only insofar as the cause of the disease. Nevertheless, French researchers found Y. pestis in the dental pulp of bodies buried in Montpellier during the 14th century. Adding to this is a October 2001 paper of Parkhill, et al. in Nature 413:523-527. They announced the complete mapping of the bacterium's genome, all 4,653,728 base pairs (more of this in a later unit). They found 149 deactivated genes that once enabled the bacterium to thrive in the human gut, but are no longer needed.]

Although the Plague no longer killed millions, it remained present on the European continent for more than three hundred years, erupting in seemingly random locations until its final gasp in Marseilles in 1720. The last major infestation of Plague (over a million died) arose in China and India in 1855 and reached Hong Kong in 1894. Estimates are that 12 million died. It was here that Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato independently described the causative agent. Strangely enough, it wasn't until 1897 that P.L. Simond identified the mode of transmission.

Today Plague is endemic in various places; Madagascar, Tanzania, Brazil, Peru, Burma, and Vietnam have experienced cases almost every year since the start of the last pandemic in 1880, and rodents in the southwestern United States carry it! In fact, 40% of the U.S land area is infested by Plague-infected animals, mostly prairie dogs! Some national parks have signs saying not to feed the squirrels because they have Plague.

Since 1947, there have been 390 cases of Plague in the U.S. resulting in 60 deaths. From 1980-1994 this country has had 229 cases with 33 deaths. The last two Americans to succumb to Plague died in August 1996, both due to transmission by way of prairie dogs. A thirteen year-old Kazakhstani boy died of bubonic Plague on August 9, 1999—the first such death in that country in 25 years. Many other nonfatal cases have been reported.

Today east Africa and Hunan province in China are permanent reservoirs, called inveterate foci, for the disease. During 1965-1971, Vietnam (in addition to fighting a war against the United States) reported 25,000 cases of Plague. The World Health Organization received reports of 18,739 cases in the period from 1980-1994, of which there were 1853 deaths (that's a 10% death rate) and between 2000 and 3000 every year. What is disconcerting is that more cases were reported from 1990-1994 than in the entire previous decade (an average of 2025 cases/year versus 861 cases/year).

The last known case of human-to-human transmission occurred in Los Angeles in 1924.

The latest large, but not major, outbreak occurred on September 20, 1994 in the Indian city of Surat in the state of Gujarat. Initially the government of India did not recognize the presence of the disease until several hundred thousand people had fled the region. By October 2, there had been 2500 cases reported and official figures of 58 deaths. Considering that this strain was the highly contagious pneumonic variety, thus spread by aerosol droplets upon respiration and was amenable to treatment with tetracycline, such a low mortality figure may or may not be comforting.

A vaccine was available for those who expected to come in contact with animals that may have been infected, but it was not completely effective. The manufacturer discontinued production in 1999 and it is no longer available. It worked on bubonic Plague but not pneumonic.

Rather ominously, the September 4, 1997 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine carried a brief report from Galimand et al. describing a case of multiple antibiotic resistant bubonic Plague. The causative agent, Y. pestis, acquired a resistance plasmid from an unknown source. The thought of another worldwide pandemic of Plague that is resistant to modern medical treatment boggles the mind.

On August 26, 1999 the wire services carried a story announcing the development of a vaccine for bubonic Plague designed to protect against bio-terrorism. Human trials were to begin shortly. We await the results.

[Demeter]

59. wikipedia tells how medicine fought the Plague

Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Until June 2007, plague was one of the three epidemic diseases specifically reportable to the World Health Organization (the other two being cholera and yellow fever).

Depending on lung infection, or sanitary conditions, plague also can be spread in the air, by direct contact, or by contaminated undercooked food or materials. The symptoms of plague depend on the concentrated areas of infection in each person: such as bubonic plague in lymph nodes, septicemic plague in blood vessels, pneumonic plague in lungs, and so on. It is treatable if detected early. Plague is still endemic in some parts of the world.

The epidemiological use of the term "plague" is currently applied to bacterial infections that cause buboes, although historically the medical use of the term "plague" has been applied to pandemic infections in general. Plague is often synonymous with "bubonic plague" but this describes just one of its manifestations. Other names have been used to describe this disease, such as "The Black Plague" and "The Black Death"; the latter is now used primarily by scholars to describe the second, and most devastating, pandemic of the disease.

Infection and transmission

Transmission of Y. pestis to an uninfected individual is possible by any of the following means.[2]

droplet contact – coughing or sneezing on another person
direct physical contact – touching an infected person, including sexual contact
indirect contact – usually by touching soil contamination or a contaminated surface
airborne transmission – if the microorganism can remain in the air for long periods
fecal-oral transmission – usually from contaminated food or water sources
vector borne transmission – carried by insects or other animals.

Yersinia pestis circulates in animal reservoirs, particularly in rodents, in the natural foci of infection found on all continents except Australia. The natural foci of plague are situated in a broad belt in the tropical and sub–tropical latitudes and the warmer parts of the temperate latitudes around the globe, between the parallels 55 degrees North and 40 degrees South.

Contrary to popular belief, rats did not directly start the spread of the bubonic plague. It is mainly a disease in the fleas (Xenopsylla cheopis) that infested the rats, making the rats themselves the first victims of the plague.

Infection in a human occurs when a person is bitten by a flea that has been infected by biting a rodent that itself has been infected by the bite of a flea carrying the disease.

The bacteria multiply inside the flea, sticking together to form a plug that blocks its stomach and causes it to starve. The flea then bites a host and continues to feed, even though it cannot quell its hunger, and consequently the flea vomits blood tainted with the bacteria back into the bite wound. The bubonic plague bacterium then infects a new victim, and the flea eventually dies from starvation.

Serious outbreaks of plague are usually started by other disease outbreaks in rodents, or a rise in the rodent population. In 1894, two bacteriologists, Alexandre Yersin of France and Kitasato Shibasaburō of Japan, independently isolated the bacterium in Hong Kong responsible for the Third Pandemic. Though both investigators reported their findings, a series of confusing and contradictory statements by Kitasato eventually led to the acceptance of Yersin as the primary discoverer of the organism. Yersin named it Pasteurella pestis in honor of the Pasteur Institute, where he worked, but in 1967 it was moved to a new genus, renamed Yersinia pestis in honor of Yersin. Yersin also noted that rats were affected by plague not only during plague epidemics but also often preceding such epidemics in humans, and that plague was regarded by many locals as a disease of rats: villagers in China and India asserted that, when large numbers of rats were found dead, plague outbreaks soon followed.

In 1898, the French scientist Paul-Louis Simond (who had also come to China to battle the Third Pandemic) established the rat-flea vector that drives the disease. He had noted that persons who became ill did not have to be in close contact with each other to acquire the disease. In Yunnan, China, inhabitants would flee from their homes as soon as they saw dead rats, and on the island of Formosa (Taiwan), residents considered the handling of dead rats heightened the risks of developing plague. These observations led him to suspect that the flea might be an intermediary factor in the transmission of plague, since people acquired plague only if they were in contact with recently dead rats, who had died less than 24 hours before. In a now classic experiment, Simond demonstrated how a healthy rat died of plague, after infected fleas had jumped to it, from a rat which had recently died of the plague.

Since human plague is rare in most parts of the world, routine vaccination is not needed other than for those at particularly high risk of exposure, nor for people living in areas with enzootic plague, such as the western United States. It is not even indicated for most travellers to countries with known recent reported cases, particularly if their travel is limited to urban areas with modern hotels. The CDC thus only recommends vaccination for: (1) all laboratory and field personnel who are working with Y. pestis organisms resistant to antimicrobials; (2) people engaged in aerosol experiments with Y. pestis; and (3) people engaged in field operations in areas with enzootic plague where preventing exposure is not possible (such as some disaster areas).

A systematic review by the Cochrane Collaboration found no studies of sufficient quality to make any statement on the efficacy of the vaccine.

Pathology

Bubonic plague

When a flea bites a human and contaminates the wound with regurgitated blood, the plague carrying bacteria are passed into the tissue. Y. pestis can reproduce inside cells, so even if phagocytosed, they can still survive. Once in the body, the bacteria can enter the lymphatic system, which drains interstitial fluid. Plague bacteria secrete several toxins, one of which is known to cause dangerous beta-adrenergic blockade.

Y. pestis spreads through the lymphatics of the infected human until it reaches a lymph node, where it stimulates severe haemorrhagic inflammation that causes the lymph nodes to expand. The expansion of lymph nodes is the cause of the characteristic "bubo" associated with the disease.

Septicemic plague

Lymphatics ultimately drain into the bloodstream, so the plague bacteria may enter the blood and travel to almost any part of the body. In septicemic plague, bacterial endotoxins cause disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), causing tiny clots throughout the body and possibly ischaemic necrosis (tissue death due to lack of circulation/perfusion to that tissue) from the clots. DIC results in depletion of the body's clotting resources, so that it can no longer control bleeding. Consequently, there is bleeding into the skin and other organs, which can cause red and/or black patchy rash and hemoptysis/hematemesis (coughing up/ vomiting of blood). There are bumps on the skin that look somewhat like insect bites; these are usually red, and sometimes white in the center. Untreated, septicemic plague is usually fatal. Early treatment with antibiotics reduces the mortality rate to between 4 and 15 percent. People who die from this form of plague often die on the same day symptoms first appear.

Pneumonic plague

The pneumonic form of plague arises from infection of the lungs. It causes coughing and sneezing and thereby produces airborne droplets that contain bacterial cells and are likely to infect anyone inhaling them. The incubation period for pneumonic plague is short, usually two to four days, but sometimes just a few hours. The initial signs are indistinguishable from several other respiratory illnesses; they include headache, weakness, and hemoptysis or hematemesis (spitting or vomiting of blood). The course of the disease is rapid; unless diagnosed and treated soon enough, typically within a few hours, death may follow in one to six days; in untreated cases mortality is nearly 100%.

Pharyngeal plague

This is an uncommon form of plague that resembles tonsillitis found in cases of close contact of patients with other forms of plague.

Meningeal plague

This form of plague occurs when bacteria cross the blood brain barrier, leading to infectious meningitis.

Other clinical forms

There are a few other rare manifestations of plague, including asymptomatic plague and abortive plague. Cellulocutaneous plague sometimes results in infection of the skin and soft tissue, often around the bite site of a flea.

Treatments

Waldemar Haffkine, a doctor who worked in Bombay, India, was the first to invent and test a plague vaccine against bubonic plague in 1897.

If diagnosed in time the various forms of plague are usually highly responsive to antibiotic therapy. The antibiotics often used are streptomycin, chloramphenicol and tetracycline. Amongst the newer generation of antibiotics, gentamicin and doxycycline have proven effective in monotherapeutic treatment of plague.

[Demeter]

62. wikipedia searches the historical records

Antiquity

The earliest account describing a possible plague epidemic is found in I Samuel 5:6 of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). In this account, the Philistines of Ashdod were stricken with a plague for the crime of stealing the Ark of the Covenant from the Children of Israel. These events have been dated to approximately the second half of the 11th century BC. The word "tumors" is used in most English translations to describe the sores that came upon the Philistines. The Hebrew, however, can be interpreted as "swelling in the secret parts". The account indicates that the Philistine city and its political territory were stricken with a "ravaging of mice" and a plague, bringing death to a large segment of the population.

In the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BC), Thucydides described an epidemic disease which was said to have begun in Ethiopia, passed through Egypt and Libya, then come to the Greek world. In the Plague of Athens, the city lost possibly one third of its population, including Pericles. Modern historians disagree on whether the plague was a critical factor in the loss of the war. Although this epidemic has long been considered an outbreak of plague, many modern scholars believe that typhus, smallpox, or measles may better fit the surviving descriptions. A recent study of DNA found in the dental pulp of plague victims suggests that typhoid was actually responsible.

In the first century AD, Rufus of Ephesus, a Greek anatomist, refers to an outbreak of plague in Libya, Egypt, and Syria. He records that Alexandrian doctors named Dioscorides and Posidonius described symptoms including acute fever, pain, agitation, and delirium. Buboes—large, hard, and non-suppurating—developed behind the knees, around the elbows, and "in the usual places." The death toll of those infected was very high. Rufus also wrote that similar buboes were reported by a Dionysius Curtus, who may have practiced medicine in Alexandria in the third century BC. If this is correct, the eastern Mediterranean world may have been familiar with bubonic plague at that early date.

In the second century, the Antonine Plague, named after Marcus Aurelius’ family name of Antoninus and also known as the Plague of Galen, who had first hand knowledge of the disease, may in fact have been smallpox. Galen was in Rome when it struck in 166 AD, and was also present in the winter of 168–69 during an outbreak among troops stationed at Aquileia; he had experience with the epidemic, referring to it as very long lasting, and describes its symptoms and his treatment of it. Unfortunately, his references are scattered and brief. According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr "this pestilence must have raged with incredible fury; it carried off innumerable victims. The ancient world never recovered from the blow inflected upon it by the plague which visited it in the reign of M. Aurelius." The mortality rate of the plague was 7–10 percent; the outbreak in 165–6–168 would have caused approximately 3.5 to 5 million deaths. Otto Seek believes that over half the population of the empire perished. J. F. Gilliam believes that the Antonine plague probably caused more deaths than any other epidemic during the empire before the mid-3rd century.

Medieval and post-medieval pandemics

Local outbreaks of the plague are grouped into three plague pandemics, whereby the respective start and end dates and the assignment of some outbreaks to either pandemic are still subject to discussion. According to Joseph P. Byrne from Belmont University, the pandemics were:

the first plague pandemic from 541 to ~750, spreading from Egypt to the Mediterranean (starting with the Plague of Justinian) and northwestern Europe

the second plague pandemic from ~1345 to ~1840, spreading from Central Asia to the Mediterranean and Europe (starting with the Black Death), and probably also to China

the third plague pandemic from 1866 to the 1960s, spreading from China to various places around the world, notably India and the West Coast of the United States.

However, the late medieval Black Death is sometimes seen not as the start of the second, but as the end of the first pandemic – in that case, the second pandemic's start would be 1361; also vary the end dates of the second pandemic given in literature, e.g. ~1890 instead of ~1840.

First Pandemic: Early Middle Ages (Plague of Justinian)

The Plague of Justinian in AD 541–542 is the first known attack on record, and marks the first firmly recorded pattern of bubonic plague. This disease is thought to have originated in China. It then spread to Africa from where the huge city of Constantinople imported massive amounts of grain, mostly from Egypt, to feed its citizens. The grain ships were the source of contagion for the city, with massive public granaries nurturing the rat and flea population. At its peak the plague was killing 10,000 people in Constantinople every day and ultimately destroyed perhaps 40% of the city's inhabitants. It went on to destroy up to a quarter of the human population of the eastern Mediterranean.

In AD 588 a second major wave of plague spread through the Mediterranean into what is now France. It is estimated that the Plague of Justinian killed as many as 100 million people across the world. It caused Europe's population to drop by around 50% between 541 and 700. It also may have contributed to the success of the Arab conquests. An outbreak of it in the AD 560s was described in AD 790 as causing "swellings in the glands ... in the manner of a nut or date" in the groin "and in other rather delicate places followed by an unbearable fever". While the swellings in this description have been identified by some as buboes, there is some contention as to whether the pandemic should be attributed to the bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, known in modern times.

Second Pandemic: from 14th century (Black Death) to 19th century

From 1347 to 1351, the Black Death, a massive and deadly pandemic originating in China, spread along the Silk Road and swept through Asia, Europe and Africa. It may have reduced the world's population from 450 million to between 350 and 375 million.

China lost around half of its population, from around 123 million to around 65 million;
Europe around 1/3 of its population, from about 75 million to about 50 million; and
Africa approximately 1/8 of its population, from around 80 million to 70 million (mortality rates tended to be correlated with population density so Africa, being less dense overall, had the lowest death rate).

This makes the Black Death the largest death toll from any known non-viral epidemic. Although accurate statistical data does not exist, it is thought that 1.4 million died in England (1/3 of England's 4.2 million people), while an even higher percentage of Italy's population was likely wiped out. On the other hand, Northeastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary are believed to have suffered less, and there are no estimates available for Russia or the Balkans. It is conceivable that Russia may not have been as affected due to its very cold climate and large size, hence often less close contact with the contagion.

The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries. According to Biraben, plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671.

The Second Pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667; subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century). According to Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to plague in the epidemic of 1628–31."

In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of pre-incident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300, and a post-incident population figure as low as 2 million. By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks occurred in 1361–62, 1369, 1379–83, 1389–93, and throughout the first half of the 15th century. An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the death rate of the plague of 1479–80 could have been as high as 20%. The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.

Plague Riot in Moscow in 1771: During the course of the city's plague, between 50,000 and 100,000 died (1/6 to 1/3 of its population).

In 1466, perhaps 40,000 people died of plague in Paris. During the 16th and 17th centuries, plague visited Paris for almost one year out of three. The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on into Russia, where the disease hit somewhere once every five or six years from 1350 to 1490. Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665,[41] reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years. Over 10% of Amsterdam's population died in 1623–1625, and again in 1635–1636, 1655, and 1664. There were 22 outbreaks of plague in Venice between 1361 and 1528. The plague of 1576–1577 killed 50,000 in Venice, almost a third of the population. Late outbreaks in central Europe included the Italian Plague of 1629–1631, which is associated with troop movements during the Thirty Years' War, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Over 60% of Norway's population died from 1348 to 1350. The last plague outbreak ravaged Oslo in 1654.

In the first half of the 17th century, a plague claimed some 1.7 million victims in Italy, or about 14% of the population. In 1656, the plague killed about half of Naples' 300,000 inhabitants. More than 1.25 million deaths resulted from the extreme incidence of plague in 17th-century Spain. The plague of 1649 probably reduced the population of Seville by half. In 1709–1713, a plague epidemic that followed the Great Northern War (1700–1721, Sweden v. Russia and allies) killed about 100,000 in Sweden, and 300,000 in Prussia. The plague killed two-thirds of the inhabitants of Helsinki, and claimed a third of Stockholm's population. Western Europe's last major epidemic occurred in 1720 in Marseilles, in Central Europe the last major outbreaks happened during the plague during the Great Northern War, and in Eastern Europe during the Russian plague of 1770-1772

Worldwide distribution of plague-infected animals 1998

The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world. Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850. Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30,000–50,000 to it in 1620–21, and again in 1654–57, 1665, 1691, and 1740–42. Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, 37 larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and 31 between 1751 and 1800. Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.

[Demeter]

63. “And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world”

http://travelingwanderlust.wordpress.com/2013/09/04/and-so-many-died-that-all-believed-it-was-the-end-of-the-world/

The infamous outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century was one of the worst epidemics in human history, killing 30-60% of the population of Europe. It caused such an impact that if the world’s population over time is charted, one can clearly see the decline caused by the pestilence, and it took decades for the population to recover from this devastating blow.

?w=474&h=389

[Demeter]

32. Government Agency Warns If 9 Substations Are Destroyed, The Power Grid Could Be Down For 18 Months

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-19/government-agency-warns-if-9-substations-are-destroyed-power-grid-could-be-down-18-m



What would you do if the Internet or the power grid went down for over a year? Our key infrastructure, including the Internet and the power grid, is far more vulnerable than most people would dare to imagine. These days, most people simply take for granted that the lights will always be on and that the Internet will always function properly. But what if all that changed someday in the blink of an eye? According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's latest report, all it would take to plunge the entire nation into darkness for more than a year would be to knock out a transformer manufacturer and just 9 of our 55,000 electrical substations on a really hot summer day. The reality of the matter is that our power grid is in desperate need of updating, and there is very little or no physical security at most of these substations.



If terrorists, or saboteurs, or special operations forces wanted to take down our power grid, it would not be very difficult. And as you will read about later in this article, the Internet is extremely vulnerable as well...

MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

34. The Music Just Ended: "Wealthy" Chinese Are Liquidating Offshore Luxury Homes In Scramble For Cash

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-19/music-just-ended-wealthy-chinese-are-liquidating-offshore-luxury-homes-scramble-cash

One of the primary drivers of the real estate bubble in the past several years, particularly in the ultra-luxury segment, were megawealthy Chinese buyers, seeking to park their cash into the safety of offshore real estate where it was deemed inaccessible to mainland regulators and overseers, tracking just where the Chinese record credit bubble would end up. Some, such as us, called it "hot money laundering", and together with foreclosure stuffing and institutional flipping (of rental units and otherwise), we said this was the third leg of the recent US housing bubble. However, while the impact of Chinese buying in the US has been tangible, it has paled in comparison with the epic Chinese buying frenzy in other offshore metropolitan centers like London and Hong Kong. This is understandable: after all as Chuck Prince famously said in 2007, just before the first US mega-bubble burst, "as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." In China, the music just ended.

But more so than mere analyses which speculate on the true state of the Chinese record credit-fueled economy, such as the one we posted earlier today in which Morgan Stanley noted that China's "Minsky Moment" has finally arrived, we now can judge them by their actions.

And sure enough, it didn't take long before the debris from China's sharp, sudden attempt to "realign" its runaway credit bubble, including the first ever corporate bond default earlier this month, floated right back to the surface...

[Demeter]

35. How Corporations Are Masking Inflation… Without the CPI Moving

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-03-19/how-corporations-are-masking-inflation%E2%80%A6-without-cpi-moving

Since 2007, the world’s Central Banks have collectively put more than $10 trillion into the financial system since 2008. To put that number into perspective, it’s equal to roughly 15% of global GDP.

This kind of money printing is literally unheard of in modern history. And it has set the stage for a roaring wave of inflation to hit the financial system. Indeed, the first signs are already showing up... not in the “official” Government data (which is bogus) but in how those who run businesses around the globe are acting.

Most people believe that when inflation hits, prices have to go higher. This is true, but higher prices can be manifested in multiple ways. Firms usually do not simply raise prices in nominal terms as price elasticity can kill revenues because it would hurt sales. Instead, companies resort to a number of strategies to maintain profit margins without hurting their sales. One of them is to simply leave part of a package EMPTY, thereby selling LESS product for the SAME price (a hidden price hike).

Food manufacturers, like the politicians currently debating health reform, may have a solution to the obesity crisis: Feed Americans a lot of hot air. But this heated air is not just a figure of speech for packaged goods companies including Ralcorp Holdings' (RAH) Post Foods and PepsiCo (PEP) subsidiaries Frito-Lay and Quaker.

In many packaged products, as much as 50% of the contents is just empty space, an investigation by Consumer Reports reveals. And we consumers are buying that nothingness every day.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/12/08/how-much-for-the-air-as-much-as-half-of-food-packaging-is-empty/

Another tactic corporation use is to simply sell smaller packages for the SAME price (another means of selling less for MORE= a price hike).

U.S. Companies Shrink Packages as Food Prices Rise

Large food companies have recently announced that they will raise the prices they charge grocery retailers for commodities-based products. For example, a chocolate bar will cost more soon: Hershey last week announced a 10% increase for most of its confectionery goods.

Of course, straightforward price hikes could cause consumers to buy less of those products or to choose less costly store brands. So in many cases, food companies are trying a different tactic: Keeping the price of an item the same while decreasing the amount of food in the package. The company recoups the costs of the rise in commodities and hopes consumers don't notice that they're getting less of the product for the same price.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/04/04/u-s-companies-shrink-packages-as-food-prices-rise/

However, perhaps the most scandalous policy employed by companies looking to engage in stealth price hikes is to swap out higher quality ingredients for lower quality/ lower cost alternatives. One bigname coffee maker was caught doing this just a few years ago.

Reuters is reporting that many of America's major brands have been quietly tweaking their coffee blends. While most coffee companies consider their blends trade secrets, and are loath to disclose exactly what goes into them, both circumstantial and direct evidence suggests they're now substituting lower-grade Robusta beans for some of their pricier Arabica, and degrading the quality of our coffee…

At least one coffee roaster has admitted it. In November, Massimo Zanetti USA, which roasts for both Chock full o'Nuts and Hills Bros., publicly confirmed upping its Robusta usage by 25% this year.

Why the switcheroo? Prepare to not be shocked. The answer is: price.

Last year, a shortage of Arabica caused prices of the premium bean to spike as high as $3 a pound -- $2 more than what a pound of Robusta would cost. This compares to a five-year historical trend of Arabica costing closer to 70 cents more than Robusta. In recent weeks, the trend has reversed, with Arabica prices falling to just a 62-cent premium over Robusta.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/06/19/noticed-that-your-coffee-tastes-funny-heres-why/?a_dgi=aolshare_twitter

In simple terms, inflation is already around us, though it’s not yet showing up in LITERAL price hikes. Instead, we’re all paying MORE for LESS. And this won’t show up in the official numbers for some time.

I'LL SAY IT IS...I AM SEVERELY ANNOYED EACH TIME I BUY 1.75 QUART ICE CREAM CONTAINERS...WHEN IT WAS A HALF-GALLON NOT THREE YEARS AGO...

[Demeter]

36. Fifth financial executive with ties to JPMorgan found dead

http://www.housingwire.com/articles/29341-fifth-financial-executive-with-ties-to-jpmorgan-found-dead

Marks the 11th in a rash of reports of banker, financial suicides... Just over 11 weeks into 2014 comes tragic news that an 11th financial executive has apparently committed suicide.

The New York Post reported Monday that a 28-year-old Manhattan investment banker who formerly worked for JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)) reportedly jumped from the roof of his sixth-floor East Side apartment building.

Kenneth Bellando, who worked at Levy Capital since January, was found dead on the sidewalk outside his East Side building on March 12 after allegedly jumping from the sixth-story roof, sources said. The Post reported that Bellando’s brother is John Bellando, the chief investment officer with JPMorgan.

This marks the third such suicide in three weeks and the 11th since late January. HousingWire – with an acknowledgement to ZeroHedge, which initially broke the story – has been covering this rash of reports of the suicides of financial executives and bankers.

Interest in these stories has been widespread, in part because of similarities shared among the victims, the firms for which they worked, or the sometimes puzzling circumstances of their deaths.

Many were prominent, or worked for firms under investigation or facing allegations from regulators both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Five of the 11 that HousingWire has covered worked for or formerly worked for JPMorgan.

Zerohedge has compiled this list of the 11 bankers and finance executives.

1 - William Broeksmit, 58-year-old former senior executive at Deutsche Bank AG, was found dead in his home after an apparent suicide in South Kensington in central London, on January 26th.

2 - Karl Slym, 51 year old Tata Motors managing director Karl Slym, was found dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok on January 27th.

3 - Gabriel Magee, a 39-year-old JP Morgan employee, died after falling from the roof of the JP Morgan European headquarters in London on January 27th.

4 - Mike Dueker, 50-year-old chief economist of a US investment bank was found dead close to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State.

5 - Richard Talley, the 57-year-old founder of American Title Services in Centennial, Colorado, was found dead earlier this month after apparently shooting himself with a nail gun.

6 - Tim Dickenson, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG, also died last month, however the circumstances surrounding his death are still unknown.

7 - Ryan Henry Crane, a 37-year-old executive at JP Morgan died in an alleged suicide just a few weeks ago. No details have been released about his death aside from this small obituary announcement at the Stamford Daily Voice.

8 - Li Junjie, 33-year-old banker in Hong Kong jumped from the JP Morgan HQ in Hong Kong.

9 - James Stuart Jr, Former National Bank of Commerce CEO, found dead in Scottsdale, Ariz., the morning of Feb. 19. A family spokesman did not say what caused the death

10 - Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown’s Vertical Group, committed suicide by jumping in front of LIRR train.

11 - Kenneth Bellando, 28, a trader at Levy Capital, formerly investment banking analyst at JPMorgan, jumped to his death from his 6th floor East Side apartment March 12.

http://nypost.com/2014/03/17/investment-banker-leaps-to-his-death/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=NYPFacebook&utm_medium=SocialFlow

...Bellando, a former investment bank analyst at JPMorgan, is the son of John Bellando, chief operating officer and chief financial officer at Condé Nast. His brother, John, a top chief investment officer with JPMorgan, works on risk exposure valuations.

Several John Bellando emails were cited during testimony at the Senate Finance Committee’s inquiry into the bank’s losses during the infamous London Whale trade fiasco.

Kenneth Bellando — who grew up in Rockville Center, LI, and was a Georgetown graduate — worked as a summer analyst at JPMorgan while in school. Upon graduation in 2007, he was hired as an investment bank analyst and worked there for one year before moving on, according to his LinkedIn page.

The investment banker then went to Paragon Capital Partners, according to his LinkedIn page, until leaving at the end of 2013....

[Demeter]

51. Ex-BofA banker pleads guilty to theft, gets prison: Massachusetts AG

THIS IS ONE FOR THE WALL, TANSY!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/18/us-bank-of-am-fraud-idUSBREA2H01B20140318

A former personal banker at Bank of America Corp pleaded guilty on Monday to stealing more than $2.1 million from 31 people in a Ponzi-like scheme, and was sentenced to between three and five years in prison, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. Elaina Patterson, 54, pleaded guilty to 31 larceny counts before Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Peter Lauriat over a scheme that lasted from 1999 to 2011 and targeted friends, family and the elderly, among others, Coakley said. The judge also sentenced Patterson, a resident of Wilmington, Massachusetts, to 10 years probation to be served after the prison term, Coakley said.

...According to the attorney general, Patterson persuaded 15 family members and friends to invest nearly $4.5 million in accounts that she claimed carried high interest rates, and which she could set up by virtue of her position at a Bank of America branch in Reading, Massachusetts, about 14 miles north of Boston. Starting in 2009, Patterson then stole almost $1.5 million from 16 other people, including a combined $315,000 from two 90-year-old customers, by forging signatures on withdrawal slips, in a bid to conceal her prior theft, Coakley said. Investigators said they uncovered close to $6 million in fraudulent transactions, of which Patterson returned nearly $3.8 million to investors, leaving the total net theft at more than $2.1 million.

A Ponzi scheme occurs when money from new investors is used to pay earlier investors. Coakley said her office began probing Patterson's conduct after Bank of America referred the matter during an initial internal investigation.

[westerebus]

68. Has the Pope cleaned up the Vatican Bank?

If so, do dead men tell no tales?

[xchrom]

37. BREAKFAST FOODS ARE GETTING PRICIER

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PRICIER_BREAKFASTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-03-21-21-38-45

NEW YORK (AP) -- Breakfast is now being served with a side of sticker shock.

The price of bacon is surging and the cost of other morning staples, like coffee and orange juice, is set to rise because of global supply problems, from drought in Brazil to disease on U.S. pig farms.

And it's not just the first meal of the day that's being affected. The cost of meats, fish and eggs led the biggest increase in U.S. food prices in nearly 2 1/2 years last month, according to government data. An index that tracks those foods rose 1.2 percent in February and has climbed 4 percent over the last 12 months.

While overall inflation remains low, the increases in food prices are forcing shoppers to search out deals and cut back.

Denise Gauthier, 54, a screenwriter in North Hollywood, Calif., calls the rising prices "shocking and outrageous." To cope, she has become more frugal, hunting for discounts and buying less food overall.

[Demeter]

38. Gazing into our "Krystal Ball" for a hope

&feature=player_embedded

[Democracyinkind]

39. Plaguing the gnomes of Zurich... A VERY LONG and VERY PERSONAL post in the spirit of what if?

What if there was a small country located in the very heart of Europe that had resisted the Anti-Democratic trends of the late 20th century... Where the people still had full power over the democratic process as long as they prove willing to claim their power?

What if a small group of people in that country finally had enough of their unelected ruling elite. What if those people actually understood where the power of that unelected ruling elite lay and they were willing to strike at the very heart of it?

What if? Well. It seems that these questions might soon become more than just hypothetical, and the Gnomes of Zurich are shitting their pants. They are already calling their army of minions in the press, in parliament, and in the executive, demanding that they explain to the people why they should retain their right over the Mandrake mechanism that has made them the Masters of the financial Universe. They have billions to spend, but yet have millions to convince.

If you enjoyed reading Asterix' comics as a kid... If, when reading those, you always wondered what it would be like if the Gauls got a chance to stick it to those Romans for good?... Maybe then the following is something for you:

Campaign for Monetary Reform – News from Switzerland

(...)

Preparations for the spring launch are well under way, including the draft proposed amendments to the Swiss Constitution. In a nut shell, the proposal extends the Swiss Federation’s existing exclusive right to create coins and notes, to also include deposits. With the full power of new money creation exclusively in the hands of the Swiss National Bank, the commercial banks would no longer have the power to create money through lending. The Swiss National Bank’s primary role becomes the management of the money supply relative to the productive economy, while the decision concerning how new money is introduced debt free into the economy would reside with the government. As is evident from the foregoing, the MoMo monetary reform initiative is essentially based on the monetary reform advocated by Positive Money.

(...)

http://www.vollgeld-initiative.ch/english.html

When Democracyinkind was younger, he much thought of himself as a revolutionary, mostly while consuming illegal drugs. Or while vandalizing banks on the First of May, his face veiled in the obligatory Kufiya. Or while writing bad revolutionary poetry bemoaning the ignorance and apathy of the bourgeois he was forced to go to school with. Those days passed (long ago, it seems) and the more he learned about actual revolutions from the books he came to love so much, the more he realized how naive and lame his youthful revolutionary days were. How for the most part, history was not about bangs, but about whimpers.
He came to believe that revolutionary acts where, most likely, private in nature: like living a decent life, striving to educate himself beyond what made even the least sense vocationally, by purchasing his food from the farmers next door and by garbing himself in lame clothes made by lame but ethically and environmentally conscious designers, instead of the newest slave-made couture that so appealed to his aesthetic senses. He even came to think of his practiced monogamy as quite revolutionary.

Not that the old thoughts didn't creep up now and again. There was a time during the dotcom bubble where Democracyinkind was actually working for the gnomes, and where he witnessed how they let businesses falter by not extending lines of credit, despite the fact that it was more than reasonable to expect them to repay. Where the Gnomes explained to him in no uncertain terms that business was about priorities, and that the Gnome's priorities would alway lay not with the people, but a small and select group of them.

I can very well remember developing pyromaniacal fantasies back then. What if I set the Paradeplatz on fire, the next time I'd be called to headquarters? Would it change anything? Would they let me speak into the cameras, hand-cuffed, giving me the opportunity to explain the revolutionary significance of setting one of the centers of Capitalism on fire? While sitting in front of my PC, crafting snake-tongued letters of refusals to honest and hard-working small businesses, I couldn't help but to take brakes and reach for the lighter in my pocket, gently stroking it and working on my post-pyromaniacal speech. It was after those fantasies subsided and I still found myself crafting the same asinine letters that the idea came to me that giving up a highly paid job in order to pursue my intellectual interests - history, philosophy, the mechanics of Capitalism and Socialism - would be revolutionary in that unspectacular private way. So that I did and thereby said good-bye to fantasies of sticking it to the assholes I worked for.

Pursuing my private intellectual interests at the university - something that did not make the least sense if seen as some sort of vocational training - helped to enlighten and broaden my ideas about revolution. Was I not, after all, living in a country where the people had - theoretically - the power to craft the political and economic landscape according to their will? Was it not possible to make use of those in bringing about a true revolution? Was I not a member of a party that - despite it being very bad PR - had written the goal of "overcoming capitalism" into its statutes? Was it not possible to strike at the heart of Capitalism with the democratic tools described before? The more I thought about it, the more I thought it plausible, possible even. But where to start?

Fortunately, there were other people at the University who shared the same thoughts. And so the discussions started... Abolish the central bank? Where they not in cahoots with the Gnomes? Did they not abide by the will of Sandoz, Novartis, Nestle, Credit Suisse and their criminal friends rather than what would have been in the interest of those discussing the subject with me? It was at that time that one of the people discussing this stuff with us mentioned that control of the printing presses had long since ceased to be the true origin of economic power. He explained to us how the banksters had become quite independent of the printing presses by their ability to create money upon the deposits that they had. "IHRE MACHT LIEGT IN DER KREATION VON GIRALGELD!!!" ("Their power resides in their ability to create book money!&quot our bearded friend declared, and subsequently pointed us to a small group of people that had had the same realization and were willing to spend the time, effort and money to strike at the heart of that power.

That is how I came to be involved in this initiative. The very long version of it. In Switzerland, the signatures of 100'000 people suffices to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot. As of this week, we have over 60'000 signatures pledged. The phase in which official signature-gathering can start begins in May. So far, it is looking good - but we are short of funds. This kind of effort consumes a lot of time, and unfortunately, a lot of money.

But what if? How much of my personal time and money would it be worth to see the Gnomes of Zurich toppled? In all my thinking about revolution over the years, I've never been quite as certain that this is the actual thing. It would force a total remodeling of the whole economy. It would level the playing field in one fell swoop. It would put Switzerland in the forefront of the progressive revolution that is necessarily dictated by the steady rise in productivity. So far, the rich keep us believing in Capitalism by stealing the gains from productivity - if they wouldn't, they would force the middle class to actually grasp the historical significance of what steadily rising productivity means for Capitalism. It would force them to realize that Capitalism itself is producing the imperative character of the coming paradigm shift. What that paradigm shift will be - serfdom for most, a godly life for some - or universal prosperity through equality - depends on who will be in control of shifting the paradigm: the rich or the people.

This initiative is the first - and most significant - step on the way to letting the people control this coming shift of paradigms. Turning the world upside down without spilling even one drop of blood. A true revolution, without the slightest hint of apocalypse (except for the sick world that the Gnomes have created).

The point is, this is personal. But for once, useful too.

[Demeter]

43. Good luck and Godspeed!

It's gonna take a revolution, but they asked for it...

[Democracyinkind]

45. Thank you! nt.

[xchrom]

40. US APPEALS COURT UPHOLDS FED'S CAP ON 'SWIPE' FEES

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEBIT_CARD_FEES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-03-21-14-26-42

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal appeals court has handed a defeat to a coalition of retail groups that challenged as too high the Federal Reserve's cap on how much banks can charge businesses for handling debit card transactions.

The ruling issued Friday by the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia overturned a lower court's decision in July that favored the merchants and was a setback for banks.

In the July ruling, a federal judge struck down the Fed's cap on so-called "swipe fees," saying the Fed didn't have the authority to set the limit the way it did in 2011, improperly including data that made the cap too high.

The retail groups had sued the Fed over its setting the cap at an average of about 24 cents per debit-card transaction. The appeals court ruling upholding the Fed's cap was a blow to an industry already buffeted by public and congressional outrage over the massive data breach that hit Target Corp. during the holiday season and other data-security violations at big retailers.

Congress mandated a ceiling on debit-card swipe fees as part of the 2010 financial regulatory overhaul. Prior to the cap, fees averaged 44 cents per swipe. The Fed had initially proposed a 12-cent fee limit, and the retailers argued that the Fed buckled under pressure from bank lobbyists when it doubled that level.

[xchrom]

42. World’s Richest Gain $26 Billion as Sanctions Hit Russia

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-21/world-s-richest-gain-26-billion-as-sanctions-hit-russia.html


The 300 wealthiest people on Earth added $25.6 billion to their collective net worth this week as the U.S. government imposed economic sanctions on several Russian billionaires.

Amancio Ortega was the week’s biggest gainer, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 77-year-old co-founder of Inditex SA, the world’s largest clothing retailer, added $2.8 billion to his fortune as the company rallied 2 percent to a one-month high. The company, which owns the Zara chain, said March 19 it plans to open more than 450 new stores this year. Ortega, the world’s fourth-wealthiest person, has a $63.1 billion net worth.

Russia richest people staged a comeback after losing more than $20 billion since the start of the Crimean crisis on Feb. 28, according to the Bloomberg ranking. The country’s 20 wealthiest citizens added $6.4 billion during the week.

“We didn’t see a shooting war break out over Ukraine, which means the stock market has come back as a result,” Walter “Bucky” Hellwig, a senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management, said by phone from his office in Birmingham, Alabama. “The sanctions were probably less than what was expected.”

[xchrom]

44. Credit Suisse to Pay $885 Million to Settle FHFA Lawsuits

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-21/credit-suisse-pays-885-million-to-settle-fhfa-mortgage-lawsuits.html

Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN), Switzerland’s second-biggest bank, agreed to pay $885 million to settle lawsuits by the Federal Housing Finance Agency over mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The company will book a charge of 275 million francs ($312 million) after taxes in the fourth quarter of 2013, resulting in a restatement of results to a net loss of 8 million francs for the period, the Zurich-based bank said yesterday.

Credit Suisse was among 18 lenders sued by the FHFA in 2011 to recoup losses on about $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities sold to the two government-sponsored companies before the financial crisis. Nine companies, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG (UBSN), have agreed to pay more than $9.2 billion to settle similar lawsuits by FHFA.

“It’s definitely good for Credit Suisse to have this thing out of the way,” said Guido Hoymann, a Frankfurt-based analyst with Bankhaus Metzler.

[xchrom]

46. Caterpillar Said to Be Focus of Senate Overseas Tax Probe

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-21/caterpillar-said-to-be-focus-of-senate-overseas-tax-probe.html

A U.S. Senate investigative panel is examining Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and whether the company improperly avoided U.S. taxes by moving profits outside the country, said three people familiar with the inquiry.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a hearing in early April, said two of the people. They spoke on condition of anonymity before an official announcement.

Rachel Potts, a spokeswoman for Caterpillar, declined to comment. Gordon Trowbridge, a spokesman for Subcommittee Chairman Carl Levin, declined to comment.

In 2009, Daniel Schlicksup, an employee who had worked on Caterpillar’s tax strategy, alleged in a lawsuit in federal court that the company used a “Swiss structure” to shift profits to offshore companies and avoid more than $2 billion in U.S. taxes. He also alleged that Caterpillar used a “Bermuda structure” involving shell companies to return profits to the U.S. without paying required taxes.

[Demeter]

47. The Crimea of Russia's imagination By Ruth Maclennan A HISTORY LESSON

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26610276



"Meteor shower of memories" is inscribed on this neoclassical belvedere


In 1893, Maximilian Voloshin's mother bought a plot of land in a little Crimean village called Koktebel. The Kiev-born Voloshin, a poet and philosopher, built a house on the waterfront and would invite his friends, poets, artists, writers, from Moscow and St Petersburg, to stay for months at a time during the first three decades of the 20th Century....The poet Marina Tsvetaeva met her husband Sergei Efron on the beach at Koktebel when they were teenagers. Poets Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam both spent time with Voloshin. Away from the city, in a tiny backwater, the artists could be bohemian - wear their hair long, or cut it short and shock the locals. Koktebel became, and to a degree remained, an artists' colony.

Part of the appeal of Crimea for Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva was its exotic, Muslim atmosphere. Mandelstam's poem Feodosia is an ode to the Tatar town of Kaffa.

Surrounded by tall hills,
Like a flock of sheep you run down the mountain,
And sparkle like pink and white stones in the dry, transparent air.
Pirates' feluccas rock back and forth,
Flags like poppies set alight the Turkish port,
Cane-like masts, elastic crystal of a wave,
And boats hanging like hammocks from ropes.

For Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam, the Black Sea and Crimea were fascinating and exotic, worlds away from Moscow, an idyllic, pre-lapsarian, pre-revolutionary time and place they return to in their poetry...Voloshin's artists' colony inaugurated a century of Crimea as holiday destination. His love of walking and other outdoor pursuits, and the upper class fashion for taking the waters in health resorts were metamorphosed into holiday camps and spa retreats for the new Soviet masses. The Soviet dream of creating an ideal Communist proletariat found much more traction when offered up in organised free leisure, rather than the Five Year Plan. The Soviet Union saw the peninsula transformed into a summer camp for rewarded workers and spoiled apparatchiks. Tens of thousands of children descended to stay in purpose-built sanatoria, and holiday camps such as the famous Artek, to enjoy two weeks of sun, sea and indoctrination through sport and leisure.

In Feodosia, mansions built in the late 19th Century by Karaite Jews - Jews of Turkic origin who were patronised by the imperial elite - were converted into sanatoria. Today, both these palaces and the Soviet sanatoria are falling into ruin.

For anyone born in the Soviet Union, Crimea is holiday-land. Crimea is the southern promise of freedom, of sensuality, an ideal time and place, outside "real life", to enjoy sun, sea, mountains, sports, exotic food, rambling, gambling, whatever takes your fancy. The Soviet fashioning of Crimea as a mass image of desire was completely successful, and still remains powerful, despite competition since the end of the Soviet Union, from cheaper, better equipped resorts in nearby Turkey.

For both Imperial Russia and then the Soviet Union, Crimea was a route to the Mediterranean - the Classical world as well as that of blue skies and sunbathing. But Crimea's attractions are real. Every kind of landscape is condensed into this little diamond: from Crimean steppe (prairie) in the East and North, sandy beaches at Feodosia, to rolling hills of vineyards and fruit trees, and spectacular cliffs dropping into the deep warm sea. Further West a forested mountain range hides ancient cave cities, and fairytale castles hang at the cliff's edge...

[xchrom]

48. Stress Test Shows 29 Banks Meet or Top Capital Target

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-20/fed-stress-test-shows-29-of-30-banks-meet-or-top-capital-target.html

The Federal Reserve’s annual stress tests found 29 of the 30 largest U.S. banks could withstand a deep recession and still pay dividends, fueling speculation about which firms will win approval next week to raise payouts.

Zions Bancorporation (ZION) is the only lender that came in below one of the Fed’s main capital thresholds in results released today by the central bank that simulated a severe economic slump. All 30 firms, including Salt Lake City-based Zions, topped the minimum in a separate scenario of rising interest rates. The Fed said capital levels have improved since the 2008 financial crisis and the largest banks are better positioned to lend and meet their financial commitments.

“The average person who relies on the banking system should be happy,” said Dan Ryan, head of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s global financial regulation practice, calling the financial system safe. “Next week will tell us whether banks and bank shareholders will be happy.”

[xchrom]

49. Yellen Drives Dollar Toward Strongest Week in Two Months

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-20/yellen-drives-dollar-toward-strongest-week-in-two-months.html

The dollar was set for its biggest weekly advance in two months versus major peers before Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher speaks today amid prospects the central bank will pare stimulus.

The greenback reached a two-week high against the euro yesterday, the day after Fed Chair Janet Yellen said borrowing costs could start rising “around six months” following an end to the U.S. central bank’s bond buying. Fisher, who votes on policy this year, said this month that the Fed’s asset purchases are “distorting” financial markets. Australia’s dollar was set for a weekly advance after a gauge of economic surprises rose to a 10-month high.

“We are in for a little bit of dollar strength here,” said Ray Attrill, the global co-head of currency strategy in Sydney at National Australia Bank Ltd. “I’d imagine that what Yellen said about the six months was music to Mr Fisher’s ears.”

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, which monitors the U.S. currency against its 10 major counterparts, was at 1,020.99 as of 6:51 a.m. in London from 1,021.54 yesterday. It has climbed 0.8 percent since March 14, poised for the steepest weekly advance since Jan. 17.

[xchrom]

50. U.S. Keeps AAA by Fitch, Outlook Raised on Debt Pact

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-21/u-s-keeps-aaa-by-fitch-outlook-raised-on-debt-pact.html


The dire economic and political landscape cited by Standard & Poor’s when it downgraded the U.S.’s AAA credit rating in 2011 is proving to be unfounded.

Fitch Ratings increased its outlook on the U.S.’s AAA credit-ranking today to stable from negative, joining Moody’s Investors Service and even S&P in assigning stable outlooks on the world’s largest economy. S&P’s dropping of its rating to AA+ contributed to an equity rout that erased about $6.1 trillion from global stocks.

Since the August 2011 downgrade, record budget deficits have shrunk, economic growth accelerated, the dollar rallied, stocks climbed to all-time highs and Treasuries strengthened their hold as the world’s preferred haven from turmoil. Deficits have fallen from $1 trillion as stronger economic growth is forecast by a government agency to reduce the budget shortfall to a seven-year low as a share of gross domestic product.

“There have been a number of positive credit developments since S&P downgraded the U.S.,” said Guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia, which oversees $11 billion in fixed-income assets. “I’m not sure the ratings companies expected the degree of contraction in the annual deficit that we’ve seen.”

[Demeter]

52. Bond Insurer Files Suit Against Detroit in Setback for Bankruptcy Plan

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/bond-insurer-files-suit-against-detroit-in-setback-for-bankruptcy-plan/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

A bond insurer on Monday struck a blow against Detroit’s proposal to exit bankruptcy, arguing in a new lawsuit that Detroit’s approach would illegally discriminate against the city’s third-biggest group of creditors — the investors who provided $1.4 billion for its workers’ pensions nearly a decade ago.

Those investors bought “certificates of participation,” which were the first securities Detroit defaulted on as it prepared to file for bankruptcy last summer. The city now contends that the 2005 borrowing was a “sham transaction” and is proposing to give the investors who bought into it one of the lowest recovery rates in its bankruptcy.

The insurer, the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company, said in its lawsuit that Detroit “seeks to turn a crooked eye to history.” It said the city had benefited greatly from the transaction but was now pretending to be “the innocent victim of fraud perpetrated on a grand scale.”

The new lawsuit could have far-reaching consequences. It might lead to a bigger recovery for the investors who hold the certificates and smaller losses for Financial Guaranty and another insurer, Syncora, which insured them. But it might also lead to a fight to claw back the $1.4 billion from the city pension system, which would throw a wrench into Detroit’s efforts to cushion its workers and retirees from some of the pain as it attempts to resolve its outsized debts....

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[xchrom]

53. Spain Needs ‘Diet’ to Narrow Budget Gap, Employers Say

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-21/spain-needs-spending-diet-to-narrow-budget-gap-employers-say.html

The Spanish government has failed to properly reform public spending and should deliver further cuts to tackle one of the highest budget deficits in the European Union, Spain’s main business lobby CEOE said.

“It’s a question of management, public spending has to be put on a diet,” Chairman Juan Rosell Lastortras said in an interview in his office in Madrid on March 19. “The state should fund only what it can afford to and as long as investments are profitable.”

Nearly two years after securing a bailout, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy hasn’t manage to curb overspending in the region’s fourth-largest economy. While Spain’s borrowing costs have dropped to pre-crisis levels and the budget deficit is narrowing, the European Commission has warned it could widen again next year without further action.

“There hasn’t been a real restructuring,” Rosell said, referring to the multiple levels of government sharing power throughout the Iberian nation. Likewise, spending in education and health care could be reduced and the government has scope to trim wages and headcount in the public sector, he said.

[Demeter]

54. GE's credit card business faces two federal investigations

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/18/generalelectric-probe-idUSL3N0MF39X20140318

Federal regulators are conducting two investigations into General Electric Co's credit card business for potential violations of consumer finance laws, according to a regulatory filing related to the unit's planned initial public offering. The business, now named Synchrony Financial, said it was in talks with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) regarding a review of its debt cancellation products and related marketing practices, according to the filing dated March 13.

The consumer bureau was created by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law and charged with cracking down on financial scams that harm borrowers. The company said that it notified the CFPB about a problem with its Spanish-language filing after spotting it as part of an internal audit. The matter was referred to the Department of Justice (DoJ), which initiated a civil investigation over a possible violation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, as some Spanish-speaking customers and customers residing in Puerto Rico were excluded from certain statement credit and settlement offers, according to the filing.

There is no assurance that the investigations will not have a "material adverse effect" on business and results, Synchrony said. The CFPB declined to comment and the DoJ could not be reached outside regular U.S. business hours. A GE Capital spokesman said on Tuesday the matter had already been disclosed in detail in the prospectus. The IPO filing last Thursday was the first step in GE's long-awaited plan to exit retail finance and reduce its dependence on its financing arm. The financing arm at one point accounted for almost half of the company's profit. The unit's rising funding costs during the 2008 financial crisis nearly sank the company.

Last December, GE Capital and CFPB resolved allegations that CareCredit, its medical credit-card division, failed to adequately explain loan terms in financing plan for medical and dental procedures. The company agreed to pay up to $34.1 million as part of the agreement. According to the latest filing, resolution of the federal investigations could include "customer remediation" as well as civil money penalties and required changes to how the unit currently conducts its business.

In 2013, the CFPB forced American Express and JPMorgan Chase & Co to refund customers as a result of investigations into the companies' credit card procedures.

[Democracyinkind]

56. Ukraine crisis is about Great Power oil, gas pipeline rivalry

To be sure, the violent rioting was triggered by frustration with Yanukovych's rejection of the EU deal, along with rocketing energy, food and other consumer bills, linked to Ukraine's domestic gas woes and abject dependence on Russia. Police brutality to suppress what began as peaceful demonstrations was the last straw.

But while Russia's imperial aggression is clearly a central factor, the US effort to rollback Russia's sphere of influence in Ukraine by other means in pursuit of its own geopolitical and strategic interests raises awkward questions. As the pipeline map demonstrates, US oil and gas majors like Chevron and Exxon are increasingly encroaching on Gazprom's regional monopoly, undermining Russia's energy hegemony over Europe.

Ukraine is caught hapless in the midst of this accelerating struggle to dominate Eurasia's energy corridors in the last decades of the age of fossil fuels.

For those who are pondering whether we face the prospect of a New Cold War, a better question might be - did the Cold War ever really end?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/06/ukraine-crisis-great-power-oil-gas-rivals-pipelines

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed

[DemReadingDU]

65. Dr Nafeez Ahmed mentioned in The Automatic Earth

in this article -
3/18/14 The global Transition tipping point has arrived - vive la révolution by Nafeez Ahmed
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/18/transition-tipping-point-revolution-doom?CMP=twt_gu

via this blog -
3/20/14 Debt Rattle Mar 20 2014: An Unprecedented Opportunity
http://www.theautomaticearth.com/debt-rattle-mar-20-2014-an-unprecedented-opportunity/




I don't doubt that the Ukraine crisis is about Great Power oil, gas pipeline rivalry, as well as greedy profits from major big corporations.

in this article -
3/21/14 Ukraine - the corporate annexation
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2328765/ukraine_the_corporate_annexation.html

from yesterday's Stock Market Watch
http://www.democraticunderground.com/111649566

[Democracyinkind]

67. Cool! Thanks for the additional material!

[DemReadingDU]

69. Thanks for your additions too!

The Weekend thread, as well as the Daily Stock Market Watch threads, always have a variety of worthwhile articles to read!

[Demeter]

57. You Don’t Say by James Kwak

http://baselinescenario.com/2014/03/17/you-dont-say/

Last week Peter Eavis of DealBook highlighted a statement made last year by New York Fed President William Dudley (formerly of Goldman Sachs, then a top lieutenant to Tim Geithner): “There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions.” There was a point, say in 2008, when many people probably thought that our largest banks were just guilty of shoddy risk management, dubious sales practices, and excessive risk-taking. Since then, we’ve had to add price fixing, money laundering, bribery, and systematic fraud on the judicial system, among other things. Eavis also tried to make something positive out of a couple of other recent comments. Dudley said, “I think that trust issue is of their own doing—they have done it to themselves,” while OCC head Thomas Curry said, “It is not going to work if we approach it from a lawyerly standpoint. It is more like a priest-penitent relationship.”

I don’t see much reason for optimism. First, framing the problem as a “trust issue”—customers no longer see banks as trustworthy institutions—is beside the point. Wall Street’s main defense is that its clients already realize that investment banks do not have their buy-side clients’ best interests at heart, and clients who don’t realize that are chumps. And in the wake of the financial crisis, I suspect there are few individuals out there who believe that their banks are there to help them. The banking industry has discovered that it can thrive without trust, which is not surprising; retail depositors trust the FDIC, and bond investors know that trust isn’t part of the equation.

Second, when an entire industry shows a deep proclivity to flaunt(SEE CORRECTION, BELOW) the law, it’s distressing that one of its top regulators sees himself more as a priest than as a lawyer. With a priest, the presumption is that the congregant actually wants to be saved, and therefore will listen to the priest. Wall Street banks just care about profits, which is only natural. Once they’ve learned that they can be profitable without being ethical, there’s no turning back. The only way to change the equation is to make lawbreaking unprofitable, which means serious penalties, both civil and criminal. In that vein, the SEC is especially proud of a judge’s decision last week to impose an $825,000 fine on Fabrice Tourre, the Goldman employee implicated in the ABACUS deal. The SEC’s enforcement director claimed that the penalty reflected “the S.E.C.’s intent of pursuing meaningful sanctions to punish individuals responsible for misconduct and deter others from violating the federal securities laws.” If only.

That is a meaningful sanction, particularly because the judge prohibited Goldman from covering Tourre’s penalty of $650,000. I doubt, however, that she could stop Goldman employees from individually gifting cash to Tourre. And, if they have any kind of sense of fairness, they should start passing the hat—because Tourre was the only one out of probably thousands of people engaged in similar behavior who got busted. Which means that, if you want to structure deals so they are likely to collapse and lie about it to your buy-side clients, the odds are spectacularly in your favor. More important, if you are a senior executive and you want to pressure your employees (including by promising them huge bonuses) to structure deals that are likely to collapse and lie about it to your buy-side clients, the odds in your favor approach certainty.

Talk is cheap. But ultimately, it’s hard to see how anyone’s behavior is going to change with the regulators we’ve got.



CORRECTION: James Kwak means “flout” (conspicuously disobey) not “flaunt” (display in a showy way). It matters because they have opposing meanings.

ACTUALLY, I THINK BOTH WORDS APPLY: THE BANKSTERS ARE FLOUTING THE LAW, AND THEN FLAUNTING THEIR FLOUTING....

[Demeter]

58. Would you believe I ALREADY have next week's topic?

That's what happens when one squanders one's sleeping hours to catch up on a whole week of missed Internet...

while I have narrowed this week's topic of plgues to the specific Plague itself, I won't continue to plague readers with it....

After all, what goes around will come around again. We'll take another stab at plagues at a future date.

plague plāg/ noun: pneumonic plague; noun: the plague; noun: plague; plural noun: plagues

1. a contagious bacterial disease characterized by fever and delirium, typically with the formation of buboes (see bubonic plague) and sometimes infection of the lungs ( pneumonic plague ).

Origin
late Middle English: Latin plaga ‘stroke, wound,’ probably from Greek (Doric dialect) plaga, from a base meaning ‘strike.’

plague (n.) Look up plague at Dictionary.com

late 14c., plage, "affliction, calamity, evil, scourge;" early 15c., "malignant disease," from Old French plage (14c.), from Late Latin plaga, used in Vulgate for "pestilence," from Latin plaga "stroke, wound," probably from root of plangere "to strike, lament (by beating the breast)," from or cognate with Greek (Doric) plaga "blow," from PIE *plak- (2) "to strike, to hit" (cf. Greek plazein "to drive away," plessein "to beat, strike;" Old English flocan "to strike, beat;" Gothic flokan "to bewail;" German fluchen, Old Frisian floka "to curse&quot .

The Latin word also is the source of Old Irish plag (genitive plaige) "plague, pestilence," German Plage, Dutch plaage. Meaning "epidemic that causes many deaths" is from 1540s; specifically in reference to bubonic plague from c.1600. Modern spelling follows French, which had plague from 15c. Weakened sense of "anything annoying" is from c.1600.

plague (v.) Look up plague at Dictionary.com
late 15c., from Middle Dutch plaghen, from plaghe (n.) "plague" (see plague (n.)). Sense of "bother, annoy" it is first recorded 1590s. Related: Plagued; plaguing.

[Democracyinkind]

60. The Shifting Explanations for the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague in Human History

But what kind of plague?

Adopting the Russian view and describing the Black Death as an outbreak of marmot plague would help to explain many of the discrepancies that trouble the Plague Deniers. For example, marmot plague’s tropism for the lungs would account for the seemingly high incidence of pneumonic disease—even in warm climates, where the weather would not have favored its transmission. Moreover, marmot plague is the only form of rodent plague that is contagious; marmots spread the disease the way humans do, via a marmot version of the cough.

Of course, marmot plague is still marmot plague. But if Dr. Wendy Orent is correct, and at some point the marmot disease evolved into a distinctly human form, given its genetic heritage, such a “humanized” plague might well produce symptoms like chest pain, blood spitting, and, as the lungs and throat became gangrenous and corrupted, a fetid body and breath odor. A humanized version of Y. pestis would also explain the absence of rat die-offs. Such an ailment would spread the way Friar Michele and Louis Heyligen describe the Black Death spreading, directly from person to person by way of the breath, though very likely other modes of transmission would have also developed. Thus, Dr. Orent thinks that P. irritans, the human flea, would have played an important role in the spread of a “humanized” plague.

Like their Russian counterparts, many American microbiologists reject the arguments of the Plague Deniers, but for different reasons. Most American scientists do not accept the Russian theory of “host” plague strains—that is, that the lethality of a particular strain of Y. pestis is shaped by its evolutionary history with particular rodent species. The plague bacillus is only fifteen thousand to twenty thousand years old, says Professor Robert Brubaker, dean of American plague researchers. In evolutionary terms, Dr. Brubaker thinks that is not enough time for the bacillus to have evolved very far away from its original form.

In Dr. Brubaker’s view and that of most of his colleagues, the Black Death and the Third Pandemic were classic examples of rat-borne plague. In the American view, differences between the two outbreaks can be explained largely in terms of external factors. One of the most important of these externals is the very different levels of knowledge available to physicians of the fourteenth and late nineteenth centuries. From firsthand observation, medieval Europeans sensed that plague was affected by factors like sanitation, nutrition, and the movement of goods and people, but this practical knowledge was attached to beliefs about the importance of astrology, miasmas, and bodily humors.

http://hnn.us/article/10949

Mr. Kelly, who holds a graduate degree in European history, is the author most recently of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time (HarperCollins), from which the following article is adapted.

Highly interesting overview of the "plague controversy", undated, but I think it's from 2006/7. The book it is based on is from 2006.

[Demeter]

64. I have heard of that controversy

I am guessing the jury is still out.

[xchrom]

61. Europe Goes Soft on Conflict Minerals, Making Human Rights Optional

http://www.thenation.com/blog/178942/europe-goes-soft-conflict-minerals-making-human-rights-optional

People in conflict zones don’t have a choice about living the midst of perpetual civil war, don’t choose to become child laborers and do not volunteer for enslavement in militia-controlled mines. But when it comes to the social responsibilities of companies that profit from the trade in conflict minerals, responding to such atrocities is mostly a matter of voluntarism.

The European Union’s new plan for restricting conflict minerals in global trade starts with good intentions, but basically ends there. The European Commission’s draft legislation, slated for implementation in 2015, aims to designate “responsible importers” that voluntarily keep their supply chains free of materials used to finance armed conflict, primarily sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and South Sudan. The plan covers four key minerals integral to electronic products like cellphones—tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold—through a “self-certification” scheme based on global ethical sourcing guidelines. But since it is not mandatory, and therefore only targets companies that voluntarily opt in, rights groups worry that the scheme would codify the trend of letting the fox guard the multinational henhouse.

And it’s a very small henhouse at that. The rules focus on European-based businesses dealing with raw materials, particularly smelters and refiners—and not companies that trade in imported, finished manufactured products that drive European consumer markets. Thus, as Euractiv reports, the program “will not apply to importers of products such as mobile phones, which may already have had the materials installed.” In other words, the dirty minerals can be present throughout the supply chain, but as long as the closest links are clean, corporate impunity will persist for the imported electronic gadgets bearing conflict-tainted metals in their circuitry.

In a statement issued earlier this month, a coalition of human rights groups warned that “the Commission’s proposal—an opt-in self-certification scheme available to a limited number of companies—is likely to have minimal impact on the way that the majority of European companies source natural resources.”

[antigop]

71. Musical interlude: "Not Dead Yet" from "Spamalot"

Original Broadway cast recording:

[xchrom]

72. This Depressing Chart Is The Best Picture Of Unemployment In America

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-depressing-chart-is-the-best-picture-of-unemployment-in-america-2014-3



***SNIP

And what's going on is still a fiasco.

So, employers are no longer laying off workers in monthly tsunamis, as they did during the financial crisis; we know because new unemployment claims have been relatively low over the last couple of years.

And employers are hiring. We know because the Employment-Population Ratio has stabilized at very low levels. They’re hiring enough to keep up with the growth of the working-age population. That’s about it. They’re not hiring enough to pick up the millions of “unemployed” or mere jobless.

Among the “unemployed,” the fiasco shows up in the average duration of unemployment – before they either find a job or get tossed on the no-longer-counted pile of the mere jobless.

The unemployment rate normally peaks at the end of a recession, and in some cases significantly later – as in the “jobless recoveries” of the early 1990s and early 2000s. The average duration of unemployment peaks even later. The pre-financial-crisis record duration of unemployment had been set in July 1983 at 21.2 weeks. The unemployment rate had peaked half a year earlier at 10.8%.

This was the worst it could get, we thought...

Until the financial crisis spooked employers into plowing under millions of jobs. Then they made structural changes that eliminated many of those jobs forever.

This chart, which compares the unemployment rate (red line) to the duration of unemployment (blue line), shows better than anything else the nature of the still ongoing unemployment fiasco in the US, despite the steadily declining unemployment rate.



Read more: http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2014/3/22/this-chart-is-a-true-picture-of-the-unemployment-crisis-in-a.html#ixzz2wikg5cP7

[xchrom]

73. Everyone's Freaked Out That China's 'Minsky Moment' Has Arrived

http://www.businessinsider.com/has-chinas-minsky-moment-has-arrived-2014-3

After years of booming credit expansion, we're now seeing slower economic growth in China and a rising number of domestic bond defaults.

This has prompted many to ask has China's "Minsky moment" arrived?

The phenomenon is named after economist Hyman Minsky who articulated that periods of speculation and credit growth inflate assets, only to end in crisis.

Societe Generale's Wei Yao was one of the first to write this up a year ago.

Morgan Stanley's Cyril Moulle-Berteaux and Sergei Parmenov, argue that China is approaching its 'Minsky moment' (via Zerohedge).

"In recent weeks, a trip to the region and further research into China’s shadow banking system have convinced us that China is approaching its “Minsky Moment,” (Display 1) which increases the chances of a disorderly unwind of China’s excesses. The efficiency with which credit generates economic activity is already deteriorating, as more investments are made in non-productive projects and more debt is being used to repay old debts."



But UBS economist Tao Wang argues that China's "Minsky moment" isn't here. Wang points to a few reasons she thinks China pessimists are wrong.

Pessimists are too focused on data at the start of the year — This data is distorted by the Lunar New Year holiday and should not be used to predict the rest of the year. In terms of exports, while the U.S. has had a severe winter, capital goods expenditures are expected to rise this year.
Systemic risks in shadow banking are limited — A sharp deleveraging is unlikely because of "the lack of leverage in the sector, ample liquidity in the financial system, and the government's control," writes Wang. She thinks risk will be contained. (More on this later).
Concerns about credit growth are overdone — Wang expects total social financing to rise 16% even as the government tries to tighten regulations on shadow banking. There will be enough credit growth to support economic activity


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/has-chinas-minsky-moment-has-arrived-2014-3#ixzz2wiotVizC

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/has-chinas-minsky-moment-has-arrived-2014-3#ixzz2wioi7OY9

[mother earth]

74. Ms. Demeter, xchrom, and all, as usual....

you do not disappoint.



TY, for the dedication and the information. The best of DU is right here.

[Demeter]

76. It's a Schaudenfreude!

a cynical delight. On behalf of all, thank you for your kind words.

[Demeter]

77. The Funnies

[Demeter]

91. The new Abbott and Costello team up

[Demeter]

92. Ain't it the truth! Especially on DU

[Demeter]

78. Music in a Time of Plague

[Demeter]

79. Documentaries

[xchrom]

81. REPORT: NSA TARGETED CHINESE TECH GIANT HUAWEI

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NSA_SURVEILLANCE_HUAWEI?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-03-22-18-20-30

BERLIN (AP) -- U.S. intelligence agencies hacked into the email servers of Chinese tech giant Huawei five years ago, around the time concerns were growing in Washington that the telecommunications equipment manufacturer was a threat to U.S. national security, two newspapers reported Saturday.

The National Security Agency began targeting Huawei in early 2009 and quickly succeeded in gaining access to the company's client lists and email archive, German weekly Der Spiegel reported, citing secret U.S. intelligence documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The New York Times also published a report Saturday about the documents.

Huawei objects to activities that threaten network security, said William B. Plummer, the company's vice president of external affairs.

"Huawei has declared its willingness to work with governments, industry stakeholders and customers in an open and transparent manner, to jointly address the global challenges of network security and data integrity," Plummer said in an email. "The information presented in Der Spiegel and the New York Times article reaffirms the need for all companies to be vigilant at all times."

[xchrom]

82. PEPSICO CEO'S PAY BUMPED TO $13.2 MILLION

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PEPSICO_EXECUTIVE_COMPENSATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-03-21-18-05-11

NEW YORK (AP) -- PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi got a pay package worth $13.2 million last year, representing a 5 percent increase from the previous year.

The pay bump was the result of a higher performance-based bonus, reflecting the company's improved financial results after coming out of a "transitional year" in which it slashed costs and stepped up investments in flagship brands.

In addition to its namesake soda, PepsiCo makes Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Quaker oats and Frito-Lay snacks such as Doritos and Cheetos.

PepsiCo Inc., based in Purchase, N.Y., had been under pressure to improve its results when Nooyi announced a "reset" in 2012 to strengthen its brands. The company made a point of investing more heavily in marketing for its Pepsi soda, which had lost market share to Coca-Cola Co. over the years.

[xchrom]

83. PALLADIUM PRICE RISES TO HIGHEST SINCE 2011

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_COMMODITIES_REVIEW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-03-21-17-59-36

Palladium prices rose sharply Friday as traders feared that continuing tensions with Russia could result in fewer exports of the metal.

The actively traded June contract for the metal jumped $17.65, or 2.3 percent, to settle at $789.30 an ounce. That's the highest price since September 2011.

Traders fear that Western sanctions against Russia could obstruct exports of the metal. Russia is a major producer of palladium, which is used in products including catalytic converters for automobiles.

Other metal prices were mixed.

Gold for April delivery rose $5.50 to $1,336 an ounce. May silver fell 12 cents to $20.31 an ounce, May copper rose 2 cents to $2.95 a pound and April platinum rose $1.20 to $1,436 an ounce.

[xchrom]

84. SCOTLAND'S VIKINGS GO OWN WAY IN INDEPENDENCE VOTE

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/scotlands-vikings-go-own-way-independence-vote

***SNIP

There are only 23,000 Shetlanders, too few to make much difference to the outcome of the independence vote. But they have Viking-sized confidence, and a big bargaining chip: a chunk of Britain's oil and gas reserves lie beneath Shetland waters.

Shetlanders are seeking new powers and official recognition of their special status — possibly along the lines of the Faroe Islands, a self-governing dependency of Denmark. The islanders feel their moment may have come, as Scotland's fluid constitutional status gives them opportunities to seek concessions from both sides.

Tavish Scott, Shetland's representative in the Scottish Parliament, said an independent Scotland "doesn't have an economy if oil and gas doesn't happen. And that gives Shetland some leverage."

A "yes" vote for independence on Sept. 18 would trigger complex negotiations between Edinburgh and London over Scotland's share of Britain's offshore oil and gas — and of its trillion-pound national debt. A "no" vote is likely to lead to talks about giving Scotland more power of its economy and resources — especially its energy reserves.

[xchrom]

85. Anti-austerity protest turns violent in Spanish capital

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/23/uk-spain-protests-idUKBREA2L0M220140323

(Reuters) - Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards rallied in Madrid on Saturday against poverty and EU-imposed austerity in a largely peaceful protest later marred by violent clashes in which police fired rubber bullets.

Some protesters started to throw stones and bottles at the large numbers of riot police present and attacked cashpoints and hoardings. The police fired rubber bullets to disperse them, according to video footage seen by Reuters.

Central government representative Cristina Cifuentes said 19 protesters had been arrested and 50 police officers had been injured, one of them very badly, in the clashes.

The so-called "Dignity Marches" brought hundreds of thousands to the capital, according to estimates of Reuters witnesses. Travelling from all over Spain, they were protesting in support of more than 160 different causes, including jobs, housing, health, education and an end to poverty.

[xchrom]

86. Greek central banker defends stress test results - paper

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/22/uk-greece-banks-idUKBREA2L0PH20140322

(Reuters) - An 'unduly conservative' approach in stress tests on Greece's major banks would have scared off investors, the head of Greece's central bank said on Saturday, adding that he believed the results would be close to EU-wide tests due later this year.

The banks' capital needs were a sticking point in the latest bailout review by Greece's lenders, which ended this week after six months of wrangling.

The EU and IMF, which had estimated that the banks' needs would be higher, said in a statement that there were "upside risks" to the Greek estimates and urged the banks to address the high level of non-performing loans.

But in an interview to be published in Sunday's Kathimerini newspaper, George Provopoulos was quoted as saying: "If were unduly conservative and imposed an overcapitalisation of the banks, we would run two serious risks.

[xchrom]

87. Emerging Europe - the new hunting ground for bad loan investors

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/23/uk-cee-banks-loan-sales-idUKBREA2M05620140323

(Reuters) - Central and eastern European countries are turning up the pressure on banks to clean up their balance sheets, creating new opportunities for bad loan investors that are seeing returns dwindle in recovering euro zone economies.

Keen to bolster fragile economic growth, countries such as Hungary, Poland and Romania are following the lead of their western neighbours and urging banks to sell off bad debts so they can lend more to businesses.

In some cases, it's the first time big portfolios of loans have been put up for sale, raising a host of legal challenges for would-be buyers, such as local banking secrecy rules, consumer protection laws, and other regulatory hurdles.

But with one-time high-yielding favourites such as Ireland and Portugal offering lower investment returns as they emerge from sovereign bailouts, and interest rates remaining low across the European Union, buyers are willing to put in the extra leg-work for deals that can yield 25 percent per annum.

[xchrom]

88. ECB won't adopt threshold-based rate guidance - Constancio

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/03/22/uk-ecb-constancio-idUKBREA2L0NT20140322

(Reuters) - The European Central Bank will not tie interest-rate policy to specific economic thresholds, a top policymaker said on Saturday.

"We think it would not be useful," ECB Vice President Vitor Constancio said on Saturday, referring to the threshold-based approach to monetary policy that the U.S. Federal Reserve abandoned this week after using it for just over a year.

He also dismissed the idea of giving a time frame for when the ECB could raise rates, saying the idea is "even worse" than thresholds.

Earlier this week, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said the U.S. central bank might raise interest rates "around six months" after it finishes winding down its bond-buying stimulus program. Stocks and bonds dropped after her remarks on Wednesday.

[xchrom]

89. Scottish independence: Economist criticises currency union rejection

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-26702405

The Scottish government has welcomed a new economic analysis which strongly attacks the UK Treasury's opposition to a currency alliance.

Leslie Young, professor of economics at a university in Beijing, claims the Treasury's position does not stand up to scrutiny.

He was commissioned by businessman Sir Tom Hunter's new institute to assess the case against a currency union between an independent Scotland and the rest of the UK.

[xchrom]

90. EL-ERIAN: The State Of 'The New Normal'

http://www.businessinsider.com/el-erian-state-of-the-new-normal-2014-3

***SNIP

The underlying rationale: The initial reasoning was based on the view that it takes many years for an economy to recover fully from a period of excessive leverage, extreme debt entitlement, and irresponsible risk taking and credit extension. Subsequently, with policy responses lagging developments on the ground (see next point), the growth/employment challenges were further aggravated by inadequate aggregate demand and insufficient attention paid to supply-side factors.

Policy concerns: While policymakers did respond boldly using extraordinary measures, their initial reactions underestimated the depth of the crisis. Too many pf them struggled to combine a cyclical mindset (which, prior to the crisis, had served them well), with a more secular and structural one. They also dismissed way too quickly the notion that western economies can learn a few things from the experience of the emerging world. When the new normal realization finally set in, the political context was no longer conducive to a comprehensive policy response. As a result, central banks have had to carry the bulk of the policy burden; and have done so using – inevitably – imperfect tools.

The impact on Main Street: It has been devastating, harming both current and future generations. Just witness the extent of long-term joblessness and youth unemployment, as well as the excessive increase in the inequality trio (of income, wealth and opportunities). It has also contributed to political polarization and weakened global policy coordination on economic and geo-political issues.

The impact on Wall Street: Here the impact has been quite subdued. Thanks to the hyper activism of central banks, markets have been largely shielded from the impact of weaker fundamentals. Indeed, central banks have inserted quite a wedge between fundamentals and market prices; and they have done so for an understandable reason: given their limited policy tools, they are obliged to use the asset price channel as a way to influence wealth, spending, animal spirits, risk taking and investing.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/el-erian-state-of-the-new-normal-2014-3#ixzz2wmb8DDGk

[Demeter]

95. We have to introduce those who would lead us to the concept of "Unacceptable"

[Fuddnik]

93. I'm not dead yet, either.

Just went back to living in a taxi again.

[Demeter]

94. a case of wish you were dead?

Stay away from the bad customers!

[Demeter]

96. I'm calling it a wrap for the Weekend

I'm tired (but not dead, yet....too tired to be sure) and cold. It got up to 29F. Whoopee. It's gonna be April and we are still in the teens...

[Fuddnik]

97. I took the day off and played golf.