STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 4 March 2015

[Tansy_Gold]

[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Wednesday, 4 March 2015[font color=black][/font]

SMW for 3 March 2015

AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 3 March 2015
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Dow Jones 18,203.37 -85.26 (-0.47%)
S&P 500 2,107.78 -9.61 (-0.45%)
Nasdaq 4,979.90 -28.20 (-0.56%)


[font color=red]10 Year 2.12% +0.02 (0.95%)
30 Year 2.72% +0.02 (0.74%)[font color=black]


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[font color=red]Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 [/font][font color=red]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
8/22/12 Doug Whitman, Whitman Capital LLC hedge fund founder, convicted of insider trading following a trial in which he spent more than two days on the stand telling jurors he was innocent
10/26/12 UPDATE: Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta sentenced to two years in federal prison. He will, of course, appeal. . .
11/20/12 Hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma charged with insider trading at SAC Capital Advisors, and prosecutors are looking at Martoma's boss, Steven Cohen, for possible involvement.
02/14/13 Gilbert Lopez, former chief accounting officer of Stanford Financial Group, and former controller Mark Kuhrt sentenced to 20 yrs in prison for their roles in Allen Sanford's $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
03/29/13 Michael Sternberg, portfolio mgr at SAC Capital, arrested in NYC, charged with conspiracy and securities fraud. Pled not guilty and freed on $3m bail.
04/04/13 Matthew Marshall Taylor,fmr Goldman Sachs trader arrested, charged by CFTC w/defrauding his employer on $8BN futures bet "by intentionally concealing the true huge size, as well as the risk and potential profits or losses associated."
04/04/13 Matthew Taylor admits guilt, makes plea bargain. Sentencing set for 26 June; faces up to 20 years in prison but will likely only see 3-4 years. Says, "I am truly sorry."
04/11/13 Ex-KPMG LLP partner Scott London charged by federal prosecutors w/passing inside tips to a friend in exchange for cash, jewelry, and concert tickets; expected to plead guilty in May.
08/01/13 Fabrice Tourré convicted on six counts of security fraud, including "aiding and abetting" his former employer, Goldman Sachs
08/14/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout charged with wire fraud, falsifying records, and conspiracy in connection with JP Morgan's "London Whale" trade.
08/19/13 Phillip A. Falcone, manager of hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, agrees to admit to "wrongdoing" in market manipulation. Will banned from securities industry for 5 years and pay $18MM in disgorgement and fines.
09/16/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout officially indicted on charges associated with "London Whale" trade.
02/06/14 Matthew Martoma convicted of insider trading while at hedge fund SAC (Stephen A. Cohen) Capital Advisors. Expected sentence 7-10 years.
03/24/14 Annette Bongiorno, Bernard Madoff's secretary; Daniel Bonventre, director of operations for investments; JoAnn Crupi, an account manager; and Jerome O'Hara and George Perez, both computer programmers convicted of conspiracy to defraud clients, securities fraud, and falsifying the books and records.
05/19/14 Credit Suisse, which has an investment bank branch in NYC, agrees to plead guilty and pay appx. $2.6 billion penalties for helping wealthy Americans hide wealth and avoid taxes.
09/08/14 Matthew Martoma, convicted SAC trader, sentenced to 9 years in prison plus forfeiture of $9.3 million, including home and bank accounts







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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]

[Demeter]

1. Lancet Study Confirms Millions Died From "Shock Therapy" 2009

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/01/18/685673/-Lancet-Study-Confirms-Millions-Died-From-Shock-Therapy



The world has become so inured to mass death, perhaps the following will merit little comment or outrage among our political punditry, even if the story did make the back pages of the New York Times...A new Lancet study, "Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis," confirms what has been known but little discussed in the past eight to ten years: millions of people, mostly men of employment age, died as a result of the effects of the "shock therapy" transition from a collectivized to a privatized economy in Russia and other formerly "communist" states in East Europe. According to the Times article, by 2007 "the life expectancy of Russian men was less than 60 years, compared with 67 years in 1985."

Back in 2001, a UNICEF-IRC study had already claimed 3.2 million unnecessary deaths due to capitalist restoration. The Lancet study cites other figures, with up to "10 million missing men because of system change." As a result, adult mortality rates soared, up almost 13% in Russia, with much of the increase attributable to the mass unemployment that followed the collapse in state enterprises. The study noted, "the Russian population lost nearly 5 years of life expectancy between 1991 and 1994." Other factors affecting the disastrous increase in the death rate included poor health care, rising HIV rates, higher alcoholism and drug addiction rates, as well as the effects of acute psychosocial stress, massive corruption, impoverishment, rising social inequalities, and social disorganization. The effects of neo-liberal "shock therapy" on Russia and other East European countries (Russia being the hardest hit) were also felt by the children of the region. According to the UNICEF-IRC study noted above, tuberculosis rates rose by 50%; 150,000 children were added to the public care rolls (while overall population was dropping by millions); there were high levels of child malnutrition, and the number of children under age 5 fell by one-third. This was not just a jolt of "shock therapy," it was a social tsunami that devastated the region. According to the Lancet, the more rapid the rate of privatization, the higher the death rate.

Radical free-market advisers argued that capitalist transition needed to occur as rapidly as possible. The prescribed policy was called shock therapy, with three major elements: liberalisation of prices and trade to allow markets to re-allocate resources, stabilisation programmes to suppress inflation, and mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises to create appropriate incentives. When implemented simultaneously, these elements would cause an irreversible shift to a market-based economy....

Although a direct cause and effect relation cannot be ascertained and a detailed discussion of their roles is beyond the scope of this Article, all these findings can be linked, in some way, to mass privatisation programmes.

As the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of free-fall, due to the unbridled policies of financial deregulation, and an evisceration of the tax base through so-called "trickle-down" economics with its massive tax cuts to the very rich, we should all ponder, with awe and great sadness, the final denouement of the Cold War, with its frenzy of capitalist restorationist policies in the old Soviet Union, and the tremendous human cost it involved. It is also important in understanding where Russia is politically today, i.e., what were the social circumstances that produced the Putin regime. Ever since the contrived Georgia-South Ossetia conflict last summer, it has appeared that the military-industrial complex of the U.S. is looking to find new "enemies," should the public taste for the "Global War on Terror" lessen with an Obama administration, and fatigue over the fruitless and largely fictional "hunt" for Osama bin Laden and the crimes and disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps most of all, the sheer horror of the loss of life, the human tragedy of the return of "democracy" (in its free enterprise garb) to the former Soviet Union, is what we need to ponder. The truth behind the privatization policies of economists like Harvard-educated Jeffrey Sachs -- now head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University -- has been hidden for years now behind glibly optimistic statements of economic progress in now-capitalist Russia. Take for examine this summary of a 1997 article in the Journal of Comparative Economics on "Bank privitization in post-communist Russia", typical of the way the changes in Russia have been reported by the dominant social and educational Western elite:

The privatization of Zhilsotsbank of Russia demonstrates that the process of privatization can contribute to the eradication of the government's role in the corporate governance of banks. Incumbent bank managers obtained control rights over new private banks following Zhilsotsbank's decentralized privatization. The swift eradication of government from direct ownership of numerous banks, combined with broad licensing rules, has enabled the Russian banking industry to be over 75% private. Mosbusinessbank, a big commercial bank formed from 26 Zhilsotsbank branches, is one of the most profitable banks the old state banking system has produced.

There is not a word on the social cost of this increased profitability. In fact, the social disaster in Russia due to privatization and the restoration of capitalism in Russia is barely known or understood in the U.S., outside a sense that gangsterism was increased thereby. The truth about world history since the end of World War II has largely been kept from the U.S. population, e.g. the recruitment of Nazi war criminals into U.S. government research programs, including the intelligence agencies, the mass murders in the 100,000s by U.S. allies in Korea (with U.S. connivance), the budget of U.S. intelligence agencies and the extent of the latter's covert actions around the globe, and the CIA's mind control project with its enlistment of top levels of social, medical and psychological personnel throughout the 1950s-1970s, and the secret medical experiments upon these programs involved.

[Demeter]

3. Under Putin, the Excessive Deaths have stopped

and life expectancy is up, the total population has leveled off instead of dropping, and Putin has 80% approval from the public.

The population hit a historic peak at 148,689,000 in 1991, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, but then began a decade-long decline, falling at a rate of about 0.5% per year due to declining birth rates, rising death rates and emigration.[13]

The decline slowed considerably in the late 2000s, and in 2009 Russia recorded population growth for the first time in 15 years, adding 23,300 people.[14][15] Key reasons for the slow current population growth are improving health care, changing fertility patterns among younger women, falling emigration and steady influx of immigrants from the ex-USSR countries. In 2012, Russia's population increased by 292,400 people.[16]

As of 2013, Russian TFR of 1.707 children per woman[17] was the highest in Eastern, Southern and Central Europe. In 2013, Russia experienced the first natural population growth since 1990 at 22,700 people. Taking into account immigration, the population grew by 294,500 people.[18]

According to the 2010 census, ethnic Russian people make up 81% of the total population. This share remained steady over the last few decades.[19][20] Six other ethnicities have a population exceeding 1 million – Tatars (3.9%), Ukrainians (1.4%), Bashkir (1.1%), Chuvash (1%), Chechens (1%) and Armenians (0.9%). In total, 160 different ethnic groups live within the Russian Federation's borders.

Russia's population density is 8.4 people per square kilometre (22 per square mile), making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The population is most dense in the European part of the country, with milder climate, centering around Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 74% of the population is urban, making Russia a highly urbanized country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

[MattSh]

13. Interesting story about Nemtsov and his role during the...

Yeltsin "Shock Doctrine" years, by someone who was in Moscow (and worked there with Matt Taibbi) for a number of years.

Boris Nemtsov: Death of a Russian Liberal

Boris Nemtsov first crossed my radar screen in early 1997, a few months after I launched The eXile in Moscow. He was hailed as the Second Coming of Liberal Jesus by the cream of Moscow’s foreign correspondent community, back when the American media still had the money to pack places like Moscow with full-staffed local bureaus. Not that all that staffing made their reporting any better—most of the reporting was regurgitated neoliberal pamphleteering and Peak Clinton jingoism; a case study in mass journalism malpractice. Every single western reporter was completely blindsided by the 1998 financial collapse, at the time the most catastrophic and complete financial collapse in modern history — all except our annoying satirical rag.

Which brings me back to Nemtsov, whom Yeltsin appointed as his first deputy prime minister in March 1997, just a couple of months after the The eXile came to life. Everyone in the west went ga-ga over Nemtsov, the young handsome free-market governor of Nizhny Novogorod. Larry Summers, who ran Clinton’s Russia policy from his post as deputy Treasury Secretary, hailed Nemtsov’s appointment sharing the first deputy premiership with Anatoly “Bonecracker” Chubais as the “an economic Dream Team.” When Nemtsov traveled to Japan, he wowed the world media by telling a meeting of Japanese businessmen he’d give them his personal cell phone number to call him if they were having any problems doing business in Russia.

*****

A few months later, Nemtsov pushed for a new law forcing bureaucrats to disclose their incomes (but not their assets or their families’ assets) — but then was caught on tape arranging a bribe in the form of an obscene book advance, $90,000, with a Yeltsin family bagman/entrepreneur named Sergei Lisovsky. (A year earlier, Lisovsky, while working for Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election campaign, wascaught in central Moscow hauling a Xerox copy paper box packed with 500,000 dollars worth of Ben Franklins.) Nemtsov’s leaked discussion with Lisovsky about the $90,000 “book advance” came just as he took credit for running one of the most controversial sell-offs of a state asset — the state telecommunications company Svyazinvest, which went to a consortium that included George Soros and Oneximbank, whose then-chairman is now Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov. Initially the Svyazinvest auction was PR’d as the cleanest and bestest Yeltsin-era state auction of public assets; and then it was discovered that the winner of the auction, Oneximbank, had funneled huge book advancesto the very same US-backed “young reformers” in Yeltsin’s government, including “Bonecracker” Chubais, who were in charge of awarding Svyazinvest to the Oneximbank-led consortium.

*****

There were other sordid stories. Nemtsov was tasked with breaking up Russia’s natural monopolies and introducing fair, free-market competition. So he “took on” the state utilities monopoly, RAO-UES by placing his favorite young Nizhny Novgorod banker, Boris Brevnov, in charge of the company. Brevnov had by this time married an American woman who was one of the World Bank’s top officers in overseeing its investments into Nizhny Novogorod when Nemtsov was governor. Less than a year after Nemtsov put Brevnov in charge of the utilities monopoly, the company’s board of directors charged Brevnov with corruption and abuse of office, including the use of company jets to fly to Kentucky to pick up Brevnov’s wife, mother-in-law and dog and bring them back to Moscow. After getting fired from RAO-UES, Brevnov moved to the US and went to work for Enron.

By August 1998, Nemtsov’s government went down in one of the largest and most devastating financial collapses of modern times.

The problem with Nemtsov’s politics wasn’t so much his adherence to radical neoliberalism, but his shallowness, his grotesque elitism, and his authoritarianism. Nemtsov is one of the top-down Russian liberals, cut from the same authoritarian cloth as Chubais, though not as wily as “Bonecracker” (so nick-named because in 1996, when Chubais summoned a meeting of top Russian newspaper editors to the Kremlin, he told the uppity editor of the then-independent Izvestiya newspaper, “You will write what we tell you to write or bones will crack”; a few months later, after Izvestiya broke the story on Chubais taking a $3 million interest-free loan from a banker who rigged an auction, that editor was out on the streets, and today Izvestiya is a wholly owned propaganda organ of the FSB.)

Deep down Nemtsov had no problem with Putin’s authoritarianism. His problem with Putin came after being ignored for too long. As George Washington University professor Peter Reddaway wrote in his book on the dark Yeltsin years, “The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy”, Nemtsov supported a Yeltsin proposal in 1993 to create an unelected upper chamber, the Federation Council, consisting of appointed oligarchs, in order to marginalize the then-powerful, opposition-dominated Supreme Soviet parliament. One of the reasons Yeltsin brought him into his government in 1997 was to protect Yeltsin and the all-powerful presidency, as enshrined in the authoritarian 1993 constitution — the same presidential powers that allowed Putin to become who he is. As Yeltsin’s presidential power was being threatened again by the Duma, Nemtsov made his position on reducing presidential powers clear: “For Russia, the weakening of presidential power would be extremely deleterious. Those who insist on transforming Russia into a parliamentary republic are consciously or unconsciously pushing the country toward chaos.”

http://pando.com/2015/03/02/boris-nemtsov-death-of-a-russian-liberal/

[DemReadingDU]

16. Maybe it wasn't Putin that had Nemtsov killed

Perhaps another country had Nemstov killed to stir up another war, as you said in post #14.

[Demeter]

17. OR, Putin was sending a message to George Soros

Not even 6 degrees of separation between them...with Nemtsov as the hinge.

Although I think Putin is much more subtle than that....

[xchrom]

2. The 10 Most Important Things In The World Right Now

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-important-things-in-the-world-right-now-march-4-2015-3


Good morning! Here's what you need to know for Wednesday.

1. Europe's private sector is picking up speed, based on the latest business surveys from Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the eurozone whole-economy.

2. Greece's new radical government has irritated fellow European leaders with their surprisingly hostile negotiating manners.

3. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an impending US-Iran nuclear agreement a "bad deal" in an address to Congress on Wednesday.

4. An explosion at a coal mine in a rebel-held region of eastern Ukraine has killed at least 30 people.

5. China's military budget will grow by 10% over the next year.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-10-most-important-things-in-the-world-right-now-march-4-2015-3#ixzz3TPqtkY3i

[bread_and_roses]

19. What on earth could be "surprising" about Greece's hostility???????????

????????????????? What world to these people live in?

[Demeter]

4. Beyond the ninth circle of hell: what changes are waiting for the Ukrainian society after the war

http://thesaker.is/beyond-the-ninth-circle-of-hell-what-changes-are-waiting-for-the-ukrainian-society-after-the-war/



http://www.odnako.org/blogs/za-devyatim-krugom-ada-kakie-peremeni-zhdut-ukrainskoe-obshchestvo-posle-voyni/

Translated from Russian by Alexander

The civil war in Ukraine is like a huge meat grinder. The hands that turn the screw conveyor kill dozens of people every day and destroy thousands of people’s lives. However, any war will sooner or later come to an end, and the wounds on the tissue of society will gradually scar – though leaving an ugly trail of dead, wounded and displaced. Therefore it would be no harm to understand how Ukrainian society will change after the war.

Life without a state

The state as a social institution – both in LDNR and the rest of Ukraine – ceased to exist. In the “Maidan-khanat” Ukraine it continues to decay at different rates depending on the region, and the latest function, and is kept up by the “Ukrainian authorities”, – repressively, and with the only method of control – terror. In LDNR the state was destroyed by Kiev authorities at the time when they gave the order to block everything they could and evacuate government agencies from what is now called “occupied territories”. However, in the republics state institutions have been created from scratch and there are successes in this matter, although the pace of state-building is clearly inadequate. For Kiev, LDNR are not even provinces – of which MPs kindly redrew borders – but territory. Kiev wages war merely for territory, not for the people who live in it. Kiev doesn’t need people – neither their own, which it has to feed, nor others who are just in the way, – and people are rapidly “mogilized.” (mogila = grave) Or, as the great orator Klitschko said, “prepare the ground”. Therefore, based on the logic of Nikolai Berdyaev, who wrote that “the state is not created in order to turn life into a paradise, but in order to not turn it into hell” and the harsh reality on the territory of Ukraine is that there is no state, branches of hell are opening in big numbers.

Bloody process of transformation

So far the number of those killed is about 50 thousand people, according to German intelligence. And this is not propaganda from one side of the conflict, but a statement of a bystander who is watching the tragedy. War, default and its aftermath will lead to significant changes in Ukrainian society.

1. The effect of the war will be a mass death of single pensioners and other elderly people who remain at least without essential medication, or in worst case – without food. Already the minimum wage of able-bodied citizen of Ukraine is (at the rate of 25 UAH. / US $.) about 48 dollars. A simple Ukrainian lives on $ 1.6 per day. The fate of pensioners and wretched: the minimum pension does not hold up to $ 40.

2. Any war causes huge losses among the male population in terms of crippled and killed. To the loss can be added not only to the dead and wounded, but also the refugees from the war in neighboring countries who had previously left for work and decided to not come back. Those who went to Russia under the program of resettlement of compatriots. Another year of such a war – and the children of those who survive this hell will be able to read in the history books about the next wave of Ukrainians’ colonization of Siberia and the Far East.

3. The society will be transformed beyond recognition. There will be less (fewer) representatives of the bourgeoisie, such as hipsters, punks, goths and other representatives of various subcultures. In order to maintain their standards of living and style they need money, and they will not have it. The number of lumpen-proletariat and peasants will increase sharply: the streets will be filled with homeless persons and beggars. The process of internal migration will intensify. Urban population will temporarily return to the villages, where the chances of finding food will be bigger. With the increased number of orphans and the destruction of the educational system, the number of homeless children in the streets will increase significantly, as street crime will as indicator of it. Crimes will predominantly be committed against property and life / health. There will be a drastic increase of domestic crimes with firearms, which will be used as decisive arguments in exacerbated interpersonal relationships in the process of alcoholism among returnees from “ATO”. The number of neurotics and other persons with mental disorders who are left to themselves will increase critically.

4. It will be especially bad for women. They have traditionally complained about the lack of normal men, and by the end of the war there will be even less. Firstly, many will die, will leave and not come back or, at best, will move to other regions. Secondly, there will be an increase of amputees and victims of post-traumatic syndromes. Finding a normal guy would be incredibly difficult, and the competition will be enormous. Due to lack of money, even one rose will be perceived as a gift, and going to a dilapidated restaurant will be an extremely exciting and memorable event, which will be bragged about to her friends.

5. The age structure of society will change. A lot of people will die at retirement age. Working pensioners will become a rarity – they will be replaced by the younger. I believe that the greatest losses will be waiting for the 60+ generation, as they are the most unprotected. Worse it will be for men aged 18-50. They are the most promising representatives of “cannon fodder” for the Ukrainian army. Age category of 50-60 years are more likely to survive without significant losses – they maintain performance and the military is not interested in them. They have the knowledge and skills that help to somehow survive troubled times. Thus, the greatest damage will be inflicted on pensioners and able-bodied men in the prime of their lives, and the country is awaiting a severe shortage of personnel.

6. The creative class (advertisers, creators, publicists, journalists) will be harmed. There will be less money, so the demand for their labor will drop. Parts will have to change the occupation or place of residence. Significantly reduced will be the number of representatives of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, parts will leave Ukraine, parts will be ruined, and some lose their lives for their past sins and crimes. The most unenviable fate of a peasantry – it suffers the strongest of all, as it is forced to fight in the interests of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie, and as a result will for decades be wallowing in misery and ruin. But the value of workers and professional technicians will increase by several times, because they will bear the burden of the restoration of damaged infrastructure.

7. Changes will occur in the mass consciousness that defensively will generate “fake” memories of his role in the Civil War. Creating memories – a way to protect the mind and maintain the ability to integrate into a changed society. Society, and such a disparate one, will even more atomize: burst social connections between people of different beliefs and ideologies, will terminate the relationship between the political opponents. Distinction between people of different regions will sharpen. Already, residents of Bessarabia and Galicia abandon their Ukrainian identity, which is manifested in the reluctance to fight on the Eastern Front, claiming that it is far and alien. The authority of Kyiv as the capital falls below zero.

8. The society will undergo denazification, and a number of social, political and economic rights of certain categories (the bourgeoisie, the creative class, security forces) will be significantly limited. With the adoption of the lustration laws, the current Ukrainian authorities increase the framework of what is permitted for those who will replace them. Turning the weapon of discrimination against his creators is only a matter of time.

9. The masses will be prompted to economical-social and political-cultural knowledge. Intellectual recovery of the masses is only possible if the state structure, which will replace the Ukraine, engages it purposefully. Otherwise the TV, from which 80% of the population get their information, will be replaced by another TV, but critical thinking skills in the country’s inhabitants will not develop. Instead, citizens will be re-propagandized.

***

Economic recovery will take decades, and the times of mindless consumerism and mass departures abroad on holiday can only be dreamt about. In any case, what happened to the people of Ukraine will become a disaster and the death of the target project in which they existed during the previous 23 years of independence. For the rest of the inhabitants of Eurasia Ukrainian tragedy has become (and continues to be) an example of the collapse of the state and a tragedy, which will heal many generations.

[Demeter]

5. What is lustration and is it a good idea for Ukraine to adopt it?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/09/what-is-lustration-and-is-it-a-good-idea-for-ukraine-to-adopt-it

The idea of lustration is gaining momentum in Ukraine. A recent survey shows that nearly 80 percent of respondents support the policy. Lustration (from the Latin verb lustrare, to ceremonially purify) refers to a policy that seeks to cleanse a new regime from the remnants of the past. The process involves screening new officials (elected or appointed) for involvement in the former regime and sets some consequences if they are found to have been involved. These consequences can range from publicizing information about collaboration in the previous regime, through dismissal and banning from holding certain offices.

Lustration started gathering attention during the Euromaidan protests, initially in the context of discussions on how to root out political corruption, which has permeated Ukrainian governments. Investigative journalist and Euromaidan Council member Egor Sobolev became one of the most vocal proponents of the idea, and just a couple of days after Yanukovych’s ouster, was appointed to head a Lustration Committee, attached to the Cabinet of Ministers. As a first step toward lustration, Ukraine’s parliament has taken preliminary steps to prepare a bill on judicial lustration. If the bill becomes law, all court chairs appointed by Yanukovych will be fired from their administrative positions. All judges will be screened for corruption and participation in politicized justice during Euromaidan, and those who do not pass the review will be fired and possibly criminally prosecuted for corruption. In addition, the Lustration Committee and the Ministry of Justice are currently working on a broader law on lustration. Sobolev has said in interviews that the goal of the lustration law will be to ban Yanukovych and his closest allies from politics for life, as well as to screen and remove those who are “agents of foreign secret service, people who have been involved in corruption, and people who have been involved in the destruction of democracy.” The radical nationalist party, Svoboda, has already submitted its version of a general law on lustration for consideration in parliament. In addition to the parameters discussed by Egor Sobolev, the Svoboda bill envisions lustrating all former KGB informants. The Svoboda bill stipulates that public servants at all levels, as well as applicants for state jobs will have to undergo a screening procedure. Those who fail the screening will be dismissed from their positions.

Ukrainian supporters of lustration often invoke the experience of other post-communist states (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Baltics, Georgia), and argue that lustration had positive effects on democratization and good governance in the region. However, the lustration laws that neighboring countries passed after the end of communism are very different from what is being proposed in Ukraine. The context of transitions away from communist one-party rule towards liberal democracy is very different from what Ukraine is experiencing today, and produced very different laws in response. Lustration laws identify a list of offices in the new regime that are subject to lustration, as well as a list of activities in the past regime that trigger a “positive lustration.” Finally, they determine which consequences a positive lustration has for an individual. The Ukrainian proposals are markedly different from currently existing lustration law in all three regards. Generally speaking, the laws passed after 1989 in East and Central Europe were designed to lustrate the bureaucracy from those who had worked for or collaborated with the communist secret service. These laws either dismiss former secret service personnel from the bureaucracy, or they simply publish that information. There is some diversity in those early lustration laws. For instance, the Czechoslovakian law focused not only on secret service personnel but also removed and barred certain communist party officials from the bureaucracy. This is not the case in Poland and Hungary, but in those countries, lustration also applies to certain political offices (such as the presidency), which is not true in Czechoslovakia. On the whole, although there is some variation in the scope of lustration laws passed in East and Central Europe after the fall of communism, these policies all share the same rough attributes: They were all attempts to remove secret service agents and informants from the state bureaucracy in the new regime.

Ukraine’s proposed policies do not fit this general pattern. The non-public, secret nature of regime involvement that the earlier lustration laws address is absent in Ukraine. Ukraine’s laws, instead, will target people for overt support for the Yanukovich regime. Moreover, while the other laws primarily lustrate the bureaucracy, Ukraine’s proposed lustration aims at removing Yanukovich and his closest associates from political office, handing them lifetime bans from politics. The consequences for those affected by lustration reach much further than anything devised in East and Central Europe after 1989. The Czechoslovakian law, which is amongst the harshest in the region, does not affect political figures; the Polish law, which does, only bans people from politics if they lie about their past, and when it does ban people, it only does so for ten a year period. Neither of these lustration laws proposes criminal prosecution for collaboration with the previous regime, recognizing that collaboration was not a crime at the time; but the Ukrainian law, uniquely, does link lustration to prosecution.

To the extent that there is similarity between the proposed Ukrainian lustration and the lustration laws on the books elsewhere in the region, it is important to note that there is no hard evidence that lustration laws contributed to democracy, that they improved governance, or that they curbed corruption. Some have claimed such positive effects off the cuff, but no study has shown them empirically. In the majority of cases, lustration laws were passed well after the transition to democracy had been completed, in countries where the transition to democracy had been a relatively smooth process. Thus if any correlation does exist between lustration and a successful democratic transition, the direction of causality may actually run from the latter to the former. Of course, one might argue that Ukrainian regime change is still under way, but that lustration can be a tool in accomplishing that goal. However, nothing of the sort occurred in any other place that introduced lustration....

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[Demeter]

6. US to Deploy Six National Guard Companies to Ukraine This Week

http://sputniknews.com/military/20150303/1018973141.html

US 173rd Airborne Brigade Commander Michael Foster said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC said the US would deploy personnel by the end of this week to train the Ukrainian national guard.



Let the Games commence

[DemReadingDU]

12. Someone wants to escalate to war

Why? Who would benefit?

[MattSh]

14. Best theory I've heard.

After WW2, the USA came out as top dog. Europe was devastated, both by the war, and by capital flight. A good portion of this capital found a home in the USA, which led to the American Century. Remember too that the USA has basically declared that it will permit no contenders; the USA sits and will remain sitting as the top dog, with all other nations submitting to it. Submit willingly, and you'll be afforded special privileges, but you'll still be subordinate. (EU) If you do not accept your designated role in the new world order, you will lose all privileges and become less than human in the eyes of the elite.

So have a major land war in Europe. Capital will then flow out of Europe into the USA, immediately fixing most of America's problems, by throwing them upon the rest of the world. There is (of course) a major flaw in this thinking. After WW2, the USA was by far the logical place to get your capital out of harms way. If I had capital to move out of harm's way these days, the USA likely would not rank in the top ten, and I believe quite a few people would react that way too.

[DemReadingDU]

15. Yeh. USA! USA! USA!

except, no empire lasts forever.

Short term, USA would be flush with money. But no amount of money, or spying, will deter a few highly motivated terrorists who would bring down the electric grid, poison the water, hack the financial banks, or something worse, in revenge for the evil that is done to others around the world. Americans are delusional if they believe we will always be 'safe'.

[Demeter]

18. George Soros wants his phone company

He stole it fair and square, and he's sending in Uncle Stupid to collect.

[xchrom]

7. A former AIG unit is about to become the biggest subprime lender in the US

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-former-aig-unit-is-about-to-become-the-biggest-subprime-lender-in-the-us-2015-3

(Reuters) - Springleaf Holdings Inc said it would buy Citigroup Inc's OneMain Financial Holdings Inc for $4.25 billion in cash, creating the largest subprime lender in the United States.

Citigroup has been seeking to hive off OneMain since at least 2011 as part of the No. 3 U.S. bank's plan to sell unwanted assets and focus on wealthier clients.

The deal will create a lender with $15 billion in assets and nearly 2,000 branches, serving the large and growing population of non-prime customers in the United States.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-former-aig-unit-is-about-to-become-the-biggest-subprime-lender-in-the-us-2015-3#ixzz3TPws8U5g

[Demeter]

8. U.S. Running Out of Room to Store Oil; Price Collapse Seen

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2015/03/03/america-lacks-room-store-oil/

The U.S. has so much crude that it is running out of places to put it -- and that could drive oil and gasoline prices even lower in the coming months.

For the past seven weeks, the United States has been producing and importing an average of 1 million more barrels of oil every day than it is consuming. That extra crude is flowing into storage tanks, especially at the country's main trading hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, pushing U.S. supplies to their highest point in at least 80 years, the Energy Department reported last week. If this keeps up, storage tanks could approach their operational limits, known in the industry as "tank tops," by mid-April and send the price of crude -- and probably gasoline, too -- plummeting.

"The fact of the matter is we are running out of storage capacity in the U.S.," Ed Morse, head of commodities research at Citibank, said at a recent symposium at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Morse has suggested oil could fall all the way to $20 a barrel from the current $50. At that rock-bottom price, oil companies, faced with mounting losses, would stop pumping oil until the glut eased. Gasoline prices would fall along with crude, though lower refinery production, because of seasonal factors and unexpected outages, could prevent a sharp decline.

Multiple Factors Involved

The national average price of gasoline is $2.44 a gallon. That's $1.02 cheaper than last year at this time, but up 37 cents over the past month. Other analysts agree that crude is poised to fall sharply -- if not all the way to $20 -- because it continues to flood into storage for a number of reasons:

U.S. oil production continues to rise. Companies are cutting back on new drilling, but that won't reduce supplies until later this year.

The new oil being produced is light, sweet crude, which is a type many U.S. refineries are not designed to process. Oil companies can't just get rid of it by sending it abroad, because crude exports are restricted by federal law.

Foreign oil continues to flow into the U.S., both because of economic weakness in other countries and to feed refineries designed to process heavy, sour crude.

This is the slowest time of year for gasoline demand, so refiners typically reduce or stop production to perform maintenance. As refiners process less crude, supplies build up.

Oil investors are making money buying and storing oil because of the difference between the current price of oil and the price for delivery in far-off months. An investor can buy oil at $50 today and enter into a contract to sell it for $59 in December, locking in a profit even after paying for storage during those months.


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[Demeter]

9. MORE CARTOONS OF THAT ILK

[xchrom]

10. EUROZONE SHOWING SIGNS OF ECONOMIC MOMENTUM

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_EUROPE_ECONOMY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-03-04-06-33-20


LONDON (AP) -- The 19-country eurozone's economy is kicking into a higher gear thanks to falling oil prices and the lower euro, but the recovery is still far short of that experienced by the U.S.

A brace of economic reports Wednesday point to economic activity picking up momentum after a year of stagnation, particularly in the crucial area of consumer spending.

[xchrom]

11. FED CHAIR YELLEN REPORTS SMALL DIP IN ASSETS FOR 2014

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_YELLEN_FINANCIAL_DISCLOSURE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-03-03-18-55-26


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Fed Chair Janet Yellen may have gotten a job promotion last year, but her total assets don't appear to have gotten a bump.

Yellen's financial disclosure form for 2014, which was released Tuesday, showed a net worth of between $4.92 million and $13.37 million

[bread_and_roses]

20. Re: all the Russia/Ukraine

All i can say is ....

I have no hope. I see no future.

It's all insane.