Weekend Economists Do the Flamenco June 5-7, 2015

[Demeter]

(As to the plans I had...I chickened out. I can only take so much novelty in a day, and I did accomplish a lot, but never enough. It is either a sign of the decrepitude of age, or the shattering effects of unremitting stress--or both. I like a quiet routine. Unfortunately, neither the Kid nor anyone else in the vicinity does. So running away for fun is, in the end, too much like work...)

Flamenco (Spanish pronunciation: [flaˈmeŋko]) is a form of Spanish folk music and dance from the region of Andalusia in southern Spain. It includes cante (singing), toque (guitar playing), baile (dance) and jaleo, which refers to the vocalizations and rhythmic sounds of palmas (handclapping) and pitos (finger snapping) that encourage performers to excel. First mentioned in literature in 1774, the genre is thought to have grown out of Andalusian music and dance styles. Flamenco is often associated with the gitanos (Romani people of Spain) and a number of famous flamenco artists are of this ethnicity. Because of this, it is often assumed or claimed that Flamenco music originated within the Romani minority in Andalucia but evidence to support this ranges from dubious to nonexistent. What is known is that it originated in Andalucia. Flamenco music was first recorded in the late 18th century but the genre underwent a dramatic development in the late 19th century. (I assume they mean written down)

In recent years flamenco has become popular all over the world and is taught in many countries. In Japan there are more flamenco academies than there are in Spain. On November 16, 2010 UNESCO declared flamenco one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity...

Americans of the gringo persuasion probably first gained exposure to flamenco through Jose Greco. In the 1950s Jose Greco was one of most famous male Flamenco dancers, performing on stage worldwide and on television including the Ed Sullivan Show, and reviving the art almost singlehandedly. His dance troupe was featured in Michael Todd's film Around the World in 80 Days; the original Jules Verne story was rewritten so that the hot air balloon and the visit to Spain could be included (Verne had written a different story about ballooning... the Mexican comedian Cantinflas, who played Passepartout, probably was delighted by the detour to Spain so he could fight the bull).

[Demeter]

1. Flamenco - Its Origin and evolution

http://www.timenet.org/detail.html

Many of the details of the development of flamenco are lost in Spanish history. There are several reasons for this lack of historical evidence:

1. Flamenco sprang from the lower levels of Andalucian society, and thus lacked the prestige of other art forms among the middle and higher classes. Flamenco music also slipped in and out of fashion several times during its existence.

2. The turbulent times of the people involved in flamenco culture. The Moors, the Gitanos and the Jews were all persecuted, and the Moors (moriscos) and Jews were expelled by the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. Many of the songs in flamenco still reflect the spirit of desperation, struggle, hope, and pride of the people during this time of persecution.

3. The Gitanos have been fundamental in maintaining this art form, but they have an oral culture. Their songs were passed on to new generations by repeated performances within their social community. The non-gypsy Andalucian poorer classes, in general, were also illiterate.

4. There was a lack of interest from historians and musicologists. "Flamencologists" have usually been flamenco connoisseurs of diverse professions (a high number of them, like Félix Grande, Caballero Bonald or Ricardo Molina, have been poets), with no specific academic training in the fields of history or musicology. They have tended to rely on a limited number of sources (mainly the writings of 19th century folklorist Demófilo, notes by foreign travellers like George Borrow, a few accounts by writers and the oral tradition), and they have often ignored other data. Nationalistic or ethnic bias has also been frequent in flamencology.

This started to change in the late 1970's and 1980s, when a growing number of musicologists and historians began to carry out more rigorous research.

There are questions not only about the origins of the music and dances of flamenco, but also about the origins of the very word flamenco. Whatever the origins of the word, in the early 19th century it began to be used to describe a way of life centered around this music and usually involving Gypsies. In his 1842 book Zincali, George Borrow writes that the word flamenco is synonymous with "Gypsy".

Blas Infante, in his book Orígenes de lo flamenco y secreto del cante jondo, controversially argued that the word flamenco comes from Hispano-Arabic word fellahmengu, which would mean "expelled peasant". Yet there is a problem with this theory, in that the word is first attested three centuries after the end of the Moorish reign. Infante links the term to the ethnic Andalucians of Muslim faith, the Moriscos, who would have mixed with the Gypsy newcomers in order to avoid religious persecution. Other hypotheses concerning the term's etymology include connections with Flanders (flamenco also means Flemish in Spanish), believed by Spanish people to be the place of origin of the Gypsies.

Background

For a complete picture of the possible influences that gave rise to flamenco, attention must be paid to the cultural and musical background of the Iberian Peninsula since Ancient times. Long before the Moorish invasion in 711, Visigothic Spain had adopted its own liturgical musical forms, the Visigothic or Mozarabic rite, strongly influenced by Byzantium. The Mozarabic rite survived the Gregorian reform and the Moorish invasion, and remained alive at least until the 10th or 11th century. Some theories, started by Spanish classical musician Manuel de Falla, link the melismatic forms and the presence of Greek Dorian mode (in modern times called “Phrygian mode”) in flamenco to the long existence of this separate Catholic rite. Unfortunately, owing to the type of musical notation in which these Mozarabic chants were written, it is not possible to determine what this music really sounded like, so the theory remains unproven.

Moor is not the same as Moslem. Moor comes from the Latin Mauroi, meaning an inhabitant of North Africa. The Carthaginians, for instance, came from North Africa. Moorish influence in the peninsula goes back thousands of years, but it was the Islamic invasion, by largely Berber armies in 711, that determined the main musical influences from North Africa. They called the Iberian Peninsula Al-Andalus, from which the name of Andalusia derives. The Moorish and Arab conquerors brought their musical forms to the Peninsula, and at the same time, probably gathered some native influence in their music. The Emirate, and later Caliphate of Córdoba became a center of influence in both the Muslim and Christian worlds and it attracted musicians from all Islamic countries. One of those musicians was Zyriab, who imported forms of Persian music, revolutionized the shape and playing techniques of the Lute (which centuries later evolved into the vihuela and the guitar), adding a fifth string to it, and set the foundations for the Andalusian nuba, the style of music in suite form still performed in North African countries.

The presence of the Moors was also decisive in shaping the cultural diversity of Spain. Owing to the extraordinary length of the Reconquesta started in the North as early as 722 and completed in 1492 with the conquest of Granada, the degree of Moorish influence on culture, customs and even language varies enormously between the North and the South. Music cannot have been alien to that process. While music in the North of the Peninsula has a clear Celtic influence which dates to pre-Roman times, southern music is certainly reminiscent of Eastern influences. To what extent this Eastern flavor is owed to the Moors, the Jews, the Mozarabic rite (with its Byzantine influence), or the Gypsies has not been clearly determined.

During the Reconquest, another important cultural influence was present in Al-Andalus: The Jews. Enjoying a relative religious and ethnic tolerance in comparison to Christian countries, they formed an important ethnic group, with their own traditions, rites, and music, and probably reinforced the middle-Eastern element in the culture and music forms of Al-Andalus. Certain flamenco palos like the Peteneras have been attributed a direct Jewish origin.



Andalusia after the Reconquest: social environment and implications on music.

The 15th century marked a small revolution in the culture and society of Southern Spain. We must highlight the following landmarks, all with future implications on the development of flamenco: first, the arrival of nomad Gypsies in the Iberian Peninsula in 1425. Later on, the conquest of Granada, the discovery of America and the expulsion of the Jews, all of them in 1492.

In the 13th century, the Christian Crown of Castile had already conquered most of Andalusia. Although Castilian kings favored a policy of repopulation of the newly conquered lands with Christians, part of the Muslim population remained in the areas as a religious and ethnic minority, called mudéjares.

Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in the Iberian Peninsula, fell in 1492 when the armies of the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and queen Isabella of Castile invaded this city after about 800 years of Moslem rule. The Treaty of Granada guaranteed religious tolerance, and this paved the way for the Moors to surrender peacefully. Months after, the Spanish Inquisition used its influence to convince Ferdinand and Isabella, who were political allies of the Church of Rome, to break the treaty and force the Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave Spain. The Alhambra decree of March 31, 1492 ordered the expulsion of all non-converted Jews from Spain and its territories and possessions by July 31, 1492, on charges that they were trying to convert the Christian population to Judaism. Some chose to adopt the Catholic religion (Conversos), but they often kept their Judaic beliefs privately. For this reason, they were closely watched by the Spanish Inquisition, and accusations of being false converts often lead them to suffer torture and death.

In 1499, about 50,000 Moriscos were coerced into taking part in mass baptism. During the uprising that followed, people who refused the choices of baptism or deportation to Africa were systematically eliminated. What followed was a mass exodus of Moslems, Sephardi Jews and Gitanos from Granada and the villages, into the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountain region (and its hills) and the rural country. Many Moslems, now known as Moriscos, officially converted to Christianity, but kept practicing their religion in private and also preserved their language, dress and customs. The Moriscos rose up on several occasions during the 16th century, and were finally expelled from Spain, their rightful homeland, at the beginning of the 17th century.

The conquest of Andalusia implied a strong penetration of Castilian culture in Andalusia, which surely influenced the music and folklore. The expulsion of the Sephardi Jews and Moriscos could have led to a weakening of middle-Eastern influence on Andalusian culture. However, during the 15th century groups of Roma people (gypsies), known as Gitanos in Spain, entered the Iberian Peninsula. At the beginning, they were well tolerated. The Spanish nobles enjoyed their dances and music, and they were regularly employed to entertain guests at private parties. The Gypsies, therefore, were in touch (at least geographically) with the Morisco population until the expulsion of the latter in the 16th century. According to some theories, suggested by authors like George Borrow and Blas Infante and supported by other flamenco historians like Mairena and Molina, many Moriscos even joined the Gypsy nomad tribes and eventually became indistinguishable from them. This has not been proved scientifically. It is generally accepted, however, that the Zambra of the Gypsies of Granada, still performed nowadays, is derived from the original Moorish Zambra.

The clash between Gypsies and the Spanish would be manifest by the end of the century. For centuries, the Spanish monarchy tried to force the Gypsies to abandon their language, customs and music. During the Reconquista, tolerance towards Gypsies ended and they were put into ghettos. This isolation helped them retain the purity of their music and dance. In 1782, the Leniency Edict of Charles III restored some freedoms to the Spanish gypsies. Their music and dance was reintroduced and adopted by the general population of Spain. This resulted in a period of great exploration and evolution within the art form. Nomadic Gypsies became social outcasts and were in many cases the victims of persecution. This is reflected in many lyrics of palos (cqatagories of songs) like seguiriyas, in which references to hunger, prison and discrimination abound.


The influence of the New World

Recent research has revealed a major influence of Sub-Saharan African music on flamenco's prehistory. This developed from the music and dance of African slaves held by the Spanish in the New World. There are 16th and 17th century manuscripts of classical compositions that are possibly based on African folk forms, such as negrillas, zarambeques, and chaconas. We also find mention of the fandango indiano (Indiano meaning from the Americas, but not necessarily Native American). Some critics support the view that the names of flamenco palos, like the tangos or even the fandango, are derived from Bantoid languages, and most theories state that the rhythm of the tangos was imported from Cuba.

It is likely that in that stay in the New World, the fandango picked up dance steps deemed too inappropriate for European tastes. Thus, the dance for fandango, for chacon, and for zarabanda, were all banned in Europe at one time or another. References to Gypsy dancers can be found in the lyrics of some of these forms, e.g., the chacon. Indeed, Gypsy dancers are often mentioned in Spanish literary and musical works from the 1500s on. However, the zarabandas and jácaras are the oldest written musical forms in Spain to use the 12-beat meter as a combination of terciary and binary rhythms. The basic rhythm of the zarabanda and the jácara is 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12. The soleá and the Seguiriya, are variations on this: they just start the metre on a different beat.


The 18th century

During this period we see the development of the juerga (flamenco fiesta). More than just a party where flamenco is performed, the juerga, either unpaid or paid, sometimes lasting for days, has an internal etiquette with a complex set of musical and social rules. In fact, some might argue that the cultural phenomenon of the flamenco juerga is the basic cultural “unit” of flamenco.

A turning point in flamenco appears to have come about with a change of instruments. In the late 18th Century the favored guitar became the 6 string single-coursed guitar which replaced the double-coursed 5 string guitar in popularity. It is the 6 string guitar to which flamenco music is inextricably tied. Flamenco became married to the 6 string guitar.


The rise of flamenco

During the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, flamenco took on a number of unique characteristics which separated it from local folk music and prepared the way to a higher professionalization and technical excellence of flamenco performers, to the diversification of flamenco styles (by gradually incorporating songs derived from folklore or even other sources), and to the popularization of the genre outside Andalusia.

The first time flamenco is mentioned in literature is in 1774 in the book Cartas Marruecas by José Cadalso. During this period, according to some authors, there is little news about flamenco except for a few scattered references from travelers. This led traditional flamencologists, like Molina and Mairena, to call the period of 1780 to 1850 as "The Hermetic Period" or the "private stage of flamenco". According to these flamencologists, flamenco, at this time was something like a private ritual, secretly kept in the Gypsy homes of some towns in the Seville and Cádiz area. This theory started to fall out of favor in the 1990s. José Blas Vega has denied the absence of evidences for this period:

There is disagreement as to whether primitive flamenco was accompanied by any instrument or not. For traditional flamencology, flamenco consisted of unaccompanied singing (cante). Later, the songs were accompanied by flamenco guitar (toque), rhythmic hand clapping (palmas), rhythmic feet stomping (zapateado) and dance (baile). Later theories claim that this is false. While some cante forms are sung unaccompanied (a palo seco), it is likely that other forms were accompanied if and when instruments were available. 19th century writer Estébanez Calderón already described a flamenco fiesta in which the singing was accompanied not only by guitars, but also bandurria and tambourine.

The Golden Age

During the so-called Golden Age of Flamenco, between 1869-1910, flamenco music developed rapidly in music cafés called cafés cantantes, a new type of venue with ticketed public performances. This was the beginning of the "café cantante" period. Flamenco was developed here to its definitive form. Flamenco dancers also became the major public attraction in those cafés. Along with the development of flamenco dance, guitar players supporting the dancers increasingly gained a reputation, and so flamenco guitar as an art form by itself was born. A most important artist in this development was Silverio Franconetti, a non-Gypsy seaman of Italian descent. He is reported to be the first "encyclopedic" singer, that is, the first who was able to sing well in all the palos, instead of specializing on a few of them, as was usual at the time. He opened his own café cantante, where he sang himself or invited other artists to perform, and many other venues of this kind were created in all Andalusia and Spain.

Traditional views on flamenco, have often accused this period as the start of the commercial debasement of flamenco. The traditional flamenco fiesta is crowded if more than 20 people are present. Moreover, there is no telling when a fiesta will begin or end, or assurance that the better artists invited will perform well. And, if they do perform, it may not be until the morning after a fiesta that began the night before. By contrast, the café cantante offered set performances at set hours and top artists were contracted to perform. For some, this professionalization led to commercialism, while for others it stimulated healthy competition and therefore, more creativity and technical proficiency. In fact, most traditional flamenco forms were created or developed during this time or, at least, have been attributed to singers of this period like El Loco Mateo, El Nitri, Rojo el Alpargatero, Enrique el Mellizo, Paquirri El Guanté, or La Serneta, among many others. Some of them were professionals, while others sang only at private gatherings but their songs were learned and divulged by professional singers.

In the 19th century, both flamenco and its association with Gypsies started to become popular throughout Europe, even into Russia. Composers wrote music and operas on what they thought were Gypsy-flamenco themes. Any traveler through Spain “had” to see the Gypsies perform flamenco. Spain - often to the chagrin of non-Andalucian Spaniards - became associated with flamenco and Gypsies. This interest was in keeping with the European fascination with folklore during those decades.

In 1922, one of Spain's greatest writers, Federico García Lorca, and renowned composer Manuel de Falla, organised the Concurso de Cante Jondo, a folk music festival dedicated to cante jondo ("deep song&quot . They did this to stimulate interest in some styles of flamenco, which were falling into oblivion as they were regarded uncommercial and, therefore, not appropriate for the cafés cantante. Two of Lorca's most important poetic works, Poema del Cante Jondo and Romancero Gitano, show Lorca's fascination with flamenco and appreciation of Spanish folk culture. However, the initiative was not very influential, and the derivations of fandango and other styles kept gaining popularity while the more difficult styles like siguiriyas and, especially, tonás were usually only performed in private parties.


The "Theatrical" period: 1892-1956

The stage after the Concurso de Cante Jondo in 1922 is known as Etapa teatral (Theatrical period) or Ópera flamenca (Flamenco Opera) period. The name Ópera flamenca was due to the custom, started by impresario Vedrines to call these shows opera, as opera performances enjoyed lower taxes. The cafés cantante entered a period of decadence and were gradually replaced by larger venues like theatres or bullrings. This led to an immense popularity of flamenco but, according to traditionalist critics, also caused it to fall victim to commercialism and economic interests. New types of flamenco shows were born, where flamenco was mixed with other music genres and theatrical interludes portraying picturesque scenes by Gitanos and Andalusians.

MUCH MORE DETAIL AT LINK

[Demeter]

2. Flamenco is often interpolated into Bizet's Carmen--with varying success

This is more a balletic version of Carmen

The original, Frenchified Bizet

[Demeter]

3. 10 WAYS TO MAKE ECONOMY WORK: #7, STRENGTHEN UNIONS, PREEMPT STATE “RIGHT-TO-WORK” LAWS

One big reason America was far more equal in the 1950s and 1960s than now is unions were stronger then. That gave workers bargaining power to get a fair share of the economy’s gains – and unions helped improve wages and working conditions for everyone. But as union membership has weakened – from more than a third of all private-sector workers belonging unions in the 1950s to fewer than 7 percent today – the bargaining power of average workers has all but disappeared. In fact, the decline of the American middle class mirrors almost exactly the decline of American labor union membership.

So how do we strengthen unions?

First, make it easier to form a union, with a simple majority of workers voting up or down. Right now, long delays and procedural hurdles give big employers plenty of time to whip up campaigns against unions, even threatening they’ll close down and move somewhere else if a union is voted in.

Second, build in real penalties on companies that violate labor laws by firing workers who try to organize a union or intimidating others. These moves are illegal, but nowadays the worst that can happen is employers get slapped on the wrist. If found guilty they have to repay lost wages to the workers they fire. Some employers treat this as a cost of doing business. That must be stopped. Penalties should be large enough to stop this illegality.

Finally – this one has been in the news lately, and if you only remember one thing, remember this: We must enact a federal law that pre-empts so-called state “right-to-work” laws.

Don’t be fooled by the “right to work” name. These laws allow workers to get all the benefits of having a union without paying union dues. It’s a back door destroying unions. If no one pays dues, unions have no way to provide any union benefits. And that means lower wages. In fact, wages in right-to-work states are lower on average than wages in non-right-to-work states, by an average of about $1500 a year. Workers in right-to-work states are also less likely to have employer-sponsored health insurance and pension coverage. When unions are weakened by right-to-work laws, all of a state’s workers are hurt. American workers need a union to bargain on their behalf. Low-wage workers in big-box retail stores and fast-food chains need a union even more. If we want average Americans to get a fair share of the gains from economic growth, they need to be able to unionize.

[Demeter]

4. SEC probing whether activist investors secretly acted jointly

WELL, GEE....I DON'T KNOW. WHAT DO YOU THINK, MARY JO?

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether some activist investors secretly acted jointly to target companies, one hedge fund industry source said.

The SEC's enforcement division recently opened multiple investigations and sent requests for information to a number of hedge funds, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier, citing people familiar with the matter. (on.wsj.com/1eRTPKi)

The names of the funds and the companies they targeted could not immediately be ascertained.

The SEC declined to comment.

Federal securities regulations require investors who jointly agree to buy, sell or vote securities to disclose those arrangements, and to designate themselves as a group if they together own at least 5 percent of a company's stock or are soliciting votes from other shareholders.

I KNOW, THEY DON'T PAY YOU TO THINK...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/06/05/sec-probe-idUKL3N0YR09720150605

[Demeter]

34. Elizabeth Warren Declares War on SEC Chairman Mary Jo White

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/elizabeth-warren-declares-war-on-sec-chairman-mary-jo-white.html



Elizabeth Warren just put SEC Chairman Mary Jo White firmly in her crosshairs. White is a deserving target. After being approved based on the promise that she’d reinvigorate a diminished agency via her chops as a former highly respected Federal prosecutor, White instead had specialized in empty promises, foot dragging and financial services cronyism. While these are sadly too common in senior regulatory circles most incumbents do far better than White in presenting a plausible veneer of serving the public interest. By contrast, White’s performance has been so remiss that a fellow Democratic party commissioner, Kara Stein, has gone into open opposition against her, and is regularly joined by the other Democrat commissioner, Luis Aguilar.

Warren’s letter (hat tip Adrien) comes a mere week after another missive calling out White’s dereliction at duty, when three former SEC commissioners blasted White for failing to to move forward on long-overdue rulemaking to require public companies to disclose their political spending.

Warren’s letter is much broader and more damning. It includes the failure to create the long-promised political donations rules and gives a detailed recap of all the times White has given a time estimate as to when they’d be completed, merely to have White promise yet another clearly meaningless due date. Oh, and White had the bad judgment to tell Warren that they’d be done by the fall of this year, only to have the OMB publish the very same day that the SEC had told them they’d be done in April 2016. Warren also blasts White for her pathetic record of getting settlements without admissions of wrongdoing, after promising to change the agency’s course, of failing to restrict the issuance of waivers for companies that have broken securities law (a major target of Stein and Aguilar) and White having to rescue herself almost routinely due to her history as a Wall Street defense attorney and her husband being a senior partner at Cravath. And mind you, Warren doesn’t even get to other widely-criticized White decisions, like her not taking action on high-frequency trading by punting the matter over to further study, or hiring a former Goldman employee to be her chief of staff.

I encourage you to read Warren’s letter in full. It’s a forceful, engaging document and leaves no doubt about how White has not even made a credible pretense at delivering on promises she made during the confirmation process.

SEE LETTER AT LINK

[Demeter]

5. EU gives banks, pension funds more breathing space over derivatives

EPIC FAIL....THE NTH VERSION...FOR WEAPONS OF MASS ECONOMIC DESTRUCTION

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/04/uk-eu-derivatives-regulations-idUKKBN0OK1QC20150604

The European Commission will give banks in the EU another six-month exemption until December from having to hold extra capital to cover transactions at clearing houses that don't meet the bloc's standards.

"The decision will give the market the legal certainty it needs for the next six months," EU financial services commissioner, Jonathan Hill, said in a statement on Thursday.

"Meanwhile we are continuing to work hard on solving the underlying issues."

Hill had little choice as talks with the United States on accepting each other's rules on clearing financial derivatives have failed to find enough common ground. As the rules are currently written, a bank would have to hold more capital in some cases to cover exposure to a European clearing house than to an American one. American regulators say their overall framework is superior and have shown no sign of backing down.

"The extension of the deadline is not surprising but the fact that there is a need for it is disappointing and points to a bigger problem: the lack of a workable mechanism to deal with the conflicting and duplicative financial services regulation that cross-border actors are increasingly facing," said Alexandria Carr, a regulatory lawyer at Mayer Brown.

The Group of 20 economies (G20) called for new rules to make derivatives markets safer after their opacity hindered regulatory responses during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Clearing houses stand between two sides of a trade, making the transaction transparent. They are set to grow substantially as rules require more trades to be centrally cleared.

Hill also said the European Commission will on Friday give pension funds more time until an obligation to centrally clear their off-exchange or over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives contracts, kicks in.

"I hope that the pension fund industry will be pleased with the decision that the commission will adopt tomorrow, to continue to exempt pension funds from the clearing obligations for another two years," he said in a speech in Amsterdam.

This would provide a greater degree of certainty, which the industry was understandably asking for, Hill added.

THIS IS HOW CATASTROPHE IS CREATED

[Demeter]

6. IMF Urges Fed to Postpone Rate Liftoff to First Half of 2016

IS IT 1929 YET? 5...4....3...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-04/fed-urged-by-imf-to-postpone-rate-liftoff-to-first-half-of-2016

NEWS CLIP AT LINK....WORTH WATCHING

SUMMARY: THE GREECE ISN'T HOT ENOUGH TO FRY THE GLOBE, YET

[Demeter]

7. Jamie Dimon Is Now a Billionaire, and He Got There in an Unusual Way

VIDEO AT LINK...INCREDULOUS COMMENTARY!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-03/jamie-dimon-becomes-billionaire-ushering-in-era-of-the-megabank-iagiwwl8

Jamie Dimon, who helped assemble Citigroup Inc. and then improved on the experiment with JPMorgan Chase & Co., is responsible for two of the biggest banks the world has ever seen. His life’s work also made him rich.

With JPMorgan shares near a record high, Dimon’s net worth is about $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Dimon’s fortune derives from a $485 million stake in New York-based JPMorgan, where he’s been chief executive officer since the end of 2005, and an investment portfolio seeded by proceeds from Citigroup stock sales.

Dimon’s status is unusual because, with the exception of former mentor Sanford “Sandy” Weill, few bank managers accumulate that much wealth. Most finance-industry billionaires start businesses or investment firms, such as hedge-fund tycoon George Soros, who is worth $28.5 billion, or Blackstone Group LP co-founder Steve Schwarzman, worth $13.4 billion.

“The odds are much, much lower for a bank CEO becoming a billionaire than a guy going to a hedge fund or private equity,” said Roy Smith, a professor at New York University Stern School of Business and a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner who started on Wall Street in 1966. “The real lucre in this business has always been on the transactional side. The CEOs of Wall Street have to deal with litigation, regulation and the relatively short tenures you have at the top of the pile.”

Dimon, 59, took a different approach. Turning down job offers from firms including Goldman Sachs, he joined Weill at American Express Co. in 1982. The pair later gained control of Baltimore-based Commercial Credit, starting a takeover spree that spurred industry consolidation and culminated in the 1998 creation of Citigroup, then the world’s biggest financial-services firm.

“I joined Sandy Weill out of business school at American Express, I don’t regret that,” Dimon said in a talk in October. “I’ve had two companies. It’s kind of like, I put the jersey on, and that’s it. I’m not a hired gun, I’m not a hired hand.”

MORE AT LINK

AS FOR THAT SHIRT:

[Demeter]

8. There Might Be No Saving the World's Top Banana

WOULD THAT THAT WERE TRUE ON WALL ST.

OH, YOU MEAN THE FRUIT?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-04/banana-killer-on-the-march-fuels-risk-of-fruit-s-next-extinction

Six decades after a banana-killing fungus all but wiped out plantations across Latin America, a new strain threatens to destroy global harvests.

A type of Fusarium wilt appeared this year in Australia’s main banana-growing state after spreading to Asia and Africa. While the fungus has been around since the 1990s and has yet to affect top exporter Ecuador, Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. called it a potential “big nightmare.” The United Nations says the disease threatens supply, and Latin American growers are taking steps to limit the risk.

The industry survived the demise of the top-selling Gros Michel banana in the 1950s by switching to a different variety, called the Cavendish. But this time, there’s no ready substitute. Americans now eat bananas almost as much as apples and oranges combined, and are the biggest buyers in an export market valued at more than $7 billion.


World Banana Production

“We don’t have anything that can replace the Cavendish,” said Gert Kema, a plant research leader at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who studies banana diseases.

Part of the problem is the way the market evolved more than a century ago, relying on a single breed rather than several varieties...

MORE PRINT, NOT MORE BANANAS, AT LINK

[Demeter]

9. Pledge Aside, Dead Billionaires Don't Have to Give Away Half Their Fortune

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-04/as-billionaires-bask-in-glow-of-pledge-giving-half-is-optional

In the five years since Bill Gates and Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge, 193 individuals have made the simple promise to give more than half of their fortune away in life or in death. This week, another 16 people joined the initiative, including Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya and Scottish oil baron Ian Wood.

Signing the pledge has brought glowing press coverage, video testimonials from Bill Gates and invitations to annual conferences in luxurious resorts with fellow billionaires such as Ray Dalio and Pierre Omidyar.

Less publicized is the fact that the crux of the pledge is subjective. Signatories are under no legal obligation to donate any of their money, and sometimes fail to give away anywhere close to half. Charity regulations and estate law can block public disclosures, and Buffett and Gates don’t ask pledge takers to prove a thing.

“It’s really thinking about how iconic figures providing inspiration and support can inspire and serve as a model for society,” said Robert Rosen, the Giving Pledge coordinator as Director of Philanthropic Partnerships for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We aren’t looking to add any additional complexity,” said Rosen.

Public disclosures of lifetime and estate giving of the 10 deceased billionaires who signed the pledge show that fulfillment of the pledge varies widely. Only two have given away more than $1 billion, and they donated the money before the initiative was started....

MORE, AND VIDEO AT LINK

[Demeter]

10. Hacking Linked to China Exposes Millions of U.S. Workers

WHY THE US GOVT. THINKS ORDINARY AMERICANS SHOULD BELIEVE ANYTHING IT SAYS ABOUT HACKING, TERRORISM, OR ANY OTHER TOPIC, COMPLETELY ELUDES MY UNDERSTANDING.

WHEN YOU HAVE PROVEN YOURSELF TO BE A SHAMELESS, INEPT, BIG FAT LIAR, YOU HAVEN'T ANY CREDIBILITY LEFT TO SQUANDER. ONLY QUIET AND EFFECTIVE GOOD WORKS WILL REVIVE THE REPUTATION OF THE USA. AND COMPLETE REGIME CHANGE.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/us/breach-in-a-federal-computer-system-exposes-personnel-data.html

The Obama administration on Thursday announced what appeared to be one of the largest breaches of federal employees’ data, involving at least four million current and former government workers in an intrusion that officials said apparently originated in China.

The compromised data was held by the Office of Personnel Management, which handles government security clearances and federal employee records. The breach was first detected in April, the office said, but it appears to have begun at least late last year.

The target appeared to be Social Security numbers and other “personal identifying information,” but it was unclear whether the attack was related to commercial gain or espionage. The announcement of the intrusion came on the same day The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had expanded warrantless surveillance of foreign hackers, an effort that could sweep up the information of innocent Americans.

There seemed to be little doubt among federal officials that the attack was launched from China, but it was unclear whether it might have been state sponsored. The administration did not publicly identify Chinese hackers as the culprits because it is difficult to definitively attribute the source of cyberattacks and to back up such an attribution without divulging classified data....

OR THE COMPLETE LACK THEREOF. WE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL THAT THEY AREN'T TRYING TO PIN IT ON PUTIN.

MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

11. Like last time:

...The breach is the third major foreign intrusion into an important federal computer system in the past year. Last year, the White House and the State Department found that their email systems had been compromised in an attack that was attributed to Russian hackers. In that case, some of President Obama’s unclassified emails were apparently obtained by the intruders.

And last summer, the personnel office announced an intrusion in which hackers appeared to have targeted the files of tens of thousands of workers who had applied for top-secret security clearances.

In that case, the objective seemed clear: The information on security clearances could help identify covert agents, scientists and others with data of great interest to foreign governments. That breach also appeared to have involved Chinese hackers.

But because the breadth of the new attack was so much greater, the objective seemed less clear....

[Demeter]

12. Wage gains appear broad, if muted, Fed’s Beige Book reports

RIIIGHT....KNOW ANYBODY IN THE 95% THAT'S GOTTEN A WAGE INCREASE, LATELY?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wage-gains-appear-broad-if-muted-feds-beige-book-reports-2015-06-03

Wages are rising, albeit slightly, in most of the country, according to the latest survey of economic conditions, known as the Beige Book, released by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday.

While the overall economy seemed slow to rebound from the weak first quarter, skilled and non-skilled workers were starting to see larger paychecks, the survey found.

The Beige Book is a collection of anecdotes collected by the dozen Fed regional banks. The report is designed to give a sense of current economic conditions to top U.S. central bankers, now debating whether the economy is strong enough to withstand higher interest rates...

BIG FAT LIARS...SO THEY CAN GOOSE THE INTEREST RATE WITHOUT FIRST BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE JOBS PROGRAM

[Hotler]

53. I know of no one getting a raise, butbutbut over in Jonestown...

there is this.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017270046

and a whole bunch of glowing reviews for how great a job Mr. President as done while in office and mounds of scorn for those that fail to drink the Kool-Aid of he can do no wrong.

Sometimes I can be a real ass.

[Hotler]

55. And to add......

I think the melt down was allowed and no one was going to go to jail because although it did cost this country trillions to pay off the bankers the 1% were given a present with which to drive down wages and keep them down and to keep the workers down in a low economic sense. Nothing drives managers, own of companies, and CEO's more crazy than the knowledge that an employee is happy and living comfortably.

[mother earth]

82. I'm with you. With the "recovery" being mainly the rich are getting richer, and Main St. pays more

and more, coupled with nobody fought for single payer, no infrastructure jobs program, the handwriting is on the wall. TPP being the final nail in the coffin for the middle class, oh yeah, the working class is being "fast tracked" into third world status, gotta stay competitive with the countries where jobs are being sent over to, or the natives who are being imported for jobs here.

Seems some feed into the BS that there is "recovery", and it has all been done on taxpayer dime, off the backs of the working class.

The corporations are thriving & growing bigger...they aren't trickling anything down except excrement.

[Demeter]

13. BlackRock to Vanguard Tell FSB: We’re Not Lehman 2.0

OH-OH! THINGS MUST BE MUCH WORSE THAN THEY ARE LETTING OUT

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-02/blackrock-to-vanguard-tell-fsb-we-re-not-lehman-2-0

The world’s biggest investment managers, from BlackRock Inc. to Vanguard Group Inc., have a simple message for Mark Carney, head of the Financial Stability Board: stop trying to regulate us like banks.

The firms are seeking to avoid the fate of lenders and insurers that were deemed systemically important in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The too-big-to-fail designation by the FSB led to higher capital and leverage requirements and tougher liquidity rules for banks led by HSBC Holdings Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The funds have challenged a proposal to create a similar list for investment funds and asset managers, arguing that they don’t take risks on their own balance sheets in the same way as banks or face the same liquidity shocks, and that size isn’t an accurate measure of the amount of risk they pose to the global financial system.

The FSB’s proposal, made jointly with the International Organization of Securities Commissions, has “problems arising from the imposition of a framework originally designed for the banking industry on the investment fund industry,” the International Capital Market Association, which represents buyers and sellers in the debt market, said in response to the FSB’s plans...

MUCH MORE

QUICK, BREAK OUT THE EMERGENCY ANGEL COSTUMES!



NOT THAT ONE! THAT'S A FALLEN ANGEL!

[Demeter]

24. G-7 Said to Ask FSB to Develop Conduct Code With Global Banks

WHAT ABOUT THE RULE OF LAW? I'M SURE IT'S LYING ABOUT HERE SOMEWHERE....

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-29/g-7-said-to-ask-fsb-to-develop-conduct-code-with-global-banks



Finance ministers of the Group of Seven nations asked Financial Stability Board chief Mark Carney to work with global lenders to develop a code of conduct, two officials briefed on the discussions said.

After a slew of scandals dented public trust in the industry, G-7 ministers meeting in Dresden, Germany, said they wanted individuals to take more responsibility for their behavior, the people said, asking not to be named as the matter isn’t public. The G-7 said it would welcome efforts by lenders to propose guidelines and encourages the FSB to work as an adviser.

A spokesman for the presidency of the G-7 declined to comment. Carney is also governor of the Bank of England.

The world’s largest banks have suffered blows to their reputation since the financial crisis, including the furor over currency-benchmark rigging that saw six lenders including JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Barclays Plc agree this month to pay a total of $5.8 billion in fines. While banks have admitted culpability, prosecutions of individuals have been rare.

[Fuddnik]

69. Where'd she fall?

I'll go pick her up!

[Demeter]

14. Jose Feliciano of Puerto Rico, playing Malaguenya

He fuses flamenco and jazz into his performances


"Malagueña", is a song by Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona; written in 1928 it was originally the sixth movement of Lecuona's Suite Andalucia, to which he added lyrics in Spanish.

[Demeter]

15. Apple Is the New Pimco, and Tim Cook Is the New King of Bonds

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/tim-cook-is-giving-pimco-a-run-for-its-money-in-the-bond-market


VIDEO INTERVIEW AT LINK--TAX EVASION, GLOBAL STYLE AND LIQUIDITY PROBLEMS THAT RESULT...

There’s a new whale in the corporate-bond market.

Apple Inc., Oracle Corp. and the other tech giants hoarding half a trillion dollars in cash have joined the ranks of the biggest buyers of the debt, often snapping up as much as half of some bond issues, according to five people with knowledge of the transactions.

The companies are muscling into a market traditionally dominated by big bond funds including Pacific Investment Management Co., BlackRock Inc., Vanguard Group Inc. and Fidelity Investments. They’re homing in on one of asset managers’ favorite ways to juice returns, particularly as the Federal Reserve holds short-term interest rates near zero for a seventh year.

“We treat them as we treat Fidelity or Vanguard or any other investor,” said Curt Zuber, treasurer of Sydney-based Westpac Banking Corp., which has issued $6.1 billion of U.S. dollar-denominated bonds in the financial year started Oct. 1 and a total of $22 billion since October 2012.

All four of Australia’s biggest banks, heavily reliant on offshore debt markets, have sent representatives to Reno, Nevada, where Apple’s money-management unit, Braeburn Capital Inc., is based, according to people with knowledge of the trips. Oracle’s cash managers are also based in the city known for its casinos, where hotel rooms costing as little as $69 a night provide cheaper lodgings than banker stops in New York, Boston and Newport Beach, California, where Pimco is based.
Piles of Cash

Corporate treasurers looking to invest record amounts of cash have increasingly turned to debt markets in recent years as yields evaporated on safer investments such as U.S. Treasuries. No industry has amassed bigger piles of cash than tech. Apple, Oracle, Google Inc. and seven of their biggest peers now have in excess of $500 billion of cash and marketable securities, up more than three-fold since 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The problem is much of it is stuck overseas. Bringing it home would mean subjecting it to U.S. repatriation taxes, so they invest it in the bond market. Apple, run by Tim Cook and based in Cupertino, California, had $171.3 billion of its cash and marketable securities in foreign subsidiaries and “generally based in U.S. dollar-denominated holdings” as of March 28, according to a regulatory filing.

The trend is cutting into traditional investors’ access to new issues...

[Demeter]

19. Gross Says Bond Rout Scary as Hell Even Without Bear Market

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/gross-says-bond-slide-scary-as-hell-even-without-a-bear-market

Treasury prices are falling enough to spook even market veteran Bill Gross.

The turmoil has sent U.S. government securities maturing in 10 years and longer down 7.4 percent since the end of March, heading for the biggest quarterly loss since 2010, based on Bloomberg World Bond Indexes. The decline is part of a global selloff, led by German bunds and fueled by what traders say is a lack of liquidity.

“I recognize the tremendous liquidity problems and the ups and the downs on a daily basis -- or even on a minute basis -- and it scares the hell out of me,” Gross said in an interview Thursday. “But I don’t think we’re in for a bear bond market just yet.”

Gross, who runs the Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund and is the former manager of the Pimco Total Return Fund, also said Treasuries have fallen to fair levels. He co-founded Pacific Investment Management Co. in 1971, according to the Janus website.

The benchmark Treasury 10-year yield rose three basis points, or 0.03 percentage point, to 2.34 percent at 6:56 a.m. New York time, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader data. It reached 2.42 percent on Thursday, the highest since October, having climbed from a year-to-date low of 1.64 percent.

Gross said 2.30 percent is “fair value.”

MORE

[Demeter]

16. There Really Are Two Americas, And Only One of Them Has Achieved Escape Velocity

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/there-really-are-two-americas-and-only-one-of-them-has-achieved-escape-velocity

NO, THERE'S ONE AMERICA, AND A BUNCH OF GLOBAL PARASITES AND THEIR LACKEYS

John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn't have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck..."

That was of course John Edwards speaking to the Democratic National Convention, July 28, 2004.

Just to get your attention, median inflation-adjusted household income is down 5.3% in the past 8 years. One America has enjoyed migrating from $54,674 to $51,939...

[Demeter]

27. U.S. Economy Contracted 0.7% in First Quarter

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/business/economy/us-economy-gdp-q1-revision.html

The United States economy got off to an even weaker start this year than first thought, the government reported Friday, as economic activity contracted because of a more dismal trade performance and continued caution by businesses and consumers alike.

The 0.7 percent annual rate of decline in economic output in the first quarter of 2015 was a reversal of the initial 0.2 percent advance for the period reported last month by the Commerce Department.

Although statistical quirks and one-time factors like wintry weather in some parts of the country played a role, as did a work slowdown at West Coast ports, the lackluster report for January, February and March underscores the American economy’s continuing inability to generate much momentum.

The pullback was the third time that economic activity had posted a quarterly contraction since the current recovery began in mid-2009, with declines in output in the first quarters of 2011 and 2014. Even acknowledging flaws in the way the government takes account of expected seasonal variations, that on-again, off-again pattern helps explain why annual growth rates in recent years have been well below the pace of gains recorded in the 1990s and mid-2000s...

[Demeter]

28. And Gasoline is back up at $2.69 locally

[Demeter]

33. Even Affluent American Strongly Support Higher Taxes on the Rich By Robert Waldmann.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/even-affluent-american-strongly-support-higher-taxes-on-the-rich.html


The Washington Post/ABC News pollsters asked “Do you think the federal government should or should not pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans?”. 62% of respondents answered yes. This should be very unsurprising as it is roughly the same as the fraction who have been telling Gallup that high income people pay less than their fair of taxes for two decades now. It is also similar to the number who support higher taxes on high incomes to pay for the ACA and (in another poll) to prevent exaustion of the social security trust fund. I have been, partly ironically, referring to this solid majority opinion as “class war” but Benen mentioned something which tends to undermine the class war interpretation/joke

What’s more, support for action in this area is quite broad. A majority of Americans regardless of race, for example, support actions to reduce the wealth gap. A majority of Americans regardless of age agree. Indeed, across the board – gender, level of education, household income, geographic region – there’s a broad consensus that this is an issue worthy of national action.

Wait a majority in the highest income sub group (income over $ 100 thousand a year) answered yes ? That sure doesn’t sound like class war does it ?



In fact, 63% of those respondents answered yes which is actually a tiny insignificant 1% higher than the overall fraction 62%.

Now I think the class war hypothesis can be saved if the vast majority of even the highest income subset don’t consider themselves “wealthy”. I sure wouldn’t consider a family of 5 with income of $101,000 and a mortgage wealthy (even though they are by world standards and very wealthy by the standards of almost all of human history). The class interest based struggle could be between the bottom 99% and the top 1% who are too few to show up noticeably in polls.

update:

the vast majority of households with income over $ 100K are not in the top 1%. In fact almost 22% of US households had income over $ 100K back in 2012. What I meant to type is that the results of the poll can be reconciled with the idea that we are all selfish if the vast majority of households with income over 100K don’t think they are “wealthy” but rather think the wealthy are the top 1%. To get in the top 1% a family needed $388,905 already in 2011. The idea I was trying to present is that someone struggling along with $ 120k might want to take from the wealthy with $ 400k per year. I’d rather think that people who consider themselves wealthy are willing to share their wealth with the rest of the US (provided other wealthy people do too).

[Hotler]

57. I wish I made $51,939.00 n/t

[Demeter]

17. The Do-It-Yourself Economy Just Hired 1 Million American Entrepreneurs

IS THAT COUNTING THE DRUG DEALERS?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/the-do-it-yourself-economy-just-hired-1-million-american-entrepreneurs

Animal spirits are returning to the American workforce.

The number of self-employed workers surged by 370,000 in May, according to the U.S. Labor Department's survey of households released Friday. And nearly 1 million workers have gone to work for themselves since just February.



The report is the latest sign that entrepreneurial activity is on the rise. The number of business startups rose in 32 of the 50 U.S. states last year, the Kansas City, Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation reported Thursday. The Kauffman Index of Startup Activity, which is an indicator of new business creation, had the biggest increase in the past two decades.

"It is evidence of a growing do-it-yourself economy," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. "The market for self-employed workers is booming and this is a sign of a pickup in entrepreneurial activity."

THE PROOF IS IN THE ECONOMY...ARE THESE PEOPLE FEEDING THEIR CHILDREN? ARE TAX REVENUES CLIMBING?

[Fuddnik]

38. It means that they're hiring people as "Independent Contractors" for the shit jobs.

That way, the cheap assed employer gets to dodge their share of payroll taxes.

Either that, or Uber hired a quarter of a million more suckers.

[Hotler]

59. "or Uber hired a quarter of a million more suckers."

[Demeter]

18. Deutsche Bank Investigating $6 Billion of Possible Money Laundering by Russian Clients

WHEN THIS BANK IMPLODES, THE WORST WILL BE OVER GLOBALLY

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/deutsche-bank-probe-said-to-target-6-billion-of-russian-trades

Deutsche Bank AG is conducting an internal probe into possible money laundering by Russian clients that may involve about $6 billion of transactions over more than four years, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The Bank of Russia approached Deutsche Bank in October asking the firm to examine the stock-trading activities of some clients in the country, said one person, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private.

Benjamin Lawsky’s Department of Financial Services in New York is looking at unusual trading activity at the firm in Russia, another person said. Deutsche Bank is analyzing data from 2011 through early 2015, and has alerted Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority, the European Central Bank and Germany’s Bafin of the investigation, two people said.

“We are committed to participating in international efforts to detect and combat suspicious activities and we take strong action where we find evidence of misconduct,” Deutsche Bank said in an e-mailed statement Friday. “We have placed on leave a small number of individuals from our Moscow operation pending the results of an internal review.”

MORE AND VIDEO INTERVIEW AT LINK

[Demeter]

20. Guajira - flamenco

[Demeter]

21. Credit Agricole Deputy CEO Musca Detained in Pollster Probe

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-03/credit-agricole-deputy-ceo-musca-detained-in-pollster-probe



French police detained Credit Agricole SA Deputy Chief Executive Officer Xavier Musca and five other former members of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s staff as a pollster probe escalates.

Investigative judges Roger Le Loire and Serge Tournaire are conducting a probe of alleged favoritism and embezzlement in political polls from the time Sarkozy was in power, according to a spokesman for the national financial prosecutor, who confirmed an Agence-France Presse report.

No charges have been filed against any individuals and the investigation revolves around contracts between Sarkozy’s office and polling companies such as Publifact. Musca joined Credit Agricole in mid-2012 after working as Sarkozy’s chief of staff.

A Credit Agricole spokeswoman declined to comment when reached by Bloomberg. She declined to provide contact information for Musca or his representatives.

Working for Sarkozy is now haunting former advisers who’ve turned to banking. In a separate case, Francois Perol, Sarkozy’s top economic aide until 2009, will face a trial later this month on conflict-of-interest charges related to his appointment as French banking company Groupe BPCE’s head. BPCE’s board has voiced confidence in Perol.

[Demeter]

22. Buffett Lunch Auction Stands at $1.59 Million With Hours to Go

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/buffett-lunch-auction-stands-at-1-59-million-with-hours-to-go

The auction for a lunch meeting with famed investor Warren Buffett had a top offer of more than $1.5 million with hours left in the annual charity event.

The bidding reached $1.59 million as of 10:13 a.m. Friday in San Francisco, according to EBay Inc.’s website. The event, now in its 16th year, started Sunday evening and concludes at 7:30 p.m. Competition typically accelerates in the closing minutes.

Buffett, 84, the chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., has raised $17.8 million for San Francisco’s Glide Foundation with the annual auctions. He said Glide, which provides meals, affordable housing and counseling for the poor, is also a source of “unconditional love” for the city’s neediest residents....

[Demeter]

23. HSBC must face US lawsuits over $34 billion mortgage debt losses

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/01/us-hsbc-mortgage-lawsuit-idUSKBN0OH39H20150601

HSBC Holdings Plc was on Monday ordered to face three U.S. lawsuits accusing it of breaching its duties as a trustee overseeing residential mortgage-backed securities that suffered more than $34 billion of losses in the global financial crisis.

U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan said the plaintiff investors, including funds from BlackRock Inc, Allianz SE's Pacific Investment Management Co and TIAA-CREF, could pursue claims accusing HSBC of breach of contract, and concealing known defects in mortgage loans backing 283 trusts.

"Based on plaintiffs' detailed allegations, it is indeed plausible to infer that HSBC had actual knowledge of breaches in representations and warranties in the specific loans at issue," Scheindlin wrote in a 53-page decision. "How HSBC gained this actual knowledge, or whether in fact it had actual knowledge, may be determined through discovery."

The judge also said the plaintiffs could pursue a conflict of interest claim accusing HSBC of refusing to "rat out" misconduct by loan servicers, hoping that they would "return the favor when the roles were reversed."

Scheindlin dismissed some claims, including for negligence and negligent misrepresentation. She gave the plaintiffs 30 days to amend their complaints, and scheduled a June 24 conference...

[Demeter]

25. The May Jobs Report in Six Charts

INTEREST TRADERS ARE SALIVATING THAT THIS REPORT PAVES THE WAY FOR THE FED TO RAISE INTEREST RATES IN SEPTEMBER...I THINK THEY ARE DRUGGED WITH GREED.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/the-may-jobs-report-in-six-charts

The economy got some good news today, with a strong Nonfarm Payrolls report for the month of May. Here's a quick rundown of the most important numbers from Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The U.S. economy added 280,000 jobs last month, beating forecasts with a big improvement over April.



However, the unemployment rate did tick back up to 5.5 percent.



But the Labor Force Participation Rate also ticked up, so that's good news.



Average hourly earnings also saw a slight gain. They were up 0.3 percent, another improvement over April's 0.1 percent.



And in yet another slice of good news, the number of long-term unemployed people dipped once gain, down to 28.6 from 29.0 percent.

[Demeter]

26. It Would Take Europe's 13 Richest People to Solve the Greek Debt Crisis

WELL, THERE ARE PLENTY OF LAMPPOSTS IN EUROPE....LET'S HAVE A BBQ!


http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/it-would-take-europe-s-13-richest-people-to-solve-the-greek-debt-crisis

Liliane Bettencourt could cover Greece's June debt obligation by herself...

Here's a creative solution to the Greek debt crisis that European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker probably hasn't considered: tapping the fortunes of Europe's richest people.

The floundering Greek economy and concerns about its possible exit from the euro hasn't hurt the rest of Europe very much, with the largest fortunes on the continent rising 12 percent in the past year, as surging stock markets have mostly shaken off the uncertainty.

Collectively, Europe's 13 richest people have $378 billion in net assets, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That's enough to cover Greece's public debt with a little left over. The cash held by Liliane Bettencourt, France's richest person, could cover all of Greece's pending June debt payment of 1.5 billion euros ($1.7 billion). Bettencourt has a net worth of $37.4 billion.

Europe's richest person, Amancio Ortega, has a net cash position of $5 million, according to the index. Ortega, who passed U.S. investor Warren Buffett to become the world's second richest person this week, has collected more than $3.4 billion in dividends from Inditex SA since the company's 2001 initial public offering, and has invested much of that cash into real estate valued at more than $6 billion.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is not likely to benefit from such an act of financial largesse. The 67 billionaires from western Europe on the Bloomberg ranking of the world's richest people have only $113 billion in cash between them. Greece's outstanding debt is hovering at around 170 percent of its GDP, making it a very expensive asset to bail out.

Research for the post is derived from Bloomberg Billionaires Index data. Get the latest intelligence about the world's biggest fortunes on Twitter @bbgbillionaires.

[Demeter]

29. GE Launches Bidding Process for $40 Billion in Commercial-Lending Operations

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-launches-bidding-process-for-40-billion-in-commercial-lending-operations-1433097083

GE asset sale key step in escaping regulation by Fed...

General Electric Co. has launched the bidding process for a $40 billion chunk of its U.S. commercial-lending operation, a crucial step in its effort to escape regulation by the Federal Reserve.

The conglomerate is seeking buyers for the U.S. portions of its dealer financing and corporate finance businesses, which provide loans for equipment purchases and truck vendors, as well as leasing and asset-backed loans for midsize...

[Demeter]

30. US Treasury Sec. Jack Lew: Greece Negotiation Delays Raise Risk Of "Accident"

IT WAS PROBABLY "CATASTROPHE" BUT GOT TRANSLATED WRONG--AH, NO, IT WAS A EUPHEMISM!

https://www.marketnews.com/content/us-lew-greece-negotiation-delays-raise-risk-accident

US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew issued a strong appeal to his European counterparts Friday to find a quick solution to the ongoing Greek crisis, warning that failure to do so risked a default or a Greek exit from the Eurozone and possible damage to the global economy. Speaking at the press conference of the US delegation after the conclusion of the G-7 summit in Dresden, Lew called on both sides of the negotiation table to make concessions.

"At some point, there won't be the ability for Greece to pay its bills and that will be the moment when, if it comes, there will be an accident," Lew said. "If you want to avoid that, the sooner the better."

"Waiting until a day or two before whatever the next deadline is is just a way of courting an accident," Lew said.

The US Treasury Secretary stressed that it was not just Greece that would have to move to resolve the current crisis. Even though he suggested that Greece should move first and, above all, present a "credible plan," he also urged the institutions formerly known as troika to be more forthcoming.

"All parties need to move. There needs to be some flexibility on the part of the institutions. There need to be some policy decisions implemented in Greece. One won't happen without the other," Lew said.

Lew also warned Europeans not be complacent about the potential danger of a Greek exit to their economies.

"It would be unwise to think that just because technical contagion has been changed from earlier years, in that debt is now held by sovereigns as opposed to banks, that we know what the full consequence of a financial crisis or the withdrawal of a country from the monetary union of Europe would mean," he said.

"There is no doubt that if there's a crisis, the worst impact will be on Greece," Lew added.

He was particularly critical the perceived tendency of both sides in the Greece negotiations to wait until the very last second before making any concessions.

"You keep raising the risk of an accident if you put off the action until whatever the next deadline is," Lew said, recommending that the negotiators should move away from their aim to reach a comprehensive deal and instead try to achieve a framework agreement first.

"It would be in the best interest of all parties to reach an understanding on a general level and leave some time to work through the details before whatever the next deadline is," Lew said.

SO, FIRST COMES THE JAW-BONING....THEN THE INCENTIVIZING BAIL OUTS...

[Fuddnik]

39. They might have an accidental coup or something.

Ooops.

[DemReadingDU]

41. Bail-ins likely too

Remember what happened in Cyprus

[Demeter]

31. WikiLeaks releases secret TISA docs: The more evil sibling of TTIP and TPP

http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/06/wikileaks-releases-secret-tisa-docs-the-more-evil-sibling-of-ttip-and-tpp/

WikiLeaks has released 17 secret documents from the negotiations of the global Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), which have been taking place behind closed doors, largely unnoticed, since 2013. The main participants are the United States, the European Union, and 23 other countries including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan and Israel, which together comprise two-thirds of global GDP.

Significantly, all the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are absent, and are therefore unable to provide their perspective and input for what is essentially a deal designed by Western nations, for the benefit of Western corporations. According to the European Commission's dedicated page: "TiSA aims at opening up markets and improving rules in areas such as licensing, financial services, telecoms, e-commerce, maritime transport, and professionals moving abroad temporarily to provide services."

TISA's focus on services complements the two other global trade agreements currently being negotiated in secret: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the corresponding deal for the Pacific region, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which deal with goods and investments. Like both TTIP and TPP, one of the central aims of TISA is to remove "barriers" to trade in services, and to impose a regulatory ratchet on participating nations. In the case of TISA, the ratchet ensures that services are deregulated and opened up to private companies around the world, and that once privatised, they cannot be re-nationalised.

The 17 documents released today include drafts and annexes on issues such as air traffic, maritime transport, professional services, e-commerce, delivery services, transparency, and domestic regulation, as well as several documents on the positions of negotiating parties. The annexe on e-commerce is likely to be of particular interest to Ars readers, since, if adopted, it would have a major impact on several extremely sensitive areas in the digital realm.
Thou shalt not...MORE

[Demeter]

32. Gaius Publius: Nancy Pelosi Is Whipping “Almost Daily” for TPP

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/gaius-publius-nancy-pelosi-is-whipping-almost-daily-for-tpp.html

Yves here. This post is important in and of itself, and also serves as an opportunity for a reminder: Please keep up your calls to your Senators and Congressman against the Fast Track. As we’ve said:

So your calls are critical to stiffening the spine of the rebels and letting the traitors know that voters will take their vengeance for a sellout in the next election. As reader Kokuanani pointed out:

As I’ve posted elsewhere with regard to contacting your Senators and Rep., NUMBERS COUNT. The staff members reading e-mails and answering the phones are only reporting the volume of incoming communication and which “side” it supports. Your fabulous essay on the evils of the TPP and Fast Track will never reach the voting member. So don’t waste your time writing it.

Pick one or two arguments [e.g., “secrecy”] and make them. Briefly. Like a sentence or two. Spend the rest of your time getting friends and family to contact Senate offices. The e-mail forms [links provided by Yves] make this ridiculously easy. All you need is a zip code showing you’re in the state. You can walk your pals through the process.

I don’t know how effective contacting the DNC would be, but it can’t hurt, and can alert them that they can’t rely on you for fund-raising or votes.

Needless to say, if you are in Pelosi’s district, it’s even more urgent for you to call and let her staff know you know what she is up to and you don’t approve at all.

So please keep the pressure on next week, and get the word to friends, family, and other allies. Here are the Senate contact details and those for your Representative.

By Gaius Publius, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, Americablog, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius, Tumblr and Facebook. This piece first appeared at Down With Tyranny.

Pelosi was a perp on Obama’s failed Chained CPI proposal as well — another Obama–Paul Ryan pro-wealth project. Not a great choice for a “San Francisco liberal” to be making...It looks like this early statement, about which I got some pushback, is proving true. Just as Chuck Schumer was the behind-the-scenes enabler on Fast Track and TPP in the Senate — he voted No but privately organized the Fast Track set of bills so they would pass — Pelosi is the behind-the-scenes enabler of TPP in the House. According to one report (see below), she might even vote No, so long as it passes with votes other than hers. Publicly, Pelosi has said both (a) she’s neutral and (b) she’s seeking a “path to yes.” Sounds like a contradiction, and it sounded so at the time. About her supposed neutrality, here’s the New York Times (my emphasis throughout):

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, who has yet to declare her position, has told House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio that he will have to produce 200 Republican votes to win the 217 he needs. In other words, she is not promising a single new convert.

That’s the spin, and it’s being repeated elsewhere as well. It’s also not true. According to two sources, in private Pelosi is working “almost on a daily basis” to get Fast Track to pass, and with it, TPP. Evidence comes from Greg Sargent at Plumline and from Politico. Let’s start with Sargent and the problems around Fast Track’s associated Trade Assistance bill.

If the Trade Assistance Bill Fails, Fast Track and TPP Will Fail

Everyone knows, though only opponents will say, that it’s mostly Big Money who wants TPP to succeed, because Big Money will make a killing from the deal. Everyone knows, though only opponents will say, that TPP will do what NAFTA did — move jobs abroad and continue to impoverish American workers. Which means, to get Democratic votes for Fast Track and TPP, they need to enact a so-called Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) bill along with it, to lessen, if only slightly, the damage to American workers. Republicans hate lessening damage to American workers, however — remember all those unemployment compensation fights — so there are a lot of Republicans who don’t want TAA to pass. And the TAA bill passed by the Senate is “paid for” by cuts to Medicare. (Yes, you read that right — Medicare cuts.) So right now, TAA is in trouble from both the left and the right. Bottom line, no TAA, no TPP. Enter Nancy Pelosi.

Pelosi Is Working to Keep the TAA–plus–Fast Track Deal Alive

Many Democrats hate the Medicare cuts (or can’t afford to seem not to). Many Republicans hate the TAA itself. So the deal is in trouble — remember, no TAA, no TPP. What does Nancy Pelosi do? When it looks like the deal could fail, she goes to bat for the deal. Greg Sargent:

Pelosi is taking the possibility of a failed TAA vote in the House seriously. A Pelosi aide tells me that she is negotiating with GOP leaders to find a new pay-for to replace the Medicare cuts, since keeping them could end up killing it.

If Pelosi is opposed to Fast Track, she could let it die by letting TAA die. That’s what Alan Grayson would do. After all, if there’s no fast track for a job-killing “trade” bill, there’s no need for worker assistance to mitigate the damage. Pelosi is working to enable the Fast Track and TPP deal, to keep it alive. She obviously wants it to pass. Nancy Pelosi — The White House “Secret Weapon” on TPP. Now from Politico, this gut-churner on Obama, Pelosi and TPP. It opens with the bottom line:

White House’s secret weapon on trade: Nancy Pelosi

Administration officials have been so impressed by Nancy Pelosi’s approach to negotiations over giving President Barack Obama “fast-track” trade authority that they’ve started to consider a crazy possibility: She could even vote for it herself.

But only if she has to.

“But only if she has to”? If she’s in favor of TPP why should she hide her hand in passing it? Feel free to make your best guess at the answer. Mine is, for the sake of appearances. For more on Pelosi controlling appearances, see the last quote in this piece. The next few paragraphs are very Pelosi-friendly, but hard to credit once you get to these passages:

Obama aides say they don’t know how Pelosi will vote in the end, but they gush about how hands-on she’s been, how accommodating she’s been in letting them make their case, how critical she’s been in saying nothing about her position to give her fellow Democrats cover to get to yes.

“I applaud the leader for creating enough space to really evaluate this legislation,” said Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), who announced his support for TPA last month and has become the anti-TPA effort’s top target to scare others into voting no. “She’s done a good job creating that space.”

That’s “New Democrat” Ami Bera, who’s being hit hard in his district for his declared Yes on TPP. Ami Bera wants to publicly “applaud” Pelosi for her work with Democrats, to “create that space” so Democrats can “get to yes.” The White House agrees:

The White House hopes Pelosi’s going to put her thumb on the backs of however many necks she needs, forcing yes votes among the more reluctant but safe members, letting the more endangered members off the hook, finding votes and trading votes until she gets to the 24, or 25, or 26 that she needs. …

“Her position is that she wants to get to yes and she is talking about this almost on a daily basis,” said a senior House Democrat.

Ignore the schizophrenia in the article about how she doesn’t know how she’s going to vote despite everything else it says about her effort. All she cares about, based on her reported behavior, is controlling her own appearance, her brand, as being “pro-worker” — and helping other pro-TPP members control their own appearances, as the above quote makes abundantly clear. And ignore articles to the contrary; they just report what Pelosi is saying about herself. Sargent and this Politico piece report what Pelosi is doing — working hard to make TPP happen. She’s the lead enabler in the House of the “next NAFTA” trade agreement, someone working almost daily to keep the deal alive in the House. If she doesn’t want to tag herself that way — and apparently she doesn’t — it falls to us to tag her. Nancy Pelosi, lead House perp on the biggest anti-worker bill of this generation. Considering the damage TPP will do, I’d gladly pay to put that on her tombstone.

[Demeter]

35. Well, tomorrow is another day--sleep well, everyone

Here's a concerto for castanets to lull you to sleep....

[Demeter]

36. Wikipedia says

Castanets are a percussion instrument, used in Kalo, Moorish, Ottoman, ancient Roman, Italian, Spanish, Sephardic, Swiss, and Portuguese music. The instrument consists of a pair of concave shells joined on one edge by a string. They are held in the hand and used to produce clicks for rhythmic accents or a ripping or rattling sound consisting of a rapid series of clicks. They are traditionally made of hardwood (chestnut; Spanish: castaño), although fibreglass is becoming increasingly popular.

In practice a player usually uses two pairs of castanets. One pair is held in each hand, with the string hooked over the thumb and the castanets resting on the palm with the fingers bent over to support the other side. Each pair will make a sound of a slightly different pitch.

The origins of the instrument are not known. The practice of clicking hand-held sticks together to accompany dancing is ancient, and was practised by both the Greeks and the Egyptians. In more modern times, the bones and spoons used in Minstrel show and jug band music can also be considered forms of the castanet.

During the baroque period, castanets were featured prominently in dances. Composers like Jean-Baptiste Lully scored them for the music of dances which included Spaniards (Ballet des Nations), Egyptians (Persée, Phaëton), Ethiopians (Persée, Phaëton), and Korybantes (Atys). In addition, they are often scored for dances involving less pleasant characters such as demons (Alceste) and nightmares (Atys). Their association with African dances is even stated in the ballet Flore (1669) by Lully, "... les Africains inventeurs des danses de Castagnettes entrent d'un air plus gai ..."

A rare occasion where the normally accompanying instrument is given concertant solo status is Leonardo Balada's Concertino for Castanets and Orchestra Three Anecdotes (1977). The "Conciertino für Kastagnetten und Orchester" by the German composer Helmut M. Timpelan, in cooperation with the castanet virtuoso, José de Udaeta, is another solo work for the instrument. See also the tocatta festiva for castanets by Allan Stephenson. Sonia Amelio has also performed her castanet arrangements as a concert soloist.

In the late Ottoman Empire, köçeks not only danced but played percussion instruments, especially a type of castanet known as the çarpare, which in later times were replaced by metal cymbals called zills.

Castanets in Spain

Castanets are often played by singers or dancers. Contrary to popular belief, castanets are not commonly used in the flamenco dance, except for two specific forms: zambra and siguiriyas. In fact, Spanish folk dance "Sevillanas" is the style typically performed using castanet. Escuela bolera, a balletic dance form, is also accompanied by castanets. The name (Spanish: castañuelas) is derived from the diminutive form of castaña, the Spanish word for chestnut, which they resemble. In Andalusia they are usually referred to as palillos (little sticks) instead, and this is the name by which they are known in flamenco.

Castanets were used to evoke a Spanish atmosphere in Georges Bizet's opera, Carmen and Emmanuel Chabrier's orchestral work España. They are also found in the "Dance of the Seven Veils" from Richard Strauss' opera Salome and in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. An unusual variation on the standard castanets can be found in Darius Milhaud's Les Choëphores, which calls for castanets made of metal. Other uses include Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio espagnol, Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole, Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor and Karl Jenkins's Tangollen.

One can also see Spanish influence in Napoletan music through the presence of castanets, as it was registered by Athanasius Kircher on his Tarantella Napoletana (tono hypodorico).

[Demeter]

37. One good turn deserves another

[MattSh]

40. Oooh, sleep. That sounds nice.

I'll have to try it tonight; was out to 4AM, got only 4 hours, courtesy of my wife's father.

You sort of expect the young'uns to get in trouble occasionally, but our family is upside-down. Our son is at home studying his butt off, while her father is out partying like it's 1959, and getting his ass into a heap load of trouble.

[Demeter]

42. As long as you are doing the good SIL--

very protective of you.

[MattSh]

66. Not that simple...sadly.

After two weeks in the hospital, the doctors told him no living on your own and no driving for three months. (The doctors run a bit conservative over here). Stroke, high blood pressure, aneurysm. Not sure what. He figured three days was enough for him. So last night, two weeks after leaving the hospital, he whacked two pedestrians crossing the road in a properly marked pedestrian crosswalk. He said he didn't see them. Apparently he's had an issue with peripheral vision in the left eye since an earlier stroke. The pedestrians, at least the one who was not whacked unconscious, said they did not see him (10 PM), indicating he might not have had his lights on. Plus he's got this habit of driving while talking on the phone. This morning, he's calling around to get his windshield replaced, apparently unaware that there's still people in the hospital. Hey, these things can happen to anyone, says he, ignoring the fact that this time it happened to him.

Then apparently, his daughter, my wife, isn't being the good daughter because she suggests that maybe he needs to stop pretending that he's still 24 y.o. (He's 74).

We might need to get his license pulled, but he'll fight us every step of the way. All this while we're trying to get our son through some very important exams.

[Demeter]

43. Very classical flamenco

[Demeter]

44. TPP/TTIP/TiSA By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/200pm-water-cooler-6415.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

“The myriad interests involved in the trade fight include some very large American corporations, which are currently padding their profits with labor costs kept low by modern-day slavery in Malaysia” (HuffPo). This would be Obama’s “new high standard rules”, then.

Menendez on trafficking: “The scene described in news reports included cages for the human victims, and in one painfully poignant image, a single tiny orange slipper — evidence that children had been among them” Roll Call. Even the most corrupt pol can sometimes say or do a good thing. Even the lowliest worm can turn.

Obama: China has “already started putting out feelers about the possibilities of participating at some point” in TPP. Obama at Nike: “If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what? China will”. So China’s going to join an organization where they get no say in the rules? Make up your mind.

Obama explains the effect of TPP on workers: “In an economy of this size, there’s always going to be some dislocations”. Yeah. When a bankster gets dislocated, he loses a bonus. When Obama gets dislocated, he goes over par. When you get dislocated, you lose your job or your house. And don’t talk to me about training, which is just walking around money for Democratic non-profits.

“Republicans proponents of TPA estimate they will need about 190 GOP votes, leaving Obama to bring along roughly 30 Democratic votes to get the bill across the finish line”.

“In the House, Rosa DeLauro, the Connecticut liberal has become the de facto leader of Democratic opposition, running a behind-the-scenes whip operation against new fast-track trade powers for the president”.

Op-Ed: “TPP backers say the deal will allow our businesses better access to foreign markets. But there simply isn’t an equivalent foreign market”. For example, “the U.S. federal procurement market is approximately double the size of similar markets in the other TPP nations.This means that any new markets American businesses could pursue as a result of the deal would be outweighed by the impact of their new domestic competitors.”

Shane Larson of the CWA: “We said, if Vietnam is not living up to the terms, why not let the AFL-CIO bring up charges? USTR said you don’t understand how the system works” David Dayen, Fiscal Times. Loomis: “That suggests we’re back in a pre-New Deal scenario.”

TiSA: “They look like working documents,” said Scott Miller who holds the William M. Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Most of them have plenty of text that is in brackets. Bracketed texts are simply proposals. They aren’t agreed to by anybody” Fiscal Times. But that’s great, right?

TiSA: “Article 6 of the leaked text seems to ban any country from using free software mandates” Ars Technica. This would “prevent a European government from specifying that its civil servants should use only open-source code for word processing—a sensible requirement given what we know about the deployment of backdoors in commercial software by the NSA and GCHQ.”

[Demeter]

45. The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-inside-story-of-how-the-clintons-built-a-2-billion-global-empire/2015/06/02/b6eab638-0957-11e5-a7ad-b430fc1d3f5c_story.html

Chevy Chase was on the plane with Bill Clinton. So was a former president of Brazil. The founders of Google. A former president of Mexico. And John Cusack.

They were all going to Davos, the Swiss resort that holds an annual conclave of the wealthy and powerful. The jet — arranged by a Saudi businessman — provided a luxurious living-room setting for a rolling discussion: Couldn’t the big names at Davos be doing more to solve the world’s big problems?

In the background, a Clinton staff member named Doug Band had an idea that would change the ex-president’s life.

“Only Bill Clinton could bring a group like this together,” Band thought.

Bill Clinton didn’t need Davos. He could do this himself.

From that revelation came the Clinton Global Initiative — an annual gathering of the wealthy and powerful centered not on a place but on a man. In the decade since, that program has become the public face of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the sprawling organization that is now at the center of the Clintons’ public and professional lives and a springboard for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Today, the Clinton Foundation is unlike anything else in the history of the nation and, perhaps, the world: It is a global philanthropic empire run by a former U.S. president and closely affiliated with a potential future president, with the audacious goal of solving some of the world’s most vexing problems by bringing together the wealthiest, glitziest and most powerful people from every part of the planet.

The evolution of the foundation, which began as a modest nonprofit focused largely on the ex-president’s library in Arkansas, is a nearly perfect reflection of the Clintons themselves. It was not designed as a master plan but rather has grown, one brainstorm at a time, in accordance with the ambitious, loyal, restless and often scattered nature of its primary namesake. Many programs were sparked by chance encounters in Bill Clinton’s life. A meeting with a Harlem shopkeeper. A friend’s plan to fight AIDS. The flight to Davos. Emergency heart surgery.


Originally founded in 1997, the foundation has since grown to include a vast number of initiatives. Here is how it all stacked up over the last 18 years. View Graphic

The foundation now includes 11 major initiatives, focused on issues as divergent as crop yields in Africa, earthquake relief in Haiti and the cost of AIDS drugs worldwide. In all, the Clintons’ constellation of related charities has raised $2 billion, employs more than 2,000 people and has a combined annual budget of more than $223 million...

BILL IS GETTING IN HILLARY'S WAY...IF SHE WERE A SENSIBLE CREATURE, SHE'D GIVE UP THE WHITE HOUSE AND SETTLE FOR THE POWER OF THE FOUNDATION, WHICH ISN'T SUBJECT TO THE WHIMS OF THE PEOPLE...

[antigop]

47. WSJ opinion piece: The Clinton ‘Charity’ Begins at Home

Employment rolls for the Clinton Foundation show scads of political operatives—but this doesn’t seem to bother the IRS.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-clinton-charity-begins-at-home-1433459849

The media’s focus is on Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and whether she took official actions to benefit her family’s global charity. But the mistake is starting from the premise that the Clinton Foundation is a “charity.” What’s clear by now is that this family enterprise was set up as a global shakedown operation, designed to finance and nurture the Clintons’ continued political ambitions. It’s a Hillary super PAC that throws in the occasional good deed.

That much is made obvious by looking at the foundation’s employment rolls. Most charities are staffed by folks who have spent a lifetime in nonprofits, writing grants or doing overseas field work. The Clinton Foundation is staffed by political operatives. It has been basically a parking lot for Clinton campaign workers—a comfy place to draw a big check as they geared up for Hillary’s presidential run.

The revolving door is spinning quickly these days. There’s Dennis Cheng, a finance director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, who went to the Clinton Foundation as its chief development officer. There he built a giant donor file, which he earlier this year took with him to head up fundraising for the Clinton 2016 campaign. There’s Katie Dowd, who raised $100 million as Mrs. Clinton’s new media director in 2008, then went to a Clinton PAC, then to the State Department, then to the foundation as a “tech adviser.” She’s now at Clinton 2016 as digital director.

[Demeter]

51. Now, THAT'S a story I can believe

Last edited Sat Jun 6, 2015, 10:52 AM - Edit history (1)

Forget Benghazi. The GOP blind pig should be snuffling under the FOUNDATION tree.




NYC STREET ART/GRAFFITTI

[Demeter]

46. How Interpol got into bed with FIFA

INTERNATIONAL RENT-A-COP? OR A PROTECTION RACKET? OR JUST PLAIN GRAFT?

http://www.politico.eu/article/fifa-funded-interpol-policing/


...Now, however, given that FIFA’s dark corners are being opened to daylight by the US Department of Justice and the Swiss attorney general’s office, serious doubts are arising about Interpol’s private sector strategy, which has made the organization financially dependent upon corporate interests.

Interpol, the world’s international police organization, is responsible for coordinating operations between its 190 member countries. Rather than conduct “boots on the ground” investigations itself, it generally plays a behind-the-scenes role, providing information, expertise and leadership to combat complex multinational crimes.

Its core budget, accrued from subscription payments from its members, amounts to about €60 million. Since April 2011, when Interpol’s “International Partnerships and Development sub-directorate” was established, this sum has been “topped up” with money from the private sector. In 2013 — the most recent year for which figures are publicly available — private funds boosted the core budget by 26 percent, to a total of €78 million.

The €20 million FIFA deal, concluded in 2011 and scheduled to be paid over 10 years, funded an Interpol program to provide “cutting-edge training, education and prevention to protect the sport, the players and the fans from fraud and corruption.” It focused principally on illegal betting and match-fixing.

With hindsight, the deal — the largest private donation Interpol has ever received — can only be seen as ironic: Interpol was being paid by FIFA to investigate corruption, which is the very matter for which FIFA is now under fire....

MORE WEIRDNESS...WERE THEY ALL ON PERFORMANCE-ENHANCING DRUGS, OR SOME OTHER KIND? I DON'T GET FIFA--THE STORY IS LIKE A HAIRBALL. OR A TAR BALL...

[Demeter]

48. How a curmudgeonly old reporter exposed the FIFA scandal that toppled Sepp Blatter

IF DC IS PAYING ATTENTION, THERE MUST BE SOMETHING IN IT FOR THEM...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/03/how-a-curmudgeonly-old-reporter-exposed-the-fifa-scandal-that-toppled-sepp-blatter/

...It was just after dawn on May 27 when Andrew Jennings’s phone began ringing. Swiss police had just launched a startling raid on a luxury hotel in Zurich, arresting seven top FIFA officials and charging them and others with running a $150 million racket. The world was stunned.

The waking world, that is. If Jennings had bothered to climb out of bed, he wouldn’t have been surprised at the news. After all, he was the man who set the investigation in motion, with a book in 2006, “FOUL! The Secret World of FIFA: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals,” followed by an exposé aired on the BBC’s “Panorama” program that same year, and then another book in 2014, called “Omerta: Sepp Blatter’s FIFA Organised Crime Family.”

“My phone started ringing at six in the morning,” Jennings said Tuesday from his farm in the hilly north of England. “I turned it off actually to get some more sleep, because whatever is happening at six in the morning is still going to be there at lunch time, isn’t it?”

If you can’t tell already, Jennings is an advocate of slow, methodical journalism. For half a century, the 71-year-old investigative reporter has been digging into complex, time-consuming stories about organized crime. In the 1980s, it was bad cops, the Thai heroin trade and the Italian mob. In the ’90s, he turned to sports, exposing corruption with the International Olympic Committee.

For the past 15 years, Jennings has focused on the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), international soccer’s governing body. As other journalists were ball watching — reporting scorelines or writing player profiles — Jennings was digging into the dirty deals underpinning the world’s most popular game....

[Hotler]

64. This a very good read. Too bad........

this guy didn't come over here and work his magic on the great melt down. You would have a hard time convincing me that Obama, Holder and members their administrations and elected officials didn't get envelopes of cash handed to them from the shit stains on Wall St. for not dragging them before a Grand Jury. Now that I think about they did in the form of campaign donations. Hell I'd bet $50.00 that members of my own City Council gets a few bucks here and there handed to them under the table from members of the Chambers of Commerce and the Business Round Table.

[Demeter]

67. There is not enough money on earth to be an investigative reporter in the Amerikkka

You'd be in Gitmo so fast, your head would probably be left behind.

[Demeter]

49. DENMARK: This country is trying to go cash-free

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102682877%E2%80%8B%E2%80%8B

Denmark is inching closer to becoming the world's first cashless country after the country's government proposed that retailers should be allowed to only accept mobile and plastic payments. This month, the Danish government unveiled a series of initiatives that included plans to eradicate laws that require stores to accept physical cash. If parliament gives the go-ahead, clothing retailers, restaurants and gas stations could go cash-free by January 2016.

Cards already dominate payment in Denmark, according to a report by payment processing company WorldPay. By 2012, 84.2 percent of Danish transactions were made using cards, with e-wallet payments facing significant growth, the report said. That same year, Ireland was the only other European country that topped Denmark in terms of card payments.

Supporters of the program say less cash at the register will help boost in-store security and cut out resources required for counting and storing coins and bills...

WHAT A STUPID EXCUSE FOR A STUPID PLAN


..."Cashless environments will make it possible to test new innovative store concepts and payment without having to incorporate the very cost-intensive measures are required when handling cash," Danish Chamber of Commerce CEO Jens Karskov said in a press release.

AH, YES, SO IT'S NOT JUST CHEESE-PARING....THERE'S SOME MAJOR FRAUD UP AHEAD!

The rise of electronic payment could also raise privacy concerns, but Hahn said these pale in comparison to what it would mean for state revenues. Tracking payments would help governments collect taxes and "could do wonders for fighting corruption."

"It makes economic sense, and it's cheaper for everyone to move to all electronic model. Pushing coins and paper through the system very expensive. Money wears out, you carry it back and forth, redistribute it, count it. It's a big cost on the system," Hahn stressed...

YES, BY ALL MEANS, LET'S FIGHT CORRUPTION BY THE 99%, AND LET THE 1% HAVE THE MONOPOLY. THEY DON'T HAVE ENOUGH, THEY WANT IT ALL!

[Demeter]

50. Europe has no choice - it has to save Greece

IT APPEARS THAT EUROPE IS COMING TO THAT REALIZATION, FINALLY. BUT IT MAY BE ENTIRELY TOO LATE. NOBODY WILL BELIEVE THEM AND THEY HAVE NO GOOD WILL LEFT. OR CREDIBILITY.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/11650240/Europe-has-no-choice-it-has-to-save-Greece.html


Even if Greece leaves the euro, Europe has to ensure the country's economy thrives. Otherwise it puts the entire EMU project at risk...Greece has been through the trauma of default and currency collapse before. It went horribly wrong. The sequence of events in the inter-war years have a haunting relevance today. In 1932, Greece turned to the League of Nations and British bankers in a last-ditch effort to defend the drachma under the Gold Standard as reserves drained away. The creditors dithered for three months but ultimately said “no”. Greece devalued and imposed a 70pc haircut on loans. Debt service costs fell by two-thirds at a stroke.

It seemed like a liberation at first. The economy was growing briskly again - at more than 5% - within a year. Then the sugar-rush faded. The credit system remained broken. Greek industry was too backward to exploit a cheaper exchange rate, unlike Japanese industry under Takahashi Korekiyo at the same time. The government never regained its credibility. There were four attempted coups d’etat, ending in the military dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas. Political parties were abolished. Trade union leaders were killed or imprisoned. Greece fell to Balkan fascism.

The cautionary episode is dissected in a seminal paper by the University of Athens. “The 1930s should perhaps be given more attention by those currently advocating the ‘Grexit scenario’,” it said. SEE PAPER AT LINK Nobody should underestimate the political hurricane that will follow if Europe proves incapable of holding monetary union together, and Greece spins out of control. The post-war order is already under existential threat from a revanchiste Russia. State authority has collapsed along an arc of slaughter through the Middle East and North Africa, while an authoritarian neo-Ottoman Turkey is slipping from of the Western camp.

To lose Greece in these circumstances - and to lose it badly - would be an earthquake. Yet that is exactly what Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras evoked in a blistering outburst in Le Monde, more or less threatening an economic and strategic rejection of the West if the creditor powers continue to make “absurd demands”. MORE

MR. GORBACHEV, TAKE DOWN THIS WALL....ST. RONNIE OF REAGAN...BYE-BYE, EURO

[Demeter]

52. Athens: Five minutes to midnight / Things here are never as they seem

https://medium.com/@edconwaysky/athens-five-minutes-to-midnight-28509196c403

...The real sense you get when you come here to Athens is one of chaos. Even inside the government, at the highest reaches, many ministers simply do not know what their colleagues are doing. No-one really knows what the plan is, when it comes to negotiations with the European institutions — and the more time you spend here, the more it seems that this is because there is no coherent plan.

Such a mercurial attitude towards economic policymaking can seem charming. However, in practice it has started to grind down on life here.

Since Syriza came into power almost six months ago, they have done almost literally nothing in terms of domestic economic policymaking. Of course this includes the big things: no major reforms; no crackdowns on corruption; no overhauls of taxes; no changes to the pensions or benefits system. But it also goes for the small, essential stuff as well: the transport ministry is no longer signing off new heavy goods driving licences; all investment cash to the regions has been stopped; some parts of the public sector have become so starved of cash that they cannot run: there have been no ferries to Ai Stratis — a small island in the northern Aegean — for the past month and a half.

Almost all policy decisions, major and minor, have been put off — the excuse being that nothing can be done until a deal is reached with the Europeans. This would be fine in a political system with a strong, impartial, efficient civil service like Britain. In Greece, where much of the civil service is politically-appointed and many apparently routine non-political decisions need to get ministerial approval, it is a disaster.

Worse still is the state of the country’s finances — both the public finances and the banking system. There was a rumour going around Athens today that on the final two days of last week, some €800m was withdrawn from Greek bank accounts. People comment about the fact that when you withdraw cash from the ATM you are more likely than not to get crisp new banknotes: the implication being that people simply aren’t putting the cash back into their bank accounts.

This anecdote is backed up by a little statistical nugget. In most countries the amount of cash people keep in the bank is far, far greater than the amount of cash floating around the economy (and when I say floating around, that could mean sitting in your pocket, in a shop cash register or under a mattress). In the UK there is about ten times as much money in instant access bank accounts and current accounts as there is cash circulating in the economy.

In Greece the multiple was always considerably lower: it’s a cash economy with a far bigger black market so by definition there is more money out there. But even so, before the crisis the amount of cash sitting in bank accounts tended to be about double the amount held in cash. But since the crisis this relationship has reversed. Today, there is now €4.1bn more held in cash than held in bank accounts....

https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/758/1*JT9f-zL2hTK63vreelOWPg.png

I'D LIKE TO SEE THEM TRY TO MAKE GREECE A CASHLESS SOCIETY....ONLY PEOPLE WITH NO SENSE OF PRESERVATION WOULD "BUY IN" TO SUCH SLAVERY

[Demeter]

54. HILSENRATH’S TAKE: A LETTER TO STINGY AMERICAN CONSUMERS WSJ

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/06/02/grand-central-a-letter-to-stingy-american-consumers/

Dear American Consumer,

This is The Wall Street Journal. We’re writing to ask if something is bothering you.

The sun shined in April and you didn’t spend much money. The Commerce Department here in Washington says your spending didn’t increase at all adjusted for inflation last month compared to March. You appear to have mostly stayed home and watched television in December, January and February as well. We thought you would be out of your winter doldrums by now, but we don’t see much evidence that this is the case.

You have been saving more too. You socked away 5.6% of your income in April after taxes, even more than in March. This saving is not like you. What’s up?

We know you experienced a terrible shock when Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and your employer responded by firing you. We know stock prices collapsed and that was shocking too. We also know you shouldn’t have taken out that large second mortgage during the housing boom to fix up your kitchen with granite countertops. You’ve been working very hard to pay off this debt and we admire your fortitude. But these shocks seem like a long time ago to us in a newsroom. Is that still what’s holding you back?

Do you know the American economy is counting on you? We can’t count on the rest of the world to spend money on our stuff. The rest of the world is in an even worse mood than you are. You should feel lucky you’re not a Greek consumer. And China, well they’re truly struggling there just to reach the very modest goal of 7% growth.

The Federal Reserve is counting on you too. Fed officials want to start raising the cost of your borrowing because they worry they’ve been giving you a free ride for too long with zero interest rates. We listen to Fed officials all of the time here at The Wall Street Journal, and they just can’t figure you out.

Please let us know the problem. You can reach us at any of the emails below. (Editor’s Note: We asked, you answered.)

Sincerely,

The Wall Street Journal’s Central Bank Team

-By Jon Hilsenrath

[Hotler]

63. A number of readers replied and were not happy with the tone of the article.

Called the reporter out of touch and an elitist. The bankers, the goons on Wall St. and this administration just do not get it. But hey have theirs and to hell with the rest of us.

Now get back to work eveybody and stop fucking off. I'm not paying you to stand around and moan and groan about your problems, I'm paying you jack shit to make me Mo money.

[Demeter]

56. Paulson’s Puerto Rico Paradise Lures Rich Fleeing Taxes

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-26/paulson-s-puerto-rico-paradise-lures-rich-fleeing-taxes

...At the bar, a 28-year-old hedge fund trader -- the type of person who posts his SAT results on his LinkedIn page -- is ranting about the tax code. He’s obsessed with it, complaining that the U.S. is the only major country taxing citizens on their worldwide income, no matter where they reside. That’s why he moved here. TO PUERTO RICO Struggling to emerge from an almost decade-long economic slump, the Puerto Rican government signed a law in early 2012 that creates a tax haven for U.S. citizens. If they live on the island for at least 183 days a year, they pay minimal or no taxes, and unlike Singapore or Bermuda, Americans don’t have to turn in their passports. About 200 traders, private-equity moguls and entrepreneurs have already moved or committed to moving, according to Puerto Rico’s Department of Economic Development and Commerce, and billionaire John Paulson is spearheading a drive to entice others to join them...

Puerto Rico’s low-tax welcome mat comes as some of the wealthiest Americans grow more anxious about tax increases and rhetoric directed at the rich. Tax bills have risen after a 10-year break under President George W. Bush that disproportionately favored the rich. The 2008 global financial crisis and the recession that followed also unleashed movements such as Occupy Wall Street that focused attention on growing inequality and the responsibility of large financial institutions in helping to create the mess...

“I’m worried about the shifting mentality among the electorate, people blaming problems on the rich, on business and on capitalism,” says Peter Schiff, a onetime candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut and a former economic adviser to libertarian presidential hopeful Ron Paul. “I’m afraid that the tax rates that are already high will get higher in the years ahead,” maybe up to 60 percent or 70 percent, he adds...

Under Puerto Rico’s new rules, an individual who moves to the island pays no local or federal capital-gains tax -- capital gains are charged based on your tax home rather than where you earn them -- and no local taxes on dividend or interest income for 20 years. Even someone working for a mainland company who is a resident of the island would be exempt from paying U.S. federal taxes on his salary. Moving to the island won’t kill all taxes: U.S. citizens still have to pay federal taxes on dividend or interest income from stateside companies. But the savings can be extraordinary, especially given the effects of compounding, says Alex Daley, chief technology investment strategist at Casey Research...Say you put $100,000 in a 5 percent certificate of deposit that compounds annually and reinvest the proceeds every year. If you lived in Puerto Rico, you’d earn $165,000 in interest over two decades, Daley calculates. If you lived in California, your state and federal taxes could reduce that to as little as $64,000.

Paulson, who made $15 billion for himself and his investors betting against U.S. mortgages during the financial crisis, helped start the wave of transplants last year, when he considered moving to the island. Paulson, 58, cited excessive media attention as his reason for staying put in the States. The press reports had an unintended consequence, though: Word quickly spread to other wealthy individuals that Puerto Rico wanted them...Puerto Ricans were given U.S. citizenship in 1917, meaning they can easily leave the island for better jobs stateside. And they have. A net 280,000 engineers, doctors and other citizens emigrated from 2005 to 2012, according to the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics. The government is hoping the campaign to lure the rich from the mainland will bring more jobs to the island and raise GDP.

“Our plan is not just about keeping government spending in line, but it is about generating wealth in Puerto Rico -- jobs, investment and trade,” García Padilla said at the April conference. The government estimates that the two tax laws could create 90,000 jobs and add $7 billion to the economy by 2016...

[Demeter]

58. The Lawsuit Machine Going After Student Debtors

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-04/the-student-debt-collection-mess

“This is robosigning 2.0”

In 2003, Adam Beverly borrowed $30,000 from Bank One, now owned by JPMorgan Chase, to help cover the cost of attending Ohio State University. He never graduated. Three years later he found himself being sued by National Collegiate Student Loan Trust, which claimed he owed more than $45,000 with interest and penalties...Beverly’s monthly payments jumped to more than $600 from about $120, says Greg Reichenbach, his lawyer. Beverly tried to discuss the payment but was bounced back and forth between First Marblehead and National Collegiate, Reichenbach says. He stopped making payments in 2009. In 2012, National Collegiate filed two lawsuits against Beverly in Ohio state court demanding repayment of the loans. Beverly says he initially turned for help with the lawsuit to a credit repair service, which told him it would take care of the problem. When Beverly didn’t contest the suits, National Collegiate won default judgments. “The cases that get filed in court for debt collection, a lot of times they are not for huge amounts, and so consumers may not show up to defend them”. The suits didn’t assert that National Collegiate owned the loans, and after Beverly appealed, National Collegiate was unable to produce any documents indicating it owned them... After a two-year court struggle, Beverly prevailed. In September a panel of Ohio judges said the collector had no evidence that it owned the debt and vacated the judgment.

Student loans have eclipsed credit cards to become the second-largest source of outstanding debt in the U.S., after mortgages. Since 2007 the federal student loan balance has more than doubled, to almost $1.2 trillion from $516 billion. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that students, former students, and their parents owe an additional $150 billion in loans from banks and other private lenders.

With defaults climbing, lenders have turned to the courts to collect. Many of their suits are marred by missing documents and procedural errors, say consumer advocates and lawyers defending debtors. “Our office is seeing an uptick in abusive loan debt-collection tactics that leave no room for relief,” wrote Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey in an e-mail. The paperwork problems echo the “robosigning” scandals that followed the housing bust. Like mortgages, student loans were bundled into packages and sold to investors. “This is robosigning 2.0 with student loans,” says Robyn Smith, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. “You have securitized loans in these large pools; you have the sloppy record keeping,” as in the mortgage crisis.

The National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts are investment vehicles created by a Boston company called First Marblehead that concentrates on education lending. From 1996 through 2007, First Marblehead bought student loans from lenders including Bank of America, JPMorgan, and a bank now owned by Citizens Bank. It transferred batches of loans to trusts it created—more than two dozen in all. The trusts sold bonds backed by the loans. The trusts are responsible for collecting loan payments from borrowers and paying out interest to bondholders. In 2013 bond rater Moody’s Investors Service said it expected losses to reach as high as 50 percent in 15 National Collegiate trusts it examined.National Collegiate trusts have been among the most active in suing borrowers, consumer advocates say. Since 2011, National Collegiate has filed more than 1,900 civil cases in Missouri, or an average of more than one lawsuit a day. The company has filed a total of more than 2,100 suits in Connecticut, Indiana, Arizona, and Oklahoma, according to state legal databases. Representatives for National Collegiate didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. “We don’t comment on the trusts,” First Marblehead Chief Financial Officer Alan Breitman says.

Student debtors are challenging National Collegiate in court, and judges in Ohio, Florida, and Kentucky have found that the trusts haven’t proved they own the debt. In California, 13 people are seeking class-action status for a suit against National Collegiate for suing them to collect on student loans without identifying the original lender—which violates California debt-collection law. National Collegiate has denied the allegations in court filings...

“The whole basis for the lawsuit is that they are entitled to enforce this alleged debt, and they don’t even claim that they were assigned the debt, let alone prove it,” says Reichenbach, who handled Beverly’s appeal. The same missing or incomplete records of loan transfers sank National Collegiate suits in Kentucky and Florida and has pushed the company to back away from lawsuits in New Hampshire, California, and Pennsylvania, say lawyers representing student borrowers. Lenders and their representatives are overwhelming the courts with thin and sometimes inaccurate lawsuits, says Christopher Koegel, an assistant director at the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Often, as in Beverly’s case, there’s no trial. “The cases that get filed in court for debt collection, a lot of times they are not for huge amounts, and so consumers may not show up to defend them,” Koegel says. When borrowers don’t contest debt-collection lawsuits, judges automatically rule in favor of the creditor. Once a lender gets a judgment, it can begin garnishing a debtor’s wages and seizing his personal property. “It may be burdening consumers with judgments over their head for years and years,” Koegel says.

Pablo Ramirez learned the benefits of fighting back. Ramirez took out a $30,000 loan to pay for a bachelor’s degree from Westwood College in 2006. When it came time to start paying off the debt, he says, the payments were more than he could afford. On a November morning in 2014, he went to his mailbox and pulled out a court notice that a judge had issued a judgment against him. He now owed $50,000 to National Collegiate. “I was in shock,” Ramirez says, because he hadn’t known he was being sued.

Ramirez contested the ruling. National Collegiate said it gave Ramirez notice of the lawsuit, but a Texas county court judge set aside the judgment. “They didn’t have any facts right,” Ramirez says. “It seemed like they were trying to throw anything against the wall to see if it stuck.”

The bottom line: National Collegiate trusts have filed more than 4,000 lawsuits in five states seeking to collect on student loans.

[Demeter]

60. Time for some Real World interaction, I guess

Carry on, fellow Weekenders! Be seeing you!

[Demeter]

62. and get some sleep!

[Hotler]

61. Miles Davis "Flamenco Sketches"

A very nice tune to listen to. It is not as fast paced as Flamenco dance. I think Miles Davis and Bill Evans called it Flamenco because of the cord changes similar to the cord changes used in triditional Flamenco music.
Please enjoy.

Flamenco Sketches" is a jazz composition written by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans. It is the fifth track on Davis's 1959 album Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz record of all time, and an innovative experiment in modal jazz. The track features Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans.

The piece has no written melody, but is rather defined by a set of chord changes that are improvised over using various modes. Each musician separately chose the number of bars for each of the modal passages in his solo. Davis gets credit for the song form, but Evans is credited with the opening 4-bar vamp over Cmaj7 and G9sus4, which is the opening theme to his ballad improvisation "Peace Piece". Because of the presence of this vamp, "Flamenco Sketches" is usually played as a ballad.

[Hotler]

65. Okay, this video is funny.

The best line is "what ever Chuck Todd calls that thing crawling around his mouth.".

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018767783

[Demeter]

68. Ukrainians Dispossessed -- Americans are next By Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42050.htm


Over the last 15 months Ukrainians have paid for Washington’s overthrow of their elected government in deaths, dismemberment of their country, and broken economic and political relationships with Russia that cost Ukraine its subsidized energy.

Now Ukrainians are losing their pensions and traditional support payments. The Ukrainian population is headed for the graveyard...On June 1 the TASS news agency reported that Ukraine has stopped payments to pensioners, World War II veterans, people with disabilities, and victims of Chernobyl. According to the report, Kiev has also “eliminated transport, healthcare, utilities and financial benefits for former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps and recipients of some Soviet-era orders and titles. Compensations to families with children living in the areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident will be no longer paid either. Ukraine’s parliamentary opposition believes that the Prosecutor General’s Office should launch an investigation against Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk who actively promoted the law on the abolition of privileges.” Notice that this is a yank of the blanket from under the elderly in Ukraine. “Useless eaters,” they are assigned to the trash can.

How do the deceived Maiden student protesters feel now that they are culpable in the destruction of their grandparents’ support systems? Do these gullible fools still believe in the Washington-orchestrated Maiden Revolution? The crimes in which these stupid students are complicit are horrific.

Yatsenyuk, or Yats as Victoria Nuland calls him, is the Washington stooge that the US State Department selected to run the puppet government established by Washington. Yats sounds like a right-wing Republican when he refers to pensions, compensations, and social services as “privileges.” This is the Republican view of Social Security and Medicare, programs paid for by the payroll tax over the working lives of Americans. The Republicans stole the payroll revenues and spent them on their wars that enrich Wall Street and the military/security complex, and now blame “welfare handouts” for America’s fiscal plight.

Is Monsanto’s right to turn Ukraine into GMO food production a privilege? ls VP Biden’s son’s right to destroy Ukraine’s surface and underground water in fracking operations a privilege? Are the external costs imposed on Ukrainians by these looting activities a privilege? Of course not! These are not privileges. This is the operation of free market economics creating the greatest good for the greatest number. (As many Americans will not realize that I am engaging in satire, I would like to affirm that I am.)

**********************************************************

The same looting is underway in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the United States. In Great Britain everything achieved by the Labour Party over many decades has been taken away, and not only by the Conservatives but by Labour leader Tony Blair himself. Tony Blair sold out his constituents for money and is now among the One Percent. Bill Clinton did the same thing. Bill and Hillary were able to spend $3 million on their daughter’s wedding, almost a world record, dwarfing many Hollywood weddings. Obama is not even out of office and is already rich. America’s faithful vassals–Merkel, Hollande, and Cameron–can look forward to equal riches.

Karl Marx was correct when he said that money corrupts all. Everything becomes a commodity that is bought and sold for money. When money becomes the measure of a person, people have become corrupted. And that is the plight of the Western world. Where in the West is your wealth, small or large, safe? Nowhere. Washington has destroyed financial privacy everywhere in the West. Washington even forced Switzerland to violate its own laws in order to comply with Washington’s insistence on the absence of any financial privacy. For decades Americans with foreign bank accounts have been required to report them on their income tax returns. Now if an American owns a gold coin in a vault overseas, this must be reported to Washington. Once Washington knows the location of your assets, the assets can be confiscated at will. Washington only has to make some declaration or accusation or the other, and your wealth is gone.

As Washington has run the printing presses hard in order to serve a handful of banks that control the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve, unless China and Russia acquiesce to becoming Washington’s vassals, at some point the dollar’s value is going to slide downward. When that happens, the Federal Reserve cannot continue to create new money to meet Washington’s needs. Where will the money come from? It will come from Americans’ pensions. Pensions accumulate tax free, and this accumulation will be confiscated in whole or part to make up for the failure to tax, another “privilege.” That confiscation works that year. But what happens the next year when the dollar is reeling on foreign exchange markets from over-supply? The answer is that another chunk of American pensions, and I am speaking of private pensions, will be confiscated “in order to stabilize the financial system.” Social Security will be long gone by this time.

Alicia Munnel, who was my replacement as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Clinton regime, advocated many years ago a confiscation of private pensions, including your IRAs and 401Ks, in order to compensate the US government for their non-taxed status. Alicia has a sinecure at an Eastern university where she continues to advocate against your pension. The joint attack by Clinton Democrats on private pensions and by Conservative Republicans on public pensions means that no American can look forward to having a pension. Americans are only one presidential election away from the loss of their pensions, and it doesn’t matter who they vote for. Economic security is a thing of the past. Security was a product of the US being the only extant economy following World War II. In those days corporations believed, as did Washington, that companies had obligations not only to shareholders but to employees, customers, and the communities in which they were located. This meant prosperity for all, not merely, as is the case today, for corporate management and shareholders.

************************************************

Apologists for exploitation claim that the rich are richer because they are smarter. But the stupidity of the rich is everywhere visible. The greedy fools have destroyed their domestic US market. Really, how stupid can you be? How do Americans buy when they are forced by offshoring out of well paid manufacturing and software engineering jobs into being waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks and part-time Walmart workers in order that corporate bottom lines improve? Who buys the stuff that sustains the profits? Not Americans who no longer have the incomes to do so.

The belief spread by Wall Street and “shareholder advocates” that corporations only have responsibility to their owners and managers has destroyed the American economy.
By locating production offshore, corporations have destroyed the incomes that supported the American consumer market. For example, the incomes associated with the production of Apple computers, I-Pads, and I-Phones are in China. Apple’s American customers do not have the incomes associated with the production of the products that Apple markets to them.

Americans are already dispossessed of their livelihoods and careers and their pensions are next. Wherever we look, the fate of populations under Western influence are the same. The Ukrainians are exploited, the Greeks, the British, the Americans. Wherever the West has an imprint, the populations are exploited. Exploitation of the many for the few is the Hallmark of the West, a decrepit, corrupt, and collapsing entity.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

[MattSh]

70. “West uses capital outflow as pressure tactics on BRICS”- $3.5 trillion over 10 years

Russian national security advisor Nikolai Patrushev has alleged that Western countries have used capital outflows from BRICS countries as a pressure tactic.

India and Brazil, among the BRICS countries, are most vulnerable to capital outflows as they relies heavily on external funding.

Western countries have pulled out more than $3.5 trillion over the last 10 years and $1.5 trillion from BRICS countries over the last three years as a mechanism to pressure the group, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said Tuesday.

“International financial institutions are being used by the West more and more often as an instrument of pressure. Over the last 10 years, the total capital outflow from the BRICS economies has reached $3.5 trillion, and more than half of that total left over the last three years,” Patrushev said during a BRICS security meeting in Moscow.

Patrushev added “the creation of BRICS development bank is an important step in ensuring economic security of the BRICS countries.”

India’s Central Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan, had also said earlier that India needs to build a “bullet-proof national balance sheet” to deal with the fallout on the economy from outflow of capital.

Complete story at - http://thebricspost.com/west-uses-capital-outflow-as-pressure-tactics-on-brics-russia/

[Demeter]

71. The Old "Water Sloshing in the Bath Tub" Trick

Which is why nations need some capital barriers at the borders. And rules about buying land by foreigners and foreign corporations. In fact, I'd insist that corporations can only rent land, never own it. Only home-grown industry should be eligible for special tax treatment, and only for limited reasons and times.

It is far better to do without the Hot Money to begin with, than to be left crying in your beer when it leaves.

If you want capital, tax the Obscenely Wealthy, put their hoards of cash to work building public infrastructure and public education and public health. If you need more, issue long-term bonds so that Capital must make a lengthy visit. And then raise enough tax to pay for the bonds when they come due.

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether your government is fascist, "democratic" or monarchical, financial discipline is hard to come by, and if achieved, even harder to hold in place. And I don't mean the "punish the poor" kind of discipline. Too many greedy people want to game the system and steal the cash, one way or another, the very definition of corruption...

[Demeter]

76. ‘Self-appointed advocate of new Ukraine’: Soros emails leaked by anti-Kiev hackers

http://rt.com/news/264037-soros-ukraine-poroshenko-leak/

ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION

POROSHENKO---SOROS----HILLARY'S VOTER REGISTRATION CAMPAIGN

[MattSh]

72. Definitely a relative thread here on DU...

As hard to fathom as that might be!


Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026792668

[Demeter]

73. Something for all the Dicks out there

[Demeter]

74. Gaius Publius: Fast Track Will Also Apply to TISA

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/gaius-publius-fast-track-will-also-apply-to-tisa.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29


Yves here. I know it’s a weekend, but on Monday, I hope you will remember to find time to call your Representative to oppose Fast Track. As reader Kokuanani stressed earlier, this is a numbers game. As he stated:

The staff members reading e-mails and answering the phones are only reporting the volume of incoming communication and which “side” it supports. Your fabulous essay on the evils of the TPP and Fast Track will never reach the voting member. So don’t waste your time writing it.

Pick one or two arguments [e.g., “secrecy”] and make them. Briefly. Like a sentence or two. Spend the rest of your time getting friends and family to contact Senate offices. The e-mail forms [links provided by Yves] make this ridiculously easy. All you need is a zip code showing you’re in the state. You can walk your pals through the process.

I don’t know how effective contacting the DNC would be, but it can’t hurt, and can alert them that they can’t rely on you for fund-raising or votes.

Here is page for contact information for Representatives. http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Kokuanani added last week:

Don’t forget the “district office” in your list of places/ways to contact. NC has provided a handy list of addresses to write or e-mail the member in Washington, but if you look in the phone book, [under “US Government”], you should be able to find your member’s local office. Perhaps they’re lonely for constituent contact; why not drop by & see….

Again, your goal is not to “convince” the Member or his/her staff re how terrible TPP is. It’s to let them know that YOU know how horrid it is, that you’ll be watching their vote, and that you’re telling all your family, friends and neighbors about this, and they’ll be watching too. Congress-folks fear the awareness and activity of their constituents.

By Gaius Publius, a professional writer living on the West Coast of the United States and frequent contributor to DownWithTyranny, digby, Truthout, Americablog, and Naked Capitalism. Follow him on Twitter @Gaius_Publius, Tumblr and Facebook. This piece first appeared at Down With Tyranny.

Fast Track is not just a path to TPP … it’s evil all on its own. There’s now another leaked “trade” deal, called TISA, and Fast Track will “fast-track” that one too. Want your municipal water service privatized? How about your government postal service? Read on. Most of the coverage of the Fast Track bill (formally called “Trade Promotion Authority” or TPA) moving through Congress is about how it will “grease the skids” for passage of TPP, the “next NAFTA” trade deal with 11 other Pacific rim countries. But as we pointed out here, TPA will grease the skids for anything the President sends to Congress as a “trade” bill — anything.

One of the “trade” deals being negotiated now, which only the wonks have heard about, is called TISA, or Trade In Services Agreement. Fast Track legislation, if approved, will grease the TISA skids as well. Why do you care? Because

(a) TISA is also being negotiated in secret, like TPP;
(b) TISA chapters have been recently leaked by Wikileaks; and
(c) what’s revealed in those chapters should have Congress shutting the door on Fast Track faster and tighter than you’d shut the door on an invading army of rats headed for your apartment.

Congress won’t shut that door on its own — the rats in this metaphor have bought most of its members — but it should. So it falls to us to force them. Stop Fast Track and you stop all these “trade” deals. (Joseph Stiglitz will explain below why I keep putting “trade” in quotes.)What’s TISA? It’s worse than TPP. As you read the following, keep the word “services” in mind. TISA protects the right of big money players to make a profit from “services,” any and all of them.

The Wikileaks Treasure Trove of TISA Documents

First, from the Wikileaks press release:

WikiLeaks releases today 17 secret documents from the ongoing TISA (Trade In Services Agreement) negotiations which cover the United States, the European Union and 23 other countries including Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Taiwan & Israel — which together comprise two-thirds of global GDP. “Services” now account for nearly 80 per cent of the US and EU economies and even in developing countries like Pakistan account for 53 per cent of the economy. While the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become well known in recent months in the United States, the TISA is the larger component of the strategic TPP-TISA-TTIP ‘T-treaty trinity’. All parts of the trinity notably exclude the ‘BRICS’ countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

The release coincides with TISA meetings at the ministerial level at the OECD in Paris today (3–5 June). The ‘T-treaty trinity’ of TPP-TISA-TTIP is also under consideration for collective ‘Fast-Track’ authority in Congress this month.

Note the breadth of the nations involved (highlighted above), the scale of economic activity covered — in the case of the U.S and E.U., 80% of economic activity — and the fact that TISA, like TPP, will be fast-tracked if Fast Track passes.

Click here to download or read the documents themselves. You’ll notice, if you do, that the drafts are marked up with the positions of the negotiators, some of whom propose or agree with provisions, some of whom oppose them. Nowhere in these documents, however, are concerns of citizens addressed. These are agreements negotiated on behalf of corporations by governments to divide up the ways that money will be made. As noted, Fast Track will make the final agreements almost impossible to reject by the U.S. Congress. For this reason alone, Fast Track is evil all on its own. Let’s look at some of the provisions of TISA.

TISA Will Make It Almost Impossible for Governments to Regulate Services

The problem with TISA? One is that it will make regulation of service activity — including financial services — almost impossible. Michael McAuliff at Huffington Post:

Wikileaks Drops Another Damning Trove Of Secret Trade Deal Documents

The latest trove of secret trade documents released by Wikileaks is offering opponents of the massive deals currently being crafted by the Obama administration more fodder to show that such agreements can impact United States laws and regulations.

The latest leak purports to include 17 documents from negotiations on the Trade In Services Agreement, a blandly named trade deal that would cover the United States, the European Union and more than 20 other countries. More than 80 percent of the United States economy is in service sectors.

According to the Wikileaks release, TISA, as the deal is known, would take a major step towards deregulating financial industries, and could affect everything from local maritime and air traffic rules to domestic regulations on almost anything if an internationally traded service is involved.

Leaked TISA documents include chapters on:

Air transport services
Competitive delivery services
Domestic regulations
Electronic commerce
International maritime transport services
Movement of natural persons
Professional services
Telecommunications services
Financial services
Transparency

and I’m not sure that’s the complete set. It’s just what we have in this release.

“Trade” Agreements, Regulations and Profit

The goal of all of these “treaties” is to protect the only thing being negotiated — the right of an investor or corporation to maximize profit from any country it wishes to operate in. I’ve always stated the concept this way:

In its simplest terms, “free trade” means one thing only — the ability of people with capital to move that capital freely, anywhere in the world, seeking the highest profit. It’s been said of Bush II, for example, that “when Bush talks of ‘freedom’, he doesn’t mean human freedom, he means freedom to move money.”

At its heart, free trade doesn’t mean the ability to trade freely per se; that’s just a byproduct. It means the ability to invest freely without governmental constraint. Free trade is why factories in China have American investors and partners — because you can’t bring down manufacturing wages in Michigan and Alabama if you can’t set up slave factories somewhere else and get your government to make that capital move cost-free, or even tax-incentivized, out of your supposed home country and into a place ripe for predation.

(By the way, “treaty” is hardly the word for these agreements, since nations are never negotiating them on behalf of their citizens. Nations are negotiating them on behalf of the corporations and investors who pull their strings. That’s why citizens can’t see them until they’re signed, while corporate lobbyists have seats at the negotiating table.)

Here’s Joseph Stiglitz on how and why these agreements are an attack on regulation:

On the Wrong Side of Globalization

… In general, trade deals today are markedly different from those made in the decades following World War II, when negotiations focused on lowering tariffs. As tariffs came down on all sides, trade expanded, and each country could develop the sectors in which it had strengths and as a result, standards of living would rise. Some jobs would be lost, but new jobs would be created.

Today, the purpose of trade agreements is different. Tariffs around the world are already low. The focus has shifted to “nontariff barriers,” and the most important of these — for the corporate interests pushing agreements — are regulations. Huge multinational corporations complain that inconsistent regulations make business costly. But most of the regulations, even if
they are imperfect, are there for a reason: to protect workers, consumers, the economy and the environment.

What’s more, those regulations were often put in place by governments responding to the democratic demands of their citizens. Trade agreements’ new boosters euphemistically claim that they are simply after regulatory harmonization, a clean-sounding phrase that implies an innocent plan to promote efficiency. One could, of course, get regulatory harmonization by strengthening regulations to the highest standards everywhere. But when corporations call for harmonization, what they really mean is a race to the bottom.

A race to the bottom of what? The least regulation — governmental interference in profit-seeking — that they can get away with. These deals really are just about the money. Stiglitz continues:

When agreements like the TPP govern international trade — when every country has agreed to similarly minimal regulations — multinational corporations can return to the practices that were common before the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts became law (in 1970 and 1972, respectively) and before the latest financial crisis hit. Corporations everywhere may well agree that getting rid of regulations would be good for corporate profits. Trade negotiators might be persuaded that these trade agreements would be good for trade and corporate profits. But there would be some big losers — namely, the rest of us.

These high stakes are why it is especially risky to let trade negotiations proceed in secret. All over the world, trade ministries are captured by corporate and financial interests. And when negotiations are secret, there is no way that the democratic process can exert the checks and balances required to put limits on the negative effects of these agreements.

Why are these agreements always negotiated in secret these days? Because they’re so toxic. TISA is yet another, perhaps the worst one. And forced deregulation may not be its worst aspect. Here’s another reason to regard TISA with suspicion — forced privatization of government-supplied services.

TISA Could Force Privatization of Government Services, Like Water

Privatizing government services is a major goal of the “neo-liberal project” — something always negotiated, for example, by the enlightened elites at the IMF and World Bank before they bail out a country with too much debt, like Greece. Here’s the Hellenic Shipping News, quoting a WSJ article:

Greece will proceed with the privatization of the country’s main port of Piraeus, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis plans to tell his eurozone counterparts at a meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, backtracking on previous statements from the new leftist government that had pledged to freeze the deal, senior Greek government officials said.

The U-turn comes as Greece’s new leftist, Syriza-led coalition government scrambles to reach a financing deal with international creditors that will keep the country from running out of cash in coming weeks and potentially defaulting on its debts. Since being voted into power just over two weeks ago, the new government has set a collision course with its European creditors by promising to roll back many of the austerity measures and reforms—such as privatizations—that Greece has undertaken in the past five years to secure billions of euros in aid.

I said “neo-liberal project” for a reason. This is not the crazy right wing; these privatization projects are undertaken by people like Rahm Emanuel, backed by people like ex-Wall Street banker William Daley — both of whom are Clinton-Obama–associated Democrats. Parking control is a government service. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel sold that to “investors,” many of them foreign. Rahm Emanuel is a “liberal,” or more accurately, a classic neo-liberal. The New Democrat wing of the Democratic Party is also its “New Liberal” (aka neo-liberal) wing. Its members serve Money, have from DLC days onward, just like Republicans do, and privatizing services is a great way to make even more money for people who love only money. It’s why the government Postal Service, for example, is being taken apart by both parties.

In Canada they’re worried that TISA will force water privatization:

Public Services International has sounded the alarm about [TISA] negotiations in its new report, TISA Versus Public Services: The trade in services agreement and the corporate agenda.

Mitch Jones at Food and Water Watch explains, “Negotiations for TISA began in 2012 when a group of 20 World Trade Organization (WTO) members formed the ‘Really Good Friends of Services’ (no, I’m not making that up). These Really Good Friends decided to negotiate a new deal outside of the normal WTO framework.”

He highlights, “Under TISA, privatization of local water systems would be made easier, and fights against privatization would be made harder.”

The report says, “Remunicipalization is significant because it demonstrates that past decisions are not irreversible. …”

“Decisions are not reversible” is its own topic. David Dayen discussed that a bit in this piece; look for references to “standstill” clauses.

The Road to “Corporate Domination”

Dayen is rarely given to exaggerated prose, yet under a headline referring to TISA as “The Scariest Trade Deal Nobody’s Talking About,” even he is forced to write:

You begin to sound like the guy hanging out in front of the local food co-op passing around leaflets about One World Government when you talk about TiSA, but it really would clear the way for further corporate domination over sovereign countries and their citizens.

And “corporate domination” can only mean domination by the very very wealthy, who use corporate power to feed off the rest of us — my own contribution to exaggerated prose.

Neo-liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs, quoted by ex-federal regulator Bill Black here, agrees, calling these same people and their moral environment “bluntly … pathological”:

I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. I’m going to put it very bluntly. I regard the moral environment as pathological. And I’m talking about the human interactions that I have. I’ve not seen anything like this, not felt it so palpably. These people are out to make billions of dollars and nothing should stop them from that. They have no responsibility to pay taxes. They have no responsibility to their clients. They have no responsibility to people, counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control, you know, in a quite literal sense. And they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent, and they have a docile president, a docile White House, and a docile regulatory system that absolutely can’t find its voice. It’s terrified of these companies.

That’s his contribution to exaggerated prose. Sachs knows his way around the neo-liberal street, having worked it himself. For example, according to Wikipedia, as an adviser to the Polish government “Sachs and IMF economist David Lipton advised the rapid conversion of all property and assets from public to private ownership.” It’s not like he’s not a fan of the project; it’s that he’s now appalled by the people who benefit from it. International agreements like TISA are important tools in an expanded power grab by the hyper-wealthy people who buy and benefit from our elections, and government negotiators are their agents. The only disagreements at the negotiating table involve which country’s predator (Nestlé, say) gets to eat which other country’s prey (water rights in Oregon, for example). “Trade” agreements empower the predators under color of law.

Fast Track Is Evil All On Its Own

Your bottom line — if Fast Track passes, anything that any President can present to Congress as a “trade deal,” for the next three to six years, will almost certainly pass. Fast Track forces the legislative calendar (no delays), forbids filibusters and amendments, and allows just up-or-down votes. TPP, TPIP (a trans-Atlantic agreement also called TAFTA) and TISA all fall under the “Fast Track” umbrella. But I guarantee, if Fast Track passes, there will be more deals like these. Fast Track is a golden opportunity, and those who love gold, or serve those who do — that’s you, Nancy Pelosi — will put it to very good use.

[Demeter]

75. I Have Got to Ask: Who Is the Evil Genius Behind All These Horrible Legislative Treaty Proposals?

and can we have a Nuremberg Trial for them?

[Demeter]

77. Zurich Is Stained: FIFA and the Sports Crime of the Century

http://grantland.com/the-triangle/zurich-is-stained-fifa-and-the-sports-crime-of-the-century/

It’s impossible to overstate the historic nature of what happened last week in Zurich and New York. It is unprecedented in the history of organized sports. What is alleged is that an entire international sport was organized and operated as a criminal conspiracy. This isn’t the Black Sox. This isn’t tennis players throwing matches or basketball players shaving points. This isn’t one owner fudging his taxes, or one team being connected to a drug cartel. It is incorrect to refer to FIFA as being “fraught” with corruption or “riddled” with crime. FIFA is itself a corrupt act. FIFA is itself the crime. This is a staggering revelation....

I PRETTY MUCH CONSIDER ALL ORGANIZED SPECTATOR SPORTS AS CRIMES OF CORRUPTION--OR THEATER. I'M NOT MUCH OF A FAN.


...So much of our corruption is in plain sight these days. The events of the last decade lead invariably to the conclusion that in every booth on the midway every wheel is conspicuously rigged. For example, in the wake of the raids in New York and Zurich, several banks in the United Kingdom began reviews to see if they’d been used to put FIFA’s dirty money through the spin cycle. One of those banks was HSBC. In 2012, HSBC paid almost $2 billion to settle charges that it had laundered money for a number of international criminal enterprises. While the alleged crimes of FIFA are unprecedented in the context of the sports-entertainment industry, they are sadly typical of the way that international systems of corporate commerce and high finance operate.

Which opens up another uncomfortable truth revealed by the FIFA indictments. There are very respectable accessories to the crime. The Clinton Foundation, for example, took contributions from FIFA. Anyone who did business with this gang — and, especially, anyone who continues to do business with FIFA — must surely realize that they are complicit in the actions of that body. There is a kind of universal string theory of elite corruption out there now. Hands in a circle, all around the world, and all the palms are greased.

Qatar, of course, represents a wide, clear window into the criminal depravity spawned by the corruption of soccer’s governing body and its corporate partners. Reports insist that the bidding process was crooked, which should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody at this point. But what has ensued since Qatar’s bid was accepted should, as the late Molly Ivins once put it, be enough to gag a maggot. Migrant laborers are held in virtual slavery to build the new venues in the tiny petro-state. One labor watchdog group estimates that 4,000 of these workers will die before all the stadia are built. Any sponsor associated with FIFA is engaging in accessorial conduct in regard to any of those deaths...

NOPE, STILL A BIG YAWNER. AFTER ALL, WE ARE GOING TO INSTITUTIONALIZE SLAVERY (AGAIN) WITH THE TTP ALL AROUND THE GLOBE

...There is no telling where this all will lead. The other organizing bodies of soccer are running for cover. The attorney general of the United States seems very serious about this case, and her federal prosecutors are so enthusiastic that they were cracking jokes at the press conference at which the indictments were announced. Angry provincials are rising in protest. But, significantly, the corporate partners are tippy-toeing around the swamp. Recent history tells us that expecting a strong stand on ethical behavior — which, in this case, would mean a strong stand against slave labor — is not something most major corporations remember how to do. For several decades, the same grab-it-all frenzy that overcame FIFA was encouraged in almost every aspect of the world economy and cheered on by many of the people who were on the business end of it when the whole thing came crashing down. All of the institutions that run our major sports were no exceptions to this rule. FIFA was only the most garish example. Nobody thinks they’re doing anything wrong as the whole world turns into Doha, and the whole world goes up for sale.

WHY WOULD THE CLINTONS TAKE MONEY FROM FIFA?

WHY NOT? IT'S ALL FUNGIBLE.

OF COURSE THE NEW ATTORNEY GENERAL IS HAPPY....NO US-BASED CORPORATIONS ARE NAMED (AS YET) AND IF HILLARY GETS TARNISHED, THAT'S NOT THE AG'S PROBLEM (AND I'M SURE OBAMA DOESN'T MIND IN THE LEAST).

[Demeter]

78. Bernie Sanders Goes off on Charles Koch (2013)

[Hotler]

79. :( ......... :(

Foxes or coyotes got the cat last night.
His name was Stubs because he was part Manx and had no tail. I took him about 2-yrs ago when the people next door moved and just left him out in the dead of winter. He was a very nice and very friendly cat to everyone, my friends and the neighbors. He played a tad rough sometimes and would leave me with a wound or two, but all and all a person could have done worse for a fur friend. He was an inside/outside cat and that is what he liked best. I know I should have made him an all inside cat, but........he was head strong and would bother me till I let him out. He loved rolling in the dirt. I found him this morning at the end of the alley. I buried him in the backyard. I sure am going to miss him. I haven't grieved this hard since my mom passed.

[Demeter]

80. Deepest condolences, Hotler

I'm still mourning my Ebony, died just before Election Day--cancer of the jaw. Can't bring myself to adopt another, just yet. The Kid's cat is a loner, and picked on Ebony, who was only 5 lbs. Don't want to subject that kind of room mate on another kitty.

[Demeter]

81. I'm getting lazy or something

I'll see you all on SMW!

Got to do some weeding and stuff. Before it's July and too late.

[DemReadingDU]

83. So sorry about your cat

Pets are part of our family too, and so sad when they are no longer with us.

[kickysnana]

84. So sorry. :-(