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Post by jacquelope on Oct 23, 2011 19:33:21 GMT -6
Then what'll happen? How will the Plutocracy maintain power in that kind of situation? It sounds to me like that means they won't be able to pay the troops to defend them.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 22, 2011 22:16:09 GMT -6
Seriously, guys, what is the likelihood that the Plutocrats will let even $60 TRILLION in risk explode in the world's faces? The sheer number of people jumping off of bridges as a result of that would reshape rivers and alter coastlines.
Pardon my excessive metaphors here but it is obvious to me that the financial arch mages are out there spewing incantations like crazy to prevent this supervolcanic financial blowup from happening. This will go on in an endless cycle of hiding the losses, slow venting... how likely is it that this will all come out in some huge financially catastrophic event? 50% chance, tops, in my opinion.
I say that because the collapse of the derivatives market, with that much money at stake, would utterly destroy the Plutocracy.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 21, 2011 21:26:29 GMT -6
Hey what's the current status of this bill? I haven't seen any news for over a week.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 21, 2011 20:05:20 GMT -6
This is incredibly regressive but to me it is not shockingly so.
I already know the Plutocracy wants to starve most people out of existence, and keep a few around as frightfully grateful servants and sex slaves.
This is just another step that is the logical means to this end. Levy taxes on the poor so they find it harder to survive. And the water in the pot slowly grows hotter for the frog...
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 21, 2011 17:08:23 GMT -6
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 21, 2011 15:16:49 GMT -6
Jeff you think that these taunters will defeat the protesters? Taunters will not defeat protesters. I favor unlawfulcombatant's view ... America's version of the protester, OWS, are a slower going more peaceful group that may well eventually sustain a powerful impact on politics in America. My above piece just reflects that the peripheral European protesters gathering in the OWS versions are different than the American peaceful groups ... for now. The Europeans version of protester compare to the European rowdy, more prone to violence and mobs at their soccer games whereas American football fans are not known for violence and are known for painting their upper bodies in colors for their teams or wearing stuff on their heads to associate with their teams. What is the 'bad ending' that will come of this if OWS's peaceful approach is going to have a powerful impact? My opinion of the guys in Europe is they don't go far enough. There's just not enough jails in Greece to contain a full scale rebellion.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 21, 2011 4:10:13 GMT -6
"Unbeknownst to those residents, their situation may have progressed past the soap box, the ballot box and even the jury box... " When it comes to voting, I wonder if they're still clinging to their 3 Gs: Guns God and Gays? Well said, all the polluters have to do is throw a gay couple into town pursuing a marriage license and let the distractions begin.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 21, 2011 4:06:08 GMT -6
Jeff you think that these taunters will defeat the protesters?
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 19, 2011 23:22:55 GMT -6
Where is a good lawyer when you need one? Movies have been made about suing polluters ... I hope some good attorneys take up the cause of suing because it requires dedication, skills and deep pockets to endure the long haul up the appeals process over many years against well paid nat gas law firms. Where's a good investigative reporter? Can't someone take a sample of this water to a local newspaper in the area to get some coverage, and maybe pressure the EPA or even Pennsylvania state agencies to do something about it? Methane is flammable, so someone should take a sample--set it on fire--and take a video of it (and date it). And if they can't get a news organization interested, then post the video on Youtube. In general, this sounds like a problem that is readily prove-able and documentable. Perhaps the problem is that no one in the court system or politics gives a shit. The big corporate money could be effectively shutting down any form of environmental protection enforcement out there. Unbeknownst to those residents, their situation may have progressed past the soap box, the ballot box and even the jury box...
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 19, 2011 17:05:21 GMT -6
news.yahoo.com/driller-wins-approval-halt-water-pa-town-182239526.htmlDriller wins approval to halt water to Pa. town By MICHAEL RUBINKAM - Associated Press | AP – 31 mins ago ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania environmental regulators said Wednesday they have given permission to a natural-gas driller to stop delivering replacement water to residents whose drinking water wells were tainted with methane. Residents expressed outrage and threatened to take the matter to court. Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. has been delivering water to homes in the northeast village of Dimock since January of 2009. The Houston-based energy company asked the Department of Environmental Protection for approval to stop the water deliveries by the end of November, saying Dimock's water is safe to drink. DEP granted Cabot's request late Tuesday, notifying the company in a letter released Wednesday morning. Scott Perry, the agency's acting deputy secretary for oil and gas management, wrote that since Cabot has satisfied the terms of a December settlement agreement requiring the company to remove methane from the residents' water, DEP "therefore grants Cabot's request to discontinue providing temporary potable water." Residents who are suing Cabot in federal court say their water is still tainted with unsafe levels of methane and possibly other contaminants from the drilling process. They say DEP had no right to allow Cabot to stop paying for replacement water. Bill Ely, 60, said the water coming out of his well looks like milk. "You put your hand down a couple of inches and you can't see your hand, that's how much gas there is in it. And they're telling me it was that way all my life," said Ely, who has lived in the family homestead for nearly 50 years and said his well water was crystal clear until Cabot's arrival three years ago.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 19, 2011 16:14:31 GMT -6
articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-15/news/30282827_1_global-economy-corporate-profits-chartsHere Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About... Henry Blodget|October 15, 2011| Last week, we published a chart-essay that illustrates the extreme inequality that has developed in the US economy over the past 30 years. The charts explain what the Wall Street protesters are angry about. They also explain why the protesters' message is resonating with the country at large. Here are the four key points: 1. Unemployment is at the highest level since the Great Depression (with the exception of a brief blip in the early 1980s). 2. At the same time, corporate profits are at an all-time high, both in absolute dollars and as a share of the economy. ..........
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 19, 2011 15:25:47 GMT -6
Our "Let's Pretend" Economy Charles Hugh Smith|April 21, 2011 articles.businessinsider.com/2011-04-21/wall_street/30096763_1_consumer-debt-federal-debt-wagesThere are two economies--the real one, which is in decline, and the "let's pretend" one touted by the State and corporate propaganda machines. Children love to play "let's pretend." Let's pretend the economy is "recovering."Why does this "recovery" remind me of an addict who's conning his caseworker? (Yes, I'm really in recovery--those aren't tracks, they're insect bites....) Let's play pretend that jobs are really really coming back, so please ignore this chart, or turn it upside down: Also ignore that Big U.S. Firms Are Shifting Hiring Abroad. Let's pretend that households, corporations and government are reducing their debt. To do that, we have to ignore that the debt-junkie (i.e. the U.S.A.) hasn't kicked the monkey off its back, it just keeps feeding it more debt. David Stockman dismantled all that propaganda about corporations sitting on trillions in cash--they're sitting on even bigger piles of debt: Federal Reserve’s path of destruction. He also takes out the claim that "consumers are deleveraging." Consumer debt has barely budged. Never mind, let's pretend we're deleveraging. So please ignore this chart: Excuse me but that cute little debt monkey on your back is actually an 800-pound gorilla. Let's pretend that wages are rising. Except they aren't--household income is getting creamed. Real wages are back to the pre-dot-com bubble days of 1996--only the debt load on households and the nation have skyrocketed since then.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 19, 2011 15:23:19 GMT -6
Outsourcing continues to be the biggest threat to manufacturing workers It most certainly is still the biggest threat, but automation is sneaking up on its lofty perch. Look what is about to happen to those Foxconn workers. Tons of them to be put out of work by machines. Automation has helped in many cases, like creating online stores which anyone can run (Cafepress, for instance), but now we are seeing a slowdown in job creation through automation. Machines will soon stop being a net creator of jobs. Mark my words on that. It's the second horse of the "jobpocalypse".
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 19, 2011 5:42:19 GMT -6
news.yahoo.com/analysis-rise-machines-americas-jobs-challenge-110607385.htmlAnalysis: Rise of the machines: America's jobs challenge ReutersBy Jason Lange | Reuters – 32 mins ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For decades, American workers and their machines advanced in tandem. As companies invested in technology, more workers were needed to operate machines. That relationship is now looking unsteady. Since 1999, business investment in equipment and software has surged 33 percent while the total number of people employed by private firms has changed little. The gap between man and machine widened even further after the 2008-09 recession, helping explain why the United States is struggling to bring down an unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent. The revolution in information technologies is taking a deeper and deeper hold in the U.S. economy. Throughout history, technology revolutions have paved the way to forms of employment: Britain's 19th century industrial revolution threw artisans out of work but eventually created mass employment in factories. But a decade-long drought in jobs in the United States is raising questions whether there is a fundamental shift in the structure of the labor market. "Labor and capital are out of sync," said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. "It seems be a growing and strengthening trend... (and) suggests there is this longer-term structural change." To be sure, some of the struggles of the U.S. labor market reflects displacement rather than the disappearance of jobs, as improvements in technology have spawned the outsourcing of operations ranging from call centers to engineering departments in lower-wage countries. But the spread of IT from America's factory floors to the massive service sector creates a double-whammy for workers, Cowen said. Retailers are in the midst of the technology revolution. Research firm VDC Research estimates retailers worldwide will spend 12 percent more on installing self-check-out kiosks -- which require fewer staff -- by 2015. In Massachusetts, supermarket chain Stop & Shop is piloting a program that allows shoppers to use their smart phones to scan groceries as they pull them off the shelves -- a move that could lead to even fewer check-out clerks. The advance of technology throughout the economy poses a challenge for policy makers fighting high unemployment. As technology reduces the number of workers needed to produce the same amount of goods and services, the economy must grow at an even faster pace if new jobs are to be created. JOBLESS RECOVERIES In the 1990s, the rate at which companies boosted equipment and software investments more than doubled and output per hour surged. Employment growth generally tracked the higher rates of productivity for a time, as it had for generations. Then something happened. After the 2001 recession, private employment growth essentially flat-lined while technology investment continued its giddy rise.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 14, 2011 19:42:35 GMT -6
It turns into a submarine, no extra charge!
;D ;D ;D
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 13, 2011 12:13:41 GMT -6
Turn it upside-down. It's 6-6-6.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 13, 2011 12:12:12 GMT -6
jeffolie - does this mean the dollar will continue to lose value against the Yuan and Rupee, etc., forcing China to devalue as well? (At least until their economy implodes as a result.)
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 13, 2011 0:41:45 GMT -6
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 23:20:29 GMT -6
Remember I said the Tea Partiers were boiling over with rage about China... here is that rage.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 23:03:12 GMT -6
An embargo would be the best possible policy. But I don't think there's much chance that Congress or Obama would ever let that go through. Over half the Chinese imports coming into this country are from Chinese located companies owned by American Globalist Free Traitors. The most hilarious part was where that Chinese idiot at the end of the story went on about how trade wars end in shooting wars. A shooting war? With the U.S.? We could embargo China, drive them into ruin and revolution, and we'd never even so much as fire a shot. Then China would get stupid, sell off our currency, and our trade deficit would flip upside down overnight with every nation on Earth.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 21:53:13 GMT -6
rt.com/usa/news/china-bill-trade-tariffs-707/China strikes back at US over tariffs A game of cat-and-mouse between Washington and Beijing intensified yesterday after Congress gave the go-ahead on a bill that increases tariffs on Chinese goods. Those overseas have already fired back, however, and the consequences could be chaotic. Though the US bill that was aimed at hitting so-called “currency manipulators” like China will most likely fail to receive votes in the House, China is taking the game that Washington has waged seriously and last night decided to lower the value of the yuan in retaliation to what DC hoped they wouldn't do. Domestically, lawmakers had hoped that tariffs imposed on Chinese exports would convince the country to readjust the currency of the yuan, and though US politicians had presupposed that the battle between the two nation’s economies would be a cold one, China has called their bluff and upped the ante. It has seemed clear that passing of the bill into a law in America would all but happen, with lawmakers hoping the threats of legislation would worry the Chinese into revaluating their currency to a high dollar amount that the US would favor. While America’s threats were largely seen as empty, China’s real response will only worsen matters in the United States, where the country is currently engrossed in a trade deficit. Now with China’s response to America’s attempt at spooking currency bosses overseas, the US’ deficit will surely take a turn for the worse. Though American leaders had shrugged off warnings of a trade war between nations as impossible, things are quickly heating up. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu has quickly fired back at US leaders by saying that the new bill "gravely violates World Trade Organization rules” and continued support out of the States could be detrimental to not just the relationship between the two massive economies but for the rest of the world.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 21:01:18 GMT -6
www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/more-americans-than-chine_n_1007845.htmlMillions of Americans are currently weathering the effects of a slow economic recovery. Many Chinese, meanwhile, find themselves struggling less to keep their families fed, according to a recent Gallup report. Nearly 20 percent of Americans say they've had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 months, up from nine percent in 2008, the Gallup report found. That’s compared to six percent of Chinese respondents, down from 16 percent in 2008.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 20:46:15 GMT -6
www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ormsby/quinn-comed-veto-occupy-chicago_b_1006299.htmlCould the Occupy Chicago Movement Help Gov. Pat Quinn Sustain ComEd "Smart Grid" Veto? The thinking among Springfield insiders up until a few weeks had been that the legislature was likely to override Governor Pat Quinn's veto of Commonwealth Edison's "Smart Grid" bill, a measure that guaranteed the electric giant a rate increase of 6 percentage points over the 30-year Treasury rate to upgrade its power grid. When a top House Democratic lawmaker was asked a couple weeks ago about the probability of a House override, the response was a terse, "Yes, I do." That was before the Occupy Wall Street movement ignited and metastasized throughout the country, spawning an Occupy Chicago branch. In 19 days, Occupy Chicago has racked up 11,191 Twitter followers, a website that is drawing nearly 100,000 visits daily, and protests that are sucking up a whole lot of news media coverage. Then three days ago the Chicago Sun-Times launched a thunderbolt into the ComEd debate. The paper published a Better Government Association report that revealed that ComEd and Ameren executives and affiliates ladled out $1.3 million to Illinois lawmakers and political campaign arms in the months leading up the legislature's approval of the "Smart Grid" rate increases. The Occupy Wall Street protesters and their Chicago cousins are foaming at their collective mouths over the perceived privileged positions and excesses of the nation's 1% -- corporate CEOs, Wall Street bankers, hedge fund wizards, etc. -- versus the 99% or everyone else. The protesters' criticisms are largely unfocused and their remedies virtually non-existent. But their anger is real. They think politicians are favoring the 1% over the 99% when it comes to solutions to the economic crisis and broader economic issues. ComEd's "Smart Grid" bill and its political muscle flexing feed directly into the spirit of the protesters' complaints. Lawmakers seeking to override Quinn could be hurtling into a political buzz saw.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 20:33:41 GMT -6
Man, I have been having fun harassing #iamthe53. Look for Le Jacquelope on there.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 13:15:13 GMT -6
There are many older views too. I see good points both in the 99'ers and the 53'ers. These so-called 53%ers don't even realize they pay taxes to support failed banks - a big beef shared by the OWS protesters. I am now hijacking #iamthe53. Any of you other guys want to join in and hijack #iamthe53? "I am one of the 53%, and I stand with the OWS 99%." "I am a 53%er and I don't want to pay taxes to bail out the banks." "I am a 53%er and I like clean air and drinkable water." "I am a 53%er and I do not support the Plutocracy." "I am a 53%er and I don't support cuts to military pensions." "I am a 53%er and I don't support sending American jobs overseas." "I pay sales taxes and self-employment taxes. I am a 53er and I stand with OWS." Come on guys, let's pound them!
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 12:26:12 GMT -6
It's called the plutonomy driving onward.
Hopefully this also means it's about to hit an economic IED.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 12, 2011 12:23:16 GMT -6
Wow, Republican Senators defected on this. Interesting. A big change from what they did back in 2010.
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 11, 2011 15:12:53 GMT -6
So Green is planning to shift the final assembly of cabinets back to Alabama, and will divide much of the lamp production between India and the U.S. Nothing's really changed with this guy. He's just going to look elsewhere for cheap labor-- like India (or Mexico. Or Vietnam) All of this nonsense could be stopped immediately if Congress would use its Constitutionally-mandated authority (and obligation) to levee Tariffs on foreign imports. Our forefathers NEVER envisioned leaving our consumer markets wide open to industry-killing foreign competition. Neither should we. Hey did you ever hear this one? I'm not sure if I posted this here or if it has been posted here but...
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 11, 2011 12:03:42 GMT -6
Well said. I see a lot of very disgruntled soldiers where I work. Some are still enthusiastic. And some are completely fed up. Converting their retirements into Corporate welfare for Wall Street will be the last straw for many. Democrats need to clean up their act and be counted as the opposition against these raids. I know it makes many of them sick to support the military but I keep hearing (without much substantiation, of course) that the military vote has not been guaranteed Republican for years, or even a decade. I've always said support the troops. When the shit hits the fan you want them on your side...
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Post by jacquelope on Oct 11, 2011 11:34:13 GMT -6
redtape.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/04/8124410-stealing-elderly-parents-identities-a-hidden-common-crimeStealing elderly parents' identities a hidden, common crime By Bob Sullivan Child ID theft is a scourge of the digital age -- a terrible crime that often sees parents ruining their own kids’ futures by taking out mortgages, car loans and other financial obligations in their names. But a new study shows that another kind of family-based ID theft, which rarely grabs headlines, might be much more prevalent: Stealing the identities of elderly parents. Security firm ID Analytics looked at billions of credit applications and other related data recently to find people using the same Social Security number and last name, but different first names, with an eye toward determining the prevalence of child ID theft. The firm then narrowed the list by searching for pairs sharing SSNs who were 18 to 25 years apart in age, indicating a jump in generations. After tossing out typographical errors and other potential inaccuracies, the firm found roughly 500,000 kids in the U.S. under 15 sharing their SSNs and last names with adults who were 25-40, making them likely victims of ID theft by their own parents. But the massive data analysis turned up an even more dramatic finding when head researcher Stephen Coggeshall tried looking for people in their 70s and 80s who were sharing their SSN and family name with someone roughly 20 years younger. The result: More than 2 million elderly adults who are sharing an SSN with their adult children. "This was very surprising to me," Coggeshall said. "I didn't think there would be a substantially higher number than young parents using their kids' IDs." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The study is imprecise. For example, it's sometimes not possible strictly through data analysis to determine who is the criminal and who is the rightful SSN holder. "But when you have a 60-year-old and an 80-year-old sharing an identity, it's unlikely that the 80-year-old is the one seeking credit," Coggeshall said.
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