PUTTING AWAY FINANCIAL CRIMINALS

WE HAVE NET HOUSEHOLD ASSETS in this country of roughly $50 trillion, give or take a bunch of trillions—more take than give probably—a number that's skyrocketed in the last 50 years. The size and complexity of the financial sector has grown even faster. But the SEC is still basically operating on the scale of the 1950s.

And the FDIC is even worse off, especially considering it's hugely expanded role in the current crisis, a role that will probably (hopefully) get even bigger. In 1992 the FDIC had 15,000 employees working for it. At the end of 2007 it had merely 4,600 employees.

We've been getting away with operating on the cheap for decades, but now it's killing us.

Given the scale, complexity and importance of our economic system, we desperately need to start creating a culture of financial surveillance and accountability. We need an agency that covers the whole money community, stocks, insurance, banks, mortgages. The works. Maybe that can be the SEC. Maybe it's a new invention. However we do it, the key thing will be to hire a ton of people (more like a megaton). This isn't rocket science. You just need enough eyeballs to look at stuff, a reasonable level of education, intellect and diligence in your people, and an institutional attitude that if the regulatee can't explain something well enough for a non expert regulator to get it, that's the regulatee's fault.

And we need to establish a new ethic of real time enforcement. I'm sure there are numerous financial malefactors who should be punished for their role in the current crisis. But when do you think the SEC will get around to coming after them based on its recent record? 2012? 2015? That's not a real deterrent. Justice delayed is justice that's largely ineffective.

The best part of this plan? It kills three birds with one stone. We've got thousands of former Wall Streeters now out of work, we have MBA students and even law students struggling to find jobs, and we get to reaffirm our reputation as the world's financial safe haven that's more transparent than anybody else. We desperately need a white collar jobs program. This is it.

The great tragedy of a depression or really nasty recession is that we don't use all the resources that we could potentially put to work. Here's a great opportunity to create jobs and do something real, that would probably also resonate pretty well with the general public.

A hundred thousand new financial cops on the street, come on Mr. President, what's the downside?

Read it all.

As we the stock market continues to plunge and our savings bleed as a result of this financial massacre, something positive and trustworthy needs to happen soon. This administration continues to stomp all over this nation's heritage of liberty, hard work, and prosperity by calling us racists and cowards and new citizens of this brave new Marxist regime it is busily crafting. Might all find ourselves wrestling with the repercussions of the next tea party?

ALAN KEYES ON BARACK OBAMA

THREE-TIME PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE ALAN KEYES, a former Republican, has a few choice words for the current occupier of the Oval Office and the eligibility concerns surrounding him, the Obama policies in tending the current financial crisis, and the future of the United States as a nation. Keyes is very clear and forthright in this interview.

ECONOMICAL SUPPLY CHAINS YANKED

No quick fix on the horizon. Note that even savings by those tight-fisted Asians are blamed for problems in their own region. Simply put, global merchants have overproduced in terms what the people can afford to buy, or desire to own; in other words, they have looked for love in all the wrong places.

But lest we forget, the Chinese and the Arabs still own America, unless we do something to break free (like produce our own energy and rebuild our own gutted industries, and insist on fair trade policies rather than this massive giveaway (trade deficit) that our leadership continues to pile up at national expense.

Washington Post reporter Steven Pearlstein:

FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, Asians and Europeans have tended to view their own financial and economic problems as largely imported from the United States. The impacts on their own economies, they reasoned smugly, would be modest and short-lived.

Turns out they were wrong.

Over the past two weeks, the bottom has fallen out of Asia's export economy while Europe has come face to face with a financial crisis that is as bad as ours and will probably become even worse without the kind of unified response that individual countries have so far resisted.

And what does that mean for us? Nothing good. It means that our downturn will be longer and deeper than many had hoped and that we can't rely as much on export growth to pull us out of the ditch.

Basically, there are two stories to tell here about the sudden downturn in the global economy.

The easiest to understand is the collapse of industrial production in East Asia, where the supply chain starts in places like Taiwan and Vietnam and moves through places like China and Japan before cars, shoes, computers and flat-panel TVs arrive at stores in the United States, Western Europe and everywhere else.

According to Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, the 40 percent decline in Taiwan's industrial production at the end of last year was the "canary in the coal mine" of Team Asia's formidable export machine. At about the same time, Japan's exports fell 35 percent, Korea's 17 percent, and China's fourth-quarter gross domestic product was essentially flat—no economic growth at all.

As did a number of other economists, Eichengreen told me he'd never seen declines this fast and this steep, even during the Asian economic crisis when he was working at the International Monetary Fund's war room here in Washington. It all reflects not only the sharp pullback in discretionary consumer spending around the world but also an equally sharp pullback in the flow of foreign investment that was used to build factories and shopping centers and has been an important driver of growth in the region.

Demand for Asian exports will pick up again before too long, but it will be a long time before they reach the levels attained at the height of the bubble economy. And it will be longer still before foreigners will be eager to invest in expanding capacity again.

Ideally, Asians would respond to this challenge by reducing their heavy reliance on exports and foreign investment and reorienting their economy more toward domestic consumption. But as Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago points out, that's not as simple as it sounds.

For starters, the things Asians might want to consume aren't necessarily the things they produce to export, so production would need to be reoriented and workers retrained and redeployed. And to replace the foreign investment, these economies would need to develop financial institutions that can raise and invest risk capital, which right now they don't really have. Most significantly, Asian governments would have to create safety-net programs like Social Security so people don't save so much and spend so little.

In short, the Asian downturn is probably manageable, particularly now that the Chinese government has responded with a massive stimulus package. But it will take time for the region to make the necessary adjustments to get the region humming again.

Read it all.

MONITORING SUBPRIME CRISIS STRIKES

TWO ARTICLES from the Atlantic Monthly bear notice. Here is a strident look at that housing strata may very well be welling up as the next wave of American slums—not the cities, but those isolated suburbs of abandoned McMansions. Then there is this long piece dissecting and analyzing a rather comprehensive set of notions impacting the history of past economic stresses and their continued impact upon the current financial meltdown in How the Crash Will Reshape America:

In this sense, the financial crisis may ultimately help New York by reenergizing its creative economy. The extraordinary income gains of investment bankers, traders, and hedge-fund managers over the past two decades skewed the city’s economy in some unhealthy ways. In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city’s rising real-estate prices were affecting his company’s ability to attract global talent.

He responded simply: “We are the cause, not the effect, of the real-estate bubble.” (As it turns out, he was only half right.) Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating. When I asked Jacobs some years ago about the effects of escalating real-estate prices on creativity, she told me, “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

With the hegemony of the investment bankers over, New York now stands a better chance of avoiding that sterile fate.

CITIZEN OUTBURST #855

WHO SAYS THE CHEAP JUNK is cheap for America? This junk is horrid for our economic infrastructure. The textile workers all across the south lost their jobs while the fat cats took their business to China, Mexico, and elsewhere for their cheap goods to be sold back here in America.

Take a look at the teen shops for clothing, those $25.00 blouses are absolute junk. When washed tiny holes show up, buttons are gone, why? the weaving is very poor quality and it falls apart. Examine other foreign-made products that fall apart. Contemplate cars fleshed out with aluminum and plastic instead of US Steel.

Last week I had a 3-mile an hour bump with a wall, creating extensive damage including the tie rod and such. By contrast, back in 1985 I survived a crash I had in a 1969 Chevy. The front wheel came off, and the car flipped five times; I was going 60 miles an hour. This automobile held together. I was not hurt and the car sustained minor damage. All of the products are being done cheap and cheaper but we are beginning to pay high costs for it, including skyrocketing insurance premiums, et cetera.

Folks. It is time for America to look out for America.

It is time for CEOs and other top executives to take pay cuts; investors' return should return to reasonable dividends instead of millions for pennies of investment. We can bring America back to it's feet again, but for now AMERICANS NEED TO GET ON THEIR KNEES TO GOD AND BE SORRY FOR ALL THE GREED, SELFISH, AND CRAZY "ME ME ME" BEHAVIOR FROM THIS APPROPRIATELY NAMED ME GENERATION.

Whatever happened to neighborhoods having block parties to exchange clothing and such with their neighbors, instead of this ugly garage sales? Face it, America is in trouble due to selfish greed.

Uh, I am left utterly speechless. There seems to be something missing here, I'm just not sure what. What about the rogue wheel of that American-made Chevrolet?

OIL PRICE COLLAPSE WEAKENING DESPOTS

IMAGINE THIS MY FRIENDS, I'm quoting the ineffable Dick Morris. The sky is indeed falling. Good news comes in strange packages sometimes. This is one of those times.

The depression—let's call it what it is—leaves us, well, depressed. But there is very good news from around the world. Our enemies are collapsing under the strain of dropping oil and gas prices.

What we had all hoped conservation and offshore drilling would achieve, the global economic collapse is accomplishing: the defeat of OPEC, Iran, Chavez, Putin and the weakening of the financial underpinnings of Islamist terrorism. In each of these nations, the hold of the dictator is weakening as, one after the other, they face the consequences of dropping oil prices.

Read it all.

CHINA EXPORTS FALL SHARPLY

BEIJING—China's trade growth collapsed in November as global consumer demand plunged, adding to pressure on Beijing to reverse a worsening economic slump and avert heavy job losses, data showed Wednesday.

November's exports fell 2.2 percent from the year-earlier period, the first decline in seven years, the government reported. That was down sharply from October's export growth of 19.1 percent and well below analysts' forecasts of a 13 to 15 percent rise. Imports fell by 17.9 percent, pushing China's trade surplus to a new high of $40.1 billion.

The decline adds to mounting signs that China's downturn is worsening in areas from manufacturing to real estate to auto sales. Beijing has launched a massive stimulus package to boost growth, but it could be months before the effects are felt and its impact is unclear.

"The economy has almost ground to a halt. Job losses will be very significant, and the risk of social unrest is rising," said JP Morgan economist Frank F.X. Gong. "They urgently need to stimulate growth to generate jobs and keep society stable."

This is, of course, NOT good news for Americans. While many of our antagonistic trading partners, such as Russia and Iran, look to bluster and blame the United States, and yes, much blame is warranted, for the recent financial crisis, the short fact is this: the United States has too often shared its prosperity and economic protocols with the rest of the world much to its own disadvantage. Trade surpluses with its partners, specifically the US, have boosted China as it races to gain financial superiority in pursuit of its own century of global power. While China collects billions of dollars in surplus trade while micromanaging the relative value of its own currency, only to lend the bankrupt US those same dollars earned on trade imbalances, the newest economic power of Asia has participated in many of the same practices of explosive greed that occasionally stymie the Western powers.

So with this newest downturn in consumption of Chinese goods, even the Chinese are feeling the pinch of the global systems of checks and balances. This is a good thing, especially in light of the dumping of inferior quality exports in exchange for Western technologies and know-how. This means the Chinese have lots of stuff they just produced, but not enough money in the pockets of people to buy them, even though their trade surplus which our politicians have failed to curtail, has increased even more. But a Chinese slowdown is good for America at this moment because Americans are also hurting.

The global slowdown, while painful in many ways to many populations, can only be considered a necessary correction to the slingshot growth that has been reeling on far too long. A bevy of Middle Eastern sheiks have also been hit hard. And oil prices are expected to remain flat, even though the ME cartel oscillates between threatens of cutting back production and increasing it. Even the more aggressive trends of our friends in Venezuela and Russia are tottering as a result of this global slowdown.

We consider this a godsend. It's no secret. Americans must wean itself off oil dependency. Do we need higher gas taxes the Democrats insist we need to keep us honest, or can we simply retool our mindsets, and use less, stay closer to home, re-invent our cities to more properly engage public transportation opportunities in the work-shop-sleep matrix, perhaps one of the few gems of the socialist dhimmitudinal European model? Let's hope someone we trust can sort this out, since it's obvious the average voter has little power in this country as politician after politician fails us.

I had a discussion with a fellow of decidedly leftist leanings who informed me quite churlishly that China has a right to oil, cars, ACs, better food, bigger houses, any and all the trappings of American life. I agreed of course they do, but my point to him is that China must compete for these this higher standards of living just as ordinary Americans must. And in this rat race, I am an American, and as such I advocate standards and practices that benefit my own nation's general welfare first.

So, let us as Americans pull together in friendly competition to clean up this mess. Retract. Stop the immigration chaos. Look inward in rebuilding our collapsing infrastructure. Reinstall American cultural pride. Name the Islamic jihadist enemy properly, and prepare to fight the menace that threatens ALL civilization. Welcome to the rip-roaring 21st Century.

Read it all

FORECLOSURE EPIDEMIC AFFECTING RENTALS

OF ALL THE THINGS that can go wrong on moving day, few could be worse than arriving at your new home to find another family already living there. Then again, in today's Darwinian housing market, worse things do indeed occur.

Like when a devious foreclosure agent tried to trick a Fairfax County teenager into handing over her family's house keys. Or when a "landlord" collecting security deposits and rent turned out to be an impostor with no legal claim to the property whatsoever.

In the past 18 months, the foreclosure debacle has pushed tens of thousands of area residents into the rental market, many with crippled credit and a desperate need for housing. Waiting for them is a new cast of swindlers, cheats and real estate sharks ready to prey on the weak and needy. Scams of various stripes are thriving in the foreclosure mess and flourishing at the margins of landlord-tenant laws.

Rental scams have generally been more of an urban problem, but the high incidence of foreclosure in the Washington region's suburbs and the relative lack of tenants' rights organizations there have helped create areas of vulnerability in such places as Prince William County. Opportunities are rife: The county and the adjacent cities of Manassas and Manassas Park have tallied 7,672 foreclosures this year through November, according to court records, up from 3,344 in 2007 and 282 the year before.

Many of those homes are bank-owned and vacant, and investors have been buying them at deep discounts and converting them into rental properties. But houses that remain vacant present some of the ripest targets for fraud, officials said.

Read it all.

MAKING EVERY NICKEL COUNT

THE ECONOMIC CRISIS HAS STAGGERED Wall Street and here is a man who says that the worst is still to come. He's been right too many times to dismiss. Try 2012 on for size. He also says President-elect Barack Obama doesn't have a prayer in fixing this mess.

Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute is a highly respected prognosticator. Here's another Celente forecast from the December 2007 newsletter called Top Trends 2008:

America’s going broke and the whole world knows it. Betting that its economy will spiral down and that the dollar will fall with it, foreign creditors are dumping dollars on the market … and even Third World street vendors don’t want to take greenbacks any longer. The further it falls, the less it’s worth. The less it’s worth, the less it buys. In the real world they call it "inflation." In America they call it "good for business."

Failing banks, busted brokerages, toppled corporate giants, bankrupt cities, states in default, foreign creditors cashing out of US securities … whatever the spark, the stage is set for panic in the streets. When the giant firms fall, they'll crush the man on the street...



It's all rather frightening. And yes, we believe this is a true outlook. There is nothing to stop this financial collapse. America is changing.

SPITZER OFFERS ADVICE ON CRISIS

Astonishing video of Peter Shiff's prediction in 2006 of current mortgage tsunami

FORMER NEW YORK STATE GOVERNOR Eliot Spitzer has penned an article on the financial crisis.

First, we must confront head-on the pervasive misunderstanding of what constitutes a "free market." For long stretches of the past 30 years, too many Americans fell prey to the ideology that a free market requires nearly complete deregulation of banks and other financial institutions and a government with a hands-off approach to enforcement. "We can regulate ourselves," the mantra went.

Those of us who raised red flags about this were scoffed at for failing to understand or even believe in "the market." During my tenure as New York state attorney general, my colleagues and I sought to require investment banking analysts to provide their clients with unbiased recommendations, devoid of undisclosed and structural conflicts. But powerful voices with heavily vested interests accused us of meddling in the market.

When my office, along with the Department of Justice, warned that some of American International Group's reinsurance transactions were little more than efforts to create the false impression of extra capital on the company's balance sheet, we were jeered at for attacking one of the nation's great insurance companies, which surely knew how to balance risk and reward.

And when the attorneys general of all 50 states sought to investigate subprime lending, believing that some lending practices might be toxic, we were blocked by a coalition of the major banks and the Bush administration, which invoked a rarely used statute to preempt the states' ability to probe. The administration claimed that it had the situation under control and that our inquiry was unnecessary.

Read it all here.

But others posit that the End of Wall Street is nigh upon us. The thieves are at the window!

THE ECONOMIC BOILING POINT

SO THIS UNDULATING G20 meeting is stirring the pot to keep us all from the boiling point. The world has gathered for Bretton Woods II. While my well-meaning but fiscally ignorant friends in the art world tell me I pessimistic in always seeing the glass as half empty, I simply shudder at the bubbling abyss into which I stare. Read this—

But I can't reiterate enough:

1. The original Bretton Woods system was destroyed in '71 because of the need for credit.
2. Our manufacturing was offshored in the need for credit.
3. Our savings were dumped over the need for credit.
4. And now we're at the point where we can't even borrow for credit. There are repercussions for destroying the world's economy, and no one will be offered blame in this but the United States as far as the history books are concerned.

At the root of this is a long, long trend of manipulation by the Fed to avoid biting the bullets of cyclical downturns in the economy. It's been spurred by the creation of more and more paper that has no backing other than the credibility of our US treasury. And now that credibility is all but gone over the bailouts.

I can't really think of any point in history where a flee floating monetary fiat system didn't ultimately fail because as aforementioned, when the going gets tough, the bank starts printing more, and more paper. We're at that point now, and this meeting which has been instigated by Gordon Brown and slammed home by Sarkozy in his endless travels will have long-lasting consequences for the United States.

And since we are the world's largest debtor due to this endless expansion of credit, our leaders aren't going to have a lot of room to maneuver or offer discourse towards rejecting any agreements short of war.

We are at the point in our history where sovereignty will be surrendered with a white flag in the name perpetuating credit. The implications are one of economic slavery for We the People who will be left holding the bag when this ponzi system comes collapsing down at the word of the American creditors.

There are men in Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, Dubai, and London right now who are laughing their gray-suited arses off.

But then again, let's go to the Great Commonwealth of Virginia for another take on matters...

I see a lot of folks on the boards concerned about globalization, the new world order, global money, etc., etc. Don't worry, I say. What we are seeing right now is an economic collapse, an economic winter. This proves that we cannot even build a Tower of Babel in our own country, let alone the world. Look at the upsides of a collapse:

1. the new world order is kaput.
2. as unemployment rises illegal aliens will be pressured into leaving
3. has anyone noticed that gasoline prices are way down?
4. the Kuwaiti investors lost their shirts in their market collapse (now ain't that a shame?)
5. my house has dropped in value. That's good you ask? Why yes, my property tax bill went down! If my house goes to $0 then I pay no tax! Plus my kids will be able to afford their own homes, rather than squatting on me. To me a home is not an ATM machine—it's where I live. If I sell it what am I gonna do? Live on a park bench?
6. our government will go broke—that means no more deficit spending—stuff like the F22 Raptor will be canned. Heck, we need men with guns on our borders more than we need the F22. The aliens we want to stop are from Mexico...not outer space.
7. imposters such as Paulson and Bernanke will be shown to have "no clothes"
8. Obama will be revealed as a eunuch (as will all world "leaders")
9. China gets sent back to the middle ages
10. etc., etc.

A collapse means a return to traditional values, conservatism, less spending, less driving, more family, for some a renewed belief in God. It also proves that the development of a new world order is many, many generations away. Winter is cold, but it does kill rats and flies.

Let's face it. Humor and personal niche politics are always the best medicine when the pot starts boiling and the broth freezes over. What's the old ire? A conservative is someone who hates socialism when it benefits poor people but loves socialism when it benefits the wealthy.

WHO IS PENNY PRITZKER?

John W. Courtney's world collapsed at dinnertime on a Friday in July 2001. That's when he learned from a television newscast that much of the $200,000 that he had saved from his construction job over a 30-year period was lost when his Chicago-area bank was shut down after pursuing a failed strategy of subprime loans.

Seven years later, the Vietnam War veteran has yet to recoup $85,000 of his uninsured losses from Superior Bank's failure. And he watches in disbelief as one of the bank's former top officials, billionaire hotel heiress Penny Pritzker, leads the record-breaking fundraising machine of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.

Mr. Courtney, now 63, wonders aloud how Mr. Obama could rail on the campaign trail against the national financial crisis started by subprime lending while allowing a former advocate of the practice to hold the senior position of finance chairwoman in his campaign. The candidate has even lauded Ms. Pritzker's business practices as a model for an Obama administration.

"He knows the Pritzker family. He knows what happened in Illinois. He knows that Superior Bank was one of the first to securitize subprime mortgages," Mr. Courtney said. "He talks about change and helping people find a better way of life, but he has distanced himself from the fact that Superior helped ignite the nation's subprime crisis and that Penny Pritzker and her family walked away from it and us."

Read it all.

RUSSIA WEATHERING MARKET CRISIS

MOSCOW, Oct. 24—As the stock markets in Russia tumbled again Friday and the Kremlin continued struggling to shore up the nation's banks, Maria Isayeva emerged from a subway station near Victory Park and shrugged off the crisis with a laugh.

"It only affects the rich people! It doesn't affect us!" declared the 61-year-old retired bus terminal cashier, who seemed amused anyone might think she owned stocks. "We're okay. We're surviving, and we have enough to eat."

Isayeva admitted feeling anxious that her children might face hardship in an economic downturn but appeared more concerned about how others in the world were faring. "I just feel sorry for the Americans," she said.

Despite a stock market that has suffered one of the steepest falls in the world, a banking system on the verge of severe upheaval, and mounting evidence of troubles in the rest of the economy, people in Russia remain remarkably calm, even sanguine, about the impact of the global financial crisis on their country.

In interviews and surveys, many Russians expressed unease about the economy, and some are bracing for a meltdown like the one that crippled the nation a decade ago. But so far there is little sign of panic, much less anger, underscoring how insulated most Russians are from the financial system, how effective the Kremlin has been in controlling media coverage of the turmoil, and how fully people here have embraced capitalism, for better or worse.

Read it all.

Remember, Russia has oil, weaponry, and awesome mismanagement skills. A gruesome combination. What would Obama do? Wish the MSM would ask him? Me too.

WORLDWIDE DEBT FORGIVENESS

THERE IS A BLOGGER named Allen Charles who doesn't tout any personal credentials, financial or otherwise. His blog seems to rise up out of nowhere with a thin infrastructure, but nonetheless this entity has aired several interesting ideas concerning a solution of this current financial meltdown that have also plagued me.

Thinking in terms of the Year of Jubilee concept from the Torah, these ideas have something of a hint of LaRouchianism about them, but then Lyndon LaRouche was indeed right on the mark in predicting this crisis.

The idea concerns debt forgiveness. Is this concept even possible knowing how nations great and small line up like pieces on a chessboard looking to pounce at the first sign of weakness in an opponent?

Read it all. Perhaps Barack Obama or John McCain will catch a whiff of something they can work toward.

IN DEFENSE OF FRESH SARAH PALIN

In Prince Georges County, MD, Obamabots strike again

OUR ESTEEMED ALAN GREENSPAN, appointed by Ronald Reagan was the Chairman of the Federal Reserve for more than 18 years before retiring two years ago. In recent testimony given to the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, it was no surprise that he voiced shock over recent financial events and called conditions deplorable, saying that he and others who believed lending institutions would do a good job of protecting their shareholders are in a “state of shocked disbelief”.

Blatant phoniness is the lynchpin of worldly success. Can you say, how now brown cow?

Never one to miss a symphonic beat, Greenspan also blamed the problems on heavy demand for securities backed by subprime mortgages by investors who failed to worry that the home equity boom might come to an end. But the self-actualized, Ayn Randian, Greenspan didn’t think that the finance industry should be forced to play by the same honest rules governing the rest of society. Let's not inhibit creativity he might have surmized. So, pressing forward, what we earned for our trust were a gaggle of egregiously creative players who found out-of-the-box ways to lose our money.

Rattlesnakes! Set up a circulative system where there are huge rewards and zero penalties for the breach of fiduciary duty and then all he can do is express surprise when the loot & pillage crowd shows up to party? This is not rocket science. Greenspan is either lying or incompetent, or both. While people in a widening circle around him were not subtle in voicing concerns about the housing bubble, he steadfastly refused to acknowledge it, and far too many of us went along for the ride thinking this must be the American way we kept hearing so much about. If he of all people didn’t notice the quickening noose, then he was horribly unqualified to be in his position. Even I knew the scenario was a high trapeze act. And I only had my own household details to consider, knowing I was not alone in this game. Fortunately, I was smart enough to stay away from the lure of an ARM.

In 2004, a deliberately cautious Mr. Greenspan supported and encouraged the ARM industry, touting them as "perhaps" a better deal. Alrighty then. Let's all beat it down to the bank and snap up one of those.



Yet, as night follows day, the media hounds and their political taskmasters make tiresome fun of Governor Sarah Palin, saying she is too inexperienced to know which end goes up, which end down with regard to anything their highly educated minds can think will tar her image. But the unmitigated misery of what these “learned” men have wrought, is telling. What has their so-called vaunted experience done for us? John McCain warned us about fraud in the FM-FM scams, and now Sarah Palin, who has successfully fought Alaskan cronyism and the carpetbaggers of Big Oil, balancing the Alaskan budget, and growing the surplus to offer resource checks to every single citizen under her wing in the process, forming a team that are just the whistleblowers and "sub-par" experience we need in Washington right now.

Old conventional political wisdom dictates that vice presidential picks don’t change the outcome of a race. When Sarah Palin received larger fanfare than John McCain a month ago, the pundits cautioned, “people vote for President, not for Vice President.” But the crooked pollsters cannot help themselves, so in spite of all the evidence contrary to their own vetted interests one crook recently had this to say, “Speaking of Palin, 55% think she’s unqualified to serve as president if the need arises, which is a troublesome number given McCain’s age.

Other polls reflect this perception problem for the McCain-Palin camp as well. Pew released its latest poll that echoes many of the NBC/WSJ findings about voters’ perceptions of Palin and their effect on McCain. Pew’s headline doesn’t mention Palin specifically, “Well, vice presidential candidates may not win elections, but this year it’s looking increasingly likely that Sarah Palin may help lose one. Notably, opinions of Palin have a greater impact on voting intentions than do opinions of Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate.”

And the beat goes on, over and over again. Sarah Palin hatred is the dessert of the day every day in the blue-lined MSM and its crooked buddies, the pollsters. But let's say that McCain wins thanks to Sarah Palin.

Well, Eliza Doolittle is more than a poke at the upper class snobs. She's a firebrand, ready for bear. But the governor is hardly in need of some high-falutin' "upper class" accent meant to camouflage a nasty disconnect with the common people, but maybe, just maybe she COULD USE a few extra changes of professional clothing to help during this grueling campaign track where candidates tend to change several times a day to keep fresh so that the attack dog press won't smear her as a frumpy backwater trailer trash candidate.

Wait a sec, they've already done that...

OIL PRICES SET TO JUMP

JUST AS AMERICANS ARE FINALLY beginning to reap the benefits of plunging gasoline prices—including more money in their pockets—OPEC is getting ready to squeeze them once again by cutting oil production and driving up prices to refineries.

The 13-nation global oil cartel—which includes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela—will hold an emergency meeting in Vienna Friday to discuss the steep and rapid decline in oil prices.

"The era of cheap oil is finished," Iran's Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari boasted on Tuesday. When asked what price Iran would want for its oil, Nozari declared, "The more the better."

"A few member nations have voiced their intentions of pushing for a cut in production, including Qatar, Iran, as well as OPEC's president Chekib Khelil, who said that output could be slashed by as much as 2 million barrels a day," analysts for Raymond James & Associates told MarketWatch.com.

When oil peaked at more than $147 a barrel in July, gas prices soared to above $5 a gallon in some parts of the U.S., and Americans were forced to cut back on driving. With the price of oil at about $73 a barrel on Tuesday, pump prices have fallen to as low as $2.30 a gallon.

The price dip in oil—and gasoline— finally is working its way into the beleagured American economy, putting a few extra dollars in the hands of consumers just as the home heating and holiday shopping seasons begin.

Read it all.

JAPAN CONSIDERS WORLD BAILOUT

Not that this generosity would be anything but a stop gap for the ailing American economy, thanks to a dwindling industrial base and our need to tack our economy to production of real goods.

TOKYO—Kotaro Tamura, an investment banker turned Japanese lawmaker, has an immodest proposal for healing the sick global economy, making all Japanese richer and compelling the United States to be more deferential toward Japan.

"We are in a special position because we have huge money," Tamura said, referring to about $950 billion in government foreign reserves, $1.5 trillion in public pension funds and $15 trillion in personal financial assets, about $8 trillion of which is on deposit at shockingly low interest rates in Japanese banks.

"We should send the signal that we are ready to save the world with this money," he said in an interview.

Tamura leads a group of 65 lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who have proposed to Prime Minister Taro Aso that Japan treat the global financial meltdown "as a huge opportunity for us."

They are urging the government to inject some of its abundant cash into troubled U.S. and European banks, in return for equity, and to purchase distressed corporate assets at fire-sale prices.

"The economy of every major power has crashed, and Japan has the least tainted market in the world," Tamura said.

The chronically risk-averse habits of Japanese savers, who keep most of their trillions in accounts that pay less than 0.5 percent interest a year, suggest that Tamura's plan to save the world and make Japan richer is unlikely to generate much popular support.

"We are a bank-centered nation that avoids risk, even good risk," said Akira Kojima, chairman of the Japan Center for Economic Research.

Kojima called the idea of investing some of Japan's cash in the midst of the financial crisis a good one, if done prudently. "It could be a catalyst for changing Japanese investment management strategy," he said.

At the same time, he said, it would be all but impossible to carry out, given the conservative bent of the government and the public.

Read it all.

THE CHINA SYNDROME

David Ignatius in the Washington Post analyzes the similarities of the Chinese bailout of its own staggering markets in 1998 to the current US government's intervention with our own faltering system. While some experts may see this Federal intervention as a last ditch desperation akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as the stock market continues to swing wildly, the majority of pundits caution us to remain calm.

As I posted a couple of days ago here, I saw this shift in American capitalism coming of necessity as the inevitable pressures of globalism frayed the interlocking financial systems with the parade of trade imbalances, currency wars, resource deficits, and the like now beginning to show their true natures as leaders attempt to deal with the flaws inherent in those particular systems. We are cautioned that we should not sweat this apparent end of orthodoxy, but should embrace this new paradigm of progressive strength, retool our own industrial base decades lost, address the needs of our national security including energy and other economic strategies, and move along. This is good advice. Monetary purists were never all that honest anyway.

Ignatius writes:

WE ARE ALL CHINESE NOW. That is, we have a nominally capitalist economy, but we don't trust the freewheeling private market when it comes to the crunch. So we turn to the government for protection and stability.

The new interventionism isn't so much socialist as it is Confucian—a belief that a public-private partnership of the wise ones will get us out of the mess. And if it's any consolation, the Chinese are becoming more like us, even as we are becoming more like them.

A Chinese preview of this week's government-funded recapitalization of the banks came in the Hong Kong stock market crash of August 1998. To counter a typhoon of speculation that had battered the local market, Chinese authorities intervened to buy up sagging stocks with public money. The government spent $15.1 billion to acquire about 7.3 percent of the companies in the blue-chip Hang Seng Index.

Free-market partisans in the West were shocked by the Chinese intervention and decried it as a dangerous precedent. But it helped stabilize the Hong Kong market. Now, that earlier bailout seems modest indeed—compared with the quasi-nationalization of the world's leading banks we're seeing this week.

Read it all.

RIDING THE BIG WAVES

Capitalism operates in waves. I have held the opinion for a decade or so that the United States would need to eventually ease into a form of national capitalism in order to compete with similar large regimes in China, Russia, Europe, and several oil-rich quasi-socialist entities in the Middle East. Let me be perfectly clear. I am not advocating a misguided heavy-handed socialist agenda for America, or anything remotely close to the pie-eyed Marxist flim flam so popular among Left-wing bookstore café hipsters who are as personally selfish as any pickup truck-driving capitalist I've ever met. Yet so many of these lovely people with the trés chic smiles embrace an ideology which always seems to end in a pernicious totalitarianism and uninvited oppression by an elite class, quite a shell shocker or two in scale from the worse forms of capitalism ever practiced. Forget all that shuck and jive about false consciousness. It exists, but no one has a monopoly on a justifiable antidote. Life is not that damn complex, even for the uneducated. After all, even for the Big Kahuna, negotiating a Big Wave is a good thing. Negotiating a tsunami, not so much.

I predicted this need to ease into a form of national capitalism back in the 1990s to a loosely knit group of internationalists who were known as the Sworgists for no other reason than the fact that we had gathered around the fledgling Scenewash Project to discuss the future of capitalism. Back then, I was a staunch believer in the capitalist system, and at some point in the late 90s I coined the phrase, "Capitalism has proven to be the most effective and purest form of communism ever practiced."

Having founded the listserv I dubbed—THE SWORG SWILL—I was operating among several staunch Marxists, and a couple of progressives who decried all previous failed experiments, of which Situationist Marxism and formal capitalism were the two more prominent. We hailed from Washington, DC, Austin, TX, Nottingham, England, Peoria, IL, and Sidney, Australia. All of us intuited that capitalism was weakening and its constitutional faultlines deepening. Trapped in our own miasma and personal biases however, we often disagreed on how to proceed with our investigations, and the group ended rather abruptly in May, 2000, after several years of communication.

But I had I suggested that we didn't need no stinking revolution because I viscerally agreed with the poet and musician John Lennon, who rejected revolution while advocating peace. No bloody pacifist am I—given the horrid nature of the world—I however still prefer peace to war, a slap in the face or a kick in the collective ass to total war, and a purpose bounced ounce of dignity in life for everyone not waving a death sentence at me or my family. My impression then and my impression now is that capitalism would fall of its own weight and greed, and in that particular historical moment, a massive reorganization towards a kinder gentler socialist model could possibly improve the government, its daily standards, and the uncommon conditions of more common people struggling in this world, where unfortunately the many prop up the few.

I think that time has come. To that end, let's observe the festering approach in today's New York Times:

FINANCE EXPERTS SAY THAT HAVING Washington take stakes in United States banks now—like government interventions in the past—would be a promising move to address an economic emergency. The plan by the Treasury Department, they say, could supply banks with sorely needed capital and help restore confidence in financial markets.

Elsewhere, government bank-investment programs are routinely called nationalization programs. But that is not likely in the United States, where nationalization is a word to avoid, given the aversion to anything that hints of socialism.

In past times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In 1917, the government seized the railroads to make sure goods, armaments and troops moved smoothly in the interests of national defense during World War I. After the war ended, bondholders and stockholders were compensated and railways were returned to private ownership in 1920.

During World War II, Washington seized dozens of companies, including railroads, coal mines and, briefly, the Montgomery Ward department store chain. In 1952, President Harry S. Truman seized 88 steel mills across the country, asserting that unyielding owners were determined to provoke an industrywide strike that would cripple the Korean War effort. That nationalization did not last long, though, because the Supreme Court ruled the move an unconstitutional abuse of presidential power.

In banking, the government took an 80 percent stake in the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust in 1984. Continental Illinois failed in part because of bad oil-patch loans in Oklahoma and Texas. As the nation’s seventh-largest bank, Continental Illinois was deemed “too big to fail” by federal regulators, who feared wider turmoil in the financial markets. In the end, the government lost an estimated $1 billion on the bad loans it bought as part of the takeover of Continental, which eventually became part of Bank of America.

Read it all.

DETECTING OPEC'S FINANCIAL JIHAD

CAPITALISM IS A GAME PLAYED BY MANY. It is the opinion of several folks, including Walid Phares that OPEC has manufactured this attack on the global markets. This idea was also discussed on Bill O'Reilly's broadcast tonight with Ben Stein and Fox Business analyst Elizabeth Macdonald, although earlier in the broadcast O'Reilly was adamant with Newt Gingrich that Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Henry Paulson and others should be investigated and held accountable for their role in the meltdown of the mortgage market.

Was this financial crisis actually planned by the likes of George Soros, which then got out of hand? One thing is certain—Soros made a billion pounds out of the sterling crash of ‘93. That's on the record, and he seems proud of it. He is sometimes referred to as the man who broke the Bank of England.

But, based on what I have been monitoring with concern to both the stealth and the unmasked jihadist movements the past two years or so, I tend to agree that key pressures exerted by an aggressive OPEC is the trigger that began the domino effect around the global financial markets, an effect that still has a way to go. Read what Phares has to say....

Who manufactured the financial meltdown? It wasn’t only Wall Street: OPEC’s heavy hand is felt but unseen by the media and our politicians.

In bypassing a narrow economic analysis of the ongoing crisis, we can detect clearly the connection between the dizzying ups in petrol pricing and the slowing of American buying capacity. Though we have to conclude that while it is due largely to both Wall Street’s corruption and politicians’ abuse of the system handed the tools of doom to the middle class, Main Street’s rapid disenfranchisement was manufactured overseas, thousands of miles away, at the hands of many of the members of OPEC, the oil-producing Cartel.

Indeed, as economic commentators tell us (including a strong accusation leveled by real estate tycoon Donald Trump on Fox News against OPEC), the oil powers are behind the instability that crumbled the will of millions of middle class Americans over the past three years.

If we go back in time, we can see that oil pricing by OPEC’s hard core shows clearly that US leadership wasn’t able to convince the top producers from the Gulf to give American oil consumers a chance. Most producing regimes replied that demand—mostly from China and India—was putting pressure on production. Pressed by Washington to produce more, the “regimes” alleged it would affect the selling price and thus minimize their profits, but promised they would try to “be understanding” of US needs in energy.

This attitude gave the producers discretion over price, while Jihadi propagandists roamed the media accusing Washington of putting unbearable pressure “on the region” to follow American injunctions in setting petrol’s prices. Was there a direct connection between the oil regimes and the Jihadi propagandist machine? We have no answer to that now, but clearly an oil strategy was in the works with a calculated impact on the US economy. This charge is still in its early stages, it will be challenged ferociously, but it will stand as long as convincing answers are not provided.

What adds to the inquiry into the OPEC destabilization factor are the many indicators that strategic political motives have appeared to be behind the pricing maneuvers. Over a period of half a decade, many voices heard on the region’s airwaves have intimated that the US economy will be made to pay for what America’s leadership is doing. Commentators, some funded by oil producers on several outlets including on al Jazeera, underlined that as long as average citizens in the United States (and eventually in the West) don’t feel financial pain, the war on terror and spreading of Democracy won’t be stopped.

Sheikh Yussuf al Qaradawi, Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and mentor of the Qatari-funded channel, spoke openly of Silah al Naft, i.e, “the weapon of oil.” Indeed, it was called a weapon—as in a warfare situation—and most likely it was used as such. Of course, the producing “regimes” will deny the existence of a real strategy to bring the US to its knees by striking at its pumps. They will dismiss statements made by emirs and commentators in this regard. The “field Jihadists”, however, won’t deny the existence of such a battlefield.

For years now, Salafist web sites and al Qaeda spokespersons have loudly called for an “oil Jihad against infidel America and its lackeys.” Online material is still circulating. But more revealing are the official speeches by Osama Bin Laden and his deputy on the “absolute necessity to use that weapon.”

Ayman Zawahiri called expressly and repetitively on the public to sell their US dollars and buy gold instead (Be’u al dullar washtaru al zahab). These were stunning statements ignored by most analysts at the time but that are making sense today. He predicted a collapse in the infidels’ economy, starting from American markets. Was he a part of the lobbying effort in the OPEC game? Most likely not, but he seems to have been privy to the game, having insiders in the Wahhabi radical circles in the Peninsula: in the end there are too many political signs to dismiss and the analysis of price warfare is too evident to ignore.

OPEC’s manipulation of the markets did hit Americans hard in their pockets. Hundreds of millions of John and Jane Does were intimidated, terrorized really, into abandoning their lifelong dreams of owning properties because of the aggressive stance of petro-regimes towards the US and its campaign to spread democracy in the Greater Middle East. In historical terms, America was punished for daring to change the status quo in the Arab and Muslim world to the advantage of the weakest and the suppressed: Shia and Kurds in Iraq, Syrian reformers, Lebanese civil society, Africans in Darfur, Iranian women and students, artists and liberals across the Arabian Peninsula. In return, the U.S was submitted to economic destabilization, steady, gradual and by small doses.

Let’s not underestimate the power of the Jihadi-oil lobby in America: it has decades of influence and it has long arms into the system, and it has powerful political allies. It knows when Americans are messing up their own system, and it knows very well how to push them over the cliff, into the abyss of economic calamity.

A counterpoint to this thesis would vigorously argue that the alleged OPEC destabilization over the US economy is illogical, as many countries in the Gulf are experiencing a recession as a result of Wall Street’s crunch. In other words, they wouldn’t do it to themselves. Yet the ideological forces manning the oil weapon aren’t particularly concerned about economic stability. Their driving factor is Jihadism. We’ve heard their ideologues stating that even if they were to incur losses among their own societies in order to defeat the infidel powers, then let it be.

Read it all.

Dr. Walid Phares, author of Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against America, of The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy and of the forthcoming book, The Confrontation. He is also the Director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.