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Bankers Capture the Money Machine - Fighting for the Family Farm
In the 1890s, "keeping the family homestead was a key political issue" given that foreclosures and evictions "were occurring in record numbers," much like today. The "Bankers Manifesto of 1892" spelled it out - a willful plan "to disenfranchise farmers and laborers of their homes and property," again like today except that now our very freedom and futures are at stake as sinister forces aim to steal them by turning America into Guatemala and lock it down by police state repression. The panic of 1893 caused an earlier depression - severe enough to establish a precedent of street protests, the result of the first ever march on Washington. Businessman/populist Jacob Coxey led his "Coxey's Army (of around 500) from Massilon, Ohio (beginning March 25, Easter Sunday) to the nation's capital to demand jobs and a return to debt and interest-free Greenbacks. Local police intervened. The marchers were disbanded. Coxey was arrested. He spent 20 days in jail for disturbing the peace and violating a local ordinance against walking on the grass. However, he was never charged, then released, and is now remembered for his heroics. He began a tradition later sparking suffragist marches; unemployed WW I veterans for their "Bonus Bill" money; numerous anti-war and earlier civil rights protests; in 2004, one million in the nation's capital for women's rights, and the previous day thousands protesting IMF-World Bank policies.
In a speech to a Talmudic law institute last January, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared it "silly" that all pieces of information about a person -- like their home address -- be considered private. In the battle between free speech and privacy, Scalia says, free speech wins. Which sounds great, as long as you don't think about it very deeply.
Fordham law professor Joel Reidenberg decided to take Scalia's remarks and turn them into a homework assignment. Using information available on the public Web, Reidenberg asked his students to compile a dossier on Scalia and his family. They dug up 15 pages worth of addresses, food preferences, photos, etc., and sent it to Scalia for his reaction.
Any economist fixated on so-called “signs of a recovery” needs to have his head examined. As I’ll prove to you in a moment, the hard-nosed reality is that five major economic cyclones are in progress at this very moment. The storms are not abating. Nor are they changing direction. Quite the contrary, what you see today is, at best, merely a deceptive calm before the next, even larger tempests. For investors who follow Wall Street, it could be fatal. For contrarian investors, however, this insanity opens up some of the greatest opportunities in many years: Precisely when we see plunging barometers all around us, we also have a new surge of hype on Wall Street, driving stock prices higher. Result: The rally has lowered the cost of contrary investments precisely when their prospects are best. Consider the five storms, and you’ll see exactly what I mean …
The level of propaganda spewing out of the U.S. government and the financial press/mass media is unprecedented in my lifetime (55 years). Public support for policies based on distorted statistics will crash once reality intrudes.
The U.S. government and its financial Plutocracy Overlords have undertaken an unprecedented propaganda campaign to convince the U.S. public that their looting of public treasure has "worked" and we can all start borrowing and spending again.
Having been cursed by a completely useless interest in politics since the age of 10 (the 1964 presidential election campaign) I can state without hesitation that the grand deceptions, Big Lies and blatant propaganda campaigns of the past pale in comparison to the current orchestration of phony statistics and "it's all fixed now, start spending."
How deep have the cuts been at Am Law 200 firms? To find out, we analyzed reports from The American Lawyer, and other confirmed sources, including statements from firms, going back to January 2008. Since that time, more than 2,800 attorney jobs have vanished, or 2.55% of the 111,377 lawyer positions that existed at Am Law 200 law firms a year ago. Coverage of law firm layoffs can be found here.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average has bounced an astounding 30% from its March 9 low of 6547. Is this the dawn of a new era? Are we off to the races again? I'm not so sure. Only a fool predicts the stock market, so here I go. This sure smells to me like a sucker's rally. That's because there aren't sustainable, fundamental reasons for the market's continued rise. Here are three explanations for the short-term upswing:
Discussion of the 50% Retracement Rule,
potential future price levels, time studies, key dates, Fibonacci, Gann, Astro numbers, Robert Rhea's Great Depression analysis.
An MP who was involved in last month's G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds. Liberal Democrat Tom Brake says he saw what he believed to be two plain-clothes police officers go through a police cordon after presenting their ID cards. Brake, who along with hundreds of others was corralled behind police lines near Bank tube station in the City of London on the day of the protests, says he was informed by people in the crowd that the men had been seen to throw bottles at the police and had encouraged others to do the same shortly before they passed through the cordon. Brake, a member of the influential home affairs select committee, will raise the allegations when he gives evidence before parliament's joint committee on human rights on Tuesday.
I'd been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard. Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel's shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained. I didn't fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Almost everyone else was a maths or economics major and had family in banking.
If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com
