Book Review: End This Depression Now!

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Sunday June 03, 2012 · 2:38 PM PDT

2012/06/03 · 14:38

I just read an interview with an economist with a huge love/hate relationship problem. The article was published in the last few hours over across the Pond, in the Guardian, and was struck by one paragraph in particular:

These Very Serious People present economics as a morality play, in which debt is a sin, and we have all sinned, so now we must all pay the price by tightening our belts together. They tell us the crisis will take a long time to resolve, and must inevitably be painful. All of this, according to Krugman, is the opposite of the truth. Austerity is a self-imposed collective punishment that is not just unnecessary, but won't work. We know what would work – but for complex political and historical reasons that his book explores, we have chosen to forget. "Ending this depression," he writes, "should be, could be, almost incredibly easy. So why aren't we doing it?"

Let's dive a little deeper past the floating orange debris... Read More

#OccupyBudweiser

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Saturday May 05, 2012 · 7:30 PM PDT

2012/05/05 · 19:30

The NY Times' Nick Kristof has put forth the call for a nationwide boycott of Anheuser-Busch products to protest the company policy of distribution of beer on the outskirts of the Oglala Sioux Indian reservation in Nebraska.

AFTER seeing Anheuser-Busch’s devastating exploitation of American Indians, I’m done with its beer.
The human toll is evident here in Whiteclay: men and women staggering on the street, or passed out, whispers of girls traded for alcohol. The town has a population of about 10 people, but it sells more than four million cans of beer and malt liquor annually — because it is the main channel through which alcohol illegally enters the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation a few steps away.

Pine Ridge, one of America’s largest Indian reservations, bans alcohol. The Oglala Sioux who live there struggle to keep alcohol out, going so far as to arrest people for possession of a can of beer. But the tribe has no jurisdiction over Whiteclay because it is just outside the reservation boundary.

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Thursday April 05, 2012 · 3:26 AM PDT

2012/04/05 · 03:26

This does not bode well for the coming elections....

An optical scan vote tallying system, now used by some 300 U.S. municipalities, misreported the results of a Palm Beach County, Florida, municipal election last month.
Dominion Voting Inc.'s Sequoia Voting Systems device mistakenly awarded two Wellington Village Council seats to candidates who were found in a post-election audit to have lost their races.

The results were officially changed last weekend after a court-sanctioned public hand count of the votes.

Palm Beach County supervisor of elections Susan Bucher did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the problem.

According to a story in the Palm Beach Sun Sentinel , the Sequoia vote counting software was set up in a way that didn't correspond to the Wellington County ballot distributed to voters.

As a result, votes meant for one candidate were credited to a different candidate.

"Election-night totals on Wellington's three races were shifted in a circle -- with village council Seat 4 votes going to the mayor's race, votes for mayor going to council Seat 1, and votes for Seat 1 going to Seat 4," the Sentinel story said.

In a product advisory notice issued last Friday, Dominion warned customers that problems could arise if the contest order on a paper ballot does not match the ballot order programmed into Sequoia machine.

"The contest order on the ballots in the database can become out of sync with the contest order shown on the corresponding paper ballots," the company noted.

http://www.cio.com/...

When you voted for your choices in the 3 races by connecting two ends of an arrow with a pen, you then fed your ballot into an optical reader. The votes were tallied correctly but then were assigned to a different candidate in a different race. The election night results showed Dem Bob Margolis to be a 700 vote winner against incumbent Repub mayor Darell Bowen, former council member Repub Al Paglia to be a winner over incumbent Dem Matt Willhite and newcomer Shauna Hostetler over John Greene, both Republicans seeking an open seat. The two council races were decided on election night, March 13 by less than 200 votes.

On March 19 a discrepency was noted during an audit and the Supervisor of Elections alerted all parties that a recount of the votes was needed. The recount was granted by the canvassing board, which consisted of 3 Wellington council members not involved in the election, plus the Village clerk. The recount kept Margolis the winner by roughly 70 votes but reversed the two council winners, with Willhite picking up a sizable 700 vote edge over Paglia.

Numerous court hearings led to an order of the physical hand recount which confirmed that the second count was 100% accurate. The winners will be sworn in next week.

Susan Bucher, the Supervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County has warned county officials that the equipment they are using is problematic for years, but budget constraints have prevented new purchases. She deserves credit for finding the problem before it was too late and preventing losing candidates from taking office.

Never a dull moment in Palm Beach County.

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Saturday February 04, 2012 · 1:12 PM PST

2012/02/04 · 13:12

Story out in the New York Times: A Mortgage Tornado Warning, Unheeded

http://www.nytimes.com/...

YEARS before the housing bust — before all those home loans turned sour and millions of Americans faced foreclosure — a wealthy businessman in Florida set out to blow the whistle on the mortgage game.

His name is Nye Lavalle, and he first came to attention not in finance but in sports and advertising. He turned heads in marketing circles by correctly predicting that Nascar and figure skating would draw huge followings in the 1990s.
But after losing a family home to foreclosure, under what he thought were fishy circumstances, Mr. Lavalle, founder of a consulting firm called the Sports Marketing Group, began a new life as a mortgage sleuth. In 2003, when home prices were flying high, he compiled a dossier of improprieties on one of the giants of the business, Fannie Mae.

In hindsight, what he found looks like a blueprint of today’s foreclosure crisis. Even then, Mr. Lavalle discovered, some loan-servicing companies that worked for Fannie Mae routinely filed false foreclosure documents, not unlike the fraudulent paperwork that has since made “robo-signing” a household term. Even then, he found, the nation’s electronic mortgage registry was playing fast and loose with the law — something that courts have belatedly recognized, too.

You might wonder why Mr. Lavalle didn’t speak up. But he did.

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Tuesday January 31, 2012 · 6:50 AM PST

2012/01/31 · 06:50

Nor a pre-made birthday cake, and quite possibly any baked goods except for Wonder bread.

Strange how on one hand the Rethugs say they are against big Government, but given half a chance to put thumbscrews on the poor and disadvantaged, well, Game On!

Check this out:http://www.thefloridacurrent.com/...

Legislation that would prevent people from using electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards or benefits from Florida’s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program for non-nutritional items such as candy, cakes or other foods with sugar or corn syrup passed through a House committee Monday

The bill ostensibly was to ban use of electronic food stamp and benefit cards from being used at casinos, internet cafes and stores with liquor licences but the leadership wanted to go a step further...

When some Republican members of the committee voiced objection, the leadership layed out its intention:

Plakon defended the proposal as a way to prevent waste and make sure taxpayer funds were being spent appropriately.
"These are taxpayer dollars," Plakon said. "It's already in the law that we put restrictions on the use of food stamps. We’re already infringing on their rights as you would put it . . . we’re just talking about how big that list is."

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Friday January 27, 2012 · 6:53 AM PST

2012/01/27 · 06:53

Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Here's the apparent message Florida Governor Rick Scott takes from the Holocaust:

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has not endorsed a candidate in the U.S. presidential contest, but he strongly endorsed the “free market” Thursday morning, using a Holocaust-era quote to encourage business leaders to defend capitalism during the presidential primaries.
“I’ve got a quote in my office,” he said before paraphrasing Martin Neimöller’s famous statement criticizing the complacency of some during the Nazi-era. “First they came for the Jews, and I wasn’t a Jew so I didn’t say anything...”

He linked the quote to criticisms, made by presidential candidates former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry, about Bain Capital, which former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney started.

“We shouldn’t be allowing candidates to attack people in business, we should be saying… 'That’s us',” Scott said at a quarterly board meeting of Enterprise Florida, the state’s economic development partnership with private businesses.

Scott is a former CEO who ran several businesses prior to becoming governor last year. After the speech, he said he used to quote to say the free market was worth defending.

“When you see somebody being attacked because they live the American dream, we ought to go out and say, ‘Gosh, I’d like to live the American dream’,” he said.

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/...

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Monday January 23, 2012 · 5:16 PM PST

2012/01/23 · 17:16

Looks like the White House speechwriters are going to burn the midnight oil tonight.... one of the major portions of the SOTU address needs to be trashed.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 23, 2012
STATEMENT FROM ATTORNEY GENERAL TOM MILLER

(CHICAGO, Illinois) State Attorneys General from both parties, along with our federal partners, are today discussing the details of the progress we have made so far in settlement negotiations, including the terms we must still resolve. We have not yet reached an agreement with the nation’s five largest servicers, and we won’t reach a settlement any time this week.

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Thursday December 22, 2011 · 1:00 PM PST

2011/12/22 · 13:00

Matt Taibbi has a post up pointing us to this essay by Max Abelson at Bloomberg which includes these pearls of wisdom from a few one percenters...

Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernard Marcus, regarding Occupy Wall Street

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” “Are you kidding me?”

John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank, regarding a Dodd-Frank Act provision

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.”

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Thursday December 15, 2011 · 8:16 PM PST

2011/12/15 · 20:16

Homeowners in foreclosure may have a better chance of getting a true trial, instead of a quickie judgment, following a 4th District Court of Appeal decision that requires banks to prove ownership of the note at the time they file for repossession.
The ruling Wednesday in Palm Beach County was heralded by foreclosure defense attorneys who said it may even force banks to dismiss some cases and start over with new paperwork.

Tom Ice, founder of the Royal Palm Beach-based foreclosure defense firm Ice Legal, called the decision a "sea change" in the way courts are looking at foreclosure cases and the importance of assignments of mortgage.

"No longer can banks just walk in and have their attorney wave around a piece of paper saying this is the note," Ice said. "The good news for homeowners is now they have an opportunity to prove their case and get a trial on its merits."

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Monday December 12, 2011 · 7:30 AM PST

2011/12/12 · 07:30

President of Russia, that is.

MOSCOW — Amid a crescendo of complaints from Russians fed up with the country’s tightly controlled political system, two prominent figures — a billionaire industrialist and the recently ousted finance minister — sought to fill a void in the opposition leadership on Monday.
The billionaire, Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who owns shares in a major gold mining company and an array of other ventures in Russia as well as the New Jersey Nets basketball franchise in the United States, said he would run for president, challenging Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

“I made a decision, probably the most serious decision in my life: I am going to the presidential election,” Mr. Prohkorov said at a news conference. He has barely appeared in public since mid-September, when he was removed as the head of a pro-business party, Just Cause, after clashing with Kremlin political strategists.

Rest of NY Times breaking story here: http://www.nytimes.com/...

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Friday December 09, 2011 · 10:07 AM PST

2011/12/09 · 10:07

Wall Street Journal:

Investor George Soros's family fund bought about $2 billion of European bonds formerly owned by MF Global Holdings Ltd., the very debt that helped force the securities firm to file for bankruptcy protection Oct. 31, according to people close to the matter.
Under the direction of MF Global's former chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, the firm accumulated $6.3 billion of short-term debt issued by various European nations, mostly from Italy, in a bid to boost trading profits. Over the summer, this debt led to nervousness by investors, regulators and ratings companies, resulting in the firm's collapse just over a month ...

The question is, why? Speculation is that the Hungarian-American may be trying to show support for Europe, as MF Global's risky bonds that led to bankruptcy were tied to European debt. He's a player alright. Just a week ago Soros indicated that the "European debt crisis is putting the global financial system in a "self-reinforcing process of disintegration."

Video of story: http://www.marketwatch.com/...

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Friday December 02, 2011 · 1:01 PM PST

2011/12/02 · 13:01

Wow. And this one is not snark, like my last one earlier today

Toys for Tots collection boxes traditionally are placed in lobbies of retail stores, office buildings, fast-food restaurants and banks. But sometimes businesses will opt out of the program, which doesn't normally upset the charity's West Pasco coordinator.
That is unless the businesses denying their lobby space happen to be branches of big corporate banks, said West Pasco Toys for Tots coordinator John Durkin. He was referring to TD Bank and Wells Fargo, which recently nixed collection boxes in their lobbies.

The banks said they are big supporters of charities in whatever community they do business. TD Bank officials said there is a meeting set up later this week to talk about the issue with Toys for Tots officials to try to reach a resolution.

"I certainly respect people's right to support or not support a cause," he said. What irked Durkin about the banks was that, "We unceremoniously were told to get the boxes out."

http://www2.tbo.com/...

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