The Independent

Government won't prosecute Goldman Sachs in probe – USATODAY.com

WOW! My previous futures broker (PFGBest)... thank God I am no longer with them... and those that think "Obamacare", run by our government, is going to turn out swell this is what you can expect... AS USUAL OUR REGULATORS ARE ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL! WHEN ARE AMERICANS GOING TO WAKE AND DEMAND CHANGE! OH, THAT'S RIGHT, YOU DID IN THE LAST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION! THE CORRUPTION AND ROT RUN TO THE CORE NOW... LEHMAN BROS BERNIE MADOFF MF GLOBAL (Corzine) GOLDMAN SACHS (Lloyd Blankfien) JP MORGAN/CHASE (Jamie Dimon) PFGBest (Russell Wasendorf Sr.) WHERE IS THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT ~ OH, THATS RIGHT ~ THEY TOO ARE ABOVE THE LAW NOW! SAD TO SAY... I SMELL A SYSTEMIC FAILURE AND THEN REVOLUTION IN OUR FUTURE... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304022004577518680956762826.html

This past Wednesday marked the three month anniversary of ObamaCare being rushed through Congress and signed into law. As Speaker Pelosi famously stated that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” Americans are beginning to dislike the health care law more and more as its harrowing details are unveiled. Although the Majority claimed the health care law would reduce premiums by $2,500, in actuality it is expected to raise premiums by as much as $2,100, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In addition, during debate of the bill, Democrats claimed their government takeover of the health care sector would create millions of new jobs. However, according to a study by the National Federation of Independent Business, the health care law’s employer mandate could eliminate 1.6 million jobs through 2014, with 66 percent of those coming from small businesses. Because the health care law raises health care costs and kills jobs, among other atrocities, Con...

THE BLUEPRINT by WAYNE ALLYN ROOT , classmate Barach Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos -- thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within. Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger gove...

This week, President Obama embarked on a public relations offensive hoping to convince skeptical Americans that the Democrats’ health care overhaul is good for them.  First up, the President held a nationally televised question-and-answer session with seniors to highlight the one-time, $250 rebate check that relatively few seniors will receive if they reach the Medicare Part D donut hole this year.  In fact, more than 9 in 10 Medicare beneficiaries will never receive one of these checks. Despite the PR campaign, the problem remains in the policy.  According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the $250 one-time check pales in comparison to the $8,980 per senior cut in Medicare spending under the law over the next ten years.  Because the new health care law harms seniors by slashing Medicare, Congressman Miller and his Republican colleagues will continue to fight to repeal the law.   

Last week, the chief actuary of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) concluded that under Obamacare half of all seniors who have Medicare Advantage plans will lose their coverage.  Created in 2003, Medicare Advantage (MA) makes Medicare payments to private insurers seeking to provide health insurance to  America ’s seniors as a substitute to traditional Medicare coverage.  Under Medicare Advantage, the beneficiary pays traditional Medicare premiums and sometimes an additional premium for the extra benefits that may be provided under their new plan.  Under the new government-run health care system, CMS estimates that in 2017 – when the MA provisions will be fully phased in – enrollment in MA plans will be lower from its projected level of 14.8 million under the prior law to 7.4 million under the new law.  This will greatly affect seniors across the country.  In fact, in California ’s 42nd Congressional District, over 31,000 seniors rely on MA plans to meet their health car...

We learned Monday that the Central Planners have proposed a $3.8 trillion budget, with $2.0 trillion of tax increases, $1.0 trillion coming by increasing income taxes on families who earn more than $250,000. For those of you earning $250,000 in your families, which is about $125,000 after taxes using current tax rates, I ask you the question, are you rich? You are paying $1,200 a month in health insurance, paying $40,000 a year in college tuition with no scholarship help because you make too much money, and had 40 percent of your stock investments and 20 percent of your real estate investments wiped out the past three years. You pay three times as much in real estate taxes on the same home you lived in ten years ago. Are you rich? You work for a firm that could downsize or go bankrupt at any moment. Are you rich? Government tax revenues decline due to economic recession, and government spending increases because that is what Central Planners do under the guise of stimulating the econom...

"The government is spending money like it is going out of style," groans one justifiably disgruntled reader. "Part of reason is huge pay to government employees and corruption by Congress. "Data from Cato Institute of Federal Pay Vs Private (i.e. taxpayers) shows federal pay and benefits in 2008 of $119,982 vs. $59,909 private industry. Twice as high! And, the gap is growing fast. A decade ago, the average federal civilian employee earned 66% more in wages and benefits than the average private taxpayer. Today, it is double. In 2009 Federal Government budget for wages is up 3%, while private employees are losing their jobs and pay is being reduced. And, state and local town employees are paid about 35% more than private taxpayers. "Is that fair for taxpayers to be supporting Federal pay double their own?" the reader goes on to ask. "The federal employees are now the elite, upper class - like in Russia. It is the reason why Washington and s...

by Money Morning Americans could be in for a rude awakening in coming months when they discover the true scope of the massive national debt racked up by the U.S. government. In fact, the $1.6 trillion deficit expected for 2010, which is above 10% of gross domestic product (GDP), is only the beginning. Since the current economic crisis began in late 2007, the U.S. Federal Reserve has tripled the size of its balance sheet, creating enormous amounts of new money by lending to hundreds of ailing banks and buying up more than $1 trillion of questionable asset-backed securities. But that’s only a small part of the story. Since the beginning of the crisis, the Fed has lent, spent, or guaranteed $11.6 trillion, including underwriting the entire system of mortgage finance in the United States, a system that currently shows a nearly $1 trillion loss. And none of these figures include any of U.S. President Barack Obama’s stimulus packages, which means the actual deficit next y...

By ROBERT PEAR Published: December 28, 2009 WASHINGTON — At the heart of the fight over health care legislation is a paradox that befuddles lawmakers of both parties... Expanding Health Coverage and Shoring Up Medicare - Is It Double-Counting? - NYTimes.com  

Democratic districts have received nearly twice as much stimulus money as Republican districts and the cash has been awarded without regard to how badly an area was suffering from job losses, according to a new study. FOXNews.com - Democratic Districts Won Twice as Much Stimulus as GOP Districts, Study Shows

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Flight Delay www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

In 2006, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi stated that “Democrats are proposing a New Direction for America”. However, nearly three years into Speaker Pelosi’s “New Direction,” jobs are down and unemployment, poverty, and misery are up. Specifically, over the past three years the number of unemployed has increased from 7 million to nearly 16 million; the unemployment rate has skyrocketed from 4.6 percent to 10.2 percent; and the misery index, an economic indicator which adds the unemployment rate to the inflation rate, has increased by 27 percent. Further, the federal budget deficit has increased by a staggering 471 percent; federal spending has increased by 33 percent; and the national debt has ballooned to $12 trillion. In addition to these harrowing statistics, this week the media reported more instances of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Democrats’ $787 billion Economic Stimulus Package. According to the Recovery.gov website, nine California congressional districts that do not exist r...

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that Housing Starts dropped a whopping 10.6 percent in the one month period October 2009 versus September 2009, and fell 30.7 percennt below an already awful number last October 2008. This is in spite of the $8,000 first time home buyers credit the Central Planners decided was a key stimulus tactic. New Building Permits fell 24.3 percent from last year's lousy October number. Mortgage Applications fell 2.5 percent last week. Clearly the Central Planners' stimulus plan is not working. The reason is simple, they have targeted a small minority to get the trillions of dollars of government spending, and have failed miserably in conducting a strategy that would get cash into the hands of all American Households. If you have a clunker and are willing to buy a tiny car with a certain gas mileage performance, if you are buying a new home for the first time, or if you are one of the largest financial companies on earth, you get the money, and...

Nov. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Bank of New York “severely limited” its ability to save taxpayer money on American International Group Inc.’s rescue by refusing to compel banks to take concessions, said a Treasury Department watchdog. The Fed didn’t use its “considerable leverage” as regulator of several of AIG’s counterparties to force them to accept so-called haircuts on credit-default swaps, Neil Barofsky, special inspector for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said today in a report. The regulator gave up efforts to negotiate discounts from the banks after two days and opted to pay them in full for $62.1 billion in swaps, Barofsky said. “These policy decisions came with a cost -- they led directly to a negotiating strategy with the counterparties that even then-New York Fed President Geithner acknowledged had little likelihood of success,” Barofsky said. Timothy Geithner, now Treasury secretary, was among officials who took over negotiations with the banks from AIG in N...

by CalculatedRisk on 11/15/2009 09:20:00 AM From Bloomberg: China’s Liu Says U.S. Rates Cause Dollar Speculation “The continuous depreciation in the dollar, and the U.S. government’s indication, that in order to resume growth and maintain public confidence, it basically won’t raise interest rates for the coming 12 to 18 months, has led to massive dollar arbitrage speculation,” [Liu Mingkang, chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission said] ... Liu said this has “seriously affected global asset prices, fuelled speculation in stock and property markets, and created new, real and insurmountable risks to the recovery of the global economy, especially emerging-market economies.” President Obama will be in China today, and there will probably be some dicussion of China's exchange rate policy.

Health care reform squeaked through the House Saturday by a 220-215 vote as the threat of working during the Christmas holiday got the House version moving. The plan passed with virtually no discussion as speaker Pelosi squashed any attempts at questioning the bill or virtually any portion of the bill. Democrats must now be especially motivated to get this passed after viewing the results in Virginia and New Jersey, which could be a precursor to the 2010 elections. A loss of even a handful of seats next year could mean this type of bill won’t get passed in the next session. It was interesting to note that one Republican voted for the bill while 29 Democrats voted against it.

Paul B. Farrell Oct. 20, 2009, 8:08 a.m. EDT Death of 'Soul of Capitalism:' Bogle, Faber, Moore By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Jack Bogle published "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" four years ago. The battle's over. The sequel should be titled: "Capitalism Died a Lost Soul." Worse, we've lost "America's Soul." And worldwide the consequences will be catastrophic. That's why a man like Hong Kong's contrarian economist Marc Faber warns in his Doom, Boom & Gloom Report: "The future will be a total disaster, with a collapse of our capitalistic system as we know it today." No, not just another meltdown, another bear market recession like the one recently triggered by Wall Street's "too-greedy-to-fail" banks. Faber is warning that the entire system of capitalism will collapse. Get it? The engine driving the great "American Economic Empire" f...

President Obama and his juvenile administration has final pissed me off! Up to this point I kind of chuckled at their antics... but no more - I AM INSULTED!  Rick White House Escalates War at Fox News Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view and not being a real news network. FOXNews.com Sunday, October 18, 2009 The White House escalated its offensive against Fox News on Sunday by urging other news organizations to stop "following Fox" and instead join the administration's attempt to marginalize the channel. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox." Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization." "Other news organizations like ...