'Mortgage Fraud': HR 3808 as Litmus Test for Obama

on whom he really serves. I'm not holding my breath, though.

HR 3808 has already passed House and Senate without any public discussion, and it is ready for Obama to sign into law.

What is it, you ask? The bill requires all federal and state courts to recognize notarizations made in other states. The practical application?

"... the legislation, if enacted, could protect bank and mortgage processors from liability for false or improperly prepared documents. In other words, with one simple signature Obama has the capacity to prevent tens of billions in damages to banks from legal fees, MBS deficiency claims, unwound sales, and to formally make what started this whole mess: Court Fraud perpetrated by banks, a legal act, and to finally trample over the constitution."

Is HR3808 The Equivalent Of TARP 2 And Obama's "Get Out Of Jail" Gift Card For The High Frequency Signing Scandal? (Tyler Durden, 10/06/2010 Zero Hedge)

Now that the High Frequency Signing (HFS, not to be confused with HFT) scandal is mainstream, and virtually every single foreclosure in the US in the past several years is under question, with the impact on mortgage servicers (who just happen to be the TBTF banks) could be just as dire as the fallout from the credit crunch, it appears that the get out of jail card for the banking syndicate has once again materialized, this time in the form of bill HR3808: Interstate Recognition of Notarizations Act of 2009, sponsored by Republican representative Robert Aderholt. The bill, it turns out, has passed both congress and senate, and is now quietly awaiting for Obama's signature to be enacted into law. In summary, the bill requires all federal and state courts to recognize notarizations made in other states. That's the theoretical definition: the practical one - the legislation, if enacted, could protect bank and mortgage processors from liability for false or improperly prepared documents. In other words, with one simple signature Obama has the capacity to prevent tens of billions in damages to banks from legal fees, MBS deficiency claims, unwound sales, and to formally make what started this whole mess: Court Fraud perpetrated by banks, a legal act, and to finally trample over the constitution. Will Obama do it? Potentially - the banking lobby certainly has enough power over him and his superiors, the members of the FOMC. On the other hand, the populist revolt that will surely follow the enactment of such a law will certainly end any dreams of a second term, and potentially of a completed first one. The drama is now on: will Obama openly side on behalf of the bankers (without a "blame the republicans" fall back this time) or of the foreclosure "victims" (granted, the bulk of whom are deadbeat homeowners who should never have owned a home to begin with). We doubt a decision will be reached before the midterms, although quite a bit now hangs in the balance." [The article continues.]

The article cites Reuter's article explaining the conundrum, and a very curious special procedure in the Senate that allowed the bill to be rushed through, even to the surprise of the sponsor of the bill. It passed the Senate one day before the recess, on September 27 without any discussion.

Zero Hedge ends the article with this remark:

"Unfortunately even if the prompt Senatorial passage of the bill was the bankers' plan all along, they may have shot themselves in the foot by leaving it up to the president to determine if America is now a banker corporatocracy (what some may call a fascist regime), or still a place that believes in laws and regulations, as broken as they may be, in broad daylight. Our sense, is that this bill will not pass, although we have on many occasions in the past underestimated the degree of corruption in this country. On the other hand, should tens of millions of Americans have a crystallized image of one person who in their view will be "responsible" for their inability to pay their mortgage bill on time, then we just may be one step closer to the full societal collapse that many predict will accompany the end of Keynesianism.

"The ball is now in the president's court."

Now, will he, or won't he, sign this into law?

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Stuxnet and Deep Water Horizon Rig

From F-SECURE.com's Security Lab blog:

Q: Did Stuxnet sink Deepwater Horizon and cause the Mexican oil spill?
A: No, we do not think so. Although it does seem Deepwater Horizon indeed did have some Siemens PLC systems on it.

F-SECURE.com also thinks this malware was created by a government.

Now, do you remember one curious response of Obama after the oil rig sank? He dispatched SWAT teams to secure other oil rigs and platforms as if he thought it was a terrorist attack on Deepwater Horizon. Or was it a terrorist attack, using Stuxnet that some unknown government created?

It's getting curiouser and curiouser.

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Schmidt: It's Google Policy "to Get Right Up to the Creepy Line"

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt strikes again.

The creepy line? As many in the comment section wonder aloud, just which side of the "creepy line" is Google approaching?

Eric Schmidt: Google gets close to 'the creepy line'
(Shane Richmond, 10/05/2010 Telegraph UK)

"Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, has described his company’s policy: “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

"Schmidt was talking to The Atlantic about the possibility of a Google implant – a chip under your skin that would track you and provide easy web access. That, Schmidt said, was probably over ‘the creepy line’.

"However, he followed that by saying: “With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

"Some might argue that that is over the line too but Google will only read your mind “with your permission”, so that’s a relief.

"Schmidt has a history of attention-grabbing and quotable statements about Google’s increasing, err, creep into our lives. There was the time that he said: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Recently he has suggested that young people might in future change their names so as to escape their Google-able past." [The article continues.]

Your "permission" may amount to nothing more than having cookies on your PC.

One of the Google founders, Sergey Brin, said in September that Google wants to be "the third half of your brain".

"Creepiness" is now the culture of Google, actively promoted by the top management. How times have changed.

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Bank of Japan Will Buy Anything and Everything, Almost

Bank of Japan has just said it will buy long-term government bonds, commercial paper, asset-backed commercial paper, corporate bonds, index ETFs, funds that invest in REITs. To do that, the bank will set up a special fund (35 trillion yen total - about 419 billion USD) on its balance sheet.

Nikkei spikes on those words..

They LOWERED the rate to zero, too. (0% to 0.1%, to be precise. It was 0.1%.)

As rubiofromitaly at Yahoo board says, "That is the sayonara wave for we are going down the toilet all together....kumbaya."

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Climategate Update: Chicago Climate Exchange Flatlining

Ah, some poetic justice meted out by a free market...

Anthony Watts at Watts With That blog posts:

Chicago Climate Exchange still flatlining – employee cuts
(8/13/2010 Watts With That)

From the “unsustainable business” department, who wants carbon at 10 cents a ton? Apparently, nobody. Data below as of August 8 2010:

Source: http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/market/data/summary.jsf

From Reuters, news of layoffs. At least their carbon footprint will be lower…

ICE cuts staff at Chicago Climate Exchange-sources

* ICE to cut around half of 50-person CCX workforce

* 1st round of layoffs began July 23, more to come in autumn

* Sources cite U.S. climate inaction as main reason for cuts

* ICE collecting feedback on what to do with climate bourse

[The entire post at the link above.]

Oh BTW, "global COOLING" is what Bilderbergers were apparently concerned about, not "global warming". Wonder why the food futures have been going up? Wonder why the super rich are reported to be buying gold by the ton?

And Algore is still peddling global warming, and so is this despicable organization called 1010global.org (warming: the link goes to their graphic promo video where they blow up children to reduce carbon footprint).

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More on Stuxnet: 'Insider and Government Job'

according to V3.co.uk.

Stuxnet worm could have been inside job (10/01/2010 V3.co.uk)

"Delegates at the Virus Bulletin 2010 conference in Vancouver have heard that the Stuxnet worm could have been an inside job.

"Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, told V3.co.uk that the worm may have been written by someone with detailed knowledge of Siemens' computer systems, possibly a current or former employee.

""The message I got was that it appears to have been written by someone with inside knowledge of how Siemens' systems work," he said.

"...The malware contains the date 9 May 1979, which coincides with the execution of an Israeli businessman in Iran. But Cluley explained that this date is also, for example, the birth date of actress Rosario Dawson, and could be a red herring.

"Cluley also said that the evidence for this being a targeted attack on Iran is patchy, since Symantec reported that more attacks had been reported in India and Indonesia than in Iran.

"Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure, told V3.co.uk that, based on the evidence he'd seen, the Stuxnet worm looks like a government attack, although conference presentations focused on the technical details of the attack rather than the motive.

"The obvious conclusion from Stuxnet is that there isn't any clear motive other than sabotage," he said.

"Crucially no-one has found a way that anyone could make money from this, which makes criminal involvement unlikely. If you look at the level of difficulty and complexity behind Stuxnet, it has to be a government effort."

[Emphasis is mine. The entire article at the link above.]

Spending so much effort (and time and money, probably) on a complex project for no financial gain. That surely fits the definition of a government job...

May 9, 1979 also happens to be the day when a Unabomber bomb injures Northwestern University graduate student John Harris, according to Wikipedia.

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James Grant: Let's Plan for the Death of the Federal Reserve

Yes, let's!

Below is a clip posted at Zero Hedge (10/01 2010).

It's a James Grant interview on Bloomberg TV, discussing how to manage the dissolution of the ultimate TBTF (too big to fail) bad bank, the Federal Reserve. His suggestions include:

• Appoint Ron Paul as the executor;
• Outsource $2.2 trillion portfolio management to competent private hands;
• Central economic planning to be undone by the executor.

His other points:

• Banks having to draw up plans for their own demise - it has nothing to do with reality.
• We have been on the road to socialization of credit for many decades, and we're kind of there now.
• Taxpayers will bail out again these insolvent banks.
• Regulators are more risk-averse, more backward-looking.
  

and

• One of the America's great strength is, has been, the capacity to deal with failure; almost any society can deal with successes. Ability to confront error, admit it, and to reprice it, and then to try the next thing, try to form a business in the face of error, in the face of his own failings.

(True! Just look at Silicon Valley...)

Don't let them - the White House, the government, court historians and economists and MSM, anyone - make you cower in fear or resignation.

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What's With This "Terror" Threat in Europe?

The US State Department and the UK Foreign Office warn of "terrorist" attacks similar to the 2008 Mumbay attack in France and Germany, with the Foreign Office saying "an attack is highly likely".

News of this "terror" threat came out of nowhere about two weeks ago.

According to ABC News exclusive, targets have already been selected with the help of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

Doesn't it make you wonder... "Really?"

WHO really selected the targets, anyway?

Al-Qaeda in Pakistan? Oh how convenient... So that's why the US have been bombing Pakistan, a US ally, ever since Obama became the president of the US?

If the authorities know that much, why don't they arrest them, instead of issuing warning to the public that there may be terrorist attacks in France or Germany or both, and the attacks are highly likely?

Or do they want the attacks to happen?

"Wag the dog" big time for....?

November election in the US?

Proposed severe budget cut in the UK?

Scaring the uppity citizens in Europe and the US who have started to defy the governments?

Is this basically the same operation that FBI has been doing (FBI informants encouraging so-called "terrorists" to take action, like this one), only on an international scale?

Ooops... CIA may have done something like that already, in Mumbay...

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J.P.Morgan Chase Reopens Underground Gold Vault

Is "gold mania" coming?

J.P. Morgan reopens vault amid gold demand: report
(10/03/2010 MarketWatch)

TOKYO (MarketWatch) -- J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM 38.81, +0.75, +1.97%) has reopened an underground gold vault in New York amid soaring demand and prices for gold bullion, according to a report in The Financial Times published Sunday. The vault had been closed since the 1990s. Deutsche Bank AG (DB 55.12, +0.19, +0.35%) and Barclays PLC's (BCS 19.10, +0.25, +1.33%) Barclays Capital are also considering opening new vaults in London, the report said. J.P. Morgan opened its first vault in Asia for precious-metals storage in Singapore late last month. Meanwhile, prices for gold continue to climb, with gold for December delivery up $1.50 at $1,319.30 an ounce on Globex in Tokyo's Monday morning trading. The contract closed at a record $1,317.80 in New York on Friday after tapping a high of $1,322.

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Stuxnet Followup: Stick It to Russians

It has wrecked havoc in Iran, it has moved to China and is doing the same, as I posted a few days ago.

No one supposedly know where Stuxnet, a virus that targets industrial control systems built by Siemens, originated, though there are not many nations in the world that are capable of programming something like this.

DEBKAfile, a website in one of such nations, insinuates that it was Russians who planted the virus:

"debkafile's intelligence sources report from Iran that dozens of Russian nuclear engineers, technicians and contractors are hurriedly departing Iran for home since local intelligence authorities began rounding up their compatriots as suspects of planting the Stuxnet malworm into their nuclear program.

"Among them are the Russian personnel who built Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr which Tehran admits has been damaged by the virus.

"One of the Russian nuclear staffers, questioned in Moscow Sunday, Oct. 3 by Western sources, confirmed that many of his Russian colleagues had decided to leave with their families after team members were detained for questioning at the beginning of last week. He refused to give his name because he and his colleagues intend to return to Iran if the trouble blows over and the detainees are quickly released after questioning.

"According to our sources, these detentions were the source of the announcement Saturday, Oct. 2, by Iranian Intelligence Minister Heidar Moslehi that several "nuclear spies" had been captured. "The enemy had sent electronic worms through the internet to undermine Iran's nuclear activities," he said. This was the first high-level Iranian admission that the Stuxnet virus had been planted by foreign elements to sabotage their entire nuclear program - and not just the Bushehr reactor. The comprehensive scale of the damage is attested to by the detention of Russian nuclear experts also at Natanz, Isfahan and Tehran.

"...The prime aim of their interrogation is to find out if Russian intelligence knowingly planted the destructive worm in Iran's nuclear facilities, possibly for under-the-counter pay, or were the unwitting carriers of equipment on order by Iran that had been previously infected.

"debkafile's Western sources report that the hundreds of Russian scientists, engineers and technicians employed in Iran were responsible for installing the Siemens control systems in Iran's nuclear complex and other facilities which proved most vulnerable to the cyber attack.

"They were the only foreigners with access to these heavily guarded plants. At Bushehr, for instance, the Russian personnel enjoyed full access to all its systems."

Uh huh. Sure. It may be easy to bribe Russians to do things like plant the virus. The obvious question is, WHO BRIBED Russians?

And of course, the usual question: Cui bono?

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NYT: Tea Party Movement Draws on "Long-Ago Texts by Dead Writers" (= AUSTRIANS!)

Hey hey hey... Is New York Times finally getting it?

Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts
(Kate Zernike, 10/01/2010 New York Times)

The Tea Party is a thoroughly modern movement, organizing on Twitter and Facebook to become the most dynamic force of the midterm elections.

But when it comes to ideology, it has reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas.

It has resurrected once-obscure texts by dead writers — in some cases elevating them to best-seller status — to form a kind of Tea Party canon. Recommended by Tea Party icons like Ron Paul and Glenn Beck, the texts are being quoted everywhere from protest signs to Republican Party platforms.

And what are those texts by dead writers? They are 'Austrian' dead writers:
(Links go to Lewrockwell.com's pages that list their books.)

Frédéric Bastiat
Friedrich Hayek
Ludwig von Mises

If they haven't done so, Tea Partiers should also read:

Henry Hazlitt
Murray Rothbard
Tom Wood
Thomas DiLorenzo
Ron Paul
Peter Schiff

And of course much more at:
Lewrockwell.com
Ludwig von Mises Institute

The NYT article seems to correctly identify the Tea Party Movements as movements "built around ideas rather than leaders".

Ding ding ding ding...

That's what Ron Paul's movement was all about for 2008 election: self-organizing, around ideas. Instead of waving and screaming in ecstasy at the sight of their dear leader like Democrats did, Ron Paul supporters went nuts when Ron Paul said the Federal Reserve must go.

And o horror of horror, as New York Times reports, these "Teabaggers" (as liberal blog writers derisively call Tea Partiers) are actually "studying" these dead men's books!

Doug Bramley, a postal worker and Tea Party activist in Maine, picked up “The Road to Serfdom” after Mr. Beck mentioned it on air in June. (Next up for Mr. Bramley, another classic of libertarian thought: “I’ve got to read ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” he said.) He found Hayek “dense reading,” but he loved “The 5000 Year Leap.”

“You don’t read it,” Mr. Bramley said, “you study it.”

Across the country, many Tea Party groups are doing just that, often taking a chapter to discuss at each meeting.

Doing what? People actually studying and discussing the ideas other than those of John Maynard Keynes and Paul Krugman? What heresy!

NYT is even starting to recognize that there's Glenn Beck's (and Sara Palin's) version of Tea Party and there are other versions, not the monolithic right-wing fringe movement sponsored by Koch brothers as mostly portrayed in the MSM like New Yorker magazine.

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All That Glitters - Gold Going Higher

$1,321.80 was the high of the day for the spot price.


Here is an amusing chart for your weekend entertainment. It is a 3-year weekly chart of Dow Jones Industrial Average in candlesticks, with Dow divided by the gold price in solid black line. As expressed in gold, the index doesn't look that good, does it? In gold terms, the index is barely off the March 2009 bottom.

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SEC Does Blame a Kansas Firm of Causing the Flash Crash

to the collective belly-laugh in the financial blogsphere and stock message boards.

Move on, nothing to see here, and those HTF algo bots are innocent.

(Who do they think they are kidding? Oh I see, themselves.)

Here's the SEC's report (the SEC staff managed to concoct a 100-page report in between porn viewing), and here's the initial take by Zero Hedge.

(The SEC would dare not point fingers at New York, Wall Street firms, would they?)

The stock of that Kansas firm in question, Waddell & Reed, is trading at $27.45 right now, up 9 cents for the day.

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Alex Jones Interviews Dr. Doug Rokke on Depleted Uranium

Another proof that when a state wages a war, it is more against its own than against another state.

Dr. Rokke "served as a member of the 3rd U.S. Army Medical Command's Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical response and special operations team and with the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Assessment team during Gulf War 1. He was the U.S. Army's Depleted Uranium Project director from 1994 - 1995 and developed congressionally mandated education and training materials and wrote U.S. Army Regulation 700-48, the U.S. Army PAM 700-48, and the U.S. Army's common task for DU incidents." (from Alex Jones Show)

Here's the interview in three parts:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

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Stuxnet Has Moved On to China

After having wrecked havoc in Iran, Stuxnet the 'cyber weapon of mass destruction' apparently has moved on to China and is busy destroying computers there.

I'm very curious to know how it traveled from Iran to China... Hmmm. Maybe Chinese should have used legit copies of Windows from Microsoft...

So, who was it who created this malware? Maybe this one and this one?

Stuxnet 'cyber superweapon' moves to China (9/30/2010 AFP via Breitbart)

"A computer virus dubbed the world's "first cyber superweapon" by experts and which may have been designed to attack Iran's nuclear facilities has found a new target -- China.

"The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week.

"Stuxnet is feared by experts around the globe as it can break into computers that control machinery at the heart of industry, allowing an attacker to assume control of critical systems like pumps, motors, alarms and valves.

"It could, technically, make factory boilers explode, destroy gas pipelines or even cause a nuclear plant to malfunction.

"The virus targets control systems made by German industrial giant Siemens commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities." [The article continues.]

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SEC About to Blame a Small Trading Firm in Kansas for May 6 Flash Crash

Yeah right. No mention of High Frequency Trading, no mention of quote delay in NYSE.

I read the article on Bloomberg, and was about to write a post.

Zero Hedge beat me to it:

Bloomberg has just released something which if true, will wipe out every last ounce of credibility left in the market. As readers will recall, the initial scapegoat that CNBC and everyone else, who has no clue what really happens in the market decided to pin the flash crash on, was small Kansas-based trading firm Waddell & Reed, which traded a few extra contracts of E-Mini futures in the hours preceding the flash crash. Well, ladies and gentlemen, if this advance glance into what the SEC is about to disclose in its flash crash report is indeed valid, then the entire flash crash is about to be blamed on Waddell and Reed once again, with no mention of High Frequency Trading, or any of the other real culprits for the drop which wiped out $1 trillion in market cap, and the furthermore the report will have no policy recommendations. This is so insulting to the general intelligence of the average American investor who has by now seen the destructive influence of HFT in action so many times, that it will wipe out the last remaining shards of credibility left in US stocks. Will Mary Schapiro next blame every single mini flash crash which we have seen on almost daily basis over the past month on Waddell and Reed as well? Or is that reserved for E-Trade retail accounts? We will not pass judgment until we see the final report, but if true, this is immediate grounds for termination of the SEC head, and will require that everyone pull their money from the market asap, as it will definitely confirm that even our regulators have no clue just how broken the market truly is. It will also confirm that every single SEC staffer has been bribed, bought and corrupted beyond repair by the HFT lobby.

In case you haven't caught on yet to what really most likely caused the flash crash that clearly triggered the 21 consecutive weeks of outflow from equity funds, here it is.

Will HTF algo bots walk scot-free? Where will they go next? Someone at CNBC thinks it will go to CDS market, which is currently OTC but will be forced to move to exchange trading and clearing under the new financial regulation bill, and it may not be a pretty sight:

Let's imagine, however, what a flash crash might look like in the CDS market.

Let's say high-frequency traders have become liquidity suppliers to the market, buying and selling bond protection. The broker-dealers have stopped providing this liquidity, in part because their profits have been squeezed out of the market by the new transparency. One day, an event somewhere in the world triggers the algorithms of a few highly correlated HFT shops to start buying more protection on a wide variety of stocks.

This triggers other HFT programs to stop selling, which triggers more buying. Prices on CDS soar across the board. The clearing houses start demanding more collateral from everyone to reflect the higher prices, triggering a rush for cash by everyone participating in the market.

Meanwhile, the risk management operations of institutional investors detect the soaring CDS prices, which are read to signal that the bonds are about to become distressed. The corporate bond market sells off and even more buyers for CDS enter the market. The short-term credit markets freeze up as money market funds stop providing credit to what look like increasingly risky corporate borrowers.

And then the clearing house notices that some market participants aren't making good on the collateral calls, so it starts closing out their positions. Outsiders get wind of this and begin to doubt the solvency of the clearing house, triggering a run on the clearing house itself. With no one able to process trades through the perhaps insolvent clearing house, and all other alternatives have been declared illegal by Dodd-Frank, the credit markets seize up completely.

The next thing we know, we're all hearing about emergency meetings down on Maiden Lane, where bankers and regulators are putting together a plan to fend off the next Great Depression. The plan is elegant and its proponents are articulate and highly adroit at defending it against critics. It involves the transfer of risk from the private market participants to the taxpayers. It is, in short, another bailout.

Can we handle a flash crash in the bond market? Are we prepared for a freeze in derivative clearing? Has anyone even asked these questions?

But what the heck, as long as the gullible taxpayers exist....

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Amrose Evans-Prichard Apologizes for Having Defended the Fed

Apologies accepted. I'm glad he is finally discarding Keynesianism.

(He must have been reading Austrians at Lewrockwell.com, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Ron Paul, Peter Schiff...)

Shut Down the Fed (Part II) (Ambrose Evans-Prichard, 9/27/2010 Telegraph UK)

"I apologise to readers around the world for having defended the emergency stimulus policies of the US Federal Reserve, and for arguing like an imbecile naif that the Fed would not succumb to drug addiction, political abuse, and mad intoxicated debauchery, once it began taking its first shots of quantitative easing.

"My pathetic assumption was that Ben Bernanke would deploy further QE only to stave off DEFLATION, not to create INFLATION. If the Federal Open Market Committee cannot see the difference, God help America.

"We now learn from last week’s minutes that the Fed is willing “to provide additional accommodation if needed to … return inflation, over time, to levels consistent with its mandate.”

"NO, NO, NO, this cannot possibly be true.

"Ben Bernanke has not only refused to abandon his idee fixe of an “inflation target”, a key cause of the global central banking catastrophe of the last twenty years (because it can and did allow asset booms to run amok, and let credit levels reach dangerous extremes).

Worse still, he seems determined to print trillions of emergency stimulus without commensurate emergency justification to test his Princeton theories, which by the way are as old as the hills. Keynes ridiculed the “tyranny of the general price level” in the early 1930s, and quite rightly so. Bernanke is reviving a doctrine that was already shown to be bunk eighty years ago.

"So all those hillsmen in Idaho, with their Colt 45s and boxes of krugerrands, who sent furious emails to the Telegraph accusing me of defending a hyperinflating establishment cabal were right all along. The Fed is indeed out of control.

"The sophisticates at banking conferences in London, Frankfurt, and New York who aplogized for this primitive monetary creationsim – as I did – are the ones who lost the plot.

"My apologies. Mercy, for I have sinned against sound money, and therefore against sound politics."

[Emphasis is mine. The article continues.]

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Obama Scolds Own Supporters for 'Apathy'

Blames anyone and everyone but himself.

Obama: Democratic voter apathy 'inexcusable' (9/28/2010 My Way News)

"WASHINGTON (AP) - Admonishing his own party, President Barack Obama says it would be "inexcusable" and "irresponsible" for unenthusiastic Democratic voters to sit out the midterm elections, warning that the consequences could be a squandered agenda for years.

""People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up," Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."" [Emphasis is mine. The article continues.]

Ding ding ding ding... What would you expect from college freshmen and sophomores (now juniors and seniors if they haven't dropped out)?

Oh I see, that's why Obama is speaking to a fresh batch of freshmen and sophomores in Wisconsin. (Sucker born every minute, as they say.)

(Are we paying for this partisan campaign event, by the way?)

Squandered agenda? Now, pray tell, what is it? Do you mean...

• Perpetuation of TBTF (too big to fail) banks via the Dodd-Frank financial "reform" bill while more Americans are facing foreclosures;
• Giving the Federal Reserve, a private entity, enormous power to create inflation (= loss of purchasing power of US dollar which hurts lower income people more than the "rich");
• Obama administration in the pocket of Wall Street, big pharma, big oil;
  
• Huge taxation for everyone (not just "rich") via the health care "reform" bill;
• Expanded war in Afghanistan, continuing "war" in Iraq, secret war against Pakistan, destroying lives there and ruining many US soldiers physically and psychologically;
• More jobs being shipped overseas, with active government help, depriving unskilled youth labor (predominantly blacks) opportunities to work.

So, true liberal and progressive voters who value human rights and justice, who support struggling working class families, who oppose wars, what are you going to do? Will you snap back into line and march with the establishment Democrats and vote for the "agenda" that seems, from what I understand, diametrically opposed to your core beliefs?

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Zero Hedge: Gross, El-Erian Rumored Replacements For Larry Summers

Of all people....

Gross, El-Erian Rumored Replacements For Larry Summers
(Tyler Durden, 9/28/2010 Zero Hedge)

"Rumor making rounds now that either of Pimco's top two men could replace the man who destroyed Harvard's endowment. Should either of these two be forced to quit Pimco, it would mean that QE would have to be massive to make sure that the Fed is a backstop of last reserve in case the next head of Pimco is unable to replicate his predecessor's success."

I bet it would be El-Erian. He was the president of the Harvard Endowment and quit just in time before the investments blew up. I'm sure he can hop out right before the US finally collapse, on his way back to the IMF where he was a deputy director, so that he can blow up the entire world.

But in between, either Gross or El-Erian may be able to make a sh-tload of money for the government by trading the government money with high leverage. 33 Liberty had better watch out...

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Gold Hit New High at $1,311.20

Gold spot (as reported by Kitco.com) hit $1,311.20.


As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says, "Gold is the final refuge against universal currency debasement".

Hear that, Dr. Bernanke?

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