Government Gone Wild!

· The Department of Defense had 1,868 employees making over $150,000 a year when the recession started. Today, that number is 10,100 employees.

· Since this recession started, the number of federal employees making more than $100,000 a year has doubled...in less than two years.

· The average total compensation for a private sector employee in 2009 was $61,000.00, compared with $123,000.00 for a federal employee.

· With approximately 21,300,000 government employees in this country, that means that about 16% of this nation’s voting electorate works for government.

“If you count spouses or other family members, that means at least 32% of the voting electorate will be likely to come out and vote against candidates who propose cutting government spending,” concluded Ingoglia. “That is a big block of people—and the hidden danger of big government.”

Sincerely,

Blaise Ingoglia, Founder
Government Gone Wild!

'The eurozone has 10 days at most'....OECD warns of eurozone contagion risk

That is the extraordinarily grim forecast from the Financial Times' Wolfgang Münchau. In essence, he doesn't think that the euro zone leaders - especially Angela Merkel - will do what is necessary to save the euro and keep the entire European Project from unraveling.

What must be done?

First, the European Central Bank must agree a backstop of some kind, either an unlimited guarantee of a maximum bond spread, a backstop to the EFSF, in addition to dramatic measures to increase short-term liquidity for the banking sector. That would take care of the immediate bankruptcy threat.

The second measure is a firm timetable for a eurozone bond. The European Commission calls it a "stability bond", surely a candidate for euphemism of the year. There are several proposals on the table. It does not matter what you call it. What matters is that it will be a joint-and-several liability of credible size. The insanity of cross-border national guarantees must come to an end. They are not a solution to the crisis. Those guarantees are now the main crisis propagator.

The third decision is a fiscal union. This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well. The eurozone needs a treasury, properly staffed, not ad hoc co-ordination by the European Council over coffee and desert.

Just what does creating a "fiscal union" mean? It means that Brussels will, for all intents and purposes, take control of the national budgets of member states. Munchau calls this a "partial loss of sovereignty. I suppose that's accurate - except its the most important part of sovereignty.

The plan would place enormous power in the hands of EU bureaucrats as well as the central bank. And its success or failure rests on just how committed the Germans are to the idea of a United Europe. Other nations - even France - don't matter now. Only Germany is big enough and strong enough to impose a solution. And right now, Merkel is balking.

How serious is the crisis? The Wall Street Journal reports:

Companies that provide the plumbing for the $4 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market are testing systems that could handle trading of previously shelved European currencies. ... Banks, analysts and investors are preparing for what many of them say is an increasing likelihood of a euro-zone breakup, either completely or in parts, leading to the potential return of currencies such as the drachma, German mark or Italian lira. (HT: Calculated Risk)

Munchau concludes:

I have yet to be convinced that the European Council is capable of reaching such a substantive agreement given its past record. Of course, it will agree on something and sell it as a comprehensive package. It always does. But the halt-life of these fake packages has been getting shorter. After the last summit, the financial markets' enthusiasm over the ludicrous idea of a leveraged EFSF evaporated after less than 48 hours.

Italy's disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.

Many analysts appear to be taking the position that the best we can hope for is more can kicking by Merkel and Sarkozy as they struggle to redefine the entire concept of a union of european states. They are trying to do it on the fly, hurriedly, and with little thought to the long term consequences. But as long as Merkel resists the idea that the European Central Bank should act like a real backstop against disaster, it won't matter because there won't be any long term consequences to worry about. The EU will be gone and with it, the dream of a united states of Europe.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/the_eurozone_has_10_days_at_most.html#ixzz1f0vObJSq

Senate Moves To Allow Military To Intern Americans Without Trial NDAA detention provision would turn America into a “battlefield”

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, November 28, 2011

The Senate is set to vote on a bill today that would define the whole of the United States as a “battlefield” and allow the U.S. Military to arrest American citizens in their own back yard without charge or trial.

“The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

Under the ‘worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial’ provision of S.1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which is set to be up for a vote on the Senate floor this week, the legislation will “basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who supports the bill.

The bill was drafted in secret by Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), before being passed in a closed-door committee meeting without any kind of hearing. The language appears in sections 1031 and 1032 of the NDAA bill.
“I would also point out that these provisions raise serious questions as to who we are as a society and what our Constitution seeks to protect,” Colorado Senator Mark Udall said in a speech last week. One section of these provisions, section 1031, would be interpreted as allowing the military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil. Section 1031 essentially repeals the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 by authorizing the U.S. military to perform law enforcement functions on American soil. That alone should alarm my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, but there are other problems with these provisions that must be resolved.”

This means Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military brig with no recourse whatsoever. Given that the Department of Homeland Security has characterized behavior such as buying gold, owning guns, using a watch or binoculars, donating to charity, using the telephone or email to find information, using cash, and all manner of mundane behaviors as potential indicators of domestic terrorism, such a provision would be wide open to abuse.

“American citizens and people picked up on American or Canadian or British streets being sent to military prisons indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. Really? Does anyone think this is a good idea? And why now?” asks Anders.
The ACLU is urging citizens to call their Senator and demand that the Udall Amendment be added to the bill, a change that would at least act as a check to prevent Americans being snatched off the streets without some form of Congressional oversight.
We have been warning for over a decade that Americans would become the target of laws supposedly aimed at terrorists and enemy combatants. Alex Jones personally documented how U.S. troops were being trained to arrest U.S. citizens in the event of martial law during urban warfare training drills back in the 90′s. Under the the National Defense Authorization Act bill, no declaration of martial law is necessary since Americans would now be subject to the same treatment as suspected insurgents in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

If you thought that the executive assassination of American citizens abroad was bad enough, now similar powers will be extended to the “homeland,” in other words, your town, your community, your back yard.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

$7,770,000,000,000 Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks Undisclosed $13B In Additional Income

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.
The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.
Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

‘Change Their Votes’
“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”
The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.
The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma -- investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort -- and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

$7.77 Trillion
The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year. “TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”
Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.

‘Motivate Others’
JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.
Howard Opinsky, a spokesman for JPMorgan (JPM), declined to comment about Dimon’s statement or the company’s Fed borrowings. Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Bank of America, also declined to comment.
The Fed has been lending money to banks through its so- called discount window since just after its founding in 1913. Starting in August 2007, when confidence in banks began to wane, it created a variety of ways to bolster the financial system with cash or easily traded securities. By the end of 2008, the central bank had established or expanded 11 lending facilities catering to banks, securities firms and corporations that couldn’t get short-term loans from their usual sources.

‘Core Function’
“Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme market stress is a core function of central banks,” says William B. English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs. “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.”
The Fed has said that all loans were backed by appropriate collateral. That the central bank didn’t lose money should “lead to praise of the Fed, that they took this extraordinary step and they got it right,” says Phillip Swagel, a former assistant Treasury secretary under Henry M. Paulson and now a professor of international economic policy at the University of Maryland.
The Fed initially released lending data in aggregate form only. Information on which banks borrowed, when, how much and at what interest rate was kept from public view.
The secrecy extended even to members of President George W. Bush’s administration who managed TARP. Top aides to Paulson weren’t privy to Fed lending details during the creation of the program that provided crisis funding to more than 700 banks, say two former senior Treasury officials who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak.

Big Six
The Treasury Department relied on the recommendations of the Fed to decide which banks were healthy enough to get TARP money and how much, the former officials say. The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, measured by peak daily debt calculated by Bloomberg using data obtained from the central bank. Paulson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The six -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley -- accounted for 63 percent of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment- services firms, the data show. By comparison, they had about half of the industry’s assets before the bailout, which lasted from August 2007 through April 2010. The daily debt figure excludes cash that banks passed along to money-market funds.

Bank Supervision
While the emergency response prevented financial collapse, the Fed shouldn’t have allowed conditions to get to that point, says Joshua Rosner, a banking analyst with Graham Fisher & Co. in New York who predicted problems from lax mortgage underwriting as far back as 2001. The Fed, the primary supervisor for large financial companies, should have been more vigilant as the housing bubble formed, and the scale of its lending shows the “supervision of the banks prior to the crisis was far worse than we had imagined,” Rosner says. Bernanke in an April 2009 speech said that the Fed provided emergency loans only to “sound institutions,” even though its internal assessments described at least one of the biggest borrowers, Citigroup, as “marginal.”
On Jan. 14, 2009, six days before the company’s central bank loans peaked, the New York Fed gave CEO Vikram Pandit a report declaring Citigroup’s financial strength to be “superficial,” bolstered largely by its $45 billion of Treasury funds. The document was released in early 2011 by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel empowered by Congress to probe the causes of the crisis.

‘Need Transparency’
Andrea Priest, a spokeswoman for the New York Fed, declined to comment, as did Jon Diat, a spokesman for Citigroup.
“I believe that the Fed should have independence in conducting highly technical monetary policy, but when they are putting taxpayer resources at risk, we need transparency and accountability,” says Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee.
Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who was a lead Republican negotiator on TARP, and Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Financial Services Committee, both say they were kept in the dark.
“We didn’t know the specifics,” says Gregg, who’s now an adviser to Goldman Sachs.
“We were aware emergency efforts were going on,” Frank says. “We didn’t know the specifics.”

Disclose Lending
Frank co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, billed as a fix for financial-industry excesses. Congress debated that legislation in 2010 without a full understanding of how deeply the banks had depended on the Fed for survival. It would have been “totally appropriate” to disclose the lending data by mid-2009, says David Jones, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who has written four books about the central bank.
“The Fed is the second-most-important appointed body in the U.S., next to the Supreme Court, and we’re dealing with a democracy,” Jones says. “Our representatives in Congress deserve to have this kind of information so they can oversee the Fed.”
The Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to release details of some emergency-lending programs in December 2010. It also mandated disclosure of discount-window borrowers after a two- year lag.

Protecting TARP
TARP and the Fed lending programs went “hand in hand,” says Sherrill Shaffer, a banking professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and a former chief economist at the New York Fed. While the TARP money helped insulate the central bank from losses, the Fed’s willingness to supply seemingly unlimited financing to the banks assured they wouldn’t collapse, protecting the Treasury’s TARP investments, he says. “Even though the Treasury was in the headlines, the Fed was really behind the scenes engineering it,” Shaffer says.
Congress, at the urging of Bernanke and Paulson, created TARP in October 2008 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. made it difficult for financial institutions to get loans. Bank of America and New York-based Citigroup each received $45 billion from TARP. At the time, both were tapping the Fed. Citigroup hit its peak borrowing of $99.5 billion in January 2009, while Bank of America topped out in February 2009 at $91.4 billion.

No Clue
Lawmakers knew none of this.
They had no clue that one bank, New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible.
Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.
Had lawmakers known, it “could have changed the whole approach to reform legislation,” says Ted Kaufman, a former Democratic Senator from Delaware who, with Brown, introduced the bill to limit bank size.
Moral Hazard
Kaufman says some banks are so big that their failure could trigger a chain reaction in the financial system. The cost of borrowing for so-called too-big-to-fail banks is lower than that of smaller firms because lenders believe the government won’t let them go under. The perceived safety net creates what economists call moral hazard -- the belief that bankers will take greater risks because they’ll enjoy any profits while shifting losses to taxpayers.
If Congress had been aware of the extent of the Fed rescue, Kaufman says, he would have been able to line up more support for breaking up the biggest banks.
Byron L. Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, says the knowledge might have helped pass legislation to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which for most of the last century separated customer deposits from the riskier practices of investment banking.
“Had people known about the hundreds of billions in loans to the biggest financial institutions, they would have demanded Congress take much more courageous actions to stop the practices that caused this near financial collapse,” says Dorgan, who retired in January.

Getting Bigger
Instead, the Fed and its secret financing helped America’s biggest financial firms get bigger and go on to pay employees as much as they did at the height of the housing bubble.
Total assets held by the six biggest U.S. banks increased 39 percent to $9.5 trillion on Sept. 30, 2011, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, according to Fed data.
For so few banks to hold so many assets is “un-American,” says Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “All of these gargantuan institutions are too big to regulate. I’m in favor of breaking them up and slimming them down.”
Employees at the six biggest banks made twice the average for all U.S. workers in 2010, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics hourly compensation cost data. The banks spent $146.3 billion on compensation in 2010, or an average of $126,342 per worker, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s up almost 20 percent from five years earlier compared with less than 15 percent for the average worker. Average pay at the banks in 2010 was about the same as in 2007, before the bailouts.

‘Wanted to Pretend’
“The pay levels came back so fast at some of these firms that it appeared they really wanted to pretend they hadn’t been bailed out,” says Anil Kashyap, a former Fed economist who’s now a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “They shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people find some of the stuff that happened totally outrageous.”
Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch & Co. at the urging of then-Treasury Secretary Paulson after buying the biggest U.S. home lender, Countrywide Financial Corp. When the Merrill Lynch purchase was announced on Sept. 15, 2008, Bank of America had $14.4 billion in emergency Fed loans and Merrill Lynch had $8.1 billion. By the end of the month, Bank of America’s loans had reached $25 billion and Merrill Lynch’s had exceeded $60 billion, helping both firms keep the deal on track.

Prevent Collapse
Wells Fargo bought Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest U.S. bank by deposits before the 2008 acquisition. Because depositors were pulling their money from Wachovia, the Fed channeled $50 billion in secret loans to the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank through two emergency-financing programs to prevent collapse before Wells Fargo could complete the purchase.
“These programs proved to be very successful at providing financial markets the additional liquidity and confidence they needed at a time of unprecedented uncertainty,” says Ancel Martinez, a spokesman for Wells Fargo.
JPMorgan absorbed the country’s largest savings and loan, Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc., and investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. The New York Fed, then headed by Timothy F. Geithner, who’s now Treasury secretary, helped JPMorgan complete the Bear Stearns deal by providing $29 billion of financing, which was disclosed at the time. The Fed also supplied Bear Stearns with $30 billion of secret loans to keep the company from failing before the acquisition closed, central bank data show. The loans were made through a program set up to provide emergency funding to brokerage firms.

‘Regulatory Discretion’
“Some might claim that the Fed was picking winners and losers, but what the Fed was doing was exercising its professional regulatory discretion,” says John Dearie, a former speechwriter at the New York Fed who’s now executive vice president for policy at the Financial Services Forum, a Washington-based group consisting of the CEOs of 20 of the world’s biggest financial firms. “The Fed clearly felt it had what it needed within the requirements of the law to continue to lend to Bear and Wachovia.”
The bill introduced by Brown and Kaufman in April 2010 would have mandated shrinking the six largest firms.
“When a few banks have advantages, the little guys get squeezed,” Brown says. “That, to me, is not what capitalism should be.”
Kaufman says he’s passionate about curbing too-big-to-fail banks because he fears another crisis.

‘Can We Survive?’
“The amount of pain that people, through no fault of their own, had to endure -- and the prospect of putting them through it again -- is appalling,” Kaufman says. “The public has no more appetite for bailouts. What would happen tomorrow if one of these big banks got in trouble? Can we survive that?”
Lobbying expenditures by the six banks that would have been affected by the legislation rose to $29.4 million in 2010 compared with $22.1 million in 2006, the last full year before credit markets seized up -- a gain of 33 percent, according to OpenSecrets.org, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. Lobbying by the American Bankers Association, a trade organization, increased at about the same rate, OpenSecrets.org reported.
Lobbyists argued the virtues of bigger banks. They’re more stable, better able to serve large companies and more competitive internationally, and breaking them up would cost jobs and cause “long-term damage to the U.S. economy,” according to a Nov. 13, 2009, letter to members of Congress from the FSF.
The group’s website cites Nobel Prize-winning economist Oliver E. Williamson, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, for demonstrating the greater efficiency of large companies.

‘Serious Burden’
In an interview, Williamson says that the organization took his research out of context and that efficiency is only one factor in deciding whether to preserve too-big-to-fail banks.
“The banks that were too big got even bigger, and the problems that we had to begin with are magnified in the process,” Williamson says. “The big banks have incentives to take risks they wouldn’t take if they didn’t have government support. It’s a serious burden on the rest of the economy.”
Dearie says his group didn’t mean to imply that Williamson endorsed big banks.
Top officials in President Barack Obama’s administration sided with the FSF in arguing against legislative curbs on the size of banks.

Geithner, Kaufman
On May 4, 2010, Geithner visited Kaufman in his Capitol Hill office. As president of the New York Fed in 2007 and 2008, Geithner helped design and run the central bank’s lending programs. The New York Fed supervised four of the six biggest U.S. banks and, during the credit crunch, put together a daily confidential report on Wall Street’s financial condition. Geithner was copied on these reports, based on a sampling of e- mails released by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
At the meeting with Kaufman, Geithner argued that the issue of limiting bank size was too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions, Kaufman says. According to Kaufman, Geithner said he preferred that bank supervisors from around the world, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, make rules increasing the amount of money banks need to hold in reserve. Passing laws in the U.S. would undercut his efforts in Basel, Geithner said, according to Kaufman.
Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Geithner, declined to comment.

‘Punishing Success’
Lobbyists for the big banks made the winning case that forcing them to break up was “punishing success,” Brown says. Now that they can see how much the banks were borrowing from the Fed, senators might think differently, he says.
The Fed supported curbing too-big-to-fail banks, including giving regulators the power to close large financial firms and implementing tougher supervision for big banks, says Fed General Counsel Scott G. Alvarez. The Fed didn’t take a position on whether large banks should be dismantled before they get into trouble.
Dodd-Frank does provide a mechanism for regulators to break up the biggest banks. It established the Financial Stability Oversight Council that could order teetering banks to shut down in an orderly way. The council is headed by Geithner.
“Dodd-Frank does not solve the problem of too big to fail,” says Shelby, the Alabama Republican. “Moral hazard and taxpayer exposure still very much exist.”

Below Market
Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, says banks “were either in bad shape or taking advantage of the Fed giving them a good deal. The former contradicts their public statements. The latter -- getting loans at below-market rates during a financial crisis -- is quite a gift.”
The Fed says it typically makes emergency loans more expensive than those available in the marketplace to discourage banks from abusing the privilege. During the crisis, Fed loans were among the cheapest around, with funding available for as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008, according to data from the central bank and money-market rates tracked by Bloomberg.
The Fed funds also benefited firms by allowing them to avoid selling assets to pay investors and depositors who pulled their money. So the assets stayed on the banks’ books, earning interest.
Banks report the difference between what they earn on loans and investments and their borrowing expenses. The figure, known as net interest margin, provides a clue to how much profit the firms turned on their Fed loans, the costs of which were included in those expenses. To calculate how much banks stood to make, Bloomberg multiplied their tax-adjusted net interest margins by their average Fed debt during reporting periods in which they took emergency loans.

Added Income
The 190 firms for which data were available would have produced income of $13 billion, assuming all of the bailout funds were invested at the margins reported, the data show.
The six biggest U.S. banks’ share of the estimated subsidy was $4.8 billion, or 23 percent of their combined net income during the time they were borrowing from the Fed. Citigroup would have taken in the most, with $1.8 billion.
“The net interest margin is an effective way of getting at the benefits that these large banks received from the Fed,” says Gerald A. Hanweck, a former Fed economist who’s now a finance professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
While the method isn’t perfect, it’s impossible to state the banks’ exact profits or savings from their Fed loans because the numbers aren’t disclosed and there isn’t enough publicly available data to figure it out.
Opinsky, the JPMorgan spokesman, says he doesn’t think the calculation is fair because “in all likelihood, such funds were likely invested in very short-term investments,” which typically bring lower returns.

Standing Access
Even without tapping the Fed, the banks get a subsidy by having standing access to the central bank’s money, says Viral Acharya, a New York University economics professor who has worked as an academic adviser to the New York Fed.
“Banks don’t give lines of credit to corporations for free,” he says. “Why should all these government guarantees and liquidity facilities be for free?”
In the September 2008 meeting at which Paulson and Bernanke briefed lawmakers on the need for TARP, Bernanke said that if nothing was done, “unemployment would rise -- to 8 or 9 percent from the prevailing 6.1 percent,” Paulson wrote in “On the Brink” (Business Plus, 2010).

Occupy Wall Street
The U.S. jobless rate hasn’t dipped below 8.8 percent since March 2009, 3.6 million homes have been foreclosed since August 2007, according to data provider RealtyTrac Inc., and police have clashed with Occupy Wall Street protesters, who say government policies favor the wealthiest citizens, in New York, Boston, Seattle and Oakland, California.
The Tea Party, which supports a more limited role for government, has its roots in anger over the Wall Street bailouts, says Neil M. Barofsky, former TARP special inspector general and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor.
“The lack of transparency is not just frustrating; it really blocked accountability,” Barofsky says. “When people don’t know the details, they fill in the blanks. They believe in conspiracies.”
In the end, Geithner had his way. The Brown-Kaufman proposal to limit the size of banks was defeated, 60 to 31. Bank supervisors meeting in Switzerland did mandate minimum reserves that institutions will have to hold, with higher levels for the world’s largest banks, including the six biggest in the U.S. Those rules can be changed by individual countries.
They take full effect in 2019.

Meanwhile, Kaufman says, “we’re absolutely, totally, 100 percent not prepared for another financial crisis.”

‘60 MINUTES’ AIRS HEART-WRENCHING UP-CLOSE LOOK AT THE DAY-TO-DAY LIVES OF HOMELESS AMERICAN CHILDREN

Alexander Tsiaras: Conception to birth -- visualized

The Video Congress Does Not Want You To See!!!

Epic Failure: The Supercommittee Was A Super Joke

Does anyone need any additional evidence that our political system is completely broken? The bipartisan congressional supercommittee that was given two months to come up with at least $1.2 trillion in deficit cuts over the next decade has failed to reach an agreement. It is an epic failure and a national embarrassment. The truth is that they never even came close to an agreement. In fact, as you will read below, the two sides on the panel have been barely even talking to each other. In the end, the supercommittee was a super joke. Meanwhile, the U.S. national debt has passed the 15 trillion dollar mark and we are facing trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. We are heading directly for a national financial disaster, and our "leaders" seem powerless to do anything about it.

According to the supercommittee's rules, any plan would have had to have been submitted to the Congressional Budget Office by Monday in order to give the CBO 48 hours to analyze how much the plan would reduce budget deficits over the coming decade.

When the supercommittee was announced, it made headlines all over the world, but now it is ending with a whimper.

The supercommittee was never a good idea in the first place, but you would have thought that they could have come up with something over the course of two months.

But instead all they are giving us are a whole bunch of excuses and a whole lot of hot air.

What a joke.

Is it really that difficult to come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts over a decade?

It isn't as if they would even be cutting very deeply. $1.2 trillion in cuts would not even cut the budget by $150 billion a year. We would still be talking about trillion dollar deficits way into the future.

But instead of agreeing to some token cuts, they have chosen to do nothing and to blame each other.

So now $1.2 trillion in "automatic budget cuts" will go into effect starting in 2013. But even that $1.2 trillion figure contains a lot of "fuzzy math". For example, it includes $169 billion in "projected savings" from "reduced interest costs" on the national debt.

I would love to see how they came up with that figure.

In any event, the truth is that none of these numbers really matter at all.

Why?

None of the budget cuts go into effect until after the 2012 election. That means that this Congress can vote to repeal the automatic cuts well before then.

Some in Congress are already pushing for this. For example, U.S. Senator John McCain said the following recently....

"It's something we passed. We can reverse it."

Or, even more likely, once the new president and the new Congress are elected in 2012 they will almost certainly choose to abandon this agreement.

When it comes to politics, the only thing that matters is what happens before the next election.

All of this talk of future cuts is just an illusion. When the next president and the next Congress come to power, they will want to do their own thing.

So after all of the huffing and puffing over the last couple of years, what has actually been accomplished as far as reducing our horrific budget deficits?

Not much at all.

We racked up a $1.3 trillion budget deficit during the fiscal year that just ended, and this fiscal year we will be somewhere in the same neighborhood.

We have been living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and at some point all of this is going to end very, very badly.

The total amount of debt in this country (government, business and consumer) has been rising much, much faster than our national income has. If you don't believe this, just check out this chart.

In particular, government debt is totally out of control. When Barack Obama first took office, the national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars.

It is now over 15 trillion dollars.

We are in debt up to our eyeballs and we desperately need our leaders to do something about it.

But according to a recent Politico article, the members of the supercommittee haven't even been talking to each other....

The supercommittee last met Nov. 1 – three weeks ago! It was a public hearing featuring a history lesson, “Overview of Previous Debt Proposals,” with Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, Pete Domenici and Alice Rivlin. The last PRIVATE meeting was Oct. 26. You might as well stop reading right there: The 12 members (6 House, 6 Senate; 6 R, 6 D) were never going to strike a bargain, grand or otherwise, if they weren’t talking to each other. Yes, we get that real deal-making occurs in small groups. But there never WAS a functioning supercommittee: There was Republican posturing and Democratic posturing, with some side conversations across the aisle.

Can you believe that?

Could it really be true that they have not met since November 1st?

Is Congress really that much of a joke?

According to Real Clear Politics, the approval rating for Congress is sitting at about 12 percent right now.

After this, it may get even lower.

Instead of working on a solution to our problems, the members of the supercommittee have been busy going on television and telling us who to blame.

The following is a short exceprt from a recent article in the Washington Post....

Republicans on the supercommittee held a conference call Saturday morning, and aides said members from both parties continued to talk by phone. But neither side was predicting a last-minute breakthrough. Instead, seven panel members booked appearances on the Sunday talk shows, as both sides readied their best arguments for why the other is at fault.

Our politicians are obsessed with finding someone else to blame and with getting ready for the next election.

Meanwhile, the ship is going down and people are starting to panic.

And this is not going to look good to the rest of the world at all. There is a very real risk that one of the other major credit rating agencies will decide to downgrade U.S. debt.

The second downgrade of debt is often more important than the first. When the first downgrade happened, U.S. debt still had a AAA rating from the other two major credit rating agencies.

But after another downgrade, the average credit rating of U.S. debt will be less than AAA. That will mean that U.S. debt will no longer be a cash proxy. A lot of transactions that take place right now in the financial world would not be able to happen if that takes place.

So what do our leaders need to do?

Well, the truth is that we should recognize that they are in a really, really tough position. Decades of nightmarish decisions have left us out of good options under our current financial system.

The reality is that members of Congress are damned if they do and they are damned if they don't.

This is what I mean - if we don't deal with our national debt now, everyone agrees that a massive day of reckoning is coming down the road. Greece is an example of what happens when debt catches up with a nation.

However, if we did cut the federal budget very deeply right now, it would almost certainly bring on a huge economic contraction.

Right now, insane federal spending is one of the only things keeping this economy afloat. If you were to suddenly pull half a trillion dollars (or more) of federal spending out of the economy, it would have a devastating impact.

A lot of people out there correctly argue for a huge reduction in federal spending, but they greatly underestimate the amount of pain that it would cause.

Let there be no doubt, all of this federal debt has enabled us to enjoy a "false prosperity" for several decades, and when we dramatically cut back on spending a lot of that "false prosperity" is going to disappear.

Our "real economy" is rapidly being gutted and America is becoming poorer as a nation every single day. One way that we have been making up the difference is by going into almost unbelievable amounts of government debt. When the government debt bubble pops, the pain is going to be enormous.

If you do not believe this right now, you will believe it soon enough.

Not that we should keep going into huge amounts of debt.

Every dollar that we "borrow" is actually being stolen from our children and our grandchildren.

In fact, that is what Thomas Jefferson believed. According to Jefferson, when the federal government borrows money in one generation which must be paid back by future generations it is equivalent to stealing....

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

We have got to stop stealing from future generations. If they get the chance, they will curse us for what we have done to them.

Anyone out there that supports our current system of running endless budget deficits is supporting a horrific crime against our children and our grandchildren.

But once again, we all need to clearly understand that when the borrowed money stops flowing out of Washington D.C., our economy is going to get much worse.

Are you prepared for the unemployment rate to double?

Are you prepared for foreclosures to soar to unprecedented heights?

Are you prepared for economic pain unlike anything you have ever seen before?

According to the New York Times, there are 100 million Americans that are either living in poverty or that are considered to be among the "near poor" right now.

So how bad will things get if we plunge into a depression?

Anyone that believes that we can drastically cut the federal budget and improve the economy at the same time under our current system is not being rational.

Just look at what is happening to Greece. They implemented substantial budget cuts (although not nearly big enough to bring them to a balanced budget) and they have plunged into a nightmarish economic depression.

Right now, we are in a position where we are going to experience a horrific amount of pain whatever we do. If we keep piling up debt at this rate we will experience a nightmare, but if we pop the debt bubble and try to live within our means we will also experience a nightmare.

There is a way out of this, but our politicians are not talking about it. As I have written about previously, if the federal government abolishes the Federal Reserve and starts issuing debt-free money, we could eliminate our federal budget deficits, cut taxes and improve the economy all at the same time.

But nobody is even talking about debt-free money.

Instead, all of our politicians are talking about "fixing" the current system.

Well, let me tell you, it is impossible to solve our problems under the current system. If we insist on maintaining our current debt-based financial system, it will only end in a massive amount of pain.

The American people need to get educated about our financial system. They need to learn that the Federal Reserve and the debt-based currency that they issue are at the very heart of our economic problems.

Back in 1913, prior to the passage of the Federal Reserve Act, the national debt was only about $2.9 billion.

Today, our national debt is over 5000 times larger.

Debt-based central banking is a perpetual debt machine. It is at the heart of our financial problems and it is also at the heart of the financial problems that Europe is experiencing.

Unfortunately, the American people don't understand this, and there are virtually no politicians out there that are even talking about this.

Very dark days are ahead for America.

You had better get prepared.

The Economic Collapse - How It Will Happen

Economic Collapse -- Why It Won't Be Stopped

THIS IS WHAT OUR FEDERAL JUDGES CALL "FREE SPEECH" TODAY!

Should public school officials have the right to prevent students from wearing pro-American garb on Cinco de Mayo?

This question has been at the heart of a California court battle between the Morgan Hill Unified School District and students who were told by a principal and assistant principal that they could not wear American flag t-shirts on the Mexican holiday back in 2010.

Following the incident, a lawsuit against the district was launched by the students and their families. This week, the case came to a close, with a federal judge ruling against the students — a blow that is likely to infuriate some free speech advocates.

According to U. S. District Court Judge James Ware, the district did not violate the students’ first amendment rights. The judge also found that officials‘ concern over the potential violence that could be incited by the students’ pro-American outfits justified the school’s actions. The Morgan Hill Times has more about the case:

[The parents and students] filed the lawsuit against the school district alleging violations against their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights after their children wore American-themed T-shirts to Live Oak and were sent home after refusing to remove the shirts and apparel after Boden and Rodriguez were concerned about the potential for violence on campus…
The lawsuit sought nominal damages including changing school policies to clearly state students’ rights and protections under the Bill of Rights and reimbursing lawyer fees and expenses for the cost of litigation.
Here’s a bit more of the background: After noticing that the students were wearing pro-American garb on May 5, 2010, Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez subsequently approached the kids, telling them to to either remove the garments or to turn their shirts inside out. School Principal Nick Boden was apparently also concerned over the potential for the outfits to create issues between Hispanic students and those wearing the clothing (both men were named in the lawsuit as well).

Following their refusal to comply, the students were allegedly taken to the school’s office where Rodriguez talked with them about Cinco de Mayo. He apparently told them that their clothing would offend Hispanic students who observe the holiday.

The Rutherford Institute and the Thomas More Law Center teamed up to represent the students and their families. John Whitehead, the president of Rutherford, was obviously less than content with the final decision. “This is nothing more than political correctness,” he said. “If these kinds of decisions are upheld, they will destroy our First Amendment rights.”

The school district, though, defends the principal’s actions and is elated by the recent decision. Wes Smith, who served as superintendent of the school district, says that he is very satisfied by the outcome. “We were encouraged to hear that the federal court found student safety paramount,” he said.

These comments seem somewhat disconnected from the statements Smith made just days after the incident unfolded. ”This has certainly been a very difficult time for our school district,” he said at a press conference on May 7, 2010. ”School leaders have to make judgment calls on when to take preventative measures to pre-empt a possible incident or conflict. In this situation, it appears that a decision was made too quickly.”

Rutherford is planning to appeal the court’s decision.

UK NEWS DEATH OF THE EURO

PREPARATIONS were under way last night for the break-up of the euro as Europe’s debt crisis spiralled out of control.
As Treasury officials worked through the night to soften the impact on Britain, David Cameron warned that the single European currency was facing its “moment of truth”.

Business Secretary Vince Cable went further and spoke about “Armageddon” while Brussels officials warned that the chaos threatened to plunge us all into a new recession.


Ministers are understood to be deeply concerned that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel are secretly plotting to build a new, slimmed down eurozone without Greece, Italy and other debt-ridden southern Euro- pean nations.

Well-placed Brussels sources say Germany and France have already held private discussions on preparing for the disintegration of the eurozone.

At the same time, City insiders yesterday speculated that the “death warrant” for the euro had already been written, with a new economic bloc dominated by Germany and France almost certain to emerge in its place.
Howard Wheeldon, senior strategist at BGC Partners, said the single currency experiment had failed.
“Undoubtedly it has failed. We know the concept of a single currency was flawed right from the start. There were too many big differences, in language, in culture and in the economies. There is absolutely no chance of the euro surviving in its current form. It cannot happen.

“There are limits to what the markets, the people and the voters will accept. That doesn’t mean the euro won’t carry on with fewer members, but it has been a failure.”
Stephen Lewis, of Monument Securities, said the search for some sort of Grand Plan or mega-fund to save the euro was corroding the whole project.

“Whatever they do, the underlying economic divergence will still exist,” he said. “It may be that there is no solution and that it would be better to finance an orderly break-up of the euro.”
Economist Nouriel Roubini said on Twitter: “It will be soon an end-game for the eurozone: restructurings and exits till break-up. Slow motion train wreck.”

And Gideon Rachman, of the Financial Times, said: “The euro is not an end in itself. The single currency is just an instrument, aimed at promoting economic prosperity and political harmony across Europe.
“As the evidence mounts that it is doing the precise opposite, it is time to think not about how to save the euro but about how to scrap it, or at least allow the weakest members to leave. Rather than insisting that the break-up of the euro is unthinkable, Europe’s leaders need to start planning for it.”

The secret plans being drawn up are for the creation of a “smaller eurozone” consisting of “fewer members” who would push towards economic and fiscal union.

Britain would be excluded from the new economic grouping, to the delight of many Eurocrats.
French and German officials have already set up a secretive cabal known as the “Frankfurt Group” to pursue their federalist agenda and bully Britain.

The Brussels source insisted the plan was not about creating a two-tier Europe but a radical re-drawing of the entire euro project.

Mr Cameron, in his starkest assessment of the crisis yet, confirmed that the Government was engrossed in contingency planning for the unravelling of the single currency.
“If the leaders of the eurozone want to save their currency then they, together with the institutions of the eurozone, must act now. The longer the delay, the greater the danger,” he said. “Here in Britain, outside the euro, we must prepare for every eventuality, and that is exactly what we will do.”

Mr Cable went even further by conceding that officials were examining the dangers of an “Armageddon narrative” in the eurozone.
Confirming that the Government’s contingency planning for a euro break-up was well under way, he said: “We have a plan. There’s a lot of scenario planning, thinking about all possible outcomes. We have to deal with the world as it is.”
He added: “I don’t think we should be panicking, and although the situation is very difficult and we’re inevitably affected by it, I think the extreme pessimism and gloom really isn’t justified in this case.”

Conceding that preparations for an economic doomsday scenario were under way, he said: “Certainly it affects our trade and potentially, in this Armageddon narrative, it affects the banking system, but we’re not there yet. We have a very clear commitment to stabilising our own country’s finances, and for shifting the base of the economy and its investments into manufacturing.”
Official European Union statistics yesterday slashed the growth forecast for the eurozone next year from 1.8 per cent to 0.5 per cent and raised fears that Britain will be hit by the fallout from the euro crisis.

And in a chilling admission that the continent’s debt crisis is having an even more ravaging impact than previously expected, EU finance commissioner Olli Rehn said: “Growth has stalled in Europe and there is a risk of a new recession.
“This forecast is in fact the last wake-up call. The recovery in the EU has come to a standstill and there is a risk of a new recession.”

The revised economic forecast from Brussels slashes predicted growth levels by nearly two thirds compared with six months ago. A section of the report dealing with the British economy said: “Risks from the euro-area sovereign debt markets and the banking sector heighten this uncertainty. As such, a contraction in Gross Domestic Product in at least one of the next few quarters cannot be ruled out.

“However, the outlook for corporate investment and net exports still appears positive enough to justify a forecast of modest positive growth, with the economy expanding by 0.7 per cent in 2011, 0.6 per cent in 2012 and 1.5 per cent in 2013.
“The substantial downward revision from the spring forecast is explained mainly by the bleaker outlook for household consumption, ­corporate investment and exports, offset partially by slower expected import growth.”

In Italy, the threat of crippling interest rates eased slightly as the country’s banks bought £4billion of Government debts and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi confirmed he will quit at the weekend.

12 Facts About Money And Congress That Are So Outrageous That It Is Hard To Believe That They Are Actually True

Do you want to get rich? Just get elected to Congress. The U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are absolutely packed with wealthy people that are very rapidly becoming even wealthier. The collective net worth of the members of Congress is now measured in the billions of dollars. The people that we have elected to the House and Senate are absolutely swimming in money. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get elected to Congress. In this day and age you generally have to be heavily connected to those that are very wealthy to get into Congress because it takes gigantic amounts of cash to win campaigns. But if you can get in to the club, you pretty much have it made. The numbers that you are about to read are very difficult to believe and they should deeply sadden you. They show that Congress has become all about money. Congressional races are mostly financed by wealthy people, most of the people that we elect to Congress are very wealthy, and they rapidly get wealthier after they are elected. All of this money has turned our republic into something far different than our founding fathers intended.

The following are 12 statistics about money and Congress that are so outrageous that it is hard to believe that they are actually true....

#1 The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress increased by 25 percent between 2008 and 2010.

#2 The collective net worth of all of the members of Congress is now slightly over 2 billion dollars. That is "billion" with a "b".

#3 This happened during a time when the net worth of most American households was declining rapidly. According to the Federal Reserve, the collective net worth of all American households decreased by 23 percent between 2007 and 2009.

#4 The average net worth for a member of Congress is now approximately 3.8 million dollars.

#5 The net worth of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi increased by 62 percent from 2009 to 2010. In 2009 it was reported that she had a net worth of 21.7 million dollars, and in 2010 it was reported that she had a net worth of 35.2 million dollars.

#6 The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, saw his wealth grow by 29 percent from 2009 to 2010. He is now worth approximately 9.8 million dollars.

#7 More than 50 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires.

#8 In 2008, the average cost of winning a seat in the House of Representatives was $1.1 million and the average cost of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate was $6.5 million. Spending on political campaigns has gotten way out of control.

#9 Insider trading is perfectly legal for members of the U.S. Congress - and they refuse to pass a law that would change that.

#10 The percentage of millionaires in Congress is more than 50 times higher than the percentage of millionaires in the general population.

#11 U.S. Representative Darrell Issa is worth approximately 220 million dollars. His wealth grew by approximately 37 percent from 2009 to 2010.

#12 The wealthiest member of Congress, U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, is worth approximately 294 million dollars.

So how are members of Congress becoming so wealthy?

Well, there are lots of ways they are raking in the cash, but one especially alarming thing that goes on is that members of Congress often make investments in companies that will go up significantly if legislation that is being considered by Congress "goes the right way".

This is called a "conflict of interest", but it happens constantly in Congress and nobody seems to get into any trouble for it.

The following is video of Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes ambushing Nancy Pelosi about one particular conflict of interest involving credit card legislation. As you can see, she does not want to talk about it....



As noted above, insider trading is perfectly legal for members of Congress.

A law that would ban insider trading by members of Congress has been stalled for years on Capitol Hill.

So has this been a significant benefit to members of Congress?

Well, there has been at least one study that appears to indicate that members of Congress have been much more successful in the stock market than members of the general public have....

A 2004 study of the results of stock trading by United States Senators during the 1990s found that that senators on average beat the market by 12% a year. In sharp contrast, U.S. households on average underperformed the market by 1.4% a year and even corporate insiders on average beat the market by only about 6% a year during that period. A reasonable inference is that some Senators had access to - and were using - material nonpublic information about the companies in whose stock they trade.

Of course all of this could just be a coincidence, right?

Meanwhile, members of Congress keep telling the rest of us that we are just going to have to cut back because times are tough.

For example, during an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, Nancy Pelosi actually claimed that we should try to encourage poor people to have less children because it costs the government so much money to take care of them....

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

This elitist attitude extends all the way into the White House as well. Earlier this year, Barack Obama made the following statement....

"If you’re a family trying to cut back, you might skip going out to dinner, or you might put off a vacation."

Meanwhile, the Obamas are living the high life at taxpayer expense. In a previous article I mentioned one outrageously expensive vacation taken by the Obamas that was paid for by our taxes....

"Back in August, Michelle Obama took her daughter Sasha and 40 of her friends for a vacation in Spain.

So what was the bill to the taxpayers for that little jaunt across the pond?

It is estimated that vacation alone cost U.S. taxpayers $375,000."

There is a massive disconnect between what our politicians say and what our politicians do.

The high life is good enough for them, but the rest of us have got to "cut back" and suffer becomes times are hard.

But when it comes to money and Congress, the most corrupting influence of all is probably all of the campaign money that gets thrown around.

In America today, it takes gigantic mountains of money to run a successful campaign.

Sadly, the candidate that raises the most money almost always wins. In federal elections the candidate that raises the most money wins about 90 percent of the time.

More than 5 billion dollars were spent on political campaigns back in 2008.

That represents a huge number of favors that need to be paid back.

In 2012, it is being projected that 8 billion dollars could be spent on political campaigns.

When big corporations and wealthy individuals shovel huge piles of money into political campaigns, it is generally because they expect something in return.

Most of those that get sent to Congress realize that they never would have won if wealthy donors had not showered cash on them. Most of them understand that they should not bite the hands that feed them if they want the cash to keep rolling in.

Politics in America has become a game that is played by the elite for the benefit of the elite.

Average Americans have the perception that they are involved in the process and that their opinions really matter, but mostly it is just an illusion.

It is so sad.

Meanwhile, members of Congress rapidly get wealthier and average American families continue to suffer. In fact, the standard of living in the United States has fallen farther over the past three years than at any other time that has ever been recorded in U.S. history.

But for members of Congress the good times just keep on rolling.

Just as it has been for most of human history, the rich rule over the poor.

Does anyone out there believe that we have any hope of changing this?

EUROZONE ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER: ‘IT’S ALL OVER. THE GOVERNMENT IS ABOUT TO COLLAPSE’

The Greek government teetered and stock markets around the world plummeted Tuesday after months of negotiations to save the Greek economy were suddenly thrown into disarray by the prospect of a public vote.

One day after Prime Minister George Papandreou stunned Europe by calling for a referendum vote on the EU bailout, the ripples reached from Athens, where some of his own lawmakers rebelled against him, to Wall Street, where the Dow Jones industrial average plunged almost 300 points.

Papandreou convened his ministers Tuesday night, and a spokesman said the prime minister was sticking to his decision to hold the referendum. Papandreou has also called a vote of confidence in his government, to be held midnight Friday.

“The referendum will be a clear mandate and a clear message in and outside Greece on our European course and participation in the euro,” Papandreou said, according to a statement released by his office. “No one will be able to doubt Greece’s course within the euro,” the statement said according to CNBC.

It is unclear whether Papandreou will have enough support. Several Socialist lawmakers have openly rebelled, with one going as far as defecting. Milena Apostolaki‘s departure whittled Papandreou’s parliamentary majority to just two deputies, leaving the party with 152 seats in the 300-member legislature.

Apostolaki’s departure “shows clearly that the government itself is losing gradually its cohesion,” said George Tzogopoulos, a political analyst from the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy.

He estimated that “that the government will not be able to remain in power for many days” and said it was likely that Papandreou “will call an early election very soon.”

READ THE REST OF THE STORY....CLICK HERE.

THIS IS THE COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF THOSE SUPPORTING OCCUPY WALL ST.

“Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.”

That line is one of the famous “Mom-ilies” often heard in homes all around the country. Perhaps mothers have drawn this wisdom from the Bible and Proverbs 13:20:

“He who walks with wise men will be wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.”
Either way, The Blaze has presented details on the people inside the OWS movement as well as those believed to be supporting it with money, material goods (sleeping bags, non-perishable foods, etc.), organizational skills, and even storage space. We have named names from the White House to the American Nazi Party, we have shown connections to several unions (like SEIU, UFT, and TWU) and pointed out the organizers like the Working Families Party and ACORN.

This morning we ask you to consider the recently posted Official list of Occupy Wall Street’s supporters, sponsors, and sympathizers put together by intrepid blogger Zombie.

The 99%: Official list of Occupy Wall Street’s supporters, sponsors and sympathizers

Communist Party USA
Sources:
Communist Party USA, OWS speech, The Daily Caller

American Nazi Party
Sources:
Media Matters, American Nazi Party, White Honor, Sunshine State News

Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran
Sources:
The Guardian, Tehran Times, CBS News

Barack Obama
Sources:
ABC News, CBS News, ForexTV, NBC New York

The government of North Korea
Sources:
Korean Central News Agency (North Korean state-controlled news outlet), The Marxist-Leninist, Wall Street Journal, Times of India

Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam
Sources:
video statement (starting at 8:28), Black in America, Weasel Zippers, Philadelphia Weekly

Revolutionary Communist Party
Sources:
Revolutionary Communist Party, Revolution newspaper, in-person appearance

David Duke
Sources:
Talking Points Memo, video statement, davidduke.com

Joe Biden
Sources:
Talking Points Memo, video statement, Mother Jones

Hugo Chavez
Sources:
Mother Jones, Reuters, Examiner.com

Revolutionary Guards of Iran
Sources:
Associated Press, FARS News Agency, UPI

Black Panthers (original)
Sources:
in-person appearance, Occupy Oakland, Oakland Tribune

Socialist Party USA
Sources:
Socialist Party USA, IndyMedia, The Daily Caller

US Border Guard
Sources:
White Reference, www.usborderguard.com, Gateway Pundit, Just Another Day blog

Industrial Workers of the World
Sources:
IWW web site, iww.org, in-person appearances

CAIR
Sources:
in-person appearance, Washington Post, CAIR, CAIR New York

Nancy Pelosi
Sources:
Talking Points Memo, video statement, ABC News, The Weekly Standard

Communist Party of China
Sources:
People’s Daily (Communist Party organ), Reuters, chinataiwan.org, The Telegraph

Hezbollah
Sources:
almoqawama.org, almoqawama.org (2), almoqawama.org (3), wikipedia

9/11Truth.org
Sources:
911truth.org (1), 911truth.org (2), 911truth.org (3)

International Bolshevik Tendency
Sources:
bolshevik.org, Wire Magazine

Anonymous
Sources:
Adbusters, The Guardian, video statement

White Revolution
Source:
whiterevolution.com

International Socialist Organization
Sources:
Socialist Worker, socialistworker.org, in-person appearance

PressTV (Iranian government outlet)
Sources:
PressTV, wikipedia

Marxist Student Union
Sources:
Marxist Student Union, Big Government, marxiststudentunion.blogspot.com

Freedom Road Socialist Organization
Sources:
FightBack News, fightbacknews.org

ANSWER
Sources:
ANSWER press release, ANSWER web site, Xinhua

Party for Socialism and Liberation
Sources:
Liberation News (1), pslweb.org, The Daily Free Press, Liberation News (2)