Thursday, December 30, 2010

No Act Of Rebellion Is Wasted - We Have A Power That Terrifies The State

posted by TimingLogic at 11:34 AM

Time’s 2010 Person Of The Year – The Peaking Of The Facebook Phenomenon

The creator of Facebook as person of the year?  Are you kidding me?  We are living through the most interesting-distressing times around the globe seen in what may be hundreds of years and Time chooses Facebook’s creator?  Does Time have a pulse?  Is Time a news magazine?   Facebook is now seven years old.  Everything about Facebook has most likely been discounted.  This is yesterday’s news.    

It has been some time since we have written of the advertising bubble but when I saw Time’s announcement, I knew the doom associated with being on the cover of Time was a slam dunk for Facebook.  Make no mistake, we are in an advertising bubble and Facebook is a huge beneficiary.  

Any web site or web service which relies heavily on ad revenue is going to have an interesting future at some point as this bubble pops.  (It already would have except taxpayers have bailed out profligacy of political and banking idiots.)  And how does Facebook pay for its massive infrastructure?  The advertising bubble. 

We also highlighted much of the dynamic of unsustainable businesses in our Marching Morons post.  ie, Innocent people are forced to move from bubble to bubble to find economic opportunity and employment as criminals (Marching Morons – banksters, politicians and monopoly business leaders – aka bureaucrats) rig our unsustainable economy.   In other words, the vast majority of success in today’s world is transient and is being in the right place at the right time.   Look at the internet bubble or the housing bubble.   Look at all of those who were considered brilliant because they opened businesses that served IT during the mid to late 90’s or who similarly brought companies public during the internet bubble, were just riding a massive scheme of lies.  Time was duped by both.  

I knew two guys who started an IT consulting business and grew it to a 400 person organization with offices in quite a few cities over a period of five or so years in the mid to late 90s..  When the bubble popped, they went under and so did a substantial amount of their wealth and all of their income.   But during the bubble they were considered brilliant.  They were even offered tens of millions of dollars to sell their business.  (The corollary to the mergers and acquisitions bubble we have written about should be self-evident on this smaller scale.  These companies – the acquirers - will eventually be selling off the underperforming assets acquired during the criminal mergers and acquisitions scam.   And private equity, who fueled this scam, will take a bath along with them.  The end of big is nigh and so is the end of financial stupidity. )  This story could be repeated thousands upon thousands of times affecting millions upon millions of people over countless bubbles in the last 25 years.  

Facebook’s revenue is a function of unsustainable ad spend driven by the profit bubble.  And as targeted marketing and personalization take hold, as we said it would years ago, Facebook will face a double whammy of an ad bubble collapse and new technology which allows advertisers to spend their money in a more productive manner.   And when the profit bubble collapses, they will have to seek a more productive use of capital as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mark Zuckerberg is going to wake up one day and wish he had sold Facebook for the same reason as all of those other failed ventures – he’s simply riding an unsustainable bubble.   The key to success in the rigged economy is knowing when to walk.  And while Facebook may survive for many years, eventual  declining ad revenues will lead to either fee-based services, loss of services, less new capability and ultimately, it’s marginalization by the endless drumbeat of innovation from other companies.

posted by TimingLogic at 10:39 AM

Republicans Embrace ObamaCare

The hypocrisy of Washington politicians.  Privatization?  The Republicans want to privatize everything.  How many times did we hear Wall Street could do a better job with Social Security privatization.  This was completely driven by fraud.   I believe the national Republican party is even more corrupt than the Democrats.  Does this plan sound familiar?  Sounds like another mandated tax which benefits the for-profit health insurance crooks.   Sounds exactly like the health care bill that was passed.   

Washington Republicans have exposed their opposition to Obama’s healthcare package as nothing but obstructionism because they are proposing the exact same fascist tax mandates which will line the pockets of private corporations with our government being the enforcer of that for-profit tax.

Government will never work for the people if we let these con artists continue to dismantle it.  The answer is not dismantling government but restoring democratic government.  Instead we should be dismantling the corporatism and the government welfare that goes with it.    

posted by TimingLogic at 10:34 AM

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Massive Creamy Nougat Energy Bubbles At The Center Of The Milky Way Candy Bar

This last week of 2010 I’m going to try to unload a few posts I didn’t get up this year.  One will tie directly into the last post on gold and all of the con games played by Wall Street cited in the associated Bloomberg article.  It’ll get up early in 2011 if not this week.   Another is this post.  A very substantial new discovery. 

This is a massive find that surprised and baffled scientists yet was lost in the histrionics of the mainstream media.  And it is right in our back yard.  On a scale of magnitude, this is like believing you are the only person alive on planet earth and then waking up tomorrow to find there are six billion other people here with you.  It’s hard to overstate the significance of this discovery.

1 light year is 5.87 x 10 to the 12th miles.  (The sun is about 8 light minutes from earth.)  This energy source is 50,000 light years across and is comprised of the most powerful energy source known to man, gamma rays, capable of energy into the billions of times that of visible light. This bubble is likely at many millions of degrees and expanding at many millions of miles per hour per astrophysicists. 

At this point, not only do we have no substantial proof of what this is, but we have no idea how long it has been there and we have no idea how it has previously, or is today or in the future will impact earth.  The leading theory is that this is from a black hole eruption at the center of the Milky Way.   The discovery of a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is also very recent. 

I think I missed the impact of this discovery in Algore’s anthropogenic global warming claim or his Nobel Prize for Dunces application.  You know, the same one that has netted him more than $200 million in personal wealth by hocking his con.  How the hell does a public servant, who was only ever elected because of his father, and who makes or invents nothing of productive use, legitimately acquire $200 million in a span of a decade?  Seriously.  Doesn’t that question ever come to mind?  Do you know any former President or Vice President that has made the hundreds of millions that Clinton and Gore have made in the span of a decade?  They used their position as public servants for personal gain.  It’s the same corrupt political environment that still exists.  An environment that Al Gore and Bill Clinton helped perfect.  The only question in my mind is how much did they sell out the American people to do it?  I know they did to the tune of trillions of dollars in losses and millions of jobs lost for Americans.  What else do we not know? 

The universe is so damn complicated and to have a bureaucrat draw a correlation graph of global temperature and CO2 levels that has been drawn tens of thousands of times by scientists before him, and to then conclude he has an epiphany that they didn’t – that he knows what causes global warming -  is just about the most ridiculous event of my lifetime.  RIDICULOUS!  They will laugh or cry when they talk of our “leaders” in future generations.

Most people probably won’t read this post because they come to this blog to read about economics and finance.  But little would most people know…..  So…..  Far enough down the post that most have probably concluded this has no relevance to either, let’s consider how this discovery ties into our theme of volatility – a concept which ties directly into financial market and economic activity.  Remember this quote from on here some years ago in our Chaiten volcano post?  ‘I'm intrigued by the potential for electrical and electromagnetic disturbances of extraterrestrial origin interacting with forces on earth as a root cause of volatility. That includes human behavior and tectonic activity amongst other symptoms.’   A fact that is almost completely lost in the mire of events at the time, unlike Algore’s every word where the mainstream media waits with bated breath, the earth was hit with a massive gamma ray burst magnitudes larger than any ever recorded coincident with the 9.3 Richter scale earthquake-tsunami disaster in southern Asia back in 2004.

As we have said on here before, the known and unknown energy forces impacting our planet and climate in the snap of your fingers is greater than humankind’s impact since our creation.  Certain stars in our galaxy emit more energy in a second than our sun emits in millions of years.  And that energy often impacts earth or the universe around us.  We just don’t see it because the energy is not in the visible spectrum.   Global warming is-was quantifiably real.   Man-made global warming is a manifestation of the ego.  The universe has its own agenda.  And there is nothing a small speck of humanity is going to do to stop it.   Instead of hyperventilating about man-made global warming, we’d do better to study the universe’s agenda (embrace true science over Al’s political con game) and deal with the massive issues facing humankind today – poverty, millions of deaths of war and famine, massive government and banking fraud, polluting our planet and ourselves and on and on.   Algore and bureaucrats pumping man-made global warming use fear-based terror ( a technique perfected when he was a politician) to paint unthinkable fear-based pictures of the boogeyman of global warming in our mind, while he says nothing about the billions of people suffering from political con games and corruption around the world today.

NASA link to discovery here

Physicist Paul LaViolette is just my kind of guy.  He’s batty and outside of the mainstream.  He has been a proponent of advanced theories involving extraterrestrial energy sources impacting earth.  In this video, he provides a unique perspective on this find and the impact on the earth, including our climate, here.

The real question is what impact do these energies play in the creation and evolution of life, our existence, consciousness and intelligence.   That’s a very, very interesting question.  I’m glad you asked.  Hahahaha.  

posted by TimingLogic at 11:16 AM

Monday, December 27, 2010

How To Create The Gold Bubble Swindle

This story is simply a reaffirmation of countless posts on here.  Although rather than an anonymous blogger stating it, it comes directly from those who helped create the con. 

If you think gold is going up because We The People are loading up on the shiny metal to protect us from a corrupt government, you really need to wake up.  Seriously.  Americans are broke courtesy of the countless other swindles played upon them.  40 million Americans are on food stamps, 80 million Americans have been completely marginalized and tens of millions more are just making it.   As we have already noted, gold is being driven by our fraudulent financial system.  And the Federal Reserve has already bailed out the gold market from complete collapse.  

Can you imagine someone who has been telling you that gold is the only sound money actually admitting the truth?  That gold is going up because a massively corrupt financial industry has been pumping it?  And you are the mark?   Hahaha.   The human ego will never allow that to happen. 

Gold is an ideology.  And ideology needs a preacher.   Someone tells the masses that gold is sound money or a great investment.  They can’t provide a credible explanation of why, but that’s not part of the con.  And that is exactly what the Bloomberg article points out.  That’s nothing new on here.  We have remarked numerous times of how Wall Street creates its bubbles including gold; all through fraud.   

In some twisted bit of irony, those who are advocating gold money are lining the pockets of a fraudulent financial system by playing society’s role of useful idiots.   They are unwittingly part of the Wall Street swindle.  Now can you imagine the ad hominen attacks were I to post this on a gold site?  The mob would burn me at the stake.  And that is exactly what one would expect with an ideology.  The same type of ideology practiced by Republicans and Democrats.

posted by TimingLogic at 10:10 AM

Friday, December 24, 2010

Happy Holidays – Our Holiday Gift Has Emerged. It Is Not A Government Of Men But A Restoration Of Constitutional Rule Of Law And Democracy. It Is Dennis Kucinich’s New Bill To Reinstitute Constitutional Money.

Before I start this post, I want to highlight that I sometimes use men or he as a gender-neutral noun or pronoun as many of the historical citings I use were written when gender neutrality was cited with the masculine form.  It still is but not as often.  They or humans or whatnot doesn’t slide off of my tongue in many contexts including the  John Adam’s quote on governments of men and governments of laws.  It has no intention of offense.
 
I was going to write a specific holiday post but this event is such a gift that this is my holiday post. 
The discussions of money around the internet have become very important over the last handful of years.  There are very few people who actually understand this topic.  Even people who profess to be experts really miss the point.  Feints of fractional reserve banking and gold-backed money are just that.  These are truly senseless and useless topics when it comes to the bigger picture of what money is or what has caused this crisis.
   
This blog was literally the only source who said liquidity shocks and a credit crunch were coming to our monetary system well before the collapse.  And that Wall Street banks were unsafe.   And that I moved all of my family’s money out of unsafe banks.  And then who warned about financial markets just days before the collapse.  And then we were the only one who wrote soon after the crisis started that the Federal Reserve could and should print money to ameliorate this crisis. (They have printed none regardless of the senseless comments of people who do not understand money that is so pervasive in the blogosphere.)  And when the histrionics reached a fever pitch that the FDIC was broke and that people’s deposits weren’t safe, we wrote that any money needed to protect the deposits of American citizens should be printed and that it would have no negative effect.   Where were all of the gold monetary experts throughout all of this?  Generally calling for leaders to let the economy collapse as a way out of this crisis.  This was and is a brain-dead position of people who don’t understand economics or money.  This was the policy of one of the worst Presidents in American history, Herbert Hoover.  How’d that work out for you?

We wrote all of this at a time when the entire world either thought this was a housing problem or was in fantasy land about how great the global economy was.   The roar of bullishness from media clowns, Wall Street and Washington was deafening.   Many are rewriting history and even coming out with books ex post facto when they had no idea what was going on at the time.  These and thousands of other remarks on here were made with a strong understanding of  what money is,  what role money plays in a society and how money works.

Let’s get something straight.  Gold-based money solves none of the fundamental issues facing the United States today.  Zero.  In fact, as we wrote, it would cause a depression as far as the eye could see. 

Point blank, if you think it does, you don’t understand the issues and you don’t understand money.   Don’t worry.  We’ll back that up in spades on here before we are done with this crisis.   We have planted hundreds or thousands of seeds on the topic of money on here.  That is true of many topics.  At some point we will go back and take all of those seeds we planted on many topics and germinate them into complete trees with complete solutions.  Right now it’s too fun watching people who continue to write so many mistruths actually stick their foot further in their mouth.

I’ll start by putting up at least one large post on this early next year when we go back and look at this recent IMF pronouncement that we should return to the gold standard.

The gold money advocates will kick and scream and they’ll try to manipulate and distort as their mistruths are exposed.  That includes their perspective on Kucinich’s bill.  That’s because they have filled your minds with useless bullshit and they really don’t understand money at all.  If they did, they would not be proposing a return to the gold standard.   They will eventually be exposed as not being the experts they portrayed themselves to be.  And most positioned themselves as expert for profit anyway.  They did it because it was financially-lucrative to convince us they were experts rather than simply writing for the virtuous sharing of ideas and knowledge.  That very fact will not allow them to seek truth but rather to rationalize many of their mistruths.   One who makes money off of opinion loses credibility when that opinion is found out to be completely wrong.  Gold money advocates understand we have a debt bubble and that is because our monetary system is corrupt.  I respect their positions on that level.  But I could stick a graph of our debt in front of a ten year old and they could tell me we have a debt problem.

The contents of Kucinich’s bill looks frighteningly similar to countless posts on this blog.  That includes his proposal to move the Federal Reserve under the Treasury, which we have also written.  In many regards the content of this bill looks like plagiarism.   That’s ridiculous though.  It most assuredly is not.   There is a reason for the similarities.  The people who wrote Kucinich’s bill understand the role of money in a democratic society.   While not perfect and while I have some major gripes with this bill, the proposal is such an exponential and massive leap forward that I will not allow perfection to be the enemy of the good in any critique.  I completely support this measure without exception.   (This bill or any other government or democratic reforms, including any type of monetary system reform, will not accomplish anything until We The People first restore democracy and end political and lobbyist corruption.)

This proposed bill would literally change the world.  Let me repeat that -  Literally change the world more than any event that has happened in our country in the last fifty years.  By a huge margin.  I don't think most people understand the impact of our banking system on every aspect of our society.  Our banking system substantially participates in the creation of poverty, drug addiction, racism, tens of millions of lost jobs, declining wages, loss of economic opportunity, educational disparity, destroyed defined-benefit pension, loss of health care and on and on and on.  It threatens Social Security, our social safety nets, our constitution and our democratic way of life. Gold money would not fix these issues.  And in some cases, it would magnify the problems. 

Kucinich’s proposal is an exponential leap in consciousness and awareness of the role of money in human development and democracy. By the way, it would kill global finance and globalization in its current form.  And guess what?  That is exactly what we wrote would happen countless times.  Another unique perspective on here.  There is no way around it - globalization is dead either by doing nothing or by doing what is right and morally-just as this bill does.  There is no going back to fantasy land.

This is a holiday gift courtesy of Dennis Kucinich, a public servant.   I would encourage you to spread his proposal to anyone and everyone you know and start reading up on the topic.   Regardless of what happens to this bill, if we can introduce this dynamic into the public debate, we will eventually take down the beast. 

Don’t believe the lies of the mainstream media, the political parties and gold ideologues who will all try to torture this proposal in the name of a false belief system or in support of continued corruption.  Dennis Kucinich is a threat to their power and so is this bill.   They will most surely try to discredit this proposal as they have tried to discredit him numerous times.  Dennis is surely not perfect, and neither is his record in Congress, and neither are you or I, but he is someone who has and remains a strong advocate of democracy, the rule of law, We The People and The Constitution.  Dennis Kucinich is a patriot for the human race and so is this bill.
 
Link here courtesy of Common Dreams

posted by TimingLogic at 10:24 AM

Thursday, December 23, 2010

White House Drafts Unconstitutional Executive Order For Indefinite Detention

I think it’s just about time to end executive orders.  Period.  Without exception.  They are clearly extraconstitutional, unconstitutional and they subvert the process of constitutional government and laws through the whims of men.

How did we get to the point where one man or woman can decide the fate of laws in our country?   Who died and made our President a king?  This is government of men and not a government of laws.

posted by TimingLogic at 11:39 AM

Merrill Lynch’s Crimes Against Humanity. Poor And Underprivileged Get The Bill For Massive Fraud And Corruption Of A Ruling Class Of Criminals.

This is a must-read.  One of the comments to this story is a private detective who remarked that what Merrill did constitutes crimes against humanity.  And that he has never seen such criminal behavior.

As more and more information leaks out about a ruling class of criminals in this country, the stench gets stronger and stronger.  They can no longer sweep this under the rug.  It will not go away.  Justice must be served.  

Link here.

posted by TimingLogic at 10:45 AM

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Why The Two Thousand Page Financial Reform Bill Of 2010 Is A Poster Child For Massive Political Fraud And Corruption Comparative To The Two Dozen Page Bill It Replaces. Politicians Have Systemically Corrupted Our Government To The Point That We Cannot Trust Anything They Do Without Complete Transparency And Oversight.

"Secret diplomacy is a necessary tool for a propertied minority, which is compelled to deceive the majority in order to subject it to its interests. Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level."

– Leon Trotsky, 1917

What has the world come to that I am quoting Trotsky on here?  1917 was a very interesting time in Russia.  There was great concentration of wealth and an illegitimate and imperialist government which perpetuated this dynamic through fraud and tyranny.  Interestingly, the government that replaced czarist Russia was even more illegitimate and barbaric.  There are some timeless parallels to the illegitimacies of the state regardless of when and where they exist.   I ran across Trotsky’s remark and thought it would be a perfect opening to the ‘secret diplomacy” that similarly defines the 2010 financial reform bill here in the U.S. 

On to the post.  

Some months ago, I said we would take a very unique look at the fraud of the Wall Street reform legislation that the President signed this year.   We will focus on the measurable outcome of corruption rather than the specific contents of the bill.  This is substantially more rational than attempting to analyze a bill which is too complex to actually analyze.  On some level the contents of the bill are completely irrelevant.   The bill is so complicated that no single person can do an effective analysis.  It would take a century to interpret every single page of code and litigate the countless interpretations of legalese for each of its pages.  If this bill stands as it is, that is exactly what is going to happen.  We have a legal system where special interests challenge law over and over until they find a pliable judicial system to see their interpretation.  Then when special interests or corporations finally get what they are able to manipulate or defraud, they’ll move on to a new piece of the code.  That’s what has happened with banking regulations, Glass-Steagall, Medicare, food safety, trade bills and on and on.  Why would the new financial reform bill be any different when the rules to the game have not changed?    

A reader remarked about the time of the passage of the financial regulation bill that maybe our economic system had become too complex.   Well, that surely is not the case.  Contrarily, the American economy has become substantially less complex over the last thirty years or so and that is at the core of its weakness and lack of vibrancy.  (Something for you to ponder.)   But, in parallel, during that time, government has become substantially more complex.   Too complex.   And so has our federal code which is now well beyond one million pages.  

How does anyone really understand the rule of law with over a million pages of legal code and thousands more being added by our new President and the Democratic Congress? 

I heard a Harvard law professor (an honest and distinguished one) once remark that the law should be easily understood by everyone in society without the aid of a lawyer.   That the rule of law was for everyone in society regardless of class or accomplishment. 

No one understands the rule of law in the United States any more.  That includes the legal system itself.  So, instead with so much excess and unnecessary code, the application of the rule of law becomes arbitrary.  ie, No enforcement agency could ever hire enough people to enforce the overly complicated codified code of the United States.  So, enforcement becomes arbitrary and random.  This leads to a less than equal society and a bastardization of democracy.  It has the exact same effects on our economy.  It leads to abuse where  arbitrary enforcement will be focused on what is important to the state.  And that often means application to enemies of the state.   Especially when the state is in a mode driven by fear and paranoia as it is today. 

e.g., While Wall Street gets away with the crimes of the millennium due to the arbitrary lack of enforcement of the rule of law, middle class and underprivileged Americans are booted from their homes or left in food lines using the arbitrary enforcement of the rule of law.   In other words, with limited resources of investigation and prosecution, the state has arbitrarily chosen to apply those resources to indict and prosecute the ‘We The People ‘side of the housing debacle coin while it also arbitrarily chooses not to apply its limited resources to prosecute the criminal Wall Street side of the same coin.  And why is that?  Because arbitrarily applying the rule of law to ‘We The People’ in lieu of Wall Street is a profitable endeavor.     We The People are the enemy of the state.  Wall Street is a tool of the state.   

Regulations (society’s rule of law applied to the economy) are necessary for any functioning economy just as the rule of law is necessary for any functioning democracy.  Regulation should be simple so that all interested economic participants are able to effectively compete in the market with a clear understanding of its rules.  (Just as code should be simple in support of democracy for the same reasons.)  i.e., No party is  allowed to dump mercury out the factory’s back door.  No ifs, ands or buts.  And here is how you must dispose of that waste.  Not a 100 page litany of exceptions and special situations put into the code by major corporations bribing our government for their benefit of cheating or advantage or stifling competition. 

The government is the referee in the game of economics.  Regulations are the rules to the game.  Economics can be defined strictly and often mathematically, not using political ideology.  That some people wish to apply libertarian political philosophy to economics is insane.  You don’t apply political ideology to the rules in a baseball game any more than you would to the economy.  Political ideology applied to markets is the very reason we have a nonfunctioning economy. Neoliberalism is in many ways the adoption of  libertarian economics.  In other words, get the government out of the regulation business and let the markets decide is substantially ridiculous.   We don’t play baseball without rules.  Yet that is often the basis for policy driven by corruption.   What we need to do is get the government out of the rigging markets or rigging the game business for monetary favors.  This is necessary for the game to function under fair rules where anyone with a legitimate business idea or plan can play the game and win. 

But we really don't have a functioning democracy in Washington. So, instead of necessary regulation, we get red tape that is defined by big business lawyers and lobbyists who write legislation determining our economic policy.  And that regulation always includes special provisions for those willing to pad the pockets of politicians.  Unlike politics, markets can be based on mathematics.  Something the political class clearly doesn’t understand nor care to understand.   We all know Wall Street wrote much of the financial reform legislation.  It was reported without question during the reform process.    

Economic models should be based on reason.  On concepts that can often proven to work under some modicum of science and rationality.   There may be more than one valid perspective on functioning markets but political ideology isn't one of them.  And neither is the red tape we call regulation provided by corporate lawyers whose goal is to stifle competition and rig the game in their favor.  Remember, we are adamantly not pro-business on here as our government is.  Not one iota.  We are pro-markets.  Pro-markets ideals can be made to align with democracy.  Pro-business aligns with corporatism or fascism that we see today.

Courtesy of our government, the dynamic we have in our economy is the same  dynamic involved in Wall Street’s endless rigging and manipulation of financial markets as highlighted in the last post on derivatives.  Our economy is rigged.  Countless tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of worthless code inserted into our rule of law by bribes and special interest favors for corporations. 

The American economy is choking on its on vomit because of Washington politicians. Washington is both the problem and the answer. Fix Washington and the American economy will be just fine. Or don't fix it and watch it continue to collapse under the weight of corruption and ignorance.  Just like the Soviet Union did.

Now let’s get specific as it pertains to the 2010 financial reform bill.   Unfortunately, it appears to me the Federal Reserve has removed the original 1933 Glass-Steagall bill from its web site.  You know, the one put in place to thwart Wall Street’s corruption that helped create the Great Depression.  Or, at least I cannot seem to find it anymore.  I looked everywhere on Federal Reserve sites.  It was once readily available.  But after this crisis unfolded, my link to the document disappeared.  Maybe the document is still out there and the link was moved innocently.  But this raises issues in my mind as to why.   Especially since a very small minority in Congress were lobbying to restore Glass-Steagall against the overwhelming Wall Street lobbyist machine telling us it wasn’t a) part of the problem and b) feasible.  Both are lies that are killing our economy and our democracy.  Did Wall Street not want Americans to see the bill they spent untold millions, if not billions, to have overturned when it came to forming new financial reform legislation in 2010?  Who knows. 

Anyway, I have a personal copy of Glass-Steagall.  And here is also a fine bit of corrupt legislation in the form of  Senator Dodd’s 2010 financial reform bill to compare and contrast. 

Senator Dodd's Bill 

Glass-Steagall Bill

Do you see any difference?  Well, one is the readability factor.   Good luck making heads or tales of the 2010 bill.  The 1933 bill was simple and concise.  Easy to read by anyone with a basic grasp of language.   It provided reasonable rules which economic participants could understand without a legion of lawyers.    

There is an even bigger difference.  A very,very,very profound difference.   Glass-Steagall is two dozen pages and the 2010 financial reform bill is going to be two thousand pages by the time it is put into final law.  (The 2010 bill’s contents and regulations haven’t actually been finalized since it was corruptly ramrodded through passage before completion.  It probably won’t be complete for many more years.  So the bill will continue to grow in scope and corruption.)  

We can safely interpret the complexity and scope creep of the 2010 bill over the Glass-Steagall bill.  That is,  every page beyond the original two dozen pages of Glass-Steagall is a page of Wall Street special-interest complexity paid for by bribery and corruption.  Complexity, just like in the derivatives market, creates a murky environment understood only by those who create and manipulate it.  That lack of transparency is necessary to keep out competition and perpetuate massive profits achieved through outright fraud and corruption.  Glass-Steagall was based on the simplicity of honesty and a functioning market.  Anyone could understand it and adhere to it without a legion of lawyers.   The 2010 financial reform bill is based on thousands of pages of special interest-written legislation bought and paid for by corrupt lobbyists and the most corrupt financial system this country has ever seen.   You tell me, how is anyone other than the mega-rich large corporations who wrote this toxic trash able to compete when there are two thousand pages of bullshit, loopholes, unnecessary complexity and legalese meant to benefit the most corrupt - the criminal monopolies of Wall Street?  They can’t.  They won’t.  And that’s exactly the point of this complex deceit. 

Wall Street has used this legislation to tighten the noose on democracy and working markets.  This financial reform bill has further rigged markets in the favor of those who can “pay to play” while providing the complexity, lack of transparency and barriers to entry they need to continue to rig markets.  That very fact was highlighted in the New York Times article in the last post we put up on derivatives.   The financial reform of 2010 was a bald-faced lie courtesy of the Washington Democrats and President Obama.   Of course the Republicans are actually worse.  They didn’t want any reform.  They were too busy begging Wall Street for political donations.    

If our banking system was the envy of the world before special interests started bribing our government with billions of dollars to dismantle or rig the regulations around it, and the core of that regulation was two dozen pages, what does it now say that we have a new financial reform bill that is thousands of pages in length and too complex for any newly interested or small business on the outside to even understand?  What it tells us is that every single page of this code is something inserted by a cartel banking system to maintain its corrupt control over our government and our society.  The voluminous length of the 2010 financial reform bill is a testament to the extent of its massive fraud. 

This regulation keeps competition out of the financial markets and guarantees a handful of firms maintain control while they continue to rape and pillage our society.  Democracy?  Are you kidding?   This financial reform legislation is simply a noose on the neck of competition and the American people that now chokes even tighter.  It is bought and paid for guarantees, bribes, loopholes and special dispensation for the privileged few.  This new “reform” bill will guarantee  there will never be change or never be competition to the corrupt cabal that is Wall Street.  All courtesy of your friendly pro-business (aka fascist) government.  Corporate personhood is the bane of humanity.  It is based purely on corruption and-or failed political ideology of our Supreme Court.   

Do you believe this is simply a problem with our banking system?  It is a problem with every single industry in the United States.  Our federal government whores itself out for legalized bribes and then restricts competition or rigs markets or sells out our federal government for money to corporations and foreign governments. 

Food, technology, computers, textiles, transportation, chemicals, financial services, banking, insurance, energy, housing, healthcare, media, military.  It doesn’t matter what the business.  They are all rigged.  All markets are rigged in our economy.   There are a handful of firms in every business vertical that maintain a tight control on competition and red tape through government bribery.  And they are all rigged to reduce competition and, therefore, job creation, new business creation and economic opportunity for We The People. 

Who works on your behalf to rig economic markets in favor of We The People?  ie, Democracy?  No one.  So what do we see in its place?  Widespread underemployment, unlivable wages, denied access to affordable health care,  incredible poverty, despicable education for underprivileged, no help for parents with special needs children, racism, class warfare,  mortality rates for many segments of the population similar to undeveloped and massively corrupt countries and on and on and on.  The stench is unbearable and unmistakable. 

Eventually, we know what happens to rigged markets, don't we?  They collapse.  Just like countless other Wall Street scams have collapsed.  The same reason the stock market is going to collapse again.  Competitors either can't or refuse to participate. Monopolies of power are built. Power-seeking stooges rise to the top and determine the future of opportunity based on cronyism rather than merit. Wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few bureaucrats who invariably prize power and control over democracy, virtue and integrity. The true believers defend a completely failed system with tremendous zeal and rationalizations. The head grows larger as the body withers.  Humpty Dumpty either comes crashing down or is dismantled by those with the jackboot of tyranny upon their neck.  

This story has been repeated a thousand times throughout history. 

Intel, BP, Microsoft, DuPont, JP Morgan Chase, Exxon Mobil, AIG, HP, Cisco, Monsanto, Oracle, IBM, GM, Ford, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Bank of American, the Robber Barons of yore, the Chinese communist party, the Republican and Democratic parties, the overlords of the former English empire, the ayatollah's in Iran, the Third Reich, Imperial Japan, the Euro zone, feudal middle-age Europe, the Soviet Union, Ancient Rome, the Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex and of course a bought and paid for U.S. federal government.  All were examples of monopolies run by power-seeking stooges who relied on cronyism and corruption for their power rather than deriving it from moral clarity, legitimacy and justice.   

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve. But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." -- Frederic Bastiat

Our government takes from We The People and gives to special interests, foreign governments and corporations.  And they do so under the influence of money and monetary favors.  Law does not  govern our society.  Neither does democracy.  Men rule as kings and queens and we are their serfs.  But our minds are free - they can never force us to support a system of corruption.  And that will contribute to their ultimate demise.  And all of the corporate welfare recipients will eventually end their reign of economic terror with it.    Just as it has throughout history.  A fish rots from the head first.   Or as we have said countless times, we are living through the end times of big.   

The rule of law has simply become something to whore out for personal favors by endlessly corrupt and power-hungry politicians.  And elites outside of the government are more than happy enough and corrupt enough to oblige.  Do you think either care about democracy?   The 2010 financial reform bill is a perfect example of that fact.   The 2010 financial reform bill praised by President Obama is simply 2,000 pages of bought-and-paid-for red tape that rigs the game even more in the favor of crooks and liars.   

And by the way, so is the healthcare reform bill of 2010 for the very same reasons.  All we needed to do was extend Medicare to any American who was unable to find affordable health care.  And then we could have told those in the top 1% wealthiest Americans that until these Americans can afford health care with a living wage, you are going to pay for their health care bills.  Given these are the people who have corrupted our government, they have the control and power to create policies which offer a living wage and economic opportunity to all Americans.   Extending Medicare would have been a twenty page bill.  Not the monstrosity of 2,500 pages of corruption and the forced for-profit corporation tax on poor Americans that was eventually passed. 

Everything the government touches under the influence of bribery by the lobbyist bubble is tainted and rigs the system in some way.  There can be no restoration of economic rights, democracy and the legitimacy of representative government over the tyranny of the state until the stench emanating from Washington is completely removed.  There is no recovery.  Only lies and deceit.   

Corporate personhood and the comingling corruption it has created must be put to death and done so constitutionally. 

The future is going to look nothing like the past.  That’s a very good thing.  Not so good if your desire is power and control.  The world’s institutions and deceits that are projections of the ego are crumbling right before our very eyes.  It’s good to be the king.  Not much longer though. 

posted by TimingLogic at 9:09 AM

Monday, December 20, 2010

Solstice Lunar Eclipse Tonight

Solstice eclipses are incredibly rare, although it will not technically occur on the exact moment of the solstice.  From what I have found, I believe this is only the second lunar solstice eclipse in the last 2,000 years. NASA's picture below shows the progression for the eastern part of the United States.

For those who have never seen the blood moon, here is a very nice time lapsed view of the recent eclipse a few years ago.

eclipse

posted by TimingLogic at 9:59 AM

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Big Pharma – Big Fraud. Bust Up The Pharmaceutical Giants.

I am not a big phan of big pharma.  I’m not a fan of anything that is organizationally big.   It’s going to most certainly be rife with corruption.  Especially if there is no oversight.  Big pharma phits that bill.  The United States is most assuredly the most overmedicated and overchemicaled, unnecessarily and with unintended consequences might I add,  population ever to live on this planet.  That is driven substantially by government corruption and big pharma payoffs to our politicians. 

It wasn’t too many months ago we questioned the intent of big pharma moving clinical trials to very impoverished countries.  Make no mistake about it.  The reason clinical trials have been moving to  impoverished countries is because there are no formal safety controls, health standards organizations and governments can often be bribed.  What’s this all mean?  You can do what you want without being concerned about safety procedures adopted in developed (aka protected) societies and you can do it almost without any financial expense.  There have been many concerned human rights organizations that have documented serious abuse and concerns about further abuse.    Now it seems the stink is starting to stick.  Some of it courtesy of Wikileaks. 

Democracy Now swings a big hammer at these abuses with three stories this week on systemic pharma corruption.  Read or watch at your own risk.  Some of this is horrifying.  

Pfizer targeted Nigerian Attorney General to Undermine Suit over Fatal Drug Tests

Deadly Medicine:  FDA Fails to Regulate Rapidly Growing Industry of Overseas Drug Testing

Study: Pharmaceutical Drug Companies Top Military Inudstry in Defrauding U.S. Government

posted by TimingLogic at 10:30 AM

Dissent Will Not Be Tolerated – Reuters Photographer Beaten By United Nations Brownshirts For Covering Protests

If there is one thing I agree with George Bush about, it is the United Nations.    I appreciate an organization of states who seek to keep an open dialog so as to not repeat mistakes of the past, but I completely reject any legitimacy it has over my sovereignty. 

I would suppose the United Nations did not want protesters to have any voice and this is why intimidation and force was used against a journalist photographing said dissent.  What sovereignty do United Nations thugs have in Mexico to detain and beat a journalist?  These thugs should have been arrested under Mexico law

posted by TimingLogic at 10:02 AM

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Voyager Sees Solar Wind Decline And Other Recent Tidbits From The Universe

Voyager link here.

As Voyager reaches the outer edge of the sun’s influence, the solar wind will slow to zero.  Scientists are now reporting this actual measurement from Voyager this past week. 

Most people in the general population, ie those who don’t study the topic, don’t realize that intelligent life is only possible because the earth is protected through its energy field, the magnetosphere.  Or that the solar system is similarly protected by the sun’s magnetosphere.   And that earth is protected from both energy and life-ending debris by massive outer solar system planets.   Or the moon is required for tides,  without which we would not have complex life.  The list of dynamics needed to create and perpetuate intelligent life are endless.   Most of which we haven’t even gathered enough rudimentary knowledge to ask appropriate questions. 

One gets an indication of the sun’s protection of our solar system through the  heliosphere marked on the graphic at the title link above.  The solar wind encapsulates our solar system in a bubble of protection.  (Although the graphic itself needs updated.  The view of a heliospheric “tail” has now been proven to be inaccurate.  Most undoubtedly, budget cuts at NASA to pay for corporate welfare and bankster bailouts.  Ha.  )

As an aside, on that note I have a question.  One that pertains to NASA’s recent discovery of microbes capable of eating arsenic.  (Although NASA is now fencing its original claims.)   Is our definition of life well too narrow?  And is that definition completely determined by our physical sensory organs rather than any actual truth?  Are natural electrical and electromagnetic energy more appropriately necessary in the determination of life than, say, carbon?  Every living thing on earth is defined by that same energy. 

Is the universe alive?  Is the process of forming new stars or black holes a process involving life?  Is it really any different than the perpetual cycle of life on earth?  Is the earth itself alive given its natural magnetic energy allows carbon-based life? 

Back to Voyager.  Do you see anything unusual in the Voyager graphic below?  I think most people would expect Pluto to be well outside of Neptune’s orbit.  But Pluto, in its highly elliptical path, has just recently (in yearly terms) emerged from a period of time where it actually passes inside of Neptune’s orbit every 248 years.   Let’s see.  What happened approximately 248 years ago? 

 2010-12-16_1009

Voyager has recently discovered that in interstellar space, beyond the solar wind wall is an unexpected energy source.   What happens when Voyager passes through this energy source?  Or when our solar system passes through any energy source?  Will we see a new life form born with the marriage of Voyager and a foreign energy source?  Will we see VGER?  Ha.   On a more serious note, could this or other energy sources coincide with an expansion of human enlightenment?  Have major jumps in human consciousness coincided with cyclicality?  Do you believe this possible?  Or are you consumed by your ego and the total control it seeks to impose on your mind?  Do you consider that truth may exist beyond your belief system or does that threaten you? 

NASA, other space agencies and physicists in general are actually uncovering quite a few mysteries as of late.  Mysteries which will eventually shatter many commonly held scientific beliefs.  That includes unknown energy sources near Orion that are bombarding earth with energy.   Does any of this energy tie into cycles of volatility?  Even the ancient study of astrology,  or the impact of energy sources from the universe,  is starting to regain some acceptance within the scientific community as new theories abound.  Including extremely credible and very compelling scientific theories on the celestial origin of global warming.  And then there is this recent pronouncement.  We could go on and on but that’s not the intent.

The intent is to consider the possibilities thatf life extends well beyond the thimbleful of knowledge we have acquired.  Without a shadow of a doubt the world is a very different place than most people believe.  That includes scientists who adhere to often dubious and incomplete untruths.   Untruths perpetuated by ego.  Just like the economic untruths perpetuated by the ego of economists, Wall Street, the mainstream media and politicians.  Just like the untruths of racism, fear, class warfare, bigotry, elitism and other equally dubious inventions of the human mind.  What is truly real and what is simply an invention of the mind?   What really is science fiction?  That would likely be most of our existence.       

Finally, I didn’t post it on here but NASA lost communications with Voyager just about the same day the stock market topped in April of 2010.  The most important index, the banking index, hasn’t come remotely close to retesting those highs.  In other words, this was a substantial turning point for markets.  That includes debt markets which have been under extreme stress since that turning point.  NASA eventually restored communications to Voyager but I find that interesting.  Don’t you?  :-) 

Signing off for now.  Nanu nanu.

posted by TimingLogic at 9:11 AM

Friday, December 17, 2010

The Asian Century …….. Of Volatility

posted by TimingLogic at 10:31 AM

Irish People Wish To Remove Dictatorship And Restore Democracy

I think this picture below sums it up pretty well.  I believe countries around the world should be defaulting on the corrupt foreign debts built up by equally corrupt governments who spent these debts on dubious programs generally benefiting the elite and the banking mobsters who enriched themselves at the expense of free societies.  Just like in the U.S. where social programs fhave been butchered for decades while government corporate welfare is at record levels.  

In the end, none of these austerity-bailout  programs in Europe are going to work.  It’s impossible.  You can’t cut wages and burden society with even more debt when they didn’t have the money to pay the debt in the first place.  These bailouts are based on government and finance corruption.

irelandfail1

Picture and excellent article courtesy of The Telegraph.

posted by TimingLogic at 9:42 AM

What Is The Back Up In Ten Year Treasury Rates Telling Us

sc

I have started to sense a heightened level of enthusiasm for those who wish and believe the U.S. will default on its debt obligations.  This because longer term Treasury rates are rising.   Bond rates go up for many reasons just like stocks go up for many reasons.  There are going to be an endless array of bond crises around the world until the entire system likely implodes but there is absolutely nothing that points to any such imminent danger in U.S. Treasuries.  To the contrary, with the Federal Reserve buying bonds, the U.S. can issue Treasuries all day long.   The Federal Reserve and Treasury dealers could easily handle the load of U.S. debt issuances even if there is not a single buyer.  That is, as long as our banking system doesn’t crater again.   Of course, we pretty much wrote this with the start of quantitative easing 2.  ie, The Federal Reserve had changed the game.  At least for now.   Ultimately there will be future stresses on our banking system but it isn’t Treasury issuances for now.

Let’s look at the more likely reason why rates are rising.  Above is the Ten Year Treasury in gray and the mega banking or Wall Street index in red.  Hedge funds and Wall Street traders have rammed the mega banking index up 20% in literally a week.   It is no coincidence that Treasury rates are rising in concert with the banking index.  This is more Frankenfinance.  It’s simply an anticipation of rising bank profits from rising interest rates or the carry trade.  ie, Borrow from the Federal Reserve for nothing and buy U.S. Treasuries for a supposedly guaranteed 3.5ish%. 

Treasuries are more than likely rising because of economic enthusiasm from Wall Street.  Although there are many bonds around the world that are rising for less than pleasant reasons.   

This is very consistent with Wall Street sentiment being off the rocker positive. 

Remember, we wrote on here some time ago that Wall Street is going to need the Federal Reserve to start buying stocks and commodities.  There is no counterparty to absorb their supply.  Wall Street is the dumb money. This is a simple truth that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else. 

posted by TimingLogic at 8:51 AM

Thursday, December 16, 2010

SEC Curtails Investigations And Oversight With Budget Cuts Courtesy Of Political Crooks

If we actually had real investigations into Wall Street corruption, it would be another WikiLeaks fiasco leading right back to Washington.

Wall Street corruption continues unabated. 

Link here.

posted by TimingLogic at 1:34 PM

The Accused WikiLeaker - In A Society Ruled By Laws, The Accused Are Granted Due Process. In A Society Ruled By Men, They Are Denied That Fundamental Right And May Even Be Tortured.

Story link here.

I don’t always agree with everything Glenn Greenwald writes - his view on corporate personhood is ill-thought in my estimation.  But he generally is a source of reason and virtue as it pertains to the rule of law.   I suppose we would expect this from someone who has dedicated their life to being a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.

You may agree or disagree that the Wikileaks leak is beneficial.   But I suspect much of any disagreement is derived from a deluded belief system.  How many people who disagree with the recent leaks of “classified” information would have a problem if we were back in the 1970s and someone smuggled out classified Soviet Union information on possible misconduct within their own society and around the world?  Dare I say no one?  Might I ask the difference? 

While two wrongs don’t make a right, is there any truth or legitimacy in all of the secrets our government keeps?  Is this really democracy?  Are they really following the intent of the law or are they creating their own laws as a society ruled by men and not laws?  I doubt a single signer of the Constitution would come to the aid of the U.S. government in this issue were they alive.  I doubt that because in many ways our government appears very similar to that of England in 1776 – imperialistic, driven by a corrupt  and heavily indebted banking system, using intimidation and war around the world to maintain an empire, wielding and levying ungranted powers, driven by its own interest over that of its sovereign citizens, etc. 

That the accused has not been charged with anything, has not granted due process and is contained in an environment many consider to be torture, should be very disturbing to anyone who appreciates freedom and democracy because this constitutes neither.

Below is a timeless quote from a man who lived in another society which was ruled by men and not by laws.  While we aren’t to that point and may never get to that point, it’s worth noting what silence and acceptance of the state’s shenanigans are capable of creating. 

First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.

posted by TimingLogic at 9:48 AM

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Bank Of America In Massive Bid-Rigging Settlement

posted by TimingLogic at 9:54 PM

Japan’s Top Currency Official - Global Recession Lasting Until 2018

I don’t know why it is so hard for people to believe this crisis is not over.  For 90% of Americans, they know its not over. 

Sakakibara notes a fundamental problem is that government’s are implementing austerity rather than growth strategies.  And how often have we said austerity is for the corrupt and people who don’t understand economics.  Sakakibara is right.  And on that note, for those advocating a return to the gold standard, that would involve massive austerity and economic misery as far as the eye can see.   Of course, we have already said that.  Gold is a religious ideology and those who espouse returning to a gold standard don’t seem to understand the first thing about what money is.   Want a history lesson and a monetary lesson?  You’ll get one in January if I can find the time. 

Pesek goes on to question if this is 1937 all over again.  Well, not really.  We aren’t repeating history exactly because policies have changed.  But we are repeating history.   And there is some comparatives to 1937 but not many. 

There is a clearly pronounced decennial or ten year cycle.  I haven’t talked about it on here but that is simply because I don’t talk about a lot of things on here.  So with this in mind, let’s look at history from a perspective of years ending in 0-9 or the ten year cycle starting with year 1 and ending with year 10.  It’s more likely that the 2001 recession was similar to the 1921 recession.  It was brief and its significance was glossed over with monetary policy in both instances.  We then entered the roaring 20’s just like we entered the roaring 200o’s.  Consumption was the order of the day in both situations.  This while much of the population was losing ground in both cases.  Wealth concentration occurred in both cases because of corruption.  Wall Street was considered brilliant in both cases.  While in reality, they were sowing the seeds of massive fraud in both situations.  The housing bubble that peaked in 2006 is similar to the housing bubble that peaked in 1926.   So, where does that leave us?  We are most likely in 1930.  That is, we had the initial stock market collapse and a fast and hard stock market recovery.   In both situations, the corrupt status quo thought the crisis had passed.  That 1930 rally is simply being extended today through currency debasement around the globe.  Following the cycle, 2011 would therefore be the return of 1931.  1931 was the resumption of the global collapse and I expect 2011 will be the resumption of a full force collapse.  That collapse will most likely be concentrated outside of the United States. 

I have never posted this on here but have discussed this with many people offline.    It’s an early holiday gift.    Happy holidays.  :) 

posted by TimingLogic at 11:12 AM

Volume At Price For The SPYders

Let’s stick a post in here before we put up the 2010 financial reform post. 

We've said since November that I believe it's possible to see the market take a rapid dump down to the lows made over the summer.  Market behavior is very unnerving on some levels.  Not because the market is going up but because how it is doing it.   The use of derivatives and leverage is offsetting the lack of fundamental demand for stocks.  This is exactly what we have written would happen probably a dozen times since the 2009 bottom.  ie, That counterparties would be forced out of the market due to fundamentals and financial firms would be left batting shares back and forth between themselves using the same quantitative algorithms.  ie, That all major financial firms would be on the same side of the trade.  We see that in Apple, Netflix, Amazon and the parabolic move in many commodities over the last few months.  This leads to many intraday dynamics which I have never seen.  I believe many financial markets are a lot less stable than it seems and all we need is an unexpected input to send the markets downward. 

To believe Wall Street has learned anything after being bailed out is preposterous.  They blew up with world with Frankenstein finance once and came close another half dozen times over the years.   While I didn’t support any ridiculous views espoused by radical nutjobs that we should have let Wall Street collapse back in 2008, the reality is that the bailouts have allowed systemic incompetence to gain an even greater hand in how Wall Street operates.   And the lack of prosecution for systemic corruption and fraud on Wall Street means the same goons are relying on the same failed strategies that have blow up the financial world before.  As we wrote at the time of the crisis, we should have either dismantled the mega banks or nationalized them and broken them up.  Instead we now have an even bigger freak show we call Wall Street. 

It’s been about five years or so since we explained volume at price and I’m not going to rehash it.  If you are interested, you may search the blog as there should be a handful of posts on the topic. 

Volume often acts as a magnet for pricing action.  ie, As the air gets thinner at price extremes, prices tend to return to substantial liquidity levels.  This is easily explainable as we noted before.  

Below is volume at the specific price levels for the SPYders ETF for all of 2010.  We see where those levels are. 

2010-12-14_2210

posted by TimingLogic at 8:42 AM

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

A Secret Elite RULES (As In Kings) The Derivatives Market

My next post will tie directly into this one.  It is something I promised to put up months ago.  That is, a unique look at how fraudulent the 2010 financial reform bill actually is.

But this new article in the New York times is really no secret.  It never has been.  At least not on here.  I think we have discussed all of the major points in this article at least once over the years.  Anyone who seeks to understand this market knows that almost the entire multi-tens of trillions of dollars derivatives market is 90+% controlled by a half dozen firms.

Supposed financial reform, undertaken by a captured government, has actually made our financial system systemically worse and has literally created an even worse cabal of crooks able to manipulate our world.  It has solved nothing of value.  Nothing. 

I have written some very detailed articles on here about derivatives.  And we wrote a very extensive post on how lack of transparency and complexity in derivatives is necessary to perpetuate fraud and mint profits.  When there is equal price discovery and transparency, Wall Street’s derivatives con fails flat on its face.   Demand for most derivatives would evaporate with complete transparency in all financial markets.  It was the derivatives con which created the housing Ponzi scheme in the first place.   And all of those out of court settlements (kept out of court so Wall Street can keep society ‘dumbed down’ as to its con, so it can continue its Ponzi schemes) where lawsuits were brought to Wall Street for f*cking our school systems, our municipalities, our retirement funds, our companies and our society with these derivatives schemes would come to an end.  

And frankly, while we could get into a philosophical discussion, derivatives really serve little, if any, useful purpose.  In their current form where a handful of firms control the entire market, they serve one purpose – to create a system so structurally unsound that a small mistake by one firm could literally once again bring our financial system to its knees.  I have said before that we should ban all derivatives within our banking system.  Period.  Banks didn’t even know what a derivative was when our economy was the envy of the world.  Even today, there is not a CEO on Wall Street who understands these markets.  They are criminally-negligent for even participating in these markets when they are charged with protecting our savings.   And please no bullshit about how the world has changed.  It’s completely indefensible.  The world is going to change again.  In a way no Wall Street banker understands.  And that means their attempts at hedging couldm almost certainly will, compound future economic crises.

Wall Street creates the need for derivatives in many markets by manipulating those markets.  A perfect example is energy.  Wall Street is criminally manipulating the energy markets.  By doing so, they create an artificial demand for derivatives in the real world.  So, as an example, with so much petroleum volatility, which Wall Street traders crave and create, airlines must hedge their fuel consumption.  Ditto in the agricultural markets where the complex inputs of grains, fuel, land, fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides are used to produce an end product.   Wall Street trading in basic commodities distorts these markets and creates an artificial demand for hedging within the agricultural community.  I know people who have been farmers for forty years and never hedged anything.  Today they are speculating in the commodities markets both to make a profit and to hedge against input product volatility created by Wall Street crooks.   This extends to every commodities market including manufacturing.  It’s all a game of manipulation that will end very, very badly.

In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks.

The banks in this group .. have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.

Banks’ influence over this market, and over clearinghouses like the one this select group advises, has costly implications for businesses large and small, like Dan Singer’s home heating-oil company in Westchester County, north of New York City.

This is all nothing more than massive fraud perpetrated by monopoly status.  All because our government will not enforce anti-trust laws or frankly, any rule of law as it pertains to the crooks on Wall Street.   Our government cannot serve two masters.  It must either serve the American people or their own self-interested greed and power.  To date, they choose self-interested greed and power.

posted by TimingLogic at 9:39 AM

Young Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Jobs

Some who finally get it.  The American dream and democracy is not fulfilled by slaving away in a corner office pushing papger in a neofeudalistic dictatorial big brother multinational firm.  Companies did not make America great, people did.  And they didn’t make America great listening to corporate bureaucrats who generally understand little about anything other than how to cut costs and pay themselves large bonuses.   Large corporations in America have been a net destroyer of jobs for almost forty years.  Why are our economic policies catering to these firms?  (And they are.  Almost exclusively.)  Politicians don’t get big donations from startups.   How many times have all of the concepts in this paragraph come across this blog? 

With the right economic model, entrepreneurialism would create untold numbers of jobs.  But we are still under the jack boot of economic tyranny.  We are witnessing the end of big.  If the government won’t fix the problem, the market will.   

posted by TimingLogic at 8:51 AM

Day Trading Still Alive, Outsourced to China

posted by TimingLogic at 8:43 AM

Monday, December 13, 2010

“Gold Seems To Have Met A Perfect Bullish Storm”

I thought it was only appropriate to compare our last few gold post to very recent comments from Le Metropole Café – possibly the pre-eminent gold investment web site.   It appears they are wildly, and I do mean wildly, enthusiastic about gold right now.  And mind you, while I have said many times over the years that I do not like gold as an investment, I have also said I respect what the shiny metal’s action and have no problem trading it.  With that in mind, we have made more than one timely call on gold. 

Even if one is bullish on gold longer term, to be bullish right here seems bordering on insanity given recently developing dynamics around the world.  Personally, I tend to think Le Metropole’s comments right now are a perfect storm of ego-driven hubris without an understanding of the economic and financial dangers around gold rather than any insightful quantitative or qualitative analysis. 

posted by TimingLogic at 2:09 PM

Sunday, December 12, 2010

WikiLeaks Is The Enemy Of The State - "Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from Internet … their funds have been frozen … media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization. What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions," – Glenn Greenwald.

Actually, what is going on here is that the state is doing anything and everything to subvert the rule of law and democracy.  Wikileaks is simply a symptom of the greater problems created by the state.  We are literally in the middle of a war.  It is not a war of violence and guns.  It is a war of control waged on the human mind, a war  of control waged on human rights and a war of control waged in the economy for your economic freedoms.   You are losing but the tide is turning ….. in your mind.  That’s a very good thing.  And that is why Wikileaks is under attack.  It’s an attempt to maintain  control of your mind.

posted by TimingLogic at 7:55 PM

Friday, December 10, 2010

You, That’s Right, YOU, Are The Enemy Of The State And Society’s Last Best Chance At Restoring Liberty And Liberating Our Democratic Institutions From The Endless Profligacy Of The State

"Of the tyrant (the state), spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people and making himself necessary to them as their leader" --Aristotle, over 2000 years ago

I thought I would slap this up in honor of Janet Napolitano and the politics of fear being waged in her Wal-mart Big Brother video.  There is something in the subconscious mind which creates a paranoia when our fearless leaders are intimating we should be on the look out for the boogeymen.  Of course, the state is driven by paranoia and finds its purpose in tactics of fear as Aristotle told us thousands of years ago.  ie, Behavior of the state is timeless.   

I got the charts below from the Center for Systemic Peace. The research on their site was funded by the CIA if you can believe that. The CSP is associated with the Polity IV project that I peruse irregularly. One of the intents of these projects is to anticipate future political volatility. Although I find their methodology lacking as the world will witness over the next decade, there is some good raw historical data available.  Interesting stuff.

You can do your own diligence but it seems to me that the only real changes in the level of terrorism dynamics we have seen in the last few decades are in countries the United States is occupying.  And there is no evidence of the “fight them there or eventually fight them on in our homeland” proselytizing pushed by George Bush and many self-interested bureaucrats who rely on the state and its control for their livelihood.  

Something we have written in our many state-based posts is that first and foremost the state will seek to sustain itself.  ie, Bureaucracy finds solutions by creating even more bureaucracy.   We see President Obama, the consummate bureaucrat, is very good at this.  We have tens of thousands of pages of new government red tape that serve the state and the corporatocracy while destroying personal freedoms and economic vibrancy. 

This is all really quite simple.  When the Cold War ended, the military-industrial complex (the state and its corporate welfare recipients) needed to find a new enemy to survive and remain relevant.  Those enemies are now terrorism, other states and the American people.  The state propaganda surrounding this dynamic and the boogeyman they have created is deafening.   It’s much better than Stephen King’s incarnation with the same title. 

We have probably spent over $10 trillion dollars fighting an enemy that is generally of our own creation. Hence my use of the term boogeyman.  This boogeyman was created by America’s interventionist foreign policy and has been elevated by our mind’s fears.  Of course all stoked by the military-industrial complex seeking the enemy it needs to sustain itself and remain relevant or “in power”.  The reality is the terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan and Iraq really don’t exist on any increased level over that of two decades ago.   Our enemy is primarily a figment of the state’s imagination.   (In addition to the $10 trillion spent fighting this boogeyman, we have backstopped another $20 trillion on assets due to Wall Street corruption.  This cumulative amount of money could have bought every American household a home, paid for Social Security for the next two hundred years and provided a non-corrupt national health care system to every American for the next two hundred years.  We are not broke because social systems aren’t sustainable or because they are communist or other incessant stupidity furnished by ideological idiots, but instead because of massive fraud.  This massive spending driven by corruption creates enormous poverty by diverting society’s limited financial and economic resources from human and economic development to the pockets of the elitist class and the state.) 

The CIA sponsored research below shows no change in the scope or size of terrorism attacks around the globe except where manifested by American military and interventionist foreign policy.  It surely doesn’t support the level of histrionics and trillions of dollars of spending by the state, the military-industrial complex and its corporate welfare recipients. 

"As organization acquires power, it uses that power, not surprisingly, to serve the ends of those involved. These ends-job security, pay, promotion, prestige, company plane and private washroom, the charm of collectively exercised power-are all strongly served by the growth of the enterprise. (the state)  So growth enhances power over prices, costs, consumers, suppliers, the community (democracy) and the state and also rewards in a very personal way those who bring it about."  -John Kenneth Galbraith

As we wrote before, the mega banks are necessary for the state to sustain itself.   ie, The structure of our banking system serves the state and its search for greater control rather than democracy.  Were the state a person, we could classify it as a megalomaniacal sociopath.  The U.S. government cannot wage war on its boogeymen by having a public banking system or a community banking system whose goals would be human and economic development.  Who would be the outlet for all of that massive government debt used to fuel this corruption?  Remember, by law Wall Street dealers (too big to fail banks) are a guaranteed outlet to purchase government debt.   They are the financial tools used to wage interventionism and war, and they are more than happy to oblige as they mint billions doing it.  The state needs megabanks so it can borrow massive sums of money to wage its hegemony.  To perpetuate the state.   ie, As our government began crowding out individual rights and private enterprise thirty plus years ago, Wall Street grew larger and larger along with it as the government needed them to in order to wage its battles against boogeymen.  And in direct response, poverty rose linearly and sharply over that time frame.    

Are there people out there who want to kill Americans.  Sure there are.  There always have been and there always will be.  But a substantial reason why they want to kill Americans now is the self-fulfilling policy of belligerence perpetuated by United States’ preemptive and aggressive foreign policy and the rise of the police state at home. 

The state will never work its way out of existence on its own.  There are checks and balances in our society and the only check left is you.  The state will either collapse due to its illegitimacy, as all eventually do, or because you force peaceful change you desire onto the world around you.

I’m sure Janet Napolitano is a well-meaning truant officer.  So were the bureaucrats of the Soviet Union and countless other states.  But she’s a bureaucrat.  She bends to authority regardless of its legitimacy because free thought, liberty and social justice aren’t in a bureaucrat’s lexicon.  Bureaucrats speak the language of control.  And because this is how their mind is governed, this is where there obedience lies.  Or as we have cited many times, Thoreau wrote that politicians “rarely make any moral distinctions [and] are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God.”.   Tell me again Janet, how do you define suspicious?  What is normal behavior and who decides it?  Is anyone really normal?  This type of broad-based Orwellian public service announcement of reporting “suspicious behavior” invites fear, intimidation and abuse.  Who decides who is acting normal?  Because this is such a nebulous pronouncement,  I can see the Department of Homeland Security declaring it a success based on the number of calls received regardless of their legitimacy.   And if it is successful, it will seek to further the program or extend it to other corporations regardless of its accuracy or abuses of our liberties.  This is a state program of fear. 

We don’t need Americans spying on other Americans in the Wal-mart parking lot or in their neighborhood.  And we don’t need another bureaucratic program meant to expand the state’s authority to encourage intrusive attacks on our freedom and our right to feel safe from unwarranted intrusions of the state.  People are smart enough to call the authorities if something suspicious identifies itself without another bureaucratic program of fear sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. 

You are the enemy of the state.  Your personal liberties, freedoms, protected privacy rights and search for economic and social justice hinder the encroachment of the state.  If you demand your constitutional and economic rights, you thwart the state and restore the balance of democracy.   

What we do need is a return to democracy, to democratic government and a democratic economic model which solves our primary issues of human development and A More Perfect Union.  And I believe that means we need to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security and fire Janet Napolitano.    

HCTBSep2010

INTter06

INTdth06

posted by TimingLogic at 10:36 AM

Thursday, December 09, 2010

Big Brother Wal-Mart Joins Big Brother Homeland Security To Protect The People. George Orwell Would Be Proud.

According to the write up by the person who sent this to me, the Department of Homeland Security and Wal-Mart have announced a partnership to promote the recent "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign.

If feedback on Youtube is any type of indication of public support for this, 95% of votes find this message  negative and the sample size is reasonably large. 

Do something great this holiday season. Go home and spy on your neighbor.

By the way, I would like to report something suspicious re Janet Napolitano’s remarks.  It’s the Department of Homeland Security.  Who do I report this to?  Oh, yeah.  The American people.  Just kidding.  Happy Holidays Janet.

 

posted by TimingLogic at 2:39 PM

Mary Landrieu - Obama-McConnell Plan Is Almost Morally Corrupt. Almost?

Link here

and here.

President Obama is paving the path to be one of the worst Presidents in modern times.   There is a chance with two years left and his inability to acknowledge massive fraud and corruption subverting democracy that he could actually turn out to be worse than George Bush and Bill Clinton.   To label him a socialist, as many political idiots have, is ridiculous.  Socialism is defined as the public ownership of production.  President Obama and other politicians are contrarily endorsing the sale of publicly-owned resources to private interests.  And personally, for me, if there are two politicians whose actions I see are truly evil, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner fit the bill.  So why does a McConnell-sponsored bill not surprise me as morally corrupt?  This is what we get when the two party monopoly dominates politics that perpetuates corrupt party platforms driven by their hoards of dirty cash.  They force out honest candidates or marginalize them as crackpots as they have done thousands of times across the country.  As they did with Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul in the Presidential elections.  

"I represent a broad constituency of hard-working, poor families, many of whom are African American," Landrieu said. "The median net worth of African American families -- net worth, not income -- in this country today according to our Census is $5,000.

We are borrowing money from constituencies, and large segments of the population like this -- now I've got many non-African American families that are just as poor...$5,000 is the median net worth of African American families in America, and we're borrowing money from them -- African American and otherwise that might be making over $1,000,000, I think we need to go back to the drawing board.”

Now we can have a philosophical debate whether uber rich or underprivileged should pay greater taxes or the same taxes when democracy is actually at work.  Frankly, I don’t believe any taxes should exist on an individual’s private property.  Property as defined by the Constitution and its framers.  That includes my person as my property.   This allows the state to take or control or threaten my property for economic reasons.   That is comparative to something like a consumption tax where those threats don’t exist.  But to allow massive theft on a never before scale and then protect those who are the thieves from any form of financial accountability is an extension of existing corruption.   The uber rich have not only stolen our government and our society’s wealth, they have no financial accountability in endless profit-making wars carried on the backs of enlisted Americans, generally those without a voice in Washington.  

There is no valid argument that our anti-democratic economic policies have relied on anti-democratic wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the rich for decades.  Wealth creation in this country fizzled decades ago.  It’s all about legalized stealing now.  We now have the uber rich, corporations and foreign entities bilking society.  And now that the uber rich have stolen all of our society’s wealth through economic policy and outright bailouts, they are using it to bribe our government in an attempt to keep it.  And they don’t care if education, public safety or other programs benefiting those they have screwed is cut in the process.  Let them eat cake.  I remember another time when the uber rich made a similar proclamation.   

There is so much man-made suffering which need not be.  And at its core, it is all because of corruption.  Washington political parties and their goons have not earned the right to serve the great people of this country.   How can the richest country on earth have any segment of the population with a median net worth of $5,000 and have politicians trying to save or extend the system as it is?  How can we endorse trade deals that treat people like dogs rather than to spread human development?   Where is the dignity of a living wage either within the U.S. or with our corrupt trade agreements?  Where is the pride exhibited by industry in creating the wealthiest class of workers in the world as it once did?  Where is the nobility of lifting up impoverished countries through noble policies of moral clarity?  Where is the virtue of a just and democratic society?  Washington has ceded its moral authority.   The leaderless society continues.

posted by TimingLogic at 2:19 PM

Is The Grim Reaper Visiting The Bombay Sensex? Three Peaks And A Domed House Pattern Completed?

I just didn't pull a rabbit out of a hat here. I have my reasons for being terribly concerned.   Some of which we just aren’t going to go into on here.  But that this pattern appears to be manifesting itself at this point in time is of great concern.   

2010-12-09_1153

posted by TimingLogic at 12:06 PM

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

JP Morgan Chase Emerges As Massive Copper Buyer (Manipulator?)

Anyone who cites commodity prices as proof of inflation needs a basic lesson in economics.   We have beat the drum incessantly since starting this blog that commodity prices are not reflective of fundamental demand but instead by massive manipulation by financial firms.  That Wall Street has inserted itself in the commodity supply chain and is screwing Americans and other countries with high prices for industrial metals, agricultural commodities, energy products, etc.

We had an almost entirely hoodwinked society going so far as to tell us we are running out of copper when it was hovering around $4 a pound before the 2008 collapse.  And the cost of mining copper is literally 5 cents.  The high inefficiency in end market pricing is because Wall Street is manipulating commodities for their cut.   The entire commodities supercycle is a corrupt pump by Wall Street crooks.   They will be punished for their lies.  Mark my word.  We have been writing for years that a commodities bust will result from this endless fraud.

Our corrupt government has done absolutely nothing to fix any of this.   And because very few understand it, they fall prey to Wall Street’s Enron-style lies.  California electricity blackouts were a result of Enron manipulating demand under the exact same dynamic we see in the commodities markets.   Enron went so far as to kill little old grandmothers who could not afford electricity during heat waves.  And in taped conversations, they laughed about it.

Anyone who understands what happened at Enron, knows it was Wall Street that was the true force behind their scam.  And while many Wall Street firms settled with massive fines for their corrupt involvement with Enron, the scam was never dismantled.  It was just transferred to Wall Street when Enron went bust.

This is one of the most underreported scams on modern times.    What the hell is a bank doing in any of the commodities markets?  What privilege are these goons given that they are allowed to speculate endlessly with our savings while we are denied access to our own capital?

We need a public banking system that serves democracy and human development.  Period.   And people like Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, should be making a bureaucrat’s salary on a government wage scale.  Because that’s about where his competency lies.

Link here.
posted by TimingLogic at 2:15 PM