COOPER: Congressman Markey, on I think it was June 23, you wrote a letter to BP, one of the many letters you’ve — you’ve written to BP, that they haven’t really responded to.
This one, you were asking for detailed information about the wellbore, about the — what they knew about the seafloor, about the status of it. That information is obviously crucially important now. Have they — and, yesterday, you were saying, look, they haven’t responded. Have they responded at all over the last 24 hours?
MARKEY: They have not responded.
And, again, I wrote back there on June 23, so that we could publicly disclose what the integrity of the wellbore is, we could publicly disclose what the integrity of the geology around the wellbore, so that we could better understand. …
Can it withstand that extra pressure, as the oil is now backed up? Can the soil, can the rock, can the sediment around the well withstand the additional pressure?
And, so, all of this is key information, which is why I believe the federal government has been wise in ensuring that BP move much more slowly than they had intended on doing. BP really has wanted to shut down this well as quickly as possible, although their incompetence has made it impossible for them to achieve that goal.
But, recently, they have wanted to move more quickly, and the federal government, led by Admiral Allen, has forced them to slow down, so that we don’t take something and make the cure actually worse than the disease by having this pipe or the rock formation around this well actually now spring leaks and make the problem even worse than it is now.
Markey all but confirms that the government has knowledge of the condition of the wellbore, but is not permitted to release the information publicly.
Markey’s wrote the June 23 letter to pressure BP to publicly disclose the problems with the wellbore. This would have allowed the information to be released without Markey doing it directly.
However, the questions raised in his letter serves to inform the public about what Congress does know about the condition of the well, without directly stating the information as fact.
The Chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee Rep. Ed Markey is now questioning not only if oil and gas are seeping out of the damaged casing into the seabed and surrounding rock, but whether oil and gas may be rushing IN to the casing after BP drilled into oil formations above the target reservoir.
Are there significant deposits of oil and gas in formations above the target reservoir?
Please provide an estimate of the total amount of oil and gas that is contained in i) the Macondo well target formation and ii) each formation above the target formation that could leak hydrocarbons into the annulus as a result of poor cementing, damage caused by the initial explosion(s), or the failed Top Kill effort.
Questions on other potential hydrocarbon reservoirs in the well. …
Please provide documents related to the possibility that the initial drilling encountered leakage from other formations above the target reservoir…
A May 23, 2010 article… in the Orlando Sentinel stated that well records indicate that in late February, there was a loss in drilling mud pressure. According to the article, this could mean that the mud fractured layers of sand or shale in the formation and vanished. The article goes on to state that in early March, the pressure of the oil and gas encountered overwhelmed the pressure of the drilling mud. In mid-April, a loss of drilling mud was reportedly again experienced. Do any or all of these events indicate that oil and gas could be flowing from somewhere other than the target reservoir? If so, please explain fully, and if not, why not?
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter. Please provide your response no later than Friday July 2, 2010. If you have any questions or concerns, please have your staff contact Dr. Michal Freedhoff of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee staff at 202-225-2836.
Sincerely,
Edward J. Markey Chairman Energy and Environment Subcommittee
cc: Honorable Henry Waxman, Chairman Honorable Joe Barton, Ranking Member Honorable Fred Upton, Ranking Member
Chairman Asks About Well Integrity, Design of Relief Wells, Timeframe, Sea Floor Leaks
Here's how Richard Davis of Consumer Metrics sees the current economy. Bar none, his is the best real time macro-economic tracking data. He emails:
On July 6th we reported that the nearly relentless decline in our 'Daily Growth Index' had leveled off, but cautioned that the index should be viewed from a longer perspective. Since then the decline has resumed:
(Click on chart for fuller resolution)
When the most recent period of contraction in our 'Daily Growth Index' (January 15, 2010 to date) is charted along with the similar 'Daily Growth Index' contraction events from 2006 and 2008 (with the first day of each contraction aligned on the left-hand axis) the relative severity of each contraction can be visualized.
(Click on chart for fuller resolution)
One measure of the true severity of an economic slowdown is the 'area under the curve' (or 'above' the curve in this case) swept out by the 'Daily Growth Index' over time. This area is just the average magnitude of the decline times the duration of the contraction event. During the 2006 slowdown this area was about 136 percentage-days of contraction, while the 2008 event was much more severe at 793 percentage-days. The 2010 event has now reached 288 percentage-days, over twice the severity of 2006 and well over a third of 2008 'Great Recession' -- and it is still growing.
The key point to notice in the above chart is that if the current 2010 curve continues its current course, in about 20 days the 2010 slowdown will be more severe on a day-to-day basis than the 2008 'Great Recession' was at the same point in its respective evolution. Unless the economy begins to pick up quickly, a double dip is likely -- with the second round milder but lingering longer than the first.
Congress should let the George W. Bush-era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 expire to help trim the mushrooming budget deficit, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says.
Tax rates will automatically revert to pre-2001 levels, unless Congress changes the law by year's end. President Bush proposed the tax reductions to pull the economy out of its slump at the time.
And Greenspan’s support helped convince Congress to approve them.
However, Greenspan now feels differently.
“They should follow the law and let them lapse,” Greenspan told Bloomberg Television.
The former U.S. central bank chairman told Bloomberg that the economy is in “a temporary slump” and would emerge with a “sluggish” 3 percent growth rate in the second half of the year.
Greenspan said that allowing the cuts to lapse "probably will" slow growth, but that the risk posed by doing nothing about the deficit is greater.
The budget deficit totaled a record $1.4 trillion last year, or about 10 percent of GDP. And the Obama administration forecasts an increase to $1.6 trillion this year.
Greenspan obviously believes spending cuts by themselves won’t be enough to get the deficit under control.
Many other experts agree with him.
“The political question is coming down to: What are the alternatives to solve this problem?” Clint Stretch, director of legislative affairs at Deloitte & Touche, tells Barron’s.
“You can’t solve the deficit problem with spending cuts alone. It’s inevitable that we’re going to have to raise taxes to do so.”
Congress is wrangling over what to do about taxes. If it does nothing, the top rate will increase to 39.6 percent next year from 35 percent currently.
President Barack Obama has proposed increasing rates for people who earn at least $200,000 a year and leaving rates unchanged for less wealthy taxpayers. Republicans want to leave rates unchanged for everyone.
Greenspan goes even further than Obama. He says the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire for middle-class as well as high-income taxpayers.
While ending the tax cuts would probably hamper economic growth, reining in the budget deficit is more important in the long run, Greenspan says.
“Unless we start to come to grips with this long-term outlook, we are going to have major problems,” he said.
“I think we misunderstand the momentum of this deficit going forward.”
Democrats may be coming around to Greenspan’s view. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Md., said last month that the exploding government debt burden may make a permanent extension of the middle-class tax cuts unfeasible.
It would be difficult for members of Congress — Democrats and Republicans — to face voters in November having approved a tax increase. Of course, if they do nothing, they will in effect have implemented higher taxes.
The result may be a one-year extension of the entire tax-cut package, says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
“The simplest solution this year would be to say ‘we have a struggling economy; we don’t want to raise taxes at all,’” he told Bloomberg.
“It’s a compromise that would get things past the end of this year.”
In the wake of the latest batch of “double-dip” chatter, the market’s attention is shifting back to the Federal Reserve. Investors are asking a simple question:
“What, if anything, will the Fed do if the economy craps out again?”
Before I give my answer to that question, I’m inclined to ask a different one:
“Who cares?”
These guys have already done just about everything they can … pulled every trick out of their hats … and bailed out and backstopped virtually the entire financial system!
While all of that free money helped boost ASSET prices, it hasn’t done a heck of a lot for the “real” economy. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. Housing continues to slump. Investment is anemic and confidence is lacking.
In other words, the Fed is pushing on a string — and more pushing isn’t going to do a darn thing for those of us living in the real world! But since the market is focusing on the Fed again, let me address the question at hand …
Is QE2 Coming?
The latest economic data clearly suggests that my double-dip scenario is becoming much more likely.
Just this week, for instance, we learned that retail sales dropped 0.5 percent in June after falling 1.1 percent in May. That was worse than economists expected and the first back-to-back decline since early 2009.
What about housing?
Well, if you believe purchase mortgage applications are a good leading indicator of demand — and I do — then you should be worried. A Mortgage Bankers Association index that tracks loan activity just fell to 163.30. That’s the lowest level going all the way back to December 1996!
Finally, as Claus noted on Wednesday, a key leading index is pointing decisively lower. The inescapable conclusion? Despite the happy talk on Wall Street and the recent market rally, the economy appears to be rolling over.
The Fed has cut interest rates to the bone, and there’s not much chance they’ll go up in the foreseeable future.
The last time the economy fell into the drink, the Fed reacted by slashing interest rates to a range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent. The federal funds rate has remained there ever since, and there’s no indication it’ll rise anytime soon.
But the Fed did much more than lower the funds rate …
It also embarked on a policy of “Quantitative Easing” (QE). That’s a fancy way of saying it printed money out of thin air and bought more than a trillion dollars of securities: Mortgage-backed bonds, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt, long-term Treasuries, and so forth.
The idea was to lower mortgage rates and bond yields, thereby spurring home purchases, refinances, and corporate investment.
Did it work?
Well, mortgage rates definitely tanked. At around 4.5 percent, in fact, 30-year fixed mortgages are the cheapest they’ve been in the last century! But as I noted above, housing activity is now plumbing depths we haven’t seen since Bill Clinton’s first term in office. Bond yields did drop initially, but not much. And they subsequently rose again.
Bottom line: I’d argue the Fed didn’t accomplish much. Even some Fed officials doubt the rampant money printing and QE policy worked all that well, according to The Wall Street Journal.
That hasn’t stopped some of the Keynesian acolytes from begging for even more free money from Helicopter Ben Bernanke though. Take New York Times columnist Paul Krugman …
He lambasted the “Feckless Fed” this week, begging it to do “all it can to stop it” — the “it” being deflation. Buy government bonds? Buy private bonds? Pledge to keep short-term rates low, essentially, forever? Krugman is all for it!
So far, the Fed itself appears split. The Journal this week puts Fed governor Kevin Warsh, Richmond Fed president Jeffrey Lacker, and Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig in the “No more funny money” camp.
But Boston Fed president Eric Rosengren and New York Fed president Bill Dudley appear more open to the idea. Bernanke is reportedly somewhere in the middle, preferring to just wait, watch, and let the market sort itself out.
If So, Should We Care?
But again, my answer is that whether the Fed goes hog wild printing money or not, it won’t matter much to the real economy. It’ll probably boost gold prices. It’ll likely hammer the dollar. And it could temporarily boost stocks, even in the face of lousy fundamentals.
No matter what the Fed does right now, it won’t help the “real” economy.
But all the kings horses, all the kings men, and even a further ballooning of the Fed’s balance sheet — currently around $2.3 trillion vs. $900 billion before the credit crisis burst onto the scene — won’t matter to most Americans.
Private companies aren’t firing workers and hoarding cash because interest rates are too high. They’re doing so because there’s too much factory and labor capacity.
Consumers aren’t cutting back on spending because loans are too expensive. They’re doing so because they just went on the wildest debt-fueled spending binge in U.S. history, and they’re trying to repair their balance sheets.
Look, we’ve had twin bubbles in stocks and housing over the past decade and a half. They both popped. The fallout will be with us for a long, long time.
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if a long Japan-like period of economic stagnation lies ahead. In fact, I’d invest accordingly — by paring back stock positions into rallies, and using inverse ETFs and put options to target downside profits.
And when the Fed chatter reaches a fever pitch, I have some advice: Turn off the TV and go play with your kids or grandkids. It just doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.
The Obama-Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, a miserable excuse for real Wall Street reform, is now about to gain final approval in the Senate. This wretched bill is now supported by the New England liberal (meaning Wall Street) Republican clique including Olympia Snow, Susan Collins, and Scott Brown, who are joined by the notoriously corrupt reactionary Democrat, Ben Nelson of Nebraska. This bill will create a multitude of new regulations and a number of large new bureaucracies, but it is utterly devoid of any bright-line prohibitions against the causes of the financial panic which struck the United States in 2008, and which continues to the present day in the form of a world economic depression.
The cause of the 2008 banking panic was that zombie banks and hedge fund hyenas were speculating with toxic and highly leveraged derivatives. The new bill does virtually nothing to attack the causes of this ongoing financial disintegration. It is a total defeat for the interests of the American people, and an historic victory for the Wall Street financier oligarchy which owns both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Stockbrokers and investment bankers have battled mightily to avoid any legal compulsion to act in the best interests of their clients, who are often the retail investors which both parties claim to care so much about. The new bill will not prevent unscrupulous used-car dealers from ripping off their customers through inflated financing costs. There is nothing in the bill to stop the plague of foreclosures, which last year turned almost 4 million American families into displaced persons on the home front. There is no ban on the disastrous use of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), the financial equivalent of time bombs, which are ruining the lives of so many millions of Americans. There is no cap on leverage banks can use in financial transactions. Despite widespread complaining about the Federal Reserve, this bill gives the Fed more regulatory power rather than less. It represents the complete triumph of the Wall Street derivatives lobby, so much so that even hardened cynics are astounded by the impudence and insolence of Obama and both parties in the Congress.
The graveyard of Hope and Change
Senator Dorgan proposed an amendment to abolish the concept of banks that were too big to fail. His amendment was rejected. Senator Kaufman tried to limit the size of banks, but his amendment was deleted. Senator Whitehouse tried to limit interest rates on credit cards and predatory payday loans, or at least to allow states to regain their regulatory role in this area, but he was defeated. Granted, many of these amendments were mere public relations exercises that were always virtually doomed to failure.
Senators McCain and Cantwell tried to restore the firewall, contained in the landmark Glass-Steagall Act of 1933-1999, which rigorously separated commercial banks with FDIC insured deposits on the one hand from investment banking and stock-jobbing on the other. Glass-Steagall was one of the signature legislative achievements of the New Deal, and there are few better illustrations of the deep hostility of the modern Democratic Party and of Obama in particular to the heritage of Franklin D. Roosevelt than the stubborn refusal of the degenerate Democrats of today to force through the necessary restoration of the Glass-Steagall protections – even in the wake of a breakdown crisis of the entire Anglo-American banking system.
Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who is fighting for her own political survival because of her record of subservience to Wall Street, tried to redeem herself with paragraph 716 of title VII of the bill, an attempt to ban trading in credit default swaps (derivatives) by FDIC banks. Notice that by this point there was no effort whatsoever to prevent these banks from dealing in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which were the toxic derivatives which destroyed Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Citibank. Nor was there any effort to curb the use of structured investment vehicles (SIVs), toxic instruments which are often used as the final packaging of a mass of CDOs and other kited derivatives. Still, since credit default swaps had been the main culprits in the bankruptcy of AIG, costing the American taxpayer $182 billion and counting, it would have been a meritorious project to keep commercial banks away from these diabolical instruments.
But it was not to be. In a dirty deal negotiated far away from the C-SPAN cameras, Dodd, Frank, and Rahm Emanuel completely gutted any effort to get commercial banks out of the business of placing side bets using credit default swaps. At a certain point in the televised reconciliation hearings, Congressman Peterson of Minnesota, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, came forward with a compromise which made paragraph 716 into a macabre joke. The infamous Peterson demanded that banks be allowed to trade credit default swaps in the form of foreign exchange swaps ( thought to be the largest category of swaps), interest-rate swaps, and credit derivatives – provided that the underlying securities were investment-grade. Since these categories represent the vast majority of swaps, and since it is not hard to procure an investment grade rating on junk paper from corrupt agencies like Standard & Poor’s, Fitch, and Moody’s, this alleged compromise meant that nothing was left of Senator Lincoln’s attempt. Treasury Secretary Tiny Tim Geithner had vehemently proclaimed the irreducible hostility of the Obama regime to any interference with this type of derivative. Interestingly, the German government had already explicitly banned naked credit default swaps issued as bets on government securities denominated in euros.
Since the restoration of the real Glass-Steagall firewall had been defeated early in the process, Senator Cantwell attempted to provide a weak face-saving substitute in the form of the so-called Volcker rule, which posited that commercial banks were not allowed to engage in speculation and other proprietary trading for their own account. This Volcker rule was already vitiated by the obvious gray area between speculation and so-called market-making, which entities like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were sure to exploit to circumvent any new legislation. However, zombie banks like State Street Bank and Bank of New York-Mellon (the latter the back-office of the TARP program. i.e. the October 2008 Wall Street bailout) found even the weak Volcker rule to be too onerous.
Demagogue Scott Brown Drives His Truck Through the Volcker Rule
Senator Scott Brown of Massachusetts won election last January by duping gullible voters with a cultural populist prop in the form of a pickup truck. At this point in the haggling, Senator Brown documented his subservience to Wall Street by driving his truck through what remained of the Volcker role. He forced through a provision allowing commercial banks to use 3% of their capital for speculation through hedge funds. It might seem that 3% is a minute fraction of a bank’s Tier I capital, and that Brown’s amendment might not be so dangerous after all. But this is not the case.
If you buy stocks and their price falls to zero, you can lose 100% of your investment, but no more. But when you are dealing with derivatives, your losses can be geometrically pyramided into interplanetary space. This proposition is not a matter of theory, but has been documented through a decade and a half of bankruptcies by hedge funds which had been speculating with derivatives, all the way back to Long-Term Capital Management of Connecticut in 1998.
Cantwell Recants
In the case of two Bear Stearns hedge funds which imploded in 2007-8, losses of about 50 times the original capital were attained. Under Scott Brown’s loophole, losses of 50:1 would already be enough to bankrupt the bank. But the 2008 crisis offers cases in which derivatives losses might attain or exceed 100:1 on the capital being wagered. These cases occur when debt instruments are wrapped into a mortgage-backed security or other asset-backed security. These latter are then included in a collateralized debt obligation, which together with other collateralized debt obligations can be made into a super CDO or CDO². Credit default swaps can be attached to these super CDOs. A number of super CDOs thus equipped can then be wrapped up in a structured investment vehicle (SIV). At every level of this cancerous mass of kited derivatives, leverage comes into play geometrically. The investment of 3% of capital in such a poisonous concoction can easily bankrupt any financial institution many times over. This phenomenon is one of the basic reasons why losses were so great in 2008, despite the fact that subprime mortgages are a relatively marginal area of the financial world. The losses became so monstrous because derivatives are the most effective tools yet devised for magnifying and multiplying financial destruction. As for Senator Cantwell, she capitulated and announced that she would support the resulting phony bill anyway.
Perhaps the members of the Massachusetts Tea Party would like now to contemplate their own roles as dupes and useful idiots for the Mitt Romney faction of Wall Street asset strippers and hedge fund hyenas, who are the people who put Scott Brown into office. From now on, Brown should be referred to on Capitol Hill as the senator from Bank of New York-Mellon, since he has no regard for the welfare of the people of Massachusetts.
But even this 3% loop hole, big enough to drive a truck through, was still too restrictive for Wall Street. The army of Gucci-clad lobbyists decided that even these nominal restrictions had to be postponed for more than a decade, quite possibly in the hopes that they may be overturned by some future reactionary majority likely to emerge amid the shipwreck of the feckless and treacherous Obama regime.
Plenty of Time for More Financial Catastrophes Before 2022
At the time of the reconciliation hearings, the remaining Volcker rule provisions were apparently supposed to take effect after seven years, allegedly to give the swaps-jobbers time to unwind their positions. But after the C-SPAN televised reconciliation proceedings were over, dark forces loyal to Wall Street revisited the conference report and introduced even longer delays in implementing even the meager restraints on credit derivatives. This crime appears to have occurred on June 28-29. On the Bloomberg Business Week website we read a report dated June 29:
Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup Inc. are among U.S. banks that may have as long as a dozen years to cut stakes in in-house hedge funds and private- equity units under a regulatory revamp agreed to last week. Rules curbing banks’ investments in their own funds would take effect 15 months to two years after a law is passed, according to the bill. Banks would have two years to comply, with the potential for three one-year extensions after that. They could seek another five years for ‘illiquid’ funds such as private equity or real estate, said Lawrence Kaplan, an attorney at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP in Washington. Giving banks until 2022 to fully implement the so-called Volcker rule is an accommodation for Wall Street in what President Barack Obama called the toughest financial reforms since the 1930s…. Partly as a result of last-minute changes to the wording of the bill, analysts, lawyers and congressional staffers say it’s unclear whether the extension period for illiquid funds would run concurrently with the other transition periods. That could mandate full compliance in less than 12 years. 1
The London Guardian also detailed the ingenious dilatory tricks for stalling, dodging, and postponing which the Wall Street lobbyists had built into the bill:
Language in the act …allows for a six-month study and a further nine months of rule-making. The measure is supposed to become effective 12 months after the final rule is laid, then banks have two years to conform. But if they need to, they can apply for a three-year extension. On top of that, a five-year moratorium is available for ‘illiquid’ funds that are hard to unwind. 2
The Revenge of The SIVs
Encoded in the 12-year delay are most emphatically those structured investment vehicles which cause so much damage in the second half of 2008. As Business Week pointed out:
The Volcker rule forbids banks from stepping in with capital infusions or other forms of support when their own funds fail. In December 2007, Citigroup agreed to assume $59 billion of assets bought by ‘structured investment vehicles’ sponsored by the bank. During the following two years, Citigroup lost more than $3 billion on the SIVs, which were a kind of hedge fund that invested in mortgage bonds, credit-card securities and other assets that soured amid the financial crisis. 3
No account of these tragic events would be complete without some attention to the systematic betrayal of the national interest by the reactionary Republicans. The Republicans are in practice more fanatically committed to derivatives than even the Democrats, and they wear their love of derivatives on their sleeves. At one point in the reconciliation process, Senator Shelby of Alabama proposed an amendment which would have removed any and all destructions on the use of derivatives by anyone whatsoever, period. The Republican method is to pretend that derivatives are used exclusively for the traditional hedging which has been carried out from time immemorial by the users of certain commodities, specifically to protect themselves from price fluctuations during the time these raw materials are being turned into finished commodities. The GOP simply ignores that 99% plus of the notional value of today’s $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble has nothing to do with the end users of any commodities. If the Republicans were acting in good faith, it would be easy to craft a narrowly defined exemption for the end-users of raw materials and other commodities, but this is not their real purpose. The GOP serves the derivatives-mongers and the swap-jobbers cynically and blatantly, while the Democrats do this under a veil of deception and anti-Wall Street rhetoric.
As Senator Harkin pointed out, Shelby was really arguing that a hedge fund of the first magnitude was really a mom-and-pop Main Street business. Shelby’s goal of opening the barn door wide to any derivatives to be issued by anybody at any time was not successful, but the Peterson amendment and similar Democratic betrayals substantially accomplished the same goals under a cloak of deception. Intervening along the same lines in defense of Wall Street come out hedge funds, and derivatives were hardened reactionary Republicans like Senators Corker, Gregg, and Chambliss. Caught between these Republicans and their own venal Dodd-Frank leadership, the small positive initiatives of figures like Blanche Lincoln, Cantwell, Harkin, and Kanjorski were surrounded and crushed.
The last Democrat in the Senate: Feingold
The one principled no vote of a Democratic senator is now likely to come from Feingold of Wisconsin, who is fighting for political survival against a reactionary Republican opponent. Feingold says that his litmus test for the bill is simply the question of whether this measure can stop the next financial meltdown. Since the answer is so obviously no, and since the fingerprints of Wall Street are all over the bill, he promises to oppose it. Feingold has voted in the past against the Iraq war powers resolution of 2002, against the Patriot Act of 2001, and against the Wall Street bailout of October 2008. He points with pride to his opposition to the Interstate Banking Act of 1994, which would have prevented the emergence of “too big to fail” by maintaining the sensible New Deal ban on commercial banks operating in more than one state. He also voted against the catastrophic Graham-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which opened the door to the derivatives bubble by completely deregulating these toxic instruments.
The utter failure of Wall Street reform means that the door is now wide open for the second wave of the current world economic depression to continue, as the world descends still further into the financial maelstrom. As for the Obama regime, they are preparing an austerity program of unprecedented savagery which they intend to impose on the American people with the help of large numbers of defeated Congressmen during the lame duck session of November-December of this year. You were warned: Obama is a Wall Street puppet, and the events of this year are a first installment of the tragic consequences of such an administration.
" Violence-plagued Chicago's ban on handguns and automatic weapons was unique in its strictness -- only the District of Columbia had ever attempted to legislate an outright ban on handguns, and that was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2008. But many states, such as New York, have extremely strict permit laws pertaining to purchasing and carrying firearms." ------ Note: And back in the late 80's when I lived in Washington, D.C. they were the murder capital of the world. Several years in a row - with the toughest gun laws. They blamed all their problems on Virginia. There is one place where prohibition works to control human behaviour - fantasyland.
I'm glad the public is armed because that will keep those intent on tyranny thinking. Recent history proves that even the American military with all their money and highly priced high-tech stuff fails when facing good old fashioned partisans.
I don't want everybody packing heat - but the recent actions of my government make me prefer a population armed to the teeth over a government armed to the teeth with a disarmed population.
One other thing - the cops are NOT protecting us. They have become an industry attached to the private prison industry, much of the "drug war" law industry, and the tyranny (war on horror/terror) industry. They only show up later to pick up the bodies and find somebody to blame.
Sorry if I'm so down on police - but they are no longer what they were when I was growing up. I new Mr. B. - the cop who lived in my neighborhood. He was a likable guy - you could talk to him. He was my neighbor. He did NOT wear black ninja outfits with gas masks and carry a machine gun.
The money is drying up - and the public is waking up. Nobody wants a police state - and these gun sales tell me nobody is going to tolerate one either. It also demonstrates that the public IS willing to take responsibility for their own protection. A much cheaper alternative to "safety" than hired thugs with assault weapons and Tasers.
Somehow I think the more guns out there - the LESS likely it will be that there will be a violent revolution. We'll see.
Consider this recent waste of money - pay special attention to the assortment of agencies, Police Departments and pseudo-soldiers involved in a false alarm:
Where's the bill for the waste above?
Here's another you may remember - where more high-tech goodies, at taxpayer expense are tested with our "public servants" hiding behind half-opened tinted cruiser windows. Obviously they forgot who they are supposed to work for...
Take a look at this excellent article - where we find that more guns means less crime. This comes from the FBI's own stats.
" The early 2009 data suggests the crime-dropping trend of 2008 is not just continuing but accelerating. In 2008, the same data showed a nearly 4 percent drop in murder and manslaughter, and an overall drop in violent crime of 1.9 percent from 2007 to 2008.—Associated Press"
Rabbit Conclusion:
The nanny state doesn't work. We are on our own here in America - nobody is coming to save us. The public seems OK with that. If only our government would stick to their real business - the business of protecting our liberty. They can't lead, we won't follow - perhaps they should just get out of our way.
We have never faced anything like what we are facing today. Most of us have planned our lives in terms of a world that is quickly disappearing and we have not set new sails based on the prevailing winds that will blow across our future bows. What will surprise most people is the fact that our true enemies are not terrorists in far away countries but psychopaths that walk among us and populate corporate boardrooms, banks and government chambers.
We have not learned what to do about the world's psychopaths so we will see our civilization ripped asunder. Psychopaths and sociopaths have little choice but to hurt others as well as the environment because it is in their very nature to do so. These vicious individuals and the institutions they manage are at war with the peoples of the world and there is little defense against them. The very nature of our civilization encourages these people to seek the pinnacles of power and they certainly found just that inside the oil companies.
They aren't that rare. In fact millions of people are 'psychopathic enough' to destroy other people's lives.
The concept of "corporate psychopaths" is an emerging realization and has been described by Dr. Robert Hare who is a world-renowned psychiatrist and professor at the University of British Columbia. The 2008 Australian documentary, I, Psychopath, points out that the vast majority of psychopaths are not crazed axe murderers: "Most of them function incognito in high-powered professions, all the way to the very top." These are people who have no conscience. They are described as being manipulative, charming, glib, deceptive, parasitic, irresponsible, selfish, callous, promiscuous, impulsive, antisocial, and aggressive. Their main defect - what psychologists call "severe emotional detachment" or a total lack of empathy and remorse - is concealed and harder to describe than the symptoms of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder."
There is an enemy that lurks, a dangerous group of people that want to do harm to the American people.
George Bush
Bush got this one right. Many people are struggling to understand and explain what is really happening in the Gulf of Mexico, who is really responsible for the explosion, and how the devastation is serving certain special interests among the elites of this world. We can assume that the most dangerous people on the planet - that have mixed their genetic deposition with greed and power - have anti-life agendas when it comes to us and pro-life ones for themselves.
Captain Joyce Riley stood before Louisiana government officials and told them the only acts of terrorism ever conducted on American soil have been perpetrated by our own government.
Dr. Robert Hare says that, "Psychopaths see nothing wrong with themselves, experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern. They perceive themselves as superior beings in a hostile, dog-eat-dog world in which others are competitors for power and resources."
Today there can be no possible doubt that evil exists and that there are people who are capable of extremely destructive behavior. Any lingering doubts on this score will be swept away by an evening spent in front of the television.
Alice Miller
It is the choice of our civilization to favor the bad over the good and this is telling in corporate politics. "Traits like being a good listener, a good team builder, an enthusiastic colleague, a great communicator do not seem to be very important when it comes to leading successful companies. In other words, warm, flexible, team-oriented and empathetic people are less likely to thrive as C.E.O.s. Organized, dogged, anal-retentive and slightly boring people are more likely to thrive," writes David Brooks for the New York Times. What Brooks is saying is that we have created the conditions for the most ruthless humans to populate the top strata of civilization.
Because psychopaths can't feel emotions such as fear, they are well suited to executive decision-making. They can eliminate emotion from weighing the upside and downside of actions; there will be no sleepless nights for them because they have closed a plant and put thousands out of work.
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Psychopaths, even those who are psychopathic killers, however, are not mad, according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards. Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings. We really have no idea how cold hearted even the medical profession is and how pediatricians insist on injecting more and more poisons into their young patients.
The medical response to the Gulf disaster is shameful, to say the least, for they are leaving men, women and children throughout the Gulf region vulnerable to severe contamination. They are not telling them anything about basic ways of treating airborne poisons. Several institutions are standing naked in front of the world during this disaster. In Russia they tried to help the people from the radiation and even used spirulina and chlorella but for some ungodly reason there seems to be little to none of that in the States.
Butoxyethanol is a major component (30-60% by weight) of Corexit 9527, an oil spill dispersant product. In the United States, the primary manufacturers are Eastman Chemical, Dow Chemical and Equistar. Corexit 9527 is being used in conjunction with Corexit 9500 in the oil spill disaster.
Psychopaths often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets - and they do not always ply their trade by killing. Most people are both repelled and intrigued by the images of cold-blooded, conscienceless murderers that increasingly populate our movies, television programs, and newspaper headlines. But what we do not see is how these people and companies thrive by creating chemicals, foods, and many products, drugs, and dental products that poison and kill people without a trace back to the source, which are the boardrooms of these companies who make these products in the first place.
Psychopaths are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others. They know their poisons are going to hurt us and our children but they just go ahead and enjoy their lives at our expense. God must see a reason for their existence. Could it be that they are here to teach us about the true nature of evil? Or the true nature of ourselves?
It is likely that at some time in your life you will come into painful contact with a psychopath. For your own physical, psychological, and financial wellbeing, it is crucial that you know how to identify the psychopath, how to protect yourself and how to minimize the harm done to you.
Dr. Robert Hare
Next time you see a child dying of leukemia (chemical poisoning) think about these psychopaths in their boardrooms who are causing a health disaster of truly sickening proportions. Reports of oil toxicity in Texas know no end and yes, go ahead and keep eating the beef from that polluted state. It's like playing Russian roulette; you never know when you are eating a steak grown right from the side of an oil pit.
There is so much wrong with our modern civilization it will be a miracle if we can ever make it right. We have accepted the madness of modern day life mostly because we have been addicted to promises and dreams of riches and comfort. Also because we are afraid to lose what it is we have. But what is it modern man has that is worth so much? Have our decades of wealth and comfort been worth so much that we have willingly sacrificed the future of our children and the carrying capacity of the planet?
Psychopaths are simply people without hearts. Sure they have pumps beating in their chests but the heart of man goes much deeper than a muscle. It is my opinion that there is just too little heart in this world, too little love. We are facing a doubtful future because we have not learned the lessons of love. Certainly the captains of civilization are not loving nor do they like to listen to anything that conflicts with their agenda.
The next effort at building a civilization will have to be fundamentally different. It will need to be built on love of our fellow human beings and that is not about to happen as long as those in power remain so. It's the elites that we have to be most careful about for they have sociopathic goals and have no compunction against using psychopathic means. They certainly have their hands on the power strings that control contemporary civilization so their lack of heart is crushing.
