The site will remain "up" for anyone who wants to read my old posts or for anyone who wants to use my links, materials, etc.
God speed to all!!
Sincerely,
Dan Weintraub
Comments on the Economy, Politics, and the World
"...I said it on our 8 o’clock show on Thursday and Friday and now I’ll put it in writing: This horrible Great Recession is over, right here and right now. A spate of economic metrics supports this daunting prediction. We'll update this information and topspin it on CNBC Reports tonight at 8 p.m. I'll get to those numbers in a moment. The more important factor, though, is how we FEEL. I've said it before, let's put it on T-shirts: Capitalism is optimism monetized. As I put it in my "Parting Shot" on CNBC Reports on Friday night, hope is the magical elixir of capitalism..." (CNBC---some guy named Kneale)
Cool. I'm psyched. Do you think I can go to the store and buy some food for my family and pay for it with hope? Yes? Sweet!


WASHINGTON – The number of people filing new jobless claims jumped unexpectedly last week, and the total unemployment benefit rolls rose to more than 6.7 million. The Labor Department data released Thursday show jobs remain scarce even as the economy shows some signs of recovering from the longest recession since World War II. The department said initial claims for jobless benefits rose last week by 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 627,000. Economists expected a drop to 600,000, according to Thomson Reuters. Several states reported more claims than expected from teachers, cafeteria workers and other school employees, a department analyst said. (Yahoo!)
I wrote this on FEBRUARY 7th, 2009: "...We’ll begin with unemployment. At 15% (U6) give or take, the actual number of U6 unemployed is in the neighborhood of 22.5 million people. These numbers are growing by roughly 500,000 per month, or approximately 2.2%/month. Now, it’s important to also consider the following: layoffs in public education cannot begin until June of this year, when contracts expire. So as the figures above demonstrate, with roughly 6.8 million teachers in the country, the U6 numbers will see a pretty dramatic jump for June as schools cut about 150,000 teachers, or 2.2% (reflective of the general 2.2% losses per month in the other sectors) of the teaching force. (Again, a conservative estimate. Why? Because many school systems are going to reduce FTE's, full time equivalent hours, and as such tens of thousands of teachers are going to become---against their will---part time employees.) And so U6 unemployment numbers, which currently stand somewhere in the neighborhood of 15%, and which are increasing by an average of just over 2% monthly, will experience an addition bump from 2.2% to just shy of 3%, as unemployment numbers for the month of June jump from roughly 500,000 to 650,000..."
It's only "unexpected" because the government and the media are replete with people who are run-of-the-mill, everyday LIARS. That is the truth.
WASHINGTON – With North Korea reportedly getting ready for a long-range missile test, President Barack Obama says the U.S. is prepared for any threat the secretive and unpredictable regime might pose. Japanese media have reported Pyongyang appears to be preparing for a long-range test around July 4 and Defense Secretary Robert Gateshas ordered additional protections for Hawaii in case a missile is launched over the Pacific Ocean. "This administration — and our military is fully prepared for any contingencies," Obama said during an interview with CBS News' Harry Smith. The interview was taped Friday and broadcast Monday on "The Early Show." "I don't want to speculate on hypotheticals," Obama said. "But I want ... to give assurances to the American people that the t's are crossed and the i's are dotted in terms of what might happen. "What we're not going to do is to reward belligerence and provocation in the way that's been done in the past," he said....A senior U.S. military official told The Associated Press on Friday that a Navy ship, the USS John S. McCain, was relatively close to the North Korean vessel but had no orders to intercept it and had not requested that authority. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive issue of ship movements. The Navy ship, a guided missile destroyer, is named after the grandfather and father of Arizona Sen. John McCain. Both were admirals. Sen. McCain, who lost the 2008 presidential election to Obama, said Sunday that the U.S. should board the Kang Nam even without North Korean permission if hard evidence shows it is carrying missiles or other cargo in violation of U.N. resolutions. "I think we should board it. It's going to contribute to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue nations that pose a direct threat to the United States," McCain said on CBS' "Face the Nation." The Kang Nam is reportedly the first North Korean vessel to be tracked under new U.N. sanctions. (Yahoo)
Our political leaders are a total embarrassment.


Satya is the Sanskrit word for “truth”; agraha means "great enthusiasm and interest"[1]. The two words combined may be rendered as "the firmness of truth.” The term was popularized during the Indian Independence Movement, and is used in manyIndian languages including Hindi. It can also mean"the force of truth."
It is time that the power of truth be brought to bear on the "powers-that-be" who, through their collective greed and criminality, have placed the entire world in great peril. The actions of the men of Wall Street and the Men of Capitol Hill have left an entire world on the brink of ruin. Hope for many is already gone. These men have chosen to sacrifice billions of us on the alter of avarice. Their mansions and yachts are testimonies to our poverty, their lavish homes a reminder of our homelessness, their Thanksgiving feasts a symbol of our hunger.
And at the heart of it all, of all of the suffering heaped upon the backs of billions of people, are the lies. The power of truth has been beaten down by the forces of greed and gluttony. We rationalize the 30 million dollar salary of the CEO as being justly earned based upon the amount of wealth that his corporation creates, but now of course we know that it is all a lie. Wealth based upon “growth” that is in fact debt (leverage) is not wealth at all, it is fraud. But the greedy nonetheless use this debt as the collateral they need to live in their mansions and drive their Mercedes and sail on their yachts, while the rest of us are left to repay these debts through taxes and cuts in services to the poor and our own debt-servitude. And all of the men in power are complicit in this lie, all of the governmental agencies that have facilitated the lies are guilty of damning the rest of us to nothing more than poverty. And as Gandhi said, poverty is the worst form of violence. And the list of lies is truly endless:
Accounting Fraud
Lending Fraud
Asset Valuation Fraud (Mark-To-Fantasy)
Ponzi Fraud
Unemployment Reporting Fraud
Tax Fraud
Insider Trading Fraud
Derivatives Fraud
TARP Fraud
Securities Fraud
Fractional Reserve Banking Fraud
Currency Fraud
Keynesian Fraud
Election Fraud
Obviously an epic list, and all perpetrated by the wealthy and powerful in order to perpetuate the system, at any and all costs. And now we are the cost, and for the liars, that is an acceptable price to pay. Our lives, the lives of billions of people, our suffering, our hunger, are acceptable to the wealthy and powerful. When will enough be enough? Maybe it is time that we March To The Sea, And Make Salt.
It takes some real BALLS to cough up this load of crap:
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Tuesday challenged Congress to force itself to pay for new spending as it goes rather than sink the nation deeper into a debt, calling it a matter of public responsibility. Republicans lashed back that Obama is no voice of fiscal restraint as the deficit soars.
I'll be interested in that if and only if it is retroactive to Obama's submitted budget, and holds deficits to no more than George W. Bush's average deficit.
Remember, we're not going to be fighting any more wars, right? So no need for big deficits, right?
Oh wait - we're going to run somewhere around $1.8 trillion in deficits this year, and Obama wants to talk about "PayGo"?
To increase the deficit from HERE?
Who cares? A deficit four times larger than ever run before, and now we're going to say "we'll cap it here"?
This is a joke, right?
No, its not:
The deficit figures flow from the deep recession, the Wall Street bailout and the cost of the economic stimulus bill. Obama has defended the massive stimulus plan as essential to helping pump some life back in the economy, one that is still shedding jobs but showing more signs of life in recent weeks.
But that "stimulus" and "bailout" won't and mathematically cannot work, because the excessive debt is still there, having been simply shifted to The Federal Government instead of forced to default on the balance sheets of the imprudent where it would have blown them to smithereens. Instead, it will blow all of us to smithereens.
How in the hell does anyone support this crap? How does this sort of thing not lead to immediate jeers from the peanut gallery, the Press and the people?
How does this sort of flat LIE not lead to 100,000 people surrounding 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with signs, pitchforks and torches - tomorrow?
We are truly a nation of sheep, and we are not going to get sheared this time - we're going to get slaughtered and eaten.
Dan W:
EVERYTHING Denninger says I agree with. EVERYTHING!!! But we are leaving out the MOST CRITICAL piece of the puzzle!!
Denninger states, "...But that "stimulus" and "bailout" won't and mathematically cannot work, because the excessive debt is still there, having been simply shifted to The Federal Government instead of forced to default on the balance sheets of the imprudent where it would have blown them to smithereens. Instead, it will blow all of us to smithereens...."
This is absolutely true. We will be 'blown to smithreens'....unless....
Unless somehow, someway, the government can find a way to increase tax revenues by some 35+%.
This is from the tax policy center:

Peck’s book begins with the profound truth that "Life is difficult!". We must attest to the fact that life was never meant to be easy, and that it is nothing but a battlefield of problems. We can either moan about them or solve them. It is here that the vital role of discipline assumes significance. Peck defines discipline as the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. These tools are delaying gratification, assuming responsibility, dedication to the truth, and balancing.
As I read and reread those words, my head spins with thoughts of just how UN-disciplined our political and financial leaders truly are. And it would be on some level comical, did not their choices to behave without any discipline whatsoever lead us down the road to a total breakdown of 'civil' society. DELAYING GRATIFICATION and accumulating DEBT are the "Rock and Scissors" of finances. And the current "BAILOUT" (8 Trillion Dollars and counting) (OK, 12.5 TRILLION now!), as well as the coming Obama TRILLION dollar stimulus debacle, are all examples of leaders unwilling to delay gratification in lieu of feeding their own self-interest (In this case, the self-interest being both the accumulation of wealth and the maintenance of political stature.) And I sit here and shake my head, drifting in consciousness between blinding rage and surreal bemusement, as our so-called and self-proclaimed leaders choose to buy time for themselves and, I suppose, for us, and postpone the inevitable---and the inevitable? Total collapse of the global economic system. (6 months down the road and NOW I think that the "inevitable", at least in the near term, is the prosecution of a wider-war in Asia, the goal of which will be to artifically and in the near term prop up GDP through an additional 5-6 TRILLION dollars in GE (on top of the current 2.8 Trillion). These monies will come from the taxpayer, who will be further fleeced through his own inability to see through the patriotic and nationalistic haze created by the Obama propaganda machine.) Why? Well, you learned it in grammar school. Negative + Negative = a bigger Negative. -3 + -3 = -6, right? Debt doesn't go away by creating more debt. (And for those who seem convinced that utilizing debt to stimulate spending and borrowing is a logical economic policy, your analyses seem long on ideology and short on facts and reality. Lest we forget, confidence in the veracity of our political leadership is at an all-time low. Don't under-estimate this dynamic. Even in this moment of relative beauty---the election of an African American President---our incipient Chief Executive has pulled together a staff of old-school, Keynesian cronies. His ploy may be an appeal to the Center, but it ignores the reality that tens of millions of Americans have come to associate the old school as entirely corrupt and duplicitous. And these suspicions will only be exacerbated by the doomed-to-failure Freidmanite approach to the financial crisis: that of spending TRILLIONS more on stimulus packages that cannot, by their very nature, succeed in an environment of debt-based toxic shock. Indeed it is beginning to unravel as we speak. The bond market is beginning to signal the end. The Obama team is desperate. War is coming. It is the only choice left to our sick and twisted leaders.
And what about ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY? Folks in Washington and on Wall Street don't like to accept responsibility. Instead they choose to lie to us and say they feel so badly and pretend to accept responsibility, but it's just an act, a sleight of hand, the skin-on-the-teeth of contrition if you will. If these folks really believed in assuming total an unequivocal responsibility for their past and present, and even future actions, then they would join with the rest of us. (Let's face it. The goal of wealth is to maintain itself...at any and all costs.) Instead they exist apart from us, living lives that do not resemble those lived by the rest of us. As Gandhi said, until our leaders toil in the fields with us, they will not represent us. Nothing could be more true of today's leaders, both political and financial. And what is also true is that 'we the people' have an extraordinary capacity for forgiveness, and for reconciliation. But we also know when an apology lacks credibility, when a fist-pounding appeal for justice lacks moral authority. Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman, did not truly accept "full responsibility" for the demise of his company when he stated, in front of Congress, that he, in fact did, accept full responsibility for the demise of his company. We knew these words were hollow because he will never toil with the rest of us. He owns many homes and many cars and his savings are secure and his retirement monies remain intact and he exists without fear of the future. Not so for the rest of us.
And what of DEDICATION TO THE TRUTH?!? The stunning arrogance of these men is that they not only lie with utter impunity, but they have come to believe that lying in pursuit of policy decisions that they support is actually a virtue. A virtue!!?! It is no wonder that we find ourselves on "the eve of destruction", staring down the barrel of a loaded canon that must, MUST reduce our world to ashes. And I'm not talking about war (Well, in 2008 I wasn't talking about war. But now, six months further on, I am. Now I see that the Obama team's ONLY possible solution to the incipient crash of the bond market, to U6 unemployment reaching 20%, to the possibility of social unrest HERE in the U.S., is the creation of a wider-war. Simply check out what I wrote to Peter Schiff today, above. You'll get the picture.), I'm talking about ashes that result from the millions of fires that will torch the social fabric that constitutes the quality of our very existence. Our leaders have no dedication to the truth: they have no idea what the truth is anymore. They see things like 5% GDP growth (by the way...all DEBT, not actual growth) and unregulated Derivatives Markets and building more and more nuclear power plants as being the truth. Conversely, they snicker at those who would conjecture that the truth is not what we WANT, but what remains within the scope that our ever-constricting circle of resources enables us to construct. And they plot the destruction of those who would dare organize resistance to the foul evils of Fractional Reserve Banking, and currency by Governmental Decree, and over and above all else, Derivatives. Derivatives, the wagers that the rich make on the lives of the rest of us.
These are techniques of suffering, means by which we experience the pain of problems in such a way as to work through them and solve them successfully, learning and growing in the process. Most of us do not want to wrestle with our problems because of the pain involved. Yet, it is only in grappling with our problems that life has its meaning.
But our leaders find suffering anathema to their quest for power and wealth. And our leaders are willing to mortgage our futures because they are unwilling to be truthful: they are unwilling to face reality---reality, which itself is the ultimate expression of truth. Barack Obama may be willing to say "things are gonna be hard", but he's not willing to tell the real truth: that the only way to heal from this orgy of greed that has left us close to death is to let all of the dead tissue slough off, and to help us hold onto each other through the pain and suffering of healing and rehabilitation, and then to begin the process of becoming whole again. Were he that courageous, there would be no stimulus package, per se. There would be no talk of encouraging lending and loosening credit markets and making sure the auto industry survived intact (an oxymoron, auto + industry). But no one in Washington has the stomach for that, because god forbid it meant not being re-elected and thus having to join REAL society once again.
Delaying gratification is the process by which we learn to meet and experience pain first, and then enjoy pleasure. By doing so, we enhance the joy of pleasure. Most of us learn this activity by the age of five. For example, a six-year-old child will prefer eating the cake first and the frosting last.
We teach our children well, but we ignore those lessons in lieu of our greed, our fear, our inability to cope with our own pain.
Taking responsibility for our problems is perhaps the most difficult. Only by accepting the fact that we have problems can we solve them.
Our leaders THINK that they are taking responsibility for our/their problems, but they are not being truthful. Our leaders have chosen to believe that the problem that needs solving is that our economy is contracting and that we have to find ways to stimulate growth, get people working, loosen credit markets, etc. If our leaders reflected HONESTLY upon these things, they might, were they constitutionally capable, come to the realization that the solution they are seeking and proposing is the very problem itself. Addiction to growth is the problem. Trying to find ways to reconstitute our usurious banking system---a system that exists ONLY if people by the hundreds of millions are compelled to obtain loans and financing and credit, and than having to service all of that debt with interest---is the problem. Spending "money" in the name of fiscal stimulus (more debt) to purportedly create jobs that do not reflect an honest appraisal of the future needs of 21st century economies is the problem. Employing QE and insane monetary policy in an all-out assault on reality is the problem. Allowing men like Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner to go on "lying tours" of the world is the problem.
We finally come to balancing-the technique of flexibility. Many a time we function with rigid, set patterns of behavior. Extraordinary flexibility is a must for successful living. Part of this technique is also learning to give up something that is dear and familiar to us.
The Friedmanites and Keynesians and Reaganites that populate our high offices have refused, and continue to refuse, to give up on their dreams of the unlimited strength and power of the irredeemable dollar, of the ability to finance debt ad infinitum without any negative consequences, of the trust in the inherent morality of the marketplace to check actions that might, in the end, result in deleterious impacts upon the economy. And yet our current reality---REALITY!!!---reflects the truth. Reality, by definition, IS the truth. It must be acknowledged, or we will continue to hasten our demise as we bury our collective heads deeper and deeper in the sand. And our reality contradicts the cries of Bernanke and Paulson and Bush and Obama, who continue to clamor for spending our way out of the crisis. And the laws of mathematics and physics could not be more clear on this point: ALL of this debt will ultimately have to be serviced, and eventually it will fall upon the common man and woman, and their children, to pay for the sins of their leaders. Worse still, our leaders will accept the destruction of entire societies, of tens of millions of NON-Americans, as we prosecute a wider-war in name of saving humanity from possibility of nuclear-armed extremists, but with the goal of artificially growing GDP through increased Government Expenditure and accompanying patriotic cries for increased taxation to pay for these wars-to-end-all-wars. Our leaders will accept the suffering and death of millions in East Asia, South Asia and Africa in order to save their wealth and to save a dying way of life.
Peck gives some identifying characteristics for evil persons. Discussed below are Scott Peck's views. Evil is described by Peck as "militant ignorance".
The Reaganite ideologues remain so focused upon their Keynesian dreams, that they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that worship of this false idol has brought the world's economies to the brink of chaos and collapse. Ben Bernanke is militantly ignorant. He would prefer dropping interest rates to NEGATIVE and printing tens of TRILLIONS more in Monopoly money than face the fact that our experiment with irredeemable currency has failed. That we were wrong. That our monetary policy is fatally flawed, and that the collapse of our way of life is assured.
The evil person:
WASHINGTON – Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is urging Congress and the Obama administration to start plotting a strategy to curb record-high U.S. budget deficits. Failing to do so could eventually erode investor confidence and endanger the economy's prospects for long-term health, he said. Bernanke's comments, in prepared testimony Wednesday before the House Budget Committee, come as concerns grow at home and overseas about the United States' mounting red ink. "Even as we take steps to address the recession and threats tofinancial stability, maintaining the confidence of the financial markets requires that we, as a nation, begin planning now for the restoration of fiscal balance," Bernanke said. (Yahoo)
What a first class, lying clown.