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The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi strikes again. 

Awesome article Paul. A must read for anyone trying to understand the 2008 financial collapse. The same Wall Street Banksters who collapsed the world economy are back at it. This time raiding the public workers pension funds, spending millions on politicians and press campaigns to blame cops, firefighters, and teachers for mounting municipal fiscal failures and the coming collapse. Blame anyone but these triple dipping Banksters and their political toadies. Excellent piece of writing too. Check out this opening excerpt introducing the five page story: "In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo - an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist - the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government. Detroit's Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford - she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about." Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island's 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Str

Takers vs. Makers.  It all comes down to that ratio.  Incredibly, California is not at the top of high risk States!  New Mexico holds that honor. excerpt: Don't buy a house in a state where private sector workers are outnumbered by folks dependent on government. Thinking about buying a house? Or a municipal bond? Be careful where you put your capital. Don't put it in a state at high risk of a fiscal tailspin. Eleven states make our list of danger spots for investors. They can look forward to a rising tax burden, deteriorating state finances and an exodus of employers. The list includes California, New York, Illinois and Ohio, along with some smaller states like New Mexico and Hawaii. "Ranked on the taker/maker ratio, our 11 death spiral states range from New Mexico, with 1.53 takers for every maker, down to Ohio, with a 1-to-1 ratio. The taker count is the number of state and local government workers plus the number of people on Medicaid plus 1 for each $100,000 of unfunded pension liabilities. Sources: the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and a study of state worker pensions done in 2009 by two academics, Joshua Rauh and Rovert Novy-Marx. Professor Rauh estimates that the shortage in pension funding is on average a third higher today. The second element in the death spiral list is a scorecard of state credit-worthiness done by Conning & Co., a money manager known for its measures of risk in insurance company portfolios. Conning's analysis focuses more on dollars than body counts. Its formula downgrades states for large debts, an uncompetitive business climate, weak home prices and bad trends in employment."

Matt Taibbi responds to his critics. 

This must read post from Clint Richardson is a Bay Area Patriots catch.  Stunning stuff.  Clint walks us through the CAFR - Comprehensive Annual Rinancial Report - for the State of California.  Governor Moonbeam is claiming that the State has a $16 Trillion dollar debt, and he's threatening to shut down public education unless California citizens agree to massive tax hikes.  Clint rips through the entire annual report discovering that Gov Moonbeam is not only lying, but that there is an official "debt increase" methodology in place to deceive citizens into voting for government seizure of their property and prosperity.  Note also that this local-state-federal "debt bomb" methodology involves conversion of tax dollars into hard assets.  Like property and productive assets.  Awful, reprehensible stuff.  Brace yourselves. excerpt: the Government is lying to you.  It promotes debt and hides assets. This should not be construed as the only hidden wealth in the California State government… just the wealth we have uncovered today. And you must understand that this is only the State government's CAFR. Each County, city, district, and other local governments and pension funds have their own CAFR's with their own funds and hidden wealth - hidden in plain sight. Totals for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other counties and municipalities in California will, when combined together, dwarf the investment wealth of the State government alone. They will tell you that some of these investments are restricted and not able to be used for taxpayer services. And as a taxpayer, that should really piss you off! They will also tell you that laws are in place that don't allow these funds to be transferred for other purposes other than what they are designated for. And yet Obama and State legislators continuously speak of raiding the pension funds for their own benefit. In their opinion, it's government's money after all, not the employees or the taxpayers. But of

Unfunded liabilities are the difference between a program's projected costs and its projected revenues, both valued in today's dollars. Medicare and Social Security both have promised benefits that outrace revenue streams. They are the largest components of the government's unfunded liabilities, the hidden debt of the nation. But there are other federal retirement programs with not merely inadequate funding like Medicare and Social Security, but with no revenue streams of their own at all. Among them are retirement programs for military and federal workers. In September 2011, USA Today analyzed dozens of overlapping programs for retired federal workers. It reported that despite the existing debt crisis, Congress continues to add to the promised benefits, so that retirement programs now have a $5.7 trillion unfunded liability. The newspaper sums up its report on the retirement programs this way: Private employers are legally required to put money into pension funds to match retirement promises. Private pensions have $2.3 trillion in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. State and local governments have $3 trillion in retirement funds. The federal government has nothing set aside. The total unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government have been calculated with a number of present value and discount models. Results of the shortfall from these methods range from about $70 trillion to $120 trillion dollars. For a family of four this represents a liability between $900,000 and $1.5 million. (You can follow the debt as it adds up at www.USdebt.org.)

As though ACLU didn't already have enough lawsuits going. But this takes the cake. Although anti-BDS legislation has been introduced several times in Congress but never got off the ground because of the First Amendment barrier. Similar measures pending in Europe too.  The good news here is that Israel's right-wing government is getting desperate. The BDS movement is mushrooming globally and routinely is achieving success in convincing companies (and recording artists, etc.) to pull out of Israel. More so in Europe, but BDS is off to a great start in the U.S. Kerry warned Netanyahu before the latter blew up the last round of negotations with the Palestinians that BDS would soon make it politically impossible for the U.S. to continue providing cover for Israel on the U.N. Security Council. There's a big shift of public opinion in the U.S. about Israel's abuse of Palestinians well under way. It won't be long before introducing Israel Lobby measures in Congress will stop happening. 

With commercial banks overloaded by investment bank derivative debt, a bank is the very last place one should park their money. See http://tinyurl.com/3oj7vbs and http://tinyurl.com/3ovf6ze FDIC insurance is now of value only to senior debtors, not to deposit account holders.

The video, "The Beholden State", has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions' political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state's public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation's and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination-high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes-has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state. How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses-that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state's politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California's unsustainable government.

Thanks to Marbux we have this extraordinary collection of facts and figures describing the economic catastrophe that has hit the USA.  excerpt: "What a year 2012 has been!  The mainstream media continues to tell us what a "great job" the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class.  It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening.  If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode.  Just "tweaking" things slightly is not going to fix our economy.  We need a fundamental change in direction.  Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic "adjustment" that America has ever gone through.  We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done.  Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up. The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year.  Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones.  Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion.  So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be "just fine", just show them these numbers.  They are a good summary of the problems that the U

Excellent video blog/discussion with Foster Gamble of the Thrive Movement.  Foster explains CAFR: The Comprehensive Annual Financial Report that local and State governments must file annually.  The CAFR includes the investments funds that governments control.  For local cities lfiling bankruptcy, ike Stockton, CA, the CAFR's are in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  Foster explains that Stockton is foot dragging on their CAFR, perhaps hoping to break the union pension and healthcare funds through a quick chapter 9 bankruptcy where the CAFR isn't put on the table? This is good stuff, demonstrating fully that governments are in the business of seizing wealth and control of property by hook or by crook.  Nice finish with the Iceland story.  The Icelanders refused to play the Bankster game, and jailed Rothschild-Rockefeller banksters and politicians while refusing to pay both the interest and debt those clowns had racked up. Excerpt: As cities and states struggle to balance their budgets, folks everywhere are losing their jobs, parks are closing and people most in need are getting left in the dust. As Foster describes in this video blog, it doesn't have to be this way. Trillions of dollars of taxpayer money is currently sitting in unpublicized government investment funds and people are organizing to get it back.

The bottom line is that the public unions continue to increase their wages and benefits, inspite of the economic free fall the economy is in, because they ruthlessly use members dues for lobbying and bargaining with politicians who are paying them with "other people's money". CC provides some interesting diagrams describing how the scam works, and, he does point to two solutions being tested in Wisconsin and Indiana. In Wisconsin, gov Walker is trying to end public sector "collective bargaining". While Gov Daniels in Indiana has successfully ended the the requirement that the State deduct union workers membership dues from their pay checks. When given the chance to choose, most union workers chose NOT to pay those dues. The Daniels method seems to be working very well, and is based on an easy to understand Constitutional principle; money earned is personal property, and the individual should have the right to chose what happens to their property. There are some other things that might be tried, although i think the Daniels principle should be an automatic first step taxpayers take to restore Constitutional Rule of Law. .... Break strike threat with non union replacements President Reagan was tested by the public sector unions when they threatened a strike by the thought to be essential and irreplaceable Air Controllers union. Reagan called them on it, and brought in non union replacements to break the strike. Painful, but it worked. ..... Privatization The most basic and Constitutional response is to privatize the service, and turn it over to the open market of competitive contract bids. Works every time, but the awarding of contracts has it's own level of political corruption and influence peddling. Personally i would prefer a grand jury approach to oversight problem involved in the awarding of contracts. Citizens need to be pressed into the task of backstopping political corruption. Any connection of cross channeling of people or t

Good primer on world economics.  First of a three part series, focusing on the basic economic terms and the certain bankruptcy-default of Greece.  Short explanation of the Euro  "Greek Bailout" dance we see today, and how it all about buying time for Big Euro Banksters to unload their Greek debt before the inevitable collapse. excerpt: The measure you're seeing frequently, especially in reference to Greece is "debt to GDP", or the amount of sovereign debt - debt guaranteed by the "full faith and credit" of a nation - compared to the nation's GDP. Anything over 120% is generally considered "not sustainable", in other words the country is in a position where they will not be able to make the interest payments on their debt and will likely default unless drastic measures are taken. Greece is running about 160%. Here's an important note. Look back at the definition of GDP and take special note that one of the elements of it is government spending. In other words, the federal government has the ability to impact the GDP - and create the perception of economic growth and stability - by borrowing money and increasing spending - and governments across the world, including the US, have been doing it for decades. OK. let's talk about Greece. And why a little country in the Mediterranean is getting all this attention. Greece is a socialist country whose population is declining at a rapid rate and whose government employees, who represent 10% of their workforce, are retiring at rapid pace with fixed retirement benefits that approach what they were making when they worked. Right now Greece spends 12% of their GDP on public pensions and that's going to go up dramatically because their population is aging rapidly. Their public debt, held primarily by other European countries and the European Central Bank (ECB) is running 160% of their GDP and their last round of bond sales produced interest rates of 17%. Their problem is exacerbated by the fa

This is the largest part of the real back story on John Kerry's feverish effort to negotiate a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine apartheid problem. The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions ("BDS") movement against Israel is growing rapidly, nearly doubling the rate of growth of the former BDS movement that successfully ended apartheid government of South Africa.   Israel has become a pariah state diplomatically because of its war crimes against Palestinians and because of BDS, is increasingly becoming a pariah state economically. At the same time, Israel has illegally colonized Palestine to the extent that a 2-state solution is all but impossible, meaning that the most likely outcome is that Israel will cease being the "Jewish State" and be forced to grant equality to Palestinians as well in a new secular government. The situation became all the more dire for Israel as the "Jewish State" when the U.N. General Assembly granted Palestine observer state status, opening the way for Palestine to, e.g., pursue criminal prosecution of Israeli leaders for war crimes before the International Criminal Court.  That has dramatically increased the Palestinian Authority's leverage in negotiations. Kerry is on a rescue mission to see if he can coerce the Palestinian Authority to cede sufficient land and powers to Israel to make a 2-state solution credible. Kerry's leverage is that the U.S. has been underwriting the Palestinian Authority's expenses and can threaten to withdraw the financial support.  All of which brings it down to the question of Palestinian Authority leadership corruption. If the PA stands tall and refuses to accept Kerry's ridiculous demands, there will almost certainly be no 2-state solution, ever, because Israel continues to colonize Palestine and has locked up most of Palestine's water resources. Further colonization means still less water for an "independent" Palestine state. The Palestine Authority, on the other hand, suffered f

Cute. The Ukrainian government needs $17 billion to service its debt to the banksters. The IMF agrees to hand over another $3 billion loan, while Obama promises another $1 billion, not nearly what is needed (Russia had offered $15 billion, an offer withdrawn in light of the coup instigated by the U.S. Now the austerity measures and privatization that always accompanies IMF loans begin. One of the first announced was to cut pensioners' monthly checks in half. Meanwhile, Iceland's economy continues to rebound after having refused to bail out its banksters and putting them in prison instead.