Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Facebook corporate dictatorship: Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about shareholders.


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A picture taken on October 1, 2012, shows Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shaking hands with Russia's communications minister Nikolay Nikiforov after Zuckerberg's meeting with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev at the Gorki residence outside Moscow.
Photo by ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/GettyImages
Fuk Facebook
Here's a piece about what Facebook can do to justify its high valuation while Christopher Mims is a bit skeptical that Facebook can ever be a profit engine. But the thing you really need to keep in mind when thinking about Facebook's business strategy is that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to care what you think. Facebook is his. All his. Everyone else is just along for the ride.
Separation of ownership and control is integral to the operation of modern financial capitalism, but typically the CEO works for the shareholders, at least in principle.
With Facebook that's not the case. As I wrote at the time of the IPO, Facebook is entirely Zuckerberg's. Or, rather, because there are two classes of shares, Zuckerberg controls 57 percent of the votes.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/31/facebook_corporate_d...

US Economy To Shrink Again In Q1: Economy Lost 2.84 Million Jobs in Jan., Obamacare In Action – Retail Workweek Hits 3-Year Low, Rising Gasoline Costs, Higher Taxes, And Defense Spending Cuts Could Kill 1 Million Jobs

Furchtgott-Roth to Moneynews: Economy Might Shrink Again in First Quarter

The January job numbers reported Friday are weak, and gross domestic product (GDP) growth stands a good chance of remaining negative in the first quarter, says Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth.
Non-farm payrolls gained 157,000 last month, a bit lower than expectations, and the unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent from 7.8 percent in December.
Meanwhile, the economy contracted 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter.
“Employment is not strong. We might have negative GDP numbers the first quarter too,” Furchtgott-Roth tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.

“We might have a negative GDP in the first quarter because of rising taxes and the increased effects of the new healthcare law.”
The Obamacare problem is that it penalizes employment, because employers who don’t offer the right kind of health insurance will have to pay $2,000 per worker per year, Furchtgott-Roth says.




Obamacare in Action: Retail Workweek Hits 3-Year Low

Hooray! The economy is adding jobs(supposedly). However, few look at the quality of the jobs, and whether or not they are part-time.
Jed Graham has a nice post on Investor’s Business Daily that describes what I have been saying for months: Obamacare has accelerated the trend towards part-time jobs. There are more jobs, but fewer hours in them.
Please consider Retail Workweek Hits 3-Year Low In ObamaCare Shift by Jed Graham.
 The fly in the ointment of January’s jobs report was the apparent shift to part-time work ahead of a key ObamaCare deadline.
Although retail payrolls grew by 32,600, total hours worked in the industry dipped, Labor Department data out Friday showed.
The explanation? Rank-and-file retail workers logged the shortest workweek since early 2010: just 30.1 hours, on average, vs. 30.4 in December.
Remarkably, aggregate hours worked in the retail sector fell below their January 2012 level, even though industry payrolls are up 200,000 over that period. A similar trend showed up in leisure and hospitality: January payrolls rose by 23,000 even as aggregate hours dipped 0.3%.
Economy Lost 2.84 Million Jobs in Jan., Yet Press Pretends Seasonally Adjusted 157K Jobs Added Represents What Actually Happened
Following the governmemt’s Employment Situation Summary yesterday, two words were noticeably absent at the Associated Press (herehere, and here), BloombergReutersCNBC, and the New York Times: “seasonally adjusted.”
While they told their readers of the number of jobs supposedly added in total (157,000) and in other sectors, the fact remains that in the real world, before seasonal adjustment, the government told us, as is the case every January, that employment declined steeply. In January 2013, the government estimates that 2.84 million jobs were lost.
This failure to refer to seasonal adjustments is odd, because while these same outlets typically use these two words when describing the weekly unemployment claims results released each Thursday and several other government reports which appear throughout the month, they typically fail to do so in describing the monthly number of jobs added or lost — and for that matter, the unemployment rate, which was really 8.5 percent in January, only 0.3 points below where is was in January 2012 (December’s, November’s, and October’s differentials were 0.7, 0.8 and 1.0 points, respectively).

Unemployment Rate Rises to 7.9% as US Adds Fewer Than Expected Jobs


Employment grew modestly in January and gains in the prior two months were bigger than initially reported, supporting views the economy’s sluggish recovery was on track despite a surprise contraction in output in the final three months of 2012.Employers added 157,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. There were 127,000 more jobs created in November and December than previously reported.The mostly encouraging jobs report included one negative sign: The unemployment rate rose to 7.9 percent from 7.8 percent in December. The rate is calculated from a survey of households, and more people in that survey said they were unemployed. The monthly job gains are derived from a separate survey of employers.

2013 Taxes Are In Effect! If You Are Making Between $50,000 And $200,000 A Year, You Will See Your Biweekly Check Cut By $68 Or More

from Bloomberg:
The budget deal passed by the U.S. Senate today would raise taxes on 77.1 percent of U.S. households, mostly because of the expiration of a payroll tax cut, according to preliminary estimates from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.
More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes. Among the households facing higher taxes, the average increase would be $1,635, the policy center said. A 2 percent payroll tax cut, enacted during the economic slowdown, is being allowed to expire as of yesterday.
The heaviest new burdens in 2013, compared with 2012, would fall on top earners, who would face higher rates on income, capital gains, dividends and estates. The top 1 percent of taxpayers, or those with incomes over $506,210, would pay an average of $73,633 more in taxes.
Much of that burden is concentrated at the very top of the income scale.
The top 0.1 percent of taxpayers, those with incomes over about $2.7 million, would pay an average of $443,910 more, reducing their after-tax incomes by 8.4 percent. They would pay 26 percent of the additional taxes imposed by the legislation.
Among households with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million, taxes would go up by an average of $14,812.

Gas Went UP 10 Cents Over Night

Check our prices in your area
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This keeps up we will hit 4.00

USA Today: Defense Spending Cuts Could Kill 1 Million Jobs

Steep defense cuts in store for America may eliminate 1 million jobs directly and then have ripple effects across the nation’s cities and towns, according to USA Today.
As Washington debates sequestration — automatic budgets cuts that could slash $600 billion in military spending — the defense industry and towns that depend on defense contracts fear sequestration is only the tip of the iceberg.
That’s because earlier debt-ceiling agreements provided that military spending, which peaked at $716.3 billion in 2012, must fall to $589 billion by 2014.

Health insurance rates going up by double digits: NYT « Hot Air

Remember that Nancy Pelosi told us that we needed to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it.  Barack Obama promised to “bend the cost curve,” too.  Looks like both of them were right, at least according to the Paper of Record, which discovers to its surprise that dumping nebulous mandates on insurers causes them to bend the cost curve sharply upward (via Instapundit):
Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.
Particularly vulnerable to the high rates are small businesses and people who do not have employer-provided insurance and must buy it on their own.
In California, Aetna is proposing rate increases of as much as 22 percent, Anthem Blue Cross 26 percent and Blue Shield of California 20 percent for some of those policy holders, according to the insurers’ filings with the state for 2013. These rate requests are all the more striking after a 39 percent rise sought by Anthem Blue Cross in 2010 helped give impetus to the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, which was passed the same year and will not be fully in effect until 2014.
In other states, like Florida and Ohio, insurers have been able to raise rates by at least 20 percent for some policy holders. The rate increases can amount to several hundred dollars a month.

Shocking Numbers That Show The Media Is Lying To You About Unemployment In America


shockingThe Economic Collapse – by Michael
Did you know that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed has continually been falling since 2006 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics?  Did you know that the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during Barack Obama’s first four years in the White House was more than three times greater than the increase in the number of Americans “not in the labor force” during the entire decade of the 1980s? 
The mainstream media would have us believe that 157,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in January.  Based on that news, the Dow broke the 14,000 barrier for the first time since October 2007.  But if you actually look at the “non-seasonally adjusted” numbers, the number of Americans with a job actually decreased by 1,446,000 between December and January.  But nowhere in the mainstream media did you hear that the U.S. economy lost more than 1.4 million jobs between December and January.  It is amazing the things that you can find out when you actually take the time to look at the hard numbers instead of just listening to the media spin.
Back in 2007, more than 146 million Americans were employed.  Today, only141.6 million Americans are employed even though our population has grown steadily since then.  When the government and the media tell you that we are in a “recovery” and that unemployment is lower than it was a couple of years ago, I encourage you to dig deeper.
The truth is that even the government’s own numbers tell us that the percentage of the U.S. labor force that is employed continues to fall and that the U.S. economy is heading into a recession.  The Obama administration and the media have been lying to you about unemployment and about the true condition of our economy.  After you see the numbers that I have compiled in this article, I think that you will agree with me.
First of all, let’s take a look at the percentage of the civilian labor force that has been employed over the past several years.  These numbers come directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  As you can see, this is a number that has been steadily falling since 2006…
2006: 63.1
2007: 63.0
2008: 62.2
2009: 59.3
2010: 58.5
2011: 58.4
In January, only 57.9 percent of the civilian labor force was employed.
Do the numbers above represent a positive trend or a negative trend?
Even a 2nd grader could answer that question.
So how in the world can the Obama administration and the mainstream media claim that the employment picture is getting better and that we are in a “recovery”?
But most Americans believe what they are told.  It is almost as if we are in some kind of a “matrix” where reality is defined by the corporate-controlled propaganda that is relentlessly pumped into our brains.
The only way that the government has been able to show a declining unemployment rate is by dumping massive numbers of Americans into the “not in the labor force” category.
Just check out how the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has absolutely skyrocketed in recent years…
2006: 77,387,000
2007: 78,743,000
2008: 79,501,000
2009: 81,659,000
2010: 83,941,000
2011: 86,001,000
In January, there were supposedly 89,868,000 Americans that were at least 16 years of age that were not in the labor force.
That number has risen by more than 8 million since Barack Obama first entered the White House, and that is highly unusual, because the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only increased by2,518,000 during the entire decade of the 1980s.
You sure can get the numbers to look more “favorable” if you pretend that millions upon millions of American workers simply “don’t want a job” any longer.  The truth is that if the labor force participation rate was at the same level it was at when Barack Obama was first elected, the official unemployment rate would be well above 10 percent.
But that wouldn’t do at all, would it?  7.9 percent sounds so much nicer.
And of course even if you do have a job that does not mean that you are doing okay.
If you can believe it, in America today 41 percent of all workers make $20,000 a year or less.
To me, that is a mind blowing statistic.  It would be incredibly challenging for anyone to live on $20,000 a year, much less try to support a family.
If you live in Washington D.C. or New York City and you have a “good job” working for the establishment, you may not realize it, but there are tens of millions of American families that are really hurting out there.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income” at this point, and most of those people actually do have jobs.
For much more on the “working poor” in the United States, please see my previous article entitled “35 Statistics About The Working Poor In America That Will Blow Your Mind“.
If something is not done, the middle class will continue to disappearand poverty in America will continue to explode.
In a previous article, I noted that during Obama’s first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
How bad do things have to get before people realize that we are living through a nightmare?
Sadly, most Americans still have faith in the system.
Most Americans are still convinced that our politicians will somehow find a way to turn things around.
Most Americans will gather around their television sets this weekend and watch the Super Bowl and laugh at all the funny commercials without even thinking about how America is literally falling apart all around them.
But there is one group of Americans that is acutely aware of how bad things have really gotten.  Small businesses have traditionally been the primary engine of job growth in this country, but right now small business owners all over the nation are facing a tremendous crisis.
Millions of small businesses are on the verge of extinction, and yet our politicians just continue to pile on more taxes, more rules and more regulations.
A recent Gallup poll found that 61 percent of all small business owners in America are “worried about the potential cost of healthcare”, and that an astounding 30 percent of all small business owners in America are not hiring and fear that they will go out of business within the next 12 months.
In a previous article entitled “We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America“, I detailed how small businesses in America are being systematically wiped out.  Small businesses are dying all around us, and the number of new small businesses continues to decline.
According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per one thousand Americans breaks down by presidential administration
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
Is that a good trend or a bad trend?
All of this is so simple that even the family pet should be able to figure it out, and yet most Americans seem oblivious to all of this.  They just keep gobbling up the mainstream media propaganda and they just continue to go out and wildly spend money.
It is almost as if we didn’t learn any lessons from 2008.
Even while household spending in Europe has moderated, household spending in the United States continues to soar.  Just check out the chartin this article.
And guess what?  The infamous “no money down mortgages” are back.  If we wait long enough, perhaps “interest only mortgages” will make a comeback as well.
Unfortunately, I am afraid that time is running out.  we have been living in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world, and it is only a matter of time until it bursts.
2008 was just a “hiccup” compared to what is coming.  Our politicians and the Federal Reserve were able to keep the house of cards from completely crashing down back then, but they are not going to be able to avert the economic horror show that is rapidly approaching.
I hope that you are getting prepared.  Back in 2008, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs, and because many of them did not have any savings, many of them suddenly lost their homes.  One of the most important things that you can do to prepare for the coming crisis is to build up an emergency fund.  If things suddenly go bad, you don’t want to lose your house and everything that you have always worked for.
In addition, anything that you can do to become more self-sufficient and more independent of the system is a good thing, because the system is failing.  The years ahead are going to be much more chaotic than what we are experiencing right now, and when the next crisis strikes you will be very thankful for the time and the energy that you put into preparing.
So what are all of you seeing in your own areas?
Are businesses shutting down?
Are people having a hard time finding good jobs?

For The Next 20 Days, Everyone In Europe Will Be Watching This Chart

On February 24-25, Italy goes to the polls to elect its new parliament.
The big fears is that Berlusconi might do better than expected, increasing the risk of an ungovernable country.
This concern helped contribute to a massive walloping in the Italian stock market today. It was down 4.5%.
For the next 20 days, everyone will be watching this chart to see if the blue line (Berlusconi) keeps trending up, and if the red line (the left coalition) keeps going down. Also watch the maroon line. That's the party of populist comedian Beppe Grillo.  His rise would complicate things further.
image

Lightest Retail Work Week In 3 Years: Thanks To Obamacare

Godfather Politics
Back in the fall, we reported on decisions that employers were making to avoid pain caused by Obamacare regulations, cutting hours so that their employees could not be counted as full time. Olive Garden and Red Lobster were reducing employees to part-time because, by 2014, the law mandates that employers provide “health care” for full-time employees.
January numbers suggest this is not just a few anomalies but a growing trend. Investor’s Business Daily reports,
“Remarkably, aggregate hours worked in the retail sector fell below their January 2012 level, even though industry payrolls are up 200,000 over that period. A similar trend showed up in leisure and hospitality: January payrolls rose by 23,000 even as aggregate hours dipped 0.3%. Meanwhile, the ranks of part-time workers due to business conditions or because they can’t find full-time work, trending lower in the past few years, rose by 212,000 to 7.8 million. While the data are volatile and the shift to shorter workweeks in January was less than dramatic, this may be the start of something big. All signs suggest that businesses are starting to adjust their employment policies in response to Obamacare. It’s possible that much of this shift may occur in the next few months.”
I’m trying to figure out what genius decided that giving companies an incentive to shed full-time employees was a good idea for 2014.

Did the decision-makers assume that the economy would be growing again so that companies could afford to suddenly be liable for hundreds (or thousands) of dollars more per month per employee?
Do they want to prevent a recovery and encourage people to remain in part time work so that they become dependent on government?
 
Are there a few mega-corporations who wanted this to happen so that most smaller companies would go bankrupt and allow them to expand their business?
Is there some group of people who simply want to destroy the American economy in order to hurt Americans?
Was all the pain considered worth the cost in order to have a new tool to force Americans to behave in ways that fit a “progressive” agenda (i.e. making business owners fund birth control and worse)?
I have no idea if any of these are the answer. Every one of them seems way too extreme. All I can say is that it is becoming quite clear that Obamacare will never help America become a more prosperous country. And it won’t provide affordable medical care.
It is designed to do the opposite. Obamacare is only amplifying and lengthening the economic depression we are in. For all his talk of jobs, Obama’s legacy will be an anti-jobs law.

S&P expects U.S. lawsuit over pre-crisis credit ratings


(Reuters) - Standard & Poor's said it expects to be the target of a U.S. Department of Justice civil lawsuit over its mortgage bond ratings, the first federal enforcement action against a credit rating agency over alleged illegal behavior tied to the recent financial crisis.
Shares of McGraw-Hill Cos, the parent of S&P, plunged 13.8 percent on Monday after news of the pending lawsuit surfaced, their biggest one-day percentage decline since the 1987 stock market crash, according to Reuters data.
An announcement of a lawsuit is expected on Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said.
The news also caused shares of Moody's Corp, whose Moody's Investors Service unit is S&P's main rival, to slide 10.7 percent.
It is unclear why regulators may be now focusing on S&P rather than Moody's or Fimalac SA's Fitch Ratings.
S&P, Moody's and Fitch have long faced criticism from investors, politicians and regulators for assigning high ratings to thousands of subprime and other mortgage securities that quickly turned sour.
"This lawsuit is significant because it could augur future government action or, even worse for the agencies, more litigation by investors," said Jeffrey Manns, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
A civil case involves a lower burden of proof than a criminal case would, and could make it easier for investigators to uncover potential "smoking guns" through subpoenas, he added.
The New York Times reported that talks between the Justice Department and S&P broke down last week after the government sought a settlement of more than $1 billion.
NO MERIT TO LAWSUIT, S&P SAYS
S&P said the expected Justice Department lawsuit focuses on its ratings in 2007 of various U.S. collateralized debt obligations.
The agency had previously disclosed a probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into its ratings for a $1.6 billion CDO known as Delphinus CDO 2007-1. It was not immediately clear whether that CDO is a focus of the case.
"A DOJ lawsuit would be entirely without factual or legal merit," S&P said in a statement. "The DOJ would be wrong in contending that S&P ratings were motivated by commercial considerations and not issued in good faith."
In a variety of lawsuits brought by investors, S&P has maintained that its ratings constitute opinions protected by the free speech clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Justice Department spokeswoman Adora Andy and Moody's spokesman Michael Adler declined to comment. Fitch spokesman Daniel Noonan said, "We are unable to comment on the S&P matter as it does not involve us, other than to say we have no reason to believe Fitch is a target of any such action."
Several state attorneys general led by Connecticut's George Jepsen are expected to join the case, said the person familiar with the matter, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Previous lawsuits from Connecticut and Illinois accused S&P of violating consumer fraud laws by stating its ratings were objective, even though it ignored increasing risks of the securities in order to cater to the investment banks that provided the firm with revenue.
A spokeswoman for Jepsen declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal first reported the pending charges.
The attorney general in New York is continuing a separate probe of the rating firm, a person familiar with that inquiry said.
In Monday trading on the New York Stock Exchange, McGraw-Hill shares closed down $8.04 at $50.30, and Moody's shares dropped $5.90 to $49.45.
One potential winner in the news of the pending lawsuit is David Einhorn, who runs the $8 billion hedge fund Greenlight Capital. Einhorn told Reuters in 2010 that he began shorting McGraw-Hill and Moody's in 2007, and had no aversion maintaining those bearish positions in the years to come. Greenlight declined to comment on Monday.
"KEY ENABLERS" OF MELTDOWN
The ratings agencies have long been scrutinized, in part because they are paid by issuers for ratings, a standard industry practice that has nonetheless raised concern about potential conflicts of interest.
In January 2011, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission called the agencies "essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction" and "key enablers of the financial meltdown."
McGraw-Hill had acknowledged last July that the Justice Department and SEC were probing potential violations by S&P tied to its ratings of structured products, and that it was in talks to try to avert a lawsuit.
Last July, Mizuho Financial Group Inc agreed to a $127.5 million settlement to resolve SEC allegations that a U.S. unit obtained false credit ratings for the Delphinus CDO.
The following month, a Manhattan federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, King County in Washington state, and other investors against S&P, Moody's and Morgan Stanley over losses in Cheyne, a structured investment vehicle.
Cheyne went bankrupt in August 2007. A trial is scheduled to begin on May 6, court records show.
In its statement, S&P said it "deeply regrets" how its CDO ratings failed to anticipate the fast-deteriorating mortgage market conditions, and that it has since spent $400 million to help bolster the quality of its ratings.
"The lawsuit itself may prove less significant than the message it sends," said Manns, the law professor. "Filing a high-profile lawsuit against S&P tells the rating industry at large that the government is serious about holding rating agencies responsible, and that they must be much more careful."
(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha in Washington, D.C. and Jonathan Stempel in New York; Additional reporting by Emily Flitter, Karen Freifeld, Jennifer Ablan and Caroline Valetkevitch in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Bob Burgdorfer, Karey Wutkowski and Tim Dobbyn)

SPOOF: Lanny Breuer On Wall Street Fraud



This is hilarious.
A deleted scene from PBS Frontline's The Untouchables. [sarc]
**
UPDATE - Read The Official DOJ Press Release On Breuer's Resignation

You can watch the full broadcast here:

PBS Frontline - Wall Street Untouchables


And the details of Lanny Breuer's departure are here:

Wall Street Shill Lanny Breuer Done At DOJ


And the angry phone call DOJ made to Frontline after the broadcast:

DOJ COMPLAINS: 'The Untouchables Was A Hit Piece'


Here's the conclusion of The Untouchables:

 
Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.



The Justice Department Under Fire - Mr. Covington & Burling
There are several additional interviews and articles at Frontline.

Lanny Breuer exposed by Frontline... (must read)

PHOTO OF THE DAY - What America Has Become


Chris Hedges:
"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."




Comedian Lewis Black on the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

This one is excellent:

PHOTO OF THE DAY - Modern Warfare


corporate flagTruth Dig – by Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges gave this talk Saturday night in Brooklyn at the People’s Recovery Summit.
The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments. The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act—and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration’s appeal of the Southern District Court of New York’s ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional—to shut down all legitimate dissent. The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens—especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor—from joining our revolt.
Workers who are unable to meet their debts, who are victimized by constantly rising interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent on credit cards, are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant. Debt peonage is and always has been a form of political control. Native Americans, forced by the U.S. government onto tribal agencies, were required to buy their goods, usually on credit, at agency stores. Coal miners in southern West Virginia and Kentucky were paid in scrip by the coal companies and kept in perpetual debt servitude by the company store. African-Americans in the cotton fields in the South were forced to borrow during the agricultural season from their white landlords for their seed and farm equipment, creating a life of perpetual debt. It soon becomes impossible to escape the mounting interest rates that necessitate new borrowing.
Debt peonage is a familiar form of political control. And today it is used by banks and corporate financiers to enslave not only individuals but also cities, municipalities, states and the federal government. As the economist Michael Hudson points out, the steady rise in interest rates, coupled with declining public revenues, has become a way to extract the last bits of capital from citizens as well as government. Once individuals, or states or federal agencies, cannot pay their bills—and for many Americans this often means medical bills—assets are sold to corporations or seized. Public land, property and infrastructure, along with pension plans, are privatized. Individuals are pushed out of their homes and into financial and personal distress.
Debt peonage is a fundamental tool for control. This debt peonage must be broken if we are going to build a mass movement to paralyze systems of corporate power. And the most effective weapon we have to liberate ourselves as well as the 30 million Americans who make up the working poor is a sustained movement to raise the minimum wage nationally to at least $11 an hour. Most of these 30 million low-wage workers are women and people of color. They and their families struggle at a subsistence level and play one lender off another to survive. By raising their wages we raise not only the quality of their lives but we increase their capacity for personal and political power. We break one of the most important shackles used by the corporate state to prevent organized resistance.
Ralph Nader, whom I spoke with on Thursday, has been pushing activists to mobilize around raising the minimum wage. Nader, who knows more about corporate power and has been fighting it longer than any other American, has singled out, I believe, the key to building a broad-based national movement. There is among these underpaid 30 million workers—and some of them are with us tonight—a mounting despair at being unable to meet even the basic requirements to maintain a family. Nader points out that Walmart’s 1 million workers, like most of the 30 million low-wage workers, are making less per hour, adjusted for inflation, than workers made in 1968, although these Walmart workers do the work required of two Walmart workers 40 years ago.
If the federal minimum wage from 1968 were adjusted for inflation it would be $10.50. Instead, although costs and prices have risen sharply, the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 an hour. It is the lowest of the major industrial countries. Meanwhile,Mike Duke, the CEO of Walmart, makes $11,000 an hour. And he is not alone. These corporate chiefs make this much money because they have been able to keep in place a system by which workers are effectively disempowered, forced to work for substandard wages and denied the possibility through unions or the formal electoral systems of power to defend workers’ rights. This is why corporations lavish these CEOs with obscene salaries. These CEOs are the masters of plantations. And the moment workers rise up and demand justice is the moment the staggering inequality of wealth begins to be reversed.
Being a member of the working poor, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicles in her important book “Nickel and Dimed,” is “a state of emergency.” It is “acute distress.” It is a daily and weekly lurching from crisis to crisis. The stress, the suffering, the humiliation and the job insecurity means that workers are reduced to doing little more than eating, sleeping—never enough—and working. And, most importantly, they are kept in a constant state of fear. Ehrenreich writes:
When someone works for less pay than she can live on—when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently—then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The “working poor,” as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
It is time to halt the sacrifice of the working poor. It is time to empower the 30 million low-wage workers—two-thirds of which are employed by large corporations such as Walmart and McDonald’s—to fight back.
Joe Sacco and I spent the last two years in the poorest pockets of the United States, our nation’s sacrifice zones, for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We saw in Pine Ridge, S.D., Camden, N.J.—the poorest and the most dangerous city in the nation—the coalfields of southern West Virginia and the produce fields of Immokalee, Fla., how this brutal system of corporate exploitation works. In these sacrifice zones no one has legal protection. All institutions, from the press to the political class to the judiciary, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. And what has been done to those in these sacrifice zones, those places corporations devastated first, is now being done to all of us.
There are no impediments within the electoral process or the formal structures of power to prevent predatory capitalism. We are all being forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The human cost, the attendant problems of drug and alcohol abuse, the neglect of children, the early deaths—in Pine Ridge the average life expectancy of a male is 48, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti—is justified by the need to make greater and greater profit. And these costs are now being felt across the nation. The phrase “the consent of the governed” has become a cruel joke. We use a language to describe our systems of governance that no longer correspond to reality. The disconnect between illusion and reality makes us one of the most self-deluded populations on the planet.
The Weimarization of the American working class, and increasingly the middle class, is by design. It is part of a corporate reconfiguration of the national and global economy into a form of neofeudalism. It is about creating a world of masters and serfs, of empowered oligarchic elites and broken disempowered masses. And it is not only our wealth that is taken from us. It is our liberty. The so-called self-regulating market, as the economistKarl Polanyi wrote in “The Great Transformation,” always ends with mafia capitalism and a mafia political system. This system of self-regulation, Polanyi wrote, always leads to “the demolition of society.”
And this is what is happening—the demolition of our society and the demolition of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. In theological terms these corporate forces, driven by the lust for ceaseless expansion and exploitation, are systems of death. They know no limits. They will not stop on their own. And unless we stop them we are as a nation and finally as a species doomed. Polanyi understood the destructive power of unregulated corporate capitalism unleashed upon human society and the ecosystem. He wrote: “In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to the tag.”
Polanyi wrote of a society that surrendered to the dictates of the market. “Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill.”
The global and national economy because of this “satanic mill” continues to deteriorate, and yet, curiously, stock market levels are close to their highs in 2007 before the global financial meltdown. This is because these corporations have been able to suppress wages, slash social programs and bilk the government for staggering sums of money. The Federal Reserve purchases about $85 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities and Treasury bills every month. This means that the Fed is printing endless streams of money to buy up government debt and toxic assets from the banks. The Federal Reserve now owns assets, much of them worthless, of $3.01 trillion. This is triple what it was in 2008.
And while corporations such as Citibank and General Electric loot the Treasury they exact more pounds of flesh in the name of austerity. General Electric, as Nader points out, is a net job exporter. Over the past decade, as Citizens for Tax Justice has documented, GE’s effective federal income tax rate on its $81.2 billion in pretax U.S. profits has been at most 1.8 percent. Because of the way General Electric’s accountants play with tax liabilities the company actually receives money from the Treasury. They have several billion dollars paid to them from the federal government into company bank accounts—and these are not tax refunds. The company, as Nader argues, is a net drain on the Treasury and a net drain on jobs. It violates a host of environmental and criminal laws. And yet Jeffery Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, was appointed to be the chairman of Obama’s Jobs Council. Immelt’s only major contribution to the jobs initiative was to get rid of 37,000 of his employees since 2001. Jim McNerney, president and CEO of Boeing, who also sat on the Jobs Council, has cut over 14,000 jobs since 2008, according to Public Campaign. The only jobs the CEOs on the Jobs Council were concerned with were the ones these CEOs eradicated. The Jobs Council, which Obama disbanded this week, is a microcosm of what is happening within the corridors of power. Corporations increasingly terminate jobs here to hire grossly underpaid workers in India or China while at the same time stealing as much as fast as they can on the way out the door.
As Michael Hudson has pointed out, financialization has created a new kind of class war. The old class warfare took place between workers and bosses. Workers organized to fight for fair wages, better work hours and safety conditions in the workplace as well as adequate pensions and medical benefits. But with a country of debtors and a government that must also borrow to continue operating, Hudson says, we have changed the way class warfare works. Finance, he points out, controls state and federal policy as well as the lives of ordinary workers. It is able to dictate working conditions. The financiers, who insist that cuts be made so governments can repay loans, impose draconian austerity and long-term unemployment to, as Hudson told a Greek newspaper, “drive down wages to a degree that could not occur in the company-by-company clash between industrial employers and their workers.”
The former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, testifying before Congress, was quite open about the role of debt peonage in keeping workers passive. Greenspan pointed out that since 1980 labor productivity has increased by about 83 percent. Yet real wages have stagnated. Greenspan said this was because workers were too burdened with mortgage debts, college loans, auto payments and credit-card debt to risk losing a job. Household debt in the United States is around $13 trillion. This is only $2 trillion less than the country’s total yearly economic output. Greenspan was right. Miss a payment on your credit card and your interest rates jumps to 30 percent. Fail to pay your mortgage and you lose your home. Miss your health insurance payments, which have been spiraling upwards, and if you are seriously ill you go into bankruptcy, as 1 million Americans who get sick do every year. Trash your credit rating and your fragile financial edifice, built on managing debt, collapses. Since most Americans feel, on some level, as Hudson points out, that they are a step or two away from being homeless, they are deeply averse to challenging corporate power. It is not worth the risk. And the corporate state knows it. Absolute power, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, depends on fear and passivity.
The only way to break this fear and passivity is to organize workers to break the cycle of mounting debt. And the first step to achieving independence from debt—the primary form of political control by the corporate state—is to raise the minimum wage. There are other solutions—forgiving mortgage and student debt, instituting universal health care, establishing a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s Third World infrastructure, and green energy—but none of this will happen until we are able to mount a sustained mass movement that discredits the corporate state. This mass movement will arise, as Nader says, when we mobilize around the minimum wage.
The lowest-grade worker at the General Electric plant that makes high-tech health care devices outside Paterson in Totowa [New Jersey]—a pay grade known as the D 04—was just raised to $14,555 a year. That is under $8 an hour. The plant’s highest-paid hourly employee, known as D 16, earns $22,000. Immelt makes over $11 million a year. This vast disparity in income, and this wage abuse, is played out in every corporation in the country. No one in Washington intends to challenge it.
Only 11.3 percent of workers in this country belong to unions. This is the lowest percentage in 80 years. And nearly all these unions, and especially the AFL-CIO, have been emasculated by corporate power.
Nader is right when he warns that we are not going to be assisted in this effort by established unions. Union leaders are bought off. They are comfortable. They are pulling down at least five times what rank-and-file workers make. Nader says we have to mount protests not only outside the doors of Walmarts and General Electric plants, not only outside congressional offices, but outside the doors of the AFL-CIO. There is no established institution inside or outside government that will help us. They are all broken or complicit. But there are the 30 million working poor who, if we organize to break the system of debt peonage that holds them hostage, may be willing to rise up. We are bound with many chains and shackles. We will have to break them one at a time. But once we rise up, once we are able to threaten the corporate systems that keep us supine through fear, we will unleash a torrent of energy and passion that will confirm the worst nightmares of our corporate overlords.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/breaking_the_chains_of_debt_peonage_20130203/

Too Fast To Fail: Is High-Speed Trading the Next Wall Street Disaster?

Computer algorithms swap thousands of stocks each instant—and could set off a financial meltdown.

 


Illustration by Giacomo Marchesi
At 9:30 A.M. on August 1 a software executive in a spread-collar shirt and a flashy watch pressed a button at the New York Stock Exchange, triggering a bell that signaled the start of the trading day. Milliseconds after the opening trade, buy and sell orders began zapping across the market's servers with alarming speed. The trades were obviously unusual. They came in small batches of 100 shares that involved nearly 150 different financial products, including many stocks that normally don't see anywhere near as much activity. Within three minutes, the trade volume had more than doubled from the previous week's average.
Soon complex computer programs deployed by financial firms swooped in. They bought undervalued stocks as the unusual sales drove their prices down and sold overvalued ones as the purchases drove their prices up. The algorithms were making a killing, and human traders got in on the bounty too.
Within minutes, a wave of urgent email alerts deluged top officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wall Street, NYSE officials scrambled to isolate the source of the bizarre trades. Meanwhile, across the Hudson River, in the Jersey City offices of a midsize financial firm called Knight Capital, panic was setting in. A program that was supposed to have been deactivated had instead gone rogue, blasting out trade orders that were costing Knight nearly $10 million per minute. And no one knew how to shut it down. At this rate, the firm would be insolvent within an hour. Knight's horrified employees spent an agonizing 45 minutes digging through eight sets of trading and routing software before they found the runaway code and neutralized it.
By then it was shortly after 10 a.m., and officials from the NYSE, other major exchanges, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority were gathering for an emergency conference call. It didn't end until 4 p.m.


In the four years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers drove the global financial system to the brink of oblivion, new technologies have changed Wall Street beyond recognition. Despite efforts at reform, today's markets are wilder, less transparent, and, most importantly, faster than ever before. Stock exchanges can now execute trades in less than a half a millionth of a second—more than a million times faster than the human mind can make a decision. Financial firms deploy sophisticated algorithms to battle for fractions of a cent. Designed by the physics nerds and math geniuses known as quants, these programs exploit minute movements and long-term patterns in the markets, buying a stock at $1.00 and selling it at $1.0001, for example. Do this 10,000 times a second and the proceeds add up. Constantly moving into and out of securities for those tiny slivers of profit—and ending the day owning nothing—is known as high-frequency trading.
This rapid churn has reduced the average holding period of a stock: Half a century ago it was eight years; today it is around five days. Most experts agree that high-speed trading algorithms are now responsible for more than half of US trading. Computer programs send and cancel orders tirelessly in a never-ending campaign to deceive and outrace each other, or sometimes just to slow each other down. They might also flood the market with bogus trade orders to throw off competitors, or stealthily liquidate a large stock position in a manner that doesn't provoke a price swing. It's a world where investing—if that's what you call buying and selling a company's stock within a matter of seconds—often comes down to how fast you can purchase or offload it, not how much the company is actually worth.
As technology has ushered in a brave new world on Wall Street, the nation's watchdogs remain behind the curve, unable to effectively monitor, much less regulate, today's markets. As in 2008, when regulators only seemed to realize after the fact the threat posed by the toxic stew of securitization, the financial whiz kids are again one step—or leap—ahead.


The Knight episode was "a canary in the mine," says Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor and former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). "We've been lucky so far that this hasn't been more serious."
Knight wasn't the worst-case scenario. Not even close. A lot of high-frequency trading is done by small proprietary trading firms, subject to less oversight than brand name financial institutions. But big banks have also tried to get in on the act. Imagine a runaway algorithm at a too-big-to-fail company like Bank of America, which manages trillions, not billions, in assets. Or, says Bill Black, a former federal regulator who helped investigate the S&L crisis of the '80s and '90s, imagine trading algorithms causing "a series of cascade failures"—like the domino effect that followed Lehman's collapse. "If enough of these bad things occur at the same time," he says, "financial institutions can begin to fail, even very large ones." It's not a question of whether this will happen, Black warns. "It is a question of when."
Years of mistakes and bad decisions led to the 2008 collapse. But when the next crisis happens, it may not develop over months, weeks, or even days. It could take seconds.
Alpha, New Jersey, is a sleepy hamlet in the Lehigh Valley, near the Delaware River. Somewhere in town (the owners won't say exactly where) is one of 10 2,000-square-foot amplifier facilities that dot the landscape every 75-or-so miles between Chicago and New York City, ensuring that fiber-optic signals travel between the two points as clearly and quickly as possible. Spread Networks, the firm that operates the facility, may have seen some poetry in the community's name—"alpha" is the term investment managers use to describe the performance of an investment after adjusting for risk.
Spread is part of a growing industry dedicated to providing hyperspeed connections for financial firms. A faster trader can sell at a higher price and buy at a lower one because he gets there first. A connection that's just one millisecond faster than the competition's could boost a high-speed firm's earnings by as much as $100 million per year, according to one estimate.
Because of this, trading firms are increasingly pushing the limits to establish the fastest connections between trading hubs like New York, Chicago, and London. Every extra foot of fiber-optic cable adds about 1.5 nanoseconds of delay; each additional mile adds 8 microseconds. That's why companies like Spread have linked financial centers to each other by the shortest routes possible. Spread's Alpha facility is one of more than a dozen similar centers arrayed along the path of its 825-mile-long, $300 million fiber-optic cable between Wall Street and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Spread reportedly charges traders as much as $300,000 a month to use its network. Exchanges like the NYSE charge thousands of dollars per month to firms that want to place their servers as close to the exchanges as possible in order to boost transaction speeds. Industry experts estimate that high-speed traders spent well over $2 billion on infrastructure in 2010 alone.
Traders' need for speed has grown so voracious that two companies are currently building underwater cables (price tag: around $300 million each) across the Atlantic, in an attempt to join Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange by the shortest, fastest route possible. When completed in 2014, one of the cables is expected to shave five to six milliseconds off trans-Atlantic trades.
But why stop there? One trading engineer has proposed positioning a line of drones over the ocean, where they would flash microwave data from one to the next like the chain of mountaintop signal fires in The Lord of the Rings. "At what point do you say, 'This is fast enough'?" asks Brent Weisenborn, a former NASDAQ vice president.
The acceleration of Wall Street cannot be separated from the automation of Wall Street. Since the dawn of the computer age, humans have worried about sophisticated artificial intelligence—HAL, Skynet, the Matrix—seizing control. But traders, in their quest for that million-dollar millisecond, have willingly handed over the reins. Although humans still run the banks and write the code, algorithms now make millions of moment-to-moment calls in the global markets. Some can even learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately, notes Weisenborn, "one thing you can't teach a computer is judgment."
One set of signals the programs have to weigh are countless trade orders other algorithms send out and then quickly rescind. There's a fierce debate about what these abortive trades might be. Some speculate they are new algorithms being tested or strategic feints, the equivalent of sonar pings probing the market for a response. Some of the fake trades could be aimed purely at gobbling up bandwidth to slow down competitors. "There are doubtless former [high-speed traders] who could tell us," Black says. "If I worked for the CFTC or the SEC I would be seeking them out to try to learn what was going on."
On the afternoon of May 6, 2010, CNBC viewers could have mistaken the channel's programming for an apocalyptic blockbuster. The Dow, already down 400 points on bad news from Europe, had suddenly plummeted another 600. Erin Burnett, wide-eyed, gesticulated at charts to illustrate the "unprecedented" 1,000-point drop. The typically manic Jim Cramer reached a new level of frenzy, shouting at viewers to buy—BUY!—Procter & Gamble, which had fallen 25 percent, and wagging his finger at the screen: "If that stock is there, you just go and buy it. It can't be there. That's not a real price!"
Prices of nearly every stock and exchange-traded fund had plunged in minutes. Some 300 securities experienced wild gyrations, with trades executed at prices as low as a penny and as high as $100,000 a share. During the same second, shares of the consulting firm Accenture traded at both $0.01 and $30.
In what was later dubbed the "flash crash," nearly $1 trillion in shareholder value was wiped out in a matter of minutes before the market rebounded, eventually closing down 3 percent from the previous day. Almost five months later, regulators would conclude that, on a day when traders had already been shaken by the Greek debt numbers, a single massive sell order executed by an algorithm belonging to a firm in Kansas had triggered a series of knock-on events that sent the market into a tailspin. The analysis portrayed "a market so fragmented and fragile that a single large trade could send stocks into a sudden spiral," the Wall Street Journal reported.
This GIF shows the rise of high-frequency trading in the stock market from January 2007 through January 2012. Source: Nanex.
The flash crash spurred regulators to action—but spurs can only make a horse gallop so fast. No one in Washington makes an extra million bucks a year for moving a millisecond faster, and it shows. So far, Congress and the nation's financial watchdogs have done more hand-wringing than regulating. In classic Washington fashion, when a Senate subcommittee held a hearing in late September on the "rules of the road" for algorithmic trading, the only consensus to emerge was that more hearings were needed.
"Thanks to technology, our securities markets are more efficient and accessible than ever before," then-SEC chair Mary Schapiro said at an October market technology roundtable. "But we also know that technology has pitfalls. And when it doesn't work quite right, the consequences can be severe. Just imagine what can happen if an automated traffic light flashes green rather than red, if a wing flap on a plane goes up rather than down, if a railroad track switches and sends the train right rather than left."

Rise Of The Preppers: 50 Of The Best Prepper Websites And Blogs On The Internet

Michael Snyder, Contributor
Activist Post

Are you preparing for the collapse of society?  If so, the truth is that you are definitely not alone.  The number of preppers in the U.S. has absolutely exploded in recent years.  It has been estimated that there are now approximately 3 million preppers in the United States, and Doomsday Preppers is currently the highest rated show on the National Geographic channel.  In fact, you could be living next to a prepper and never even know it.

All over America, families are transforming spare rooms into long-term food storage pantries, planting survival gardens, unplugging from the grid, converting their homes over to alternative sources of energy, taking self-defense courses and stocking up on just about everything that you can imagine.

The re-election of Barack Obama and other recent events seem to have given the prepper movement even more momentum.  For example, in January the U.S. Mint broke all kinds of records and sold nearly half a billion dollars worth of gold and silver coins to the public.  Not only that, Americans bought enough guns during the last two months of 2012 alone to supply the entire armies of China and India.  When it comes to prepping, nobody can match the passion that Americans put into it.

So what are all of these people prepping for?

Well, the truth is that no two preppers have the exact same motivation.  There is a general consensus among preppers that our world is becoming increasingly unstable, but when you sit down and talk with them you find out that there are a whole host of different civilization-killing events that various preppers are concerned about.  Some are preparing for the collapse of the economy.  Others are extremely concerned about the potential for crippling natural disasters and catastrophic earth changes. To other preppers, the rise of the "Big Brother" surveillance grid that is being constructed all around us is the greatest danger, and many of them warn of the tyrannical agenda of the New World Order.

 Terrorism, killer pandemics, EMP attacks, World War III, martial law, solar megastorms, asteroid strikes and societal chaos are some of the other things that many preppers are worried about.  There are even some preppers that are not worried about any "threats" at all - they just want to get "back to the land" and want to become less dependent on the system.

Whatever the motivation, it is undeniable that the prepper movement has gotten very large and that it continues to grow.

In fact, there was a recent article in the New York Times about preppers that was actually written by a prepper entitled "The Preppers Next Door"...

To the unprepared, the very word 'prepper' is likely to summon images of armed zealots hunkered down in bunkers awaiting the End of Days, but the reality, at least here in New York, is less dramatic. Local Preppers are doctors, doormen, charter school executives, subway conductors, advertising writers and happily married couples from the Bronx. They are no doubt people that you know — your acquaintances and neighbors. People, I’ll admit, like myself.
 I was absolutely amazed that one of the key mouthpieces of the establishment, the New York Times, would publish an article that was mostly positive about preppers, because the truth is that prepping is essentially a huge expression of a lack of faith in the establishment.   Even the article admitted as much...

PREPPING IS THE BIG SHORT: a bet not just against a city, or a country or a government, but against the whole idea of sustainable civilization. For that reason, it chafes against one of polite society’s last remaining taboos — that the way we live is not simply plagued by certain problems, but is itself insolubly problematic.
And that is exactly right.  There are millions of us that are entirely convinced that the world around us is becoming increasingly unstable and that "the system" will not be there to take care of us when everything falls to pieces.

With each passing day, even more Americans lose faith in the system and begin prepping.  If you are one of those new preppers, there are actually dozens of great websites out there on the Internet where you can get an education about prepping for free.  The list of websites and blogs that I have compiled below contains more articles and resources than you could ever possibly need.  Hopefully many of you will find this list to be extremely helpful.

The following are 50 of the best prepper websites and blogs on the Internet...

1. Survival Blog
2. American Preppers Network
3. The Survival Mom
4. SHTFPlan.com
 5. Survival 4 Christians
6. Urban Survival
7. Backdoor Survival
8. Off Grid Survival
9. Modern Survival Online
10. The Survivalist Blog
11. The Suburban Prepper
12. The Great Northern Prepper
13. Prepper Website
14. The Survival Podcast
15. Doom And Bloom
16. Provident Living Today
17. Prepper.org
18. Prepared Christian
19. SHTFblog.com
20. Survival Cache
21. Modern Survival Blog
22. Rural Revolution
23. Preparedness Advice Blog
24. Prep-Blog.com
25. Survival And Prosperity
26. TEOTWAWKI Blog
27. The Neighbor Network
28. The Apartment Prepper
29. Armageddon Online
30. The Berkey Guy Blog
31. The Home For Survival
32. My Family Survival Plan
33. Prepography
33. Prepper Dashboard
34. Bacon And Eggs
35. SHTF School
36. Canadian Preppers Network
37. Maximum Survival
38. Survivor Jane
39. Prepping To Survive
40. SaltnPrepper
41. SGTReport
42. SHTF Wiki
43. Jewish Preppers
44. Survival Magazine
45. Survival Week
46. Prepper Forums
47. Survivalist Boards
48. Tactical Intelligence
49. The Prepared Ninja
50. Common Sense Homesteading

The sad truth is that our world is becoming increasingly unstable in a whole bunch of different ways and we all need to learn how to prepare for the difficult years ahead.

Unfortunately, most Americans simply are not prepared for much of anything.

For example, a large percentage of Americans do not even have enough savings to get them through a single financial emergency.  According to one recent report, approximately 44 percent of all households in the United States are just one unexpected event away from financial disaster.

Most American families do not have much food stored up either.  One recent survey discovered that 55 percent of all Americans have less than three days supply of food in their homes.

Could that possibly be accurate?  Do people really keep that little food in their homes?
 Another survey asked Americans how long they think they could survive if the entire electrical grid went down and there was no more power for an extended period of time.  Incredibly, 21 percent of those who responded said that they would survive for less than a week, and an additional 28 percent of those who responded said that they would survive for less than two weeks.  Close to 75 percent of those who responded said that they would be dead before the two month mark.

So who are the crazy ones?

Are the people trying to become more independent and self-sufficient crazy, or are the people who have complete and total faith that the system will take care of them no matter what happens actually the crazy ones?

I don't know about you, but I would prefer for myself and my family to at least have a chance to survive if society melts down for some reason.

What about you?

Are you a prepper?

Do you know some preppers?

Do you believe that people should be prepping?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below...

This article first appeared here at The Truth.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

HBO Wants Google to Censor…. HBO.com

hbo
Every week Google is asked to remove more than four million URLs from its search engine. While these automated requests are usually legitimate, mistakes happen more often than one might expect. In a recent DMCA notice HBO asked Google to censor links to HBO.com, as well as several other legitimate sites and blogs.
In common with many other websites on the Internet, Google has an obligation to remove infringing content upon receiving a valid DMCA request from copyright holders.
Starting a few months ago copyright holders drastically increased the number of notices sent, totaling more than 50 million last year.
While many of the submitted URLs do indeed link to infringing content, there are also occasional mistakes, often caused by automated filters. Not a big surprise considering the number of requests that go out, but these mistakes can still be quite embarrassing.
Today, for example, we stumbled upon a DMCA notice sent on behalf of HBO in which Google was asked to remove “infringing” links to ‘Eastbound and Down’ content in HBO’s very own store.


And that’s not the only mistake they’ve made.
HBO doesn’t like HBO
hbono
The same DMCA notice also lists various other legitimate sites, including Perez Hilton’s blog, Pinterest, MTV.com and IGN.com. All sites wrote reviews or news articles about HBO content, but there were no links to pirated content.
It is worth noting that the DMCA notice in question was sent by DtectNet. This is the anti-piracy division of MarkMonitor, the same company that is also responsible for tracking down BitTorrent pirates as part of the upcoming six-strikes anti-piracy scheme.
The good news is that Google appears to have caught quite a few of these erroneous claims, meaning that not all of the reported sites are censored. However, this task isn’t getting any easier as the number of notices continue to increase.
At least it provides us with content to write about, although with the text “Eastbound and Down” appearing in this article too, who knows how long it will remain indexed by Google….