Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Fed's Bernanke Should Testify in AIG Bailout Lawsuit, Judge Rules


A U.S. judge said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should be required to testify in the lawsuit by the former chief of American International Group Inc., Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, against the United States over the insurer's 2008 bailout.


Judge Thomas Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims on Monday rejected the government's effort to keep Bernanke from being subjected to a deposition by Greenberg's Starr International Co.

Wheeler called Bernanke a "key witness" who can provide highly relevant testimony, given that he was a "central figure" in the decision to bail out AIG.

"Indeed, the court cannot fathom having to decide this multi-billion dollar claim without the testimony of such a key government decision maker," Wheeler wrote. "These facts constitute 'extraordinary circumstances' for the taking of Mr. Bernanke's deposition," which Wheeler said he plans to attend.

Read More...

Bank of Cyprus depositors lose 47.5% of savings

Depositors at bailed-out Cyprus' largest bank will lose 47.5% of their savings exceeding 100,000 euros ($132,000), the government said Monday.
The figure comes four months after Cyprus agreed on a 23 billion-euro ($30.5 billion) rescue package with its euro partners and the International Monetary Fund. In exchange for a 10 billion euro loan, deposits worth more than the insured limit of 100,000 euros at the Bank of Cyprus and smaller lender Laiki were raided in a so-called bail-in to prop up the country's teetering banking sector.
The savings raid prompted Cypriot authorities to impose restrictions on money withdrawals and transfers for all banks to head off a run. Christopher Pissarides, the Nobel laureate who heads the government's economic advisory body, forecast Monday that the bank controls could be in place for another two years.
"The (economy) has absorbed the initial shock and is moving ahead. We see things improving," he told reporters after talks with Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades Monday.
Read More...

Federal Mortgage Bailout Program Sees a Quarter of Homeowners Re-Default


This story speaks for itself:
Nearly 1.2 million mortgage modifications have been completed since the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) was first launched four years ago. Yet more than 306,000 borrowers have re-defaulted on their loans and more than 88,000 are at risk of following suit, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) found in its quarterly report to Congress.
In addition, the watchdog found that the longer a homeowner stays in the HAMP modification program, the more likely they are to default. Those who have been in the program since 2009, are re-defaulting at a rate of 46%, the inspector general found.
HAMP, which was launched by the Treasury Department at the height of the foreclosure crisis, aimed to help as many as 4 million borrowers avoid foreclosure by making their payments more affordable through reduced interest rates, extended loan terms or, in some cases, reduced mortgage principals.
Not only has the program fallen far short of that goal but with each year of the program, a growing number of homeowners have re-defaulted, the inspector general found.
What’s the cost to taxpayers so far?
As of April 30, taxpayers have lost some $815 million on the permanent mortgage modifications that have re-defaulted, the inspector general reported. As part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Treasury allocated $19.1 billion to the HAMP program. So far, it has spent $4.4 billion, the inspector general said.
Read More...

The Important Things We DON’T Have Money For, And The Crazy Things We DO Have Money For…

In an age of “belt tightening” and “budget cuts”, you would think that government officials would be trying to spend our money wisely.  Unfortunately, when it comes time to cut spending our politicians tend to do everything that they can to protect their own interests and their own pet projects, but they don’t seem to mind implementing cuts that deeply hurt military families, the poor and the elderly.  The facts that you are about to read will likely upset you very much.  The federal government and our state governments are wasting money in some of the most ridiculous ways imaginable.  Meanwhile, we are being told that we don’t have any money for a lot of really important things.  Our hard-earned tax dollars are being horribly mismanaged, and the American people deserve to hear the truth about this gross negligence.
Now before I go any further, I want to make it very clear that I believe that the federal government and our state governments are already taking in more than enough money.  They should be able to do everything that they need to do on the money that they are already extracting from all of us.  And if we had been living within our means all this time, we would not be drowning in debt as a nation today.
Unfortunately, our politicians did choose to go into tremendous amounts of debt, and the American people did not stop them.  So now we are rapidly heading toward a debt crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
And our politicians should be reducing spending.  There is no question about that.  But what this article is about is priorities, and right now our politicians really seem to have their priorities messed up.  What follows are some examples of this…
The city of Detroit says that it is totally broke and has no money for pensions
…but somehow the city has 444 million dollars to spend on a new hockey arena for the Detroit Red Wings.
Large numbers of federal employees have been hit with mandatory furloughs in 2013 due to the sequester…
…but somehow the federal government is able to spend tens of millions of dollars to fill our skies with surveillance drones.
The U.S. government is so broke that it has had to borrow more than a trillion dollars from China…
…but somehow we have plenty of money to help  “modernize China’s energy grid“.
The U.S. Congress has cut $60,000,000 for schools on Indian reservations across the country…
…but somehow the IRS is able to pay out $70,000,000 in bonuses to their workers.
It is being projected that federal budget cuts will cost the U.S. economy 1.6 million jobs through the end of 2014…
…but somehow the federal government has plenty of money to provide many former members of Congress with six-figure annual incomes for life
Members of Congress receive retirement benefits that are far more generous than those earned by the average worker, according to a recent Bankrate analysis.
Not only do congressional representatives and senators earn the guarantee of a monthly pension check — a benefit that has become increasingly rare for most U.S. workers — they also receive Social Security payments and can opt to pay into the federal Thrift Savings Plan, a 401(k) style-plan with fees that are far lower than most retirement plans.
As a result, longtime members of Congress can easily retire with six-figure annual incomes for life.
The Obama administration is forcing the U.S. Army to reduce the number of active combat brigades from 45 to 33
…but the Obama administration has no problem finding millions of dollars to send to radical jihadist Syrian rebels that are beheading innocent Christians over in Syria.
Barack Obama says that there simply is not any money available for White House tours
…but the Obamas are able to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on exotic vacations.  In August, Obama and his family will be spending 8 days in a beautiful home on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.
The federal government says that there was not enough money for the traditional 4th of July fireworks at many military bases around the country this year…
…but somehow the National Institutes of Health has $509,840 to spend on “a study that will send text messages in ‘gay lingo’ to methamphetamine addicts to try to persuade them to use fewer drugs and more condoms.”
Due to “budget cuts”, swimming pools for military families are being shut down all over the country…
…but Barack Obama felt that it was so important to send $500,000,000 to the Palestinian Authority that he signed a national security executive order last Friday that enabled him to get around an act of Congress that was intended to prevent him from sending that money to them.
The state of California is so strapped for cash that it may have to release thousands of violent criminals back on to the streets…
…but somehow the state of California has plenty of money to provide a multitude of welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.
A total of about 38 million dollars is being cut from “meals on wheels” programs around the nation due to the sequester…
…but somehow the federal government has plenty of money to hassle ordinary citizens with ridiculous amounts of red tape.  For example, a small-time magician out in Missouri that does magic shows for kids was recently forced to submit a 32 page “disaster plan” for the rabbit that he uses in his shows.
With priorities like this, is it any wonder that our national debt is completely and totally out of control?
If the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills, it would stretch from the earth to the moon five times.  It would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.
If our politicians would have been spending our money wisely all of these years, we would have enough money to do the essential things that the government should be doing.
But instead, our money has been wasted in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable, and yet the American people just continue to sit back and allow our politicians to flush our money down the toilet.
So what do you think about all of this?  Are there any additional examples that you would add to the list above?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Republished from: The Economic Collapse

Either Through War Or Financial Collapse: “It Will Be Very Painful”

Well known contrarian economist Dr. Doom Marc Faber weighs in on the state of the global economy and current events.
Despite being ignored by his many colleagues in economic circles for his dire warnings ahead of the crash of 2008, Faber has been on the mark about how stock markets would behave, what governments would do, and the subsequent effects on the global populace.
To say that he expects a crash would be an understatement.
According to Faber, what’s coming down the pike will be much, much worse than any crash we’ve seen in our lifetimes, which is why he’s previously recommended high voltage electric perimeter fencing and attack dogs as investments, along with farms outside of high population areas and machine guns to defend them.
Here are the latest insights from Marc Faber via The Daily Crux and Zero Hedge:
In general, if you look at the world, say compared to the 1950′s, the 1960′s and even the 70′s, it’s very clear that financial markets have grown disproportionately compared to the real economy. In other words, you have a global GDP of $60 Trillion and you have financial markets that turn $60 trillion around in a week or less.
I believe that one day this financial bubble will have to adjust to the down side.
Either it will have to adjust to the downside because we have an inflationary burst, or we have a collapse of the system.
We don’t know exactly how the end game will be played.

It’s going to end one day. And when it ends, either through war or through a financial collapse, it will be very painful.
According to the good doctor, as we’ve seen throughout history, when governments begin to lose the confidence of their people through economic collapse they often turn to war. And this time will be no different, as Faber has previously forecast that World War III will occur in the next five years.
It’s coming, and those who have not developed long term preparedness plans, stored nutritious foods, invested in gold and silver, and stockpiled barterable supplies will experience the worst of what humanity has to offer.
The collapse of the global financial and economic bubble, which has been built on conjecture and lies over the last several decades, is inevitable.
Get ready.

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Author:
Mac Slavo
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Date: July 29th, 2013
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Republished from: SHTF Plan

Big Banks Manipulated Energy Markets In California and the Midwest … Ripping Off Tens of Millions of Dollars in 9 Months

by WashingtonsBlog

Energy Markets Are Manipulated

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says that JP Morgan has massively manipulated energy markets in  California and the Midwest, obtaining tens of millions of dollars in overpayments from grid operators between September 2010 and June 2011.
As shown below, big banks have manipulated virtually every other market as well – both in the financial sector and the real economy – and broken virtually every law on the books.

Commodities Are Manipulated

The big banks and government agencies have been conspiring to manipulate commodities prices for decades.
The big banks are taking over important aspects of the physical economy, including uranium mining, petroleum products, aluminum, ownership and operation of airports, toll roads, ports, and electricity.
And they are using these physical assets to massively manipulate commodities prices … scalping consumers of many billions of dollars each year.

Interest Rates Are Manipulated

Interest rates are rigged:

Derivatives Are Manipulated

The big banks have long manipulated derivatives … a $1,200 Trillion Dollar market.
Indeed, many trillions of dollars of derivatives are being manipulated in the exact same same way that interest rates are fixed: through gamed self-reporting.

Currency Markets Are Rigged

Currency markets are massively rigged.

Gold and Silver Are Manipulated

The Guardian and Telegraph report that gold and silver prices are “fixed” in the same way as interest rates and derivatives – in daily conference calls by the powers-that-be.

Oil Prices Are Manipulated

Oil prices are manipulated as well.

Everything Can Be Manipulated through High-Frequency Trading

Traders with high-tech computers can manipulate stocksbonds, options, currencies and commodities. And see this.

Manipulating Numerous Markets In Myriad Ways

The big banks and other giants manipulate numerous markets in myriad ways, for example:
  • Engaging in mafia-style big-rigging fraud against local governments. See thisthis and this
  • Shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction they handled over the course of decades, stealing collectively billions of dollars from pensions worldwide. Details hereherehereherehere,herehereherehereherehere and here


  • Pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers. See thisthisthisthis and this. This would be like selling your car, and collecting money from 10 different buyers for the same car
  • Pushing investments which they knew were terrible, and then betting against the same investments to make money for themselves. See thisthisthisthis and this
  • Engaging in unlawful “Wash Trades” to manipulate asset prices. See thisthis and this
  • Participating in various Ponzi schemes. See thisthis and this
  • Bribing and bullying ratings agencies to inflate ratings on their risky investments

The Big Picture

The big picture is simple:
  • The big banks manipulate every market they touch
  • The government has given the banks huge subsidies … which they are using for speculation and other things which don’t help the economy. In other words, propping up the big banks by throwing money at them doesn’t help the economy
  • The big banks own the D.C. politicians … so Congress and the White House won’t do anything unless the people force change

Russia & China Intend to “Kick the Chair Out From Under the US Dollar”

Russia and China have now pooled their efforts in order to make their dreams of a stronger rouble and yuan come true. The currency wars raging around the world are just the tip of the iceberg, the famous US trader Russ Winter says. China has launched a series of manoeuvres to wrest away from the dollar its current status as the planet’s main reserve currency. In accordance with a long-standing Chinese tradition, the strategy of that war is based on deception.
The two allies’ plan is as follows: first they want to put a tight noose around the dollar’s neck, and then, when a convenient moment comes, kick the chair out from under the United States.



Silver Buffs Generic Add2
We have long warned readers that the dollar is currently undergoing a death by a thousand cuts as nations the world over move to reduce their holdings of dollars and announce new trade agreements in non-dollar currencies.
If currency trader Russ Winter is correct, Russia & China are getting ready to give the process a kick start.
As Russia, Behind the Headlines points out, the goal is for the rouble and the yuan to eventually replace the dollar as global reserve currencies:
In simple terms, Russia and China want to increase the convertibility of the rouble and the yuan, and to increase the two currencies’ role in international trade – and then to propose them as global reserve currencies. The United States, where the level of sovereign dept is approaching 110 per cent of GDP, will be unable to meet such a challenge.

How does one go about position your currency as the next global reserve currency? In a word, gold:

To that end, China and Russia will need to back their currencies with gold. Last year China held 30.2 per cent of the global gold and currency reserves. It is unclear how much of the Chinese reserves are being held in gold, since the country does not disclose such details.
There is no doubt, however, that China’s gold reserves are growing.

Jim Rickards has estimated that China has already accumulated over 5,000 tons of gold. The true number could already be closer to 10,000 tons:

Experts suspect that when the Chinese said they held 1,054 tonnes of the metal in 2009, they deliberately underreported the figure by a factor of 2 or 3.
Be that as it may, China is known to produce 350 tonnes of gold every year, which translates into 1,400 tonnes over the past four years. There is little doubt that all that gold goes straight to the Chinese central bank’s vaults.
Meanwhile, Chinese imports of gold via Hong Kong rose by 950 tonnes between 2011 and 2012. In the first five months of 2013 mainland China imported more of the metal than in the entire 2012.

Perhaps the reason that GOFO has gone (permanently?) negative is the fact that 1,198 tons of gold have been sucked East out of the LBMA during the first half of 2013 alone:
Yet another important factor is the physical shipments of gold from the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) last May.
During that month, shipments rose to 28.2 million ounces (877 tonnes) of gold. The physical volume of gold that has been sold to China since the beginning of 2013 currently stands at 1,198 tonnes.
While the Western financial media screams that the secular bull market in gold has ended, if anything is ending, it is the global reserve status of the US dollar. We suspect sub-$1200 gold only accelerated China’s acquisition of gold.  Expect June’s import numbers to top 1,000 tons.   When one day in 2015 or 2017 China suddenly announces that the yuan will be backed with 10,000 tons of 1kg gold bars, the chair will certainly be fully kicked out from under the US dollar.

Got PHYZZ??

Judge Napolitano: Detroit's Obamacare Bailout To Backfire


"Avalanche Of Abuse" Forces Ex-JPMorganite To Quit Bank Of Israel Candidacy

A month ago we noted the out-squidding of Goldman Sachs as ex-JPMorganite Jacob Frenkel looked set to replace Fischer as the head of the Bank of Israel. Four weeks later and it seems the chairman of the all-important Group-of-30 has had enough, and when it comes to "squidding" into central banks, Goldman truly has no comparable.
  • FRENKEL SAYS HE WITHDRAWS CANDIDACY FOR BANK OF ISRAEL CHIEF
  • FRENKEL SAYS HE SUFFERED `AVALANCHE' OF ABUSE
Poor thing. And this is after his actual 'acceptance' was already agreed.

Treasury's Lew: Congress Needs to Pass Debt Limit

Congress needs to raise the debt limit and take away the "cloud of uncertainty" about the nation's ability to pay its bills, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said in an interview broadcast Sunday.
"The fight over the debt limit in 2011 hurt the economy, even though, in the end, we saw an extension of the debt limit. We saw confidence fall, and it hurt the economy. Congress needs to do its job. It needs to finish its work on appropriation bills. It needs to pass a debt limit," Lew said on NBC's Meet The Press.
Senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill are trying to come up with must-do legislation to keep federal agencies running after Sept. 30 and prevent the possibility of a government shutdown. At issue is what is normally routine: a plug-the-gap measure to fund the government for a few weeks or months until a deal can be worked out on appropriations bills giving agencies their operating budgets for the full 2014 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
However, some Democratic liberals don't want to vote to continue to fund the government at new, lower levels mandated by the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration. And some conservatives are making a last stand against President Barack Obama's new health care law. In addition, Senate Democrats are resistant to a $20 billion spending cut wanted by many Republicans.
Lew maintained that the president won't negotiate over the debt limit but stopped short, however, of saying that Obama would shut down the government.
"Drawing this to brinksmanship is a mistake. It's bad for the economy for it to be brinksmanship," he said.
© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Fewer Young Americans Have Full-Time Jobs Now Than Last Year (CHART)

According to a recent poll, young Americans are finding themselves with fewer job opportunities as the recovery continues.
The poll, conducted by Gallup, discovered that only 43.6 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 had a full-time job in June 2013. That rate is lower than the 47 percent of millennials who were employed full-time in 2012. In fact, more young Americans reported to be employed full-time three years ago than last month.
Here is the chart from Gallup:

young americans full time jobs
One report by the organization Generation Opportunity measured the youth jobless rate at 16.1 percent in June, more than double the 7.6 percent unemployment rate experienced by all Americans. Additionally, Generation Opportunity has estimated that there are 1.7 million young adults without a job who are not counted as unemployed because they've given up looking for work altogether.
After the number of unemployed Americans skyrocketed during the Great Recession, young people began to compete with more experienced candidates for very few job openings. In turn, America's youth nonemployment has become one of the worst among large and wealthy nations, according to a report from public policy organization Demos.
Gallup's recent poll also discovered that the benefits of having a college education in today's job market continue to grow. Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 who have at least a college degree are nearly twice as likely to have a full-time job than their peers without a degree, according to the survey.
That said, many young Americans with college degrees are facing the additional stress of paying back ever-growing student loan debt. A recent survey from One Wisconsin Institute, a communication network for Wisconsin progressives, found that it will take the average student loan borrower more than 21 years to completely pay off their debt.
Roughly two-thirds of college students graduated in 2011 with debt levels reaching about 60 percent of their average annual income, according to a June report from Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.

The Important Things We DON’T Have Money For, And The Crazy Things We DO Have Money For…

by Michael Snyder
Government Waste
In an age of “belt tightening” and “budget cuts”, you would think that government officials would be trying to spend our money wisely.  Unfortunately, when it comes time to cut spending our politicians tend to do everything that they can to protect their own interests and their own pet projects, but they don’t seem to mind implementing cuts that deeply hurt military families, the poor and the elderly.  The facts that you are about to read will likely upset you very much.  The federal government and our state governments are wasting money in some of the most ridiculous ways imaginable.  Meanwhile, we are being told that we don’t have any money for a lot of really important things.  Our hard-earned tax dollars are being horribly mismanaged, and the American people deserve to hear the truth about this gross negligence.
Now before I go any further, I want to make it very clear that I believe that the federal government and our state governments are already taking in more than enough money.  They should be able to do everything that they need to do on the money that they are already extracting from all of us.  And if we had been living within our means all this time, we would not be drowning in debt as a nation today.
Unfortunately, our politicians did choose to go into tremendous amounts of debt, and the American people did not stop them.  So now we are rapidly heading toward a debt crisis unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
And our politicians should be reducing spending.  There is no question about that.  But what this article is about is priorities, and right now our politicians really seem to have their priorities messed up.  What follows are some examples of this…
The city of Detroit says that it is totally broke and has no money for pensions
…but somehow the city has 444 million dollars to spend on a new hockey arena for the Detroit Red Wings.
Large numbers of federal employees have been hit with mandatory furloughs in 2013 due to the sequester…
…but somehow the federal government is able to spend tens of millions of dollars to fill our skies with surveillance drones.
The U.S. government is so broke that it has had to borrow more than a trillion dollars from China…
…but somehow we have plenty of money to help  “modernize China’s energy grid“.
The U.S. Congress has cut $60,000,000 for schools on Indian reservations across the country…
…but somehow the IRS is able to pay out $70,000,000 in bonuses to their workers.
It is being projected that federal budget cuts will cost the U.S. economy1.6 million jobs through the end of 2014…
…but somehow the federal government has plenty of money to provide many former members of Congress with six-figure annual incomes for life
Members of Congress receive retirement benefits that are far more generous than those earned by the average worker, according to a recent Bankrate analysis.
Not only do congressional representatives and senators earn the guarantee of a monthly pension check — a benefit that has become increasingly rare for most U.S. workers — they also receive Social Security payments and can opt to pay into the federal Thrift Savings Plan, a 401(k) style-plan with fees that are far lower thanmost retirement plans.
As a result, longtime members of Congress can easily retire with six-figure annual incomes for life.
The Obama administration is forcing the U.S. Army to reduce the number of active combat brigades from 45 to 33
…but the Obama administration has no problem finding millions of dollars to send to radical jihadist Syrian rebels that are beheading innocent Christians over in Syria.
Barack Obama says that there simply is not any money available for White House tours
…but the Obamas are able to spend hundreds of millions of dollarson exotic vacations.  In August, Obama and his family will be spending 8 days in a beautiful home on the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.
The federal government says that there was not enough money for the traditional 4th of July fireworks at many military bases around the country this year…
…but somehow the National Institutes of Health has $509,840 to spend on “a study that will send text messages in ‘gay lingo’ to methamphetamine addicts to try to persuade them to use fewer drugs and more condoms.”
Due to “budget cuts”, swimming pools for military families are being shut down all over the country…
…but Barack Obama felt that it was so important to send $500,000,000to the Palestinian Authority that he signed a national security executive order last Friday that enabled him to get around an act of Congress that was intended to prevent him from sending that money to them.
The state of California is so strapped for cash that it may have to releasethousands of violent criminals back on to the streets…
…but somehow the state of California has plenty of money to provide a multitude of welfare benefits for illegal immigrants.
A total of about 38 million dollars is being cut from “meals on wheels” programs around the nation due to the sequester…
…but somehow the federal government has plenty of money to hassle ordinary citizens with ridiculous amounts of red tape.  For example, a small-time magician out in Missouri that does magic shows for kids was recently forced to submit a 32 page “disaster plan” for the rabbit that he uses in his shows.
With priorities like this, is it any wonder that our national debt is completely and totally out of control?
If the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills, it would stretch from the earth to the moon five times.  It would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.
If our politicians would have been spending our money wisely all of these years, we would have enough money to do the essential things that the government should be doing.
But instead, our money has been wasted in some of the most bizarre ways imaginable, and yet the American people just continue to sit back and allow our politicians to flush our money down the toilet.
So what do you think about all of this?  Are there any additional examples that you would add to the list above?  Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

Detroit: Pensions or Derivatives? Glass-Steagall Would Have Made the Choice

Detroit: Pensions or Derivatives? Glass-Steagall Would Have Made the Choice
The 250-year-old “arsenal” city of Detroit was brought into extreme impoverishment by the collapse of the auto/machine-tool industry in size and wage levels, and the national refusal to reverse that collapse, under the Bush and Obama presidencies. Lyndon LaRouche first put forward the policy to revive that industrial base in November 2004; Bush and Felix Rohatyn blocked it; Obama fixed the wage collapse in stone in the 2009 auto bankruptcy/bailout.
But now the most immediate choice in Detroit involves the impact of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1998.
That choice is as follows: The city emergency manager, bankruptcy lawyer Kevyn Orr, has made an agreement to pay three banks — UBS, Bank of America, and SBS — approximately $$225 million by Nov. 1. This amount equals 15% of Detroit’s total annual all-source revenues estimated at $1.49 billion this year, and Orr agreed to do it while defaulting on pension bonds. This $225 million is not a debt; rather it represents 75% of the “current negative value” (to Detroit) of swaps agreements with those banks on $1.4 billion in 2005 city borrowing. That is, it is a payoff on a LIBOR-rigged derivatives bet that Detroit was conned into making in 2005 by those banks, after borrowing from them. And if the payment is delayed beyond Nov. 1 to a second payment deadline of Mar. 1, 2014, under Orr’s agreement it will be 85% of the “current negative value” of the bet, or likely $250 million.
Orr agreed to this derivatives payoff two days before declaring bankruptcy against pensions, retiree health funds, and other general creditors, giving it first priority outside the bankruptcy court.
Read more: http://larouchepac.com/node/27528#.UfVFpv_1jVQ.twitter

Modern Cars Can Be Hacked -- Boats and Planes Next?

Nicholas West
Activist Post

The question of whether or not modern cars can be hacked has been answered in the wake of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of journalist Michael Hastings.

Dr. Kathleen Fisher spoke in 2012 about DARPA's High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) program, making it clear that all modern cars could be vulnerable to hacking and solutions need to be found.



Additional concerns are now being raised about the role GPS systems could play in making it possible to hack boats, planes and other GPS-reliant systems.

GPS tracking and positioning technology was brought to us by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Apparently, DARPA has done such a good job thoroughly embedding GPS into military applications, as well as permitting it to trickle down to "civilian devices," that it has permeated nearly all of modern life.

As stated by Arati Prabhakar, head of DARPA, "sometimes a capability is so powerful that our reliance on it, in itself, becomes a vulnerability."



As Extreme Tech reports, this vulnerability can be exploited very easily, and very cheaply:
About a year ago, Todd Humphreys and his team from the University of Texas called GPS navigation into serious question. Using just a few simple pieces of equipment, a roughly $3,000 investment dwarfed by what cyber-criminals often invest in hardware, they were able to steer a small drone badly off course. It was a blunt instrument, just capable of messing with the drone’s sense of direction and, potentially, sending it careening into the ground. The demonstration was so worrying that Humphreys soon found himself testifying before Congress, and sitting in meetings with everyone from the FAA to the Pentagon.
The same hole used to exploit GPS to down the drone still exists, and Humphrey's team has upped their game by further improving their capability to interfere with GPS:
This week, they boarded a 210-foot super-yacht by the name of White Rose of the Drachs and used the exact same technique to leave its captain and crew stunned and helpless. 
All you have to do is introduce a signal stronger than the one generated by these satellites. 
With just a laptop, a small antenna, and a GPS “spoofing” device, the team fed a stronger signal to the yacht’s steering system than the genuine one, incoming from actual GPS satellites... 
This is an insidious form of attack because the ship’s navigation technology will continue to report that the ship is both on course and precisely where it is supposed to be — even if neither of those things is true...
The team was able to steer the ship to port or starboard at will, and the crew was totally unaware that anything was wrong. Captain Andrew Schofield told Fox News he was “gobsmacked,” when he found out what had been done to his ship, as was the entire deck team. His $80 million baby could have easily been run into a sandbar or reef...  
This spoofing attack undermines the trust these professionals put in their navigation systems. Even slightly interfering with a large amount of sea traffic could hamper trading ports, and potentially throw a wrench into large-scale economies. 
The threat extends to any type of transportation that uses GPS, which of course includes planes. The same type of attack could be used to steer a plane, or planes, off course, causing mid-air collisions or worse. However, at least with boats and planes there is a possible human override. Not so with unmanned systems. In fact, drones already have been revealed as open to hacking and viruses, as Dr. Kathleen Fisher also confirmed in the video above, but apparently Congress is not sufficiently concerned to thwart the entrance of drones to American skies by 2015.

Beyond drones, what about GPS-directed munitions? These are the scenarios that become worrisome at a whole different level.

Extreme Tech closes their article with a solution: "implement the P(Y)-code encryption used by military assets in a wider range of civilian technology."

However, DARPA has already moved in another direction, which may indicate the increased news coverage about GPS vulnerability. Whether or not the threat is real, they are using it to explore the idea of an "autonomous chip."

The world has apparently become so dependent on GPS, that mega defense contractor, Raytheon, offers the following infographic - "Imagine The World Without GPS" - to illustrate the comprehensive concern:

Click graphic to enlarge. Source: Raytheon

Naturally, the original source of what has now become a problem is offering the solution.  DARPA seeks to augment or perhaps eliminate the reliance on satellites altogether by establishing a new system that relies on microchips:
The tiny chip holds three gyroscopes, three accelerometers and an atomic clock, which, together, work as an autonomous navigation system
DARPA envisages using this technology to replace GPS in some contexts, especially in small-caliber ammunition or for monitoring people. (emphasis added) [Source]
The official DARPA press release entitled, "Extreme Miniaturization: Seven Devices, One Chip to Navigate Without GPS" is worth reading in its entirety as it is a perfect example of why we should never feel safe looking to the military-industrial complex for safety. Using our tax dollars, they all but admit that the GPS technology with which they have marked the world is severely compromised. And, naturally, it is that waste of money that requires us to throw more money into the solution, even as they supposedly could not have envisioned the threat from the beginning.

This project might be a massive boondoggle, since it is slightly strange that the call to augment or replace GPS was publicized one year ago by DARPA, and is being openly developed. If the scenarios for creating mass havoc on the cheap are to be believed, this would not be a smart announcement to make.

It is almost certain that we will be increasingly subjected to potential scenarios designed to convince us that every "bad actor" from North Korea to Anonymous to any common low-rent terrorist is set to bring down planes, the economy, and whatever else will get us to welcome the latest round of ubiquitous surveillance and tracking technology.



Additional Sources:
http://defensesystems.com/articles/2011/08/16/darpa-develops-gps-free-navigation-systems.aspx
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/110916/north-korea%E2%80%99s-gps-jammer-brigade-spy-plane

Heart Surgery in India for $1,583 Costs $106,385 in U.S.

Devi Shetty is obsessed with making heart surgery affordable for millions of Indians. On his office desk are photographs of two of his heroes: Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi.
Shetty is not a public health official motivated by charity. He’s a heart surgeon turned businessman who has started a chain of 21 medical centers around India. By trimming costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and spurning air-conditioning, he has cut the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago, and wants to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $106,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. 
“It shows that costs can be substantially contained,” said Srinath Reddy, president of the Geneva-based World Heart Federation, of Shetty’s approach. “It’s possible to deliver very high quality cardiac care at a relatively low cost.”
Medical experts like Reddy are watching closely, eager to see if Shetty’s driven cost-cutting can point the way for hospitals to boost revenue on a wider scale by making life-saving heart operations more accessible to potentially millions of people in India and other developing countries.
“The current price of everything that you see in health care is predominantly opportunistic pricing and the outcome of inefficiency,” Shetty, 60, said in an interview in his office in Bangalore, where he started his chain of hospitals, with the opening of his flagship center, Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City, in 2001.

Out-of-Pocket

Cutting costs is especially vital in India, where more than two-thirds of the population lives on less than $2 a day and 86 percent of health care is paid out of pocket by individuals. A recent study by the Public Health Foundation of India and theLondon School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found that in India non-communicable ailments such as heart disease are now more common among the poor than the rich.
One in four people there die of a heart attack and per-capita health spending is less than $60 a year. Yet the country performs only 100,000 to 120,000 heart surgeries each year, well short of the 2 million Shetty estimates are needed. The mortality rate from coronary artery disease among South Asians is two to three times higher than that of Caucasians, according to a study published in 2008 in the journal Vascular Health and Risk Management.

Dietary Patterns

“There has been fast urbanization in India that’s brought with it a change in dietary patterns and lifestyle,” said Usha Shrivastava, head of public health at the National Diabetes, Obesity and Cholesterol Foundation. “It’s leading to this huge jump in cardiovascular disease.”
The average age for a first heart attack in India, Pakistan and other South Asian nations was 53 years, compared with 58.8 years in countries outside the region, according to a study published in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The biggest impediment for heart surgery in India is accessibility. Shetty aims to bridge that by building hospitals outside India’s main cities. He said he plans to add 30,000 beds over the next decade to the 6,000 the hospital chain has currently, and has identified 100 towns with populations of 500,000 to 1 million that have no heart hospital.
A 300-bed, pre-fabricated, single-story hospital in the city of Mysore cost $6 million and took six months for construction company Larsen & Toubro Ltd. to build, Shetty said. Only the hospital’s operating theaters and intensive-care units are air-conditioned, to reduce energy costs.

Changing Procedures

One of the ways in which Shetty is able to keep his prices low is by cutting out unnecessary pre-op testing, he said.
Urine samples that were once routine before surgery were eliminated when it was found that only a handful of cases tested positive for harmful bacteria. The chain uses web-based computer software to run logistics, rather than licensing or building expensive new systems for each hospital.
When Shetty couldn’t convince a European manufacturer to bring down the price of its disposable surgical gowns and drapes to a level affordable for his hospitals, he convinced a group of young entrepreneurs in Bangalore to make them so he could buy them 60 percent cheaper.
In the future, Shetty sees costs coming down further as more Asian electronics companies enter the market for CT scanners, MRIs and catheterization labs -- bringing down prices. AsIndia trains more diploma holders in specialties such as anesthesiology, gynecology, ophthalmology and radiology, Narayana will be able to hire from a larger, less expensive talent pool.
One positive unforeseen outcome may be that many of the cost-saving approaches could be duplicated in developed economies, especially in the U.S. under health reform.
“Global health-care costs are rising rapidly and as countries move toward universal health coverage, they will have to face the challenge of providing health care at a fairly affordable cost,” said the World Heart Federation’s Reddy, a New Delhi-based cardiologist who is also president of the Public Health Foundation of India.

Detroit debts ‘should be cancelled’

A political commentator says Detroit™s debts are œillegitimate” and œshould be cancelled.”
œThe debt is illegitimate and therefore should be cancelled,” Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of Pan-African News Wire said, œThis is the only solution for Detroit.”
œFirst of all we have to understand that Detroit was hit by a wave of predatory lending and housing which in fact resulted in some 100,000 foreclosures. And as result of these foreclosures the tax base of the city was eroded over the last decade even prior to the wave of predatory lending you had large outsourcing and downsizing in the automotive industry.”
œWhen the city is in a situation that cannot gain revenue through taxes they have to borrow from these same financial institutions which of course led to the massive of foreclosure crisis,” Azikiwe told Press TV.
He also said that if senior citizens of œthe birthplace of the world™s automotive industry” are stripped of their social security to pay off the city™s debts, this would create a very bad pattern for municipalities.
œThere are $6 billion in pension fund that are at stake in this trouble,” he noted.
œThis bankruptcy was engendered by the banks and large financial institutions insides the United States. They are at the root cause of the crisis.”
The Obama administration is making no sign of helping Detroit as its emergency manager and republican governor steer the city towards bankruptcy proceedings.
At least five republican senators have recently proposed tacking language onto spending bills that would broadly prohibit municipal bailouts.
These proposed measures are aimed towards preventing any federal aid to Detroit.
GOP leaders are attacking the city with notable venom at a time when its 700,000 residents–80 percent of whom are African-American–must contend with deepening crises of poverty and privatization.
AN/ARA
Republished from: Press TV

Is This The Greatest Stock Market Bubble of All Time?

by Phoenix Capital Research

Some truly awful economic results were released over the last week.
First and foremost, we discovered that 80% of the US adults struggle with joblessless, are near poverty, or have a reliance on welfare for at least part of their lives.
This is truly extraordinary. I’ve noted before that the employment ratio (the number of Americans of working age who have jobs divided by the total number of Americans of working age) indicates that there has been little if any real recovery in the jobs market. But the fact that four out of five adults is struggling truly shows just how endemic economic weakness is in the system.
It’s also a stunning rebuke of the Federal Reserve’s claim that its policies help Main Street. Below is a chart indicating the impact of QE(s) 1,2,3, and 4 on the employment population ratio. All told, we’ve spent over $3 trillion… and the ratio has barely moved higher.

Despite this incredible amount of money printing, the US economy has failed to recover in any meaningful way. Indeed, we have not had a single year of 3% GDP growth since Bernanke took the help as Fed Chairman.

Instead, all we’ve got is a new stock market bubble. Investing legend Jim Chanos recently noted that today more companies are trading over 3X their book value than in March 2000 (at the height of the Tech Bubble).
I also want to note that the stock market today is more stretched over its 200-weekly moving average than it was at the height of the Housing Bubble. Once this market really begins to correct, we could easily fall to this line (currently 1300 on the S&P 500).

And if things get VERY ugly we’ll take this line out and crash to new lows.
It’s just like 2007 all over again. Only this time around, we know for a fact that the Fed hasn’t fixed things and has bankrupted itself and the financial system pretending that it can.
This is not doom and gloom. This is a fact. The Fed has created an even bigger bubble than the 2007 one.
The time to prepare for this is not once the collapse begins, but NOW, while stocks are still rallying. Stocks take their time moving up, but when they crash it happens VERY quickly.

For more market insights and commentary, visit us at:
www.gainspainscapital.com
Best Regards
Graham Summers

CHICAGOLAND: Cash reserves plunge, debt triples… WOONSOCKET ROCKET: City hikes taxes 23%

CHICAGOLAND: Cash reserves plunge, debt triples
Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed the books on 2012 with $33.4 million in unallocated cash on hand — down from $167 million the year before — while adding to the mountain of debt piled on Chicago taxpayers, year-end audits show.
Last week, Moody’s Investors ordered an unprecedented triple-drop in the city’s bond rating, citing Chicago’s “very large and growing” pension liabilities, “significant” debt service payments, “unrelenting public safety demands” and historic reluctance to raise local taxes that has continued under Emanuel.
http://www.suntimes.com/21552920-761/city-of-chicagos-cash-cushion-plummets-debt-triples-arrests-drop-water-use-rises.html
WOONSOCKET ROCKET: City hikes taxes 23%
WOONSOCKET — When about 30,000 supplemental tax bills are mailed out Tuesday, it will be, city officials hope, the last major part of a five-year plan to balance the city’s books, pay off an $8.1-million deficit and stabilize the pension fund.

The supplemental tax will raise $2.5 million from multifamily residential real estate and motor vehicles, and the money will be used to balance the 2012-13 budget, which ended June 30. That assessment is also built into the 2013-14 tax rate, along with a 4-percent tax increase and a cut in the homestead exemption, which means the average homeowner in the city will see a 23-percent increase in his or her tax bill.
Taxpayers aren’t the only ones who will take a hit. The state-appointed Budget Commission, which has been running the city since May 2012, said its plan cuts $4.7 million by reducing city employee health benefits and increasing employee and retiree contributions.
http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20130728-woonsocket-hopes-supplemental-tax-will-be-end-of-deficits.ece
AP: 4 out of 5 in USA face near-poverty, no work
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/exclusive-4-5-us-face-near-poverty-no-work-0
Whites below poverty line at 41%, twice number of poor blacks
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POVERTY_STRUGGLING_WHITES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-07-29-03-59-28

Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.
Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.
The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.
As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused - on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.
Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."
"I think it's going to get worse," said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.
"If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work," she said. Children, she said, have "nothing better to do than to get on drugs."
While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.
The gauge defines "economic insecurity" as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.
Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.
"It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position," said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.
"There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front," Wilson said.
---
Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.
Sometimes termed "the invisible poor" by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.
Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.
More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.
Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to "buy the kids everything they need."
"It's pretty hard," she said. "Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name."
---
Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.
In 2011 that snapshot showed 12.6 percent of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person's lifetime risk, a much higher number - 4 in 10 adults - falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty also have been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people ages 35-55, coinciding with widening income inequality. For instance, people ages 35-45 had a 17 percent risk of encountering poverty during the 1969-1989 time period; that risk increased to 23 percent during the 1989-2009 period. For those ages 45-55, the risk of poverty jumped from 11.8 percent to 17.7 percent.
Higher recent rates of unemployment mean the lifetime risk of experiencing economic insecurity now runs even higher: 79 percent, or 4 in 5 adults, by the time they turn 60.
By race, nonwhites still have a higher risk of being economically insecure, at 90 percent. But compared with the official poverty rate, some of the biggest jumps under the newer measure are among whites, with more than 76 percent enduring periods of joblessness, life on welfare or near-poverty.
By 2030, based on the current trend of widening income inequality, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
"Poverty is no longer an issue of `them', it's an issue of `us'," says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. "Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need."
The numbers come from Rank's analysis being published by the Oxford University Press. They are supplemented with interviews and figures provided to the AP by Tom Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University; John Iceland, a sociology professor at Penn State University; the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute; the Census Bureau; and the Population Reference Bureau.
Among the findings:
-For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks. Hispanic single-mother families in poverty trailed at 1.2 million.
-Since 2000, the poverty rate among working-class whites has grown faster than among working-class nonwhites, rising 3 percentage points to 11 percent as the recession took a bigger toll among lower-wage workers. Still, poverty among working-class nonwhites remains higher, at 23 percent.
-The share of children living in high-poverty neighborhoods - those with poverty rates of 30 percent or more - has increased to 1 in 10, putting them at higher risk of teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 17 percent of the child population in such neighborhoods, compared with 13 percent in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
The share of black children in high-poverty neighborhoods dropped from 43 percent to 37 percent, while the share of Latino children went from 38 percent to 39 percent.
-Race disparities in health and education have narrowed generally since the 1960s. While residential segregation remains high, a typical black person now lives in a nonmajority black neighborhood for the first time. Previous studies have shown that wealth is a greater predictor of standardized test scores than race; the test-score gap between rich and low-income students is now nearly double the gap between blacks and whites.
---
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, a biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45 percent say their family will have a good chance of improving their economic position based on the way things are in America.
The divide is especially evident among those whites who self-identify as working class. Forty-nine percent say they think their children will do better than them, compared with 67 percent of nonwhites who consider themselves working class, even though the economic plight of minorities tends to be worse.
Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites - defined as those lacking a college degree - remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.
Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.
Some Democratic analysts have urged renewed efforts to bring working-class whites into the political fold, calling them a potential "decisive swing voter group" if minority and youth turnout level off in future elections. "In 2016 GOP messaging will be far more focused on expressing concern for `the middle class' and `average Americans,'" Andrew Levison and Ruy Teixeira wrote recently in The New Republic.
"They don't trust big government, but it doesn't mean they want no government," says Republican pollster Ed Goeas, who agrees that working-class whites will remain an important electoral group. His research found that many of them would support anti-poverty programs if focused broadly on job training and infrastructure investment. This past week, Obama pledged anew to help manufacturers bring jobs back to America and to create jobs in the energy sectors of wind, solar and natural gas.
"They feel that politicians are giving attention to other people and not them," Goeas said.
---
AP Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta, News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius and AP writer Debra McCown in Buchanan County, Va., contributed to this report.

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