STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 29 April 2015

[Tansy_Gold]

[font size=3]STOCK MARKET WATCH, Wednesday, 29 April 2015[font color=black][/font]

SMW for 28 April 2015

AT THE CLOSING BELL ON 28 April 2015
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Dow Jones 18,110.14 +72.17 (0.40%)
S&P 500 2,114.76 +5.84 (0.28%)
[font color=red]Nasdaq 5,055.42 -4.82 (-0.10%)


[font color=red]10 Year 2.00% +0.06 (3.09%)
30 Year 2.70% +0.07 (2.66%) [font color=black]


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[font size=2]Market Conditions During Trading Hours[/font]
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[font size=2]Euro, Yen, Loonie, Silver and Gold[center]

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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Market Data and News:[/font][/font]
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Economic Calendar
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Economic Blogs:[/font][/font]
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Essential Reading:[/font][/font]
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Matt Taibi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout


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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Government Issues:[/font][/font]
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[font color=black][font size=2]Handy Links - Videos:[/font][/font]
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Charlie Rose talks with Roubini
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[font color=red]Partial List of Financial Sector Officials Convicted since 1/20/09 [/font][font color=red]
2/2/12 David Higgs and Salmaan Siddiqui, Credit Suisse, plead guilty to conspiracy involving valuation of MBS
3/6/12 Allen Stanford, former Caribbean billionaire and general schmuck, convicted on 13 of 14 counts in $2.2B Ponzi scheme, faces 20+ years in prison
6/4/12 Matthew Kluger, lawyer, sentenced to 12 years in prison, along with co-conspirator stock trader Garrett Bauer (9 years) and co-conspirator Kenneth Robinson (not yet sentenced) for 17 year insider trading scheme.
6/14/12 Allen Stanford sentenced to 110 years without parole.
6/15/12 Rajat Gupta, former Goldman Sachs director, found guilty of insider trading. Could face a decade in prison when sentenced later this year.
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
6/22/12 James F. Cochran, 56, former chairman of the board of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and six counts of wire fraud.
6/22/12 Rick D. Snow, 48, former CFO of Fair, convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, one count of securities fraud, and three counts of wire fraud.
7/13/12 Russell Wassendorf Sr., CEO of collapsed brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group Inc. arrested and charged with lying to regulators after admitting to authorities he embezzled "millions of dollars" and forged bank statements for "nearly twenty years."
8/22/12 Doug Whitman, Whitman Capital LLC hedge fund founder, convicted of insider trading following a trial in which he spent more than two days on the stand telling jurors he was innocent
10/26/12 UPDATE: Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta sentenced to two years in federal prison. He will, of course, appeal. . .
11/20/12 Hedge fund manager Matthew Martoma charged with insider trading at SAC Capital Advisors, and prosecutors are looking at Martoma's boss, Steven Cohen, for possible involvement.
02/14/13 Gilbert Lopez, former chief accounting officer of Stanford Financial Group, and former controller Mark Kuhrt sentenced to 20 yrs in prison for their roles in Allen Sanford's $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme.
03/29/13 Michael Sternberg, portfolio mgr at SAC Capital, arrested in NYC, charged with conspiracy and securities fraud. Pled not guilty and freed on $3m bail.
04/04/13 Matthew Marshall Taylor,fmr Goldman Sachs trader arrested, charged by CFTC w/defrauding his employer on $8BN futures bet "by intentionally concealing the true huge size, as well as the risk and potential profits or losses associated."
04/04/13 Matthew Taylor admits guilt, makes plea bargain. Sentencing set for 26 June; faces up to 20 years in prison but will likely only see 3-4 years. Says, "I am truly sorry."
04/11/13 Ex-KPMG LLP partner Scott London charged by federal prosecutors w/passing inside tips to a friend in exchange for cash, jewelry, and concert tickets; expected to plead guilty in May.
08/01/13 Fabrice Tourré convicted on six counts of security fraud, including "aiding and abetting" his former employer, Goldman Sachs
08/14/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout charged with wire fraud, falsifying records, and conspiracy in connection with JP Morgan's "London Whale" trade.
08/19/13 Phillip A. Falcone, manager of hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners, agrees to admit to "wrongdoing" in market manipulation. Will banned from securities industry for 5 years and pay $18MM in disgorgement and fines.
09/16/13 Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout officially indicted on charges associated with "London Whale" trade.
02/06/14 Matthew Martoma convicted of insider trading while at hedge fund SAC (Stephen A. Cohen) Capital Advisors. Expected sentence 7-10 years.
03/24/14 Annette Bongiorno, Bernard Madoff's secretary; Daniel Bonventre, director of operations for investments; JoAnn Crupi, an account manager; and Jerome O'Hara and George Perez, both computer programmers convicted of conspiracy to defraud clients, securities fraud, and falsifying the books and records.
05/19/14 Credit Suisse, which has an investment bank branch in NYC, agrees to plead guilty and pay appx. $2.6 billion penalties for helping wealthy Americans hide wealth and avoid taxes.
09/08/14 Matthew Martoma, convicted SAC trader, sentenced to 9 years in prison plus forfeiture of $9.3 million, including home and bank accounts







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[font size=3][font color=red]This thread contains opinions and observations. Individuals may post their experiences, inferences and opinions on this thread. However, it should not be construed as advice. It is unethical (and probably illegal) for financial recommendations to be given here.[/font][/font][/font color=red][font color=black]

[Demeter]

1. Banks Increasingly Refuse Cash Withdrawals – Switzerland Joins the Fun

http://www.acting-man.com/?p=37037

Banks Increasingly Refuse Cash Withdrawals – Switzerland Joins the Fun

The war on cash is proliferating globally. It appears that the private members of the world’s banking cartels are increasingly joining the fun, even if it means trampling on the rights of their customers.

Yesterday we came across an article at Zerohedge, in which Dr. Salerno of the Mises Institute notes that JP Morgan Chase has apparently joined the “war on cash”, by “restricting the use of cash in selected markets, restricting borrowers from making cash payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines and auto loans, as well as prohibiting storage of cash in safe deposit boxes”.

This reminded us immediately that we have just come across another small article in the local European press (courtesy of Dan Popescu), in which a Swiss pension fund manager discusses his plight with the SNB’s bizarre negative interest rate policy. In Switzerland this policy has long ago led to negative deposit rates at the commercial banks as well. The difference to other jurisdictions is however that negative interest rates have become so pronounced, that it is by now worth it to simply withdraw one’s cash and put it into an insured vault.

Having realized this, said pension fund manager, after calculating that he would save at least 25,000 CHF per year on every CHF 10 m. deposit by putting the cash into a vault, told his bank that he was about to make a rather big withdrawal very soon. After all, as a pension fund manager he has a fiduciary duty to his clients, and if he can save money based on a technicality, he has to do it...

CLIFFHANGER? MORE AT LINK!

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. This really bears watching.

So much easier for banks and Gov't...oops, one and the same, really...to grab your money by a click of a computer key, and trace your spending the same way.

[Demeter]

2. One Reason Economists Don’t Get Any Love: They Refuse to Take Any Blame for the Great Crash

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/one-reason-economists-dont-get-love-refuse-take-blame-great-crash.html

By Ed Walker, who writes as masaccio at Firedoglake. You can follow him at Twitter at @MasaccioFDL, and here’s his author page at Firedoglake.

The field (economics) is filled with anxious introspection, prompted by economists’ feeling that they are powerful but unloved, and by robust empirical evidence that they are different.

The Superiority of Economists, by Marion Fourcade, Etienne Ollion and Yan Algan.

I feel bad for these lost souls, the unloved economists, so I’ll try to help them understand why people don’t love them. It’s obvious that the principal reason is that economists refuse to take any responsibility for the Great Crash, despite the fact that it was their policy recommendations and justifications that led to the dismantling of the regulatory structure that worked for decades to prevent such massive disasters. They could have confessed that that they didn’t do a proper cost benefit analysis of the risks associated with their policies getting rid of Glass-Steagall, and ending aggressive enforcement of securities and commodities laws, and that they had absolutely no idea what might happen as a result...But they didn’t. What they did was to define the debate over their failures as a question about their models. Here are some examples: Noah Smith, finance professor at SUNY Stony Brook, David Andolfatto at the St. Louis Fed, and Chris Dillow, economist and writer. Here’s one from December 2010, an interview with the neoliberal Gary Becker.(LINKS AT OP) The gist of the defense is that it’s not fair to ask that their models predict disasters like the Great Crash. Here’s David Andolfatto:

But seriously, the delivery of precise time-dated forecasts of events is a mug’s game. If this is your goal, then you probably can’t beat theory-free statistical forecasting techniques. But this is not what economics is about. The goal, instead, is to develop theories that can be used to organize our thinking about various aspects of the way an economy functions. Most of these theories are “partial” in nature, designed to address a specific set of phenomena (there is no “grand unifying theory” so many theories coexist). These theories can also be used to make conditional forecasts: IF a set of circumstances hold, THEN a number of events are likely to follow. The models based on these theories can be used as laboratories to test and measure the effect, and desirability, of alternative hypothetical policy interventions (something not possible with purely statistical forecasting models).

That’s a pretty good description of the behavior of economists as described by Fourcade et al. They set up models and then tell politicians, central banks, legislators, regulators and all the rest of us how to behave and what policies are best. But it turns out that not only are their models not going to give “time-dated forecasts of events” like the Great Crash, there are no circumstances under which their models will predict a financial crash until it’s upon us. Consider this paper from the staff of the International Monetary Fund. The abstract tells us “this paper presents the theoretical structure of MAPMOD, a new IMF model designed to study vulnerabilities associated with excessive credit expansions, and to support macroprudential policy analysis.” They explain

As has been emphasized in a number of recent theoretical and empirical studies by the world’s leading policy institutions (see for example Macroeconomic Assessment Group, 2010), the critical macroprudential policy tradeoff is between reducing the risks of very costly financial crises and minimizing the costs of macroprudential policies during normal times.

The obvious implication is that economists never thought of using their models to figure out any of the circumstances under which those models would predict a crash. Worse, they didn’t use their models to estimate the cost generated by crashes until several years after their favored policies wrecked the financial system. In this paper by Del Negro et al. of the New York Fed, the authors describe tweaks they made to a standard DSGE model and the addition of data as late as Fall 2008. Here’s their conclusion:

We show that as soon as the financial stress jumps in the Fall of 2008, the model successfully predicts a sharp contraction in economic activity along with a modest and more protracted decline in inflation. Price changes are projected to remain in the neighborhood of one percent. This result contrasts with the commonly held belief that such models are bound to fail to capture the broad contours of the Great Recession and the near stability of inflation.

The paper tells us that if you put in the data about a crash, their modes can predict the outcome. Of course, no one thought of doing that in the 20th Century when these guys were busy tearing down the regulatory structure. This model wasn’t even created until after the Great Crash, and it still won’t predict a crash; the authors had to put the crash into the data. The plain fact is that economists converged on a set of ideas, perhaps because of the way the field is organized, as explained by Fourcade et al. Those ideas furthered the personal and corporate interests of the rich and of Wall Street, and drew their enthusiastic support. To these economists and their self-interested supporters, economic efficiency was so important that it wasn’t useful or reasonable to evaluate the costs of a crash. The US and other countries adopted their favored macroprudential policies, like getting rid of New Deal financial regulation. The result was trillions of dollars of damage. And how much were the gains from purported economic efficiency? And precisely who reaped those gains? And who paid the price? No surprises here: the gains, whatever they were, went to the rich and their friends on Wall Street, and the price was paid by the rest of us.

The problem is not that models created by economists didn’t predict this Great Crash. The problem is that the models are not designed to predict crashes. And even worse, they weren’t set up to evaluate the costs of events like the Great Crash. That means it was in utter ignorance of the costs of failure that economists told policy makers it would be great to get rid of the entire New Deal regulatory structure.

That’s one reason why people don’t love economists.

[Demeter]

3. Richard Wolff, "Taboo Broken: New Critical Writing About Capitalism"

A MESSAGE OF HOPE AND A DIRECTION TO PROGRESS....

[Demeter]

4. A Foreclosure Conveyor Belt: the Continuing Depopulation of Detroit

http://www.alternet.org/how-banks-are-driving-depopulation-detroit?akid=13021.227380.jW3Nrm&rd=1&src=newsletter1035068&t=13


Detroit is not a city in the midst of a “revival,” as enterprising investors and the national media often claim

...the latest perversity Detroit officials were inflicting on city residents: the potential eviction of tens of thousands, possibly as many as 100,000 people, all at precisely the same time. Little wonder that it seemed as if everyone was getting stuck in the rotating doors of that Wayne County office building on the last day residents could pay their past-due property taxes or enter a payment plan to do so. Those who didn’t, the city warned, would lose their homes to tax foreclosure, the process by which a local government repossesses a house because of unpaid property taxes.

“Oh, my lord,” exclaimed one bundled-up woman when she first spotted the river of people, their documents in envelopes and folders of every sort, pouring out of cars, hunched over walkers, driving electric scooters, being pushed in wheelchairs, or simply attempting to jam their way on foot into the building. The afternoon was gray and unseasonably cold. The following day, in the middle of a snowless meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the governor of California would announce the state’s first-ever water restrictions as a result of an unprecedented, climate-change-influenced drought. Here in Michigan, city residents were facing another type of man-made disaster: possibly the largest single tax foreclosure in American history.

“It’s the last day to pay,” one woman heading toward the rotating glass chamber yelled to a pedestrian who had slowed to watch the commotion. Inside, a Wayne County Sheriff’s Department officer-turned-traffic-controller boomed instructions to a snaking line of people. “When you get to the eighth floor, you will get a number. Keep that number! Then go to the fifth floor.’”

The eighth floor, however, turned out to be little more than another human traffic jam, a holding space for thousands of anxious homeowners who faced hours of waiting before reaching the desk of some overworked city representative down on five. Yet, as a post office delivery worker gaping at the fiasco told me, this was less hectic than it had been a only few days earlier, when the treasurer’s office had rented out the Second Baptist Church across the street. There, people waited for the opportunity to enter the revolving doors to take the elevator to the eighth floor before heading for the fifth floor to... you get the gist.

In fact, the whole week had been a god-awful mess. A day earlier, rumors had it, a woman had passed out in the elevator between the eighth and fifth floors en route to “making arrangements,” the euphemism for getting on a payment plan that might save your home.

“What happens if you can’t pay?” a slender man asked me as we dodged a new wave of people surging through the glass cylinder.

“Then they sell your house at auction,” I replied.

“For real?” he asked, amazed.

MUCH MORE


Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and the author of "A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home," forthcoming from Zuccotti Park Press.

[Demeter]

5. Satyajit Das: Two Views of Japan’s Setting Sun

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/satyajit-das-two-views-japans-setting-sun.html

Yves here. Das discusses two recent books on Japan, and both provide windows on how Japan is coping with its now lost two decades. One of them is by Tag Murphy, who I met in my days in Japan and has long been a very insightful commentator. As I said at the Atlantic Economy conference, rather than trying to “jump start the economy,” which would take more radical restructuring than they are willing to engage in, the top wealthy might be better served to worry about managing low growth better. And for its many flaws, egalitarian Japan has muddled through a far more severe bubble and bust with more grace than we have.

By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of Extreme Money and Traders Guns & Money

David Piling (2014) Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival, Allen Lane

R. Taggart Murphy (2014) Japan and the Shackles of the Past, Oxford University Press

...Foreign interest is focused on society, culture, art, and, more recently, on economics. In the case of Japan, well founded clichés about stoicism, societal solidarity, appreciation of beauty and creativity have multiplied over the year. Yet, the reality is infinitely more complex. Japan abounds in contradictions. Alongside much admired qualities, there are a number of less attractive features like corruption, fatalism, paralysis, secretiveness, xenophobia, racism, misogyny, a predilection for sexual violence at least in its literature and sex industry and disregard for the environment and wildlife, evidenced by Japan’s attitude to whaling. But, as in most cultures, the desirable and undesirable attributes co-exist.

In the economic sphere, the initial focus of analysis was on the Japanese miracle which led to blind aping of industrial and management practices. More recently, as Japan endured a quarter of a century of stagnation, the emphasis has been on whether the disease is transmissible and different treatment approaches...

Mr. Piling is the Financial Times Asia Editor who spent some years covering Japan. Bending Adversity is constructed around his return to Japan to report on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami as well as the related Fukushima nuclear disaster. He uses the events to frame a series of reflections on Japan, its history, the post-bubble economy and its politics. Bending Adversity’s discussions of Japan itself are derivative and draw heavily on existing sources. The better part of the book is it reportage on the tsunami. These sections are well written and personal, evoking with great compassion the magnitude of the destruction and anger at the predictable deceitful and inept response of the government and especially officials. In reality, the Japanese attempt to deal with the crisis was no better or worse than, say, the US attempt to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Who can forget President Bush’s gushing praise of Michael Brown’s handling of the situation “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, a phrase now synonymous with politically connected incompetence....



Japan and the Shackles of the Past is ultimately the more challenging and rewarding work. A Professor of International Political Economy at the Tokyo campus of the University of Tsukuba and a long term resident of Japan, Taggart Murphy has crafted a precise and highly critical analysis of Japan’s problems. Professor Murphy sees the current state of Japan as a logical and inevitable result of its historical evolution. The first part of Japan and the Shackles of the Past looks at the driving forces of this change: the Meiji revolution, the militarism of the early twentieth century and its post-war recovery as an US satellite. The second part looks at how this history affects the economy, finances, society, culture, politics and international relations. Much of the analysis is not new, but Professor Murphy brings together existing material well to make his arguments strongly. At the heart of Japan and the Shackles of the Past is Karel van Wolferen’s astute observation that Japan has been involved for the last 200 years in the “management of reality”. Nothing exemplifies this better than Emperor Hirohito’s unprecedented 15 August 1945 broadcast announcing the nation’s surrender after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he advised the Japanese people that “the war had not necessarily developed to Japan’s advantage”. Japan is a series of elaborate but careful falsehoods. The Meiji restoration was based on the two fictions of an idealised past of imperial rule and its Western counterpoint of constitutional government and the rule of law, at least as it was implemented in Japan. The nation’s participation in World War 2 was driven by a confused combination of the need for Lebensraum (living space) and access to resources. It culminated in actions that leaders realised would always result in catastrophe. Defeat, in the wake of two nuclear attacks, allowed perpetual victimhood, enabling successive generations to continue to avoid taking responsibility for wartime atrocities...The falsehoods are aided and abetted in the post-World War 2 era by American co-operation. Needing a fixed aircraft carrier for military operations in Korea and a bulwark against communism, America actions nurtured this strange Japanese reality. As John Dower wrote in Embracing Defeat: “If the man in whose name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held accountable for the initiation of or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?’ The Americans’ exoneration of the emperor turned the issue of ‘war responsibility’ into a joke.”

Professor Murphy highlights Japan’s curious combination of a stunted democracy and economic prosperity. Japan’s dysfunctional political system emerges as the result of long-standing feudalism, and manipulation by the US and its agencies including the CIA which helped create the Liberal Democratic Party (“LDP”) to prevent leftist forces from gaining power. The political infantilism was balanced by the fantasy-land of happy consumerism, exquisite design and exacting hygiene standards for the happy children of Japan. Except that economic prosperity was really built on a weak currency, crony capitalism guided by the government, preferential financial access, social repression and environmental damage, such as the tragedy of Minamata.

The most obvious point of difference between Bending Adversity and Japan and the Shackles of the Past is the country’s future trajectory...Japan and the Shackles of the Past sees change as difficult. The author sees a system in which doublethink is deeply engrained and power holders deceive themselves both about what they are doing and about their motives for doing it. The position is complicated by a powerful bureaucracy who see themselves as “servants of the emperor” rather than voters and particularly ephemeral politicians....

AND IS THAT NOT A GOOD DESCRIPTION OF THE USA, AS WELL?

[Demeter]

6. The 23 Count Indictment of the TPP CALL CONGRESS (AGAIN) TODAY!

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/23-count-indictment-tpp.html


Yves here. This post will serve to remind you: call your Representative (contact info here) and Senators (contact info here) today and tell them in no uncertain terms that you expect them to vote against Fast Track authority. This post provides more detail about the dangers of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and its evil twin, the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. And you can read here about why Fast Track authority is a hazard to your political health...

By Joe Firestone, Ph.D., Managing Director, CEO of the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI), and Director of KMCI’s CKIM Certificate program. He taught political science as the graduate and undergraduate level and blogs regularly at Corrente, Firedoglake and New Economic Perspectives. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives

To really appreciate what a travesty the TPP is, and the scandal of the failure of our Congress to reject it, and the “Fast Track Authority“ sought for it, out of hand, I’m going to list 23 negative consequences that would likely follow from it. Any one of these, would, by itself be sufficient for any representative of the people, Senator or Congressperson, to vote to kill it. I’ll offer this list in the form of stanzas appropriate for a chant, except for the starting point in the list...The tune of the chant that might be used is the tune used for Dayenu, the passover seder chant in which Dayenu means “It would have been sufficient,” where the reference is to all the things the almighty is purported to have done for the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and during their wanderings in the Sinai. I’m sure the President is familiar with this chant since he has had seders at the White House more than once. I’m also sure that he never envisioned using Dayenu to highlight the horrors of one of his favorite projects, the passage of “Fast Track Authority,” the TPP, and other “free trade” agreements such as the TTIP, and the TISA, all of which would get “Fast Track Authority” if the present bill passes.

The Stanzas of the Anti-TPP Chant

1. The TPP makes it easier to offshore more jobs now performed in the United States.

2. If the TPP just made it easier to offshore more jobs and did not also generate increasing downward pressure on wages, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

3. If the TPP just generated increasing downward pressure on wages and did not also empower another 25,000 foreign corporations to use Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals to gut our net neutrality, environmental, health, labor and safety laws and regulations, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

4. If the TPP just empowered another 25,000 foreign corporations to use investor state tribunals to gut our net neutrality, environmental, health, labor and safety laws and regulations and did not also give big pharma new monopoly patent rights, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

5. If the TPP just gave big pharma new monopoly patent rights, and did not also provide for rolling back financial regulations put in place after the crash of 2008, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

6. If the TPP just rolled back financial regulations and did not also provide for banning buy local and buy domestic policies, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

7. If the TPP just provided for banning buy local and buy domestic policies and did not also undermine climate change and energy policies by constraining the permissible policies governments can use to implement them, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

8. If the TPP just undermined climate change and energy policies by constraining the permissible policies governments can use to implement them and did not also use an anti-democratic fast track process that gives Representatives and Senators no space to represent the range of people they represent, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

9. If the TPP did not just use an anti-democratic fast track process that gives Representatives and Senators no space to represent the range of people they represent, and did not also potentially prevent the Treasury from replacing the practice of issuing Treasury debt to fund deficit spending with alternative funding methods, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

10. If the TPP did not just potentially prevent the Treasury from replacing the practice of issuing Treasury debt to fund deficit spending with alternative funding methods, and did not also potentially prevent the Fed from using negative interest rate policies if it chooses to do so, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

11. If the TPP did not just potentially prevent the Fed from using negative interest rate policies if it chooses to do so, and did not also potentially force the US to bail out insolvent banks through ISDS settlements, it would still be sufficient to vote to kill it!

12. If the TPP did not just potentially force the US to bail out insolvent banks through ISDS settlements, and did not also constitute ISDS tribunals as criminogenic environments with corporate advocates who play the roles of both judges and corporate attorneys at different times and who have substantial incentives to both drag out and sustain corporate suits against governments at all levels, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

13. If the TPP did not just constitute ISDS tribunals as criminogenic environments with corporate advocates who play the roles of both judges and corporate attorneys at different times and who have substantial incentives to both drag out and sustain corporate suits against governments at all levels, and did not also turn over the legislative power of the Federal government to the investor state dispute settlement courts and the corporations buying their loyalty, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

14. If the TPP just turned over the legislative power of the Federal government to the investor state dispute settlement courts and the corporations buying their loyalty, and did not also paralyze action by future Congresses that might reduce corporate “expectations of profits,” it would still be sufficient to kill it!

15. If the TPP just paralyzed action by future Congresses that might reduce corporate “expectations of profits,” and did not also create a permanent political fight over repealing the horror of the TPP while the US economy declines year after year, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

16. If the TPP just created a permanent political fight over repealing the horror of the TPP while the US economy declines year after year, and did not also create an unconstrained and unconstitutional trade agreement fusing judicial and legislative authority whose overnight judicial undoing would create international instability, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

17. If the TPP just created an unconstrained and unconstitutional trade agreement fusing judicial and legislative authority whose overnight national judicial undoing would create international instability, and did not also demand that the American public ought to ensure them against the business risks they take abroad, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

18. If the TPP just demanded that the American public ought to ensure them against the business risks they take abroad, and did not also insist on classification of the TPP drafts, hiding them from the public and making it an impossible burden for Congresspeople to evaluate them, and then on keeping the proposed or actual agreement secret so that the American people can’t even know what the law is that may result in international levies of many billions of dollars upon them, for four years after the TPP is either passed or defeated, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

19. If the TPP just insisted on classification of the TPP drafts, hiding them the public and making it an impossible burden for Congresspeople to evaluate them, and then on keeping the proposed or actual agreement secret so that the American people could not even know what the law was that might result in international levies of many billions of dollars upon them for four years after the TPP is either passed or defeated, and did not also create the possibility that one ISDS case, decided by a biased three-judge panel dominated by attorneys who primarily work for corporate clients could deliver a financial crisis to an American State or local government, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

20. If the TPP just created the possibility that one ISDS case, decided by a biased three-judge panel dominated by attorneys who primarily work for corporate clients could deliver a financial crisis to an American State or local government, and did not also provide multinationals protections against risk that would not be accorded to domestic corporations, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

21. If the TPP just provided multinationals protections against risk that would not be accorded to domestic corporations, and did not also define “investment” so broadly that it applies to any asset that is either owned or controlled and therefore to any new regulation that may be passed by any democratic government placing chains on all of them and defeating the requirement of the consent of the governed, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

22. If the TPP just defined “investment” so broadly that it applies to any asset that is either owned or controlled and therefore to any new regulation that may be passed by any democratic government placing chains on all of them and defeating the requirement of the consent of the governed,, and did not also prohibit “Buy American” laws and regulations, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

23. If the TPP just prohibited “Buy American” laws and regulations, and did not also fail to provide a clear legal provision allowing regulating investments for public purpose through laws and regulations that would not be subject to the interpretations of ISDS tribunals dominated by representatives of corporations making decisions in accord with the principle that national level rule making must not interfere with the “expectations of profits” held by multinational private corporations, or to any other tribunals not subject to the consent of the governed, it would still be sufficient to kill it!

And finally, if it only fails to provide a clear legal provision allowing regulating investments for public purpose through laws and regulations that would not be subject to the interpretations of ISDS tribunals dominated by representatives of corporations making decisions in accord with the principle that national level rule making must not interfere with the “expectations of profits” held by multinational private corporations, or to any other tribunals not subject to the consent of the governed, then that alone would still be sufficient to kill it!

Conclusion

The governing functions of the TPP regime would not be exercised with the consent of the governed. The combination of the vague definition of “investment,” the ISDS criminogenic tribunals, and the elevation of the principle of “expectation of profits” above the principles of “public purpose,” “consent of the governed,” and “separation of powers,” is tantamount to the overthrow of democracy, preserving its form in national level elections, but emptying its elections of meaningful content in mandating change and conferring legitimacy on national authorities.

And, further, the ISDS tribunals if in operation, would not exercise just powers, but only illegitimate power derived from the TPP agreement itself, negotiated in secret, passed without benefit of open debate based on the secret text of the TPP, and intended to remain secret for years after the TPP is signed. That makes TPP decision making, performed without the consent of the governed, tyranny, and makes those who want to pass the TPP guilty of conspiracy to create tyrannical rule of the few over the people of the United States and other TPP member nations.

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[Demeter]

7. Local Spring Update

The magnolias blossomed last week and the crab apples and non-fruiting cherries are at it already. In spite of the continuing frosts and chilly nights, Spring is marching on...I don't know about the fruit trees, yet....so worried!

Next Tuesday we have a state referendum on 2 issues: increasing the state sales tax to pay for roads and a whole lot of other goodies (doomed to fail, according to the polls) and a local school millage (I think it will pass...as we have no local newspaper, good information is impossible to find. Can't even find bad information, if the truth be told).

I had an excellent weekend off (thank you again, Matt!) but it was too short. I'm thinking of a more extended vacation...on the order of years. Unfortunately, the Kid was sick yesterday, and any vacation isn't going to happen soon, especially if she gets sick after it. At least, it wasn't DURING it...

Enjoy it as much as possible!

[Demeter]

9. PS: the dandelions are out in full force!