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Demeter

(85,373 posts)
Fri May 1, 2015, 08:00 PM May 2015

Weekend Economists “Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” May 1-3, 2015



MY SOURCE FOR THE QUOTES USED HEREIN IS:

100 Quotes From ‘Star Wars,’ In Order Of Awesomeness, by Oliver Miller


http://thoughtcatalog.com/oliver-miller/2013/03/100-quotes-from-star-wars-in-order-of-awesomeness/

…And by “quotes from Star Wars,” I of course mean the three real Star Wars movies, and not the prequels, which I still haven’t fully recovered from. Seriously; the prequels — I have no words. I am speechless. I have no words. And now they’re making three more Star Wars movies. Maybe it’s time to ask ourselves: how many Star Wars movies do we need, exactly? This seems like an important question to be asking. Maybe three Star Wars movies is good? I’m good with that. Anyway, maybe stop with three and someone call Disney about that and get on the horn with them and tell them to stop.

…ANY-way, Star Wars. Which was once the best thing ever and which could be again, if we stop making new movies. …Star Wars, which so profoundly influenced my worldview that I don’t even know how to think about life without these wacky movies with glowing space-swords and things. Anyway, here are some quotes from the three good movies. And hey, and also; you can read other dumb lists of quotes, ohhh, let’s see — right here, here, sort of here but not really, here, and here. (SEE OP FOR LINKS, IF YOU ARE INTERESTED--DEMETER)




Yes, long ago and far away, in a distant galaxy, a generation was born to strive, to right the wrongs of history. Then Emperor Reagan happened. Our ship of state was knocked off course, spinning, lost in space...and so 30 years and more passed. And here we are...without a Jedi Knight in sight. Except for the one in exile in Moscow. And a few shadowy resistance groups...

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to kick some Empire ass!

Post them if you've got them: politics, economics, Star Wars....

And come Monday, May the 4th be with you!


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Weekend Economists “Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” May 1-3, 2015 (Original Post) Demeter May 2015 OP
We haven't had a bank failure since February 27th Demeter May 2015 #1
October DemReadingDU May 2015 #10
Can't be sure to bring you up to date Demeter May 2015 #11
Not this year. Jackpine Radical May 2015 #26
Greek pensioners start bank runs after payments delayed Demeter May 2015 #2
Berkshire Hathaway first-quarter profit rises 10% Demeter May 2015 #3
Naftogaz Files $16 Bln Claim Against Gazprom Demeter May 2015 #4
EU's Anti-Trust Charges Against Gazprom Are Really About Greece Demeter May 2015 #17
Britain's Scandal-Battered Banks Are Paralyzed By Stephen Morris Demeter May 2015 #5
The New Economic Rules for the 21st Century Are Being Written in Secret—And We Can Stop It Demeter May 2015 #6
Soon the corporations will replace nations, with the push to privatize, the only thing socialized mother earth May 2015 #30
Big Banks Claim Reform Will Hurt the Economy. Here's Why That's Bullsh*t. Demeter May 2015 #7
Robert Reich: Why America's Economy Is an Utter Disaster Demeter May 2015 #8
Fed rate hike in June 'on the table,' two policymakers say Demeter May 2015 #9
WIKIPEDIA ON STAR WARS Demeter May 2015 #12
Star Wars Expanded Universe Demeter May 2015 #14
Stocks end higher FRIDAY MAY 1, bouncing back from a drop the day before Demeter May 2015 #13
EVERYBODY HAS TO GET INTO THE ACT! WEIRD AL Demeter May 2015 #15
Signs of Spring Demeter May 2015 #16
Chuck Schumer Warns Obama His Trade Agenda Is Dead Without A China Currency-Manipulation Crackdown Demeter May 2015 #18
Obama Bribes Abe to Support the TPP by Unleashing Japanese Military Demeter May 2015 #19
Fast Track/TPP:Death of National Sovereignty, State Sovereignty, Separation of Powers, and Democracy Demeter May 2015 #20
I can't help myself....Sorry. Hotler May 2015 #21
You are with friends here...no need to apologise Demeter May 2015 #22
We saw "The Woman in Gold" Demeter May 2015 #23
There is nothing better for flagging spirits than a story of perseverance Demeter May 2015 #24
Excellent movie! DemReadingDU May 2015 #29
The week from heck... MattSh May 2015 #25
Reality sucks. Image is what counts. MattSh May 2015 #27
Here's the mentioned video... MattSh May 2015 #28
All I know about Ukraine I learned from Fiddler on the Roof Demeter May 2015 #31
In the shock of temperatures staying above freezing Demeter May 2015 #32
Good luck with the peach tree DemReadingDU May 2015 #38
For those with an abiding interest in Worker Co-ops Demeter May 2015 #33
Marc Faber: Stocks Will Drop '30 to 40 Percent at Minimum' as Bubble Bursts Demeter May 2015 #34
Sheldon Adelson lectures court after tales of triads and money laundering Demeter May 2015 #35
Star Wars anthology director Josh Trank quits to pursue 'creative opportunities' Demeter May 2015 #36
The Potentate Of Prague — How the War Party in Washington is Losing Eastern Europe, Hillary Clinton Demeter May 2015 #37
With the Clintons... MattSh May 2015 #39
What Happens When You Hand Over Your Gold To The Bank Of England For "Safekeeping" Demeter May 2015 #40
US jobs relapse raises fresh doubts on Fed tightening By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Demeter May 2015 #41
An Assessment of the State of the World Economy Demeter May 2015 #44
The Dollar Joins the Currency Wars Demeter May 2015 #42
EXCUSES, EXCUSES! Demeter May 2015 #43
Folks, I have exhausted my usual sources of material Demeter May 2015 #45
U.S. Has 7th Highest Cancer Rate in the World Demeter May 2015 #46
Five things Americans still don’t understand about Obamacare Demeter May 2015 #47
HOMAGE TO ELIZABETH: Behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Treasury takedown Demeter May 2015 #48
 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
1. We haven't had a bank failure since February 27th
Fri May 1, 2015, 08:03 PM
May 2015

We should start a pool for when the next collapse will occur....I'm thinking September....

AS HAN SOLO SAID: “I have a bad feeling about this.”

 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
11. Can't be sure to bring you up to date
Sat May 2, 2015, 07:49 AM
May 2015

but on the whole (except for Harrison Ford) I prefer Star Trek, especially the reboot, which has really brought the franchise into the future!

Jackpine Radical

(45,274 posts)
26. Not this year.
Sat May 2, 2015, 02:52 PM
May 2015

Next. Just in time to pin it on Obama"s "socialist" policies & elect another Republican.

 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
2. Greek pensioners start bank runs after payments delayed
Fri May 1, 2015, 08:08 PM
May 2015
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/greek-pensioners-start-bank-runs-after-payments-delayed-10218114.html



Panic descended in Athens on Thursday as Greece’s 2 million pensioners were hit with delays to their monthly state stipend. Pensioners raided their accounts and broke into a board meeting, according to reports.

The Greek government blamed delays to payment on a technical hitch but this was denied by a government insider, who told the FT that state pension funds were still missing several hundred million euros on Tuesday morning.

Greece's main state social security fund delayed pension payments due Tuesday by almost eight hours. The fund relies on a monthly subsidy from the government to meet its payments. The Times reported that pensioners broke into a board meeting of the state pension fund demanding that it stop transferring cash reserves to the government. The fund must make these transfers under emergency decree, to keep the country solvent.

Many others queued outside the National Bank of Greece, which pays out state pensions staggered over several days. “Normally I only withdraw half the money at the end of the month, but today I’m taking it all,” Sotiria Zlatini, 75, a former civil servant, told the FT. “There are so many rumours going round because of the government’s problems and what happened two days ago.”

MORE

WASN'T IT HANS SOLO WHO SAYS: “Never tell me the odds!”
 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
3. Berkshire Hathaway first-quarter profit rises 10%
Fri May 1, 2015, 08:23 PM
May 2015

COULD THIS BE WHY THE 1ST QUARTER GROWTH WAS SO....NOTHING? WARREN SUCKED IT ALL UP.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/102641890

VIDEO REPORT AT LINK



Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway on Friday said first-quarter profit rose 10 percent, helped by improved results in its BNSF railroad unit, as well as by gains from derivatives.

Net income rose to $5.16 billion, or $3,143 per share, from $4.71 billion, or $2,862. Quarterly operating profit increased 20 percent to $4.24 billion, or $2,583 per share, from $3.53 billion, or $2,149. Book value per share, Buffett's preferred measure of growth, rose 0.5 percent from year-end to $146,963.

Results were released one day before Berkshire's annual meeting in Omaha, where shareholders are expected to celebrate Buffett's 50th anniversary at Berkshire's helm.


“…Scoundrel. I like that.”--STAR WARS QUOTE #9

 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
4. Naftogaz Files $16 Bln Claim Against Gazprom
Fri May 1, 2015, 08:26 PM
May 2015
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/05/01/naftogaz-files-16-bln-claim-against-gazprom/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix

The ugly divorce between Ukraine’s Naftogaz and Russia’s Gazprom continues. And the latest does not bode well for a renegotiation on the so-called “Winter Package II”, which ends next month. On Friday, Naftogaz filed its notice of claims to the Arbitral Tribunal in Stockholm in their ongoing gas transit arbitration panel against the Russian energy giant.

In December, a Stockholm court concluded that the gas transportation deal signed between Naftogaz and Gazprom in 2009 may be considered as “non-compliant with European competition and energy law.” At first blush, the charge seems ridiculous as Russia and Ukraine are not subject to European laws. However, Naftogaz is a major distributor of Gazprom natural gas to Europe and is therefore subject to local rules. Naftogaz also submitted a claim for compensation for underpayment of transit that dates back to 2010. In addition, there are claims for under delivered gas volumes on contract. It just doesn’t end for these guys. The Ukrainians are going for the jugular.

Naftogaz’s monetary claims related to Gazprom amount to more than $16 billion, which is about 20% of the company’s market cap. The amount is also three times what the Ukrainian government owes Russia. Ukraine still has a $3 billion bond payment to Russia, which could be used as leverage to settle the legal dispute. Ukraine is deeply in debt and its central bank reserves are dwindling. Every dollar that doesn’t have to be paid back is a dollar from heaven.

Meanwhile, Gazprom continues to face pressure by the European courts. On April 22, an anti-trust investigation at the European Commission charged Gazprom with overcharging 8 central and eastern European countries. Gazprom stock will move on oil and gas prices in the near-term. But legal and political risks could very quickly pull the rug out from under her. The stock is up 30% in dollar terms so far this year.


YODA: “Who’s the more foolish; the fool, or the fool who follows him?”
 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
17. EU's Anti-Trust Charges Against Gazprom Are Really About Greece
Sat May 2, 2015, 08:39 AM
May 2015
http://russia-insider.com/en/eu-versus-gazprom-battle-intensifies-gazprom-looks-set-cut-deal-greece/5968

EU Commission rushed out an anti-trust action against Gazprom to prevent Greece from joining Russia’s pipeline to Turkey. The European Commission has published today (22nd April 2015) a statement that provides details of the Statement of Objections it has sent to Gazprom with respect to the anti-trust action it has now brought against that company.

I reproduce it below together with Gazprom’s reply.

This news comes as no surprise to anyone who has followed the tangled relations between the EU and Gazprom.

The background to this story is that the EU bureaucracy has always been antagonistic to Gazprom.

The reasons for this are twofold:

  • The EU bureaucracy has never been happy with a large state-owned company based outside the EU operating outside its control within the EU area and cutting individual deals with individual EU companies and governments.

  • Going far beyond that, however, is the deep resentment of the EU and of the West as a whole at the refusal of the Russians to let Western oil and gas extraction companies operate inside Russia in the way they do in some other oil and gas producing countries.

    Back in the 1990s, when the USSR broke up, the West saw in Russia an El Dorado of natural resources. The so-called “dash to gas” that took place then assumed limitless supplies of natural gas flowing to Europe from Russia, extracted there by Western companies. That didn’t happen because of the determination of the Russian government to keep control for Russia of the country’s natural resources. It is impossible to understand the furious Western response to the Khodorkovsky case without taking this factor into account. At the time of his arrest Khodorkovsky was cutting deals with Western investors that some in the West saw as offering hope of a large scale entry of Western companies into the Russian energy industry.

    It is impossible also to understand the West’s personal hostility to Putin himself without this background. Rightly or wrongly, Putin has come to be seen as the individual who blocked the opening up of the Russian energy industry to Western energy companies. Many of the allegations concerning Putin’s supposed fortune were originally intended to insinuate that he was doing this because he has a personal stake in the Russian energy industry, alleging that he is its actual owner. This accounts for some of the fantastic figures one sometimes sees bandied around for the amount of Putin’s wealth.

    As for Gazprom, it is no secret that many in the West (e.g., the Swedish economist Anders Aslund) want to see it privatised and broken up, with its parts sold off to Western companies.

    The EU Commission’s case against Gazprom has been in preparation for some time. What seems to have precipitated its publication today is alarm that, following a visit by Gazprom’s CEO Alexey Miller to Athens, Greece might be about to sign a deal linking up to the pipeline Russia is building to Turkey. The EU Commission wrecked the preceding South Stream pipeline project by insisting that the EU’s Third Energy Package, which requires separation of ownership of production and distribution infrastructure, must retroactively apply to it. It did so in the expectation that South Stream was so important to Russia that Gazprom would submit to the Third Energy Package and agree to share ownership of South Stream with Western companies. The EU Commission undoubtedly saw this as a first step towards getting Western companies involved in the gas industry in Russia itself. To the EU Commission’s astonishment and to the dismay of central and eastern Europe, where countries had been relying on South Stream to fill their energy needs, Russia instead responded by cancelling South Stream and contracting to build a pipeline to Turkey. In doing so, however, Russia left it open to the Europeans to decide whether or not they wanted to join up with this pipeline at some future date. Several central and eastern European countries have said they want to do so and there have been reports circulating that Greece was looking to sign a pipeline deal with Gazprom in return for a $5 billion prepayment with which it could meet its current obligations to the IMF. There were even some reports that Greece might even sign such a deal today (22nd April 2015).

    The rushed announcement today (22nd April 2015) of the anti-trust action against Gazprom seems to have been intended in part to avert that possibility. Not only would such a deal have represented a revolt by Greece against the EU’s anti-Gazprom energy policy. More alarming still, it would mean that Greece, with which the EU is engaged in difficult negotiations over its bailout, would obtain a source of funding from outside the EU, which would strengthen its position in the bailout negotiations. That is a nightmare the EU leadership wants to prevent at all costs. That does not of course mean that the case the EU is bringing against Gazprom is only about Greece. As I have said, given the EU bureaucracy’s hostility to Gazprom, this case has been brewing for some time. Even if there was no risk of a deal with Greece the case would have been brought eventually. The fear of a deal between Gazprom and Greece has determined the timing of the announcement, not the substance of the case.That Gazprom as an entity is the ultimate target is obvious from the complaints the EU Commission is bringing against it. Buried in the text of the EU’s statement there is obvious annoyance at the way in which Gazprom has been able to use what are actually standard terms in commercial contracts forbidding resale of its product to prevent, for example, the success of the EU’s attempt to supply Ukraine with Russian gas through the process known as “reverse flow”. That explains this comment in the EU statement:

    “Gazprom imposes territorial restrictions in its supply agreements with wholesalers and with some industrial customers in above countries. These restrictions include export bans and clauses requiring the purchased gas to be used in a specific territory (destination clauses). Gazprom has also used other measures that prevented the cross-border flow of gas, such as obliging wholesalers to obtain Gazprom’s agreement to export gas and refusing under certain circumstances to change the location to which the gas should be delivered. The Commission considers these measures prevent the free trade of gas within the European Economic Area (EEA)”


    Gazprom insists that it has a right to operate within the EU and to cut deals with whomever it chooses and to do so in a way that protects its legitimate position within the market. It has operated within the EU in that way for more than 20 years — ever since its creation — without this causing any problem, and it sees no reason why retroactive EU legislation should be applied to it to tear up longstanding agreements it has made. Certainly there seems little logic in challenging the well-established link between gas and oil prices, which forms the basis of the price formula Gazprom has used. That formula has been accepted and used by the market for many years and it is not obvious why the EU thinks Gazprom should be forced to change it.

    Gazprom itself was formed from the previous Soviet ministry that was in charge of the USSR’s gas industry, which actually created Russia’s gas industry and which built most of the pipelines within the USSR’s former territory, including those that crisscross Ukraine. As Gazprom pointedly says in its response:

    “We also expect that it will be duly noted that OAO Gazprom was established beyond the jurisdiction of the EU, and that it is empowered by the laws of the Russian Federation with special socially-significant functions and has the status of a strategic government- controlled business entity.”


    As a strategic state-owned Russian company that emerged from a Soviet ministry and whose operations are ultimately controlled by the Russian state, Gazprom considers its supply arrangements to be the product ultimately of intergovernmental agreements between Russia and the EU and between Russia and the sovereign governments that make up the EU states and to which it supplies gas. In other words Gazprom is not a normal commercial company but is the vehicle through which Russia, a sovereign state that is not part of the EU, chooses to sell its gas. Any dispute between the EU and Gazprom is therefore, in Gazprom’s view, in reality a dispute between the EU and Russia, and must therefore be decided politically, at an intergovernmental level, and not through the legal mechanism of an anti-trust action. Gazprom makes this quite clear in the last paragraph of its response:

    “OAO Gazprom expects the resolution of this situation in the framework of agreement, previously reached between the Government of the Russian Federation and the European Commission to find an acceptable solution to the antitrust investigation on the intergovernmental level.”


    These sort of disputes will continue for as long as the EU sees Russia and Gazprom not as partners in the supply of energy, but as a threat. Russia for its part has made it repeatedly clear that it is not prepared to have the EU’s energy security decided at the expense of its own or at the price of its long term economic interests. Though the EU market remains for the moment important for Russia, this constant harassment of Gazprom is driving it away and explains why it is redirecting its gas flow away from Europe, towards Asia and China. As for the EU there has been talk for decades of the EU diversifying its gas imports away from Russia. Little however has so far been achieved. For the moment Russia seems to be having much more success finding alternative customers for its gas than the EU is having finding alternative suppliers. At some point this is also going to become a major issue within the EU itself, with some EU member states becoming increasingly exasperated at the way in which the anti-Russian obsessions of some other EU member states and of parts of the EU bureaucracy are being allowed to damage their economic interests and those of the EU as a whole. A glance at a map shows why there is ultimately no alternative gas supplier to the EU that can replace Russia at anything like the sort of prices that Russia can charge. Greece and possibly Slovakia and Hungary already look to be close to this point. The political realities within the EU however probably mean that this row is still some way away.

    ——————————————

    EU Commission Statement 22nd April 2015

    The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Gazprom alleging that some of its business practices in Central and Eastern European gas markets constitute an abuse of its dominant market position in breach of EU antitrust rules. See Factsheet for further details.

    On the basis of its investigation, the Commission’s preliminary view is that Gazprom is breaking EU antitrust rules by pursuing an overall strategy to partition Central and Eastern European gas markets, for example by reducing its customers’ ability to resell the gas cross-border. This may have enabled Gazprom to charge unfair prices in certain Member States. Gazprom may also have abused its dominant market position by making the supply of gas dependent on obtaining unrelated commitments from wholesalers concerning gas transport infrastructure.

    Gazprom now has 12 weeks to reply to the Statement of Objections and can also request an oral hearing to present its arguments. The Commission will fully respect Gazprom’s rights of defense and carefully consider its comments before taking a decision. Sending a Statement of Objections does not prejudge the final outcome of the investigation.

    EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy Margrethe Vestager said: “Gas is an essential commodity in our daily life: it heats our homes, we use it for cooking and to produce electricity. Maintaining fair competition in European gas markets is therefore of utmost importance.

    All companies that operate in the European market – no matter if they are European or not – have to play by our EU rules.

    I am concerned that Gazprom is breaking EU antitrust rules by abusing its dominant position on EU gas markets. We find that it may have built artificial barriers preventing gas from flowing from certain Central Eastern European countries to others, hindering cross-border competition. Keeping national gas markets separate also allowed Gazprom to charge prices that we at this stage consider to be unfair. If our concerns were confirmed, Gazprom would have to face the legal consequences of its behaviour.”

    The Commission’s preliminary findings in the Statement of Objections

    Gazprom is the dominant gas supplier in a number of Central and Eastern European countries. In light of its investigation, the Commission’s preliminary view is that Gazprom is hindering competition in the gas supply markets in eight Member States (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia). The Commission finds that Gazprom implements an overall abusive strategy in these gas supply markets, in particular:

    • Gazprom imposes territorial restrictions in its supply agreements with wholesalers and with some industrial customers in above countries. These restrictions include export bans and clauses requiring the purchased gas to be used in a specific territory (destination clauses). Gazprom has also used other measures that prevented the cross-border flow of gas, such as obliging wholesalers to obtain Gazprom’s agreement to export gas and refusing under certain circumstances to change the location to which the gas should be delivered. The Commission considers these measures prevent the free trade of gas within the European Economic Area (EEA).

    • These territorial restrictions may result in higher gas prices and allow Gazprom to pursue an unfair pricing policy in five Member States (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland), charging prices to wholesalers that are significantly higher compared to Gazprom’s costs or to benchmark prices. These unfair prices result partly from Gazprom’s price formulae that index gas prices in supply contracts to a basket of oil product prices and have unduly favoured Gazprom over its customers.

    • Gazprom may be leveraging its dominant market position by making gas supplies to Bulgaria and Poland conditional on obtaining unrelated commitments from wholesalers concerning gas transport infrastructure. For example, gas supplies were made dependent on investments in a pipeline project promoted by Gazprom or accepting Gazprom reinforcing its control over a pipeline.

    The Commission’s provisional findings are that these practices constitute an abuse of Gazprom’s dominant market position prohibited by Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Such behaviour, if confirmed, impedes the cross-border sale of gas within the Single Market thus lowering the liquidity and efficiency of gas markets. It raises artificial barriers to trade between Member States and results in higher gas prices.

    Background

    The Commission opened formal proceedings against Gazprom on 31 August 2012.

    Gazprom is the dominant natural gas supplier in all Central and Eastern European countries, with market shares well above 50% in most, and in some countries up to 100%.

    Article 102 TFEU prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position, which may affect trade between Member States. Implementation of this provision is defined in the Antitrust Regulation (Council Regulation (EC) No 1/2003), which can be applied by the Commission and by the national competition authorities of EU Member States.

    A Statement of Objections is a formal step in Commission investigations into suspected violations of EU antitrust rules. The Commission informs the parties concerned in writing of the objections raised against them and the parties can reply in writing of the objections raised against them. The addressees can examine the documents in the Commission’s investigation file, reply in writing and request an oral hearing to present their comments before representatives of the Commission and national competition authorities. The Commission takes a final decision only after the parties have exercised their rights of defence.

    There is no legal deadline for the Commission to complete antitrust inquiries into anticompetitive conduct. The duration of an antitrust investigation depends on a number of factors, including the complexity of the case, the extent to which the undertaking concerned cooperates with the Commission and the exercise of the rights of defence.

    For more information, you may consult the public case register on the Commission’s competition website under the case number 39816.

    ————————

    Gazprom Statement 22nd April 2015

    OAO Gazprom’s Statement on the adoption of the European Commission’s Statement of Objections within its antitrust investigation

    On 22 April, 2015 the European Commission placed on its official website a press release informing that it had approved a Statement of Objections within the on- going antitrust investigation of OAO Gazprom’s activities in the countries of the European Union (EU).

    OAO Gazprom considers the objections put forward by the European Commission to be unfounded. It should be noted that the Statement of Objections is only one of the stages within the on-going antitrust investigation and does not amount to finding Gazprom guilty of violating any provision of EU law.

    OAO Gazprom strictly adheres to all the norms of international law and national legislation in the countries where the Gazprom Group conducts business. The business practices of the Gazprom Group in the EU market, including the principles of gas pricing, are in full conformity with the standards observed by other producers and exporters of natural gas.

    We expect that within the framework of the on-going antitrust investigation our company’s rights and legitimate interests, rooted both in EU legislation and international law, will be taken into consideration.

    We also expect that it will be duly noted that OAO Gazprom was established beyond the jurisdiction of the EU, and that it is empowered by the laws of the Russian Federation with special socially-significant functions and has the status of a strategic government- controlled business entity.

    OAO Gazprom expects the resolution of this situation in the framework of agreement, previously reached between the Government of the Russian Federation and the European Commission to find an acceptable solution to the antitrust investigation on the intergovernmental level.

    Information Directorate, OAO Gazprom
  •  

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    5. Britain's Scandal-Battered Banks Are Paralyzed By Stephen Morris
    Fri May 1, 2015, 08:30 PM
    May 2015
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/britains-scandal-battered-banks-paralyzed-040100373.html

    Whatever the outcome of Britain’s election next week, the outlook for the country’s banks is worsening. Almost seven years since the industry received the biggest taxpayer bailout in history, public confidence in banks is near an all-time low and lenders’ efforts to boost profit are being frustrated by investigations into alleged currency and interest rate-rigging. Since the coalition government took power in 2010, U.K. bank stocks have lost 7 percent. Their U.S. counterparts have returned 46 percent.

    “You can hardly believe we are now seven years into this crisis, and we’ve still got billions in fines to come and virtually none of the major banks predicting decent returns for at least another three to four years,” said Ed Firth, head of European bank research at Macquarie Group Ltd. “If you told us that in 2007, we just wouldn’t have believed it.”

    MORE WHINING AT LINK....CRY ME A RIVER, CITY OF LONDON!

    OR AS THEY SAY, IN A GALAXY FAR AWAY....

    “Would it help if I got out and pushed?!!” “...It might!?
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    6. The New Economic Rules for the 21st Century Are Being Written in Secret—And We Can Stop It
    Fri May 1, 2015, 08:52 PM
    May 2015
    http://www.alternet.org/economy/new-economic-rules-21st-century-are-being-written-secret-and-we-can-stop-it?akid=13063.227380.vnh-g-&rd=1&src=newsletter1035713&t=20

    The TPP – an agreement negotiated entirely of, by and for corporate representatives – is not an agreement on “our” terms....

    MAINLY A RIFF ON THOMAS FRIEDMAN

    “Laugh it up, fuzzball!”


    ...The Trans-Pacific Partnership – an agreement negotiated entirely of, by and for corporate representatives who represent giant, multinational corporations that don’t even pay us taxes anymore – is not an agreement on “our” terms. We the People will get nothing from a rigged process like that, no matter how much these so-called “American” corporate giants might profit from it. We won’t get better pay, we won’t get better schools or infrastructure, we will only get even more cutbacks in the things our government does to make our lives better. TPP with fast track is an agreement between the plutocrats of the various giant corporations involved, some perhaps calling themselves “American” and others not.

    If Thomas Friedman of all people is claiming you are right and your critics are wrong you really, really, really, really, really, really, really ought to rethink your position.

    Dave Johnson is a fellow at Campaign for America's Future and a senior fellow at Renew California.

    mother earth

    (6,002 posts)
    30. Soon the corporations will replace nations, with the push to privatize, the only thing socialized
    Sat May 2, 2015, 04:07 PM
    May 2015

    being risk...and there's no satisfying the oligarch & law-not-applicable banksters, so the pace is quickening.

    At times like these I am not hopeful for our future. Why do we bother to have elections...the parties should be renamed Koch & Pepsi.
    Who owns the machines these days? We are dying-boldly.

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    7. Big Banks Claim Reform Will Hurt the Economy. Here's Why That's Bullsh*t.
    Fri May 1, 2015, 09:00 PM
    May 2015
    http://www.alternet.org/economy/big-banks-claim-reform-will-hurt-economy-heres-why-thats-bullsht?akid=13050.227380.NEPSdU&rd=1&src=newsletter1035618&t=13

    If we don't fix this house of cards, it will fall on us again.

    Lynn Parramore: How would you describe the problem of Too Big to Fail banks. Whey does it matter to an ordinary person?

    Anat Admati: Too Big to Fail is a license for recklessness. These institutions defy notions of fairness, accountability, and responsibility. They are the largest, most complex, and most indebted corporations in the entire economy.

    We all have to be really alarmed by the fact that not only do we still have such institutions, but many of them are ever-larger and more complex and at least as dangerous, if not more so, than they were before the financial crisis.

    They are too big to manage and control. They take enormous risks that endanger everybody. They benefit from the upside and expose the rest of us to the downside of their decisions. These banks are too powerful politically as well.

    As they seek profits, they can make wasteful and inefficient loans that harm ordinary people, and at the same time they might refuse to make certain business loans that can help the economy. They can even break the laws and regulations without the people responsible being held accountable. Effectively we’re hostages because their failure would be so harmful. They’re likely to be bailed out if their risks don’t turn out well.

    Ordinary people continue to suffer from a recession that was greatly exacerbated or even caused by recklessness in the financial system and failed regulation. But the largest institutions, especially their leaders — even in the failed ones — have suffered the least. They’re thriving again and arguably benefitting the most from efforts to stimulate the economy.

    So there’s something wrong with this picture. And there’s also increasing recognition that bloated banks and a bloated financial system – these huge institutions—are a drag on the economy.

    MORE

    Anat Admati, who teaches finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is co-author of The Bankers' New Clothes, a classic account of the problem of Too Big to Fail banks.

    On May 6th she will address the “Finance and Society” conference sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, featuring influential women who have challenged the status quo, like Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, IMF Managing Director Christine LaGarde, and Senator Elizabeth Warren.

    Admati will join Brooksley Born, former chair of Chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to discuss how effective financial regulation can make the system work better for society. Seven years after financial hell broke loose, Admati warns that we are far from fixing a bloated and dangerous financial system —and that the system can’t fix itself. Why should you care? This gigantic house of cards could fall on you.


    “That’s no moon.” (LOOKING AT DEATH STAR)
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    8. Robert Reich: Why America's Economy Is an Utter Disaster
    Fri May 1, 2015, 09:05 PM
    May 2015
    http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-why-americas-economy-utter-disaster?akid=13050.227380.NEPSdU&rd=1&src=newsletter1035618&t=5

    For the past quarter-century—at least since Bob Kuttner, Paul Starr, and I founded The American Prospect—I’ve offered in articles, books, and lectures an explanation for why average working people in advanced nations like the United States have failed to gain ground and are under increasing economic stress: Put simply, globalization and technological change have made most of us less competitive. The tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.

    My solution—and I’m hardly alone in suggesting this—has been an activist government that raises taxes on the wealthy, invests the proceeds in excellent schools and other means people need to become more productive, and redistributes to the needy. These recommendations have been vigorously opposed by those who believe the economy will function better for everyone if government is smaller and if taxes and redistributions are curtailed.

    While the explanation I offered a quarter-century ago for what has happened is still relevant—indeed, it has become the standard, widely accepted explanation—I’ve come to believe it overlooks a critically important phenomenon: the increasing concentration of political power in a corporate and financial elite that has been able to influence the rules by which the economy runs. And the governmental solutions I have propounded, while I believe them still useful, are in some ways beside the point because they take insufficient account of the government’s more basic role in setting the rules of the economic game.

    Worse yet, the ensuing debate over the merits of the “free market” versus an activist government has diverted attention from how the market has come to be organized differently from the way it was a half-century ago, why its current organization is failing to deliver the widely shared prosperity it delivered then, and what the basic rules of the market should be. It has allowed America to cling to the meritocratic tautology that individuals are paid what they’re “worth” in the market, without examining the legal and political institutions that define the market. The tautology is easily confused for a moral claim that people deserve what they are paid. Yet this claim has meaning only if the legal and political institutions defining the market are morally justifiable.

    Most fundamentally, the standard explanation for what has happened ignores power...

    “Only at the end do you realize the power of the Dark Side.”
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    9. Fed rate hike in June 'on the table,' two policymakers say
    Fri May 1, 2015, 09:08 PM
    May 2015
    “Well, you said you wanted to be around when I made a mistake.” “…I take it back!”


    http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/01/us-usa-fed-idUSKBN0NM4H420150501?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews

    The Federal Reserve could well raise interest rates as soon as June, two top U.S. central bankers said on Friday, so long as economic data strengthens as expected from a dismal first quarter.

    That view - from the hawkish-leaning chief of the Cleveland Fed and from the centrist head of the San Francisco Fed - is at odds with the view of many traders, whose bets in the interest-rate futures markets suggest they have all but discounted a June rate hike and now expect the Fed to wait until December before raising rates for the first time since 2006.

    The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since December 2008.

    The key, both Loretta Mester, president of the Cleveland Fed, and John Williams, president of the San Francisco Fed, said, is that by a quirk of the calendar there will be two more months of data for many of the key gauges the Fed follows, including the U.S. jobless rate, jobs gains, retail sales and others...
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    12. WIKIPEDIA ON STAR WARS
    Sat May 2, 2015, 08:07 AM
    May 2015
    Star Wars is an American epic space opera franchise centered on a film series created by George Lucas. The film series, consisting of two trilogies (and an upcoming third), has spawned an extensive media franchise called the Expanded Universe including books, television series, computer and video games, and comic books. These supplements to the franchise resulted in significant development of the series' fictional universe, keeping the franchise active in the 16-year interim between the two film trilogies. The franchise depicts a galaxy described as "far, far away" in the distant past, and commonly portrays Jedi as a representation of good, in conflict with the Sith, their evil counterpart. Their weapon of choice, the lightsaber, is commonly recognized in popular culture. The franchise's storylines contain many themes, with strong influences from philosophy and religion.

    The first film in the series was released under the title Star Wars on May 25, 1977, by 20th Century Fox, and became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon followed by two sequels, released at three-year intervals. Sixteen years after the release of the trilogy's final film, the first in a new prequel trilogy of films was released. The three prequel films were also released at three-year intervals, with the final film of the trilogy released on May 19, 2005.

    In 2012, The Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion and announced that it would produce three new films, with the first film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, planned for release in 2015. 20th Century Fox still retains the physical distribution rights to the first two Star Wars trilogies, owning permanent rights for the original film Episode IV: A New Hope, while holding the rights to Episodes I–III, V and VI until May 2020. The Walt Disney Studios owns the digital distribution rights to all the Star Wars films—excluding A New Hope.

    Reactions to the original trilogy were positive, with the last film being considered the weakest, while the prequel trilogy received a more mixed reaction, with most of the praise being for the final film, according to most review aggregator websites. All six of the main films in the series were nominated for or won Academy Awards. All of the main films have been box office successes, with the overall box office revenue generated by the Star Wars films (including the theatrical Star Wars: The Clone Wars) totalling $4.38 billion, making it the fifth-highest-grossing film series. The success has also led to multiple re-releases in theaters for the series.

    THE STORY

    The events depicted in Star Wars media take place in a fictional galaxy. Many species of alien creatures (often humanoid) are depicted. Robotic droids are also commonplace and are generally built to serve their owners. Space travel is common, and many planets in the galaxy are members of a Galactic Republic, later reorganized as the Galactic Empire.

    One of the prominent elements of Star Wars is the "Force", an omnipresent energy that can be harnessed by those with that ability, known as Force-sensitives. It is described in the first produced film as "an energy field created by all living things[that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together." The Force allows users to perform various supernatural feats (such as telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition, and mind control) and can amplify certain physical traits, such as speed and reflexes; these abilities vary between characters and can be improved through training. While the Force can be used for good, it has a dark side that, when pursued, imbues users with hatred, aggression, and malevolence. The six films feature the Jedi, who use the Force for good, and the Sith, who use the dark side for evil in an attempt to take over the galaxy. In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, many dark side users are Dark Jedi rather than Sith, mainly because of the "Rule of Two" (see Sith Origin).

    Theatrical films

    The film series began with Star Wars, released on May 25, 1977. This was followed by two sequels: The Empire Strikes Back, released on May 21, 1980, and Return of the Jedi, released on May 25, 1983. The opening crawl of the sequels disclosed that they were numbered as "Episode V" and "Episode VI" respectively, though the films were generally advertised solely under their subtitles. Though the first film in the series was simply titled Star Wars, with its 1981 re-release it had the subtitle Episode IV: A New Hope added to remain consistent with its sequel, and to establish it as the middle chapter of a continuing saga.

    In 1997, to correspond with the 20th anniversary of A New Hope, Lucas released a "Special Edition" of the Star Wars trilogy to theaters. The re-release featured alterations to the three films, primarily motivated by the improvement of CGI and other special effects technologies, which allowed visuals that were not possible to achieve at the time of the original filmmaking. Lucas continued to make changes to the films for subsequent releases, such as the first ever DVD release of the original trilogy on September 21, 2004 and the first ever Blu-ray release of all six films on September 16, 2011. Reception of the Special Edition was mixed, prompting petitions and fan edits to produce restored copies of the original trilogy.

    More than two decades after the release of the original film, the series continued with a prequel trilogy; consisting of Episode I: The Phantom Menace, released on May 19, 1999; Episode II: Attack of the Clones, released on May 16, 2002; and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, released on May 19, 2005.

    On August 15, 2008, Star Wars: The Clone Wars was released theatrically as a lead-in to the weekly animated TV series of the same name. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is scheduled for release on December 18, 2015.

    In 2013, it was announced the original Star Wars film will be the first Hollywood film to be dubbed into Navajo.

    Plot overview


    The original trilogy begins with the Galactic Empire nearing completion of the Death Star space station, which will allow the Empire to crush the Rebel Alliance, an organized resistance formed to combat Emperor Palpatine's tyranny. Palpatine's Sith apprentice Darth Vader captures Princess Leia, a member of the rebellion who has stolen the plans to the Death Star and hidden them in the astromech droid R2-D2. R2, along with his protocol droid counterpart C-3PO, escapes to the desert planet Tatooine. There, the droids are purchased by farm boy Luke Skywalker and his step-uncle and aunt. While Luke is cleaning R2, he accidentally triggers a message put into the droid by Leia, who asks for assistance from the legendary Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luke later assists the droids in finding the exiled Jedi, who is now passing as an old hermit under the alias Ben Kenobi. When Luke asks about his father, whom he has never met, Obi-Wan tells him that Anakin Skywalker was a great Jedi who was betrayed and murdered by Vader. Obi-Wan and Luke hire the smuggler Han Solo and his Wookiee co-pilot Chewbacca to take them to Alderaan, Leia's home world, which they eventually find has been destroyed by the Death Star. Once on board the space station, Luke and Han rescue Leia while Obi-Wan allows himself to be killed during a lightsaber duel with Vader; his sacrifice allows the group to escape with the plans that help the Rebels destroy the Death Star. Luke himself (guided by the power of the Force) fires the shot that destroys the deadly space station during the Battle of Yavin.

    Three years later, Luke travels to find the Jedi Master Yoda, now living in exile on the swamp-infested world of Dagobah, to begin his Jedi training. However, Luke's training is interrupted when Vader lures him into a trap by capturing Han and his friends at Cloud City. During a fierce lightsaber duel, Vader reveals that he is Luke's father and attempts to turn him to the dark side of the Force. Luke escapes and, after rescuing Han from the gangster Jabba the Hutt, returns to Yoda to complete his training, only to find the 900-year-old Jedi Master on his deathbed. Before he dies, Yoda confirms that Vader is Luke's father. Moments later, Obi-Wan's spirit tells Luke that he must confront his father once again before he can become a Jedi, and that Leia is his twin sister.

    As the Rebels attack the second Death Star, Luke engages Vader in another lightsaber duel as the Emperor watches; both Sith Lords intend to turn Luke to the dark side and take him as their apprentice. During the duel, Luke succumbs to his anger and brutally overpowers Vader, but controls himself at the last minute; realizing that he is about to suffer his father's fate, he spares Vader's life and proudly declares his allegiance to the Jedi. An enraged Palpatine then attempts to kill Luke with Force lightning, a sight that moves Vader to turn and kill the Emperor, suffering mortal wounds in the process. Redeemed, Anakin Skywalker dies in his son's arms. Luke becomes a full-fledged Jedi, and the Rebels destroy the second Death Star.

    The prequel trilogy begins (32 years before the original film) with the corrupt Trade Federation setting up a blockade of battleships around the planet Naboo. The Sith Lord Darth Sidious had secretly planned the blockade to give his alter ego, Senator Palpatine, a pretense to overthrow and replace the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic. At the Chancellor's request, the Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn and his apprentice, a younger Obi-Wan Kenobi, are sent to Naboo to negotiate with the Federation. However, the two Jedi are forced to instead help the Queen of Naboo, Padmé Amidala, escape from the blockade and plead her planet's crisis before the Republic Senate on Coruscant. When their starship is damaged during the escape, they land on Tatooine for repairs, where Qui-Gon discovers a nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker. Qui-Gon comes to believe that Anakin is the "Chosen One" foretold by Jedi prophecy to bring balance to the Force, and he helps liberate the boy from slavery. The Jedi Council, led by Yoda, reluctantly allows Obi-Wan to train Anakin after Qui-Gon is killed by Palpatine's first apprentice, Darth Maul, during the Battle of Naboo.

    The remainder of the prequel trilogy chronicles Anakin's gradual descent to the dark side as he fights in the Clone Wars, which Palpatine secretly engineers to destroy the Jedi Order and lure Anakin into his service. Anakin and Padmé fall in love and secretly wed, and eventually Padmé becomes pregnant. Anakin has a prophetic vision of Padmé dying in childbirth, and Palpatine convinces him that the dark side of the Force holds the power to save her life. Desperate, Anakin submits to Palpatine's Sith teachings and is renamed Darth Vader.

    While Palpatine re-organizes the Republic into the tyrannical Empire, Vader participates in the extermination of the Jedi Order, culminating in a lightsaber duel between himself and Obi-Wan on the volcanic planet Mustafar. Obi-Wan defeats his former apprentice and friend, severing his limbs and leaving him to burn to death on the shores of a lava flow. Palpatine arrives shortly afterward and saves Vader by placing him into a mechanical black mask and suit of armor that serves as a permanent life support system. At the same time, Padmé dies while giving birth to twins Luke and Leia. Obi-Wan and Yoda, now the only remaining Jedi alive, agree to separate the twins and keep them hidden from both Vader and the Emperor, until the time comes when Anakin's children can be used to help overthrow the Empire.

    Themes


    Aside from its well known science fictional technology, Star Wars features elements such as knighthood, chivalry, and princesses that are related to archetypes of the fantasy genre. The Star Wars world, unlike fantasy and science-fiction films that featured sleek and futuristic settings, was portrayed as dirty and grimy. Lucas' vision of a "used future" was further popularized in the science fiction-horror films Alien, which was set on a dirty space freighter; Mad Max 2, which is set in a post-apocalyptic desert; and Blade Runner, which is set in a crumbling, dirty city of the future. Lucas made a conscious effort to parallel scenes and dialogue between films, and especially to parallel the journeys of Luke Skywalker with that of his father Anakin when making the prequels.

    Star Wars contains many themes of political science that mainly favor democracy over dictatorship. Political science has been an important element of Star Wars since the franchise first launched in 1977. The plot climax of Star Wars is modeled after the fall of the democratic Roman Republic and the formation of an empire. Star Wars also reflects on the events in America following the September 11 attacks. Some have drawn similarities between the rise in authoritarianism from around the beginning of Clone Wars until the end of the Old Republic and the United States government's actions after 9/11, specifically passage of the Patriot Act in 2001.

    WOW! I MISSED SOME OF THOSE PLOT TWISTS...NOT SURPRISING, THOUGH. THE SECOND TRILOGY WAS FREQUENTLY TOO PAINFUL TO WATCH CLOSELY, AND THERE WAS PRECIOUS LITTLE DIALOG TO DEVELOP THE PLOT...AND THEN, THERE WAS JAR-JAR BINKS (LESS SAID ABOUT THAT CHARACTER, THE BETTER).
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    14. Star Wars Expanded Universe
    Sat May 2, 2015, 08:22 AM
    May 2015

    The term Expanded Universe (EU) is an umbrella term for officially licensed Star Wars material outside of the six feature films. The material expands the stories told in the films, taking place anywhere from 25,000 years before The Phantom Menace to 140 years after Return of the Jedi. The first Expanded Universe story appeared in Marvel Comics' Star Wars #7 in January 1978 (the first six issues of the series having been an adaptation of the film), followed quickly by Alan Dean Foster's novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye the following month.

    Despite Disney's acquisition of the product, George Lucas retains artistic control over the Star Wars universe. For example, the death of central characters and similar changes in the status quo required his approval before authors were allowed to proceed. In addition, Lucasfilm Licensing and the new Lucasfilm Story Group devote efforts to ensure continuity between the works of various authors across companies. Elements of the Expanded Universe have been adopted by Lucas for use in the films, such as the name of capital planet Coruscant, which first appeared in Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire before being used in The Phantom Menace. Additionally, Lucas so liked the character Aayla Secura, who was introduced in Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars series, that he included her as a character in Attack of the Clones.

    Lucas has played a large role in the production of various television projects, usually serving as storywriter or executive producer. Star Wars has had numerous radio adaptations. A radio adaptation of A New Hope was first broadcast on National Public Radio in 1981. The adaptation was written by science fiction author Brian Daley and directed by John Madden. It was followed by adaptations of The Empire Strikes Back in 1983 and Return of the Jedi in 1996. The adaptations included background material created by Lucas but not used in the films. Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, and Billy Dee Williams reprised their roles as Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, and Lando Calrissian, respectively, except in Return of the Jedi in which Luke was played by Joshua Fardon and Lando by Arye Gross. The series also used John Williams' original score from the films and Ben Burtt's original sound designs.

    While Lucasfilm strived to maintain internal consistency between the films and television content with the expanded universe, only the films and the second Clone Wars television series are regarded as absolute canon, since Lucas worked on them directly. On April 25, 2014—anticipating future film installments—the company announced that they had devised a "story group" to oversee and co-ordinate all creative development. The first new on-screen canon to be produced will be the television series Star Wars Rebels. Previous EU titles will be reprinted under the "Legends" banner.

    Other films

    In addition to the two trilogies and The Clone Wars film, several other authorized films have been produced:

    Star Wars Holiday Special, a 1978 two-hour television special, shown only once and never released on video. Notable for the introduction of Boba Fett.

    Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, a 1984 American made-for-TV film—released theatrically overseas.

    Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, a 1985 American made-for-TV film—released theatrically overseas.

    The Great Heep, a 1986 animated television special from the Star Wars: Droids TV series.

    Lego Star Wars: The Quest for R2-D2, a 2009 official comedy spoof primarily based on The Clone Wars film.

    Animated series

    Following the success of the Star Wars films and their subsequent merchandising, several animated television series have been created:

    Star Wars: Droids, also known as Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO, which premiered in September 1985, focused on the travels of R2-D2 and C-3PO as they shift through various owners/masters, and vaguely fills in the gaps between the events of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

    Star Wars: Ewoks, also known as Ewoks, was simultaneously released in September 1985 and focused on the adventures of Wicket and various other recognizable Ewok characters from the original trilogy in the years leading up to Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

    Star Wars: Clone Wars, an animated micro-series created by Genndy Tartakovsky, which aired on Cartoon Network from November 2003 to March 2005.

    Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a CGI-animated series based on the animated movie of the same name, which aired on Cartoon Network from October 2008 to March 2013. The final season of the series aired on Netflix in March 2014.

    Star Wars Rebels,[138] an animated series set between Episode III and Episode IV that premiered as a special on Disney Channel and aired on Disney XD beginning in October 2014.

    Star Wars Detours,[139] an animated comedy series written by Brendan Hay, who is a writer for the comedy news show The Daily Show, and with creative consulting from the co-creators of Robot Chicken: Seth Green and Matthew Senreich. The series will take place during the original trilogy and the setting will be remote from the front line of war. Following the Disney purchase, this series was put on indefinite hold.

    Literature


    Star Wars-based fiction predates the release of the first film, with the 1976 novelization of Star Wars (ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster and credited to Lucas). Foster's 1978 novel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, was the first Expanded Universe work to be released. In addition to filling in the time between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, this additional content greatly expanded the Star Wars timeline before and after the film series. Star Wars fiction flourished during the time of the original trilogy (1977–83) but slowed to a trickle afterwards. In 1992, however, Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy debuted, sparking a new interest in the Star Wars universe. Since then, several hundred tie-in novels have been published by Bantam and Del Rey. A similar resurgence in the Expanded Universe occurred in 1996 with the Steve Perry novel Shadows of the Empire, set in between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and accompanying video game and comic book series.

    LucasBooks radically changed the face of the Star Wars universe with the introduction of the New Jedi Order series, which takes place some 20 years after Return of the Jedi and stars a host of new characters alongside series originals. For younger audiences, three series have been introduced. The Jedi Apprentice series follows the adventures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and his master Qui-Gon Jinn in the years before The Phantom Menace. The Jedi Quest series follows the adventures of Obi-Wan and his apprentice Anakin Skywalker in between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. The Last of the Jedi series follows the adventures of Obi-Wan and another surviving Jedi almost immediately, set in between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

    Following Disney's purchase of the franchise, Disney Publishing Worldwide also announced that Del Rey would publish a new line of canon Star Wars books under the Lucasfilm Story Group being released starting in September on a bi-monthly schedule. The Star Wars Legends banner would be used for those Extended Universe materials that are in print.

    Marvel Comics published Star Wars comic book series and adaptations from 1977 to 1986. A wide variety of creators worked on this series, including Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin, Howard Chaykin, Al Williamson, Carmine Infantino, Gene Day, Walt Simonson, Michael Golden, Chris Claremont, Whilce Portacio, Jo Duffy, and Ron Frenz. The Los Angeles Times Syndicate published a Star Wars newspaper strip by Russ Manning, Goodwin and Williamson with Goodwin writing under a pseudonym. In the late 1980s, Marvel announced it would publish a new Star Wars comic by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy. However, in December 1991, Dark Horse Comics acquired the Star Wars license and used it to launch a number of ambitious sequels to the original trilogy instead, including the popular Dark Empire stories. They have since gone on to publish a large number of original adventures set in the Star Wars universe. There have also been parody comics, including Tag and Bink. On January 3, 2014, Marvel Comics—itself a Disney subsidiary—announced that it would once again publish Star Wars comic books and graphic novels, taking over from Dark Horse, with the first release arriving on January 14, 2015.

    Games

    Since 1977, dozens of board, card, video, miniature, and tabletop role-playing games, among other types, have been published bearing the Star Wars name, beginning in 1977 with the board game Star Wars: Escape from the Death Star (not to be confused with another board game with the same title, published in 1990). Star Wars video games commercialization started in 1982 with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back published for the Atari 2600 by Parker Brothers. Since then, Star Wars has opened the way to a myriad of space-flight simulation games, first-person shooter games, role-playing video games, RTS games, and others. Three different official tabletop role-playing games have been developed for the Star Wars universe: a version by West End Games in the 1980s and 1990s, one by Wizards of the Coast in the 2000s and one by Fantasy Flight Games in the 2010s.

    The best-selling games so far are the Lego Star Wars and the Battlefront series, with 12 million and 10 million units respectively while the most critically acclaimed is the first Knights of the Old Republic. The most recently released games are Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, for the PS3, PSP, PS2, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and Wii. While The Complete Saga focuses on all six episodes of the series, The Force Unleashed, of the same name of the multimedia project which it is a part of, takes place in the largely unexplored time period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and casts players as Darth Vader's "secret apprentice" hunting down the remaining Jedi. The game features a new game engine, and was released on September 16, 2008 in the United States. There are three more titles based on the Clone Wars which were released for the Nintendo DS (Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Jedi Alliance) and Wii (Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Lightsaber Duels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Republic Heroes).

    Star Wars trading cards have been published since the first 'blue' series, by Topps, in 1977. Dozens of series have been produced, with Topps being the licensed creator in the United States. Some of the card series are of film stills, while others are original art. Many of the cards have become highly collectible with some very rare "promos", such as the 1993 Galaxy Series II "floating Yoda" P3 card often commanding US$ 1 000 or more. While most "base" or "common card" sets are plentiful, many "insert" or "chase cards" are very rare. From 1995 until 2001, Decipher, Inc. had the license for, created and produced a collectible card game based on Star Wars; the Star Wars Collectible Card Game (also known as SWCCG).

    The board game Risk has been adapted to the series in two editions by Hasbro: and Star Wars Risk: The Clone Wars Edition (2005) and Risk: Star Wars Original Trilogy Edition (2006). From July 25 to August 15, 2013, Disney's online game Club Penguin hosted a Star Wars Takeover event based on the films.

    Fan works


    The Star Wars saga has inspired many fans to create their own non-canon material set in the Star Wars galaxy. In recent years, this has ranged from writing fan-fiction to creating fan films. In 2002, Lucasfilm sponsored the first annual Official Star Wars Fan Film Awards, officially recognizing filmmakers and the genre. Because of concerns over potential copyright and trademark issues, however, the contest was initially open only to parodies, mockumentaries, and documentaries. Fan-fiction films set in the Star Wars universe were originally ineligible, but in 2007 Lucasfilm changed the submission standards to allow in-universe fiction entries.

    While many fan films have used elements from the licensed Expanded Universe to tell their story, they are not considered an official part of the Star Wars canon. However, the lead character from the Pink Five series was incorporated into Timothy Zahn's 2007 novel Allegiance, marking the first time a fan-created Star Wars character has ever crossed into the official canon. Lucasfilm, for the most part, has allowed but not endorsed the creation of these derivative fan-fiction works, so long as no such work attempts to make a profit from or tarnish the Star Wars franchise in any way.

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    13. Stocks end higher FRIDAY MAY 1, bouncing back from a drop the day before
    Sat May 2, 2015, 08:10 AM
    May 2015

    AND THE CORRECTION IS DELAYED YET AGAIN...

    http://apnews.excite.com/article/20150501/financial_markets-6214c8503e.html

    The stock market bounced back on Friday as investors picked up companies that had dropped earlier in the week. Major indexes recovered nearly all their losses from a fall the day before.

    "It's an odd day in the markets," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank. The news out Friday was mostly disappointing, he said. Big corporations' earnings reports weren't all that good...Charlie Smith, chief investment officer at Fort Pitt Capital Group, cautioned against reading too much into a day with light trading. "The rally is fun," he said, "but it doesn't mean much."

    NO KIDDING! MORE BLATHER AT LINK

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    16. Signs of Spring
    Sat May 2, 2015, 08:26 AM
    May 2015



    The weather underground promises that we won't drop below 50F for a week....thereby jumping the average temperature by 20 degrees overnight...this is very hard on a body to adjust. But it's sunny, and the need to rearrange the closets cannot be put off any longer...spring is here.
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    18. Chuck Schumer Warns Obama His Trade Agenda Is Dead Without A China Currency-Manipulation Crackdown
    Sat May 2, 2015, 08:47 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/02/chuck-schumer-currency-trade-china_n_7192708.html?utm_hp_ref=business&ir=Business

    President Barack Obama can just about kiss his trade agenda goodbye if he doesn't allow Congress to pass a measure cracking down on China and other nations that manipulate the value of their currency, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

    Schumer, likely the next leader of Senate Democrats, has railed for years against the Chinese practice of keeping the value of its currency artificially low, which makes its products cheaper and American products more expensive. The imbalance is estimated by some to have cost more than 3 million U.S. jobs.

    With Obama pushing Congress to give him so-called fast-track authority to pass massive new trade agreements with Pacific nations and Europe, Schumer and a bipartisan group of lawmakers are using the opportunity to try and force the White House to get tough on China's monetary policy. They managed to add a currency manipulation measure to one of four bills passed by the Senate Finance Committee last month that would advance Obama's trade agenda.

    But most Democrats oppose granting any president fast-track authority, since it would allow the White House to pass trade deals through Congress with no amendments and none of the procedural blockades usually thrown up in the Senate. If they didn't like the eventual trade pacts, there would be little they could to halt them.

    "What we’ve got now is a tough currency bill that doesn’t require the OK of the administration because both the Bush administration and this administration have refused in this instance to protect the American workers by citing China for currency manipulation, even though everyone knows they're doing it," Schumer said.


    MORE

    I DON'T CARE IF SCHUMER GETS WHAT HE WANTS...HE BETTER NOT BRING THIS SLAVERY UPON US
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    19. Obama Bribes Abe to Support the TPP by Unleashing Japanese Military
    Sat May 2, 2015, 08:54 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/obama-bribes-abe-support-tpp-unleashing-japanese-military.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29



    Great minds seem to be working alike. Our resident Japan expert, Clive, had pointed out that the US Trade Representative, Michael Froman, had nothing to offer Japan to change its indifference to the proposed TransPacific Partnership. Only the State Department could serve up the needed inducements, and they were missing in action. But that changed as Obama became more eager about pushing his toxic, traitorous deal over the line. We pinged Clive Wednesday evening:

    I heard from a Congressional staffer today that Japan has changed its position on the TPP from being cool to being keen about it

    You pointed out early on that Froman couldn’t deliver a deal, that State needed to get involved.

    Apparently that happened.

    I noticed the defense pact and wondered if it had anything to do with the TPP. Apparently it did.

    The understanding with the “defense” agreement is that the US will let Japan go offensive.

    Of course, I have no idea how that squares with the Japanese constitution.

    Any corroborating evidence in the Japanese media? And can Abe get the Diet to follow or is there some horsetrading still to be done?


    We got corroborating evidence in the form of a must-read story by Patrick Smith in Salon, which describes in some detail the roots of Abe’s militarism. His grandfather, Nobusuke Kiishi, was charged as a war criminal but never tried because (unlike in Germany), the US reversed itself on rousting out war leaders, deciding it needed to rely on them to rein in communists. Kiishi became prime minister in 1957 and in 1960 achieved passage of a security treaty with the US by having some members of the Diet removed physically so that the otherwise minority in favor of it would pass it. Fast forward to the present:

    As to Abe, let’s take the occasion to deconstruct these various deals he is cutting with the Obama administration.

    • On the defense side, Abe’s new accord with Washington marks the most significant change in the security relationship since Kiishi’s connivances. There is nothing new in Secretary of State Kerry’s reiteration of America’s “ironclad” commitment to protecting Japan. This is the postwar idea in a single phrase: Japan is a protectorate and will remain one.

    Where Kerry broke very new ground is in extending this concept to the disputed islands Japan calls the Senkakus and China the Diaoyus. This is astonishingly indelicate, to put the point mildly—an open affront to Beijing. Until this week Washington recognized the dispute, not either side’s sovereignty. That was correct. My interpretation: Abe, a vigorous hawk on the islands question, horse-traded something Washington dearly wants in exchange for its endorsement of Tokyo’s territorial claim.

    What Washington dearly wanted and now has is a commitment from Tokyo to deploy its military anywhere America or any American ally comes under threat. This, of course, means more or less anywhere we can think of.

    This is big for two reasons.

    One, it opens Asia to the projection of Japanese power for the first time since 1945. Will Japanese forces deploy next time things get hot with North Korea? What if something unexpected and untoward happens in the Taiwan Strait? Have we just been told that Washington will go to war with China if the islands dispute breaks into open conflict, as it easily could?

    These are new, unwelcome questions. China will object loudly to the new accord and, in my judgment, American allies such as South Korea may prove unready for it.

    Two, the agreement is unconstitutional. Here things get a little complicated.

    American lawyers wrote Japan’s “peace constitution” and handed it to them in 1947. But note the date. Truman started the Cold War the same year, and the Occupation promptly began reversing course. Washington has since spent a lot of time and effort supporting LDP efforts to bend, violate or rewrite the law it gave them. This is the core contradiction in a relationship beset with many, and it is now on full display in Washington.

    It may seem odd that nationalists such as Abe favor closer relations with the U.S. given the sacrifice of sovereignty these ties entail, but this is why: Washington supports the remilitarization the LDP has also long favored. The majority of the Japanese, meantime, are as restless with the security relationship now, if not as animated, as they were when Kiishi forced it upon their grandparents.


    This was Clive’s take on our questions:

    The Japanese MSM is concentrating its coverage on the Article 9 (constitutional change) to reporting what exactly the changes means in practical terms and suggesting it is still in going through committee Hell and that Komeito (the LDP’s coalition partner who’s approval isn’t actually needed given the LDP’s dominance of the Diet but as a member of a formal coalition can’t just be ignored) is trying to water down what is permissible for the Self Defence Force, what the precise meaning of the revised constitutional wording is, what approvals must be in place prior to Self Defence Force deployment and so on. Komeito is supposedly a pacifist party so isn’t very happy about Prime Minister Abe’s attempt to make Japan more interventionist, but it is by-and-large going along with it in public (and in classic Japanese methodology chipping away as much as possible behind the scenes).

    Oh, and if your Congressional staffer source is perplexed about the wording of the new Guidelines for Japan U.S. Defense Co-operation, I think this is a feature not a bug. I’m reading the entire Japanese langue version (http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/files/000078187.pdf) and comparing it to the English one and, let’s put it this way, I wouldn’t have translated it using the same wording. For the paragraph they identified, this is how I would translate it (emphasis mine):

    As for the US military, in order to support and complement the SDF, it is possible (for the US military) to implement a strategy involving the use of a strike force. In a situation where US military is implementing such a strategy, it is possible for the SDF to, if necessary, provide assistance. These strategies, when appropriate, will be carried out based on a close bilateral coordination.

    … which is clearer than the English version provided. So the U.S. takes military action on some pretext or other, and if it is deemed to be in Japan’s interests (and Japan could easily enough have orchestrated the initial U.S. military action), hey-presto the SDF then can work directly with U.S. forces in a coalition. As your source rightly said, all very gameable.

    The Guidelines for Japan U.S. Defense Co-operation must though operate within the constitution hence the need to revise (or re-interpret) Article 9.

    Abe is having to proceed very cautiously because polling shows that the majority of Japanese oppose the Article 9 changes. The pacifist left wing obviously doesn’t like any of it. But ironically, the right wing (and this *has* been brought out in JP language press coverage but isn’t widely reported even in the English language versions of the JP press for reasons I’ll explain below) also has reservations.

    This is because while the “you can’t be a strong country if you can’t protect your homeland” notion means there is some support for Article 9 changes on the right, the far right (which gets a lot of Yakuza support because the Yakuza are – or like to see themselves as being – big on protecting the cohesiveness of the community and thus share what they believe are a lot of the same core values as the far right) ironically is more concerned about how they perceive Japan to be a vassal state of the U.S. and therefore anything that increases interdependency between Japan and the U.S. such as the New Guidelines for U.S-Japan Defense Cooperation is viewed as weakening Japan’s independence and ability to exercise military strength in the region even if constitutionally the Self Defence Force is allowed greater latitude for military action.

    The far right, the Yakuza, Japanese militarism and so on are all in the “too awkward to mention in front of the foreigners” category so this angle isn’t widely reported outside of Japan. But the groups pushing for renouncing Japan’s pacifist constitution aren’t doing so for the U.S.’s benefit. They are doing so because they believe in Japan reasserting itself as a regional power in its own right. So Abe is, as usual, about to find out that when you mess about with nationalist and jingoist forces, you’re playing with fire.

    However, Abe probably thinks that he’s treading a middle ground between the pacifism and the militarism. And he most certainly wants a bit less of the pacifism and a bit more of the militarism. So he’s doing an “economic and military security” play, pitching the TPP as an aid to economic security alongside the Article 9 and the Guidelines for Japan U.S. Defense Co-operation changes as a boost military security.

    If the U.S. threw Japan the latter as a sweeter, then yes, that would definitely boost the chances of Abe justifying and explaining the selling out of various internal Japanese constituencies such as agriculture and delivering the concessions needed to pass the TPP in a form which pleases the U.S. The Guidelines for Japan U.S. Defense Co-operation aren’t a formal treaty so if Japan annoys the U.S. then the U.S. can unilaterally vary them. This would be at the expense of pee’ing off Japan, but if Japan doesn’t deliver the TPP for Obama, it wouldn’t be the first time that the U.S. has responded to a diplomatic setback by throwing its toys out of the pram in a short term-ist fit of pique at the expense of its own long term strategic interests.

    Prime Minister Abe will though have to navigate very murky and choppy domestic political waters in getting this through — for the reasons I’ve explained above. There are a lot of moving parts in play and few of them under Abe’s direct control. Many are hostile to Abe for being either too militaristic or not militaristic enough. Some are distinctly unsavoury.

    For the U.S. (I’m referring to the Obama administration here, the TPP isn’t in any way in the interests of ordinary Americans), this however is a very, very clever move. They are playing Abe like a fiddle.


    Patrick Smith, without going into the same level of detail, agrees that getting the TPP passed in Japan is still an uphill battle, and is gobsmacked that the US is going into such open opposition with China. Before, the idea of the TPP as a part of the “pivot to Asia” to bolster the US’s position with an “everyone but China” deal seemed like an odd aspiration, particularly since trade is substantially liberalized already. And if anyone thinks Japanese would really eat American beef even if a trade deal passed, they are smoking something strong. The Japanese are fabulously loyal to domestic producers believing their products to be superior. And given how terrible US meat inspection is, they are right in the case of beef. And how can the US even think of increasing animosity with China? The US depends on China for many key products like chip manufacture and ascorbic acid. We are so economically intertwined that some analysts call the relationship “Chimerica”. Here is Smith’s assessment:

    My conclusions on the TPP’s prospects in Japan—and by extension elsewhere—are several.

    One, Abe will have a tough time—however sincere or halfhearted his effort, and this is a question—getting the TPP past domestic constituencies. The pact hits too many vested political interests, and the Japanese value too highly the intense localism embedded in their system and way of life…

    Two, if the TPP passes in Japan it will require—per usual when Tokyo deals with Washington—corrupting the political process to one extent or another. Assuming it passes, I suspect many of its terms will sit there, as inert as potatoes, unobserved other than in form. The Japanese are very good at this kind of thing. “Let the foreigner in so as to keep him out,” is the old expression.

    Three, the talks with Abe have drawn Obama further out of the closet as to the anti-Chinese aspect of the accord. “If we don’t write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region,” the president said in a Wall Street Journal interview just before Abe’s arrival.

    This is another of Obama’s appalling mistakes in his dealings across the Pacific. The TPP’s exclusion of the mainland is pointed, as is its purpose as an instrument in Washington’s undeclared war for primacy in the Pacific. This is wrong already.

    What is the point, then, of pushing these realities in Beijing’s face? You would think Washington would have learned something from its pouting and fruitless opposition after China launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, a rival of the IMF and the World Bank, last autumn. Not a chance.


    Obama is giving George Bush the Second a run for his money as a candidate for Worst President in History. But the Japanese Diet may spare him by refusing to pass the TPP. Keep your fingers crossed.
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    20. Fast Track/TPP:Death of National Sovereignty, State Sovereignty, Separation of Powers, and Democracy
    Sat May 2, 2015, 09:21 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/fast-tracktpp-death-national-sovereignty-state-sovereignty-separation-powers-democracy.html

    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 Corrente

    Most of the critical attention given to the Fast Track Trade Agreement legislation and to the associated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Congressional – Executive Agreement on mainstream corporate media and by politicians and establishment interest groups interacting with them in the beltway echo chamber, has focused on the likely or possible economic impacts of these. But relatively little attention has focused on sovereignty, constitutional separation of powers, or democracy impacts, which however are being covered increasingly well in alternative social media. See here, here, here, and here. LINKS AT OP

    In hopes of breaking through this fragmentation by type of media of the debate over the TPP, I’ll focus this post only on governance impacts and try to make the case, that this so-called trade agreement, if passed and implemented would create profound governance changes in the United States without benefit of the constitutional amendments that would normally be required to accomplish such changes. I’ll also make the case that the governance impacts destroy national sovereignty, state sovereignty, separation of powers, and democracy.

    Governance Impacts

    The anti-democratic fast track process that gives Representatives and Senators no space to represent the range of people electing them. This process provides no room for debate of the TPP that includes the public and severely restricts Congressional debate. It also incorporates secrecy of the TPP drafts, hiding them from the public and making it an impossible burden for Congresspeople to evaluate them and to solicit the views of their constituencies about them. It also then provides for 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. Of course, Congress can simply take back the policy space that would be taken from them by Fast Track by defeating it, letting the Executive know in no uncertain terms that the sense of Congress is that Fast Track is an improper device for getting around Congress’s constitutional role in reviewing and giving its informed consent to Congressional – Executive Agreements, and that Fast Track proposals from the Executive Branch preceding trade deals will from then on be dead on arrival.

    The separation of powers demands that Congress play its full constitutional role in such agreements and that includes its ability to amend and reconstruct them in a manner that reflects the will of Congress and the people it represents, and not just the will of the President and the leaders of foreign nations. That means there must be consideration by Congress of a number of alternatives to the proposed agreement and not just a consideration of acceptance or rejection of the President’s formulation. So, to restore traditional constitutional governance in the area of negotiating Congressional – Executive Agreements, breached most notably in the case of NAFTA and so-called “free trade” agreements since then, Fast Track must be defeated and forbidden by Congress from future consideration through establishing new Congressional rules prohibiting representatives from introducing such proposals.

  • Preserving the range of choice the Treasury Department now has to fund Congressional deficit spending appropriations. Right now, Treasury funds deficit spending overwhelmingly by issuing debt subject to the limit. However, it has a range of other options (see the Postscript) for accomplishing this useful in overcoming debt ceiling crises created by an uncooperative House of Congress, or for the purpose of ceasing to issue debt at all in funding deficits. The TPP could infringe on the authority of Treasury to use these methods because it could, depending on the rulings of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) tribunals, potentially prevent the Treasury from replacing the practice of issuing Treasury debt with other funding methods. In combination with a debt ceiling crisis such rulings could prevent the Treasury from spending mandated Congressional appropriations, forcing a constitutional crisis in which the President might have to invoke the 14th amendment and rely on the Supreme Court to rule the debt ceiling legislation unconstitutional. This is just one more way in which the TPP could infringe on the sovereignty of the Federal Government.

  • Preventing the Federal Reserve from using negative interest rate policies if it chooses to do so. ISDS tribunals could cause this problem in response to an ISDS suit citing expectations of lost profits arising from negative interest rates on Treasury securities. The Fed has never used that tool of monetary policy in the past. But that doesn’t mean it won’t want to in the future. If the TPP is passed, however, then its freedom of action is compromised by providing ISDS tribunals with the authority to award lost profits to the corporations that might lose money if the Fed made this policy move. In effect, the Fed would need an implicit by your leave from the corporations and the ISDS panels to pursue such a policy. In fact, this point may easily be generalized. Every action of the central banks in every nation costs some corporation money and creates gains for other corporations. Of course, the corporations who gain will just accept their good luck, while among the corporations that lose, some will go to the ISDS tribunals because, under the TPP, they can.

  • Forcing the TPP signator nations to bail out insolvent banks through ISDS settlements. The US and other nations now have the choice of bailing out insolvent banks or allowing them to fail, but there is at least one case where an investor in a bank has been awarded damages from the Czech Republic by an ISDS panel, because it lost its investment in a bank that was failing, was declared insolvent, and then was taken over by a sovereign government signator to a free trade deal. So, we know that ISDS tribunals can decide that way and restrict the policy space of sovereign governments to do anything but bail out investors in failed banks. How do we suppose the American public including, of course, tea party activists will react to such an infringement on sovereignty, if the next time there’s a great financial crisis, the President or the Fed says that they can’t refuse to bail out the big banks because multinational investors in them are likely to win a massive court case against the US if they do let those banks fail and then take them over?

  • Turning over the legislative power of the Federal government to the ISDS panels and the multinational corporations buying their loyalty. Of course, the legislative power turned over to the ISDS tribunals isn’t the positive power to pass laws. But it is the power to paralyze legislative action by future Congresses that might reduce corporate “expectations of profits,” and it is also the power to prevent Congress from even considering a whole range of solutions to the many serious problems of the United States that would work, but that Congress sees as ruled out by past or likely ISDS tribunal decisions. Much of the power to legislate lies in the power to block legislation and to direct legislation away from certain alternatives. It is these powers that the TPP would be able to impose in undermining the sovereignty of national governments signing the TPP including the US government. Since the TPP provides these negative legislative powers to the ISDS tribunals which would direct and constrain the positive legislative powers of national legislatures, the ISDS tribunals fuse legislative and judicial functions, breaching the separation of powers guaranteed by the US and other constitutions. Also, this fusion is unconstrained because it is legislative authority that could be applied in almost any area a government decides to legislate about, since multinational corporations or multinational corporate investors may be involved in, and may find, that their “expectations of profits” are impacted by any new legislation in any area.

    Indeed, one has to ask the important question, of whether, under the TPP and the standard of impacting “expectations of profits” of multinationals, there is, operationally, any area of government activity in which new legislation by a local, state, or national government would not impact the expectations of any number of corporations, some favorably, and others unfavorably? If not, then isn’t it true that governments can expect to have to cope with ISDS actions, in connection with any legislation they pass, and any rule change they make? And isn’t it also true that the ISDS provisions in the TPP are in fact a grant of exclusive authority to profit making corporations in comparison to all other types of social institutions to review and veto legislation by democratically elected legislative bodies, countering popular sovereignty, with multinational corporate sovereignty?

  • Destroying US Federalism. Amendment 10 of the US Constitution says:

    The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.


    That is, the power to impose fines on the States, or local governments, formed as sub-divisions within States, due to laws and regulations passed by States in pursuit of the general welfare of their citizens, isn’t explicitly granted to the Federal government by the Constitution. So, how can the Federal government delegate a power it does not have under the Constitution to the ISDS tribunals by signing the TPP? Treaties are the law of the land, and they trump previously passed legislation. But, first, according to the Constitution a Congressional – Executive Agreement is not a treaty. And second, even if it were, it would not trump the Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land. So, Federalism, as expressed in Amendment 10, means that the states of the union have a limited sphere of state sovereignty that cannot be breached by either the Federal government, or by treaties or international agreements concluded by it. And that sphere of state sovereignty is precisely in the area of providing for the general welfare of its citizens. If a state in the US decides, for example, that the Federal minimum wage isn’t high enough for the general welfare of its citizens, it is free, right now, to pass a minimum wage at any level exceeding the Federal minimum that it thinks is desirable. Multinational corporations have nothing to say about this in any tribunal, but under the TPP they could sue the State for lost profits and collect damages.

    So, if enacted, the TPP would violate Federalism, state sovereignty, and therefore the Constitution of the United States, in a way that the Federal Government cannot now do. It is clearly an unconstitutional treaty, which the United States has no right to conclude.


    LARGE EDIT HERE..SEE LINK

    How can there be any other outcome when an action taken in office destroys National Sovereignty, State Sovereignty, Separation of Powers, and Democracy with a single vote.
  •  

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    22. You are with friends here...no need to apologise
    Sat May 2, 2015, 09:29 AM
    May 2015

    Glad to see you are in fine fettle.

    I'm off to a movie with the Kid. We've been having bad health and stress and a really sucky week. Going to a movie with Harrison Ford, by mutual choice, even if he isn't the lead actor...

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    23. We saw "The Woman in Gold"
    Sat May 2, 2015, 01:02 PM
    May 2015

    It is a masterpiece! Harrison Ford is not in this film, but that's okay.

    I started crying 5 minutes in, and that's all right, too. I only cry at the good movies.

    This true life story was brilliantly and beautifully performed and filmed. It is as much a work of art as the original Klimt portrait at its heart. You must see it! It's a good companion piece to the Monuments Men, which starred George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett. World War II reparations are in fashion...

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    24. There is nothing better for flagging spirits than a story of perseverance
    Sat May 2, 2015, 01:07 PM
    May 2015

    and this is one of those. The niece and her lawyer went all the way to the Supreme Court, and won! Then they went to Austria, and did it again!

    The film shows many beautiful buildings in Vienna, but I have to think it more a sepulcher than the city of wine, women and song...

    The past is not dead. It is not even past. The bullies, thieves and psychopaths had best remember that.

    MattSh

    (3,714 posts)
    25. The week from heck...
    Sat May 2, 2015, 02:47 PM
    May 2015

    Last week our son had a major test he had to take for school. In Ukrainian Language. He did worse than we had hoped. But so did everyone else. We speculate they went out of their way to make the test harder for native Russian speakers.

    My wife's father called her a couple of days ago and reported he had lost his eyesight. Seems it was related to him stopping his high blood pressure pills about a month ago. Now he gets a 10-14 day stay in the hospital. He's already trying to escape. In the states, you'd get a couple of visits to a doctor's office max unless they find a more serious problem. His eyesight is mostly back now.

    Went out to our summer cottage for only the third time this year. (See #1 above) Found out the only English speaker there (outside my family) died earlier this spring. I never actually talked to him much though. A recurring tumor in the head was the cause. His father, a retired doctor, almost lost his wife a couple of days later, but was able to resuscitate her after a couple of minutes of CPR. He's 88, and she's 86. And they are not the oldest one in our little community. Our next door neighbor is 91 and routinely flirts with my wife.

    Another resident there spent his entire working life in a place called Kramatorsk, before retiring with his wife to the Kiev region. Kramatorsk was a battleground last summer, going from rebel hands back into government hands. He gets absolutely livid when the discussion centers on the current government. Colorful language guaranteed.

    The police were out in force this weekend, guarding major public sites and events for May Day here in Kiev. The reason? Russia might attempt something. Yep, Russia again. Trust me. If something happens, it will happen May 9, it will be an Ukraine and friends false flag, and it will likely not be in Kiev. They're trying desperately to keep things mostly normal in Kiev to attract investment. In fact, Mayor Klitschko is touring (or recently toured) the USA to drum up investment. Even palled it up with VP Biden and "F*ck the EU" Nuland.

    Back in Kiev now. Generally have internet at our summer cottage only for the summer months. We don't spend much time there in May. Last year it cost approximately $12 a month. This summer it will cost under $6. Currency devaluation will do that.

    MattSh

    (3,714 posts)
    27. Reality sucks. Image is what counts.
    Sat May 2, 2015, 03:02 PM
    May 2015
    US to Create ‘New Image’ for Ukraine – Sputnik International

    The US often acts according to principles of the corporate law and seeks to achieve its goals not only by economic, political and military means, but also using marketing technologies, German Internet portal reported.

    The United States is engaged in "rebranding" of Ukraine, which purpose is to create a new image of the country, German portal Propagandaschau wrote.

    The process will resemble the creation of popular brands as the US has long become a kind of “corporation,” living in accordance with strict principles of the market economy.

    Human rights are only a ‘brand’ for the US in the global system. According to the US, marketing and public relations are no less important for a state than for Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Ford companies, the author wrote.

    The foreign policy of the United States is focused on the export of totalitarian market ideology, which is necessary for the country to expand its markets and increase profits. The US throws itself into new markets and fills them with its own ideology, laws and commodities. To capture new potential markets the country uses not only methods of pressure, but also competent marketing, PR and outright propaganda, the article said.

    The author analyzed a lecture, made by a US citizen Vivian Walker and released on YouTube, which "astonished Ukrainians" with a rebranding project for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

    The designers have created a new type “Bandera Pro”, which the Foreign Ministry is expected to use. They also have created a new logo — a graphic picture of a ship with the slogan "The will of the people – it is the wind in our sails."

    Complete story at - http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150425/1021375692.html#ixzz3YLtAYPAg

    MattSh

    (3,714 posts)
    28. Here's the mentioned video...
    Sat May 2, 2015, 03:12 PM
    May 2015

    for those who happen to have a spare hour and 20 minutes. That wouldn't include me.

    Though one commenter said the sound starts at the 10 1/2 minute mark.

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    32. In the shock of temperatures staying above freezing
    Sun May 3, 2015, 03:59 AM
    May 2015

    (they were supposed to stay above 50F, but it's only 48F as I write)

    I forgot to mention that my little peach tree, in its third year of my stewardship, is dotted with large, healthy, pink blossoms! If it stays above freezing, as the weatherman promised, for the next week, there will be peaches!

    I will have to finally make that pie from the peaches of two years ago, which I prepared and froze (it's been a bad time to make pie, lately, but I'm fixing that mood swing, with litigation, no less!). Last year's horrible weather prevented any peaches (or even flowers) from appearing.

    As soon as the sun is up, I'm going to check on the pear and plum trees and blueberry bushes planted last year...

    I want to put in a cherry tree or two...but the stock in the garden shops is not only horribly expensive, it looks inferior, sick and weak. I will have to look in the more expensive, less-frequented stores.

    In the madness that is Michigan weather, it's supposed to hit the 80's Thursday-Saturday. Of course, the odds are only 50:50, but to go from daytime highs of 40 to 80 in two weeks....that's the misery of Spring in the Northeast. I should be grateful for getting half a month of actual Spring weather, but I didn't pick my alias as a whim.

    DemReadingDU

    (16,000 posts)
    38. Good luck with the peach tree
    Sun May 3, 2015, 06:52 AM
    May 2015

    I was reading a recent article in our area that said 2 years in a row of super cold temps, is really hard on peach tress. As long as the temps don't freeze again, your tree should be fine! There is nothing better than eating a fresh peach with the juice dripping down your arm!

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    34. Marc Faber: Stocks Will Drop '30 to 40 Percent at Minimum' as Bubble Bursts
    Sun May 3, 2015, 04:35 AM
    May 2015

    THIS IS THE PERMA-BEAR REPORT....

    http://www.newsmax.com/Finance/StreetTalk/Faber-stocks-bubble-value/2015/04/30/id/641763/

    With the S&P 500 index hovering less than 2 percent below its record high, many market participants are calling for a correction of about 10 percent. Marc Faber, editor of The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, is calling for a little more than that.


    "For the last two years, I've been thinking that U.S. stocks are due for a correction," he told CNBC. "But I always say a bubble is a bubble, and if there's no correction, the market will go up. And one day it will go down, big-time."


    So what's big-time?

    "The market is in a position where it's not just going to be a 10 percent correction," Faber said. "Maybe it first goes up a bit further, but when it comes, it will be 30 percent or 40 percent minimum."

    And you can thank central banks around the world, whose massive easing campaigns have left "all assets grossly overvalued," Faber noted.

    In addition, market momentum has slowed, he suggested. "Look at the market since November of last year to now. The market is up 2 percent. It hasn't done much, and a lot of stocks are breaking down. I don't think that the market is in a healthy condition."


    **********

    Meanwhile, Byron Wien, vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners, says slowing population growth will put a damper on GDP growth and profits during the next 50 years. A new study by the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that population growth will drop to 0.3 percent a year over the next half-century, after growing six-fold over the last 50 years.

    "If productivity continues to contribute 1.8 percent, overall economic growth will decline to 2.1 percent, a rate 40 percent less than during the past half-century," Wien wrote in an article for Barron's.


    "The implications of this slowdown on global changes in the standard of living and investment opportunities could be enormous."


     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    35. Sheldon Adelson lectures court after tales of triads and money laundering
    Sun May 3, 2015, 04:41 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/01/sheldon-adelson-lectures-court-triads-money-laundering?CMP=ema_565

    The billionaire’s Las Vegas trial heard claims that his Macao casino had organised crime links but the 81-year-old was more interested in telling lawyers’ their job...Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire Republican party donor, continued the fight for the reputation of his casino empire in a Las Vegas court on Friday at the end of a week that brought accusations of links to organised crime and of laundering millions of dollars from a suspected drug trafficker. Adelson once again put up a combative performance, spending the first half an hour of Friday’s hearing avoiding a direct answer to a question as to whether he recognised an email sent in his name.

    The multibillionaire, judged by Forbes to be the world’s eighth richest man, earlier in the week denounced as “delusional and fabricated” allegations by the former head of his casino operations in Macao that the Las Vegas Sands’ subsidiary was involved in influence-peddling with a legislator in the Chinese enclave and used men with ties to Chinese organised crime gangs, the triads, to bring in high-rolling gamblers.

    Adelson is being sued for wrongful dismissal and defamation by the former CEO of his highly profitable Macao casinos, Steven Jacobs, who claims he was fired in 2010 because he stopped what he described as excessive payments to a Macao lawyer and legislator, Leonel Alves, on the grounds they might be in breach of US anti-bribery laws. Jacobs also claims Adelson objected to his efforts to end ties to the triads. The case is being monitored by the Nevada gaming authorities because it has implications for Las Vegas Sands’ licences.

    On Friday, Adelson again strongly denied any wrongdoing by his company as Jacobs’ counsel sought to portray the 81-year-old Las Vegas Sands chairman as far more hands on than he admits in the running of the Macao casinos. In response, Adelson accused Jacobs of planting stories in the Wall Street Journal alleging “Sands involvement in prostitution and bribery”.

    AN UGLY TRIAL, FOR AN UGLY MAN

    MORE DETAIL AT LINK
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    36. Star Wars anthology director Josh Trank quits to pursue 'creative opportunities'
    Sun May 3, 2015, 04:48 AM
    May 2015
    “I find your lack of faith disturbing.” Darth Vader


    http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/may/02/star-wars-anthology-director-josh-trank-quits-to-pursue-creative-opportunities?CMP=ema_565

    The 30-year-old filmmaker, who says he wants to take a ‘different path’, was due to make the second anthology film due for release in 2018...The rebooted Star Wars franchise has suffered a blow after filmmaker Josh Trank stepped down from directing one of the upcoming new films in the series. Trank, 30, director of the sci-fi movie Chronicle and the upcoming Fantastic Four movie, was selected to direct the second Star Wars Anthology film due out in 2018. The three anthology films will intersect a new trilogy in the franchise that kicks off with Star Wars: The Force Awakens in December.

    But Trank said on Friday he was pursuing other “creative opportunities”.

    “After a year of having the incredible honor of developing with the wonderful and talented people at Lucasfilm, I’m making a personal decision to move forward on a different path,” Trank said in a statement on StarWars.com.

    “I’ve put a tremendous amount of thought into this, and I know deep down in my heart that I want to pursue some original creative opportunities.“

    Lucasfilm’s vice president of development, Kiri Hart, said: “We are grateful for the energy and love of Star Wars that he brought to the process.”


    No replacement for Trank has been named yet.

    The Force Awakens, directed by JJ Abrams, is the first of a new Star Wars trilogy being produced by Walt Disney since it purchased the franchise from Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.05bn. It is expected to be a huge box office success later this year, and its two trailers have already amassed millions of views amid frenzied fan interest

    Star Wars Anthology: Rogue One, directed by Gareth Edwards and starring Felicity Jones, is the first of the standalone films and is due out in 2016.

    Star Wars, created by filmmaker George Lucas, grossed more than $4.4 billion at the worldwide box office since 1977 with six films and has become embedded in pop culture, spawning a legion of devoted fans.

    Franchise stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher will all return in The Force Awakens.
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    37. The Potentate Of Prague — How the War Party in Washington is Losing Eastern Europe, Hillary Clinton
    Sun May 3, 2015, 04:59 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/04/john-helmer-potentate-prague-war-party-washington-losing-eastern-europe-hillary-clinton.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

    By John Helmer, the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears


    Andrej Babis is the one of the wealthiest men in eastern Europe — if you bite bread, read a newspaper, fill your car with fuel, or put fertilizer on your window box in Prague, chances are you owe Babis money. He is also Deputy Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Finance Minister, and candidate to become the next Czech President. When Babis announced on Friday (4/17) in Washington that he is planning to sue the US foreign policy establishment for libel, he wasn’t bluffing. His aim is to stop the US State Department, American officers at NATO headquarters in Brussels, and the war party in Kiev from attacking him as a Kremlin stooge.

    The rise of Babis is also the takeoff of another albatross which is about to hang itself around the neck of candidate to become President of the US, Hillary Clinton. For it’s her campaign booster and pollster, Douglas Schoen and his old firm Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), which claim credit for inventing Babis’s political party, Akce Nespokojených Občanů (Action of Dissatisfied Citizens) – the acronym ANO also means “yes” in Czech – and putting Babis in power. From non-existence in 2011, ANO took 19% of the votes in the Czech lower house election of 2013, a close second behind the ruling Social-Democratic Party; 17% in the Czech senate election of last October. According to the American pollster, PSB’s Czech-educated executive, Alexander Braun is the winner of several US awards for his Czech political campaigns. He also claims credit, along with Schoen, for advising “notable clients…including Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, as well as presidents in Mexico, Ukraine, and Philippines.” With the ANO vote running at close to 20%, and Babis’s voter approval rating at better than 60%, he and his appointees in the Czech Government control the ministries of finance, defence, justice, transport, environment, and regional development. Try buying, lighting, and stubbing out a cigarette between Karlovy Vary in the west, on the German border, and Ostrava in the east, near Poland, and you need ANO’s permission.




    If it is American strategy to prevent Germany or Russia, or the two of them together, from ruling who can drop their butts in Eastern Europe, then the rise of the potentate of Prague is either a good thing, or a bad thing. For the time being, it’s an uncertain, so a dangerous thing. When “Dragoon Ride”, a convoy of 120 armoured cars from the US Army and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), tried to rally Czech support for American rule of Ukraine and war against Russia last month, it was the ANO ministries which refused to allow them to drive through Prague, diverting them instead to a military base on the outskirts. The US Army called “Dragoon Ride” a “highly visible demonstration of U.S, commitment to its NATO allies and demonstrating NATO’s ability to move military forces freely across allied borders in close cooperation.” On March 29 the Stars and Stripes reported that “the convoy unleashed fierce debate among the Czech people and politicians. On Saturday, thousands of people gathered in Prague, the capital, to demonstrate support for and opposition to the convoy and American foreign policy.” The Ukrainian regime media called that “the opening of another Russian front in the Czech republic”, and the Czech Republic “Russia’s outpost in central Europe.” In Kiev Babis’s ANO was called the “Führerpartei”.

    The Ukrainian allegations were published on March 29. On April 13 a US-supported think-tank in London calling itself the Henry Jackson Society published a report on Babis entitled “Now the Czechs have an oligarch problem, too”. The author was Andrew Foxall, who heads the Jackson group’s Russia Studies Centre. Foxall has been an academic in Belfast. For several days he has had a problem. When readers tried to open his report on Babis, the link was blocked by what was described as a “fatal error”. The think-tank now says “that was a technical problem with our website.” It can now be read here. The Jackson think-tank reports patrons representing the US Council on Foreign Relations; the US National Endowment on Democracy; General Jack Sheehan (below left), a former US NATO commander and now lobbyist for the Bechtel construction company; former Pentagon official, Richard Perle (centre); and Robert Kagan (right) a foreign policy advisor to several secretaries of state. Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, the State Department official currently in charge of eastern Europe and the Ukraine war.

    On Friday (April 17) Babis was in Washington for the annual spring meeting of finance ministers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), announcing there that the Jackson Society’s allegations are “a pack of lies and dirty tricks…What a coincidence that it was published on April 10, two days before I arrived in the United States.” Babis directed his public attack against Foreign Policy, which published Foxall’s report in the US. The magazine was owned by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace until 2008, when it was bought by the Washington Post. When the Post was sold in 2013 to Jeffrey Bezos, the Amazon.com owner, Foreign Policy was one of the small properties in the deal. It calls itself “A Trusted Advisor for Global Leaders When the Stakes are Highest.” David Rothkopf, the editor of Foreign Policy, is an apparatchik from Bill Clinton’s administration. He also owns a company called Garten Rothkopf, which he describes as “an international advisory company specializing in global political risk, energy, resource, technology and emerging markets issues based in Washington, D.C.” According to the company, it specializes in “focus on political realities that uncovers the likely – though often unintended – consequences of government action”.

    A TEMPEST IN AN OVERLY-ACTIVE TEAPOT...YOU GOT TO HAND IT TO HILLARY...SHE REALLY KNOWS HOW TO PICK THEM, BOTH HER FRIENDS AND HER ENEMIES...

    MattSh

    (3,714 posts)
    39. With the Clintons...
    Sun May 3, 2015, 07:26 AM
    May 2015

    it always seems to be "follow the money." But the paths that money takes is so convoluted that it would make money launderer proud.

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    40. What Happens When You Hand Over Your Gold To The Bank Of England For "Safekeeping"
    Sun May 3, 2015, 09:42 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-01/what-happens-when-you-hand-over-your-gold-bank-england-safekeeping

    When Nazi Germany annexed the Czechoslovak border province of the Sudetenland in September 1938, it immediately absorbed a good part of the country’s banking system as well as most of Czechoslovakia’s strategic defenses. By then the country’s national bank had prudently transferred most of its gold abroad to two accounts at the Bank of England: one in the name of the BIS, and one in the name of the National Bank of Czechoslovakia itself. (Countries had deposited some of their gold reserves in a sub-account at the BIS account in London to ease gold sales and purchases.) Of the 94,772 kilograms of gold, only 6,337 kilograms remained in Prague. The security of the national gold was more than a monetary issue. The Czechoslovak reserves, like those of Republican Spain, were an expression of nationhood. Carved out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Czechoslovak Republic was a new and fragile nation. A good part of the gold had been donated by the public in the country’s early years. Josef Malik, the governor of the national bank, and his fellow Czechs believed that, even as the Nazis’ dismembered their homeland, if the national gold was safe, then something of the country’s independence would endure.

    They were wrong. The Czechoslovaks’ faith in the probity of the BIS and the Bank of England was tragically misplaced. The gold was sacrificed, with barely a second thought, to the needs of transnational finance and the Third Reich. The Nazis’ first demand came in February 1939 when Berlin ordered Prague to transfer just over 14.5 metric tons of gold, supposedly to back the German currency now circulating in the Sudetenland. This was certainly an innovative idea— first invade a neighboring country, annex part of it, and then demand that the newly truncated state supply the gold to pay for the loss of its territory.

    The following month the question became academic. On March 15 the Wehrmacht marched into Prague. The German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was declared, and Czechoslovakia no longer existed. But the gold reserves did. Three days later a Reichsbank official was dispatched to the National Bank of Czechoslovakia and ordered the directors, under the threat of death, to issue two orders. Thanks to diligent detective work by Piet Clements, the BIS archivist, we have a clear picture of what happened next. The first order instructed the BIS to transfer the 23.1 metric tons of Czechoslovak gold held at the BIS account at the Bank of England to the Reichsbank BIS account, also held at the Bank of England. The second order instructed the Bank of England to transfer almost 27 metric tons of gold held in the National Bank of Czechoslovakia’s own account to the BIS’s gold account at the Bank of England.

    Malik and his fellow directors hoped that it would be obvious that the instructions had been issued under duress and so would not be implemented. The Nazis had just invaded Czechoslovakia and would obviously target the national gold reserves. But Malik had not reckoned on Montagu Norman. The governor of the Bank of England had no interest in whether Czechoslovakia was free or a Nazi colony. “Political” considerations must not affect the BIS’s transactions. The transfer order, he said, must go through.

    Meanwhile, in Basel, Johan Beyen, the Dutch president of the BIS, wavered. Beyen discussed the matter with the BIS’s legal adviser, Felix Weiser. But like Norman, Weiser took the most formalistic approach possible. As long as the paperwork was in order, the monies must go through. Weiser argued, somewhat bizarrely, that there could be no legal grounds to claim that the transfer order had been issued under duress, as such a plea could be brought before a Swiss court only by the persons who had acted under duress. Clearly, the directors of the National Bank of Czechoslovakia were unlikely to travel to Switzerland to present their case. Therefore any decision not to authorize the transfer would be one of BIS policy, rather than administration. The board of the BIS made policy. Thus Beyen would have to consult the board to stop the payment. (This was poor advice for another reason— under the terms of the BIS statutes the Swiss authorities anyway had no jurisdiction over gold transfers between states.)

    Beyen was unwilling to take a decision without authorization. But who could he ask? The chairman of the BIS board, Sir Otto Niemeyer, of the Bank of England, was traveling to Egypt and so was incommunicado. At 6 p.m. on March 20, Roger Auboin, the bank’s general manager, told Beyen that the governor of the Bank of France had discussed the matter with London. The Bank of England and the Bank of France would not be taking any action to stop the transfer, because they felt that there were no grounds for action. The BIS transfer order went through.

    With London, Paris, and Basel’s compliance, Nazi Germany had just looted 23.1 metric tons of gold without a shot being fired.


    MORE--BANKING AS USUAL!

    Source: TOWER OF BASEL: The Shadowy History of the Secret Bank that Runs the World by Adam LeBor.
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    44. An Assessment of the State of the World Economy
    Sun May 3, 2015, 10:32 AM
    May 2015
    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/05/assessment-state-world-economy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

    The beatings will continue until morale improves, on a country-specific basis.

    Olivier Blanchard, Chief Economist, IMF. Originally published at VoxEU.

    What has struck me the most as I was writing the foreword to the April World Economic Outlook is the complexity of the forces shaping macroeconomic evolutions around the world and the resulting difficulty of distilling a simple bottom line. Let me develop and expand.

    Two deep forces are shaping these evolutions over the medium term:

  • Legacies of both the Global and the Eurozone crises are still visible in many countries.

    To varying degrees, high levels of debt—public, corporate, or household—still weigh on spending and growth. Nonperforming loans, in a number of European countries, are still weighing on banks, and limiting credit supply to new borrowers. Low growth, in turn, makes deleveraging a slow process.

  • Potential output growth has declined.


    AND THAT'S THE GOOD NEWS! MUCH MORE AT LINK
  •  

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    42. The Dollar Joins the Currency Wars
    Sun May 3, 2015, 10:02 AM
    May 2015
    https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dollar-joins-currency-wars-by-nouriel-roubini-2015-05

    In a world of weak domestic demand in many advanced economies and emerging markets, policymakers have been tempted to boost economic growth and employment by going for export led-growth. This requires a weak currency and conventional and unconventional monetary policies to bring about the required depreciation. Since the beginning of the year, more than 20 central banks around the world have eased monetary policy, following the lead of the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan. In the eurozone, countries on the periphery needed currency weakness to reduce their external deficits and jump-start growth. But the euro weakness triggered by quantitative easing has further boosted Germany’s current-account surplus, which was already? a whopping 8% of GDP last year. With external surpluses also rising in other countries of the eurozone core, the monetary union’s overall imbalance is large and growing. (In Japan, quantitative easing was the first “arrow” of “Abenomics,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s reform program. Its launch has sharply weakened the yen and is now leading to rising trade surpluses.)

    The upward pressure on the US dollar from the embrace of quantitative easing by the ECB and the BOJ has been sharp. The dollar has also strengthened against the currencies of advanced-country commodity exporters, like Australia and Canada, and those of many emerging markets. For these countries, falling oil and commodity prices have triggered currency depreciations that are helping to shield growth and jobs from the effects of lower exports. The dollar has also risen relative to currencies of emerging markets with economic and financial fragilities: twin fiscal and current-account deficits, rising inflation and slowing growth, large stocks of domestic and foreign debt, and political instability. Even China briefly allowed its currency to weaken against the dollar last year, and slowing output growth may tempt the government to let the renminbi weaken even more. Meanwhile, the trade surplus is rising again, in part because China is dumping its excess supply of goods – such as steel – in global markets.

    Until recently, US policymakers were not overly concerned about the dollar’s strength, because America’s growth prospects were stronger than in Europe and Japan. Indeed, at the beginning of the year, there was hope that US domestic demand would be strong enough this year to support GDP growth of close to 3%, despite the stronger dollar. Lower oil prices and job creation, it was thought, would boost disposable income and consumption. Capital spending (outside the energy sector) and residential investment would strengthen as growth accelerated.

    But things look different today, and US officials’ exchange-rate jitters are becoming increasingly pronounced. The dollar appreciated much faster than anyone expected; and, as data for the first quarter of 2015 suggest, the impact on net exports, inflation, and growth has been larger and more rapid than that implied by policymakers’ statistical models. Moreover, strong domestic demand has failed to materialize; consumption growth was weak in the first quarter, and capital spending and residential investment were even weaker. As a result, the US has effectively joined the “currency war” to prevent further dollar appreciation....

    Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/dollar-joins-currency-wars-by-nouriel-roubini-2015-05#pZpwK6oyBbGZXQ5e.99
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    45. Folks, I have exhausted my usual sources of material
    Sun May 3, 2015, 12:03 PM
    May 2015

    I was skimming through the newsletters that I hadn't gotten to, these past two years, but events have transpired to make them quaint artifacts of a kinder, gentler, more naive time. In other words, of no use to today.

    It appears that the present is too chaotic and conflicted to generate anything like a theme or timeline, or predictions (other than the hell in a handbasket types). Or maybe, everyone is off enjoying the long-delayed advent of Spring.

    In any event, see you on the SMW tomorrow. With the kind of luck we've been getting, something horrible will happen, and you'll find out about it in this group first!

    May the 4th be with you!

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    46. U.S. Has 7th Highest Cancer Rate in the World
    Sun May 3, 2015, 01:03 PM
    May 2015

    NOT THAT I BELIEVE THEIR STATISTICS...IT'S VERY HARD TO GET GOOD DATA FROM 6+ BILLION PEOPLE IN 140+ NATIONS, MOST OF WHOM AREN'T COUNTING...

    http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20110123/us-has-7th-highest-cancer-rate-in-the-world

    About 300 of every 100,000 Americans develop cancer each year, which means the U.S. has the seventh highest cancer rate in the world.

    “We are higher than we should be, and this is not the type of list you want to be on top of,” says Alice Bender, MS, RD, a nutrition communications manager at the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) in Washington, D.C.

    The new rankings were compiled by the AICR,using World Health Organization (WHO) estimates. The American Cancer Society and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France are planning to issue a report on the same data in the coming weeks.

    The U.S. ranks 10th in the world for cancers in men and 8th for cancer in women, the report shows.

    Our lifestyles have a lot to do with our ranking, she says. “Americans are more likely to be overweight, drink more alcohol, and don't engage in as much physical activity as people in other parts of the world,” Bender says....

    AS I WAS SAYING, WHO IS COUNTING THE REST OF THE WORLD? DOES LIFE EXPECTANCY ENTER IN? WHEN PEOPLE DIE OF WAR OR VIOLENCE, OR COMMUNICABLE DISEASE, OR STARVATION OR THE EXHAUSTION OF SLAVERY, THEY DON'T LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO DEVELOP CANCER.

    AN EXCELLENT CASE OF LYING WITH STATISTICS.

     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    47. Five things Americans still don’t understand about Obamacare
    Sun May 3, 2015, 01:15 PM
    May 2015
    http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2015/0323/Five-things-Americans-still-don-t-understand-about-Obamacare

    Five years after President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, many Americans still misunderstand key aspects of the landmark legislation and the impact it has had on the health insurance marketplace, a new poll shows. While a majority of Americans – 60 percent – correctly assume that more Americans have been able to secure health insurance since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, misconceptions remain about who qualifies for subsidies and how much they are costing the federal government, according to a survey of 1,067 US adults conducted by PerryUndem Research/Communication for Vox Media. Some 57 percent of respondents reported that they did not have enough information to sufficiently understand the law. That, in itself, is unsurprising. Americans' confusion with the individual policies of the ACA have been well-documented. For example, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey released in March found that just over half of respondents were aware that the penalty for not purchasing health insurance takes effect this year. Two in 10 respondents thought it would go into effect in 2016, while one in 10 thought the penalty was rolled out last year – and about one in 6 respondents said they didn't know when the penalty would take effect.


    "Taken overall, the poll paints a frustrating picture for Democrats: most Americans aren't changing their opinion; those who are have mostly become more negative; and some widely held beliefs about the Affordable Care Act are far from accurate," wrote Sarah Kliff of Vox. "But it's not all good news for Republicans, either: though most Americans dislike Obamacare, more want to see it improved than repealed."

    Here are five misconceptions that persist:

    No. 1: Obamacare has driven up premiums higher than they would have gone without a federal mandate.


    An overwhelming majority of Americans – 82 percent – either say the price tag for health care has gone up, or that they aren't sure, when the price of premiums has actually decreased compared to initial estimates, according to the Vox poll. There is some truth in this particular misconception. Some 65 percent of existing plans have in fact been rising, with a median increase of 4 percent, according to analysis of emerging trends in health care exchanges conducted by the McKinsey Center for US Heath System Reform. However, the increase seen under Obamacare is minimal compared with the sharp increases seen in health-care premium costs in the years prior to the implementation of Obamacare, suggests Rick Ungar, a left-leaning blogger for Forbes.

    “When was the last time we saw insurance premiums experience an annual increase of less than 5 percent? I cannot remember such a time and doubt that you can either,” Mr. Ungar wrote in October.

    No. 2: Businesses are cutting employee hours to avoid having to pay for health coverage.


    More than half of all Americans, 54 percent, or 74 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of Democrats, think that businesses are cutting back on employee hours to avoid the employer mandate to provide health insurance, the Vox poll shows. But Sarah Kliff of Vox points out that while this is happening in isolated circumstances, the phenomenon is not widespread. Moreover, experts say that such maneuvers could have legal consequences for the companies in question.

    "Companies can legally cut a worker's hours if business conditions warrant such a move, but thanks to an often-overlooked section of a federal statute, if a court determines that a firm did so primarily to avoid responsibility for providing health benefits, they may be found in violation of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA," wrote Lauren Weber for the Wall Street Journal.


    No. 3: The federal costs of Obamacare have exceeded original estimates.


    Budget projections released early this month by the Congressional Budget Office and the congressional Committee on Taxation demonstrated that Obamacare would cost the federal government $1.2 trillion over the next decade, or 11 percent less than the CBO estimated earlier this year. Moreover, the April report had already decreased by 7 percent, compared with a report released in April 2014, according to US News and World Report. The estimate in the 2014 report had been marked down by more than $100 billion from original estimates, Vox reported. Despite the steady decline in cost projections, only 5 percent of respondents in the Vox poll knew that the price tag for Obamacare is less than was originally estimated. Forty-two percent said that the law has cost the federal government more than originally estimated.

    No. 4: Undocumented immigrants qualify for health subsidies.


    Only 20 percent of Americans know that undocumented immigrants cannot get financial help to pay for health insurance, according to the Vox poll. Fifty-five percent said that they were not sure, while 23 percent believed that undocumented immigrants could receive financial aid to pay for health insurance.

    In fact, undocumented workers cannot purchase health care coverage through Obamacare marketplaces, even if they are using their own funds to do so. LUCKY THEM!

    No. 5: Not enough people have signed up for Obamacare to work.


    In 2009 and 2010, one of the main concerns of lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle was that consumers wouldn’t sign up for coverage through the Affordable Care Act. However, these predictions did not materialize. Last year, more than 7.1 million people signed up on federal or state exchanges, passing the administration’s enrollment goal four days prior to the deadline. And in 2015, around 9.5 million people had signed up for Obamacare or renewed their coverage 19 days before the enrollment deadline, Bloomberg reported. Only 13 percent of respondents knew that Obamacare met its enrollment goals.

    PRAY TELL, WHO BENEFITS FROM MEETING AN "ENROLLMENT GOAL"? NOT PEOPLE....OBAMA WOULD, IF HE HADN'T MUDDIED THE WATER AS BADLY AS HE DID. THE SICK? SOME OF THEM... UNTIL THE CO-PAYS AND OUT-OF-NETWORK EXPENSE BILLS COME IN. THE AVERAGE CONSUMER IS GETTING ROYALLY SCREWED OVER....PEOPLE CAN'T EVEN FIGURE OUT WHICH PLACE TO LIVE TO GET THE BEST DEALS....BECAUSE WHERE YOU LIVE DETERMINES WHAT YOU CAN GET. SOME EQUALITY, NO?

    THE ONLY PEOPLE MAKING OUT OF THE DEAL ARE INSURANCE COMPANIES...AS WE KNEW IN ADVANCE. AND THEY ARE BITCHING THAT THEY AREN'T GETTING THE DOUBLE-DIGIT PROFITS THEY USED TO GET.

    MY POINT IS: IT'S A SCAM, YOU CAN'T PREDICT THE WINNERS AND LOSERS, THEREFORE, MOST PEOPLE ARE LOSERS. THERE IS NO EQUALITY, THERE'S NO MEETING A REAL NEED FOR HEALTH CARE

    I ONLY HOPE BERNIE SANDERS PREVAILS, AND CAN CLEAN UP THIS GARBAGE DUMP OF A PROGRAM...
     

    Demeter

    (85,373 posts)
    48. HOMAGE TO ELIZABETH: Behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Treasury takedown
    Sun May 3, 2015, 01:23 PM
    May 2015
    http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/antonio-weiss-lizabeth-warren-treasury-114539.html

    HOW WARREN REGENERATED HOPE AND MADE A REAL CHANGE IN WASHINGTON....A MUST READ STORY FOR A DEMORALIZED NATION.
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