Click here to view this media In his speech to the “Take Back The American Dream” conference Monday, former Obama advisor Van Jones held up the “Occupy Wall Street” movement as an example of what progressives could do to force change. “I’m not mad at [the tea party] for being so loud,” he said. “I’m mad at us for being so quiet the last two years.” “Something just came across the news wire,” Jones announced. “It’s an extraordinary thing. We know we have the young folks and the struggling folks who are down there on Wall Street… They went down there to the scene of the crime against our future. They went down there and they have been camping in the rain. They’ve been beaten. They’ve been pepper-sprayed. They’ve been falsely arrested. And when they police were dragging them away, they said, We’re out here, the 99 percent, we’re fighting the one percent. You, officer, are part of the 99 percent. We’re fighting for your pensions too. We’re fighting for your pensions too.’ This is a new movement.” “And because of their courage and the character they showed, today it was announced that in their dress blues, Marines are going to protect them and stand with them. In their dress blues! The Marines! The veterans!” He added: “This is a movement moment! Something’s happening in America! Something’s happening in America! Don’t you give up on this country! Don’t you give up on this movement!” “They’re going to stand out there with those young people in their dress uniforms. And one of them had a sign and the sign said, ‘This is the second time I fought for my country… It’s the first time I’ve known who my enemy was.’”
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Prime minister says ‘fat tax’ could help prevent health costs soaring and life expectancy falling The government will consider introducing a “fat tax” to tackle Britain’s growing obesity levels, the prime minister, David Cameron, has said. Cameron said drastic action was needed to prevent health costs soaring and life expectancy falling. Under measures introduced in Denmark recently, a surcharge is being placed on foods that contain more than 2.3% saturated fat. The levy targets high-fat products such as butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food. Danish consumers have criticised the move, which has left many retailers complaining of excessive bureaucracy. However, Cameron said the introduction of a similar idea in the UK should not be ruled out. “I think it is something that we should look at,” he told 5 News during a round of broadcast interviews at the Tory conference in Manchester. “The problem in the past when people have looked at using the tax system in this way is the impact it can have on people on low incomes. “But frankly, do we have a problem with the growing level of obesity? Yes. Do we have a kind of warning in terms of – look at America, how bad things have got there – what happens if we don’t do anything? Yes, that should be a wake-up call.” He added: “I am worried about the costs to the health service, [and] the fact that some people are going to have shorter lives than their parents.” He warned that obesity was on the verge of overtaking smoking and drinking as the biggest health challenge facing Britain. “Don’t rule anything out, but let’s look at the evidence and let’s look at the impact on families,” he added. Conservative conference 2011 David Cameron Health policy Tax and spending Conservative conference Obesity Health guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …‘Occupy Wall Street’ Organizer Is Marketing Analyst Whose LinkedIn Lists Work For Investment Bankers
October 3, 2011 No Comment
Trust him–he might be young, but he's a “professional sociologist.”
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enlarge In July of 2010, two dozen members of the Congressional Tea Party Caucus led by Michele Bachmann co-sponsored a resolution announcing support for Israel “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the use of military force.” So, Tea Partiers must have been shocked – shocked! – to learn that Charles and David Koch , the billionaire brothers underwriting their “movement,” were also in business with Iran . As it turns out, the Kochs are merely following Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney among the Republican luminaries caught up in dirty deals with Tehran. Twenty four years after Ronald Reagan sent a Bible, a cake and U.S. weapons to the mullahs in Tehran, Bloomberg News reported that, in the words of a former employee, the Koch brothers in likely violation of the American sanctions used “every single chance they had to do business with Iran, or anyone else.” A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries — in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East — has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism… Internal company records show that Koch Industries used its foreign subsidiary to sidestep a U.S. trade ban barring American companies from selling materials to Iran. Koch-Glitsch offices in Germany and Italy continued selling to Iran until as recently as 2007, the records show. The company’s products helped build a methanol plant for Zagros Petrochemical Co., a unit of Iran’s state-owned National Iranian Petrochemical Co., the documents show. The facility, in the coastal city of Bandar Assaluyeh, is now the largest methanol plant in the world, according to IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based provider of chemicals, energy and economic data. In response to the allegations , Koch spokesperson Melissa Cohlmia said, “During the relevant time frame covered in your article, U.S. law allowed foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies to engage in trade involving countries subject to U.S. trade sanctions, including Iran, under certain conditions,” adding that Koch has since stopped all of its units from trading with Iran. If this story sounds familiar, it should. Just change the company to Halliburton and the CEO’s name to Dick Cheney. As the New York Times explained in March 2010, even as the Obama administration was seeking tougher UN sanctions to press Tehran into curbing its nuclear program, “of the 74 companies The Times identified as doing business with both the United States government and Iran, 49 continue to do business there with no announced plans to leave.” The federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington’s efforts to discourage investment there, records show. That includes nearly $15 billion paid to companies that defied American sanctions law by making large investments that helped Iran develop its vast oil and gas reserves . Among the U.S. contractors also profiting from Iran was Halliburton, which pocketed $27.1 billion from American taxpayers between 2000 and 2009: Halliburton, former Vice President Cheney’s old company, provided oil and gas drilling services to Iran through foreign subsidies. After a political furor erupted over the work, the company announced it would do no new business in Iran, and it exited the country altogether in 2007. While still operating in Iran, Halliburton won huge contacts from the federal government, including a no-bid contract to restore Iraq’s oil sector, as did its subsidiary at the time, Kellogg Brown & Root. As Perrspectives detailed four years ago, Halliburton had side-stepped the U.S. sanctions regime in place against Iran since the 1990′s by using a Cayman Islands subsidiary. And what should come as a surprise to no one, CEO Dick Cheney opposed those very sanctions until, of course, he became George W. Bush’s Vice President. In 2004, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes detailed the Iranian business dealings of Cheney’s former company, Halliburton. Despite the prohibitions signed into law by President Clinton with his 1995 executive order and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 , Halliburton continued to reap the profits of business with Iran through its non-U.S. subsidiaries. While U.S. law bans virtually all commerce with the rogue nations, Halliburton was able to jump through its major loophole: the rules do not apply to any foreign or offshore subsidiary so long as it is run by non-Americans. As CBS documented : That subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., is wholly owned by the U.S.-based Halliburton and is registered in a building in the capital of the Cayman Islands — a building owned by the local Calidonian Bank. Halliburton and other companies set up in this Caribbean Island, because of tax and secrecy laws that are corporate friendly. Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government. In the wake of the January 2004 60 Minutes piece, the company moved quickly to declare that “Halliburton’s business in Iran is clearly permissible under applicable laws and regulations” and cited its October 2003 disclosures to the New York City police and fire pension funds. Despite those assurances, Dick Cheney’s old firm was subpoenaed by a U.S grand jury in June 2004. In early 2005 , Halliburton announced that it would end its business activities there when after fulfilling its ongoing contracts, including a $35 million gas drilling project it had just won the previous month. Halliburton’s exit was completed in 2007 . Though he did not benefit directly from the Iran contracts of Halliburton’s foreign-based subsidiaries, Cheney continued to have financial ties to his former firm. Despite Cheney’s assurances that “I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest,” a 2003 report by the Congressional Research Service found that the Vice President retained 433,000 shares of Halliburton. In addition, Cheney received $162,392 and $205,298 in deferred payments in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Given the stakes, it’s no wonder Dick Cheney had a born-again experience on Iranian sanctions when he entered the Bush administration. While Vice President, Cheney in 2002 denounced Iran as “the world’s leading exporter of terror.” But during his tenure as Halliburton CEO in the 1990′s, Cheney strenuously argued against Clinton’s sanctions regime and expanded Halliburton’s business with Tehran. In 1998, he complained that U.S. firms were “cut out of the action.” And back in 1996, Cheney railed against the Clinton prohibitions on Iranian trade and financial activity for American firms: “We seem to be sanction-happy as a government. The problem is that the good Lord didn’t see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments.” For his part, Dick Cheney never made tough but hypocritical talk about Iran sanctions part of a run for the White House. That comic fate fell to Mitt Romney . Candidate Romney began his grandstanding on Iranian disinvestment by targeting the Democratic-controlled states of New York and Massachusetts. On February 22, 2007, Romney sent letters to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton as well as state comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli urging a policy of “strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime.” Romney’s theatrics continued: “With your new responsibilities overseeing one of America’s largest pension funds, you have a unique opportunity to lead an effort to isolate Iran as it pursues nuclear armament. I request that you immediately launch a policy of strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime. Screening pension investments and divesting from companies providing financial support to the Iranian regime or linked to Iran’s weapons programs and terrorist activities could have a powerful impact. New investments should be scrutinized as long as Iran’s regime continues its current, dangerous course.” Sadly for Governor Romney, as the AP detailed within 24 hours of the letter’s publication, Romney’s former employer and the company he founded had recent links to recent Iranian business deals: Romney joined Boston-based Bain & Co., a management consulting firm, in 1978 and worked there until 1984. He was CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm, from 1984 to 1999, despite a two-year return as Bain & Co.’s chief executive officer from 1991 to 1992. Bain & Co. Italy, described in company literature as “the Italian branch of Bain & Co.,” received a $2.3 million contract from the National Iranian Oil Co., in September 2004. Its task was to develop a master plan so NIOC — the state oil company of Iran — could become one of the world’s top oil companies, according to Iranian and U.S. news accounts of the deal. Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that Romney started and made him a multimillionaire, teamed up with the Haier Group, a Chinese appliance maker that has a factory in Iran, in an unsuccessful 2005 buyout effort. In response to the revelations, Romney played dumb — and blind. The former Massachusetts governor claimed his investments were in Boston-managed blind trust beyond his control. And more importantly, Romney feebly declared that his new-found distrust of the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran would only apply going forward : “This is something for now-forward. I wouldn’t begin to say that people who, in the past, have been doing business with Iran, are subject to the same scrutiny as that which is going on from a prospective basis.” As the New York Times noted last year, the Iran Sanctions Act was also devised “to punish foreign companies that invest more than $20 million in a given year to develop Iran’s oil and gas fields. But in the 14 years since the law was passed, the government has never enforced it, in part for fear of angering America’s allies.” Which, needless to say, has drawn the ire of one John Bolton . Bolton, American ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush, said: Failing to enforce the law by punishing such companies both sent “a signal to the Iranians that we’re not serious” and undercut Washington’s credibility when it did threaten action. Of course, as the Iran follies of Bolton’s allies the Koch brothers, Dick Cheney and Mitt Romney all showed, credibility begins at home. UPDATE: The National Jewish Democratic Council asked GOP presidential candidates Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann to return donations from the Koch political action committee. The PAC, NJDC noted, “gave $50,000 to Texas Governor Rick Perry and donated to Representative Michele Bachmann in the past.” (This piece also appears at Perrspectives .)
Continue reading …Fox News Watch Panel Continues to Flog Discredited Obama Bullied Ford Story
October 3, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Media Matters has been following this discredited story for some time now and you can read some of their past posts on that here —
Continue reading …T-Mobile and Walmart offer 4G with no long-term contract, avoiding the pain of divorce
October 3, 2011 No Comment
Tree-Mobil… sorry, T -Mobile and Walmart are offering up an exclusive “No Annual Contract” deal for commitment-phobic customers who want to get 4G mobile data . The $30 a month Monthly4G plan gives you unlimited mobile data, with the first 5GB coming down through America’s so-called largest 4G network . After you pass that limit, your data shuffles down at 2G speeds. You also get unlimited text messages and 100 included minutes of talk, but you’re probably more interested at getting at that data, aren’t you? The service will be available from October 16th, to coincide with Walmart swelling its range of budget T-Mob handsets to six, including its first pre-paid 4G handset. After the break we’ve got some official looking words, neatly arranged into a press release. Continue reading T-Mobile and Walmart offer 4G with no long-term contract, avoiding the pain of divorce T-Mobile and Walmart offer 4G with no long-term contract, avoiding the pain of divorce originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink
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Today, I saw two very different reactions to moves made by two different banks. One bank was once considered “too big to fail.” The other is a tiny blip in the banking world. How they reacted to upcoming regulatory changes says everything about their corporate culture. Bank of America made the incredibly stupid decision to start charging debit card users five dollars a month. On the same day, a local bank in Richmond Kentucky decided to close a small branch. In my new book, Wealth Without Wall Street: A Main Street Guide to Making Money I encourage people to use debit cards and not use credit cards at all. My primary reason for a no credit card philosophy is to keep people from going into debt and encourage using a debit card. Bank of America went a different direction. They want to gouge customers, especially small customers, who can’t afford $60 in fees a year, in an attempt to make an estimated $3 billion in profits. Just three years ago, the Congress of the United States authorized nearly $100 billion in bailout money to Bank of America. They took some of that taxpayer money to buy Merrill Lynch. Instead of saying “thank you” Bank of America chose to tell the taxpayers ______ you. I got the word today that a local bank is closing the branch near to my office. Like a lot of financial institutions, profits have to be down and they are tightening their belts where they can. What they did not do is try to stick it to their loyal customers. I don’t see them charging five dollars a month for debit cards. I have a chapter in Wealth Without Wall Street about a cause Arianna Huffington started — ‘move your money’ from a “too big to fail” bank to a local bank. I did a long time ago. I won’t be paying debit card fees to some Wall Street bank. Moebs Services research shows that overdraft fees in 2009 averaged $35 for large banks compared to $25 for small banks. A similar gap existed with bounced check fees and stop-payment orders. Personal service is another point in favor of small banks. According to J.D. Power and Associates (and quoted on the moveyourmoneyproject.org website), “small banks have consistently rated higher in overall customer satisfaction than their Wall Street counterparts and that gap has only widened in the last few years.” Supporting small business is another benefit that ‘move your money’ touts. According to FDIC data, 57 percent of bank assets are with the 20 largest banks, but only 28 percent of small-business lending comes from that top 20. Small banks (defined as under $1 billion in assets) provide 34 percent of the loans, and mid-size banks (assets between $1 billion and $10 billion) provide 20 percent of the loans. Although data shows that moving money from a Wall Street bank has benefits for the consumer and for Main Street, a primary motivation for the ‘move your money’ movement is to decrease the power of Wall Street banks and their role in the financial markets. It took $700 billion in taxpayer money to bail out Wall Street banks in 2008. Most of the losses for Wall Street came from casino-like trading in a financial instrument called derivatives. Few of the losses came from loans, deposits, or services traditionally done by banks. It was more profitable for big banks to act as gamblers rather than as deposit and lending institutions. The quest for profits, documented in books such as The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis and Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin, set Wall Street up for a huge crash. Wall Street banks have not learned much from their 2008 near-death experience. According to a report issued by the U.S. comptroller of the currency, in the fourth quarter of 2010, four of the biggest Wall Street banks held 95 percent of the derivatives for the entire banking industry. In other words, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs have 95 percent of the exposure to losses in the derivatives market. The other 6,349 banks in the United States have 5 percent. It’s stunning to see Wall Street banks go back into a derivatives market after being burned so badly. It’s like watching someone jump out of a sixth-floor window, survive the fall, and go up to the eighth floor and try it again. Bank of America’s move on debit cards was the classic sign of a bank that doesn’t “get it.” It’s the classic jump out of the eighth floor window. Totally clueless as to how people on Main Street would react. The debit card debacle makes it easy to show that if you have money at Bank of America, you should be moving it. Like today. Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC is the bestsellling author of the book Wealth Without Wall Street: A Main Street Guide to Making Money McNay, who lives in Richmond Kentucky, an award-winning financial columnist and Huffington Post Contributor. You can learn more about him at www.donmcnay.com He is the Chairman of the Board for the McNay Group (www.mcnay.com) which provides structured settlement consulting for injury victims, lottery winners, and the families of special needs children. McNay founded Kentucky Guardianship Administrators LLC, which assists attorneys in as conservators and setting up guardianship’s. It is nationally recognized as an administrator of Qualified Settlement (468b) funds.
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How to Make It in America Season 2 Episode 1 “I’m Good” part 1/5 How to Make It in America S2E1 “I’m Good” How to Make It in America Season 2 Episode 1 “I’m Good” part 3/5 HasritSidhu says: How to make it in america #goodstart
Continue reading …This summer, a protest in Tel Aviv started with a few tents and grew to a huge tent city, culminating in a massive march of over 350,000 people who were angry over the lack of jobs, unaffordable housing and economic justice in Israel. It included Jews, Christians and Palestinians, and at its peak, was pulling huge support in public polls, with even 85 percent of Netanyahu’s Likud voters saying the protest was justified. And yet, there was almost no TV news coverage of this in America, which was spending so much time covering the Arab spring. From August 3rd: The Tent Protest has been dominating the news cycle in Israel for two weeks, and now there are also a couple of interesting polls regarding its possible political impact. While it would be unwise to try and predict what sort of effect these unprecedented demonstrations will have on Israeli politics, the polls do confirm some of the hunches we had in the last three weeks, and most notably, a potential for far-reaching changes in the political system in the years to come. – The support for the protest crosses sectors and party lines. According to Channel 10’s poll conducted on Monday, 88 percent of Israelis support the protest. The middle class parties lead the way: 98 percent of Kadima voters (!), 95 percent of Labor’s and even 85 percent of Netanyahu’s Likud voters find the protest just. Even if these figures dropped in the last couple of days—which had some fractions and public disputes in the protest movement—they are still exceptionally high. – The attempts to discredit the protest have mostly failed. Government spokesperson and rightwing organizations tried to tie the protest to left wing movements, claiming that it is a politically-motivated move aimed personally against PM Netanyahu. Still, 74 percent of the public think that the protest is a genuine one, and only 22 percent find it to be politically motivated. – The hard right is the only group not identifying with the protest. Half of Shas’ voters and most of those voting for the settlers’ parties think the protest is politically motivated. Voters of those parties are more inclined to oppose the protest than any other group. I believe that these groups sense that the protest might challenge the dominant political arrangements in Israel – ones [which] benefit the settlers and the religious parties. – The protesters reject the major opposition and the coalition parties alike. I wouldn’t take the headline of the Globes-Jerusalem Post’s poll—about a possible social party winning 20 seats in the coming elections—too seriously. There is a long time until the elections and it’s impossible to know which issues will dominate the campaign. Still, it’s very interesting to see where these 20 seats (roughly 16 percent of the votes) come from: 4-5 seats from Kadima, 2-3 seats from Likud, 2-3 seats from Labor, and some more votes from Meretz and undecided voters. The Arab parties and the extreme right are not hurt by the protest. To sum it up, all figures point to a unique phenomenon: the secular middle class – usually the backbone of society—is unsatisfied with the political and economical trends, and more important, with the entire political system (usually it’s the other way around – the more you move to the edges of the system, the less satisfied people there are). Under these circumstances, the potential for major political changes—though not necessarily immediate ones—is enormous. So what happened to this movement ? They were derailed by attacks officials claimed were from Gaza that killed seven Israelis : Organisers of the tent protests which have enthralled Israel for more than a month have called off demonstrations planned for this weekend following the attacks in the south of the country . A series of marches and rallies was due to be held around the country with the main focus in Jerusalem. This weekend will be the first for five weeks with no Saturday night demonstrations. In a statement, the National Union of Israeli Students said the protest movement was “lowering its head on this difficult day, joins the families in mourning, and wishes the wounded a speedy recovery”. NUIS leader Itzik Shmueli told Army Radio: “We decided given the events to cancel them.” He said the campaign for “social justice” and over the high cost of housing, childcare, fuel, electricity and food would continue. Some participants have said only a major security event would deflect attention away from the protests. So what can we learn from this? The Powers That Be don’t seem to want us to know that even in countries that aren’t run by dictators, citizens everywhere are unhappy with huge economic inequalities and lack of opportunity, nor are they willing to support the huge military expenditures that suck up money away from everything else. We also learn that whether by design or circumstances, if the people are too restless, the establishment will look for ways to divert us.
Continue reading …AP’s Choi Fails to Identify the Law, the President, or the Political Party Responsible for New Debit-Card Fees
October 2, 2011 No Comment
If you only read Thursday's coverage of Bank of America's decision to impose a $5 monthly debit card fee by Associated Press Personal Finance Writer Candice Choi, you would have no idea that last year's “Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” triggered BofA's decision. The legislation gave the Federal Reserve the power to limit debit card interchange fees. The Fed's limit — 21 cents plus 0.5% of each purchase transaction — basically cut the banks' fees by about half from their pre-Dodd-Frank level. CardHub.com estimates that the cap will reduce banks' fee income by $9.4 billion annually. Ms. Choi only cited the existence of “a new rule” in her opening paragraph. She then waited until the ninth paragraph to vaguely cite the existence of “a regulation.” It hardly seems accidental that most news consumers who didn't follow the fee fight a year ago will probably have the impression that banks are driving the fee increases, as the following excerpt will demonstrate (bolds are mine): More bad news for bank customers: Debit card fees Bank of America will start charging debit-card users $5 a month to pay for purchases. The move comes as the cards increasingly replace cash and as banks look for ways to offset the loss of revenue from a new rule that will limit how much they can collect from merchants. Paying to use a debit card was unheard of before this year and is still a novel concept for many consumers. But several banks have recently introduced or started testing debit card fees. That's in addition to the spate of other unwelcome changes checking account customers have seen in the past year. Bank of America will begin charging the fee early next year. … Customers will only be charged the fee if they use their debit cards for purchases in any given month, said Anne Pace, a Bank of America spokeswoman. Those who only use their cards at ATMs won't have to pay. The debit card fee is just the latest twist in the rapidly evolving market for checking accounts. A study by Bankrate.com this week found that just 45 percent of checking accounts are now free with no strings attached, down from 65 percent last year and 76 percent in 2009. … The changes come ahead of a regulation that goes into effect next month. Starting Oct. 1, the regulation will cap the fees that banks can collect from merchants whenever customers swipe their debit cards. … There is no similar cap on the merchant fees that banks can collect when customers use their credit cards, however. That means many banks are increasingly encouraging customers to reach for their credit cards, in hopes of reversing a trend toward debit card usage in the past several years. Ms. Choi never identified what law drove the need for the fee (Dodd-Frank), who championed it (President Barack Obama), who passed the law (the Democratic Congress led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid), which Senator pushed for the fee cap (Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who of course is claiming the new fees aren't his fault ), or who issued the rule (the Fed). There's room for discussion as to whether capping merchant fees for debit-card transactions has merit. But there's no good excuse for Ms. Choi's failure to report how the cap came about and who's responsible. I suppose she may claim that she's “only” a personal finance writer and not a political reporter, but that doesn't cut it. As written, it could have been the American Bankers Association and not the federal government which imposed the rule. Choi's writeup enables those who passed the legislation and issued the rule to partially avoid accountability for what they've done, and would seem to betray a belief on her part that readers would not be pleased with them if they knew. Free checking is starting to disappear, and fee fever is growing. Why it's happening — because of so-called “consumer” legislation — is news, Candice. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com .
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