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POPSAmericans Buying Less Quite frankly, why does it surprise everyone that this pyramid scheme finally fell? People simply did not have the money to buy all these goods and the banks gave credit to those who were not credit worthy. When people maxed out on their personal credit cards, banks gave easy lines of home equity loans. It had to all fall because people didn't have the money to buy these goods and now they have to live within their means. It's a good lesson for consumers--sadly one that is probably cyclic in nature.
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POPSTitle Cash Albuquerque Auto title loans are personal loans that are based on the equity of your vehicle. Much like a home equity loan, but for your car or truck instead of your house. As long as you can prove that you have a monthly income of at least $1,500, then it doesn’t matter if you are unemployed, retired, or on disability. Make sure to mention if you are when you apply for a title loan with us.
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POPSThe trouble with diversity: celebrating difference doesn't reduce inequality More: If you're worried about the growing economic inequality in American life, if you suspect that there may be something unjust as well as unpleasant in the spectacle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, no cause is less worth supporting, no battles are less worth fighting, than the ones we fight for diversity… Our identity is the least important thing about us. And yet, it is the thing we have become most committed to talking about. From the standpoint of a left politics, this is a profound mistake since what it means is that the political left -- increasingly invested in the celebration of diversity and the redress of historical grievance -- has converted itself into the accomplice rather than the opponent of the right.
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POPSObama’s FCC, “Media Justice” Mob, and Liberal Churches
* Media change of all kinds must expose and directly confront the mechanics of structural racism and systemic oppression. * Leaders from historically marginalized communities must be developed as effective media activists and strategic movement communicators. * Media policy advocacy and strategic communications are more effective when clearly relevant to the primary justice issues of the movement for racial justice, economic and gender equity, and youth rights. * Compelling communications and media activism campaigns must be both rooted in critical issues and coordinated across issue, sector, and region for national impact. * When justice sectors strengthen communications strategies, center the use of culture as a communications tool, employ winning frames and messages, and strengthen their influence over media rules and rights, the possibilities for transformative change skyrocket. “Transformative change” = a media landscape purged of the Right’s most powerful voices.
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POPSBMW to Cap Executive Pay - wundervoll! Now let me get this straight. GM, Ford, and Chrysler have all lost market share in the US and complain that worker wages and benefits made them uncompetitive. Germans assembly line workers average $60,000 a year and BMW sales have not plummeted as US car makers have. And now, BMW says they are capping executive pay by establishing the current ration of difference 25-1 as THE ratio. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average U.S. worker earned $29,544. The ratio of CEO pay to average pay is 364:1 and to minimum wage is 885:1. So... Why is it that US car companies have trouble competing?
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POPSSafety nets for the rich More: Enough! Goldman Sachs is thriving while the combined rates of unemployment and underemployment are creeping toward a mind-boggling 20 percent. Two-thirds of all the income gains from the years 2002 to 2007 — two-thirds! — went to the top 1 percent of Americans. We cannot continue transferring the nation’s wealth to those at the apex of the economic pyramid — which is what we have been doing for the past three decades or so — while hoping that someday, maybe, the benefits of that transfer will trickle down in the form of steady employment and improved living standards for the many millions of families struggling to make it from day to day. That money is never going to trickle down. It’s a fairy tale. We’re crazy to continue believing it.
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POPSACORN foresaw the foreclosure crisis in 2001
More: Moreover, Oakland's law would have gone much farther than requiring that borrowers could afford loans. In 2001, ACORN officials already recognized that the driving force behind the subprime lending was the ability of brokers to chop up risky mortgages, repackage them with good loans as "securities," and sell them to other banks on a largely unregulated market. When homeowners who couldn't afford their loans later defaulted on them, these securities became widely known as "toxic assets" and were the primary cause of the world financial crisis… But if Oakland's law had been widely adopted, the bailout likely would have been unnecessary and the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression probably averted. Why? Because the city's ordinance not only would have held mortgage brokers liable for making bad loans, but also every other bank that later bought pieces of those bad loans after they were securitized. In short, the market for subprime loans would have dried up.
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POPSCritics blast $3M mining handout A mining company owned by Goldman Sachs and two private equity funds is in line to get a $3 million earmark for work at a rare earth elements mine in Mountain Pass, Calif.
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POPSReader's Digest plans to file for bankruptcy
"The Chapter 11 filing will apply only to the company's U.S. businesses. Its operations in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia-New Zealand will not be affected. "Restructuring our debt will enable us to have the financial flexibility to move ahead with our growth and transformational initiatives," said President and Chief Executive Officer Mary Berner, in a statement." The Pleasantville, N.Y., media company said the bankruptcy would help facilitate an agreement with lenders to exchange a portion of its $1.6 billion in senior secured debt for equity, and transfer company ownership to the lender group. --- "The agreement, which is subject to court approval, also includes a commitment from some members of the senior lender group to provide $150 million in debtor-in-possession financing, which would help fund operations during the reorganization. The pre-arranged plan proposes to cut debt by 75 percent to $550 million, from the current $2.2 billion."
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POPS"World Trade Has Collapsed... Shipping Lines Have Become Graveyard Archipelagos" Yet all of this is beyond the land, and thus far from sight. Of course, who needs trade when you have a speculative market trading in its own bubble, hitting yearly highs day after day, thanks only and exclusively to the Chairman's printing press. It is a pity these ships can not sail in the sea of hundred dollar bills that is being created each and every day at the Federal Reserve, whose only use these days it seems is to buy junker stocks and to feed the algos that lift whatever offers are stupid enough to float in the equity market." Thousands Of Rusting Ship Hulls Are A Fitting Tribute To The Speculative Market Bubble To view enlarged images please visit website (green indicates operating ship, red denotes a ship out of spot/charter and currently unused) http://www.zerohedge.com/article/thousands-rusting-ship-hulls-are-fitting-tribute-speculative-market-bubble
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POPSObama Helps Strengthen General Electric-Putin Ties "U.S. companies have arguably lost out to some European companies in joint ventures, and better diplomacy will likely improve the chances for investors in the strategic sectors of the Russian economy," said Carlo Gallo, senior Russia analyst at London-based consultancy Control Risks. GE CEO Jeff Immelt sits on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and GE owns MSNBC, the network famously friendly to Obama. By: Timothy P. Carney Examiner Columnist 09/17/09
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POPSCulture of Terror: the Collapse of America ~ I
This great betrayal has taken our “progressive” culture, with “the giant” of applied science lurking over everyone’s sense of the possible and turned it to fatalism. These betrayals have led to “multiculturalism” and the balkanization both of nations, and families, the better to centralize power and to scramble all states into a World “Commonwealth” where power, control and resources are monopolized by an oligarchy; those closer to the labyrinth’s center having greater amounts of all material and social perks and greater immunity from “law.” The dogma of “relativism,” gussied up as “situational ethics” means in effect that the law is the will of those with most power and that reason is an instrument of will and thus of appetites; that the rationales of this new State are thus insane, acts of wanton atrocity, to quote Melville in the epigraph. This deification of the will is a radical subversion of the principles of law, justice and righteousness, as well as charity rooted in Scri
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POPSFDIC Sets Rules for Private Equity to Buy Shut Banks The FDIC has twice brokered deals with private-equity groups this year. In March, California-based IndyMac Federal Bank, split off from IndyMac Bancorp Inc., was sold to investors led by Steven Mnuchin, an ex-Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banker, and including buyout firm J.C. Flowers & Co. Florida’s BankUnited Financial Corp. was sold in May to firms including Blackstone Group and Wilbur Ross’s WL Ross & Co. Today’s vote, which followed a public comment period on the July proposal, shows the FDIC was listening to critics who said the initial plan would drive away potential investors, Ross said in a Bloomberg Television interview. ‘Champagne-Cork Popper’ “The new proposal is better than the one they had before but it isn’t a champagne-cork popper,” Ross said. The agency agreed to shelve a proposal that would have required investors that owned at least two banks to cover losses in the event of a failure. The rules scale back this provision, applying it . . .
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POPSTreasury, FDIC And More: How Many Lies? This usually occurs when a bidder for the failed bank is willing to pay a higher price for the entire deposit franchise. We are authorized to deviate from the "least cost" resolution only where a so-called "systemic risk" exception is made. This is an extraordinary procedure which we have never invoked. And again, any money we borrow from the Treasury Department must be repaid through industry assessments. I am confident in the strength of the FDIC's resources to make good on our sacred pledge to insured depositors. And, remember, no depositor has ever lost a penny of insured deposits, and never will. Note that bolded text. See, this is the second lie. Yes, the FDIC is required to follow the "least cost resolution" process, but what's being left out is that the FDIC (along with OTS and OCC) are also required to follow "Prompt Corrective Action" which serves as a means of preventing losses from happening in the first place. Yet the history of this crisis proves . . .
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POPSGerman real estate company may vote to approve nationalization The interesting thing about this is the difference between American and European perspectives. Actions that are decried as socialism (like buying a 90% stake in a company) here are actually conservative in Europe (Merkel is the leader of the center-right Christian Democrats). Of course, since a wealthy American might lose his stake in the company, I fully expect Fox News to make a lot of hay out of this story.
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POPSAuto Czar Quits Post Six Months Into the Job Mr. Rattner, a former investment banker and His Former Firm Are Involved in a Long-Running Investigation by the New York Attorney General's Office. It seems to me that this would have immediately disqualified him from being appointed to this post to begin with.
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