thanks.
after the clip you posted finished, two more clips popped up, one of them “home with the armadillo” with gary p. nunn. i clicked on it, and despite the listing, it was “l. h. b.” by jerry jeff walker! the exact same cut from the ’70s i was thinking about in the first place!
texas has its own music!
thanks
best I could do:
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/30/2010 00:12 -0500
Submitted by Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform
The Ruling Elite Called
I just got off the horn with the Ruling Elite. We had an emergency conference call and to tell you the truth, they ain’t happy. You little people are not responding the way you are supposed to. A significant portion of you are not getting more optimistic because they tell you to. Instead of just reading the headline on Bloomberg that durable goods orders skyrocketed in June, you actually read the details that said durable goods orders plunged. It is getting difficult for the ruling elite to keep the masses sedated and dumbed down. These damn bloggers, with their facts and critical thinking, are throwing a wrench into the gears. Obama and his crack team are working round the clock to lock down the internet, but it will take time. Not that they are totally dissatisfied. They’ve been able to renovate their penthouses and purchase new mansions in the Hamptons with the billions in bonuses you supplied through TARP. The $1.2 trillion supplied by your children and grandchildren to buy up toxic mortgages off their balances sheets was a godsend. They will never call you suckers, to your face.
Their spirits were buoyed by the 2,600 pages DONK (Dodd/Frank) financial reform bill. So many loopholes, so little time. Obama and his crack team of Obamanistas in the White House, supported by their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, have been able to easily manipulate the non-thinking masses into believing this bill would have stopped the last financial crash and will stop the next one. The Ministry of Truth has been working overtime utilizing Federal Reserve paid shill economists like Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi to perpetuate the myth that the actions taken in the last 18 months have averted a Depression, saved 8 million jobs, created a long-lasting recovery, wiped out Swine Flu, and earned Paul Krugman a nobel prize in fiction.
This is where we have a problem. The worshippers of Keynes, that rule the country, are pissed off at you. Don’t you realize that government spending of your money, borrowed from the Chinese, with the bill passed to your grandchildren, was supposed to reinvigorate your animal spirits. They handed you other people’s money to buy cars and homes and what do you do? You stop buying cars and homes as soon as they stop paying you to buy cars and homes. You ungrateful bastards. Bennie has been hugely successful at ruining the retirements of millions of grandmothers by paying them .20% on their money market accounts while forcing mortgage rates for 30 years down to 4.5%. And still you don’t buy houses. Timmy has instructed Fannie Mae to make home loans to anyone with a pulse who can make an X on a piece of paper. No money down, no proof of income, no assets. Just like the good old days. Still you don’t buy houses. What is wrong with you?
The criminal banking elite have more than bent over backwards to get this economy humming. They have patiently stood by while you haven’t made your mortgage payments for two years while still residing in the house. They’ve pretended to go along with the brilliant HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program) plan, masterminded by the rocket scientists in the White House. Just because virtually no one has been able to qualify for the plan and the redefault rate is 75%, doesn’t mean it hasn’t worked wonders for the economy. The awesome part of not making people pay their mortgages is that they were able to make payments on their credit cards. That allowed the mega elite banks to pretend that consumers are flush and relieve their loan loss reserves while not writing off the bad mortgages and reporting billions in profits for the 2nd Quarter. It is good to be the ruling elite.
The ruling elite are letting you slide on your mortgages and you have the gall to withdraw $20 billion from U.S. equity funds and not buy into this fake stock rally. Don’t you realize that when the stock market goes up, the economy follows? Everyone knows this. But, instead you sit on the sidelines and refuse to invest in the stock market. The super computers of the mega-banks are getting tired of trading with each other and single-handedly making the stock market appear safe. Just because the ruling elite have vaporized $10 trillion of your net worth in the last two years, you hold a grudge? Remember the mantra “Stocks For the Long Run” that the ruling elite burned into your brains through CNBC and the rest of the shillstream media? Why are you so suspicious of our advice. Ignore the fact that the S&P 500 today is at the exact level it reached on March 24, 1998. They meant the really really long term.
Here is the message from the ruling elite to you ignorant masses: Debt got us into this mess and it sure as hell is going to get us out. They have convinced the mainstream media that the reason the economy is sputtering is because the average Joe is not doing their part. This crazy concept of saving for a rainy day seems to be catching on. This is very dangerous. Savings could lead to investment and long-term stability. The ruling elite will have none of that foolishness. The mainstream media is telling you that this new found austerity will push us back into recession. The talking heads continue to pound away that you have reduced your spending too much, when anyone with a calculator and half a brain (Krugman doesn’t make the cut) can determine that the decrease in consumer debt outstanding is completely the result of write-offs by the mega elite banks. Consumers are living off their credit cards at this point.
The military industrial complex continues to do the heavy lifting for this economy. If they weren’t blowing up bridges, power plants and orphanages in foreign countries and then rebuilding them at ten times the expected cost, how would they possibly spend $895 billion per year. It ain’t easy to waste that kind of money annually. Whenever some crazy dude like Ron Paul questions the need to spend as much as the rest of the world combined on the military, some potential terrorists are captured in the nick of time and the threat level is raised to Orange (thanks Tom Ridge). The “professional” journalists on the major networks then do their part in this farce by spreading fear among the general population. Rinse and repeat.
So, we now find ourselves at the edge of the abyss again. The ruling elite have a great plan. It involves more debt, more stimulus, more printing, more accounting fraud, more pain for the masses, and of course more bonuses for Wall Street. If you, the little people, will just follow this 10 step plan, the ruling elite will be just fine:
The ruling elite expect you to comply without question. Have they ever led you astray before?
I concur with your conclusions. I am in no great hurry for gold or silver to skyrocket. I would, however, like to see the miners reflect the higher prices we have seen in the last two or three years.
somebody who knows how to post music, please post “london homesick blues” by jerry jeff walker.
thx
The Adrian Douglas/GATA article is very good, especially when added to other recent posts. He makes 2 main points. First, he argues that China’s economy is not about to collapse. It is a mistake to say that because percentages of growth are reducing this points to a collapse. He points out, rightly, that as China gets bigger and bigger the percentages inevitably reduce. The second point is that inventories at the LME are disappearing fast, and that a rapid rise in commodity prices is around the corner.
I’m wondering if there is more to the story, and the last part of his article, where he discusses US monetary growth, is actually the key.
China is awash in US cash (debt), and acquires more every month. True, it has been reducing its total holding of Treasuries, but what other currencies or bonds can it buy in the quantities it needs? Besides, it would be self-defeating for China to be seen to be offloading too much US debt since that would cause the value of its remaining holdings to fall. China has also been on a buying binge for raw materials around the globe, and this is the key. First, it’s a good way to spend US dollars as quickly as possible without greatly affecting the value of the US debt it holds, and secondly it’s a great way to prepare for the future.
It seems likely that the FED will start QE2 soon. IMVHO, QE is madeness, but the FED more or less got away with QE1. The dollar did not collapse, there was a small rebound in the economy, and the banks were saved. Now, though, the world is a wiser place and knows the dangers. IMVHO, QE2 will be the spark that ignites paper currencies. I think China knows this, and is planning for it. When fiat everywhere collapses, China will have full granaries, full wharehouses, full oil-tanks, and will either own or control the production of commodities in many parts of the globe.
If Adrian Douglas says that LME inventories will be gone in @ 2 years, well, isn’t that likely to be when China expects fiat to collapse? At that point it will write off any US debt it still holds. It will have the goods, and who cares about the paper? Yes, there will be social unrest in China, lots of it. But it will be less than the chaos elsewhere, and China more than anywhere will be ready for it.
Would this also be the moment that ‘Another’ was speaking of? When the Gulf States suddenly demand gold for their oil, not dollars. The moment when fiat burns?
Speaking of gold, I’ve been chewing on the price, which continues to disappoint us here in the tent. Who wants a lower price? Well, almost everyone actually, except us.
The Chinese, for a start. China is the biggest gold-mining countries in the world, but all production has to be sold to the government. Is it likely that the government wants to pay more? Are they also buying on the world markets? They were, and they probably still are. Are they capable of playing the futures markets to manipulate today’s price in their favour? You bet!
Who else wants to keep the price low? The bullion banks, who can continue their gold-lease games only so long as the price is strictly controlled. Then there’s the FED, and Obama, who don’t want any external hint that their control of the US dollar is slipping. Likewise, the Brits and the Europeans, they don’t want a high price. Half of them fear inflation, which would be signalled by higher gold, and half of them want to buy it while it’s still available at an attractive price. The Indians? As buyers they definitely prefer a lower price. The Russians? Like the Chinese, they are hoarding it. They’ll want a higher price in time, but not yet, not yet.
In fact, when you think about it the only ones who want a higher price today are right here in the tent. I’m looking around in here, and I don’t count very many of us. Outside the flaps this is the ‘Stealth Accumulation’ stage of buying gold. Everyone in the know is doing it, no-one is saying it.
If Adrian Douglas is right, there is about 2 years before gold will be in orbit, though it may start to rev its engines sooner. I suppose it depends which commodity in London runs out first, that will be the launch day. Silver, perhaps?
Patience, mes amis, patience. As I said a few days ago, there will be only 2 seats when the music stops, gold and silver. And food, of course. Guess who is buying arable land in Africa?
Have a good weekend. Equiz.
www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/head-into-the-arctic-easy/article1657381/
I am proud of meself….Took a Power of Attorney Form for Belize and customized it for USA compliance . problem is ..at the bottom it says
Any questions …Call TLAGA USA Barrister……haha
that is not an opinion my friend, that is a statement of effing fact.
It might be home to ancient ruins and historical landmarks, but these days it seems Europe itself is in ruins. The plummeting economy is plaguing Western Europe and Greece in particular, but for Canadians planning a trip abroad this year, the economic state can mean saving money while traveling in class.
The Canadian dollar is currently worth roughly 0.65 British pounds and 0.78 Euro - a sharp contrast from what it has been in years past, when the Pound was often worth double the Loonie.
It’s surprisingly cheap to head to Europe, and now’s the time to do it. Check out these inexpensive destinations, and plan a trip to the Old Contient that you’ll never forget:
Five surprisingly cheap European travel destinations
When it comes to cheap destinations in Europe, you’ll generally find that Eastern Europe to be more affordable than the classic European cities of Western Europe.
If you want to know where you can visit for cheap, try the TripAtlas.com Trip Builder and connect with travel professionals & tour operators who can give you recommendations on cheap destinations in your price range.
Romania isn’t a frequently visited destination for average tourists but it’s written itself onto many backpacker’s itineraries over the past decade, with hostels that cost anywhere from $7/night and up. Extended landscapes, medieval churches, and rustic cities like Bukovina and Maramures will charm you. Don’t miss the Carpathian Mountains or the Danube Delta.
Read our 10 Tips to Stretch your Dollar in Europe for more great tips about saving money in Europe.
The Netherlands is an unexpected affordable destination, but when its famous Amsterdam city offers meals for less than $5 and hotels for less than $20, you can’t go wrong. Don’t miss the Anne Frank museum/house by day or the Red Light District by night.
Go wild, read up on our 10 Best Places to Get Naked on Vacation.Croatia is another less popular destination, though it boasts tons of architecture and history to rival Paris and London. Accomodations often start at $11/night. The city of Dubrovnik is known as the pearl of the Adriatic with charming red-tiled roofs, city walls, fortresses, narrow streets, and the Stradun promenade.
Find out more about visiting Dubrovnik.The Czech Republic is another great destination for travellers looking to stretch their dollar, and the usual go-to is Prague, even though accommodations start at higher prices - around $20 per night. Known for its stunning architecture, Prague will not let you down – many of the buildings have been standing for hundreds of years. When in Prague, do as as the locals do – it’s all about beer pubs and gardens, where beer is as cheap as it gets: less than $1 for a half-litre.
Greece is still reeling from financial collapse but that also means great value for visitors this year. For the cheapest of them all, opt for the island of Ios, Greece’s version of Amsterdam, where life begins when the sun goes down.
one gets copied into rss..?..
This one should be copied!
Doing a little checkout…
Should NOT BE COPIED!
do not get any as gifts from neighbors. But I did grow up with rhubarb. On the dryland farm of southwest Saskatchewan where I grew up, rhubarb, gooseberries and crabapples (the latter in only some of the less dry years) were the only dessert-producing products from our farm garden. We did better harvesting wild berries from north-facing ravines, mainly choke cherries and saskatoon berries ( the latter sometimes called serviceberries). When we visit southwest Saskatchewan farms now we see a broader range of fruit crops grown there now, due mainly, I think, to breeding and propagation programs by horticultural and agricultural geneticists who are specialists in dryland and short-growing-season conditions - a good example of how science can have a positive payoff. Cheers. Equiz.
it is obvious that some of the denial about the reality and the true severity of the world economic crisis will continue in 2009 - until it becomes clearer in 2010that there is much more damage to the world’s financial structure than was previously thought.
James Kunstler comments at length on just this point:
“Lending on the scale that became normal over the last decade is for sure the one thing that we will not recover. We turn around in 2009 to find ourselves a much poorer nation than we thought we were a year ago, especially among that broad range of formerly middle-class wage-earners who lived so luxuriously until yesterday. The public can’t process this reality and the president, for all his relaxed charm, is either not ready to articulate it, or can’t process it himself.
“Everything that we’re doing right now is engineered to avoid reality, to sustain the unsustainable, to recover the unrecoverable, when the mandate of reality compels us to face our losses in order to move on to the next chapter of a collective American life.
“The next chapter would be a society that runs on a much more local and modest scale,centered on essential activities like growing food, requiring harder physical work, and focused attention — in other words, the opposite of a society lost in abstractions, long-range daisy chains of off-loaded responsibility, and incessant pleasure-seeking.”
“In retreat from this reality,” Kunstler points out, “We’ve set in motion two forces that are pretty certain to bring us to grief. The first proceeds from the fateful FMOC decision last week at the Federal Reserve Bank to begin buying massive amounts of our own treasury bonds and bills.
This is predicated on the idea that the mechanisms of wealth production — even of illusory wealth, such as the fortunes created by trading securitized unpayable debt — can keep chugging along, spinning off limitless additional suburban villas, chain stores, car trips, and deep-fried snacks.”
See - www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIPMg…eature=channel
“It would be sententious to explain how this destroys currencies,” he says, “but wherever ‘monetizing debt’ has been tried before in history, that is the outcome. The result would be ruinous at every level and would lead straight to the second terrible force: social upheaval brought on by the conversion of economic problems into political turbulence.
“Those two forces are underway right now, in fact, since the overt monetizing of last week was preceded by the shoveling of bail-outs, which tacitly guaranteed a collapse of credibility in US debt instruments.
“I’m not in favor of violence and anarchy, but after the AIG bonus affair, it’s hard to imagine that we are not one more corporate misdeed away from a rocket-propelled-grenade, or something like that, being fired into a glass office tower somewhere — and then the “first-broken-window” rule of social disintegration comes into play.”
“Meanwhile, I stick to my time-table of six-to-eighteen months before the reckless creation of new money-for-nothing filters through the system, overcomes even compressive mass bankruptcy, and starts expressing itself in the sinking value of dollars and the revved up velocity of their circulation in pursuit of tangible commodities.
“We’re already seeing the first twinges of that in the up-creep of oil prices, busting through the $50-a-barrel barrier,” Kunstler notes. “Since scarcity tends to express itself in gross volatility, it’s easy to imagine oil prices rising swiftly beyond the$147-per-barrel record level of last year. As that occurs, the most basic premises of everyday life in the USA will be called into question.
See - www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j-vl…eature=channel
“If you think car sales have been bad lately, with oil in the $35-a-barrel range most of the winter, just wait. The newly-minted unemployed will be marooned in their subdivisions.
“They will not be buying GMC Yukons on 48-month installment contracts, let alone X-boxes on their Visa cards. They might be very, very hungry, though. All bets are off as to how these social classes may organize themselves to alleviate their hunger (and express their anger about it).”
the VAT has always been there, now its official.
all costs are passed to the last buyer.
the problem is we are being sold a lot of stuff we taxpayers dont want.
so, the obvious solution is a buyers strike.
when I come up on a prius.
on the rear bumber was the osama/biden 08 sticker.
then it hit me……and explained the actions of these two, I dare not say morons as they are a brilliant man in one.
obama/biden=osama bin ladin. they just reversed a few letters.
its all clear to me now. its been in front of us all this time. or in back of us on the bumper.
the taxpayers will pay for it ALL before it is over! JMO
Tax Code Goof: BP’s $10B Credit for Gulf Oil Spill Loss
Submitted by asiablues on 07/30/2010 21:46 -0800
President Obama
This was posted at my blog on Tue. July 27, and I just now got around posting on zh. To those bullies chasing my post all over net: I stand by my opinion, so let it rip!!
******************************************************************
By Dian L. Chu, Economic Forecasts & Opinions
There is no shortage of news from BP on Tuesday:
The oil major reported its first quarterly loss–$17.15 billion–in eighteen years, and will sell about $30 billion in assets.
The company also announced that CEO Tony Hayward will step down on Oct. 1 to work at TNK-BP–BP’s joint venture in Russia.
Bob Dudley, an American BP executive, will succeed Hayward as the new Chief Executive
The more eyebrow-raising news; however, is that BP plans to claim almost $10 billion in U.S. tax credit as a direct result of the Gulf oil spill. Here is how the tax code and math work.
Under the U.S. corporate tax law, companies can take credits up to 35% of their loss. Since BP reported $32.2 billion charge related to the cost of the spill, 35% of that will give you roughly $10 billion in credit. So BP’s claim is pretty much what its spokesman said.
“This is the accounting process, we are going by U.S. laws.”
The intention of the tax code is to encourage investments and to help companies even out profit and loss, along with the associated taxes. Lawmakers just forgot to incorporate a rider clause for public safety and/or environmental damage related expense.
The tax credit, if claimed, could mean $10 billion of the Gulf aftermath costs would come out of taxpayers’ pocket. This could potentially be quite an embarrassment for the Administration as President Obama vowed that BP will “pay every dime owed” for the spill damage.
Of course, BP could conceivably “do the right thing” and drop its tax credit claim to avoid a crashing tsunami of public anger and outrage. However, don’t expect BP to give up on this sizable cost offset that easily, since BP has made considerable concessions such as a voluntary $20 billion oil spill fund, and speculation of U.S. government’s involvement in Hayward’s dismissal and Dudley’s appointment.
As reputation goes, it is hard to imagine the IRS would let this $10 billion slip by. Could revenge of the IRS be in the cards, or as Leona Helmsley famously said “Only the little people pay taxes”?
Sorry about the RPG vs the RPW on SLV. SLV could use an RPG up its XXX.
Buy catfood manufacturers.
44 minutes ago
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press Writer
(AP:WASHINGTON) Tucked into the new health care law is a requirement that could become a paperwork nightmare for nearly 40 million businesses.
They must file tax forms for every vendor that sells them more than $600 in goods.
The goal is to prevent vendors from underreporting their income to the Internal Revenue Service. The government must think vendors are omitting a lot because the filing requirement is estimated to bring in $19 billion over the next decade.
Business groups say it will swamp their members in paperwork, and Congress is listening. Democrats and Republicans want to repeal it, but getting them to work together on the issue is proving difficult in an election year.
The House rejected a bill Friday that would have repealed the provision. The two parties disagreed on how to make up the lost revenue.
“This foolish policy hammers our business community when we should be supporting their job growth,” Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska said in the Republicans’ weekly radio and Internet address Saturday. “It’s only one example of how the administration’s promise to support small businesses really rings hollow.”
Democrats blamed Republicans for Friday’s failure.
“Despite all of their rhetoric about the need to eliminate this reporting requirement, Republicans walked away from small businesses when it mattered most,” said Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
Businesses already must file Form 1099s with the IRS when they purchase more than $600 in services from a vendor in a year. The new provision would extend the requirement to the purchase of goods, starting in 2012.
The requirement would hit about 38 million businesses, charities and tax-exempt organizations, many of them small businesses already swamped by government paperwork, according to a recent report by the National Taxpayer Advocate. It would also create an avalanche of paperwork that could strain the IRS itself, wrote the advocate, an independent watchdog within the IRS.
Businesses that repeatedly make small purchases from the same vendor would have to keep good records in case the total exceeded $600 in a year. Companies would also have to get vendors’ tax identification numbers to include in the filings.
“Tax paperwork and compliance are already major expenses for small businesses,” a coalition of 80 business groups recently wrote lawmakers. “This new and expanded requirement means that almost every business-to-business transaction is potentially reportable to the IRS.”
Republicans want to repeal the filing requirement and pay for it by changing other parts of the new health care law, a strategy that Democratic leaders won’t support. Democrats want to repeal the filing requirement and pay for it by raising taxes on international corporations and limiting taxpayers’ ability to use special trusts to avoid gifts taxes. Republicans won’t support that.
The House rejected the Democratic bill Friday after Democratic leaders brought it up under a procedure that requires a two-thirds majority for approval. The vote was 241-154, with nearly all Democrats voting in favor of the bill and nearly all Republicans opposed.
Johanns has been working to repeal the filing requirement in the Senate, with similar results.
But they thought they owned gold!
Although it does not appear until almost the end of this article in the Financial Times, BIS Gold Swaps Mystery Unravelled, the source of the gold provided in the dollar swaps with BIS is coming from customers of about 10 European banks who are holding their gold at the banks in ‘unallocated accounts.’
“The gold used in the swaps came mainly from investors’s deposit accounts at the European commercial banks. Some investors prefer to deposit their gold in so-called “allocated accounts”, which restrict the custodian bank’s ability to use the gold in their market operations by assigning them specific bullion bars. But other investors prefer cheaper “unallocated accounts”, which give banks access to their bullion for their day-to-day operations.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/07/european-banks-lent-their-customers.html
