A Day In The Life

People blame our government for the shape the country is in, but the government isn’t at fault. It’s the voters who are to blame. People are as ignorant as the day is long when it comes to voting and what their priorities for government are. How do you think Bush got elected to a second term? It was all up to Ohio in the second election and what did the Ohio voters do? They voted for Bush because he was against abortion and same sex marriages. Meanwhile innocent lives were being taken and billions of dollars were being spent on a war that we didn’t need to be in and big corporations were getting tax breaks.
While abortion and same sex marriage may be important to voters, it’s not the biggest problem facing our country right now, nor was it the most important problem facing our country when Bush ran for a second term. We were in a war with Iraq, a country that was not a threat to us, nor did they have weapons of mass destruction like Bush’s government said they did. They lied to us and it cost us billions of dollars that ultimately led us spiraling down the road that led to the shape that we’re in today. Politicians lie, it’s in their DNA. The sooner you the voter realize that the better off we will all be.
But the only thing the voters were concerned about was abortion and same sex marriage. First of all I am not pro nor con when it comes to abortion and same sex marriage, I really don’t care either way. But I do care about the economy and what our elected officials are doing with our lives and our money. We need to set our priorities straight. Being against abortion and same sex marriage is not going to get us out of the problems we’re facing today. Americans need jobs, we need job security; we need big corporations and Wall Street to quit looking after themselves and start looking after the people.
I realize that corporations are considered people now thanks to a pathetic law passed by our Judicial System. Exactly how corporations are people is beyond me. I wonder how much money they paid the judges to vote that way. I wonder how much money our elected officials got from big corporations to vote the way they do. The members of Congress can tell us how to live yet they can’t tell the big oil companies how much to charge for gas. I saw recently that gas prices may reach $5.00 a gallon before the end of the year. Most Americans can’t afford $5.00 a gallon for gas, I can’t. And what does Congress have to say about it? “We can’t do anything about that.” They can’t do anything about it or don’t want to do anything about it, that is the question. And the reason is big oil companies give billions of dollars to Congressmen. They can tell you how to live your life when they don’t live by the same rules they pass for us to live by. They can tell us which healthcare we need, yet they don’t have the same health care that we do. They have a great healthcare system, it pays 100%. They get their full salaries until they die, yet everyday Americans are being laid off without any compensation at all. And all we’re concerned about is a gay couple getting married and a woman having an abortion?
Mitt Romney is probably going to be our next President, unless everyone thinks Obama is doing a great job – which he’s not. Romney is a corporate man. If he gets elected we’re just going to keep spiraling down that road to destruction. If Newt Geingrich is elected, it will be the same thing; if Rick Sanatorium gets elected it will be the same thing. In fact, Santorium is playing the abortion card now because he knows that’s what the voters want.
Ron Paul wants to quit sending billions of dollars to foreign countries. He wants to get out of the foreign countries and let them take care of their own problems. Maybe we should vote for Ron Paul, but that will never happen. That’s change that Americans aren’t ready for – Ignorance, that’s all it is.
We’re sending billions of dollars to Columbia to control drug traffic, yet drugs are a bigger problem today than ever before. We don’t even know where all that money is going. We have no idea whose hands it’s getting into, but we keep sending it to them.
Marijuana has been proven time and time again to be great medicine and it helps cancer patient’s deal with their pain, it cures stress, most of which is brought on by our government, and it’s far less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes, both of which are legal, but marijuana is illegal and always will be because the voters want it to be – ignorance, that’s all it is. Why will marijuana never be legal? Congress has too much to lose from the drug companies who put billions of dollars into their campaigns to keep it illegal. Meanwhile the voters are too strung out on Prozac and Valium to care.
Our prison system is over crowded with people who were caught smoking a weed that grows out of the ground. I read recently where police broke down a man’s door and went into his house and arrested him for sitting on his couch smoking marijuana while watching TV, hurting no one. Now he’s in prison with rapists and murderers and gang members, all because of one joint. There is something terribly wrong with this picture.
We’re sending billions of dollars to countries that don’t even like us and vote against us every time in the United Nations, yet we just sit back and let it happen. As long as abortion is illegal and gay couples can’t get married it’s okay. That is beyond pathetic, it’s detestable.
How do you think Barack Obama got elected when he knew nothing about how our government runs? He’d only been in Congress for one term and before that he was nothing but a community organizer. He wasn’t a community leader, he was a community organizer. Anybody can be a community organizer. He’s arrogant and he’s ignorant when it comes to policy, yet he was elected. Why, because black people voted for him just because he’s black. They thought that by electing a black president things would get better for them, but it didn’t happen, did it?
Mexicans have it better than Americans; they’re getting social security and didn’t even pay anything into it. No wonder our social security system is broke. I’m not against them coming to America for a better life, but I am against them taking jobs away from hard working Americans and living a life they haven’t earned. If they’re going to get social security, let them put something into it first. And if they’re going to live here, make them learn our language – English.
The unemployment rate is higher than ever in this country for both black and white people, so apparently electing Obama didn’t help the black people at all. But I’m sure they will vote for him again just because he’s the same color. They can’t see the big picture.
We need to set our priorities straight. We need to quit sending billions of dollars to other countries and start spending more on America. We’re building schools in other countries and at the same time we’re laying off teachers in America and cutting back on education. Education is the key. So why does our government keep cutting education, it’s simple - because they want to keep the voters ignorant. They don’t want smart voters; they want ignorant voters, the only kind that will vote for their two-faced sorry asses.
We can’t save the whole world, that’s obvious, so we need to quit trying. But we can be more concerned with who we vote for so things will change in this country.
Quit voting for the candidate that looks the best or the one who is the same color, or the one the TV tells you to vote for and vote for the one who is going to change the way our government is run. Do your own research; don’t leave it up to someone else. I know why you don’t do it. It’s because you’re too busy running you own life to worry about the politicians. And our government is why you don’t have the time. Politicians have made it that way on purpose. It’s a catch 22 and it in their favor and they love it.
We can bring about change. It can be done, we just have to quit being so ignorant when it comes to voting. If voters want change they can get it. All they have to do is vote for the right person. We need to vote for the one who will do what they say they will do. And if they don’t do it, vote them out. It’s that simple. Get on all the social networks, find like minded people and join together and let’s change the way our government is run.
If you can’t see that Barack Obama knows nothing about running the country and Mitt Romney is nothing more than just another corporate guy who’s going to do everything he can to get corporations everything they want, then you need to have your eyes checked.
People are ignorant when it comes to voting and our government wants to keep it that way because that’s the only way they’re going to get elected. Fortunately ignorance can be fixed and that’s the purpose of this article, to help you look beyond your ignorance and vote the right way.
Our country can get back on its feet but it’s going to be up to the voters, not the government to do it. Obviously our government can’t fix it; all they can do is make it worse.
America can’t take much more of this crap. Something has to change and it has to change pretty quickly. And that change needs to be this – quit being so ignorant when you vote.

Labels: bad politics, government, ignorant voters, stupid voters

Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.
Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.
Three years after taxpayers rescued some of the biggest U.S. lenders, regulators are grappling with how to protect FDIC-insured bank accounts from risks generated by investment-banking operations. Bank of America, which got a $45 billion bailout during the financial crisis, had $1.04 trillion in deposits as of midyear, ranking it second among U.S. firms.
“The concern is that there is always an enormous temptation to dump the losers on the insured institution,” said William Black, professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former bank regulator. “We should have fairly tight restrictions on that.”
Accommodating Clients
Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, declined to comment on the transfers or the firm’s discussions with regulators. The company “continues to accommodate the needs of our clients through each of our multiple trading entities, including Bank of America NA,” he said in an e-mailed statement, referring to the company’s deposit-taking unit.
Barbara Hagenbaugh, a Fed spokeswoman, said she couldn’t discuss supervision of specific institutions. Greg Hernandez, an FDIC spokesman, declined to comment.
Bank of America posted a $6.2 billion third-quarter profit today, compared with a loss of $7.3 billion a year earlier, ascredit quality improved and the firm booked one-time accounting gains. The lender rose 7.3 percent to $6.47 at 1:54 p.m. in New York trading, making it the day’s best performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Credit-default swaps on Bank of America eased 10 basis points to a mid-price of 380 as of 11:49 a.m. in New York, according to broker Phoenix Partners Group.
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Bank of America’s long-term credit ratings Sept. 21, cutting both the holding company and the retail bank two notches apiece. The holding company fell to Baa1, the third-lowest investment-grade rank, from A2, while the retail bank declined to A2 from Aa3.
Moody’s Downgrade
The Moody’s downgrade spurred some of Merrill’s partners to ask that contracts be moved to the retail unit, which has a higher credit rating, according to people familiar with the transactions. Transferring derivatives also can help the parent company minimize the collateral it must post on contracts and the potential costs to terminate trades after Moody’s decision, said a person familiar with the matter.
Bank of America estimated in an August regulatory filing that a two-level downgrade by all ratings companies would have required that it post $3.3 billion in additional collateral and termination payments, based on over-the-counter derivatives and other trading agreements as of June 30. The figure doesn’t include possible collateral payments due to “variable interest entities,” which the firm is evaluating, it said in the filing.
Dubrowski declined to comment on collateral or termination payments after the downgrade.
‘Be Prepared’
Bank of America’s rating is now four grades below the one Moody’s assigned to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the biggest U.S. bankby deposits at midyear, and a level below the rating given toCitigroup Inc. (C), the third-biggest. Bank of America is the only U.S. lender that lacks a rating of A3 or higher among the five firms listed by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as having the biggest derivatives books.
“We had worked very hard over the course of the last nine months to be prepared to the extent that we did receive a downgrade, and feel very good about the way that we’ve minimized the potential impact” Bank of America Chief Financial OfficerBruce Thompson said in a conference call today with analysts.“Since the downgrade, we have not seen any change in our global excess liquidity sources.”
Derivatives are financial instruments used to hedge risks or for speculation. They’re derived from stocks, bonds, loans, currencies and commodities, or linked to specific events such as changes in the weather or interest rates.
Dodd-Frank Rules
Keeping such deals separate from FDIC-insured savings has been a cornerstone of U.S. regulation for decades, including last year’s Dodd-Frank overhaul of Wall Street regulation.
The legislation gave the FDIC, which liquidates failing banks, expanded powers to dismantle large financial institutions in danger of failing. The agency can borrow from the Treasury Department to finance the biggest lenders’ operations to stem bank runs. It’s required to recoup taxpayer money used during the resolution process through fees on the largest firms.
Bank of America benefited from two injections of U.S. bailout funds during the financial crisis. The first, in 2008, included $15 billion for the bank and $10 billion for Merrill, which the bank had agreed to buy. The second round of $20 billion came in January 2009 after Merrill’s losses in its final quarter as an independent firm surpassed $15 billion, raising doubts about the bank’s stability if the takeover proceeded. The U.S. also offered to guarantee $118 billion of assets held by the combined company, mostly at Merrill. The company repaid federal bailout funds in 2009 with interest.
‘The Normal Course’
Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according todata compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.
That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
The moves by Bank of America are part of “the normal course of dealings that we’ve had with counterparties since Merrill Lynch and BofA came together,” Thompson said today.
‘Created a Firewall’
Moving derivatives contracts between units of a bank holding company is limited under Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, which is designed to prevent a lender’s affiliates from benefiting from its federal subsidy and to protect the bank from excessive risk originating at the non-bank affiliate, saidSaule T. Omarova, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.
“Congress doesn’t want a bank’s FDIC insurance and access to the Fed discount window to somehow benefit an affiliate, so they created a firewall,” Omarova said. The discount window has been open to banks as the lender of last resort since 1914.
As a general rule, as long as transactions involve high-quality assets and don’t exceed certain quantitative limitations, they should be allowed under the Federal ReserveAct, Omarova said.
In 2009, the Fed granted Section 23A exemptions to the banking arms of Ally Financial Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Fifth Third Bancorp, ING Groep NV, General Electric Co., Northern Trust Corp., CIT Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., among others, according to letters posted on the Fed’s website.
The central bank terminated exemptions last year for retail-banking units of JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays Plc, Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and Deutsche Bank AG. The Fed also ended an exemption for Bank of America in March 2010 and in September of that year approved a new one.
Section 23A “is among the most important tools that U.S. bank regulators have to protect the safety and soundness of U.S. banks,” Scott Alvarez, the Fed’s general counsel, told Congress in March 2008.
To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.net; Hugh Son in New York at hson1@bloomberg.net; Christine Harper in New York at charper@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Gary Putka at gputka@bloomberg.net;David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.

Labels: bad politics, crooked business, crooked government, crooked politicians, finances, your money

Walmart

1 . Americans spend
$36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.

2.. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!

3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St.
Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.

4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +
Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.

5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people and is the largest
private Employer, and most speak English.

6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the
World.

7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger & Safeway
combined, and keep in mind they did this in only 15 years.

8. During this same period, 31 supermarket chains sought
bankruptcy.

9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the
world.

10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which
1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had
5 Years ago.

11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences
will occur At a Wal-Mart store. (Earth's population is
approximately 6.5 Billion.)

12. 90% of all Americans live within 15 miles of a
Wal-Mart.

You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying
the ground work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the
guys who run Wal-Mart to Fix the economy.


This should be read and understood by all Americans

Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!!

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the
Legislature,

It is now official you are ALL corrupt morons:

* The U.S. Post Service was established in
1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is
broke.
* Social Security was established in 1935.
You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
* Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You
have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.
* War on Poverty started in 1964. You have
had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is
confiscated each year and transferred to "the
poor" and they only want more.
* Medicare and Medicaid were established
in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are
broke.
* Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You
have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
* The Department of Energy was created in
1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has
ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a
year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32
years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every "government service" you
have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax
dollars

AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A
GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM??

I don’t think so.

Labels: bad politics, government, government soending

Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.

By SHELBY STEELE


If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.


Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devil—an indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.


Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.


Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it.


So, in Mr. Obama, America gained a president with ambivalence, if not some antipathy, toward the singular greatness of the nation he had been elected to lead.


But then again, the American people did elect him. Clearly Americans were looking for a new kind of exceptionalism in him (a black president would show America to have achieved near perfect social mobility). But were they also looking for—in Mr. Obama—an assault on America's bedrock exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence?


American exceptionalism is, among other things, the result of a difficult rigor: the use of individual initiative as the engine of development within a society that strives to ensure individual freedom through the rule of law. Over time a society like this will become great. This is how—despite all our flagrant shortcomings and self-betrayals—America evolved into an exceptional nation.


Yet today America is fighting in a number of Muslim countries, and that number is as likely to rise as to fall. Our exceptionalism saddles us with overwhelming burdens. The entire world comes to our door when there is real trouble, and every day we spill blood and treasure in foreign lands—even as anti-Americanism plays around the world like a hit record.


At home the values that made us exceptional have been smeared with derision. Individual initiative and individual responsibility—the very engines of our exceptionalism—now carry a stigma of hypocrisy. For centuries America made sure that no amount of initiative would lift minorities and women. So in liberal quarters today—where historical shames are made to define the present—these values are seen as little more than the cynical remnants of a bygone era. Talk of "merit" or "a competition of excellence" in the admissions office of any Ivy League university today, and then stand by for the howls of incredulous laughter.


Our national exceptionalism both burdens and defames us, yet it remains our fate. We make others anxious, envious, resentful, admiring and sometimes hate-driven. There's a reason al Qaeda operatives targeted the U.S. on 9/11 and not, say, Buenos Aires. They wanted to enrich their act of evil with the gravitas of American exceptionalism. They wanted to steal our thunder.


So we Americans cannot help but feel some ambivalence toward our singularity in the world—with its draining entanglements abroad, the selfless demands it makes on both our military and our taxpayers, and all the false charges of imperial hubris it incurs. Therefore it is not surprising that America developed a liberalism—a political left—that took issue with our exceptionalism. It is a left that has no more fervent mission than to recast our greatness as the product of racism, imperialism and unbridled capitalism.


But this leaves the left mired in an absurdity: It seeks to trade the burdens of greatness for the relief of mediocrity. When greatness fades, when a nation contracts to a middling place in the world, then the world in fact no longer knocks on its door. (Think of England or France after empire.) To civilize America, to redeem the nation from its supposed avarice and hubris, the American left effectively makes a virtue of decline—as if we can redeem America only by making her indistinguishable from lesser nations.


Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.


America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding—by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness?


As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them.


Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism—the genius for freedom—of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.


Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Among his books is "White Guilt" (Harper/Collins, 2007).

Labels: bad politics, Barack Obama, crooked government, illegal politics, president