earthbased wrote: 

And just to toss one more thing into the mix (for those who think that we are not broke (or screwed) as a nation)... according to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) ...

A look at the 2011 fourth quarter bank trading and derivatives activities report released by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) showed that the top five SIFIs — Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JPMorgan — collectively accounted for more than 50 percent of the $700 trillion OTC derivatives trades worldwide in total notional value. JPMorgan alone accounted for more than $70 trillion of the $700 trillion, the report said. “That represents one-tenth of the global OTC derivatives exposures. This is what I call concentration of risk and what is defined as an institution that is too big to fail,” an industry official told Thomson Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The official said he found it alarming that, when the top five banks’ assets and total exposures to derivatives activities were added up, they showed a leverage of one to 45 times. The OCC report showed that JPMorgan Chase North America has total assets of $1.8 trillion to cover $70 trillion worth of OTC derivatives exposure. JPMorgan Chase & Co has total assets of $2.26 trillion, the report also stated.
...

“Regulators are spending too much time figuring out regulations rather than taking ownership of a proper regulatory framework to govern banking activities,” he told Thomson Reuters.

---

Yeah so let's all worry about Romney's tax returns instead .... 

 kurtster wrote: 



Until America's currency crashes sometime, most likely, in 2014. Anyone who wants to be President must be suicidal or too stupid to understand America cannot turn around the debt situation which is over $120 Trillion on a GAAP basis factoring n NPV of future obligations. Cheers!

 ScottN wrote: 
We have not had a single budget passed since Obama has been in office.  The Senate has not passed any budget measure since Obama was elected and in the House none were passed until after the 2010 election and that was by the Republican House which was under Dem control from 2006(7) until 2010(11).

Alls we have had since Obama has been elected are continueing resoltutions. 

 kurtster wrote: All budgets are presented by the President to Congress, but the actual Budget Bill must originate in the House, as all (or nearly most) spending bills must.  True, it was a Dem Congress, but there were a LOT of voices heard and amendments made and/or defeated before the bill is then sent to the Senate where it gets the same treatment.  The final, much changed version, is then sent to POTUS for signature or veto. This was the budget for 2010, not 2009.

So, to speak as if Obama, by Presidential fiat did what you said in bolds, (his first presented budget was for 2010), is simply wrong. Remember please, any newly elected President's first year in office is budgeted the previous year...by W., in this case, obviously.  My recall is W.'s budget, inherited by Obama, was amended, in the main, by the new Congress only to clean up Bush's bank bailout, TARP, and the auto-industry.  All good moves, imo. 101.

 miamizsun wrote: 
That's pretty much how I came to understand things.

One thing that everyone forgets is that one of the first things Obama did as incoming POTUS and proclaimed in his first Address to Congress was that he was immediately instituting a 10% across the board increase in total spending across all departments on top of what was in the 2009 Budget put together by Bush.

The article linked here touches on the increase but does not specify what I just did.  So we have an immediate 10% increase to begin with and then since we have not had a budget since 2009, all federal departments have a built in annual increase of 8% per year, regardless of need.

When everyone talks about budget cuts, the dirty little secret that neither side is effectively communicating is that all both sides are talking about is cuts in the growth, not freezing growth.  Obama insists on his 8% while the repubs are really only willing to cut the increase in growth to 3% per year.  No one is cutting spending, just its growth.  Obama built in his 10% at the front so that if pressed he could reduce things by 10 % if really pressed into it and still be ahead of where he started.  But he never had to.  His 10% at the front was a slingshot load of sudden growth that sucked a ton of money out of our econony all at once when it needed it most.  That was about $300 Billion of real money.  The Fed hadn't started printing yet.  Then he sucked another $800 Bilion out with his stimulus and again the Fed hadn't started printing money yet.  So for a round number, Obama sucked $1 T of real dollars out of private hands and the economy and put it into the governments hands (which only consumes and produces absolutely nothing in product out but more debt) in his first six months in office.  All the Fed has been doing since is trying to cover that money by printing more and more.

And a number that no one can dispute is that he is borrowing 40¢ of every dollar he spends as POTUS.

I see this as econ 101 stuff.  Unless I'm totally wrong here, which is always possible.

 hippiechick wrote: 
i think that's been addressed

truth is they're all out of control

regards

 Isabeau wrote: 
I guess that knocks me out of the saddle...

 

 Isabeau wrote: 
Totally, me too

 hippiechick wrote: 
I think he's one of the sexist men on the planet. Give me cerebral wit over dull pretty boys any day.

 Isabeau wrote: 
He's great!

 hippiechick wrote: 
Or as Bill Maher said revealing this chart on his show:  "I know its hard to believe — the Black guy's is the shortest."

Who Is The Smallest Government Spender Since Eisenhower? Would You Believe It's Barack Obama?

Of course, the Heritage Foundation is having none of it, attempting to counter the actual numbers by pretending that the spending initiated by the Bush Administration is the fault of Obama. As I understand the argument Heritage is putting forth —and I have provided the link to the Heritage rebuttal so you can decide for yourself—Marketwatch, in using the baseline that Obama inherited, is making it too easy on the President.

But then, with the Heritage Foundation being the creator of the individual mandate concept in healthcare  only to rebut the same when it was no longer politically convenient, I’m not quite sure why anyone believes much of anything they have to say any longer. With their history of reversing course for convenience, I can’t help but wonder, should they find themselves reviewing the spending record of a President Romney four years from today, whether they might be tempted to use the Obama numbers as the baseline for such a new Administration.

contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com

Twitter @rickungar

NOTE: Some of the comments to this piece have gotten well out of control, involving threats and obscenity to other commenters and myself. While I welcome and encourage comments from all points of view, obscene remarks are removed and not tolerated. I’ll be happy to jump back into the conversation and reply to some comments when those who are misusing the forum settle down.

Just imagine if GWB was still president the media yelling and screaming.  But the end game is near for the great inflation and credit bubble that was triggered in 1971 when Nixon could not honor France at the gold window since the Great Society had secretly sold most of the backing gold.   And the MSM never asks itself if it encourages wackos to seek the fame by killing innocent persons.  GAAP Deficit is $5 Trillion.  

 pjcle wrote: 


When you talk about the police, you are talking about civilians...  there are specific limitations listed in the U.S. Constitution for domestic military actions...  several violations of the Constitution have gradually been increasing for the last 30 years...  do some research on this subject—  it is really really important stuff...

 pjcle wrote: 
That's what they all say, Citizen.

 romeotuma wrote: 

Why do people make such a big distinction between manned and unmanned aircraft?  What is it about drones that freak people out?  The only difference between a satellite and a drone is that drones are currently faster.  Cops have the right to drive down the street, fly a helicopter over your house, or knock on your door.  They can't come in without a warrant.  Drones don't change that.

Highways will eventually have large computers that monitor everyone's speed and sends the tickets in the mail.  Whether they mount them on poles or drones, what's the difference?  There was a traffic light by my office, and I got about 4 tickets for going through the red light.  I never went through the red light.  Apparently, my fender was over some line by .04 seconds after the light switched.  It's a short left turn light.  The state of VA probably collects 500 dollars a day off that light.  It's was outrageous.  If enough people cared, it would have been fixed or removed.  What does it matter to me if it was a stationary camera or a drone?

This is for those of you who like to throw around the term "Chicago Style Politics"

Chicago Style

Romney is accusing Obama of practicing “Chicago-style politics.” Apparently, he has no idea what that means.

 romeotuma wrote:romeotuma wrote:

"Obama be my hero....."

America’s Drones Are Homeward Bound
by Col. Ann Wright
Truthdig
July 17, 2012

Americans have been protesting and getting arrested at U.S. drone bases and research institutions for years, and some members of Congress are starting to respond to the pressure.

But it’s not that drones are being used to extrajudicially execute people, including Americans, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that has U.S. lawmakers concerned. Rather it’s the possible and probable violation of Americans’ privacy in the United States by unlawful drone surveillance that has caught the attention of legislators.

Rep. Jeff Landry, R-La., says “there is distrust amongst the people who have come and discussed this issue with me about our government. It’s raising alarm with the American public.” Based on those discussions, Landry has placed a provision in a defense spending bill that would prohibit information gathered by drones without a warrant from being used as evidence in court.

Two other legislators, Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced identical bills to bar any government agency from using a drone without a warrant to “gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a regulation.”

No one in Congress, however, has introduced legislation requiring the government to provide to a neutral judge evidence of a criminal act committed by a person to be targeted for assassination by a drone, or allowing such a person the right to defend himself against the U.S. government’s allegations...

 

The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama
by Tom Junod
in the August issue of Esquire

You are a good man. You are an honorable man. You are both president of the United States and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. You are both the most powerful man in the world and an unimpeachably upstanding citizen. You place a large premium on being beyond reproach. You have become your own deliberative body, standing not so much by your decisions as by the process by which you make them. You are not only rational; you are a rationalist. You think everything through, as though it is within your power to find the point where what is moral meets what is necessary.

You love two things, your family and the law, and you have surrounded yourself with those who are similarly inclined. To make sure that you obey the law, you have hired lawyers prominent for accusing your predecessor of flouting it; to make sure that you don't fall prey to the inevitable corruption of secrecy, you have hired lawyers on record for being committed to transparency. Unlike George W. Bush, you have never held yourself above the law by virtue of being commander in chief; indeed, you have spent part of your political capital trying to prove civilian justice adequate to our security needs. You prize both discipline and deliberation; you insist that those around you possess a personal integrity that matches their political ideals and your own; and it is out of these unlikely ingredients that you have created the Lethal Presidency.

You are a historic figure, Mr. President. You are not only the first African-American president; you are the first who has made use of your power to target and kill individuals identified as a threat to the United States throughout your entire term. You are the first president to make the killing of targeted individuals the focus of our military operations, of our intelligence, of our national-security strategy, and, some argue, of our foreign policy. You have authorized kill teams comprised of both soldiers from Special Forces and civilians from the CIA, and you have coordinated their efforts through the Departments of Justice and State. You have gradually withdrawn from the nation building required by "counterinsurgency" and poured resources into the covert operations that form the basis of "counter-terrorism." More than any other president you have made the killing rather than the capture of individuals the option of first resort, and have killed them both from the sky, with drones, and on the ground, with "nighttime" raids not dissimilar to the one that killed Osama bin Laden. You have killed individuals in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and are making provisions to expand the presence of American Special Forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In Pakistan and other places where the United States has not committed troops, you are estimated to have killed at least two thousand by drone. You have formalized what is known as "the program," and at the height of its activity it was reported to be launching drone strikes in Pakistan every three days. Your lethality is expansive in both practice and principle; you are fighting terrorism with a policy of preemptive execution, and claiming not just the legal right to do so but the legal right to do so in secret. The American people, for the most part, have no idea who has been killed, and why; the American people — and for that matter, most of their representatives in Congress — have no idea what crimes those killed in their name are supposed to have committed, and have been told that they are not entitled to know.

This is not to say that the American people don't know about the Lethal Presidency, and that they don't support its aims. They do. They know about the killing because you have celebrated — with appropriate sobriety — the most notable kills, specifically those of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki; they support it because you have asked for their trust as a good and honorable man surrounded by good and honorable men and women and they have given it to you. In so doing, you have changed a technological capability into a moral imperative and have convinced your countrymen to see the necessity without seeing the downside. Politically, there is no downside. Historically, there is only the irony of the upside — that you, of all presidents, have become the lethal one; that you, of all people, have turned out to be a man of proven integrity whose foreign and domestic policies are less popular than your proven willingness to kill, in defense of your country, even your own countrymen ... indeed, to kill even a sixteen-year-old American boy accused of no crime at all...