Inside and Out

As the world careens headlong into financial Armageddon 2.0, here's what's happening in our nation's capital:

"Obama Pardons Holiday Turkeys, Pokes Fun at Media" (Reuters)

It may not help the economy, but President Barack Obama found another move he can make without congressional approval on Wednesday: pardon a turkey.

Obama, a Democrat, has spent the last several weeks criticizing the Congress and Republicans for not embracing his jobs proposals, launching a "We Can't Wait" campaign to highlight executive actions he was taking to boost the economy without lawmakers' input.

With tongue in cheek, the president brought the same logic -- minus the economic incentive -- to the annual White House ritual of sparing a turkey.

...

"Some of you may know that recently I've been taking a series of executive actions that don't require congressional approval," Obama told a chuckling crowd at the White House, with his daughters standing at his side.

"Well, here's another one. We can't wait to pardon these turkeys. Literally. Otherwise, they'd end up next to the mashed potatoes and stuffing."

Obama, grinning, raised his hand over one bird, dubbed "Liberty," and pronounced it safe from slaughter.

Outside the Washington Beltway, meanwhile, the mood is a little different:

"Survival Shop Reports Jump In Sales To People Preparing For 'Possible Collapse'" (KMOX)

WEBSTER GROVES, MO - A chain of three stores that sells survival food and gear reports a jump in sales to people who are getting prepared for the “possible collapse” of society.

“We had to order fifty cases of the meals ready to eat to keep up with the demand in the past three months,” said manager Steve Dorsey at Uncle Sam’s Safari Outfitters Inc. in Webster Groves. “That’s not normal.  Usually we sell 20 to 30 cases in a whole year."

Dorsey says business has been brisk since the spring uprisings in the middle east, as customers share concerns about political uprisings, the world economy and the future of the United States.

“I’ve had people in here that are very wealthy and they’ve spent thousands of dollars just on backpacks that they fill with survival gear, one for each person of their family,” Dorsey said, “And something where they can just grab a bag and get out of Dodge.”

Comments

[roger]

Advice from CEO Chenault from AMEX,to save jobs
people should do their shopping at the
small retailers,sure tell that to the people
lined up at the big box stores waiting to get
the bargains of their life. It seems that the
brightest, well educated,experienced people in
business have a very idealistic view of the system
they so admire.

[Tom]

In response to the "very wealthy" people who have "spent thousands of dollars just on backpacks that they fill with survival gear, one for each person of their family,”. . . "where they can just grab a bag and get out of Dodge.”

uh, where you gonna run to (as the song goes)? Johnny you're too bad, woah-oo-oohhhh!

[Rocky]

In the 1942 movie "Casablanca", a visa to the US is the hottest ticket in Nazi occupied Europe. Some of the actors in the movie had fled Europe after the start of the Third Reich because they were Jewish (S Z Sakall, Peter Lorre) or married to a Jew (Conrad Veidt). If society breaks down in the US, where will Americans go?

[Doug]

Canada.

[Listen and pass on]

And you wonder if it can happen -- it, incidentally, being the people banding together and saying "no more fraud damnit!"
Yes, it can. Note who this is, where he's speaking, and think very, very carefully about whether attacking a group that is listening and willing to act on this correct perspective is wise.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=198032

[Conflict of interest]

We Speak on PBS Newshour About Why No Bank Executives Have Gone to Jail

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/we-speak-on-pbs-newshour-about-why-no-bank-executives-have-gone-to-jail.html

[Hollowing out]

Then we hear from a veteran financial reporter and Wall Street insider William Cohan, the author of the new book “Money and Power; How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World”. We discuss how corporate America is sitting on piles of cash that, rather than investing it in plant and equipment or on R&D, the top executives are using their idle billions to buy back company stock in order to reward themselves at the expense of the workers they are laying off.

http://ianmasters.com/sites/default/files/images/bbriefing_2011_11_24b_william%20cohan.mp3

http://ianmasters.com/content/november-24-tahrir-square-explodes-again-how-american-ceos-fire-workers-extract-wealth-and-r

[Jaspar]

"If society breaks down in the US, where will Americans go?"
Um, just about anywhere except big cities. Preferably a smaller
town, rural, with only a few roads in and out (that can be
quickly closed).

[Survival of the looters]

Are MF Global Customer Funds Being Looted to This Day Through the Same Risky Trading That Sunk the Firm?

As MF Global customers approach the one month anniversary of the cluster-circus that has become the liquidation proceedings, replete with unnecessary delays, half-measures, and outright deceptive statements by Trustee James W. Giddens (that will only ensure the proliferation of hours billable at $890 each), we wish to highlight an order entered just days after the bankruptcy that gave MF Global Holdings and its affiliates carte blanche to continue the very risky and suspicious trading that led to its demise. A hearing is set for Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 3:00 pm on this and other germane matters, including the super priority status of JP Morgan Chase (the conflicted first-lien holder) afforded to it ahead of the customers whose segregated accounts were putatively to have been held sacrosanct.

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/are-mf-global-customer-funds-being-looted-day-through-same-risky-trading-sunk-firm?

[One good audit will do it]

MF’s Missing Money Makes You Wonder About Goldman: Jonathan Weil

Six months ago the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said MF Global Holdings Ltd. and its units “maintained, in all material respects, effective internal control over financial reporting as of March 31, 2011.” A lot of people who relied on that opinion lost a ton of money.

When an auditor certifies that a client’s internal controls are effective, that’s supposed to mean the company can do basic functions like maintain accurate financial records, detect unauthorized transactions and keep track of its receipts and expenditures. We know MF couldn’t do these things during the final days before its bankruptcy filing, when former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was still its chief executive officer.

The newspaper also quoted Thomas Peterffy, CEO of Interactive Brokers Group Inc., saying: “I always knew the records were in shambles, but I didn’t know to what extent.”

Although we shouldn’t rule out anything, this scenario seems implausible. One lesson from the 1980s savings-and-loan crisis is that whenever a financial institution fails, it’s almost always true that its internal controls were poor -- and had been that way for a long time. Otherwise it wouldn’t have failed.

There’s more at stake here than the missing $1.2 billion. Besides MF, other companies that use Pricewaterhouse’s New York office as their auditor include Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Both banks presumably are too big to fail, meaning taxpayers would be on the hook if they ever blew up. A Pricewaterhouse spokesman, Caroline Nolan, declined to comment on the firm’s work for MF.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-25/mf-s-lost-cash-makes-you-wonder-about-goldman-commentary-by-jonathan-weil.html

[Maybe the survivalists are onto something?]

Richard Russell: Crumbling Debt to Crush Everything in its Path

Richard Russell continues:

“As of now, both the Dow and the S&P are down for the year. I call this Stage One. Stage Two will occur if the Dow sinks into the 10,000 (level). Stage Two Point Five will occur if the Dow starts trading below 10,000. I think if the Dow trades under 10,000, consumer sentiment will change from hope to fear and anxiety.

The big, smart money is choosing diversity. Their problem, diversify into what? The answer may be to diversify into something that is life sustaining...Sustaining may be a matter of food, water, and shelter.

I know much of the above sounds outrageous, but in 1980 the Dow at 10,000 sounded outrageous. We're moving into a world that today's generations will be dealing with matters that they've never had to deal with before.

Continue to accumulate gold and 10 ounce silver bars. I'm sorry for young people now, their biggest move has been to move back in to their parents homes, back into the nest is the fated move today. As far as the economy is concerned, the phrase is ‘Don't be a pest, go back into the nest.’

This is what occurred during the 1930s, and it's in full bloom today. My best advice if your kid moved back in with you, make them pay some rent. They must realize that there is no free lunch, and there are no free living quarters. Next week I will go into detail as to why a giant storm is brewing.”

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2011/11/26_Richard_Russell__Crumbling_Debt_to_Crush_Everything_in_its_Path.html

[Scratching my head trying to understand]

COMFORTABLY NUMB

As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can’t help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I’ve concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.

Both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement are a reflection of the mood change in the country, which is a result of government overreach, political corruption, dysfunctional economic policies, and a financial system designed to enrich the few while defrauding the many. The common theme is anger, frustration and disillusionment with a system so badly broken it appears unfixable through the existing supposedly democratic methods. The system has been captured by an oligarchy of moneyed interests from the financial industry, mega-corporations, and military industrial complex, protected by their captured puppets in Washington DC and sustained by the propaganda peddling corporate media. The differences in political parties are meaningless as they each advocate big government solutions to all social, economic, foreign relations, and monetary issues.

I’m left scratching my head trying to understand their animosity towards people drawing attention to the enormous debt based ponzi scheme that is our country, versus their silent acquiescence to the transfer of trillions in taxpayer dollars to the criminal bankers that have destroyed the worldwide financial system. I can only come to the conclusion the average American has become so apathetic, willfully ignorant of facts and reality, distracted by the techno-gadgets that run their lives, uninterested in anything beyond next week’s episode of Dancing with the Stars or Jersey Shore, and willing to let the corporate media moguls form their opinions for them through relentless propaganda, the only thing that will get their attention is an absolute collapse of our economic scheme. Uninformed, unconcerned, intellectually vacant Americans will get exactly that in the not too distant future.
http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=25234

[CrisisMaven]

See, these survival shops flourish because people begin to realise they're not a turkey that Obama can pardon, rather he (and all the other politicinas - this is bipartisan maybe with the exception of a certain Ron Paul) has everyone convicted to debt slavery cum inflation so that he may yet get one of the last presidential libraries.