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The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
                ---Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Yeah, these are the "masters of the universe" that tanked our economy, was bailed out for 10s of billions of dollars after their CEO became the treasury secretary, then outsourced 1,000 American jobs and gave their execs huge raises and paid "up to" a paltry $5 billion for defrauding their own customers.

No high level execs at Goldman Sachs went to jail,and the systemic problem is worse today than before the crisis.

Why would I give even even a penny to admitted criminals with a proven record of abusing their customers and being grossly selfish and irresponsible?!

Fuck those guys. Seriously.

Funny how the "Democrats" ripped open Blair Hull and Jack Ryan's divorce records for the anointed one. http://www.economicpolicyjourn... http://www.chicagotribune.com/...

You confuse an object with wide range of utility and a limited set of nefarious uses, a knife, with a system of technology and techniques with a limited range of utility and vast capability for misuse (mass surveillance). I suspect the annual proportion of illegitimate knife use to legitimate knife use is so low, it would look stupid to even write it out.

If we round up substantially, we get about 2000 knife murders per year in the US. http://www.economicpolicyjourn... There are roughly 300,000,000 people. Let's say each person uses a knife on average once per day (spreading butter, chopping veggies, cutting string, killing people). That's 109,500,000,000 knife uses per year. 2k/109,500,000k -- that works out to a proportion of 0.00000001826484 evil knife uses per legitimate knife use.

Note: there are more than 300m people in the US, there are actually fewer than 2000 knife murders per year, and most people probably use a knife more than once per day. There are of course other illegitimate knife uses than murder, but considering that the number up there is extremely generous to your argument, we could probably call it a wash.

(For our very narrow definition of qualified "climate scientists") (and broad assumptions in reviewing the literature)

Yes, "narrowly defined" as in "people who study this stuff and therefore are qualified to talk about": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I won't even respond to the rest of your "crackpot"-ishnes; it refutes itself :-)

Apparently because that's all you've got. Pointing to a Wikipedia article created and religiously (yes) guarded by climate change alarmist politicos really doesn't make much of an argument, does it?

That "97%" BS argument has been debunked over and over. And it's repeated ad nauseum by people that should know science is not about consensus.

(For our very narrow definition of qualified "climate scientists") (and broad assumptions in reviewing the literature)

Yes, "narrowly defined" as in "people who study this stuff and therefore are qualified to talk about":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I won't even respond to the rest of your "crackpot"-ishnes; it refutes itself :-)

Yeah, it must have to do with really bored "liberals" having nothing better to do than make people poor for no reason.

Oh, they have lots of reasons. Envy, group-based politics, delusions of a Bold New World Order, valuing equality of outcomes over equality under the law, romantic notions of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, etc., etc. Of course most would never admit their goal is to make everyone equally poor, it's just the inevitable result of the centralization of power heavy-handed, cradle-to-grave regulatory scheme that their policies are driving toward.

It couldn't possibly be that the overwheleming magjority of climate scientists all agree we're causing irreversible changes in our climate

(For our very narrow definition of qualified "climate scientists") (and broad assumptions in reviewing the literature)

that will eventually result in thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of death and billions of dollars of property damage, or anything like that ...

These EPA regulations are going to be a lot more expensive than that, in both terms.

"The father of the Boston bombing suspects claims to Channel 4 News that the FBI telephoned his elder son after the attack, and prior to a fatal shootout that claimed the life of a police officer."

"the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother of Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, in 2011 at the request of a foreign government to see if he had any extremist ties"

"Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended a workshop sponsored by the CIA-linked Jamestown Foundation,Izvestia reports today (see English translation here). The Russian newspaper cites documents produced by the Counterintelligence Department Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia confirming that the NGO “Fund of Caucasus” held workshops in the summer of 2012 and Tsarnaev attended."

I beg to differ. Koch Industries does, in fact, make drones.

http://www.economicpolicyjourn...

Because more people die due to guns in the US than due to any other type of weapon. It's pretty straightforward.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/12/how-people-are-murdered-in-united-states.html

No, you are exactly wrong. The U.S. has an epidemic of gun violence. I don't care about knife attacks, because the rate of knife attacks or baseball bat attacks is staggeringly low compared to gun violence. The whole issue of knife attacks is a red herring made up by ant-gun control zealots who cant take the facts at hand: in 2010 8,700 people were killed with guns, while 1,700 were killed with knives.

That means more than 4 times as many people were killed with guns. So why the hell should I care about knife attacks as much as gun attacks? KNIFE ATTACKS are NOT THE ISSUE. Gun violence is.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/12/how-people-are-murdered-in-united-states.html

The US also had a top marginal tax rate like that. It was during the great economic boom of the 50s and 60s. Turns out that trickle-down, voodoo economics is and always will be bunk.

And as it turns out, nobody paid it. The effective tax rate, i.e. the tax rate people actually paid was around 30-35% at that time.

Historically, all despotic regimes have sought to disarm the citizenry, usually before behaving blatantly despotic. Not a coincidence! Peaceful and/or underground resistance is much more difficult to manage and be effective with than resistance from a large and publicly armed populace. Here is a story from an Austrian citizen who witnessed the Nazi Germany takeover of Austria.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2011/06/bastards-want-to-track-our-gold.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

And if you want to bother with fringy sources like "shadowstats.com" or "truthistreason.net" go for it, but there's no way I'm wasting my time critiquing conspiratorial crap.

Shadow stats is far from "fringy", but why you feel the need to throw out ad hominems is beyond me, when all the information I posted has multiple sources for confirmation. Are you claiming that it's NOT true about the Libyan rebels oil company and central bank? It's general knowledge and there are many other sources. Sorry if that fact blows away the approved narrative that you were buying into before.

As for the inflation, the commodities graph of inflation that I posted is the same time period that the Federal Reserve distributed $16 trillion in fiat money around the world, so that's the correlation.

Yes, oil is up because we (or our proxies in the Middle East) are going to war with Iran. At least you acknowledge that it's a done deal and there is no amount of protest or outrage that will stop the elites from making sure that war happens. But that's not only an intentional move, but mostly a short-term blip with less influence than the long-term trend caused by MASSIVE INFLATION that will eventually become hyperinflation once the other major economies (Europe, China, etc.) have divested themselves of US reserve currency and start trading commodities instead, just like has already started happening.

If you really believe that the inflation numbers quoted by the Federal Government are accurate, you are truly naive. Not even Ben Bernanke himself believes it, although he doesn't come out and say so, he certainly won't defend those numbers.

Here's a free marketer's take on Umair Haque's article:

Harvard Business Review Goes Gaga over Karl Marx

Here's a more strategic take on the incident. To quote:

The more Congressmen that we can get into a Weiner type scandal the better. Let's keeping these characters moving in and out of Congress, so they don't have time to form a lot of long-term alliances and get their plotting games down cold.

Can you elaborate? It seems to me we're in for a serious financial crisis if we don't do something about the debt. I just wonder why Republicans weren't calling for action while Bush was running the debt up over $10 billion. Why is it suddenly a problem after Obama took office?

that's why people are comparing Apple's current CEO with Howard Hughes.

The Fed listens to Wall Street and believes what it hears. This distortion into a partial and often highly distorted perception of reality is unhealthy and dangerous.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2008/08/fireworks-at-jackson-hole-buiter-lets.html

This is what happens to many regulatory bodies, like the US Fed, FCC, US Patent Office, SEC, FDA, FERC (Federal Electric Regulatory Commission), etc. They end up promoting and defending their institutional clients rather then performing honest regulation.

The problem is made much worse by revolving doors, money and right wing ideology. The FED is a horrible example of the revolving door: just look at Paulson. When he was in charge of Goldman-Sacks they successfully lobbied to change the leverage ratio of banks (like Goldman-Sacks) from 20:1 to 30:1. This made the crash even worse. Then when he was the Treasury Secretary, he bails out banks at the expense of the national deficit. And by the way, he also helped preserve his own personal wealth. (Why is Pauson not under indictment for fraud?)

As for the corruption of money, a lot of lead researchers at the FDA in charge of specific programs were on the payroll of he very companies that were applying for FDA approval on their topic. All undisclosed to anyone, and all legal under the then current rules. Can you say conflict of interest?

Or look at FERC during the California energy chrisis when ENRON was gaming the system. The energy lobby got a bunch of pro-industry/anti-regulation hacks (some of whom owned energy monopolies) appointed to FERC, and when the chrisis hit they refused to do anything. On top of that, they blocked California regulators from doing anything. After the damage was done and Califonia wanted to get out of the bad deals that wer made during the worst part of the problem, FERC ruled that the contracts were valid, and the court backed them up. As a result California is still paying for the bad results of deregulation to this day. For some details see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/blackout/themes/ferc.html

In every other country with a single payer system, you just go to a doctor and get treatment. In most countries you don't even have to fill out any paperwork. And they pay about half of what we do, and have the same life expectancy.

And there is rationing as well as waiting periods. "When Canadian Member of Parliament Belinda Stronach needed breast cancer surgery herself in 2007, she went to a California hospital and paid cash." "When Robert Bourassa, the premier of Quebec, needed cancer treatment, he went to the US to get it."

If Canada's health care is so great why are Canadian members of government coming to the US for surgery?

And there isn't rationing in the US right now? The difference is that Belinda Stronach would have gotten the surgery in Canada in a medically useful time-frame (perhaps not as soon as she wanted though), but a US citizen without either health insurance or money to pay out-of-pocket wouldn't be able to get the surgery. Unless of course they were on Medicare or Medicaid, but I suppose you would be against the very existence of such programs. Unless there was some specific treatment that wasn't available in Canada, but was available in the US (unlikely but possible) the same could be said for Robert Bourassa.

Oh and by the way, both of them could have done the same thing by going to the UK instead of the US. The UK has private for-profit healthcare providers, as well as a government-run system. Most probably, the main reason why they didn't go to the UK has to do with the difference in travel costs, not the difference between the level of medical care in the US and UK.

Meanwhile here in the US I as a student with no insurance had an accident and was Medivaced by helicopter from the accident scene to the hospital. I spent about a month in the hospital, some of that tyme in a coma. I was then transfered to a rehab house where I lived several more weeks. Afterwards I went to the hospital I was originally taken to for therapy twice a week for several more weeks. All together my medical bills, which none of the medical personnel or facilities were guarantied to be paid for, came to more than $120,000. Despite not being able to pay I got all that medical care anyway.

Falcon, the treatment was provided to you wasn't because of "The Market". It was provided to you because hospitals are required by law in the US to stablize and treat emergency cases until hospitalization is no longer medically required, regardless of the of the patient to pay. If that wasn't a legal requirement, many hospitals wouldn't have let you on their property, as few modern hospitals are non-profit.

In every other country with a single payer system, you just go to a doctor and get treatment. In most countries you don't even have to fill out any paperwork. And they pay about half of what we do, and have the same life expectancy.

And there is rationing as well as waiting periods. "When Canadian Member of Parliament Belinda Stronach needed breast cancer surgery herself in 2007, she went to a California hospital and paid cash." "When Robert Bourassa, the premier of Quebec, needed cancer treatment, he went to the US to get it."

If Canada's health care is so great why are Canadian members of government coming to the US for surgery?

Meanwhile here in the US I as a student with no insurance had an accident and was Medivaced by helicopter from the accident scene to the hospital. I spent about a month in the hospital, some of that tyme in a coma. I was then transfered to a rehab house where I lived several more weeks. Afterwards I went to the hospital I was originally taken to for therapy twice a week for several more weeks. All together my medical bills, which none of the medical personnel or facilities were guarantied to be paid for, came to more than $120,000. Despite not being able to pay I got all that medical care anyway.

Falcon