Hmmmm...
Seems to me like the President is just trying to slide off the blame for an economy that is, at best, slowly recovering - at worst it's sliding fast. While his historic Health Care Bill goes into effect it really doesn't do much to combat a 9.9% unemployment, and worsening state and global economics. Freddie and Fannie continue to drain our coffers:
http://www.france24.com/en/20091225-fannie-mae-freddie-mac-unlimited-public-funding-2012-real-estate
and our government focuses more on social issues (like racial profiling and illegal aliens) than fiscal.
Granted that without a Democratic controlled house and senate nationalized health care would never have passed, but aside from Obama promising to focus on the economy like a laser beam - nothing has really happened to boost our economy in 2 years. All I've seen is the rapid printing of money to shore up fast eroding programs.

Now with businesses collapsing and federal/state tax revenue declining, we have to implement tax incentives that will create growth in both big and small business and cut back on the union pensions and social programs for the short term. This creates jobs, and revenue.
It took years but Gov. Schwarzenegger has come to this same conclusion in California.
http://gov.ca.gov/speech/15164/

But I have little hope that anything will get fixed as long as politicians remain in power.
Oh and go see waiting for Superman:
http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEf-vJZOj4M&feature=player_embedded

To be honest he's right on dithering, but that's not entirely Obama's fault. Part of the problem has been McChrystal leaked report on Afghanistan which confronted him with being forced to make an immediate decision or appearing to waver. The fraudulent elections have also made committing more troops before the debacle is resolved unfeasible and would have appeared as if he was propping up a pro-US autocratic regime. Now that Karzai has agreed to a second round recount, and there exists the potential for a power sharing agreement eventuating with Abdullah, the symbolic gesture of committing more troops becomes more genuine, as well as politically plausible at home.

He's blatantly wrong on the missile shield though. The chance of Russia, particularly given how much of a hit its economy took from the global economic downturn, of making any big strides into Eastern Europe are slim. After all, it's actions into Georgia while disproportionate were arguably provoked. It's clear the main purpose of them from the start was to protect against the threat of a nuclear Iran. But then, the process of setting up this missile shield angered Russia, which then caused it become closer both economically in their willingness to help build nuclear reactors and in providing valuable VETO votes against further sanctions through the UN, which formed a catch 22. Especially considering the unproven nature of the missile shields, and the value of Russia as an ally versus slightly thornier relationships between the US and Eastern Europe, it seems that dismantling them was easily the best option considering the downsides of both choices.

Alright, people. One of my best friends goes to the University of Pittsburgh and he was in the middle of the whole thing. Most of the "protesters" were just students curious about what was going on. He wrote this about it all:

"This note is for my friends who are not in Pittsburgh and have not yet been given a fairly comprehensive version of what has been going on here. If you have been seeing my wall posts, you'll know that something bad happened in Pittsburgh, but if you want my story, here it is...

On Thursday and Friday September 24-25, the G-20 World Leader's Summit occurred in Pittsburgh. The summit involved the leaders of the United States, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The purpose of the summit is to have a forum for the major world leaders about the global economic crisis. Pittsburgh was chosen to be the location for the summit in order to highlight its economic recovery after the city's manufacturing industry collapsed about 40 years ago.

The G-20 is always met with protesters for various causes, including global warming awareness, socialism, peoples' rights in other countries, anti-free-trade, and anti-war, and anarchy. The city of Pittsburgh was required to bring in police forces from all regions of the state of Pennsylvania and other nearby states.

On the evening of the 24th, the summit began with a dinner in the Phipps Conservatory, a plant exhibition hall (really quite a nice place) just under a mile from my dorm in the borough of Oakland. The University cancelled classes after 4:00 PM that day in order to ensure that students did not have to be outside if they did not wish to. During the day of the 24th, several protests had been broken up by riot police. At about 7:00 PM a small protest began at the Schenley Plaza. (from this point on, I will be referring to locations on campus, please refer to the map I posted at:< http://photos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc1/hs209.snc1/7620_178174626232_559501232_4081545_8066324_n.jpg>)

I went there to investigate myself at about 8:00 PM. The protest itself was fairly small, only about a hundred or so people total, with only a handful of protesters. There was some live music and dancing, courtesy of the Hare Krishna. Despite the fact that the protest was fairly small and peaceful, there were several hundred police forming a perimeter around the plaza, which is under a quarter-mile from the Conservatory. All of the Police were in riot gear, which covered any form of identification they may have had; they were also all armed with lethal and non-lethal weapons.

Around 9:00, I decided to return to my dorm. At 10:15, I overheard someone saying that they saw fire on Forbes Avenue. I decided to go out and investigate. At this point, the street had been flooded by curious students, and would remain that way until the police removed them. Several dumpsters had been pushed into the intersection of Forbes and Atwood by anarchist protesters. The next intersection had a overturned dumpster with flaming garbage spilled on the street. Several shop windows had been broken by a protester from California, however the media initially implicated that it had been students who were responsible.

I reached the lawn of the Pitt Union, and at about 10:45 the police began to multiply rapidly. They also brought in several scary-looking trucks with large dish-shaped things on them. This turned out to be a Long-Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which emits a loud, scary noise which is physically disabling within a certain radius. At 11:00 PM, the trucks began playing a pre-recorded message declaring that the people in the streets had become an "illegal gathering" and that the crowd was to disperse, or they could be subject to arrest or attack with "less lethal" weaponry (does that mean you're less dead when you get hit?)

At this, I decided to retreat to Forbes Hall. Other people were not fortunate enough to get out of there as quickly as I did, and became exposed to a hail of "OC" gas, rubber bullets, mace, LRAD blasts, and nightsticks. The University unfortunately decided to lock down the residence halls as the police approached, giving the retreating students nowhere to go to escape from the police. One of my friends was arrested while holding open the doors to the Litchfield Towers residence hall lobby so that escaping students had somewhere to go. She was dragged outside of the doorway, beaten to the ground, not given any rights, held for five hours, and released without any charge as of yet.

At the time, I was unaware of this, but I watched the police advance through the lower campus (residential area, mainly between Forbes and Fifth avenues) via the live feed on the local news. When I noticed that they were three blocks away from Forbes Hall, I went to the patio on the second floor of the hall (out of reach of anyone who didn't live there or have a friend there). At about midnight, the cops were in front of the hall, still chasing a small group of protesters despite being nearly a mile from the original protest ground and being practically at the end of the campus. Without any real warning, they threw several canisters of "OC" gas onto the patio. Unknown to me at the time, several also entered the lobby and threatened to mace several students who were unable to enter the hall due to the lockdown.

OC gas is for all intents and purposes the same as tear gas. When you inhale it, your lungs and throat itch and you can't do anything but cough. If it gets in your eyes, you become partially blind and it feels like your eyes are melting. I was several feet away from a grenade and was directly exposed to it for several seconds as my fellow students and I tried to escape. I ran to my bathroom on the sixth floor and flushed my eyes and choked for five minutes. The third floor had window open out of which the students had been looking, it was filled with gas, and the students living on the third floor became refugees for several hours while it cleared.

Shortly after passing Forbes hall, the police attack ended. They left Oakland with 42 arrests (most were let go that morning), and a large number of unfairly treated, assaulted, and pissed students. The university itself has yet to make any statement regarding Thursday night, but the Mayor of Pittsburgh and Chief of Police have stated that they are "proud of how well the police handled the situation". They are apparently not fans of students either.

I will save my personal commentary and descriptions of the aftermath for another note. However, here are a few links that you will find interesting.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNeD4rHUF4A> a compilation of student-made videos from 9/24.
The videos are of varying quality and contain some harsh language and violence. These will give you an idea of what the students here experienced (I know the person being dragged away at 2:35)
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6aRrQz7224> This video was not taken by me, but it was taken from my vantage point when Forbes Hall was attacked
<http://www.pittnews.com/> Pitt's student newspaper, featuring independent coverage of the G-20 (and some rather good photography, the ones I took came out terribly)
<http://www.pittbriefly.com/> A blog on which many videos of the G-20 'riot' have been posted. Some of these cannot be found on Youtube.

Thank you for reading this,
......."

I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's a great presentation. The guy is so clued up, and he's got a lot of courage to take on Wall Street. He called the naked short selling issue in 2005. If only people like this were listened to and not derided.

Oh yeah, his name is Patrick Byrne, he's CEO of Overstock.com and founder of www.deepcapture.com. I'm sure you can find his e-mail address at one of those sites.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_M._Byrne

If you are interested in the guy theres a great interview over at CNet.com with him. A really great guy who has lived a pretty interesting life.

http://news.com.com/CEO+on+the+hot+seat/2008-1030_3-6046300.html

Cheers

In reply to this comment by GeeSussFreeK:
Dude, awesome linkage! Best hour I have spent learning in awhile. Very great stuff

Do you know who did it so I can send him a thank you as well? That was surely a lot of effort.

In reply to this comment by SpeveO:
Make sure to watch the presentation on 'naked short selling' at http://www.businessjive.com/. It's a very thorough explanation if you are looking to understand what 'naked short selling' is, how it works and how it's been abused. Mind blowing.

Dude, awesome linkage! Best hour I have spent learning in awhile. Very great stuff

Do you know who did it so I can send him a thank you as well? That was surely a lot of effort.

In reply to this comment by SpeveO:
Make sure to watch the presentation on 'naked short selling' at http://www.businessjive.com/. It's a very thorough explanation if you are looking to understand what 'naked short selling' is, how it works and how it's been abused. Mind blowing.

>> ^MaxWilder:
If it was just one bank failing, they would have let it fail. But this was a LOT of banks about to fail. That would have decimated the economy, probably making the US and many other western countries into third world nations overnight.
It took me a while to figure it out too.
The politicians were tripping over themselves to give away money, because they were not going to be blamed for the resulting fallout of a collapsed economy.


Destruction of the economy on such a global level such as might have happened had the banks been allowed to fail could quite possibly been the best thing for the world. The banks needed to be propped up to maintain a monetary economy that is essential to class stratification.

A paradigm shift in global economics will happen within this century, might as well get it over with now.

>> ^Psychologic:
You assume they were only kind to religious people. This is not the case.

It sadly is that way for most of religions. Just look at all the denominations of Christianity that think that if you're not in their particular sect you're not following the Truth and therefore going to hell. If they can't even respect people with nearly the same beliefs as them why do they deserve my respect? The particular group you're referring to may be an exception, if so good for them.

Do you feel that your anger is any better?

Better? Absolutely not, I've never claimed that my immense distrust and dislike for anyone with any religious faith makes me a good person. I accept that it's a character flaw. But when I see a billboard quoting scripture, hear about one of my friends being beaten for being gay, or see that the school board is ditching sex ed and adding "Evolution is make beleive" stickers to text books, I do feel that I have a some justification for my anger.
That's fine, they're idiots. That doesn't mean religion causes everyone to act like that.

Except that because of their religion they're given a free pass to be idiots by all facets of our society. Laws are written to support their dogma, school curriculums are changed to maintain their hold on children, politicians pander to their interests even when all available evidence proves the opposite course of action is better.

There are atheists who are just as hateful as those in the video, and that is just as bad.

The difference is that atheists are marginalized at all turns. We are a larger minority than any other, but are the only one that can be openly discriminated against. I'd say we've plenty of cause to be hateful.

Most places I've seen are less religious every year. If you really want to convert people to atheism then show them that you can be a kind and moral person even without religion. Hate and insults will only strengthen their belief that atheism leads to irrational behavior (as you believe religion does).

While that may be true for a large portion of the world, it's certainly not the case everywhere. In the US Evangelical Christianity continues to gain in numbers and political power each year. A recent Gallop poll showed that only 39% of Americans believe in Evolution. In Africa Christian missionaries have led to the out of control AIDS pandemic, which will cost the lives of millions of people. Islamofascism and the lack of understanding of the causes of terrorism, creating the "War on Terror", has cost the lives of countless innocent people and helped to bring about global economic disaster. Rationalism is losing ground to the lunacy of religion.

I accept that not every person of faith fits the type of people I've been talking about, that I'm generalizing quite a bit, but I can't help noticing that the intelligent/tolerant/forward thinking believers don't seem to make much effort to correct the impression that religious people are xenophobic, homophobic, ignorant people.

Now if we were to see more evidence that more religious people were embracing rationalism, tolerance, and making a concerted effort to distance themselves from their less appealing brethren, than I'd be willing to change my impression of the faithful. As it stands, I've no reasons to change my mind on anything more than an individual basis once a person has proven themselves better than my assumptions.

>> ^rougy:
>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^rougy:
Everybody deserves $20/hr or more.
Anything less than that is simply subsistance.

You raise the pay, you raise the cost to do business and thus raise the cost of the products. The raising of minimum wage is just a ploy by the government to make more on taxes. Once you raise minimum wage, companies have grounds to raise the price of their product equally so it does nothing for you or I. A lot of people don't understand that places like Wal mart and large grocery stores only make about a penny per dollar in profit so every little change in overhead will impact profit.
I'm really beginning to wonder if that applies at all. The Waltons are among the richest people on Earth, yet for them to grow richer and richer is just fine while everybody else has to scrimp and scrape to get by.
It's always okay for rich people to grow richer, and they have grown much richer in the past eight years, but whenever that wealth is about to spread to the lower classes, suddenly it's doom and gloom on the horizon.
Working class people aren't greedy enough. There's no way in hell so many of us should be busting our asses for nothing while five members of the same family grow richer by hundreds of millions every year.
I think our entire business model (Capitalism) needs to be turned on its head.
We are on the brink of global economic disaster, again, and the working class people asking for better wages and benefits had nothing to do with creating it.

Capitalism always has employees begging for the most pay for the least amount of labor and companies begging for the most amount of labor for the least amount of pay. At the way our economy is, people will be grabbing any job they can and the companies that have stuck around are in the driver's seat as far as hours/pay/benefits.

And yes, I have worked retail...it sucks. Long gone are the days where you can get by fairly comfortably on the wages of a retail employee. Especially when you're living in an area where I live. You can't get a place to live for under $800/mo. That doesn't leave much for food/gas/bills/entertainment. But if you were to raise the cost of running an operation like Wal*Mart, it'll naturally drive the price of the product up. Then why shop there? And if you don't shop there, then they have to "downsize". So now you have 5 people without jobs. So raising their wages would actually perpetuate the economy in its current direction.

>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^rougy:
Everybody deserves $20/hr or more.
Anything less than that is simply subsistance.

You raise the pay, you raise the cost to do business and thus raise the cost of the products. The raising of minimum wage is just a ploy by the government to make more on taxes. Once you raise minimum wage, companies have grounds to raise the price of their product equally so it does nothing for you or I. A lot of people don't understand that places like Wal mart and large grocery stores only make about a penny per dollar in profit so every little change in overhead will impact profit.

I'm really beginning to wonder if that applies at all. The Waltons are among the richest people on Earth, yet for them to grow richer and richer is just fine while everybody else has to scrimp and scrape to get by.

It's always okay for rich people to grow richer, and they have grown much richer in the past eight years, but whenever that wealth is about to spread to the lower classes, suddenly it's doom and gloom on the horizon.

Working class people aren't greedy enough. There's no way in hell so many of us should be busting our asses for nothing while five members of the same family grow richer by hundreds of millions every year.

I think our entire business model (Capitalism) needs to be turned on its head.

We are on the brink of global economic disaster, again, and the working class people asking for better wages and benefits had nothing to do with creating it.

Honestly the Davos Economic Summit is not at all covered at Videosift even though its the most important Summit in the last 10 years given the same situation right now in the world. Alot of news worthy events occurred, some videos from the Summit:

http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Extent-of-the-Economic-Crisis-Stephen-Roach
http://www.videosift.com/video/Turkish-PM-Storms-Out-of-Gaza-Debate-at-Davos
http://www.videosift.com/video/Clinton-Jokes-About-Putin-Supports-Bad-Bank
http://www.videosift.com/video/Marketplace-org-discusses-how-Bad-Banks-could-be-good
http://www.videosift.com/video/Putin-Jabs-at-US-Over-Global-Economic-Crisis
http://www.videosift.com/video/The-Daily-Show-Lawrence-Lindsey-talks-the-stimulus
http://www.videosift.com/video/Barney-Frank-Fact-Slaps-GOP-on-Stimulus-Plan
http://www.videosift.com/video/Where-Are-The-Bankers-Barney-Frank

and so on and so on from the Unsifted...

Thanks!

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
*promote

Epic fail of Capitalism.
We had to Nationalize the banking system to prevent global economic collapse.

Yet, like a dog to it's vomit, the laissez-faire free market trickle downers continue to embrace their failed philosophy.

>> ^Skeeve:
She's hot, but she's also full of crap. There is an estimated 1.75 trillion barrels of conventional oil worldwide (mostly in Saudi Arabia). If we continue to use about 30 billion barrels of oil per year we would run out in 58 years. The Athabasca Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada has at least 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, doubling that rough estimate to 116 years. There is a further 235 billion barrels in the tar sands of Venezuela.
She says tar sands (among other energy sources) wont make up for a fraction of the oil we use but she should have checked the numbers - tar sands make up about 2/3 of the world's oil.
I totally agree that we should reduce our dependence on oil and work towards more efficient and more environmentally friendly sources of energy, but using the same inaccurate scare tactics that people have been using for decades is not the right way to do it.


The main reason the "scare tactics" aren't effective is because there's always a fleet of people who want to come out and say "That's not true! Everything's fine, we've got decades to worry about it! Why do anything until it's all gone?" People choose to believe the rosier picture. I guess that's human nature.

The reason she says tar sands won't make up the difference is because it's a lot harder to extract.

Case in point, from the Wikipedia page on the Athabasca Oil Sands of Alberta, it says that only 10% is able to be economically retrieved. That estimate is out of date, since that's based on an oil price of $69/barrel, and it's ~$125 right now. So, more oil will be extractable, but only because of the higher price.

You're also assuming fixed demand, but in reality demand is going up, and is expected to rise exponentially as nations like China and India start buying cars en masse.

The only reason we won't actually run out of oil is because we use a free market to distribute it. Given a diminishing supply, and rising demand, price will grow rapidly. People will have to curtail their use of oil, simply because they won't be able to afford to use it anymore.

If there's no comparably cheap alternative, there's going to be a global economic crash the likes of which we've never experienced. Cheap alternatives, if they can be found, will take years to develop, and decades to implement.

We knew all this in the 1970's, but decided not to invest in developing an alternative. Mostly because a bunch of people, backed by the oil industry, came out and made an argument essentially saying "eh, we've got a long time to worry about it, don't develop alternatives!"

Telling people the truth (a "scare tactic" of the worst kind) hasn't worked. She figured maybe men will listen if she does a sexy dance while speaking the truth.

Guess she'll have to try something else.

It's true.

The following weapons are much better then the M4; the FN SCAR, the HK416 and the XM8 from Heckler & Koch. The XM8 was about to be picked up a few years ago but it all stopped.

All the weapons are mentioned are from Belgium and Germany, a military arms contract for the US Army would mean a huge loss for Colt which is a US arms firm. There is external pressure to keep with Colt even though its now an inferior design. 40 year old weapon design for a grunt field weapon is too long, its outdated, the AK has evolved in leaps and bounds comparatively to the 74 and 101 spec.

"Other issues were that the Army has a legislated obligation to prefer U.S.-based manufacturers, and that a previous agreement with Colt Defense required the Army to involve Colt in certain small-arms programs."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM8_rifle

Note: "Colt Defense LLC is the sole source supplier of the M4 Carbine to the US military and the only manufacturer worldwide that meets or exceeds all US military specifications for the weapon."

My personal belief is that there is also external pressure to hold off on replacing the rifles and carbine (as mentioned in the article) for something that is Future Combat spec like the OICW, but coming from a US manufacturer and not a German one (regardless of the fact that global economics means that the rifle would actually be made in Georgia). The XM spec weapons directly came from the OICW.

I don't believe the trails are done so much from a grunt perspective but from a cost benefit analysis with some big weights pressing to continue with the Colt license, Colt losing it and actually making a better weapon then the M4 is a huge financial loss for them.

So much for free markets eh?

In reply to this comment by Jordass:
I know there was a lot of debate on military weapons on certain posts. Saw this http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24229068 and wondered if you or MGR thought it had any weight or just the media making shit up again

Quality, is a subjective exercise with regard to what I am talking about-I detest cheap, plastic, crap. and farhad, why should we laud the recent up-and- commence of a country who, after wiping the sleep out of the collective eyes after their civil war, Dung and Mao, and being thrust out of poverty to bloom into the manufacturing shit hole of today.....huge amounts of natural resources are imported to keep their infrastructure going, and the net is an export explosion of low-end, disposable goods. Oh well......this is all as it should be, there is no going back-If the "global economy now" as a vision of the future.....the place WILL look like some 21century William Gibson scenario..

My hope for a future, would be cessation of the global economic gristmill, about 2/3rds of the earth's population disappearing in a matter of a few years (preferably some natural catastrophic scenario, and a collective upward thrust of mankind's remnants, finally getting their heads out of their ass, and working together for some worthwhile global scenario......until then, I'm all for getting rid of currency altogether.....