I must admit and why I put together the weekly "things that had me laughing out loud" SMC because it gets so absurd, so ridiculous, it's hard to spend a lot of time analyzing, writing up what works, when you have these things going on and you know any sane, rational, highly analyzed, not corrupted, highly targeted policy will never get even suggested, never mind passed.
The SEC guy compulsively jerking off at work via Internet porno,gee, what, there are only 30 million Americans needing a job at the moment?
After having decimated and demonized the unions. How long before the forty hour work week and time and half are back on the table? G.W. Bush made an attempt http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-07-15/news/union-of-lost-souls/1/
and it won't be long before that and the minimum wage are targeted as "job killing regulation" , check your watch.
Do a search on "ending the forty hour work week", there are a lot of recent articles pushing just that. Goodbye dignity and hello $0.61 per hour.
As long as MNCs have the same rights as natural persons (citizens) and can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns in secret ... for that long and no longer ... USA will continue under the yoke of the WTO, the Communist Party of China and other corporatist regimes, regardless of what they call themselves.
The Citizens United decision may not be the last word on this topic! Securities and Exchange Commission could right now require disclosure of political spending by multinational corporations, thus facilitating action by shareholders to sign off on such spending.
Not only would this SEC action advance both democracy and economic populism, it would also be in the best interests of shareholders and investors. The point is brought home in recent Washington Post article by John C. Coates (Harvard Law School) and Taylor Lincoln (Public Citizen) --
A common assumption has been that, whether corporate political activity is good for the country, it is good for corporate shareholders. Why else would corporations want to get involved in politics? .... Counter to those perceptions, however, several studies suggest that companies seeking political advantage may not be doing their shareholders any favors. Rather, such activity [paying off politicians] may reflect the interests of corporate managers and benefit shareholders less than other possible uses of their money.
The Kennedy referred to is Justice Anthony Kennedy (not President Kennedy or Senator Kennedy). Kennedy provided the crucial fifth vote in the Citizens United 5-4 majority, taking the position that auditing of corporate political donations could and should be implemented under the Commerce Clause or other constitutional authority, although not by way of regulation of political campaign expenditures, as such, which would contradict the money-is-speech doctrine (that goes back to the 1980s).
Let's put Justice Anthony Kennedy's theory in the Citizens United case to the test! And maybe save the country into the bargain!
Those who are fortunate enough to own equity shares in multinationals are being shut out from any ability to audit corporate political donations that are not in their best interest as investors or as citizens of the United States .... but the SEC can change that!
To move forward with economic populism, we need to make corporate transparency an issue -- a key issue on which we decide our votes in 2012.
We need to do like President Truman, "I don't give them hell, I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."
______
There are many more rulings like this, killing endangered sea turtles is one that sticks out, but the inability of a nation to even enact their own environment protections, safety protections just takes the cake.
Anyone notice one the U.S. joined the WTO the nation has been on a steady downward spiral for the most part? So, it's not exactly helping the American people economically for the most part.
All of these trade agreements need to be cancelled, renegotiated to real trade that puts the nation and people of the nation first.
I've not been one to call for WTO withdrawal as others have been but this one takes the cake.
Add to that, I found Snakes on the Plane to be so ridiculous, so absurd, so out of the planet by any stretch of representational government, I fear what this Congress would do generally.
It seems our government is either corrupt, crazy or both. We have a jobs crisis so bad it's bringing down the entire economy and these people are holding hearings on snake & reptile imports. America has plenty of snakes in the grass and most of 'em are slithering around in the halls of Congress.
I too have been trying to get a modificaion for over 3 year! BofA requests the same info over and over and then claims that I did not respond to one of their requests and closes the file. Then when we call to follow up, they state "file was closed due to lack of response"!! Bastards!!! We have pages and pages of notes, we call weekly!! So we start the process over......play the waiting game. As of today, file is in with a new underwriter, we will see what happens.
Need a good lawyer who wants to sue them for being incompetent. So frustrating!
She notes this story was buried (although markets obviously knew about it), while the rogue trader at UBS got the headlines. More ass-backwardness of course. commentary here on the Fed's yet another EU bail out move.
I thought there was a new law where they had to offer student loan consolidation. I'd do some research on that one. On credit scores, it's ridiculous, they are going up to 780 as a threshold for mortgages. The way it's tabulated I believe you can be a perfect little consumer with a fairly high stable income and not hit 780 FICO.
But we've seen this over and over where TARP funds, U.S. Fed is bailing out other countries banks. Right, nationalism, sovereignty and putting U.S. citizens first is a joke to these people, U.S. citizens are dead last in their concerns. I don't think anyone can say a nation which has a GINI index below many African nations is 1st world. The income inequality is so high, the U.S. is really 3rd world, the majority of us anyway.
Why is the overwhelming mantra of modern US politics that we need to run government "more like a business" when no sane investment body would provide "unlimited dollar loans" to ANYONE, let alone an organization which has shown itself to be unwise or imprudent in investments??! I mean, hell, I have a credit score well over 700 but because I don't own a house (because I'm young and know that the bottom hasn't fallen out of the market yet) my majority student lender won't consolidate its own holdings with a very small loan from another institution. Talk about tight markets for we of lesser gods.
As an American I want to know the country of origin of all of my food. And I want to know if tuna I buy was harvested using dolphin-safe methods.
Just like I want to know the ingredients in my food, and whether it was grown organically, I want to know what country it was produced in. This is so important because many countries don't have the high level of food safety standards that America has. It could be unhealthy to say the least to eat food produced in these countries.
America must leave the WTO. How Americans want their food labeled is none of the WTO's business.
Anyone other than me get the distinct impression that the world's financial markets are being engineered for a uniform collapse and subsequent introduction of a global currency? You just can't make up stories that are this stupid.
It seems like it's endless, when you have the US version of Rome, in which we pay tribute to our vassals and they have healthcare, pensions and other social services no one here even dreams of. Now we're going to add to the list by backing up the European banking system. Another self-sacrifice by the US. I only wish we had our own version of Uncle Sam -- but unfortunately, we do not.
Of course we, as a First World nation, end up the beneficiaries of the general transfer of resources from poorer countries to richer countries, so I guess we can't pretend not be exploiters.
But within the family of nations, we have to be the world's biggest masochist. We've paid a king's ransom to keep Europe safe since 1940s and 1950s and have stood by while they've dodge their obligations to defend themselves. The situation with Japan and Korea is similar except they put more money into their developing their economies vs social services than Europe did.
In addition to the people who are still "over there", there's the enormous and unfair burden of those "over there" who came over here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't whatever "peace dividend" we get by the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- plus trillions more? -- end up getting plowed right into taking care people here due to excessively high immigration levels (both legal and illegal) since the 1980s?
One way or another we'll end up legalizing the illegal, so there's another 10 million plus their citizen descendants to take care of -- forever. Add that to the 1 million plus green cards and work visas handed out each year and the decrease of jobs and wages for the average American and we're on the road to God only knows where.
None of us average folks will get back much of anything for all the money -- our money -- that will be spent to provide education, healthcare and social services to all these former citizens of other countries who came here "to find a better life."
Where do Americans who are losing everything they used to have, in terms of security, jobs and peace of mind, go to find a better life? You know, the life that's no longer obtainable in the US by average people whose families worked and fought to make America what was in 1980?
The idea of us volunteering to take on another burden right now is really upsetting to me. Are we even going to make any interest on what we're lending?
Why are we so good at saying Yes to other countries and No to ourselves?
I was being sarcastic, get it, eggs, cycles? ;) but that's some very interesting additional info on egg markets that I sure didn't know.
Thanks.
Also, I disabled comments on the PPI thread because the site is currently getting attacked by spammers trying to get on the site.
There are little scripts that try to post comments, which look like real comments but are links to scam/malicious sites and also they think this increases their site page rank.
I'm working on code to block them as I type. What a big pain.
That question can be definitively answered: "Yes ... but maybe it doesn't matter."
The question further is about increases in price of baked goods and how that relates to wholesale eggs. To answer that question, we would have to find numbers for powdered eggs versus fresh eggs.
Of course, no baker worth his salt would admit to using powdered eggs ... and, if you've ever tried powdered eggs, you'll understand why. I suspect that in this instance, wholesale eggs price changes are about two factors: weather and related energy costs, and, imports from Canada.
I'm thinking that if you have severe heat in your egg factory in Texas, it's going to cost a lot to keep your artificial environment going, and you just have to raise your bottom-line price. Or, buyers could decide to buy from Canadian producers instead, but the price would still be up a little.
Some years ago (of course) I used to buy eggs by the small truckload at what was considered to be a more-or-less natural or humane egg factory. (Contradiction in terms, I know.) The layers were batteried but not to the extremes of most 'factory farms'. The farm claimed to have better eggs than other (less naturalistic) factory farms. For sure they did not artificially color the yolks or anything like that. They also claimed that by giving the hens more room to move, cannibalism was reduced and they did not need to feed them so much in the way of anti-biotics. Their layers actually had two legs each! Light was partly natural, so the layers molted in the natural cycle, that is, in the fall.
MOLTING AND SUPPLY CYCLE
Like their wild ancestors, free-range and backyard layers molt in the fall, which means in March or April in the great Down Under. So, if it's worth it to import eggs from across the world, you could offset the natural cycle. (I'm not sure what happens in the tropics.)
Mainly though, eggs store easily for 60 days, so cyclic effects aren't all that significant, although there has long been an annual price cycle reflecting supply cycle.
Of course, what happens in USA (in the factory farms) is forced molting. That's a huge topic in poultry farming. Also, there's all kinds of genetic modification going on, especially about bird flu -- which was a big scare a couple of years ago. It's a complicated public health topic. It may be that there's a trend toward increasing eggs prices exactly because of the bird flu thing. All that research and experimentation has to be paid for.
LOCAL EGGS
I have friends who raise chickens for eggs to sell at farmers' markets locally. There's a pretty good and probably increasing demand for "local eggs" that short-circuit the normal food distribution supply chains. Most egg farmers who go the more natural food route, plan on a fall molt and slaughter many birds at that time. That's definitely what typical backyard growers do, but some small-medium-size operations bring in specialists to do the slaughter and butchering. The real deal is fertilized eggs, with real roosters. Now that's free range!
EGG IMPORTS
There's a huge program ongoing to regulate importation of hatching eggs, which are considered as live poultry imports. This has to do not only with bird flu but also with other poultry diseases or poultry-vectored pathogens.
There's a hue-and-cry about animal rights activists who would like to illegalize the battery-system (factory-farm or, euphemistically, "caging") system of egg and poultry production. The industry responds with the globalization defense: "It would drive some egg production to countries like Mexico without such a ban, and result in imports of eggs produced under different food safety, welfare and environmental standards."
Obviously, USA gave away all regulatory authority at the Uruguay Round years ago
I haven't found a neat source for egg imports up to date, but generally, 90% of USA imports of eggs and egg products is from Canada and that totaled some 22.4 million pounds in FY 2010. So, USA imports something like 2 million pounds of eggs and egg products every month, mainly from Canada.
That means that wholesale egg price numbers are influenced by exchange rate of USD versus CanD -- or expectations of exchange-rate changes.
Traven is best known for his The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (made into the film of that name by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, winning three Academy Awards in 1949). It's unfortunate that Traven's real "jungle novels" series is so often overlooked ... such as ...
March to the Monteria (1933)
The novels describe the life of Mexican Indians in the state of Chiapas in the early 20th century, who are forced to work under inhuman conditions at clearing mahogany in labour camps (monterias) in the jungle, which results in a rebellion and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
no big deal, just going to check something technical. Right, and even worse, because people are completely pissed at Obama's corruption and breaking campaign promises right and left, unfortunately (of course), the press is interpreting this to mean somehow Americans endorse the GOP economic insanity. Of course they do not.
getting some real programs with real statistics, proven to be cost effective, actually work, is near impossible.
If the press paid any attention to statistics and wasn't corrupted themselves, we might get somewhere.
I must admit and why I put together the weekly "things that had me laughing out loud" SMC because it gets so absurd, so ridiculous, it's hard to spend a lot of time analyzing, writing up what works, when you have these things going on and you know any sane, rational, highly analyzed, not corrupted, highly targeted policy will never get even suggested, never mind passed.
The SEC guy compulsively jerking off at work via Internet porno,gee, what, there are only 30 million Americans needing a job at the moment?
No one is available to answer your call all employees are currently busy watching porn, please leave a message. We will return your call in the order it was received.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/04/eye_opener_porn_and...
after congress does away with the EPA and FDA, our food supply will be safe as melamine milk.
After having decimated and demonized the unions. How long before the forty hour work week and time and half are back on the table? G.W. Bush made an attempt
http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-07-15/news/union-of-lost-souls/1/
and it won't be long before that and the minimum wage are targeted as "job killing regulation" , check your watch.
Do a search on "ending the forty hour work week", there are a lot of recent articles pushing just that. Goodbye dignity and hello $0.61 per hour.
As long as MNCs have the same rights as natural persons (citizens) and can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns in secret ... for that long and no longer ... USA will continue under the yoke of the WTO, the Communist Party of China and other corporatist regimes, regardless of what they call themselves.
The Citizens United decision may not be the last word on this topic! Securities and Exchange Commission could right now require disclosure of political spending by multinational corporations, thus facilitating action by shareholders to sign off on such spending.
Not only would this SEC action advance both democracy and economic populism, it would also be in the best interests of shareholders and investors. The point is brought home in recent Washington Post article by John C. Coates (Harvard Law School) and Taylor Lincoln (Public Citizen) --
Link to the WaPo article webpage
This next link is TO INITIATE DOWNLOAD of the entire study -- Link to the study (PDF download) by Coates and Lincoln, Fulfilling Kennedy’s Promise: Why the SEC Should Mandate Disclosure of Corporate Political Activity
The Kennedy referred to is Justice Anthony Kennedy (not President Kennedy or Senator Kennedy). Kennedy provided the crucial fifth vote in the Citizens United 5-4 majority, taking the position that auditing of corporate political donations could and should be implemented under the Commerce Clause or other constitutional authority, although not by way of regulation of political campaign expenditures, as such, which would contradict the money-is-speech doctrine (that goes back to the 1980s).
Let's put Justice Anthony Kennedy's theory in the Citizens United case to the test! And maybe save the country into the bargain!
Those who are fortunate enough to own equity shares in multinationals are being shut out from any ability to audit corporate political donations that are not in their best interest as investors or as citizens of the United States .... but the SEC can change that!
To move forward with economic populism, we need to make corporate transparency an issue -- a key issue on which we decide our votes in 2012.
We need to do like President Truman, "I don't give them hell, I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."
______
Credit to currently linked-at- EP BaselineScenario article, Would Disclosure Help?
______
[Links checked and functioning as of posting]
There are many more rulings like this, killing endangered sea turtles is one that sticks out, but the inability of a nation to even enact their own environment protections, safety protections just takes the cake.
Anyone notice one the U.S. joined the WTO the nation has been on a steady downward spiral for the most part? So, it's not exactly helping the American people economically for the most part.
All of these trade agreements need to be cancelled, renegotiated to real trade that puts the nation and people of the nation first.
I've not been one to call for WTO withdrawal as others have been but this one takes the cake.
Add to that, I found Snakes on the Plane to be so ridiculous, so absurd, so out of the planet by any stretch of representational government, I fear what this Congress would do generally.
It seems our government is either corrupt, crazy or both. We have a jobs crisis so bad it's bringing down the entire economy and these people are holding hearings on snake & reptile imports. America has plenty of snakes in the grass and most of 'em are slithering around in the halls of Congress.
I too have been trying to get a modificaion for over 3 year! BofA requests the same info over and over and then claims that I did not respond to one of their requests and closes the file. Then when we call to follow up, they state "file was closed due to lack of response"!! Bastards!!! We have pages and pages of notes, we call weekly!! So we start the process over......play the waiting game. As of today, file is in with a new underwriter, we will see what happens.
Need a good lawyer who wants to sue them for being incompetent. So frustrating!
She notes this story was buried (although markets obviously knew about it), while the rogue trader at UBS got the headlines. More ass-backwardness of course.
commentary here on the Fed's yet another EU bail out move.
I thought there was a new law where they had to offer student loan consolidation. I'd do some research on that one. On credit scores, it's ridiculous, they are going up to 780 as a threshold for mortgages. The way it's tabulated I believe you can be a perfect little consumer with a fairly high stable income and not hit 780 FICO.
But we've seen this over and over where TARP funds, U.S. Fed is bailing out other countries banks. Right, nationalism, sovereignty and putting U.S. citizens first is a joke to these people, U.S. citizens are dead last in their concerns. I don't think anyone can say a nation which has a GINI index below many African nations is 1st world. The income inequality is so high, the U.S. is really 3rd world, the majority of us anyway.
Why is the overwhelming mantra of modern US politics that we need to run government "more like a business" when no sane investment body would provide "unlimited dollar loans" to ANYONE, let alone an organization which has shown itself to be unwise or imprudent in investments??! I mean, hell, I have a credit score well over 700 but because I don't own a house (because I'm young and know that the bottom hasn't fallen out of the market yet) my majority student lender won't consolidate its own holdings with a very small loan from another institution. Talk about tight markets for we of lesser gods.
As an American I want to know the country of origin of all of my food. And I want to know if tuna I buy was harvested using dolphin-safe methods.
Just like I want to know the ingredients in my food, and whether it was grown organically, I want to know what country it was produced in. This is so important because many countries don't have the high level of food safety standards that America has. It could be unhealthy to say the least to eat food produced in these countries.
America must leave the WTO. How Americans want their food labeled is none of the WTO's business.
Anyone other than me get the distinct impression that the world's financial markets are being engineered for a uniform collapse and subsequent introduction of a global currency? You just can't make up stories that are this stupid.
Very well said.
Our government wants to take care of all world problems but our own. It forgets its very own citizens.
Where do American citizens go when their own government forgets them? Will any other nation in the world accept them and provide economic opportunity?
Cool, I haven't read that or seen the movie.
It seems like it's endless, when you have the US version of Rome, in which we pay tribute to our vassals and they have healthcare, pensions and other social services no one here even dreams of. Now we're going to add to the list by backing up the European banking system. Another self-sacrifice by the US. I only wish we had our own version of Uncle Sam -- but unfortunately, we do not.
Of course we, as a First World nation, end up the beneficiaries of the general transfer of resources from poorer countries to richer countries, so I guess we can't pretend not be exploiters.
But within the family of nations, we have to be the world's biggest masochist. We've paid a king's ransom to keep Europe safe since 1940s and 1950s and have stood by while they've dodge their obligations to defend themselves. The situation with Japan and Korea is similar except they put more money into their developing their economies vs social services than Europe did.
In addition to the people who are still "over there", there's the enormous and unfair burden of those "over there" who came over here.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't whatever "peace dividend" we get by the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- plus trillions more? -- end up getting plowed right into taking care people here due to excessively high immigration levels (both legal and illegal) since the 1980s?
One way or another we'll end up legalizing the illegal, so there's another 10 million plus their citizen descendants to take care of -- forever. Add that to the 1 million plus green cards and work visas handed out each year and the decrease of jobs and wages for the average American and we're on the road to God only knows where.
None of us average folks will get back much of anything for all the money -- our money -- that will be spent to provide education, healthcare and social services to all these former citizens of other countries who came here "to find a better life."
Where do Americans who are losing everything they used to have, in terms of security, jobs and peace of mind, go to find a better life? You know, the life that's no longer obtainable in the US by average people whose families worked and fought to make America what was in 1980?
The idea of us volunteering to take on another burden right now is really upsetting to me. Are we even going to make any interest on what we're lending?
Why are we so good at saying Yes to other countries and No to ourselves?
I was being sarcastic, get it, eggs, cycles? ;) but that's some very interesting additional info on egg markets that I sure didn't know.
Thanks.
Also, I disabled comments on the PPI thread because the site is currently getting attacked by spammers trying to get on the site.
There are little scripts that try to post comments, which look like real comments but are links to scam/malicious sites and also they think this increases their site page rank.
I'm working on code to block them as I type. What a big pain.
Robert Oak asked question in comment at August 2011 PPI -- "Co chickens have cycles?"
That question can be definitively answered: "Yes ... but maybe it doesn't matter."
The question further is about increases in price of baked goods and how that relates to wholesale eggs. To answer that question, we would have to find numbers for powdered eggs versus fresh eggs.
Of course, no baker worth his salt would admit to using powdered eggs ... and, if you've ever tried powdered eggs, you'll understand why. I suspect that in this instance, wholesale eggs price changes are about two factors: weather and related energy costs, and, imports from Canada.
I'm thinking that if you have severe heat in your egg factory in Texas, it's going to cost a lot to keep your artificial environment going, and you just have to raise your bottom-line price. Or, buyers could decide to buy from Canadian producers instead, but the price would still be up a little.
Some years ago (of course) I used to buy eggs by the small truckload at what was considered to be a more-or-less natural or humane egg factory. (Contradiction in terms, I know.) The layers were batteried but not to the extremes of most 'factory farms'. The farm claimed to have better eggs than other (less naturalistic) factory farms. For sure they did not artificially color the yolks or anything like that. They also claimed that by giving the hens more room to move, cannibalism was reduced and they did not need to feed them so much in the way of anti-biotics. Their layers actually had two legs each! Light was partly natural, so the layers molted in the natural cycle, that is, in the fall.
MOLTING AND SUPPLY CYCLE
Like their wild ancestors, free-range and backyard layers molt in the fall, which means in March or April in the great Down Under. So, if it's worth it to import eggs from across the world, you could offset the natural cycle. (I'm not sure what happens in the tropics.)
Mainly though, eggs store easily for 60 days, so cyclic effects aren't all that significant, although there has long been an annual price cycle reflecting supply cycle.
Of course, what happens in USA (in the factory farms) is forced molting. That's a huge topic in poultry farming. Also, there's all kinds of genetic modification going on, especially about bird flu -- which was a big scare a couple of years ago. It's a complicated public health topic. It may be that there's a trend toward increasing eggs prices exactly because of the bird flu thing. All that research and experimentation has to be paid for.
LOCAL EGGS
I have friends who raise chickens for eggs to sell at farmers' markets locally. There's a pretty good and probably increasing demand for "local eggs" that short-circuit the normal food distribution supply chains. Most egg farmers who go the more natural food route, plan on a fall molt and slaughter many birds at that time. That's definitely what typical backyard growers do, but some small-medium-size operations bring in specialists to do the slaughter and butchering. The real deal is fertilized eggs, with real roosters. Now that's free range!
EGG IMPORTS
There's a huge program ongoing to regulate importation of hatching eggs, which are considered as live poultry imports. This has to do not only with bird flu but also with other poultry diseases or poultry-vectored pathogens.
USDA on hatching eggs imports
There's a hue-and-cry about animal rights activists who would like to illegalize the battery-system (factory-farm or, euphemistically, "caging") system of egg and poultry production. The industry responds with the globalization defense: "It would drive some egg production to countries like Mexico without such a ban, and result in imports of eggs produced under different food safety, welfare and environmental standards."
Obviously, USA gave away all regulatory authority at the Uruguay Round years ago
See, UnitedEgg PDF
I haven't found a neat source for egg imports up to date, but generally, 90% of USA imports of eggs and egg products is from Canada and that totaled some 22.4 million pounds in FY 2010. So, USA imports something like 2 million pounds of eggs and egg products every month, mainly from Canada.
That means that wholesale egg price numbers are influenced by exchange rate of USD versus CanD -- or expectations of exchange-rate changes.
Yeah! Jack London is awesome!
Also check out B. Traven, if you haven't ...
The Death Ship (1934), originally Das Totenschiff (1926)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_Ship
Traven is best known for his The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (made into the film of that name by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart, winning three Academy Awards in 1949). It's unfortunate that Traven's real "jungle novels" series is so often overlooked ... such as ...
March to the Monteria (1933)
no big deal, just going to check something technical. Right, and even worse, because people are completely pissed at Obama's corruption and breaking campaign promises right and left, unfortunately (of course), the press is interpreting this to mean somehow Americans endorse the GOP economic insanity. Of course they do not.
getting some real programs with real statistics, proven to be cost effective, actually work, is near impossible.
If the press paid any attention to statistics and wasn't corrupted themselves, we might get somewhere.
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