We're in a recession

We're in a recession

By Joseph A. Giannone

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, who once led Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs, on Wednesday told Reuters the U.S. economy already is in a recession that could persist, and that federal authorities have only taken the first steps toward turning things around.
"I certainly concur with the view that we are in a recession," Corzine said in an exclusive interview at Reuters' U.S. headquarters in New York. "We have pretty strong indications that we have seen a major, major downshift in the economy. I think we'll find we started in the last quarter of last year."

The New Jersey Democrat became governor of the 11th largest state last year after a short stint as U.S. senator and a 24-year career at Goldman Sachs. Corzine rose through the ranks as a bond trader to become chairman and CEO of what is now the world's largest securities firm, and he played a key role in its 1999 conversion from a partnership to a public company.
Corzine spoke the same day a quarterly survey of corporate finance chiefs found 54 percent believed recession has already begun and would last longer than other recent downturns.
The U.S. central bank, eager to stave off an economic contraction, has cut benchmark rates five times by a combined 2.25 percentage points since September to 3.0 percent.
And on Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Reserve said it would lend $200 billion of Treasuries to primary dealers and accept mortgages as collateral to ease liquidity pressures on banks. These efforts, Corzine said, are only a start.

While "$200 billion is a very large number, it is relatively insignificant in the overall scheme: trillions of dollars in the mortgage market," he said. "It's a really good start, but it's probably not going to change the ocean of credit that's extended in the mortgage arena."
Corzine suggested the Fed would cut benchmark rates again next week, lowering yields for low risk assets and putting pressure on investors to buy other assets. He also predicted that the Fed may intervene again to support the banking system, though it tends to take small steps.

The Opiate of Tax Cuts

Nothing feels as good as a hit of taxcut.

In 2000, for the first time in a long while, the US government enjoyed a true surplus of revenue. Presidential candidate George W. Bush assured Americans that, under the circumstances, it was their Right to take a hit of taxcut now. They had earned it. And Americans agreed.

In 2001, the US economy started sagging. Now George W. Bush and the Republicans declared that we Needed a hit of taxcut. The nation could not agree more. The US government would lose income it needed to support itself and share with state and local governments, but each hit of taxcut would feel sOooo gOOood!

So why stop at the Federal level? Florida Republicans knew they had a good product to offer. Give Floridians hits of state taxcuts and they would be happy, and they would vote to keep Republicans in power. Sure the State of Florida would have less money to support itself and contribute to local governments and schools. But each hit of taxcut would feel very, very good.

So why stop there? How can you stop there? We still had the taxes for local governments and school districts. Sure the local governments and school districts needed this money to support themselves, especially given the reduced contributions from the State and Federal governments…but we could still get a hit of taxcut out of them! So a cry went up, especially from rich property owners in Florida, that we needed yet another hit of taxcut, this time out of local revenue.

Florida’s Republican governor and legislators heard those cries, especially the cries from the wealthy property owners. With “Amendment 1” and other measures they moved to ensure that Floridians, particularly rich property owners, could get a hit of taxcut out of local government revenue. And it felt so pleasant to get another hit of taxcut.

Unfortunately, the Federal government can no longer fully support itself. The State of Florida can’t support itself, either, and has to continuously slash departments, staff, and services. Now the local governments and school districts have to do the same. We’re going to feel the hurt from lack of services, and soon. And when that happens, people are going to remember who was pushing taxcut after taxcut. I’m betting that the taxcut pushers will be run out of government.

Postscript: Taxes are the “maintenance fees” for governments, like the maintenance fees for condominium associations. Maintenance fees should be set, raised and lowered in a pragmatic manner, according to needs and capacities determined by the community. To lower them for other reasons is irresponsible.

Seven modern mortal sins

Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, Sloth, Environmental pollution,Genetic manipulation, Accumulating excessive wealth, Inflicting poverty, Drug trafficking and consumption, Morally debatable experiments, Violation of fundamental rights of human nature.

"The Vatican has brought up to date the traditional seven deadly sins by adding seven modern mortal sins it claims are becoming prevalent in what it calls an era of "unstoppable globalisation".

Those newly risking eternal punishment include drug pushers, the obscenely wealthy, and scientists who manipulate human genes. So "thou shalt not carry out morally dubious scientific experiments" or "thou shalt not pollute the earth" might one day be added to the Ten Commandments.
MODERN EVILS

Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments

Violation of fundamental rights of human natureThe Catechism of the Catholic Church states that "immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell".
The new mortal sins were listed by Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti at the end of a week-long training seminar in Rome for priests, aimed at encouraging a revival of the practice of confession - or the Sacrament of Penance in Church jargon.
According to a survey carried out here 10 years ago by the Catholic University, 60% of Italians have stopped going to confession altogether. The situation has certainly not improved during the past decade.
Catholics are supposed to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year. The priest absolves them in God's name.

Talking to course members at the end of the seminar organised by the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican department in charge of fixing the punishments and indulgences handed down to sinners, Pope Benedict added his own personal voice of disquiet.

The seven deadly sins don't need modernising, secular law will suffice.
Chris Ashworth, Australia

"We are losing the notion of sin," he said. "If people do not confess regularly, they risk slowing their spiritual rhythm," he added. The Pope confesses his sins regularly once a week.
Greatest sins of our times
In an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Archbishop Girotti said he thought the most dangerous areas for committing new types of sins lay in the fields of bio-ethics and ecology.
He also named abortion and paedophilia as two of the greatest sins of our times. The archbishop brushed off cases of sexual violence against minors committed by priests as "exaggerations by the mass media aimed at discrediting the Church".
ORIGINAL DEADLY SINS

Pride
Envy
Gluttony
Lust
Anger
Greed

SlothFather Gerald O'Collins, former professor of moral theology at the Papal University in Rome, and teacher of many of the Catholic Church's current top Cardinals and Bishops, welcomed the new catalogue of modern sins.

"I think the major point is that priests who are hearing confessions are not sufficiently attuned to some of the real evils in our world," he told the BBC News website. "They need to be more aware today of the social face of sin - the inequalities at the social level. They think of sin too much on an individual level.

"I think priests who hear confession should have a deeper sense of the violence and injustice of such problems - and the fact that people collaborate simply by doing nothing. One of the original deadly sins is sloth - disengagement and not getting involved," Father O'Collins said. The Jesuit professor now teaches at St Mary's University in Twickenham.

"It was interesting that these remarks came from the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary," he said. "I can't remember a time when it was so concerned about issues such as environmental pollution and social injustice. It's a new way of thinking." "

The above is an information article with source provided. It expresses an interest in spirituality not necessarily agreement nor disagreement with the content covered.  - A.T. (Yoda) Brooks

Source: 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7287071.stm

Slave Trade, a global stable market

"With $50 and a plane ticket to Haiti, one can buy a slave. This was just one of the difficult lessons writer Benjamin Skinner learned while researching his book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.

Skinner met with slaves and traffickers in 12 different countries, filling in the substance around a startling fact: there are more slaves on the planet today than at any time in human history. Skinner speaks with Anthony Brooks about his experience researching slavery.
Though now illegal throughout the world, slavery is more or less the same as it was hundreds of years ago, Skinner explains. Slaves are still "those that are forced to work under threat of violence for no pay beyond sustenance."

Something disturbing has changed however — the price of a human. After adjusting for inflation, Skinner found that, "In 1850, a slave would cost roughly $30,000 to $40,000 — in other words it was like investing in a Mercedes. Today you can go to Haiti and buy a 9-year-old girl to use as a sexual and domestic slave for $50. The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced."
Skinner obtained this specific figure through a very hands-on process. In the fall of 2005, he visited Haiti, which has one of the highest concentrations of slaves anywhere in the world.
"I pulled up in a car and rolled down the window," he recalls. "Someone said, 'Do you want to get a person?'"

Though the country was in a time of political chaos, the street where he met the trafficker was clean and relatively quiet. A tape of the conversation reveals a calm, concise transaction. He was initially told he could get a 9-year-old sex partner/house slave for $100, but he bargained it down to $50.

"The thing that struck me more than anything afterwards was how incredibly banal the transaction was. It was as if I was negotiating on the street for a used stereo."
In the end, he agreed on the price, but told the trader not to make any moves.
"When I was talking to traffickers, I had a principle that I wouldn't pay for human life," he says.
This principle enabled him to keep a certain distance from the system, but not giving in to the temptation to free a suffering human being was an emotionally taxing struggle, he says.
"It's one thing when you are planning an effort like this, this is a work of journalism — I'm not going to interfere with my subjects. It's another thing when you are in an underground brothel in Bucharest, who has this girl with Down Syndrome, who you know is undergoing rape several times a day. When this girl is offered to me in trade for a used car ... I walk away ... it's not an easy thing to do," he says.

At one point, he did violate his principal — helping a mother free her daughter from slavery. He says he does not regret his decision, however, and continues to track her progress through a local NGO in Haiti. She's now in school, he says, and wrote him a letter over Christmas.
Slavery consumes Skinner, he says.

"When I come back to a nice loft in Brooklyn and I have to think about writing this thing — that drove me. I knew that I had to write as compelling a book as possible. This is a life-long commitment for me.""

2 fired in passport case

"Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tells reporters that she has apologized to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. for an incident in which State Department contractors unnecessarily reviewed his passport file, Friday, March 21, 2008, at the State Department in Washington, during a meeting with Brazil's Defense Minister Nelson Jobim. Rice said she would be 'disturbed' if her passport file was viewed in such an unauthorized manner."

"By ANNE FLAHERTY, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 21, 4:42 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The Associated Press has learned that the two contractors fired for snooping into Barack Obama's passport records worked for a Virginia-based company called Stanley Inc.

Earlier this week, the 3,500-person company won a five-year, $570-million contract to support passport services at the State Department.
The company is referring all questions to the State Department. An agency official confirmed that the two contractors had been employed at Stanley. The official requested anonymity because the information had not been publicly released.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — State Department employees snooped through the passport files of three presidential candidates — Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain — and the department's inspector general is investigating.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the violations of McCain and Clinton's passport files were not discovered until Friday, after officials were made aware of the unauthorized access of Obama's records and a separate search was conducted.
The incidents raise questions as to whether the information was accessed for political purposes and why two contractors involved in the Obama search were dismissed before investigators had a chance to interview them. It recalled an incident in 1992, when a Republican political appointee at the State Department was demoted over a search of presidential candidate Bill Clinton's passport records. At the time, Clinton was challenging President George H.W. Bush.
McCormack said one of the individuals who accessed Obama's files also reviewed McCain's file earlier this year. This contract employee has been reprimanded, but not fired. The individual no longer has access to passport records, he said.

"I can assure you that person's going to be at the top of the list of the inspector general when they talk to people, and we are currently reviewing our (disciplinary) options with respect to that person," McCormack said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke with all three candidates on Friday and expressed her regrets. In the meantime, State Department officials headed to Capitol Hill to brief the candidates' staffs.

After speaking with Obama, Rice told reporters: "I told him that I was sorry, and I told him that I myself would be very disturbed."
Obama said Congress should be part of any investigation.
"When you have not just one but a series of attempts to tap into peoples' personal records, that's a problem not just for me but for how our government functions," Obama told reporters in Portland, Ore. "I expect a full and thorough investigation. It should be done in conjunction with those congressional committees that have oversight so it's not simply an internal matter."
The State Department said the Justice Department would be monitoring the probe in case it needs to get involved.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the case has not yet been referred to the Justice Department for investigation, and indicated prosecutors likely would wait until the State Department's inspector general concludes its inquiry. But Mukasey did not rule out the possibility of the Justice Department taking an independent look at the passport breach.
"Have they asked us to become involved — no," Mukasey told reporters during a Friday briefing. "When, as, and if we have a basis for an investigation, including a reference — that is, one basis would be a reference — we could conduct one."

Asked what another basis could be, Mukasey said: "I don't want to speculate but if somebody walked in here with a box full of evidence, they wouldn't be turned away."
In Clinton's case, an individual last summer accessed her file as part of a training session involving another State Department worker. McCormack said the one-time violation was immediately recognized and the person was admonished.
Obama's records were accessed without permission on three separate occasions — Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and as recently as last week, on March 14.

McCormack declined to name the companies that employed the contractors, despite demands by a senior House Democrat that such information is in the public interest.
"At this point, we just started an investigation," he said. "We want to err on the side of caution."
McCain, who was in Paris on Friday, said any breach of passport privacy deserves an apology and a full investigation.

"The United States of America values everyone's privacy and corrective action should be taken," he said.
It is not clear whether the employees saw anything other than the basic personal data such as name, citizenship, age, Social Security number and place of birth, which is required when a person fills out a passport application.

Aside from the file, the information could allow critics to dig deeper into the candidates' private lives. While the file includes date and place of birth, address at time of application and the countries the person has traveled to, the most important detail would be their Social Security number, which can be used to pull credit reports and other personal information.
The firings and unspecified discipline of the third employee already had occurred when senior State Department officials learned of the break-ins to the files. Rice learned about it Thursday, after a reporter inquired about Obama's case.
The violations were detected by internal State Department computer checks because certain records, including those of high-profile people, are "flagged" with a computer tag that tips off supervisors when someone tries to view the records without a proper reason.
The Washington Times first reported the incident involving Obama.

Former Independent Counsel Joseph diGenova said the firings of the contract employees will make the investigation more difficult because the inspector general can't compel them to talk.
"My guess is if he tries to talk to them now, in all likelihood they will take the Fifth," diGenova said, referring to the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.
The State Department's top management officer, Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy, briefed members of the Clinton, Obama and McCain staffs in a Senate Foreign Relations Committee room midday Friday.

"Mistakes and errors happen from time to time. ... We caught these and we've got to work and correct that process," Kennedy said after the more than 90-minute session.
Kennedy had said Thursday that the incident was not handled properly.
"I will fully acknowledge this information should have been passed up the line," Kennedy told reporters in a conference call. "It was dealt with at the office level.""

Feature: Cars and Oil

$1.85 was the price for a gallon of gas until Hurricane Katrina which decreased refining capacity in the Gulf of Mexico then immediately went up to $2.70. We were told the price would go down when the refiners got back up to capacity, it then went to around $2.10 then back up to about $2.30 because Oil companies said they had to change the gas make up do to seasonal changes. Now we’re up to $3.25. This is not natural economic factors at work: it’s the result of price gauging by the Oil companies in an attempt to grab every red cent with no concern for everybody else. My friends bare in mind the following fact: after Hurricane Katrina when the refiners came back online the price of gas never never came back down to its previous amount. The price at the pump is artificially high; it does not have to be $3.50. It does not have anything to do with OPEC because globally there is an over production of oil on the markets. American oil companies (not oil producing countries) have no reason to decrease prices if we continue to pay. I’m no economist but I did minor in economics: ideally the government would be advised to aggressively regulate the price of gas (similar to how some cities have price ceilings on apartment prices) however this could only happen in a utopian world so I offer the following capitalistic tangible ideas. To decrease the price of gas the consumer must cut back on driving therefore decreasing demand in addition to the private sector ramping up competition targeted within automotive industry: The United States producing quality durable cars, economical affordable cars, fuel efficient cars, and hastening innovation where technologies are available but motivation to change is absent – hybrids, hydrogen is the way to go. Such a hastening is to be directed by corporate CEO/Presidents. No one can argue with my stance because it is fact that auto makers that valued quality, affordability, and fuel efficiency (Toyota) have surpassed FORD and GMC in their share of American auto sells. This will be the salvation of U.S. economy. Open your eyes business! Cars and Oil.

-A.T. Brooks

Where's the money?

The money is there for a different economic approach in America. Some however say there is no money. Why then was funding for War in Iraq immediately budgeted? The stance of Checks & Balances is that spending on Social Programs would result in far more in advancements in the economy and jobs than military spending because the benefits are domestic. It is estimated the Iraq War will cost the U.S. a trillion dollars. It has in fact cost $90 Billion every year since its inception. Now more facts; they say there is no money to solvate Social Security however one infusion of $90 Billion can completely revitalize the program. It is fact that they say there is no funding for a nationalized healthcare however combined with Medicare, Medicaid, fee for service and insurance in addition to annual government funding of $5 Billion per year such a program is achievable.

I wish the politics of government to be simpler where profit motives and partisan baloney has no place.

Gas Price Tracker - $3.25

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Gov. Spitzer Resigns

The New York Times is reporting Monday March 10, 2008 that Spitzer has told senior advisers that he had been involved in a prostitution ring.

Spitzer, who is married with three daughters, was scheduled to make an announcement Monday afternoon. Spitzer officials wouldn't immediately comment on the story.
The Times reported that a person with knowledge of the governor's role believes the governor is identified as a client in court papers. Four people allegedly connected to a high-end prostitution ring called Emperors Club VIP were arrested last week.

Update: Spitzer Resigns After Sex Scandal, Pressure

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has resigned, bowing to enormous pressure for him to leave public office in the wake of allegations that he has repeatedly used the services of a high-priced prostitution ring. Spitzer has not denied those allegations.
A somber Spitzer, flanked by his wife, Silda, stepped to the podium to give up the office he assumed just 14 months ago.

"I look at my time as governor with a sense of what might have been," Spitzer said.
"The remorse I feel will always be with me," he told gathered reporters. "I cannot allow for my private failings to disrupt the people's work."
Referring to the high standards he has expected from others, "I can and will expect no less of myself," he said.

The governor's resignation will have an effective date of Monday, March 17, one week after the case first became public knowledge. Lt. Gov. David Paterson, 53, now becomes New York's first black governor. Paterson, who is legally blind, will serve out Spitzer's term, which ends on Dec. 31, 2010.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88134976