Goldman Sachs CEO: Entitlements must be contained

Goldman Sachs Man Put on the Spot by BBC

SUNDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2011

I was listening to a “best of Today” podcast, from Radio 4′s famous morning news programme. It was on Greece, the Euro and the economy (from last Friday I think).

Lo and behold up popped an “expert” from Goldman Sachs. Now I do not know all the intricacies of the ‘Global Downturn’ but my failing memory tells me that Goldman Sachs played quite the pivotal role.

So there I was, shaking my fist at my MP3 player, when the interviewer, John Humphries cut in that Goldman Sachs had helped created the mess with Greece by hiding the extent of Greece’s debts. He intimated that in lying (fraud surely?) Goldman Sachs had made a bad situation worse, letting monies being poured into a Greek black hole.

The response of the Goldman Sachs man? “I have not come on here to discuss that.”  

More at Final Conflict

Lloyd Blankfein: The Business Plan for American Revival

The challenges that America faces are not those of World War II. But meeting today’s challenges will demand a similar dedication to cooperation—and not just between political parties. A spirit of compromise and reconciliation would do wonders for the economy if government and business resolved together to address the following priorities:

1. Remove the risk of a double-dip recession and give the economy a stimulative jolt.
2. Restore confidence in public finances.
3. Keep marginal tax rates low.
4. Act like we need to compete and win—because we do.
5. Energy policy is crucial.
6. Sensible immigration reform is also a high priority.

America has a long tradition of talented and experienced people who have gone to work for the government after a successful business career. They bring to public service useful perspectives about how business operates and, while in government, they develop a deeper appreciation for the responsibility government has to broader constituencies. Their experience is a virtue, not a vice, and should be encouraged in the years ahead.

(CBS News) Stocks shook off their post-election slump Monday, in part because of optimism that the president and Congress will reach a compromise on the nation’s budget by the end of the year.

If they don’t, there will be automatic tax increases and huge cuts in federal spending — that so-called fiscal cliff.

It’s a time bomb, according to Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs,

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Short URL: http://www.newsnet14.com/?p=113327

Billy Joel - Pressure

FHA projected to exhaust reserves, could need bailout

WASHINGTON –The Federal Housing Administration, which has played a crucial role in stabilizing the housing market, said it ended September with $16.3 billion in projected losses — a possible prelude to a taxpayer bailout.

The precarious financial situation could force the FHA, which has been self-funded through mortgage insurance premiums since it was created during the Great Depression, to tap the U.S. Treasury to stay afloat.

The agency said a determination on whether it needs a bailout won’t come until next year.

The FHA is required to maintain enough cash reserves to cover losses on the mortgages it insures. But in its annual actuarial report to Congress, the agency said a slower-than-anticipated housing market recovery has led its reserves to fall $16.3 billion below anticipated losses.

The FHA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees it, said the report “does not mean FHA has insufficient cash to pay insurance claims, a current operating deficit or will need to immediately draw funds from the Treasury.”

A request for taxpayer money would come in President Obama‘s 2014 budget, set to be released in February, with a final determination of whether the FHA needs the funds coming next September. The FHA has permanent and indefinite authority to draw money from the Treasury, although it has never had to use that power.

I can not locate the 2014 Budget as of yet, but this is an interesting find all should read. ~shera
FISCAL YEAR 2013 HISTORICALTABLES BUDGET OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENTOFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
The FHA does not lend money, but guarantees loans made by banks in exchange for insurance premiums. The agency’s role has expanded since the crash of the subprime mortgage market, and it now insures about $1.1 trillion in loans, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.

thank you Gregory for the article

Short URL: http://www.newsnet14.com/?p=112921

We’re DOOMED: Full On War In Israel,

The United States is advising citizens inside southern Israel to “take appropriate measures” as the fighting escalates, and has ordered embassy personnel to take shelter and curb all non-essential travel to the southern part of the nation.

State Department sides with Israel in new Hamas war

“We strongly condemn the barrage of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel, and we regret the death and injury of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians caused by the ensuing violence,” State Department Deputy Spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement.

 ”There is no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel. We call on those responsible to stop these cowardly acts immediately. We support Israel’s right to defend itself, and we encourage Israel to continue to take every effort to avoid civilian casualties.”

Is Israel leading the U.S. into war? A retired top former Israeli general seems to think that perception could, if the U.S. goes to war with Iran, do damage to the Israeli-American relationship. “What I am mainly concerned of is a scenario where the United states is dragged into a war with Iran and the perception in the United States is that Israel dragged it into this war,” said Israeli Brig. Gen. (ret.) Shlomo Brom at a Friday event at the Center For American Progress (where I used to work) in Washington.

It’s hard not to see why Americans might have this perception: for months now, Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu led a very public campaign to push the U.S. to shift its trigger for war on Iran to a nuclear weapon “capability.” Capability is ill-defined, but this much seems clear: it is a lower threshold for war than Iranian weapons production, where the Obama administration has its red line.

More from Pakalert Press

5 Corporate Brands Making a Killing on America’s Wars

by Nick Turse

Giant weapon makers are not the only ones cashing in on US wars. Unbeknownst to the public, the companies behind some the most familiar household name brands constitute the backbone of what has mushroomed into a military-corporate complex of “civilian” firms, which rake in huge profits while helping the Pentagon to carry out its wars and foreign occupations. Unsurprisingly, at least five of these companies have seen their contracts with the Defense Department skyrocket since 9/11.

Chances are, if you’ve ever sent a package overnight, bought a PC or a can of soda, you’ve paid your hard-earned money to a major Pentagon contractor. While large defense corporations that make fighter jets and armored vehicles garner the most attention, tens of thousands of “civilian” companies, from multi-national corporations hawking toothpaste and shampoo to big oil behemoths and even local restaurants scattered across the United States, all supply the Pentagon with the necessities used to carry on day-to-day operations and wage America’s wars. And they’ve made a killing doing it since 9/11.

In 2001, the massive arms dealers Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman ranked one, two and five among Department of Defense contractors, raking in $14.7 billion, $13.3 billion and $5.2 billion, respectively, in contracts. Last year, Lockheed’s contract dollars were almost double their pre-9/11 level, clocking in at $28 billion, while Boeing’s had jumped to almost $19 billion and Northrop Grumman, still in the five spot, had more than doubled its 2001 take, with $12.8 billion in contracts.

Unknown to most U.S. taxpayers and even many Pentagon-watchers, some of the largest and most recognizable corporations in the world have also been getting rich on America’s wars. Below are five examples of “civilian” companies that have reaped major rewards from the Pentagon during its last decade at war:

• 1. BP: The oil giant, perhaps most famous for dumping 206 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico last year, is also a perennial power when it comes to Pentagon contracts. Back in 2001, BP nabbed a cool $357 million in contracts from the Department of Defense. Last year, the number hit $1 billion and it’s no secret why.
• 2. FedEx: The overnight shipping giant is a long-time defense-contracting powerhouse that has also seen an exponential increase in contract dollars since September 10, 2001, when its stock was trading at just under $40 per share. By the end of that year, FedEx had been awarded about $211 million in contracts from the Pentagon.
• 3. Dell: If you’re in the military and you want to pilot a drone, transfer supplies or write a memo, you need a computer. That’s just what Dell provides. The desktop- and laptop-maker has been plying the Pentagon with computers for many years and, just like Lockheed, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, has done especially well by the Department of Defense since 2001.
• 4. Kraft – From A-1 steak sauce, their signature mayonnaise and Oreo cookies to Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Planters peanuts and Wheat Thins crackers, this company ranks as one of the largest and best known food concerns in the world.
• 5. Pepsi – Once upon a time it was the “choice of a new generation.” These days, it’s the choice of the Pentagon. In 2010, PepsiCo washed down $217 million in Defense Department contract dollars, compared to the mere $61 million in deals it inked back in 2001.

In his famous 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” by what he called the “military-industrial complex.” Today, however, the “large arms industry” that Eisenhower warned about is only part of the equation. Civilian firms such as FedEx and PepsiCo form the backbone of what more accurately can be described as a military-corporate complex of “civilian” businesses that enable the Pentagon to function, to make war and to carry out foreign occupations.

Almost a decade after Eisenhower’s farewell address, there were still only about 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the Department of Defense. Last year, according to U.S. government records, the number stood at almost 135,000.  more

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3. The Conquest of the Unhappy Consciousness: Repressive Desublimation

Herbert Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man

Herbert Marcuse

marcuse.org

Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, Marcuse studied at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg. Marcuse worked in US Government Service, which helped form the basis of his book Soviet Marxism (1964). Celebrated as the “Father of the New Left,”^[4] his best known works are Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man(1964). His Marxist scholarship inspired many radical intellectuals and political activists in the 1960s and ’70s, both in the U.S. and internationally.  Wikipedia

Having discussed the political integration of advanced industrial society, an achievement rendered possible by growing technological productivity and the expanding conquest of man and nature, we will now turn to a corresponding integration in the realm of culture. In this chapter, certain key notions and images of literature and their fate will illustrate how the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.” They succumb in fact to the process of desublimation which prevails in the advanced regions of contemporary society.

The achievements and the failures of this society invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a backward stage of the development. What is happening now is not the deterioration of higher culture into mass culture but the refutation of this culture by the reality. The reality surpasses its culture. Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth.

Today’s novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.

In fact, they serve as instruments of social cohesion. The greatness of a free literature and art, the ideals of humanism, the sorrows and joys of the individual, the fulfillment of the personality are important items in the competitive struggle between East and West. They speak heavily against the present forms of communism, and they are daily administered and sold. The fact that they contradict the society which sells them does not count.more

Herbert Marcuse One-Dimensional_Man

Short URL: http://www.newsnet14.com/?p=112815

Obama Begins Push for New National Retirement System

A recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor Departments marked the beginning of the Obama Administration’s effort to nationalize the nation’s pension system and to eliminate private retirement accounts including IRA’s and 401k plans, NSC is warning.

The hearing, held in the Labor Department’s main auditorium, was monitored by NSC staff and featured a line up of left-wing activists including one representative of the AFL-CIO who advocated for more government regulation over private retirement accounts and even the establishment of government-sponsored annuities that would take the place of 401k plans.

“This hearing was set up to explore why Americans are not saving as much for their retirement as they could,” explains National Seniors Council National Director Robert Crone, “However, it is clear that this is the first step towards a government takeover. It feels just like the beginning of the debate over health care and we all know how that ended up.”

A representative of the liberal Pension Rights Center, Rebecca Davis, testified that the government needs to get involved because 401k plans and IRAs are unfair to poor people. She demanded the Obama administration set up a “government-sponsored program administered by the PBGC (the governments’ Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation).” She proclaimed that even “private annuities are problematic.”

Such “reforms” would effectively end private retirement accounts in America, Crone warns. “These people want the government to require that ultimately all Americans buy these government annuities instead of saving or investing on their own. The Government could then take these trillions of dollars and redistribute it through this new national retirement system.”

Deputy Treasury Secretary J. Mark Iwry, who presided over the hearing, is a long-time critic of 401k plans because he believes they benefit the rich. He also appears to be one of the Administration’s point man on this issue.

Automatic

Changing the Way America Saves

By William G. Gale, Mark Iwry, John David 

“This whole issue is moving forward very quickly,” warns Crone. “Already there is a bill requiring all businesses to automatically enroll their employees in IRA plans in which part of every employee’s paycheck would be automatically deducted and deposited into this account. If this passes, the government will be just one step away from being able to confiscate all these retirement accounts.”  MORE