Green Company Gets $390 Million In Government Subsidies Then Lays Off 125 While Giving Raises To Top Execs

Another Department of Energy Debacle? Taxpayers, you should be proud of Obama's  inept appointee, Steven Chu; this time your loss is only a quarter of a billion dollars.  Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it?

Wake Up America! 

Your hard earned tax dollars are like dust in the wind with that bungling bunch of idiots.

A123 Systems, an electric car battery company once touted as a stimulus "success story" by former Gov. Jennifer Granhom, D-Mich., has laid off 125 employees since receiving $390 million in government subsidies - but is still handing out big pay raises to company executives.

The Department of Energy gave the battery company $249.1 million in grant money, while the Michigan government provided A123 with another $141 million in tax credits and subsidies, according to the Mackinac Center.

"[T]he company has laid off 125 employees and had a net loss of $172 million through the first three quarters of 2011," the Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports, observing that the company's primary customer, Fisker Automotive, is also struggling financially. "Yet, this month A123’s Compensation Committee approved a $30,000 raise for [Chief Financial Officer David] Prystash just days after Fisker Automotive announced the U.S. Energy Department had cut off what was left of its $528.7 million loan it had previously received."

This month has seen significant pay boosts for other A123 executives, as well:

Robert Johnson, vice president of the energy solutions group, got a 20.7 percent pay increase going from $331,250 to $400,000, while Jason Forcier, vice president of the automotive solutions group, saw his pay increase from $331,250 to $350,000. Prystash’s raise was 8.5 percent, going from $350,000 to $380,000.

"It looks like they are trying to pad their top people’s wallets in case something really bad happens," Paul Chesser, associate fellow for the National Legal & Policy Center, suggested.

Washington Examiner

America's Per Capita Debt Worse Than Greece (Graph)

Think America Can't Burn Like Greece? Think Again!

 

 

Under Obama's Plan, Gross Federal Debt Alone Soars to $75,000 Per Capita in 2022

Obama Administration Invested Billions in Companies Supported by Energy Department Insiders

 If you think the incestuous glad handing within the Obama clique at the DOE ended with the exposure of Solyndra, think again. This time, Barry O's cronies - or friends of cronies - are set to receive another 4 BILLION DOLLARS of your taxpayer money for their pet projects. 

If it looks like a rat, and smells like a rat..it IS a rat.

Wake Up America!

Following on the Solyndra controversy, the Department of Energy under President Barack Obama is now accused of funneling billions of dollars in funding to companies that have connections within the department.

An investigation by The Washington Post found that the Energy Department has approved nearly $4 billion in federal grants and financing to 21 companies supported by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers.

Of this amount, $2.46 billion flowed to nine businesses that have ties to VantagePoint Venture Partners, a venture capital firm where Sanjay Wagle, an Energy Department adviser, worked before coming to Washington.

The other four officials identified by the Post include Assistant Secretary David Sandalow, who previously worked for Good Energies, a company that received $737 million from the Energy Department; and Steve Westly, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and now a member of Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s advisory board. The Westly Group took in $600 million in federal financing.

The Obama administration says that the Energy Department employees and advisers took no part in grant-making decisions, which would mean that these business windfalls were just happy coincidences.

AllGov

Former US Comptroller General David Walker: US Will Look Like Greece in 2 Years

In two years, the U.S. economy will resemble that of Greece when the debt crisis began there, says David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General and current CEO of the Comeback America Initiative.

The United States has never carried so much debt as it does today ever save during World War II, when such hefty borrowing and spending was needed to halt a devastatingly widespread war.

The United States, Walker tells the Worcester Economic Club, ranks 28th out of 34 countries in terms of fiscal responsibility, with the debt-heavy Greece coming in at last place.

"We’re about two years away from where Greece was when it had its debt crisis," Walker says, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

"The fact of the matter is government is not the engine of growth, innovation and job creation," Walker says, adding "spending is a bipartisan problem" that has gotten out of control in the last decade.

While federal spending was 2 percent of the gross domestic product in 1800, it hit 23.8 percent in 2011 and is on track to hit 36.8 by 2040, according to Walker.

Furthermore the U.S. spends double per person what other industrialized nations do on healthcare and education, while military spending should not be immune to budget cuts either.

"We can, we must and we will reduce defense spending," Walkers says.

President Barack Obama sent a $3.8 trillion budget proposal to Congress recently, and Republicans have pointed out that while the president is quick to hike taxes on the wealthy, he's not so quick to cut spending, which the country really needs.

"Instead of leading the effort to bring down our debt and make tough choices, the president is proposing that we spend more and more," says Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington state, according to CNN.

"All his wasteful spending puts us deeper in debt to China. All his tax hikes would destroy jobs and make it tougher to compete with China."

Money News

Cop Tasers Handcuffed Girl in Back. She is Now Brain Dead (Video)

We have posted about this type of police abuse in the past and will continue to do so until it comes to an end. When are the citizens of this country going to rise up against the repeated assaults against those that the police have sworn to "serve and protect"? The only ones these goons serve are themselves and the only thing being protected are their own asses.

Wake Up America!

Please Like this post on Facebook if you agree. Your comments are much appreciated

Ron Paul: US Slipping Into a Fascist System Dominated By Big Government and Big Businesses

Kansas City: Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul says the US is "slipping into a fascist system" dominated by big government and big businesses.

The Texas congressman held a fiery rally on Saturday night across the street from a World War I Memorial, upstaging simultaneous Republican Party banquets being held on both sides of the nearby Missouri and Kansas line.

Paul said the US got off track during the era of president Woodrow Wilson, who led the nation through World War I and unsuccessfully advocated for the nation's involvement in a forerunner of the United Nations.

 Although campaign aides were aware, Paul told reporters after his speech that he did not know his rally was coinciding with long-established Republican Party events.  

ZeeNews.com

Attention US Taxpayers. You ARE Funding Overseas Mosques and Internet Access For Muslims. Surprised? You Shouldn't Be (Video)

The US State Department is giving away HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YOUR TAX DOLLARS every year to pacify Arab Muslims overseas. We're broke and they are sending OUR money to support Muslim regimes.

We The People CAN demand an end to this abomination .

Wake Up America!

Look Who 'Has Stolen IDs and Fake Tax Returns'.. What's a Little Bank Fraud Between Friends, Anyway?

Did HSBC Bank Knowingly Launder Billions in Drug Money?

Making fraudulent loans to corporate accounts that existed in name only was a key part of an alleged money-laundering scheme by the global bank HSBC, according to a whistleblower who has provided WND with more than 1,000 pages of evidence.

The evidence includes customer account ledgers for dozens of companies through which the financial institution was laundering money each month, charges John Cruz, a former relationship manager for the bank’s southern New York region.

“A bank employee would first set up a bogus corporate account using a stolen corporate identification and the required personal identification to set up the account,” the whistleblower explained. “The loan request would go to HSBC underwriting in Buffalo and the loan would get approved, often on the basis of fraudulent tax returns and fraudulent documentation to support the loan.”

The series of articles on HSBC already has caused fallout for this reporter and for WND, which saw one of the articles temporarily blocked when HSBC filed a complaint with an Internet provider that turned out to be unwarranted. PayPal and American Express also have been implicated in the bank fraud.

HSBC reportedly is under investigation by a U.S. Senate committee, and WND has provided material to federal investigators.

Cruz said the scheme relied on corporate and personal information selected by identity theft to give the fraudulent account a sufficiently good credit history to justify the loan, even though all the supporting documentation, including tax returns, was fraudulent.

“Even when these fraudulent loans were declined, HSBC employees in on the scheme would simply call senior bank executives to have the loans approved, thereby effectively by-passing underwriting.

Exhibit 1 is a HSBC list of fraudulent bank loans made by various employees, all of whom used the same bogus USER ID here redacted as 433***36. All customer and bank employee information has been redacted from this report to respect privacy restrictions.

Each line item in Exhibit 1 represents a different loan made to a different fraudulent company.

Cruz noted that all of the Social Security numbers are legitimate numbers used by the HSBC identity thieves to establish the account.

“None of companies listed were functioning companies, and the loan files lacked critical documentation including source of repayment,” Cruz said.

The whole point was to steal hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars from HSBC itself, Cruz alleged, through the fraudulent loans drawn from bank income. As a result, the net earnings of the bank were depressed and the loan loss transferred to the shareholders once the loans defaulted.

“Once the loans were made, checking accounts were established by HSBC employees for the fraudulent corporations, and the loan proceeds were transferred into the corporate accounts,” he explained. “Once the loan funds were in the fraudulent corporate accounts, HSBC employees in on the scheme could wire the money out of the accounts to locations not recorded in the account bank statements.”

Exhibit 2 is another HSBC internal bank record documenting fraudulent loans. The user ID of the bank employee making the loans is again 433***86, a number multiple bank employees utilized when setting up bogus corporate accounts for fraudulent loans.

Exhibit 2: HSBC internal report documenting alleged fraudulent loan activity

Every time Cruz saw suspicious loan activity, he reported it – through emails, faxes and telephone calls.

When he realized his reports with senior management and bank security were being ignored, Cruz began wearing a wire so he could record conversations with bank employees in which the discussions confirmed their awareness of the fraudulent activity and their unwillingness to do anything to stop it.

He also began printing out reports documenting fraudulent loans and keeping a record of his emails that he could remove from the bank location for safekeeping.

Exhibit 3 is a memo Cruz wrote in his attorney’s office shortly before he was terminated by HSBC, to be sent to his direct management supervisor at HSBC.

In the memo, Cruz explained the methodology in which fraudulent loans were being created by HSBC employees. He also detailed his efforts to bring the information to bank security officers.

The names of the bank officers discussed in the memo have been redacted to respect privacy.

Exhibit 3: John Cruz memo to HSBC bank management

“The only result of the memo was that the bank took disciplinary action against me,” Cruz said. “I reported the fraud, and I was reprimanded for not bringing in more business. I was told that my job was not to report fraud, but to bring in more business. Since I refused to bring in new business from fraudulent accounts, I marked myself for termination.”

In February 2010, Cruz was terminated from HSBC for poor job performance; he had been at HSBC since January 2008.

After leaving the bank, Cruz attempted through his attorney to turn his information over to the Department of Homeland Security.

“DHS didn’t even respond,” he said. “We didn’t get as much as a letter from DHS, despite the repeated calls and emails my attorney made to DHS in the attempt to get their attention.”

Cruz has no idea how much money went through HSBC in fraudulent loan activity. The amount that he observed and was not able to print out ran into the billions of dollars, he estimates.

“Every day I went to work, I began to wonder how many fraudulent accounts I would find that day,” he said. “But every time I found something suspicious, the reaction I got from bank management and bank security was, ‘Shut up and do your job.’”

Article by Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., and a WND senior staff reporter. He has authored many books, including No. 1 N.Y. Times best-sellers "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command." Corsi's latest book is "Where's the REAL Birth Certificate?"

Preschooler's Homemade Lunch Confiscated and Replaced with Nuggets? by a "State Agent".

The US Government has overstepped their boundaries again. This time one of their Hitlerite divisions, the "Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services" confiscated a child's healthy homemade lunch and replaced it with processed chicken nuggets. Adding insult to injury, the school then CHARGED the kid's mom for the meal.

Those citizens wishing for a Nazi state, your dreams are quickly coming true. For every other American, Wake Up!

What's in them "nuggets" anyway?

A Hoke County preschooler was fed chicken nuggets [can anybody tell us exactly what part of the chicken they get those from?] for lunch because a state worker felt that her homemade lunch did not have enough nutritional value, according to a report by the Carolina Journal.

The West Hoke Elementary School student was in her More at Four classroom when a state agent who was inspecting lunch boxes decided that her packed lunch - which consisted of a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, apple juice and potato chips - “did not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines.”

The decision was made under consideration of a regulation put in place by the the Division of Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services, which requires all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs to meet USDA guidelines.

“When home-packed lunches do not include all of the required items, child care providers must supplement them with the missing ones,” the Journal reports.

The student’s mother told the Journal she received a note from the school about the incident and was charged $1.25 for the cafeteria tray, from which her daughter only ate three chicken nuggets.

The note explained how students who did not bring “healthy lunches” would be offered the missing portions and that parents could be charged for the cost of the cafeteria food, the Journal reports.

The mother, who was not identified in the report, expressed concern about school officials telling her daughter that she wasn’t “packing her lunch box properly.”

Fox News

30,000 Drones in American Skies? Big Brother WILL Be Watching You!

RQ-7 Shadow 200 Drone

Washington - A bill passed last week allocating more than $63 billion to the Federal Aviation Administration would increase the existence of drones in civilian airspace across America and is expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama.

As America’s drone war begins a new surge in Pakistan, the U.S. House and Senate have both approved the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act bill, a bill which would pressure the FAA to weaken rules currently in place on domestic drone authority, and allow American skies to be filled with tens of thousands of drones. 

If the new bill becomes law, up to 30,000 drones could by flying in U.S. airspace by decade’s end. The Senate passed the bill by a 75-20 margin. Civil liberties groups have spoken out on the measure, stating the new legislation offers no restrictions on drone surveillance operations by police and federal agencies and could put us on track toward a “surveillance society.” 

As drone technology rapidly advances, America’s law enforcement community is eager to use these robotic machines in their daily operations, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) notes

Unfortunately, nothing in the bill would address the very serious privacy issues raised by drone aircraft. This bill would push the nation willy-nilly toward an era of aerial surveillance without any steps to protect the traditional privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected.

Details in the new drone bill are extensive. Among them, the bill would require the FAA to expedite and simplify its drone operation permission process to government agencies, to be completed within 90 days. The FAA is currently considering a proposed set of regulations alleviating drone rules, set to be released this spring. 

The operation of any drone weighing 4.4 pounds or less would require the FAA’s approval to “a government public safety agency,” as long as certain parameters are heeded (sight lines, daytime operation, operation below 400 feet in altitude, and operated only in safe airspace.) 

Also included in the new measure is a requirement the FAA produce a comprehensive plan “to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system,” Common Dreams reports. 

In this instance, “civil” drones applies to those operated in the private sector, but as things currently stand, permission to operate a drone is all but impossible for a non-government entity, save for hobbyists. Drone industry groups, along with their congressional backers, consider this as a potential source of income. The bill requires the FAA’s plan allow the integration of drones into U.S. airspace “as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015. 

The FAA has been given nine months to produce the plan. Additionally, it must develop a five-year “roadmap for the introduction” of these civil drones in national airspace. 

The bill would also require the FAA’s final ruling, within 18 month of the comprehensive plan’s submission, “that will allow” civil operation of drones weighing under 55 pounds in U.S. airspace along with a proposed ruling for conducting the plan. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a watchdog group, has brought a lawsuit against the federal government requesting the FAA release records on agencies, almost 300 of them, carrying authorization for domestic drone operations. 

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with EFF told Talking Points Memo the new drone bill increases the importance of the lawsuit. “I think the fact that Congress is pressuring the FAA to expand its UAS program through the FAA Reauthorization Act only reinforces the need for these records,” she noted. “It’s important that we learn more about how the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies are already using UASs before we expand their use further. The privacy concerns posed by the use of drones for domestic surveillance are too great to excuse the FAA’s lack of transparency on this issue." 

Digital Journal

The Federal Reserve's Explicit Goal: Devalue The Dollar 33%

 

The Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) has made it official:  After its latest two day meeting, it announced its goal to devalue the dollar by 33% over the next 20 years.  The debauch of the dollar will be even greater if the Fed exceeds its goal of a 2 percent per year increase in the price level.

An increase in the price level of 2% in any one year is barely noticeable.  Under a gold standard, such an increase was uncommon, but not unknown.  The difference is that when the dollar was as good as gold, the years of modest inflation would be followed, in time, by declining prices. As a consequence, over longer periods of time, the price level was unchanged.  A dollar 20 years hence was still worth a dollar.

But, an increase of 2% a year over a period of 20 years will lead to a 50% increase in the price level.  It will take 150 (2032) dollars to purchase the same basket of goods 100 (2012) dollars can buy today.  What will be called the “dollar” in 2032 will be worth one-third less (100/150) than what we call a dollar today.

The Fed’s zero interest rate policy accentuates the negative consequences of this steady erosion in the dollar’s buying power by imposing a negative return on short-term bonds and bank deposits.  In effect, the Fed has announced a course of action that will steal — there is no better word for it — nearly 10 percent of the value of American’s hard earned savings over the next 4 years.

Why target an annual 2 percent decline in the dollar’s value instead of price stability?  Here is the Fed’s answer:

“The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) judges that inflation at the rate of 2 percent (as measured by the annual change in the price index for personal consumption expenditures, or PCE) is most consistent over the longer run with the Federal Reserve’s mandate for price stability and maximum employment. Over time, a higher inflation rate would reduce the public’s ability to make accurate longer-term economic and financial decisions. On the other hand, a lower inflation rate would be associated with an elevated probability of falling into deflation, which means prices and perhaps wages, on average, are falling–a phenomenon associated with very weak economic conditions. Having at least a small level of inflation makes it less likely that the economy will experience harmful deflation if economic conditions weaken. The FOMC implements monetary policy to help maintain an inflation rate of 2 percent over the medium term.”

In other words, a gradual destruction of the dollar’s value is the best the FOMC can do.

Here’s why:

First, the Fed believes that manipulation of interest rates and the value of the dollar can reduce unemployment rates.

The results of the past 40 years say the opposite.

The Fed’s finger prints in the form of monetary manipulation are all over the dozen financial crises and spikes in unemployment we have experienced since abandoning the gold standard in 1971.  The financial crisis of 2008, caused in no small part by the Fed’s efforts to stimulate the economy by keeping interest rates too low for, as it turned out, way too long is but the latest example of the Fed failing to fulfill its mandate to achieve either price stability or full employment.

The Fed’s most recent experience with Quantitative Easing also belies the entire notion that monetary manipulation can spur the economy.  Between November 2010 and June 2011, the Fed tried to spur economic growth by purchasing $600 billion in Treasury securities, flooding the banking system with reserves and keeping interest rates low.  In response the economy, which had been growing at a 3.4% annual rate, slowed to a 1% annual rate in the first half of 2011.  Once, the Fed stopped supplying all of that liquidity, economic growth in the second half of the year accelerated to a 2.3% annual rate.

Second, the Fed does not use real time indicators of the price level.  Instead, it views inflation through the rear view mirror of the trailing increases in the PCE.  And, even when it had evidence of rising inflation — as it did in the first quarter of last year — it chose to temporize, betting that the spike in inflation would prove temporary.

This spike in inflation did prove temporary, as Fed Chairman Bernanke predicted at the time, but not for the reasons — a slack economy — that he cited.  Instead, the growing debt crisis in Europe led to a massive shift in deposits out of the euro and into the dollar — an event totally out of the Fed’s control.  Yet, this increase in the demand for dollars was far more important than any action taken by the Fed because it increased the value of the dollar and produced a slowdown in the inflation rate.

What we are left with is a trial and error monetary system that depends on the best judgment of 19 men and women who meet every six weeks around a big table at the Federal Reserve in Washington.  At the end of a day and a half of discussions, 11 of them vote on what to do next.  The error the members of the FOMC fear most when they vote is deflation.  So, they have built in a 2% margin of error.

Given the crudeness of the tools the FOMC uses to set monetary policy, allowing for such a margin of error is no doubt prudent.  For example,  when the economy slowed in the first half of last year, inflation picked up, accelerating to a 6.1% annual rate during the second quarter.  And, when the economic growth accelerated in the second half, inflation slowed.  These results are the precise opposite of what the Fed’s playbook says are supposed to happen.

The best the Fed can do — an average debauch in the dollar’s value of 2% a year while producing recurring financial crises and a more cyclical economy — is demonstrably inferior to the results produced by the classical gold standard.  Here’s just one example.   The largest gold discovery of modern times set off the 1849 California gold rush and increased the supply of gold in the world faster than the increase in the output of goods and services.  The price level in the U.S. did increase by12.4 percent over the next 8 years.  That translates into an average of just 1.5% a year.  The gold standard at its worst was better than the best the Fed now promises to do with the paper dollar.

The Fed’s best is hardly good enough.  The time has arrived for the American people to demand something far better — a dollar as good as gold.

Article by Charles Kadler, Forbes.com

Obama’s Made-Up Jobless Numbers. Its' Nice To Be Dictator

 

When it comes to the unemployment rate, it’s nice to be president.

Sure, it wasn’t so nice for President Obama in October 2009, when the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics declared the rate was 10 percent. But exactly a year from Election Day 2012, the rate began a precipitous plunge, first to 8.9 percent, then the next month, to 8.7, then to 8.5. And just last week, the BLS said the rate had fallen all the way down to 8.3 percent.

If the spectacular “recovery” keeps up at the same pace, the rate will be 6.3 percent by Nov. 6. It hasn’t been that low since — well, all but four of the 96 months George W. Bush was in office. But you get the point. America is back!! 

Woo-hoooo!!

So, spectacular news for the president, yes? And fantastic news for America, right? Uh, yes. And absolutely no.

See, the BLS boys, no doubt at the president’s direction, are busy rewriting the rules, and they’re in uncharted, and unchecked, territory. The federal government Friday declared that the U.S. had created — not “saved,” mind you, “created” — 243,000 jobs. Amazing, right?

But wait, what’s that little asterisk here? A record 1.2 million Americans left the labor force? 1.2 million?! Well, where’d they go? Oh, just left? Well, OK. But no, wait. What does that even mean?

Zerohedge.com’s Tyler Durden precisely spelled out the government version of “Project Mayhem”:

“A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55 percent. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: It appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non-institutional population increased to 242.3 million, meaning those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30-year low of 63.7 percent as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.”

The labor force rate — all workers more than 16 years old — climbed above 66 percent in October 1988. It stayed there throughout the term of President George H.W. Bush, and topped 67 percent for 40 consecutive months during President Clinton’s two terms. The rate stayed above 66 percent for almost all of President George W. Bush’s two terms.

But the month Mr. Obama was elected, the rate dropped to 65.8 percent. By the end of his first year in office, the BLS said the labor participation rate was just 64.6 percent. And last month, for the first time in nearly 30 years, the rate dropped all the way down to 63.7 percent.

Still, month after month, the mainstream media laps up reports of a falling unemployment rate. “U.S. Jobless Rate Falls to 8.3 Percent, a 3-Year Low,” blared the New York Times. “The nation’s unemployment rate dropped for the fifth straight month, to 8.3 percent, its lowest level in three years, the Labor Department reported Friday, with widespread hiring across the economy,” declared the Washington Post.

Clearly, they hadn’t read the major financial papers the month before. When the unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent in December, the Financial Times wasn’t convinced. “According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.”

And they must have ignored the Gallup write-up the month before: “The sharp drop in the government-reported unemployment rate for November and the sharp drop in jobless claims during the most recent reporting week have combined to create the perception that the job market may be improving … . In contrast, Gallup’s data suggest little improvement in the jobs situation.” The organization concluded: “It may be wise to exercise caution in interpreting the drop in the government’s most recent jobless claims numbers.”

No one in the mainstream media, busy rewriting the government’s press release on Friday, will bother to question the newest number, or explore what trimtabs.com CEO Charles Biderman said that very day: “Actual jobs outstanding, not seasonally adjusted, are down 2.9 million over the past two months. It is only after seasonal adjustments — made at the sole discretion of the Bureau of Labor Statistics economists — that 2.9 million less jobs gets translated into 446,000 new seasonally adjusted jobs for January and December.

“No one I know has any idea as to how the BLS does this seasonal adjustment,” he said.

When Project Mayhem has run its course, Tyler Durden looking out across the city, where banks and financial institutions are about to implode, says: “Out these windows, we will view the economic collapse. One step closer to global equilibrium.”

Indeed.

Article by Joseph Curl, Washington Times

Ron Paul: “People Are Frightened! They’ve Lost Faith In Government! They’re Sick & Tired Of Wars!” (Video)