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Congress Occupied: Hundreds Swarm Capitol Hill To Represent 99 Percent

by Michael McAuliff on January 17, 2012

Huffington Post…

A diverse crowd of hundreds from around the country descended on Capitol Hill Tuesday as the Occupy movement tried to get its point across to a Congress returning from a long recess. “We came to add to the numbers, to be heard,” said Rosetta Star, a social entrepreneur from Asheville, N.C. “We came to inspire others; we came to inspire our children. We came because we can’t sit still and pretend like nothing is going wrong, when we feel like the collective bus of the country is getting driven off a cliff.” (CLICK HERE FOR LIVE UPDATES) Star, who with her husband, Jack, runs the restaurant Rosetta’s Kitchen and a compostable packaging firm, Jack’s Boxes , as well as a third business, said she wanted Congress to stop paying the majority of its attention to the most fortunate. “Our systems are flawed by a for-profit mentality, and therefore the needs of the masses are being ignored for the profits of the few,” said Star, who is managing to make a go of her own entrepreneurial ventures while balancing activism. “We make a living between hustling for those three different small businesses,” said Star, who traveled to Washington with her four children and one of their friends, as well as her father. “We even make a living enough that we got a hotel when we came to Occupy.” “Grandpa and the boys camped” though, she added. Ryan Blackwell, 18, of Columbia, Mo., said he joined up with Occupy D.C. a week before Thanksgiving, much to his parents’ displeasure. “Let’s just say I had to defriend them on Facebook,” he said. For all his difficulty with his family, Blackwell saw in Tuesday’s gathering a chance for his voice to be heard. “It’s gorgeous,” he said, referring to a crowd that started small, but was well into the hundreds by early afternoon. “We want our rights back.” Like Star, the teenager pointed to a growing economic disparity in America, but also named as infringements things such as the recent passage of the National Defense Authorization Act , which codifies indefinite military detention of American terrorism suspects . “It’s evil,” he said. Roland Fellot, 52, a health inspector from Silver Spring, Md., volunteered to carry a sign calling for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, the measure repealed during the Clinton administration that allowed banks and investment houses to unite their businesses. Many blame the measure for allowing banks to get infected with the toxic mortgage assets that sparked the 2008 meltdown. “The connection to Occupy is that when the backers of removing this actually got their way and they did away with it, that was just a typical example of the top 1 percent, the wealthy, influencing enough politicians here on Capitol Hill to get what they want,” Fellot said. But he said the message demonstrators want to convey is larger than a bill or two. “The Occupy movement and the issue about 1 percent is so much beyond just one or two acts. It’s about the whole system,” Fellot said. “The super wealthy have always been heard, and they’ve usually gotten what they wanted. What’s happened of late is they’re the only ones who get heard.” “Congress has been screwing us for far too long, and I’m not okay with that, and neither are a lot of people,” said Deejay Paredi, 20, of Charlotte, N.C., also singling out the NDAA, which President Obama signed on New Year’s Eve. “It’s really taking our rights away, and most Americans do not even realize what’s going on,” Paredi said. “So I feel like it’s up to those of us who are aware to make ourselves heard. Most of this I feel is being done on the down-low. Unless you actually care and are actually interested in what’s happening in the government — most people aren’t and don’t care — you don’t know that this is happening.” The crowd was largely calm, although a handful of people were arrested for apparently testing the limits of the boundaries set by Capitol Police. One man, William Griffin, was charged with assault on a police officer, a police spokeswoman said. Members of the protest tweeted at the time that police instigated the altercation. Nathaniel Schrier, Clinton Boyd and Heron Boyce were charged with crossing a police line, said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider. Prostesters also walked the halls of Congress without apparent incident, visiting members’ offices, although many lawmakers still had not yet returned to work. By Tuesday afternoon, hundreds of protesters spread out through the halls. Overall, the protest had much the feel of 2009′s Tea Party rallies, minus the tri-corner hats. There were even a handful of the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags that have become iconic for the conservative movement. Rosetta Star said the atmosphere did not surprise her. “I believe that the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement have a huge amount in common,” she said, noting that she has reached out to more traditionally conservative groups in her community on the belief that they share similar problems. “If we could figure out what we all have in common, then we could truly be the 99 percent,” she said. “The 99 percent right now is a slogan that’s been taken but hasn’t actually been represented. People are trying to, and it’s true that the negative situations are being experienced by the 99 percent.” Star said she thought moments like Tuesday’s protest would help raise that awareness. “I believe that we are going to hit a tipping point, and it’s kind of un-ignorable and unavoidable,” she said, with her 3-year-old clambering around on her back. “The tipping point for me would be when 99 percent of the people become politically active, they participate on some level with what’s happening around them in the world that they’re living in, other than just their own families immediate needs.” One big difference between the Tea Party and the Occupy movement is that the Tea Party was organized in part as a deliberate electoral effort that helped the Republican Party take over the House of Representatives in 2010. It is not clear what impact Occupy will have in the fall’s campaign season, although Democrats have been trying to harness at least some of the energy and feelings expressed by the movement. Still, Star said that she will keep at it whether others do or not. “I will always fight the good fight regardless of the expected outcome so that I can always feel clear looking at myself in the mirror, and looking back and reflecting on my own life and my own choices,” she said. “Apathy is the worst poison in my mind.” Michael McAuliff covers politics and Congress for The Huffington Post. Talk to him on Facebook .

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Congress Occupied: Hundreds Swarm Capitol Hill To Represent 99 Percent

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Top Advocate For Entrepreneurs Resigns

by The Huffington Post on January 3, 2012

Huffington Post…

Carl Schramm, the president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation , a leading entrepreneurship advocacy group, is stepping down. Schramm, who has led Kauffman since 2002, is departing in order to “return to scholarship and business,” according to a statement released by the non-profit organization on Tuesday. Under Schramm’s leadership, Kauffman saw its research gain prominence and its legislative proposals draw bipartisan support in Washington as lawmakers embraced the group’s increasingly popular credo that the solution to high U.S. unemployment lies in young, “fast-growth” startups . Among other initiatives aimed at alleviating America’s employment woes through entrepreneurship, Schramm spear-headed Startup America , a public-private partnership designed to boost U.S. innovation by encouraging private investment in startups. Schramm was not immediately available for comment. In a statement , he said, “The Kauffman Foundation has researched and practiced entrepreneurship and change over the past ten years. I feel gratified to have played a role in the growth of its influence and the quality of its programs. The Kauffman Foundation’s position as the vanguard of entrepreneurial education is due in large part to its remarkable people. And, as I leave the foundation, it is the day-to-day interaction with those great people that I will most cherish.” Benno Schmidt, a Kauffman trustee and a former president of Yale University, has been appointed the interim president, effective Jan. 1.

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Top Advocate For Entrepreneurs Resigns

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PHOTOS: Rome On Fire

October 16, 2011

(Reuters) – Anti-greed protesters rallied globally on Saturday, denouncing bankers and politicians over the international economic crisis, with violence rocking Rome where cars were torched and bank windows smashed. Galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, protests began in New Zealand, touched parts of Asia, spread to Europe, and resumed at their starting point in New York with 5,000 marchers decrying corporate greed and economic inequality. After weeks of intense media coverage, U.S. protests have still been smaller than G20 meetings or political conventions have yielded in recent years. Such events often draw tens of thousands of demonstrators. The demonstrations by the disaffected coincided with the Group of 20 meeting in Paris, where finance ministers and central bankers from major economies were holding talks on the debt and deficit crises afflicting many Western countries. The Occupy Wall Street movement has gathered steam for a month, culminating with the global day of action. It remains unclear what momentum the movement, which has been driven by social media, has beyond Saturday. While most rallies were relatively small and barely held up traffic, the Rome event drew tens of thousands of people and snaked through the city center for miles (kilometers). Hundreds of hooded, masked demonstrators rampaged in some of the worst violence seen in the Italian capital in years, setting cars ablaze, breaking bank and shop windows and destroying traffic lights and signposts. Police fired volleys of tear gas and used water cannon to try to disperse militant protesters who were hurling rocks, bottles and fireworks, but clashes went on into the evening. Smoke bombs set off by protesters cast a pall over a sea of red flags and banners bearing slogans denouncing economic policies the protesters say are hurting the poor. The violence sent many peaceful demonstrators and local residents near the Colosseum and St John’s Basilica running into hotels and churches for safety. NOT AS LARGE AS HOPED American protesters are angry that U.S. banks are enjoying booming profits after getting massive bailouts in 2008 while average people are struggling in a tough economy with more than 9 percent unemployment and little help from Washington. In New York, where the movement began when protesters set up a makeshift camp in Lower Manhattan on September 17, organizers said the protest grew to at least 5,000 people as they marched to Times Square in midtown Manhattan. Some were disappointed the crowd was not larger. “People don’t want to get involved. They’d rather watch on TV,” said Troy Simmons, 47, who joined demonstrators as he left work. “The protesters could have done better today. … People from the whole region should be here and it didn’t happen.” The Times Square mood was akin to New Year’s Eve, when the famed “ball drop” occurs. In a festive mood, protesters were joined by throngs of tourists snapping pictures, together counting back from 10 and shouting, “Happy New Year.” Police said three people were arrested in Times Square after pushing down police barriers and five men were arrested earlier for wearing masks. Police also arrested 24 people at a Citibank branch in Manhattan, mostly for trespassing. At about 8 p.m., police arrested another 42 people for blocking the sidewalk. Protesters complained they had no place to go with a wall of police in riot gear in front of them and thousands of demonstrators behind them leaving Times Square. Small and peaceful rallies got the ball rolling across the Asia-Pacific region on Saturday. In Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city, 3,000 people chanted and banged drums. In Sydney, about 2,000 people, including representatives of Aboriginal groups, communists and trade unionists, protested outside the central Reserve Bank of Australia. Hundreds marched in Tokyo. Over 100 people gathered at the Taipei stock exchange, chanting “we are Taiwan’s 99 percent” and saying economic growth had only benefited companies while middle-class salaries barely covered basic costs. In Hong Kong, home to the Asian headquarters of investment banks including Goldman Sachs, over 100 people gathered at Exchange Square in the Central district. Students joined with retirees, holding banners that called banks a cancer. Portugal was the scene of the biggest reported protest action, with more than 20,000 marching in Lisbon and a similar number in the country’s second city Oporto, two days after the government announced a new batch of austerity measures. Hundreds broke through a police cordon around the parliament in Lisbon to occupy its broad marble staircase. “This debt is not ours!” and “IMF, get out of here now!,” demonstrators chanted. Banners read: “We are not merchandise in bankers’ hands!” or “No more rescue loans for banks!” Around 4,000 Greeks with banners bearing slogans like “Greece is not for sale” staged an anti-austerity rally in Athens’ Syntagma Square, the scene of violent clashes between riot police and stone-throwing youths in June. Many were furious at how austerity imposed by the government to reduce debt incurred by profligate spending and corruption had undermined the lives of ordinary Greeks. In Paris, around 1,000 protesters rallied in front of city hall, coinciding with the G20 finance chiefs’ meeting, after coming in from the working class neighborhood of Belleville where drummers, trumpeters and a tuba revved up the crowd. “This is potentially the start of a strong movement,” said Olivier Milleron, a doctor whose group of trumpeters played the classic American folk song “This land is your land.” “THE INDIGNANT ONES” The Rome protesters, who called themselves “the indignant ones,” included unemployed, students and pensioners. “I am here to show support for those don’t have enough money to make it to the next pay check while the ECB (European Central Bank) keeps feeding the banks and killing workers and families,” said Danila Cucunia, a 43-year-old teacher. “We can’t carry on any more with public debt that wasn’t created by us but by thieving governments, corrupt banks and speculators who don’t give a damn about us,” said Nicla Crippa, 49. “They caused this international crisis and are still profiting from it. They should pay for it.” In imitation of the occupation of Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in Manhattan, protesters have been camped out across the street from the headquarters of the Bank of Italy for days. The global protests were a response to calls by New York demonstrators for others to join them. Their example has prompted similar occupations in dozens of U.S. cities. At a small protest in Dublin, Ireland, Gordon Lucas, an unemployed software developer said “We don’t have economic democracy anymore. … I don’t feel I am being represented.” In Madrid, around 2,000 people gathered for a march to the central Puerta del Sol. Placards read: “Put the bankers on the bench” and “Enough painkillers — euthanasia for the banks.” “It’s not fair that they take your house away from you if you can’t pay your mortgage, but give billions to the banks for unclear reasons,” said 44-year-old telecom company employee Fabia, who declined to give her surname. In Germany, thousands gathered in Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig and outside the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. Demonstrators gathered peacefully in Paradeplatz, the main square in the Swiss financial center of Zurich. In London, around 2,000 people assembled outside St Paul’s Cathedral, near the City financial district, for a rally dubbed “Occupy the London Stock Exchange.” Joe Dawson, 31, who lost his job as a product developer at Barclays Bank, said he had taken his two children aged 10 and 8 to the rally to show them people had a voice. “I’m not passive anymore and I don’t want them to be. This is their future too,” Dawson said. “I work four jobs part-time, I take whatever I can get.” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the crowd: “I hope this protest will result in a similar process to what we saw in New York, Cairo and Tunisia,” he said, referring to revolutions in the Arab world. Outside of New York, similar protests were held in other U.S. cities and Canada. Hundreds turned out in Washington, D.C., while a couple of thousand people gathered near Toronto’s financial district as well as in Portland, Oregon. A protest in Los Angeles drew about 5,000 people. (Additional reporting by Catherine Hornby in Rome, Naomi O’Leary and Michael Holden in London, Natalia Drozdiak in Berlin, Alexandria Sage and Gus Trompiz in Paris, Iciar Reinlein, Jonathan Gleave and Carlos Ruano in Madrid, Cameron French in Toronto, Edith Honan, Ray Sanchez and Ed McAllister in New York, Carmel Crimins in Dublin; Writing by Mark Heinrich; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Mark Egan and Todd Eastham) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Shocking Crowd Reaction At GOP Tea Party Debate

September 13, 2011

A bit of a startling moment happened near the end of Monday night’s CNN debate when a hypothetical question was posed to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). What do you tell a guy who is sick, goes into a coma and doesn’t have health insurance? Who pays for his coverage? “Are you saying society should just let him die?” Wolf Blitzer asked. “Yeah!” several members of the crowd yelled out. Paul interjected to offer an explanation for how this was, more-or-less, the root choice of a free society. He added that communities and non-government institutions can fill the void that the public sector is currently playing. “We never turned anybody away form the hospital,” he said of his volunteer work for churches and his career as a doctor. “We have given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves, assume responsibility for ourselves … that’s the reason the cost is so high.” The answer may have struck a truly libertarian tone but it was clearly overshadowed by the members of the crowd who enthusiastically cheered the prospect of letting a man die rather than picking up the tab for his coverage.

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Mike Green: Investing in America’s Growing Assets: Minorities

July 18, 2011

How will America’s economic portfolio change in the next few decades as we race toward 2050 when racial minorities are expected to emerge as the majority of the U.S. population? Investing today to uplift America’s minority students and innovators seems prudent. Unfortunately, the excitement and energy of a nation that elected its first Black president a few years ago has dissipated. Did we expend all of our energy just to elect him to the office with none left over to do the necessary work? I was hopeful such an election would translate into changes in the education system that routinely relegates poor black and brown students to lives upon a conveyor belt of chaos and confusion, where the American Dream is an elusive nightmare. I was hopeful the infrastructure of private risk capital (angels and venture capitalists) would be expanded to include minorities. Unfortunately, both Whites and non-Whites seem to have relegated the president to the single-handed task of removing significant economic obstacles that block productive progress for millions of minorities. I don’t know where the notion was conceived that the election of a Black leader would, in an instant, mitigate the economic imprisonment and wealth gap established by institutions of oppressive policies and practices that have remained from post-slavery to this presumed “post-racial” era. We should recognize the fact the election of President Barack Obama is a precedent-setting anomaly lacking the infrastructure of support necessary to make Obama’s historic leadership much more than a first step in the right direction. I’ve heard the premise that we live in a ” post-racial ” America where the presumed dying embers of red-hot racism that fueled the production of an economic foundation and built this nation’s institutions upon the backs of slave and low-cost labor for centuries is only kept alive today by those with a victim mentality who continue to rant and rave about racism. My response? Follow the economic data. The main economic categories that offer insight into a significantly divided Black and White America are simply: education and jobs. EDUCATION There’s no need to belabor criticism of the failed system of public education, which services 50 million American students and dispenses disparate results along racial lines readily seen when relevant data are reviewed. Consider that 87 percent of eighth-graders in high-poverty schools are not proficient in math. 88 percent are not proficient in reading. The data indicate another economic crisis is set to hit the nation in 2015. Millions of unqualified students will flood the job market unable to obtain livable wages and engage in productive work. What will become of these masses of minorities in whom the nation has failed to adequately invest? JOBS On July 13, a coalition of more than 4,000 Black pastors released an open letter they signed and submitted to President Barack Obama petitioning to halt budget cuts that would negatively impact programs serving the poor. As Christian leaders, we are committed to fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice. We are also committed to resist budget cuts that undermine the lives, dignity, and rights of poor and vulnerable people. The group, which calls itself Sojourners , made this specific point pertaining to the allocation of government resources: A fundamental task is to create jobs and spur economic growth. Decent jobs at decent wages are the best path out of poverty, and restoring growth is a powerful way to reduce deficits. The compassion on display by the pastors is honorable. Unfortunately, no data suggests that government has ever been the answer to the employment problem for Black Americans in any substantive way. In fact, the data suggest just the opposite: Since the days of Dr. Martin Luther King’s call for jobs from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 to this very day, unemployment among Black Americans has remained nearly double the overall jobless rate every year in a pattern so consistent that it is the focus of discussions and debates among those who have knowledge of the data. “Job growth is going to be driven by the private sector but we can make some smart decision to encourage businesses to feel like this is the right time to invest and that America’s the right place to invest,” President Obama told the 26-member job council he formed in January 2011 with a goal of creating one million jobs. Historically, no such institutional investment focus has targeted regions predominantly dominated by African Americans. Historically, White American business owners have been reluctant to employ Blacks; and diversity , which receives some lip service, isn’t high on the priority list for leaders in White corporations and White-owned small businesses that dominate America’s job market. Need for Private Risk Capital The Census Bureau’s most recent stats on 1.9 million Black-owned businesses reveal the vast majority are sole proprietorships; and of those with employees, very few have more than 100. Add to that fact the total gross revenue of all those businesses was $137.5B in 2007 … before the economic recession. The revenue generated by all Black-owned business is less than 1 percent of GDP. The National Venture Capital Association boasts venture-backed companies produced $2.9T. That revenue amounted to 21% of the nation’s $14T GDP in 2008. Compare that to Asian-owned businesses that produced $2.5T and employed half of all employed minorities in the nation. Black Americans have no such risk capital infrastructure. Angels and venture capitalists across the nation focus their investments on targeted regions. The private risk capital infrastructure, currently 65 years old, has largely ignored Black America, relegating innovative minority entrepreneurs to bootstrapping enterprises that lack the capital to move beyond the bootstrapping phase. Even Startup America , a national collaborative venture endorsed by President Obama to support innovation and spur job growth, has yet to provide a plan by which it will assist Black America’s innovators who lack the infrastructure of business incubators, accelerators and connections to private risk capital. The options provided by Startup America make assumptions that do not address the challenges facing Black entrepreneurs, thus indicating a strong need for minority representation amongst the decision-makers presiding over partnerships and investments. For Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and other racial demographic societies that have been oppressed or ignored by the main power structure, the answer is we must invest in ourselves. As minorities continue to grow in number, but lack authority and economic power, it is vital that investments in the education of our children are sufficient to adequately prepare them to become both qualified job seekers as well as innovative job creators. We need strong minority leadership in the 21st century that will emerge from those cohorts in whom we invest today. Investing In America’s Future We need more organizations such as these that invest in minority youth and the future of America: Usher’s New Look Foundation: Usher Raymond IV is teaching youth entrepreneurial skills and global leadership with impressive results. His foundation, UNL, has developed a formula that shows every dollar spent generates 43 times return on investment. UNL hosts it Annual World Leadership Conference on July 20th in Atlanta and will honor Ted Turner among other leaders. “We’re teaching youth about the world,” says Shawn Wilson, UNL’s president. “That’s how we make them stronger — by taking them outside the classroom, even overseas, to introduce them to new paradigms. We broaden their vision by exposing them to global issues. We help them think outside of the box to seek global solutions.” Level Playing Field Institute: Promising high school students from poor backgrounds are often prevented from realizing their potential solely due to lack of economic resources. The Level Playing Field Institute’s Summer Math and Science Honors (SMASH Academy removes the financial problem and changes the equation. Currently, servicing 80 students on each of the campuses of UC Berkeley and Stanford University, SMASH is gearing up to expand across the nation and service students nationwide. Students spend three consecutive summers in 5-week immersive environments with top instructors. SMASH boasts 100 percent of its students are accepted to four-year universities, the vast majority majoring in a STEM field. “We shouldn’t be thanked for doing what we do,” says Level Playing Field Institute founder Freada Kapor Klein , “It should be a non-issue. These are incredibly talented, ambitious, wonderful kids. There shouldn’t have to be anything special for them. They should be in institutions that recognize and reward their talents. And they’re not. Our educational institutions aren’t set up that way. Our workplaces aren’t set up that way. “Being a real meritocracy is hard work. Let’s get on it!” We’re racing toward the year 2050. It’s time to invest in those promising minority students and talented innovators who have failed to receive our focus and investment. After all, at the rate minority populations are growing, they represent the next generation of America’s leaders building the American Dream of the 21st century.

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Beverly Macy: Social Media Is Morphing Into Social Business

July 17, 2011

These days, if you’re doing business, you’ve got to go social. As ‘social media’ morphs into ‘social business,’ the conversation is broadening within the enterprise. In addition to Marketing and Communications, we’re now seeing Legal, HR, Customer Services, Sales, and other departments adopt social technologies both internally and externally. The adoption curve is maturing. The world’s leading companies are realizing that a solid grasp of social technologies and social platforms, along with the concepts of authenticity, transparency, and trust will become critical to building global brands, transforming product development, enabling real-time customer service, and fostering social collaboration with customers and key stakeholders. From the beginning, way back in 2007, the term ‘social media’ rubbed some the wrong way. Just what is social media, anyway? Doesn’t it mean Facebook, blogs, Twitter? Or is it more about the new communication platforms? Or about real-time? Or maybe it’s just another term for ‘digital media’? When I was developing the curriculum for the Social Media Marketing class I teach with Karl Kasca for the UCLA Extension, we grappled with this as well. Back in 2007, we spent a lot of time in the first session defining ‘social media,’ and quite a lively discussion ensued. And today the market is still defining it. One thing is certain. The ‘shareability’ factor and the ‘like’/'follow’/'friend’ factor has been a key ingredient. Fast forward to July 2011 and traditional management consulting companies like McKinsey and IBM Services are side-by-side social consulting companies (including Gravity Summit) to guide companies through ‘Social’ as a Business Process Re-Engineering change project. If you’re in top management, don’t wait. Work with a solid strategic consulting team who can help you develop a road map of entry points to foster social business, both internally and externally. The opportunity to deepen relationships with clients and partners by removing communication barriers is truly transformational. My advice is fail fast, fail forward, but do something . The rewards are waiting for those who blaze the trail. Join Beverly and her team as top brands and rising companies discuss social business transformation at Gravity Summit FutureM Boston , to be held at the Harvard Faculty Club on September 12, 2011. Beverly Macy is the CEO of Gravity Summit LLC, and the Co-Author of The Power of Real-Time Social Media Marketing . Email her at beverlymacy@gmail.com

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Lorrie Febus: 8-Year-Old Wisdom

July 17, 2011

Many of us are keeping a close eye on the debt ceiling deliberations as the decisions made in the next few weeks can impact our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come. I believe if they raise the debt ceiling without making some serious spending cuts, we will go down a slippery slope of continued loss of confidence and devaluation of the US dollar. I watched Bernanke being grilled by the Senate, doing the song and dance of “recovery slower than expected”. In our household, we strive to teach our kids about money, financial and economic issues. I explained to our 14- and 8-year-olds how the decisions our leaders make in the next few weeks will impact our lives and especially their lives in the future. Our government needs to make temporarily hard decisions now to keep America strong. Basically, a strong America equals an easier life in the future, and a weak America equals a harder life in the future. I explained how the money collected from taxes is not enough to pay for all the government spending. Here is how the conversation went: Mom: “When you go to work and get paid they take income taxes out of your paycheck that goes to the government, which is the money they are talking about now. ” 8 yr. old: “So basically they steal our money every month to pay for their stuff?” Mom: “Well sort of, but they don’t call it stealing — they call it taxes”. 8 yr. old: “Okay they call it taxes, but basically it is stealing!” Mom: “Well, some of those taxes go to pay for things we need like firemen, police and things like that”. 8 yr. old: “They should get rid of taxes and they should go to a ‘donate’ system and let everyone decide what they want to do with their money.” Mom: “Yes, you are probably right, and that is likely what our founding fathers had in mind when they created our country. Low taxes, small government and most of services and material needed donated by the citizens of the country.” Wow, what a concept! We are at a pivotal point in history — and many people don’t know how critical the next few weeks are. We are in for very difficult economic times if we continue to monetize our debt and the world decides to move away from the US dollar as the standard of currency. Take a stand! Talk to your kids about the issues, contact your Senator and let them know you care about our country, give a helping hand to someone in need, prepare for the worst, and hope for the best.

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Alan B. Krueger: Doubt and Confidence on Hitting the Debt Ceiling

July 17, 2011

Alan Krueger, who served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of the Treasury 2009-2010, was interviewed by Yu Chen for this post on the debt limit. Yu Chen (YC): Do you think the debt ceiling will get raised? Alan Krueger (AK): There are some things like raising the debt ceiling that simply have to be done. For instance, the only thing that prompted the administration to put health care reform briefly on hold was working with Congress to raise the debt ceiling at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010. This was one thing that I had the opportunity to work on that didn’t get much attention at the time — or since. I remember Secretary Timothy Geithner said at one point, “The American people don’t realize that one of our significant achievements was raising the debt ceiling without incident.” We are approaching the debt ceiling again. The debt ceiling is a funny animal. Congress tells Treasury to spend money on various programs, and it authorizes the collection of a certain amount of tax revenue, expecting Treasury to borrow to make up for any shortfall of revenues over spending. Yet, it also sets a limit on how much debt the government can accumulate. The Treasury isn’t borrowing money because it wants to; it is borrowing because Congress chose to spend more money than it chose to collect. If Congress wants to limit the debt, it should vote to cut spending and/or raise revenues — and it can do that independently of voting to raise the debt ceiling. So, in my view, the debt ceiling is an unnecessary constraint that can cause severe damage to the financial reputation of the United States and health of the world economy if it is not raised in an orderly way that is congruent with past spending and taxing decisions. I’m 90% confident that, despite all the attendant drama, the debt ceiling will go up without incident. And I suspect the debt ceiling might go up in steps rather than all at once, as it did last time. But I do think that Congress will do the right thing – the absolutely necessary thing — and avoid a fiscal meltdown by raising the debt ceiling. Of course, there may be some strings attached. Some Congressmen have said things like, “We don’t believe that August is the real deadline. The Treasury Department will have some opportunity to juggle the books and move things around.” YC: But the Treasury doesn’t play games with the debt ceiling. If it came to it — and I very much hope this is never tested — I think Treasury will pull out all stops to avoid defaulting on the debt. It could, for example, repo or sell the government’s gold supply or other assets to raise money to service the debt for a time. However, you reach a point where you’re legally required to default on some obligation, whether it’s an obligation to pay interest on Treasury bills, to pay the military or to pay social security benefits. If the debt ceiling is not raised, Treasury will soon need to default on some obligation and radically reduce spending. Given the amount of borrowing the government is doing, failing to raise the debt ceiling would require a widespread reduction in spending, and if we reach that point, I think it’s going to cause severe trauma for the economy — not just now, but for years to come. I think a default on our obligations would raise our borrowing costs and saddle the next generation with even more debt and a heavier burden as a result. YC: How did you play a role? AK: The Treasury Secretary is required to notify Congress 90 days in advance of when he expects to hit the debt ceiling. They used to always send up a letter that said, “We’re going to hit it on such and such day, plus or minus one week.” I asked, “Where did the plus or minus one week come from?” Treasury has an office that makes projections of how much the government will need to borrow in the future, called the Office of Debt Projections, which is staffed by career employees. They do the same thing for every administration — they project how much money the government is expected to borrow each day for months into the future. We’re a lot less certain about how much we will need to borrow now than we were three or four years ago, because the deficit has increased so much. Our borrowing needs are determined by many factors that are harder and harder to forecast: interest rates vary, tax revenues vary and spending rates vary from day to day. All of these factors affect borrowing needs. When a specific date for hitting the debt ceiling was reported at one of our meetings with an air of certainty in the fall of 2009, Tim Geithner asked, “How do you know for sure? Can’t you calculate some type of a range? What’s that thing you guys call it; you know, that interval?” I realized he was referring to a confidence interval. I’m not sure anyone else in the Department besides me remembered what a confidence interval was. This is something that I have taught in statistics classes, so I was pleased to put on my professorial hat. I explained what a confidence interval was and gave an example — a range calculated in such a way that 95% of the time it would contain the true date we were going to hit the debt ceiling. I took it upon myself, with my staff, to try to calculate some measure of uncertainty for when we were going to hit the debt ceiling. I’m really proud of my staff, because it wasn’t so easy to do. When we got the historical projections — the historical data on what actually happened and past projections of borrowing needs — we looked at how much error there was and how big the mistakes were to get some idea of the uncertainty that would accompany projections going forward. This calculation was difficult because spending and tax revenue tend to be very lumpy from day to day; some days a lot of money comes in and some days a lot of money goes out. Now, when the Secretary warns Congress about the debt ceiling, he includes a 99% confidence interval, and when we talked to Congress about this issue, we would bring a chart showing a range of uncertainty around the government’s projected borrowing needs. I think this is extremely helpful. Indeed, I once remarked that I was responsible for bringing the Treasury Department into the 20th century when it comes to statistics… I was also relieved that our confidence interval contained the true date that we would have hit the debt ceiling had Congress not raised the debt limit. A shrewd Congressman once called the Department and said, “We’re going to raise the debt ceiling in steps. We haven’t gotten it all worked out, but we’re going to give you enough money to get by for X weeks, and it’d be very convenient if we could hit the next ceiling just before the next recess.” (Congress often uses an upcoming recess to force it to act.) He then asked, “How much money do we need to make it to such and such holiday?” When the question reached me, my response was that, I can tell you the date plus or minus two weeks; I can’t tell you a specific time. It’s kind of folly to think that you can predict with that much certainty. Sometimes an understanding of statistics doesn’t intersect well with the way politicians think about issues, but I think confidence intervals are a useful addition for managing the nation’s borrowing needs. YC: Does the Treasury have any wiggle room once the debt ceiling is reached? AK: There is some wiggle room, but that is mostly taken into account in the forecasts. Treasury calls it “extraordinary measures” — things like withdrawing money that the Treasury has deposited at the Federal Reserve or delaying deposits to federal workers’ retirement accounts. The problem with taking the extraordinary measures is that more and more, they put the government at risk (e.g., the money deposited at the Fed gives the Fed some room to maneuver), or diminish the effectiveness of government programs. I already mentioned that there may be some new extraordinary measures that go beyond the previous canon that are not included in the forecast, such as repoing or selling assets, that can make it possible to pay for our bills a little while longer. Eventually, the government runs out of extraordinary measures. Unless there are some tricks that I’m not aware of, if the debt ceiling is not raised by August 2nd, the government will soon need to make some painful decisions that would likely irreversibly harm the country’s fiscal reputation and ability to borrow cheaply in capital markets, and that could throw the world economy back into a deep recession or a second Great Depression.

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Credit Suisse Is ‘Target’ Of Inquiry

July 17, 2011

U.S. prosecutors are ratcheting up the pressure on Credit Suisse Group AG as part of an escalating tax-evasion probe.

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Taking A ‘Young & Reckless’ Approach To Business

July 17, 2011

Chris “Drama” Pfaff has spent his entire adult life under the watchful eye of an MTV camera. In 2007, fresh out of high school, he moved from the suburbs of Ohio to the Hollywood Hills, to become the assistant to his older cousin — professional skateboarder and soon-to-become reality star Rob Dyrdek. For three very successful seasons, Pfaff thanklessly washed clothes and looked after a miniature horse on Rob & Big, a buddy comedy chronicling the travails of Dyrdek and his 6-foot-6, 415-pound bodyguard, Christopher “Big Black” Boykin. While Pfaff served as the picked-on little brother, the experience served as an unlikely entrepreneurial apprenticeship.

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Rev. Seamus P. Finn, OMI: The Power Of Religion To Influence Corporate Responsibility

July 16, 2011

The recent experience of the near calamitous meltdown of the financial system was a clear indication of what can happen when unbridled greed and inadequate regulation are given free rein. The controversies swirling around News Corp are another ugly example of what happens when an ethical values system isn’t in place in the boardroom and powerful, intimidating personalities are given permission to create a culture that prizes “scooping” their competitors over serving the public good. The question is: what can these debacles teach us about the role of ethics and morality in the marketplace and, perhaps more importantly, are we ready to learn? As the director of the Faith Consistent Investment ministry of my congregation, I have been engaged in shareholder advocacy and corporate social responsibility since the early 70s. Recognizing the enormous influence global corporations have to impact the “common good”, my colleagues and I press CEOs and management to scrutinize their business practices on a myriad of issues from policies on lending and executive compensation, to water use in drought-prone areas and to human rights abuses in the supply chain wherever they source products or services. In the early 90′s I began to notice that corporate management referred quite often to the unique culture of their particular company and the values and practices that flowed from that culture. It became clear to me that there was a concerted effort on the part of responsible management to codify these values within the context of an identity statement that was part of the organizational DNA that would govern both its internal and external behavior. An ethical values system has proven to be an important ingredient in the delivery of quality services and products, and the key to building customer loyalty, employee satisfaction and long term viability. But where do these values systems come from? Historically, it can be demonstrated that the impact of faith on the social responsibility of any given corporation can be traced directly to the religion and character of the owner or CEO and how he/she integrated their value system into the corporation’s identity and operations. It was generally assumed that the decisions and actions of the business leader directing the corporation were significantly influenced by the religious principles at the foundation of their personal lives. Religion’s impact is also seen through debate in the legislative and rule making processes whereby societies regulate businesses. As corporations are granted a license to operate they are expected to comply with the principles and constraints that are included. Basic values such as honesty, transparency, responsibility, fairness and integrity that are common to most faith traditions are included in this social contract. A number of things that have changed over the last 75 years have profoundly impacted the intersection of religion and corporations. Let me briefly identify four of these changes and the consequences that flow from them. Evolving Business Models : The Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) is the predominant business model today. LLCs whether public or privately held are managed and owned by a diverse group of professionals and shareholders, each with their own religious beliefs. These new models are less likely to be strongly shaped by the values and beliefs that business leaders or employees bring to them. Influence of Corporations on all aspects of life : The legislative and political landscape, our culture and priorities are all profoundly shaped by the influence of corporations. This is true within the business and economic sectors, but also in the development initiatives that are taking place in some of the remotest villages and communities across the world. These are spaces where religious institutions, as spiritual guides and teachers of their followers, compete directly for public influence. Access to information : The democratization of information through the development of the Internet and other modes of communication and travel have uncovered accounts of corporate abuses from all corners of the world. This has awakened an acute awareness of the relatedness that exists between people and communities because of the products and services that they rely on. Active ownership of shareholders : Church communities and values-driven individuals who hold shares in corporations or are stakeholders in corporations have become increasingly more organized and active in the responsible exercise of their ownership and their stakeholder positions. This has resulted in direct and productive engagement by religious institutions with the management of major global corporations on a host of issues. But for too many of us, corporate behavior is an abstraction and disconnected from our daily lives and so, the Banking and News Corp headlines are just that: headlines that produce momentary outrage but no meaningful change in corporate behavior. We must demand that corporations behave ethically and in service of the common good and bring values back to the boardroom.

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CNBC Anchor Mark Haines Dies

May 25, 2011

NEW YORK — Mark Haines, co-anchor of CNBC’s morning “Squawk on the Street” show, died unexpectedly on Tuesday evening, the network said. He was 65. The network said he died in his home. It did not specify the cause of death. Haines worked at CNBC for 22 years after working as a news anchor at TV stations in Philadelphia, New York and Providence, R.I. He was the founding anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box” morning show. In 2005, he started co-anchoring “Squawk On The Street,” a 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. show, with Erin Burnett, while “Squawk Box” was pushed to an earlier slot. Burnett recently left CNBC to host a general news show on CNN. CNBC President Mark Hoffman said Haines was “always the unflappable pro.” “He was an authentic voice in business media,” said Eric Jackson, who runs the hedge fund Ironfire Capital. “He resonated with so many people because he would speak out, and with opinion. Too often the media lets the corporate PR army and highly trained CEOs get their points across without question. He wouldn’t let that happen.” WATCH: Barry Ritholtz, head of the research firm Fusion IQ and frequent guest on CNBC, said Haines was “a no-nonsense straight shooter. He knew what questions to ask and how to ask them.” Ritholtz said that the biggest complaint about CNBC in the 1990s was that its anchors cheered on the stock-market bubble. He said the exception was Haines, who was always skeptical. “He was trained as an attorney,” Ritholtz said. “He brought that keen lawyer’s eye to everything he did. It wasn’t something often seen in the financial media.” Haines had a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and was a member of the New Jersey State Bar Association, CNBC said. Haines is also remembered for calling a bottom to the stock market decline on March 10, 2009, his first call of the recession. The Dow Jones Industrial Average never closed below its level of March 9. Haines is survived by his wife, Cindy, his son, Matt, and daughter, Meredith. CNBC said funeral arrangements have yet to be made.

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WATCH: Donald Trump Responds To Charges Of Racism

May 9, 2011

Donald Trump came to his own defense in the wake of facing charges of racism during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning. “I am the least racist person there is,” asserted the potential presidential contender. “And I think most people who know me would tell you that. I am the least racist, I’ve had great relationships.” Trump pointed to his “Celebrity Apprentice” reality show to make his case. “In fact, Randal Pinkett won as you know on ‘The Apprentice’ a little while ago, a couple of years ago,” he said. “And Randall’s been outstanding in every way. So I am the least racist person.” Reuters reported last week: An African-American political advocacy group is targeting “Celebrity Apprentice” star Donald Trump in the aftermath of what many feel are racially tinged political comments made about President Obama. On Thursday, the organization ColorOfChange launched a Twitter-based campaign to persuade black “Celebrity Apprentice” cast members Star Jones and Lil Jon to denounce Trump for what the group terms “race-baiting.” During a recent appearance on CNN, Trump was asked whether his repeated calls for President Barack Obama to disclose his long-form birth certificate were motivated by racism. The question was presented to the billionaire on the heels of the White House releasing the document and after weeks of Trump raising skepticism over the issue . The billionaire said that he is “the least racist” and suggested that those who know him “would laugh” at the suggestion that wasn’t the case. As for whether he plans to run in 2012, Trump recently told Bloomberg News, “In my mind, I have already decided.” He signaled his intent to jump into the presidential race, though said he could not be expected to make a formal announcement until the end of “Celebrity Apprentice,” which culminates its season on May 22. WATCH:

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In Deposition, Donald Trump Admitted Exaggerating His Net Worth, Stretching The Truth

April 22, 2011

Q: Let me just ask you first about the first sentence there: Trump relentlessly bloviating about his developments — this is going to be the biggest, best, most amazing — leads people to assume he exaggerates his net worth. Do you see that? A: Yes. Q: Do you know what bloviating means? A: Well, I’m not sure that there’s an exact definition, but I would imagine that’s what it means. Q: Exaggeration? A: Could be, yeah. Q: Lying? A: No. [from a deposition given by Donald Trump in a libel lawsuit] * * * * * NEW YORK — Notorious for his lack of modesty, Donald Trump has long flaunted his wealth and touted his net worth as a multibillionaire. During his Comedy Central roast, which aired last month, the real estate developer and possible 2012 presidential candidate joked, “What’s the difference between Donald Trump’s hair and a wet raccoon? A wet raccoon doesn’t have seven fucking billion dollars in the bank.” Now that he’s considering a campaign on the Republican ticket, he’s wielding his bravado as a political cudgel. He recently mocked multimillionaire Mitt Romney’s reputation as a successful businessman by declaring himself “many, many, many times Mitt Romney.” Yet Trump has often been accused of exaggerating his wealth, even adding a few zeroes to the actual amount, which may undermine his credibility as a candidate with business credentials. Despite Trump’s own claims that he’s worth around $7 billion, last September the most recent Forbes 400 rankings — which many consider to have overestimated the real estate developer’s wealth in the past — estimated his net worth at $2.4 billion, putting him in a six-way tie for 153rd-richest person in America. And a deposition in a defamation lawsuit filed by Trump provides numerous examples of him stretching the truth about his success in real estate. Former New York Times editor and reporter (and current Huffington Post national editor) Timothy L. O’Brien wrote in his 2005 book, “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” that the developer was probably worth $150 to $250 million, rather than the typical estimates of $2 to $3 billion. Trump sued O’Brien for libel, claiming that the book’s lower figure killed some potential deals and damaged his reputation. The case was dismissed, but Trump filed an appeal and a decision is pending. Trump’s deposition, taken on Dec. 19-20, 2007, was obtained by The Huffington Post and CNN . In 2005, Trump claimed that he was worth $3.5 billion, but a financial analysis by North Fork Bank estimated his worth at just $1.2 billion. The previous year, when he was claiming a worth in excess of $3 billion, Deutsche Bank estimated his worth much lower, at $788 million. Asked in the deposition about his statements in 2007 that his net worth was $8 billion, Trump conceded: “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Well, maybe I’m adding 4 or 5 billion dollars worth, 3 billion, for the value of a brand. But I don’t know.” Such comments prompted CNN contributor Jeffrey Toobin to tell “In the Arena” host Eliot Spitzer on Thursday night that the deposition could be used against Trump by his GOP opponents: “They could beat him over the head with this,” Toobin said. Among the deposition’s most glaring examples of his fondness for exaggeration, Trump was asked why he claimed in several media accounts that he had a 50 percent interest in the massive Riverside South project on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when he actually had a much smaller interest. “I own 30 percent,” Trump replied. “But because of the fact I put no money up, that 30 percent is equated to 50 percent.” At another point, he is quizzed about his claim to CNN’s Larry King that he earned over $1 milliion from a speech he gave to the Learning Annex. Trump admits that he was actually paid only $400,000 in cash, proffering the novel argument that adding in the annex’s promotional expenses puts his payment in the $1 million-plus range. In November 2007, Trump wrote a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal to complain about a story on his net worth, explaining that a development in Hawaii was a huge success. “My tower in Waikiki was 100 percent sold out with 729 million in sales, 5 hours, a record,” he wrote. Yet he admitted in the deposition that he doesn’t actually own the building — he just has a licensing agreement with the real owners. At another moment, he is asked about $18.3 million in insurance proceeds he received due to hurricane damage to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 2005, explaining that he never felt obligated to turn that money over to the club or to spend all the money on repairs. And he told Crain’s New York Business in 2004 and 2005 that his Trump Organization has 22,000 employees, but admitted in the deposition that some of those employees are “not directly” on the payroll. Some are “suppliers, including construction workers, people that supply items to your building.” For his part, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen told The Huffington Post that Trump is worth “a lot … substantially more than what’s recorded in Forbes .” “They don’t take into account the value of the Trump brand, of the mark, one of the most valuable marks that’s ever been created,” Cohen said. “He has very little debt, triple-A assets. He is going to provide audited financial disclosures when the time comes, if in fact he decides to run — I think you’re going to be shocked by the number that’s being released.” Those records have yet to be prepared, Cohen said, but Trump does obviously have audited financials year to year.” “I don’t think there’s any downside,” to Trump running for president, Cohen added. Trump has claimed it is rare for him to file a defamation lawsuit, but O’Brien’s lawyers noted the number of times that he has threatened to sue, citing the following targets: • The New York Times • Rosie O’Donnell • Fortune magazine • Author Robert Slater • George magazine • Wall Street Journal reporters Neil Barsky and Alex Frangos (for separate stories) • The New York Post (twice) • Tina Brown (after Vanity Fair published a profile that described how Trump keeps a book of Hitler speeches by his bed, prompting Trump to write Brown that writer Marie Brennan “was a sick woman who couldn’t see fairness if it was staring her in the face.”) • The Chicago Tribune architectural critic Paul Gapp • The Los Angeles Times ‘ David Lazarus

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How Much Is Donald Trump Worth?

April 22, 2011

Eliot Spitzer and CNN Sr. Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin look at discrepancies by possible GOP pres. candidate Donald Trump in a deposition for a libel case.

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‘Gang Of Six’ May Go After Social Security

April 17, 2011

WASHINGTON — The bipartisan “gang of six” may recommend changes to Social Security as part of its deficit-reduction plan, even though some Democrats have insisted such a proposal would be a non-starter. “You know, part of this is just math — 16 workers for everyone retiree 50 years ago, three workers for every retiree now,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), a member of the group, told CBS “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer on Sunday. Warner credited House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) for producing a “serious” budget plan but criticized him for not proposing any way to raise revenues while transferring “more responsibility onto our seniors in terms of paying for health care.” “What we’re doing is we’re saying everything has to be on the table,” he said. “Entitlement reform, dramatic spending cuts, looking at tax reform.” While Ryan’s plan primarily talks about lowering tax rates, Warner said the gang of six is also looking at raising revenue by eliminating some of the tax expenditures . While getting rid of such deductions may be considered an increase in taxes, Warner said the group will not propose actually raising tax rates: WARNER: Bob, I think you’ve got to look at both sides of the ledger. Long before I was in politics, I spent 20 years in business. I built companies. And you’ve got to look at the revenue side. You’ve got to look at the spending side. We’re looking at a ratio of about $3 in cuts for every additional dollar in revenues. And the revenues we’re talking about literally are coming from lower rates, where we can lower our rates on individual and on corporate rates back to where they’re much more competitive on a worldwide basis. But we’re getting rid of a number of the tax expenditures. I mean, a fact that I’m not sure most Americans realize — we collect about $1 trillion a year in income taxes, yet we have $1.2 trillion a year in income tax expenditures, deductions, many of them that are popular, charitable deduction, home mortgage deduction. If we would cut back on some of those, we could actually lower rates and still increase revenues. SCHIEFFER: So that’s where you would get the additional revenues, by eliminating deductions, not necessarily by raising taxes? WARNER: We’re not talking about raising taxes. According to The Hill , Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has insisted Social Security reform be part of the gang of six plan, while Democratic negotiators in the group, including Sens. Kent Conrad (N.D.) and Dick Durbin (Ill.), have said it should be handled separately . A budget deal with changes to Social Security may face intense resistance from Democrats. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) suggested on CNN’s “State of the Union Sunday that his party won’t support Social Security reform as part of a debt-reduction plan. “I know debt limits frequently have things attached. I understand that,” he said. “But I have to tell you, if they wind up holding up things like Medicare, Social Security, these bedrock programs that help people in need, help form the safety net in our country, it is a non-starter, Democrats won’t vote for it.”

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WATCH: Donald Trump Goes After Mitt Romney

April 17, 2011

Washington — Potential presidential candidate Donald Trump says he’s a better businessman than possible 2012 rival former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Trump said during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning that he has a “much, much bigger net worth. I mean my net worth is many, many, many times Mitt Romney.” Here’s an excerpt of what Trump had to say in touting his own business credentials: I’ve built a great company. And one of the beauties of, frankly, if and when I announce, some time prior to June, you will see how big my company is, because it’s much bigger and much more powerful and much stronger than anyone really knows. So you’re going to see how good it is. You’re going to see how strong it is. It’s a big, strong company that I built. And I have thousands and thousands of jobs that I’ve created over the years… Trump described Romney as a “small business guy.” Romney is a former venture capitalist with a record of turning around failing companies. While heading Bain Capital, he helped launch the Staples office supply chain, as well as buy Domino’s Pizza. Romney invested more than $40 million of his own money in the 2008 race. As for Trump’s own presidential ambitions, the billionaire said he “wished [he] didn’t have to” consider mounting a campaign for the White House. “I’m having a good time,” he said of his current life. “I have a great company. I have a very successful show, all of that stuff. … But I love this country. And if you ask me, what are the odds, I’ll let you know some time prior to June. But I will tell you, I am giving it serious, serious thought. And I’m honored by the polls, because people agree with what I’m saying.” WATCH:

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Geithner: Not Raising Debt Ceiling Would Be ‘Catastrophic’

April 17, 2011

WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday he’s certain congressional lawmakers will come together to raise the nation’s debt limit and warned of dire consequences if they don’t. “I want to make it perfectly clear that Congress will raise the debt ceiling,” Geithner told ABC News “This Week” anchor Christiane Amanpour. According to Geithner, members of Congress conveyed this view to President Obama on Wednesday at the White House. “I sat there with them, and they said, we recognize we have to do this. And we’re not going to play around with it,” Geithner said. “We know that the risk would be catastrophic. It’s not something you can take too close to the edge.” This sentiment differs significantly from what some lawmakers say publicly. “I will oppose any attempt to vote to raise the limit on our $14 trillion debt until Congress passes the balanced-budget amendment,” declared Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has made similar statements . On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Geithner said lawmakers who play politics with the debt ceiling will have to own the consequences. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Republicans and Democrats on this — I saw with the Senate Finance Committee last week — and they absolutely understand the stakes in this, and the leadership understand that you can’t play around with this,” he said. “You can’t take it too long. And those people up there who are telling people that you can take this to the brink because it gives them some leverage, they’re going to own the responsibility for the risk that creates for the American economy.” On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) seemed willing to explore attaching provisions to a debt ceiling hike. When asked by host Candy Crowley whether he would consider some spending cuts, he replied, “Of course. I think that we need to have conversations about how we reduce spending. We also need to have a conversation about how we get some equality into our tax code again.” Federal law currently caps the federal debt at $14.3 trillion . But sometime in the next month, the United States will inevitably surpass that amount. Congress consistently votes to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, a decision it face again in the coming weeks. Geithner outlined myriad consequences should Congress decide, for some reason, not to raise the debt ceiling by June. “What will happen is that we’d have to stop making payments to our seniors — Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We’d have to stop paying veterans’ benefits,” he told Amanpour. “We’d have to stop paying all the other payments on all the other things the government does. And then we would risk default on our debt — and if we did that, we’d tip the U.S. economy and the world economy back into recession — depression.” Watch Geithner’s appearance on “This Week” below (via ABC News ):

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Alan Simpson: ‘We Have Homophobes In Our Party’

April 12, 2011

Former senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) didn’t mince words in weighing in on the crop of Republicans mulling presidential campaigns for the next election cycle during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday. When asked for his assessment of the emerging GOP field by anchor Chris Matthews, the co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission didn’t hold back in criticizing members of his party on social issues. “Who the hell is for abortion?,” asked Simpson, who has developed a reputation for making blunt and colorful remarks . “I don’t know anybody running around with a sign that says, have an abortion, they’re wonderful. They’re hideous. But they’re a deeply intimate and personal decision, and I don’t think men legislators should even vote on the issue.” Simpson went on to address the issue of gay rights. “Then you’ve got homosexuality,” he said. “You’ve got ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ We have homophobes in our party. That’s disgusting to me. We’re all human beings. We’re all God’s children. … [Former Pennsylvania senator Rick] Santorum has said some cruel things, cruel, cruel things about homosexuals. Ask him about it. See if he attributes the cruelness of his remarks years ago. Foul.” Simpson was presumably referring to remarks made by Santorum in 2003 that have already resurfaced in the early stages of the GOP presidential primary campaign. CNN reported at the time on the comments in question: In [an] AP interview, Santorum criticized homosexuality as he discussed a pending Supreme Court case over a sodomy law in Texas. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything,” Santorum said in the AP interview. “That’s the kind of guys that are going to be on my ticket, you know, makes you sort out hard what Reagan said, you know, ‘stick with your folks,’” explained Simpson to Matthews. “But I’m not sticking with people who are homophobic, anti-women, you know, moral values while you’re diddling your secretary while you’re giving a speech on moral values. Come on. Get off of it.” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is one Republican who Simpson praised in the context of the conversation that began on the topic of the 2012 presidential election. He called the governor “quite awesome.” WATCH: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy

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Obama Adviser Weighs In On Trump’s Presidential Ambitions

April 10, 2011

Senior White House adviser David Plouffe weighed in on the presidential ambitions of Donald Trump on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “I saw Donald Trump kind of rising in some polls and given his behavior and spectacle the last couple of weeks, I hope he keeps on rising,” said Plouffe. “There is zero chance that Donald Trump would ever be hired by the American people to do this job.” In recent weeks, Trump has captured headlines and sparked controversy by repeatedly raising skepticism over whether President Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States. He has released his own official birth certificate and has called on Obama to do the same despite the fact that the president’s birth records have been available online for over three years. Last week, Trump signaled that he has investigators on the ground in Hawaii in search of more details on the president’s birthplace. Plouffe called the actions demonstrated by Trump “sideshow behavior.” “There may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s a sideshow,” he said, adding that voters want political leaders to focus on the economy and pressing policy issues. Karl Rove and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are two conservatives who have expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that Trump continues to hammer the issue. Nevertheless, Trump raised doubt over the president’s citizenship once again in an interview that aired on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. He called the ordeal “a strange situation” and suggested that it’s because of the media that “the word birther is a negative word.”

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GOP Budget Proposal Seeks To Make $4 Trillion-Plus In Cuts

April 3, 2011

WASHINGTON — A Republican plan for the 2012 budget would cut more than $4 trillion over the next decade, more than even the president’s debt commission proposed, with spending caps as well as changes in the Medicare and Medicaid health programs, its principal author said Sunday. The spending blueprint from Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, is to be released Tuesday. It deals with the budget year that begins Oct. 1, not the current one that is the subject of negotiations aimed at preventing a partial government shutdown on Friday. In an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Ryan said budget writers are working out the 2012 numbers with the Congressional Budget Office, but he said the overall spending reductions would come to “a lot more” than $4 trillion. The debt commission appointed by President Barack Obama recommended a plan that it said would achieve nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction. Ryan said Obama’s call for freezing nondefense discretionary spending actually locks in spending at high levels. Under the forthcoming GOP plan, Ryan said spending would return to 2008 levels and thus cut an additional $400 billion over 10 years. Speaking broadly about the proposal, Ryan said it would include: _A “premium support system” for Medicare. In the future, older people would choose plans in the marketplace and the government would subsidize those plans. Ryan said that would differ from the voucher system he has proposed in the past. Those 55 and older would remain under the present Medicare system. Ryan acknowledged that the “premium support system” would shift more costs to Medicare recipients, especially what he called “wealthy seniors.” He did not define at what level someone would be considered wealthy. _Block grants to states for Medicaid, the health program for the poor. Ryan disputed reports that the plan would seek savings of $1 trillion over 10 years from Medicaid, but would say only that the details would be in the plan. “Medicare and Medicaid spending will go up every single year under our budget. They don’t just go up as much as they’re going right now,” he said. Ryan said governors have told members of Congress they want “the freedom to customize our Medicaid programs. … We want to get governors freedom to do that.” _A statutory cap on actual discretionary spending as a percentage of the economy. While Ryan did not specify the amount during the interview, he said it would be at a lower level than proposed by Obama and would return the government to its “historic size.” _Pro-growth tax changes, including lower tax rates and broadening the tax base. Ryan said overhauling taxes would boost the economy. The plan will not propose tax increases. Ryan was a member of the bipartisan debt commission but voted against its final recommendations, saying they failed to reduce spending on health care. The commission also endorsed tax increases along with painful spending cuts as necessary to dealing with the debt problem. “We’re not going to go down the path of raising taxes on people and raising taxes on the economy. We want to go after the source of the problem, and that is spending,” Ryan said Sunday. Ryan didn’t mention how the budget plan would address Social Security. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia was skeptical that Ryan’s proposal could achieve its targets without damaging social programs. He also questioned whether reductions in defense spending and seeking more revenue through tax reform would be part of the plan. “I don’t know how you get there without taking basically a meat ax to those programs who protect the most vulnerable in the country,” Warner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I’ll give anybody the benefit of a doubt until I get a chance to look at the details,” he said, “but I think the only way you’re going to really get there is if you put all of these things, including defense spending, including tax reform, as part of the overall package.” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., part of a six-member group of Republicans and Democrats forging their own budget proposal, said that the lawmakers would be looking for “real balance” in Ryan’s plan and wanting all options considered. “I think we’ll come at it differently,” Durbin said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “The idea of sparing the Pentagon from any savings, not imposing any new sacrifice on the wealthiest Americans, I think goes way too far. We have got to make certain that it’s a balanced approach and one that can be sustained over the next 10 years.” Ryan criticized Obama, telling Fox that the president was “punting on the budget and not doing a thing to prevent a debt crisis, which every single economist tells us is coming sooner rather than later in this country.” “You have to address the drivers of our debt,” he said. “We need to engage with the American people on a fact-based budget, on stopping politicians from making empty promises to people and talk to the country about what is necessary to fix these problems.”

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GOP Senator Questions Costs Of Libya Conflict

March 27, 2011

WASHINGTON — On Sunday, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) raised questions about the economic costs of U.S. involvement in Libya. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Lugar insisted that the U.S. has no vital national security interest in Libya and argued that additional military spending will exacerbate the nation’s budget deficit. “There have to be objectives and a plan and an agreement that we’re prepared to devote the military forces but also the money,” Lugar said. “It makes no sense in the front room, where in Congress we are debating seemingly every day the deficits, the debt ceiling situation coming up, the huge economic problems we have — but in the back room we are spending money on a military situation in Libya.” President Obama committed U.S. forces in Libya amid escalating violence, in which Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi pledged to show “no mercy” to those opposing his regime. Other members of Congress have been critical of Obama’s Libya decision, presenting arguments that many congressional Democrats had used to critique President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq war. But in recent years, Lugar has developed a record of questioning U.S. military efforts that other top Republicans have supported. After initially supporting the Iraq invasion, Lugar broke with President Bush and his party in 2007 by calling for a reduced American role in Iraq. He has also criticized continued U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past year, noting the costs of the operation and unclear military objectives . Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) introduced legislation last week to immediately halt military action in Libya unless the president receives authorization from Congress. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) has also pressed the administration for a full accounting of the costs of U.S. involvement , saying he has not yet received a straightforward answer from the White House. Administration officials are not planning on asking Congress for a supplemental bill to pay for the military intervention in Libya, which National Journal estimated cost more than $100 million in Tomahawk missiles alone in its first day. “The operation in Libya is being funded with existing resources at this point. We are not planning to request a supplemental at this time,” Office of Management and Budget spokesman Kenneth Baer said Monday. In an interview with Jake Tapper on ABC’s “This Week,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates refused to estimate the length of the U.S. commitment in Libya. When asked by Tapper whether American troops would be withdrawn by the end of the year, Gates responded, “I don’t think anybody knows the answer to that.” Gates was also cautious about defining American objectives in Libya, noting that “regime change is a complicated business,” and suggesting that a full ouster of Gaddafi may not be a final goal of the U.S. mission. In a separate interview for “Meet the Press,” Gates acknowledged that Libya does not represent a clear threat to U.S. national security interests, but said that other considerations make the military mission important. “I don’t think it’s vital interest of the United States, but we clearly have interests there,” Gates said. “And it’s a part of the region which is a vital interest for the United States.” Sens. Jim Webb (D-Va.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) have both suggested the U.S. implemented its no-fly zone out of concerns over the stability of oil prices. Rising oil prices are crimping American consumers amid a fragile economic recovery. But Lugar questioned whether the money being spent on military operations in Libya would be better spent elsewhere. “Estimates are that about $1 billion has already been spent on an undeclared war in Libya, some would say only hundreds of millions, and that that will diminish in the days ahead,” Lugar said. “But [who] knows how long this goes on? And furthermore, who has really budgeted for Libya at all? I have not really heard the administration come forward saying that, ‘We’re going to have to devote these funds, folks, and therefore it’s something else we’ll have to go or it simply adds to the deficit.’” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also made the Sunday talk show rounds with Gates. In an interview on ABC, Clinton insisted that international cooperation made the U.S. mission in Libya a more manageable operation than the war in Iraq, and one that does not need the same level of congressional approval. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) made similar statements on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “There was no U.N. support in Iraq. It made a big difference,” Levin said. “We’re part of an international coalition which has been supported now by U.N. resolution, the support of Arab countries, to prevent the slaughter of civilians in Libya.” When Tapper asked why President Obama chose to intervene in Libya, after declining to commit U.S. troops to unrest in other Middle East nations, Clinton said the severity of the violence in Libya had touched a particular humanitarian nerve in the international community. “Each of these situations is different,” Clinton responded. “But in Libya, where a leader says ‘spare nothing, show no mercy’ and calls out air force attacks on his own people, that crosses a line.”

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Electric Car Pioneer, Richard H. Griffiths, Joins EVCARCO, Inc. as Chief Communications Officer

March 15, 2011

FT. WORTH, TX–(Marketwire – March 15, 2011) – EVCARCO, Inc. ( OTCBB : EVCA ) ( OTCQB : EVCA ) announced today that well known electric vehicle marketing expert, Richard H Griffiths, has accepted the position of Chief Communications Officer. Mr. Griffiths, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_H._Griffiths , is an electric vehicle marketing expert as well as a Senior Government Advisor for the U.S. State Department, Government of Colombia, Republic of Tanzania and the Kingdom of Thailand. He will develop strategic relationships with governments, Hollywood celebrities and persons of influence in North America and globally. Mr. Griffiths has been successful in getting electric vehicles on media shows such as Regis and Kelly, FOX, CNN and was featured on the History Channel as one of the early pioneers of

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McConnell Issues Threat Over The Deficit

March 13, 2011

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a direct challenge to the Obama administration on Sunday, telling “Fox News Sunday” that Republicans will vote against raising the debt ceiling if it is not coupled with a “credible effort” to shrink the nation’s overall debt. “I don’t intend to support raising the debt ceiling, and I don’t believe any Senate Republicans do unless we do something important related to spending and debt,” McConnell said. “It is going to have to carry something with it that the markets, foreign countries and the American people believe is a credible effort to get a handle on spending and the debt effort.” The United States will reach its debt ceiling within the next few months, setting the stage for another battle over government spending. Lifting the debt ceiling, or authorizing the Treasury to borrow money to pay its obligations, was once a routine action. But Republicans have opposed increasing the limit in recent years, voting against it multiple times in the 111th Congress. Because Democrats hold a majority in the Senate, efforts to block an increase to the debt limit have been thwarted. McConnell acknowledged that Republicans would be out-voted on raising the debt ceiling. “The Democrats can raise it themselves if they choose to and try do nothing whatsoever about the problem,” he said. Not raising the debt limit would have a disastrous effect on financial markets by causing the United States to default on its loans, according to government officials. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Six” working toward shrinking the deficit, told “Fox News Sunday” he opposes Republican efforts to tie the debt ceiling vote to other actions on the deficit. “I get a little worried when we start tying it to the debt limit vote,” Warner said. “Because as Chairman Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve has said, if we play Russian Roulette with the instability of the financial markets, if we were to default on America’s obligation to pay, you could end up seeing us back in a financial crisis like 2008.” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Congress should focus on shrinking the deficit, but must be realistic about the timeline. “We’re not going to balance America’s budget in the next six months,” Durbin said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s time for people of goodwill in both political parties to sit down and work it out. If there are going to be new revenues or cuts in other areas, let’s get it done. Let’s move forward.”

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Australian Market Report of March 10, 2011: Cardia Bioplastics (ASX:CNN) Partner With Wesco China To Distribute Sustainable Resins In China

March 10, 2011

Australian Market Report of March 10, 2011: Cardia Bioplastics (ASX:CNN) Partner With Wesco China To Distribute Sustainable Resins In China

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Obama’s Wackiest Budget Cuts

February 15, 2011

NEW YORK (CNN Money) — The funding grants nobody wants. The “mobile” policing unit that doesn’t get around much. How about the big fancy telescope that has been mismanaged? President Obama’s 2012 proposal lists more than 200 programs that he wants to cancel or cut, for billions in savings.

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Donald Trump CPAC Speech Stirs Buzz

February 10, 2011

Donald Trump’s surprise appearance at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference is stirring buzz that the billionaire real estate mogul and television personality could mount a run for the White House in 2012. The Trump camp reached out to organizers of the annual event regarding the possibility of the potential presidential contender delivering a speech, according to CNN . Trump reportedly confirmed he’d address the crowd earlier this week. Trump signaled last year that he was interested in running for president in the next election cycle. During an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” he said it “could be fun” to run because he’d “like to see some positive things happen for the country.” He also spoke out on the possibility of facing off against former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin , who signaled this week she’s seriously considering running for president in the next election cycle. “She’s very interesting,” explained Trump. “And don’t underestimate her. I mean, I see what she does. Do not underestimate Sarah Palin. One month earlier, Trump told Fox News that if he were to mount a presidential campaign he’d run as a Republican. The AP relays what Trump had to say at CPAC on Thursday: He says he may run because the United States has becoming what he calls the whipping post for the rest of the world. He says the country is becoming — quote — “the laughingstock of the world” and he’s worried about its future. Trump says the country needs an accomplished president. And he all but offered himself up as the answer. Click here here for updates on CPAC 2011 and the latest news to come out on the conservative conference.

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Woman Can Be Likeable Or Powerful… But Not Both

February 4, 2011

By Patricia Sellers CNN.com Women face a narrower band of acceptable behavior than men do. Women can be powerful. Women can be likeable. Being both is difficult to do.

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Allstate Retracts Failed Zodiac Joke

February 3, 2011

Is your Zodiac sign affecting your insurance rating? That’s what some were left wondering after Allstate issued a press release Wednesday listing accident rates of drivers based on their “new” zodiac signs , according to CNN . But few were left laughing, as many were shocked to think that the signs were actually being used to determine insurance rates. Allstate’s original astrological sign accident breakdown, from CNN Money : Virgo – 211,650 Leo – 179,657 Taurus – 177,503 Pisces – 172,030 Sagittarius – 154,477 Gemini – 136,904 Capricorn – 128,005 Aries – 112,402 Libra – 110,592 Aquarius – 106,878 Cancer – 101,539 Ophiuchus – 83,234 Scorpio – 26,833 After some backlash about the joke, Allstate quickly retracted the press release, and issued an apology for the confusion. From the Allstate retraction press release : We recently issued a press release on Zodiac signs and accident rates, which led to some confusion around whether astrological signs are part of the underwriting process. Astrological signs have absolutely no role in how we base coverage and set rates. Rating by astrology would not be actuarially sound. We realize that our hard working customers view their insurance expense very seriously. So do we. We deeply apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

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Chuck Schumer: GOP Risking ‘A Depression’ With Budget Antics

January 30, 2011

WASHINGTON — Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned on Sunday that if House Republicans, in an effort to flex their fiscal conservative muscles, held up passage of a budget this coming March, it could send the United States into a deep recession and possibly a depression. The New York Democrat, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said that the GOP was “playing with fire” by threatening either to not fund the government or not raise the debt ceiling unless they were first placated with deep spending cuts. “On March 4 the government-funding resolution expires and it seems that a lot of Republicans in the House want to risk a shutdown of the government if they don’t absolutely get their way,” said Schumer. “That was a mistake when [former House Speaker] Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995. It would be a bigger mistake now. It is really playing with fire…. you can risk the credit markets really losing some confidence in the United States Treasury and that could create a deeper recession than we had over the last several years or, god forbid, even a depression.” “It is playing with fire to risk the shutting down of the government just as it is playing with fire to risk not paying the debt ceiling,” he added. The raising of the rhetoric and associated stakes surrounding the budget and debt ceiling debate is something Democrats have been doing for weeks. Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, set the trend when he called the idea of a self-imposed default “insanity.” To a certain extent, the tack has worked, with GOP leadership showing little of the willingness for a political showdown that the younger, predominantly Tea Party members exhibit. “That would be a financial disaster not only for our country but for the worldwide economy,” House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), said of a U.S. default on its debt, during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “Remember, the American people on Election Day said, we want to cut spending and we want to create jobs. You can’t create jobs if you default on the federal debt. Listen, there has been a spending spree going on in Washington these last couple of years beyond control and the president is going to ask us to increase the debt limit then he has got to be willing to cut up the credit cards. We have got to work together by listening to the American people and reducing these obligations that we have.” “I don’t think [defaulting] is a question that is even on the table,” he added.

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Tina Dupuy: Government Workers Are the New Illegal Aliens

January 25, 2011

Did you know the government can’t create jobs? Nearly two years ago on CNN, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele said, “Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created jobs.” And then, “Trust me.” When Steele said those words, he was widely panned. It was dismissed on the right as a gaffe and debunked on the left as grossly inaccurate . It was laughable… when Steele said it. Cut to: Meet the Press last Sunday. Erin Burnett CNBC’s Squawk on the Street host said, “Government can’t create jobs.” It was left unchallenged by any of the other panelists and host David Gregory. Karen Hughes who worked in the Bush administration, her government j-o-b added, “Well… the president seems to have had a revelation that it’s actually business that creates jobs.” Then to top it all off the Democratic Congressman James Clyburn — agreed. “No, we can’t create jobs, and we shouldn’t. We want them created in the private sector. ” Over 16.5% of Americans are employed by the government , about 22 million of the 135 million payroll jobs. And they’re not just pencil-pushing, useless cushy benefit collectors — but scientists. There are no private sector astronauts. None. Firefighters are government employees as are police. “More cops on the streets” means more government trained and compensated people in your community. The district attorneys, judges and bailiffs draw an Uncle Sam signed paycheck. The government? Law and order. The second largest employer in the country is the United States Postal Service. Try telling the lady raising her family by delivering your overdue notices that the government can’t create jobs. According to the Department of Labor, the private sector has been steadily adding jobs and the public sector has been cutting jobs at the fastest rate in 30 years . Especially local government jobs: teachers, sanitation workers and librarians. So the government does, in fact, create jobs. It also slashes them. Cities and states have been balancing their budgets by cutting back on everything. Most infamously Camden, New Jersey is eliminating half of their police force . To those who work for a living, a job is a job. To those who sloganeer for a living, cutting jobs means magically creating them. It seems government workers are the new illegal immigrants. They are the new group who are treated like parasites on the system; their jobs are illegitimate and disposable. Lawmakers gleefully talk about eliminating government employees’ livelihoods. The rhetoric would have us believe those aren’t even jobs . It’s not the banksters and hucksters on Wall Street who wrecked our economy. No, now they’re the only ones who can save us! It’s not a general revenue slow down tied to a collapse after the Saturnalia of liar loans and real estate cheats. It’s those comfortable public servants who are bleeding us dry! We’re told we’re bankrupt because of well-paid government employees with “Cadillac health insurance plans.” Yes, we still refer to posh things as an American made car from a company, GM, which the U.S. government saved and made profitable again. So everyone who makes an actual Cadillac can thank the government for their job. Out of our $3.5 trillion annual budget we dole out around $1.5 trillions on “defense” spending. It really should be considered “offense” spending these days, but I digress. There are some accounting tricks with mandatory and discretionary spending. But added up: it’s $1.5 trillion . What is the military? Jobs. Careers too. Plus a retirement plan and socialized medicine. It’s a jobs program the government created . It’s also a big wasteful unaccountable sieve for tax dollars. If the GOP-controlled House is really looking to weed out pork (which they arguably are not) they would check out the bacon haven we call the Pentagon. But, better to stick with the empty and symbolic than tackle the difficult.

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The 14th Banker: So Bill Daley, Who’s Your Daddy?

January 7, 2011

Yesterday President Obama heralded his newly appointed Chief of Staff, to great fanfare from the Republicans, US Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street Journal and others. According to the Wall Street Journal , The selection of Mr. Daley shows that the president is more concerned with reaching out to the independent voters and to the Republicans who now control the House and have greater numbers in the Senate. Per CNN , Daley is the son of legendary Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and brother of the city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley. He runs Midwest operations for the investment bank JP Morgan Chase, and his appointment is expected to help patch up Obama’s frosty relations with the business community after nasty battles over health care reform, taxes and government regulations. So I am open-minded about this. Clearly Obama needs a change in program and needs someone who can reach across the aisle. But reaching across the aisle is not the same as capitulating. Even the Huffington Post reporting is fairly sanguine on this. Daley, the son and brother of Chicago mayors, has always been the Inside Daley, the one who deals quietly with the powers that be in the city and country — the brokers of money, commerce, family and tribal politics. Daley is an ancestral Democrat, which means that he believes in the government’s role in helping people survive and live a decent life. He is an Irishman through and through, with a fierce faith in friends and loyalty. He is a big-city guy, at home in big-city haunts. But he is not an ideologue of the left or right. He helped Bill Clinton pass free-trade agreements, even though Democratic union bosses hated them. Now a banker, he opposed some provisions of the bank-reform bill. He also expressed skepticism about the political and substantive wisdom of Obama’s spending a year on health care reform. He’s not for government for government’s sake. The question for Daley is “who’s your daddy?” The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington power elites is still revolving. His predecessors have proven to be lap-dogs. As a big bank insider, Daley knows . He knows the games being played. He knows the scare tactics used to manipulate Washington for what they are, scare tactics designed to keep the status quo. He knows the business tactics and the business ethics. He knows the compensation structure and what it incents. He knows what management really cares about. He knows why executives shun shareholder empowerment. He knows why they offshore so many jobs. He knows why trading operations are housed where they are and how trans-national banks play the regulatory arbitrage game globally. He knows if the books are cooked. He knows if Primary Dealers get a heads up on Fed market actions and why they win in trading virtually every day, whichever way the markets move. He knows if they trade against their customers. He knows why they fight transparency. He knows why they fear Elizabeth Warren and may attempt to castrate her budget. With this knowledge comes a greater responsibility. Our financial system is past its prime. It is not longer suitable for the evolving society. So will Daley stand for the entrenched interests, or muster the courage to help the President usher in a new age by rigorous enforcement and funding of Dodd-Frank, such as it is, and by pressing for additional measures to close gaps in the legislation? Should a new crisis emerge, will he allow the process of creative destruction to take place with adequate systemic safeguards as proposed by Bill Black and Randall Wray? Will he permit bondholders to take the haircuts their risks and rewards warrant or will he support the big bank subsidy of implicit TBTF status? Bill Daley, who’s your daddy?

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New Year’s Resolution: 84% Want To Find A New Job

December 29, 2010

New Year’s resolutions come in all shapes and sizes. From losing weight to spending less to finding a new job it seems everyone has something they’d like to change. It seems the thing most people want to change this year, is their job . 84% of working individuals plan to find a new job in the new year, according to Manpower, a job-placement firm. That’s up a staggering 24% from last year. The change comes largely from the fact that people seem to simply be disappointed with their current positions, as wages have frozen, according to CNN Money . However, this doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a large number of available jobs. While the desire to change jobs may be powered in many cases by dissatisfaction with management, it may actually have more to do with money, according to The Street . Wages have grown marginally since the height of the recession ended, and many are looking for greater income. While unemployment was up at the end of 2010 , the outlook for 2011 looks better, and may afford many workers the opportunity to make career changes.

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Dan Solin: Best and Worst Investing Awards for 2010

December 29, 2010

We are coming to the end of 2010, which has been a very interesting year for investors. I thought this would be a good time to hand out the Best and Worst Investing Awards for 2010. I hope you will find them helpful as you formulate your investing strategy for next year and thereafter: 1. The best prediction : To Newsweek Magazine . It predicted the possibility the Dow would hit 12,000, which is close enough. 2. The worst prediction : This was a tough one because there were so many contenders. I give the nod to Mohamed El-Erian, who predicted stocks would tank in January, 2010. Dr. El-Erian has credibility as chief executive of Pimco, overseeing over $1 trillion in assets. Hard to believe his predictions have no more merit than those of an astrologer. 3. Best TV media for sound investment advice : CNN because it does the best job of providing reliable information without encouraging bad investor behavior. It’s sad there isn’t a single program on TV that tells investors how to invest intelligently. I am working hard to change that. 4. Worst TV media for sound investment advice : CNBC is the hands down winner. An entire network devoted to instilling fear and uncertainty and encouraging stock picking, market timing and fund manager picking. The network is a shill for the securities industry. Its viewers are the hapless victims of its programming. 5. Investors’ Best Friend : Irving Picard, the court-appointed trustee assigned to recover assets from victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme. His tireless efforts have recovered almost one-third of the $20 billion in losses, and he is hot on the trail of the balance. 6. Investors’ Worst Enemy : The feeder funds, banks and other institutions who ignored the obvious red flags indicating Madoff was a fraud and accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks for investing their clients money with him. While some have done the right thing and made their investors whole (the Bank of Kuwait is a laudable example), many others have lawyered up and are engaged in a scorched earth defense of their indefensible conduct. 7. Best source for intelligent investment advice : The hands-down winner is the Fama/French forum where noted economists Eugene Fama and Kenneth French dispense investing wisdom, in an easy-to-understand format. Essential viewing for all investors. 8. Worst source for intelligent investment advice : Jim Cramer’s Mad Money , where Cramer fools investors nightly into believing he has some special insight into the direction of the markets and the ability to pick stock winners, although there is precious little evidence he (or anyone else) has this expertise. 9. Best Financial Product : Exchange Traded Funds which, when used correctly, can permit investors to invest intelligently, at low cost. Unfortunately, they are more often misused to pick sectors and trade frequently, which reduces returns. 10. Worst Financial Product : Another tough one. Hedge funds, variable annuities, equity-index annuities and private equity funds all qualify. However, the award goes to Principal Protected Notes. Their name got them the nod. The principal is not protected against issuer default. They have excessive fees and the upside is grossly overstated. Their complexity makes it very difficult for investors to understand how they are being ripped off and why much simpler alternatives would be superior investments. This combination of qualities typifies the conduct of many brokers and other “investment professionals”, and earned this product the award, but it was very close. 11. Most intelligent investing phrase : “It’s not different this time.” Because it wasn’t. 12. Dumbest investing phrase : A tie between the “new normal” and “buy and hold are dead.” There is no “new normal” and those who bought and held came through the crash and subsequent recovery with flying colors. 14. ( I know it should be 13, but I’m superstitious ). Most appreciative author/blogger : This was an easy one. Me. I get a tremendous amount of fan mail from readers of my books and my blogs (Okay, there is the occasional hate mail from a disgruntled broker). My books had stellar sales in 2010. It’s particularly encouraging to hear that many of you give my books to your children so they won’t make the same mistakes you did. I can’t answer everyone who contacts me and tells me how my advice has impacted them, but I do read every e-mail. I deeply appreciate your encouragement and support. I view it as a privilege to be able to dispense sound investing advice to such a wide audience. To all of you and your families, I wish you a prosperous New Year! The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. Returns from index funds do not represent the performance of any investment advisory firm. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Readers who require investment advice should retain the services of a competent investment professional. The information on this blog is not an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any securities or class of securities mentioned herein. Furthermore, the information on this blog should not be construed as an offer of advisory services. Please note that the author does not recommend specific securities nor is he responsible for comments made by persons posting on this blog.

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Video: Gibbs Says Obama May Name Summers Successor Next Month

December 27, 2010

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) — A successor to National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers will probably be named next month, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program yesterday. Summers is keeping his position through the end of the year, and President Barack Obama wanted to “take some time to make a good decision,” Gibbs said. Bloomberg’s Peter Cook reports. (Source: Bloomberg)

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Robert Gibbs: Larry Summers Replacement Could Come Mid-January

December 26, 2010

WASHINGTON — Don’t look for any big changes in President Barack Obama’s Cabinet as the new year gets under way. The president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, tells CNN’s “State of the Union” that he doesn’t expect any major shuffling to take place in the Cabinet. Gibbs says that there’s much work yet to be done at the Treasury Department to implement financial reform and at the Health and Human Services Department to implement health care reform. He calls the president’s team “very talented.” Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, had been expected to depart the administration last fall. Gibbs says he thinks Obama will name Summers’ replacement a week or two after the new Congress convenes. CNN’s interview with Gibbs aired Sunday.

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WATCH: New Car Runs On Air

December 22, 2010

There are cars that run on gas, electricity, vegetable oil, even human waste, and now there is a car that runs on air. The AirPod has been created in the UK and runs on compressed air. This CNN video demonstrates how the three-wheeled, two door, steering wheel-free vehicle zips around. (It is also oddly reminiscent of a car from “The Jetsons,” but that was probably not planned.) Compared to a standard car, the AirPod emits a fraction of the pollution, can reach up to 50 mph, and will cost around $10,000 . Motor Development International hopes that the AirPod will be the future of urban transportation. WATCH this car run on air:

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Nataly Kelly: Lady Gaga Sings the Language of Global Marketing

December 8, 2010

Lady Gaga, who was recently crowned CNN’s most provocative entertainment icon of 2010, is well-known for her creative costumes and performances. Now, she’s planning to mix things up from a language perspective. According to Lady Gaga’s promoter, Ralph Simon, her forthcoming album in May 2011 may include one song in Russian. The international music phenomenon has also been discussing plans to release tunes in Hindi, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. Releasing international hits is a savvy business move, one that many music super-stars have practiced long before her. Back in 1988, Sting released a version of his album “Nothing Like the Sun” which included songs in Portuguese and Spanish. In 1995, Madonna’s Spanish-language version of her hit, “You’ll See” (“Verás”) was a hit on the Billboard Hot Latin Songs. What Sting and Madonna did decades ago — making their music available to potential fans in more languages — was a smart move. In today’s highly globalized and digital world, adopting a multilingual approach not only makes sense, but will help Gaga optimize the potential of the world wide web to deliver more relevant content to her global fan base. Which languages should Lady Gaga pick? Earlier this year, we published a study that revealed the top 57 languages for expanding global brand presence. If Gaga wants to target the 10 most economically significant tongues, she should select Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Korean, and Arabic. Russian comes in at #11 on our list, but is growing in importance. Hindi is much further down the list of languages of global importance on the web. But in the music industry in general, Hindi could be a very smart move, as it could help Lady Gaga ease into the enormous — and potentially lucrative — Bollywood music scene. However, songs might not be enough to achieve global music dominance. If Lady Gaga wants to effectively crack the global code, she’ll need to do much more, including implementing a multilingual social media strategy. She currently has more than 24 million fans on Facebook, but to truly take her brand global, the Gaga team will need to look at strategies such as the one Anheuser-Busch recently announced to make social media content available in many languages. Lady Gaga is considering what other artists have done for decades — singing in other languages. That alone is not a revelation. Yet, in all other areas of artistic expression, Lady Gaga balances the mainstream with the avant-garde. What’s the linguistic equivalent of the gravity-defying shoes for which she’s known? Instead of just selecting the languages that will help her global brand, she also should choose a less common language to add to her music arsenal. Recording a tune in, say, Tibetan, would not only help her make a statement, but would draw attention to languages and populations that might benefit from the positive publicity. Such a stunt would certainly get people talking — and beyond her music, that’s what Gaga does best.

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Jonathan Weiler: Face Value: Deficits as Code for Tribal Fears

November 25, 2010

It’s obvious, of course, that the right’s new concern with deficits is not really about deficits, per se (any more than their new-found concern with government tyranny can be viewed with a straight face). Little fuss was heard from right-wing precincts during the Bush years, when the decider quickly burned through Clinton-era surpluses and ran up large deficits by pursuing reckless fiscal and military policies. And it would be hard to square American conservatives’ conferring of sainthood on Ronald Reagan with their now profound, deep, over-riding concern with deficits, given that Reagan oversaw dramatic increases in deficit spending . If deficits are the ultimate measure of irresponsibility, out-of-control government and a failure to live prudently and within one’s means — all values conservatives claim to hold dear — lionizing as the very embodiment of greatness and true leadership a President who behaved fiscally irresponsibly would simply make no sense. For some in Washington and its media environs, deficits do mean, roughly, something related to spending too much money. Erskine Bowles, co-chair of the deficit commission, believes that there is a threshold for spending money beyond which very bad things will happen( though Bowles has failed to come up with a coherent rationale for explaining what that threshold is ). And people like CNN ‘s Gloria Borgen, who recently insisted that the voters’ message on November 2 was that they wanted deficits reduced ( despite data showing how utterly laughable that claim is ) probably have nothing more in mind when it comes to deficits than what they hear at cocktail parties. But for the movement that has made the biggest issue out of deficits, the Tea Party, broadly speaking, deficits mean more than arbitrary numbers on a balance sheet or stupid mischaracterizations of what Americans actually care about. And because they’ve so powerfully shaped political discourse in the past eighteen months, it’s worth understanding what the underlying meaning of their concern with deficits is really all about. Yes, Wall Street, bondholders, banking interests and central bankers care about deficits for their own reasons, and these matter, of course, for what’s on the political agenda ( including Bowles himself ). But as a galvanizing emotional issue, deficits are a big deal in 2010 because they pack the kind of emotional punch and dog-whistle politics that once made crime and welfare such potent wedge issues. Deficits have become code. And the code is quite clear, once you think about it for a moment — that when government acts, it always acts to help the undeserving and, in doing so, hurts real Americans who are faithful to real American values. In this code, America is awash in free-loaders and law-breakers — poor, illegal, grubby-handed “losers” who are ruining everything that once made America great. Deficits are government’s way of indulging, coddling and abetting these losers. Crime and welfare had an obvious “face” — an African-American face. And politicians from Nixon, to Reagan to the elder Bush self-consciously exploited that racial code to win elections, as Lee Atwater , among others, openly acknowledged. But the code is more diffuse now. It’s not strictly about race any longer. It’s about every sort of un-nerving difference. Yes, swarthy skin is still a surefire way to set off the terror that has galvanized the Beck-istas and the dittoheads — Muslims and illegal immigrants being easy focal points of the hatred du jour. But it all runs together now — embodied in what Sarah Palin during the 2008 campaign, when she spoke of the “real” America — a place of exclusion, fear, resentment and desperation to defend their besieged communities from the tax collector and all those menacing representations of difference on whose behalf the tax collector serves. This is why, as I’ve said before, though Obama’s skin color, name and background are highly relevant to the right-wing’s insane and misplaced hatred of him (he’s cut taxes for nearly everybody, presided over record corporate profits, expanded our military operations and continued the most repressive features of the Bush national security apparatus) — the skin color issue also misses the deeper-seated motives behind that hatred . Had Hillary Clinton been president and pursued similar deficit-spending policies, she would have been subject to similar attacks. It’s what deficits represent that matters most — a hand out to people who are worthy of nothing but hatred and contempt, who have bespoiled “our” fragile community, who are responsible for the dread and insecurity we feel – because what those deficits mean is that the government will help and defend “them,” but not “us.” In sum, deficits are code for government taking sides in a tribal war, with the one good tribe — the real Americans — under siege from all the tribes of venality, dissipation and filth. We can debate the significance of long-term deficits for our economic well-being and, yes, I am well aware that, in the long run, most economists agree that this is a significant policy problem that we need to tackle. But this fairly technical policy debate is not what’s mobilizing the tea party to scream about deficits in 2010, after having watched quietly while their putative conservative heroes acted with fiscal abandon from 1980 on. Spending money on their own kind is one thing (and the Reagans and Bushes can be reliably counted on to do that) — an affirmation of the natural, acceptable state of things. Spending it on all those “others” out there is something else entirely. People are entitled, of course, to believe that they and their kind are more deserving than others. But we’re under no obligation to take their anger about deficits at face value, when it’s so clear that something much deeper lurks behind the crying over spilled red ink. Jonathan Weiler’s second book, Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics , co-authored with Marc Hetherington, was published last year by Cambridge University Press.

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Michael Moore: They Said They Would Push Me "Off a Cliff"

November 17, 2010

Yesterday, on the TV and radio show Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman, the former Vice President of CIGNA, one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies, revealed that CIGNA met with the other big health insurers to hatch a plan to “push” yours truly “off a cliff.” The interview contains new revelations about just how frightened the health industry was that Sicko might ignite a public wave of support for “socialized medicine.” So the large health insurance companies came together over a common cause: Stop the American people from going to see Sicko — and the way to do that was to cause some form of harm to me (either personally, professionally or… physically?). Take a look at this stunning section of the interview with Wendell Potter: WENDELL POTTER [former executive, CIGNA]: …We were concerned that the movie [ Sicko ] would be as successful as Fahrenheit 9/11 had been. And we knew that if it were, it really would change public opinion about our health care system in ways that would be harmful to the profits of health insurers. So, it was very important for this [attack] campaign to succeed. At one point during a strategy meeting, one of the people from [the insurance companies' public relations firm] APCO said that if our efforts, our initial efforts, were not successful, then we’d have to move to an element of the campaign to push Michael Moore off a cliff. And not meaning to do that literally, but to — AMY GOODMAN: Are you sure? WENDELL POTTER: Well, I’m not sure. To tell you the truth, when I started doing what I’m doing [as a whistleblower], I was concerned about my own health and well-being, maybe just from paranoia. But these companies play to win. And we’re talking about some big bucks at stake here — billions and billions and billions of dollars. AMY GOODMAN: So what were they talking about when they said, “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to push him off the cliff”? WENDELL POTTER: Well, it would be just an incredibly intense PR effort, if necessary, to spend more premium dollars to defame Michael Moore, to discredit him even more as a filmmaker. AMY GOODMAN: So, were you doing research on him? WENDELL POTTER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: You were going — personally? WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was a part of the effort. I didn’t — that was part of the reason for hiring APCO and to work with a trade association, is that it relieved me of the responsibility of doing that kind of work. You paid for it to be done by people who were experts in doing that kind of research. AMY GOODMAN: But they were doing an investigation into him personally? WENDELL POTTER: Well, absolutely. We knew as much about him probably as he knows about himself. AMY GOODMAN: About his wife, about his kid, about — WENDELL POTTER: Oh, yeah. You know, it’s important to know everything that you might be able to use in some kind of a campaign against someone, to discredit them professionally and often personally. AMY GOODMAN: And did you use that? WENDELL POTTER: You use it if necessary. The interview goes on as Potter reveals how his front group was able to get its talking points and smears into stories in the New York Times and CNN. It is a chilling look inside how easy it is to manipulate our mainstream media — and just how worried the health insurance companies were that the American people might demand a true universal health care system. In particular, Potter talks about how they may have succeeded in influencing CNN to run a factually untrue story about Sicko by its reporter, Sanjay Gupta (which led to my infamous encounter with Wolf Blitzer and later, an apology from CNN for getting their facts wrong). Potter believes his work to defame Sicko succeeded, as the film didn’t end up posting Fahrenheit 9/11 grosses. To be clear, Sicko went on to become the 3rd largest grossing documentary of all time at that point. And as the release of Sicko in June of 2007 was the first time since the defeat of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare bill in 1994 that the issue of health insurance was brought to the forefront of the national media, I believe it helped to reignite the issue during the 2008 election year by exposing millions of Americans to the truth about the health insurance industry. More than one person on Capitol Hill will admit that Sicko was a big help in rallying public support for the compromise bill that eventually passed earlier this year. But I agree, their smear campaign was effective and did create the dent they were hoping for — single payer and the public option never even made it into the real discussion on the floor of Congress. (There was really only one reason Sicko didn’t sell as many tickets as Fahrenheit and that was because of a felony that was committed — a felony that I will discuss for the first time in the coming weeks or months ahead on my website . Stay tuned.) Please read or watch the entire interview with Wendell Potter. It’s a fascinating peek behind the curtain of how corporate America really runs this country. And how if any of us get in their way, then those people must be stopped. It begs the question: Seeing how there’s more of us than there are of them, how long will we let their takeover of our democracy continue? God Bless the Ruling Class, Michael Moore P.S. Over the next few days I will continue this examination of the Wendell Potter revelations on Democracy Now and in his new book. Please check in at my website .

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Chris Guillebeau: How to Get Paid for What You Love

November 12, 2010

I’m no consultant, but from time to time (as in, several times a day) people ask for my opinion about building some kind of online business. I’m happy to give $0.02 for whatever it’s worth, and I’m sure there are times when it’s not worth more than that. How can you do something you love and make a good living from it? Much of my Unconventional Guides business is devoted to answering this question in one way or another. And as discussed before, often when we ask for advice, we don’t really want advice — we want someone to say “That’s great! Go for it!” But when people really want advice about building a business out of something they love, there are a few principles that are fairly universal. Starting with… Not everything you love makes a good business. In fact, most things you love don’t really make a good business. This is probably the most common misconception of the entire “follow your passion” concept: you love watersports, or crafting, or traveling, for example. So why not build a business around it and do what you love all the time? There are actually several reasons why this isn’t always a good idea, one of which is that you might not like everything that goes along with running a business as much as you like the actual activity. Sure, you like traveling… but how much do you want to work while you’re traveling? Do you like the business of crafting or just the crafting itself? Second, not everything you do is commercially viable. Chances are, no one will pay money to watch you go surfing, and this brings us to the next point… What you love must be relevant to other people. Whoever your prospects, customers, or clients are, they have to identify with what you do and believe it can be possible for them as well. That’s why you work to find the magic convergence between your passions and what customers will pay for. (I go on and on about this in my business work — if you have the Empire Building Kit , I’m sorry for repeating myself. But, I repeat myself: you have to meet a clear need or solve a real problem for the people who pay you. This is critical!) In fact, the more you can focus on other people’s needs and understand how they overlap with a skill you enjoy sharing, that’s where the real follow-your-passion model gains potential. Often you won’t get paid for the obvious thing, but something related. To get paid for what you love, you must inspire, educate, or entertain — preferably at least two of the three. But one way or another, you’ll get paid for helping people, not just being awesome. As much fun as it is, I don’t get paid to travel. I get paid because of a business I’ve built that helps other people; it has very little to do with my actual travel. Sometimes it helps to separate the business model from your passions, even if the two are ultimately correlated. The main question you have to answer for the business model is: “What will customers actually pay me for?” It probably isn’t surfing or travel, unless you’re teaching people to go surfing or travel. Instead of “breaking in” somewhere, create your own market. Freelance writing is a good example. As far as I can tell, supporting yourself as a freelance writer under the traditional system is effectively dead. Business Week, CNN, Psychology Today , and the Huffington Post all pay me a grand total of $0 for the articles they post with my byline. It’s worth it to me because I’ve built my own platform at AONC and UnconventionalGuides.com . Without that platform, I’d literally be working for free. So don’t worry about breaking in — figure out what you can do that no one else is doing, or at least how you can do it in a different way than everyone else is doing. You can waste a lot of time trying to get into an existing system, or you can put the time to good use and build your own system. (Ironically, when you do the latter, it becomes easier to break in to the original system as you go along.) Keep startup costs very low. Someone asked me the other day, “If you had $1,000 to start over with my business, how would you spend it?” I said I would get a $10 domain name, a free Wordpress installation, and a PayPal account. Then I would set up a one-page site and see what I could do with it. If it looked promising, there are plenty of things I could spend the remaining $990 on (I’d probably start with design). But the point is, I would first make sure I had some kind of viable idea. If you can start something without spending a lot of money, that’s best. If you have to invest some amount of money, that’s OK too. But the worst thing you can do is spend a lot of money and do nothing. Don’t do that! Find a way to make it work just a little . In Louisville, Kentucky I talked with Nick, who told me about a small photography business he wanted to start. A few weeks later, I saw him again in Charleston, West Virginia, and this time he had an update: “I sold a print for $50!” he said with great enthusiasm. And I knew exactly why Nick was so excited–he wasn’t going to cash it in and retire on one $50 sale, but it was very empowering to get paid for something he loved to do. When it comes to a lifestyle business, a little momentum goes a long way. The sooner you can get paid, even a small amount or a one-time sale, the better. *** The greatest benefit of a lifestyle business is freedom. But usually we find that freedom does not just appear out of nowhere; it requires a shift in mindset and the corresponding action. It also sometimes requires a surprising amount of work to maintain. ( If you love something, you have to protect it .) These disclaimers are not meant to dissuade anyone. Overall, I think this is a fantastic time to start a business and find a way to get paid for what you love to do. Don’t hold back! Just make sure you head off in the right direction. As I see it, the right direction begins with taking action, like Nick did with his $50 print sale. ### Image: The Wolf

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David Isenberg: Be Careful What You Ask For

October 25, 2010

Remember those comparatively long ago, rather naïve, days when former Senator Hillary Clinton was running for President and cosponsored legislation calling for the Secretary of State to ban the use of private contractors like Blackwater from guarding State Department employees? One wonders whether Secretary of State thinks of those days now that she is facing an increasingly serious situation concerning the use of private security contractors in Afghanistan; thanks to President Hamid Karzai who back on August 7 during his visit to the Civil Service Institute in Kabul announced that he would ban both national and international Private Security Companies (PSCs) operating in Afghanistan, which is supposed to start in December. President Karzai argued that PSCs have created a parallel security force which competes with the Afghan Security Forces (ASFs). And PSCs are, at times, a cause of instability in Afghanistan as well. Actually, as I have noted previously, he has a point there. And the Senate Armed Services Committee report reinforces that view. Viewed in the long term U.S. officials praise Mr. Karzai’s plan because diplomats say they perpetuate the country’s entrenched militia culture. Thus, on August 17, President Karzai issued an eight article decree disbanding all PSCs operating in Afghanistan within the next four months. This step was taken as part of the President’s plan to hand over security responsibilities to Afghan security forces by the end of 2014. However, it seems that the four month deadline for closure of PSCs is impractical, to put it mildly, since the necessary procedures for transferring responsibilities from PSCs to the Afghan security forces, in addition to ending contracts between international organizations and PSCs would take more than four months. Many think that at the least the Afghan government should dissolve PSCs gradually instead of speedily. And now that we are moving ever closer to December 17, when the ban is expected to take effect, President’s Karzai’s decree is producing significant consequences. Last Friday American and European officials in Afghanistan warned that contractors handling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of projects to build roads, schools and networks for electricity and irrigation were planning to sharply limit or halt their work here if the Afghan government moves ahead with plans to enforce the PSC ban, Simply put, without protection, many, if not most reconstruction companies cannot function in Afghanistan because their workers, whether foreigners or Afghans associated with foreigners, are targets for insurgents. This month a Scottish aid worker, Linda Norgrove, was kidnapped by the Taliban and later killed in a botched American rescue attempt. The company she worked with, Development Alternatives Inc., has told the United States Agency for International Development that it will have to cancel 330 projects worth $21 million and not start several million dollars in new projects, according to a spokesman. On October 21 the Washington Post reported that U.S.-funded development firms are beginning to shut down massive reconstruction projects because the Afghan government has refused to rescind the ban. One U.S. official said the ban would affect about $1.5 billion in ongoing reconstruction work. More than 20,000 Afghans will lose jobs in road-building and energy projects alone. So much for winning the hearts and minds of the people! Good luck with implementing your counterinsurgency policy Gen. Petraeus. It may still be possible to work out a deal, at least for the short term. On October 14 the Washington Post reported that the United States and its NATO allies, worried about how the Afghan government’s ban on PSC might affect their operations, have asked President Hamid Karzai to sign a letter allowing such companies to continue protecting the foreign aid community. The United States and its NATO allies, worried about how the Afghan government’s ban on private security companies might affect their operations, have asked President Hamid Karzai to sign a letter allowing such companies to continue protecting the foreign aid community, according to Western officials in Kabul. On October 17 CNN reported that the Afghan government clarified the exceptions to a PSC ban, stating that those firms offering protection to embassies and foreign diplomats will be allowed to continue to operate. Sunday’s announcement clarified that private security firms that have the responsibility of guarding the interior of embassies, escorting foreign diplomats, protecting diplomatic accommodations and protecting international military bases and weapons storage, will be allowed to continue their work. Yesterday the AP reported that Secretary Clinton called President Karzai on Saturday to try to persuade his government to modify its PSC ban. Clinton suggested formulating a joint plan to steadily phase out private security companies without disrupting the work of contractors who employ private guards to protect their workers, projects, and facilities, The call was part of intense negotiations that U.S. and other Western diplomats were conducting with Afghan officials this weekend. Also, Karzai’s spokesman Waheed Omer said earlier this month that the ban would not immediately affect companies dealing with the training of national security forces or guards operating inside buildings to provide protection. Will Karzai blink? Will the U.S. cut him a better deal? Stay tuned.

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HuffPost TV: Arianna On CNN’s ‘Parker Spitzer’: Anxiety About The Economy Goes Beyond Left vs. Right (VIDEO)

October 16, 2010

Arianna took part in a wide-ranging roundtable discussion on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” Friday night, together with Steve Kornacki, News Editor at Salon.com, author and model Paulina Porkizkova and political veteran Ed Rollins, a CNN Senior political correspondent. The panel began by discussing Sarah Palin’s new TLC reality series , “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” “You have to give her credit for the fact that she really knows how to do social media,” Arianna said. “Look at her Facebook reach – the fact that she doesn’t really have to give an interview to The New York Times , she can just post something on her Facebook wall.” Switching gears, Eliot Spitzer asked: “Is this a center-right country?” “No, it is absolutely not a center-right country,” Arianna responded. “Where we are is in a huge new game. … A lot of people are deeply anxious. Not just the people who have lost jobs and lost homes, but the people whose relatives have lost jobs, whose kids are graduating from college and can’t get jobs. So what we are facing is really just a deep need to reset our values, see what the future is.” “I think it’s the people who are stuck on that New York-Washington axis who want to portray everything as a left-right issue,” Arianna said. WATCH:

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HuffPost TV: Arianna Slams Wall Street On CNN’s ‘Parker Spitzer’: They’re Not Making Things, They’re Making Things Up (VIDEO)

October 16, 2010

Arianna appeared on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” tonight together with Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal to debate the government’s role in fixing the economy. “We’ve got to grow the economy,” Arianna said. “And we’re not going grow the economy with Republican policies which basically are all about cutting taxes, including for those making over 250,,000 a year. “The job creators,” Moore interjected. “Those include a lot of people on Wall Street who have moved from making things to making things up,” Arianna responded. “They’re not exactly job creators. They’re not wealth creators. They’re just casino gamblers. That’s one of the problems we are facing, and you have to come to terms with that and stop defending them.” “On top of it,” Arianna said to Moore, “you guys have got to get serious about our military spending. If you are serious about the deficit, you cannot ignore the fact that we are spending $2.8 billion a week on Afghanistan, on a war that is unnecessary, propping up a corrupt regime. What’s your excuse for that?” WATCH:

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Top Bank Regulator Doesn’t Believe Consumers Harmed By Foreclosure Fraud Scandal

October 15, 2010

The nation’s top bank regulator doesn’t believe homeowners are being harmed directly by an ongoing foreclosure fraud scandal, despite multiple reports of banks mistakenly evicting homeowners who aren’t even in foreclosure. For example, Nancy Jacobini said she had been working on a mortgage modification with JPMorgan Chase after falling four months behind when the bank sent somebody to change the locks. “I did not receive any information at all in reference to a foreclosure,” she told CNN . The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency does not view anecdotes like Jacobini’s as evidence of consumers being harmed by the unfolding foreclosure fraud scandal. (There are several other similar anecdotes .) “The core issue remains the improper completion and submission of paperwork required by state law before foreclosing on seriously delinquent borrowers when alternatives to foreclosure are not possible,” said Kevin Mukri, a spokesman for the OCC, in an email to HuffPost. The nation’s largest banks have temporarily halted foreclosures across the country after revelations that “robosigners” put their signatures on foreclosure paperwork without verifying any of the information in the documents. It started when a robosigner for Ally Financial (formerly known as GMAC) admitted to signing thousands of foreclosure affidavits without so much as looking at the exhibits. Original notes have been lost as Wall Street banks repacked and resold mortgages as securities. “Immediately after concerns surfaced regarding Ally foreclosure processing issues, the OCC ordered large national bank servicers to review their procedures to ensure compliance with state and federal law before foreclosing on seriously delinquent borrowers,” Mukri said. “As a result, several announced temporary suspensions of their foreclosure proceedings.” Consumer advocates say the scandal is not just about bogus paperwork for seriously delinquent borrowers doomed to foreclosure. They say anecdotes like Jacobini’s are symptoms of the same problems at the heart of the robosigner scandal. “Part of the purpose of having a human being actually look at a file and verify that a particular mortgage should be foreclosed is to prevent that kind of thing from happening,” said Alan White, a professor at the Valparaiso University Law School. “OCC assumes incorrectly that foreclosures are initiated (and the robosigning starts) ONLY after all efforts at modifications and short sales are exhausted. This is clearly incorrect. Servicers routinely file foreclosure (with robosigned affidavits) at the same time that their loss mitigation departments consider requests for modification and short sales.” “They’re exactly the product of a servicing system that is non-functional,” said Ira Rheingold, director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. “[The OCC is] afraid of saying anything that remotely points to the fact that the banks really have screwed this up, that the servicing industry is completely broken.” White and Rheingold said the well-documented shortcomings of the Home Affordable Modification Program show that servicers are dropping the ball for the seriously delinquent and not-seriously delinquent alike. Treasury Department guidelines require servicers to hold off on referring borrowers to foreclosure while they apply for HAMP, but homeowners and their lawyers say it happens all the time. “There are several class actions pending for homeowners who allege that they are being foreclosed despite being eligible for HAMP modifications,” said White. “In a case where a homeowner should be approved for HAMP modification, but the servicer has lost the paperwork or just hasn’t responded yet, the robosigner will send the foreclosure documents to the court without checking to see whether in fact there is an alternative to foreclosure in the works.”

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Donald Trump Says He’s Seriously Considering Running For President

October 5, 2010

Real estate mogul Donald Trump said on Tuesday’s edition of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC that he’s “absolutely thinking about” making a bid for the White House in 2012. The same day, Trump told Fox News that if he were to mount a presidential campaign he’d run as a Republican. “I’m totally being serious because I can’t stand what’s happening to the country,” said the New York-based businessman to the network. “I am being serious about it. I’ve been asked for years to do it. And I had no interest. This is the first time I am — at least I’m considering it.” Trump stressed that while he’s thinking about running for president, it’s premature to say whether or not he’ll bite the bullet in the end. CNN reported earlier this week: Trump is making clear he had nothing to do with a mysterious poll in New Hampshire that, accordant to TIME Magazine, asked Granite State voters about a potential Trump presidential bid. “I never heard of this poll but I’m anxious to find out what it says. I do not know about a poll taken in New Hampshire,” Trump said Monday on CNN’s “American Morning.” Trump reiterated to Fox News that he played no role in generating the study; however, he did call the results it produced “amazing.” He signaled he thinks he may just be the right person to takeover the White House, saying, “I think my whole life has sort of been about finesse when you get right down to it.” WATCH: Donald Trumps Talks 2012 On MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’

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Donald Trump For President? New Hampshire Residents Polled About Potential Run

October 4, 2010

Time magazine is reporting that residents in New Hampshire were polled about prospective Republican candidates for president — and that they were asked 30 questions about Donald Trump. According to Time , the pollsters asked people if they knew that Trump had donated to Democrats and how they thought his television career would affect a potential run for the White House. In an interview with CNN on Monday, Trump insisted he had nothing to do with the poll — Time could not find out who did — but said that he understood why his name might be in the air: “I think the United States is a kicking bag for the rest of the world, virtually. I mean we’re being ripped off by OPEC. We’re being ripped off with all of the wars. We’re protecting people…we’re not very smart. Let’s put it that way. We are not very smart…so I have been outspoken about things such as that. And I guess people are doing polls. But it’s certainly not me.” WATCH (via Time): Trump also praised New Hampshire, always a key state in any presidential campaign. “I really like the people of New Hampshire because they are strong people, they are intelligent people,” he said. “They know what’s happening to this country is wrong. So I can understand why I did well in a poll.”

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Jess Walter: Trust Me… Finance and Poetry Are Funny

September 30, 2010

Last week, the Terminator mainframe that has replaced the American news media accidentally let a little old-fashioned news slip in between Kardashian bikini updates: Economists Locate End of Recession , the headline read. It turns out the worst economic crash since the Great Depression actually ended some fifteen months ago — although you could be forgiven for missing it, as you likely were out selling plasma or you don’t get CNN in the sewer-grate cardboard box where you live. So wait. That’s it? It’s… over? When this recession began, I was angry, agitated, upset. It felt like something structural had broken in our economy — that it was permanent and would require serious attention by serious people — reform of Wall Street and policies that would finally address the economic caste system we’ve been building the last thirty years in America. So certain was I that we were experiencing something historic and profound I did the only rational thing an angry person could do: I began working on a comic rant of a novel called The Financial Lives Of The Poets , about an unemployed guy who writes financial poetry, smokes pot outside his neighborhood 7-Eleven and stalks the man his wife is flirting with on facebook. At the time, my protagonist’s deep middle-class anxiety felt like life to me. Many of my friends were out of work, my house had lost a third of its value, and I was trying to figure out what to do about medical insurance. Two years later, the recession is over and it’s a new world. Many of my friends are out of work, my house is worth two-thirds what it was and I’m trying to figure out what to do about medical insurance. It’s Morning in America. And I can’t find my pants. To be clear, I’m not a real victim of this recession. I’m doing fine. A former journalist and now fat-cat-novelist, I am part of that media elite that President-Elect Palin keeps warning you about, a veritable multi-thousandaire whose assets are spread evenly between hard liquor (I’m hoarding; it’s the next gold) and signed copies of my friends’ books. And don’t get me wrong: I’m happy those economists finally found the end of the recession. (Turns out the damn thing was here all along; it had just slipped between cushions of the peasant-skin couch in the Goldman Sachs executive lounge.) I just wonder, now that it’s over, what’s changed? Remember in history class, how periods of American trial were followed by seismic sociological change? The Depression leads to government regulation and the beginnings of a social safety net; World War II leads to the baby boom, the beginning of racial integration and a burgeoning middle class. So what did we get for our collective trouble over the last few years? That’s easy. More of the same. The same week that economists found the end of the recession, another news story moved between Lindsay Lohan crime spree bulletins: During the last year, 3.8 million Americans (or roughly … Oregon) slipped below the poverty limbo stick. Now, 42 million people, or one in seven Americans, lives in poverty (for a family of four this means living on $22,000 a year; you should try it sometime.) This represents the largest percentage increase in that number since 1959, two full years before our current President was born (to sleeper cell agents in the very cave where Osama Bin Laden now lives; sadly, the cave is only worth 70 percent of what it was then.) This could end up being the first recession in history in which the gap between rich and poor actually gets bigger. According to several studies, the top 1 percent of people makes 23 percent of the money , the highest measure of income inequality since 1928, the year before the Great Depression. Not so fast, says the right-wing Cato Institute; these numbers aren’t fair because they don’t factor in government programs like food stamps, which would lower that number to the top 1 percent earning only 21 percent of the money . Yes. Food stamps. This is the world we live in, post-recession. The rich are richer and whining about food stamps in their attempt to keep former President Obama from raising taxes on those making more than $200,000 a year. And are the 80 percent of Americans making 20 percent of the money the ones who are inflamed? No, it’s the rich, who are fighting mad about socialism or food stamps or… something. Meanwhile, the poor are that much poorer, and more disenfranchised than ever. On CNBC , ratings are back up, along with the S&P, and they’re playing “Eye of the Tiger” as the up-ticking stock price flashes for a soaring financial concern that figured out the way to increase share price was to not hire people, to not invest its money, and seven million American homes remain in danger of being foreclosed while a handful of billionaires secretly and cynically fund the Tea Party as their own personal Trojan Horse, using religion, immigration, guns, and any other old distracting issue that will separate low- and middle-class Americans from voting in their best interest. Don’t raise taxes on the rich because you’re not factoring in food stamps. We went to the recession and all we got was this lousy T-shirt. “So what’s your book about?” a woman asked me at a reading recently. It’s a rant about the financial crisis, I said. She made a face. And it’s got poetry, I added. She made a worse face. It’s a comic novel? I tried. Finally, she smiled. “Ooh, I like those,” she said, “and do you draw the pictures yourself?” I started to say that it wasn’t that kind of comic . But baby needs more grain alcohol. Why yes, I said, I most certainly do. Jess Walter is a former National Book Award finalist and author of, most recently, The Financial Lives Of The Poets, now available in paperback .

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Stephen King On eBooks: Is A Book Just A Delivery System For Story? (VIDEO) (POLL)

September 24, 2010

Bestselling author Stephen King was asked on CNN Money : “The internet, in many ways, killed the music industry. So, why won’t it do that to books?” “Well, I’m not sure that it won’t,” King said. “The book is not the important part. The book is the delivery system. The important part is the story.” So, what do you think? Do you agree with King? WATCH:

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Video: Ted Turner Sees UN Foundation Progress Against Polio: Video

September 23, 2010

Sept. 23 (Bloomberg) — Ted Turner, philanthropist and founder of CNN, and Tim Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, discuss the work of the foundation, which was established to disburse the $1 billion Turner pledged to the UN. Turner and Wirth talk to Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop.” They speak at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. (This is an excerpt of the full interview. Source: Bloomberg)

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