Friday Linkage
By Barry Ritholtz - March 19th, 2010, 3:35PM
Some links for today:
• Rival Merrill warned regulators over Lehman (FT)
• Federal Reserve Must Disclose Bank Bailout Records (Bloomberg)
• Rosier Views + Easier Comps = Profit Growth (WSJ)
• Martin Wolf: China and Germany unite to impose global deflation (FT)
• S&P 500 in ‘Air Pocket,’ Could Reach 1,225: Technical Analysis (Bloomberg)
• It wasn’t us! Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke still do not believe monetary policy bears any blame for the crisis (The Economist)
• Philip K. Dick after seeing a glimpse of Blade Runner (PKD)
• New College Graduates To Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves (The Onion)
• The best video you will have watched this year: Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion (TED)
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March 19th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
Allow taxpayers to know where their $2T went, what a radical idea!
March 19th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
We “just wouldn’t understand”
March 19th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
BR – Your buddy Dick Bove is back, touting TARP as one of the govmt’s most successful programs ever, with Hank Paulson’s genius leading the charge –
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/bove-thanks-to-hank-paulson-citi-shares-set-to-double-from-here-445327.html
Interesting Philip K Dick letter. He died only a few months later, and his mental health was generally pretty variable, but it probably was gratifying for him to see a high budget and somewhat artistic rendering of his work.
March 19th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Tracking a Century of American Eating
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/March10/Features/TrackingACentury.htm
Lots of information and graphs about the changing eating habits of Americans over the past 100 years. More cheese, fewer eggs, and lots more chicken:
March 19th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
Phil. Dick died three months before Blade Runner premiered. It trailed E.T. on it’s opening weedend and barely beat Firefox and The Wrath of Khan, both of which had been out for a couple of weeks. The reviews were not stellar either …… but a few years later we all agree with Mr. Dick’s assessment!
These old box office stats sites are fun:
http://boxofficemojo.com/weekend/chart/?yr=1982&wknd=26&p=.htm
March 19th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
watch psuedo documentary Food Inc……….amazing transformation over 50 years
March 19th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free
* By Daniel Roth
* February 22, 2010 |
The Future of Money
From Credit Card to PayPal: 3 Ways to Move Money
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_futureofmoney/all/1
March 19th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/money-out-of-thin-air-now-federal-reserve-chairman-ben-bernanke-wants-to-eliminate-reserve-requirements-completely
“..The following is an excerpt from Ron Paul’s remarks to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at a recent Congressional hearing….
“The Federal Reserve in collaboration with the giant banks has created the greatest financial crisis the world has ever seen. The foolish notion that unlimited amounts of money and credit created out of thin air can provide sustainable economic growth has delivered this crisis to us. Instead of economic growth and stable prices, (The Fed) has given us a system of government and finance that now threatens the world financial and political institutions. Pursuing the same policy of excessive spending, debt expansion and monetary inflation can only compound the problems that prevent the required corrections. Doubling the money supply didn’t work, quadrupling it won’t work either. Buying up the bad debt of privileged institutions and dumping worthless assets on the American people is morally wrong and economically futile.”
The truth is that the financial system that we have created makes inflation inevitable. The U.S. dollar has lost more than 95 percent of the value that it had when the Federal Reserve was created. During this decade the value of the dollar will decline a whole lot more.
That doesn’t sound like a very good investment.
But that is what happens when you give bankers power to make money up out of thin air…”
March 19th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
What, nothing about how Obamacare was responsible for the breaking of the justified winning streak?ct
Won’t turn on CNBC. But, judging by the website, it was probably pretty interesting. I could picture Kudlow and Cramer and the Cuban with the big ones all fretting about how their capital gains will be taxed a little closer to the rates that honest, hard working people pay on their wages. Who knows, someday they might have to pay a higher rate than those who work for a living!
March 19th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Central Bank Gold Holdings Expand at Fastest Pace Since 1964
http://tinyurl.com/yljcp6n
March 19th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
bank 31
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/03/bank-failure-31-american-national-bank.html
March 19th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
freefall…another history of the crash and burn
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/03/18/freefall/
March 19th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
ban naked CDS?
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/03/ban-naked-cds.html
March 19th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Greenies error?
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/03/19/greenspans-error/
or how he did it?
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/03/11/53463/less-maestro-more-ingenue/
March 19th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
more on Greenspan
http://alephblog.com/2009/03/11/greenspan-the-excellent-obfuscator/
March 19th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
banks 32 and 33
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/03/bank-failures-32-33-georgia-and-utah.html
March 19th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
From WSJ Blogs Deal Journal earlier this week (3/15)
Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead!
http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2010/03/15/michael-lewiss-the-big-short-read-the-harvard-thesis-instead/
You can download a copy of her Harvard Undergraduate thesis (all 115 pages) here:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/m-rcbg/students/dunlop/2009-CDOmeltdown.pdf
It’s a great epilogue to Bailout Nation. Great minds must think alike, regardless of age (hey BR, play the violin?).
Quoting from the Abstract of Barnett-Hart’s thesis:
“Overall, my findings suggest that the problems in the CDO market were caused by a combination of poorly constructed CDOs, irresponsible underwriting practices, and flawed credit rating procedures.”
March 19th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Gosh … reading the WSJ puff piece on the markets/economy, one would never know that …
*) we have a large chunk of unemployed who have been unemployed for a longer interval than any stretch going back to the Great Depression
*) we have over a year’s worth of unsold housing, and an unstoppable foreclosure firestorm
*) we have a commercial real estate crisis in progress
*) small businesses continue to report being unable to get the credit they need to stay alive, while banksters continue to take cheap Fed credit and buy Treasury debt
*) the financial industry would, by and large, dry up and blow away if we were to revert to market-based accounting rules
*) the government owns 80% of the largest insurer on the planet, and is slowly (VERY slowly) deconstructing it, in a sort of slow-mo bankruptcy liquidation
*) the government now completely owns the majority of the mortgage lenders, and is continuing to operate them on a heavily money-losing basis while running trillion-dollar deficits and managing two foreign occupations that have a tremendous ongoing cost
*) a significant fraction of the states and municipalities are spiraling down the drain towards default
…
I guess that’s the other side of the coin from the “Break out the party hats—the earnings recovery is in full swing” perspective.
Maybe the earnings recovery IS in “full swing”, but it’s best to not stray very far from the exits. Someone could cry out “FIRE!” at any minute.
March 19th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
U.S. Forest Service Admits Putting Surveillance Cameras on Public Lands
March 19th, 2010
Via: Island Packet:
Last month, Herman Jacob took his daughter and her friend camping in the Francis Marion National Forest. While poking around for some firewood, Jacob noticed a wire. He pulled on it and followed it to a video camera and antenna.
The camera didn’t have any markings identifying its owner, so Jacob took it home and called law enforcement agencies to find out if it was theirs, all the while wondering why someone would station a video camera in an isolated clearing in the woods.
He eventually received a call from Mark Heitzman of the U.S. Forest Service.
In a stiff voice, Heitzman ordered Jacob to turn it back over to his agency, explaining that it had been set up to monitor “illicit activities.”
Posted in Police State, Surveillance
http://cryptogon.com/?p=14403
Ex-Pfizer Worker Cites Genetically Engineered Virus In Lawsuit Over Firing
March 18th, 2010
Via: Hartford Courant:
Medical experts will be watching closely Monday when a scientist who says she has been intermittently paralyzed by a virus designed at the Pfizer laboratory where she worked in Groton opens a much anticipated trial that could raise questions about safety practices in the dynamic field of genetic engineering.
Organizations involved in workplace safety and responsible genetic research already have seized on the federal lawsuit by molecular biologist Becky McClain as an example of what they claim is evidence that risks caused by cutting-edge genetic manipulation have outstripped more slowly evolving government regulation of laboratories…
http://cryptogon.com/?p=14390
I wonder which we, really, should be keeping ‘an eye’ on..
March 19th, 2010 at 6:58 pm
The broken society. Pretty much nails it and the cure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/opinion/19brooks.html?th&emc=th
The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis. …
The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime, and, as a result, four million security cameras. …
Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian U.S. But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. This country, too, needs a fresh political wind. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.
March 19th, 2010 at 7:06 pm
what did the ARRA accomplish according business economists?
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2010/03/what_do_busines.html
March 19th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
big bank failure day?
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/03/bank-failures-34-through-37-busy-day-at.html
March 19th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
Not a Whoopie Post…but this one caught my eye:
———
Thursday, March 18, 2010
SEC, Fed Alerted By Merrill of Lehman Balance Sheet Games in March 2008
So which theory is it: stunning bureaucratic incompetence, wishful thinking and denial (a better gloss on theory #1) or a cover up? Or a combination of the above?
No matter which theory or theories you subscribe to, the continuing revelations of how the SEC and perhaps more important, the New York Fed conducted themselves in the months before Lehman’s collapse paint an increasingly damning picture.
The Valukas report shows both regulators were monitoring Lehman on a day-to-day basis shortly after Bear’s failure. They recognized that it has a massive hole in its balance sheet, yet took an inertial course of action. They pressured a clearly in denial Fuld to raise capital (and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s accounts of those efforts make it clear they were likely to fail) and did not take steps towards any other remedy until the firm was on the brink of collapse (the effort to force a private sector bailout as part of a good bank/bad bank resolution).
One of the possible excuses for the failure to do more was that the officialdom did not recognize how badly impaired Lehman was until too late in the game to do much more than flail about. But that argument is undercut by a story in tonight’s Financial Times.
Merrill warned both the SEC and the Fed in March 2008 that Lehman was engaging in balance sheet window dressing of a serious enough nature for it to put pressure on Merrill (as in it was making Merrill look worse relative to the obviously impaired Lehman).
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/sec-fed-alerted-by-merrill-of-lehman-balance-sheet-games-in-march-2008.html
When a company under stress makes fraudulent statements about its financial condition, it is a sign of desperation, and possibly imminent collapse. The fact that Merrill, with a little digging, could see that Lehman’s assertions about its financial health were bogus says other firms were likely to figure it out sooner rather than later. That in turn meant that the Lehman was extremely vulnerable to a run. Bear was brought down in a mere ten days. Having just been through the Bear implosion, the warning should have put the authorities in emergency preparedness overdrive. Instead, they went into “Mission Accomplished” mode.
More at…..
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/03/sec-fed-alerted-by-merrill-of-lehman-balance-sheet-games-in-march-2008.html
March 19th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
“Bank bailout record”: Who cares who got money or how much. I won’t to know the reasoning that led to the decisions. “The Second Circuit” didn’t specify a due date for the info giving the Fed plenty of time to appeal their decision. I am so sick of USG actions that are based on “saving the average American from themselves” that I could puke. WMD? TARP? The real adults are out here in the real world.
“It wasn’t us”‘: These two are still in denial. The problem in Ben’s case is that he IS the active FED chair and if he hasn’t learned from their mistakes, he is apt to repeat them and we are sure to suffer through them (bubbles), again. Wash, rinse, repeat… Remind me again why Ben was Time’s Man of the Year?
March 19th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
RE: Federal Reserve Must Disclose Bank Bailout Records
‘Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont, said the decision was a “major victory” for U.S. taxpayers.
“This money does not belong to the Federal Reserve,” Sanders said in a statement. “It belongs to the American people, and the American people have a right to know where more than $2 trillion of their money has gone.” ‘
What money?…the FED just print paper…they are publishers.
March 19th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
@Pat G. Says:
March 19th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
“Bank bailout record”: Who cares who got money or how much. I won’t to know the reasoning that led to the decisions. “The Second Circuit” didn’t specify a due date for the info giving the Fed plenty of time to appeal their decision. I am so sick of USG actions that are based on “saving the average American from themselves” that I could puke. WMD? TARP? The real adults are out here in the real world.
“It wasn’t us”‘: These two are still in denial. The problem in Ben’s case is that he IS the active FED chair and if he hasn’t learned from their mistakes, he is apt to repeat them and we are sure to suffer through them (bubbles), again. Wash, rinse, repeat… Remind me again why Ben was Time’s Man of the Year?
———
It goes deeper…stuff we aren’t really focusing on in the whole hooplah of what’s going on, because the WHOLE SYSTEM needs a CLEAN OUT….
——–
Dodd’s Chief Counsel Bought Financial Stocks During 2008 Crisis
Share Business ExchangeTwitterFacebook| Email | Print | A A A
By Robert Schmidt
March 18 (Bloomberg) — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd’s chief counsel in 2008 traded stock in Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo & Co., American International Group Inc. and other rescued companies as the panel considered legislation to address the credit crisis, according to her financial disclosure form filed with the Senate.
Amy Friend, 51, who is now leading the panel’s effort to write a bill overhauling Wall Street regulations, bought $1,000- to-$15,000 stakes in four banks, weeks after Dodd hired her in January 2008, the form shows. She also owned shares of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and other insurance firms, according to the disclosure document, which she signed on June 5, 2009.
-snip-
Friend, who declined to comment, informed her supervisor of her holdings, and consulted the Senate Ethics Committee when she was hired, Kirstin Brost, the Senate Banking Committee spokeswoman, said.
Friend lists the investments as jointly owned with her husband. She continues to hold financial securities, Brost said. Friend’s disclosure form for 2009 is due in May.
Sloan and other ethics specialists say Friend’s stock ownership and trading reflect the leeway lawmakers and congressional staff have with their investments. Unlike Treasury Department employees or bank examiners at independent regulatory agencies who aren’t allowed to hold shares of companies they oversee, U.S. lawmakers and their staff are free to invest with few restrictions.
—–
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aUo98IguVJ3Y
March 19th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
a quick one, for Mike in H-town, esp…
http://publicintelligence.net/microsoft-windows-7vista-advanced-forensics-guides-for-law-enforcement/
March 19th, 2010 at 9:00 pm
“South Park” does Video of Tiger Redeemed! It’s a Hoot for fans of “SP”…and to be fair…there were some rofl laughing moments in the thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDCQHECmb6A
REMEMBER…TIGER IS BACK! NIKE IS HAPPY…Tiger at the “EXCLUSIVE MASTERS” coming to you for the BENEFIT of ….hold your breath….”THE GOLF INDUSTRY!”
Hey, it’s good for real estate! (Tiger is now designing Golf Courses near you…and hoping you’ll plunk down a ML or 2 to get into his exclusive gated Golf Developments he started doing (alas…during the bubble) so he’s under water along with having a wife who wants to knock his brains out with the club because of phone and real time sexual infidelity. :D
March 19th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
re: (sp)iPhones
If this is happening on an almost indiscriminate basis with law enforcement cases, how wide of a net is being cast on the intelligence side?
Via: Newsweek:
Amid all the furor over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials. But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors “were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device,” said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. “And I started asking the U.S. Attorney’s Office, ‘What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?’ ”
Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama’s Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government’s relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket…
http://cryptogon.com/?p=13933
~~
Intelligence Fusion Centers
^^Part of domestic surveillance system that incorporates private contractors, federal government, military, and local law enforcement
^^Originally organized by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice
^^Provide federal authorities with access to local databases and legally protected information concerning law-abiding citizens
^^Often function with military liaisons and integrate with National Guard…
http://publicintelligence.net/intelligence-fusion-centers
~~
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=intelligence+fusion+centers
#2. on the hit-parade is from our old friends at the CFR..
March 19th, 2010 at 9:52 pm
Mark: Many thanks. I had read about that leaking a month or two ago and thought it would be interesting but no way to get it.
BTW, I recommend to everyone the use of Truecrypt from http://www.truecrypt.org. It’s an open source encryption program that runs on the major platforms. You can encrypt your hard drive so even if the machine is stolen, the data is inaccessible if you’ve used a decently long and complicated passphrase. It looks like even the NSA would have some problems with it. If it stolen, you’ve lost the cost of the laptop, but the data is safe, assuming you have it backed up somewhere out of reach. (I use Jungledisk myself.)
The idea is that you encrypt the drive containing your operating system and data. This can be done while you’re using it. It makes you run some checks to makes sure everything is working ok. After that, when you start up the machine or bring it out of hibernation, you have to type in the passphrase you’ve assigned for the encryption. As I said, without the passphrase, even you can’t start the machine or get at the data, so make sure it’s something you can remember. I taught mine to my wife in case something happens to me, but I guess you could put the phrase in a safe deposit box. Once you’ve unlocked it, the machine runs normally with no noticeable slowdown.
If you don’t want to encrypt the whole drive, you can just create an encrypted area containing your important data. This can even be done with plausible deniability, where you create an encrypted dummy area with a few things on it, but the real stuff is in smaller encrypted portion hidden within that. If pressed, you can reveal the dummy portion and there’s no way prove that there is the smaller hidden portion. This feature is recommended to those who have to travel to totalitarian states where the government may want to examine your hard drive when you cross the border. Not naming names here.
March 19th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
@MEH: Thanks for the heads up. But we both know how this is going to end.
When courts can rule in violation of the Constitution that individual Congressional votes do not have to be recorded, we are on the slippery slope down.
So, Britain has 4 million surveillance cameras. How many do we have?
Most are totally clueless how many government surveillance cameras exist in the US today and where they are. LOL.
Tracking cell phones using their built-in GPS is there for the taking. Harder to turn it off than on.
Want to move around without being tracked? Turning your phone off won’t get it done. Pull the battery.
Oh, and your car? Has a built in recorder for x seconds of driving including speed, acceleration and braking. Perhaps location as well. And GPS tracking? I think it’s called OnStar. Or anonymously there.
The feds have been on this one for years.
March 19th, 2010 at 10:10 pm
MEH and Alfred e:
What can we say?
Moo?
March 19th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Mark E Hoffer Says:
March 19th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
U.S. Forest Service Admits Putting Surveillance Cameras on Public Lands
March 19th, 2010
Via: Island Packet:
————
MEH…
I wouldn’t put anything past SC in doing Surveillance on “Public Lands.” Georgia is probably doing it, too.
BTW: “Island Packet” used to be a breath of fresh air for the Left down there on Hilton Head. I wonder if it still is. Some of Charlie Fraser’s doing, I might think.
March 19th, 2010 at 11:29 pm
@MA: It’s a quandary. Unlimited surveillance in US gets funded under “Homeland Security” to several agencies as anti-terrorism. Actually it’s Brave New World citizen surveillance.
“Homeland Security”. What a false euphemistic term. The feds had been waiting years for the opening, and when they got it …..
Or did they allow it?
It can be defeated. And subjugated. But not easily. And not likely.
From here on, mooing is probably the best approach.
And practice bending over.
March 20th, 2010 at 12:01 am
“Actually it’s Brave New World citizen surveillance.”–alfred e, above
alfred,
it’s, too much, like that, Huxley’s Novels seem like, verbatim, Blueprints for what has been developing.
and, if we add: http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Ehrlich+Holdren+Mandatory+Sterilization+Obama%27s+Science+Czar
and..
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=Gates+Vaccines+to+reduce+population
it, quickly, goes beyond ‘mere’ surveillance, into such lovely topics as Eugenics..
http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=William+Henry+Gates+Sr.+Eugenics+Planned+Parenthood
~~
but, MA, to your Q:, I hear ya, ‘mooing’ may seem to be a reasonable response..
seems that we’ve navigated an Arc from Citizen –> Consumer –> “Conned-Mooer”
though, BR, himself, hit upon it recently, w/ Spartacus — maybe a prescription of a Weekend’s viewing, of such, ‘on loop’, would serve to help snap people out of it..
Complacency, as we know, kills more than, just, Time
March 20th, 2010 at 12:52 am
>> What money?…the FED just print paper…they are publishers.
Creating more of it reduces the value of the currency in my wallet. Yes, it is absolutely the public’s money.
March 20th, 2010 at 1:15 am
Theme music for MEH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ96oEwYrE8
March 20th, 2010 at 5:06 am
States battle feds on health care
Some states are trying to block key parts of President Obama’s health care plan, which could spark a legal fight.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-14-healthstates_N.htm
March 20th, 2010 at 5:30 am
Contestants turn torturers in French TV experiment
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100316/ts_afp/francetelevisionpsychologyentertainment
I was just thinking today about what would happen if someone like a Miley Cyrus were to tell her fans to kill someone. Would the more rabid zealots do it?
March 20th, 2010 at 5:52 am
Finding lots of good stuff tonight. It seems the giant has awoken. No wonder the elitists are panicked
People in power make better liars, study shows
Findings suggest that dishonesty comes more easily to those on top
http://tinyurl.com/ycnoo2t
Yeah baby! You can’t blame the ‘right wing whackos’ for this one:
Wyoming Governor Signs Sovereignty Resolution
This week, Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed House Joint Resolution 2 (HJ0002), claiming “sovereignty on behalf of the State of Wyoming and for its citizens under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government or reserved to the people by the Constitution of the United States.”
Freudenthal, a long-time Democrat, was previously a US attorney for the Clinton administration, and is currently serving his 2nd term as Governor of Wyoming. He endorsed Barack Obama for president and is commonly referred to as one of the most popular governors in the country.
http://tinyurl.com/yacmhw5
March 20th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
To Martin Wolf and all the other advocates of German consumption increases. Germany simply needs to increase military spending.