Saturday 7 June 2008

::> I Can No Longer Stomach Middle Class Americans of the Commissar Caste

--> Fascinating discussion in thread...

T.Ruth2power (234 posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Sat Jun-07-08 04:32 PM
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I Can No Longer Stomach Middle Class Americans of the Commissar Caste
Cheaper to rent slaves than own them- by Joe Bageant



These people do not consider themselves affluent or their families particularly elite. Yet their kids, after finishing expensive educations, will eventually take the reins of the administrative class, university deans, government bureaucrats, financial managers, publishing and electronic media people, etc. Then they will continue to stick the ole prickly pear to the other four-fifths of Americans, not to mention the world, without flinching. And they will continue to consider themselves quite ordinary Americans, and expect their children to do even better. Though it is nowhere near the middle demographically, this is the true middle class in America, the only group that meets the criteria we are trained to associate with the term "middle class." In truth they only represent about 20% of the population. The dangerous 20% in my opinion. Not that they ever ask me.

I'm like everyone else in my generation. I was raised on Ozzie and Harriet and the Dick Van Dyke Show. So the image of the middle class American life fried into my cranial wiring by the great hologram burner looks like that. People stashing money in the college fund for the Beav, and never getting tired or dirty at work ... sporting Argyle sweaters and smiling affectionately, asking, "Are you boys ready for a milk shake?" (Ozzie always had time to make a fucking milk shake. Did that guy ever actually go to work?). However, if the middle class is defined as the middle of the middle of Americans, then the real middle class guy or gal is probably driving a car parts delivery truck or clerking at the mall.

Anyway, I'm just et up wif class rage bubba! I can no longer stomach middle class Americans of the commissar caste. I'll blame them for any fucking thing I can think up. Because it is they who enable the great faceless economic machine to grind the piss out of the other four-fifths of the population. They've got theirs and they'll blow whoever they must to keep what they’ve got. The core of this nation’s gutlessness rest with this national bucket of soft little maggots. Because on the whole they are the only class with even modest political power politicians would actually listen to them if the screeched about justice instead of losing 10% on their 401Ks. But they won't. So I lay much of this nation's planetary and societal criminality on this three-quarter million dollar fuck-box crowd.

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2008/06/cheaper-to-rent.h...
:: El mundo necesitaría 1.300 nuevas nucleares para bajar las emisiones

La AIE llama a impulsar la energía atómica y las tecnologías de captura de CO2

EL PAÍS - Madrid - 07/06/2

Lograr reducir a la mitad las emisiones de CO2 de 2010 a 2050 es un reto difícil pero no imposible para la Agencia Internacional de la Energía (AIE). Pero sí costoso. Para lograrlo se precisará una inversión de al menos 45 billones de dólares (unos 28 billones de euros) y la combinación de las distintas energías existentes. Al incremento del uso de fuentes renovables para la generación de electricidad, este organismo de la OCDE propone, entre otras cosas, la construcción de 32 plantas nucleares anuales de 2010 a 2050, es decir, unas 1.280 centrales nuevas. Algo que, aseguran, supondría un ahorro de CO2 de un 6%. Actualmente hay 435 reactores en operación y 30 en construcción en todo el mundo.

"Es posible lograr un futuro energético sostenible", dice la AIE en el informe presentado ayer en Tokio. El estudio Perspectivas sobre tecnología energética 2008 asegura que la clave está en la tecnología. "Lo principal es una mayor eficiencia energética, la captura y almacenamiento de CO2, las fuentes renovables y la energía nuclear", sostiene. En este análisis, que traza posibles escenarios y estrategias hasta 2050 para reducir las emisiones, sostiene que la economía energética precisará "una revolución".

/... http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/mundo/necesitaria/1300/nuevas/nucleares/bajar/emisiones/elpepusoc/20080607elpepisoc_7/Tes


http://www.iea.org/
6 June 2008
Towards an Energy Revolution - IEA launches Energy Technology Perspectives 2008 in Japan
Read press release...
Access fact sheets…
See presentation…
Link to special ETP page…
:: La posible subida de tipos dispara el Euríbor al 5,4%, el máximo histórico

El repunte encarecerá las hipotecas y complica aún más la situación económica

LUIS DONCEL - Madrid - 07/06/2008

Un lío monumental. Si el Euríbor ya llevaba meses desbocado, a una distancia inusual de los tipos de interés oficiales, las palabras que el jueves salieron de la boca del presidente del Banco Central Europeo (BCE) han terminado de enmarañar la situación. Jean-Claude Trichet insinuó que en breve podía subir tipos, y el índice al que están ligados la mayor parte de créditos reaccionó de inmediato: escaló hasta el 5,42%, rompiendo de paso varios récords. No es sólo que el Euríbor esté ahora en el nivel máximo de sus casi 10 años de historia; es que la subida de ayer, del 0,29%, es la mayor que ha experimentado el índice en un solo día a lo largo de su ajetreada década de vida.

/... http://www.elpais.com/articulo/economia/posible/subida/tipos/dispara/Euribor/54/maximo/historico/elpepueco/20080607elpepieco_5/Tes

:: Sleeping in Cars in the USA
Crewleader (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Sat Jun-07-08 04:19 AM
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Sleeping in Cars in the USAUpdated at 4:19 AM

by Mike Whitney / June 5th, 2008



Look around. The evidence of a withering economy is everywhere. In “good times” consumers shun the canned meat aisle altogether, but no more. Today, Spam sales are soaring; grocery stores can’t keep it on the shelves. Everyone is looking for cheaper ways to feed their families. The Labor Dept. assures us that core-inflation is only 4 per cent, but everybody knows it’s load of malarkey. Food prices are going through the roof. White bread is up 13 percent, bacon is up 7 percent and peanut butter is up 9 percent. Inflation is rampant and there’s no end in sight. The dollar is closing in on the peso and working people are struggling just to get by. The bottom line is that more and more people in “the richest country on earth” are now surviving on processed pig-meat. That says it all.

In Santa Barbara parking lots are being converted into hostels so that families that lost their homes in the subprime fiasco can sleep in their cars and not be hassled by the cops. The same is true in LA where tent cities have sprung up around the railroad yards to accommodate the growing number of people who’ve lost their jobs or can’t afford to rent a room on service-industry wages. It’s tragic. Everywhere people are feeling the pinch; that’s why 9 out of 10 Americans now believe the country is now headed in the wrong direction and that’s why consumer confidence is at its lowest ebb since the Great Depression. This is the great triumph of Reagan’s free trade “trickle down” Voodoo economics; whole families living out of their cars waiting for the pawn shop to open.

The economy is on life-support. The rest of the world would be doing us all a favor if they decided to chuck the dollar and boycott US financial products altogether. That would put an end to Wall Street’s chicanery once and for all. Foreign investors should be demanding restitution and impounding American assets to compensate for the trillions of dollars they lost in the subprime/securitization swindle. Litigate, litigate, litigate; that’s the only way to make the guilty parties pay for their crimes. Either that or set up a gallows on Wall Street and get down to business.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/06/sleeping-in-cars-...
:: ECB FOCUS-Rate signal shows ECB betting on growth surprise
Fri Jun 6, 2008 12:27pm EDT

By Marc Jones and Krista Hughes

FRANKFURT, June 6 (Reuters) - By dropping a blatant hint that a July interest rate hike is on the cards, the European Central Bank is once again betting it knows better than those who fear Europe's economy is heading for trouble.

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet shocked financial markets and dashed economists' expectations for the next move to be a cut when he revealed on Thursday that policymakers had weighed up an immediate hike in rates and were seriously considering a rise next month.

Analysts are now wondering whether a July hike to 4.25 percent would prove to be a one-off shot across the bows or signal the start of a more concerted efforts to tame inflation.

"The question of course now is, how far are they going to go?" said Merrill Lynch economist Klaus Baader. "I would be surprised if one 25 basis point (hike) will do the job, it's more likely to go through to 4.5 percent."

The ECB is facing the toughest inflation environment in its 10-year history and policymakers including Germany's Axel Weber and Austria's Klaus Liebscher have warned the bank cannot sit on the sidelines as price pressures accelerate.

Although Trichet made it clear not all 21 Governing Council members agreed with the call for higher rates, markets are betting the hawks will win through.

Euribor interest rate futures price in two hikes to 4.50 percent by the end of 2008, effectively assuming the ECB will now complete the tightening cycle begun in late 2005 but derailed in mid-2007 when credit market turmoil struck.

This course of action would mean the ECB -- as it has done in the past -- is gambling on the euro-zone economy turning out to be more resilient than other forecasters expect.

Until Thursday's shock, economists had based predictions for a rate cut this year on expectations growth would nosedive after a stronger-than-expected start to 2008.

Earlier this week the International Monetary fund (IMF) predicted euro-zone growth would drop to 1.25 percent next year and urged the ECB keep rates unchanged, a call echoed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

ECB staff also trimmed growth projections for next year but Trichet said he thought the slowdown would be shortlived, bottoming out later this year before improving again in 2009.

"The economic fundamentals of the euro area are sound... On a quarterly basis real GDP growth is projected to reach a trough in 2008, before gradually recovering thereafter," he said.

DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME?

It is not the first time the ECB has been at odds with economists and global institutional heavyweights.

In late 2005, the IMF and OECD also urged the ECB to wait until the recovery was on solid footing before tinkering with monetary policy. The ECB ignored the advice and raised rates for first time in more than two years.

At the time, and against the grain, the Frankfurt-based central bank was predicting a sustainable recovery with growth close to 2 percent in 2006 and 2007. The figures were later surpassed and the ECB was subsequently proved correct.

Analysts said the ECB was making a similar bet this time, but would likely be proved wrong.

"I think they (the ECB) genuinely believe growth will resume potential at the turn of the year. That's the great divide between them and the market at the moment," said UniCredit analyst Aurelio Maccario.

/continues... http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINL0693988320080606?rpc=44&sp=true

Friday 6 June 2008

:: UBS may reveal U.S. clients' names in probe: report
DogPoundPup Donating Member (675 posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 01:33 PM
Original message
UBS may reveal U.S. clients' names in probe: report
Source: Reuters

(Reuters) - UBS AG is considering whether to reveal the names of up to 20,000 wealthy American clients as federal authorities intensify an investigation into offshore bank accounts, the New York Times said on Friday, citing people close to the inquiry.

Federal investigators believe some clients may have used offshore accounts to hide as much as $20 billion in assets from the Internal Revenue Service, enabling them to evade at least $300 million in federal income taxes, the newspaper said, citing a government official connected with the investigation.

A spokesman for UBS declined to comment on the report and said the bank's position had not changed.

"We are taking the investigations very seriously. We are putting in a lot of resources in order to work with the investigators. We will analyze these points and if necessary take corrective measures," he said.

According to the newspaper, UBS said it was cooperating with investigators and that it was against the Swiss bank's policy to help Americans evade taxes.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSBNG280063200...



In related "offshore U.S. tax evasion" news...
10 Big Businesses That Have Moved Their Headquarters Abroad to Pay Less U.S. Taxes

Some call the practice of moving a company abroad to avoid taxes "corporate inversion," while others deem these businesses “expatriate corporations.” Whichever term you prefer, the fact is that several successful American companies have moved their headquarters overseas in recent years to avoid hefty U.S. taxes.

#1. Halliburton: Houston-based Halliburton, which offers a broad array of oil-field technologies and services to upstream oil and gas customers worldwide, announced the opening of a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai on March 12, 2007. The company, which was once led by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, said that its relocation was part of a strategy that it announced in mid-2006 to concentrate its efforts in the Middle East in order to attract business............
finish reading @ http://www.hrworld.com/features/10-overseas-companies-0...
/Thread Here:... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3341206
:: NFPs fell by 49,000 - unemployment up to 5.5%

UpInArms Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 01:07 PM
Response to Reply #2
20. NFPs fell by 49,000 - unemployment up to 5.5%
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/jobless-rate-soar...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. unemployment rate jumped by a half percentage point to 5.5% in May on the biggest increase in seasonally adjusted unemployment in 33 years, the Labor Department reported Friday.

Nonfarm payrolls fell by 49,000 in May, the fifth consecutive decrease and in line with expectations of economists. See Economic Calendar.

The economy has lost 324,000 jobs so far this year.

Unemployment rose by 861,000 to 8.5 million, the government said. It is the biggest increase in unemployment since January 1975.

The 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate was a shock, as economists expected a much smaller 0.1 percentage point gain to 5.1%. The jobless rate is the highest since October 2004. It was the biggest percentage point gain in unemployment since 1986.

The report is likely to have little impact on the Federal Open Market Committee, which meets in three weeks. Analysts expect no change in the 2% federal fund target rate in the near future. Fed officials have said they believe the economy and the job market are likely to worsen in coming months before bouncing back by the end of the year.

In May, job losses were concentrated in construction, manufacturing, retail and temporary help jobs. Health-care and government continued to be the bright spots for hiring.

The average work week was unchanged at 33.7 hours. Total hours worked in the economy dropped by 0.1%.

Of 274 industries, 45.4% were hiring in May. Of 84 manufacturing industries, 33.3% were hiring.

Average hourly earnings rose 5 cents, or 0.3%, to $17.94. Average wages are up 3.5% in the past year, falling short of the increase in consumer prices.



A broader measure of unemployment that includes discouraged workers rose to 9.7% from 9.2%.

...more...
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DemReadingDU Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 01:14 PM
Response to Reply #2
21. Increase in the jobless rate is the biggest since 1986


6/6/08
The unemployment rate took its biggest jump in more than two decades in May as employers once again cut jobs from U.S. payrolls, according to a government report Friday, showing a job market weaker than expected.

The unemployment rate soared to 5.5% from only 5% in April. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had only forecast the closely watched rate would rise to 5.1% in the month.

It was the biggest one-month jump in unemployment since February 1986, and the 5.5% rate is the highest level seen since October 2004.

A jump of this magnitude, even over a period of several months, is considered a warning sign of a recession. The unemployment rate is now a full percentage point higher than a year ago.

The Labor Department also reported that there was a net loss of 49,000 jobs in May, compared to a revised loss of 28,000 jobs in April. That was actually a touch better than economists' forecast of a loss of 60,000 jobs, but it marked the fifth straight month that the economy has lost jobs.

Revisions to payroll estimates from earlier this year added 15,000 to the job losses in the first four months of the year. With the May loss, the economy has now shed 324,000 jobs so far this year, the worst start to a year since 2002, when the nation was still struggling with the after-effects of a recession

http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/06/news/economy/jobs_may/i...
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Prag Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 02:12 PM
Response to Reply #21
38. 1986?
Whoooowheee... Maybe it would've been better if they'd sort of snuck up on it, slowly, by telling the -TRUTH- for
the past while?
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UpInArms Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 03:16 PM
Response to Reply #21
56. That 70s show - The 1970s were bad enough the first time around
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/jobless-report-su...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The 1970s were bad enough the first time around.

Anybody who lived through oil shocks, gas lines, stagflation and leisure suits can't help but hope that those days will never return.

But Friday's jump in unemployment, coupled with unprecedented jumps in oil prices and Middle East political tensions, sure seem to have us heading back to a pretty depressing future.

The jobless rate rose 0.5% to 5.5% in May, the biggest month-to-month jump in seasonally adjusted unemployment in 33 years. See related story.

True, the Labor Department numbers have to attempt to account for a time of year when lots of temporary workers come into the labor force. But the size of the jump and its breadth really overwhelm any hopes that the number is a fluke.

The timing couldn't be worse for Ben Bernanke.

...more...
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DemReadingDU Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 03:41 PM
Response to Reply #56
69. Poor Ben


I remember those 70s. I had 2 preschoolers, going back to college, 1 car to the family, and spouse unemployed. But hey, we survived, and can do it again.

I do worry about my kids, now both grown and in their 30s with houses and their preschoolers. It's so different today where families have bigger houses, 2 cars, and both parents working. Not going to be easy when they realize they will need to cutback.
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Tansy_Gold (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 04:52 PM
Response to Reply #69
88. What Kevin Phillips had to say about the 70s
When I read this a couple of nights ago, I burst out laughing. Talk about "right on"!

from "American Theocracy: The peril and politics of radical religion, oil, and borrowed money in the 21st century", (c) 2006

p. 53-56

The larger point, of course, is that because the twenty-first-century United States has a pervasive oil and gas culture from its own earlier zenith -- with an intact cultural and psychological infrastructure -- it's no surprise that Americans cling to and defend an ingrained fuel habit. Many of the museums and exhibits date from the 1980s. The hardening of old attitudes and reaffirmation of the consumption ethic since those years may signal an inability to turn back.

The chance to do so came a quarter century ago. From the late seventies to the early eighties, oil consumption in the United States underwent a powerful reversal. Energy-using Americans had been scared. In 1976 the political combination of the Watergate scandal, the energy crisis, inflation, economic recession, and military collapse in South Vietnam (1975) dominated that year's election and cost Republicans the White House, albeit only by a thin margin. The new Democratic chief executive, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter -- by vocation a peanut grower and by religious belief a Sunday school-teaching Baptist -- had campaigned on a reformist vision. Even Texas gave him a narrow victory, casting its final twentieth-century vote for a Democratic president

Forswearing the trappings of the imperial presidency, Carter left his limousine to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day in January 1977. Weeks later he made an energy speech on television wearing a cardigan sweater. In mid-1979 the embattled president underscored the second OPEC oil crisis by asking for "the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun." Nixon, before being completely overwhelmed by Watergate, had taken a similar but less ambitious tack on energy independence. Soon thereafter Congress passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which among other things mandated a doubling of passenger-car fuel economy by 1985. Carter went further in 1977, declaring "the moral equivalent of war."

The ideology and culture of the four Carter years were broadly anti-imperial, as they stressed energy conservation; peace (rather than arms sales) in the Middle East; skepticism of CIA clandestine operations and the overthrow of foreign governments; reduced conspicuous consumption; federal missionary work on behalf of solar power and renewable energy sources; smaller automobiles; and the enactment of a 55 mph federal speed limit. Carter also promoted government restraint in budgetary matters and a vague attempt to crystallize "less is more" and "smaller is better" viewpoints, both of these in opposition to earlier mandates to spend, build, produce, and consume.

Militarily the Carter White House spoke softly and also managed to carry a pretty small stick. After the revolutionary government of Iran in 1979 seized fifty-three Americans from the U.S. embassy, the air rescue mission Carter ordered in the spring of 1980 failed. With the helicopters down in the Iranian desert a symbol of his greater ineptitude, Carter lost the 1980 election and is remembered as a weak president.

The 1975-1985 revolution in energy efficiency, however, was a relative success. Together with spiking oil prices, a conservationist ethic tightened America's energy belt. Between 1977 and 1985 -- and in the face of an expanding economy -- oil demand fell by more than one-sixth. The percentage of oil consumed in the United States annually that had to be imported shrank from 46 percent to 30 percent. Inasmuch as two-thirds of the petroleum used in the United States went to keep automobiles on the road, the CAFE standards enacted in 1975 were a linchpin in this reduction. Where the average car in the United States got just fifteen miles per gallon that year, the figure by 1985 was twenty-five. California was in the forefront, having followed Governor Jerry Brown's call to move away from dependence on nonrenewable fossil fuels.

Nationally, new homes were often twice as energy efficient as similar-sized predecessors. Appliances made even bigger gains. New refrigerators, for example, used only one-quarter the power of pre-1970s models. As for the U.S. manufacturing sector as a whole, its energy efficiency improved by 30 percent between 1977 and 1986. The conservation "weapon," once fired, was probably at least as efficient as the military operation would have been.

. . . .

By the mid-1980s, support for energy conservation was ebbing. For one thing, the Reagan-Bush administration had been lukewarm to it, reducing spending on solar energy by two-thirds, deemphasizing efficiency, and moving the spotlight back to petroleum. . . .

Plummeting oil and gasoline prices soon put the ignition key back into the great American automobile culture. Further federal tightening of fuel-economy standards was rejected in 1985, adn Detroit also took advantage of the statute's permissive standards for light trucks by developing its soon-to-be bestsellers: sport-utility vehicles. For ten years, technological improvement had concentrated on fuel economy. Now automobile manufacturers returned to their pre-1973 priorities: powever, acceleration, and speed.


(emphasis in the original)



Phillips points out that both Reagan and Bush I -- and of course subsequently boooosh II and cheeeeney -- had deep roots in the oil bidness and were not likely to veer from a high-gasoline-demand philosophy. California has long been a major oil-producing state, as has Texas, so petroleum had a major impact on the economies of both states, not to mention the urban sprawl, lack of mass transit, etc., and concomitant automobile usage that distinguished both of those geographically large states.


Like many SMWer and DUers, I lived through those "interesting" times as an adult -- my daughter was born in 76, my son in 77. In 1979, we built an earth-sheltered house and got a huge tax credit for it. It was energy efficient enough that we heated the whole 2000-square-feet of it with a single wood-burning stove and about 1.5 cords of hardwood per northern Indiana winter. I don't miss Indiana, but I miss that house!

Almost got into an argument with BF the other night because he was saying the ONLY thing needed to turn the current situation around is for corporations to accept lower profits. I've learned not to waste my breath when he's got his mind made up on some simplistic resolution, but because I do remember the 70s and what we went through to survive them, I believe the general population needs to adapt to a different attitude. As we learned from Mother Earth News all those years ago, less IS more. Instead of dreading the arrival of the propane tanker that filled most of our friends' tanks to heat their homes through some of those bitter 70s and early 80s winters, we went out in the woods with the kids and selected a couple of trees to cut for the next winter's supply. We watched for squirrels and rabbits and deer and hawks. We hunted mushrooms. We marvelled at the spring's first violets (purple and yellow ones!), the redbud trees, the dogwood and sassafrass. We raked leaves, and the kids and dogs rolled in the piles before we took the leaves back to the woods to compost. We bought our soda in returnable bottles, not throw-away plastic. We remembered that we are part of the earth, not separate from it.

In some ways, the 70s weren't all that bad. Leisure suits, on the other hand. ..... eeeeeeiuw!


Tansy Gold

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Dr.Phool Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 04:08 PM
Response to Reply #56
76. What happened to that nice rosey report yesterday? It said we added jobs.

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UpInArms Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 04:25 PM
Response to Reply #76
80. ...


:hi:
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ozymandius Donating Member (1000+ posts) Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 04:43 PM
Response to Reply #76
86. Yeah what happened? Could it be that whole thing was fiction?
:eyes:
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Ghost Dog (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 04:58 PM
Response to Reply #56
89. "leisure suits" rofl.
:rofl:
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UpInArms Donating Member (1000+ posts) Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list Fri Jun-06-08 02:58 PM
Response to Reply #2
50. RPT-Gauge of U.S. economy edges lower in week - ECRI
http://www.reuters.com/article/bondsNews/idUSN064227052...

NEW YORK, June 6 (Reuters) - A gauge of future U.S. economic growth edged lower in the latest week and its annualized growth rate slipped deeper into recessionary territory, a research group said on Friday.

The Economic Cycle Research Institute, a New York-based independent forecasting group, said its Weekly Leading Index inched down to 132.4 in the week to May 30 from 132.8 in the prior period.

The fall in the index was due to higher interest rates, lower stock prices and weaker housing activity, said Melinda Hubman, research associate at ECRI.

The index's annualized growth rate fell to negative 6.2 percent, from minus 6.0 percent, which was its highest level since the week of Dec. 21.

...more...

Apture