his echonomic people are Chicago boys.. no regulation of speculation, or Corportists.. we are doomed, they are eating us alive
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/kleinsnip... "The market has gotten out of balance," he /obama/ says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama--who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade--is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School. ...snip"
snip"...Another of Obama's Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette's vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed)--and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge-fund tax loophole...snip"
http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3252.shtmlMay 5, 2008, 00:19
The price of crude oil today is not made according to any traditional relation of supply to demand. It’s controlled by an elaborate financial market system as well as by the four major Anglo-American oil companies. As much as 60 percent of today’s crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price. How?
First, the crucial role of the international oil exchanges in London and New York is crucial to the game. NYMEX in New York and the ICE Futures in London today control global benchmark oil prices which, in turn, set most of the freely traded oil cargo. They do so via oil futures contracts on two grades of crude oil: West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent.
A third rather new oil exchange, the Dubai Mercantile Exchange (DME), trading Dubai crude, is more or less a daughter of NYMEX, with NYMEX President James Newsome sitting on the board of DME and most key personnel British or American citizens.
l.com/artman/publish/article_3252.shtml
http://www.star-telegram.com/ed_wallace/story/651928.htmlsnip"...Fiddling While We Burn
There it is in plain sight for everyone to see, exactly what I’ve been reporting for the past few years: Many individuals who are investing in oil and natural gas futures are going out in the media and trying to convince the American public that either we are out of oil or there is a serious supply shortage of crude against worldwide demand. The question is: Does it surprise you to discover that the US Senate investigated the rigging of the oil market by speculators in the summer of 2006 – and concluded that there was no supply and demand problem with oil? Did you know that their conclusion was that speculators were responsible for a 70 percent overcharge in the price of oil in the months leading up to the summer of 2006? ..."snip
snip"...Professor Michael Greenberger of the University of Maryland, a former board member of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, testified in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on December 14 of last year. Under discussion that day was the manipulation of the energy markets and prices, but Professor Greenberger added these comments: "Three, four months from now, you’re going to have a hearing on the subprime meltdown, and you’re going to find that the very same legislation
deregulated something called collateralized debt obligations, CDOs." That legislation, friends, directly ties the mortgage meltdown to the high price of energy today..."snip
http://www.star-telegram.com/ed_wallace/story/659081.html
snip"...No Conscience in Congress?
All you hear daily is that the world has a severe shortage of oil, or you can buy only 200 pounds of rice at one time, or we will have a gasoline crisis this summer, etc. But it takes only a minute to find hundreds of quotes from highly respected oil and economic analysts, (not to mention CEOs of the major oil companies), that completely dismiss the claim of oil, gas or food shortages that have been headlining the news.
Even more troubling is that within months of the CFMA’s going into effect, we knew it had enabled easy manipulation of any energy market, but nothing was done to fix it. Nor was anything done when the Senate held its hearings on this matter in 2006, or in the House hearings last December.
Today we call this situation the "Enron Loophole," but that’s untrue. It’s not a loophole: it was a new law passed in 2000 – and far more individuals than Ken Lay have used that law to line their pockets with hundreds of billions of American consumers’ hard-earned dollars. That’s not my opinion, that’s direct testimony by numerous experts before both the House and Senate.
Professor Greenberger warned about our "New American Economy" far better than I could:
"Should we have an economy that’s based on whether people make good or bad bets? Or should we have an economy where people build companies, create manufacturing, do inventions, advance the American society and make it more productive? We are rewarding people for sitting at their computers and punching in bets. That’s not the way our economy is going to be built, and India and China, with their focus on science and industry and building real businesses, are going to eat our lunch, unless the American public wakes up and puts an end to an economy that praises and makes heroes out of speculators...."
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