The penny clipping reminds me of the first computer banking fraud I ever heard about. Back in the early days of electronic banking, there was a consortium of banks in DC who hired a programmer to write check sorting programs, depositing the checks in the proper accounts and re-figuring the balances. The first part of the program, invisible to all but the programmer, skimmed the fractions of pennies generated from interest, which the banks thought they had kept for themselves.

By the time the fraud was discovered, just a few months after implementation, he had skipped to the Caimans with a few million.

Goldman practically owns the S&P. I and others have been calling this a suckers rally for some time now. Goldman’s profits do not come from wealth creation but from draining money off the markets. If I was an institutional investor, like a pension fund, I would be mad as hell because Goldman’s profits are coming out of my pocket.

But note that Goldman made even more of its profits from commodities. In particular, off of oil. Given an oil glut and weak economic activity, oil should be trading in the low $30 range yet even with some fall off in prices it is still trading at twice that. Guess where a lot of that differential is going. Goldman Sachs isn’t just setting up pension funds to take a big fall. It is draining your wallet everytime you fill up your gas tank.

Goldman and the other TBTF institutions are really nothing more than financial terrorists. al Qaeda despite the hype was never much more than a pin prick to us. Companies like Goldman on the other hand have brought our economy to its knees. They are terrorists in ways that al Qaeda could never dream.

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

Being laid off is an expensive proposition.

I was laid off about five months ago. Besides the obvious costs in money, ego, stress and lost retirement, not just for me, but for my wife and son, there are the hidden costs of what could be called the “little” predators, as opposed to the big predators we have all heard of: banks, Wall Street investment firms, creators of indecipherable derivative debts, subprime mortgages palmed off on the ignorant and desparate-for-the-American-Dream masses, the trillion-dollar bailout of the creators of those derivatives and the predators selling those subprime mortgages.

The little predators are the companies, Web sites, and entrepeneurs who spring up to provide—at a cost, plus hidden cost—resume writing aid, job-search sites, interview skills training, high falutin’ sales jobs where the dangled-in-your-face salary stretches into the hundreds of thousands while the real income is more like the $10 per hour you could get from unemployment.

My recent credit-card bills were jawdropping, as the hidden costs were finally revealed. For extra features on CareerBuilder, where no price is in an obvious place—if anywhere at all—I paid $530 last month and got zero job interviews. The networking service, LinkedIn, charged $200 for services I hadn’t realized I had incurred in my attempts to spread the word that I was available for employment. I DID get interviews to sell all kinds of insurance, however. Of course, I had to have the costs of software and classes upfront, with a promise of repayment in the foggy future. Those costs? $400. And I haven’t even explored the cost of the state of New York licensing exam I must take before making the promised, or inferred, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, there was a mediabistro fee of $100 that I hadn’t expected. I have to clarify that I knew I had asked for additional features from mediabistro and CareerBuilder and LinkedIn, but nowhere were the costs displayed, and digging down into the Web sites is not appealing when you’re pressed for time job searching and surviving.

Again, while Wall Street idiots and outright thieves were bailed out, the “coal shovelers” like myself now have to pay $89 a month for a subway pass instead of $81, $2.25 per ride instead of $2.00. It’s easy to push the cost onto the schmuck with no power as long as the cost to him is fairly small, small enough so he won’t take his shovel and storm city hall, the White House, or Capitol Hill, or Wall Street. It’s a death of a thousand cuts. Meanwhile, grocery stores now seem to charge at least $4 for EVERYTHING and McDonald’s “meal deals” in midtown are nearing $8—to eat there! Gracious!

Four of our married friends from church have had to move in with the wife’s parents to avoid paying NYC’s exhorbitant rents.

The comp/severance package my worldwide conglomerate gave me when I was laid off five months ago? Sure looked good, but human resources neglected to tell this coal shoveler that 42 percent of it would be taken out for taxes, because it was not “regular” income.

As the Great Depression II drags on, the prospect of having to move in with a friend or family looms, as do an inability to pay for COBRA health insurance (at $275 per month just for me, not including my wife and child), which would mean my son would not get his Concerta or a speech-delay specialist, and my wife an operation she really should have.

With journalism in newspapers a dying field, salaries for my like aren’t going to rise. In fact, to get into Web site media, many of my associates are “pre-lancing,” which is a newly coined word for “free lancing for no money.” The idea is to work for free for one week, learn the new Web site media, and get a good reference from the “pre-lance” “employer.”

For Obama to change all of this, he will have to be FDR, Lincoln, Kennedy and LBJ rolled into one. He will have to push, shove and DEMAND that changes be made to help the little guy. Even the mighty baseball NY Yankees need the little teams to play, or there would be no games to televise and from which to make the huge TV revenue they thrive on.

People are not getting the message, except those who actually ARE CURRENTLY homeless. On any Friday night, you can still see people ignorant of the world’s crisis, the price of gas, the need to cut back from consumerism. They cruise the main streets of midtown or of any sector in the five boroughs, with the men’s arms hanging out over the convertible’s door as their “arm-candy” Friday night date, snuggles up next to their shoulder. Oblivious to the impending Depression and/or collapse as mentioned as a real possibility in Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.”

They blare songs like the following out the convertible’s windows, while I sit in my apartment pounding on my keyboard, sending out resume after resume, like some coal miner shoveling coal and owing my soul to “the company store”—in this case, in the future, the elites of Wall Street, when they make me their serf.

“Little Deuce Coupe”
Sung by The Beach Boys

Little deuce coupe
You don’t know what I got

Well I’m not braggin babe so don’t put me down
But I’ve got the fastest set of wheels in town
When something comes up to me he don’t even try
Cause if I had a set of wings man I know she could fly
She’s my little deuce coupe
You don’t know what I got

Just a little deuce coupe with a flat head mill
But she’ll walk a thunderbird like (she’s) standin still
She’s ported and relieved and she’s stroked and bored.
She’ll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored

She’s my little deuce coupe
You don’t know what I got

She’s got a competition clutch with the four on the floor
And she purrs like a kitten till the lake pipes roar
And if that ain’t enough to make you flip your lid
There’s one more thing, I got the pink slip daddy!

And comin’ off the line when the light turns green
Well she blows ‘em outta the water like you never seen
I get pushed out of shape and its hard to steer
When I get rubber in all four gears

She’s my little deuce coupe
You don’t know what I got

Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.
These seven Wall Street firms are (in order of money given): Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.

derived from data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, quoted from “Obama’s Money Cartel”
By PAM MARTENS

on Counterpunch.

Hope-n-Change®!

“The AMM offers 100 shares at $20.05. The institutional algo declines the trade. It offers $20.04. The algo declines the trade. Then it offers $20.03 – and the algo accepts the trade.”

There is no such thing as “nothing happens and immediatly in computing” There is a response, it’s either no or yes.