Financial and World News Noisy Room Update – 03/02/11

Published in March 2nd, 2011

STOCKS PLUNGE, THE MIDEAST CRASHES, AND GOLD SURGES: Here’s What You Need To Know

HUGE Explosion Reported In Benghazi

Complete Ineptitude Of Saudi Government Fuels Public Rage

Huge Crash In Cocoa After Technical Glitch

Check Out Pictures Of The USS Kearsarge, The Amphibious Assault Ship Zooming Towards Libya Right Now

Consumer Reports Pees All Over The Chevy Volt

Public Employees Paid More Than Private Workers in 41 States

Now The Saudi Market Is Off 7%, And This Is The Article Everyone’s Looking At

The One “High-Risk” Arab Country That Hasn’t Revolted Yet

Guess The One Country That’s LOVING The Crisis In The Middle East

The CIA Operative Who Shot Two Pakistanis Is Now A Hostage — Obama Needs To Resolve This Quickly

The Bullying Mob; Everything Tea Partiers Were Not

We’re on the verge of mob violence in Wisconsin

Flying over the cuckoo’s nest

The Lion Sleeps

‘It’s About the Children!’

“When the money stops flowing to Main St…”

SEA OF RED INK, CHINESE DEBT LARGER THAN ESTIMATED

The Saudi Market Crash Is Continuing, And Qaddafi Is Now Bombing Rebel Territories

A Super Quick And Dirty Overview Of The Saudi Economy

Shanghai Is Slipping, Oil Is Above $100, And Japan Is Getting Crushed

Now The Saudi Market Is REALLY Crashing, And There’s A Rumor Going Around Of Riots

European Markets Are Sliding Across The Board, While Libya-Connected Bank UniCredit Hits New Lows

In Just The Last Hour, The Saudi Market Crash Got A Lot Worse

How Green Is Your Lost Job?

Pakistan’s only Christian Cabinet member assassinated

Ohio Lawmakers Battle Over Union Bargaining Rights

Iran would “slaughter” people in revolt: defector

Government shutdown avoided for now, with a two-week funding extension

Mideast Unrest Rattles Markets

GAO Audit Hits Agencies for Uncoordinated, Inefficient Programs

Morning Bell: Why Liberals Love Government Waste

Low-Flush Toilets: The San Francisco Treat?

Highly Paid Federal Workers Rally to Support Union Allies in Wisconsin

Governors to Congress: We Could Do Better If Washington Got Out of the Way

Oil jumps after Libyan air strike near oil terminal

Gadhafi vows fight to last man

‘It’s a conspiracy to take our oil’

Forces retake towns near capital

Rebels push back Libya regime attack on oil port

…Want UN air strike

Farrakhan: Jews are pushing the US into war

US warships enter Suez Canal on way to Libyan waters

Panic on borders

Astonishing wealth of Gaddafi and his family revealed

YEMEN RAGES

Announced Job Cuts ‘Rose 20% From Year Ago’

Forbes: Obama is Carter

Gunman fires on US airmen at German airport; 2 dead, 2 wounded

Supreme Court rules for military funeral protesters

Barbour says Obama cheers for higher gas prices

Wisc GOP passes bill to fine AWOL Dems

Ohio union bill set for vote today

Idaho county files for bankruptcy

SHOWDOWN: Bernanke warns Republicans: Don’t hold debt-ceiling hostage

Gaddafi and the Passover story

Feds Launch Massive Organized Crime Crackdown (Hat Tip: Nancy Jacques)

The Islamic Demolition of the Statue of Liberty (Hat Tip: Brian B.) Take a look at this crap. Your eyes will bleed and your blood pressure will skyrocket…

Bernanke Doesn’t Rule Out More Bond Buying to Aid Economy

Reid, Boehner Trade Jabs On Budget Extension

NFL Labor Talks in Two-Minute Warning

R.I. Teachers to Rally in Protest of Mass Firings

Wisconsin Gov’s Budget Chock Full o’ Cuts

U.N. Builds Special Video Relationships with Google, Brit Broadcaster

Dialysis Can Wait… Union Workers Leave Sick & Elderly Patients Stranded So They Can Attend Rally

Eric Holder: Black Panther Case Demeans “My People”

Governor Scott Walker Delivers Wisconsin State Budget Address

Teachers’ Unions 101: “A” is for “agitation”

One measly deepwater drilling permit: Hoo-freaking-rah

Inflation Is Here – Just Open Up Your Eyes And Look At These 5 Financial Charts!

QE3? Several Top Federal Reserve Officials Seem To Think That More Quantitative Easing Is Necessary

See the Google Earth Images That May Have Sparked the Bahrain Unrest

Blaze Exclusive: Socialist Mantra Hidden in Grade School Chants

Message to the American Worker

SurvivalBlog:

Spot Silver was at $34.65 per Troy Ounce.

Is the U.S. dollar still a safe haven?

Peter Schiff: “We’re in the Early Stages of a Depression”

History Tells Us That A Surge In Fuel Costs Makes A US Recession Likely

Silver Squeeze to Continue

The Silver Bullet And The Silver Shield

Why The Financial Werewolves Hate Silver

Marc Faber: I Think We Are All Doomed

Source:  Financial and World News Noisy RoomUpdate – 03/02/11

Message to the American Worker

Glenn's message to the average hard working American, union or non-union..it does not matter because though we may disagree on certain issues, we will all have to weather this storm together. Right now, we are all finding ourselves in the same situation- it is getting harder and harder to make ends meet. Union members are now in a situation that every American may soon find themselves in..rich and poor. They are being asked to lose a pension, take a cut or lose a job. The cuts are necessary, but they have worked hard for their pensions. We are all going to have make sacrifices very soon…

Video:  Message to the American Worker

Glenn Beck Show Notes (3.1.11)

On tonight’s TV show, Glenn asked what the American Dream really meant, and how it could really be achieved. He spoke to everyday Americans, including and especially the typical union worker, and talked about the difference between those who think man can rule himself and those who think that man has to be ruled because he doesn’t know what is best for them.

Those who are arguing for bigger government don’t think man can rule himself. These are men like Richard Trumka and Cass Sunstein who say they are helping when they are really regulating. They bring change but remove choice. They bring help but breed dependence. That’s not the American Experiment.

Glenn also touched on:

Charlie Sheen
Noodle Guy
Louis Farrakhan

All super happy fun topics!

Links to stories and information used in tonight’s program:

1. Gas prices up for 7 days in a row
http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/01/news/economy/gas_prices/index.htm

2. No Inflation? That’s Not What Food Prices Are Saying
http://www.cnbc.com/id/41831886

3. Cotton Soars on Tightening World Supply; Orange Juice Fluctuates
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-03-01/cotton-soars-on-tightening-world-supply-orange-juice-fluctuates.html

Young Madison Socialist Reveals Popular ‘Noodles & Company‘ Restaurant Is Actually Harsh ’Dictatorship’
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/young-madison-socialist-reveals-popular-noodles-company-restaurant-is-actually-harsh-dictatorship/ <http://www.theblaze.com/stories/young-madison-socialist-reveals-popular-noodles-company-restaurant-is-actually-harsh-dictatorship/>

• The nationwide chain has several locations in Madison, Wisconsin. One young socialist, Rob Lewis (ISO member) who is involved in the protests around Madison is now blowing the lid off the real story.
• Aaron Kennedy, the founder of Noodles, grew up on a farm with few to no connections to money. Like my friend Rob, Kennedy also studied at the University of Wisconsin. At 29, while eating at a Chinese restaurant, Kennedy had an idea, and scribbled his business plan on a napkin.
• Scraping some money together from his friends and family and maxing out eight credit cards, Kennedy opened the first Noodles in his basement, and then put together a team with whom he’d build and operate 100 Noodles branches all on their own. It is now a $75 million franchise with 240 locations in 18 different states, providing jobs to over 3,000 employees just like Rob. This is what the American Dream looks like.
• Under Lewis’ vision, however everything Kennedy has worked for would be taken away from him. The status he has earned for himself through his achievements would be reduced to that of one filling out an application for the very business he built from the ground up. Perhaps my imagination is limited, but I at the moment I cannot imagine a greater humiliation. This is what socialism looks like.

ABOUT AARON KENNEDY, FOUNDER & FORMER CHAIRMAN OF NOODLES
(source: <http://www.bus.wisc.edu/alumni/profiles/aaron_kennedy.asp> Univ of Wisconsin)

• Earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism and English at Augustana College in his home state of Illinois and his MBA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• He is on the board of the University of Wisconsin Business School, has been named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, and is a guest lecturer at several universities including the University of Colorado, University of Denver, University of Wisconsin and the Cooking School of the Rockies.
• It all began when Kennedy, then the marketing director of a New York City design agency, visited an Asian noodle shop in Greenwich Village in 1993. As he sampled the restaurant’s collection of Asian-influenced dishes, he realized noodles are a staple all over the world. Although Kennedy had never considered a job in the restaurant industry, his previous experience as a brand manager at Oscar Mayer and PepsiCo was relevant to the task he had in mind.
• That weekend he took his wife out to dinner and shared his idea, jotting down a rough business plan right there. He refined the concept and approached 25 friends and family members for the $250,000 needed to get started.
• Kennedy and Executive Chef Ross Kamens opened the first restaurant in Denver, Colorado, in 1995. The second restaurant opened in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, six months later.

ROB LEWIS SOTS
ROB LEWIS IS A NOODLES EMPLOYEE & MEMBER OF ISO. DURING THE INTERVIEW HE INVITES THE REPORTER TO COME TO A SOCIALIST MEETING THE FOLLOWING DAY CALLED “ FROM CAIRO TO MADISON”

Rob on classes SOT

• There are two fundamental classes that are just a plain fact in society. You either work for someone else or you work for yourself. Most people work for someone else in a way that they aren’t free. You don’t really get to decide your worth. For example I work at Noodles, the restaurant, and basically it’s a dictatorship there. We’re told exactly what to cook, how we’re going to cook it. what time we’re going to get there. And basically if they don’t like what we’re doing, they try to tell us what to do. If we don’t listen they get rid of us. We’re not actually allowed to cooperate in a way that we make decisions together.

Rob on Unions SOT

• I try to convince my fellow employees that we should have a union at Noodles. IT’s a source of power to start with. And then I think in terms of the bigger picture, when you look at revolutions, the way that you actually get rid of any sort of dictatorship is by having workers take control of the place where they work.

Rob on business owners SOT

• If the owner wanted to cooperate with us as an equal, and provide his skills that he had, we would definitely cooperate with him. // We’d have to abdicate his position as being an owner and controller of us. He would have to recognize that we run Noodles together. And basically if he doesn’t want to cooperate with us, he’s against us.

Rob on IRS (socialist magazine)

• It’s an in-depth kind of analysis that goes deeper than just saying what’s happening with current events but kinda goes into the details of analyzing the picture of Who’s involved? what are they trying to do? and kind of a deeper understanding of what’s behind this?

SOTS FROM SOCIALIST MEETING

Phil Gasper, former professor – Feb 23

• We’re linked together as part of a global capitalist economy that’s destroying the environment, that’s destroying people’s lives around the world. And that’s why the parallels that everybody’s been drawing between Cairo and Madison make sense.

Phil Gasper, former professor – Feb 23

• If you want to know what the next 5, or 10, or 20 years is going to look like, it’s not going to look like the last 20 to 30 years. It’s gonna look a lot more like the last month in Egypt and the last week in Wisconsin. Not every day is gonna look like that. But it’s gonna happen more and more and more often.

Mike Imbrogno, AFSCME Local 171 ((at socialist meeting))

• I feel like we can actually have an effect by organizing folks together. No concessions, tax the rich. It’s not our mess, it’s your mess clean it up. it’s the Koch brothers, we need to fight back, etc.

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000149 EndHTML:0000010161 StartFragment:0000000199 EndFragment:0000010127 StartSelection:0000000199 EndSelection:0000010127 NEW FARRAKHAN SOTS FROM SAVIOURS’ DAY 2011
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/this-is-the-day-of-your-doom-farrakhan-says-mideast-uprisings-will-come-to-americas-door/ <http://www.theblaze.com/stories/this-is-the-day-of-your-doom-farrakhan-says-mideast-uprisings-will-come-to-americas-door/>

FARRAKHAN SPEECH, Feb. 27

• War. They love war over peace. They love wrong over right, and injustice over justice. This is the day of your doom, the end of your world and life (applause)

• What you’re looking at in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Yemen, in Jordan, in Libya, in Bahrain and soon, very soon in all the nations of the world. And even sooner to take place in America so don’t you get bent out of shape what you see happening there, while it’s happening there, you better prepare because it will be coming to your door America. And I hope that President Obama will remember his instructions to other nations. Be careful how you attack and kill innocent people who are protesting. Take your own words into your busom and be reminded when it comes to your door (applause)

• This is a sign that the great Madhi that the Muslim world has been looking for is present in the world. The Christ that you hoped for. The Christ that we long for is present in the world. And all tyrants will be sent down. God is stimulating the rise of the masses. Soon it will come to these shores. Indeed it has already begun.

About Saviours’ Day 2011, Feb. 25 -27 in Rosemont, IL
http://www.noi.org/sd2011/

• The 2011 Saviours’ Day convention marks the 81st year of the Nation of Islam’s existence in North America. Each year, to commemorate the birth of its founder Master W. Fard Muhammad (February 26, 1877), thousands of members and supporters of the Nation of Islam from around the world make the journey to attend the annual convention during the last week of February for a weekend of fellowship, networking, information dissemination and spiritual renewal

Belief of Madhi Among Muslims
http://books.google.com/books?id=BgP72cgvn-gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Siege+of+Mecca+by+Yaroslav+Trofimov&hl=en&ei=OS9tTfDFH4GBlAevitHZBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Mahdi&f=false

• “The idea of Mahdi has fueled Muslim imagination for centuries. There is no mention of it in the Quran itself. But Prophet Mohammed, according to some narrators, had forecast that God will one day dispatch a redeemer – a Mahdi – to command a Mulsim world and establish an ideal society, after an apocalyptic clash of forces of evil. The Mahdi cannot be killed by mere mortals – at least not during the first seven years of his reign.”

Louis Farrakhan says Moammar Gadhafi has always been a friend
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/4047358-418/louis-farrakhan-says-moammar-gadhafi-has-always-been-a-friend.html

• Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan says Moammar Gadhafi has always been a friend and he won’t distance himself from the Libyan dictator.
• But the 77-year-old said no leader has been loved by 100 percent of his people and said that if Gadhafi is persecuted for crimes against humanity, the same should apply to former President George W. Bush for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Farrakhan visited Gadhafi in the 1980s and in 1996 accepted a humanitarian award from him. But during his speech Sunday he warned the wave of revolution spreading across the Middle East is coming to the United States

FARRAKHAN – WRIGHT CONNECTION

02/26/2008, “Meet the Press”

• RUSSERT: The title of one of your books, “Audacity of Hope,” you acknowledge you got from a sermon from Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the head of the Trinity United Church. He said that Louis Farrakhan “epitomizes greatness.” He said that he went to Libya in 1984 with Louis Farrakhan to visit with Moammar Gadhafi and that, when your political opponents found out about that, quote, “your Jewish support would dry up quicker than a snowball in Hell.”

Obama’s Farrakhan Test by Richard Cohen, Wash Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html?hpid=opinionsbox1 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html?hpid=opinionsbox1>

• He has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind.
• And yet Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan. According to Trumpet, he applauded his “depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation.” He praised “his integrity and honesty.” He called him “an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.” These are the words of a man who prayed with Obama just before the Illinois senator announced his run for the presidency. Will he pray with him just before his inaugural?

OBAMA’S RESPONSE – JAN. 15, 2008

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/Obama_knocks_Farrakhan.html

• Richard Cohen in the Post <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402083.html?hpid=opinionsbox1> made Louis Farrakhan — a former State Senate constituent of Obama’s, and the honoree of a publication by his church — an issue today, and Obama has a comment out now:
• I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.

h/t to the Daily Beck

The Weimar Solution

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency,” said Lord Keynes.

Ben Bernanke disagrees. A student of the Depression, the Fed chair appears far more fearful of deflation — a vicious cycle of falling prices, debt defaults, home foreclosures and rising unemployment.

Deflation is what America underwent in the 1930s. A Fed-created bubble burst, causing margin calls to go out to stockholders, who ran to their banks that, besieged, collapsed, wiping out a third of our money. As Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel for his thesis that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, told PBS in 2000: “For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing … with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.

“(T)he Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were … urging them to do that. So it was … clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.”

Is Bernanke fighting the war of 1929 in 2009? Surely, today, with the explosion in M1, the basic money supply, there is no shortage of dollars out there, even if they are not circulating fast enough.

To end our recession, Bernanke may be running an even greater risk: hyper-inflation. This has destroyed more nations than deflation or even depression.

Recall: It was French military intervention in the Ruhr in 1923, to force payment of war reparations, and Weimar’s decision to let the currency fall and pay the French in cheap marks that led to the wipeout of the German middle class, the discrediting of that democratic republic and the Munich beer-hall putsch of Adolf Hitler.

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation,” said Ernest Hemingway, “is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

Which brings us to last week’s shocker...

The Fed will buy up $300 billion in long-term Treasury bonds and spend $750 billion more buying sub-prime mortgages to remove them from the balance sheets of ailing big banks, to get the banks lending again.
Bernanke is printing money to buy U.S. bonds.

This new gusher from the Fed, after the $700 billion TARP bailout, comes on top of a Congressional Budget Office estimate that this year’s deficit will be $1.85 trillion, 13.1 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice the share of the U.S. economy of the largest previous postwar deficit.

Concluding the dollar is being abandoned in a frantic Fed effort to stop the recession, markets reacted instantly. The dollar plunge was the steepest since the Plaza Agreement of 1985. Gold shot up to $950 an ounce. Silver had a 12 percent run-up, the sharpest ever. Oil prices surged above $50 a barrel. Commodity markets advanced.

The Fed seems to have confirmed the fears of Premier Wen Jiabao, who said that China is “definitely a little worried” about the value of the U.S. bonds Beijing has purchased with the dollars piled up from her trade surpluses with the United States.

Can one blame the Chinese? They have already been burned on their U.S. investments. And if the defense of the dollar against its ancient enemy inflation is being abandoned, and protecting the dollar is to take a back seat to the Fed’s fight to avoid deflation, than it is indeed time to get out of the dollar and dollar-denominated assets.

For inflation is theft. It make liars and cheats of governments. By eroding the value of a currency, inflation punishes savers and creditors and rewards debtors. And what nation is the biggest debtor of them all? The United States of America.

Insidiously, inflation consumes the value of cash, savings, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, Treasury bonds and T-bills. Friends who lent America money, who bought our debt in good faith, are robbed and made fools of, while speculators who bet against America by shorting the dollar in the currency markets are vastly rewarded.

Given the $3.6 trillion budget Obama plans, the $1.8 trillion in red ink he will run by Oct. 1 and the trillions the Fed is pumping into the economy, gross domestic product should spike, as it did after the far smaller stimulus package of 2008.

We will feel a healthy glow, and folks will begin to sing, “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Yet, one senses that we are doing again exactly what we have done before in this generation. Rather than endure the pain and accept the sacrifices to cure us of our addiction, we are going back to the heroin. And this time, with Dr. Bernanke handling the needle, we may just overdose.

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By Pat Buchanan who is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,"  "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and  "Where the Right Went Wrong."