"The Global Consciousness Project, also known as the EGG Project, is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others continuously collecting data from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites worldwide. The archive contains over 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second."
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, October 12, 2012
The company is profitable.
Sensata Technologies, 2520 S. Walnut Road, Freeport, Illinois – which was created by Bain Capital in 2006 – develops, manufactures, and sells sensors and controls for major auto manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors.
Despite rising profits, the company plans to institute the final layoffs in November. The workers are training their Chinese replacements, who have been flown to Illinois by the company.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is a co-founder of Bain Capital, the private equity investment firm that created Sensata. According to SEC filings, Romney served as CEO of Bain Capital from its founding in 1984 until 2002. Romney, however, has repeatedly said he left the company in 1999.
Sorry, but Mitt Romney won’t save the Freeport jobs
Protesters want Mitt Romney to intervene on their behalf.
FORTUNE — As Occupy Wall Street celebrated its one-year anniversary yesterday in Zuccotti Park, a much smaller group of protesters set up camp in the northwestern Illinois town of Freeport. They called it called BainVille, in sarcastic homage to the private equity firm they blame for outsourcing their jobs to China.
What the protesters want is for Mitt Romney to intervene on their behalf, leveraging both his national profile and his relationship with Bain Capital executives. And, in theory, it makes sense. After all, what presidential candidate wouldn’t want to help save 170 American manufacturing jobs? Particularly someone who talks about getting tough with China?
But it simply isn’t going to happen.
For the uninitiated, here’s a quick backgrounder: Late last year, a Bain-owned company called Sensata Technologies (ST) agreed to Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Tuesday, September 11, 2012
As the president and others – nonpartisan and partisan alike – have noted, BIG BUSINESS should NOT need a bailout. They should be operated in such a manner as to allow the Free Market to decide how, to what extent, and if they prosper. As part of that process, ironclad and strong regulation to prevent fraud and abuse should be vigorously enforced. And chief executives Read the rest of this entry »
By Daniel C. Maguire, Professor of Moral Theological Ethics, Marquette University
Posted: 08/21/2012 12:08 pm
Sound the alarm! There has been a Catholic coup d’etat in the United States of America! Six members of the Supreme Court are Catholics (just imagine the furore if six were Muslims or Jews!). Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell are Catholics. And now, rising to top of this surging Catholic dynasty is the alleged Wunderkind of Republican economics, perky Paul Ryan.
Ryan wears his strange version of Catholicism with a jaunty sophomoric pride. “Catholic social doctrine is indispensable for officeholders.” If only Paul Ryan knew what “Catholic social doctrine” is he would take flight from it just as fast as he is scrambling from the Ayn Rand breasts that, as he has proclaimed, suckled him and inspired all his political and economic views. Catholics who know the difference between Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand skewered perky Paul. They know that Jesus’ mission, unlike Ayn Rand’s, was “good news for the poor” (Luke 4:18). They embarrassed the righteous Ryan when he spoke at the Jesuit Georgetown University carrying a sprawling sign that asked: “Where were you, Paul Ryan, when they crucified the poor?”
Of course they know where he was. He was driving the nails into everything that helps the poor — and remember most of “the poor” are children. Budgets are intensely moral documents. They show where the heart is. To budget-makers we can say: show me the losers and the winners and I will tel you what you are. The Ryan budget plan, embraced by Mitt Romney as “marvelous,” puts greed over need. Among its losers: Read the rest of this entry »
Take just about any business situation in which the value of a company’s primary product suddenly falls by more than 29% and it could be time to panic. Then there is the oil patch, where billions of dollars in profits are possible even after that kind of collapse in crude prices. Chevron Corp. of San Ramon, Calif., is just such an example.
Even with the sharp drop in oil prices that began in the first quarter and ran through the end of the second quarter — a decline from $109.41 a barrel to $77.69 a barrel — Chevron had a positive margin of $23.53 on every barrel of crude it produced, according to analysts. Chevron said its margin was actually $26 a barrel. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, July 27, 2012
No… no… no…
Banks don’t need to be regulated.
They’re doing quite fine with all the money they’ve stolen from you already.
No, they don’t need regulation.
And no, we don’t need to re-enact the Glass-Steagall Act – the federal law that kept Wall Street Brokerage Houses, Insurance Companies, and Banks separate and out of each other’s business. Right now, as things stand with them, they’re enjoying an incestuous fiscal orgy. And that’s good. We need more incest. We need more orgies. They’re all good. In fact, the more mammon… er, money you have, the more holy you are, the more the Almighty has blessed you – and not someone else (those lazy slobs who don’t deserve anything). {/sarcasm}
But there’s really no reason to worry… the banks will get what’s comin’ to ’em – and the ‘what’ is NOT your money. They have that already.
Come a-courtin’ time (that’d be in the court room), the Banksters be ruled against in a BIG way.
Just wait.
It’s coming.
Next thing you’ll hear in the news are the BIG BANKSTERS wanting legal protection from Congress for the wrongdoing they’ve done.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about what’s been dubbed the “LIBOR rate fixing scandal,” where some of the biggest banks in the world have been accused of manipulating a key global interest rate.
If those words — “manipulation of a key interest rate” — leave you wondering what the big deal is, and who would be harmed, meet Dan Sullivan. He says the manipulation of LIBOR cost him a million dollars, in just 24 hours.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, May 21, 2012
Life is more than money.
“Those who love money will never have enough. How meaningless to think that wealth brings true happiness!” Ecclesiastes 5:10 (NLT)
“But if any one has this world’s wealth and sees that his brother man is in need, and yet hardens his heart against him–how can such a one continue to love God?” 1 John 3:17 (WNT)
“But godliness with contentment is great gain.” 1 Timothy 6:6 (NIV)
“Then he said, “Beware! Guard against every kind of greed. Life is not measured by how much you own.”” Luke 12:15 (NLT)
“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”Matthew 19:24 (NIV)
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Nurses (yes, nurses) lead charge forWall Street‘sin’ tax
By Miranda Leitsinger, msnbc.com
Friday, May 18, 2012
A coalition of nurses’ unions is calling for a “Robin Hood” tax on Wall Street, which they say could generate up to $350 billion a year, in the first major protest ahead of this weekend’s NATO summit in Chicago.
Their pitch: impose a tax of 50 cents on every $100 of trades of stocks, bonds, dividends and other financial transactions, which are not currently taxed. The U.S. would join more than a dozen other nations that already have a financial transaction tax, according to National Nurses United (NNU).
“I’ve been asked many, many times … ‘What are you doing here as nurses? … What do you have to do with the economy?'” Karen Higgins, a registered nurse and co-president of NNU, said to the crowd in Chicago’sDaley Plaza.
“We’re watching this every day. We’re watching patients suffer,” she said, noting that nurses were seeing people without insurance or others who can’t afford their co-pays, as well as a spike in the number of children with adult diseases due to eating poorly because their parents can’t afford healthy food. “This is serious and in some cases it is actually deadly.”
“We know the solution .. we are watching and seeing Wall Street throwing our money away as we see people suffer and die. It will not continue,” she said. “We pay sales tax. It is time for Wall Street to start paying back what they owe the rest of the country and they need to pay sales tax.”
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Sunday, October 30, 2011
In a YouTube video entitled “Peter Schiff nails Wall Street Protesters,” Peter Schiff asks one of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators the following question – verbatim: “Wouldn’t you like to get in the 1%? You don’t want more money?”
By asking that question, Mr. Schiff makes a very critical error. In fact, it’s a very simple one to understand. Not everyone will be the 1%. By adding more to the category identified as “the 1%,” it suddenly becomes more than 1%.
As the video progresses, Mr. Schiff continues rhetorically down that deeply and fundamentally flawed path, so that by the end of the video, the conclusions he infers from the statements he makes seem to make reasonable, rational and logical sense. They are, however, founded upon logically flawed premises.
I posit that most viewers would not even casually consider such a blatant problem.
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Monday, October 24, 2011
Doubtless, if you’ve been paying any attention to news – either online, broadcast or print – you’ve had to at least heard something about the Occupy Wall Street movement. And no matter where you fall along the political spectrum – arch-conservative, neo-conservative, raging liberal, classical liberal, Austrian liberal, middle of the road, pragmatist, mash-up, federalist, states rights, moderate, or any conglomeration of the above, or even none at all – you certainly have some opinion – good, bad, or indifferent – about the message, the messengers, and the movement – no matter what you may hold to be true about it.
The movement has also spread to various cities throughout the United States, including Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago and other areas. None, however, have had as much action and publicity as the New York City movement.
If you’re tired of the lies, the deception, the failed mortgages, bail-outs, TARP, jobs shipped overseas, inferior imported goods, Read the rest of this entry »
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