Too big to fail?

Now do banking.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Fascism growing stronger by the day

"I have given the deal my blessing," Trump said. "I approve the deal in concept."

Since when does the president of the United States give his blessing to private deals?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Free market capitalism at its finest

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

There better be some serious consequences for this company

Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies.

This past September, with the design of the new Trilogy Evo Universal finally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, HHS ordered 10,000 of the ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.

But as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe, there is still not a single Trilogy Evo Universal in the stockpile.

Instead last summer, soon after the FDA’s approval, the Pennsylvania company that designed the device — a subsidiary of the Dutch appliance and technology giant Royal Philips N.V. — began selling two higher-priced commercial versions of the same ventilator around the world.

[...]

Last Friday, President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to compel General Motors to begin mass-producing another company’s ventilator under a federal contract. But neither Trump nor other senior officials made any mention of the Trilogy Evo Universal. Nor did HHS officials explain why they did not force Philips to accelerate delivery of these ventilators earlier this year, when it became clear that the virus was overwhelming medical facilities around the world.

[...]

An HHS spokeswoman told ProPublica that Philips had agreed to make the Trilogy Evo Universal ventilator “as soon as possible.” However, a Philips spokesman said the company has no plan to even begin production anytime this year.

  Pro Publica

Who's their friend in Congress? The White House? HHS?

Neither HHS nor Philips would provide a copy of their contract, citing proprietary technical information that would have to be redacted under a Freedom of Information Act request. But from public documents and interviews with current and former government officials, it appears that HHS has at times been remarkably deferential to Philips — and never more so than in the current pandemic.

[...]

[T]he contract HHS signed in September 2019 gave Philips almost a year before it had to produce a single Trilogy Evo Universal, and two more years to fulfill the order of 10,000 ventilators.

[...]

On the same day in July that the FDA cleared the stockpile version of the ventilator, it granted the application of Philips’ U.S. subsidiary, Respironics, to sell commercial versions of the Trilogy Evo. Philips quickly began shipping the commercial models overseas from its Murrysville, Pennsylvania, factory.

[...]

Philips is negotiating with a White House team led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to build 43,000 more complex and expensive hospital ventilators for Americans stricken by the virus.

Does Jared have stock in the company?

Some experts said the nature of the current crisis — in which the federal government is scrambling to set up field hospitals in New York’s Central Park and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center — underscores the urgent need for simpler, lower-cost ventilators. The story of the Trilogy Evo Universal, described here for the first time, also raises questions about the government’s reliance on public-private partnerships that public health officials have used to piece together important parts of their disaster safety net.

“That’s the problem of leaving any kind of disaster preparedness up to the market and market forces — it will never work,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency medicine specialist in Minnesota who has advised HHS on pandemic preparedness since 2002. “The market is not going to give priority to a relatively no-frills but dependable ventilator that’s not expensive.”

[...]

Steve Klink, the company’s Amsterdam-based spokesman, said Philips was within its rights under the HHS contract to prioritize the commercial versions of the Trilogy Evo. An HHS spokeswoman — who insisted she could not be identified by name, despite speaking for the agency — did not disagree.

“Keep in mind that companies are always free to develop other products based on technology developed in collaboration with the government,” she said in a statement to ProPublica. “This approach often reduces development costs and ensures the product the government needs is available for many years.”

But not the year when it's desperately needed.

Just last month, HHS gave a very different impression to Congress, hailing the Trilogy Evo it funded as a breakthrough in its campaign for pandemic preparedness.

“This game-changing device, considered a pipedream just a few years ago, is now available at affordable prices to improve stockpiling and deployment” in an emergency, the agency told Congress in a budget document delivered on Feb 10.

[...]

Had government officials insisted that Philips first produce the ventilators that taxpayers paid to design, the government could conceivably be distributing all 10,000 to hospitals now.

[...]

Klink, the company spokesman, said Philips was only committed to meeting the original contract deadline of 10,000 ventilators by September 2022.

What is wrong with capitalism and free market?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Man of the People

Donald Trump, the man who positioned himself as the common man's shield against Wall Street, signed a series of orders today calling for reviews or rollbacks of financial regulations.

  Matt Taibbi

Of course he did.

[Trump] talks a big game when slamming the door on penniless refugees, but curls up like a beach weakling around guys who have more money than he does.

[...]

[Jamie] Dimon, [Steve] Schwarzman, [Larry] Fink and [Gary] Cohn collectively represent a rogues gallery of the creeps most responsible for the 2008 crash. It would be hard to put together a group of people less sympathetic to the non-wealthy.

[...]

The watchdogs who are supposed to be making sure the morons on Wall Street don't blow up the planet all failed: the compliance people within private companies, the so-called self-regulating organizations like the NYSE, and finally the government agencies like the OCC and the OTS.

These companies are now so enormous that they can't keep track of their own positions. Also, in sharp contrast to the propaganda about what brainy people they all are, many of them lack even the most basic understanding of the potential consequences of deals they might be making.

[...]

The enduring lesson of the financial crisis is that in markets as complex as this one, the most extreme danger is in opacity. The big problem is that these egomaniacal Wall Street titans want markets as opaque as possible.

[...]

This is why they want to get rid of the fiduciary rule, because they don't think it's anyone's business if they choose to bet against their clients (as Cohn's Goldman famously did), or overcharge them, or otherwise screw them.

[...]

Trump – a man who doesn't want you to see what's going on underneath his hair, let alone in his books – naturally sympathizes with Wall Street's efforts to keep the markets opaque. The obvious conclusion is that these orders will eventually lead us back to ballooning risk, overheated markets (the NYSE is already soaring) and speculative bubbles.

Frankly, I'm not sure T-Rump caved in the face of these banksters (although I wouldn't be surprised to find out he owes some of them big money).  I think it's more likely that his anti-Wall Street schtick during the campaign was just more of his bullshit to get votes.  He has no more scruples than an actual politician.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Brilliant

Global crude prices rose on Thursday after US National Security Advisor Michael Flynn said Washington is putting Tehran "on notice" in response to an Iranian missile test.

[...]

"As soon as those comments hit the wires, you saw a bit of a rally in crude oil," John Kilduff, founding partner at energy hedge fund Again Capital told CNBC.

  RT

Let's see how Trump voters like their new higher gas prices. Market instability will be great with this administration.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Market Response to Muslim Ban

According to the Guardian:

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Four Years of Instability

Every time he opens his mouth.

President-elect Donald Trump lashed out at overspending on drugs and fighter jets during his press conference on Wednesday, giving progressives something to hope for but sending stocks in related companies diving.

  The INterept

And yet. I'm not a fan of the markets anyway.

First, he took aim at the drug industry, complaining that it is making too many of its products overseas and that the government does not negotiate with the industry for prices for the Medicare program.

It would be nice if it's not just bluster, and he actually took on Big Pharma and health care.

“The other thing we have to do is create new bidding procedures for the drug industry because they’re getting away with murder. Pharma, Pharma has a lot of lobbyists — a lot of lobbyists — a lot of power, and there’s very little bidding on drugs. We’re the largest buyer of drugs in the world and yet we don’t bid properly and we’re going to start bidding and we’re going to save billions of dollars over time.”

Let's have a single payer public option. Something tells me he's not interested in that.

[T]he admirals have been fantastic. The generals have been fantastic. I’ve really gotten to know ’em well. And were going to do some big things on the F-35 program and perhaps the F-18 program. And we’re going to get those costs way down, and we’re gonna get the plane to be even better and we’re going to have to competition. And it’s going to be a beautiful thing.”

You know how the media and the pundits all start throwing around phrases after the president says them, like Obama's "shellacking" comment? It's going to be a beautiful thing.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Dangerous Donald

Every time this man pulls out his phone and Tweets his latest irritation, the world will react.

Buckle your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016

Were Boeing to lose a $4 billion contract, that would certainly cause people to be skeptical of future earnings. But this, as seems always to be the case with Donald Trump tweets, is not the full story.

[...]

His campaign spent $6.7 million on his personal aircraft after he announced his candidacy, and he has called Air Force One "a step down" from his personal aircraft "in every way." (Not size, mind you.) Once Trump received a Secret Service detail, the agency paid $1.6 million for its agents to travel with him -- money that went to TAG Air, a company owned by Trump.

[...]

As it turns out, though, the Trump tweet may not have been unprompted. CNN's Jake Tapper noted on Twitter that shortly before the tweet (which was posted at 8:52 a.m. Eastern) the Chicago Tribune posted an article quoting the [Boeing]'s CEO, Dennis Muilenberg.

[...]

"Anyone who paid attention to the recent campaigns and the election results realizes that one of the overarching themes was apprehension about free and fair trade," Muilenberg said at the Illinois Manufacturing Association last week, as noted by Tribune columnist Robert Reed.

[...]

"Last year, we delivered 495 737s from our factory in Renton, Wash., to customers around the world," Muilenberg continued, noting that a third of the planes were sent to China.

[...]

Those are pointed comments. It was Trump, of course, who robustly criticized free trade during the general election.

[...]

Trump's tweet tanked Boeing's stock price, albeit only briefly. In 2013, Trump tweeted about having just bought stock in Boeing ("great company!"), but his spokesman said on Tuesday that the president-elect no longer holds stock in Boeing, or anything else, having sold it all in June.

  WaPo

Also, Free Market

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Get Ready

In a note to clients released Wednesday, Murray Gunn, the head of technical analysis for HSBC, said he was on red alert for an imminent sell-off in stocks in the light of the price action over the past few weeks.

"With the US stock market selling off aggressively on October 11, we now issue a RED ALERT. The possibility of a severe fall in the stock market is now very high," Gunn wrote.

Other financial firms have also issued red alert warnings. Citigroup told clients that investors aren't adequately hedging US election risk. The managing director at Citi Thomas Fitzpatrick has also pointed at the market's similarities to the 1987 crash.

  RT

If the election doesn't do it, it's just a matter of time until the banksters continuing to do the things that led to the 2008 crash will.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Clash of Free Markets and Democracy

In North America and Europe [...] the intellectual myopia that [tortured, exiled, and assassinated Chilean Orlando] Letelier condemned so ferociously continues to restrict the perimeters of far too many of our public debates. As in Letelier’s time [during the US-backed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet], our loudest establishment voices generally have no trouble condemning repression by foreign dictatorships or the rise of neofascism within our borders—some will even admit that there is a crisis of police violence. But very rarely are the dots connected between such troubling phenomena and the celebrated free-market policies for which Chile, under the Chicago Boys, was the earliest and purest laboratory.

And yet the connections are screaming to be made. There is a reason, for instance, why authoritarian 
China has become the sweatshop for the world: As in Chile in the ’70s, its suppression of democracy, restrictions on information, and brutal repression of dissidents create the required conditions to keep wages down and workers under control.

Similarly, there is a clear reason why mass incarceration exploded in the United States in the midst of the neoliberal economic revolution, when the welfare system has been radically eroded and the public funding of virtually all social services is under attack. It isn’t a grand conspiracy, but the economic exclusion of huge swaths of the population required some parallel strategy of escalated repression and containment (the drug war was awfully handy that way). [...] And yet, too often, we imagine that these forces can be defeated without substantive shifts in policy.

[...]

“High levels of unemployment and decades of disinvestment in black communities have led to dangerous interactions with police,” explains Dorian T. Warren, one of the authors of the Movement for Black Lives’ economic platform and board chair of the Center for Community Change. Or as Letelier put it all those years ago: “The economic plan has had to be enforced.”

  The Nation

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They Don't Pay for Nothing

Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff.

  ABC

Because the department's professional staff doesn't know that big donors are among the first to receive political appointments? Are these professionals out of high school yet?

The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later.

[...]

[Rajiv K.] Fernando's expertise appeared to be in the arena of high-frequency trading -- a form of computer-generated stock trading. At the time of his appointment, he headed a firm, Chopper Trading, that was a leader in that field.

[...]

He was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton's 2008 bid for president, giving maximum contributions to her campaign, and to HillPAC, in 2007 and 2008. He also served as a fundraising bundler for Clinton, gathering more than $100,000 from others for her White House bid. [...] Prior to his State Department appointment, Fernando had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation.

So, after ABC's inquiry, “Mr. Fernando chose to resign from the Board [...] citing additional time needed to devote to his business.”

Fernando is now a board member of a private group called the American Security Project, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan organization created to educate the American public and the world about the changing nature of national security in the 21st Century.” He also identifies himself online as a member of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and says he's involved with a Washington think tank.

And he continued to donate to Democrats, and to Clinton. He emerged as one of the first “bundlers” to raise money for Clinton’s 2016 bid. And in July 2015, he hosted a fundraiser for Clinton at his Chicago home. Fernando has also continued to donate to the Clinton Foundation. He now is listed on the charity’s website as having given between $1 million and $5 million.

How very non-partisan of him.

About six months after Fernando resigned from the State Department advisory board, he was invited to attend a White House State Dinner, honoring the British Prime Minister. And this summer Fernando will serve as a super delegate at the Democratic National Convention. According to Chicago media reports, he has committed to supporting Clinton.

No!

For the lowdown on high-frequency trading, see this Bloomberg article:



And for a fascinating look at HFT's secretive beginnings and the guys who busted the story, check out Flash Boys by Michael Lewis.

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Banksters on the Move

The Federal Reserve is a Central Bank that is charged with a curious power to smooth out the blips in the banking system, keep stable prices, maintain moderate interest rates, and promote full employment. Noble endeavors no doubt.

[...]

Some claim that the entire arrangement is designed to enrich a few due to special flows of information regarding the bank’s operations.

[...]

The Fed and other Central Banks seem to operate at arms length to any arrangement of accountability. Because of this, these banks seem to self expand their powers and broaden their scope. If the environment is good, a blind eye is turned. If the environment is really good, both eyes are blind. Stocks are at all time highs.

Central Banks are buying the stock market. Do not question if this is in their mission statement or within the scope of their mandated operations. Stocks are up, all is good.

But if all is good, why do the Fed and other Central Banks feel the need to support what should be a self supporting stock market?

  American Thinker

Because they created a monstrous failing in the economic system, which affected them as well as the rest of the world, and now they’re looking to recoup?  Because there can never be enough money in their private accounts?  Because it is against their principals to leave untouched any available monies?

Central Banks buying stocks because they are being hurt by the low interest rates that they themselves create is a new event. They explain that because they aren’t getting enough of a return on their reserves they have turned to buying stocks. Since when is a Central Bank a for profit entity? It is a dangerous notion.

[...]

One might ask, who at these Central Banks decide what to buy, and when? Who decides when to stop buying? [...] Would they ever choose to raise rates and perhaps harm their portfolio? Will they ever trim their equity exposure by selling out to unknowing buyers? How could that not happen? And how could that not be insider trading, manipulation, and just inherently unfair?

Ours is not to reason why.

Banksters Fixing Rates? Shocking

New York state's financial regulator has opened an investigation into alleged manipulation of foreign exchange markets and is demanding documents from more than a dozen banks, a source familiar with the investigation told Al Jazeera.

Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Goldman Sachs and a number of other large banks that the Department of Financial Services regulates will be investigated in the probe, the source said.

[...]

Investigators suspect that traders from different banks may have used chat rooms to share information about trades in ways that benefited their positions.

  alJazeera

Surely not.

Banksters on the Loose

If they only get rewarded, or a slap on the wrist, what's to stop them?

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history.

[...]

[This past spring, word] leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess.

[...]

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

[...]

Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

  Matt Taibbi: Rolling Stone

And wouldn’t you be surprised?

If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

[...]

In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices.

[...]

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants' incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

[...]

[D]espite so many instances of at least attempted manipulation, the banks mostly skated. Barclays got off with a relatively minor fine in the $450 million range, UBS was stuck with $1.5 billion in penalties, and RBS was forced to give up $615 million. Apart from a few low-level flunkies overseas, no individual involved in this scam that impacted nearly everyone in the industrialized world was even threatened with criminal prosecution.

And aren’t you surprised?

Michael Hausfeld of Hausfeld LLP, one of the lead lawyers for the plaintiffs in this Libor suit, declined to comment specifically on the dismissal. But he did talk about the significance of the Libor case and other manipulation cases now in the pipeline.

"It's now evident that there is a ubiquitous culture among the banks to collude and cheat their customers as many times as they can in as many forms as they can conceive," he said. "And that's not just surmising. This is just based upon what they've been caught at."

[...]

And just like in Libor, the potential losers in an interest-rate-swap manipulation scandal would be the same sad-sack collection of cities, towns, companies and other nonbank entities that have no way of knowing if they're paying the real price for swaps or a price being manipulated by bank insiders for profit.

Well, I think they could make an educated guess.

"In all the over-the-counter markets, you don't really have pricing except by a bunch of guys getting together," Masters notes glumly.

That includes the markets for gold (where prices are set by five banks in a Libor-ish teleconferencing process that, ironically, was created in part by N M Rothschild & Sons) and silver (whose price is set by just three banks), as well as benchmark rates in numerous other commodities – jet fuel, diesel, electric power, coal, you name it. The problem in each of these markets is the same: We all have to rely upon the honesty of companies like Barclays (already caught and fined $453 million for rigging Libor) or JPMorgan Chase (paid a $228 million settlement for rigging municipal-bond auctions) or UBS (fined a collective $1.66 billion for both muni-bond rigging and Libor manipulation) to faithfully report the real prices of things like interest rates, swaps, currencies and commodities.

All of these benchmarks based on voluntary reporting are now being looked at by regulators around the world, and God knows what they'll find.

And, the rest of us can make an educated guess.

The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less.

And they do it because they can. The price they may eventually pay is always negligible and well worth it.

All hail the “free” market system.

And I will never understand the tendency of the majority of people to dismiss the idea of conspiracies.  They so very obviously exist in every facet of life.  Is it the absolute power of the folks at the top or the simple-minded, easily deceived mentality of the chumps at the bottom that makes the accusation "conspiracy theorist" so rigidly avoided, and so disdainfully utilized?  Conspiracy is no theory.  It's a common reality.

The above article is long, and includes explanations of swaps and manipulated financial reporting, along with examples.  Worth reading the whole thing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  http://youwillanyway2.blogspot.com/2014/02/banksters-fixing-rates-shocking.html

Here's Your "Free Market"

Readers may recall an ugly story that broke earlier this summer, when New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman rebuked the news/business information firm Thomson Reuters for selling access to key economic survey data two seconds early to high-frequency algorithmic traders. The story strongly suggested that some Thomson Reuters customers were using their two-second head start (an eternity in the modern world of computerized trading) to front-run the markets.

[...]

Rolling Stone has since learned that a whistleblower complaint has been filed to the SEC identifying 16 of the world's biggest banks and hedge funds as the allegedly even-earlier recipients of this key economic data. The complaint alleges that this select group of customers received the data anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the markets.

[...]

If true, it's yet another story suggesting that the markets are a sharply uneven playing field, with the general public playing the role of suckers trading on sloppy-seconds information, while powerful insiders pay for enhanced access.

  Matt Taibbi

And you think maybe there's a chance this ISN'T true?

The Price of Gas: So Much for Supply & Demand

The last time the price of Brent crude closed below $100 a barrel was Oct. 6, 2011. It’s since gone up nearly 30 percent, to a high of $126.20 on March 1. Tensions over Iran’s nuclear program have people spooked that a potential attack would disrupt the country’s 2.2 million barrels of daily oil exports. And so money has been pouring into oil futures contracts, driving up the price without any significant change in the underlying supply-and-demand fundamentals. Only the threat of one.

[...]

In the U.S., the world’s biggest oil consumer, demand is close to a 15-year low.

[...]

So who’s buying?

Talk to oil analysts these days and chances are they’ll tell you that more than half the spike in the oil price is due to speculators—specifically noncommercial users. That’s jargon for investors who are buying up futures contracts not because they intend to use the oil, but because they think it’s a good investment. These aren’t airlines or refining companies; these are money managers betting that the price will go up. And so far they’ve been right, thanks to themselves.

[...]

According to Tim Evans, an oil analyst with Citigroup [...], money managers now hold[...] “about 290 days’ worth of Iranian oil exports, [which] implies that we’ve already priced in a nine-month outage from Iran.”

[...]

And that’s without a single shot fired.

  Business Week

Speculators, wrote [Murray N. Rothbard in the summer of 1990], “perform an important function.” If people reacted mechanistically to fluctuations in supply, rather than anticipating future fluctuations, “a cutoff of Middle Eastern oil would disrupt the economy by causing a sudden drop in supply and a huge jump in prices. Speculative anticipation eases this volatility by raising prices more gradually.” In short, it could be worse – and will be worse, once the shooting starts in the Strait of Hormuz.

[...]

Newt Gingrich is right, albeit for the wrong reasons: the President’s policies – his foreign policy, specifically – are indeed the driving force behind rapidly rising gas prices. The problem for Gingrich and his fellow Republican war-hawks, however, is that they would march us off to war – and off an economic cliff – much sooner than the current occupant of the White House.

  Justin Raimondo

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Free Market

I can't quote salient parts of this post about Rick Santorum and Big Pharma without simply stealing the entire post.  It's short, but it's acutely weighty, so please just go read it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.