Penny Pritzker as an example of the criminality of our elites

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime
oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait." - Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed," more dramatically rendered in English as "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

President Obama is nominating his top fund raiser, Penny Pritzker, to be Secretary of Commerce. Incredibly - perhaps I should write, sadly - the announcement is causing hardly a stir among the liberal and progressive blogosphere. At the very least, Greg Palast's May 4, 2013 post at Smirking Chimp, Billionaire Bankster Breaks into Obama’s Cabinet,  should be going viral. Palast wrote:

Pritzker’s net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust – at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior’s depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama’s South Side district lost their homes.

There were also a couple diaries on DailyKos, including by front pager Laura Clawson, who called attention to Pritzker's and her family's role in Hyatt Hotels, which has compiled what may be the worst records of labor abuses in the hotel industry. Incredibly, just to prove, I suppose, how hopelessly uninformed, ignorant, and unaware liberals and progressives can be, someone posted in one of the first comments, "She's not the monster you think she is."

Even President Obama rushed to show that he was likewise uninformed, ignorant, and unaware, though at this point I'm not about to attach the labels "liberal" or "progressive" to him. 

"She's built companies from the ground up," Obama said. "She knows from experience that no government program alone can take the place of a great entrepreneur."

There once were, in most every city, old labor and socialist organizers, veterans of the labor strife of the 1920s and 1930s, you could sit down with in a neighborhood tavern, and during the course of an evening, well lubricated by a few pitchers of beer, tell you more than you really wanted to know about who was actually running your town. How the police chief's kids got really good paying jobs because the chief would not make too many inquiries about (in other words, would remain deliberately uninformed, ignorant, and unaware) the prostitution on the West Side; or the numbers racket along the riverfront; or the freight pilferage at the airport. How the mayor's wife was able to drive around in a brand new Cadillac because a certain tract of land had been quietly rezoned, to the advantage a mayoral crony. Such petty corruption used to be the stock in trade of good local investigative reporters at big metropolitan newspapers, back in a nearly forgotten era when FCC rules made it nearly impossible for one or two corporate behemoths to own every major newspaper, radio station, and television station in one city.

Many of you already know that I used to be an economics correspondent, and that I burned out and became depressed watching Wall Street have its way in the early 1990s in what was called, back then, "off balance sheet liabilities" (what we today call "financial derivatives" - the stuff, like credit default swaps, that blew up in 2007 through 2008, and left a dismaying amount of the world's economy in ashes). Well, that's not really the whole truth. About what got me depressed, that is. So, tonight, you're going to learn a bit more of the truth. You're going to learn some of the dark, frightful secrets hidden away in my memory; stuff I usually don't mention, because it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. 

In a word, the mob. Organized crime. The syndicate. In Chicago, it was called the Outfit. But every major city had its own crime family, or branch thereof. You see, part of what I researched and wrote about in that depressing period of nearly a quarter century ago was how the billions of dollars, nay, hundreds of billions of dollars that were fueling what was politely called mergers and acquisitions, most especially including leveraged buy outs, came from, not entirely, but in large part, organized crime. That included hundreds of billions of dollars that the Wall Street banks laundered from illegal narcotics trafficking, including heroin and cocaine.  The beginnings of financial derivatives were closely tied to the mob going legit.

So, the Reagan regime of deregulation was really a double whammy. It basically decriminalized the worst behavior of banks and corporations, at the very time that some of the most immoral, ruthless, indeed murderous, people in America were buying legitimacy for themselves and their heirs by seizing control, through brazen manipulation of debt and stock markets, of America's industrial companies.

The story of the hour is Penny Pritzker becoming Secretary of Commerce. So, tonight, you're going to learn about the Pritizker family and its fortune. I suspect that it's probably more than you want to know.

The origins of the Pritzker family fortune was her grandfather's mob connections when he was a tax attorney for a lot of people in "The Outfit," the Chicago mob, beginning under Al Capone, and continuing through the 1980s. This connection to organized crime was reportedly what financed the creation of Hyatt Hotels by Penny's father. There was no crime involved, but the financial backing came from organized crime, plain and simple.  The details are in Gus Russo's 2006 tome Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers. Russo's book is crucial reading for anyone trying to understand why America's ruling elites are, well, so bad. It's not really a matter of incompetence or ineptitude. Rather, it is a case study in how the republican (small "r", not capital "R" as in the Republican Party, or GOP - greedy old pricks) ideals of public virtue, the general welfare, and economic and political equality, are forgotten and eventually undermined by allowing a criminal class to become legitimate and amass political and economic influence. The story of the Pritzker family is an all-American story, of how a family with ties to organized crime amasses a great fortune while striving relentlessly for legitimacy, and arrives at the pinnacle of economic and political power in America. Chris Hedges is not exaggerating when he states that "the criminal class in this country has seized power."

This ascent to America's summits is an oft-trod trek, pioneered by Boston and Newport maritime merchants who parlayed opium and millions of ruined lives in China into wealth, respectability, and power in the 1800s. Many of the mercantile banks established along the way are still with us, brightened and prettified by numerous changes in corporate branding. The one constant is the ruthless concentration on private gain. The extent to which that concentration on private gain is tempered and ameliorated by fleeting notions of public service provides the cracks and crevices in which the ebb and flow of history eddy and swirl. 

Now, you can point to the Kennedy family as an example of ill-begotten gains leading to some very good minded public service. But Penny Pritzker's roles at Hyatt and Superior Bank are, to say the least, highly troubling, and cast doubt on the idea that she may be anywhere near as mindful of the general welfare as John, Bobby, and Edward Kennedy were. Instead of public service, the tradition in the Pritzker family seems focused on economic exploitation of others, skirting the law as much as possible, and shady dealings. There is a strong tradition in the Pritzker family of outright money laundering and offshore tax evasion.

Japan—here we go

The news out of Japan is not surprising to anyone remotely interested in the economics of development.  Just remember, the great outburst of development economics here in USA was most embraced (some say invented) by those closest to the frontiers where folks were attempting to turn virgin soils into farms and towns.  The only state bank is in North Dakota.  The People's Party was formed in Omaha.  Thorstein Veblen grew up in Minnesota the son of an actual pioneer.  Our people have been thinking about the economics of development since at least 1873 so we have a pretty clear-eyed view of what works under adverse conditions.  And since Abenomics is a more or less an A+ incarnation of everything we believe about how societies grow and prosper, it's not surprising it's beginning to succeed.  We are usually right about these things.

Of course, just because Abenomics is off to a rollicking start does not mean it will be a long-term success.  The most important factor will be just how long the Japanese are willing to stick to their expansionary plans.  Here in USA, we have a perfect cautionary take.  FDR began his Keynesian expansion in 1933 but lost his nerve in 1937 when he started listening to the budget-balancing devils in his head.  It only took a few months before the nasty Depression had returned and would continue until USA started gearing up its war machine in advance of its entry into WW II (1941).  Only when FDR became consumed with war fever did his government approve of a Keynesian stimulus large enough finally end the Great Depression.

What is especially interesting about the following article from Business Insider is that it relies on what in the old days was that most trusted of economic indicators—machine tool orders.  I am certain Tony would approve—I know I do.

Saturday toons 18 MAY 13

Climate change and Peak Oil—the evidence is overwhelming

One of the main reasons why I have such a short fuse around folks who deny Climate Change or Peak Oil and then expect you to treat them seriously is that I never know whether they are just incredibly lazy or hopelessly ignorant—and neither trait is especially flattering.  The science that backs both concepts is not only overwhelming, but is especially easy to understand—we're not talking about the "holes" that migrate through semi-conductors or dark matter, after all.

I remember my first impressions of Marion King Hubbert and his descriptions of the life cycle of oil fields writ large he called Peak Oil.  I mean, not only did the guy have a name one could easily associate with the awl bidnuss, his descriptions of the yield curve sounded like the sort of thing all the oil guys I had ever known would say.  So I have been waiting for a real oil guy to come to Hubbert's defense.  Thanks to K. Fathi, I just read a good one.  It is a pretty clear description of the frustrations encountered by the Producer Class subset of the oil industry when trying to describe their reality to an "investment strategist."

Following that we have a study that counts up the percentage of peer-reviewed science papers on Climate Change.  Spoiler alert: Of more than 4,000 academic papers published over 20 years, 97.1% agreed that climate change is anthropogenic.  What makes this article especially interesting is that it speculates about a world where even 97% scientific agreement won't change a lot of minds—especially in the general public where the issues have become so muddied—and suggests that efforts be concentrated on working the decision-making elites.

Solar has definitely arrived

Over the years, there have been thousands of community-activist types who have marched and demonstrated in favor of using solar power.  What is ironic about this sort of activism is that the serious advances in the solar-collecting art were accomplished by boring nerds who went to work in their labs every day trying to extract tiny amounts more efficiency from their cells, and their pals in production technologies who took successful lab experiments and turned them into reliable consumer products.  At least 99% of the success in solar is due to the good work habits of the Producing Classes.

I point this out because even though solar is still in many ways an infant industry, it has matured enough to compete head to head some dirty old stalwarts like coal.  Yes, even coal with its 200 year head start.  And as the technology matures, people are just beginning to understand the economic implications of a technology that you put out on the lawn or up on a roof and it provides useable energy.  To say this is a game-changer is to court the outer limits of understatement.

Rev. Dr. William Barber NC NAACP demands: WHERE ARE YOU NOW?

Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II, President of the North Caroline NAACP, speaking at Martin Street Baptist Church, Raleigh, NC, Tuesday evening, May 7, 2013.



The past two election cycles have been political catastrophe in North Carolina. In 2010, Republicans won control of both houses of the state legislature and got very, very busy, preparing to seize total control of the state in 2012. Which they did. State legislative and state senate and U.S. Congressional districts were wildly gerrymandered, with the result that last year, though nearly half a million more Democrats than Republicans voted, the Greedy Old Pricks party won even larger majorities in the state House and Senate, took the governorship, and won seven of 10 seats in the U.S. Congress. The new Speaker of the North Carolina House, Thom Tillis, is a national board member of ALEC, and former Rep. Fred Steen, the past state ALEC chairman, is now Gov. Pat McCrory’s legislative lobbyist.

The legislation introduced and passed by the Republicans has been stunningly swift and breathtakingly awful, and all based on ALEC templates. Unemployment benefits have been cut back to among the stingiest in the nation. Funding for pre-school education has been slashed.  Private school vouchers have been enacted. College students who dare to register where they go to college are having their parents penalized to the tune of $2,500 by the Republicans legislating that such students are no longer dependents, and cannot be claimed as a dependent on parents' state income taxes. A voter ID law is in the works that is so draconian that even some Republicans are warning it needs to be changed. Just a week or two ago, the Republicans introduced legislation to make it illegal for anyone to sell a Tesla, the hot-new all-electric car that was named Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine, except through an in-state Tesla dealership – of which there are exactly zero. (One of the GOP leaders is the legislature own a few car dealerships.)

Their blockbuster effort is to abolish the state income tax, and replace it with a state sales tax. Including on food and medicine. In other words, outlaw any semblance of a progressive tax system, and impose one that totally favors the rich at the expense of the poor.

The agenda of North Carolina Republicans is so extreme, and the pain being imposed on the poor and disadvantaged so overwhelming, that the first sparks of civil disobedience have been ignited. Under the leadership of North Carolina NAACP president Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, about 100 to 200 protestors have congregated in the halls of the General Assembly on each of the past three Monday afternoons, with about a score arrested each time. They have used the methods  of non-violent resistance during their protests and arrests, and teams of supporters, including lawyers, have stood vigil each time until bond was set and the protestors released. At around four in the morning, each time.

Rev. Dr. Barber is calling this Moral Monday, and he is about to begin a speaking tour of twenty other counties in the state, to begin organizing similar resistance. In his speech on the Tuesday after last week’s Moral Monday, Rev. Dr. Barber laid down the gauntlet to our conservative brothers and sisters of faith.

Watching Japan

Japan's economic experiment is barely under way and already the self-annointed experts are passing judgement.  Part of the problem is that for those steeped in the conventional wisdom, no country would actually TRY to drive down the exchange value of its currency.  Must be to please their exporters, muse the wags.

Yes, the declining Yen has made a lot of currency dealers rich—with no risk because the Bank of Japan told everyone what they intended to do well ahead of time.  Yes, I am sure that the exporters are delighted the Yen is back above 100 to the dollar.  And yes, the Nikkei is back above 15,000 so those who believe this is the only metric worth taking seriously are happy.  But as I see it, this is merely the sideshow to the big event—Japan intends to get into the business of massive infrastructure upgrades and they intend to issue the funds rather than issuing new debt.  The spirits of Edison and Ford are dancing with delight.  Yes!  Precisely!

And in the meantime, just the suggestion that Japan has changed course is spilling over into the economic debates in Europe.  Stay tuned—this could get very interesting.

Inflation—the official threat of the "conventional wisdom"

When the only tool you have is a hammer, pretty soon everything begins to look like a nail. 

I first heard this little gem of wisdom from an orderly who worked in the emergency room of this sprawling teaching hospital attached to the University of Minnesota.  Because this mega-university came with a labor pool, over-educated orderlies were pretty common.  I believe my friend was a philosophy major.  He was commenting on the difference between the medical subspecialties and how they handled trauma.  He was warning me that we might have more business than usual in the OR because the surgeons were staffing the ER that night.

Over the years I have heard this line from many sources—it's actually something of a Producer Class favorite.  And it most certainly describes the economics profession as embodied in Rogoff and Reinhardt.  The neoliberals owe their triumph to their victory over those soft-on-inflation Keynesians.  And when they staged their intellectual coup d' etat in the 1970s, one's credentials were determined by how harsh you were willing to be to fight inflation.

Four decades later, and the moonie-like babbling about inflation can been seen in the comments threads about inflation on economic sites like Business Insider.  In the face of an 1930s-style economic calamity, everybody still mouths the same platitudes about the evils of an expansionist monetary strategy.  In their world, Bernanke and his program of quantitative easing will lead to the hyper-inflation of Zimbabwe.  They just KNOW that Japan's cheaper Yen strategy will fail because they also KNOW that no sane person would EVER want a cheaper currency.  I don't know what it is called, but these folks are singing lustily from the same songbook.  Not surprising since they probably came of age when the job definition of the world's central banks had been reduced to the enforcement of price stability.

Only one problem—there is no inflation.  Deflation is the problem.  And those economists who believe that inflation is the greatest threat to civilization they can imagine, may soon discover that they have the wrong tools to understand the real economy.  And if they made the serious mistake of believing inflation is the ONLY economic problem worth being concerned about, they must either relearn their profession or be utterly obsolete for the next 40 years.

Climate change and agriculture

Last summer taught me how fragile agricultural production really is.  Watching nearly the whole Corn Belt go from potential record crops to staggering losses in just a few weeks was pretty damn scary.  And while I usually don't approve of apocalyptic predictions for climate change, the one where someone predicts that agriculture could fail on an entire continent doesn't seem so very far-fatched.

The new Gilded Age rules

Bill Maher took some time to remind his viewers (at 3:02) on the occasion of the release of a new "Great Gatsby" just how wildly skewed the income distribution in USA has become and how angry and desperate that makes those on the bottom.  His token right wing guest is caught looking quite distressed.

Selling our children into slavery

There are few places on planet earth where the young are not royally screwed.  50% unemployment rates are fairly common.  But very few places rival good old USA for the evil treatment of their children.

Case in point—education.  In places like Minnesota, middle and high school education is well-funded and quite luxurious.  There are dozens of organized activities devoted towards personal enrichment.  Athletic teams often travel in coach-type buses.  In the town where I last lived, the high school had an enormous arts wing that included practice rooms, a theater, and a video editing complex that had two dozen Final Cut Pro editing suites.  In spite of the built-in trauma of being 15, these years may be the most comfortable and stimulating of many student's lives.  Unfortunately, while high school like this can be a lot of fun, the students graduate knowing FAR less of anything as academically rigorous as their grandparents had to know to graduate the eighth grade.

No problem.  They can all just go to college.  Nice plan but college can cost upwards of $50,000 a year.  Who can afford that?  Well, almost no one but hey, there is always the trip to the friendly arms of the moneychangers.  And so to get the education they should have gotten in high school, they go into massive debt.  And not just any debt, mind you, but debt that can never be discharged with bankruptcy.  Kids who simply want to obtain the skills they need to survive in today's society must sell themselves into debt slavery to get them.

And while our banks can borrow at nearly 0% interest, the poor, overwhelmed students must pay something close to the rates for consumer debt.  The government has been subsidizing the rate to keep it at 3.4% but the rates are set to double to 6.8% July 1st.  Elizabeth Warren seems to think that student loan interest rates should be closer to .75%.  She isn't about to address the naked rip-off of the young by an education business that charges $50k / year for a mostly worthless diploma, but at least she understands the concept of usury.



Here, Assif Mondvi looks at what students are actually getting for their high-priced educations and suggests that kids would be much better off staying out of school, seeking more practical alternatives, and not selling themselves into debt bondage.  For something out of a comedy show, this is intense and powerful.

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Saturday toons 11 MAY 13

Iowa invests in more wind

Regular readers know that of all the forms of green energy, wind is by far my favorite.  I spent part of my childhood in NW North Dakota.  I really need no further excuse.  But I have one.  I learned how to sail in my 20s and grew to truly love it.  It is a fascinating subject with a vast literature because for most of recorded human history, sailing was the best way to get around—by far.  The people who went to sea funded an astonishing amount of scientific and technological research.  And at the very center of all this heavy thinking was question #1: How do we harness the power in the wind?

At the height of their powers, the sailors had figured out the glorious clipper ships.  Make no mistake, being a sailor was a cruel and hazardous life but when those clippers were pushing forward at 22 knots, it was also one of the great rushes known to human experience.  Just remember, sailors these days do it for fun!  Humanity actually has quite a bit of experience using the wind.

Iowa may seem an odd place to find wind enthusiasts—being about as far from the seas as is humanly possible.  But it actually makes a lot of sense.  Iowa's population includes a bunch of Hollanders (plus plenty of Nordics.)  Ever since Rembrandt made a practice of including in his paintings the windmills that powered much of the prosperity of the Dutch Republic, this is a clan that understands the issues of wind power in their bones.  It's deeply cultural—almost religious.

Iowa is also a welcome place for really smart folks.  Their luminaries include James van Allen and Norman Borlaug.  James Hansen, the finest mind in climate science was a small-town Iowa boy.  Robert Noyce, the genius behind integrated circuits learned everything important growing up on the campus at Grinnell.  The reason this is important is that working with wind is a difficult problem precisely because it doesn't blow all the time.  Powering a society designed to run whenever the switch is thrown with a variable power source is probably not impossible, but it will be damn difficult.  Nice to have smart folks around who actually enjoy solving hard problems.

Iowa's wind position is not like North Dakota's, but it has plenty of good wind sites.  Even better, Iowa has a capital city in Des Moines, but it doesn't really have a central city.  Instead, there are medium-sized cities distributed throughout the state.  This is an open invitation for a technology that works better if the collected energy doesn't have to be shipped very far.  Oh and then there's that little matter of once you invest in the technology, the fuel is free.

What extra charming about this article is how excited Iowa folks are over a $1.9 billion project.  On Wall Street, this isn't even a rounding error.  In Iowa it's a big deal.

Growth in what?

One of the prime motivations for writing Elegant Technology was my impatience with economists who kept insisting that growth—even compound geometric growth—was not only possible, but desirable.  As someone who fervently believes that geometric growth in a finite biosphere is absolutely impossible, the only solution I could imagine was a growth in the technologies and systems that reduced or eliminated resource inputs and waste products.  Those technologies and systems are what I called "Elegant Technology."

I brought up this growth dilemma 73 times in the final version of the book.  The reason is simple—tell people who are trying to get by on too little that there is no hope the economy can expand to meet their needs and you are likely to be lynched.  Trust me on this—even explaining to people that what is needed are new kinds of growth is enough to arose serious hostility.  People want economic growth.  But anyone who promises old-fashioned growth is fundamentally dishonest.

So here we see a German economist named Welzer trying to grapple with the same problem.  Nice to know I am not alone.

Debt-free money—of course we can rebuild our infrastructure

Back in the day when the Producer giants walked the earth, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford were asked about the financing of a large infrastructure project at Muscle Shoals.  Edison's answer, as it appeared in the New York Times on December 6, 1921, describes perfectly the essential Producer position on money.  Why, asks Edison, does the government need to go into debt to build projects that increase the wealth of the nation and employ the energies of its citizens—if the government can issue an interest-bearing bond, why doesn't it just go ahead and issue the necessary currency.  In both situations, the taxpayers are backing the venture.  The difference is that if the government issues the currency, all the money can be spent on the project.  If the government issues a bond, less than half of the money goes for the project.

The basic argument that Edison makes is that the money is made good by the hard work and ingenuity of those who build the infrastructure.  Because the money is immediately validated by the project, it is neither inflationary NOR deflationary.  Read Edison's argument.  It is absolutely relevant for today.

Green economics—getting things done

One of the easiest ways to know that you are in the presence of folks who are technologically literate is to observe their attention to details.  Many a project has faltered on some detail so small as to barely noticeable.  I learned that lesson building flying model airplanes, but the point was really driven home during the Indianapolis 500 of 1967.  A charming mouse-milk salesman by the name of Andy Granatelli had decided to invest the money necessary to make a competitive turbine-powered car.  It was by FAR the fastest car in the race but on lap 197 of 200, a $6 transmission bearing failed.  Details!  You have to have all the parts endure to the end.

The same thing holds true for public policy.  For example, any meaningful response to the problems of climate change will require a LOT of superb elements working together.  And Monday, the DW site provided a perfect example of some meaningful developments in the ongoing project to build a green society.  We read about an executive from Siemens who is trying to explain that the green economy could solve many of Europe's big economic problems.  Then we read about a speech given by Frau Merkel explaining that "waiting is not an option" on solving climate change.

If those two events happened here in USA, I would be both shocked and delighted.  But even though this so very German approach to environmental issues seems like it comes from a land of the super-enlightened, it isn't going to change much.  Why?  Because it does not address the problem of how to pay for these projects.  And this folks, is not a small detail.  When you let crooks and short-sighted fools control the economy, the good stuff will not be built.  Frau Merkel has thrown in with the creditor classes who want to extract their pounds of flesh.  Because this is true, her exhortations about the urgency of climate change are nothing but some more hot air.

The Danes do renewables well

It turns out you do not need to be a superpower with a massive industrial base to make great progress in a conversion to renewable energy.  In fact it could be argued that that all you need is a tiny nation with a highly educated electorate, a seriously organized work ethic, and a reasonably honest government.  Sounds like Denmark?  Well it can be argued that the Danes are the closest to having a renewable energy society of any on earth.

The Pope surprises—May Day in retrospect

When I was involved in anti-Vietnam War protests in the last years of the 1960s, the contingent from the Newman Center always showed up ready to work.  The energy Catholic social progressives derived from Vatican II was amazing.  They had been on the sidelines for centuries and were now the center of the church's culture.

It was too good to last.  The Catholic Church has been resisting change since forever.  The Protestant Reformation happened because the mother church could not incorporate a few minor suggestions made by Luther.  They could not accept Galileo even though he could literally show them the moons of Jupiter through his telescope.  So by the early 1970s, the pushback against the innovative thinking of Vatican II was in full swing.  Here in Minnesota, those forces of reaction would mean a serious weakening of the DFL as Catholics were led out of the party over abortion.  Their attack on public education over the issue of vouchers was not as successful as in other states but it was enough to make the state's teachers pretty damn defensive.  And their positions on human sexuality were so reactionary as to be borderline insane—preaching that contraception is evil in a world being overrun by us humans or that condoms are a bad idea in the face of the AIDS epidemic actually WERE insane.

But even though the Catholics have been hopelessly reactionary for 5/6 of my life, I still hold out some hope for those moments of enlightenment that I saw as a university underclassman.  And while I was all set to be disappointed by this latest Pope, he made an especially enlightened pronouncement for World Labor Day.  Here we have a report from DW on this speech followed by the Vatican's account.

Saturday toons 4 MAY 13

Italy, the banksters are still winning

The last election in Italy was one of the more interesting in my lifetime.  The Grillo followers demonstrated quite perfectly how much pure talent there is in the ranks.  Unfortunately, they did not win enough votes to form a government and the established parties are so hopelessly corrupt, there was no desire to form up a coalition government with any of them.

So the creditor classes stepped in and provided a "solution" to the political stalemate with a "reliable" partner named Enrico Letta.  In the first article we see the French celebrating him as someone who shows up with a non-austerity agenda.  In the second article, we read the lamentations of someone who sees Letta as just another Trilateralist stooge.  What's interesting here is that both may be absolutely right—Letta may just BE a Trilateralist stooge with instructions to dump the austerity agenda.  The Trilateralists may be be worried that the anti-austerity backlash may be getting out of hand.  This is the LAST thing they want because even though the banksters have a lot of power, most of it is an illusion.  It is in their interests to keep folks from asking the really embarrassing questions.

It's freaking MAY!

We got about 9" of very heavy wet snow last night.  The clotheslines were pretty droopy under the load.