Making Heroes of Those Who Slash Jobs

By Wolf Richter: Wall Street makes heroes of CEOs who slash jobs. Especially of those who parachute into the executive office. The more people get axed, the better. The knee-jerk reaction can be phenomenal. Citigroup’s massacre of 11,000 souls caused its stock to jump 8% before tapering off a bit.
By the irony of coincidence, we also learned that wages adjusted for inflation had dropped 1.4% in the third quarter—a continuation of the brutal 12-year-long real wage decline that has hollowed out the middle class, pushed many people into the lower classes, and devastated the poor, though it has largely spared the top 5% [The Pauperization of America].
Other big US corporations already bathed in layoff glory this year. In May, H-P announced 27,000 job cuts, about 7% of its worldwide workforce. AMR is still trying to figure out how many people it will axe, maybe 11,000. In February, PepsiCo picked up some brownie points with plans to slash 8,700 workers, after J.C. Penney had said it would shed 5,500 workers.
Citi, the third largest bloat bank in the US by assets and the recipient of multiple bailouts by the government and the Fed, wasn’t a trailblazer. Its 11,000 planned layoffs bring the worldwide tally of 30 big banks to 171,000 since early last year, according to a Reuters analysis—and that doesn’t include the job cuts at innumerable smaller banks and brokers. The new CEO, Michael Corbat, had to show the world that he wasn’t lagging behind, that he was on top of it, that he was doing something. So he fired off a broadside rather than continue plinking at 150 people here and 3,000 there.

Ex-CEO of Olympus blows the Whistle on Fraud and a Culture of Dysfunction in Japan

Recently, top bosses and executives at Olympus, the Japanese manufacturer of medical equipment and cameras, pleaded guilty to fraud in one of Japan's largest corporate scandals. Today we talk to Michael Woodford, the former President and CEO of Olympus, about the scandal and its implications. It was big news in the spring of 2011 when he became president of the company, as he was the first westerner to climb the ranks of a major Japanese corporation; in October of 2011, he became CEO in addition to President. Yet just two weeks later, in mid-October of last year, he was unexpectedly fired by the board. According to the Financial Times, Olympus portrayed him as an outspoken Westerner who "diverted from the rest of the management team."

But Michael Woodford has a different story: he exposed to the press the mismanagement and accounting cover-ups he discovered at Olympus. Woodford became the first CEO of a global multinational company to blow the whistle on his own company. We talk to him about the 1.7 billion dollar fraud he exposed, as well as what he thinks about larger business practice and economic health in Japan.

UK Autumn Statement; chancellor cooks the books + It's all about social control "...chopping your head clean off!"

The artist taxi driver
"They are robbing us blind...What a bunch of fucking slags!"

Gold will be Last Asset Standing - Jim Willie

By usawatchdog: Jim Willie of GoldenJackass.com contends, "The gold standard will return because gold will be the last asset left standing. Everything in paper is going to go to Hell." The transition will be very painful. Willie says, "We have a climax bust coming for bonds, currencies and the banking system because they are all interrelated." Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Jim Willie, also editor of the "Hat Trick Letter."

Nasrallah Will Not Let Syria Fail - Mr Leb Resistance

By Morris: The Goal of the Syrian insurgency has not really been to topple Assad but to prevent Hezbollah being rearmed through Syria. Source

"Gold Is A Physical Safe Asset” Says Central Bank of Korea

Submitted by Tyler Durden: From GoldCore Gold Bullion
The Bank of Korea increased gold reserves 20% last month to diversify investments, boosting holdings for the fourth time since June 2011 and underscoring increased demand by central banks according to Bloomberg.  The bank added 14 metric tons in November, bringing the total to 84.4 tons, the bank said in a statement today. By value, holdings increased about $780 million to $3.76 billion, equivalent to 1.2% of total reserves, the bank said. “Gold is a physical, safe asset,” the Bank of Korea said in the statement. The precious metal “is a way of diversification, which helps reduce investment risk in terms of foreign-exchange reserves management,” it said. The Bank of Korea bought 16 tons in July, 15 tons in November 2011 a further 25 tons over a one-month period from June to July last year.

My husband died like a battery hen, frightened, cold and ignored by hospital staff: MP's tearful attack on NHS care

MP said her husband was 'squashed up against the iron bars of the bed' with 'an oxygen mask that didn’t fit his face'

The human rights advocate said 'nobody should die in such conditions'

A spokesman for the University Hospital of Wales promised to investigate, saying they wouldn't tolerate poor care

A senior MP broke down in tears yesterday as she condemned the ‘coldness, indifference and contempt’ of nurses she blames for her husband’s death.
Ann Clwyd said her beloved Owen Roberts died ‘like a battery hen’ after her repeated pleas for NHS nurses to help him were ‘brushed aside’.
Miss Clwyd, a Labour MP for 28 years, sobbed as she revealed she has nightmares over the way Mr Roberts died six weeks ago ‘from the cold and from people who didn’t care’.
At one stage, she said, her 6ft 2in husband was ‘squashed up against the iron bars of the bed’ and nurses cried ‘anybody for breakfast’ at the very moment that he passed away.

Iran to take US to international court over intercepted spy drone

RT: Iran has threatened international legal action against Washington over its alleged interception of a US spy drone. Tehran claims it has evidence of illegal spying on Iran’s nuclear program to present to an international court.
­Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi announced on Tuesday that Tehran now has proof of the presence of US spy drones over Iranian territory.
“We had formally protested such actions by the US and had announced that we would defend our borders by any means possible,” Salehi told national media. International law forbids the violation of national borders, which Tehran had warned the US against before, “but unfortunately they did not comply,” he said.
“We will use this drone as evidence to pursue a legal case against the US invasion at relevant international bodies,” the Iranian FM said.
In a video broadcast on Iran’s Press TV on December 4, a US ScanEagle drone recently intercepted over the Persian Gulf by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was not visibly damaged. If the drone was manufactured by Boeing subsidiary Insitu, the lack of damage indicates it was not shot down, but was ‘hooked’ intact and brought to the ground.

London's mayor wants UK out of 'intellectually and morally wrong' EU

The mayor of one the world's leading financial hubs, London, has called the euro a "calamitous project" and demanded a national referendum on whether Britain should retain its EU membership.
­Boris Johnson, speaking at the Thomson Reuters headquarters in Canary Wharf, has called for negotiations on a new "pared-down relationship" with Brussels, stressing that the UK should remain in the single market but leave the political union.
“And if people don't think the new relationship is an improvement, then they will exercise their sovereign right to leave the EU,” he said in a speech calling for a formation of an "outer-tier" of the EU, which would also include non-member states Switzerland and Norway.
Johnson asked Prime Minister David Cameron to alter Britain's tactics with EU partners.
“I don't understand why we continually urge the eurozone countries to go forward with this fiscal and political union, when we know in our hearts that it is anti-democratic and therefore intellectually and morally wrong,” he said.
He called the common currency a “nightmare” and gave a grim prediction that it “will eventually blow up – but I wouldn't care to bet on when.”

Peace on Earth: Are You For It? Or Are You Against It?

Submitted by Gerald Celente: The Trends Journal’s Top Trend for 2013 is “Peace.” And we mean it! This is not just a Christmas cliché.

As you know, I have been forecasting that “The 1^st Great War of the 21^st Century” would soon begin. It has begun.

The world is at war. And if the current trend lines continue, a war will soon be coming to a neighborhood near you.

Just take a look around the world … pick a country.

Let’s start with Libya. Perhaps you remember that winter evening when President Obama declared that the United States would join NATO in a “Humanitarian Mission” to depose the “brutal dictator,” Muammar Qaddafi.

Surely you haven’t forgotten that this glorious “Humanitarian Mission” was not really a war, but rather, in the memorable, euphemistic terminology of Press Secretary Jay Carney; “a time-limited, scope-limited, kinetic military action.”

Now, a year later, the same presstitutes that banged the Libyan war drums acknowledge what we predicted in The Trends Journal before that “kinetic military action” even began: We forecast that President Obama’s “Humanitarian Mission” would be a total failure. We said that taking out Qaddafi would leave a vacuum that would be filled with a bloody, protracted civil and tribal war.

New Water

Trade with Dave: If you read Dave, you know that I don’t put as much stock in what George Soros says as I do in what George Soros does.  Soros started something called the Institute for New Economic Thinking, INET.  The name sounds pretty cool.  Like a cross between and Ipad and the internet.  It’s new.  Everybody loves new and in the wake of the global financial collapse and its full acceptance of responsibility by Alan Greenspan’s self-admission of his presumptive mistake (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAH-o7oEiyY), we know what got us here in the first place.  Rather than throw out the Keynesian baby with the radioactive economic bathwater of a global financial meltdown, instead Soros gives the baby a good $50 million neo-Keynesian scrubbing with his self-funded launch of INET.
I watched an interview with Soros minion, Bill Janeway, in the wake of his new book release Doing Capitalism In The Innovation Economy when it struck me that there’s nothing new under the sun… including economics.  I started thinking about fracking and the fact that every drop of water that ever existed within the earth’s atmosphere still exists.  We don’t add or take away water.  Then I started thinking about the economics of pumping fresh water into the ground to extract gas and oil.  Then I thought how do you get the water back once you pump it into the earth?  To me that’s INET in a nutshell.  It’s “new” economic thinking about an idea that’s as old as water itself – values.

TSA creating new watch list for passengers not concerning enough to be on bloated no-fly list

By Madison Ruppert: If Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the government’s various lists weren’t ludicrous enough as is, the number of individuals harassed will be increased significantly thanks to a new list specifically for “low risk” passengers as revealed in a recently released Federal Register newsletter.
While this appears to be focused mostly on airline flights, one must wonder if such lists will also be used when the TSA invades locations outside of airports around the entirety of the United States. After all, at least one college student has been harassed, detained and interrogated when traveling via train simply for engaging in Islamic studies.
It must also be mentioned that the claims that this will increase security are simply laughable since the TSA really has no interest in security evidenced by airport employees being allowed to work without background checks and the fact that an illegal immigrant was somehow able to work as an airport security supervisor for a whopping 20 years without being caught.
The newsletter, released Nov. 19 and brought to my attention by Russia Today, reveals that the TSA is creating a new list of airline passengers who are not concerning enough to justify being placed on the no-fly list.
“As part of the effort to identify individuals that are low risk, TSA also is creating and maintaining a watch list of individuals who are disqualified from eligibility from TSA Pre[check]TM, for some period of time or permanently, because they have been involved in violations of security regulations of sufficient severity or frequency,” the newsletter states.