Jobs Report Huge Miss at 38,000 Jobs Added, Stagnant Real Wages, Shrinking Labor Participation

"This election was lost four and five and six years ago and not this year. They didn't start thinking of the poor old common fellow until they started out on the election tour.

The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickled down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot.

But he didn't know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night anyhow. But it will at least have passed through some poor fellow’s hands.

They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue."

Will Rogers, 5 December 1932

I said yesterday that 'I have a hunch that gold and silver are being capped here for a reason.  Maybe.  It's hard to tell with the non-linear Fed.'

And today I think that things are becoming clearer, as suspected.  The Fed needs to raise rates to cool down the economy, in a pig's eye.  They want to raise rates for their own policy purposes, so they can lower them again when their latest paper asset bubble fails.

The common person may not understand all this, and the lessons from history.  But the 'experts' most certainly should understand them, and quite frankly they do.   They may not say so, they may never admit it, they may let themselves be convinced, and even convince themselves and quiet the nagging doubts, but at the end of the day they know exactly what they are doing, what they are abiding, what they are enabling if only by their silent acquiescence.

Then why do they keep pursuing the same failing policies, and try to justify them with wildly inaccurate forecasts and flat out misstatements of fact?   Why do the wealthy prosper while the country as a whole stagnates, and for years?

Why do the politicians go all out to try and maintain things as they are, even though they can clearly see with their own eyes that they are failing the people whom they have pledged to serve by oath?

Herein lies the credibility trap.   They wish to keep things as they are because, at least for them and their friends and cronies, the times are good, and for some wildly so.  Innovation is risky, but the wrongheaded consensus of the insiders is safe.   Insider do not speak ill of other insiders, and therein can keep their sinecures, their connections, and the camaraderie of the fortunate few.

They are caught between the age old Scylla and Charybdis of pride and profit.  They fancy themselves to be exceptional, a credentialed elite, but the sad truth is that their conceits and self-delusions are as old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that this oligarchy consists of six megabanks. What are the six banks?

JAMES KWAK: They are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that they control 60 percent of our gross national product?

JAMES KWAK: They have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors, since there have been a lot of mergers, had less than 20 percent. Their assets were less than 20 percent of the gross national product.

BILL MOYERS: And what's the threat from an oligarchy of this size and scale?

SIMON JOHNSON: They can distort the system, Bill. They can change the rules of the game to favor themselves. And unfortunately, the way it works in modern finance is when the rules favor you, you go out and you take a lot of risk. And you blow up from time to time, because it's not your problem. When it blows up, it's the taxpayer and it's the government that has to sort it out.

BILL MOYERS: So, you're not kidding when you say it's an oligarchy?

What Are Sanders and Obama Going To Discuss

Apparently President Obama and Senator Sanders are going to have an 'informal one-on-one meeting with no agenda' and no press today.

This presidential election has really framed up as an attempt at a popular revolt against a Big Money political establishment. And it is fascinating to watch.

Although the mainstream media keeps feigning astonishment, the broader public is clearly seeking two non-establishment candidate who, for better or worse, they think cannot be bought off by Big Money and the revolving door.

This meeting is an informal one with no set agenda.

Perhaps Obama will share the insight he allegedly had early in his Presidency about reformers as recounted by the ex-CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern.

"He’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for? Obama turned sharply and said, “Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?” That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote."

Ray McGovern

I am sure Obama was being flip.   They was no need to buy him because he was a well-crafted brand backed by Big Money from the very start.  What he was voicing, if indeed he said this, was the time honored motto of political corruption, to go along to get along.  This was the great lesson to the Democratic party from the Clintons.

I have included a short but interesting video at the very bottom about how things work in Washington these days as recounted by Neil Barofsky to Bill Moyers.

And finally I include a short video describing the state of politics in the US from that wild eyed radical, former President Jimmy Carter.

Bernie Sanders Meets With Obama Today: What They Might Talk About
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
January 27, 2016

Expensive media real estate is reporting that presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will meet with President Obama in the Oval Office today. Much is being made of the fact that the meeting comes less than a week before the politically important Iowa caucuses and just two days after Politico published an exclusive interview with the President in which he appeared to favor a Clinton presidency. (Memo to the President: this election is about finding an authentic non-establishment candidate, so your opinion as the quintessential establishment figure is not likely to sway folks – at least not in a good way.)

The first thing that came to mind when we heard about the meeting was that one or more kingpins on Wall Street might have asked the President to whisper in Senator Sanders’ ear to stop repeating at every campaign stop that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. Sanders is also regularly stating on the stump that one of his top priorities as President will be to break up those Wall Street banks that would require another taxpayer bailout if they should fail.

Would Wall Street actually be brazen enough to try to censor the message of a sitting U.S. Senator? Back in March of last year, Reuters reported that representatives of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America “have met to discuss ways to urge Democrats, including [Elizabeth] Warren and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, to soften their party’s tone toward Wall Street.” The article noted that withholding campaign donations to Senate Democrats was one option that was on the table at the Wall Street banks...

Read the entire story at Wall Street On Parade.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Anti-Knowledge of the Elites - Credibility Trap

After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. 'Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them.

Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say.

But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.'

I had been warned.

Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance


And he said to me, he said, "Neil, you're a smart guy. You're a young guy. You're a talented guy. You got your whole future in front of you. You've got a young family that's starting out. But you're doing yourself real harm.” And the reason why you're doing yourself real harm is the harsh tone that I had towards the government as well as to Wall Street, based on what I was seeing down in Washington. And he told me that if I wanted to get a job out on the Street afterwards, it was going to really be hard for me.

And I explained to him that I wasn't really interested in that. And he said, "Well, maybe a judgeship. Maybe an appointment from the Obama administration for a federal judgeship." And I said, "Well, again, that would be great. But I don't really think that's going to happen with my criticisms." And he said it didn't have to be that way. "If all you do is soften your tone, be a little bit more upbeat, all this stuff can happen for you."

And I felt a real obligation and sense of duty to fulfill the oath that I took in Secretary Paulson's office on December 15th, 2008 to do the job that I was sent down there to do. But I wasn't really tempted with a big job on Wall Street. And frankly, if it meant getting a judgeship, compromising the job that I needed to do and was supposed to do, it just wasn't interesting to me.

When I had my incident with the assistant secretary that my deputy, who had come down from-- who's another former federal prosecutor, who did narcotics work, said to me, Kevin Puvalowski. And he said to me, "Neil, you were just offered the bullet or the bribe, the gold or the lead."

That's kind of what happens in a society where the rewards and incentives are, again, nobody's getting shot in the head thank goodness. But it's a breakdown of the system.

And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent - to the detriment of everyone else."

Neil Barofsky, Interview with Bill Moyers


"He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

John Henry Newman

Here is a must read piece about the current flavor of kool-aid being quaffed by the acolytes of the credibility trap in Washington and New York.   The Anti-Knowledge of the Elites.

It has never been more important in the twin power areas of foreign policy and finance. You must believe to be an insider.

The precious metals markets are becoming dangerously over-leveraged and unstable.  The cause of this is a conscious mispricing of risk that is being overlooked by the regulators because of who is doing it, and why.

We cannot maintain a sustainable economic system on a financial system grounded in the actions of a few, very powerful financial crime families and serial felons.

What are we thinking?  Why does this not bear discussion?   Why do we feel the need to distort our own realities to the point of our own destruction?

Gold and silver were hammered lower right on the release of the Non-Farm Payrolls report.  So needless to say we have still not seen any short term buy signals.

The number looked like an outlier to me based on a overly generous seasonal adjustment. If they had applied the same seasonality factor which they used last October the headline number would have been around 144,000.

There was one more business day in October last year, but jobs are not jars, and production of new jobs is not a linear daily function.

This is not to say that the NFP number was 'wrong' or even purposely fat in order to provide confidence to the markets and useful cover for the Fed.

Rather, these headline numbers for a single month are very noisy as we have discussed before. They get revised several times in the short term, and then often radically so in whole revisions that go back years.

This is why I like to look at the six and nine month moving averages for jobs to get a feeling for the trend. And the trend is still fairly sluggish.

But at the end of the day, the Fed wants to raise rates for all the reasons we have discussed, mostly having to do with their own policy mechanics.

And the financiers want to do what they wish to do, and they have their way for now. Winning.

As I suggested they might, JPM has transferred their recently acquired 'house account' gold from Nova Scotia's warehouse to their own as shown in the report below.

The Bucket Shop was otherwise quiet, with the usual slow bleed out of the silver warehouses.

The precious metals are still a relatively 'small tent.'  When they go mainstream, as I think that they will, I suspect that the metals will be as agnostic with regard to value, politics, and philosophy as any other form of wealth.

But perhaps not now, in these politically divisive times with the financial engineers and their courtiers in the ascendancy.  All the very serious player learn soon enough to serve the world, and the will to power.  They want to have access, connections, recognition, approval.

They sell themselves more cheaply than you might imagine.   Not for the world, but for position, the faint praises and approval of others and, above all, for the appearances of power.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Going Off the Rails on a Crazy Train

"And what happens when PR turns a profit, and truth goes penniless?"

Bill Moyers

"Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results."

Albert Einstein

"Has he lost his mind?

Can he see or is he blind?

Now the time is here

for Iron Man to spread fear."

 

Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Man

 

Most Americans are completely unaware of FIFA or what it does, and only a bit more aware of the World Cup and non-US football.  Unless they are school age children perhaps, the parents of same, or recent immigrants from Europe and South America.

 

The official reason for the US to proceed with prosecutions of FIFA this week, after a 24 year investigation, is that the payoff schemes involved some of the Wall Street Banks.  Since it is unlikely that there will be any action against these same Banks, one wonders as to the reason and the timing for this.

 

This week FIFA was expected to sanction Israel on Wednesday for their truly terrible treatment of Palestinian football clubs.   And the US was perturbed that Qatar was chosen as the 2022 World Cup host, despite their awful human rights record, and record donations to the Clinton Fund, and loyalty to the US ambitions in the Mideast.   And finally, FIFA dared to award the 2018 World Cup to Moscow.   

 

Have you noticed that this FIFA prosecution, which so few understand and care about in the States, is getting so much more media coverage than the latest massive thefts by the Banks in wholesale rigging in the forex markets, for which no one is being prosecuted and no serious reforms are being undertaken?  There are risks in standing in any way against the will of an empire.

And besides, FIFA is THEIR scandal, and it serves to distract from OUR scandals.

 

Speaking of gold, it appears that Austria has decided that the risks of storing its sovereign gold in London are too great, and are repatriating it home.   As well they may, because in the times that are just ahead, we might suspect that possession will be nine-tenths of the law, MF Global-style.

 

Gold and silver are quite obviously in some sort of locked down trading range.    Gold will become much more interesting next week as June is an active month, and the leverage on the deliverable portion of the Comex gold warehouses is historically rather high, indicating higher prices ahead.

 

Of course, that is not the way things work necessarily in The Bucket Shop on the Hudson.   The gold game in the US benefits The Central Bank storytelling, and the Banks, who 'make markets,' or make-up markets to suit themselves and their trading profits.  It is quite lucrative as we have seen in so many other cases like is such as LIBOR, forex, derivatives, and so forth.

 

On a final note, it must seem like madness to the non-US observers, what the Fed is doing with QE and top down stimulus.  Well not to the Brits, because they have taken such madness to heart, or the Continent, which is visiting senseless misery now on Greece, and a number of the usual suspects yet to come, until they finally make they way around to the volks at home.

 

And so here we are, running off the rails on the neo-con and neo-liberal crazy train.   

 

Have a pleasant evening.

Related:  Down With FIFA!  Next World Cup Should Be in the US

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moyers: Democrats Bow Down To Wall Street

The Clintons are the founders of the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party.

The Republicans are even more servile in pandering to Big Money, but that is little comfort for the cause of genuine reform.

 

And similarly, Elizabeth Warren calls out the Democratic and Republican leadership for putting the public back at risk for the Banks gambling on derivatives.

 

Related:  Democrats Who Voted For Cromnibus Had On the Financial Contributions Feed Bag

               Senate Passes Spending Bill Including the Wall St Derivatives Package

 

Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Audacious Oligarchy

"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."

Dean Baker

"Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked.  And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a problem with. And I think most people agree with me."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

"No lie can live forever."

Thomas Carlyle

There is a currency war ongoing.  It's objective is the subjugation of whole peoples, including the domestic public.  In a very real sense it is nationless.

There is an 'audacious oligarchy' of self-defined rulers who move freely between private industry and government, whose primary objective is preserving and furthering their own power and self-interest.

Sheldon Wolin called this 'inverted totalitarianism.' Economist Robert Johnson has called it an 'audacious oligarchy.'  And so have many other responsible economists from Simon Johnson to Jeffrey Sachs.

I do not think that warnings or lessons from history will be sufficient to provoke change. Hubris makes people deaf and blind to consequences.  They will not learn, nor be informed by anything outside their own small circles.

This implies that there will be another financial crisis,  a 'hard stop' in the Western markets. How and when that will occur I do not yet know.

Have a pleasant evening.

BILL MOYERS: And you say that these this oligarchy consists of six megabanks. What are the six banks?

JAMES KWAK: They are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that they control 60 percent of our gross national product?

JAMES KWAK: They have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors, since there have been a lot of mergers, had less than 20 percent. Their assets were less than 20 percent of the gross national product.

BILL MOYERS: And what's the threat from an oligarchy of this size and scale?

SIMON JOHNSON: They can distort the system, Bill. They can change the rules of the game to favor themselves. And unfortunately, the way it works in modern finance is when the rules favor you, you go out and you take a lot of risk. And you blow up from time to time, because it's not your problem. When it blows up, it's the taxpayer and it's the government that has to sort it out.

BILL MOYERS: So, you're not kidding when you say it's an oligarchy?

JAMES KWAK: Exactly. I think that in particular, we can see how the oligarchy has actually become more powerful in the last since the financial crisis. If we look at the way they've behaved in Washington. For example, they've been spending more than $1 million per day lobbying Congress and fighting financial reform. I think that's for some time, the financial sector got its way in Washington through the power of ideology, through the power of persuasion. And in the last year and a half, we've seen the gloves come off. They are fighting as hard as they can to stop reform.

The Financial Oligarcy in the US - Bill Moyer's Journal

Bill Moyers with Bill Black: Chasing Mice While Lions Roam the Campsite

"The Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all could have prevented the financial meltdown...We have created the incentive structures that are going to produce a much larger disaster.”

William K. Black

The big thieves hang the little ones.

Anat Admati: Seeing Through the Bankers' New Clothes - The Bullet or the Bribe

"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity...few people have yet considered the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbors."

George Orwell

The reign of the Banks was reintroduced on the back of, and is sustained by, a major campaign of corruption of the political processes and the public discourse. The decisive moment was the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and the further withdrawal of the watchers on the wall by both political parties who have gone along to get along.

The difference in the analogy offered in this talk is that the monied interests are not some semi-benign doddering old emperor who has fallen victim to the flattery of courtiers and the schemes of conmen.  They are a monstrous construction of reckless pride and greed who will work their schemes until the exhaustion and collapse of their prey.

One is foolish to expect them to be ruled by self-control and appeals to reason, given the nature of their pathology.  These are the very types that cause people to organize themselves for their protection.  This is the highest responsibility of government: the promotion of justice, and the defense of all people, including the foolish and the weak, for the common good against thieves, conmen, bandit, foreign armies, and domestic predators.

"There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."

Andrew Jackson, Veto of the Second Bank of the United States

The Banks and their associated Corporations continue to extract usurious fees, misprice risk, rig markets, and engage in a variety of soft bribery and extortion.  And it will not end well.  I would like to be more optimistic, but it is discouraging to see how easily the financially powerful have co-opted some sincere reform movements into their willing tools, spouting utopian nonsense.  The shepherds have been struck down, by the bullet and the bribe, and the sheep have been scattered.

The Anglo-American financial system is an accident waiting to happen.  And you can be sure that they are expecting, once again, to dip their beaks deeply into the public pockets when they do. 



h/t Bill Moyers



We are surely not the first generation to face this sort of trial, since it is in the very nature of this fallen world, and the burden of every generation to rise to their particular trials and temptations. If anything we may be notable for our weakness, our lack of faithfulness, our foolish pride, a perverted perspective unworthy of our many gifts, and the stubborn hardness of our hearts too often in the name of our just and loving Lord.

"...He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J. H. Newman

NAV Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds - Stockman On Crony Capitalism

As I suggested might happen yesterday, the precious metal longs were given a gutcheck today as the price was hit on the NY open.

The housing number this morning was a well-seasonalized canard, from the looks of it.

Below the chart, there is a reprise of Bill Moyers and David Stockman discussing the crony capitalism that is pervasive on the US economic scene, have encompassed both political parties, despite their marketing campaigns and brand differentiation.

Bill Moyers: Deep State Hiding In Plain Sight

"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.

My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an 'establishment.'

All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude."

Mike Lofgren, Anatomy of the Deep State

"Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo."

Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

David Simon: Our Rigged Political System

David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, returns to talk with Bill Moyers about the triumph of capital over democracy.

“If I could concentrate and focus on one thing … and start to walk the nightmare back, it would be campaign finance reform” Simon says.

Simon warns that if we don’t fix our broken election system — by getting big money out of elections and ending gerrymandering — we will have reached “the end game for democracy.”

Credibility Trap: Fatal Web of Lies

From "Bill Moyers World of Ideas" 1994 Interview with ethicist Sissela Bok:

"As a philosopher, Sissela Bok grapples with hard truths – and with hard untruths, as well. Her writings explore the psychology of lying, the consequences of deception, and the perils of keeping secrets. With advanced degrees in both psychology and philosophy, she has taught ethics at Harvard’s Medical School, the Kennedy School of Government, and philosophy at Brandeis University. Her books include Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life and A Strategy for Peace."

Moyers: Can a republic die of too many lies?

Sissela Bok: I think a republic definitely could—especially if the lies are also covered up by various methods of secrecy. If you combine lying and secrecy, and if you also bring in violence so that secrecy covers up for schemes of lying and violence, then I think a republic can die.

I don’t think it’s possible for citizens to have very much of an effect if they literally don’t know what’s going on.

A credibility trap is a condition in which the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud. The leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The influential status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited, at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards them.

And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it can be seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.

The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious, 'organized hypocrisy.'

Related Reading:

JP Morgan and Madoff: Nesting Dolls of Fraud, Pam Martens

America's Gilded Capital: Losing Democracy to the Predator Class

Bill Moyers: Moral Mondays, North Carolina State of Conflict

Bill Moyers: Zombie Politics and Casino Capitalism

Henry Giroux speaks with Bill Moyers about the madness of the Anglo-American system.

Moyers: Wendell Berry On Peaceful Resistance To the Savaging of Life By Reckess Greed

I finally had the time and opportunity to see this interview, and enjoyed it more than I thought I might.

Wendell Berry is a very interesting person, a 'poet farmer.' And he has a fascinating, holistic view of life.

This week on Moyers & Company in a rare television interview, Bill talks to visionary, author and farmer Wendell Berry to discuss a sensible, but no-compromise plan to save the Earth. We also examine the critical role of honey bees in our food supply and the threats they face in The Dance of the Honey Bee. And after the antics in Washington this week, Bill shares his views on the government shutdown.

"To make a living doesn't mean to make a killing, it means to have enough."

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Bill Moyers: Weapons Of Mass Distraction and Bending Towards Justice

Bill Moyers and Lawrence Lessig On Privacy

Moyers: Martin Luther King's Dream of Economic Justice

Theologian James Cone and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch join Bill to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King’s vision of economic justice, and how so little has changed for America’s most oppressed.

Links For Saturday, 30 March

"Are we often weary, disheartened and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won’t be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive, if only we open ourselves to him."

Francis I, Easter Vigil, 2013

Links For Today

Bill Moyers: The Hypocrisy of 'Justice for All'

David Stockman: We've Been Lied To, Robbed, and Misled (podcast)

Afghan and Iraq Wars To Cost US From $4 to 6 Trillion

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of the Three Strikes Law - Rolling Stone

Inside the Three Strikes Project: An Inmate's Letter - Taibbi

Cyprus Depositors May Have Up to 60 Percent Seized

SAC's Steinberg Gets a Perp Walk - NYT

A Tale of Two Londons - Vanity Fair

Wall St Burden's the Public Debt - Michael Hudson

$600 Million Ponzi Scheme Collapse in North Carolina

Lesser Known Aspect of Currency War and the US Dollar - Rubino

Nation's Only State-Owned Bank the Envy of Wall Street

How G. W. Bush Won the Iraq War - Palast

Median Household Income Down 7% Since Start of Recession

Sheila Bair with Bill Moyers: Big Banks' Greed and Impunity