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#71 stocks

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Posted 24 November 2013 - 09:29 AM

New York spends $168,000 a year on each inmate

New York City spent nearly $168,000 per inmate in its jails last year, according to a report by an independent watchdog.

An average of 12,287 people a day were incarcerated in the city in 2012, more than three quarters of whom were awaiting trial, the report by the city's Independent Budget Office said.

Blacks accounted for 57 percent of the city's jail population and Hispanics 33 percent; barely seven percent were white, the report said.

In determining that the city spent nearly $168,000 per inmate last year, the report's authors factored in prison operating costs, the salaries and benefits of prison system employees, and the cost of servicing the debt for building and maintaining the prisons.

http://news.yahoo.co...-171026189.html


The Rise and Fall of New York

Gotham is starting to look more like California with large Asian and Latino populations and small wealthy white elites, trendy industries and a real estate bubble temporarily funding welfare programs and union sweetheart deals that carry with them an unsustainable debt.


Twenty years ago, New York’s long nightmare ended with a Giuliani victory over Mayor Dinkins. Now the nightmare returns as former Dinkins staffer and terrorist supporter Bill de Blasio will begin wrecking the city where Dinkins and his Democratic predecessors left off.


http://frontpagemag....ll-of-new-york/


De Blasio and The Triborough Amendment: The Impending Fiscal Crisis For NYC


De Blasio’s recent mayoral victory was a sad day for New Yorkers. Electing him was proof that the constituency in NYC is morally, philosophically, and educationally bankrupt. And if the mayor sticks to his positions that he declared as candidate De Blasio, NYC will be financially bankrupt as well.

A strong argument can be made that the entire election was a public service union push. For four years now, the public service unions have waited to negotiate their contracts until Bloomberg was out of office. The time has come for the unions. De Blasio, from a position of patronage, will roll over and give the unions huge back-end and retroactive pay increases and benefits both undeserved and unaffordable. New York City could easily find itself in the same fiscal categories as Detroit and Chicago.


http://canadafreepre...p/article/59446
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Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#72 Rogerdodger

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Posted 26 November 2013 - 07:34 PM

Commies everywhere!

City Orders Bar To Remove 'Thank A Veteran For Your Freedom!' Sign...
The issue has some of the sign’s supporters scratching their heads.
Said one veteran: “I can understand city ordinances, but it’s been up there for 10 years. I don’t understand why it’s a problem now.”

Edited by Rogerdodger, 26 November 2013 - 07:35 PM.


#73 stocks

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Posted 03 December 2013 - 06:52 PM

America's Royalty On Its Coasts Decides How The Rest Live

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.

The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America's big decisions are made.

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel and power. They expect service in elevators to limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don't really know — other than to influence through a cable news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters are all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted.

Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.





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-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.
 

#74 diogenes227

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Posted 04 December 2013 - 02:27 AM

As far as wretched excesses go, and a great argument for a 95 percent estate tax (or a guillotine...), there's this slug and his siblings:

TRUST-FUND BABY

And as far as trust-fund babies go, I'll take Paris in the springtime anytime. Instead of crashing cars, she at least has done a job of ONCE WASHING ONE.

B)

Edited by diogenes227, 04 December 2013 - 02:34 AM.

"If you've heard this story before, don't stop me because I'd like to hear it again," Groucho Marx (on market history?).

“I've learned in options trading simple is best and the obvious is often the most elusive to recognize.”

 

"The god of trading rewards persistence, experience and discipline, and absolutely nothing else."


#75 stocks

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Posted 05 December 2013 - 07:32 AM

America's Royalty On Its Coasts Decides How The Rest Live

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.

The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America's big decisions are made.

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel and power. They expect service in elevators to limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don't really know — other than to influence through a cable news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters are all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted.

Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.





Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investor...m#ixzz2mSOhBj9K
Follow us: @IBDinvestors on Twitter | InvestorsBusinessDaily on Facebook


Senator Tom Coburn compares Washington to “parasitism.”


The chief national correspondent for the New York Times Magazine offers a view of Washington’s elites in his occasionally funny yet depressing book, This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!. The book is mostly about narcissism and the self-serving, self-reinforcing world of the elites which, while common to major cities around the world, has a unique flavor here on the Potomac.

No one comes off well in this book. Not Tim Russert, Trent Lott, Harry Reid, Terry McAuliffe, Bob Rubin, Chris Matthews, Ken Duberstein, Sidney Blumenthal, Darrell Issa, the staff of Politico, or the rest of the members of this “grimy ecosystem.” The Beltway is “Suck-up City” in which “Sucking up is as basic to Washington as humidity.” Here “It has never been easier for ‘strategists’ and ‘consultants’ and ‘agents’ of all stripes to affix themselves like barnacles to the local money barge, sucking in green nutrients.”

Former Louisiana Senator, John Breaux, now a lobbyist, once said that his vote could not be bought but “could be rented.” This may be one of the many reasons Senator Tom Coburn compares Washington to “parasitism.”

Leibovich cites estimates of former congressmen now lobbying between 160 and 305, depending on what sources you believe. My former congressman in St. Louis, Richard Gephardt, who served as Democratic majority leader in the House, a solid supporter of organized labor, was, by 2010, listing his billings for his lobbying firm at $6.59 million. He represents Goldman Sachs, Boeing, and Visa. While in Congress he supported a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of 1915, “only to oppose the resolution as a lobbyist who was being paid about $70,000 a month by the Turkish government…”



http://spectator.org...-beltway-bubble
-- -
Defenders of the status quo are always stronger than reformers seeking change, 
UNTIL the status quo self-destructs from its own corruption, and the reformers are free to build on its ashes.