Investigators from the Colombian attorney general’s office have talked with employees of the hotel where the Secret Service agents were staying and have also questioned the taxi driver who drove home the woman whose complaint about not being adequately paid triggered the scandal, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss the investigation and asked not to be indentified by name.

Police also went to at least one of the adult entertainment clubs linked to the scandal to verify the ages of the women who worked there, a club employee said.

Two Secret Service supervisors have been forced to retire since the scandal broke and a third is expected to be fired. The 10 members of the military face disciplinary action. The men were in Cartagena as an advance team preparing for President Barack Obama’s attendance at a summit of Western Hemisphere leaders last week.

Neither the club employee nor the attorney general’s office would comment on the record about the investigation or the police operation at the Pleyclub, one of the late-night clubs linked to the scandal.

“Prostitution that involves adults is not a crime in Colombia, but inducing minors to engage in prostitution is a crime and this is the reason why the government is trying to verify whether underage women participated in this,” the official said.

So far, she added, officials have not found any evidence of any minors involved in the incident. One of the ways investigators have verified the women’s ages was by examining information the hotel gathered from their identification cards, which women staying overnight at the hotel are required to leave at the reception desk.

The scandal began in the early morning of Thursday, April 12, when a woman, identified as Dania Suarez, complained loudly in a hallway of the Caribe Hotel that the man who had hired her for sex had not paid her the agreed price of $800.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney rejected criticism from Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that the scandal showed poor management. The two Republicans had said the prostitution scandal was part of a pattern that included other recent scandals, including the recent controversy over a General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas and loans to the now-bankrupt company Solyndra. In responding to the question, Carney also mentioned photographs of American soldiers abusing corpses in Afghanistan.

“It is preposterous to politicize the Secret Service; to politicize the terrible conduct of some soldiers in Afghanistan in a war that’s been going on for 10 years,” Carney said. “It’s a ridiculous assertion that trivializes both the very serious nature of the endeavor that our military is engaged in in Afghanistan and the very serious nature … of the work that the Secret Service does.”

Carney has said the White House has confidence in Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to conduct the investigation and said Friday that Obama “wants the investigation that the Secret Service is leading to come to a completion. Once that completion is reached, if _ if the result is that the allegations that have been broadly reported turn out to be true, he will be angry about it.”

The Three Markets: Contract, Spot and Futures

Both oil and gas are traded on three markets: the contract market, the spot market, and the futures market. Each is influenced by different factors and impacts the price of gas at different stages of production. Unlike the futures market, the contract and spot markets are not the kind of markets found on Wall Street; they are informal networks of businesspeople.

The Contract Market
Though it seems like oil companies spend most of their time ruining your day by raising the price of gas, their primary business is exploration. Once an oil company finds a field and coaxes it into producing crude, it takes that unrefined oil and sells to refiners. The vast majority of oil is sold by contracts. A veritable orgy of contracts signed between oil companies and dealers, oil companies and refiners, refiners and independent dealers predetermine the fate of most oil and gas.

Refiners plan their purchasing and refining activity to ensure that these contracts are fulfilled. In exchanged for this privileged standing, refiners charge contract customers a premium.

The Spot Market

Need some extra oil? Got a spare barrel you need to sell today? The spot market is for you. The spot market fills the gap left by the contracts market. When a refiner needs extra oil to meet its contracts, they find people with surplus oil on the spot market. Unlike the contract and futures markets, which trade pieces of paper, the spot market involves the trade of actual barrels.

The best deals are often found on the spot market. Since neither the buyer or seller is locked into a prearranged deal, the laws of supply, demand, and free market are mostly in effect.

The Futures Market
Crude oil is the bees knees of the American Mercantile Exchange. A futures contract might stand for 1,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate to be delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma. The futures market represents that collective state of the oil market at any particular moment. When you hear reporters talk about the price of oil reaching $100 per barrel, they’re talking about the futures market. Because fluctuations on the futures market are driven by information, its prices guide the contract and spot markets.

The people buying and selling futures rarely, if ever, collect on their contracts; a seven year period saw 5 billion barrels traded, of which only 31,000 were ever delivered.

Refineries

Refineries are the temples where crude oil gets Bar Mitzvah’d into gas. Shifts in the refining world over the past two decades have helped ratchet up the price of gas. In the early 80′s, there were over 350 refineries, mostly owned by the oil companies. The oil companies didn’t see refining as a place to generate profit, but as an integral part of a larger operation.

If a refiner’s rack price is consistently too high, dealers will take their business elsewhere when their contracts expire. If the rack price is too low, buyers might swamp the refiner, leaving it unable to meet its contractual obligations.

To ensure pricing continuity, refiners used to call each other and share pricing information. Activist judges on the Supreme Court called this “collusion.” The refiners, unfazed by the justices, came up with a crafty alternative: publicly posting their rack prices. Somehow, the Ninth Circuit Court found this to be illegal, too. Nobody knows how refiners discuss their pricing arrangements nowadays, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it involved a members-only group on Facebook.

Despite multiple warnings, the American political system is so dysfunctional that very little has changed since a president named Jimmy Carter tried to get us to get serious about reducing our dependence on gasoline. Oh, cars and trucks get better gas mileage than they did back then. But the nation still lacks a coherent policy for radically reducing consumption.

The frustration over prices at the pump is likely a major contributor to Obama’s sagging approval ratings.

Earlier this month, Gallup’s daily tracking poll showed that the president’s favorability rating had slipped to 41 percent, tied with his lowest ever. Voters tend to blame the person in the Oval Office when gas prices soar.

I understand the frustration. Families struggling in the post-recession economic landscape — some still jobless, many earning less than they used to — are hard-pressed to fork over more and more money at the gas pump.

And for many of those families, driving has become a necessity. They’re not taking leisurely spring-break road trips. They’re trying to get to work, to the doctor’s office, to the grocery store.

Over the last 30 years, suburban and exurban development, especially in fast-growing Sunbelt cities, have produced sprawling mega-lopolises, wherein workers may live an hour’s drive (or more) from the workplace. Those suburbs aren’t exclusive enclaves of the affluent, either. Many suburbs are economically and racially diverse, so more families of modest means live far from work. A dime a gallon can break the budget.
]]> http://my-complaint.com/gas-prices-never-down/feed/ 1 http://my-complaint.com/blame-for-usa-recession/ http://my-complaint.com/blame-for-usa-recession/#comments Tue, 19 Jul 2011 01:58:40 +0000 admin http://my-complaint.com/?p=15755 Continue reading →]]> It’s no secret that the U.S. economy is in bad shape. The housing bubble burst. The stock market crashed. People lost a lot of their retirement savings. The federal government has been bailing out big industries like banks and auto makers. State governments are feuding over state budgets. People are losing their jobs with some of the highest unemployment rates young professionals have seen in their lifetime.

Who’s to blame for the recession we’re in? It’s a hotly debated topic, and there really is no single right answer. The economic recession didn’t stem from a single group or a lone action. But to help you understand how the current economic situation came about, let’s look at three groups that had a hand in it:

The Federal Reserve – For years, the Fed kept interest rates low. Low interest rates help to grow the economy–they make borrowing (and therefore spending based on that borrowing) more attractive to consumers. Low interest rates also benefit banks making loans, because it’s easier for them to attract new customers as they advertise that low interest. The problem is that low interest leading to growth is good when the economy needs a boost; not so much when it’s already booming. That can lead to rapid inflation like we saw for years with the skyrocketing housing prices around the country.

Banks - You would probably be hard-pressed to find any American who didn’t hold banks at least partly to blame for the credit crunch-turned-recession. The fact that their tax dollars then went to bail out the banks with little oversight certainly didn’t help matters. And they would be right. Banks played a major role in the current crisis–a role stemming from greed.

To explain it as simply as possible, banks knowingly loaned money (through mortgages for over-inflated housing prices) to people who couldn’t afford it. They did it for the sole purpose of earning more money–they can charge much higher interest on sub-prime loans to people at the most risk of not paying them back.

Consumers – Yes, even consumers just like you played a role in the current economic recession. Let’s be honest about it. If people lived within their means without a sense of entitlement to more, they wouldn’t have racked up debt they couldn’t afford.

In their defense, the average consumer is somewhat easily sucked in by promises of low interest and great deals (if the marketing messages and sales pitches didn’t work on many, people wouldn’t use them across most sales-oriented industries). Banks basically promised high-risk consumers something they never thought they’d have–a house of their own. People who otherwise would have stayed in their smaller homes or continued to rent strove for something better, but something they ultimately knew they couldn’t afford.

No single person, or even a single industry, led to the collapse of the housing market or our overall economic recession. While it may be easy to place blame on whoever the media or government is targeting on any given day, when you really think about the situation critically you see that there’s plenty of blame to go around. While you can’t say any one person caused the recession, you can be sure of one thing–the economy will rebound. It may not happen as quickly as we’d like, but it always does. Following every boom there comes a bust. And after every bust we rebuild.

According to a 2010 Bigresearch.com study, home owners are throwing their home improvements plans out the window like burnt toast. Over 20% of those surveyed said they were putting-off all forms of home improvement indefinitely. Interestingly, this percentage ranked second highest among all survey questions, with only “vacation travel” showing a higher figure (25%).

With cash reserves at a premium, many home owners have simply decided to wait on making improvements, and understandably so. Faced with record unemployment, higher costs of living, rising taxes and a dim view of any short term changes for the better, who could blame them?

Worse yet, home improvements have historically yielded very low returns when compared to their actual cost. In fact, Remodeling Magazine’s 2009-10 “cost vs. value” report reveals that home owners, on average, recoup less than of 65% of the money they invest in their home improvement projects.

But before you conclude that your home improvement plans should be scraped, let’s take a step back.

There are very few home owners who wouldn’t admit to needing some measure of improvement to their home. Whether it’s as simple as repairing the leaky faucet gasket that drives you crazy with its relentless dripping, or an unreliable front porch light fixture that leaves you fumbling around in the dark when you return home from a long day at work. Every house has its deficiencies.

But with a recession in full bloom, and statistics showing little to no hope of ever getting your money back, why would anyone bother with a home improvement project?

Though at first it may seem like a lost cause or verging on lunacy, there are simple solutions that many consumers are using to solve this problem.

First, let’s address the big one. The statistics from Remodeling Magazine and other similar resources, assume that a building contractor is being paid to perform all the labor and to supply all the materials. And if you assume, on average, approximately 50% of the total costs of most home improvement projects will be attributable to labor and fees, you can literally transform the investment returns by performing the majority of the work yourself. What was once a 35% loss becomes a 30% gain by simply providing your own labor force. Not a bad return in any economy.

Unstable conditions throughout the world create uncertainty within the global marketplace. Wholesalers may not know if they’ll receive the much needed oil. Consequently, wholesalers are willing to pay more to secure their share in the marketplace.
Today, the demand for gasoline has increased, creating the need for gas stations on every major street corner. In the early 70′s the demand was not as high. The gasoline supply was high relative to the demand. However, in the late 70′s we entered into the era of the ‘oil shortage’ causing the gasoline price to escalate. (In hindsight we now know there was no real oil shortage, it was based on cutting the supply thus the affect was increased gasoline prices.) Gradually, as our demands for gasoline increased, more gas stations came into the marketplace. Unfortunately, most of the gas stations were owned by the same corporations taking away the competition and allowing for the reason why are gasoline prices so high. Simply, large demand with little competition.

China, only one country within the global marketplace, has increased their oil supply by 30% in 2003. Other economically growing countries increased their demand too. Over all, the demand for oil worldwide has increased, thus, increasing the gasoline price on a world market level.

With some profit, it costs Saudi Arabia $3.50 to produce each barrel of oil, in the most expensive areas of the Gulf of Mexico, it costs around $10.00. At those oil prices the cost of a gallon of gas should be around $1.10.

In the US, the oil companies are making 100′s of times more profit, than normal, because they sell our own oil to us at the speculative market price. Even if we produce more of our own oil, the oil companies will sell it to us at speculative prices. They need to cap the price of the oil we produce in our country so that we don’t pay speculative prices. If we produce more oil, the OPEC will reduce supply to keep the prices of oil high, the same way that they have been doing it fore years.

The OPEC is a group of countries that are dedicated to cut the production/supply of oil to force it to increase it’s price. It has to force countries to not sell more oil, and it has become better at controlling countries to cut their production over the last couple of years.

The Oil companies have created their own mini-OPEC with the refining of gasoline. They practically have not built any refineries in decades, so that they can increase the gasoline price by putting the supply in the critical area. They just need to put one refinery on maintance mode and they will cause the price of gas to rise. If one refinery has an accident, and the price of the gasoline will sky rocket..

In addition to that, Oil and gasoline traders have learn to manipulate the buy/sell/delivery/storage process and they can cause further spikes in the price of the oil and gasoline. All in the name of greed.

Oil companies are making 100′s of billions of dollars, per year, for a reason, which is we are getting shaft by OPEC, the oil companies, the traders, and the corrupt politicians that let this happen to our country since it affects directly our economy, our own pockets, and raises the price of everything we need.

While the corporate media attempts to minimize, under-report, distort, or outright ignore the enormous and growing and irreparable damage to people, wildlife, fishing, vegetation, and the eco-system of Mother Earth caused by this corporate horror that began on April 20th, 2010, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama / Biden / Rahm Emanuel administration was busily urging that off-shore drilling be expanded. In an April 15th, 2010, article in The Black Commentator titled, ‘Decloaking the Deadly Foxes in Our Midst,’ I specifically warned about the insidious and “environmentally insane off-shore drilling” policies on the part of “Obama and his Democratic and Republican Party colleagues.” Who was paying attention? Who is paying attention even now?

It is important to understand that British Petroleum (BP) is not by any means the only corporate player involved in this horrendous national and planetary disaster, just as Goldman Sachs is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only corporate vampire on Wall Street. In point of fact, Haliburton Corporation, Transocean Corporation, and Hyundai Heavy Industries all worked together with British Petroleum. The bottom line for these corporations is profit for the elite, motivated by greed. The safety and welfare of everyday people and the planet is a distant second or third – if indeed at all.

Even as the pro-apartheid Zionist Obama / Biden / Rahm Emanuel clique continues to wage bloody imperialistic wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan (to name but a few places), joblessness, foreclosures, college / university education-tuition hikes, homelessness, racism, corporate government attacks on labor unions & working people, and prison incarceration rates continue to sky rocket in this nation. Even as public education is in fact dismantled and privatized by the Democratic Party foxes and Republican Party wolves, our young people serve as cannon fodder for the corporate / military elite – going from the cradle to the military or to prison.

Our addiction to oil comes at a very high price. We have to wean ourselves off of it and as quickly as possible. Our ability to destroy and pollute this planet seems mind bogling and insane. We knew long ago this was coming but took no steps towards change. It amazes me that as a species we can be so kind on one hand but continue to destroy the planet at a reckless pace on ther other. I fear a true desire and push for real change will only come when millions of people are sickened and die. By then I wonder if it may be too late. Facts are facts people. We best wake up soon.

His office, which handles complaints from consumers about their banks, has seen a spike in the number of new cases it is investigating. In the quarter that ended Jan. 31, the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, or OBSI, opened 301 new files – nearly twice the number in the same quarter last year and almost three times as many as in 2008.

Part of the reason for the increase: More consumers are looking into breaking their mortgages to refinance at lower rates – only to discover that doing so often triggers a prepayment penalty of thousands of dollars.

One frequent complaint is that the method of calculating the penalties is confusing. Last year, as interest rates were falling to all-time lows, Michael Davie looked into breaking the mortgage contract on his two-bedroom Ottawa condominium. The 27-year-old engineer, a first-time homeowner, was just two years into a five-year, fixed-rate mortgage of 4.479 per cent, but he suspected that refinancing might be worth it. /p>

“I decided to have a look at it but I had the same problem as everyone else – I couldn’t figure out how the penalty was calculated,” he said.

He searched his mortgage documents and failed to find it spelled out anywhere. A quick call to the mortgage company revealed that his penalty was the so-called interest rate differential, or IRD. Mr. Davie was charged a $2,500 penalty for breaking his mortgage and refinancing at a lower variable rate, saving himself roughly $300 a month in interest payments.

On a variable-rate mortgage, a penalty of three months’ interest is usually charged for prepayment. For fixed mortgages, the penalty could be three months or the IRD, which is more difficult to calculate. The IRD is based on the difference between the existing mortgage rate and the one at which the customer would be renewing.

Sometimes lenders calculate it using the posted mortgage rate – increasing the size of the penalty – rather than using the lower, discounted rate that many customers actually pay.

Over the years, most people had grown accustomed to the fees being three months interest, Mr. Melville said. “It just happens that in this unique interest rate environment, that was not the case. It was the three months’ interest or the IRD, and right now the IRDs are a lot bigger than the three months’ interest.”

Together, they would drastically lower taxes in Colorado. Proposition 101 would cut income taxes 0.1 percent a year until the rate was 3.5 percent – down from the current 4.63 percent. The initiative also would cut auto-registration fees to $1 or $2 and repeal all taxes and fees on telephones and computer networking, except for the 911 fee
The paper and printing costs alone for the 1,600 pages of petitions would have exceeded $200, according to the complaint.

“I just don’t think they have any regard for that aspect of the law,” said Tyler Chafee, spokesman for Protect Colorado’s Communities.

Of the official six ballot proponents, only conservative activist Freda Poundstone is well-known in political circles. Poundstone was visiting family in Washington on Tuesday and said she was not aware of the complaint, but she said she spent no money on the petition campaign.

She referred questions to Jeff Gross, the main sponsor of Proposition 101. Gross did not return an e-mail Tuesday, and he has declined previous interview requests.

Even if the complaints are successful, they will not keep the three questions off the ballot, said Rich Coolidge, spokesman for Secretary of State Bernie Buescher. If Buescher finds the complaints meet legal requirements, he will send them to an administrative law judge, who will set a hearing in the next 15 days, Coolidge said.

Chafee’s group is asking for fines of $50 a day and disclosures of the fundraising and expenses of the anti-tax campaigns since they started working

I’ve known Americans who’ve gone to Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico and Austria for medical and dental treatment they couldn’t afford here. (In fact, Logan wrote about this a few weeks ago.) If people are getting on a plane to go somewhere to get treatment, that’s got to tell you something:

MEXICO CITY — It sounds almost too good to be true: a health care plan with no limits, no deductibles, free medicines, tests, X-rays, eyeglasses, even dental work — all for a flat fee of $250 or less a year.

To get it, you just have to move to Mexico.

As the United States debates an overhaul of its health care system, thousands of American retirees in Mexico have quietly found a solution of their own, signing up for the health care plan run by the Mexican Social Security Institute.

Canadian Health care vs American health care
The governments of both nations are closely involved in health care. The central structural difference between the two is in health insurance. In Canada, the federal government is committed to providing funding support to its provincial governments for health care expenditures as long as the province in question abides by accessibility guarantees as set out in the Canada Health Act, which explicitly prohibits billing end users for procedures that are covered by Medicare. While some label Canada’s system as “socialized medicine,” the term is inaccurate. Unlike systems with public delivery, such as the UK, the Canadian system provides public coverage for private delivery. As Princeton University health economist Uwe E. Reinhardt notes, single-payer systems are not “socialized medicine” but “social insurance” systems, because doctors are in the private sector.[21] Similarly, Canadian hospitals are controlled by private boards and/or regional health authorities, rather than being part of government.

In the U.S., direct government funding of health care is limited to Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which cover eligible senior citizens, the very poor, disabled persons, and children. The federal government also runs the Veterans Administration, which provides care to veterans, their families, and survivors through medical centers and clinics.

The U.S. government also runs the Military Health System. In Fiscal Year 2007, the MHS had total budget authority of $39.4 billion and served approximately 9.1 million beneficiaries, including Active Duty personnel and their families and retirees and their families. The MHS includes 133,000 personnel, 86,000 military and 47,000 civilian, working at more than 1,000 locations worldwide, including 70 inpatient facilities and 1,085 medical, dental, and veterinary clinics.

“It is surprising and disappointing that an organization chartered to promote diversity and cultural understanding would take a public position of intolerance,” Rasmussen said.

The group’s executive director, Brenda Sturdevant, said that her group regularly sends youth home to change into appropriate clothing. “I expect our public leaders to follow the same guidelines that we have for our youth,” she told the Statesman Journal.

Rasmussen -who identifies as transgender prefers male pronouns- has called the dress code unnecessary and explained that he wore the outfit due to the heat.

“It was hot and sticky. My attire was completely appropriate to the circumstances and I also received a number of compliments during the day,” he said.