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If you are interested, please phone me at 330-202-7661 or email me. My cell phone is 330-317-9331. I just know we can work something out, and I know in my heart, before God, you’ll never find anyone else who will try as hard for you as I will. ~ Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans.

MSNBC’s Ratigan: Stock market an ‘obviously corrupt’ fraud, The Raw Story, June 30, 2010, by Daniel Tencer, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

On his afternoon show Tuesday, MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan explained why he believes the usual explanations given in the media for why the stock market went up or down on a given day are nonsense.

“Seventy percent of the volume [of trades on the stock market] is computers that are run by the banks playing ping pong with stocks for 10 seconds at at time,” Ratigan said.

“The stock market at this point, which used to be a reflection of the future value of actual businesses in this country, has been turned by our government and our banks into little more than a paper shredding facility [about which] we can make up reasons why it goes up and down,” Ratigan said. “But when the computers … at the banks are controlling the action, most everything else is kind of silly.”

Ratigan concluded that it’s time to create an “alternative investment structure” that would allow people to invest their money without putting it “into the obviously corrupt stock market in this country.”

Ratigan was referring to the relatively new phenomenon known as high-frequency trading: High-speed computer programs that are able to “peek” at stock trades less than a second before the trades are made. If the computer sees that a trade about to be made will raise the price of a particular stock, it can purchase the stock in the split-second before that trade is made.

Many market observers say this “games” the entire stock market in favor of the large banks that practice high-frequency trading. Indeed, there is evidence that HFT has made the large investment banks much more profitable. As Ratigan mentioned, HFT is estimated to account for 70 percent of all the trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Mike Konczal at the Atlantic offers an analogy for high-frequency trading:

Imagine if eBay had a rule where you could cancel your bid within 1 second. I put up some stuff on ebay, and you place a bid for it. Then I place a bid that is higher than the current bid to see if that becomes the new highest bid. If it is, I cancel it within milliseconds. Remember, I don’t want to buy the product — I just want to drive the price higher! This is similar to what critics of HFT think is going on; HFT is able to ping prices with bids that exist for only milliseconds to see how much other buyers are willing to pay to squeeze out the maximum profit.

On May 6, 2010, when the Dow Jones unexpectedly plunged nearly 1,000 points, some observers blamed the sudden collapse — which saw some companies’ shares plummet to nearly zero within seconds — on high-frequency trading. Among those advocating that theory was Larry Leibowitz, COO of NYSE Euronext. But some other observers argued that the HFT programs had nothing to do with it, because they were shut down when the market panic set in.

Among the leading voices opposing HFT is Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who last year called for restrictions on the practice.

“The hallmark of our markets are that they are open and above board and the little guy has as much of a chance as the big guy,” Schumer told the New York Times. “This takes a dagger to the heart of that concept.”

Earlier this month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that it’s looking into placing restrictions on high-frequency trading.

Evans Liberal Politics is now proud to announce a partnership as an affiliate of The Raw Story. We will be bringing you cutting edge journalism from The Raw Story along with our regular columnists such as Robert Reich, and Daily Kos writers Joan McCarter, DemFromCT, MinistryOfTruth, Jed Lewison and economics writer Bob Swern. We are proud of our new association and welcome Raw Story journalism on Evans Liberal Politics.

The following video was broadcast on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, June 29, 2010, and was uploaded to YouTube by MoxNews.

DJ Stock Market Drops Below 10,000

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Conyers throws in with Grayson, co-sponsors ‘War is Making You Poor Act’, The Raw Story, June 30, 2010, by Stephen C. Webster, used with permission, quoted verbatim:

It seems that Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) would agree, perpetual war is making you poor.To begin rectifying the situation, he’s joined with Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) in co-sponsoring the “War is Making You Poor Act,” which would limit defense spending to $548.9 billion: the exact figure alloted in the fiscal year 2011 budget.

The act also seeks to utilize an additional $159.3 billion set aside for “discretionary” operations abroad to relieve the full federal income tax burden on every American’s first $35,000 earned per year, or up to $70,000 per year for married couples.

According to Detroit publication MLive, Conyers, who chairs the powerful House Committee on the Judiciary, is adding his name to the roster of support.

“I believe that the thing we need to do is to take that $159 billion that the President has set aside – we’re not saying he has to stop the war, we’re not giving a cut-off date for the war – we’re simply saying you need to fund that out of the base budget of $549 billion,” Grayson said of his bill. “And we take 90 percent of that and give it back to the American people.”

He’s also launched an online petition in support of the “War is Making You Poor Act”. At time of this writing it had accrued over 45,000 signatures.

Surprisingly enough, even some conservatives see the legislation as a potential positive.

“Each troop we send to Afghanistan costs the public $1 million per year,” National Review‘s E.D. Kain noted. “That’s $1 million siphoned out of the U.S. economy and shipped overseas to the mountains of Afghanistan and the Iraqi deserts. As Veronique de Rugy pointed out in 2008, for years many of these costs were hidden, not even included in the Pentagon’s defense budget. This obscures not only the real cost of war, but the costs of all the extraneous programs our tax dollars end up going toward in the name of national defense.”

He goes on to call Grayson’s bill “a good start” toward slashing America’s massively bloated defense budget.

“The costs of the war have been rendered invisible,” Grayson said on the floor of the House. “There’s no draft. Instead, we take the most vulnerable elements of our population, and give them a choice between unemployment and missile fodder. Government deficits conceal the need to pay in cash for the war.

“We put the cost of both guns and butter on our Chinese credit card. In fact, we don’t even put these wars on budget; they are still passed using ‘emergency supplemental’. A nine-year ‘emergency’.

“Let’s show Congress the cost of these wars is too much for us.”

The bill, H.R. 5353, is currently before the House Armed Services and Ways and Means committees.

This video is from C-Span, broadcast May 20, 2010.

BOEHN-head view of the day: See Afghanistan or Social Security? Boehner Says We Have to Choose, Campaign for America’s Future, June 29, 2010, by Richard (RJ) Eskow. Easy choice, that. ~ Paul Evans

See Senate Confirms Petraeus As War Commander, The New York Times, June 30, 2010, by Carl Hulse.

Alan Grayson on the War Is Making You Poor Act

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