28 Good Questions That The Mainstream Media Should Be Asking

Why is there so little trust in the mainstream media these days?  CNN ratings have been hovering close to record lows over the past few months.  A recent Gallup survey found that 60 percent of all Americans "have little or no trust" in the mainstream media.  That was a record high according to Gallup.  So why is this happening?  Sadly, the truth is that the mainstream media quit telling the truth a long time ago.  The mainstream media has an agenda, and more Americans than ever are beginning to recognize this.  Once upon a time, control of the news in the United States was at least somewhat decentralized.  But now there are just six giant media corporations that control almost everything that we see, hear and watch.  The version of "the news" that they give us is designed to serve the interests of those corporate giants and the other corporate giants that spend billions of dollars to advertise their products through those outlets.  Watching the news on television can be an extremely frustrating experience these days.  Yes, there are little bits and pieces of the truth in there, but you have to wade through an awful lot of "infotainment" to get to those bits and pieces.  That is one of the reasons why the "alternative media" has absolutely exploded in recent years.  The American people are hungry for the truth, and they are increasingly turning to alternative sources of news on the Internet in an attempt to find it.

We live at a time when the world is changing more rapidly than ever before.  Just about everything that can be shaken is being shaken, and anyone with half a brain realizes that we are heading for challenges that previous generations never even could have imagined.

There certainly is no shortage of news, but instead of focusing on the terribly important issues that we are facing, the mainstream media feeds us an endless stream of fluff, scandals and celebrities.

Just check out some of the headlines that I found on the front pages of major mainstream news websites today....

"Man Dies After Roach-Eating Contest"

"Ex-NFL Cheerleader Admits To Sex With Minor"

"Facebook Rolls Out Pinterest-Like Tool For Buying Stuff"

"Grumpy Cat Becomes Internet Sensation"

So what should the mainstream media really be talking about today?

The following are 28 good questions that the mainstream media should be asking....

1. Why is the IMF warning that there is an "alarmingly high" risk of a deeper global economic slowdown?

2. Why is Switzerland preparing for "major civil unrest" throughout Europe?

3. If the Spanish financial system completely collapses, what is that going to mean for the rest of Europe and the rest of the globe?

4. Is Turkey about to drag the rest of NATO (including the United States) into a war with Syria?

5. Why aren't people screaming in outrage about the fact that the U.S. national debt increased by more than a trillion dollars for the fourth straight year in 2012?

6. Should we be concerned that the U.S. government added more to the U.S. national debt on the first day of fiscal year 2013 than it did from 1776 to 1941 combined?

7. If temporary refinery problems can cause some gas stations to shut down and cause gas prices in California to skyrocket to all-time highs, what would a real crisis do?

8. Why are some analysts predicting that a "rapid collapse" is coming for the U.S. dollar?

9. Will the U.S. dollar soon lose its status as the primary reserve currency of the world?

10. Why is Marc Faber warning that the wealthy "may lose up to 50 percent of their total wealth"?

11. By keeping interest rates near zero, is the Federal Reserve crushing the retirement dreams of millions of elderly Americans?

12. Why do Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and most members of Congress continue to stand behind the TSA when nearly 400 TSA employeeshave been fired for stealing from travelers since 2003?

13. Why are nearly half a million employees of the federal government making over $100,000 a year?

14. How in the world can you have a debate about the economy that lasts for an hour and a half and never even mention Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve or quantitative easing?

15. Why are Romney campaign signs being smeared with excrement?

16. British taxpayers spent 57.8 million dollars on the royal family in 2011.  U.S. taxpayers spent 1.4 billion dollars on the Obamas that same year.  How in the world can this be justified?

17. Why does the U.S. government treat our military veterans like garbage?  Many of them have given everything for their country.  Shouldn't we treat them with more respect?

18. Why is the mainstream media ignoring a warning that an international gang of cybercriminals plans "to steal money from the online accounts of thousands of consumers at 30 or more major U.S. banks"?

19. The New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts is warning that rapidly rising global food prices could soon lead to massive food riots all over the planet.  Is this something that we should be concerned about?

20. Why is the United Nations pushing to have the authority to impose "global taxes" on all of us?

21. How did we get to the point where sex trafficking is now at epidemic levels all over the United States?

22. Why are so many young people being arrested?  Should we be concerned that 41 percent of all Americans have been arrested by the time they reach the age of 23?

23. Why are most Americans either overweight or obese or severely obese?

24. How was one Baltimore woman able to accumulate 30 free cell phones all paid for by the federal government?

25. Why are nearly 30 percent of all young adults in the 25 to 34 year old age bracket living at home with their parents?

26. Why has the birth rate in the United States fallen to an all-time low?

27. With the race for president incredibly tight right now, will the side that loses end up accusing the other side of using voter fraud to steal the election?

28. Is the U.S. Supreme Court about to make it illegal to resell our own stuff at yard sales, in thrift stores and on eBay?

Do you have any questions to add to this list?

Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below....

Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal

Samuel Aranda for The New York Times

In Spain, the unemployment rate is over 50 percent among young people. More Photos »

By SUZANNE DALEY

Published: September 24, 2012

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MADRID — On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night.

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At first glance, she looked as if she might be a store employee. But no. The young woman was looking through the day’s trash for her next meal. Already, she had found a dozenaging potatoes she deemed edible and loaded them onto a luggage cart parked nearby.

“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”

The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet.

Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash binsas a public health precaution.

A report this year by a Catholic charity, Caritas, said that it had fed nearly one million hungry Spaniards in 2010, more than twice as many as in 2007. That number rose again in 2011 by 65,000.

As Spain tries desperately to meet its budget targets, it has been forced to embark on the same path as Greece, introducing one austerity measure after another, cutting jobs, salaries, pensions and benefits, even as the economy continues to shrink.

Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families.

For a growing number, the food in garbage bins helps make ends meet.

At the huge wholesale fruit and vegetable market on the outskirts of this city recently, workers bustled, loading crates onto trucks. But in virtually every bay, there were men and women furtively collecting items that had rolled into the gutter.

“It’s against the dignity of these people to have to look for food in this manner,” said Eduardo Berloso, an official in Girona, the city that padlocked its supermarket trash bins.

Mr. Berloso proposed the measure last month after hearing from social workers and seeing for himself one evening “the humiliating gesture of a mother with children looking around before digging into the bins.”

The Caritas report also found that 22 percent of Spanish households were living in poverty and that about 600,000 had no income whatsoever. All these numbers are expected tocontinue to get worse in the coming months.

About a third of those seeking help, the Caritas report said, had never used a food pantry or a soup kitchen before the economic crisis hit. For many of them, the need to ask for help is deeply embarrassing. In some cases, families go to food pantries in neighboring towns so their friends and acquaintances will not see them.

In Madrid recently, as a supermarket prepared to close for the day in the Entrevias district of Vallecas, a small crowd gathered, ready to pounce on the garbage bins that would shortly be brought to the curb. Most reacted angrily to the presence of journalists. In the end, few managed to get anything as the trucks whisked the garbage away within minutes.

But in the morning at the bus stop in the wholesale market, men and women of all ages waited, loaded down with the morning’s collection. Some insisted that they had bought the groceries, though food is not generally for sale to individuals there.

Others admitted to foraging through the trash. Victor Victorio, 67, an immigrant from Peru, said he came here regularly to find fruits and vegetables tossed in the garbage. Mr. Victorio, who lost his job in construction in 2008, said he lived with his daughter and contributed whatever he found — on this day, peppers, tomatoes and carrots — to the household. “This is my pension,” he said.

For the wholesalers who have businesses here, the sight of people going through the scraps is hard.

“It is not nice to see what is happening to these people,” said Manu Gallego, the manager of Canniad Fruit. “It shouldn’t be like this.”

In Girona, Mr. Berloso said his aim in locking down the bins was to keep people healthy and push them to get food at licensed pantries and soup kitchens. As the locks are installed on the bins, the town is posting civilian agents nearby with vouchers instructing people to register for social services and food aid.

He said 80 to 100 people had been regularly sorting through the bins before he took action, with a strong likelihood that many more were relying on thrown-away food to get by.

But Mr. Berloso’s locks created something of an uproar across Spain, where the economic crisis is fueling more and more protests highlighting hunger. A group of mayors and unionists in southern Spain, where unemployment rates are far above the average, recently staged Robin Hood raids on two supermarkets, loading carts with basic foods and pressing them to donate more food to the needy.

More than a dozen are facing prosecution for theft over the stunt. But they are unrepentant and appear to have huge local support. “Taking some food and giving it to families who are having a really hard time, if this is stealing, I am guilty,” one of the men, Francisco Molero of the farmworkers’ SAT union, told the local news media afterward.

Some politicians say Girona’s locks are really all about protecting Girona’s image. Dominated by medieval buildings and the picturesque cobblestone streets of a beautifully preserved former Jewish quarter, the city of about 100,000 derives most of its income from tourism.

“The social workers or civil agents could refer people to the food distribution center without having to lock bins,” said Pia Bosch, a Socialist councilor in Girona. “It’s like killing a fly with a cannonball.”

The unemployment rate is still relatively low in Girona — 14 percent over all, compared with 25 percent for the country as a whole. But more and more families have no income. Of the 7,700 unemployed in Girona, Mr. Berloso said, 40 percent have now run out of benefits.

Many, he said, were “people who never expected to find themselves in this position.”

Ramon Barnera, who runs the Caritas programs in Girona, said the organization realized early on that shame was a factor preventing people from coming forward to ask for food. So three years ago, it helped create food distribution sites that looked more like supermarkets, and removed the charity’s name from the outside of the building.

“We looked for a system that would give dignity,” Mr. Barnera said. “This is not easy for people.”

On a recent morning, Juan Javier, 29, who had come to collect milk, pasta, vegetables and eggs from one of the distribution centers, was one of the few clients who would discuss his circumstances. A former printer, he has been out of work for two years. “I would like to have a job,” he said, “and not be here.”

In a nearby soup kitchen, Toni Lopez, 36, waited quietly for a free lunch with his girlfriend, Monica Vargas, 46, a beautician. The couple recently became homeless when they fell two months behind on their rent.

“All our lives we have been working people,” Mr. Lopez said. “We are only here because we are decent people. The landlord was knocking on the door demanding the rent, so we said, ‘Here, here are the keys.’ ”

Mr. Lopez, who gets occasional work these days in restaurant kitchens, said he had a sister but had not gone to her for help. “I can’t bear to tell her,” he said. “ I have always pulled through. I’ve always managed to get by. This is new.”

Rachel Chaundler contributed reporting.

Will Germans Pick Up the Tab for Deutsche Bank, Too?

Illustration by Brian Walker

By Simon Johnson Sep 16, 2012 3:30 PM PT

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Pity the German taxpayer.

Recent weeks have brought a slew of bad news in terms of contingent liabilities for the German state -- meaning that taxpayers are potentially on the hook for increasing amounts. Two weeks ago, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi affirmed his willingness to commit the ECB -- partly owned by Germany -- to take on added sovereign-debt risk. And last week the German constitutional court confirmed that the European Stability Mechanism is consistent with German law, allowing further fiscal transfers to the euro-area periphery.

About Simon Johnson

Simon Johnson, who served as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund in 2007 and 2008, is a professor ofentrepreneurship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.

More about Simon Johnson

And most recently, Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) unveiled its revamped strategy, with a new vision for its organization and growth. The German taxpayer should be very worried.

Deutsche Bank cannot fail -- in the sense of experiencing a Lehman Brothers-type bankruptcy. The German government wouldn’t allow it. With a balance sheet equivalent to about 80 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product, Deutsche Bank is too big to fail both in terms of its direct involvement with the national economy and the potential knock-on effect on confidence in German industry.

But the bank can fail in the sense that it could require future taxpayer assistance. To determine how likely this is -- and the scale of potential losses at any bank -- you need to answer three questions.

Equity Financing

First and foremost, how much capital does the bank have? In this context, capital is a synonym for equity financing, so the right question is: How much is the bank financed with shareholder equity rather than any form of debt? Sometimes people speak of a bank “holding” capital, but this is the wrong verb; it implies that capital is a type of asset, when it is actually a form of liability.

As taxpayers view banks, equity capital is critically important because it is the buffer that absorbs losses. If losses exceed the value of equity, the bank is insolvent and -- assuming there is a rescue -- the difference becomes a taxpayer responsibility.

Seen in this light, Deutsche Bank has long been a worry because it one of the more thinly capitalized global megabanks.

Its official capital ratios might seem respectable to a casual observer: At the end of the second quarter, it reported a core Tier 1 capital ratio (a regulatory measure of equity) of 10.2 percent of total assets.

The problem with this measure is that it uses risk-weighted assets. In other words, if a bank can convince itself and its regulators that it can apply lower risk weights to a given portfolio, its capital ratio will look higher.

What is considered to be a low-risk asset in the context of European banks? Typically, the sovereign debt of euro-area countries has been regarded as very low risk. But Draghi is being forced into extraordinary measures and the German constitutional court is being asked to rule on the ESM and other bailout measures precisely because sovereign debt for some euro countries has become so risky. And if you think there is a non- zero probability of the euro area breaking up, then risk-free assets have become a meaningless concept in Europe.

To evaluate any global bank today, it is much more advisable to look at its leverage ratio, the total size of its balance sheet relative to its equity, without any risk adjustments.

At the end of the second quarter, Deutsche Bank had total assets of 2.241 trillion euros ($2.93 trillion). Its total shareholder equity capital was 55.75 billion euros -- a little less than 2.5 percent of total assets. That is a lot of leverage. Bloomberg News reported that this is the least equity (and most leverage) “among the 24 biggest European banks.”

Risk Management

Second, does the bank have a good grip on risk management? None of the recent statements from the new co-chief executive officers, Juergen Fitschen and Anshu Jain, are reassuring, primarily because they don’t address the issue of Deutsche Bank’s very high leverage. If you believe a global $2.9 trillion portfolio cannot suffer more than 3 percent losses, I have some U.S. mortgage-backed securities, euro-periphery debt, and Chinese bridges to nowhere to sell you. Or you can talk to the people at UBS AG (UBSN) who lost their jobs for this kind of hubris.

Third, does management have a convincing vision for staying out of trouble? The really worrying issue in this regard is that Fitschen and Jain remain focused on hitting a return-on-equity target.

They have set a target of a 12 percent after-tax return , a headline number that the bank says is comparable to the 25 percent pretax target set when Josef Ackermann was CEO, but may end up being sharply lower. But as Anat Admati of Stanford University and her colleagues have explained at length in recent years, ROE is a completely flawed target for banks, precisely because it doesn’t capture the associated risks.

“Since investors must be compensated for bearing risk, higher leverage increases the required, or expected, return on equity. To judge whether a manager has created value, one cannot simply look at the return on equity; one must adjust for risk,” Admati wrote in the New York Times. “A bank manager can attempt to reach a ‘target return on equity’ by taking on more risk and by using more leverage, but this, in and of itself, does not create value. It does, however, increase fragility and systemic risk.”

If you invest in banks and haven’t followed this debate, you really need to catch up. The full set of Admati papers is here.

Germany has deep pockets, and many people lined up to put their hands in. But the wealth and the patience of the German people is limited. The country’s gross general government debt is already almost 80 percent of GDP while net debt is 54 percent of GDP, according to the International Monetary Fund’s spring 2012 fiscal monitor. German GDP is 2.65 trillion euros.

Euro Rescue

The even bigger threat is to Germany’s influence in the escalating intra-European struggle over how to save the euro area and who will pay that bill. In the next round -- the argument about potential conditionality that may be attached to ECB and ESM support -- expect Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to make the point that reckless German banks, including state-backed Landesbanken, contributed to the debt mess on the periphery. Northern lenders, pursuing foolish ROE targets, were not careful and pushed cheap credit on real-estate developers and governments alike.

Allowing German banks to lend recklessly within the euro area will prove to be a costly mistake, no matter who pays the final bill. Why go down the road again of pursuing high return on equity while mismeasuring credit risk?

Deutsche Bank should be instructed to raise more capital, exactly as UBS and Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) have been recently compelled to do. The Swiss authorities recognized that to act otherwise would be fiscally irresponsible. German taxpayers should be clamoring for their government to come to the same realization.

(Simon Johnson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management as well as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, is co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

Read more opinion online from Bloomberg View. Subscribe to receive a daily e-mail highlighting new View editorials, columns and op-ed articles.

Today’s highlights: the editors on the mad expansion of occupational licensing, on India’s bold reforms and on Istanbul’s potential to be a financial hub; Albert R. Hunt on Mitt Romney’s tax plan; Virginia Postrel on middle-class job security; Dorothy A. Brown on why Harry Reid shouldrelease his tax returns.

To contact the writer of this article: Simon Johnson at sjohnson@mit.edu

To contact the editor responsible for this article: Max Berley at mberley@bloomberg.net