Source: Associated Press
Pres. Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper remain at odds over a proposed oil pipeline from Canada through the U.S., with Obama showing no interest in speeding up a project that the Harper sees as vital to his nation’s economy.

From Washington Examiner:

After a long-running dispute between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, there’s a lot of happy talk coming out of Washington state today. That’s because the two sides reached a tentative deal, pending the approval of union members next week. If approved, the Machinists say they will drop their grievances before the National Labor Relations Board, which had led the board to take the unprecedented action of suing Boeing to prevent it from opening a non-union factory in South Carolina. Beneath the happy talk, however, we’re left with an ominous reality — the appearance of a union using the NLRB as its personal weapon to shake down a private company.

Here’s what they got:

Though Boeing did not agree to shut down its South Carolina facility, the company did agree to build its 737 MAX passenger jets in unionized Washington state, though they had been considering building them elsewhere. In addition, the Machinists report the tentative deal includes:

• Annual wage increases of 2 percent, plus cost-of-living adjustments;
• An incentive program intended to pay bonuses between 2 and 4 percent;
• A ratification bonus of $5,000 for each member;
• Increases to the formula for calculating pensions in each year of the pact; and
• Guarantees that new hires would continue to receive traditional pensions.

They promise not to target “small businesses” so it’s okay. Screw the big retailers. F*ck all the employees that work at those companies, right? These people are a disgrace. Why would we want to destroy the successful retailers in America? Is that supposed to help the economy? These people are Marxist morons. We don’t owe them shit.

Blue Cross/Blue Shield CEO Scott Serota was attempting to give a speech.

Here’s the explosive ’60 Minutes’ report that is causing an uproar around the nation:

Steve Jobs, the man who created the very computer I’m typing this on passed away today. He was 56. Not only was he a visionary and a genius, he was one of the greatest CEO’s this country has ever produced.

His family is in my prayers.

From the LA Times:

The race is on to tap one of the most vital sources of campaign cash — Wall Street — and the early results are not looking good for President Obama.

The president’s campaign struggled this week to sell out a fundraising dinner Friday at Manhattan’s gilded FourSeasons restaurant despite its being hosted by America’s No. 1 capitalist, Warren Buffett, according to people close to the campaign who were not authorized to speak publicly. The dinner for 100 was also a relative bargain at $10,000 a plate; recent fundraisers in Hollywood and New York have gone for $35,800 a pop.

The episode highlights a worrying trend for the Obama campaign. Wall Street, a key contributor to Obama in 2008, seems to be switching allegiances.

Reading that makes me laugh maniacally. The president demonizes “millionaires and billionaires” at every opportunity and accuses them of not “paying their fair share,” then has the cojones to show up with his hand out. He’s lucky they don’t spit in it. It’s because of the president’s Marxist cronies that the “Occupy Wall Street” crap is going on. That’s the far left Van Jones crowd. Those are the president’s people.

The LA Times has a good piece today about Barack Obama’s class warfare rhetoric disappearing and then reappearing depending on his audience. At $35,000 per ticket fundraisers with evil millionaires and billionaires the president doesn’t mention anything about the “Buffet rule” or ask the attendees to “pay their fair share.” But in front of $100 a ticket crowds he goes back to railing about the rich and calling for new taxes on them.

Barack Obama is a cynical left wing politician so I’m not really surprised. The sad part is that millionaires and billionaires would still line up to give him money which will directly fund his goal of taking more of their money. It’s bizarre world we live in.

(H/T Weasel Zippers)

(image via Flopping Aces)

This dude gets it. Period. The best part is when he keeps antagonizing that liberal academic next to him. He scribbles notes refuting her testimony and passing them to her. LOL!

(H/T Conurls)

This article titled “Banks under new pressure as ‘rogue trader’ loses $2bn” was written by Jill Treanor, for The Guardian on Thursday 15th September 2011 20.20 UTC

Pressure to accelerate reform of the banking industry is mounting as a star trader at the UBS investment bank remained in police custody in London amid allegations that he was at the heart of a rogue trading incident that has cost the Swiss bank about $2bn (£1.2bn).

Kweku Adoboli, 31, faced a night of questioning by officers from City of London police after being arrested at 3.30am when his managers became suspicious about his trading activities and alerted police and financial regulators. Police said he was being held on suspicion of “fraud by abuse of position”.

Adoboli’s father, a retired United Nations employee from Ghana, told Reuters in Accra that his “Godfearing family” was “heartbroken because fraud is not our way of life”.

John Adoboli, who had worked in trouble spots around the world, said his son’s girlfriend had confirmed his arrest. Adoboli Sr said he was calling his son’s phone and he hoped he would “be granted bail soon so I can hear his side of the story”.

The Nottingham University graduate’s arrest coincided with the third anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and sparked a 10% fall in UBS’s shares as it warned it might make a third-quarter loss.

Days after the government pledged to endorse ringfencing ideas put forward by Sir John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking, senior political figures used the UBS incident as ammunition to encourage reform. Lord Oakeshott, the former Lib Dem Treasury spokesman in the Lords, said it exposed the “toxic banking risk” still in the system. Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister during the banking crisis, warned taxpayers were still on the hook should a UK bank fail.

UBS, which had been fighting to restore its reputation after it became one of the biggest continental European casualties of the 2008 banking crisis, alerted City of London police at 1am on Thursday after it uncovering alleged “unauthorised trading” in the late afternoon and embarked on a wide-ranging internal investigation.

City of London police arrested Adoboli at the sprawling UBS office complex near Liverpool Street in central London, where around 6,000 people are employed. “The man was taken to a City of London police station for questioning and he remains in custody while officers are continuing to investigate this matter,” police said.

The allegations facing Adoboli follow a series of rogue trading incidents in the financial markets. Nick Leeson is perhaps the highest profile after he was jailed in Singapore for bringing down Barings Bank in 1995 but there have been many others, including Yasuo “Mr Copper” Hamanaka and Jérôme Kerviel, a trader at Société Générale, whom the French authorities sentenced to three years in prison last year after he ran up losses of €4.9bn. Kerviel is appealing against the sentence.

Adoboli now risks entering that list if charges are brought against him. The bank would not confirm his position at the bank but his entry on LinkedIn, the social networking site, described him as director of exchange traded funds (ETF) and delta one trading at UBS.

This operation, in the equities division on the third floor of the UBS head office, was known internally as a profitable – and risk free – area of business. But it is understood that the trading desk was largely silent on Thursday

Staff were said to be stunned as Adoboli and his colleagues were regarded as “stars” by their colleagues and top management.ETFs are complex financial instruments that comprise a basket of investments intended to mimic a market’s movements. They have become an area into which firms have expanded since the subprime mortgage crisis. Traders on so-called delta one desks try to make huge profits on tiny differences between prices.

The Financial Services Authority, the City regulator, is understood to have been alerted in the early hours and Swiss regulators were watching the situation closely.

The Serious Fraud Office may also become involved after it said it was “seeking discussions” with the bank, the City of London police and the FSA about how to proceed if fraud needed to be investigated. The SFO had already issued a warning about the “inherent dangers” of ETFs because of their complexity.

UBS is expected to reveal more details on Friday about the allegations facing Adoboli but the City was rife with speculation that he had been caught out by the sudden move by the Swiss National Bank last week to lower the rate of exchange of the Swiss franc.

On 6 September, the Swiss National Bank warned that it would no longer allow one Swiss franc to be worth more than €0.83 – equivalent to SFr1.20 to the euro. “The Swiss currency moved by 8% straight away which is a huge move for foreign exchange markets.

Probably a good guess as to where the loss came from, but at the moment we do not know,” said Louise Cooper, analyst at BGC Partners.

Amid concerns about the health of Europe’s banking system, Oakeshott told a debate on the Vickers reforms in the Lords that “this reminds us how much toxic banking risk remains in the system, and how urgent radical reform is”.

He added: “The problem is that big investment banks are full of rogue traders: it is what they do.”

Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister at the time of the banking crisis, told the Guardian: “Until this government does something – either Vickers or Vickers ‘plus’ – the taxpayers remain on the hook.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010