Glenn Beck’ Gold Sponsor Siezed By Feds

Hehehe:

The Superior Gold Group, one of Glenn Beck’s reliable advertisers, has been put into court-ordered receivership based on evidence that it was ripping people off.

But wait…there’s more…now how much would you pay?:

Putting a company in receivership is a pretty drastic and very rare move for a judge in a civil case. It does not bode well for Beck’s other and much bigger gold advertiser, Goldline, which has also been accused of very similar tactics, as Mother Jones documented earlier this year.

Stay tuned, I think the ol’ Beckerhead mighta just lost hisself two more advertisers. Only this time, no boycott required!

Iceland No Longer In Recession

Standard caveat for this post: Iceland’s economy is far smaller and more homogenous than the United States – as are its banks.

Iceland was one of the first economies to truly go up in flames in the wake of the Lehman collapse – but it was followed quickly and for some of the same reasons by other countries. In fact, such calamities threatened to happen nearly everywhere, and the worldwide economy entered a general slump.

Two years later, though, there’s a sharp difference between the fate of the real economy in other countries which were hard-hit by the financial near-collapse of late ‘08, such as Greece, Ireland and even right here, and the real economy in Iceland today. The New York Times explains:

Iceland emerged from recession in the third quarter, official data showed Tuesday, returning to growth for the first time since its financial system collapsed at the height of the crisis in 2008.

Iceland’s real gross domestic product grew by 1.2 percent in the July-September period from the previous quarter, the first quarterly increase since the same period in 2008. Iceland entered a slump after its overleveraged financial sector collapsed in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy.

What accounts for the striking difference? The group of people Iceland chose to allow to shoulder the burden of the problems:

Like Ireland and Greece, Iceland has taken a large dose of austerity measures to rebuild its economy. Unlike Ireland and Greece, however, Iceland allowed private banks to fail, and its currency, the krona, has declined by about 46 percent against the dollar since the start of 2008.

“Excluding the financial system, the real economy is doing well,” Arsaell Valfells, a professor of business and finance at the University of Iceland, said in telephone interview. Retail spending was still shrinking, he said, but the export sector, consisting mainly of fish, aluminum and tourism, was improving. (emphasis mine)

Imagine that. In Iceland – contrary to both Ireland and the United States (where a 9.8% unemployment rate continues to haunt both President Obama and the Democrats’ reelection chances and, of course, those tens of millions of people who remain out of work) – the people who are hurting in Iceland (and elsewhere) are the investors, bankers and bondholders, not the working people who are the true engine of the economy.

MasterCard, Visa Experience Blowback Over WikiLeaks

SECOND UPDATE: Perhaps this might have something to do with VISA and MasterCard’s support for the US government.

UPDATE: as of approximately 4pm EST, VISA.com is also down, thanks to the same crew. I can’t imagine it’ll be much longer before PayPal gets the same treatment, though (owing to the fact that they are an entirely Internet-based company) they may be better prepared to defend against such attacks. A PayPal spokesman has admitted that it was “State Department pressure” which caused their corporate decision to sever WikiLeaks’ cord. In a disgusting, Hitler-youth-esque twist, the PayPal spokesman said that the State Department hadn’t actually even contacted them; instead, PayPal had decided to “turn in” WikiLeaksbecause Foggy Bottom said WikiLeaks had broken the law. Oy.

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A group of anonymous Internet hackers calling itself Operation Payback announced on Twitter that they haz succeeded in bringing down the MasterCard site – still down as of this writing – in response to MasterCard’s refusal to accept donations to WikiLeaks. Watch their video warning: