Hello folks, do you Democrat Republican blame gamers know how absolutely ridiculous you sound. It is downright embarrassing to see what I assume are "grownups" spinning whatever news item that comes across the wire to fit your fundamentalist political religion. Most people know the stock market is just another Ponzi scheme.  It's not even a question of the truth but willful hypocrisy for your "democracy"! Our political system is a one headed two party system serving their masters, Wall Street and the Banksters/Federal Reserve. Both parties are the same with the exception of a few social issues.  If you would like to come back to earth from the Presidential Reality Show and truly want to improve our country your priorities and concerns will have to change from the ‘Apology Tour” and “Big Bird” rhetoric to the real problems that plague our society. I’m sure there are many smart people out there that can add to the enclosed list.  We allow a foreign entity (Federal Reserve, neither federal nor a reserve, a group of mostly European banksters) to control our currency! This system is why you, I, economies and nations are in debt and debt slaves! The Fed has just passed QE3 to infinity and subsidiaries of the Fed like the European ECB can print money, but how can they create wealth by letting bankers use it for speculation (derivatives market), greater consolidation, and big bonuses?  We let Wall Street run our government! Wall Street is Washington and Washington is Wall Street! We have a two headed one party system serving their masters Wall Street and the Federal Reserve!  Our presidential politicians in both parties are going to spend approximately 1 billion dollars each on their campaigns this year, yet we are laying off fire fighters, teachers and policemen. Two billion dollars on presidential campaigns, is that insane or what? Then, we allow the Super Pac’s with little regulation and full anonymity to influence our American elections through the sheer volume of money that has been used to mislead the public to elect a corporate candidate or pass a corporate sponsored bill!  Our congress is bought and paid for by lobbyists and are involved with insider trading, doing the bidding for those who put the most money in their pockets! They get rich while we the “freeloaders” get cuts to Medicare and Social Security all the while the congress receive a tax payer salary and health benefits for life for themselves and their family compliments of the “freeloaders”.  We've legalized Corporations (Citizen's United) as people! They can now buy any election they want to, from sheriff to president! They don't even have to be American corporations! Corporations have severed their moral contract with America. It used to be you worked hard and helped them gain success and you shared in their success through better wages and benefits, all you get now is a pink slip.  The BP Corporation will likely not be charged with any criminal malfeasance in the largest natural disaster in history. The oil leak continues to flow and there are reports Corexit is still being used without any oversight by the U.S. - Many scientists claim the gulf loop current has been broken and the gulf sea floor has been permanently cracked. If you want evidence of the leak just talk to the residents and oil spill workers living along the gulf from Texas to Florida.  We invade a different country every year! Killing and displacing millions of people and spending trillions of dollars to enrich the Oil, Banking, and Corporate cartels!  The Census Department of the American Federal Government recently reported that “50% of the nation’s population were living below the poverty line”.  50 million people can't go to a doctor because they don't have health care!  47 million people need food stamps just to feed themselves!  25 million people are unemployed or underemployed!  15 million people's mortgages are worth more than their homes!  Our national debt is 16 trillion dollars! We pay off our debt with more debt! That is like putting gas on the fire! They tell the U.S. citizens it is their fault because they don't live within their means! They fail to mention it has everything to do with corrupt business and political leaders and the Federal Reserve and their fractional reserve banking system! In the U.S. we are injecting 85 billion a month in the economy via QE3 (40 billion a month), Operation Twist (45 billion a month) and guess who is on the hook for this irresponsible fiscal monetary policy?  The international banking elite with tacit approval from Democrats and Republicans has given the world 1.4 Quadrillion in derivatives fraud, the HSBC drug laundering fraud, the MF Global fraud, the PFG fraud, the high frequency trading pilfering and stock market fraud, the manipulation of the precious metals and bond market fraud, the MERS mortgage fraud, nearly countless individual frauds from both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, and the international 800 trillion LIBOR interest rate fixing banking fraud, just to name but a few recent FRAUDS and breaches of Bankster credibility and trustworthiness and who’s gone to jail? In blind obedience to the plutocrats we bail them out over and over and over again. You know their motto, privatize profits and socialize losses!  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the flagships of our housing bubble that has burst! The housing market used to be what was fueling the middle class as manufacturing was being outsourced to foreign countries, it got over leveraged like our banks and stock markets and there is no resolution in site! The mortgage settlement just signed is just another small fine and in reality a bailout for the banks for what they are truly liable for.  They tell us social safety nets, Medicare and Social Security that you and I paid into is Socialism when the largest recipients of social welfare in the history of the world are our “Capitalist, Free Market” banking and financial institutions! Remember the bailouts? We keep bailing out the banks to the tune of tens of trillions and we're told it's because they are too big to fail and all the while we allow them to get bigger! We are witnessing the biggest bank robbery in history and the banks and financial institutions are doing the robbing!  Our media (presstitutes) are bought and paid for by corporations and treat us like mushrooms! Reuters and the Associated Press try to tell us what to believe and think, such as unemployment is at 8.3% and falling, freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength, war is peace, they hate us for our freedom, the terrorists are out to get you, the economy is great, borrow and spend! etc…  Our constitution, our most sacred document as a country is meaningless!  We have lost most of our civil liberties through the passage of the Patriot Act, Foreign Investigation and Surveillance Act (FISA) and National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the new National Defense Resources Preparedness (NDRP)! They have authorized the use of spy drones in American skies! You can be surveilled by any number of Federal agencies, have your phone and computer tapped, bank, medical, and private records accessed! You can be arrested without gaining access to an attorney or a trial. We are molested at the airports or radiated for “security”. And just recently added National Defense Resources Preparedness (NDRP) which comes on the heels of NDAA. This Executive Order allows the government to take pretty much whatever it wants including crops, farm equipment, vehicles, boats, aircraft and fuel to “prepare” for the national defense. This includes making people work for free. You think I’m kidding about the free labor? Here’s a line straight from the EO that says, “. . . to employ persons of outstanding experience and ability without compensation. . .” This is authorized even in peace time!  NYPD’s aggressive street policing program, called “stop-and-frisk,” which predominantly targets low-income minority neighborhoods. In 2011, the program stopped and searched more than 900,000 New Yorkers, 85 percent of them black or Latino. This program is moving to a city near you!  We have created another cartel the “Prison Industrial Complex”! We have outsourced our incarceration of United States citizens which consists of over 6 million prisoners! This exceeds the number of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in history! All objectivity of prison reform has flown out the window in exchange for profits! No prisoners no profits! In some state contracts the conditions of privatization require that states guarantee prisons remain at 90% occupancy! Are there prison lobbyists? You bet and loaded with cash compliments of you and me!  The Military Industrial Complex is King, our defense budget is larger than the rest of the world’s combined! We are the enforcement arm of all the world’s cartels! The policeman of the world! In our countries short history we have bombed over 65 different countries and been at war with the world for 216 of our 236 years! The outsourcing of our security to private military companies like XE (formerly Blackwater) is increasing dramatically!  The phony war on drugs! While our military protect the poppy fields in Afghanistan, the Opium supply produced in Afghanistan went from a modest 185 tons at the start of American intervention in 2001, to a robust 8,200 tons of opium, a remarkable 53 percent of the country’s GDP and 93 percent of global heroin supply; Wells Fargo has been caught laundering money for the Mexican drug cartel in the United States (look it up); The use of drugs in the health care industry is over a 100 billion dollar a year scam. There's no profit in the cure only in the treatment. You are not allowed to buy the same manufactured prescription drugs from other countries at a cheaper price because the drug lobby has had congress pass laws against it to protect their profits.  Fukushima, which still remains stricken over 18 months after the disaster despite the fact that it has disappeared from mainstream news coverage.  The spent fuel pool inside unit number 4 at Fukushima which stores the spent fuel rods is under dire threat of collapse. Scientists have predicted that there is a 98% chance the facility will be hit by a 7.0 magnitude or higher earthquake within the next three years, threatening a disaster that would be worse than three reactor meltdowns combined. We should be made aware of the progress of the cleanup and situation.  We let the elite divide us so that they can keep us in fear, distracted, and divided to the theft going on right in front of our eyes each and every second of the day! The theft of our civil liberties, money and property!  What is wrong with this picture and what does it say about us that we allow this to take place? We have lost our moral compass and our priorities as a country and need to get them back! It is time we concentrate on fixing America for awhile!
Updated at 4:02 p.m. ET: Stocks fell sharply Tuesday as earnings from a host of large multinational companies and a Moody's credit rating downgrade of several regions in Spain triggered concerns about the slowing global economy. The Dow Jones industrial average closed the day do …