This morning, I got up to news that Occupy Wall Street was going to use the day traditionally used by communists to celebrate, well, communism, May 1, to mobilize against ugly capitalism by marching in about 140 cities, shutting down bridges and tunnels, blocking traffic, threatening banks, menacing stores and shoppers, and getting in the face (or worse) of law enforcement. Socialism’s storm troopers are on the march.

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As you might imagine, I read a tremendous amount of market research from varied sources. I read it all with a jaundiced eye since I principally believe that most of the folks who publish this stuff are trying to sell it. I see absolutely nothing wrong in that, but it does provide a filter and it should for you as well.

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At a time Barack Obama celebrates the passage of a two month tax holiday extension after 2 years of failing to pass a budget, Israel’s finance minister’s attribution of Israel’s economic success to a move to a biannual budget should have a particular resonance in the US. Yuval Steinitz explained in an interview to the Times of India:

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In past posts I’ve described how the CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, created a website called Deep Capture that is aimed at smearing the critics of his stewardship of Overstock.com.

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A month after Wall St. Journal published Kosovo’s terrorist prime minister Hashim Thaci, the Heroin-Trafficker-in-Chief got to ring the opening bell at NASDAQ on Thursday.

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The U.S. economy is moving sideways. While there are some signs of life, the most important indicators are very weak. Economic growth slowed to a 1.8% annual rate in the first quarter of this year, down from 3.1% of last year’s 4th quarter. If you exclude inventories (which picked up), the economy actually only grew by an anemic .8%.

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It should not be a surprise that Americans are losing their faith in Capitalism as they mistakenly identify it with the recent highway robbery of tax payers practiced by so called Capitalist states. For the socialization of private loss and the bout of Fed money printing is nothing less. Unfortunately, the only place tax payers were in a position to prevent their government from such action is in Iceland and they said no. FT editors are right. Other countries should follow Iceland’s example.

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The Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, made a stunning comment this week that got very little attention. He said that the non-partisan number crunchers at the Congressional Budget Office have a computer model that simulates our economy going forward. The model indicates that if we keep spending as we are, without significant cuts and entitlement reform, our economy will crash in 2037. Ryan went on the say that the CBO computer model cannot conceive of any way in which the economy continues after such a collapse.

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I cannot imagine anything more absurd and mean spirited than the one expressed by Fareed Zakaria on GPS this morning:

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the Scott Walker’s throwdown in Wisconsin over public union workers is long, long overdue.  It is almost unfathomable to me that no government official in recent memory has had that intestinal fortitude to step up and say ‘enough is enough.’ Mr. Walker, I applaud you. I also fear for your job, not because I think the voters of Wisconsin disagree with what you are doing, but because you have now incurred the collective wrath of labor unions both public and private nationwide who see their purse strings being closed tight. Like a wild animal trapped in corner, they will fight to the death.

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The NYT is struggling with the statistics that show that state and local government workers are better compensated than private workers. Moreover, the are “rarely fired” and have better retirement benefits.

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Happy Valentine’s Day. You may want to grab a box of chocolates, because what I’m about to tell you will otherwise leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

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China’s president, Hu Jintao, arrives in Washington tonight for a four day state visit. There is no shortage of topics for discussion between Hu and President Obama.

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Americans benefits from Israeli high tech: With more clinical trials by Israeli biomed firms being held in Ohio than in any other state, it’s clear that its priority to woo Israeli businesses is bearing fruit.

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The Asian Cold War is heating up. On Jan. 7 China offered Europeans its services as a white night to the Euro. A mere 3 days later Japan upped the ante for as Lisa Twaronite writes from Japan, Whenever China says it will lend a helping hand, Japan is sure to offer an arm or a leg of its own. Indeed, American decline ends not only the period of Chinese free ridership but even the India one. Sides must be chosen and Japan is determined not to accede to Chinese hegemony without a fight and to do so it must have allies. Everything must be done to secure and strengthen the democratic alliance. That means preventing Europe from becoming even more indebted to China as well as forcing India to enforce sanctions on Iran.

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To understand one of the major reasons for American economic decline, one has to come to terms with the dangerous appeasement policies practiced by those amongst the American governing class known as “reasonable moderates.” It is an appeasement policy based on the arrogant assumption that America is so rich and its democratic system so invulnerable that it can afford to pay any price to buy off vocal minorities opposed to democratic capitalism. Amazingly, the obvious recent difficulties of the American economy caused them no second thoughts as demonstrated by recent waste laden compromise tax bill and the Fed’s insistence on continuing with the already failed policy of quantitative easing.

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As the economy was so weak, unemployment so high and Congress was in no mood for a second stimulus, I have no choice but to print money, Bernanke has been saying. Fine. But now Congress is about to enact a second stimulus in the form of a series of tax cuts worth 800 billion dollars, so Bernanke has no valid reason to continue his money printing.

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Normally a surge in the price of used equipment relative to new signals a robust order book. Not for truck manufacturers. A series of US and EU standards for diesel engine emissions has added 7 to 10 per cent so far to the cost of a typical heavy duty model while increasing fuel costs by nearly a quarter.

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Why is Ben Bernanke insist on printing dollars? Because he wishes “to regenerate the animal spirits of America’s now dormant asset-dependent economy,” writes Stephen Roach. Roach calls the strategy “very dangerous” and doubts its success. I would call it self defeating. I have yet to remember a time when an administration has tried so hard to awaken that spirit or that the American “animal spirits” have been more depressed. Why? Because the Obama administration’s massive experiment in behavioral economics had not not only been failing but had led to a lose of public faith in the credibility of the Fed and, indeed, in the entire country’s economic management.

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The battle over the Fed QE2 (quantitative easing) is raging. Sarah Palin is not the only one who asked Ben Bernanke to cease and desist his latest bout of money printing.

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A man gets on his knees next to a car carrying U.S. President Barack Obama as he pulls away from Valois restaurant in Chicago, October 31, 2010

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Stimulus emerged as a dirty word in this election cycle. Democratic Keynesians argue that it saved the US and what is needed is more of the same. 2/3 of American polled, consider it a waste of money. They may not know the reason the Keynesian recipe no longer works but they can see that it not only does not work but that it is making the sick American economy sicker. But why have American efforts to stimulate the economy fail so miserably while Chinese efforts have succeed so well? Because in the US (though not in China) demand is local but supply is global, points out Andy Xie.

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In a hail-mary attempt to garner main street support for Democrats before the elections put an end to the legislative season, President Obama finally was able to push the small business lending bill through the Senate, thanks to two retiring Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote for the stimulus package.

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Those doubting the fact that American investors and analysts have indeed embarked on a kind of strike Ayn Rand would have predicted, have only have to refer to the results of the latest quarterly Bloomberg global poll of investors and analysts.

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As if the Democrats didn’t have enough headaches of their own making. Today, the American people hear a number of appalling new things. Just when you thought you had heard it all with these lunatic Democrats, something else comes flying at you.

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Candidate Obama told Charlie Gibson that he would sacrifice economic growth to economic fairness. His Marxist professors failed to teach him that everywhere such a trade off has been tried, the rich got richer and the poor seriously poorer. So he used the 2008 economic crisis to put his ideology into action with the to be expected results. The WSJ editors write

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Catch, for example, the September issue of Wired–the lustrous eye-blasting pink one with the Chris Anderson-Michael Wolff graffiti declaring “The Web is Dead.” Nearby on the newsstand you can see Scientific American trumpet “the end” in the same shockingly hot infrared tones, canceling time itself (gasp!) by “crunch”, “whimper”,” rip”, “freeze” or “lurch” and incinerating earth by runaway global warming, all presumably in at least one of the innumerable multiple parallel universes trumpeted in recent issues as a substitute for Gd.

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I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer and perhaps someone can explain a few things to me, or at least I hope so.

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Barack Obama’s favorite economic narrative goes like this: The Republicans drove us into the ditch and he has been able to pull us out only part of the way. Therefore, though times are bad, reelecting Republicans would mean undoing all his good work. Challenging this narrative is none other than very liberal Colombia University economics professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs argues that instead of beginning to pull us out of the ditch, the Obama administration, unlike the Merkel one, drove us deeper into the ditch. Why? Because they panicked and opted for short term solutions. Sachs know. He was there:

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Did you know that in 1933, when the country was sick and nobody knew what to do about it, people got in their cars, drove to Washington, presented themselves at the White House, and said “What can I do to help?”

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