NIA - The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission today held hearings with former Lehman Brothers Chairman Dick Fuld. They are trying to figure out why Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse, with the belief that the failure of Lehman Brothers caused the financial crisis of 2008. The truth is, the failure of Lehman Brothers was a result of the crisis and allowing them to fail was the only correct decision the government made during the crisis.
The pain that was felt after the collapse of Lehman Brothers is nothing compared to the pain that will come when we begin to feel the effects of bailing out the rest of Wall Street. U.S. second quarter GDP growth was revised down on Friday from 2.4% to 1.6%. In order to get this 1.6% GDP growth, the U.S. government had to spend $3.7 trillion on bailouts, stimulus bills, the buying of mortgage backed securities, and other commitments.
General Motors reported today that their August deliveries fell 25% from one year ago to 185,176 vehicles. The U.S. government used "cash for clunkers" to buy GDP growth in 2009, but that growth stole from future automobile sales. NIA believes that GM's sales decline is a sign that the U.S. will likely see a sharp contraction in GDP beginning in the third-quarter, which will lead to the Federal Reserve implementing the mother of all quantitative easing and cause a massive sell off in the U.S. dollar.
Christina Romer, outgoing Chairwoman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, today called for more government spending and less taxes as a way to bring down unemployment. The combination of more government spending and less taxes equals massive inflation, but this represents the state of mind in Washington today. Inflation is still the last thing on their minds because they don't see it yet.
Even though we might not see massive across the board price inflation at this time, gold and silver prices have been surging ever since NIA released its article "Gold and Silver Capitulation is Near" on July 28th. Gold is very close to breaking its all time nominal high of $1,264.90 per ounce set during June and silver is getting ready to test the critical $20-$21 per ounce resistance level.
Rising gold and silver prices indicate that the U.S. is headed for an explosion in budget deficits that will rise far beyond what it can pay for through borrowing. Leading Chinese economists are now calling Japanese debt less risky than U.S. debt and with the Japanese savings rate in decline, the U.S. will soon have nobody left to borrow from. The only option will be monetization and already the Federal Reserve is getting ready to buy $10 billion to $30 billion per month in U.S. treasuries to keep its balance sheet at inflated levels.
There are now 50 million Americans on Medicaid, with annual Medicaid costs rising 36% over the past two years to $273 billion. The recently enacted health care bill will add 16 million more Americans to Medicaid beginning in 2014, but the U.S. government will likely go bust by then. It is impossible to have an economic recovery when jobless benefits are encouraging Americans to stay unemployed. U.S. unemployment insurance spending has nearly quadrupled since 2007 to $160 billion annually. Even food stamp costs have surged 80% over the past two years to $70 billion annually.
Once Americans get used to receiving and relying on government entitlement programs, it is hard to wean them off of them. NIA has been hearing reports from members with friends who say they will only "come out of retirement" if they can find a job that pays $25 per hour or more, because with anything less it wouldn't be worth losing their jobless and food stamp benefits. Americans expect to receive their jobless benefits forever and we are sure Obama will continue to extend them leading up to the 2012 election.
There are now countless warning signs all around us on a daily basis that the U.S. is headed for a complete societal collapse. NIA received an overwhelming response from its members when we asked you to submit any signs you see that a societal collapse is near. The response we received was so strong that we are now beginning to produce a documentary about America's upcoming collapse of society. The documentary will be over an hour long and we are hoping to release it by the end of October. It will go beyond the economic facts and statistics that were discussed in 'Meltup' and help expose the upcoming collapse from a real life perspective. NIA believes this documentary will appeal to a very mainstream audience and help open up the world's eyes to the truth about the path this country is on.
Showing posts with label federal governmant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label federal governmant. Show all posts
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Obama Stimulus Plan: Homelessness Up 50% In New York City
MYFOXNY.COM - If you think you've been seeing more people sleep on city streets, statistics back up the perception. The homeless population living on New York City streets has gone up 50 percent in the past year, according to city statistics reported by the HellsKitchenLife.com blog.
The New York City Department of Homeless Services conducts a yearly survey of the streets of the city to count the number of homeless who are not in shelters. The HOPE survey was conducted in January 2010.
The number of homeless in the borough of Manhattan was up 47 percent in the past year, according to the count. The 2010 count had 1,145 people living in the streets. That is up 368 from 2009.
Brooklyn had the biggest increase of any borough. It saw a homeless increase of more than 100 percent in 2010.
More than 1,000 people now live in New York City's subway system -- up 11 percent in the past year.
While the numbers are alarming, they are still at historically low levels and the ratio of homeless to the general population remains low compared to other major cities, according to the city. The HOPE survey showed a 29 percent drop in homelessness from 2005.
DHS works to prevent homelessness and also provides short-term emergency shelter. The agency seeks to help homeless individuals move from shelters back to permanent housing.
For example, the DHS says it provided temporary, emergency shelter to 8,230 families with children -- equating to 25,204 adults and children in July. But the agency says shelters have seen fewer families. From October 2009 through June 2010, shelters had 11 percent fewer children, who are now back in homes of their own
The New York City Department of Homeless Services conducts a yearly survey of the streets of the city to count the number of homeless who are not in shelters. The HOPE survey was conducted in January 2010.
The number of homeless in the borough of Manhattan was up 47 percent in the past year, according to the count. The 2010 count had 1,145 people living in the streets. That is up 368 from 2009.
Brooklyn had the biggest increase of any borough. It saw a homeless increase of more than 100 percent in 2010.
More than 1,000 people now live in New York City's subway system -- up 11 percent in the past year.
While the numbers are alarming, they are still at historically low levels and the ratio of homeless to the general population remains low compared to other major cities, according to the city. The HOPE survey showed a 29 percent drop in homelessness from 2005.
DHS works to prevent homelessness and also provides short-term emergency shelter. The agency seeks to help homeless individuals move from shelters back to permanent housing.
For example, the DHS says it provided temporary, emergency shelter to 8,230 families with children -- equating to 25,204 adults and children in July. But the agency says shelters have seen fewer families. From October 2009 through June 2010, shelters had 11 percent fewer children, who are now back in homes of their own
Thursday, August 26, 2010
America's Debt:: The Big Wave Is Coming Soon
Damien Hoffman - This morning credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s (MHP) said in order for the US to keep its AAA-rating, it is “very important” for Congress to deal with the cascading US Debt. China’s largest credit rating agency Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. was less diplomatic: they simply downgraded the US credit rating to AA.
This, my friends, is only the tip of the iceberg of what will unfold should we choose to kick the proverbial can farther down the road. As you can see in the infographic below, according to the US Treasury we are watching a debt Tsunami come ashore. If we have any pride or patriotism, we’ve got to start dealing with the crisis now before it wipes out generations of wealth.
This, my friends, is only the tip of the iceberg of what will unfold should we choose to kick the proverbial can farther down the road. As you can see in the infographic below, according to the US Treasury we are watching a debt Tsunami come ashore. If we have any pride or patriotism, we’ve got to start dealing with the crisis now before it wipes out generations of wealth.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
GZM IMAN: USA Has More Muslim Blood On It's Hands Than Al-Qaeda
Sister Toldjah - Is there really anything else we need to know about this man after this?
Waiting for the apologists on the left to feign ‘concern’ about the comments before asserting that he has the ‘right’ to say whatever he wants to, when none of this – not what he says, not the proposed site of the mosque – is about whether he has a right to do/say what he does, but whether or not it is right to do/say.
And we’re supposed to be “tolerant” when it comes to this blame-America firster? I don’t think so.
Waiting for the apologists on the left to feign ‘concern’ about the comments before asserting that he has the ‘right’ to say whatever he wants to, when none of this – not what he says, not the proposed site of the mosque – is about whether he has a right to do/say what he does, but whether or not it is right to do/say.
And we’re supposed to be “tolerant” when it comes to this blame-America firster? I don’t think so.
Mexican Bullets Shut Down El Paso, Texas
Newsvine.com - Yes, this is another dispatch from the war zone along the Mexican border (where I live in El Paso, right across from Juarez, Mexico–a stone’s throw, or bullet path, away).
This story–from events over the weekend, but still making news today in El Paso–is beyond belief. I thought things were bad when the El Paso City Hall was splattered with bullets from a firefight across the river. But this weekend El Paso police SHUT DOWN part of downtown El Paso because of flying bullets from a gun battle in a house on a hill in Juarez–a gun battle that evidently lasted 30 minutes and illed at least three people in Juarez. No one was–a matter of luck–killed in El Paso, although there are reports that a shattered car window may have been from a bullet. It is evidently estimated (no, they can’t know) that about 50 bullets came over the border into downtown El Paso.
And Obama has the GALL to tell me it is SAFER along the border. The man is a piece of work. I have lived in the El Paso area of the Southwest for approximately 50 years. At NO time, during that entire period, do I remember this kin of thing happening. I think the last time anything close to it happended were in the days of Pancho Villa.
This story–from events over the weekend, but still making news today in El Paso–is beyond belief. I thought things were bad when the El Paso City Hall was splattered with bullets from a firefight across the river. But this weekend El Paso police SHUT DOWN part of downtown El Paso because of flying bullets from a gun battle in a house on a hill in Juarez–a gun battle that evidently lasted 30 minutes and illed at least three people in Juarez. No one was–a matter of luck–killed in El Paso, although there are reports that a shattered car window may have been from a bullet. It is evidently estimated (no, they can’t know) that about 50 bullets came over the border into downtown El Paso.
And Obama has the GALL to tell me it is SAFER along the border. The man is a piece of work. I have lived in the El Paso area of the Southwest for approximately 50 years. At NO time, during that entire period, do I remember this kin of thing happening. I think the last time anything close to it happended were in the days of Pancho Villa.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
10 Signs The U.S. Is Becoming a Third World Country
Activist Post - The United States by every measure is hanging on by a thread to its First World status. Saddled by debt, engaged in wars on multiple fronts with a rising police state at home, declining economic productivity, and wild currency fluctuations all threaten America’s future.
The general designations of the ranking system for world status date back to the 1950s, and have included countries at various stages of economic development. Since the Cold War, the definition has come to be synonymous with repressive countries where a wealthy class of ruling elites segment society into the haves and have-nots, many times capitalizing on the conditions that follow an economic crisis or war.
While much of the world is still mired in poverty, the reduced cost of innovative tools such as computing and connectivity ironically puts traditional Third World countries at the forefront of a new lean-and-mean economy that is based on ideas of empowerment for the disenfranchised. For better or worse, the world is leveling due to Globalism. However, America and other over-leveraged countries face this re-balancing of the globe at a time when they have dwindling resources. We can speculate about who and what is to blame for America’s fantastic fall, but for the purposes of this article we shall focus on the obvious signs that the United States is beginning to resemble a Third World country.
1. Rising unemployment and poverty: Unemployment numbers, food stamps, and home foreclosures continue to reach new record highs. The ugly reality of those numbers was recently on display when 30,000 people showed up to apply for public housing in East Point, GA for 455 available vouchers. Fights broke out, people were fainting from the heat while in line, and riot police showed up to handle the angry poor.
2. Economic dependence: The United States finished 2009 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 85%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The current trend projects the United States to finish 2010 at 94% and 2011 at 98%. The 90% level has become the IMF’s make-or-break point for countries hoping to grow their way out of debt. If the government debt load climbs above 90% of GDP, economic growth slows so much that growth is no longer a viable solution for reducing that debt, and the IMF insists on austerity measures. Surpassing this debt threshold has also caused China’s lead credit rating agency to cut America’s credit rating.
3. Declining civil rights: Everyday freedoms are often a casualty of a society in collapse. As the anger of the populace mounts in response to declining economic conditions and political corruption, the government counters by increasing draconian measures that restrict the political rights and civil liberties of its citizens.
America is becoming a country like China, which has one of the lowest scores according to Freedom House. In America, private discussions and movements are monitored, free speech is corralled, the freedom to assemble for protest is by government decree, and independent thought that questions the political system is increasingly looked upon with suspicion. A final indicator is when the government insists upon secrecy for its own actions, while new laws and systems are created to put the individual under nearly constant surveillance.
4. Increasing political corruption: When political corruption becomes the accepted norm, as opposed to the exception, then there’s a good bet your country resembles the Third World. Congress and all major institutions face a growing crisis in confidence, where a record-low 11% of the population believe Congress is doing a good job. It now seems obvious to all observers that big corporations directly control the agenda in Washington — much like typically corrupt Third World countries.
5. Military patrolling the streets: The rise of a militarized police state is a hallmark of most Third World countries, particularly in times of rapid economic collapse. America’s declaration of the War on Terror has created a constant threat to National Security that has allowed for the military to be deployed on American soil. Building upon the War on Drugs, this has created a fusion between the military and local police, where military-grade weapons and tactics are being used against American citizens in a cascade of violent confrontations over non-violent offenses. Military checkpoints are moving farther inland, away from meaningful border control functions, and a full-blown military presence in American cities has been planned by the U.S. Army War College.
6. Failing infrastructure: As 46 of 50 states are on the verge of bankruptcy, cities are going dark, asphalt roads are returning to the stone age, and nationwide budget cuts are leaving students without teachers, supplies, or a full-time education. These are common features one will see as they travel through the poorest of Third World countries.
7. Disappearing middle class: During the last presidential debate season, they argued that a family income of $250K was solidly middle-class. Well, Census data shows less than 15% of families make over $100K, and only 1.5% of families make over $250K. The income gap between the rich and poor has increased at a staggering pace, while many more middle-class folks join the ranks of the poor every day. Cavernous income gaps may be what Third-World nations are best known for.
8. Devalued currency: The value of the Federal Reserve Note (U.S. dollar) has declined 96% since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The value of the dollar is based on its supply in circulation and, to a lesser extent, the demand for those dollars. For the last three years, the money supply has spiked literally off the charts. It can be argued that the dollar has become America’s top export as the world’s reserve currency, and if the volatile dollar is scrapped, which the U.N. and IMF now suggest, then demand will plummet, killing the currency.
9. Controlling the media: A government-influenced media that censors information is a key component of Third World countries. In some countries it is openly owned by the State. In America, privately-owned major media is not as balanced or as diverse as it seems; the concentration of ownership has led to censorship when national and corporate interests have sometimes overlapped. The persecution of high-profile investigative journalists such as WikiLeaks is set amid a backdrop of the proposed Internet censorship of bloggers who wish to remain anonymous. The end of net neutrality creates a pay-to-play system that can lead to further corporate and government control of information and opinion. Cybersecurity initiatives are the final nail in the coffin, as the entire free flow of information can be vetted in a China-style system of “identity management.” On the street, the police state and media control have converged in the recent rise of arrests for those who videotape the police. This is a huge blow to First Amendment rights and the role of photojournalists who wish to document public police behavior.
10. Capital Controls: Many nations have enforced capital controls as their economies collapse. It most recently happened in Argentina and Venezuela as they sought to keep the remaining wealth within their borders. The SEC already has adopted policies to allow money market funds to suspend withdrawals during a financial crisis, while the recent HIRE bill (HR 2487) puts restrictions on Americans moving capital to foreign countries. Some economists suggest that the national debt has gotten so high that the government must now force investment of private capital into U.S. Treasury debt.
Key economic indicators point to a situation potentially worse than the Great Depression. The land of opportunity for so many is devolving into a system of government corruption, corporate looting, and military rule that threatens to sink the American Dream. The capital flight from America has left a dwindling middle class holding an empty bag. This style of underinvestment in the foundation of society is similar to what already has led to the exodus from the rural Midwest. Now, there are ominous signs of a silent exodus of young, intelligent professionals seeking opportunities to realize their dreams outside of America; they are becoming known as Generation Xpat. Lastly, many skilled immigrants have returned to their home countries to seek a better quality of life, which might be the scariest indicator of all.
The general designations of the ranking system for world status date back to the 1950s, and have included countries at various stages of economic development. Since the Cold War, the definition has come to be synonymous with repressive countries where a wealthy class of ruling elites segment society into the haves and have-nots, many times capitalizing on the conditions that follow an economic crisis or war.
While much of the world is still mired in poverty, the reduced cost of innovative tools such as computing and connectivity ironically puts traditional Third World countries at the forefront of a new lean-and-mean economy that is based on ideas of empowerment for the disenfranchised. For better or worse, the world is leveling due to Globalism. However, America and other over-leveraged countries face this re-balancing of the globe at a time when they have dwindling resources. We can speculate about who and what is to blame for America’s fantastic fall, but for the purposes of this article we shall focus on the obvious signs that the United States is beginning to resemble a Third World country.
1. Rising unemployment and poverty: Unemployment numbers, food stamps, and home foreclosures continue to reach new record highs. The ugly reality of those numbers was recently on display when 30,000 people showed up to apply for public housing in East Point, GA for 455 available vouchers. Fights broke out, people were fainting from the heat while in line, and riot police showed up to handle the angry poor.
2. Economic dependence: The United States finished 2009 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 85%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The current trend projects the United States to finish 2010 at 94% and 2011 at 98%. The 90% level has become the IMF’s make-or-break point for countries hoping to grow their way out of debt. If the government debt load climbs above 90% of GDP, economic growth slows so much that growth is no longer a viable solution for reducing that debt, and the IMF insists on austerity measures. Surpassing this debt threshold has also caused China’s lead credit rating agency to cut America’s credit rating.
3. Declining civil rights: Everyday freedoms are often a casualty of a society in collapse. As the anger of the populace mounts in response to declining economic conditions and political corruption, the government counters by increasing draconian measures that restrict the political rights and civil liberties of its citizens.
America is becoming a country like China, which has one of the lowest scores according to Freedom House. In America, private discussions and movements are monitored, free speech is corralled, the freedom to assemble for protest is by government decree, and independent thought that questions the political system is increasingly looked upon with suspicion. A final indicator is when the government insists upon secrecy for its own actions, while new laws and systems are created to put the individual under nearly constant surveillance.
4. Increasing political corruption: When political corruption becomes the accepted norm, as opposed to the exception, then there’s a good bet your country resembles the Third World. Congress and all major institutions face a growing crisis in confidence, where a record-low 11% of the population believe Congress is doing a good job. It now seems obvious to all observers that big corporations directly control the agenda in Washington — much like typically corrupt Third World countries.
5. Military patrolling the streets: The rise of a militarized police state is a hallmark of most Third World countries, particularly in times of rapid economic collapse. America’s declaration of the War on Terror has created a constant threat to National Security that has allowed for the military to be deployed on American soil. Building upon the War on Drugs, this has created a fusion between the military and local police, where military-grade weapons and tactics are being used against American citizens in a cascade of violent confrontations over non-violent offenses. Military checkpoints are moving farther inland, away from meaningful border control functions, and a full-blown military presence in American cities has been planned by the U.S. Army War College.
6. Failing infrastructure: As 46 of 50 states are on the verge of bankruptcy, cities are going dark, asphalt roads are returning to the stone age, and nationwide budget cuts are leaving students without teachers, supplies, or a full-time education. These are common features one will see as they travel through the poorest of Third World countries.
7. Disappearing middle class: During the last presidential debate season, they argued that a family income of $250K was solidly middle-class. Well, Census data shows less than 15% of families make over $100K, and only 1.5% of families make over $250K. The income gap between the rich and poor has increased at a staggering pace, while many more middle-class folks join the ranks of the poor every day. Cavernous income gaps may be what Third-World nations are best known for.
8. Devalued currency: The value of the Federal Reserve Note (U.S. dollar) has declined 96% since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913. The value of the dollar is based on its supply in circulation and, to a lesser extent, the demand for those dollars. For the last three years, the money supply has spiked literally off the charts. It can be argued that the dollar has become America’s top export as the world’s reserve currency, and if the volatile dollar is scrapped, which the U.N. and IMF now suggest, then demand will plummet, killing the currency.
9. Controlling the media: A government-influenced media that censors information is a key component of Third World countries. In some countries it is openly owned by the State. In America, privately-owned major media is not as balanced or as diverse as it seems; the concentration of ownership has led to censorship when national and corporate interests have sometimes overlapped. The persecution of high-profile investigative journalists such as WikiLeaks is set amid a backdrop of the proposed Internet censorship of bloggers who wish to remain anonymous. The end of net neutrality creates a pay-to-play system that can lead to further corporate and government control of information and opinion. Cybersecurity initiatives are the final nail in the coffin, as the entire free flow of information can be vetted in a China-style system of “identity management.” On the street, the police state and media control have converged in the recent rise of arrests for those who videotape the police. This is a huge blow to First Amendment rights and the role of photojournalists who wish to document public police behavior.
10. Capital Controls: Many nations have enforced capital controls as their economies collapse. It most recently happened in Argentina and Venezuela as they sought to keep the remaining wealth within their borders. The SEC already has adopted policies to allow money market funds to suspend withdrawals during a financial crisis, while the recent HIRE bill (HR 2487) puts restrictions on Americans moving capital to foreign countries. Some economists suggest that the national debt has gotten so high that the government must now force investment of private capital into U.S. Treasury debt.
Key economic indicators point to a situation potentially worse than the Great Depression. The land of opportunity for so many is devolving into a system of government corruption, corporate looting, and military rule that threatens to sink the American Dream. The capital flight from America has left a dwindling middle class holding an empty bag. This style of underinvestment in the foundation of society is similar to what already has led to the exodus from the rural Midwest. Now, there are ominous signs of a silent exodus of young, intelligent professionals seeking opportunities to realize their dreams outside of America; they are becoming known as Generation Xpat. Lastly, many skilled immigrants have returned to their home countries to seek a better quality of life, which might be the scariest indicator of all.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
1-15 Children In U.S. Has Illegal Immigrant Parents
Howard Fischer - About one out of every 15 children in the United States was born to a family where at least one parent is in this country illegally, according to a new report today.
And four out of five of them are “anchor babies,” the Pew Hispanic Center concluded.
The figures, which the organization calculated based on 2009 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, are the best estimates to date of the scope of the issue which has resulted in calls to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny automatic citizenship to children solely by virtue of their birth within this country.
That percentage of children of illegal immigrant parents might be increasing.
The overall figure is about 6.8 percent of all children 17 and younger have at least one illegal immigrant parent.
But the center calculated that about 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were offspring of “unauthorized” immigrants. That computes out to 7.9 percent.
Researchers peg the number of illegal immigrants in the United States at something slightly in excess of 4 percent of the total population.
“But because they are relatively young and have high birth rates, their children make up a much larger share of the newborn population and the child population in this country,” the report says.
The 14th Amendment says that anyone born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of both this country and the state where they reside. Courts have interpreted that to entitle citizenship to those born in the United States regardless of whether one or both parents had no legal right to be here.
Some foes, including Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, argue those rulings are flawed.
He noted that the amendment makes its provisions conditional on the children being “subject to the jurisdiction” of this country. Pearce said courts, citing that language, concluded for years that did not entitle Native Americans to citizenship even though they were clearly born within the country’s borders.
It was only after Congress specifically altered the law regarding Indians that situation changed.
And four out of five of them are “anchor babies,” the Pew Hispanic Center concluded.
The figures, which the organization calculated based on 2009 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, are the best estimates to date of the scope of the issue which has resulted in calls to amend the U.S. Constitution to deny automatic citizenship to children solely by virtue of their birth within this country.
That percentage of children of illegal immigrant parents might be increasing.
The overall figure is about 6.8 percent of all children 17 and younger have at least one illegal immigrant parent.
But the center calculated that about 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were offspring of “unauthorized” immigrants. That computes out to 7.9 percent.
Researchers peg the number of illegal immigrants in the United States at something slightly in excess of 4 percent of the total population.
“But because they are relatively young and have high birth rates, their children make up a much larger share of the newborn population and the child population in this country,” the report says.
The 14th Amendment says that anyone born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of both this country and the state where they reside. Courts have interpreted that to entitle citizenship to those born in the United States regardless of whether one or both parents had no legal right to be here.
Some foes, including Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, argue those rulings are flawed.
He noted that the amendment makes its provisions conditional on the children being “subject to the jurisdiction” of this country. Pearce said courts, citing that language, concluded for years that did not entitle Native Americans to citizenship even though they were clearly born within the country’s borders.
It was only after Congress specifically altered the law regarding Indians that situation changed.
Friday, August 13, 2010
15 Economic Statistics That Just Keep Getting Worse
Economic Collapse - A little over a week ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner penned an article for the New York Times entitled “Welcome To The Recovery” in which he touted the great strides that the U.S. economy was making. But with unemployment still dangerously high and with foreclosures and personal bankruptcies continuing to set all-time records, should we really be talking about a “recovery”? The truth is that the numbers don’t lie, and statistic after statistic shows that the economic fundamentals continue to get progressively worse. The U.S. government can continue to try to pump up with economy with more debt, but the reality is that there is not going to be a legitimate “recovery” until consumer spending rebounds. Consumer spending makes up the vast majority of U.S. GDP. But without good jobs, consumers are not going to be able to spend money. Unfortunately, our jobs base continues to be erode as millions upon millions of middle class jobs are shipped over to China, India and dozens of third world nations by the global predator corporations that now dominate the world economy.
The U.S. government cannot create real wealth out of thin air. It can borrow even more money and flood the economy with even more paper currency, but the short-term “buzz” that creates does absolutely nothing to solve our long-term economic problems.
It is the private sector that actually creates wealth. But unfortunately, over the last several decades we have allowed that wealth to become highly concentrated. Now the giant global predator corporations have decided that American workers aren’t really that desirable after all. They are slowly taking away their factories and their offices and they are moving them to where people are willing to work for one-tenth the pay.
So where does that leave middle class American “consumers”?
Well, it leaves us in a world of hurt.
The following are 15 key economic statistics that just keep getting worse and which reveal the horrific economic plight in which we now find ourselves….
1 – The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has set a new all-time record for 18 months in a row. But there is every indication that things are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the number of Americans on food stamps will increase to 43 million in 2011.
2 – The U.S. economy lost 131,000 more jobs during the month of July. But the truth is that the U.S. economy has been bleeding jobs for a long time. According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Meanwhile, immigrants (both legal and illegal) continue to pour into this nation in unprecedented numbers.
3 – Americans who are out of work are finding it incredibly difficult to get back into the workforce. In the United States today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to an all-time record of 35.2 weeks.
4 – The U.S. government keeps trying to pump up the economy with debt, and in the process things are getting wildly out of control. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
5 – The interest on all of this debt is becoming increasingly oppressive. As of July 1st, the U.S. government had spent $355 billion so far in 2010 on interest payments to the holders of the national debt. The total for 2010 should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion. According to Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama’s national debt commission, the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion just on interest on the national debt by 2020. Keep in mind that the entire U.S. government budget is less than $4 trillion for the entire year of 2010.
6 – If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.
7 – Social Security will pay out more in benefits in 2010 than it receives in payroll taxes. This was not supposed to happen until at least 2015. In the years ahead, these new “Social Security deficits” are projected to be absolutely catastrophic.
8 – There are simply far too many retirees and not nearly enough workers to support them. Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
9 – Wealth continues to become highly concentrated at the top. Since 1973, the average CEO’s salary has increased from 26 times the median income to over 300 times the median income.
10 – According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
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11 – The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one mortgage payment during the January to March time period. That was a new all-time record and represented an increase from 9.1 percent a year ago.
12 – A recent survey of last year’s college graduates found that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up substantially from 63 percent in 2006.
13 – During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
14 – The total number of U.S. bank failures passed the 100 mark in July of this year. In 2009, the total number of U.S. bank failures did not pass the century barrier until October.
15 – The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today. An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today.
Any rational observer (and clearly U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not qualify) can see that the foundations of the U.S. economy are coming apart. The rapidly accumulating mountain of debt that has fueled our “prosperity” is impossible to repay and is going to progressively choke the life out of our economic system. The good jobs that we have allowed to be shipped out of our country are never coming back. Every single day, more wealth flows out of this country than flows into it.
Anyone who claims that things are getting “better” is either ignorant, completely deluded or is purposely lying.
The U.S. economy is not getting “better”.
The U.S. economy is dying.
You should adjust your plans accordingly.
The U.S. government cannot create real wealth out of thin air. It can borrow even more money and flood the economy with even more paper currency, but the short-term “buzz” that creates does absolutely nothing to solve our long-term economic problems.
It is the private sector that actually creates wealth. But unfortunately, over the last several decades we have allowed that wealth to become highly concentrated. Now the giant global predator corporations have decided that American workers aren’t really that desirable after all. They are slowly taking away their factories and their offices and they are moving them to where people are willing to work for one-tenth the pay.
So where does that leave middle class American “consumers”?
Well, it leaves us in a world of hurt.
The following are 15 key economic statistics that just keep getting worse and which reveal the horrific economic plight in which we now find ourselves….
1 – The number of Americans who are receiving food stamps rose to a new all-time record of 40.8 million in May. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has set a new all-time record for 18 months in a row. But there is every indication that things are going to get even worse. The U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that the number of Americans on food stamps will increase to 43 million in 2011.
2 – The U.S. economy lost 131,000 more jobs during the month of July. But the truth is that the U.S. economy has been bleeding jobs for a long time. According to one analysis, the United States has lost 10.5 million jobs since 2007. Meanwhile, immigrants (both legal and illegal) continue to pour into this nation in unprecedented numbers.
3 – Americans who are out of work are finding it incredibly difficult to get back into the workforce. In the United States today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to an all-time record of 35.2 weeks.
4 – The U.S. government keeps trying to pump up the economy with debt, and in the process things are getting wildly out of control. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report to Congress, the U.S. national debt will top $13.6 trillion this year and climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
5 – The interest on all of this debt is becoming increasingly oppressive. As of July 1st, the U.S. government had spent $355 billion so far in 2010 on interest payments to the holders of the national debt. The total for 2010 should be somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion. According to Erskine Bowles, one of the heads of Barack Obama’s national debt commission, the U.S. government will be spending $2 trillion just on interest on the national debt by 2020. Keep in mind that the entire U.S. government budget is less than $4 trillion for the entire year of 2010.
6 – If the U.S. government was forced to use GAAP accounting principles (like all publicly-traded corporations must), the annual U.S. government budget deficit would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 trillion to $5 trillion.
7 – Social Security will pay out more in benefits in 2010 than it receives in payroll taxes. This was not supposed to happen until at least 2015. In the years ahead, these new “Social Security deficits” are projected to be absolutely catastrophic.
8 – There are simply far too many retirees and not nearly enough workers to support them. Back in 1950 each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025 it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
9 – Wealth continues to become highly concentrated at the top. Since 1973, the average CEO’s salary has increased from 26 times the median income to over 300 times the median income.
10 – According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
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11 – The Mortgage Bankers Association recently announced that more than 10% of all U.S. homeowners with a mortgage had missed at least one mortgage payment during the January to March time period. That was a new all-time record and represented an increase from 9.1 percent a year ago.
12 – A recent survey of last year’s college graduates found that 80 percent moved right back home with their parents after graduation. That was up substantially from 63 percent in 2006.
13 – During the first quarter of 2010, the total number of loans that are at least three months past due in the United States increased for the 16th consecutive quarter.
14 – The total number of U.S. bank failures passed the 100 mark in July of this year. In 2009, the total number of U.S. bank failures did not pass the century barrier until October.
15 – The U.S. dollar continues to rapidly decline in value. An item that cost $20.00 in 1970 would cost you $112.35 today. An item that cost $20.00 in 1913 would cost you $440.33 today.
Any rational observer (and clearly U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner does not qualify) can see that the foundations of the U.S. economy are coming apart. The rapidly accumulating mountain of debt that has fueled our “prosperity” is impossible to repay and is going to progressively choke the life out of our economic system. The good jobs that we have allowed to be shipped out of our country are never coming back. Every single day, more wealth flows out of this country than flows into it.
Anyone who claims that things are getting “better” is either ignorant, completely deluded or is purposely lying.
The U.S. economy is not getting “better”.
The U.S. economy is dying.
You should adjust your plans accordingly.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Texas, 60,000 Babies Of Noncitizens Get U.S. Birthright
Sherry Jacobson - As Republican members of Congress press for changes to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, preventing automatic citizenship for babies born to illegal immigrants, opponents insist the debate is not really about babies.
Instead, they say it is about politics and votes – not fixing the immigration system.
Still, the debate could resonate in Texas, where not only 1.5 million illegal immigrants are estimated to reside but at least 60,000 babies are added to their households annually.
Parkland Memorial Hospital delivers more of those babies than any other hospital in the state. Last year at Parkland, 11,071 babies were born to women who were noncitizens, about 74 percent of total deliveries. Most of these women are believed to be in the country illegally.
State Rep. Rafael AnchÃa, D-Dallas, accused Republicans of using the births to generate an explosive election issue.
"They're pulling the pin on the immigration grenade," he said. "It's all about the November elections and continuing to use the immigration issue as a wedge to win votes this fall."
But to Republicans, the emerging national debate is long overdue, considering that millions of immigrants have been living illegally in this country for years.
"They're violating our law, and we're giving their children the benefit of U.S. citizenship," said state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, whose 2009 bill in the Legislature would have challenged the birthright of immigrant children.
That bill died in committee, although Berman has vowed to file another version next year that would prohibit the state from issuing birth certificates to the children of "illegal aliens."
"I've checked the Congressional Record for when the 14th Amendment was written, and the author was quoted as saying that it did not apply to foreigners," he said. "There's no question in my mind about it."
Amendment's history
The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 as a way to block state laws that prevented former slaves from becoming citizens. It also effectively overruled the Dred Scott decision of 1857 in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that slaves were mere property and could not become citizens.
The amendment offered a broad definition of citizenship in one simple sentence: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."
Donald Kerwin, a vice president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said he feared that altering the current interpretation of that law "would essentially restore the Dred Scott reasoning and create a hereditary underclass in the United States.
"These children, who didn't break any laws, would have no rights and nowhere to go," he said. "It's a very extreme position."
The effort to reinterpret the 14th Amendment has been talked about for years and been targeted by numerous congressional measures that went nowhere. Last year's unsuccessful Birthright Citizenship Act, which had about 100 co-sponsors in Congress, would have required at least one parent to be a U.S. citizen for a baby to become an American citizen at birth.
The difference in this year's effort to change the 14th Amendment is that prominent Republicans are offering their support and making public statements demanding a national debate of the issue.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called Wednesday for a review of "birthright citizenship," after concluding that illegal immigrants had taken advantage of the post-Civil War constitutional provision.
"We need to have hearings," he said. "We need to consult constitutional scholars and study what the implications are."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he might introduce a constitutional amendment that would repeal the citizenship provision of the amendment.
And both Arizona Republican senators, John McCain and John Kyl, announced that the time was ripe for such a change.
"If both parents are here illegally, should there be a reward for their illegal behavior?" Kyl said recently on a Sunday morning talk show.
Changing the Constitution, however, is not as simple as getting a bill through Congress by majority vote.
Amendments have to be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, then ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures. It has happened only 27 times in U.S. history, most recently in 1992 in reference to congressional pay increases.
This latest effort would fall far short of tackling the entire Latino population now living illegally in the U.S. – the 11 million to 12 million people, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center – because it would target only the children.
That distinction has drawn an outcry from some, who believe the U.S. should be embracing its growing diversity rather than trying to disenfranchise the youngest elements of it.
"Babies are born without awareness, while other individuals chose to migrate because they want something," said Dr. Jacobo Kupersztoch, an associate professor at Richland College. "If we want to grow and we want to continue to be on the top of the world, we have to continue to integrate these people into our system."
16 percent of births
In Texas, between 60,000 to 65,000 babies achieve U.S. citizenship annually by being born in the state's hospitals, according to a tally released by the state's Health and Human Services Commission. Last year, such births represented almost 16 percent of the total births statewide.
Between 2001 and 2009, births to illegal immigrant women totaled 542,152 in Texas alone.
"The next 10 years will be an even more transformative decade demographically for Texas," said Dr. Roberto Calderon, an associate history professor at the University of North Texas and a Latin American expert following the debate.
He speculated that the Republicans probably were aware of this ongoing demographic shift and how it might threaten their party since Hispanic voters tend to support Democrats.
"Manipulating the status ... the rights and the opportunities for Latinos is the only avenue many on the conservative right see as a solution to remaining viable electorally," he said. "They're expecting what used to be safe Republican seats on the state and federal level will no longer be so safe."
However, Dr. Steve Murdock, a past director of the U.S. Census Bureau, said it would be difficult – even impossible – to turn this demographic tide by targeting the legal status of future births.
"It might slow it down some," he said. "But the idea that the majority of Texas Hispanics are illegal is ludicrous. The vast majority are citizens."
Murdock, previously the state's chief demographer and now a professor at Rice University, said the growth of Hispanics as a group in Texas has more to do with their relatively younger ages than the Anglo majority and their higher birthrates.
"In the last decade in Texas, over 60 percent of the state population increase was due to Hispanics," he said. "The idea that the growth of Hispanics is sudden or happened only in the past few years or only in Texas is not correct."
Instead, they say it is about politics and votes – not fixing the immigration system.
Still, the debate could resonate in Texas, where not only 1.5 million illegal immigrants are estimated to reside but at least 60,000 babies are added to their households annually.
Parkland Memorial Hospital delivers more of those babies than any other hospital in the state. Last year at Parkland, 11,071 babies were born to women who were noncitizens, about 74 percent of total deliveries. Most of these women are believed to be in the country illegally.
State Rep. Rafael AnchÃa, D-Dallas, accused Republicans of using the births to generate an explosive election issue.
"They're pulling the pin on the immigration grenade," he said. "It's all about the November elections and continuing to use the immigration issue as a wedge to win votes this fall."
But to Republicans, the emerging national debate is long overdue, considering that millions of immigrants have been living illegally in this country for years.
"They're violating our law, and we're giving their children the benefit of U.S. citizenship," said state Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, whose 2009 bill in the Legislature would have challenged the birthright of immigrant children.
That bill died in committee, although Berman has vowed to file another version next year that would prohibit the state from issuing birth certificates to the children of "illegal aliens."
"I've checked the Congressional Record for when the 14th Amendment was written, and the author was quoted as saying that it did not apply to foreigners," he said. "There's no question in my mind about it."
Amendment's history
The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868 as a way to block state laws that prevented former slaves from becoming citizens. It also effectively overruled the Dred Scott decision of 1857 in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared that slaves were mere property and could not become citizens.
The amendment offered a broad definition of citizenship in one simple sentence: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."
Donald Kerwin, a vice president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., said he feared that altering the current interpretation of that law "would essentially restore the Dred Scott reasoning and create a hereditary underclass in the United States.
"These children, who didn't break any laws, would have no rights and nowhere to go," he said. "It's a very extreme position."
The effort to reinterpret the 14th Amendment has been talked about for years and been targeted by numerous congressional measures that went nowhere. Last year's unsuccessful Birthright Citizenship Act, which had about 100 co-sponsors in Congress, would have required at least one parent to be a U.S. citizen for a baby to become an American citizen at birth.
The difference in this year's effort to change the 14th Amendment is that prominent Republicans are offering their support and making public statements demanding a national debate of the issue.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, called Wednesday for a review of "birthright citizenship," after concluding that illegal immigrants had taken advantage of the post-Civil War constitutional provision.
"We need to have hearings," he said. "We need to consult constitutional scholars and study what the implications are."
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said he might introduce a constitutional amendment that would repeal the citizenship provision of the amendment.
And both Arizona Republican senators, John McCain and John Kyl, announced that the time was ripe for such a change.
"If both parents are here illegally, should there be a reward for their illegal behavior?" Kyl said recently on a Sunday morning talk show.
Changing the Constitution, however, is not as simple as getting a bill through Congress by majority vote.
Amendments have to be approved by a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, then ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures. It has happened only 27 times in U.S. history, most recently in 1992 in reference to congressional pay increases.
This latest effort would fall far short of tackling the entire Latino population now living illegally in the U.S. – the 11 million to 12 million people, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center – because it would target only the children.
That distinction has drawn an outcry from some, who believe the U.S. should be embracing its growing diversity rather than trying to disenfranchise the youngest elements of it.
"Babies are born without awareness, while other individuals chose to migrate because they want something," said Dr. Jacobo Kupersztoch, an associate professor at Richland College. "If we want to grow and we want to continue to be on the top of the world, we have to continue to integrate these people into our system."
16 percent of births
In Texas, between 60,000 to 65,000 babies achieve U.S. citizenship annually by being born in the state's hospitals, according to a tally released by the state's Health and Human Services Commission. Last year, such births represented almost 16 percent of the total births statewide.
Between 2001 and 2009, births to illegal immigrant women totaled 542,152 in Texas alone.
"The next 10 years will be an even more transformative decade demographically for Texas," said Dr. Roberto Calderon, an associate history professor at the University of North Texas and a Latin American expert following the debate.
He speculated that the Republicans probably were aware of this ongoing demographic shift and how it might threaten their party since Hispanic voters tend to support Democrats.
"Manipulating the status ... the rights and the opportunities for Latinos is the only avenue many on the conservative right see as a solution to remaining viable electorally," he said. "They're expecting what used to be safe Republican seats on the state and federal level will no longer be so safe."
However, Dr. Steve Murdock, a past director of the U.S. Census Bureau, said it would be difficult – even impossible – to turn this demographic tide by targeting the legal status of future births.
"It might slow it down some," he said. "But the idea that the majority of Texas Hispanics are illegal is ludicrous. The vast majority are citizens."
Murdock, previously the state's chief demographer and now a professor at Rice University, said the growth of Hispanics as a group in Texas has more to do with their relatively younger ages than the Anglo majority and their higher birthrates.
"In the last decade in Texas, over 60 percent of the state population increase was due to Hispanics," he said. "The idea that the growth of Hispanics is sudden or happened only in the past few years or only in Texas is not correct."
Monday, August 2, 2010
Men Run Onto Mets Citi Field With Mexican Flags
Two men carrying Mexican flags in protest of Arizona’s immigration law ran into the outfield during the seventh inning of the New York Mets’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks on Friday night at Citi Field.
The men were apprehended by security fairly quickly without much incident.
Prior to the game, about 40 people across the street from the ballpark chanted “Oppose racism!” and “Boycott Arizona!”
The men were apprehended by security fairly quickly without much incident.
Prior to the game, about 40 people across the street from the ballpark chanted “Oppose racism!” and “Boycott Arizona!”
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Sen. Graham Discusses Changing Constitution On Anchor Babies
According to a staffer with Sen. Lindsey Graham’s office, the Senator discussed changing citizenship requirements for children born in the United State.
According to the 14th Amendment, all children born in the United States are citizens.
Graham’s proposal would require the parents of any children to be legal citizens of the United States.
The senator said it would require a constitutional amendment to change.
His office issued the following statement regarding the plan and the comments made in the State newspaper:
The State called it a “stunning reversal” but that’s not accurate. He is putting another issue on the table when it comes to our broken immigration system.
He still believes the first step is to secure our border. That needs to be now.
Then we need to address all the issues related to our broken immigration system – employment verification, guest worker program, merit-based immigration, and what to do with the 12 million illegal immigrants already here. He has added another issue to that list of things we need to address – what do we do with birthright citizenship.
According to the 14th Amendment, all children born in the United States are citizens.
Graham’s proposal would require the parents of any children to be legal citizens of the United States.
The senator said it would require a constitutional amendment to change.
His office issued the following statement regarding the plan and the comments made in the State newspaper:
The State called it a “stunning reversal” but that’s not accurate. He is putting another issue on the table when it comes to our broken immigration system.
He still believes the first step is to secure our border. That needs to be now.
Then we need to address all the issues related to our broken immigration system – employment verification, guest worker program, merit-based immigration, and what to do with the 12 million illegal immigrants already here. He has added another issue to that list of things we need to address – what do we do with birthright citizenship.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Trillions For Wall Street Banksters
Mike Whitney - On Tuesday, the 30-year fixed rate for mortgages plunged to an all-time low of 4.56 per cent. Rates are falling because investors are still moving into risk-free liquid assets, like Treasuries. It’s a sign of panic and the Fed’s lame policy response has done nothing to sooth the public’s fears. The flight-to-safety continues a full two years after Lehman Bros blew up.
Housing demand has fallen off a cliff in spite of the historic low rates. Purchases of new and existing homes are roughly 25 per cent of what they were at peak in 2006. Case/Schiller reported on Monday that June new homes sales were the “worst on record”, but the media twisted the story to create the impression that sales were actually improving! Here are a few of Monday’s misleading headlines: “New Home Sales Bounce Back in June”–Los Angeles Times. “Builders Lifted by June New-home Sales”, Marketwatch. “New Home Sales Rebound 24 per cent”, CNN. “June Sales of New Homes Climb more than Forecast”, Bloomberg.
The media’s lies are only adding to the sense of uncertainty. When uncertainty grows, long-term expectations change and investment nosedives. Lying has an adverse effect on consumer confidence and, thus, on demand. This is from Bloomberg:
The Conference Board’s confidence index dropped to a 5-month low of 50.4 from 54.3 in June. According to Bloomberg News:
“Sentiment may be slow to improve until companies start adding to payrolls at a faster rate, and the Federal Reserve projects unemployment will take time to decline. Today’s figures showed income expectations at their lowest point in more than a year, posing a risk for consumer spending that accounts for 70 per cent of the economy.
“Consumers’ faith in the economic recovery is failing,” said guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia, whose forecast of 50.3 for the confidence index was the closest among economists surveyed by Bloomberg. “The job market is slow and volatile, and it’ll be 2013 before we see any semblance of normality in the labor market.” (Bloomberg)
Confidence is falling because unemployment is soaring, because the media is lying, and because the Fed’s monetary policy has failed. Notice that Bloomberg does not mention consumer worries over “curbing the deficits”. In truth, the public has only a passing interest in the large deficits. It’s a fictitious problem invented by rich corporatists (and their think tanks) who want to apply austerity measures so they can divert more public money to themselves. In the real world, consumer confidence relates to one thing alone–jobs. And when the jobs market stinks, confidence plummets. This is from another article by Bloomberg:
“Consumer borrowing in the U.S. dropped in May more than forecast, a sign Americans are less willing to take on debt without an improvement in the labor market.
The $9.1 billion decrease followed a revised $14.9 billion slump in April that was initially estimated as a $1 billion increase, the Federal Reserve reported today in Washington. Economists projected a $2.3 billion drop in the May measure of credit card debt and non-revolving loans, according to a Bloomberg News survey of 34 economists.
Borrowing that’s increased twice since the end of 2008 shows consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 per cent of the economy, will be restrained as Americans pay down debt. Banks also continue to restrict lending following the collapse of the housing market, Fed officials said after their policy meeting last month” (Bloomberg)
Consumer confidence is falling, consumer credit is shrinking, and consumer spending is dwindling. Jobs, jobs, jobs; it’s all about jobs. Budget deficits are irrelevant to the man who thinks he might lose his livelihood. All he cares about is bringing home the bacon. Here’s a quote from Yale professor Robert Schiller who was one of the first to predict the dot.com and the housing bubble:
“For me a double-dip is another recession before we’ve healed from this recession … The probability of that kind of double-dip is more than 50 per cent. I actually expect it.”
There’s no need for the economy to slip back into recession. It is completely unnecessary. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke knows exactly what needs to be done; how to counter deflationary pressures via bond purchasing programs etc. He has many options even though interest rates are “zero bound”. But Bernanke has chosen to do nothing. Intransigence is a political decision. By the November midterms, the economy will be contracting again, unemployment will be edging higher, and the slowdown will be visible everywhere in terms of excess capacity. The Obama economic plan will be repudiated as a bust and the Dems will be swept from office. The bankers will get the political gridlock they desire. Bernanke knows this.
On Tuesday, a $38 billion Treasury auction drove 2-years bond-yields down to record lows. (0.665 per cent) Investors are willing to take less than 1 per cent on their deposits just for the guarantee of getting it back. Bond yields are a referendum on the Fed’s policies; a straightforward indictment of Bernanke’s strategy. Three years into the crisis and investors are more afraid than ever. The flight to Treasuries is an indication that the retail investor has left the market for good. It is a red flag signaling that the public’s distrust has reached its zenith.
Presently, big business is awash in savings ($1.8 trillion) because consumers are on the ropes and demand is weak. The government’s task is simple; make up for worker retrenchment by providing more fiscal and monetary stimulus. If private sector and public sector spending shrink at the same time, the economy will contract very fast and recession will become unavoidable. So, Go Big; create government work programs, help the states, rebuild infrastructure and support green technologies. The economy is not a sentient being; it makes no distinction between “productive” labor and “unproductive” labor. The point is to keep the apparatus operating as close to capacity as possible–which means low unemployment and big deficits.
Increasing the money supply does nothing when interest rates are already at zero and consumers are slashing spending. Bernanke has added over $1.25 trillion to bank reserves but consumer borrowing, spending and confidence are still flat on the canvass. The problem is demand, not the volume of money. Bernanke knows what to do, but he refuses to do it. He’d rather line the pockets of bondholders, bankers and rentiers. This is from Calculated Risk:
“This report from the National League of Cities (NLC), National Association of Counties (NACo), and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) reveals that local government job losses in the current and next fiscal years will approach 500,000, with public safety, public works, public health, social services and parks and recreation hardest hit by the cutbacks.
The surveyed local governments report cutting 8.6 per cent of total full-time equivalent (FTE) positions over the previous fiscal year to the next fiscal year (roughly 2009-2011). If applied to total local government employment nationwide, an 8.6 percent cut in the workforce would mean that 481,000 local government workers were, or will be, laid off over the two-year period.”
The cutbacks will ravage local governments, state revenues and public services. Emergency facilities by the Fed provided $11.4 trillion for underwater banks and non banks, but nothing for the states. The GOP is helping the Fed strangle the states by opposing additional aid for Medicare payments and unemployment benefits. Many cities and counties will be forced into bankruptcy while Goldman Sachs rakes in record profits on liquidity provided by Bernanke. It’s a disaster.
The bottom line? When Wall Street is hurting, money’s never a problem. But when the states are on the brink of default and 14 million workers are scrimping to feed their families, it’s time for belt-tightening. Explain that to your kids.
Housing demand has fallen off a cliff in spite of the historic low rates. Purchases of new and existing homes are roughly 25 per cent of what they were at peak in 2006. Case/Schiller reported on Monday that June new homes sales were the “worst on record”, but the media twisted the story to create the impression that sales were actually improving! Here are a few of Monday’s misleading headlines: “New Home Sales Bounce Back in June”–Los Angeles Times. “Builders Lifted by June New-home Sales”, Marketwatch. “New Home Sales Rebound 24 per cent”, CNN. “June Sales of New Homes Climb more than Forecast”, Bloomberg.
The media’s lies are only adding to the sense of uncertainty. When uncertainty grows, long-term expectations change and investment nosedives. Lying has an adverse effect on consumer confidence and, thus, on demand. This is from Bloomberg:
The Conference Board’s confidence index dropped to a 5-month low of 50.4 from 54.3 in June. According to Bloomberg News:
“Sentiment may be slow to improve until companies start adding to payrolls at a faster rate, and the Federal Reserve projects unemployment will take time to decline. Today’s figures showed income expectations at their lowest point in more than a year, posing a risk for consumer spending that accounts for 70 per cent of the economy.
“Consumers’ faith in the economic recovery is failing,” said guy LeBas, chief fixed-income strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Philadelphia, whose forecast of 50.3 for the confidence index was the closest among economists surveyed by Bloomberg. “The job market is slow and volatile, and it’ll be 2013 before we see any semblance of normality in the labor market.” (Bloomberg)
Confidence is falling because unemployment is soaring, because the media is lying, and because the Fed’s monetary policy has failed. Notice that Bloomberg does not mention consumer worries over “curbing the deficits”. In truth, the public has only a passing interest in the large deficits. It’s a fictitious problem invented by rich corporatists (and their think tanks) who want to apply austerity measures so they can divert more public money to themselves. In the real world, consumer confidence relates to one thing alone–jobs. And when the jobs market stinks, confidence plummets. This is from another article by Bloomberg:
“Consumer borrowing in the U.S. dropped in May more than forecast, a sign Americans are less willing to take on debt without an improvement in the labor market.
The $9.1 billion decrease followed a revised $14.9 billion slump in April that was initially estimated as a $1 billion increase, the Federal Reserve reported today in Washington. Economists projected a $2.3 billion drop in the May measure of credit card debt and non-revolving loans, according to a Bloomberg News survey of 34 economists.
Borrowing that’s increased twice since the end of 2008 shows consumer spending, which accounts for about 70 per cent of the economy, will be restrained as Americans pay down debt. Banks also continue to restrict lending following the collapse of the housing market, Fed officials said after their policy meeting last month” (Bloomberg)
Consumer confidence is falling, consumer credit is shrinking, and consumer spending is dwindling. Jobs, jobs, jobs; it’s all about jobs. Budget deficits are irrelevant to the man who thinks he might lose his livelihood. All he cares about is bringing home the bacon. Here’s a quote from Yale professor Robert Schiller who was one of the first to predict the dot.com and the housing bubble:
“For me a double-dip is another recession before we’ve healed from this recession … The probability of that kind of double-dip is more than 50 per cent. I actually expect it.”
There’s no need for the economy to slip back into recession. It is completely unnecessary. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke knows exactly what needs to be done; how to counter deflationary pressures via bond purchasing programs etc. He has many options even though interest rates are “zero bound”. But Bernanke has chosen to do nothing. Intransigence is a political decision. By the November midterms, the economy will be contracting again, unemployment will be edging higher, and the slowdown will be visible everywhere in terms of excess capacity. The Obama economic plan will be repudiated as a bust and the Dems will be swept from office. The bankers will get the political gridlock they desire. Bernanke knows this.
On Tuesday, a $38 billion Treasury auction drove 2-years bond-yields down to record lows. (0.665 per cent) Investors are willing to take less than 1 per cent on their deposits just for the guarantee of getting it back. Bond yields are a referendum on the Fed’s policies; a straightforward indictment of Bernanke’s strategy. Three years into the crisis and investors are more afraid than ever. The flight to Treasuries is an indication that the retail investor has left the market for good. It is a red flag signaling that the public’s distrust has reached its zenith.
Presently, big business is awash in savings ($1.8 trillion) because consumers are on the ropes and demand is weak. The government’s task is simple; make up for worker retrenchment by providing more fiscal and monetary stimulus. If private sector and public sector spending shrink at the same time, the economy will contract very fast and recession will become unavoidable. So, Go Big; create government work programs, help the states, rebuild infrastructure and support green technologies. The economy is not a sentient being; it makes no distinction between “productive” labor and “unproductive” labor. The point is to keep the apparatus operating as close to capacity as possible–which means low unemployment and big deficits.
Increasing the money supply does nothing when interest rates are already at zero and consumers are slashing spending. Bernanke has added over $1.25 trillion to bank reserves but consumer borrowing, spending and confidence are still flat on the canvass. The problem is demand, not the volume of money. Bernanke knows what to do, but he refuses to do it. He’d rather line the pockets of bondholders, bankers and rentiers. This is from Calculated Risk:
“This report from the National League of Cities (NLC), National Association of Counties (NACo), and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) reveals that local government job losses in the current and next fiscal years will approach 500,000, with public safety, public works, public health, social services and parks and recreation hardest hit by the cutbacks.
The surveyed local governments report cutting 8.6 per cent of total full-time equivalent (FTE) positions over the previous fiscal year to the next fiscal year (roughly 2009-2011). If applied to total local government employment nationwide, an 8.6 percent cut in the workforce would mean that 481,000 local government workers were, or will be, laid off over the two-year period.”
The cutbacks will ravage local governments, state revenues and public services. Emergency facilities by the Fed provided $11.4 trillion for underwater banks and non banks, but nothing for the states. The GOP is helping the Fed strangle the states by opposing additional aid for Medicare payments and unemployment benefits. Many cities and counties will be forced into bankruptcy while Goldman Sachs rakes in record profits on liquidity provided by Bernanke. It’s a disaster.
The bottom line? When Wall Street is hurting, money’s never a problem. But when the states are on the brink of default and 14 million workers are scrimping to feed their families, it’s time for belt-tightening. Explain that to your kids.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
$8.7 Billion Of Iraq Development Money Missing
Kurt Nimmo - The Defense Department is unable to account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in Development Fund for Iraq monies it received for reconstruction in Iraq, reports Federal News Radio today.
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) issued a report today that claims a “weakness” in the DoD’s “financial and management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI funds.” The money vanished “because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds,” explains the Inspector General. “The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.”
DFI revenue is generated from export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas from Iraq, and surplus funds from the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program as well as frozen Iraqi assets, according to SIGIR.
If you believe the money was simply lost through shoddy accounting practices, you may also be interested in a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn. Simply put, the money was pilfered.
You may recall then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s admission on September 10, 2001, that the Pentagon lost $2.3 trillion. This money was supposed to go for our “national defense” against CIA assets like Osama bin Laden and tin horn dictators like Saddam Hussein and the mental case Kim Jong-Il.
It became a non-story of little interest the next day when cave Muslims violated the laws of physics and supposedly attacked us for our freedom. It now basically resides in the corporate media memory hole.
$2.3 trillion amounts to $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America.
Nobody knows exactly where the $2.3 trillion went. But some think it was siphoned off through companies like DynCorp, AMS, and Lockheed Martin, which control the bookkeeping for federal agencies, where fraud is rampant, unchecked and very lucrative for corporate and government insiders, writes Uri Dowbenko. “The fraud is so egregious, in fact, that the sovereignty of the nation itself can be questioned when bogus accounting systems can mask the revenue streams and expenditures of federal agencies to such an extent.”
At the time the money disappeared, Dov Zakheim was the Comptroller of the Pentagon. In addition to serving as a member of the notorious Project for a New American Century, Zakheim was chummy with the military-industrial merchants of death complex. He was an executive at System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor specializing in electronic warfare technologies including remote-controlled aircraft systems.
Fraud and thievery is rampant in Iraq. In June, it was reported that tens of millions of dollars in federal property went missing or unaccounted for at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. A report from the State Department revealed that 159 of the embassy’s 1,168 vehicles, worth $18.5 million, are unaccounted for and pays nearly $270,000 per year in charges for more than 2,000 cell phones that have not been registered to authorized users, according to the Associated Press.
Money slotted for Iraq development — rebuilding what the Pentagon destroyed — has a funny way of disappearing. Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad. More than $9 billion went missing. “The simple truth about the missing money is the same one that applies to so much else about the American occupation of Iraq. The U.S. government never did care about accounting for those Iraqi billions and it doesn’t care now. It cares only about ensuring that an accounting does not occur,” write Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele for Vanity Fair.
Grilled by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the former Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, told Rep. Henry Waxman that if the cash had gone to “ghost employees” he would have known about it. Bremer sheepishly told Rep. Dennis Kucinich he had no idea where the money went.
Instead of launching a criminal investigation and tracking down the thieves, the SIGIR study suggests “that the Secretary of Defense create new accounting and reporting procedures to avoid such mistakes in the future. It also recommends designating an executive agent to oversee progress, establishing measurable milestones, and determining whether any DoD organizations are still holding DFI funds.”
The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) issued a report today that claims a “weakness” in the DoD’s “financial and management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI funds.” The money vanished “because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds,” explains the Inspector General. “The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss.”
DFI revenue is generated from export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas from Iraq, and surplus funds from the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program as well as frozen Iraqi assets, according to SIGIR.
If you believe the money was simply lost through shoddy accounting practices, you may also be interested in a bridge I have for sale in Brooklyn. Simply put, the money was pilfered.
You may recall then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s admission on September 10, 2001, that the Pentagon lost $2.3 trillion. This money was supposed to go for our “national defense” against CIA assets like Osama bin Laden and tin horn dictators like Saddam Hussein and the mental case Kim Jong-Il.
It became a non-story of little interest the next day when cave Muslims violated the laws of physics and supposedly attacked us for our freedom. It now basically resides in the corporate media memory hole.
$2.3 trillion amounts to $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America.
Nobody knows exactly where the $2.3 trillion went. But some think it was siphoned off through companies like DynCorp, AMS, and Lockheed Martin, which control the bookkeeping for federal agencies, where fraud is rampant, unchecked and very lucrative for corporate and government insiders, writes Uri Dowbenko. “The fraud is so egregious, in fact, that the sovereignty of the nation itself can be questioned when bogus accounting systems can mask the revenue streams and expenditures of federal agencies to such an extent.”
At the time the money disappeared, Dov Zakheim was the Comptroller of the Pentagon. In addition to serving as a member of the notorious Project for a New American Century, Zakheim was chummy with the military-industrial merchants of death complex. He was an executive at System Planning Corporation, a defense contractor specializing in electronic warfare technologies including remote-controlled aircraft systems.
Fraud and thievery is rampant in Iraq. In June, it was reported that tens of millions of dollars in federal property went missing or unaccounted for at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. A report from the State Department revealed that 159 of the embassy’s 1,168 vehicles, worth $18.5 million, are unaccounted for and pays nearly $270,000 per year in charges for more than 2,000 cell phones that have not been registered to authorized users, according to the Associated Press.
Money slotted for Iraq development — rebuilding what the Pentagon destroyed — has a funny way of disappearing. Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad. More than $9 billion went missing. “The simple truth about the missing money is the same one that applies to so much else about the American occupation of Iraq. The U.S. government never did care about accounting for those Iraqi billions and it doesn’t care now. It cares only about ensuring that an accounting does not occur,” write Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele for Vanity Fair.
Grilled by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the former Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, told Rep. Henry Waxman that if the cash had gone to “ghost employees” he would have known about it. Bremer sheepishly told Rep. Dennis Kucinich he had no idea where the money went.
Instead of launching a criminal investigation and tracking down the thieves, the SIGIR study suggests “that the Secretary of Defense create new accounting and reporting procedures to avoid such mistakes in the future. It also recommends designating an executive agent to oversee progress, establishing measurable milestones, and determining whether any DoD organizations are still holding DFI funds.”
Global Warming 'Will increase Mexico-U.S. Illegal Immigration'
A warming climate could see millions of adult Mexicans migrate to the US as rising temperatures cause a drop in crop yields, according to a study by researchers at Princeton University.
For every 10% of lost crop yields in Mexico, another 2% of Mexicans are likely to leave their country, the study says.
The research draws a clear connection between climate change and immigration - two heavily debated issues in the US.
It says warming may bring between 1.4m and 6.7m Mexicans to the US by 2080.
Many climate experts say human activity is contributing to an increasingly warm planet.
And now a team of researchers led by Michael Oppenheimer says rising temperatures affecting crops through floods, droughts, and stronger storms will induce some workers to relocate.
Farmers migration
"Climate change is expected to cause mass human migration, including immigration across international borders," says the study.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said a 10% reduction in crop yields would lead an additional 2% of the population to emigrate.
"It has been well established that farmers do tend to want to migrate when they are not doing so well," Mr Oppenheimer told the Reuters news agency.
The study used census data from 1995 to 2005 as well as statistics on climate data and crop production, which allowed the group to calculate a projected rate of migration.
According to a variety of "warming scenarios", the researchers estimated that by the year 2080, between 1.4 million and 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15-65) would seek to emigrate to the US.
Mr Oppenheimer, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the findings drew attention to "the need to grapple with greenhouse gases".
Experts say these findings are also relevant to other regions around the world, from Africa to Australia - where Mr Oppenheimer's team predicts migration will become a "significant issue".
The study on Mexican migration comes after last month was declared by scientists to be the hottest June on record.
Roughly 6.7 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be in the US are from Mexico.
Meanwhile, a new immigration law is set to take effect on 29 July in the US state of Arizona, which will make it a crime to be in the state without immigration papers.
For every 10% of lost crop yields in Mexico, another 2% of Mexicans are likely to leave their country, the study says.
The research draws a clear connection between climate change and immigration - two heavily debated issues in the US.
It says warming may bring between 1.4m and 6.7m Mexicans to the US by 2080.
Many climate experts say human activity is contributing to an increasingly warm planet.
And now a team of researchers led by Michael Oppenheimer says rising temperatures affecting crops through floods, droughts, and stronger storms will induce some workers to relocate.
Farmers migration
"Climate change is expected to cause mass human migration, including immigration across international borders," says the study.
The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said a 10% reduction in crop yields would lead an additional 2% of the population to emigrate.
"It has been well established that farmers do tend to want to migrate when they are not doing so well," Mr Oppenheimer told the Reuters news agency.
The study used census data from 1995 to 2005 as well as statistics on climate data and crop production, which allowed the group to calculate a projected rate of migration.
According to a variety of "warming scenarios", the researchers estimated that by the year 2080, between 1.4 million and 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15-65) would seek to emigrate to the US.
Mr Oppenheimer, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the findings drew attention to "the need to grapple with greenhouse gases".
Experts say these findings are also relevant to other regions around the world, from Africa to Australia - where Mr Oppenheimer's team predicts migration will become a "significant issue".
The study on Mexican migration comes after last month was declared by scientists to be the hottest June on record.
Roughly 6.7 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be in the US are from Mexico.
Meanwhile, a new immigration law is set to take effect on 29 July in the US state of Arizona, which will make it a crime to be in the state without immigration papers.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Goldman Sachs Reveals Where Bailout Cash Went
Des Moines Register - Goldman Sachs sent $4.3 billion in federal tax money to 32 entities, including many overseas banks, hedge funds and pensions, according to information made public Friday night.
Goldman Sachs disclosed the list of companies to the Senate Finance Committee after a threat of subpoena from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.
Asked the significance of the list, Grassley said, "I hope it's as simple as taxpayers deserve to know what happened to their money."
He added, "We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on ... we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world."
Grassley said he was reserving judgment on the appropriateness of U.S. taxpayer money ending up overseas until he learns more about the 32 entities.
SETTLEMENT: Goldman Sachs admits it misled investors, pays $550M fine
GOLDMAN CONSENT: SEC vs. Goldman Sachs
JUDGEMENT: Final judgement of defendant
Goldman Sachs (GS) received $5.55 billion from the government in fall of 2008 as payment for then-worthless securities it held in AIG. Goldman had already hedged its risk that the securities would go bad. It had entered into agreements to spread the risk with the 32 entities named in Friday's report.
Overall, Goldman Sachs received a $12.9 billion payout from the government's bailout of AIG, which was at one time the world's largest insurance company.
Goldman Sachs also revealed to the Senate Finance Committee that it would have received $2.3 billion if AIG had gone under. Other large financial institutions, such as Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, sold Goldman Sachs protection in the case of AIG's collapse. Those institutions did not have to pay Goldman Sachs after the government stepped in with tax money.
Shouldn't Goldman Sachs be expected to collect from those institutions "before they collect the taxpayers' dollars?" Grassley asked. "It's a little bit like a farmer, if you got crop insurance, you shouldn't be getting disaster aid."
Goldman had not disclosed the names of the counterparties it paid in late 2008 until Friday, despite repeated requests from Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
"I think we didn't get the information because they consider it very embarrassing," Grassley said, "and they ought to consider it very embarrassing."
FINANCIAL REFORM: How Congress rewrote the regulations
FIXED? Will new regulations prevent future meltdowns?
FINANCIAL OVERHAUL AND YOU: Mortgages, debit cards, loans, more
The initial $85 billion to bail out AIG was supplemented by an additional $49.1 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, as well as additional funds from the Federal Reserve. AIG's debt to U.S. taxpayers totals $133.3 billion outstanding.
"The only thing I can tell you is that people have the right to know, and the Fed and the public's business ought to be more public," Grassley said.
The list of companies receiving money includes a few familiar foreign banks, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays.
DZ AG Deutsche Zantrake Genossenschaftz Bank, a German cooperative banking group, received $1.2 billion, more than a quarter of the money Goldman paid out.
Warren, in testimony Wednesday, said that the rescue of AIG "distorted the marketplace by turning AIG's risky bets into fully guaranteed transactions. Instead of forcing AIG and its counterparties to bear the costs of the company's failure, the government shifted those costs in full onto taxpayers."
Grassley stressed the importance of transparency in the marketplace, as well as in the government's actions.
"Just like the government, markets need more transparency, and consequently this is some of that transparency because we've got to rebuild confidence to make the markets work properly," Grassley said.
AIG received the bailout of $85 billion at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was led at the time by Timothy Geithner. He now is U.S. treasury secretary.
"I think it proves that he knew a lot more at the time than he told," Grassley said. "And he surely knew where this money was going to go. If he didn't, he should have known before they let the money out of their bank up there."
An attempt to reach Geithner Friday night through the White House public information office was unsuccessful.
Grassley has for years pushed to give the Government Accountability Office more oversight of the Federal Reserve.
U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, a Waterloo Democrat, said he would propose that the House subcommittee on oversight and investigations convene hearings on the need for more Federal Reserve oversight. Braley is a member of the subcommittee.
Braley said of Geithner, "I would assume he would be someone we would want to hear from because he would have firsthand knowledge."
Braley also noted that the AIG bailout was negotiated under President George W. Bush, a Republican.
He said he was confident that the financial regulatory reform bill signed by President Obama this week would help provide better oversight than the AIG bailout included.
"There was no regulatory framework in place," Braley said. "We had to put something in place to begin reining them in. I'm confident they will begin to be able to do that."
Goldman Sachs disclosed the list of companies to the Senate Finance Committee after a threat of subpoena from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.
Asked the significance of the list, Grassley said, "I hope it's as simple as taxpayers deserve to know what happened to their money."
He added, "We thought originally we were bailing out AIG. Then later on ... we learned that the money flowed through AIG to a few big banks, and now we know that the money went from these few big banks to dozens of financial institutions all around the world."
Grassley said he was reserving judgment on the appropriateness of U.S. taxpayer money ending up overseas until he learns more about the 32 entities.
SETTLEMENT: Goldman Sachs admits it misled investors, pays $550M fine
GOLDMAN CONSENT: SEC vs. Goldman Sachs
JUDGEMENT: Final judgement of defendant
Goldman Sachs (GS) received $5.55 billion from the government in fall of 2008 as payment for then-worthless securities it held in AIG. Goldman had already hedged its risk that the securities would go bad. It had entered into agreements to spread the risk with the 32 entities named in Friday's report.
Overall, Goldman Sachs received a $12.9 billion payout from the government's bailout of AIG, which was at one time the world's largest insurance company.
Goldman Sachs also revealed to the Senate Finance Committee that it would have received $2.3 billion if AIG had gone under. Other large financial institutions, such as Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley, sold Goldman Sachs protection in the case of AIG's collapse. Those institutions did not have to pay Goldman Sachs after the government stepped in with tax money.
Shouldn't Goldman Sachs be expected to collect from those institutions "before they collect the taxpayers' dollars?" Grassley asked. "It's a little bit like a farmer, if you got crop insurance, you shouldn't be getting disaster aid."
Goldman had not disclosed the names of the counterparties it paid in late 2008 until Friday, despite repeated requests from Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel.
"I think we didn't get the information because they consider it very embarrassing," Grassley said, "and they ought to consider it very embarrassing."
FINANCIAL REFORM: How Congress rewrote the regulations
FIXED? Will new regulations prevent future meltdowns?
FINANCIAL OVERHAUL AND YOU: Mortgages, debit cards, loans, more
The initial $85 billion to bail out AIG was supplemented by an additional $49.1 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, as well as additional funds from the Federal Reserve. AIG's debt to U.S. taxpayers totals $133.3 billion outstanding.
"The only thing I can tell you is that people have the right to know, and the Fed and the public's business ought to be more public," Grassley said.
The list of companies receiving money includes a few familiar foreign banks, such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays.
DZ AG Deutsche Zantrake Genossenschaftz Bank, a German cooperative banking group, received $1.2 billion, more than a quarter of the money Goldman paid out.
Warren, in testimony Wednesday, said that the rescue of AIG "distorted the marketplace by turning AIG's risky bets into fully guaranteed transactions. Instead of forcing AIG and its counterparties to bear the costs of the company's failure, the government shifted those costs in full onto taxpayers."
Grassley stressed the importance of transparency in the marketplace, as well as in the government's actions.
"Just like the government, markets need more transparency, and consequently this is some of that transparency because we've got to rebuild confidence to make the markets work properly," Grassley said.
AIG received the bailout of $85 billion at the discretion of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was led at the time by Timothy Geithner. He now is U.S. treasury secretary.
"I think it proves that he knew a lot more at the time than he told," Grassley said. "And he surely knew where this money was going to go. If he didn't, he should have known before they let the money out of their bank up there."
An attempt to reach Geithner Friday night through the White House public information office was unsuccessful.
Grassley has for years pushed to give the Government Accountability Office more oversight of the Federal Reserve.
U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, a Waterloo Democrat, said he would propose that the House subcommittee on oversight and investigations convene hearings on the need for more Federal Reserve oversight. Braley is a member of the subcommittee.
Braley said of Geithner, "I would assume he would be someone we would want to hear from because he would have firsthand knowledge."
Braley also noted that the AIG bailout was negotiated under President George W. Bush, a Republican.
He said he was confident that the financial regulatory reform bill signed by President Obama this week would help provide better oversight than the AIG bailout included.
"There was no regulatory framework in place," Braley said. "We had to put something in place to begin reining them in. I'm confident they will begin to be able to do that."
Monday, July 26, 2010
Mexican Drug Gangs Invades Texas
Kurt Nimmo - The United States is under attack by narco terrorists invading from the failed state of Mexico and Obama and the federal government are doing nothing about it.
In June, the Mexican drug mafia forced the closure of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona. Authorities in Arizona admit that criminals now control a drug and human smuggling corridor that stretches from the border into metro Phoenix. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu explained in June that the Mexican Mafia controls three counties in his state.
Now drug smugglers are repeating the pattern in Texas.
On Saturday, the Cypress Times, an online newspaper in Cypress, Texas, reported that the murderous Los Zetas has crossed into the United States and taken over at least two ranches in the Laredo, Texas area. The owners of the farms have evacuated and were not harmed.
“I can personally vouch that this info came in late last night from a reliable police source inside the Laredo PD,” Jeff Schwilk, founder of the San Diego Minutemen, told the online newspaper. “There is currently a standoff between the unknown size Zeta forces and U.S.Border Patrol and local law enforcement on two ranches on our side of the Rio Grande.”
Kimberly Dvorak, writing for the Albuquerque Examiner, reports that two sources inside the Laredo Police Department have confirmed the incident. “We consider this an act of war,” said one police officer on the ground near the scene. There is a news blackout of this incident at this time and the sources inside Laredo PD spoke on the condition of anonymity, writes Dvorak.
The DBKP blog contacted the the Laredo Police Department on Saturday. “We have been advised to say nothing. The Webb County Sheriff is taking the lead on this and they’re advising that they can’t confirm anything either,” a spokesperson told the blog.
On March 30, 2008, the Dallas Morning News reported Mexican drug cartels operated military-styletraining camps in at least six such locations in northern Tamaulipas and Nuevo León states, some within a few miles of the Texas border, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities and the printed testimony of five protected witnesses who were trained in the camps.
“Traffickers go to great lengths to prepare themselves for battle,” a senior U.S. anti-narcotics official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the newspaper. “Part of that preparation is live firing ranges and combat training courses…. And that’s not something that we have seen before.” In the state of Tamaulipas, Los Zetas train with other mercenaries, including the Kaibiles from Guatemala, the officials said.
Homeland Security consider the Mexican drug cartels as the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.
Los Zetas was founded by an elite force of assassins from Mexican Army deserters and is now integrated by corrupt ex-federal, state, and local police officers. Los Zetas was first hired as a private mercenary army for Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, but since February of this year have gone independent and are now enemies of its former partner.
In the first eleven months of 2008, Los Zetas killers were directly responsible for the deaths of 5,300 people, including soldiers, their own operatives, civilians, journalists, and rival drug traffickers.
In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon supposedly declared war on the drug cartels. Since Calderon’s declaration, more than 25,000 people have been killed in Mexico due to drug violence. In June of this year alone hundreds of people in Mexico died from drug-related violence.
Last week CBS News said Mexico’s drug Mafia had adopted “al-Qaeda tactics” after a car bomb exploded across the border from El Paso, Texas, in Ciudad Juárez, killing two federal officers and a musician and injuring 11 people, including several bystanders. In late June, the El Paso City Hall was struck by gunfire from a deadly narco terrorist attack across the border in Juárez.
In May, Obama announced that 1,200 troops would be sent to the border to crack down on smuggling and drug cartel violence. Critics have called it political posturing in the run-up to November congressional elections and a response to Arizona’s recently passed immigration law.
Republicans in Texas consider the deployment of 250 troops in their state an insult. “The National Guard troops are not an adequate or long-term solution — they’re only a Band-Aid,” a spokeswoman for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White told the Star-Telegram. “Maybe Texas should sue the federal government for not doing its job,” added U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville.
Senator Kyl of Arizona said in June that Obama is refusing to secure the border until Congress passes so-called immigration reform. “The problem is, he said, if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform,” Kyl said at a town hall organized by a local Arizona Tea Party.
In June, the banksters admitted they fund the Mexican drug Mafia. Wachovia and Bank of America have moved money for Mexican drug smugglers.
“The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years,” Bloomberg reported. “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case, told Bloomberg.
Bankster participation has also financed the Mexican Mafia’s expansion into Texas and Arizona.
 | |
 | |
| Los Zetas crossed the border near Laredo, Texas, and reportedly seized two ranches in the area indicated by the orange square above. | |
Now drug smugglers are repeating the pattern in Texas.
On Saturday, the Cypress Times, an online newspaper in Cypress, Texas, reported that the murderous Los Zetas has crossed into the United States and taken over at least two ranches in the Laredo, Texas area. The owners of the farms have evacuated and were not harmed.
“I can personally vouch that this info came in late last night from a reliable police source inside the Laredo PD,” Jeff Schwilk, founder of the San Diego Minutemen, told the online newspaper. “There is currently a standoff between the unknown size Zeta forces and U.S.
Kimberly Dvorak, writing for the Albuquerque Examiner, reports that two sources inside the Laredo Police Department have confirmed the incident. “We consider this an act of war,” said one police officer on the ground near the scene. There is a news blackout of this incident at this time and the sources inside Laredo PD spoke on the condition of anonymity, writes Dvorak.
The DBKP blog contacted the the Laredo Police Department on Saturday. “We have been advised to say nothing. The Webb County Sheriff is taking the lead on this and they’re advising that they can’t confirm anything either,” a spokesperson told the blog.
On March 30, 2008, the Dallas Morning News reported Mexican drug cartels operated military-style
“Traffickers go to great lengths to prepare themselves for battle,” a senior U.S. anti-narcotics official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the newspaper. “Part of that preparation is live firing ranges and combat training courses…. And that’s not something that we have seen before.” In the state of Tamaulipas, Los Zetas train with other mercenaries, including the Kaibiles from Guatemala, the officials said.
Obama announced his anemic response to border violence in May.
The Justice Department warned local police in Arizona and California about Los Zetas violence along the border. “The violence will spill over the Mexican border into the United States and law enforcement agencies in Texas, Arizona and Southern California can expect to encounter Los Zetas in the coming months,” warned an intelligence bulletin issued by the feds. The Justice Department and Los Zetas was founded by an elite force of assassins from Mexican Army deserters and is now integrated by corrupt ex-federal, state, and local police officers. Los Zetas was first hired as a private mercenary army for Mexico’s Gulf Cartel, but since February of this year have gone independent and are now enemies of its former partner.
In the first eleven months of 2008, Los Zetas killers were directly responsible for the deaths of 5,300 people, including soldiers, their own operatives, civilians, journalists, and rival drug traffickers.
In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon supposedly declared war on the drug cartels. Since Calderon’s declaration, more than 25,000 people have been killed in Mexico due to drug violence. In June of this year alone hundreds of people in Mexico died from drug-related violence.
Last week CBS News said Mexico’s drug Mafia had adopted “al-Qaeda tactics” after a car bomb exploded across the border from El Paso, Texas, in Ciudad Juárez, killing two federal officers and a musician and injuring 11 people, including several bystanders. In late June, the El Paso City Hall was struck by gunfire from a deadly narco terrorist attack across the border in Juárez.
In May, Obama announced that 1,200 troops would be sent to the border to crack down on smuggling and drug cartel violence. Critics have called it political posturing in the run-up to November congressional elections and a response to Arizona’s recently passed immigration law.
Republicans in Texas consider the deployment of 250 troops in their state an insult. “The National Guard troops are not an adequate or long-term solution — they’re only a Band-Aid,” a spokeswoman for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White told the Star-Telegram. “Maybe Texas should sue the federal government for not doing its job,” added U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville.
Senator Kyl of Arizona said in June that Obama is refusing to secure the border until Congress passes so-called immigration reform. “The problem is, he said, if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform,” Kyl said at a town hall organized by a local Arizona Tea Party.
In June, the banksters admitted they fund the Mexican drug Mafia. Wachovia and Bank of America have moved money for Mexican drug smugglers.
“The admission came in an agreement that Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia struck with federal prosecutors in March, and it sheds light on the largely undocumented role of U.S. banks in contributing to the violent drug trade that has convulsed Mexico for the past four years,” Bloomberg reported. “Wachovia’s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,” Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case, told Bloomberg.
Bankster participation has also financed the Mexican Mafia’s expansion into Texas and Arizona.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Tab For 'War On Terrorism' Tops $1 Trillion
The United States has spent more than $1 trillion on wars since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, a recently released Congressional report says. Adjusting for inflation, the outlays for conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world make the "war on terrorism" second only to World War II.
The report "Cost of Major U.S. Wars" by the Congressional Research Service attempts to compare war costs over a more than 230-year period -- from the American Revolution to the current day -- noting the difficulties associated with such a task.
Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars, although the tab in the 1940s was $296 billion.
CNN - World War II consumed a massive 36 percent of America's gross domestic product -- a broad measurement of the country's economic output. The post-9/11 cost of the conflicts is about 1 percent of GDP.
Comparisons of costs of wars over a 230-year period, however, are inherently problematic, the report says.
"One problem is how to separate costs of military operations from costs of forces in peacetime. In recent years, the DOD (Department of Defense) has tried to identify the additional 'incremental' expenses of engaging in military operations, over and above the costs of maintaining standing military forces."
"Figures are problematic, as well, because of difficulties in comparing prices from one vastly different era to another," according to the report. "Perhaps a more significant problem is that wars appear more expensive over time as the sophistication and cost of technology advances, both for military and for civilian activities."
The costs associated with the "war on terrorism" could still go much higher.
The report "Cost of Major U.S. Wars" by the Congressional Research Service attempts to compare war costs over a more than 230-year period -- from the American Revolution to the current day -- noting the difficulties associated with such a task.
Since the the 9/11 terror attacks, the United States has spent an estimated $1.15 trillion. World War II cost $4.1 trillion when converted to current dollars, although the tab in the 1940s was $296 billion.
CNN - World War II consumed a massive 36 percent of America's gross domestic product -- a broad measurement of the country's economic output. The post-9/11 cost of the conflicts is about 1 percent of GDP.
Comparisons of costs of wars over a 230-year period, however, are inherently problematic, the report says.
"One problem is how to separate costs of military operations from costs of forces in peacetime. In recent years, the DOD (Department of Defense) has tried to identify the additional 'incremental' expenses of engaging in military operations, over and above the costs of maintaining standing military forces."
"Figures are problematic, as well, because of difficulties in comparing prices from one vastly different era to another," according to the report. "Perhaps a more significant problem is that wars appear more expensive over time as the sophistication and cost of technology advances, both for military and for civilian activities."
The costs associated with the "war on terrorism" could still go much higher.
A Congressional Budget Office estimate from 2007 said the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could total $2.4 trillion by 2017, more than double the current amount.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Real Jobs, Fake Jobs
Lew Rockwell - In many ways, the unemployment numbers are much worse than they appear. One factor has been the timing of the US census. The bureau hired some 700,000 workers to collect data, people who otherwise were having a very difficult time navigating the choppy labor markets. They went for the jobs because they were a sure thing, paid decently, and didn’t require unusual skills (anyone can knock on a door and pester people about their private lives).
That inflated the jobs number for a while. But now these jobs are at an end — a highly unusual event in government employment, which usually lasts a lifetime. Now all of these people are facing the bracing reality of looking for employment in an economy wrecked by the government.
The press has been posting tributes to these people and their jobs and wailing about their fate now that their jobs are vanishing. And that raises questions. If these jobs were so great, why should they be eliminated at all? Surely, there is a way that these people could be transitioned to some other kind of government-funded service? That way, one might reason, people would have jobs, work would get done, and everyone would be better off.
Right? Wrong. Census jobs perform no market function, and the wages of these workers are paid by the taxpayer, meaning that these jobs are actually destructive of wealth. They siphon wealth and work out of the private sector into the wasteful sector. In fact, we can go further to say that eliminating these jobs is actually a step toward economic recovery.
Given the way economic fallacy has gone viral these days, it seems necessary to explain the issue further. The point of employment is not just jobs; it is productive and economically viable jobs.
It would be possible, for example, to reduce unemployment to its bare minimum simply by a mandatory regression in technology. We could abolish the trucking industry and force all freight to be carried by car, thereby creating millions of new jobs. Or we could abolish the car and create even more jobs for people to haul freight around by hand.
In each case, the number of jobs created would vastly outnumber the number of jobs lost. But would we be richer as a result? Not in any way. It would amount to a mandatory drop in living standards for everyone. These kinds of policies violate the Hazlitt dictum that part of good economic thinking consists in looking at what is good not just for one group (the unemployed), but all groups in society, and not just for the short term but for the long term.
The point of jobs is for people to work towards providing goods and services that are valued by the marketplace. If there is no consumer-driven demand for the things people are doing, their jobs are nothing more than waste. It does nothing for society if everyone is employed building pyramids, contrary to what Keynes once claimed. It would be senseless to have a business that employs thousands to do nothing but break new cellphones and repair them again, or to dig holes and fill them. And why is that? Because there is no economically rational basis for these tasks to exist.
To be sure, a wealthy entrepreneur can create a business doing anything, even something that loses money and is even socially ridiculous. But in order to sustain that, he will have to continue to throw good money after bad for an indefinite period of time, even unto the end of time. The day that he decides to stop doing it, the jobs will go away.
Of course, no businessman in his right mind wants to do such a thing. If you are going to create and retain uneconomic jobs, there is really only one way to do it: government. The government takes money from the private sector to throw around in inefficient ways, regardless of whether the job is worth doing in the first place.
The taxing and debt creation that is necessary to fund the government jobs is extracted from the real engine of wealth creation. This is not only true of census jobs but of all public sector jobs, whether in the federal bureaucracy, the military, or the educational sector. For this reason, the public sector’s payrolls really ought to be excluded from the employment rolls.
One objection might be that some of what public jobs produce is actually necessary for long-term economic health. We need an educated society, people might say, and even the results of the census are necessary for private-sector planning. But if that is true, there is no reason why the private sector would not have the incentive to provide these services themselves.
And they do in fact. The private sector has ever more sophisticated means for educating its employees, and making up for the inferior products of public schooling. It is the same with the census results, which are used by the state to keep track of us and control us; the private sector has its own methods of assessing demographic concerns over business location and product development. Even if there were government jobs that are in fact productive in their results, they could be performed at a profit instead of by extortion.
While everyone obsesses about the plight of census workers, there is a genuine calamity taking place in the private sector, which is being attacked by government every day. This is why the latest jobs numbers show nothing like robust job growth where it matters most. We see only slight overall increases from a decade ago, with boom-time jobs almost entirely wiped out in the bust.
This is what needs attention, but not from government programs. We need an absence of government programs, plus dramatic cuts in taxes and regulations of all sorts, and across the board. We need wage reductions in some sectors so that employment can grow in other sectors. Government cannot plan real job growth. It can only get out of the way and let it happen.
That inflated the jobs number for a while. But now these jobs are at an end — a highly unusual event in government employment, which usually lasts a lifetime. Now all of these people are facing the bracing reality of looking for employment in an economy wrecked by the government.
The press has been posting tributes to these people and their jobs and wailing about their fate now that their jobs are vanishing. And that raises questions. If these jobs were so great, why should they be eliminated at all? Surely, there is a way that these people could be transitioned to some other kind of government-funded service? That way, one might reason, people would have jobs, work would get done, and everyone would be better off.
Right? Wrong. Census jobs perform no market function, and the wages of these workers are paid by the taxpayer, meaning that these jobs are actually destructive of wealth. They siphon wealth and work out of the private sector into the wasteful sector. In fact, we can go further to say that eliminating these jobs is actually a step toward economic recovery.
Given the way economic fallacy has gone viral these days, it seems necessary to explain the issue further. The point of employment is not just jobs; it is productive and economically viable jobs.
It would be possible, for example, to reduce unemployment to its bare minimum simply by a mandatory regression in technology. We could abolish the trucking industry and force all freight to be carried by car, thereby creating millions of new jobs. Or we could abolish the car and create even more jobs for people to haul freight around by hand.
In each case, the number of jobs created would vastly outnumber the number of jobs lost. But would we be richer as a result? Not in any way. It would amount to a mandatory drop in living standards for everyone. These kinds of policies violate the Hazlitt dictum that part of good economic thinking consists in looking at what is good not just for one group (the unemployed), but all groups in society, and not just for the short term but for the long term.
The point of jobs is for people to work towards providing goods and services that are valued by the marketplace. If there is no consumer-driven demand for the things people are doing, their jobs are nothing more than waste. It does nothing for society if everyone is employed building pyramids, contrary to what Keynes once claimed. It would be senseless to have a business that employs thousands to do nothing but break new cellphones and repair them again, or to dig holes and fill them. And why is that? Because there is no economically rational basis for these tasks to exist.
To be sure, a wealthy entrepreneur can create a business doing anything, even something that loses money and is even socially ridiculous. But in order to sustain that, he will have to continue to throw good money after bad for an indefinite period of time, even unto the end of time. The day that he decides to stop doing it, the jobs will go away.
Of course, no businessman in his right mind wants to do such a thing. If you are going to create and retain uneconomic jobs, there is really only one way to do it: government. The government takes money from the private sector to throw around in inefficient ways, regardless of whether the job is worth doing in the first place.
The taxing and debt creation that is necessary to fund the government jobs is extracted from the real engine of wealth creation. This is not only true of census jobs but of all public sector jobs, whether in the federal bureaucracy, the military, or the educational sector. For this reason, the public sector’s payrolls really ought to be excluded from the employment rolls.
One objection might be that some of what public jobs produce is actually necessary for long-term economic health. We need an educated society, people might say, and even the results of the census are necessary for private-sector planning. But if that is true, there is no reason why the private sector would not have the incentive to provide these services themselves.
And they do in fact. The private sector has ever more sophisticated means for educating its employees, and making up for the inferior products of public schooling. It is the same with the census results, which are used by the state to keep track of us and control us; the private sector has its own methods of assessing demographic concerns over business location and product development. Even if there were government jobs that are in fact productive in their results, they could be performed at a profit instead of by extortion.
While everyone obsesses about the plight of census workers, there is a genuine calamity taking place in the private sector, which is being attacked by government every day. This is why the latest jobs numbers show nothing like robust job growth where it matters most. We see only slight overall increases from a decade ago, with boom-time jobs almost entirely wiped out in the bust.
This is what needs attention, but not from government programs. We need an absence of government programs, plus dramatic cuts in taxes and regulations of all sorts, and across the board. We need wage reductions in some sectors so that employment can grow in other sectors. Government cannot plan real job growth. It can only get out of the way and let it happen.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Jobless Americans: The Real Unemployment Rate 16.5% To 22%
Pallavi Gogoi - Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.
"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.
However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.
Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical
Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.
In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.
Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market's problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.
"The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren't going to be thinking as big as they should be," says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. "It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn't going to be there."
Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don't appear or orders don't flow in.
College Grads Serving Fries
Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.
Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can't find a full-time job that they're qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.
The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves "unemployed" and "looking for a job," and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica's respondents.
Jobless Workers Who Disappear
Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who've given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.
"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted," says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. "It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."
According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That's almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.
Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled "U-6," says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.
Misreading Americans' Anxiety
However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.
Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers' not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn't extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration's decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.
By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he's doing, while 52% disapprove -- the first time Obama's disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.
It's obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it's already bigger than Washington thinks.
"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.
However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.
Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical
Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.
In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.
Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market's problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.
"The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren't going to be thinking as big as they should be," says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. "It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn't going to be there."
Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don't appear or orders don't flow in.
College Grads Serving Fries
Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.
Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can't find a full-time job that they're qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.
The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves "unemployed" and "looking for a job," and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica's respondents.
Jobless Workers Who Disappear
Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who've given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.
"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted," says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. "It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."
According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That's almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.
Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled "U-6," says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.
Misreading Americans' Anxiety
However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.
Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers' not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn't extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration's decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.
By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he's doing, while 52% disapprove -- the first time Obama's disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.
It's obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it's already bigger than Washington thinks.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Former Contracter: BP Is Not Interested In Cleaning Up The Oil Spill
Former Contractor: BP Not Interested In Cleaning Up Oil Spill 120710top
Former high-level BP contractor and Army Special Operations soldier Adam Dillon told a New Orleans television station that British Petroleum is not interested in cleaning up the oil spill because the company is run by “cutthroat individuals” who only care about money.
Dillon was fired by BP “after taking photos that he believes were related to the use of dispersants and to the cleanup of the oil.” Before his dismissal, Dillon was “confined and interrogated for almost an hour,” by BP officials.
“There are some very great, hardworking individuals in there. But the bottom line is just about money. There are some very cutthroat individuals. They’re not worried about cleaning up that spill as it is,” said Dillon, adding that he has “lost faith” in BP’s response.
Dillon was one of BP’s hired goons used to keep reporters from asking questions of cleanup workers on beaches in Houma, but turned whistleblower after he was fired for taking photos of the consequences of chemicals used by BP to clean up the spill.
“I saw something when I was out there,” he said. “I took pictures of something and I brought it to the attention of the command structure and whatever I took pictures of, 12 hours later I was gone.”
Dillon decided to speak out publicly because he placed his oath to his country over and above any loyalty to BP.
“I will never have loyalty to this company,” he said. “I will always have loyalty to my country. And my country comes first.
“What this company is doing to this country right now is just wrong.”
As we have highlighted, as one of the founding members of the cap and trade lobby, BP stands to reap a financial bounty if the Obama administration succeeds in exploiting the worsening oil spill crisis to push through a carbon tax.
The worse the situation gets, the more political capital Obama builds in his effort to impose a consumption tax on American citizens in the name of reducing dependence on foreign oil. Viewed from this perspective, BP has no real motivation in cleaning up the oil spill.
BP’s market value plunged by more than a third in the months following the oil spill debacle, but this has recovered somewhat in recent days and once the spill is finally cleared up, expect to see the price return to pre-spill levels.
If the government manages to justify a carbon tax in the eyes of lawmakers by pointing to an environmental catastrophe in the Gulf, BP can look forward to massive long-term profits from both a sustained rise in the price of oil allied to a carbon tax that will be passed on to consumers.
BP’s botched efforts to cap the leaking oil well have done nothing to alleviate the problem, while the company’s use of the chemical Corexit is worsening the damage caused by the oil spill while causing sickness amongst large numbers of cleanup workers. The Obama administration has similarly dragged its feet in responding to the oil spill, waiting for months before it accepted help offered by thirteen different countries whose sophisticated technology could have fixed the leak within weeks.
BP’s reaction to the oil spill has proved that the company is more concerned about blocking media access to information about the situation than actually cleaning up the consequences of the spill.
Former high-level BP contractor and Army Special Operations soldier Adam Dillon told a New Orleans television station that British Petroleum is not interested in cleaning up the oil spill because the company is run by “cutthroat individuals” who only care about money.
Dillon was fired by BP “after taking photos that he believes were related to the use of dispersants and to the cleanup of the oil.” Before his dismissal, Dillon was “confined and interrogated for almost an hour,” by BP officials.
“There are some very great, hardworking individuals in there. But the bottom line is just about money. There are some very cutthroat individuals. They’re not worried about cleaning up that spill as it is,” said Dillon, adding that he has “lost faith” in BP’s response.
Dillon was one of BP’s hired goons used to keep reporters from asking questions of cleanup workers on beaches in Houma, but turned whistleblower after he was fired for taking photos of the consequences of chemicals used by BP to clean up the spill.
“I saw something when I was out there,” he said. “I took pictures of something and I brought it to the attention of the command structure and whatever I took pictures of, 12 hours later I was gone.”
Dillon decided to speak out publicly because he placed his oath to his country over and above any loyalty to BP.
“I will never have loyalty to this company,” he said. “I will always have loyalty to my country. And my country comes first.
“What this company is doing to this country right now is just wrong.”
As we have highlighted, as one of the founding members of the cap and trade lobby, BP stands to reap a financial bounty if the Obama administration succeeds in exploiting the worsening oil spill crisis to push through a carbon tax.
The worse the situation gets, the more political capital Obama builds in his effort to impose a consumption tax on American citizens in the name of reducing dependence on foreign oil. Viewed from this perspective, BP has no real motivation in cleaning up the oil spill.
BP’s market value plunged by more than a third in the months following the oil spill debacle, but this has recovered somewhat in recent days and once the spill is finally cleared up, expect to see the price return to pre-spill levels.
If the government manages to justify a carbon tax in the eyes of lawmakers by pointing to an environmental catastrophe in the Gulf, BP can look forward to massive long-term profits from both a sustained rise in the price of oil allied to a carbon tax that will be passed on to consumers.
BP’s botched efforts to cap the leaking oil well have done nothing to alleviate the problem, while the company’s use of the chemical Corexit is worsening the damage caused by the oil spill while causing sickness amongst large numbers of cleanup workers. The Obama administration has similarly dragged its feet in responding to the oil spill, waiting for months before it accepted help offered by thirteen different countries whose sophisticated technology could have fixed the leak within weeks.
BP’s reaction to the oil spill has proved that the company is more concerned about blocking media access to information about the situation than actually cleaning up the consequences of the spill.
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