Monday, December 30, 2013
Fearing the Tea Party???
Establishment Terrified Tea Party Won’t Back Unnecessary Wars
Thomas R. Eddlem
The interventionist establishment is terrified that a reinvigorated Tea Party may prevent new unnecessary wars and foreign military interventions in the coming years, according to an article in Democracy magazine. The article — “R.I.P. Republican Internationalism” by Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb and Michael Kramer — frets that “a common thread emerges: a Tea Party-wide reluctance to engage with the world, except for those they view as true U.S. friends, such as Israel.”
The authors of the article — reposted on the website of thecenter of America’s political establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations — say that Americans can “count on three consequences then. First, a stronger, even more vociferous Tea Party. Second, a growing isolationist, anti-world impulse among its adherents. Third, much rougher opposition for any President wanting to conduct necessary business abroad.”
By “necessary business,” Gelb and Kramer mean ground wars and air strikes in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. And woe to those who oppose such foreign interventionism, since they risk being branded “isolationist” and “anti-world” — as the authors do in their article. Of course, the epithets are not accurate, since it is neither “isolationist” nor “anti-world” to want to stay clear of foreign quarrels...
Read the rest here:
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/17267-establishment-terrified-tea-party-won-t-back-unnecessary-wars
Thomas R. Eddlem
The interventionist establishment is terrified that a reinvigorated Tea Party may prevent new unnecessary wars and foreign military interventions in the coming years, according to an article in Democracy magazine. The article — “R.I.P. Republican Internationalism” by Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb and Michael Kramer — frets that “a common thread emerges: a Tea Party-wide reluctance to engage with the world, except for those they view as true U.S. friends, such as Israel.”
The authors of the article — reposted on the website of thecenter of America’s political establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations — say that Americans can “count on three consequences then. First, a stronger, even more vociferous Tea Party. Second, a growing isolationist, anti-world impulse among its adherents. Third, much rougher opposition for any President wanting to conduct necessary business abroad.”
By “necessary business,” Gelb and Kramer mean ground wars and air strikes in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. And woe to those who oppose such foreign interventionism, since they risk being branded “isolationist” and “anti-world” — as the authors do in their article. Of course, the epithets are not accurate, since it is neither “isolationist” nor “anti-world” to want to stay clear of foreign quarrels...
Read the rest here:
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/17267-establishment-terrified-tea-party-won-t-back-unnecessary-wars
" The indispensable interface between parties, business, and elites is guarded by a special class of loyalists, usually extremely bright individuals of modest family and social status, chosen by the state elite to do this work, and later rewarded accordingly. When we look at these men and these functions, it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise."
Guardians of the Warfare State
By T. Hunt Tooley
An analysis of the U.S. secretaries of war and defense (the name was changed from secretary of war to secretary of defense in 1947) gives us some insight into the nature of the relationships within the “military-industrial complex.” Though these secretaries are not the only gatekeepers of the warfare-welfare state (and perhaps not even the most important ones), they do perform a crucial function in coordinating the collectivist, rent-seeking corporate entities with the political parties and their largely social-democratic agendas.
Of 41 secretaryships since 1900, we are looking at 39 individuals, two having served twice under two separate presidents. These 39 secretaries came from 19 states only. The overwhelming majority were from the Atlantic seaboard. Strikingly, 41 percent of these secretaries of defense and war came from just three states: New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Casting our net a bit wider geographically catches two-thirds of the secretaries. These three states were populous ones, to be sure, but for the whole period, their average percentage of U.S. population would be something under 20 percent. Furthermore, very few came from the great cities. The secretaries from New York were far more likely to come from Clinton (Elihu Root) or Glen Falls (Robert Patterson) than New York City. These were mostly small-town kids from western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and adjoining districts.
Perhaps less surprisingly, 52 percent attended Ivy League institutions (some of them only the professional schools at the Ivies). Of the Ivy Leaguers, 11 were Republican secretaries, ten Democrat. Yet in spite of the elite educational connections, most of the secretaries came from middle-class, and in several cases, distinctly lower middle-class backgrounds.
Not all, of course. Robert Lovett (under Truman) was a scion of Union Pacific money (hence related to a couple of banking empires). Elliott Richardson (under Nixon) was from a blue-blooded family of Boston Brahmins. William Howard Taft (under Theodore Roosevelt) was from the powerful Ohio Taft family of Cincinnati.
Their bios show that, at least in broad summary, even the most atypical of the 39 do not stray too far from the following portrait, a kind of ideal-type of war secretary.
Our model secretary of war or defense is an individual from western Pennsylvania. He comes from a sturdy middle class background which enables this bright, hard-working kid to get an Ivy League education, most likely at Yale. He writes or edits one of the college publications. Since our man is at Yale, he is sought out by a secret society, and he gets into, say, Skull and Bones (the most frequently occurring, though some others are represented), rubbing shoulders there with the elite families and fortunes.
If there is a war on after college, our man will serve a short stint in the military. He will then study law at Harvard, working afterward for a law firm or an investment bank. Making his way into state or national politics, he will serve in a number of legislative or executive positions.
Our ideal man — and they are all males — would definitely be in the Council on Foreign Relations (after 1922). After having served for three or four years as secretary of war or defense, our man will go back to “business,” almost certainly investment banking. (This is true in nearly every case, even for those who were not bankers before.) He would also maintain extensive board memberships, consultative positions, and other connections to the arms industry. And he would be connected with the worlds of both government task forces and the great tax-free foundations (Ford Foundation, Rand, etc.) and maintain close connections to Lehman Brothers, Morgan, Jacob Schiff, and Goldman Sachs.
Now, let me say that there are plenty of incidental variations in the pool. Interesting ones at that. One secretary of war had two descendants (grandson and great grand-daughter) who would be nominated for academy awards (George Dern, one of FDR’s war secretaries). One secretary of defense served twice and in between joined big pharma and successfully gained the FDA approval of Aspartame (Rumsfeld). One secretary of war established the Davis Cup in tennis (Davis). Two secretaries had previously been college roommates (Rumsfeld and Carlucci). And one of Roosevelt’s war secretaries was a strict non-interventionist (Woodring)!
As mentioned, only a few of the secretaries came from old money and privilege: in general, these men are not the shadowy banker puppet masters nor the vicious capitalists of imagination, but rather the sons of farmers, small-town attorneys, and school teachers whose ambition took them to positions of influence. Indeed, some exercised enormous influence on policy: think Stimson, McNamara, and Rumsfeld, for example. Some much less. There were no real Metternichs or Richelieus among them, no “coachmen of Europe” so to speak. Rather, they were high functionaries of the warfare-welfare state. And, it must be said, hard-working, intelligent, and capable individuals.
All this hard work was applied to procuring materials for war, getting them from the preferred sources, shaping American defense organizations so as to carry out the military plans of the president and his advisors. Maybe even ensuring that the destruction inflicted would be such that the reconstruction would yield profit to favored sectors and companies later on. These secretaries certainly provide one of the secured connections between politics and the upper-level decision-making levels of “wise men.”
I am suggesting that this specific profile may be crucial to the political process of brokering deals between the parties, the administration, high finance, the military, and arms manufacturing — in essence the military industrial complex. The modern imperium, no less than the state of the Sun King, needs highly skilled managers of even temperament and total loyalty. The “democracy” of today — part theater, part therapy, part oligarchy— might serve up oddballs and originals as Secretaries of state, senators, and presidents. But the defense secretaries, crucial machinery of the perpetual warfare state, are finely-honed parts of a specific make.
Parenthetically, and without attributing special significance, I observe a tendency to partisan difference in style among our defense ministers. The Democrat party has tended to choose a few more out-of-sync secretaries than the Republican party. Also, a few more Democrat secretaries came from outside the Bermuda Triangle (of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio) of war secretaries.
On the other hand, it is likewise true that Defense is the cabinet position that probably most frequently crosses party lines, as in the case of Secretary Hagel. Clearly, at times, these guardians are simply interchangeable.
Both political parties have of course acted as fronts for the state elite, for the system of the warfare-welfare state. The appearance of tension between the two parties in matters of war-making has been theater in many ways, though many participants are, no doubt, true believers. Yet these ideas have to be conveyed against the backdrop of actual aggressive warlike activity by both parties when in power.
The indispensable interface between parties, business, and elites is guarded by a special class of loyalists, usually extremely bright individuals of modest family and social status, chosen by the state elite to do this work, and later rewarded accordingly. When we look at these men and these functions, it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/t-hunt-tooley/guardians-of-the-killer-state/
By T. Hunt Tooley
An analysis of the U.S. secretaries of war and defense (the name was changed from secretary of war to secretary of defense in 1947) gives us some insight into the nature of the relationships within the “military-industrial complex.” Though these secretaries are not the only gatekeepers of the warfare-welfare state (and perhaps not even the most important ones), they do perform a crucial function in coordinating the collectivist, rent-seeking corporate entities with the political parties and their largely social-democratic agendas.
Of 41 secretaryships since 1900, we are looking at 39 individuals, two having served twice under two separate presidents. These 39 secretaries came from 19 states only. The overwhelming majority were from the Atlantic seaboard. Strikingly, 41 percent of these secretaries of defense and war came from just three states: New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Casting our net a bit wider geographically catches two-thirds of the secretaries. These three states were populous ones, to be sure, but for the whole period, their average percentage of U.S. population would be something under 20 percent. Furthermore, very few came from the great cities. The secretaries from New York were far more likely to come from Clinton (Elihu Root) or Glen Falls (Robert Patterson) than New York City. These were mostly small-town kids from western Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and adjoining districts.
Perhaps less surprisingly, 52 percent attended Ivy League institutions (some of them only the professional schools at the Ivies). Of the Ivy Leaguers, 11 were Republican secretaries, ten Democrat. Yet in spite of the elite educational connections, most of the secretaries came from middle-class, and in several cases, distinctly lower middle-class backgrounds.
Not all, of course. Robert Lovett (under Truman) was a scion of Union Pacific money (hence related to a couple of banking empires). Elliott Richardson (under Nixon) was from a blue-blooded family of Boston Brahmins. William Howard Taft (under Theodore Roosevelt) was from the powerful Ohio Taft family of Cincinnati.
Their bios show that, at least in broad summary, even the most atypical of the 39 do not stray too far from the following portrait, a kind of ideal-type of war secretary.
Our model secretary of war or defense is an individual from western Pennsylvania. He comes from a sturdy middle class background which enables this bright, hard-working kid to get an Ivy League education, most likely at Yale. He writes or edits one of the college publications. Since our man is at Yale, he is sought out by a secret society, and he gets into, say, Skull and Bones (the most frequently occurring, though some others are represented), rubbing shoulders there with the elite families and fortunes.
If there is a war on after college, our man will serve a short stint in the military. He will then study law at Harvard, working afterward for a law firm or an investment bank. Making his way into state or national politics, he will serve in a number of legislative or executive positions.
Our ideal man — and they are all males — would definitely be in the Council on Foreign Relations (after 1922). After having served for three or four years as secretary of war or defense, our man will go back to “business,” almost certainly investment banking. (This is true in nearly every case, even for those who were not bankers before.) He would also maintain extensive board memberships, consultative positions, and other connections to the arms industry. And he would be connected with the worlds of both government task forces and the great tax-free foundations (Ford Foundation, Rand, etc.) and maintain close connections to Lehman Brothers, Morgan, Jacob Schiff, and Goldman Sachs.
Now, let me say that there are plenty of incidental variations in the pool. Interesting ones at that. One secretary of war had two descendants (grandson and great grand-daughter) who would be nominated for academy awards (George Dern, one of FDR’s war secretaries). One secretary of defense served twice and in between joined big pharma and successfully gained the FDA approval of Aspartame (Rumsfeld). One secretary of war established the Davis Cup in tennis (Davis). Two secretaries had previously been college roommates (Rumsfeld and Carlucci). And one of Roosevelt’s war secretaries was a strict non-interventionist (Woodring)!
As mentioned, only a few of the secretaries came from old money and privilege: in general, these men are not the shadowy banker puppet masters nor the vicious capitalists of imagination, but rather the sons of farmers, small-town attorneys, and school teachers whose ambition took them to positions of influence. Indeed, some exercised enormous influence on policy: think Stimson, McNamara, and Rumsfeld, for example. Some much less. There were no real Metternichs or Richelieus among them, no “coachmen of Europe” so to speak. Rather, they were high functionaries of the warfare-welfare state. And, it must be said, hard-working, intelligent, and capable individuals.
All this hard work was applied to procuring materials for war, getting them from the preferred sources, shaping American defense organizations so as to carry out the military plans of the president and his advisors. Maybe even ensuring that the destruction inflicted would be such that the reconstruction would yield profit to favored sectors and companies later on. These secretaries certainly provide one of the secured connections between politics and the upper-level decision-making levels of “wise men.”
I am suggesting that this specific profile may be crucial to the political process of brokering deals between the parties, the administration, high finance, the military, and arms manufacturing — in essence the military industrial complex. The modern imperium, no less than the state of the Sun King, needs highly skilled managers of even temperament and total loyalty. The “democracy” of today — part theater, part therapy, part oligarchy— might serve up oddballs and originals as Secretaries of state, senators, and presidents. But the defense secretaries, crucial machinery of the perpetual warfare state, are finely-honed parts of a specific make.
Parenthetically, and without attributing special significance, I observe a tendency to partisan difference in style among our defense ministers. The Democrat party has tended to choose a few more out-of-sync secretaries than the Republican party. Also, a few more Democrat secretaries came from outside the Bermuda Triangle (of New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio) of war secretaries.
On the other hand, it is likewise true that Defense is the cabinet position that probably most frequently crosses party lines, as in the case of Secretary Hagel. Clearly, at times, these guardians are simply interchangeable.
Both political parties have of course acted as fronts for the state elite, for the system of the warfare-welfare state. The appearance of tension between the two parties in matters of war-making has been theater in many ways, though many participants are, no doubt, true believers. Yet these ideas have to be conveyed against the backdrop of actual aggressive warlike activity by both parties when in power.
The indispensable interface between parties, business, and elites is guarded by a special class of loyalists, usually extremely bright individuals of modest family and social status, chosen by the state elite to do this work, and later rewarded accordingly. When we look at these men and these functions, it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/t-hunt-tooley/guardians-of-the-killer-state/
The NSA ruling...
NSA has Become a Four-Letter Word in US
By Russia Today
The NSA “has become a four-letter word in the US” and Americans are irritated, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams, told RT while commenting on a ruling which states that the agency’s spying is legal.
RT: The hackers’ congress which is underway in Hamburg is seeking to raise awareness of encryption and privacy. We’re used to thinking about hacking as something illegal. Are hackers becoming the new heroes of our time?
Daniel McAdams: When the government is doing things that are illegal, it takes formerly illegal things like hackers to try to protect us. The only worry is [whether these are] all legitimate hackers or some [are] infiltrated. The whole world of encryption is also somewhat concerning as well.
RT: Assange called on hackers to fight back against the spy agencies. Is the job any easier these days, after all these revelations?
DM: I think there has been an enormous increase in awareness of what the government is doing. What is interesting is that this ruling by Judge Pauley on Friday said the ACLU does not have the right to challenge this collection of metadata because it was gotten illegally because of revelations by Snowden.
RT: Are you surprised by that ruling?
DM: The Washington Post called it ‘Kafkaesque,’ and I think that is right. One of their journalists pointed out that because Congress meant for orders under Section 2.15 of the Patriot Act to be secret, the ACLU has no right to challenge that. The implications are incredible. It means that if the government was illegally using 2.15 – something that we would objectively say was illegal use of 2.15 – we could never challenge that because we were not supposed to have known that they were doing it. And it really is like Kafka, it is absolutely chilling.
RT: How is the public mood in the US?
DM: Americans are very irritated. The NSA has become a four-letter word in the US. People never thought about it before. Someone like Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said yesterday that he is glad of this ruling because maybe Americans will now stop being so mean and angry with NSA. I think that is wrong.
RT: How much damage have Snowden’s leaks done to America’s foreign relations and its image?
DM: I don’t think a lot of the revelations about the foreign spying should have been a surprise to anyone. Americans are more concerned with the NSA getting out of control in its monitoring of American citizens. That is where the outrage is here in the US, and you find out that this bulk collection of everything is fine and dandy. As Judge Pauley pointed out, this was the government’s counter-punch against Al-Qaeda. Although they can’t tell us of one single success that they had with this monitoring of our communications.
RT: Do you think the governments that are most affected by NSA surveillance will be able to stand up to the US and put an end to the snooping?
DM: It is a subtle process that takes place over time. The image of America has decreased in the eyes of the world, if you look at polling data over the last decade. I think things like the attack on Iraq that was obviously based on lies, the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, the US manipulating elections, manipulating governments throughout the world – most recently we see that in Africa and South Sudan – I think this is a process and it is showing the rest of the world more and more that US interventionism is certainly not a force for good. At least not this day and age.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/russia-today/nsa-is-a-4-letter-word/
By Russia Today
The NSA “has become a four-letter word in the US” and Americans are irritated, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams, told RT while commenting on a ruling which states that the agency’s spying is legal.
RT: The hackers’ congress which is underway in Hamburg is seeking to raise awareness of encryption and privacy. We’re used to thinking about hacking as something illegal. Are hackers becoming the new heroes of our time?
Daniel McAdams: When the government is doing things that are illegal, it takes formerly illegal things like hackers to try to protect us. The only worry is [whether these are] all legitimate hackers or some [are] infiltrated. The whole world of encryption is also somewhat concerning as well.
RT: Assange called on hackers to fight back against the spy agencies. Is the job any easier these days, after all these revelations?
DM: I think there has been an enormous increase in awareness of what the government is doing. What is interesting is that this ruling by Judge Pauley on Friday said the ACLU does not have the right to challenge this collection of metadata because it was gotten illegally because of revelations by Snowden.
RT: Are you surprised by that ruling?
DM: The Washington Post called it ‘Kafkaesque,’ and I think that is right. One of their journalists pointed out that because Congress meant for orders under Section 2.15 of the Patriot Act to be secret, the ACLU has no right to challenge that. The implications are incredible. It means that if the government was illegally using 2.15 – something that we would objectively say was illegal use of 2.15 – we could never challenge that because we were not supposed to have known that they were doing it. And it really is like Kafka, it is absolutely chilling.
RT: How is the public mood in the US?
DM: Americans are very irritated. The NSA has become a four-letter word in the US. People never thought about it before. Someone like Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said yesterday that he is glad of this ruling because maybe Americans will now stop being so mean and angry with NSA. I think that is wrong.
RT: How much damage have Snowden’s leaks done to America’s foreign relations and its image?
DM: I don’t think a lot of the revelations about the foreign spying should have been a surprise to anyone. Americans are more concerned with the NSA getting out of control in its monitoring of American citizens. That is where the outrage is here in the US, and you find out that this bulk collection of everything is fine and dandy. As Judge Pauley pointed out, this was the government’s counter-punch against Al-Qaeda. Although they can’t tell us of one single success that they had with this monitoring of our communications.
RT: Do you think the governments that are most affected by NSA surveillance will be able to stand up to the US and put an end to the snooping?
DM: It is a subtle process that takes place over time. The image of America has decreased in the eyes of the world, if you look at polling data over the last decade. I think things like the attack on Iraq that was obviously based on lies, the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, the US manipulating elections, manipulating governments throughout the world – most recently we see that in Africa and South Sudan – I think this is a process and it is showing the rest of the world more and more that US interventionism is certainly not a force for good. At least not this day and age.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/russia-today/nsa-is-a-4-letter-word/
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Breathe through your nose...
Mouth Breathing During Exercise May Increase Your Risk for Asthma and Cardiac Problems
By Joseph Mercola
One of the most basic requirements for an effective exercise session is good oxygenation of your muscles and organs. You can actually control how well your tissues are being oxygenated by how you breathe.
But if you’re like most people, you take your breathing for granted. After all, it’s so automatic! You may not realize that there is an optimal way to breathe to increase body oxygenation and improve your health. There is a chance you may be doing it the wrong way without even realizing it.
While breathing is a fundamentally natural function of human beings, it can be negatively infl uenced by many factors of modern living such as stress, sitting at a desk all day, and excessive talking. In fact, about 80 percent of the Western population breathes incorrectly.
Mouth and nose breathing differ dramatically in terms of the depth of your breath, how the air is “prepared,” and the effects they produce in your body. The first step to attaining optimal breathing is to breathe through your nose, not through your mouth.
Nasal breathing has a number of physiological advantages for your health AND your fitness. The amount of benefit you derive from your exercise efforts is largely controlled by your breathing habits, which affect your performance, endurance, post-exercise energy levels, and even your ability to metabolize fat.1
Most people overbreathe – in other words, they chronically hyperventilate. Typical characteristics of overbreathing include mouth breathing, upper chest breathing, sighing, noticeable breathing during rest, and taking large breaths prior to talking. Overbreathing during exercise can have a number of harmful consequences. The way to prevent this is to “retrain” your nose to do the job it was designed to do, which is what this article will cover.
Read the rest here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/joseph-mercola/do-you-know-how-to-breathe/
By Joseph Mercola
One of the most basic requirements for an effective exercise session is good oxygenation of your muscles and organs. You can actually control how well your tissues are being oxygenated by how you breathe.
But if you’re like most people, you take your breathing for granted. After all, it’s so automatic! You may not realize that there is an optimal way to breathe to increase body oxygenation and improve your health. There is a chance you may be doing it the wrong way without even realizing it.
While breathing is a fundamentally natural function of human beings, it can be negatively infl uenced by many factors of modern living such as stress, sitting at a desk all day, and excessive talking. In fact, about 80 percent of the Western population breathes incorrectly.
Mouth and nose breathing differ dramatically in terms of the depth of your breath, how the air is “prepared,” and the effects they produce in your body. The first step to attaining optimal breathing is to breathe through your nose, not through your mouth.
Nasal breathing has a number of physiological advantages for your health AND your fitness. The amount of benefit you derive from your exercise efforts is largely controlled by your breathing habits, which affect your performance, endurance, post-exercise energy levels, and even your ability to metabolize fat.1
Most people overbreathe – in other words, they chronically hyperventilate. Typical characteristics of overbreathing include mouth breathing, upper chest breathing, sighing, noticeable breathing during rest, and taking large breaths prior to talking. Overbreathing during exercise can have a number of harmful consequences. The way to prevent this is to “retrain” your nose to do the job it was designed to do, which is what this article will cover.
Read the rest here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/joseph-mercola/do-you-know-how-to-breathe/
And who is the terrorist???
Economic Policy Journal
The Nation writes:
U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called "signature strikes"that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against "a pre-identified 'signature' of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity." In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a “suspect” category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are). In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind.
Consider it a record. For the period since September 11, 2001, we’re number one... in obliterating wedding parties! In those years, whether we care to know it or not, “till death do us part” has gained a far grimmer meaning.
Source:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/12/the-us-has-bombed-at-least-eight.html
Do you know what's in your drinking water???
A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.
But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.
In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville
Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public "doesn't know how to interpret the information" and might be unduly alarmed.
How do the drugs get into the water?
People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.
And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies — which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public — have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.
"We recognize it is a growing concern and we're taking it very seriously," said Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Members of the AP National Investigative Team reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. They also surveyed the nation's 50 largest cities and a dozen other major water providers, as well as smaller community water providers in all 50 states.
Here are some of the key test results obtained by the AP:
• Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city's watersheds.
• Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.
• Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.
• A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco's drinking water.
• The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.
• Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson.
The situation is undoubtedly worse than suggested by the positive test results in the major population centers documented by the AP...
Read the rest here:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dfd_1388279208
OOPS!!! Sea ice??? What sea ice???
Scientists Trapped In Record Sea Ice Announce That It Is Disappearing
Source:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/scientists-trapped-in-record-sea-ice-announce-that-it-is-disappearing/
Source:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/scientists-trapped-in-record-sea-ice-announce-that-it-is-disappearing/
Saturday, December 28, 2013
And the answer is???
by Jacob G. Hornberger
In the healthcare-related controversy over whether President Obama is a socialist or not, it would be better to ask a more fundamental question: Is America’s overall healthcare system socialist or not.
Why is that important?
Three reasons.
First, socialism always produces chaos and crises.
Second, socialism cannot be fixed or reformed and any attempts at improving it only make the situation worse.
Third, if a doctor gets the diagnosis of an illness wrong, it’s likely that he’s going to get the prescription wrong as well. The same applies to the diagnosis and treatment of what ails the American body politic.
As everyone knows, for decades America’s healthcare system has been characterized by never-ending and ever-growing chaos and crises, especially with respect to constantly soaring healthcare costs. That should give us a hint on whether America’s healthcare system is free enterprise or socialism.
Moreover, no matter what healthcare reform is adopted, the chaos and crises only get worse, with the most recent example being Obamacare. That should give us another hint as to whether America’s healthcare system is socialist or not.
If America’s healthcare system is founded on socialist principles rather than free-market principles, then the next obvious question arises: Why not simply repeal and dismantle the socialism and embrace a free market in healthcare as the cure for what ails the body politic? That is, why not rid our society of the disease rather than trying to sustain, improve, or reform it?
So, what’s the answer? Does America’s healthcare system — which is founded on such massive government programs and interventions as Medicare, Medicaid, medical licensure, healthcare regulation, insurance regulation, and income-tax manipulation — constitute socialism or free enterprise?
Perhaps an examination of the healthcare systems of four communist countries, all of which, of course, are based on socialist principles, might help us to answer the question. From Wikipedia:
Cuba: The Cuban government operates a national health system and assumes fiscal and administrative responsibility for the health care of all its citizens.
North Korea: Healthcare in North Korea includes as national medical service and health insurance system. North Korea’s government claims that it provides universal health care for all citizens.
Vietnam: The Ministry of Health (MOH) is the government ministry responsible for the governance and guidance of the health, healthcare and health industry of Vietnam. In conjunction with other ministries and the prime minister’s office, the Ministry is responsible for creating and promulgating long-term health policy programs such as the “National Strategy on Nutrition for the 2001 – 2010 period” and the “National Policy on Injury Prevention 2002 – 2010.”
China: China’s government, specifically the Ministry of Health of the State Council oversees the health services system, which includes a substantial rural collective sector but little private sector. Nearly all the major medical facilities are run by the government.
Link:
http://fff.org/2013/12/24/is-americas-healthcare-system-socialism-or-not/
"It looks like Justice is not blind, after all. And she is definitely not color-blind..."
The Knockout “Game”: It’s Only a Federal Hate Crime When a White Guy “Plays” It
Kimberly Paxton
The Knockout “Game” is a sick scourge in which sociopathic young people attempt to punch a random stranger unconscious with only one blow. The domain of bullies, the attacks have often taken place against the physically weakest members of society: the elderly, women, and even young teens.
Up until now nearly all of the attacks have been black people punching white people. The mainstream has limited it’s coverage of this fact to avoid being considered racist. The only reason we know that the previous attacks were perpetrated by blacks is because of mug shots and videos that were published. Race is not mentioned throughout most of the articles.
That has all changed now that a white man has punched a black man in the face. Before, the mainstream media called it a “game” that deprived, neglected inner city youth “played”. Now that a white guy has “played”, it’s suddenly a federal hate crime.
This attack was equally as despicable as all of the attacks that preceded it. A strong 27 year old man greeted an elderly man in a friendly manner, struck him in the face so hard that the victim’s jaw was broken, and yelled, “Knockout”, videotaping the entire thing for posterity.
The only difference is, this time the attacker was white and the 79 year old victim was black. The US Department of Justice has filed federal hate crime charges against Conrad Alvin Barrett, upping his potential jail time exponentially as per the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The Texas case came to authorities’ attention after Mr. Barrett showed a video he took of the assault to a couple he didn’t know at a restaurant on Nov. 24, the FBI said in an affidavit submitted in the case.
One of the couple was an off-duty arson investigator and peace officer. After they left the restaurant, the couple reported the video to a police officer and identified Mr. Barrett. The police officer confiscated the smartphone containing the video and began an investigation that ended with a criminal complaint filed on Christmas Eve and the arrest Thursday.
According to the FBI statement, Mr. Barrett spent a week trying to work up the nerve to try knockout.
The FBI said that in a video from Nov. 24, the day of the assault, Mr. Barrett said he wanted “to see if I were to hit a black person, would this be nationally televised?” The video shows him stopping his car, approaching the 79-year-old man and asking, “How’s it going, man?” — before “a loud smack is heard and the victim falls to the ground.”
“Barrett laughs, says ‘knockout,’ and then flees,” the FBI affidavit says.
In other videos, the FBI said, Mr. Barrett uses racial epithets and says blacks “haven’t fully experienced the blessing of evolution.”
The victim of the assault, identified only as “R.C.,” lost three teeth, suffered a broken jaw and had two metal plates inserted into his mouth. (source)
So the question is this: How is it being justified to charge Barrett with a federal hate crime, but not charge all of the perpetrators of black on white crimes with a federal hate crime?
Never fear, a few “experts” have chimed in to attempt to explain this biased application of the law.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels, Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division:
“Hate crimes tear at the fabric of entire communities. As always, the Civil Rights Division will work with our federal and state law enforcement partners to ensure that hate crimes are identified and prosecuted, and that justice is done.” (source)
Dr. Donald Green, Political Scientist, Columbia University in New York:
“The reason why you have black perpetrators and white victims being prosecuted asymmetrically hinges on what evidence there is about why they’re doing what they’re doing…If suspects call the victim racial names, and one of the other witnesses testifies to that effect, it would be prosecutable as a hate crime.”(source)
Dr. Jack Levin, Criminologist, Northeastern University in Boston
[Levin] argues in an upcoming journal article that racially fueled knockout attacks are in the news is because they’ve actually become rarer than in the past, so they are more notable. The 1990s, he says, had far more reports of so-called “thrill hate crimes” – think white teenagers beating up homeless men.
“This is a thrill hate crime because typically young people who go out looking for someone to bash or assault, the act doesn’t necessarily require some triggering episode in wider society,” says Mr. Levin in a phone interview with the Monitor. “These knockout attacks are usually interracial, but not every interracial crime is a hate crime.” (source)
Special Agent in Charge Stephen Morris, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Houston Office
“It is unimaginable in this day and age that one could be drawn to violently attack another based on the color of their skin. We remind all citizens that we are protected under the law from such racially motivated attacks, and encourage everyone to report such crimes to the FBI.” (source)
Ted Williams, defense attorney:
“[Barrett] also during the course used the ‘n’ word. There may be those that would say the requisite intent for the national hate crime is not there but I do believe that this would be an excellent test case.” (source)
Previous to this attack, the only knockout attack that has been prosecuted as a hate crime was one against an Orthodox Jewish man wearing a yarmulke in Brooklyn. That crime, however, was not prosecuted federally.
Does this indicate an agenda of deliberate racial division? Does the Obama administration want to stir up racial conflict? Why is the law applied differently to white criminals than it is to black criminals? Why would the Department of Justice opt to make an example out of a white thug after ignoring numerous attacks by black thugs?
This crime was despicable and cowardly, but no more so than scores of previous knockout attacks that were black criminals assaulting white victims.
It looks like Justice is not blind, after all. And she is definitely not color-blind.
Link:
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-knockout-game-its-only-a-federal-hate-crime-when-a-white-guy-plays-it_122013#sthash.JN2LcATM.dpuf
Kimberly Paxton
The Knockout “Game” is a sick scourge in which sociopathic young people attempt to punch a random stranger unconscious with only one blow. The domain of bullies, the attacks have often taken place against the physically weakest members of society: the elderly, women, and even young teens.
Up until now nearly all of the attacks have been black people punching white people. The mainstream has limited it’s coverage of this fact to avoid being considered racist. The only reason we know that the previous attacks were perpetrated by blacks is because of mug shots and videos that were published. Race is not mentioned throughout most of the articles.
That has all changed now that a white man has punched a black man in the face. Before, the mainstream media called it a “game” that deprived, neglected inner city youth “played”. Now that a white guy has “played”, it’s suddenly a federal hate crime.
This attack was equally as despicable as all of the attacks that preceded it. A strong 27 year old man greeted an elderly man in a friendly manner, struck him in the face so hard that the victim’s jaw was broken, and yelled, “Knockout”, videotaping the entire thing for posterity.
The only difference is, this time the attacker was white and the 79 year old victim was black. The US Department of Justice has filed federal hate crime charges against Conrad Alvin Barrett, upping his potential jail time exponentially as per the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The Texas case came to authorities’ attention after Mr. Barrett showed a video he took of the assault to a couple he didn’t know at a restaurant on Nov. 24, the FBI said in an affidavit submitted in the case.
One of the couple was an off-duty arson investigator and peace officer. After they left the restaurant, the couple reported the video to a police officer and identified Mr. Barrett. The police officer confiscated the smartphone containing the video and began an investigation that ended with a criminal complaint filed on Christmas Eve and the arrest Thursday.
According to the FBI statement, Mr. Barrett spent a week trying to work up the nerve to try knockout.
The FBI said that in a video from Nov. 24, the day of the assault, Mr. Barrett said he wanted “to see if I were to hit a black person, would this be nationally televised?” The video shows him stopping his car, approaching the 79-year-old man and asking, “How’s it going, man?” — before “a loud smack is heard and the victim falls to the ground.”
“Barrett laughs, says ‘knockout,’ and then flees,” the FBI affidavit says.
In other videos, the FBI said, Mr. Barrett uses racial epithets and says blacks “haven’t fully experienced the blessing of evolution.”
The victim of the assault, identified only as “R.C.,” lost three teeth, suffered a broken jaw and had two metal plates inserted into his mouth. (source)
So the question is this: How is it being justified to charge Barrett with a federal hate crime, but not charge all of the perpetrators of black on white crimes with a federal hate crime?
Never fear, a few “experts” have chimed in to attempt to explain this biased application of the law.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels, Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division:
“Hate crimes tear at the fabric of entire communities. As always, the Civil Rights Division will work with our federal and state law enforcement partners to ensure that hate crimes are identified and prosecuted, and that justice is done.” (source)
Dr. Donald Green, Political Scientist, Columbia University in New York:
“The reason why you have black perpetrators and white victims being prosecuted asymmetrically hinges on what evidence there is about why they’re doing what they’re doing…If suspects call the victim racial names, and one of the other witnesses testifies to that effect, it would be prosecutable as a hate crime.”(source)
Dr. Jack Levin, Criminologist, Northeastern University in Boston
[Levin] argues in an upcoming journal article that racially fueled knockout attacks are in the news is because they’ve actually become rarer than in the past, so they are more notable. The 1990s, he says, had far more reports of so-called “thrill hate crimes” – think white teenagers beating up homeless men.
“This is a thrill hate crime because typically young people who go out looking for someone to bash or assault, the act doesn’t necessarily require some triggering episode in wider society,” says Mr. Levin in a phone interview with the Monitor. “These knockout attacks are usually interracial, but not every interracial crime is a hate crime.” (source)
Special Agent in Charge Stephen Morris, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Houston Office
“It is unimaginable in this day and age that one could be drawn to violently attack another based on the color of their skin. We remind all citizens that we are protected under the law from such racially motivated attacks, and encourage everyone to report such crimes to the FBI.” (source)
Ted Williams, defense attorney:
“[Barrett] also during the course used the ‘n’ word. There may be those that would say the requisite intent for the national hate crime is not there but I do believe that this would be an excellent test case.” (source)
Previous to this attack, the only knockout attack that has been prosecuted as a hate crime was one against an Orthodox Jewish man wearing a yarmulke in Brooklyn. That crime, however, was not prosecuted federally.
Does this indicate an agenda of deliberate racial division? Does the Obama administration want to stir up racial conflict? Why is the law applied differently to white criminals than it is to black criminals? Why would the Department of Justice opt to make an example out of a white thug after ignoring numerous attacks by black thugs?
This crime was despicable and cowardly, but no more so than scores of previous knockout attacks that were black criminals assaulting white victims.
It looks like Justice is not blind, after all. And she is definitely not color-blind.
Link:
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/the-knockout-game-its-only-a-federal-hate-crime-when-a-white-guy-plays-it_122013#sthash.JN2LcATM.dpuf
"They are a tag-team. The Fed finances the Military Empire. On the other side of the equation, the Military Empire makes sure everyone uses and accepts the Feds dollars. Should a country (any country) even think of using anything else as money, they will have bombs dropped on them immediately."
By Chris Rossini
The U.S. Colossus is a double-edged sword. The money-creating machine known as the Federal Reserve comprises one of the razor sharp edges. And the other consists of the massive worldwide military empire.
Each blade looks out for the other side. They are a tag-team. The Fed finances the Military Empire. On the other side of the equation, the Military Empire makes sure everyone uses and accepts the Feds dollars. Should a country (any country) even think of using anything else as money, they will have bombs dropped on them immediately.
Both edges of the sword have carte blanche. “The people” and their “representatives” are not allowed to know what goes on, and chances are excellent that they never will…..At least not until it all crumbles under its own weight, and like archaeologists, future generations put together the pieces on what went on.
By now, you’ve surely heard of calls to “Audit The Fed”. But what about the other edge of the sword? What about “Audit The Pentagon?”.
Reuters provides a nice Q&A on this subject:
Question: Is the Pentagon required to be audited?Answer: Yes. Congress passed a law in 1990 requiring all federal agencies to be audited annually. The law required the Defense Department to comply by 1996. The Pentagon missed that deadline and has remained in violation ever since.
Q: What’s preventing the Pentagon from being audited?A: The Defense Department has had no working accounting system. In recent years, it has relied on at least 2,100 (estimates range up to 5,000) separate systems spread throughout the military services and other defense organizations, almost all developed independently over the years with little thought to sharing data or preparing accurate financial statements.
5,000 separate systems? Chances of ever getting an audit? Zero.
Q: How much taxpayer money has the Defense Department spent that has never been audited since the 1996 deadline?A: About $8.5 trillion.
And there you have it…The gift that keeps on giving for the bureaucrats. Trillions and Trillions handed over. No one knows where it goes.Well, that’s not entirely true. The people who receive the Trillions know where the money went.
Q: What are the consequences?A: It is impossible for the Pentagon or any auditor to determine how much of the annual defense budget is spent as Congress directed and how much is diverted for other uses.
Q: What is happening now to improve the situation?A: After the Pentagon for years continually extended its own deadline for becoming audit-ready, Congress in 2009 cracked down. It set a legal deadline of fiscal 2017 for the entire department to be ready for an audit.
2017?…Ha!…They can put all the legal limits that they want. By the time 2017 comes around, the legal limit will be pushed to 2027….Rinse & Repeat.
Q: Why is the effort faltering? A: Many of the costly new systems don’t work. Several were canceled outright as failures after amounts exceeding $1 billion were spent on each.
See my post from yesterday for more on that.
Q: Are there consequences for failing to meet the 2017 deadline?A: There are no legal consequences if the Defense Department isn’t audit-ready by 2017.
There are no consequences because there will be no audit.
Put yourself in the Fed & Pentagon’s shoes. A real audit (i.e., not a ‘you can see what you’re allowed to see’ audit) on either one is equivalent to a game over. Even our wildest imaginations can’t fathom what happens to those Trillions.
There’s no way the greatest (criminal) game in the history of the world is going to come to an end because the victims (us) want to know what’s going on. We have Miley Cyrus and Duck Dynasty to focus on.
Only economics will stop the double-edged sword now. Empires ultimately hit the economic wall. Thank goodness for that wall, otherwise humanity would be toast.
Has the wall been hit? None of us are smart enough to know that. But one thing is for sure. We are going through one vicious financial crisis after another. They’re definitely occurring more often, and each time they happen, the powers-that-be act like they are more frazzled and desperate than ever.
So it’s not all bad. Yes, the bureaucrats scam us out of Trillions every year. But we also have gifts that keep on giving…and our gifts are permanent. They never go away. They include: Supply & Demand, Marginal Utility, No Free Lunches, Human Action, and the most important one of them all — Truth.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/chris-rossini/the-usg-colossus-is-a-double-edged-sword/
Friday, December 27, 2013
It's only fair, right???
Obama Administration charges rare white 'knockout' suspect with hate crime. Hundreds of Black assailants not charged with anything.
By Stephen Dinan
The Obama administration filed a federal hate-crimes charge Thursday against a man whom authorities accused of using the “knockout game” to target a black man, videotaping it, and then bragging about the assault to strangers.
The charge marks the first time the administration has taken action on a “knockout” case after the game became an Internet and media phenomenon. It chose a case in which the person accused is white, even though most other cases reported in the news have involved black assailants.
In this case, the man accused is 27-year-old Conrad Alvin Barrett, who the Justice Department says attacked a 79-year-old black man in Fulshear, Texas, just west of Houston. Justice Department officials said they brought the case to make a point about hate crimes.
“Suspected crimes of this nature will simply not be tolerated,” said Kenneth Magidson, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas. “Evidence of hate crimes will be vigorously investigated and prosecuted with the assistance of all our partners to the fullest extent of the law.”
Mr. Barrett’s attorney, George Parnham, told CNN that his client is on medication to treat bipolar disorder. Mr. Parnham said Mr. Barrett “is very sorry” for the victim.
He could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a hate crime under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
Knockout, in which a participant tries to knock out a random person with one punch, has been in the news because of a spate of assaults in recent weeks.
The “game” has spawned a fierce cultural debate, with some commenters and law enforcement leaders disputing reports of a wave of attacks in New York, the District of Columbia and Midwestern cities such as St. Louis.
Link:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/26/federal-authorities-charge-white-knockout-suspect-/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS#ixzz2oh6WcW46
By Stephen Dinan
The Obama administration filed a federal hate-crimes charge Thursday against a man whom authorities accused of using the “knockout game” to target a black man, videotaping it, and then bragging about the assault to strangers.
The charge marks the first time the administration has taken action on a “knockout” case after the game became an Internet and media phenomenon. It chose a case in which the person accused is white, even though most other cases reported in the news have involved black assailants.
In this case, the man accused is 27-year-old Conrad Alvin Barrett, who the Justice Department says attacked a 79-year-old black man in Fulshear, Texas, just west of Houston. Justice Department officials said they brought the case to make a point about hate crimes.
“Suspected crimes of this nature will simply not be tolerated,” said Kenneth Magidson, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas. “Evidence of hate crimes will be vigorously investigated and prosecuted with the assistance of all our partners to the fullest extent of the law.”
Mr. Barrett’s attorney, George Parnham, told CNN that his client is on medication to treat bipolar disorder. Mr. Parnham said Mr. Barrett “is very sorry” for the victim.
He could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of a hate crime under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
Knockout, in which a participant tries to knock out a random person with one punch, has been in the news because of a spate of assaults in recent weeks.
The “game” has spawned a fierce cultural debate, with some commenters and law enforcement leaders disputing reports of a wave of attacks in New York, the District of Columbia and Midwestern cities such as St. Louis.
Link:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/26/federal-authorities-charge-white-knockout-suspect-/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS#ixzz2oh6WcW46
"This irrational stock market bubble is not going to last for too much longer..."
The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory
Michael Snyder
It is time to crank up the Looney Tunes theme song because Wall Street has officially entered crazytown territory. Stocks just keep going higher and higher, and at this point what is happening in the stock market does not bear any resemblance to what is going on in the overall economy whatsoever.
So how long can this irrational state of affairs possibly continue? Stocks seem to go up no matter what happens. If there is good news, stocks go up. If there is bad news, stocks go up. If there is no news, stocks go up. On Thursday, the day after Christmas, the Dow was up another 122 points to another new all-time record high. In fact, the Dow has had an astonishing 50 record high closes this year. This reminds me of the kind of euphoria that we witnessed during the peak of the housing bubble. At the time, housing prices just kept going higher and higher and everyone rushed to buy before they were “priced out of the market”. But we all know how that ended, and this stock market bubble is headed for a similar ending.
It is almost as if Wall Street has not learned any lessons from the last two major stock market crashes at all. Just look at Twitter. At the current price, Twitter is supposedly worth 40.7 BILLION dollars. But Twitter is not profitable. It is a seven-year-old company that has never made a single dollar of profit.
Not one single dollar.
In fact, Twitter actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter alone. And Twitter is expected to continue losing money for all of 2015 as well.
But Twitter stock is up 82 percent over the last 30 days, and nobody can really give a rational reason for why this is happening.
Overall, the Dow is up more than 25 percent so far this year. Unless something really weird happens over the next few days, it will be the best year for the Dow since 1996.
It has been a wonderful run for Wall Street. Unfortunately, there are a whole host of signs that we have entered very dangerous territory.
The median price-to-earnings ratio on the S&P 500 has reached an all-time record high, and margin debt at the New York Stock Exchange has reached a level that we have never seen before. In other words, stocks are massively overpriced and people have been borrowing huge amounts of money to buy stocks. These are behaviors that we also saw just before the last two stock market bubbles burst.
And of course the most troubling sign is that even as the stock market soars to unprecedented heights, the state of the overall U.S. economy is actually getting worse…
-During the last full week before Christmas, U.S. store visits were 21 percent lower than a year earlier and retail sales were 3.1 percentlower than a year earlier.
-The number of mortgage applications just hit a new 13 year low.
-The yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries just hit 3 percent.
For many more signs like this, please see my previous article entitled “37 Reasons Why ‘The Economic Recovery Of 2013′ Is A Giant Lie“.
And most Americans don’t realize this, but the U.S. financial system and the overall U.S. economy are now in much weaker condition than they were the last time we had a major financial crash back in 2008. Employment is at a much lower level than it was back then and our banking system is much more vulnerable than it was back then. Just before the last financial crash, the U.S. national debt was sitting atabout 10 trillion dollars, but today it has risen to more than 17.2 trillion dollars. The following excerpt from a recent article posted on thedailycrux.com contains even more facts and figures which show how our “balance sheet numbers” continue to get even worse…
Since the fourth quarter of 2009, the U.S. current account deficit has been more than $100 billion per quarter. As a result, foreigners now own $4.2 trillion more U.S. investment assets than we own abroad. That’s $1.7 trillion more than when Buffett first warned about this huge problem in 2003. Said another way, the problem is 68% bigger now.
And here’s a number no one else will tell you – not even Buffett. Foreigners now own $25 trillion in U.S. assets. And yet… we continue to consume far more than we produce, and we borrow massively to finance our deficits.
Since 2007, the total government debt in the U.S. (federal, state, and local) has doubled from around $10 trillion to $20 trillion.
Meanwhile, the size of Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage book declined slightly since 2007, falling from $4.9 trillion to $4.6 trillion. That’s some good news, right?
Nope. The excesses just moved to a new agency. The “other” federal mortgage bank, the Federal Housing Administration, now is originating 20% of all mortgages in the U.S., up from less than 5% in 2007.
Student debt, also spurred on by government guarantees, has also boomed, doubling since 2007 to more than $1 trillion. Altogether, total debt in our economy has grown from around $50 trillion to more than $60 trillion since 2007.
So don’t be fooled by this irrational stock market bubble.
Just because a bunch of half-crazed investors are going into massive amounts of debt in a desperate attempt to make a quick buck does not mean that the overall economy is in good shape.
In fact, much of the country is in such rough shape that “reverse shopping” has become a huge trend. Even big corporations such as McDonald’s are urging their employees to return their Christmas gifts in order to bring in some much needed money…
In a stark reminder of how tough things still are for low-income families in America, McDonalds has advised workers to dig themselves “out of holiday debt” by cashing in their Christmas haul.
“You may want to consider returning some of your unopened purchases that may not seem as appealing as they did,” said a website set up for employees.
“Selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist could bring in some quick cash.”
This irrational stock market bubble is not going to last for too much longer. And a lot of top financial experts are now warning their clients to prepare for the worst. For example, David John Marotta of Marotta Wealth Management recently told his clients that they should all have a“bug-out bag” that contains food, a gun and some ammunition…
A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, theNSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.
David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor and Forbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”
His memo is part of a series addressing the potential for a “financial apocalypse.” His view, however, is that the problems plaguing the country won’t result in armageddon. “There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely,” said the Charlottesville, Va.-based president of Marotta Wealth Management.
So what do you think is coming in 2014?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-stock-market-has-officially-entered-crazytown-territory
Michael Snyder
It is time to crank up the Looney Tunes theme song because Wall Street has officially entered crazytown territory. Stocks just keep going higher and higher, and at this point what is happening in the stock market does not bear any resemblance to what is going on in the overall economy whatsoever.
So how long can this irrational state of affairs possibly continue? Stocks seem to go up no matter what happens. If there is good news, stocks go up. If there is bad news, stocks go up. If there is no news, stocks go up. On Thursday, the day after Christmas, the Dow was up another 122 points to another new all-time record high. In fact, the Dow has had an astonishing 50 record high closes this year. This reminds me of the kind of euphoria that we witnessed during the peak of the housing bubble. At the time, housing prices just kept going higher and higher and everyone rushed to buy before they were “priced out of the market”. But we all know how that ended, and this stock market bubble is headed for a similar ending.
It is almost as if Wall Street has not learned any lessons from the last two major stock market crashes at all. Just look at Twitter. At the current price, Twitter is supposedly worth 40.7 BILLION dollars. But Twitter is not profitable. It is a seven-year-old company that has never made a single dollar of profit.
Not one single dollar.
In fact, Twitter actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter alone. And Twitter is expected to continue losing money for all of 2015 as well.
But Twitter stock is up 82 percent over the last 30 days, and nobody can really give a rational reason for why this is happening.
Overall, the Dow is up more than 25 percent so far this year. Unless something really weird happens over the next few days, it will be the best year for the Dow since 1996.
It has been a wonderful run for Wall Street. Unfortunately, there are a whole host of signs that we have entered very dangerous territory.
The median price-to-earnings ratio on the S&P 500 has reached an all-time record high, and margin debt at the New York Stock Exchange has reached a level that we have never seen before. In other words, stocks are massively overpriced and people have been borrowing huge amounts of money to buy stocks. These are behaviors that we also saw just before the last two stock market bubbles burst.
And of course the most troubling sign is that even as the stock market soars to unprecedented heights, the state of the overall U.S. economy is actually getting worse…
-During the last full week before Christmas, U.S. store visits were 21 percent lower than a year earlier and retail sales were 3.1 percentlower than a year earlier.
-The number of mortgage applications just hit a new 13 year low.
-The yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries just hit 3 percent.
For many more signs like this, please see my previous article entitled “37 Reasons Why ‘The Economic Recovery Of 2013′ Is A Giant Lie“.
And most Americans don’t realize this, but the U.S. financial system and the overall U.S. economy are now in much weaker condition than they were the last time we had a major financial crash back in 2008. Employment is at a much lower level than it was back then and our banking system is much more vulnerable than it was back then. Just before the last financial crash, the U.S. national debt was sitting atabout 10 trillion dollars, but today it has risen to more than 17.2 trillion dollars. The following excerpt from a recent article posted on thedailycrux.com contains even more facts and figures which show how our “balance sheet numbers” continue to get even worse…
Since the fourth quarter of 2009, the U.S. current account deficit has been more than $100 billion per quarter. As a result, foreigners now own $4.2 trillion more U.S. investment assets than we own abroad. That’s $1.7 trillion more than when Buffett first warned about this huge problem in 2003. Said another way, the problem is 68% bigger now.
And here’s a number no one else will tell you – not even Buffett. Foreigners now own $25 trillion in U.S. assets. And yet… we continue to consume far more than we produce, and we borrow massively to finance our deficits.
Since 2007, the total government debt in the U.S. (federal, state, and local) has doubled from around $10 trillion to $20 trillion.
Meanwhile, the size of Fannie and Freddie’s mortgage book declined slightly since 2007, falling from $4.9 trillion to $4.6 trillion. That’s some good news, right?
Nope. The excesses just moved to a new agency. The “other” federal mortgage bank, the Federal Housing Administration, now is originating 20% of all mortgages in the U.S., up from less than 5% in 2007.
Student debt, also spurred on by government guarantees, has also boomed, doubling since 2007 to more than $1 trillion. Altogether, total debt in our economy has grown from around $50 trillion to more than $60 trillion since 2007.
So don’t be fooled by this irrational stock market bubble.
Just because a bunch of half-crazed investors are going into massive amounts of debt in a desperate attempt to make a quick buck does not mean that the overall economy is in good shape.
In fact, much of the country is in such rough shape that “reverse shopping” has become a huge trend. Even big corporations such as McDonald’s are urging their employees to return their Christmas gifts in order to bring in some much needed money…
In a stark reminder of how tough things still are for low-income families in America, McDonalds has advised workers to dig themselves “out of holiday debt” by cashing in their Christmas haul.
“You may want to consider returning some of your unopened purchases that may not seem as appealing as they did,” said a website set up for employees.
“Selling some of your unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist could bring in some quick cash.”
This irrational stock market bubble is not going to last for too much longer. And a lot of top financial experts are now warning their clients to prepare for the worst. For example, David John Marotta of Marotta Wealth Management recently told his clients that they should all have a“bug-out bag” that contains food, a gun and some ammunition…
A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, theNSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.
David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor and Forbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”
His memo is part of a series addressing the potential for a “financial apocalypse.” His view, however, is that the problems plaguing the country won’t result in armageddon. “There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely,” said the Charlottesville, Va.-based president of Marotta Wealth Management.
So what do you think is coming in 2014?
Please feel free to share your thoughts by posting a comment below…
Link:
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-stock-market-has-officially-entered-crazytown-territory
History stuff: World War I...
World War I
Charles Burris
Concerning American involvement in the First World War, consider these perceptive observations from a famous participant in that tragic conflict (who later became very instrumental in the Second World War):
America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these `isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government – and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.
– Winston Churchill 1936 interview, the New York Enquirer
As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he supervised the British hunger blockade of Germany. By endeavoring to starve the German population, Churchill hoped to undermine the German war machine from within.
As historian Ralph Raico notes:
From the outset of hostilities, Churchill, as head of the Admiralty, was instrumental in establishing the hunger blockade of Germany. This was probably the most effective weapon employed on either side in the whole conflict. The only problem was that, according to everyone’s interpretation of international law except Britain’s, it was illegal. The blockade was not “close-in,” but depended on scattering mines, and many of the goods deemed contraband for instance, food for civilians had never been so classified before. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions by which men have tried to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. As a German historian has dryly commented, Churchill was ready to break the rules whenever the very existence of his country was at stake, and “for him this was very often the case.”
The hunger blockade had certain rather unpleasant consequences. About 750,000 German civilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition. The effect on those who survived was perhaps just as frightful in its own way. A historian of the blockade concluded: “the victimized youth [of World War I] were to become the most radical adherents of National Socialism.” It was also complications arising from the British blockade that eventually provided the pretext for Wilson’s decision to go to war in 1917.
Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear. A week before the disaster, he wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Many highly-placed persons in Britain and America believed that the German sinking of the Lusitania would bring the United States into the war.
The most recent student of the subject is Patrick Beesly, whose Room 40 is a history of British Naval Intelligence in World War I. Beesly’s careful account is all the more persuasive for going against the grain of his own sentiments. He points out that the British Admiralty was aware that German U-boat Command had informed U-boat captains at sea of the sailings of the Lusitania, and that the U-boat responsible for the sinking of two ships in recent days was present in the vicinity of Queenstown, off the southern coast of Ireland, in the path the Lusitania was scheduled to take. There is no surviving record of any specific warning to the Lusitania. No destroyer escort was sent to accompany the ship to port, nor were any of the readily available destroyers instructed to hunt for the submarine. In fact, “no effective steps were taken to protect the Lusitania.”
Beesly concludes:
Unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.
Most conventional historians today view World War I and World War II as a modern Thirty Years War, interrupted on the surface by a supposed brief hiatus of ceased overt hostilities but where unresolved tensions and covert aggressive provocations (as a result of the vengeful Carthaginian peace of the Treaty of Versailles) continued to fester and undermine peaceful international order. This viewpoint challenges the myth of between the wars “isolationism” put forth by generations of court historians. Just as internecine tensions in the Balkans led to the Great War, hostile actions such as the Polish-Soviet War, and aggressions in Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, preceded the Second World War.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/world-war-i/#more-469209
Charles Burris
Concerning American involvement in the First World War, consider these perceptive observations from a famous participant in that tragic conflict (who later became very instrumental in the Second World War):
America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these `isms’ wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government – and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.
– Winston Churchill 1936 interview, the New York Enquirer
As First Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, he supervised the British hunger blockade of Germany. By endeavoring to starve the German population, Churchill hoped to undermine the German war machine from within.
As historian Ralph Raico notes:
From the outset of hostilities, Churchill, as head of the Admiralty, was instrumental in establishing the hunger blockade of Germany. This was probably the most effective weapon employed on either side in the whole conflict. The only problem was that, according to everyone’s interpretation of international law except Britain’s, it was illegal. The blockade was not “close-in,” but depended on scattering mines, and many of the goods deemed contraband for instance, food for civilians had never been so classified before. But, throughout his career, international law and the conventions by which men have tried to limit the horrors of war meant nothing to Churchill. As a German historian has dryly commented, Churchill was ready to break the rules whenever the very existence of his country was at stake, and “for him this was very often the case.”
The hunger blockade had certain rather unpleasant consequences. About 750,000 German civilians succumbed to hunger and diseases caused by malnutrition. The effect on those who survived was perhaps just as frightful in its own way. A historian of the blockade concluded: “the victimized youth [of World War I] were to become the most radical adherents of National Socialism.” It was also complications arising from the British blockade that eventually provided the pretext for Wilson’s decision to go to war in 1917.
Whether Churchill actually arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915, is still unclear. A week before the disaster, he wrote to Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Many highly-placed persons in Britain and America believed that the German sinking of the Lusitania would bring the United States into the war.
The most recent student of the subject is Patrick Beesly, whose Room 40 is a history of British Naval Intelligence in World War I. Beesly’s careful account is all the more persuasive for going against the grain of his own sentiments. He points out that the British Admiralty was aware that German U-boat Command had informed U-boat captains at sea of the sailings of the Lusitania, and that the U-boat responsible for the sinking of two ships in recent days was present in the vicinity of Queenstown, off the southern coast of Ireland, in the path the Lusitania was scheduled to take. There is no surviving record of any specific warning to the Lusitania. No destroyer escort was sent to accompany the ship to port, nor were any of the readily available destroyers instructed to hunt for the submarine. In fact, “no effective steps were taken to protect the Lusitania.”
Beesly concludes:
Unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.
Most conventional historians today view World War I and World War II as a modern Thirty Years War, interrupted on the surface by a supposed brief hiatus of ceased overt hostilities but where unresolved tensions and covert aggressive provocations (as a result of the vengeful Carthaginian peace of the Treaty of Versailles) continued to fester and undermine peaceful international order. This viewpoint challenges the myth of between the wars “isolationism” put forth by generations of court historians. Just as internecine tensions in the Balkans led to the Great War, hostile actions such as the Polish-Soviet War, and aggressions in Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, preceded the Second World War.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/world-war-i/#more-469209
Here's something to think about...
What if the Germans had Won the First World War?
With the war's centenary near, this is not a parlour game. Counterfactual conjecture allows us to see the conflict far more objectively
By Martin Kettle
People who see a divine hand or the iron laws of dialectical materialism at work in human affairs bridle at the question: “What if things had turned out differently?” To EH Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, to speak of what might have happened in history, as opposed to what did happen, was just a “parlour game”. To EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, such counterfactual speculation was “unhistorical shit”.
Other historians have confessed to being more intrigued. “The historian must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will seem to permit different outcomes,” wrote Johan Huizinga. It is important to recognise that, at any moment in history, there are real alternatives, argued Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Happily, none of this argument deters the writers of fiction or the public. Germany’s possible defeat of Britain in 1940 is by some distance the national treasure trove of might-have-beens. As long ago as 1964, the film It Happened Here by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo raised the then unthinkable thought that collaboration would have thrived in Hitler’s Britain. More recently, a succession of novels, including Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Resistance by Owen Sheers and CJ Sansom’s Dominion – which imagines a Vichy Britain in 1952 ruled by Lord Beaverbrook and Oswald Mosley – have explored the same theme.
By comparison, the first world war has been the subject of far less counterfactual speculation. Niall Ferguson is one of the exceptions, in an essay which considers the possibility that Britain might have stood aside from the European war in August 1914. And although his essay suffers from the fact that the Eurosceptic Ferguson is over-eager to portray the kaiser as the godfather of the later European Union, his account of the cabinet debates of 1914 is fascinating because Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government could so easily have decided to stay out of the war – and very nearly did.
With the centenary of the first world war almost upon us, 2014 is likely to witness plenty of debate about the right forms of commemoration and about whether the war achieved anything. At present, argument about the war mainly consists of two mutually uncomprehending camps. On the one hand, there are those who, as Margaret MacMillan put it recently, think the war was “an unmitigated catastrophe in a sea of mud”. On the other, there are those who insist that it was nevertheless “about something”. At the time, says MacMillan, people on all sides thought they had a just cause. “It is condescending and wrong to think they were hoodwinked.”
But what was the something that the first world war was about? To answer that it was a war between empires, which it surely was, is fine as long as some effort is made to distinguish between the empires. But this rarely happens in a debate that is polarised between collective myths of national sacrifice on the one hand (certainly in Britain and France) and an indiscriminate muddy catastrophe on the other...
Read rest here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/25/if-germans-won-first-world-war
With the war's centenary near, this is not a parlour game. Counterfactual conjecture allows us to see the conflict far more objectively
By Martin Kettle
People who see a divine hand or the iron laws of dialectical materialism at work in human affairs bridle at the question: “What if things had turned out differently?” To EH Carr, historian of Soviet Russia, to speak of what might have happened in history, as opposed to what did happen, was just a “parlour game”. To EP Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class, such counterfactual speculation was “unhistorical shit”.
Other historians have confessed to being more intrigued. “The historian must constantly put himself at a point in the past at which the known factors will seem to permit different outcomes,” wrote Johan Huizinga. It is important to recognise that, at any moment in history, there are real alternatives, argued Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Happily, none of this argument deters the writers of fiction or the public. Germany’s possible defeat of Britain in 1940 is by some distance the national treasure trove of might-have-beens. As long ago as 1964, the film It Happened Here by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo raised the then unthinkable thought that collaboration would have thrived in Hitler’s Britain. More recently, a succession of novels, including Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Resistance by Owen Sheers and CJ Sansom’s Dominion – which imagines a Vichy Britain in 1952 ruled by Lord Beaverbrook and Oswald Mosley – have explored the same theme.
By comparison, the first world war has been the subject of far less counterfactual speculation. Niall Ferguson is one of the exceptions, in an essay which considers the possibility that Britain might have stood aside from the European war in August 1914. And although his essay suffers from the fact that the Eurosceptic Ferguson is over-eager to portray the kaiser as the godfather of the later European Union, his account of the cabinet debates of 1914 is fascinating because Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government could so easily have decided to stay out of the war – and very nearly did.
With the centenary of the first world war almost upon us, 2014 is likely to witness plenty of debate about the right forms of commemoration and about whether the war achieved anything. At present, argument about the war mainly consists of two mutually uncomprehending camps. On the one hand, there are those who, as Margaret MacMillan put it recently, think the war was “an unmitigated catastrophe in a sea of mud”. On the other, there are those who insist that it was nevertheless “about something”. At the time, says MacMillan, people on all sides thought they had a just cause. “It is condescending and wrong to think they were hoodwinked.”
But what was the something that the first world war was about? To answer that it was a war between empires, which it surely was, is fine as long as some effort is made to distinguish between the empires. But this rarely happens in a debate that is polarised between collective myths of national sacrifice on the one hand (certainly in Britain and France) and an indiscriminate muddy catastrophe on the other...
Read rest here:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/25/if-germans-won-first-world-war
Thursday, December 26, 2013
"Indeed, some American authorities have literally said that the Founding Fathers were terrorists … and that their behavior should be treated as terrorism."
by WashingtonsBlog
The Founding Fathers Are Treated As “Terrorists”
The Founding Fathers started the Revolutionary War because England was spying on the colonists in the exact same way that the NSA is spying on modern Americans. Indeed, Americans are the most spied on people in world history.
Ironically, Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams did exactly what Edward Snowden did … and were likewise labeled as traitors by the British government.
The Founding Fathers fought for freedom from an oppressive central bank which sucked the prosperity out of the economy, but the Federal Reserve’s policies have created inequality even worse than experienced by slaves in Colonial America in 1774.
The Founding Fathers warned against standing armies, saying that they destroy freedom. And they warned against financing wars with debt. But according to Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the U.S. debt for the Iraq war could be as high as $5 trillion dollars (or $6 trillion dollars according to a study by Brown University.) The U.S. has the largest standing army in history, and treats anti-war sentiment as terrorism.
The Founding Fathers fought and died for a free press … but the current American authorities treat journalism as an act of terrorism. Indeed, Americans have lost virtually all of the rights that the Founding Fathers fought and died for.
The Founding Fathers also launched the Revolutionary War because the British government was engaging in crony capitalism (which constituted taxation without representation), instead of letting the colonists have a shot at free market competition. The modern American authorities are doing the same thing.
Indeed, some American authorities have literally said that the Founding Fathers were terrorists … and that their behavior should be treated as terrorism.
According to Daniel Ellsberg, the American authorities are even more draconian than King George. After all, he never indefinitely detained people without trial or access to a lawyer.
Link:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/still-america-authorities-believe-founding-fathers-terrorists.html
Don't be stupid...
If You Believe the Government, ‘You’re Stupid’
Americans are taught the myth that their democracy is safeguarded by an independent press. But the government and other powerful entities have long mastered the art of manipulating the major media, even to the point of bluntly telling reporters the facts of life, as Jon Schwarz recalls.
By Jon Schwarz
Everyone who watched John Miller’s “60 Minutes” segment on the NSA should follow it up with this story involving Morley Safer — who, at 82 years old, is still a correspondent at “60 Minutes”:
In August, 1965 Safer appeared in what became one of most famous TV segments of the Vietnam War, showing U.S. troops setting fire to all the huts in a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers.
Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.
Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.
A year later in 1966, Safer wrote an article about what he’d seen firsthand during a visit to Vietnam by Arthur Sylvester, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (i.e., the head of Pentagon PR). Sylvester met with reporters for U.S. news outlets at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon:
There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand — to say something that would jar us. He said:
“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.
A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”
“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.
An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian [a press officer based in Vietnam] — about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:
“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? — stupid.”
One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam—a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea — suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:
“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”
At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers. [For the full article by Safer, see below.]
There are several significant aspects to this:
– A top U.S. official was honest enough to tell reporters: look, we lie to you constantly and you’re a moron if you believe anything we say. He also honestly expressed his total contempt for them and intention to manipulate news coverage by dealing directly with their management and employers.
Moreover, Sylvester (who before going to work for the Pentagon had been the Washington correspondent for the Newark News) put his beliefs into practice at key moments of history. He lied about what the U.S. knew about Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and personally told the key lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident (listen to him here).
And word was passed to Safer’s superiors at CBS that “Unless you get Safer out of there, he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his back.”
This is such important information about how politics and the media work that it should be taught to everyone in second grade. It’s not.
– Even if regular people don’t know this story, you’d expect it to be famous within the media — and particularly famous at “60 Minutes.” You might even imagine that “If you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid” would be spray-painted on the walls of the “60 Minutes” offices. But if the performance of John Miller and his producers on the NSA segment is anything to go by, that is not the case.
It’s hard to imagine what more the U.S. government could do to get reporters to distrust it, and all for naught. John Miller likely has an office feet away from someone who’s been told by a top U.S. official that reporters are morons if they believe anything top U.S. officials say. Miller’s response? Believe everything top U.S. officials say. (Of course, given that Miller is recreating Sylvester’s career path, it may also simply be that he agrees with Sylvester on the necessity of the press being handmaidens of government.)
– Even if reporters have forgotten this story, you’d expect that it would be Exhibit A for left-wing media critics and repeated so often that it would be common knowledge in those limited circles. Yet the forces of forgetting in the U.S. are so powerful that I’d never encountered it, and I’m probably one of America’s top 25 consumers of left-wing media criticism.
I can’t find any references to it by Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Solomon, Jeff Cohen, Robert Parry, Robert McChesney or Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. (William Blum does tell part of what happened in his book Killing Hope, and the key sentence appears
in some online collections of quotes about the media.)
To make it even more surprising, Safer’s story was well-known enough at the time that Indiana’s anti-war Senator Vance Hartke referred to it on the Senate floor as “the now famous article.” And references to it sometimes appeared in books about Vietnam during the late Sixties and early Seventies. But after that it evaporated.
So if something this significant can disappear from history, truly only god knows what else has been thrown down the memory hole. To try to pull it back, I’m putting the entire text of the article online for the first time below, and adding the gist to Safer’s Wikipedia page.
I’m also going to try to get John Miller to answer a straightforward question: has Morley Safer ever told him this story?
Jon Schwarz is editor of MichaelMoore.com and was research producer for ‘Capitalism: A Love Story.’ He’s also contributed to the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Saturday Night Live and NPR. [Reprinted with the author's permission.]
Click here for an image of the article as it appeared in the Southern Illinoisan on Sept. 1, 1966.
‘Look, If You Think Any American Official Is Going to Tell You the Truth, Then You’re Stupid’
There has been no war quite like it. Never have so many words been churned out, never has so much l6-mm film been exposed. And never has the reporting of a story been so much a part of the story itself.
This has been true whether you are reporting television’s first war, as I have been, or for one of the print media. Washington has been critical of American newsmen in Saigon almost continuously since 1961. That criticism has manifested itself in a number of ways—from the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions to orders to put certain correspondents on ice to downright threat.
As a friend of mine puts It, “The brass wants you to get on the team.”
To the brass, getting on the team means simply giving the United States government line in little more than handout. It means accepting what you are told without question. At times it means turning your back on facts.
I know of few reporters in Viet Nam who have “gotten on the team.” The fact is, the American people are getting an accurate picture of the war in spite of attempts by various officials—mostly in Washington—to present the facts in a different way. That is why certain correspondents have been vilified, privately and publicly.
By late winter of 1964-1965 the war was clearly becoming an American war. And with it came an American responsibility for providing and reporting facts. American officials thus were able to deal directly with reporters. The formality of “checking it out with the Vietnamese” ceased to be relevant.
In Washington the burden of responsibility of giving, controlling and managing the war news from Viet Nam fell to—and remains with—one man: Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.
By early summer of 1965 the first set of ground rules had been laid down for reporting battles and casualties. There was no censorship but a very loose kind of honor system that put the responsibility for not breaking security on the shoulders of correspondents. The rules were vague and were therefore continually broken.
For military and civilian officials in Viet Nam there was another set of rules—rather another honor system that was not so much laid down as implied. “A policy of total candor” is a phrase used by Barry Zorthian, minister-counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Zorthian is what Time calls “the information czar” in Viet Nam.
The breaking of the vague ground rules was something that annoyed everyone. Correspondents were rocketed by their editors, and the military in Viet Nam felt that Allied lives were being endangered. So in midsummer, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to Saigon and brought Sylvester with him, we all looked forward to the formulation of a clear-cut policy. Sylvester was to meet the press in an informal session to discuss mutual problems. The meeting was to take the vagueness out of the ground rules.
The Sylvester meeting was surely one of the most disheartening meetings between reporters and a news manager ever held.
It was a sticky July evening. Inside Zorthian’s villa it was cool. But Zorthian was less relaxed than usual. He was anxious for Sylvester to get an idea of the mood of the news corps. There had been some annoying moments in previous weeks that had directly involved Sylvester’s own office. In the first B-52 raids, Pentgaon releases were in direct contradiction to what had actually happened on the ground in Viet Nam.
There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand—to say something that would jar us. He said:
“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.
A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”
“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.
An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian—about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:
“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?—stupid.”
One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam—a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea—suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:
“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”
At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers.
A correspondent for one of the New York papers began a question. He never got beyond the first few words. Sylvester interrupted:
“Aw, come on, What does someone in New York care about the war in Viet Nam?”
We got down to immediate practical matters—the problems of communication, access to military planes, getting out to battles.
“Do you guys want to be spoon-fed? Why don’t you get out and cover the war?”
It was a jarring and insulting remark. Most of the people in that room has spent as much time on actual operations as most GI’s.
The relationship between reporters and public information officers in Saigon, or the other hand, has been a good, healthy one. The relationship in the field is better, and in dealing with the men who fight the war it is very good indeed.
Link:
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/18/if-you-believe-the-goverment-youre-stupid/
Americans are taught the myth that their democracy is safeguarded by an independent press. But the government and other powerful entities have long mastered the art of manipulating the major media, even to the point of bluntly telling reporters the facts of life, as Jon Schwarz recalls.
By Jon Schwarz
Everyone who watched John Miller’s “60 Minutes” segment on the NSA should follow it up with this story involving Morley Safer — who, at 82 years old, is still a correspondent at “60 Minutes”:
In August, 1965 Safer appeared in what became one of most famous TV segments of the Vietnam War, showing U.S. troops setting fire to all the huts in a Vietnamese village with Zippo lighters and flamethrowers.
Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.
Longtime CBS News correspondent Morley Safer.
A year later in 1966, Safer wrote an article about what he’d seen firsthand during a visit to Vietnam by Arthur Sylvester, then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (i.e., the head of Pentagon PR). Sylvester met with reporters for U.S. news outlets at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon:
There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand — to say something that would jar us. He said:
“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.
A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”
“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.
An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian [a press officer based in Vietnam] — about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:
“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that? — stupid.”
One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam—a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea — suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:
“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”
At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers. [For the full article by Safer, see below.]
There are several significant aspects to this:
– A top U.S. official was honest enough to tell reporters: look, we lie to you constantly and you’re a moron if you believe anything we say. He also honestly expressed his total contempt for them and intention to manipulate news coverage by dealing directly with their management and employers.
Moreover, Sylvester (who before going to work for the Pentagon had been the Washington correspondent for the Newark News) put his beliefs into practice at key moments of history. He lied about what the U.S. knew about Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and personally told the key lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident (listen to him here).
And word was passed to Safer’s superiors at CBS that “Unless you get Safer out of there, he’s liable to end up with a bullet in his back.”
This is such important information about how politics and the media work that it should be taught to everyone in second grade. It’s not.
– Even if regular people don’t know this story, you’d expect it to be famous within the media — and particularly famous at “60 Minutes.” You might even imagine that “If you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid” would be spray-painted on the walls of the “60 Minutes” offices. But if the performance of John Miller and his producers on the NSA segment is anything to go by, that is not the case.
It’s hard to imagine what more the U.S. government could do to get reporters to distrust it, and all for naught. John Miller likely has an office feet away from someone who’s been told by a top U.S. official that reporters are morons if they believe anything top U.S. officials say. Miller’s response? Believe everything top U.S. officials say. (Of course, given that Miller is recreating Sylvester’s career path, it may also simply be that he agrees with Sylvester on the necessity of the press being handmaidens of government.)
– Even if reporters have forgotten this story, you’d expect that it would be Exhibit A for left-wing media critics and repeated so often that it would be common knowledge in those limited circles. Yet the forces of forgetting in the U.S. are so powerful that I’d never encountered it, and I’m probably one of America’s top 25 consumers of left-wing media criticism.
I can’t find any references to it by Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Norman Solomon, Jeff Cohen, Robert Parry, Robert McChesney or Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. (William Blum does tell part of what happened in his book Killing Hope, and the key sentence appears
in some online collections of quotes about the media.)
To make it even more surprising, Safer’s story was well-known enough at the time that Indiana’s anti-war Senator Vance Hartke referred to it on the Senate floor as “the now famous article.” And references to it sometimes appeared in books about Vietnam during the late Sixties and early Seventies. But after that it evaporated.
So if something this significant can disappear from history, truly only god knows what else has been thrown down the memory hole. To try to pull it back, I’m putting the entire text of the article online for the first time below, and adding the gist to Safer’s Wikipedia page.
I’m also going to try to get John Miller to answer a straightforward question: has Morley Safer ever told him this story?
Jon Schwarz is editor of MichaelMoore.com and was research producer for ‘Capitalism: A Love Story.’ He’s also contributed to the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Saturday Night Live and NPR. [Reprinted with the author's permission.]
Click here for an image of the article as it appeared in the Southern Illinoisan on Sept. 1, 1966.
‘Look, If You Think Any American Official Is Going to Tell You the Truth, Then You’re Stupid’
There has been no war quite like it. Never have so many words been churned out, never has so much l6-mm film been exposed. And never has the reporting of a story been so much a part of the story itself.
This has been true whether you are reporting television’s first war, as I have been, or for one of the print media. Washington has been critical of American newsmen in Saigon almost continuously since 1961. That criticism has manifested itself in a number of ways—from the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions to orders to put certain correspondents on ice to downright threat.
As a friend of mine puts It, “The brass wants you to get on the team.”
To the brass, getting on the team means simply giving the United States government line in little more than handout. It means accepting what you are told without question. At times it means turning your back on facts.
I know of few reporters in Viet Nam who have “gotten on the team.” The fact is, the American people are getting an accurate picture of the war in spite of attempts by various officials—mostly in Washington—to present the facts in a different way. That is why certain correspondents have been vilified, privately and publicly.
By late winter of 1964-1965 the war was clearly becoming an American war. And with it came an American responsibility for providing and reporting facts. American officials thus were able to deal directly with reporters. The formality of “checking it out with the Vietnamese” ceased to be relevant.
In Washington the burden of responsibility of giving, controlling and managing the war news from Viet Nam fell to—and remains with—one man: Arthur Sylvester, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs.
By early summer of 1965 the first set of ground rules had been laid down for reporting battles and casualties. There was no censorship but a very loose kind of honor system that put the responsibility for not breaking security on the shoulders of correspondents. The rules were vague and were therefore continually broken.
For military and civilian officials in Viet Nam there was another set of rules—rather another honor system that was not so much laid down as implied. “A policy of total candor” is a phrase used by Barry Zorthian, minister-counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Zorthian is what Time calls “the information czar” in Viet Nam.
The breaking of the vague ground rules was something that annoyed everyone. Correspondents were rocketed by their editors, and the military in Viet Nam felt that Allied lives were being endangered. So in midsummer, when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to Saigon and brought Sylvester with him, we all looked forward to the formulation of a clear-cut policy. Sylvester was to meet the press in an informal session to discuss mutual problems. The meeting was to take the vagueness out of the ground rules.
The Sylvester meeting was surely one of the most disheartening meetings between reporters and a news manager ever held.
It was a sticky July evening. Inside Zorthian’s villa it was cool. But Zorthian was less relaxed than usual. He was anxious for Sylvester to get an idea of the mood of the news corps. There had been some annoying moments in previous weeks that had directly involved Sylvester’s own office. In the first B-52 raids, Pentgaon releases were in direct contradiction to what had actually happened on the ground in Viet Nam.
There was general opening banter, which Sylvester quickly brushed aside. He seemed anxious to take a stand—to say something that would jar us. He said:
“I can’t understand how you fellows can write what you do while American boys are dying out here,” he began. Then he went on to the effect that American correspondents had a patriotic duty to disseminate only information that made the United States look good.
A network television correspondent said, “Surely, Arthur, you don’t expect the American press to be the handmaidens of government.”
“That’s exactly what I expect,” came the reply.
An agency man raised the problem that had preoccupied Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and Barry Zorthian—about the credibility of American officials. Responded the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:
“Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you’re stupid. Did you hear that?—stupid.”
One of the most respected of all the newsmen in Vietnam—a veteran of World War II, the Indochina War and Korea—suggested that Sylvester was being deliberately provocative. Sylvester replied:
“Look, I don’t even have to talk to you people. I know how to deal with you through your editors and publishers back in the States.”
At this point, the Hon. Arthur Sylvester put his thumbs in his ears, bulged his eyes, stuck out his tongue and wiggled his fingers.
A correspondent for one of the New York papers began a question. He never got beyond the first few words. Sylvester interrupted:
“Aw, come on, What does someone in New York care about the war in Viet Nam?”
We got down to immediate practical matters—the problems of communication, access to military planes, getting out to battles.
“Do you guys want to be spoon-fed? Why don’t you get out and cover the war?”
It was a jarring and insulting remark. Most of the people in that room has spent as much time on actual operations as most GI’s.
The relationship between reporters and public information officers in Saigon, or the other hand, has been a good, healthy one. The relationship in the field is better, and in dealing with the men who fight the war it is very good indeed.
Link:
http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/18/if-you-believe-the-goverment-youre-stupid/
Get out your wallets if you actually have any more money for them to steal...
New ObamaCare fees coming in 2014
By S.A. Miller and Geoff Earle
Here comes the ObamaCare tax bill.
The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills.
Most insurers aren’t advertising the ObamaCare taxes that are added on to premiums, opting instead to discretely pass them on to customers while quietly lobbying lawmakers for a break.
But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.”
The new taxes on one customer’s bill added up to $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, according to Kaiser Health News. It boosted the monthly premium from $322.26 to $345.40 for that individual.
The new taxes and fees include a 2 percent levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018.
There’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
Insurers pay a 3.5 percent user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov Web site.
ObamaCare supporters argue that federal subsidies for many low-income Americans will not only cover the taxes, but pay a big chunk of the premiums.
But ObamaCare taxes don’t stop with health-plan premiums.
Americans also will pay hidden taxes, such as the 2.3 percent medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents and prosthetic limbs.
Those with high out-of-pocket medical expenses also will get smaller income-tax deductions.
Americans are currently allowed to deduct expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their annual income. The threshold jumps to 10 percent under ObamaCare, costing taxpayers about $15 billion over 10 years.
Then there’s the new Medicare tax.
Under ObamaCare, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 will pay an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income, such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration touted a surge of more than 2 million visitors Monday at HealthCare.gov, plus about 250,000 calls to ObamaCare call centers.
“Volumes remain high but not equal to [Monday] and we have not had to deploy our queuing system on the site,” said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, referring to a virtual waiting room that is activated when the site is overloaded.
“We are taking thousands of calls at our call centers, which remain open until midnight, and we are seeing thousands of visitors complete enrollment online,” she said.
It wasn’t smooth sailing for everyone on the troubled site.
Software techie Jeff Karaaro tweeted in frustration: “Got three different codes trying to submit plan choices. No [one] can tell me what they mean. I nor call center can complete my application due to error.”
Link:
http://nypost.com/2013/12/25/new-obamacare-fees-coming-in-2014/
By S.A. Miller and Geoff Earle
Here comes the ObamaCare tax bill.
The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills.
Most insurers aren’t advertising the ObamaCare taxes that are added on to premiums, opting instead to discretely pass them on to customers while quietly lobbying lawmakers for a break.
But one insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, laid bare the taxes on its bills with a separate line item for “Affordable Care Act Fees and Taxes.”
The new taxes on one customer’s bill added up to $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, according to Kaiser Health News. It boosted the monthly premium from $322.26 to $345.40 for that individual.
The new taxes and fees include a 2 percent levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018.
There’s also a $2 fee per policy that goes into a new medical-research trust fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
Insurers pay a 3.5 percent user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov Web site.
ObamaCare supporters argue that federal subsidies for many low-income Americans will not only cover the taxes, but pay a big chunk of the premiums.
But ObamaCare taxes don’t stop with health-plan premiums.
Americans also will pay hidden taxes, such as the 2.3 percent medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents and prosthetic limbs.
Those with high out-of-pocket medical expenses also will get smaller income-tax deductions.
Americans are currently allowed to deduct expenses that exceed 7.5 percent of their annual income. The threshold jumps to 10 percent under ObamaCare, costing taxpayers about $15 billion over 10 years.
Then there’s the new Medicare tax.
Under ObamaCare, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 will pay an added 0.9 percent Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax. They’ll also pay an extra 3.8 percent Medicare tax on unearned income, such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration touted a surge of more than 2 million visitors Monday at HealthCare.gov, plus about 250,000 calls to ObamaCare call centers.
“Volumes remain high but not equal to [Monday] and we have not had to deploy our queuing system on the site,” said Julie Bataille, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, referring to a virtual waiting room that is activated when the site is overloaded.
“We are taking thousands of calls at our call centers, which remain open until midnight, and we are seeing thousands of visitors complete enrollment online,” she said.
It wasn’t smooth sailing for everyone on the troubled site.
Software techie Jeff Karaaro tweeted in frustration: “Got three different codes trying to submit plan choices. No [one] can tell me what they mean. I nor call center can complete my application due to error.”
Link:
http://nypost.com/2013/12/25/new-obamacare-fees-coming-in-2014/
Get ready...
Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse
By PAUL BEDARD
A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, the NSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.
David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor and Forbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”
His memo is part of a series addressing the potential for a “financial apocalypse.” His view, however, is that the problems plaguing the country won't result in armageddon. “There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely,” said the Charlottesville, Va.-based president of Marotta Wealth Management....
Link:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/be-prepared-wall-street-advisor-recommends-guns-ammo-for-protection-in-collapse/article/2541205
By PAUL BEDARD
A top financial advisor, worried that Obamacare, the NSA spying scandal and spiraling national debt is increasing the chances for a fiscal and social disaster, is recommending that Americans prepare a “bug-out bag” that includes food, a gun and ammo to help them stay alive.
David John Marotta, a Wall Street expert and financial advisor and Forbes contributor, said in a note to investors, “Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list. There are some terrible people in this world. And you are safer when your trusted neighbors have firearms.”
His memo is part of a series addressing the potential for a “financial apocalypse.” His view, however, is that the problems plaguing the country won't result in armageddon. “There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely,” said the Charlottesville, Va.-based president of Marotta Wealth Management....
Link:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/be-prepared-wall-street-advisor-recommends-guns-ammo-for-protection-in-collapse/article/2541205
Free markets??? What free markets???
Colossal Fraud-There are No Free Markets-Rob Kirby
By Greg Hunter
Financial analyst Rob Kirby says, “There is colossal fraud and price control going on. There are no free markets.” Kirby goes on to say, “What we’ve seen over the last six months is a ramp-up in interest rate swaps to the tune of $12 trillion . . . . What the build in these interest rate swaps is achieving, it’s stemming the rise in interest rates.” Kirby, who has 15 years experience in trading derivatives, says these complicated derivatives overseen by the U.S. Treasury control the price of virtually everything. Kirby contends, “I refer to this as a price control grid. They are able to dictate and arbitrarily set the price of all strategic goods in the market, whether it’s capitol, whether it’s energy or whether it’s precious metals.” As an example of control, Kirby explains, “We have 10-year U.S. bond rates under 3%, and I would say the United States is actually insolvent, and we have countries like Greece where 10-year bonds are yielding over 9%.” When does this end? Kirby points to the finite physical gold market and massive Chinese global buying for a clue. Kirby says, “When China doesn’t get their gold, that’s when this ends, and that might be when we have a war.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Rob Kirby of KirbyAnalyitics.com.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/greg-hunter/colossal-fraud/
By Greg Hunter
Financial analyst Rob Kirby says, “There is colossal fraud and price control going on. There are no free markets.” Kirby goes on to say, “What we’ve seen over the last six months is a ramp-up in interest rate swaps to the tune of $12 trillion . . . . What the build in these interest rate swaps is achieving, it’s stemming the rise in interest rates.” Kirby, who has 15 years experience in trading derivatives, says these complicated derivatives overseen by the U.S. Treasury control the price of virtually everything. Kirby contends, “I refer to this as a price control grid. They are able to dictate and arbitrarily set the price of all strategic goods in the market, whether it’s capitol, whether it’s energy or whether it’s precious metals.” As an example of control, Kirby explains, “We have 10-year U.S. bond rates under 3%, and I would say the United States is actually insolvent, and we have countries like Greece where 10-year bonds are yielding over 9%.” When does this end? Kirby points to the finite physical gold market and massive Chinese global buying for a clue. Kirby says, “When China doesn’t get their gold, that’s when this ends, and that might be when we have a war.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Rob Kirby of KirbyAnalyitics.com.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/greg-hunter/colossal-fraud/
" Central banks always result in feeding those forces that centralize and expand the nation-state."
100 Years Ago: Why Bankers Created the Fed
By Christopher Westley
The Democratic Party gained prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century as being the party that opposed the Second Bank of the United States. In the process, it tapped into an anti-state sentiment that proved so strong that we wouldn’t see another like it until the next century.
Its adversaries were Whig politicians who defended the bank and its ability to grow the government and their own personal fortunes at the same time. They were, in fact, quite open about these arrangements. It was considered standard-operating procedure for Whig representatives to receive monetary compensation for their support of the Bank when leaving Congress. The Whig Daniel Webster even expected annual payments while in Congress. Once he complained to the Bank of the United States President Nicholas Biddle, “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me my usual retainer.”
No wonder these people were often pummeled with canes on the House floor.
It is little wonder that early Democrats garnered such popular support and would demand Andrew Jackson end America’s experiment with central banking. Jackson called it “dangerous to the liberty of the American people because it represented a fantastic centralization of economic and political power under private control.”
It’s hard to believe that guy who said that is now on the $20 bill.
Jackson also warned that the Bank of the United States was “a vast electioneering engine” that could “control the Government and change its character.” These sentiments were echoed by Roger Taney, Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, who talked of the Bank’s “corrupting influence” and ability to “influence elections.” (The Whigs would later get revenge on this future chief justice when Abraham Lincoln, in response to a written opinion with which he disagreed, issued his arrest warrant.)
But the courtship between the political classes and their cronies would continue in the decades following Lincoln’s assassination. Those politically well-connected groups that benefited from early central banking continued to benefit from government finance, especially off of “internal improvements,” which is the nineteenth-century term for pork. National banking would appear during the War Between the States, setting in place a banking system in which individual banks would be chartered by the federal government. The government itself would use regulations backed by a new armed U.S. Treasury police force to encourage the banks’ inflation and protect them from the market penalties that inflation would otherwise bring them, such as the loss of specie and the occurrence of bank runs.
The boom and bust cycle, explained by the Austrian School in such detail, became worse and worse in the period leading up to 1913. And with the rise of Progressive Era spending on war and welfare, and with the pressure on banks to inflate to finance this activity, the boom and bust cycles worsened even more. If there was one saving grace about this period it would be that banks were forced to internalize their losses. When banks faced runs on their currencies, private financiers would bail them out. But this arrangement didn’t last, so when the losses grew, those financiers would secretly organize to reintroduce central banking to America, thus engineering an urgent need for a new “lender of last resort.” The result was the Federal Reserve.
This was the implicit socialization of the banking industry in the United States. People called the Federal Reserve Act the Currency Bill, because it was to create a bureaucracy that would assume the currency-creating duties of member banks.
It was like the Patriot Act, in that both were centralizing bills that were written years in advance by people who were waiting for the appropriate political environment in which to introduce them. It was like our current health care bills, in which cartelized firms in private industry wrote chunks of the legislation behind closed doors long before they were introduced in Congress.
It was unnecessary. If banks were simply held to similar standards as other more efficient industries were held to — the rule of law at the very least — then far fewer fraudulent banks would ever come about. There were market institutions that would penalize those banks that over-issued currencies, brought about bank runs, and financial crises. As Mises would later write:
What is needed to prevent further credit expansion is to place the banking business under the general rules of commercial and civil laws compelling each individual and firm to fulfill all obligations in full compliance with the terms of contract.
The bill was passed fairly easily, in part because the Democrats had a larger majority in both Houses than they do today. There were significant differences that were resolved in conference, with one compromise resulting in the requirement that only 40 percent of the gold reserve back the new currency. So instead of a 1-to-1 relationship between gold and currency issued — a ratio that defined sound market banking since the time of Renaissance Italy — the new Federal Reserve notes would be inflated, by law, at a ratio of 1-to-2.5.
The bill that was first drawn up at Jekyll Island was signed by Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office shortly after the Senate approved it. At one point during the signing ceremony, as he reached for a gold pen to finish signing the bill, he jokingly declared “I’m drawing on the gold reserve.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Central banks always result in feeding those forces that centralize and expand the nation-state. The Fed’s policies in the 1920s, so well documented by Rothbard, would provoke the Great Depression, which, in the end, wrenched political power from cities and state governments to the swampland in Washington. Today people take seriously the claim that there can be a viable federal solution to every problem thanks to the money printed up by the Fed, while each decade has seen a larger proportion of the population become dependent on its inflation.
And yet Andrew Jackson’s beliefs about the perniciousness of the Second Bank of the United States are just as applicable to the Federal Reserve today.
Here’s to hoping we’ll see Jackson’s hawkish nose and unkempt hair on a gold-backed, privately issued currency in the not–too-distant future.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/christopher-westley/why-bankers-created-the-fed/
By Christopher Westley
The Democratic Party gained prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century as being the party that opposed the Second Bank of the United States. In the process, it tapped into an anti-state sentiment that proved so strong that we wouldn’t see another like it until the next century.
Its adversaries were Whig politicians who defended the bank and its ability to grow the government and their own personal fortunes at the same time. They were, in fact, quite open about these arrangements. It was considered standard-operating procedure for Whig representatives to receive monetary compensation for their support of the Bank when leaving Congress. The Whig Daniel Webster even expected annual payments while in Congress. Once he complained to the Bank of the United States President Nicholas Biddle, “I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me my usual retainer.”
No wonder these people were often pummeled with canes on the House floor.
It is little wonder that early Democrats garnered such popular support and would demand Andrew Jackson end America’s experiment with central banking. Jackson called it “dangerous to the liberty of the American people because it represented a fantastic centralization of economic and political power under private control.”
It’s hard to believe that guy who said that is now on the $20 bill.
Jackson also warned that the Bank of the United States was “a vast electioneering engine” that could “control the Government and change its character.” These sentiments were echoed by Roger Taney, Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, who talked of the Bank’s “corrupting influence” and ability to “influence elections.” (The Whigs would later get revenge on this future chief justice when Abraham Lincoln, in response to a written opinion with which he disagreed, issued his arrest warrant.)
But the courtship between the political classes and their cronies would continue in the decades following Lincoln’s assassination. Those politically well-connected groups that benefited from early central banking continued to benefit from government finance, especially off of “internal improvements,” which is the nineteenth-century term for pork. National banking would appear during the War Between the States, setting in place a banking system in which individual banks would be chartered by the federal government. The government itself would use regulations backed by a new armed U.S. Treasury police force to encourage the banks’ inflation and protect them from the market penalties that inflation would otherwise bring them, such as the loss of specie and the occurrence of bank runs.
The boom and bust cycle, explained by the Austrian School in such detail, became worse and worse in the period leading up to 1913. And with the rise of Progressive Era spending on war and welfare, and with the pressure on banks to inflate to finance this activity, the boom and bust cycles worsened even more. If there was one saving grace about this period it would be that banks were forced to internalize their losses. When banks faced runs on their currencies, private financiers would bail them out. But this arrangement didn’t last, so when the losses grew, those financiers would secretly organize to reintroduce central banking to America, thus engineering an urgent need for a new “lender of last resort.” The result was the Federal Reserve.
This was the implicit socialization of the banking industry in the United States. People called the Federal Reserve Act the Currency Bill, because it was to create a bureaucracy that would assume the currency-creating duties of member banks.
It was like the Patriot Act, in that both were centralizing bills that were written years in advance by people who were waiting for the appropriate political environment in which to introduce them. It was like our current health care bills, in which cartelized firms in private industry wrote chunks of the legislation behind closed doors long before they were introduced in Congress.
It was unnecessary. If banks were simply held to similar standards as other more efficient industries were held to — the rule of law at the very least — then far fewer fraudulent banks would ever come about. There were market institutions that would penalize those banks that over-issued currencies, brought about bank runs, and financial crises. As Mises would later write:
What is needed to prevent further credit expansion is to place the banking business under the general rules of commercial and civil laws compelling each individual and firm to fulfill all obligations in full compliance with the terms of contract.
The bill was passed fairly easily, in part because the Democrats had a larger majority in both Houses than they do today. There were significant differences that were resolved in conference, with one compromise resulting in the requirement that only 40 percent of the gold reserve back the new currency. So instead of a 1-to-1 relationship between gold and currency issued — a ratio that defined sound market banking since the time of Renaissance Italy — the new Federal Reserve notes would be inflated, by law, at a ratio of 1-to-2.5.
The bill that was first drawn up at Jekyll Island was signed by Woodrow Wilson in the Oval Office shortly after the Senate approved it. At one point during the signing ceremony, as he reached for a gold pen to finish signing the bill, he jokingly declared “I’m drawing on the gold reserve.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Central banks always result in feeding those forces that centralize and expand the nation-state. The Fed’s policies in the 1920s, so well documented by Rothbard, would provoke the Great Depression, which, in the end, wrenched political power from cities and state governments to the swampland in Washington. Today people take seriously the claim that there can be a viable federal solution to every problem thanks to the money printed up by the Fed, while each decade has seen a larger proportion of the population become dependent on its inflation.
And yet Andrew Jackson’s beliefs about the perniciousness of the Second Bank of the United States are just as applicable to the Federal Reserve today.
Here’s to hoping we’ll see Jackson’s hawkish nose and unkempt hair on a gold-backed, privately issued currency in the not–too-distant future.
Link:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/christopher-westley/why-bankers-created-the-fed/
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
OOPS!!! 2013 another bad year for the warm-mongers...
Newsbytes: For Global Warming Campaigners, 2013 Was The Year From Hell
by Anthony Watts
From the GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser
News Media No Longer Interested In Climate Hysteria
2013 marks the 17th year of no warming on the planet. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the cause of global warming. 2013 was the best of years for climate skeptics; the worst of years for climate change enthusiasts for whom any change – or absence of change — in the weather served as irrefutable proof of climate change. That governments and the public would abandon the duty to stop climate change was in their minds no more thinkable than Hell freezing over. Which the way things are going for them, may happen in 2014. –Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 20 December 2013
Read the rest here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/20/newsbytes-for-global-warming-campaigners-2013-was-the-year-from-hell/
by Anthony Watts
From the GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser
News Media No Longer Interested In Climate Hysteria
2013 marks the 17th year of no warming on the planet. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong for the cause of global warming. 2013 was the best of years for climate skeptics; the worst of years for climate change enthusiasts for whom any change – or absence of change — in the weather served as irrefutable proof of climate change. That governments and the public would abandon the duty to stop climate change was in their minds no more thinkable than Hell freezing over. Which the way things are going for them, may happen in 2014. –Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 20 December 2013
Read the rest here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/20/newsbytes-for-global-warming-campaigners-2013-was-the-year-from-hell/
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