My friend (with his wife next to him ) says yea this country sucks ?

My friend (with his wife next to him ) says yea this country sucks ?    And my response is yes so we have to do what we can to fix it and he and she says no TO HELL WITH IT  and i say what about our children ( they have 15 year old living at home with them .     They say let them worry about we don't care anymore , and i stand there shocked as they drive away ....

There is a method to Their Madness..:) Former “car czar” Steven Rattner settles influencing-peddling case for $10 million Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/30/former-car-czar-steven-rattner-settles-influencing-peddling-case-for-10-million/#ixzz19hU8PURE

Former “car czar” Steven Rattner settles influencing-peddling case for $10 million

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/12/30/former-car-czar-steven-rattner-settles-influencing-peddling-case-for-10-million/#ixzz19hU8PURE


When you read these accounts of a man who cheats on Taxes being put in charge of the IRS or a car  CZar incharge of the great cash for clunkers also eveidently caught with influencing charges then you know something is afoot :)


What is happening here is an attemp to anger the citizens and make them go nuts , the any good dictatorship can step in and take over it's that simple its a matter of Hypnosis thats how you start it tramatize then hypnotize and thus have an excuse to step in and control, thats why the TSA is being so flagrant in their degrading of the american peoples in public . 


Any good Bully knows this and these thugs know it well :) so sit back and enjoy the show till the Bell Tolls for You :(

i have faith in your Christ but i do not like your christians ... spoken by Gandhi

i agree sometimes with this saying from Gandhi,when looking up this quote this came up on Google :) http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/358532    i think some people see this, that Jesus Said (You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free)   not to get you presents on Christmas :)      Ben Franklin who said: "How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, his precepts! O! 'tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments"

Read more: Gandhi said, "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." Do you agree? | Answerbag http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/358532#ixzz198XZeZdT So hope remember that we were set free and not down some road to religious slavery or other :( Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

High taxes kill States and This Country

So when The Leaders decide to Raise Taxes what they really want to do is punish the Rich  and give more services to the poor...So what should any Tax Rate be ?    i don't know, that varies with any area and instance but from the article below anytime people can keep more of their own money they will , and i suspect this isn't just the rich moving out of state.    i am sure that when Albany New York goes from 1/2 million down to 1/4 million as the rest of New York State was doing ( minus New York City) which is explained below then it can't be disregarded, like what is now happening to all these large states like California and Ohio etc.    THE FACT IS THE NEOCONSERVATIVE WANTS TO BUILD THE MILITARY AND DAMN THE COST, AND THE LIBERAL WANTS TO BUILD THE STATE DAMN THE COST, and the rest of us are cast to the fringes.  And as long as they can load more on the packhorse ( the economy and the debt over and above what is brought into public coffers ) they will, and they get theirs just like the states and cities have done and Damn the consequences, because they know we won't take food from the babies mouths or stop building the military for our defense,( no matter who got us in to what war and why) because once they send my son or my friends son to war i have to support it  ..:(    Or once they put the unemployed on handouts and welfare then they create another dependent class who no longer has incentive to go back to work.   So Hubris reigns Supreme :( in that as they build it we must then support forever)  or as my boss used to tell me once we install a system we must forever maintain it so that is an additional cost for a system .   Who among us can argue against what i have just said ????

One more thing , go to http://viewfromthewilds.blogspot.com/2010/12/china-evidence-of-overinvestment.html
 and notice what the Blogger there has documented the ghost cities of China,  it's a great read with great pictures to document, and Spain and other countries around the world have done this same thing .



Published in the New York Post on December 23, 2010
High taxes kill states. There can be no better evidence than the 2010 Census. The states that lost House seats — because they’re shrinking, relative to the nation — had taxes 27 percent higher than the ones that gained seats.
Of the seven states that don’t have a personal income tax, four (Texas, Florida, Nevada and Washington) account for eight of the 12 seats apportioned to the fastest-growing states.
New York and Ohio lost two more seats. Other losers — down one each — are Massachusetts, Missouri, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Louisiana and Iowa. What do they all have in common? High taxes.

Texas, with the second lowest taxes in the nation, gained four seats, Florida picked up two and Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah, and Washington state each gained one. All have low taxes.
The states that lost seats ranked an average of 24th in taxes and had an average tax burden of $2,267 per capita (weighted more toward the states that lost more than one seat).
The states that gained seats ranked an average of 39th in taxes and had an average tax burden (weighted) of $1,788 — 27 percent lower than the losing states.
People vote with their feet and flee to low-tax states. It’s not the climate; it’s the taxes.
In New York, the city grew from 7.3 million in 1990 to 8 million in 2000 to 8.4 million in 2010 — but population upstate shrank dramatically. Some 1.7 million people left New York state in the last decade, the largest exodus any state experienced. Upstate New York is dying, killed by high taxes.
The New York City metro area can grow despite high taxes. It’s the historical center for immigration from overseas, a glittering attraction for migration from within the country and the foremost global city. But upstate has no such offsetting attractions.
Consider Buffalo. From half a million people in 1960, it has fallen to a quarter of a million. It’s lost half its population in 50 years.
The trend is unmistakable: The “losing” states drove out their high-income citizens (and middle-income jobs) with heavier tax burdens. As New York and other high-tax states confront their budget difficulties, they need to be mindful of this trend — lest they wind up taxing their states into oblivion.

When Does the other Shoe Drop ?????

i know that the New Years ball drops at midnight on New Years but how long after that before Ex lax finally hits the Housing foreclosures ???    How about March or April ? or later ?     They can come up with plenty of Diversions like the Debt bomb of the Liberal Statesl,  but in the end thats where everyone has tied up they're money for the last few generations its as american as _________ whatever,,   anyway we Must stand at this point and when the curtain is pulled back the nakedness of our excesses will be quite apparent !!!    The Pain is better endured then forestalled to build up till we are done in by it which is what They ( the rulling class ) hope

THUS THEY WILL DO TO US AROUND THE WORLD!!!! Beware those who would serve you ,they serve to rule you .

THUS THEY WILL DO TO US AROUND THE WORLD!!!!  http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1729156220101217

Now you will see others taking the same road As Chavez trying to first take over their own country , taking away the properties of the rich in the guise to give to the poor who support them .   Systematically taking over their industry, then their banking ( in the guise of DOING IT FOR THE PEOPLE) then once they have expanded through out their own people they must conquer foreign lands.  Inch by inch freedom is lost and man sells himself for a pot of porridge.   Soon we will regret our instant fix to a arranged problem and will want our freedom back but it is much easier given than taken back .  Beware those who would serve you ,they serve to rule you .               ( Remember America President Obama Likes Hugo Chavez....)

Why Unemployment Will Remain High For Years (Part I)

A logical Explanation or what has happened during the Greenspan,and Bernak era- this article in above link..

 

Why Unemployment Will Remain High For Years (Part I)

Submitted by Econophile on 12/15/2010 14:34 -0500

• Alan Greenspan
 
• Commercial Real Estate
• Housing Prices
 
• Irrational Exuberance
 
• Musical Chairs
• Real estate
 
• Recession
 
• recovery
 
• Unemployment

This article originally appeared in The Daily Capitalist.

There are 15.1 million workers unemployed in America (U-1). Another 9 million are working temp for economic reasons, and another 2.5 million are marginally attached or discouraged from the work force (U-6). That is about 26.6 million people in trouble. We can argue about the "true" number of unemployed but for the purpose of this article, the fact that it is high under any measure is sufficient.

The labor participation rate, which shows what percentage of the workforce is engaged in employment, has been steadily dropping for ten years:

It hovered at about the 60^th percentile for many years (1948 to 1970) and then it took off in 1970 and peaked at 67.1% from 1997 to 2001 when it started declining to its present level.

Thus, it seems that we have been going backward for the past ten years after rising rather steadily for 30 years.

What has happened during the past ten years? We have experienced two business cycles as a result of the Federal Reserve's money manipulation. The Dot com boom result in the Dot bomb bust of 2001 to 2004 and stubborn, but moderate unemployment. In our current cycle, unemployment has risen sharply since late 2007. These two unemployment cycles have lasted longer than any other Post-WWII cycle. This chart illustrates the problem:

Note the duration of the brown line (2001) and the red line (2007). Just from looking at this chart it is obvious that these recent cycles have been more difficult for the government and the Fed to "stimulate" into jobful recoveries. The depth of our current recession is unprecedented for the period following WWII.

The Big Questions: Why does unemployment persist? What is different about this cycle that makes it worse than others?

One answer is that many jobs created during these booms aren't coming back. Another answer is that a lack of "real capital" will hinder robust job growth.

The Dot com boom tricked those involved in it that they were experiencing a "New Paradigm," or a world where profitability mattered less than "concept," where buzz meant more than feasibility.  Tremendous amounts of capital poured into dubious companies. The Geek Moment was at its all-time high, and they poured into Silicon Valley to make their overnight fortunes. That ended as soon as Alan Greenspan wrote "irrational exuberance" on the blackboard 100 times. What had made sense during the heat of the moment didn't look so good when the Fed's juice ran out. It was like a game of musical chairs, but in this game half of the chairs were taken away when the music stopped. Those jobs disappeared never to come back. Just look at the brown line again on the spaghetti chart: it took 47 months for employment to get back to positive job growth.

The Crash of  '08 was the biggest credit bubble the world has ever seen. New Fed money flows somewhere during booms and this time it was into housing. It was so vast that the spillover poured into commercial real estate, leisure and hospitality, autos, consumer goods, and student loans.  As we are finding, this boom spread to most of OECD economies (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, comprising 34 of the world's more prosperous economies). Fake wealth from new credit instruments spread worldwide as investors jumped lemming-like into the pool.

Credit bubbles never last. When the frenzy created by easy money starts to spin out of control the Fed regains some sanity and stops "printing money" by raising interest rates. Then things fall apart. This is the inevitable bust phase of the cycle.

This time we were hit really hard since the Fed's monetary expansion was immense. All jobs related to residential real estate have been severely impacted: workers in the construction industry, building materials jobs, developers, real estate salespeople, escrow and title workers, the real estate finance sector including home mortgage brokers, banks that financed mortgages, high-end employees in structured financing departments in very large banks, investment houses, and hedge funds. The spillover wealth effect of the boom that had pumped up the auto, retail and leisure, and hospitality industries, hit these industries hard in the bust phase.

We all understand this effect of economic busts: businesses go bankrupt or cut back, workers are laid off, and banks suffer huge losses. Then things are supposed to get better, and after some passage of time we continue growing. But that isn't happening and hasn't been happening for the past ten years if one measures employment and the labor participation rate. I don't put any faith in traditional measures of economic recovery by the NBER, the arbiter of when recessions start and end. I don't accept that there is a "recovery" when unemployment is close to 10% of the workforce.

The reason employment has been declining for the past ten years and what is significantly different from past cycles is that these boom-bust cycles have been destroying real capital on a massive scale.

The perceived prosperity of the boom was false, supported only by the Fed's creation of fiat money and credit. When the veil of fiat money was lifted we discovered the ashes of projects that were a waste of the capital invested in them. If you destroy enough capital in an economy, then fewer jobs are created because fewer businesses are able to expand and grow. It is my belief that this has happened on a massive scale in the past ten years.

Another way of saying this is that quite a bit of the perceived expansion of the economy for the past ten years was a waste of money. There is a technical term for this in economics, called "malinvestment" of capital. Let me explain this concept and how it works.

First a couple guidelines. If the Fed or any central bank could create wealth (capital) by printing money then we would all be rich. They can't. The only way capital is created is through the production of goods from which some profit is derived and saved. Government can't create wealth because it produces nothing. Only the private economy can do that.

What printing money can do is destroy capital.

How? By creating money out of thin air. Here's how it works.

Let's say you are a developer of residential housing. You've been looking at a piece of property for a 100 home project and you pencil it out to discover that it doesn't make sense. Let's say that a year later you look at the property again, but the Fed has been printing money for the past year and as a result price inflation has driven housing prices up. You think you can now sell the homes for $250,000 rather than the $220,000 you had projected last year, and now the project looks feasible to you. You think you can make 15% profit on the project. You go to your bank and borrow 70% of the money for the project, say $15,000,000. For the other 30%, or 6,250,000, you get 90% of it from a big pension fund and put up 10% of the money yourself.

The bank extends the loan and the Fed creates it out of thin air. By a few keystrokes the bank has another $15,000,000 on its books and credits your account by that amount. It is brand new money, freshly "printed" by the Fed. All the bank needed was $1,500,000 of uncommitted Tier 1 capital to make this happen. You now go out and build the project with the new money and bid away building materials from others and pay with checks that are deposited into the suppliers' bank accounts. What have you done? You have gotten something for nothing. You have bought goods for free because the money is a fiction of a keystroke.

Other builders see this new activity (assume you aren't the only one doing this) and they see prices of homes rising and do the same thing. All prices are going up as new money bids away scarce resources. As we get farther away from the bank's injection of new money, the lowly consumer earns no more money but prices are going up and he has to pay more. He's getting screwed and you've gotten something for nothing.

It takes you two years to build the project. But by then the Fed sees that prices are spiraling up and up and they raise interest rates to slow the creation of money. Mortgage rates increase, and for a while home prices also continue their rise. But now fewer folks are buying homes because they can't afford them: it only worked with cheap mortgage rates. Now buyers can't afford to buy your homes, and your sales slow down. Maybe you've sold half of them but the rest lay idle. You know that you wouldn't make any money until the sale of the last 15 homes. At this point, you haven't made enough back to pay off the bank or the pension fund, or take money home for yourself.

The economy slides into recession and more and more housing projects are going belly up. You can't sell a thing. After another year of trying to work things out with your lender, the bank forecloses, and takes back the 50 unsold homes. They sell the homes at wholesale prices and have lost about $4,000,000. The pension fund lost its entire $5,600,000, and you've lost $550,000 and the bank and the pension fund are going after you personally for repayment. You go bankrupt and they get nothing.

This is exactly what happened during The Great Recession. I speak from experience.

Tomorrow, Part II.

OPRAH doesn't need another MOMMY

i  saw an excerpt of Oprah Winfrey on a 60 minutes up coming show ,  and she was crying when talking about her best friend who is also a woman and then she cried about how  " this lady is like a mother and a sister for her and the world would be a better place if we all knew and loved her " .  i suspect that Oprah is a nice woman and trying to do the best she can, only she's looking for love in all the wrong places ,as a song says, so we all can look in the wrong place for answers and thus we keep getting the wrong information, i hope someday she finds the FATHER of  Lights and is directed to a path of salvation from the stresses and evils of this worldly plain.
 .....:)    Post Script .. i don't capitalize when calling myself  ( i  ) is because i believe only the God should be treated like this ...:)

Well Here comes the next Economic STORM

Interesting article in Big Peace tonight , i have sensed this for years but this man has illucidated better than i could ..:)

Economic Storm Clouds on the Horizon

by Paul A. Rahe

The experts charged with determining when recessions begin and end tell us that the latest of these unpleasant events ended a while ago. Technically, they are no doubt right. But that does not mean that the economic crisis we have been facing is over. I suspect that we have thus far only seen its first act. The drama to come may be far, far worse. To see why, one must recognize that economic downturns come in two different forms.

The economists who study recessions tend to think about them in turns of the business cycle – and rightly so, for in most cases it is the business cycle that produces the downturn. In the course of such a cycle, 

http://biggovernment.com/prahe/2010/12/10/economic-storm-clouds-on-the-horizon/#more-205373

it can be summed up as lack of confidence in this economy as run by our current leaders, We are all huckered down waiting for the clouds to clear so we can start going forward again but with the way this country has lost it's way and strayed from the light we may or may not make it..

Are you Ready ? Lotta people on their toes :(

So i just went out and bought insurance today, or more and different  insurance . A person needs money different types and different types of fuels ( for when and if the lights go out ) i am working on a extra propane tank ( because my house is all electric ) just in case things go south on us ,  like we no longer have food at the stores or electric to heat with .  i never would have worried about this 5 years ago but my how the world has changed .  i remember 2 years ago we had an ice storm, worst in many years ,  we had no power for 7 days no way to heat the house but with a stove burner ,  i'm set up better now, and gas was scarce for a day or so , since people were stocking up.  But what if this were for several weeks like Catrina storm in Louisiana.  Well i gotta get ready,  then leave it to my FATHER , he can and will guide and oversee but i can't be idle :) , besides if bad happens i'll have family,  etc counting on me to have a place in the country away from the chaos . BUT insurance is just that something you hope you don't need , so once i have done this i get right back to life lol , paying bills and trying to work on my hobby and more importantly showing the LIGHT to any who are lost and looking for hope :)

So whats going on here ?

ig Banks Are Stifling Economic Growth & Taxing Consumers

Submitted by asiablues on 12/06/2010 08:54 -0500

• Bank of America
 
• Ben Bernanke
 
• Commodity Futures Trading Commission
• Copper
 
• CPI
 
• Crude
 
• Crude Oil
 
• Demographics
 
• Global Economy
• Goldman Sachs
 
• Japan
 
• Monetary Policy
 
• Morgan Stanley
 
• Recession
• Unemployment
 
• Volatility
 

By Dian L. Chu, EconForecast

Have you noticed the price of oil lately? It’s $90 a barrel in a dismal economy with unemployment hovering around 10%. The problem with Fed chairman Bernanke`s latest QE 2 initiative is that he has just given more access of cheap money to the big banks.

Non-Productive Use of QE Money

And what are they doing with all this cheap money? Nothing productive from an economic standpoint. Instead of lending the money to entrepreneurs, business projects, and venture capital initiatives which actually create jobs and foster much needed economic growth, the big banks are just taking this cheap money and pouring it into commodities like crude oil, copper and grains.

Taxing Consumers by Bidding Up Commodities

So not only are the big banks doing nothing productive with the latest QE2 capital, but they are in essence dragging down economic growth with a counterproductive tax on consumers when they can least afford it. The last thing the economy needs with 10% unemployment is to be paying a hefty tax on food and energy products, especially given the fact that these markets are well supplied, and are necessity items for consumers.

Actually, Mr. Bernanke would have been better served by taking liquidity out of the system, as commodities would be much cheaper with higher rates, and the economy would be much more inclined to spur economic growth and job creation with lower food and energy prices.

Deflaton Fear - Theory vs. Reality

The entire notion that we have to worry about a Japan-style deflation is completely overblown, and the manifestation of over the top theoretical academic postulating. Sure, the US is just coming out of a recession, and we are growing slowly, but the differences between Japan and the United States in terms of resources, demographics, economic diversity, monetary policy, and how the US handled losses in the banking sector makes any comparison between the two countries a wild stretch by any standard.

This is the problem with having too many academics in the Fed, and absolutely no one with any market experience who understands how markets actually function. Mr. Bernanke even admitted in open proceedings in front of Congress that he didn`t understand the dynamics of the Gold market--a pretty telling inadequacy as the head of our monetary policy.

Exporting Inflation via Commodity Plays

But there is more to the story of how big banks are actually hurting global growth if we analyze the emerging markets and their burgeoning inflation problem. The emerging market economies like China, for example, have gone into tightening mode in order to fight what is starting to appear as a runaway inflation problem with a CPI reading of 4.4%, and talk of a 5% reading on the next CPI report.

Meanwhile, crude oil is up $10 and gasoline prices are up 25 cents per gallon since Bernanke’s QE2 announcement, and this doesn`t even factor in the run-up in commodity prices since QE2 was up for debate starting in August.

China Tightening Bad For All

How is this going to slow global growth? Well, because China needs to fight inflation, and the big banks are exporting inflation even further by pumping more money into commodities, artificially raising prices beyond any fundamental basis for these commodities, China has a more severe inflation fight on their hands, which means even more severe tightening measures and monetary policy controls.

So, what do these severe monetary measures do for growth in China? It starts putting downward pressure on the economy, i.e., results in slower growth. In essence, not only does big banks’ propensity to take government cheap capital and ineffectively invest it stifle growth in the US, but also is exported in the form of higher input costs and increased inflation dynamics for the emerging economies, which had previously been the one bright spot keeping the global economy afloat.

CFTC – No Action

The CFTC as part of the financial reform bill are supposed to come out with some new position limits for the big banks which might be helpful in reducing some of the speculative inflows into these commodities. But they keep dragging their feet on the issue, and since the big banks have historically obfuscated these rules in the past, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

Take Physical Delivery or Else

However, it would be interesting to see this rule passed for the crude oil market--All market participants have to take physical delivery. Then, literally overnight, you would see the price of oil drop to $40-$50 a barrel as very few market participants actually take physical delivery.

Commodity generally has an inverse relationship with equity. But crude oil these days trades more in line with the S&P 500 as an asset class (see Chart) rather than as a commodity subject to supply and demand dynamics where producers and users like airlines actually hedge their interests.  

Actually if the big banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, HSBC and Bank of America got out of the business of pumping of commodity prices like oil, there would be a lesser need to hedge in the first place by actual producers and users.

Price Distortion = Lower Producer Profit 

It’s the price distortion practices of the big banks that provide for so much volatility and instability in the market which needs to be curtailed so that the underlying fundamentals of supply and demand dynamics that embodies free markets can actually occur.

Producers are even hurt by this volatility and market price distortions as many have both upstream and downstream exposure, and with 10% unemployment and a sluggish economy, you can only pass so much of the gasoline price onto consumers and businesses, so the price of crude rises higher than the price of the products, which really hurts their refining margins.

QEs Should Be Conditional 

The QE2 initiative is not the end of the world, but if you are going to go down this road, you need to have some kind of disincentive and/or penalty for the big banks to just take this extra cheap liquidity, and go and pile this capital into commodities like food and energy futures, and provide some sort of incentive for actually get this capital to directly support job creating business activity. After all, isn`t the business of lending supposed to be their primary business in the first place?

Even the I-Banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley could better serve the Fed`s purpose of fostering economic growth and job creation if they used this cheap money for fueling venture capital initiatives and underwriting business expansion activities for corporations as opposed to taxing consumers through their investment in commodities like food and energy.

The Fed can also put some kind of ground rules for the big banks in what they can invest this essentially zero percent capital into so that the productive utilization of this capital occurs thereby stimulating job creation and economic growth, versus the counterproductive use of this cheap capital which actually stifles the economy and hinders job creation through higher input costs, and an effective tax on consumption in higher commodity prices.

Dian L. Chu, Dec. 5, 2010  
Mobile Reader & Website

So whats going on here why is Ben Bernack Running the Fed and not some one like Ms. Chu ?Why is common sense not followed right now why are we hearded down the Wrong path and why is it when we ask questions we're told to shut up it's over our heads ?Same thing happens in any church you might stumble into tho your told to sit down shut up and learn the program . or kicked out as a non believer .Dont believe me go ask Jesus what happens or Gandhi or MLK , asking questions is dangerous (always ) but more so when this world gets dark.

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