XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Sunday, 7 November 2010

Calif borrows $40M a day to pay unemployment - tops list 32 states that borrowed a total of $41 Billion to pay claims -

With one in every eight workers unemployed and empty state coffers, California is borrowing billions of dollars from the federal government to pay unemployment insurance.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the state owes $8.6 billion already, and will have to come up with a $362-million payment to Washington by the end of next September.

The continued borrowing means federal unemployment insurance taxes are going to increase, upping the annual payroll costs $21 a year per worker.

California tops the list of 32 states that have borrowed a total of $41 billion to pay claims.

The state took out its first loan from the federal government early last year, to deal with rising payment of benefits and number of claims.

Ron Paul Is About to Totally Revolutionize the House Monetary Policy Panel - 1st priority will be to open up the books of the Fed -

Odds are you haven’t heard of the monetary policy subcommittee. Officially known as the House Subcommittee for Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, it’s a subdivision of the House Financial Services Committee that has mostly occupied itself with pressing questions of issuing commemorative coins and whether or not to eliminate the penny.

That’s about to change. Ron Paul, the Republican Congressman from Texas, is the ranking member of the monetary policy subcommittee, and when the next Congress takes over he’ll likely be the chairman of the subcommittee.

And Congressman Paul has some big plans.

“I will approach that committee like no one has ever approached it because we’re living in times like no one has ever seen,” Paul said in an interview with NetNet Thursday.

Paul said his first priority will be to open up the books of the Federal Reserve to the American people.

“We need to create transparency there. To see what it is they are buying and lending, and who it is they are dealing with,” Paul said.

Paul mentioned that he hoped to use subcommittee hearings to educate the public about the causes of business cycles—which he believes are mainly attributable to monetary manipulation by central bankers.

Monetary reform is also on the agenda. Paul is a noted advocate of the gold standard.

“We will have to have monetary reform,” Paul said. “I think those on the other side of this issue are already planning. They are going to try to replace a bad system with an equally bad system.”

Saturday, 6 November 2010

A choice between Fear and Love - Zeitgeist: The Movie - 2007 by Peter Joseph. (with 2010 update) -

A choice between Fear and Love - Zeitgeist: The Movie - 2007 by Peter Joseph. (with 2010 update) -

Zeitgeist: The Movie - 2007 by Peter Joseph from ZeitgeistMovie.com on Vimeo.

Ron Paul: Federal Reserve System is “Deeply Flawed” -

14 pieces of bad economic news that are so horrifying you might not want to read them standing up -

Today the financial world was buzzing with excitement because there was one moderately good piece of news for the U.S. economy. U.S. employers added 151,000 jobs during the month of October and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.6%. This is certainly welcome news, but these days it seems as though there are at least ten pieces of bad economic news for every hopeful economic signal. So don’t get fooled when the U.S. economy takes one step forward, because it is about to take another dozen or so steps backwards. We are living in the middle of a nightmarish long-term economic decline that has been building for generations. The deindustrialization of the United States, the horrific trade deficit caused by globalization and the skyrocketing national debt are problems that have taken decades to develop. The Federal Reserve has been ripping the guts out of our financial system since 1913. These are not things that are going to be fixed overnight. In fact, there are some statistics that just keep getting worse and worse and worse as time goes by. We are heading straight for a devastating economic collapse and hopefully we can all warn as many people as possible while there is still time.

The more research that you do into our economic situation the more depressing it becomes. We are in big, big, big trouble. The following are 14 pieces of bad economic news that are so horrifying you might not want to read them standing up….

#1 More than 42 million Americans were on food stamps during the month of August. That is a new all-time record, and that number is 17 percent higher than it was one year earlier. In fact, the number of Americans on food stamps is up more than 58 percent since August 2007.

#2 The number of “persons not in the labor force” in the United States has set another new all-time record. The United States has not had such an extended bout of mass unemployment since the Great Depression. The “official” unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months.

#3 More than 1000 people now live in the 200 miles of flood tunnels that exist under the city of Las Vegas. Once one of the most prosperous cities in the United States, Las Vegas is now little more than a shiny, glittering corpse that it rapidly decaying.

#4 Poverty is absolutely exploding and it is hitting those who are the most vulnerable the hardest. According to one recent study, approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010.

#5 In the past 60 days alone, the price of cotton is up 54%, the price of corn is up 29%, the price of soybeans is up 22%, the price of orange juice is up 17%, and the price of sugar is up 51%.

#6 One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

#7 The American Bankruptcy Institute says that there will be about 1.6 million consumer bankruptcies in 2010. That would represent a huge increase over 2009.

#8 According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

#9 The individual U.S. states are mostly flat broke. For example, it is being reported that the 15 largest U.S. states spent on average over 220% of their tax receipts over the past decade. Clearly this is not even close to sustainable.

#10 The U.S. government is completely and totally broke. After analyzing Congressional Budget Office data, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff concluded that the U.S. government is facing a “fiscal gap” of $202 trillion dollars.

#11 In an attempt to keep our financial system solvent, the U.S. Federal Reserve has announced plans to create $600 billion out of thin air and pump it into the U.S. economy. The Fed is calling this “quantitative easing“, but what they should really be calling it is “cheating, debasing and inflating”.

#12 Many of the major trading partners of the United States are expressing deep resentment regarding the new quantitative easing policy announced by the Fed. Ambrose Evans-Pritchardrecently described the growing animosity this way….

Li Deshui from Beijing’s Economic Commission said a string of Asian states share China’s “deep bitterness” over dollar debasement, and are examining ways of teaming up to insulate themselves from the tsunami of US liquidity.

#13 For many analysts, the economic collapse of the United States comes down to cold, hard math. For example, the former CEO of the tenth largest bank in the United States says that it is a “mathematical certainty” that the U.S. government will eventually go bankrupt.

#14 According to a recent article on CNBC, the financial world is already buzzing about QE3….

“They’re already talking about QE3,” said Dave Rovelli, managing director of US equity trading for Canaccord Adams. “Eventually we’re going to be printing so much money the dollar is going to really go down and everybody’s going to try to deflate their currency against us. I just don’t know how this could end well.”

So is that all the Federal Reserve has left?

Are they just going to keep pouring bags of money into the economy until things get back to “normal”?

Are we going to have “Quantitative Easing 3″, “Quantitative Easing 4″, and “Quantitative Easing 5″?

It has been a long-running joke, but perhaps by the end of this thing Ben Bernanke will literally go up in a helicopter and start shoveling out huge piles of cash over the countryside.

The era of great prosperity that we have all enjoyed for so long is coming to an end. It would be advisable to use the remaining period of economic stability that we still have to prepare for what is ahead.

These economic problems could have been fixed decades ago if people would have actually listened and would have followed sound economic principles on an individual and on a corporate level, but that did not happen.

Now we are up to our eyeballs in debt and the greatest economic machine in history is rotting all around us.

We are in deep, deep, deep trouble and denying it is not going to make it go away.

Friday, 5 November 2010

Great balls of fire over Canada: NASA investigates -

Great balls of fire over Canada: NASA investigates -

Slideshow image

Great balls of fire have been reported swooping over Eastern Canada and several U.S. states.

Even NASA's on the case.

There are different theories about what was behind the sighting of those fireballs. A NASA spacecraft got a closer look at one of the possible sources today.

The spacecraft flew past Hartley 2 -- taking closeup pictures after the comet made one of its closest passes by Earth this week.

But one expert is skeptical of reports that any fireballs came from Hartley -- which is roughly 1.2 kilometres wide and spews deadly cyanide gas.

Scientist Peter Brown says his meteor group at the University of Western Ontario tracked one of two fireballs while the other was tracked by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

Broken Washington DC Metro escalators send riders flying - landed four in the hospital -

Two escalator brake failures in five days sent passengers flying down to the bottom — and landed four in the hospital, putting the spotlight on Metro’s deteriorating escalator performance.

Both brake failures happened when the escalators were packed. The first occurred after Saturday’s rally on the National Mall when a L’Enfant Plaza station escalator went into free fall; the second came on Wednesday night at Gallery Place-Chinatown, where witnesses said a station escalator suddenly sped up on passengers who were leaving the Washington Capitals game.

Metro safety officials presented a preliminary report on the weekend incident Thursday morning. Spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said officials investigated the second incident on Thursday.

“It was determined that one of the escalators did need a new brake, so they will be installing it when [the part] is available either today or tomorrow,” she said.

The accidents are two blows to an agency already plagued by worsening escalator performance. According to Metro data, the average escalator reliability has fallen three straight years to 90.5 percent in 2009.

Even then, some Metro Board members believe escalator performance is much worse.

“When I give people that 90 percent number, they never believe me,” board member Jeff McKay said at an October meeting.

The L’Enfant report said the sheer volume of the passengers on the escalator — on a day when Metro broke a ridership record — contributed to the malfunction.

“When the escalator shut down [due to the volume], the brakes engaged but failed due to the passenger load,” Metro Deputy Chief of Rail Safety Robert Maniuszko told the committee.

“After the distinct sound of a metallic ‘bang,’ ” he said, the escalator went into an 18-second free fall.

Passengers “piled up at the bottom” and six were injured; two declined medical attention. One of the four sent to the hospital suffered a “severe laceration and possibly internal injury,” Maniuszko said.

An inspection of the brakes revealed one had oil on it, another “showed wear” and a third was in good condition. Farbstein said the agency is investigating the escalator and the adjacent ones for the “root cause” of the failure but is not conducting a sweeping inspection of all 588 escalators in the system.

The L’Enfant escalator was last inspected in September and investigators are reviewing those records, according to Maniuszko. The unit was

installed in 1977 and rehabbed in 2004.
Samuel Robfogel, a witness to the Saturday accident, said he wants more accountability from Metro.

“My confidence is shaken,” said Robfogel, a university administrator in the District. “And Metro still hasn’t released a statement about it. I just want to know that these things are being addressed and being taken seriously. I want to know what went wrong and what’s going to be done to fix it.”

Christopher Zimmerman, chairman of the Metro Board’s safety committee, said Thursday afternoon he had not heard of the Gallery Place malfunction but that “it is of great concern any time something like this occurs.”

Zimmerman, who has served on Metro’s board since 1998, said malfunctions of this severity — where the units speed up — are rare.

“I haven’t previously heard of anything like this happening,” he said.

Barack Obama suffers another defeat as he is knocked off Forbes power top spot - Hu Jintao Chinese named most powerful

Barack Obama suffers another defeat as he is knocked off Forbes power top spot - Hu Jintao Chinese named most powerful -

The annual list, compiled by Forbes, the business magazine, places David Cameron, the British prime minister, at seven, behind Angela Merkel, the German chancellor in the list of 68.

Forbes explained that those on the list had been chosen “because, in various ways, they bend the world to their will”.

King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud of Saudi Arabia came in third behind Mr Jintao and Mr Obama, while Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister was fourth, ahead of Dmitry Medvedev, who only came in at 12.

Pope Benedict XVI was in fifth place, while the rest of the top 10 was rounded off by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, Sonia Gandhi, the Indian president, and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mr Gates finished ahead of Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, who was in 17th place.

The list, another blow to the US president, cited his party’s poor performance in the midterm elections.

“Obama’s Democrats suffered a mighty blow in US midterm elections, with the president decisively losing support of the House of Representatives, and barely holding onto the Senate. It’s quite a comedown for last year’s most powerful person, who after enacting widespread reforms in his first two years in office will be hard-pressed to implement his agenda in the next two.”

Mr Obama’s wife, Michelle, was last month named Forbes Most Powerful Woman.

Of Mr Hu, Forbes wrote: “Unlike Western counterparts, Hu can divert rivers, build cities, jail dissidents and censor internet without meddling from pesky bureaucrats, courts. Recently surpassed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy both in absolute and purchasing power terms. Credible estimates have China poised to overtake US as world’s largest economy in 25 years – although, crucially, not on a per-capita basis.”

Thursday, 4 November 2010

Ron Paul vows renewed Fed audit push next year - Paul said he would also push to examine the country's gold reserves -

Republican Representative Ron Paul on Thursday said he will push to examine the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions if he takes control of the congressional subcommittee that oversees the central bank as expected in January.

"I think they're way too independent. They just shouldn't have this power," Paul, a longtime Fed critic, said in an interview with Reuters. "Up until recently it has been modest but now it's totally out of control."

Paul is currently the top Republican on the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees domestic monetary policy, and is likely to head the panel when Republicans take control of the chamber in January.

That could create a giant headache for the Fed, which earlier this year fended off an effort headed by Paul to open up its internal deliberations on interest rates and monetary easing to congressional scrutiny.

Paul, who has written a book called "End the Fed," has been a fierce critic of the central bank's efforts to boost the economy through monetary policy.

"It's an outrage, what is happening, and the Congress more or less has not said much about it," he said.

Paul said his subcommittee would also push to examine the country's gold reserves and highlight the views of economists who believe that economic downturns are caused by bad monetary policy, not the vagaries of the free market.

Global organizations like the International Monetary Fund also will come under scrutiny, he said.

"Eventually we're going to have monetary reform. I do not believe the dollar can be the reserve standard of the world," said Paul, who has called for returning the United States to a currency backed by gold or silver.

Many economists say that the Fed's decisive actions during the 2008 financial crisis prevented the deep recession that followed from turning into a depression. But grassroots outrage over the bank bailouts and other Fed actions helped propel many Republican candidates to victory in Tuesday's congressional elections -- including Paul's son, Rand Paul, who will represent Kentucky in the Senate.

"With a lot of new members coming and the problems getting worse rather better, there's going to be a lot more people who are going to be looking for answers," Paul said.