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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 25, 2013 15:25:55 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.com www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/05/18/washington-signals-dollar-deep-concerns-paul-craig-roberts/Washington Signals Deep Dollar ConcernsMay 18, 2013 by Paul Craig Roberts "Over the past month there has been a statistically improbable concurrence of events that can only be explained as a conspiracy to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing (QE). Quantitative Easing is the term given to the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing 1,000 billion new dollars annually in order to finance the US budget deficit by purchasing US Treasury bonds and to keep the prices high of debt-related derivatives on the “banks too big to fail” (BTBF) balance sheets by purchasing mortgage-backed derivatives. Without QE, interest rates would be much higher, and values on the banks’ balance sheets would be much lower. Quantitative Easing has been underway since December 2008. During these 54 months, the Federal Reserve has created several trillion new dollars with which the Fed has monetized the same amount of debt. One result of this policy is that most real US interest rates are negative. Another result is that the supply of dollars has outstripped the world’s demand for dollars. These two results are the reason that the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing money with which to purchase Treasury bonds and mortgage backed derivatives threatens the dollar’s exchange value and, thus, the dollar’s role as world reserve currency. To be the world reserve currency means that the dollar can be used to pay any and every country’s oil bills and trade deficit. The dollar is the medium of international payment. This is very helpful to the US and is the main source of US power. Because the dollar is the reserve currency, the US can cover its import costs and pay for its cost of operation simply by creating its own paper money. If the dollar were not the reserve currency, Washington would not be able to finance its wars or continue to run large trade and budget deficits. Therefore, protecting the exchange value of the dollar is Washington’s prime concern if it is to remain a superpower. The threats to the dollar are alternative monies–currencies that are not being created in enormous quantities, gold and silver, and Bitcoins, a digital currency. The Bitcoin threat was eliminated on May 17 when the Gestapo Department of Homeland Security seized Bitcoin’s accounts. The excuse was that Bitcoin had failed to register in keeping with the US Treasury’s anti-money laundering requirements. Washington has stifled the threat from other currencies by convincing other large currencies to out-print the dollar. Japan has complied, and the European Central Bank, though somewhat constrained by Germany, has entered the printing mode in order to bail out the private banks endangered by the “sovereign debt crisis.” That leaves gold and silver. The enormous increase in the prices of gold and silver over the last decade convinced Washington that there are a number of miscreants who do not trust the dollar and whose numbers must not be permitted to increase. The price of gold rose from $272 an ounce in December 2000 to $1,917.50 on August 23, 2011. The financial gangsters who own and run America panicked. With the price of the dollar collapsing in relation to historical real money, how could the dollar’s exchange rate to other currencies be valid? If the dollar’s exchange value came under attack, the Federal Reserve would have to stop printing and would lose control over interest rates. The bond and stock market bubbles would pop, and the interest payments on the federal debt would explode, leaving Washington even more indebted and unable to finance its wars, police state, and bankster bailouts. Something had to be done about the rising price of gold and silver. There are two bullion markets. One is a paper market in New York, Comex, where paper claims to gold are traded. The other is the physical market where personal possession is taken of the metal–coin shops, bullion dealers, jewelry stores. The way the banksters have it set up, the price of bullion is not set in the markets in which people actually take possession of the metals. The price is set in the paper market where speculators gamble. This bifurcated market gave the Federal Reserve the ability to protect the dollar from its printing press. On Friday, April 12, 2013, short sales of gold hit the New York market in an amount estimated to have been somewhere between 124 and 400 tons of gold. This enormous and unprecedented sale implies an illegal conspiracy of sellers intent on rigging the market or action by the Federal Reserve through its agents, the BTBF that are the bullion banks. The enormous sales of naked shorts drove down the gold price, triggering stop-loss orders and margin calls. The attack continued on Monday, April 15, and has continued since. Before going further, note that there are position limits imposed on the number of contracts that traders can sell at one time. The 124 tons figure would have required 14 traders with no open interest on the exchange to sell all together in the same few minutes 40,000 futures contracts. The likelihood of so many traders deciding to short at the same moment at the maximum permitted is not believable. This was an attack ordered by the Federal Reserve, which is why there is no investigation of the illegality. Note also that no seller that wanted out of a position would give himself a low price by dumping an enormous amount all at once unless the goal was not profit but to smash the bullion price. Since the April 12-15 attack on the gold price, subsequent attacks have occurred at 2pm Hong Kong time and 2 am New York time. At this time activity is light, waiting on London to begin operating. As William S.Kaye has observed, no entity concerned about profits would choose this time to sell 20,000 to 30,000 futures contracts, but this is what has been happening. Who can be unconcerned with losing money in this way? Only a central bank that can print it. Now we come to the physical market where people take possession of bullion instead of betting on paper instruments. Look at this chart from ZeroHedge. www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-16/gold-demand-one-chart-physical-vs-etf [1] The demand for physical possession is high, despite the assault on gold that began in 2011, but as the price is set in the non-real paper market, orchestrated short sales, as in the current quarter of 2013, can drive down the price regardless of the fact that the actual demand for gold and silver cannot be met. While the corrupt Western financial press urges people to abandon bullion, everyone is trying to purchase more, and the premiums above the spot price have risen. Around the world there is a shortage of gold and silver in the forms, such as one-ounce coins and ten-ounce bars, that individuals demand. That the decline in gold and silver prices is an orchestration is apparent from the fact that the demand for bullion in the physical market has increased while naked short sales in the paper market imply a flight from bullion. What does this illegal manipulation of markets by the Federal Reserve tell us? It tells us that the Federal Reserve sees no way out of printing money in order to support the federal deficit and the insolvent banks. If the dollar came under attack and the Federal Reserve had to stop printing dollars, interest rates would rise. The bond and stock markets would collapse. The dollar would be abandoned as reserve currency. Washington would no longer be able to pay its bills and would lose its hegemony. The world of hubristic Washington would collapse. It remains to be seen whether Washington can prevail over the world demand for gold and silver. Can the dollar remain supreme when offshoring has deprived the US of the ability to cover its imports with exports? Can the dollar remain supreme when the Federal reserve is creating 1,000 billion new ones each year, while the BRICS, China and Japan, China and Australia, and China and Russia are making deals to settle their trade balances without the use of the dollar? If the consumption-based US economy deprived of consumer income by jobs offshoring takes a further dip down in the 3rd or 4th quarter–a downturn that cannot be masked by phony statistical releases–the federal deficit will rise. What will be the effect on the dollar if the Federal Reserve has to increase its Quantitative Easing? A perfect storm has been prepared for America. Real interest rates are negative, but debt and money are being created hand over foot. The dollar’s demise awaits the world’s decision how to get out of it. The Federal Reserve can print dollars with which to keep the bond and stock markets high, but the Federal Reserve cannot print foreign currencies with which to keep the dollar afloat. When the dollar goes, Washington’s power goes, which is why the bullion market is rigged. Protect the power. That is the agenda. Is it another Washington over-reach? Bitcoin Note: On May 16, PCWorld reported: “The seizure of funds of the largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, was triggered by an alleged failure of the company to comply with U.S. financial regulations, according to a federal court document. The U.S. District Court in Maryland on Tuesday ordered the seizure of Mt. Gox’s funds, which were in an account with Dwolla, a payments company that transferred money from U.S. citizens to Mt. Gox for buying and selling the virtual currency bitcoin.” Reports subsequent to my column suggest that instead of funds being seized, a money transfer mechanism was shut down. Whatever happened, the government has demonstrated that it can disable or destroy Bitcoin at will. Bitcoin might be tolerated unless it becomes widely used. If the government regards Bitcoin as a refuge from the dollar, it can simply have its agents buy up the Bitcoins, driving the price skyhigh, and then dump the purchases all at once, just as tons of gold shorts were dumped on the gold market. Bitcoin showed its vulnerability in April when, according to news reports, someone gave away $13,627 worth of Bitcoins, and Bitcoin values crashed from $265 to $105. Some people who watch this market concluded that the exercise was a covert central bank stress test. The fact that I reported on Bitcoin does not mean that I oppose Bitcoin. The point of my article is to demonstrate that the government will take all steps to protect the dollar from Quantitative Easing. "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 25, 2013 15:08:21 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.org www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/05/13/gangster-state-america-paul-craig-roberts/Gangster State AmericaMay 13, 2013 by Paul Craig Roberts "There are many signs of gangster state America. One is the collusion between federal authorities and banksters in a criminal conspiracy to rig the markets for gold and silver. My explanation that the sudden appearance of an unprecedented 400 ton short sale of gold on the COMEX in April was a manipulation designed to protect the dollar from the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing policy has found acceptance among gold investors and hedge fund managers. The sale was a naked short. The seller had no gold to sell. COMEX reported having gold only equal to about half of the short sale in its vaults, and not all of that was available for delivery. No one but the Federal Reserve could have placed such an order, and the order came from one of the Fed’s bullion banks, one of the entities “too big to fail.” Bill Kaye of the Greater Asian Hedge Fund in Hong Kong and Dave Kranzler of Golden Returns Capital have filled in the details of how the manipulation worked. Being sophisticated investors of many years of experience, both Kaye and Kranzler understand that the financial press runs with the authorized story planted to serve the agenda that has been put into play. Institutional investors who have bullion in their portfolio do not want the expense associated with storing it securely. Instead, they buy into Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) and hold their bullion in the form of a paper claim. The largest, the SPDR Gold Trust or GLD, trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The trustee and custodian is a bankster, and only other banksters are able to turn investments into delivery of physical bullion. Only shares in the amount of 100,000 can be redeemed in gold. The price of bullion is not set in the physical market where individuals take delivery of bullion purchases. It is set in the paper futures market where short selling can drive down the price even if the demand for physical possession is rising. The paper gold market is also the market in which people speculate and leverage their positions, place stop-loss orders, and are subject to margin calls. When the enormous naked shorts hit the COMEX, stop-loss orders were triggered adding to the sales, and margin calls forced more sales. Investors who were not in on the manipulation lost a lot of money. The sales of GLD shares are accumulated by the banksters in 100,000 lots and presented to GLD for redemption in gold acquired at the driven down price. The short sale is leveraged by the stop-loss triggers and margin calls, and results in a profit for the banksters who placed the short sell order. The banksters then profit again as they sell the released gold into the physical market, especially in Asia, where demand has been stimulated by the sharp drop in bullion price and by the loss of confidence in fiat currency. Asian prices are usually at a higher premium above the spot prices in New York-London. Some readers have said “don’t bet against the Federal Reserve; the manipulation can go on forever.” But can it? As the ETFs such as GLD are drained of gold, their ability to cover any of their obligations to investors diminishes. In my opinion, these ETFs are like a fractional reserve banking system. The claims on gold exceed the amount of gold in the trusts. When the ETFs are looted of their gold by the banksters, the gold price will explode, as the claims on gold will greatly exceed the supply. Kranzler reports that the current June futures contracts are 12.5 times the amount of deliverable gold. If more than 8 percent of these trades were to demand delivery, COMEX would default. That such a situation is possible indicates the total failure of federal financial regulation. What the Federal Reserve has done in order to maintain its short-run policy of protecting the “banks too big too fail” is to make the inevitable reckoning more costly for the US economy. Another irony is the benefactors of the banksters sale of the gold leeched from the gold ETFs. Asia is the beneficiary, especially India and China. The “get out of gold line” of the US financial press enables China to unload its excess supply of dollars, accumulated from the offshored US economy, into the gold market at a suppressed price of gold. Kranzler points out that not only does the Fed’s manipulation permit Asia to offload US dollars for gold at low prices, but the obvious lack of confidence in the dollar that the manipulation demonstrates has caused wealthy European families to demand delivery of their gold holdings at bullion banks (the bullion banks are essentially the “banks too big to fail”). Kranzler notes that since January 1, more than 400 tons of gold have been drained from COMEX and gold ETF holdings in order to satisfy world demand for physical possession of bullion. Again we see that institutions of the US government are acting 100% against the interests of US citizens. Just who does the US government represent?"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 25, 2013 8:31:25 GMT -6
Attached is a graphic of the comparison of median CPI (via the Cleveland Fed), CPI (BLS), and core CPI (BLS) Attachments:
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 25, 2013 7:56:00 GMT -6
The Cleveland Federal Reserve had devised an alternative measure of inflation that varies somewhat from the US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics method.
It's called the "median CPI".www.clevelandfed.org/research/data/us-inflation/about_mcpi.cfm?DCS.nav=Local from the Cleveland Fed: "Federal Reserve policymakers are always on the lookout for inflation (a general increase in prices), and they use a variety of measures to gauge inflation trends. One such measure is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The CPI measures changes in the prices of a number of goods and services—things like gas, rent, groceries, and clothing. However, the prices of some of these items—such as energy—are volatile; they can change a lot from month to month, based on supply and demand. So the BLS also publishes a measure of “core” prices that excludes food and energy prices. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the Ohio State University devised a different way to get a “core CPI” measure—or a measure of underlying inflation trends. It’s called the Median CPI. To calculate the Median CPI, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland looks at the prices of the goods and services published by the BLS. But instead of calculating a weighted average of all of the prices, as the BLS does, the Cleveland Fed looks at the median price change—or the price change that’s right in the middle of the long list of all of the price changes. According to research from the Cleveland Fed, the Median CPI provides a better signal of the inflation trend than either the all-items CPI or the CPI excluding food and energy. According to newer research done at the Cleveland Fed, the Median CPI is even better at PCE inflation in the near and longer term than the core PCE." -------------- Though the concept of a "median" seems like a better indicator than the average (or mean), the Cleveland Fed's number is based only on "core" items, and omits food & energy.
Consequently, this calculation also understates inflation felt by the lower 95% of consumers, since energy and food are a larger portion of their expenditures.
Thus the true, "median" CPI is larger than even the Cleveland Fed's median number.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 25, 2013 7:26:18 GMT -6
www.clevelandfed.org/research/data/US-Inflation/mcpi.cfmThe Cleveland Fed has introduced a term I haven't heard previously: the " median CPI." I'm assuming that median means the number where ½ are above and ½ are below. So apparently the Cleveland Federal Reserve's median DISAGREES with the BLS's April Consumer Price Index change. +0.2% rise in median CPI according to the Cleveland Fed -0.4% drop in overall CPI according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a 0.6% difference--over 1 month. That'd be an annualized 7.2% difference. That's a lot of difference. The "median" number means that most Americans are feeling the +0.2% more than the -0.4% concoction from the BLS. And that -0.4% concoction may well be due to stagnant prices on high end products purchased by the rich. And it is quantitatively distorted by the rich buying more items per person than the non-rich.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 24, 2013 0:20:20 GMT -6
from PaulCraigRoberts.org Why Disinformation Works — Paul Craig Roberts
May 23, 2013 by Paul Craig Roberts "Have you ever wondered how the government’s misinformation gains traction? What I have noticed is that whenever a stunning episode occurs, such as 9/11 or the Boston Marathon bombing, most everyone whether on the right or left goes along with the government’s explanation, because they can hook their agenda to the government’s account. The leftwing likes the official stories of Muslims creating terrorist mayhem in America, because it proves their blowback theory and satisfies them that the dispossessed and oppressed can fight back against imperialism. The patriotic rightwing likes the official story, because it proves America is attacked for its goodness or because terrorists were allowed in by immigration authorities and nurtured by welfare, or because the government, which can’t do anything right, ignored plentiful warnings. Whatever the government says, no matter how problematical, the official story gets its traction from its compatibility with existing predispositions and agendas. In such a country, truth has no relevance. Only agendas are important. A person can see this everywhere. I could write volumes illustrating how agenda-driven writers across the spectrum will support the most improbable government stories despite the absence of any evidence simply because the government’s line can be used to support their agendas. For example, a conservative writer in the June issue of Chronicles uses the government’s story about the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, to argue against immigration, amnesty for illegals, and political asylum for Muslims. He writes: “Even the most high-tech security systems imaginable will inevitably fail as they are overwhelmed by a flood of often hostile and dangerous immigrants.” The writer accepts all of the improbable government statements as proof that the brothers were guilty. The wounded brother who was unable to respond to the boat owner who discovered him and had to be put on life support somehow managed to write a confession on the inside of the boat. As soon as the authorities have the brother locked up in a hospital on life support, “unnamed officials” and “authorities who remain anonymous” are planting the story in the media that the suspect is signing written confessions of his guilt while on life support. No one has seen any of these written confessions. But we know that they exist, because the government and media say so. The conservative writer knows that Dzhokhar is guilty because he is Muslim and a Chechen. Therefore, it does not occur to the writer to wonder about the agenda of the unnamed sources who are busy at work creating belief in the brothers’ guilt. This insures that no juror would dare vote for acquittal and have to explain it to family and friends. Innocent until proven guilty in a court has been thrown out the window. This should disturb the conservative writer, but doesn’t. The conservative writer sees Chechen ethnicity as an indication of guilt even though the brothers grew up in the US as normal Americans, because Chechens are “engaged in anti-Russian jihad.” But Chechens have no reason for hostility against the US. As evidence indicates, Washington supports the Chechens in their conflict with Russia. By supporting Chechen terrorism, Washington violates all of the laws that it ruthlessly applies to compassionate Americans who give donations to Palestinian charities that Washington alleges are run by Hamas, a Washington-declared terrorist organization. It doesn’t occur to the conservative writer that something is amiss when martial law is established over one of America’s main cities and its metropolitan area, 10,000 heavily armed troops are put on the streets with tanks, and citizens are ordered out of their homes with their hands over their heads, all of this just to search for one wounded 19-year old suspect. Instead the writer blames the “surveillance state” on “the inevitable consequences of suicidal liberalism” which has embraced “the oldest sin in the world: rebellion against authority.” The writer is so pleased to use the government’s story line as a way of indulging the conservative’s romance with authority and striking a blow at liberalism that he does not notice that he has lined up against the Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence and rebelled against authority. I could just as easily have used a left-wing writer to illustrate the point that improbable explanations are acceptable if they fit with predispositions and can be employed in behalf of an agenda. Think about it. Do you not think that it is extraordinary that the only investigations we have of such events as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing are private investigations, such as this investigation of the backpacks: whowhatwhy.com/2013/05/20/official-story-has-odd-wrinkles-a-pack-of-questions-about-the-boston-bombing-backpacks/ [1] There was no investigation of 9/11. Indeed, the White House resisted any inquiry at all for one year despite the insistent demands from the 9/11 families. NIST did not investigate anything. NIST simply constructed a computer model that was consistent with the government’s story. The 9/11 Commission simply sat and listened to the government’s explanation and wrote it down. These are not investigations. The only investigations have come from a physicist who proved that WTC 7 came down at free fall and was thus the result of controlled demolition, from a team of scientists who examined dust from the WTC towers and found nano-thermite, from high-rise architects and structural engineers with decades of experience, and from first responders and firefighters who were in the towers and experienced explosions throughout the towers, even in the sub-basements. We have reached the point where evidence is no longer required. The government’s statements suffice. Only conspiracy kooks produce real evidence. In America, government statements have a unique authority. This authority comes from the white hat that the US wore in World War II and in the subsequent Cold War. It was easy to demonize Nazi Germany, Soviet Communism and Maoist China. Even today when Russian publications interview me about the perilous state of civil liberty in the US and Washington’s endless illegal military attacks abroad, I sometimes receive reports that some Russians believe that it was an impostor who was interviewed, not the real Paul Craig Roberts. There are Russians who believe that it was President Reagan who brought freedom to Russia, and as I served in the Reagan administration these Russians associate me with their vision of America as a light unto the world. Some Russians actually believe that Washington’s wars are truly wars of liberation. The same illusions reign among Chinese dissidents. Chen Guangcheng is the Chinese dissident who sought refuge in the US Embassy in China. Recently he was interviewed by the BBC World Service. Chen Guangcheng believes that the US protects human rights while China suppresses human rights. He complained to the BBC that in China police can arrest citizens and detain them for as long as six months without accounting for their detainment. He thought that the US and UK should publicly protest this violation of due process, a human right. Apparently, Chen Guangcheng is unaware that US citizens are subject to indefinite detention without due process and even to assassination without due process. The Chinese government allowed Chen Guangcheng safe passage to leave China and live in the US. Chen Guangcheng is so dazzled by his illusions of America as a human rights beacon that it has never occurred to him that the oppressive, human rights-violating Chinese government gave him safe passage, but that Julian Assange, after being given political asylum by Ecuador is still confined to the Ecuadoran embassy in London, because Washington will not allow its UK puppet state to permit his safe passage to Ecuador. Perhaps Chen Guangcheng and the Chinese and Russian dissidents who are so enamored of the US could gain some needed perspective if they were to read US soldier Terry Holdbrooks’ book about the treatment given to the Guantanamo prisoners. Holdbrooks was there on the scene, part of the process, and this is what he told RT: “The torture and information extraction methods that we used certainly created a great deal of doubt and questions in my mind to whether or not this was my America. But when I thought about what we were doing there and how we go about doing it, it did not seem like the America I signed up to defend. It did not seem like the America I grew up in. And that in itself was a very disillusioning experience.” rt.com/news/guantanamo-guard-islam-torture-608/ [2] In a May 17 Wall Street Journal.com article, Peggy Noonan wrote that President Obama has lost his patina of high-mindedness. What did Obama do that brought this loss upon himself? Is it because he sits in the Oval Office approving lists of US citizens to be assassinated without due process of law? Is it because he detains US citizens indefinitely in violation of habeas corpus? Is it because he has kept open the torture prison at Guantanamo? Is it because he continued the war that the neoconservatives started, despite his promise to end it, and started new wars? Is it because he attacks with drones people in their homes, medical centers, and work places in countries with which the US is not at war? Is it because his corrupt administration spies on American citizens without warrants and without cause? No. It is none of these reasons. In Noonan’s view these are not offenses for which presidents, even Democratic ones, lose their high-minded patina. Obama can no longer be trusted, because the IRS hassled some conservative political activists. Noonan is a Republican, and what Obama did wrong was to use the IRS against some Republicans. Apparently, it has not occurred to Noonan that if Obama–or any president–can use the IRS against opponents, he can use Homeland Security and the police state against them. He can use indefinite detention against them. He can use drones against them. All of these are much more drastic measures. Why isn’t Peggy Noonan concerned? Because she thinks these measures will only be used against terrorists, just as the IRS is only supposed to be used against tax evaders. When a public and the commentators who inform it accept the collapse of the Constitution’s authority and the demise of their civil liberties, to complain about the IRS is pointless."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 22, 2013 23:39:00 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 22, 2013 12:00:18 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 22, 2013 11:49:33 GMT -6
Statins ARE thought to have an anti-proliferative effect, which accounts for at least some of the protective effect against heart attacks and strokes. It may be that this same anti-proliferative effect works against skeletal muscle growth and conditioning as well.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 21, 2013 11:53:47 GMT -6
from OC Housing News Home Ownership Hurts Economy?ochousingnews.com/news/new-report-may-kill-the-home-mortgage-interest-deduction"Home ownership hurts the economy. That’s the startling conclusion of a new report that demonstrates a strong correlation between high rates of home ownership and high rates of unemployment. While correlation may not be causation, the correlation is too strong to be ignored. Whether or not home ownership itself is the cause of unemployment is debatable, but whether it does or not, the report will be useful to politicians who need political cover to scale back the home mortgage interest deduction. I’ve covered the merits of the home mortgage interest deduction in many posts. The bottom line is that the HMID does nothing to improve home ownership rates, it inflates the values of houses in neighborhoods dominated by high wage earners, and it’s very costly to the federal government. The only reason we still have it today is because lobbyists for realtors and homebuilders have fought successfully to maintain their subsidies. Politicians in Washington want to cut back this subsidy, but they need political cover to justify their decision. Trimming the budget is a good reason, and now with this report, they can also argue that the subsidy hurts the economy by increasing unemployment." By FLOYD NORRIS — May 9, 2013 Homeownership is a good thing, for the individual and for society. Or so American governments, whether Republican or Democrat, have long believed. The benefits have been cited repeatedly in justifying the existence and expansion of the tax breaks given to home buyers. But maybe it isn’t nearly as good as had been thought. A new study by two economists concludes that rising levels of homeownership in a state “are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in that state.” As more homes are owned, in other words, fewer people have jobs. That’s a remarkable conclusion. Identifying the actual cause is a challenge because it’s difficult to conceive a reason why owning anything, stocks, bonds, gold, real estate, would cause unemployment. The study, by David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England, does not argue that homeowners are more likely to lose jobs than are renters. But it does argue that areas with high and rising levels of homeownership are more likely to be inhospitable to innovation and job creation and to have less labor mobility and longer commutes to work. Why would this be so? I can see how labor mobility would be hindered because it’s much more difficult to sell and repurchase a house than it is to change rentals, but how would home ownership stifle innovation? “We find that a high rate of homeownership slowly decimates the labor market,” Professor Oswald said. At the simplest level, the authors of the study, released by the Peterson Institute of International Economics, point to the fact that the five states with the largest increase in homeownership from 1950 to 2010 — Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and West Virginia — had a 2010 unemployment rate that was 6.3 percentage points higher than in 1950. The unemployment rates in the five states where homeownership went up the least — California, North Dakota, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin — rose 3.5 percentage points during the period. Such statistics are not persuasive by themselves, and the professors know it. Many factors obviously influence unemployment rates in any given state. North Dakota’s current boom stems from energy deposits, which would have been there no matter who owned the land. Is it just random chance that the states with the largest gains in home ownership had the highest rates of unemployment while the states with the lowest gains in home ownership had some of the lowest? Correlations that strong are difficult to ignore."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 20, 2013 23:53:56 GMT -6
In previous articles I have explained how heavy short-selling triggers stop-loss orders and margin calls on investors in gold ETFs. Scared out of their shares or forced out by margin calls, investors’ add to the downward price pressure caused by the shorts. Bullion banks and prominent investors such as Soros are the only ones who can redeem GLD shares for physical metal. They purchase the shares that are sold in response to the falling gold price, and present the shares for redemption in gold metal. Does anyone understand how this works? Why can only Bullion banks and prominent investors redeem GLD shares for physical metal?
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 20, 2013 23:46:38 GMT -6
Very interesting.
Too bad the "opinion makers" have proportionately so much influence on the market, and that consumers don't have a more overwhelmingly dominant role.
I wondered what happened to that.
I was really hopeful this could be put in to practice in medicine.
Instead, marketers sold us a bunch of garbage E-medicine programs and platforms that have seriously compromised the quality of modern medicine.
It's too bad the influence of billers, insurance companies, and government bean counters overwhelmed the influence of doctors in the designing of electronic medical records (EMRs). All EMRs have become is a dumbed-down medical charting system designed exclusively for the benefit of billers, payers, and Government auditors.
I can now see only 10 patients with electronic medical records in the time I could have seen 20 patients with the worst paper medical record system.
EMR's have caused a de-evolution of the practice of Medicine.
I can't help but wonder how many other fields are equally--and negatively--affected.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 20, 2013 12:10:06 GMT -6
At least that's what economist Paul Craig Roberts believes. No Bear Market in GoldMon, May 20, 2013, by Paul Craig Roberts. " You know that gold bear market that the financial press keeps touting? The one George Soros keeps proclaiming? Well, it is not there. The gold bear market is disinformation that is helping elites acquire the gold.
Certainly, Soros himself doesn’t believe it, as the 13-F release issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 15 proves. George Soros has significantly increased his gold holding by purchasing $25.2 million of call options on the GDXJ Junior Gold Miners Index. bullmarketthinking.com/soros-reports-over-239mm-in-gold-positions-buys-25mm-in-call-options-on-juniors/
In addition the Soros Fund maintains a $32 million stake in individual mines; added 1.1 million shares of GDX (a gold miners ETF) to its holdings which now stand at 2,666,000 shares valued at $70,400,000; has 1,100,000 shares in GDXJ valued at $11,506,000; and 530,000 shares in the GLD gold fund valued at $69,467,000. [values as of May 17]
The 13-F release shows the Soros Fund with $239,200,000 in gold investments. If this is bearish sentiment, what would it take to be bullish?
The misinformation that Soros had sold his gold holdings came from misinterpreting the reason Soros’ holdings in the GLD gold trust declined. Soros did not sell the shares; he redeemed the paper claims for physical gold. Watching the gold ETFs, such as GLD, being looted by banksters, Soros cashed in some of his own paper gold for the real stuff.
The giveaway that Soros is extremely bullish on gold comes not only from his extensive holdings, but also from his $25.2 million call option on junior gold stocks. This is a highly leveraged bet on the weakest gold mines. With high production costs and falling gold price from constant short selling in the paper market, Soros’ bet makes no sense unless he thinks gold is heading up as the short raids concentrate gold in elite possession.
In previous articles I have explained how heavy short-selling triggers stop-loss orders and margin calls on investors in gold ETFs. Scared out of their shares or forced out by margin calls, investors’ add to the downward price pressure caused by the shorts. Bullion banks and prominent investors such as Soros are the only ones who can redeem GLD shares for physical metal. They purchase the shares that are sold in response to the falling gold price, and present the shares for redemption in gold metal.
Insiders familiar with the process describe it as looting the ETFs of their gold basis.
In my last column I described how the orchestration of a falling gold price in the paper market protects the dollar’s value from the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing 1,000 billion new ones annually. The other beneficiary of the operation is the financial elite who buy up at low prices the ETF shares sold into a falling market and redeem them for gold. Like all other forms of wealth in the West, gold is being concentrated in fewer hands, while the elite shout “bear market, get out of gold.”
The orchestrated decline in gold and silver prices is apparent from the fact that the demand for bullion in the physical market has increased while short sales in the paper market imply a flight from bullion. As a hedge fund manager told me, it is a Wall Street axiom that volume follows price. Bull markets are characterized by rising prices on high volume. Conversely bear markets feature declining prices on low volume. The current bear market in gold consists of paper gold declining steadily while demand has escalated rapidly for physical metal. This strongly indicates that demand for physical gold continues to be in a bull market despite the savage attacks on paper gold.
If the orchestration is apparent to me, a person with no experience as a gold trader, it certainly must be apparent to federal regulators. But don’t expect any action from the Commodities Future Trading Corporation. It is headed by a former Goldman Sachs executive.
And don’t expect any investigation from the financial press. The financial press sees a bear market while supplies of bullion decline, premiums over spot rise, and even publicly declared bears such as George Soros make highly leveraged bets that will fail in the absence of a bull market in gold."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 20, 2013 12:04:01 GMT -6
It looks like the Fed's irresponsible easy-credit policies are well on the way to creating another Housing Bubble. from the pressherald.com via Patrick.net Housing market showing signs of bubblingMay 19, 2013 As home prices jump, economists caution that in some areas they are rising at a pace that is unlikely to last. By PRASHANT GOPAL and KATHLEEN M. HOWLEY Bloomberg News " BOSTON - Just a year since the U.S. housing market hit bottom after the biggest plunge in eight decades, signs of excess are re-emerging.
U.S. home prices jumped almost 11% in March from a year earlier, the biggest gain since the height of the real estate boom in 2006. Demand for housing has been fueled by low mortgage rates, a scarcity of listings and investors’ appetite for foreclosed homes.
The Atlanta area saw home prices increase by more than 30 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier.
An open house for a five-bedroom brownstone in Brooklyn priced at $949,000 drew 300 visitors and brought in 50 offers.
Three thousand miles away in Menlo Park, Calif., a one-story home listed for $2 million got 6 offers last month, including four from builders planning to tear it down to construct a bigger house.
In south Florida, ground zero for the last building boom and bust, 3,300 new condominium units are under way, the most since 2007.
The U.S. spring home-buying season has been marked by a frenzy of demand fueled by the Federal Reserve's drive to push down borrowing costs, a scarcity of listings and Wall Street's new appetite for foreclosed homes....
economists including Stan Humphries of Zillow Inc. and Mark Vitner of Wells Fargo & Co. assert prices in some areas are rising at an unsustainable pace -- a dramatic shift from early 2012, when billionaire Warren Buffett said housing "remains in a depression."
"It's a big change from a year ago," said Paul Willen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. "You've gone from hearing horror stories about people losing money to hearing stories of frenzy -- lots of traffic and multiple offers."
U.S. home prices jumped almost 11% in March from a year earlier, the biggest gain since the height of the real estate boom in 2006, CoreLogic Inc. reported last week.
Values are rising faster than incomes, an indication that prices may fall in some cities once higher mortgage rates erode affordability, Humphries said.
Investor purchases will inevitably cool, adding another potential hit to the market, according to Vitner.
The gains in some U.S. areas aren't sustainable for a healthy market, said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
"If prices keep going up at this rate for another 6 months, we will have a bubble, and people will get hurt," he said in a telephone interview.
U.S. buyers spent 3 times their annual incomes on homes at the end of last year, and those properties were 15% pricier relative to incomes than before the housing bubble of the mid-2000s, according to data from Seattle-based Zillow.
Markets such as Silicon Valley, Southern California, Boston and New York will look expensive relative to incomes when mortgage rates rise, Humphries said.
"The Fed has put every home on sale because of its actions," Humphries said in a telephone interview....We want people to be aware of the fact that this is unusual and not bake these expectations of high appreciation into their long-term calculus."
The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 3.42% last week, and reached a record low of 3.31% in November, according to Freddie Mac. That compares with an average rate of 6.24% from 2001 to 2006....
So far, the biggest gains are limited to hard-hit markets such as Phoenix and Las Vegas and thriving job centers such as San Francisco, while prices are falling in cities such as Chicago and Indianapolis, according to CoreLogic.
Nationally, existing-home sales are about a 1/3 off a 2005 peak and home construction is down by 66%....
Still, the recent price surge has made 8 U.S. markets -- including Orange County, Calif.; Houston; and Portland, Ore. -- overvalued, the San Francisco-based real estate data company said.
Of the 150 metropolitan areas tracked by the National Association of Realtors, 9 out of 10 showed price increases in the 1st quarter from a year earlier and areas such as Silicon Valley, Calif.; Phoenix; Atlanta; and Reno, Nevada, saw gains of more than 30%, the group said....
In much of the country, inventory has been drained by institutional investors such as Blackstone Group and Colony Capital buying single-family homes, often foreclosures, to turn into rentals, said CoreLogic Chief Economist Sam Khater.
Blackstone, the largest buyer in the United States, spent more than $4 billion on 24,000 rental properties last year.
Vitner, of Wells Fargo, said investors are buying properties as quickly as they can and when they leave, housing will take a hit. Investors accounted for 19% of sales in the U.S. in March and even more in some former bubble markets, according to the National Association of Realtors.
"The problem is if they don't earn a high enough return, they all walk away," Vitner said. "Investors accounted for a larger proportion of the housing recovery than people realize."
In south Florida, 20 condominium towers with more than 3,300 units are under construction, according to Peter Zalewski, owner of Condo Vultures, a brokerage and consulting firm based in Miami.
Another 14,600 units are planned, about three-quarters of them for Miami-Dade County, where the crash left dozens of unfinished and failed condo projects, now mostly filled with renters, he said.
"I don't think there's any question that we're in the early stages of the next great south Florida construction boom," Zalewski said.
The conditions that have propelled prices up for the past year won't last, said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors Inc. in Holland, Pa.
"We're eventually going to see mortgage rates increase, supply increase and affordability decline, so you probably cut price gains at least by half," Naroff said."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 19, 2013 9:05:24 GMT -6
from Salon.com Government preparing to fine tech firms that don’t comply with wiretaps
Apr 30, 2013 By Natasha Lennard " A DOJ task force’s proposal would penalize companies like Google or Facebook and pique privacy concerns.
The government has for many years sought the means, through tech giants like Google and Facebook, to wiretap communications with the use of built-in backdoors. According to the Washington Post, a Justice Department task force, prompted by FBI efforts, is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Facebook and Google to comply with law enforcement wiretaps. Via WaPo:
[/b] A company that does not comply with an order within a certain period would face an automatic judicial inquiry, which could lead to fines. After 90 days, fines that remain unpaid would double daily. … The proposal, however, is likely to encounter resistance, said industry officials and privacy advocates.[/ul] Mike Masnick at TechDirt expressed such anticipated privacy concerns: As Masnick noted, “this is a really silly proposal, that won’t make us any safer. Instead, it’s likely to make us a lot less secure, because those backdoors will be abused, not just by law enforcement, but by those with malicious intent who will work hard to find the backdoors and make use of them.”[/i]"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 19, 2013 8:56:34 GMT -6
from Salon.com Obama may back plan to make FBI wiretaps easierWed, May 8, 2013 by Natasha Lennard " The DOJ proposal, prompted by the FBI, would fine firms that don't comply with government wiretaps
As Salon noted last week, a Justice Department task force — working on the FBI’s bidding — is preparing legislation that would allow the government to wiretap online communications with far greater ease. The plan would see tech giants — like Facebook, or Google — facing fines were they not to build in backdoors to their messaging systems, which would enable government surveillance. The New York Times now reports that President Obama is “on the verge” of backing this surveillance law overhaul, which has been decried by tech industry players and privacy advocates alike.
Albert Gidari Jr., who represents technology companies on law enforcement matters, told the Times, “We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this.” Gidari argued, according to the Times, “that if the United States started imposing fines on foreign Internet firms, it would encourage other countries, some of which may be looking for political dissidents, to penalize American companies if they refused to turn over users’ information.”
Others in opposition to the proposal argue that the built-in backdoors that will be mandated will also make Internet users more vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves. The federal authorities have long complained that current surveillance laws are out-of-date, failing to enable the easy surveillance of online messaging."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 18, 2013 23:53:14 GMT -6
from Policymic.com Obama Wants to Wiretap Your Facebook Feed — Seriously, You Can't Make This Upby Pierce Stanley " Obama Wants to Wiretap Your Facebook Feed — Seriously You Cant Make This Up
Overshadowed by news this week that the federal government secretly obtained two months of Associated Press phone records and following a bevy of reports that Bloomberg News reporters routinely employed their parent company’s sophisticated terminal software to spy on employees at financial firms comes far scarier privacy news.
President Obama is set to endorse the work of a Justice Department task force — working on the FBI’s bidding — to prepare legislation allowing the government to wiretap online communications with far greater ease.
The plan would see tech giants like Facebook or Google face hefty fines if they do not build into their messaging systems backdoors enabling at-will government surveillance. The New York Times reports the Obama administration’s apparent decision resolves years of internal debate on the FBI’s 2010 proposal to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act — “a 1994 law that already requires phone and network carriers to build interception capabilities into their systems” — to include internet-based services....
According to a Washington Post report, “Under the draft proposal, a court could levy a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, on firms that fail to comply with wiretap orders.” A company that refuses to comply with an order within a certain period would face an automatic judicial inquiry, leading to substantial fines, and after 90 days, fines remaining unpaid would double daily.
Foreign-based communications services that do business in the United States and small startups would also be subject to the procedures. Foreign-based companies would be required to have a point of contact on domestic soil that could be served with a wiretap order.
But how are tech companies reacting to the proposal? Not well, say privacy advocates who argue this plan could prove disastrous for innovative companies that fear security risks from hackers who could easily exploit backdoor safeguards, and these firms loathe the potentially huge expenses associated with the plan that may slow down the pace of innovation.
Albert Gidari, Jr., a lawyer who represents technology companies on law enforcement matters told the Times that potential fallout from the plan is politically disastrous as well. When the United States starts imposing fines on foreign internet firms, it may encourage other countries, some of which may be searching for political dissidents, to penalize American companies if they refuse to turn over users’ information. “We’ll look a lot more like China than America after this,” Gidari said. How then might the Chinese react the next time American policymakers object to routine internet wire-tapping practices there?
Claims by the feds that we need cybersecurity legislation, especially bills touting backdoor wiretaps ring hollow. TechDirt blogger Mike Masnick argued it best — this proposal won’t make us any safer, “instead, it’s likely to make us a lot less secure, because those backdoors will be abused, not just by law enforcement, but by those with malicious intent.”"
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 18, 2013 23:42:35 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 18, 2013 23:09:14 GMT -6
It should be lower than that, since we are producing more workers than jobs.
It should be 0.0%.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 16, 2013 12:01:49 GMT -6
www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdfAccording to the official CPI report, total CPI fell -0.4%. Reviewing the details of the report, however, indicates the decline came almost exclusively from a fall in energy prices. But where I live, there has been a 0.0% decline in Gasoline prices over the last 12 months. Everything else has gone up. Food prices have increased +1.5% over the last 12 months. Shelter prices increased +2.2% over the last 12 months. Overall Transportation Services increased +2.5%.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 16, 2013 11:50:24 GMT -6
It's very good news for that 43% of Americans who don't own a home--especially those who'd like to buy 1 some day.
The Fed's actions have done nothing but keep asset prices high. But it's done nothing to create jobs, or new wealth.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 16, 2013 0:05:47 GMT -6
It's the return of Feudalism--21st Century-Style.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 15, 2013 11:57:15 GMT -6
Thanks for the update.
The solution here, as with Pharmaceuticals, is simple.
Simply don't extend patents beyond their original date. There's no justification for doing so.
The producer KNEW at the time how long the patent exclusivity was good for.
How, in an allegedly "free-market", do you justify granting an extension on an already lenthy monopoly for production of a good?
Allowing for patents is anti-free market to begin with. Allowing for extensions beyond the expiration date is beyond being anti-free market. It's a government granted monopoly to a rich producer who can afford to pay off regulators and/or legislators to keep his cash-cow machine longer than he agreed to keep it, and extract unjustifiable pricing power over consumers.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 14, 2013 23:18:36 GMT -6
from MarketWatch: How to stop the FBI from reading your email Officials can read messages older than 6 months without a warrant
May 14, 2013 By Jonnelle Marte " Emails are not private. A message may have one sender and one recipient but it can, with little effort, be read by a 3rd party. In fact, despite the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unlawful searches, federal agencies do not necessarily need a warrant to read emails older than 6 months.
Concerns over such government snooping were raised by the American Civil Liberties Union, which last week noted a “troubling picture” of email surveillance practices by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice. The agencies may be taking advantage of a component of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which requires warrants only for emails that have been stored on a third-party server for less than 180 days.
Documents reviewed by the ACLU showed that the FBI may be reading emails and other electronic messages without a warrant, and that different U.S. attorney’s offices may be applying “conflicting standards,” the group says. “It is time for Congress to step in and standardize the requirements and require warrants across the board,” says Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the ACLU. The report follows a similar review of IRS documents.
Facing pressure from the ACLU and lawmakers, the IRS said it would require warrants before reading all emails in both criminal and civil investigations, but did not offer any clarity on its policy for social media sites. The FBI issued a separate statement saying it “obtains emails in accordance with the laws and Constitution of the United States.” The Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
But such statements aren’t enough, some lawmakers say. A bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.) and Mike Lee (R, Utah) would require the government to obtain a search warrant before going through all Americans’ emails and electronic communications, with some exceptions for emergencies and national security threats.
But even if the bill is passed, privacy experts say, it won’t take long for such a measure to become outdated, or for authorities to find a loophole. “The problem is the law is always, in my opinion, five years to 10 years behind the technology,” says Eduard Goodman, chief privacy officer for ID Theft 911, an identity-management solutions firm.
In the meantime, what can Americans do to protect themselves from warrantless email searches? Authorities will probably always be able to access messages if they have reason to believe someone is breaking the law, says Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser for Sophos, an information technology security and data protection company. But those hoping to avoid unnecessary snooping through emails sent to a spouse (or regrettable messages sent during one’s college years) can take a few steps to protect themselves.
One option is to encrypt messages before sending them, which can make them indecipherable as they are transmitted across servers. Such messages can only be read after the recipient unlocks the message with an encryption key. The process may be too cumbersome for most emails, says Wisniewski, since it requires people to exchange keys. And the option isn’t offered by all email providers, he says.
Given that authorities can only access emails that have been stored on a server for more than six months, privacy experts say another option is to delete older emails or store them directly on a hard drive (which is protected by the Fourth Amendment). Common email platforms like Microsoft Outlook will typically offer an option for archiving emails on a hard drive, says Wisniewski but such messages could no longer be accessed remotely. And if the hard drive fails, the data could be lost entirely.
One final option is an “offshore email account.” Servers operated in other countries would not be subjected to the same rules as those based in the U.S., says Wisniewski. The tradeoff: Connections might be slower than with American email providers, he adds. And people who decide to store their emails abroad also need to be conscious of the privacy rules of the country hosting their server."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 14, 2013 12:01:55 GMT -6
Does the patent have an expiration date, or is it forever?
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 14, 2013 11:34:15 GMT -6
According to the following article, Target sells products that are made using Slave-Labor-picked cotton from Uzbekistan.
I guess American workers just need to be more "competitive" to keep from losing their jobs to slaves.
Or maybe we just need to become slaves like our "competition." from Democrats.com Must Americans Compete with Slaves?" Target Corporation (Target)[1] often offers prices that seem too good to be true - how do they keep their prices so low? Turns out some of Target’s products might be so cheap because they are made with slave-picked cotton from Uzbekistan and/or purchased from Daewoo International, a company that accounts for approximately 20% of all cotton processed in Uzbekistan.
Every year, during the harvest season, over a million children and adults – including teachers, nurses and doctors – are ripped out of their homes, schools and jobs, and forced to work in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan to meet daily picking quotas. They are often threatened and beaten, as in the case of 18-year-old Navruz Muyzinov who was reported to have been beaten to death by police officers when he left his assigned cotton field before meeting his quota during the 2012 cotton harvest.
Over 100 apparel companies (including Target) from all over the world have taken a stand against slavery in Uzbekistan, pledging to not buy slave-picked Uzbek cotton in an effort to push the Uzbek government to end the enslavement of its people. Now, they’re being called upon to follow up on their pledge by joining the Daewoo Protocol, declining to do business with Daewoo until it takes serious steps to stop sourcing slave-picked Uzbek cotton.
We expect more from Target, a company that takes pride in holding the highest ethical standards for itself and for its business partners. So we called and asked them to join the Daewoo Protocol. Target said they didn't need to sign the Daewoo Protocol because they have a “No Uzbek Cotton” policy. But such a policy only works if you're willing to enforce it.
If Target is truly serious about keeping slavery out of its stores, it needs to stop doing business with Daewoo by agreeing to implement the Daewoo Protocol – a series of steps companies need to take to eliminate slave-picked cotton from their supply chains."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 13, 2013 11:57:28 GMT -6
from the NY Post via Patrick.net m.nypost.com/p/news/business/next_home_crisis_lJoi2HNNojY2NGeDei8MsL?source=Patrick.netNext home $ crisisBy JOHN AIDAN BYRNE May 6, 2013 " The seeds of the next housing crisis are being sown this spring, according to a former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae.
Despite the green shoots reported by the Case-Shiller index last week that home prices rose a blistering 9.3 percent in February from 12 months ago, Edward Pinto, a former executive at the government-backed mortgage business, says another crash can’t be too far behind.
Pinto faults Uncle Sam’s housing policy of guaranteeing 90 percent of new loans in the gigantic $6 trillion market through Fannie Mae.
He goes on to say the feds are providing billions in fat trading profits to Wall Street banks and artificially — but temporarily — propping up housing prices.
Sooner or later, he says, economic reality will catch up with this fairy-tale market, which will lead to another depressing housing collapse.
The fundamentals that matter most are falling behind the latest house prices. These include job and wage growth. And that’s amidst a surprise loosening in lending standards and tightened inventory because of the snail’s pace of moving foreclosed properties to market, says Pinto, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Astonishingly, as much as 50 percent of all mortgages today are issued with zero-down payments, which includes many refinanced homes for the banks’ better clients.
In the meantime, Wall Street powerhouses reap their windfall gains, trading these complex mortgage-backed securities.
The Street makes out like a bandit. In this game, banks accumulate nickels and dimes on each side of the trade, profiting on shifting interest rates, mortgage prepayments and other variables — but not on the “real” value of the underlying mortgages.
“The Street makes millions and millions of dollars on these securities,” Pinto told The Post.
“That’s the dirty little secret. The government guarantees repayment of principal and interest payments on a timely basis, regardless of what the borrower does on an individual mortgage level.”
Borrowers also get another lift. The Fed, scrambling to lower mortgage rates, currently near 3.5 percent, buys up $40 billion monthly in these mortgage-backed securities.
But Pinto doesn’t buy it. The trends are remarkably clear, stretching back 150 years through American real-estate history.
“When interest rates go up, which they inevitably will — and we seem to be at the bottom right now — they go up gradually but deliberately over a period of 20 to 30 years,” Pinto said, noting this long-term trend.
When that occurs, the housing market will be hammered again.
By his calculations, if mortgage rates rise from 3.5 percent to 6 percent, incomes would have to rise by 33 percent, or house prices would have to drop by 25 percent, to stave off an otherwise inevitable housing disaster.
Since personal incomes have been static since 2007, that part of the equation is hardly guaranteed. So a home price bust is not far behind, says Pinto."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 12, 2013 23:09:51 GMT -6
NO.
It does not train you for distractions. It trains you to concentrate better on 1 thing at a time, because of the "threat" of distractions.
The Carnegie Mellon study did NOT show that they handled distractions better. It showed that those threatened with distractions--but did NOT experience any--did a lot better.
There's no debate about distractions reducing productivity and critical thinking--and by HUGE amounts at that.
And the study makes clear that multi-tasking reduces productivity and critical thinking--and again by a lot.
Multi-tasking is really just toggling between multiple tasks, and not performing any of them well.
And we can thank cell phones and I-contraptions for that.
The 2 of them are the worst inventions in World History.
They've reduced the productivity, creativity, and functional capacity of society as a whole--despite all the marketing deception and lies to the contrary.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 12, 2013 6:41:10 GMT -6
Is modern technology causing society to move backwards and become less productive?
In at least some areas, the answer is "yes."
from Yahoo:Brain, Interrupted
Tues, May 7, 2013 By Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson " Technology has given us many gifts, among them dozens of new ways to grab our attention. It’s hard to talk to a friend without your phone buzzing at least once. Odds are high you will check your Twitter feed or Facebook wall while reading this article. Just try to type a memo at work without having an e-mail pop up that ruins your train of thought.
But what constitutes distraction? Does the mere possibility that a phone call or e-mail will soon arrive drain your brain power? And does distraction matter — do interruptions make us dumber? Quite a bit, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab.
There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer.
In fact, multitasking is a misnomer. In most situations, the person juggling e-mail, text messaging, Facebook and a meeting is really doing something called “rapid toggling between tasks,” and is engaged in constant context switching.
As economics students know, switching involves costs. But how much? When a consumer switches banks, or a company switches suppliers, it’s relatively easy to count the added expense of the hassle of change. When your brain is switching tasks, the cost is harder to quantify.
There have been a few efforts to do so: Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. But there has been scant research on the quality of work done during these periods of rapid toggling.
We decided to investigate further, and asked Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology, and the psychologist Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon to design an experiment to measure the brain power lost when someone is interrupted.
To simulate the pull of an expected cellphone call or e-mail, we had subjects sit in a lab and perform a standard cognitive skill test. In the experiment, 136 subjects were asked to read a short passage and answer questions about it. There were three groups of subjects; one merely completed the test. The other two were told they “might be contacted for further instructions” at any moment via instant message.
During an initial test, the 2nd and 3rd groups were interrupted twice. Then a 2nd test was administered, but this time, only the 2nd group was interrupted. The 3rd group awaited an interruption that never came. Let’s call the 3 groups Control, Interrupted and On High Alert.
We expected the Interrupted group to make some mistakes, but the results were truly dismal, especially for those who think of themselves as multi-taskers: during this 1st test, both interrupted groups answered correctly 20% less often than members of the control group.
In other words, the distraction of an interruption, combined with the brain drain of preparing for that interruption, made our test takers 20% dumber. That’s enough to turn a B-minus student (80%) into a failure (62%).
But in Part 2 of the experiment, the results were not as bleak. This time, part of the group was told they would be interrupted again, but they were actually left alone to focus on the questions.
Again, the Interrupted group underperformed the control group, but this time they closed the gap significantly, to a respectable 14%. Dr. Peer said this suggested that people who experience an interruption, and expect another, can learn to improve how they deal with it.
But among the On High Alert group, there was a twist. Those who were warned of an interruption that never came improved by a whopping 43%, and even outperformed the control test takers who were left alone. This unexpected, counter-intuitive finding requires further research, but Dr. Peer thinks there’s a simple explanation: participants learned from their experience, and their brains adapted.
Somehow, it seems, they marshaled extra brain power to steel themselves against interruption, or perhaps the potential for interruptions served as a kind of deadline that helped them focus even better.
Clifford Nass, a Stanford sociologist who conducted some of the 1st tests on multitasking, has said that those who can’t resist the lure of doing 2 things at once are “suckers for irrelevancy.” There is some evidence that we’re not just suckers for that new text message, or addicted to it; it’s actually robbing us of brain power, too. Tweet about this at your own risk.
What the Carnegie Mellon study shows, however, is that it is possible to train yourself for distractions, even if you don’t know when they’ll hit."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on May 11, 2013 10:24:28 GMT -6
I can think of some legitimate reasons why young people vote less.
To start with, they simply don't know as much about the world as a whole. They haven't experienced as much, due to having spent less time on this earth.
Abstaining from voting, due to one's admitted lack of knowledge on a subject or issue, is perfectly legitimate in my opinion.
In addition, and unlike retirees, young people have less overall time available to research issues due to employment.
In contrast, however, not voting due to lack of interest is highly problematic. It is young people who will be most affected by electoral & legislative outcomes, because they have more time left on this earth. Consequently, they have more time to suffer the adverse consequences of electoral & legislative out comes.
I applaud those who abstain from voting due to an acknowledged lack of understanding.
But not those who simply don't care.
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