Winner of the 2012 US Presidential Election Is . . .

UPDATE Nov. 7, 2012: I was right! . . . but wish I was wrong.

UPDATE Dec. 26, 2012: Barack Obama received more than 99 percent of the vote in more than 100 precincts in Ohio on election day. Ohio was a very important swing state in Obama’s election. Third world dictators don’t even get 99% of the vote. See the key Ohio precinct vote counts here. Lucky coincidence for Obama that he was so popular in those Ohio precincts.

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A bold prediction about the outcome of the upcoming U.S. election:

I know, for sure, who is going to win.

The winner will be the candidate who is in favor of and supports:

• Going to war with Iran
• Continuation of bankster bailouts
• Continuation of the ongoing legal corporate “donations” and lobbying that pays politicians to be total sellouts
• Increasing the size of government–through more debt, regulation, entitlements, military spending, etc.
• Restriction of liberties, erosion of the Bill of Rights, expansion of police powers, and the growth of Federal power over States Rights
• Continued multi-trillion-dollar debt-based spending, putting the United States into a position of never-ending debt, and possibly economic collapse.

Which candidate is this, you ask?

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A Few Paths to Waking Up the Masses–courtesy of unintended consequences resulting from the evil elite’s insatiable greed and lack of empathy

Like a 2×4 hitting ‘em to get their attention . . .  many things can precipitate a radical change in viewpoint–and drive the masses to want answers, to wake up. For example:

The more people who lose their homes and material wealth in this manipulated downturn, the more people who stop, think and re-evalute.

The more people who realize the financial and political situation is engineered for the good of a very few and not the people, the more wake up.

Such paths to waking up the masses include: (Source)

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Got 3 Minutes?–for a short, concise explanation of our economic crisis, and why the evil elite are lovin’ it

Finally, a short, concise explanation of our economic crisis:

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Ever Wonder Why the Real Estate Market Was Crashed?

Answer: To set up the Oligarch Welfare Program following:

A Huge Housing Bargain — but Not for You

Via: The Street:

The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors — vulture funds.

These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to real value.

You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction.

In the process, these investors will instantaneously become the largest improved real estate owners and landlords in the world. The U.S. taxpayer will get pennies on the dollar for these homes and then be allowed to rent them back at market rates. (Source)

Here we finally see the hidden motivation and the real purpose of crashing the real estate market: creating an excuse to force people out of their homes, making it easy for lenders to grab their homes. The lenders then are “bailed-out” by the Federal Reserve, who passes the bill on to the tax payers. Once the lenders are bailed out they no longer want to hold actual properties, so they quickly sell all their repossessed homes to giant hedge funds for pennies on the dollar. The lenders know they have to sell quickly before anyone realizes what they did, before anyone files legal actions. Lol! Once the homes are sold off just try and get them back. Can’t be done. Bwahahahaha !!

Crashing the real estate market was necessary to take homes from ordinary people, so they could then transfer them to the wealthy–who will turn around and rent them back to the very people who lost homes.

Voila! Wealth transfer mission $$ accomplished.  

Ahem, why not just give the discount on the homes to the folks who live in them?

Duh. Don’t ask silly questions.

As always, profit before people.

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Building 7

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Solving the Mystery of WTC 7

Architects and Engineers: WTC Building 7 collapse

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US is Broke–but . . .

The USA Is Broke But Can Afford 737 U.S. Military Bases And 2-1/2 Million Troops Around The World   . . . But we are going to be forced to “sacrifice” the Social Security money we paid into the government, which they looted and refuse to cannot afford to pay back.

The USA Is Broke But Can Afford to Give $10,700 in Foreign Aid for Every Man, Woman, and Child in Israel:

. . . and, in the news on Aug. 8, 2011, just by coincidence:

81 US congressmen to visit Israel in coming weeks.

[Why are we reading about this in the Jerusalem Post and not the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal? . . . Although accepting free trips from lobbyists is illegal for Congress members under US anti-graft and corruption laws, the trips to Israel have been granted a special exception by the Congress. (Source) ]

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The USA Is Broke But Can Afford to Give Another “Tax Holiday” to Big Corporations . . . Can’t ask corporations to pay their share–can we? 60 Minutes Expose On How Corporations Avoid Taxes While Citizens Pay Over $1 Trillion A Year

Big Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes–taxes are for the little people

1)      Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009.  Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.

2)      Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.

3)      Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.

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It’s Official: Current US Housing Correction is Now Worse than the Great Depression

US Home prices fall harder than in the Great Depression

Home prices during the troubling five years of 1928 through 1933 saw a decline of 25.9 percent nationwide and this was during the Great Depression.

The latest Case-Shiller data shows that home prices in the 20 City and 10 City composite measures are down by 32 percent from their 2006 peak.  (Source)

Home prices have been falling steadily since the summer of 2010.  The fact that we still have close to 7,000,000 homes in the shadow inventory tells us that we still have a long way to go before any normal housing market is restored.

This by far is the worst housing collapse ever and it is still ongoing.

Pity the owners of this home--marked down to only: $150,000,000

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Spain’s Economy in Collapse–right wing austerity measures only served to make things worse

Austerity protests in Spain

 Instead of helping the Spanish people and small businesses, the government has bailed out its big banks and then implemented austerity measures to try to dig its way out of its fiscal hole. That’s why people are protesting. (Source)

Nobel Winner Stiglitz Warns Job-Killing Austerity Measures Hurt Economies

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The Economic Crisis–leads to political crisis

The economic crisis has lead to many credible warnings of crash-induced unrest:

• The head of the World Trade Organization
• The head of the International Monetary Fund (and see this)
• The head of the World Bank
• Credit rating agency, Moody’s
• U.S. Army War College monograph [click on Policypointers’ pdf link to see the report]
• Senator Christopher Dodd
• Congressman Ron Paul (radio interview on March 6, 2009)
• Britian’s MI5 security agency
• Leading economic historian Niall Ferguson
• Leading economist Marc Faber and billionaire investor Jim Rogers
• Leading economist Nouriel Roubini
• Leading economist John Williams
• Top trend researcher Gerald Calente
• European think tank Leap2020
• Washington’s Blog in February 2009 and again in December

The sense of outrage at the injustice of the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer is a growing global trend.

How, exactly, then are Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein different from Mubarak and Ben Ali? Is it because what they do is legal? That would be too easy; they make the laws. What Mubarak did was perfectly legal in Egypt; he made the laws. Is it because they wear no crowns? (Source)

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Global Change–will be live

What we are dealing with here, is nothing short than the transformation of the world as we know it. It is going to sweep the Arab world and from there it will sweep outward in all directions.

Look upon the world at this time and marvel. You can see the plans hatch and fail in real time. You can see the wave, as it rises up from the plains and sweeps around the world into the hearts of every living thing, causing them to vibrate and cry out the truth concerning themselves. (Source)

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This video shows 24 different countries that began 2011 with protests. The video shows the country location and news about the protest/riot. 2011 protests are increasing in quantity and support. Countries shown are Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Honduras, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America, Venezuela and Yemen.

McCain Calls Middle East Pro-Democracy Movement A ‘Virus’

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Underneath the Happy Talk, Is This As Bad as the Great Depression?–cross post from Washington’s Blog

Underneath the Happy Talk, Is This As Bad as the Great Depression?

Cross post from → Washington’s Blog; (Source: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/12/underneath-happy-talk-is-this-as-bad-as.html )

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The following experts have – at some point during the last 2 years – said that the economic crisis could be worse than the Great Depression:

• Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
• Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan (and see this and this)
• Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker
• Economics scholar and former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin
• The head of the Bank of England Mervyn King
• Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
• Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman
• Former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead
• Economics professors Barry Eichengreen and and Kevin H. O’Rourke (updated here)
• Investment advisor, risk expert and “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Well-known PhD economist Marc Faber
• Morgan Stanley’s UK equity strategist Graham Secker
• Former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae Edward J. Pinto
• Billionaire investor George Soros
• Senior British minister Ed Balls

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Bankruptcy for Cities and States–a tool to legally grab the public’s assets

Bwahahahaha hahahaha

2011: The Year Cities Go Bust?

Strange Bedfellows: The right, which usually sees the government as the villain, now wants states to have the right to declare bankruptcy and default on their payments to bondholders.  Of course their goal is not the losses to the bondholdrs (who will turn out to mostly be pension funds – the middle class), but to enable “restructuring contracts” and thus force government workers, police, firemen, etc. to accept vastly lower wages and benefits.  But the big prize is letting/forcing states to privatize everything.  Roads, water systems, parks…  Look at it this way, if Grover Norquist is for it, it cannot be good for the great majority of us. (Source)

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Commercial Real Estate in Europe–50%+ markdowns

After Christmas Markdown: Credit Suisse Group sold $2.8 billion in commercial real estate loans for $1.2 billion.  The loans covered property in Denmark, France, Germany and Sweden. (Source)

Credit Suisse Group is selling a $2.8 billion portfolio of soured commercial-property loans to Apollo Management LP for $1.2 billion, marking one of the largest bank sales of distressed real-estate loans since the downturn, according to people familiar with the matter. (Source)

Clearance Sale!

Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland shares tumbled on Friday after Lloyds said it had effectively written-off more than half of its outstanding loans to Irish borrowers. . . The huge write-offs have largely been driven by the collapse of the Irish property market and 90% of the bank’s loans against commercial property in Ireland are impaired, meaning that the borrower is either behind on payments or unable to service the debt.  (Source)

The EU Crisis:

Spain and Italy have to refinance over 400 billion euros ($530 billion) of bonds in the spring, potentially sparking a fresh crisis within the 16-nation euro area. . . . The euro might break up at this point, though European politicians are normally able to respond to a crisis,” said Center for Economics and Business Research Chief Executive Douglas McWilliams. (Source)

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One in Seven in America, or more–are economic casualties

Beyond Repair: Instead of squandering trillions on pointless wars and bailouts for the rich we could have been investing in our future, our children’s future, our country’s infrastructure.  Instead we’re broke and our infrastructure is broken.  We are fast becoming another country. (Source)

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Wall Street to get $144 Billion in Bonuses for 2010

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All that bailout money has got to go somewhere  . . .

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Know what I’m sayin’?

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How well are the rest of US doing?

U.S. Economy in Review: One in seven in the U.S. lost part or all their income, and so 1 in 7 went on food stamps, 1 in 7 couldn’t afford health insurance, and 1 in 7 couldn’t pay their mortgage, and now 1 in 7 homes stand vacant.

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Here’s the facts:

One in seven in the U.S., or more–are unemployed or under-employed:

The ‘Real’ Jobless Rate: 17.5% Of Workers Are Unemployed. (Source: CNBC News)

One in seven in the U.S.–rely on Food Stamps:

14% of the population is now living on food stamps. That’s about 43 million people, or about one out of every seven Americans. (Source: CNN News)

One in seven in the U.S., or more–have no health insurance:

More than 59 million Americans had no health insurance for at least part of 2010, an increase of 4 million from the previous year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported. (Source: CBS News )

One in seven residential 1st mortgages in the U.S.–are non-performing or defaulting:

An incredible 14% of the nearly 54 million first liens in the country are now either delinquent or in default. (Source: Real Estate Channel News )

One in seven housing units in the U.S.–are vacant:

Approximately 85.5 percent of the housing units in the United States in the third quarter 2009 were occupied and 14.5 percent were vacant. (Source: 2009 US Census report)

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Are Special Interests Bankrupting US

Special Interests Bankrupting US

Organizations of all types lobby vociferously for untenable subsidies and tax breaks. Greedy politicians willing to accept bribes to get reelected, go along. On any threat of reduction in subsidies or increase in taxes, the organizations get out the vote with massive fear-mongering campaigns promising ruin if they do not get what they want. At election time organizations donate massively to candidates willing to back their agenda. Over time, board of directors, city halls, and legislative bodies in general get packed with politicians accepting bribes (campaign contributions) from the organization.

Problems big and small are everywhere you look, and the process of buying votes and seeking special favors is generally smack in the midst of it all.

Republicans will not give in on military spending (nor will Obama quite sadly), and Democrats won’t budge on entitlements. (Source)

Giveaways and Entitlements for the Defense Industry

Defense Budgets

While this graph puts the US defence budget at $US711 billion in 2009, that doesn’t include

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UK Students Riot Due to Tripling of Tuition–economic austerity measures may lead to political crises, or worse

http://www.youtube.com/v/PRKcPZt61SQ?fs=1&hl=en_US

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Another Flood of Foreclosures on the Way–one in seven

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One in Seven Mortgages Are Non-Performing or in Default

As of 10/29/2010 an incredible one in seven or 14% of the nearly 54 million first liens in the country are now either delinquent or in default. (Source)

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The problem is that most houses currently in default become foreclosures later. (The depressing statistics of “failure to cure” are discussed below.) So what? It could get worse–much worse:

1. Given the huge number of houses in default now, a flood of foreclosures is clearly on the way.
2. The expected flood of foreclosures in the near future could further depress prices of home.
3. Lower home prices will put even more home owners “under water” (owning more on their mortgage than the home is worth if sold)
4. Being “under water” could lead to even more home owners to stop making payments, and so on . . .

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Want to see how many homes are in default or foreclosure in your neighborhood? Use Google’s foreclosure maps to expose the extent of defaults and foreclosures nationwide and in your neighborhood. (Source)

For example, this map shows ONE ZIP CODE on Chicago’s South West Side, 60629.

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Foreclosures: Chicago’s South West Side, 60629 (Source)

The red dots represent properties in that zip code that are either in pre-foreclosure (missed one or more payments), or are in foreclosure, or are already bank owned. They are each individual tragedies. (Source)

Take another look at this map for a moment. Consider the words of Fr. Stan Rataj, Pastor of St. Nicholas of Tolentine Parish, located in the center of this Chicago community: “If several hundred families lost their homes to a fire or a tornado, we would rush to help them. This tragedy is just as serious, yet people feel that they have to face it by themselves”. (Source)

Slow Foreclosure Process

Banks are working through their huge backlog of houses in default and foreclosing on them–although it is a slow process. The WSJ says it takes 492 Days From Default to Foreclosure. Why?

Because there is a massive and growing backlog of latent foreclosures. Millions of owners have simply stopped paying their mortgages, and the banks are doing nothing about it, letting the owner live in the house for free.

• If a bank forecloses and takes possession of a house, that means the bank is responsible for property taxes and maintenance. Banks don’t like those costs.
• If a bank then sells the foreclosure at current prices, the bank has to admit a loss on the loan. Banks like that cost even less.

So there is a tsunami of foreclosures on the way that the banks are ignoring, for now.

Those foreclosures will wash over the landscape, decimating prices. (Source)

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Mortgage Foreclosure Fraud

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The banking authorities were shocked – shocked – to discover last week that an awful lot of mortgage paper in this country is not quite in order… appears to contain, er, irregularities. . .

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• How 2 Civilian Sleuths Brought Foreclosure Problems To Light
• The Foreclosure Fraud Crisis,
• Officials in 50 states launch foreclosure probe,
• The Daily Show-foreclosure-crisis

What’s going on here?

There is no rational way to discuss one aspect or another of the hydra facing us. Yes, fraudulent affidavits were used to keep foreclosure mills running. Why not? The mortgages were frauds at inception – deceitful loans made to deceitful buyers. The fraudulent mortgages were quickly passed on to the slice and dice middle-men who knew what they were cutting up was fraudulent but didn’t care as long as they could pass it on – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – as MBS given fraudulently high ratings by firms that were no better than houses of prostitution. A “service” industry grew up that was designed to keep all the players fat, dumb and happy until they were starved, very unhappy, but still greedy, still dumb. (Source)

Want more details? Read this: Nine stories the press is underreporting — fraud, fraud and more fraud

As one commentator summed up the situation: (Source)

You need to be careful of these stories that portray the gang-rape of Americans by the bankers as purely a foreclosure fraud issue. It isn’t. Amy has missed the real heart of the story. The core of the crime is that the mortgages backing the mortgage-backed securities were resold over and over, as many as 20 times, reaping billions in instant profits. But there is no way the sellers of those mortgage-backed securities could make good on the over-subscription, so the only way for the scheme to work is for the housing market to be crashed, and all those mortgages foreclosed as quickly as possible to erase the paper trail that could land the fraudsters in jail!

This scam is not unlike the one portrayed in the Mel Brooks movie “The Producers” in which the producers intentionally choose what they think is a terrible script, “Springtime for Hitler”, which they hope will close the first night. The producers then over-subscribe the investment in the play by 1000%. 100% is spent producing the show, with the other 900% to be pocketed after the show fails and the investors, unaware of the extra shares in the show, accept their losses and leave.

If the over-selling of mortgages into mortgage backed securities was intentional, and that appears to be the case since so many companies were doing it, then the same financial institutions that profited from the selling of mortgage backed securities intended to crash the housing market to cover their escape. They took mortgages and sold them as mortgage-back securities over and over again, then foreclosed the properties to end their obligations to the over-subscribed mortgage backed securities. This is why nobody cared whether home buyers were actually qualified for the mortgages, as the mortgages were never intended to be repaid, only foreclosed on!

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Meanwhile, Wall Street gives points the finger to homeowners:

Wall St. Pins Foreclosure Fiasco on Homeowners

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With fraud absolutely everywhere in our banking system, like some advanced metastatic cancer, financial metabolism comes to a sickening stop. Nobody can buy or sell property. Nobody can trust any American financial institution. Money can’t circulate. Nobody will be able to get any money. It won’t be long before that translates into nobody getting any food. (Source)

In the US, housing is central to the economy, to the financial system, and to the society. It has failed. And with it the consumer economy has lost its main support, so, too, have employment, taxation, the social contract and governance. (Source)

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Rollover, a 1981 movie paints the picture:

Repeat after me: It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie.

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Unemployment Soars among the Younger Generation–85% of college seniors plan to move back home with their parents after graduation

The youth of America rarely have a voice in the country yet their unemployment rate is now at a historical high:

The current unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds in America is 19.1 percent.  You can only imagine what the underemployment rate is (30+ percent).  This is a disturbing trend because research has shown that young workers that lag in terms of starting their career will never catch up financially to other cohorts.  The fact that the unemployment rate is twice the rate of that in July of 2000 should be startling. (Source)

This recession has hit young adults particularly hard,” according to Rich Morin, senior editor at the Pew Research Center in DC. So hard that a whopping 85% of college seniors planned to move back home with their parents after graduation last May, according to a poll by Twentysomething Inc., a marketing and research firm based in Philadelphia. That rate has steadily risen from 67% in 2006.  (Source)

Unemployed Grads NOT Counted among the “Unemployed”: With graduates flooding out of the colleges and universities with dim prospects for employment you might think that unemployment would increase. It won’t. If you’ve never had a job, then, according to Federal lies statistics, you are not counted as being unemployed. To U-3 and U-6 we propose a new category: U-Lose. (Source.)

In the UK things are even worse for new grads: “There are now 40 or 50 graduates chasing every job in the market.” (Source.)

Devil’s Workshop: Alert observers note that sweeping political changes often start with protests led by upset college students with idle time on their hands.

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The extent of the unemployment problem in the US is given historical perspective by the following chart – the current situation stands alone when measured against all post World War II recessions. (Source)

Every state from December of 2008 to December of 2009 saw private sector job losses: (Source)

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It’s not just the young, 60 Minutes reports that underemployment soars to 23% in Silicon Valley:

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9th anniversary of 9/11

It’s the 9th anniversary of 9/11.

WTC 7 collapsed but was NEVER hit by any airplane on 9/11. Watch a 1 minute video clip of WTC 7 falling on 9/11. Pay special attention to the penthouse on the WTC 7 building which mysteriously collapses for no apparent reason just before the rest of the building falls:

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Can you describe what happens to WTC 7 in this video? Take a close look at the manner in which WTC 7 collapses straight down. For the building to collapse in this fashion, all of the load bearing supports would have had to fail at exactly the same time.

And . . . what about that penthouse?

High-rise buildings with much larger, hotter, and longer lasting fires have not “collapsed”, and furthermore, WTC7 exhibited none of the characteristics of destruction by fire: (Source)

• Slow onset with large visible deformations
• Asymmetrical collapse which follows the path of least resistance (laws of conservation of momentum would cause a falling, to the side most damaged by the fires)
• Evidence of fire temperatures capable of softening steel.

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WTC7

Side-by-side comparison of WTC7 falling and a similar building taken down with controlled demolition.

On 9/11 WTC7 supposedly “fell” even though it was never hit by any airplane.

(Source: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3151863007058964662#)

On 9/11 WTC7 supposedly “fell” even though it was never hit by any airplane.

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Who were the terrorists?

Did you know:

• 

  Mural on van on 9/11

  It wasn’t Muslims who were caught on 9/11/01 with a van between 6th and 7th on King Street with a mural painted of a remote controlled airplane diving into the twin towers of WTC.

• It wasn’t Muslims who acquired a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, Buildings Four and Five and approximately 400,000 square feet of retail space, and insured for billions of dollars against terror attacks a mere six weeks before terror attacks did in fact occur, it was Larry Silverstein and his partner Australian billionaire and holocaust survivor Frank Lowy.
• 

  Larry Silverstein

  It wasn’t Muslims who normally breakfasted at the WTC Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower, but by some bizarre coincidence did not happen to be there on 9/11 and were thus spared the fate of occupants on that tragic day (none of whom escaped from the floors above the aircraft impact at 8:46 AM); it was Larry Silverstein who was spared due to having an appointment, an event which also spared his two children who worked at WTC.

• It wasn’t Muslims who trained their cameras on the World Trade Center Towers prior to the first aircraft impact as part of their job in “documenting the event“, who danced and celebrated with high fives prior to the second WTC impact, and who were caught with foreign passports, maps highlighting certain places in the city, and a van that tested positive for traces of explosives; it was Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner, and Omer Marmari, several of whom have been confirmed as Mossad agents.
• 

  Rabbi Dov Zakheim

  It wasn’t a Muslim who took a position as Comptroller of the Pentagon in May 2001 when the Pentagon’s accounting systems were in complete disarray; it was Rabbi Dov Zakheim who took the job as Undersecretary of Defense and Comptroller of the Pentagon where more than $2 trillion of poorly documented transactions were vulnerable to a “terror attack” if the relevant auditing section were to be destroyed.

• It wasn’t a Muslim who served as Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, whose expertise entailed psy-ops, and who confirmed that the Iraq war had been for Israel’s benefit; it was Philip Zelikow.
• It wasn’t a Muslim who, in a 1995 book, predicted that “if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam, the next thing you will see is militant Islam is bringing down the World Trade Center.”
• It wasn’t Muslims who broadcast the pilot episode on March 4, 2001 of The Lone Gunmen TV series, an episode about a plot by a secret cabal within the US government to electronically hijack by remote control a Boeing heading for Boston and divert it to crash into the World Trade Center; it was Fox TV, owned by Rupert Murdoch.
• It wasn’t Muslims who provided two hours’ advance warning of an attack on the World Trade Center via an instant messaging company based in Herzliya.
• It wasn’t Muslims who profited by speculating on airline and insurance stocks in advance of 9/11.

(Excerpted from: http://www.takeourworldback.com/itwasntmuslims.htm )

See also:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZGJ1Jev2m4&feature=player_embedded
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVutUGDiQN0

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Related Links:

• • 9-11 research
  • 911blogger.com
  • Architect and Engineers for 9-11 Truth
  • BUILDING WHAT .ORG
  • Christopher Bollyn
  • Fire fighters for 9-11 Truth
  • Information Underground
  • International Center for 9/11 Studies
  • Lawyers for 9-11 Truth
  • Military officers for 9-11 Truth
  • Pilots for 9-11 Truth
  • Rediscover 9/11
  • WTC, Stranger than Fiction

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Related Articles

• “It Fell in Silence: The Collapse of World Trade Center 7″ (disquietreservations.blogspot.com)
• Building 7: The Smoking Gun of September 11th (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
• 1,280 Architects and Engineers Launch Third Light Beam into NYC Night Skyline on 9th Anniversary of September 11th (prnewswire.com)
• EXCLUSIVE: Uncovered 9/11 Footage Shows FBI Director Asking Firefighters About “Secondary Hits” On WTC… (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Not the Muslims–less than 1% of Europe’s terrorist attacks in 2009 were by Muslims
  
• Scientifically, Building 7 On 9/11 Was An Inside Job (man-over-board.com)
• 9/11 Families Ask: What Happened to the Third Building That Collapsed in the WTC Attacks? (alternet.org)
• BuildingWhat? TV Ad On The Air Now in New York City! (musicians4freedom.com)

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Obama’s Record Deficits–$22,158 new debt added for every US household

Hey, you, middle class people. Get back to sleep.

In the first 19 months of the Obama administration, the federal debt “held by the public” increased by $2.5260 trillion. (Source)

This works out to $22,158 of new federal debt added for each and every US household. How is that calculated?  Lets do the math:

• $2,526,000,000,000 / 114,000,000 US households = $22,158 per US household

When President Barack Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, the total federal debt held by the public stood at 6.3073 trillion, according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department. As of Aug. 20, 2010, after the first nineteen months of President Obama’s term, the total federal debt held by the public had grown to a total of $8.8333 trillion, an increase of $2.5260 trillion.

“Debt held by the public,” includes U.S. government securities owned by individuals, corporations, state or local governments, foreign governments and other entities outside the federal government itself.

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Chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers—Quits

Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has resigned her position. (Source)

"I quit" . . . Christina Romer, Chair, Obama's Council of Economic Advisers

Why did she quit? Maybe she feels like a failure?

Romer had predicted that Obama’s stimulus package (which she advocated strongly) would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent or less; it is now 9.5 percent.

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Here’s what she shared at her final speech:

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At a lunch at the National Press Club on Wednesday Romer gave a farewell speech with four points, each more unnerving than the last:

• She had no idea how bad the economic collapse would be.
• She still doesn’t understand exactly why it was so bad.
• The response to the collapse was inadequate.
• And she doesn’t have much of an idea about how to fix things.

The speech included scary descriptions and warnings:

• “Terrible recession. . . .
• Incredibly searing. . . .
• Dramatically below trend. . . .
• Suffering terribly. . . .
• Risk of making high unemployment permanent. . . .
• Economic nightmare.”

(Source)

Lots of luck guys . . .

According to Romer, “What we would all love to find – the inexpensive magic bullet to our economic troubles – the truth is it almost surely doesn’t exist.”

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Outcomes of Austerity Policies–Greece vs. Ireland

Will anti-austerity riots spread?

Governments everywhere are going broke and want to implement “austerity policies” –cuts to education, medicine, pensions, etc.

But how much? Inquiring minds are asking: How far can governments squeeze the masses with austerity programs before riots break out?

Social experiments are being conducted right now in various countries to get the answer before implementing similar measures elsewhere–like in America.

Don’t want the cattle to resist being led down the path . . .

Point of View: Ireland’s populace quietly accepted their half-bowl of gruel, sat in the unheated corner and were rewarded by seeing their government debt costs rise.  The Greeks got all excited and took to the streets and burned a few cars and then ate some dolma and washed it down with ouzo and have been rewarded by getting lower interest rates than the Irish.  So, which form of democratic participation in the affairs of state seems to work better? (Source)

Revealed: When the self-anointed experts say that revolution is not possible in America, ask yourself what the parents will do when their children are hungry and have no food, sick and have no medicine, cold and have no shelter?  That future is closer than you think. (Source)

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Tony Robbins Grows Up–explains the economy in plain terms

Those familiar with Tony Robbins know that he always goes out of his way to stress the positive, so if even he is openly warning the public about a coming economic nightmare than you know that things are starting to get really, really bad out there.

The video that Tony Robbins published where he gives his economic warning is posted in two parts below.  This is unlike any Tony Robbins video that you have ever seen before and it is absolutely jaw dropping…. (Source)

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An Important Note Of Caution

http://www.metatube.com/en/videos/37911/An-Important-Note-Of-Caution-By-Tony-Robbins/

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Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Prepper Dad?

Even Robert Kiyosaki Is Warning That an Economic Collapse Is Coming

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US Midterm Economic Report Card

84% of Mainstream Americans say the country has gotten off on the wrong track

A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 67% of Political Class voters believe the United States is generally heading in the right direction. (Source)

However, things look a lot different to Mainstream Americans. Among these voters, 84% say the country has gotten off on the wrong track. (Source)

With a gap that wide, it’s not surprising that 68% of voters believe the Political Class doesn’t care what most Americans think.  (Source)

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Some “report card” statistics about the U.S. economy (Source):

• According to a new survey, 28% of U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.
• There are 9.2 million Americans that are unemployed but that are not receiving an unemployment insurance check. [That’s 5.9% of the entire 155 M US work force--who are no longer counted as “unemployed” according to US Govt statistics.]
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  Hmmm . . .

  According to a poll taken in 2009, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck.  That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

• The FDIC’s deposit insurance fund now has negative 20.7 billion dollars in it, which represents a slight improvement from the end of 2009.
• For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

Meanwhile, looking a little beyond the immediate situation:

• Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the combined pension liability for all 50 U.S. states.  What they found was that the 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they only have $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds.  That is a difference of 3.2 trillion dollars. (Source)

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Deflation vs. Virtual Wealth

Some 95% (or more) of our (U.S.) money supply is credit, and by no means all of it was created by any central bank.

Deflation

There have been numerous engines of credit expansion during the mania years – fractional reserve banking, the whittling away of reserve requirements, lack of attention paid to credit-worthiness, securitization, derivatives, the development of the shadow banking system, conflict-of-interest at the ratings agencies, fraud etc.

Credit expansion creates multiple and mutually-exclusive claims to the same pieces of underlying wealth-pie, thereby creating a fictitious wealth that will implode once people realize its existence and reality. Deflation is the chaotic elimination of excess claims to underlying real wealth – the collapse of a money supply that has come to be dominated by ephemeral credit and debt.

At some point we will see investors trying to sell distressed assets, and then we will realize what they are actually worth (i.e. what someone will actually pay for them). When we see that they are worth pennies on the dollar, and that whole asset classes need to be repriced overnight, we will see the reality of deflation. That, almost at a stroke, will mark the destruction of the virtual wealth created during the long expansion years. (Source)

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The Meaning of “Austerity” — and its antidote in Iceland

Off-loading of fiscal responsibility: The most impressive facet of today’s financial landscape is how much of their bad debts the financial sector was able to quickly transform into government debt to be paid through austerity measures imposed on the taxpayers.   After bailing out the banks, governments are destitute and will try to force the public to live on bread and water so the treasury can continue to feed the wealthy. (Source)

The ultimate consequence is going to be that not only will your wages, pensions, health care and other services fade and slowly vanish, what’s left of your wealth will increasingly be confiscated and handed to a bunch of rich gamblers with political clout. (Source)

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Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Unless, maybe, the middle class of USA and Europe learn from the people of Iceland.

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What if all businesses screwed us like Goldman-Sachs?

(Source)

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Austerity Measures — and so it begins . . .

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We are soon going to find out that today’s bailouts are tomorrow’s spending cuts. (Source)

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As Always: In order to allow foreign bankers and speculators to recoup their ill-advised investments in Greece, the EU is imposing severe austerity measures that fall mostly on the poor and will worsen the recession already underway.  Inexplicably, the unions representing about half the country’s workers have called for strikes to show their displeasure at lower pensions, extended retirement age, lower wages and fewer social services.

Tent cities

Meanwhile, in USA: Rep Paul Ryan (R-WI) the top GOP member of the Budget Committee wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Defense(!) plus privatize Medicare, increase taxes on the bottom 20% of citizens by 12.3%, decrease taxes on the richest 1% by a whopping 15%, send a few hundred billion to for-profit insurance companies and calls the whole thing a tax cut. Tax cut – where 90% of the population pays more taxes to receive less services. (Source)

Moody’s Blues: Moody’s says that the reduction in government spending, increases in taxes and cuts to social programs will involve “substantial execution risk.”   By which, they rush to explain, they mean merely riots, not revolution. (Source)

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Some say it’s a pity that we now have to institute austerity measures for the masses, but the bailouts were necessary.

Did bailouts for billionaires “fix” the crash?

No.

Everyone with three functional synapses and an opposable thumb knows that we are headed into a second great depression. (Source)

Want evidence? Ponder this chart . . .

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Collapse accelerates . . .

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Or, consider that:

Alan Greenspan says that the current current credit crunch is “by far the greatest financial crisis, globally, ever” — including the 1930s Great Depression. (Source)

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So, where do we go from here?

Either we’ll have hyper-inflation with relatively little new borrowing, which will rapidly increase the size of GDP while holding the debt load steady.  OR we’ll have gradual growth of GDP [austerity measures] combined with a gradual reduction in debt.

Neither will be a particularly happy outcome, though the level of unhappiness in each scenario will vary depending on your circumstances.

• If you have a job and owe a boatload of money, root for hyperinflation: It will make your salary go up fast (in nominal dollars) while your debt load stays the same.
• If you’ve saved a bunch of money, root for slow growth of GDP [austerity measures] and gradual debt deduction: This will preserve the value of your hard-earned savings. (Source)

Which path is more likely? Just ask yourself which path you’d choose if you were a billionaire with millions to spend on lobbying — and there’s your answer.

The total wealth owned by the 358 richest people in the world, the dollar billionaires, is greater than the annual income of almost half the world’s poorest inhabitants, in other words about 2.6 billion people. (Source)

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Can California Declare Bankruptcy? — not unless we call it something else, like receivership

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States, such as California, are not allowed to declare “bankruptcy”:

Chapter 9 of the U.S. bankruptcy code allows individuals and municipalities (cities, towns, villages, etc.) to declare bankruptcy. But that doesn’t include states. (The statute defines “municipality” as a “political subdivision or public agency or instrumentality of a State”—that is, not a state itself.) For one thing, states are said to have sovereign immunity, as protected by the 11th Amendment, which means they can’t be sued. In other words, they don’t need any protection from angry creditors who would take them to court for failing to pay their debts. As a result, states can simply borrow money ad infinitum.

How  California will can escape its debts? Receivership.

Via "receivership" -- not bankruptcy

Say the state can’t make its debt payments, and no one will lend it any more money. In that case, the federal government can step in and put the state into receivership. This would involve the assignment of an accountant to manage the state’s debt, overseen by a judge. It would be a lot like bankruptcy, except instead of following a structured set of steps—informing creditors, appointing creditors’ committees, a 120-day window to file a plan, etc.—a receiver has the authority to force creditors to renegotiate loans in a speedy fashion. However, the accountant in charge would not have the power to make decisions about the state’s budget, such as which programs needed to be cut and which taxes had to be raised. (No state has ever gone into receivership.) (Source: Can California Declare Bankruptcy?)

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When If California goes into receivership then something like this will can happen:

Motion to force Prichard to pay pensioners denied by judge

(Source: Prichard, AL, March 10, 2010)

Prichard, AL

A bankruptcy court judge for Prichard, the second-largest city in Mobile County, AL, denied a motion Tuesday that would force Prichard to pay its pensioners, saying they do not qualify as administrative claims — or day-to-day obligations — of the city.

A group of pensioners, who have a civil lawsuit pending against Prichard, asked U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge William Shulman to include the pensioners. “They are unable to pay for their basic life essentials,” Alexandra Garrett, a lawyer for the pensioners, argued.

The last check pensioners received was in September. The city filed for bankruptcy in October.

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[Failure of government to honor pension obligations in Prichard, Alabama] should serve as a clarion call to anyone expecting money from [their] pension plan.  Unless you’re going to die soon, don’t count on getting all of it.  Politicians are under no obligation to fund their promises and when the trust runs out of money nobody is going to bail it out. (Source)

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Politicians vs. pension obligations

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