TAKING STOCK

The attached link is a discussion by 6 leading thinkers talking about the immediate problems facing the planet   here

Three major crisis take center stage and should be known by everyone.  A financial crisis is due any time soon with almost nothing you and I can do to prevent it.  The second crisis we are already feeling the effects of is our water supply.  The third crisis is oil depletion.

So lets look at the financial problem.  We have a stock market at all time highs with lots of margin money in play, buying all kinds of junk, including the same deadly derivative packages still being created.  Some say the market is not in a bubble that P/E ratings are in a normal range and on the surface it looks ok, but when you dig deep in the garbage pit you find that a substantial portion of the supposed profit was gotten on the backs of laid off workers, buying back of their own stock, moving factories out of country and other underhanded stunts to make their bottom line look good.

With the whole world playing the austerity game, consumption is falling everywhere as the effects of firings, layoffs, and closings take effect.  Coupled to a new labor market that has supplied mostly low wage jobs to replace the blue collar jobs that have disappeared.  Household income in the US has been falling steadily for many years and inflation (held to be low by government numbers) is actually over 10% on the things every family consumes each month.

If that wasn't enough there is a concentrated movement out there to bust what few unions still exist, strip benefit packages from all workers including those already retired.  For an example look at what is going on in Detroit.  During their bankruptcy  they  have cut wages and benefits for all city workers including those already retired.  Detroit is being watched carefully as the PTB would like to bring it to more troubled cities and more that likely on to federal government workers at some point in time. And if that ain't enough the workers are being screwed by union management.

Another good deal in Detroit they are privatizing all city services, water, sewers, garbage pickup, museums etc. which always ends up costing the citizens more for these services .  The saying use to say "As go GM so goes the nation"   it now says, "  As goes Detroit so goes the nation"  Is the game that wants to be played.

For half the nations households 50K/yr is about as much as they can expect in the US today and many have to do with much less. 

Trade treaties  and government policies have eroded the economics of most families during the last 34 years.  The PTB are still not satisfied and are pushing more treaties such as the TPP to push us further into the ditch.

Meanwhile most of the citizenry seems to be able to ignore what is going on probably for lots of reasons.  Prime reason being they just don't know what to do about it.  While it does seem to be an impossible task sooner or later the people will have enough and find a way to get back to the game.  

Meanwhile new alliances are being formed and finalized to form new world currencies, some have already started trading in their own currencies and it seems to be spreading throughout Asia.  When enough counties trade without dollars involved the dollar as the one world currency is history and it's value will drop like a rock.  Putting further economic burden on us.

With the world getting tired of the US's hegemony plans, they are starting to take actions to isolate the US from a lot of the world.  Yet we still are messing with countries that we want to control, like Venezuela, Ukraine, Cuba and more.
Now we are starting the all adviser game in Iraq , remember Nam, that's how that started.  With Russia and Iran coming to the aid of the current Iraq government it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

WAR MONGERS VOTE AGAINST VETS TIME AFTER TIME

If you have voted republican in the last 30 years I suggest you evaluate your votes in hindsight.  You backed every war since then all of which have been brought to you with proven lies.

Denying vets the benefits they have earned  (for budget reasons)while  continuously pushing for more tax breaks to the upper quintiles  ,coupled with the corporate pork they support should show you your votes have been misplaced.

They went totally ape shit over the VA hospital screwing with vets appointments allowing 40 of them to die while waiting for service.  They could be taken seriously if they hadn't voted continually against every Vet bill presented.

These same bunch of Congressman push for more wars and action under arms but almost never vote to provide those who served the benefits they have earned.  Some of these vets have given body parts, brain parts, and years of their lives.  Some have lost everything they had, families, homes and jobs.  Many can't find work , yet bills to provide training and employment counseling go unfunded.

Here's a partial list of bills they defeated.

Here's a concise extraction for easy viewing for those who are INTERESTED IN VETERANS ISSUES and need to know which party supports veterans and which party does not.

The rejected Bills are named:

H.R. 466 – Wounded Veteran Job Security Act became H. R. 2875.

H.R. 1168 -- Veterans Retraining Act

H.R. 1171 – Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program Reauthorization

H.R. 1172 -- Requiring List on VA Website of Organizations Providing Scholarships for Veterans

H.R. 1293 -- Disabled Veterans Home Improvement and Structural Alteration Grant Increase Act of 2009

H.R. 1803 -- Veterans Business Center Act

H.R. 2352 – Job Creation Through Entrepreneurship Act


DETAILS OF BILLS REJECTED BY REPUBLICANS:

H.R. 466 – Wounded Veteran Job Security Act – This bill would actually provide job security for veterans who are receiving medical treatment for injuries suffered while fighting in defense of their country. It would prohibit employers from terminating
employees who miss work while receiving treatment for a service-related disability.

H.R. 1168 -- Veterans Retraining Act – This bill would provide for assistance to help veterans who are currently unemployed with their expenses while retraining for the current job market.

H.R. 1171 – Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program Reauthorization – This bill would reauthorize programs in support of homeless veterans, to assist them with job training, counseling, and placement services through the Department of Veterans Affairs through 2014.

H.R. 1172 -- Requiring List on VA Website of Organizations Providing Scholarships for Veterans which does nothing more than direct the Department of Veterans Affairs to include information about scholarships for veterans.

H.R. 1293 -- Disabled Veterans Home Improvement and Structural Alteration Grant Increase Act of 2009 – Here’sanother bill in support of those who have fought for their country, passed by House Democrats and blocked from becoming law by Republicans.

This would increase the amount paid by the VA to disabled veterans for necessary home structural improvements from $4,100 to $6,800 for those who are more than 50% disabled, and from $1,200 to $2,000 who are less than 50%, disabled. This means, if a veteran lost the use of his legs in service of his country, the country will pay for the wheelchair ramp so that he can live at home.

By the way, the last time this ceiling was lifted was in 1992. There isn't even a fiscal reason for being against this bill, as the total cost of this bill, according to CBO estimates, would be a “whopping” $20 million. That's about a quarter (25 cents) per family of four.

H.R. 1803 -- Veterans Business Center Act – This bill would set up a Veterans Business Center program within the Small Business Administration, which would specialize in such programs as grants for service-disabled veterans, help them develop business plans and secure business opportunities. In other words, folks, it would create jobs and offer opportunities those who have fought in defense of our country.

H.R. 2352 – Job Creation Through Entrepreneurship Act – This bill essentially combines a number of other bills that Republicans had blocked in the Senate previously, and adds a few elements. The bill would again establish a Veterans Business Center Program; .... it would establish a Military Entrepreneurs Program; ...

Blocked a 21 billion bill for medical, education and retraining.

DISENGAGE BRAIN ENGAGE 0 TOLERANCE

Just one more story on the stupidity of 0 tolerance running rampant through our school system.   In this case the boy was driving his father's care (his father is a fisherman) during a lock down and inspection they the fishing knife in the car.  Boy is a senior and he was immediately suspended for 10 days and sent for 90 days to an alternative school (what the hell ever that is).

No explanation allowed , suspended and punished without an explanation.  His family was unsuccessful coming to his defense as no excuses would satisfy the warden that his story was worthy of a look.. Nop go your done, sent to purgatory for what?

All too often this 0 tolerance system comes to the surface and it usually involves some minor violation that could be solved any number of saner ways.  But no, the zero tolerance rules must be obeyed without engaging a brain.

My first encounter with   Zero tolerance was in the late sixties in Idaho, where JR Simplot started a zero defect program in his potato plants.  So there after it started showing up in the school systems as the thing to do.  It requires an administrator to simply look at a little chart and pronounce the sentence, you did this ,x number of days on the beach or perhaps and expulsion.

Even in the good ole days in catholic school the black crows would ask for your story before they punished you.  Once in awhile they believed you and you went unpunished.. If guilty you may have been whacked with a ruler.  Yeah capital punishment , somehow seemed more just than actions today.
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In the 90's at a meeting of school board candidates "ZERO TOLERANCE" was a question asked of the candidates   all but one was for it.   Of course the one lone dude didn't have a chance he was soundly defeated.  The people had no problem with dogs searching backpacks and lockers with no probable cause.  Over time it sure looks to be that  when one becomes a school administrator one parks their brain in a locked safe.

Zero tolerance might make it easier for punishment but it sure doesn't give any credit for telling the truth.  Even the military in the old days gave some lee way during the mast phase of on investigation
to hear the stories of those involved in the incident.  There are positions in this world (as Captain of a ship) where if it happened in your command you are responsible and in lots of cases you loose your command.

It would seem as the world progresses we would always move forward, but the reverse seems to be true.    

FROM BAD TO GOOD TO ESSENTIAL

26 Years ago after my quad heart bypass and do to my wife's insistence we became very conscience of the kinds of foods we took in.  Drastic changes in diet occurred and things got pretty boring for awhile.  One more bran muffin and I was ready to exit this earth.  Then I bought a book entitled "THE LIVING HEART DIET"  therein was the best description of what cholesterol was and how to control it.  Great book that even contained good recipes .  At that time lots of everyday items were verboten , but the book emphasized that taking everything in moderation would work too,  So we started to modify a pretty dull diet into something you could live with.

During the ensuing years bad turned to good to essential.. A little common sense told you that they were not correct in putting the bad label on lots of things we enjoyed.. Whole milk, coffee, sugar, salt etc.. we slowly added stuff back to our diet to make things a bit more interesting..

Now along comes a new report that reclassifies things that were on the bad list to now being essential. HERE'S THE REPORT  

Taking into consideration genetic variations driving your cholesterol problem diet at best in most can correct just 10% of your numbers.. Therefore assistance from drugs is a must for most.  For instance in my case , cholesterol at heart attack was 360 (keep in mind in 87) cholesterol was not in the forefront of the medical field.  Shortly after it became the hottest item in medical care.   Everybody was on some drug or the other.  In the beginning our diet was very strict practically removing all fat from our diet,  discouragingly my cholesterol dropped to the low 300's.  Worked like hell for the next 25 years or so taking multiple drugs to control the beast... managed to get below 200 most of the time.. A recent change in my body has made everything easier to control, down to one drug for cholesterol instead of 3 .  Lots of other things happened at the same time and no one knows why the changes occurred .

Now the linked report verifies what we had kinda figured out on our own over the years... So if you have given up items on the now good list you can in good conscience add them back to your diet.   Life will be a little more fun.

Waiting patiently for them to say they were wrong about smoking.  Don't say it, I know..

TAKING STOC K

The pen of the Tiger has been quiet of late.  Lack of motivation, no, really waiting for all the big guns to state their state of the economy and make their potifications  public.   Of course all of their projections of where we are going in 2014 are all over the place, but of this mismatch of ideas several major and sometimes startling things have been revealed.

Let's for the sake of this post just put the gains of the stock market where they belong , only of interest to the very rich  who primarily benefiting from the run up of the market fueled by over 3 trillion dollars of newly printed greenbacks that went straight to the banks who promptly started pumping up Wall Street till it reached heights many believe are unsustainable.. at nearly double normal P/E's there is no doubt that a crash is coming and probably very soon.  I don't  make time predictions I instead try to guess the order of events over time.

So we shall consider things only of importance to the every day folks trying to maintain an upright position thruout this turbulent time.  Let there be no doubt that I believe it was crooked banks and mortgage brokers who tailored this crisis to their own benefit.  Some , of the economists I trust blame it on the government either too little regulation or too much regulation ,  I on the other hand think the banks are the one's with the most fault.  They committed felony after felony using phony data to qualify folks who in normal times would not have been qualified for a loan.  How many of the housing loans were of this nature is hard to say but if you look at the number of foreclosures you can get a feel that it was in the millions.  That was a terrible thing they did but not the worst thing.  The worst was building the derivative packages out of the junk mortgages packaging them with just enough decent loans to enable the rating companies to give them an A rating signifying were investment grade bonds knowing for well they were really junk.  The rating they all knew was false.  How they got so many money managers to buy this junk still amazes me considering how much danger they inflicted on their pension funds and city monies on this stuff.  Throughout the world manager after manager bought this junk and bankrupted their countries forcing the citizens to eat the debt instead of the banks that caused the problem . How big was the problem , nobody can actually put a number on it but estimates have from 600 trillion to a quadrillion dollar problem .  If that was not bad enough, housing prices shot up 15 to 20% per year giving many equity in their homes the banks convinced them was their money and liberally gave out second mortgages that also turned out toxic in the end.  This is obviously the end of the train that was planned and carried out over 30+ years with unfortunately pretty successful.

How did we get into the mess we are in.  To understand it you have to go clear back to 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan, bringing with him the Free Market babble that him and Stockman and cronies sold the public.  Singing the song that we were entering a new age of white collar jobs that would replace the blue collar jobs that built our middle classes.. Among his first act was to bust the Patco union of air traffic controllers that started the onslaught of union busting that drove union participation from the mid 30's to 7 %.  Production jobs and the companies started fleeing the country looking for cheaper labor costs.  As those jobs disappeared what replaced them in  general were low wage (minimum wage most of them) jobs that dropped house hold income as much as $5000 a year present day.  Some folks retrained and got positions in white collar jobs that soon started to disappear to foreign soil too, leaving our work force trying to make ends meet without a lot of success.

We arrive today at the beginning of another year and from the description above you know we are not in good times.  We are told that GDP increased by 3+ points while all the major companies are reporting their November and December were not very good.  Knowing that we consumers are 70% of demand and that half of  the households are making 50K or less, a lot with only one wage earner are below 30K we will you immediate doubts about the Gov's GDP numbers.  In actuality GDP has been positive only one time since 2001 as shown by Shadow Stats.

It is pointed out often that we are doing just fine, look at the stock market up a ton last year.  Of course they are hoping that you figure that means your are doing well.  How come we are not?  Several factors are easily seen to be a major contributor to our lack of well being.  The average family has lost $5000 of income in the last decade while inflation measured with the old formula is running close to 10% verified to be closer to reality than government numbers every time we go to the grocery store.   A pictorial view of food inflation , seems about right to me.

  

People are making less if they are making anything at all and are loosing ground every day to low wage, high prices for everyday things food, gas, heat, lights , the things we have to have.  While the government pretends that inflation is down and are actually worried about deflation we in the real world watch what bucks we are bringing disappearing faster and faster each month.

The loss of 8 million manufacturing jobs and 60000 factories have left us throwing away several generations of our people.  The latest college grads can't find work or if they do the job pays so poorly a large chunk of them have moved back with their parents.   Sooner then these grads know they will be considered out of the work force too long to be of use to anybody.. What are they to do?  then you have the 50 and over crowd you can't find work doing anything.. You find some at fast food joints or Walmarts but they are the lucky few of this age group able to find any work.  The rest are just screwed.   I know of some who have been looking for work for 4  years without a bite and some of these have 10 and 15 years in the business , their age kills any chance of them finding work.

Meantime back in the republican  bunkers they are finding more ways to kill what little is left of the middle class.  Take a city like Detroit where the latest news from the appointed City Manager is intending to remove health care from 20000+ retired city workers, and reduce payments to their pension fund  by 75%. Seems fit to mention here that those benefits were gained under negotiated contracts that the city believes can be just thrown out the window.  False stories are published every day saying how these greedy union workers have demanded too much and their pension funds are sorely underfunded ( which is just more Voodoo economics) If funds are short it is because the  city and states have not been paying their share into the funds for a long time.   These 30 year estimates are so wacky nobody should ever believe even one of them.  Same kind of math that has been used to figure derivatives is being used to same these funds are underfunded.   The attack on teacher's pushed by mainly republican governors has destroyed many schools and teachers while not making a thing better.

We now live in a country where every thing about our daily lives is noted by some device to be used for God knows what.  Sure it may be mainly to sell us stuff but once the data is out there anything is possible.  Way too many under the blanket programs are running out there listening in to, or video recording every moment of our lives.   Soon thousands of drones will be flying our skies probing into our secret places, no more playing grabass with your love in the weeds.

We are saddled with a Supreme Court whose decisions over a decade or two have stripped us of our rights and giving corporations unlimited access to our politicians because after all they are people too?  They stole an election giving us 8 lovely years of Bush/Cheney and a couple of wars we didn't need.

We are saddled with a congress who have done damn near nothing for for the last 6 years.  A Congress manned by varying degrees of lunatics pursuing the agenda of their corporate masters caring not what we need and want.  In most cases no amount of citizen action seems to be able to sway their minds.  They plod on uncaring of what we say or think about them.. Without a way to break the corporate hold on our lawmakers the ruse will go on forever.

The parallels between 1914 and 2014 are many.  Corporate strangle hold on government, monopolies abound, bubbles blowing around us, a restless world with trouble spots in lots of places.  Budget problems similar to   the Great Depression.  Even though they call our current downturn a Great Recession, it more resembles the Big D.  I believe the downturn is not over yet and the conservatives aided by a complacent democratic party and president will strangle us with more austerity driving us into the final leg of the 2nd Great Depression.

How do we get out of this mess.. The usual fix is a great war. WW2 is given credit for our recovery from the GD.  A war might have fixed the first one, but times are different today.   Nukes all over the place change the balance sheet as to the possibility of using war as a growth tool.  We may still be the strongest  in war capability and we could certainty nuke em, but getting nuked back would surely put and end to this mess, unfortunately the world end too.  We have proven 3 times in recent history we cannot win a land war anywhere,  Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been abject failures and they had punk armies.  Our biggest possible enemies are much better equipped land army wise but all are left without a way to move large armies across seas.  So scratch wars , they are just not survivable.

By now you should know the whole world is in the same mess, caused by the same few institutions and people.  They are intending to make us pay for their misdeeds and so far have done so in much of the world.  A few countries such as Iceland have shown us how not to do that.  So far we haven't learned that lesson.

There is only one way I can think of to fix this mess and it could be done world wide.  A mass effort to bring the world power to their knees is the only choice.  To bring them down you have to put their wealth in danger.  All the money in the world will not buy the services they need from us.  A week of not buying anything , or going to work would bring them around pretty quick. Problem is how to pull this off.  At present most don't  seem inclined to do anything but take it.  But as we have seen the more they take from us the more they want.  They will reach a point where "WE THE PEOPLE" will stand and say enough.  It will take a strong leader to take command in just one country and step forward and call for the masses to stand up and scream "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I WON'T TAKE IT ANY MORE.  WITH YOUR HELP IT COULD HAPPEN

FUKUSHIMA JUST THE SCIENCE OF OUR ENVOLVEMENT

Over the last few weeks there have been several very scary stories blaming Fukushima  radiation for every happening in the Pacific.  Most official sources of information (read governments) have been very quiet on posting real data on events caused by the plant meltdowns.

Realizing much of the data being pushed was from not too reliable sources so I went in search of a real organization researching all aspects of the problem.  So I am offering this LINK as a reliable source of info on the disaster

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING HERE OR NOT

First we hear of Starfish mass dying off and now this article saying the Pacific ocean floor has a 98% covering of dead things.  The coverage just a few years back was 1% , now something is killing off the ocean critters.  Change started about the time  Fukushima  blew up.  Does this mean that the meltdown caused this?  I guess you have little true information to fall back on that you can count on as real..Scientists of all sorts give opinions on the scope of the problem and you can pick your favorite.

While reports vary widely on the contamination levels off our coast are low and barely above normal.  But you can't help but question the truth of any of this when you see stories like the one linked here.  A sudden die off of such a wide range of sea creatures should cause lots of folks digging into the cause.. If it is radiation causing this we are in bad trouble, as the leaks from Japan continue today at what levels none can be sure as the reliability of the data being released is questionable..

THEN THERE IS THIS Seems like the above story is another made up piece that makes trying to understand the problems caused by the meltdown impossible.  Real information is scrambled by those trying to make their point , data be damned.  So one has to be very careful in selecting their information sources..

AND FROM SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN :  THIS