Weekday NEWS to Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable.
Mon 05.18.2009
Don't Count On Your 401(k) "Our nation's system of retirement security is imperiled, headed for a serious train wreck. That wreck is not merely waiting to happen; we are running on a dangerous track that is leading directly to a serious crash that will disable major parts of our retirement system." -- John Bogle, Feb. 24 If several years before the financial and credit crisis hit, someone had told you that the housing market was preposterously overvalued and derivatives were headed for cataclysm, would it have been worth paying attention to? The answer's pretty clearly yes, ain't it? Of course, some of the best minds in finance -- from Warren Buffett to Yale housing economist Robert Shiller -- did. It's just that hardly anyone listened. Now there's another crisis building. It's just as big. Again, some of the best thinkers in the financial world are warning about it. (Yes, Buffett's one of them.) And yet again, as is often the case with gathering storms, most of us are doing our best to ignore the warning signs. Americans lost almost a quarter of their retirement savings last year. Yet even if there were no market drop, we'd still be facing a disaster in the making.
Guaranty Financial on the Rocks Guaranty Financial should be included in OA’s “bank death watch.” With $15 billion in assets and $11.6 billion in deposits as of 12/31, Guaranty Bank would be the largest bank failure in 2009.* Reader Andrew tipped us off to their second “notification of late filing” regarding Q1 financials. Like BankUnited, Guaranty’s balance sheet is so messy, the company is at a loss regarding its financial condition. Also like BKUNA, the bank has orders to raise capital or face seizure.
Treasuries Advance as Stocks Fall, Fed Prepares to Buy Debt Three times this week Treasuries rose, adding to last week’s gain, as Asian stocks extended losses and the Federal Reserve prepared to buy 10-year notes today. Benchmark 10-year yields will fall about 40 basis points by mid-year and the U.S. economic recovery may stall, according to a report from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the 16 primary dealers that trade directly with the Fed. The central bank also plans to buy Treasuries on May 20 and May 21 as part of its plan to cap borrowing costs and combat the steepest U.S. recession in 50 years. “The economy is still in trouble,” said Takashi Yamamoto, chief trader in Singapore at Mitsubishi UFJ Trust & Banking Corp., part of Japan’s biggest bank. “Yields will go down.”
DOLLAR CRISIS IN THE MAKING, Part 1 Before the stampede Increasingly ominous clouds are gathering in what could soon be the perfect storm against the United States dollar and against the present dollar-centric global financial order. This is not shaping up to be a storm that anyone is trying to initiate, not even those who are actively driving for a new global financial order that is no longer centered on the dollar. Instead, it will result from a correlation of forces arising out of the deepening global financial and economic crises, coupled with recurring and conspicuous miscalculation on the part of some of the world's political, financial and economic leaders. The storm has the potential to cause upheaval on a grand scale, opening the door to swift, and largely uncontrolled, fundamental transformation.
DOLLAR CRISIS IN THE MAKING, Part 2 The not-so-safe haven Official and popular analysis of the predicament facing the US dollar has for the most part been distinctly unwilling to come fully to grips with the stark truth about the real nature of this deepening crisis and the escalating risks that are surfacing. Far too much optimism and wishful thinking, and scarce courageous realism, is a recipe for an even worse disaster than the one we're suffering at present. We have seen in Part 1 the profound risks of a dollar crisis being triggered if global demand for US Treasuries remains high and that the debt bubble persistently and destructively sucks all the air out of the global credit markets. However, if global demand for Treasuries is not sustained at a very high level, there exists an entirely different, yet equally destructive set of impending and mounting risks that a dollar crisis might be triggered.
DOLLAR CRISIS IN THE MAKING, Part 3 China inoculates itself against dollar collapse There is mounting evidence that China's central bank is undertaking the process of divesting itself of longer-dated US Treasuries in favor of shorter-dated ones. There is also mounting evidence that China's increasingly energetic new campaign of capitalizing on the global crisis by making resource buys across the globe may be
helping its central bank to decrease exposure to the dollar, while
simultaneously positioning China to make much greater profit on its investment of its reserves into hard assets whose prices are now greatly beaten down, while
also affording it greatly increased control of strategic resources and the geopolitical clout that goes with it. This is turning out to be a win-win-win situation for China as it capitalizes upon the important opportunities afforded it by the present global crisis.
Elizabeth Warren Introduces COP's May Report
China is right to fear US dollar debauchery The US dollar has weakened sharply against the euro over the last week. Optimism is one reason: investors feel cheerful enough to leave the supposedly safe haven of the greenback. But fear is another reason. In the middle of the week, China's central bank warned of a "policy mistake" by some of its western peers. The Chinese are worried that the decisions by the US and the UK to try to print their way out of economic trouble will end badly. The money creation could end up debauching the dollar and pound and inviting a global inflationary crisis.
The Almighty Renminbi? Chinese Yuan will eventually take over from the dollar as reserve currency THE 19th century was dominated by the British Empire, the 20th century by the United States. We may now be entering the Asian century, dominated by a rising China and its currency. While the dollar’s status as the major reserve currency will not vanish overnight, we can no longer take it for granted. Sooner than we think, the dollar may be challenged by other currencies, most likely the Chinese renminbi. This would have serious costs for America, as our ability to finance our budget and trade deficits cheaply would disappear.
Fed plays proxy for China Both the US Federal Reserve and the bond markets have a vested interest in seeing yields on Treasuries of all stripes remain very low, and this is especially so when it comes to the longer-dated assets. Low yields tend to keep the costs for financing government spending low. Since quite a number of loan rates, such as home mortgages, are tied to the yield on certain Treasuries, low yields tend to bring down interest rates on key consumer and business borrowing, which then tends to liven-up seized credit. Holders of Treasuries, especially the longer-dated assets, don't want to see yields rise because that eats away at the value of their holdings. So, if the interests of the Fed and those of the bond markets coincide on low yields, where's the clash of wills between the two parties?
China keeps buying U.S. bonds despite concerns China is pumping more money into US Treasury bonds, recent data show, despite concerns expressed in Beijing in recent months over the safety of dollar-linked assets. Mainland China's holding of Treasury securities jumped to 767.9 billion US dollars in March from 744.2 billion US dollars the previous month, according to US Treasury data. The figure does not include those of Hong Kong, China's special administration region, which climbed to 78.9 billion US dollars from 76.3 billion US dollars. The statistics showed China sitting comfortably as the top purchaser of Treasury bonds despite years trying to diversify its reserves from the US dollar.
Have China watchers never heard of a decoy? I would bet that the Chinese have been busy using their Treasury debt as collateral against FIXED-interest-rate loans. They will have used this money to buy real assets. We know they have bought at least 454 tonnes of gold. They are importing 70 percent more copper than they consume. They are filling up a strategic petroleum reserve. They have been going around the world making deals for raw materials and acquisitions of small-enough companies that they fly under the radar. (The Chinese learned their lesson from trying to buy Unocal.) . . . . . . . . The Chinese have a $300 billion sovereign wealth fund. If that is properly positioned in commodities, it alone will hedge China's entire bond portfolio. The notion that the Chinese have accumulated this massive U.S. debt portfolio and only now are wondering what to do about it is so naive it doesn't warrant serious consideration. I have dealt with Chinese in business and they are the sharpest knives in the drawer. My guess is that China has already diversified most of its dollar holdings.
The China Puzzle . . . . Over the past decade, China and the United States have developed a deeply symbiotic, and dangerous, relationship. China discovered that an economy built on cheap exports would allow it to grow faster than it ever had and to create enough jobs to mollify its impoverished population. American consumers snapped up these cheap exports — shoes, toys, electronics and the like — and China soon found itself owning a huge pile of American dollars. Governments don’t like to hold too much cash, because it pays no return, so the Chinese bought many, many Treasury bonds with their dollars. This additional demand for Treasuries was one big reason (though not the only reason) that interest rates fell so low in recent years. Thanks to those low interest rates, Americans were able to go on a shopping spree and buy some things, like houses, they couldn’t really afford. China kept lending and exporting, and we kept borrowing and consuming. It all worked very nicely, until it didn’t.
Asia will author its own destruction if it triggers a crisis over US bonds Japan beware, crashes have a habit of bringing regime change ET TU TOKYO? If Washington is counting on Japan to act as last-resort buyer of US dollar bonds, it may have to think again. Masaharu Nakagawa, finance chief of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), told the BBC that his country should not purchase any more US debt unless issued in yen as "Samurai" bonds, akin to "Carter bonds" in 1978. This is the sort of petulance that tends to emerge in the late phase of slumps (1840s, early 1930s) when mass lay-offs provoke a populist backlash and hotheads run away with the agenda. Mr Nakagawa later played down the comments, calling them private thoughts, but the genie is out of the bottle.
The Problem With Debt 5.4 million homeowners now owe more on their houses than their houses are worth, up from 13.6 million four months ago. The number will probably top 20 million when all is said and done. To mark this sad stat, we've updated our post from last fall on the power of leverage. As Warren Buffett succinctly observed, anything multiplied by zero is zero. Put differently, when the value of the asset drops below the value of the debt used to buy it, poof. Nowhere is this concept more important than in the housing market.
Peter Schiff Vlog Report 15 May 2009 Americans have to figure out how to convert shopping malls back into factories to produce for ourselves and rebuild our savings - process is harder because of what the government is doing. Our recession will get worse and worse.
Central Banks May Need More Oversight Authority, BIS Says Central banks may need more supervisory authority over financial companies that pose a danger to the financial system, the Bank for International Settlements said. “If central banks are to play a key role in dealing with systemic risk when applying a more macro-prudential approach, they may also need to have closer oversight of systemically significant institutions,” the Basel-based BIS said in a report to be published tomorrow [Monday, May 18th].
There Will Be No Recovery All the glad-handing, back-slapping self-congratulatory accolades the Obama administration and Wall Street are heaping upon themselves in the press is scant comfort for the vast majority of citizens now unemployed and of no fixed address. For them, this economic crisis isn’t so much a temporary crisis as a permanent redistribution of wealth and living standards representative of a downgrade in the quality of life. A dispassionate eye, equitably minded, would regard the current gross imbalance among haves and have nots as a simple case of injustice, easily rectified. Those travelling daily in jets and Escalades leveraged the savings and credit ratings of the common people to agglomerate assets onto their own balance sheets to satisfy a sense of entitlement derived from an overpriced education.
U. S. Banks Are Already Bunkrupt? - Bloomberg
*** professor make some excellent points, thinks Fed is making mistakes; doing what congress should be deciding. Inside Look - Inflation Threat Looming? - Bloomberg Interview with Carnegie Mellon Professor, Dr. Alan Meltzer
As Smash-and-Grab Capitalism Collapses, the French Economy Shines Many in Britain and the United States are in mourning for what’s taken as the suicide of the American (or Thatcherite, or Chicago-school) model of capitalism, accompanied by the non-interventionist state that hands the national economy over to business and financial leaders to run. Not least among the mourners ought to be The Economist magazine in London, a major part of whose charm has always been the insolent certitude with which it expresses its views. It is not a publication used to lunching on its own words. But The Economist too has become a victim of the world crisis, and its current issue’s cover story pays a handsome tribute to the success of the formerly scorned, centralized, interventionist, Colbertist French economic model, and the state practices and values that support it.
Fed Up by Ron PAUL Audit the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve's recent and unprecedented actions in the realm of monetary policy have provoked a backlash among the American people. Trillions of dollars worth of loans and guarantees have been provided to Wall Street firms, while Main Street Americans suffocate under harsh taxation, the prospect of higher debt levels and increasing inflation. These events have awakened many Americans to problems with the Fed's loose monetary policy, the bubbles it has created in the past and the potential hyperinflation it might cause in the future.
Ron Paul Discusses Austrian vs Keynesian Economics 5/15/2009
Lady's got ants in her pants Nobody's having more fun watching Nancy Pelosi squirm than the ants in her pants. The dowager queen of Capitol Hill was shocked - shocked! - by what's been going on at Guantanamo, and reveled in telling everyone so. Now it turns out that maybe she wasn't so shocked after all. When she was told soon after 9/11 that some of the prisoners there had been deprived of sleep and "waterboarded" she did not object. Like everyone else back in the day, she was terrified that 9/11 was merely a prelude to something really, really bad.
Marc Faber: Capitalism Will Fall Like Communism Thailand resident Marc Faber says it's highly possible that capitalism will fail just like communism did, and he guarantees that the US government will go bust (that's going to suck!). CNBC.com: The years 2006 and 2007 were "the peak of prosperity" and the world economy is not likely to return soon to that level, he added. "I think the final low in markets will occur when the system is cleaned out," Faber said. The Federal Reserve's policy of printing money is destabilizing the markets and creating "enormous volatility" said Faber, who in his latest "Gloom, Boom & Doom Report" wrote that it was money printing that had pushed stock prices up. "The US government for sure will go bust. That I guarantee you. Not tomorrow, but it will go bust," he added.
No Global Recovery Anytime Soon Dr. Doom
Portugese Authorities Investigating $50 Billion Scam On JP Morgan Chase A Portuguese website reports that authorities are investigating an attempted transfer of 50 billion dollars (36.6 billion euros) from JP Morgan Chase in what might where result would be the biggest fraud ever, rivaling the Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff. According to the website, Publico, the scam transfer was attempted by an unidentified woman, who presented a bank in Lisbon with an interbank contract for the transfer of 36.4 million euros.
Obama Adminstration Wants to Slash Defense Contractors by Hiring More Than 30,000 New Federal Employees Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he wants to reduce the role support-service contractor employees by a third and replace them with more than 30,000 new government employees. . . . . . . The Pentagon, he said, plans to reduce “the number of support service contractors from our current 39 percent of the workforce to the pre-2001 level of 26 percent and replacing them with full-time government employees. “Our goal is to hire as many as 13,800 new civil servants in FY10 (fiscal year 2010) to replace contractors and up to 33,600 new civil servants in place of contractors over the next five years,” Gates told the committee.
Marc Faber on the US stock market pt 1/3 May 13 2009 future inflation in US will be higher than assumed
Marc Faber pt 2/3 May 13 2009 cash & bonds vs equities and commodities - demand for oil will go up in Asia
Marc Faber pt 3/3 May 13 2009 Western world is NOT growing anymore - US is contracting which could lead to war with emerging nations; printing of money and fiscal deficits are a disaster - one way to distract from fiscal irresponsibility is to engage in war
Toxic Plastic Relief Too Late for Many as Rates Rise, Credit Limits Fall Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would transform the way credit card companies and consumers interact. t's been a long time coming, consumer advocates say. But relief won't come anytime soon, even if the legislation makes it to President Obama's desk by Memorial Day, as he has requested. As proposed, the earliest that either the House or Senate version would go into effect is nine months after being signed into law. The Federal Reserve, meanwhile, has approved new regulations that do not go into effect until July 2010.
Health Care’s Enigma in Chief The most stunning and least reported news about President Obama’s press conference with health industry executives this week wasn’t those executives’ willingness to negotiate with a Democrat. It was that Democrat’s eagerness to involve those executives in a discussion about health care reform even as they revealed their previous plans to pilfer $2 trillion from Americans.
The Machinery Behind Health-Care Reform How an Industry Lobby Scored a Swift, Unexpected Victory by Channeling Billions to Electronic Records When President Obama won approval for his $787 billion stimulus package in February, large sections of the 407-page bill focused on a push for new technology that would not stimulate the economy for years. The inclusion of as much as $36.5 billion in spending to create a nationwide network of electronic health records fulfilled one of Obama's key campaign promises -- to launch the reform of America's costly health-care system. But it was more than a political victory for the new administration. It also represented a triumph for an influential trade group whose members now stand to gain billions in taxpayer dollars. A Washington Post review found that the trade group, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, had worked closely with technology vendors, researchers and other allies in a sophisticated, decade-long campaign to shape public opinion and win over Washington's political machinery.
GM looks to China to bolster U.S. sales Increased production there would lead to cars being exported to America SHANGHAI - China's auto industry has come a long way since General Motors Corp. set up its first factory here in a brand new industrial zone in Shanghai just over a decade ago. With monthly vehicle sales topping those in the U.S. so far this year, China is now an auto power in its own right — though foreign joint ventures still dominate. A reported move by GM to export cars built here to its home market in the U.S. could be just as important to the local industry's own global ambitions as it is for General Motors's survival, industry experts say.
The 81% Tax Increase To pay for government's promises on Social Security and Medicare. This week, the federal government published two important reports on long-term budgetary trends. They both show that we are on an unsustainable path that will almost certainly result in massively higher taxes. The first report is from the trustees of the Social Security system. News reports emphasized that the date when its trust fund will be exhausted is now four years earlier than estimated last year. But in truth, this is an utterly meaningless fact because the trust fund itself is economically meaningless.
Glenn Beck Tom Woods Meltdown Fed caused the problem
Commercial Real Estate Defaults Headed To 6% As you try to sort whether commercial real estate is indeed the next "shoe to drop" (as everyone's saying) here's a little more chartology, prepared by Pasquale Cardone at Realpoint, showing just how fast CRE loans are going sour.You can see it's basically quadrupled since the crisis started last autumn, and at this rate, it's easy to imagine it hitting 6% by the end of the year, which would be unheard of.
New York City Real Estate Prices To Fall At Least Another 35% Deutsche Bank runs the real-estate numbers and concludes that nationwide prices will fall another 17%, for a total peak-to-trough collapse of 40%. In New York City, meanwhile, where prices started falling later than the rest of the country (and from a higher peak) prices have another 35% to fall. And that's just to get back to fair value. If prices stop at fair value after a bubble this big, it will be the first time in history in which this happened.
Our Vanishing Home Equity Everyone knows that U.S. house prices have fallen almost 30% from the peak. What is less well known is that Americans' equity in those houses--the part that American homeowners actually own--has fallen much further. Why? Because, despite all the foreclosures and write-offs, our total mortgage debt has only dropped slightly from its peak. When value falls and debt stays the same, equity gets crushed. If house prices end up falling more than 40% peak to trough, which seems likely, U.S. homeowner equity will drop more than 70% and as many as half of American mortgage holders will be underwater.
Census GPS-tagging your home's front door Coordinates being taken for every residence in nation According to an online Yahoo program, the Global Position System coordinates for the White House, probably one of the best-known publicly owned buildings in the world, are 38.898590 Latitude and -77.035971 Longitude. And since you know that, it's no big deal for the White House to know the coordinates for your front door, is it? Some people think it is, and are upset over an army of some 140,000 workers hired in part with a $700 million taxpayer-funded contract to collect GPS readings for every front door in the nation. The data collection, presented as preparation for the 2010 Census, is pinpointing with computer accuracy the locations and has raised considerable concern from privacy advocates who have questioned why the information is needed. The privacy advocates also are more than a little worried over what could be done with that information.
Another 1,225,980+ Guns Bought by Law-abiding Americans in April 2009 Americans Are Clinging To Their Guns At A Record Pace. NEWTOWN, Conn. – The upward trend in firearms sales continued in April, marking the sixth consecutive month of significant increases. Data released by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) reported 1,225,980 checks in April 2009. This figure is a 30.3 percent increase from the 940,961 reported in April 2008. FBI background checks are required under federal law for all individuals purchasing either new or used firearms from federally licensed retailers. The checks serve as a gauge of actual sales but do not reflect the actual number of firearms sold, since, following a background check, a customer may decide not to purchase a firearm or may purchase more than one firearm.
PBS Weighs Separation Of Church & Stations PBS stations are debating the limits of one of public television's basic commandments: Thou shalt not broadcast religious programming. The discussion, some station managers fear, could lead to a ban on broadcasts of local church services and other faith-oriented programs that have appeared on public stations for decades despite the prohibition. The Public Broadcasting Service's board is to vote next month on a committee's recommendation to strip the affiliation of any station that carries "sectarian" content. Losing its PBS relationship would mean that a station could no longer broadcast programs that the service distributes, from "Sesame Street" to "Frontline."
Pro-Obama Group Demands Socialist Media A socialist-oriented “media reform” group with ties to the Obama Administration is calling for new federal programs and the spending of tens of billions of dollars to keep journalists employed at liberal media outlets and to put them to work in new “public media.” The group, which calls itself Free Press, is urging “an alternative media infrastructure, one that is insulated from the commercial pressures that brought us to our current crisis.” However, Free Press didn’t say one word about the well-documented liberal bias that has contributed to the decline in readers and viewers for traditional media outlets and has enabled the rise of the Fox News Channel, conservative talk radio, and the Internet. Instead, Josh Silver of the Free Press attacked the “bellowing ideologues” on the air and declared that “The entire dial is empty of local news in many communities.” This was a tip-off that, in order to take conservative radio hosts off the air, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be flooded with complaints that “local news” has been shortchanged by stations airing conservative personalities with national programs such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Michael Savage.
'Killer Chip' tracks humans, releases poison Saudi inventor applies for rights to GPS-linked lethal security device You can run, but you cannot hide ... and if you try, one push of a button will cause a lethal poison to immediately begin flowing through your body. That's the Orwellian future a Saudi inventor was seeking to bring to Germany until that nation's patent office announced last week it was rejecting his request to patent what has been dubbed the "Killer Chip." The tiny semiconductor device is intended to be surgically implanted or injected into the body, according to the patent application, for the purpose of tracking visitors from other nations by global-positioning satellites and preventing them from overstaying their visas.
Obama’s Climate Plans Spark Lobbying Boom by Shell, Boeing, 3M President Barack Obama’s push for a climate-change law this year has set off a lobbying boom on Capitol Hill, where companies are registering to weigh in at a rate of about one every business day. Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat crafting legislation in the House, and other lawmakers said they haven’t seen this much intensity since 1993, when the pharmaceutical companies and insurers lined up to combat President Bill Clinton’s proposal, championed by his wife, Hillary, to provide Americans with universal health care. “We’ve certainly had a steady stream of people in to talk to our staff,” said Waxman, 69, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. So far this year, 82 firms, trade groups and companies such as Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Boeing Co. and 3M Corp. have signed up to lobby on climate change, Senate filings show. That’s more than four times as many as are registered to lobby on another issue that is mobilizing business, a law that would make it easier for workers to join unions.
How America Lost its Freedom What Americans MUST Do to Get it Back It’s now clear to most Americans that their country is not only headed in the wrong direction, but on the brink of complete extinction. In just the last six months, every major economic sector is speeding towards bankruptcy and the Fed has spent trillions in printed funny money, in an unbridled and ill-fated effort to buy up (not bail out) America’s free-market economic system, leaving the nation, its currency, its people - and yes - FREEDOM, headed towards imminent total collapse.
Obama's Militaristic Youth Corp Commercial
Tucker Confirms Geithner Presence at Bilderberg Meeting Intrepid Bilderberg investigator and reporter Jim Tucker of the American Free Press confirms that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will attend this year’s Bilderberg meeting in Athens, Greece. Geithner’s presence will be in violation of the Logan Act, intended to prohibit American citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments. Congress established the Logan Act in 1799. The only Logan Act indictment occurred in 1803. It involved a Kentucky newspaper article that argued for the formation in the western United States of a separate nation allied to France. No prosecution followed. Tucker told Alex Jones today that Geithner will attend the secretive meeting to talk about global government. Geithner recently announced while addressing the Council on Foreign Relations that he supported a proposal to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a composite of currencies that would be managed by the International Monetary Fund.
Are the people who 'really run the world' meeting this weekend? The Bilderberg group, the topic of many conspiracy theories, is now meeting behind closed doors in Greece. . . . . The individuals at the meeting come from such power houses as Google and the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. Senate and European royalty. Governments, the banking industry, big oil, media and even the world of academia are amongst the Bilderberg ranks. Those reportedly in attendance at last year's conference in Virginia include former U.S. senator Tom Daschle; Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and his predecessor Henry M. Paulson; former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice; Microsoft executive Craig Mundie; senior Wall Street Journal editor Paul Gigot; World Bank President Robert Zoellick and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
A Leader of Veterans Is Exposed as a Fraud DENVER — When Rick Duncan spoke at veterans’ events in Colorado, recounting how he was badly wounded when his Humvee was blown apart by a roadside bomb in Iraq, it was not unusual for those in the audience to weep. After all, Mr. Duncan was a leading voice for veterans here, a charismatic former Marine captain who told of having been at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, who spoke movingly of his war wounds and whose advocacy group led a drive to help homeless veterans in Colorado Springs. But on Thursday the Colorado Veterans Alliance, the organization he founded, announced that it was disbanding, having discovered that his entire story was a sham. As it turns out, the group said, Rick Duncan is not even Rick Duncan but instead a man named Richard Glen Strandlof.
Glenn Beck - The Problems With the Montana Gun Law - May 11, 2009 Glenn Beck interviews Randy Barnett, professor at Georgetown law and author of "Restoring the Lost Constitution". Barnett argues that it's not likely that Montana and the other states involved in the intrastate gun legislation are going to have a winning argument if/when it goes to the Supreme Court.
Is China really going green? Camels still plod the arid plains outside the ancient Silk Road city of Urumqi, their heads bowed into the gritty winds that funnel down the through the valleys of China's Tian Shan, or 'celestial' mountains. But today the same winds that struck fear into the traders of the Silk Road, swallowing whole caravans in blinding storms of dust, are being used to power plans for a new, green revolution for China's energy-hungry economy. At Dabancheng, a few miles outside the city, great forests of windmills stretch to the horizon, their blades beating out a lazy rhythm that belies the sudden urgency with which China's rulers are now investing in renewable energy.
Say No To A Palestinian State Obama's ''solutions'' will endanger Israel. Irving Kristol said that whomever the Gods want to teach humility they first tempt to resolve the Middle East conflict. Solving this conflict has been so difficult because it has always been misconstrued. As a result of confusion about the conflict's nature, the solutions that were nevertheless tried, such as the Oslo agreement establishing the Palestinian Authority, or Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, resulted in costly failures. The suffering of Israelis and Palestinian Arabs increased.
Agendas clash as Netanyahu, Obama meet U.S. links peace, Iran TEL AVIV | On the eve of the first summit between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is worried about clashing with its top ally over strategy toward Arab-Israeli peace and preventing Iran from building a nuclear bomb. The first meeting between the two recently elected heads of state may be a defining moment for the Obama administration's effort to reshape policy in the region. The new administration has indicated that it wants progress on both Iran and Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, suggesting that the issues are linked.
Obama makes his bid for Middle East peace Tomorrow [Monday, May 18th] the Israeli prime minister meets the US president at the White House. The following week Obama will also meet the Egyptian and Palestinian leaders. America has signalled it wants solutions in the Middle East, but are the president's guests ready to make concessions? Late tomorrow morning President Barack Obama will welcome Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, into the Oval Office at the White House. Leave five minutes for the pleasantries, 30 seconds for the coffee to be poured, and 84 and a half minutes will remain to kick-start what is perhaps the most ambitious bid to bring peace to the Middle East for nearly a decade. Once again, true to his campaign motto of "Yes we can", Obama is boldly plunging in where others fear to tread. May will see an extraordinary series of meetings for the new president: Netanyahu will be followed to the White House by President Mubarak of Egypt and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian National Authority. Other regional allies will be consulted, envoys dispatched, world leaders called and cajoled. And then, in the first week of June, Obama will fly to Egypt, where he will deliver a historic speech aimed not just at outlining his own strategy for bringing peace to the Middle East, but also at reframing America's entire relationship with the Muslim world, so damaged during recent years.
Obama to warn Israel's PM, Benjamin Netanyahu: 'No more blank cheques' Barack Obama is to deliver a blunt warning to Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that the era of the blank US cheque is over. The President will use a meeting with Mr Netanyahu in Washington on Monday to tell him that from now on Israel must earn its privileged relationship with America. Mr Obama will make clear that he will not allow his foreign policy objectives to be dictated by the Jewish state's interests, and that its leaders must resume working for peace with the Palestinians.
Ron Paul Thought Obama WOULD BE FIGHTING LESS WARS! (5/14/08)
Afghanistan stalled on its land bridge President Hamid Karzai has been keen, since becoming head of Afghanistan's interim administration in late 2001, to tout his landlocked country's potential as a "land bridge" for regional trade. The idea entails transforming the mountains of Hindu Kush from a conflict zone into a trade hub between China, the Middle East, South Asia and Central Asia - home to one-third of the world's population. The realization of such a vision, many Afghans believe, would do more to help restore peace and bring development to their impoverished country than any amount of foreign aid.
Gold versus Discretion 1983 Ron Paul 1 Speech on the Gold Standard by Congressman Ron Paul 1983. The Gold Standard, An Austrian Perspective.
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