Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Britain feels strain as austerity bites


British households are facing financial strain
LONDON (CNNMoney)

Millions of Britons are facing a bleak holiday season worried about falling incomes and how to repay debt, as economic reports raise questions about whether the country's austerity measures can restore growth.

A survey released Monday showed 43% of households expect their finances to deteriorate in 2013, compared with only 24% who expect an improvement.

"The vast majority of households anticipate that their financial well-being will either worsen or stagnate next year," said Tim Moore, senior economist at financial data provider Markit, which compiled the report.
"With three-quarters of all households not expecting any improvement in their finances, the latest survey suggests that domestic consumer demand will remain under pressure in the near term -- especially since inflation perceptions remain elevated and job insecurities are prevalent across the U.K."
Related: Europe's Debt Crisis
Britain has stuck fast to its austerity program of spending cuts and tax hikes, despite evidence that the economy will shrink this year. The government said earlier in December that the belt tightening would have to continue into 2018, which is a year longer than expected.
While the U.K. economy started to grow again in the third quarter of 2012, the rate was revised down on Friday to 0.9% from 1.0%. Reports show that most of Britain's growth this year was due to one-off factors such as the London Olympics.
National output remains about 3% below pre-recession levels, with many economists expecting the world's sixth biggest economy to contract slightly again in the fourth quarter.
Related: UK growth slowing as Europe weakens
The British government is also struggling to bring down borrowing. Figures released Friday show the U.K. budget deficit stood at £17.5 billion in November, compared with about £16.3 billion a year ago.
Spending cuts, falling incomes, inflation and the legacy of debt are combining to squeeze millions of households, with many Britons no better off than they were over a decade ago.
In a recent report, independent researchers at the Resolution Foundation said they had identified 3.6 million households as "debt loaded". These households were spending more than a quarter of their income on secured and unsecured debt repayments, displaying high levels of concern about their debt, and lacking any wiggle room in the face of future financial shocks.
"Widespread pessimistic expectations for finances in 2013 are a reminder that the underlying situation is that household finances are under severe strain from lower incomes and higher living costs," Markit's Moore said.
At its most extreme, the impact is forcing many more British families to seek food handouts this Christmas. The Trussell Trust, which oversees a network of more than 250 food banks, expects to feed 15,000 people over the holiday period -- almost twice as many as last year.
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China on alert for Japanese fighter jets over East China Sea

BEIJING -- China is on alert after Japan dispatched fighter jets to airspace over the East China Sea, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Hua Chunying made the remarks at a daily news briefing. Media reports say Japan's Air Self-Defense Force sent F-15 fighter jets to the area on Saturday to intercept a Chinese marine surveillance plane bound for the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.
"As far as I know, China's marine surveillance plane you mentioned has been conducting routine patrols in airspace over the East China Sea," she said in response to a journalist's question.
"The Chinese side is highly concerned with, and alert to, Japan sending the Air Self-Defense Force jets," said the spokeswoman, adding that China had lodged solemn representations to Japan over the issue.
"The Chinese side will pay close attention to Japan's intentions," she added.

載滿觀光客‧緬甸客機迫降斷開2死11傷

飛機從中部斷開,造成2人死亡,11人受傷。
蒲甘航空公司表示,這架機齡老舊的福克式100型飛機由瓦城起飛,飛往撣邦海霍機場,在距機場 3公里處緊急迫降。這處機場是通往緬甸熱門旅遊勝地茵麗湖的門戶。緬甸政府近年推動系統改革措施,打開門戶,吸引大批遊客湧入觀光,但最新的空難事件讓人 質疑緬甸新興的旅遊業及航空業的安全標準。







緬甸信息部在官網表示,飛機在濃霧中迫降,卻撞及機尾而起火。但有匿名官員告訴法新社,飛機在飛行途中引擎著火,在機場附近緊急迫降時,機身從中間斷裂。一名準備接機的當地導遊說:“火幾乎燒了整架飛機。”
緬甸民航局副局長說:“機上當時有71名乘客,只有1人喪生,非常罕見。”緬甸當局已對今次空難事件展開調查。航空公司稱已找到黑盒,將查明事故原因。
機上有71人,其中51人是外國旅客。蒲甘航空表示,有4位外籍遊客受傷,包括2名美國人、1名台灣人及1名法國人。
撞上摩哆車1死
較早前,信息部指機上死者年僅11歲,但航空公司後來澄清,死者是一名導遊。另外,飛機迫降時撞上機場附近街道的1輛摩哆車,造成1人喪生。航空公司起初表示,這次事件是緊急降落,但後來改口:“飛機在距海霍機場約1.6公里處降低高度時撞上電纜,迫降在稻田。”
但據英國廣播公司(BBC)引述航空公司代表報導,認為飛機駕駛員在濃霧中判斷失誤,將公路當成機場跑道。

Say Goodbye To The Good Life

The Economic Collapse – by Michael
Will this be the last normal holiday season that Americans ever experience?  To many Americans, such a notion would be absolutely inconceivable.  After all, in the affluent areas of the country restaurants and malls are absolutely packed.  Beautiful holiday decorations are seemingly everywhere this time of the year and children all over the United States are breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus.

Even though poverty is exploding to unprecedented levels, most families will still have mountains of presents under their Christmas trees.  Of course a whole lot of those presents were purchased with credit cards, but people don’t like to talk about that.  It kind of spoils the illusion.
Sadly, the truth is that our entire economy is a giant illusion.  The extreme prosperity that we have been enjoying has been fueled by debt, and any future prosperity that we will experience is completely dependent on our ability to go into even more debt.  The total amount of debt in our economy is almost 10 times larger than it was just 30 years ago, but we don’t like to think about that too much.
Most Americans are way too busy living the good life to be bothered with “doom and gloom”.  Well, get ready to say goodbye to normal.  As history has shown us, no financial bubble lasts forever, and time is rapidly running out for us.
You know that the hour is late when even mainstream news sources start publishing articles with titles such as this: “Will 2013 Mark the Beginning of American Decline?
That article appeared on Bloomberg.com the other day, and it was written by Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.  He is convinced that a day of reckoning is coming for U.S. government finances, and he seems resigned to the fact that we will not be ready when that day arrives…
“Sooner or later, it will be America’s turn to fall out of favor with investors and to see its own interest rates rise. It is hard to know when that day will come, or precisely what pressures the country will face.
Let me only venture one forecast: We will not be ready.”
Other analysts are far more pessimistic.  For example, the following is what Gerald Celente said about the “bond bubble” during a recent interview with King World News
Eric King: “Gerald, I wanted to take a look at this upcoming issue you have coming out. (In here it says,) ‘Bonds Away! The bond bomb is ready to explode … threatening to make the real estate and dot-com bubbles, and even the Great Recession, look like market corrections.’ Can you talk about that?”
Celente: “Yes. This piece is being penned by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan. And he is convinced that the bond bubble is about to burst. This cannot continue to go on the way it is. Everyone knows that the whole game is rigged, and so is this….”
“The whole game is rigged. It’s ready to go down, and Dr. Paul Craig Roberts believes it’s ‘Bonds Away’ in 2013 as the bond bubble explodes and brings about a financial disaster even worse than the Great Depression.”
Eric King: “He’s saying here it’s a road to financial collapse that we are going to head down when this thing bursts.”
Celente: “It is. Because the whole world is being propped up by these phony bonds and it’s going to collapse. It has to happen. Interest rates are going to start going up, and when they do the bond bubble explodes. You cannot keep interest rates at zero for this amount of time and expect anything other than disaster to follow.”
For much more on all this, you can listen to another excellent interview with Gerald Celente right here.
Our politicians just assume that we will be able to borrow trillions upon trillions of dollars far into the future at super low interest rates, but that is a very dangerous assumption.
As I noted the other day, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 2.534 percent at the end of November.  If that number just rose to where it was about a decade earlier we would be in a massive amount of trouble.
Back in the year 2000, the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt was 6.638 percent.  If we were at that level today, the U.S. government would be paying out more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.
But our politicians just keep borrowing and spending as if we could do this forever.
From the time that George Washington was inaugurated (1789) to the time that George W. Bush was inaugurated (2001), the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt.
During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about 5.7 trillion dollars of debt.
How can anyone support this kind of insanity?
You can see an excellent video demonstrating the vastness of our national debt right here.  In the end, all of this debt will absolutely destroy the U.S. dollar, our economic system and the bright futures that our children and our grandchildren were supposed to have.
As if all of that was not enough to be concerned about, there is also the threat that Wall Street could implode at any time.  Most Americans have no idea that Wall Street has been transformed into the largest casino in the history of the world.  The “too big to fail” banks are the ringleaders, and the derivatives bubble hangs over our financial system like a “sword of Damocles” that could fall at virtually any moment.
Everything will remain fine as long as the spiral of derivatives that our bankers have constructed remains perfectly balanced.  But if something happens and it becomes unbalanced and starts to collapse, the consequences could be unlike anything we have ever seen before.
A recent Zero Hedge article entitled “1000x Systemic Leverage: $600 Trillion In Gross Derivatives ‘Backed’ By $600 Billion In Collateral” detailed how there is barely any collateral backing up the hundreds of trillions of dollars of derivatives that are out there…
But a bigger question is what is the actual collateral backing this gargantuan market which is about 10 times greater than the world’s combined GDP, because as the “derivative” name implies all this exposure is backed on some dedicated, real assets, somewhere. Luckily, the IMF recently released a discussion note titled “Shadow Banking: Economics and Policy” where quietly hidden in one of the appendices it answers precisely this critical question. The bottom line: $600 trillion in gross notional derivatives backed by a tiny $600 billion in real assets: a whopping 0.1% margin requirement! Surely nothing can possibly go wrong with this amount of unprecedented 1000x systemic leverage.
Our entire economy has become a giant pyramid of debt, risk and leverage.  At some point there is going to be a giant crash.  When that happens, people are going to become very desperate.
When people become very desperate, they often accept “solutions” that they were not willing to consider previously.
We need to learn some lessons from history.  This is exactly the kind of thing that happened back in the 1930s.
For example, an elderly woman named Kitty Werthmann is telling audiences what life was like in Austria back in the late 1930s…
“In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates.”
“Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs.”
The Austrian people were really hurting and they were desperate for answers.  When Hitler came to them with “solutions”, they were ready to embrace him with open arms…
“We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933.” she recalls. “We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living.”
“Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group – Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy. We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back.”"Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler.”
“We were overjoyed,” remembers Kitty, “and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.”
Sadly, America is already starting to go down the same path in many ways.  If you doubt this, you can read the rest of her accountright here.
Right now, things are still relatively good in America.  Yes, there are a whole host of economic numbers that look really bad, but what we are experiencing right now is nothing compared to the horrific economic pain that is coming.
When our economy finally crashes, nobody is going to be able to press a button and restore things to how they were previously.  We will be told that we have to “adjust” and consider “new solutions” to our “new challenges”.  Someday we will look back on the good life that we were enjoying in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and wish that we could go back to those days.
So enjoy the relative peacefulness and prosperity of these times while you still can.  A horrific economic collapse is on the way, and once it strikes none of our lives will ever be the same.

One Hundred Million Dollar Penny

Fort Knox and the gold dipped tungsten bars (Michael Rivero show)

Michael Rivero of What Really Happened, Wrote the Best Explanation I have Seen Anywhere of Why the Banks are Getting away with FRAUD!



Michael Rivero wrote on his site WhatReallyHappened  (which is a Great alternative Real News Site) today the best explanation I have seen on why the Banks are getting away with the FRAUD that they are!

He wrote this in regards to a video he has above it about how the members of Congress have seen their own personal income/wealth increase hundreds of percentage points in the last few years.  The video is inserted below Michael's remark of it.

Michael Rivero's Explanation of the Bank Fraud and why they are getting away with it:


What happened is simple. Congress members were invested in the Wall Street Firms behind the Mortgage-Backed Securities Fraud; the biggest financial swindle since the Great South Seas Bubble of 1721. Congress passed an $8000 first-time home-buyer credit to lure more suckers into the scam, to front load the fraud with fresh mortgages of questionable worth, and raked in huge profits from the "tulip mania" sales of the MBS. 

Then the scam fell apart. Foreign banks and investment companies (and indeed entire nations) were brought to the edge of ruin by the fraud and demanded that Wall Street refund their money. Wall Street does not like to surrender profits, even ill-gotten ones, and neither does the Congress. So Congress voted for the "bailouts", which are actually buy-backs, to use public money (and more funds borrowed from the Federal Reserve) to purchase back the bad paper and cover the credit swaps, dropping the costs of the scam onto the American people. This was done despite 90% of the American people opposing the use of tax money to save the bankers form their own reckless behaviors. (Can you say "Taxation without representation?")
 At the same time, in 2008, the White House set a policy that nobody on Wall Street was going to be investigated or charged for this fraud, because inevitably the scandal would envelope all the members of the Congress who had their personal fortunes tied up in the swindle. Obama had Tim Geithner go up to New York to intercede with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to make certain no Wall Street CEOs were investigated in connection with the mortgage-backed Securities scam. (That is obstruction of justice). 

During the Bush administration, and accelerating under Obama, tax incentives were created for corporations that encouraged the offshoring of high-paying jobs to other countries. Americans, stripped of their ability to pay their mortgages, became easy prey for banks, who needed the entire value of the foreclosed homes on their balance sheets to stay solvent as the cash flowed out the door to buy back all the fraudulent investment bundles. 

In other words, the government took your jobs so the banks could take your homes to save themselves from going to prison for the crimes that made themselves and Congress incredibly rich.
Any questions?

Red Beckman: The 16th Amendment was Never Ratified! - Alex Jones Tv 1/4

Mark Koernke: The Storm Is Upon Us

I encourage everyone to view these, in the order which they run and then encourage others that you know to do the same.
These videos speak of what we see emerging today, the attempted and complete overthrow of Our Constitution, which in turn, will bring Tyranny and Oppression to all who live in this Republic.

This has been in the process for many years….as some of you all ready know.
But only in the last 20 years have the enemies of Our Republic become so emboldened.
Many folks are unable to put the pieces together because of the long time frame which these actions have been taking place.
These videos lay it all out, as one is looking forward, to our present time and place in American history.
As one is traveling along, looking at a map that reveals where one is headed.
The plans of America’s enemies are not new, and they’ve been in effect for some time.
Their objectives have not changed; the only thing that’s changed is the date on the calendar.
Even now these days are running short, for the enemies of this Republic, will be moving faster to achieve their goals.
Now we’re about to witness the attempted disarming of the American people.
The enemies of Our Republic have sold us into indentured servitude through debt.
Now they cannot begin to pay back the interest they owe to the lenders.
The dis-arming of the American people, will allow them to take possession of the collateral.
OUR PROPERTY !  AND OUR RESOURCES !
Along with Our Nations resources, OUR PROPERTY is all that’s left.
They’ve taken Our industries, jobs, and technologies.
In order to take Our property, they must disarm the people.
The question remains, “What will YOU do?”

More Lies From Statists ~ ‘We’ll Keep You Safe’


Just give us your guns and every thing will be just fine.
By Dan Roberts

More Lies From Statists ~ 'We'll Keep You Safe'
More Lies From Statists ~ ‘We’ll Keep You Safe’


Manasquan, NJ --(Ammoland.com)- As the Nation continues to work through the myriad of emotional reactions to the Connecticut tragedy, fear is the one emotion that is shamelessly exploited by those in power and their propagandists in the media in order to seize more power from the Citizens.
Fear that your doctor, your neighbor, the accountant, your co-worker, the hunter, the woman standing in the check out line behind you, might own a modern semi automatic rifle and could “snap” at any moment and use it against others.
They must be stopped, these evil black rifles must be banned.
Its far from the first time that Government has used fear, to manipulate the people into supporting giving up their freedoms or supporting policies against their own interests.
We saw the same thing in the aftermath of 9-11, when the Government  used fear of another attack at as crass marketing ploy to convince people that the only way to stay “safe” was to give up their rights. Now we have warrantless wire taps, secret lists of people which have not been charged with committing a crime and virtual strip searching and the physical molestation of passengers , including children, attempting to board planes.
Adolf Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels used the tactic of exploiting fear to convince the German Citizenry that the mass slaughter of six million people was something to support.
Throughout all of human history those in power have exploited fear in order to increase their iron fisted grasp on control. While it is true that America is unique in many significant ways from any other country on Earth, it still does not change the fact that ANY Government including ours has an insatiable desire for ever more power and control.
Why do so many people find it so difficult to believe that those in Congress would be any different?
Our Founding Fathers were all to well aware of the corrosive influence of power on a persons character and set out as best they could to limit those damaging effects by establishing our system of government the way they did, intentionally wording the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights in such a way as to make it clear it was the Citizens that rightfully retained power and control and only loaned the same to those elected to Office. And by definition, when you loan something to another, you have every moral and legal authority to take it back at any time.
This isn’t the first time the Anti Gun Ideologues have used a tragedy to further their agenda. They shamelessly exploited the 1989 Stockton California Schoolyard Shooting by Patrick Purdy to push through the first Federal “Assault Weapons Ban” , a law that Dept of.Justice statistics and every credible study now prove had no measurable effect on violent crime or homicide rates.
Congress and the media are now using fear of another Connecticut or Aurora to convince people that their RIGHT to bear arms simply must be significantly curtailed. But the fact is according to the FBI , mass shootings of the type in Connecticut and Colorado are statistically exceedingly rare events and the criminal use of firearms of all types is less than one tenth of one percent of the total number of firearms in the Country.
We also know from the most recent Dept of justice Uniform Crime Reports that violent crime and homicide at are near 40 year low levels, something even more remarkable when one considers that violent crime and murder typically increases during bad economic times, which we have been mired in for the last five years, while firearms ownership rates have increased and the total number of firearms in circulation has almost doubled since 1994.
Those on the Anti Gun side even brazenly ADMIT to intentionally exploiting fear to further their ideology. Call it either an exceedingly rare moment of candor or alternatively the usual arrogance and contempt for the intelligence of people, in an interview in 1989 , Josh Sugarmann, Executive Director of the virulently Anti Gun Group, The Violence Policy Center publicly admitted to using fear to manipulate people into supporting a ban on so called “assault weapons “.
“Assault weapons — The weapon’s menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons— anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.” ~ Josh Sugarmann, Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, 1988
Maybe I’m off the mark, but I don’t know to many people that appreciate being told they are being manipulated and willingly go along with that manipulation. Yet it seems maybe I have overestimated the wisdom and intelligence of the public to recognize such manipulation and stop it in its tracks if recent events and comments on gun control are any indication.
After any violent crime, be it a string of rapes, or a series of molestations by a trusted person to incidents like a mass shooting, people always say “you never think that could happen here” , as if their personal piece of the World is somehow magically exempt from evil, criminal acts, all available evidence to the contrary.
The uncomfortable truth so many refuse to acknowledge and seek to avoid at all costs is that violent, evil, criminal acts have, can, do and will.continue to occur at any place, at any time be they by an individual or by the State. And that is just one of a myriad of perfectly rationale and logical reasons why people “need” , to purchase, own, possess, train with and if necessary, use modern semi automatic rifles, those scary looking guns that people are told no one “needs” .
Lord Acton is famous for noting that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” , it would be difficult to find a more glaring example of this warning in practice than what we see going on right now in Congress and the media when it comes to talk of renewed gun control.
About Dan Roberts
Dan Roberts is a grassroots supporter of gun rights that has chosen AmmoLand Shooting Sports News as the perfect outlet for his frank, ‘Jersey Attitude’ filled articles on Guns and Gun Owner Rights.As a resident of the oppressive state of New Jersey he is well placed to be able to discuss the abuses of government against our inalienable rights to keep and bear arms as he writes from deep behind NJ’s Anti-Gun iron curtain. Read more from Dan Roberts or email him at DRoberts@ammoland.com You can also find him on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dan.roberts.18

Theft By Deception - Deciphering The Federal Income Tax