“Author Archive”
Stories written by sherry
hat tip: abc6.com
May 21, 2010
ABC6 News Anchor John DeLuca sat down with two prominent economists, with two drastically different outlooks for the nation’s economy.
Gerald Celente, Director of the Trends Research Institute, sees a very bleak future for the United States, and a major collapse coming soon for the entire nation, maybe the entire world.
URI Economics Professor Leonard Lardaro admits some serious problems in today’s economy, and that of the future, but thinks Celente’s ‘doomsday’ scenarios are too dire, and a little much.
End story.
May 28th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
Hat tip: guardian.co.uk
Thursday 27 May 2010
Bill abolishing ID cards and national identity register will be first piece of legislation introduced to [British] parliament by the new government, says Theresa May
The timetable for dismantling the national identity card scheme was spelled out today by the home secretary, Theresa May. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
The £4.5bn national identity card scheme is to be scrapped within 100 days, the home secretary, Theresa May, announced today.
The 15,000 identity cards already issued are to be cancelled without any refund of the £30 fee to holders within a month of the legislation reaching the statute book.
Abolishing the cards and associated register will be the first piece of legislation introduced to parliament by the new government. May said the identity documents bill will invalidate all existing cards.
The role of the identity commissioner, created in an effort to prevent data blunders and leaks, will be abolished.
The government said the move will save £86m over four years and avoid £800m in costs over the next 10 years that would have been raised by increased charges. An allied decision to cancel the next generation of biometric fingerprint passports will save a further £134m over four years. Savings to the public under the whole package will total £1bn.
May 28th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
You push for higher taxes so the government can provide cows for everyone.
REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?
SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.
CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
May 28th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
An interview with Jordan Flaherty
By Angola 3 News
Jordan Flaherty is a journalist, an editor of Left Turn Magazine, and a staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience and audiences around the world have seen the television reports he’s produced for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, GritTV, and Democracy Now.
Flaherty’s most recent articles have tackled a variety of important stories. His article, Jena Sheriff Seeks Revenge for Civil Rights Protests, follows up on the Jena Six story and exposes a wave of post-Jena 6 arrests directed at activists and the Black community in general. New Complaints of Police Violence in New Orleans, reports that “New Orleans’ Black and transgender community members and advocates complain of rampant and systemic harassment and discrimination from the city’s police force, including sexual violence and arrest without cause,” and then the article provides a voice to the activists who are fighting back. Did a White Sheriff and District Attorney Orchestrate a Race-Based Coup in a Northern Louisiana Town? focuses on a town called Waterproof, where “the African American mayor and police chief assert that they have been forced from office and arrested as part of an illegal coup carried out by an alliance of white politicians and their followers.”
This summer, Haymarket Books will release his new book, FLOODLINES: Stories of Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six, and this fall he will be touring with the Community and Resistance Tour. Contact him at neworleans@leftturn.org. For more information on the book and tour, please see floodlines.org.
May 27th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
by Kurt Nimmo
hat tip: Infowars.com
May 21, 2010
On Thursday, two police officers were fatally shot and two wounded. “Two police officers in West Memphis, Ark., were killed at a traffic stop. The two suspects later died in a shootout with law enforcement in a Walmart parking lot. The Crittenden County sheriff and his top deputy were wounded,” USA Today reported yesterday afternoon. “The suspects, who have not been identified, were killed about an hour later after being spotted at the Walmart Superstore in West Memphis, across the Mississippi River from Memphis, Tenn.”
16 year old Joe Kane dead at the scene. Note the missing license plate on the vehicle.
On the surface, the story seems like yet another instance of meaningless violence that resulted in the murder of cops and armed suspects.
However, there is something fishy about the story most of the corporate media is not reporting.
May 26th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Dr. Ron Paul 
Congress, with its insatiable appetite for spending, is set to pass yet another “supplemental” appropriations bill in the next two weeks. So-called supplemental bills allow Congress to spend beyond even the 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal government. These are akin to a family that consistently outspends its budget, and therefore needs to use a credit card to make it through the end of the month.
If the American people want Congress to spend less, putting an end to supplemental appropriations bills would be a start. The 13 “regular” appropriations bills fund every branch, department, agency, and program of the federal government. Congress should place every dollar in plain view among those 13 bills. Instead, supplemental spending bills serve as a sneaky way for Congress to spend extra money that was not projected in budget forecasts. Once rare, they have become commonplace vehicles for deficit spending.
The latest supplemental bill is touted as an “emergency” war spending bill, needed to fund our ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. The emergencies never seem to end, however, and Congress passes one military supplemental bill after another as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on.
Many of my colleagues argue that Congress cannot put a price on our sacred national security, and I agree that the strong, unequivocal defense of our country is a top priority. There comes a time, however, when we must take stock of what our blank checks to the military industrial complex accomplish for us, and where the true threats to American citizens lie.
The smokescreen debate over earmarks demonstrates how we have lost perspective when it comes to military spending. Earmarks constitute about $11 billion of the latest budget. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the $708 billion spent by the Pentagon this year to expand our worldwide military presence. The total expenditures to maintain our world empire is approximately $1 trillion annually, which is roughly what the entire federal budget was in 1990!
We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and far more than we spent during the Cold War. These expenditures in many cases foment resentment that does not make us safer, but instead makes us a target. We referee and arm conflicts the world over, and have troops in some 140 countries with over 700 military bases.
May 25th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
Submerging Execs Could Be ‘Win-Win’
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – At a conference of oil leak experts in Washington today, attendees proposed plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico with executives of BP, the company responsible for the catastrophic spill.
“We’ve tried containment domes, rubber tires, and even golf balls,” said William Cathermeyer of the National Oil Leakage Institute, a leading consultancy in the field of oil leaks. “Now it’s time to shove some BP executives down there and hope for the best.”
Submerging the oil company executives thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface could be a “win-win” situation, Mr. Cathermeyer said.
“Best-case scenario, they plug the leak,” he said. “And at the very least, they’ll shut the f**k up.”
May 25th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In their new book, Nullifying Tyranny: Creating Moral Communities in an Immoral Society, James and Walter Kennedy address the case for nullifying unconstitutional federal legislation to “fellow Christians who . . . understand that the government . . . has been slowly taken over. . . by an anti-Christian secular humanist element . . .” It is, in essence, an attempt to wake Christians up to the fact that the “god” of democracy results in a situation where immoral people can force everyone to comply with their edicts. “Government, even when sanctified by a majority vote, cannot turn an otherwise immoral act into a moral act.”
Amen.
Government under democracy is nothing more than legalized theft on a massive scale, the Kennedy brothers say in their Rothbardian analysis of the state. Whether it is monarchy or democracy, government steals private property (through taxation, mostly) “in order to pay for the loyalty of . . . supporters those close to the source of power who have a natural interest in maintaining the status quo.” Moreover, “A loyal court, a loyal police and military, and a loyal religious establishment” all “lead parasitic lives. The cost is paid by the productive who must labor to earn enough for the king” (or the state in general, under democracy).
Many Christians misread Jesus’s command, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are Gods,” they write. What Jesus said was NOT to obey ALL of Caesar’s commands, but only to “render unto Caesar things that belong to the realm of government, obey [only] legitimate laws enacted by government . . .” For “the larger the government the greater harm it will eventually do to society’s morals . . . . the only way to maintain a moral community is to keep the corrosive power of government at a minimum.”
May 25th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
by Michael Collins
hat tip: Economic Populist
05/23/2010
This analysis looks behind the scenes at how the ban on offshore drilling was lifted and what that had to do with the ultimate prize for big oil, the American Power Act. It focuses on the current administration. That in no way implies that the problem originated in January 2009. The out sized and destructive influence of the oil monopoly has been with us for since the 1870′s.
Banning Offshore Drilling
In 1969 a Unocal oil rig off the coast of Santa Barbara, California began leaking oil. The extent of the leak, damage to wildlife, and the shoreline caused considerable outrage. The state of California banned offshore drilling shortly after the leak. In 1980, Congress banned offshore drilling in most federally controlled waters. President George H.W. Bush reluctantly banned off shore drilling in 1990 for California, Florida, Oregon and Washington and in the North Atlantic.
End story.
May 24th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
by Doug French
hat tip: Mises Daily
Monday, May 24, 2010
Anyone who follows financial markets has to wonder at times, “What are people thinking? How did they come to make those decisions?”
It’s hard to imagine that John Muth and Robert Lucas came up with what’s known as the “rational-expectations theory,” wherein, as explained in Wikipedia,
it is assumed that outcomes that are being forecast do not differ systematically from the market equilibrium results. That is, it assumes that people do not make systematic errors when predicting the future, and deviations from perfect foresight are only random.
Muth and Lucas should watch daily programs on the financial channels like Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, which is supposedly to help individual investors, or CNBC’s Fast Money, a show clearly geared toward speculators. No viewer can watch these shows and walk away believing, “people do not make systematic errors when predicting the future.”
So while financial markets have been a series of speculative bubbles as the Federal Reserve creates money ad infinitum, rational-expectations economists Robert Flood and Robert Hodrick daringly conclude, “The current empirical tests for bubbles do not successfully establish the case that bubbles exist in asset prices.”
May 24th, 2010 | Posted in Web-Only Content | Read More »
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