Courage, Change & Chance

It takes courage to take a chance on change.

"A good researcher should not be afraid to change his mind; he should not feel desperate because his comforting beliefs leave him as soon as he begins to think critically. "

Jacques Vallée - Passage to Magonia

Lenon Honor

Time always tells the truth.

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Sunday, December 14, 2014

EBOLA: What You Need To Know

By Jean Bush

The following video by StormCloudsGathering is the most up to date information by a non-medical researcher we have.  Make sure you click and read his transcript AND the medical links included.



Remember, despite advice to the contrary, fear keeps us on our toes and forces us to seek out solutions; but fear must not turn to panic, then we loose everything.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

Barack Obama was visiting a school in North Carolina, a fourth grade class. They were in the middle of a discussion related to words and their meanings.

The teacher asked the President if he would like to lead the discussion on the word ‘tragedy.’ So the president asked the class for an example of a ‘tragedy.’
One little boy stood up and offered: “If my best friend, who lives on a farm, is playing in the field, and a tractor runs him over and kills him, that would be a tragedy.”

“No,” said Obama, “that would be an accident.”

A little girl raised her hand: “If a school bus carrying 50 children drove off a cliff, killing everyone, that would be a tragedy.”

“I’m afraid not,” explained Obama. “That’s what we would call great loss.”
The room went silent. No other child volunteered. Obama searched the room.
“Isn’t there someone here who can give me an example of a tragedy?”

Finally at the back of the room, Little Johnny raised his hand.

The teacher held her breath.

In a quiet voice he said: “If the plane carrying you and Mrs. Obama was struck by a ‘friendly fire’ missile and blown to smithereens that would be a tragedy.”
“Fantastic!” exclaimed Obama. “That’s right. And can you tell me why that would be a tragedy?”

“Well,” says Johnny, “It has to be a tragedy, because it sure as hell wouldn't be a great loss… and you can bet your ass it wouldn’t be an accident either!

The teacher fainted…..




 Joke courtesy of Anne Berg.


Sunday, November 9, 2014

GUN TO YOUR HEAD? Political Correctness - Stopping You Before You Open Your Mouth

This excellent article on PC shows the dangers to your personal freedom in a way never thought of before.   Like in 1984, the thought police are everywhere, making sure the less you're allowed to say, the less you are allowed to think.

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/2001-the-twisted-motives-behind-political-correctness

Open your mouth and put a stop to this.

Jean

Saturday, October 4, 2014

The Myth of the Working Poor

STEVEN MALANGA
The Myth of the Working Poor
Two Americas? The scaremongering bestsellers that say so are economically illiterate.
Autumn 2004
Forty years ago a young, radical journalist helped ignite the War on Poverty with his pioneering book The Other America. In its pages, Michael Harrington warned that the recently proclaimed age of affluence was a mirage, that beneath the surface of U.S. prosperity lay tens of millions of people stuck in hopeless poverty that only massive government intervention could help.
Today, a new generation of journalists is straining to duplicate Harrington's feat—to convince contemporary America that its economic system doesn't work for millions and that only government can lift them out of poverty. These new journalists face a tougher task than Harrington's, though, because all levels of government have spent about $10 trillion on poverty programs since his book appeared, with disappointing, even counterproductive, results. And over the last four decades, millions of poor people, immigrants and native-born alike, have risen from poverty, without recourse to the government programs that Harrington inspired.

But brushing aside the War on Poverty's failure and the success of so many in climbing America's economic ladder, this generation of authors dusts off the old argument for a new era. Books like Barbara Ehrenreich'sNickel and Dimed and David Shipler's The Working Poor tell us that the poor are doing exactly what America expects of them—finding jobs, rising early to get to work every day, chasing the American dream—but that our system of "carnivorous capitalism" is so heavily arrayed against them that they can't rise out of poverty or live a decent life. These new anthems of despair paint their subjects as forced off welfare by uncompassionate conservatives and trapped in low-wage jobs that lead nowhere. They claim, too, that the good life that the country's expanding middle class enjoys rests on the backs of these working poor and their inexpensive labor, so that prosperous Americans owe them more tax-funded help.

Though these books resolutely ignore four decades' worth of lessons about poverty, they have found a big audience. The commentariat loves them. Leftish professors have made them required course reading. And Democratic candidates have made their themes central to the 2004 elections. So it's worth looking closely at what these tomes contend, and at the economic realities that they distort.

To begin with, they follow Harrington's 1962 classic by seeing the poor as victims of forces over which they have no control. From the hills of Appalachia to the streets of Harlem, Harrington had found a generation of impoverished former sharecroppers whose jobs had been replaced by mechanization. For them, the advances that enriched everyone else spelled disaster: "progress is misery" and "hopelessness is the message." Unprepared for life off the farm, many could never find productive work, Harrington argued, and would need perpetual government aid.

But the new thinkers quickly veer to the left of Harrington, following some of his more radical acolytes whose theories produced the War on Poverty's most spectacular disasters. Harrington had seen the poor as victims because they could find no work; his more radical allies, especially a group associated with Columbia University's social-work school, argued that compelling the demoralized inner-city poor to work or take part in training that would fit them for work, instead of giving them unconditional welfare, was itself victimization. Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, for example, argued that America's poverty programs—"self-righteously oriented toward getting people off welfare" and making them independent—were violating the civil rights of the poor. Journalist Richard Elman claimed that "vindictive" America was "humiliating" welfare recipients by forcing them to seek entry-level work as taxi drivers, restaurant employees, and factory laborers, instead of giving them a guaranteed minimum income.

Sympathetic mayors and welfare officials responded to Cloward and Piven's call, boosting benefits, loosening eligibility rules, and cutting investigations of welfare cheating. Welfare rolls soared, along with welfare fraud and illegitimate births. The result was a national backlash that sparked the Reagan administration's welfare spending cuts.

But the Columbia crew left its enduring mark on welfare policy, in the principle that welfare, once a short-term program to help people get back on their feet, should be continuous and come with few restrictions and no stigma. A welfare mother, screaming at New York mayor John Lindsay (responsible for much of the city's rise in welfare cases), expressed the system's new philosophy: "It's my job to have kids, Mr. Mayor, and your job to take care of them." It was a philosophy that bred an urban underclass of non-working single mothers and fatherless children, condemned to intergenerational poverty, despite the trillions spent to help them.
Like communists who claim that communism didn't fail but instead was never really tried, Barbara Ehrenreich made her public debut with an attempt to brush aside the War on Poverty's obviously catastrophic results. The 46-year-old daughter of a Montana copper miner-turned-business executive, she joined Cloward and Piven to co-author a 1987 polemic, The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State. The War on Poverty had failed so far, the book claimed, not because of its flawed premises but because the government hadn't done enough to redistribute the nation's wealth. America needed an even bigger War on Poverty that would turn the country into a European-style social welfare state. Pooh-poohing the work ethic and the dignity of labor, the authors derided calls for welfare reform that would require recipients to work, because that would be mortifying to the poor. "There is nothing ennobling about being forced to please an employer to feed one's children," the authors wrote, forgetting that virtually every worker and business owner must please someone, whether boss or customer, to earn a living. Welfare's true purpose, the book declared, should be to "permit certain groups to opt out of work." (The authors never explained why all of us shouldn't demand the right to "opt out.")
The Mean Season's argument gained little traction, but as the nineties dawned, Ehrenreich found a way to bring Cloward and Piven's socialistic themes successfully into the new decade and beyond. Her 1989 book,Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, blamed poverty's continued existence in America partly on the Me Generation, which Tom Wolfe had so brilliantly made interesting to the nation. America's emerging professional middle class had started out hopefully in the 1960s, Ehrenreich claims, the inheritor of a liberating cultural revolution. But because that class depended on intellectual capital to make its living, rather than on income from property or investments, it felt a sharp economic insecurity, which by the late 1980s had made it "meaner, more selfish," and (worse still) "more hostile to the aspirations of the less fortunate," especially in its impatience with welfare.

The book vibrates with Ehrenreich's rage toward middle-class Americans. The middle class, she sneers, obsessively pursues wealth and is abjectly "sycophantic toward those who have it, impatient with those who do not." To Ehrenreich, "The nervous, uphill climb of the professional class accelerates the downward spiral of society as a whole: toward cruelly widening inequalities, toward heightened estrangement along class lines, and toward the moral anesthesia that estrangement requires." Ironically, Ehrenreich's economic prescription for a better America was for government to create one gigantic bourgeoisie: "Tax the rich and enrich the poor until both groups are absorbed into some broad and truly universal middle class. The details are subject to debate." Time magazine, the voice of the bourgeoisie, made her a regular columnist.
If the Reagan era could provoke Ehrenreich to such anger, it's no surprise that the 1996 welfare reform heightened her fury. Passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Democratic president Bill Clinton, the legislation ended welfare as an automatic federal entitlement and required states to oblige able-bodied recipients to work. The law put a five-year limit on welfare (the average stay on the rolls had been 13 years) but exempted 20 percent of the cases—roughly equivalent to the portion of the welfare population believed too dysfunctional ever to get off public assistance. After President Clinton signed the bill, Ehrenreich claimed that she had seen the betrayal coming: she'd presciently cast a write-in vote for Ralph Nader in 1992's presidential election. She castigated the Left for its muted response to the new welfare law, though she later praised National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland's hunger strike protesting the bill.

Ehrenreich's anger propelled her to write Nickel and Dimed. Beginning life as a piece of "undercover journalism" for Harper's, the 2001 book purports to reveal the truth about poverty in post-welfare reform America. "In particular," Ehrenreich asks in the introduction, how were "the roughly four million women about to be booted into the labor market by welfare reform . . . going to make it on $6 or $7 an hour?"
Nickel and Dimed doesn't fuss much with public-policy agendas, messy economic theories, or basic job numbers. Instead, it gives us Ehrenreich's first-person account of three brief sojourns into the world of the lowest of low-wage work: as a waitress for a low-priced family restaurant in Florida; as a maid for a housecleaning service in Maine; and as a women's-apparel clerk at a Minneapolis Wal-Mart. In her journeys, she meets a lively and sympathetic assortment of co-workers: Haitian busboys, a Czech dishwasher, a cook with a gambling problem, and assorted single working mothers. But the focus is mostly on Ehrenreich, not her colleagues.
The point that Nickel and Dimed wants to prove is that in today's economy, a woman coming off welfare into a low-wage job can't earn enough to pay for basic living expenses. Rent is a burden, Ehrenreich discovers. In Florida, she lands a $500-a-month efficiency apartment; in Maine, she spends $120 a week for a shared apartment in an old motel (she turns down a less expensive room elsewhere because it's on a noisy commercial street); in Minneapolis, she pays $255 a week for a moldy hotel room. These seem like reasonable enough rents, except perhaps for Minneapolis, judging from her description of the place. But with her entry-level wages—roughly the minimum wage (when tips are included) as a waitress, about $6 an hour as a maid, and $7 an hour to start at Wal-Mart—Ehrenreich quickly finds that she'll need a second job to support herself. This seems to startle her, as if holding down two jobs is something new to America. "In the new version of supply and demand," she writes, "jobs are so cheap—as measured by the pay—that a worker is encouraged to take on as many as she possibly can."

What's utterly misleading about Ehrenreich's exposé, though, is how she fixes the parameters of her experiment so that she inevitably gets the outcome that she wants—"proof" that the working poor can't make it. Ehrenreich complains that America's supposedly tight labor market doesn't produce entry-level jobs at $10 an hour. For people with no skills, that's probably true in most parts of the country; but everywhere, the U.S. economy provides ample opportunity to move up quickly. Yet Ehrenreich spends only a few weeks with each of her employers, and so never gives herself the chance for promotion or to find better work (or better places to live).
In fact, few working in low-wage jobs stay in them long. And most workers don't just move on quickly—they also move on to better jobs. The Sphere Institute, a California public-policy think tank founded by Stanford University professors, charted the economic path of workers in the state from 1988 to 2000 and found extraordinary mobility across industries and up the economic ladder. Over 40 percent of the lowest income group worked in retail in 1988; by 2000, more than half of that group had switched to other industries. Their average inflation-adjusted income gain after moving on: 83 percent, to over $32,000 a year.

The workers who stayed in retail, moreover, were usually the higher earners, making about $10,000 more a year than the leavers. They had already started improving their lots back in 1988, in other words, and probably elected to stay because they rightly saw further opportunity in retailing, though the study doesn't say what happened to them. The same dynamic occurs in other industries where low-wage jobs are concentrated, the study found: those who do well stay and watch earnings go up; those who feel stuck often depart and see earnings rise, too, as they find more promising jobs. In total, over 12 years, 88 percent of those in California's lowest economic category moved up, their incomes rising as they gained experience on the job and time in the workforce, two things that the marketplace rewards.
Such results are only the latest to confirm the enormous mobility that the U.S. economy offers. As a review of academic, peer-reviewed mobility studies by two Urban Institute researchers put it: "It is clear that there is substantial mobility—both short-term and long-term—over an average life-cycle in the United States." Perhaps most astonishingly, mobility often occurs within months. The Urban Institute report points out that several mobility studies based on the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has traced thousands of American families since 1968, show that about 20 percent of those in the lowest economic quintile rise at least one economic class within a year. If Ehrenreich had given herself 12 months in her low-wage stints, instead of a week or two, she might have worked her way into the lower middle class by the end of her experiment.

This mobility explains why poverty rates didn't soar in the 1990s, even though some 13 million people, most of them dirt-poor, immigrated here legally. In fact, the country's poverty rate actually fell slightly during the nineties—which could only happen because millions already here rose out of the lowest income category.

Confidence in the American economy's capacity to foster income mobility helped impel the 1996 welfare reform in the first place. Most former welfare recipients entering the workforce, reformers believed, would over time improve their lives—at least if other handicaps such as drug or alcohol addiction and serious mental deficiencies didn't hold them back. Everything we've subsequently learned about welfare reform shows that the reformers were right, rendering Ehrenreich's book oddly dated from the outset.
Since welfare reform passed, employment among single mothers who'd never previously worked has risen 40 percent. More important, child poverty in single-mother households fell to its lowest point ever just three years after welfare reform became law. Except for a hiccup at the end of the last recession, the poverty rate among those households has continued to drop, down now by about one-third. The New York Timesrecently reported that "lawmakers of both parties describe the 1996 law as a success that moved millions of people from welfare to work and cut the welfare rolls by 60 percent, to 4.9 million people." Those results belie the hysterical warnings of welfare advocates, Ehrenreich among them, that reform would drastically worsen poverty.

Given that such data subvert Ehrenreich's case against the U.S. economic system, she unsurprisingly puts statistics aside in Nickel and Dimed and instead seeks to paint the low-wage workplace as oppressive and humiliating to workers forced by reformers to enter it. But given the author's self-absorption, what the reader really gets is a self-portrait of Ehrenreich as a longtime rebel with an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, who can't stomach the basic boundaries that most people easily accept in the workplace.
At Wal-Mart, for instance, she's "oppressed by the mandatory gentility" that the company requires of her, as if being nice to customers and co-workers were part of the tyranny of capitalism. (I suspect that most customers, if they encountered a snarling Ehrenreich as a clerk while shopping, would flee for the exit.) Told to scrub floors on her hands and knees by the maid service, she cites a "housecleaning expert" who says that this technique is ineffective. Ehrenreich then theorizes that the real reason that the service wants its employees down on their hands and knees is that "this primal posture of submission" and "anal accessibility" seem to "gratify the consumers of maid services." Never has the simple task of washing a floor been so thoroughly Freudianized.

In Ehrenreich's looking-glass world, opportunity becomes oppression. Hired by Wal-Mart shortly after applying, she weirdly protests that "there is no intermediate point [between applying and beginning orientation] . . . in which you confront the employer as a free agent, entitled to cut her own deal." Though she admits that in such a tight labor market, "I would probably have been welcome to apply at any commercial establishment I entered," she still feels "like a supplicant with her hand stretched out."
Unable to understand why her fellow workers don't share her outrage, this longtime socialist and radical feminist turns on the very people with whom she's trying to sympathize, imagining that they can only accept their terrible exploitation because they've become psychologically incapable of resisting. Why are the maids so loyal to the owner of the cleaning service? she asks. They're so emotionally "needy" that they can't break free, she speculates. Why do Wal-Mart workers accept their place in "Mr. Sam's family" instead of rising in a tide of unionization against the company? The Waltons have hoodwinked them, she surmises, misunderstanding completely the appeal to employees of Wal-Mart's opportunity culture, where two-thirds of management has come up from hourly-employee store ranks and where workers own a good chunk of company stock.
Responsibility for America's shameful economic injustice rests not only with exploitative businesses like Wal-Mart, in Ehrenreich's view, but also with the rich and—you guessed it—the middle class. Going beyond evenFear of FallingNickel and Dimed hangs a huge guilt trip on the middle class. Actually, guilt "doesn't go anywhere near far enough," Ehrenreich says. "[T]he appropriate emotion," she claims, "is shame—shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others." After all, Ehrenreich tells us, it's the middle class and its irritation with the poor that led to the catastrophe of welfare reform. "When poor single mothers had the option of remaining out of the labor force on welfare, the middle and upper middle class tended to view them with a certain impatience, if not disgust," she maintains.

Like some of Ehrenreich's earlier work, Nickel and Dimed is contemptuous of ordinary Americans. Cleaning the homes of middle-class families, she snoops in bookcases and finds mostly writers on the "low end of the literary spectrum"—you know, Grisham, Limbaugh, those kinds of authors. "Mostly though, books are for show," she clairvoyantly concludes. A woman whose home furnishings suggest that she is a Martha Stewart "acolyte" comes in for particularly withering scorn. "Everything about [her home] enrages me," Ehrenreich snaps. She's only slightly less condescending toward the lower middle class. She mocks Wal-Mart's customers for being obese—or at least the "native Caucasians" among them. Ehrenreich doesn't say what she thinks about the body types of middle-income blacks, Latinos, or Asians.
Ehrenreich's disparagement of the middle class, Wal-Mart, Martha Stewart, and various other targets of the Left these days doubtless has a lot to do with Nickel and Dimed's remarkable success. The book rode theNew York Times hardcover bestseller list for 18 weeks and has been on the paperback bestseller list for nearly two years now. So far, it has sold upward of a half-million copies in the U.S.

The left-leaning professoriat is helping drive the sales. Nickel and Dimedis standard fare in many freshman-orientation reading programs, in which schools require an entire incoming class to read one particular book. Among the 20 or so schools that have picked Nickel and Dimed for such programs are Ohio State (14,000 freshmen), the University of California, Riverside (nearly 20,000 freshmen), and Ball State (8,000-plus freshmen). Some of the schools, including Mansfield University in Pennsylvania (freshman class, about 1,600), have bought the book for students, just to ensure that the kids don't miss out on its wisdom. Since the book's publication, Ehrenreich enthuses, she's lectured at more than 100 universities.

Not everybody is taking this force-feeding of leftist propaganda sitting down. Conservative students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill protested the freshman-orientation reading committee's choice of Nickel and Dimed, bringing in local conservative groups and state legislators to try to force greater ideological balance on the school's reading program. What students objected to, explains Michael McKnight, a UNC grad who helped lead the protest, was the book's biased and misleading depiction of the American workplace, along with UNC's failure to provide any counterweight, such as critical reviews of the book. Says McKnight, "The freshman-orientation package of resources on the book included nothing but glowing reviews of it and lists of Ehrenreich's awards."

There's other evidence that students aren't buying Ehrenreich's pessimistic line on the U.S. economy. Professor Larry Schweikart, who teaches U.S. economic history at the University of Dayton, assigns his students Nickel and Dimed along with other books that paint a brighter picture of the American economy. Schweikart says that many students quickly grasp what's wrong with Ehrenreich's book. "Many of these kids have worked in the low-wage marketplace, so they are more familiar with it than their professors or media reviewers. They tell me that there are better jobs out there than the ones Ehrenreich stuck herself with, that those jobs aren't long-term, and that they understand that she didn't give herself any time to find better work or advance."
If the holes in Ehrenreich's argument are clear even to some college kids, the logical gaps gape even wider in the 2004 book that hopes to succeedNickel and Dimed as the definitive left statement on the oppressiveness of low-wage work: The Working Poor, by former New York Timesreporter David Shipler. To his credit, Shipler, unlike Ehrenreich, cares enough about the workers who are his subjects to try to give a comprehensive account of their struggles to make it, delving into their lives and addressing important economic and cultural issues head-on. Following Ehrenreich, however, Shipler wants to blame an unjust U.S. economy for the plight of the poor. Yet his own evidence proves a very different, and crucial, point: it's often dysfunctional behavior and bad choices, not a broken economy, that prevent people from escaping poverty.
Consider some of the former welfare recipients Shipler profiles in his chapter called "Work Doesn't Work." Christie, a day-care worker, describes herself as "lazy" for never finishing college (her brother, who did, is an accountant, and her sister is a loan officer). She has had several children out of wedlock with various men, and now lives with one of them—Kevin, an ex-con—in public housing. Christie can't make ends meet, but that's partly because, having never learned to cook, she blows her $138-a-month food-stamp allocation on "an abundance of high-priced, well-advertised snacks, junk food, and prepared meals."

Then there's Debra, who had her first illegitimate child at 18. Forced to work by welfare reform, Debra actually lands a job in a unionized factory—the holy grail of low-wage work to the Left. Unfortunately, she can't adjust to work in the shop, has nightmares about the assembly line, and imagines that the bosses prefer the Hispanic workers to her, since she's black. Shipler understands that with such attitudes, she is unlikely to move up.

Or how about Caroline, who spent years on welfare and has worked various jobs, including at Wal-Mart? She actually owns her own house, though, as Shipler ominously mentions, "it is mostly owned by the bank." (Welcome to the club, Caroline.) Caroline is a victim of the "ruthlessness of the market system," Shipler informs us, because she can't seem to land a promotion. We eventually learn from her caseworkers, however, that she doesn't bathe regularly and smells bad, that when she first divorced she refused her in-laws' offer of help, that she then married a man who beat her (she later left him), and that she keeps managing to get hired but then loses one job after another.
How has the U.S. economy let these workers down? In each of these cases, bad choices have kept someone from getting ahead.

Shipler's grim chapter headings are often wildly at odds with the stories he tells. One chapter, "Harvest of Shame," describes Hispanic seasonal farmworkers, who toil long hours for little money, often live in substandard temporary quarters, yearn for their families, and—because many are here illegally—don't qualify for government benefits. Again, though, is the U.S. economic system really exploiting these workers, as Shipler thinks? We soon learn that many of the illegals have come here to support families back in Mexico. They send home 70 percent of what they earn and plan to return south when they've amassed enough wealth (by Mexican standards).
True, since they're illegals, they can't get mainstream jobs with the potential for promotion and benefits. Yet for them, this low-wage work pays off. Pedro earns nine times more working illegally on a North Carolina farm than he did toiling in a Mexican slaughterhouse. He sends from $300 to $500 a month home to his folks. If he works just two more years on the farm, he figures, he'll have enough to build a house in Mexico, and it'll be time to go home. Like many of his countrymen, Pedro is temporarily using America to make up for the Mexican economy's deficiencies. This hardly represents a failure of our economy. Shipler nonetheless finds puzzling the "absence of anger" among these immigrants.

Pointing to illegals like Pedro, who can't take advantage of the larger opportunities that our economy offers, or to people like Debra and Christie, who, every time they start to climb the economic ladder, do something self-destructive that causes them to fall back a few rungs, Shipler claims that economic mobility is vanishing from the United States. Today, he says, low-wage workers can only better themselves if they benefit from a "perfect lineup of favorable conditions."
The Tran family is just such an exception, Shipler thinks. Everything works for these Vietnamese immigrants. Within four months of arriving in the U.S. in 1998, three family members were working, earning $42,848 in their first year in the country. Within five months, the family had earned enough to buy two used cars. Within two years, two children had registered for college. This is a "heroic" success story, in Shipler's view, because for low-wage workers in today's America, "there is no room for mistake or misfortune—not for drugs, not for alcohol, not for domestic violence."

But what the Trans have done, admirable as it is, isn't heroic—or even unusual. In 1990s California, where the Trans did so well, recall that nearly nine out of ten low-wage workers moved up, presumably avoiding the drugs, alcohol, and violence that Shipler wrongly sees as endemic to poverty. The average real income of the low-wage workers in the Sphere Institute study doubled over that time to more than $27,000 a year. Nor is there any evidence, statistically or anecdotally, that such mobility is disappearing from the U.S.
For Shipler, as for Ehrenreich, the U.S. always shortchanges the poor. Education is a prime example, he says. He tours Washington, D.C.'s public schools, where student scores are abysmal and dropout rates are inexcusably high, and—noticing the classrooms' shortages of supplies and books and the nonexistent computers—says that lack of money is to blame. But the notorious failure of D.C.'s public schools has nothing to do with money. Those schools spend some $13,500 per pupil a year—not as much as rich suburban districts, true, but far above the national average and well above what many private schools spend to educate kids effectively. As for the missing supplies and computers, blame a corrupt, dysfunctional system that wastes the more-than-adequate funds. There's no hint of this ongoing scandal in Shipler's book, even though for years the local papers have chronicled it extensively and, in desperation, Mayor Williams and the U.S. Congress have set up a voucher plan to address it.

Shipler's obliviousness to the real causes of poverty also characterizes the latest addition to the "working poor" canon: Joanna Lipper's Growing Up Fast. A sometime documentary filmmaker, Lipper traveled to the once-thriving industrial town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in order to chronicle the lives of a generation of teenage unwed mothers. Because many of these young women are daughters of blue-collar workers who lost their jobs as General Electric gradually pulled out of Pittsfield during the 1980s, Lipper blames G.E. and, more broadly, globalization for the social pathology evident in the town today—not just the teen pregnancies but also the rising crime and drug-abuse rates that she says followed G.E.'s departure. The town's youth "have been excluded from the American dream," she writes.

Yet as the tale of Pittsfield and its teens unfolds, a different story emerges, even if Lipper—like Shipler in this regard—seems not to grasp the meaning of her own evidence. We learn, for example, that the town's drug problem actually began in the early 1980s, before G.E. left, after social-services providers opened government-funded drug-treatment centers in the area and imported hundreds of addicts from New York City and elsewhere to receive treatment. Many of these addicts, released from the programs but not fully detoxed, stayed on. They then brought friends and relatives to town and started dealing drugs around local fast-food joints and other spots where teens hung out. Not that all the buyers were kids, let alone "excluded" ones. Fueling the market, we learn, were "doctors from Williamstown and well-to-do people."

The teens get pregnant, as Lipper tells it, because they've got nothing better to do. They feel trapped, because "the major institutions of American life," the job market heading the list, "are not working for them," Lipper says. "[H]ope is the ingredient missing" from their lives. Yet one teen mother, Jessica, confides: "I had so much going for me before I got pregnant." Another, Shayla, herself born to teen parents long before job woes came to Pittsfield, says that she wanted to attend college but didn't work hard enough in high school to get in.
It never occurs to Lipper that teen pregnancy doesn't naturally flow from economic status. After all, millions of impoverished immigrants came to America from Europe in the early twentieth century without illegitimacy getting out of hand, thanks to strong religious traditions that stigmatized illegitimacy. What's really missing from the lives of Pittsfield's unwed mothers isn't hope; it's shame about teenage sex or out-of-wedlock pregnancy. The teens talk openly of early sexual escapades, and matter-of-factly pose for book photos with their illegitimate kids—unsurprising in a culture that glorifies sex and in which movie stars and rock musicians proudly flaunt their out-of-wedlock offspring. The demise of shame is a far more plausible explanation for Pittsfield's teen-pregnancy problem than is economic distress.

Like Shipler, in other words, Lipper has reversed cause and effect. She sees social dysfunction in Pittsfield and blames it on poverty. But it typically is personal failure and social dysfunction that create poverty. To stay out of poverty in America, it's necessary to do three simple things, social scientists have found: finish high school, don't have kids until you marry, and wait until you are at least 20 to marry. Do those three things, and the odds against your becoming impoverished are less than one in ten. Nearly 80 percent of everyone who fails to do those three things winds up poor.

That's a crucial truth that left-wing social thinkers have tried to deny from the earliest days of the welfare-rights movement. And as these books show, even after the conclusive failure of the War on Poverty and the resounding success of welfare reform, they are still at it.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

LOOK AT ME!!! I'M ON TV!!!!

Post tragedy antics by those who have lost loves, family, friends & limbs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_SbsDfyO7g

The Boston Bombing

Smile, though your heart is breaking, smile so we know you're faking...........














Yes!  The Devil made me do it!




Yay!  I'm so fucked up!  Hahahha!

Yeah, laughing all the way to the bank.   What a pretty penny these useless actors made.

By their smiles ye shall know them.

Stay alert, stay well.

Jean

Saturday, July 12, 2014

I'M STUPID!!!

A man who lives in Boston corrected me regarding the photographs I used in my previous post trying to prove the bombings were a hoax using uncredentialed photos pulled from an unchecked source.

The first picture showing runners going past the monitor was actually taken from the BAA 5K race the 2 days before the Boston Marathon


If you go to the previous link, you can see a much larger version:


Scroll down to the photo and you will notice the timer is at 32:31 and underneath it says: 5K.  The monitor is clearly seen.

This is the race link:


Here are the 2 winners at the Marathon:


At the upper right hand you can clearly see the edge of the monitor.  Race time is 2:29:15.

A couple of hours later the bombs went off.   Look carefully at the red, brick building and you will see the steel back of the monitor AFTER it has been taken down but not yet removed.


This correction neither proves no disproves the bombing was a hoax, I am merely correcting my first post.

I would say that the bombing actually took place the same day as the Marathon, not two separate films.

We have to be very careful when using someone else's research material.   Even the most enthusiastic fighters make mistakes.  I apologize to my readers for misleading them.

Jean

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Monday, May 26, 2014

100% Proof Boston Bombing Is A Hoax!

By Jean Bush


In this photo of runners crossing the finish line before the explosions, you will see the big, blue framed monitor against the red, brick building:



Shortly after the bombs:



Where is the monitor???   Proof that the bombings were filmed days earlier as a drill and spliced into the marathon day to run as a continuous shot.

Here's the original link with larger photos.


There should no longer be any questions about this.  Now let's move on to more false flags and hoaxes.

Stay alert and stay well.


Monday, January 20, 2014

WE'RE FUCKED!!!!






This is from Saddletramp, posted on Godlikeproductions  on 01/20/2014 11:51 AM

Here Is What Is About To Happen To You...
Okay, I’m going to save time for those of you who piss and moan about “Wall of Text” OP’s. I’m going to give a synopsis right up front for all of you Fluoridated, ADHD medicated, passer-by trolls that just come to financial posts on GLP to say, “You Can’t Eat Silver!”

The Synopsis of this thread is: You’re fucked!

There, now you can go on and go view the latest post on Jay-Z, or Dennis Rodman, or the Nobody, or what-the-fuck-ever…Goodbye and God-Speed.

For the rest of you that want to know what’s about to happen to your finances, hell to life as you know it, follow me down the rabbit hole for a moment. I will assure you that the time you take reading this post will be time well spent.

First, let me remind you, I don’t post timing predictions willy-nilly on financial matters. I have a Youtube channel and a Blog that some people actually come to for legitimate advice, so I try to stay away from the “timing game” regarding financial matters as much as I can, because it can always change through unforeseen circumstances and financial moves by the Central Banks. They keep their plans fluid people, and they have all the time in the world. That being said, the reason I feel fairly confident in posting this rough sketch timing of the next big financial event is because it is already in motion...

Second, let’s go over the evidence we have already collected of this well planned financial crisis that is coming at us like a freight train in a tunnel.

The Evidence

I could go all the way back to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 and bring you forward to the point we are at now, but you already know about this stuff, and if you have any questions regarding long past financial events that relate to our current situation, then I will try as best I can to address those questions on this thread. For purposes of brevity, I’m going to stick to recent financial news and how it relates to the coming financial reset, but please understand, all of those past moves that I’m not discussing here from 1913 to present are still part of this equation, a big part. So keep them in mind as you read on.

2010 to the Present, Capital Controls: In 2010 The United States began printing a new series of $100 bills (for information on that series just Google: The New $100 Bill, and you will get all the info you need), but they don’t begin circulating the new $100 bill, they just printed them by the pallet load and put them in storage. Meanwhile, they enact Capital Controls in 2011 through a hefty sur-tax on money leaving the country and going to places like Belize, and other favorite spots for Ex-Patriots, those capital controls went into effect at the beginning of 2012. Also during this time they are pulling worn and torn $100 bills out of the system at record rates, pulling down the amount of actual U.S. currency on the world market, all while flooding that same world market with electronically generated computer dollars. The bottom line to all of these moves is; DURING THE LAST THREE YEARS CAPITAL CONTROLS HAVE BEEN STEALTHFULLY PUT INTO PLACE AND MADE FULLY FUNCTIONAL IN THE USA!

Also, an interesting side note on the Capital Controls issue, they have decided to release into circulation the new $100 bill beginning in October of 2013, keep this date in mind as you read on.

2010 to the Present, Financial Regulations: In 2010 the United States passed the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act, and similar regulations were passed by England, the European Union, and most other developed countries. Despite all of the “Consumer Protection” hoopla surrounding these financial reforms, they were decidedly not consumer friendly. In point of fact, they were quite the opposite. Essentially what these regulations have done is totally changed the nature of the banking relationship. You are no longer a “depositor” at your financial institution; you are now an “unsecured creditor” of your bank. This doesn’t seem like much of a change until you also put together the way they have changed the method by which they reorganize a “systemically important” bank or financial company when it defaults. In the past, with regards to FDIC insured deposits at banks, if you had more money on deposit than was covered by the FDIC insurance, you might not get all of your money over $250,000 back, but you were first in line to get your money back from the liquidation of the other assets of the bank. Now, you are moved to the very back of the line, and any money over $250,000 dollars will most likely be replaced with stock certificates in a worthless shell company organized by the FDIC to hold all of the banks “bad assets” after post default reorganization. We all saw test runs of this with MF Global, and in Cyprus, and the tests went pretty much according to plan except, with regards to Cyprus, that much of the Russian Mafia money was allowed to flee the country through branches in other countries. These problems were promptly fixed by quiet new banking regulations involving out of country branches of a bank organized in another country.

Also, with regards to financial regulation, the Bank of International Settlements, the shadowy Central Bank of Central Banks, in Basel, Switzerland has passed a new set of Basel Banking Regulations that they began working on in 2010, called Basel III. Now you can read up about Basel III if you like, but in a nutshell what it does is put severe leverage restrictions and increased capital requirements on banks within the BIS structure (which is virtually all of the developed world). Now the European Union and the USA have been tinkering with the wording of these regulations since the last half of 2012, basically not changing them in any real fashion, but more looking for the right time to implement them. It now appears that that timing will be at the end of Q2 or the beginning of Q3, 2013. This will mean that during Q3 or Q4 of 2013, expect to see a massive credit freeze happen. Now, do you remember the date of circulation for the new $100 bill?

If you have any questions about the power of these Basel Banking Regulations you can also see the effects that Basel II and 2.5, mark to market accounting, had on the Housing Markets in the United States of America in 2008. There were many causes for that housing bubble, then housing crisis, but Basel II and 2.5 was most assuredly the pin that popped the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis of 2008-09.

2010 to Present, Financial Events: There have been many financial events that have caused economists and traders to false start, then false start again on predictions of doom, but all of these events have seemingly been blown away by the massive Bull Market in the United States and China. Traders and Economists have complained ad-nauseum that these markets simply don’t seem to have any relationship anymore to the actual economic environment, and they are right. These markets are wholly bought out with massive printing of electronic fiat dollars by monolithic financial institutions associated with the Federal Reserve and fully controlled by high frequency computer trading algorithms. The equity markets, and other fractional reserve markets such as precious metals, bear no relationship to the economy anymore. And despite the Quantitative Easing cheerleaders on the TV and in the financial forums, that is simply a fact.

There are many events in the financial markets that have transpired over the last two years that were signals of impending crisis, in fact so many that I simply don’t have the time, nor do you, to go over all of them. So I will choose three recent events that have been very large signals to me of what is to come for the world economy.

First, Cyprus: As I stated before, Cyprus was a test run of the new financial regulations of the European Union in much the same way that MF Global was in the United States, but it was also a signal to those in the know, that you had better get your money out of the banks! I won’t go over it again, but rest assuredly; this was a major recent signal.

Second, The Orchestrated Take-Down of Precious Metals: This was a move that may have well backfired on the Financial Cartel, in a sense. In seeking to take down the level of Precious Metal to allow for more inflation of these same metals later on (when it is needed to expand a currency that they decide to back with PM’s), they sought to also transfer the remaining private ownership of these metals from what we in the financial world call, “Weak Hands to Strong Arms”. It started with financial talking heads on TV trashing Gold and Silver as an investment for almost two months, and it then culminated with Black Friday in the commodity pits. What they never expected was that stackers would actually try to take that opportunity to load up on metals. They never expected the Physical Market to stabilize, and then push the paper market higher. They never expected the immediate disconnect of spot price in relation to physical price that happened and is still happening almost a month later. However, the move still serves a purpose for the Financial Cartel, it put all of the markets, including the bond markets and derivative markets, on tenuous footing, and it allowed for Banks to load up on physical metals at a cheap price for compliance with Basel III Capital Requirements. Unfortunately for the Cartel boys though, they may well have sacrificed the COMEX, their controlled price discovery system, in this transaction. But I doubt it matters much in the long run to them, as the COMEX was already dead the moment this plan was put into place. This move in PM’s was another huge signal of what’s to come, and if you will bear with me, I will tie it all together as we move through my scenario.

Third, The Ongoing Bond Implosion in Japan: Now this is a financial story that is still developing, but it is progressing at a rapid rate. Japan is the most leveraged country in the world, and their economy has been constantly controlled by the Financial Cartel, and virtually stagnate for almost twenty years now. Japan has been ripe to fall off of the tree for a long time, so it only makes sense that any bond and/or derivative market collapse would begin here. Japan is leading in the race to the bottom of currency degradation in the world currency wars, and they are the trigger that will cause the debt markets in Europe to implode, and then shortly thereafter, the debt markets in the USA. I’ve been saying for a couple of years now, and I still say, if you want to know the timing of all of this, watch Japan.

So, while there were obviously many more financial events that have transpired over the last three years that are slowly leading us to this cliff of financial oblivion that we now stand at the precipice of, these three alone are enough to help us with our conclusion.

Problem, Reaction, Solution; a Hegelian Love Story: So you say, fine, you’ve shown us a bunch of individual and apparently unrelated pieces of evidence of economic disaster, but yet we are still here. We are still standing despite it all.

Here’s where we tie it all together. You see the economic world moves in cycles, just like everything else in the Universe, and when we were using a more modified Austrian model of economics our economies moved in a 20-30 year cycle, but after WWII that all changed, because when the Austrian cycle came rolling around again for the World Reserve Currency in the 1970’s the financial cartel did something that would forever alter the path of human development, they pulled the worlds reserve currency, the U.S. Dollar, off of the gold standard, replaced it with the petro-dollar, and moved all world currencies to a totally fiat Keynesian economic system. This allowed for exponential expansion of currency and capital that was previously only dreamed of in Austrian circles, but it also allowed for the expansion of debt to never before imagined levels. And this is where we are today.

So Here’s The Problem: Debt; more debt has been created under this ever inflating system of Keynesian Economics and it’s fractional reserve banking than can ever be paid off. More debt exists on this planet than money exists to pay it off. So how do we cure something that can no longer be cured through economic expansion? Because you see, economic expansion, inflation, is the only way things are cured in a Keynesian System. So this leaves one to ask, how does the Financial Cartel take down a monolithic skyscraper of debt that they’ve built all they way up to the heavens, but has become structurally unsound at its foundation without taking themselves out in the process?

Controlled demolition, that’s how.

Of course what I’m talking about there is the real problem, not the problem you will hear about in the news.

Hyperinflation is not ordinary expansive inflation like we are used to in a Keynesian system. It’s not even runaway growth. Hyperinflation is the loss of confidence in a currency. In this case, following an implosion in world bond markets, and a subsequent deflation of the world derivative markets, the world will lose faith in all fiat currencies. Hyperinflation will ensue around the world. Economic premises that we are familiar with, that we are used too, financial relationships, like those of inflation to growth in equity markets, will become useless, and will in fact work in an entirely opposite manner of the way they worked before a loss of confidence. Imagine Market deflation while the value of the currency is dropping like a stone. Market deflation while prices for basic commodities and finished products are going through the roof. While interest is being jacked up on a daily basis to try and stave off the ravaging beast of inflation. If you don’t think this is possible, simply look to the fall of the USSR and Argentina for modern examples of this economic time bomb at work. Hyperinflation will be the one and only thing on the mind of every person of the world, and they will be beating that dead horse back to death nightly on every TV screen around the world.

So how does hyperinflation happen? Many people thought printing money would cause hyperinflation, and if that money had actually been let loose in the street economy, it would have. But that money was tightly controlled by a select few and disseminated into the system through financial instruments rather than loans to business. But now the tipping point has been reached, we cannot grow our way out of this mess with stocks and derivatives, and yet we cannot put that money into the hands of small business, they would only ravage big business and steal their market share. The system is full, the over-arching cycles of energy and food production are all moving into decline, and that will in turn move populations into decline. There are simply no “Consumers” left to exploit, the edges of our economic habitat have been found and fully explored. There is simply no where left to grow.

So without growth in the Keynesian system comes deflation, but they’ve stalled that deflation with artificial money printing that has propped up markets that long ago should have collapsed under the weight of their own hubris. So it, the deflation, transfers itself to the only place it can, the credit markets, sovereign debt, bonds! And so the loss of confidence begins in the bond markets, with the losses piling over into the titanic fantasy world of the derivative markets.

Derivative Markets, the only place on Earth where you could find someone to buy an option on Unicorn futures.

The Reaction of the Sheeples: It begins in the Japanese bond and derivative markets, and after that it cascades across the continent back to Europe, and anywhere else that debt exceeds an ever shrinking manageability level. Once Europe is fully enveloped in this credit crisis, expect America to follow suit soon thereafter, probably within six weeks. Interest rates on Bonds will skyrocket, leading to increases in interest rates for Residential and Commercial Property Mortgages. Soon interest will have to increase on all loans, including inter-bank lending. Once Basel III is thrown into the mix, there will be credit freezes due to decreased leverage and increased capital requirement for banks. Banks are no longer allowed to expand their way out of trouble, that’s too dangerous now, too many rogue elements out there for that.

Physical commodities begin to bring an ever widening premium over the paper markets. Electronic cash is still abundant, but actual paper currency becomes harder and harder to come by in this shadow world of capital controls. Central Banks end printing and begin to pull back on the reins, trying to tighten their money supplies. Prices at the gas station and at the grocery store explode, corporate profits implode and the equity markets tank. People’s savings and investments, their ever precious Pensions, 401k’s, and IRA’s begin to evaporate into the cyclone of a deflating debt bubble. People are losing their entire life savings and their house, the main source of their net worth, is now becoming worthless as well because no one can get a loan to buy a house, and even if they could, they couldn’t afford the ever increasing interest, you see because banks are now refusing to fix rates for more than three months because of the spiraling inflation.

Civil unrest follows as people lose their entire life’s work in a matter of weeks. People are demanding a solution to this economic disaster; they are demanding that the same system that put them into this mess be saved so that they can save something, anything, after the fall. Unemployment skyrockets as companies lose market share and credit markets dry up. It’s murder and mayhem, cities are burning, some are even claiming it’s Armageddon.

The Economic powers of the world schedule a meeting to solve this economic debt crisis and bring the hyperinflating major currencies of the world under control.

The Solution, Brought To You By Your Good Friends At The World Financial Cartel: The problem is now clear, forget the debt, forget the credit freeze, forget all the stuff that brought us here, it’s now obviously a currency crisis we face. But it just so happens, they have a solution ready to roll out. Of course they will have to jawbone it for a while to make it look good for the masses, but here’s what they’re going to do, just as soon as you’re hurting bad enough to accept it of course.

So the following is their solution to the problem they created, or something very equivalent.

First: They will create a world body, or use one of their world bodies they’ve already created, to manage world currencies and the amount of those currencies in circulation.

Second: any country that agrees to enter into, and abide by, an agreement to allow this “world body” to control the amount of that country’s, or Union’s, currency in circulation according to rules prescribed in the agreement will receive a huge discount in the amount of their sovereign debt owed. Probably something in the order of an instant haircut to bond holders of 50%, or in some instances, even more. This is probably also the point where governments begin to nationalize retirement accounts. For the people's safety of course.

Third: all participating currencies of each country will from that point on be backed by a basket of commodities specific to that country or union. For instance, Great Britain and China, who lack many natural resources, will probably back their currency primarily with gold and silver, while other countries that are richer in natural resources, like the United States, will probably back their currency with a basket of commodities such as energy reserves, real estate, mineral reserves, and possibly some percentage of gold and silver. These currencies would all be pegged together with this circulation agreement and the amount of currency in circulation would only fluctuate according to the value of the commodities pledged by the country as determined by the open markets.

Fourth: all excess liquidity over and above the prescribed circulation limits in the agreement will be removed from the system. So they will have to have the people using these “New” backed currencies around the world turn in their old currency, at (for example sake only) say $200 old, for $100 new (now again think of why they are waiting until October to release the new $100 bill which they have been printing for three years now), of course this will be easy with your bank account and investment accounts, they will simply slash the amount of money in your account by the prescribed percentage with the keystroke of a computer (and in case you’ve been wondering why all of the bank systems have had so much trouble lately, it’s because the software capability to do this was being installed and the accounts that need to be flagged and watched have already been identified).

Fifth: all of the resources and commodities used to back the currency of the country will be placed under the defacto control of the Central Bank that issues the currency, and thereby the BIS (Bank of International Settlements), so that countries themselves cannot cheat this agreement by pledging or selling off their resources by any manner other than that prescribed by the agreement.

A Hegelian Love Story: So that’s that, and in the end they will control all of the resources of the world because that’s what they always wanted from the beginning anyway. And the people of the world, well most of them will get down on their knee’s to thank them for saving a system that left them almost broke and penniless after a lifetime of work; all because at least some small pittance of their Pension or their 401k was saved and left in their possession. After all, the problem was worldwide, so obviously we needed some vestige of World Government to solve this, right?!?!?

Nathaniel Rothschild said, “Give me control over a nations currency, and I care not who makes its laws.”

Now they will say, “Give me control over a nations resources, and we will destroy that antiquated notion of national sovereignty.”

So when this is all said and done they will not only have control of the currencies of the world, (essentially meaning a one world currency, with familiar national denominations so as not to alarm the Conspiracy Theorists) they will also have control of the resources of the entire world to mete out as they see fit.

If that doesn’t chill you to the bone, then you my friend have not been paying very close attention to the world outside of your office or home recently. Because they will also use this chaotic opportunity to roll out the worst parts of their tyrannical scientific machine of control, all in the public good of course. Only to protect you – and them – from any reprisals from the fringe elements of society that demand things like “Freedom” and “Self-Determination”. Outlaw concepts of a bygone era. And the complaint media will parrot this line, and the people, sad though it may be, when presented with their futures going up in the fires of national currencies, will go along as well. Because the failure of this system would leave them penniless and without means; freedom be damned after all, I might lose my spot at the country club!

For those of you who think this could never happen, you need only research in depth what they've done as far as Financial Reform and Regulation since 2010. Of course the media isn’t telling you what’s going on, so you have to look these things up, but when you look at the evidence, the laws and regulations they’ve passed since 2010, the financial moves they’ve made, objectively; well I challenge you to find any other reasonable conclusion. In writing this I have also relied on other things as well though, such as information from personal friends still in the mix in banking circles. Not surprisingly though with much of this information in hand, even these people, some very high up people, in banking circles, don’t have a full understanding of what’s coming down the pipe. It’s called compartmentalization, and game theory. It’s knowing what you can do to provoke a certain response in your opponent or even someone working for you; they’ve been doing it for ages.

Regardless of the nay-sayer’s that will undoubtedly make their way to this thread may say, I stand firmly by the conclusions I have reached. So much so, that I am betting my livelihood and life savings on it. This scenario is going to happen, I’ve never been more convinced of anything in my life, but when will it happen?

Conclusions and Solutions, Falling Out Of Love: My best guess as far as timing regarding the scenario I have placed before you is that by the end of Q3 2013 we will be in it like a fully involved fire. By Q4 2013 Chaos in the financial markets and on the street will be the order of the day. Tyranny will reign in the name of protection and security. How fast certain elements of this go, I cannot say, there are simply too many variables at play to make a definitive prediction. Just say this, by the end of 2013, you will know the direction this is headed with absolute clarity, and because you took the time to read this, you will know that I was right, and you will at least know what you should have done, or perhaps you will even have done it.

Stop looking for fast money in this market, yes there will still be a few opportunities for a fast buck available, but don’t tie up and waste your resources with that anymore. Buy and hold is the order of the day now. If you have available funds here is what I would do, you can take it as a recommendation if you like, but I have to say, I’m not a licensed investment adviser, so I don’t offer it as recommendation, merely as an example of my financial strategy for the next two to five years.

With any “available” funds, I would first pay off any debt I had. Interest rates will likely be going up in the very near future, and if you were waiting for a signal of that to pay off some cheap interest debt you have, then consider the recent bond movements in U.S. Treasuries and Japanese Bonds as your signal. Interest will be going up in short order, but I also wouldn’t keep a lot of money in the bank. Trying to capture money through interest on savings is liable to become a dangerous game in the scenario I’ve laid out, as there will very likely be many bank closures forthcoming, and credit disruptions in the banking industry.

Second, I would buy non-perishable food. I don’t think you will have to have years and years’ worth in stock according to this scenario, but six months certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Third, I would keep enough paper currency for one or two month’s expenses, the rest I would put into commodities that you can hold physically. For most, that is gold or silver, but if you have land that you can grow crops or livestock on that might also mean extra fuel, feed, seed, or animals for consumption.

Fourth, if I had more saved than would pay for three years expenses, I would take that excess and buy agricultural land. NOT SECOND/RENTAL HOUSES OR COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE. If the agricultural land you choose has a house, so much the better, but don’t buy it just because of a house, or buy anything in the way of land with the idea of re-selling it in the next five to ten years, buy it with the idea of living on it for the next five to ten years, then re-assess your position in relation to the economy.

Well that’s it, I’m sorry it was so long, but it’s a big subject. I hope it will help you and perhaps generate some critical thinking out there. More than anything I just hope it helps. If one person gets a head’s up from me, then I consider my mission accomplished.

Nothing about this is going to be easy, time tables will change as circumstances arise, chaos will be the order of the day. Wars may even start over this. So I hope you will all stay safe, brave new world or no, because remember, in the end; The New World Order will be run by the same people that brought you The Old World Order…

by Saddletramp

Of further interest:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/government/2013/10/17/jpmorgan-chase-denies-new-capital-controls-on-accounts/
Anytime they deny something, you can bet your last inflated dollar, it's true.  

Remember: the sicker, weaker, confused, frightened and broke we are, the easier we can be controlled.



Jean