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Water Color by Lesta Frank

By Anne Stuhldreher

…Unless, that is, you’re friends with someone like Maria del Carmen Torres. In between serving up pupusas and plantain chips at local farmers’ mark…

Target, Burlington, MA

By Eric Janszen

The first half of 2009 goes like this:

1. After Christmas sales: 20% to 50% off
2. Liquidation sales: 50% to 80% off
3. Then 30% to 40% of retailers go out o…

If you planned to check out a library book, visit a city clinic or have your garbage picked up on Monday, you’re out of luck.

The City of Chicago is basically closed for business on Aug. 17, a redu…

If nuclear weapons exist, then nuclear war is a real possibility. And Delhi is a prime target. It is.

But where shall we go? Is it possible to go out and buy another life because this one’s not panni…

By Rebecca Smith

Only a third of nurses have said they are willing to have the vaccine against swine flu amid fears it has not been tested enough, a survey has found.

Continue reading Only a Third…

Sir! No Sir!

Sir! No Sir! is a documentary produced, and written by David Zeiger  about the opposition to the Viet Nam War in military ranks. Subtitled “the suppressed story of the GI movement to en…

Thank you for all of your wonderful comments at the blog.

Alas, not all those commenting had the readers and our best interests at heart. And despite lots of spam filters, the spam has become quite s…

The Lockheed Fire in Santa Cruz was one of nine big wildfires burning more than 100,000 acres in California last week. It was named after the largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, because it th…

The 2008 GAAP-based deficit (counting unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities, etc.), using accrual accounting, was $5.1 trillion, up from $1.2 trillion ($4 trillion-plus, using consistent a…

By Daniel Whitten and Simon Lomax

The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable …

Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga) also spoke of a “socialistic elite” – Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who might use a pandemic disease or natural disaster as a…

Dear Senator Boxer:

You were so right on when you scolded the general on TV for using the term, “ma’am,” instead of “Senator”. After all, in the military, “ma’am” is a term of respect when addressin…

By Laurence Gonzales

As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to…

By David Liechty

On December 23, 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act (ch. 6, 38 Stat. 251) and again fundamentally changed the monetary structure of the United States, creating a mixed pub…

“”A lie keeps growing and growing until it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

I keep getting e-mails that militia are on the rise in America. I don’t believe a word of it. There are a lot of Ame…

Nothing would please Bernanke and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York more than to see both low long term yields and higher highs in equities. However, the juggling act required to ramp both equiti…

A friend of mine who has worked in the prison system tells me that the prisoners say the way to tell when the economy is in real trouble is prison riots trigged by dissatisfaction with food. The fol…

By Peter Whoriskey

Hate car salesmen? Want to skip the test drive?

General Motors has some cars to show you.

The government-rescued automaker announced on Monday that it is starting a trial in whi…

The Case-Shiller has been signalling an improvement in the second derivative of housing prices for a few months, and in the latest report it even showed a sequential increase. But check out the NAR’…

By Joe Weisenthal and Kamelia Angelova
Hopefully deficits don’t matter, because if they do, then boy are we screwed. Today’s chart was put together by Diapason Securities analyst Sean Corrigan (via A…

By Richard Milne in Amsterdam

Manufacturers are abandoning global supply chains for regional ones in a big shift brought about by the financial crisis and climate change concerns, according to e…

Secret Office, at The General Post-Office

Welcome to John Potter’s world. He’s the nation’s postmaster general. Yes, that’s right: for the last nine years, he has run the United States Posta…

When Mexico Had the Blues: A Transatlantic Tale of Bonds, Bankers, and Nationalists, 1862–1910

By Steven C. Topick

As Joseph Schumpeter lyrically described the broader phenomenon of public finance…

By Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta Jr.

Before he became President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary in 2006, Henry M. Paulson Jr. agreed to hold himself to a higher ethical standard than his…

Southern Presidential Peaks By Gary Tompkins

By Catherine Austin Fitts

As a child, my summers were spent hiking in the White Mountains (New Hampshire).

My grandparents had a farm that was listed …

“Our goal was to find out whether we could program DNA to assemble into shapes that exhibit custom curvature or twist, with features just a few nanometers wide,” says biophysicist Hendrik Dietz, a p…

The United States on Thursday issued new rules on oil market manipulation that prohibits market players from providing misleading information to influence prices.

The Federal Trade Commission said in…

Deutsche Bundesbank

Germany’s gold is in U.S. custody, Bundesbank confirms.

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

International journalist Max Keiser has just posted a nine-minute documentary he has done …

From Wikipedia

The South Atlantic Anomaly (or SAA) is the region where Earth’s inner Van Allen radiation belt makes its closest approach to the planet’s surface. For a given altitude, the radiation …

By Brody Mullins

Congress plans to spend $550 million to buy eight jets, a substantial upgrade to the fleet used by federal officials at a time when lawmakers have criticized the use of corporate j…

YouTube

By Charles Abbott

For the first time, more than 34 million Americans received food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries, government figures said on Thursday, a sign of the longest and one …

The picture above is an article about allegations of sex slave trafficking relating to a defense government contractor named DynCorp.

I became interested in DynCorp after observing their role as we…

By Joe Weisenthal and Kamelia Angelova

The severe bloodletting in the construction industry is slowly waning. The pace of layoffs is coming well off its peak, according to ADP, probably since compa…

Russian Nuclear-powered Submarine

By Mark Mazzeti and Thom Shanker

A pair of nuclear-powered Russian attack submarines has been patrolling off the eastern seaboard of the United States in recent d…

Penumbral Lunar Eclipse February 9, 2009
A penumbral lunar eclipse will take place on August 6, 2009, the third of four lunar eclipses in 2009. The moon’s small entry into the earth’s penumbral shad…

Credit & Copyright: Barry & Noemi Diacon

Continue reading Astronomy Picture of the Day

View full article at oftwominds.com

So when you’re reading the news about how randomly careless and stupid everybody was, just remember the Argentine plan: all the right people win, all the wrong p…

At tipstrategies.com

Go to the website to view an animated graphic of The Geography of Jobs between 2004 and 2009.

Photo: Moises Saman for The New York Times

By Campbell Robertson

Throughout the marshes, the reed gatherers, standing on land they once floated over, cry out to visitors in a passing boat.

“Maak…

President Barack Obama is nominating Robert Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, to a top economic position at the State Department.

Hormats, 66, will serve as undersecretary of s…

Jackpot

By Grant McCool 

The report said bonuses for Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were “substantially greater” than the banks’ net income.

Goldman earned…

Our very own Susan Johann just took 1st place at the Artists Guild of Spartanburg with Winter Hydrangea.

Susan Johann – Fine Art and Commercial Photographer

Financial Permaculture Chautaqua?

Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal has transmitted the following memorandum and proposed resolution on state sovereignty to the Wyoming Legislature’s Management Council.

Continue Reading Wyoming…

Robert Orel Dean at Wikipedia

“Thriller”

1,500 plus inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in Cebu, Philippines practice Michael Jackson’s global mega hit, Thriller.

Why a Recovery May Still Feel Like a Recession
New York Times (31 Jul 09)  The recession has produced declines far greater than in previous downturns over the past half-century. As a result, th…

One of the great mysteries surrounding the spread of GMO plants around the world since the first commercial crops were released in the early 1990’s in the USA and Argentina has been the absence of …

Continue Reading Obama Passing New Law to Allow Searching of PC’s, Laptops, And Media Devices

Each business day, the United States Treasury Department publishes a report on the workings of the government’s income and spending. One of the items on this report is the “Withheld Income and Em…

In July, the Secretary of Health and Human Services announced that the federal government expects to initiate a voluntary fall vaccination program against the 2009 H1N1 flu virus. The CDC will help…

By Howard Berkes

It was a Third World scene with an American setting. Hundreds of tired and desperate people crowded around an aid worker with a bullhorn, straining to hear the instructions and worri…

Welcome to the Community Toolbox. Here you will find fliers, brochures,    documents, and more to help you in your community efforts to raise awareness. Please Read the following post to help you …

From MyBudget360.com

View enlarged charts as pdf file . . .

The Moneychanger
By Franklin Sanders
Facing a collapsing national economy, we must revive local economies. To do that we need a local money that will stay local. Various community currencies have be…

From the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund
(29 Jul 09)

“Call your Senators TODAY to urge that NAIS funding be cut. The Senate is expected to consider the Senate Agriculture Appropriations bill as …

I have called my representative, Rep. Marsha Blackburn to request that she vote against HR 2749 (The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009).

The Weston A. Price Foundation alert says as follows:

HR2…

Courtesy of Rob Kirby

Continue Reading US Government Orchestrates Market Moves

By Kristina Cooke

Frustrated by your spouse’s spending habits?

It might be why you married them, according to a working paper titled “Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction” by professors of the Wharton Scho…

By Stu Woo

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday signed a plan to close California’s $24 billion budget shortfall, after using his line-item veto powers to slash $500 million in spending in addition …

Memorandum to all Primary Dealers and Recipients of the Weekly Press Release on Dealer Positions and Transactions

The latest list reflects the following changes:

Effective July 27, 2009, Nomura Se…

Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm, Virginia.

“When was the last time you heard a group of parents bragging? Ever hear one say, “Well, you can have your doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers. My ki…

Photo By Phil Ewing

By David Axe

“On several occasions the instruments gave reading of material objects moving at incredible speed,” a sub commander recalled. “Calculations showed speeds of a…

By Jason Leopold

Former Vice President Dick Cheney pressured President George W. Bush and other top administration officials to deploy US soldiers to a Buffalo, New York, suburb to arrest suspected t…

Gold in Sacks

By David Davis

When I read in the pages of this newspaper this month that the Conservative Party was planning to transfer people’s health data to Google, my heart sank. The policy described was so…

Chinese US Dollar

The dollar may be the focus of Chinese-U.S. talks starting in Washington today as China presses the Obama administration on how it will tame the fiscal deficit and protect the U.S…

By Peggy Noonan

This is big, what’s happening. President Obama appears to have misstepped on a major initiative and defining issue. He has misjudged the nation’s mood, which itself is news: He ro…

The L-Curve graph represents income, not wealth
If we divided the income of the US into thirds, we find that the top ten percent of the population gets a third, the next thirty percent gets another t…

Treasury’s is borrowing $235B in one week:

* 70-day CMB (7/24/09) $30B
* 13-week Bill (07/27/09) $32B
* 26-week Bill (07/27/09) $31B
* 19-year 6-month TIPS (07/27/09) $6B
* 52-week Bil…

I subscribe to The Kiplinger Letter. Among other things, I find it a predictor of the “official story” combined with a useful flow of tax and regulatory information.

This week, Kiplinger describes th…

By David Liechty

In 1863, Congress authorized the Treasury to receive “deposits of gold coin and bullion” in exchange for “certificates” payable on demand, having quasi-legal-tender status …

By Sam Smith

One of the clues that Obama was not who he professed to be during the campaign was his closeness to Harvard professor Cass Sunstein. When Obama appointed Sunstein to direct the White Hou…

By Richard Gray

By Ed Pilkington

The world is about to cross a demographic landmark of huge social and economic importance, with the proportion of the global population 65 and over set to outnumber…

By David Liechty

With irredeemable Greenbacks and precious metal coin circulating at identical legal, “dollar”, value (see Thompson v. Butler, 95 U.S. 694 at 696 (1878) , stating that “[a] co…

I believe one of the goals of the swine flu vaccine is depopulation. Perhaps it is the goal of a swine flu epidemic as well, whether bio-warfare or hype around a flu season.

These days, I keep rememb…

by F. William Engdahl

The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, has just signed a decree granting vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from any ne…

By Barry B. Burr

Pension fund fiduciaries under ERISA are “arguably required” to integrate environmental, social and corporate governance factors into their regular investment decision-making pro…

By James Howard Kunstler

The eulogy for Walter Cronkite as “the most trusted man in America” on the CBS “Sixty Minutes” show said a lot about the condition of this nation — though it did not signify…

By Arthur’s Baby Clipart

…from a vaccine-death case in the U.S. Vaccine Courts. Explains the physiological mechanism by which the MMR vaccine caused the child’s death, and how this same mechanism…

Illustration by S. Kambayashi

By Peter Brimelow

I’m amazed: Grousing about Goldman Sachs, and fury at the financial sector, is actually reaching the point where something might happen — maybe even…

Watch and learn people. This is how we do it ! Jon Stewart explains the great shape of our economy…

Jon Stewart Explains The Great Shape of Our Economy…
YouTube (17 July 09)

Hank Paulson’s testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week was painful to watch. The hardest thing in the world is to look into the mirror and say “I’m the patsy….

By: Prison Planet

I started F. William Engdahl’s new book, “Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order,” this weekend and literally could not put it down.

Engdahl begin…

Artist: Alberto Ruggieri

From BBC News

“From programmes involving large capital infusions into hundreds of financial institutions, to a mortgage modification programme, to public-private partnershi…

We posted this back in 2007, but thought it might be worth viewing again as we watch a parade of rich financiers insist that they are innocent of what has happened. A bubble this big is no accident, n…

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and California legislative leaders Monday said they reached a compromise to close the state’s $26 billion budget shortfall.

Continue Reading California Budget Deal Closes $…

By Tim Mullaney

Venture capital investment fell 51 percent in the second quarter as firms coped with the recession and a drought in initial public offerings, bringing funding for startups to the l…

More information at Wikipedia . . .

Update:

Asia Darkens Under Long Solar Eclipse
Reuters (22 July 09)

By Rob Kirby

With the former Investment Banks being granted Commercial Banking status due to the unfolding financial crisis in late 2008, it was widely reported in the mainstream financial press th…

Shock: Inside the Healthcare Bill
EconomicPolicyJournal.com

“Following the mad recommendations of Peter Singer made in NYT’s Sunday magazine, it pays to take a look at what is actually in the healt…

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-…

Public Roads

By: Ellen Dannin

On July 24, 2008, the Denver Post reported that Coloradans were shocked to learn that the private contractor that had leased the Northwest Parkway objected to road imp…

By Paul Craig Roberts

There is no economy left to recover. The US manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.”

The “New …

By Zachary Roth

So: is Steve Rattner stepping down as the Obama administration’s car czar because of the investigation into whether his private-equity fund used pay-to-play tactics to win business fr…

Under a broader definition of joblessness, some states have rates higher than 20 percent. This rate includes part-time workers who want to work full time, as well some people who want to work but have…

AnimalFarm

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they h…