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Originally posted by daryllyn
And to the commenter that stated people should be able to make it at 22,000 per year and that if those people didn't buy alcohol, cigarettes and drugs that they would be fine. HOW RUDE of you to assume that you know anything about them. Shame on you.
I'm sure you have, as have many other members here. But this story is about the middle class - think debt-load, and people trying to hang on to their homes, pay bills and avoid bankruptcy....
There has been no real progress made in the economy. In fact, the actions taken by Washington, the U.S. Treasury and the criminal Federal Reserve Bank have assured the effects of this depression will persist for decades.
...Even worse, the recent surge in Treasury yields is putting upward pressure on mortgage rates, despite the intended actions from the Fed’s quantitative easing program. In fact, government bond yields of virtually every major economy have soared ever since the Fed announced the commencement of its latest round of quantitative easing....
The climax is coming, with a higher cost structure across the USEconomy, and shortages where prices are kept down artificially. US businesses see little prospect in capital investment, at least not within the United States. They sit on cash, and see little usage for it. So they speculate with it, a contradiction that capitalism exists in the US at all. In the next chapter, future price inflation will be called economic growth, the next travesty!!
Look for an increase in empty sections of supermarket shelves for food, and gasoline stations shut down. It will be an end symptom....
www.marketoracle.co.uk...
“Gold Finger - A New Take On Operation Grand Slam With A Tungsten Twist”
I’ve already reported on irregular physical gold settlements which occurred in London, England back in the first week of October, 2009. Specifically, these settlements involved the intermediation of at least one Central Bank [The Bank of England] to resolve allocated settlements on behalf of J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank – who DID NOT have the gold bullion that they had sold short and were contracted to deliver. At the same time I reported on two other unusual occurrences:
1] - irregularities in the publication of the gold ETF - GLD’s bar list from Sept. 25 – Oct.14 where the length of the bar list went from 1,381 pages to under 200 pages and then back up to 800 or so pages.
2] - reports of 400 oz. “good delivery” bricks of gold found gutted and filled with tungsten within the confines of LBMA approved vaults in Hong Kong....
here’s what the Chinese allegedly uncovered:
Roughly 15 years ago – during the Clinton Administration [think Robert Rubin, Sir Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers] – between 1.3 and 1.5 million 400 oz tungsten blanks were allegedly manufactured by a very high-end, sophisticated refiner in the USA [more than 16 Thousand metric tonnes]. Subsequently, 640,000 of these tungsten blanks received their gold plating and WERE shipped to Ft. Knox and remain there to this day. I know folks who have copies of the original shipping docs with dates and exact weights of “tungsten” bars shipped to Ft. Knox....
And yet the top 1% of Americans control the majority of the wealth.
How can you have billions of dollars, a hundred extra rooms in your mansion, and yet not feel the urge in your heart to help some of these people?
Does moolah blind your conscience or what? I'm asking cuz i'm working class, I wouldn't know.
Originally posted by againuntodust
Originally posted by daryllyn
And to the commenter that stated people should be able to make it at 22,000 per year and that if those people didn't buy alcohol, cigarettes and drugs that they would be fine. HOW RUDE of you to assume that you know anything about them. Shame on you.
That was me and I stand by the comment. I don't make sweeping statements. I did not mean everyone who gets free food is buying booze and drugs, but I do know for a fact some of them are. And if it's rude for me to assume I know anything about them, then it's rude for you to assume that you do either. So shame on us both.
Good financial stewards are a rarity in this country. Coupling that with the statistic of 25% of people smoke, and 75% of people drink, and my own personal experience whereas EVERYONE I've ever seen needing assistance has been abusing it by these methods, allows me to make my statement without shame. Here is a research paper on Substance Use among Welfare Recipients.
For those that are good financial stewards, and sober, and still needing the assistance - the comment is not directed towards them... they deserve the help. I'm pretty sure we all agree there.
Originally posted by illuminnaughty
Personally I think its only right, that the americans suffer a bit. After all, they have been stuffing them selves for years at the expense of the rest of the world. Now they can experience what life in the poorer countrys is like. Struggling to make ends meet. Maybe it will make them wake up. Half the world is starving, Whilst they sit on their rather large asses. Making silly comments about other poorer countrys and how lazy the people are there.
Originally posted by againuntodust
I have a feeling if these people weren't buying booze, cigarettes and drugs that they wouldn't need food assistance. But I am just drawing from personal experience - what I've seen through my life on who uses and abuses these programs.
Personally I think its only right, that the americans suffer a bit.... Yes thats a real good american idea and a dream, they can all believe in. Kill poorer people to make them selves wealthy again.
In 1976 A typical American CEO earned 36 times as much as the average worker. By 2008 the average CEO pay increased to 369 times that of the average worker. timelines.ws...
This works out to approx 25% of America relying on food stamps. Hello extended depression....
I am amazed that the US government, in the midst of the worst financial crises ever, is content for short-selling to drive down the asset prices that the government is trying to support....
The bald fact is that the combination of ignorance, negligence, and ideology that permitted the crisis to happen still prevails and is blocking any remedy. Either the people in power in Washington and the financial community are total dimwits or they are manipulating an opportunity to redistribute wealth from taxpayers, equity owners and pension funds to the financial sector. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury www.countercurrents.org...
The fact that we live in societies where supermarkets will through away perfectly good food that could feed thousands of people just shows how far off the tracks we have gone.
Originally posted by crimvelvet
reply to post by brill
This works out to approx 25% of America relying on food stamps. Hello extended depression....
Tye US government has been lying through its teeth for years by constantly changing how they present "Statistics" For example the estimate of the REAL unemployment rate is 22% So I am not surprised that 25% of the USA is on food stamps.
Add in 17% of the labor force that works for the Federal government and you can see we as a country are in a real world of hurt. On top of that we just added three more bureaucratic headaches, Obamacare, the Food safety Farce and the 1099 nightmare
Sorry, I just found it difficult to believe fuel prices weren't an issue in any of these calculations...especially as it seems it would be such a pivotal swath of some retched billionaires pen.
Former President Clinton told a U.N. gathering Thursday that the global food crisis shows "we all blew it, including me," by treating food crops "like color TVs" instead of as a vital commodity for the world's poor...
Clinton criticized decades of policymaking by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and others, encouraged by the U.S., that pressured Africans in particular into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed and other farm inputs as a requirement to get aid. Africa's food self-sufficiency declined and food imports rose... seattletimes.nwsource.com...
When Haiti lowered its tariffs on rice in the 1990s due to international pressure, the local agricultural sector was destroyed. In a remarkable admission, former President Bill Clinton confessed that such “free trade” policies were a mistake....
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton made a remarkable admission a couple of weeks ago. His neoliberal “free trade” policies of the 1990’s have led to the destruction of Haiti’s agricultural sector and the inability of the country to feed itself.
"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," said Clinton to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.
www.stwr.org...
Originally posted by illuminnaughty
Personally I think its only right, that the americans suffer a bit. After all, they have been stuffing them selves for years at the expense of the rest of the world. Now they can experience what life in the poorer countrys is like. Struggling to make ends meet. Maybe it will make them wake up. Half the world is starving, Whilst they sit on their rather large asses. Making silly comments about other poorer countrys and how lazy the people are there. Whats needed is for the peace prize winner, to start another war. Then the americans can get back on top. Yes thats a real good american idea and a dream, they can all believe in. Kill poorer people to make them selves wealthy again.
I don't know in detail how the economic crisis will develop in the US, but I am aware that some of New Labour's bail out policies were adopted over there during 2008-09 if anyone could post insight please?
Structural Adjustment Policies are economic policies which countries must follow in order to qualify for new World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans and help them make debt repayments on the older debts owed to commercial banks, governments and the World Bank....
SAPs generally require countries to devalue their currencies against the dollar;[in the future the Yen! ] lift import and export restrictions; balance their budgets and not overspend; and remove price controls and state subsidies...
Balancing national budgets can be done by raising taxes, which the IMF frowns upon, or by cutting government spending, which it definitely recommends. As a result, SAPs often result in deep cuts in programmes like education, health and social care, and the removal of subsidies designed to control the price of basics such as food and milk. So SAPs hurt the poor most, because they depend heavily on these services and subsidies....
By devaluing the currency and simultaneously removing price controls, the immediate effect of a SAP is generally to hike prices up three or four times, increasing poverty to such an extent that riots are a frequent result. www.whirledbank.org...