A new television ad about the U.S. national debt produced by Citizens Against Government Waste has been deemed “too controversial” by major networks including ABC, A&E and The History Channel and will not be shown on those channels. The commercial is a homage to a 1986 ad that was entitled “The Deficit Trials” that was also banned by the major networks. Apparently telling the truth about the national debt is a little too “hot” for the major networks to handle. But perhaps it is time to tell the American people the truth. In 1986, the U.S. national debt was around 2 trillion dollars. Today, it is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars. The American Dream is being ripped apart right in front of our eyes, but apparently some of the major networks don’t want the American people to really understand what is going on. (Read More...)
If You Want To Board An Airplane In America You Now Have Two Options: Let Airport Security Gawk At Your Exposed Body Or Let Airport Security Feel You Up
In America today, we have become so spooked by “terror threats” that now we will submit to just about anything in the name of security. At this point, we are allowing ourselves to be treated as little more than cattle. Procedures that would once be considered an affront to human dignity are now accepted as “the new normal”. If you want to get on an airplane in America today, you must either go through one of the incredibly intrusive full body scanners that are going into all U.S. airports and let airport security gawk at your exposed body, or you must allow airport security to feel you up using the new “enhanced pat-down” techniques they are being instructed to employ. As you will see below, these new pat-down procedures are incredibly intrusive. If anyone tried to touch us like that out on the street they would be put in prison. But this is the new America where all of us must give up all of our privacy and all of our dignity just so that everyone can feel a little bit safer. (Read More...)
12 Polls That Prove That The American People Are Really, Really Pissed Off As Election Day 2010 Approaches
The American people are mad. No, check that, they are steaming mad. In the weeks leading up to the election, poll after poll after poll has shown that the American people are angrier at government than at any other point in modern U.S. history. American voters have been angry before, but this time it is different. Instead of being mad at just one political party, the American people are now clearly disgusted with both political parties. Neither major party has a positive approval rating. People are sick and tired of the economy being in the tank, they are sick and tired of not being able to get good jobs and they are sick and tired of the nonsense that has been going on in Washington. Both political parties are busy pointing fingers at each other, but what all the major polls in the weeks leading up to the election clearly show is that the American people are placing the blame on both the Republicans and the Democrats. In fact, as you will see below, a clear majority of the American people now wish that they could throw every member of Congress out of office and a clear majority of the American people now wish that they had a third political party to vote for. We have arrived at a point where both political parties have lost the faith of the American people, and where we go from here is anyone’s guess. (Read More...)
22 Statistics That Prove The Elite Are Becoming Fabulously Wealthy While The Middle Class Is Being Ripped To Shreds
In the United States today, the only group that is “doing better” each year financially is the folks at the very top of the income pyramid. Everyone else has seen their incomes decline. Once upon a time, America had a relatively egalitarian system where just about anyone could “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” if they just worked hard enough. But today, there are millions of Americans that can’t seem to get jobs no matter how hard they try. Millions of others feel their tenuous hold on the American Dream slipping out of their grasp just a little bit more each month. The truth is that we don’t have true capitalism in the United States anymore. Over the past several decades, the financial system in the U.S. has been carefully molded and shaped in such a way that all the wealth is funneled to the elite at the very top and to the monolithic predator corporations that now dominate the global economy. Power has become concentrated in the hands of very few individuals, and they are nearly impossible to compete against. If you doubt this, go set up a general store right next to your local Wal-Mart and see how long you can survive. In America today, the elite are becoming fabulously wealthy and the middle class is being ripped to shreds. One of the things that our Founding Fathers were extremely concerned about was not allowing too much power to be accumulated in the hands of any one person or institution, but today we have turned our backs on that principle and now we are paying the price. (Read More...)
Ford Motor Company Is Making Record Profits – By Shipping Our Jobs Overseas
On Tuesday, Ford Motor Company reported a record breaking profit for the third quarter. Ford earned 1.7 billion dollars during the quarter, which was way up from a profit of $997 million a year ago during the same time period. Ford CEO Alan Mulally is being hailed as a miracle worker, and investors are giddy about the future of the company. So is all of this success by Ford translating into good jobs for American workers? No. As described in a recent article on MSNBC, Mulally has been “revamping Ford’s U.S. and global manufacturing operation to be cheaper, more efficient and more flexible”. In other words, Mulally has been getting rid of American workers in droves. Since Mulally took over as CEO, Ford has slashed its North American work force by nearly half. Ford has shut down or plans to shut down a dozen U.S. manufacturing facilities. Today, only about 40 percent of Ford’s 178,000 workers are employed in North America, and a lot of those jobs are in Canada and Mexico. In fact, the number of Ford cars produced in Mexico continues to grow rapidly. The truth is that this is yet another example that proves that what is good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for average American workers. (Read More...)
The 2010 Commodity Bubble
Over the past several decades, the world financial system has produced a seemingly endless series of bubbles. For example, there was the “dot com bubble”, the “housing bubble” and the “yen carry trade”. So what bubbles are being created currently? Well, nobody wants much real estate right now and investors are still a bit wary of the stock market. Instead, money has been flooding into U.S. Treasuries and into commodities. In 2010, agricultural commodities have been going crazy, precious metals have been setting records and even the price of oil is now starting to move up. All over the globe, there is a growing lack of trust in paper currencies, and that is helping to fuel the move towards commodities. Unfortunately, “the 2010 commodity bubble” is going to have a very real impact on American consumers. As the prices of wheat, corn, pork and oil continue to rise on world markets, it is inevitable that those price increases will be passed on to the rest of us. (Read More...)
Why The Chinese Monopoly On Rare Earth Elements Is So Incredibly Dangerous
Most Americans have no idea why rare earth elements are important or why the Chinese monopoly on them is so dangerous. But now that China is enforcing strict new quotas on the export of these metals a lot more people are going to start learning about them. So just exactly what are they? Well, “rare earth elements” is a name that has been given to 17 metals from the middle of the Periodic Table with nearly unpronounceable names such as lanthanum, cerium, tantalum, neodymium and europium. These metals are used in an increasing number of high technology products. Everything from iPods to wind turbines to missile-guidance systems use these metals. Unfortunately, today China controls over 90 percent of the world supply of rare earth elements. This puts China in an incredibly powerful position. (Read More...)
Is This The Dirtiest Election Cycle Of All Time?: The 8 Most Vicious Political Attack Ads Of 2010
With just a few precious days to go until the November elections, politicians across the United States are pulling out all the stops in an effort to get elected. Vicious attack ads are seemingly everywhere. In fact, many analysts are already proclaiming that 2010 is the dirtiest election cycle of all time. When it comes to politics, the truth is that it is a lot easier to communicate one really bad thing about your opponent than it is to communicate a whole bunch of small positive things about yourself. As the old saying goes, drivers are not going to slow down to look at a pretty sunset, but they certainly will slow down to look at a really bad car wreck. In the waning weeks of the 2010 election, candidates across the United States are desperately attempting to manufacture those “car wreck moments”. This has resulted in an absolute flood of vicious political attack ads popping up on television in recent days. If the Founding Fathers could look back on us now, do you think they would be proud of how we are conducting ourselves? (Read More...)
Mortgage Investors To Bank Of America: We’re Pissed And We Want Our 47 Billion Dollars Back
Everyone knew that the foreclosure fraud crisis was going to spawn a festival of lawsuits, and now it looks like it is already beginning. The New York Federal Reserve Bank is part of a consortium of eight large institutional investment firms that has launched an effort to force Bank of America to repurchase $47 billion worth of mortgages packaged into bonds by its Countrywide Financial unit. It turns out that most mortgage bond contracts explicitly require the repurchase of loans when the quality of the loans falls short of promises made by the sellers. As most of us know by now, many of these mortgages that were packaged together into “AAA rated” securities were actually a bunch of junk. But this is just the beginning. There are going to be hordes of lawsuits stemming from this crisis and it is going to take years and years for this thing to work through the legal system. All of the big players in the U.S. mortgage industry are going to be paralyzed for an extended period of time by this crisis, and that means that buying a home and achieving the American Dream is going to become a lot harder for millions of Americans. Not only that, if mortgage lending institutions end up being forced to take back gigantic mountains of bad mortgages it could end up sinking a whole lot of them. The implications for the U.S. financial system would be staggering. (Read More...)