Archive for October 2009
Be Prepared For The Worst: “…The Economy Is Going To End Badly.”
Ron Paul / Forbes – October 31, 2009
Any number of pundits claim that we have now passed the worst of the recession. Green shoots of recovery are supposedly popping up all around the country, and the economy is expected to resume growing soon at an annual rate of 3% to 4%. Many of these are the same people who insisted that the economy would continue growing last year, even while it was clear that we were already in the beginning stages of a recession.
A false recovery is under way. I am reminded of the outlook in 1930, when the experts were certain that the worst of the Depression was over and that recovery was just around the corner. The economy and stock market seemed to be recovering, and there was optimism that the recession, like many of those before it, would be over in a year or less. Instead, the interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt caused the Depression to worsen, and the Dow Jones industrial average did not recover to 1929 levels until 1954. I fear that our stimulus and bailout programs have already done too much to prevent the economy from recovering in a natural manner and will result in yet another asset bubble.
Anytime the central bank intervenes to pump trillions of dollars into the financial system, a bubble is created that must eventually deflate. We have seen the results of Alan Greenspan’s excessively low interest rates: the housing bubble, the explosion of subprime loans and the subsequent collapse of the bubble, which took down numerous financial institutions. Rather than allow the market to correct itself and clear away the worst excesses of the boom period, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury colluded to put taxpayers on the hook for trillions of dollars. Those banks and financial institutions that took on the largest risks and performed worst were rewarded with billions in taxpayer dollars, allowing them to survive and compete with their better-managed peers.
This is nothing less than the creation of another bubble. By attempting to cushion the economy from the worst shocks of the housing bubble’s collapse, the Federal Reserve has ensured that the ultimate correction of its flawed economic policies will be more severe than it otherwise would have been. Even with the massive interventions, unemployment is near 10% and likely to increase, foreigners are cutting back on purchases of Treasury debt and the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet remains bloated at an unprecedented $2 trillion. Can anyone realistically argue that a few small upticks in a handful of economic indicators are a sign that the recession is over?
What is more likely happening is a repeat of the Great Depression.
Link to entire article below…
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1116/opinions-great-depression-economy-on-my-mind.html
Halloween/All Hallows Eve/Samhain: Why We Carve Pumpkins Today
World Of Mysteries – October 31, 2009
Big orange veggies are pretty strange as far as holiday symbols go, but there are actual historical reasons that we carve pumpkins every Halloween.
Like Halloween itself, the display and carving of pumpkins – from the lanterns placed inside to the scary faces we pick – has pagan origins that morphed with the passage of time as well as the crossing of an ocean.
The modern traditions of Halloween have roots in a Celtic holiday called Samhain, which was celebrated throughout Western Europe (but especially Ireland) every Oct. 31 to mark the end of the summer and the final harvest.
Warding off the Otherworld
As the tipping point that also ushered in the beginning of the “dark season,” it was believed that the night opened a kind of door to the Otherworld, letting spirits roam the Earth.
“The feast of Samhain was the occasion of stock-taking and in-gathering, of reorganizing communities for the winter months, including the preparation of quarters for itinerant warriors and shamans,” wrote Nicholas Rogers, a historian at York University in Toronto, in his book Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford University Press, 2002). “It was also a period of supernatural intensity, when the forces of darkness and decay were said to be abroad, spilling out from the sidh, [or] the ancient barrows or hills of the countryside.”
To combat the threat, ancient Celts often held raging bonfires – fire being a common way to ward off evil spirits.
The practice continued throughout the region even after Christianity took hold in the Middle Ages and the festival was renamed All Hallows Eve. Later, in towns, the fires shrank and were placed instead within turnips or gourds, which were inexpensive, readily available and safe “containers.”
“Originally they were simply pierced to emit light, and were carried to scare away the spirits from the Otherworld who could enter the mortal realm,” said Verlyn Flieger, a mythology specialist at the University of Maryland. Carving the gourds became common over time, Flieger explained. “Designed to ward off scary faces, they gradually took on the aspects of the very foes they were supposed to forestall,” she told LiveScience.
Turnips to pumpkins
All Hallows Eve came to North America “by boat, like everything else, carried by European immigrants to the New World,” Flieger said. The holiday exploded in the United States and Canada with the wave of Irish that came over during that country’s potato famine in the mid 19th century.
The new Americans couldn’t find their usual produce to carve at Halloween, however, so they turned to a reasonable fascimile.
“Gourds were scarce in the New World and turnips even scarcer, so pumpkins became the veggie of choice,” said Flieger.
A few fun facts about pumpkins, according to the U.S. Census Bureau: The United States’ major pumpkin states produce over one billion pounds of the vegetable annually, worth over $100 million. Illinois produces more pumpkins than any other American state. California, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York also contribute healthy crops.
The largest pumpkin on record is a 1,725 pound behemoth grown in the summer of this year in Ohio.
Link to original article below…
http://worldmysteries9.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-we-carve-pumpkins-not-turnips.html
Collapse Of Detroit: Ground Zero For De-industrialization Agenda 21
Aaron Dykes / Infowars – October 30, 2009
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, 1992
It’s a history where the bankers have embedded themselves into the economy, building up infrastructure for a time, then bringing down the system within the United States in concert with the international economic warfare and the rise of global government.
It’s the collapse of Detroit, and like the Great Depression of the 20th Century, the looming Greater Depression of the 21st Century, and the collapse of Building 7 and the Twin Towers, it was a staged collapse. This stage of the game is De-industrialization.
Inside this agenda is a plan for global government to emerge from the ashes of the once great United States and for the era of national sovereignty itself to subside. To achieve their goal, an economic squeeze is placed upon the nation and environmental pretexts are being used to strangle independence and viability– in America it has been the NAFTA, GATT, WTO and United Nations treaties that have wrecked her integrity and pillaged her productiveness.
A subsequent volume of ‘Fall of the Republic’ will further detail the staged-collapse of America’s economy, and Detroit is the most-detailed ground analysis yet undertaken by the Infowars team in preparation and research for the film. As this video of Detroit shows, its decline began in the Late 1950s and early 1960s with the collapse of the Packard Plant. We witnessed boarded-up abandoned houses, cities being reclaimed by nature and ethnic demography hardening into areas divided into sub-cultures and readied for control through community demagogues.
A key agent of the Rockefeller family, Dr. Richard Day, the National Medical Director of the Rockefeller-sponsored Planned Parenthood, told a meeting in March 1969 that American industry will be sabotaged and shown to be uncompetitive. He said:
“The stated plan was that different parts of the world would be assigned different roles of industry and commerce in a unified global system. The continued preeminence of the United States and the relative independence and self-sufficiency of the United States would have to be changed… in order to create a new structure, you first have to tear down the old, and American industry was one example of that.”
“Each part of the world will have a specialty and thus become inter-dependent, he said. The US will remain a center for agriculture, high tech, communications, and education but heavy industry would be “transported out.”
This is Agenda 21 in action—the agenda for the 21st Century as set by the globalists who run the United Nations and other key international mechanisms. The bankers most assuredly created the crisis now underway:
Detroit, Michigan
Link to entire article below…
Feds Post Monster Obamacare Bill: Complete Takeover Of Healthcare!
Kurt Nimmo / Infowars – October 30, 2009
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants you to read all 1,990 pages of the Obamacare plan. “We are putting it online for all Americans to see,” she announced. Most Americans will probably not read the bill. You’ll need a Washington-ese decoder ring to plow through the monstrosity.
If you are adventurous, however, here is a link to Pelosi’s “transparent” bill.
Republican John Boehner has posted the details of this boat anchor tribute to coercive government on his website. According to Boehner, the government take-over of health care includes: a plethora of new taxes on middle class families, massive cuts to Medicare benefits, no protections for small business, increased costs in the form of higher premiums, budget gimmickry to hide the massive total cost for future generations, imposes job-killing employer mandates, rigs the health care game in favor of a government-run insurance company, forces unfunded mandates on the states, adds more arcane gobbledegook to the tax code, and much more.
In fact, the bill — excluding the creation of the Federal Reserve and confiscatory income taxes — is the largest and most egregious intervention of the government into the private lives of Americans in history.
Americans for Tax Reform have posted the following points taken from the bill:
Link to entire article below…
Mysterious Virus Kills 30 People In Ukraine With 40,000 Now Infected
Radio Netherlands Worldwide – October 30, 2009
Radio Netherlands Worldwide reports: A viral infection has killed 30 people in Ukraine.
The illness begins as an ordinary bout of flu, but after a week the symptoms get worse. Almost 40,000 Ukrainians have contracted the disease. Around 100 are in hospital.
In the west of the country there has been a run on virus inhibitors and surgical masks. Schools and childcare centres in the city of Lvov are closed.
Tests are being carried out to establish what kind of virus is causing the sickness. The H1N1 virus which causes Mexican flu has been ruled out.
Russia Today puts the number closer to 40 and says it is H1N1:
Russia Today
Link to original article below…
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/mysterious-virus-hits-ukraine
US Home Vacancies Rise To 18.8 Million On Defaults In Third Quarter
Kathleen M. Howley / Bloomberg – October 29, 2009
Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) — About 18.8 million homes stood empty in the U.S. during the third quarter as banks seized properties from delinquent borrowers and new home sales fell in September.
The number of vacant properties, including foreclosures, residences for sale and vacation homes, rose from 18.4 million a year earlier and 18.7 million in the second quarter, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report today. The record high was in the first quarter, when 18.95 million homes were vacant. The homeownership rate, meaning households that own their own residence, stood at 67.6 percent.
The worst U.S. housing crash since the Great Depression has led to a record number of foreclosures and shaved almost a third off property values. The S&P/Case-Shiller Index of 20 cities in August was 29 percent below its 2006 high, after rising for four consecutive months.
“We are bumping along the bottom of the housing market,” said James Lockhart, vice chairman of WL Ross & Co. and the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. “There is the potential for another swing down.”
Sales of new U.S. homes fell 3.6 percent in September to an annual pace of 402,000, the Commerce Department said yesterday. That was lower than the 440,000 median forecast of 75 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.
Link to entire article below…
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aNQJ9BUq2_yM
Soros Warns America Against Resisting New Global Financial System
Paul Joseph Watson / Prison Planet – October 28, 2009
Billionaire globalist George Soros told the Financial Times during an interview that China will supplant the United States as the leader of the new world order and that America should not resist the country’s decline as the dollar weakens, living standards drop, and a new global currency is introduced.
Asked what Obama should discuss when he visits China next month, Soros stated, “This would be the time because I think you really need to bring China into the creation of a new world order, financial world order,” adding that China was a reluctant member of the IMF who didn’t make enough of a contribution.
“I think you need a new world order that China has to be part of the process of creating it and they have to buy in, they have to own it in the same way as the United States owns…the current order,” said Soros, adding that the G20 was a move in this direction.
Soros said that there was a flight from currencies across the board, and that this is why the price of commodities, notably gold and oil, were generally rising. He also stated that an orderly decline of the dollar was “desirable” and that the entire system needed to be reconstituted towards a global currency.
“You need a new currency system and actually the Special Drawing Rights do give you the makings of a system and I think it’s ill-considered on the part of the United States to resist the wider use of Special Drawing Rights, they could be very useful now when you have a global shortfall of demand, you could actually internationally create currency through Special Drawing Rights,” said Soros, explaining that this was already in process after the IMF injected an allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) equivalent to $250 billion into the global economy.
Soros also stated that richer countries were already transferring wealth to poorer countries via SDR’s, with the IMF paying for the half per cent transaction cost.
Soros said the world would have to go through a “painful adjustment” following the decline of the dollar and the introduction of a global currency. Reading between the lines, he essentially threatened to kill the dollar completely if the United States did not get on board with the global currency.
Soros predicted that China would become the new engine of the global economy, replacing the U.S., and that this would slow economic growth and reduce living standards. Soros characterized the United States as a drag on the global economy because of the declining dollar.
Watch the video interview below…
Link to original article below…
http://www.prisonplanet.com/soros-china-will-lead-new-world-order.html
Deadly Car Bomb Kills 90 People In Pakistan As Hillary Clinton Visits
Zeeshan Haider and Andrew Quinn / Reuters – October 28, 2009
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) – A car bomb ripped through a crowded market killing 90 people in Pakistan’s city of Peshawar on Wednesday, just hours after Washington’s top diplomat arrived pledging a fresh start in sometimes strained relations.
Wednesday’s bomb, the latest urban attack since the army launched a major assault on rural Taliban strongholds two weeks ago, was the deadliest since 2007 when around 140 died at a procession to welcome home former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated just weeks later.
The bomb went off in the busy Peepal Mandi market street in a city that for years served as the headquarters of the Pakistan- and U.S.- backed mujahideen war against the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan.
Although nobody claimed responsibility, suspicion immediately fell on Pakistani Taliban militants who are the target of the army offensive.
The rugged landscape between Afghanistan and Pakistan has become a haven for Taliban militants fighting on both sides of the border as well as many hundreds of al Qaeda operatives and other foreign Islamist insurgents.
Hours after the blast, visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a news conference that Washington fully supported Pakistan’s battle.
Link to entire article below…
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/091028/us/politics_us_pakistan_security
Does US-Israeli Missile Defense War Game Signal An Attack On Iran?
Paul Craig Roberts / Infowars – October 28, 2009
There’s no word in the Western press, but Aljazeera reports that the US and Israel are conducting tests of the high altitude missile defense system that the US has provided to Israel.
The anti-missile system is useless against the short range rockets of Hamas and Hezbollah. Its purpose is to protect Israel from longer range Iranian missiles. Everyone understands that Iran would not attack Israel except in retaliation. It is logical to conclude that the missile defense system signals an upcoming Israeli attack on Iran.
If the US were opposed to an Israeli attack on Iran, the US would not provide Israel with protection against retaliation and would not engage in war games with Israel to test the system. The best way to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran is to leave Israel open to retaliation. This decision by the United States government is irresponsible in the extreme. It enables Israel to spread aggression in the Middle East. By signaling an attack, it would encourage a less cautious country than Iran to strike first before the Israeli missile defense system is operative.
The joint US-Israeli war games involving 2000 troops from the US European Command, the Israeli Army, and 17 US Navy ships is further indication to the world that no matter what crimes the Israelis commit, the US will protect Israel from being held accountable.
In the world today, the US and Israel are the two threats to peace.
Link to original article below…
http://www.infowars.com/does-us-israeli-missile-defense-war-game-signal-israeli-attack-on-iran/
The Tonka Report 