Friday, April 15, 2011

Gasoline averaging $4 a gallon in 5 states

Gasoline averaging $4 a gallon in 5 states | GoUpstate.com
Published: Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, April 15, 2011 at 11:30 a.m.

NEW YORK — The average price of gasoline is now above $4 per gallon in five states, and it could rise to that level in New York and Washington, D.C., this weekend.

The $4 mark is a tough reminder for American drivers. The last time they saw prices that high was in the summer of 2008, just before the economy went into a tailspin. Retail surveys show that motorists are already starting to buy less fuel, yet the government still expects pump prices to keep climbing this summer.

The national average has increased for 24 straight days, hitting $3.82 per gallon on Friday. It's above $4 in Connecticut, Illinois, California, Hawaii and Alaska.

Meanwhile, benchmark crude lost 44 cents to $107.67 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

NATO says confident of more planes for Libya soon

NATO says confident of more planes for Libya soon - Yahoo! News

BERLIN – NATO failed for a second day to find new ground-attack aircraft for the fight against Moammar Gadhafi's forces in Libya but Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told The Associated Press on Friday he expects the additional planes soon.

NATO's top military commander, U.S. Navy Adm. James Stavridis, has said there is a growing need for precision attack aircraft to avoid civilian casualties as Gadhafi's forces camouflage themselves and hide in populated areas to avoid Western airstrikes.

American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details, said the commander is looking for about eight to 10 additional planes.

In an interview with the AP following a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Fogh Rasmussen refused to confirm that number but said he was confident that military commanders would get the additional resources soon.

5 Grocery Staples That Are Going Up In Price

5 Grocery Staples That Are Going Up In Price
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistic's most recent Consumer Price Index report, consumers saw a price increase of 2.8% during the the last yearly period for food bought at grocery stores. This "food at home" component includes grocery staples such as milk, bread, vegetables and meat. World economic growth, rising crude oil prices, shrinking stockpiles, strong commodity demand and severe crop-destroying weather have created a perfect storm of sorts, resulting in rising food costs worldwide. In fact, the global food price index, compiled from price data for sugar, cereals, oils, meat and dairy products, recently reached a new, all-time high. While the effects of increased food costs are felt everywhere, from the school cafeteria to our favorite restaurants, here are five staples that cost more at the grocery store. (Inflation is often a consequence of economic recovery. Here's how you can protect your financial portfolio.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/04/11/investopedia51610.DTL#ixzz1JbzJWVFq

20 Signs That A Horrific Global Food Crisis Is Coming

20 Signs That A Horrific Global Food Crisis Is Coming

In case you haven't noticed, the world is on the verge of a horrific global food crisis. At some point, this crisis will affect you and your family. It may not be today, and it may not be tomorrow, but it is going to happen. Crazy weather and horrifying natural disasters have played havoc with agricultural production in many areas of the globe over the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the price of oil has begun to skyrocket. The entire global economy is predicated on the ability to use massive amounts of inexpensive oil to cheaply produce food and other goods and transport them over vast distances. Without cheap oil the whole game changes. Topsoil is being depleted at a staggering rate and key aquifers all over the world are being drained at an alarming pace. Global food prices are already at an all-time high and they continue to move up aggressively. So what is going to happen to our world when hundreds of millions more people cannot afford to feed themselves?

Most Americans are so accustomed to supermarkets that are absolutely packed to the gills with massive amounts of really inexpensive food that they cannot even imagine that life could be any other way. Unfortunately, that era is ending.

There are all kinds of indications that we are now entering a time when there will not be nearly enough food for everyone in the world. As competition for food supplies increases, food prices are going to go up. In fact, at some point they are going to go way up.

The Real Housewives of Wall Street

The Real Housewives of Wall Street | Rolling Stone Politics

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Most Americans know about that budget. What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the "official" budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.

This article appears in the April 28, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue will be available on newsstands and in the online archive April 15.

Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the "other" budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loanseach to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. "Our jaws are literally dropping as we're reading this," says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. "Every one of these transactions is outrageous."

Wall Street's Big Win

But if you want to get a true sense of what the "shadow budget" is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall's haul doesn't seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn't seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.

BP faces angry protests at first annual general meeting since spill

BP faces angry protests at first annual general meeting since spill | The Raw Story

LONDON — BP was facing angry protesters and disgruntled shareholders on Thursday at its first annual general meeting since a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The meeting in London is taking place almost a year since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and caused millions of barrels of oil to spew into the sea.

Bob Dudley, the American who took over as chief executive in October, faces accusations that he engineered a deal to create a venture to explore for oil in the Arctic with Russian giants Rosneft in a bid to camouflage the worst disaster in BP's history.

The Rosneft issue has been put off until next month after BP said Thursday that it and the Russian company had agreed to extend a deadline to complete a $16 billion share swap that is key to the deal.

Fishermen who claim their livelihoods have been damaged by the Gulf oil spill are set to protest at the AGM, alongside environmental campaigners.

GREENVILLE SC TEA PARTY RALLY BEFORE THE 1st PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 05 MAY 11

Huge bond fund bets against U.S. debt - Business

Huge bond fund bets against U.S. debt - Business - Eye on the Economy - Stocks & economy - msnbc.com
updated 4/11/2011 2:43:34 PM ET

The world's largest bond fund began betting against U.S. government debt last month on the expectation that shaky finances will jolt interest rates higher.

PIMCO, through its outspoken co-chief investment officer, Bill Gross, have been raising alarms about a lack of buyers for Treasuries once the Federal Reserve ends its own bond purchase program, also known as QE2, in June.

In February Gross revealed his ultra-bearish view on the United States by dumping all of his fund's U.S. government-related debt holdings.

Libya: The Hard-Sell is Coming

Libya: The Hard-Sell is Coming

New York Times op-ed piece by Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron

Tony Cartalucci
Prisonplanet.com
April 15, 2011

When presidents are writing editorials in newspapers a hard-sell is just around the corner. Judging by the recent tripartite op-ed in the New York Times by Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron regarding Libya, the hard-sell is most likely a protracted air campaign above Libya with an ever increasing ground presence below possibly leading to an all out invasion. Clearly the operation in Libya will exceed the “days or weeks, but not months” we were told it would take.

Predictably the UNSC r.1973 mandate of “protecting civilians” has “mission crept” into providing air cover for armed militants as they fight towards Tripoli – militants now openly proclaiming their allegiance to Al Qaeda. The CIA and MI6 are also admittedly on the groundassisting the rebels and attempting to bring down Qaddafi’s regime – violating entirely the contrived UNSC r.1973 that defined the intervention in the first place. Further violations come in the form of US calls to arm the rebels and allowing arms to flow into eastern Libya from Egypt. Hillary Clinton said she believed arming rebel groups was legal under UNSC r.1973. Of course, as Adolf Hitler has reminded us, everything is legal when you are the one writing the laws.

Now we are being told via this tripartite op-ed that it is unacceptable for Qadaffi to remain in power and that the operation cannot end until he is removed. Considering the verified lies surrounding UNSC r.1973′s premise and the fact that the resolution has turned out to be protecting and aiding known terrorists, we should be hesitant to accept any expansion upon this disingenuous foundation. We must remember that when asked about reports of Qaddafi brutalizing his people with air strikes, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen both responded “We’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever.”

Likewise, the International Institute of Strategic Studies conceded during a questioning session regarding military options in Libya that stories of mercenaries and the intentional targeting of civilian populations were not only unverified, but highly unlikely given that Qaddafi was well aware such actions would only further invite foreign intervention.

Greece Plans $110 Billion in Cuts, Asset Sales to Slash Debt

Greece Plans $110 Billion in Cuts, Asset Sales to Slash Debt - Businessweek

(Updates with bond yields in fourth paragraph, Papandreou comments in fifth and in ninth.)

April 15 (Bloomberg) -- Greece plans to carry out 76 billion euros ($110 billion) in austerity measures and state- asset sales to meet budget-deficit goals as Prime Minister George Papandreou vowed the country won’t restructure its debt.

Greece will enact 26 billion euros in deficit cuts and 50 billion euros in asset sales through 2015, the Finance Ministry said today in an e-mailed statement from Athens. The measures will cut the deficit to near 1 percent of gross domestic product by 2015, from a targeted 7.4 percent this year, Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said.

BP faces angry protests at first annual general meeting since spill

BP faces angry protests at first annual general meeting since spill | The Raw Story

LONDON — BP was facing angry protesters and disgruntled shareholders on Thursday at its first annual general meeting since a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The meeting in London is taking place almost a year since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig killed 11 workers and caused millions of barrels of oil to spew into the sea.

Bob Dudley, the American who took over as chief executive in October, faces accusations that he engineered a deal to create a venture to explore for oil in the Arctic with Russian giants Rosneft in a bid to camouflage the worst disaster in BP's history.

The Rosneft issue has been put off until next month after BP said Thursday that it and the Russian company had agreed to extend a deadline to complete a $16 billion share swap that is key to the deal.

Fishermen who claim their livelihoods have been damaged by the Gulf oil spill are set to protest at the AGM, alongside environmental campaigners.

The Goldman Sachs Hearings: 7 Cantankerous Hours Securitized Into A 5 Minute Super Clip (Comedy)

The Goldman Sachs Hearings: 7 Cantankerous Hours Securitized Into A 5 Minute Super Clip (Comedy) - BlackListedNews.com



Thursday, April 14, 2011

Want to Blame Someone? Blame the Fed

Want to Blame Someone? Blame the Fed : Deadline Live With Jack Blood

April 13, 2011 by Szandor Blestman
Filed under Commentary

Are you currently experiencing economic difficulties? It seems like everyone is these days. All kinds of people from all walks of life seem to be having more and deeper financial problems. Normally I would make the claim that a person should blame themselves for their financial woes, but in the real world there are extenuating circumstances and powerful forces working against the best interests of even the most hard working and capable people. The common folk have been kept in the dark. People can’t make choices for themselves when they don’t know choices exist. People can’t be blamed for their behavior when they have been trained from birth that the system they live in is the only system they can operate in.

In today’s world, people who have been victimized by the economic downturn are looking for someone to pin the blame on. Just about everyone seems to understand that something is wrong with the current system and most everyone seems to think they know who’s to blame. I am no exception. Some people blame Republicans. Others blame Democrats. Some blame unions. There are those who blame the Chinese and those who blame illegal immigrants. Some poorer people may well blame those who are better off financially and some well to do people may blame those who are less fortunate and look to the state for help. There are many people to blame and many excuses that can be used to blame them, all which are very divisive. I think if you’re going to blame someone or something for our financial woes, it may as well be the organization that nearly everyone in the world is a victim of. It may as well be the entity that claims control over the world’s economy. You may as well blame the Fed.

If you don’t know the story behind the Fed, then likely you haven’t been paying attention lately. It has become quite the story on many economic blogs and even some corporate media broadcasts with the continuing push to audit it. The Fed likes to operate in secret and has done so from its very conception. The meeting that conceived it in its modern form and determined how to best sell it to the American people, who were historically anti central banking, was held in great secret back in 1910. It came into existence in 1913 more through shady political dealings, payoffs and questionable voting practices than through open and honest debate, popular support or popular consent. Since that time its tentacles have reached into nearly every aspect of our economic lives and its enforcement arm, the IRS, has grown into the fearsome spectacle we see today.

Naturally, the Federal Reserve claims it needs its secrecy. They claim that their business will be harmed if exposed to public scrutiny. They claim that doing so will harm the American people. Just what are they trying to hide? What practices could a central bank be doing that would be harmful if we knew about it? If everything is on the up and up, they should have nothing to fear from a full and complete audit. We all know that secrecy isn’t there to protect the American people, it’s there to protect wrong doing from being discovered. It’s there to protect thieves and liars. It’s there to cover up practices that are harmful to the economy. It’s there to protect the extremely wealthy and the power elite.

From its inception, the Federal Reserve has worked to get its fingers into everyone’s pie. It wasn’t hard for them to do since they have a monopoly on the currency we are required to use. Just a few years after it was established, America found itself embroiled in Europe’s first world war. That involvement quickly used up America’s treasure and forever indebted the nation to the elite few who claim ownership of the Federal Reserve. I don’t know how much gold, assets, real money and wealth was transferred at that time, but I don’t imagine it was a mere pittance. From that moment forward, the wealth manipulation and monetary chicanery becomes historically obvious as the downward trend of the value of the dollar, and all fiat currencies, is charted.

The Federal Reserve System promised stability. They promised full employment. They lied. They broke their promises. They failed miserably. What had been promoted as a banking system radically different from anything the world had ever seen before became nothing but a mega ponzi scheme, just like any other fractional reserve, fiat driven central bank. It has become a wealth funneling scheme that has taken some very wealthy banking families and made them into modern day royalty.

The Fed has its hands in nearly everything, and certainly in everything worth anything. They are the corporate establishment, more or less. Huge corporations have become dependent on the Fed’s ponzi scheme for their survival, after all, currency that is based on nothing but debt is only good so long as people have faith in the system. People stop having faith in the system when they are unemployed, underemployed, their means of employment have been shipped overseas, prices of basic necessities like energy and food keep rising, the gap between rich and poor widens and political policies serve only the very wealthy or the very poor.

The corporate establishment owns the politicians. The Fed owns the corporate establishment. If you’re angry about anything political, blame the fed. Mad about the bailouts? Blame the Fed. Mad about the wars and occupations? Blame the Fed. Mad about states and municipalities going broke? Blame the Fed. Mad about the deficit? Blame the Fed. Mad about high taxes and unaccountable government? Blame the Fed. Why even acknowledge the political class anymore? They don’t listen to you. They don’t answer any redress of grievances. They don’t answer to you, they answer to their corporate masters. They answer to the Fed. They answer to the super wealthy, elite central bankers. The Fed pulls the strings. You wouldn’t blame the puppets if you didn’t like the show. You’d go behind the curtain and express your displeasure to the puppeteers. Politicians are simply the puppets, those behind the Federal Reserve System and central banks worldwide are the puppeteers.

The thought occurs to me that perhaps most protests are aimed in the wrong direction. Maybe the bankers are laughing at us. Maybe the power brokers and influence peddlers are snickering as they watch the angry mobs take to the streets and demand their puppet politicians do something. Million man marches have done no good. Flooding the congress with letters and emails have done little good, although it seems to have made a dent. Still, I think something more can be done. What if protesters started showing up in large numbers in front of Federal Reserve buildings, only they weren’t just protesting for the audit of the fed? What if anti war protesters started protesting there? What if union protesters started demanding policy changes in front of Federal Reserve buildings instead of at state houses? What if tax protesters, Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists and other freedom advocates took their causes to the doors of the Fed’s buildings? What if the common folk of the world joined in and began to take their protests to the doors of their central banks?

Better yet, what if the protesters started marching outside the private residences of those who own the world’s central banks? What if the common folks showed them that they know who holds the real power? What if these people who believe they are untouchable and above all law couldn’t walk outside their homes without hearing the jeers and complaints of the common folk? What if people started petitioning the real governments of the world for a redress of grievances? Perhaps then someone would listen. Perhaps then something would get done. At the very least, they would know that we know who to blame. They would know that we know where the real power rests. At the very least, they would know that their cover has been blown and they can no longer hide behind the skirts of their puppet politicians.

My archived articles are available at szandorblestman.com. Please visit there to help support me and my efforts. I also have an ebook available entitled “The Ouijiers” by Matthew Wayne.

Video: US troops fire on Iraqi detainees - Press TV News

Cut This! Cut That! We're Spending 8 Billion Dollars A Month On A War Th...

TSA Gropes 8-Year Old Boy, In Front Of Outraged Mother

» TSA Gropes 8-Year Old Boy, In Front Of Outraged Mother Alex Jones' Infowars: There's a war on for your mind!

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
April 14, 2011

Following the emergence of a video of a TSA agent subjecting a scared and confused 6-year old girl to an invasive full body pat down this week, another incident has come to light today in which an 8-year old boy was recently groped in the same way. This despite the fact that the TSA claimed it had changed its security procedure for children.

Young Spencer Sheahan was looking forward to the trip of a lifetime to Disneyland, but the fun was cut short at Portland International Airport in Oregon when a TSA agent pulled the child out of line and frisked him up and down in front of his stunned mother.

“They went up his leg, into that area, down the next leg, up here (chest), felt all over,” Heather Sheahan tells KGW News.

Ms Shehan quickly grabbed her camera and took photos to document the incident.

The pictures can be seen in the following KGW report:

“I was confused,” Spencer told the reporter. “I did not know what they were going to do to me.”

Globalists Positioned to Exploit Japan's Tragedy

Land Destroyer: Globalists Positioned to Exploit Japan's Tragedy
No Good Crisis Goes to Waste.
by Tony Cartalucci

Bangkok, Thailand April 14, 2011 - With US troops occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, conducting military operations in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and covertly inside Iran, and troops tied up at more than 820 installations in at least 135 countries, America couldn't offer Japan much help even if they wanted to.

The United States has approximately 38,000 troops stationed in Japan, however they have neither the equipment nor the training to provide the sort of help needed to deal with Japan's unprecedented disaster. TheWall Street Journal has reported that US military forces were struggling against a myriad of foreseeable and unforeseeable obstacles to provide even a basic response such as surveying the damage or delivering badly needed supplies to disaster victims.

Despite occupying Japan for 66 years, the Wall Street Journal cites "language barriers" as one such obstacle to the US response. Radiological contamination is also cited, despite the treat of North Korean nuclear, biological, and chemical attack and the defense America supposedly provides against it that has been touted for years as a selling point for America's continued presence in Japanese territory.

The troops, most of which are likely doing their absolute best given what is on hand, are not to be blamed for this humiliating response. It is the politicians and the corporate interests steering them that have left the United States so far stretched it is incapable of responding to a crisis that threatens an "ally" and even its own shores. The botched response to Hurricane Katrina is another good example of this phenomenon in practice.

Adding Insult to Injury

While the globocrats myopically obsessed over exploiting a contrived crisis in Libya, there were smatterings of interest gravitating not around how to mitigate the ongoing disaster in Fukushima, but rather how Japan should rebuild - expressed amongst the pages of the corporate-funded think-tank reports.

One such report by Brookings Institute's Robert Pozen titled, "Japan Can Rebuild on New Economic Foundations" includes calls for Japan to throw its borders open, allowing immigrants to solve their aging population dilemma, reforming its political system to undermine spending in rural Japan, and of course, stimulating economic growth with advances in computer technology, drug discovery, and "financial innovation." Financial innovation is of course creating and marketing new forms of securities (i.e. derivatives.)

The Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) Foreign Affairs magazine article "Tokyo's Turning Point" sees the disaster as an opportunity for Japan to abandon protectionism and embrace the "free-trade" travesty that is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP is yet another bid to further mire nations in the disastrous interdependency that is dragging economies from the US and across Europe into a speculative debt black-hole brought on by international bankers.

The article continues by suggesting future military reforms resulting from March 11 should include removing "anachronistic constraints" on JSDF rules of engagement, interoperability with U.S. forces, and participation in international defense industrial collaboration. It also suggests that faith in nuclear power having been shaken, Japan's dependency on foreign oil will increase, breathing new life into America's mandate to maintain the security of sea-lanes from Japan's coast all the way to the Middle East (China's "String of Pearls.")