It is my personal conviction that the problem is inherently their own, not ours.

We've had a central bank since Alexander Hamilton created one for the first administration. They are NOT illegal; I don't care what Ron Paul or Alex Jones say.

Perhaps more oversight would prompt such necessary action when it is warranted to prevent a crash instead of the Fed's track record of standing aside AS crashes in the market occur.

Just food for thought.

Freedom loving Americans reject Socialism as just a way for the government to control every aspect of a persons life.

No laws were broken

AMY GOODMAN: The New York Times reports President Obama and his national security advisers are considering expanding the American covert war in Pakistan beyond the tribal areas and deep into Baluchistan, around the area, the city, of Quetta.

Obama is expected to name Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence. Blair, as Allan Nairn reported on Democracy Now!, was implicated in backing the perpetrators of church massacres in East Timor in 1999.

Obama’s team has said he wants to abide by the rule of law in intelligence and foreign policy. So, in ’99 in Indonesia, Timor, did Admiral Blair abide by the rule of law? If Obama thinks the answer is no, then he should prosecute Blair, not appoint him. If Obama thinks the answer is yes, that that was abiding by the rule of law, then that means it’s OK to sponsor mass killings of civilians, and doing that earns you a promotion in Barack Obama’s Washington.

or are they just living in fear and paying for the Goverments mistakes.

It's not just governments..... the mass media are just as guilty in promoting a herd mindset.

I speak from a Canadian perspective

The simple fact of the matter is that the systems of law and economy have become far too complicated for the average person to understand

The real issue is that the governments in virtually every western nation have allowed special interests to dictate their agendas to the public.

Rapid increases in federal spending have resulted in higher levels of borrowing

It's not surprising though - Ben Bernanke, Fed Chairman, authored one of the most popular college textbooks on Microeconomics.

What are the symptoms of this purported Swine Flu? That's not at all clear according to virologists and public health experts. They say Swine Flu symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific. ‘So many different things can cause these symptoms. it is a dilemma,’ says one doctor interviewed by CNN. ‘There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know that a person has the Swine Flu.’ It has been noted that most individuals with Swine Flu had an early onset of fever. Also it was common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are symptoms so general as to say nothing.

Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they reported, ‘Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms

judging from all the conspiracy loonies out here

and that thought of to many windmills will alter our wind patterns is ridiculous

and that thought of to many windmills will alter our wind patterns is ridiculous

I have seen single whole house windmills and besides the leggings on the support tower that spread wide at ground level,the blades 60 feet up are only like 12 foot,takes very little air space,

not real noticeable.

Wind, sunlight,...water,...all these things are available and do NOT damage the planet,..

While there is no indication that ExxonMobil paid the climate skeptics directly and the scientists may have their own motivations for participating, the company poured millions of dollars into spreading its message worldwide. Here's where some of that money went.

Follow the MONEY............

The taxpayer was raped for $700 billion dollars after explicitly telling their Representatives and Senators NO by somewhere between a 100:1 and 300:1 ratio, depending on the individual Rep or Senator.

In addition to this The Taxpayer was further violated to the tune of some $8-12 trillion in additional "commitments and loans" for which he had no representation or voice, as those "commitments" were made by The Fed and affiliated agencies, which Congress has refused to exercise control over, despite having the clear Constitutional mandate to do so.

This is over $40,000 per man, woman and child in this country, and it was stolen from you quite literally at gunpoint for the explicit purpose of preventing the banksters responsible for this mess suffering the loss of their shirts, their homes, their yachts and their bonuses.

You must read George Will....

The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. While above the record minimum set on September 16, 2007

Second, tax rates on corporations are too high at 40%

As the GAO study documents and the historical record proves, corporate tax dodging is directly linked to the reduction of corporate tax revenues. Corporate tax receipts dropped from an average of 4.8 percent of GDP during the 1950s to 1.3 percent of GDP in FY2003. Treasury Department figures show that actual corporate income tax revenues fell 36 percent from FY2000 to FY2003. And while the statutory corporate income tax rate is 35 percent, the effective corporate tax rate - the actual share of corporate taxes paid on corporate profits - has averaged just 26 percent since 1993, according to the Congressional Research Service.

As corporate tax receipts decreased, payroll taxes, the most regressive of all taxes, increased dramatically. Specifically, payroll taxes increased from 1.6 percent of GDP in FY1950 to 6.8 percent of GDP in FY2002

Yet the Bush administration was able to find room in its 2004 budget to dramatically increase funding for compliance with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-income families. The Bush budget requested a 68.5 percent increase in EITC enforcement, despite the fact that EITC avoidance represents only 2.8 percent of the overall uncollected tax gap.

But I don't hold the banks responsible. If we give them the rope, and they pull it, and we don't yank it back, what do we expect them to do, stop pulling? If we let them continue as they did before, they will.

In 2000 the Clinton Administration then-Treasury Secretary was a man named Larry Summers. Summers had just been promoted from No. 2 under Wall Street Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be No. 1 when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Vice Chairman of Citigroup.

Summers convinced President Bill Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law which opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some $5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton.

Today five US banks according to data in the just-released Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency’s Quarterly Report on Bank Trading and Derivatives Activity, hold 96% of all US bank derivatives positions in terms of nominal values, and an eye-popping 81% of the total net credit risk exposure in event of default.

The five are, in declining order of importance: JPMorgan Chase which holds a staggering $88 trillion in derivatives (€66 trillion!). Morgan Chase is followed by Bank of America with $38 trillion in derivatives, and Citibank with $32 trillion. Number four in the derivatives sweepstakes is Goldman Sachs with a ‘mere’ $30 trillion in derivatives. Number five, the merged Wells Fargo-Wachovia Bank, drops dramatically in size to $5 trillion. Number six, Britain’s HSBC Bank USA has $3.7 trillion.

An oil refinery uses 100-500GWxh/year to make petrol, how silly is that? Maybe using petrol is unrealistic and we should give up on the idea? You need a fuel source that (a) has enough energy to get you from A to B, (b) can be carried around without its own weight causing a problem, and (c) it's relatively cheap to manufacturer, and (d) it can be replenished easily. The problem with using electricity directly via batteries has been (b) and (d). Using lith-ion, ala laptop batteries, instead of the old lead-acid has dramatically helped with (b). If cost can be reduced and (d) improved then maybe we won't need an intermediary storage such as petrol or hydrogen.

It has everything to do with it. Making your own hydrogen is the EASY part once you've got a cheap or free source of electricity. The latter bit is the HARD part.

It may be a couple of years or it may be a decade. It depends on a number of things, such as new developments in research, finding efficient methods of manufacturing, reducing the cost of components, political will, etc.

This is silly. It always costs more to transfer energy from one matter to another than you can get out of it. To do otherwise is contrary to the laws of physics. Otherwise you could have perpetual motion machines.

The same was said of using "grossly inefficient" solar power to run a home, yet people are doing that right now

There are already prototype cars you can drive around that are totally run by hydrogen fuel cells

Hydrogen has a number of challenges that won't be solved anytime soon.

I know for a fact Canada won't go for it.

A partnership will mean that the US dictates the policies

just that we like to have some say in our own affairs.

They are still looking for support despite engineering their own demise.

So i take the time now to ask,
Is this thing about to turn around?
Have we seen the deepest drops?

Should people really have seen this coming years ago?

I've been meaning to go back through my Heinlein again