Saturday, December 30, 2006
Thursday, December 28, 2006
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES TO SELL DOLLARS FOR EUROS
The United Arab Emirates plans to convert 8 percent of its foreign-exchange reserves to euros from dollars before September, the latest sign of growing global disaffection with the weakening U.S. currency.
The U.A.E. has started, "in a limited way," to sell part of its dollar reserves, the governor of the country's central bank, Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, said in an interview. "We will accumulate euros each time the market appears to dip" as part of a plan to expand the country's holding of euros to 10 percent of the total from the current 2 percent.
The Gulf state is among oil producers, including Iran, Venezuela and Indonesia, looking to shift their currency reserves into euros or sell their oil, which is now priced in dollars, for euros. The total value of the reserves held by the U.A.E. is $24.9 billion, Suwaidi said.
The dollar has fallen more than 10 percent this year against the euro.
Part of the reason for the decline is the outlook for slower U.S. growth, which makes the dollar a less attractive investment.
But fears that the dollar's level is unsustainable because of the heavy indebtedness of the United States to other countries is also behind the weakness this year, analysts said. Read on…
The U.A.E. has started, "in a limited way," to sell part of its dollar reserves, the governor of the country's central bank, Sultan Bin Nasser al-Suwaidi, said in an interview. "We will accumulate euros each time the market appears to dip" as part of a plan to expand the country's holding of euros to 10 percent of the total from the current 2 percent.
The Gulf state is among oil producers, including Iran, Venezuela and Indonesia, looking to shift their currency reserves into euros or sell their oil, which is now priced in dollars, for euros. The total value of the reserves held by the U.A.E. is $24.9 billion, Suwaidi said.
The dollar has fallen more than 10 percent this year against the euro.
Part of the reason for the decline is the outlook for slower U.S. growth, which makes the dollar a less attractive investment.
But fears that the dollar's level is unsustainable because of the heavy indebtedness of the United States to other countries is also behind the weakness this year, analysts said. Read on…
Monday, December 25, 2006
Friday, December 22, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Monday, December 04, 2006
Friday, December 01, 2006
Thursday, November 30, 2006
Monday, November 27, 2006
EXPLAINING POLITICS
POLITICS
Whether Democrat or Republican, I think you'll get a kick out of this!
A little boy goes to his dad and asks, "What is Politics?" Dad says, "Well son, let me try to explain it this way:
I am the head of the family, so call me The President. Your mother is the administrator of the money, so we call her the Government. We are here to take care of your needs, so we will call you the People. The nanny, we will consider her the Working Class. And your baby brother, we will call him the Future. Now think about that and see if it makes sense."
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what Dad has said Later that night,! he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper. So the little boy goes to his parent's room and finds his mother a sleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father in bed with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed.
The next morning, the little boy say's to his father, "Dad, I think I understand the concept of politics now. " The father says, "Good, son, tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about." The little boy replies, "The President is screwing the Working Class while the Government is sound asleep. The People are being ignored and the Future is in deep shit
Whether Democrat or Republican, I think you'll get a kick out of this!
A little boy goes to his dad and asks, "What is Politics?" Dad says, "Well son, let me try to explain it this way:
I am the head of the family, so call me The President. Your mother is the administrator of the money, so we call her the Government. We are here to take care of your needs, so we will call you the People. The nanny, we will consider her the Working Class. And your baby brother, we will call him the Future. Now think about that and see if it makes sense."
So the little boy goes off to bed thinking about what Dad has said Later that night,! he hears his baby brother crying, so he gets up to check on him. He finds that the baby has severely soiled his diaper. So the little boy goes to his parent's room and finds his mother a sleep. Not wanting to wake her, he goes to the nanny's room. Finding the door locked, he peeks in the keyhole and sees his father in bed with the nanny. He gives up and goes back to bed.
The next morning, the little boy say's to his father, "Dad, I think I understand the concept of politics now. " The father says, "Good, son, tell me in your own words what you think politics is all about." The little boy replies, "The President is screwing the Working Class while the Government is sound asleep. The People are being ignored and the Future is in deep shit
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Friday, November 10, 2006
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Monday, November 06, 2006
ELECTION 2006
call 1-866-ourvote to report any voting irregularities
1-888-votetip
take a video camera, camera, camera phone into the booth with you when you vote to record any problems you may have voting.
1-888-votetip
take a video camera, camera, camera phone into the booth with you when you vote to record any problems you may have voting.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Friday, November 03, 2006
LEAKED 2003 REPORT ON MARYLAND'S DIEBOLD VOTING SYSTEMS REVEALS SERIOUS SECURITY CONCERNS WERE WITHHELD FROM ELECTIONS BOARD, GOVERNOR AND PUBLIC
THIS IS A MUST-READ BREAKING STORY.
VOTES PROBABLY WERE STOLEN IN ELECTION
VOTES PROBABLY WERE STOLEN IN ELECTION
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
HOWARD DEAN PUTS KERRY SNAFU IN PERSPECTIVE -- VIDEO
. . . . and does anyone remember this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yJF13BS-hE
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
THE OCTOBER SURPRISE . . . .
can it be -- the GOP spends its wad of campaign money and blitzing with a plan to have the focus go to one of their stronger issues . . . immigration maybe. the seeds were planted for that a couple of weeks ago. we'll soon see.
WARNING OF FISCAL DISASTER -- A MUST READ
Warning of fiscal disasterOfficial takes to road to point out dangers of U.S. financial policyBy
Matt CrensonAssociated PressPublished October 30, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas -- David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office."This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them."There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity--maybe Oprah Winfrey--to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy--he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen. He wants them to know about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the Baby Boomer generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.He's dubbed his campaign the fiscal wake-up tour. The Illinois stop has not yet been scheduled.To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation.A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today. And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a while during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.And with the first Baby Boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently accounts for 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders--primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners--have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5 trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit--the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
Matt CrensonAssociated PressPublished October 30, 2006
AUSTIN, Texas -- David M. Walker sure talks like he's running for office."This is about the future of our country, our kids and grandkids," the comptroller general of the United States warns a packed hall at Austin's historic Driskill Hotel. "We the people have to rise up to make sure things get changed."But Walker doesn't want, or need, your vote this November. He already has a job as head of the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that audits and evaluates the performance of the federal government.Basically, that makes Walker the nation's accountant-in-chief. And the accountant-in-chief's professional opinion is that the American public needs to tell Washington it's time to steer the nation off the path to financial ruin.From the hustings and the airwaves this campaign season, America's political class can be heard debating Capitol Hill sex scandals, the wisdom of the war in Iraq and which party is tougher on terror. Democrats and Republicans talk of cutting taxes to make life easier for the American people.What they don't talk about is a dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows, or at least should. The vast majority of economists and budget analysts agree: The ship of state is on a disastrous course, and will founder on the reefs of economic disaster if nothing is done to correct it.There's a good reason politicians don't like to talk about the nation's long-term fiscal prospects. The subject is short on political theatrics and long on complicated economics, scary graphs and very big numbers. It reveals serious problems and offers no easy solutions. Anybody who wanted to deal with it seriously would have to talk about raising taxes and cutting benefits, nasty nostrums that might doom any candidate who prescribed them."There's no sexiness to it," laments Leita Hart-Fanta, an accountant who has just heard Walker's pitch. She suggests recruiting a trusted celebrity--maybe Oprah Winfrey--to sell fiscal responsibility to the American people.Walker doesn't want to make balancing the federal government's books sexy--he just wants to make it politically palatable. He has committed to touring the nation through the 2008 elections, talking to anybody who will listen. He wants them to know about the fiscal black hole Washington has dug itself, the "demographic tsunami" that will come when the Baby Boomer generation begins retiring and the recklessness of borrowing money from foreign lenders to pay for the operation of the U.S. government.He's dubbed his campaign the fiscal wake-up tour. The Illinois stop has not yet been scheduled.To show that the looming fiscal crisis is not a partisan issue, he brings along economists and budget analysts from across the political spectrum. In Austin, he's accompanied by Diane Lim Rogers, a liberal economist from the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.Their basic message is this: If the United States government conducts business as usual over the next few decades, a national debt that is already $8.5 trillion could reach $46 trillion or more, adjusted for inflation.A hole that big could paralyze the U.S. economy; according to some projections, just the interest payments on a debt that big would be as much as all the taxes the government collects today. And every year that nothing is done about it, Walker says, the problem grows by $2 trillion to $3 trillion.People who remember Ross Perot's rants in the 1992 presidential election may think of the federal debt as a problem of the past. But it never really went away after Perot made it an issue, it only took a breather. The federal government actually produced a surplus for a while during the 1990s, thanks to a booming economy and fiscal restraint imposed by laws that were passed early in the decade. And though the federal debt has grown in dollar terms since 2001, it hasn't grown dramatically relative to the size of the economy.But that's about to change, thanks to the country's three big entitlement programs--Social Security, Medicaid and especially Medicare. Medicaid and Medicare have grown progressively more expensive as the cost of health care has dramatically outpaced inflation over the past 30 years, a trend that is expected to continue for at least another decade or two.And with the first Baby Boomers becoming eligible for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011, the expenses of those two programs are about to increase dramatically due to demographic pressures. People are also living longer, which makes any program that provides benefits to retirees more expensive.Medicare already costs four times as much as it did in 1970, measured as a percentage of the nation's gross domestic product. It currently accounts for 13 percent of federal spending; by 2030, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will consume nearly a quarter of the budget.Social Security is a much less serious problem. The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. But Social Security will begin to run deficits during the next century, and ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.Why is America so fiscally unprepared for the next century? Like many of its citizens, the United States has spent the last few years racking up debt instead of saving for the future. Foreign lenders--primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners--have been eager to lend the government money at low interest rates, making the current $8.5 trillion deficit about as painful as a big balance on a zero-percent credit card.Macroeconomic meltdown is probably preventable, says Anjan Thakor, a professor of finance at Washington University in St. Louis. But to keep it at bay, he said, the government is essentially going to have to renegotiate some of the promises it has made to its citizens, probably by some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.But there's no way to avoid what Rogers considers the worst result of racking up a big deficit--the outrage of making our children and grandchildren repay the debts of their elders.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
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