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  • DeMint: Law of the Sea Treaty now dead

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty now has 34 senators opposed to it and thus lacks the Senate votes needed for U.S. ratification, a key opponent of the treaty announced Monday.

    But the treaty’s main Senate proponent denies the treaty is sunk, saying plenty of time still exists to win support before a planned late-year vote.

    The Law of the Sea Treaty, which entered into force in 1994 and has been signed and ratified by 162 countries, establishes international laws governing the maritime rights of countries. The treaty has been signed but not ratified by the U.S., which would require two-thirds approval of the Senate.

    Critics of the treaty argue that it would subject U.S. sovereignty to an international body, require American businesses to pay royalties for resource exploitation and subject the U.S. to unwieldy environmental regulations as defined.

    The list of treaty opponents has been growing, and on Monday, Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican and a leader of efforts to block it, announced that four more Republicans have said that they would vote against ratification: Sens. Mike Johanns of Nebraka, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Rob Portman of Ohio and Johnny Isakson of Georgia.

    “With 34 senators against the misguided treaty, LOST will not be ratified by the Senate this year,” Mr. DeMint said in a statement on his website.

    This head count of treaty opponents — if the number stands — would make it impossible to reach the 67 votes needed to ratify the pact, which Sen. John F. Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, plans to bring to a vote.

    Full article: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/16/demint-says-law-sea-treaty-now-dead/


    News and Politics 📎and tagged

  • 27 Things That Every American Should Know About The National Debt

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    #1 It took more than 200 years for the U.S. national debt to reach 1 trillion dollars. In 1986, the U.S. national debt reached 2 trillion dollars. In 1992, the U.S. national debt reached 4 trillion dollars. In 2005, the U.S. national debt doubled again and reached 8 trillion dollars. Now the U.S. national debt is about to cross the 16 trillion dollar mark. How long can this kind of exponential growth go on?

    #2 If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rises to just 7 percent, the U.S. government will find itself spending more than a trillion dollars per year just on interest on the national debt.

    #3 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

    #4 Since Barack Obama entered the White House, the U.S. national debt has increased by an average of more than $64,000 per taxpayer.

    #5 Barack Obama will become the first president to run deficits of more than a trillion dollars during each of his first four years in office.

    #6 If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

    #7 The U.S. national debt has increased by more than 1.6 trillion dollars since the Republicans took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. So far, this Congress has added more to the national debt than the first 97 Congresses combined.

    #8 During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has accumulated more new debt than it did from the time that George Washington became president to the time that Bill Clinton became president.

    #9 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

    #10 As Bill Whittle has shown, you could take every single penny that every American earns above $250,000 and it would only fund about 38 percent of the federal budget.

    #11 Today, the government debt to GDP ratio in the United States is well over 100 percent.

    #12 A recently revised IMF policy paper entitled “An Analysis of U.S. Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: Who Will Pay and How?” projects that U.S. government debt will rise to about 400 percent of GDP by the year 2050.

    #13 The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.

    #14 At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

    #15 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

    #16 The U.S. national debt is now more than 22 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.

    #17 It is being projected that the U.S. national debt will surpass 23 trillion dollars in 2015.

    #18 Mandatory federal spending surpassed total federal revenue for the first time ever in fiscal 2011. That was not supposed to happen until 50 years from now.

    #19 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

    #20 The U.S. government has total assets of 2.7 trillion dollars and has total liabilities of 17.5 trillion dollars. The liabilities do not even count 4.7 trillion dollars of intragovernmental debt that is currently outstanding.

    #21 U.S. households are now actually receiving more money directly from the U.S. government than they are paying to the government in taxes.

    #22 The U.S. government is wasting your money on some of the stupidest things imaginable. For example, in 2011 the National Institutes of Health spent $592,527 on a study that sought to figure out once and for all why chimpanzees throw poop.

    #23 If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for last year would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.

    #24 The Federal Reserve purchased approximately 61 percent of all government debt issued by the U.S. Treasury Department during 2011.

    #25 At this point, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.

    #26 If the federal government began right at this moment to repay the U.S. national debt at a rate of one dollar per second, it would take over 480,000 years to completely pay off the national debt.

    #27 The official government debt figure does not even account for massive unfunded liabilities that the U.S. government will be hit with in the years ahead. According to Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, the U.S. government is facing a future “fiscal gap” of more than 200 trillion dollars.

    Full article: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/27-things-that-every-american-should-know-about-the-national-debt


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  • The price of gold has been manipulated. This is more scandalous than Libor

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The new media and the 24-hour news cycle have a great deal to answer for, not least encouraging a political class which would otherwise be happily engaged expensing duck houses into the belief that it should demonstrate perpetual action on our behalf – hence the endless stream of badly drafted legislation from the corridors of Whitehall.

    It does, however, reveal things that would otherwise be ignored. The issue of manipulation in the gold market which I wrote about last week is a case in point. The ball of half-truths and downright lies which have surrounded the issue for a long time is beginning to unspool in an issue internet activists kept alive long before it was acknowledged by the mainstream media.

    People ask why the issue is important at a time of naked market manipulation of the Libor rate. The answer is simple: the Libor manipulation scandal can be seen as the thin end of the wedge in terms of government market manipulation.

    Although Libor manipulation affects the interest rates we pay on all number of credit products, gold market manipulation is more serious still.

    The price of gold is traditionally a proxy for the value of money. A soaring bullion price is indicative of a lack of faith in fiat currency.
    Our financial system is predicated on the notion that money stands as a proxy for the factors of production – capital, labour, land and enterprise.

    In short, the abundance of money in the economy should be related to the abundance of those factors. The harder we work, for instance, the more we create. There is more labour in the economy, therefore a rise in the money supply is legitimate in order to mirror this. There is nothing wrong with printing money per se so long as the printing reflects an expansion in the real economy.

    Twentieth and Twenty-First century economics appears to have done away with this. Money is now created ex nihilo to feed both the top and bottom ends of society.

    Money printing or Quantitative Easing is mainly of benefit to two parties. Firstly, the Government, which is able to borrow more and borrow cheaper than it otherwise would have done. This is because QE money is used to buy bonds, forcing down yields.

    The Government uses this money to finance both existing debt and an expansive welfare state which bribes large portions of the population to accept a life of hellish boredom and dribbling docility in exchange for £70 a week in dole money. Such payments are not a genuine transfer of the fruits of existing production within an economy; they are borrowed. They help governments electorally at the cost of the vigour of society.

    At the top end, Quantitative Easing money goes directly to banks, who are able to sell their government bonds at a profit. In theory they may use this to even up their balance sheet. In reality they frequently use it as stake money at riskier tables.

    In both cases, paper money has been stripped of meaning. It is no longer a reflection of production nor any of its components. It now simply exists of its own right – but it can survive as a measure only for so long as the government keeps such printing in small enough doses that the de-leveraging does not become apparent to workers.

    As with everything in economics, there is a correctional market mechanism for this scenario – the flight to commodities, particularly precious metals like gold. Gold holds its value when paper money loses value, because it is beyond the gift of the government to simply will gold into being and give it to friends in high places or voters in low ones.

    If gold has been manipulated downwards and if that process continues, then all recourse to a store of value (other than land and property) has been taken from the individual.

    The value of our money is falling thanks to Quantitative Easing. Fixing in the gold market takes away one of the key hedges for those with cash assets but no property.

    The true fall in the value of money is probably better seen through the rise in house prices since the 1980s – a much better reflection of the market mechanism thanks to the suppliers being so large and because of the lack of a two-way interplay between house prices on the street and derivative products for traders.

    In any case, it would appear that the Libor scandal at Barclays has acted to draw out more market figures willing to claim openly that organised price fixing has occurred in gold.

    Full article: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100018574/the-price-of-gold-has-been-manipulated-this-is-more-scandalous-than-libor/


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