The headline that “Pelosi chocks up warning against political “Violence” exposes the raw nerves of the country which are becoming more exposed due to growing pressures on the American public, including the continuing debasement of our currency, the banker-run housing bubble that has resulted in a collapse which has dropped home values 31.4% since May 2006 (S&P/Case-Schiller Housing data, seasonally adjusted series) and a growing trend of federal encroachment into States’ internal autonomy (see story “As Federal Bureaucrats Take Over America” following).
Both political parties are responsible for the collapsing state of the economy, and despite the handover of bailout dough to the bankster class last year, it’s only just this week that congress is getting around to voting on an extension of unemployment benefits. But to the millions out of work, this is only 13-weeks of extension -0 hardly a nation-saving move. Moreover, the special treatment given the bankster class underscores where Washington’s true allegiance lies – the expansion of the rights of the corporate persona, including freedom from liability on many fronts, while calls opposed to special interest legislation go unheeded.
What do the people inside the Beltway expect? Cheers while the drive America (Constitutional America, not this lawyer-cobbled up patchwork of laws that pass comprehensible decades back)? What about a simple flat tax instead of a wildly abused tax code? Genuine federal investment in critical infrastructure?
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The entire global economy is on the verge of collapse. Not only is the U.S. dollar in serious doo-doo, but there are continuing indications that “Protectionism rising despite G-20 vows on trade” and other indicators.
Tech-ticker has an interview with former banker Charles Morris about “America’s Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown” and he, for one, is skeptical about how serious any recovery will be; more bumping along the bottom is what he sees. “Bankers are not really lending yet, and if they do want to lend, whom can they lend to?”
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And its worse than the spew of jingoisms from Washington.
The latest batch of TEU data from the Port of Long Beach just out shows their container traffic is down a whopping 21.7% from last year. What’s worse? While imports are down 21.9%, the outbound loaded figure is down a full 26% which means the balance of trade picture is suffering continued asymmetry.
True, the Port of Seattle August container traffic showed a rise of 5.4% in August this year, but the odds of Seattle hitting its all time high of 14-million + metric tons of cargo (set in 2005) this year are somewhere between slim and none.
Nor is Seattle’s blip a coast-wide phenomena: The Port of Portland’s container volume was down 14.5% from 2008 (the previous month it was down 18.5%) but compared with 2007, Portland is down almost 22%.
The Port of Los Angeles showed a 19.32% drop in loaded inbound, while loaded outbound was down only 14.22%. But just so you don’t get the wrong idea for your balance of trade musings, keep in mind that even with the lesser decline in exports, Los Angeles still runs only 31.7% export trade; the rest is inbound.
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Is the Speaker of the House right to be worried about ‘violence’ in America? We’ve been seeing the words “revolution’ pop up for more than a year in the predictive linguistics work out of www.halfpasthuman.com and if I’m reading it right, the Speaker has every reason to be concerned.
As Federal Bureaucrats Take Over America
No one that I’ve seen has given adequate coverage (read: any coverage) to another case of the federal government usurping States’ Rights. But here’s what’s going on:
Effective June 30 of this year a new law went into effect that mandated that all commercial vehicles in a state that were 26,001 pounds gross vehicle weight were being required (with a few exceptions to 2012) to get USDOT registration numbers and display them on their sides even if the vehicle was not used in interstate (between the states) commerce and was used only intrastate (inside a single state).
The key distinction that I see here is that not only are the feds assuming power over interstate commercial (I won’t argue that) but they are now also assuming the right to tell people inside Texas as well as another 49-states that they MUST register their big trucks even if they never cross a state line. Where were the Feds when we were leasing state taxpayer-built roads to foreign corporations, WTF?
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To me, this is just about the clearest evidence I have seen (at least so far today, LOL) of federal encroachment into States’ Rights, yet the right-spin-wing media which I would expect to be standing up to creeping federalism has been strangely mute on this – probably because it was passed when the right spun wingers had control in Washington, don’t you suppose?
As I’ve maintained many times – the battles that matter are not the left/right BS that crowds out the real news from the MSM, but the up/down, little guys vs. big government battles – and many of these pass unnoticed, unchallenged, and undisputed. But this is where power shifts first.
For now, the mandatory vehicle weight is 26,001 pounds. Want to place a bet how long before that’s lowered to encompass the 3/4 ton farm pickups or the 2-ton dually used for a service truck? More than just another way to get $40-bucks a year for federal processing fees, this is about one thing: control.
And no one shall resist, since the big guys set precedence by rolling over first.
We fight the wrong wars, don’tcha think?
Where’s Global Warming?
Not to sound like a broken record, broken record, broken record….but: “Arctic sea melt still heavy, but no record.“
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So once again, to recap: Bad data (from errant instruments and heat islanding as discussed earlier this week) and now the ice is not setting records, which we all know has more to do with the sun not coming out of its cyclical low sun spot activity as expected. Gee, what will we do for a new financial bubble if there’s no way to strong-arm 401(k) money into buying ethereal carbon credits to fund retirements?
Heaven forbid we’ll have to get local and sustainable, huh?
Kid Tracking
If you’re a parent and you have worries about where your kids are, check out the new GPS kid-tracking watch. Gee, maybe Big Brother really can track your family, huh?
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Based on all the divorce and court drama crap on TV I don’t know why they haven’t launched his & hers versions for people in untrustworthy relationships…
