2011 January 27 « Socio-Economics History Blog

Groceries Up 12.5% in 15 Months, BLS Says “Nah”!

Still believe the official US government lie, ahem statistics? If you don’t eat, travel and are dead, yup, no inflation for you alright!

Groceries Up 12.5% in 15 Months, BLS Says “Nah”
LOS ANGELES, Jan 24 (Reuters) – McDonald’s Corp plans to raise prices this year to help offset an expected rise in its grocery bill for the 10 commodities that account for around 75 percent of its food preparation costs.

Whom do you trust more, the BLS or Ronald McDonald? Well, I never did like clowns, but at least Ronald never lied to me. A recurring theme here on TRB is how pathetic the official stats are versus what anyone running a household sees when calculating the cost of living. My friend Kalpa at Big Picture Agriculture highlights a recent article that shows just how far apart the government’s food inflation measures are from reality…

Today, inflation and food inflation articles are everywhere in the news. But, the recent article that got my attention was from The Tennessean about a food basket survey that they did earlier this month. They found a 12.5% spike in prices for a typical grocery basket filled with staples compared with November 2009. Ouch.

According to a study done last year, Americans spent 10% of their income on food in 2009. As I continue to note, although the reported food inflation figure by the BLS was 1.5% for 2010, according to the same report, the rate of inflation for meat, poultry, fish and eggs was up 5.5 percent and dairy was up 3.7 percent. Beef is up 6.2% from 2009.

Take your BLS data and deep fry it for all I care, it has no bearing on what we are actually spending to keep food on the table. I know that Whole Foods is an extreme example, but I bought an apple there for two dollars this weekend. One apple. Apples should be free for Americans who can trace their ancestors back to the Apple Tree War of 1915, in which 700 brave souls gave their lives at MacAllister’s Orchard when the Macedonians invaded Washington State.

But take solace in the fact that we’ve rescued the big banks with endless zero interest rates. They’re the real heroes, after all.

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January 27, 2011 Posted by mosesman | Economics | Currency, Devaluation, GreatDepression, Hyper-inflation, Unrest, US | Comments Off

Flashback 2007: Ex-China Foreign Ministry Official Says Extraterrestrials Live Among Us!

Sun Shili shows off his drawings of extraterrestials in human guise. Source: http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/

To those Christians who say I am wrong about UFOs and Aliens that they are fallen angels and their Nephilim children, here is a clue, quote from article below:

Chinese man Meng Zhaoguo encounters Alien
“She was 10 feet [3.03 metres] tall and had six fingers, but otherwise she looked completely like a human,” he says. “I told my wife all about it afterwards. She wasn’t too angry.”
What creature in the Bible is so tall and has 6 fingers on each hand?

Genesis 6:4 (New King James Version)
⁴ There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.

2 Samuel 21:20 (New King James Version)
²⁰ Yet again there was war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number; and he also was born to the giant.

1 Chronicles 20:6 (New King James Version)
⁶ Yet again there was war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, with twenty-four fingers and toes, six on each hand and six on each foot; and he also was born to the giant.
These Nephilim giants, seed of the serpent are playing a very complex game this time round. They appear to be inter-breeding with the human race again. But to engineer a seed of the serpent race that is more like normal human beings and not giants. Planet earth is once again under assault by fallen angels who want to corrupt species via genetic mingling/modifications across species boundaries. Think I am crazy? What about the GM mosquitoes released out in Malaysia this week? What about the glowing mice with jellyfish genes?

As the alien spacecraft reached the highest point of the building, it suddenly showed seven white lights evenly displaced around the outer edge of the craft. Reference: Nationalufocenter.com

Note the ridicule of the biblical view! It is religious dogma so must be false. Ha! The jokes on you buddy! The Canadian newspaper:

Ex-China Foreign Ministry Official says Extraterrestrials live among us
In the industrialized West, there evolved the prevailing Pseudo-religious dogma that human beings are at the centre of ‘G-d’s creation in the universe’. This dogma is the ideological motivation behind the on-going de-legitimization of the verifiable contact that people have had with Extraterrestrials (ETs). This apparent dogma has become the modern equivalent of the corresponding dogma, that “the world is flat”, which Church and other elites centuries ago used to champion. In contrast, free of Western pseudo-religious based dogma, the Buddhist milieu of China, has freed their scientific community, with the support of government, and of community participation, to seek to explore UFO incidences and evidence of human contact with Extraterrestrials.

What is dogma?
‘Dogma’ is a system of obfuscations, propaganda and related ideology, which elites present as “truth”, with the aim to maintain social control, and toexpand their own hold on power. Other examples of current operating dogma include schemes of socialization that aim to convince people that “capitalism promotes freedom and democracy”, that “privatization is a good thing”, and that “economic protectionism is a bad thing”.

A notable example of dogma, in the context of the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’, is that “the U.S. and its coalition partners are waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan not subtantively for oil, but to promote human rights;” meanwhile well-documented human destruction, suffering and oppression worsen.

UFO research is an appreciated and duly recognized science in China
Izvestia reports that China has a record number of UFO scientific and community-based organizations. There are many who even attempt to establish some sort of a contact with extraterrestrials. Their actions are protected by the National Society of the Extraterrestrial Studies, which was founded 25 years ago. This National Society is financed by the government.

Only professional scientists and engineers are allowed members in the Society. A person also required to have Ph.D. in science and have several published works about UFOs. About a third of all members of the society are also members of the Government of China.

The study and civic appreciation of Extraterrestrials are NOT systematically marginalized as the case in the industrialized West, which tries to use dogma to ridicule community and academic UFO research initiatives, and also the work of ‘Exopolitics’ groups. Hundreds of scientists and engineers in China conduct thorough studies of apparent Extraterrestrial phenomenon.

Do Extraterrestrials live among humans?
Chinese scientists also say that aliens live among humans. This includes Sun Shili, a retired foreign ministry official who is now president of the Beijing UFO Research Society who also concludes that waixingren (extraterrestrials) are living among us.

Sun’s first close encounter occurred in 1971, when he was sent to the remote countryside during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) to perform the grueling task of rice planting. One day while toiling in the field, his attention was diverted to a bright object in the sky, which rose and fell repeatedly.

At first, Sun assumed the spectacle was some sort of Cold War intelligence monitoring device – a reasonable deduction considering the times – however years later, after reading foreign materials on UFO sightings, he knew he had experienced a close encounter.

And Sun is not the only expert in the country taking these sightings seriously. According to the highly-accredited Shen Shituan, an actual rocket scientist, president of Beijing Aerospace University and honourary director of the government-supported China UFO Research Association, every report of an alien encounter is worth investigating.

”Some of these sightings are real, some are fake and with others its unclear,” said Shen Shituan, a real rocket scientist, president of Beijing Aerospace University and honorary director of the China UFO Research Association. ”All these phenomena are worth researching.”

Research [ethically-based] into UFO’s could help spur new forms of high-speed travel, unlimited sources of non-polluting and non-fossil fuel based energy and faster-growing crops, claims Sun Shili, president of a government-approved UFO Research Association (membership 50,000).

Shen Shituan does not readily dismiss UFO/ET reports like his counterparts in Western scientific communities, including the claims of one worker that aliens entered his Beijing home while his wife and child were present, and whisked him 265 kilometres east and back in only a few hours.

The best-known alien abduction story in China is the case of Meng Zhao Guo, a young tree farmer, from Wuchang, near Harbin in Heilongjiang province. In June 1994 Zhao Guo and two other farm workers, working at Red Flag logging camp saw something unusual on nearby Mount Pheonix.

The complex and bizarre encounter that followed involved Meng being hit by a beam of light, as well as allegedly experiencing an abduction and a sexual encounter with a female alien.

Meng Zhaoguo, a rural worker from northeast Wuchang city, explains he was 29 when he broke his marital vows for the first and only time — with an extraterrestrial of unusually robust build.

“She was 10 feet [3.03 metres] tall and had six fingers, but otherwise she looked completely like a human,” he says. “I told my wife all about it afterwards. She wasn’t too angry.”

During September 2003 Zhang Jingping, a Beijing-based UFO researcher, had psychologists and police technicians subject Zhao Guo to hypnosis and a lie detector test in Beijing. Zhang indicated the test results proved the abductee was telling the truth.

He also indicated that doctors had indicated that Zhao Guo’s scars “could not possibly have been caused by common injuries or surgery.” Meng Zhao Guo, a humble farmer with only 5 year’s schooling, also indicated that he had never heard of UFOs or ufologists until after his experience had been reported.

…. to continue reading click here!

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January 27, 2011 Posted by mosesman | EndTimes, Social Trends | Aliens, Nephilim, UFO | 1 Comment

Ireland’s Voters Ready to Confront Rest of Euro Zone!

Source: http://dailybail.com/slideshows/irish-bank-protest/

The Irish people should just tell the banksters and their politician puppets to have a colonoscopy on themselves. Iceland which voted ‘Hell No!’ against the banksters is already experiencing economic recovery. (See: What Ireland can learn from Iceland’s economic recovery!).
The Irish have a choice: debt enslavement for them, their children, children’s children …. or ‘No thank you! We Irish people have survived as a sovereign nation for umpteenth generations without the EU!‘ You either kick the banksters’ asses or your children will lick their asses forever! The reality is: Ireland is going to default sooner or later so why give your country to banksters who are screwing you?

Ireland’s Voters Ready to Confront Rest of Euro Zone
Whenever it happens, Ireland’s general election will mark the first clash between the desires of voters in a euro-zone nation that is in receipt of help from its brethren, and the declared interests of the currency area as a whole.

At the heart of that conflict will be a blanket guarantee made by the outgoing government to pay back international holders of all bonds issued by Irish banks should they fail.

Most Irish voters blame the banks for their nation’s spectacular fall from economic grace in recent years. While bankers are hardly the most popular people in most post-crisis democracies, in Ireland they are viewed in an even less favorable light, and stand accused of something bordering on economic treason.

The architect of the 2008 guarantee to holders of the banks’ bonds—Finance Minister Brian Lenihan—says it was the only way to prevent even greater damage to the economy, since a default on the banks’ debts would have done irreparable damage to Ireland’s reputation among foreign investors, including the many U.S. companies that have chosen Ireland as their European manufacturing hub.

An independent report by Central Bank of Ireland Governor Patrick Honohan published last June found “no evidence” that political favors or corruption played a part in the rapid growth and sudden collapse of Ireland’s banking system. But voters don’t seem convinced. Instead, they view the guarantee as a deal between the government and its friends in the banks, struck at the expense of the taxpayers. It’s worth noting that the crisis that finally led to the government’s breakup Sunday was triggered by revelations that Prime Minister Brian Cowen had played golf with a leading banker a few months before the guarantee was announced.

Fianna Fail’s association with the bank guarantee is the key reason for its weak showing in recent opinion polls. Without some Lazarus-like revival in the weeks ahead, the party that has dominated Irish politics for eight decades is heading for its worst-ever showing in a general election.

Opinion polls suggest most voters would like to drop the guarantee and reschedule or default on the bank debt. And Labour and Fine Gael, the parties that hope to form the next government, will have to address the deep anger that has led to the astonishing collapse in support for Fianna Fail.

They have already been critical of the bond guarantees and made it clear they want to renegotiate the terms of the bailout package. “Another major area for discussion must be the extent of burden sharing between taxpayers and bank bondholders,” Joan Burton, the Labour Party’s chief spokesperson on the economy, said in a speech last week.

“Chancellor [Angela] Merkel made the common-sense observation that investors who take a risk should not be given complete cover by sovereign governments. However, her approach seems to be that of St. Augustine: ‘make me chaste, but not yet.’ She and other EU leaders have not yet accepted that part of the solution to the current banking and economic crises, never mind the next one, is appropriate burden-sharing between taxpayers and investors.”

Nonetheless, both Labour and Fine Gael have acknowledged that in renegotiating the bailout there is a constraint: what the rest of the euro zone wants from Ireland in return for its loans. And what it wants is for the banks’ debts to be honored in order to protect the soundness of their own financial institutions. They fear any restructuring of the bonds would spook investors and prompt them to withdraw their money from other banks around the bloc.

Source: http://dailybail.com/slideshows/irish-bank-protest/

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January 27, 2011 Posted by mosesman | Economics | Bailout, Bankruptcy, Collapse, Eurozone, GreatDepression, Meltdown, Unemployment, Unrest | Comments Off

Bank of England Chief Mervyn King: Standard of Living To Plunge At Fastest Rate Since 1920s!

Are we still in denial? Recovery? What recovery? The BOE chief has now come out and publicly stated the obvious. This is Great Depression 2.0 and it is far worse than the first Great Depression. The United Kingdom is cratering. No amount of QE will help. If you can create money out of thin air to engineer economic growth, it would have been done many times in the past.
The reality is: almost all industrialized nations are bankrupt! The Eurozone is bankrupt with debts to GDP at 80-100%(based on their shady official statistics, it is likely well above 150%), Japan is bankrupt with debts to GDP above 200% and the United States is bankrupt with debt to GDP at 100% (if you take only the current liabilities at US$14T). Taking into account social security, Medicare, GSE … debts and liabilities, America’s debts is probably close to US$200T!
How do you tell when politician snakes lie? Whenever they move their lips! America, Eurozone and Japan have embarked on QE. This will not end, QE2 will be followed by QE3, 4, 5 ….. 100. Until their currencies: USD, UKP, Euro and Yen become toilet paper. Such currency debasement implies hyperinflation. Make sure you get real money as insurance against devaluation. Got gold yet?
Be wary of politician snakes with their crocodile tears of empathy for Main Street. They serve their Illuminist bankster masters! Subtlety and deception, that is all it is!

Bank of England chief Mervyn King: standard of living to plunge at fastest rate since 1920s
Households face the most dramatic squeeze in living standards since the 1920s, the Governor of the Bank of England warned, as he reacted to the shock disclosure that the economy was shrinking again.

Families will see their disposable income eaten up as they “pay the inevitable price” for the financial crisis, Mervyn King warned. With wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation, workers’ take- home pay will end the year worth the same as in 2005 — the most prolonged fall in living standards for more than 80 years, he claimed.

Mr King issued the warning in a speech in Newcastle upon Tyne after official figures showed that gross domestic product fell by 0.5 per cent during the final three months last year. The Government blamed the unexpected reduction — the first since the third quarter of 2009 — on the freezing weather that paralysed much of the country last month.

But there were fears that the country was poised to slip back into recession, defined as two successive quarters of negative growth. Economists said the situation was “an absolute disaster”. The economic gloom deepened this morning as figures showed that mortgage lending by the major banks dived to an 11-and-a-half-year low during December.

Net lending, which strips out redemptions and repayments, fell to £880 million during the month, the lowest level since June 1999, according to the British Bankers’ Association. Labour has accused ministers of jeopardising recovery by pushing ahead with public spending cuts too quickly.

Mr King said he was unable to offer any imminent hope of a rise in interest rates in coming months because of the poor economic outlook. Savers and “those who behaved prudently” would be among the biggest losers in the squeeze, he admitted.

Disposable household income has been hit by sharp increases in the cost of food, fuel and tax, coupled with restricted wage rises for most workers. Last year, take-home pay fell by about 12 per cent, official figures showed, and the trend was expected to continue in 2011. The governor warned that the Bank “neither can, nor should try to, prevent the squeeze in living standards”.

He said that the economic figures were a reminder that the recovery will be “choppy”. However, he said the biggest threat facing the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee, which sets interest rates, was rising inflation. The Bank is expected to use interest rates to keep inflation below two per cent, but the governor said inflation could rise “to somewhere between four per cent and five per cent over the next few months”.

He claimed that rising inflation had been caused largely by increases in global oil and commodity prices, and tax rises such as the increase in VAT introduced at the beginning of the year, which the Bank was powerless to control. “In 2011, real wages are likely to be no higher than they were in 2005,” he said. “One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years.

“The squeeze on living standards is the inevitable price to pay for the financial crisis and subsequent rebalancing of the world and UK economies.” Mr King insisted that the Monetary Policy Committee could not have increased interest rates from their current record low level to tackle the rise in inflation.

“If the MPC had raised the Bank Rate significantly, inflation might well have started to fall back this year, but only because the recovery would have been slower, unemployment higher and average earnings rising even more slowly than now,” he said.

“The erosion of living standards would have been even greater. The idea that the MPC could have preserved living standards, by preventing the rise in inflation without also pushing down earnings growth further, is wishful thinking.”

He added: “Monetary policy cannot be based on wishful thinking. So, unpleasant though it is, the Monetary Policy Committee neither can, nor should try to, prevent the squeeze in living standards, half of which is coming in the form of higher prices and half in earnings rising at a rate lower than normal.” “The Bank of England cannot prevent the squeeze on real take-home pay that so many families are now beginning to realise is the legacy of the banking crisis and the need to rebalance our economy.”

The comments represented one of the governor’s starkest warnings yet. His claim that the banking crisis was behind the ongoing squeeze on living standards comes at a sensitive time, as banks prepare to announce multi-million pound bonuses for their executives.