Friday, October 17, 2014

Bus Driver Organizes Black Mob Violence Against White Family (American Thinker)

 

By Colin Flaherty

Some stories you have to read 10 times before deciding: ’Yes: What I thought was too crazy is really true.’

This is one of those stories. Here goes, believe it or not:

A black Baltimore bus driver organized a mob of 20 black people to assault a white family of three on her bus, which they did with gusto and pepper spray. All the while, the other black passengers hooted and hollered in encouragement.

All while the bus driver waited for the beating to finish so the attackers could get back on the bus. With her thanks.

The bus company didn’t give a darnn. And it took Baltimore police two months before they even investigated it.

If you want to reread that another ten times, go ahead. I’ll wait.

More details from WBAL TV that somehow escaped the attention of the Baltimore Sun. (Which means either this happens all the time and is not newsworthy. Or the paper has an embargo on news about large scale black mob violence. Or both.)

It happened in June: A Baltimore couple was escorting their 9-year old son home from school on the city bus. The bus was crowded, so the driver asked the family to move to the back. They said they could not. There was no room. That is when the driver started yelling at them. From WBAL TV news:

“If you would have gotten your (expletive) off you wouldn't be having these problems,” the bus driver told the family.  “You better watch the way you're talking to me.… Come up here and I'll show you what I'll do. You better get your ass way back there in the back.”

Eventually, the driver confronted her white passengers, said the mother of the family:

"She got out of her seat belt, stood up screaming in both of our faces, 'Don't tell me how to do my job. If you have a problem, come across this line and I'll knock you the F out.’”   

At that point, other black passengers started yelling for the bus driver to remove the white family from the bus. One of passengers urged the bus driver to use her phone and “call them up.” The family would soon find out who “them” was:

“Two bus stops later, (the victim) said a large number of Mergenthaler Vo-Tech and Academy for College and Career Exploration students boarded the bus.”

The victims were standing next to the bus driver and they heard her tell the newly-boarded students: “I don’t care where they get off. You handle that (Bleep) and I’ll take care of you. I’ll wait for you.”

Soon after, the family of three left the bus, along with the 20 black students who had just boarded it.

They beat and pepper-sprayed all three members of the family, choking and banging their heads on the ground -- all while the bus driver waited and watched. All while some of the students got on and off the bus.

"I was really scared," the 9-year-old victim told 11 News. “He said he tried to defend his mother but couldn't. "I tried to get the girl that was beating her up off of her, and she turned around and pepper-sprayed me."

Charging documents show the bus driver watched the assault and yelled several times, "Yeah, that's what you get." After the teens were finished with the beating, they got back on the bus, and the bus drove away, offering the victims no assistance, police said.

Murphy is awaiting a November trial. Eight students were also arrested.

The Baltimore Sun said this is the second recent example of a bus driver assisting people who assault riders.

Now you can go back to your real life, where bus drivers do not organize black mob violence against white families. Except for when they do.

Some stories you have to read 10 times before deciding: ’Yes: What I thought was too crazy is really true.’

This is one of those stories. Here goes, believe it or not:

A black Baltimore bus driver organized a mob of 20 black people to assault a white family of three on her bus, which they did with gusto and pepper spray. All the while, the other black passengers hooted and hollered in encouragement.

All while the bus driver waited for the beating to finish so the attackers could get back on the bus. With her thanks.

The bus company didn’t give a darnn. And it took Baltimore police two months before they even investigated it.

If you want to reread that another ten times, go ahead. I’ll wait.

More details from WBAL TV that somehow escaped the attention of the Baltimore Sun. (Which means either this happens all the time and is not newsworthy. Or the paper has an embargo on news about large scale black mob violence. Or both.)

It happened in June: A Baltimore couple was escorting their 9-year old son home from school on the city bus. The bus was crowded, so the driver asked the family to move to the back. They said they could not. There was no room. That is when the driver started yelling at them. From WBAL TV news:

“If you would have gotten your (expletive) off you wouldn't be having these problems,” the bus driver told the family.  “You better watch the way you're talking to me.… Come up here and I'll show you what I'll do. You better get your ass way back there in the back.”

Eventually, the driver confronted her white passengers, said the mother of the family:

"She got out of her seat belt, stood up screaming in both of our faces, 'Don't tell me how to do my job. If you have a problem, come across this line and I'll knock you the F out.’”   

At that point, other black passengers started yelling for the bus driver to remove the white family from the bus. One of passengers urged the bus driver to use her phone and “call them up.” The family would soon find out who “them” was:

“Two bus stops later, (the victim) said a large number of Mergenthaler Vo-Tech and Academy for College and Career Exploration students boarded the bus.”

The victims were standing next to the bus driver and they heard her tell the newly-boarded students: “I don’t care where they get off. You handle that (Bleep) and I’ll take care of you. I’ll wait for you.”

Soon after, the family of three left the bus, along with the 20 black students who had just boarded it.

They beat and pepper-sprayed all three members of the family, choking and banging their heads on the ground -- all while the bus driver waited and watched. All while some of the students got on and off the bus.

"I was really scared," the 9-year-old victim told 11 News. “He said he tried to defend his mother but couldn't. "I tried to get the girl that was beating her up off of her, and she turned around and pepper-sprayed me."

Charging documents show the bus driver watched the assault and yelled several times, "Yeah, that's what you get." After the teens were finished with the beating, they got back on the bus, and the bus drove away, offering the victims no assistance, police said.

Murphy is awaiting a November trial. Eight students were also arrested.

The Baltimore Sun said this is the second recent example of a bus driver assisting people who assault riders.

Now you can go back to your real life, where bus drivers do not organize black mob violence against white families. Except for when they do.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Federal Debt Now $200,000 Per Full-Time Private-Sector Worker (US)


Townhall.com ^ | October 15, 2014 | Terry Jeffrey

Posted on ‎10‎/‎15‎/‎2014‎ ‎9‎:‎54‎:‎59‎ ‎AM by Kaslin

Which will be greater: the burden of student debt on Americans who went off this fall to their first year of college, or the amount of federal debt per full-time private-sector worker when these students earn their degrees and start looking for jobs? There is no doubt: It will be the amount of federal debt per full-time private-sector worker.

As of last Friday, the total debt of the federal government was $17,858,480,029,490.28, according to the U.S. Treasury. That equaled $200,258.81 for each of the 89,177,000 full-time private-sector workers that, according to the Census Bureau, were in the United States in 2013.

(There were a total of 105,862,000 full-time workers in the United States in 2013, according to the Census Bureau. However, 16,685,000 of these full-time workers worked for government, getting paid with tax dollars or from government borrowing. That left only 89,177,000 who were self-employed or worked for private-sector employers.)

Federal debt per full-time private-sector worker has escalated rapidly. At the end of 2007, the total federal debt was $9,229,172,659,218.31, which equaled $101,158.25 for each of the 91,235,000 full-time private-sector workers in the United States that year. In 2000, the total federal debt was $5,662,216,013,697.37, which equaled $66,553.23 for each of the 85,078,000 full-time private-sector workers that year.

Since 2000, federal debt per full-time private-sector worker has more than tripled. On average, going to a four-year private college -- and borrowing every single penny of the cost -- will impose a smaller burden on this year's college freshman who ends up graduating and eventually becoming a full-time private-sector worker than will the federal deficit spending that took place per full-time private-sector worker before that young person ever stepped foot, as a matriculating student, on his or her college campus.

According to the College Board, the full price for tuition, fees, room and board at a four-year private college in the 2013-2014 school year averaged $40,917. At that rate, a student who went to a private college for four years would spend an average of about $163,668 for their education -- if they paid full fare.

Thus, the current federal debt per full-time private-sector worker of $200,258.81 exceeds the average four-year cost at a private college by about $36,591.

When this year's college freshmen graduate and get jobs, quite likely the biggest personal expense they will face is buying a home.

So which will be greater: the federal debt per full-time private-sector worker, or buying an existing single-family home?

In the short run, it may be a close call.

In 2013, the median price on an existing single-family home was $197,400, according to the National Association of Realtors. In January, it was $187,900. By August, the latest month for which figures are available, it had risen to $220,600. But single-family homes were less expensive in August in the South and Midwest, where the median prices were $192,000 and $175,000, respectively.

Still, a person putting a 10-percent down payment of $22,060 on a single-family home at the median August price of $220,600 would end up with a mortgage of $198,540. That $198,540 mortgage is less than the $200,258.81 in current federal debt per full-time private-sector worker.

Americans who invest in a college education or a single-family home are not only buying a solid asset that will serve them well for the rest of their lives; they are investing in what we used to consider the American dream.

Americans who get up every morning and go to work, and do it week after week after week, and are forced to pay progressively higher taxes to maintain a federal welfare state that is driving our national debt to an unsustainable level are being forced to subsidize a system that is killing the American dream.

After Central Bank Financial Bubbles, Comes Liquidation And Industrial Deflation (ZeroHedge)

 

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/14/2014 21:02 -0400

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

Nearly two decades of central bank financial repression have created huge distortions and imbalances in the world economy. Now they are coming home to roost as the impossibility of ZIRP forever dawns on even our mad money printers. Having created yet another round of ebullient financial bubbles, they are now getting palpably nervous.

Even the lady with the perpetual tan and unfailing call for “moar” monetary and fiscal stimulus, IMF head Christine Lagarde, said something sensible over the weekend:

“There is too little economic risk-taking, and too much financial risk-taking.”

She got the “too much financial risk-taking” part right, but here’s the thing. The apparatus of state policy—-fiscal borrowing and central bank money printing—-can not cause enterprise to flourish. Free market capitalism is the milieu in which business enterprise, invention, risk-taking and labor productivity thrive best. So, yes, reducing market impairments—such as tax rates on production and capital which are too high or regulations, protectionist laws and subsidies which are too onerous—-is always helpful.

These latter steps are now coming into fashion under the heading “structural reform” and they make sense as far as they go. But central bankers like Draghi and international monetary bureaucrats like Lagarde pushing this agenda fail to recognize that their own policies on the fiscal and monetary side currently dwarf the ill-effects of, for instance, over-zealous EPA regulation in the US or protectionist labor laws in Europe.

In fact, long-standing financial repression and absurdly low interest rates have generated malinvestments and debt burdens that are crushing enterprise and true economic risk-taking throughout the world economy. In the DM (developed market economies), the resulting malady is consumer balance sheets that are bloated with debt; and in the EM (emerging markets) the ill takes the form of vastly bloated industrial capacity and public infrastructure. So if there were ever a case of “physician, heal thyself”, this is it.

Indeed, the current spectacle of Europe’s monetary arsonist, Mario Draghi, telling Italy’s most recently installed double-talking politician, Prime Minister Renzi, to change the nation’s labor laws so that employers can more easily fire redundant workers says it all. Of course this should be done—Italy can’t thrive in a global economy based on 1960s communist union theories that were invalidated the moment that the comrades in Beijing swapped Mao’s little red book for the printing presses of red capitalism. Still, the redundant labor and resulting economic inefficiency in Italy’s few remaining large-scale industrial plants is trivial compared to the burden of nearly $3 trillion of public debt—a figure that amounts to 130% of GDP and continues to mount.

Italy Government Debt to GDP

By his ill-considered and undeliverable pledge to do “whatever it takes”, and the phony peripheral bond rally it elicited, Draghi has destroyed any semblance of political will in Italy to tackle its 130% of GDP public debt. Instead, based on the blatant scheming now underway in Italy’s parliament, it is already evident that the “labor reform” that Renzi is talking up amounts to statutory legerdemain that will make almost no difference in the domestic jobs market for years to come. Yet, it will provide the pretext for a return to out-and-out fiscal profligacy in Italy next year—-as Italy’s politicians are already making evident in an openly public manner.

So what’s going on is Keynesian central bankers are looking for a scapegoat, and have found exactly the right word cloud to define it—-that is, “structural reform”.  And the politicians are grabbing the bait, knowing that infinitely malleable enabling acts can be made to sound constructive upon parliamentary approval, even as they permit real policy change to be buried in regulatory wrangling and judicial review for years to come.

At the same time, the politicians’ pound of flesh in this emerging scam is more pork barrel spending and fiscal stimulus in the guise of “public investment”. But the litmus test on that proposition is quite simple: Are the proposed public “investment” projects being funded with higher user fees and taxes or general government borrowing?

It goes without saying that it is the latter. Yet with DM governments at peak public debt ratios nearly everywhere (i.e. 100% of GDP and higher), borrowing even more money to fund public projects which for the most part are not needed, and will not contribute to improved economic efficiency, is a little more than a recipe for higher taxes and more economic stagnation down the road.

So the new consensus coming out of this weekend’s IMF meeting is just a smokescreen.  What ails the global economy can not be remedied by toothless “structural reforms” or wasteful “public investments”. What is urgently needed, instead, is an end to central bank financial repression and rapid return to normalized interest rates and budget surpluses that can pay down unsustainable public debt burdens that have built up over the past few decades.

Yes, that would cause the boys & girls and robo-traders on Wall Street to throw one hellacious hissy fit. But there’s no getting around it. Current money pumping policies by the major central banks are just inflating financial bubbles to ever more treacherous heights, guaranteeing that the eventual day of reckoning will be all the more traumatic.

And yet the central bankers are reluctant to allow interest rates to escape from the zero bound and begin their flight upward toward “normalization” because they are wedded to the Keynesian fallacy that a weak economy is evidence of insufficient “aggregate demand”. Therefore, monetary “accommodation”—even when it reaches the lunatic extent of recent years— is purportedly needed to goose households and businesses into more spending.

In the DM world, however, the credit transmission channel of monetary policy is broken and done.  Real interest rates for maturities up to five years have been negative in real terms for most of this century. Not surprisingly, main street households have smothered themselves in debt, and have thereby, ironically, reduced the efficacy of Keynesian stimulus policies practically to zero.

The reason is that during the decades after the demise of Bretton Woods in 1971, public and private balance sheets were consistently and drastically levered-up on a one-time basis. The resulting credit-fueled consumption binge in DM economies added to measured GDP, but not to true, sustainable wealth gains. It was a one-time parlor trick that has now left them with contractually fixed public and private debts ranging from 350-500% of GDP—– off-set by stagnant incomes and unsustainable mark-to-market asset values that are vastly inflated by the long years of bubble finance.

So the DM world has now reached the limits of “peak debt”, even with the ZIRP enabled ultra-low “carry” cost on these towering obligations. In this regard, the US and Spanish ratio patterns are typical. But in either case, Keynesian monetary stimulus is simply pushing on a string, as is reflected by slowly falling debt ratios since the 2007-2008 peak.

Stated differently, there has been no escape velocity owing to Keynesian stimulus. Massive central bank liquidity injections have remained in the canyons of Wall Street and other major financial markets where they have enabled endless free money funding of speculation and carry trades, but have contributed virtually nothing to spending by debt-saturated main street households.

Household Leverage Ratio - Click to enlarge.

At the same time, central bank financial repression has made capital inordinately cheap and has thereby caused fantastic over-investment in the EM world. The current disastrous overcapacity in China’s steel industry is a case in point. Between the year 2000 and 2010 its steel industry grew from 150 million tons of annual capacity to 750 million tons—a rate of heavy industry growth never before witnessed anywhere.

Yet as shown below, the flood of cheap money from the Peoples’ Printing Press of China in response to the Great Recession only stimulated a further round of even more fantastic steel capacity growth.

The 300 million tons or 40% gain since 2010 is a striking measure of the current global derangement. China’s steel capacity expansion in just the last four years exceeds the combined capacity of the entire steel industry of Europe and North America combined. Yet China’s sustainable domestic need is arguably less than 500 million tons per year—once its spree of constructing empty apartment buildings, unpopulated cities, redundant highways, bridges, airports and high speed railroads and unneeded industrial capacity comes to an end—as it surely must and will. Even the comrades in Beijing are signaling a resignation to that unavoidable outcome.

Already, the inevitable collapse is becoming visible. Prices are plunging, inventories are soaring, and profits in the steel industry have virtually disappeared. As detailed in the attached story from Bloomberg, the inexorable consequence will be a flood of cheap exports on the world market.

stel capacity

Indeed, the real problem is that once this immense capacity was brought into being, it was not going to go quietly into the night. China’s true excess capacity now amounts to upwards of 50% of steel production in the rest of the world. Consequently, when China’s domestic consumption is sharply curtailed as the world’s greatest historical building boom winds down, the flow of excess plate and sheet and rebar and structural products into the world steel markets will have a relentless shocking impact. Prices and profits will be crushed everywhere; and protectionist policies not seen since the 1930s are likely to be kindled.

After all, it only need be recalled that 85% of all the growth in global steel production since the year 2000 has been attributable to China. In the rest of the world, steel production during the last 14 years has barely inched forward—growing at just 1.1% per annum owing to a tepid level of end demand. So when the flood of dumped still comes flooding in from China, it is evident that the absorption capacity is next to zero.

And steel is just the most advanced case. A huge wave of industrial deflation is virtually guaranteed in the food chain of materials extraction, production and fabrication.

Today’s Bloomberg story on China’s growing steel industry crisis notes that “China steel now as cheap as cabbage.” Perhaps that is a foretaste of things to come!

In any event, the stunning collapse of steel prices and the soaring inventories of iron ore in China are a reminder that cheap capital artificially provisioned by central banks can lead to an enormous boom of malinvestment. But ultimately the laws of economics will out and a relentless deflationary correction ensues.

It would appear that the global steel industry, among others, is soon to find out about the crack-up part which inexorably follows the boom.

China Iron ore Inventory

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Wednesday, October 1, 2014

"If Something Rattles This Ponzi Scheme, Life In America Will Change Overnight" (ZeroHedge)

 

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/30/2014 21:13 -0400

inShare4

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

I know that headline sounds completely outrageous.  But it is actually true.  The U.S. government is borrowing about 8 trillion dollars a year, and you are about to see the hard numbers that prove this.  When discussing the national debt, most people tend to only focus on the amount that it increases each 12 months.  And as I wrote about recently, the U.S. national debt has increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal year 2014.  But that does not count the huge amounts of U.S. Treasury securities that the federal government must redeem each year.  When these debt instruments hit their maturity date, the U.S. government must pay them off.  This is done by borrowing more money to pay off the previous debts.  In fiscal year 2013, redemptions of U.S. Treasury securities totaled $7,546,726,000,000 and new debt totaling $8,323,949,000,000 was issued.  The final numbers for fiscal year 2014 are likely to be significantly higher than that.

So why does so much government debt come due each year?

Well, in recent years government officials figured out that they could save a lot of money on interest payments by borrowing over shorter time frames.  For example, it costs the government far more to borrow money for 10 years than it does for 1 year.  So a strategy was hatched to borrow money for very short periods of time and to keep "rolling it over" again and again and again.

This strategy has indeed saved the federal government hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments, but it has also created a situation where the federal government must borrow about 8 trillion dollars a year just to keep up with the game.

So what happens when the rest of the world decides that it does not want to loan us 8 trillion dollars a year at ultra-low interest rates?

Well, the game will be over and we will be in a massive amount of trouble.

I am about to share with you some numbers that were originally reported by CNS News.  As you can see, far more debt is being redeemed and issued today than back during the middle part of the last decade...

2013

Redeemed: $7,546,726,000,000

Issued: $8,323,949,000,000

Increase: $777,223,000,000

2012

Redeemed: $6,804,956,000,000

Issued: $7,924,651,000,000

Increase: $1,119,695,000,000

2011

Redeemed: $7,026,617,000,000

Issued: $8,078,266,000,000

Increase: $1,051,649,000,000

2010

Redeemed: $7,206,965,000,000

Issued: $8,649,171,000,000

Increase: $1,442,206,000,000

2009

Redeemed: $7,306,512,000,000

Issued: $9,027,399,000,000

Increase: $1,720,887,000,000

2008

Redeemed: $4,898,607,000,000

Issued: $5,580,644,000,000

Increase: $682,037,000,000

2007

Redeemed: $4,402,395,000,000

Issued: $4,532,698,000,000

Increase: $130,303,000,000

2006

Redeemed: $4,297,869,000,000

Issued: $4,459,341,000,000

Increase: $161,472,000,000

The only way that this game can continue is if the U.S. government can continue to borrow gigantic piles of money at ridiculously low interest rates.

And our current standard of living greatly depends on the continuation of this game.

If something comes along and rattles this Ponzi scheme, life in America could change radically almost overnight.

In the United States today, we have a heavily socialized system that hands out checks to nearly half the population. In fact, 49 percent of all Americans live in a home that gets direct monetary benefits from the federal government each month according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  And it is hard to believe, but Americans received more than 2 trillion dollars in benefits from the federal government last year alone.  At this point, the primary function of the federal government is taking money from some people and giving it to others.  In fact, more than 70 percent of all federal spending goes to "dependence-creating programs", and the government runs approximately 80 different "means-tested welfare programs" right now.  But the big problem is that the government is giving out far more money than it is taking in, so it has to borrow the difference.  As long as we can continue to borrow at super low interest rates, the status quo can continue.

But a Ponzi scheme like this can only last for so long.

It has been said that when the checks stop coming in, chaos will begin in the streets of America.

The looting that took place when a technical glitch caused the EBT system to go down for a short time in some areas last year and the rioting in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri this year were both small previews of what we will see in the future.

And there is no way that we will be able to "grow" our way out of this problem.

As the Baby Boomers continue to retire, the amount of money that the federal government is handing out each year is projected to absolutely skyrocket. Just consider the following numbers...

-Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid.  Today, more than 70 million Americans are on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.

-When Medicare was first established, we were told that it would cost about $12 billion a year by the time 1990 rolled around.  Instead, the federal government ended up spending $110 billion on the program in 1990, and the federal government spent approximately $600 billion on the program in 2013.

-It is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.

-At this point, Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.  That comes to approximately $328,404 for every single household in the United States.

-In 1945, there were 42 workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits.  Today, that number has fallen to 2.5 workers, and if you eliminate all government workers, that leaves only 1.6 private sector workers for every retiree receiving Social Security benefits.

-Right now, there are approximately 63 million Americans collecting Social Security benefits.  By 2035, that number is projected to soar to an astounding 91 million.

-Overall, the Social Security system is facing a 134 trillion dollar shortfall over the next 75 years.

-The U.S. government is facing a total of 222 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities during the years ahead.  Social Security and Medicare make up the bulk of that.

Yes, things seem somewhat stable for the moment in America today.

But the same thing could have been said about 2007. The stock market was soaring, the economy seemed like it was rolling right along and people were generally optimistic about the future.

Then the financial crisis of 2008 erupted and it seemed like the world was going to end.

Well, the truth is that another great crisis is rapidly approaching, and we are in far worse shape financially than we were back in 2008.

Don't get blindsided by what is ahead.  Evidence of the coming catastrophe is all around you.

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