Stock Markets and BP

News Free Press Of Kooskia Idaho Logo 2 June 17,2010 

Hello Everyone,

                               First I want to say I am proud to be part of the The U.S. Constittional Free Press, they are doing a great job. Keeping the American people informed about anything that they are not getting from other media sources. Keep up the great work everyone.

                               Lets start with BP British Petroluim it has come out in the last couple of days, that a new estimated amount of oil being poured into the waters of the Gulf. They are saying 30 to 60 thousand Gallons a day is spilling in the ocean,  which equels making an Exxon Valdes every 5 days. We are now on day 59 of this massive leak of oil,   

                               BP is an 80 Billion dollar company, and this spill could exceed the value of the company. In Europe they are saying that BP could have to file for Bankruptcy before the well is capped.  just this week they are saying that BP could spend 81 Billion dollars to just clean up this oil in the Gulf. Thats not even touching on the amount of money that will make the people of the affected area of the Gulf made whole. The Macondo well is spilling about 2.50 Million Gallons per day into the Gulf.  

                            Today it came out the President of the USA gave Mr George Soro’s own oil company the one he owns 80 percent of in Brazil 2 Million Dollars, Mr Soro’s has 80 Billion dollars in an oil company so whats the 2 Million Dollars for well its for drilling in the Deep waters of of Brazil for oil.   Mr Soro’s has been one of President Obama’s advisors on this oil spill.   

                              This week an new Fund was started for the people affected by the oil spill in the Gulf, and its being headed up by Kenneth Feinberg. Yes the same Gentleman that headed up the 911 fund, money was miss handled Mr Obama chose Mr Feinberg he said for his fine work with 911 fund. more to come about BP .

                               Now onto Information about the stock Market this last 2 weeks. This week California that they have a zero cash flow, just by saying that they are saying they are broke. What will happen next is that we have to bail them out, so here is what I say to CA inadvance  of their request for a loan. Tighten your wallets, pay off your bills, use the tenth Admendment of the state Constitution. Alot of the state spending is their fault, the rest of it is the federal Governments Fault. So CA get some guts to tell the Federal Government to keep their Mandates, next go through all of your monthy bills, pick all the important ones pay for those. And get rid of all of the waste and fruad and abbuse. There are at least 16 other states in the same boat, and that boat is about to sink into an never ending sea of constant. Debt I say that you need a realistic  Budget. There are 22 other states that are in so bad a shape that they will be cutting back on retirement benifits for their state employees, not suprised that Idaho is one of those 22 States in Dire straits.

                           There is someone that could teach you how to stay within your means. I have no debt other then my land, which will be paid of in about the next 1 year and half. My house is not finished, why becuase I have not gotten a loan to pay for the supplies to finish it but it is getting done.

                                        this next couple of weeks I will finaly have a closet, to put clothes in. I have been living out of a suitcase for the 12 years, I have lived here. Now before all of you yell at my husband, for me not having closets. Dave is a hard working man, he does a lot of honey do’s arround here. He tried to get the closets done while I was on my Mothersday vacation. I just got back before they were done lol. Anyways back to what I was saying about being Debt free. We dont spend money we dont have. We save up for everything we want, I am putting a business together piece by piece. I save up for awhile spend some on the things I need for my business, then I save up some more. I am not like the Government can’t borrow money, or print my own money. So I have to live within my means.  I feel its way past the time the  States get there act together.

                               This week Greece has been downgraded to BA1 statice which is junk Bond statice , and next week france will have their rating lowered to AA statice from AAA the rating.  Are done by Moody’s and this week I found out whom owns most of Moody’s.  This week I Found out that Moody’s is owned by Halliburtan and they are owned by Warren Buffett owns stock in both Halliburtan and Moody’s. well I will end this blog for today and will write my next blog on http://NewsFreePress.wordpress.com I should have a blog there in about 24 hours from now have a great day.

                             Tonight I will co host News Free Kooskia Idaho at this link http://www.blogtalkradio.com/News-Free-Kooskia-ID   tonights show airs at 9pm Pacific and 10pm Mountain and 11pm Central and 12am Eastern time zones Tonight is our Thrsday night Ham Radio show with Dave Brainerd wb6dhw

Big Brother Wants to Spy on You!

by Capitol Confidential

Thanks to provisions buried within the Obama/Dodd financial deform bill, your personal information — from ATM withdrawals to loans — will now be collected by the federal government with no protections to your personal privacy.

The legislation creates another federal bureaucracy — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that is nothing more than a systematic government invasion of your personal finances of every consumer creating a financial fingerprint for the government to watch over.

Dodd’s bill deputizes the CFPB to act as a new federal watchdog agency to collect consumers’ personal financial information and transactions including records from Automatic Teller Machines from any financial institution or firm.

Don’t believe us — read the bill.

Section 1022 – Under Dodd’s bill the CFPB is granted unprecedented power to write, administer and enforce federal consumer financial law with no Congressional oversight.

Section 1071 – Dodd’s bill compels financial institutions like banks, credit unions and stock brokerage firms to maintain records of all financial transactions including the number and dollar amount and to submit that information to the CFPB.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the bill is it leaves it up to the discretion of the CFPB bureaucrats to determine how to use the personal information collected on American consumers and to share that data with other Federal agencies as it sees fit.

The Dodd bill constitutes an unprecedented intrusion into the privacy of the American people. For this reason alone, it deserves to be defeated.

Sen. Reid will not commit to reforming immigration this year

By Michael O’Brien

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) could not commit on Sunday to moving immigration reform this year.

Reid said he would like to move comprehensive immigration reform, but stressed that some Republican support would be necessary, a difficult prospect in the current political environment.

“The Senate is not a body that is defined by time,” Reid said on “Al Punto” on the Spanish-language network Univision. “I’m going to move immigration as quickly as I can.”

Reid was among a group of Democrats to unveil an outline for immigration reform legislation in late April, though he backed off earlier indications that he might move immigration next after it drew Republican complaints, specifically from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

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“We are committed to do comprehensive immigration reform, the President supports us on that, but I tell everyone we can’t do a bill unless we get some Republican,” Reid stressed.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the second-ranking Senate Democrat behind Reid, acknowledged this weekend that the busy Senate schedule ahead could put in doubt efforts to do immigration reform this year.

President Barack Obama has said he wants reform set in motion this year, and House leaders have said that immigration reform must begin in the Senate.

Reid rejected the notion, though, that Latinos would stay at home or vote for Republicans this fall — especially in Nevada, where Reid is facing a tough reelection challenge — if Democrats come up short on immigration.

“I believe, as has been indicating in all the polling, that even people who are Hispanics who identify as being Republicans, are walking away from the Republicans,” Reid said. “This is an anti-immigrant party and is very clear.”

Fred Barnes: Public-sector employees are the new fat cats

By: Fred Barnes
Sunday Reflections Contributor

ohn Edwards was right. There are two Americas, just not his two (the rich and powerful versus everyone else).

The real divide today is, on one side, the 20 million people who work for state and local governments and the additional 3 million who’ve retired with fat pensions. On the other, the rest of us, about 280 million Americans. In short, there’s a gulf between the bureaucrats and the people.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, puts his fight with teachers and their unions in roughly those terms. He says there are “two classes of citizens in New Jersey: those who enjoy rich public benefits and those who pay for them.” The teachers want to keep a pay raise and continue to pay a minimal share of their retiree benefits.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, state and local government salaries are 34 percent higher than those for private-sector jobs. OK, that’s partly because government workers tend to have white-collar jobs. Benefits, 70 percent higher for these workers, are the real rub. And benefits for government retirees are the most flagrant.

They’ve become a national scandal, a fiscal nightmare for states, cities, and towns, and an example of unfairness of the sort liberals routinely complain about but are mostly silent about just now.

Let’s start with horror stories of pensions run amok.

o In Contra Costa County, Calif., the final salary of one fire chief, 51, was $221,000. He was given an annual, guaranteed pension of $284,000. Another chief, 50, whose final salary was $185,000, got a pension of $241,000. Credit the Contra Costa Times with uncovering this.

o Christie cited two tales in February when he declared a state of fiscal emergency in New Jersey. One retiree, 49, paid “a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments and health benefits.” A retired teacher paid $62,000. She’ll get “$1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.”

o In New York, a pensioner in the state retirement system received $641,000 in state payments in a single year. He was a triple dipper. He had a pension of $261,000, the highest in the state. He had a post in the state university system in which he made $280,000. And he was paid $100,000 a year as a consultant for the agency from which he’d retired, the teachers retirement system.

o Except for new hires, state workers in New York can retire at 55 with guaranteed benefits to which they contribute only in their first 10 years of work. They pay no state income tax on their pensions, and overtime is counted in computing the size of pensions. “Compared with the average New York worker, state and local government employees receive the gold standard of pensions,” the Syracuse Post-Standard said last year.

o Also in New York, the retirement system is riddled with lucrative pensions for retirees who were fired or convicted of crimes related to their state jobs. Former Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who once ran the state’s $154 billion pension fund, was found guilty of defrauding the state. Yet he’s got a pension of $104,123.

o In California, 9,111 retired government workers have pensions of more than $100,000. One retiree draws an annual pension of $509,664. Among retired teachers, 3,065 receive more than $100,000. One gets $285,460. Pensions for retired state workers and teachers will rise 2 percent this year, though Social Security recipients aren’t getting any cost-of-living increase. The increase in California isn’t tied to inflation.

o The city of Vallejo, Calif., declared bankruptcy in 2008, largely because the payroll for police and firefighters, and their pensions and overtime, consumed three-fourths of the budget. City employees could retire at 55 with 81 percent of their last year’s salary guaranteed as pensions. In bankruptcy negotiations, however, Vallejo officials declined to reduce current pensions.

The lofty pay scales and benefits for government workers — as compared with those in the private sector — suggest the idea of “public service” isn’t what it used to be. Once, taking a government job meant a sacrifice in pay and benefits. No more.

Most bureaucrats have secure, recession-proof jobs with automatic salary increases, paid leave and lavish benefits, notably in retirement. And they get to retire earlier than private-sector workers.

Christie has asked, Is this fair? The answer is no.

But if you happen to think it is fair, I’d advise you to click on the Web site pensiontsunami.com. It’s operated by one person in California who daily posts fresh examples of pension abuse across the country.

Lack of fairness isn’t the biggest problem with exorbitant pensions. The pension explosion has created a fiscal crisis in many states, cities and towns across the country, California being the worst off. Not only are pensions for government workers a perilously unfunded liability for many states, their soaring cost is causing sharp cuts in other programs.

“Paying for those pension promises is already crowding out funding for higher education, for parks, and for other areas like health care … and that crowding out is only going to get worse,” California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said last week in touting a pension reform plan. “In California, we had the Internet bubble, we had the housing bubble, and I see in the very near future a public pension bubble.”

He’s not exaggerating. State pension funds have gone up 2,000 percent in the past decade. The unfunded pension debt in California is $500 billion, according to a new study by Stanford University’s public policy program. It’s seven times greater than the state’s general obligation bonds, says Schwarzenegger adviser David Crane.

A staggering pension shortfall “is not just [in] California,” Crane told me. “It’s every state.” Nationwide, unfunded retirement benefits are $3.2 trillion, according to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. On top of that, he estimates the unfunded debt for the health coverage of state and local government retirees is $1.4 trillion.

At least 17 states have either enacted or looked into cost-cutting pension reforms in the past two years, says Ed Mendel, a pension expert in California. In Illinois and New York, both with large unfunded liabilities, the rules governing pensions have been tweaked, though solely for new government employees.

Only Alaska, Michigan and the District of Columbia have adopted the obvious long-term solution to the pension mess: putting new workers in 401(k) defined-contribution plans rather than defined-benefit plans. The switch would save billions. Even Virginia’s new, conservative governor, Bob McDonnell, declined to do this for new state workers, instead requiring them to pony up 5 percent for a traditional pension. (Current Virginia workers pay nothing.) But hope lies in the state with the worst pension situation. Meg Whitman, the likely Republican nominee for governor of California, says she would make the switch for new state hires.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard, from which this is adapted.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Sunday_Reflections/Public-sector-employees-are-the-new-fat-cats-93125624.html#ixzz0nOgXag1X

San Francisco’s Unconstitutional Arizona ‘Boycott’

By Bruce Walker

San Francisco and other city governments have jumped on the bandwagon of formally “boycotting” business with Arizona in response to that border state’s new law to assist the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Boycotts are an honorable way to influence governments or citizens. When the Nazis came to power, millions of Americans boycotted German imports. Blacks in Mississippi boycotted the Montgomery Bus System for its discriminatory practices toward blacks five decades ago. American patriots boycotted British goods prior to the Revolutionary War. Conservatives prior to our toppling Saddam Hussein called for boycotts of French goods.

Boycotts have been used against conservatives like Dr. Laura and against leftists like Rosie O’Donnell. In a world in which we have enough “stuff,” there is a compelling case to be made that all of us should use our votes in the marketplace to support values we treasure instead of just getting the best economic bargain. Many of us do that. I have not watched new television programming for decades. Millions of us boycott Hollywood.

The term “boycott” derives from a British officer, Captain Charles Boycott, who zealously enforced the legal but draconian rights of British landlords against Irish tenants in 1880. The Irish people voluntarily decided to have absolutely nothing to do with Captain Boycott. They neither offered nor threatened violence. They acted as a group, but as a group of private individuals. Within a fairly short period of time, the captain and his family left Ireland and returned to England.

Those cities threatening to “boycott” Arizona, however, are not threatening a boycott at all. Instead, as governments under our Constitution, these leftist city councils are creating an embargo. This is wrong, and it is unconstitutional. Under our federal system, state governments and their political subdivisions may not impose undue burdens on interstate commerce. Moreover, states and cities have no right to punish private citizens in other states for the actions of the state governments. Citizens have the right, within our federal system, to be treated equally and fairly.

Arizona, for example, could not pass a law preventing any business with San Francisco until that city modified its ordinances on sexual relations or gun control. It would not matter if an overwhelming majority of Arizonans thought this embargo was good. Political majorities and politicians backed by those majorities may not discriminate against citizens or states which displease them.

Likewise, San Francisco could not refuse to carry merchant traffic from its port facilities to Arizona. Likewise, Arizona could not stop interstate commerce traveling from San Francisco through Arizona. If state and city governments begin to exercise an extra-constitutional power to obstruct interstate commerce by imposing political filters, then there is no logical ending point to a feud between politicians from one part of the country and those in another part of the country. State and local governments throughout the nation have duties to each other. Apolitical and open trade is one of those duties.

Who is hurt when the City of San Francisco “boycotts” (i.e., embargoes) trade with the State of Arizona? The injured parties are the citizens of San Francisco and the citizens of Arizona. Commerce between those governments would exist only if that commerce made economic sense. In other words, the only time in which the prohibitions enacted by San Francisco government would go into effect would be when it makes economic sense to do business with Arizona. Ordinary citizens — who have always had the private right to boycott those they dislike — lose.

Who wins from an embargo when leftist run cities artificially substitute politics for market value in investments? Politicians with an almost insatiable appetite for power and praise win politically — after all, it is not their businesses hurt by an economically irrational embargo against Arizona. Who wins financially? Shrewd investors who buy undervalued assets in places like Arizona! The effect of an utterly political embargo is to reward those who ignore it.

An unconstitutional embargo could also easily cause economic blowback. What if Arizona passed a retaliatory embargo on commerce with the City of San Francisco? How short a step would that government-to-government embargo be from an Arizona embargo that precluded commerce with any business licensed by the City of San Francisco? Such businesses, after all, must largely conform to San Francisco municipal laws, and those laws would formally discriminate against Arizona. What argument would there be against such a discriminatory embargo by Arizona — particularly when the underlying rationale for a San Francisco government embargo on business with Arizona is explicitly to hurt Arizona businesses?

The underlying problem reflects a concern which I expressed in a recent article: The gravest problem in America today is not government, per se, but the use of government as a sock puppet for an angry, relentless partisan or interest group movement. When those groups seize governments, then the general welfare, as opposed to the welfare of special groups, melts into limp glop. The welfare of the citizens of the several states, even the welfare of ordinary San Franciscans, is abandoned so that political bosses can kowtow to particular interests.

America has an excellent mechanism for punishing those who follow the law but behave badly. It is called the free market. Nearly all of us make our consumer choices based upon complex factors which include more than pure economics. Just as we give our money to churches and to synagogues and we give our time to charities and to community activities, so we buy goods and services, in part, because we approve of the values of those selling. The danger of substituting brute state force for persuaded consumer opinion is that there is no end to the cycle of action and reaction — and no resolution to any of the underlying problems.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.