Jul 29
Shocking business news from the Associated Press. AP reports that PAYDEX, an index that tracks how much time small businesses take to pay their bills, shows businesses are paying debts later and later.
Small businesses are increasingly paying bills 30 or 45 days late.
A 2014 study by Georgia Tech found that companies are taking an average of 46 days to pay major bills (in 2014), compared to 35 percent in 2009, “even though the economy was much healthier in 2014.”
Jul 29
Obamacare and Medicare were pushed with claims they would bring health insurance prices down for poor people.
Yet health care costs have increased faster than inflation every year for 30 years.
Now, just a couple years after the implementation of Obamacare, Montana’s major health insurers (who, ironically, lobbied heavily for the passage of Obamacare and even helped write portions of it) say they’re losing money and are seeking 2017 rate increases of up to 62 percent.
The state’s smallest marketplace insurer, PacificSource, says it averaged a loss of $1,100 per insured member last year.
Jul 29
Occasionally, a whistleblower alerts the world to the clear scripting of ‘terror’ videos by the CIA or elements within western intelligence agencies.
Here is a new video of an Islamist extremist Syrian rebel giving a statement. And you can hear his CIA director telling him to start the statement over!
Jul 29
Both of America’s government-supremacist parties have been led by overt warmongers for decades. The recent release of previously secret emails between high-level Democrats reveals that the Democratic Party rigged the Democratic Primaries to install yet another warmonger (Hillary Clinton) as the Party’s presidential nominee.
Also, at this week’s Democratic National Convention, the Democrats gave a prime speaking slot to former “Defense” Secretary and CIA director Leon Panetta.
A crowd of long-suffering Democratic delegates chanted, “No More War!” See here.
Jul 29
Socialism is a curse that people should wish on their enemies.
When hardline socialists won control of Venezuela 15 years ago, socialists and government trusters worldwide cheered. Professors and their grad students across the western world announced the success of “third way” politics: a fusion of private industry under the control and central planning of government officials.
Now Venezuelans die in the streets fighting over pennies. Venezuelans boldly loot stores loudly daring cops and soldiers to shoot them.
The latest: the Venezeulan government has now declared the people to be slaves. A decree requiring Venezuelans to work on farms for free was issued last week. See here.
Jul 24
Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks (who is currently trapped in London’s Ecuadoran Embassy) recently released some secret emails by high level Democratic Party officials, including Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. A hacker reportedly obtained the emails and posted them to Wikileaks.
The emails show DNC chairwoman Schultz and other DNC officials and staff rigging the Democratic primary system to ensure that Schultz’s friend Hillary Clinton would win the Party’s nomination.
There are emails indicating that the DNC deliberated about ways to marginalize Hillary’s rival–Bernie Sanders–by depicting him as an atheist in southern states, and even by mocking Sanders’ Jewish heritage. See here.
Jul 24
Headlines blared last week regarding a supposed “coup” attempt to overthrow President Erdogan of Turkey.
Whistleblowers have since come forward and provided evidence that Erdogan himself staged the alleged “coup” plot to make himself look better and make his impoverished subjects “rally around the flag.” Such staged, false-flag attacks are quite common in history.
Now Turkish government authorities are doing what government officials have always sought to do in every society.
Warrantless arrests, mass surveillance, roundups of schoolchildren for “treason,” and process-free jail hearings are now part of everyday life in Turkey.
Jul 23
A group of fame-seeking manmade-global-warming alarmists are making headlines around the world with claims that they are sailing around the North Pole which is virtually ice-free.
The boat’s crew have bought into government statements that ice is disappearing in the Arctic.
Unfortunately for the crewmen of the sailboat, the government claims about unusual melting are lies.
Tony Heller writes that “They have zero chance of getting through without an icebreaker. It has become abundantly clear that these people are attempting to defraud the public about the state of Arctic ice.”
When Heller tried to contact the crew to ask if they are being led by an icebreaker vessel, the crew shut off all communications.
“So far,” Heller writes,
“everyone who has asked the Polar Ocean crew if they are being accompanied by an icebreaker has been blocked [on Twitter]. I was blocked by another crew member today for asking “Ben, are you being accompanied by an icebreaker through the Northeast Passage?””
Jul 22
Remember those tourists to Yellowstone Park who were prosecuted and punished for picking up a freezing abandoned bison calf and trying to save it in their vehicle?
The story made national news, with government officials shaming and lecturing YNP visitors to NEVER, EVER, try to save wildlife in national parks.
Apparently, a whistleblower came forward to tell a similar story about a National Park Service employee who did THE EXACT SAME THING with a baby calf bison in South Dakota. The Park Service investigated the claims and found them true:
But the government agent is NOT BEING PROSECUTED (or even publicly named, let alone shamed). See here.
There is one set of rules for government workers; another for common peasants.
Jul 19
America, like Japan, Denmark and other former capitalist flagships, took a serious turn toward overregulation, overtaxation and socialism since the 1990s.
And American economic growth has stagnated. 8 years into a supposed “recovery,” U.S. GDP growth rates still hover around 2 percent annually or less.
According to George Will, “If 2 percent growth is, as he says, “the most likely scenario” for the foreseeable future, the nation faces a second consecutive lost decade — one without a year of 3 percent growth.”
N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard economist and chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, writes in the New York Times that in the past decade the growth rate of the real gross domestic product per person averaged 0.44 percent, down from the historical norm of 2 percent: At 2 percent, incomes double every 35 years; at 0.44 percent, about every 160 years.
