New Hampshire city suing ‘Robin Hood’ for paying parking meters of strangers
The New Hampshire city of Keene is suing “Robin Hood and His Merry Men” — a group that has made a name for itself by putting coins in people’s parking meters before parking enforcement agents can slap them with a ticket.
The New Hampshire Union Leader reported this week that the six “Robin Hooders” named in the suit troll downtown Keene — often tracking parking enforcement officers — in search of cars parked at expired meters.
When they find one, they pay the meter and slip notes under the windshield wiper of the vehicle that says: “Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king’s tariffs, Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Please consider paying it forward.” The note includes an address where people can send donations for the effort.
The city claims in the lawsuit that the “Robin Hooders” are taunting and harassing the city’s three parking enforcement officers and causing them so much anxiety and distress that they’ve considered leaving their jobs — an outcome that would force the city to pick up the tab for hiring and training replacements.
“They say video recording or talking to them is harassing them, but I don’t agree with that,” James Cleaveland, a member of the group, told the Union Leader.
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FASCISM RISING; Britain, Severe Austerity For Subjects, 5 Million Pound Pay Raise For Tyrant Queen!!
(AE) – This year the UK taxpayers will provide a 15 percent pay raise of 5 million pounds, for a total of 36.1 million pounds, to support their occupying tyrannical German Queen, Elizabeth II (Saxe Coburg Gotha).
Apparently the Crown Estates’ profits of 240 million pounds per year was not enough booty, a pay increase was required.
The dark ages continue…
2013.5.8 Queen’s Speech; Monarch To Get Huge Pay Rise As Brits Tighten Belts (RT, youtube.com):
The UK is staying committed to measures that reduce the country’s deficit – the British Queen has laid out her government’s agenda for the next year. In her speech she said it will work to promote a fairer society to reward those who work hard. However what may sound a little unfair for austerity-hit Britain, is the news that the royal family’s set to get a 5-million-pound pay rise.
2013.4.4 Queen’s Pay Rise At Expense Of Public (PressTV, youtube.com):
An analyst describes the Queen’s pay rise as inappropriate, insensitive, callous and completely out of touch with reality as masses of Brits suffer economic depression. In the background of this the British people may face a triple-dip recession in the near future as many now battle daily to cope with immense austerity pressures imposed upon them by their government. It is at this time that the yearly sovereign grant for the Queen that is also used to pay staff and maintain palaces of the royal family, paid by the British tax payers, has received a hefty rise of five million pounds per year.
Press TV has interviewed Rodney Shakespeare, professor of binary economics, London about this issue.
Researchers Have Stumbled On A Massive Lithium Mine That Could Meet All US Demand
The U.S. currently imports more than 80% of the lithium it uses, with the silvery metal winding up in batteries from cell phones to electric cars.
According to a United States Geological Survey publication on lithium, “The only commercially active lithium mine in the United States was a brine operation in Nevada. The mine’s production capacity was expanded in 2012, and a new lithium hydroxide plant opened in North Carolina. Two companies produced a large array of downstream lithium compounds in the United States from domestic or South American lithium carbonate, lithium chloride, and lithium hydroxide. A U.S. recycling company produced a small quantity of lithium carbonate from solutions recovered during the recycling of lithium ion batteries.”
Gartman on Gold: We’ve Never Ever Seen Anything Like It
Gold prices continued to plummet Monday on concern that Cyprus will have to sell excess reserves of the precious metal to raise about $522 million to help finance that country’s $13 billion international bailout, Dennis Gartman, editor of The Gartman Letter, told CNBC.
“There are a lot of people throwing up their hands. Throwing positions overboard. Panic is everywhere,” Gartman said in a “Squawk Box” interview on Monday. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean it.”
Obama signs STOCK Act modification
President Obama quietly signed legislation Monday that rolled back a provision of the STOCK Act that required high-ranking federal employees to disclose their financial information online.
The White House announced Monday that the president had signed S. 716, which repealed a requirement of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requiring the disclosure, which had previously been delayed several times by Congress.
Cyprus to sell around 400 million euros worth of gold
(Reuters) – Cyprus has agreed to sell excess gold reserves to raise around 400 million euros and help finance its part of its bailout, an assessment of Cypriot financing needs prepared by the European Commission showed.
The draft assessment, obtained by Reuters, also said that Cyprus would raise 10.6 billion euros from the winding down of Laiki Bank and the losses imposed on junior bondholders and the deposit-for-equity swap for uninsured deposits in the Bank of Cyprus.
Judge Rules To End Debt Slavery (Approve bankruptcy) For Stockton, CA
April 2, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Economy
This precedent could launch a wave of similar filings all across the uSA. Now IS IT TIME TO “DEFAULT” ON INTEREST + (ALLEGEDLY) OWED TO THE “FEDERAL” RESERVE? We say YES …. in fact HELL YES!
Via Last Resistance
“Today a judge ruled that the city of Stockton California is indeed bankrupt and that the city acted in good faith. Creditors asked the judge to void the bankruptcy, saying the city could raise taxes instead.”
Since people should pay their debts, some conservatives might complain about this situation. So let me explain why it is a wonderful decision.
First, regarding debt in general, no one is obligated to do what they cannot do. So even people who are under a debt load they can’t pay off, don’t have that obligation. People who lend money are taking a risk on a possibly profitable enterprise, just like the person who borrowed the money is taking a risk. At some point, both parties need to move on and stop pretending this debt is ever going to be paid back. Otherwise they are forever stuck in the past, unable to progress forward.
Second, though there is some overlap, in general the people who took the obligation are not the same people who are now obligated. People have left Stockton and moved into Stockton. Raising taxes would mean less revenue as more people moved away. Perhaps those with properties that lose their value because no one wants to live in Stockton will be forced to stay in the town, but for that reason the town’s economy will decline future and they won’t be able to provide more revenue to the municipality. But in any case, we’re talking about two different groups of people. Those being burdened with the debt liability were not the same people who took the loan.
Third, people should know to invest in productive assets, not in a ponzi scheme. Loaning money to a government is an inherent scam because they have no productive assets (or if they do have such assets, they will never be managed as effectively as similar assets are managed in the private sector). If you loan money to an oil company or a software developer they will use your money to produce something profitable so that they can pay your money back with interest. But a government is only promising to tax residents in the future to pay you back. Very little or even nothing profitable is done with the money; it is not invested but consumed. The moral obligation is not to pay back an impossible loan. The moral obligation was to invest in real development rather than buy government bonds.
So this left us with the question: Were the courts going to demand that insolvent cities pay back their debts by any means necessary? Were they going to force cities to take out more loans to pay back past loans, so that the spiral of debt only deepened? Were they going to give cities the authority to confiscate all bank accounts within their jurisdiction? (Of course, the Federal Government would never allow this because they are saving this alternative for themselves alone.)
The judge did the right thing. The debt is too large. The bondholders took a risk and lost on it. That happens sometimes; that’s why it is called “risk.”
In the meantime, though the financial meltdown will cause a lot of pain, we will be able to get through it and rebuild if this decision is upheld.
David Stockman: Ben Bernanke Is The Most Dangerous Man In US History
April 2, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Economy
We are witnessing the most opposition to the Fed in our lifetime.
The Total Iraq and Afghanistan Pricetag: Over $4 Trillion The wars are over, but the spending is just beginning, says a new study
April 1, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Economy
U.S. Marines and Afghan police in Afghanistan. A new study estimates the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost $4 to $6 trillion.
The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been declared officially over, but America has barely begun to pay the bill, says a new study. That could make defending the nation and paying the government’s bills even tougher to do in the future.
[PHOTOS: The 10th Anniversary of the Iraq War]
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars will together cost $4 to $6 trillion, according a new study from Harvard University’s Kennedy School. A large share of those bills has yet to be paid: the study finds that the U.S. has spent around $2 trillion thus far on the two controversial wars, and that growing commitments to spending on military personnel and veterans will drive much of the spending in the decades to come. The study notes that the Veterans’ Affairs budget has tripled since the start of the wars.
“Assuming this pattern continues, there will be a much smaller amount of an already-shrinking defense budget available for core military functions,” writes Linda Bilmes, senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard and the study’s author.
Bilmes has been studying the costs of the two wars for years, and she says that the estimates of the total cost continue to climb as the cost of continuing care for veterans mounts.
“What has happened is the number of injuries and the number of claims and the complexity of claims…in these conflicts has been much higher than in previous wars,” she says. She notes that after Vietnam, veterans averaged around two and a half to three conditions per claim, whereas veterans now have over eight conditions per claim.
[PRESS PAST: The Underestimated Costs, and Price Tag, of the Iraq War]
Of the nearly 1.6 million troops that have been discharged from the wars, over half have received Veterans’ Affairs medical treatment and will also receive benefits for the rest of their lives. Those costs will stack up as more troops are discharged and need benefits. The study finds that providing medical and disability benefits to vets will eventually cost over $836 billion.
This long tail of spending follows a well-established historical trend, writes Bilmes: disability spending on World War I veterans hit its peak in 1969, and spending on World War II veterans was at its highest in the late 1980s.
There are other factors at play here, however: the military must also spend on replacing worn-out equipment and on interest on the cost of the wars. In addition, Congress ramped up spending on personnel and veterans during the wars, increasing pay for troops to counteract difficulties in recruitment and expanding the military’s TRICARE healthcare system. Bilmes believes that spiraling costs may have the potential to change spending on veterans from a “sacred cow” to an area with real potential for deficit reduction.
[DEBATE CLUB: 10 Years Later, Was the Iraq War Worth It?]
“If you look at some of the costs that are baked into the system as a result of the wars—military pay raises, military health benefits, expanding the TRICARE system—it’s more expensive to have personnel in the Defense Department,” which could pressure lawmakers to target that area for cuts in the future. There has already been a glimpse of that in the willingness of some on Capitol Hill to accept the forced cuts of sequestration, which did not exempt the military.
While this study puts the total cost of the wars at $4 trillion to $6 trillion, assessments of the wars’ costs do differ from source to source. While the Harvard study puts the cost of the two wars thus far at around $2 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office as of October 2012 said that only $1.4 trillion had been appropriated, though they do not account for some areas, like Social Security Disability Insurance, Bilmes points out. In addition, while she estimates the total cost of the two wars at $4 to $6 trillion, the Costs of War project at Brown University estimates it at around $4 trillion.
More News:
“Your money is not really yours if the government needs it.” (James Grant on CNBC)
March 27, 2013 by Jack Blood
Filed under Economy
Fed skeptic tells it like is it on MSM cable channel -
HIGH POINTS:
2:30 – (NOW) The Greatest and most Perilous experiment in paper money in history?
3:50 – This will end with an immense destruction of wealth
4:40 – What we are seeing is the suppression of enterprise through manipulation of the markets
5:00 – Markets will have the last word over Bernanke
5:40 – To the “authorities” you money is not necessarily your money if its needed.
