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Does China Plan To Establish “China Cities” And “Special Economic Zones” All Over America?

Does China Plan To Establish Chinese Cities And Special Economic Zones All Over America?What in the world is China up to?  Over the past several years, the Chinese government and large Chinese corporations (which are often at least partially owned by the government) have been systematically buying up businesses, homes, farmland, real estate, infrastructure and natural resources all over America.  In some cases, China appears to be attempting to purchase entire communities in one fell swoop.  So why is this happening?  Is this some form of “economic colonization” that is taking place?  Some have speculated that China may be intending to establish “special economic zones” inside the United States modeled after the very successful Chinese city of Shenzhen.  Back in the 1970s, Shenzhen was just a very small fishing village, but now it is a sprawling metropolis of over 14 million people.  Initially, these “special economic zones” were only established within China, but now the Chinese government has been buying huge tracts of land in foreign countries such as Nigeria and establishing special economic zones in those nations.  So could such a thing actually happen in America?  Well, according to Dr. Jerome Corsi, a plan being pushed by the Chinese Central Bank would set up “development zones” in the United States that would allow China to “establish Chinese-owned businesses and bring in its citizens to the U.S. to work.”  Under the plan, some of the $1.17 trillion that the U.S. owes China would be converted from debt to “equity”.  As a result, “China would own U.S. businesses, U.S. infrastructure and U.S. high-value land, all with a U.S. government guarantee against loss.”  Does all of this sound far-fetched?  Well, it isn’t.  In fact, the economic colonization of America is already far more advanced than most Americans would dare to imagine.

So how in the world did we get to this point?  A few decades ago, the United States was the unchallenged economic powerhouse of the world and China was essentially a third world country.

So what happened?

Well, we entered into a whole bunch of extremely unfavorable “free trade” agreements, and countries such as China began to aggressively use “free trade” as an economic weapon against us.

Over the past decade, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs to China.  When the final numbers for 2012 come out, our trade deficit with China for the year will be well over 300 billion dollars, and that will be the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the world.

Overall, the U.S. has run a trade deficit with China over the past decade that comes to more than 2.3 trillion dollars.  That 2.3 trillion dollars could have gone to U.S. businesses and U.S. workers, and in turn taxes would have been paid on all of that money.  But instead, all of that money went to China.

Rather than just sitting on all of that money, China has been lending much of it back to us – at interest.  We now owe China more than a trillion dollars, and our politicians are constantly pleading with China to lend more money to us so that we can finance our exploding debt.

Today, the U.S. government pays China approximately 100 million dollars a day in interest on the debt that we owe them.  Those that say that the U.S. debt “does not matter” are being incredibly foolish.

So thanks to our massive trade deficit and our exploding national debt, China is systematically getting wealthier and the United States is systematically getting poorer.

And now China is starting to use a lot of that wealth to aggressively expand their power and influence around the globe.

But isn’t it more than a bit far-fetched to suggest that China may be planning to establish Chinese cities and special economic zones in America?

Not really.

Just look at what has already happened up in Canada.  It is well-known that the Chinese population of Vancouver, Canada has absolutely exploded in recent years.  In fact, the Vancouver suburb of Richmond is now approximately half Chinese.  The following is an excerpt from a BBC article…

Richmond is North America’s most Asian city – 50% of residents here identify themselves as Chinese. But it’s not just here that the Chinese community in British Columbia (BC) – some 407,000 strong – has left its mark. All across Vancouver, Chinese-Canadians have helped shape the local landscape.

A similar thing is happening in many communities along the west coast of the United States.  In fact, Chinese citizens purchased one out of every ten homes that were sold in the state of California in 2011.

But in other areas of the United States, the Chinese are approaching things much more systematically.

For example, as I have written about previously, a Chinese group identified as “Sino-Michigan Properties LLC” has purchased 200 acres of land near the town of Milan, Michigan.  Their stated goal is to build a “China City” that has artificial lakes, a Chinese cultural center and hundreds of housing units for Chinese citizens.

In other instances, large chunks of real estate in major U.S. cities that are down on their luck are being snapped up by Chinese investors.  Just check out what a Fortune article from a while back says has been happening over in Toledo, Ohio…

In March 2011, Chinese investors paid $2.15 million cash for a restaurant complex on the Maumee River in Toledo, Ohio. Soon they put down another $3.8 million on 69 acres of newly decontaminated land in the city’s Marina District, promising to invest $200 million in a new residential-commercial development. That September, another Chinese firm spent $3 million for an aging hotel across a nearby bridge with a view of the minor league ballpark.

Toledo is being promoted to Chinese investors as a “5-star logistics region“.  From Toledo it is very easy to get to Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Indianapolis…

With a population of 287,000, Toledo is only the fourth largest city in Ohio, but it lies at the junction of two important highways — I-75 and I-80/90. “My vision is to make Toledo a true international city,” Toledo’s Mayor Mike Bell told the Toledo Blade.

But some of these deals appear to be about far more than just making “investments”.  According to the Idaho Statesman, a Chinese company known as Sinomach (which is actually controlled by the Chinese government) was actually interested in developing a 50 square mile self-sustaining “technology zone” south of the Boise airport…

A Chinese national company is interested in developing a 10,000- to 30,000-acre technology zone for industry, retail centers and homes south of the Boise Airport.

Officials of the China National Machinery Industry Corp. have broached the idea — based on a concept popular in China today — to city and state leaders.

The article suggested that this “technology zone” would be modeled after similar projects that already exist in China, and that Chinese officials were conducting similar negotiations with other U.S. states as well…

Sinomach is not looking only at Idaho.

The company sent delegations to Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania this year to talk about setting up research and development bases and industrial parks. It has an interest in electric transmission projects and alternative energy as well.

The technology zone proposal follows a model of science, technology and industrial parks in China — often fully contained cities with all services included.

Thankfully the deal in Idaho appears to be stalled for now, but could we soon see China establish special economic zones in other communities all around America?

The Chinese certainly do seem to be laying the groundwork for something.  They have been voraciously gobbling up important infrastructure all over the country.  The following comes from a recent American Free Press article…

In addition to already owning vital ports in Long Beach, Calif. and Boston, Mass., the China Ocean Shipping Company is eyeing major ports on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico. China also owns access to ports at the entry and exit points of the Panama Canal.

And due to fiscal woes plaguing many American cities and states, U.S. legislators have been actively seeking out Chinese investors. In one of the worst cases, Baton Rouge, La., Mayor Kip Holden offered the Chinese government ownership and operating rights to a new toll way system if the Chinese would provide the funding to build it.

Does it make sense for the Chinese to own some of our most important ports?

Isn’t there a national security risk?

Sadly, there isn’t much of anything that our politicians won’t sell these days as long as someone is willing to flash a lot of cash.

The Chinese have also been busy buying up important real estate on the east coast as a recent Forbes article explained….

According to a recent report in the New York Times, investors from China are “snapping up luxury apartments” and are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on commercial and residential projects like Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Chinese companies also have signed major leases at the Empire State Building and at 1 World Trade Center, the report said.

But it is not only just land and infrastructure that the Chinese have been buying up.

They have also been purchasing rights to vital oil and natural gas deposits all over the United States.

There have been two Chinese companies that have been primarily involved in this effort.

The first is the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).  According to Wikipedia, CNOOC is 100 percent owned by the Chinese government…

CNOOC Group is a state-owned oil company, fully owned by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, and the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) performs the rights and obligations of shareholder on behalf of the government.

The second is Sinopec Corporation.  Sinopec Group is the largest shareholder (approx. 75% ownership) in Sinopec Corporation.  And as the Sinopec website tells us, Sinopec Group is fully owned by the Chinese government…

Sinopec Group, the largest shareholder of Sinopec Corp., is a super-large petroleum and petrochemical group incorporated by the State in 1998 based on the former China Petrochemical Corporation. Funded by the State, it is a State authorized investment arm and State-owned controlling company.

So whenever you see CNOOC or Sinopec, you can replace those names with the Chinese government.  The Chinese government essentially runs both of those companies.

And as you can see from the following list compiled by the Wall Street Journal, those two companies have been extremely aggressive in buying up rights to oil and natural gas all over the nation…

Colorado: Cnooc gained a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming in a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Louisiana: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 265,000 acres in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale after a broader $2.5-billion deal with Devon Energy.

Michigan: Sinopec gained a one-third interest in 350,000 acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.

Ohio: Sinopec acquired a one-third stake in Devon Energy’s 235,000 Utica Shale acres in a larger $2.5 billion deal.

Oklahoma: Sinopec has a one-third interest in 215,000 acres in a broader $2.5 billion deal with Devon Energy.

Texas: Cnooc acquired a one-third interest in Chesapeake Energy’s 600,000 acres in the Eagle Ford Shale in a $2.16-billion deal.

Wyoming: Cnooc has a one-third stake in 800,000 acres in northeast Colorado and southeast Wyoming after a $1.27 billion pact with Chesapeake Energy. Sinopec gained a one-third interest in Devon Energy’s 320,000 acres as part of a larger $2.5 billion deal.

Gulf of Mexico: Cnooc Ltd. separately acquired minority stakes in some of Statoil ASA’s leases as well as six of Nexen Inc.’s deep-water wells.

So why is the U.S. government allowing this?

That is a very good question.

For a nation that purports to be pursuing “energy independence”, we sure do have a funny way of going about things.

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that China is absolutely mopping the floor with the United States on the global economic stage.  China is rising and America is in an advanced state of decline.  Global economic power has shifted dramatically and most Americans still don’t understand what has happened.

The following are 44 more signs of how dominant the economy of China has become…

1. A Chinese firm recently made a $2.6 billion offer to buy movie theater chain AMC.

2. A different Chinese firm made a $1.8 billion offer to buy aircraft maker Hawker Beechcraft.

3. In December it was announced that a Chinese group would be purchasing AIG’s plane leasing unit for $4.23 billion.

4. It was recently announced that the Federal Reserve will now allow Chinese banks to buy up American banks.

5. A $190 million bridge project up in Alaska was awarded to a Chinese firm.

6. A $400 million contract to renovate the Alexander Hamilton bridge in New York was awarded to a Chinese firm.

7. A $7.2 billion contract to construct a new bridge between San Francisco and Oakland was awarded to a Chinese firm.

8. The uniforms for the U.S. Olympic team were made in China.

9. 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

10. The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.

11. The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

12. In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

13. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

14. According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

15. The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.

16. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

17. The United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs per month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

18. Overall, the United States has lost a total of more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

19. According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

20. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

21. In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.

22. Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

23. After being bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, General Motors is currently involved in 11 joint ventures with companies owned by the Chinese government.  The price for entering into many of these “joint ventures” was a transfer of “state of the art technology” from General Motors to the communist Chinese.

24. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Ten years later, the United States had less than 15 percent and China’s share had soared to 20 percent.

25. The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

26. China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment.

27. The number one U.S. export to China is “scrap and trash”.

28. The U.S. trade deficit with China is now more than 28 times larger than it was back in 1990.

29. Back in 1985, the U.S. trade deficit with China was just 6 million dollars for the entire year.  For the month of November 2012 alone, the U.S. trade deficit with China was 28.9 billion dollars.

30. China now consumes more energy than the United States does.

31. China is now the leading manufacturer of goods in the entire world.

32. China uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.

33. China is now the number one producer of wind and solar power on the entire globe.

34. Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

35. Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

36. China now produces 11 times as much steel as the United States does.

37. China produces more than 90 percent of the global supply of rare earth elements.

38. China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.

39. A recent investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services found more than one million counterfeit Chinese parts in the Department of Defense supply chain.

40. 15 years ago, China was 14th in the world in published scientific research articles.  But now, China is expected to pass the United States and become number one very shortly.

41. China now awards more doctoral degrees in engineering each year than the United States does.

42. According to one study, the Chinese economy already has roughly the same amount of purchasing power as the U.S. economy does.

43. According to the IMF, China will pass the United States and will become the largest economy in the world in 2016.

44. Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040 if current trends continue.

Without the “globalization” of the world economy, none of this would have ever happened.  But instead of admitting our mistakes and fixing them, our politicians continue to press for even more “free trade” and even more integration with communist nations such as China.

In fact, according to Dr. Jerome Corsi, the U.S. government has already set up 257 “foreign trade zones” all over America.  These “foreign trade zones” are apparently given “special U.S. customs treatment” and are used to promote “free trade”…

Corsi noted that the U.S. government has created 257 foreign trade zones, or FTZs, throughout the United States, designed to extend special U.S. customs treatment to U.S. plants engaged in international-trade-related activities.

The FTZs tend to be located near airports, with easy access into the continental NAFTA and WTO multi-modal transportation systems being created to move free-trade goods cheaply, quickly and efficiently throughout the continent of North America.

“There is nothing in the U.S. government’s description of FTZs that would prevent a foreign government, like China, from operating a shell U.S. company that is in reality owned and financed by the Chinese government and operated through a Chinese government-owned corporation,” Corsi wrote.

Sadly, we are probably going to see a whole lot more of this in the years ahead.

According to Corsi, a professor of economics at Tsighua University in Beijing named Yu Qiao has suggested the following plan as a way to transform the debt that the United States owes China into something more “tangible”…

  1. China would negotiate with the U.S. government to create a “crisis relief facility,” or CRF. The CRF “would be used alongside U.S. federal efforts to stabilize the banking system and to invest in capital-intensive infrastructure projects such as high-speed railroad from Boston to Washington, D.C.
  2. China would pool a portion of its holdings of Treasury bonds under the CFR umbrella to convert sovereign debt into equity. Any CFR funds that were designated for investment in U.S. corporations would still be owned and managed by U.S. equity holders, with the Asians holding minority equity shares “that would, like preferred stock, be convertible.”
  3. The U.S. government would act as a guarantor, “providing a sovereign guarantee scheme to assure the investment principal of the CRF against possible default of targeted companies or projects”.
  4. The Federal Reserve would set up a special account to supply the liquidity the CRF would require to swap sovereign debt into industrial investment in the United States.

Apparently the Bank of China really likes this plan and would like to see something like this implemented.

In the years ahead, perhaps many of you will end up working in a “special economic zone” for a Chinese company on a project that is being financially guaranteed by the U.S. government.

If that sounds like a form of slavery to you, the truth is that you are probably not too far off the mark.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we should have never allowed ourselves to get into so much debt.

Now we will pay the price.

To get an idea of how much the world has changed in recent years, just check out this incredible photo which contrasts the decline of Detroit over the years with the amazing rise of Shanghai, China.

Things did not have to turn out this way.  Unfortunately, we made decades of incredibly foolish decisions and we wrecked the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen.

Now the future for America looks really bleak.

Or could it be that I am being too pessimistic?  Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below…

The United States - A Colony Of China? - Photo by DrRandomFactor

We Are Witnessing The Death Of Small Business In America

Historically, small businesses have been the primary engine of new job creation in the United States.  If the economy was getting healthy, we would expect to see the number of jobs at new businesses rise.  Instead, we are witnessing just the opposite.  We are told that the economy is supposed to be “recovering”, but the number of “startup jobs” at new businesses has fallen for five years in a row.  According to an analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data performed by economist Tim Kane, there were almost 12 startup jobs per 1000 Americans back in the year 2006.  By 2011, that figure had fallen to less than 8 startup jobs per 1000 Americans.  According to Kane, the number of jobs in the United States at businesses that are less than one year old has fallen from 4.1 million in 1994 to 2.5 million in 2010.  Overall, the number of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” has fallen by more than 50 percent as a percentage of the population since 1977.  The United States was once known as “the land of opportunity”, but now that is fundamentally changing.  At this point we truly do have a “crisis of entrepreneurship” in this country, and that is a huge reason why America is in decline.  We are witnessing the slow death of the small business in America, and that is incredibly bad news for all of us.

Unfortunately, the problems that small businesses are experiencing right now have been building up for decades.  The economic environment for small businesses in America has become incredibly toxic.  Sadly, we can see this in the numbers.  According to Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

Obviously, we are headed very much in the wrong direction.  Kane speculates about why this may be happening in his paper…

There is anecdotal evidence that the U.S. policy environment has become inadvertently hostile to entrepreneurial employment. At the federal level, high taxes and higher uncertainty about taxes are undoubtedly inhibiting entrepreneurship, but to what degree is unknown. The dominant factor may be new regulations on labor.  The passage of the Affordable Care Act is creating a sweeping alteration of the regulatory environment that directly changes how employers engage their workforces, and it will be some time until those changes are understood by employers or scholars. Separately, there has been a federal crackdown since 2009 by the Internal Revenue Service on U.S. employers that hire U.S. workers as independent contractors rather than employees, raising the question of mandatory benefits. New firms tend to use part-time and contract staffing rather than full-time employees during the startup stage. According to Labor Department data, the typical American today only takes home 70 percent of compensation as pay, while the rest is absorbed by the spiraling cost of benefits (e.g., health insurance). The dilemma for U.S. policy is that an American entrepreneur has zero tax or regulatory burden when hiring a consultant/contractor who resides abroad. But that same employer is subject to paperwork, taxation, and possible IRS harassment if employing U.S.-based contractors. Finally, there has been a steady barrier erected to entrepreneurs at the local policy level. Brink Lindsey points out in his book Human Capitalism that the rise of occupational licensing is destroying startup opportunities for poor and middle class Americans.

Kane raises some very good points in his analysis.  Without a doubt, small businesses in the United States are being taxed into oblivion.  If you doubt this, just read this article.

And the regulatory environment for small businesses is more suffocating than it has ever been before.  Unfortunately, our politicians never seem to learn that lesson.  During his first term, Obama piled on mountains of new regulations, and now that he has won a second term he is preparing to unleash another massive wave of new regulations.

But many times the worst offenders are politicians on the state and local level.  There are some areas of the country (such as California) that have created absolutely nightmarish conditions for small businesses.  California had the worst “small business failure rate” in the country in 2010.  It was 69 percent higher than the national average.  And in 2011, the state of California ranked 50th out of all 50 states in new business creation.

Yet the politicians in California just continue to pile on even more regulations and even more taxes.

Sadly, this kind of thing is happening from coast to coast and it is killing off hordes of small businesses.  Just consider the following statistics…

-According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. economy lost more than 220,000 small businesses during the last recession.

-As a share of the population, the percentage of Americans that are self-employed fell by more than 20 percent between 1991 and 2010.

-As a share of the population, the percentage of “new entrepreneurs and business owners” dropped by a staggering 53 percent between 1977 and 2010.

-The average pay for self-employed Americans declined by $3,721 between 2006 and 2010.

So what needs to be done?

Well, first of all, the tax burden and the regulatory burden on small businesses both need to be greatly reduced.

Secondly, the balance of power in our nation needs to be dramatically shifted.  Conservatives run around talking about the need to reduce the power of government and liberals run around talking about the need to reduce the power of corporations, and actually both of them are right.

Our founding fathers intended to establish a Republic where power would never be concentrated in the hands of just a few.  That is why they tried to strictly limit the power of the federal government in the U.S. Constitution, and that is why they greatly restricted the size and scope of corporations in early America.  For much more on this, please see this article: “Corporatism Is Not Capitalism: 7 Things About The Monolithic Predator Corporations That Dominate Our Economy That Every American Should Know“.

Our founding fathers wanted to empower individual citizens and small businesses.  They never intended for us to have a system where big government and big corporations dominate everything and crush the “little guy” at every opportunity.

Even as we witness the death of the small business in America, corporations are absolutely thriving.  The following chart shows how corporate profits after tax have exploded to new record highs in recent years…

So has this been good for workers?  No, it has not translated into more jobs and higher wages.  In fact, wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP are now at an all-time low…

That is why it is imperative that we change “the rules of the game” so that the balance of power is shifted back in the direction of individual citizens and small businesses.  We desperately need to turn back to the principles that this nation was founded upon.

If nothing is done, these trends are going to get even worse.  Barack Obama certainly has no plans to reduce the size and the power of the government.  Since he was elected, an average of 101 new federal employees have been added to the government payroll every single day…

In the 1,420 days since he took the oath of office, the federal government has daily hired on average 101 new employees. Every day. Seven days a week. All 202 weeks. That makes 143,000 more federal workers than when Obama talked forever on that cold day in January of 2009.

And if nothing is done, the monolithic predator corporations that dominate our economy will just get even larger and even more powerful.  Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands more small businesses will close up shop all over the country.

Unfortunately, most Americans seem totally apathetic about these issues.  They seem content to wear “meggings“, watch “Honey Boo Boo” on television and let our government and corporate overlords run everything.  Most of them have even been brainwashed into believing that this is the American way of doing things.

So where do we go from here?

Well, this nation will probably continue to keep doing the same things that it has been doing, and it will continue to get the same results.

The death of small business in America is happening right in front of our eyes, and everybody can see it happening, but very few people are doing anything to stop it.

Lock Your Doors And Prepare To Defend Your Family

Do you think that is an alarmist headline?  Well, I am not the one saying this.  Law enforcement authorities all over the country are telling citizens that they can no longer deal with all the crime and that people need to lock their doors and prepare to defend their families.  Just recently, the city attorney of San Bernardino, California told citizens to “lock their doors and load their guns” because there is not enough money to pay for adequate police protection any longer.  The murder rate in San Bernardino is up 50 percent this year, but the city is dealing with bankruptcy and has been forced to lay off 80 police officers.  But San Bernardino is not the only city dealing with this kind of a thing.  In Oakland, burglaries are up 43 percent so far this year, and to say that there is a “crime wave” going on in Oakland would be a massive understatement.  If you can believe it, in Oakland “more than 11,000 homes, cars or businesses have been broken into so far this year – translating to about 33 burglaries a day.”  Sadly, there simply are not enough police to keep up with it all.  Due to budget cuts, it is being projected that by February the size of the police force in Oakland will be about 25 percent smaller than it was back in 2008.  But what is happening in Detroit is perhaps even more frightening.  Today there are about 1,000 fewer police officers in Detroit than there was a decade ago.  But crime just continues to rise.  So now even the police are telling people to “enter Detroit at your own risk“.  With very little police protection, an increasing number of citizens are taking matters into their own hands.  As I noted in a previous article, justifiable homicide in the city of Detroit increased by 79 percent in 2011, and the rate of self-defense killings in Detroit is approximately 2200 percent above the national average.  But don’t laugh at what is happening in cities like San Bernardino, Oakland and Detroit.  What is happening in those cities will be coming to your community soon enough.

From coast to coast, criminals are becoming increasingly bold and increasingly desperate.  My sister lives near a large city in the middle part of the country, and a house across the street from the one her family just moved into was recently vandalized.  The criminals took all of the exposed copper pipe and copper wire that could be accessed easily.

Other criminals have become very focused on gold because it has soared in value and it is easy to resell.  For example, there have been more than 250 gold chain robberies in Stockton, California just since the month of April.  According to the CBS News affiliate in Sacramento, criminals are just ripping these chains right off of the necks of unsuspecting citizens, and many of the victims that have tried to resist have ended up getting hurt.  Normally the criminals sell off the jewelry within 24 hours, so solving these crimes is a real challenge…

Most victims of the robberies are female (65 percent), and 44 percent of victims are age 50 or older, the data showed. The most common time of day for the crimes were between 12 and 5 p.m., though this only accounts for about a third of the crime.

Parino said robbers took even police by surprise initially.

“When [criminals] do these crimes, they normally get rid of the items within 24 hours,” he said.

That’s why police are now checking up on secondhand stores and pawn shops on a weekly basis.

Many dismiss reports such as these as “anomalies”, but how many “anomalies” do we need before we finally admit that we have a widespread problem in our society?

Personally, there are many major U.S. cities that I would not want to be living right in the middle of right now.

Just take a look at Chicago.  It has become one of the deadliest major cities on the entire globe.  In recent years we have seen massive cuts to the police budget coupled with a dramatic increase in gang activity in Chicago.

The murder rate in Chicago is way up this year and the police force is massively outnumbered.

As I have written about previously, there are only about 200 police officers assigned to Chicago’s Gang Enforcement Unit.  It is their job to handle the estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city.

How would you like to be outnumbered 100,000 to 200?

When things really hit the fan, Chicago is going to be a complete and utter nightmare.

And sometimes we get a peek into how people will behave when things break down.  Just look at what happened during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

If you can believe it, some criminals actually took advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday to loot homes in the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens.  That was the neighborhood where approximately 100 homes burned down.  The suffering of the residents of that neighborhood made headlines all over the nation.  But that has not stopped criminals from moving in and taking advantage of their vulnerability…

Cops told the victims burglaries are on the rise in Breezy Point.

There were 14 home break-ins from Nov. 12 to Nov. 18, compared with none a year before.

And in the 28 days before that, there were 48 burglaries. Only four break-ins were reported in that time period the year before.

In the days after Sandy, some of the hardest-hit areas were plagued with store looting, home burglaries, street muggings and other crimes.

There are some very sick people out there.  These days you simply do not know who you can trust.  The person you meet on the street may be perfectly fine or they may be a total sicko.  It is so hard to tell.  But without a doubt there are a lot of sickos out there.  Just check out what authorities in Pennsylvania found recently…

Animal welfare workers say 11 puppies were found dead and skinned near an eastern Pennsylvania park.

Sadly, authorities in that area had come across another similar incident recently…

The discovery is second disturbing incident in the county in less than a week. About 20 miles away in Lynn Township police say a dog was discovered skinned and cooked.

Who would do such things?

What in the world is happening to this country?

Things are changing, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.  As conditions shift, we are all going to have to carefully evaluate what is necessary to protect our families.  Don’t ignore all of the warning signs.  Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be okay is not going to help anything.

So what do all of you think about all of this?  Please feel free to post a comment with your opinion below…

55 Reasons Why You Should Buy Products That Are Made In America

This is the time of the year when Americans run out to their favorite retail stores and fill up their shopping carts with lots of cheap plastic crap made by workers in foreign countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  By doing this, the American people are actively participating in the destruction of the U.S. economy.  You see, buying products that are made in America is not just a matter of national pride.  It is a matter of national survival.  If we do not support American workers, they are going to continue to see their jobs shipped out of the country.  If we do not support American businesses, they are going to continue to die off at a staggering rate.  Last year, the United States had a trade deficit with the rest of the world of 558 billion dollars.  More than half a trillion dollars that could have gone into the pockets of U.S. workers and U.S. businesses went overseas instead.  If that money had stayed in the country, taxes would have been paid on that mountain of cash and our local, state and federal government debt problems would not be as severe.  As a result of our massive trade imbalance, we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth.  Both major political parties have sold us out on these issues, and we are getting poorer as a nation with each passing day.  We desperately need a resurgence of economic patriotism in the United States before it is too late.

Yes, I know that it is very tempting to buy foreign-made products.  After all, they are almost always cheaper.

But most people don’t often think about why they are cheaper.

Unfortunately, in the name of “free trade” American workers have been merged into a global labor pool where they have to compete directly for jobs with workers on the other side of the globe that live in countries where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  This makes employing American workers a tremendous liability.

If a company hires you and pays you 10 to 15 dollars an hour with benefits, how is it going to compete with another company that pays workers a dollar an hour with no benefits on the other side of the planet?

Both major political parties are pushing this emerging “one world economic system“, but it is absolutely killing American jobs.  We have already seen a mass exodus of jobs and businesses out of this country, and wages for the jobs that remain in the United States are being forced down because there are hordes of unemployed workers that are willing to take just about any decent job they can find.

It has become painfully obvious that our politicians are not going to do anything to help us on these issues, so what we need is a mass awakening among the American people.

We need to educate people that buying things that are made in America is good for the economy and that buying things that are made elsewhere is bad for the economy.

But for now, most Americans are clueless.  They will line up on Black Friday morning and trample one another in a desperate attempt to save a few bucks on cheap plastic devices that were made on the other side of the planet.

And they will pay for much of this “shopping” with credit cards.

Credit card debt is on the rise once again.  In fact, average credit card debt per borrower was 4.9 percent higher in the third quarter of 2012 than it was in the third quarter of 2011.  It looks like most of us didn’t learn our lessons from the last financial crisis.

But not all Americans enjoy the shopping that is typically involved with this time of the year.  One recent survey found that approximately 45 percent of all Americans think that there is so much financial pressure associated with the holidays that they wouldn’t mind skipping them completely.

That same poll found that approximately 41 percent of all Americans would only be able to survive for two weeks without a paycheck.  Many Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt, their incomes are not keeping up with rising prices, and they find themselves scratching and clawing just to make it from month to month.

Meanwhile, we continue to destroy our own jobs and businesses by spending our money on products that have been made outside the country.

The following are 55 reasons why you should buy products that are made in America this holiday season…

1. When you buy products that are made in America you support American workers.

2. When you buy products that are made in America you support companies that are doing business in America.

3. In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.

4. The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

5. Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion.  That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.

6. In 2011, our trade deficit with China was 28 times larger than it was back in 1990 and more than 49,000 times larger than it was back in 1985.

7. When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.

8. One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

9. Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.  That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers.  Federal, state and local taxes would also have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.

10. According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.

11. The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

12. According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, the United States has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years.

13. During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities permanently shut down in the United States every single day.

14. Overall, the United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

15. The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.

16. Between December 2000 and December 2010, 38 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Ohio were lost, 42 percent of the manufacturing jobs in North Carolina were lost and 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.

17. As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.

18. Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

19. Right now, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.

20. The United States now has 10 percent fewer “middle class jobs” than it did just ten years ago.

21. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. economy loses approximately 9,000 jobs for every $1 billion of goods that are imported from overseas.

22. As our economic infrastructure is gutted, formerly great manufacturing cities all over America are being transformed into festering hellholes.

23. Between 2001 and 2007, the value of products that Wal-Mart imported from China grew from $9 billion to $27 billion.

24. In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

25. The United States spends about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that China spends on goods and services from the United States.

26. Back in 1998, the United States had 25 percent of the world’s high-tech export market and China had just 10 percent. Today, China’s high-tech exports are more than twice the size of U.S. high-tech exports.

27. In 2002, the United States had a trade deficit in “advanced technology products” of $16 billion with the rest of the world.  In 2010, that number skyrocketed to $82 billion.

28. The United States has lost more than a quarter of all of its high-tech manufacturing jobs over the past ten years.

29. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry was actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

30. The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors.  This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.

31. According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

32. In 2010, China produced more than twice as many automobiles as the United States did.

33. Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

34. Do you remember when the United States was the dominant manufacturer of automobiles and trucks on the globe?  Well, in 2010 the U.S. ran a trade deficit in automobiles, trucks and parts of $110 billion.

35. In 2010, South Korea exported 12 times as many automobiles, trucks and parts to us as we exported to them.

36. In 2010, China produced 627 million metric tons of steel.  The United States only produced 80 million metric tons of steel.

37. In 2010, China produced 7.3 million metric tons of cotton.  The United States only produced 3.4 million metric tons of cotton.

38. Today, China produces nearly twice as much beer as the United States does.

39. 85 percent of all artificial Christmas trees are made in China.

40. Right now, China is producing more than three times as much coal as the United States does.

41. China is now the number one supplier of components that are critical to the operation of U.S. defense systems.  How stupid can we possibly be?

42. According to author Clyde Prestowitz, China’s number one export to the U.S. is computer equipment.  According to an article in U.S. News & World Report, during 2010 the number one U.S. export to China was “scrap and trash”.

43. All over the United States, road and bridge projects are being outsourced to Chinese firms.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent ABC News article….

In New York there is a $400 million renovation project on the Alexander Hamilton Bridge.

In California, there is a $7.2 billion project to rebuild the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland.

In Alaska, there is a proposal for a $190 million bridge project.

These projects sound like steps in the right direction, but much of the work is going to Chinese government-owned firms.

“When we subsidize jobs in China, we’re not creating any wealth in the United States,” said Scott Paul, executive director for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.

44. The new World Trade Center tower is going to include glass that has been imported from China.

45. The new Martin Luther King memorial on the National Mall was made in China.

46. The Chinese economy has grown 7 times faster than the U.S. economy has over the past decade.

47. The Chinese economy is projected to be larger than the U.S. economy by 2016.

48. One economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.

49. In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced “free trade” and the emerging one world economy like never before.  Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

50. If you gathered together all of the workers that are “officially” unemployed in the United States today, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.

51. China now holds approximately more than a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt.  If you were alive back when Jesus was born and you had spent a million dollars every single day since then, you still would not have spent that much money by now.

52. Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama’s highly touted “Jobs Council”, has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States.

53. Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty.  Today, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.

54. According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

55. If U.S. consumers do not start supporting U.S. workers and U.S. businesses, eventually we will all be so poor that very few of us will be able to afford to buy any gifts during the holiday season.

The Twinkie That Broke The Economy’s Back?

Can you hear that sound?  It is the sound of the air being let out of the economy.  Since the election, there has been a massive tsunami of layoffs and business failures.  Of course the company that is making the biggest headlines right now is Hostess.  On Monday, Hostess will be in a New York bankruptcy courtroom as it begins the process of liquidating itself.  Needless to say, Twinkie lovers all over America are horrified.  Many are running out to grocery stores and hoarding as many as they can find, and some online sellers are already listing boxes of 10 Twinkies for as much as $10,000 on auction websites such as eBay.  Well, there is really no reason to panic.  It is very likely that another company will purchase the Twinkie brand and continue to produce them.  In fact, it is already being rumored that a Mexican company may have the inside track.  But even though the Twinkie may survive, the failure of Hostess is yet another sign of how weak the U.S. economy has become.  Approximately 18,500 Hostess workers will be losing their jobs, and even if some of them are rehired by the company that takes over the Twinkie brand, the truth is that those workers will almost certainly be looking at greatly reduced pay and benefits.  Sadly, we are seeing this kind of thing happen all over America.  Large numbers of once thriving businesses are either shutting down or laying off workers.  Overall, the failure of Hostess is not that big of a deal for the U.S. economy.  But we may look back someday and remember Hostess as a symbol of the economic problems that were unleashed by the election of 2012.  Since November 6th, a wave of pessimism has swept over the economy and we are now seeing some of the worst economic numbers that we have seen in more than a year.  Many fear that we may have reached a tipping point and that things are only going to get worse from here.

Sadly, the reality is that Hostess is not the only iconic American company that is in a huge amount of trouble right now.  Sears just announced a loss of nearly 500 million dollars in the third quarter.  Sears has been bleeding money like this for a couple of years, and if they continue to do so it will just be a matter of time before Sears is headed for liquidation as well.

Can you imagine trying to explain the Sears catalog and Twinkies to future generations in a world where those things no longer exist?

Our world is changing at mind blowing speed, and the pace of change is only going to keep accelerating.

A few days after the election, I wrote an article about the huge number of layoff announcements that we saw after Barack Obama won.

Well, it has gotten even worse since then.  The following is a partial list of the layoffs and job losses that have been announced since November 6th…

Abbott Labs 700
Activision 30
Adventist Health 48
Airlines SAS 6000
AMD 400
American Cotton Growers 110
ArcelorMittal 20
American Independence Museum 4
Ameridose 790
American Airlines 4400 + 800 leaving voluntarily
American Coal 54
Atlantic Lottery Corporation 16
Assc Milk Producers 130
Aveo Oncology 45
ATI 172
Bankia 5000
Bechtel Power Corp 277
Bigpoint Games 47
Boston Scientific 1200
Brake Parts LLC 75
Brattleboro Retreat 31
Bristol Myers 500
Career Education 900 + Closing 23 Campuses
Cigna 1300
Citigroup 100
Commerzbank 6000
Consol Energy in W.V. 145
Covidien 595
Crouse Hospital Syracuse NY 70
Cummins 150
CVPH 27
DEP in Tallahassee FL 15
DuPont, Co. 64
Eagle-Tribune, Andover 21
Emanuel Medical Cente 24
Energizer Holdings 1500
Ericsson 1550
Exide Tech, Laureldale 150
City of Findlay, OH 39
First Energy 400
Gameforge Berlin 20
Gamesa Energy 92
GenOn Energy Inc 33
Glen Falls Hospital 29
Groupon 80
GT Advanced Tech 165
Harris’ Broadcast 17
Hawker Beechcraft 400 + Facilities closing
Hill Rom 200
Hills Holdings 300
HMX Group 567
Hostess 627
Iberia Airlines 4500
ICM of Colwich 25
ING 2350
Judson University 21
Juniper Networks 500
Kaiser Permanente 84
Kinetic Concepts 427
Kratos Defense Security 125
Lackawanna County PA 11
Lightyear Network Solutions 12+
Lonza 500
Majestic Star Casino/hotel 80
Major Wind Company 3000
Martha Stewart Living 70
Medtronic 1000
Mills Manufacturing NC 68
Momentive, Inc. 150
Monitor Group 235
Montco Behavioral Health/Dev 58
NBC 500
Nebraska Medical Center 38
Neovia Logistics Services 52
New Energy 40
Ormet 200
Panasonic 10000
PayPal 320
Penn Refrigeration 40
Penske Logistics 50
Pepsi 4000
Philips Electronics 218
Pierce Mfg 325
Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne 100
Research in Motion 200
Rheem Manufacturing 50
Sentry Foods 70
Shaw’s Supermarket 700
Shawano foundry WI 90
Smith & Nephew 770
Smithfield Packing Co. 125
Solel Solar Systems 140
Southeastern Container 15
SpaceX 100
SRA Intl Inc 222
St. Jude Medical 300
Stryker 1170
Sulake 60
Sun Media 500
TE Connectivity 620
TECO Coal Corporation 90
Texas Instruments 1700
The Providence Journal Co 23
TMX Group Ltd. 100
Turbocare 220
Turkey Point Nuclear Plant 277
Oce North America, Inc. 135
Turbocare OCE 220
UBS 10000
US Cellular 980
UtahAmerican Energy Inc 102
Volvo Trucks Pulaski County 300
Wake Forest Baptist Medical 950
Welch Allyn 275
West Ridge Mine 102
Westinghouse 50
World Media Enterprises Inc 105
WPS Health Insurance 600
Wright Patterson AFB 115
Wyodak Coal Mine 11
Xerox 2500

Sadly, the list actually keeps going.  You can view the remainder of the list right here.

Even companies owned by Obama supporters are laying people off.  Just check out this excerpt from a report by CitizenLink…

A corporation whose part owner gave $2 million to a group committed to re-electing President Obama announced this week that it will be forced to lay off more than 1,000 employees in lieu of the financial hardship imposed by the president’s signature health care law.

Overall, more than 100,000 job losses have been announced since the election.  It is almost as if the election was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  Everyone in the business community that had been hoping for something different now realizes that no change is coming.

Meanwhile, Obama continues to pour on even more rules and regulations.  According to CNSNews.com, the Obama administration has posted a total of 6,125 regulations on its reguations.gov website during the past 90 days.  Our politicians are clueless and they simply don’t understand what they are doing to the business community.

But of course this goes for politicians from both sides.  For decades we have been consuming far more than we produce and spending far more money then we bring in, and most of our politicians seem to be under the delusion that this can continue indefinitely.

The other night my wife had me watch a documentary entitled “The Queen of Versailles” that followed the lives of time share mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie.  I found it to be a perfect metaphor for what America is going through right now.  David Siegel built the greatest time share empire the world has ever seen on a mountain of easy money and cheap credit.  At the beginning of the movie, David and Jackie were living the high life and were constructing the largest house in America down in Florida.

Well, things dramatically changed when the financial crisis of 2008 struck.  Suddenly nobody wanted to lend to David’s company and the house of cards started to crumble.  But even though they were facing massive financial problems, Jackie found it incredibly difficult to adjust her lifestyle.  She just kept spending and spending and spending.

It would be easy to pass judgment on David and Jackie, but the truth is that they are a perfect example of what this entire country is going through.  Thousands of businesses are failing, our economic infrastructure is being gutted, millions of jobs are being shipped overseas, our financial system has become a gigantic casino and we keep piling even more mountains of debt on top of the mountains of debt that we already have.  We have been living way above our means for so long that we don’t even have any concept of what “normal” is anymore.

If you have not seen “The Queen of Versailles” yet, I encourage you to do so.  Don’t watch it to laugh at the downfall of David and Jackie Siegel.  They are just trying to make their way in this world like all of us are.  Rather, watch for parallels between their lives and what the United States is experiencing as a whole.  As I mentioned earlier, I found their story to be a perfect metaphor for what is happening to this entire country.  You can find the trailer for “The Queen of Versailles” right here.

As the economy falls apart, it is going to be really easy to point fingers at one another and blame one another.  But what will really be needed is more love and compassion.  A lot of workers at Hostess and a lot of other good companies just lost their jobs.  The unemployment epidemic in this country is going to get a lot worse.  These people are going to need our love and support.

In the end, we are all in this together.  The coming economic storm is not going to be averted, but we can choose how we respond to it.  Hopefully the crisis that is coming will bring out the best in many of us.

Share This Massive List Of Post-Election Firings And Layoffs With Everyone You Can

The victory by Barack Obama on election night has resulted in a huge wave of firings and layoffs all over America.  A large number of businesses seem to have suddenly shifted into panic mode.  The number of layoff announcements that we have seen in the last 48 hours has been absolutely shocking.  So why is this happening?  Well, the truth is that the federal government is absolutely suffocating small businesses all over America with rules, regulations and taxes.  If you have never tried to run a small business, then you have no idea how oppressive this system actually is for people that are trying to run small businesses successfully.  It has steadily gotten worse over the years no matter who has been in the White House and no matter who has controlled Congress.  So we shouldn’t put 100% of the blame on Obama.  Bush massively expanded government and made things harder on small business people too.  But what many small business people were looking for on this election day was just a little bit of help.  Many were desperately holding out hope that Obamacare would be repealed so that they would not have to get rid of some of their employees.  Many were hoping to get a little bit of relief from the crippling regulations and taxes that are absolutely crushing them.  But now that Barack Obama has been given another four years, they understand that there is no hope on the horizon and that things are only going to get worse.  So they are making the hard decisions that they feel are necessary in order to survive in this economic environment.

And I certainly don’t blame them.  You only want to have employees if you can make a profit on them.  And in this environment it is getting harder than ever to make a profit on an employee.  You see, the truth is that what you cost your employer goes far beyond your salary or your hourly wage.  I think many of you would be absolutely shocked if you learned how much it actually costs your employer to employ you.  And now thanks to Obamacare, that cost is going to go up even more.

Many businesses are not even feasible at all in this economic environment.  Many small businesses had been holding out hope that somehow this election might turn things around and make it possible for them to keep going, but when Obama won it was kind of like the straw that broke the camel’s back.

You can’t do what the federal government and the state governments are doing to us and expect to have a thriving economy.  They are choking the life out of us.

New businesses and small businesses are supposed to be at the heart of our economic system.  Unfortunately, the environment that has been created is absolutely killing them.  This is a recipe for disaster.

In a previous article, I noted that the number of jobs created at new businesses in 2010 in the United States was less than half of what it was back in the year 2000.

Now we can expect that number to get even worse and we can expect large numbers of small businesses to shrink in size or close their doors completely.

The following is a list of some of the post-election firings and layoffs that we have seen since Tuesday night…

#1 Utah

A Utah coal company owned by a vocal critic of President Barack Obama has laid off 102 miners.

The layoffs at the West Ridge Mine are effective immediately, according to UtahAmerican Energy Inc., a subsidiary of Murray Energy Corp. They were announced in a short statement made public Thursday, two days after Obama won re-election.

The layoffs are necessary because of the president’s “war on coal,” the statement said. The slogan is one used frequently during the election by Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray, who was an ardent supporter of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

In its statement, UtahAmerican Energy blames the Obama administration for instituting policies that will close down “204 American coal-fired power plants by 2014” and for drastically reducing the market for coal.

#2 Ohio

I work for the oldest and largest health insurer in the state of Ohio in the underwriting department. At 9 a.m.this morning, my department (about 50) were called into a meeting in the executive boardroom. We were informed that due to a provision in the healthcare ‘reform’ effective 2014 called guarantee issue, our services would no longer be needed, and we were offered severance  So Obama got to keep his job, and we lost ours. It is maddening that some tyrant 400 miles away can have such a ruinous effect on peoples lives.

#3 Nevada

A Las Vegas business owner with 114 employees fired 22 workers today, apparently as a direct result of President Obama’s re-election.

“David” (he asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons) told Host Kevin Wall on 100.5 KXNT that “elections have consequences” and that “at the end of the day, I need to survive.”

Here’s an excerpt from the interview. Click the audio tab below to hear even more from this compelling conversation:

“I’ve done my share of educating my employees. I never tell them which way to vote. I believe in the free system we have, I believe in the right to choose who they want to be president, but I did explain as a business owner that I have always put my employees first. I always made sure that when I went without a paycheck that [I] made sure they were paid. And I explained that I always put them first and unfortunately I’m at a point where I’m being forced to have to worry about me and my family now and a business that I built from just me to 114 employees.

#4 Posted below is a list of layoff headlines from the past few days that was posted on AmericanThinker.com…

Obama was “fired up” and so were the voters, and so now, the mass firings begin. Here’s a collection of today’s headlines.  Please say a prayer for the families who will be suffering. Had Romney won, many of these companies would now be hiring.

Teco Coal officials announce layoffs

Momentive Inc plans temporary layoffs for 150

Wilkes-Barre officials to announce mandatory layoffs

600 layoffs at Groupon

More layoffs announced at Aniston Weapons Incinerator

Murray Energy confirms 150 layoffs at 3 subsidiaries

130 laid off in Minnesota dairy plant closure

Stanford brake plant to lay off 75

Turbocare, Oce to lay off more than 220 workers

ATI plans to lay off 172 workers in North Richland Hills

SpaceX claims its first victims as Rocketdyne lays off 100

Providence Journal lays off 23 full-time employees

CVPH lays off 17

New Energy lays off 40 employees

102 Utah miners laid off because of ‘war on coal’, company says

US Cellular drops Chicago, cuts 640 jobs

Career Education to cut 900 jobs, close 23 campuses

Vestas to cut 3,000 more jobs

First Energy to cut 400 jobs by 2016

Mine owner blames Obama for layoffs (54 fired last night)

Canceled program costs 115 jobs at Ohio air base

AMD trims Austin workforce – 400 jobs slashed

100 workers lose jobs as Caterpillar closes plant in Minnesota

Exide to lay off 150 workers

TE Connectivity to close Guilford plant, lay off 620

More Layoffs for Major Wind Company (3,000 jobs cut)

Cigna to lay off 1,300 workers worldwide

Ameridose to lay off hundreds of workers

#5 According to the Blaze, the following major corporations have all announced layoffs in just the past two days…

Energizer

Exide Technologies

Westinghouse

Research in Motion Limited

Lightyear Network Solutions

Providence Journal

Hawker Beechcraft

Boeing (30% of their management staff)

CVPH Medical Center

US Cellular

Momentive Performance Materials

Rocketdyne

Brake Parts

Vestas Wind Systems

Husqvarna

Center for Hospice New York

Bristol-Meyers

OCE North America

Darden Restaurants

West Ridge Mine

United Blood Services Gulf

You can get the rest of the details right here.

#6 The following is a list of companies that will be laying off workers just because of Obamacare that was compiled by FreedomWorks…

Dana Holding Corp.

As recently as a week ago, a global auto parts manufacturing company in Ohio known as Dana Holding Corp., warned their employees of potential layoffs, citing “$24 million over the next six years in additional U.S. health care expenses”.  After laying off several white collar staffers, company insiders have hinted at more to come.  The company will have to cover the additional $24 million cost somehow, which will likely equate to numerous cuts in their current workforce of 25,500 worldwide.  

Stryker

One of the biggest medical device manufacturers in the world, Stryker will close their facility in Orchard Park, New York, eliminating 96 jobs in December.  Worse, they plan on countering the medical device tax in Obamacare by slashing 5% of their global workforce – an estimated 1,170 positions.

Boston Scientific

In October of 2009, Boston Scientific CEO Ray Elliott, warned that proposed taxes in the health care reform bill could “lead to significant job losses” for his company.  Nearly two years later, Elliott announced that the company would be cutting anywhere between 1,200 and 1,400 jobs, while simultaneously shifting investments and workers overseas – to China.

Medtronic

In March of 2010, medical device maker Medtronic warned that Obamacare taxes could result in a reduction of precisely 1,000 jobs.  That plan became reality when the company cut 500 positions over the summer, with another 500 set for the end of 2013.  

Others

A short list of other companies facing future layoffs at the hands of Obamacare:

  • Smith & Nephew – 770 layoffs
  • Abbott Labs – 700 layoffs
  • Covidien – 595 layoffs
  • Kinetic Concepts – 427 layoffs
  • St. Jude Medical – 300 layoffs
  • Hill Rom – 200 layoffs

A lot of other businesses are going to reduce the number of employees they have or reduce the average work week in order to avoid the Obamacare insurance coverage mandate that will soon be implemented.

This is how CNSNews.com describes the choice that many employers will be facing…

That section, known as the employer mandate, requires any business with 50 or more full-time employees to provide at least the minimum level of government-defined health coverage to those employees. In other words, a business must provide insurance if it has 50 or more employees working an average of just 30 hours per week, which is 10 hours per week fewer than the traditional 40-hour work week.

Thus, by cutting employees’ hours to ensure they average less than the 30 per week, employers could potentially avoid the cost of providing the minimum insurance levels mandated by Obamacare.

So if your company trims the number of workers to just under 50 or starts going to “29 hour work weeks”, then you will know who to blame.

All of this is complete and utter insanity.  We are committing national economic suicide.

But perhaps we deserve this.  After all, Americans willingly chose their leaders on election day.  It is getting harder and harder to deny that our politicians are truly a reflection of who we are as a nation.

The American people chose this path, and now we get to see where it leads us.

Anarchy Along The Jersey Shore And On Long Island In The Aftermath Of Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy is another reminder of just how incredibly fragile the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted on a daily basis really is.  Many of the hardest hit areas along the Jersey shore and the coast of Long Island have descended into a state of anarchy.  More than 7 million people live on Long Island, and millions more live along the Jersey shore and right now they are getting a taste of what life would be like during a total economic meltdown.  At the moment, there are still approximately 4.7 million homes and businesses that do not have power.  Officials say that some of those homes and businesses may not have their power restored until the weekend of November 10th and 11th.  Meanwhile, it is getting very cold at night.  This weekend the low temperatures on Long Island are supposed to dip into the upper thirties.  There have been reports of people diving into dumpsters behind supermarkets in a desperate search for food, and there have been other reports of roaming gangs of criminals posing as officials from FEMA or Con Edison and then robbing families at gunpoint once they have gained entrance into their homes.  If people will behave like this during a temporary emergency that lasts only a few days, what would they do during a total economic collapse?  That is a frightening thing to think about.

Most gas stations along the Jersey shore and on Long Island are either totally out of gasoline or they don’t have any power to operate the gas pumps.  It is estimated that more than half of all gas stations in New York City are closed at the moment, and officials say that more than 80 percent of all gas stations in New Jersey are not able to sell gas right now.  So needless to say, the lines at the gas stations that remain open are horrific.

It is being reported that some people are waiting in line for hours for gasoline in some areas and that state troopers have actually been deployed at every gas station along the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway.

The following is how one New Jersey mayor described the situation…

“Gas lines are stretching for a couple of miles,” said Anthony Ammiano, mayor of Freehold, N.J., who recalled the oil crisis of the 1970s. “It’s like the Jimmy Carter years. It’s a flashback of bad memories.”

There have even been reports of people literally fighting each other over gasoline…

“It’s so crazy. Cars are pulling up and people are fighting each other. There is no gas around here,” said Mena Aziz, who manages a Gulf Express station in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “It’s been so busy.”

According to Breitbart, there have been continuous reports of “fistfights and people bringing guns to gas stations” on Twitter.  The following are a couple of examples…

Just awful! RT @metrogypsy: Someone just pulled a knife at Greenpoint #gas station as line stretches with hours long wait #gettingrealFAST

— Camila Xavier (@camilaxavier) November 1, 2012

You know things are bad when you ask the gas station attendent “when do you think you’re going to get more gas?” and he just laughs at you.

— Prede (@predederva) November 1, 2012

Unfortunately, authorities are projecting that the gas shortage may last for another week at least.

How angry and frustrated will people get by that time?

There are vast stretches of the Jersey Shore and the coast of Long Island that will never be the same again.  The following is an excerpt from a comment that a reader of mine from Long Island left on one of my recent articles…

I live in Massapequa NY …..No power to 95%. almost every home south of Merrick Road ( 1.5 miles from open water ) has been flooded. No electricity, no supermarkets in immediate area, no gas (approx 80% of gas stations closed on Long Island).

This was not just another storm.  It was a life-altering event for millions of people.

Unfortunately, just as we have seen after every other major storm in recent years, looters are taking advantage of the chaos caused by Hurricane Sandy.

According to the New York Post, a number of arrests for looting have already been made on Long Island…

In the Rockaways, lowlifes were sneaking into clothing stores and cleaning out pizzerias. Two men and a woman were arrested for robbing a BP gas station on Beach Channel Drive, three men and one woman were cuffed for pillaging a Radio Shack on Beach 88th Street, and two people were arrested for raiding a clothing store near Beach 86th Street, cops said. Stores were emptied along a two-block stretch of Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island. Seven people were busted.

Over on Coney Island, looting appeared to be out of control during the immediate aftermath of the storm…

Thieves broke in to the badly damaged Mega Aid Pharmacy on Mermaid Avenue and reportedly stole more than 10,000 pharmaceutical items, including prescription drugs.

“The water went away and these people started walking down the streets and just robbed stores,” a pharmacy worker told HuffPo’s Andy Campbell.

Manager Stan Gutkin said the major heist essentially “breaks the business.”

Looters reportedly also targeted banks, other shops, and other pharmacies.

And residents are noticing.

“People are turning on each other — they’re attacking each other,” Ocean Towers resident Dena Wells told Campbell.

Amazingly, a number of not-so-smart looters have actually been displaying their looted goods on Twitter.  Just check out the shocking photos in this article.

But most people living in the areas that were most affected by Hurricane Sandy are decent people that just want some assistance.  One resident of Hoboken, New Jersey became so frustrated that he inflated an air mattress and used it to float down to city hall in an attempt to get some answers…

Nearly 20,000 people have been trapped at home in the New Jersey city of Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from New York City, amid accusations that officials were slow to deliver food and water.

One man blew up an air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies had not reached residents – at least a quarter of homes there are flooded and 90% do not have power.

Just like we saw after Hurricane Katrina, the response by the federal government and by big aid agencies such as the Red Cross has been very slow.  In fact, Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro has gone so far as to call the Red Cross an “absolute disgrace” and is urging people that live in his area to quit giving money to them…

“You know, I went to a shelter Monday night after the storm. People were coming in with no socks, with no shoes. They were in desperate need. Their housing was destroyed. They were crying. Where was the Red Cross? Isn’t that their function? They collect millions of dollars. Whenever there’s a drive in Staten Island, we give openly and honestly. Where are they? Where are they? I was at the South Shore yesterday, people were buried in their homes. There the dogs are trying to find bodies. The people there, the neighbors who had no electricity, were making soup. Making soup. It’s very emotional because the lack of a response. The lack of a response. They’re supposed to be here….They should be on the front lines fighting, and helping the people.”

If this is how angry and frustrated that people become over a temporary disaster, how angry and frustrated would they get if there was a total economic meltdown that was permanent?

Sadly, the truth is that what we are seeing during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy is just a very small preview of what is coming on a national level.

Our economy is a complete and total mess right now, and things are going to get a whole lot worse.

When unemployment starts skyrocketing again and large segments of the population realize that there is no hope for a turnaround, many of them are going to totally give in to despair and become very desperate.

And as we are seeing along the Jersey Shore and on Long Island right now, desperate people do desperate things.

That is why I am constantly pounding on the need to prepare for what is ahead.  There are signs of social decay all around us, and most Americans are not equipped to deal with the pressures that come with a major emergency.  When things totally fall apart, you don’t want your family to be totally unprepared and surrounded by millions of angry and desperate people.

Hopefully Hurricane Sandy will serve as a wake up call for millions of American families.  Time is definitely running out, and we all need to get prepared while we still can.

Obama And Romney Both Favor A One World Economic System That Kills American Jobs

Either way this election turns out, American jobs are going to continue to get slaughtered by the millions.  During this campaign, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have both attempted to portray each other as the “outsourcer in chief“.  Unfortunately, they are both right.  Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have both participated in the outsourcing of American jobs, and both are openly admitting to the American people that they favor the emerging one world economic system which will continue to destroy millions of American jobs.  In fact, they argue with each other about which of them will be more aggressive in pursuing more “free trade” agreements over the next four years.  Unfortunately, the “free trade” agreements that the U.S. government enters into are never “fair trade” agreements.  As a result, over the past decade we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth.  This year alone, we will buy about half a trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they will buy from us.  This trade deficit will be about 7 times larger than the trade deficit of any other nation on earth.  Our economy will continue to bleed jobs at a horrifying pace, but Obama and Romney insist that the answer to our problems is even more “free trade”.  What makes all of this even more dreadful is that most Americans continue to fall for this nonsense.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that merging our labor pool with the labor pools of nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages was going to kill American jobs and drive down wages for the jobs that remain in the United States.

Why should some giant predator corporation pay you 15 dollars an hour plus benefits when they can pay a worker on the other side of the planet a dollar an hour with no benefits to do the same job?

During the second presidential debate, when Obama was asked why high tech products such as the iPhone could not be made here in the United States, Obama openly admitted that there are some jobs that aren’t ever going to come back.

But why does that have to be so?

Why can’t those jobs come back to America?

It seems to me that if you cracked down on nations that are cheating such as China, imposed a system of common sense tariffs and cut the corporate tax rate to a level more consistent with the rest of the world that you could get a lot of those jobs flooding back in by the end of next year.

But Obama is so blinded by his faith in the emerging one world economy that such measures are unimaginable to him.

In recent years, the Obama administration has entered into new “free trade” agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia.  In addition, the Obama administration is making the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“the NAFTA of the Pacific“) a very high priority.

Considering what a nightmare the first NAFTA was, do we really need another one?

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a treaty that would essentially ban all “Buy American” laws.  It is being touted as one of the most comprehensive “free trade” agreements in history, and it would open up the door for millions more good jobs to be shipped out of the country.

The workers of America simply cannot afford another four years of Barack Obama.

In fact, the Obama administration has actually spent billions of taxpayer dollars to create jobs in other countries.  The following is from a pro-Republican website…

Over his four years in office, Obama promised that he would focus on creating “jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.” However, as he racked up trillions in new debt, billions of dollars did go to create jobs that were outsourced or spent overseas. Whether it is electric cars made in Finland or solar panels in Mexico, taxpayers would be astonished to learn that their hard earned money went abroad for jobs that weren’t created in the United States.

You can get all the details right here.  Needless to say, the Obama administration has been an absolute disaster on these issues.

So would Romney be an improvement when it comes to trade?

That is very doubtful.

The truth is that Mitt Romney was involved in outsourcing jobs while he was at Bain Capital.  The following is from a recent article posted on Forbes.com…

David Corn of Mother Jones reports that “according to government documents . . . Romney, when he was in charge of Bain [Capital], invested heavily in a Chinese manufacturing company that depended on US outsourcing for its profits—and that explicitly stated that such outsourcing was crucial to its success.”

This didn’t happen after 1999, when Mitt Romney says he left Bain Capital to run the Salt Lake City Olympics (Corn was one of the first reporters to raise questions, now gaining wide exposure, of whether Romney really left Bain then), but the year before. On April 17, 1998, Brookside Capital Partners Fund, a Bain Capital affiliate of which Romney was the sole shareholder, sole director, president, and chief executive, invested an estimated $14.2 million in Global-Tech, an appliance maker in Dongguan, China. Global-Tech made products for American companies like Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, and Proctor-Silex. In September 1998 Global-Tech’s CEO announced that the company was postponing a factory expansion because Sunbeam was slowing its rate of outsourcing, and said, “Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue.”

Since Romney left, Bain Capital has become even more aggressive with outsourcing jobs.  In fact, Bain Capital has been forcing American workers to train their Chinese replacements even in the midst of this campaign.  Aren’t they concerned that they are making their former boss look bad?  The following is from an article written by an American worker that is having his job shipped to China by Bain Capital…

On Monday, November 5th Bain Capital is outsourcing my job to China. On Tuesday, November 6th I’m casting my vote against Mitt Romney.

Yes, I blame Mitt Romney for the loss of my job. Here’s why.

I’ve worked at the same factory in Freeport, Ill. for thirty-three years, making sensors and controls for the auto industry. It’s tough work, but it pays a living wage with health benefits that folks can count on, and it fuels our town’s economy and tax base.

That’s been changing since Bain Capital came to town. Two years ago, our factory was sold to Sensata Technologies, a company created by Bain Capital, and they told us that by December 2012, all 170 of our jobs would be shipped to China. They even made us train our Chinese replacements.

Layoff notices have been sent out, and some folks have already been laid off. Where there was once lots of people and energy and life, now there’s only the discoloration on the floor where the machinery used to be. It’s depressing. They’re not just dismantling the equipment and the plant; they’re dismantling our community.

All of this outsourcing is killing America.

Back in 1950, the population of this country was less than half of what it is now, and yet there were more Americans working in manufacturing back in 1950 than there are today.

The decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States has been really dramatic since the year 2000.

In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million…

I think that it is interesting to note that China joined the WTO in 2001.  Since that time we have been losing jobs to them at an astounding pace.  According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. trade with China “cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011”.

The Chinese slap huge tariffs on many of our goods, they manipulate currency rates to make sure that U.S. companies cannot compete, they steal our intellectual property and they deeply subsidize their own businesses.

And yet Obama and Romney insist that this is “free trade”.

What a joke.

And our tax structure is absolutely killing us as well.  The following is from a recent article by Ernest F. Hollings…

A U.S. manufacturer exporting to China pays the 35% Corporate Tax and a 17% VAT when its exports reach Shanghai.  A China manufacturer exports tax free to the U.S.

Are you starting to get the picture?

Our trade policy is a complete and total disaster, and yet Obama and Romney continue to insist that we just need to become even more integrated with the emerging one world economic system.

Well, in a previous article I listed 22 statistics which prove that the current path that we are on has been absolutely disastrous for American workers…

#1 One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.

#2 The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.

#3 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975.  That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers.  Federal, state and local taxes would have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.

#4 When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars.  In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.

#5 In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China.  In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.

#6 The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors.  This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business.  The following is from a recent Fox News article….

To keep Chinese products artificially inexpensive on US store shelves, Beijing undervalues the yuan by 40 percent. It pirates US technology, subsidizes exports and imposes high tariffs on imports.

#7 According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.

#8 The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was 295.4 billion dollars.  That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.

#9 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was only about 6 million dollars (million with an “m”) for the entire year.

#10 U.S. consumers spend about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and services from the United States.

#11 The United States has actually lost an average of about 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.

#12 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year.

#13 The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.

#14 During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities closed their doors in America every single day.

#15 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.

#16 As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.

#17 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.

#18 The percentage of working age Americans that are employed right now is actually smaller than it was at the end of the last recession.

#19 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is nearly three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.

#20 Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.

#21 Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty.  Today, more than 100 million Americans are on welfare.

#22 In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced “free trade” and the emerging one world economy like never before.  Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.

At this point, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.

Median household income has fallen for four years in a row.  In fact, median household income is down by more than $4000 since Barack Obama entered the White House.

One recent survey found that about 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.  We are a country that is full of broke people.

What we need are more good jobs.  But Obama and Romney are both determined to keep shipping good jobs out of the country.

The path that we are on will only lead to disaster.  Please wake up America.

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