Why The Melted Fuel Under Fukushima Could Poison Our Planet With Nuclear Radiation For 1000s Of Years

Nuclear Danger Sign - Public DomainSix years ago, an absolutely devastating tsunami caused a triple meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power facility.  It was the worst environmental disaster in all of human history, and even though six years have passed since that time, nobody knows where the three melted cores are.  Just recently, authorities believe that they spotted some melted fuel underneath reactor 2, but even from a distance the level of nuclear radiation that was detected was being described as “unimaginable”.  Essentially what we are talking about are three enormous “dirty bombs” that are continuously emitting tremendous amounts of nuclear radiation into the air, water and soil.  Some of the radioactive elements that are being released have half-lives that are measured in tens of thousands of years, and so the poisonous effect of these “dirty bombs” could potentially be with us for generation after generation.

Personally, I don’t know why the big mainstream news outlets in the U.S. are almost entirely ignoring Fukushima these days.  Fox News did a story on the “unimaginable” radiation at Fukushima just a few days ago, but that was about it.

To me, it is certainly newsworthy that nuclear radiation inside reactor 2 at Fukushima is at the highest level ever recorded

Radiation levels inside a damaged reactor at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant have hit a record high, and are the worst since the plant suffered a triple meltdown nearly six years ago. The latest readings now pose a serious challenge as officials prepare to dismantle the stricken facility.

Radiation levels inside the containment vessel of reactor No. 2 at Fukushima has reached 530 sieverts per hour—a figure described by experts as “unimaginable.”

Previously, the highest level of radiation measured at Fukushima was 73 sieverts per hour, and just a small fraction of that amount would be fatal to most humans

Needless to say, this plant is not fit for human life. Just one dose of a single sievert is enough to cause radiation sickness and nausea. Exposure to four to five sieverts would kill about half of those exposed to it within a month, while a single dose of 10 sieverts is enough to kill a person within weeks.

At 530 sieverts per hour, the radiation is so intense that even robots can only last for a couple of hours in that environment.  The Japanese hope to eventually remove the melted fuel from these reactors someday, but first they have to figure out if it is even possible.

And the truth is that the level of radiation in reactor 2 may actually be far higher than 530 sieverts per hour.  That is because the recent reading was taken “some distance from the melted fuel”

The 530 sievert reading was recorded some distance from the melted fuel, so in reality it could be 10 times higher than recorded, said Hideyuki Ban, co-director of Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center.

Experts are also warning that the levels of radiation may be much higher than 530 sieverts per hour in reactors 1 and 3.  Nobody knows, because the melted fuel in those reactors has not even been located yet.

Even though so much time has gone by, there is still very much an urgency to this crisis.  In a newly published article, Mike Adams of Natural News explained why this is the case

In effect, Fukushima has become the world’s largest dirty bomb, and the remaining fuel rods could explode (achieve criticality) at any moment. Even right now, the radiation is so intense that robots built to explore the wreckage can only survive for a few hours before their circuits are destroyed. Thus, there’s almost no scenario in which Japan, Tepco or anybody in the world figures out how to clean up the wreckage, reclaim the melting fuel rods and reestablish control over the nuclear reactions that are still ongoing.

You can’t even successfully build a containment vessel on top of it all because the melting nuclear fuel has already burned a massive hole in the floor and is melting its way into the ground water.

What most people don’t understand is that the melted nuclear fuel under Fukushima is going to be with us for a very, very long time.  Some of the fuel rods contained plutonium-239, and plutonium-239 has a half-life of approximately 24,000 years

Do they think a one-meter hole magically appears in nuclear containment vessels due to random chance? No, it’s melting fuel rods, you morons. And some of that fuel is MOX fuel, which contains plutonium-239 that boasts a half life of 24,000 years. So sometime in the year 26000 A.D. the Fukushima nightmare will be HALF as toxic as it is right now. What a wonderful, progressive future to look forward to, eh?

Plutonium-239 is one of the most dangerous substances known to humanity.  As nuclear expert Steven C. Jones once explained, it would not take much plutonium-239 to kill every man, woman and child on the entire planet…

To give one an example of how lethal radiation is, one pound of plutonium evenly distributed into everyone’s lungs would kill every man, woman and child on Earth. There are literally “tons” of radioactive plutonium (among other radioactive elements) that have been released into the air and ocean environments since March 11th. Another critical fact to remember is that radioactive plutonium, for example, remains lethal (killing life) for thousands years as it has a half-life of 24,000 years. Some other radioactive elements such as uranium have a half-life of 4.47 billion years.

And remember, more radioactive material is being released from Fukushima every single day.  The following comes from an interview with Kevin Kamps, the radioactive waste monitor at Beyond Nuclear…

There are claims that “it’s all contained, don’t worry about it.” It is indisputable that there is a daily flow of radioactively contaminated groundwater into the ocean. The figures something like 80,000 gallons per day of relatively low-level radioactive waste water. Then you’ve got those storage tanks – we’re talking 800,000 tons of highly radioactive water stored in tanks. Every day they pour a hundred tons of water on each of these three melted down cores. Sometimes they lose those tanks. They leak, they overflow – it is an ongoing catastrophe.

Are you starting to understand how serious this is?

Once nuclear material escapes from Fukushima, it literally gets distributed all over the planet.

That means that it is getting into our air, our water and our food supply.

And I find it extremely interesting that the EPA was moving to dramatically raise the “safe limits” on radioactivity in our drinking water right at the end of the Obama administration.  The following comes from a Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility press release dated December 22, 2016

“Following Japan’s Fukushima meltdown in 2011, EPA’s claims that no radioactivity could reach the U.S. at levels of concern were contradicted by its own rainwater measurements showing contamination from Fukushima throughout the U.S. well above Safe Drinking Water Act limits. In reaction, EPA prepared new limits 1000s of times higher than even the Fukushima rainwater because ‘EPA experienced major difficulties conveying to the public that the detected levels…were not of immediate concern for public health.’”

Why in the world would the EPA do that?

Here are some more of the details

The documents obtained by PEER revealed that the EPA plans to raise maximum allowable limits of iodine-131, cobalt-60 and calcium-45 to more than 10,000 times the levels allowed under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Others would be hundreds or thousands of times higher under the new guidelines.

The agency’s justification for withholding the new proposed limits from the public until after the proposal had been adopted was that it wanted to “avoid confusion.”

Radioactive material is also getting into our food supply.  If you love to eat fish this next item may be a bummer, because it is being reported that radiation from Fukushima was recently found in salmon off the coast of Oregon…

Fish contaminated by radiation from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have been detected 6,000 miles away of the US west coast.

Salmon carrying traces of caesium 134 particles – the so-called fingerprint of the Fukushima – were found by researchers in the seas off Oregon.

One we eat something that has been contaminated, radioactive material will often migrate to key organs in our body, and once it is there it can poison us indefinitely.  In a previous article I included a quote from author Helen Caldicott, the author of “Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe“.  I am including the quote once again in this article because it is absolutely imperative that we all understand the danger that we are facing…

Internal radiation, on the other hand, emanates from radioactive elements which enter the body by inhalation, ingestion, or skin absorption. Hazardous radionuclides such as iodine-131, caesium 137, and other isotopes currently being released in the sea and air around Fukushima bio-concentrate at each step of various food chains (for example into algae, crustaceans, small fish, bigger fish, then humans; or soil, grass, cow’s meat and milk, then humans). After they enter the body, these elements – called internal emitters – migrate to specific organs such as the thyroid, liver, bone, and brain, where they continuously irradiate small volumes of cells with high doses of alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, and over many years, can induce uncontrolled cell replication – that is, cancer. Further, many of the nuclides remain radioactive in the environment for generations, and ultimately will cause increased incidences of cancer and genetic diseases over time.

The amount of cesium-137 that has been released at Fukushima is equivalent to hundreds of Hiroshima bombs.

But because we can’t see, touch, taste or hear the danger, to many people it may not seem real.

Nuclear radiation is a silent killer, and unless a miracle happens the consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be felt for generations to come.

The United States Is On The Precipice Of Widespread Civil Unrest

SFO Muslim Ban Protest - Photo by Quinn NortonIt doesn’t take much of a trigger to push extremely large crowds of very angry protesters into committing acts of rioting and violence.  And rioting and violence can ultimately lead to widespread civil unrest and calls for “revolution”.  The election of Donald Trump was perhaps the single most galvanizing moment for the radical left in modern American history, and we have already seen that a single move by Trump can literally cause protests to erupt from coast to coast within 48 hours.  On Friday, Trump signed an executive order that banned refugees from Syria indefinitely and that placed a 90 day ban on travel to the United States for citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.  Within hours, protesters began to storm major airports, and by Sunday very large crowds were taking to the streets all over the country

From Seattle to Newark, Houston to Boston, hundreds jammed airport terminals — lawyers, immigration advocates, ordinary citizens compelled to the front lines, many refusing to leave until those who had been detained by U.S. Customs had been freed or had obtained legal counsel.

On Sunday, the movement caught fire and demonstrations and rallies erupted in communities across the U.S. from city halls to airports to parks. In the nation’s capital, the site of the march that drew a crushing 500,000 people Jan. 21, Pennsylvania Avenue was shut down Sunday as thousands trekked from the White House to the U.S. Capitol. An energized crowd stopped outside Trump’s showcase hotel along the avenue to shake fists and chant “shame.”

You can see some really good pictures of the protests going on around the nation right here.

As I was going through articles about these protests today, I remember one woman holding up a sign that said “Remove Trump By Any Means Necessary”.

It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what she was suggesting.

Visions of violence are dancing in the heads of these very frustrated people, and they are being egged on by top members of Congress such as Chuck Schumer

‘These orders go against what America has always been about,’ Schumer told the crowd in Battery Park according to the New York Daily News. ‘The orders make us less humanitarian, less safe, less American and when it comes to making us less safe people forget this, that’s why so many of our military, intelligence, security, and law enforcement leaders are opposed to this order and all those like it.’

Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Trump’s presidential rival, Hillary, tweeted a picture from the rally. It was captioned: ‘Yes. We will keep standing up for a country that matches our values and ideals for all. #NewYork #NoBanNoWall.’

On Sunday, President Trump attempted to clarify what his executive order was really about and make it clear that it was not a ban on all Muslims.  The following comes from CNN

President Donald Trump insisted Sunday his travel ban on certain Muslim-majority nations would protect the United States from terrorists, after a weekend of outrage and confusion over the move.

In an afternoon statement, Trump wrote the country would continue showing “compassion to those fleeing oppression.”

Unfortunately, polls show that somewhere around a third of the country greatly dislikes Trump, and those people are more than ready to believe that Trump is a racist bigot that hates all Muslims.

But the truth is that Trump does not hate any group of people.  His target is simply Islamic terror, and he is actually pro-immigration as long as it is legal immigration.

Let us not forget that his wife is a legal immigrant.

I know that Trump is quite eager to get things done, but putting out this executive order at this particular moment was definitely a case of poor timing.

We are a nation that is deeply, deeply divided, and now this latest controversy threatens to divide us even further.

When I was out earlier today, I saw a pro-Trump billboard that some business owner had put up that was urging liberals to quit their whining.

On the surface that may sound funny, but it definitely doesn’t do anything to bring us together.

If you give anger enough fuel, eventually it leads to violence.  I am certainly not suggesting that we should ever compromise on what we believe, but what I am suggesting is that there is a wise way to handle things and an unwise way to handle things.

Someday, widespread civil unrest is going to sweep across the United States and major American cities will burn.

My hope is that we can put this off for as long as possible.

In fact, I sincerely hope that this will not happen at all during the Trump/Pence era.

But you would have to be blind not to see the hate, anger and frustration that are all growing like cancer in the hearts of our young people.

This is a time for the peacemakers.  If there are any left in Washington, we need them to rise up now and try to bring healing before it is too late.

10 Ways That Donald Trump Could Try To Reverse The Curse That Obama Has Put On America

trump-wallWhen Barack Obama betrayed Israel at the United Nations, that put a curse on our nation.  But that doesn’t mean that we have to stay cursed.  In the coming days, the new Trump administration should immediately start taking steps to reverse the curse that we are under as a result of what Obama has done.  Perhaps if Donald Trump takes strong enough steps to try to undo what Obama has done, instead of being cursed we can once again return to being blessed.

One thing that Trump will not be able to undo is UN Security Council Resolution 2334.  It would take another UN Security Council resolution to undo it, and the votes simply wouldn’t be there.  UN Security Council Resolution 2334 passed by a vote of 14 to zero with the U.S. abstaining.  And even if Trump could miraculously pull together enough votes, one of the other permanent members of the Security Council (Russia, China, the UK or France) could just veto it.

So it looks like we are stuck with UN Security Council Resolution 2334, but that doesn’t mean that Trump can’t do anything to try to address this matter.

Recently, a Breitbart article suggested five steps that Trump should take regarding Israel once he becomes president, and I would like to add another five to the list.

The following are 10 things that should immediately be done once Trump becomes president to try to reverse the curse that Obama has put on America…

#1 Donald Trump should clearly disavow UN Security Council Resolution 2334 during his Inaugural address.  This would send a clear signal to the rest of the world that this new administration does not stand behind Obama’s betrayal of Israel.

#2 Sanctions should be imposed on every nation that voted in favor of the resolution.  I know that this would be politically tricky and would greatly upset the other permanent members of the Security Council, but it should still be done.

#3 There should be a congressional declaration clearly disavowing UN Security Council Resolution 2334, and Donald Trump should endorse this declaration.

#4 The Trump administration should immediately introduce another UN Security Council resolution that would include language that completely overturns the previous resolution.  Of course that resolution would almost certainly fail, but the point would be to show that the Trump administration is horrified by what has been done, and it would force the rest of the Security Council into a very uncomfortable position.

#5 Trump should immediately move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.  By law this was already supposed to have happened anyway, but past presidents have always put the move off.  Of course this would cause the Palestinians to riot, but Trump needs to show the world that U.S. policy is not going to be dictated by threats of violence.

#6 Trump should cut off all funding to the Palestinian authority.  Considering how much debt we are in, I don’t know why we are giving them money in the first place.

#7 Trump should publicly announce that his administration will never recognize a Palestinian state.  The rest of the world would get very upset by this, but it is the right thing to do.

#8 Trump should publicly announce that it is the policy of the United States government that every inch of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza strip and the Golan Heights belongs to Israel.  I don’t think that Trump would ever do this, but it would be the single most important step that he could take.

#9 The United Nations could be defunded in whole or in part.  But we don’t want to leave the United Nations entirely as some are suggesting.  Now that Trump is going to be president, we want him to use the power that we have on the Security Council to protect Israel.  Because without the U.S. standing in the way, the rest of the world would gang up on Israel in a major way.

#10 Trump should make an immediate presidential visit to Israel during the very first week of his presidency.  This would largely be symbolic, but it would show the rest of the planet that we stand solidly with the Netanyahu government.

And if Barack Obama takes additional action against Israel during the remaining days of his presidency, steps such as I have just outlined above will become even more important.

There are still rumblings that we could see another UN Security Council resolution that would officially establish a Palestinian state before Obama leaves office.  The following comes from an article by Bob Eschliman

The official said the U.N. action could come in the form of declarations by U.N. bodies, including the General Assembly; U.N. sessions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; or even another United Nations Security Council resolution. He said any further UNSC resolution would depend on the support of the U.S. and European countries after the upcoming Paris Mideast summit slated for Jan. 15.

He said the U.N. action would seek to set the parameters of a future Palestinian state with a clear timeline for negotiations. If the action comes in the form of a resolution at a U.N. body, it could call for an infrastructure to establish mechanisms to enforce last week’s UNSC resolution, which demanded a complete halt to Israeli construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and declared those territories occupied Palestinian lands.

If the UN Security Council does vote to formally recognize a Palestinian state, all hell will break loose in America.

Let us hope that does not happen, and let us hope that Donald Trump works very hard to repair the damage that has already been done once he gets into office.

John Kerry Unveils His Plan For A Palestinian State Based Upon 1967 Borders With East Jerusalem As The Capital

john-kerry-photo-by-david-hume-kennerlyBarack Obama stabbed Israel in the back on Friday, and now John Kerry has slapped Israel in the face just five days later.  In a shameful speech that lasted for 71 dreadful minutes, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry laid out his plan for peace in the Middle East on Wednesday.  His six-part plan is being welcomed warmly by the Palestinians, but it has further infuriated the Israelis.  Kerry claims that his plan reflects the emerging global consensus as to what a “final solution” will look like, and now we will wait to see what the 70 nations that will be gathering in France to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on January 15th will do.  There is a great deal of concern that the principles agreed upon at that conference will form the basis for a UN Security Council resolution that will be rushed to a vote before President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20th.

The core of Kerry’s plan is the division of the land of Israel into two states.  The borders between Israel and “Palestine” would be based upon the 1967 ceasefire lines with mutually agreed upon land swaps.  The following comes from ynetnews.com

Outgoing US Secretary of State John Kerry laid out the Obama administration’s parameters for peace between Israel and the Palestinians during a speech at the State Department on Wednesday that lasted 71 minutes, one of the longest in US State Department history.

Breaking sharply from longstanding US policy that foreign powers shouldn’t impose a solution, Kerry unveiled a six-part outline of what a future peace deal could look like. The outline tracked closely with principles long assumed to be part of an eventual deal, and Kerry insisted he was merely describing what’s emerged as points of general agreement.

Primarily, Kerry called to create a secure and recognized border between Israel and a contiguous Palestine along the 1967 lines, with “mutually agreed, equivalent (land) swaps.”

As part of the land swaps, Kerry insists that the Palestinians must be given land that connects the West Bank and the Gaza strip.  In his speech he stated that “Palestine must be viable and contiguous”, and he made it exceedingly clear that East Jerusalem will be the capital of the new Palestinian state.

Of course UN Security Council Resolution 2334 has already given the entire West Bank and every inch of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.  So the only thing that another UN Security Council resolution would be needed for would be to formally establish a Palestinian state.

Kerry went on to say that if Israel does not accept a two-state solution “it will not have peace with the rest of the Arab world, I can guarantee that.”

Of course Kerry is half-correct in making that statement, because Israel will not have peace with the rest of the Arab world even if a Palestinian state is established.  In fact, the establishment of a Palestinian state would actually make war much more likely.

Kerry also shockingly claimed that “Israel can either be Jewish or democratic”

Kerry said a two-state solution, which calls for an independent Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel, is the only way to guarantee the Jewish state’s long-term security in the region.

“If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both,” Kerry said.

Needless to say, Kerry’s speech sparked a tremendous amount of outrage among pro-Israel leaders here in the United States.

One of the leaders that is condemning Kerry’s remarks is U.S. Senator Ted Cruz.  In a strongly worded statement, he accused Barack Obama and John Kerry of being “relentless enemies of Israel”

Ted Cruz, a Republican senator and 2016 presidential candidate, lit into Kerry and Obama in a statement that accused of them being ‘bitter clingers.’

They’re ‘spending every last minute of this administration wreaking havoc domestically and abroad,’ he said.

‘These acts are shameful. They are designed to secure a legacy, and indeed they have: history will record and the world will fully understand Obama and Kerry as relentless enemies of Israel.’

And Donald Trump is speaking out as well.  On Twitter, he let the world know what he thinks about how the Obama administration has been treating Israel…

“We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect,” Trump tweeted. “The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.!) Stay strong, Israel, January 20th is fast approaching!”

In response, Barack Obama actually got on the phone and called Donald Trump in an attempt to smooth things over.

After eight years of failure, Barack Obama has saved the very worst for last.  With less than 30 days to go in his presidency, he has chosen this moment to betray Israel, and by doing so he has greatly cursed America.

I don’t get upset about a lot these days, but this is something that is worth getting upset about.  If Obama would have just left things alone, everything would have been fine.  But instead of deferring to the next president on important matters, Obama has chosen to implement a “scorched earth policy” during his final month in the White House.

As we move into 2017, our relationship with Israel is going to be one of the biggest political issues that we are facing.

If you are anti-Israel, you are with Barack Obama, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, the United Nations and all the rest of the globalists that are obsessed with dividing the land of Israel.

If you are pro-Israel, you are with Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz and all of the other brave leaders that are fighting the forces of globalism.

All over the world, the forces of anti-Semitism are rising.  Even here in the United States, there are large numbers of people that are virulently anti-Israel.

Ultimately, it is a spiritual thing.  Those that hate Israel and that hate the Jewish people are being inspired by the powers of darkness, and this cancer is spreading even among those that call themselves Bible-believing Christians.

God loves all people – and this includes the Israelis and the Palestinians.  And the ultimate solution to the problems in the Middle East would be to follow God’s blueprint, but unfortunately global leaders have their own ideas, and their anti-Semitic agenda is going to end up getting an enormous amount of people killed.

America You Need To Lose Weight: At Least 1 Out Of Every 5 People Are Obese In All 50 States

Overweight Kids Become Overweight Adults - Public DomainThe United States officially has an obesity crisis.  According to a brand new report that was just released by the Trust for America’s Health, at least one out of every five people meet the clinical definition for obesity in all 50 states.  But of course in some states things are far worse than that.  More than 35 percent of all adults are obese in four states, and the obesity rate is between 30 and 35 percent in 21 other states.  And it is important to keep in mind that just needing to lose weight does not mean that you are obese.  According to the CDC, you have got to have a body mass index of at least 30.0 to meet the clinical definition for obesity.

Each year, the American people spend 60 billion dollars on weight loss programs and products.  That breaks down to about 188 dollars for every man, woman and child in the country.  We are a nation that is absolutely obsessed with losing weight, and yet obesity levels are hovering near all-time record highs.

But some parts of the U.S. are definitely doing better than others.  The following is an excerpt that comes directly from the new report

In 2015, Louisiana has the highest adult obesity rate at 36.2 percent and Colorado has the lowest at 20.2 percent. While rates remained steady for most states, they are still high across the board. The 13th annual report found that rates of obesity now exceed 35 percent in four states, are at or above 30 percent in 25 states and are above 20 percent in all states. In 1991, no state had a rate above 20 percent.

Did you catch that last part?

I put it in bold for a reason.  To me, it is absolutely incredible that no state in the entire country had an obesity rate of more than 20 percent just 25 years ago.

How is that possible?

How could obesity explode to such a dramatic level in just a couple of decades?

Well, a lot of it has to do with what we eat and drink, and I will have some comments about that below.  But first, let’s take a look at some more statistics from this new report.  It turns out that there seems to be a significant link between obesity and poverty

  • 9 of the 11 states with the highest obesity rates are in the South and 22 of the 25 states with the highest rates of obesity are in the South and Midwest.
  • 10 of the 12 states with the highest rates of diabetes are in the South.
  • American Indian/Alaska Natives have an adult obesity rate of 42.3 percent.
  • Adult obesity rates are at or above 40 percent for Blacks in 14 states.
  • Adult obesity rates are at or above 30 percent in: 40 states and Washington, D.C. for Blacks; 29 states for Latinos; and 16 states for Whites.

The report also noted that it has been estimated that our obesity epidemic costs the United States somewhere between 147 billion dollars and 210 billion dollars every single year.

That is an enormous amount of money, and if we were all a bit healthier it would benefit our society tremendously.

Sadly, as a society we have fallen into some very bad habits.  For example, the new report also found that the number of high school students that play video games for at least 3 hours per day “has increased more than 88 percent since 2003 (from 22.1 to 41.7 percent)”.

When I was in high school, almost all of the kids couldn’t wait to get outside and play after school.  But these days most playgrounds are parks are eerily silent most of the time, and even if kids wanted to go use them the truth is that many of them aren’t very safe.

In the old days, parents could let their kids go outside and play freely without having to worry about it.  But in 2016, many of our communities are infested by addicts, gangs, sex predators, etc.

But that is a topic for another article. Last year, Gallup also did a survey on obesity, and what they found lines up with this new report very well…

-The national rate of obesity has risen to an all-time high of 27.7 percent. That is up from 27.1 percent in 2013, and it is much higher than the 25.5 percent number that we were sitting at in 2008.

-At 19.0 percent, Hawaii has the lowest rate of obesity in the entire country.

-At 35.2 percent, Mississippi has the highest rate of obesity in the entire country.

-The rest of the top 10 includes West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Iowa and Missouri.

And remember, being obese is different from being overweight.

According to CNN, an astounding 70 percent of all Americans are overweight at this point.

Let that number sink in for a moment.

70 percent.

So how did this happen?

Well, our addiction to sugar plays a major role in this.  If you were just to make one change to your diet, you could immediately start living a much healthier lifestyle.  What I am talking about is soda.

Many people that have cut all soda out of their diets have immediately started losing weight, and they often report feeling much better too.

Other people have actually decided to completely cut all sugar out of their diets, and needless to say the health benefits have been nothing short of astounding.

If you know me, you know that I like sugar, but I try to keep it at a very reasonable level.  But that is difficult, because sugar is in just about everything.  And if it isn’t sugar, it is some other type of sweetener such as high fructose corn syrup.

There are others that know much more about these things than I do, but I just wanted to share with you a couple common sense things I have learned over the years that can immediately help you if you are interested in a healthier lifestyle.

Another thing that is a huge menace is pork.  All meat is not created equal, and if you eat lots of pork you should know that you are on a highway to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.  Pork is one of the most toxic things that humans consume, and once you learn all of the things that pork is infested with you will likely never want to eat it again.

Of course cancer loves sugar too, and so it is no wonder why we have a cancer epidemic in this country.  If you can believe it, Americans spend 100 billion dollars a year on cancer drugs alone.

We are literally digging our own graves with our forks, knives and spoons.  What we eat and what we drink are the biggest reasons why we have an obesity epidemic in this nation, and if we will just take a few common sense steps we could start turning around this crisis tomorrow.

Bye Bye Middle Class: The Rate Of Homeownership In The United States Has Hit The Lowest Level Ever

Abandoned House - Public DomainThe percentage of Americans that own a home has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded.  During the second quarter of 2016, the non-seasonally adjusted homeownership rate fell to just 62.9 percent, which was exactly where it was at when the U.S. Census began publishing this measurement back in 1965.  This is not what a “recovery” looks like.  All throughout the Obama years, the percentage of Americans that own a home has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller.  The reason for this, of course, is that the middle class in America is dying.  Last year, we learned that middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population for the first time ever.  In order to have a high rate of homeownership, you need a thriving middle class, and you can’t have a thriving middle class without good paying middle class jobs.  This is why I write about the evisceration of the middle class so extensively, because the U.S. economy is systematically being hollowed out and most Americans don’t understand what is happening.

Traditionally, owning a home has been a sign that you have arrived as a member of the middle class, but under Barack Obama the percentage of Americans that own a home has fallen every single year.  In the past, we have talked about how it had fallen to the lowest level in decades, but now it has officially fallen to the lowest level ever.  The following comes from CNBC

After rising just over a decade ago to its highest level ever, the nation’s homeownership rate fell to match its all-time low and could drop even further in the months to come.

In the second quarter of this year, the rate fell to 62.9 percent, not seasonally adjusted, which is the same as it was in 1965, when the U.S. Census started tracking the metric. During the epic housing boom in the mid-2000s, the rate soared as high as 69.2 percent. That was when politicians touted the so-called “ownership society.”

So why is this happening?

Well, according to Wolf Richter analysts are blaming many factors…

  • Rising home prices in an economy of stagnant wages (for the lower 80%) have pushed entry-level homes out of reach for many people.
  • Lower priced homes in many urban areas entail a huge and costly ($ and time) commute every day. And even then, these homes may be too much of stretch for big parts of the population in expensive urban areas.
  • First time buyers are having trouble saving for a down payment since they spend their last available dime to meet soaring rents.
  • Millennials have been blamed. They always get blamed for everything. They saw their parents deal with the American Dream as it turned into the American Nightmare, and they learned their lesson early in life.
  • The super-low interest rate environment hasn’t made homes more affordable because home prices, in response to super-low interest rates, have soared, and in the end, mortgage payments are higher than they were before.
  • Higher home prices entail other costs that are higher, including taxes, brokerage fees, and insurance.

Certainly all of those points are legitimate, but the truth is that what we are facing is much broader than all of that.  The middle class in the United States has been dying for decades, and in recent years the long-term trends that have been slowly eating away at the middle class like cancer have accelerated significantly.  Just consider these numbers…

-In America today, nobody has a job in one out of every five families.

-At this moment, 102 million working age Americans do not have a job.

-According to the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of American workers currently make less than $30,000 a year.

-In 1970, the middle class brought home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has plunged to just 43 percent.

-The Federal Reserve says that 47 percent of Americans could not pay an unexpected $400 emergency room bill without borrowing the money from somewhere or selling something.

-One recent survey discovered that 62 percent of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings.

-If you currently have no debt and you also have ten dollars in your pocket, that gives you a greater net worth than about 25 percent of all Americans.

-According to Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, the authors of a book entitled “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America“, there are 1.5 million “ultrapoor” households in the United States that live on less than two dollars a day.  If you can believe it, that number has doubled since 1996.

-Back in 2007, approximately one out of every eight children in America was on food stamps. Today, that number is one out of every five.

-Things continue to get worse for the middle class as we head into the second half of 2016.  Gallup’s U.S. economic confidence index just hit the lowest level so far this year.

I could keep quoting numbers at you all day, but hopefully you are getting the picture.

The middle class in America just keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and our politicians just keep on conducting business as usual.  They don’t seem to care that they are strangling the life out of what was once the largest and most thriving middle class in the history of the planet.

And things could soon get much worse for the middle class as this new global economic crisis accelerates.  In fact, highly respected economist Peter Schiff believes that a major downturn in the U.S. is imminent

HERE IS THE REALITY: The world has caught on, and the gig is up. Under Obama’s stewardship, the U.S. national debt has gone from $10 Trillion, to what will be $20 Trillion by the time he leaves office, with nothing more than 100 MILLION Americans out of work, and 50 MILLION in poverty and on food stamps. That’s what cheap money bought for us. It was all “borrowed” cheap money too, making it infinitely worse, and the world is tired of lending.

There are so many families out there that are really struggling right now, and more than two-thirds of all Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track.

I would like to tell you that happy days are here again and that the best times for America are just around the corner, but unlike the politicians at the Republican and Democratic national conventions, I am not going to lie to you.

Very rough times are coming, and things are going to get much harder for the middle class.

Plan accordingly, and get prepared while you still can.

Donald Trump Is Right – Here Are 100 Reasons Why We Need To Audit The Federal Reserve

Donald Trump - Photo by Marc NozellWhen one of our major politicians gets something exactly right, we should applaud them for it.  In this case, Donald Trump’s call to audit the Federal Reserve is dead on correct.  Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has far more power over the economy than anyone else does – including Barack Obama.  Financial markets all over the planet gyrate wildly at the smallest comment from Fed officials, and virtually every boom and bust cycle over the past 100 years can be traced directly back to specific decisions made by the Federal Reserve.  We get all excited about what various presidential candidates say that they “will do for the economy”, but in the end it is the Fed that is holding all of the cards.  The funny thing is that the Federal Reserve is not even part of the federal government.  It is an independent private central bank that was designed by very powerful Wall Street interests a little over 100 years ago.  It is at the heart of the debt-based financial system which is eating away at America like cancer, and it has no direct accountability to the American people whatsoever.

The Fed has been around for so long that most people assume that we need it.

But the truth is that we don’t actually need the Federal Reserve.  In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in United States history happened during the decades before the Federal Reserve was created.

A little over 100 years ago, very powerful forces on Wall Street successfully pushed for the creation of an immensely powerful central bank, and since that time the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by about 98 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

The Federal Reserve does whatever it feels like doing, and Fed officials insist that the institution must remain “independent” and “above politics” because monetary policy is too important to entrust to the American people.

To me, this is absolutely ridiculous.  Everything else, including our national defense, is subject to the normal political process, and yet the decisions made by the Fed are so “important” that the American people can’t have a voice?

It is high time that the American people begin to learn what the Federal Reserve is really all about, and that can start with a full, comprehensive audit of all of the Federal Reserve’s activities.  Yesterday, Donald Trump came out in favor of such an audit…

Previously, Trump has made quite a few comments that were very critical of the Fed.  For example, last year he told Bloomberg News that he believed that the Federal Reserve was “creating a bubble”…

“In terms of real estate, if I want to develop … from that standpoint I like low interest rates. From the country’s standpoint, I’m just not sure it’s a very good thing, because I really do believe we’re creating a bubble.”

And of course Trump was exactly right about that too.  By pushing interest rates to artificially low levels and creating billions upon billions of dollars out of thin air during the quantitative easing era, stock prices were driven to ridiculously high levels.  Now that the artificial support has been withdrawn, stocks are beginning to crash, and the financial collapse which is starting to happen is going to be far worse than it otherwise would have been because of the Fed’s actions.  The following comes from one of my previous articles

As stocks continue to crash, you can blame the Federal Reserve, because the Fed is more responsible for creating the current financial bubble that we are living in than anyone else.  When the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates all the way to the floor and injected lots of hot money into the financial markets during their quantitative easing programs, this pushed stock prices to wildly artificial levels.  The only way that it would have been possible to keep stock prices at those wildly artificial levels would have been to keep interest rates ultra-low and to keep recklessly creating lots of new money.  But now the Federal Reserve has ended quantitative easing and has embarked on a program of very slowly raising interest rates.  This is going to have very severe consequences for the markets, but Janet Yellen doesn’t seem to care.

I don’t understand why so many Americans continue to support the Federal Reserve.

We don’t need a bunch of central planners setting interest rates and determining monetary policy.  We are supposed to have a free market system, and the free market should be setting interest rates – not the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately, just about every nation on the entire planet now has a central bank.  Even though the nations of the world can’t agree on much, somehow central banking has been adopted virtually everywhere.  At this point, more than 99.9% of the population of the world lives in a country that has a central bank.

There are still some minor island countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia that do not have a central bank, but the only major nation not to have one right now is North Korea.  And nobody in their right mind would ever want to live there.

So how in the world did this happen?

Did the people of the world willingly choose this debt-based system or was it imposed upon them?

To my knowledge, there has never been a single vote where the population of a nation has willingly chosen to establish a central bank.  I could be wrong about this, but I have never heard of one.

It is the elite that have always wanted central banking, and now they pretty much have the entire planet in their grasp.

That is why we should applaud Donald Trump when he stands up to the elite.  And it isn’t just regarding the Fed that he has done this.  The following comes from an excellent article that was just written by Dan Lyman

Ultimately, Trump knows it is the global elite who have pried our borders wide open. He knows it is THEY who are responsible for the tens of millions of Third Worlders pouring into our nations. He knows that THEY are the monsters who need the world to be constantly at war. He knows THEY are radically altering our food supply with GMOs and poisonous chemicals. He knows THEY are responsible for poisoning our drinking water, filling our skies and air supplies with toxic waste, genociding our unborn children, collecting data on all citizens to implement the Orwellian police state, forcing poison into our babies’ veins – and soon the rest of us, redistributing what remains of our wealth under the guises of ‘saving the planet’ or ‘refugee aid,’ allowing and funding the ISIS Islamofascists to decimate places like Syria and Iraq in Satanic fashion, promoting the psychotic LGBT Nazis to goose-step all over our religious liberties and gender-privacy in school bathrooms. If there is a societal cancer metastasizing somewhere, it can usually be traced back to the same sources.

Yes, there are many things that we can criticize Trump and the other Republican candidates for.  But when they nail something, we should be willing to admit that they got something right.

In this case, Donald Trump is absolutely correct to call for an audit of the Fed.  As I promised in the title of this article, I want to share 100 reasons why the Fed should be audited.  The following list has been adapted from one of my previous articles

#1 We like to think that we have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central planners has far more power over our economy than anyone else in our society does.

#2 The Federal Reserve is actually “independent” of the government. In fact, the Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in federal court that it is “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized “much like private corporations“.

#4 The regional Federal Reserve banks issue shares of stock to the “member banks” that own them.

#5 100% of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve are private banks. The U.S. government owns zero shares.

#6 The Federal Reserve is not an agency of the federal government, but it has been given power to regulate our banks and financial institutions. This should not be happening.

#7 According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”. So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?

#8 If you look at a “U.S. dollar”, it actually says “Federal Reserve note” at the top. In the financial world, a “note” is an instrument of debt.

#9 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue “United States notes” which were created by the U.S. government directly and not by the Federal Reserve. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

#10 Many of the debt-free United States notes issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today.

#11 The Federal Reserve determines what levels some of the most important interest rates in our system are going to be set at. In a free market system, the free market would determine those interest rates.

#12 The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as “the fourth branch of government“.

#13 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank.

#14 The Federal Reserve was designed to be a perpetual debt machine. The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. Since the Federal Reserve was established 100 years ago, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

#15 A permanent federal income tax was established the exact same year that the Federal Reserve was created. This was not a coincidence. In order to pay for all of the government debt that the Federal Reserve would create, a federal income tax was necessary. The whole idea was to transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the federal government to the bankers.

#16 The period prior to 1913 (when there was no income tax) was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

#17 Today, the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.

#18 From the time that the Federal Reserve was created until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value.

#19 From the time that President Nixon took us off the gold standard until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 83 percent of its value.

#20 During the 100 years before the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. economy rarely had any problems with inflation. But since the Federal Reserve was established, the U.S. economy has experienced constant and never ending inflation.

#21 In the century before the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent. In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation has been about 3.5 percent.

#22 The Federal Reserve has stripped the middle class of trillions of dollars of wealth through the hidden tax of inflation.

#23 The size of M1 has nearly doubled since 2008 thanks to the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing.

#24 The Federal Reserve has been starting to behave like the Weimar Republic, and we all remember how that ended.

#25 The Federal Reserve has been consistently lying to us about the level of inflation in our economy. If the inflation rate was still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere between 8 and 10 percent today.

#26 Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

#27 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.

#28 The Federal Reserve created the conditions that caused the stock market crash of 1929, and even Ben Bernanke admits that the response by the Fed to that crisis made the Great Depression even worse than it should have been.

#29 The “easy money” policies of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan set the stage for the great financial crisis of 2008.

#30 Without the Federal Reserve, the “subprime mortgage meltdown” would probably never have happened.

#31 If you can believe it, there have been 10 different economic recessions since 1950. The Federal Reserve created the “dotcom bubble”, the Federal Reserve created the “housing bubble” and now it has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.

#32 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made 16.1 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks during the last financial crisis. The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the report…

Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

#33 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks $659.4 million in “fees” to help “administer” those secret loans.

#34 During the last financial crisis, big European banks were allowed to borrow an “unlimited” amount of money from the Federal Reserve at ultra-low interest rates.

#35 The “easy money” policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have created the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen, and this has set the stage for the great financial crisis that we are rapidly approaching.

#36 Since late 2008, the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars to more than 4 trillion dollars. This is complete and utter insanity.

#37 During the quantitative easing era, the value of the financial securities that the Fed has accumulated is greater than the total amount of publicly held debt that the U.S. government accumulated from the presidency of George Washington through the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton.

#38 Overall, the Federal Reserve now holds more than 32 percent of all 10 year equivalents.

#39 Quantitative easing creates financial bubbles, and when quantitative easing ends those bubbles tend to deflate rapidly.

#40 Most of the new money created by quantitative easing has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy.

#41 According to a prominent Federal Reserve insider, quantitative easing has been one giant “subsidy” for Wall Street banks.

#42 As one CNBC article stated, we have seen absolutely rampant inflation in “stocks and bonds and art and Ferraris“.

#43 Donald Trump once made the following statement about quantitative easing: “People like me will benefit from this.

#44 Most people have never heard about this, but a very interesting study conducted for the Bank of England shows that quantitative easing actually increases the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

#45 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been since the 1920s.

#46 The mainstream media has sold quantitative easing to the American public as an “economic stimulus program”, but the truth is that the percentage of Americans that have a job has actually gone down since quantitative easing first began.

#47 The Federal Reserve is supposed to be able to guide the nation toward “full employment”, but the reality of the matter is that an all-time record 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number has risen by about 27 million since the year 2000.

#48 For years, the projections of economic growth by the Federal Reserve have consistently overstated the strength of the U.S. economy. But every single time, the mainstream media continues to report that these numbers are “reliable” even though all they actually represent is wishful thinking.

#49 The Federal Reserve system fuels the growth of government, and the growth of government fuels the growth of the Federal Reserve system. Since 1970, federal spending has grown nearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has.

#50 The Federal Reserve is supposed to look out for the health of all U.S. banks, but the truth is that they only seem to be concerned about the big ones. In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States. Today, there are only 6,891 left.

#51 The six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years.

#52 The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets. The six largest banks now account for 67 percent of those assets and all of the other banks account for only 33 percent of those assets.

#53 The five largest banks now account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States.

#54 We were told that the purpose of quantitative easing was to help “stimulate the economy”, but today the Federal Reserve is actually paying the big banks not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in “excess reserves” that they have parked at the Fed.

#55 The Federal Reserve has allowed an absolutely gigantic derivatives bubble to inflate which could destroy our financial system at any moment. Right now, four of the “too big to fail” banks each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of 40 trillion dollars.

#56 The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 381 times greater than their total assets.

#57 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.

#58 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking establishment.

#59 The Federal Reserve was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.

#60 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would eliminate the business cycle.

#61 There has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.

#62 The Federal Reserve system has been described as “the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world“.

#63 The following comes directly from the Fed’s official mission statement: “To provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.” Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve has failed in those tasks dramatically.

#64 The Fed decides what the target rate of inflation should be, what the target rate of unemployment should be and what the size of the money supply is going to be. This is quite similar to the “central planning” that goes on in communist nations, but very few people in our government seem upset by this.

#65 A couple of years ago, Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

#66 The Federal Reserve has taken some other very frightening steps in recent years. For example, back in 2011 the Federal Reserve announced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. Someone at the Fed will almost certainly end up reading this article.

#67 Thanks to this endless debt spiral that we are trapped in, a massive amount of money is transferred out of our pockets and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy each year. Incredibly, the U.S. government spent more than 415 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt in 2013.

#68 In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent. If we got back to that level today, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and it would collapse our entire financial system.

#69 The American people are being killed by compound interest but most of them don’t even understand what it is. Albert Einstein once made the following statement about compound interest…

Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

#70 Most Americans have absolutely no idea where money comes from. The truth is that the Federal Reserve just creates it out of thin air. The following is how I have previously described how money is normally created by the Fed in our system…

When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

#71 What does the Federal Reserve do with those U.S. Treasury bonds? They end up getting auctioned off to the highest bidder. But this entire process actually creates more debt than it does money…

The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

But wait.

There is a problem.

Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

But that never actually happens, does it?

And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well. They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

#72 Of course the U.S. government could actually create money and spend it directly into the economy without the Federal Reserve being involved at all. But then we wouldn’t be 17 trillion dollars in debt and that wouldn’t serve the interests of the bankers at all.

#73 The following is what Thomas Edison once had to say about our absolutely insane debt-based financial system…

That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.

Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.

But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.

#74 The United States now has the largest national debt in the history of the world, and we are stealing roughly 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day in a desperate attempt to keep the debt spiral going.

#75 Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

#76 At this moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at $18,141,409,083,212.36. If we had followed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, it would be sitting at zero.

#77 When the Federal Reserve was first established, the U.S. national debt was sitting at about 2.9 billion dollars. On average, we have been adding more than that to the national debt every single day since Obama has been in the White House.

#78 We are on pace to accumulate more new debt during the 8 years of the Obama administration than we did under all of the other presidents in all of U.S. history combined.

#79 If all of the new debt that has been accumulated since John Boehner became Speaker of the House had been given directly to the American people instead, every household in America would have been able to buy a new truck.

#80 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percent during that entire time period.

#81 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 102.98 percent.

#82 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.

#83 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

#84 As I have written about previously, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

#85 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#86 Sometimes we forget just how much money a trillion dollars is. If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#87 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#88 In addition to all of our debt, the U.S. government has also accumulated more than 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. So where in the world will all of that money come from?

#89 The greatest damage that quantitative easing has been causing to our economy is the fact that it is destroying worldwide faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. debt. If the rest of the world stops using our dollars and stops buying our debt, we are going to be in a massive amount of trouble.

#90 Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a staggering amount of U.S. government debt even though Ben Bernanke once promised that he would never do this.

#91 China recently announced that they are going to quit stockpiling more U.S. dollars. If the Federal Reserve was not recklessly printing money, this would probably not have happened.

#92 Most Americans have no idea that one of our most famous presidents was absolutely obsessed with getting rid of central banking in the United States. The following is a February 1834 quote by President Andrew Jackson about the evils of central banking…

I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.

#93 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?

#94 The capstone of the global central banking system is an organization known as the Bank for International Settlements. The following is how I described this organization in a previous article

An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.” The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”. During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

#95 The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve has turned all of us into debt slaves.

#96 Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate all the rest of us. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in our system (all government debt, all business debt, all consumer debt, etc.) was sitting at about 3 trillion dollars. Today, the grand total is approaching 60 trillion dollars.

#97 Unless something dramatic is done, our children and our grandchildren will be debt slaves for their entire lives as they service our debts and pay for our mistakes.

#98 Now that you know this information, you are responsible for doing something about it.

#99 Congress has the power to shut down the Federal Reserve any time that it would like. But right now most of our politicians fully endorse the current system, and nothing is ever going to happen until the American people start demanding change.

#100 The design of the Federal Reserve system was flawed from the very beginning. If something is not done very rapidly, it is inevitable that our entire financial system is going to suffer an absolutely nightmarish collapse.

 

27 Facts That Show How The Middle Class Has Fared Under 6 Years Of Barack Obama

27 Facts That Show How The Middle Class Has Fared Under Barack ObamaDuring his State of the Union speech on Tuesday evening, Barack Obama is going to promise to make life better for middle class families.  Of course he has also promised to do this during all of his other State of the Union addresses, but apparently he still believes that there are people out there that are buying what he is selling.  Each January, he gets up there and tells us how the economy is “turning around” and to believe that much brighter days are right around the corner.  And yet things just continue to get even worse for the middle class.  The numbers that you are about to see will not be included in Obama’s State of the Union speech.  They don’t fit the “narrative” that Obama is trying to sell to the American people.  But all of these statistics are accurate.  They paint a picture of a middle class that is dying.  Yes, the decline of the U.S. middle class is a phenomenon that has been playing out for decades.  But without a doubt, our troubles have accelerated during the Obama years.  When it comes to economics, he is completely and utterly clueless, and the policies that he has implemented are eating away at the foundations of our economy like a cancer.  The following are 27 facts that show how the middle class has fared under 6 years of Barack Obama…

#1 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale now earn less money than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#2 American families in the middle 20 percent of the income scale have a lower net worth than they did on the day when Barack Obama first entered the White House.

#3 According to a Washington Post article published just a few days ago, more than 50 percent of the children in U.S. public schools now come from low income homes.  This is the first time that this has happened in at least 50 years.

#4 According to a Census Bureau report that was recently released, 65 percent of all children in the United States are living in a home that receives some form of aid from the federal government.

#5 In 2008, the total number of business closures exceeded the total number of businesses being created for the first time ever, and that has continued to happen every single year since then.

#6 In 2008, 53 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “middle class”.  But by 2014, only 44 percent of all Americans still considered themselves to be “middle class”.

#7 In 2008, 25 percent of all Americans in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket considered themselves to be “lower class”.  But in 2014, an astounding 49 percent of all Americans in that age range considered themselves to be “lower class”.

#8 Traditionally, owning a home has been one of the key indicators that you belong to the middle class.  So what does the fact that the rate of homeownership in America has been falling for seven years in a row say about the Obama years?

#9 According to a survey that was conducted last year, 52 percent of all Americans cannot even afford the house that they are living in right now.

#10 After accounting for inflation, median household income in the United States is 8 percent lower than it was when the last recession started in 2007.

#11 According to one recent survey, 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.

#12 At this point, one out of every three adults in the United States has an unpaid debt that is “in collections“.

#13 When Barack Obama first set foot in the Oval Office, 60.6 percent of all working age Americans had a job.  Today, that number is sitting at only 59.2 percent…

Employment Population Ratio 2015

#14 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen from 19.8 weeks to 32.8 weeks.

#15 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers make less than $30,000 a year.

#16 At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, our yearly trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars.  Last year, it was more than 314 billion dollars.

#17 When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent.  Today, it is over 101 percent.

#18 The U.S. national debt is on pace to approximately double during the eight years of the Obama administration.  In other words, under Barack Obama the U.S. government will accumulate about as much debt as it did under all of the other presidents in U.S. history combined.

#19 According to the New York Times, the “typical American household” is now worth 36 percent less than it was worth a decade ago.

#20 The poverty rate in the United States has been at 15 percent or above for 3 consecutive years.  This is the first time that has happened since 1965.

#21 From 2009 through 2013, the U.S. government spent a whopping 3.7 trillion dollars on welfare programs.

#22 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to 46 million.

#23 Ten years ago, the number of women in the U.S. that had full-time jobs outnumbered the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps by more than a 2 to 1 margin.  But now the number of women in the U.S. on food stamps actually exceeds the number of women that have full-time jobs.

#24 One recent survey discovered that about 22 percent of all Americans have had to turn to a church food panty for assistance.

#25 An astounding 45 percent of all African-American children in the United States live in areas of “concentrated poverty”.

#26 40.9 percent of all children in the United States that are living with only one parent are living in poverty.

#27 According to a report that was released late last year by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the number of homeless children in the United States has reached a new all-time record high of 2.5 million.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

The incredibly foolish decisions that have been made by Obama, Congress and the Federal Reserve have brought us right to the precipice of another major financial crisis and another crippling economic downturn.

So as bad as the numbers that I just shared with you above are, the truth is that they are nothing compared to what is coming.

We are heading into the greatest economic crisis that any of us have ever seen, and it is going to shock the world.

I hope that you are getting ready.