Charitable Giving

Keep these facts in mind when "donating".




As you open your pockets for yet another natural disaster, keep the following facts in mind; we have listed them from the highest (worse paid offender) to the lowest (least paid offender).



The worst offender was yet again for the 11th year in a row is, UNICEF - CEO, receives $1,200,000 per year, (plus use of a Rolls Royce for his exclusive use where ever he goes, and an expense account that is rumoured to be well over $150,000.) Only pennies from the actual donations goes to the UNICEF cause (less than $0.14 per dollar of income).



The second worst offender this year is Marsha J. Evans, President and CEO of the American Red Cross... for her salary for the year ending in 2009 was $651,957 plus expenses. Enjoys 6 weeks - fully paid holidays including all related expenses during the holiday trip for her and her husband and kids, including 100% fully paid health & dental plan for her and her family, for life. This means out of every dollar they bring in, about $0.39 goes to related charity causes.



The third worst offender was again for the 7th time was, Brian Gallagher, President of the United Way receives a $375,000 base salary (U.S. funds), plus so many numerous expense benefits it's hard to keep track as to what it is all worth, including a fully paid lifetime membership for 2 golf courses (1 in Canada, and 1 in the U.S.A.), 2 luxury vehicles, a yacht club membership, 3 major company gold credit cards for his personal expenses... and so on. This equates to about $0.51 per dollar of income goes to charity causes.



Fourth worst offender who was also again in the fourth spot, for every year since this information has been made available from the start 1998 is amazingly yet again, World Vision President (Canada) receives $300,000 base salary, (plus supplied - a home valued in the $700,000 - $800,000 dollar value range, completely furnished, completely paid all housing expenses, including taxes, water/sewer, telephone/fax, HD/high speed cable, weekly maid service and pool/yard maintenance, fully paid private schooling for his children, upscale automobile and an $55,000 personal expense account for clothing/food, with a $125,000 business expense account).

Get this, because it is a "religious based" charity, it pays, little to no taxes, can receive government assistance and does not have to declare were the money goes.

Only about $0.52 of earned income per dollar is available for charity causes.



Of the sixty some odd "charities" we looked at, the lowest paid (President/ C.E.O/Commissioner) was heading up a charity group in Canada. We found, believe it or not, it was...



Ready for this...



I think you might be surprised...



It is, none other than...



The Salvation Army's Commissioner Todd Bassett receives a salary of only $13,000 per year (plus housing) for managing this $2 Billion dollar organization. Which means about $0.93 per dollar earned, is readily available and goes back out to local charity causes...truly amazing...and well done "Sally Anne."



No further comment is necessary..."Think Twice" before you give to your Charity of choice as to which one really does the best for the most - or the least for the most, for that matter.

Gold Bullion For Only 4.75% Over Spot…

from Ed Steer- not a personal reco from me, other than the fact that everyone should have gold and silver in their possession


While I'm on the subject of gold and silver bullion, here's a special offer I just found out about that really made me stand up and take notice. Andy Schectman, a bullion dealer at Miles Franklin, has acquired a limited lot of one-ounce gold bullion coins at below-market cost, and is able to pass on the savings to us. He has brand new 2011 Canadian Maple Leafs, along with 2010 Australian Kangaroos, and can offer them to us for only 4.75% above spot. He also has 2011 Silver Maple Leafs for only $2.35 over spot for any quantity. I've searched the web and can tell you this is one of the lowest premiums in the industry. My coin guy here in Edmonton can't even buy the gold coins wholesale at this price!







You know how I feel about owning physical bullion – it's a must, given the precarious nature of all currencies... and that we're nowhere near out of the woods of this crisis. This is a great way to add to your holdings at a below-market price. If you're interested in buying a Maple Leaf or Kangaroo for a 4.75% premium... or a silver Maple Leaf for $2.35 over spot, call Miles Franklin at 1-800-822-8080. Mention you're calling from my letter, Ed Steer's Gold & Silver Daily, to get the discount. [Note: Miles Franklin is open from 8am to 5pm, Central time.]

e-mail from Bix Weir

I'll never forget back in July 2008 when I first came to the conclusion that Alan Greenspan was secretly on the side of the Good Guys working to take down the banking cabal that had stolen our monetary system. For months I had pestered Bill Murphy of GATA to publish a paper I had written called "Greenspan's Magnum Opus!" but he would have no part of it. To a Gold Bug, Greenspan was arch enemy #1 and even the suggestion of him working as a sort of double agent against the Banking Cabal was considered heresy!




Murphy, to his credit, finally broke down in late 2008 and published my article which eventually came to be known as Greenspan's Golden Secret!



http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/101.cfm



It took at least another year for the cries of "Bix Weir you TRAITOR!" from my fellow GATA Warriors to die down to where we sit today. Those who have thoroughly read and studied the Road to Roota Archives and listen to what the Maestro is saying today have accepted the once unthinkable...THAT ALAN GREENSPAN IN FACT IS TRYING TO RETURN US TO A GOLD STANDARD!

So I ready for the FERVENT subscriber response I got when I recently suggested the possibility of another very controversial figure, Sarah Palin, being slated by the Good Guys to take the position of Vice President if Ron Paul replaces Barrack Obama. Let me tell you the CALLS OF MY INSANITY were loud and strong again!

Of course, that did not dissuade me off my line of thinking and a speech by Sarah Palin today actually reinforces my original theory.

I invite you to read the words of this speech she delivered today and argue to me again that there is no way that she is being set up to run with Ron Paul...
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/252715/palin-bernanke-cease-and-desist-robert-costa



Sarah Palin to Bernanke: "Cease and Desist"

I'm deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve's plans to buy up anywhere from $600 billion to as much as $1 trillion of government securities. The technical term for it is "quantitative easing." It means our government is pumping money into the banking system by buying up treasury bonds. And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We're printing it out of thin air.

The Fed hopes doing this may buy us a little temporary economic growth by supplying banks with extra cash which they could then lend out to businesses. But it's far from certain this will even work. After all, the problem isn't that banks don't have enough cash on hand - it's that they don't want to lend it out, because they don't trust the current economic climate.

And if it doesn't work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What's the end game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? Do we have any guarantees that QE2 won't be followed by QE3, 4, and 5, until eventually - inevitably - no one will want to buy our debt anymore? What happens if the Fed becomes not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort?

All this pump priming will come at a serious price. And I mean that literally: everyone who ever goes out shopping for groceries knows that prices have risen significantly over the past year or so. Pump priming would push them even higher. And it's not just groceries. Oil recently hit a six month high, at more than $87 a barrel. The weak dollar - a direct result of the Fed's decision to dump more dollars onto the market - is pushing oil prices upwards. That's like an extra tax on earnings. And the worst part of it: because the Obama White House refuses to open up our offshore and onshore oil reserves for exploration, most of that money will go directly to foreign regimes who don't have America's best interests at heart.



We shouldn't be playing around with inflation. It's not for nothing Reagan called it "as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man." The Fed's pump priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared, and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed's proposals "clueless." When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it's time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist. We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings. We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track.



Maybe she can't tell you what newspapers she reads in the morning or where Russia is relative to her backyard but it sure sounds like someone very much "in the know" is writing her speeches on Monetary Policy!

The jury is still out on this "off-the-wall" road to Roota prediction!

Are we having fun yet?


Bix

Will Bailing Out the States Tank the Dollar?

by John Rubino on November 3, 2010


Back in 2006 Meredith Whitney was an obscure Wall Street analyst who bit the hand that fed her by declaring housing a bubble and the big banks a disaster. This took guts, both because analysts who dis their research universe tend to lose access and/or their job, and because the overwhelming consensus, from Alan Greenspan on down, held that things were fine, home ownership was good, and big banks were rock-solid.



Whitney was right, they were wrong, and since then she’s used her considerable cred to keep hammering away at the illusion of a recovering US financial system. Her current target is state and local finances, which, she says, are far worse than the mainstream realizes. In today’s Wall Street Journal she lays out this thesis and asserts that a federal bailout isn’t coming — it’s already here.



I intended to post a few excerpts, but couldn’t find a single paragraph that didn’t contain something useful. So here’s the whole thing:



State Bailouts? They’ve Already Begun



Bond subsidies and transfers have allowed states to avoid making tough decisions. It won’t last.



The threat posed by the state fiscal crisis in the U.S. is vastly underestimated and under-appreciated—because even today too few people understand how states have been managing their finances.



A clear example of this took place in Manhattan last week at the Economist magazine’s Buttonwood Conference, where a panel role-played the federal government’s response to a near default of the hypothetical state of New Jefferson. After various deliberations and simulated threats from the Chinese government, the panel reluctantly voted to grant New Jefferson an emergency bailout of $1.5 billion to cover the state’s debt payment.



What this panel and so many other investors fail to appreciate is that state bailouts have already begun. Over 20% of California’s debt issuance during 2009 and over 30% of its debt issuance in 2010 to date has been subsidized by the federal government in a program known as Build America Bonds. Under the program, the U.S. Treasury covers 35% of the interest paid by the bonds. Arguably, without this program the interest cost of bonds for some states would have reached prohibitive levels.



California is not alone: Over 30% of Illinois’s debt and over 40% of Nevada’s debt issued since 2009 has also been subsidized with these bonds. These states might have already reached some type of tipping point had the federal program not been in place.



Beyond debt subsidies, general federal government transfers to states now stand at the highest levels on record. Traditionally, state revenues were primarily comprised of sales, personal and corporate income taxes. Over the years, however, federal government transfers have subsidized business-as-usual state spending not covered by state tax collections. Today, more than 28% of state funding comes from federal government transfers, the highest contribution on record.



These transfers have made states dependent on federal assistance. New York, for example, spent in excess of 250% of its tax receipts over the last decade. The largest 15 states by GDP spent on average over 220% of their tax receipts. Clearly, states have been spending at unsustainable levels without facing immediate consequences due to federal transfer payments and other temporary factors.



At the same time, local governments now rely on state government transfers for 33% of their funding. Thus, when a state finds itself in a financial bind, it has the option of saving itself before saving one of its local municipalities. Pennsylvania recently assisted the state capital, Harrisburg, in the form of a one-time “advance” payment—but there are hundreds of towns like Harrisburg that will also need assistance. These one-time fixes fail to address the real structural problems facing so many states and municipalities.



State budgets are likely to experience their second consecutive year with deficits of close to $200 billion. The root of the problem is simple: State governments have spent recklessly and unsustainably. Rainy-day funds are depleted, pension-fund contributions are already at record lows, and almost all of the major federal government subsidy programs will run out in June 2011.



Until now, the states have been able to evade the need to rein in spending largely because the federal government enabled them to do so through record high federal allocations, and by creative accounting that put off funding well over a trillion dollars of state-employee pension and other retirement obligations.



The level of complacency around this issue is alarming. Most assume, as last week’s Buttonwood panel did, that the federal government will simply come to the rescue of the states without appreciating the immensity of the cumulative state-budget gaps. I expect multiple municipal defaults to trigger indiscriminate selling, which will prompt a federal response. Solutions attempted in piecemeal fashion, as we’ve seen thus far, would amount to constantly putting out recurring fires.



Rather than waiting for more federal intervention, states need to make their own hard decisions and not kick the can down the road. How will taxpayers from fiscally conservative states like Texas or Nebraska feel about bailing out threadbare Illinois or California? Let’s hope we never have to find out.



Some thoughts:



When you add up state and local pension liabilities, operating fund deficits and outstanding muni bonds, the bailout numbers become Fannie/Freddiesque. We’re talking several trillion dollars up front, with no end in sight because states will use federal money to avoid the kinds of changes that would bring them back into a semblance of balance.

The size of this ongoing federal commitment will be obscured in the official announcements — as it is now — but analysts like Whitney will see through the lies and publish real numbers. So eventually the markets will understand that Washington, just a few years after nationalizing the mortgage market, has taken on another several trillion dollars of junk paper from the states.

The global markets, already worried about the viability of the dollar as a reserve asset, will really start to sweat. The question is how they’ll react to this latest assault on their collective balance sheet. Foreign central banks and risk-averse investors are starting to resemble battered spouses, putting up with pretty much anything from the US because they have nowhere else to go. But even this kind of pathological patience has to have a limit, and if a bailout of California and Illinois is the final straw, then the game changes from fiscal crisis to currency crisis.

Electric Cars Threaten Energy Independence

Environment & Climate News > November 2010
Written By: Maureen Martin

Publisher: The Heartland Institute



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



We’ve all heard the mantra: we must wean ourselves from foreign oil to save the nation not only from global warming but also from oil-revenue-fueled terrorism. This situation, the mantra goes, warrants spending billions in federal funds for subsidies and tax credits to foster a market for electric cars. But the proposed cure may be worse than the asserted problem.



Hostile Lithium Providers

The top two suppliers of foreign oil to the United States are Canada and Mexico. But electric cars need batteries, and these batteries need lithium. “All these vehicles use lithium,” a Ford spokesman told the New Yorker. “We don’t think about electric vehicles using anything else.”



That’s because lithium is lighter than the nickel now used in batteries. It also holds a larger charge for a longer period of time.



“[W]ith the emergence of electric cars, lithium could challenge petroleum as the dominant fuel of the future,” the New Yorker article noted. “And nearly half the world’s known resources are buried beneath vast salt flats in southwestern Bolivia, the largest of which is called the Salar de Uyuni. Bolivians have begun to speak of their country becoming ‘the Saudi Arabia of lithium.’”



There’s one important problem with tapping into lithium from Bolivia, though. The BFFs of Bolivia’s president Evo Morales are Hugo Chavez of Venezuala, Fidel Castro of Cuba, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In fact, Iran and Bolivia recently announced a collaborative project on lithium technology.



Bolivia’s Domestic Roadblocks

Bolivia’s government hopes to make a financial killing on lithium by nationalizing it, as it did with the country’s hydrocarbon reserves.



“Either capitalism dies, or else Planet Earth dies,” Morales has proclaimed, the New Yorker reports. “Such rhetoric tends to scare away the kind of foreign investment that would facilitate the development of” lithium recovery, the magazine notes.



Another barrier to Bolivia becoming the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” is the lack of infrastructure in the desert regions where lithium is plentiful. Landlocked, Bolivia needs an airport large enough to transport lithium to users abroad. The same problem exists in remote regions of China, another area where lithium resources are abundant and infrastructure scant.



Global Uncertainties

What remains unclear is how much lithium there actually is in the world, where it is, how readily it can be recovered and made available, and whether the supply is sufficient for an expanded market in electric cars.



If the market for electric cars expands rapidly, some analysts predict lithium shortages in ten years. Capitalists such as Warren Buffet and many other private sources of capital are investing in exploration and development of technology to bolster the supply.



These questions prompt one certain conclusion, however. Given the uncertainties of the supplies of lithium and potential hostility of some of its suppliers, the Obama administration should stop putting its lead foot on the accelerator of this industry by forcing taxpayers to invest billions of dollars in it.



Maureen Martin (mmartin@heartland.org) is an attorney and senior fellow for legal affairs at The Heartland Institute

Effects of climate-driven primary production change on marine food webs: implications for fisheries and conservation. Global Change Biology 16: 1194-1212.

review from the NIPCC

References:  Brown, C.J., Fulton, E.A., Hobday, A.J., Matear, R.J., Possingham, H.P., Bulman, C., Christensen, V., Forrest, R.E., Gehrke, P.C., Gribble, N.A., Griffiths, S.P., Lozano-Montes, H., Martin, J.M., Metcalf, S., Okey, T.A., Watson, R. and Richardson, A.J. 2010.

 According to Brown et al. (2010), "climate change is altering the rate and distribution of primary production in the world's oceans," which in turn "plays a fundamental role in structuring marine food webs (Hunt and McKinnell, 2006; Shurin et al., 2006)," which are "critical to maintaining biodiversity and supporting fishery catches." Hence, they are keen to examine what the future might hold in this regard, noting that "effects of climate-driven production change on marine ecosystems and fisheries can be explored using food web models that incorporate ecological interactions such as predation and competition," citing the work of Cury et al. (2008), which is what they thus set out to do.

Brown et al. first used the output of an ocean general circulation model driven by a "plausible" greenhouse gas emissions scenario (IPCC 2007 scenario A2) to calculate changes in climate over a 50-year time horizon, the results of which were then fed into a suite of models for calculating primary production of lower trophic levels (phytoplankton, macroalgae, seagrass and benthic microalgae), after which the results of the latter set of calculations were used as input to "twelve existing Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) dynamic marine food web models to describe different Australian marine ecosystems," which protocol ultimately predicted "changes in fishery catch, fishery value, biomass of animals of conservation interest, and indicators of community composition." And what did the models show?



The seventeen scientists state that under the IPCC's "plausible climate change scenario, primary production will increase around Australia" with "overall positive linear responses of functional groups to primary production change," and that "generally this benefits fisheries catch and value and leads to increased biomass of threatened marine animals such as turtles and sharks," adding that the calculated responses "are robust to the ecosystem type and the complexity of the model used."



Given these findings, in the concluding sentence of their paper, Brown et al. state that the primary production increases suggested by their work to result from future IPCC-envisioned greenhouse gas emissions and their calculated impacts on climate "will provide opportunities to recover overfished fisheries, increase profitability of fisheries and conserve threatened biodiversity," which is an incredibly nice set of consequences to result from something the world's climate alarmists claim to be an unmitigated climate catastrophe.



Additional References

Cury, P.M., Shin, Y.J., Planque, B., Durant, J.M., Fromentin, J.-M., Kramer-Schadt, S., Stenseth, N.C., Travers, M. and Grimm, V. 2008. Ecosystem oceanography for global change in fisheries. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 23: 338-346.



Hunt, G.L. and McKinnell, S. 2006. Interplay between top-down, bottom-up, and wasp-waist control in marine ecosystems. Progress in Oceanography 68: 115-124.



Shurin, J.B., Gruner, D.S. and Hillebrand, H. 2006. All wet or dried up? Real differences between aquatic and terrestrial food webs. Proceedings of the Royal Society B -- Biological Sciences 273: 1-9.

That cracking sound was the BACKBONE of the worlds financial system.

By Bix Weir

That cracking sound was the BACKBONE of the worlds financial system.




A few years back I was jumping up and down about Ambac and MBIA (monoline insurance cos.) who basically insure much of the municipal bond market. Back in the Go-Go days of "Structured Finance" a B rated city or state entity could borrow at a cheaper rate by buying AAA insurance from one of these monoline insurance companies who would back the payments with their own credit rating. This way big investment funds can buy muni paper for their portfolios due to the better rating. The problem comes once Ambac or MBIA lose their AAA rating ALL OF THE BONDS THEY INSURED LOSE THEIR AAA RATING!



Ambec Says May Go Bankrupt This Year



http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6A021F20101101?pageNumber=2



Once the muni bonds lose their higher rating many of the funds CAN'T hold the lower rated paper. And you have a mad rush to dump muni bonds.



AND THAT'S JUST A SMALL PART OF WHAT THE MONOLINES INSURE!



It's just about to get VERY, VERY UGLY out there!