Ragbag Headliners

Living On Less Than $2 A Day

Can you imagine living on less than $2 a day?

That's exactly what nearly 1.5 million American families have had to do.

The number of households living on $2 a day or less, per person, surged by 130% between 1996 and 2011, according to the National Poverty Center. They now constitute nearly one-fifth of the non-elderly households with children living in poverty.

Some 2.8 million children resided in these extremely poor households.

More than a third of these households were headed by a married couple, while just over half were run by a single woman. Nearly half were headed by whites, while one-quarter by blacks and 22% by Hispanics. The largest growth, however, came in households headed by blacks and Hispanics.

The center opted to use the $2 measure because it is one of the World Bank's main indicators of poverty in developing nations.

Food stamps, which help lift many families out of poverty, are not included in the measure. If food stamps were counted as income, the number of households in extreme poverty was 800,000 in 2011, an increase of 67% over the past 15 years.

Have you gotten off public assistance -- such as food stamps or housing vouchers -- in the past five years? Email realstories@cnnmoney.com with your contact information and you could be contacted for an upcoming story or video. –CNN Money

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Japan Remembers Horrific Quake, Tsunami

19,000 died one year ago

[On March 11] people across Japan prayed and stood in silence Sunday to remember the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck the nation one year ago, killing 19,000 people and unleashing the world’s worst nuclear crisis in a quarter century.

In the devastated northeastern coastal town of Rikuzentakata, a siren sounded at 2:46 p.m. — the exact time the magnitude-9.0 quake struck on March 11, 2011 — and a Buddhist priest in a purple robe rang a huge bell at a damaged temple overlooking a barren area where houses once stood.

At the same time in the seaside town of Onagawa, people facing the sea pressed their hands together in silent prayer.

Meanwhile, at a memorial service in Tokyo’s National Theater, 78-year-old Emperor Akihito, Empress Michiko and Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda stood in silence with hundreds of other people dressed in black.

Even in Tokyo’s busy shopping district of Shibuya, pedestrians briefly stopped and fell silent before carrying on.

Mr. Noda recalled in a speech that the Japanese people have overcome disasters and difficulties many times in the past, and pledged to rebuild the nation and the area around the tsunami-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant so that the country will be “reborn as an even better place.”

“Our predecessors who brought prosperity to Japan have repeatedly risen up from crises, every time becoming stronger,” Mr. Noda said. “We will stand by the people from the disaster-hit areas and join hands to achieve the historic task of rebuilding.”

The earthquake was the strongest recorded in Japan’s history, and set off a tsunami that swelled to more than 65 feet in some spots along the northeastern coast, destroying tens of thousands of homes and bringing widespread destruction.

The tsunami also knocked out the vital cooling systems at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, causing meltdowns at three reactors and spewing radiation into the air.

Some 100,000 residents who were forced to flee remain in temporary housing or with relatives, and a 12-mile area around the plant is still off-limits.

The emperor voiced concern about the difficulties of decontaminating the land around the plant.

“In order to make the area inhabitable again, we face the difficult problem of removing radiation,” he said in a brief address. “We shall not let our memory of the disasters fade, pay attention to disaster prevention and continue our effort to make this land an even safer place to live.”

All told, some 325,000 people rendered homeless or evacuated are still in temporary housing. While much of the debris along the tsunami-ravaged coast has been gathered into massive piles, very little rebuilding has begun.

Beyond the massive cleanup, many towns are still finalizing reconstruction plans, some of which involve moving residential areas to higher, safer ground — ambitious, costly projects.

Bureaucratic delays in coordination between the central government and local officials have also slowed rebuilding efforts.

Anti-nuclear protesters at a downtown Tokyo park also held a moment of silence Sunday before marching toward the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Public opposition to nuclear power has grown in the wake of the disaster, the worst since Chernobyl in 1986. –The Washington Times 

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The Obamacare Sex Strike

Feminists are declaring a sex strike for Obamacare-subsidized birth control. The group Liberal Ladies Who Lunch is organizing “Access Denied,” a week-long exercise in self-denial starting April 28. The strike is supposed to motivate men to stand up for government-funded birth control “because when we lose our reproductive choices, so do they.” This is akin to protesting welfare cuts by getting a job.

Highlighting opposition to Obamacare-subsidized birth control by abstaining from sex is a bit off-message for the feminists. This isn’t exactly Lysistrata trying to stop the Peloponnesian War. In this case, activists are abandoning the activity that causes their supposed need for the birth-control handout. The only people affected are their unfortunate husbands and boyfriends who may begin to question their devotion to being sensitive New Age guys.

Conservatives should applaud the strike. Abstention is well-regarded on the right, and not simply because it is 100 percent effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies. Taking a week off from promiscuity may give young women an opportunity to think about their life choices. Perhaps there is more to being a woman than ensuring the government supplies the means to engage in limitless hookups. Nursing chastity for a week puts necessary perspective on the type of subsidized sexuality that’s at the center of the debate.

Liberals think the issue is a winner. On Sunday, Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat, claimed the “latest polls show we’re up by 15 percent” among women voters, but Mr. Schumer should check his facts. A month ago, President Obama’s support was 51 percent among women in the Gallup weekly survey. In the latest poll, it’s still 51 percent. A Washington Post poll revealed Mr. Obama’s gains among women were within the margin of error. A CBS/New York Times poll released Monday showed Mr. Obama “lost some support among women over the past month, even as the debate raged over birth-control insurance coverage.”

The deeper poll numbers explain why. To the extent people have an opinion, they side against the administration. Fifty-one percent said all employers should be able to opt out of government-mandated birth-control programs, which rose to 57 percent when asked about religiously affiliated employers. Asked what is the “most important problem facing the country today,” jobs and the economy combined got 51 percent of responses. All other issues were in low single digits. Democrats might think harping on this issue fires up their base, but to the average voter, it is time wasted that could better be devoted to getting the economy out of the ditch.

In response to the radical feminist sex strike, a conservative group on Facebook announced “Access Granted,” a week in which women can “spend quality time with their husbands (or significant others) and to appreciate that a true man will stand behind us when we truly believe in something.” The group calls on women to “vow to not use your intimate relationship as a ‘weapon’ to get what you want. Have respect for yourselves!” Meanwhile, maybe leftists could protest limits on federally funded abortion by abstaining from killing the unborn. –The Washington Times

6 Reasons Not To Like Daylight Saving Time

Daylight saving time has been getting a bad rap. Some are saying that setting our clocks forward one hour today, Sunday, March 11, is just a “big fast waste of time” that “creates chaos and confusion” and might actually use up more energy than it saves — which would be more than unfortunate, as the United States began to observe daylight saving time during World War I to conserve energy, on the theory that having an extra hour of daylight at night meant that people would use less electricity by needing to turn the lights on for fewer hours.

Does gaining an extra hour of sunlight make up for waking up in the dark for weeks?

Since 2007, the period for daylight saving time has been extended by four weeks to promote energy conservation, under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The Washington Post reviews some disadvantages (and benefits?) of daylight savings time; I have added one of my own.

1. Daylight Saving Time Doesn’t Conserve Energy

A 2008 study by economists Matthew J. Kotchen and Laura E. Grant found that, when all counties of Indiana had to shift to daylight saving time under state law, the time shift caused “the greatest increase in electricity consumption in the fall” due to, in part, people turning up their air conditioners more. Daylight saving time actually costs Indiana $10.7 million to $14.5 million more per year, due to higher electricity bills and increased pollution from coal.

2. Daylight Saving Time Doesn’t Affect Gasoline Usage

When Congress extended daylight saving time under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, analysts claimed that oil consumption would fall by 1 percent. But a 2005 review (pdf) by the Department of Energy found that gasoline consumption had not been affected at all.

3. Daylight Saving Time May Not Make the Roads Safer

The Washington Post cites a 1995 study (pdf) in the American Journal of Public Health according to which the roads are safer, thanks to the extra hour of sunlight from daylight saving time. But a 1996 study by Stanley Coren in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the fatigue from losing an hour of sleep led to an increase in traffic accidents in the spring, while traffic accidents decreased in the fall when we set our clocks back.

4. Daylight Saving Time May Be Hazardous For Your Health

The Washington Post found research that argues for the benefits of daylight saving time — more sunlight means we get more Vitamin D — but being tired (that lost hour of sleep) due to the time change is associated with an increased risk for heart attacks, says a new study from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Tired workers mean the risk of workplace accidents is greater, too, says a 2009 study (pdf).

5. Daylight Saving Time Hurts Some Parts of the Economy

Daylight saving time has benefits for retailers — more hours of daylight mean people are out longer to shop — as well as for what the Washington Post calls the “all-powerful golfing industry.” But audiences in movie theaters and for prime-time television decrease, presumably because people are out on the links or otherwise enjoying more hours of sunlight.

6. It Is Just Really Confusing To Change the Clocks

The time changes, especially when it’s time to “fall back” and set the clock back an hour in October, can be disruptive for my teenage autistic son, Charlie and schoolchildren everywhere (especially sleepyhead teenagers). Charlie has a sense of time based on his internal body clock and observing when it’s light and dark, but is still learning to use a digital clock to tell time. The rationale behind changing the times on the clock makes little (or more likely, no) sense to him. He is often an early riser so “springing forward” today has not been a big deal, but setting the clock back often has painful results, as it means for at least a week in the fall he hears his parents rousing him an hour earlier.

On the other hand, Charlie and my husband are very glad for an extra hour for bike rides.

Should we keep daylight saving time or is it a practice that has outlived its usefulness? -Care2

NewsBusted 1/24/12

Are American Unions Increasing Poverty Rates?

American unions are a major cause of unemployment in the U.S. and they have greatly increased the number of children and families living in poverty by stunting the U.S economy.

In the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, President Obama’s own former economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers said, “Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy.”

There are reasons other than relatively inflated union workers’ wages and benefits causing an undeniable increase of outsourcing and overseas placement of production facilities from this country – for example high taxes and government overregulation. However, the AFL–CIO, national trade union center, the largest federation of unions in the United States, and other large unions, are major culprits.

While American steel companies, automobile production and other traditional industries continue to downsize and increasingly outsource production of components, unionized Green companies like Solyndra are failing within months of receiving massive, low-interest loans from the federal government that amount to taxpayer-funded union slush funds. Solyndra was touted as a successful Green company by President Obama months before the company went belly-up and left taxpayers to pay the company’s half-billion-dollar government-backed loan. Solyndra claimed it could not compete with foreign companies but where the government money went is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation.

In the U.S., unionized workers are on average paid much higher wages than non-union workers and generally receive superior benefits and pensions. The result of such artificial wage inflation through union negotiations, strikes, political campaign donations and sick-outs is that American companies lose the ability to compete with foreign companies. The relentless phenomenon of economically downsizing America is no longer a 600-pound gorilla that voters can simply ignore. American companies are moving entire operations overseas and outsourcing jobs to foreign companies leaving more and more union workers and non-union employees standing in the unemployment line or permanently unemployed. Many recent polls indicate that Americans’ patience and empathy for union strikes and protests are wearing thin.

States like California are choosing Chinese companies to supply major U.S. infrastructure because unionized American companies can’t compete. For example, over $6 billion of a $7.2 billion contract to rebuild the Oakland –to-San Francisco bridge was awarded to the Chinese because unionized American companies could not successfully compete. The massive steel work for the bridge was built and assembled in China and shipped to California on Chinese vessels while American unionized companies sat on their hands. Americans were relegated to assembling and paving the complex new bridge.

If unions remain strong, expand and continue to demand inflated wages and benefits for union bosses and their workers, an ever-more globalized economy will continue shrinking the share of jobs available to unionized workers and other Americans.

The results will include permanently higher unemployment, soaring government deficits, double-dip recessions and further increases in American poverty rates. The situation will surely become more severe for the U.S. and most of Europe as more developing nations offering the same products for less enter a global economy in mass.

Unionization is the 600-pound gorilla in the unemployment line and it doesn’t discriminate between union workers, non-union workers or small businesses. –Government Gone Wild

A Powerful Message From Stevie Wonder On The Death Of Whitney Houston

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Author Unknown

A Bailout Monstrosity

[After] two years of efforts to pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding the largest bank bailout in history, Bloomberg.com revealed the true scope of the phrase, “too big to fail.” In short, the number is staggering: total loan guarantees and lending limits engineered by the Federal Reserve to rescue the financial system amounted to $7.77 trillion as of March 2009. Bloomberg got the information after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal last March by the Clearing House Association LLC, a group comprised of the nation’s largest commercial banks. They, along with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, tried to prevent the details from becoming public. The ultimate question: was both the scope of the effort–and the secrecy surrounding it–necessary? Unfortunately, the answer to that question is far from clear.

One thing is certain. In order to accept that any or all parts of the numerous transactions involved were necessary, one is required to accept as a given that the entire financial world was on the brink of systemic collapse. Was it? Perhaps a more accurate answer to that question is that the status quo was on the brink of collapse. It was a status quo where “too big to fail” had been institutionalized long before this particular crisis took hold. In 1984, faced with the failure of Continental Illinois, a large commercial bank, the government not only engineered a rescue, but extended FDIC insurance to both the bank depositors and all its other lenders, including those whose accounts exceeded FDIC limits, as well as global bondholders. In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose financial excesses had many major Wall Street firms on the hook, was rescued by the Federal Reserve with funding from its member banks. Thus, long before the government-engineered housing crisis that led to the debacle of 2008 took hold, the pattern of “privatizing profits and socializing losses” had been established. This situation virtually invited financial institutions to take greater and greater risks.

As this latest revelation shows, those risks reached astronomical levels. In a single day, December 5, 2008, the banks were in such dire straits they needed a combined $1.2 trillion to remain solvent. Yet even as financial institutions were taking Fed funds, some of their leading officers were touting the strengths of the institutions involved. On Nov. 26, 2008, Bank of America Corp.’s former CEO, Kenneth D. Lewis, informed shareholders that B of A was “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world” despite owing the Federal Reserve $86 billion at the time. In a March 26 letter to shareholders, JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon claimed his firm used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility (TAF) “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system,” even though the bank’s total borrowings were nearly twice its cash holdings. He also failed to mention that the height of Chase’s borrowing, which crested to $48 billion, occurred on Feb. 26, 2009–over a year after the TAF had been created. Spokesmen for both banks declined to comment.

Furthermore, borrowing by banks from the Fed substantially exceeded the $700 billion they borrowed from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the rescue plan engineered by the government. The six largest U.S. banks–JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Inc., Wells Fargo & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley–received $160 billion of TARP funds, even as they took  $460 billion from the Fed. Such borrowing amounted to 63 percent of the average daily debt owed to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment-service firms. That represented a 13 percent increase from the 50 percent the Big Six owed prior to the bailout.

And then there was the secrecy. Bush administration officials who managed the TARP program were unaware of what the Fed was doing. So were top aides to then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. So was Congress, including Judd Gregg, former New Hampshire senator who was a lead Republican negotiator on TARP, and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), who chaired the House Financial Services Committee. Cryptically both men claim they were unaware of the “specifics,” although Frank admitted both men “were aware emergency efforts [by the Fed] were going on.” Even Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, said he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude” of Federal Reserve lending taking place.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke justified the secrecy, claiming that borrowers would be “stigmatized” if the extent of their loans were revealed. He further contended that investors and counterparties would shun such firms, and that needy firms would be reluctant to borrow — in the next crisis. Others contend revealing the extent of the crisis as it was happening would have exacerbated it, leading to a run on financial institutions, subsequently leading to even greater lending by the Fed as a result.

Whether either argument is reasonable is debatable. But what is now known is that the lack of knowledge was undoubtedly influential. The results of congressional legislation enacted–and not enacted–may have been radically different if those voting would have been privy to the extent of the Fed involvement. For example, the amount of money doled out via TARP legislation was based on information supplied by the Fed to the Treasury Department. Ostensibly, only banks that were still “healthy” enough to survive would merit funding, a point reinforced by Bernanke himself in a speech in April of 2009. Yet Fed internal memos described one of its biggest borrowers, Citigroup, as “marginal.” At its peak in January of 2009, Citigroup owed the Fed $99.5 billion. One month later Bank of America owed the Fed $91.4 billion. Yet the top prize for a “healthy” borrower goes to Morgan Stanley. On the day of September 29, 2008 alone, they owed the Fed $107 billion.

Another piece of legislation undoubtedly influenced by the secrecy was the Safe Banking Act of 2010. Introduced by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and former Senator Ted Kaufman (D-DE), the bill was about placing hard caps on the leveraging abilities and size of financial institutions, aimed primarily at the aforementioned Big Six banking institutions. “The amount of pain that people, through no fault of their own, had to endure–and the prospect of putting them through it again–is appalling,” Kaufman said. “The public has no more appetite for bailouts. What would happen tomorrow if one of these big banks got in trouble? Can we survive that?” he asked.

Bank lobbyists weren’t about to give up without a fight. From 2006 to 2010, spending to defeat the bill increased from $22.1 million to $29.4 million. The Financial Stability Board (FSF) sent a letter to Congress November 13, 2009, touting the “stability of large banks” and citing the “irreparable economic harm to the growth and job-creating capacity of the U.S. economy” if such a bill were to pass. Top Obama administration officials sided with the FSF, including Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner who, according to Kaufman, told the ex-senator that issue was “too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions.” The bill was defeated 60-31. Kaufman believes support for the bill would have been much greater if Congress knew the extent of the Fed’s intervention.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, billed as a fix for the financial industry, was also debated without knowing the scope of the Fed’s involvement. Ironically, it creates a Financial Stability Oversight Council that has the power to shut down failing institutions in an “orderly way.” The irony? The council is headed by Secretary Geithner.

Former Senator Bob Dorgan (D-ND) believes greater knowledge might have also led to the re-instatement of the Glass-Steagall Act. The Depression-era legislation separated deposit and investment banks. Its repeal during the Clinton administration–a move the former president now regrets–led to the creation of the mega-banks at the heart of the crisis. Newt Gingrich, who also supported the repeal, has recanted as well.

On the other hand, the mega-bailout has its defenders. “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is what a lender of last resort looks like,” writes Reuters columnist Felix Salmon referring to the Bloomberg piece. “The Fed didn’t blink: it kept on lending, as much as it could, to any bank which needed the money, because, in a crisis, that’s its job,” he adds. “Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme market stress is a core function of central banks,” says William B. English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs. “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.”

One suspects many Americans would dispute that assessment. While bigger banks have eased some of their credit restrictions, 80 percent of lenders have tighter credit since 2008. Furthermore, the “most prevalent tightening occurs in CRE (commercial real estate) loans, leasing, and small business loans. The most prevalent easing is in international, large corporate, asset-based lending, and leveraged loans.” In other words, Main Street borrowers are still taking it on the chin while Wall Street is back to business as usual.

Maybe better than usual. Even though it’s a relatively small number, banks earned an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates during the crisis. Total assets held by the Big Six have increased 39 percent, from $6.8 trillion on September 30, 2006 to $9.5 trillion as of September 30, 2011. The Big Six have also paid out $146.3 billion in compensation in 2010, which comes to $126,342 per worker. “The pay levels came back so fast at some of these firms that it appeared they really wanted to pretend they hadn’t been bailed out,” says Anil Kashyap, a former Fed economist who’s now a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “They shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people find some of the stuff that happened totally outrageous.”

Much of the outrage is eminently justified. The overwhelming amount of it stems from the fact that while ordinary Americans were being hammered by a recession (and still are), the crony-capitalist nexus of big government and big finance was engineering a cushy landing for some of the most irresponsible people on the planet. People who not only remain unaccountable for their behavior, but have prospered from it.

Perhaps it was a necessary evil in the sense that a systemic failure might have hurt innocent Americans even worse than what has occurred. But it is truly disturbing that not one CEO or any other board member of the institutions who benefitted from the Fed bailout or TARP–which Bloomberg revealed was essentially collateral for the far bigger loans–was forced to resign as a condition for receiving the funds. And the “brain drain” rationale used to justify that fact is a howler. These are the same “brains” who brought the nation to its knees. No one but their equally-compromised colleagues would miss them.

Moreover, the revelations of the Fed bailout may have other repercussions. Already, Reuter’s Felix Simon is contending that the European Central Bank (EBC) should emulate the Fed and bail out the European Union. On Monday the White House also pledged its support to the EU, in order to “reinvigorate economic growth, create jobs and ensure financial stability.” And lest anyone forget, American taxpayers fund the International Money Fund (IMF) that has provided billions for the Greek bailout.

Furthermore, the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite its tenuous grasp of economics and its anti-capitalist underpinnings, is sure to get a boost. The boost will come from those Americans whose grasp of both concepts is equally suspect, and those who don’t understand that the word “crony” in front of the word “capitalism” completely changes the parameters of the debate, as sure as the word “illegal” in front of immigrant does.

As for the idea that the financial industry has been saved and that something like this couldn’t happen again, Exhibits A and B offer a different perspective. Exhibit A is the EU, which has the capacity to drag any number of American financial institutions back into trouble. Which ones? No one knows for sure, as “transparency,” despite all contentions to the contrary, remains steadfastly elusive. Exhibit B is the move by Fitch ratings agency, affirming the AAA status of U.S. debt–but changing its outlook going forward from “stable” to “negative.” Chances of another downgrade? Better than 50 percent over the next two years.

So was the Fed bailout a success? The “lender of last resort” claims almost all of the loans have been repaid, and that there have been no losses. But there is something equally big at stake here. Nobel Prize-winning economist Oliver E. Williamson explains. “The banks that were too big got even bigger, and the problems that we had to begin with are magnified in the process,” he notes. “The big banks have incentives to take risks they wouldn’t take if they didn’t have government support. It’s a serious burden on the rest of the economy.”

Burden? More moral hazard on steroids. –Front Page Mag

Democracy Is On The Retreat In Europe

Many Americans, understandably heartened by the Arab Spring, seem to believe that democracy is on the march. And it is — backward.

It’s Europe where democracy is in headlong retreat. There, the leaders of the continent’s largest nations — German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy — have asked their fellow European leaders to relinquish control of their national budgets to unelected European Union technocrats and judges. Any nation whose budget deficit exceeds 3 percent of its gross domestic product will face (as yet unspecified) financial sanctions, which can be suspended only by a supermajority of other E.U. member nations’ leaders.

The economic consequences of this piece of misapplied fiscal puritanism are frightening enough. If the other E.U. nations agree to it, they will be consigning their citizens to years, maybe decades, of declining living standards. If a country is in recession — and some European nations already are — it will not be able to make job-creating investments. What’s more, a balanced budget is no guarantor of economic health. Spain, for instance, was running budget surpluses right up until its privately funded housing bubble collapsed. When unemployment soared to 20 percent, its budget inevitably plunged into the red. But the changes proposed by Merkel and Sarkozy do nothing to curtail the cycles of speculative boom and bust. By prohibiting governments from enacting Keynesian stimulus legislation, they merely make it all but impossible for a country like Spain to recover.

So why would the European leaders scheduled to vote on the Sarkozy-Merkel straitjacket agree to put it on? Why would they surrender their hitherto sovereign power to the bean counters of Brussels? The answer is that markets leave them little choice. The interest rates they pay to float the bonds they need to stay in business have risen to ruinous heights for the less-productive nations of Southern Europe, and now Standard & Poor’s is threatening to lower the credit ratings — effectively raising borrowing rates — of the very productive nations of Northern Europe. Germany is being threatened with a rate hike not because of its conduct but because it is in the middle of a shaky neighborhood.

Like S&P’s August downgrade of the U.S. credit rating after congressional floundering over the debt ceiling, its threat to downgrade Europe on the eve of the vote to terminate national fiscal sovereignty illustrates a huge power shift in human affairs. As investment banker Roger Altman, a deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, recently noted in the Financial Times, financial markets have become “a global supra-government. They oust entrenched regimes where normal political processes could not do so. They force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes. . . . [L]eaving aside unusable nuclear weapons, they have become the most powerful force on earth.”

Altman rightly attributes this epochal shift to the huge increase in financial assets and the concomitant rise in global financial flows. Financial deregulation and the emergence of mega-banks “expanded the scale of finance” so greatly that it came to dwarf and then dominate the real economy. From 1990 to 2007, the ratio of global financial assets to global GDP rose from 2.5 to 1 to nearly 3.6 to 1. The ratio of financial power to governmental, democratic and popular power can’t be quantified so neatly, but it has increased hugely as well.

The turmoil in Europe is commonly depicted as a fight between Germany, which wants its neighbors to adopt fiscal constraints, and the feckless southern countries. In a larger sense, though, Germany is merely fronting, however unwittingly, for global finance. This is no small irony, considering that Germany has kept its financial sector small and frowns on speculation. Indeed, the one major concession Merkel made in her agreement with Sarkozy was to abandon her position that banks and other investors would have to settle for less than full repayment of their loans when Europe restructures its nations’ economies. The new European compact will require governments and citizens to get by with a lot less, but banks — even when they’ve been the cause of economic collapse, as they were in Ireland and Spain — will emerge unscathed. Public profligacy is punished; private profligacy goes unchecked.

A global supra-government — unelected, unaccountable and unconcerned with the general welfare — has emerged. It has nothing to do with the United Nations; it doesn’t fly around in black helicopters. Gulfstream jets are more like it. And whatever 2011 may be, it’s not a good year for democracy. –The Washington Post

Really!?!

Ragbag Headliners

Free Condom Mail Program Sparks Debate

A state-sponsored program is generating some controversy and debate. California is delivering free condoms to teenagers. Orders are taken online.

The non-profit California Family Health Council has teamed up with the state Department of Public Health to launch this mail-order condom program. It’s being paid for by funds set aside by the Centers for Disease Control.

Teens can easily buy condoms at the store or get them for free at certain health clinics, but now, they have another option. 12-to-19 year olds can now go online at teensource.org and place an order for condoms to come straight to their home, at no cost.

“Research shows barriers such as embarrassment or concerns around confidentiality or affordability are present for teens, so we want to be able to break down those barriers,” said Amy Moy from the California Family Health Council. –Big Health Report 

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If You Think It Would Never Happen Here In The United States, Think Again!

In Pennsylvania, a man dressed up as "Zombie Mohammed" was physically assaulted by a Muslim who took offense, erroneously believing that attacking those who blaspheme Mohammed was perfectly legal in the United States...

But guess who the judge scolded? Not only was the assault victim embarrassed before the court, but the judge also scolded the victim [the Pennsylvania man] telling him that in Muslim societies, he, [the American victim] would have been put to death for offending Mohammed.

Did you read about this in the media? Was it front page news? Of course not! These are stories the mainstream media love to sweep under the rug.

Traditional Values Coalition continues to be the bulldog in Washington, DC taking on Sharia law as it creeps into our nation's capital and communities:

> TVC was there when Hillary Clinton tried to trade our First Amendment rights of freedom of religion for "freedom of worship" at an event supposedly designed to center around free speech and toleration,

> TVC continues to speak nationwide alerting communities about the impact of Sharia law,

>As more and more states begin passing anti-Sharia legislation, TVC has been there every step of the way, and

> we will continue to be your watchdog in Washington and nationwide!

After seeing the impact of Sharia law and Sharia compliance, I know just how dangerous the Sharia threat really is. Sharia has already impacted Western Europe with the advent of "Sharia courts" and the creation of no-go zones for non-Muslims.

Even in Dearborn, Michigan there are issues. Christians have been prevented from preaching the Bible, attacked for wearing Christian shirts and jewelry, and shouted down by Islamists within their community.

Christians are just now realizing how invasive and intrusive this frightening new Islamist front against our constitutional values really has become.

Here in Washington, we are still treated to rallies where it is loudly proclaimed "that the jihadi way is the way to liberate your lands."

Is that the sort of America you want to live in?

Our children and our neighbors should never be afraid of being assaulted by a crazed Islamist who believes a certain outfit -- or even a t-shirt -- is offensive to their faith. Judges who use sharia in place of American laws should be removed or impeached.

Andrea Lafferty
President
Traditional Values Coalition

‘Buy a Gun’ & ‘Keep Your Powder Dry’: Economists Warn of Looming ‘Economic 9/11′

Despite recent reports that the U.S. economy is “recovering” and that there are signs of economic growth, some analysts are less than thrilled with what they see in the near future. In fact, they’re downright scared.

Harry Dent, author of “The Great Crash Ahead,” believes that the global debt bubble is going to burst and when it does, there will be a massive market crash. It should be noted that this is a revision of his earlier prediction that a crash would hit in 2012. He says he modified his forecast because the global central banks have been pumping the markets with so much money, stocks have been given a temporary boost. But he warns that as soon as the short-lived boost comes to an end, the crash will be hard.

“This will be a repeat of 2008-09, only bigger, when it finally hits,” Dent told USA Today.

Gerald Celente, a market analyst at the Trends Research Institute, believes Americans should brace themselves for what he calls an “economic 9/11.” He blames policymakers for their inability to solve the world’s financial and economic woes, according to the USA Today report.

Once the meltdown hits, he says, it will lead to social upheaval, anti-government sentiment, a devalued U.S. dollar, and skyrocketing unemployment.

“Celente won‘t rule out another financial panic that could spark enough fear to cause a run on the nation’s banks by depositors,” USA Today reports. “That risk could cause the government to invoke ‘economic martial law’ and call a ‘bank holiday’ and close banks as it did during the Great Depression.”

“We see some kind of threat of that magnitude,” Celente said in a recent interview.

Robert Prechter, author of “Conquer the Crash,” is being described as “still bearish.” Because he believes there is a frightening amount of similarities between today’s economy and the one preceding the Great Depression, he warns that America should brace for “1930s-style deflation.”

“Prechter predicts that the major U.S. stock indexes, such as the Dow Jones industrials and Standard & Poor’s 500, will plunge below their bear market lows hit in March 2009 during the last financial crisis,” USA Today reports. “The brief recovery will fail as it did in the 1930s, he says.”

What does this mean? Well, if Prechter is correct, stocks stand to lose more than half of their value.

“The economic recovery has been weak, so the next downturn should generate bad news in a big way,” Prechter said in an e-mail interview. “For the third time in a dozen years, the stock market is in a very bearish position.”

But what about all that “positive” economic news we keep hearing about?

Take, for example, recent reports that the markets are rebounding. Many economists have noted that the markets are finally approaching pre-2008 levels.

“Tech stocks in the Nasdaq composite are trading at levels last seen in 2000. Data on auto sales, manufacturing and consumer confidence have been firming. Job creation is also on the rise. The unemployment rate dipped to 8.3% in January, its lowest level in three years,” USA Today argues.

Furthermore, economists and market analysts are updating their forecasts and predicting a hopeful and bright economic future. Some have even bet that the eurozone will stabilize.

So why are Prechter, Celente, and Dent so worried?

“Dent says the combination of aging Baby Boomers exiting their big spending years and a shift toward debt reduction and austerity around the world will cause the economy to suffer another severe leg down, making it more difficult for the government and Federal Reserve to avert a new meltdown,” USA Today reports.

Celente, on the other hand, who has also been warning of economic disaster for years, believes that the national debt and “income inequality” has put the U.S. in a very dangerous place.

He warns that bank runs, brought about by social unrest, will wreak sever economic havoc. He also warns that the current economic crisis could very easily transform into real violence. He believes the markets will be turned upside down by not only the eurozone crisis but also by an increase in oil prices due to the standoff between Iran and the West.

“2012 is when many of the long-simmering socioeconomic and political trends that we have been forecasting and tracking will climax,” Celente wrote in his “Top 12 Trends 2012” newsletter.

“When money stops flowing to the man on the street, blood starts flowing in the street,” he added in an interview.

So, although some are economists are advising investors to jump back into the markets, these three analysts are warning that a different strategy is needed.

“Get out of the way,” Dent advises.

His solution? Buy short-term U.S. Treasury bills and the U.S. dollar, which will benefit from safe-haven cash flows. Forget stocks; they’ll fall in value.

Celente advises investors to buy gold – it won’t lose its purchasing power when the dollar tanks. Also, he says, buy a gun to protect yourself from marauders in search of food and money. He also advises people to plan a getaway to places with “more stable finances and governments.”

Prechter’s advice? Simple: keep your powder dry and buy when the economy starts to get out of hand.

“When things get really scary, as in early 2009, I get bullish,” he said. –The Blaze

 

Founder of ACT Speaks At Anti-Sharia Convention

How Smart Is Your Child?

Last February, while on a cruise, as my usual habit, I tried to get acquainted with as many fellow passengers and learn as much about them as I possibly can. One morning, at breakfast, I happened to sit with a couple and their 10-year-old daughter from Pennsylvania. In the course of the conversation, I happened to ask their daughter, "Did you know what day tomorrow happens to be?"

She replied, "It's President's Day!"

I was impressed for indeed it was, and I thought. . .this is one smart kid.

So, I further asked, "What is President's Day all about?"

She replied, "It is when Obama steps out of the White House, and if he sees his shadow we have one more year of unemployment."

Author Unknown

Birth Control Pills for Men: Coming Soon?

After more than 40 years of research, scientists at the University of Kansas Medical Center may have devised a new form of birth control: a non-hormonal pill for men. Joseph Tash, a reproductive biologist, has been studying the problem since the 1960s. As he told the Kansas State Collegian, “I felt it was one-sided, and if I could do something to develop a male pill that would help the situation I would. I’ve been working on it since.”

In the last decade, Tash has made some exciting breakthroughs. He’s tried a variety of approaches, from preventing sperm from being able to reach the egg, to completely halting the production of sperm. And thanks to H2-gamendazole, a substance derived from an anti-cancer drug, they may have finally found something that works safely and reversibly.

There have been plenty of false starts with hormonal medications for men, which for some reason simply aren’t as effective as they are in women. They were effective for some men, but not others, and researchers still haven’t quite figured out why. There’s also the issue of unintended side effects, since hormones affect multiple systems throughout the body.

Gamendazole, on the other hand, targets only the late stages of sperm production. It’s safer and has fewer side effects than hormonal contraception – potentially making it a better option for couples if the woman experiences side effects from birth control pills, or is unable to take them for medical reasons.

The drug isn’t ready to go on the market yet. It still needs to get FDA approval for human trials. Tash is continuing his research to see if there are any potential side effects, and is getting together the data necessary to demonstrate to the FDA that it doesn’t pose a safety risk. He’s hoping to be able to test the drug in humans within the next few years.

Of course, this raises the question: how will the anti-contraception crowd react when male contraceptive pills hit the shelves? Satirist Stephen Colbert is already prepared for that possibility. Taking a dig at some of the recent anti-abortion legislation being proposed by conservatives across the US, he proposes “transurethral ultrasounds” for all men considering taking the pill. He describes his idea in the video below: -Care2

^^^*^^^

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Face Recognition in a Crowd

If you click on the link below, it shows the photograph of a crowd of thousands during a mass demonstration.

If you put your cursor anywhere over the photo and zoom-in by moving the "resolution bar" up towards the "+" sign at the top of the column on the left side of the screen, you can zero-in on each person's face on the section of the photo that you choose, and the clarity is unbelievable. The face of every single person in the crowd in that section of the photograph can be clearly and perfectly seen!

This kind of camera, which the police and the military have had at their disposal for several years now, was used during the 2009 Obama inauguration, the very first presidential inauguration in which security in Washington, D.C. was really "beefed up".

Today, with this type of surveillance and other forms of electronic monitoring capabilities at the disposal of government authorities, Uncle Sam actually knows more about you than you know about yourself.

So you can say "good-bye" to anonymity and privacy in the U.S.A. [and the world]. . .they are now completely "history"! 

Click here to see how this technology works.

China vs. America

British Muslims Try To Ban Negative Reporting Of Islam

A Muslim activist group with links to the Muslim Brotherhood has asked the British government to restrict the way the British media reports about Muslims and Islam.

The effort to silence criticism of Islam comes amid an ongoing public inquiry into British press standards following a phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World and other British newspapers.

The Leveson Inquiry, established by British Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2011, is currently considering how to increase government oversight of the British media.

But in a move that many worry will result in government regulation of the Internet, Lord Justice Leveson, a British judge who serves as Chairman of the inquiry, now says he wants to include Internet bloggers into any system of press regulation that he proposes.

Observers say the Leveson Inquiry's effort to regulate blogging, combined with the Muslim attempt to ban negative reporting about Islam, poses a clear threat to free speech in Britain.

Appearing before the Leveson Inquiry on January 24, Muslim activist Inayat Bunglawala said the amount of negative stories about Muslims in Britain is "demonizing" Islam and fuelling a "false narrative." He called on the government to do all it can to "ensure a fairer portrayal, a more balanced portrayal of the faith of Islam" in the British media.

In a separate written submission, Bunglawala complained about the "enormous impact of coverage that is proven to be inaccurate, inflammatory, prejudicial and detrimental" to the representation of Islam in Britain.

He continued: "British Muslims as a social group collectively suffer from poor media practices, whether this be the excessive attention granted to fringe Muslim groups, like Muslims Against Crusades, by the media or poor fact-checking prior to publication. Improving media practices and media responsibility on portraying and reporting fairly on Islam and British Muslims, without bias or discrimination or intent to incite anti-Muslim prejudice, is an urgent concern."

His solution: The British media needs a "more robust system of self-regulation…one which mandates the right…to challenge misrepresentations, inaccuracies and false reporting."

Lord Justice Leveson expressed sympathy for Bunglawala's plea and said that any government regulation of the British media would have to extend to the Internet and include blogs, so as to ensure a "level playing field" between print and online media.

Lord Hunt, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body which deals with complaints about the editorial content of newspapers and magazines, recently said he is looking into the idea of regulating bloggers and online publications. According to him, "at the moment, it [the Internet] is like the Wild West out there. We need to appoint a sheriff."

Lord Hunt would invite bloggers on current affairs to voluntarily agree to regulation. They would receive a seal-of-approval rating that they would lose if complaints against them were repeatedly upheld.

This plan would please Muslim activists such as Bunglawala, who say they are offended by Islamophobia but have no problems purveying anti-Semitic rhetoric about Jews, Zionists, Jewish power and the "Tribe of Judah."

Bunglawala, who says he represents mainstream moderate Muslim opinion, is a director of the Muslim Council of Britain, a self-appointed umbrella group that is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. He strongly objects to the use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism" and has described Osama bin Laden as a "freedom fighter for hundreds of Muslims in Britain."

Bunglawala said the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, was "courageous" and living out his "calling on Muslims to fulfill their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere."

In 2010, Bunglawala published an article in the Guardian newspaper entitled, "If We Care about Free Speech, Let these Muslim Speakers In," in which he urged the British government to "demonstrate its commitment to liberal values" by allowing two Muslim "hate preachers" to enter the United Kingdom.

The late Christopher Hitchens described Bunglawala this way: "A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are 'Zionist controlled.'"

As for the BBC, it already self-regulates when it comes to reporting on Islam. Consider a recent 700-word article on the proliferation of honor-based violence in Britain, in which the BBC failed to mention the words "Muslim," "Islamic" or "Islam" even once.

A poll of Muslims in Britain found little support for freedom of speech. Nearly 80% of Muslims in Britain said that the publishers of the Danish cartoons depicting the Muslim Mohammed should be prosecuted; 68% said that those who insult Islam should be prosecuted; and 62% of Muslims in Britain disagree that freedom of speech should be allowed if it insults and offends religious groups.

Meanwhile, the European Union has offered to host the next meeting of the so-called Istanbul Process, an aggressive effort by Muslim countries to make it an international crime to criticize Islam.

The Istanbul Process -- its explicit aim is to enshrine in international law a global ban on all critical scrutiny of Islam and/or Islamic Sharia law -- is being spearheaded by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a bloc of 57 Muslim countries.

Based in Saudi Arabia, the OIC has long pressed the European Union and the United States to impose limits on free speech and expression about Islam.

But the OIC has now redoubled its efforts and is engaged in a determined diplomatic offensive to persuade Western democracies to implement United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution 16/18, which calls on all countries to combat "intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization of … religion and belief." (Analysis of the OIC's war on free speech can be found here and here.)

Resolution 16/18, which was adopted at HRC headquarters in Geneva in March 2011, and was recently backed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the most recent Istanbul Process Conference in Washington in December, is widely viewed as a significant step forward in OIC efforts to advance the international legal concept of defaming Islam. –Stonegate Institute

By Soeren Kern

Foot Note: Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.

Do You Have a Dirty Mind?

Uggg… I hate to be the one to inform you but chances are pretty high that you do. AND, that your beloved noggin is dishin’ out high levels of stinking, putrid thoughts right now.

Am I writing this to make you feel negative, corrupt, tarnished!? If you are like most of us, you can do that pretty darn well on your own (gosh, I am full of the bad news, huh?). So, no, no… I am here to support you in your dirtiness with the intent of getting you to think about not thinking.

Let’s back up for a moment. I hadn’t heard the phrase “dirty mind” in sooo long and there it was… dished out on public radio. Made me think about the wonderful way I used these words when I was a kid. It was a taunt-worthy, melodic statement said with judging disgust to little boys with nasty and impure intentions – ha. Nose crinkling was also a necessary part of this delivery.

As an adult who has been uber conscious of her thoughts for 12 intensely challenging and satisfying years, having a dirty mind now conveys images of a brain littered with jumbled thought and energy. Maybe not as fun as the old version but definitely more deep.

Take this moment to honestly evaluate. Are your days/mind pretty crammed with details about work, errands, expectations, chores and duties? Then, what about past events or longings that are still alive-and-well in your head: hurt feelings with your spouse from last week, contemplating how your life would be different “if…”,  how upset you are that you ate those three Dunkin Donuts yesterday after your workout?!? Oooo, now things are getting messy. All of this thought compounds like trash in a compactor to create a mind that is haplessly influencing our true reality and driving us to do many things we really don’t even want to do. Like gerbils on an endless wheel – not even lucky enough to be driving a Kai.

This makes for a life that passes by so very, very quickly. One without true acknowledgment or pause… creating an existence of drive and disconnection. This disconnection fuels an underlying sense of sadness that many in our world are dealing with right now. It’s like living a “big, whirling blah.”

Let me express this with all of my clarity in tact and in devout seriousness. Every one of us is unique beyond bounds. Sitting and resting without taking on your mind can feel like another task, and yes, not going to sugar coat it, it can be the hardest thing you attempt to do. But, if you take the time… to stop… to sit… the more your life will flow with grace, ease, purpose, creativity, laughter and beauty regardless of the challenges/tasks that face you.

If you could start by simply setting aside five minutes a day with the intention of doing nothing but being with yourself. Sitting with whatever comes. Resisting the urge to get up or to react to a thought or emotion. To just see yourself as this crazy, wonderfully messy, fabulous, flawed human being put on this earth simply to be a part of it and discover whom you truly are. That’s all (ok, yes, I know, that is actually A LOT!). Just forget about those damn donuts!

But, but – start with five and see if it can grow. Your brain can be like a militant ruler – sometimes you gotta over throw it. Give it some room to expand and rest. And, you may soon discover that those five minutes are the most worthwhile, liberating and exciting time of your day. –Care2

Ragbag Headliners

Congress Restructures Unemployment Benefits

The 99ers? Call them the 73ers.

Beginning later this year, the maximum number of weeks the jobless can collect unemployment benefits will be reduced to 73 weeks.

The legislation, which Congress approved Friday, calls for unemployment insurance to be reduced in two stages. States with lower jobless rates will see federal benefits trimmed starting in June. The full cut will go into effect in September.

Lawmakers also revamped parts of the unemployment insurance system, by allowing drug tests of certain recipients and permitting states to use the funds to subsidize employment. The legislation also creates national job-search requirements for everyone collecting either state or federal benefits.

The jobless have been able to collect up to 99 weeks of benefits since November 2009, as part of the nation's unprecedented response to the Great Recession.

While long-term unemployment remains a problem, a growing chorus of experts and lawmakers have called for the easing of the safety net as the economy slowly recovers and the federal government looks to rein in spending. Republicans, in particular, had looked to reduce the number of weeks the jobless could collect benefits and tighten eligibility requirements.

Changes in benefits

The unemployment section of the legislation, which also extended the payroll tax credit, costs $30 billion. Americans have collected a total of $434 billion in unemployment benefits over the past four years, with the federal government footing $185 billion of the tab.

Starting in September, the jobless in states with unemployment rates below 6%, such as North Dakota and Vermont, will get a maximum of 40 weeks of checks. Now they get as much as 60 weeks. Those in the 6% range will get no more than 54 weeks, a reduction of as much as 32 weeks.

Unemployed residents of states around the national average, currently 8.3%, will get a maximum of 63 weeks, which equates to a drop of as much as 36 weeks.

The jobless living in states with unemployment rates above 9% will top out at 73 weeks, down 26 weeks from the current 99-week maximum. These states currently include Florida, California and Nevada.

The change equates to a loss of thousands of dollars for the jobless. In Washington, for instance, where unemployment is just above the national average, a nine-month reduction in checks could total more than $13,650 if the rate is the same in September.

The federal-benefits pullback follows the curtailing of some state benefits last year. At least six states reduced the number of weeks the jobless could receive state benefits from the standard 26.

"The graduated approach will avoid the shocks to the economy and to unemployed workers that there would have been with a sharp cutoff" of federal benefits, said George Wentworth, senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. "It keeps the program functioning as the effective lifeline it needs to be."

New rules

The legislation will also allow states to screen applicants for illegal drugs if they lost their job due to a failed or refused drug test, or if they are applying for a position that requires testing.

States will also be able to apply for waivers enabling them to implement reforms, such as using unemployment insurance funds to subsidize employment. Up to 10 states will be allowed to test Georgia Works-type programs, which place the jobless in training positions while they continue to collect weekly checks.

The legislation also mandates the creation of national job-search requirements for all recipients, in order to eliminate the state-by-state approach currently in existence.

States will also receive $1 billion to assist with skills testing for the long-term unemployed, underemployed and self-employed. The U.S. Department of Labor already provides funding to assess the work-readiness of the unemployed, but the legislation makes it a requirement for those who have been jobless for more than 26 weeks.

Republicans trumpeted the fact that these changes made it into the final bill. But President Obama had also called for several of these adjustments in his American Jobs Act proposal last September. –CNN Money

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Hepatitis C Now Kills More Americans Than HIV

Deaths from hepatitis C have increased steadily in the United States in recent years, in part because many people don’t know they have disease, a new government report says.

More Americans now die of hepatitis C than from HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, according to 1999-2007 data reviewed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And most of those dying are middle-aged.

“These data underscore the urgent need to address the health threat posed by chronic hepatitis B and C in the United States,” said investigator Dr. Scott Holmberg, chief of the Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch in CDC’s Division of Viral Hepatitis.

About 3.2 million Americans are infected with hepatitis C, a major cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis, the CDC authors said. An estimated one-half to three-quarters of infected adults are unaware they have the disease, which progresses slowly. –Big Health Report

The Life Report: James Opie

The following Life Report was submitted in response to my column of Oct. 28, in which I asked readers over 70 to write autobiographical essays evaluating their own lives.

My father’s small business was founded in November of 1929, a month after the stock market crashed, and my parents were both marked by the Great Depression.  I remember well the respect my parents exercised toward older people, their church, and their bank.  Sharing a life of continual hard work and thrift, my parents also shared lighter moments with many friends, who entertained each other in their homes, at little cost.  Our family went out to restaurants two or three times a year, at most.  My father was an extraordinarily hard working and versatile businessman who rolled up his sleeves to work on every piece of equipment in his small plant.  I never met, and will surely never meet, anyone who worked harder to amass a million dollars than my father.

Just as young people now overestimate the ranges of possibilities open to them, my father underestimated the range of possibilities open to my generation.  He saw a narrow gate at the same time the American gate was growing wider.  Born in the late 1930s and early 1940s and taught to “buckle down” and “keep your nose clean,” by the 1960s my generation had the winds of prosperity to its back.  A young person could experiment, flounder, stray off-track, and still return to an orderly life.  While many stuck to the straight-and the-narrow, that was but one option.

In 1962 I graduated from a state university in Ohio without any notion of what to do for a living.  Having married just out of college—at that time a pregnant girlfriend spelled “marriage,”—I was surprised when a rural high school near my university was willing to hire me as a teacher.  My young wife turned out to not be pregnant after all, and a walloping shock struck a year later when she left to visit her parents for a few days, never to return.  Knowing I had failed dismally as a husband but not understanding how, this blow and responses to it gradually stirred new feelings and interests.  Inner realignments began touching an inarticulate quality of search.

While teaching in the rural high school, I came to see that even the dullest students knew more than I did about life.  Most could subsisted through a barren economy by growing and harvesting crops, fixing farm equipment with bailing wire, raising and slaughtering animals, and by being good neighbors.  Although I liked the students and probably did relatively little harm, I was a terrible teacher.  Moreover, next to most of the students, I knew nothing.

After two years in that high school, single again, restless and unwilling to pretend to “teach” for another year, I drove to California, to a place someone extolled once over a glass of beer: Big Sur.  How appealing it sounded and how extraordinary it was.  A summer there awakened me to the infinite depths of nature, and to pot.

The Vietnam war was in full swing by that time and, needing to avoid the draft, in the fall of 1964 I enrolled in graduate school in the same university in Ohio from which I had graduated.  This began a period of great confusion—“What am I doing here?  What is anyone doing?  Why do we exist?”  A series of crises involving the law, a broken ethical yard-stick, and ongoing inner mayhem led to a siege of sleeping sixteen and eighteen hours a day—surely “clinical depression”—that only lifted with an inner experience proving beyond doubt that something inside us knows more than we do.*   A week later, on the heels of this revelation, I took LSD for the first time, experiencing inner and outer dimensions beyond words and concepts.  Even “God” was too small a word.

I managed to get through the spring term before returning to the place that made the most sense to me, Big Sur, where I participated in the memorable summer of 1965.  What sublime, unearthly realizations, and earthly dissolutions, awaited me along the coast and among the redwoods.  For months I stayed stoned on pot, sleeping in a sleeping bag in the forest, and trying to re-evoke my first experiences under LSD.

Also, I tried to write.

My stable upbringing provided unseen moorings to which I began to turn in 1966.  Renting a thirty-five dollar per month one-room house in Sand City, California, just north of Monterey, I wrote, walked among sand dunes, and began reading the writings of P. D. Ouspensky and G. I. Gurdjieff.  Called by my draft board for a physical exam and likely induction into the Army, once inside the induction center I handed leaflets I had written, questioning our engagement in this war, before being stopped.  The commanding officer and I negotiated an agreement leading to a handwritten note of his, which I still possess:  “I will not permit you to hand out your leaflets in this building!”

(What an amazing nation, in which a young “nobody” can confront military power in this way.)

With nothing publishable to show for writing efforts, in 1967 I moved to the Bay Area and began substitute teaching in inner city schools in Oakland.  For several weeks, I sat in a high school hallway, by my presence keeping students from breaking windows in classrooms facing the hallways.  Soon I was hired full-time in a junior high school where, during off hours, I continued to read books by and about Gurdjieff.  Influenced by his autobiography, Meetings with Remarkable Men, Islamic architecture and Oriental rugs began to interest me and in the summer of 1970 my second wife and I traveled to Iran, attracted by the mosques of Tabriz, Isfahan and Shiraz.

Returning from that trip, weeks later all the rugs we had purchased were stolen from our apartment and I immediately wrote to a dealer in Shiraz, asking if he might help me replace them.  He surprised me with bundles of rugs sent through the mails, trusting me to pay for the goods after they sold.  This exceptional act of trust placed me on the fringes of the Oriental rug business and by 1973, with extremely little money, I was making annual buying trips to both Iran and Afghanistan.

By 1974, my second wife and I had a “family.” with two wonderful children, but, we agreed, not a workable marriage.  An amiable divorce was arranged.

In 1982 I published my first book, Tribal Rugs of Southern Persia.  By that time a retail rug store in Portland, Oregon provided a bare living, along with opportunities to learn about the merchandise I bought and sold, and the cultures producing these objects. Slowly, funds needed to operate a business of this nature began to accumulate.

My father and I, having suffered a tense and distant relationship for many years, came together in a surprising way during the final weeks of his life, in 1984.  His final words to me were amazing:  “Jim, have fun.”

In the decades since my father’s final breath I discovered that relationships do not end with death.  Love for him grows in me still.

By 1980 a third failed marriage led to self-confrontations and the need to understand this pattern, with help from a therapist.  Ongoing engagements with the Gurdjieff teaching aided this process, given Gurdjieff’s emphasis on incrementally strengthening the capacity to face the truth about oneself.  (There is so much we resist seeing.)

My business struggled through years of preoccupation with a line of study that, while fascinating, was never remunerative.  I invested great amounts of time and travel money in tracing the origin of the oldest tribal rug motifs and—seeing this period from another perspective—trying to make myself “famous.”

In 1991 a publisher in London and I co-published my second book, Tribal Rugs, which shared conclusions from my study within broader thematic frameworks.  (This book was translated into three other languages.)  While years of research and writing nearly broke me, the book was an exceptional success.  Within several years I invested several hundred thousand dollars earned from publishing profits in new qualities of hand-woven rug merchandise then coming onto the market.  (Many younger rug dealers worked to encourage a return to the use of vegetable-dyed yarns in rug weaving.  Renewed standards of quality in our field, and highly saleable merchandise, developed.)

How many fourth marriages thrive?  In 1988 I met a wonderful woman and we married in 1991.  Succeeding years have been prosperous, creative, and happy.  A solid home life may not be absolutely essential for a rewarding life, but this marriage has made a tremendous difference for me.  My fifth and sixths decades have been the most fruitful of my life, and the seventh begins well.

How could such an ordinary person, who toyed with ruining his life, be so very fortunate?  Life is full of meaning, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.  Inner doors that remained shut for decades now appear to be opening.  My wife keeps me on an exercise routine and at 72 I am in good health, enjoying shared interests in a community of people who also respond to life’s deepest inner challenges.  Recently I began work on my first novel with a clearer goal than ever: to understand more as I encourage others to search for unexpected resources within their own natures. -By David Brooks-The New York Times