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How to Get Rich in 2012 Starting with Zero Cash

2012-02-08T08:36:00.000-08:00

How to Get Rich in 2012

There's a practically 'forbidden' investment that could make you a boatload of cash in the coming year. In fact, it's not uncommon to see triple-digit gains in a single day with these investments. Yet few people know how to access them or that they even exist. Although this opportunity isn't for everyone – those who take advantage of it could make an absolute killing in 2012.

Click here to watch this 'how to' video.
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It's Not Too Late to Get Into This Huge 2012 Trade in Resource Stocks

2012-02-08T08:32:00.001-08:00

By Matt Badiali, editor, S&A Resource Report

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

It's not too late… but if you want to get on-board one of biggest money-making trades of 2012, you need to act soon.

If you don't take action, you could miss out on 50%-100% gains this year.

Over the past three months or so, my colleague Steve Sjuggerud and I have been writing about the "bad to less bad" opportunity setting up in natural resource stocks… the companies that mine things like copper, fertilizer, gold, silver, coal, and iron ore.

Regular DailyWealth readers know this sector of the market is capable of experiencing huge booms and busts. Stay out of the busts, get in early on the booms, and you can easily make 50%-100% in a year with these companies.

As I highlighted last month, resource stocks busted in 2011. They had enjoyed a big run higher in 2010. But when folks got scared of holding stocks and commodities last year (due to fears of the European debt crisis and the ripple effects it would have on the rest of the world), they dumped resource stocks… Major "trophy" stocks like Freeport-McMoRan (copper) and Vale (iron ore) lost 30%-50% of their values in just months. Smaller resource stocks lost even more.

As Steve and I expected, resource stocks have put in a bottom… and have staged a big rally. For example, Freeport is up 26% since Steve ran this essay.

While resource stocks are likely to take a short-term breather after this big surge, there's good reason to expect them to keep rising over the course of 2012.

As my colleague Porter Stansberry recently noted, Europe is now printing money in order to stave off its debt crisis. The U.S. Federal Reserve has an ultra-stimulative interest rate policy in place right now. These efforts should "goose" the economy… which will drive up the prices of natural resources. That's a big tailwind for companies like Freeport.

Since Freeport and its sector colleagues have climbed so much in such a short time, it's only reasonable to expect a small correction. That's just how the market works. When that correction arrives, use it as a buying opportunity… and let the coming natural resource "boom" do the rest.

Good investing,

Matt Badiali

Further Reading:

In addition to Freeport and Vale, Matt believes two other resource stocks are headed higher. "These are among the world's greatest 'boom and bust' sectors," he writes. And shares "have the potential to rally 50% or 100% in the coming year." Read more here: How to Risk a Little and Potentially Win A LOT in the Resource Market.

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2012-02-02T07:05:00.000-08:00

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Gingrich under fire from conservative media

2012-01-27T06:46:00.000-08:00

by Beth Fouhy

NEW YORK — Forget the so-called liberal media. Right now Newt Gingrich's most ardent critics are conservative pundits and columnists, many of whom have launched aggressive campaigns to discredit him and trip up his run for the Republican nomination.

This crew has largely been lukewarm about Gingrich's chief rival, Mitt Romney, considering him too moderate. But their open criticism of Gingrich is evidence that for all their misgivings about the former Massachusetts governor, they see him as a much stronger contender against President Barack Obama.
To hear columnists Ann Coulter and Charles Krauthammer and the conservative media aggregator Matt Drudge tell it, Gingrich is an inconsistent conservative who didn't fully support President Ronald Reagan and whose undisciplined nature mirrored that of President Bill Clinton, who was Gingrich's Democratic adversary in the 1990s.
The conservative media hits against Gingrich have come with force just as the GOP establishment seems to be rallying around Romney in earnest, perhaps out of fear that Gingrich may end up winning the nomination.
On Thursday, Romney's campaign released a scathing open letter from the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, who served as Senate Republican leader when Gingrich presided over the House. In the letter, Dole glowingly endorses Romney and repudiates Gingrich.
"If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices," Dole wrote. "Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway."
Jacob Heilbrunn, in the conservative-leaning magazine The National Interest, mused that Gingrich "is essentially bragging that his prime credential to become president is that he's willing to debate for hours and bring a knuckle-duster. This is evidence of his sober judgment? This is supposed to induce swing voters to back him?"
Conservative radio titan Rush Limbaugh also weighed in, seemingly to defend Gingrich from some of the attacks. But, in doing so, he also vividly outlined many of the critiques against Gingrich from other conservatives.
Conservatives "are raising questions here about Newt and his mendacity, his forthrightness — it's incredible," Limbaugh marveled on his show Thursday.
Gingrich stormed to a decisive win over Romney in the South Carolina primary last week fueled in part by two well-timed attacks on the news media. Both came during nationally televised debates, guaranteeing maximum exposure.
In a CNN debate, Gingrich pushed back at anchor John King when King questioned him about an interview Gingrich's second wife, Marianne, had given ABC News. In the interview, Marianne Gingrich suggested her husband had asked her for an open marriage so he could carry on with a mistress, Callista Bisek, now his third wife.
"I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that," Gingrich said. "I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans."
The audience rose in a standing ovation.
Gingrich also told King that his campaign had given ABC News the names of friends who would vouch for him but that the network had rejected the offer. On Wednesday, a Gingrich spokesman acknowledged that the claim was a mistake and that the campaign had offered only Gingrich's two adult daughters to defend him.
Gingrich drew raves at another Fox News debate before the South Carolina primary when asked about his oft-stated assertion that Obama is a "food stamp president." He angrily denied the statement had anything to do with race.
Mark Jurkowitz of the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism said Gingrich had tapped into longstanding resentment of many conservatives against mainstream news outlets.
"Running against the elite media — we've seen now for a good 30 years — certainly has resonance among Republican base voters. In conservative circles, there's been the perception that the media are tilted against them," Jurkowitz said.
Brent Bozell, founder of the conservative Media Research Center, announced Thursday that his group was set to spend $5 million on an advertising campaign to expose media bias in the 2012 election.
"You have a left-leaning media that's out of control. You've got to corral them," Bozell said in a news briefing, promising radio ads, billboards and an "unprecedented" effort in social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.
Gingrich, for his part, promised in his South Carolina victory speech to keep up his attacks on the media. But the hits he took this week while campaigning in Florida came from other conservatives.
By Thursday, Gingrich was disparaging the Commission on Presidential Debates, suggesting he might not participate in debates the commission organizes if he becomes the Republican nominee.
"We've had enough of newsmen deciding what the topics would be," Gingrich told supporters in Jacksonville, many of whom waved "Don't Believe the Liberal Media" signs.
Later, Gingrich was asked about the attacks from conservative pundits, particularly from the American Spectator's Emmett Tyrell, who wrote that Gingrich has had "private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out."
Gingrich tried to turn such criticisms to his advantage, suggesting they represent "establishment" thinking.
"Tyrrell has to write whatever Tyrrell wants to write," Gingrich said. "There's the Washington establishment sitting around in a frenzy, having coffee, lunch and cocktail hour talking about, `How do we stop Gingrich?'"
While Gingrich relishes bashing the media "elite" in public, he is friendly with the reporters who cover his campaign and makes himself available for media questions daily on the campaign trail. He seems to relish the back-and-forth with journalists, sometimes labeling questions he dislikes "bizarre."
At a campaign stop in South Carolina, he wished a reporter covering his campaign a happy birthday, and he typically stops by to chat with reporters at dinner after a day of campaigning.
___
Associated Press writers Brian Bakst in Jacksonville, Fla., and Shannon McCaffrey in Atlanta contributed to this report.
___
Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bfouhy

Tell Congress: Only people are people. End Citizens United Supreme Court Decision

2012-01-25T20:24:00.000-08:00

Tell Congress: Only people are people.

We deserve a country where our elected officials are not bought and paid for by big corporations.
But the Citizens United vs. FEC Supreme Court decision overturned over a century of precedent and opened the floodgates for unlimited amounts of corporate money to flow into our political system.
Shockingly, the court came to this decision based on the notion that a corporation is legally a "person" entitled to First Amendment rights, and by equating a corporation's right to spend unlimited amounts of money influencing an election with our right to free speech.
Tell your senators and member of Congress to support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and end corporate personhood.
Even before the Citizens United decision, we too often saw the interests of Main Street subverted in favor of the interests of Wall Street.
But with the Citizens United decision now the law of the land, large corporations have the power to spend unlimited amounts of money from their general treasuries to buy elections.
To put things in perspective, the roughly $745 million Barack Obama raised to run for President in the 2008 election cycle (which was the most money raised by any candidate ever to run for office in the U.S.) is dwarfed by the $45 billion in profits a single company (ExxonMobil) made in 2008.
What's more, Citizen United opened loopholes that allow corporations to hide their campaign expenditures by laundering the money through non-profit advocacy organizations.
Tell your senators and member of Congress to support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and end corporate personhood.
Unfortunately, because Congress cannot pass a law that supersedes a Supreme Court ruling, it may take a constitutional amendment to undo the worst aspects of the Citizens United decision and end corporate personhood.
Clearly, the bar to successfully amending the Constitution is very high. But with 85% of the public opposed to the Citizens United decision, there is a potential for a broad coalition of Democrats, Republicans and Independents who all want to restore our democracy.
And let's remember, the stakes are too high to allow inaction on this issue. It's no exaggeration to say that the Citizens United decision fundamentally threatens the integrity of our democracy.
We need a government of, for and by the people. And sadly, we might need to work really hard to re-establish the common sense and democratic view that only people are people, not corporations.
Your senators and member of Congress need to hear from you, regardless of where they stand on this issue. We need to show them that their constituents are part of a broad movement demanding action -- not only to convince them that overturning Citizens United is the right thing to do, but also that it's possible.
Today, take a step to be part of that movement.
Tell your senators and member of Congress to support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and end corporate personhood.

STOP SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) !

2012-01-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

... or else you could find many of the sites you use on a regular basis permanently closed to you. And maybe find your sites closed to many of your regular visitors.

The Basics

SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) is a bill currently in the US Congress that would allow the US Government to add sites to a blacklist, preventing anyone in the United States from accessing them. The stated goal is to limit access to pirate ("warez") sites, and sites that sell counterfeit physical products. Fake Rolexes, designer clothes, prescription drugs, etc.

The intent of the bill is something we strongly support. Piracy affects those of us in the Warrior group more than most, as a lot of us make our livings selling our own intellectual property. Our membership includes tens of thousands of authors, musicians, graphic designers, photographers, programmers, copywriters, videographers, public speakers and others, from nearly every creative field.

We feel the impact of digital thievery first hand.

This bill is not the way to handle the problem. It is a disaster in the making.

It would damage the Internet's basic security infrastructure, possibly require ISPs to monitor every site you visit, and make the operation of any website that contains user-generated content (blogs, forums, digital marketplaces, and social media sites) too risky for investors and new developers.

Wikipedia has posted a good basic summary of the potential problems. Read it. It is frightening. And you need to be scared.

How It Would Work

Here's the simple version: If the Justice Department or any copyright holder accused a site of "encouraging or facilitating" piracy, the government could order that site removed from US-based search engines and ad networks, forbid payment processors from handling transactions for them, and require ISPs to block access to those sites by their customers.

Let's consider how that might apply to this forum... There are currently over 335,000 pages on this site. If just one of those pages contained a single post promoting an illegal download, or one WSO seller has used graphics or code from a copyrighted product without permission, or we miss just one Chinese spam for counterfeit goods, we could be blocked.

Would it matter that we actively look for and delete those posts? Maybe, but only after the process had begun. And we'd probably never know about it until the block was in place.

The amount of time that it would take to correct such an unjustified blocking would cause permanent damage to any interactive site. Shifting the membership away from a destination for that long nearly guarantees the site would never recover.

Along with that, there is no requirement that payment processors re-accept a site that has been blocked this way. You know how these guys work: They don't care if the site is eventually found innocent. They'd label it as "high risk," and never deal with it again. And they'd probably start creating whole new categories to lock out, just to avoid the headaches.

"You let visitors post on your site? Sorry. We don't accept interactive services in our network."

And, unless the ISPs are working from a centralized and regularly updated database, it's unlikely most of them would ever remove the blocks once they were in place.

Mistakes would almost certainly be fatal to the target sites. We're talking about legitimate sites that provide real value for their visitors and real incomes for their operators and their families.

It is unclear at this point whether the legislation would affect sites based in the US, or if it applies only to "foreign" sites. Even if it doesn't start out applying to sites hosted in the United States, do you really think it will stay limited to "offshore sites" for long?

And how do we justify sitting by while our friends around the world are subjected to this potential for arbitrary blocking within the US?

Don't Think This Will Affect You?

Maybe you aren't involved in a market where this would seem to matter, and you're not interested in the principle of the thing. Consider a few possible examples that might make the reach of this Congressional folly clearer.

Any blogs you like? Keep in mind how many of them are hacked every day. One of the main activities for those hackers is pointing the victim sites to online shops selling illegal drugs.

*POOF*

Gone.

Hang out at any scrapbooking sites? A lot of them let the members share their original page themes and other digital scrapbooking elements. If one clueless designer uses graphics from a catalog or other copyrighted source, your fun little hobby community could be taken away from you. And the site owner could lose their income.

Use shareware or freeware? Legitimate software libraries, like CNet's, would be prime targets. After all, it only takes one mistake.

Do you surf using proxies to protect your privacy? Forget that. It's only a matter of time before that's marked as a refuge for pirates and they're blocked.

Have you ever tried to keep track of which sites are pirating your products? If you live in the US, you can forget that, too. Once they hit the blocklist, you can't see them. Which means you can't take any action to reduce the damage.

That's just the tip of the virtual iceberg.

The real damage will begin when the pirates implement new systems for distributing their warez. Evading a domain-based list is child's play for experienced people, and pirates really don't care if it's illegal. If they did, they wouldn't be pirates.

And it won't just be the traditional pirates who join in. Anyone who's studied history knows that prohibition just romanticizes the suppliers and users, and creates networks dedicated to serving that "heroic" image.

And, of course, there's the problem of retribution. If the US starts arbitrarily blocking access to foreign sites from within our country, how long do you think it will be before other countries develop similar approaches to advancing their political goals, and block their citizens from accessing sites they don't deem suitable?

At that point, it isn't even nominally about piracy any more. It's about politics, pure and simple. If you doubt the temptation, consider how quickly nations in the Middle East tried to block their citizens from accessing western social networks at the first sign of unrest over the past few years.

Think about how this would look to the world after all our comments about the Chinese "Great Firewall."

If you believe our bureaucrats would be careful enough to only list sites that existed for the sole purpose of piracy, remember: These are the same bureaucrats who listed a then-sitting US Senator (the late Edward Kennedy, of MA) on our anti-terrorist "no fly" list.

What's your recourse if someone accuses you of "encouraging or facilitating" piracy and you're found to be innocent? Good luck with that. The only way you could get any satisfaction there would be if you could prove they wilfully and knowingly made false allegations.

Ask your lawyer what the chances are of proving that. Be prepared from them to laugh and say "Zero."

This is the single most dangerous piece of legislation to regulate the Internet that has ever had any real chance of becoming law in the US.

What Can You Do?

If you live in the US, contact your Senators and Representatives and encourage them to vote against SOPA (H.R. 3621) and PIPA, the Senate version (S. 968).

When you contact them, be calm, clear, and concise. Tell them that you support the goal but oppose the legislation, because of the damage it will do to small businesses and the security of the Internet in general.

If you feel the need to cite a source for them, point them to the Wikipedia article, which lists a number of US government studies and reports that show just how much damage the legislation could do.

And be clear that you don't want to see an edited version of the bill passed. This thing is not just poorly implemented. The concept itself is flawed and dangerous.

Emails count a little. Phone calls and faxes count more. A short, clear printed letter mailed to them counts the most.

If you're contacting your representative, mention H.R. 3621 (SOPA). If it's your Senators, the bill number to mention is S. 968 (PIPA).

You can find the contact information for both Senators and Representatives at Contacting the Congress. Just select your state, type in your zip code, and click the "Submit It" button.

When contacting them, be sure to either mention your name and address to the person you speak with on the phone or include it in your correspondence. They want to know you're actually one of their constituents.

Remember to be polite, clear, and brief. These folks are trying to protect your interests. Most of them simply don't understand the potential problems the bill would create.

Calling them, or typing a brief letter and putting a stamp on it, will probably take less time than you were about to spend in this forum today. And it could make a huge difference.

If every US citizen who reads this takes that few minutes' worth of action, we can generate a ton of pressure against the bill. If we all just leave it to everyone else, we're likely to be stuck with this as law, along with all the problems it brings.

It's up to you. Choose wisely.

AFGE Week In Review January 13,2012

2012-01-13T22:04:00.000-08:00

Jan. 13, 2012

AFGE President John Gage Responds to Obama’s Agency Consolidation Plan: AFGE National President John Gage today issued the following statement in response to President Barack Obama’s proposed consolidation of business and trade agencies:
“I welcome President Obama’s decision to reinstate the Small Business Administration’s status as a Cabinet-level agency – a position it held during the Clinton administration. This signifies the president’s confidence in Administrator Karen Mills and the thousands of hard-working federal employees who serve America’s small business owners.

AFGE represents employees at four of the trade- and commerce-related agencies and offices that I understand would be consolidated under the Obama administration’s plan. We represent 2,200 employees at SBA, nearly a hundred each at the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and about two dozen at the Trade and Development Agency.

We are eager to review the details of the president’s consolidation plan and determine how it will impact the employees we represent and the services we deliver to the American people. I do take issue, however, with the notion that most of government is inefficient and that cutting federal workers will somehow solve the problem. Federal employees and supervisors are only carrying out the work that has been created by Congress and elected officials, who have mandated these various layers of bureaucracy largely for political gains.”
AFGE President John Gage Responds to Proposed 0.5% Raise: AFGE National President John Gage has issued the following statement in response to the Obama administration’s proposed 0.5% federal employee pay raise for 2013:
“After freezing federal employee’s salaries for two years, the Obama administration is proposing a miniscule half-percentage point increase in their wages next year. It’s less than half of the 1.2% nationwide adjustment employees are entitled to next year under the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act, which was signed into law by the first President Bush in 1990. The proposal also effectively freezes locality pay for another year. The fact is, this increase is well below the rate of inflation of 3.6%, and will be wiped out by higher costs for health care, groceries and other essential needs.

“Federal employees aren’t overpaid government bureaucrats. They are the aircraft mechanics and commissary workers at local military bases, the nurses at the local VA hospital, the men and women guarding our borders and the claims representatives who process Social Security and disability benefits. Especially in these tough economic times, we must ensure that all workers are provided with fair and meaningful wage increases to prevent them from falling further behind. I urge Congress to approve a meaningful pay raise that will allow these employees to provide for their families.

“Having said that, we’re hopeful that this is a positive step that spells an end to the barrage of attacks on pay and benefits for working people and serves as an acknowledgement that attacking the jobs we have won’t create the new jobs we need.”

AFGE Urges DoD to Shift Budget-Cutting Focus to Contractors: AFGE is urging the Defense Department to take a balanced approach to spending reductions that subjects private contractors to the same cost-cutting scrutiny that has already been placed upon the civilian workforce. The Pentagon has pledged to cut $450 billion in spending during the next decade. In addition, the department may have to cut another $500 billion during the next decade to comply with a sequestration mandate. DoD has arbitrarily capped the civilian workforce at 2010 levels, which means cutting tens of thousands of civilian positions. It is also pursuing cuts in military retirement pay and other employee benefits. At the same time, defense spending on service contractors is growing at an alarming rate. The department spent $121 billion on service contracts in fiscal 2010, nearly twice as much as originally budgeted, according to an inventory of service contracts cited in a recent letter from several members of Congress on the House Appropriations Committee to the Pentagon.

“We understand that the law requires sacrifices, but it is wrong for civilian workers to shoulder the entire burden,” AFGE National President John Gage said. “Tens of thousands of civilian jobs are slated for elimination, despite strong evidence that having civilians perform these jobs is the most cost effective strategy. Meanwhile, the department continues to increase spending on contractors, even though they are more costly and less accountable. There is no budgetary or strategic rationale for excluding DoD’s vast contractor ‘shadow workforce’ from the cost-cutting measures that the military and civilian workforces are facing.”

“The main issue this country is facing is a lack of jobs. Cutting military and civilian jobs and hacking away at their benefits hurts the economy and does nothing to spur job creation,” Gage added.

Inmates Assault BOP Officers in Seattle, Coleman: AFGE’s Council of Prison Locals (CPL) today reiterated its call for more resources and manpower following two inmate assaults on officers the first week of the new year. The first incident occurred Jan. 3 at the Federal Detention Center – SeaTac in Seattle, Wash., when two inmates attacked and assaulted a correctional officer who was working alone during morning rounds. The officer, an Iraq war veteran, has been hospitalization for treatment. The FBI is investigating the incident. The assault in Seattle was followed up by another incident days later at the United States Penitentiary – Coleman in Florida where two correctional officers were assaulted by inmates inside the facility. CPL pointed to BOP’s inadequate staffing and funding levels as a major reason for the uptick in violence throughout the nation’s prison system.

“We’re outraged to learn of more assaults against staff,” said CPL President Dale Deshotel. “Sadly, these types of attacks – one where a staff member is unarmed and frequently working alone – happen far too often throughout the federal prison system. This is a safety issue and must be addressed immediately.”

BOP correctional officers and other staff members inside federal prisons are unarmed, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by inmates with homemade weapons. For years, AFGE and CPL have fought not only for additional staffing and funding at BOP but also for protective equipment such as stab-resistant vests. The need for additional resources can be seen with the countless violent outbreaks occurring at BOP facilities across the country. A correctional officer can be responsible for supervising as many as 150 inmates at once and is unarmed inside the facility. Low staffing levels and a more aggressive inmate population have led to a spike in violence – something AFGE says cannot continue.

AFGE Fights Proposed Closure of Historic Hot Springs VA Hospital: AFGE strongly objects to the proposed closing of the historic Hot Springs, South Dakota VA Medical Center. The Department of Veterans Affairs has proposed shuttering this facility, which is part of the Black Hill Health Care System, covering South Dakota, and portions of Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. The dismantling of this facility would force veterans to attend other facilities in the network that are between 50 and 100 miles away or be pushed to private sector health care centers that may lack the expertise in treating veterans.

“Hot Springs is a veterans’ town and our VA facility has served America’s heroes for more than 100 years. The proposal by the agency to close the doors of this veterans’ care center, on top of its already diminished capacities, is an outrage,” said Patrick Russell, president of AFGE Local 1539. “This has become a pattern with the VA, where we are finding the agency systematically closing its in-patient care facilities, in order to solely operate outpatient clinics and be in the business of managing contracts with the private sector. This is no way to care for our nation’s vets.”

AFGE members, the American Legion, veterans, community members and other supporters have mobilized grassroots efforts in Hot Springs to petition the agency to keep the facility open to area veterans. The historic facility has been the ideal location to treat those with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health conditions, given its small town atmosphere.

Obama Recess Appoints Labor Board: President Barack Obama has recess-appointed Sharon Block, Terence Flynn, and Richard Griffin to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), bypassing the approval of right-wing lawmakers in the Senate who would likely stall the nominations as they previously did with other nominations. The three NLRB appointees will allow the five-member board to continue on with a quorum after board member Craig Becker’s term came to an end last week. The independent labor board conducts union elections and investigates unfair labor practices.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said, “We commend the President for exercising his constitutional authority to ensure that crucially important agencies protecting workers and consumers are not shut down by obstructionism. Working families and consumers should not pay the price for political ploys that have repeatedly undercut the enforcement of rules against Wall Street abuses and the rights of working people.”
Obama’s recess appointments infuriated right-wing lawmakers despite the fact that President George W. Bush made a total of 171 recess appointments and President Obama had made only 28 recess appointments as of December 8, 2011, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Obama Taps OMB Chief to Become White House Chief of Staff: Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew has been tapped by President Barack Obama to become the White House chief of staff. Lew, who was Bill Clinton’s OMB chief, will replace Bill Daley, former banker and Clinton’s commerce secretary, at the end of this month.
AFGE Wins Ground Rules Agreement, Ready to Move Forward with Contract Negotiations at TSA: AFGE is one step closer to bringing home a collective bargaining agreement for 44,000 TSA officers after the union on Wednesday won an agreement with TSA on ground rules that govern the actual contract negotiations.
AFGE and TSA negotiators signed the ground rules agreement at about 5:40 p.m. on Jan. 11, paving the way for contract negotiations. This was a major step forward after TSA had been reluctant to adopt standard ground rules and practices used across the government. AFGE insisted that TSA do the right thing and our persistence paid off when management finally agreed to our proposals. For example, management originally refused to provide AFGE with advance notice of changes to work rules subject to bargaining, saying they couldn’t ensure they would always be able to do that. Other agencies, of course, readily agree to such a provision and comply without difficulty. But not TSA. After endless debate over how quickly they could provide such notice, they finally agreed to give notice “as soon as practicable.” It may seem like a small point, but it should give TSOs a sense of why TSA foot-dragging delayed the ground rules.

TSA Relents on Radiation, AFGE Proposes Joint Committee to Provide Dosimeters: After years of pressure from AFGE, TSA management finally relents and makes plans for issuing radiation dosimeters for TSA officers. Members around the country have expressed concerns for years about the level of radiation they are exposed to from screening equipment. The European Union recently banned certain types of scanners due to radiation concerns. Thanks to AFGE’s advocacy about this issue from the beginning, we will finally be able to give the officers what they really need – concrete information on the level of radiation exposure they are experiencing at work.
AFGE is also proposing a joint union-management committee to implement TSA’s new radiation monitoring program following the agency’s announcement of its plan to purchase personal and area dosimeters to be used at certain federalized airports. Specifically, TSA is seeking vendors who can provide individual and area dosimeters as part of the agency’s ongoing study to detect ionizing radiation and assess risk to employee health and safety. It will be a two-year contract worth $150,000.

“We would like to see TSA implement a comprehensive radiation safety and monitoring program to provide dosimeters to assess employee exposure over time as well as provide training and education on radiation and its possible health effects,” said AFGE President John Gage in a Jan. 11 letter to TSA Administrator John Pistole.

Application Period Now Open for AFGE’s JNS Family Scholarship: Each January, AFGE members and their dependents are eligible to apply for the John N. Sturdivant (JNS) Family Scholarship. This scholarship, administered by the Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund (FEEA), offers twenty five awards in the amount of $2,000 each on a yearly basis.
Applicants must be enrolled or plan to enroll in an accredited college or university in a course of study that will lead to a two-year, four-year or graduate degree and have at least a 3.0 grade point average on a 4.0 scale. Applications are accepted from January - March of each year and completed application packages must be postmarked no later than March 30, 2012. For other requirements and to access the JNS Family Scholarship Application Form, click here. Please note that those attending the National Labor College will not qualify for the JNS Family Scholarship as AFGE offers a separate scholarship program for this institution.

For more information, contact Carolyn Williams at 202.639.6406 or visit the AFGE Education website at http://education.afge.org.

AFL-CIO to Host Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Observance in Detroit: Hundreds of labor and civil right activists are expected to gather at the AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Observance and National Conference to honor Dr. King’s legacy in Detroit, Michigan on Jan. 12-16. Featured speakers and awardees include Rep. Hansen Clarke, Rep. John Conyers, national radio host Joe Madison, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, UAW Pres. Bob King, U.S Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker. A series of workshops will be provided on important issues like voting rights, protecting public education, and organizing for job-creating legislation. Click here for more information.

Tweet of the Week: “Measured in dollars, fuel was America's top export in 2011. We're selling it because the price is good: an avg. $95 a barrel last year ~ WestWingReport

Brangelina Meets Obama: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt stopped by the White House Wednesday to chat with the president.

Inside Government: Tune in now to AFGE´s "Inside Government" for a special discussion with Americans for Democratic Action National Director Michael J. Wilson. The show, which originally aired on Friday, Dec. 30, is now available on demand. Wilson addressed the benefits of collective bargaining and cited the recent four-year labor agreement between Boeing and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers as proof that the process works.MSNBC´s Ed Schultz, host of "The Ed Show," and U.S. Rep. Karen Bass were then featured as two of the program's top interviews of 2011. Schultz discussed the need for a strong middle class and proposed ideas to get Americans back to work, while Bass shared her views on the U.S. job market and celebrated the work of public servantsnationwide.
Listen LIVE on Fridays at 10 a.m. on 1500 AM WFED in the D.C. area or online atwww.federalnewsradio.com.

Quote of the Week:

AFGE Council of Prison Locals President Dale Deshotel on the union’s repeated calls for more resources to adequately fund and staff federal prisons:
“We’re outraged to learn of more assaults against staff. Sadly, these types of attacks – one where a staff member is unarmed and frequently working alone – happen far too often throughout the federal prison system. This is a safety issue and must be addressed immediately.”

American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO 80 F Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001 | Tel. (202) 737-8700 | Fax (202) 639-6492 | www.afge.org

Iran's Real Weapon Of Mass Destruction Is Oil Prices

2012-01-05T09:08:00.000-08:00

Oil prices jumped 8% last week after Iranian Vice-President Mohamad Reza Rahimi threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if the rest of the world slapped an embargo on his country’s oil exports. Today, Reuters reports the European Union will do just that, with its diplomats agreeing in principle to halt Iranian imports.
There are lots of practical reasons to suspect Iran is bluffing. Not only would attacking shipping in the Strait be military suicide, but the regime needs the hard currency it gets from exporting 2.1 million barrels a day. Still, Iran is playing a powerful hand when it threatens to disrupt shipping through the narrow Strait and choke off what the Energy Information Administration estimates is 20% of the world’s traded crude.

2012 Outlook: Crude Oil Prices Could Rise This Year, But Prices Could Be Very Volatile Kitco News Contributor

As my friend and economist Ed Hirs pointed out in a paper in 2010, the loss of 10 million barrels a day of Middle East production could drive short-run oil prices to $413 a barrel, given the inability of consumers to rapidly shift to other fuels. And that kind of shock is enough to blast the U.S. economy back into recession. Economist Kevin Kliesen with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said that sudden and sustained increases in oil prices increase the odds of recession by 50% in the first year, and 90% after three years.
“If you look at the historical data, nine of the past 10 recessions in the U.S. were preceded by sharp increases in oil prices,” Kliesen said. “If it’s large enough, it can cause people to adjust their future path of spending.”
A 50-cent increase in gasoline prices sucks $70 billion a year out of the pockets of U.S. consumers. And none less than Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, earlier in his career, wrote that unexpected new information like jumping oil prices can cause businesses to delay capital spending, since the “option value” of waiting to see what happens next exceeds the expected return on investment.
Economists re-examining the 2008 financial meltdown are increasingly identifying the sudden, 55% jump in oil prices that preceded it as a big contributor to the subsequent decline in economic activity. Economist James D. Hamilton of the University of California at San Diego, for example, found that a model of the impact of oil prices on gross domestic product he created in 2003 predicted, with an error of less than 0.2%, the actual decline in GDP in the third quarter of 2008.
The surprising thing, Hamilton told Congress in 2009, is that oil caused so much economic damage given other problems at the time. Plunging residential investment only accounted for about half the shrinkage in GDP in the first three quarters of 2008, for example, and some of that might have been due to consumers resisting buying homes in far-flung suburbs because they were worried about the rising cost of commuting.
“Something else, in addition to the pre-existing problems in the housing sector, contributed to tipping the scales from an economic slowdown into a self-feeding dynamic of falling output and employment,” Hamilton told Congress. “I see little basis for doubting that a key aspect of that new drag on the economy resulted from the effects of the oil price shock.”
Kliesen of the St. Louis Fed also believes high oil prices had a lot more to do with the recent recession than many people think.
“It was a key event that really helped slow things down,” Kliesen told me. “Clearly we had some different shocks in that period that really hammered the economy but oil was one of those shocks that was lost in all the reporting about the financial crisis and housing downturn.”
Sudden changes in oil prices hit the capital-goods market particularly hard, Kliesen has found, since businesses simply stop investing until they get a better sense of where prices are going (that was Bernanke’s thesis, in a more general way). Higher oil prices also drive investors to shift money toward sectors of the economy that are less affected “and such reallocation is costly,” Kliesen has written.

A 2000 study by the International Monetary Fund found that a $5 permanent increase in oil prices cuts world GDP growth by 0.25% over the first four years. But the impact on the U.S. was a larger 0.3%, reflecting this country’s high per-capita energy use.
According to the EIA, 14 crude tankers a day pass through the Strait of Hormuz, a 21-mile-wide passage the EIA calls “the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint.”

Iran's Real Weapon of Mass Destruction is Oil Prices

Oilpatch leading the tango with China: China Buying Up Canadian Resurces

2012-01-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

By Michael McCullough | January 03, 2012
     PetroChina's purchase of the 40% of the McKay River oilsands project it doesn't already own from Athabasca Oil Sands is just the latest example of China's national oil companies snapping up Canadian energy reserves. Coming after China National Offshore Oil's outright takeover of Opti Canada and Sinopec's bid for Daylight Energy in 2011, it shows the NOCs are ready to own and operate Canadian assets outright.
But the deal also gives a hint of who's really pursuing whom. It was Athabasca in this case that triggered a shotgun clause forcing PetroChina to buy its stake for $680 million (because this was part of the 2009 deal between the companies, the upsell does not require Investment Canada approval). Athabasca wanted the cash, it said, to pursue light oil opportunities—presumably with a shorter time horizon.

       "It's not just the Chinese who are eager to come in," says Wenran Jiang, a University of Alberta professor who organizes an annual Canada-China energy forum. The NOCs are being approached by lawyers and investment bankers not just from Calgary but from Houston and Melbourne too, seeking patient capital for long-timeline projects while equity prices for energy companies have been steadily sinking on stock markets despite the high price of oil. "They're swamped by these people," Jiang says.
Now that they're in the driver's seat at McKay River, it will be interesting to see how they proceed. Will they hire an all-Canadian management team or tap some of their internal expertise? One of the lingering fears about NOC investment is that companies might just sit on high-cost Canadian assets for years without developing them, as a hedge against higher energy prices.
Jiang expects the opposite. "The Chinese," he says, "are fast movers. It's the western companies that delay." He notes Sinopec's disappointment when French-based Total SA, the majority owner and operator of the Northern Lights oilsands project, pushed the in-production date there back to 2024. "That's totally frustrating to them," he says.
The Chinese are interested in our resources, no question. But the Canadian demand for patient capital is just as strong.
Astronomical Gains from a Tiny Canadian Oil Company?

The 3 Most Dangerous Retirement Lies Brokers Are Telling Americans Today

2011-12-29T15:31:00.000-08:00

In the next few minutes, you could LOSE ALL FEAR of…

Outliving Your Nest Egg
Saving for Retirement
Having Your Hard-Earned Retirement Money

Ravaged By Soon-to-Soar Inflation

There’s a simple first step to achieving your retirement dreams and more: Stop listening to the lies of brokers and financial advisors
They’re telling lies.
Brokers, financial advisors, Wall Street investment firms…
They’re likely all perpetuating dangerous retirement myths. Sometimes it’s to sell more products and sometimes it’s just because they don’t know any better.
These three lies are costing millions of Americans big money every day.
Not just little white lies either… but lies jeopardizing the financial futures Americans are working (or have worked) so hard to build, threatening the legacy they plan on leaving behind for their kids and grandkids.
You may have even been victim of these ridiculous lies yourself!
But even if you have, there’s no reason you have to succumb to it. Or let it happen again…
So I’m blowing the lid off the most dangerous lies about investing for retirement in America today.
I’m doing this to save you from the fate that so many of your misled friends and neighbors may have succumbed to because of these costly lies.
Lies that could prevent you from ever reaching your dream retirement.

Fact is, that for lots of people in America, retirement is actually kind of sad …
Not only do people have to pinch pennies and be careful, but CBS News reports that a shocking 80% of baby boomers plan to “retire late,” working well past the age of 63.
Working longer than their parents and their grandparents did.
And that’s a shame. After all, you worked all those years. You sacrificed. You did the right thing.
So shouldn’t you have the freedom and the ability to enjoy yourself however you choose?
Maybe you want to travel the world, buy a fancy car or two, or a beachfront home in some exotic locale?
Or set up your grandkids with college funds or donate cash to charity causes close to your heart?
That’s a REAL retirement! And it could be yours; too… starting today… starting right now… it’s easier than you think… I’ll show you how.
I’m here to do more than just expose the lies the financial community is perpetuating on the American public.
I actually want to share with you wealth-building secrets brokers won’t tell their clients about since they don’t benefit or don’t even know exist.
Secrets that you can easily apply and give you the wealthy- thriving retirement you deserve.
A group of regular Americans are using them right now to make a fortune…

Allison Sloan in Miami, FL reports, “I have a $57,000 profit.”

James Hanson in Boston, MA says, “I’ve made $132,200.”

But before we get to the dirty details, let me introduce myself...
Hello. My name’s Chris Mayer and I’m a veteran market analyst.
Maybe you've seen me during my many appearances on Fox's Bulls & Bears, Forbes on Fox, or CNBC... Or heard my voice on CNN Radio... or read my popular book, Invest Like a Dealmaker: Secrets From a Former Banking Insider.

Perhaps you know one of the 44,000 Americans who’s recently followed my research to money multiplying gains of 137.6%, 127.34%, 101.64%, 107% and 115%.
I know the financial world — even the banking world — from the inside.
Fresh out of my masters program, I helped manage over $200 million for a major commercial bank... and even became their youngest vice-president...
I mention it because that background — poring over the balance sheets of major and minor companies alike, looking for anomalies, mistakes, and even hidden value — was about the best stock picking training you could imagine.
After all, a company I’d feel comfortable lending to is one I’d feel comfortable owning shares of.
That’s how I spent years studying history’s finest analysts... compiling and testing their systems... until I had my own ruthless formula for testing the companies I evaluated, much more deeply than your average broker.
It was so effective that I’m proud to say I never lost a single dime on any of the major loans I made. The board even offered me stock options and promotions as a reward.
But that was just when lenders grew cocky and lowered their lending standards... putting America’s financial system on a dangerous path that would inevitably lead to crisis.
And devastate the retirement hopes of millions of innocent Americans.
So I decided to walk away to do my own 100% independent stock market research.
I have zero allegiance to any Wall Street investment firm, just to my loyal readers. To people just like you.
And to say I’m appalled by the nonsense that the financial community is feeding you about retirement today is a huge understatement.
You’re being directly taken for a ride… at a time when the stakes for most Americans couldn’t possibly get any higher.
That’s why it’s absolutely critical that you learn the REAL story about investing for retirement right now and what you must do if you want a secure financial future.
So let’s get right to the details starting with the first outrageous lie…
MOST DANGEROUS RETIREMENT LIE #1:
“Diversify! Diversify! Diversify!” One of the biggest drums beaten today in investing for retirement is to DIVERSIFY.
It’s a time-tested method for reducing risk and maximizing an investor’s portfolio’s returns by investing in a variety of assets.
However too much diversification, or “diworsification”, can be a bad thing. In fact, some brokers have incentives to “diworsify” investment portfolios.
“Diworsification” is a term originally created by billionaire investor Peter Lynch to describe a conglomerate, a company made up of seemingly unrelated businesses.
Today it’s morphed into a buzzword meaning money-burning diversification of an investment portfolio.

It’s an easy trap to fall into and happens when people become “collectors of investments” as opposed to just investors.
Some people simply buy what they think they should own with little regard to how it contributes to their overall portfolio.
In the end you have a smorgasbord of investments not linked to any real purpose.
Owning too many investments can be confusing; makes it harder to do the diligence, increases investment costs, and can take a big bite out of returns over the long term.

As Joel Greenblatt, author of You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, points out, “After purchasing six or eight stocks in different industries, the benefit of adding even more stocks to your portfolio in an effort to decrease risk is small.”

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett says, “Diversification makes very little sense for those who know what they are doing.”

And multimillionaire investor Jim Rogers writes, “Diversification is something that stock brokers came up with to protect themselves, so they wouldn't get sued [for making bad investment choices for clients]. You can go broke diversifying.”

So what kind of schemes are brokers using today to manipulate their clients’ money?
Brokers are using new products to spread their client’s money called “auto-diversification” investments.
One example is a target-date fund – a mutual fund whose asset mix becomes more conservative as the target date (usually retirement) approaches.

Since it’s managed by a third party and not by the broker himself, it requires little work on his part and gives him convenient finger pointing opportunities if things go awry.

Brokers also overdiversify their client’s accounts to keep the “money in motion.”
Buying and selling investments that are packaged differently with similar risk does very little to diversify a portfolio, but these transactions often result in higher fees and more commissions for the broker.
And then there’s this ridiculous retirement lie…

MOST DANGEROUS RETIREMENT LIE #2:
“Bonds Are a Good Investment and Should
Represent a Large Portion of an Investor’s Portfolio”

It’s common for older clients to be pushed into a greater percentage of bonds in their portfolio.
An often-quoted rule is that investors should hold their age in bonds as a total percentage of their portfolios.
For instance, a sixty-five-year-old should hold 65% bonds in his portfolio.
In fact, many companies are redesigning their 401(k)s to funnel investors into the target-date funds I told you about earlier, which automatically steer older investors into bonds.
The reasoning behind this scheme is that financial advisors generally believe bonds to be a safer, less “plunge-prone” investment than stocks.
It makes a bit of sense because if the company goes bankrupt, bondholders will be paid before the stockholders.
But the reason I don’t like fixed-income investments as an alternative to stocks is that I believe they have much of the downside risk of stocks with little of the upside.
Let me explain…
In the recent downturn, we saw stocks of certain companies fall 75 percent, and their bonds are also significantly off, sometime in excess of 50 percent.
Likewise, in times of high inflation, we have seen bonds with long maturity dates (10 years or more) also do poorly.

The Economic Times confirms, “In an inflationary environment, bonds do poorly.”

Smartmoney.com says, “Even a cursory look at the headlines shows it's a shaky time for bonds, with inflation fears rising and government finances in bad shape.”

So, both bonds and stocks have big downside risk if inflation takes off or a company’s earnings prospects decline significantly.
But what if things improve?
What if the economy gets better and a company grows faster than expected?
The bondholder has no upside.
No matter how well the company is managed and how good its earnings prospects are, the bondholder simply gets his promised fixed rate of return.
But since the stockholder has an ownership stake in the company, if the company’s fortunes improve, so does the stockholder’s return.
In short, the bondholder is just going to get their money back in good times while the stockholder has real upside potential as the company’s earnings improve.
So if you are holding bonds, you may be missing a better alternative in stocks, while facing similar downside risk.
I believe people are fooled by the name “fixed-income securities” when in fact there is no such thing.
And there’s another crazy lie about retirement the financial community NEEDS you to believe…

MOST DANGEROUS RETIREMENT LIE #3
“Before Investing, Speak With
a Broker or Financial Advisor”

It is preached that before you invest, you should talk with a financial advisor whose long-term investing perspective will end up saving you a great deal of money over time.
But does it really?
While it’s difficult to track all the investment advice given by stockbrokers, academic studies have been done as to the quality of their research departments’ advice.
And it has been found that over time, buying the stocks that banks’ research departments recommend does not yield any superior performance in a portfolio.
Similarly, a study was done in which all of Jim Cramer’s investment advice was followed, and it was determined that he did not outperform the market either.
Finally a study of all the mutual funds shows that, as a whole, they also under perform the market by exactly the amount of their fees.
Therefore, it certainly doesn’t make sense to pay ridiculous 1, 2 or 3 percent fees per year to get worthless advice.
You may as well bury your money in the backyard – at least you won’t pay fees to do that.
Let's look at the shocking impact of fees, over time, on your nest egg.
The table below assumes $2,000 is invested on January 1st of each year and earns a 10% rate of return before deducting fees.

The Balance after	40 Years
Mgmt. Fee @ 0.02%	$968,249
Mgmt. Fee @ 0.25%	$907,762
Mgmt. Fee @ 0.50%	$846,479
Mgmt. Fee @ 1%	$736,584
Mgmt. Fee @ 2%	$559,562
Mgmt. Fee @ 3%	$427,219

Think about the numbers on this table...
If you have investments that are costing 3%, then your nest egg will be an astonishing $541,000 lower after 40 years than if you used low-fee investments and did your own investing!

As Ric Edelman, ranked by Barron’s as America’s #1 independent financial advisor, says,

“There's no greater pitfall than the one created by the retail mutual fund industry. [They] are ripping you off. You are incurring greater risks, lower returns and higher fees than you realize, and as a result you are in danger of not achieving your financial goals.”

Bottom line: Even though a broker’s obligation is to act in the best interest of the client, most often this is simply not the case.
In a way, it’s like the more money their clients lose, the more money they make.
That’s because most brokers have incentives to sell certain types of products. They have interests in overdiversifying their clients’ accounts.
And the cumulative damage can be devastating to an investor’s long-term wealth.
Up to $541,000 devastating!
It’s no wonder most investors in America think the game is rigged against them!
Frankly, You Deserve Better… You’ve worked too hard to dump your life savings into some corporate black hole in return for mediocre performance, huge fees and arrogance.
Well it’s not too late to turn the tide on your financial future. Even better, you can do it yourself!
It’s still not too late to put yourself on the path to a wealthy and fulfilling retirement.
You can achieve the retirement of your dreams despite today’s scrambled markets.
All you have to do is be willing to make a few small, simple changes, if you’ve been duped into making these mistakes.
Even if you’re already retired, the secrets I’ll share with you today can give you a richer, more comfortable retirement...
It all starts with this unique, little-known strategy for potentially amassing rich stock gains over and over again.
In fact, it’s perhaps the single most powerful wealth secret you’ll ever come across…

The Secret Behind America’s Wealthiest Empires And a Bulletproof Retirement

This investment technique is based on the secret that’s built some of America’s greatest corporate empires.

Allow me to illustrate this idea for you with a simple analogy...

Say there are two houses.

In one, the family who lives there also owns the house. In the other, the family who lives there rents it out.

Which house do you think will be in better shape after 10 years?

If you said the house where the people who lived there owned it, odds are you’d be right.

In real estate, owners take better care of property than renters.

The same logic applies to the stock market, too. Not surprising, is it?

When the people who run the companies are also large owners — when they have their own skin in the game — those companies tend to deliver astonishing results over time.

I’m talking about some of the most successful, iconic S&P 500 firms over the last half century…

Like Wal-Mart under the leadership of its founder, Sam Walton. When Sam was at the helm, the stock delivered a stunning annual return of 20.5%. But after he stepped down, Wal-Mart returned only about 9% per year.

Another example is IBM. Under the Watson family, IBM returned 6.6% more than the stock market. But after the Watson’s, the stock did only 1.7% better than the market.

Or take Apple, whose IPO created more millionaires than any other company in history. Without Steve Jobs for over a decade, Apple returned 3.1% per year worse than the overall market. With him, the stock did 28% per year better than the market.

Of course, the list goes on…

This is called the “Owner Operator” model.

It works so well because people like Walton and Jobs don’t focus on the company’s short-term share price like hired gun CEO’s tend to. CEO’s who just want to take their bonuses and run.

Since they own the business instead, they concentrate their efforts more on the company’s overall long-term health.

So their interests are exactly in line with common shareholders because they are in the same boat.

In short, this is a nearly bulletproof strategy proven by companies like Wal-Mart, IBM and Apple to lead to stronger stock performance and outsized gains for shareholders.

The “Owner Operator” model is one part of my special 4-part stock-picking strategy that’s helped me pinpoint money-multiplying gains for readers like 108.9%, 114%, 155%, 165%, and 232%.

But before I tell you more about my unique strategy, let me share with you one of these little-known stocks you can buy today for life-altering profit potential even in this irrational market.

The same family has run this company since inception.

Barron’s says that there are “few Wall Street analysts covering [this stock].”

Forbes calls it a “cash machine.”

In just the last 2 years, this stock has returned 114%, more than 12 times the return of the S&P 500.

If you invest, you could own profitable stakes in energy, commodities, insurance and luxury property – in one single investment.

With a clever management team and unmatched financial strength, I believe that the upside for this stock could be virtually unlimited.

And it could be a reliable source of endless cash for your retirement nest egg. Cash you can spend however you like.

I give you the full details about this company inside your FREE report I’d like to rush you right away called Buy And Hold This Stock For Unlimited Upside Potential.

Just fill out the secure order form at the end of this presentation and I'll see to it that you get your complimentary copy immediately.

Of course, there’s a lot more I’d like to tell you about first.

I apply this ruthless 4 part stock-picking filter to every stock I recommend for 44,000+ retirement seeking readers of my 100% independent investment newsletter, Capital & Crisis.

In fact, I’ve put together this definitive strategy report that shows you my scientific stock-picking method step-by-step.

It’s called CODE: My Proven Four-Step Formula for Getting Rich In Any Market and its yours FREE just for giving my newsletter, Capital & Crisis a risk-free try.

I’d love for you to get the chance to see the “CODE” system in live action.

This unique four-point strategy I put every stock through is astonishingly simple and clear.

And it can make your every market decision much easier.

I’m certain you won’t find anything like it. Anywhere.

This strategy is so powerful that since 2004, when Agora Financial began publishing my newsletter, I’ve NEVER had a single losing year.

Here's a sample of some of those rich results...

*NOTE: These are actual results that readers could have seen following my recommendations. They are not theoretical. I told readers the best dates to buy and the best dates to sell.

Leucadia National 109%	Orient-Express Hotels 109%
Brookfield Asset Management 115%	Companhia Paranaense 121%
CNX Gas Corp. 44%	Imperial Sugar Co. 145%
ABX Air 38%	Catellus Development Corp. 24%
Walter Industries 44%	FEMSA 29%
Gulfport Energy 115%	Chiquita Brands Intl. 52%
Ameriprise Financial 77%	Bandag 18.3%
Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste SA 100.3%	SJW Corp. 28.5%
Plum Creek Timber 28%	Industrias Bachoco 19.75%
Goldkist 39%	Questar 113%
Arch Capital Group 45%	San Juan Basin Royalty Trust 144%
Presidential Life Corp. 65%	Guitar Center 151%
Northwest Pipe 114.5%	Sovran Self Storage 155%
Intrawest Corp. 72%
And you can see, the list goes on.

I hope to start showing you these same results too. Results that can boost your nest egg higher than you’ve ever dreamed and give you the robust retirement you deserve.
Forget counting on the government to make things better. After all it was officials at the Fed who kept credit cheap for so long, helping to finance the bubble and the crash.
These authorities in Washington stood by while Wall Street speculators became more powerful than the agencies that were supposed to watch them, allowing them to invent dangerous investing practices that turned our financial world into a casino.

Now with record levels of corporate, public, and private debt, our nation does face challenges ahead – one of the most dangerous ones to your wealth being inflation.
That means every time the government prints money, the dollar is devalued. So every dollar you have saved and invested is worth less and less each day.
It buys less and less.
With the trillions of dollars the government has forced into the economy, we could see inflation take off pretty quickly.
Investors can be irrational and unforgiving in an inflationary environment...
Back in the 1970s, investors punished the greatest growth stocks of the time like IBM, Polaroid and Proctor & Gamble, even as their fundamentals remained strong.

Investments like CDs, bonds and money-market funds will turn into financial deathtraps when their modest rates of return fall terribly behind the soaring rate of inflation.
Retirees on fixed incomes could see their standards of living erode. Monthly social security checks buy less and less… stock dividends and yields… everything shrivels in the soaring cost of living.
And once investors realize they can get a better deal from hard assets, they will, once again flock, into oil, gold, and other resource plays, causing commodity prices to soar.
The gas you're already paying close to $4 a gallon for will get more expensive, and so will the groceries you buy at the store.
This is the cold reality of an inflationary market – a reality few on Wall Street (let alone financial advisors and brokers across America) understand.
As US News & World Report points out, “Even modest inflation can eat away a life's worth of saving.”
That’s why I want to tell you about some outstanding alternative investments proven to benefit instead of suffer from the challenges facing the global economy.
These are some of the market’s best, recession-proof anti-inflation investments.
Opportunities most people don’t even know exist that you can buy as easily and as inexpensively as regular stocks.
Anti-Inflation Fortress Play #1:
Red-Hot Precious Metals

My first recommendation for inflation-proofing your retirement is to own precious metals. Specifically, gold and silver.

Right now, they’re both on fire… up over 300% in the past decade.

And I firmly believe that both metals have much, much further to climb.

Gold has gone up every single year for the past 10 years in a row!

And I don’t see it hitting the brakes anytime in the near future.

Of course, I’m not the only one…

Hedge fund legend Eric Sprott, owner of one of Canada’s largest securities firms with $9 billion in assets, says, “Gold will go north of $2,000 and the wind is at our back because the money printing is increasing at a very fast pace.”

Multimillionaire investor Jim Rogers says, “Gold should be well over $2,000 now.”

And Frank Holmes, CEO of US Global Investors, writes, “Gold would need to rise all the way to $7,931 in order to cover the outstanding amount of U.S. money supply.”

But what you may find even more shocking is that for 2010, silver actually BEAT gold… nearly DOUBLING in value!

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Were big banks ’stealing homes’?

2011-12-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 19, 2011
Posted: 10 am ET

Forget for the time being all the Three Stooges document-fumbling surrounding the housing collapse. Set aside the obvious malfeasance of robosigning and rocket dockets.

The question on the table now is, were America's largest mortgage lenders stealing homes?

The recent lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley against five of the nation's largest banks for deceptive foreclosure and loan modification practices essentially accuses them of doing exactly that.

Coakley accuses Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and Ally Financial of the following:

1. Engaging in unfair and deceptive foreclosure practices by conducting foreclosures when the defendants lacked the right to do so and misrepresenting to homeowners their roles as mortgagees or as the holders of the mortgages.

2. Engaging in false documentation practices to facilitate their foreclosure practices.

3. Deceiving homeowners in the course of servicing mortgage loans by misrepresenting to borrowers regarding its loan modification programs, acting deceptively in implementing loan modifications and deceiving borrowers regarding foreclosure proceedings.

"The layman's term for that is 'stealing homes,' says Firedoglake blogger David Dayen. "Coakley is accusing banks of stealing homes. They didn’t have the proper proof of ownership to take control of the homes in a foreclosure, and they did it anyway, by forging documents and committing fraud upon state courts."

Coakley's suit also includes the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, the epicenter of its "false documentation practices" charge.

Massachusetts isn't the only state that has grown frustrated with the Obama administration's year-long attempt to negotiate a let's-move-forward settlement between the 50 states and the banks. Others, including California, Delaware, Nevada and New York, have distanced themselves from the talks, which appear headed toward an agreement that some AGs say amounts to a hand slap for the big banks.

But as the first to break from the pack, Coakley's suit reframes the debate from a snipe hunt for sundry robo-shenanigans by underlings to some serious charges leveled at top management.

The 50-state agreement under construction looks like it would grant the lenders immunity from prosecution in exchange for a settlement of $20 billion to $25 billion, to be used primarily for principal reduction and loan mods.

Coakley says she'll consider signing onto any forthcoming agreement based on its merits but has made clear she won't be party to any plan that includes broad liability release regarding MERS and other issues.

What's next? Will other states follow Coakley's lead?

Only time will tell.

But her bold break certainly throws into question the attraction of that (now) 49-state work-in-progress, and perhaps the wisdom of attempting to collectively bargain away a national disgrace.

Read more: Were big banks ’stealing homes’? | Bankrate.com http://www.bankrate.com/financing/mortgages/were-big-banks-stealing-homes/#ixzz1h5FRUsSG

The sad fact of the matter is "We the People" have become too dependent on everyone and thing, but ourselves. We empower these people, than get raped by them. Banks cannot survive if “WE THE PEOPLE” simply, do not give them are business. The fact my bank is listed on this list tells me it is time to move my funds, and business to a credit union.
The Federal Reserve is a joke and is owned by the banks, they basically bailed themselves out, through T.A.R.P. (The WORST American Bill in its history) Long story short, and as Bloomberg reported earlier this month 7.7 trillion in U.S. bail out money went to the banks through what is being referred to as a government “discount window” so not only did these banks receive 7.7 trillion in money, they are also stealing homes. Yet none one is jail, or being prosecuted, and this is fair how? And “WE THE PEOPLE” tolerate this; why? I believe the answer to that question is more important than someone being able to answer how we all came to be to begin with.

Read more and comment in Finance and Investments Directory

How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich by Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone Magazine Nov.24,2011 issue

2011-11-20T20:34:00.000-08:00

By Tim Dickinson November 9, 2011 7:00 AM ET
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109 Matt Mahurin

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy."

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today's Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

"The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility," says David Stockman, who served as budget director under Reagan. "They're on an anti-tax jihad – one that benefits the prosperous classes."

The staggering economic inequality that has led Americans across the country to take to the streets in protest is no accident. It has been fueled to a large extent by the GOP's all-out war on behalf of the rich. Since Republicans rededicated themselves to slashing taxes for the wealthy in 1997, the average annual income of the 400 richest Americans has more than tripled, to $345 million – while their share of the tax burden has plunged by 40 percent. Today, a billionaire in the top 400 pays less than 17 percent of his income in taxes – five percentage points less than a bus driver earning $26,000 a year. "Most Americans got none of the growth of the preceding dozen years," says Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. "All the gains went to the top percentage points."

The GOP campaign to aid the wealthy has left America unable to raise the money needed to pay its bills. "The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree," says Rhode Island governor and former GOP senator Lincoln Chafee, pointing to two deficit-financed wars and an unpaid-for prescription-drug entitlement. "It tanked the economy." Tax receipts as a percent of the total economy have fallen to levels not seen since before the Korean War – nearly 20 percent below the historical average. "Taxes are ridiculously low!" says Bruce Bartlett, an architect of Reagan's 1981 tax cut. "And yet the mantra of the Republican Party is 'Tax cuts raise growth.' So – where's the fucking growth?"

Republicans talk about job creation, about preserving family farms and defending small businesses, and reforming Medicare and Social Security. But almost without exception, every proposal put forth by GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates is intended to preserve or expand tax privileges for the wealthiest Americans. And most of their plans, which are presented as common-sense measures that will aid all Americans, would actually result in higher taxes for middle-class taxpayers and the poor. With 14 million Americans out of work, and with one in seven families turning to food stamps simply to feed their children, Republicans have responded to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression by slashing inheritance taxes, extending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and endorsing a tax amnesty for big corporations that have hidden billions in profits in offshore tax havens. They also wrecked the nation's credit rating by rejecting a debt-ceiling deal that would have slashed future deficits by $4 trillion – simply because one-quarter of the money would have come from closing tax loopholes on the rich.

The intransigence over the debt ceiling enraged Republican stalwarts. George Voinovich, the former GOP senator from Ohio, likens his party's new guard to arsonists whose attitude is: "We're going to get what we want or the country can go to hell." Even an architect of the Bush tax cuts, economist Glenn Hubbard, tells Rolling Stone that there should have been a "revenue contribution" to the debt-ceiling deal, "structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do." Instead, the GOP strong-armed America into sacrificing $1 trillion in vital government services – including education, health care and defense – all to safeguard tax breaks for oil companies, yacht owners and hedge-fund managers. The party's leaders were triumphant: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even bragged that America's creditworthiness had been a "hostage that's worth ransoming."

It's the kind of thinking that only money can buy. "It's a vicious circle," says Stiglitz. "The rich are using their money to secure tax provisions to let them get richer still. Rather than investing in new technology or R&D, the rich get a better return by investing in Washington."

It's difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn't always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending – Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn't really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent – double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.

That only changed in the late 1970s, when high inflation drove up wages and pushed the middle class into higher tax brackets. Harnessing the widespread anger, Reagan put it to work on behalf of the rich. In a move that GOP Majority Leader Howard Baker called a "riverboat gamble," Reagan sold the country on an "across-the-board" tax cut that brought the top rate down to 50 percent. According to supply-side economists, the wealthy would use their tax break to spur investment, and the economy would boom. And if it didn't – well, to Reagan's cadre of small-government conservatives, the resulting red ink could be a win-win. "We started talking about just cutting taxes and saying, 'Screw the deficit,'" Bartlett recalls. "We had this idea that if you lowered revenues, the concern about the deficit would be channeled into spending cuts."

It was the birth of what is now known as "Starve the Beast" – a conscious strategy by conservatives to force cuts in federal spending by bankrupting the country. As conceived by the right-wing intellectual Irving Kristol in 1980, the plan called for Republicans to create a "fiscal problem" by slashing taxes – and then foist the pain of reimposing fiscal discipline onto future Democratic administrations who, in Kristol's words, would be forced to "tidy up afterward."

There was only one problem: The Reagan tax cuts spiked the federal deficit to a dangerous level, even as the country remained mired in a deep recession. Republican leaders in Congress immediately moved to reverse themselves and feed the beast. "It was not a Democrat who led the effort in 1982 to undo about a third of the Reagan tax cuts," recalls Robert Greenstein, president of the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "It was Bob Dole." Even Reagan embraced the tax hike, Stockman says, "because he believed that, at some point, you have to pay the bills."

For the remainder of his time in office, Reagan repeatedly raised taxes to bring down unwieldy deficits. In 1983, he hiked gas and payroll taxes. In 1984, he raised revenue by closing tax loopholes for businesses. The tax reform of 1986 lowered the top rate for the wealthy to just 28 percent – but that cut for high earners was paid for by closing tax loopholes that resulted in the largest corporate tax hike in history. Reagan also raised revenues by abolishing special favors for the investor class: He boosted taxes on capital gains by 40 percent to align them with the taxes paid on wages. Today, Reagan may be lionized as a tax abolitionist, says Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator and friend of the president, but that's not true to his record. "Reagan raised taxes 11 times in eight years!"

But Reagan wound up sowing the seed of our current gridlock when he gave his blessing to what Simpson calls a "nefarious organization" – Americans for Tax Reform. Headed by Grover Norquist, a man Stockman blasts as a "fiscal terrorist," the group originally set out to prevent Congress from backsliding on the 1986 tax reforms. But Norquist's instrument for enforcement – an anti-tax pledge signed by GOP lawmakers – quickly evolved into a powerful weapon designed to shift the tax burden away from the rich. George H.W. Bush won the GOP presidential nomination in 1988 in large part because he signed Norquist's "no taxes" pledge. Once in office, however, Bush moved to bring down the soaring federal deficit by hiking the top tax rate to 31 percent and adding surtaxes for yachts, jets and luxury sedans. "He had courage to take action when we needed it," says Paul O'Neill, who served as Treasury secretary under George W. Bush.

The tax hike helped the economy – and many credit it with setting up the great economic expansion of the 1990s. But it cost Bush his job in the 1992 election – a defeat that only served to strengthen Norquist's standing among GOP insurgents. "The story of Bush losing," Norquist says now, "is a reminder to politicians that this is a pledge you don't break." What was once just another campaign promise, rejected by a fiscal conservative like Bob Dole, was transformed into a political blood oath – a litmus test of true Republicanism that few candidates dare refuse.

After taking office, Clinton immediately seized the mantle of fiscal discipline from Republicans. Rather than simply trimming the federal deficit, as his GOP predecessors had done, he set out to balance the budget and begin paying down the national debt. To do so, he hiked the top tax bracket to nearly 40 percent and boosted the corporate tax rate to 35 percent. "It cost him both houses of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections," says Chafee, the former GOP senator. "But taming the deficit led to the best economy America's ever had." Following the tax hikes of 1993, the economy grew at a brisk clip of 3.2 percent, creating more than 11 million jobs. Average wages ticked up, and stocks soared by 78 percent. By the spring of 1997, the federal budget was headed into the black.

But Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax revolutionaries who seized control of Congress in 1994 responded by going for the Full Norquist. In a stunning departure from America's long-standing tax policy, Republicans moved to eliminate taxes on investment income and to abolish the inheritance tax. Under the final plan they enacted, capital gains taxes were sliced to 20 percent. Far from creating an across-the-board benefit, 62 cents of every tax dollar cut went directly to the top one percent of income earners. "The capital gains cut alone gave the top 400 taxpayers a bigger tax cut than all the Bush tax cuts combined," says David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else.

The cuts also juiced irrational exuberance on Wall Street. Giving a huge tax advantage to investment income inflated the dot-com bubble, observed Stiglitz, "by making speculation more attractive." And by eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales, the cuts fueled the housing bubble: A study by the Federal Reserve estimated that the tax giveaways boosted housing transactions by 17 percent through 2007.

The most revealing aspect of the tax cuts, however, came from a simple mistake. In a major blow to the inheritance tax – America's most progressive form of taxation – the GOP cuts nearly doubled the amount that the rich could pass on to their heirs tax-free. From now on, the first $1 million would be exempt from federal taxes – unless your estate was worth more than $17 million. In those rare cases, the superwealthy would have to pay taxes on their entire inheritance.

Then something strange happened. Due to a "drafting error," the final bill failed to include the exception for the superwealthy. Everyone in both parties agreed that it had been a mistake. But instead of fixing the error, Republicans blocked a pro forma correction to the law – meaning that even the wealthiest estates would pay no taxes on the first $1 million. The move effectively secured an $880 million tax cut for the rich – one that Congress never intended, and never voted for. Ari Fleischer, the then-spokesman for Rep. Bill Archer of the House Ways and Means Committee, exulted over the undemocratic tax cut for the wealthy. "When a mistake works against the government and for the taxpayers," he explained, "we're in no rush to correct it."

Republicans, abetted by conservative Democrats, passed the tax cuts with a veto-proof majority, and Clinton signed them into law. But for the remainder of his term, Clinton repeatedly blocked Republican demands for further cuts. "He vetoed one tax cut after another," says Robert McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice. In 1999, in a triumph for fiscal sanity, Clinton rejected a massive $792 billion cut to inheritance and investment taxes. The mood during the veto ceremony in the Rose Garden was festive. A five-piece band played "Summertime," and the living was easy. Unemployment stood at 4.2 percent, and stocks were booming. "Our hard-won prosperity gives us the chance to invest our surplus to meet the long-term challenges of America," Clinton declared. The Republican tax cuts, he warned with eerie prescience, would return America to a period of "deficit upon deficit" that culminated in "the worst recession since the Great Depression."

Then came the election of George W. Bush, the first president of the Party of the Rich.

Within months of taking office, Bush delivered a tax break to the rich that trumps anything he accomplished through the actual tax code. "The most important thing the Bush administration did in the whole area of taxes," says Johnston, "was to kill tax harmonization."

"Tax harmonization" was economic jargon for a joint project by the world's developed countries to shut down offshore tax havens in places like the Cayman Islands. At the time, such illicit havens were costing U.S. taxpayers $70 billion a year. For Republicans, going after big-time tax evaders should have been as American as apple pie. As Reagan once said of such cheats: "When they do not pay their taxes, someone else does – you and me."

But for Bush and other leaders of the Party of the Rich, blocking corporations from hiding their money overseas wasn't an act of patriotism – it was tyranny. Rep. Dick Armey, the GOP majority leader, railed against tax harmonization as an effort to create a "global network of tax police." One of Bush's biggest donors, Enron, was using a network of nearly 900 offshore tax hideaways to pay no corporate taxes – while reporting massive profits that later turned out to be fraudulent. In one of his first acts as president, Bush "basically vetoed the initiative," says Stiglitz.

The veto spurred a cavalcade of corporations – including stalwart American firms like Stanley Works – to pursue phony "headquarters" in Bermuda and other lax-tax nations. The move not only encouraged some of the world's richest companies to avoid paying any U.S. taxes, it let them book overseas-"expenses" that qualified them for lucrative tax deductions. In one of the most notorious cases, GE filed for a $3 billion tax rebate in 2009, despite boasting profits of more than $14 billion.

But Bush wasn't content to simply make the world safe for corporate tax evaders: He also pushed to deliver $1.6 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals. On paper, at least, the federal government looked like it would soon be rolling in cash. Assuming the economy continued to grow as it had under Clinton, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a federal surplus of $5.6 trillion by 2011. Nearly half that bounty was already spoken for – the government needed some $3 trillion to shore up Social Security and Medicare – but that still left $2 trillion to play with.

Still, those numbers were only a projection. "It's certainly not money in the bank," Fed chairman Alan Greenspan warned incoming Treasury Secretary O'Neill over breakfast at the Federal Reserve. Yet there was no such note of caution in the White House. The month after Bush took office, the president's then-budget director, Mitch Daniels, suggested in an internal memo that $5.6 trillion was likely too small a figure. Daniels concluded that Bush's plan was "so fiscally conservative" that even after cutting $1.6 trillion in taxes, fixing Social Security and setting aside $900 billion in a contingency fund, the government would still have enough money left over to retire $2 trillion in debt.

"Everybody for a good while accepted that the surpluses were real," insists Daniels, now the governor of Indiana. When pressed, however, he also concedes that by the time Bush took office, "the economy was already unraveling." Indeed, a wave of layoffs at the end of 2000 prompted Dick Cheney to warn, "We may well be on the front edge of a recession here."

The conflicting forecasts – one of sunshine and surplus, the other of gloom and contraction – should have set off alarm bells in the White House. But instead of rethinking the prudence of its massive giveaway to the rich, the Bush team dreamed up a new rationale for cutting taxes: to provide a needed jolt to the economy. "It's a fair thing to say that the stimulus argument was added in the spring of '01, when it had not been there before," Daniels says.

The stimulus argument was lousy economics. The previous two decades, after all, had demonstrated that "trickle-down" tax cuts don't juice the economy – they create bubbles and balloon deficits. Proponents pointed to Reagan's original tax cut in 1981, claiming it had spurred economic growth. But that is nothing more than "urban legend," Stockman says. The economy "did recover after 1982," he says, "but mainly because the Federal Reserve defeated inflation."

In fact, Stockman insists, Bush's tax cuts for the rich represent a bastardization of Reaganism. "The Republican Party originally said that prosperity comes from the private sector," he says. "But today's Republicans have become Chamber of Commerce Keynesians – using tax policy as a way of stimulating, boosting, prodding the economy." The Party of the Rich, in essence, was offering up a twisted version of New Deal policies that laissez-faire Republicans like Reagan had long opposed.

Spinning the tax giveaways as a stimulus plan did serve one useful function: It helped obscure the true purpose of the Bush tax plan. In an internal memo written just days after the inauguration, O'Neill advised Bush that he had a "great opportunity" for quick action on his tax cuts if he framed the choice for Congress as tax cut vs. recession. "We can get this argument on our ground," O'Neill wrote, "and stop the drumbeat about a tax cut for the rich."

With no patience for the specifics of tax policy, Bush deputized Vice President Dick Cheney to push through his tax cut for the rich. Once a deficit hawk who confessed that he was "not convinced that the Reagan tax cuts worked," Cheney had emerged from his tenure as CEO of Halliburton as a leading advocate for rewarding big corporations and their executives – even as GOP moderates warned that Bush's tax cut would foreclose needed investments in education and infrastructure. "The vice president had no interest in what I had to say," recalls Chafee. "He ran the show right from the beginning, and he suffered no compromise."

As the economy worsened, even the president's Treasury secretary grew concerned about the tax cuts. O'Neill pushed Bush to include a trigger mechanism that would rein in the cuts if the projected surpluses failed to materialize. "The trigger was a good idea – having the foresight that if things turned bad, we wouldn't have to reverse course in a difficult time," O'Neill says now. "But there was never any serious interest in it" from the Bush administration.

To Chafee, the opposition to a trigger mechanism seemed to offer a clue about the real goal of the tax cuts: They were designed not to boost the economy, but to force the kind of spending cuts championed by Grover Norquist and other small-government activists. His suspicion that the starve-the-beast crowd was driving the cuts was confirmed, he says, by a conversation he had while walking the Senate corridors with Trent Lott, then the GOP majority leader.

"What's going on here?" Chafee asked. Why not safeguard the economy by adopting a trigger mechanism?

Lott turned to Chafee. "We're going to strangle the spending," he said. On the stump, Bush hyped the benefits of his plan by emphasizing how much in taxes it would save a single waitress. But the real action was at the top rung of the income ladder. Over 10 years, the bottom fifth of income earners could expect to pocket an extra $744. That waitress might be left with enough cash to change out the clutch on her Corolla. The top one percent, meanwhile, would receive more than $340,000 on average – enough to buy his and hers Bentleys.

To mask such glaring inequality, Republicans inaugurated the tax cut with an across-the-board rebate. The waitress would get a $300 check, along with everyone else from Warren Buffett on down. But in reality, the tax cuts were backloaded with benefits for the wealthy. In the first year of the deal, the top one percent would pocket just seven percent of the tax cuts – but by the time the cuts were set to expire in 2010, the rich would be reaping more than half of the windfall. What's more, the cuts were nefariously designed so that small-business owners and upper-middle-class professionals – primarily those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 a year – would see as much as three-quarters of their tax break eroded by the Alternative Minimum Tax, a levy Congress originally intended to keep rich people from cheating on their taxes.

Every year since the Bush tax cuts were approved, Congress has passed a multibillion "patch" to prevent this politically potent group of professionals from being denied their tax breaks. But at the time, Cheney used the money "saved" by the AMT claw-back to finance another favor exclusively for the rich: a series of cuts to the estate tax culminating in a one-year abolition, set to take effect in 2010. Rejecting a less costly bargain proposed by Democrats that would have provided a permanent escape from estate taxes for all but the richest of the rich, Republicans instead demanded a more expensive plan catering to the wealthiest 0.25 percent of all estates.

In May 2001, Republicans in the House voted in lock step to approve the Bush tax cuts, which cleared the Senate with the support of 45 Republicans and 12 conservative Democrats.

But then reality intervened. The bursting of the dot-com bubble, followed by the attacks of September 11th, tipped the economy headlong into recession. Rather than reversing course, however, Republicans rallied around another tax giveaway for the rich. That October, a bill passed by the House – and endorsed by Bush – not only called for eliminating a law requiring that tax-dodging corporations pay at least something in taxes, it ordered rebate checks to be cut to corporate giants for their past taxes. Under the bill, 16 companies of the Fortune 500 would have each received $100 million or more – including $1.4 billion for IBM, $671 million for GE and $254 million for Enron. Democrats in the Senate ultimately sank the bill, producing a stimulus package that extended unemployment benefits for the middle class and awarded tax incentives to corporations for new investments.

But Republicans kept their eyes on the prize. The following year, after the GOP regained control of the Senate and expanded its majority in the House, Cheney immediately pushed forward with an even deeper tax cut for the wealthy that O'Neill today describes as "an atrocity."

"We won the midterms," the vice president told O'Neill at the time. "This is our due."

By that point, any economic rationale for cutting taxes had vanished. September 11th, the recession and the 2001 tax cuts had plunged the nation $158 billion into the red. The mirage of the $5.6 trillion surplus had vanished – replaced with a forecast that America would rack up some $3 trillion in debt by 2012. But rather than put the brakes on tax cuts, as a trigger mechanism might have done, Cheney was determined to accelerate them, so the rich would get their money even sooner. To further reward the wealthiest, Cheney also wanted to slash taxes on capital gains and corporate dividends, with half of the money going to the top one percent.

To secure the new tax cuts, however, Cheney would first have to overcome opposition not only from Alan Greenspan, but from some of Bush's top advisers. The Fed chair had personally presented Cheney with a 20-page econometric analysis showing that soaring deficits caused by the tax cuts would sink long-term growth. Instead of communicating Greenspan's alarm to Bush, Cheney tasked a deputy named Cesar Conda to draft a memo disputing the study. Conda, a former tax lobbyist, blithely dismissed the projections of the Fed's senior economist as "completely wrong."

In November 2002, at a meeting in the White House, the president and his top economic advisers packed tightly around a mahogany table in the Roosevelt Room. With the administration's own forecasts showing that the economy had already regained its footing, one after another of Bush's deputies sounded the alarm about the dangers of a new tax cut. "This burns a big hole in the budget," deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten told the president. "The budget hole is getting deeper," added Daniels, "and we are projecting deficits all the way to the end of your second term." O'Neill warned the president that a "tax cut that benefits mostly wealthy investors" could imperil the budding prosperity. "With the economy already improving, this could cause an unnecessary boost," he said. "That's how you get a bubble." Entertaining the chorus of doubters, Bush himself voiced qualms about more cuts for the rich. "Won't the top-rate people benefit the most?" he asked. "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?"

But Cheney was having none of it. When O'Neill warned Bush that America was headed for a "fiscal crisis," the vice president, sitting at the Treasury secretary's right elbow, dismissed him midsentence by citing the ultimate champion of Republican tax cuts: "Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don't matter, Paul."

A true student of Reagan would have understood that 2002 was the moment for a tax increase. When his 1981 tax cut overshot the mark, Reagan had put aside ideology and raised taxes, putting the needs of the country above the desires of the wealthy. Bush's father had also raised taxes to avoid passing massive deficits on to future generations. Moreover, the Bush administration had already committed the country to a costly war in Afghanistan, and was on the brink of invading Iraq. Historically, Republican and Democratic administrations alike had met the financial burdens of war by raising taxes. But this was a new Republican Party, one determined to aid the rich even as it sent the military budget soaring. As House Majority Leader Tom DeLay would soon declare, "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes."

After the meeting, Cheney set out to remove anyone who stood in the way of the new tax giveaway. He phoned O'Neill and demanded the Treasury secretary's resignation. He also dispensed with economic adviser Larry Lindsey, whose frank assessment of the possible costs of the Iraq War had threatened to derail the tax cut.

Budget-conscious Republicans in Congress who opposed the tax cuts could not be disposed of – but they could be strong-armed. Voinovich and Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who refused to go along with cuts of more than $350 billion, were summoned to the White House for a meeting with Bush and Cheney. "The president wanted nearly a trillion dollars when he started with us," recalls Voinovich. "They were working on us: We need more, we need more." The senators held out for a smaller bill – though in hindsight, Voinovich says, there shouldn't have been any tax cuts. "Just think where we'd be if we'd gone along with what the president wanted," he says, laughing bitterly. "Where would we be today? Oh, my God."

In the end, Cheney's voice was the only one that mattered. In April 2003, when the bill reached the floor, the Senate deadlocked 50-50. The vice president cast the deciding "aye" that moved the tax cut into law. The benefits were even more tilted to the rich than the first Bush tax cuts. When fully phased in, 53 percent of the new cuts went to the top one percent. Those making $10 million or more pocketed an average of $1 million a year – twice the haul they made from the earlier cuts, and every cent of it borrowed. "It was a deficit-financed tax cut," concedes Hubbard, who chaired Bush's Council of Economic Advisers.

The deal privileged gambling on stocks over working for a living: The tax rate the richest pay on their long-term capital gains was slashed by 25 percent, while their rate on dividends fell by almost 60 percent. The move not only fueled speculation of Wall Street, it further widened the considerable gap between rich and poor. "It was a very destructive combination to have a national economic policy that stimulated debt-financed capital gains and then taxed the windfall at the lowest rate imaginable," says Stockman. "That contributed, clearly, to the growing imbalance in household income and wealth."

But Republicans didn't stop there. The following year, they passed the little-noticed American Jobs Creation Act. Named in the same Orwellian fashion as Bush's "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" initiatives, the 2004 law allowed corporations to bring home billions in profits they had stockpiled in offshore tax havens – the very flight of capital that Bush had blessed by torpedoing tax harmonization three years earlier. Under the tax amnesty, corporations repatriated $300 billion in profits they had stashed offshore. But instead of paying the nominal corporate tax rate of 35 percent, they were taxed at just 5.25 percent.

The title of the bill notwithstanding, corporations invested almost none of their windfall in new factories or other measures to create the 500,000 jobs that Republicans had promised. In fact, many companies that received the biggest tax break actually slashed jobs. Hewlett-Packard laid off 14,500 workers – one pink slip for every $1 million in profits it shipped back home from overseas. All told, according to an analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research, up to 92 percent of the "jobs creation" money was handed out to top executives and shareholders in a frenzy of dividend payments and stock buybacks. And thanks to the GOP's cut on investment income the previous year, wealthy individuals who pocketed the offshore profits paid the same rate on their bonanza, 15 percent, that a waitress at a diner might pay on her tips.

When Democrats regained control of both the House and Senate in 2006, they temporarily halted the GOP's binge of borrowing from the Treasury to give tax cuts to the wealthy. But that didn't stop Republicans from finding other ways to aid the rich. As the economy collapsed in 2008, the Bush administration used the crisis to provide a stealth handout to the nation's banks – even those at no risk of failing. Under the TARP bailout, overseen by Treasury secretary and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson, taxpayers were forced to give banks $254 billion for assets worth just $176 billion – a handout of $78 billion to the financial sector, including $2.5 billion for Paulson's cronies at Goldman. "Paulson pushed the money into the hands of the banks – no strings attached, no accountability, no transparency," Elizabeth Warren, then-chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, told Rolling Stone last year.

As with the offshore profits, the banks used the money to line the pockets of executives and investors – while doing little to speed the recovery of Main Street. "We gave an enormous subsidy to these financial institutions, and they have not returned it to the American people," said Warren. "The administration could have said, 'All right, take this and multiply it throughout the economy.' But Paulson never made that a condition of taking the money."

Taken together, the Bush years exposed the bankruptcy behind the theory that tax cuts for the rich will spur economic growth. "Let the rich get richer and everybody will benefit?" says Stiglitz. "That, empirically, is wrong. It's a philosophy of trickle-down economics that's belied by the facts." Bush and Cheney proved once and for all that tax cuts for the wealthy produce only two things: "lower growth and greater inequality."

The GOP's frenzied handouts to the rich during the Bush era coincided with the weakest economic expansion since World War II – and the only one in modern American history in which the wages of working families actually fell and poverty increased. And what little expansion there was under Bush culminated in the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. "The wreckage was left by Dick Cheney, Grover Norquist and the gang," says Chafee. "This was their doing."

By driving the economy into the ditch, Republicans left the next president little choice but to drive up deficits in the short term by launching a massive campaign of federal spending to ward off a global depression. But even the $787 billion stimulus engineered by President Obama was hamstrung by his predecessor's ongoing giveaway to the wealthy: Republicans insisted that nearly 10 percent of every stimulus dollar be devoted to financing the annual "patch" to the Alternative Minimum Tax – the off-budget legacy of Bush's tax cuts for the rich. This was a $70 billion handout that inflated the cost of the stimulus package without stimulating anything – other than the paychecks of wealthy Americans.

From the outset of the Obama presidency, in fact, Republicans have engaged in a calculated, across-the-board campaign to protect the tax privileges of the wealthiest Americans. Their objective was made explicit by Rep. Eric Cantor during the height of the stimulus debate: "No Tax Increases to Pay for Spending" declared one bullet point on Cantor's website. "House Republicans are insisting that any stimulus package include a provision precluding any tax increases, now or in the future, to pay for this new spending." Having racked up the largest deficits in American history, Republicans suddenly found it expedient to return to their old-school rhetoric of deficit-bashing. "Under Bush, they had a story about deficits not mattering," says Michael Ettlinger, who directs economic policy at the Center for American Progress. "Then, all of a sudden Obama becomes president, and deficits matter again."

The battle reached a fever pitch over health care reform. To truly understand the depth of the GOP's entrenched opposition to Obamacare, it's crucial to understand how the reform is financed: The single largest source of funds comes from increasing Medicare taxes on the wealthy – including new taxes on investment income. According to the Tax Policy Center, Americans who make more than $1 million a year will pay an extra $37,381 in annual taxes under the plan. The top 400 taxpayers would contribute even more: an average of $11 million each.

Rarely in American history has a tax so effectively targeted the top one percent. "It took Republicans about four months to figure out how much they hated it," says McIntyre, president of Citizens for Tax Justice. Republican rage over the president's health care plan has far less to do with the size of government or the merits of the individual mandate than the blow to the investor class. If Obamacare remains in place and the Bush cuts for the wealthy expire as planned, top earners will be paying a tax of 23.8 percent on capital gains – more than they have at any time since Clinton cut the capital gains tax in 1997. Health care reform, griped The Wall Street Journal, was nothing but a "sneaky way" for Democrats to wage a "war on 'the rich.'"

A key element of the GOP's war on the poor was cemented by the surprise election of Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate in January 2010. As a candidate, Brown had made his high-mileage GMC pickup truck the star of his campaign commercials. "I love this old truck," he said. "It's brought me closer to the people." But Brown's real allegiance was to his wealthy donors: the billionaire Koch brothers, who bankrolled the Tea Party, and the financial interests who made a last-minute investment of more than $450,000 to propel Brown into office.

As soon as he was sworn in, Brown set about hollowing out the so-called Volcker Rule, which was designed to bar big financial institutions from using their own money to make risky, speculative bets on the market. By agreeing to provide Democrats with the crucial 60th vote on finance reform, Brown secured an exemption from the trading ban for mutual funds and insurers – a move directly benefiting Massachusetts-based financial giants like Fidelity and MassMutual. Brown also insisted that the Wall Street giants who caused the financial collapse – banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase – be allowed to continue using taxpayer-subsidized capital to gamble on hedge funds and private-equity deals. Former Fed chair Paul Volcker was furious: "Allowing a bank to invest in a speculative fund," he said, "goes against the very intent of the bill."

But Brown wasn't done. At the 11th hour, he forced Democrats to spike a tax on big banks and hedge funds that was designed to generate $19 billion to pay for the costs of financial reform. As a result, consumers and small banks had to pick up the tab. Brown, meanwhile, was richly rewarded for his efforts on behalf of Wall Street: During a three-week period at the height of negotiations, he raked in $140,000 in campaign cash from big financial firms, including Fidelity and MassMutual, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

When Republicans won back control of the House in last year's midterm elections, they followed Brown's lead and moved swiftly to betray their Tea Party backers by running up more deficits on behalf of the rich. Within days of the election, Republicans not only secured a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, they also enabled America's richest scions to inherit millions of dollars without paying a dime in taxes. All told, the GOP's two favors for the party's biggest donors were secured in a lame-duck bargain that adds another $858 billion to the debt – an amount greater than the original stimulus plan the Republicans opposed so bitterly.

First, the GOP filibustered a Democrat-led effort to extend the Bush tax cuts on only the first $250,000 of income. The party leadership's hard-line stance – supported by barely a third of all voters – turned $90 billion over to the wealthiest Americans. It also set a precedent for further extensions that would cost nearly $1 trillion over the next decade. At the same time, the GOP drove through a deal that actually raised taxes for couples who make less than $40,000 a year – and then turned much of the extra cash over to couples who earn more than $200,000. Obama agreed to this massive transfer of wealth in order to retain the Bush tax cuts for the middle class – but the only other significant thing he got in return was a one-year extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed.

But even the GOP's big payday for the wealthy pales in comparison to the handout that Republicans secured by gutting the estate tax. With the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the inheritance tax was set to snap back to its Clinton-era standard: exempting the first $1 million of all estates from taxation, and stepping up the tax rate on the wealthiest estates to 55 percent. Instead, Obama agreed to raise the exemption to $5 million and lower the top tax rate to 35 percent – an apparent horse trade demanded by the Senate's second-ranking Republican, Jon Kyl of Arizona, who then allowed the president's nuclear-stockpile treaty with Russia to move forward in the Senate.

Shockingly, the deal actually sweetened the bargain the super-rich had received in 2009, enabling the heirs to the richest 0.25 percent of estates to pocket an extra $23 billion they would have otherwise owed in taxes under Bush. In fact, under the terms Kyl demanded, the federal government will spend more to eliminate or cut taxes for 100,000 rich people than it will to extend unemployment benefits for 7 million Americans.

In a little-noticed detail, the two-year deal also created a loophole that allows the wealthiest couples to pass on $10 million to a child today – while they're still living – without paying a penny of tax. That means the rich can offload their wealth to their children before it increases in value – evading higher estate taxes in the future. "In the next two years," one tax attorney crowed to The Wall Street Journal, "wealthy people have an unprecedented opportunity to push a lot of the value of their assets out of the estate-tax system." According to tax historians, the new rules create the most generous tax environment for wealth transfers for the super-rich since 1931.

And that was just the beginning of the budget-busting handouts the GOP demanded for the rich. In April, Republicans in the House passed a budget that would have slashed income taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans to just 25 percent – a $3 trillion giveaway that would have been financed by doubling out-of-pocket expenses for future retirees on Medicare. Top Republicans like Cantor have also pushed for a replay of the American Jobs Creation Act – endorsing a new tax amnesty that would allow corporate giants like Apple and Pfizer to bring home $1.4 trillion in offshore profits that would be taxed at just 5.25 percent – a favor for the wealthy that would generate another $79 billion in deficits. "At the same time they're talking about these big deficit problems, running around saying, 'We're broke,' they're contemplating one of the most egregious tax giveaways in recent memory," says Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "The potential windfall gains are beyond enormous – and the lion's share would go to shareholders of these big corporations and their executives."

Never mind that the previous tax amnesty in 2004 created virtually no new jobs, as corporate executives eagerly pocketed the windfall for themselves: Republicans are once again claiming that the tax amnesty will enable corporations to spend their repatriated wealth putting Americans back to work. Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential front-runner, promises that the flood of corporate cash will generate "hundreds of thousands if not millions – of good, permanent, private-sector jobs." That flies in the face of basic economics, given that corporate America is already sitting on hundreds of billions in domestic cash reserves. What the tax amnesty would do, however, is boost stock prices. According to an analysis by JP Morgan, as much as two-thirds of the $1.4 trillion that would be brought back into the country would go to stock "buybacks and dividends" rather than "new factories, new jobs and new equipment," as Romney claims.

JP Morgan has a big stake in the debate – as do fellow bank-bailout beneficiaries Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. Combined, the four financial giants have $87 billion in untaxed profits stockpiled offshore. That's similar to the combined offshore profits of drug giants Pfizer and Merck at $89 billion. Tech giants Cisco and Microsoft have more than $61 billion they'd like to bring home, while Big Oil companies Exxon and Chevron have $56 billion. The company with the most to gain, by far – with offshored reserves of $94 billion – is corporate America's most notorious tax scofflaw, GE.

Romney's rival for the GOP nomination, Rick Perry, has also endorsed the tax amnesty for giant corporations. But for Perry, the proposal doesn't go far enough on behalf of the rich. "Why not talk about how you are going to repatriate those dollars at a substantially lower rate than 35 percent?" Perry said recently, stumping in New Hampshire. "Like zero."

In September, Perry went even further, proposing a flat tax that would take a sharp bite out of the paychecks of the poorest Americans – while slashing taxes by more than 40 percent for the wealthiest. When confronted by a reporter over the fact that his plan would give millions to the rich, Perry replied: "I don't care about that." His plan is almost as regressive as Herman Cain's original 9-9-9 plan, which called for increasing taxes on 84 percent of Americans – squeezing $4,400 a year out of every middle-class couple to finance a $455,000 tax cut for millionaires. What's more, both Perry and Cain want to abolish the estate tax entirely and eliminate all taxes on capital gains. A similar plan by Michele Bachmann would enable 23,000 millionaires to pay no taxes at all – while allowing the top 400 earners to pocket nearly two-thirds of their income tax-free, and then pass those riches on to their heirs without paying a penny. "It's madness," says Stiglitz. "And it is dangerous to the fiscal order. The wealthy know very well how to convert normal income to capital gains income."
The Republican mania for rewarding the rich with tax cuts has become so warped that the normal rules of budgeting no longer seem to apply. Arguing for an extension of the Bush tax cuts, Sen. Kyl spelled out what could well serve as the Party of the Rich's credo: "You should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." The same rule, of course, doesn't apply to spending for those in need: At the time he called for more borrowing on behalf of the rich, Kyl was also fighting to deny unemployment benefits to 5 million Americans. "Continuing to pay people unemployment compensation," he scoffed, "is a disincentive for them to seek new work."

In retrospect, the true victor of the midterm elections last year was not the Tea Party, or even Speaker of the House John Boehner. It was Grover Norquist.

"What has happened over the last two years is that Grover now has soldiers in the field," says Bartlett, the architect of the Reagan tax cuts. "These Tea Party people, in effect, take their orders from him." Indeed, a record 98 percent of House Republicans have now signed Norquist's anti-tax pledge – which includes a second, little-known provision that played a key role in the debt-ceiling debacle. In addition to vowing not to raise taxes, politicians who sign the pledge promise to use any revenue generated by ending a tax subsidy to immediately finance – that's right – more tax cuts.

Norquist insists the measure is necessary to force Congress to rein in spending. "I'm not focused on the deficit," he says. "The metric that matters is keeping spending down." But in the real world, the effect of Norquist's oath is to prevent the government from cutting the deficit by ending tax breaks to the rich. All told, tax breaks cost the government $1.2 trillion each year – far more than defense spending ($744 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($719 billion) or Social Security ($701 billion). And most of the breaks – think of them as government subsidies delivered through the tax code – go to the wealthy. The richest one percent of Americans receive a 13.5 percent boost in their incomes from such subsidies – almost double the benefit the bottom 80 percent receives. Under Norquist's pledge, lawmakers are forbidden from ending any kind of tax break – mortgage deductions for luxury vacation homes, subsidies for giant oil companies, lower tax rates for private-equity millionaires – without using the money to pay for another tax cut. "If you can't get rid of tax expenditures – if old Grover is going to call that a 'tax increase' – it's not just ludicrous, it's deception," says Simpson, the former GOP senator.

Ludicrous or not, Norquist's intransigence on tax expenditures killed the "grand bargain" that President Obama proposed during the debt-ceiling standoff. In return for $1 trillion in cuts to social spending and national security, plus another $650 billion in reductions to entitlements like Medicare, Obama asked Republicans to get rid of $1.2 trillion in wasteful tax subsidies. "Democrats weren't talking about raising taxes – they were talking about eliminating tax expenditures, for God's sakes!" says Voinovich. "Many of them should have been eliminated a long time ago." But with so many Republicans committed to Norquist's anti-revenue pledge, Boehner was forced to walk away from the deal.

"Grover's got 'em terrified," says Simpson. "I always tell Republicans, 'Hell, Grover can't kill ya. He can't burn down your house. The only thing he can do to you is defeat you in re-election – and if re-election means more to you than your country, then you shouldn't be in the legislature.'"

The battle over the debt ceiling underscores the GOP's rapid evolution into the Party of the Rich. The budget savings projected from the compromise that Republicans wound up agreeing to – $2.1 trillion – won't even begin to pay for costs incurred by the Bush tax cuts. In their first decade alone, the cuts wound up depriving the Treasury of $2.5 trillion – with 38 percent of the money now going to the richest one percent of Americans. For all their talk of cutting the deficit in recent years, Republicans have spent far more of the public's money to subsidize the wealthy.

Indeed, since Republicans began their tax-cut binge in 1997, they have succeeded in making the rich much richer. While the average income for the bottom 90 percent of taxpayers has remained basically flat over the past 15 years, those in the top 0.01 percent have seen their incomes more than double, to $36 million a year. Translated into wages, that means most Americans have received a raise of $1.50 an hour since the GOP began cutting taxes during the Gingrich era. The most elite sliver of American society, meanwhile, saw their pay soar by $10,000 an hour.

America became a great nation with a prosperous middle class on the strength of a progressive tax code – one that demands the most of those who benefit most from our society. But the Party of the Rich has succeeded in breaking the back of that ideal. Today, says Johnston, "the tax system ceases to be progressive when you get to the very top of the wealthiest one percent." Above that marker, the richer you get, the lower your relative tax burden. "We have moved toward a plutocracy," Warren Buffett warned in a recent interview. "As people have gotten richer and richer, they have been favored by taxation – and have gotten richer to a greater degree."

Far from creating the trickle-down economics promised by Reagan, the policies pursued by the modern Republican Party are gusher up. Under the leadership of Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the House's radicalized GOP caucus is pushing a predatory agenda for a new gilded age. Every move that Republicans make – whether it's to gut consumer protections, roll back environmental regulations, subsidize giant agribusinesses, abolish health care reform or just drill, baby, drill – is consistent with a single overarching agenda: to enrich the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, even if it requires borrowing from China, weakening national security, dismantling Medicare and taxing the middle class. With the nation still mired in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, Republicans have categorically rejected the one financial policy with a proven record of putting the country back on a more prosperous footing. "You hear the Republicans say that you don't dare raise taxes in a weak economy," says Stockman. "Ronald Reagan did – three times." Not even the downgrading of America's debt – which placed the world's only superpower on credit par with New Zealand and Belgium – has given GOP leaders cause to reconsider their pro-wealth jihad. In August, as the so-called Supercommittee began its work to complete the debt-ceiling deal by reducing future deficits by another $1.5 trillion, Cantor issued the Party of the Rich's marching orders, insisting that Republicans not buckle under the "tremendous pressure" to hike taxes and instead target spending cuts in "mandatory programs."

The composition of the committee offers little hope that Congress will hold the rich accountable for their share of the deficit burden. While Democrats appointed deal-oriented centrists like Sen. Max Baucus to the committee, Republicans stocked it with anti-revenue hard-liners, including Sens. Jon Kyl and Pat Toomey, who used to run the Club for Growth – an ally of Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. "Your wallet is safe," Norquist tweeted after the Republican roster was announced.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Norquist expresses pride that the GOP has been so thoroughly transformed since the days of Reagan. "It's a different Republican Party now," he says. Norquist even goes so far as to liken the kind of Republicans common in Reagan's day – those willing to raise taxes to strengthen the economy – to segregationists. The "modern Republican Party," he says, would no sooner recognize a revenue-raiser than the "modern Democratic Party would recognize George Wallace."

Norquist expresses no discomfort at the moral impact of his project – providing tax favors for the wealthy that are paid for by cutting services to those who truly need them. "I understand greed and envy," Norquist says. "The idea that somebody's making money and you want to steal some of it? That's an interesting idea. But it's not morality. It's certainly not justice."

Such extremist rhetoric – equating taxation with theft – is exactly the kind of talk that dismays old-line Republicans. Many of those who fought for years at the side of Ronald Reagan say they no longer recognize traditional GOP values in the new Republican Party. Fighting for the rich, after all, is not the same as championing the right.

"You can look up my record: On conservatism and taxes I was better than Jesse Helms," says Simpson, the former senator. "But whatever happened to common sense? People are going to look around in five or 10 years and say, 'Whatever happened to the things that made me comfortable? That made our streets and schools good things?' And they'll look, hopefully, at Grover Norquist. I can say to you with deepest sincerity: If this country and this legislature are in thrall to Grover Norquist, we haven't got a prayer."

This story is from the November 24, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109#ixzz1eJERwSQE

How The GOP Became the Party of the Rich

CAN ANYONE VERIFY WHO THESE JustBeenPaid MEMBERS ARE and IF THEY ARE ACTUALLY BEING PAID?

2011-11-16T11:06:00.000-08:00

"Our Members Love JSS-Tripler Because They're Making Money Like Crazy!"
CAN ANYONE VERIFY WHO THESE MEMBERS ARE and IF THEY ARE ACTUALLY BEING PAID?

Please submit your answers or inquiries to the JustBeenPaid and JSS Tripler Post on the Web Success Forum
Members Who Gave Testimonials: Geoff Barraclough; Mike & Danna Sexsmith, Wrightwood, CA; Clayton Masse ;Robert Hinrichs, California, USA; Kirk Beall;
John Bass. Australia; Michael Dietrich ; Alan Chapman; Mark Petrelis .

JSS-Tripler's Top 20 Earners

The table below shows the top 20 JSS-Tripler earners -- cumulative account fundings and earnings since the program started on 17th February, 2011. (The table is updated approximately once a day.)

JSS-Tripler's Top 20 Earners
Rider #	Account Funding	Active Positions	# of Refs	"2%" Earnings	Referral Bonuses	Total Earnings
1	$32010.65	4002	6	$170097.80	$9357.50	$179455.30
2	$10175.00	1181	245	$92187.40	$81415.50	$173602.90
3	$35631.91	4742	9	$134856.40	$8791.00	$143647.40
4	$9703.62	3568	1	$98042.00	$24165.50	$122207.50
5	$40427.00	4452	0	$114097.00	$0.00	$114097.00
6	$26201.00	9253	2	$71595.00	$6026.00	$77621.00
7	$242.00	358	36	$16676.80	$55130.00	$71806.80
8	$15096.00	4102	0	$65310.20	$0.00	$65310.20
9	$10827.16	954	20	$49508.40	$13173.50	$62681.90
10	$35922.70	3985	4	$55911.00	$1636.00	$57547.00
11	$7890.33	902	88	$42589.60	$14372.00	$56961.60
12	$3090.80	1422	19	$34317.60	$19117.00	$53434.60
13	$16799.90	3543	0	$52840.60	$0.00	$52840.60
14	$9613.50	2496	40	$43890.40	$8817.00	$52707.40
15	$22443.70	2200	2	$50756.00	$727.50	$51483.50
16	$34802.00	7238	12	$47862.60	$1283.50	$49146.10
17	$9103.50	636	10	$42959.60	$6090.50	$49050.10
18	$22691.00	6632	0	$48960.20	$0.00	$48960.20
19	$1320.00	951	12	$28192.00	$20593.00	$48785.00
20	$77.80	3	70	$150.20	$46276.50	$46426.70

(Note: "# of Refs" = "Number of Referrals."
Our Earners can also receive additional residual income streams from JustBeenPaid! and from its other related programs -- with no extra work!)

Please submit your answers or inquiries to the JustBeenPaid and JSS Tripler Post on the Web Success Forum

Tell corporations to stick to business: STOP Corporations BUYING Politicians !!!

2011-11-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, corporations existed to produce goods and provide services to customers.

But these days it seems like corporations have a new priority – namely, spending millions to elect politicians who will do their bidding.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can take back our democracy.

Please sign our petition urging corporations to refrain from political spending in 2012! Act Now!

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to special interest money in our elections. That money is now threatening to drown out the voices of ordinary Americans like you and me.

And while there are lots of options for reversing Citizens United, we can't wait two, five or ten years for politicians to take action to fix our broken system.

We need to do something NOW. Let's remind corporations to stick to business and refrain from political spending in the 2012 elections.

Sign our petition today, and we'll deliver it to the top 500 corporations – starting with Bank of America, our #1 target as chosen by you, our Common Cause members and activists.
Act Now!

Thanks for all you do,

Bob Edgar and the rest of the team at Common Cause

P.S. Please forward this message to four friends who also want to see corporations doing more to strengthen community, not investing in politics that divide it.
Join on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Common Cause is a national nonpartisan organization with chapters in 35 states. Our mailing address is 1133 19th Street NW, 9th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Our phone number is (202) 833-1200.

Where Is Vernon Chumbley, owner of http://www.SmileyTraffic.com ?

2011-11-09T16:22:00.000-08:00

Where Is Vernon Chumbley, owner of http://www.SmileyTraffic.com ?

Having bought 5,000 Manual credits on November 5,2011 and never having received
a response to 5-6 emails sent to him, I cannot figure if he is sick, hospitalized
or possibly dead. It is to tally uncharacteristic of him not to respond after
buying traffic. I completely trust in his honesty,integrity and I am only worried for his health and safety. I know his address and have not yet contacted the local Police
Department to find out if he is okay. I may do that.
However, if anyone knows how he is doing and if he needs assistance,please reply on this blog or to these two web addresses:

1. Where Is Vernon Chumbley?

2. Where Is Vernon Chumbley?
on the web Success Forum

Thank you from a concerned Smiley Traffic affiliate- follower- admirer.

Vernon Chumbley is back at work. He just gave me twice the amount of manual
credits than I paid for. God Bless him. I hope he is well. Civilization has survived !! (-: Thank you Mr. Smiley

The New Face of Oil Sands in Canada

2011-11-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

by Robert Mansell October 20,2011

One of new Alberta premier Alison Redford’s key responsibilities is to ensure the success of the energy sector. Our prosperity depends on navigating a host of market and policy issues. Resolving those effectively, however, will require the sector to earn broader public support.

The premier recognizes the need to reduce dependence on non-renewable resource revenues, diversify markets, invest in renewable energy, reduce environmental footprints and mitigate labour shortages. This is all to the good.

But the increasingly worrisome issue is that such a large percentage of the population, both in the province and in other regions, does not understand how their economic welfare is linked to the success of the petroleum sector. And while the protests in New York and elsewhere are for now focused on the financial sector and economic inequality, their target may well shift to “big business” in general. That means the already controversy-plagued oil and gas sector.

The failure of so many to connect petroleum to their own their economic welfare is no doubt related to the growing extent of the linkages. About two-thirds of all employment and incomes generated by petroleum are actually in other sectors—manufacturing, construction, finance, trade and business services across the country. Similarly, the average citizen does not see that a large proportion of the benefits they receive is via the $60 billion or so the sector pays each year to governments nationwide, without which that citizen would receive fewer services or pay higher taxes. In fact, the petroleum sector accounts for about one half of all incomes, employment and government revenues in Alberta, and approximately half of all Canadian goods and services exports. It is the dominant contributor to our favorable trade balance, it is the largest private-sector investor in the national economy, and it accounts for about one-quarter of all tangible national wealth.

A broader public understanding of its role in our economy will allow smarter policy decisions. And nobody is better positioned to get the message out than Redford. Communicating a better understanding of the sector may prove her most vital challenge.

Robert Mansell is a professor of economics and academic director of the University of Calgary's School of Public Policy.

Fre.e Video Reveals $1,407 Per Day Software: Mobile Cash/Money Machines

2011-10-28T15:42:00.000-07:00

The product is a very unique software, that fuses together two of the largest buyer pools in the world and allows users to make easy commissions from them.

Unlike other mobile products which are complicated, have a huge learning curve, or just impractical...

The Mobile Money Machines System provide an all-inclusive suite of tools and training to make massive amounts of affiliate money.

We expect VERY low refunds, and VERY happy customers, as this has already been tested extensively with a beta group of customers.

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This means your customers will be able to get questions answered right away which will further reduce refund rates.

With the team we have behind this it will convert like crazy.

You can expect sky-high EPC's because this has been tested with over a million clicks... YOU WILL MAKE MONEY mailing this. Mobile Money Machines

How a Simple Formula Has Been Scientifically Proven to Cure Cancer and Virtually All Diseases:One-Minute Cure

2011-10-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

How a Simple Formula Has Been Scientifically Proven to Cure Cancer and Virtually All Diseases: One-Minute Cure
Why this one-minute therapy is being suppressed in the U.S. while more than
15,000 European doctors have been using it to heal millions of patients
by Madison Cavanaugh

What if you lived in a world where there is an alternative cancer cure - or that any other disease -- was no longer a threat to you? What if you never had to experience the horror of receiving a doctor's chilling diagnosis of a terrible disease -- or watch helplessly as someone you care about suffers from cancer or some other life-threatening disease -- with you not being able to do anything about it?

What would you be willing to give to ensure that you and your loved ones would never need to suffer -- or die -- from so-called "incurable" diseases that are actually curable? Would it be nice to know that you can cure cancer?

If you're like most people, chances are, you or someone you know suffers from one or more of the following diseases: (Check all that apply.)

Cancer AIDS Heart Disease
Alzheimer's Disease Parkinson's Disease Asthma
Diabetes Rheumatoid Arthritis Multiple Sclerosis
Alcoholism Hepatitis Herpes
Emphysema Periodontal Disease Click to list other diseases

Imagine never having to worry about getting the flu again -- or suffering from migraine headaches, gum disease, sinusitis, anemia, lupus, bronchitis -- and any other disease, for that matter.

Click here if you want to read more about Natural Cures and Natural Cures for Cancer
What if you no longer had to live in fear that one day you'll develop a disease that "runs in the family" or get diseases that naturally come from "getting older" or from bad lifestyle choices?

And what if you had a one-minute cure (which costs only 1½ cents a day to self-administer) that could get rid of virtually any disease in the event that you actually acquired one?

I know, I know. You're probably thinking, "That just can't be true! How could one simple remedy possibly cure all diseases? There's no such thing as a panacea." Well, you have every reason to be skeptical. I know I was.

But if you can suspend your disbelief for a moment -- you're about to learn the most amazing health secret anyone could ever possess. Your life -- or the life of your loved one -- could very well depend on this information.

In the next 5 minutes as you read this article in its entirety, you will discover ...
a remarkable, scientifically proven natural therapy that creates an environment within the body where disease cannot thrive. This therapy does not cure disease but enables the body to cure itself of disease.

* Why over 6,100 articles in European scientific literature have attested to the effectiveness of this simple therapy in not only killing diseased cells but also simultaneously revitalizing and rejuvenating healthy cells, thereby creating vibrant energy and well-being.
Click here if you want to read more about Natural Cures and Natural Cures for Cancer
+ how this safe, inexpensive and powerful healing modality has been administered by an estimated 15,000 European doctors, naturopaths and homeopaths to more than 10 million patients in the past 70 years to successfully treat practically every known disease.

If you or someone you care about suffers from, or are at risk of acquiring, any disease, this will be the most important article you'll ever read in your life.

You'll discover why this simple therapy has the potential to save the lives of millions of people; how it can dramatically improve the quality of our lives by eradicating disease; and how it could potentially solve the health care crisis in this country.

You'll also find out why information about this groundbreaking therapy has been deliberately kept secret from the American public -- and why you must grab the earliest opportunity to learn about this one-minute therapy before this information is banned by enterprises, cartels and agencies whose financial interests are threatened by it.

Before we get started, here's why thousands of physicians, researchers and health practitioners who administer this simple therapy are calling it the . . .

"World's Greatest Healing Miracle of All Time"

Two-time Nobel Prize-winning doctor, Otto Warburg, shocked the world when he revealed that most disease is caused by insufficient levels of oxygen in the body. In fact, his studies showed that if you deprive a cell 35% of its required levels of oxygen for 48 hours, the cell is likely to become cancerous.

That's why cancer is so widespread in our modern society -- because most people suffer from oxygen deprivation. What most people don't know is that lack of oxygen is not only the underlying cause of cancer but is also the cause of most diseases -- from AIDS to yeast infections.

Curing cancer and other diseases, then, is just a matter of getting rid of the cause of the disease. It's as simple as that! But it's human nature to complicate the solution, and turn the simple into something complex.

Current medical research, for instance, is focused on the wrong causes of disease. Some claim that viruses, microbes, germs or harmful bacteria are the cause of cancer and other diseases. Others say it's the toxins in the food we eat, the air we breathe and the substances we consume. And still others say it's our genes or stress that causes us to acquire disease.

While all of these factors do characterize most diseases, or might be precursors or by-products of disease, they do not CAUSE disease. Rather, they bring about a condition in the body (oxygen deficiency) that, in turn, causes disease.

Clearly, the primary physical cause of all diseases is linked in one way or another to oxygen deficiency -- and when the human body is supplied with abundant amounts of oxygen, all cancer cells, viruses, harmful bacteria, toxins, pathogens and disease microorganisms are killed because they cannot survive in a high-oxygen environment.
Click here if you want to read more about Natural Cures and Natural Cures for Cancer
"One out of every 3 adults in America already has cancer -- but most of them don't know it yet because the cancer is undiagnosed and undetected. According to the American Cancer Society, there's a 41% probability that an individual, male or female, will develop cancer in his or her lifetime (or die from it). Additionally, every human being has cancer cells existing in the body which are just seeking a low-oxygen environment where they can multiply into the full-blown disease ." -- Madison Cavanaugh, The One Minute Cure: The Secret to Healing Virtually All Diseases [Click here to download 1st chapter]

Since an oxygen-rich body is uninhabitable by disease, then the solution for eradicating disease seems simple enough, doesn't it? Just supply the body with an abundant supply of oxygen, right?

Wrong! It's actually not as simple as that. Here's why:

Oxygen Cannot Cure Disease Unless It's Delivered to the Cells and Tissues of the Body

Most humans are NOT able to get proper amounts of oxygen in their cells and tissues -- due partly to poor air quality, poor breathing habits and oxygen-depleting activities. More importantly, the human body is NOT always able to deliver oxygen to the cells and tissues.

In order for oxygen to eradicate disease, it must be delivered not just to the lungs -- and not just to the bloodstream -- but to the cells and tissues of the body. That's why other oxygen-based therapies -- such as oxygenated water, oxygen-rich foods or supplements, or treatments that release oxygen into the bloodstream -- are not always effective in treating disease. While they may supply the body with oxygen, they don't always have an efficient mechanism for breaking the oxygen free from the hemoglobin molecule, which means the oxygen is not delivered to the cells and tissues. Such oxygen-based therapies, therefore, are seldom effective in preventing and curing disease.

The simple therapy you're about to learn, which thousands of people all over the world are calling "the world's greatest healing miracle of all time," is the only one that uses a natural oxygenating substance which ...
...stimulates the movement of oxygen atoms from the bloodstream to the cells to a dramatically greater degree
than is usually reached by other means.
Click here if you want to read more about Natural Cures and Natural Cures for Cancer
It does this by increasing oxygen and hemoglobin dissociation, thereby maximizing the delivery of oxygen from the blood to the cells, according to a prominent doctor best known for treating AIDS patients with a holistic protocol which includes oxygen therapy (see page 97 of The One-Minute Cure).

Is Gery Carson an Idiot? He is DESTROYING EVERYONE’s ability to GROW and REWARD a DOWNLINE by 50 TCredit All-time Limit.

2011-10-25T10:47:00.000-07:00

Gery Carson is DESTROYING EVERYONE’s ability to GROW and REWARD a DOWNLINE by this judgment of limiting the amount of TCredits you can give to 1 person only in your
level one to 50 Tcredits for ALL-time:

“Keith Stieneke to me show details Oct 24 (1 day ago)
Thank you for contacting the SFI Support Desk.

I found out from Natalie that TCredits can only be assigned to first level PSA’s and that you can only give each a maximum of 50 over any period of time. You give someone 50 this month and you can never give them again to that person. This was a decision by Gery."

Is Gery Carson an Idiot? You tell him what you think at :

Please complain in the SFIMG Forum

Corporations have no business in politics because Wall Street and corporations have corrupted the political process.

2011-10-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

Anger at corporations is spilling -- literally -- into the streets.

Big businesses are no longer content to wield their considerable influence only through lobbyists. Now they want to use their profits to directly elect and defeat political candidates, and thanks to Citizens United, there's nothing to stop them.

We believe that elections should be decided by "we, the people," not "they, the corporations." That's why we're launching a major campaign calling on publicly traded companies not to spend their profits on politics in the 2012 elections. Their ability to spend huge amounts of money drowns out the rest of our voices.

We need your help to determine where to start. Vote today and tell us who is #1 on your "worst of the worst" list.

Will you vote for Bank of America, which is under investigation for its role in the mortgage collapse and which gave $14 million to PACs (political action committees)? Or will Comcast, a company that pays big bucks to the American Legislative Exchange Council for the privilege of sitting side-by-side with state legislators to draft bills to protect its media monopoly, be your top choice?

See who else made our list and submit your vote today. Think we missed someone? There is even a write-in ballot! (Just in case you're wondering why Koch Industries isn't on our list: We're focusing on publicly traded companies, and Koch is private. But don't worry -- we're keeping the pressure on the Kochs in other ways!)

It's time for corporations to get out of the business of electing our leaders. Please vote today, and stay tuned for more ways you can help take back our democracy.

Sincerely,

Bob Edgar
and the rest of the team at Common Cause
Forward this email Join on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Common Cause is a national nonpartisan organization with chapters in 35 states. Our mailing address is 1133 19th Street NW, 9th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. Our phone number is (202) 833-1200.

Launch Alert: New Ricochet Riches pays you 2%+ in DAILY, PASSIVE Income!

2011-10-14T10:08:00.000-07:00

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Monsanto is secretly poisoning the population with Roundup

2011-10-10T22:12:00.000-07:00

By Jeffrey M. Smith -(NaturalNews)
Dr. Andreas Carrasco remained in the locked car and watched with fear as the crowd beat the vehicle and shouted at him -- for two hours. His friends who didn't make it into the vehicle were not so lucky. One ended up paralyzed. Another unconscious. The angry crowd of about 100 were likely organized by a local rice grower who was furious at Carrasco for what he was trying to do that day. Carrasco's crime? Telling people that Roundup herbicide from Monsanto causes birth defects in animals, and probably humans.

Carrasco is a leading embryologist at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and the Argentinean national research council. He had heard the horrific stories of peasant farmers working near the vast fields of Roundup Ready soybeans -- plants genetically engineered to withstand generous doses of Monsanto's poisonous weed killer. The short-term impact of getting sprayed was obvious: skin rashes, headaches, loss of appetite, and for one 11 year old Paraguayan boy named Silvino Talavera, who biked through a fog of herbicides in 2003, death. But Carrasco also heard about the rise of birth defects, cancer, and other disorders that now plagued the peasants who were sprayed by plane. He decided to conduct a study.

Exposing Roundup's 30 year cover-up of birth defects
Carrasco injected minute amounts of Roundup into chicken and frog embryos, and sure enough, the offspring exhibited the same type of birth deformities that the peasant communities were seeing in their newborns. A report by the provincial government of Chaco soon followed, confirming that those living near soy and rice fields sprayed with Roundup and other chemicals did in fact have higher rates of birth defects -- nearly a fourfold increase between 2000-2009. (Child cancer rates tripled during the same period.)

Regulatory agencies had given Roundup a green light years before, claiming that it was free of such problems. However after Carrasco's findings were published, European authorities quietly pushed their official re-assessment of Roundup, due in 2012, back to 2015. And the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, charged with responding to Carrasco's findings, issued a statement claiming that the Argentine scientist must be mistaken; earlier studies conducted by manufacturers of Roundup (including Monsanto) had already demonstrated that Roundup does not cause birth defects.

But in June 2011, a group of international scientists released a report detailing a massive cover-up that went back to the 1980s. The very industry studies cited by the German Consumer Protection office in fact showed just the opposite. Roundup did increase birth defects. Using scientific sleight of hand, Europe's regulators had ignored statistically significant increases in birth defects, and so did every other regulatory agency worldwide. Monsanto has relied on these misleading statements of safety by regulators ever since, using them to deny that Roundup causes birth defects.

Monsanto secretly poisoning the population, again and again
Covering up toxic effects of their products was not new for Monsanto. They're experts at it. In 2003 the company paid $700 million in settlements for secretly poisoning the population living next to their PCB factory in Anniston, Alabama. Court documents showed the arrogance of Monsanto executives made aware of the product's effects: 'We can't afford to lose $1 of business,' was the written response in a secret company memo.

Leaked documents also revealed that EPA scientists had charged Monsanto with fraudulently hiding the toxic effects of Agent Orange -- effectively preventing Vietnam veterans from collecting compensation for cancer, birth defects, and other symptoms of exposure.

When Carrasco first reported his findings, he got the usual treatment. His results were vehemently denied, and he was attacked in the press by biotech advocates. Four highly aggressive men showed up at his office and tried to interrogate him, but he wasn't physically attacked. Not until he tried to give a speech on his results in the small Argentine farm town of La Leonesa on August 7, 2010. That was unusual.

Punishing messengers worldwide
When Dr. Irina Ermakova came to her office, the meaning of the charred remains of papers on her desk was unambiguous -- it was yet another attempt to intimidate or punish her. So was the theft of samples from her laboratory, and the continuous verbal attacks by biotech advocates. Her crime? She fed rats genetically modified Roundup Ready soy, and reported the results.

Those results were clearly not what the sellers of GM soy wanted us to hear. After female rats were fed GM soy, more than half their babies died within three weeks. The rat pups were also considerably smaller, and in a later experiment, were unable to reproduce. Offspring from mothers fed non-GM soybeans, on the other hand, died at only a 10% rate, and were able to mate successfully.

Journal ambushes scientist
After Ermakova presented the results as 'preliminary' at an October 2005 conference, the biotech industry's damage control teams kicked into high gear. At the center of the coordinated attack was the editor of the journal Nature Biotechnology
PureHealthSystems.com

But that was just a 'dummy proof.' What was actually published was quite different. Instead of an essay, the journal had inserted scathing criticisms from the four biotech advocates after nearly every paragraph. Many of Ermakova's citations were also stripped off and replaced with those chosen by the biotech detractors -- to weaken her case. It was an academic lynch mob, conducted by four biotech apologists: Bruce Chassy, Vivian Moses, Val Giddings, and Alan McHughen. All acknowledged that they had no personal experience in the type of research they were condemning, but that didn't stop them from throwing every type of challenge they could think of at Ermakova.

The purpose of the attack was transparent. It allowed the biotech industry to claim from that point forward that the study showing high death rates was officially refuted and discredited. It also served as a warning: if anyone wanted to defend Ermakova (or do similar research) they too would be mercilessly attacked.

The problem was that nearly all their criticisms were utterly baseless. About 75 % of their arguments, for example, were simply complaints that she didn't provide sufficient detail. Now remember -- she was told to only provide a summary. Her request to the editor to submit complete details was denied. It was quite a setup. When the details of this ambush were made public, independent scientists charged Nature Biotechnology with an unethical 'premeditated attack.' At least one letter called on the editor to resign.

It didn't happen. Instead, international pressure against Ermakova got so intense, her boss told her not to do any more studies on GMOs. One of her colleagues even tried to comfort her by suggesting that perhaps the GM soy could solve the human overpopulation problem. (She wasn't comforted.) According to Ermakova, the editor contacted her and told her he was going to include a description of her study as a sort of essay in the journal. She was then asked to summarize her research over the phone, or if she preferred, in writing. Ermakova, a senior scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, was surprised by the request and asked instead to properly submit the findings for peer review and publication. Oh no, the editor insisted, he just wanted a summary. She sent it in, and the journal sent Ermakova back a proof of the article, with her named as the author.

Real life confirms research: GM soy = high infant mortality for rats
The main valid criticism against Ermakova's research was that she failed to conduct a biochemical analysis of the feed. Without that, we don't know if some rogue toxin present in the bag of soy flour might have been responsible for the astonishing death rate and stunted growth in her experiment. But subsequent events at her laboratory suggest otherwise.
PureHealthSystems.com

After Ermakova repeated the test three times with similar results, the supplier of rat food used at the facility began using GM soy in the formulation. With all the rats now eating GM soy, Ermakova couldn't conduct any more experiments (she had no controls). After two months, however, she asked her colleagues at the lab about the mortality rate in their rat experiments. It turned out that 99 of 179 (55.3%) rat pups whose parents were fed GM soy-based rat chow had died within the first 20 days. Thus, whatever caused the high death rate does not appear to be confined to the one batch of GM flour used in her experiment. Both the study, and the subsequent laboratory-wide mortality rate, are published in the Russian peer-reviewed journal Ecosinform.

Horrific reproductive disorders
Other studies on Roundup Ready soy also show scary reproductive problems. Ermakova showed that the testicles of rats fed GM soy changed from the normal pink to blue (not published). Peer-reviewed research from Italy also showed changes in mice testicles, including alterations in young sperm cells. A Brazilian team found changes in the uterus and ovaries of female rats. The DNA of mice embryos functioned differently, compared to those whose parents were fed non-GM soy. And when hamsters were fed GM soy for two years, by the third generation, most lost the ability to have babies. The offspring grew at a slower rate and the infant mortality rate was 4-5 times that of the non-GM soy group. Many also had hair growing in their mouths.

When the Austrian government tested Roundup Ready corn (which was also engineered to produce an insecticide), mice had fewer – and smaller – babies.

PureHealthSystems.com
It's not possible to know if the reproductive damage was due to the genetic changes in the GM crops, the high residues of Roundup in the GM soybeans and corn, or some other reason. But the American Academy of Environmental Science is among the medical organizations that don't need more animal studies before issuing a warning. They urge all doctors to prescribe non-GMO diets to everyone.

Omnipresent Roundup literally falls from the sky
Although eliminating Roundup Ready soy and corn from our diet will certainly reduce our intake of Roundup, a recent study suggests that getting our exposure down to zero is not possible. In the Midwest during the growing season, Roundup is found in 60–100% of air and rain samples, as well as in streams.

The omnipresence of Roundup in the US is due in large part to the more than 100 million acres of Roundup Ready crops. As farmers pour on Monsanto's weed killer, weeds are learning to adapt and withstand the poison -- so farmers pour on more. In the first 13 years since GM crops were introduced, the use of herbicide-tolerant crops resulted in an additional 383 million pounds more herbicide. And due to the emergence of superweeds (now found in 11 million acres), the increased use of Roundup is accelerating dramatically.
USDA solution? Even more Roundup
The USDA has a unique response to this mounting threat: Add more Roundup. In January 2011 they deregulated yet another Roundup Ready crop, alfalfa -- which is widely used for animal feed. Only 7% of the more than 20 million acres of this crop typically gets any herbicide applied to it. But that's about to change, since Roundup Ready alfalfa will soon be drinking Roundup in a hay field near you.

Not content with just the alfalfa, on July 1 the USDA told Scotts Miracle-Gro that it could introduce Roundup Ready Kentucky Bluegrass to lawns, golf courses, and soccer fields around the nation, without any government oversight.

So now we have Roundup in our food, animal feed, air, rain, and streams, and soon it will be sprayed in high doses where our children play on the grass. It's not just birth defects that may soon plague America as a result. Roundup is also linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, lower sperm counts, abnormal sperm, human cell death, miscarriages, and other disorders. But it's also linked to billions in profits for Monsanto. No wonder they are working overtime to silence the scientists and cover-up the findings. What if people knew the truth?

PureHealthSystems.com
_____________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey M. Smith is the author of Seeds of Deception (http://www.seedsofdeception.com/Pub...), the world's bestselling book on GMOs. He is also the author of Genetic Roulette (http://www.geneticroulette.com), and the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology (http://www.responsibletechnology.org). The Institute's Non-GMO Shopping Guide website (http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com), iPhone app ShopNoGMO, and pocket guide, help people navigate to healthier non-GMO foods. Join the Institute's Non-GMO Tipping Point Network (http://action.responsibletechnology...) to connect with others in your area, to bring the truth about GMOs to your friends and community.

http://www.naturalnews.com/033772_Monsanto_Roundup.html

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The Eight Marks of Fascist Policy, Part II

2011-10-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

[Ed. Note: In his 1944 book, As We Go Marching, John T. Flynn outlined what he saw as eight marks of fascist policy. Recently, at Doug Casey’s “When Money Dies” conference in Phoenix, AZ, Llewellyn Rockwell presented Flynn’s points, offering some thoughts on each as he went. In today’s edition, we present a snippet from that presentation. For Part I, please see here.]

Point 5. Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.

Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. Mostly this refers to the economic self-determination of the nation- state. The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support rapid economic growth for a large and growing population.

This was and is the basis for fascist expansionism. Without expansion, the state dies. This is also the idea behind the strange combination of protectionist pressure today combined with militarism. It is driven in part by the need to control resources.

Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We would be supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in part by the producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the American empire generally, which supports dollar hegemony.

It is the reason for the planned North American Union.

The goal is national self-sufficiency rather than a world of peaceful trade. Consider, too, the protectionist impulses of the Republican ticket. There is not one single Republican, apart from Ron Paul, who authentically supports free trade in the classical definition.

From ancient Rome to modern-day America, imperialism is a form of statism that the bourgeoisie love. It is for this reason that Bush’s post-9/11 push for the global empire has been sold as patriotism and love of country rather than for what it is: a looting of liberty and property to benefit the political elites.

6. Government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing.

This point requires no elaboration because it is no longer hidden. There was stimulus 1 and stimulus 2, both of which are so discredited that stimulus 3 will have to adopt a new name. Let’s call it the American Jobs Act.

With a prime-time speech, Obama argued in favor of this program with some of the most asinine economic analysis I’ve ever heard. He mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when schools, bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply and demand come together to match up needed work with jobs.

Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that Obama refers to are all built and maintained by the state. That’s why they are falling apart. And the reason that people don’t have jobs is because the state has made it too expensive to hire them. It’s not complicated. To sit around and dream of other scenarios is no different from wishing that water flowed uphill or that rocks would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of reality.

Still, Obama went on, invoking the old fascistic longing for national greatness. “Building a world-class transportation system,” he said, “is part of what made us an economic superpower.” Then he asked, “We’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?”

Well, the answer to that question is yes. And you know what? It doesn’t hurt a single American for a person in China to travel on a faster railroad than we do. To claim otherwise is an incitement to nationalist hysteria.

As for the rest of this program, Obama promised yet another long list of spending projects. Let’s just mention the reality: No government in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as much, and created as much fake money as the United States. If the United States doesn’t qualify as a fascist state in this sense, no government ever has.

None of this would be possible but for the role of the Federal Reserve, the great lender to the world. This institution is absolutely critical to US fiscal policy. There is no way that the national debt could increase at a rate of $4 billion per day without this institution.

Under a gold standard, all of this maniacal spending would come to an end. And if US debt were priced on the market with a default premium, we would be looking at a rating far less than A+.

Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.

Have you ever noticed that the military budget is never seriously discussed in policy debates? The United States spends more than most of the rest of the world combined.

And yet to hear our leaders talk, the United States is just a tiny commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from the world. They would have us believe that we all stand naked and vulnerable. The whole thing is a ghastly lie. The United States is a global military empire and the main threat to peace around the world today.

To visualize US military spending as compared with other countries is truly shocking. One bar chart you can easily look up shows the US trillion-dollar-plus military budget as a skyscraper surrounded by tiny huts. As for the next highest spender, China spends 1/10th as much as the United States.

Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is essential for the US way of life that the United States be the most deadly country on the planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey. This should be considered a fiscal and moral outrage by every civilized person.

This isn’t only about the armed services, the military contractors, the CIA death squads. It is also about how police at all levels have taken on military-like postures. This goes for the local police, state police, and even the crossing guards in our communities. The commissar mentality, the trigger-happy thuggishness, has become the norm throughout the whole of society.

If you want to witness outrages, it is not hard. Try coming into this country from Canada or Mexico. See the bullet-proof-vest- wearing, heavily armed, jackbooted thugs running dogs up and down car lanes, searching people randomly, harassing innocents, asking rude and intrusive questions.

You get the strong impression that you are entering a police state. That impression would be correct.

Yet for the man on the street, the answer to all social problems seems to be more jails, longer terms, more enforcement, more arbitrary power, more crackdowns, more capital punishments, more authority. Where does all of this end? And will the end come before we realize what has happened to our once-free country?

Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.

Ronald Reagan used to claim that his military buildup was essential to keeping the peace. The history of US foreign policy just since the 1980s has shown that this is wrong. We’ve had one war after another, wars waged by the United States against noncompliant countries, and the creation of even more client states and colonies.

US military strength has led not to peace but the opposite. It has caused most people in the world to regard the United States as a threat, and it has led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of aggression were defined at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.

Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to do so, but his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done the opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new ones. In reality, he has presided over a warfare state just as vicious as any in history. The difference this time is that the Left is no longer criticizing the US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing ever to happen to the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.

As for the Right in this country, it once opposed this kind of military fascism. But all that changed after the beginning of the Cold War. The Right was led into a terrible ideological shift, well documented in Murray Rothbard’s neglected masterpiece The Betrayal of the American Right. In the name of stopping communism, the right came to follow ex-CIA agent Bill Buckley’s endorsement of a totalitarian bureaucracy at home to fight wars all over the world.

At the end of the Cold War, there was a brief reprise when the Right in this country remembered its roots in noninterventionism. But this did not last long. George Bush the First rekindled the militarist spirit with the first war on Iraq, and there has been no fundamental questioning of the American empire ever since. Even today, Republicans elicit their biggest applause by whipping up audiences about foreign threats, while never mentioning that the real threat to American well-being exists in the Beltway.

Regards,

Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.,
for The Daily Reckoning

Joel’s Note: If, as Mr. Rockwell asserts, the US is much further down that road to fascism than most people think (or indeed, already there), it probably helps to at least have an idea of what’s going on. Last Friday, Agora Financial executive publisher, Addison Wiggin, released a presentation that most people won’t want to view. It contains certain truths they simply don’t want to hear. But ignoring these facts won’t make them go away...and it won’t help people properly prepare for their consequences. Take a look at what Addison has to say here in a video. or

If you would like to read about the biggest of all of America's financial bubbles bursting, read it here by clicking to delete it and a POPUP will pop up and you can click Cancel,then read the article.

You Earn 2% per Day or 60% per Month! No sponsoring Requirements at JSS Tripler

2011-10-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

Basically, You Earn 2% per Day or 60% per Month! No sponsoring Requirements. Use Daily Compounding to Increase Your Earnings! Make Daily Withdrawals to Get Your Money Out! This may be one of the easiest and best ways to earn money you've ever seen!

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America's Credit Card Shut Off: How Do People NOT See This Coming?

2011-10-06T20:45:00.000-07:00

The best-selling author who predicted the housing crisis, gold's meteoric rise and the fall of the U.S. dollar now predicts a much more insidious event.

An event that could change your lifestyle forever.

Services you take for granted could start disappearing overnight. 911 calls could go unanswered, newly paved roads become dusty, gravel paths hardly suitable for driving, trash removal will be services only the super-wealthy can afford.

What's more, phase one of this event has already begun to take place... although you may not have even noticed yet.

And should the final phase of this event unfold, it will be too late to do anything about it.

Don't be caught unprepared. Learn more about his controversial prediction -- including specific actions he suggests you take - right here in a video.

OR

Or Read it here by clicking Exit then Cancel to to stay on page and read:“The Mother of All Financial Bubbles Is Just Now Starting to Pop...”-- Addison Wiggin Three time NYT bestselling author and co-founder of dailyreckoning.com

Sincerely,

Doug Hill
Publisher, Laissez Faire Books

FWP's Statement on Fair Trade USA's Resignation from Fairtrade International (FLO)

2011-10-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

* Fair World Project, Oct 3, 2011 Straight to the Source

Fair trade is a social movement and market model that aims to empower small-scale farmers and consumers in underdeveloped countries to create an alternative trading system that supports equitable trading, sustainable development and long-term trading relationships. Fair trade supports fair prices and wages for producers, safe working conditions, investment in community development projects, and the elimination of child labor, workplace discrimination and exploitation.

Certified fair trade products now represent a multi-billion dollar industry with over 10,000 products in the marketplace. Consumer demand for fair trade products has steadily risen over the course of the last decade thanks to the tireless work of dedicated advocates, fully committed companies, and students.

On September 15th, Fairtrade International (FLO) and Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) jointly announced that FTUSA is resigning its membership in FLO, effective December 31, 2011. FTUSA's resignation from the FLO system is partially due to its new initiative, "Fair Trade For All" (http://fairtradeforall.com/) which it claims will "double the impact" of fair trade by 2015.

In an open letter, Rob Cameron, CEO of Fairtrade International, wrote: "I, the staff at Fairtrade International, and the entire global Fairtrade network sincerely regret FTUSA's decision to pursue its own approach, rather than continue working within the global system. It is a decision they have taken themselves, and we have to respect their choice."

Fair Trade USA's move raises many questions for fair trade producers in the Global South. Many producers rely heavily on the US market for sales and distribution. FTUSA's rash exit from the FLO system will most certainly cause chaos in the near-term as FTUSA has failed to publish its own standards or details regarding its new labeling scheme. In the long run, everything from consumer apathy to competing labels that make similar claims will undermine the fair trade market and the overall positive impact for producers.

At its core, "Fair Trade For All" is FTUSA's unilateral decision to initiate certification of Fair Trade coffee on plantation and hired labor operations. FTUSA intends to open other commodities, like cocoa, to plantation and hired labor for certification as well. Fair trade was established on the values of supporting small-scale, disenfranchised farming communities, most often organized in democratic cooperatives. Despite claims to the contrary, hundreds of thousands of small producers organized in cooperatives still lack access to fair trade markets. To continue to make progress and expand the benefits of fair trade, these producers must be given priority and support when considering further expansion of the fair trade system. Without strict standards and implementation, the expansion of fair trade to include plantations in coffee and other sectors will most certainly erode standards and dilute fair trade's impact.

While it is true that farmer and worker advocates are deeply concerned with the plight of farmworkers and other hired laborers in the Global South, it is not conclusive that the current fair trade system is the best antidote for their situation. Fair trade's record as it relates to hired labor operations, like tea and bananas has been anything but successful. In fact, the literature suggests that fair trade certification often undermines national labor laws and the union presence that brings more benefits to plantation workers than fair trade.

FTUSA's decision has drawn the widespread condemnation of fair trade producer networks, including the Network of Asian Producers (NAP), Latin American and Caribbean Network of Small Fair Trade ... and Fairtrade Africa. It is inconceivable that an organization who's organizational values include striving "to always act ethically and we value relationships built on honesty, mutual respect and trust" would advance a program without the knowledge or consent of the very producers it aims to support.

FTUSA's move away from FLO comes on the heels of the organization's controversial name change. In fall of 2010, FTUSA changed their name from TransFair USA, eliciting a significant uproar from within the FT community, with over 10k concerned consumers, advocates, and FT organizations sending letters to FTUSA expressing their concern about what many saw as an effort to monopolize the FT market and movement in the United States.

In January 2011, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), charging that FTUSA authorized the misleading and deceptive labeling and advertising of the "Mark" brand products as "Fair Trade Certified" when, in fact, the products so labeled contain a minimal amount of fair trade certified ingredients. Over 8k people have signed letters in support of OCA's complaint. OCA is awaiting the pending decision from the FTC.

FTUSA has repeatedly failed to apply FLO standards. Case in point is FLO's commercial availability standard 2.2.Various brands and products lines which states that "Food composite ingredients must contain as many [FLO Fair Trade] certified ingredients as available." (http://www.fairtrade.net/standards.0.html). Dozens of products in the marketplace, ranging from Honest Tea to Sunspire Organic Cocoa Chips, have failed to source fair trade ingredients, yet continue to display the FTUSA fair trade seal. This dilution of the standards undermines consumer confidence in fair trade and denies producers the full benefit of a fair trade market.

Finally, FTUSA has a poor track record of responsibly engaging stakeholders on new initiatives. For example, FTUSA's textile and apparel multi-stakeholder process was contentious and divisive, not to mention a missed opportunity to create common cause and alliances with trade unions and labor advocates. For more information on this process, see the open "Letter to Transfair USA regarding Fair Trade Garments Pil..." signed by International Labor Rights Forum, SweatFree Communities, Presbyterian Hunger Project, STITCH, Workers United (an affiliate of SEIU), New York Labor Religion Coalition and the Organic Consumers Association.

The future of fair trade in the United States and beyond

Fair trade is at a critical crossroads. Despite the incredible potential in the United States to support ethical and fair companies and initiatives, the market is overrun with hundreds of social, ethical, green, and sustainable labels and certifiers, many with questionable ethics and standards. For consumers to maintain confidence in FTUSA and its certification program, FTUSA must actively and in good faith be accountable to producers and civil society at large.

FWP calls upon Fair Trade USA to do the following:

1) Suspend plans for certifying plantations and other hired labor operations in coffee and other commodities.

2) Promptly publish its new fair trade standards with clear mechanisms for accountable stakeholder review and engagement.

3) Open its Board of Directors to broad participation from members of producer networks, fair trade advocates, and students.

4) Commit to full transparency and traceability.

5) Create an ethical labeling scheme that clearly identifies percentage of FT ingredients on packaging and whether the product contains ingredients from plantations or estates.

6) Actively cooperate with FLO, IMO and other reputable certifiers to establish a "high bar" standard for fair trade certification.

Fair Trade References:
1. http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_24073.cfm

2. http://www.fairtrade.net/897.0.html

3. http://fairtradeforall.com/

6 Ways To Increase Your Business' Followers on Twitter

2011-10-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Are you looking for ways to increase your Business’ following on Twitter? Included in this article are five ways that you can boost your followers. These steps are easy to take and will help improve the amount your total amount of followers to increase and make your twitter feed more popular.

First you can start by putting a follow me button on your business’ blog page. If you put your follow me button on the blog page, not only will you be helping people know you have a twitter but they can simply click and begin to follow your feed. This follow me button can also be placed on your Business’ webpage, giving an extra place for people to see that you have a twitter account.

Another way that you can help to increase your business’ following is by placing your twitter webpage link inside of your e-mail signature. This will give those whom you e-mail a place to see that you are involved in Twitter, and a direct link to your account.

If you have a business card, or you plan on creating a new business card, it is also another place that you can place your twitter on. By putting your twitter account name on your business card, each person who receives your card will be able to have access to your twitter and see that your company is also using twitter.

While your company has a twitter account another easy way to get your Business’ followers increased is by putting your twitter account on Stumbleupon, Digg or other social bookmarking sites. This will also get your twitter out there and help people to click on your page and get your company more traffic.

Another simple way to receive more followers for your business is by following other businesses. This will show that you are out there involved in businesses other then your own. Perhaps they too will agree to follow you and direct some more traffic to your twitter.

Join SocialOomph
With a SocialOomph Professional account, you have the following additional benefits on top of the existing free features:
Easily Find Quality Twitter Users To Follow With Keywords That You Define
Enter your keywords and we will search for Twitter users and/or StatusNet users who tweet about those topics and present them to you so that you can decide whether you want to follow them or not.
Enter your keywords and we will search for Twitter users and/or StatusNet users who tweet about those topics and present them to you so that you can decide whether you want to follow them or not.
On Twitter accounts, the system will automatically add new friends (once you approve them) into your Twitter lists. You can connect a list to a specific keyword or to several keywords. Friends that are found with that keyword will be added to the list of your choice. For example, you could define a keyword of "@yourusername" (which will find people who mention you) and create a private list called "Mentioned Me", which you connect to that keyword. Friend Finder will then add the people who mention you to your Mentioned Me list. Instruct the system to maintain the list at a size of your choice (up to a maximum 500 Twitter accounts), and the system will automatically rotate out the oldest entries when it adds new ones to the list.
Tell the system to automatically ignore any Twitter or StatusNet account that has been flagged as SPAM or has been blocked by any of your fellow SocialOomph users.
The system selects candidate Twitter and/or StatusNet users, according to your criteria, and places them on a queue where you can very easily review them and decide whether you want to follow or ignore the person. You see the Twitter and StatusNet users in one integrated console. The Friend Finder is not a mass following tool. It is a tool to easily find quality users whom you can follow if you choose to do so.
You can opt to auto-follow the candidates on your review queue if you do not vet them within a certain time period.
Why spend hours searching for and ferreting out quality Twitter and StatusNet users to follow? You need to do searches, view their profiles, check the numbers and then hit the calculator to compute the ratios. We remove all that time and effort for you. The only thing you need to do is quickly review those profiles that have passed through your filters and decide whether you want to follow them or not in one easy step.
With Friend Finder you can throw a salute and say, "Bye bye spammers!"
Schedule Your Facebook Status Updates
Now you can keep your Facebook status updates fresh by scheduling them to appear on your Facebook account at the dates and times of your choosing. No need to rush or find online access just to login to Facebook and post a time-sensitive update. Schedule it in our system and we will make sure that it gets on Facebook at the right time.
In similar vein of updating your Facebook status, you can schedule updates to be posted to the wall of any Facebook Page of which you are an administrator.
We never ask for your Facebook login credentials. Our application uses the secure Facebook Connect technology, as provided by Facebook, to perform the tasks you request on your account. You explicitly grant our application limited access only for what we need to do, and revoking that access is easily done from either your SocialOomph account or your Facebook account.
Submit Social Updates via Email
Send emails from your existing email address to an email address that you own (on your own server, or on Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and have those emails turned into standard social updates and published on your Twitter account(s), your Facebook account(s), your Facebook Page(s), and other social accounts.
Imagine if Mary sends an email from mary@yourdomain.com to technicaltips@yourdomain.com, that email will be published as a social update on your Twitter account, tagged with ^Mary, and on your Facebook Page with no author tag. If she sends an email from mary@yourdomain.com to marketingtweets@yourdomain.com, the email will be published as a social update to your Twitter account and will be tagged with ^MaryM. When Peter sends an email from peter@yourdomain.com to marketingtweets@yourdomain.com, the email will be published to your Twitter account and will be tagged with ^Peter. That's what you can do with this feature, and more.
Have the updates automatically tagged with author tags that you define (eg., ^Mary or ^JohnD). The tags are under your control. The employees cannot change or override them.
Only emails sent from an authorized email address (you do the granting and removal of authorization) to a specific target email address that you own are processed and turned into social updates.
Your employees need only their existing email accounts, nothing more. They do not need a SocialOomph account. All you need is one SocialOomph Professional account, where you authorize the email addresses of the employees whom you want to submit updates to your social accounts.
Schedule & Publish Blog Posts
Integrate your social media updates with your blog posts in one central command center, namely your SocialOomph account. Your blog posts are shown integrated with your social media updates so that you can see exactly when what is going to publish.
You can add as many blogs as you want in your one SocialOomph account, and schedule posts for them all.
We provide you with a feature-rich WYSIWYG editor to write your blog posts, so that you can create and format them exactly the way you want.
As long as your blog has one of the following remote publishing APIs, you can schedule posts for it: Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress API (wordpress.com and self-hosted), metaWeblog API, Movable Type API, Blogger API, and Atom API.
In addition to writing and scheduling blog posts, you can also grab one or more (in fact as many as you like) RSS feed(s) and automatically create blog post entries from the entries on the RSS feed(s). At the same time, you can also publish updates to social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) using those same entries on the RSS feed.
Define Your Own Tweet Viewing/Grouping Channels And Focus On Specific Topics Of Interest
Define your own tweet channels so that you can see tweets from a selected number of friends, or from other selected Twitter or StatusNet accounts, or from Twitter Search keywords, in your own private viewing channel. It's like your own tweet timeline on Twitter or StatusNet, except a channel contains only the tweets from those Twitter or StatusNet users, or Twitter Search keywords that you include in the channel.
Define an unlimited number of channels.
You can include Twitter users and StatusNet users and Twitter Search keywords in the same channel!
No need to follow someone to include that person in a channel.
Specify how many tweets from each person / keyword you want to include in a channel.
Easily Discover Followers Who Have The Most Clout
We analyze your list of followers on Twitter and StatusNet accounts and show you the top fifty followers who have the most clout, judged in terms of the number of people who follow them.
Easily contact those followers.
Build relationships with the folks who have the most clout and develop mutually beneficial cooperation on shared interests.
These folks are already following you, which means they are interested in you, and you can DM them. Leverage that interest!
Manage The Direct Messages Of All Your Accounts On One Page And Automatically Filter Out SPAM
Fire up your Direct Message Manager where you easily manage the direct messages of all your Twitter and StatusNet accounts from one central and integrated console. Twitter and StatusNet DMs are shown in one integrated console, sorted by date.
Easily customise your Direct Message Manager to suit your exact needs by:

* Including or excluding certain Twitter and StatusNet accounts,
* Setting the number of DMs to display for each account (e.g., max 10 DMs from account "X", 5 DMs from account "Y", 15 DMs from account "Z", etc.)
* Color-code each account so you don't have to squint and wonder on what account a DM came in.

Automatically filter out SPAM by choosing one of several settings. When you mark something as SPAM, you can tell the system to:

* Just delete the DM (select this option if you've taken a dose of happy gas),
* Delete the DM and also automatically delete any future DMs from the person (the happy gas has worn off a little),
* Delete the DM and unfollow the person (that will teach them a lesson),
* Delete the DM, unfollow the person, and also block the person (while wearing your best satisfied and evil grin).

Automatically weed out DMs that contain SPAM words, which you define.
Benefit from the collective SPAM assessments of your fellow SocialOomph Professional users. You can tell the system to treat as SPAM any Twitter or StatusNet account that any other SocialOomph user has already marked as SPAM.
Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts? Click Here!

These were all easy ways to increase your Business’ twitter followers. By using these few simple steps, you should be receiving more followers and getting your Business out there more and bring in more people interested in your company. Social networking has become increasingly popular and is a simple way to put your business out there on the market more. Follow WebSuccess4You on Twitter

The Perfect Stock for a Dangerous World

2011-10-03T17:41:00.000-07:00

I was in Manhattan a few days before the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11. There were reminders of the upcoming anniversary all over the city. The date inspired a lot of reflecting on how America has changed since that horrible day.

When I arrived in New York City, I didn’t intend to find an investment theme that grew directly out of the events of Sept. 11. I stumbled on it, by accident, at the Gabelli 17th Annual Aircraft Supplier Conference.

My beat is financial markets. So I don’t want to write a treatise on all the ways America has changed in the last decade. But I do want to focus on one important way it has. It directly affects our next investment idea, which is a remarkable company doing some extraordinary things. The stock ought to easily double in 2012 if management can come anywhere close to hitting the numbers it laid out.

Let me go back a few days before the conference. I happened to watch an episode of Frontline, called “Top Secret America.” It’s based on the work of Dana Priest and William Arkin. I admire Priest, who is a legendary reporter at The Washington Post. Her expertise is on matters of intelligence and the “war on terror.”

What Priest uncovered as part of a near two-year investigation was a secret America growing up in the wake of Sept. 11. After Sept. 11, America’s intelligence, surveillance and counter-terrorism agencies basically got a blank check to fund their efforts. The CIA got a billion dollars right away. So did the National Security Agency (NSA). “What we found in the years immediately after Sept. 11 was that the existing agencies grew enormously,” Priest says. “They doubled in size, many of them, and new organizations were created as well, big ones.”

There was a boom in new agencies geared to fighting this new war. Consider that in 2002, there were 34 new organizations created to work at the top-secret level. In 2003, government created 39 more; in 2004, 30 more; in 2005, another 35; and more each year since. “Every year,” Priest goes on, “more than two dozen, sometimes three dozen, entirely new federal organizations dedicated to counterterrorism [were] being created after Sept. 11.”

And each agency, after its creation, grew and grew. One example is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI started as 11 people in the Old Executive Office Building. In short order, it grew to a couple of hundred people and moved to a bigger building. It had two floors in the massive Defense Intelligence Agency building. Still, it grew. “So they moved to some of the priciest real estate in the Washington area,” Priest says. “And now they are gigantic — 500,000 square feet, five Wal-Marts stacked on top of each other.”

At the conference, the big topic of discussion was defense spending. Everyone is expecting defense-spending cuts. They are inevitable. And this will affect many of the companies at the conference because they have large defense businesses.

But there is one aspect of defense spending that isn’t going go to go down. In fact, broader government spending on intelligence and surveillance and covert warfare is only to go up.

What’s going to be cut are the traditional battlefield programs. The big stuff: Tanks. Submarines. No one is going to let the air out of a ballooning secret America. “No one’s talking about turning them off,” Priest says. “It’s not like they’ve got mobile trailers that they’re up in, and then when the floods recede, they’re going to take them away.”

The rules also changed, greasing the skids. Government made it easier to higher contractors to skirt the slow process of hiring more federal workers. Now, when they want to grow quickly, they turn to the private sector. Priest talks about how the big defense contractors — CACI, Lockheed Martin, L-3 — and others saw this boom in intelligence, surveillance and the like.

The “war on terror” is not one that needs tanks and submarines and fighter jets. It needs to gather information. It needs to analyze that information. It needs surveillance equipment. Smart weaponry. Unmanned drones. It’s a top-secret America.

Priest talked about how she discovered that nearly a million people have top-secret clearance. That’s 2.5 times the population of Washington, D.C. There are 1,900 companies and 1,100 federal organizations that work at the top-secret level.

It also seems independent of political affiliation. President Obama has shown an affinity for the covert, as David Ignatius reports in a column titled “The Covert Commander in Chief.” Obama stepped up the pace of Predator drone attacks over Pakistan. He approved the raid on Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden. He has favored the covert on many other occasions. “The president appears to be ratcheting up intelligence and paramilitary operations,” Ignatius writes, “even as he withdraws uniformed troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.”

All of this costs a lot of money.

I am not going to pass judgment on what’s happening here. You can decide for yourself. I would encourage you to read Dana Priest’s and William Arkin’s work. There is a lot out there on the web, too, in addition to a book, plus the Frontline episode.

Some of their work is mind-blowing. If you were to start talking about this stuff at a dinner party, your friends would think you were a conspiracy theorist. But this is real. I mean, we’re talking about massive nondescript buildings in the Washington area that might be one or two floors up, but go 10 stories down. One of the guys on TV said they have shops and restaurants down there “just for them.” I’ll never look at the Washington suburbs in quite the same way again. What are they are all doing? No one knows for sure.

Anyway, my main focus here is how we can invest intelligently to secure our own financial futures, given the world as it is. And the above mark an unmistakable trend and a big change from the way we used to think of defense and security in a pre-Sept. 11 world. This will have an impact, positive and negative, on a slew of companies.

But I have a favorite that will benefit from the proliferation of top-secret America. It is, as far as I know, the only pure play on the theme.

Out of consideration for the subscribers of Mayer’s Special Situations, I can’t reveal the name of the company. But here’s a hint: It was one of the company’s that presented at the Gabelli conference.

To learn more about U.S. foreign policy and defense spending please go to American Public policy and Government Accountability and
American Public Policy Books

Regards,

Chris Mayer,
for The Daily Reckoning

Joel’s Note: Join the Mayer’s Special Situations email list and get an inside look at the back page — which includes ALL of the companies Chris has recommended to his readers...along with price action, per cent gain/loss since recommendation, research notes, in- depth analysis and more — right here. Chris’ next alert is due out this coming Friday.

One tiny Canadian company discovers a revolutionary new proprietary technology – using "The Fourth Element"

2011-10-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

ACT FAST: This presentation and special offer will be removed
from the Internet at Midnight, September 29th

One tiny Canadian company discovers a revolutionary new proprietary technology – using "The Fourth Element" – that's set to supercharge our fighter jets and other military weapons deep into the 21st Century.

And starting today, here's how you can tap into the explosive $707 BILLION market for this astonishing discovery.

Dear Reader,

Imagine...

A pilot sits far away from the front lines of Afghanistan, in a "cockpit" in Nevada, USA.

He's linked by satellite communications to a DRONE – an unmanned aircraft – that's orbiting high above the battlefield of the Hindu Kush.

In fact, the DRONE is so high up that no one on the ground even knows that it's there.

The pilot slews a camera on the bottom of the DRONE, down toward a stone house.

There's no vibration in the camera's optic system. The image is crystal clear.

It's like the pilot is looking out of a plate glass window, staring at people working in their back yard next door.

Down below, the pilot sees about a dozen men assembling and wiring bombs.

He needs to do something, and do it now.

The DRONE pilot — assisted by a backup team of observers in Nevada and Afghanistan — quickly alerts the chain of command.

There's a well-drilled procedure in this circumstance.

Signals flash between orbiting satellites, linking people in Nevada with a command center near Kandahar.

Numerous sets of eyeballs review the imagery.

Indeed, one technician grabs "screen shots" from the crystal clear DRONE feed.

He runs clear images of peoples' faces through a relational database of hundreds of thousands of photos.

Within seconds, pattern recognition software begins to identify the bomb-builders, based on years of past intelligence gathering.

There's no doubt on this one.

Heck, you can positively identify some of the Taliban men based on facial features.

There's simply no vibration in the camera hanging from that DRONE.

It's a positive ID — enough to satisfy even the staff of flinty lawyers who look over every shoulder these days.

"Take them out," comes the order.

"Release authorization granted. Arming circuits engaged. Downrange clear. Weapons hot."

The pilot in Nevada has by now positioned the DRONE into a firing position.

He makes his attack run. With numerous witnesses in attendance, the DRONE pilot hits a red button on the control stick.

He feels nothing, but half a world away, a rocket motor ignites inside a Hellfire missile.

The weapon slides effortlessly off a lightweight rail, accelerates like greased lightning and moves down out of the sky, toward the aim point.

Hellfire Missiles

The Hellfire missile moves so fast, in fact, that it strikes the ground before its sound reaches the eardrums of any of the Taliban fighters.

When the missile hits, there's a sudden flash. A blast wave moving at over 25,000 feet per second engulfs the area.

Within a few thousandths of a second, several of the bombs that the Taliban were building cook off as secondary explosions.

From a distance, there's a bright flash that's quickly engulfed in a large cloud of dust.

A massive, thunderous echo rolls off the nearby hills and mountain slopes. People look from miles away.

Far away, in Kandahar, the operational commander requests that a Navy aircraft, a carrier-based F/A-18F Super Hornet, fly over the site.

F/A-18 Super Hornet

That is, she needs an independent battle damage assessment to determine if a follow-up strike is necessary.

Within a few moments, there's the crackling sound of powerful jet engines above the mountains.

A haze-gray aircraft takes its vector from the air controllers and moves toward the target scene.

The flight officer in the back seat of the Super Hornet slews a camera that's part of an imagery pod hanging from one of the wings.

The gimbal system of the imagery pod tracks down to the exact global position on the ground where the missile hit.

There's no vibration in the camera, none at all.

Again, a crystal-clear image transmits from the aircraft and bounces off a series of satellites and back to command centers across Afghanistan, to ships at sea and to Nevada.

There's still a lot of dust in the air, so the F/A-18 pilot sets the aircraft in a circling pattern.

The camera remains locked precisely on the target, hardly deviating more than a few inches from the exact center of a 15-foot hole in the ground.

The imagery indicates that the first strike by the Hellfire missile did the job, with the secondary explosions delivering any necessary coups de grace.

But the imagery also shows details of bodies, backpacks and weapons lying about.

These items hold the potential for more actionable intelligence.

The next decision for the battlefield commander is whether or not to send in a team of Special Forces to pick up the pieces... And so it goes.

These kinds of decisions are made every day on the modern battlefields in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

It's reality.

How is it that things work so well in a complex battle space?

Why do those DRONE cameras work so nicely?

Why does that missile rail shoot so straight?

And the camera on the F/A-18? How can it hold its bearing from the bottom of a roaring jet and send back a crystal-clear image?

What about those satellite systems that bounce the signals between Afghanistan and Nevada?

What's going on?

Three Powerful Words – "The Fourth Element"

Until now, its importance to national defense has not been well understood, except to military professionals across the world that follow these kind of developments. Well that's about to change...

Because this little-known Canadian company has discovered a revolutionary new proprietary technology that makes important use of "The Fourth Element"...

A "super metal" that could help save countless soldiers lives with its unique properties...

The Department of Defense (Dodd) calls this rare metal "essential for important defense systems" and says that it "... possesses unique properties that make it indispensable in many of today's critical U.S. defense systems, including sensors, missiles and satellites, avionics, and nuclear weapons."

It's a silvery white metal and one of the lowest-density metals there is. That means it's very lightweight.

It owns the atomic number 4 on the periodic table, hence the name "The Fourth Element", and has six times the specific stiffness of steel.

Some of its major advantages include...

* It resists rust, even at extremely high temperatures
* It has a high melting point
* So it holds its mechanical properties up to extremely high temperatures
* It's stronger than steel
* Transparent to X-rays
* Non-sparking
* Non-magnetic

It possesses a combination of physical and mechanical characteristics specifically suited to a wide range of demanding applications.

And this small Canadian company has discovered a way to manipulate "The Fourth Element's" unique properties to make it strengthen and lighten satellites and space structures, aircraft, optical systems, semiconductors, medical imaging and nuclear systems.

As the story up above demonstrates, this explosive Canadian company's new "super metal" technology... with "The Fourth Element" and aluminum as its main components... could become an essential element in gun sights, rocket launch rails and guidance systems.

In fact, this "super metal" technology can be used in an incredible array of different areas... including nuclear, aerospace, defense, telecom, computing, electronics, medical, automotive, oil & gas, and many more...

Already, this tiny company holds several high-end patents and trade secrets for manufacturing this revolutionary product.

And this savvy company has also acquired the rights to mineralized properties in two Western U.S. states and Brazil... so they can provide their own "fourth element" metal to their production line.

So there's a resource angle to the company as well.

Early investors who understand the magnitude of this incredible opportunity could watch their fortunes explode with this tiny penny stock...

This penny stock is currently priced under 22-cents a share and has a tiny market cap of under $42 million...

So once the news leaks out about this tiny Canadian company's revolutionary "super metal" breakthrough, you could see this company's stock price soar 10-fold or more...

Because the fact is, it would only take a tiny chunk of the defense budget's $707 billion spending spree to well exceed this Canadian company's small $42 million market cap.

And as you'll see in just a moment, this fast-growing company already has secured some important government contracts and brought onboard a retired General to facilitate even more lucrative government contracts.

But chances are this is the first time you've heard of the "super metal" technology breakthrough...

Because until recently, this strategic metal powerhouse – called "The Fourth Element" – has taken a back-seat to its more popular 17 cousins on the periodic table, called the rare earth elements.

While stories about rare earth elements have been all over the business news channels and money magazines lately, "The Fourth Element" has been completely ignored by the mainstream media and Wall Street Insiders.

And while they're both critical to modern day technologies... including strategic weapon systems... their availability and makeup is vastly different.

Right now, China controls over 97% of production of rare earth elements...

And since demand is growing in China itself for these precious rare earth elements, they've cut their export quotas by 72% in the second half of 2010 — and then 35% for the first half of 2011.

For those who need these rare earths to create all the newest technologies... mp3 players, cell phone, laptop, flat screen televisions, hybrid car batteries... China's got them by the throat.

Of course that encompasses about everyone, so you can imagine this has been a booming opportunity for wealth-builders in rare earth elements stocks...

But it could also prove to be a massive opportunity
for forward-thinking companies that are trying to find other strategic metals to use in today's cutting-
edge technologies...

Like this tiny Canadian company... with its proprietary and patented new "super metal" technology...

A breakthrough technology that incorporates not only the best features of "The Fourth Element," but goes a step further and combines that with another valuable strategic metal... aluminum.

Together, this new hybrid technology combines "The Fourth Element's" light weight and high stiffness with aluminum's excellent processing characteristics and low cost.

It's a true breakthrough in military technology... contributing hardness, strength, high electrical and thermal conductivity, and resistance to wear and fatigue to U.S. fighter jets and other vital weapon systems.

In military fighter jets, this new technology saves weight critical to speed and maneuverability, while also ensuring razor-sharp targeting and strike capabilities.

In critical situations and equipment, its stiff, lightweight components ensure precise operation under extreme conditions.

And what makes this breakthrough technology so valuable is its ability to make fighter jets lighter, stronger... and more fuel efficient.

A perfect combination in these difficult economic times...

This amazing proprietary technology could become an essential part of everything from the F-35 fighter jet to the next generation of unmanned aircraft.

Delivering transformational weapons systems that provide huge leaps in their ability to deliver strikes with swiftness, accuracy and stealth. And therefore, could increase their ability to survive hostile actions...

No wonder the top military brass are so excited.

But that's just the beginning of this breakthrough technology's vast market...

Scientists are discovering that not only is this "super metal" technology critical for the aerospace markets, but essential in products as wide ranging as construction equipment, oil drilling bits and computer chip fabrication systems.

The bottom line is this tiny Canadian company has discovered a patented new technology that utilizes two critical strategic metals that have all sorts of uses... including medical, aerospace, defense, information technology, scientific, nuclear and other applications.

Meaning its target market far surpasses the $707 billion potential defense market and expands into a vast array of other opportunities.

Lucrative opportunities that could supersize this booming Canadian company's revenue stream... and could bring enormous returns to early wealth-builders.

And this new technology is currently ONLY available from this tiny Canadian company – because no other competitor has been able to duplicate this unique hybrid technology commercially...

As you can imagine, this new "super metal" technology is currently in high demand for aerospace and advanced technology applications...

It can be used in almost any military application that requires complex, lightweight, and/or high-stiffness parts... including...

* Windshield frames and other structures in high-speed aircraft and space vehicles
* Aircraft braking systems (heck, they used this stuff to stop the space shuttle, before the fleet was grounded by politics!)
* Satellite mirrors and space telescopes
* Inertial guidance systems and gyroscopes
* Nuclear weapons components
* Electrical connectors, fasteners and structural components in fixed-wing aircraft and fighters
* Real-time imagery and targeting on surveillance in the nation's unmanned aerial systems

The list of critical uses for this new hybrid technology seems endless...

From enhancing surveillance and targeting systems that help keep soldiers safe...

To assuring a first line of defense in targeting and destroying missile threats...

To providing real-time imagery and targeting on surveillance and reconnaissance flights...

To adding structural and dimensional stability for satellites in space...

And fortunately, the "Fourth Element" is one strategic technological metal whose supply is not controlled by China...

That's why this relatively unknown
Canadian company's "super metal" discovery
couldn't come at a more critical time...

Currently, this tiny Canadian company is getting their supply of the "Fourth Element" for its patented breakthrough technology from a pro-Western country located in Central Asia.

However, just to assure its continued supply of "The Fourth Element," it also has over 370 mineral claims on over 7,600 acres in the U.S. in an area that has known "Fourth Element" deposits, as categorized in the U.S. Geological Survey and by the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

Fact is, current production rates at this highly prized U.S. location constitute nearly 60% of world production of the "Fourth Element."

So this tiny Canadian company's future supply of "The Fourth Element" is secure...

That's great news, because this fast-growing company has just opened a 60-thousand plus square foot facility in the U.S. to underscore their commitment to producing its proprietary new hybrid technology...

With global demand for hi-tech goods and military equipment booming, the market looks enormous for the future of this Canadian company's revolutionary new "super metals" technology...

That, unlike rare earth elements, is not dependent on the whims of Chinese leaders.

But there's more good news for wealth-builders...

The Wall Street Journal has reported breaking news that could prove instrumental for this tiny company's success in landing major contracts with the military...

Increasing its odds considerably in grabbing a sizeable chunk of the allocated $707 billion defense budget...

According to the Wall Street Journal... this tiny
company just hired a highly respected Retired Major General as an independent director of the company...

That's a major coup...

The Major General will be instrumental in providing assistance and guidance to take advantage of strategic opportunities in the military for this breakthrough new "miracle metal."

And provide some important insider connections for future military contracts.

This new member of the team knows how to get past the red tape, and market the company's products straight to the requirements-guys and key decision makers.

Already, this move has paid off.

Recently, this booming company signed a huge contract with the US Air Force to develop their patented new hybrid technology.

And signed a Development and Technical Services Agreement with the US Military's Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Navy's Tactical Multi-Mission Unmanned Aerial Systems Program.

With the Major General on-board, this fast-growing Canadian company has the inside-track to landing multiple future contracts from the projected $707 billion U.S. Defense Budget...

And despite continuing global economic and
market uncertainty, 2011 is a sizzling success for
this thriving company...

Unlike most companies suffering in these incredible difficult economic times, this tiny Canadian company has seen improvement in customer outlook... resulting in a strong order book.

In fact, revenues are estimated to soar 43% in 2011 alone.

The picture looks bright for this growing Canadian company and its breakthrough new proprietary "super metal" technology... and even brighter for savvy wealth-builders who get in early on this explosive opportunity...

When news of this "super metal" technology hits the mainstream, the question isn't whether this tiny Canadian company could make you extremely rich...

The question is: How much longer can you get in on this booming Canadian penny stock, priced under 22-cents per share, before it soars past $1 per share?

Time is of the essence...

Once the Wall Street herd find out about the explosive money-making opportunities available with this little-known Canadian company, your chances at huge gains will quickly disappear.

That's why I'm excited to give you all the details on this emerging strategic metal powerhouse in a new FREE report, How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains.

More on how to get your FREE copy in just 3 minutes...

But first, let me introduce myself and tell you more about this tiny Canadian company...

Hello... My name is Byron King

You might say I know a thing or two about military operations...

Back when I was on active duty, I flew jets in the Navy. In fact, I logged 128 carrier landings. So I know the importance of discoveries like this breakthrough "Fourth Element" technology, and the huge role it plays in the future success of our military operations.

And for over five years, I've been exclusively researching and writing about the world's best energy and resource investment opportunities – like this tiny Canadian company.

I'm passionate about the energy and mining sectors. You could say it's my life.

That's why when I was accepted to Harvard back in the 70s, I studied geology.

Nowadays, I spend my hours each day reading, learning, talking on the phone, trading emails, dealing with people and coming up with energy and resource ideas that I hope will pay off.

I scour the world looking for resource investment ideas — figuratively and literally.

You see, I don't just sit in my office and do research...

I go places, meet and talk with people, looked at sites and projects, learn more and more.

According to the official records of several airline companies, I logged over 188,000 miles in flight last year (most of it in coach class, if you're wondering).

From visiting the mines and mills of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to uncovering the massive oil discoveries in Namibia, to meeting with top dignitaries in Moscow, Russia... I'm always on the lookout for the hottest energy and resource opportunities worldwide.

And recently I had the opportunity to visit
this fast-growing Canadian company's amazing
new manufacturing plant in the Northeast U.S. –
and I was blown away...

It's a high-tech (no, make that very high-tech) manufacturing facility. Indeed, this new facility takes the ancient art of melting, casting and forging metals to new levels.

I've had the opportunity to visit plenty of high-tech manufacturing facilities in my long career, but this one takes the GOLD MEDAL with ease...

The quality of this small plant is world-class...

The site is full of cutting-edge technology that you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

The equipment I inspected at this plant is mostly brand-new.

The mold-making and metal-casting processes are beyond complicated — they're truly ingenious.

The actual casting involves melting alloys at about 2,000 degrees Celsius and pouring metal into molds under a near vacuum.

The air inside the facility is double filtered, and there are virtually no outside emissions.

I held items in my hand that are much lighter than aluminum, yet harder, stronger and stiffer than steel.

I handled "space-rated" copies of products that are — right now — hanging off satellites that orbit the earth.

I also handled copies of metal castings that are critical to advanced U.S. weapon systems.

Indeed, these products are so advanced that one senior company executive asked me to confirm that I'm a U.S. citizen just to touch one object.

He explained, "Under the ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), we can't discuss this or show it to people from most other countries."

Needless to say, no photo of that one...

Inside, I heard information about this amazing new "super metals" technology that has never been released to the press... or as far as I know, to anyone outside the walls of this state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.

And in all my time as a Harvard geologist and financial professional, I've rarely seen an opportunity with so much potential as this booming Canadian company...

That's why I'm rushing you this urgent
"Fourth Element" presentation today...

This is a rare opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor of a tiny company that could be your "money ticket" to enormous wealth...

A company whose revenue is set to double and its cash flow ten-fold between 2009 and 2012.

At under 22-cents a share, you could buy 50,000 shares of this penny stock and ONLY be out a mere $11,000.

And with this under-the-radar resource opportunity, you could bring in gains as much as 378%, 798%, or even 4,493%... just as similar companies have done in the past.

It’s Happened Before with
Cutting-Edge Technology Metals...

The market for Rare Earths Elements is completely out of whack.

It's due to distortions from the Chinese monopoly.

The West has spent the past 20 years sitting on its collective butt not understanding the seriousness of this strategic resource-based issue.

The chickens have come home to roost.

Well over three years ago, I alerted readers that the Chinese would be ramping up their stockpiling of Rare Earth Elements products.

Now Rare Earth prices are skyrocketing.

Dysprosium oxide prices, for example, doubled in the first two weeks of June. Price and availability are going nuts.

"The Fourth Element" prices are not on a tear...yet. But I am very bullish about the long-term prospects for this "super metal"...

And also the tiny Canadian company that has found a way to incorporate this critical "super metal" – "The Fourth Element" – into its breakthrough new technology.

A "super metal" that is much easier to get than the Chinese dominated rare earth elements and just as essential to our military weapons and breakthrough technology products.

Just look at the recent spike in prices of some of these hard-to-get rare earth elements... which like "The Fourth Element"... are critically important ingredients to today's technology marvels:

And over the last year, these strategic metal stocks have tagged along...

* Rare Element Resources is up 798%
* Medallion Resources is up 328%
* Great Western Minerals Group is up 306%
* Arafura Resources is up 236%
* Alkanet Resources is up 378%

As long as America has a massive defense budget and there is a global demand for technology – and things that are smaller, faster, lighter, brighter, more powerful and more efficient – there will be a global demand for strategic metals...

I sincerely hope you got in early on some of those and made a few bucks.

But if you didn't, don't worry.

Because right now, you can get in early on this emerging Canadian company's incredible new "super metal" technology that could transform America's F-35's, drones and other military machines into lighter, stronger and more deadly precision machines.

And at only 22-cents per share, you could own over 100,000 shares of this emerging metal powerhouse for under $22,000.

So you can own more shares for less cash. Your upside is a lot bigger.

And it's so easy to play... just make a quick call to a broker and you'll be on your way in minutes.

But here's the best news: penny stocks
can deliver truly explosive gains...

In fact, they're the most profitable stocks on Wall Street.

Let me explain...

With a big "blue chip" stock it can take many years for a $25 share to turn into $50.

Maybe even a decade or more...

But with a penny stock, like this tiny Canadian company who shares sell now for a mere 22-cents, you can see its price surge to 44-cents overnight! After all, the share price only has to go up 22-cents!

So with penny stocks, you could double your money in one day.

It could take years to make the same gains with a big stock...if it ever happens at all!

Perhaps most important of all, the potential gains of as much as 4,493% from this little-known penny stock could guarantee you peace of mind and give you more time to devote to the people and pastimes you love.

You could turn a mere $20,000 into $898,600 or invest a bit more and turn $50,000 into a life-altering $2.2 million...

The huge burden of wondering about how to build your retirement in this continuing economic downturn could be lifted with just this ONE-penny stock trade...

Giving you time to spend doing what you really want to do – whether it's work you enjoy, taking an exotic vacation, paying for your child's soaring tuition, or just relaxing with friends and family?

But make no mistake: this fast-growing Canadian superstar will not be off the radar for long.

This is without doubt one of the most potentially profitable opportunities you'll ever come across.

This penny stock's discovery is so crucial to national security and modern technologies that the state of the economy has little impact on its value...

Meaning you could still become a millionaire off this incredible "technology metals" discovery no matter what's going on in the markets... up, down, or sideways.

So isn't it about time you take the first step?

And in just a moment, I'll give you all the details on this emerging strategic metal powerhouse in a new FREE report, How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains.

But first, take a look at how early-in investors could find an explosive opportunity for huge gains from this groundbreaking metal technology...

Lucrative contracts in the military and defense sectors are just the beginning of a long list of possible applications that this "super metal" can be used for...

Just recently, this tiny company booked a major contract with an advanced technology company to supply an array of "Fourth Element" items for complex manufacturing systems.

The agreement has the potential to generate a minimum of $4 million in annual revenues for this fast expanding company.
This is the kind of business arrangement that leads to a brilliant future.

And that's just the start... the list of potential customers reads like the advertising index of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine... Honeywell, General Dynamics, Raytheon, among many others...

Just look at the enormous potential the "Fourth Element" has in the nuclear power sector...

Recently, this tiny Canadian company, in a joint venture with two world-renowned universities, unveiled a huge discovery that could revolutionize the nuclear power industry.

To put it very simple... their research involved mixing "The Fourth Element" with uranium in fuel rods.

What do you get?

Well, first you need to understand that "The Fourth Element" has phenomenal heat-flow characteristics.

You can heat it up and it cools down fast because heat dissipates out through the atomic structure.

So take that idea, and now mix it with uranium.

You can build fuel rods with much higher ability to transfer heat away.

That is, you can heat up the fuel rods and they'll cool down a lot faster. If you expose hot fuel rods to air, they won't melt down on you.

So what is it about this idea that seems familiar?

Well, it's what did NOT happen at Fukushima, Japan, with the old-technology fuel rods that are zirconium-clad uranium.

The Japanese rods — as with all fuel rods, everywhere across the world — held in the heat and needed cooling water.

When the system lost the cooling water, the Japanese plants experienced a series of catastrophic meltdowns.

That causes huge problems, for a long time to come.

But looking ahead, what if you build fuel rods with heat-dissipating "Fourth Element" in the metallurgy?

There's less chance of a melt-down.

So while it's true that the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan has had a negative impact upon the nuclear sector...

This tiny company could have exclusive rights to the magic bullet the nuclear industry needs to get back on its feet.

First off, this new fuel can be operated at a lower overall temperature without sacrificing power output, and that means this fuel is a safer source of energy.

And because the fuel operates at a lower temperature it can be shutdown more rapidly in the event of an emergency.

No wonder word is beginning to spread in the nuclear sector about this incredible breakthrough.

Here's a unique hybrid fuel that not only reduces nuclear power plant safety concerns, but saves money in operating costs.

This discovery could prove to be one of the greatest advancements to the world's energy crisis in the last 20 years!

That could be the reason why General Electric, Toshiba and Hitachi jumped on board and recently formed a partnership with this tiny Canadian company.

Together, they hope to advance this revolutionary technology to meet the challenges posed by the high performance of today's nuclear power reactors.

And as you know, any company capable of producing a nuclear energy breakthrough this powerful could instantly be inundated with orders from across the globe.

In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch, John Longo, professor of finance at Rutgers Business School says "The momentum that had been building in nuclear power prior to the accident in Japan has been derailed, but nuclear will continue to be an important part of the long-term energy solution."

Jeb Handwerger, a well-known natural-resource analyst, says getting into nuclear energy stocks now is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity"... as many uranium companies have dropped by as much as 40% or more due to Japan's nuclear incident.

"The bottom line is that while the Fukushima accident and its global implications have been rather negative, the broader nuclear market is set to continue to expand due, in most part, to the continued growth in the reactor programs in China, Russia, South Korea and India," says Jonathan Hinze, vice president of international operations at the Ux Consulting Company, the world's leading nuclear-fuel consultancy.

So here you have a tiny Canadian developer, on the cusp of bringing in MASSIVE cash flow from various "Fourth Element" applications.

And you can get in early on this emerging rare metal powerhouse by getting your FREE copy of our timely new report, How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains.

But hurry, once word gets out on this little-known penny stock, your opportunity for massive gains could be forever gone.

Already, over the past five months — as this company gets closer to completing the test phases for its world-changing new fuel — its stock has skyrocketed as much as 77%!

That's why it's so urgent that you learn about this story – and this tiny company – immediately.

Because right now you can get an early-in on this booming Canadian penny stock that's poised to make monster gains of 4,493%... or more... as the mainstream media picks up on its incredible new "Fourth Element" discoveries.

Now, like I told you earlier...

In my entire career as a geologist and researcher, I've rarely been as excited as I am right now about the opportunities available with this tiny Canadian company.

And that's saying a lot...

See, I've been a member of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for over 30 years, and I'm former member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration.

I've discussed the topic of Peak Oil with T. Boone Pickens and I've even been asked to provide advice on national energy policy by the U.S. Department of Defense.

I've attended numerous conferences to keep up-to-date on what's going on in the world's crucial energy sectors...

And the reason I'm telling you this is not to boast or brag, but to let you know that I'm 100% serious when I say that what's happening in this tiny Canadian company is truly remarkable... with world-changing technological breakthroughs that could bring you monster gains of 4,493% or more.

That's why I'm so excited to send you my new report, How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains... FREE... just for trying my research service, called Energy & Scarcity Investor, risk-free.

Introducing Energy & Scarcity Investor

The idea behind Energy & Scarcity Investor is simple — each month I seek to uncover the smallest penny stock energy companies with the BIGGEST potential.

As a subscriber, you'll get at least 12 top-of-the-line resource micro-cap picks each year... including precious metals, energy and agriculture.

Picks that could create incredible gains in the continued multi-decade commodity bull market... Stocks exactly like the tiny Canadian company with the revolutionary new "super metal" technology.

Now... let me make something very clear:

I'm not a fund manager looking for fees. I'm not a broker looking for commissions.

All I want to do is show you a chance to make boatloads of money... instead of being constantly sucked dry by the Wall Street "fat cats."

Explosive Gain Potential from
Tiny Resource and Energy Stocks

So have I helped my readers pull that off before?

Here's proof:

In 2009, I recommended Energy & Scarcity Investor readers close out an African oil play for a quick 209%! Readers were also given the chance to get in on a Chinese fertilizer play for 127%.

In 2010, I recommended readers close out a London oil play for a possible 98.5% gain. And a Canadian rare earth metals play for a 109% gain in less than 2 months.

So far in 2011, I told readers to close out a Texas drilling play for a chance at a 123.54% gain. And a North American Rare Earth play for a whopping 177.88% gain!

And we continue to post new gains, even now. Currently, the Energy & Scarcity research portfolio has open gains of...

* 104%
* 147%
* 150%
* 218%
* 344%

And many more!

(I can't name those stocks for you right now. That wouldn't be fair to current readers. But I'll tell you how to find out about all of them, right after you finish this presentation.)

Just have a look at what readers are saying right now about Energy & Scarcity Investor...

First, we have James from Scranton, who snagged an incredible $135,000 from my picks...

What our Readers Have to Say...

"I am very pleased with Byron's work I've already seen a $30,000 investment in one stock rocket to $150,000 in less than a year. And a double in another from $15,000 to $30,000 in a few months," says James V. in Scranton, PA

"Byron has been a favorite of mine for a few years now. He combines the intellect of an Ivy League geologist, lawyer, and military man with the down-to-earth style and wisdom that makes you feel like you're getting advice from your dad or a very good friend. His advice has sure paid off in 2010. My retirement account has increased very nicely. I'm up 511% on one stock alone. I trust Byron more than other stock researcher and he hasn't been wrong on any of his big recommendations as long as I can remember," writes Andrew T. in Salt Lake City, UT

"I am up over $35,000 alone on one stock," reports Mary R. in Columbus, OH

"I can't say enough good things about Byron King. I subscribed to Energy & Scarcity Investor 18 months ago. I invested 85% of my lifetime savings into an assortment of mining and energy stocks recommended by Byron. I am excited to report that my portfolio is up 200% as I type this letter... WOW. Thank you Byron," writes Nick C. in Dallas, TX

It's no wonder they're thrilled. And I hope you'll send me some letters, too.

I hope you grab a hot $135,000 like James did...

But know this; if you're interested in research on mainly "buy and wait" blue chip plays, this service is simply NOT for you.

Clearly, these micro cap plays are more speculative than getting involved with, say, an established blue chip major like Exxon or Newmont Mining.

For this reason, you need an increased tolerance for risk to make the best use of the research in Energy & Scarcity Investor.

As you know, the larger the chance for gain, the larger your risk. That simple fact will never vanish.

You need to be more sophisticated and nimble than your common man.

Now that doesn't mean you should shy away from the explosive profit potential that nano-cap resource plays like this tiny Canadian penny stock offers.

It just means that we have to treat these companies with more diligence.

We must approach the opportunities with more sophistication and with more courage against risk.

These important qualities make Energy & Scarcity Investor a smaller, more elite research service.

That's why beginning wealth builders may not want to subscribe.

This elite nature of my research has forced me to place a firm limit of 1,000 copies that I'll send out of our FREE special report, How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains.

So please respond quickly to avoid disappointment.

More on this limit in a bit...

But for now, let's take a look at some past impressive gains from micro and small cap resource stocks just like the ones that Energy & Scarcity Investor will focus on:

* 1,650% on Almaden Resources
* 549% on Antares Minerals
* 3,516% on Bear Creek Mining
* 562% on Dynasty Metals

And the list goes on and on...

Energy & Scarcity Investor aims for those kinds of impressive quadruple- and high triple-digit gainers.

In fact, I have a good feeling that the tiny Canadian penny stock play that has me so excited has potential like that.

OK, I see you've stuck with me up to this point in the presentation.

Congratulations!

You're the kind of person with as much mettle as James, who you just saw bagged a cool $135,000 from my picks...

And you're the kind of person who's cut out for the chance to make 4,493% gains and turn $50,000 into a life-changing $2.2 million...

After all, isn't life REALLY just about enjoying yourself?

With as little work as possible.

And by taking action today and trying my research service, Energy & Scarcity Investor, I'll make this opportunity even better...

In addition to sending you How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains.

I'll also send you a timely report, The "Hidden" $944 Million Goldmine of King Alexander l," that covers another hot area of interest for Energy & Scarcity wealth-builders right now ... GOLD.

With the continuing conflicts in the world and the huge debt in the U.S. and Europe taking center stage, gold is sizzling hot right now.

Inside you'll discover the goldmine of past Serbian Kings...

This is an opportunity so rare that I spent ten days, traveling over 12,432 miles, over to Serbia and back.

While in Serbia, I drove for hours, deep into the heart of the Balkan Mountains.

I hiked up hillsides, across ridges, through oak forests.

Then I had to wade through mud and muck, almost up to my knees, just to get to one particular spot... King Alexander I's "hidden" goldmine.

This gold-lined shaft sat idle... "hidden"... for nearly three-quarters of a century.

Until now...

And what I found out during my visit to this potentially $944 million goldmine could make you incredibly wealthy in the coming months and years...

See, recently, the Serbian government has given ONE tiny Canadian exploration company EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS to exploit this rediscovered goldmine of Serbian Kings...

This incredible find has placed a $944 million gold fortune in the hands of a little-known $47 million company located 4,360 miles from Serbia... in mining friendly Canada.

That means this tiny company... priced at just under $1.10 per share... is sitting on gold reserves that could be over 20 times its total "market cap."

And this exclusive deal couldn't come at a better time for this Canadian penny stock...

Gold is red hot right now... recently hitting a record high of over $1,750 an ounce...

And there's no end in sight.

As Bloomberg recently points out, "The forces propelling the commodity's rise are still at work."

Bottom line is this...

As gold continues to soar... you could make massive gains of 1,915%... or more... from one of the last remaining unexplored gold mines in the world...

Lucky for us, NO ONE is covering this story... YET.

But once the mainstream media gets hold of this incredible story, it's likely to start an absolute feeding frenzy on Wall Street.

Early investors could be poised to turn a small stake of $10,000 into $191,500 starting just days from now.

Make no mistake: Wall Street will not ignore this situation for long...

This is a rare opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor of a major gold discovery before the general public has a clue.

You could see gains of 1,915%... or more... if news of this huge gold discovery is revealed to the average investor.

To help you get in right away, I've written up everything you need to know in your second FREE report, The Hidden $944 Million Goldmine of King Alexander I.

And to make sure Energy & Scarcity is right for you, I'll throw in another valuable new report that could make you explosive gains in coming months... The Great Rare Earth Supply Crunch: How You Could Make 4,851% Gains From Today's "Technology Metals" Juggernauts...

You see, I don't limit my research to oil, gas, gold and silver stocks. We do the ENTIRE resource universe.

The Great Rare Earth Shortage

According to Forbes, "America has a new dependency and it's not Middle East oil. It is instead several arcane elements known as rare earth elements (REE)."

There are 17 rare earth elements that are essential to most modern and almost all "green" technologies.

And without rare earths, the "green" energy economy of the future will not happen.

All those electric cars that "we're gonna build." All the windmills. All the thin-film solar panels we are expecting to see. All those green jobs to replace the vanishing jobs in the U.S. Rust Belt.

Well, it's all Star Trek fantasy without rare earths. There are simply NO substitutes.

In fact, without these "technology metals" many modern technologies would cease to exist — including millions of iPods, Hybrid car batteries, digital cameras, flat screen televisions, laptops and cell phones.

Imagine your life without all of these modern day technologies.

The problem is that the United States currently has ZERO rare earths production capability. There's no working plant or mine at all — the last of it closed down back in 2002, and nothing has re-started yet.

And as I mentioned above when discussing "The Fourth Element," almost all of the world's rare earths supply comes from one source: China.

Defense News reports, "China today controls 97% of the world market at the very time rare earths are in soaring demand."

Bottom line: A worldwide shortage of "technology metals" is rapidly approaching!

So when I came across a tiny Canadian penny stock... with over a giant $13.8 billion rare earths discovery... I was excited to share it with my readers...
This company plans to restart mining and rare earth production at this plant... very soon.

All at a daunting time when America and the rest of the world are facing the biggest rare earth supply crunch in history...

That's why it's so urgent that you learn about this story — and this tiny company — right now.

Early investors could see 4,851% gains or more before its headline news.

You could turn a mere $25,000 into a life-changing $1,212,750!

You can get all the details on this explosive penny stock in your THIRD FREE report, The Great Rare Earth Supply Crunch: How You Could Make 4,851% Gains From Today's "Technology Metals" Juggernauts...

We'll rush all THREE FREE REPORTS to you right away when you agree to sample our research RISK-FREE. Just so you can get started right away...

The reports include every detail and instruction you'll need to pocket substantial gains.

So, in summary, here's what you'll receive when you sign up for Energy & Scarcity Investor...

Here's the Full Breakdown of All Your
Reports and Access...

FREE BONUS REPORT #1: How One Tiny Canadian Company's "Super Metal" Technology Could Supercharge Your Stock Market Gains... Here's how you can tap in early on a tiny Canadian penny stock with its new "super metal" technology... You could see gains as much as 4,493% from this booming Canadian energy-focused investment company. Value: $795

FREE BONUS REPORT #2: The "Hidden" $944 Million Goldmine of King Alexander l... Gold is red-hot right now... With the world in turmoil, investors are flocking to gold as a "safe haven." You could make 1,915% gains from the tiny Canadian exploration company that's uncovered King Alexander l's $944 million gold fortune. Value: $795

FREE BONUS REPORT #3: The Great Rare Earth Supply Crunch: How You Could Make 4,851% Gains From Today's "Technology Metals" Juggernauts... One tiny Canadian company is set to win the race on rare earth metals production outside of China with its massive $13.8 billion discovery. You could see gains of 4,851% off this little-known rare earth stock once Wall Street catches wind of it. Plus you'll get two more under the radar rare earth penny stocks that could quickly add thousands to your bottom line. Value: $795

A Full Year of Monthly Energy & Scarcity Investor Issues... Each month, you'll receive at least one — possibly more — new micro cap resource recommendations in your issue of Energy & Scarcity Investor. You'll get specific stock symbols and specific buy ranges. You'll get the issue immediately by e-mail, and we'll mail you a hard copy, as well. Value: $1,495

Flash Buy and Sell Alerts... Sometimes the market forces us to act swiftly. If an event arises that forces us to recommend you sell out of a position, we'll let you know anytime. That way, you won't delay locking in gains. Likewise, if I discover an opportunity that can't wait for the scheduled monthly or weekly updates, I'll send it to you right away.

Urgent Updates Once a Week... I'll email you a weekly Energy & Scarcity Investor update on the status of your recommended positions and the resource markets. Again, this is part of your FREE one-year membership in this premium research service.

Instant 24-hour Access to the Private, Members-Only Energy & Scarcity Investor Website... Here you'll find everything I write to you in one convenient spot... your special investment reports, the monthly issues and weekly updates. You can also access a real-time model portfolio that tracks all of your Energy & Scarcity Investor plays.

Your Personal Subscriber Care Hotline... The Energy & Scarcity Investor subscriber care team is available five days a week. Any problems at all, simply give them a call and they'll be happy to assist you.

As you can see, the total value of your one year membership to Energy & Scarcity Investor exceeds $3,880.

That's pretty cheap compared to what you'd pay for other high-end research services.

And you could easily recoup your money in no time.

If you bank $135,000 like James from PA did...well I'm sure you'll be pretty satisfied with how cheap your membership is...

But don't worry: You won't pay nearly $3,880 to accept your membership.

Because I'm so excited about this tiny Canadian "technology metals" company, I don't want a high subscription price to stop you from knowing the name and ticker of the play.

So I'm cutting the yearly subscription fee for Energy & Scarcity Investor by 50%.

The price for one year is now just $750.

So that's like getting six months for FREE.

A sensational deal, I think you'll agree.

To get started right now, simply click the "YES! Start my subscription now" link below and I'll immediately email you copies of all three special reports.

That's just $750 to start your subscription to Energy & Scarcity Investor, plus access to the three blockbuster reports... at least one of which could deliver to you a mind-blowing gain of 4,493%.

With a small $50,000 investment, you could make over $2.2 million.

Enough to pay the subscription price for Energy & Scarcity Investor 2,995 times!

But let me make the deal even better, by removing all the risk for you...

Here's how it works:

Respond to this trial offer today and you receive your three exclusive reports.

You decide if you want to invest in any or all of those stocks. Or, if you prefer, simply "paper trade" them and watch what happens.

Soon, your monthly issues arrive.

You get your weekly updates and exclusive password access to the member-only Web site...

You decide which recommendations you want to act on.

My guarantee: If, within two months, you're not satisfied with the opportunities Energy & Scarcity Investor picks have shown you, you can call us and demand a full refund.

Your Gold-Clad Guarantee

You heard that right. If you're not satisfied with your membership, you pay nothing for it.

Even in the last hour of the 60th day. No questions asked. And you keep every single thing I've ever sent you.

I think that's the simplest guarantee in all independent investment research.

So you bear no risk. Except the risk of getting so wealthy you'll lose your friends.

Just click the "Subscribe Now" link below to grab this risk-free trial offer.

But I'm afraid I can't keep the books open on this deal forever.

Because the future juggernaut companies I'll show you have smaller market caps — I must be careful how many readers find out about them.

Only a small number of folks can get in on this at any time.

It's first come, first served.

For example, the tiny Canadian company which discovered the breakthrough "super metal" technology is one of the smallest recommendations I've ever made. I must be careful how many readers find out about it.

I'm concerned that the stock is TOO small and any big influx will blow share prices up... ruining the opportunity for everyone.

Remember, the company who has the rights to the metal miracle breakthrough is trading under $0.22 per share... which makes it a tiny, tiny penny stock...

And we're not in the business of driving stocks higher – we're in the business of helping readers ride them to the moon.

So I'm putting a hard limit of 1,000 on the first run of reports.

What exactly does that mean?

Once we give out 1,000 reports we will IMMEDIATELY shut this offer down and see how the stock performs.

So if you are serious about making the kind of money I've shown you, it's crucial to take action immediately.

Simply click the "Subscribe Now" link below this presentation to get started.

OR, if you prefer to order by phone, please call our friendly VIP member services desk at 1-866-361-7662. Available Monday - Friday from 9am-5pm, EST.

I'm eager to have you onboard.

And I hope you grab your own $135,000 like James did!

Byron King
Editor, Energy & Scarcity Investor
September 2011

SUBSCRIBE NOW
or if you want to spend $49 a year to receive Outstanding Investments,Rated by Hurlbert Financial Digest as the best performing Stock Newsletter for a decade. or
if you want to figure this all out for yourself by discussing it on the Web Success Forum, then check out "New Silicon": The Next Junior Mining Sector Poised For Lift .

Stop the Corporate TakeOver of America ! Large Corporations Kill the Economy !

2011-09-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

If you weren't sure before, you can be now: a corporate takeover is underway in this country, and its targeting our pocketbooks, our healthcare, schools in our communities and even our democracy.

Alarmist? Not if you look at the agenda of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. This secretive organization pairs up big business with state legislators to draft bills that put corporate profits ahead of the public interest.

Common Cause has been out front all summer exposing ALEC's business-first agenda, challenging its tax-exempt status as a public charity and shining a spotlight on the political money spent by its members.

We need your help to keep the pressure on companies that fund ALEC and the elected representatives who do the group's bidding. Let's take our democracy back!

Please make a gift to support our work --
give today and your donation will be doubled!

Please Donate Today
to Help Save Our Democracy from Corporate Control

Let's look at the numbers:

* In the past 10 years, ALEC's corporate leaders have poured more than $370 million into state elections.

* Common Cause has documented ALEC spending in all 50 states, with California alone targeted by more than $204 million to block tobacco tax increases and other popular initiatives.

* An estimated 2,000 state legislators are dues-paying members of ALEC.

* 22 major corporations sit on its "private enterprise" board -- including Koch Industries.

* ALEC boasts that 180 of its model bills are enacted in at least one state each year.

* ALEC-supported legislation has made it harder to vote in 18 states so far.

Now please help us reach a different number: $50,000. That's what we need to receive a matching gift that will take our ALEC campaign to the next level.

We're already more than halfway there: Can you help put us over the top today?

Please Donate Today
to Help Save Our Democracy from Corporate Control

Let's stand and fight together, state-by-state and bill-by-bill, to save our democracy from corporate control.

Thanks for all you do,

Bob Edgar
and the rest of the team at Common Cause

P.S. Next week, Robert Reich (chairman of Common Cause's board) and I will be speaking at the Take Back the American Dream Conference. If you'll be in Washington, DC on October 3rd, 4th or 5th, I hope you'll join us there. If you can't be there in person, please check out our website where we'll have live streaming video from the conference.

Join on Facebook

Follow on Twitter

Common Cause is a national nonpartisan organization with chapters in 35 states. The mailing address is 1133 19th Street NW, 9th Floor, Washington, DC 20036. The phone number is (202) 833-1200.

The World's Safest Dividend-Paying Stocks

2011-09-28T05:49:00.000-07:00

By Brett Eversole, analyst, True Wealth Systems
Saturday, August 13, 2011

The last three weeks have been among the worst ever on Wall Street...

Which investments held up the best? After such a dramatic selloff, which companies should you buy now?

Let's take a quick look at the selloff and its best performers to find out...

Between July 22 and August 8, the S&P 500 fell nearly 17%. This was one of the worst 11-day periods in stock market history. We've seen crashes this bad just five times since 1946.

After such a historic crash – where companies like Bank of America (America's biggest bank) and U.S. Steel (America's biggest steelmaker) fell as much as 35% – it's important to know which companies barely budged during the crisis. We know these are some of the safest companies in the world.

Yesterday, I screened the S&P 500 to find the best performers between July 22 and August 8. The table below shows the results...

Company	Ticker	Return July 22-Aug 8	Market Cap (in billions)	Sector
Lexmark	LXK	2.15%	$2.4	Technology
National Semi	NSM	-0.81%	$6.2	Technology
Cephalon	CEPH	-3.02%	$6.2	Health care
Pepsico	PEP	-4.24%	$99.8	Consumer Goods
Southern Company	SO	-4.42%	$32.9	Utilities
Priceline	PCLN	-4.78%	$25.8	Services
Kraft	KFT	-4.85%	$60.4	Consumer Goods
Colgate-Palmolive	CL	-5.50%	$40.5	Consumer Goods
Mead Johnson	MJN	-5.60%	$13.9	Consumer Goods
General Mills	GIS	-5.84%	$23.2	Consumer Goods
Consolidated Edison	ED	-5.92%	$15.2	Utilities
Coca-Cola	KO	-6.61%	$153.1	Consumer Goods
Altria	MO	-6.90%	$52.2	Consumer Goods

As you can see, only 13 S&P 500 companies fell less than 7% during the crash. And only one company, Lexmark International, managed to move higher. (Lexmark had its own crash before the broad market crash, and it reported better than expected quarterly results.)

There's an important idea in this list... one we've written about many times in DailyWealth. The idea is to own the best dividend-paying businesses in the world... ones that sell products that never go out of style, no matter what the economy is doing.

Companies like Coke (soda), General Mills (cereal), Pepsico (chips and soda), Kraft (food), Colgate (toothpaste), Mead Johnson (formula), and Altria (cigarettes) sell the "basics." And they held up well during the crash.

Think of them as beach houses that held steady during a hurricane... while most homes were devastated.

The strength these companies showed is no fluke, either. During the 2008-2009 recession, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, and General Mills, for example, all grew revenue and net income. They grew earnings per share by an average 17.6%. The ability to grow through one of the worst recessions in history is a huge mark of stability.

And on top of that growth, their share prices "only" fell an average of 26% during the housing bust and financial crisis. This is just over half of the 48% decline we saw in the S&P 500...

If you're thinking of jumping back into stocks, consider buying some of the names on this list. They have the best brand names in their industries. Many pay stable dividends. And they held up extraordinarily well during one of the worst stock crashes in history.

Good investing,

Brett Eversole

Further Reading:

Dan Ferris has found a way to use these brand name companies to increase shareholders' income year after year... With his strategy, you can "sock a little money away every year," he writes, "no matter what the economy or the market is doing."

Learn more about his strategy here: How to Earn Predictable Returns That Go Up Every Year.

Perfect Storm Creates Tidal Wave of Gold Demand

2011-09-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

By Frank Holmes

09/20/11 San Antonio, Texas – A few weeks ago we held our Case for Investing in Gold webcast with the World Gold Council’s (WGC) Jason Toussaint, who gave some remarkable insight into gold demand in the East. In these countries, gold is not only celebrated, acquired, worn or displayed during holidays or special occasions; it is seen as an everyday symbol of wealth.

Increases in demand from China and India have driven a 7.5 percent increase in demand for gold jewelry during the first half of the year despite a 25 percent increase in the price, according to a report released this week from GFMS. However, much of India’s potential gold demand remains untapped.

Toussaint highlighted an interesting fact: Of the roughly 800 tons of gold imported to India each year, only the top 40 percent of Indian households purchase all of the country’s gold, says Toussaint. The other 60 percent of Indians, who may have the same adoration for gold and celebrate Ramadan and Diwali, historically may not have had access to purchase gold. This large population represents a huge untapped market. To fulfill demand, the WGC has created a program with Indian post offices to distribute coins and small pieces of gold. Toussaint says right now there are 700 post offices in the rural areas servicing 90,000 customers and he expects that number to grow. This market is worth pursuing based on McKinsey’s research that a “huge wealth creation wave” is developing in India. As Toussaint puts it, “if purchase patterns continue, we will see from 2005 to 2025, a four times larger gold market in India.”

This is a fascinating idea because very few entities other than the post office have the network and infrastructure necessary to reach beneath the surface of the world’s largest gold market.

India may be the world’s largest gold market, but in China, gold buying has become so significant that the country has become the fastest-growing market for gold jewelry in the world. Not only are Chinese purchasing increasing amounts of gold, they prefer pure 24-carat gold. This high-quality gold is given to celebrate special occasions, such as birthdays, and purchased for a bride at her wedding. In 2010, 6.6 million brides will make gold a part of their ritual as the yellow metal signifies the importance of a long-term relationship, says the WGC website.

While jewelry represents a large percentage of gold purchases in the country, Chinese can also purchase gold at their local bank. WGC formed a partnership with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC Bank), the largest bank by deposits in the world. They began offering a “Gold Accumulation Plan” that lets investors buy and accumulate small portions of gold over time. Similar to a bank account, people participating have access to the underlying gold or the cash value at any point. Since it was launched in December 2010 through this summer, the ICBC has an estimated 1.7 million accounts, with an accumulation of more than 12,000 kilograms of gold.

After India and China led the global demand for gold, accounting for 52 percent of 2010 tonnage, the GFMS says the two Asian countries have “continued impressive growth” this year. Gold buying in India jumped 38 percent during the second quarter alone. GFMS reported China’s gold purchases jumped 90 percent on a year-over-year basis through June. This is a follow up to the 75 percent increase in gold demand the country experienced last year.

This share tops all of North America, which accounts for 8 percent, Europe and Russia, which account for 13 percent, and even the Middle East and Turkey, which together account for 12 percent. North American gold demand fell 12 percent during the first half of 2011 due to the slumping U.S. economy and rising prices.

David Lamb, the WGC’s managing director for jewelry, recently told Reuters there is a “significant tidal shift to the Asian markets, to India and China in particular, and gold rising upwards and disappearing from the mass merchandising in the West.”

Central Banks Load Up on Gold

Demand for gold isn’t only coming from the residents of China and India. There’s been a huge sentiment shift among central banks as well. Toussaint noted how, after many years of selling, central banks have become net buyers of gold. He says, “Western Central banks have essentially shut the tap off, and the vast majority of the buying is coming from Eastern central banks.”

In just the first half of this year, official sector purchases are up three-fold over the 2010 total to 216 tons, accord to the GFMS report. GFMS says the rise is largely due to low sales levels from Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) signatories and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) completing its sales program at the end of 2010. In addition, other countries have gobbled up gold in an effort to diversify reserves away from the U.S. dollar. Scotia Capital estimates central banks’ total purchases of gold will reach 248 tons by year-end.

Some of the big buyers have been Mexico (whose central bank purchased roughly 100 tons of gold earlier this year), Korea (purchased 25 tons in June), Thailand (purchased nearly 19 tons in June) and Russia (which has purchased over 50 tons of gold from its domestic market year-to-date).

Toussaint says Eastern central banks are “catching up with the rest of the world” because their current allocation is tiny right now. However, whenever the WGC discusses these buying habits with the central banks of Korea, Taiwan and other Asian countries, they consistently say that they are interested in gold, and looking to hold it over the long-term. In other words, he says, this is not a “knee-jerk reaction to the direction of the dollar.”

GFMS also believes that this could be just the beginning. In a release announcing the report, Philip Klapwijk, Global Head of Metals Analytics at GFMS, said, “we are in essence in chapter three of the central bank story—we’ve left behind a period of heavy net sales, then a short period of neutrality and we’re now in a new environment of heavy buying.”

Regards,

Frank Holmes,
for The Daily Reckoning

P.S. This only scratches the surface of what was covered during the webcast. We discussed much more than China, India and central bank gold demand. If you missed it the first time, you can listen to the entire presentation at your leisure here. Find out the reasons we don’t believe gold is in a bubble, the economic factors affecting how gold is valued, and how our culture and emotions shape the gold-investing landscape. It’s great insight for the serious gold investor.

Read more: Perfect Storm Creates Tidal Wave of Gold Demand http://dailyreckoning.com/perfect-storm-creates-tidal-wave-of-gold-demand/#ixzz1YkCA2Zbn

Operation Twist and More Ways to Throw Money Down the Drain - Thanks to the Fed

2011-09-22T20:45:00.000-07:00

by Joel Bowman Reporting from El Calafate, Argentina...

Last we checked, the world of money was still falling apart, breaking off one chunk at a time. And, just as might be expected, those trying to “fix” it were still busy hastening its demise. Some people never learn. More on that in a moment. First, a none-too- subtle analogy...

Your editor spent much of the past week trekking around Los Glaciares National Park, down in the Santa Cruz province in Argentine Patagonia. Our folks are in town from Australia, catching up with their walkabout son and his gypsy girlfriend. There’s not a lot of glacier parks back on the “sunburned continent,” so we thought a few days in crampons and thermals, hiking over the freezing ice pack, might make for a fun little excursion. Besides, nothing clears your mind quite like a sub-zero gust fresh off a snowy peak.

The Perito Moreno glacier is one of a small handful of glaciers in the world still thought to be growing. It’s gained approximately 700 meters in length since some intrepid adventurers discovered and mapped it sometime in the late 1800s. Top to bottom it measures roughly 200 meters in thickness, although only about one sixth of that can be seen above water. The “front” of the glacier, where all the calving takes place, is nearly five kilometers from side to side. There is something rather humbling about watching a chunk of ice the size of an apartment block fracture, break off from the main body, and tumble into the icy waters below.

Standing atop the Perito Moreno glacier itself, you can see the snow-capped mountains of the Austral Andes rise up spectacularly on either side, as the glacier underneath you creeps down the river in between, moving quickest in the middle, where there is less resistance, and slowest at the edges, where it clings to the shallow banks. It’s this difference in speeds — as well as in pressure, tension, depth, friction, etc. — that cracks and splits the glacier, giving it that spiky, other-worldly kind of look, full of crevices and drain holes that disappear into a deep blue abyss beneath the surface. Hold that thought...

Scanning the headlines this morning, it looks as though nothing major has changed in the world of finance and economics. There are daily announcements, of course, incidentals, talking points and chin-wagging “power lunches,” but the larger, more important trend is already underway...and it ain’t changing course. That trend, as we keep saying, has to do with debt...and the slow, painful march toward correcting it, breaking it up, destroying it.

Greece, for example, is as broke today as when we left it. Maybe more so. The yield on its 2-year government bonds is now over 134%. Well, that was yesterday...who knows what it is today? Who cares? The Greeks are going under. The market is expecting a default. It will get it. And Spain, Portugal and Italy are not far behind. All have their hands out for more funding. All are clinging to the continent for dear life. But all will have to reckon with their debts eventually, one way or another...chunk by chunk...

“A deepening crisis of some kind is certain,” opined Eric Fry in yesterday’s reckoning, “especially because the US economy is still reeling from the credit crisis of 2008. Fearing a repeat of ’08, the US Federal Reserve is springing into action, which pretty much guarantees a repeat. Earlier today, the Fed christened the launch of “Operation Twist” — a scheme to buy up a bunch of the long-term Treasury bonds...

“Operation Twist,” continued Eric, “is simply a new form of Quantitative Easing, which was simply a new form of printing money out of thin air. (The Fed says it will pay for its new purchases with proceeds from the sale of the short-dated Treasuries it already owns. We don’t believe it. By hook or by crook, the Fed’s balance sheet will probably grow over the next few months. We will be watching). Op Twist, therefore, is merely the next illogical step in a regrettable progression toward dollar debasement. After Op Twist, look for Operation Contort, Operation Zig-Zag, Operation Bait-and- Switch, Operation Capital Control and ultimately, Operation Devalue.”

“Op Twist,” we now learn, is to be a $400 billion dollar effort — much bigger than the market was expecting. Why “more action” is the order of the day, we don’t know. The economy is in tatters, even after trillions of quantitatively eased dollars were pumped into the system. The Fed even said so itself. Its own statement noted “significant downside risks to the economic outlook, including strains in global financial markets.”

If these magic elixirs are so helpful, so desperately needed, so critical for economic health and vitality, then why the soggy outlook? Fellow Reckoners already know the answer. There are no magic elixirs. No potions. No panaceas. No “free lunches.”

Investors, for their part, appear to be finally catching on. Just as they “re-re-discovered” Europe today, they also “re-re-learned” that the US Federal Reserve can do nothing to reverse the laws of economics; not with twists...not with zigs...and not with zags. Worldwide, markets are down big time. Measures in London, France and Germany were all off by about 5%, as was Hong Kong’s Hang Seng. Indonesia’s Jakarta Composite Index fell by 9% overnight!

In the US, too, trading screens are bleeding red. The S&P500, Dow and Nasdaq were all lower by about 4% as of this writing.

So much money...so heavy an opportunity cost...so much do-gooding and fixing, tinkering and world-improving. And for what? To delay the inevitable? To worsen the crisis that must eventually come due? Seems like a waste of time to us. Besides, what’s wrong with a little creative destruction from time to time? Why not stand back and allow some much needed debt destruction in the US? How about a fierce round of currency calving in Europe? Why not let nature take its course? Why not, as Bill suggests below, “give collapse a chance”?

In the end, it probably won’t matter whether the Feds “allow” collapse or failure to happen. Our money says, they’ll get it either way.

One man who is no stranger to a bit of “creative destruction,” and the immense profit opportunities this vital process can bring, is Ray Blanco, the forward-looking editor of Technology Profits Confidential.

What Today's 391 Point Sell-Off in the NYSE Means......

2011-09-22T14:29:00.000-07:00

For those investors who are rattled by this today’s sell-off, I have this important message for you:

You should be buying stocks—not selling them.

The reason is simple:

The Fed’s repositioning of its $2.65 trillion securities portfolio will not only lower interest rates and boost investments, but also dramatically increase spending.

Everybody who thinks otherwise is going to kick themselves in six months when this shift results in record corporate earnings, sales, investor confidence and profits.

All thanks to the FED’s shift toward longer-term Treasuries that will result in even lower interest rates for years to come.

DON’T MISS THIS!

Fellow Investor,

Please—whatever you do—don’t even think of running to the sidelines.

Today’s sell-off is simply an over reaction to the Fed’s action to reposition its assets by unwitting investors who simply don’t know what this means.

Let me spell it out for you in the simplest of terms so you can see with your own eyes the profit opportunity that everyone who is rushing to the sidelines is missing.

Here’s what the Fed's action is designed to do: Drive interest rates even lower for an even longer term.

Do you realize what this means?

Low interest rates create a chain reaction that corporations love. Low rates mean big corporate buybacks, more mergers and acquisitions and an investor frenzy that adds market liquidity.

And all of this leads to big investor profits from the companies that benefit the most.

How can it not?

Longer-term lower interest rates make it:

1. More affordable for people to buy homes and cars, and

2. More profitable for businesses to invest in equipment, investors and buildings.

All while putting more money in consumers hands to buy more goods and services because less of their money will be going to pay interest.

And that’s just the beginning.

It will also drive the dollar much lower making U.S. exports even more profitable, as the demand for U.S. goods gives foreign purchases a greater BANG for their buck.

That’s why you will ultimately see the market rocket back even higher well past today’s 391 point sell-off and head back over the 12,000 mark in the coming months when record fourth quarter earnings are reported, and Europe further resolves debt concerns.

This is why BlackRock and other shrewd players, like us, are weighing back into the market TODAY to buy fundamentally sound stocks and commodities that have sold off as part of the mass exodus that will ultimately profit from a long-term falling dollar.

That’s why you should be buying stocks too!

When you look back weeks from today, you’ll see that today’s panic selling was driven by factors that don’t affect the stocks we own here at Blue Chip Growth.

With today’s sell-off in mind, I simply can’t stress this enough: The markets are the most oversold since February 2009 and 1987!

So please don’t let this opportunity to load up on our top stocks pass you buy. Taking advantage of opportunities like this is what can make a dramatic impact to your financial success.

Frankly, this is how we doubled our money four times in the past two and one half years—by investing against conventional wisdom beating the market by $3-to-$1 along the way.

For these reasons, I urge you—in the strongest terms possible—to take advantage of this second gift discount the market is handing you and add to your holdings now

Here’s the best way to do it:

If there is just one addition to your holdings I want you to make TODAY, this is it: Add my A-rated silver stock to your portfolio now.

Three reasons:

1. Act NowThe fear in the market place is not going to away soon, as investors continue to have a strong sense of déjà vu with 2008.

2. Gold prices at record levels, are giving new investors pause, fearful they may be buying at the top.

3. Silver gives the individual investor a much better and way to play the rise—with historical gains that are better than gold by as much as $5-to-$1.

In fact, the 279% gains our top silver producer has handed investors over the past two years has not only beaten the pants off of the world’s top gold stocks by as much as $5-to-$1 but also offers you a preview of the profit opportunities headed your way.

Here’s why:

This silver company bought up nearly the world’s supply of silver at $3.90 an ounce back in 2004 when the rest of the world wasn’t looking.

That’s a whopping $33 under today’s spot price of silver.

All by negotiating purchase agreements at the world’s 15 top mines when silver prices were at their rock bottom.

So it’s no wonder this company’s stock has been a great investment over both the short and long term as silver prices have risen from $5 to $37 an ounce.

Just look:

* 6 years 930%
* 2 years 279%
* 12 months 80%

With the falling dollar and global economic uncertainty pushing up commodities prices and silver production insufficient to meet rising industrial and investment demands, we see this company doubling again in the next 12 months.

That’s why I can tell you with unmatched certainty; my newest silver play will deliver profits…

Five Times Better Than Gold
—and Then Some

Louis Navellier here, and if you liked the $310-an-ounce gold play I brought you in 2010, you’re going to love my breakout silver play as well—only the profits you’ll grab here could again be four times bigger than gold.

The reasons are compelling and clear:

1. Silver is massively undervalued when compared to the price of gold. Just look: While gold is $500 above its 1980 high in precious metals, silver is still 50% below the level reached that year and is beginning to catch up.

2. As the market’s sold off, our top rated silver play outperformed gold again by four times again, and by all indication will continue to so as investors rush headlong into commodities and the dollar continues to fall.

3. As a result, its sales, earnings, and stock price should continue to soar as the dollar continues to spiral south and industrial demand for silver skyrockets.

4. What’s more, because this company is “unhedged,” it profits directly from the rise in silver’s price and not from mining operations as hedged operations do.

And that’s just the beginning!

5. As I write this, the world’s silver production is currently inadequate to meet rising industrial and investment demands, as reported inventories are near all-time lows.

6. The biggest boost in demand is coming from China, where the technology boom is pushing up prices because silver is the best electrical and thermal conductor of all metals and goes into everything from solar cells to cell phones, from cellophane to batteries.

7. With investors increasingly concerned about a new global economic crisis, the run on silver may be just the beginning as investors “seek to protect their wealth from weakening currencies,” according to a recent Bloomberg report.

As a result, what we are witnessing here is a classic supply/demand silver squeeze in the making. Demand for silver is soaring worldwide… while silver supplies continue to get tighter… as the falling dollar the global economic crisis continues to push silver’s price up daily.

The chain reaction could not only drive the price of silver above $50 and beyond in 2011 but also double our silver company’s profits again in 2012.

This is why the world’s top mutual fund managers and institutional investors, including BlackRock, Oppenheimer, American Century, and Fidelity, have piled into this stock hand over fist, as they see, as we do, that silver may be a stronger investment than gold in the long term.

This is also why I’m telling my readers, and now you, too, that…

A $5,000 Investment Here
Could Jump to $10,000 Rather Quickly

It’s no wonder.

With 870% earnings growth, 105% sales growth, and demand for silver rising exponentially, we see another big breakout coming here, as the dollar falls, silver demand rises, and supply simply can’t keep pace with demand.

Join TodayThat’s how this little-known silver company popped up on our radar screen. It simply matched the same explosive earnings profile that led us to a 447% gain in EMC, a 397% profit in America Movil, and a 397% gain in Dell before Wall Street knew these companies existed. The same situation is repeating itself here.

Tragically, most analysts on Wall Street are missing this story by a country mile. The reason is simple: They tend to file silver stocks along with other poor man’s commodities like wheat and corn and not in the same category as copper and gold.

Yet, without silver there would be no advanced technology/telecommunications boom, as silver—not copper—is a much faster conducting metal and a key speed component in virtually every lightening quick cell phone, HD TV, or hard drive that’s manufactured in the world.

This is why this company has continued to spit out better than 152% average annual gains since 2005 as the boom in new speed-hungry technologies pushed up demand for silver and supply has failed to keep pace—all as the falling dollar and inflation fears have driven the price of commodities through the roof.

This is also why the country’s largest institutional investors have already staked out their positions, and why I’m highly recommending that you do, too, before this silver miner’s stock price takes off again.

I’m not the only one who says that this silver company is set to soar, either.

1. The analyst community is forecasting third-quarter sales growth of over 160% over last year.

2. Three analysts have already revised their consensus earnings upward in the past month with another hopping on board in the past ten days.

After all, with U.S. economic uncertainty growing, the dollar continuing to fall, and China’s silver demand growing stronger every month, silver’s price will never be lower.

That’s why if you can add this recommendation to your holdings before it jumps again, you could walk away with a double by this time next year.

If you hold this one for the next two to three years, you could triple your money—and then some—just as has happened in our past special situations.

So when I say, “Five times better than gold—and then some”—I mean it.

My advice:

Back Up the Truck Now!

And it’s all because silver not only profits from the falling dollar and economic uncertainty but also because it is a key metal in the booming wireless and tech industries.

After all, without silver their would be no fast moving technologies there would be no smart phone, no 3G or 4G network to run it on, LCD TV, GPS, or a computer upon which you are reading your email or the high-tech drones and satellites that are working 24/7 defending America.

For these reasons, if you don’t act now—TODAY—to add my silver juggernaut to your holdings, I guarantee you’ll kick yourself for years to come as the dollar falls, the price of silver rises, global silver demand grows, and my top-rated silver company hands investors another 50% to 80% gains in 12 months.

Let Me Give You a Taste of
What I’m Talking About Here

This unhedged silver miner has…

* registered 870% revenue growth last quarter with analysts expecting another 20% jump to be reported in the coming quarter.

* offered a market cap of $11 billion,

* handed investors 80% gains in 12 months, 279% gains in the past two years, and 930% gains since 2005.

* exhibited one of the strongest buy ratings of any of our stocks—and it’s about to clobber Wall Street and double investors’ money again.

All thanks to falling dollar, rising overblown investors fears, and mounting silver demand in the technology sector, which has already pushed up the price of silver to all time highs.

Unfortunately, I Can’t Tell You More or
Give You This Company’s Name Here!

You’ll find it only on my private website as an exclusive for my subscribers of record.

Two reasons:

1. Hedge funds and the media follow me too closely, and

2. Naming it in this email would make it impossible for you to get it at the buy-below price.

I DON’T want the rest of Wall Street to bid this one higher until after you get in.

Act NowBut I can tell you this:

1. The profits here will be enormous.

2. Given its previous 870% earnings growth and 80% 12-month run-up, I’d be disappointed if the company’s earnings growth didn’t repeat itself and the stock didn’t double again.

This is why the world’s top mutual fund managers and institutional investors, including BlackRock, Oppenheimer, American Century, and Fidelity, have piled into this stock hand over fist, as they see, as we do, that silver may be a stronger investment than gold in the long term.

For these reasons, if you don’t grab this one now, you’re going to kick yourself for years to come. Because this will be the easiest and most profitable investment you make this year.

Act now.

The Biggest Profits Will Come
in the Next 14 Days

The reason is simple:

U.S. debt related and growth tensions will continue to send investors rushing headlong into commodities like silver.

Silver supplies will continue to tighten as current production is currently inadequate to meet rising industrial and investment demands.

And the tech boom will push up prices because silver is the best electrical and thermal conductor of all metals and goes into everything from solar cells to cell phones, from cellophane to batteries.

However, if you wait until after these forces take hold you will miss this juggernaut’s next big move upward as the dollar weakens, the company global sales increase, and our silver play here continues to richly reward investors along the way.

If the dramatic rise in gold and silver stocks are any indication of what’s headed your way, this is one opportunity you don’t want to be sitting on.

Have I caught your attention?

I hope so!

Because most investors will miss this locked-in profit opportunity. But you won’t when you join me here at Blue Chip Growth.

MY PROMISE:
If My New Silver Play Doesn’t Hand You
at Least 35% to 50% Gains by 2012
You Won’t Pay a Dime

Naturally, I couldn’t offer you such a strong guarantee if I weren’t convinced beyond any doubt that the company’s earnings would continue to surge skyward.

That’s how confident I am that this one has winner written all over it.

In fact, I’ve set this up so that you can join me today and then cancel on the last day of your sixth month and still get all your money back—no questions asked—if my new silver play doesn’t pan out the way I am forecasting here.

Why am I doing this?

To give you the opportunity to profit—not only from silver’s next breakout, but also from my complete Blue Chip Growth system that’s beaten the market by $3 to $1 since 1998—before you decide if we’re right for you.

Look…

If I’m right, you could easily find yourself 50% richer in the next six months with our silver play—PLUS you’ll grab a few of our next BIG breakout stocks along the way, like those that have handed my readers 100%, 200%, even 300% gains since 1998.

If I’m wrong, you won’t pay a dime.

Either way, you’ll get six full months to invest alongside us without risking a dime.

On this simple, fair-and-square basis, Blue Chip Growth has become one of the most respected and largest-circulation investment advisories in America.

Once you join us, you’ll see why.

And if you act now to lock in your share of profits, you’ll receive this quick-action reward:

Half Off, Today Only

Because the precious metals sector is gaining momentum at light speed and the profit potential on my new silver stock is so great, my publisher has allowed me to open the door for a limited number of 100%-risk-free trials for half our regular price—just $99.95.

Those who have been with me from the beginning have beaten the S&P 500 by $3 to $1 for more than 12 years—all by investing in our fast-growing blue-chip stocks such as these:

* EMC Corporation, up 477%
* America Movil, up 397%
* Dell, up 307%
* Vodafone, up 263%Join Risk-Free
* Nokia, up 252%
* Monsanto, up 236%
* Occidental Petroleum, up 231%
* Valero, up 222%
* Cisco, up 209%
* Canadian Natural Resources, up 206%
* Amgen, up 204%
* Suncor Energy, up 195%
* Research In Motion, up 154%
* Potash, up 110%
* MEMC Electronic Materials, up 109%

My 100%-risk-free trial guarantees that my new silver play—along with my other newest recommendations—will hand you similar profits… or your money back.

In the bargain, you’ll receive these three special reports that will help you pile on the profits:

* How to Buy Silver for $4 an Ounce
* Five Big Oversold Stocks to Grab Now
* How to Invest $50,000 Now

Together, they’ll give you a panoramic overview of the strong economic forces that will propel the silver sector to new heights… along with an understanding of our Blue Chip Growth approach that’s beaten the market by $3 to $1 since 1998… plus an inside look at the top stocks we’re targeting for exponential profits.

With my money-back guarantee, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

But you’ll have to act now because your…

Window of Opportunity Closes at Midnight

I can’t stress this enough:

If you wait until you may have missed our top silver stock’s next BIG move upward and kick yourself for years.

That’s why my special offer to join me ends at midnight tonight.

The reason is simple:

If you can’t take me up on my discount offer TODAY, chances are you wouldn’t grab the next big move in precious metals prices anyway—or those of my other fast-moving Blue Chip Growth stocks—and I would be remiss in accepting you as a new reader.

So if you’d like to profit from the falling dollar, continued investors fears, and rising profits in the precious metals sector, my friend, NOW is the time to join us.

When you add everything up, how can you possibly say no?

You’re getting a guaranteed winner in my new silver play… my lowest price ever… a six-month money-back guarantee… along with my complete system that’s delivered $3 to $1 profits in 12 years.

So is it a deal? I hope so.

Because as the dollar continues to fall and global economic tensions rise, the only direction my new recommendation is headed is up, up, UP!

If you join us today, I guarantee you’ll be first in line to profit from silver’s next big move—or you won’t pay a dime.

Act now.

I guarantee it will be the most profitable investment decision you make in 2011.

Sincerely,Join Today

signed- Louis Navellier
Louis Navellier
Editor, Blue Chip Growth

P.S. Remember: My risk-free trial and money-back guarantee give you six months to grab your share of profits from silver’s next big move before you decide if Blue Chip Growth is right for you.

Again…

If I’m right, joining me today will be your best financial decision of 2011. If I’m wrong, you can cancel and get your money back.

And it’s your decision all the way.

Destiny is Demography by Bill Bonner

2011-09-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Federal Reserve bank came out with a gloomy forecast last month. Its analysts said that stocks were likely to earn paltry returns over the next 10 years. The reason cited was simple enough; stockholders don't live forever.

'Demography is destiny,' said Auguste Comte. 'It works the other way around too,' he might have added. If they thought they were going to live longer, America's most ubiquitous age cohort -- the baby boomers -- might continue to buy stocks. Instead, the cold hand of the grave is on their shoulders and on the whole economy. The boomers are retiring at the rate of 10,000 per day over the next 18 years. They will sell stocks to finance their remaining years.

Old people have always been a drag on an economy. Migrating tribes left them behind. Eskimos put them out on the ice. Old people generally bowed to their fate with good grace. In times of famine, for example, they stopped eating so the young might live.

Mortality has doomed the stock market, says the S.F. Fed. P/E ratios will likely be cut in half. Investors are unlikely to see their stocks return to 2010 levels, says the report, until 2027. And this assumes that US companies will continue to grow profits as they did since 1954. Not very likely. Because democracy, energy, and financial quackery are destiny too. Jointly and severally, they are responsible for the biggest financial debacle in history.

This week, Deutsche Bank came out with a report of its own. It, too, is confident that the "Golden Age" -- 1982-2007 -- is over. In its place is a "Grey Age." Instead of the nominal 12.8% gains of the Golden Age, investors have gotten returns of -- 2.8% per annum for the last 4 years. Deutsche Bank expects stock market investors to lose about 10% of their money -- in real terms -- over the next 10 years, while the economy goes through 3 recessions!

But what would you expect? Everything droops. For the last 3 or 4 centuries the winning formula for developed economies and their governments has been simple: More energy. More output. More people. More credit. More promises. This formula has been so effective for so long people began to think it was destiny itself. It's not. Instead, it is slave to destiny not its master.

By 2007, the slave was put in his place. The business cycle turned sour. Native populations in Europe and Japan are falling. Energy use per person in the developed world has leveled off. Private sector credit is shrinking. So is real private sector output.

The feds responded to this challenge as they had to every post-WWII slowdown. They added more -- more money, more credit. The government itself spent more money and used more energy. But the economy did not react in the old manner.

An obvious reason: people are no longer as young and sans-soucis as they used to be. A young man's eye may be drawn to fast German cars or slick Italian suits. But an old man can barely see at all. The baby boomers no longer roll their joints; they rub them. And they are no longer the source of an economic boom; now, they are the proximate cause of the bust.

But there's more to this new Grey Age than demography. People too are subject to the law of declining marginal utility. They wear out. But so do even the most enduring and impressive economic trends. There were only 450 million people on the planet in 1500. It took 99,000 years to reach that level. Then, over the next 5 centuries -- the population soared 10 times. Today, it is hard to find a parking place in any major city. How was such a big jump in population possible? Destiny was demography. With ready, cheap energy at hand, man could grow more food. And then he could ship it all around the world. And he could put his talents to work making more and better machines...which would vastly increase his output and his standard of living.

But the Machine Age ages too. The first tractors appeared more than 100 years ago. They may have increased production 10...20...100 times. Since then, improvements have been incremental, not revolutionary. We have bigger, faster, better tractors -- that use more energy than ever.

Meanwhile, energy itself came to be more expensive. When the price of energy rose in the '70s, the "30 glorious years" that followed WWII were soon over. Hourly wage rates stopped increasing and have not gone up since.

Yes, there is plenty of energy around. But it is net output that you get from energy that counts, not the raw output. If a gallon of gasoline costs $5...it must produce more than $5 in additional output or the economy gets poorer. As the price rises fewer and fewer new energy apps pay off.

Likewise, credit is subject to the law of declining marginal utility too. In 1950, an additional dollar of credit added about 70 cents to GDP. By 2007, the US economy was adding more than $5 of debt to produce a single new dollar's worth of GDP. Now, the feds' new credit inputs produce negative real returns.

The jig is up. More no longer works.

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
for The Daily Reckoning

Joel's Note: The "hard math of demography," as they called it, is a subject Bill and co-author, Addison Wiggin, addressed at some length in their groundbreaking book, Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century. In it, the intrepid pair foretold much of the turmoil that would later come to pass, both in the financial markets and in the Middle East.

Interestingly enough, the "hard math" is coming home to roost in the United States too. Look, for example, at the inter-generational friction lighting up the Social Security debate. Retiring baby boomers want back what they paid (by governmental force) into the scheme. Meanwhile, younger generations, themselves struggling with soaring unemployment and diminished job opportunities, are loath to pay into something they've already written off as an economically unsustainable scam. Needless to say, something's gonna give.

"It's one of the major themes we'll be exploring in Apogee going forward," explained Addison in a conference call yesterday. Addison's Apogee Advisory seeks to cover the nexus between money and politics, between Wall Street and Washington. How will these trends impact you? How can you prepare yourself? And what, exactly, should you even be looking out for? Check out Addison's latest presentation here for a sneak peak at one particularly unsettling theme already well underway...and what you can do about it.