Statistics That Obama Neglected in SOTU

Jan 302014

32 Statistics That Obama Neglected To Mention During The State Of The Union Address

By Michael Snyder, on January 29th, 2014

Show this article to anyone that believes that the economy has actually improved under Barack Obama. On Tuesday evening, Barack Obama once again attempted to convince all of us that things have gotten better while he has been in the White House. He quoted a few figures, used some flowery language and made a whole bunch of new promises. And even though he has failed to follow through on his promises time after time, millions upon millions of Americans continue to believe him. In fact, you can find a list of 82 unfulfilled promises from his previous State of the Union addresses right here. Soon we will have even more to add to that collection. At this point, you have to wonder if Obama even believes half the stuff that he is saying. Of course it is extremely unlikely that he is going to come out and admit that he has failed and that he has been lying to us this whole time, but without a doubt the gap between reality and what he is saying to the public is becoming ridiculously huge. To say that his credibility is “strained” would be a massive understatement. No, things have not been getting better in America. In fact, they continue to get even worse. The following are 32 statistics that Obama neglected to mention during the State of the Union address…

#1 According to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 28 percent of all Americans believe that the country is moving in the right direction.

#2 In 2008, 53 percent of all Americans considered themselves to be “middle class”. In 2014, only 44 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be “middle class”.

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

#4 Right now there is approximately a billion square feet of vacant retail space in the United States.

#5 There are 46.5 million Americans that are living in poverty, and the poverty rate in America has been at 15 percent or above for 3 consecutive years. That is the first time that has happened since 1965.

#6 Barack Obama says that the unemployment rate has declined to 6.7 percent, but if the labor force participation rate was at the long-term average it would actually be approximately 11.5 percent, and it has stayed at about that level since the end of the last recession.

#7 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the number of Americans on food stamps has gone from 32 million to 47 million.

#8 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the percentage of working age Americans that are actually working has declined from 60.6 percent to 58.6 percent.

#9 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average duration of unemployment in the United States has risen from 19.8 weeks to 37.1 weeks.

#10 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, social benefits as a percentage of real disposable income has risen from about 17 percent to nearly 21 percent.

#11 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the rate of homeownership in the United States has fallen to levels that we have not seen in nearly two decades.

#12 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, median household income in the United States has fallen for five years in a row.

#13 While Barack Obama has been in the White House, the average cost of a gallon of gasoline has gone from $1.85 to $3.27.

#14 At the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office, our yearly trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars. Now it is over 300 billion dollars.

#15 Workers are taking home the smallest share of the income pie that has ever been recorded.

#16 Sadly, 1,687,000 fewer Americans have jobs today compared to exactly six years ago even though the population has grown significantly since then.

#17 One recent study found that about 60 percent of the jobs that have been “created” since the end of the last recession pay $13.83 or less an hour.

#18 Only 47 percent of all adults in America have a full-time job at this point.

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

#20 The Obama years have been absolutely brutal for small businesses. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…

Bush Sr.: 11.3

Clinton: 11.2

Bush Jr.: 10.8

Obama: 7.8

#21 You can still buy a house in the city of Detroit for just one dollar.

#22 The U.S. cattle herd is at a 61 year low.

#23 It is being projected that health insurance premiums for healthy 30-year-old men will rise by an average of 260 percent under Obamacare.

#24 According to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program each month.

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

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

#27 Right now, there are 1.2 million students that attend public schools in the United States that are homeless. That number has risen by 72 percent since the start of the last recession.

#28 Only 35 percent of all Americans say that they are better off financially than they were a year ago.

#29 Only 19 percent of all Americans believe that the job market is better than it was a year ago.

#30 According to a recent CNN poll, 70 percent of all Americans believe that “the economy is generally in poor shape”.

#31 According to a recent Pew Research survey, only 19 percent of all Americans trust the government. Back in 1958, 73 percent of all Americans trusted the government.

#32 According to another poll that was recently released, 70 percent of all Americans do not have confidence that the government will “make progress on the important problems and issues facing the country in 2014.”

I’m Five…Wats Bitcoin Daddy?

Bitcoin, Money No Responses »

Jan 292014

I’m Five…Wats Bitcoin Daddy?

If you still can’t figure out what the heck a bitcoin is…

Nik Custodio in Future of Currency

We’re sitting on a park bench. It’s a great day.

I have one apple with me. I give it to you.

You now have one apple and I have zero.

That was simple, right?

Let’s look closely at what happened:

My apple was physically put into your hand.

You know it happened. I was there. You were there. You touched it.

We didn’t need a third person there to help us make the transfer. We didn’t need to pull in Uncle Tommy (who’s a famous judge) to sit with us on the bench and confirm that the apple went from me to you.

The apple’s yours! I can’t give you another apple because I don’t have any left. I can’t control it anymore. The apple left my possession completely. You have full control over that apple now. You can give it to your friend if you want, and then that friend can give it to his friend. And so on.

So that’s what an in-person exchange looks like. I guess it’s really the same, whether I’m giving you a banana, a book, or say a quarter, or a dollar bill….

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to apples!

Now say, I have one digital apple. Here, I’ll give you my digital apple.

Ah! Now it gets interesting.

How do you know that that digital apple that used to be mine, is now yours, and only yours? Think about it for a second.

It’s more complicated, right? How do you know that I didn’t send that apple to Uncle Tommy as an email attachment first? Or your friend Joe? Or my friend Lisa too?

Maybe I made a couple of copies of that digital apple on my computer. Maybe I put it up on the internet and one million people downloaded it.

As you see, this digital exchange is a bit of a problem. Sending digital apples doesn’t look like sending physical apples.

Some brainy computer scientists actually have a name for this problem: it’s called the double-spending problem. But don’t worry about it. All you need to know is that, it’s confused them for quite some time and they’ve never solved it.

Until now.

But let’s try to think of a solution on our own.

Ledgers

Maybe these digital apples need to be tracked in a ledger. It’s basically a book where you track all transactions — an accounting book.

This ledger, since it’s digital, needs to live in its own world and have someone in charge of it.

Say, just like World of Warcraft. Blizzard, the guys who created the online game, have a “digital ledger” of all the rare flaming fire swords that exist in their system. So, cool, someone like them could keep track of our digital apples. Awesome — we solved it!

Problems

There’s a bit of a problem though:

1) What if some guy over at Blizzard created more? He could just add a couple of digital apples to his balance whenever he wants!

2) It’s not exactly like when we were on the bench that one day. It was just you and me then. Going through Blizzard is like pulling in Uncle Tommy(a third-party) out of court(did I mention he’s a famous judge?) for all our park bench transactions. How can I just hand over my digital apple to you, like, you know— the usual way?

Is there any way to closely replicate our park bench, just you-and-me, transaction digitally? Seems kinda tough…

The Solution

What if we gave this ledger — to everybody? Instead of the ledger living on a Blizzard computer, it’ll live in everybody’s computers. All the transactions that have ever happened, from all time, in digital apples will be recorded in it.

You can’t cheat it. I can’t send you digital apples I don’t have, because then it wouldn’t sync up with everybody in the system. It’d be a tough system to beat. Especially if it got really big.

Plus it’s not controlled by one person, so I know there’s no one that can just decide to give himself more digital apples. The rules of the system were already defined at the beginning. And the code and rules are open-source—you know, kinda like the software used in your mom’s Android phone. Or kinda like Wikipedia. It’s there for the smart people to contribute to, maintain, secure, improve on, and check on.

You could participate in this network too and update the ledger and make sure it all checks out. For the trouble, you could get like 25 digital apples as a reward. In fact, that’s the only way to create more digital apples in the system.

I simplified quite a bit

…but that system I explained exists. It’s called the Bitcoin protocol. And those digital apples are the “bitcoins” within the system. Fancy!

So, did you see what happened? What does the public ledger enable?

1) It’s open source remember? The total number of apples was defined in the public ledger at the beginning. I know the exact amount that exists. Within the system, I know they are limited(scarce).

2) When I make an exchange I now know that digital apple certifiably left my possession and is now completely yours. I used to not be able to say that about digital things. It will be updated and verified by the public ledger.

3) Because it’s a public ledger, I didn’t need Uncle Tommy(third-party) to make sure I didn’t cheat, or make extra copies for myself, or send apples twice, or thrice…

Within the system, the exchange of a digital apple is now just like the exchange of a physical one. It’s now as good as seeing a physical apple leave my hand and drop into your pocket. And just like on the park bench, the exchange involved two people only. You and me — we didn’t need Uncle Tommy there to make it valid.

In other words, it behaves like a physical object.

But you know what’s cool? It’s still digital. We can now deal with 1,000 apples, or 1 million apples, or even .0000001 apples. I can send it with a click of a button, and I can still drop it in your digital pocket if I was in Nicaragua and you were all the way in New York.

I can even make other digital things ride on top of these digital apples! It’s digital after-all. Maybe I can attach some text on it — a digital note. Or maybe I can attach more important things; like say a contract, or a stock certificate, or an ID card…

So this is great! How should we treat or value these “digital apples”? They’re quite useful aren’t they?

Well, a lot of people are arguing over it now. There’s debate between this and that economic school. Between politicians. Between programmers. Don’t listen to all of them though. Some people are smart. Some are misinformed. Some say the system is worth a lot, some say it’s actually worth zero. Some guy actually put a hard number: $1,300 per apple. Some say it’s digital gold, some a currency. Other say they’re just like tulips. Some people say it’ll change the world, some say it’s just a fad.

I have my own opinion about it.

That’s a story for another time though. But kid, you now know more about Bitcoin than most.

Morpheus Bitcoin lifestyle

Morpheus No Responses »

Jan 202014

Morpheus Titania: Businessman, activist, Bitcoin Sales

Morpheus has chosen to live outside the “system” ever since the events of 9/11. At that time he was co-owner of Direct Mail Business known as “The Direct Hit” The company was started in his home. The Company did $300,000 in 2000 and $1.5 Million in sales from January 2001 to August 2001. After the Events of 9/11, first with the “terrorist” of planes being flown into buildings, then with the Anthrax in the mail, September sales were tanking from $250,000 in June and August 2001 to $5,000 in September 2001. With all contracts being canceled all the salesmen quit, cause they weren’t selling anything. With his formerly thriving business imploded, this left Morpheus had a great deal of time on his hands to study the events of 9/11. He came to the irrefutable proof that at bare minimum there was a massive co-ordinated coverup of the events of 9/11. Since that time he has been removing himself more and more from that “SYSTEM”.

Prior to owning The Direct Hit” Morpheus worked at the number 1 Dodge store in the world as a top producing salesman, as well as being a top producing gold certified Fleet manager.

Working outside of the system for over 10 years has lead him to the wonderful qualities of the digital currency known as Bitcoin. Bitcoin has many desirable qualities:

Bitcoins are transferred from person to person via the internet.
Any amount of Bitcoin can be easily transferred locally or internationally for pennies.
Bitcoin transactions happen instantly and the transaction clearing happens in 10 minutes.
properly protected Bitcoins are virtually impossible to be steal.
A Bitcoin “account” can’t be frozen.
Bitcoin has no prerequisites or limits.

Morpheus has been selling Bitcoin with a fervor of a man on a mission. The old decrepit systems of the Banks, Organized Religion and Government (The BORG) are failing humanity at every level. Through the use of Bitcoin, is how the old power structure will be made obsolete. He applies his 20 years of sales and marketing experience to Bitcoin marketing and sales. Because of his rock solid reputation, He is one of the biggest sellers in the Phoenix area.

Morpheus is now semi retired as a bitcoin trader / entrepreneur. He got started selling in March 2013 when Bitcoin was selling for $31. He has successfully done traded over 1000 bitcoins in the past year. He uses his role as an activist now, to promote the use of Bitcoins by businesses. Business that accept Bitcoin have a unique advantage over other business that do not accept Bitcoin, because there are many people out in the world that have bitcoins and want to spend them at participating merchants. Not accepting Bitcoin in the future

Because of the unique nature of Bitcoin, it is very possible to acquire sizable wealth by taking advantage of Bitcoins incredible DEFLATIONARY Nature. This means things in the future will cost less than in the past. This is exactly the opposite of the de Facto system most of us live under. Many of us know there is a financial shit storm brewing on the horizon. Every single inflationary monitory system the world has ever seen has eventually destroyed itself. Are we so pompous to believe that human nature is going to be any different now then any other time in history. Do you trust the “government” to save you?

Many of us know, the current status quo system provides a unique relationship between the Banks and the Government that allows these 2 institutions to do anything they want, even when it is to the detriment of humanity. Bitcoin and crypto-currency is the way We The People, take back control of our lives. With Bitcoin, Banks are no longer needed. Now, anyone can be a bank and the fees are a whole lot less. Banks will simply fade away, like the old vinyl record and carburetor companies did, when the CD and fuel injection was introduced. Government bureaucracy will also diminish as they won’t have unlimited resources to implement their fraudlent schemes.

For Businesses, it’s like the Gold Rush or the Internet boom all over again. Business that accept Bitcoin have significant advantages over business that have yet to take bitcoin. Many of us know that Credit Cards are insecure, in the past even large institutions like Target and Home Depot have had Credit Card security breaches; with Bitcoin an invalid or counterfiet transaction is statistically IMPOSSIBLE! Retailers pay between 2-5% for the use of credit cards. Using Bitcoin there is never a fee, unless the merchant wants to convert the Bitcoins to de facto currency like dollars or euros’s. There are Bitcoin exchanges like Coinbase who will convert the Bitcoins into Currency for 1%, although the first million dollars is a zero fee.

Even more importantly than saving money for a business is access to new customers. Like a said earlier all business have 2 requirements, you have to find new customers and service the ones you have. The Bitcoin community does all this for you. Most people involved in Bitcoin want to see it succeed, well in order to have it succeed it has to be promoted. Whats the best way to promote a new currency, is to use it. So a business that accepts Bitcoin, is going to automatically earn my business, every time. Lets take where my office is, in the complex is Ashleigh’s Cafe, she takes Bitcoin because i introduced it to her. Ashleigh’s Cafe is listed with other Merchants on Airbitz.co It made sense and now every morning I go to her Cafe to get coffee and something to eat and I pay her with Bitcoins. She wins my business BECAUSE she accepts Bitcoin. There are business all around town that take Bitcoins, when I need something they offer, I buy it from them. Whats the expense? Zero. I had her download an Free app and she is now accepts Bitcoin.

Business that do not convert their Bitcoins into cash get to take advantage of the deflationary nature of Bitcoin. Even with the huge fluctuations the general trend has been in the for the rise of the price of Bitcoins vs the fiat monetary systems. For example, the first known Bitcoin trade occurred on May 22, 2010. On that date, a guy from Fort Lauderdale sent 10,000 Bitcoins to a guy in England, who then bought $30 worth of Pizza, for the guy in Ft. Lauderdale. That established the price at btc 10,000 / $30 = $.003 per Bitcoin. As of this writing the price of Bitcoin is $263.28. so the guy with the 10,000 bitcoins has profit of 2.63 Million dollars!

Smuggler of 2500 Children looses Peace Prize to…

ethical, Government, Military Industrial Complex, motivation, Police State, Uncategorized No Responses »

Jan 162014

Irena Sendler Smuggles 2500 children out of Warsaw ghetto

Irena Sendler Saves children Irena Sendler
Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98)
Warsaw , Poland
Irena Sendler memorial

During WWII, Irena Sendler got permission from the Nazi’s to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing / Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive. Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids. Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking which covered the kids/infants noises.

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During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazi’s broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out, in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she did her best to locate any parents that may have survived and to reunite the families

.
Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

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Slide Show Wins Peace Prize

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. Politician, Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming. Later another politician, Barack Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACORN.

In MEMORIAM – 65 YEARS LATER
I’m doing my small part by forwarding this message. I hope you’ll consider doing the same. It is now more than 67 years since the Second World War in Europe ended. This article is a memorial chain, In memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated! Now, more than ever, with Iran , and others, claiming the HOLOCAUST to be ‘a myth’, it’s imperative to make sure the world never forgets,because there are others who would like to do it again. This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide!

Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world. Please send this e-mail to people you know and ask them to continue the memorial chain. Please don’t just delete it.. It will only take you a minute to pass this along.

Denise (Dede) Snyder
Granite City Abstracting
9015 Ogden Ave NE
Otsego, MN 55330
Ph:320.290.5384
g-c-a-b-s-t-r-a-c-t-i-n-g@g-m-a-i-l.c-o-m
Take care and Blessings to you and yours. Sue Anne
Everything happens for a reason and a purpose and it serves you!

Life is about to surviving the storm, and how having fun to dancing in the rain.
God and Bitcoin We Trust!
Your Thoughts, they become Words.
Your Words, they become Actions.
Your Actions, for they become Habits.
Your Habits, for they become Character.
Your Character, becomes your Destinee.”

2014 The Year of Bitcoin

Bitcoin, Government No Responses »

Jan 012014

2014 The Year of Bitcoin

Patrick L Young is expert in global financial markets working in multiple disciplines, ranging from trading independently to running exchanges.Published time: December 31, 2013 05:35

Photo from www.casascius.com

Like it or love it, bitcoin has been a constant theme of headlines for the past year, as 2013 marked its coming of age.

Last year’s nerd money fad has become this year’s most talked about product.

Ultimately, nature abhors a vacuum and with western political leadership an increasingly distant memory, citizens are becoming increasingly restive about the parlous state of financial governance. Throughout the West, the ravages of quantitative easing [QE] have helped the wealthiest prosper, while ordinary citizens have struggled through a grinding economic plight, which has left voters feeling increasingly abandoned by government.

Into this void has stepped something which had been mooted for many years: a popular electronic currency. Bitcoin is filling a gap self-interested central bankers are keen to suggest doesn’t need filling. Establishment media has been wrong-footed as the Copernican Revolution in finance creates not just bitcoin but a series of parallel financial universes where independent money is at the center of commerce, as opposed to government manipulated fiat currency.

Meanwhile, bitcoin may not be the cryptocurrency the world uses in a decade and the biannual obituaries may yet prove right! As 2013 concluded, BTC’s value had multiplied albeit off its highs after the Bank of China endeavored to close the door to the threat of a backdoor floatation of the renminbi.

In reality, BTC is still remarkably small – growing exponentially from about 142 million dollars to circa 8 billion by Christmas. In other words, the total value of bitcoin amounts to the annual GDP of the Bahamas. Clearly bitcoin isn’t economically significant, yet. However, it now has its first ATM and many have bought beers, lattes and even homes with BTC this past year.

Naturally bankers of all shades are scared of losing their monopolist grip on money, yet given the vast inefficiency of their decrepit systems, it is probably already too late. Decentralized money is an idea whose time has come. Bitcoin is the breakthrough currency creating a widespread consciousness that there is an alternative to holding greenbacks, or lugging a trunk full of gold around.

Photo from www.casascius.com

Perhaps the most surprising thing about bitcoin is, in essence, the banality of the arguments. When all else fails, skeptics just cry tulipmania. Indeed, bitcoin bubbled and almost halved in value before the year’s end, but then again, thanks to the idiocy of the banker-government nexus in the last decade, just about every asset bubbled then and a great deal are bubbling now, like art and classic cars, thanks to QE [quantitative easing].

Yes, people steal bitcoins and these thefts are techno-mythologized by scaremongering media. Yet stealing bitcoin is just a virtual variant of traditional pickpocketing. Indeed BTC has been used to finance crime, just like the dear old anonymous bearer bond dollar is beloved of drug cartels. Some American security agencies have expressed concern about their lack of control over bitcoin, but they had an annus horribilis, during which, despite their vast overarching eavesdropping capacity, they still failed to see their own currency woes coming.

While price inflation is the first thing everybody recalls about bitcoin in 2013, what really defines its incredible year was how it slipped out of nerds’ virtual wallets into the mainstream. An 8 billion dollar asset leveraged its value to dominate the headlines and gain widespread recognition. Germany legalized it and many nations acknowledged it – even the US courts. That Norway called it an asset was seen as a dreadful slight; rather it was a splendid incremental step to wider appreciation. In the end, China and Thailand pushed back against the bitcoin juggernaut. The latter is hardly of global economic significance, while the former maintains a closed currency regime.

The year of bitcoin began with the currency on the fringes of digital society, but by the end of the year it was clearly “merging with the mainstream”. Decentralized crytocurrency is still in its infancy but the argument against central bankers’ follies is being won across the globe. After all, you can’t ‘clip’ bitcoin to degrade its value, nor can you inflate its value with QE or other flawed government policies.

2013 ended with citizens increasingly alienated from government as a monetary ally and edging closer to “In Bitcoin we Trust”. Bitcoin itself may only be the first stage of a revolution, similar perhaps to the Netscape browser at the birth of the web, or the Ford Model T which popularized automobile transport. Ultimately, however you look at it, this was the year when bitcoin made its irrevocable mark on history.