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Wednesday 10.03.2012

Gold Hovers After Touching New Highs
BY BEN TRAYNOR - FinancialSense.com
Gold Allocation "Part of Diversified Portfolio" says Pimco
Wholesale gold prices hovered in a tight range just below $1780 an ounce for most of Tuesday morning in London, just below a new 2012 spot market high touched yesterday following comments from US Federal Reserve policymakers.
Silver prices traded just below $35 per ounce, close to seven-month highs, while stocks and the Euro ticked higher despite warnings that Spain is underestimating the amount of recapitalization its banks need.

Bill Gross Warning in Outlook Great
For Gold Bugs, Over the Next Decade
By 24/7 Wall St. - DailyFinance.com
Bill Gross, a.k.a. ';The Bond King,' was very pessimistic in his monthly PIMCO outlook for October. What is so interesting is that he was actually far less negative than what I was expecting based upon his comments a month ago. Gross took a lot of heat on his "death of the cult of equities" feature even though he was right if you read the article rather than focused on his catchy headline.
We were expecting that Bill Gross would say in his PIMCO October investment outlook that the U.S. was on an immediate path toward the demise of the U.S. and hyperinflation hated by everyone but the most extreme of the gold bugs. That did not happen. Still, Gross was full of warnings that are coming up in the years ahead.

Will Silver Shine Brighter Than Gold?
By Przemyslaw Radomski - SilverSeek.com
Mining executives met this week in a MINExpo convention in Las Vegas and the talk was mostly bullish. They heard Newmont CEO Richard O'Brien say that gold is presently trading more like a currency than a commodity. O'Brien told the audience that investment is the largest growing component of the gold market, currently comprising about 40% of demand. As more currencies weaken, such as the U.S. dollar and the Euro, O'Brien suggests the current bull market for gold will continue well into the future.

Bill Gross: Bonds Could Be 'Burned to a Crisp'
[Google 'title' for FREE article pass]
By MIN ZENG - WSJ.com $$
Bill Gross, the manager of the world's biggest bond fund, warned that bonds could be "burned to a crisp" if the U.S. doesn't tackle its debt problems, even as his fund took in $2.8 billion in new cash last month.
The inflows, released by fund tracker Morningstar Inc. MORN -0.64% Tuesday, comes as the $278 billion Pimco Total Return Fund has churned out a return that has pulled significantly ahead of the benchmark index.

The Fed Plays All Its Cards
By: Peter Schiff - GoldSeek.com
There never really could be much doubt that the current experiment in competitive global currency debasement would end in anything less than a total war. There was always a chance that one or more of the principal players would snap out of it, change course and save their citizenry from a never ending cycle of devaluation. But developments since September 13, when the U.S. Federal Reserve finally laid all its cards on the table and went "all in" on permanent quantitative easing, indicate that the brainwashing is widely established and will be difficult to break. The vast majority of the world's leading central bankers seem content to walk in lock step down the path of money creation as a means to economic salvation. Never mind that the path will prevent real growth and may ultimately lead off a cliff. The herd is moving. And if it can't be turned, the only thing that one can do is attempt to get out of its way.

"Fiscal cliff" fears may impede faster job growth
By Lucia Mutikani
WASHINGTON | Tue Oct 2, 2012 4:36pm EDT
(Reuters) - U.S. job growth likely improved only slightly in September as businesses remained cautious out of fear a sharp tightening of the government's budget could deliver a big blow to the economic recovery early next year.
Employers are expected to have added 113,000 jobs to their payrolls, an increase from 96,000 in August, with the unemployment rate edging up by a tenth of a percentage point to 8.2 percent, according to a Reuters survey of economists.

Economists: Fiscal cliff a serious threat, but unlikely
By Chris Isidore - Fortune.com
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Getting economists to agree on almost anything is tough. But on the subject of the fiscal cliff, a survey by CNNMoney found an almost unanimous consensus.
Of 17 top economists surveyed, 14 believe the end of tax breaks and the steep federal spending cuts set to take effect at the start of next year would cause the economy to tumble into a new recession.
Twelve of them believe the fiscal cliff is the most serious risk facing the economy, more serious than the European sovereign debt crisis, business uncertainty about various government regulations or the continued weakness in the job and housing markets.

Do Western Central Banks Have Any Gold Left???
By Eric Sprott & David Baker - GoldSeek.com
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the world's Western central banks lie vaults holding gargantuan piles of physical gold bars… or at least that's what they all claim. The gold bars are part of their respective foreign currency reserves, which include all the usual fiat currencies like the dollar, the pound, the yen and the euro.

The Federal Reserve and the Currency Wars
By José Antonio Ocampo - Project-Syndicate.org
NEW YORK – The United States Federal Reserve's recent decision to launch a third round of "quantitative easing" has revived accusations by Brazil's finance minister, Guido Mantega, that the US has unleashed a "currency war." In emerging-market countries that are already struggling with the impact of rapid currency appreciation on their competitiveness, expansionary measures announced in recent weeks by the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have heightened the sense of alarm at the Fed's decision.

Ben Bernanke Says Federal Reserve Is Not Monetizing The Debt
By 24/7 Wall St. - DailyFinance.com
FOMC Chairman Ben Bernanke is speaking Monday to the Economic Club of Indiana in Indianapolis with his speech titled "Five Questions about the Federal Reserve and Monetary Policy." As far as a brief summary, here are some comments before the full question and answer format presented.
Bernanke sees the economy continuing to expand and he expects that inflation will remain low for the foreseeable future. The growth has not been enough to help the jobs picture very much, but tax reform and fiscal changes would help the economy also as monetary policy cannot fix everything. Bernanke reiterated that the Fed will keep rates low even after the real recovery begins. The part that we are keen to see is that Bernanke claims that the Fed is not monetizing the debt. We will leave that interpretation up to you without any sarcastic comments.

How Does a Currency Drop 60% in 8 Days? Just Ask Iran
By Matthew O'Brien - TheAtlantic.com
In case you were wondering, this is what an economy dying looks like. More specifically, it's what a currency dying looks like. It turns out the latter implies the former, as Iran is quickly finding out.
The chart below compares the official and black market exchange rates between the Iranian rial and the U.S. dollar. The official rate is the fiction the regimes wishes its people lived with, and the black market rate is the fact they actually live with.

America and a ring of fire … of debt
By James Pethokoukis - AEI-Ideas.org
President Obama says the ballooning national debt isn't a short-term problem. I dunno, 2020 doesn't seem so far away to me. Bond manager Bill Gross contends Washington needs to cut the debt "rather quickly over the next five to 10 years." More from Gross:
To keep our debt/GDP ratio below the metaphorical combustion point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, these [Congressional Budget Office, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlements] studies (when averaged) suggest that we need to cut spending or raise taxes by 11% of GDP.

Dollar Deluge Disguises Deceitful Econ Data
By Bill Frezza - RealClearMarkets
Did someone slip Paul Krugman juice into The Wall Street Journal's water cooler? That's the only conclusion I can fathom after reading a pair of articles celebrating the long awaited return of prosperity.
The Happy Days Are Here Again two-step began with "Home Prices Rise in July" followed by a companion piece, "Consumers Back to Feeling Flush." If you stopped reading at the end of each lede-choking your way through the shameless Obama plug before throwing in the towel-you might believe that the economic witch-doctors in Washington have finally started to deliver on their promised magic. But if you read both pieces from start to finish and haven't forgotten how to do arithmetic, you could only end up scratching your head. Whom are they trying to fool?

The Growth Recession Of 2012 And The Presidential Election
By Charles Kadlec - Forbes.com
The U.S. economy has slipped into a growth recession. The final revision to the second quarter GDP report downgraded real growth to 1.3%, a rate insufficient to produce an adequate number of jobs for a growing labor force.
The economic consequence will be either higher unemployment, a further decline in the labor force participation rate, or a combination of the two. The political consequence will be increased scrutiny of each Presidential candidate's economic program during the debates and through the final days of the campaign.

What Is the Fed Trying to Hide from Americans?
Bernanke Warns His Creator
Editorial, New York Sun
"Bernanke warns congress to butt out of interest-rate policy discussions . . ." is the headline up on the Drudge Report following the speech today by the Federal Reserve's chairman at Indiana. It sounds to us like the chairman is warning Congress against passing Congressman Ron Paul's audit-the-Fed legislation and Congressman Kevin Brady's Sound Dollar Act, both of which would open up Fed policies to inspection. The chairman's speech marks another step in the Fed and the Congress moving into what might be called open, if polite, confrontation.

Greece pushes for austerity deal as time runs short
By Renee Maltezou
ATHENS | Tue Oct 2, 2012 3:46pm EDT
(Reuters) - Greece held a new round of talks with foreign lenders to bridge differences over 2 billion euros of disputed austerity cuts on Tuesday, with time running short to clinch a deal before a meeting of euro zone ministers next week.
Athens has been haggling for weeks over 12 billion euros of cutbacks that its European Union and International Monetary Fund lenders have refused to sign off on over fears that some of the proposed savings are unlikely to materialize.

Government: We plan to sue more banks
By Jennifer Liberto - Fortune.com
WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Wall Street banks should be prepared for more lawsuits, a taskforce of federal and state investigators said Tuesday.
The warning came one day after New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued JPMorgan Chase-owned Bear Stearns, alleging that bankers committed systemic fraud against investors. The suit was the government's latest attempt to hold the big banks accountable for the financial crisis.

Obama's big budget deficits could mean
a $4,000 a year middle-class tax hike
James Pethokoukis - AEI-Ideas.org
President Obama doesn't think Americans should fret about the exploding national debt. As he told talk show host David Letterman recently, "We don't have to worry about it short term. Right now interest rates are low because people still consider the United States the safest and greatest country on Earth, rightfully so. But it is a problem long term and even medium term."
So, in Obama's view, dealing with the debt is more of a tomorrow thing than a today thing. Or maybe even a day-after-tomorrow thing.

With Liberty And Taxes For All
Best way to limit growth of government is to make sure everyone has "skin in the game."
By Glenn Reynolds, USA Today
"They'll turn us all into beggars 'cause they're easier to please."
That's a line from a 1980s rock song, but it's a pretty concise summary of the Obama administration's political approach: Vote for us because we'll take other people's money from them and use it to buy you stuff.
Whether it's Sandra Fluke's contraceptives, Obama's "spread the wealth" response to Joe The Plumber, his 1998 plan to make welfare recipients a majority coalition or the free phone in the viral "Obamaphone" video, that's the gist of it. And it obviously works.

NY Attorney General Says More Suits Will Follow JPMorgan
By David McLaughlin and Chris Dolmetsch -
The New York lawsuit over mortgage- backed securities against JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the biggest U.S. bank, will serve as a template for suits against other issuers, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said.
Schneiderman alleged that the Bear Stearns business that JPMorgan took over in 2008 deceived mortgage-bond investors about the defective loans backing securities they bought, leading to "monumental losses," according to a complaint filed yesterday in New York State Supreme Court.

JPMorgan Rivals Face Billions in Damages After MBS Case
By David McLaughlin - Bloomberg.com
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)'s rivals may face government lawsuits claiming tens of billions of dollars in damages tied to investor losses on mortgage bonds after New York's attorney general filed a fraud lawsuit against the nation's biggest bank by assets.
A state-federal task force set up this year to investigate misconduct in the bundling of mortgage loans into securities will bring other cases, according to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Investor losses in the JPMorgan case alone will be "substantially more" than the $22.5 billion cited in his complaint, he said.

Maybe Jamie Dimon wasn't so clever with Bear
By Antony Currie - Reuters.com
Maybe Jamie Dimon wasn't so clever with Bear Stearns after all. Back in March 2008, the JPMorgan chief executive looked pretty shrewd picking up the collapsed investment bank on the cheap, even after raising his offer five-fold to $10 a share. Dimon stuffed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with $29 billion of Bear's worst-looking mortgage assets. Not only did those securities wind up making money, but a new lawsuit filed by New York's top lawman shows that JPMorgan didn't cover all its bases.
Bear's home loan-backed assets were in the red for a while at the New York Fed. Inside JPMorgan, which retained only the first $1 billion of losses, they might have damaged Dimon's fortress balance sheet during the darkest days of the crisis. They did eventually turn a profit for the central bank, as Dimon had suggested they could. But that took almost four years.

Think We're the Most Entrepreneurial Country In the World?
Not So Fast
We're the venture-capital capital of the world, but start-ups and young small businesses play a lesser role in America's economy than in many other rich nations.
By Jordan Weissmann - TheAtlantic.com
America's entrepreneurial streak as one of the things that, theoretically, is supposed to make us exceptional as a country. At least it is if you listen to most politicians. But how do we actually stack up with rest of the world when it comes to building our own businesses?
We are, in fact, pretty unexceptional.
A Start-up Rate Lower than Sweden's (and Israel's, and Italy's...)

The Last Housing Crash Is Not Even Over
But Bernanke Is Already Setting The Stage For The Next One
By Michael Snyder - EndOfTheAmericanDream.com
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is determined to push mortgage rates to record low levels and he is encouraging the banks that the Fed regulates to make home loans more freely. Wait a second - isn't that exactly what caused the last housing bubble? After 9/11, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates and this caused mortgage rates to steadily fall. Financial institutions were urged to help "expand home ownership" in America, and many of them started making home loans to people who never, ever should have gotten home loans. When mortgage rates started to go back up, millions of families with adjustable rate mortgages discovered that they could not make their monthly payments. Mortgage delinquencies absolutely soared and large numbers of mortgage-backed securities suddenly turned into garbage. So what is the Fed doing about it? The Fed recently announced another round of quantitative easing in which it will buy 40 billion dollars worth of these mortgage-backed securities a month. Essentially the Fed is clearing the bad financial paper out of the system and is creating the conditions for another housing bubble. But will we really fix our problems by going back and doing the same things that got us into trouble in the first place?

Countrywide: Don't Look Now, But It's Baaack
Wall Street and consumer advocates, surprisingly, roll out the welcome mat.
By Stephen Gandel - Fortune.CNN.com
FORTUNE --The Federal Reserve's recent decision to buy mortgage bonds until the economy recovers has made home lending more attractive than it has been in years. The spread between what it costs to fund a mortgage loan and what borrowers actually pay is nearly three times as large as usual. So it's perhaps no surprise that one of the first firms to rush into this profit-filled fun house is headed by the former executives of the most notorious subprime lender of the era that led to the financial crisis.

Aging population a boon for health care workers
By Hadley Malcolm, USA TODAY
As Baby Boomers age into retirement by the millions each year, their growing health care needs require more people to administer that care.
That makes fields such as nursing one of the fastest-growing occupations, and hospitals are hiring now to prepare for what's to come.
Central Florida Health Alliance has 140 to 170 open positions a week, and almost 90% of them are for jobs that include registered nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists and pharmacy technicians, says Holly Kolozsvary, human resources director.

Curing the Pre-Existing Conditions of ObamaCare
The administration's emphasis on pre-existing conditions falsely implies that the only way to cover future serious illness is with ObamaCare's heavy-handed requirements.
By Tom Miller and James C. Capretta - The American Magazine
Families USA, an advocacy group closely aligned with the Obama administration, recently claimed that 25 percent of non-elderly Americans, or 65 million people, suffer from a pre-existing condition that would threaten the security of their health insurance if it were not for ObamaCare's protections.
This preposterous claim fits a pattern. ObamaCare's apologists have been trying for three years to divert the public's attention away from the trillion-dollar entitlement expansion, tax hike, and power grab by the federal government that ObamaCare represents. The emphasis on pre-existing conditions is aimed at creating the false impression that the only way to cover anyone who might become seriously ill is with ObamaCare's heavy-handed and government-centric requirements.

Americans May Be Getting Poorer,
But At Least We Are Getting Fatter And Sicker
By Michael Snyder - TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
I know, there really isn't any good news in that headline. Americans are steadily getting poorer, fatter and sicker and yet most people continue to operate under the delusion that things are somehow going to get better. Sadly, not only are we not better off than we were four years ago, the truth is that things have been getting worse for a very long time. Median household income in the United States has declined for four years in a row, and it has fallen by more than $4000 overall since Barack Obama has been in the White House. Yet the media insists that we are in the midst of an "economic recovery". A higher percentage of Americans are obese or severely obese than ever before, and Baby Boomers are much sicker than their parents were at the same age. Yet we are supposedly a "health conscious" nation. Technology is advancing faster than we have ever seen before in human history, but the life expectancy of poor Americans has dropped significantly in recent years. So exactly what in the world is going on here?

Facebook Sells More Access to Members
By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER - WSJ.com
Facebook Inc. is experimenting with new ways to leverage its greatest asset—personal data on about 900 million people—reigniting concerns about privacy. The strategy: selling access to its users.
To amp up the effectiveness of its ads, Facebook in recent months has begun allowing marketers to target ads at users based on the email address and phone number they list on their profiles, or based on their surfing habits on other sites.
It has also started selling ads that follow Facebook members beyond the confines of the social network.

Startup Says it Can Predict Social Information Flow
By Don Clark - WSJ.com
Twitter Facebook and their ilk have spawned many firms that try to extract insights from the flood of posts. One of the most ambitious is Tellagence.
The Portland, Ore., startup says it can predict how information will flow on social networks. The goal is to allow companies to figure out who is really likely to spread their messages–and avoid wasting time and money on reaching others.
Tellagence, which is giving the first public demonstration of its technology at the Demo conference on Wednesday, says it does not merely analyze what people are saying or count their followers. Nor does it try to make predictions based on past patterns of activity.

Why We Are So Rude Online
Online Browsing Lowers Self-Control
and Is Linked To Higher Debt, Weight
By Elizabeth Bernstein - WSJ.com
Jennifer Bristol recently lost one of her oldest friends—thanks to a Facebook fight about pit bulls.
The trouble started when she posted a newspaper article asserting that pit bulls were the most dangerous type of dog in New York City last year. "Please share thoughts… 833 incidents with pitties," wrote Ms. Bristol, a 40-year-old publicist and animal-welfare advocate in Manhattan.
Her friends, many of whom also work in the animal-welfare world, quickly weighed in. One noted that "pit bull" isn't a single official breed; another said "irresponsible ownership" is often involved when dogs turn violent. Black Labs may actually bite more, someone else offered.

Newly-Discovered Comet May Outshine The Moon
If a recently found comet lives up to expectation it could become "one of the brightest in history", says an astronomer.
News.Sky.com
A newly-discovered comet should become one of the brightest lights in the sky - even outshining the Moon, according to astronomers.
Russian astronomers recently spotted comet 2012 S1 (ISON) 90 million kilometres from the Earth, according to a report by National Geographic.
It is currently a faint glow streaking between Saturn and Jupiter, but as the Sun's gravity draws the comet closer, dust and ice will be blasted off, it giving it a highly-reflective tail.

How Blue Man Group learned to see green
By Dinah Eng - Fortune.CNN.com
(Fortune) -- When the founders of Blue Man Group decided to get bald and blue, they had no idea that shooting goo out of their chests and teaching fractal geometry would turn into two decades of fun and a multimillion-dollar show business enterprise. Today an average of 60,000 people a week attend Blue Man Group performances in six cities around the world -- not including the touring shows -- at an average ticket price of $59, or roughly $3.54 million in revenue a week from sellouts. Co-founders Matt Goldman, 51, Phil Stanton, 52, and Chris Wink, 51, continue to write and produce the shows, perform for special events -- and have no thoughts of retiring. Their story:

The Only Practical Way Out of Our Economic Doldrums
They have not made the connection between their proposed policies and the robust growth rates we need.
By Steve Conover - American.com
In the forthcoming presidential debates, the issue of the federal debt and deficit is likely to come up. Just about everyone agrees that today's trajectory is unsustainable, so the question is not whether the debt and deficit need to improve, but when, and by how much. (For example, see a previous piece on this topic, "Why Growth Matters More Than Debt.")
America's economic experiences during the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton demonstrate that growth is the most effective way to mitigate a debt burden, create jobs, and advance our standard of living. The current presidential campaign, however, lacks a clear growth message from either side.

Cheap Politicians
By Thomas Sowell - PatriotPost.us
Now that the National Football League has apparently learned that it can be costly to hire cheap officials, perhaps the rest of us should learn the same lesson when it comes to government officials, whose bad calls can do a lot more damage.
What do we do when we want a better car, a better home or a better bottle of wine? We pay more for it. We definitely need a lot better crop of public officials. Yet we insist on paying flea market prices for people who will be spending trillions of tax dollars, not to mention making foreign policy that can either safeguard or jeopardize the lives of millions of Americans.

If Obama Wins, What Changes for His Second Term?
If the president prevails on Nov. 6, he's said he hopes to break Washington's stalemate. A look at the odds of an altered GOP, bipartisanship—and Erskine Bowles at Treasury.
by Eleanor Clift - TheDailyBeast.com
With an Obama second term looking like a better than even probability, short of sweeping both chambers of Congress, can the newly reelected president break the stalemate in Washington and govern successfully? He says the partisan fever will break once he cannot run again. He may be right, but President Obama will have to move quickly after the election to send the right signals of strength and resolve, and position himself to take advantage of the recriminations among Republicans that inevitably will surface in the wake of a Romney defeat.

The Hispanic vote in 2012: Important, but not a gamechanger
Henrik Temp - AEI-Ideas.org
The Pew Hispanic Center has released a fascinating report on Hispanics in the 2012 electorate. While you should check it out for the interesting data, overall it confirms what I've written before: The "sleeping giant" of American politics is slumbering on.
That might be surprising given the report's headline number: A 22% increase from 2008 in the number of Latinos who are eligible to vote. As you can see from the chart below, the number of eligible Latinos has skyrocketed to 23.7 million from just 13.2 million in 2000.

The World's Most Dynamic Religion Is ...
By Dennis Prager - PatriotPost.us
For at least the last hundred years, the world's most dynamic religion has been neither Christianity nor Islam.
It is leftism.
Most people do not recognize what is probably the single most important fact of modern life. One reason is that leftism is overwhelmingly secular (more than merely secular: it is inherently opposed to all traditional religions), and therefore people do not regard it as a religion. Another is that leftism so convincingly portrays itself as solely the product of reason, intellect, and science that it has not been seen as the dogma-based ideology that it is. Therefore, the vast majority of the people who affirm leftist beliefs think of their views as the only way to properly think about life.

Cynthia McKinney On Leadership
By Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org
Those who have followed the Republican campaign for the presidential nomination and current contest between Romney and Obama know that the United States has no political leadership in Washington.
Billions of dollars have been spent on political propaganda, but not a single important issue has been addressed. The closest the campaign has come to a political issue is which candidate can grovel the lowest at the feet of Israeli prime minister Netanyahu. Romney won that contest. But for the rest, well, it is like two elementary school children sticking their tongues out at one another.

Socialism vs. Capitalism: Part I
By Sam Weaver - PatriotPost.us
Many commentators -- including one prominent "conservative" (i.e., traditionalist) pundit -- chastise those on the "far right" who dare to call President Obama a socialist. Make even the slightest hint that you believe our president might harbor Marxist persuasions, and you are quickly branded an intolerant, bigoted zealot unworthy of participation in a free and open society by many of these commentators. If you cannot see it now, I hope that before the end of this article, you will see the irony in this.

Matt Damon fracking film backed by big OPEC member
By Steve Hargreaves - CNN.com
Matt Damon's new film on fracking, "Promised Land", is generating some buzz -- though probably not the kind studio execs were hoping for.
Last week, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation pointed out that in the trailer for film, one of the financial backers listed is Image Nation Abu Dhabi.
Image Nation Abu Dhabi is, in turn, owned by Abu Dhabi Media - a state media company for the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, an OPEC member, is the world's third-largest oil exporter.
For a film that highlights the dangers of fracking -- the controversial process that has unleashed an energy boom in the United States -- this may be problematic, as evidenced by Twitter posts Monday:

North and South Korea 'on the verge of nuclear war'
A senior North Korean diplomat warned a meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York that "a spark of fire could set off a thermonuclear war" on the Korean Peninsula.
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo - Telegraph.co.uk
Pak Kil-yon, Pyongyang's vice-foreign minster, put the blame for the tense state of inter-Korean relations firmly on South Korea's conservative government and claimed the citizens of the North feel "shame" and "political terror."
Monday's speech was the first time a representative of North Korea has addressed the General Assembly since Kim Jong-un assumed power after the death of his father in December last year.

Why Is Germany Collecting Taxes for the Catholic Church?
How easy would it be for Berlin to forcibly tax all Germans and turn over their money to Rome, when it is already involved in tithe collection for state-recognized religions?
BY ANDREW MIILLER - theTrumpet.com
The German Catholic Bishops Conference issued a decree in September warning that those Germans who opted out of paying the country's "church tax" would no longer be entitled to sacraments, religious burial or any part of parish life.
This "church tax" is a special tax collected in Germany and several other Western European nations that was introduced in the 19th century in compensation for the nationalization of religious property. All Germans who officially register as Catholics, Protestants or Jews on their tax documentation must pay a religious tax of 8 to 9 percent on their annual income tax bill.

Sunday Law Warning
The National Sunday law will begin in the United States Of America, it will then be enforced in the rest of the world. This is the Mark 666. The Mark of the Beast. Be warned.

Pawns in the Game
by William Guy Carr
Here is a TRUE story of international intrigue, romances, corruption, graft, and political assassinations, the like of which has never been written before. It is the story of how different groups or atheistic- materialistic men have played in an international chess tournament to decide which group would win ultimate control of the wealth, natural resources, and man- power of the entire world. It is explained how the game has reached the final stage. The International Communists, and the International Capitalists, (both of whom have totalitarian ambitions) have temporarily joined hands to defeat Christian-democracy. The cover design shows that all moves made by the International Conspirators are directed by Satan and while the situation is decidedly serious it is definitely not hopeless. The solution is to end the game the International Conspirators have been playing right now before one or another totalitarian-minded group impose their ideas on the rest of mankind. The story is sensational and shocking, but it is educational because it, is the TRUTH. The author offers practical solutions to problems so many people consider insoluble.

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