Free Republic

As the day progresses, I expect there to be substantial activity in Venezuela. As I learn of it, updates will be provided here or through new posts. Few seem to know what to do. Perhaps Leopoldo Lopez does.According to Daniel, as far as I knew until recently the only English language blogger still hanging on in Venezuela, the country is adrift. The question here is who is most adrift in Venezuela today, the regime or the opposition?  The crisis that started late January in Tachira has spread as no other crisis has spread in Venezuela since "el caracazo" when looting happened in...

Fingers crossed. A good sign is that Assembly leaders now say they will take on the massive shortfall in the State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS) that provides retirement, disability and survivor benefits for CaliforniaÂ’s 868,493 teachers and their families. Speaker John Perez says he wants to find a way to begin paying down the $80 billion unfunded liability for teacher pensions and the Assembly will hold hearing on the issue this month.While CalPERS, the other major public employee pension system, is in a weak position, CalSTRS is close to falling into the abyss. However, neither of the systems is...

“One of the biggest obstacles we face is the one of trust,” Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters at a news conference Thursday. “There’s widespread doubt about whether this administration can be trusted to enforce our laws and it’s going to be difficult to move any immigration legislation until that changes.” Illustrating that distrust, Boehner pointed to Obama’s unilateral moves to change the timeline for implementing the new health care law and the president’s widely publicized intent to circumvent Congress on several other issues through executive orders. “I never underestimated the difficulty in moving forward this year [on immigration reform] and the...

America has recently experienced a wave of municipal bankruptcies significantly fueled by underfunded pension and retiree health obligations to retired city workers, including policemen, firemen and teachers. The bankruptcies of Detroit and some California towns, the massive pension shortfall in Illinois only partially addressed by recent legislation, and the tense situation in Chicago with the mayor asking municipal workers for give-backs are just the beginning of difficulties that will appear across the country. Asset returns have come up short of what has been assumed. Generous unfunded retirement benefits with early retirement dates and expensive cost-of-living adjustments were doled out to...

(Newser) – Bacon lovers, be warned. A fast-spreading pig virus could send pork prices to record highs in the US, reports the Wall Street Journal. The PED virus, short for porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, has hit farms in 22 states so far. It's lethal only to young pigs, not humans, but the Journal says the number of pigs being lost per week is likely to push pork prices beyond the record of $3.81 a pound. A post at Agri-Pulse predicts that the worst spikes will come in the summer.

Calling the Chicago pension crisis the worst in the nation is saying something - like, how bad can it get? The city's underfunded pension system for teachers, firefighters, police, and transit workers threatens to punch a hole in the city budget that would devastate city services. The teachers' alone are $1 billion short of funds, while the city as a whole is looking at a whopping $27 billion shortfall. The state of Illinois is even worse off with more than $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Where is the money going to come from to fix the problem? Financial Times:...

A global retirement crisis is bearing down on workers of all ages. How retirement systems vary, country to country Associated Press Spawned years before the Great Recession and the financial meltdown in 2008, the crisis was significantly worsened by those twin traumas. It will play out for decades, and its consequences will be far-reaching. Many people will be forced to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65 — to 70 or even longer. Living standards will fall, and poverty rates will rise for the elderly in wealthy countries that built safety nets for seniors after World War II.

New international test scores show American students lagging behind in math and performing about average in science and reading. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tests 15-year-olds around the world every three years as part of the Program for International Student Assessment. Half a million students in 65 countries participated in the most recent test, administered in 2012. The top average scores in each subject came from Shanghai, China's largest city and also from Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the results a "picture of educational stagnation." However, critics of the...

Mounting opposition to ObamaCare among young adults is creating a new crisis for the White House. While the federal enrollment website HealthCare.gov appears to be improving by the day, polls show the “young invincibles” key to making the law work are becoming less likely to enroll. Younger people were skeptical of the healthcare reform law even before its troubled rollout, despite their support for President Obama. But polling indicates the problems facing HealthCare.gov — a site the administration initially touted as a hip, tech-friendly experience — have reinforced their doubts about the need to have health insurance at all. “The...

Are U.S. federal government policy makers planning for an economic meltdown? Fiscal and financial news isn’t a particularly sexy topic for broad audiences, even under normal circumstances. And over the Thanksgiving national holiday weekend, about the only news people care to consume are football scores. But as we enjoyed turkey dinners, shopping, and hopefully some quality time with friends and family – and even in the recent days leading up to the holiday weekend – some major policy ideas and changes have emerged that could keep you away from your personal finances in the face of another meltdown. Americans...

My last thread about TVs was published in 2006. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/1725379/posts I still have the 2k in the bank and still want to buy one I have been looking at the Sharp Aquos Quattron 3D 240 70" Model 757. Any opinions? Good Amazon ratings. How does one get it installed if purchased on the net? How does one pick a sound system, and I need a sound system with headphones because of a mild hearing deficit (What did he just say? Where are they going? Why did he kill her?) I am looking for a theatre-sort of experience at my low...

For more than 65 years the National Health Service has occupied a sainted position in British life. Even the most radical, right-leaning Governments have hesitated before embarking on reforms which could be characterized by opponents as “cuts”. In recent years, however, the halo has slipped dramatically. … Now, details from a secret report on Wexham Park Hospital have provided devastating confirmation. … The report highlights huge structural problems, with a top-heavy cadre of bureaucrats spending their time—and our money—feuding with each other, against a backdrop of deepening financial problems and a chronic bed shortage. Shockingly, we have also established that...

America’s public pension funds are in trouble because sketchy Mr. Wall Street sold some slack-jawed pension fund managers on risky investments with promises of high returns that may never materialize. Or so Matt Taibbi seems to believe. In a recent piece in Rolling Stone, Taibbi blames public pensions’ current woes on “Gordon Gekko wanna-be’s” (sic), “scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital,” and “Wall Street,” who used the financial crisis to lure weakened pension funds into investing in “alternatives.” Alternatives are investment vehicles that are different from stocks, bonds, and commodities in that they are typically traded by individuals without the...

I think that’s it’s safe to say that community organizing is a little bit easier than, say, being President of the United States. Or being a practicing attorney. Barack Obama has now found that out. To the sorrow of the rest of us. And here’s the essential problem with Barack Obama’s resume, as opposed to, say, Abraham Lincoln’s, who also was unprepared to become president of the United States, but made up for it with ability: Obama has spent his whole life being against stuff, protesting against powers higher than himself, blaming those in control. Lincoln on the other hand...

lmost exactly one year ago we wrote "The Next Subprime Crisis Is Here: Over $120 Billion In Federal Student Loans In Default" in which we took the latest (2009 three year cohort) loan default data on Federal Student Loans released by the Department of Education and applied it to the total amount of student loans outstanding, which back then was $914 billion. Yesterday, ED.gov provided its annual update - this time to the 2010 three year and 2011 two year cohorts - and to nobody's major surprise, learned that things just got even worse. To wit: "The national two-year cohort...

Five years ago, Jim Simpson informed America of the grand conspiratorial sabotage presenting Barack Obama for the United States Presidency. That is, he presented much more than we already knew, to those who were already awake, aware, alarmed, and looking for more. And we have all continued to tell those who have not been willfully, unrepentantly, and fatally ignorant. This article also introduced to many the very old, Marxist and fascist (some would say Illuminist and Jacobin) strategy of collapsing a nation’s economy through government obligations and debt, recently reprised as the “Cloward-Piven strategy.” Whether reviewing or reading for the...

Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness that many experimentally established “facts” don’t seem to hold up to repeated investigation. This was highlighted in a 2010 article in the New Yorker entitled The Truth Wears Off and since then, there have been many popular press accounts of different aspects of science’s current reproducibility crisis. These include an exposé of the increasing number of retractions by scientific journals and damning demonstrations of failures to replicate high profile studies. Articles in recent days have discussed how the majority of scientists might be more interested in funding and fame...

Israel's largest daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot has a photo of US President Barack Obama published with the comment "From threats to words." In Jerusalem, we are disappointed by Obama's behavior. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued veiled criticism of the White House: "If we do not help ourselves, no one will." According to Netanyahu, the world needs to see: "Anyone who uses weapons of mass destruction, has to pay the price." If Syria used chemical weapons against its own people, there is no doubt it would do so against Israel. Therefore, America's reluctance to act now is being heavily criticized...

For the five year anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis, Ed Lazear and I have released a paper titled “Observations on the Financial Crisis,” published through the Hoover Institution. It’s just over 25 pages and also has a fairly detailed timeline of events as an appendix. Ed was chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers when I was director of the National Economic Council. Here are the 19 observation headlines. I urge you to read our supporting arguments, especially if you’re going to comment on or respond to them. Each argument takes only about a page. “The recession that...

"'Your No. 1 client is the government,' John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley's chairman and chief executive from 2005 to 2009, told current CEO James Gorman in a recent phone call. Mr. Gorman, who was visiting Washington that day, agreed." - Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2013. The five year anniversary of the ‘financial crisis' has predictably generated all manner of commentary about its presumed causes. What's most unfortunate five years later is that ‘financial' and ‘crisis' are still used together. It's unfortunate simply because despite what you read, the crisis was decidedly not financial, nor was it caused by a...