Free Republic

U.S. Rail Freight Volume Down During Thanksgiving Holiday Week 3 Dec 2009 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For More Information Contact: AAR Communications Holly Arthur 202-639-2100 harthur@aar.org U.S. Rail Freight Volume Down During Thanksgiving Holiday Week Increases Seen in Nine Freight Commodity Groups WASHINGTON, D.C. – Dec. 3, 2009 – The Association of American Railroads today reported that freight rail traffic was down for the Thanksgiving holiday week ended Nov. 28, 2009. U.S. railroads reported originating 246,133 carloads for the week, down 3.9 percent compared with the same week in 2008 and down 29.3 percent from the same week in 2007. The...

Is the United States in inexorable economic decline, destined to be overshadowed by an emerging Chinese economic superpower? This seems to be a popular view among commentators of various political persuasions. I am happy to report, however, that America's economic demise is not around the corner. One of the most frequently cited examples of American economic decline, particularly from those on the Right, is the decline of the manufacturing sector (which now accounts for only about 12% of GDP). I remember hearing the argument that we are economically weak because "we don't make things here anymore" as far back as...

It has become fashionable on both the left and the right to compare the United States to ancient Rome. Decline and fall: We are a militaristic power trying to make everyone else in the known world submit to our way, or we are an irreligious, hedonistic bunch going the way of all flesh. Or maybe both. Not true, according to two interesting recent books. Thomas F. Madden, a professor of ancient history at St. Louis University, begins his book, "Empires of Trust," by denouncing "political screeds that yank bloody bits of Roman history out of context in order to make...

HONG KONG/SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Federal Reserve officials on Thursday downplayed the consequences of the falling U.S. dollar, underscoring that deflation is still a threat, especially with commercial real estate prices falling. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said in an interview with Market News International that the weakening dollar, which hit a 15-month low against major currencies on Monday, is only one of the factors the Fed watches when setting policy. "You pay attention to this," Fisher said in reply to a question about the effects of a weaker dollar. "On the other hand, in terms of its inflationary input, unless...

California's best years have passed, voters say In a survey of 1,500 registered voters, 80% say the state is on the wrong track. Respondents express little confidence in state politicians and candidates, even as support for Obama remains high. By Cathleen Decker November 8, 2009 Frustrated at California's woes, voters are sharply pessimistic about whether the next governor will be able to move the state in the right direction, and most believe California is in the midst of a long-term decline, a new Los Angeles Times/USC poll shows. Against that grim backdrop, next year's political contests loom as potentially volatile,...

Item: It was reported, from California, that a 15 year-old girl was raped as she left her high school homecoming event, by upwards of 20 teenage boys. There were passersby. Some did nothing. Others captured the event on cellphone video cameras for posting on the Internet. Item: While standing on the 14th St Union Square subway platform at about noon, looking into the tunnel for signs of a train, we notice the lanky black man leaning against the last I-beam is urinating on the platform. We turn away. Then we turn back, deciding not to give him the benefit of...

The sky isn't falling, exactly. America isn't on a fast track to irrelevance. Even in a state of total neglect, we could probably shamble along as a disheveled superpower for a few more decades. But all empires end, and the warning signs of American decline seem to be blinking more consistently. In the latest annual "prosperity index" published by the Legatum Institute, a London-based research firm, the United States ranks as the ninth most prosperous country in the world. That's five notches lower than last year, when America ranked No. 4. The drop might seem inconsequential, especially in the midst...

Review: When China Rules the World, by Martin Jacques While the decades since the Vietnam War may be most known for their startling technological developments, they have also spawned a chic genre of literature: the ‘America is in Decline' tract. What started most prominently with the work of Paul Kennedy has turned into a veritable cottage industry. Tomes in this category have included Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, Bruce Horton's Decline and Fall, and, most recently, Fareed Zakaria's The End of America, which Barack Obama was famously photographed holding last summer. Some of these books argue that the decline...

I, like many, have been concerned about this administration and paying (literally) for their socialist agenda. We can go on forever about this. However, I have a question, concern and would like a better understanding about our dollar and what's at stake. First, for the past year or so I have been contemplating buying commodities added to my portfolio of stocks, mutual funds and other investments. As I was getting ready to buy some silver I starting to go over what has happened over the past 1.5 years. This is where I am a bit confused: Last year the USD...

Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students' personalities. Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring. Big nonprofits that administer...

Once again, the Catholic world has been rocked by yet more allegations of sexual impropriety by Legionnaires of Christ founder, the late Fr. Marcial Maciel. It seems the now-disgraced founder-cum-pervert fathered more children than previously suspected; the latest claimants to his paternity purport to have evidence that the late Pope John Paul II knew of Maciel's sexual dilettantes, and turned a blind eye to them. (If true, it would confirm the prior journalistic scholarship of author Jason Berry.) The allegations highlight what for all too many Catholics is the elephant-in-the-room when discussing the ills which beset the modern Church: the...

Detroit was the Silicon Valley of the 1920s — the booming home of a glamorous new industry, a place where huge fortunes were conjured in years, sometimes months. But while the creators of the computer industry have as yet bequeathed very little to the built environment, the automobile industry piled up around it an astounding American city, in astoundingly little time. The Detroit of 1910 was a thriving Midwestern milling and shipping entrepot, a bigger Minneapolis. The Detroit of 1930 had rebuilt itself as a grand metropolis of skyscrapers, mansions, movie palaces and frame cottages spreading northward beyond the line...

MEMO to Oprah Winfrey: Your slip is showing. TV's reigning queen is losing viewers at a rate that hasn't been seen since "The Oprah Winfrey Show" was launched 23 years ago. Winfrey's ratings for the July 4th week, released yesterday, were her lowest since 1983 -- the latest in an alarming slide that's been going on for the last five years. The ratings for "Oprah" since 2004 are down by nearly a third, 32 percent, records show. So, is TV's biggest star losing her legendary mojo? "There's the fatigue factor," says industry analyst Marc Berman of Mediaweek. "Oprah's been on...

The king of pop, Michael Jackson, was laid to rest today. Every media outlet, the Communist News Network, the All Barack Channel, the Fe aux News Network, the Couric Buffoon Series, and the Never Been Credible news channels have taken the death of this troubled man and turned it into a circus. This particular circus has served to distract us from North Korea launching missiles in every direction, the Chinese murdering people in the streets, the Iranians crushing their people with an iron fist, our President and Vice President contradicting each other on foreign policy, cap and trade being shoved...

* we still have record levels of debt to pay down; * we have no economic model in place in the U.S. to provide the jobs to pay off this debt (our GDP is 30% based on a financial sector, which was built on a house of derivative cards) and fully two thirds of our GDP is based on consumer spending, which is a bit circular in terms of helping to support further consumer spending; * we have an aging population of baby boomers that just lost 40-50% of their retirement and significant home value but they are going to...

Perma-bear Ambrose Evans-Pritchard seems to have stuck his nose out of his cave after a brief hibernation and determined that the world has gone mad with some “green shoots” fever. He works overtime this week trying to cure us of this malady. The first thing he does in his Telegraph article is throw cold water at us in the form of statistics: The elastic was bound to snap back, just as it did in the bear rally of early 1931. Whether the underlying economy has begun to heal is another matter.

ANALYSIS-North Korea's prosperity push could raise poverty 12 May 2009 08:01:56 GMT Source: Reuters By Jon Herskovitz SEOUL, May 12 (Reuters) - North Korea's plan to mark the centenary of the birth of its founder and eternal president, Kim Il-sung, with major rebuilding projects will likely drag its ravaged economy deeper into poverty. But that in turn may eventually force the hermit state to be more cooperative with the outside world, which has been trying with little success to halt Pyongyang's efforts to build nuclear weapons in return for aid. The programme to forge a "great and prosperous nation" by...

'FREEDOM in the 50 States" is the most comprehensive ef fort to date to rank states by how their public policies influence "individual freedom in the economic, social and personal spheres." New York state is dead last in the freedom index "by a wide margin," the new study by George Mason University's Mercatus Center reports. The study includes dozens of variables, from social and personal freedoms (such as parents' rights to educate their children) to regulatory freedom (such as the degree of occupational- licensing requirements) to fiscal liberty (as measured, for instance, by states' debt burdens, which represent a constraint...

Is this the VERY beginning of the downward spiral of our currency? I am beginning to notice that the Euro and Pound are going up daily. The Euro was at 1.23 now at 1.35 and the Pound previously 1.36 to 1.50...is this the beginning of inflation? Oil rising as well...this could be the tip of the "turd" ready to erupt. Hey, printing all that $$$ will eventually have consequences, there really is no escape from that. Never in the history of man kind has "throwing money" at a crisis helped...NEVER!

Canadian economy taking a fast fall REPORT: Bank of Canada says decline steepest in 50 years Posted By JULIAN BELTRAME, THE CANADIAN PRESS Posted 22 hours ago The Canadian economy took a shocking fall during the first quarter, dropping at the steepest pace in at least 50 years to what the Bank of Canada says might be the bottom. The central bank said Thursday it does not plan any immediate action but is watching for further trouble and considering dramatic new interventions into stressed financial markets. Gross domestic product fell an estimated 7.3% -- the biggest contraction since comparable records...

There are not many moments in history when it is possible to worry that the world has become too happy for its own good. One such moment came in Europe during the late nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars had receded into the distance and the First World War was still hidden over the horizon. For a brief period, it became possible to believe that the West was headed for a condition of permanent peace; that technology, democracy, and globalization were driving a virtuous circle that no atavistic violence could disrupt. This vision never came very close to becoming a...

From Vice, a post-apocalyptic photoessay of public schools left abandoned in Detroit. The above image is captioned: A box elder tree grows from a soil made of ash and pulp from science textbooks in the Detroit Public Schools' Roosevelt Warehouse. A man's body was discovered in a frozen lift shaft here. It is assumed he had been there for some months as his face had decomposed. More Detroit gothic here. More on the failure of the Detroit public education system here. More money for the city's schools here.

U.S. stock index futures fall; economy in focus Mon Mar 9, 2009 5:46am EDT * Dow Jones futures DIc1 fell 2.2 percent by 0920 GMT; S&P 500 futures SPc1 were down 2.4 percent, Nasdaq futures NDc1 2.0 percent lower, signalling that Wall Street would decline on Monday. * No S&P 500 companies scheduled to report; no economic indicators of note due for release. * National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, the White House's chief economic adviser, told the Financial Times that kickstarting economic growth should take precedence over ironing out global imbalances. * President Barack Obama promised on Saturday to...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A widely watched index shows home prices tumbled by the sharpest annual rate on record in the fourth quarter and in December.

Japan awaits a future that seems bleaker by the day HAMISH MCDONALD ASIA-PACIFIC EDITOR 14/02/2009 1:48:18 AM HILLARY CLINTON is expected in Tokyo on Monday on her first foreign trip as Barack Obama's new secretary of state. The same day, Japan will announce its figure for gross national product growth for the last quarter of 2008; economists surveyed by Bloomberg news this week expect it to show the country's economy contracting at an annualised rate of nearly 12 per cent. Japan has been hit by the worst economic slump since World War II - greater than the oil shock of...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. reported a $21.7 million loss for the fourth quarter on Thursday, reflecting the declining value of its newspapers, and said it plans deep cost cuts this year. McClatchy, which publishes The Miami Herald, The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee and other newspapers, wouldn't say how much, if any, of the $100 million to $110 million in cuts would come from layoffs. The company said plans were still being completed. The company, which already has imposed a companywide wage freeze through September, said it also would freeze pension plans and suspend matches to its 401(k)...

PARIS: Music sales worldwide fell by about 7 percent last year as another sizable jump in digital sales failed to make up for a deepening decline in the compact disc market, according to John Kennedy, chief executive of the industry's main international trade group. Revenue from music sold over the Internet, via mobile phones and in other digital forms, rose by 25 percent last year, to $3.7 billion, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry said in a report set for publication Friday. Digital sales accounted for 20 percent of the industry's revenue, up from 15 percent a year earlier....

"By 1998, when I first made my prediction, it had exceeded $2 trillion. Now it is more than 11 trillion. This is a pyramid that can only collapse." ... "It is already collapsing. Due to the financial crisis, three of the largest and oldest five banks on Wall Street have already ceased to exist, and two are barely surviving." ... "Two countries could assume this role: China, with its vast reserves, and Russia, which could play the role of a regulator in Eurasia." ... "Millions of citizens there have lost their savings. ... whole cities will be left without work...

Intelligence: Our spy agencies have taken another look into their crystal ball and see a long period of American decline. We're betting they aren't any more accurate on this prediction than they've been on others in the past. The National Intelligence Estimate put out periodically by the nation's 17 spy agencies is intended to serve as a road map for future policy actions. Unfortunately, the one just released takes a lot of wrong turns. It warns, for instance, of Russia once again rising in global affairs — in part because global warming will be a boon to that nation's sprawling...

The Border Patrol is claiming success along a formerly chaotic five-mile stretch of the border between the San Ysidro and Otay Mesa ports of entry, where fencing was raised and reinforced with razor-studded concertina wire. Yesterday, agents in San Diego celebrated the completion of the wire project, begun in December and mostly finished about two months ago. The Border Patrol said both illegal-crossing arrests and assaults against agents in the area are down by more than 50 percent. However, a growing number of apprehensions and assaults are occurring west of the San Ysidro port of entry, and overall arrests in...

Just as the world at large is experiencing an unprecedented collapse of demography, the UN Population Division reports a sharp decline of fertility rates (number of births per woman) in Muslim and Arab countries, excluding Afghanistan and Yemen. The myth of "doubling population every 20 years" has been shattered against the cliffs of demography. The director-general of UNESCO, Koichiro Matsuura, stated, during a UNESCO conference on "Population: From Explosion to Implosion," that "there is an abrupt slowdown in the rate of growth... also in many countries where women have only limited access to education and employment... There is not the...

October 12, 2008 Is this the end of the American era? Paul Kennedy A few nights ago, having read far too much about the alarming drop of share prices on Wall Street, I fell asleep trying to remember those lines from Shelley’s Ozymandias that were drummed into my skull at school long ago: . . . Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that...

U.S. May Take Ownership Stake in Banks Treasury Dept. Would Hope to Spur Lending By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and MARK LANDLER Treasury officials say the just-passed $700 billion bailout bill gives them the authority to inject cash into banks that request it. Q & A: The Fed’s Rate Cut Times Topics: Credit Crisis — The Essentials

Regarding "This Election"; the candidate: "Barack Obama"; and "The MainStream Media" How many times have you stopped and "caught yourself".......... literally "shaking your head" - in UTTER AMAZEMENT & DISBELIEF - that Barack Obama is even a "candidate" for President Of the US, much less the INSANE REALITY of him actually LEADING/WINNING!?! Couple that with the almost total Media Blackout regarding his obvious, blatant and irrefutable poor judgement, past history, anti-american friends/associates, etc. etc. Not only does the media not mention or question the incredibly obvious, alarming and very real CONCERNS, ISSUES & DANGERS surrounding him being elected and holding...

Factory data show wider economy sufferingBy Chris Giles in London Financial Times, October 2 2008 Manufacturers across the world's advanced economies suffered a torrid September, surveys suggested yesterday, providing clear evidence that the real economy had been unable to escape the woes of the financial sector. From Japan, across Europe and in the US, surveys of manufacturers were bleak with readings suggesting output was falling. Snip.

Washington, DC -- Americans received good news back in January when new figures from Planned Parenthood's research group showed the number of abortions nationwide have fallen to their lowest point in 30 years and have declined 25 percent since 1990. That has resulted in a drop in the nation's infant mortality rate.

Summer 2008 Falling Upwards: Declinism, The Box Set Robert J. Lieber Is America finished? Respected public intellectuals, think tank theorists, and members of the media elite seem to think so. The scare headline in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story by Parag Khanna titled “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony” asks, “Who Shrunk the Superpower?” Almost daily, learned authors proclaim The End of the American Era, as the title of a 2002 book by Charles Kupchan put it, and instruct us that the rise of China and India, the reawakening of Putin’s Russia, and the expansion of the European Union...

Tomorrow is our nation’s 232nd birthday. Two months ago Israel celebrated its 60th birthday. I feel that more honest arithmetic would have had the small beleaguered country actually celebrating its 3,320th birthday. What happened three millennia ago which brought the people of Israel into existence? Ancient Israel became a nation with an eternal destiny when it received its constitution, the Torah, from God on Mount Sinai and formally adopted it. “And (Moses) took the Book of the Covenant, and read it in the hearing of the people; and they said...

Cleavers to Lohans: The Downhill Slide of the American TV Family It used to be kids in TV families who caused the problems and the parents who solved them. In the brave new world of reality television, parents are the problem. June 2, 2008 - by Katherine Berry There was a time in American television when parents and children alike would gather in front of the TV to watch Leave it to Beaver or even The Cosby Show, programs that affirmed the importance of the family structure and reminded us that loving parents can guide their children through even the...

No denial. France of today is a magnificent nation. The almost perfect blend of shopping opportunities, beauty of architechture and landscape, nice freeways, marvelous food, well educated people and high-tech solutions are just about everywhere. Today, even a place like Paris or Monaco (not "de jure" French) has become poorer than Hamburg, Switzerland, Inner City London and Scandinavia, but Paris and Monaco still live up to their former reputation in many ways. Personally, I admire good old France. Just have a look at it: 25% study Sociology 25% are retired 25% are unemployed 25% are on strike Where does the...

LONDON: A Pakistan born senior bishop has warned that the decline of Christianity in Britain has paved the way for radical Islam to fill a moral vacuum, a comment that could create a row over the relationship between Islam and the West. The Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, claimed the "social and sexual" revolution of the 1960s had led to a steep decline in the influence of Christianity over society. The bishop, who was born in Pakistan of Christian parents, said the decline of Christian values has created a "moral vacuum" which radical Islam is filling, the...

...For decades now, scholars have been writing about the invisibility of whiteness. To be white in America meant that you were a member of the default category that just isn't discussed. In 2000, journalists didn't incessantly mention that George W. Bush was seeking to become the 43rd white male president of the United States. No one even thinks in those terms. It's implied. It's one of the perks of dominance. We generally mention race when we speak of nonwhites. ...To mention whites as an interest group -- in the way we do minority groups -- hearkens back to segregation and...

Is America in Economic Decline?America in economic decline? Everyday, it seems there is a new economic statistic about a weakening US economy or a news report about the US$ dropping in value against other currencies. My answer is: NO. Maybe right now the dollar is at a low level and portions of the American economy could be better, but the overall economy is solid and the dollar weakness is temporary. If you read history, it seems to be a good rule to never underestimate the American people or our economy. In fact, i think some of the nation’s best economic...

House prices decline at record levels By Stephen Adams and Andrew Porter, Political Editor Last Updated: 2:08am BST 15/04/2008 House prices are experiencing their most widespread decline since records began because of the fallout from the credit crisis, a report released today shows. Halifax statistics showed house prices tumbled by 2.5 per cent from February to March, the biggest such fall since 1992 Almost four out of five chartered surveyors saw a fall in values in March, research by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has found. RICS disclosed that they were the worst figures since it started compiling such...

The number of people crossing into the United States at San Ysidro has fallen 21.4 percent from a peak three years ago, a precipitous drop that economists and others attribute to frustrating border waits, dwindling tourism and a struggling U.S. economy. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 10.3 million fewer people crossed at the San Ysidro point of entry, the busiest gateway in the country, than did so in 2004. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics also indicate that for all crossings between California and Mexico, the average drop-off was 14.2 percent, or 13 million people. The...

CINO Prep by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 07, 2008 Although Catholic schools look good when compared with their public counterparts, they don’t fare as well in contrast to the way they used to be. In the wake of Vatican II, “Radical reformers tore at every aspect of Catholic life, questioning time-honored practices and beliefs,” Phillip F. Lawler writes in The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture. “Catholic schools jettisoned their religious education programs; the old reliable Baltimore Catechism quickly became a collectors item.” “In parochial high schools, religion classes became freewheeling discussion sessions, with students encouraged to reflect...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sales of existing homes fell for the sixth straight month in January, dropping to the slowest sales pace on record. Median home prices were also down and many analysts predicted further price declines in the months ahead given high levels of unsold homes. The National Association of Realtors said Monday that sales of single-family homes and condominiums dropped by 0.4 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million units. That was the slowest sales pace, going back to 1999, and was seen as evidence that the steepest slump in housing in a quarter-century...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9, 2008 – U.S. troops found a diary belonging to an al Qaeda in Iraq leader that has Coalition forces believing the terrorist organization is “on its heels,” a senior military official in Baghdad said this morning. Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team on Nov. 3, 2007, captured a diary belonging to Abu Tariq, an al Qaeda emir in control of five battalions within two sectors, U.S. Air Force Col. Donald J. Bacon, a Multinational Force Iraq spokesman, told online journalists and “bloggers” during a conference call. The soldiers found the diary during...

Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow Motion Suicide, by Bruce S. Thornton (Encounter Books, 300 pp., $21.95) It used to be said that when it came to worldviews, Americans were from Mars and Europeans were from Venus. But a new school of thought posits a different role for our continental counterparts. Europe, in this schema, is more like a dying star: a once-brilliant civilization whose best days lie behind it, that has lost the internal strength to endure, and that is headed toward oblivion. Bruce Thornton, a classics professor at California State University, is the latest to take up this thesis....

...Fifteen years ago, Japan ranked fourth among the world's countries in gross domestic product per capita. It now ranks 20th. In 1994, its share of the world's economy peaked at 18 percent; in 2006, the number was below 10 percent... ...Japan's slide relative to other major economies is not a tabloid tale of suddenly squandered riches. It is rather an insidious petering out of growth, productivity and innovation -- and of political will to stop the slippage. The slide has dovetailed with another quietly insidious crisis -- the petering out of the population. Japan has the world's highest proportion of...