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We’re seeing some strange things in modern society and all signs point to the fact that famine is coming. Within the US, drought on the plains is making is so that winter wheat can’t grow while up in North Dakota there’s so much water that farmers’ fields are too waterlogged for anybody to do any planting. I have my suspicions. American farmers that are able to get out into the field are having a hard time finding critical components they need to their machinery. Two children were just hospitalized due to a lack of infant formula within America. When have...

President Biden said that there is little that can be done to affect the course of the coronavirus pandemic in the coming days. Biden made the comments while signing two executive orders that were aimed at combating hunger and financial instability by increasing the value of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, helping get stimulus checks to those who haven't received them yet, and establishing a $15 minimum wage and emergency paid leave for federal employees. The president argued that these benefits would be necessary considering that the toll of the coronavirus could continue for some time. "There is nothing we...

Thirty years after an oil well was drilled at an Arctic wildlife refuge, the effects are still visible from space.

A mood of economic gloom hangs over the nation as President Obama and Republican leaders scramble to strike a deficit deal that avoids automatic tax hikes and spending cuts, according to a new poll for The Hill. The poll, conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, found nearly 6-in-10 people (59 percent) feel the country is on the wrong track. It also showed people are deeply pessimistic about their chances for future prosperity, with 54 percent saying they believe their children will be worse off as adults than their parents.The poll results cast a shadow over talks in Washington aimed at averting...

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The Democrats have now cleared the way to ram the final health care socialism package through the House this Sunday by using "deem and pass." They are in open and direct violation of Article 1, Section 7 of the United States Constitution. The vast majority of Americans who are adamant in their opposition to this imposed socialism are screaming at the top of there lungs to have their elected "representatives" hear them and vote the way the majority wants. The Democrats in the House and Senate have a message for all of you. Screw the constitution, and screw you, too!...

HURRICANE EARTH Joe Weisenthal Feb. 4, 2010, 5:40 PM From the time the market started rallying last March, skeptics have been warning of a coming storm ahead. Today, it felt like we experienced it. As one market pro put it today: This was real. Here are the key highlights: * The 15 sovereigns at risk of collapse > * 20 reasons the economy can't recover > * Morgan Stanley: We can't believe how fast the euro unraveled > * The Dow crashes through 10,000 > * It's a good thing you're hedge with gold > * The crazy action in...

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There's a $700 trillion elephant in the room and it's time we found out how much it really weighs on the economy. Derivative contracts total about three-quarters of a quadrillion dollars in "notional" amounts, according to the Bank for International Settlements. These contracts are tallied in notional values because no one really can say how much they are worth. But valuing them correctly is exactly what we should be doing because these comprise the viral disease that has infected the financial markets and the economies of the world. Try as we might to salvage the...

41 US States Face Bankruptcy In 2009A recent study by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that 41 states are facing severe budget shortfalls for 2009. Some states are worse off than others, with California ($31.7 billion) and Florida ($5.1 billion) leading the deficit pack. In all, the 41 states are currently facing a $71.9 billion budget shortfall. The key word here is “currently,” since a similar study was conducted by the same group only three months earlier, at which time “only” 29 states were predicted to face shortfalls of a “mere” $48 billion. As the recession...

Don't misunderstand me: Obama is wrong on Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, health care, corporate tax rates, investment taxes, education flexibility, abortion regulation, immigration policy, meeting with dictators, social security, energy, trade, and believing that subprime lending was a good idea. He has opportunistically changed or regularly misstated his positions on public financing, gun control, born alive infant protection, wire tapping, timetable for Iraq, elimination of the Bush tax cuts, the DC gun ban, an undivided Israel, the Cuba embargo, NAFTA, participation in town halls with McCain, oil drilling, and support of nuclear power. He has no major legislative accomplishments as...

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A "minor planet" with the prosaic name 2006 SQ372 is just over two billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune. But this lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to a team of researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). The discovery of this remarkable object was reported today in Chicago, at an international symposium titled "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Asteroids to Cosmology." A...

As Economic Tide Recedes, an Undertow of Long-Simmering Insecurities Grows Among Americans Even when experts were declaring the economy healthy, many Americans voiced a vague, but persistent dissatisfaction. True, jobs were relatively plentiful over the last few years. It was easy to borrow and very cheap. The sharp rise in the value of homes and plentiful credit cards encouraged a nation of consumers to get out and buy. But to many people, something didn't feel right, even if they couldn't quite explain why. Now the economic tide is receding, and the undertow that was there all along is getting stronger....

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being “Mister Gloom’n’doom,” or for “not offering any solutions” to our looming energy crisis. So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here are my suggestions: 1. Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed “greens” and...

My husband and I discovered this morning that yet another young man whom we know well has volunteered to be deployed to Iraq. He will be leaving in January. Which spurred me to do some serious thinking on the subject of our young men volunteering … My support for the war effort in Iraq has dwindled, for two sad reasons: (1) Our president told us four years ago that America has to battle the terrorists in the Middle East in order to prevent the need to battle them here on our own soil. So we are sending our troops...

This Labour Day, I thought about the working class, the masses. No, honestly, I did. Okay, I was on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand had jobs they'll be getting back to this morning. They worked. They would be classed as workers. But they're not a homogeneous "working class," they're not conscripts in Karl Marx's "masses." The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers' solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism. If you want to see what "the masses" are meant to look like, buy a...

Cerberus Capital Management may be celebrating its historic acquisition of Chrysler after turmoil in the credit markets delayed the deal, but no champagne is flowing for the private-equity firm's other landmark purchase in Detroit. GMAC, the finance arm of General Motors (GM - Cramer's Take - Stockpickr) that is 51%-owned by Cerberus, is facing worries in the derivatives markets about bankruptcy at its mortgage-lending unit. The price of credit protection for GMAC's mortgage business, Residential Capital, or ResCap, soared by more than $100,000 a year on Friday, as measured by the credit default swaps market. "ResCap is trading like it...

Don't Ruin Economy Over Tiny Temp Rise February 11, 2007 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist Our Thought For The Week comes from the Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman: "I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future." That would be yours truly: the climate holocaust denier. I wrote last week about "global warming," or "cooling," or "climate change," or (the latest term) "climate disruption" -- for...

Dmitri Konstantino from Moldova gestured glumly around him at the empty stalls in Moscow’s largest food market yesterday and asked: “So, where are all these Russians?” His question is being repeated at markets across the country as an attempt to create jobs for Russians by imposing strict quotas on migrants appeared to have backfired. Two weeks after the Government introduced a law limiting nonRussians to 40 per cent of the workforce, Russia’s markets are emptying of traders as hundreds of thousands of foreigners are expelled. Stalls run traditionally by people from Central Asia and the Caucasus are standing bare, as...

Foreclosures in 2006 reached levels not seen since the real-estate crash of the late 1980s, and it doesn’t look like they’re coming down anytime soon. “There is no reason for the foreclosures to actually drop significantly,” said George Roddy, president of Foreclosure Listing Service, which tracks foreclosure postings. About 1,000 properties in Tarrant County were scheduled for auction every month this year, with about 40 percent to 50 percent of them actually sold on the courthouse steps, according to Roddy’s company. Many avoided foreclosure by selling their houses beforehand, reaching agreements with their lenders or filing for bankruptcy protection. Roddy...