This was sent to the Heretic and I thought it was worth sharing as it  is really well put, in terms the average punter can understand … it cuts thru political doublespeak and provides clarity

USA Today:  Lesson # 1:
Why the U.S. was downgraded:

* U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
* Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
* New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
* National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
* Recent budget cuts: $ 38,500,000,000

Let’s now remove 8 zeros and pretend it’s a household budget:

* Annual family income: $21,700
* Money the family spent: $38,200
* New debt on the credit card: $16,500
* Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
* Total budget cuts: $385

Got It ?????

OK now Lesson # 2:
Here’s another way to look at the Debt Ceiling:

Let’s say, you come home from work and find there has been a sewer backup in your neighbourhood … and your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.  What do you think you should do?  Raise the ceilings, or pump out the (ummmm) “effluent”?

Lesson 3 :  Australia today

FROM ROSS GREENWOOD …  Quoted from Ross Greenwood of Money News..

Right now the Federal Government is at pains to tell everyone – including us the mug-punters and the International Monetary Fund, that it will not exceed its own, self-imposed, borrowing limits.

How much?    $200 billion.  And here’s a worry. 
If you work in a bank’s money market operation; or if you are a politician; the millions turn into billions and it rolls off the tip of the tongue a bit too easily. but every dollar that is borrowed, some time, has to be repaid. By you, by me and by the rest of the country.

Just after 5 o’clock tonight I did a bit of math for Jason Morrison (Sydney radio presenter). But it’s so staggering its worth repeating now.

First thought; Gillard, Swan, Wong, before that Rudd, all of the Labor Cabinet, call these temporary borrowings, a temporary deficit.
Remember Those Words :  Temporary Deficit.

The total Government debt will end up around $200 billion. So here’s a very basic calculation … I used a home loan calculator to work it out … it’s that simple … $200 billion is $2 hundred thousand million.

The current 10 year Government bond rate is 4.67 per cent. I worked the loan out over a period of 20 years. Now here’s where it gets scary … really scary.

The repayments on $200 billion, come to more than one and a quarter billion dollars – every month – for 20 years. It works out we – as taxpayers – will be repaying $15.4 billion in interest and principal every year .. $733 for every man woman and child – every year.

The total interest bill over the 20 years is – get this – $108 billion.   Check out our debt in real time here
Remember, this is a Government, that just 4 years ago, had NO debt. NO debt.

In fact it had enough money to create the Future Fund, to pay the future liabilities of public servants’ superannuation, and it had enough to stick $20 billion into the Building Australia Fund …..

Here is a bit of serious trivia:

A note was sent to me which explains that the six leading members of the Government, from Ms Gillard down, have a collective work experience of 181 years, but only 13 in the private sector.

If you take out of those 13 years the number that were spent as trade union lawyers, 11, only two years were spent in the private sector.

So out of those 181 years:

- no years spent running their own business
- no years spent starting their own business
- no years spent as a director of a family business or a company
- no years as a director of a public company
- no years in a senior position in a public company
- no years in a senior position in a private company
- no years working in corporate finance
- no years in corporate or business restructuring
- no years working in or with a bank
- no years of experience in the capital markets
- no years in a stock-broking firm
- no years in negotiating debt facilities with banks
- no years running a small business
- no years at the World Bank or IMF or OECD
- no years in Treasury or Finance.

But these people have plunged Australia into unprecedented debt.

Well, in a way you can’t blame them.   It’s clear the electorate did not do their homework, because the  Government is there by right.

Ah, but they are Labor and people vote for them because Labor is good  for the working family – right???

If you have read this you may like to pass it on to your friends to help  educate a little as you, them and I, will be  repaying the above.

Do you actually know who you are voting for?  What are their morals, their ethics, their real policies?  

BETTER CANDIDATES, BETTER PARLIAMENT, STRONGER AUSTRALIA: 

 If our current crop of politicians were managers in a company you owned and instead of getting on with the job they are paid to do, they spent all day sniping at each other and jostling for promotion, what would you do?  Fairly simple … you would fire them!  Remember they are playing these games on our – the Taxpayer’s money – and are showing no respect for the people who elected them.

If you interviewed someone for the job and they said “I’ll tell you how I’ll handle the job once you employ me”, what would you do?  You’d be an idiot to hire them.  So why do we allow politicians (recently heard from the mouth of Joe Hockey) to tell us they won’t tell us their policies until they are in power and why do we allow politicians like the so-called independents to go against what their constituents want once they are elected and go unpunished?  Why do we agree to parties putting up candidates that are no hopers, scoundrels, thieves and liars and giving us no way of registering our disgust other than to vote ‘informal’ * which helps no one.  Currently we are forced to go with an ‘endorsed’ candidate that we may not even know or like.  People Power CAN change that.  By doing this we can make both the party and individual candidates be held responsible.

How you might ask?  Simple:  Help get enough signatures to get the Electoral Office to include a “No Vote” box that HAS to be counted on all ballot papers.  If the “No Votes” are greater than any candidate then that seat stays vacant until the next election.

By doing this we can make both the party and individual candidates be held responsible.   It will force parties to have a more transparent pre-selection process and even, possibly, take up Julian Leeser’s* suggestions on how this can be achieved.  If a candidate is not elected they lose their deposits and the party has one less member – severe consequences for both.

We also need a “No preferences to be allocated” box so that political parties cannot do deals and give our votes away.

*See the Paper putting forward a case for introducing Primaries into our electoral system by Julian Leeser,  Executive Director, Menzies Research Centre here. This paper was first delivered as a speech to the Australian Liberal Students’ Federation Annual Conference July 2008.  Interesting reading.

Did you know that the increase in ‘informal’ votes has more than doubled in every State since 1983?

which I think goes to show how disillusioned we all are. And the significance of these figures?  They could mean as much as a 5 point swing in the final results if they were actually counted and I believe the figure would be higher if people were given the choice between saying “I vote for none of these ratbags you have put forward”, or destroying their vote or voting for someone they would rather not vote for.

Please register your thoughts on the Poll and/or sign the petition the Heretic will be submitting to the Electoral Commission here.

Well here’s the thing that’s been on my mind.  Our property is totally solar powered – we are too far to connect to the grid, so this is something I live with everyday.  Unlike the ideological rantings of some City Yuppie, we actually walk our talk.

We have 28 panels – enough to run a normal household, albeit with caution. Having moved from the city it was a steep learning curve but one that showed us the enormous waste that most people are not even aware of.  However, that said, when the sun doesn’t shine, guess what we need to do?  Run the generator of course, and of course that takes fuel – fossile fuel!  And around our way, it rains and it rains a lot.  That can mean up to 6 hours of generator a day.  Now we are also in a very lucky position in that we have a creek running around our property and when it is raining the creek can get up some current, so our next step will be to put a water turbine in so that when the sun doesn’t shine we have an alternative.

So what is this ramble about?  Well, simply put when everyone in Australia is on Solar power or Wind Turbines and the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow, how exactly are we going to keep the lights on?  What are businesses and industry going to do when we no longer have power stations?  Do they just stop manufacturing when the sun goes down?

The Heretic came across this brilliant (and very humorous treatment of the Carbon Tax debate) and just had to share:

Show your disgust for the broken promises of the Labor  Government and

Join the “Revolt against Carbon Tax”  here

“Inconvenient nonsense infiltrates the classroom ...”

An excellent article by Bob Carter prompted the Heretic to post this information about Al Gore, Obama and his band of thieves …

So  you think you know quite a bit about Climate change and who will benefit …  Read on and see just how little we all  know.

This is an interesting story put together from various articles and TV shows by the British Times paper. It shows what Obama and his friends are really all about.

Climate Change … It’s not about hope and change, it is about money.

I warn you, the first part is a little boring, but stick with it. The second part connects all the dots for you (it will open your eyes). The end explains how Obama and all his cronies were hoping to end up as multi-billionaires. (It’s definitely worth the read. You will not be disappointed).

A small bank in Chicago called SHOREBANK almost went bankrupt during the recession. The bank made a profit on its foreign micro-loans  but had lost money in sub-prime mortgages in the US. It was facing likely closure by federal regulators. However, because the bank’s executives were well connected with members of the Obama Administration, a private rescue bailout was arranged. The bank’s employees had donated money to Obama’s Senate campaign. In other words, ShoreBank was too politically connected to be allowed to go under.

ShoreBank survived and invested in many “green” businesses such as solar panel manufacturing. In fact, the bank was mentioned in one of Obama’s speeches during his election campaign because it subjected new business borrowers to Eco-litmus tests.

Prior to becoming President, Obama sat on the board of the JOYCE FOUNDATION, a liberal charity. This foundation was originally established by Joyce Kean’s family which had accumulated millions of dollars in the lumber industry. It mostly gave funds to hospitals but after her death in 1972, the foundation was taken over by radical environmentalists and social justice extremists.

The JOYCE FOUNDATION, which is rumored to have assets of 8 billion dollars,  set up and funded, with a few partners, something called the CHICAGO CLIMATE EXCHANGE, known as CXX.  It was to be the exchange (like the Chicago Grain Futures Market for agriculture) where Environmental Carbon Credits are traded.

Under Obama’s new bill, businesses in the future will be assessed a tax on how much CO2 they produce (their Carbon Footprint) or in other words how much they add to global warming. If a company produces less CO2 than their allotted measured limit, they earn a Carbon Credit. This Carbon Credit can be traded on the CXX exchange. Another company, which has gone over their CO2 limit, can buy the Credit and “reduce” their footprint and tax liability. Just like trading shares on Wall Street.

Well, it was the same JOYCE FOUNDATION, along with some other private partners and Wall Street firms that funded the bailout of ShoreBank.  The foundation became one of the major shareholders. The bank was designated to be the “banking arm” of the CHICAGO CLIMATE EXCHANGE (CXX). In addition, Goldman Sachs was  contracted to run the investment trading floor of the exchange.

So far so good; now the INTERESTING parts.

One ShoreBank co-founder, named Jan Piercy, was a Wellesley College roommate of Hillary Clinton. Hillary and Bill Clinton have long supported the bank and are small investors.

Another co-founder of Shorebank, named Mary Houghton, was a friend of Obama’s late mother. Obama’s mother worked on foreign MICRO-LOANS for the Ford Foundation. She worked for the foundation with a guy called Geithner. Yes, you guessed it. This man was the father of Tim Geithner, the present US Treasury Secretary, who failed to pay all his taxes for two years.

Another founder of ShoreBank was Ronald Grzywinski, a cohort and close friend of Jimmy Carter.

The former ShoreBank Vice Chairman was a man called Bob Nash. He was the deputy campaign manager of Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. He also sat on the board of the Chicago Law School with Obama and Bill Ayers, the former terrorist. Nash was also a member of Obama’s White House transition team.

(To jog your memories, Bill Ayers is a Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He founded the Weather Underground, a radical revolutionary group that bombed buildings in the 60s and 70s. He had no remorse for those who were killed, escaped jail on a technicality, and is still an admitted Marxist).

When Obama sat on the board of the JOYCE FOUNDATION, he “funneled” thousands of charity dollars to a guy named John Ayers, who runs a dubious education fund. Yes, you guessed it. The brother of Bill Ayers, the terrorist.

Howard Stanback is a board member of Shorebank. He is a former board chairman of the Woods Foundation. Obama and Bill Ayers, the terrorist, also sat on the board of the Woods Foundation. Stanback was formerly employed by New Kenwood Inc., a real estate development company co-owned by Tony Rezko.

(You will remember that Tony Rezko was the guy who gave Obama an amazing sweet deal on his new house. Years prior to this, the law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland had represented Rezko’s company and helped him get more than 43 million dollars in government funding. Guess who worked as a lawyer at the firm at the time. Yes, Barack Obama).

Adele Simmons, the Director of ShoreBank, is a close friend of Valerie Jarrett, a White House senior advisor to Obama. Simmons and Jarrett also sit on the board of a dubious Chicago Civic Organization.

Van Jones sits on the board of ShoreBank and is one the marketing directors for “green” projects. He also holds a senior advisor position for black studies at Princeton University. You will remember that Mr. Van Jones was appointed by Obama in 2009 to be a Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House. He was forced to resign over past political activities, including the fact that he is a Marxist.

Al Gore was one of the smaller partners to originally help fund the CHICAGO CLIMATE EXCHANGE. He also founded a company called Generation Investment Management (GIM) and registered it in London, England. GIM has close links to the UK-based Climate Exchange PLC, a holding company listed on the London Stock Exchange. This company trades Carbon Credits in Europe (just like CXX will do in the USA) and its floor is run by Goldman Sachs. Along with Gore, the other co-founder of GIM is Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury Secretary and former CEO of Goldman Sachs. His wife, Wendy, graduated from and is presently a Trustee of Wellesley College. Yes, the same college that Hillary Clinton and Jan Piercy, a co-founder of Shorebank attended. (They are all friends). The CXX was the brainchild of Northwestern University business professor Richard Sandor, who used $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based left-wing Joyce Foundation to launch the CCX.  For his efforts, Time named Sandor as one of its Heroes of the Planet in 2002 and one of its Heroes of the Environment in 2007.

Interesting?

Because many studies have been exposed as scientific nonsense, people are slowly realizing that man-made global warming is nothing more than a money-generating hoax. As a result, Obama was working feverishly to win the race.

Obama knew he had to get his bill passed before he lost his majority in Congress in the mid-term elections. Apart from Climate Change he “sold” this bill to the public as generating tax revenue to reduce  debt.

But, here’s the KICKER (THE MONEY TRAIL).

The initial estimates of the size of CCX’s trading was around $500 billion but that estimate ballooned to over 10 TRILLION dollars being traded each year. At a commission rate of only 4 percent, the exchange would earn close to 400 billion dollars to split between its owners, all Obama cronies. At a 2 percent rate, Goldman Sachs would also rake in 200 billion dollars each year.

But don’t forget SHOREBANK. With 10 trillion dollars flowing though its accounts, the bank looked to earn close to 40 billion dollars in interest each year for its owners (more Obama cronies), without even breaking a sweat.

It was estimated Al Gore alone would probably rake in 15 billion dollars just in the first year. Of course, Obama’s “commissions” would be held in trust for him at the Joyce Foundation. They were estimated to be over 8 billion dollars by the time he left office in 2013.

Some financial experts believed that this would prove to be the largest “scam” or “legal heist” in world history. Obama’s cronies make the Mafia look like rank amateurs. They will make Bernie Madoff’s fraud look like penny ante stuff.

and the Epitaph …

from an article on Pajamas Media, by Steve Milloy, who publishes JunkScience.com and is the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them.

“…Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX’s backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world.

The CCX seemed to have a lock on success. Not only was a young Barack Obama a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX, but over the years it attracted such big name climate investors as Goldman Sachs and Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the CCX’s highly anticipated looting of taxpayers and consumers — cap-and-trade imploded following its high water mark of the House passage of the Waxman-Markey bill. With ongoing economic recession, Climategate, and the tea party movement, what once seemed like a certainty became anything but.

CCX’s panicked original investors bailed out this spring, unloading the dog and its across-the-pond cousin, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), for $600 million to the New York Stock Exchange-traded Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) — an electronic futures and derivatives platform based in Atlanta and London. (Luckier than the CCX, the ECX continues to exist thanks to the mandatory carbon caps of the Kyoto Protocol.)

The ECX may soon follow the CCX into oblivion, however — the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. No new international treaty is anywhere in sight.

While we don’t know how well Al Gore and Goldman Sachs fared on their investments in the CCX, we do know that there’s no reason to cry for Sandor. He received $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake in CCX when it was sold. Not bad for a failure that somebody else financed… “

Read the full article here or click the link below.

And I can’t help but give a punt to Steve Milloy’s book Green Hell – a must read!
Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them

Related articles

• If Al Gore’s Chicago Climate Exchange Suffers Total Failure, Does the MSM Make a Sound? (pajamasmedia.com)
• Al Gore’s Climate Exchange Scheme Utterly Fails… Media Ignores It All (chicagonow.com)
• “Al Gore’s Climate Exchange Utterly Fails… Media Ignores It All” and related posts (bigjournalism.com)
• ShoreBank’s Ill-Fated Crosstown Expansion (online.wsj.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Thomas  Jefferson said in 1802:

‘I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people
of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.’

Admin : I rest my case …

I AM A SMOKER AND I VOTE AND I BELIEVE I AM A VICTIM OF DISCRIMINATION:

Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 I believe a class action could be taken by smokers:

Grounds of unlawful discrimination

Physical, intellectual, psychiatric, sensory, neurological or learning disabilities; physical disfigurement; disorders, illness or diseases that affect thought processes, perceptions of reality, emotions or judgement, or results in disturbed behaviours; presence in body of organisms causing disease or illness (eg HIV virus).

Areas covered

Employment; education; access to premises; accommodation; buying or selling land; activities of clubs; sport; administration of Commonwealth laws and programs; provision of goods; and services and facilities.

If we smokers want to get picky we could claim that we are victims of a disorder (addiction to nicotine) and that we have an illness that affects our thought processes (we are told we will die yet we continue to smoke).

We are denied accommodation or have to put up with ‘non-smoking’ accommodation, we are denied services and facilities at pubs, clubs, restaurants, hotels.   Coles Supermarkets refuse to allow you to buy cigarettes at the normal check-outs.  The government targets us specifically to increase taxes every budget and the list goes on …

And bear in mind that we are now told that Obesity is the biggest killer in Australia – yet Malls are banning smoking but not fast food outlets!!!!

If you are a smoker or you just hate discrimination order your sticker here:  dii@hereticjournal.com

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• Who has the real dirt on emissions trading? (greenfudge.org)

TORONTO, May 4 (Reuters) – Australia’s proposed new mining tax could prove advantageous for Canada by attracting investors seeking lower tax jurisdictions, Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Tuesday.
“I quite frankly need to review it further. I want to make sure I understand exactly what they’re doing,” Flaherty told reporters.
“If it is what it appears to be, a significant tax increase, that’s another competitive advantage for Canada. We’re reducing our corporate taxes.”

So !!!! This is why Australia’s market is down.

The Heretic thanks John P  BE Mining for this enlightening information.

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• Shares of mining companies fall over Australia’s tax plan (newstatesman.com)
• No hooray for Henry (thepunch.com.au)

The Heretic loves this man: Paul Colgan

• The one super phrase in a budget full of babble (thepunch.com.au)

Now Micro-Finance

… definitely worth talking about because it is so very easy for each of us to actually do something worthwhile for very little cost or effort. I came across this today “9 Ways to do Good with 5 minutes or $25.00″.

These guys are trying to do it right and what a wonderful concept it has been for so many.  And then of course my favourite people (not!) the wanker bankers just couldn’t keep their hands off it … see article below.   Not a day goes by that these double-breasted suits don’t find another way to feather their nests at the expense of the worst off in all societies.

Shame on them …

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• Global banking: A way to bilk the really, really poor (trueslant.com)