This is from Personal Liberty;

Moe, Larry And Curly Bernanke

WWW.FEDERALRESERVE.GOV

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said he wanted inflation. He got his wish. Now the question is: Is it getting out of hand?

In the 1940 short film “A Plumbing We Will Go,” The Three Stooges pose as plumbers trying to stop a leaky pipe in a large home while a party is going on.

Since they know nothing about plumbing, it isn’t long before the boys have connected the water pipes to a conduit and water is pouring out everywhere. Of course, the party is ruined and the house is wrecked.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is Moe, Larry and Curly all rolled into one, and his efforts to stop the leaky economy have been as successful as the boys’ efforts were in fixing the dripping pipe. Bernanke’s latest effort of quantitative easing — known as QE2 — is running out, and the bubble he created is deflating faster than one of the Stooges’ helium-filled cakes.

Last week, a Chinese ratings house accused the United States of defaulting on its massive debt by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies — eroding the wealth of its creditors, the biggest of which is China.

China holds $1.145 trillion of U.S. Treasury securities. That is down from its peak of $1.175 trillion in October, according to a story by the AFP news service.

China, the No. 1 holder of U.S. debt, is now a seller of U.S. Treasuries. Japan, the second largest holder of U.S. Treasuries, may soon be a seller as well. It needs money to repair infrastructure following this year’s earthquake and tsunami.

The stock market was down six weeks in a row before last week, when it finally finished a week on an up note. According to The Economic Collapse blog, that hasn’t happened since the dotcom bubble burst in May 2001.

The false euphoria created by QE2, which propped up Bernanke’s Wall Street buddies by driving money into the market, has worn off. Investors realize this, and they are looking for new places to put their money.

Meanwhile, once again, John and Jane American are watching their meager retirement funds dry up. Unemployment is up (the true unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers, is 22.3 percent, according to the National Inflation Association), manufacturing and consumer confidence are down and one in seven Americans is on food stamps. Millions of Americans receive some sort of government assistance.

The price of everything is increasing. According to NIA: “90% of sporting goods manufacturers have seen their input costs rise substantially this year and 41% of them have already announced major price increases for athletic apparel, footwear, and sports equipment. As the 8,000 toy manufacturers in China are forced to raise the wages they pay their employees, Toys R’ Us is now beginning to see major wholesale price increases for their products, which they will have to pass on to U.S. consumers. Hasbro recently raised prices on all of their products by 6% to 7%. Mattel recently imposed an across the board high single digit price increase after reporting a 33% decline in quarterly profits (despite sales surging by 8%) due to skyrocketing raw material costs.”

May sales reflected what consumers thought of the rising prices. Retail sales fell for the first time in 11 months. The drop in sales hit autos, electronics, appliances, furniture, groceries, sports retailers and department stores.

Bernanke said he wanted inflation. He got his wish. Now the question is: Is it getting out of hand?

Go here to read the rest of the article;

http://www.personalliberty.com/conservative-politics/government/moe...

This is a recent article from The Energy Tribune. The numbers are based on a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). There are graphs and charts available at the link that did not transfer over which show the numbers more dramatically. By the way, the shale oil deposits that are not included in the numbers in this article are estimated to be over 800 Billion barrels, that is per the U.S. Department of Natural Resources.

U.S. Has Earth’s Largest Energy Resources

By Peter C Glover
Posted on Mar. 24, 2011

In case anyone missed it, let me repeat something that is of a magnitude of 10 on the scale of news-quakes for Joe Public USA: America’s combined energy resources are, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CSR), the largest on earth. They eclipse Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th) and Canada (6th) combined – and that’s without including America’s shale oil deposits and, in the future, the potentially astronomic impact of methane hydrates.

The energy facts in the CRS report should be making front page news all over America. Mostly it isn’t. Given the devastating news from Japan and New Zealand, it may be right to postpone dancing in the streets. But something else is going on. Even though they are going to dominate global energy supply for decades to come the insidious war on vital fossil fuels continues apace.

Thus it perhaps falls to a friend of the US (i.e. me) to state that if the White House is in any way serious about impacting the economic Black H*** that is the burgeoning national debt, reinvigorating business big-time, creating real jobs and restoring ebbing national wealth, the best shot by a distance if you’re American ... well, you’re standing on it, or rather above it.

While love, spiritually speaking and in fiction, may make the world go around, it is energy – and mostly hydrocarbon energy – that actually drives it. As blockbuster thrillers sometimes put it, “Who will tell the President?”

Political pantomime

From over here, the lack of a comprehensive US energy policy and the incoherence of President Obama’s political take on energy, reminds me of a pantomime I saw last Christmas, Aladdin. The cave is full of energy riches, but ‘Emperor’ Obama – or is it Wishy-Washy? –refuses to allow the words “open sesame” to be spoken.

Senator Lisa Murkowski, Ranking Member of the Senate Energy and National Resources Committee, takes up the theme: “As we debate ways to reduce gas prices and provide relief to American families and businesses, this report should be required reading for every member of Congress.” How about for every American citizen too, Senator? Murkowski adds, “For the sake of our national security, our economy, and the world’s environment, we need to explore and develop more of our own resources.”

“The Obama administration has made a conscious policy choice to raise energy prices, accomplished in good measure by restricting access to domestic energy supplies.” So says Senator James Inhofe, a Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He adds forthrightly, “We could help bring affordable energy to consumers, create new jobs, and grow the economy if the Obama administration would simply get out of the way so America can realize its true energy potential.”

Wow, heavy stuff. But then there’s much to be ‘heavy’ about.

While the US is often depicted as having only a tiny minority of the world’s oil reserves at around 28 billion barrels (based on the somewhat misleading figure of ‘proven reserves’) according to the CRS in reality it has around 163 billion barrels. As Inhofe’s EPW press release comments, “That’s enough oil to maintain America’s current rates of production and replace imports from the Persian Gulf for more than 50 years”. Next up, there’s coal. The CRS report reveals America’s reserves of coal are unsurpassed, accounting for over 28 percent of the world’s coal. Much of it is high quality too. The CRS estimates US recoverable coal reserves at around 262 billion tons (not including further massive, difficult to access, Alaskan reserves). Given the US consumes around 1.2 billion tons a year, that’s a couple of centuries of coal use, at least.

In 2009 the CRS upped its 2006 estimate of America’s enormous natural gas deposits by 25 percent to around 2,047 trillion cubic feet, a conservative figure given the expanding shale gas revolution. At current rates of use that’s enough for around 100 years. Then there is still the, as yet largely publicly untold, story of methane hydrates to consider, a resource which the CRS reports alludes to as “immense...possibly exceeding the combined energy content of all other known fossil fuels.” According to the Inhofe’s EPW, “For perspective, if just 3 percent of this resource can be commercialized ... at current rates of consumption, that level of supply would be enough to provide America’s natural gas for more than 400 years.”

See what I mean about an Aladdin’s Cave of untapped energy? Could America.........

To read the rest of the article and view the graphs and charts, go here;

http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/6933/US-Has-Earths-Larges...

This is from our friends at Personal Liberty;

Who Shot The Dollar?

PHOTOS.COM

President Barack Obama delivered the deathblow to the dollar.

Who killed the U.S. dollar? This question will be debated by future historians. Already, more people are asking that question than tuned in to find out who shot J.R. on Dallas. The lineup of suspects is long, but it ends with Barack Obama, the triggerman who killed the buck.

The first wound came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who expanded the Federal government’s influence far beyond what the writers of the Constitution ever imagined. He devalued the price of gold and made it impossible for ordinary Americans to convert currency to bullion. But FDR was also crucial during America’s World War II victory, a pivotal event that set the stage for America to become the world’s largest creditor and greatest superpower.

LBJ Chooses Guns And Butter

Another suspect is Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. When I was in college studying economics, our professor made us read history. This seemed counterintuitive until we read about the guns-and-butter policies of the Johnson Administration.

And while Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama make Johnson look like a penny-pincher, Johnson was the first to take a shot at the dollar.

Johnson pressed forward his vision with major spending programs for education, medical care, crime and transportation. He wanted to transform America the way FDR had. And he had a war to fight in Vietnam.

Gold demand rose, creating a drawdown on America’s gold reserves. The root of it all was a growing trade deficit that the United States owed to the rest of the world.

The Administration of John F. Kennedy knew America’s gold standard was in trouble. In January 1961, Kennedy’s Undersecretary of the Treasury, Robert Roosa, suggested the U.S. and Europe pool their gold to prevent a private marketplace for gold in which the price would exceed the mandated price of $35 per ounce. French President Charles de Gaulle reneged on the deal and began to redeem dollars for gold instead of U.S. Treasuries. The drain on U.S. gold became severe.

The 1960s marked a gigantic increase in Federal spending. Johnson’s two-front war was being fought at a prohibitive cost. In 1968, for the first time since 1893, the United States ran a deficit in its balance of trade. Federal debt began to soar. By the end of the 1960s, the U.S. faced the stark choice of eliminating trade deficits or devaluing the dollar.

Gold On Nixon’s Enemies List

On Aug. 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon cut the final link between gold and the dollar. Other nations could no longer redeem rapidly depreciating greenbacks for bullion.

In February 1973, the world’s currencies “floated.” By the end of 1974, the price of gold had soared from $35 to $195 an ounce. The U.S. could suddenly pump dollars without constraint. It was a period during which red flags were being raised for paper investors, few of whom paid any notice.

The majority of investors would pay a steep price for their ignorance. Over the next decade, they suffered through the worst bear market in stocks since the Great Depression and the worst bond market of the 20th century.

A Democrat Gives The Dollar A Reprieve

It is ironic that another Democrat would breathe life into the buck, but that is what President Bill Clinton did.

During the Clinton Administration — with the help of innovative accounting — the dollar stormed back. The disgrace Clinton brought to the Oval Office over the Monica Lewinsky affair seems almost forgivable since his Administration presided over a growing economy and what underpinned it, a strong dollar. More than a decade ago, the world had confidence in the U.S. dollar.

If you do not believe me, check the chart below.

As you can see, the greenback has been experiencing an unprecedented decline since 2001. No doubt much of the weakness in the dollar was caused by another guns-and-butter President: George W. Bush.

Just 2½ years into office, Obama is pushing the value of the dollar even lower. It’s so low that the value of the U.S. dollar now threatens to undermine our future and our children’s future.

To read the rest of the article go here:

http://www.personalliberty.com/conservative-politics/government/who-shot-the-dollar/?eiid=&rmid=2011_06_15_PLA_[P11408439]&rrid=394822321