A company called NeoStem will be announcing a joint project with the Vatican on Tuesday to promote research in adult stem cell therapy.
It’s not often that the Vatican gets directly involved with a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and while the Catholic Church is not making a financial commitment in the deal, it is a kind of “Vatican Seal of Approval.”
The charitable arm of the biopharmeceutical company, the Stem for Life Foundation, will be working together with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture to try to show the promise of adult stem cell research in treating disease.
The Catholic Church has long opposed research on embryonic stem cells, arguing that such work means destroying life.
“There are terrible ethical and moral problems with the use of embryonic stem cells,” said Fr. John Zuhlsdorf of the Catholic Online Forum. “To use them you have to kill an embryo. This is not a problem with adult stem cells.”
Fr. Robert Gahl, professor of ethics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, said the Vatican should be congratulated for working with NeoStem.
“This is an ethical approach to discovering new cures for thousands of diseases, even including degenerative conditions,” Gahl told FoxNews.com. “Tens of thousands of patients have already been successfully treated and the further promise of this research is truly exciting.”
Fr. Thomas Berg of the Westchester Institute, a Catholic think tank, said the initiative is an example of a Vatican department thinking out of the box – at least by Vatican standards – and trying to engage the world of biotechnology.
“I think we should all welcome this announcement as a sign that the Church is indeed trying to engage that culture in a positive way,” Berg told Fox.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told the country’s military to be combat-ready in a message broadcast last week that coincided with South Korea’s announcement that it blamed his regime for the sinking of a warship, a dissident group said.
The order was broadcast on May 20 by O Kuk Ryol, vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, according to the website of North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a Seoul-based group run by defectors from the communist country. Yonhap News agency reported on the posting earlier today, sending the won lower by the most in more than a year and causing stocks to drop.
The report added to perceptions of increased tension in the Korean peninsula following the March 26 sinking of the 1,200 ton Cheonan. South Korea yesterday announced plans for joint military exercises with the U.S. off the west coast where the ship sank, while North Korea today warned of military action in the area after accusing the South of violating its territory in the disputed zone.
“For Kim Jong Il to be giving such an order is pretty serious,” said Kim Yong Hyun, professor of North Korean studies at Seoul-based Dongguk University, adding that he doubted that such a direct order was given.
A U.S. soldier is under investigation for posting a ‘disgraceful’ video on his Facebook page, taunting Iraqi children by asking if they are gay, engage in sex acts and if they would grow up to be terrorists.
The two young boys did not appear to understand the questions, which were in English, but smiled at the camera and at times flashed the ‘thumbs up’ gesture during the 30-second clip.
Spc Robert Rodriguez, based at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, was ordered to remove the video from his site, U.S. army spokesman Major Bill Coppernoll said.
‘The incident is currently under investigation and the army will take appropriate action based on the findings of the investigation,’ he said.
It was not immediately clear if Mr Rodriguez shot the video or just posted it, Maj Coppernoll added.
HARTFORD – While many campaigns were taking a breather Monday from the long hours of the political party conventions, Democrat Ned Lamont came to the capital city to talk about job creation with a group of young professionals.
About a dozen attendees gathered around long tables to kick around ideas about how to improve Connecticut’s image among some that it is merely a stopping point between New York and Boston. The group gathered at the University of Hartford, which is about halfway between Albany and Providence.
“All my friends are headed to D.C., New York or San Francisco,” said Meg Evans, a 22-year-old senior at Yale University who has lived in Connecticut virtually her whole life. “That’s a big pull.”
Many of her friends, she said, actually live in Manhattan and make the reverse commute to work in Stamford.
“If you go to those train stations in Fairfield County, there are as many people coming in as going out,” Lamont responded.
One woman caught Lamont’s attention when she said she left the famed Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and is now teaching political science at the University of Connecticut. She said that Connecticut would be a better state if there was a light rail system to get from UConn to New Haven.
Others in the roundtable discussed the long-stalled New Britain-to-Hartford busway, although some said that will not make much difference in the quality of life in either of those cities.
“The heck with the Research Triangle,” Lamont told the group. “You want to be in New Britain. … Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport were three of the richest cities in the world a few generations ago, and they can be again.”
Lamont will be facing former Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy in the Democratic primary on August 10. On the same day, Republicans Tom Foley of Greenwich, Mike Fedele of Stamford, and Oz Griebel of Simsbury will be battling in the GOP primary.
Anti-war protester Brian Haw was arrested today as police carried out security sweeps ahead of the Queen’s Speech.
Mr Haw was seen being handcuffed by police as they cleared the area outside the Houses of Parliament before the monarch’s visit this afternoon.
He and other peace campaigners have been camping there and maintaining a 24-hour peace vigil.
Police with sniffer dogs moved in this morning to search the ragtag collection of tents in what Scotland Yard said was a ’standard’ security operation.
Mr Haw, who was wearing a grubby T-shirt declaring ‘IRAQ 2,000,000 DEAD, 4,000,000 FLED, was allegedly trying to stop them when he was arrested.
Transonic Combustion, Inc., a fuel-injection systems startup, announced today that Bob Lutz has joined the company’s board of directors.
“Lutz brings to Transonic’s leadership team a legendary career in the global automotive industry, including senior leadership positions at four of the world’s leading automakers,” Transonic said in a statement.
“For the foreseeable future, the internal combustion engine will remain the dominant propulsion system for automobiles,” Lutz said, “and there is still a lot of room to improve its efficiency. Customers and manufacturers want better fuel economy, lower emissions and a great vehicle experience all at an attractive price. Transonic’s new supercritical fuel injection technology can greatly improve engine efficiency and potentially become the new industry standard.”
Lutz recently retired from his nine year position as vice chairman of General Motors. His resume also holds respectable titles including CEO of Exide Corp; a 12 year position with Chrysler where he was vice chairman, president, chief operation officer and executive vice president; 12 years with FoMoCo; and three years with BMW.
Guess Lutz has no interest in retiring and resting… ever.
Hillary Clinton was trotted out by the global elite today with task in-hand — war with the authoritarian state of North Korea.
“U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that North Korea’s sinking of a South Korean warship has created a ‘highly precarious’ security situation in the region and that the Obama administration is working to prevent an escalation of tension that could lead to conflict,” reports the Associated Press. “We are working hard to avoid an escalation of belligerence and provocation,” Clinton said. “This is a highly precarious situation that the North Koreans have caused in the region.”
Back in March, when the 1,200 ton corvette Cheonan sank in the Yellow Sea, there was scant evidence North Korea had anything to do with the disaster.
“Initial reports of the sinking had provoked fears that North Korea had attacked the ship, possibly with a torpedo, however South Korean military authorities have now said there is no evidence so far that North Korean forces were to blame,” the Daily Telegraph reported on March 27. “Speculation is now turning to the possibility that the Cheonan, which would have been carrying torpedos, suffered an accident or had perhaps struck a sea mine that had broken free from its mooring.”
In order to blame North Korea and set the stage for the possibility of a war that will conveniently displace the daily horror show of the engineered global economic implosion, a “joint civilian-military investigation group” of military and civilian experts was cobbled together.
“Investigators on Thursday presented fragments of a torpedo, which they said sank the vessel on the night of March 26 near the disputed West Sea maritime border between the two Koreas,” CNSNews reported on May 20. “The evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that the torpedo was fired by a North Korean submarine,” said Yoon Duk-yong, co-chairman of the joint investigation team. “There is no other plausible explanation,” he added.
On cue the script-reading corporate media chanted the mantra that the evil North Koreans had sunk the military ship and wantonly killed South Korean sailors, thus attempting to rationalize the mass murder that may or may not soon unfold.
Lew Rockwell hit the nail square on the head. “In the most recent Korean incident, did the North’s navy sink a ship of the South’s navy? Only one thing is for sure: it is none of the US’s business, which should immediately end its long occupation of the South,” he writes. “But since the empire seeks to rule the world and beyond, everything is its business, and it looks as if the chickenhawk Obama may be about to launch a second Korean war.”
Naturally almost the entire nation is under a government and corporate media induced voodoo trance on the stage-managed issue. According to the official version of history, North Korea crossed the border at the 38th Parallel and mercilessly attacked South Korea as reunification negotiations were underway. The Chinese and Soviets supported North Korea and the United States and the United Nations supported South Korea.
Establishment historians mark the Korean War as the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War. Nearly a million and a half people lost their lives, including more than 55,000 U.S. soldiers.
Establishment history books omit a few inconvenient facts about the Korean War. As early as 1949, South Korean troops were launching incursions into North Korea, actions that ultimately led to the support from communist China and the Soviet Union. President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, announced in 1950 that the United States had little interest in Korea because the country had no geopolitical significance and yet John Foster Dulles is said to have worked behind the scenes with the leaders of Taiwan, South Korea and the U.S. military-industrial complex to set the stage for war.
As the Col. L Fletcher Prouty documents, the Cold War was a wholly manufactured phenomenon. Prouty was an insider who spent nine of his 23 year military career in the Pentagon — including a stint as a liaison officer between the CIA and the Air Force for Clandestine Operations — and wrote two books detailing how the elite systematically plan and execute wars and conflicts around the world. “The Grand Strategy decision to create a new bipolar world had already been made in 1944-45,” writes Prouty in JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy (p. 12).
British researcher and author Atony Sutton has documented how the global elite financed and supported the Soviet Union from its inception and provided the communists with military assistance (see Sutton’s The Best Enemy Money Can Buy). “The United States financed the economic and military development of the Soviet Union. Without this aid, financed by U.S. taxpayers, there would be no significant Soviet military threat, for there would be no Soviet economy to support the Soviet military machine, let alone sophisticated military equipment,” Sutton wrote in 1986 before the planned implosion of the Soviet Union.
“It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the U.S.S.R. was made in the U.S.A.,” notes Gary Allen. “Remember that for over 150 years it has been standard operating procedure of the Rothschilds and their allies to control both sides of every conflict. You must have an ‘enemy’ if you are going to collect from the King.”
It helps, as well, to have “enemy” that you admire, as David Rockefeller admires communism, specifically the murderous version created by Mao. “Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history,” Rockefeller told the New York Times on August 10, 1973.
“In Korea we have direct killing of Americans with Soviet weapons,” Sutton writes in the concluding chapter of his book. “The 130,000-man North Korean Army, which crossed the South Korean border in June 1950, was trained, supported, and equipped by the Soviet Union.” Soviet tanks with U.S. parts, artillery tractors that were direct metric copies of Caterpillar tractors, trucks from a Henry Ford-Gorki plant in Russia, and airplanes built in plants with U.S. Lend-Lease equipment were used to kill U.S. soldiers in Korea.
Nearly two decades later, the U.S. would still be selling military technology to the Soviets. “Who were the government officials responsible for this transfer of known military technology? The concept originally came from National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger,” writes Sutton. Kissinger was (and is) “a paid family employee of the Rockefellers since 1958 and has served as International Advisory Committee Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, a Rockefeller concern.”
In regard to North Korea’s nuclear threat, this too was made in the U.S.A. Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and high-level globalist operative, made it possible for North Korea to possess nuclear technology.
In early 2000, Rumsfeld was involved with Swiss-based ABB when the company secured a $200 million contract with Pyongyang. The ABB contract was to deliver equipment and services for two nuclear power stations at Kumho on the North Korean east coast. The ABB contract followed a 1994 deal between the U.S. and North Korea allowing construction of two reactors in exchange for a freeze on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, a deal North Korea subsequently violated (or so we are told) as it continued to develop a nuclear weapons program.
North Korea initiated a missile program in the early 1960s with the assistance of China and the Soviet Union, that is to say with technology introduced by the United States, as Sutton has documented. Thousands of missiles are currently aimed at Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
North Korea, under the authoritarian cult of personality leadership of the psychotic Kim Jong-il, has vowed to unleash these missiles and his military machine against South Korea if it retaliates for the sinking of the Cheonan. “If (South Korea) tries to deal any retaliation or punishment, or if they try sanctions or a strike on us … we will answer to this with all-out war,” North Korean naval spokesman Col. Pak In Ho warned on Thursday.
“The U.S. and South Korean militaries will undergo two new training exercises in light of last week’s finding that North Korea sank a South Korean navy ship, killing 46 sailors, a Pentagon spokesman announced today,” the American Forces Press Service has announced. “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, on a pre-arranged diplomatic trip to Asia, today said U.S. and South Korean military leaders are working closely to ensure readiness in the region,” in other words possibly preparing for armed conflict.
“President Obama has directed his military commanders to coordinate closely with their Korean counterparts to ensure readiness and to deter future aggression,” Clinton said. “As part of our ongoing dialogue, we will explore further enhancements to our joint posture on the peninsula.”
In remains to be seen if these “further enhancements,” coupled with North Korea’s avowed declaration of “all-out war” in response, will result in hostilities.
If war ensues, not only will Lindsay Lohan be swept off the front page, but so will the economic crisis that is bearing down menacingly on the world with each passing day.
There’ll be no cramming for Biology 101 finals or sitting through riveting Intro to Sociology for Miley Cyrus: America’s Most Famous Teen Girl doesn’t want to go to college. The “Can’t be Tamed” singer, 17, has no plans to follow in her sister’s footsteps of higher education despite being eligible to begin her freshman year in the fall.
After all, they’ll be plenty of time for that when she’s a senior citizen.
Cyrus told Q100’s Bert Show Monday morning: “My sister went to MTSU in Nashville, so I’d probably want to be there with all my friends, but I’m not gonna go to college right now. I am a firm believer that you can go back at any age you want, because my grandma went back to college at 62 years old.”
A Wilmington Island family is upset, after they say four Tybee Island Police officers beat their autistic son.
A broken tooth, scrapes and bruises and two puncture marks from Tasers are the only reminders Clifford Grevemberg has of his visit to Tybee Island Friday night.
“They literally just beat the heck out of me,” he said.
A beating 18-year-old Clifford and his brother, Dario Mariani, said happened after they left the annual Tybee Beach Bum Parade.
They say they stopped to get food at the Rockhouse. Clifford is 18, but couldn’t go inside. Instead he sat on the curb. That’s when he said the trouble started.
“The UK worryingly combines a couple of financial parallels to Japan with far less room for fiscal action to compensate for them than Japan had.”
Britain faces an uncomfortable trio of obstacles, none of which faced Japan in the 1980s or 1990s. Unlike Japan, Britain has to sell a large proportion of its debt to overseas investors, who are more likely to exit the market if they become scared of Britain’s fiscal prospects. The UK also faces the challenge of having to boost a troubled manufacturing sector if it is to recover sufficiently. Unlike Japan, it does not have the luxury of having a worldwide market with a large and growing appetite for exports.
BitTorrent, as a technology, has a stigma about it, but it certainly transformed Internet traffic for the past years and plenty of companies and projects have been using it for more efficient distribution of large amounts of data. With the release of uTorrent 2.0, a lightweight BitTorrent client owned by BitTorrent Inc., the company, a new prot… (read more)
Tila Tequila is finally getting help the only way she knows how -– by going on a reality TV show.
The trainwreck attention-seeker/compulsive fibber has signed up for the next season of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab, a fly-on-the-wall reality series that follows D to Z-grade “celebrities” on their path to recovery in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation clinic.
We thought her only addiction was to attention (and she’s obviously not seeking treatment for that), but Tila claims she’s become dependent on prescription drugs in the months since the death of her fiancee Casey Johnson — who died of complications from diabetes last December.
Tila — who previously starred on the MTV reality dating hit A Shot At Love — hopes that if she stays sober, VH1 will offer her a spinoff show about her new life.
“I KNOW I am an EXTREMELY smart girl, and to run all these empires when I am not even 30 yet, is quite an accomplishment, however I finally admitted to myself that I cannot rely on taking prescription pills everyday for the rest of my life!” the former MySpace pin-up blogged on Monday. “I MUST not be another LINDSAY LOHAN where I just flush everything I worked so hard for down the toilet for nothing…”
I just about fell out of my chair when I heard about a new trend in using alternative or green sources of energy for data center cooling. Apparently, the good folks at HP recently released a research paper on the use of cattle waste as a source of power for cooling data centers. No, seriously. The NY Times ran a story about the research paper and said that “according to HP’s calculations, 10,000 cows could fuel a one-megawatt data center which would be the equivalent of a small computing center used by a bank.”
Moo! A bit of CFD fun with FloEFD. Image courtesy of Mentor Graphics.
Now I don’t know if anyone is seriously thinking about using biogas at this stage but I do know that data center cooling is a hot (pardon the pun) topic. Up until a few years ago, data center cooling costs were not something organizations worried about. The cost was rolled up under facilities and as long as the data center got enough power and cooling no one really fussed about the cost. But then the cost of buying electricity shot up drastically and the rules of the game changed. As a result, IT managers realized that they needed to do something a bit more sophisticated than “shirt-sleeve” management.
There are a lot of resources out there about why simulation can help IT managers rein in the challenge of data center cooling – for example, we’ve got a couple of on-demand presentations titled: CFD in the Data Center: It’s Not About the Hall and Learn How to Reduce your Data Center Running Costs. But if you’re interested in learning about how an organization has successfully leveraged simulation (and all the gory details) please join us for an upcoming presentation titled: The Chilling Facts in Data Center Design. The presentation will take place on June 16 and you can sign-up for it here. Now I know most of you are mechanical design engineers who don’t deal with data centers so I’d appreciate it if you were to spread the word about the presentation to your IT departments. Anyway, our guest presenter for this session is Stuart Walker who is the Worldwide Facilities Critical Infrastructure Manager at Mentor Graphics. Stuart (who is an IT guy as opposed to a CFD specialist), will give us all a behind-the-scenes look at how Mentor Graphics manages our data centers around the world. Having met Stuart in person recently, I have a new appreciation for what IT managers in a similar role do across the world. Besides, this is a great chance to meet with someone who not only understands the pains associated with managing data centers but can also share firsthand knowledge of how simulation has made his life a bit easier. I really hope you can join us — it’s going to be a good session.
The other day I was feeling too lazy to leave the house, so it was one of those, “What can I make for dinner with whatever is in the fridge?”
Fortunately, when mom and dad were here last month we did a Costco run and in the freezer I had a bazillion shrimp and mango chicken sausages. Okay, well not a bazillion, but when you buy stuff at Costco for one, the amount of food you get can feel ginormous. I’ll probably be eating that frozen shrimp until the end of the year.
A shrimp scampi was sounding pretty good, and when I looked in the pantry, I didn’t have any pasta, but I had a package of organic Cha soba noodles infused with fresh green tea leaves. My friend @bmok likes to, what he calls, “bastardize” culinary traditions by combining things you’d not normally see but just might be good together.
As you know, I’m totally into experimenting with ingredients, so I thought, why not make a scampi using soba noodles instead of a fettuccine, and then using the mango chicken sausage instead of bacon? I like to use bacon in my scampi dishes. It’s like East meets suburban Italian. Talk about melting pot ay!
I’m so glad I got creative because this dish was awesome, so this week it becomes my, “I tried something new” eats. Best yet, my concoction was easy to make!
I used olive oil in this recipe instead of butter because I have the cow milk allergy. If I didn’t have the allergy, I’d totally be using slabs of creamy butter. I also use shaved manchego cheese because it’s made from sheep milk which I can eat and have recently become addicted to as seen in this golden beets with shaved manchego and pecans dish I made last week. If I could have cow, I’d try shaved asiago or gouda.
Ingredients (serves 2):
2 cups cooked soba noodles
12 large frozen pre-cooked shrimp (thawed)
1 mango chicken sausage sliced into thin pieces
4 cloves of diced garlic (use more if you want more garlicky taste)
fresh manchego cheese to shave on top
3 tbsp olive oil
garlic salt and black pepper
Let’s get cooking:
Cook the soba noodles according to the package, drain and set aside.
In a sauce pan, pour in 1 tbsp of olive oil, heat to medium, and then fry the mango sausage until brown on both sides. I fried the sausage slightly not too much just to give it a bit of a crunchy bacon like experience.
Add in the remaining 2 tbsp of olive oil into the pan, along with the garlic. Saute the garlic with the sausage for about a minute. I like the amount of olive oil on the dry side to help reduce fat content, but if you want a bit more of a wet scampi, then add one more tbsp of olive oil.
Toss in the shrimp and add in garlic salt and pepper to taste. I added just a tad bit more salt then I normally add because when you mix everything with the noodles the salt taste will calm down some. You can also wait until you mix the shrimp, sausage mixture with the noodles first, then taste, and determine if you need more salt or not. Better to start salt light than with too much.
You won’t need to cook the shrimp long because it’s already cooked. You just want to heat it up like a couple minutes. Continue to stir the sausage, shrimp, and garlic while cooking the shrimp.
Take the pan of the hot burner and put on a cool burner. Pour the soba noodles into the pan with the sausage, shrimp, and garlic. Mix everything well together.
Plate the scampi, and then shave fresh manchego cheese on top. Enjoy!
" … Wegmans, a supermarket chain … launched a fleet of 50 hydrogen fuel cell-powered pallet trucks using Air Products’ (NYSE: APD) … technology at its Pottsville, Pa. warehouse … the first commercial site in Pennsylvania … using hydrogen-powered material handling equipment."
" … environmental benefits … Because hydrogen is the fuel source, heat and water are the only byproducts. …"
" …systems can be quickly refueled in less than five minutes, … Wegmans hopes to convert its entire lift truck fleet at the Pottsville facility to hydrogen fuel cells over the next few years. …"
"… fuel cell-powered equipment provides consistent power strength during use and does not experience decreased performance or wear down as traditional lead-acid battery units do … fuel cell forklifts are not adversely impacted by temperature or by operating in coolers and freezers, … fuel cell equipment is more environmentally friendly because it does not involve lead-acid battery storage and disposal issues."
I threw in the link to a map and comparison map. Everything is in place for the 2007 levels to be met although wind is supposed to have a lot to do with it all.
The reality is that we have been and continuing to lose roughly the same amount of ice each year. Because so much has now been destroyed the impact of each year is rapidly accelerating.
I predicted now almost three years ago that the loss rate strongly supported a general wipe out by 2012. I even made a bit of noise about it. A couple of months later, someone over at NASA came out and said the same thing. I suspected that they already knew as much and did not want to get caught out looking like idiots in four years.
I actually predicted the present deteriation long before it became apparent that 2007 was going to be decisive year in ice loss.
This story informs us just now rotten the ice presently is and just how little this winter’s weather affected the Arctic.
My only surprise is over how few among the media or anyone else even understands what is happening. Recall every scientist was calling for a loss of ice safely in the distant future and generally well outside the likely time lines of their career. It was apparent that no one appreciated the trend lines except in the most simplistic terms conforming to linear assumptions in a clearly non linear process.
At this point their worst expectations are turning out to be ridiculously conservative and obviously misleading. The Arctic is opening up to global shipping and will now be open for perhaps four hundred years.
I am been aggressive on this and my reasons are sound. The warming that is hitting into the Arctic is ocean based and is part of a millennial cycle. It will actually get much warmer before this is all done.
Coverage at 2007 level now, and declining faster, making ice-free northern summers possible soon
Bob Weber
The Canadian PressPublished on Thursday, May. 20, 2010
Arctic sea ice is on track to recede to a record low this year, suggesting that northern waters free of summer ice are coming faster than anyone thought.
The latest satellite information shows ice coverage is equal to what it was in 2007, the lowest year on record, and is declining faster than it did that year.
“Could we break another record this year? I think it’s quite possible,” said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
“We are going to lose the summer sea-ice cover. We can’t go back.”
In April, the centre published data showing that sea ice had almost recovered to the 20-year average. That ignited a flurry of interest on climate change skeptic blogs.
But much of that ice was thin and new. The warmest April on record in the Arctic made short work of it.
Ice cover has already fallen back to where it was in 2007 at this time of year and is disappearing at a faster pace than it did then. Dr. Serreze said winds, cloud cover or other weather conditions could slow the melt, but he points out that the decline is likely to speed up even more in June and July.
“Will [thawing] this year be particularly fast?” he asked. “We don’t know. We really don’t know.”
One of Canada‘s top sea-ice experts suggests things might even be worse than Dr. Serreze thinks. His data could be underestimating the collapse of summer ice cover, said David Barber of the University of Manitoba. Researchers can’t learn anything from satellite data about the state or thickness of the ice.
“What we think is thick multiyear ice late in the summer is in fact not,” he said. “It’s heavily decayed first-year ice. When that stuff starts to reform in the fall, we think it’s multiyear ice, but it’s not.”
Arctic explorers and scientific expeditions are finding more open water and untrustworthy ice ever, Prof. Barber said.
He pointed out the Arctic continued to lose multiyear ice even in 2008 and 2009, when total ice coverage rebounded somewhat.
True multiyear ice – the thick, hard stuff that stops ships – now comprises about 18 per cent of the Arctic ice pack. In 1981, when Prof. Barber first went north, that figure was 90 per cent.
“This is all just part of a trajectory moving toward a seasonally ice-free Arctic,” he said. “That’s happening more quickly than we thought it would happen.”
Once northern waters are clear in the summer, there will be little difference between navigating the Northwest Passage and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, he suggested.
He recounts sailing through degraded ice in an icebreaker. The ship’s top speed in open water was 13.7 knots. Its speed through the decayed ice was 13 knots.
Like Ellen, I support this approach completely. This maps out a lot of the fine detail and she is well into that in her own research. This supports current initiatives in this direction in several States.
The need to redistribute the powers of banking away from Wall Street could hardly be more apparent. California today must go begging to New York to salvage a banking system and credit system ravaged by decisions made in New York.
Even with a newly launched State bank, California will still be a long ways from been out of the woods. Yet the tools and the reshaped political ecology brought about by such a change will shift momentum in the right direction.
In fact, the capacity of the governor to influence the economy will be hugely strengthened for the better.
Importantly, all stakeholders will face transparency regarding the decisions they influence and get direct feedback from other stakeholders. This can only be healthy.
Taking Back the Money Power: How Hidden Pools of Government Money Could Help Save the Economy
For over a decade, accountant Walter Burien has been trying to rouse the public over what he contends is a massive conspiracy and cover-up, involving trillions of dollars squirreled away in funds maintained at every level of government. His numbers may be disputed, but these funds definitely exist, as evidenced by the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) required of every government agency. If they don’t represent a concerted government conspiracy, what are they for? And how can they be harnessed more efficiently to help allay the financial crises of state and local governments?
The Elusive CAFR Money
Burien is a former commodity trading adviser who has spent many years peering into government books. He notes that the government is composed of 54,000 different state, county, and local government entities, including school districts, public authorities, and the like; and that these entities all keep their financial assets in liquid investment funds, bond financing accounts and corporate stock portfolios. The only income that must be reported in government budgets is that from taxes, fines and fees; but the investments of government entities can be found in official annual reports (CAFRs), which must be filed with the federal government by local, county and state governments. These annual reports show that virtually every U.S. city, county, and state has vast amounts of money stashed away in surplus funds. Burien maintains that these slush funds have been kept concealed from taxpayers, even as taxes are being raised and citizens are being told to expect fewer government services.
Burien was originally alerted to this information by Lt. Col. Gerald Klatt, who evidently died in 2004 under mysterious circumstances, adding fuel to claims of conspiracy and cover-up. Klatt was a an Air Force auditor and federal accountant, and it’s not impossible that he may have gotten too close to some military stash being used for nefarious ends. But it is hard to envision how all the municipal governments hording their excess money in separate funds could be complicit in a massive government conspiracy. Still, if that is not what is going on, why such an inefficient use of public monies?
A Simpler Explanation
I got a chance to ask that question in April, when I was invited to speak at a conference of Government Finance Officers in Missouri. The friendly public servants at the conference explained that maintaining large “rainy day” funds is simply how local governments must operate. Unlike private businesses, which have bank credit lines they can draw on if they miscalculate their expenses, local governments are required by law to balance their budgets; and if they come up short, public services and government payrolls may be frozen until the voters get around to approving a new bond issue. This has actually happened, bringing local government to a standstill. In emergencies, government officials can try to borrow short-term through “certificates of participation” or tax participation loans, but the interest rates are prohibitively high; and in today’s tight credit market, finding willing lenders is difficult.
To avoid those unpredictable contingencies, municipal governments will keep a cushion of from 20% to 75% more than their budgets actually require. This money is invested, but not necessarily lucratively. One finance officer, for example, said that her city had just bid out $2 million as a 30-day certificate of deposit (CD) to two large banks at a meager annual interest of 0.11%. It was a nice spread for the banks, which could leverage the money into loans at 6% or so; but it was a pretty sparse deal for the city.
Meanwhile, Back in California
That was in Missouri, but the figures I was particularly interested were for my own state of California, which was struggling with a budget deficit of $26.3 billion as of April 2010. Yet the State Treasurer’s website says that he manages a Pooled Money Investment Account (PMIA) tallying in at nearly $71 billion as of the same date, including a Local Agency Investment Fund (LAIF) of $24 billion. Why isn’t this money being used toward the state’s deficit? The Treasurer’s answer to this question, which he evidently gets frequently, is that legislation forbids it. His website states:
“Can the State borrow LAIF dollars to resolve the budget deficit?
“No. California Government Code 16429.3 states that monies placed with the Treasurer for deposit in the LAIF by cities, counties, special districts, nonprofit corporations, or qualified quasi-governmental agencies shall not be subject to either of the following:
“(a) Transfer or loan pursuant to Sections 16310, 16312, or 16313. “(b) Impoundment or seizure by any state official or state agency.”
The non-LAIF money in the pool can’t be spent either. It can be borrowed, but it has to be paid back. When Governor Schwarzenegger tried to raid the Public Transportation Account for the state budget, the California Transit Association took him to court and won. The Third District Court of Appeals ruled in June 2009 that diversions from the Public Transportation Account to fill non-transit holes in the General Fund violated a series of statutory and constitutional amendments enacted by voters via four statewide initiatives dating back to 1990.
In short, the use of these funds for the state budget has been blocked by the voters themselves. Bond issues are approved for particular purposes. When excess funds are collected, they are not handed over to the State toward next year’s budget. They just sit idly in an earmarked fund, drawing a modest interest.
What’s Wrong with This Picture?
California’s budget problems have caused its credit rating to be downgraded to just above that of Greece, driving the state’s interest tab skyward. In November 2009, the state sold 30-year taxable securities carrying an interest rate of 7.26%. Yet California has never defaulted on its bonds. Meanwhile, the too-big-to-fail banks, which would have defaulted on hundreds of billions of dollars of debt if they had not been bailed out by the states and their citizens, are able to borrow from each other at the extremely low federal funds rate, currently set at 0 to .25% (one quarter of one percent). The banks are also paying the states quite minimal rates for the use of their public monies, and turning around and relending this money, leveraged many times over, to the states and their citizens at much higher rates. That is assuming they lend at all, something they are increasingly reluctant to do, since speculating with the money is more lucrative, and investing it in federal securities is more secure.
Private banks clearly have the upper hand in this game. Local governments have been forced to horde funds in very inefficient ways, building excessive reserves while slashing services, because they do not have the extensive credit lines available to the private banking system. States cannot easily incur new debt without voter approval, a process that is cumbersome, time-consuming and uncertain. Banks, on the other hand, need to keep only the slimmest of reserves, because they are backstopped by a central bank with the power to create all the reserves necessary for its member banks, as well as by Congress and the taxpayers themselves, who have been arm-twisted into repeated bailouts of the Wall Street behemoths.
How the CAFR Money Could Be Used Without Spending It
California, then, is in the anomalous position of being $26 billion in the red and plunging toward bankruptcy, while it has over $70 billion stashed away in an investment pool that it cannot touch. Those are just the funds managed by the Treasurer. According to California’s latest CAFR, the California Public Employees’ Retirement Fund (CalPERS) has total investments of $360 billion, including nearly $144 billion in “equity securities” and $37 billion in “private equity.” See the State of California Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2009, pages 83-84.
This money cannot be spent, but it can be invested — and it can be invested not just in conservative federal securities but in equity, or stocks. Rather than turning this hidden gold mine over to Wall Street banks to earn a very meager interest, California could leverage its excess funds itself, turning the money into much-needed low-interest credit for its own use. How? It could do this by owning its own bank.
Only one state currently does this — North Dakota. North Dakota is also the only state projected to have a budget surplus by 2011. It has not fallen into the Wall Street debt trap afflicting other states, because it has been able to generate its own credit
through its own state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND).
An investment in the State Bank of California would not be at risk unless the bank became insolvent, a highly unlikely result since the state has the power to tax. In North Dakota, the BND is a dba of the state itself: it is set up as “the State of North Dakota doing business as the Bank of North Dakota.” That means the bank cannot go bankrupt unless the state goes bankrupt.
The capital requirement for bank loans is a complicated matter, but it generally works out to be about 7%. (According to Standard & Poor’s, the worldwide average risk-adjusted capital ratio stood at 6.7 per cent as of June 30, 2009; but for some major U.S. banks it was much lower: Citigroup’s was 2.1 per cent; Bank of America’s was 5.8 per cent.) At 7%, $7 of capital can back $100 in loans. Thus if $7 billion in CAFR funds were invested as capital in a California state development bank, the bank could generate $100 billion in loans.
This $100 billion credit line would allow California to finance its $26 billion deficit at very minimal interest rates, with $74 billion left over for infrastructure and other sorely needed projects. Studies have shown that eliminating the interest burden can cut the cost of public projects in half. The loans could be repaid from the profits generated by the projects themselves. Public transportation, low-cost housing, alternative energy sources and the like all generate fees. Meanwhile, the jobs created by these projects would produce additional taxes and stimulate the economy. Commercial loans could also be made, generating interest income that would return to state coffers.
Building a Deposit Base
To start a bank requires not just capital but deposits. Banks can create all the loans they can find creditworthy borrowers for, up to the limit of their capital base; but when the loans leave the bank as checks, the bank needs to replace the deposits taken from its reserve pool in order for the checks to clear. Where would a state-owned bank get the deposits necessary for this purpose?
In North Dakota, all the state’s revenues are deposited in the BND by law. Compare California, which has expected revenues for 2010-11 of $89 billion. The Treasurer’s website reports that as of June 30, 2009, the state held over $18 billion on deposit as demand accounts and demand NOW accounts (basically demand accounts carrying a very small interest). These deposits were held in seven commercial banks, most of them Wall Street banks: Bank of America, Union Bank, Bank of the West, U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo Bank, Westamerica Bank, and Citibank. Besides these deposits, the $64 billion or so left in the Treasurer’s investment pool could be invested in State Bank of California CDs. Again, most of the bank CDs in which these funds are now invested are Wall Street or foreign banks. Many private depositors would no doubt choose to bank at the State Bank of California as well, keeping California’s money in California. There is already a movement afoot to transfer funds out of Wall Street banks into local banks.
While the new state-owned bank is waiting to accumulate sufficient deposits to clear its outgoing checks, it can do what other startup banks do – borrow deposits from the interbank lending market at the very modest federal funds rate (0 to .25%).
To avoid hurting California’s local banks, any state monies held on deposit with local banks could remain there, since the State Bank of California should have plenty of potential deposits without these funds. In North Dakota, local banks are not only not threatened by the BND but are actually served by it, since the BND partners with them, engaging in “participation loans” that help local banks with their capital requirements.
Taking Back the Money Power
We have too long delegated the power to create our money and our credit to private profiteers, who have plundered and exploited the privilege in ways that are increasingly being exposed in the media. Wall Street may own Congress, but it does not yet own the states. We can take the money power back at the state level, by setting up our own publicly-owned banks. We can “spend” our money while conserving it, by leveraging it into the credit urgently needed to get the wheels of local production turning once again.
Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.” She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites arewww.webofdebt.com, www.ellenbrown.com, and www.public-banking.com.
Thanks to Carl Herman for discovering the CalPERS figures.
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