31 May 2012, Sears Holdings announced that it will sell off a portion of its Sears Canada operations. Currently Sears Holdings controls 95% of Sears Canada.
Sears Holdings said it “…will retain approximately 51% of the issued and outstanding common shares of Sears Canada.” So they are willing to let go of 49% control of Sears Canada in order to raise cash, however, Sears Holdings states they reserve “…the right not to complete the spin-off …”.
2 June 2012, the Venezuelan government imposed a total ban on gun sales: “We are going to make serious efforts as President Chavez has done for the security of our citizens. We’re going to continue to fight against criminals and more importantly against what causes violence.”-Elias Jaua, Vice President of Venezuela
Anti-gun laws don’t work! A 1 June 2012 report out of the U.S. anti-gun state of California proves it!
The U.S. Attorney General’s office revealed that their investigation showed that California cops are selling guns to the public. Those guns are illegal for California’s civilian population under California law!
So law enforcers are behind illegal gun sales in anti-gun California! California cops are using their legal rights to buy guns, which are legal for cops but illegal for civilians, and then turning around and selling the guns to the public at as much as a triple profit!
After a shootout in San Francisco in February 2011, investigators discovered that the fugitive had 20 guns, 12 of which were illegal under California law. To their surprise they traced two machine pistols back to a Sacramento County sheriff’s deputy!
Further investigations revealed that some California cops were regularly selling illegal weapons, including .50 caliber (12.7 mm) guns! The .50 caliber bullet will take your head off, and punch through armored cars, no problemo.
The Sacramento District Attorney revealed that California cops are also altering the already illegal guns, making them more lethal!
Here’s the amazing thing, the California government has not arrested these cops, they’ve simply been charged with a crime. Some have been fired from their jobs, others have been placed on paid leave.
This is proof that anti-gun laws don’t do what they’re supposedly intended to do, that is reduce gun violence. By the way, back to Venezuela, note that the vice presidente inferred that the violence in his country was because of guns. Hello, people cause violence, not guns! This is also justification for the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Amendment which demands that people of the United States be able to equip themselves with the weapons of the day (“arms”) in order to protect themselves, even to protect themselves from their own cops!!!
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”-2nd Amendment, ratified December 1791
“I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”-Oath of Enlistment U.S. military
“I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the State of (STATE NAME) against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the Governor of (STATE NAME) and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to law and regulations. So help me God.”-Oath of Enlistment state National Guard
Note: In respect to the U.S. Constitution’s 1st Amendment, you are not required to say “So help me God.”
2 June 2012, United Kingdom’s Queen Elizabeth II’s rental property & business management empire, Crown Estate, reported a 9,200% increase in revenue over the past 60 years!
Keep in mind that according to an Act of Parliament, all profits from the Royal property/business management scheme are to go to the British Treasury! According to the Financial Times: “Under an agreement struck between King George III and the government in 1760, the portfolio was managed by the Crown on behalf of the state, with surplus revenue going to the Treasury. In turn, the Treasury made a fixed annual payment to the monarch.”
Also: “The Queen has no powers to liquidate assets belonging to the Crown Estate. She cannot buy or sell properties and is entitled to a modest slice of the company’s revenues.”
So how much money is the Crown Estate making? Here’s what the Crown Estate’s own website claims: “…the urban estate the value of the portfolio increased by 11.6 per cent to £5.2 billion [$7.9 billion USD].”
“…marine estate revenue increased by 1.7 per cent to £47.4 million [$72.8 million USD]. Total property value rose to £586.9 million [$902.2 million USD]…”
“…income from renewables….rose….to £3.5 million [$5.3 million USD]…”
“The coastal estate…added £14.3 million [$21.9 million USD] in revenue…”
“…capital value of the rural estate exceeded £1 billion [$1.5 billion USD] for the first time…”
“…asset management saw revenue rise….to £25.7 million [$39.5 million USD]…”
The question is, if the Crown Estate is making so much money, and it’s supposedly meant to benefit the commoners of the United Kingdom (through the state) then why is the government of the United Kingdom imposing such drastic austerity measures upon those very commoners?
Just how much is the “fixed annual payment to the monarch”? Under a new Sovereign Grant Act, beginning in 2012 the Queen can receive only 15% of the revenues. How much was she getting before that?
But wait, there’s more! Members of the royal family own other property companies, not beholden to the British government. Here’s one; the Grosvenor Estate.
“The Grosvenor Estate is a portfolio of businesses, rural estates and other assets owned by trusts on behalf of Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor who is the 6th Duke of Westminster, and his family.”-Grosvenor website
However, unlike the incompetent British government (by the way the Queen is the literal boss of the House of Lords in the British government, she is not a figure head!), Grosvenor Estate is actually spending money to try and build up the economy in the English city of Liverpool. The Duke’s Grosvenor Estate is spending the equivalent of $1.5 billion USD on a project called Liverpool One.
Again, the question is, what happened to all the money from the Queen’s Crown Estate that was supposed to be used for the people of Britain?
2 June 2012, despite Japan just joining a trilateral military pact with the U.S. and Australia, getting oil from Iran is still of utmost importance to Japanese industries.
So much so that Iran and Japan are developing their own shipping insurance companies, to avoid the U.S./U.K. dominated shipping insurance business, and therefore get around U.S./European sanctions.
The European oil sanctions against Iran go into effect on 1 July. Iran is considering laws that will allow their domestic shipping insurance industry to insure foreign ships.
Japan is now working to create an insurance system that will cover Japanese oil tanker ships carrying Iranian oil. The system might be similar to one created to help Japanese airlines after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the U.S. Prior to that Japanese airlines were insured through U.S. companies, but the U.S. companies drastically cut their coverage after the 11 September attacks.
“Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith joined Panetta and Watanabe in another trilateral meeting. The U.S., Japanese and Australian leaders agreed ‘to work through 2020 to refine and consolidate their trilateral defense relationship and support the network of existing alliances, forums and dialogues to meet a variety of common security challenges,'”-U.S. Department of Defense press release
2 June 2012, Australia, Japan and the U.S. have agreed to pursue a military pact that is in line with what an unnamed U.S. Defense official said was “…our rebalancing to the region.”
There are a lot of coded words and phrases in the Defense Department press release, all indicating that the U.S., along with dozens of countries in the Asia Pacific region, are falling in line against China!
But don’t blame Barack Obama, these Shangri-La Dialogue anti-China re-balancing meetings began under the George W. Bush administration.
According to Japanese news media reports, the new military pact between Australia, Japan and United States will include joint military industry developments.
“…make no mistake, in a steady, deliberate and sustainable way, the United States military is re-balancing and brings enhanced capabilities to this vital region.”-Leon Panetta, U.S. Secretary of Defense
2 June 2012, U.S. Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, announced that the United States is now sending most of its Navy to the Asia-Pacific region, with the goal of having 60% of U.S. naval forces in place by 2020!
Panetta made the announcement at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue conference, in Singapore. He stressed that the bad economy, and U.S. government budget cuts will not affect the buildup of U.S. military forces near the South China Sea.
The coming full blown global war could be between China and the West, not between Christians and Muslims. It will be centered on controlling the immense oil fields at the bottom of the South China Sea.
The U.S. has been there before, it was called (unofficially) the Vietnam War.
Decades ago, while doing research in a community college library in California, I came a cross a little black book, published only once. It was a chronicle of U.S. and European oil companies who were attempting to explore the South China Sea. They concluded that there was massive oil reserves there, but the technology needed to get at it was not worth what oil was selling for. Believe it or not the average price per barrel of oil, from 1958 to 1970, was only $3.00 USD!!!
According to the book (of which I forget the title), the oil industry’s decision not to spend anymore money on South China Sea exploration was a key factor in U.S. President Richard Nixon’s decision to get out of Vietnam (the peaceful anti-war demonstrations had nothing to do with it).
Since the end of the Vietnam War, China has laid claim to the entire South China Sea. In the past few years several other countries have as well, such as; Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Philippines and Japan. Why? Because the current price per barrel of oil makes drilling in the South China Sea worth it!
Already China has secretly built natural gas rigs in the Sea. They were discovered by Japanese recon planes sent to investigate the sighting of huge fire balls shooting into the sky.
To enforce how important the South China Sea is to the Whore of Babylon oil industry of the United States, in November 2011 a U.S. Asian political analyst said: “If we are going to move out of this recession, Asia is going to be part of that equation. Asia is where we are going to grow.”-Ernest Bower, Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
This newly announced U.S. naval buildup in the Asian Pacific is on top of the U.S. military buildup in Australia.
“There are one million millionaires in China. I will have more than enough business if I sell to China’s millionaires alone!”-Earl Kluft, makes luxury mattresses
1 June 2012, Chinese media reporting that some business owners in the U.S. state of California are targeting the growing number of millionaires in the Communist country of China.
Back in September a California mattress maker decided to take a chance on selling his handmade mattresses in China. It paid off, big time. Chinese elites are paying as much as $50,000 USD for one of Earl Kluft’s mattresses! The result was that Kluft’s revenues for 2011 hit $50 million!
According to Boston Consulting Group, China is third for number of millionaires. Japan is number two, and, to prove the point of the Occupy and Tea Party movements, the United States is still number one for 1% elites.
However, that could soon change. According to the Group M Knowledge-Hurun Wealth Report 2011, the number of Chinese millionaires is expanding at a rate of 10% per year.
Kluft markets his mattresses as heirloom mattresses, and they can be made from expensive materials such as cashmere, mohair, Joma wool and Talalay latex. Have any of us commoners ever thought of owning a mattress like that? Chairman Mao is rolling in his tomb!
But forget handmade, now Kluft says high sales of his mattresses have forced him to dedicate two factories in the United States specifically to meet Chinese demand, and he says they’re still willing to pay the high handmade price: “The Chinese demand for American made luxury products is on the rise…..The Chinese consumers want them made in America. They don’t want them made in China.”
1 June 2012, bad news for everyone, that is bad news for everyone playing the western (U.S./British dominated) game of capitalism (including the “communist” Chinese)!
Employment numbers did not live up to the expectations of experts in the United States. The U.S. Department of Labor reported that only 69,000 net jobs were created in May. Employment experts in the private sector expected at least 150,000 new jobs.
To top that, the Labor Department revised the April and March employment numbers…down! For the two months before May, the number of net jobs created was revised downward by 49,000!
In the past labor officials said that in order to have an economic recovery unAmerican Corporate America must create 200,000 net new jobs every month. That hasn’t happened, and now it’s worse! The latest estimates are that 362,000 net new jobs must be created every month, for three years straight! That would bring down the unemployment rate to 6%.
Here’s some factual numbers: At least 12.7 million people in the U.S. are “officially” unemployed. At least 100,000 million people are “unofficially” unemployed! Both those factual numbers come from the U.S. Department of Labor!
As one of the many Low Income workers who recently went back to work, working for the Man in the U.S. (after two years of unemployment), let me just say this: No Shit Sherlock!
We Low Income workers, still with jobs, have seen the unAmerican Corporate America bullshit first hand, on a daily bases. It’s now to the point many of us see it on an hourly bases! Nothing has changed, people! If anything the glorified, deified, well educated, well financed leaders of our country are only picking up speed with their snowballing moronic decision making! Need proof? How about JP Morgan Chase (I now work for a contractor who lost a contract with Chase, now I think we know a major reason why Chase canceled the contract)? Wake up people!!! UnAmerican Corporate America is the cause of our economic decline!
Now for Europe.
The 17 member European Union held onto its record unemployment rate for the second month in a row. The latest report is for the month of April, and it stands at 11%. When you break it down by EU member countries it gets worse: Italy 10.2%, Portugal 15.2%, Greece 21.7% (stats for February only).
But how about that Spain? 24.3% unemployment! When you look at just youth unemployment (workers under 25 years of age) it’s 51.5%!!! Can you say “get ready for civil war”?
The result of the collapse of the EU is causing the euro to crash & burn, and forcing the Japanese yen to increase in value. Not only that, but today was the first day that China and Japan began trading their money (in order to avoid the U.S. dollar) and the yen gained in value over the Chinese yuan!
That will kill Japanese business. Japan is a country whose economy depends on international trade. Since 2011 the yen has gained in value, and has already caused major harm to Japanese companies. Yesterday Toyota announced that it was selling $2.5 billion USD in bonds to raise cash, because they believed another credit crash was coming (funny how the U.S./British mainstream media misreported the news).
China is reporting a drop in the Purchasing Managers’ Index, down 2.9 points from April. The drop is caused by a combination of decreased sales internationally, and domestically. It means China’s economy is slowing down, and if China is the manufacturing center of the western capitalist world, then it makes for a good canary in the western capitalist economic coal mine.
Oh, let’s not forget those stable government bonds. On 1 June 2012, U.S. ten year bonds hit a record low of 1.5% interest! German government bonds hit a record low of 1.1%!
The result of all this doom & gloom, based on factual data, is that all the stock markets in Asia went down. In the United States the Dow Jones Industrial Average (aka Wall Street) lost all its gains for January to May 2012, falling more than 200 points in one hour and 30 minutes!
“Iran is an important neighbor and crucial trade partner for India, and also a major source of our energy supplies.”-S M Krishna, External Affairs Minister of India
31 May 2012, after a meeting between Iranian and Indian officials, India made it clear that Iran was India’s number one source for oil!
Indian officials are looking to Iran for other economic deals, as India considers Iran the economic gateway to Central Asia. S M Krishna said Iran was also the economic key to the whole world!
The two countries also discussed “threats” being made against them.
Iran has invited India to attend the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in August. NAM consists of countries that do not kowtow to the United States/British Empire.
31 May 2012, The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that the U.S. GDP continues to stagnate at 1.9%! That was for January through March.
Once again, the experts were expecting it to be higher, like around 2.2% (which is still stagnation). The problem is that the experts were expecting business inventories to be around $69.5 billion USD, instead they ended the 1st quarter at $57.7 billion.
Also, consumer spending was a tiny bit lower than what the experts were expecting; 2.7% instead of the expected 2.9%.
Government spending dropped by 3.9%, also more than what the experts were expecting.
Inflation went up 2.4% (price index for personal consumption), which is twice that of the 1st quarter of 2011! By the way, the experts got this one right.
The inflation rate for core PCE gauge, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, was at 2.1%, which is up from the 4th quarter of 2011.
But wait, there’s more! The Commerce Department said the 1st quarter GDP could have been even lower if it weren’t for an unexpected increase in business spending! Business spending went up 1.9%, the experts were expecting it to drop by 2.1%!
By the way, one of the BRICS countries, India, reported an explosive GDP growth rate of 5.3%, during the same time period, and keep in mind that’s a decline from the previous year!