The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation announced that it has disposed of almost all of its investments in Olympus.
Singapore held 2% of Olympus stocks. They are the first major stock holder to announce they were dumping their shares in Olympus. U.S. Olympus stockholders seem to be waiting for Olympus officials to provide an explanation as to where all their money went.
On 02 November 2011, Tokyo Electric Power Company said Reactor 2 at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was in melt down, again. Now they changed their mind!
TEPCo now says the level of xenon radiation they detected is too low to be from spontaneous fission. Can these guys get anything right?
“When I became a judge I had no idea that I was becoming a gatekeeper to the largest psychiatric facility in the state of Florida – the Miami-Dade Jail.”–Steve Leifman, Miami-Dade County judge
Not only does the United States have the most people in prison, in the whole world, but it also has the most people with mental problems in prison.
A National Public Radio report says that the University of South Florida looked at who was the most frequently jailed people in the Miami-Dade County prison system. It turns out that people with mental problems are the most frequently jailed people: “Over a five-year period, these 97 individuals were arrested almost 2,200 times and spent 27,000 days in the Miami-Dade Jail. It cost the taxpayers $13 million.”-Steve Leifman, Miami-Dade County judge
Most states don’t use mental health facilities, no thanks to former President Ronald Reagan’s decision to cut funding in the 1980s, so most people who commit crimes because of their mental problems end up abused in prisons.
“It seems to me that we have criminalized being mentally ill.”-Greg Hamilton, Travis County Sheriff, Texas
Sheriff Hamilton says because there is little funding for hospitals to care for mental patients, the prison system becomes the default ‘treatment’ center.
The amount of time a person with mental problems stays in a Travis county jail is between 50 and 258 days.
According to a 2009 Corrections Today interview with Judge Leifman, 90% of U.S. hospital beds for mental health patients have been closed, and there’s been a 400% increase in the mentally ill offenders entering prison!
According to a May 2011 Daily Kos posting: “There are three times as many men and women with mental illness in U.S. prisons as in mental health hospitals.”
“The costs of keeping a mentally ill individual in a penitentiary are three to six time what it costs to treat them at an outpatient mental health center.”
“The U.S. prison system had become the largest mental health provider in the country – with nearly 50% of inmates reporting mental health problems.”
“According to the most recent survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 81% of mentally ill inmates currently in state prison, 76% of mentally ill inmates in federal prison, and 79% of mentally ill inmates in local jails have prior convictions.”
“Mentally ill prisoners are more likely than others to end up housed in especially harsh conditions, such as isolation, that can push them over the edge into acute psychosis.”
“…there are powerful economic drivers to keep locking more and more of them up. In fact incarceration and detention has turned into a multibillion dollar growth industry.”
“…the [privately run Corporate] prison industrial complex is primarily motivated by economics, such that a formidable amount of prison industry capital is devoted to creating prisoners…”
In other words the exploding growth of Corporate run prisons demands more prisoners, so that the Corporate run prisons can make the money to pay back investors. Mentally ill people are easy targets.
According to the Idaho Department of Labor, corporate executives based in Idaho, used unemployment benefits to float their companies (because of the bad economy).
The executives, who own their companies, would apply for unemployment benefits claiming they had lost their executive position. They would then use the money to float the company that they held controlling stock in. It was all legal.
As of now they can’t do that anymore. Idaho lawmakers created a new law that says corporate executives applying for unemployment benefits must prove they have no ownership in the company they had worked for. The new law affects about 30,000 executives in Idaho.
However, the new law allows corporate executives to stop paying into the corporate unemployment system. In Idaho unemployment taxes are paid by employers, not employees, but employers can be eligible for a refund.
“I was optimistic we’d have a better month, but it looks now like the recovery ended last summer, which means we’re just idling.”-Ed Leamer, University California Los Angeles economist
If you use diesel fuel you might have noticed that the price has been slowly going down. That’s good for those of use who pay at the pump, but for the economy as a whole it’s a Canary in the Coal Mine of worse to come for our economy.
Diesel fuel prices are dropping because of a huge drop in demand. That drop has been ongoing since last year, and in the past four months has been picking up speed.
Most users of diesel are transportation industries. They ship products all over the country, but shipments of new products have dropped so much in eight of the past 12 months, that trucks, ships and aircraft are sitting idle.
According to the Ceridian-UCLA Pulse of Commerce Index, the drop in diesel fuel demand is proof any economic recovery that might have been, is over.
Ed Leamer says the two main reasons demand is down: Low wages/lack of jobs and high debt. Notice they’re the two things our elected officials, across the board from local leaders to the White House, can’t seem to deal with.
Leamer also says such a drop in demand, in the U.S., is a first in world history: “U.S. demand has been such a key for the rest of the world for so long. This is sort of uncharted territory.”
Read my November 20, and November 5, 2011, postings about current diesel prices. It’s bad news, it explains why prices are only going up, and how fracking of natural gas is really for fuel production.
May 3, Diesel fuel prices are higher than gas, at the pump.
In Idaho, as of May 3, most gas stations are selling Diesel for about $4.15 per gallon. The highest is $4.50 near Mountain Home. That’s way higher than gas. Most gas stations are selling gasoline around $3.65 per gallon, with the highest at $4.00 near Hailey, Idaho.
Yet Diesel futures are selling for less than gas futures on the commodities market. As of May 2, gas futures, for June delivery, were at $3.34 per gallon. Compare that to Diesel NY at $3.29, and Diesel Gulf at $3.31 per gallon.
So why is Diesel so much higher at the pump?
Many websites say it’s because Diesel must be refined to low sulfur standards. That doesn’t explain the higher price at the pump! The commodity prices paid are for already refined Diesel, so the claim that low sulfur refining is the cause doesn’t work.
Some people say it’s because Diesel is actually in higher demand than gasoline, due to industry (like trucking & airlines, “jet” fuel is actually a form of Diesel/Kerosene) and the military (possibly the biggest user of Diesel, thank the War on Terror). That might be, but normally the commodity price reflects anticipated demand.
Some journalists have asked oil executives about fuel costs, but oil executives can only talk about the price of refined fuels sold on the commodities market, not at the pump.
What about taxes? It turns out that taxes for Diesel are more than taxes for gasoline. In Idaho the average (January 2011) pump tax (combined state/federal) for Diesel is 49.4 cents per gallon. For gas, in Idaho, it’s 43.4 cents. That’s only a 6 cents per gallon difference, so that doesn’t explain the 50 cent per gallon difference in the pump price of Diesel vs gasoline ($4.15 for Diesel minus $3.65 for gas).
By the way, California has the highest tax rates in the country for Diesel at 76 cents per gallon, and gas at 66.1 cents. That’s because California has higher local and state taxes on top of the federal taxes.
So, the only conclusion I can come up with is that Diesel fuel prices, at the pump, are higher than gasoline due to higher taxes for Diesel, and maybe higher demand for Diesel (again that’s usually what drives commodity prices, before it gets to the pump). Maybe gas stations are trying to make up for their extremely slim profit margins on gas prices by jacking up the more stable Diesel prices?