Bruce’s Poor Man Survival Bulletin
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
For Independent Minded People!
ISSN 2161-5543
In
This Issue:
1. Government strips away more rights
2. If you lose electricity for more than
four hours…
3. Guard against false charges
4. Audit your own energy
5. Nationalizing your retirement funds
A goal without a plan is
just a wish.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French philosopher
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, French philosopher
"America's
government has taken on a life of its own," said one of our readers.
"The government now justifies its own existence and pillages the serfs to
fund its ever growing appetite. My concern is how do you avoid the poorhouse in
this situation?"
Democrats
Introduce Privacy Bill Before Election . . . Obama Administration Rewrites Bill
To Strip Away Privacy And Democrats Push For Passage
Many
civil libertarians refused to vote for President Barack Obama given his dismal
record in the expansion of the security state, surveillance law, and assertions
of unchecked executive power. The Administration went into radio silence on
such issues during the campaign in an effort to woe back liberals (as they did on
medical marijuana)
only to announce after the election that they would resume the same policies.
The Democratic leadership has shown the same duplicity on civil liberties for
years -- including hiding knowledge of the Bush torture program and
surveillance programs as well as blocking any meaningful investigations into
those alleged crimes. Now, the Democrats have put on that hypocrisy on public
display again. Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the bill and, as originally
written, required warrants for the reading of emails and was heralded by
Democrats in the election as their showing of fealty to privacy after years of
betrayal. The Justice Department then took the bill and flipped it to serve as
a sweeping denial of privacy rights . . . and Leahy and the Democrats are
pushing on passage. The bill includes warrantless access to university email
systems.
|
Proposed
law scheduled for a vote next week originally increased Americans' e-mail
privacy. Then law enforcement complained. Now it increases government access
to e-mail and other digital files.
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NOTE: Mr. Turley was a contributor to our How to Take Back America from Dysfunctional
Politicians & Bureaucrats series.
The truth about
so-called Toning Sneakers…research indicates there is no evidence that
‘shape-up’ shoes help you exercise more intensely or to burn more calories or
tone muscles.
PM’s
Compendium of Useful Resources
Save Time on Ordering Household Supplies Online
This site offers free
shipping and assists in locating coupons and other deals.
If you lose electricity for more than four hours…
Throw away perishable food
items from your fridge, including meat and dairy products, leftovers. Uncut produce should be fine for 2-3
days. A fully stocked freezer keeps its
temps for at least two days. The freezer
portion of your fridge does not stay cold as long. Toss melted ice cream.
Peer-to-Peer lending sites help you rent tools…
Cameras and other items, or
you can sign up to rent out your own tools.
Listings are generally free but sites charge a security deposit in case
items are damaged. Here are a few useful
sites:
SnapGoods.com
US.Zilok.com
Guard Against False Charges…
Sign up for the free account monitoring service at BillGuard.com, which alerts you when any
questionable charges or fees occur on up to three credit or debit accounts.
Audit Your Own Energy
Improve heating and cooling
efficiency to lower your utility costs.
Go to EnergyStar.gov and select “Assess Your Home” under ‘Home
Improvement.’
To get more from your batteries, don’t mix
them. Use batteries which are the same
brand and age.
Billions in post-9/11 taxpayer dollars have paid for combat-style
gear…
In spite of
strained city and state budgets in local years, the trend has continued thanks
to generous federal grants. According to a new story by
the Center for Investigative Reporting, $34 billion in federal grant money has
financed the past decade’s shopping spree.
Less well known is that police forces in small towns and
far-flung cities have also been stocking up on heavy equipment in the years
since Sept. 11, 2001.
Despite already overspent budgets, there is a dizzying
array of grants that local communities are eligible for from the Department of
Homeland Security and sometimes the Justice Department. A few grants existed
prior to 9/11. After DHS was created, Congress kept creating new programs to
meet perceived needs around security. Essentially,
steering the country toward more insolvency…
How Does a 91% Income Tax Sound to You?
To Paul Krugman, the left's economist, it sounds just about perfect.
And forget everything you've ever learned about common sense and economics. Krugman says we'll thrive under those tax rates.
To Paul Krugman, the left's economist, it sounds just about perfect.
And forget everything you've ever learned about common sense and economics. Krugman says we'll thrive under those tax rates.
The Parting Thought- Nationalizing your retirement funds…
The National Seniors Council has announced that “Obama (has) Begun to Push for a
New National(ized) Retirement System”.
According to them, a recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor
Departments marked the beginning of the Obama Administration’s effort to
nationalize the nation’s pension system and to eliminate private retirement
accounts including IRAs and 401k plans.
Department of Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, “...stagnant wages and rising costs are making it harder and harder to build up a nest egg through a retirement savings plan (e.g., a 401(k) or IRA) or otherwise.”
You see, productivity has increased, but wages have stagnated, and yet prices are rising. This is the “middle class squeeze” that is at the core of the so-called retirement crisis. People are simply not able to save enough to one day live without a wage
Both the pension and Socialist
Insecurity legs of the “three-legged stool” are bound to falter. It's simple
savings that people will need to rely on. Yet saving is impossible because of
rising prices in the face of stagnant wages, while what can be saved constantly
loses purchasing power over the years. But what could possibly cause rising
prices when the people doing the buying don't have any money with which to bid
up the general prices? The central bank, of course. This is how inflation works
over time. Wages may rise, but prices tend to rise more quickly.
The government is calling for a remedy to a problem that the central bank creates in the first place. Declining pensions aren't the problem. Currency debasement is as can be shown by the massive drop in worker wages ever since Richard Nixon removed the lest vestige of gold from the dollar in 1971.
Because of this problem, which was caused by the government and central bank, the politicians and their pet economists are proposing the creation of a new kind of private retirement fund: Universal, Secure, and Adaptable Retirement Funds (USA Retirement Funds).
According to a publication recently put out by the Committee, “USA Retirement Funds would be privately-run, licensed, and regulated retirement plans. Each USA Retirement Fund would be overseen by a board of trustees consisting of qualified employee, retiree, and employer representatives. The trustees would act as fiduciaries and be required to act prudently and in the best interests of plan participants and beneficiaries.”
TERESA GHILARDUCCI TO THE RESCUE
Immoral, world-improver, Teresa Ghilarducci has been peddling her plan before Congress. In a recent New York Times op-ed she warns: “Almost half of middle-class worker, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retHere’s the bottom line:
a) Government creates a crisis. In this case the Federal Reserve, through the slow pickpocketing of inflation, destroys the ability of the average person to take the simple option of saving money for retirement, and instead forces them to take risks in the financial markets to get returns greater than the rate of purchasing power destruction caused by central bank inflating the money supply in the first place.
b) Government offers a solution that is really an excuse to either increase their power or steal more money. In this case the target is the roughly $4.5 trillion in retirement funds held in private defined contribution plans (as of the end of 2011).
The writing is on the wall. It’s been written for a while and only a few, such as we at TDV have been ringing the alarm bells. In 2011, with the federal debt ceiling about to be hit , Timothy Geithner (who is now calling to do away with the debt ceiling and have debt to infinity) was planning to borrow the pension funds of federal employees. Those funds are already within easy reach. And Obama's new pension plan will put all American's private retirement funds within easy reach, too.
It's not like there isn't precedence in the Western world for this kind of behavior from governments.
In late 2010 Hungary's government gave its citizens a choice: hand over all their savings to the government or lose all their state pension money. The government sought control over Hungarians' $14 billion in individual retirement accounts. The Bulgarian government did something very similar when it tried to transfer $300 million in private early retirement savings into a state pension scheme. They only managed to get roughly 20% of the funds they sought. Last year Ireland raided the private stash in the National Pension Reserve Fund with a 0.6% levy under the label of a “jobs plan” in order to bail out insolvent Irish banks.
LEAVE YOUR MONEY WITH THE GOVERNMENT IF YOU TRUST THE GOVERNMENT
We’ve said for a few years that this is where things are headed. It’s baked in the cake. The US government, and almost all Western governments are bankrupt. But before they die they will do what almost every nation state in history has done and try to confiscate as much wealth as possible from their tax cows before the collapse.
Source: Excerpted from the Dollar Vigilante
“Until the next
revolution”, the Poor Man
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1 comment:
Killer issue my friend and more reasons why you cannot trust the feds.
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