California’s Budget Needs Spending Cuts in Right Places

It is terribly sad that California lawmakers aren’t cutting spending in the right places like waste in prisons, medicare/medicaid fraud, workers comp – where more is paid out than collected.

Despite propositions to increase taxes in California (where we already pay the highest taxes in the nation) were defeated, lawmakers are still looking to find ways to increase more taxes or collect money in ways that would make Bernie Madoff look like an an amateur.

Budget magicians use sleight of hand to help close California’s giant deficit.

It’s a shame – our taxes are already funding schools that have a 50% failure rate. Superintendents in LAUSD make $300,000 plus benefits. LAUSD spends more per student, has more bureaucrats per student, higher paid teachers and principals – compared to the Catholic Archdiocese. But Catholic schools with a lower per student spending have a higher success rate for students than LAUSD. Maybe LAUSD can learn a thing or two about education from them. As it is – in California, 1 in 4 students drop out, 1 in 4 students can’t read.

California - A Sinking Ship

Obamanomics: Bailouts of America’s Most Inefficient Businesses

Obamanomics is all about bailing out those who made all the wrong decisions producing, managing and investing. Such as banks, automakers, insurance companies, inefficient government agencies, government mortgage companies, etc. All the enterprises that failed should get to join his wealth distribution plan which was to take money from efficiently run businesses and individual tax payers who were making money doing the right things such as saving money, not speculating, making wise investments and then use that money to bail out the failed and inefficient parts of our economy while making those who got him elected rich in the process.

Here is Mish (Michael Shedlock) analyzing some articles in his blog.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/05/if-youre-not-petrified-of-obama-youre.html

Excerpt:

Davidowitz is correct about money going to the most inefficient parts of the economy. Bailing out AIG just so it can payoff Goldman Sachs is hardly a good use of taxpayer money. Nor is forcing a shotgun marriage between Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, only how have taxpayers pick up the tab.

Please see Let the Criminal Indictments Begin: Paulson, Bernanke, Lewis for my take on the coercion Paulson used on Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis, pressuring Lewis to go along with a merger he clearly knew was not in shareholder best interests.

Here is a snip from Geithner’s Plan Can Succeed: “The Plan: Dump $500 billion of toxic assets on to unsuspecting taxpayers via a public-private partnership in which 93% of the losses are born by the taxpayer.”

Obama Zombies

Paul Craig Roberts: Who Rules America?

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and journalist. He was Assistant Secretary of Treasury during the Reagan Administration. Forbes has ranked him as one of the top 7 journalists in the US.

He is one of the most outspoken people in America today and he has been a critic of both Republicans and Democrats for their abuse of power.

You will find his articles very enlightening. Here’s his latest:

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22611.htm

Here he writes about how the the Senate bill to allow homeowners to renegotiate mortgages with the banks was defeated by the banksters who pay the politicians millions and help them get elected. What a scam!

What a shame this is for our nation. Trillions of our taxes went to bailout the banks for their mistakes, then trillions more for war against nations that pose no threat to us – but when some politicians tried to help homeowners stay in their homes – not one penny will be spent to help them. Let them lose their homes. This should really outrage every “Patriotic American”. If it doesn’t shame on you.

Excerpt:

How is it possible that “the world’s only superpower” is threatened by the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan? How can the US be a superpower if it is threatened by countries that have no military capability other than a guerilla capability to resist invaders?

These “wars” are a hoax designed to enrich the US armaments industry and to infuse the “security forces” with police powers over American citizenry.

Not a dime to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes, but hundreds of billions of dollars to murder Muslim women and children and to create millions of refugees, many of whom will either sign up with insurgents or end up as the next wave of immigrants into America.

This is the way the American government works. And it thinks it is a “city on the hill, a light unto the world.”

Americans elected Obama because he said he would end the gratuitous criminal wars of the Bush brownshirts, wars that have destroyed America’s reputation and financial solvency and serve no public interest. But once in office Obama found that he was ruled by the military/security complex.

Read the full article here:

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22611.htm

Never-ending Government Lies

A Brilliant article on how free markets built America – today the government bamboozles people into tax slavery by lying about how these financial crisis are caused by lack of regulation – which are actually created due to government intervention and over-regulation!

Now the government is setting interest rates and fees for credit card companies, dictating the health care costs, health care treatment and rationing of health care for us all – ignoring the fact that intervention and regulation is causing high health care costs. If I could buy my own health care from the lizard guy at Geico, health care costs would drop dramatically as hospitals and doctors would compete directly for my business.

We thought the Internet is the last free place on earth – no longer – Obama is appointing an Internet Czar and soon will be regulating the Internet.

Where in the Constitution is it written that this is the government’s job? People, you are witnessing the fall of the mighty USA,

Lately, the US government is invading and intruding way too much into the economy and into activities it historically never managed before.

Who says we are still a free country?

Now for the article link – read it – very enlightening and educational:

http://mises.org/story/3446

Peter Schiff on the Clueless Economists In Our Government

Government is looking to put together a committee that will spend billions to find the causes of the financial crisis. What a scam….

The causes were government intervention and regulation – Obama can save billions and instead buy Thomas E. Woods’s book and it will be more than anything he learned in Harvard:

http://www.amazon.com/Meltdown-Free-Market-Collapsed-Government-Bailouts/dp/1596985879

US Dollar Rally to End

Jim Rogers, the Sage Of Singapore, has been pretty accurate in his predictions so far. He predicts now that the dollar rally will end soon. His reasoning is pretty tight and I would be the last person to disagree with him.

My friends and people I know have been preparing for this for years and buying gold and silver. I bet buying Euro and British Pounds is also a good idea now. I would not bet on US stocks though as the stock market only has sucker rallies – there is no increase in productivity in the US. This is the key to economic growth, not consumption and spending. Consumers are realizing borrowing to spend can only last so long.

Click here for full story.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=a3YnR0N8LgpQ&refer=germany

Excerpt:

May 12 (Bloomberg) — The dollar’s rally is set to end in a “currency crisis,” investor Jim Rogers said, adding that he may bet on a slide in equities after nine weeks of gains.

The advance in the U.S. currency has been driven by investors covering their short sales, Rogers, 66, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Singapore. He may consider adding to his holdings of the yen and prefers the euro to the dollar or the pound, the investor added.

“We’re going to have a currency crisis, probably this fall or the fall of 2010,” Rogers said. “It’s been building up for a long time. We’ve had a huge rally in the dollar, an artificial rally in the dollar, so it’s time for a currency crisis.”

The dollar has climbed against all of the so-called Group of 10 currencies except the yen over the past 12 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The U.S. currency was at $1.3592 per euro today from $1.3582.

Rogers joins “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in avoiding the U.S. currency. Taleb told a May 7 conference in Singapore he preferred gold and copper to the dollar and the euro as the global economy faces a “big deflation.”

US Bombs Three Afghan Villages Killing 150 Civilians

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the US bombed three villages (of mostly poor farmers) in Afghanistan to pieces. The Independent reports 147 civilians have been killed in those air strikes.

One old white bearded man was crying over several bodies he had recovered – he had lost 30 family members in the bombings.

Robert Fisk says we have become the same as Israel.

And of course, the reason is quite simple. We live, they die. We don’t risk our brave lads on the ground – not for civilians. Not for anything. Fire phosphorus shells into Fallujah. Fire tank shells into Najaf. We know we kill the innocent. Israel does exactly the same. It said the same after its allies massacred 1,700 at the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982 and in the deaths of more than a thousand civilians in Lebanon in 2006 and after the death of more than a thousand Palestinians in Gaza this year.

Read his complete article and thoughts on the botched bombing:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-civilians-pay-price-of–war-from-above-1680408.html

This is what causes terrorism. This is what causes suicide bombing – there is a whole scientific research conducted on the subject done by Dr. Robert Papes in his book “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”.

One of his conclusions is that the fact is that every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

Bush’s war on Terror is now Obama’s. As mentioned many times by countless people – Afghanistan is called “The Graveyard of Empires” for a reason. No one has ever won there – all great Empires in the past have gone to die there. Now it is America’s turn.

No, The Free Market Did Not Cause The Financial Crisis

In this article, Thomas E. Woods explains how we got into this mess.

It was not lack of regulation but excessive regulation and government intervention that brought about this mess. No one has been able to nail down the causes of the current financial crisis better than economists of the Austrian school of economics.

Here’s an excerpt:

In March 2007 then-Treasury secretary Henry Paulson told Americans that the global economy was “as strong as I’ve seen it in my business career.” “Our financial institutions are strong,” he added in March 2008. “Our investment banks are strong. Our banks are strong. They’re going to be strong for many, many years.” Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said in May 2007, “We do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system.” In August 2008, Paulson and Bernanke assured the country that other than perhaps $25 billion in bailout money for Fannie and Freddie, the fundamentals of the economy were sound.

Then, all of a sudden, things were so bad that without a $700 billion congressional appropriation, the whole thing would collapse.

Click below link to read to complete article:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods111.html

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is senior fellow in American history at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of nine books, including the just-released Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Visit his new website.

Pentagon to create 20,000 jobs to manage arms buys

Gotta love the government – this is how they create jobs out of thin air. 20,000 people to manage how to spend $100 billion on overpriced bombs.

In a depressed economy – building up a military is not kosher – just ask Hitler.

President Obama has disappointed a lot of people with unwavering support of Israeli genocide, warmongering policies in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, trillions in bailout of Maserati driving bankers and his support for the atrocious Bush policies of torture and civil liberties.

Click below for the full story.

http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSTRE54545N20090506?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews&rpc=22&sp=true

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s Defense Department plans to create 20,000 new government jobs to help revise how it buys more than $100 billion of weapons each year, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official told Congress.

So much for “hope” and “change”.

Maula Mere, Maula Mere

The other day I was playing this song in my car and thinking about my beautiful wife – Mahi Jaan. I called her and tried singing the words to her but I was causing such a traffic jam on the 405 so gave up. She was probably worried that the Bel Air residents would come out wondering what shattered their windows or “Who let the dogs out?”. Let’s face it – We all don’t have magical voices like Tahir.

But as I listened…suddenly everything I looked at turned into sheer beauty….on the 405, the San Fernando Valley below me. On the 101, the sun rising so majestically, yet delicately veiled by gentle clouds, the mountains in the eastern distance still wearing their white caps….

Oh boy, it was indeed a mystical experience. As Carmen would say “QUE BONITO ES EL AMOR!”

Funny thing was that Hitesh also happened to think of the same song on the same day! Coincidence? Maybe he was also enveloped with sheer beauty everywhere – since London is such a beautiful city.

Here is the song with such beautiful and expressive poetry. I also have translated the lyrics to English below, to be as close as possible to its original Urdu meaning and in most places have used the literal meaning of the words but sometimes the symbolic to try stay true to its Sufi poetic form.

Enjoy!

Singer: Roop Kumar Rathod
Lyrics: Sayeed Qadri

You can listen to it here on YouTube:

Maula Mere Maula Mere

Maula mere, maula mere, maula mere, maula mere

Aankhein teri, kitni haseen
Ke inkaa aashiq, mein ban gayaa hoon
Mujhko basaa le, inme tu

Ishq hai…

Maula mere, maula mere maula mere, maula mere

Ke inkaa aashiq, mein ban gayaa hoon
Mujhko basaa le, inme tu

Mujhse yeh har ghadi, meraa dil kahe
Tum hi ho uski aarzoo

Mujhse yeh har ghadi, mere lab kahe
Teri hi ho sab guftagoo

Baatein teri itni haseen,
Main yaad inko jab kartaa hoon
Phoolon se aaye, khushboo

Rakh loon chhupaa ke main kahin tujhko
Saayaa bhi teraa naa main doon

Rakh loon banaa ke kahin ghar, main tujhe
Saath tere, mein hi rahoon

Zulfein teri, itni ghanee
Dekh ke inko, yeh sochtaa hoon
Saaye me, inke main jiyoon

Ishq hai…

Maula mere, Maula mer, Maula mere, Maula mere

Meraa dil yahi bolaa, meraa dil yahi bolaa,
Yaara, raaz yeh usne hai mujh par kholaa
Ki hai ishq mohabbat, jiske dil mein
Usko pasand karta hai Maulaa mere

TRANSLATION:

O’ My Master, O’ My Master,

Your eyes, how beautiful they are
That their lover, I have become,
Captivate me within them

It is passionate love…

O’ My Master, O’ My Master

Your eyes, how beautiful they are
That I have become their lover,
Captivate me within them

Every moment, my heart keeps saying
That you are its deepest desire

Every moment, my lips keep saying
Only you should be all they talk about

Every word you speak, so charming
That whenever I reminisce them,
I smell the fragrance of flowers

Let me take you and hide you somewhere
Where even your shadow cannot reach

Let me build you a house somewhere
Where only I, will be with you

The tresses of your hair, so rich
I glance at them and imagine,
In their shadow is where I’ll live

It is passionate love

O’ My Master, O’ My Master

My heart has spoken, my heart has spoken
O’ friend, this secret, it has revealed to me…
Whoever has passion and love in their hearts,
They are the beloved ones of my Master