Lots of Year End News of Interest

YouTube - Meet The Press - Alan Greenspan: WE CAN ALWAYS PRINT MORE MONEY. The video is only 24 seconds, it is of Alan Greenspan, past head of the Federal Reserve, saying that it doesn't matter how much debt we have because we can just print money. Tell me how anyone could be that dumb. It would be like you or I saying that we can run up as much credit card debt as we want and just send checks to pay it even though we don't have any money in our bank accounts.

YouTube - HempCrete Strongest Building material in Nature. There is a lot of talk right now about legalizing Marijuana. Personally, I am 100% in favor of allowing cancer patients to have easy access to it; but, there is another product that is related to it called hemp that is also illegal. Hemp is not marijuana and it would take bags of the stuff to get anyone high; but, historically it has been used to make clothes, paper, boats, buildings and also can be used to produce oils. It is also illegal. I had some hemp soap once and the stuff was great on my skin. If you don't know anything about hemp, you should watch the video. If we used it instead of wood, we could save a lot of trees and it captures CO2.

Yahoo - Reuters - Miami loses bid to dismiss SEC fraud lawsuit
. Here is the short on it, municipalities funnel money to investors and others when they issue municipal bonds and some municipalities fudge the numbers to keep up their ratings. Awhile back I read an article about how a City was issuing bonds based upon the value of their streets. Basically saying that there streets were an asset of the City. I contacted one of the two lawyers who had created the bonds and asked them how they could use streets as an asset when they did not own the streets and only had an easement which the law prohibits them for charging people to use. The municipal bond market is just as rigged as the rest of wall street. When a municipality issues bonds, lots of insiders make money.

Yahoo - Reuters - Italy presses Monte Paschi to complete $4 billion cash call. Keep an eye on this one, how this bank is taken over may be an indication of things to come to other banks.

The Guardian - Mortgage rise will plunge a million homeowners into 'perilous debt'
. England, land of mass debt which is pushed by their own government. One of the last couple posts was on exactly this, their housing bubble.

Yahoo - Reuters - SEC pushes US insurers for details on 'captives': WSJ. More Wall Street dishonesty and cheating.

Yahoo - Reuters - NYC sues FedEx for illegally shipping cigarettes to homes. I bet New York wouldn't sue the Post Office because they cannot. This is really just putting responsibility for what private shippers like UPS and FedEx allow to be shipped, which will then mean that they will start inspecting more and more of your packages. Still sure you want to eliminate the US Postal Service, at least with the Post Office there are laws that protect you, your packages and your privacy.

Huffington Post - U.S. Population Grows At Slowest Rate Since The Great Depression. This is really dangerous on many levels. The long term effect will be that as our population ages, we will not have enough workers; but, equally important is the effect on culture and society. The growth rate is so low that no society has ever recovered from a rate this low, in history.