Wal-Mart’s low prices don’t come cheap. In fact, each Wal-Mart store employing 200 people costs taxpayers approximately $420,750 annually in public social services used by Wal-Mart workers whose low wages and unaffordable health insurance mean most of them are among the working poor. That’s the finding of Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart, a report by the minority staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Education and the Workforce Committee.

Get the Facts at http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/walmart/walmart_1.cfm

For years, I’ve heard that Rumsfeld announced — the day before 9/11 —
that 2.3 Trillion Dollars was missing from the Department of Defense.

Well, now we have the video clip to prove it.

RELATED: What is the Federal Reserve?, Shut DOWN the Federal Reserve Petition

A newly published paper by a researcher for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis warns that a ballooning budget deficit and pension and welfare timebomb is growing into a $65.9 trillion fiscal gap that will force the United States into bankruptcy.

In the view of Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University, the U.S. is already bankrupt – at least the government is.

“The U.S. government is, indeed, bankrupt,” he writes, “insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds.”

Aspen Daily News
The American dream is closer to a hallucinatory hope than a reachable reality, according to a new study presented at The Aspen Institute last week.

With the cost of living rising on several fronts, the majority of Americans surveyed in the study “What Do American Voters Really Want in ‘06?” said they are not living the dream that the European settlers who first founded this country suggested could be realized through hard work, courage and a determination to improve one’s life.

Even though 81 percent of those surveyed agree the United States is the land of opportunity, they also said the concept is not being achieved and is abstract. The study indicated 61 percent of Americans say they are not living the dream and nearly two-thirds of those who are not living it don’t believe they will achieve the dream in their lifetime, the study that Dr. Douglas E. Schoen, a nationally renowned pollster, conducted for the institute showed.

Bloomberg
Syria, under fire from the U.S. for the alleged support of terrorism, plans to end its currency peg to the dollar by year-end to reflect closer trade ties with Europe, central bank Governor Adib Mayaleh said.

The Central Bank of Syria has already converted half its foreign-exchange reserves to euros, Mayaleh said in a telephone interview from Damascus, without being more specific. Syria’s reserves, including gold, totaled $4.1 billion at the end of 2005, according to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

“We want to have a currency peg that will reflect our external trade,'’ Mayaleh said yesterday. The European Union is Syria’s largest trading partner, taking half of its exports, he said.<!–more–>

The country may instead link the Syrian pound to a weighted group of currencies including the euro or loans from the International Monetary Fund that are known as Special Drawing Rights, Mayaleh said. SDRs comprise the euro, dollar, yen and British pound.

Most Middle East countries, including the six oil-producing Persian Gulf monarchies and Jordan, peg their currencies to the dollar. Egypt and Iraq manage floated currencies. The Syrian pound is pegged at 52.2 versus the dollar, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Central bankers from Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Sweden and Finland have this year indicated they aim to diversify their reserves away from the dollar. The euro is appreciating this year after its first annual decline since 2001. It traded at $1.2750 at 12:27 p.m. in London today, from $1.1849 at the start of the year.

Increased Trade

The Syrian government is “studying options'’ with regard to ending the dollar peg, Abdullah Dardari, the country’s deputy prime minister for economic affairs, told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Damascus on June 10.

Syria last year sold $2.9 billion of goods, including crude oil and textiles, to the European Union, according to data from the European Commission. Imports from the EU totaled $2.7 billion. That compares with $155 million from the U.S., based on figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The U.S. imposed sanctions on Syria in May 2004, including a ban on trade transactions with the Commercial Bank of Syria, in an effort to halt exports to the country that stands accused by President George W. Bush’s administration of aiding militants in Iraq and pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Egyptian Pound

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan used the Egyptian pound as their official currency while under British and French control.

France, which controlled Syria and Lebanon, introduced a franc-based currency for the two countries in 1924 that lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War.

In the 1960s, Syria’s major trading partners were communist- controlled Eastern European states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, reflecting its political ties with the Soviet Union.

In the 1970s, that shifted toward Western Europe, which accounted for 49 percent of Syrian imports in 1975 and 56 percent in 1976, according to the U.S. Library of Congress.

By 1984, West Germany, France, Italy and Japan were Syria’s biggest suppliers of goods including machinery, transport equipment, and iron and steel. In 2004, Turkey, followed by the Ukraine, China and Russia were its biggest sources of imports, according to the CIA.

Syria is seeking to open its economy after the socialist Baath Party, which came to power 1963, began moving toward a market economy in the 1990s. Syrian officials have allowed private banks and insurance companies to operate for the first time as the country seeks to attract foreign investors.

Economic growth is forecast to reach 6 percent this year as investments continue to flow to the country, the third-largest non-OPEC oil producer in the Middle East, according to Mayaleh.

CNN
I don’t get it. What’s the percentage in keeping the minimum wage at $5.15 an hour? After nine years? This is such an unnecessary and nasty Republican move. Congress has voted seven times to raise its own wages since last the minimum wage budged. Of course, Congress always raises its own salary in the dark of night, hoping no one will notice. But now it does the same with the minimum wage, quietly killing it.Anyone who doesn’t think this is a country where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer needs to check the numbers — this is Bush country, where a rising tide lifts all yachts.

According to the current issue of Mother Jones:

• One in four U.S. jobs pays less than a poverty-level income.

• Since 2000, the number of Americans living below the poverty line at any one time has risen steadily. Now, 13 percent — 37 million Americans — are officially poor.

• Bush’s tax cuts (extended until 2010) save those earning between $20,000 and $30,000 an average of $10 a year, while those making $1 million are saved $42,700.

Read about the Federal Reserve… then sign this petition to SHUT IT DOWN!!!

All you need to do is to enter your name and e-mail address.

Whiatleblower MagazineWhile millions of Americans look with awe to the Federal Reserve to protect the nation’s financial well being, millions more mistrust the Fed, seeing it as an unaccountable, private banking cartel siphoning off citizens’ wealth and manipulating America’s economy for the benefit of a hidden elite.

Where does the truth lie? That’s the question that’s asked – and answered in-depth – in the July issue of WorldNetDaily’s acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine.

Titled “THE FEDERAL RESERVE: FRAUD OF THE CENTURY,” Whistleblower documents authoritatively and with uncommon clarity how the “Federal Reserve” – which is neither part of the federal government, nor does it rely on monetary reserves – is an unconstitutional, unelected cartel that literally creates the devastating problems it was supposed to prevent.

Today, the entire Western financial world holds its breath every time the Fed chairman speaks, so influential are the central bank’s decisions on markets, interest rates and the economy in general. Yet the Fed, supposedly created to smooth out business cycles and prevent disruptive economic downswings like the Great Depression, has actually done the opposite.

“From the Great Depression, to the stagflation of the seventies, to the burst of the dotcom bubble” in 2001, charges U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, “every economic downturn suffered by the country over the last 80 years can be traced to Federal Reserve policy.”

While many Fed defenders claim it worked valiantly to prevent or minimize the ravages of the Great Depression, in reality the Fed caused the Depression and greatly increased the severity of its effects.

In fact, as July’s Whistleblower documents, the Fed’s new chairman, Ben Bernanke, admits that the Federal Reserve was responsible for the Great Depression. “We did it,” Bernanke said, adding, “We’re very sorry.”

Ralph Nader | Nader.org
Whatever led to the metastasis of corporate demons inside the brain of the Democratic Party over the last thirty years, it has paid off the business establishment. The cost of freezing the minimum wage has deprived millions of working Americans of trillions of dollars for their necessities of life.

A few Democrats, most prominently Senator Edward M. Kennedy, have championed keeping the minimum wage up with inflation for years. But the Republicans and the somnolent Democratic Party have combined to defeat Kennedy’s bills over and over again.

Last year the federal minimum wage at $5.15 per hour was $3.50 below in purchasing power of what it was in 1968. Today’s minimum wage has the lowest purchasing power since 1949 when economic productivity per worker was a fraction of what it is today, when the super-rich corporate bosses had not become hyper-rich averaging over $8000 an hour.

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | July 8 2006
The representative of the largest group of 9/11 families says that the official version of events is a fallacy and that the NORAD stand down and evidence of incendiary devices used to bring down the towers amount to government complicity in the attacks - a conclusion shared by half of the 9/11 families he represents.

Doyle heads the Coalition of 9/11 Families and lost his own son Joey in the collapse of the twin towers.

“If you want to believe what they want to snow you under on like the 9/11 Commission - that’s a total fallacy,” said Doyle.

“The continuing cover-up is beyond belief,” Doyle told GCN radio host Alex Jones.

Michael Paladin | Police State USA
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” –Thomas Jefferson

What is the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve is not in anyway federal, nor does it have anything in reserve. The Federal Reserve is a privately owned corporation, out for profit. It is the fourth central bank in America and on December 22, 1913 was granted the unconstitutional right to print and coin money, as well as set interest rates for the United States economy.

The United States Constitution strictly prohibits any institution, except Congress, from issuing our money in America. In fact, the US Constitution clearly states in Article 1 Section 8 Paragraph 5 that congress alone shall reserve the right to: To coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coins, and the standard of weights and measures. This means our coins are supposed to contain a specific and just amount of precious metal, in which the coins today contain none.

Ron Paul (Texas Republican Congressman)

They declared, in terms that still are radical today, that all men are created equal, and endowed with certain inalienable rights that government neither grants nor can take away.

In the Declaration of Independence, the founding fathers sought to demonstrate to the world that they were rejecting a tyrannical king. They listed the “injuries and usurpations” that contain the philosophical basis for our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

One point of consternation to our founding fathers was that the king had been “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent.” But 230 years later, taxation with representation has not worked out much better.

Indeed, one has to wonder how Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would react to the current state of affairs. After all, they were outraged by mere import tariffs of a few pennies on the dollar. Today, the average American pays roughly 50 percent of their income in direct and indirect taxes.

We are going to hit close to $4.00 a gallon by the summer. Want gasoline prices to come down? We need to take some intelligent, united action.

By now you’re probably thinking gasoline priced at about $1.50 is super cheap. Me too! It is currently $3.05 for regular unleaded in my town.

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a gallon of gas is CHEAP at $1.50-$1.75, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS control the marketplace…. not sellers.

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas!

And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.

Key Retail Merchandising Traps & 9 Tips for Consumers to Avoid Them
Brian W. Vaszily | SixWise.com
The next time you set foot in a retail store of any sort, please state the following: “I am NOT a hamster.” Saying it aloud is good, but saying it aloud to the cashier or greeter is even better.

Oh, you may be cute like a hamster. You may stuff your cheeks full when you eat. You may even bury yourself under shredded newspaper when you sleep.

But there is no way you can repeatedly be lured through mazes without even being aware of it, like a hamster. There is no way you can constantly be tricked into actions that please others without you even being aware of it, like a hamster.

No, no, no.

Well actually, yes there is.

Anne Kadet | SmartMoney.com
1. “We trick you into paying higher prices.”
Most of us have spent enough time in supermarkets to think we know how to save a few bucks: Buy in bulk whenever possible and buy brands that are on special. Too bad the supermarket chains have quietly changed the rules.

Bulk buying, it turns out, is often more expensive, simply because in the early 1990s supermarket chains figured out that consumers lean toward it, and they’ve jacked up prices accordingly. “Supermarkets know that consumers believe a two-pound package is cheaper, ounce per ounce, than a one-pound package,” says Arun K. Jain, a marketing professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “But the reality is, you’re often better off buying two one-pound packages.” He estimates that almost all supermarkets engage in this practice. We found proof at a store near the SmartMoney offices, where a 12-ounce bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup cost $2.09, while a 24-ounce bottle was $4.65; a quart of Lactaid milk was selling for $1.79, while a half-gallon was $3.85.

BBC News
The US Federal Reserve raised its key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point on Thursday as it looks to slow inflation.

The Fed’s Open Market Committee has raised its key interest rate for a 17th time in a row to its highest level in over five years to 5.25%.

Walmart Watch
Unfortunately for blue-collar workers, on Tuesday the Senate rejected a plan to increase the minimum wage incrementally during the next two years. Fortunately for Wal-Mart employees, forward-thinking cities such as Chicago are taking matters into their own hands.

A city council committee approved a plan introduced by Alderman Joe Moore that would require retailers with 75,000 square feet of interior space or more to pay employees at least $10 an hour in salary, along with a benefits package of at least $3 an hour. The measure will go before the full council next week.

Lou Dobbs | CNN
Without much fanfare, the House of Representatives last week voted to give members of Congress yet another pay raise, as it has done almost every year for nearly a decade.