There’s a new Blog on the WEB. Starting Monday July 04, 2011 I will begin to publish a new and exciting online news site, complete with essays, commentaries and breaking news Headlines. International, National, Regional and local news of interest will be the standard fare. Well I’m sure there will be a somewhat conservative slant on things…don’t you think? I really enjoy writing and bringing interesting stories and items to light to the Public. Especially Important news…. that’s too often left out of the mainstream media outlets.
Heart of Dixie News provides International, National, Regional and Local News with a conservative “SOUTHERN” Accent. We provide the THE NEWS that is not spoon-fed by the mainstream media. We try to write and publish News stories with links that are interesting,informative, important and central to you and your Family’s Daily Life. Now there are hundreds of political pundits out there using a lot of big words to say something…. My aim with this blog is not to pander to the elites, the pundits, or the so-called experts. Sometimes that means pointing out something that others didn’t say or said in a way that it doesn’t stand out. Sometimes it just means explaining things the way an average American would understand. I’m not an expert and sometimes experts are wrong: dead wrong.
Why do this? Because I’m just like you, an average American and what the experts think doesn’t always coincide with what the average American thinks. Besides, who trusts the media and their experts these days? I know that I certainly do not! So…get ready here it comes, a new and exciting way to read the news and hopefully we will all have some fun in the process.
Sunday, July 3, 2011
All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup
You: doing more with less. Corporate profits: up 22 percent. The dirty secret of the jobless recovery.
On a bright spring day in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled "on the side." It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.
"Ah," he said, "the speedup."
His old-school phrase gave form to something we'd been noticing with increasing apprehension—and it extended far beyond journalism. We'd hear from creative professionals in what seemed to be dream jobs who were crumbling under ever-expanding to-do lists; from bus drivers, hospital technicians, construction workers, doctors, and lawyers who shame-facedly whispered that no matter how hard they tried to keep up with the extra hours and extra tasks, they just couldn't hold it together. (And don't even ask about family time.)
Webster's defines speedup as "an employer's demand for accelerated output without increased pay," and it used to be a household word. Bosses would speed up the line to fill a big order, to goose profits, or to punish a restive workforce. Workers recognized it, unions (remember those?) watched for and negotiated over it—and, if necessary, walked out over it.
But now we no longer even acknowledge it—not in blue-collar work, not in white-collar or pink-collar work, not in economics texts, and certainly not in the media (except when journalists gripe about the staff-compacted-job-expanded newsroom). Now the word we use is "productivity," a term insidious in both its usage and creep. The not-so-subtle implication is always: Don't you want to be a productive member of society? Pundits across the political spectrum revel in the fact that US productivity (a.k.a. economic output per hour worked) consistently leads the world. Yes, year after year, Americans wring even more value out of each minute on the job than we did the year before. U-S-A! U-S-A!
Except what's good for American business isn't necessarily good for Americans. We're not just working smarter, but harder. And harder. And harder, to the point where the driver is no longer American industriousness, but something much more predatory.
You have nothing to lose but your gains
Productivity has surged, but income and wages have stagnated for most Americans. If the median household income had kept pace with the economy since 1970, it would now be nearly $92,000, not $50,000.
...Growth is back
...But jobs aren't
Click here for 9 more charts that will make your blood boil.Sound familiar: Mind racing at 4 a.m.? Guiltily realizing you've been only half-listening to your child for the past hour? Checking work email at a stoplight, at the dinner table, in bed? Dreading once-pleasant diversions, like dinner with friends, as just one more thing on your to-do list?
Guess what: It's not you. These might seem like personal problems—and certainly, the pharmaceutical industry is happy to perpetuate that notion—but they're really economic problems. Just counting work that's on the books (never mind those 11 p.m. emails), Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. The differential isn't solely accounted for by longer hours, of course—worldwide, almost everyone except us has, at least on paper, a right to weekends off, paid vacation time (PDF), and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don't mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland. U-S...A?)
To understand how we got here, first let's consider the Ben Franklin-Horatio Alger-Henry Ford ur-myth: To balk at working hard—really, really hard—brands you as profoundly un-American. Who besides the archetypical Japanese salaryman derives so much of his self-image from self-sacrifice on the job? Slacker is one of the most biting insults available in polite company.
And so we kowtow to—nay, embrace—a cultural maxim that just happens to be enormously convenient to corporate America. "Our culture has encouraged me to only feel valuable if I'm barely hanging on to my sanity," one friend emailed as we were working on this article. In fact, each time we mentioned this topic to someone—reader, source, friend—they first took pains to say: I'm not lazy. I love my job. I come from a long line of hard workers. But then it would pour out of them—the fatigue, the isolation, the guilt.
"I am exhausted," said a "part time" college instructor in Illinois. "I can't help my son with his homework because I am grading papers until late into the night. I get up very early during the week, skip lunch to save not money but time, and the workload never lets up. My employer uses and abuses full-time employees even more so than those of us that are hourly. My supervisor, for example, runs a large department. He was just promoted to a new, even more demanding position, but his position running the department will not be filled. He will now be doing what is a 60-to-70-hour job 'on the side.' I can't complain of overwork, because everyone is competing to get enough classes to pay the bills. If you lose a class, you lose a chunk of your paycheck. If we can't handle it, the class can always be given to another teacher who will be desperate for the work or money."
Sure, but these are tough times—employers struggling to survive the recession are just tightening their belts, right? That's true for some. But in the big picture, the data show a more insidious pattern. Consider the charts above: After a sharp dip in 2008 and 2009, US economic output recovered nicely to near pre-recession levels—we did better than most of our fellow G-7 economies. But not so American workers: Far more people here lost their jobs, and fewer were hired back once the recovery began, than anywhere else.
Now, some jobs always get "rationalized" away, thanks to technological or organizational improvements—an area where, it's not jingoistic to say, the US has led its European counterparts. But that "productivity gap" has narrowed considerably, and in any case, there certainly was no dramatic tech or efficiency breakthrough between 2008 and 2010 (quite—Twitter/Facebook/FarmVille—the opposite).
What about offshoring? That's certainly a factor. But increasingly, US workers are also falling prey to what we'll call offloading: cutting jobs and dumping the work onto the remaining staff. Consider a recent Wall Street Journal story about "superjobs," a nifty euphemism for employees doing more than one job's worth of work—more than half of all workers surveyed said their jobs had expanded, usually without a raise or bonus.
In all the chatter about our "jobless recovery," how often does someone explain the simple feat by which this is actually accomplished? US productivity increased twice as fast in 2009 as it had in 2008, and twice as fast again in 2010: workforce down, output up, and voilá! No wonder corporate profits are up 22 percent since 2007, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute. To repeat: Up. Twenty-two. Percent.
This is nothing short of a sea change. As University of California-Berkeley economist Brad DeLong notes, until not long ago, "businesses would hold on to workers in downturns even when there wasn't enough for them to do—would put them to work painting the factory—because businesses did not want to see their skilled, experienced workers drift away and then have to go through the expense and loss of training new ones. That era is over. These days firms take advantage of downturns in demand to rationalize operations and increase labor productivity, pleading business necessity to their workers."
How does corporate America have the gall? You pretty much know the answer, but for official confirmation let's turn to Erica Groshen, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: It's easier here than in, say, the UK or Germany "for employers to avoid adding permanent jobs," she told the AP recently. "They're less constrained by traditional human-resources practices [translation: decency] or union contracts." In plainer English, here's Rutgers political scientist Carl Van Horn: "Everything is tilted in favor of the employers...The employee has no leverage. If your boss says, 'I want you to come in the next two Saturdays,' what are you going to say—no?"
And lest CNBC hornswoggle you, this is not just a product of the recession. Throughout the past decade, salaries stagnated and workloads grew, but Wall Street's bubble allowed us to drown our sorrows in credit. (Sure, I'm working crazy hours and our pension fund is history, but check out my granite countertop!) Then cam
Which brings us to another shared delusion: multitasking. Our best efforts at collective denial notwithstanding, simple arithmetic reveals that even after housewives entered the workforce, the work of housewives still had to be done. Sure, some of it—especially child care—was outsourced, often at rock-bottom wages. But for many women, and a rising (though not yet sufficient) number of men, the second shift awaits each night. And it's increasingly being joined by a third shift, as we remain digitally tethered to the office in the diminishing hours we're actually home.
Multitasking seems the obvious fix—let me just answer this email while I help with your homework! But here's the scary research news: Minus a few freakish exceptions, most of us cannot actually multitask. Try to keep up a conversation with your spouse while scanning the BlackBerry, and empirical data shows (PDF) that you do both things poorly. And not only that: If you multitask constantly, your actual mental circuitry erodes, and your brain loses its ability to focus. (Same with sleep: Aside from a tiny minority of mutants, humans perform distinctly and progressively worse when they get fewer than eight hours a night. Go ahead and cry.)
Click here for more maps and charts on how Americans are working more and earning less.Think you're the exception? Nope. "Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking," warns Stanford sociologist Clifford Nass. "And one of the big discoveries is, you know what? You're really lousy at it. [It's] been demonstrated over and over and over. No one talks about it—I don't know why—but in fact there's no contradictory evidence to this for about the last 15, 20 years."
Actually, it's not hard to guess why no one talks about it: We need to believe there's a personal workaround for what we're conditioned to see as a personal shortcoming. When, in fact, the problem is the absurd premise that our economy can produce ever more with ever less.
But take heart! Up in the corner offices, there's a growing recognition that unrealistic demands on time are destroying the souls of...executives. "Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy," notes a recent article in McKinsey Quarterly, the research publication of the giant global consulting firm that has been corporate America's chief efficiency cheerleader. "These scourges hit CEOs and their colleagues in the C-suite particularly hard." McKinsey's advice to beleaguered execs? Do one thing at a time; delegate; take more breaks.
Just try telling that to the millions of people whose work has been downsized, offshored, and sped up thanks to McKinsey.
How have we been so brainwashed? For a lucky few, money and perks help sugarcoat the daily frenzy—anything from the workaday onsite gym to the rock-climbing wall, free dry-cleaning, massage parlor, and unlimited sushi you'll find at the Googleplex. Some heed the siren song of Tony Robbins/Franklin Planner/4-Hour Workweek/Lifehacker—pick your productivity guru. But for most Americans, it's just fear—of being passed over at best, downsized at worst. Even among college grads, unemployment is twice what it was in 2007, and those statistics don't take note of all the B.A.'s stocking shelves and answering phones. McDonald's recently announced that it had gotten more than a million applicants for 62,000 new positions. Enough said.
Meanwhile, what's passed off as the growing pains of a modern economy is—not to go all Marxist on you—simply about redistribution. For 90 percent of American workers, incomes have stagnated or fallen for the past three decades, while they've ballooned at the top, and exploded at the very tippy-top: By 2008, the wealthiest 0.1 percent were making 6.4 times as much as they did in 1980 (adjusted for inflation). And just to further fuel your outrage, that 22 percent increase in profits? Most of it accrued to a single industry: finance.
In other words, all that extra work you've taken on—the late nights, the skipped lunch hours, the missed soccer games—paid off. For them.
This will keep up as long as we buy into three fallacies: One, that to feel crushed by debilitating workloads is a personal failing. Two, that it's just your company or industry struggling—when in fact what's happening to hotel maids and sales clerks is also happening to project managers, engineers, and doctors. Three, that there's nothing anyone can do about it.
Mule Design Studio, a web-design shop with a number of blue-chip clients, has a saner policy: "Our office hours are Monday through Friday 9-6. We do not hand out our cell phone numbers. On the weekend, we cease to exist."
No, no, and no. We got to this point because of decades of political decisions. To name but three: turning over the financing of elections to wealthy interests; making it harder for unions to organize; deregulating Wall Street (and completely wimping out on reregulating it after the financiers nearly destroyed the global economy). And even after having watched these policies bring the global economy to its knees, Mitch McConnell & Co. say that any questioning of corporate power is tantamount to rolling out the tumbrels. Please.It would take a boatload of arrogance, and an essay four times this length, to prescribe a solution. But suffice it to say there are companies in the US that have figured out a way to thrive and maintain a sane, even engaging, work environment. (Take the policies of Mule Design Studio, a web-design shop with a number of blue-chip clients: "Our office hours are Monday through Friday 9-6. We do not hand out our cell phone numbers. On the weekend, we cease to exist.")
European companies face the same pressures that ours do—yet in Germany's vigorous economy, for example, six weeks of vacation are de rigueur, weekend work is a last resort, and companies' response to a downturn is not to fire everyone, but to institute Kurzarbeit—temporarily reducing hours and snapping back when things start looking up (PDF). Sure, they lag ever so slightly behind us in productivity. But ask yourself: Who does our No. 1 spot benefit?
Exactly. So maybe it's time to come out of the speedup closet. Rant to a friend, neighbor, coworker. Hear them say, "Me too." That might sound a little cheesy, and it's not going to lance Mitch McConnell from the body politic of America. But if you're in an abusive relationship—which 90-plus percent of America currently is—the first step toward recovery is to admit you have a problem.
Debt Increased More Under Geithner Than Under Any Treasury Secretary in U.S. History
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner testifies in the House Small Business Committee on Wednesday, June 22, 2011.
(CNSNews.com) – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner oversaw the largest increase in the national debt of any Treasury secretary in American history, presiding over a $3.7 trillion increase in the debt.
According to data from the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Public Debt, the national debt has increased $3,723,575,990,130.10 from Jan. 26, 2009 until June 30, 2011, Geithner’s entire tenure to date as Treasury secretary.
When Geithner took office the total national debt stood at $10.6 trillion. As of June 30, 2011, it had risen to $14.3 trillion.
In fact, the debt accrued under Geithner is greater than all federal debt accrued in the first 204 years of the nation’s history. The national debt did not reach $3.7 trillion until October 1991, according to historical Treasury data that reaches back to 1791.
Geithner, who reportedly may step down from his position soon, has overseen the accrual of more federal debt (in only 2.5 years) than every Treasury secretary combined from Alexander Hamilton to Nicholas Brady, who was Treasury secretary in October 1991 when the national debt reached $3.7 trillion.
Since then, the federal debt has increased by historically large amounts under each Treasury secretary since Brady but not to the level it is today under Geithner. The debt increases under those secretaries are presented below.
Nicholas Brady (9/15/88-1/17/93): $1,564,862,000,000.00
Lloyd Bentsen (1/20/93-12/22/94): $559,880,257,144.59
Robert Rubin (1/11/95-7/2/99): $815,560,432,731.13
Lawrence Summers (7/2/99-1/20/01): $109,651,004,604.88
Paul O’Neill (1/20/01-12/31/02): $677,930,718,549.89
John Snow (2/3/03-6/30/06): $2,040,609,369,491.81
Henry Paulson (7/10/06-1/20/09): $2,218,644,118,047.16
Gay Marriage II. Another PSYOP in the Making?
By Servando Gonzalez – Contributing Writer According to a recent Associated Press report,
After days of contentious negotiations and last-minute reversals by two Republican senators, New York became the sixth and largest state in the country to legalize gay marriage, breathing life into the national gay rights movement that had stalled over a nearly identical bill here two years ago.One of the most unexplainable things about American gays is their desire to get married in a country where less and less heterosexual couples are getting married and the institution of marriage is in decline.
Pending any court challenges, legal gay marriages can begin in New York by late July after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed his bill into law just before midnight Friday.[1]
A recently published study by the Pew Research Center, mentions a survey done in association with Time magazine. Of 2,691 Americans interviewed, four in 10 think marriage is becoming obsolete. This represents an 11 percent jump since 1978, when Time asked the same question.[2]
Another difficult to understand thing is that this uncontrollable desire usually flashes before a presidential election, and quietly fades after it. As if on cue, this time it has begun just before the first Republican presidential debate.
The answer to the mystery is that gay marriage has nothing to do with human rights. It is just another psychological warfare operation (PSYOP) designed by the Wall Street conspirators to carry out their plans.
This does not mean that most homosexual couples that married or wanted to do it are consciously supporting the PSYOP. On the contrary, I think that most of them are well intentioned and sincerely believe they are trying to exercise a right that had been denied to them.[3]
Nevertheless, like in all psychological warfare operations, the brainwashing works not only in the minds of the target population, but also in the minds of the ones who unwittingly are part of the PSYOP. Like, Oswald, Sirham, and the Muslims who participated in the 9/11 false flag operation, most of the homosexuals who rushed to San Francisco City Hall in 2003 to get married played the role of patsies — the necessary useful fools.
One of the main reasons offered by gays for their uncontrollable desire to be legally married is that currently they are discriminated because they don’t have the rights to health care and other benefits that married heterosexual couples have.
However, this argument doesn’t hold water, because a growing number of companies are currently giving non-married homosexual couples the same rights as married heterosexual couples. On the contrary, for some unexplainable reasons, these very same companies keep discriminating against non-married heterosexual couples and don’t extend those benefits to them.
As a matter of fact, the ones really discriminated are hundred of thousands of non-married heterosexual couples who don’t receive the benefits given both to married heterosexual couples and unmarried homosexual couples, but they don’t run to City Hall to get married.
On the other hand, they may be happy for not paying the marriage tax penalty[4] — another reason why it is difficult to understand the gay couples’ uncontrollable impulse to getting married.
A clue, however, is that, as I mentioned above, this uncontrollable impulse always flashes out before a presidential election.
In order to understand why, however, we must begin by understanding that, contrary to its claims, the gay movement is actually a political movement, not a social one.
In their book, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s, a plan for a veritable PSYOP intended to legitimize the gay movement, authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen advice, “wherever possible come out.”[5]
But there is nothing sexual in coming out. Actually, coming out is a political statement, and this proves the fact that the gay movement is actually a political movement cleverly disguised as a social one.[6]
The bottom line is that a gay is not just a homosexual, but also a militant homosexual who supports the goals of the gay movement. By the way, thousands of American homosexuals, including many who mistakenly call themselves “gay,” didn’t fall in the trap, and chose to stay in the closet.
The 2003 Gay Marriage PSYOP
In 2003, the Council on Foreign Relations conspirators changed their plans to appoint Hillary Clinton as the next president of the United States and decided to keep George W. Bush in the White House for four more years. But Bush’s disastrous policies had won the dissatisfaction of most of his conservative base in the Republican Party, particularly among Southern Christians.
So, they conceived a PSYOP. As if on cue, San Francisco gays fell their pre-election uncontrollable urge to get married, and all hell broke loose —its flames conveniently fanned by the mainstream media and some CFR-controlled evangelical pastors.
As the typical result of this Hegelian-type PSYOP, the scared conservatives were easily duped, and reluctantly chose Bush again as the lesser of two evils.[7] Soon after, the frantic gay-marriage advocates calmed down and dug back in their holes like cicadas waiting for the next presidential election.
A few months later somebody discovered that San Francisco’s pro-gay mayor Gavin Newsom, the man who supported the whole charade, had been a contributor to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.[8]
By the way, I am not the only one who has suspected something fishy about Mr. Newsom’s decision in February 2004 to open City Hall to thousands of gay weddings. Actually, it became a subject of considerable debate among Democrats.
Some in the party were suggesting even before the election that Mr. Newsom had played into President Bush’s game plan by inviting a showdown on the divisive same-sex-marriage issue.
Most of these talks were kept behind closed doors. Nevertheless, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat and Newsom supporter, answered a question about the subject at a news conference outside her San Francisco home, the prickly discussion spilled into the open and the cat was out of the bag.
After Bush had been reelected in 2004, Feinstein was asked her opinion about the same-sex marriages in 2004, and she immediately blamed San Francisco’s mayor Gavin Newsom for the Democrat’s defeat.
According to Senator Feinstein, “I believe it did energize a very conservative vote. It gave them a position to rally around. The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon.”[9]
Feinstein was not an isolated case. Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, an openly gay member of Congress, also disagreed with Newsom.
Mr. Frank was opposed to the San Francisco weddings from the start and told it to Mr. Newsom before the ceremonies began. He urged the mayor to follow the Massachusetts path, which involved winning approval for the marriages in court before issuing licenses.
Mr. Frank concluded that mayor Newsom had helped to galvanize Mr. Bush’s conservative supporters in those states by playing into people’s fears of same-sex weddings. “The thing that agitated people were the mass weddings,” he said, adding, “It was a mistake in San Francisco compounded by people in Oregon, New Mexico and New York. What it did was to provoke a lot of fears.”[10]
The self-described “radical anti-capitalist queer group” Gay Shame went a step further, and attacked Newsom, both physically and verbally, for his gay marriage decision. The first time, they attacked him with pipes and sticks during the Gay Pride parade.
Later they expressed their disgust with both Newsom and the San Francisco gay community, calling them “sell-outs” for backing Newsom’s opening of gays to marriage — which they called “the central institution of that misogynist, racist system of domination and oppression known as heterosexuality.”[11] Though their actions may be questionable, from their point of view their logic is unbeatable.
Playing his scripted part on the gay marriage PSYOP, as the 2004 election approached, George W. Bush began distancing himself from the gay community — despite the fact that he got an estimated 25% of the gay vote in 2000 — while, at the same time, embracing the four million southern evangelicals, most of whom didn’t vote for him in 2000 and made the election a cliffhanger.
In an article she wrote for Salon.com, Joan Walsh summarized the angry reaction to the gay marriage event by some gays and Democrats who were not part of the PSYOP. Newsom’s decision to allow 4,000-plus gay couples to marry in February, before he was stopped by the courts, irritated many fellow Democrats, who feared he’d handed a perfect wedge issue to President Bush.
Some party leaders even blamed Newsom for Bush’s sudden speedup of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
The Coming 2112 Presidential Election
In the first place, we must keep in mind that we, the American people, do not elect our leaders anymore: the CFR conspirators do it for us. The elections are just smoke and mirrors to fool the gullible sheeple into believing that they can control the government through the power of their votes.
Nevertheless, contrary to professional revolutionaries like Lenin, Hitler, Mao or Castro, most of the conspirators at the CFR’s inner core are physical cowards, who have never fought in the wars and revolutions they have artificially created. Even more important, despite all their power and money the conspirators are not all-powerful gods.
Granted, the conspirators are very strong, but they are not so strong that all resistance is futile. Their plans are not perfect and sometimes fail miserably. As political analyst Adrian Salbuchi rightly pointed out,
They have many weak points: internal dissent, serious miscalculations, omissions, mistakes, errors, oversights, sloth, ignorance, at times stupidity, pride that always comes before the fall. At times they often seem to shoot themselves in the foot.[13]For example, Obama’s health care plan — whose main purpose is creating a Nazi-like, CFR-controlled army of thugs to oppose American patriots — has failed miserably as a Hegelian PSYOP. Its antithesis was an artificially created flu epidemic that was going to be used to terrorize the American public into accepting the health plan as the lesser of two evils.
The main reason why the PSYOP failed was because a large part of the American people never believed the threat. Many of them even refused to take the vaccines that allegedly were going to save them from certain death.
The Global warming PSYOP has also failed miserably. It is becoming obvious that Gaia betrayed the conspirators, and their failure is the direct result of plain stupidity.
If, instead of global warming, they had focused their campaign since the very beginning on climate change, that would have fooled most of us, because it is evident that, as it has happened since the beginnings of time, we are approaching a big global climate change, though not caused by human activity. Nevertheless, they made the mistake of believing their own lies, and got caught in their own trap.
The fact that the conspirators’ plans are failing, and that they are scared of the growing dissidence among their ranks — the rats are the first ones to escape from a sinking ship — was acknowledged by none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting in Montreal early last year, he warned that a “global political awakening,” in combination with infighting amongst the elite, was threatening to derail the move towards a one-world government.[14]
The global political awakening Brzezinski is scared about is the result of the extended access to alternative, non-controlled media, mostly through the Internet. Actually the two more important stumbling blocks the globalist conspirators have in their road to total power are the Internet and the people’s private ownership of guns.
Consequently, if they are to succeed, first they have to eliminate both easy access to the Internet and guns in the hands of the people.
Eliminating the Internet threat is relatively easy, and could be accomplished by a Democratic president. A false flag operation in the form of a devastating cyberattack would be the excuse that will justify strict control over publication and access to the Internet.
However, registration and eventual confiscation of guns, mostly in the hands of conservative Republicans, is a little more difficult, and only a Republican president can fool the Republican sheeple without provoking an all out, bloody rebellion. The most likely pretext for gun confiscation may be a false flag PSYOP in the form of a devastating terrorist attack in the continental US.
One may argue that a terrorist attack could not lead to gun confiscation since it will be precisely at that moment when the people would need guns more than ever. But gullible Americans who accepted the far-fetched theory of second hand smoking can accept any cock-and-bull story, provided that its source is the government.
The need that will make gullible Republicans to accept the confiscation of their guns would be “national defense” — whatever that means.
Of lately, a name seems to be gaining popularity among Republicans, even though he didn’t participate in the presidential debate: Texas governor Rick Perry. Despite his official Republican affiliation, Perry is a globalist in the closet, fully in the hands of the CFR conspirators.
Currently the CFR conspirators are working in the final stages of the elimination of the United States of America as a sovereign nation, as an important part of the creation of a New World Order. In this final run for the implementation of the totalitarian communo-fascist New World Order they envision, they cannot afford to run any risks.
They cannot afford a president like Reagan or Nixon, who, despite being under their control, took some independent actions. Much less they want a president like John F. Kennedy, who threatened the power of the Federal Reserve Bank.
For this crucial phase of their plan, they need in the White House a person they can fully trust, a power-thirsty psychopath — a Hitler, a Stalin, a Castro — who cannot sway or hesitate when the time comes for him to take the drastic decisions that this moment will require.
It does not seem that Obama is up to the task. Is Rick Perry the right person for the job, or are they going to go back to step one and put Hillary in the White House?
Anyway, if Perry finally announces his bid for the White House,[15] and in the coming months he begins showing his displeasure for gay marriage, that will be a strong sign that another gay marriage PSYOP is in the making. Let’s wait and see.
America's Fattest and Thinnest Cities
MSN news has ranked the fattest and thinnest cities in the U.S.--with some surprising results. Most of the fattest cities in the country are in Texas, and most of the thinnest are on the West Coast. An F grade is on the fattest end of the scale and an A grade is on the thinnest end of the scale.
The Heaviest Cities:
The Leanest Cities
The Heaviest Cities:
| Ranking | City | State | Grade |
| 1. | Corpus Christi | Texas | F |
| 2. | Charleston | W.Va. | F |
| 3. | El Paso | Texas | F |
| 4. | Dallas | Texas | F |
| 5. | Memphis | Tenn. | F |
| 6. | Kansas City | Mo. | F |
| 7. | San Antonio | Texas | F |
| 8. | Baltimore | Md. | F |
| 9. | Houston | Texas | D- |
| 10. | Birmingham | Ala. | D- |
| Ranking | City | State | Grade |
| 1. | San Francisco | Calif. | A+ |
| 2. | Burlington | Vermont | A+ |
| 3. | Washington, D.C. | A | |
| 4. | Seattle | Wash. | A |
| 5. | Austin | Texas | A |
| 6. | Albuquerque | N.M. | A- |
| 7. | Portland | Ore. | A- |
| 8. | Cincinnati | Ohio | A- |
| 9. | Denver | Colo. | A- |
| 10. | Aurora | Colo. | B+ |
Tide rolls through airwaves: Radio broadcasts reach more people than ever
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As the director of broadcasting for the Crimson Tide Sports Network, Roberts knows all angles of the transforming business that is sports on the radio.
On the air, he's a host.
In the office, he hammers out contracts with the local stations who carry the broadcasts.
Without the local affiliates, there is no network. In all, there are 60-plus stations in five states who hear Eli Gold call the action every fall Saturday.
But what about all the competition?
The SEC didn't have multi-billion dollar television deals when Roberts started as a statistician with the radio network in 1979, and the Internet was science fiction.
Still, the old-fashioned airwaves have its place in the modern world.
"You would think that it's probably lost some popularity because all of our games are on TV, but we don't get that impression and the station interest and advertiser interest both say there's still a significant number of people who listen to the games," Roberts said. "It's becoming more and more difficult. We have substantial number of people who tell us they turn down the sound on the television and turn up the radio."
Revenues from the radio, television and radio contracts negotiated by the school totaled $8.4 million in 2010 -- up from $7.3 million in 2009, according to the budget summaries UA filed with the NCAA.
Local affiliates aren't complaining either.
"It's as solid as it's probably ever been," said John Rodriguez, the market manager for the Montgomery affiliate WXFX-FM of Cumulus Media, Inc. "Alabama and Auburn have been fortunate over the past few years to get coverage on television, but people who are fans normally want to hear it from a somewhat partisan announcer's point of view, which means they want Eli Gold giving them the play-by-play as opposed to somebody on ABC or CBS or whoever."
The role of a Crimson Tide Radio Network local affiliate involves much more than airing football games and cashing checks. Contracts call for much more participation to keep the valuable rights.
Stations are required to carry all men's basketball games, women's basketball and baseball games against SEC opponents, a weekly "Hey Coach" show and short daily updates.
Exceptions are made in special circumstances.
"If we want to get an affiliate, say in East Alabama, I'd go with less than that just to get some of our programming on the air."
For 1580-AM in Columbus, Ga., being east of the state line isn't a hindrance to its commitment to Alabama coverage.
"Half this city went to Alabama, the other half went to Georgia -- well some of them went to Auburn," said Carl Conner, the vice president for operations for the station. "We get a lot of people here who are Alabama fans -- Alabama fanatics, excuse me."
Contracts last between three and four years and turnover is rare.
Most have 20-plus years of partnerships with the school.
Roberts couldn't reveal the value of contracts with local stations, but said they varied based on the size of a market. The still unrealized goal is to have an affiliate in all 67 counties in the state and each county is limited to one.
Changing landscape
The one-per county limit comes with a catch displayed clearly on the list of local affiliates on Alabama's athletic website. Several cities have multiple stations in a twist of the changing reality in modern radio.
Listeners in Huntsville, for example, can hear Tide broadcasts on 730-AM, 770-AM, and 92.5-FM since all three are owned by Cumulus.
Other corporate radio groups own a stranglehold on the college football broadcast rights.
Cumulus, owners of seven stations in Montgomery, has Alabama games on 95.1-FM and Auburn on 92.3-FM and 740-AM."Alabama and Auburn are probably the two best things we have in the building, as far as consistently being sold out," Rodriguez said. "We have little or no problem selling those."
Joe Burns has the same good fortune selling advertising space at 1400-AM in Decatur, but similarities with the Montgomery ownership ends there. Cumulus' website claims it's the second-largest owner of radio stations with a presence in 68 markets from Southern California to Northern Maine.
Burns is one of the few mom and pop station owners left in the business now ruled by publicly-traded giants. The Columbus, Ga., affiliate is also locally owned.
Tucked in the back corner of a strip mall on Danville Road, the office doors for WWTM were locked Wednesday afternoon with no one inside. The entire station is automated by computer. Burns programs it all in advance, so the need for on-site engineers doesn't exist.
The station's affiliation with ESPN provides the content unless there's a game for Alabama, Decatur High School football, basketball, baseball or Calhoun Community College baseball.
The station, founded in 1935 as WMSL, has owned the rights to Alabama broadcasts for all but two of the 25 years Burns owned it. Switching over to Auburn in the late 80s or early 90s didn't pan out.
"Well, I couldn't get any sponsors," Burns said. "That's what stations do. You have so much commercial time with every gamem and that's when you sell local sponsors. But I couldn't find enough sponsors to make it worthwhile when I had Auburn. So I went with Alabama and Alabama was always easier to sell."
Overlapping markets can also be an issue.
In Northern Alabama, Tide broadcasts from Huntsville affiliates are heard in Morgan County along with the Decatur-based 1400-AM signal and the powerful 93.9-FM out of Florence.
"If a station is going to be profitable, they probably need some exclusivity in the area they cover," Roberts said.
It hasn't hurt business for Burns."We have no problem selling Alabama," he said.Joe Burns has the same good fortune selling advertising space at 1400-AM in Decatur, but similarities with the Montgomery ownership ends there. Cumulus' website claims it's the second-largest owner of radio stations with a presence in 68 markets from Southern California to Northern Maine.
Burns is one of the few mom and pop station owners left in the business now ruled by publicly-traded giants. The Columbus, Ga., affiliate is also locally owned.
Tucked in the back corner of a strip mall on Danville Road, the office doors for WWTM were locked Wednesday afternoon with no one inside. The entire station is automated by computer. Burns programs it all in advance, so the need for on-site engineers doesn't exist.
The station's affiliation with ESPN provides the content unless there's a game for Alabama, Decatur High School football, basketball, baseball or Calhoun Community College baseball.
The station, founded in 1935 as WMSL, has owned the rights to Alabama broadcasts for all but two of the 25 years Burns owned it. Switching over to Auburn in the late 80s or early 90s didn't pan out.
"Well, I couldn't get any sponsors," Burns said. "That's what stations do. You have so much commercial time with every gamem and that's when you sell local sponsors. But I couldn't find enough sponsors to make it worthwhile when I had Auburn. So I went with Alabama and Alabama was always easier to sell."
Overlapping markets can also be an issue.
In Northern Alabama, Tide broadcasts from Huntsville affiliates are heard in Morgan County along with the Decatur-based 1400-AM signal and the powerful 93.9-FM out of Florence.
"If a station is going to be profitable, they probably need some exclusivity in the area they cover," Roberts said.
Turn down the TV
In today's world when all 12 regular-season football games air live on television, the radio broadcasts still have a place in those living rooms.
It's just getting harder to sync the radio play-by-play to the moving pictures on the screen.
Roberts said there's little anyone can do about that from his end. He traces the path of the radio signal that leaves Bryant-Denny Stadium, travels to an unlink, to a satellite in space and back to local stations creating a short delay of a second or two.
Most local affiliates add an extra seven seconds to the delay to avoid any obscenity trouble with the Federal Communications Commission. All told, the signal arriving in the listeners' home is eight or nine seconds behind the live game action.
The television broadcasts also include a variation of the seven-second delay.
"(The listener) might have an over-the-air signal from the TV station in Birmingham that carries the games or he might have DirecTV or he might have DISH or Charter cable or Comcast cable," Roberts said. "All those are varying degrees of delay from the live (feed). "It becomes a technical nightmare, and there's no way we could do it because of the different ways our stations are carrying it and the different ways the TV folks are routing it."
The decision to delay the radio feed is a decision made by the local stations. Doing so avoids the potential of an FCC complaint. Twice in the past two seasons, Tide coach Nick Saban used one of the seven dirty words in impassioned halftime interviews with sideline reporter and former Alabama linebacker Barry Krauss.
There is no delay for 1400-AM in Decatur and there's nobody in the office to dump out of the live broadcast it.
"We have no control over their broadcast," Burns said. "It's just a feed by satellite. So if they don't catch it, it goes out over the air."
The future
Changes and advancements in the radio business have introduced game coverage to listeners way out of the range of radio stations in the Southeast.
Crimson Tide Radio Network broadcasts came to satellite radio several years ago so the reported 20 million-plus SiriusXM subscribers can hear games coast to coast.
The Internet takes it worldwide.
A $120 annual subscription to the Alabama All-Access package on RollTide.com provides live broadcasts of all Tide sporting events.
It's a far cry from Roberts' first days with the network.
"When I first started doing this, we had a color man, a play-by-play guy, an engineer and a sideline reporter," he said. "Now we have a spotter, a stat man, a pregame show host, a postgame show host.
"There are more people involved."
That includes the Joe Burns and the Cumulus Radios of the world.
Without the affiliates, after all, there is no network.
Alabama secondary violations revealed
Former Alabama and current Buffalo Bills defensive lineman Marcell Dareus was suspended for the first two games of last season as a result of NCAA rules violations.
Ranging from improper recruiting text messages to selling complementary game tickets, the Alabama athletics department broke a few handfuls of minor NCAA rules over the past two years -- 44 to be exact.
The school released the list secondary NCAA violations committed from July 1, 2009 through Thursday on its website Friday. Of the 44 missteps, 16 involved the football program and two for men's basketball.The NCAA defines a secondary violation as an isolated or accidental in nature. They're not as serious as the major infractions committed in the textbook scandal that brought penalties involving vacating victories and probation handed down two years ago.
"Secondary violations do not include extra benefits or any significant recruiting benefits," the NCAA website states. "If a school commits several secondary violations, they may collectively be considered a major infraction. Secondary violations occur frequently and are usually resolved administratively."
The information released is subject of regular open record requests made by media organizations every few months. Messages left for UA officials were not returned Saturday afternoon.
For the Crimson Tide football program, most of the 16 involved communication with recruits deemed impermissible. Six were for text messages or phone calls, two for publicizing recruiting visits and another for visiting a recruit on the day of competition.
Marcell Dareus' trips to a party thrown by an agent in Miami last summer accounted for one of the two offenses leading to a game suspension. Dareus was held out of the first two games of last season.
Another unnamed player was held out after selling free tickets to games. The player was also required to repay the profits to charity and the entire team was reeducated on the specific rule.
Most "corrective actions" for the violations included rules education, while others included a letter of admonishment. Bans on communicating with recruits also ranging from 14 to 30 days.
One of the two infractions committed by the men's basketball team brought stiffer penalties. After sending impermissible texts to recruits, the entire staff was banned from sending any recruiting material to any recruit for two weeks.
The assistant coach who committed the violation was not allowed to initiate any contact with recruits for 14 days, and the entire staff was prohibited from contacting a specific unnamed recruit. The number of official visits was also reduced.
Dates of violations were not included on the list released by the school.
The other basketball issue resulted from a walk-on playing in two games during the December vacation before being declared eligible. The player later was declared eligible.
Nine other programs were cited for secondary violations as well as the sports information department and the alumni association. The NCAA championship-winning gymnastics program committed six infractions related to recruiting.
The women's basketball program had the second-most violations behind football with eight. Of the list, seven involved recruiting and the other was for leaving more than 48 hours before a road game.
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