Jury Awards $2.4 Million in First Chinese Drywall Trial
June 21st, 2010Via: AP:
A Florida couple who fled their dream home because of foul-smelling, ruinous Chinese drywall was awarded $2.4 million in damages Friday in the nation’s first jury trial over the defective wallboard that could have legal ramifications for thousands of similar cases.
The six-person jury ruled that Armin and Lisa Seifart should receive more than just the costs of gutting and renovating their home: they were also awarded damages for loss of enjoyment of the $1.6 million house and for the drywall stigma that might reduce its resale value.
The defendant, drywall distributor Banner Supply Co., is named in thousands of other lawsuits. Attorneys in those cases, as well as many others pending nationwide against other companies, will look to the Seifart damage award as a guide for what kinds of damages they seek.
Defective, sulfur-emitting Chinese drywall has been linked to possible health problems along with a noxious odor, corrosion of wiring, plumbing, computers, plumbing and jewelry. Most of the problems have arisen in Florida, Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana in homes built during the housing boom and some damaged during the busy 2005 hurricane season.
The Seifarts, who have two young sons, left their five-bedroom home in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood last year so it could be gutted and renovated. Their attorney, Ervin Gonzalez, said the couple was not told of problems with the Chinese drywall in March 2008 when they moved in.
Montana: Tornado Destroys Rimrock Auto Arena
June 21st, 2010The only reason I’m posting this is because you have to see the video.
Via: AP:
A tornado that ripped the roof off a sports arena in Billings, Mont., Sunday evening also tore through businesses, damaging a bar and a casino and leaving just the walls of an auto glass shop standing.
The tornado struck at about 5 p.m. as a big storm system with golf ball-sized hail passed through the area.
After running through Main Street in the city’s northeast area, the twister moved toward the 10,000-seat Rimrock Auto Arena about a half-mile away, where it hovered for about 15 minutes, snapping trees and telephone poles.
“It would touch down and suck back up and touch down and touch down again,” said Trooper Toman Baukema of the Montana Highway Patrol, who saw the tornado from a patrol station about a mile away.
Big pieces of metal could be seen hanging from power lines near the arena, and tangles of insulation and metal debris were strewn for hundreds of yards in the surrounding industrial area.
There were several employees inside the arena when it struck, but there were no reports of injuries, Baukema said.
Los Angeles Lakers Post Game Riot and Vehicle Arson
June 21st, 2010Ahhhh, Los Angeles. I can’t say I miss ye’.
Maybe the tourism board should start up a new campaign: Headed Downtown? Don’t Forget Your Marshmallows!
Power of the Purse Volume 1
June 21st, 2010Lee Rogers of roguegovernment.com and the Live Free or Die radio show sent me a copy of his new documentary film, Power of the Purse Volume 1.
It’s almost five hours of fiat currency Hell, including a dog leg into the 9/11 spectacle.
I was particularly interested in the portions of the film that dealt with the history of the topic before 1900. Have you ever heard of King Henry the First’s tally sticks?
Unsplit tally sticks started as mathematical objects serving as mnemonic aids to counting, but they eventually found another use as commerce developed. Because so few people could read and write, tallies provided the earliest form of bookkeeping for recording both physical quantities and money. By the medieval period, tallies had really come into their own as the English equivalent of today’s credit card and as an instrument of internal control. King Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, assumed the throne of England in 1100 AD, and in an effort to enhance his power, invented a unique money system called the tally stick system.
Tally sticks were made of polished hazel or willow wood, and transactions were recorded by notches carved into the square tally with a knife…
…
Internal control was implemented by splitting the tally stick lengthwise through the notches, leaving one half of the notches on each piece. Each party to a transaction kept one half of each tally stick, and the accounts were audited by fitting the two pieces together to determine if they would “tally.”
But King Henry expanded the role of tally sticks beyond simple record keeping. Because tally sticks could be used to pay the taxes imposed by the king, he created a demand for tally sticks. This demand for tally sticks expanded their role, and they began to circulate as a form of money (Carmack, 2003).
What a scam! Essentially the same ancient scam is running now, but on a planetary scale.
Via: Power of the Purse Movie:
Film Summary
Throughout human history the control and manipulation of money has been used by the elites to control free humanity. This has continued up until this day.
Power of the Purse Volume 1 is a 4 hour and 50 minute documentary spanning 2 DVDs that details the history of how money has evolved from ancient times to the 21st century. This film exposes how those who have controlled money have used this power to fund both sides of wars in order to bankrupt nations and peoples.
This film reveals important historical facts and information about the modern day monetary system that the corporate media and the teachers indoctrinating our youth in the so-called public education (indoctrination) system refuse to talk about.
Topics Covered
Power of the Purse Volume 1 explores the following topics and much more:
The Knights Templar’s International Banking System.
The Rise of the Rothschild’s European Banking Empire.
How the Federal Reserve and other Central Banks create money out of thin air to drive nations and peoples into debt.
How both sides of major wars and conflicts have been funded and engineered by powerful banking interests.
The lies surrounding the official story of the September 11th, 2001 attacks and how it has been used to justify endless war.
How the manipulation of the value of money has been used to create economic depressions.
Comrade Simba on Fox-14
June 20th, 2010Video at the link.
Via: Comrade Simba:
Too bad it was only a three minute human interest story crammed in between sports and stock market crap but not bad for a brief overview. At least the dig at wal-mart got through which is the main point of what this whole homestead thing is all about. Do it yourself or rely on the agribusiness corporations – expect the stores to be stocked and the food to be worth eating? Yeah, right. So this is one more drop in the sea of examples; chances are good that as many people who write us off as crackpots will be less than or equal to the numbers who see that this is a good idea.
Betcha somebody picks up a shovel this week.
Le Cercle and the Struggle for the Eurasian Continent
June 20th, 2010Via: ISGP:
Each time a visitor mentions that he has been invited to Le Cercle, he gives away details what this group is about. In our previous article we already suspected that the Cercle is not only continuing the Cold War by trying to undermine capitalist opposition in Russia and Eastern Europe, but also that it has always been severely biased in favor of the Arab countries, this to the detriment of Israel. These newly identified members pretty much confirm this theory. Their biographies also made it possible to identify the apparent long term strategy of the Cercle. Following are some details on the new members…
Fannie and Freddie Tab is $146 Billion and Rising
June 20th, 2010Via: New York Times:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took over a foreclosed home roughly every 90 seconds during the first three months of the year. They owned 163,828 houses at the end of March, a virtual city with more houses than Seattle. The mortgage finance companies, created by Congress to help Americans buy homes, have become two of the nation’s largest landlords.
Bill Bridwell, a real estate agent in the desert south of Phoenix, is among the thousands of agents hired nationwide by the companies to sell those foreclosures, recouping some of the money that borrowers failed to repay. In a good week, he sells 20 homes and Fannie sends another 20 listings his way.
“We’re all working for the government now,” said Bridwell on a recent sun-baked morning, steering a Hummer through subdivisions laid out like circuit boards on the desert floor.
For all the focus on the historic federal rescue of the banking industry, it is the government’s decision to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008 that is likely to cost taxpayers the most money. So far the tab stands at $145.9 billion, and it grows with every foreclosure of a three-bedroom home with a two-car garage one hour from Phoenix. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the final bill could reach $389 billion.
Bank Failure Rate Double Last Year’s
June 20th, 2010Via: USA Today / AP:
Regulators on Friday shut down a Nevada bank, raising to 83 the number of U.S. bank failures this year.
The 83 closures so far this year is more than double the pace set in all of 2009, which was itself a brisk year for shutdowns. By this time last year, regulators had closed 40 banks. The pace has accelerated as banks’ losses mount on loans made for commercial property and development.
Napolitano on Internet Surveillance
June 20th, 2010Via: AP:
Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.
As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents.
“The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
California on ‘Verge of System Failure’
June 20th, 2010Via: Globe and Mail:
Arnella Sims has seen a lot in her 34 years as a Los Angeles County court reporter, but nothing like this.
Case files piling up by the thousands, phones ringing off the hook, forced midweek courthouse closings and occasional brawls as frustrated citizens queue for hours to pay parking fines.
“People think we’re becoming a Third World country,” said Ms. Sims, 55. “They don’t understand.”
It’s a story that’s being repeated all across California – and throughout the United States – as cash-strapped state and local governments grapple with collapsed tax revenues and swelling budget gaps. Mass layoffs, slashed health and welfare services, closed parks, crumbling superhighways and ever-larger public school class sizes are all part of the new normal.
California’s fiscal hole is now so large that the state would have to liberate 168,000 prison inmates and permanently shutter 240 university and community college campuses to balance its budget in the fiscal year that begins July 1.
Think of California as Greece on the Pacific: bankrupt and desperately needing a bailout.
“We are on the verge of system failure,” warned Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project, an independent think tank based in Sacramento.
None of this would matter much to anyone outside the not-so-Golden State except that California’s budget crisis is a harbinger of a grim dilemma that all Americans will soon confront. The country has built an elaborate and costly government machine, tied to a regressive tax system that can’t generate enough revenue to pay for it all.
