TOP Economists Certain of Australian Housing Bubble Bloodbath, & More

Economists claim Australia in midst of largest housing bubble on record

AUSTRALIA is in the midst of the “largest housing bubble on record” and when it bursts it will be a “bloodbath”.

This is the assessment of two housing economists who claim Australia is on track for a US and Irish-style collapse because of an oversupply of housing in the country.

In a frank and scathing submission to the upcoming parliamentary inquiry into home ownership which will begin this Friday, Lindsay David and Philip Soos criticise politicians and the housing industry for perpetuating the myth of housing shortages in major capital cities.

They claim there is actually an oversupply of housing, especially in Victoria.

The Next Downturn Will Be Worse Than 2008 And What You Can Do About It? 

Get ready for the next crisis, it's going to be far worse than 2008. Get out of debt. Money in the bank may not be there when you need it. A core holding in precious metals is a must. Invest in alternative energy for your home, it will pay a huge return. Be careful of your investments in Wall Street, they may not be there when you most need them. Most of all, be prepared!

The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change 

Forever 

Solar power will eventually get so cheap that it will outcompete new fossil-fuel plants and even start to supplant some existing coal and gas plants, potentially stranding billions in fossil-fuel infrastructure. The industrial age was built on coal. The next 25 years will be the end of its dominance.

A World Without Work

This winter, I traveled to Ohio to consider what would happen if technology permanently replaced a great deal of human work. I wasn’t seeking a tour of our automated future. I went because Youngstown has become a national metaphor for the decline of labor, a place where the middle class of the 20th century has become a museum exhibit.

Climate Change Health Risk Is a 'Medical Emergency,’ Experts Warn 

The report, commissioned and published by The Lancet medical journal, was compiled by a panel of specialists including European and Chinese climate scientists and geographers, social, environmental and energy scientists, biodiversity experts and health professionals.

Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay   

Rome didn't fall so much as erode away. That's the template for collapse.



While collapse may be sudden, the decay that generated the collapse had been rotting away the foundation for years or decades. In distilling the vast literature on collapse into nine dynamics, I am drawing upon many other authors' work, including: 

The Collapse of Complex Societies 

The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History 

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century 

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization 

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed 

The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age 

Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects

 Top Weekly Ideas and Insights

The Extin

Is Deutsche Bank Following Lehman? & More...

Is Deutsche Bank The Next Lehman? 

Probably the first public indication that things were heading downhill for Lehman wasn’t until June 9th, 2008, when Fitch Ratings cut Lehman’s rating to AA-minus, outlook negative.

The “negative outlook” indicates that another further downgrade is likely. In this particular case, it was the understatement of all time.

The Era Of Dissolution 

So we have the people for whom collapse is a means of claiming unearned power, the people for whom it’s a blank screen on which to project an assortment of self-regarding fantasies, and the people for whom it’s an excuse to do nothing in the face of a challenging future. All three of those are popular gimmicks with an extremely long track record, and they’ll doubtless all see plenty of use millennia after industrial civilization has taken its place in the list of failed civilizations. The only problem with them is that they don’t happen to provide any useful guidance for those of us who have noticed that collapse isn’t merely a rhetorical gimmick meant to get emotional reactions—that it’s something that actually happens, to actual civilizations, and that it’s already happening to ours.

Anyone have change for a quadrillion 

dollar bill? 

In most corners of the world, deflation is currently a far bigger concern than inflation, let alone hyperinflation. The typical central banker has to worry about having too little power to influence wages and prices, not too much. Governments do have the capacity to create Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation through deficit spending, but that requires far more excess than any halfway decent political system will allow.

Iceland Jailed Bankers and Rejected Austerity—and It’s Been a Success

Instead of imposing devastating austerity measures and bailing out its banks, Iceland let its banks go bust and focused on social welfare policies. It has now repaid 85% of UK claims. When the global economic crisis hit in 2008, Iceland suffered terribly—perhaps more than any other country. The savings of 50,000 people were wiped out, plunging Icelanders into debt and placing 25% of homeowners in mortgage default. Now, less than a decade later, it will become the first European country that faced collapse to beat its pre-crisis peak of economic output. The IMF declared that Iceland had achieved economic recovery 'without compromising its welfare model' of universal healthcare and education.

Arctic Sea Ice Area Drops 320,000 Square Kilometers in Just One Day

WikiLeaks: Big-Pharma Measures in TPP Will Raise Drug Prices

the TPP would steer member states towards pro-business, anti-consumer healthcare policies.It would crush the public health system of  New Zealand and Australia. It would restrain governments' abilities to provide healthcare and medicine to citizens. 

 Top Weekly Ideas and Insights

The Extinction Debate

STOP “Trade” (Immigration Flood) Deal!

POPULATION-ENVIRONMENT BALANCE
www.balance.org

Action Alert





June, 2015

STOP “Trade” (Immigration Flood) Deal! & Support BALANCE’s Real Solution
  

Greetings!

The Senate has passed a TPA (Trade Promotion Authority) Bill giving President Obama “Fast Track” Authority to Unilaterally negotiate the Terms of the Trade Deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven (or more) Asian and Latin American Nations.

Only the House of Representatives can stop it now!

And it must be stopped because it would likely result in authorizing an almost unlimited number of Foreign “Guest Workers” to Flood the U.S. Job market via the L1 and other Visas, in addition to the Million+plus Immigrants already admitted legally each year and the hundreds of thousands coming illegally.

L1 Visa Holders typically use the L! as a stepping stone to getting a Green Card entitling them to achieve permanent residence. And Spouses of L1 Visa holders are allowed to work without restriction (via the L2) in the U.S. too. And there is no Firm CAP on the number of L1 and L2 Visas issued. And these workers would compete for jobs with Millions of Unemployed and Underemployed Americans.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)summarizes the seriously Negative Consequences.  "Fast Track is an affirmative decision by Congress to suspend several of its most basic powers for the next six years and to delegate those powers to the Executive. … Because TPP is a ‘Living Agreement’ it can be changed after adoption … (it) would empower the President … to admit more foreign workers into the United States — without ever coming to Congress for approval … (and for) immigration increases above current law — and precious few ways Congress could stop its happening.”

Thus, Approval of the TPA would allow potentially unlimited Immigration Increases above Current Law without Congressional Approval. The Sad History of these Trade Deals show they Hurt American Business and Workers.

Between 2000 and 2010 after NAFTA, GATT and MFN for China, 55,000 U.S. factories closed and 5 million to 6 million manufacturing Jobs Disappeared.  TPA and TPP would be worse because, besides jobs disappearing, immigration could go on steroids and more immigrants would be in the US taking jobs that Americans need.

HELP Stop TPA in the House, which intends to act on it very soon!

Contact your Representative in the House and Urge your Rep to VOTE No on the Fast Track TPA Bill and on any TPP Agreement. The Best Way to Raise American Workers’ Wages is to reduce increasing competition from Legal and Illegal Immigrants.

And for BALANCE Supporters it is time to help BALANCE in its Push for environmentally sustainable immigration policies.  Indeed, BALANCE and its ASAP! Coalition Allies are the only organizations which are actually pushing what would be a Real Solution to our Nation’s problems caused by Immigration-generated Population Growth.

If you have supported us in the past, but not within the last year, now is the time to renew your Annual Membership — only $35 / $50 / $100 / $250  or more

Make a Tax-Deductible Donation at balance.org or Mail a Check to our Mailing Address Below.

And if you have never supported BALANCE, NOW is the time.


Ensure you receive key information (often suppressed by the Main Stream Media!) about developments in Washington DC and across the country regarding these two important and interlinked issues facing our country and actually help BALANCE push Real Solutions.

For example, consider BALANCE’s Real Solution to the Water Crisis in the West (See BALANCE’s May 2015 Alert posted at www.balance.org ).

Indeed, the extent of and likely seriously Negative prospects for the intensifying Water Crisis are not being revealed to residents of California nor indeed to the entire West. Thus, the public is not prepared for the Havoc this Crisis will likely cause in the next few months.

Consider that virtually all of California’s 400,000 plus annual population growth is caused by Legal and Illegal Immigration. The added population causes a demand for an Additional Million Acre feet of Water per year, which is the entire Amount of Water actually in 9 Major California Reservoirs as we write.  A NASA/Cal-Tech Scientist correctly claims that California will literally run out of water in its Reservoirs within one year if present Trends continue.

We should be prepared to see this intensifying Crisis as an Opportunity. We need to work at raising public awareness of the underlying population problem, so that it creates a Genuine Chance of actually achieving substantial Immigration Reduction.

Only two other nonprofits have explicitly linked immigration-generated population growth to the Water Crisis, but one of them has done it in a counterproductive way by informing the public about the linkage, but then failing to push an Effective Immigration Solution -  one which would truly ameliorate the problem in the long run -  allows someone to conclude that “Toilet to Tap” Sewage Reprocessing and/or more Dams or Canals (for Non-Existent Water) are Realistic.

The Only Solution that would keep the Situation from getting much, much worse than it already will be, is to push for a zero-net Moratorium on Legal Immigration (as well as actually enforcing the border in accordance with existing law).

Advocating a demographically and ecologically realistic Solution is essential. Only Advocacy of a zero-net Moratorium is ALSO politically powerful enough to get Immigration Reductions and stop Mass Migration across the Border.

Only one Message is powerful enough to give immigration reduction a good chance of being enacted by the incoming President and Congress in Spring, 2017. That message is a zero-net Moratorium. Only BALANCE and its ASAP! Coalition Allies are pushing zero-Net, and we need to continue to build Momentum for a Real Solution. (Zero-net would still allow admission of about 150,000 immigrants per year.)

Nature, which always bats last, has given BALANCE and its Allies the Opportunity to actually Succeed in getting Dramatic Immigration reductions.

We ask for your support. Make a Tax-Deductible Donation at our Website, balance.org, or by mail to

Mailing address: 

Population-Environment Balance | P.O. Box 268 | San Francisco, CA 94104

Thank you,

Population-Environment Balance

 

Mailing address:
Population-Environment Balance | P.O. Box 268 | San Francisco, CA 94104

Washington, DC address:
Population-Environment Balance | 1629 K Street NW, Suite 300 | Washington DC, 20006


 

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Humanity's Insanity - Impossible Growth Mantra

Foggy-Headed; T. Boone Pickens - Just drill it all, quickly?

State of Oil and Gas: We're Creating the Jobs

Someone asked me the other day to name the first president I voted for. My answer: “Abraham Lincoln.”





That’s a joke, of course, but it does illustrate a point: At 85, I’ve witnessed a lot of history. I’ve spent 60 years of it in the oil and gas industry, and while I’ve seen a lot of ups and downs in that sector, the state of the oil and gas industry has never been stronger. Less than a decade ago, a pervasive theory marked the industry, and it was one of global “peak oil.” I was a member of that club, believing U.S. oil production had “peaked” in 1970 and were in irreversible decline here, and elsewhere.

How wrong we were. The industry, driven by the innovation that marks private enterprise, has – once again – innovated.

With stunning technological advances (chiefly the combination of fracking and horizontal drilling), we now have more energy reserves that any other nation on earth.
Not only that, we have the cheapest in the world, too.

Today, the oil and gas business is the most dynamic industry in America. Unfortunately, they are still targeted by Washington, DC, as villains and increasingly blamed for everything from profiteering to earthquakes. If you want to blame that industry for anything, blame it for creating too many jobs.

                           
 
Consider these statistics:

• The nation’s lowest unemployment rate – 2.7 percent – is in North Dakota, home of the Baaken oil field.
• Oilfield employment is so high in North Dakota that housing is in short supply, with rents in Williston, a city of only about 15,000 people, topping those in New York City and Los Angeles.
• Midland, Texas, an oil and gas hub, has become one of the wealthiest towns in North America.
• The oil and gas industry is now responsible for 10 million jobs, both direct and indirect.

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What did you leave for us? Just pickens?

This air-head  simply has no clue and obviously missed a few courses in mathematics or else they just didn't teach exponentials a hundred years ago. More  jobs, more drilling, more depletion, more devastation to bio-conditions, more carbon emissions, more warming, and on and on. Oh yeah, and by the way let's do all this as quickly as possible so that no other generation could ever possibly live on this planet in less than a hundred years.

How do we deal with such an intellectual feather-weight who cannot even discern between two simple concepts of finite and infinite? Answer: here's what the top scientists would tell him:

Did you think this crazy villain would get it now? Of course not - its just too far beyond the interests and cognitive functions of prophets (sic).

Platinum Wealth  Partners
April 10, 2014