Still LOST At Sea

...George W. Bush, Globalist, by Pat Buchanan. Two of Mr. Buchanan's conclusions in the article follow:
"But now President Bush is about to take his country by the hand and make a great leap forward into world government. He has signed on to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which transfers jurisdiction over the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic oceans and all the oil and mineral resources they contain, to an International Seabed Authority. This second United Nations would be ceded eternal hegemony over two-thirds of the Earth. It is the greatest U.N. power grab in history and, thanks to George Bush, is about to succeed."
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"The Law of the Sea Treaty is an utterly unnecessary transfer of authority from the United States and of the wealth of its citizens to global bureaucrats who have never had our interests at heart, and to Third World regimes that have never been reliable friends. That Republicans senators think this is a good idea speaks volumes about what has become of the party of T.R., Bob Taft, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan."
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...HOUSING
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Think Home-Price Slide Is Over? The Worst Appears Yet To Come, by Dean Calbreath, San Diego Union-Tribune:
“Everyone's talking about the real estate market coming back in 2009,” said Robert Simpson, chief executive of Investors Mortgage Asset Recovery Co. in Irvine. “We're not coming back anywhere near 2009. It took about five years for this market to build up, and it'll take five years to come down. Properties are going to slide back to neighborhood income, so people will be able to afford them. It has always been thus.”
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...MARKETS

It's Time To Notice The Brokerage And Banking Stocks Implosion, by Terry Keenan, NY Post:
"It's not ill-advised to worry when the stocks of the nation's biggest bank (Citigroup) and best-know brokerage firm (Merrill Lynch) lose 17 and 13 percent of their value, respectively, in a single week. All this, even after Ben Bernanke actually cut rates on Wednesday and showered the banking system with an additional $41 billion on Thursday - the most since 9/11."
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They Have Got To Be Kidding, by Peter Schiff.
"Yesterday, as the dollar fell to new record lows and oil and gold prices surged to new highs, Wall Street remained fixated on wholly meaningless government data that managed to report the lowest inflation in the last half century.... the government's ability to make "economic growth" magically appear is based purely on statistical finesse."
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...It is fascinating that the government can report the lowest inflation in decades, isn't it? There is an old joke in accounting that goes something like, "Figures don't lie, but liars do figure." Anybody who has to buy groceries or put gas in the tank knows that inflation is alive and well, but did you know that your government does not put those figures into their inflation calculations? They are considered too volatile and they might skew the figures, goes the official line of thinking. A skeptic might counter that they might also frighten the sheeple, and of course, if the items that were necessary to everyday life were included in the data, it would also mean higher government payouts to those folks on fixed incomes who depend on government payouts (such as Social Security), since the calculation of those payouts is directly linked to the government inflation data.
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...One final thought for the day. I am constantly surprised by the folks who get mad at others for buying an automobile with a foreign name on it or for shopping at Wal-Mart, but then keep re-electing the people who actually make the decisions that ship the American jobs overseas. It would be much more effective to direct one's dissatisfaction to the folks who make those policy decisions, don't you think? When lobbyists spend billions of dollars a year influencing politicians, who do you think those politicians are actually working for? You? Or the people who have the clout to keep them in or remove them from office?
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...Quote: "People still think nationally or even locally. Steelworkers still think about steelworkers, auto workers about auto workers. The trouble is, the multinational corporations don't think European or American any more, they haven't for a long time. They think globally." Marcello Malentacchi, International Metalworkers Federation general secretary, quoted in the book One World, Ready Or Not by William Greider.