Hidden pockets of elderly said to be in poverty
19 minutes ago
By HOPE YEN
Associated Press Writer

(AP:WASHINGTON) The poverty rate among older Americans could be nearly twice as high as the traditional 10 percent level, according to a revision of a half-century-old formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations in the cost of living.

The National Academy of Science’s formula, which is gaining credibility with public officials including some in the Obama administration, would put the poverty rate for Americans 65 and over at 18.6 percent, or 6.8 million people, compared with 9.7 percent, or 3.6 million people, under the existing measure. The original government formula, created in 1955, doesn’t take account of rising costs of medical care and other factors.

“It’s a hidden problem,” said Robin Talbert, president of the AARP Foundation, which provides job training and support to low-income seniors and is backing legislation that would adopt the NAS formula. “There are still many millions of older people on the edge, who don’t have what they need to get by.”
http://news.ino.com/headlines/?newsid=6896571728386790

On April 5, Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 6102. This was the order to confiscate everybody’s gold. It commanded everybody to deliver their gold and gold certificates to the Federal Reserve bank, where they would be paid in paper money. You could keep up to $100.00 in gold, but anything above that was illegal. Gold had become a controlled substance. Possession was punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and imprisonment for up to 10 years.

Now the only people with a claim to gold in the Treasury were foreigners holding dollars. Since he was on such a roll, Roosevelt decided to rip them off too. On January 31, 1934, Roosevelt issued another Executive Order. Here he declared that the dollar was now only 59.06% of its former gold quantum of 23.22 grains. Now the dollar was only worth 13.71 grains of gold.

Look at it from the point of view of one of these hapless foreigners. It used to cost you only $20.67 to get a troy ounce of gold. Now it cost you $35.00. The U.S. government, under the dictatorship of Roosevelt, had just stolen 40% of your money.

By burglarizing the rest of the world, Roosevelt made the Great Depression even Greater. It was more Global because he had impoverished millions of foreigners, and it was more Persistent because he had ruined the good credit of the United States.

Not bad for his first year in office.

Some have suggested that FDR had no choice because if he had allowed the “run” to continue, soon there would be no more gold in the U.S. Treasury to back the gold certificates.

But how could that be? Each gold certificate certified that there was a certain amount of gold in the Treasury payable to the bearer on demand. The law decreed that $20.67 would get you one troy ounce of gold, which was just sitting there in the vault waiting for you to “demand” it.

In his excellent 1935 book Monetary Mischief, George Robinson claims that these gold reserves really did exist. Maybe so, maybe not. Either way, FDR was not honouring the redemption promise. The U.S. was now running a con game, having printed “gold certificates” that in fact could not be redeemed for gold at all.

Imagine if e-gold or GoldMoney suddenly began issuing new digital gold grams without having the real gold grams to match them. That would be theft and counterfeiting. Certainly creating even more fictional gold grams would not be the solution to this problem. (Mike’s note: For those that do not know, GoldMoney is a checking account denominated in gold. You make a dollar deposit which is immediately turned into ounces of gold and you can write checks on your account. Your account is then debted for the amount of gold that your check represents. So if you write a check for $993, the current price of gold, one ounce is subtracted from your account.)

FDR engaged in theft and counterfeiting as a solution to a problem caused by theft and counterfeiting. A more honest solution would have been to make good on as many gold redemptions as possible, and then begin a massive liquidation of government assets to purchase gold on the open market until all redemptions were made. To avoid the pricing problems of sudden mass liquidations and mass gold purchases, the government might have offered gold bonds to those who would accept them. These bonds would be payable with interest in gold after a fixed time period. To people immediately demanding their gold, the government would have to tell them to wait, and then proceed quickly to round up enough gold to satisfy the request. I’m sure the people would have preferred to hear “hold on, we’re getting your money” than “screw you, we’re stealing your money.”

The sale of government assets would include office buildings, vehicles, huge tracts of land, etc. In other words, my solution would be: take every action to make good on all the gold redemptions. Do not steal the gold.

Some have said that FDR’s actions were necessary because a default on the redemption of paper currency would bankrupt the country, and not just the government, but all private debts as well.

But that’s just it–the government DID default on the redemption of paper currency, and it did bankrupt the country by deepening the depression and spreading it worldwide. Sadly, it did not bankrupt the government, only the indentured servants we like to call “citizens.” (Brother, can you spare a dime?)

I must emphasize that when the government devalued the dollar and confiscated gold, they WERE defaulting on their redemption obligations. They didn’t magically skirt the underlying hard reality just because some politicians signed some pieces of paper.

Some have said that FDR was faced with a dire national emergency, and did the only thing he knew how to do with the powers that had been granted to his new office.

To that I say: FDR was not granted these powers. He had no more legal authority to do what he did than my immigrant grandfather had. But that never stopped a president from doing anything to consolidate and maintain power. As a betrayer of the Constitution, FDR ranks right up there with Lincoln, LBJ and Nixon.

http://www.strike-the-root.com/columns/Chkoreff/chkoreff1.html

FDR, Thief of America’s Gold

by Patrick Chkoreff

As Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated as president on March 4, 1933, Americans were in a state of panic. Banks were failing every day, and people clamoured by the thousands to withdraw their money. Ordinarily they might have accepted paper money in the form of gold certificates, but people feared that the government might simply resort to printing worthless money to meet the massive withdrawal requests. They didn’t want paper. They wanted gold. Furthermore, people who had gold certificates rushed to redeem them for real gold.

In 1933, the U.S. dollar had a very precise definition. The government defined the dollar as 23.22 grains of gold. Since there are 480 grains to a troy ounce, this works out to about $20.67 per troy ounce.

This meant that if you had a $20 gold certificate, you could redeem it for roughly 1 troy ounce of gold. Each certificate bore this solemn statement: “This certifies that there have been deposited in the Treasury of the United States Twenty Dollars in Gold Coin payable to the bearer on demand.” There are two promises here. First, the gold is there waiting for you. Second, you’ll get the gold when you demand it.

So in March 1933, thousands of people decided to make the government honour its promise. They quickly found out that the government was lying.

Just two days after his inauguration, Roosevelt ordered a “bank holiday” closing all the banks in the country from Monday March 6 through Thursday March 9. He proclaimed that there was a “national emergency” caused by “heavy and unwarranted withdrawals of gold and currency” for the purpose of “hoarding.” Of course, “hoarding” simply means people holding on to their own money. Roosevelt called it “hoarding” to make it seem like evil or immature behaviour. It was the typical politician’s ploy of blaming the government’s woes on the people’s vices.

On March 9, the Senate passed the Emergency Banking Act after very little debate. This gave the Secretary of the Treasury the power to compel every person and business in the country to relinquish their gold and accept paper currency in exchange.

The next day, Friday March 10, Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 6073, forbidding people from sending gold overseas and forbidding banks from paying out gold.

Pretty good for his first week in office. But wait, there’s more.

I guess this is why our inner city schools are such shining examples of academic scholarship. I guess the Black kids are just kidding when they tell those within their race they are “acting white” because they take books home, do their homework, and want to learn something. I guess the generational welfare families are just a myth.

You know full well that men like Jesse Jackson are poverty pimps. They promote a level of racism that does not exist. The school systems are designed to teach to the lowest denominator.

You live in Fanatasy Land. You believe that because you sit down with a handful of people and tell them, “yes you can” that they will. But even when you have poor people that want to move up, you have the obstacle of rotten schools in the way. Yet when the selfish conservatives suggest that these poor be given vouchers to send their kids to any school they wish, it is conservatives that are vilified.

kash, stop being a “Useful idiot.”

“All government, of course, is against liberty. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”

Most people that believe in the state is the solution to most of societies problems are idealistic in their thinking. If the proposed legislation sounds good then it is good, regardless of the outcome. Therefore in their minds when the government provides funds to help the poor with housing that will help the poor out of poverty. If the government provides food stamps to help them feed the family then that provides the means by which they can eventually beat the poverty cycle. If the government provides them with a welfare check to suppliment income, then the poor will be able to use the excess money to the benefit of their families. All this SOUNDS VERY GOOD, and it gives the kashes of the world a warm fuzzy. They are so compassionate and feel so good that through their efforts they are helping the poor. So after over $10 trillion spent to end poverty in America, why is it that the poor are still with us? The percentage of people living in poverty has not changed. We also know that in more than just a few families we now have a history of generation following generation in poverty. Yet we also know of people that come from other countries, that do not know the culture or the language, rising up and actually becoming very wealthy. Why are these immigrants, who are also racial minorities, able to rise up out of poverty and actually become more successful than Americans that have been here for generations?

I believe the answer to that lies in their state of mind. They come here with ambition and with a state of mind that if left alone they will succeed. They come from countries where oversized government oppresses them and only the privileged attain wealth. They believe in their God given talents and are determined to succeed. Contrast this with the helplessness and dependence created by our Welfare state. Welfare payments are alive and well in America. Instead of getting a welfare check we now have the “Earned Income tax credit” which pays low income workers for work they did not do. The cycle of dependence continues, and there is no incentive to “make a better life for yourself.” The government actually discourages personal advancement since should you attain better employment you will lose benefits.

Minority groups are constantly told that White Racism keep them subjugated and deny them rights. The poverty Pimps like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, etc. guarantee that the racial minorities continue to live in a slavery of the mind.

Back in the 1970s I lived in a community that received a large group of Vietnamese refugees. These people did not know the culture, they did not know the language, and many had their families disrupted by the Communist take over of their countries. There was also a large group of Cambodians that had suffered the killing fields. I knew young people that had seen family members (mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters) raped and / or murdered. They experienced things that reach the peak of what anyone would call trauma. I went to a graduation of the son of a friend in 80s. The Validictorian and Salutitorian were from Southeast Asia. The individuals graduating with honors we predominantly from these Asian immigrants. I know of one family, who raised their niece since her parents were killed, from the time they came to America. Within 1 year both parents were working, not receiving any aid what-so-ever, learning English and the young girl, who came here at the age of 10 had already moved out of English as a Second language class. The girl came here knowing NO English.

The aunt and uncle enrolled her in piano classes. By the time she was ready for high school, she received a Scholarship to very exclusive private school. She eventually received a full academic scholarship to Duke University. From there I lost track since I moved to another city.

So was this young lady a prodigy? Not really. She studied like no other student I ever knew. She did not start dating until she went to college. She spent most of her time in the library or practicing the piano. There was no TV in the home, not because they couldn’t afford it, but because the adults in the home saw it as a waste of time. The focus of this family, like the focus of so many Asians that came to this community was to advance within the nation that offered them all these opportunities. They took advantage of the opportunities, while many of our American poor are given the message that they need government to “make it,’ and if they don’t make it, it is not their fault. It is the fault of the racist that run the nation.

The statist are determined to keep the people enslaved…dependent on government. It is how they maintain their power. So the well intentioned people like kash get their warm fuzzies while government enslaves the nation. Oh I forgot, those that work and make this country what it is find themselves getting further and further behind as the state takes more and more from them. Between taxes and inflation, which is created by government, the fruits of our labor is stolen.

We are now in the end game as government is now growing exponentially. kash fails to see the danger and therefore she supports the very system responsible for the misery we are now experiencing and for the extreme misery to come. She believes that the ones that created the problem will now fix it by doing more of the same. She is the classic “useful idiot.”