"No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself"Friedrich Nietzsche
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Obama: $1 trillion deficits 'for years'
01.07
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- President-elect Barack Obama is inheriting the worst economy in decades and says he'll need to "invest an extraordinary amount of money" to get it back on track.
Indeed, Obama's first act in office will be to push through what is expected to be an $800 billion economic recovery plan.
The stimulus package, combined with the $7.2 trillion the government has invested or loaned in the past year to combat the financial crisis, will add greatly to the federal budget deficit.
"At the current course and speed, a trillion-dollar deficit will be here before we even start the next budget," Obama said Tuesday. "And potentially we've got trillion-dollar deficits for years to come, even with the economic recovery that we are working on at this point."
On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office will release its 2009 budget and economic outlook, which will tell the deficit tale in black and white. A report from the Treasury Department last month found that the deficit in just the first two months of the current fiscal year exceeded $400 billion -- almost as high as it had been for all of fiscal year 2008.
But Obama promises that his administration will also embrace budget reform and put a choke collar on the country's record deficit, if not in the immediate term, then soon after.
On Tuesday, he vowed to "bring a long-overdue sense of responsibility and accountability to Washington."
For now, many economists, even some noted deficit hawks who warn about the danger of Uncle Sam's long-term financial shape, say the severity of the economic downturn justifies borrowing more money in order to spend big in the short run and pave the way for long-term growth.
"Such steps -- even if deficits exceed $1 trillion this year and next -- are necessary to help avert a deep and prolonged recession," according to a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Keep stimulus spending short term
While no deficit hawk is happy about incurring record trillion-dollar deficits, they are much more concerned about longer-term debts that dwarf the annual deficits.
Not that $7.2 trillion to stem a financial crisis and another $800 billion to revive the economy isn't staggering. But it's also not money necessarily spent and gone, said Jim Horney, CBPP's federal fiscal policy director. Some portion of the $7.2 trillion is likely to come back to federal coffers over the next several years.
Further, an economy that falls into a prolonged recession can add to the deficit as well because of reduced tax revenue and increased government spending.
"As big as the deficits are, they have little effect on the long-run," Horney said.
Here's an example he offers: Excluding the costs from the federal bailouts and stimulus, the country's long-term fiscal gap -- the amount of spending cuts or tax increases needed to stabilize debt at today's level over the next 40 years -- is 4% of projected gross domestic product, according to CBPP estimates.
Add in the costs of those bailouts and stimulus and the gap rises only slightly to 4.2%.
To keep that gap from growing, any stimulus passed should be "timely, targeted and temporary," said David Walker, president and CEO of the Pete G. Peterson Foundation, a deficit watchdog group.
Obama and Congress should avoid permanent economic recovery measures that increase the country's long-term spending obligations or reduce its long-term revenue, Walker said.
Walker says there may be a silver lining to having a record annual deficit this year and next.
"It's a problem and it's an opportunity to learn lessons from recent failures and to put a process in place to avoid a much bigger problem," Walker said.
Time to tame real threat: Health care
Horney and Walker both say the United States is on an unsustainable fiscal course in large part because of the rising cost of health care, which in turn pushes up the cost of providing Medicare and Medicaid.
Obama has promised that former CBO Director Peter Orszag, whom Obama has tapped to head the White House Office of Management and Budget, will go through the federal budget line by line and recommend areas where cuts can be made.
And, Obama said, "I'm going to be willing to make some very difficult choices to get a handle on this deficit."
But no matter how intrepid Orszag may be in making suggestions or how willing Obama is to play the heavy, they will only be able to trim so much without striking at the heart of the beast threatening to consume more and more of the country's financial resources: health care.
Barring any changes to federal law, the CBO estimates that total spending on health care will rise from 16% of GDP to 25% in 2025 and 50% in 2082.
When it comes to curbing the long-term federal deficit, Horney said, "The big enchilada is bringing health care under control."
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German battlefield yields Roman surprises
01.07
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Archaeologists have found more than 600 relics from a huge battle between a Roman army and Barbarians in the third century, long after historians believed Rome had given up control of northern Germany.
For weeks, archeologist Petra Loenne and her team have been searching this area with metal detectors, pulling hundreds of ancient Roman weapons out of the ground. They paint a picture of a highly organized, technologically superior Roman army beset by Germanic tribes in a forest about 80 km (50 miles) south of the modern city of Hanover.
The hillside battlefield was discovered by relic-hunters illegally searching for souvenirs of more recent wars near the town of Kalefeld-Oldenrode. One of them brought some of the items he found to Loenne, who works for the local government.
The artifacts are so well preserved that the scientists can already retrace some of the battle lines. Watch how the battlefield discovery could re-write history »
"We believe the Germans ambushed the Romans here, but the legions quickly fired back with catapults and archers -- and then it came to a massive man-on-man onslaught," Loenne said.
The items unearthed so far include an axe, still sharp after nearly 1,800 years; horseshoes; shovels; spearheads; and dozens of arrowheads for a Scorpio, a cross between a catapult and a crossbow -- the ancient equivalent of artillery.
"With a very high speed, on a very long distance -- about 300 meters -- you can hit targets precisely," said Henning Hassman, of Hanover's archeological institute.
Researchers say the evidence suggests the tribesmen lured the Romans into the forest to keep them from making full use of those long-range weapons and draw them into hand-to-hand combat, outside of the formations the imperial troops had mastered. However, they believe the Romans ultimately prevailed.Other relics include coins depicting the late second-century Roman emperor Commodus, depicted in the Oscar-winning Hollywood epic "Gladiator" -- a film that opens with a scene of battle against a barbarian horde that scientists say appears to be largely accurate. And Loenne said her team may have only begun to scratch the surface of the forest.
"We hope we might find fortifications and if we are lucky, maybe even battlefield graveyards," she said.
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Israel Using Depleted Uranium Against Gaza Victims
01.05
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Medics have found traces of depleted uranium in victims of Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza, according to a Press TV report, meaning the ultimate death toll could be far higher as future generations are plagued by cancers and birth defects.
“Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies,” states the article.
Following the conclusion of the first Gulf War in 1991, in which depleted uranium was used by U.S. forces, cancers and birth defects in Iraq soared and many veterans organizations agree that the weapon was responsible for the emergence of Gulf War Syndrome that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans.
Depleted uranium shell holes at the infamous Highway of Death in Iraq showed measurements 1,000 times more radioactive than background radiation. The residue of a DU weapon can be spread by the wind and infect humans not in the immediate area as well as the entire food chain.
The image below shows some of the shocking effects of depleted uranium and how its use leads to horrific birth defects.
In 1999, the UN called for the use of depleted uranium to be banned worldwide but efforts to downplay its effects led by the Pentagon have blocked such a ban.
Former head of the Pentagon’s 1994 U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project Maj. Doug Rokke has faced constant harassment, including murder attempts, after going public in 1997 to expose the health effects from depleted uranium that the U.S. government and the World Health Organization have consistently dismissed.
Israel’s use of depleted uranium against victims of the Gaza bombing campaign provides further evidence that war crimes are being committed with the tacit approval of both the current administration as well as president elect Barack Obama.
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GOOGLE tries converting every book ever written to digital...
01.05
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, California:
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of a Web site and software package called the Visual Thesaurus, was seeking the earliest use of the phrase "you're not the boss of me." Using a newspaper database, he had found a reference from 1953.
But while using Google's book search recently, he found the phrase in a short story contained in "The Church," a periodical published in 1883 and scanned from the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
Ever since Google began scanning printed books four years ago, scholars and others with specialized interests have been able to tap a trove of information that had been locked away on the dusty shelves of libraries and in antiquarian bookstores.
According to Dan Clancy, the engineering director for Google book search, every month users view at least 10 pages of more than half of the one million out-of-copyright books that Google has scanned into its servers.
Google's book search "allows you to look for things that would be very difficult to search for otherwise," said Zimmer, whose site is visualthesaurus.com.
A settlement in October with authors and publishers who had brought two copyright lawsuits against Google will make it possible for users to read a far greater collection of books, including many still under copyright protection.
The agreement, pending approval by a judge this year, also paved the way for both sides to make profits from digital versions of books. Just what kind of commercial opportunity the settlement represents is unknown, but few expect it to generate significant profits for any individual author. Even Google does not necessarily expect the book program to contribute significantly to its bottom line.
"We did not think necessarily we could make money," said Sergey Brin, a Google founder and its president of technology, in a brief interview at the company's headquarters. "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."
Revenue will be generated through advertising sales on pages where previews of scanned books appear, through subscriptions by libraries and others to a database of all the scanned books in Google's collection, and through sales to consumers of digital access to copyrighted books. Google will take 37 percent of this revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors.
The settlement may give new life to copyrighted out-of-print books in a digital form and allow writers to make money from titles that had been out of commercial circulation for years. Of the seven million books Google has scanned so far, about five million are in this category.
Even if Google had gone to trial and won the suits, said Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property at the company, it would have won the right to show only previews of these books' contents. "What people want to do is read the book," Macgillivray said.
Users are already taking advantage of out-of-print books that have been scanned and are available for free download. Clancy was monitoring search queries recently when one for "concrete fountain molds" caught his attention. The search turned up a digital version of an obscure 1910 book, and the user had spent four hours perusing 350 pages of it.
For scholars and others researching topics not satisfied by a Wikipedia entry, the settlement will provide access to millions of books at the click of a mouse. "More students in small towns around America are going to have a lot more stuff at their fingertips," said Michael Keller, the university librarian at Stanford. "That is really important."
When the agreement was announced in October, all sides hailed it as a landmark settlement that permitted Google to proceed with its scanning project while protecting the rights and financial interests of authors and publishers. Both sides agreed to disagree on whether the book scanning itself violated authors' and publishers' copyrights.
In the months since, all parties to the lawsuits — as well as those, like librarians, who will be affected by it — have had the opportunity to examine the 303-page settlement document and try to digest its likely effects.
Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows. Although nonprofit groups like the Open Content Alliance are building their own digital collections, no other significant private-sector competitors are in the business. In May, Microsoft ended its book scanning project, effectively leaving Google as a monopoly corporate player.
David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said the company wanted to push the book database to as many libraries as possible. "If the price gets too high," he said, "we are simply not going to have libraries that can afford to purchase it."
For readers who might want to buy digital access to an individual scanned book, Clancy said, Google was likely to sell at least half of the books for $5.99 or less. Students and faculty at universities who subscribe to the database will be able to get the full contents of all the books free.
For the average author, "this is not a game changer" in an economic sense, said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the Association of American Publishers and president of the digital media investments group at Bertelsmann, the parent company of Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books.
"They will get paid for the use of their book, but whether they will get paid so much that they can start living large — I think that's just a fantasy," Sarnoff said. "I think there will be a few authors who do see significant dollars out of this, but there will be a vast number of authors who see insignificant dollars out of this."
But, he added, "a few hundred dollars for an individual author can equate to a considerable sum for a publisher with rights to 10,000 books."
So far, publishers that have permitted Google to offer searchable digital versions of their new in-print books have seen a small payoff. Macmillan, the company that owns publishing houses including Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin's Press and represents authors including Jonathan Franzen and Janet Evanovich, offers 11,000 titles for search on Google. In 2007, Macmillan estimated that Google helped sell about 16,400 copies.
Authors view the possibility of readers finding their out-of-print books as a cultural victory more than a financial one.
"Our culture is not just Stephen King's latest novel or the new Harry Potter book," said James Gleick, a member of the board of the Authors Guild. "It is also 1,000 completely obscure books that appeal not to the one million people who bought the Harry Potter book but to 100 people at a time."
Some scholars worry that Google users are more likely to search for narrow information than to read at length. "I have to say that I think pedagogically and in terms of the advancement of scholarship, I have a concern that people will be encouraged to use books in this very fragmentary way," said Alice Prochaska, university librarian at Yale.
Others said they thought readers would continue to appreciate long texts and that Google's book search would simply help readers find them.
"There is no short way to appreciate Jane Austen, and I hope I'm right about that," said Paul Courant, university librarian at the University of Michigan. "But a lot of reading is going to happen on screens. One of the important things about this settlement is that it brings the literature of the 20th century back into a form that the students of the 21st century will be able to find it."
Google's book search has already entered the popular culture, in the film version of "Twilight," based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire. Bella, one of the main characters, uses Google to find information about a local American Indian tribe. When the search leads her to a book, what does she do?
She goes to a bookstore and buys it.
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Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers
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01.07
An expensive economic recovery plan will add to the short-term federal shortfall. But experts warn the bigger problem by far is the long-term picture. |
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01.07
Archaeologists have found more than 600 relics from a huge battle between a Roman army and Barbarians in the third century. |
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01.05
...meaning the ultimate death toll could be far higher as future generations are plagued by cancers and birth defects. |
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01.05
Google gives out-of-print books a new life online |
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01.05
The pills were small and white, $30 for 12. Ms. Dominguez, two or three months pregnant, went to a friend’s apartment and swallowed the pills one by one... |
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01.04
The sixth planet from the sun, Saturn, is perhaps best known for its many rings, which consist of billions of particles of ice and rock. |
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01.04
Russia and Ukraine traded insults at the weekend as a gas stand-off between the two countries entered a fifth day! |
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01.03
GAZA, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Israeli troops backed by helicopters advanced into Gaza on Saturday |
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01.03
Storing and sending information using quantum phenomena is one of the hottest areas of research today. |
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12.29
America's CIA has found a novel way to gain information from fickle Afghan warlords - supplying sex-enhancing drug Viagra, a US media report says. |
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12.29
Cash-strapped states weigh selling roads, parks. |
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12.27
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Andy Burnham says he believes that new standards of decency need to be applied to the web. He is planning to negotiate with Barack Obama’s incoming ..... |
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12.24
CAIRO — An Australian teacher who stuffed his luggage with 2,000-year old animal mummies and religious figurines wrapped as gifts was arrested Wednesday, an Egyptian airport security official said. |
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12.22
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12.22
Leonard Cohen's song "Hallelujah" made British chart history Sunday when it became both number one and number two in the Christmas singles charts -- although both versions were covers. |
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12.22
A 9-year-old Texas boy has almost fully recovered after suffering an orthopedic decapitation in a car accident 3 months ago, |
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12.21
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12.19
Veteran investor Jim Rogers warns that the policies of central banks and politicians & Barack Obama’s taxation agenda will only make the problem much worse. |
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12.19
The glaciers atop the Iztaccíhuatl and Pico de Orizaba volcanoes in Central Mexico will disappear in the next 10 to 35 years due to global warming. |
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12.19
President Bush tossed General Motors and Chrysler a temporary lifeline from the taxpayers on Friday, announcing $13.4 billion in emergency loans |
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12.17
Two women were killed Thursday when a pair of light planes collided while flying over suburban Sydney, causing one of them to crash into the backyard of a home and burst into flames. |
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12.17
Chrysler said Wednesday that it would close all 30 of its factories for at least one month, starting at the end of this week, in response to plunging vehicle sales in the United States. |
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12.17
Morgan Stanley reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.36 billion — or $2.34 a share |
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12.17
A few weeks before 13-year-old Jonathan King killed himself, he told his parents that his teachers had put him in "time-out." |
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12.16
New satellite observations have revealed a previously unknown rhythmic expansion and contraction of Earth's atmosphere on a nine-day cycle.
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12.16
Researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have found a way to fool a bacteria's evolutionary machinery into programming its own death.
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12.15
Troops and mercenaries will be used to detain Americans in prison camps, warns deadly accurate trends forecaster |
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12.15
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12.15
List of potential victims in what is said to be a massive Ponzi scheme run by money manager Bernard Madoff continues to grow. |
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12.15
Whether it’s a Tiffany diamond or a three-year-old lawnmower, more and more Americans from all social classes are pawning their possessions to make ends meet. |
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