A little light reading on a bigger picture that may make BD a LITTLE more important.
THE INTERNATIONAL FORECASTER 26, October 2002 (#4) An international financial, economic, political and social commentary. Robert Chapman, Editor Vol. 6- No. 10- 4 ( 53pgs.) Phone & Fax: 941 639 4756 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sunday, October 20th, Bob Chapman was a guest on the Stirling Faux Show on the Corus Radio Network in Canada. You can listen to this program on the Internet by going to www.howestreet.com. This interview will remain on this site until we do another one. US MARKETS. George W. Bush is deceiving the American people in order to wage war on Iraq, just as his father did when he invaded Panama. The administration is engaged in a massive disinformation campaign. The administration has proven no charges against Saddam Hussein. He attacks Iran and we supported him with supply biochemical agents, which he used against Iran after Iran used them against him. He attached Kuwait after our state department told him he could do so, and then we attacked him. He has not attacked another country in 10 years, nor has he been involved in any act of terrorism. Suspecting he has weapons of mass destruction does not prove he has them. He has filled most of the UN resolutions and even if he fulfilled them all, our President has told us he is going to overthrow him anyway. This information is fact yet our members of congress ignore it and have given Mr. Bush power to do exactly as he pleases. This isn't irresponsible it's criminal. Saddam Hussein may be a bad dictator, but it is a bad government that lies to its own people. If the criteria for invasion is he is preparing weapons of mass destruction, why don't we attack North Korea, which has admitted they are close to having operable weapons of mass destruction? Social Security recipients will receive the smallest increase in their benefit checks in four years in January, a pitiful 1.4% rise that translates into $13.00 a month. That will be offset by another increase in the monthly Medicare premium of $14.70 to $58.70. Retirees don't buy many things, they buy services and services costs have not come down as quickly as goods costs, so many will not be able to pay their bills. This comes as many have taken horrendous losses in their stock portfolios. Many 401(K)'s have lost 50-70% of their value. Worse than that certificates and bonds that paid four to nine percent now pay one to four percent, cutting income of the most conservative senior saver. On top of that medical costs are soaring and most don't have drug coverage. A terrible state of affairs. Those of you who are veterans we advise you to register with the Veterans Administration. You can get prescriptions for $7.00 and the care has improved markedly in most locations. Another American institution is shipping its production overseas. The nation's last major shirt plant, C.F. Hathaway, in business for 165 years, will close and fire 235 workers in Waterville, Maine. This is a staggering economic blow to the area after having lost G.H. Bass and Cole Haan, which shut down in 1998-99 and the Dexter shoe plant that closed late last year putting 475 people out of work. You are watching the destruction of our entire manufacturing base and the demise of the American economy by elitist transnational corporations. It started out as a done deal but because of outraged public opinion Napoleon Bush's plan for an invasion of Iraq and its occupation is running into stiff resistance. Just about every nation in the world with the exception of England is hoping Mr. Bush will make a mistake, lose popularity and lose support for his insane war ambitions. Every time we think about his escapades we can't help but think of Caligula. In Mr. Bush's quest for power and approval, the administration has arrogantly and shamelessly again run the Dow up over 1,000 points in a week. He must think people are stupid. Even cab drivers are talking about a rigged market. The public is catching on. They are beginning to realize their sons and daughters are going to be murdered so the Bush crime family and the elitists can steal Iraq's oil. You don't see it in the US media but the world public is overwhelmingly against an invasion of Iraq. There is now no question, as we have said for a year, that oil is what this is all about. Elitists' oil interests, once in control of Iraq's oil will break OPEC and drive oil prices down to $12 to $15 a barrel. This may help basic individual costs but it will also expedite deflation and depression. That means new wars will have to be created in order to occupy the people and make the specter of death far more important than economic and social problems. One distinct possibility after Iraq, then Iran, is Russia and China. A $15 a barrel oil price will cost Russia dearly. It will totally wipe out any current account surplus they might have had. In addition Russia and France will have some of their oil interests abrogated if Napoleon Bush conquers Iraq. Now that America has vanquished fourth world Afghanistan, the World Bank is in Kabul with our tax dollars financing elitists' transnational business deals. On another note, Prince Saud has again withdrawn support for the coming US war after a report, which we reported on two weeks ago, by the CFR, which blames the Saudis' for financing terrorism, which certainly takes the gloves off. The CFR investigation was directed by top CFR officials and former CIA operative Maurice Greenberg of AIG. This is the same AIG-Greenberg involved in money laundering for over 50 years for the CIA and their narcotics operations. The main supplier in the 1980's and 90's was Carlos Lehder, who was sentenced to life and somehow miraculously was released from jail, so he could live the good life in Nassau. AIG has employed Mr. Lehder's wife recently, what a coincidence. Carlos ran drugs for George H. W. Bush and Iran Contra along with Barry Seal. One way or another Saudi Arabia is going down probably through internal insurrection. The Bush's and the oil cartel want to control the oil and Greenberg and Israel want Saudi and Iraq out of the way for obvious reasons. Iraq and Saudi would give US and UK oil interests control of 35-40% of the world's oil. They would then leave no stone unturned to take out Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, giving them even more power and control and breaking up OPEC at the same time. A major justification by Mr. Bush for an Iraq invasion was Saddam who was on the verge of having nuclear weapons, yet so is North Korea. Why isn't North Korea being invaded? Is it because pipelines pass through North Korea? We may yet be able to stop the invasion of Iraq but the possibility is remote. The elitists have bought 98% of congress and 100% of the UN. They'll do what they want to do and it will end up a catastrophe. We believe that even if they have their way there will be an enormous backlash from not only Americans but also the world at large and that outrage could bring the elitists down. We started to zero in on under-funded pension plans three years ago and the situation has gotten much worse in the interim. AMR is under-funded by 601%, Delta 353%, Goodyear 142%, General Motors 137%, McDermott Int. 134%, Delphi 88%, Navistar 88% and Ford 87% and it goes on and on. Listen to this, AMR is under-funded by $3.367 billion and their current stock market value is $500 million, Delta $4.376 billion to $1,240 billion, Goodyear $1.965 to $1.386 billion, Gm $29,428 billion to $21,421 billion, etc. You talk about a time bomb. A Dow at 4,500 will bankrupt these companies and many more so now you can well understand why "The Working Group on Financial Markets," the Plunge Protection Team is pulling out all stops to keep the stock market from falling lower. Of the 500 S&P companies of the 360 with defined benefit plans 240 are under-funded, the highest level in 10 years. Next year that figure could well be 360 and don't forget to pay the pensions, that money has to come from operating profit, which means less earnings. It could also mean bankruptcy. If the market goes to the lower levels that we anticipate, we believe beside the gold price explosion, this could be the major issue in the headlines. We have over $300 billion of pension-fund deficits in 2002 for S&P 500 companies. These companies have to produce this money over the next few years. For the year 1999, 2000 and 2001 pension-fund assets lost $80 billion. At the same time pension obligations grew by $170 billion. Most fund estimates were based on a 7.5% return on investment. We believe that will soon be cut to about 5%, which means they are far deeper in the hole than they or their retirees realize. Many companies had basic assumptions on eight to nine and one-half percent returns. These pension liabilities could bankrupt the nation. This and the gold crisis will turn the world financial system upside down. In the coming environment a five percent return is dicey. Safe 10-year Treasury notes could give you four percent and the market zero or less. Worse, even though pension-fund assets lost $90 billion in 2001, they showed an increase of $104 billion through the use of Mickey Mouse bookkeeping. Furthermore, pension-fund liabilities are off-balance sheet liabilities. How's that for stealth? We now hear the propaganda machine telling us of the war dividend. We've never heard anything so stupid. Next we'll hear that Hannibal Lector was a benevolent killer. We hear of how stocks go up during wars. That has been true, but were the wars held at times when the world financial system was on the verge of collapse? No, that was never the situation. We were close in 1938, not having recovered from the depression, but the system had held on for almost 10 years. Don't be misled this time, it is different and it's not a good different. A point to remember is that stock valuations remain higher than at any earlier bear market bottom and that the current market has shown a knack for breaking what once seemed to be immutable market verities, even with the assistance of our government. It looks like the rally in Treasuries has run its course. The yield has run from 3.59% to 4.26% in just a week. The bubble has been broken. From the beginning of 2000 through this month Treasuries have outperformed the S&P 500 by 77.24%. A good part of the move in treasuries was due to complex Treasury and Mortgage-backed securities trades known as "converity trades." Mortgages comprise $4.3 trillion of the $19 trillion US credit market. As of late, holders of MBS and asset-backed securities experienced huge losses, some as high as 50% or more. This was caused by unprecedented, accelerated mortgage prepayments triggered by historically low-interest rates. Of course Treasuries are supposed to go up when the market goes down and vice-versa, but both the rally in the market of over 1,000 points in a week and a loss of 61 basis points is very extraordinary. Treasuries have been benefiting from a flight from corporate issues due to increasing credit risk. The Merrill Lynch High-Yield Master II Index, which hit a record 10.97% over comparable Treasuries on 10/10, closed the week at 10.41%. Evidently the FED has some new wrinkle up its sleeve the professionals know about. Perhaps it's a 25% rate cut, although such a rate cut would have sent yields lower not higher. We think the FED does not want to ease and ran the market up to force yields higher. Be that as it may, it's confusing when you are not on the inside, but we can say the market rally should be peaking out soon; as well as the dollar rally. The best has past and now it's let's go the other way with a market correction and a drop in rates, which will accompany a lower dollar and higher gold prices. Few politicians ever tell the truth and this was again unfortunately borne out by the Bush administration. Several senators said through their aides that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not mention North Korea's covert nuclear weapons program during a classified briefing held in a secure chamber less than three hours before two senior administration officials revealed the news in a conference call with four reporters. The information had been available 12 days earlier. Congress passed the Iraq resolution and Mr. Bush signed it hours before the 7pm disclosure about North Korea. The question really is why are we not attacking North Korea?" The answer was "the President is disciplined and focused and he has made a determination that Iraq is a serious threat that needs to be dealt with immediately. Nothing has changed to alter that determination." We'd say he's very narrowly focused. Again the congress and the American people have been deceived. Rumors abound regarding downgrades at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley among others. If that happens, great pressure will be put on counter-party risk. We'd imagine some companies and governments would be forbidden with these downgrades to execute future business with these firms and perhaps wind up current derivative positions. We have no independent verification of the following from alternative sources, but we thought it best to pass on the following. It seems the BATF is calling and approaching citizens whose records, form 4477, have been pulled from local gun dealers in Maryland and demanding they turn over their rifles for inspection. Of course, if any agency gets possession of your weapons you seldom get them back again. Usually only by court order by a federal judge. We know, we've been there. Evidently some 5,000 weapons have been taken in for "testing" and attorney's phones are ringing off the hook. As usual the BATF agents are being as nasty as possible. If you are approached by the BATF have your attorney handle it. If you give them your weapons you may never see them again or they may be returned in an altered state. This, if true, is another example of a police state Gestapo. New York City is deeper in trouble than we previously reported. Police are told not to arrest suspects, even violent offenders, in the last three hours of their tour to get off the clock faster. Doctors and nurses at municipal hospitals are begging patients' families for help in performance of vital tasks. Due to curtailed sanitation pickups doormen are taking garbage to landfills in New Jersey. The budget gap has swollen to $6 billion, the largest deficit in history. The state will be underwater $12 billion next year and taxes in New York are already unbelievable. Taxes, fees, fines, tolls and citations are going up in cost and municipal services are being cut back again. MTA rates go to $2 a ride, up a 50-cent increase, as the MTA has a deficit of $663 million. Terrorists and the collapse of Wall Street, skyrocketing pension costs, the erosion of confidence in publicly traded corporations and the legacy of former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani are besieging NYC residents. The problems were also caused by a $3 billion loss of direct tax revenues to 9/11 and its fallout and a loss of 146,0000 jobs, which cost $17 billion in lost wages. Wall Street profits that were $21 billion in 2000 will be $12.8 billion this year. That means no bonuses, less taxes paid and less buying by consumers. Mayor Giuliani used $2.5 billion of a $2.8 billion surplus to pay operating costs. He deliberately wiped out the city's reserve. In the second quarter the city's income fell 1.3% and unemployment in NYC hit 7.9%. Of the $21.4 billion promised by the Feds only $2.7 billion has been released. What are we looking at? Well, based on the 1970's debacle in NYC over 30 months 63,828 municipal workers were laid off, including 3,390 cops, 879 firefighters, 10,800 teachers and 4,000 hospital workers and this time it's much worse. A 10% increase in property taxes will bring in $1 billion annually, 10% state tax surcharge $583 million and a .45% levy on income of suburbanites who go to the city for work, would raise $490 million a year. That's $2,073 billion. That means $4 billion in cuts will have to be made. This is a disaster and as the economy sinks further NYC will become a war zone. The movie, Escape from New York, wasn't far off. Goodyear Tire and Rubber will replace 1,200, $18 per hour workers at its Lincoln plant with workers at a facility in Mexico who make $12.77 a day. The jobs go to Chihuahua and our citizens are thrown out of work. When are Americans going to wake up? When it's too late and we have to fight in the streets? This is a national disgrace. These transnationals don't care about American workmanship; they want these jobs out of the US because they want our country on its knees so we will accept world government. What do they have to do, draw pictures for you? Our country is being raped and made impotent. If we do not leave NAFTA and WTO our country's economy will be destroyed. America is facing the greatest upsurge in financial fraud since the 1920's. The accounting scandals in America's major corporations have cost Americans billions of dollars. At the root of the problem are Wall Street and the lack of regulatory oversight from the SEC, NASD, the US Attorney, state regulators and states' attorneys. It's like a big club of criminals called the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberger members. They do whatever they want and no one goes to jail. Meanwhile these agencies prey on small companies and small brokers and brokerage firms because they don't have the financial means to take these crooks on. We know: we've been there. Massachusetts state securities regulators will file civil-fraud charges against Credit Suisse First Boston. The state has demanded a complete separation of the firm's research from its investment banking business and a $100 million fine, which CSFB dismissed, hence the legal action. CSFB already paid a $100 million fine in January to the SEC and NASD for charging excessive commissions to hedge funds for allocations of hot IPO's. They have also referred their findings to New York City's Eliot Spitzer for possible criminal charges under New York's Martin Act. Many health insurance companies place a cap on the amount they will pay out over the course of a person's lifetime. Two-thirds of people in preferred-provider organizations have such lifetime benefit maximums. You can avoid this if you pay a premium, which would take a lifetime payment from $300,000 to $1 million, but even a million dollars today can be reached in a short period of time. Hospital costs are increasing 15-20% a year and some small group plans are reducing lifetime maximums to as little as $30-$50,000. As an example, bone marrow transplants cost $200-$500,000. Those who experience catastrophic illness are simply wiped out. That is why many smart people are transferring assets to their children after age 65. You then reside in a state that has a high-risk insurance pool. Sales of office furniture peaked in 2000 at $13.3 billion. They declined 17.4% in 2001 and are expected to decline 19% this year to less than 49 billion. Sales at Herman Miller and Steelcase are off 40% in two years. If it wasn't bad enough that corporate America and the major brokerage houses are screwing their clients, so are the mutual funds. Fund managers are failing to disclose conflicts-of-interest that corporate executives could never legally hide behind. It is a conspiracy of silence. We like to call it, lying by omission. There are the deficiency audits, insider trading, failure to disclose brokerage costs, soft dollar costs, failure to disclose taxable distributions, failure to disclose fees honestly, and continued failure to disclose performance accurately. Others are, failure to disclose proxy votes, charges in team-managed funds, disclosure of portfolio holdings in a timely manner and failure to disclose manager compensation. These failures damage the investor and the funds themselves. There should be total transparency. What is zero financing doing to the auto industry? First it has destroyed the market in wholesale used cars. You buy a new car for $35,000 and two years later its wholesale value, under normal circumstances, is $15,000. You have just lost $20,000 on a vehicle that you have driven 30,000 miles and still have to pay another $25,000 on over the next three years. It's no wonder the lenders want to exempt car loans from bankruptcy. GM's sales are booming but hidden costs are building. They have pension and health care bills for 460,000 retirees and these costs have become a huge competitive disadvantage. They could very well soak up every dime of free cash flow the company generates over the next few years; yes every dime. That's if they make money. If they don't make money they have to sell assets and if they can't do that they go under. GM has 2.5 retirees for every active worker as opposed to one-to-one at Ford and Chrysler and no legacy responsibilities at Japanese and Korean carmakers. GM pays $1 billion a year for medical and life insurance benefits for retirees. Over the next 13 years they'll pay out $38 billion in pension obligations or $76 billion. They are currently short $9 billion. A 10% drop in stocks by the end of 2002 brings that $49 billion to $20 billion in under-funded obligations. The bottom line is GM cannot survive unless the market goes up and we don't think it's going up. Therefore, we are instituting a short on GM shares at $37.25 and cover at $30.80. If it breaks $30 a share you reset your short, which will then be open with no cover. On Monday the market was subject to another fable, that Bank One would takeover JP Morgan Chase, of course, and based on that the market rallied another 216 DOW points. The prospect of that happening, we believe, is remote, especially with Morgan being such a can of worms. It is inevitable that American productivity will drop. The reasons are simple. Staffs' management and workers are demoralized as the survivors of layoffs and cost cutting, and they still have to get the same amount of work done despite the shrinking staff and resources. They must now not only do their jobs, but also the work of fired colleagues. The combination of more work and not having been trained properly to do additional work cuts into efficiency. Stress and tension over time takes its toll. The situation will get worse before it improves. Borrowers are progressively having more trouble meeting debt payments. That generally means reducing frivolous spending, trying to create an emergency fund, reducing credit-card debt, consolidating high interest loans and refinancing mortgages. Present evidence suggests late or non-payment of debt is becoming a major problem and it has crossed economic boundaries, hitting all income classes. Mortgage delinquencies have recently risen to their highest levels in 12 years. Credit-card delinquencies have caused Capital One Financial and Sears to increase bad debt reserves. Delinquent auto loans have forced Ford to raise $700 million. Debt payments made up 14.04% of disposable household income in the second quarter of 2002 versus 13.55% in the second quarter of 1999. As unemployment rises and the economy slips into depression these figures will quickly and easily double. Corporations need cash and they are selling real estate holdings. They sold 95 properties worth $2.35 billion during the third quarter, up from 63 properties totaling $98 million in the year-ago quarter. For the year they sold 240 worth $4.78 billion versus 208 worth $3.70 billion a year ago. Property companies and REIT's are the buyers. About 47% of companies own their real estate and 53% lease. The corporate race for cash continues to build reserves while they can and to increase earnings. The former General Counsel, in court documents, said that auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers knew of the $14 million in relocation loans he got from Tyco. The ex-General Counsel is facing fraud charges for falsifying documents and could get four years in jail. We often get the question: Is deflation worse than inflation? And the answer is yes. Deflation does more macroeconomic damage than an equal and opposite amount of inflation. It's because nominal interest rates cannot go below zero, deflation reduces the flexibility of central bankers, increases economic volatility and introduces dangerous distortions in the economy. Deflation, particularly that which accompanies business cycle downturns, renders conventional monetary policy tools ineffective. As the zero lower mark for nominal interest rates approaches, it becomes near impossible for central banks to engineer negative real interest rates that are urgently needed to stimulate growth. If the fall in the velocity of money is not temporary, it presages the limits of conventional monetary policy tools. As in Japan for the past 10 years, deflation has not been reversed and represents a terrifying specter. The result is output falls, savings rise, unemployment rises and psychologically the citizen loses confidence in his or her government. It creates an insular phenomenon. The dangerous distortions of deflation eventually generate a high real interest rate that transfers wealth from debtors to creditors. High real interest rates and lower net worth reduce the ability of borrowers to meet nominal debt obligations, bringing about bankruptcy. This disrupts the smooth functioning of the financial system, particularly when accompanied by derivative, real estate, credit, bond and pension bubbles. They all depress investment, which has already begun, along with employment and prices, which are also underway. Output is an increasing function of prices, producers increase prices as production rises and decrease prices as production falls. Output then is affected by declining prices as is employment and investment. Falling prices bankrupt entrepreneurs and the fear of falling prices forces them to close operations and reduce output and employment. Deflation, modest or chronic, is very dangerous to any economy suffering from a business cycle downturn. Those with large debt, personal or corporate, are particularly vulnerable. Like it or not this is where we are heading. You know what to do: do it. If you have any questions call or write and we'll do our best to help. Second quarter dividends from S&P 500 companies rose by 7.8% from the previous year. Dividend paying companies outperformed those that paid no dividends by 22.5% over the first nine months of the year. Yet, the S&P yield is still only 2.04% against 3.25% for the Eurotop 300. This should be a very good lesson to companies. A higher dividend probably means a higher or better share price. Ford, which has been priced out of the mainstream debt market, will raise more money from securitized bond issues or asset-backed bonds in Europe and Australia to ensure it has access to funding. Both Ford and GM have been locked out of the unsecured debt markets due to weak profits and massive unfunded pension liabilities. Since downgrades, both companies' unsecured bonds have fallen sharply. We certainly would not be interested in any of their securities at this time. IBM's strong earnings report that helped send the market up were bogus. Earnings from continuing operations in the third quarter were down 1% from a year ago. Worse yet, income actually fell 18%, but this decline includes earnings, or lack thereof, from discontinued operations. Yet earnings per share increased two cents in the third quarter versus a year ago. Another deceiving factor is that IBM buys back lots of its outstanding shares, which causes the outstanding shares to decrease, also aiding earnings. Like many other sectors of the economy REITS are winding up their second year of deteriorating markets and dwindling rents. The question is how much more financial stress can REITS withstand before their dividends are threatened? In a second quarter study of 30 REITS they produced $1.14 in cash for every dollar needed to cover the dividend. That's not much of a cushion, considering that the next 18 months promise to be very tough. Just a slight drop in occupancy and they'll be in hot water. For the first three quarters of this year, REITS paid an average dividend of 7%, whereas the S&P 500 dividend was 1.95%. As occupancy and profits drop so will dividends. That means the shares will drop. If you own REITS you had best take a closer look because you could end up losing money. In order to stay in business stock brokerage firms are raising fees and instituting new ones such as the $30 per quarter "account service fee" if you don't do enough trading, which Charles Schwab charges. Starting this month, Schwab customers who use brokers to buy no-load funds must pay $25 per trade. Investors who have less than $10,000 in their brokerage account now pay a $45 per quarter fee and a $15 increase for investors who have between $5,000 and $9,000 in assets. Fidelity has added a $3.00 order-handling fee. TD Waterhouse has boosted commissions by $3.00 to $17.95 for customers who have less than $250 in assets or make fewer than 18 trades per quarter. Morgan Stanley has upped IRA fees from $30 to $40 yearly and cash management fees from $80 to $100. Payne Weber and Merrill Lynch are posting similar fees. Retail trading volume is off 60 to 70%, so someone has to pay to keep these brokerage houses in business especially after they made billions of dollars in the nineties and many of them screwed their clients. AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND Australians are dead set against the US invading Iraq. The Aussies have lost a one billion wheat deal with Iraq and America is increasing taxes on Australian farm products. Australians are outraged, but this is normal for the NWO crowd. We were under the impression Australians were forced to turn all their guns in to the government. A man armed with several handguns walked into a Monash University lecture hall and shot two students dead and wounded five before he was overcome. Moody's raised New Zealand's credit rating to Aa2 and Australia was upgraded to Aaa. Australia's growth rose 0.5% in September and 1.4% for the year. Inflation was about 0.7% for an annual rate of 3%. MIDDLE EAST The IMF recommends that Saudi Arabia speed up implementation of a proposed tax on expatriate workers, who make up 48% of total manpower, and to also extend the tax to Saudis. It's a rough time to implement taxation. Growth was 1.2% last year and it's forecast at only 0.7% this year. If they tax locals they may have a revolution on their hands. ASIA Those who disagree with our deflation forecasts should read this. Hong Kong consumer prices fell 3.7% from a year earlier, the steepest fall since June 2000. A low demand similar to what is developing in the US and has been present in Japan for some years has now afflicted Hong Kong in a big way. Lack of demand has killed retail-pricing power and property rentals continue to fall. Hong Kong's economy has been in a depression for 44 months. JAPAN Moody's has raised its credit-rating ceiling on Japan's foreign-currency debt to the top Aaa grade from Aa1. This is a technical adjustment. SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION: 1-year $99.95 U.S. Funds. Make check payable to Robert Chapman, (NOT International Forecaster), and mail to: P. O. Box 510518, Punta Gorda, Fl 33951. Please include name, address, telephone number and email address. We accept VISA and MasterCard charges. Please provide us with your card number and expiration date. We will charge your card $99.95 for a one-year subscription. Please note, we publish twice a month by surface mail or 3-4 times a month by email. Our email is: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] For new or renewal subscriptions please contact 941-639-0619 or the above email addresses. ----- Original Message ----- From: csakima To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 2:42 PM Subject: [biofuel] What it's turned into Was:: BP chief fears US will carve up Iraqi oil riches Harmon's brought up a really good point. The way the system's set up here in the U.S. of A., you put in hard labor at your job. Then the vultures from Washington make sure that (oh) about 50% (approximately, after all said and done) of your rewards goto them. Then Washington's buddies-in-bed (Corporate) step in .... charging you an arm and a leg for "necessities" .... you know ... like Electricity .... and Natural gas ... and Gasoline. Corporate-chain groceries .... hard goods .... etc. That takes about ... oh .... about 49.999 percent of the sweat of your labours .... Let's see ... 50% .... plus about 49.999% .... what does that give you?? Which leaves the average American to enjoy in his pockets .... let's see ..... is that .001% ..... or .01%??? Well, you get the picture!! (LOL) Wait a minute!! Putting in your hard labor's at work .... resulting in receiving a good-'ol 0.01% (0.001%?) of it ..... doesn't that sound like something the "South" was fighting for in the Civil War?? Curtis Get your free newsletter at http://www.ezinfocenter.com/3122155/NL ----- Original Message ----- From: Harmon Seaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> I'd love to. If I had the money I'd leave in a split second. Next you'll probably say you'll start up a collection, but nothing will ever come of it, unfortunately. --------------------------------------------- Introducing NetZero Long Distance 1st month Free! Sign up today at: www.netzerolongdistance.com Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
