I went to Wegmans today and bought all their loss leaders and nothing else, including 20 bottles of lemonade and Italian mineral water averaging about 99 cents apiece, four pounds of strawberries ($8), and fifteen pounds of ground beef ($1.89/lb) which I promptly froze. I used one pound of strawberries in my home-made ice cream, then sliced and froze the rest.

Last week I bought five cases of soda for just $11. If I keep this up they’re not going to let me shop there anymore.

(Yup, that’s me and my bags about two years ago!)

It’s so funny, because it’s so true . . .

Remember that when the government comes calling. If they say they want to help and they only offer you $290 billion or some bullcrap number like that, you stand proud and tell the government, “I didn’t work my ass off behaving so irresponsibly as to bring our nation’s economy to the brink of disaster just so you could call me a slut!” The government will apologize and it will let you know how much you mean to it by offering you another $10 billion. “You’re worth it,” the government will say, brushing a tear from your cheek. “You’ve always been worth that much to me.”

These Coach peep toe pumps, perfectly tailored and comfortable (for heels), retailed at $250.

At DSW they were $170, STILL too much for this fashionista to pay. Unless they’re couture I won’t pay over $100 for any pair of shoes, ever. But DSW put this pair in the back room at 70% off so I grabbed them, put them on my feet and danced around screaming MINE MINE MINE! OK I didn’t really scream, but I did dance a little. Plus I had a $10 gift certificate, bringing the total price down to

$24 !!!

Nation Buys Porn With Stimulus Package

An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans’ mailboxes across the country.
According to Kirk Mishkin, Head Research Consultant for AIMRCo, “Many of the sites we surveyed have reported 20-30% growth in membership rates since mid-May when the checks were first sent out, and typically the summer is a slow period for this market.”

(Fox News closes the barn door after the livestock escapes)

To find out what’s really going on in the economy, the LAST place you want to look is the mainstream news channels! Two places I like to visit are shadowstats.com to see how the U.S. Government “lies with statistics,” and the Daily Reckoning to laugh at the Mogambo Guru’s rants.

Here’s something interesting: Three market crashes, including the one we are presently suffering, superimposed. During the bubble periods shown here stocks rose more than 350% in 6 years. During the crash the market fell more than 50% in 3 years. After the crash markets were volatile for at least 10 years.

Barclays warns of a financial storm as Federal Reserve’s credibility crumbles

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 28/06/2008

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US central bank accused of unleashing an inflation shock that will rock financial markets, reports Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall “below zero”.

“We’re in a nasty environment,” said Tim Bond, the bank’s chief equity strategist. “There is an inflation shock underway. This is going to be very negative for financial assets. We are going into tortoise mood and are retreating into our shell. Investors will do well if they can preserve their wealth.”

Barclays Capital said in its closely-watched Global Outlook that US headline inflation would hit 5.5pc by August and the Fed will have to raise interest rates six times by the end of next year to prevent a wage-spiral. If it hesitates, the bond markets will take matters into their own hands. “This is the first test for central banks in 30 years and they have fluffed it. They have zero credibility, and the Fed is negative if that’s possible. It has lost all credibility,” said Mr Bond.

RBS issues global crash alert

Read more by Ambrose Evans Pritchard

(more…)

My last Matching Martini Madness post featured a favorite nightgown I acquired during my Ebay fixation of 2007. It seems to be from the 1960’s or 1970’s, though it’s hard to tell because there is no label.

I love it because the lace is so lavish and deep, and because it’s so soft. This kind of quality is hard to find outside of very high end lingerie shops. However, I bet that when this nightgown was new it was both 1) union made, and 2) reasonably priced. They really don’t make things like they used to, do they?

Anyone with an IQ over room temperature knows that the subprime mortgage “solutions” coming from Wall Street and Washington D.C., corporate entities that feed off the public the way a vulture would, are NOT solutions at all but just another parboiled plot to distract and weaken us further.

(The “Paulson Deal” was dead-on-arrival. Actually, so was Paulson, apparently, as reports of his untimely-but-much-deserved death may just turn out to be true. Media footage and photography appear to be old stock, while Department of the Treasury insiders are reportedly calling the physical Henry Paulson “The Double.” All of my attempts to verify this on “mainstream” websites have been deleted. NOT scoffed at or disproved. DELETED.)

So are you just going to sit there and take it up the arse?

No? Good.

Recently a blue collar family with a total income of about $30,000/yr fought the banksters and WON. The bank is appealing, but mark my words: This family is going to keep it’s home, not so much because the law will swoop in to make it all better but because they’re fighting, kicking and screaming, getting competent legal advice, alerting the local media and keeping the noise at a public and very high pitch. If there is any time in a person’s life when passivity = death, it’s now.

THIS IS HOW YOU DO IT: Educate yourself and keep abreast of news in the mortgage industry. Work with a competent professional, and if you’ve been scammed, SCREAM BLOODY MURDER! Fight like hell and tell EVERYBODY about it. Refuse to leave; if the banks try to serve you with an eviction notice, play the same game that the rich do: Make the bank PROVE it owns the house because it might not be able to:

In 99 percent of the residential foreclosure cases, plaintiffs are asking the court to accept a promissory note copy as the original because it is presumed lost!!!

This is important: Do nothing in “confidence” (i.e., confidential) because you are working with pond scum, people who do NOT have your best interests at heart and who will renig on a deal at the first opportunity. Just remember that sunlight is your best disinfectant during times such as these.

Bank Fraud Victim Center

Are you a victim of Predatory Lending or Mortgage broker Fraud?

Are you unable to Refinance your Mortgage?
Did you get an inflated appraisal?
Were you charged single premium insurance?
Were you charged High Fees?
Are you being locked in by Prepayment Penalties?
Were you charged Yield-Spread Premium?

There are many different ways that banks, lenders and brokers can trick homeowners into giving up their homes. There is a legal remedy to recover Truth In Lending Act violation fines, void the lenders security interest in the property and collect money damages.

Ellen H. Brown is the author of Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System — The Sleight of Hand That Has Trapped Us in Debt and How We Can Break Free

March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, when people of all national origins raise a glass and declare, “Today we’re all a bit Irish!” This may be truer than we know. The Irish were driven to America by debt, and they are leading the Western world in household debt today. The London Daily Telegraph reported on March 13, 2008 that household debt in Ireland has reached 190 percent of disposable income, the highest in the developed world; and that the Irish banking system is suffering such acute strains from the downturn in the housing market that it may have to nationalize its banks.¹ The same may soon be happening in the United States, and for much the same reasons.

Debt Drives the Irish to America

A short review of the history of the Irish in North America reveals that few were here before 1845, when a disease struck the potato crops of Ireland, wiping out the chief or only source of food for many poor farmers. Famine continued for the next five years, killing over 2.5 million people. “God put the blight on the potatoes,” complained the Irish farmers, “but England put the hunger upon Ireland.” Farmers who were heavily in debt were shipped to England to pay the rent owed to their landlords. Impoverished Irish immigrants saved what little money they could to send family members across the Atlantic, traveling on overcrowded ships on which many died of disease or hunger on the way. When they arrived, the Irish men had to fight – often physically – to get labor jobs involving long hours and low pay; while the women worked mainly as servants (called “Brigets”) to upper-class families. Despite their very low wages, they managed to send a bit of money back to their families, until other family members had enough to buy the ship tickets to America. In the American South (mainly New Orleans), the Irish lived in swamp land infested with disease. Here, Irish men were looked upon as actually lower than slaves. As one historian put it, if a plantation owner lost a slave, he lost an investment; if he lost a laborer, he could always get another. Because the Irish workers were plentiful and expendable, they were often sent in to do dangerous jobs for which the slave-owners were reluctant to send their valuable slaves.²

“Debt Slavery” Replaces Physical Slavery

This form of “debt slavery” or “debt peonage” was not just an accidental development of history. It was a deliberately-planned alternative to the slave arrangement in which owners were responsible for the feeding and care of a dependent population, and it is still with us today. Although European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status, they admitted privately that they were not necessarily interested in preserving slavery. They preferred “the European plan”: capital could exploit labor by controlling the money supply, while letting the laborers feed themselves. In July 1862, this ploy was revealed in a notorious document called the Hazard Circular, which was circulated by British banking interests among their American banking counterparts. It said:

Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are glad of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. This can be done by controlling the money. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war, must be used as a means to control the volume of money. To accomplish this, the bonds [government debt to the bankers] must be used as a banking basis. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that.³

A system of “debt peonage” is inextricably linked to a banking system in which money is issued privately by bankers and lent to the government rather than being issued as “greenbacks” by the government itself Today the “European plan” has evolved into the private central banking system, and it has come to dominate the economies of the world. A private central bank creates money simply by printing it or entering it as an accounting entry, then lends it to the federal government in exchange for government bonds or debt. Private commercial banks create many more dollars in the same way, advancing money created as accounting-entry loans without even incurring the cost of a printing press. Except for coins, the entire U.S. money supply is now created as a debt to private bankers.⁴ Banks create the principal but not the interest necessary to pay back their loans, so more money is always owed back than was put into the money supply in the first place. More loans must therefore continually be taken out to cover the interest, spiraling the economy into increasing levels of debt and inflation, in a futile attempt to repay principal and interest on a debt that is actually impossible to repay. The result is “debt peonage,” and it has systematically reduced the people to working for the company store, bound to their corporate masters for the food, shelter and health care formerly provided by slave owners under the old physical-slave system.

more . . .

When it comes to the state of the economy there is nowhere to go but DOWN. What to do? Let’s see: Hoard food, medicine, toilet paper and and booze, and pay off the credit cards before they jack up the rates? All good things to be sure; however, there is one thing you MUST remember to do before it’s too late, especially if you’re a woman:

Chocolate. Make sure you have all the chocolate you need to last for several months.

Chocolate bars get stale, so don’t get too much. I’d say several bars of baking chocolate (10-20) and if you don’t eat them before they turn stale you can sell them for a million dollars to the clueless and unprepared people in your neighborhood.

Buy several cans of chocolate sauce; it lasts a long time. Barring Divine Intervention the Godiva Chocolate Liqueur will be about a hundred dollars a bottle next year, so it behooves one to learn how to make a chocolatini on the cheap. Here’s what to do:

Buy a few gallons of cheap vodka, the kind in the plastic bottles on the bottom shelf at your local liquor store. Then buy the biggest bottle of Creme de Cacao you can afford and a few cans of chocolate syrup. Powdered cocoa is optional:

Chocolatini on the Cheap

2 parts plain vodka
1 part creme de cacao
1 part chocolate syrup
cocoa powder

Rim your martini glass with chocolate syrup and dip the rim into powdered cocoa if you’re in the mood to be fancy; otherwise skip it. Mix the liquid ingredients in a shaker with ice and strain into the martini glass. It’s the most chocolatey martini I’ve tasted so far. Enjoy!

Even though she appears to have forgotten her pajama bottoms this lovely lady is smart: She’s filling her gas tank today. Iran’s new Bourse will be open for business on Monday, but that event is only a part of her reasoning: Tomorrow is likely to be a turning point for international relations overall. She doesn’t want to spend hours in a gas line should people begin to panic over OPEC sanctioning the world’s biggest supporters of terrorism: US.

I bought groceries yesterday. Two brown paper bags, $70.00. Then I bought a tube of drugstore mascara. L’Oreal, $7.00. Stagflation is already here folks, and our Arab allies may be “cutting us off” in a day or two to detach its operations from our dollar. Can you blame them? A few store fronts in New York City even have signs posted announcing that their businesses “Now Accepts Euros.” You can’t blame them, either.
The U.S. owes the other G-9 nations a boatload of money but Bush won’t allow any payments. Internet cables are (still?) being cut overseas by our Navy. Now banking transactions are impossible in those areas, and daily operations and communications are impaired. For the record, cutting off the communications in another country is an act of war.

The G-10 nations have their collective finger on the trigger: Who will blink first? It doesn’t help matters that our President is a belligerent asshole whose crime family set the world stage for a shootout. Regardless of how it ends, unless God/dess intervenes our economy is hosed and basic necessities will soon become scarce and expensive. We’ll be the biggest Banana Republic in the world! You won’t see much sympathy from the long suffering international small fry; they’ll probably be happy to see the schoolyard bullies finally getting their comeuppance.

IF YOU DO NOTHING BUT FILL YOUR GAS TANK(S) ON SUNDAY you’ll at least be set for a few days. Buy a gallon gas can too, if they still sell them. Then buy your favorite NON - perishables (remember your pets!) and hunker down, because unless we receive some divine intervention tomorrow things are going to get ugly. And if nothing bad happens, hey now you have a full tank of gas and a cupboard full of canned goods. Whoopie!

So long as I’m allowed to have my way a typical Saturday involves my sleeping until noon. If Bunny wants me up earlier she brings a double espresso upstairs and passes it under my nose until I wake up. This morning she was so engrossed in her instant messaging on the internet so I was free to snooze.

When I woke up it was time to shop. Time to spoil the child again! We went to the local teenybopper boutique and spent her Christmas gift certificate on trendy knits. The child spoilage is deliberate: I had a dorky childhood and swore that no matter what, my child would always have enough “cool” clothes so that she’d never feel the way I felt the day my mother insisted the plaid corduroy pants were “practical.” Today Bunny is very, very cool. She’s tall and very mature and has been hanging out with seniors (now college freshmen) since the day she started high school. Since she’s an A/B student on the bowling team, and has never given me a lick of trouble she’s allowed out on Friday nights with a midnight curfew. She wears whatever she wants, and gets whatever she wants within reason. Today I said no to the $80 jeans.

Those of you who’ve been here awhile know that I’ve been having tummy problems for the last few months. That’s a delicate way of saying I’ve been belching like a cow and hating every minute of it. I’m not talking about those big, competition-grade burps you guys say the alphabet through; rather these are the “wince and touch sternum every few seconds” belches. My stomach has blown up like a balloon and I’m steadily gaining weight.

I tried every antacid on the market to no avail. I saw my primary doctor, who gave me a prescription for an industrial-strength laxative. That little bottle of pills would have left me $130.00 poorer had I actually paid for it instead of walking away from the pharmacy counter in distress, and I have a prescription plan! After deciding I needed a specialist I went to a GI doctor and he recommended an over-the-counter, tasteless powder called Miralax and a bottle of mint-flavored Maalox. He also wrote a prescription for what he’s certain is acid reflux and by the time I made it to the drugstore I was desperate. $90.00 later I had another bottle of little pills and felt better, but not for long. Days passed with my taking something for my gut every few hours.

Then I read something on the internet, something about how we should have a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar every day for proper PH levels and better digestion. I had a flashback to my childhood: PICKLES! When I was a kid I used to drink pickle juice when my tummy gave me problems. I know the though of drinking what looks like a lab sample sounds gross, but acid reflux and constipation are even MORE disgusting than pickle juice, and besides the pickle juice always worked for me. I don’t even know where I came up with the idea.

But pickles are acidic, right? Acid for acid? It didn’t make any sense at all. What of this huge antacid market? The Purple Pill? Tums? Maalox? Milk of Magnesia? I did a little bit of reading on the topic, and it didn’t take me long to discover that antacids are POINTLESS, sometimes even damaging, in addition to being extremely expensive over the long term. God I love the internet!

It only seems counterintuitive at first: Alternative and holistic healer types insist that antacids only backfire, while adding MORE acid to your gut will make your body decide to stop producing it. I just happened to have a jar of Vlasic dills wedged up against the back of the inside of my refrigerator, so I chugged about six ounces while Bunny cried “Ewwwwwwwwwwwww!” The next day I ate/drank: A can of V8 Juice, an orange, a whole jar of dill pickles, Tang powdered beverage, salt-and-vinegar potato chips, 1/4 ounce each balsamic and white wine vinegars. I felt results immediately: The belching STOPPED and four hours later I was making repeated mad dashes to the employee washroom. I shit you not (ha); it’s a miracle cure I swear! Just don’t try it if you plan to be spend a long time on the road afterwards.

If you have tried EVERY antacid and you’re still miserable you probably have too LITTLE acid in your gut, not too much, even if you’re puking stomach acid. This is what’s most likely going on in your stomach:

a. You eat a decent meal, but your stomach and intestines don’t have enough acid necessary to digest it.

b. Your digestion begins to shut down but you keep eating like normal.

c . The food you eat has nowhere to go so it just sits there in your gut and percolates and ferments into something you’d rather not think about.

d. Central Control (your brain) says “Oh shit!” and presses the MAKE MORE ACID button.

e. Your body pumps out more acid to digest the food rotting in your gut.

f. Your body continues to overproduce acid like Mickey Mouse overproduced his broom and bucket of water in Fantasia.

g. You are one miserable bitch who looks about 4 months pregnant.

h. You start with the pointless antacids, with disappointing results.

This is about the time you ought to try the apple cider vinegar or pickle juice. You’ll probably feel better immediately!

Obviously antacids are NOT my answer, and perhaps they’re not yours either. It’s interesting: Cider and pickle juice are more effective on reflux and MUCH cheaper than those fancy purple pills, so why the heck do doctors . . . OK we all know why. Money. Your buying a gallon of vinegar won’t do anything to the pharmaceutical companies’ bottom lines. I do like this MiraLAX laxative though because it’s completely tasteless. You just pour a capful into any beverage and stir until it dissolves. That’s it! It is expensive though; just under $1 a dose. But trust me: When you need it you won’t care.