Have you heard about wireless electricity meters being installed. I've heard after installed elect comp can invade all electronics in your home? HELP. what we can do? Get form print out put on electric meter, elect comp mot allowed to touch if paper work attached. So no more Meter Readers more jobs gone poof! I live in Fl this is going on now

Thom - you're about to have Ravi on - please press him on Peak Oil! I blogged about Ravi and Peak Oil a couple of months ago. You can read that here: https://www.thomhartmann.com/users/bandy-legged-marsupial-cave-rabbi/blo...

You forgot the part about Obama endorsing the legislation.

Seems pretty obvious that when Cain, regarding food, tells us to "... buy second hand ..." he is simply telling us to -- eat shit!

I only listened to you interview yourself for the first hour today.

1. I gather you are against the death penalty. While you were bloviating on that subject, the good people of Connecticut saw fit and condem to death a man for invading a home, beating the family with a baseball bat, killing the mother, raping the 11 year old daughter while her 17 year old sister was tied up in a bed. After they had there fun, they set the house on fire killing three family members. God forbid that was your family. As far as the execution method, mine would be far more uncivil that a shot in the arm that paralyzes them and stops there heart. Off the bridge, or a .45 that I would happily handload for 15r¢ is just fine. Human garbage.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44894512/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/

2. You spent a lot of time complaining about Herman Cains 9-9-9 plan. Yes, it does have flaws, but you made the statement that millionaires and billionaires tax rates would fall from 36% to 9% Then you went to Warren Buffett's tax rate of 17%. In the past, you stated that millionaires and billionaires "sit around the pool waiting to collect dividend checks" and pay from zero to 15% tax rate. Which is it?

3. On the Warren buffett tax return of 17% that Mr. Buffett feels is way to low, you forgot to mention that this overly generous individuals company, Birkshire Hathaway, owes the U.S.Government (you & me), about ONE BILLION DOLLARS IN BACK TAXES starting in 2002 that they forgot to pay.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/warren-buffett-taxes-berkshire-hathaway_n_941099.html

God. One hour is enough.

Colombia, South Korea, and Panama- Free trade also means making deals with bankers holding important ports which circulate the illegal drug trade, historically.

What does it matter when the illegal drug and pharmaceutical trades are both controlled by the Central Bank?

I truly believe we cannot extricate ourselves from this mess.

Whenever you hear FREE you know something is wrong. There is no such thing as a "free lunch." Anytime someone offers you something "free" grab your wallet. That person is trying to pry something from you. This is not free, someone will pay a price, likely American workers. Trade tarriffs are useful economic tools to keep Americans working or at least competing on a level playing field. I understand that their were certain foreign policy issues involved in this passage, nonetheless, it is another step down a road that leads to trouble. If these agreements were begun by the Republicans while George W "Asleep at the Wheel" Bush was President, that should be a warning.

I don't understand why the Republicans are so eager to send American jobs overseas. How does that fit with resolving the unemployment problem in the United States. They cheer when American jobs go overseas, they boo when American soldiers say they are gay, they cheer when they imagine a 30 year dying because he failed to purchase health insurance. These are a sick bunch of leaders.

jrboehmfl Exclusion obstructs possibilitys.

leighmf "I truly believe we cannot extricate ourselves from this mess." That just goes to show that belief has limitations and limited value.

"Free" trade ?

Poverty here is no more benefit to the striken here than it is to the stricken there. Poverty can't be resolved through devices that impoverish. We can stick our math up our @$$ on that one.

Jrboehmfl: Just as POT (plain old telephone) copper lines can both carry voice and DSL (digital subscriber line--ie: the internet) at the same time because the carrier frequencies are different, the 60 cycle (or Hertz) frequency of your copper AC power line can carry other frequencies at the same time. They even make products that allow you to control lights or other devices...sensors...etc..that utilize this principle.

It is quite conceivable, and even probable, that even if you turn off and disconnect your DSL modem from your computer that what you do on your computer, can be monitored because the power line can be modulated with a frequency from your computer carrying information from your computer. I would imagine having an electric meter would help facilitate isolating the house wiring from the line in, making it easy for someone monitoring from the street...or even further...what you do on your computer or what you say inside your house and even your location inside your house...depending on the electronic devices they may plant in your house.

There are a couple of different kinds of computer keyboard loggers...software kind and hardware kind. Of the hardware kind, installed on your keyboard or keyboard cable(who really pays attention to the cabling?), one type has to be picked up after a time to read, another type can actually broadcast (to the street?) what you type. They can get passwords and other things...read everything you type. The other kind is software that is injected into your computer by a trojan.

"Regardless of which protection method is used, the following supplementary countermeasures should be added.

1. All electrical power lines should be filtered to prevent RF emissions from the equipment being transmitted along the lines that act as antennas. This is necessary even with Tempest equipment or a product like the SHIELD."
http://cryptome.org/tempest-leak.htm

This is in reference to natural RF emission from the equipment, which could supply 'useful (to the spy)' data but it is also conceivable that a modulated signal can be purposefully gotten from your computer via the AC power line, isolated at the electric power meter, with filters, which then broadcasts the signal to those monitoring you from the street. Either someone would have to plant a modulator in your computer or the computer could be built with it already there, or maybe even software planted in your computer could act as the modulator.

Governments have been concerned about spies being able to monitor them for many years and the idea is not new. Even the RF radiation from computers and monitors are able to be monitored. I guess it is not inconceivable, especially now, that our government could being spying on us in ways we could not even imagine.

Governments can be paranoid...but we can't be? Besides, it not really paranoia if you have good reason to be right. The technology is here, and the government has shown us much reason to be suspecting of them.

Drew Peacock: Yes, that was bad and they deserve what they are going to get. But how much worse has been the raping, pillaging, torture, maiming, and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children...families in the Middle East that didn't deserve to die any more than that one in Connecticut. Our government sponsored terrorism conducted by ruthless war criminals deserve far more punishment than those guys in Connecticut. Yet some feckless, jingoist, flag-waving useful idiots support this kind of behavior.

Drew Peacock: I agree...Obama is the devil! But Cain is overtly SATAN.

I could not agree more with your statement. We should get out and stay out. It is none of our business.

Fact is that none of these rich people are going to automatically and beneficently hand over any of their ill-gotten gains without an honest and true representation of the majority of Americans by our government forces the rich to pay. Our government is corrupt and until it again enforces the rules and laws, that were meant to protect us from rapacious greed, we will not be able to turn things around for the better for most Americans.

Senile ? No way Warren has given away billions to Bill Gates charites

Comparative advantage is a pretty straightforward concept, focus on the thing you do best and use the production in excess of what you need inside your own country to trade for the products of other countries making what they do best. The key idea is being able to produce more than you could if you had to make everything yourself and trading your excess output with other trading partners.

I suspect that the place our free trade agreements are failing us is in the negotiation and enforcement of the agreements. The agreements need to limit our exposure to trade goods to those that equal our excess production. If we as consumers wish to obtain more than we produce, we can purchase them through ordinary methods, buying them from retail suppliers oversees and shipping them home for personal use. The overhead in those individual transactions, the shipping, the transaction costs and hassle, will naturally limit the advantage a low wage nation has over a high wage country.

We also need to make the details of our trade agreements more transparent, assuming that is not counter to our national interests. As always, transparency is a two edged sword. We like to know what our government is doing, but in finding out the details, we make them public for our competitors and those who would seek to do harm to our interests to know as well. It would be one thing if we felt we could trust our elected representatives to look out for the best interests of the nation, but as Thom so often reminds us, they are paid representatives of multi-national corporations, with precious few exceptions.

Trade can be a good thing for everyone involved if you make the right deals, and you negotiate on behalf of the American people.

Speaking of the American people. It's time we accepted the fact that the world has changed. We cannot expect to remain in a single profession with a single employer and retire comfortably at 65 years old, never learning a new set of skills or a new business. I thought I was diversified, working in Wisconsin for the state government in technology, and buying, fixing up and renting out homes that had fallen into disrepair. As you can imagine, my fortunes have changed considerably over the last 5 years. The message I have absorbed is that once you lose one of your diversified sources, you need to replace it as fast as you can.

And never underestimate the ignorance of a certain segment of the voting population. :)

Free trade only works in markets where we are free to NOT buy something. Markets involving necessities are more of a shake down where the law of supply and demand breaks down. The demand for health care doesn't rise and fall as a function of scarcity and price. Demand is contant even at super high prices because the buyer can't refuse to buy it. There needs to be an economic firewall between markets for necessities and everything else.