wilson96   Economy, Politics, and More…

The American economy has spun into an economic meltdown, including the largest drop in GDP growth since 1980. The constant blow to the nation’s consumers has drastically reduced spending power, causing depression worries.  A widespread drop in housing prices, dips in the stock markets and insolvency by highly trusted banks have left people with no other option but to stop spending and start saving. S&P/Case-Shiller statistics revealed that house prices in 20 big cities fell at the annual rate of 16.6%. There has also been a rise in the unemployment rate (6.1%) and is expected to move upwards further. Bloomberg forecasts that there may be another 0.2% increase in the last one month bringing the final statistics to 175,000 jobs lost. Reliable bank and credit sources have also lost shape and credit levels had already fallen to 3.7% in August.  Around the world, the Japanese and European economies are nearing recession and the global credit crunch has affected many more.Tomorrow’s US presidential election will help decide the policies that will be in force for the next few years. Cutting taxes can leave extra cash, and credible plans for long-term fiscal health need to be put in place. Obama’s plan to put $45 billion in reserve and investing $75 billion has got him 82% support from one of the leading online discussion network, Minekey. His plans to introduce a tax credit of up to $500 per person and many more such similar benefits may work well for the economy. Economic policies that act as stimulus to the present depressing economic status can act as a catalyst in raising current standards. Going by the trend set by people the world over, at the popular discussion network Minekey, Obama’s policies are well received and appreciated. Opinion polls conducted by Readers Digest also shows a mixed blend of nationals voting for Obama’s strong economical and financial policy proposals. A reality check on what is actually being discussed and agreed upon can be found at many of the online election sites, that have contributed to creating awareness about the current economic and political scenario. Strong recommendations on where to invest in the coming months and how well taxes can be cut down can be got from these discussion boards. They have not only generated support for the candidates, but also helped users to vote, discuss and express freely their opinions on the probable effects of these policy proposals.What happens after November 4th, 2008 is yet to be seen. What has happened so far may go for the better or worse after the introduction of new policies. The American economy and the election’s outcome can make a huge difference in global markets. While at home, jobs can be restored and houses can be saved, markets worldwide can manage to cross over again, if this consistent slump down can be slowed down and stopped eventually. The trend may continue up to the first quarter of 2009, after which there can be seen some vital signs of improvement. Policies implemented after elections may also take its own time to restore economic normalcy and stabilization. Meanwhile, those who have managed to save and do not use credit are those who may be able to sustain the economic depression.

The process of presidential elections in the United States is a political drama is exhausting, born from an historic 200-year, and to “guide” for the presidential election other countries. And the result, perforce approved, will affect the lives of many other nations (among others: war, terrorism, financial crisis & technology originating from the U.S.). However, there is a process to distinguish the period of this year compared to previous-period. This year, the United States presidential election is becoming increasingly popular and be joined by many people from various classes and groups: residents of a small child in Kenya,f rom Hawaii to Munich. The topic is a candidate named Barack Obama. Obama is for many the symbol at once mirror and also the phenomenon.

Obama is the gray man, born and great in the cultural crossroads that make  him find difficulty at the beginning of the period of his life. Son of a Kenyan with jet and mother of United States with as white as milk, grew up in a simple white culture but choose to identify himself as a man of black skin. Since only a small dream to become professional basketball players in the NBA, and the politicians put a board up. A biography that is not common for an American presidential candidate (which suspicion and injured due to political racism in the ago has not lost at all), as well as a biography of the Conference a lot of people.Grayish this opportunity to make Obama as a target shoot political opponents, accusations of Obama is Muslim, Obama not born in the land of America to Obama is socialist. Carefulness in work but take advantage of Obama in her biography as evidence of democracy in the U.S. intensity (often Obama said: “What can I achieve can only happen in this country, not anywhere”), the ability to understand the public desire and mantra formulate changes in the way can make it engage in the severity politics in the U.S.. Appear as a candidate elected from the Democratic Party with a first-class political brake engine owned  Clinton dynasty, after long and exhausting fight for 8 months.

Campaign against the Republic Party candidate, John McCain, clearly not an easy thing for him. McCain is a hero to U.S. figures, a war veteran from the offspring of U.S. marine brass Force (father and grandfather was Admiral McCain), never crouch Vietkong jailed and receive punishment communist Vietnam for five years. Obama is far more relatively young (47 years, Mc Cain 72 years) and minimal political experience (McCain has been a member since the U.S. Congress 26 years ago). But once again Barack Obama successfully through the challenges.

Adrian Salbuchi’s first follow-up report on how the 12 Transitional Triggers designed by the New World Order Power Elite to wrap-up Globalization and usher in a World Government, are being deployed. The original description can be found on the 14-December-2009 video “2010 Forecast: Transition from Globalization to World Government”.

ACCI tells leaders to focus on economy
ACCI CEO Peter Anderson says it is in the national interest to put the economy before poll-driven groups.

Read more on BigPond News

Sales prospecting in down economies is no different than sales prospecting in up economies. It is still a behaviour, a discipline – doing what we have to do, even when we do not want to do it.
The only difference is that you may have to invest more time in sales prospecting in a down economy.
Sales prospecting can be time consuming in itself, but in a down economy, it is even more time consuming as sales prospects seem to be harder to find.
Therefore, more time invested in sales prospecting is required. If you did ten daily sales prospecting calls before, you may now have to do twenty to get the same results.
However, besides investing time, there is a better way to get the same or better results when it comes to sales prospecting. But first, you have to do your homework.
You need to know what our sales prospects should look like – you need to profile them so that you can take a targeted sales prospecting approach and not a shot gun approach.
It is the shot gun approach that is time consuming and does not get you the sales prospecting results you are looking for.
In a targeted sales strategy you need to define the criteria for three customer levels – A, B, and C.
The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your sales results come from 20% of your customers.
That 20% would be considered as your best customers. They are “A” or absolute customers, because they provide you with 80% of your revenues and without them, you would be out of business.
Answer this question: What criteria best describes you’re A customers? Is it profitability, loyalty, margin, volume, brand, relationship, etc.? Note your answers.
Then you need to proceed with the same question for the next level of sales prospecting – “B” beneficial customers. So, what is the sales criteria for your “B” level of customers ? How are they distinguished from A customers? Note your answers.
You can then proceed with what is the sales criteria for your next level of customers – “C” – convenient customers? How are they distinguished from B customers? Note your answers.
You may find that most of your prospecting activities are probably to “C” or convenient customers, as most sales people invest 80% of their sales prospecting time where they get 20% of the revenues.
So, let’s do the opposite and focus our sales prospecting activities on the A customers.
Once your sales criteria is defined for each level of customer, go to your sales data base and using the sales criteria identify your existing customers as A, B or C.
Separate the A customers and create their profile based on the information on hand. You will find that there is something different about them, compared to the B’s and C’s.
What is that difference? Now map that profile over to the market place for sales prospecting. Who are the A sales prospects out there that are not presently doing business with you?
Do the same with the B customers and identified the sales prospects for you B category in the marketplace. Also, look at your existing B customers who have potential to be come A’s.
Sales prospecting can be fun and most rewarding for sales results when you invest the time and plan your sales prospecting approach.

WORLD OF WARCRAFT : Comedian Rich Kuras infiltrates the World of Warcraft to poll players on the 2008 Presidential Election. We broke down the results per race and Class. What we found may…and please excuse the pun…WOW you.

Jesse is the former governor of Minnesota, an ex Navy Seal Vietnam Veteran, Demolition Expert and an avid spokesperson for 911 Truth. In this video Jesse talks about: – The CIA implanted in State Government. – His interrogation by 23 members of the intelligence agency when he was the Governor of Minnesota. – Finally, he talks comically about how he was tailed by the CIA when being escorted around Cuba by Castros security guards. This is the edited version to fit YouTube, produced by SO OUT THERE. Check thestateoftruth.com For more. Check the other Jesse Ventura videos on YouTube.

AARP survey: Economy is top issue for a third of respondents
WAILUKU – Nearly a third of Maui residents more than 50 years old say they would like to see candidates for state offices address the economy as their top issue, according to a survey by AARP.

Read more on The Maui News

The easy availability of credit has created what Robert Manning calls our Credit Card Nation, where we are encouraged to shop until we drop. In the aftermath of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush made that point shamelessly when he told the American people that the best way to help in that traumatic period was to go shopping again. He knew, even if most Americans didn’t, that it is their non-stop consumption that drives the economy. Without it, I guess, the terrorists could have won.
“In fact,” Robert Manning writes in his seminal book on credit cards, “with the ascendance of the post-industrial economy, bank credit cards have become an essential technological and financial tool for commercial transactions as well as an increasingly important macro-economic tool for U.S. Policy-makers.”
Shopping is our real national pastime, but it comes, as he warns, at a price that is not advertised in the malls:The idyllic wonderland of consumer credit too often belies a reality of unknown sacrifices and enduring debt… the credit card industry is playing a crucial role in transforming American consumer attitudes. The promotion of “immediate gratification” ruptures the cognitive connection between earnings/saving and credit/debt that has traditionally shaped consumer behavior. It is this “cognitive disconnect,” with its siren song “Buy, buy, buy. It could be free, free, free” that constitutes the cornerstone of the Credit Card Nation.
And so it is not surprising that holidays are used or created as national events to spur consumption. They have become rituals of shopping. None is as important as the first day after Thanksgiving, itself a day set aside for overindulgence at the kitchen table. That day now has a name, Black Friday, so called because it is supposed to be the day when the whole retail sector goes into the black financially. (This may not have been such a wise use of language since the Wall Street crash of l929, ushering in the Great Depression, started on a “Black Thursday.”)
After months of financial volatility, Black Friday of 2007 was seen as a make-or-break event. Would it send a cathartic and upbeat signal that the economy was back? Shoppers had been tasked to launch the Holiday season with a big bang.
On Wall Street, buyers jumped the gun, sending prices higher with their hopes. AP reported, stocks rebounded as investors engaged in a bit of Black Friday bargain hunting and looked for signs of how well retailers might fare during the holiday shopping season. The market was voting its own money.
In the malls, preparations had been made for five months with advertising dollars set aside for promoting sales and deep discounts to lure the shoppers who had almost been boycotting the stores in September and October. Ingenious plans for opening earlier and staging “midnight madness” sales to trigger a stampede were put in place.
The hype machine went into overdrive with TV ads having the expected effect of getting TV News, especially in local markets, actively building anticipation.
I was watching local news stories in Boston, featuring perky local news “correspondents” who were stirring a buying frenzy with upbeat reports on manic consumers waiting feverishly to rush into malls the night before. It was, in the words of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a “shopopocalyse.” His crusade against out-of-control consumption is pictured in the new film What Would Jesus Buy?
This highly relevant film was not on TV, of course, because our media is deeply complicit in promoting/encouraging mindless consumerism through newspapers, commercials, and on newscasts.
This is a well-practiced formula mirroring TV’s promotion of the war in Iraq, as the line between selling and telling disappears. Media outlets are amply rewarded with endless ad revenues hyping all the discounted goodies you can get, with the Boston Globe packing no less than 43 advertising/sales supplements (down from 47 a year ago) into a paper that had wall-to-wall Macy’s ads, including some offering $10 coupons to bribe you into the stores. Marketing like this is what the media does best.
The only negative note was the fear among some that toys might be unsafe because of lead or other dangers. Some 26 million toys, most made in China, had been recalled in 2007, a sign that the regulators were asleep on this front in the economic wars as they were on Wall Street.
The real danger may not be lead in the toys but another type of lead – in our heads. It’s that “lead” that leads to denial on the part of millions that we can go on with our addictive, well-cultivated crazed consumption habits.
Bill Bowles writes about this on his CNI Blog:The problem is that many of us have been force-fed with a diet of nothing but passive, uncritical consumptionism, indeed, we are addicted to the stuff; breaking such powerful habits is what this is all about; it’s about getting people to think critically again about what’s going on and why and what, if anything, we can do about it.
Bowles also ties this cultural affliction, sometimes known as affluenza, back to our dependence on a media system that won’t really allow other voices to be heard.It would be an understatement to say that the world has changed almost beyond recognition in the past two decades, we appear to have re-entered the age of the dinosaur, gigantic creatures stomping across the planet, “guided” by pea-sized brains. So … we have increasing concentrations of powerful media – media that is actually an entire raft of processes critical to the survival of capitalism – either in the hands of vast corporations or the state (which in any case is now openly in bed with the big corporations)…
Were most media outlets connecting any dots between the annual shopathon and the “severe recession” that many economists are forecasting? Were there any warnings to the public to save their rapidly inflating money for the expected hard times? Was there any explanation of how prices have sharply risen and, thus, the discounts – often “teaser” rates just like the ones offered loan victims – are really not all they are cracked up to be?
No way.
What about the larger trends? Yes, there has been reporting on how bad things are – but this reality was largely NOT depicted in the “shop now, be happy” coverage. This euphoria was deliberate and deceptive. The Boston Globe did run a story in the B Section where the business news is buried. At the very end of the AP report (not theirs) you read this:Last year, retailers had a good start during the Thanksgiving weekend, but many stores struggled in December and a shopping surge just before and after Christmas wasn’t enough to make up for lost sales. This year, analysts expect sales gains to be the weakest in five years. Washington-based National Retail Federation predicted that total holiday sales would be up 4 percent for the combined November and December period, the slowest growth since a 1.3 percent rise in 2002.
Holiday sales rose 4.6 percent in 2006 and growth has averaged 4.8 percent over the last decade.
Where were the stories alerting us to this coming calamity on the front pages? They weren’t there. It is not in their interest to carry them, clearly a big No No. It gets worse. MTV pointedly rejected an ad from the Cultural Jammers Network urging a Buy Nothing Day. Commented one blogger, “The station that markets itself as the voice of hip youth has censored the burping pig.”
But why? Their advertising standards representative, Elisa Billis, said, “The spot goes further than we are willing to accept on our channels.” Too radical for self-styled “hip” MTV, which routinely carries military recruiting ads with no qualms.
The Boston Globe did carry a cartoon lampooning local sports mania in a town with winning teams. In its last panel, set in a mortgage office, a fan is being told he will be able to pay off his Red Sox/Celtics/Patriots tickets in just a few decades.
Many of the shoppers this season are charging it even though all the credit card companies have jacked up rates, driving the real cost of shopping higher, and even though credit balances are at an all-time high. The companies are just waiting for them. The day after Christmas, VISA will report on how much business was done. In years past, they called it “disappointing.”
And then in January, the returns – consumers bringing back purchases and gifts – will start as the bills come due. Experts – including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers – are warning that the credit card system itself may be the next to fall.
Writes economist Robert Samuelson:”The specter of the subprime debacle is that it’s just a start. Huge amounts of auto loans, credit-card debt, commercial mortgages and equipment leases have also been securitized. If similar problems emerged, it would shake confidence in the securitization model and, by magnifying investors’ losses, threaten to turn the credit crunch from a slogan into a reality. A broader crisis, though a long shot, can’t be excluded.
Thanksgiving this year fell on the anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination. The New York Times predictably marked the event with one more op-ed article – one in a long line – assuring us that there was no conspiracy. (Even as 80% of the public continues to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.) In some ways obsessive debt-creating consumption patterns are a form of self-assassination as a nation of shoppers shoots holes in their financial futures.
While they discredit suggestions of a past conspiracy, they seem to be ignoring a current one. That involves the steady decline of our economy, thanks to illegal practices through white-collar predatory lenders backed by our biggest banks and hedge funds, as well as the inability of regulators to regulate, and a complicit media to blow the whistle, which caused a multi-billion dollar economic crime that is still in progress.
So what happened? Was the day the big success we were told it would be by the media’s relentless upbeat coverage? In a culture where perception itself is carefully managed, Black Friday didn’t appear to be dark at all. On Friday night, after a day of boosterism disguised as journalism, retailers and media promoters were, like President Bush in Iraq, proclaiming victory – “mission accomplished.”
Not so fast.
Yes, Black Friday showed better results than expected, but the retail industry afterward said it still expected a weak Christmas. Remember, the stores were open longer than ever and the advertising/ hype was more pervasive. Also. the discounting was deeper and the bargains more extensive. We know that the sales were up, but what about the returns and expected credit card defaults?
The New York Times sent reporters into the stores and found “desperation rather than celebration.” By Monday, Wall Street was glum, according to Fox News: “So much for a ‘Black Friday’ bounce for Wall Street. Instead, negative market sentiment and another ugly day for financial stocks sent the Dow plunging 237 points lower.”

During his “White House to Main Street” tour today in Savannah Georgia, President Obama makes a surprise lunch stop at the famous Mrs. Wilkes’ Boarding House restaurant. Turns out, he prefers wings to drumsticks.