the Fannie and Freddie Bailout Real Cost: At Least $1.3 Trillion

August 23, 2008 at 6:37 am · Filed under The Financial Crisis, The Make Believe Middle Class, Leadership - not bureaucrats!, Executive Fiat, Liberty and Justice For All, Land of the Free?

A recent study from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has zero credibility. It pegged likely taxpayer losses in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts at $25 billion. For those with a sense of history, it is worth remembering that the S&L bailout had a $160 billion price tag. The numbers diverge so far from reality as to be laugh-out-loud funny. Funny, that is, except that the CBO estimate demonstrates a willful disconnect with the actual consequences of federal government actions.

As demonstrated below, the real cost of the bailouts will easily exceed $1.3 trillion. In fact, the real cost is likely to range between $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion, and is not unlikely to reach $2.5 trillion.

Between 2001 and 2007, Fannie and Freddie purchased or guaranteed $700 billion of Alt-A and subprime loans. Given the default rates on these loans — and the fact that the price of the housing that is the ultimate security of the loans will, for reasons demonstrated below, fall by at least thirty percent — this alone implies a loss for Fannie and Freddie on the order of $210 billion.

Fannie and Freddie acknowledge already-impaired loans on the balance sheet of $19 billion, which they have used creative accounting to avoid deleting from the shareholder equity account. This means that Fannie and Freddie have a maximum of $64 billion in capital remaining.

Given the inevitable losses on the Alt-A/subprime portion of their portfolio, it must be the case that if the federal government, as it is doing, guarantees Fannie and Freddie’s solvency, the difference between the loss and the capital to be made up by the government (i.e., the taxpayers) must equal, not $25 billion but $147 billion.

That alone would mean that the CBO is blowing smoke with their estimated cost figures, and if you think back to the S&L cost of $160 billion, this is not a surprising result. The real picture is so much worse that it is pretty obvious the CBO is flat out inventing figures just to get the politicians through November.

The real story is simple. We have witnessed the largest asset-price bubble in US history, making the tech-stock bubble seem like an overdone weekly rally.

When you look at the graph of the Case-Shiller residential real-estate index, an index dating from 1890 to the present and an index which measures the cost of housing in comparison to other goods, the first thing you see is that the 2001 to 2006 bubble stands out like a fifty foot saguaro cactus in a patch of daisies. There simply has never been anything like it before.

When you know what you are looking at — the biggest bubble in history — it is scary.

To be precise, the Case-Shiller Index in its entire 110-year history had never crossed 140 until the recent bubble. In 2006, it reached 210. Every single real-estate bubble in the past has at best been followed by a fall back to at least the 110 level in the postwar era, although the bubble preceding the Great Depression witnessed a fall to 60.

What this means is that in the best-case scenario, real-estate prices have to fall in the medium to long run by almost half.

Now consider Fannie and Freddie. Just looking at their portfolios on the balance sheet without the guarantees, let us accept (for no particular reason other than a desire that the reader sleep better at night) that real-estate prices only fall by thirty percent.

Well, since Uncle Sam is now committed to “doing whatever it takes,” that is a loss right there of $1 trillion. This committment to keep financial markets open as usual is made in spite of the overwhelming evidence that what we have been taught is usual is in fact delusional, given that Fannie and Freddie own $3 trillion and change of mortgages.

The CBO is not fence-post stupid, so obviously just as in the S&L fiasco in 1988, they are outright inventing figures so that the politicians can slither into November and then announce, Whoops! our numbers were a little low.

The more realistic scenario is actually worse. Fannie and Freddie own and guarantee a total of more than $5 trillion in mortgages.

Given the long-run historically plausible equilibrium values of residential real estate as embodied in the Case-Shiller Index, that means that the taxpayer loss definitely reaches $1.3 trillion, easily ranging up to $1.6 trillion.

Unfortunately, that is the good news. The bad news is that if real-estate prices were to replicate the Great Depression (as would surely occur in the case that hedging instruments of Fannie and Freddie were to catastrophically fail due to counterparty failure — and given the absurdly low risk premiums on credit-default swaps at the height of the bubble, such an event cannot be considered unlikely) the Case-Shiller Index tells us that the loss to the taxpayers could exceed $2.5 trillion dollars.

I don’t know what those people in Washington are taking to sleep at night after all their electorally driven accounting and finance exercises, but I can tell you what they will be doing to keep the government open for business: printing a whole lot of money.

Chairman Bernanke has the discount window open to any collateralization not worth the paper it is written on, so in effect he has the helicopters ready to drop hundred-dollar bills over Wall Street — as he once famously described the ultimate policy instrument of a fiat-money system.

Of course, if he does that, we will have to change his nickname from Helicopter Ben to Hyperinflation Ben, which answers the question of who picks up the tab of bailing out Fannie and Freddie: anyone owning dollars.

Produce a lot of something, and it becomes worth less. And given the losses at Fannie and Freddie, the taxpayer guarantee, and the ongoing initiation of Boomer retirement, only the inflation tax will work to pay for keeping Fannie and Freddie afloat.

Like it or not, we are about to enter interesting times, and it is too bad our supposed professional civil servants at the Congressional Budget Office have failed to tell the emperor the truth: that he is buck-naked bankrupt and getting ready to take a lot of people with him.

Our only hope is to (1) accept up front a twenty-percent fall in American living standards for a people living beyond their means for the past twenty-five years on the delusions made possible by fiat money, and (2) simultaneously discipline the creature from Jekyll Island, a.k.a. the Federal Reserve System, not to create new money just to prop up asset-price bubbles.

Don A. Rich is an instructor of economics, finance, and political science at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, PA. He also teaches economics, government, and history at Delaware County Community College in Exton, PA.

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The Market, Part 1

August 14, 2008 at 6:14 am · Filed under The Financial Crisis, Corporate Power, The Make Believe Middle Class, Study History-Avoid Failure, Leadership - not bureaucrats!, Executive Fiat

by Ludwig von Mises

  1. The Characteristics of the Market Economy
  2. Capital
  3. Capitalism
  4. The Sovereignty of the Consumers
  1. Competition
  2. Freedom
  3. Inequality of Wealth and Income
This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of Human Action. Robert Murphy has written a study guide for this chapter, available in HTML and PDF. This chapter follows “The Scope and Method of Catallactics.”

1. The Characteristics of the Market Economy

The market economy is the social system of the division of labor under private ownership of the means of production. Everybody acts on his own behalf; but everybody’s actions aim at the satisfaction of other people’s needs as well as at the satisfaction of his own. Everybody in acting serves his fellow citizens. Everybody, on the other hand, is served by his fellow citizens. Everybody is both a means and an end in himself; an ultimate end for himself and a means to other people in their endeavors to attain their own ends. This system is steered by the market. The market directs the individual’s activities into those channels in which he best serves the wants of his fellow men.

There is in the operation of the market no compulsion and coercion. The state, the social apparatus of coercion and compulsion, does not interfere with the market and with the citizens’ activities directed by the market. It employs its power to beat people into submission solely for the prevention of actions destructive to the preservation and the smooth operation of the market economy. It protects the individual’s life, health, and property against violent or fraudulent aggression on the part of domestic gangsters and external foes. Thus the state creates and preserves the environment in which the market economy can safely operate.

The Marxian slogan “anarchic production” pertinently characterizes this social structure as an economic system which is not directed by a dictator, a production tsar who assigns to each a task and compels him to obey this command. Each man is free; nobody is subject to a despot. Of his own accord the individual integrates himself into the cooperative system. The market directs him and reveals to him in what way he can best promote his own welfare as well as that of other people. The market is supreme. The market alone puts the whole social system in order and provides it with sense and meaning.

The market is not a place, a thing, or a collective entity. The market is a process, actuated by the interplay of the actions of the various individuals cooperating under the division of labor. The forces determining the — continually changing — state of the market are the value judgments of these individuals and their actions as directed by these value judgments. The state of the market at any instant is the price structure, i.e., the totality of the exchange ratios as established by the interaction of those eager to buy and those eager to sell. There is nothing inhuman or mystical with regard to the market. The market process is entirely a resultant of human actions. Every market phenomenon can be traced back to definite choices of the members of the market society.

The market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation. The market prices tell the producers what to produce, how to produce, and in what quantity. The market is the focal point to which the activities of the individuals converge. It is the center from which the activities of the individuals radiate.

The market economy must be strictly differentiated from the second thinkable — although not realizable — system of social cooperation under the division of labor: the system of social or governmental ownership of the means of production. This second system is commonly called socialism, communism, planned economy, or state capitalism. The market economy — or capitalism, as it is usually called — and the socialist economy preclude one another. There is no mixture of the two systems possible or thinkable; there is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would be in part capitalistic and in part socialist. Production is directed either by the market or by the decrees of a production tsar or a committee of production tsars.

If within a society based on private ownership of the means of production some of these means are publicly owned and operated — that is, owned and operated by the government or one of its agencies — this does not make for a mixed system which would combine socialism and capitalism. The fact that the state or municipalities own and operate some plants does not alter the characteristic features of the market economy. These publicly owned and operated enterprises are subject to the sovereignty of the market. They must fit themselves, as buyers of raw materials, equipment, and labor, and as sellers of goods and services, into the scheme of the market economy. They are subject to the laws of the market and thereby depend on the consumers who may or may not patronize them. They must strive for profits or, at least, to avoid losses. The government may cover losses of its plants or shops by drawing on public funds. But this neither eliminates nor mitigates the supremacy of the market; it merely shifts it to another sector. For the means for covering the losses must be raised by the imposition of taxes. But this taxation has its effects on the market and influences the economic structure according to the laws of the market. It is the operation of the market, and not the government collecting the taxes, that decides upon whom the incidence of the taxes falls and how they affect production and consumption. Thus the market, not a government bureau, determines the working of these publicly operated enterprises.

Nothing that is in any way connected with the operation of a market is in the praxeological or economic sense to be called socialism. The notion of socialism as conceived and defined by all socialists implies the absence of a market for factors of production and of prices of such factors. The “socialization” of individual plants, shops, and farms — that is, their transfer from private into public ownership — is a method of bringing about socialism by successive measures. It is a step on the way toward socialism, but not in itself socialism. (Marx and the orthodox Marxians flatly deny the possibility of such a gradual approach to socialism. According to their doctrine the evolution of capitalism will one day reach a point in which at one stroke capitalism is transformed into socialism.)

Government-operated enterprises and the Russian Soviet economy are, by the mere fact that they buy and sell on markets, connected with the capitalist system. They themselves bear witness to this connection by calculating in terms of money. They thus utilize the intellectual methods of the capitalist system that they fanatically condemn.

For monetary economic calculation is the intellectual basis of the market economy. The tasks set to acting within any system of the division of labor cannot be achieved without economic calculation. The market economy calculates in terms of money prices. That it is capable of such calculation w-as instrumental in its evolution and conditions its present-day operation. The market economy is real because it can calculate.

Continue at : http://mises.org/story/3029

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I.O.U.S.A. LIVE!

August 9, 2008 at 6:58 am · Filed under The Financial Crisis, The Make Believe Middle Class

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It’s The Economy, Stupid!

August 7, 2008 at 5:52 am · Filed under Stupid!, The Financial Crisis, The Make Believe Middle Class, Surviving In NJ

Today I thought I would try my hand at economics, but not without some hesitation. I subscribe to the rule that it is good to stay close to home on the big subjects about which I know pretty much nothing, at least formally. But as I see the inescapable consensus forming everywhere that our economy is teetering on the edge of breakdown, as a part of the whole I feel entitled to my say.

Besides, we are given two serious presidential aspirants: the Republican, whose life has been government, government, and government, makes no bones about knowing nothing about economics; and the Democrat, whose life has been activist, activist, activist, kind of like a Bono who can’t sing, is a lawyer. So not knowing anything about economics is clearly not a diriment impediment to throwing in two cents, as long as you can live with embarrassment. Come to think of it, now I think that I am beginning to see why politics and economics go hand in glove together.

As I understand it, our economy is melting down because of a crisis in the credit markets. Too many people are in over their heads for buying too much stuff with too little money to pay for it. One or two houses, one or two cars, a trip to the mall when you’re feeling blue, a 40, 50, 60 inch TV to catch the action on QVC should you be laid up in bed with the flu; this is the stuff that people wanted, this is the stuff they bought on time, and this is the stuff they haven’t time in their lives to pay for if they live to be a hundred. The reason is that the miracle of compound interest played backwards is a nightmare; a nightmare times 40 or 50 million, and I’ll leave that for somebody else to describe.

At any other time we would all be blaming The People and there would be tent meetings going on with preachers preaching about envy, gluttony, whatever and whoever. This is not any other time. This is an election year. You don’t blame The People in an election year. If you blame The People in an election year, the other guy gets elected. It is as simple as that.

But we do need to talk blame because otherwise we will not be able to find any pleasure in this crisis at all. Who else is there to blame? Fortunately for The People and the politicians, there are others. Even more fortunately, there are others who can be blamed with justice.

Take for example Uncle Sugar the strawman, his own august self. Finding himself equidistant between two giant mountains of guns and butter, over the years he has been choosing both very happily. Of course this means to pay for his gluttony he had to dip into the credit markets of China, Saudi Arabia, a few other such places, but our resourceful Uncle had a trick up his sleeve that has not been made available to the People at large, yet. Uncle deflated the dollar about 30 or 40%. Now those dollars if they are going to have any value have to come home where the People are bust and not buying stuff any longer.

The whole mess sounds almost like it was cooked up by New Jersey wise guys. If any group of thugs knew how to exploit weakness and make weakness keep on paying, it was New Jersey wise guys. They would give high interest credit to their losers so they could keep on losing. When the losers tapped out, the wise guys then took their businesses for a run through those credit lines. They would buy a couple of truckloads of stuff, send it out the back door, play until credit ran out, and everybody in the end busted out but the wise guys. The problem is that in the current situation I can’t figure out who are the wise guys. Everybody seems to be busting out.

I can’t say that I ever thought very highly of Bill Clinton when he was President. But he was a kind of Arkansas wise guy until recently when even he busted out. When he talked economics, he knew what he was talking about. It really is “The Economy, Stupid.” He never was emphasizing the second word. It was always about the third. Slick Willy understood The People back then.

——————

Jim Dooley at NJ Voices

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N.J. should support offshore wind farms

August 7, 2008 at 5:40 am · Filed under Beautiful NJ, Because We Can, A Clean Energy Future

The federal government should go forward with plans to lease sea bottom off the coast for weather studies.To reach Gov. Jon Corzine’s goal to produce nearly a quarter of the state’s electricity from renewable sources, wind-generated power must be expanded.In the draft energy master plan by the Corzine administration, the goal is to generate at least 22.5 percent from renewable sources. Yet, if the state can meet more of the state’s energy needs with this clean power, or with solar, it should support efforts to do so.

The U.S. Minerals Management Service is preparing to lease the sea bottom in six areas off the New Jersey coast to energy companies who would gather weather information and assess the suitably of building wind farms.

Some people raise legitimate concerns about the farms possibly disturbing marine life or perhaps adversely affecting the state’s strong tourism industry. Yet, New Jersey already has wind farms on land generating electricity, and there have not been major problems reported.

Tim Dillingham of the American Littoral Society, which is dedicated to conserving the coast, told a Gannett New Jersey reporter that officials should review regulations to protect the shore before moving ahead with the studies.

State and federal officials should weigh these concerns, but it is time to move forward on developing renewable energy. In terms of the environmental and economic effect, wind farms should be a net plus for New Jersey.

Replacing fossil fuels with wind power can significantly reduce air pollution and ease the drain on the economy from sending dollars overseas to pay for foreign oil.

With energy demand rising worldwide, it is clear that a significant shift to clean, renewable energy is needed to protect our lifestyle as well as the planet.

New Jersey may be a small state, but its shift to renewable energy can help clean up the world and take the pressure off energy prices.

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N.J. transportation bill could save key programs for seniors, disabled

August 5, 2008 at 5:51 am · Filed under The Financial Crisis, The Make Believe Middle Class, The Suffering Poor

Local advocates for the disabled and elderly are urging state officials to pass a bill that would increase funding for statewide transportation programs facing budget cuts in January.Dottie Cullen, a Vineland resident who sits on the county’s Transportation Advisory Council, said Sunday that an imminent $60,000 cut to the county’s Cumberland Area Transit System, or CATS, will affect hundreds of local senior citizens and disabled people who use that service every day.

“It’s just unbelievable,” Cullen said. “We have people with disabilities who are productive citizens. Our drivers get up at five in the morning, pick them up, take them to work, to dialysis, doctors, counselors, everything. Sure, I know the economy is bad. We all know it. But in this country, we shouldn’t have to beg.”

The program is funded entirely through the Casino Revenue Fund, which allocates 7.5 percent of its annual revenue to fund transportation programs across the state. Since decreased casino revenue has translated into decreased funding, a bill working its way through the Legislature, A-2046 and S-1830, would increase the funding percentage by one point, to 8.5 percent.

Misono Miller, executive director of the Cumberland County Office of Aging and Disabled, said Sunday that the small boost would be enough to hold off a transportation catastrophe.

“That increase would probably reinstate most of the reductions in all the counties,” Miller said. “It would prevent a major crisis that transportation systems are facing in New Jersey.”The $60,000 loss, Miller said, makes up about 11 percent of the CATS 2008 budget. It will translate, however, into two eliminated positions, one of which would have to be a driver.

Theresa Van Sant, project director for the CATS service, said the system makes 500 to 700 trips per day, averaging about 130,000 per year. The loss of those two positions, Van Sant added, would be keenly felt by the system’s users.

Both Miller and Van Sant added that rising gas prices have also become a source of concern for CATS.

“I think the gas costs have doubled in the past two years, and there’s a serious situation in how to maintain systems operations without any disruption,” Miller said.

According to Cullen, the bills being considered by the Legislature have been floating around in Trenton for a number of years, ever since transportation officials suspected that the 7.5 percent Casino Revenue Fund allocation would eventually become insufficient.

In the state Senate, the bill has moved somewhat briskly, and was referred June 9 to the Budget and Appropriations Committee. In the Assembly however, it has lagged in a tourism and gaming committee, where it was sent in June after being introduced in February.

Cullen said she has threatened lawmakers with organizing a march in Trenton, akin to the ones farmers held in April when they protested at the Statehouse in their tractors. For this issue, Cullen said, maybe she’ll invite all her disabled and wheelchair-bound friends to gather in Trenton.

“County transportation is a critical need,” she said, adding that she felt it saved her life after her stroke 10 years ago. “People don’t realize. Here in this country, we shouldn’t have to beg. I don’t know really what else to tell you. These are people who need to go to dialysis to survive.”

E-mail John Martins:

JMartins@pressofac.com

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The State of the Union

August 3, 2008 at 8:14 am · Filed under The Financial Crisis, Corporate Power, The Make Believe Middle Class, The Authentic American Right, 2008 Election, Study History-Avoid Failure, Read and Weep!, Executive Fiat, Because We Can, Liberty and Justice For All, Land of the Free?

CARTOON CAPITALISM
by Bill Bonner

Last week, purely in the spirit of mischief, we brought up a sore subject: America’s largest mortgage finance companies, Fannie and Freddie. The two have so much water in their lungs it will take at least $25 billion of the public’s money to save them. Possibly $300 billion. Were it up to us, we’d leave them on the beach.

But, last week, the U.S. Senate bent down and pressed its large mouth onto those gaping traps of the mortgage twins - gurgling into them a corrupt breath of life. Since the two hold one out of every two mortgages in the nation, in effect, Congress is nationalizing the U.S. housing stock itself. Henceforth, citizens will pay not only their taxes to the government, but their mortgage payments too.

In America itself, how this came to be is the subject of little concern. But despite the lack of interest, it is the subject of the next 500 words or so.

At a speech in Vancouver, James Kunstler seemed positively delighted. Finally, gasoline over $4 a gallon was going to do what generations of artistic scorn could not - destroy Fannie and Freddie’s collateral. Kunstler’s critique of American suburban vernacular architecture is that its products are not real houses at all - but “cartoon houses.” They have porches that look like real porches from a distance, but they are too narrow to sit on. They have shutters too - nailed to the wall, making them completely useless. They may have “picture” windows…looking out on nothing…or no windows at all. And they wouldn’t exist at all were it not for cheap credit and cheap gasoline.

Of course, the same may be said of America’s - and Britain’s - entire economies during the last 20 years. The loose credit that built cartoon houses also constructed cartoon economies; they look like real economies, but they are essentially perverse, consuming wealth rather than creating it.

For proof, we return to Fannie and Freddie. Here were two companies that appeared to be helping Americans own houses. But since they were created, homeowners’ equity - that portion of the house actually owned and paid for by the homeowner - fell from 70% to below 50%. Currently, Americans’ total equity is lower than their mortgage debt. As a whole, the nation’s homeowners are “upside down,” in other words. Nearly 9 million Americans have zero or negative equity already - and house prices are still falling.

How comes this to be? The answer is simple: lenders lent more than the houses were worth to people who couldn’t pay it back anyway. This Looney Tune approach to finance radiated to all points of the economy. People pretended that they earned more - spending more and more money to buy more and more goods and services - but wages did not really increase. Then, they bought houses - believing the roofs over their heads were investments, rather than consumer items. With no down payment, no proof of income, and zero interest loans - for most of the new buyers, home ownership was merely a dangerous conceit. Now that the roofs have caved in, it is a staggering burden.

The “consumer economy” was always a mockery. No serious economist ever suggested that you could get richer by consuming wealth. But that didn’t make consumerism unpopular. The more people consumed, the more GDP went up. GDP measures output, not wealth creation; but who could tell the difference? In a cartoon economy - no one. Besides, spending made people feel as though they were getting richer.

Then, whenever the consumer threatened to come to his senses, the feds rushed to “stimulate” him - by giving him more of what he least needed, more credit. More spending kept the cartoon economy running - allowing the consumer, the businessman and the speculator to add to his burden of debt. In 1971, when the United States went off the gold wagon, household debt was less than 50% of GDP. Now, it is more than 100%. And now, the poor consumer’s knees buckle; he will be forced to work the rest of his life just to keep up with his debt burden, let alone pay it off.

Even the rentiers were bamboozled by their own claptrap. Stocks rose from ‘82 to 2000…fell heavily to 2002 and bounced back. For the last 10 years, shareholders have gotten little for their effort. In July of ‘98, the FTSE hit a high of 5,458. This month, it has reached 5,625. And in America, if stock prices were quoted in gallons of gasoline, the Dow would take the driver no further in 2008 than it did 40 years ago.

The cartoon capitalists did it all backwards; they are supposed to exploit the workers, not be exploited by them. But while consumers and investors were going nowhere, corporate managers and Wall Street hustlers were getting rich. The two Bozos running Fannie and Freddie, for example, pocketed about $32 million between them last year - during a period in which the companies lost almost $5.2 billion - not to mention the losses to shareholders. And on Wall Street, managers paid out $250 billion in bonuses in the 4 years leading up to the credit crunch. The firms declared a profit and paid bonuses when the bets were made; they didn’t wait to see how they turned out. Thus did the big banks and big brokers become capitalists without capital, dependent on the gullibility of investors to keep them in business. And when investors began to wise up, they turned to the public for capital support.

What kind of scam is this? It may look like capitalism from a distance. But this is not real capitalism; this is cartoon capitalism - run by clowns, who sell freak investments to chump investors, and encourage the lumpen householder to ruin himself.

Editor’s Note: Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning. He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of the national best sellers Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century and Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis.

Bill’s latest book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics, written with co-author Lila Rajiva, is available now by clicking here:

Mobs, Messiahs and Markets

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/

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Moon-walker claims alien contact cover-up

July 25, 2008 at 5:45 am · Filed under UFOs-The Debate, Strange Phenomena, Believe It Or Not!

FORMER NASA astronaut and moon-walker Dr Edgar Mitchell - a veteran of the Apollo 14 mission - has stunningly claimed aliens exist.

And he says extra-terrestrials have visited Earth on several occasions - but the alien contact has been repeatedly covered up by governments for six decades.

Dr Mitchell, 77, said during a radio interview that sources at the space agency who had had contact with aliens described the beings as ‘little people who look strange to us.’

He said supposedly real-life ET’s were similar to the traditional image of a small frame, large eyes and head.

Chillingly, he claimed our technology is “not nearly as sophisticated” as theirs and “had they been hostile”, he warned “we would be been gone by now”.

Dr Mitchell, along with with Apollo 14 commander Alan Shepard, holds the record for the longest ever moon walk, at nine hours and 17 minutes following their 1971 mission.

“I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we’ve been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real,” Dr Mitchell said.

“It’s been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it’s leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

“I’ve been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it’s been happening quite a bit.”

Dr Mitchell, who has a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering and a Doctor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics claimed Roswell was real and similar alien visits continue to be investigated.

He told the astonished Kerrang! radio host Nick Margerrison: “This is really starting to open up. I think we’re headed for real disclosure and some serious organisations are moving in that direction.”

Mr Margerrison said: “I thought I’d stumbled on some sort of astronaut humour but he was absolutely serious that aliens are definitely out there and there’s no debating it.”

Officials from NASA, however, were quick to play the comments down.

In a statement, a spokesman said: “NASA does not track UFOs. NASA is not involved in any sort of cover up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe.

‘Dr Mitchell is a great American, but we do not share his opinions on this issue.’

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New Jersey’s Future - Your Children’s Future

July 25, 2008 at 5:36 am · Filed under Reviving New Jersey, A Clean Energy Future

Atlantic City is known for lots of things: Casinos . . . songs by the Boss . . . and wind turbines.

Since 2005, five turbines in Atlantic City have given us a glimpse of the potential for wind power in the Garden State.

For the last two months, Gov. Corzine has been getting feedback on his energy plan, including three public hearings this past week. We need to ensure Gov. Corzine plans to maximize our off-shore wind potential — and not build more power plants. Click here to make sure we live up to our off-shore wind potential:

http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/action/energy/off-shorewind?id4=ES

Off-shore wind can be a huge source of energy. By 2020, we could generate 3,000 mega-watts of energy from off-shore wind — enough to power 800,000 New Jersey homes.

Please remind Gov. Corzine of this potential, and tell him that you want to see more off-shore wind, not more power plants in his final energy plan. Take action today:

http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/action/energy/off-shorewind?id4=ES

Thank you to more than 900 of you who signed onto the off-shore wind petition earlier this week.

Even famous Texas oil-man T. Boone Pickens is pouring his millions into developing wind power. But we shouldn’t let Texas get ahead of us.

New Jersey should be a national leader in clean energy — and building off-shore wind is one of the first steps.

Friday is the deadline to weigh in on Gov. Corzine’s energy plan. He’s already heard from big utilities as they push hard to build more power plants and incinerators across the state.

Has he heard from you? Tell Gov. Corzine to build off-shore wind in New Jersey — not more power plants and incinerators:

http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/action/energy/off-shorewind?id4=ES

Off-shore wind can be a huge source of energy. By 2020, we could generate 3,000 mega-watts of energy from off-shore wind — enough to power 800,000 New Jersey homes.

Remind Gov. Corzine of this potential, and tell him you want to see more off-shore wind, not more power plants in his final energy plan. Take action today!

http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/action/energy/off-shorewind?id4=ES

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