Fiscal Cliff: Let's Call Their Bluff with Ellen Brown

Ellen has been working on the pressing problem of financial reform for the past several years and is slowly turning into a revolutionary on the topic. Certainly all these ideas have merit, some seriously are needed and until they happen out system will remain dysfunctional. The shocker for myself was to realize that we are still two trillion short from 2008. This is credit deflation with a vengeance.

I will not go into the fussy details that I have covered before except to welcome the obvious extension of public banking to the large cities as well as the States. This all truly needs to be done simply for strategic reasons. Banking centralization is and continues to court disaster. Breaking that core risk into the regional entities immunizes the nation from that risk.

The one suggestion not made is to institute a VAT that is split between the federal government and the States. Critically, this VAT would also apply to all interest paid and fees in financial transactions. It would also apply to all income payments and allow the income tax to be outright eliminated. It would allow the concurrent establishment of a rebate system for those unable to generate a minimum income that could even be tailored to support necessary services such as medical insurance.

Yet VAT is now been seriously discussed and may well be something that the politicians can ultimately agree upon, particularly if income tax can be dumped and splitting with the States can be also made to happen. This and public banking would revolutionize public finance.

Fiscal Cliff: Let’s Call Their Bluff!

By Ellen Brown

Global Research, December 19, 2012

http://www.globalresearch.ca/fiscal-cliff-lets-call-their-bluff/5316267

The “fiscal cliff” has all the earmarks of a false flag operation, full of sound and fury, intended to extort concessions from opponents.  Neil Irwin of the Washington Post calls it “a self-induced austerity crisis.”  David Weidner in the Wall Street Journal calls it simply theater, designed to pressure politicians into a budget deal:   

The cliff is really just a trumped-up annual budget discussion. . . The most likely outcome is a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and  kicking the can down the road.

Yet the media coverage has been “panic-inducing, falling somewhere between that given to an approaching hurricane and an alien invasion.”  In the summer of 2011, this sort of media hype succeeded in causing the Dow Jones Industrial Average to plunge nearly 2000 points.  But this time the market is generally ignoring the cliff, either confident a deal will be reached or not caring.

The goal of the exercise seems to be to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, something a radical group of conservatives has worked for decades to achieve.  But with the recent Democratic victories, demands for “fiscal responsibility” may just result in higher taxes for the rich, without gutting the entitlements.

The problem is that no deal is going to be satisfactory.  If we go over the cliff, taxes will be raised on everyone, and GDP is predicted to drop by 3%.  If a deal is reached, taxes will be raised on some people, and some services will be cut.  But the underlying problems – high unemployment and a languishing economy – will remain.  More effective solutions are needed.

 Be Careful What You Wish for:  Fiscal Hostage-Taking Could Backfire

 Taxpayers and governments that are pushed too far have been known to resort to more radical measures, and there are some on the table that could fix the problem at its core.  Here are a few that are receiving media attention:

 1.  A financial transactions tax.  While children’s shoes and lunchboxes are taxed at nearly 10%, financial sales have so far gotten off scot-free.  The idea of a financial transactions tax, or Tobin tax, has been kicked around for decades; but it is now gaining real teeth.  The European Commission has backed plans from 10 countries — including France, Germany, Italy and Spain — to launch a financial transactions tax to help raise funds to tackle the debt crisis.  Sarah van Gelder of Yes! Magazine observes that the tax would not only help reduce deficits but would hit the highest income earners, and it would cool the speculative fever of Wall Street.

Simon Thorpe, a financial blogger in France, cites figures from the Bank for International Settlements, showing total U.S. financial transactions of nearly $3 QUADRILLION in  2011.  Including other sources, he derives a figure of $4.44 QUADRILLION.  Even using the more “conservative” $3 quadrillion figure, a tax of a mere 0.05% (1/20th of 1%) would be sufficient to raise $1.5 trillion yearly, enough to replace personal income taxes with money to spare.

2.  The trillion dollar coin trick.  If Republicans insist on the letter of the law, Democrats could respond with a law of their own.  The Constitution says that Congress shall have the power to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof,” and no limit is put on the value of the coins Congress creates, as was pointed out by a chairman of the House Coinage Subcommittee in the 1980s.

I actually suggested this solution in Web of Debt in 2007, when it was just a “wacky idea.”  But after the 2008 banking crisis, it started getting the attention of scholars.  In a December 7th article in the Washington Post titled “Could Two Platinum Coins Solve the Debt-ceiling Crisis?,” Brad Plumer wrote that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling as part of the fiscal cliff negotiations, “then some of these wacky ideas may get more attention.”

Ed Harrison summarized the proposal at Credit Writedowns like this:

• The Treasury mints a $1 trillion coin, or whatever amount is desired.
• The Treasury deposits the coin into the Treasury’s account at the Fed.
• The Treasury buys back bonds.
• The retirement of bonds is an asset swap, no different from QE2.
• The increase in reserve balances is not inflationary, as Credit Easing 1.0, QE 1.0, and QE 2.0 already have shown.
• These operations by the Treasury create no new net financial assets for the non-government sector.
• The debt ceiling crisis is averted.

Plumer cites Yale Law School Professor Jack Balkin, confirming the ploy is legal.  He also cites Joseph Gagnon of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, stating, “I like it.  There’s nothing that’s obviously economically problematic about it.”

To the objection that it is a legal trick that makes a mockery of the law, Paul Krugman responded, “These things sound ridiculous — but so is the behavior of Congressional Republicans.  So why not fight back using legal tricks?”

3.  Declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional.  The 14th Amendment to the Constitution mandates that Congress shall pay its debts on time and in full, and Congress does not know how much it will collect in taxes until after the bills have been incurred.  The debt ceiling was imposed by a statute first passed in 1917 and revised multiple times since.   The Constitution trumps it and should rule.

4.  Borrow interest-free from the government’s own central bank.  If the government refinanced its entire debt through the Federal Reserve, it could save nearly half a trillion dollars annually in interest, since the Fed rebates its profits to the government.  The Fed’s newly-announced QE4 adds $45 billion monthly in government securities purchases to the $40 billion for mortgaged-backed securities declared in QE3, and no time limit has been designated for ending the program.  Forty-five billion dollars monthly is over half a trillion yearly.  Added to the federal debt already held by the Fed, the whole $16 trillion federal debt could be bought back in 28 years.

This is not a wild, untested idea.  Borrowing interest-free from its central bank was done by Canada from 1939 to 1974, by France from 1946 to 1973, and by Australia and New Zealand in the first half of the 20th century, to excellent effect and without creating price inflation.

5.  Decommission some portion of the military.  When past costs are factored in, nearly half the federal budget goes to the military.  The data speaks for itself.  I wrote about it here.

6.  Debt forgiveness.  Economists Michael Hudson and Steve Keen maintain that the only way out of debt deflation is debt forgiveness.  That could be achieved by the Fed by buying up $2 trillion in student debt and other asset-back securities and either ripping them up or refinancing the debts interest-free or at very low interest.  If the banks can borrow at 0.25%, why not the people?

7.  Publicly-owned state and local banks.  Municipal governments are facing cliffs of their own. Ann Larson, writing in Dissent Magazine, blames predatory Wall Street lending practices, which have inflicted deep and growing suffering on communities across the country.

Predatory Wall Street practices can be avoided by establishing publicly-owned state and local banks, which leverage the public’s funds for the benefit of the public.  The profits are returned as dividends to the local government.  German researcher Margrit Kennedy calculates that a whopping 40% of the cost of public projects, on average, goes to interest.  Publicly-owned banks slash borrowing costs by returning this interest to the government, along with many other advantages, detailed here.

Unshackle the Hostages and Let the Good Times Roll

The fiscal cliff has been said to be holding Congress hostage to conservative demands, but the real hostages are the debt slaves of our financial system.  The demand for “fiscal responsibility” has been used as an excuse to impose radical austerity measures on the people, measures that benefit the 1% while locking the 99% in debt.

The government did not demand fiscal responsibility of the failed financial sector.  Rather, Congress lavished hundreds of billions of dollars on it, and the Fed lavished trillions more.  No evident harm from these measures befell the economy, which has fared better than the austerity-strapped EU countries.  Another couple of trillion dollars poured directly into the real, productive economy could give it a serious boost.

According to the Fed’s figures, as of July 2010, the money supply was actually $4 trillion LESS than in 2008.  (The shrinkage was in the shadow banking system formerly reported as M3.)  That means $4 trillion could be added back into the money supply before general price inflation would be a problem.

The self-induced austerity crisis is a diversion from the real crises, including unemployment, the housing crisis, a bloated military, and unrepayable debt.  Slashing services, selling off public assets, and raising taxes won’t cure these ills.  To maintain a sustainable and productive economy requires a visionary leap into the new.  A new economy needs new methods of public financing.

Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute.  In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private banking oligarchy has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites arehttp://WebofDebt.com, http://EllenBrown.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. This article was first posted on Truthout.

Scottish Public Banking Explored

 Simply put, the power of banking is explicitly the power to create money and to place it to account.

For that reason alone it needs to be progressively localized. I go so far as asserting that it needs to be available even at the local model community level as a core operating tool. It certainly need to be available wherever capital is already concentrated as in the State house, the big city council and were as in Scotland, reckless banking has wiped out the capital base available to local lending.

In fact the centralizing of banking authority is a retrogressive activity that needs to be avoided however logical it appears.

Iceland did it right by quickly reinstating middle class credit and nationalizing the local banking system.

In Scotland, they are relearning the power of local banking after watching it all swept away.

Ensuring Scottish Sovereignty: Exploring the Public Bank Option

Posted: 12/07/2012 2:42 pm

Ellen Brown

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/public-bank-option-scotland_b_2239527.html

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the Bank of Scotland have been pillars of Scotland's economy and culture for over three centuries. So when the RBS was nationalized by the London-based UK government following the 2008 banking crisis, and the Bank of Scotland was acquired by the London-based Lloyds Bank, it came as a shock to the Scots. They no longer owned their oldest and most venerable banks.

Another surprise turn of events was the triumph of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election. Scotland is still part of the United Kingdom, but it has had its own parliament since 1999, similar to U.S. states. The SNP has rallied around the call for independence from the UK since its founding in 1934, but it was a minority party until the 2011 victory, which gave it an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament.

Scottish independence is now on the table. A bill has been introduced to the Scottish Parliament with the intention of holding a referendum on the issue in 2014.

Arguments in favor of independence include that it will allow the Scottish people to make decisions for Scotland themselves, on such contentious issues as having nuclear weapons in their seas and being part of NATO. They can also directly access the profits from the North Sea oil off Scotland's coast.

Arguments against independence include that Scotland's levels of public spending (which are higher than in the rest of the UK) would be difficult to sustain without raising taxes. North Sea oil revenues will eventually decline.

One way budgetary problems might be relieved would be for Scotland to have its own publicly-owned bank, one that served the interests of the Scottish people.  True economic sovereignty means having control over the national currency, credit and debt.

The Public Bank Option

It was in that context that I was asked to give a presentation on public banking at RSA Scotland (the Royal Society of Arts) in Edinburgh on Nov. 22.  Among other attendees were a special adviser and a civil servant from the Scottish government.  The presentation was followed by one by public sector consultant Ralph Leishman, director of 4-consulting, who made the public bank option concrete with specific proposals fitting the Scottish context.  He suggested that the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB) be licensed as a depository bank, on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota. Lively debate followed.

The SIB is a division of Scottish Enterprise (SE), a government economic development body. SE encourages economic development, enterprise, innovation and investment in business, which is achieved by the SIB through the Scottish Loan Fund. As noted in a September 2011 government report titled "Government Economic Strategy":

"[S]ecuring affordable finance remains a considerable challenge... Evidence shows that while many large companies have significant cash holdings or can access capital markets directly, for most Small and Medium-sized companies bank lending remains the key source of finance. Unblocking this is key to helping the recovery gain traction."

The limitation of a public loan fund is that the money can be lent only to one borrower at a time.  Invested as capital in a bank, on the other hand, public funds can be leveraged into nearly ten times that sum in loans. Liquidity to cover the loans is provided by deposits, which remain in the bank available to the depositors. Any shortage in liquidity can be covered by borrowing at low interest from other banks or the money market.  As observed by Kurt von Mettenheim, et al., in a 2008 report titled "Government Banking: New Perspectives on Sustainable Development and Social Inclusion from Europe and South America" (at page 196): "[I]n terms of public policy, government banks can do more for less: Almost ten times more if one compares cash used as capital reserves by banks to other policies that require budgetary outflows."

Leishman stated that the SIB now has investment funds of 23.2 million pounds from the Scottish government. Rounding this to 25 million pounds, a public depository bank could have sufficient capital to back 250 million pounds in loans.  For deposits to cover the loans, the Scottish Government has 125 million pounds on deposit with private banks, currently earning little or no interest. Adding just 14 percent of the General Fund cash and cash equivalent reserves held by Scotland's local governments would provide another 125 million pounds, reaching the needed 250 million pounds, with six times that sum in local government revenues to spare.

The Model of the Bank of North Dakota

My assignment was to show what the government could do with its own bank, following the model of the Bank of North Dakota (BND).  on the Saturday following the RSA event, The Scotsman published an article by Alf Young that summarized the issues and possibilities so well that I'm taking the liberty of abstracting from it here.

North Dakota is currently the only U.S. state to own its own depository bank. The BND was founded in 1919 by Norwegian and other immigrants, determined, through their Non-Partisan League, to stop rapacious Wall Street money men foreclosing on their farms.

All state revenues must be deposited with the BND by law. The bank pays no bonuses, fees or commissions; does no advertising; and maintains no branches beyond the main office in Bismarck. The bank offers cheap credit lines to state and local government agencies. There are low-interest loans for designated project finance. The BND underwrites municipal bonds, funds disaster relief and supports student loans. It partners with local commercial banks to increase lending across the state and pays competitive interest rates on state deposits. For the past ten years, it has been paying a dividend to the state, with a quite small population of about 680,000, of some $30 million (18.7 million pounds) a year.

Young writes:

"Intriguingly, North Dakota has not suffered the way much of the rest of the U.S. -- indeed much of the western industrialized world -- has, from the banking crash and credit crunch of 2008; the subsequent economic slump; and the sovereign debt crisis that has afflicted so many. With an economy based on farming and oil, it has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S., a rising population and a state budget surplus that is expected to hit $1.6 billion by next July. By then North Dakota's legacy fund is forecast to have swollen to around $1.2 billion.

With that kind of resilience, it's little wonder that twenty American states, some of them close to bankruptcy, are at various stages of legislating to form their own state-owned banks on the North Dakota model. There's a long-standing tradition of such institutions elsewhere too. Australia had a publicly-owned bank offering credit for infrastructure as early as 1912. New Zealand had one operating in the housing field in the 1930s. Up until 1974, the federal government in Canada borrowed from the Bank of Canada, effectively interest-free.

... From our western perspective, we tend to forget that, globally, around 40 per cent of banks are already publicly owned, many of them concentrated in the BRIC economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China."

Banking is not just a market good or service.  It is a vital part of societal infrastructure, which properly belongs in the public sector. By taking banking back, local governments could regain control of that very large slice (up to 40 percent) of every public budget that currently goes to interest charged to finance investment programs through the private sector.

Recent academic studies by von Mettenheim et al., and Andrianova et al. show that countries with high degrees of government ownership of banking have grown much faster in the last decade than countries where banking is historically concentrated in the private sector.  Government banks are also less corrupt and, surprisingly, have been more profitable in recent years than private banks.

Young concluded his article:

"As we left Thursday's seminar, I asked another member of the audience, someone with more than thirty years' experience as a corporate financier, whether the concept of a publicly-owned bank has any chance of getting off the ground here. 'I've no doubt it will happen,' came the surprise response. 'When I look at the way our collective addiction to debt has ballooned in my lifetime, I'd even say it's inevitable.'"

The Scots are full of surprises, and independence is in their blood. Recall the heroic battles of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce memorialized by Hollywood in the Academy Award-winning movie Braveheart.  Perhaps the Scots will blaze a trail for economic sovereignty in the EU, just as the North Dakotans did in the U.S.  A publicly-owned bank could help Scotland take control of its own economic destiny, by avoiding unnecessary debt to a private banking system that has become a burden to the economy rather than a pillar in its support.

Debunking the Hunter Gatherer Workout

The interesting take home is that the hunter gatherers were all thin while effectively been more sedentary than we ever are. The difference of course is in the quality of the carbohydrates and in the application of short bursts of exertion.

More seriously though we need to respect sedentary protocols and obviously practice racket ball. Distance running has its own merits but is is hardly the only way to physically prosper.

This is a surprise to those of us who ever thought that our ancestors entered a life of unrelenting toil because it has more rewarding and it allows us to understand the reluctance of hunter gatherers to adopt modernism. If your family has not gone hungry for little effort for thousands of years, it is hard to merit a change.

It is also noteworthy that 80 year old grandmothers remain strong and vital.

Tanzania

Al Sears, MD

December 14, 2012

I’m a Lucky Guy

The Hadza tribe, which I’m planning to visit in a few months, live near Lake Eyasi, just south of the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania.

http://www.alsearsmd.com

I’m blessed to have been in Tanzania three times now. I was lucky enough to meet with the Masai, the ancient hunter-gatherers who shared with me all of their herbal knowledge.

I was also blessed to be able to visit the Ngorongoro Crater and get a personal tour from the chief conservator of the crater. He told me the inside story of how they take care of the biggest lions on the planet.

Then I had an incredible climb up Kilimanjaro, the highest walkable point on Earth...

And I also went to see Olduvai Gorge, the birthplace of humankind. It’s one of the most important archeological sites in the world, where the archeologist Mary Leakey discovered almost 2-million-year-old australopithecine pre-human remains.

I held pieces of their skulls, jawbones and tools in my hand. Truly incredible.

It’s amazing one country has all those things in it... and now I’m making plans to go back there to visit another ancient tribe of hunter-gatherers.

Because after reading a recent article in The New York Times, I’m definitely planning on seeing the Hadza people.

At the time I read the article, I was reading the latest research on exertion and oxygen uptake for my new subscription newsletter Confidential Cures.

I read a study called “Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity” and noticed that the lead author had written an article in The Times. His article is titled “Debunking the Hunter-Gatherer Workout.”

So I wanted to see what the article was all about.

The gist of it is that the author and his colleagues wanted to try and figure out if a lack of physical activity is the reason that modern human beings are fat. So they decided to measure calories burned in a hunter-gatherer group in Africa and compare it to our calories burned.

They looked at the Hadza from northern Tanzania, a group pretty much untouched by the West, which is very rare in the modern world. And they found that the Hadza didn’t burn more calories than we do.1

I’ve visited many of these tribes myself, including the Batwa and the Masai in Africa, and the Ashaninkas in South America. And it’s not surprising that they don’t burn that many calories...

They don’t hunt that often. We push ourselves at a low level of exertion all day long every day because of our busy lifestyle. They sit back and pretty much lie around most of the time.

The lead author went on to write in The Times that, because we burn the same amount of calories, we are not fat due to being sedentary... and that this debunks the hunter-gatherer style workout.2

But what they studied has nothing to do with proving why people are fat. The researchers never looked at the quality of the Hadza’s exertion, or the intensity of it, or even what kind of exertion it was... which makes all the difference.

What they should have done was open their eyes and look around and see that the Hadza were all thin. And being thin is not about burning calories. It’s about the kind of calories you take in, and the way you exert yourself.

Compared to how hunter-gatherers ate, we more than doubled the percentage of carbohydrates that we consume. Plus, the character of the carbohydrate has changed to a much higher glycemic index.

Your body converts carbs into either sugar or fat. So if you religiously follow the latest low-fat, high-carb diet, your waistline will only get bigger.

And the modern notion of constant, low-level endurance exercise to get in “the fat-burning zone” makes it worse. Exertion for short periods and a total of less than 20 minutes, like I show you how to do in my P.A.C.E. program, will use these carbs during exercise and signal your body that you don’t need fat. You burn off the fat after your workout while you replenish the carbs for your muscles.

Debunking the Hunter-Gatherer Workout

By HERMAN PONTZER

Published: August 24, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/opinion/sunday/debunking-the-hunter-gatherer-workout.html

DARWIN isn’t required reading for public health officials, but he should be. One reason that heart disease, diabetes and obesity have reached epidemic levels in the developed world is that our modern way of life is radically different from the hunter-gatherer environments in which our bodies evolved. But which modern changes are causing the most harm?

Many in public health believe that a major culprit is our sedentary lifestyle. Faced with relatively few physical demands today, our bodies burn fewer calories than they evolved to consume — and those unspent calories pile up over time as fat. The World Health Organization, in discussing the root causes of obesity, has cited a “decrease in physical activity due to the increasingly sedentary nature of many forms of work, changing modes of transportation and increasing urbanization.”

This is a nice theory. But is it true? To find out, my colleagues and I recently measured daily energy expenditure among the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the few remaining populations of traditional hunter-gatherers. Would the Hadza, whose basic way of life is so similar to that of our distant ancestors, expend more energy than we do?

Our findings, published last month in the journal PLoS ONE, indicate that they don’t, suggesting that inactivity is not the source of modern obesity.

Previous attempts to quantify daily energy expenditure among hunter-gatherers have relied entirely on estimation. By contrast, our study used a technique that calculates the body’s rate of carbon dioxide production — and hence the calories burned per day — by tracking the depletion of two isotopes (deuterium and oxygen-18) in an individual’s urine over a two-week period.

It was a testament to the Hadza’s graciousness, and their years of friendship with several of my colleagues, that they welcomed us into their camps and participated in the study. As we sat back and observed, the Hadza went about their normal routines.

The Hadza live in simple grass huts in the middle of a dry East African savanna. They have no guns, vehicles, crops or livestock. Each day the women comb miles of hilly terrain, foraging for tubers, berries and other wild plant foods, often while carrying infants, firewood and water. Men set out alone most days to collect honey or hunt for game using handmade bows and poison-tipped arrows, often covering 15 to 20 miles.

We found that despite all this physical activity, the number of calories that the Hadza burned per day was indistinguishable from that of typical adults in Europe and the United States. We ran a number of statistical tests, accounting for body mass, lean body mass, age, sex and fat mass, and still found no difference in daily energy expenditure between the Hadza and their Western counterparts.

How can the Hadza be more active than we are without burning more calories? It’s not that their bodies are more efficient, allowing them to do more with less: separate measurements showed that the Hadza burn just as many calories while walking or resting as Westerners do.

We think that the Hadzas’ bodies have adjusted to the higher activity levels required for hunting and gathering by spending less energy elsewhere. Even for very active people, physical activity accounts for only a small portion of daily energy expenditure; most energy is spent behind the scenes on the myriad unseen tasks that keep our cells humming and our support systems working. If the Hadza’s bodies somehow manage to spend less energy in those areas, they could easily accommodate the elevated energy demands of hunting and gathering. And indeed, studies reporting differences in metabolic-hormone profiles between traditional and Western populations support this idea (though more work is needed).

Our findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that energy expenditure is consistent across a broad range of lifestyles and cultures. Of course, if we push our bodies hard enough, we can increase our energy expenditure, at least in the short term. But our bodies are complex, dynamic machines, shaped over millions of years of evolution in environments where resources were usually limited; our bodies adapt to our daily routines and find ways to keep overall energy expenditure in check.

All of this means that if we want to end obesity, we need to focus on our diet and reduce the number of calories we eat, particularly the sugars our primate brains have evolved to love. We’re getting fat because we eat too much, not because we’re sedentary. Physical activity is very important for maintaining physical and mental health, but we aren’t going to Jazzercise our way out of the obesity epidemic.

We have a lot more to learn from groups like the Hadza, among whom obesity and heart disease are unheard of and 80-year-old grandmothers are strong and vital. Finding new approaches to public health problems will require further research into other cultures and our evolutionary past.

Herman Pontzer is an assistant professor of anthropology at Hunter College and a co-founder of the Hadza Fund, a nonprofit organization that supports the Hadza population.

Land Choke in India

 In short, real estate is a huge choke point for the economy.

In Vancouver a development cycle takes at most about two years and a lot less for an ordinary build out requiring no zone changes. This includes public input as needed and rezoning profits are siphoned off by the city in the process. This last is not universal outside Vancouver, but it is the natural trend. Thus no reward exists for inappropriate bribes.

Thus planning begins to bite and the playing field is seen as essentially level.

From this, it appears that most of what is needed is already in place. Take away the gimmes and rationalize the approval flow and the garbage ends. The city may even get the coin to upgrade and modernize their information systems.

In time the bribe culture may slowly go away as it has done elswhere.

India: Why land is at the centre of all scandals

By Alam SrinivasBusiness analyst

9 December 2012 Last updated at 19:51 ET

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-20457766

India's real estate sector is one of the worst offenders for generating illegal money

Recent estimates indicate that the size of India's shadow economy may vary from 25% to 50% of the country's annual gross domestic product (GDP).

Among the 176 nations ranked in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index (2012), India stood at 94, which was a lot worse than Brazil and China.

India's property sector is possibly the worst offender. Barun Mitra, the founder and director of the Delhi-based Liberty Institute, has calculated that all the land transactions, including those related to natural resources like mining, generate $20bn (£12.54bn) to $40bn of illegal money each year.

That equals 1%-2% of the GDP.

This is also evident from recent allegations made by activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal about links between the Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra and the country's biggest real estate developer, DLF.

Here are five reasons why the real estate sector contributes so much to the black economy in India.

DEMAND-SUPPLY MISMATCH

A government report concluded that the shortage of residential houses in urban India would rise from 24.71 million in 2007 to 26.53 million in 2012.

In addition, there is a huge pent-up demand for commercial spaces and land for building factories and huge infrastructure projects such as roads, ports and power plants.

Despite the huge scarcity of real estate, thousands of owners hoard properties and are reluctant to sell because they expect prices to rise in the near future.

The combination of a demand-supply mismatch and speculative urge provides opportunities for bribery.

Experts believe that a majority of real estate deals have "white" and "black" components, which implies that a part of the price - up to 50% in some cases - is paid in cash to avoid paying tax.

HUGE TRANSACTION COSTS

For both the buyer and seller of property, the taxes are too high. In many cases they can rise above 10% of the value of the property.

While the buyer pays a tax to register the land in their name, the seller has to pay capital gains on the difference between the purchase and sale prices.

So there is an incentive on both sides to understate the price in a bid to avoid the taxes, and pay the difference between actual and declared values in illegal money.

However, the government hopes to correct this distortion. Under a new bill to establish a central property regulator, the cost of land registration may be reduced to 5%.

NON-TRANSPARENT LAND RECORDS

In his book, The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto has argued that a principal reason why capitalism does not work in developing and under-developed nations is because the ownership rights of land and property "are not adequately recorded".

Hence, "these assets cannot readily be turned into capital". By contrast, in the developed nations like the US, "every parcel of land, every building is represented in a legally binding property document".

Land records in India are opaque, stored in inaccessible places, and most of the ownership is disputed either in a court of law or because of family fights.

The lack of trustworthy online ownership data and the use of incomplete documents make it difficult for both buyers and sellers to enter into property transactions with complete confidence.

Thus, there is a tendency among sellers with disputed records to demand payments in cash.

The only buyers who can enter such a market are those with access to illegal money.

Now, the government has proposed that only those states that have their land records online can access central funds for welfare schemes like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

STATES' DISCRETIONARY POWERS

Although every city and town has its master plan, which designates areas meant for agriculture, residences and offices, these can be arbitrarily changed at any given time by the local authorities.

Thanks to such official discretionary powers, there is a tendency among builders, estate agents and powerful individuals to abuse political patronage to change the land use of their properties.

As is indicated from the allegations made against Mr Vadra, changing land use from agricultural to commercial can treble and quadruple its price within a few months.

Similarly, there are huge opportunities to buy land in advance near an upcoming highway or metro train track, whose value is likely to multiply once the project comes through.

Here too, political links help to know the status of such projects in advance.

These anomalies lead to under-the-table payments and bribes to grab such favours.

RED TAPE AND BUREAUCRATIC RULES

To complete a sizeable property project, any builder in India has to get almost 60 approvals, produce about 175 documents, and deal with 40 central, state and local government departments.

Estimates indicate it may take a builder three to four years to complete the official paperwork and get all the requisite bureaucratic clearances.

There is, therefore, a tendency to pay bribes to politicians and bureaucrats to speed up the process.

At the same time, individual sellers who are unable to deal with the red tape demand their pound of flesh in cash payments so that they can evade taxes and earn extra bucks.

Britain's Big Cats

The reality is that folks have been keeping inappropriate large cats as pets for as long as it has been possible. In England, that surely goes back to even Roman times. That leads inevitably to a release simply because the same impulse to keep a pet always makes it almost impossible to take responsibility to put it down when it becomes necessary.

What is not likely is a sustainable breeding population and we have slim evidence of that. Otherwise we have hungry pets who easily revert to instinct and will generally thrive however unlikely you may think that to be. There is just too much game out there to go after, and no one has ever needed to teach a cat to stalk and kill.

So I think that we can put the mystery part aside and let them live out their lives while keeping the rabbits under control.

Britain's Big Cats

By Nick Redfern     December 14, 2012

http://www.mania.com/lair-beasts-britains-big-cats_article_136078.html

For decades, people all across the United Kingdom - from the cold northern realms of Scotland to the southern-most borders of England – have reported sightings of large cats, very often the size of mountain-lions and equally often completely black in color. 

Their many and varied colorful and memorable names include the Beast of Bodmin, the Essex Lion, the Surrey Puma, and the Beast of Exmoor.

Needless to say, no-one should be seeing any such creatures – anywhere at all – in the wilds of the UK. And yet people do see them, on no less than dozens and dozens of occasions each and every year. So, since Britain has no large, indigenous cats in its midst at all, this begs a very important and big question: where are the cats coming from? Let’s see…

If someone had said to me, before I embarked upon my quest for the truth about the big cats of Britain back in the 1990s, that I would find myself digging into the accounts of a man known as the Lion Man and his pal, One-Eyed Nick Maiden – whose moniker made him sound like something straight out of the pages of Treasure Island or the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise - I would probably have merely smiled and forgotten all about it. 

But sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. 

Dudley’s Lion Man – or Louis Foley, who died a couple of years ago, to give him his real name – claimed to have been personally acquainted with a number of people who had stealthily released big cats into the heart of England’s expansive Cannock Chase woods in the 1970s; largely as a result of the significant changes that were made, in 1976, to the Dangerous Wild Animals Act that regulates the keeping of exotic animals in the UK.

I met Foley midway through 2000, while co-writing a column on strange mysteries for a now-defunct English newspaper called The Chase Post. His fascination with big cats began back in the 1970s, when he purchased his first lion, ostensibly as a “guard dog.” 

Astonishingly, Foley’s interest eventually resulted in him possessing an absolute zoo of exotic big cats, including seven lions, plus tigers, pumas, panthers - and nothing less than a crocodile, too!

According to Foley’s own, personal recollections of that long-gone era: “Heartless cowards who bought panthers and other big cats as fashion accessories soon realized what a handful they could be. They were left to die in areas like the Chase and many of them would have perished because they were tame. But I have seen tracks and evidence of kills that proves there are many that survived.”

Foley added, somewhat guardedly, that his friend, One-Eyed Nick Maiden, personally released both a panther and a cougar, after they had been given to him when their owner became completely unable to cope with caring for the beasts.

Foley said: “I was away at the time and I was furious, but One-Eyed Nick had no choice; we just did not have any more room. I would never release a ‘tame’ big cat because I have respect for them and keeping one is like having a child. You have a responsibility to look after them. When I heard about them being released, I would travel in the area and try to recapture them in case they could not survive.”

In conclusion, Foley stated: “If people could no longer look after the big cat or could not afford to keep them – and did not want them put down – an area like the Chase would be an ideal place to release one. I lived with my big cats for years and I would assure Chase folk there is no danger to their lives. Wild cats will avoid humans.”

While there is no doubt in my mind that Foley’s words do explain at least some of the stories of large cats prowling around the UK – particularly from the 1970s onwards – they cannot explain the earlier reports, some of which date back to the 1940s and 1950s. And then there are even older reports that date back centuries.

So, I’m confident that we have a few of the answers, but, to a significant degree, the mystery of Britain’s big cats remains.

Nick Redfern is the author of many books on strange creatures, including Monster Diary, Wildman, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter, Man-Monkey, Monsters of Texas (with Ken Gerhard), There’s something in the Woods, Three Men Seeking Monsters, and the forthcoming 2013 release, The Monster Files.

Subsea UFOs

 This is a detailed report covering two prominent cases in which UFOs operate underwater. As I have posted before, it is creditable that space adapted mankind would establish subsea access to underground cities already on Earth. Here we get a pile of data that conforms totally to that conjecture. Of particular note is the museum which is likely more than conventional preservation and possibly an example of stasis. I observe that the ice is not remarked on as particularly cold.

It is also noted that the observers are handled by human beings.

As important, we get a valid description of the behavior underwater. The depth range is two miles and the speed is around 150 miles per hour. Both are well beyond our present expectations but should be noted. In particular, the in water speed is still modest as compared to atmospheric speeds. Thus it is clear that the water still impedes velocity. There is also no sign of a shock wave. It may well not be displacing mass.

BIZARRE EXPERIMENTATIONS

By Sean Casteel 

http://www.ufodigest.com/article/bizarre-experimentations

Are aliens taking abductees to their underwater lairs to administer frightening physical examinations out of the way of prying eyes?

Is a “secret invasion” about to take place that is being kept veiled for the time being because the ETs – or whoever they are – have hidden themselves in our vast bodies of water?

There is now ample evidence that existing alongside the UFO phenomenon is an equally complex but less well known phenomenon with the acronym USO, which stands for Unidentified Submerged Object, or alternately, Unidentified Submarine Object. While they are seen much less frequently than the above ground UFOs, they are nevertheless observed often enough to warrant extensive study as a related phenomenon.

In the book “UFO Abduction From Undersea,” published by Timothy Green Beckley through his publishing company Global Communications, I contributed some opening chapters on USOs to set the stage for a book coauthored by Miami UFO researcher Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo and the late Colonel (Ret) Wendelle Stevens about a fascinating USO case that took place in 1979.

“UFO Abduction From Undersea” begins, fittingly enough, with the attempt to define just what an USO is. In an interview I conducted for the book with world-renowned UFO researcher Stanton Friedman, he told me, “There have been a number of reports over the years of objects that do several things. Navy submarines have apparently seen things moving along much faster than they can underwater, without going in or coming out. Others have seen UFOs come down in the water and move around and then take off from the water. And there have been reports of things that just come bursting forth out of the water.”

Another story was told to me by Don Ledger, the coauthor of a book on the famous Shag Harbor incident. Ledger received training in the fields of marine navigational aids and radar. In the course of that training, he spoke to a man at a sonar shop at a naval base in Halifax, Canada.

“He was working as a repairman for the navy on sonar,” Ledger recalled. “I asked him, ‘Did you ever see anything unusual down there, like whales or something besides submarines?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, every once in a while we’ll run across something that seems to be moving way too fast for a submarine.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by fast?’ And he said, ‘Well, one time we recorded one going about 150 miles an hour underwater. That’s impossible.’ So I said, was there something wrong with the equipment? And he said, no, the equipment all checked out.”

The sonar repairman also said it hadn’t been the first time such an object had been sighted and it would not be the last time, either. The repairman also said the USO had reached an incredible depth of two miles, which is also well in excess of the abilities of manmade submarines. It is amazing that they can handle the pressure without killing the occupants, especially when that fact is coupled with the extremes of speed these objects can reportedly attain. Perhaps, Ledger speculates, the objects are surrounded by an energy field that operates equally well both in the air and underwater.

“They’re probably in an envelope all their own,” Ledger said. “It doesn’t really matter how deep these things go. It probably doesn’t affect them whatsoever.”

I also spoke to Chris Styles, Don Ledger’s research partner and his coauthor for the book “Dark Object: The World’s Only Government-Documented UFO Crash,” published in 2001. The book deals with a sighting that took place in Shag Harbor, on the southern coast of Nova Scotia in Canada.

“On October 4, 1967,” Styles told me, “around 11:20 PM, several people called the nearby RCMP detachment and reported seeing simply lights. Some reported that an airplane had crashed into the ‘Sound,’ as they called it, Shag Harbor.”

When the police arrived, they found a pale yellow light floating on the water. The light began moving under its own power and left a heavy, dense trail of yellow foam on the water. When they saw the light sink beneath the surface, they commandeered a local boat and went out in the harbor to look for it, but found no physical evidence.

The search resumed at first light the next day, and ships were sent by the Canadian navy as well as seven divers. After five days, the search was called off, with nil results. No aircraft were ever reported missing, and it was generally believed that the object was the crash of a UFO. The government documents that declare the object to be a downed extraterrestrial craft are freely available in Canada, according to Styles.

Before it disappeared, the object was reported by several witnesses to be at least 60 feet across and to display flashing colored lights that repeated in the same sequence over and over. But Styles emphasized that it was not the public who called the object a UFO. The neighboring residents had only initially reported strange lights. It was the Canadian authorities themselves who referred to the incident as a “UFO search,” contrary to normal expectations surrounding such things.

When asked why the extraterrestrial occupants would operate underwater, Styles said, “I think water provides a perfect medium for hiding; it’s great for stealth. You’re out of sight and out of mind. I mean, off the coast of Nova Scotia, so many feet down, there’s not a whole lot of traffic there, right? I know some people have wondered, is there a base down there? These things are always fun to speculate about, but I’m more into getting the data. We’ll find something and then we’ll worry about the interpretation.”

For Stanton Friedman, it’s a matter of the USOs exploiting what’s down there of value.

“Besides just hiding from the guys above,” Friedman said, “there are a lot of resources at the bottom of the ocean. There are nodules of all kinds of metals, almost pure metals. There are loads of diamonds, for instance, off the coast of Africa, that are underwater. There are nodules of manganese and cobalt and other things at the bottom of the ocean, besides all kinds of strange sea creatures from which they may extract some very interesting biological or chemical things.”

Having established a little background on USOs, let us now examine a case of abduction from undersea.

Betty Andreasson Luca is a housewife, mother and grandmother, and is also one of the most important alien abductees ever to be investigated and documented. Researcher and author Raymond Fowler has written a series of books about Betty, which tell the continuing story of Betty’s mind-bending encounters with diminutive gray aliens she believes to be angelic servants of Jesus Christ.

In April 1980, Betty underwent yet another session of regressive hypnosis to retrieve the buried memories of some of what happened to her at the hands of the aliens. As the session began, she reported being abducted into an alien spacecraft, which may seem fairly routine at this point. But this time, she recalled the ship started hurtling toward a body of water. Under hypnosis, with the tape recorder rolling, she becomes terrified that the ship was about to “crash” into some water. Betty was so frightened that the hypnotist interrupted the session to allow her to calm down.

When the examination of this memory resumed a few days later, Betty recalls the craft entering the water and being wholly submerged beneath it. The ship proceeds to enter a cave or tunnel with walls of solid ice and icicles throughout. The underwater place is brightly-lit. Betty sees people, “people like me,” she says.

What Betty next reports is astounding. She is seeing what Fowler later called “The Museum of Time” – living people encased in the ice in what we call “tableaux” in earthly terms. Each museum person on display has his or her own scenery appropriate to their time, wearing the correct clothes, etc. The figures look neither dead nor stuffed, and include babies and children as well as many different races. Betty repeatedly calls the clothing “funny and old-fashioned.” There are too many cubicles for Betty to count.

When Fowler listened to a cassette of this particular regression session several days later, he found his mind “rebelling,” unable to believe what Betty had said. Yet how, he wondered, could Betty spontaneously and emotionally relive such detailed and intricate experiences unless they were true?

Fowler would later write, “A cold chill coursed through my body when Betty was describing people and animals enclosed in glassy cubicles in an icy cavern. Perhaps Betty was privy to the aliens’ Museum of Time!”

Does all this offer a clue as to what the USO occupants are really up to down there? In any case, they appear to be the same entities as the more familiar airborne UFOs, with the same proclivity for abducting their Chosen Ones and subjecting them to frightening confrontations with as yet unknown and perhaps ultimately incomprehensible alien truths. Do the aliens maintain a kind of museum of human history? Are they proudly and affectionately displaying specimens of their creation, humankind? Or is there a darker mockery at work here, a kind of contemptuous collecting of samples of a shamefully lower form of life?

THE MOST SPECTACULAR USO ABDUCTION CASE OF ALL TIME!

The primary focus of the Global Communications book “UFO Abduction From Undersea” is the story of Filiberto Cardenas —THOUGH HE WAS NOT ALONE! Like Betty Andreasson Luca, he was abducted by a USO. Cardenas was also given many strange prophecies by his captors, prophecies which came electrifyingly true shortly thereafter.

It all began on the evening of January 3, 1979, when Cardenas was in his gift shop in Hialeah, Florida, and received a phone call from his friend, Fernando Marti. Marti asked Cardenas to accompany him to buy a pig from the local merchants to roast the next Sunday. Marti and his wife and daughter arrived at Cardenas’ place of business and they set out on their errand. After stopping at two different farms, they were still unable to find an acceptable ‘puerco” for their feast. As they continued their drive, they turned off onto a rural road that was in poor condition. At that point, the car began to lose power.

The two men examined the engine but were unable to see what the problem was. Then the engine began to reflect red and violet lights in sequence. At the same moment, they heard a strange noise, like a swarm of bees. Next the car began to shake, and Marti’s wife began to scream in panic, believing it was an earthquake. When Cardenas tried to approach her to calm her down, he became paralyzed, frozen under the hood of the car. Then the same force that had paralyzed him began to lift him and suspend him in the air. Cardenas began to shout, “Don’t take me! Don’t take me!” The noise and lights ceased and everything seemed to return to normal. Then Marti looked up and saw a UFO ascending into the sky. He shouted, “They have taken Filiberto!”

After several attempts, he was able to start the car. He felt compelled to tell the police, but feared he would not be believed, or worse, that he would be accused of having himself harmed Cardenas. He decided to inform the police anyway and also called Cardenas’ wife, saying, “A light took Filiberto away.”

Meanwhile, Cardenas awoke onboard the UFO, in a seat that seemed to hold him in place by some kind of suction and restrained all his movements. He saw three strange figures, one of whom placed a strange helmet on his head and spoke to him in a language he thought sounded like German. He was shown projected images, as on a television, of scenes from the past, present and future of humankind. He was then taken to a smaller ship that discharged from the mother-ship. He saw a beach approaching, and then the UFO plunged into the sea. Everything was obscured by the incredible velocity at which the ship moved.

The ship veered to the right and began to lose speed. Cardenas could now see a tunnel with walls that seemed illuminated as if they were phosphorescent. The ship entered the tunnel and then emerged in a place that was completely dry. The area was huge. He noticed two symbols, one of them being a serpent as large as “an electric light pole,” Cardenas later said. The other image was similar but smaller. His captors took him from the ship and told him to sit down on a large rock.

At this point, one must note the similarity to what happened to Betty Andreasson Luca. As with Luca, the UFO that transported Cardenas quickly plunged into the sea and emerged in a dry alien environment. While in Luca’s case the surroundings were icy, it is still remarkably similar to the large cave to which Cardenas was taken.

IN THE UNDERWATER CAVES

In the cavern area, Cardenas was welcomed by a human-looking figure who said he was from the Earth and had long worked with the UFO entities. He seemed to be saying that Cardenas was most fortunate to be receiving instructions from “beings like us.” After some further conversation, and a quick trip to what was apparently an undersea alien city, Cardenas was returned to a pasture near where he had been originally abducted. The aforementioned predictions Cardenas received from the aliens included everything from the future succession of the popes to the 1980 election of President Ronald Reagan, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City and the demonstration by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Cardenas, armed with the prophecies from the aliens, was also able to accurately predict the assassination in 1981 of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 1990.

All of these prophecies are included in this expanded edition of “UFO Abduction From Undersea,” written by Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo. Sanchez-Ocejo provides an impressive amount of data and documentation that tells the story of Filiberto Cardenas in exquisite detail, providing transcripts of the regressive hypnosis sessions in which Cardenas relived his bizarre experience and even medical documentation on the typical marks and scars left on Cardenas’ body in the aftermath of his excursion into the unknown.

The late Lieutenant Colonel Wendelle C. Stevens, the UFO researcher who published the original book, also contributes a preface that takes up the defense of the worthiness of the case in spite of the fact that local media at the time scoffed at the story and quickly ceased to cover it. In spite of that media scorn, there is still a wealth of supporting evidence, Stevens writes, that was completely overlooked at the time.

Serious UFO researchers may want to watch the witnesses tell their story and see the subsequent hypnosis session. This will give the reader a feel for the obvious sincerity of those involved. It is available in Spanish on You Tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUghBO3dloU

One must once again applaud the continued effort by Timothy Green Beckley to republish classic UFO/flying saucer books, in newly expanded form, that have not only earned a place in history but should also be read by a new audience who will undoubtedly learn that, while there may be nothing new under the sun, there is still a great deal to learn from Ufology’s past. “UFO Abduction From Undersea” will enthrall the reader even as it terrifies, and who could ask for more than that?

Thorium Not So Wonderful?

Thorium has attracted a lot of attention for several excellent reasons and the one cited here is a concern and not well understood but otherwise it is a management issue.

The true value of the Thorium reactor is that it can be used to reduce uranium and its daughters into a safe end product while producing power. That one such reduction does lead to an isotope suitable for weapons manufacture is still minor when compared to Uranium itself. That it can be done in a modest lab merely tells us that aggressive enforcement is necessary.

Yet that is a small price to pay in order to make all nuclear waste disappear.

In the end this piece of work is just convenient window dressing for a nuclear industry that has long outrun its raison d'etre.

I am expecting the nuclear industry as we know it to be obsolete very soon. That will stick us with a mountain of radioactive waste that needs to be nicely eliminated. A couple of Thorium Reactors and a few decades will do it quite nicely while producing some grid power to defray the bills.

Hyped-up nuclear 'wonder fuel' not so wonderful, scientists warn

Sunday, December 09, 2012 by: David Gutierrez

http://www.naturalnews.com/038280_nuclear_fuel_proliferation_thorium.html

(NaturalNews) A radioactive element being promoted as a "wonder fuel" by the nuclear power industry is much less benign than it has been presented as being, according to a paper by four nuclear energy specialists published in the journal Nature.

The element in question, thorium, has been portrayed as a potential nuclear fuel source that could not be used to make nuclear weapons.

"We think that the public debate regarding its proliferation-resistance so far has been too one-sided," said lead author Steve Ashley of the University of Cambridge.

"Small-scale chemical reprocessing of irradiated thorium can create an isotope of uranium - uranium-233 - that could be used in nuclear weapons. If nothing else, this raises a serious proliferation concern."

Thorium has been promoted as a uranium alternative for nuclear power generation, in large part because it is three to four times more abundant, and deposits are found in many parts of the world. In addition, many scientists have noted that the most common form, thorium-232, cannot actually be used to produce nuclear fission. To be used for nuclear power, thorium-232 must be bombarded with neutrons until it radioactively decays into uranium-233, also producing the highly dangerous and radioactive isotope uranium-232 i as a result. All of this means, thorium advocates say, that the production of weapons-grade uranium from thorium would require the use of large, high-tech facilities that could be easily monitored by nuclear regulators.

Still a proliferation threat

The Nature article does not focus on the environmental and health risks involved in producing radioactive uranium-233 and uranium-232 from thorium. Instead, the authors warn that small quantities of uranium-233 can actually be produced using standard lab equipment, without the knowledge of nuclear regulatory agencies.

During its natural process of radioactive decay, thorium-232 breaks down into thorium-233. Just 22 minutes later, much of the thorium-233 decays into an element known as protactinium-233. At this stage, it is possible to separate the protactinium-233 out from the protactinium-thorium mix. Twenty-seven days later, the protactinium-233 will have naturally decayed into uranium-233, without producing any uranium-232 that would need to be handled by large facilities. This natural process could be accelerated, the scientists note, by bombarding the elements with neutrons at each stage.

"The problem is that the neutron irradiation of thorium-232 could take place in a small facility," Ashley said. "It could happen in a research reactor, of which there are about 500 worldwide, which may make it difficult to monitor."

Based on prior experiments, the authors conclude that it would take only 1.6 metric tons of thorium to produce the eight kg of uranium-233 required to make a nuclear weapon. It would be possible to refine this much uranium-233 "in less than a year," they said.

"The most important thing is to recognize that thorium is not a route to a nuclear future free from proliferation risks, as some people seem to believe," Ashley said.

"We need more debate on the associated risks, if we want a safer nuclear future."

Learn more:

http://www.naturalnews.com/038280_nuclear_fuel_proliferation_thorium.html#ixzz2EdG07wyS