Fixing and expanding underground drinking water systems will cost over $1 trillion in the next 25 years and users will get socked with the bill, according to the American Water Works Association. As with most infrastructure investments, spending heavily now means less costs down the road. But with little appetite in the country for even trickling taxes now, a delayed and more expensive fix is almost guaranteed. The association figures that spending to fix leaky water systems will double from roughly $13 billion a year today to $30 billion annually by 2040.

"Because pipe assets last a long time, water systems that were built in the later part of the 19th century and throughout much of the 20th century have, for the most part, never experienced the need for pipe replacement on a large scale," said the report provided to Washington Secrets. "The dawn of an era in which the assets will need to be replaced puts growing stress on communities that will continue to increase for decades to come." What kind of stress? Families can expect to pay at least $300-$550 more for water in taxes and fees just to keep their current systems operating. Add growth and improved systems, and that bill jumps to $900 for a family of three, said the report.

Currently, Americans pay about $400 a month in water taxes and fees.

There are a couple of major reasons for this. Number one, the Ogallala Aquifer is being depleted at an astounding pace. The Ogallala Aquifer is one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the entire world, and water from it currently irrigates more than 15 million acres of crops. When that water is gone we will be in a world of hurt. Secondly, drought conditions have become the “new normal” in many areas of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and other states in the middle part of the country.

Scientists tell us that the wet conditions that we enjoyed for several decades after World War II were actually the exception to the rule and that most of time the interior west is incredibly dry. They also tell us that when dust bowl conditions return to the area, they might stay with us a lot longer than a decade like they did during the 1930s. Unfortunately, without water you cannot grow food, and with global food supplies as tight as they are right now we cannot afford to have a significant decrease in agricultural production.

But it is not just the central United States that is experiencing the early stages of a major water crisis. Already many other areas around the nation are rapidly developing their own water problems. As supplies of fresh water get tighter and tighter, some really tough decisions are going to have to be made. Fresh water is absolutely essential to life, and it is going to become increasingly precious in the years ahead.

Most Americans have never even heard of the Ogallala Aquifer, but the truth is that it is one of the most important bodies of water on the globe. It covers well over 100,000 square miles and it sits underneath the states of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota. Water drawn from the Ogallala Aquifer is used to water more than 15 million acres of crops. Without this source of water, the United States would not be the breadbasket of the world.

We had a totally different perspective on things in which we essentially said that Iran, with the complicity of major trading partners like China, India and Russia is preparing to phase out the petrodollar: a move which would be impossible if key bilateral trade partners would not agree to it. Gradually it appears this is increasingly the case following a just released Reuters report that "Iran will take payment from its trading partners in gold instead of dollars, the Iranian state news agency IRNA quoted the central bank governor as saying on Tuesday."

Now this would be great news for Greece which as previously reported had at times relied for more than 50% of its crude imports on Iran. There is just one problem: very soon the country will no longer have said gold in its possession, as part of the preapproved Greek bailout of Europe, the country's constitution would be changed to reflect that even its gold now is part of the bailout conditions, and European banks have a lien on it. Especially if said gold is located in the basement of the NY Fed where it most likely resides.

(zerohedge.com confirms - "Ms Katseli, an economist who was labor minister in the government of George Papandreou until she left in a cabinet reshuffle last June, was also upset that Greece’s lenders will have the right to seize the gold reserves in the Bank of Greece under the terms of the new deal".)

Nothing is sacred to Pedro Passos Coelho, not even Carnival. Portugal's prime minister expects government employees at their desks and working on Entrudo, the traditional high point of the country's Carnival celebrations, which falls on this Tuesday. This is "not the time to talk about tradition," the conservative head of state has commanded those of his citizens who see the move as an attack on their culture. Rather, he says, they should stop "whining" about austerity measures. It's time, the prime minister adds, to break free of old structures and to change "lazy and sometimes self-involved patterns of behavior."

Fans of Carnival celebrations are not the only ones affected - churchgoers and nationalists will have to make bitter sacrifices as well. In response to this national state of emergency, the Portuguese government plans to do away with four public holidays. Corpus Christi and Assumption are to be crossed off the calendar without a replacement, and public holidays celebrating Portugal's first republic and the 1640 end to its union with Spain will no longer be commemorated.

This readiness to make sacrifices comes as welcome news to the so-called troika, made up of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB), whose officials are currently in Lisbon to evaluate the country's reform program. But does Portugal really have a better chance of avoiding bankruptcy than Greece does? Or is the country simply the next domino destined to fall in the course of the euro crisis?

Financial markets take a far more critical view of Portugal than does the troika. They are assuming there is a 71 percent probability that the country will default within the next five years, as reflected in insurance premiums on Portuguese government bonds - so-called credit default swaps - in early February.

Here's an idea. Police reports used to exclude the ethnic origins of the perpetrators of crimes. Why not apply that practice to reporting the euro crisis? We could stop mentioning which countries are getting aid. Instead of writing about the Greeks or Portuguese, we could just refer to the recipient as a southern European country - or, better yet, of our fellow European citizens in the south. Perhaps that would serve to improve the mood in Europe.

You have to be very careful about what you say these days. One careless statement and suddenly you can get crushed by a wave of emotions. I know what I'm talking about. After the cruise ship accident near Giglio in Italy, I made a few irreverent comments about Italians that seemed to outrage half of Italy. The Italian ambassador in Berlin even gave me a dressing down. I'm just happy that Italy is part of the Schengen Zone. After reading what had been written about me in the Italian press, I don't know whether they would have let me back into the country.

In my defense, I can say that I am not the only person who has unwittingly triggered a diplomatic imbroglio in these difficult times. Who would have thought that people in Athens also listen to SWR 2 radio? But German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble had barely finished an interview with the public radio broadcaster from his southern German home region about the reform efforts of Greek politicians before he was accused of disparaging the Greeks. "Who is this Herr Schäuble who insults Greece?" Greek President Karolos Papoulias roared back at Berlin. Schäuble, too, apparently underestimated how easy it is to insult people in the south.

Sentiment towards the Germans isn't very good in the region right now. Hardly a day goes by without Chancellor Angela Merkel being depicted in a Nazi uniform somewhere. Swastikas are a common sight as well. It doesn't seem to help at all that we faithfully approve one aid package after the other. If calculations by experts are true, then we are far beyond the point where we are just providing loan guarantees.

A good deal of the €130 billion expected to be approved by the German parliament on Monday will never be seen again. But if you read the editorial pages of newspapers in the crisis regions, for whom this money is intended, you would be led to believe that we are out to achieve what our grandfathers failed to do 70 years ago (and this despite the fact that research into Hitler outside of Greece is fairly unanimous in the belief that National Socialism didn't launch its tyranny of Europe with a bailout package). It won't be long before they start burning German flags. We've now become the Americans of Europe.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, one of the architects of the European single currency, has stepped into the German debate about the wisdom of providing Greece with further aid. On Tuesday, he urged Germany to stay committed to European unity, which he said remained a matter of war and peace, even 67 years after the end of World War II.

"The current discussion in Europe and the crisis in Greece mustn't lead us to lose sight of or even question or retreat from the goal of a united Europe," Kohl wrote in a guest commentary published in Germany's best-selling daily, Bild, on Tuesday. In a bid to preserve his legacy, the former chancellor, who is 81 and frail, has made several appeals to the German government to show greater leadership and solidarity with struggling euro-zone member states during the crisis. His latest comment coincides with a rift in the center-right coalition of his former protégé, Chancellor Angela Merkel, over whether Greece should remain in the euro zone.

Merkel was forced to rebuke Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich for telling Spiegel that Greece should be encouraged to quit the currency. She also faced a backbench revolt in Monday's parliamentary vote on the second Greek bailout package. "Merkel is losing her powers to convince, and the members of the Bundestag are losing their belief that everything will go according to plan," Gero Neugebauer, a politics professor at Berlin's Free University, told Reuters. Opposition leaders went as far as to say the rebellion signalled the beginning of the end of her government.

“Whatever the nature of schooling – homeschool, private school, Catholic school – we do not tolerate disrespect for differences,” said Donna McColl, Lukaszuk’s assistant director of communications. “You can affirm the family’s ideology in your family life, you just can’t do it as part of your educational study and instruction.”

Paul Faris, president of the Home School Legal Defence Association of Canada, told the news website the Ministry of Education is “clearly signaling that they are in fact planning to violate the private conversations families have in their own homes. A government that seeks that sort of control over our personal lives should be feared and opposed.”

According to the report, a government spokesman said, “You can affirm the family’s ideology in your family life. You just can’t do it as part of your educational study and instruction.” LifeSiteNews reports that the Human Rights Act has been used to target Christians and conservatives across the country, especially those who hold traditional beliefs about homosexuality.

McColl added that Christian homeschooling families can teach biblical lessons on homosexuality in their homes, “as long as it’s not part of their academic program of studies and instructional materials. What they want to do about their ideology elsewhere, that’s their family business,” she said. “But a fundamental nature of our society is to respect diversity.”

Standard & Poor’s said it had put the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the “big bazooka” tasked with raising the bail-out funds, on negative outlook. The rating agency said the fund’s profile was weaker since some of its guarantor countries were stripped of their AAA ratings.

S&P also downgraded Greece to "SD", meaning it believed the country has undergone a selective default. The agency cited Greece's retroactive insertion of collective-action clauses to its debt as the reason for the move.

Over the weekend, the G20 finance minister said they would refuse to grant the eurozone more funds via the International Monetary Fund (IMF) until they were shown “the colour of the eurozone’s money first”. The G20 pushed the decisions back to the European Union leaders, who meet in Brussels on Thursday. Jose Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, said the leaders would decide to boost the bail-out funds - the EFSF and its replacement the European Stability Mechanism (EMS) - but later in March, not this week.

Germany is the biggest contributor to the bail-out funds. Ms Merkel’s official position has been to insist that the “firewall” fund already has enough funding. However, in a speech before the vote, Ms Merkel admitted to the Bundestag there were “no guarantees” the second bail-out would work. But the Chancellor warned: “The risks of turning away from Greece now are incalculable. No one can assess what consequences would arise for the German economy, on Italy, Spain, the eurozone as a whole and finally for the whole world.”

Protestors gathered outside the Bundestag, while Germany’s best selling newspaper, Bild, splashed with the headline: “Billions for Greece – Stop”. The paper called for politicians not to “go any further down this crazy path”. An opinion poll published in a Sunday newspaper found 62 percent of Germans were against the second Greek rescue package while 33 percent were in favour. “Quite clearly the mood in Germany is turning against further rescues for Greece,” said Klaus-Peter Willsch, a member of Ms Merkel’s Christian Democrats party.

The German parliament on Monday approved the €130 billion ($175 billion) second bailout package for Greece with a large majority, as expected. A total of 496 lawmakers voted in favor of the package, with 90 against and five abstentions. The parliament had been all but certain to back the motion because the opposition Social Democrats and Greens said they would support it.

In a slight setback for Angela Merkel, the chancellor failed to secure an absolute majority within her own government coalition. A total of 304 members of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) voted in favor of the bailout, but 311 were required for a majority. Within the CDU/CSU bloc, 13 politicians rejected the bailout, with four members of the FDP joining them to oppose it. Ultimately, Merkel had to rely on opposition support.

In a speech before the vote, the chancellor had conceded that there was no "100 percent guarantee" that the rescue would succeed, but said the potential benefits outweighed the risks. "Europe will fail if the euro fails. Europe wins if the euro wins," she said in a statement to parliament, repeating her mantra that the euro zone must be kept intact despite signs that her coalition is divided on whether Greece can be rescued.

Jake Tapper, the White House correspondent for ABC News, pointed out that the administration had lauded brave reporting in distant lands more than once and then asked, “How does that square with the fact that this administration has been so aggressively trying to stop aggressive journalism in the United States by using the Espionage Act to take whistle-blowers to court?”

He then suggested that the administration seemed to believe that “the truth should come out abroad; it shouldn’t come out here.” Fair point. The Obama administration, which promised during its transition to power that it would enhance “whistle-blower laws to protect federal workers,” has been more prone than any administration in history in trying to silence and prosecute federal workers.

The Espionage Act, enacted back in 1917 to punish those who gave aid to our enemies, was used three times in all the prior administrations to bring cases against government officials accused of providing classified information to the media. It has been used six times since the current president took office.

Setting aside the case of Private (First Class) Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of stealing thousands of secret documents, the majority of the recent prosecutions seem to have everything to do with administrative secrecy and very little to do with national security. In case after case, the Espionage Act has been deployed as a kind of ad hoc Official Secrets Act, which is not a law that has ever found traction in America, a place where the people’s right to know is viewed as superseding the government’s right to hide its business.

Harry Dent, author of the new book The Great Crash Ahead, says another stock market crash is coming due to a bad ending to the global debt bubble. He has pulled back on his earlier prediction of a crash in 2012, as central banks around the world have been flooding markets with money, giving stocks an artificial short-term boost. But a crash is coming in 2013 or 2014, he warns. "This will be a repeat of 2008-09, only bigger, when it finally hits," Dent told USA TODAY.

Gerald Celente, a trend forecaster at the Trends Research Institute, says Americans should brace themselves for an "economic 9/11" due to policymakers' inability to solve the world's financial and economic woes. The coming meltdown, he predicts, will lead to growing social unrest and anti-government sentiment, a US dollar with far less purchasing power and more people out of work. Celente won't rule out another financial panic that could spark enough fear to cause a run on the nation's banks by depositors. That risk could cause the government to invoke "economic martial law" and call a "bank holiday" and close banks as it did during the Great Depression. "We see some kind of threat of that magnitude," Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal newsletter, warned in an interview.

Robert Prechter, author of Conquer the Crash, first published in 2002 and updated in 2009, is still bearish. He says today's economy has similarities to the Great Depression and warns that 1930s-style deflation is still poised to cause financial havoc. Prechter predicts that the major US stock indexes, such as the Dow Jones industrials and Standard & Poor's 500, will plunge below their bear market lows hit in March 2009 during the last financial crisis. The brief recovery will fail as it did in the 1930s, he says. If he's right, stocks would lose more than half of their value. "The economic recovery has been weak, so the next downturn should generate bad news in a big way," Prechter said in an email interview.

"Now more than ever, families need to work at saving and paying off any outstanding debts," said Howard Dvorkin, a certified public accountant and founder of the credit counseling service Consolidated Credit. After a few months of reducing credit card debt levels, Dvorkin said, Americans are starting to return to their reliance on debt. "People made some progress in reducing card debt earlier in the year, but in the last few months, as the stock market started to rise, they started to return to their old ways of charging things," he explained.

In December 2011, the total consumer debt - which is the combination of non-revolving and revolving debt - rose by some 9.3 percent to $2.498 trillion, according to the latest Federal Reserve Board numbers. Both revolving debt and non-revolving debt increased. Revolving debt, which is credit-card debt, went up by 4.1 percent. Non-revolving debt, which includes loans for cars and education, rose 11.8 percent, the central bank's report said. The trend - month to month, quarter to quarter and year to year - is rising steeply.

Within hours, a Philippine surveillance plane, patrol ships and light attack aircraft arrived in the disputed area of Reed Bank in the South China Sea. By then the Chinese boats had left after chasing away the survey ship, Veritas Voyager, hired by UK-based Forum Energy Plc. But the tension had become so great Forum Energy chief Ray Apostol wanted to halt two months of work in the area.

"They were so close to finishing their work. I told them to stay and finish the job," Sabban, who heads the Western Command of the Philippine Armed Forces, told Reuters at his headquarters in Puerto Princesa on Palawan island. Over the next few days, President Benigno Aquino would call an emergency cabinet meeting, file a formal protest with China, and send his defense secretary and armed forces chief to the Western Command in a show of strength.

The March 2011 incident is considered a turning point for the Aquino administration. The president hardened his stance on sovereignty rights, sought closer ties with Washington and has quickened efforts to modernize its military. A year later, Forum Energy is planning to return. Top company executives told Reuters the company intends to sail to Reed Bank within months to drill the area's first well for oil and natural gas in decades, an event that could spark a military crisis for Aquino if China responds more aggressively.

The US military has also signalled its return to the area, with war games scheduled in March with the Philippine navy near Reed Bank that China is bound to view as provocative.

So how come Japan can borrow for 10 years at a measly 1 percent versus 5.45 percent for Italy, the world's eighth-largest economy. And why isn't anybody talking about the unthinkable: that Japan, the world's third-largest economy, could default? Japan can borrow much more cheaply than Italy can for two reasons. First, Japan borrows in a currency it controls. Second, almost all of Japan's public debt is money it owes to its own people. Conversely, consider Italy. Because only the European Central Bank can print euros, it's actually possible for Italy to run out of euros. If investors think that this might happen - or if they think that other investors think this might happen - they'll dump Italian bonds and send interest rates soaring. It's a classic bank run, but on a national level.

The same can't happen to Japan, because it has its own central bank, the Bank of Japan (BOJ). Japan can't run out of yen. If a panic did grip Japanese bonds, the BOJ could step in as a buyer of last resort. More importantly, it's rare for a country to default on itself. Usually countries that default, like Iceland, are stiffing foreign creditors. Japan, however, has run massive current account surpluses for the past thirty years. They are net lenders to, rather than borrowers from, the rest of the world. Put simply, they don't at all rely on foreigners to finance their debt. Italy does.

But that might be changing. With their nuclear plants idled following the tsunami, Japanese energy imports have skyrocketed in the past year - pushing them much closer to a point where they would need to borrow from abroad. It's not clear if is just a one-time blip, or the beginning of a new long-term trend. If it's the latter, Japan could be in trouble.

Foreign investors would probably demand higher interest rates on Japanese bonds than domestic investors. This isn't a question of patriotism. Rather, Japanese banks and insurance companies can be regulated into buying their government bonds, even at negligible interest rates. International investors don't face that pressure. They can shop around the globe for the best deal. So Japan would have to pay more to borrow. And that could be toxic. A vicious circle where higher interest rates increase deficits, causing investors to demand even higher interest rates could set in. The BOJ could intervene, but, in the nightmare scenario, all other buyers would disappear. Japan would be left with a grim choice between outright default and hyperinflation.

Question: Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation journal?

Answer: We do have people who submit pieces to American journals.

Question: Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?

Answer: This I think gets into the details I'd like to get into in executive session (so the public doesn’t hear how we control all the networks).

Considering that this was going on in the 1950's, it is highly likely that this is happening now and to a much larger extent. The CIA and other government agencies literally control the corporate controlled media. Anytime you hear a story on the major networks that has any implication in US foreign or domestic policy rest assured that it was, at the very least, vetted by the CIA before being released. In the early 90's CNN was also used to test Army psychological operations.