Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
China Buys Euros as Fear of World Depression Grows
Webster G. Tarpley
TARPLEY.net
August 25, 2010
The US Treasury has just announced that China’s official holdings of U.S. Treasury securities declined by about $30 billion between April and May of this year, from about $900 billion to some $868 billion. According to the US authorities, this means that Chinese holdings of US government paper are now at the lowest level in the past year. A 2% to 3% decline in a month does not qualify as massive dumping, but simply means that China is in the process of diversification. It is also very likely that China has more U.S. Treasury bonds than this official count would indicate, quite possibly through proxy purchases via Hong Kong and other places.
With the sales of existing homes in the United States falling by 27% this morning, together with disastrous statistics regarding unemployment and foreclosures, it ought to be obvious that the US economy is in depression. Even experts interviewed on CNBC are beginning to wake up to this obvious fact.
Treasury bills and Treasury notes at the short end. The main reason for this demand is of course fear and panic – coming from the growing awareness that the world is indeed experiencing the second wave of a world economic depression of colossal proportions.
There is now a large-scale international bond bubble involving, among others, US treasuries and German Bunds. Since the flash crash of May 6, many investors have fled the stock markets entirely. It is still too soon to sound the alarm on deflation ahead, but deflation has now appeared over the horizon as a concrete possibility – partly because so many major financial players are now convinced that deflation is the wave of the future. If this were to come about, it would mean a depression looking much more like 1929-1933 than the relatively more mild situation we have experienced over the last two years. The depression may be taking a turn toward something far more excruciating for the masses of the population. One by-product of that would be vastly decreased popular gullibility for the anti-government recipes of the libertarian Austrian school, which are tailored for those who have money, and which have very little appeal to people who are unemployed, homeless, and starving.
Also on August 24, the Japanese yen hit a 15-year high compared to the dollar, and a nine-year high compared to the euro. This kind of currency championship is a Pyrrhic victory which nobody wants, since it means the Japanese exports are in the process of being strangled. This is true currency chaos and world depression at the same time, pointing once again towards the urgent need to restore the fixed rate system of Bretton Woods, which was destroyed 39 years ago this month by Nixon and Kissinger, urged on by Milton Friedman and other snake oil economists.
For the past year, the main thrust of the London and New York financial centers has been the effort to export the Depression into Europe by means of a speculative attack on the government bonds of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and some other countries, all designed to provoke a panicked flight out of the euro, which would in turn allow the Anglo-Americans to loot and asset strip the accumulated wealth of the old continent. This was not a market event, but it orchestrated strategic attack, inspired by such figures as Soros, Einhorn, and Paulson. During July and the first half of August, it became apparent that this Blitzkrieg as originally planned had failed to reach its objectives. But the Anglo-Americans, one-trick ponies as always, maybe persisting in the assault.
There is every indication that the Chinese made a decision not to allow the destruction of the euro during the late spring and early summer. That decision was technical, commercial, and political at the same time. The technical part was the China sought to re-balance the basket of currencies it uses to maintain the international stability of the renminbi. As the euro looms larger in Chinese trade, purchases of euros and Eurobonds are in order. It is also worth pointing out that the Chinese have not delivered on their promise to radically raise the international value of the renminbi, as hysterically demanded by Tiny Tim Geithner and others.
The commercial and political sides of Chinese support for the euro were reflected in the June visit of the Chinese vice prime minister to Greece, notably to the port of Piraeus. This Chinese envoy signed more than a dozen important economic cooperation deals, including shipping and shipbuilding, telecom, and container ports. The deputy Greek finance minister, Theodoros Pangalos, was quoted as saying: “The Chinese want a gateway into Europe. They are not like these Wall Street [blankety-blanks], pushing financial investments on paper. The Chinese deal in real things, in merchandise. And they will help the real economy in Greece.”1 The emphasis on the production of tangible physical commodities by the Chinese, in contrast to Wall Street’s reliance on a mass of toxic and kited derivatives, points to the real basis of Chinese economic ascendancy. If the Chinese are wise, they will not go overboard with short-term greed, but rather be ready for generous concessions to the Greek labor movement, so as to get the unions on their side. In any case, these euro-denominated Greek purchases are one obvious reason why Beijing is holding fewer greenbacks and more euros.
But the most likely victim remains Wall Street itself. A glance at the stock chart of Bank of America over the past three months shows what any technical analyst would regard as a very ugly picture. There are rumblings that Citibank may be heading towards liquidity trouble in September and October. For those who like to read the tea leaves, CNBC’s Jim Cramer today responded to a question about Citigroup by emphatically declaiming “Stick with Citi,” and “Stick with Pandit.” Citigroup, he affirmed, remained his “favorite speculation.” For contrarians who have learned something over the past two years, this may already be enough to head for the hills. In any case, if the banking panic breaks out in New York, then the dollar may turn out to be the victim.
Another CNBC analyst has ventured to predict a ragged decline of the Dow to about 5,000 over the months ahead. If that begins to happen, then the danger of deflation will be enhanced, and in such a scenario the dollar would actually tend to increase in value compared to other currencies. On the other hand, Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s trademark is his strategy for flooding the system with bailouts and other liquidity if deflation looms. Bernanke is the captain of that ship of fools known as the QE2. The one certainty is that there is no recovery, and that the second wave of a world economic depression dominates the world.
TARPLEY.net
August 25, 2010
With the sales of existing homes in the United States falling by 27% this morning, together with disastrous statistics regarding unemployment and foreclosures, it ought to be obvious that the US economy is in depression. Even experts interviewed on CNBC are beginning to wake up to this obvious fact.
World Bond Bubble
On August 24, the Treasury’s two-year note reached its highest price in recorded history, meaning that the yield was at a record low. The entire world is piling into short-term U.S. Treasury paper, and many buyers cannot get enough. This makes a mockery out of the right wing reactionary refrain that the US equals Greece and soon will be unable to borrow. If, according to the crackpot Austrian theory, markets know things that individual humans cannot know, then surely the market is signaling a great desire for TTreasury bills and Treasury notes at the short end. The main reason for this demand is of course fear and panic – coming from the growing awareness that the world is indeed experiencing the second wave of a world economic depression of colossal proportions.
There is now a large-scale international bond bubble involving, among others, US treasuries and German Bunds. Since the flash crash of May 6, many investors have fled the stock markets entirely. It is still too soon to sound the alarm on deflation ahead, but deflation has now appeared over the horizon as a concrete possibility – partly because so many major financial players are now convinced that deflation is the wave of the future. If this were to come about, it would mean a depression looking much more like 1929-1933 than the relatively more mild situation we have experienced over the last two years. The depression may be taking a turn toward something far more excruciating for the masses of the population. One by-product of that would be vastly decreased popular gullibility for the anti-government recipes of the libertarian Austrian school, which are tailored for those who have money, and which have very little appeal to people who are unemployed, homeless, and starving.
Also on August 24, the Japanese yen hit a 15-year high compared to the dollar, and a nine-year high compared to the euro. This kind of currency championship is a Pyrrhic victory which nobody wants, since it means the Japanese exports are in the process of being strangled. This is true currency chaos and world depression at the same time, pointing once again towards the urgent need to restore the fixed rate system of Bretton Woods, which was destroyed 39 years ago this month by Nixon and Kissinger, urged on by Milton Friedman and other snake oil economists.
For the past year, the main thrust of the London and New York financial centers has been the effort to export the Depression into Europe by means of a speculative attack on the government bonds of Greece, Spain, Portugal, and some other countries, all designed to provoke a panicked flight out of the euro, which would in turn allow the Anglo-Americans to loot and asset strip the accumulated wealth of the old continent. This was not a market event, but it orchestrated strategic attack, inspired by such figures as Soros, Einhorn, and Paulson. During July and the first half of August, it became apparent that this Blitzkrieg as originally planned had failed to reach its objectives. But the Anglo-Americans, one-trick ponies as always, maybe persisting in the assault.
China Blocks US-UK Attack On Euro
The Anglo-American hedge fund attack, as we have documented here, employed credit default swaps as the primary weapon against Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish government bonds. The failure of London and New York to induce a panic flight out of the euro during the May-June timeframe was partly results of the German self-defense measures, involving bans on naked credit default swaps and bans on naked shorting of German equities. In addition to this, Chinese support for the euro has played a decisive role.There is every indication that the Chinese made a decision not to allow the destruction of the euro during the late spring and early summer. That decision was technical, commercial, and political at the same time. The technical part was the China sought to re-balance the basket of currencies it uses to maintain the international stability of the renminbi. As the euro looms larger in Chinese trade, purchases of euros and Eurobonds are in order. It is also worth pointing out that the Chinese have not delivered on their promise to radically raise the international value of the renminbi, as hysterically demanded by Tiny Tim Geithner and others.
The commercial and political sides of Chinese support for the euro were reflected in the June visit of the Chinese vice prime minister to Greece, notably to the port of Piraeus. This Chinese envoy signed more than a dozen important economic cooperation deals, including shipping and shipbuilding, telecom, and container ports. The deputy Greek finance minister, Theodoros Pangalos, was quoted as saying: “The Chinese want a gateway into Europe. They are not like these Wall Street [blankety-blanks], pushing financial investments on paper. The Chinese deal in real things, in merchandise. And they will help the real economy in Greece.”1 The emphasis on the production of tangible physical commodities by the Chinese, in contrast to Wall Street’s reliance on a mass of toxic and kited derivatives, points to the real basis of Chinese economic ascendancy. If the Chinese are wise, they will not go overboard with short-term greed, but rather be ready for generous concessions to the Greek labor movement, so as to get the unions on their side. In any case, these euro-denominated Greek purchases are one obvious reason why Beijing is holding fewer greenbacks and more euros.
Will Hungary, Ireland, or Budget Austerity Sink The Euro?
The Anglo Americans are still beside themselves with rage and consternation over the fact that their original attack on the euro has not worked. But since about the middle of August, the euro has fallen from over $1.30 to about $1.26 or thereabouts. Part of this is due to the decline of the New York Stock market, given the long-standing dollar-Dow trade-off. Another negative factor for the euro is doubtless the cruel and stupid deflationary policies introduced by many EU governments in a craven attempt to ward off further speculative attacks. In a depression, government spending is the main thing that supports the entire economy, so cutting the government budget is a recipe for economic disaster, as some EU countries are now being reminded. Another factor is simply the month of August, when Catholic Europe, including France, Italy, Spain, and Bavaria, tends to shut down.Where Will The Next Panic Break Out?
The world is now in a time of mixed signals and cross-currents. The forces of depression, in the form of $1.5 quadrillion of toxic and kited derivatives, are most emphatically still lurking, and since they have not been shredded, canceled, deleted, outlawed or abrogated, they will soon find a way to explode once again. Serious financial observers are now waiting to see where the next currency or banking panic will come. Over the last day or two, there have been reports of heavy selling of the Hungarian forint, which is inside the EU but not part of Euroland. Late on August 24, Standard & Poor’s announced a major downgrade of Irish debt, switching to a negative outlook. If the panic comes in Hungary or Ireland, then the euro could indeed go down. CNBC traders, in response to the question of how to make money off the crisis of the Hungarian currency, immediately replied that the way to do that was to short the stocks of Austrian banks, who hold much Hungarian debt. From here, the crisis would move on to Germany, and soon the entire continent would be back in the soup. The British pound sterling also has massive vulnerabilities to being the next monetary unit to crash.But the most likely victim remains Wall Street itself. A glance at the stock chart of Bank of America over the past three months shows what any technical analyst would regard as a very ugly picture. There are rumblings that Citibank may be heading towards liquidity trouble in September and October. For those who like to read the tea leaves, CNBC’s Jim Cramer today responded to a question about Citigroup by emphatically declaiming “Stick with Citi,” and “Stick with Pandit.” Citigroup, he affirmed, remained his “favorite speculation.” For contrarians who have learned something over the past two years, this may already be enough to head for the hills. In any case, if the banking panic breaks out in New York, then the dollar may turn out to be the victim.
Bernanke and QE2
Today also brought the publication of the August 10 minutes of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee. These minutes reveal a serious split in the management committee of the US financier oligarchy. Bernanke and his majority are afraid of deflation, and want a new round of quantitative easing – already dubbed QE2 by the Street. But there is also a significant Austro-monetarist reactionary minority who regard inflation as the greater evil, and to whom a deflationary crash would not be unwelcome, as libertarian rantings over many decades have made plain. These tensions may well be on display at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming at the end of this week.Another CNBC analyst has ventured to predict a ragged decline of the Dow to about 5,000 over the months ahead. If that begins to happen, then the danger of deflation will be enhanced, and in such a scenario the dollar would actually tend to increase in value compared to other currencies. On the other hand, Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s trademark is his strategy for flooding the system with bailouts and other liquidity if deflation looms. Bernanke is the captain of that ship of fools known as the QE2. The one certainty is that there is no recovery, and that the second wave of a world economic depression dominates the world.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Trilaterals’ Secret Meeting Will Be Held in D.C. in Spring
By James P. Tucker Jr.
americanfreepress.net
Already the TC is struggling to reignite its global government efforts but is unable to overcome resistance from American patriots. The Senate is balking at ratifying the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) because of unconstitutional excesses. Action has been delayed until a lame-duck session following the November elections. But the TC, and its brother group, Bilderberg, is using the time to pressure the Senate to embrace START after the elections are safely over.
START and other sovereignty-surrendering treaties, such as the North America Free Trade Agreement, are important steps in the TC-Bilderberg campaign to establish a world government. An “American Union” similar to the European Union is to be established with the proposed “amero” becoming the “euro” in this hemisphere.
The immediate danger is that the Senate will bow to immense pressure to ratify START at the post-election lame-duck session. A significant number of incumbents are likely to lose and have no political stake in the issue. Others will be told their votes will be forgotten before the next election so they had better take big bucks now rather than offend the power brokers.
Secretaries of state, defense and treasury always attend TC and Bilderberg meetings, as do White House officials and congressional lapdogs. All are pressuring the Senate to ratify START. The treaty creates a Bilateral Consultative Commission with power to approve “additional measures as may be necessary to improve the viability and effectiveness of the treaty.”
The U.S. and Russian executive branches could implement the commission’s recommendations without Senate ratification. This is unconstitutional on its face. When the White House gets through implementing commission recommendations you may be unable to recognize the START treaty.
Even the courts, not often recognized as bastions of constitutional principle, are saying such treaties are unconstitutional.
In 2006, the federal appellate court for the District of Columbia declined to implement “adjustments” by an international organization to an environmental treaty. The court cited “significant debate over the constitutionality of assigning lawmaking functions to international bodies.”
The court ruled that treating the treaty adjustments as law “would raise serious constitutional questions in light of the non-delegation doctrine, numerous constitutional procedural requirements for making law, and the separation of powers.”
Friday, August 20, 2010
Black Ops Insiders Reveal Secrets
By Pat Shannan
Most Americans haven’t heard the terms “psy-warfare” or “psy-op,” nor can they define these buzzwords. Both terms, with reference to world politics, terrorist events and war, connote in a layman’s explanation that “things usually ain’t what they appear.”
According to a recent letter from an active operative, our government leaders have a plethora of “specialists” and are hiring, from time to time, any number of the tens of thousands of mercenaries—often retired Special
Forces soldiers—who have made themselves available for secret duty in more than 40 countries. These “private contractors” commit unspeakable acts on orders from our own government leaders, many times against U.S.
citizens.
“Often there are duties assigned to agent teams that some of us won’t follow, due to a certain amount of concern for fellow Americans and patriotism for their own country,” says a former U.S. military psy-op agent known to us only as “Sinbad.” He cannot divulge his true name and credentials for reasons that will become even more obvious in this report.
He says that the U.S., the British and the Israeli Mossad are the best in the world at “misleading and misdirecting the focus of the masses toward selected evidence, subjects and targets.”
For the past 30 years, retired Phoenix police officer Jack McLamb has published Aid & Abet, a monthly newsletter for the military and police to help educate them on the perilous New World Order, best defined as a calculated political and economic consolidation on a global scale. “Sinbad” is a regular subscriber, and the letter we speak of went to McLamb’s Idaho office with permission to reprint but with the request that the original be burned. McLamb says he complied.
This writer also suspects that “Sinbad,” because of the timeliness of his spending several paragraphs explaining the high-tech ability governments have in falsifying evidence, may have seen the story in the Aug. 2 edition of AFP on the recent plight of Idaho attorney Edgar Steele and the alleged “murder for hire” that reeked of an FBI setup and the framing of Steele.
According to a recent letter from an active operative, our government leaders have a plethora of “specialists” and are hiring, from time to time, any number of the tens of thousands of mercenaries—often retired Special
Forces soldiers—who have made themselves available for secret duty in more than 40 countries. These “private contractors” commit unspeakable acts on orders from our own government leaders, many times against U.S.
citizens.
“Often there are duties assigned to agent teams that some of us won’t follow, due to a certain amount of concern for fellow Americans and patriotism for their own country,” says a former U.S. military psy-op agent known to us only as “Sinbad.” He cannot divulge his true name and credentials for reasons that will become even more obvious in this report.
He says that the U.S., the British and the Israeli Mossad are the best in the world at “misleading and misdirecting the focus of the masses toward selected evidence, subjects and targets.”
For the past 30 years, retired Phoenix police officer Jack McLamb has published Aid & Abet, a monthly newsletter for the military and police to help educate them on the perilous New World Order, best defined as a calculated political and economic consolidation on a global scale. “Sinbad” is a regular subscriber, and the letter we speak of went to McLamb’s Idaho office with permission to reprint but with the request that the original be burned. McLamb says he complied.
This writer also suspects that “Sinbad,” because of the timeliness of his spending several paragraphs explaining the high-tech ability governments have in falsifying evidence, may have seen the story in the Aug. 2 edition of AFP on the recent plight of Idaho attorney Edgar Steele and the alleged “murder for hire” that reeked of an FBI setup and the framing of Steele.
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“One successful use of our talents is in creating realistic but false videos, DVDs or audio recordings of individuals to be used as ‘evidence’ of a crime,” wrote “Sinbad” in his letter. “One of our easiest duties today, with all the new technology, is in creating this kind of false evidence.”
As witnessed in Ruby Ridge in 1992, Waco in 1993, Oklahoma City in 1995 and the northeast United States on Sept. 11, 2001, false evidence presented by government leaders through the controlled and cooperative corporate media can quickly move the public’s mind in the government’s chosen direction.
What makes this misdirection work so well, explains “Sinbad,” is that due to the strong personal moral code of average Americans, they just cannot believe that their leaders have no honor and no integrity. They can’t imagine the depths of trickery and treachery to which their own leaders will stoop to deceive the world.
“Using new computer technology and taking a video and a voice print of you, Officer McLamb, in just a couple of hours, we agents could have you on TV dancing on top of a pile of dead Catholic nuns and shouting that you had just purchased 100 weapons of mass destruction from the Boy Scouts of America,” wrote our source. “You name it, we can create it.”
STEELE SET-UP?
In the Idaho case, this writer recently learned that Mrs. Steele heard the same shocking “evidence” on tape that was played for her husband while he was in jail. At the time, Steele was told that there were more tapes. A week or so later, she called the FBI with the request that she be able to listen to the other recordings and was told “those tapes aren’t ready yet.”
What could “not be ready” about tapes that were already recorded?
After hearing this, we had an hour-long telephone conversation with another longtime CIA operative experienced in all the aforementioned dirty tricks as well as MK-Ultra’s half-century-plus practice of mind control.
After seeing news on Steele’s situation, this former CIA agent wrote, “Steele is toast. He has been set up big time. With no personal knowledge of the case or participation in it in any way, I can tell you that I know a government frame when I see one, and this one is classic. I would bet my house on it. They wanted him, and they got him. His problem will be obtaining the original tapes, and if he can’t get an expert to debunk those (because the tainted manipulation becomes ‘original’ on the copy), then he will not get his head out of the noose. And this is why his wife was told what she was told. You can bet by trial time that the real originals will be nowhere to be found, and an FBI lying expert will be testifying to the authenticity of the phonies.”
The trial has been reset for Nov. 1.
BP Whistleblowers Paying High Price for Confessions
By Victor Thorn
A host of casualties prove his point. First is whistleblower Mike Mason, who worked for BP subcontractor Nabors Drilling. In 2005 he told investigators that BP regularly falsified blowout preventer (BOP) tests at Alaskan facilities.
His employer immediately fired him following these disclosures, but not before Mason reported to Hamel’s Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission that BP’s safety procedure is to “look the other way when it’s convenient for them.”
Hamel had been chronicling BP abuses since the 1980s, costing them millions in repairs to the Alaskan pipeline. As retaliation, journalist Marcus Baram reported on May 12 that a BP subsidiary in Alaska “hired a private security firm, Wackenhut, to conduct surveillance on Hamel.” Their tactics included wiretaps and forced entries into his home. They watched his house and his family and even hired attractive women to try to persuade him to divulge his secret sources.
Hamel sued BP, Exxon and Wackenhut in the 1990s for harassment and invasion of privacy and reportedly settled for an undisclosed amount believed to be in the millions of dollars.
Read more
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
The Ecstasy of Empire
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times column, “Welcome to the Recovery.”
As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echoes from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David Stockman, who excoriated the Republican Party for becoming big-spending Democrats.
It is encouraging to see some realization that, this time, Washington cannot spend the economy out of recession. The deficits are already too large for the dollar to survive as reserve currency, and deficit spending cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been moved offshore.
However, the solutions offered by those who are beginning to recognize that there is a problem are discouraging. Kotlikoff thinks the solution is savage Social Security and Medicare cuts or equally savage tax increases or hyperinflation to destroy the vast debts.
Perhaps economists lack imagination, or perhaps they don’t want to be cut off from Wall Street and corporate subsidies, but Social Security and Medicare are insufficient at their present levels, especially considering the erosion of private pensions by the dot com, derivative and real estate bubbles. Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15 per cent of their earnings all their lives, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.
Tax increases make even less sense. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of households cannot survive on one job. Both husband and wife work and often one of the partners has two jobs in order to make ends meet. Raising taxes makes it harder to make ends meet--thus more foreclosures, more food stamps, more homelessness. What kind of economist or humane person thinks this is a solution?
Ah, but we will tax the rich. The rich have enough money. They will simply stop earning.
Let’s get real. Here is what the government is likely to do. Once Washington realize that the dollar is at risk and that they can no longer finance their wars by borrowing abroad, the government will either levy a tax on private pensions on the grounds that the pensions have accumulated tax-deferred, or the government will require pension fund managers to purchase Treasury debt with our pensions. This will buy the government a bit more time while pension accounts are loaded up with worthless paper.
The last Bush budget deficit (2008) was in the $400-500 billion range, about the size of the Chinese, Japanese, and OPEC trade surpluses with the US. Traditionally, these trade surpluses have been recycled to the US and finance the federal budget deficit. In 2009 and 2010 the federal deficit jumped to $1,400 billion, a back-to-back trillion dollar increase. There are not sufficient trade surpluses to finance a deficit this large. From where comes the money?
The answer is from individuals fleeing the stock market into “safe” Treasury bonds and from the bankster bailout, not so much the TARP money as the Federal Reserve’s exchange of bank reserves for questionable financial paper such as subprime derivatives. The banks used their excess reserves to purchase Treasury debt.
These financing maneuvers are one-time tricks. Once people have fled stocks, that movement into Treasuries is over. The opposition to the bankster bailout likely precludes another. So where does the money come from the next time?
The Treasury was able to unload a lot of debt thanks to “the Greek crisis,” which the New York banksters and hedge funds multiplied into “the euro crisis.” The financial press served as a financing arm for the US Treasury by creating panic about European debt and the euro. Central banks and individuals who had taken refuge from the dollar in euros were panicked out of their euros, and they rushed into dollars by purchasing US Treasury debt.
This movement from euros to dollars weakened the alternative reserve currency to the dollar, halted the dollar’s decline, and financed the US budget deficit a while longer.
Possibly the game can be replayed with Spanish debt, Irish debt, and whatever unlucky country is eswept in by the thoughtless expansion of the European Union.
But when no countries remain that can be destabilized by Wall Street investment banksters and hedge funds, what then finances the US budget deficit?
The only remaining financier is the Federal Reserve. When Treasury bonds brought to auction do not sell, the Federal Reserve must purchase them. The Federal Reserve purchases the bonds by creating new demand deposits, or checking accounts, for the Treasury. As the Treasury spends the proceeds of the new debt sales, the US money supply expands by the amount of the Federal Reserve’s purchase of Treasury debt.
Do goods and services expand by the same amount? Imports will increase as US jobs have been offshored and given to foreigners, thus worsening the trade deficit. When the Federal Reserve purchases the Treasury’s new debt issues, the money supply will increase by more than the supply of domestically produced goods and services. Prices are likely to rise.
How high will they rise? The longer money is created in order that government can pay its bills, the more likely hyperinflation will be the result.
The economy has not recovered. By the end of this year it will be obvious that the collapsing economy means a larger than $1.4 trillion budget deficit to finance. Will it be $2 trillion? Higher?
Whatever the size, the rest of the world will see that the dollar is being printed in such quantities that it cannot serve as reserve currency. At that point wholesale dumping of dollars will result as foreign central banks try to unload a worthless currency.
The collapse of the dollar will drive up the prices of imports and offshored goods on which Americans are dependent. Wal-Mart shoppers will think they have mistakenly gone into Neiman Marcus.
Domestic prices will also explode as a growing money supply chases the supply of goods and services still made in America by Americans.
The dollar as reserve currency cannot survive the conflagration. When the dollar goes the US cannot finance its trade deficit. Therefore, imports will fall sharply, thus adding to domestic inflation and, as the US is energy import-dependent, there will be transportation disruptions that will disrupt work and grocery store deliveries.
Panic will be the order of the day.
Will farms will be raided? Will those trapped in cities resort to riots and looting?
Is this the likely future that “our” government and “our patriotic” corporations have created for us?
To borrow from Lenin, “What can be done?”
Here is what can be done. The wars, which benefit no one but the military-security complex and Israel’s territorial expansion, can be immediately ended. This would reduce the US budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. More hundreds of billions of dollars could be saved by cutting the rest of the military budget which, in its present size, exceeds the budgets of all the serious military powers on earth combined.
US military spending reflects the unaffordable and unattainable crazed neoconservative goal of US Empire and world hegemony. What fool in Washington thinks that China is going to finance US hegemony over China?
The only way that the US will again have an economy is by bringing back the offshored jobs. The loss of these jobs impoverished Americans while producing oversized gains for Wall Street, shareholders, and corporate executives. These jobs can be brought home where they belong by taxing corporations according to where value is added to their product. If value is added to their goods and services in China, corporations would have a high tax rate. If value is added to their goods and services in the US, corporations would have a low tax rate.
This change in corporate taxation would offset the cheap foreign labor that has sucked jobs out of America, and it would rebuild the ladders of upward mobility that made America an opportunity society.
If the wars are not immediately stopped and the jobs brought back to America, the US is relegated to the trash bin of history.
Obviously, the corporations and Wall Street would use their financial power and campaign contributions to block any legislation that would reduce short-term earnings and bonuses by bringing jobs back to America. Americans have no greater enemies than Wall Street and the corporations and their prostitutes in Congress and the White House.
The neocons allied with Israel, who control both parties and much of the media, are strung out on the ecstasy of Empire.
The United States and the welfare of its 300 million people cannot be restored unless the neocons, Wall Street, the corporations, and their servile slaves in Congress and the White House can be defeated.
Without a revolution, Americans are history.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Saturday, August 14, 2010
America Enters a New Time
CounterPunch Diary
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I went to get my hair cut the other day in the town of Fortuna and waited ten minutes when the elderly barber finished buzz-cutting a young Mexican American. After the young man had exited under his thin skullcap of black stubble, Don the barber sighed and said, “That’s the third boy I’ve cut today who’s headed into the Marines. They all say the same thing. “There’s no work around here and I’ve got a family to support.” When I tell them to hold off, they say the same thing: “Too late. I’ve signed up.”
This is Humboldt county, northern California, where the marijuana boom is in its final paroxysms, with people flocking from around the world to get a piece of the action, just like they did in the Gold Rush. One of the many places selling bags of good soil to marijuana growers ($10 a bag, 8 bags to each marijuana plant, grown in a 100 foot x 30 foot plastic greenhouse, $25,000 or so) had a $300,000 day lately. So there’s more money here than most places across America, where the situation is truly desperate.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Did Google Block “Barry Soetoro” Search Term?
Paul Joseph Watson
GCN Live.com
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Screenshots obtained by a Prison Planet reader suggest that Google may have moved to de-list “Barry Soetoro” as a popular search term shortly after it rose to the top of the Google Trends charts after yesterday’s effort by radio talk show host Alex Jones to focus attention on Barack Obama’s real name.
The search term reached number one on Google Trends soon after Alex Jones began discussing the issue on his show yesterday and Prison Planet.com released an article on the same topic. However, within the space of about an hour, the term quickly slipped down the list of hot search terms and by the end of the day was gone completely.
A screenshot captured by a reader gives us an insight as to why the term didn’t remain in the number one spot on Google Trends for very long. Upon attempting to perform a Google search for “Barry Soetoro,” one of our readers was met with a Google screen that stated, “We’re sorry….but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”
Click for enlargement.
The big question revolves around whether Google moved to block the term to certain IP addresses, or whether the ban was Internet-wide.
Despite Google’s apparent efforts to block searches for “Barry Soetoro,” the term was still number one on Google Trends overall for August 9th.
At no point did Alex Jones encourage listeners to use auto-bots to send automated search queries to Google, nor was this ever mentioned on any of his websites. Did Google deliberately prevent people from searching the term in order to suppress information about Barack Obama’s real name when he was registered as an Indonesian citizen being Barry Soetoro in order to prevent the topic from going super-viral?
The suggestion is perfectly plausible given the fact that Google have been vehemently supportive of Obama since the early days of his election campaign.
Obama and Google have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, with Google’s former chief lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin going on to become Barry’s deputy chief technology officer. Emails released recently by ethics watchdog the National Legal and Policy Center revealed that McLaughlin was using his government email account to co-ordinate meetings with Google lobbyist Marckham Ericsson and Google front group Free Press.
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly backed Obama and campaigned on his behalf before the 2008 Presidential election. Google was Obama’s 5th biggest financial backer, contributing $803,436 dollars to his campaign.
Schmidt was also part of Obama’s financial transition team, and at one stage was even being touted as Soetoro’s technology czar.
Google’s apparent effort to block searches for a particular term is unprecedented, and smacks of political censorship in the vein of Chinese-style Internet policing. For the sake of free speech on the web, we hope that the block was merely a technical glitch, and we invite Google to explain why it occurred.
GCN Live.com
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Screenshots obtained by a Prison Planet reader suggest that Google may have moved to de-list “Barry Soetoro” as a popular search term shortly after it rose to the top of the Google Trends charts after yesterday’s effort by radio talk show host Alex Jones to focus attention on Barack Obama’s real name.
The search term reached number one on Google Trends soon after Alex Jones began discussing the issue on his show yesterday and Prison Planet.com released an article on the same topic. However, within the space of about an hour, the term quickly slipped down the list of hot search terms and by the end of the day was gone completely.
A screenshot captured by a reader gives us an insight as to why the term didn’t remain in the number one spot on Google Trends for very long. Upon attempting to perform a Google search for “Barry Soetoro,” one of our readers was met with a Google screen that stated, “We’re sorry….but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”
Click for enlargement.
The big question revolves around whether Google moved to block the term to certain IP addresses, or whether the ban was Internet-wide.
Despite Google’s apparent efforts to block searches for “Barry Soetoro,” the term was still number one on Google Trends overall for August 9th.
At no point did Alex Jones encourage listeners to use auto-bots to send automated search queries to Google, nor was this ever mentioned on any of his websites. Did Google deliberately prevent people from searching the term in order to suppress information about Barack Obama’s real name when he was registered as an Indonesian citizen being Barry Soetoro in order to prevent the topic from going super-viral?
The suggestion is perfectly plausible given the fact that Google have been vehemently supportive of Obama since the early days of his election campaign.
Obama and Google have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, with Google’s former chief lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin going on to become Barry’s deputy chief technology officer. Emails released recently by ethics watchdog the National Legal and Policy Center revealed that McLaughlin was using his government email account to co-ordinate meetings with Google lobbyist Marckham Ericsson and Google front group Free Press.
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly backed Obama and campaigned on his behalf before the 2008 Presidential election. Google was Obama’s 5th biggest financial backer, contributing $803,436 dollars to his campaign.
Schmidt was also part of Obama’s financial transition team, and at one stage was even being touted as Soetoro’s technology czar.
Google’s apparent effort to block searches for a particular term is unprecedented, and smacks of political censorship in the vein of Chinese-style Internet policing. For the sake of free speech on the web, we hope that the block was merely a technical glitch, and we invite Google to explain why it occurred.
The New Push for a Global Currency
Lew Rockwell
Campaign for Liberty
August 9, 2010
You surely didn’t think that the governing elites would let this economic crisis pass without pushing some cockamamie scheme for control. Well, here is the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, a revival of a 60-year-old idea of a global paper currency to fix what ails us.
The IMF study that calls for this is by Reza Moghadam of the Strategy, Policy, and Review Department, “in collaboration with the Finance, Legal, Monetary and Capital Markets, Research and Statistics Departments, and consultation with the Area Departments.” In other words, this paper shouldn’t be ignored.
It’s a long-term plan, but the plan has the unmistakable stamp of Keynes: “A global currency, bancor, issued by a global central bank would be designed as a stable store of value that is not tied exclusively to the conditions of any particular economy…. The global central bank could serve as a lender of last resort, providing needed systemic liquidity in the event of adverse shocks and more automatically than at present.”
The term bancor comes from Keynes directly. He proposed this idea following World War II, but it was rejected mostly for nationalistic reasons. Instead we got a monetary system based on the dollar, which was in turn tied to gold. In other words, we got a phony gold standard that was destined to collapse as gold reserve imbalances became unsustainable, as they did by the late 1960s. What replaced it is our global paper money system of floating exchange rates.
But the elites never give in, never give up. The proposal for a global currency and global central bank is again making the rounds. What problem is being addressed? What is so desperately wrong with the world that the IMF is floating the idea of a world currency? In a word, the problem is hoarding. The IMF is really annoyed that “in recent years, international reserve accumulation has accelerated rapidly, reaching 13 percent of global GDP in 2009 — a threefold increase over ten years.”
You see, monetary policy isn’t supposed to work this way. In their ideal world, the central bank releases reserves and these reserves are lent out, leading to a boom in consumption and investment and thereby global happiness forever (never mind the hyperinflation that goes along with it). But there is a problem. The current system is nationally based and so the economic conditions of one country turn out to have an influence on the borrowing and lending markets. Without borrowers and lenders, the money gets stuck in the system.
This is a short history of the last two years. By now, if the Fed had its way, we would be awash in money. Instead the reserves are stuck in the banking system. It’s like the whole of the population of the United States has suddenly been consumed by the moral advice: neither a borrower nor a lender be.
And why? Well, there are two reasons. Borrowers are just a bit nervous right now about the long term. They are watching balance sheets day by day, consumed with a weird sense of reality that had gone out the window during the boom times. Meanwhile, the bankers are just a bit risk averse, happier to keep the reserves in the vault than toss them to the winds of fate. They have the bank examiners breathing down their necks right now, and lending doesn’t pay well, not with interest rates being suppressed down to the zero level.
Under these conditions, yes, hoarding seems like a pretty good idea. What’s more, we should be very grateful indeed for this retrenchment. The idea of plunging back into another bubble seems rather shortsighted.
The IMF has a problem with this practice, though it doesn’t dwell on it. The problem is that this practice of maintaining high reserves is putting a damper on consumption and investment, prolonging the recession. The simple-minded solution coming from the high-minded eggheads at the IMF is to find some system, any system, that would push the money from the vaults into the hands of the spending public.
The rationale for the global currency and global central bank is that the reserves could always find a market in a globalized system, and would not therefore be so tied to the exigencies of a nationally based banking and monetary system.
An academic paper can wax eloquent for hundreds of pages about the advantages of a global system. It will lead to more stability, efficiency, and less politicization of money and credit. And truly, there is a point here: a real gold standard is always tending towards a global currency system. Different national currencies are merely different names for the same thing.
But there is a key difference. Under a gold standard, the physical metal is the limit and the market is the master. Under a global paper system, the paper provides no limit whatsoever and the politicians are the masters. So there is no sense of talking about the glories of globalization in the current context. A world paper currency and world central bank would heighten the moral hazard and lead to a global inflationary regime such as we’ve never seen. There would be no escape from political control at that point.
Every proposal of a drastic solution such as this always comes with a warning of some equally drastic consequence of failing to adopt the proposal. In this case, the IMF actually raises questions about the survivability of the dollar itself. “There has been a long-running debate speculating on whether the dollar could collapse,” says the paper. It raises the worry that if a run on the dollar materializes, central banks could attempt to race each other to dump it permanently.
But, the paper points out, many people wonder whether “good alternatives to the dollar exist.” And for this reason, it might be a good idea to cobble together such an alternative sooner rather than later.
There is probably more truth in that statement than most people want to grant. But the right alternative is not yet another and more global experiment in paper money inflation. God forbid. If we want an alternative to the dollar, there is one that could appear before our eyes if only we would let it happen. Private currencies traders the world over could, on their own, give rise to a new currency rooted in gold and traded by means of digital media. On many occasions over the last 20 years, such a system nearly came to be. But guess what? The government cracked down and stopped it. The governing elites have decided that there will be no currency reform unless it comes from the marble palaces of the monetary elites.
Campaign for Liberty
August 9, 2010
You surely didn’t think that the governing elites would let this economic crisis pass without pushing some cockamamie scheme for control. Well, here is the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, a revival of a 60-year-old idea of a global paper currency to fix what ails us.
The IMF study that calls for this is by Reza Moghadam of the Strategy, Policy, and Review Department, “in collaboration with the Finance, Legal, Monetary and Capital Markets, Research and Statistics Departments, and consultation with the Area Departments.” In other words, this paper shouldn’t be ignored.
It’s a long-term plan, but the plan has the unmistakable stamp of Keynes: “A global currency, bancor, issued by a global central bank would be designed as a stable store of value that is not tied exclusively to the conditions of any particular economy…. The global central bank could serve as a lender of last resort, providing needed systemic liquidity in the event of adverse shocks and more automatically than at present.”
The term bancor comes from Keynes directly. He proposed this idea following World War II, but it was rejected mostly for nationalistic reasons. Instead we got a monetary system based on the dollar, which was in turn tied to gold. In other words, we got a phony gold standard that was destined to collapse as gold reserve imbalances became unsustainable, as they did by the late 1960s. What replaced it is our global paper money system of floating exchange rates.
But the elites never give in, never give up. The proposal for a global currency and global central bank is again making the rounds. What problem is being addressed? What is so desperately wrong with the world that the IMF is floating the idea of a world currency? In a word, the problem is hoarding. The IMF is really annoyed that “in recent years, international reserve accumulation has accelerated rapidly, reaching 13 percent of global GDP in 2009 — a threefold increase over ten years.”
You see, monetary policy isn’t supposed to work this way. In their ideal world, the central bank releases reserves and these reserves are lent out, leading to a boom in consumption and investment and thereby global happiness forever (never mind the hyperinflation that goes along with it). But there is a problem. The current system is nationally based and so the economic conditions of one country turn out to have an influence on the borrowing and lending markets. Without borrowers and lenders, the money gets stuck in the system.
This is a short history of the last two years. By now, if the Fed had its way, we would be awash in money. Instead the reserves are stuck in the banking system. It’s like the whole of the population of the United States has suddenly been consumed by the moral advice: neither a borrower nor a lender be.
And why? Well, there are two reasons. Borrowers are just a bit nervous right now about the long term. They are watching balance sheets day by day, consumed with a weird sense of reality that had gone out the window during the boom times. Meanwhile, the bankers are just a bit risk averse, happier to keep the reserves in the vault than toss them to the winds of fate. They have the bank examiners breathing down their necks right now, and lending doesn’t pay well, not with interest rates being suppressed down to the zero level.
Under these conditions, yes, hoarding seems like a pretty good idea. What’s more, we should be very grateful indeed for this retrenchment. The idea of plunging back into another bubble seems rather shortsighted.
The IMF has a problem with this practice, though it doesn’t dwell on it. The problem is that this practice of maintaining high reserves is putting a damper on consumption and investment, prolonging the recession. The simple-minded solution coming from the high-minded eggheads at the IMF is to find some system, any system, that would push the money from the vaults into the hands of the spending public.
The rationale for the global currency and global central bank is that the reserves could always find a market in a globalized system, and would not therefore be so tied to the exigencies of a nationally based banking and monetary system.
An academic paper can wax eloquent for hundreds of pages about the advantages of a global system. It will lead to more stability, efficiency, and less politicization of money and credit. And truly, there is a point here: a real gold standard is always tending towards a global currency system. Different national currencies are merely different names for the same thing.
But there is a key difference. Under a gold standard, the physical metal is the limit and the market is the master. Under a global paper system, the paper provides no limit whatsoever and the politicians are the masters. So there is no sense of talking about the glories of globalization in the current context. A world paper currency and world central bank would heighten the moral hazard and lead to a global inflationary regime such as we’ve never seen. There would be no escape from political control at that point.
Every proposal of a drastic solution such as this always comes with a warning of some equally drastic consequence of failing to adopt the proposal. In this case, the IMF actually raises questions about the survivability of the dollar itself. “There has been a long-running debate speculating on whether the dollar could collapse,” says the paper. It raises the worry that if a run on the dollar materializes, central banks could attempt to race each other to dump it permanently.
But, the paper points out, many people wonder whether “good alternatives to the dollar exist.” And for this reason, it might be a good idea to cobble together such an alternative sooner rather than later.
There is probably more truth in that statement than most people want to grant. But the right alternative is not yet another and more global experiment in paper money inflation. God forbid. If we want an alternative to the dollar, there is one that could appear before our eyes if only we would let it happen. Private currencies traders the world over could, on their own, give rise to a new currency rooted in gold and traded by means of digital media. On many occasions over the last 20 years, such a system nearly came to be. But guess what? The government cracked down and stopped it. The governing elites have decided that there will be no currency reform unless it comes from the marble palaces of the monetary elites.
The Economy in Pictures
Jake Towne
Campaign for Liberty
August 9, 2010
“Truth persists and illuminates, even if there is no one to utter it.” Government is not the solution; rather, it is causing the problems. The below slides (view at Scribd, backup PDF) highlight the economic situation, updated from a May presentation. I’ve written about the solutions to the unemployment problem, the deficit, Social Security, and the high costs of health care which are linked below.
Will the real national debt please stand up? The national debt published in the papers and online — which is closely tied to the USTreasury market is now over $13.3 trillion. Current government plans include massive deficit spending through 2013, and the government’s optimistic projections of a return to “normalcy” after 2013 are not anchored in reality. Source of budget data. However, the true national debt is hidden by the cash-based accounting method government uses. The true national debt is over $120 trillion when GAAP (Generally Acceptable Accounting Principles) are used to identify future taxation sources and future debts such as Social Security and Medicare. That’s around $400,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Massive reductions in spending and taxation are necessary if America is to regain its financial sovereignty, my proposals are outlined here and in “Guns or Health Care?”
As seen in the official USTreasury report on page 178/254, the total unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security is a jaw-dropping $107 trillion over the future of these programs. While I predict the Democrats may bear the brunt of the blame for the collapse of Medicare, one must not forget that it was the Republican’s massive expansion of Part D’s prescription drug plan under Bush that severely worsened Medicare’s fiscal situation. While the situation in Medicare is worse — and changing daily due to the new healthcare legislation — some of my proposals to maintain Social Security are outlined in “Social Security or Insecurity?”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.“ — Declaration of Independence, 1776 The quote above from the Declaration is far more true in 2010 than it was in 1776. Not counting the millions of government contractors, the government’s Republocrat-controlled work force is currently 22.8 million bureaucrats. This is America’s largest single job sector, and remember, the taxpayer bears the full cost to keep these bureaucrats employed. Like something out of an Orwell novel, the Washington Post estimates 854,000 bureaucrats are employed to spy on and keep tabs on the rest of us and the world. Lisa Benson’s cartoon says it all.
Keep in mind bureaucrats make nearly twice the average wage of the private sector, and have better benefits. My solution? Lead by example. I will refuse the elite congressional pension and healthcare plans when elected, and keep just the median income for a salary and donate the rest of the $116,000 to local non-profit hospitals.
Next, notice that more than 1 in 8 Americans are on food stamps, or 40.4 million people. USDA link here. Note the strong rise in number of SNAP food stamp recipients during the past year. One would expect to see this number dropping or even flat-lining — along with employment rising — if a recovery were underway. The annual projected cost is now $66 billion, paid for by the ever-diminishing work force.
No jobs, no recovery. BLS link here. Note that while the “newspaper” unemployment rate is still 10%, the U-6 figure — which more accurately describes total unemployment is 17% — a depression statistic. An estimated 1.6 million will file for bankruptcy this year. I’ve described the common sense solutions to end the rampant unemployment created by the government almost overnight in the campaign’s Jobs plank.
Since the BLS drops off workers from its U-6 figure, the real unemployment rate is likely greater than 17%. Shadowstats estimates the rate at about 22%.
The number of new housing starts has reached a 5-decade low, while about 25% of all residential mortgages are underwater. Note that in prior recession cycles, a quick rebound occurred while this depression looks more like a dead cat bounce. This is because… .
The Federal Reserve bailed out the bankers and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The above is built from the Federal Reserve H.4.1 data here. The red line is the total (reported) balance sheet of the FED, which has more than doubled since the time of the Banker Bailout. While the original TARP bailout (not shown) accounted for much of the initial sharp increase, most of the debt has been replaced by $1.12 trillion of mortgage-backed securities (the purple line). This graph shows the nationalization and propping of America’s entire residential housing industry. The yellow and green lines show the cumulative totals of USTreasury and USAgency debt held by the FED. While the Federal Reserve has admitted it will take losses on the MBS debt, the question remains as to how much and when.
The purchasing power of the dollar has lost well over 94% since FDR took America off the classical gold standard in 1933 through monetary inflation. The monetary inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve. They debase the dollar by creating more and more irredeemable paper dollars, which is of increasing concern since China has stopped buying Treasury debt. A major reason why healthcare now appears so expensive is this money-printing, as I highlighted in my article “Health Care Solutions.” Graph provided by Bloomberg Financial, 2009.
To cap off the situation with the dollar, the latest quarterly banking profile from the FDIC state the deposit insurance fund (DIF) is bankrupt. While consumers at failed banks still receive “insured” funds, the losses are presumably filled in with dollars from the FED, as reported last here. The current FDIC “watch list” rose to 775 banks, or almost 10% of all FDIC-insured banks in the US per p. 3/26. In summary, do not expect a recovery until the Republocrat ruling elite are removed from power or are forced to address the problems the rest of society faces. As the extravagant $5 million Bill Clinton wedding under heavy security — possibly paid for by the taxpayer — and $7 million John Kerry yacht (and avoidance of >$500,000 in taxes) demonstrate, the elite are not exactly suffering. As Stuart Carlson’s great cartoon shows, the “Great Recession” still has a firm grip on the economy. Sadly, the truth is the situation in America will not improve until the government removes its jackboots from the throat of the economy. Ceasing all special privileges to special groups would help as well.
Campaign for Liberty
August 9, 2010
“Truth persists and illuminates, even if there is no one to utter it.” Government is not the solution; rather, it is causing the problems. The below slides (view at Scribd, backup PDF) highlight the economic situation, updated from a May presentation. I’ve written about the solutions to the unemployment problem, the deficit, Social Security, and the high costs of health care which are linked below.
Will the real national debt please stand up? The national debt published in the papers and online — which is closely tied to the USTreasury market is now over $13.3 trillion. Current government plans include massive deficit spending through 2013, and the government’s optimistic projections of a return to “normalcy” after 2013 are not anchored in reality. Source of budget data. However, the true national debt is hidden by the cash-based accounting method government uses. The true national debt is over $120 trillion when GAAP (Generally Acceptable Accounting Principles) are used to identify future taxation sources and future debts such as Social Security and Medicare. That’s around $400,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Massive reductions in spending and taxation are necessary if America is to regain its financial sovereignty, my proposals are outlined here and in “Guns or Health Care?”
As seen in the official USTreasury report on page 178/254, the total unfunded liabilities for Medicare and Social Security is a jaw-dropping $107 trillion over the future of these programs. While I predict the Democrats may bear the brunt of the blame for the collapse of Medicare, one must not forget that it was the Republican’s massive expansion of Part D’s prescription drug plan under Bush that severely worsened Medicare’s fiscal situation. While the situation in Medicare is worse — and changing daily due to the new healthcare legislation — some of my proposals to maintain Social Security are outlined in “Social Security or Insecurity?”
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.“ — Declaration of Independence, 1776 The quote above from the Declaration is far more true in 2010 than it was in 1776. Not counting the millions of government contractors, the government’s Republocrat-controlled work force is currently 22.8 million bureaucrats. This is America’s largest single job sector, and remember, the taxpayer bears the full cost to keep these bureaucrats employed. Like something out of an Orwell novel, the Washington Post estimates 854,000 bureaucrats are employed to spy on and keep tabs on the rest of us and the world. Lisa Benson’s cartoon says it all.
Keep in mind bureaucrats make nearly twice the average wage of the private sector, and have better benefits. My solution? Lead by example. I will refuse the elite congressional pension and healthcare plans when elected, and keep just the median income for a salary and donate the rest of the $116,000 to local non-profit hospitals.
Next, notice that more than 1 in 8 Americans are on food stamps, or 40.4 million people. USDA link here. Note the strong rise in number of SNAP food stamp recipients during the past year. One would expect to see this number dropping or even flat-lining — along with employment rising — if a recovery were underway. The annual projected cost is now $66 billion, paid for by the ever-diminishing work force.
No jobs, no recovery. BLS link here. Note that while the “newspaper” unemployment rate is still 10%, the U-6 figure — which more accurately describes total unemployment is 17% — a depression statistic. An estimated 1.6 million will file for bankruptcy this year. I’ve described the common sense solutions to end the rampant unemployment created by the government almost overnight in the campaign’s Jobs plank.
Since the BLS drops off workers from its U-6 figure, the real unemployment rate is likely greater than 17%. Shadowstats estimates the rate at about 22%.
The number of new housing starts has reached a 5-decade low, while about 25% of all residential mortgages are underwater. Note that in prior recession cycles, a quick rebound occurred while this depression looks more like a dead cat bounce. This is because… .
The Federal Reserve bailed out the bankers and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The above is built from the Federal Reserve H.4.1 data here. The red line is the total (reported) balance sheet of the FED, which has more than doubled since the time of the Banker Bailout. While the original TARP bailout (not shown) accounted for much of the initial sharp increase, most of the debt has been replaced by $1.12 trillion of mortgage-backed securities (the purple line). This graph shows the nationalization and propping of America’s entire residential housing industry. The yellow and green lines show the cumulative totals of USTreasury and USAgency debt held by the FED. While the Federal Reserve has admitted it will take losses on the MBS debt, the question remains as to how much and when.
The purchasing power of the dollar has lost well over 94% since FDR took America off the classical gold standard in 1933 through monetary inflation. The monetary inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve. They debase the dollar by creating more and more irredeemable paper dollars, which is of increasing concern since China has stopped buying Treasury debt. A major reason why healthcare now appears so expensive is this money-printing, as I highlighted in my article “Health Care Solutions.” Graph provided by Bloomberg Financial, 2009.
To cap off the situation with the dollar, the latest quarterly banking profile from the FDIC state the deposit insurance fund (DIF) is bankrupt. While consumers at failed banks still receive “insured” funds, the losses are presumably filled in with dollars from the FED, as reported last here. The current FDIC “watch list” rose to 775 banks, or almost 10% of all FDIC-insured banks in the US per p. 3/26. In summary, do not expect a recovery until the Republocrat ruling elite are removed from power or are forced to address the problems the rest of society faces. As the extravagant $5 million Bill Clinton wedding under heavy security — possibly paid for by the taxpayer — and $7 million John Kerry yacht (and avoidance of >$500,000 in taxes) demonstrate, the elite are not exactly suffering. As Stuart Carlson’s great cartoon shows, the “Great Recession” still has a firm grip on the economy. Sadly, the truth is the situation in America will not improve until the government removes its jackboots from the throat of the economy. Ceasing all special privileges to special groups would help as well.
Wave Goodbye To Brand Obama
Paul Joseph Watson
GCN Live.com
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Administration spokesman Robert Gibbs’ angry retort that left-wing critics of President Obama ought to be “drug tested” because they are “crazy” marks a crucial benchmark in the accelerating evisceration of Obama’s public support, even amongst liberals who, having exalted Obama as some kind of savior, are now realizing that he is merely a servant to the banking elite.
Gibbs’ meltdown occurred during an interview with The Hill newspaper, in which he slammed the “professional left” for criticizing Obama for failing to live up to his ideological promises.
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
While some of the criticism coming from the left is undoubtedly over side-issues like gay marriage or gays in the military, much of it centers around Obama’s continuation and indeed intensification of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his failure to close Guantanamo Bay, in addition to his cosying up to Wall Street while abandoning Main Street as the economic decline worsens.
Our warnings right at the beginning of the Obama presidency, explored at length in Alex Jones’ documentary The Obama Deception, are now coming to fruition, as Americans from across the entire political spectrum come to the understanding that they’ve been the victims of a monumental hoax.
The HIll article leaps to Obama’s defense, claiming he is “Overseeing the end of the Iraq war, with the U.S. on schedule to end its combat operations by the end of this month.”
However, as we have previously documented, Obama now has more American troops deployed than at any time under Bush. The date for withdrawing troops from Iraq is continually pushed back, and even then it is admitted that a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops will remain to occupy the country.
In addition, Obama has also expanded the Bush-era bombing raids into Pakistan.
Of the troops that do come home from Iraq, the vast majority look like they’ll be needed for the next invasion, should Obama support an Israeli attack on Iran as many expect in the upcoming months.
As we have previously documented, Obama has broken every major promise he made during the campaign trail, from ending warrentless secret surveillance of American citizens, to bringing Bush administration officials to justice for the illegal torture program, to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
With the millions of Americans who were hypnotized into voting for the corporate marketing creation Obama now waking up to the fact that they were lied to and that Barry Soetoro is nothing more than a sock puppet for the elite, the administration can be expected to become increasingly desperate in its bid to cling on to power.
As we have warned, a war on Iran could prove to be the perfect distraction from Obama’s domestic troubles, rallying the country around an external threat and reversing his plummeting approval ratings.
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct
Ironic it may be that the “peace candidate” will be forced to play the war card as a last resort to rescue his political dynasty, but he can count on the support of an army of neo-cons who have been calling for an attack on Iran since the early years of the Bush presidency.
Similarly, as Robert Shapiro, former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, made clear in a Financial Times article last month, a terror attack on the scale of 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing would do wonders to address Obama’s “growing credibility crisis” and reinstate Americans’ belief in his leadership.
Whether the string pullers behind Obama will make a late and desperate lunge to rescue his tattered credibility, or whether they will merely hand over the baton to another neo-con to continue the same globalist agenda, remains to be seen. But what we can now say for certain is that Brand Obama has been completely demolished, with the reality behind the facade exposed for all to see, and Obama’s political legacy being forever characterized by deceit, deception and misplaced hope.
GCN Live.com
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Administration spokesman Robert Gibbs’ angry retort that left-wing critics of President Obama ought to be “drug tested” because they are “crazy” marks a crucial benchmark in the accelerating evisceration of Obama’s public support, even amongst liberals who, having exalted Obama as some kind of savior, are now realizing that he is merely a servant to the banking elite.
Gibbs’ meltdown occurred during an interview with The Hill newspaper, in which he slammed the “professional left” for criticizing Obama for failing to live up to his ideological promises.
“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”
While some of the criticism coming from the left is undoubtedly over side-issues like gay marriage or gays in the military, much of it centers around Obama’s continuation and indeed intensification of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his failure to close Guantanamo Bay, in addition to his cosying up to Wall Street while abandoning Main Street as the economic decline worsens.
Our warnings right at the beginning of the Obama presidency, explored at length in Alex Jones’ documentary The Obama Deception, are now coming to fruition, as Americans from across the entire political spectrum come to the understanding that they’ve been the victims of a monumental hoax.
The HIll article leaps to Obama’s defense, claiming he is “Overseeing the end of the Iraq war, with the U.S. on schedule to end its combat operations by the end of this month.”
However, as we have previously documented, Obama now has more American troops deployed than at any time under Bush. The date for withdrawing troops from Iraq is continually pushed back, and even then it is admitted that a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops will remain to occupy the country.
In addition, Obama has also expanded the Bush-era bombing raids into Pakistan.
Of the troops that do come home from Iraq, the vast majority look like they’ll be needed for the next invasion, should Obama support an Israeli attack on Iran as many expect in the upcoming months.
As we have previously documented, Obama has broken every major promise he made during the campaign trail, from ending warrentless secret surveillance of American citizens, to bringing Bush administration officials to justice for the illegal torture program, to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
With the millions of Americans who were hypnotized into voting for the corporate marketing creation Obama now waking up to the fact that they were lied to and that Barry Soetoro is nothing more than a sock puppet for the elite, the administration can be expected to become increasingly desperate in its bid to cling on to power.
As we have warned, a war on Iran could prove to be the perfect distraction from Obama’s domestic troubles, rallying the country around an external threat and reversing his plummeting approval ratings.
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Ironic it may be that the “peace candidate” will be forced to play the war card as a last resort to rescue his political dynasty, but he can count on the support of an army of neo-cons who have been calling for an attack on Iran since the early years of the Bush presidency.
Similarly, as Robert Shapiro, former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, made clear in a Financial Times article last month, a terror attack on the scale of 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing would do wonders to address Obama’s “growing credibility crisis” and reinstate Americans’ belief in his leadership.
Whether the string pullers behind Obama will make a late and desperate lunge to rescue his tattered credibility, or whether they will merely hand over the baton to another neo-con to continue the same globalist agenda, remains to be seen. But what we can now say for certain is that Brand Obama has been completely demolished, with the reality behind the facade exposed for all to see, and Obama’s political legacy being forever characterized by deceit, deception and misplaced hope.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Fidel Castro Warns of Imminent Nuclear War; Admiral Mullen Threatens Iran; US-Israel Vs. Iran-Hezbollah Confrontation Builds On Multiple Fronts
TARPLEY.net
August 9, 2010
On July 21, the present writer offered the evaluation that an attack on Iran by the United States and Israel was now emphatically back on the agenda after a two-year hiatus.1 More than two weeks after issuing that warning, it is possible to offer a second installment of evidence to buttress the original finding. The author considers that this evidence is now sufficient to confirm the July 21 analysis. The contours of the coming conflagration are becoming somewhat more distinct, and give us reason to fear not just a Middle East regional war, but possibly even a world war, with increasing danger that nuclear weapons will come into play.
Fidel Castro Convokes Parliament, Issues Dramatic War Warning
The most dramatic and outspoken confirmation of the views expressed here on July 21 comes from Fidel Castro, the first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, and the de facto head of state of Cuba. During the spring and summer of 2010, Castro has referred several times to the growing war danger among the United States, Israel, and Iran. On August 8, Castro took the unusual step of convening a special session of the Cuban parliament to discuss the nuclear war danger threatening the peace of the world. Essentially, Castro called for the worldwide mobilization of peace-loving forces to avoid the worst, and included a special personal appeal to Obama.Castro: Hundreds Of Millions Of Deaths
According to the Cuban News Agency, this war avoidance agenda ‘was the purpose of the Cuban Revolution leader’s address to the Cuban parliament summoned for an extraordinary session in Havana, due to the urgency of mobilizing the world, faced with the danger of a nuclear war that would be triggered by a US-Israeli led aggression on Iran.’ Castro said that Obama, ‘in the instant he gives the order, which is the only one he could give due to the power, speed and countless number of missiles accumulated in an absurd competition between powers, he would be ordering the instant death not only of hundreds of millions of people, including, an immeasurable number of inhabitants of his own country, but also the crews of all US ships in the seas near Iran.” “Simultaneously, the war would break out in the Near and Far East and across Eurasia,” said Fidel. Otherwise, if the war breaks out, the current social order will abruptly vanish and the price will be much higher, Fidel warned.’2Whatever one may think of Castro personally and politically, he is unquestionably one of the longest-serving national leaders in today’s world, and brings to the table his experience during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Castro knows, in short, what a nuclear confrontation looks like from the inside. The American public would do well to put aside the arrogance and impudence of the US mass media and pay attention to why this sick old man is putting so much of his flagging energy into an attempt to alert the world to a danger which Continue reading Fidel Castro Warns of Imminent Nuclear War; Admiral Mullen Threatens Iran; US-Israel Vs. Iran-Hezbollah Confrontation Builds On Multiple Fronts
Monday, August 9, 2010
Rockefeller Study Envisages Future Dictatorship Controlled By Elite
Blueprint for life under the new world order revealed: Global pandemics that kill millions, mandatory quarantines, checkpoints, biometric ID cards, and a world of top-down government control
Paul Joseph Watson
GCN Live.com
Friday, July 16, 2010
Global pandemics that kill millions, mandatory quarantines, checkpoints, biometric ID cards, and a world of top-down government control. These things are not lifted from the latest sci-fi blockbuster movie, they’re part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s vision for what the globe might be like in 15-20 years’ time under a new world order tightly controlled by the elite.
This is one of four scenarios for the future of the planet outlined in the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” a study produced in association with the Global Business Network.
Entitled “Lock Step,” the scenario depicts,”A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.”
After global H1N1 pandemic originating from geese infects 20 per cent of the global population and kills 8 million people, the economy grinds to a halt and governments impose authoritarian measures to respond to the crisis.
“During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and
restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets,” states the study.
Tellingly, even after the pandemic fades, these draconian measures remain in place and even intensify, as leaders take a “firmer grip on power” and citizens willingly sacrifice their sovereignty and privacy, leading to “a more controlled world” bossed by “paternalistic states” who impose biometric ID cards for all citizens. “Enforced cooperation” with global regulatory agreements forges the path towards global governance even as a backlash ensues following public displays of “virulent nationalism”.
Eco-fascism is also brought to the fore in the “lock step” scenario, which discusses how “high-emission” cars will be banned and every home will be forced to install solar panels by law.
The implementation of top-down authoritarianism causes entrepreneurial activity to wither and the economy stutters, but by 2025 people start to grow weary of “so much top-down control and letting leaders and authorities make choices for them” and an organized “pushback” against this tyranny begins to gather momentum.
“Even those who liked the greater stability and predictability of this world began to grow uncomfortable and
constrained by so many tight rules and by the strictness of national boundaries. The feeling lingered that sooner or later, something would inevitably upset the neat order that the world’s governments had worked so hard to establish,” the study concludes.
The important thing to understand from the scenario outlined by the Rockefeller study is that China is praised as the model for how governments globally should respond to crises. The most draconian and dictatorial policies, including mandatory quarantines, are praised in the scenario as having “saved millions of lives, stopping
the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post pandemic recovery,” while allowing people freedom of mobility is scorned as having worsened the crisis.
Ironic therefore it is that just this week, the Associated Press reported on how the Chinese government has already virtually imposed checkpoint quarantines on its poorer citizens, by “gating and locking some of its lower-income neighborhoods overnight, with police or security checking identification papers around the clock, in a throwback to an older style of control.”
The Rockefeller study is not a warning against preventing the kind of tyranny contained in this scenario from unfolding, it’s a blueprint for how globalists want to exploit global crises like bio-terror attacks and pandemics in order to completely destroy society and rebuild it under a new world order in their image.
The Rockefeller scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to a 2007 UK Ministry of Defence study which forecast that by 2035, people would have brain chips implanted, that the middle class would become revolutionary, and that society would be gripped by chaos and civil unrest as a result of increased globalization, immigration and a more authoritarian state.
It is crystal clear from reading the “Lock Step” scenario that the oppressive society portrayed in the study is not presented as an admonishment of how governments would cynically seize upon a pandemic to set up a police state and empower themselves as dictators, it’s a ringing endorsement that this approach would be the correct thing to do.
This is the post-industrial society demanded by Bilderberg luminaries like European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
This is what the globalists want – pandemics, warfare, chaos and crises that they can engineer and then exploit to lock in place a dictatorial society ruled by the elite from their ivory towers, while the citizens are reduced to impoverished, squabbling, dependent peasants tightly controlled with sophisticated big brother technology, far too concerned about where their next meal is coming from to have time to overthrow their new rulers.
Paul Joseph Watson
GCN Live.com
Friday, July 16, 2010
Global pandemics that kill millions, mandatory quarantines, checkpoints, biometric ID cards, and a world of top-down government control. These things are not lifted from the latest sci-fi blockbuster movie, they’re part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s vision for what the globe might be like in 15-20 years’ time under a new world order tightly controlled by the elite.
This is one of four scenarios for the future of the planet outlined in the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,” a study produced in association with the Global Business Network.
Entitled “Lock Step,” the scenario depicts,”A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.”
After global H1N1 pandemic originating from geese infects 20 per cent of the global population and kills 8 million people, the economy grinds to a halt and governments impose authoritarian measures to respond to the crisis.
“During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and
restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets,” states the study.
Tellingly, even after the pandemic fades, these draconian measures remain in place and even intensify, as leaders take a “firmer grip on power” and citizens willingly sacrifice their sovereignty and privacy, leading to “a more controlled world” bossed by “paternalistic states” who impose biometric ID cards for all citizens. “Enforced cooperation” with global regulatory agreements forges the path towards global governance even as a backlash ensues following public displays of “virulent nationalism”.
Eco-fascism is also brought to the fore in the “lock step” scenario, which discusses how “high-emission” cars will be banned and every home will be forced to install solar panels by law.
The implementation of top-down authoritarianism causes entrepreneurial activity to wither and the economy stutters, but by 2025 people start to grow weary of “so much top-down control and letting leaders and authorities make choices for them” and an organized “pushback” against this tyranny begins to gather momentum.
“Even those who liked the greater stability and predictability of this world began to grow uncomfortable and
constrained by so many tight rules and by the strictness of national boundaries. The feeling lingered that sooner or later, something would inevitably upset the neat order that the world’s governments had worked so hard to establish,” the study concludes.
The important thing to understand from the scenario outlined by the Rockefeller study is that China is praised as the model for how governments globally should respond to crises. The most draconian and dictatorial policies, including mandatory quarantines, are praised in the scenario as having “saved millions of lives, stopping
the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post pandemic recovery,” while allowing people freedom of mobility is scorned as having worsened the crisis.
Ironic therefore it is that just this week, the Associated Press reported on how the Chinese government has already virtually imposed checkpoint quarantines on its poorer citizens, by “gating and locking some of its lower-income neighborhoods overnight, with police or security checking identification papers around the clock, in a throwback to an older style of control.”
The Rockefeller study is not a warning against preventing the kind of tyranny contained in this scenario from unfolding, it’s a blueprint for how globalists want to exploit global crises like bio-terror attacks and pandemics in order to completely destroy society and rebuild it under a new world order in their image.
The Rockefeller scenario bears more than a passing resemblance to a 2007 UK Ministry of Defence study which forecast that by 2035, people would have brain chips implanted, that the middle class would become revolutionary, and that society would be gripped by chaos and civil unrest as a result of increased globalization, immigration and a more authoritarian state.
It is crystal clear from reading the “Lock Step” scenario that the oppressive society portrayed in the study is not presented as an admonishment of how governments would cynically seize upon a pandemic to set up a police state and empower themselves as dictators, it’s a ringing endorsement that this approach would be the correct thing to do.
This is the post-industrial society demanded by Bilderberg luminaries like European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso.
This is what the globalists want – pandemics, warfare, chaos and crises that they can engineer and then exploit to lock in place a dictatorial society ruled by the elite from their ivory towers, while the citizens are reduced to impoverished, squabbling, dependent peasants tightly controlled with sophisticated big brother technology, far too concerned about where their next meal is coming from to have time to overthrow their new rulers.
New IMF Strategy Document Charts Launch Of “Bancor” Global Currency
Highlights “potential resistance” on road from “voluntary multilateral framework” to full blown global currency
Steve Watson
GCN Live.com
Wednesday, Aug 4th, 2010
A newly published IMF strategy document calls for the implementation of a global currency, called the “bancor”, to stabilise the international monetary system, while acknowledging that only a monumental shift toward acceptance of globalism will make it possible in the short term.
The IMF blueprint, authored by Reza Moghadam, director of the IMF’s strategy, policy and review department, has stayed under the radar for three months.
However, an article on the Financial Times blog alphaville, entitled IMF blueprint for a global currency – yes really, today highlights the document and the clear strategy of the global financial body.
“…in the eyes of the IMF at least, the best way to ensure the stability of the international monetary system (post crisis) is actually by launching a global currency.” Izabella Kaminska notes.
“And that, the IMF says, is largely because sovereigns — as they stand — cannot be trusted to redistribute surplus reserves, or battle their deficits, themselves.”
A chart within the document, innocuously titled Reserve Accumulation and International Monetary Stability (PDF link), presents a stepping stone system toward a fully fledged global currency:
Beginning with a vague recommendation for “voluntary policy adjustments” to be adopted by member states, the chart moves through more and more draconian economic policies toward a long term endgame of a global currency.
The chart also plots “potential resistance” to each stepping stone from sovereign states, with a spike in the short term, followed by a lull, and then a general rise as the move toward a global currency progresses over time.
The IMF’s road to a global currency hinges on a wider use of and eventual implementation of an international monetary system based on special drawing rights (SDR), the IMF’s synthetic paper currency.
Once an SDR-based system is in place, the IMF envisages just one final step to the launch of a new global currency.
The document even gives the global currency a name, the “bancor” after John Maynard Keynes’ proposed, but never implemented, World Currency Unit of clearing.
The following section of the IMF document highlights this:
A clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders led to analysts describing the dawn of a “revolution in the global financial order.”
“We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” The clause stated.
“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph wrote at the time.
“The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” he added.
The same conclusion was drawn by the Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola, who described how the IMF is on course to be transformed into “a veritable United Nations for the global economy.”
The move has also been endorsed separately by the World Bank and the UN.
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has repeated the call for a global currency via SDR multiple times.
The introduction of a new global currency and taxation system, with an overarching regulatory body, is a key cornerstone in the move towards global government, centralized control and more power being concentrated into fewer unaccountable hands.
The IMF’s push toward this kind of system is part of the ongoing movement to empower a group of unelected central bankers with the authority to usurp state sovereignty by overseeing benchmarks for national financial governance and setting regulations for financial institutions all over the globe
Steve Watson
GCN Live.com
Wednesday, Aug 4th, 2010
A newly published IMF strategy document calls for the implementation of a global currency, called the “bancor”, to stabilise the international monetary system, while acknowledging that only a monumental shift toward acceptance of globalism will make it possible in the short term.The IMF blueprint, authored by Reza Moghadam, director of the IMF’s strategy, policy and review department, has stayed under the radar for three months.
However, an article on the Financial Times blog alphaville, entitled IMF blueprint for a global currency – yes really, today highlights the document and the clear strategy of the global financial body.
“…in the eyes of the IMF at least, the best way to ensure the stability of the international monetary system (post crisis) is actually by launching a global currency.” Izabella Kaminska notes.
“And that, the IMF says, is largely because sovereigns — as they stand — cannot be trusted to redistribute surplus reserves, or battle their deficits, themselves.”
A chart within the document, innocuously titled Reserve Accumulation and International Monetary Stability (PDF link), presents a stepping stone system toward a fully fledged global currency:
Beginning with a vague recommendation for “voluntary policy adjustments” to be adopted by member states, the chart moves through more and more draconian economic policies toward a long term endgame of a global currency.
The chart also plots “potential resistance” to each stepping stone from sovereign states, with a spike in the short term, followed by a lull, and then a general rise as the move toward a global currency progresses over time.
The IMF’s road to a global currency hinges on a wider use of and eventual implementation of an international monetary system based on special drawing rights (SDR), the IMF’s synthetic paper currency.
Once an SDR-based system is in place, the IMF envisages just one final step to the launch of a new global currency.
The document even gives the global currency a name, the “bancor” after John Maynard Keynes’ proposed, but never implemented, World Currency Unit of clearing.
The following section of the IMF document highlights this:
48. From SDR to bancor. A limitation of the SDR as discussed previously is that it is not a currency. Both the SDR and SDR-denominated instruments need to be converted eventually to a national currency for most payments or interventions in foreign exchange markets, which adds to cumbersome use in transactions.The document concludes that without a catalyst to create a sudden clamour for globalism, the implementation of a global currency will take time:
And though an SDR-based system would move away from a dominant national currency, the SDR’s value remains heavily linked to the conditions and performance of the major component countries. A more ambitious reform option would be to build on the previous ideas and develop, over time, a global currency. Called, for example, bancor in honor of Keynes, such a currency could be used as a medium of exchange—an “outside money” in contrast to the SDR which remains an “inside money”.
It is understood that some of the ideas discussed are unlikely to materialize in the foreseeable future absent a dramatic shift in appetite for international cooperation.The IMF first touted the possibility of a new global currency in March of last year. The issue was then debated at the G20 Summit in London just days later.
A clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders led to analysts describing the dawn of a “revolution in the global financial order.”
“We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” The clause stated.
“In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph wrote at the time.
“The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.” he added.
The same conclusion was drawn by the Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola, who described how the IMF is on course to be transformed into “a veritable United Nations for the global economy.”
The move has also been endorsed separately by the World Bank and the UN.
The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has repeated the call for a global currency via SDR multiple times.
The introduction of a new global currency and taxation system, with an overarching regulatory body, is a key cornerstone in the move towards global government, centralized control and more power being concentrated into fewer unaccountable hands.
The IMF’s push toward this kind of system is part of the ongoing movement to empower a group of unelected central bankers with the authority to usurp state sovereignty by overseeing benchmarks for national financial governance and setting regulations for financial institutions all over the globe
Sunday, August 8, 2010
South Ossetia remembers victims of Georgian aggression
South Ossetia remembers victims of Georgian aggression
Hundreds of people gathered overnight for a mourning ceremony in downtown Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, on the second anniversary of Georgia's attack.
The "Living light of memory" mourning ceremony and a requiem concert began in Tskhinvali at 23:35 Moscow time [19:35 GMT] on Saturday, the time when Georgian troops fired first projectiles at the city. The ceremony will continue throughout the night, and is thought to be over at about 6:00 Moscow time [2:00 GMT] on Sunday.
"They say time is a great healer, but it will never soothe the pain in our hearts. On this day, our republic and our people came under fire from those who wanted to turn all southern part of South Ossetia into desert. We will never forget it. We did not start this war, but it's no comfort to those who lost their relatives and loved ones," South Ossetian President Eduard Kokoity said.
"I ask mothers of Ossetia and Russia to forgive me for not saving the lives of your sons. We will do our best to assure that the victory, for which you've paid so dearly, is here to stay," he said.
More events are planned in South Ossetia throughout the day. The Museum of Burnt Souls will be inaugurated in the town of Khetagurovo, which sustained the most serious damage during the Georgian aggression.
At 14:00 Moscow time [11:00 GMT] flowers will be laid to the monuments of soldiers who died during the hostilities.
Long-standing tensions between Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia turned violent during a five-day war in August 2008.
The war started in the early hours of August 8 when Georgia launch a military offensive against South Ossetia, where most residents are Russian passport holders. Russia reacted swiftly expelling Georgian troops from South Ossetia and forcing them deep into Georgia amid accusations on both sides of human right abuses.
South Ossetia says over 1,500 people perished during the conflict. Russian investigators confirmed deaths of 162 South Ossetians and 48 Russian servicemen, including ten peacekeepers.
According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, a total of 655 houses in were razed to the ground and over 2,000 partially collapsed in Tskhinvali as a result of the Georgian attack.
Two weeks after the end of the war, Russia recognized both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which both split from Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The move was heavily criticized by Western powers. So far, only Venezuela, Nicaragua and the tiny island nation of Nauru have followed suit.
TSKHLINVALI, August 8 (RIA Novosti)
Robert Scheer: "Chelsea Clinton's marriage to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler"
Married to the Clinton Mob
By Robert Scheer
August 3, 2010
Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford. Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won’t follow in the footsteps of his financier father, “Fast-Talkin’ Eddie,” as they called him back in Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.
Anyway, Chelsea also worked at a hedge fund, her mother dabbled in banking shenanigans in her Whitewater days and father Bill’s radical deregulation made it a lot easier for financial plunderers to stay on the right side of the law. So the Clintons and the Mezvinskys have a lot in common. I hope their children will do better, and I was going to simply wish them well until I read Tina Brown’s paean to power, “Why America Needed Chelsea’s Wedding,” in the trend-chasing Daily Beast, which she edits.
In what I assume was not self-parody, Brown stated that “the Clintons are enjoying political rosy-glow syndrome. In the light of what’s happened since—two grueling wars, the implosion of debt, 14 million unemployed … Chelsea’s wedding allowed us to remember all that prosperity, those continuous Clinton surpluses.” But not, as I the party pooper must add, the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which enabled the financial bubble that caused those 14 million to be unemployed.
But don’t dare tag Hillary with anything her husband brought about or even for what Brown calls the “two grueling wars” which Obama inherited and which Hillary voted for and now pushes as energetically as do the top hawks in the Pentagon. “No sticky wars then,” Brown writes, referring to the good old days of the reign of Bill. “Meanwhile, Hillary, pummeled and reviled during the campaign year of Obama worship, is now the popular member of Bam’s administration.”
OK, so I have gone on too long about a column by one preening society writer, but it is irritating that the Clinton parents are getting off the hook while Obama, who is guilty of relying too heavily on Clintonista alums for policy direction, is somehow scorned. Without President Clinton turning the economy over to Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, there would have been no financial meltdown. Obama’s cardinal error was bringing Summers and another Clinton acolyte, Timothy Geithner, back into power.
Clinton nostalgia is dangerous nonsense, and for Democrats to go down that road is to avoid serious assessment of their own party’s role in the economic debacle that haunts the nation.
Read the full article at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/married_to_the_clin... /
By Robert Scheer
August 3, 2010
Out of respect for privacy, even concerning famous people, I wasn’t going to write about the marriage of Chelsea Clinton to a Goldman Sachs alum and budding hedge-fund hustler with the resources to buy a $4 million loft so soon after graduating from Stanford. Hopefully Marc Mezvinsky won’t follow in the footsteps of his financier father, “Fast-Talkin’ Eddie,” as they called him back in Iowa, a former Democratic House member who just completed a five-year federal sentence for dozens of fraud felonies.
Anyway, Chelsea also worked at a hedge fund, her mother dabbled in banking shenanigans in her Whitewater days and father Bill’s radical deregulation made it a lot easier for financial plunderers to stay on the right side of the law. So the Clintons and the Mezvinskys have a lot in common. I hope their children will do better, and I was going to simply wish them well until I read Tina Brown’s paean to power, “Why America Needed Chelsea’s Wedding,” in the trend-chasing Daily Beast, which she edits.
In what I assume was not self-parody, Brown stated that “the Clintons are enjoying political rosy-glow syndrome. In the light of what’s happened since—two grueling wars, the implosion of debt, 14 million unemployed … Chelsea’s wedding allowed us to remember all that prosperity, those continuous Clinton surpluses.” But not, as I the party pooper must add, the Financial Services Modernization Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which enabled the financial bubble that caused those 14 million to be unemployed.
But don’t dare tag Hillary with anything her husband brought about or even for what Brown calls the “two grueling wars” which Obama inherited and which Hillary voted for and now pushes as energetically as do the top hawks in the Pentagon. “No sticky wars then,” Brown writes, referring to the good old days of the reign of Bill. “Meanwhile, Hillary, pummeled and reviled during the campaign year of Obama worship, is now the popular member of Bam’s administration.”
OK, so I have gone on too long about a column by one preening society writer, but it is irritating that the Clinton parents are getting off the hook while Obama, who is guilty of relying too heavily on Clintonista alums for policy direction, is somehow scorned. Without President Clinton turning the economy over to Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Lawrence Summers, there would have been no financial meltdown. Obama’s cardinal error was bringing Summers and another Clinton acolyte, Timothy Geithner, back into power.
Clinton nostalgia is dangerous nonsense, and for Democrats to go down that road is to avoid serious assessment of their own party’s role in the economic debacle that haunts the nation.
Read the full article at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/married_to_the_clin... /
Iran Announces Acquisition of S-300 Air Defense Systems
According to Iran’s Fars news agency, Iran has obtained four S-300PT air-defense missile systems.
Fars claimed that this report was first revealed last year by another news agency—one linked to Hezbollah—and that Iran never disputed the story. The report claimed that two of the four systems came from Belarus; details about the source of the other two systems were not provided and have not been reported elsewhere since the Fars claim. Belarus has denied any involvement in such a deal.
In fact, the story begins well before last year. According to a report by Mark Harrington from February 2008 in Jane’s International Defence Review, Belarus and Iran were then finalizing a major arms deal, conceived at an exhibition in Minsk in May 2007 attended by Iranian President Ahmadinejad and other senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders.
Harrington’s sources enumerated many details. For instance, Iran was to purchase two surplus S-300PT (also known as SA-10 “Grumble”) systems, composed of two types of Fakel-class missiles, which had been recently deployed around Minsk. These were to be broken down and transported by air to Iran, covered as ordinary cargo, along with a full complement of spare parts and Belarussian training and maintenance personnel. In addition, at the time of Harrington’s report, Belarussian personnel had already completed the repair and upgrade of two other S-300PT systems already possessed by Iran since the late 1990s. Belarus’ asking price for the entire package totaled $140 million USD. All this was supposedly done without the knowledge of Russia, the original manufacturer.
U.S. intelligence is aware of the threat of the emergence of Iranian S-300 systems. Another Jane’s report highlighted a November 2008 conference at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, titled “Iranian Surface-to-Air Missile Systems.” Though the content of that meeting is classified, one day of the conference was devoted to a case-by-case review of Iranian systems, which included a 45-minute session titled “SA-20 SAM Systems.” The SA-20 is a more modern, longer-range variant of the S-300 system. Its inclusion in a briefing otherwise focused on known Iranian systems is indicative of a belief—already present in 2008—that the advanced system was likely to soon become operational.
The Heritage Foundation’s Ariel Cohen has explained that Iranian deployment of the S-300 system would be a “game-changer in the Middle East.” Iran’s existing air defense system is outdated and unable to defend against airstrikes targeting its nuclear facilities, but an Iranian-manned S-300 network could significantly restrict the West’s military options—even more than they already are. For example, Israel does not possess aircraft with stealth technology; the S-300 system was designed to defend against primarily conventional warplanes, and its possession by Iran could severely hamper Israel’s ability to strike effectively.
Iran’s announcement creates more questions than answers. If Iran has obtained even the early SA-10 variant of the S-300 system, its air defense capabilities have evolved considerably almost overnight. If Iran obtains the more modern SA-20 variant, American contingency strike plans will surely become even more limited because of that system’s greatly enhanced range, survivability, and capability. However, the intelligence on this subject remains patchy, and in the past, Western planners have demonstrated a great capability to overwhelm Soviet- and Russian- made anti-aircraft missile systems.
Nick Krueger is the Jordan Saunders Intern in the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Dangerous Drilling: BP is at it AGAIN
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