EASY READING CULTURE OF LIFE NEWS: UNDERSTANDING COLLAPSING SYSTEMS « Culture of Life News 2
One of my readers, J.H., kindly sent me a book, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects: Dmitry Orlov. This book expanded on a famous powerpoint presentation by Dimitry Orlov. Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US | Energy Bulletin has the entire powerpoint presentation. Below are two of Orlov’s slides:
The emblem here is from the Golden Era of Cooperation between the Communists and the US/NATO/G7 empire. Starting with the right-winger, Nixon, cooperation with the communists was seen as a key to expanding our empire, winning over the very alienated third world nations, getting our pathetic selves out of Vietnam in one piece and stopping OPEC.
We befriended China to counter Russian power in Asia, particularly in Vietnam. The Russian need for US wheat and corn due to collapsing agricultural output was our first opening to the USSR government. Various peaceful space missions were suggested by the Soviet government and the US, struggling to fund NASA, thought this was a good idea. Thus, the Apollo and Skylab projects were successfully launched.
Western Europe needed natural gas and Germany eagerly began negotiating with the Soviet leaders to extend gas lines from Eastern Europe. France was already deep in these projects, playing a successful triangulation game with the US and the Soviet Union, incidentally, becoming the hub for third world diplomacy thanks to hosting the US/Soviet/Vietnam peace talks.
All of this pretty much collapsed when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Like a poisoned thorn, this poorest of almost all third world nations is rich in psychological fury and power . Bereft of nearly all things that sustain societies, the super-poor of Afghanistan are super-rich in determination, independence [of the sort that is filed under ‘freedom means having nothing left to lose’] and high religious fervor.
When left alone, countries with high religious or political fervor usually slide into deep poverty and the population ends up passive/aggressive. This happens when the religious/political True Believers take power and crush all opposition via cruel, blunt means. When censorship rises and political or religious activities are crushed in the name of making a system homogenous, all systems rot and die.
This is due to the necessity of having a multi-cultural/multi-philosophical system if one wishes to ‘be nimble and quick.’ Ideology of any sort or system is, in contrast, quick sand, not faster in speed. Below is another slide from Orlov’s excellent presentation:
One problem with Olov’s book as well as his analysis is, he thinks the entire Russian system collapsed and ceased to exist. And when it rebuilt, it did so organically and under the hammer of hostile Western powers which viewed the collapse of Russia as an excellent looting opportunity.
He did cover this somewhat in his book but mentions Putin only twice. The book was written in 2008 which means, not only was it out of date in this regard [I have been writing about Putin for more than 5 years now!] but also only mentions him because Putin puts into pithy language, observations that are quite amusing. But not recognizing him as the Chief Architect of the New Russian Empire is a major failing in this book.
Orlov’s comparisons between Russia’s ‘make do/barter society set up by the loss of value in the currency from 1919-1999 and the US money-oriented social system is a very good analysis. I know, from my own travels and experiences, the dollar or the DM in the Soviet Union had great utility. People were quite happy to get their hands on these since they could be used to buy things in the stores set up for government officials.
The USSR had a dual shopping system: one for insiders and then the state system for outsiders. The insider shopping system was based on imports using capital from the Russian military/industrial complex international sales and later, from sales of energy to Western Europe. As international finance flowed more and more into the USSR, the differential between the special stores using only foreign currencies versus the ones that accepted rubles grew and grew until they were totally opposite each other.
A dynamic exists whereby a system, when it reaches any extreme horizon of any sort, will suddenly ‘flip’ or switch to its opposite. For example, stores for only the elites will either be looted or the elites will be killed. Or, in most cases, both happen. The total collapse of the Soviet system didn’t kill off the elites, they either fled the country or switched themselves into a new guise. So, instead of a revolution, Russia bungled along, being steadily looted, until Putin took over and began to eliminate both dissent internally as well as ruthlessly eliminating, via assassination, the looters who thought their money would protect them from the former KGB leader.
For knowledge is still power. Putin knew a lot since he had control of the vast Soviet-era information gathering systems and the allegiance of the most of the core of the secret police. Using them as his main tool, coupled with a blazing sense of patriotism towards Mother Russia, Putin was able to pull Russia away from total collapse and will be hailed as one of Russia’s greatest leaders.
Orlov’s book gives a totally wrong conclusion to his narrative. He thinks that Russia pulled out due to the lack of private ownership which led to people simply looting public systems or living off of them for an indefinite period of time and this sustained them when there was no economy and therefore, since the US has a much more limited public system, we will fare worse. Especially, he derides the politically active people by declaring, they had no solutions and therefore, were wasting their time. Everyone was busy trying to find food, grow food or locate things.
But not everyone was busy doing this! Vladimir Putin was rebuilding the State from within the predecessor to the KGB, the FSB. Putin was very, very politically active throughout his life and definitely, this picked up, not collapsed, with the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev . The Chechnya rebellion was a total disaster for the Russian central government until Putin took over power in the famous 2000 New Year’s celebration where a drunk Yeltsin suddenly resigned due to Putin holding a great deal of private information about Yeltsin and his corrupt family.
Using his political and police connections, fusing this with great patriotism and a belief that Russia should be powerful, not weak, and a burning desire to actually change the course of history led Putin to victory. Orlov’s book doesn’t explain how power was reassembled and how the gangs and looters who operated with impunity during the collapse were all brought to justice or eliminated ruthlessly.
Obviously, even when the military collapsed, the secret police didn’t collapse, they reorganized around the dynamic Putin who was exposed to German influences during the East German regime’s heyday. Putin wasn’t a back-water provincial but an internationalist who had many contacts in the West. When East Germany merged with West Germany, the Germans who worked with Putin in the past were still very much in Berlin only now, they had free access to all Western systems and were now involved in German politics. Putin used these systems and contacts as a springboard to the West.
I differ greatly from both Mr. Kunstler’s style of ‘Oh my god! Suburbia will collapse!’ and Mr. Orlov’s ‘Oh well, forget politics, they don’t matter!’ dual belief systems. I have lived on the edge of capitalism and lived in suburbia, the countryside, isolated mountain observatories and the biggest cities on earth. I found, for example, that when NYC was going bankrupt, my political power grew. It did not shrink.
I had enough power to cause a lot of headaches for other political rivals, for example. I could carve out places of great power via organizing the community to do simple things like street patrols. I could control my own environment to an immense degree. As the State retreated and gave up, I moved in and took over.
If the State refused to light the streets, I took over that! If the State left us at the mercy of armed gangs, I formed my own ‘gang’ and took over a reasonable area, about 50 square blocks of Brooklyn. Many neighborhoods were reduced to smoldering ruins while mine, in the middle of this destruction, improved. The City came back from bankruptcy and retook these public sectors and I moved to suburbia. Which I didn’t like at all and so, moved to my mountain where I am Queen of all that I survey.
Giving up is stupid. Those who organize and even more importantly, take over the SOCIAL systems abandoned by either the government or capitalists, become VERY POWERFUL. I cannot emphasize this enough! Anyone counseling us to ‘give up and survive’ is a fool. The future belongs exactly to whoever is willing to organize the masses and provide services. This often falls to religious organizations which is why the Church was so successful as the Roman welfare state collapsed.
And organizers of armed bands who could compel devotion or distribute wealth and control lands ended up as the creators of a new aristocracy that lasted for a thousand years! The organizers of any collapsed state gain tremendous powers and control of tremendous resources including the all-important labor pools.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida
“One thing seems probable to me,” said Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, in September 2008. As a result of the crisis, “the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.” You don’t have to strain too hard to see the financial crisis as the death knell for a debt-ridden, overconsuming, and underproducing American empire—the fall long prophesied by Paul Kennedy and others.
Big international economic crises—the crash of 1873, the Great Depression—have a way of upending the geopolitical order, and hastening the fall of old powers and the rise of new ones. In The Post-American World (published some months before the Wall Street meltdown), Fareed Zakaria argued that modern history’s third great power shift was already upon us—the rise of the West in the 15th century and the rise of America in the 19th century being the two previous sea changes.
But Zakaria added that this transition is defined less by American decline than by “the rise of the rest.” We’re to look forward to a world economy, he wrote, “defined and directed from many places and by many peoples.” That’s surely true. Yet the course of events since Steinbrück’s remarks should give pause to those who believe the mantle of global leadership will soon be passed. The crisis has exposed deep structural problems, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. Europe’s model of banking has proved no more resilient than America’s, and China has shown that it remains every bit the codependent partner of the United States. The Dow, down more than a third last year, was actually among the world’s better-performing stock-market indices. Foreign capital has flooded into the U.S., which apparently remains a safe haven, at least for now, in uncertain times.
>It is possible that the United States will enter a period of accelerating relative decline in the coming years, though that’s hardly a foregone conclusion—a subject I’ll return to later. What’s more certain is that the recession, particularly if it turns out to be as long and deep as many now fear, will accelerate the rise and fall of specific places within the U.S.—and reverse the fortunes of other cities and regions.
This article ranges through history and is a very interesting read. But as usual, has many assumptions based on generalized reading. For example, it talks about how manufacturing left the Northeast and moved elsewhere, abandoning all the Hill Towns of New England. But this is not entirely true. Yes, many factories did leave but most of the towns out here still had industry. The retraction of this industrial base after Reagan opened the doors to imports has been staggering. Nearly all of the industries here struggled for 20 years to adapt to the ‘new competition’ and finally, just simply gave up.
Towns in farming communities in Europe and America gave up because they became huge slave estates where the owners didn’t live with their farms and instead, used illegal aliens and slave-style machines using cheap energy, to run massive farming enterprises. Since no one needed the services of all the people who populate villages, these vanished. Lawyers, undertakers, sales people, preachers, doctors, etc all vanished. They are vanishing from my own village! We have virtually no stores left and they struggle to survive.
Since we are near a big city, the lawyers, doctors, etc all practice in the City, not in the Village. So, even though we have these people for neighbors, we don’t have access to their services here, we must travel to the City to get it.
The Atlantic article talks about how our all northern industries are being relocated to either the former-slave states that make unionizing impossible or to foreign shores where wages are very low. The stresses between the slave states versus the free states will have yet another turn of the screw in history. For, even today, the free states fund the slave states in the form of Federal taxes that have drained wealth from the north and moved it south, using the central government as a leverage for displacing economic benefits.
Free trade enabled this process to speed up. Competition with non-unionized, police states has undermined unionized, democratic states. The global world supports despotism and uniformity while local politics and economics is various and self-sustaining.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida
But another crucial aspect of the crisis has been largely overlooked, and it might ultimately prove more important. Because America’s tendency to overconsume and under-save has been intimately intertwined with our postwar spatial fix—that is, with housing and suburbanization—the shape of the economy has been badly distorted, from where people live, to where investment flows, to what’s produced. Unless we make fundamental policy changes to eliminate these distortions, the economy is likely to face worsening handicaps in the years ahead.
Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth.
Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.
But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required.
Cities operate only if the surrounding countryside is also operational. The suburban power structure deliberately starved the cities. And made fun of urban culture. And basically, reversed the flow, the poor in the cities would have to commute to the suburbs to work for the suburbanites who worked in the cities! For most of the spending by the suburban culture was in the suburbs, not the cities! Instead of going to the City to shop, the working masses shopped outside of the cities, also starving them of tax revenues in this area, too.
What created the ‘sun belt boom’ was two things: government spending starting with FDR, who was a Democrat and back then, the South was mostly Democratic. And the invention of air conditioning. First, in the dry southwestern deserts, the invention of the ‘swamp box’ made the indoors bearable in summer. And the air conditioner, which removes moisture, then allowed the humid South to thrive.
The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida
If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem.
And while homeownership has some social benefits—a higher level of civic engagement is one—it is costly to the economy. The economist Andrew Oswald has demonstrated that in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.
As homeownership rates have risen, our society has become less nimble: in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were nearly twice as likely to move in a given year as they are today. Last year fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the Census Bureau started tracking address changes, in the late 1940s. This sort of creeping rigidity in the labor market is a bad sign for the economy, particularly in a time when businesses, industries, and regions are rising and falling quickly.
Homeowning is not for everyone. Someone has to fix things. The mania for ‘fix ’em up’ has been a good force, I believe. It increases job skills. It also increases the attachment to a social system. Renters are very hard to organize for saving a community. Easy to organize to start a system that controls the rent. Rent control for NYC, for an example, has been a total disaster and led to the loss of apartments by the hundreds of thousands via landlords either abandoning them or the tenants destroying them.
Tenants tend to be quite destructive, in fact. They will clog toilets repeatedly rather than learn how to do things properly. They will leave windows open so rain comes in and ruins the floors. They scratch things, break things, etc. Only if a landlord has the legal right to collect for damage, can they make a profit. And easy eviction laws are also necessary. These can and are abused by landlords. For example, a child of mine was renting in Seattle. There was an earthquake. The landlord blamed her for the damage! But waited until she moved out of state to hit her with a lawsuit, knowing she was on the opposite side of the continent and he could give her lots of trouble in court until she paid.
So I much prefer buying for a wide variety of reasons. But the problem of difficulty in selling is due to bubbles: bubbles are always local. So people can’t move to bubble states easily from non-bubble states. This is why avoiding bubbles is so important. The principal value matters! People were allowed to bid up prices using various tricks and lies. This, in turn, burdened the banking system and the social systems with inflated capital costs which can’t be undone without causing the whole economic system to collapse.
This is why avoiding bubbles is life an death on nearly every level. They are fun, going up. But distort the basic economic system and creates more problems than they solve. They endanger not just economic systems but social systems. And can cause political collapse. And the only way to resolve a political collapse is to work like crazy to launch a new political system. Orlov counsels giving up and letting outsiders do this. The Atlantic article assumes that the US people will spontaneously come up with a new system.
I say, we will try to avoid this for as long as possible. We will inch further and further into a police state that is unsustainable due to the high overhead of our police and military that are gold plates while utterly and totally inefficient and incompetent due to too much easy money and too much ‘fat.’ Literally, fat, for that matter. Anyone talking about how we transitioned from the Great Depression must mention WWII. And it was a major war inside of Russia that brought Putin into power.
Nationalists who are patriotic tend to be the ones who pull nations out of tailspins. Sometimes, they are utterly evil like Hitler or Mao. But they succeed due to their anchoring their systems into defending their own homelands. Good people do this, too: if they are truly patriotic, they win in the long run. Good or evil, patriotism wins over ‘give up’ or ‘sell out to foreign powers.’ The US elites are ‘sold out to foreign powers’ and happily evade taxes, move offshore and import semi-slave labor to wreck the lives of citizens who can’t do all this. They can do this with impunity until the People realize the major political parties are corrupt. And the leaders, traitors. Then, we have a revolution or a coup run by patriots.
A coup where the military simply openly steals won’t work, by the way. There has to be some sort of good social services given in return for power. This is why the anarchists and libertarians will never control any power.
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EMAIL ADDRESS:
emeinel@fairpoint.net
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EMS NEWS
P.O. BOX 483
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Make checks out to ‘Elaine Supkis’
Culture of Life News 
Checks! Do they still have them in Europe? An Überweisung will work in Germany, though.
Just wanted to know why you’re asking for donations. Is it those high wordpress.com fees? 😉
I spend many precious hours researching, writing and in general, hauling around the place to make this blog possible. And yes, there are fees I pay, and wear and tear on the computers, etc.
I’ve subscribed and look forward to reading you.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
I do not know what to think about above article from author of the same
book. It’s scary.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
link in not working, from some reason there is double forward slash at the end of link.
I have been reading Elaine for years now, and she manages to write 1-3 supurb articles a day! I don’t know how she cares for her disabled husband and runs her farm (for it is a farm in all but name) at the same time.
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If you are going to donate money, give it to someone you learned something from. Elaine has taught us all much about our world that our society never wanted us to know, and her proven track record in forecasting what will happen is beyond critique at this point.
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There are those who make millions while misleading everyone who reads them. Any money given to Elaine will be well spent and well deserved.
For years? Interesting! Can you please leave a link to other sites she was writing on? The archives here only go back to late 2008.
Culture of Life News
Culture of Life News II
are my two previous blogs. Both times, I was forced to move due to technical limitations of the previous servers.
I have published over 1,000 long articles, none of which are ‘look at this!’ stuff where all the text is lifted. And I have 1,000 illustrations and cartoons, too.
In reply to the first comment.
It’s better to ask you for something then to steal it from you.
Just my opinion. Not to be used as trading advice.
Speaking of which, can all those articles fit on a DVD or CD? I need a hard copy to give to my sons. I don’t want them to be ignorant like I was.
«Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. »
Well, many people have looked at this centrifugal process of offshoring by which “production” moves ever farther away.
But I have also noticed that there is the converse process, “headquarterization” (horrible word I know) where a centripetal force bring headquarters (courts) to concentrate, and Elaine has noticed it too:
Since no one needed the services of all the people who populate villages, these vanished. Lawyers, undertakers, sales people, preachers, doctors, etc all vanished. They are vanishing from my own village! We have virtually no stores left and they struggle to survive.
«Since we are near a big city, the lawyers, doctors, etc all practice in the City, not in the Village. So, even though we have these people for neighbors, we don’t have access to their services here, we must travel to the City to get it.»
This has happened on a global scale, and the industrial policy of the right in the USA and UK has been to run with both forces, sending production to anti-union states and emerging countries, and attracting headquarters to the financial and media centres of the west (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London).
To some this has worked (too bad about the recent implosion of the main financial centres of the west). But not for long anyhow…
Unfortunately there is a fundamental difference between moving production from the centre to the periphery and administration from the periphery to the centre in the same country and across countries.
Headquarters/courts/capitals live off the tribute/surplus of the periphery.
Within the same countries factories in Georgia send all their profits/tribute/surplus to headquarters because headquarters own them, and can enforce their will as they are in the same jurisdiction.
But across countries that does not work so well, especially when the periphery is actually a very ancient, cultured, old state. So far factories or cubicle farms around Wenzhou or Bangalore send their profits to their owners in headquarters in New York because they still need investment and know how transfer and brand marketing from them.
But the Chinese and the Indians are not stupid, and they are well backed by their own government. Sooner rather than later they will get rid of their very, very expensive headquarters in New York and produce and make money for themselves.
This has already started to happen on a fairly massive scale…
Also, the Chinese and Indians do not need the services of Wall Street or the City to raise/sell/trade financial capital; they have Bombay, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and it is in Asia that cash flows are generated, where the money is. Financial centres cannot be far from where the money comes, unless they are small tax and security havens.
Very valuable post today, Elaine. Your sane, wise, yet radical understanding is a good book-end, along with the Archdruid’s blog, to all the semi-informed, dire prognostications on the web. Yes, most have a piece of the “truth”, but it is very difficult to know for sure which way events will unfold. An historical perspective, when deep enough, is illuminating, and in short supply these days. Thanks!
I’ve also been pleased to find that two people commenting on JGH’s and Jay Hanson’s sites (and maybe here as well) live within an hours’ drive (by car-we’ll see how long it takes by horse in a few years). We’re meeting in-person (Eastern CT if anyone else wants to join us) soon-who knows, perhaps a grass-roots beginning of our new hub?
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ELAINE HERE: Yes, I live very close to where Vermont, Mass. and NY come together and plan to someday have an ‘event’ on my mountain but not now! Winter is ending and we go straight into the worst season of the year: MUD SEASON. It is hard to get to my place except if you have very good 4wd with high, high clearance or a tractor.
Elaine:
part of the article text is off the left edge on this article…When I went to the enlarged version, I was able to read it ok. I have one of those nasty Windows computers. Thanks..
Have you seen the movie Valkerie? It is about exactly this issue, but applied to WWII Germany when the German patriots realized that their war leader needed to be executed and their country returned to the people.
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Unless we listen to what Elaine is saying and Americans awaken from their iPod stupor Hegel will be correct.
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“What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles”. – George Wilhelm Hegel
I disagree with Hegel.
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People HAVE acted on principles in the past. It is only “governments” (not tribes, clans, families, etc.) that NEVER act on principles.
came up from some reading a russian was designing a system of trade by enlisting 2000 companys which could thereby list products for trade… sounds kind of crazy but with a sophisticated computer system and more users… you mite be able to get a rating system of payment in commodities and home ‘local’ labor ‘manufacturing and communication need scale’… so that your work represents your rating and a higher rating means better trade value ‘skills and efficiency’ and we could all be free working for ourselves doing what we really want and are capable of… we could get paid in virtuacredit
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http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-53565441845289277&q=nuclear+fision&total=185&start=10&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
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change is not for morons
Putin and his comrades are the looters too…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_billionaires_by_net_worth
“came up from some reading a russian was designing a system of trade by enlisting 2000 companys which could thereby list products for trade… ” LOL, russians, trying to invent what’s already invented.. and their stock market lost 80%, certainly a sign of imperial economic power. Gimme a break 🙂
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if the pandas eat all the bamboo noone knows how to grow trees… at least we are sure that trees exist somewhere, so the pandas ARE still under good management…
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should have fuking sold the pandas to someone who can take care of them
February 13, 2009
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“IMF confirms plan to sell 403 tonnes gold”…
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http://www.thedailybell.com/index.asp
like at what strata of society does being able to pay your bills seem like a devious scheme that hurts real people
Things getting worse..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/4623525/Failure-to-save-East-Europe-will-lead-to-worldwide-meltdown.html
“Not even Russia can easily cover the $500bn dollar debts of its oligarchs while oil remains near $33 a barrel. The budget is based on Urals crude at $95. Russia has bled 36pc of its foreign reserves since August defending the rouble.
“This is the largest run on a currency in history,” said Mr Jen. “
IMF confirms plan to sell 403 tonnes gold
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uhhhh really
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403’tons’ x 2000’pounds’ x 16’ounces’ x 940’dollars’ = 12,122,240,000
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thats almost as much as we paid for the Louisiana territory
http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE51E0BS20090215
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californias going to do whatever it takes to not print garbage IOUs to fuel a ‘mother of all black markets’ black market
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thanks arnie
David noticed:
The page came up the same way on my mac.
On a whim, I tried selecting the text, thinking I could paste it into another document and read it. As I selected text and moved the cursor left, the rest of the page scrolled into view. Very odd. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Try it. Maybe it will work on your computer, too.
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ELAINE HERE: Yikes! WordPress was messing around with systems today and many queer things happened. I hope this settles down. As it is, I have to keep logging in and it won’t remember my ID. This is pissing me off a bit.
“Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.”
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Yes, this is all true…especially for my family…daughter drives nearly 100 miles/day to her job. Our area was,until outsourcing,a thriving industrial area…now a lot of that’s gone…mainly waitress or fast food or clerical, and a shrinking number of professional jobs; doctors, dentists and lawyers who are aging out with the rest of us permanent baby boomer residents. As soon as children graduate high school, they move on. In the local restaurant where we eat, only aging baby boomers.
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We own rental property (thankfully near a major interstate and lake recreation) most of our working age tenants use our area as a bedroom community…great living, and good to educate kids, but they too have to travel the interstate to find work.
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Son who just graduated college is setting up his own specialized business in medium sized nearby city…our local town is dying. For our family, owning rent houses in our location is a burden…we know that as fuel prices rise, if no industry is revived here, eventually, tenants will be difficult to find…Also, local property taxes are climbing as federal money to states and local governments dries up. On tenant uses most of his Social Security check to pay his rent…and keeps on working doing custom upholstery work in his basement to earn a living…no savings…times are tough for working people.
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Still, I often consider that most of our tenants are better off than we are….no property taxes, repairs, insurance expenses, and they can move on to where opportunities exist and are growing.
Blissix said:
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“But the Chinese and the Indians are not stupid, and they are well backed by their own government. Sooner rather than later they will get rid of their very, very expensive headquarters in New York and produce and make money for themselves. This has already started to happen on a fairly massive scale…”
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My wife is a corporate credit manager. Her company has changed from being an American producer to just an importer of Chinese goods. She says that her accounts tell her that the Chinese are already calling them, offering to sell containers full of product at half price, with any label the customer wants printed and applied to the products.
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American outsourcers will soon come home with their tails between their legs and their asses dragging, minus their machinery and I will laugh…ha ha ha, and our elites will go hat in hand to China begging money to operate what’s left of their corporations, and some new Chinese-style rules will apply to their business decisions…ha ha ha.
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On the positive side of all of this decline, I know of a local lumber producer who is also a furniture factory owner, and the guy believes in America. He has his crews working 4 days per week producing lumber, treating it against rot, and stacking it.
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He is also going to have his factory keep producing furniture and storing it in abandoned warehouses in our town…probably for the next couple of years…until this economy shakes itself out.
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When things do eventually turn around…our local businessman will have lots and lots of cheaply produced furniture to sell, at hugely inflated prices under the new devalued currency…and might make a fortune doing this…don’t know where his money is coming from right now…he is related to old money though…and knows people with old money.
Also,
while thinking about this, in this economy, investing in real goods might be a better business decision than putting money in gold or something else that might evaporate in a puff of bad wind. At least, this guy can go to a warehouse an look at his wealth…and it is real.
Understand that Russia is a nation and USA is a large and extensive colony, then you can apply this to Orlov’s analysis, and many of his points:
USA ethnic makeup is like a Yugo
No one will help you if you are broke
Ideologies are outdated
«On the positive side of all of this decline, I know of a local lumber producer who is also a furniture factory owner, and the guy believes in America. He has his crews working 4 days per week producing lumber, treating it against rot, and stacking it.»
That’s part of the past and future of USA exports — exporting natural resources that don’t require a lot of oil to extract or cultivate.
September 11th, 2008–America’s Economic 9/11?
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“…Then I saw another angel descend from heaven who shouted with a mighty voice: ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! For she has become a dwelling for demons and every evil spirit…All the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries…The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her…But now the music of harpists and musicians, pipers and trumpeters will never be heard in her again, nor will any worker of any trade or even the sound of a millstone ever be found in her again…Woe! Woe to you, great city, you mighty city of Babylon…For in one hour your doom has come…”
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Book of Revelations, Ch 18
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In an admission stunning for its frankness (and particularly given the fact it originated with a politician whose country is held prisoner by foreign, criminal interests) Rep. Paul Kanjorski, (D, Penn) Chairman of the House’s Capitol Markets Subcommittee recently admitted on C-SPAN that the current economic problems faced by–not just the United States, but indeed the entire world–were the result of an “electronic run on the bank” that resulted in the hemorrhaging of $550 billion dollars in just “an hour or 2”.
=========
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The idea that Israel would do such a thing–whether it be the terror attacks on 9/11/2001 or the financial attacks on 9/11/2008–should be no surprise to those even vaguely familiar with the Jewish state’s well-documented history of false flag attacks in creating certain pre-desired political outcomes. Whether it is the myriad of bombings, shootings and assassinations throughout the world engineered by Israel and then blamed on “Ahab the Arab” for the last 60+ years, there are events such as her deliberate attack on the USS Liberty June 8, 1967 resulting in the deaths of 34 American servicemen, the Lavon affair any many others proving that Israel is more than ready, willing and able to dirty her hands in the dirtiest business imaginable. Anyone still doubting this should sit down and talk with the 5 Mossad agents arrested on 9/11 as they sat cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers, an event they said on Israeli TV they were sent “to document” after being released by then-Justice Department Official Michael Chertoff.
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=======
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http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/september-11th-2008-america%E2%80%99s-economic-911/
Let me guess. Bin Laden did it.
pardon the non clarification to the last statement post saying that property taxes are deductible without saying “deductible to those who take standasrd deduction”……
and your not noticing that says something about you being an itemizer………
“By way of deception, thou shalt do war” ~ (motto of Mossad according to ex-Mossad operative, Victor Ostrovsky)
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With friends like these who needs enemies, eh?
On Friday the 13th, the new director of national intelligence told Congress on that the global economic turmoil and the instability it could ignite had outpaced terrorism as the most urgent threat facing the United States.
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The crisis that began in American markets has already “increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global economy,” the intelligence chief, Dennis Blair, said. “The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests,” he said.
Read @ http://tinyurl.com/aa42uk
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This is THE GOOD NEWS. Finally someone in authority and with “intelligence” is getting it. ZERO CREDIBILITY is a bigger threat than all the booga-booga in the world. Sadly, a self-inflicted situation. Can you imagine if the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan had been spent at home instead?
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Now for THE BAD NEWS. Both Chinese and U.S. real-estate companies are increasingly organizing tour groups of Chinese citizens looking to buy depreciating American homes and businesses, according to USA Today. These trips are a growing trend: cash-rich Chinese citizens with little investment opportunities in their home countries are seeking bargain properties in the largest and most open market in the world. Read @ http://tinyurl.com/dhu8og
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The Chinese will hyperinlflate America with US dollars before they become worthless. Everyone askes, what will the Chinese do if America defaults on their debt? Answer: They will buy America before that happens. That’s the most likely scenario. And you can thank your elite for this. If you were on the other side of the fence and owed money, you too would do the same.
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“Very little is written about what will happen when all the dollars, built up as foreign central bank and private holdings, get spent. Indeed, we believe that not only will the dollars get spent, but this spending will have massive inflationary implications for America.” —Richard Benson
This page conveniently links together pictures of B Obama, M Obama, G Bush, L Bush, Cheney, B and H Clinton and Prince William etc, etc, giving the Satanic signal.
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http://www.atlanteanconspiracy.com/2009/02/coincidence-anyone.html
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Is the really so hard for everyone to understand? Did public school really dull our thinking so far as to not be able to think clearly?
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Maybe that is too blunt and I should tell a fairy tale.
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One upon a time there was a happy world where groups of people cooperated with each other and formed families and societies. Every generation worked hard to improve life for the next.
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Then one group found out that if they worshiped death, power and themselves they could rule the others.
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The End.
For the idyllic society that is bent on improving everyone’s lives…
Well this must have happened before colonization of the Americas
interesting as hell as usual…. i didn’t understand milo or simon…love revelations naturally,…and not convinced at all that israel was responsible for 911 terror or the financial attacks….but what do i know the world is too wierd for me….lets see GK onto some satanic signals too!!!! actually love the fairy tale. so ok i will “research” satanic conspiricies. oh yes. someone mentioned a website called the druids too and i found it! looking forward to learning more about all this. druids. satan signing….is this like the hookem horns signal by university of texas? well my taxes need to be done by wednesday. i just don’t see george bush as being connected with satan….goofy perhaps but not satan surely. i always thought george seemed out of his league but basically meaning well. obama?
After clicking on the book linked by Elaine,
“Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects: Dmitry Orlov”
I found some interesting data
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oh come on! the pictures of satanic signals???? i figured satan minions would like have their pictures taken with frenzied naked, blood-dripping, rockenrolling, dirty dancing, sexing anything that will move situations. if you were a follower of satan, would you be in a parade with smiling people? i would be getting it on with some really interesting unfortunates….
and i can hardly think of a more interesting development than having actual chinese buying houses and properties all around me. how interesting that could be. there is a nice house on a few acres right next to my farm i wish a real chinese from china would buy it and hell i would be the best neighbor anyone could imagine. i would love to go to china with my newfound chinese friends! china is the only country i would be interested in going to i think. chinese neighbors….
instead of the really, really dreary and self-destructive and hard on my rental houses poor white …. (gad, they are me!) anyway, elaine was right about them being hard on property. some of the single females want to trade sex for rent if they get behind. do you have that problem too david?
Skull ‘n’ Bones ain’t a country club.
About the photos of the Evil Eye gesture: some of those were people giving the ‘I Love You’ in sign language. My husband, who is half deaf, does this sign all the time.
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Some of the pictures were natural relaxed hands [in the artistic way when posing consciously]. But the Bush and Cheney and Mrs. Bush pictures WERE evil eyes and ditto, the Prince who was flashing this because of an annoying camera was being shoved at him. Even I do this gesture when someone ‘crowds’ me.
true story. a man and wife bought about 400 acres in the neighborhood. they both graduated from harvard law school and don’t even work anywhere near iowa and they built this huge mansion thingy….i suppose it looks like what old money would live in to them and it is a mansion. and one day the man told me he would never have moved around here and never would have built this huge house for sure if he had known about all the neighborhood country farm kids who would sneak around his property at night cooking their meth. hahahahahahah! true story. the toothless good old boys and girls freaked him out when they looked at him wierdly coming and going from his mansion. hahahahah! i bet they could give the satan signaling smiling parade people a run for their money out here!
openly hidden: That’s probably what the American Indians thought when they welcomed the European settlers 400 years ago. 😉
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Kidding aside, isn’t that what America is all about, ethnic divergence, the right to prosper and self determination? It is also the result of selling the American dream to the world, now the world is coming to get and live the dream that was so carelessly squandered. It just wasn’t enough, was it? It never is.
i just figure the world and its history runs in cycles and we had ours for awhile. whitey had a good run and now it is up to the rest of the world to pick it up now. things got too good and too much was taken for granted i think. i sure as hell am not going to begrudge the rest of the world getting theirs finally. lord knows “the west” has built up some bad karma the last couple of centuries. imagine living in your own part of the world forever and then having some white guys showing up one day and “discovering” you. then going about “improving” you to death. live is funny sometimes…depending on how you look at it.
Openly hidden:
As a matter of fact, I once did have the problem with a single female, and she was a real looker too, and I felt a great deal of pity for her, but, alas, my wife is no dummy, and keeps the rental books herself…no fooling her on stuff like this, so the sweet tenant got herself a live-in boyfriend instead to help pay the rent, and I sighed and walked the line like a good husband.
I think this person is more tongue-in-cheek than serious, just look at this slide:
Slide [26] It’s important to understand that the Soviet Union achieved collapse-preparedness inadvertently, and not because of the success of some crash program. Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. The last thing we want is a perfectly functioning, growing, prosperous economy that suddenly collapses one day, and leaves everybody in the lurch. It is not necessary for us to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning to match the Soviet lackluster performance in this area. We have our own methods, that are working almost as well. I call them “boondoggles.” They are solutions to problems that cause more problems than they solve.
Just look around you, and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance, legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says “I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen” – by all means encourage him! It’s not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Say japan bye bye !
GNP = – 12,7 % 4th quarter of 2008
openly hidden: Touché! My ancestors did this in the Philippines so I get it. Only difference is we didn’t erase the the local people but assimilated into them. Better karma perhaps. At the end of the day, we, all of us, are really one family, one people, one genus. It’s just a few miscreants that screw it up for everyone else.
Japan is more like the Soviet and hard wearing
although the current generation may not be as tolerant of adverse conditions as the post-WWII group
ahh david….i know you are a true romantic i know you really are probably a true southern gentleman.
it is true, life turns on some of the tiniest little moments you don’t even notice sometimes and you had yours and you passed apparently. imagine how “eventful” your life may have become if you had agreed to “help” the sweet young thing….and your wife found out. hee. hee.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090213.wcogee13/BNStory/Front
Will this global crisis help pull the plug on autocrats?
Openly Hidden:
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In regards to obtrusive McMansion building:
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In the countryside where I live, for generations, the woodlands, regardless of ownership, were pretty much open to everyone for roaming, hunting and fishing by all neighbors, and all of us were pretty much of the same economic class, farmers, sawmillers, workers, small business, etc…and we shared…without much complaint except we were expected to take care of each other’s property when visiting or hunting or fishing. During my youth, I experienced this, and it was wonderful…not to be seen again anytime soon.
That all changed in the 1960s and 1970s as new wealth and new people came into our area. They put up no trespassing posters, and became reclusive and protective of their “property rights.”
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It got worse as the nouveau riche from this last bubble that started in the 1990s came to our countryside and bought up large tracts of farmland and built the most godawful McMansions you can think of.
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One of these stupid bastards even built a miniature copy of a medieval castle on a large tract of land where I hunted as a kid. He has skeet towers so his friends can come and shoot skeet. We often hear full automatic weapons fire there in the distance…this guy has big bucks so he probably has a legal license for his automatic weapons.
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It’s not so much that we dislike these folks. It’s just that they think they can move into a neighborhood and then shut out the lifelong residents whose families have lived there for generations, and they see no sense in becoming a part of the community. You do get a sense of how Native Americans felt when the first pretentious white settlers came to America and began building large log houses.
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But, alas, the human mind searches to ever expand its control over all it surveys, and it tries to push out others who are already there, but then, within another generation or sometimes sooner, it all turns to dust, just as with Madeoff and others, their fortunes dissipate into nothingness in one fell moment (Damned! that sounded good didn’t it? Kinda proud of that) And after all of the dust settles, and the big Mc Mansions crumble, life for the peasantry, goes on much as before.
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OH:
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In regard to the sweet young thing tenant problem,
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After my wife and I were first married awhile, just after I had worked hard and we accumulated a little stuff, my wife informed me that if she ever caught me being untrue, I could count on giving up a lot of my stuff. One of the things she talked about my giving up was a puckering string in a body orifice…and the lady does not lie, so I took her at her word.
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So, OH, even if I should have some romantic tendencies, my dear lady’s reasoning has found its mark, and my sensibilities must defer to her reasoning….But OH, they sure are sweet and I still like to observe and speculate…after all, I’m human.
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So, I must console myself by writing long diatribes about the dastardly deeds of our elites and how things might be improved. Such is love and life….sigh!
Simon: You are spot saying, “the current generation may not be as tolerant of adverse conditions as the post-WWII group”. I was told by the Japanese elite sometime in ’92 that they would intentionally bring their country to a recession so as to make the then youth of the day learn to stay grounded, not to forget where they came from post WWII. However, it seems like that hand has been overplayed under the current circumstance. As the saying goes, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” 🙂
David, a builder bought a neighboring property in 2004 and built his dream house, a lovely 10,000 sq.ft. under roof McMansion, which was in foreclosure by 2007.
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And so it remains … in foreclosure.
David: It’s called window shopping, last I heard! LOL.
Simon: I meant, you are spot on! Typing faster than i think again today. 🙂
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David: A lot has to be said for loyalty, a very scarce quality these day. I very much subscribe to loyalty. Your wife is a lucky woman, as mine is. About 95% of my friends are monogamous. You are the company you keep.
When I bought my land, the locals were using it for illegal drugs. The first week I was here, one of these idiots came over to scare me away. Now, my ancestors were one of the very first white Europeans to come to this area. We predated the Dutch! So I have a desire to establish control here.
Well, this guy comes barreling up and I hid my gun behind my back while he talked in a threatening way. Then I unleashed my dog, Duke, who flung himself happily upon the man and as he tried to pull on me, I pulled on him! He ran off.
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Came back to vandalize the place. But my dogs and I lit after him and his brother. We followed them, all the way to their home. I stood outside and yelled, ‘I know where you live, now! You are history.’
They moved out.
Unlike the Russian guy, Orlov, who thinks people who don’t own land will be stronger than people who do, is wrong. It all depends on the person. If the entire world collapses, I can always function on a very small level. That is, my land is mine and I will fight tooth and nail, to control it.
Kunstler’s novel about the collapse takes place in my part of NY [he lives pretty close to my place]. He has a character shoot a working dog. The owner of the dog didn’t go hunt down the guy who did this. I chewed out Kunstler for this. He said, ‘Dogs are pets. They have no use.’ I nearly fell out of my chair! My dogs thought this was very funny.
Yes, Elaine, Property left unattended can attract parasites very quickly. They will attempt to intimidate a new owner as well – that`s been my experience. Decent fencing and a padlock on the gate makes trespassing a criminal offence – they all understand this.
david things were exactly how you described them as far as local neighbors hunting, fishing, “nuting” on local farmland and pastures and woods. until “leasing” hunting rights to rich people from the big cities became anothher “revenue stream”…. but still the ordinary common farmers don’t do this leasing stuff, mostly the big ambitious farming on big debt “tigers” do. another nail in the coffin of community…another “revenue stream” touted is “farmers” raising birds and animals in captivity to turn loose for rich people to come and hunt on their holidays. it sickens and disgusts me! a rich bastard stands where the basically domesticated “wild game” will fly by or run by and shoots them and pays money to some yokel for this.
Elaine:
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I certainly see your point, and I too would have done just as you did. One thing a person has to learn about me in relation to my stuff and property is not to push me on my own property.
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If you ask, and it is reasonable, legal and suits me, I will bend over backward to help you, but if you push or threaten, that’s another matter…and I don’t usually back down.
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In fact, I recently did have a confrontation that I would not recommend anyone repeat…could have gotten myself in some real trouble too.
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Punk kids (I didn’t know who it was at the time) were playing “glide king” with their Honda cars, sliding around on the country streets of the sparsely populated development where my rent houses are located, and they had torn down most of street signs. Then I heard tires squealing and became irritated. Not knowing what I might encounter, I grabbed an old 1944 Russian army rifle, loaded it and carried it when I went to investigate…when I arrived, their cars were parked and they were off in the bushes with their girlfriends. I shouted and they came out with sheepish looks on their faces.
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I kindly took their names and then,without overt threat except by them seeing the old rifle across my arm, asked them to leave and never come back. I then put up private and no tresspassing signs at the entrance to the development, so I too have had confrontations and have established control, and the glide king kids stayed away, and my tenants appreciated this.
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A note to city dweller blog reader:
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Elaine is very right about control nowadays. If you own land, you must patrol it and keep the meth and marijuana producers off of it. They love to set up operations on your land. Then, when the DEA finds it, they can confiscate your land and put you in prison if they so desire, and some might have friends who might want to bid on your land at public auction.
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I have a contrary neighbor who watched a marijuana patch on his land with a high powered rifle, with the intent of killing the growers until his wife talked him into turning it in to the law. In our area, unless you know who you are dealing with, the law is untrustworthy since some are known to deal drugs themselves…anyway, neighbor did turn it in, and it was estimated to have a value of a half million dollars.
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Also, in relation to tenants…you must collect the rent in person each month, and establish a presence to keep control, and don’t let tenants slip into default with rents or your rentals into disrepair, and don’t be afraid to tell them to clean up. If they are going to be late with rents and tell me ahead of time, I will accept title to a nice piece of furniture, a riding lawnmower, or other possessions until the past due rents are paid, and I get a signed statement of this agreement. Usually works. If I go to collect and they won’t answer the door, I leave written notice on the door and make a note of the attempt..in ten days, if I’ve not heard from them, the sheriff is evicting them. It’s the only way you can have rentals…to have control…people are people and even the best will take some advantage.
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Now, I’m not a heartless ogre either. I have one single mother who has been with us for years. She makes two rent payments each month, takes better care of her house than I do, and is never late. She gets reduced rents because I don’t have to spend as much money on upkeep of her house.
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The times I described of my youth were a time or innocence…no marijuana or meth labs…just hard working people and their respectful kids…who knew what a switch (Southern term for a small diameter flexible stick used for beating disobedient children) felt like if they were disrespectful of people or property, including neighbors who all knew your parents…and as I said, those times are gone and probably will not return anytime soon.
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As far as owning land, my dad always told me that land will eventually come back to its true worth, no matter how much things go up and down economically. His theory was pretty simple. There are increasing numbers of people and an unchanging amount of land, and this will cause land to continually be subdivided and increase in value as population increases.
OH:
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The hunting lease thing disgusts me too. Often, these hunters go to the woods with the intent of killing as many animals as possible…after all they “paid” for them…which is pure BS. I know of these lease hunters who kill as many as ten deer per year…no family can eat that much meat…a true hunter respects the animals and only kills what he can use.
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I once was on a well controlled bear hunt. Out of twenty of us, only one bear per day was allowed to be killed, and we all had to go into the woods and hunt this animal with big claws that could hunt us back. When one of us finally killed a bear each hunter got a couple of pounds of meat, and the hunter who took the bear got the head and hide for a bear rung…and then we all went home…and we only hunted on Saturdays….this is how controlled hunting should be conducted, with respect for the animals and for the future.
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Because of all of the land leasing stuff, I’ve pretty well given up hunting…and I don’t eat a lot of meat anymore anyway. Might have to take it back up if things get really bad.
I’m gonna shut up now…you don’t have to tell me thanks either!
a neighbor built a million and a half dollar mansion on the old feilds adjacent to my old homestead in new york in 1995 and could not sell it at a third of its tax assessed value for years.
that half million pot plantation crop would only be worth 5,000 if it was a legal crop good like tobacco as a animal feed….suckers
Yep. Some things are obvious.
RE: The “electronic run on the bank” that resulted in the hemorrhaging of $550 billion dollars in just “an hour or 2”.
GK…. This “run on the bank of 550 Billion dollars was probably the result of
derivative insurance contracts whose “markers” had to be covered by defaulting
CDO’s, SIV’s etc. Village Voice right now has a good article on these
derivatives. Often times the same banks/brokerages were writing numerous
derivative contracts on the same financial “assets” or debts . This was called “replicating”. This explains the secretive nature of these hedge
funds and the secretive bailout of the whole system. Elaine has been
howling about this evil shit for quite some time to her credit. Almost no one else until recently knew the destructive power of these things. A few people like Warren Buffet and the former head of the Commodities Commision warned but not many others. BTW the former head of the Commodities Commission lost his job due to his forceful opposition to derivative
contracts. He could smell their stench ahead of time.
The former head of the Commodities Commission was Brooksley Born
Heres the article about the derivatives scam
http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/news/what-cooked-the-world-s-economy/
“Blair Team starts work on investment and governance with Sierra Leone”…
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http://tinyurl.com/adc4do
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Some VERY lucrative opportunities there me thinks.
“British GDP Has Already Collapsed by 30%”
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“British GDP (AMBI) at the end of 2008 is estimated at £1.275 trillion, against £1.267 trillion at the end of 2007. However sterling has collapsed against major global currencies by 30% or more, which translates into a real terms collapse in the countries GDP of 30%, i.e. 2007 GDP of $2.7 trillion has now fallen to $1.8 trillion a collapse in GDP of over 30%. The Government, Bank of England and FSA are failing in their primary duty which is to preserve the purchasing power of the currency.”
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“The Labour government has destroyed the purchasing power of the British Pound by 30% so as to save on 1% or 2% on the actual officially published GDP data during 2009. That’s a price of 30% for a net benefit of at most 1.5% which will still not prevent a deep recession from occurring. Quantative Easing is madness personified which for several months had been supported by the mainstream press which my November article illustrated -Bankrupt Britain Trending Towards Hyper-Inflation? , which sacrifices long-term growth for possible short-term benefit”
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“Therefore whatever is the conclusion of this analysis in terms of sterling GDP contraction during 2009, what readers need to remember is that the real purchasing power of Britain’s currency loss of 30% means that the countries GDP has already been sacrificed in lieu of hoodwinking the electorate into believing that things are not as bad as they actually are”…
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http://tinyurl.com/c3bs6g