Today we muse about the ants, bees and grasshoppers as well as the dangers of having a national media that lies, hides things and misleads. I a have to go to evil communist China to discover important diplomatic news. As well as Japan to find out what the Iranians say about nuclear war. Why can’t we have a real news media again? We had one in the 19th century.
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ΩΩThis made news in Japan but not the US. The US media loves to talk and talk about how China has ‘censorship’ but the US media self-censors tons and tons of interesting news that is of greatest importance to the US since this news is all about a possible WWIII.
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Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani arrived in Nagasaki Saturday on his first trip to the atom-bombed city and visited the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Larijani, speaking through an interpreter, told reporters, ‘‘Even a single nuclear bomb can pose a threat to humanity if it exists in this world. People in the world should stand up for a nuclear-free world.’‘
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ΩΩI agree totally with Ali. He is 100% correct. The US and Israel want to keep full spectrum dominance via massive nuclear arsenals while screaming silly about Iran possibly having the same. This rank hypocritical howling is most dangerous since both nuclear powers are threatening to invade Iran just as they have invaded so many other Muslim nations: Israeli DM: No Need to Coordinate With US on Attacking Iran — News from Antiwar.com
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ΩΩThis news should alert Bomb Bomb Bomb Obama to please say something to AIPAC to stop this insanity. The US bombers may imagine no one will notice who is funding 50% of Israel’s military but I would suggest the entire planet is quite aware of this fact. The US public isn’t told this simply because our media owners want to keep this secret. There are many, many secrets dear to the hearts of the warmongers who own nearly all of our media.
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ΩΩIt always irritates me that the Washington Post and NYT would publish antiwar information in the Vietnam War such as the Pentagon Papers but today are totally complicit with Israeli war aims to the point, we get a bare tiny crumb of news of importance. For example, all of Europe and the Middle East is abuzz about the Mossad team of assassins who used stolen IDs to commit a murder. This is rocking the relationships of many nations who allow the Jews to do as they please including committing many overt crimes.
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ΩΩNot that anyone in the US is barely aware of this unless they read Antiwar.com! The story has been nearly totally blacked out here. Far from sending reporters to investigate, the NYT Mossad agent in Jerusalem is playing deaf and dumb. Instead of using their very extensive contacts inside of Mossad to get to the bottom of this story, they ARE this story in assisting in covering up the crimes and to keep the US public as clueless as possible.
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ΩΩMartin Kramer Spouts Anti-Muslim Racism at Prestigious Herzliya Conference | Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place: Yale professors have been openly talking about the need to starve Palestinian women so they can’t reproduce. This ‘ghetto death’ process mimics EXACTLY the early Nazi attempts at putting Jews into ghettos and starving them. We know the next step and the Jews who are Zionists itch to implement it: death camps. Even as a video came out showing Jewish professors openly talking total Nazi talk, the NYT doesn’t notice this nor discuss this.
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ΩΩ Knesset criminalises the commemoration of the “Nakba” :: www.uruknet.info :: informazione dal medio oriente :: information from middle east :: [vs-1]: Israel never had ‘free speech’ anymore than it has equal civil rights or separation of synagogue and state. The natives are viewed as aliens and are denied even the simplest of civil rights. Jews are now aggressively moving into Muslim neighborhoods where they torment their neighbors because they can spit, hit and steal from them while they can’t talk back or call the police. This is roiling not just the West Bank but Israel itself as this aggression is visited upon Muslims living near Tel Aviv, for example.
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ΩΩNow, this odious and evil law was passed forbidding the Muslims from mourning the deaths of their own people. While the Jews march all over this planet screaming about the Holocaust and how we can’t forget…except for the other minorities tormented to death by the Nazis. Or the Armenians. Or anyone outside of Darfur. Which, to this day, Jews will still mention if someone tries to talk about Palestinians. ‘Look at Darfur! Fix that first!’ was the mantra for several years as Jews brutalized the natives of Palestine.
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ΩΩIt looks like Rachael Corrie’s parents have forced the Jews in Israel to investigate the murder of their daughter. She was run over by a military bulldozer used to flatten Palestinian homes so the Jews could displace the natives. The US absolutely refused to complain about this murder. And the Jewish media refused to carry the story. When the NYT did carry a story, it was full of lies and evasions. No mention there is a video showing the crime, all they did was report what Mossad told them to say.
ΩΩIt is most infuriating that the media in the US gets all teary-eyed over a young lady in Iran being killed by the police while Corrie’s murder is totally ignored. No one in Congress is giving lovely speeches about how tragic and evil it is to kill innocent demonstrators. Hell, our own government cheerfully kills US citizens demonstrating against the government and shows zero guilt! Now on to more international news and this time, we go to China because a lot of interesting news about China is also censored in the US so I visit the Chinese government media to see what is developing;
Japan told to be prudent over US alliance
The Defense Ministry Thursday warned that Japan’s recent move to play up China’s military threat and hints at strengthening the Japan-US alliance to counteract China’s growing power will result in a deterioration in Beijing’s trust in Tokyo.
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“I need to point out that the Japan-US alliance is a bilateral arrangement against a specific historical background, which should be limited strictly to the bilateral sphere and not target a third party,” Huang said.
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Zhou Yongsheng, a Japan studies professor with the China Foreign Affairs University, said the new defense guidelines reflect the fact that Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s pro-China attitude cannot outweigh a growing negative trend against China in the country.
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“The new guideline sees China as a future threat, and that means Japan has basically returned to its old strategies,” he said.
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Some Japanese politicians said recently that Japan’s alliance with the United States would become even more important given China’s rise as a military power and decided to hold discussions on the issue when amending its new defense guideline.
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ΩΩLike Russia, China has a right to be very annoyed with neighbors who talk about forming hostile alliances since both empires have been the victims of sneak attacks and outright mass invasions. The US has been the victim of a sneak attack in the past but never mass invasions. But both China and Russia are hyperaware of this thanks to a long history of problems with this and we must take this into account when dealing with both empires.
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ΩΩThe Chinese are seeing some retrograde diplomacy going on lately due to tensions in global trade. The US chooses to overlook deep and long lasting Japanese incursions into US domestic and foreign markets to focus nearly only on US/China trade deficits. These deficits ballooned, of course, but the underlying problems with the US are not with China at all but with Japan. China merely took the Japanese system and did it even more aggressively.
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ΩΩIf we fix only the Chinese elements, we will continue to run in the red and lose sovereignty to Japan if we don’t tackle Japan. Japan realizes this which is why they are siding with us against China in the military sphere while at the same time, due to China’s trade with Japan now exceeding Japan’s one way trade with the US, Japan can’t alienate China. So the Dragon snarls at Japan as a warning not to play this game too cute.
U.S. criticism on RMB exchange rate has ulterior motive: expert
The United States, along with other developed nations, has problems in its economic structures, he said.
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However, facing huge domestic political risks and pressures, leaders of these nations don’t dare undertake a bigger adjustment in economic structures, the expert observed. Rather, they saw the RMB exchange rate as the excuse, the easiest solution to their problems.
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That is unwise and unpractical, and also unfair to China, Du said, adding that the Western nations should seek the reasons from within and find the right and specific solution, rather than fussing over the RMB exchange rate.
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ΩΩNo one will hire me to talk about international FOREX holdings and the business of currency trade games vis a vis world trade. The open currency markets are supposed to balance trade between nations via degrading a currency that is issued by a nation running a trade deficit! This has been a roaring failure and the markets created in the wake of the collapse of the gold standard have to be reviewed and altered. Instead, this jerry-rigged system that is a total failure continues rolling onwards because the international bankers get filthy rich, moving money accounts up and down and all around while export powers love this system because it enables them to continue running huge trade surpluses with the US and UK. While the US and UK love this system because it allows both to run deep in the red in trade while enjoying a happy consumer economy which pleases the masses….until recently.
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ΩΩIn all capitalist systems, you need to gain capital profits which should flow not from playing lending games but rather, flow from the benefits of mass production coupled with rising wages of the workers. The ‘rising wages of workers’ part is missing from many analysis of what is happening. China’s workers are seeing rising wages. Wages in Japan, the UK and US are dropping. As these three economic powers weaken the finances of workers, they are falling, one after the other, into longer and longer depressions.
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ΩΩThe US is denuding itself of all industries outside of the military system and worker’s wages here have collapsed into a pit. Falling by 50% in manufacturing, employment there has not been rising, it continues to plummet. On top of this, production systems use fewer workers.
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ΩΩAs ‘productivity’ rises, the number of workers collapse. This means other parts of the system get to tap into the capital production while the workers are ruthlessly eliminated, one by one. Union membership has fallen relentlessly year after year, too. The Chinese didn’t create this problem. As we see from the employment graph here, the crossover point was when Reagan became President.
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ΩΩHis anti-union policies were very popular. And we were granted our wish for no unions. And now workers struggle to make ends meet and the only way they can keep up purchasing power is to buy Chinese imports! This is why Walmart is nearly 100% Chinese imports: it caters to this segment of the working public. If we totally eliminate trade with China, not one US manufacturing job will magically appear. The Chinese know this but the US public is kept in the dark about this.
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German Skill in Exporting Puts Pressure on E.U. Neighbors – NYTimes.com
As Glasbau Hahn and thousands of other small German exporters rebound from a dreadful 2009, they give the European Union a much-needed shot of growth. Unfortunately, some of their success comes at the expense of countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal.
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The so-called peripheral countries have incurred crushing debts in part because they bought too many Mercedes cars and other imports from Germany and elsewhere, without producing enough of their own export goods. In fact, goods from Greece, Spain and Portugal were often no longer competitive because in the last decade those countries had let wages rise faster than productivity and had become too expensive.
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At the same time Germany, a country of savers, exported more than it consumed, profiting from its spendthrift neighbors but not reciprocating by buying equal amounts of imports.
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ΩΩAs we see from the graph above, rising productivity does absolutely nothing for trade problems. The US productivity has shot upwards like a rocket while our exports also shot up…but imports shot up twice as fast and continue to do this! The key is in the last paragraph: Germany, China and up until recently, Japan are all net savers! Bingo! End of story. Nations that run on deficits end up in the ditch. Nations that save and have sovereign wealth end up on top. This, of course, is ignored by most analysts.
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ΩΩJust as we have to throw into the scrap heap of economic thought all thoughts that protectionism caused the Great Depression, ditto with productivity leading to economic good health. I hark back to the concept of Libra all of the time because this is a very, very ancient concept going back at least 3,000 years.
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ΩΩIt is ‘tried and true’: all forces must be balanced and savers are the balancers. Not spenders. Savers. That is, if everyone is spending, things crash. If everyone is borrowing, things crash. If everyone is acting like grasshoppers in summer and not ants, when winter comes, everyone freezes to death. The busy bee stores hone for winter while the grasshopper eats everything and if there is no food, forms huge masses and become plagues, eating everything in their path.
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ECB’s inflation hawk Weber has got it totally wrong – Telegraph Blogs
The suggestion by Olivier Blanchard, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, that raising inflation targets to 4 per cent might help in fighting the economic crisis is not just “playing with fire”, but is “reckless and deeply damaging”. For the German speakers among you, a full version of Mr Weber’s broadside published in this morning’s FT Deutschland can be read by clicking here.
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This hardly comes as a surprise. For Mr Weber, being an inflation hawk is not just a matter of economic choice, but a deeply held conviction and almost religiously held belief. In these matters, he is a fundamentalist nutter. You need only a cursory knowledge of German history to see why. Americans draw their cultural understanding of economic calamity from the Great Depression, but Germans take theirs from the hyper-inflations of the Weimar Republic and the immediate post war period. On both occassions, savings were obliterated and in the first case it helped prompt the tragedy of the Third Reich.
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ΩΩOK: the Brits and US grasshopper economists are pissed as hell with the German and Chinese ants and bees. The grasshoppers demand the bees and ants cease and desist saving food, making honey and selling the excess to the grasshoppers. No, they should consume everything like crazy! HAHAHA. The Germans know the end of the grasshopper story and warn us all the time and no one listens. We can’t blame the Germans for this. Someone has to remember painful stories!
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ΩΩAnd the US is always a short hop away from Nazi-style tyranny which is why the so-called liberal Democratic President signed a renewal of the Patriot Act. We blame all the wrong parties for our problems. Or worse, are split in this. The Tea Party, for example, started as an anti-banker bail out group and was hijacked by FOX TV’s owner, the foreigner Murdoch, and twisted into an anti-social service monstrosity. Starve the poor replaced tax the rich!
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US Federal Reserve chairman calls for austerity plan
In response to a question from Senator David Vitter (Republican from Louisiana), who asked how quickly the current level of US budget deficits would “become a major problem in terms of the economy,” Bernanke said, “It come become a problem tomorrow if bond markets are not persuaded that Congress is serious about bringing down the deficit over time.”
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Half of our deficit is now funded by Asian trade rivals. We chose to start a trade war with ONLY China so China is ceasing buying our bonds. It has zero to do with using the debt for social services during a depression.
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Bernanke made a point in his opening remarks of reassuring nervous financial markets, shaken by the Fed’s decision last week to raise its largely symbolic discount rate, that the move did not signal an intention to push forward plans for an eventual hike in the key federal funds rate, which broadly impacts short-term interest rates across the economy.
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Banks and big investors want the Fed to keep the federal funds rate—the interest on overnight inter-bank loans—at the current level of zero to 0.25 percent as long as possible. The extraordinarily low rate, which has been maintained since the height of the financial crisis in December 2008, provides a virtually unlimited supply of cheap credit to major banks and finance houses, enabling them to make huge profits by speculating on stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.
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At the same time, the financial elite wishes to avoid having to pay for the inevitable consequences of debt and asset bubbles, skyrocketing government deficits, and the bankrupting of the state as a result of the bailout of the banks. It wants to place the full burden on the working class through historic reductions in basic social programs such as Medicare and Social Security, new taxes on consumption, long-term high unemployment and continuous wage-cutting.
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ΩΩThis is why grasshoppers freeze to death. We did the exact opposite of Germany. During good times, we expanded social programs and spending. When bad times hit, we slash social spending and punish the poor. This makes things much, much worse. This is why I say, the ‘revolution’ has to be psychological as well as philosophical: we have to become a nation of careful savers who pay attention to balancing things when it is going well, not suddenly lurch into balancing things when they are already collapsing.
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ΩΩBalancing our budget today after overspending the entire time we had a bubble, cutting taxes while running deficits when we were seeing a rising economy: this is madness. All families should know that we save money during good times just in case we have bad times and need to spend money to stay alive! Instead, we yell, ‘Whoopee!’ and party when times are good and then starve when things go bad.
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Enrollment in Medicaid increased by 3.3 million between June 2008 and June 2009 to nearly 47 million cases, according to a study released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Caseloads increased in every US state. In thirteen states, enrollment shot up by more than 10 percent. According to a new study by Families USA, for every 1 percentage point rise in the US unemployment rate, 1 million people become eligible for Medicaid and related programs. With Medicaid already consuming about a fifth of most state budgets—the same as the average outlay for education—both Democratic and Republican governors and lawmakers throughout the country are insisting on deep cuts in the services provided to Medicaid recipients.
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ΩΩThe Tea Party believes that only people who already have full healthcare should keep it and the others can just go off and die. Being used by cynical, cunning foxes who hate the American people, they fell into this trap of demanding the deaths of others so they, themselves, can be fat, happy grasshoppers. Germany, for example, has universal healthcare. The US doesn’t. Our wild spending brought us no closer to the German full coverage despite a booming economy.
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ΩΩNow, with things collapsing, the sick who have no personal wealth and no jobs will be unceremoniously dumped into the grave. Instead of fixing the world’s most expensive healthcare system, a system that cripples our export abilities due to high overhead compared to Germany, we are seeing the world’s most expensive healthcare bill being debated by a gang of corrupt politicians lining their own pockets at the expense of not only the American people but our ability to compete in world trade.
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ΩΩIf we don’t fix healthcare by imitating the ants and bees of Germany, we shall continue our manufacturing and trade run down to zero.
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Ferguson: We’re One Downgrade Away From The End Of American Empire
Ferguson claims that it will take a simple, but dramatic event to shake the belief in the American Empire.
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Foreign Affairs: But one day, a seemingly random piece of bad news—perhaps a negative report by a rating agency—will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but also the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: a complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability.
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ΩΩChile just had a major quake. It is not Haiti, a third world nation. Haiti illustrates what happens when the population totally outstrips the carrying capacity of a landmass. Chile, on the other hand, illustrates how having good building codes doesn’t work so hot when there is an 8.8 mag quake. People have told me in the past that California’s building codes means there is little fear a major quake will cause much damage.
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ΩΩThis is BS. The Chile quake was offshore. An 8.8 quake along the San Andreas, on the other hand, is inland. If the coastal parts of California suddenly moves northwards by 33 feet, you can bet this will totally wreck most anything along its spine! And there is a lot of stuff crossing this fault including most of LA’s water, all motor traffic, train lines, etc. The disruptions will be totally horrendous and hideously expensive.
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ΩΩThe grasshoppers in the US have put aside no money at all for fixing this obvious problem. There is no insurance system for this. The US government is the insurance. And it just sucked down over 60% of the US mortgage market as well as AIG’s derivatives losses.
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Fannie Mae Posts 4Q Loss, Wants $15.3 Billion In Additional Government Aid
Fannie Mae needs another $15 billion in federal assistance, bringing its total to more than $75 billion. And worse, the mortgage finance company warned its losses will continue this year.
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The rescue of Fannie Mae and sister company Freddie Mac is turning out to be one of the most expensive aftereffects of the financial meltdown. The new request means the total bill for the duo will top $126 billion.
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And the pain isn’t over. Fannie warned Friday that it will need even more money from the Treasury, as unemployment remains high and millions of Americans lose their homes through foreclosure.
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Fannie Mae reported Friday that it lost $74.4 billion, or $13.11 a share, last year, including $2.5 billion in dividends paid to the government. That compares with a loss of $59.8 billion, or $24 a share, a year earlier.
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Fannie Mae, which was seized by federal regulators in September 2008, has racked up losses totaling $136.8 billion over the past three year.
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Late last year, the Obama administration pledged to cover unlimited losses through 2012 for Freddie and Fannie, lifting an earlier cap of $400 billion.
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ΩΩOK: a massive earthquake in California=massive default on hundreds of thousands of mortgages on homes damaged by the quake! End of story. California was, overall, the most expensive real estate market in the US and many of the million dollar homes are right next to the fault lines or sitting right smack on top of the San Andreas. The most expensive houses also sit on hillsides which will see massive landslides if the San Andreas gives a very violent jerk northwards.
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ΩΩThe mortgage losses will exceed $100 billion if we get a 9.0 California earthquake along the San Andreas system. Virtually no homeowners have regular insurance for earthquake damage. Most of this is, like hurricane insurance, via the government. And the government is going bankrupt. Already, the regulators expect losses in Fannie Mae, etc to exceed half a trillion. And we spend half a trillion in just three years, fighting peasants in Iraq and Afghanistan!
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ΩΩHalf a trillion here, half a trillion there and before you know it, you are bankrupt.
Banking Chairman Christopher Dodd’s Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration may be doomed
Obama in mid-2009 proposed an independent U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Agency to regulate mortgages, credit cards and other financial products. But it ran into stiff resistance from Republicans and lobbyists for banks and Wall Street.
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In recent weeks, Dodd has discussed a range of possible compromises on the watchdog proposal. The Bureau of Financial Protection approach has yet to win support of Republicans, said a financial services industry source close to Senate talks.
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Both developments — on the banking supervision agency and the consumer watchdog — could mark turning points in the Senate’s long discussions about regulatory reform following the worst U.S. financial crisis since the 1930s.
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If the Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration that Dodd proposed is dropped, the bill he hopes to bring to the Senate floor soon would more closely align with one approved in December by the U.S. House of Representatives, simplifying House-Senate reconciliation of their measures.
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But abandoning the FIRA would also mark a retreat from an ambitious plan to consolidate a patchwork of bank regulators that was widely criticized after the crisis for gaps in oversight and narrowness of vision in monitoring the industry.
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ΩΩOur grossly expensive and inefficient and even cruel healthcare system will not be amended to operate like the German system. Nor will our grossly expensive and inefficient banking system be fixed. Nor will we stop our military adventures that are bankrupting us. Our trade deficit went down only because world trade collapsed. Now that it is reviving, our trade deficit has returned to doubling faster than our trade surplus. Nothing has been learned and nothing has been fixed.
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ΩΩWe just went though a very massive economic crash and as I feared, the stupid and unbalanced status quo has been restarted and restored! NOTHING has been fixed at all. No one at the top is even slightly inclined to fix what is wrong because we can’t talk about what is wrong. And this is the fault of the people who should know better: we must discuss why the ant savers are saving all that grain and honey instead of consuming it during the summer! Somehow, we grasshoppers have to figure out, we must imitate the ants and bees, not goof off and party when the sun is shining!
Culture of Life News 
The German people are ants but their govts have been grasshoppers.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4504514,00.html
After the currency conversion and factoring in the US population which is nearly 4 times bigger than Germany, you’ll find that Germany’s govt debt is very similar to that of the US.
The Germans have far better govt provided social benefits than the USA but as you can see from the debt, this system is also not sustainable.
Germany’s industrial base hasn’t been nearly as gutted, but their demographics are worse than the USA in that their population is aging at a much faster rate.
Since everybody is clamoring for govt provided health care and social security, how do you suggest this gets paid for ? Where does the money come from without running up massive govt debt ?
( Cutting back on the war industry spending won’t work in Germany’s case )
I’d also like you to address the following issue :
Govt provided social benefits are only sustainable under a very, very specific set of circumstances. When you have a very large and productive group of YOUNG people at the bottom of the demographic pyramid then it is economically feasible to allocate some of these resourses to a much smaller group at the top of the pyramid.
This worked to a limited extent during the peak boomer earnings years. But now the boomers are moving to the top of the pyramid and are set to cash in on their promised SS and Medicare. And the youth at the bottom of the pyramid are meant to provide for them.
Houston we have a problem. The top of the pyramid is HUGE and the bottom is SMALL.
What kind of magic will it take to fix this situation ?
OT, but NY’er mag artcile on, Elaine’s favorite; KRUGMAN.
Krugman went wrong when he decided that it was impossible to predict how or where a countries industry would nucleate. ie, an industry may result of a single invention. Therefore ” in the end industrial policy [protectionism] would likely benefit mostly the owners of a few businesses and hurt everyone else”.
Then ,in a now rare moment, the NY’er quotes the example of Japan, China, Korea etc as a ‘counterfactual’ ,” imagine that they didn’t have an industrial policy. Then a quote from Robert Kuttner, ” But to be a conventional academic economist you almost have to swear an oath that governments can’t outguess markets in the allocation of capital”.
Then it turns out that economists will only consider ideas that have been translated into mathematical models, so even simple minded ideas are ignored if there is no model ,economics must be a science after all. [ i feel some what vindicated having been persecuted by matheticians early in my life] Krugman gained his fame by modeling some of these ideas, with mixed results.
The top is not ‘huge’ while the bottom is ‘small’. You typically exaggerate things to back up bad analysis (or paranoia).
Look, the US has a powerful base for eliminating all social services. The FDR anomaly is long gone and we have returned to the ‘let’s loot everyone’ ideology. Of course, if we have to individually save for retirement, we would not spend any money on anything except necessities!
Hardly what I see around me at all. Of course, we could tax the rich or better yet, enforce savings via having high tariffs on imports and use this to pay for social services…HAHAHA.
About Krugman: he is stupid. And MITI in Japan certainly is a quasi government branch set up to do industrial/trade systems which put into motion the whole Japanese export power business.
The US blunders along letting corporations do whatever profits them even if this destroys our own country.
@Elaine,
but why would you save with zero interest, and still some inflation happening?
what can you do in these situations (after reducing debt)?
Elaine writes : ” Look, the US has a powerful base for eliminating all social services. The FDR anomaly is long gone and we have returned to the ‘let’s loot everyone’ ideology.”
My analysis wasn’t a political one based on ideology. I simply pointed out the impossible economics. Tariffs and high taxes are totally inadequate given the demographics. Never mind taxes ( Germany’s rates are FAR higher and look at their govt debt mess),if you took every penny that the rich had, if every govt asset was liquidated, this STILL won’t fix the problem.
And the youth are going to view this as a case of the old eating the young, when it’s actually a case of the banksters and the govts eating their citizens.
The propaganda is already beginning that wants to pin the blame on the boomers, specifically the leftist hippies.
Did Woodstock Hippies Lead to the Financial Collapse?
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/woodstock-hippies-lead-financial-collapse-film/story?id=9958077
Perhaps what people really want is to live in the post apocolyptic world of “The Postman” where an honest man riding a horse can be a hero.
This view is reflected in the current culture via ie:
Melissa McClelland: Passenger 24
The John Birchers seem to advocate that, of course the head guy rules like a Pharoah, this aspect never goes away.
Onto NYTimes:
The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into this one, it reflects confusion and the chaotic disintegration of consensus that is the glue holding together society.
Maybe you have to destroy a village to save the village? And rebuilt it in the image of your chief propagandist?
@adammateyko, I wonder if the conservative movement will break up in pieces? The NYT seems to conflate the Tea Party with CPAC when they are two different things. CPAC favored Ron Paul whereas the Tea Party Convention just adored Sarah Palin. CPAC even booed a loudmouthed, bigoted homophobe off the stage!
If we are to have a conservative government I’d rather it be libertarian-conservative led by the likes of Ron Paul.
Sarah Palin OTOH is dangerous, she could be the very one James Kuntsler calls our “corn-pone Hitler.” Not good for ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. Or anybody else for that matter: she would bring in a totalitarian nighmare. And bring about the Apocalypse.
nighmare = nightmare
Zionist and NAZI cooperation
in 1933 to move Jews to Palestine.
Pic of coin, swastika on one side
and star of david on the other.
Ha’avara
http://randompottins.blogspot.com/2007/05/coin-with-two-sides.html
Through this unusual arrangement, those Jews bound for Palestine deposited money in a special account in Germany. The money was used to purchase German-made agricultural tools, building materials, pumps, fertilizer, motor transport, and other goods of all kinds and descriptions, which were exported to Palestine and sold there by the Jewish-owned Ha’avara company in Tel-Aviv.
Money from the sales was given to the emigrants upon their arrival in Palestine in an amount corresponding to their deposits in German banks.
German goods poured into Palestine through the Ha’avara, which was supplemented a short time later with a barter agreement by which Palestine’s oranges and agricultural products were exchanged for German timber, automobiles, agricultural machinery, and other goods.
The Agreement enabled German Jews to meet the requirements of the British certificate of immigration and served the Zionist aim of bringing Jewish settlers and development capital to Palestine, while it simultaneously served the German economy with an increase in the production and export of German goods to offset its economic depression. For a time, the Ha’avara Agreement helped the Nazis in undermining the anti-Nazi boycott initiated by the American Jewish Congress only weeks before the agreement was signed.
Desperate people fight desperate wars. IMO Israel is desperate, because the Zionists have driven it into a desperate (unsustainable) position vis a vis the Palestinians and the rest of the Islamic world. I suspect that it will be the first country to use nuclear weapons.
Retaliation will follow. Remember nuclear weapons may also be gifted away (one or two at a time to better retrieve them when the need is over). On the ground level and using conventional weapons the Iranians can beat the Zionists–even with NATO bullying its way around Afghanistan.
Indeed, to get the news, I shop around the world. News from the U.S. and U.K. alone are unreliable, misleading, sometimes goes unmentioned.
When the excrement finally hits the turbine blades, maybe our Frat Boy Yuppies can fall to their knees and pray to Ayn Rand for deliverance.
@ Gary – Ayn Rand hated the conservatives with a passion. She also hated the philosophy of Liberalism but found the Libs more interesting to argue with.
Ayn Rand was a wannabe elitist. She would adore being part of say, the Bilderberg Group.
US$, Wars & Earthquakes
By Nalliah Thayabharan
At the end of WWII, an agreement was reached at the Bretton Woods Conference which pegged the value of gold at US$35 per ounce and that became the international standard against which currency was measured. But in 1971, US President Richard Nixon took the US$ off the gold standard and ever since the US$ has been the most important global monetary instrument, and only the US can print them. However, there were problems with this arrangement not least of all that the US$ was effectively worthless than before it reneged on the gold-standard. But more importantly because it was the world’s reserve currency, everybody was saving their surpluses in US$. To maintain the US$’s pre-eminence, the Richard Nixon administration impressed upon Saudi Arabia and therefore Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries(OPEC) to sell their oil only in US$. This did two things; it meant that oil sales supported the US$ and also allowed the USA access to exchange risk free oil. The USA propagates war to protect its oil supplies, but even more importantly, to safeguard the strength of the US$. The fear of the consequences of a weaker US$, particularly higher oil prices is seen as underlying and explaining many aspects of the US foreign policy, including the Iraq and Libyan War.
The reality is that the value of the US$ is determined by the fact that oil is sold in US$. If the denomination changes to another currency, such as the euro, many countries would sell US$and cause the banks to shift their reserves, as they would no longer need US$ to buy oil. This would thus weaken the US$ relative to the euro. A leading motive of the US in the Iraq war — perhaps the fundamental underlying motive, even more than the control of the oil itself — is an attempt to preserve the US$ as the leading oil trading currency. Since it is the USA that prints the US$, they control the flow of oil. Period. When oil is denominated in US$ through US state action and the US$ is the only fiat currency for trading in oil, an argument can be made that the USA essentially owns the world’s oil for free. Now over $1.3 trillion of newly printed US$ by US Federal Reserve is flooding into international commodity markets each year.
So long as almost three quarter of world trade is done in US$, the US$ is the currency which central banks accumulate as reserves. But central banks, whether China or Japan or Brazil or Russia, do not simply stack US$ in their vaults. Currencies have one advantage over gold. A central bank can use it to buy the state bonds of the issuer, the USA. Most countries around the world are forced to control trade deficits or face currency collapse. Not the USA. This is because of the US$ reserve currency role. And the underpinning of the reserve role is the petrodollar. Every nation needs to get US$ to import oil, some more than others. This means their trade targets US$ countries.
Because oil is an essential commodity for every nation, the Petrodollar system, which exists to the present, demands the buildup of huge trade surpluses in order to accumulate US$ surpluses. This is the case for every country but one — the USA which controls the US$ and prints it at will or fiat. Because today the majority of all international trade is done in US$, countries must go abroad to get the means of payment they cannot themselves issue. The entire global trade structure today works around this dynamic, from Russia to China, from Brazil to South Korea and Japan. Everyone aims to maximize US$ surpluses from their export trade.
Until November 2000, no OPEC country dared violate the US$ price rule. So long as the US$ was the strongest currency, there was little reason to as well. But November was when French and other Euroland members finally convinced Saddam Hussein to defy the USA by selling Iraq’s oil-for-food not in US$, ‘the enemy currency’ as Iraq named it, but only in euros. The euros were on deposit in a special UN account of the leading French bank, BNP Paribas. Radio Liberty of the US State Department ran a short wire on the news and the story was quickly hushed.
This little-noted Iraq move to defy the US$ in favor of the euro, in itself, was insignificant. Yet, if it were to spread, especially at a point the US$ was already weakening, it could create a panic selloff of US$ by foreign central banks and OPEC oil producers. In the months before the latest Iraq war, hints in this direction were heard from Russia, Iran, Indonesia and even Venezuela. An Iranian OPEC official, Javad Yarjani, delivered a detailed analysis of how OPEC at some future point might sell its oil to the EU for euros not US$. He spoke in April, 2002 in Oviedo Spain at the invitation of the EU. All indications are that the Iraq war was seized on as the easiest way to deliver a deadly pre-emptive warning to OPEC and others, not to flirt with abandoning the Petro-dollar system in favor of one based on the euro. The Iraq move was a declaration of war against the US$. As soon as it was clear that the UK and the US had taken Iraq, a great sigh of relief was heard in the UK Banks.
First Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for US$, shortly before each country was attacked. The cost of war is not nearly as big as it is made out to be. The cost of not going to war would be horrendous for the US unless there were another way of protecting the US$’s world trade dominance. The US pays for the wars by printing US$ it is going to war to protect.
After considerable delay, Iran opened an oil bourse which does not accept US$. Many people fear that the move will give added reason for the USA to overthrow the Iranian regime as a means to close the bourse and revert Iran’s oil transaction currency to US$. In 2006 Venezuela indicated support of Iran’s decision to offer global oil trade in euro. In 2011 Russia begins selling its oil to China in rubles
6 months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, Iraq had made the move to accept Euros instead of US$ for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the US$ as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.
Muammar Qaddafi made a similarly bold move: he initiated a movement to refuse the US$ and the euro, and called on Arab and African nations to use a new currency instead, the gold dinar. Muammar Qaddafi suggested establishing a united African continent, with its 200 million people using this single currency. The initiative was viewed negatively by the USA and the European Union (EU), with French president Nicolas Sarkozy calling Libya a threat to the financial security of mankind; but Muammar Qaddafi continued his push for the creation of a united Africa.
Muammar Gaddafi’s recent proposal to introduce a gold dinar for Africa revives the notion of an Islamic gold dinar floated in 2003 by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, as well as by some Islamist movements. The notion, which contravenes IMF rules and is designed to bypass them, has had trouble getting started. But today Iran, China, Russia, and India are stocking more and more gold rather than US$.
If Muammar Qaddafi were to succeed in creating an African Union backed by Libya’s currency and gold reserves, France, still the predominant economic power in most of its former Central African colonies, would be the chief loser. The plans to spark the Benghazi rebellion were initiated by French intelligence services in November 2010.
In February 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has called for a new world currency that would challenge the dominance of the US$ and protect against future financial instability. In May 2011 a 32 year old maid, Nafissatou Diallo, working at the Sofitel New York Hotel, alleges that Strauss-Kahn had sexually assaulted her after she entered his suite.
Accepting Chinese yuans for oil, Iran and Venzuelathey have constantly been threatened by the US. If euros, yens, yuans or rubles were generally accepted for oil, the US$ would quickly become irrelevant and worthless paper.This petro dollar arrangement is enforced by the U.S. military.
On Aug 18 2011, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announces a plan to pull Gold reserves from US and European Banks .Venezuela reportedly has the largest oil reserves in the world. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been a strong proponent for tighter Latin America integration – which is a move away from the power of the US banking cartels.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez formed oil export agreements with Cuba, directly bypassing the Petrodollar System. Cuba was among those countries that were later added to the “Axis of Evil” by the USA. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has accused the US of using HAARP type weapons to create earthquakes.
On Aug 24, 2001 a 7 magnitude earthquake rocks Northern Peru bordering Venezuela which doesn’t use the Petrodollar system and Brazil which has been engaged in discussions to end US$ denominated oil transactions. Is it a coincidence that these uncommonly powerful earthquakes are occurring in historically uncommonly large numbers during such a short period of time?. And that they are occurring in or close to countries that have been seriously discussing plans to leave the Petrodollar system, or are already outside it?
HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is an ionospheric research program that is jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The HAARP program operates a major Arctic facility, known as the HAARP Research Station. It is located on an US Air Force owned site near Gakona, Alaska. HAARP has the ability to manipulate weather and produce earthquakes. It is capable of directing almost 4 Mega Watts of energy in the 3 to 10 MHz region of the HF band up into the ionosphere. This energy can be bounced off of the ionosphere and directed back down at the earth to create earthquakes. HAARP could potentially be used by adversaries to produce such events. Depending on the frequency, focusing, wave shape, one can induce a variety of effects such as earthquakes, induced at a distant aiming point, severe disturbances in the middle and upper atmosphere over the target area and anomalous weather effects known as the “Tesla effect”.
HAARP based technology is being actively used to emit powerful radio waves that permeate the earth and subsequently cause strong enough oscillations along fault lines of targeted areas to produce earthquakes. The high power radio waves of HAARP can be used to produce such intense vibrations as to cause an earthquake. HAARP based technology can be used to encourage and produce various weather phenomena such as hurricanes, flooding, or drought through manipulation of the ionosphere. Already Russia, China and Venezuela have suggested that a HAARP type technology weapon is capable of such and attack and been used against several countries causing severe destructions in Haiti, Japan, Russia, China, Iran, Chile, New Zealand, Afghanistan, India etc.
What would the probable response be to such a HAARP attack be? An armed conflict with USA? Or the elimination of the Petrodollar system and a subsequent dumping of surplus US$ into the international and US financial markets resulting in the quick collapse of the US$. Attacking these countries with HAARP would destabilize their economies and currencies and to prevent a move away from the US$ and the Petrodollar system.
You went right off the cliff with the old chestnut, ‘The rulers control hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes and volcanoes!’ rubbish. See how mixing this up with other things makes you seem…credulous?
Mother Nature is an extremely powerful lady who is hard to control, deny, hide from or even manipulate. We do manipulate nature a lot but it is swept aside easily every time Mother Nature rouses herself even slightly.