ΩΩThe entire world went through a very massive credit bubble era and as this implodes and all credit bubbles implode, the attempts of governments to fix this via creating massive amounts of government debts is leading to a secondary implosion that is much, much more dangerous than the primary implosion. Right now, all of Europe is spiraling downwards in a credit crash as one PIIGS after another is dropping in ratings towards junk bonds while costs on borrowing shoots upwards. This, in a ZIRP world due to a depression!
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ΩΩThis is classic: it happens in all great credit crashes. Namely, attempts by governments to fix credit bubble crashes cause governments to collapse due to rising debt. No government can fix any bubble by sucking down all the bad debts. This is very much like a mother saving a child from poison by drinking up all the poison, herself.
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ΩΩThis futile business was first done by Japan. Japan had a very massive credit bubble ten years before all the other nations. Government debt went from normal levels of under 25% of GDP to nearly 200% of GDP and it is getting worse, not better, over time. Dealing with the effects of bubble pops is nearly impossible. There is NO SHORT CUTS. Instead, one must endure a long spell of no easy borrowing. This is why we must use modern tracking statistics to spot bubbles and then eliminate them via raising interest rates.
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ΩΩOf course, our infamous central bank, the Federal Reserve, refused to do this. Even as the bank tracked all the vital statistics, the head of the Fed and his gang refused to see the obvious and of course, we got this obvious massive credit bubble. I remember Greenspan when he dropped rates to 1% while the price of oil shot upwards and he was trying to undo the Dot Com bubble by flooding the US with sub-inflation level lending.
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ΩΩThat is, savings lost value due to inflation but gained little to no interest to make up for this so no one saved money, everyone borrowed money. The US savings rate dropped to virtual zero. When debt shoots upwards while savings collapse, this leads to economic chaos. And this was all due to regulators refusing to regulate.
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ΩΩThe entire premise of the floating fiat currency regime was, gold was not sufficient for growing lending so we needed a ‘better’ system. But ever since this floating fiat currency regime was launched, we saw immense growth in lending across the planet but this quickly got totally out of control. The gold restraints were gone and replaced with absolutely nothing.
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ΩΩOriginally, rising interest rates were supposed to constrain borrowing. But the differential between rates between countries made this impossible thanks to the sudden rise of international lending via various pirate islands and small kingdoms. That is, they got rich via being the generators of loans, playing off high interest rate countries against low interest rate countries.
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ΩΩFor 20 years, this seemed to work sort of OK. That is, there wasn’t all that much credit created out of thin air. But then, Japan had its little bubble and crash and entered, in 1996, ZIRP lending. The differential between Japan and any other nation on earth was immense. Instead of all nations seeing rates go up or down pretty much in tandem with maybe 50 basis points separating them, we had this Grand Canyon differential of 500 basis point spreads. This proved to be very alluring and the term, ‘Japanese carry trade’ entered the banking vocabulary.
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ΩΩNow, this flood of easy lending based on the differential between the economic giant, Japan and the rest of the industrialized world is crashing due to its simple size: it got way too big. The desperation to dump this easy borrowing from Japan onto something got so out of hand, lenders wanted to give money to illegal aliens in the US who had very small incomes, to buy mansion-priced housing, for example. Or in the case of corporations, everyone was engineering hostile take overs all over the place, using pure Japanese carry trade debt as the funding mechanism.
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ΩΩAs I keep saying, we can’t have a sane world if the world’s number #2 (now #3 economy) is constantly mired in a Great Depression while the rest of the world is hyperactive. This is a cruel balance which has not been fixed at all, it is actually now getting much, much worse as more and more G20 nations goes off the debt cliff.
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Angela Merkel moved to halt the deepening crisis in the euro yesterday by pledging German support for a controversial Greek bailout package. . Despite her actions, fears that the shockwaves from Greece’s debt crisis were spreading to the continent’s other ailing economies grew after the credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded Spain’s rating. The risk of a wholesale collapse in the value of government bonds issued by the weaker eurozone nations is now becoming more real, and threatening the fragile recovery across the EU…. . …The decision on Spain reflects concern that is potentially far more significant than the warnings about Greece and Portugal, both comparatively small Eurozone economies. Spain, by contrast, is the fourth-largest zone’s economy behind Germany, France and Italy.
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ΩΩJapan could waddle along for nearly 20 years while sinking into a sea of red ink due to exactly one very important thing: Japan had no trade deficit. It had a pretty immense trade surplus. None of the PIIGS or the US or UK have trade surpluses. Trade surpluses are capital. And what is going bust are debts. We can’t capitalize our own borrowing much longer and as GDP falls relative to world debt, the differential between the debt and the economy supporting it becomes too great and the debt causes the economy to crash.
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ΩΩJapan, during the recent depression in world trade, saw trade revenues collapse badly. This, in turn, began to seriously affect the GDP/debt ratios so that the Japanese public government debts suddenly shot up to nearly 200% of GDP, the worst on earth. The Japanese fix for this? More ZIRP lending despite rising inflation. That is, more poison.
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Europe debt crisis spreads to Portugal – Yahoo! Finance
Greek and Portuguese stocks were pounded — down 6.7 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively — while their market borrowing costs went through the roof. The interest rate for Greek two-year bonds jumped to a massive 18 percent.
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The interest rate gap, or spread, between Portugese and benchmark German 10-year bonds rose about half a percentage point Tuesday to reach its highest point since the euro came into circulation. The higher the gap, the less confidence in Portugal; its bonds on Tuesday had an interest rate 5.86 percentage points higher than German bonds.
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ΩΩWhen the desperate US dropped the gold standard, within less than 10 years, our own interest rates suddenly shot up to 18%, too. We didn’t go bankrupt, we didn’t even retract our immense military empire. What we did was, play monetary tricks that were brand new or which were based on undoing Great Depression banking reforms. Lest we forget, the Great Depression happened when the WWI debt bubble burst.
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ΩΩAbsolutely everyone owed us money for WWI and when they couldn’t pay us, our own banking system went under, too. But back in 1982, the US voted for Ronnie Reagan and he let the Derivatives Beast out of its den and since then, we have had nothing but growth, growth and more growth….of massive debts. As our interest rates dropped more and more from that 18% peak, our debts climbed. And these climbed on the back of a huge and increasing trade deficit, the exact opposite of Japan.
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Warning for Britain as financial chaos spreads to Spain – Telegraph
Last night the government in Madrid appealed for calm, promising an “austerity programme” to cut spending….
. …Britain’s government deficit this year will be bigger than that of either Greece or Spain, and some City analysts believe the UK’s AAA credit rating could be cut, driving up interest rates and raising the prospect of Britain being bailed out by the International Monetary Fund.
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Yesterday David Cameron, the Conservative leader, suggested Britain could follow Greece into crisis. “Greece stands as a warning to what happens if you don’t pay back your debt,” he said.
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ΩΩActually, Britain and all the other big nations never pay off their debts. What they do is, roll them over and over and over a la Japan, and if this principal balance is based on 1% interest rates, this rolling ball can grow to immense size and never be visible due to no interest payments of any great degree. But have high interests and the costs of rolling over and over short term loans to infinity becomes increasingly hard until it becomes impossible.
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ΩΩJapan sells virtually no debts to foreigners but all the nations in trouble today sell most of their debt to foreigners and guess who these foreigners are! The very same international pirates who run the banking system that is destroying us! The very same Japanese carry trade agents! The scandal of Goldman Sachs selling bad US housing loans to unsuspecting investors pales in comparison to the scandal of a bunch of unregulated banking pirates on various islands using the Bank of Japan to flood the world with ridiculous levels of debt.
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BBC News – Who owns the UK’s debt?
The biggest owners of gilts are insurance companies and pension funds….Next on the list comes investors overseas. Unfortunately, nobody keeps records showing in which countries these gilts are held.
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HAHAHA. And we think the Federal Reserve is secretive! The UK likes to preen itself as a great banking power. This is a sick illusion. The UK is the mirror image of Japan: as Japan lends like crazy, the UK sucks up debt like crazy and imagines, this is ‘banking’. Meanwhile, the UK capital base is vanishing very quickly.
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This is in contrast to, for example, the US, which regularly publishes lists of the countries that own its Treasury Bills. So we know that at the end of 2009, $302.5bn (£196bn) of US government debt was held in the UK, making the UK the third-biggest investor behind Japan and China.
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Note that Japan and China, the other big holders of US debt, don’t hold a mere $300 billion in US debt, they both hold nearly a trillion in US debt. A very significant difference. They hold this mega-debt in order to gain significant trade and political advantages.
ΩΩAnyone looking at this data can see that the UK is in even worse shape than any of the PIIGS. The central bank is sucking down nearly all the GROWTH in new debt. This happened in the US, too. We saved Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan by taking on all the bad stuff and recapitalizing these mega-bad banks at the expense of the Treasury and the entire nation’s welfare. This is why talk of killing off all social services has resumed.
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ΩΩAs it is in the PIIGS nations: we are telling them to kill social programs and raise taxes while we tell ourselves, we can have our cakes and eat them too, at least, for a while. And not one, not one media outfit or major politician (Ron Paul and Kucinich do not appear in the news except very rarely so they don’t count) mentions cutting our military spending and stopping our insane wars. Indeed, the US continues to pressure all of Europe to militarize, increase NATO spending and ship troops all over the planet especially into Muslim countries we are trying to suppress.
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I understand immigration worries, says Brown – UK Politics, UK – The Independent
But the issue of immigration continued to dog him, with one worker demanding what he was going to do about it during a question-and-answer session with staff.
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Mr Brown insisted that he understood the sense of public concern, pointing to the Government’s introduction of an Australian-style points system for workers coming from outside the EU.
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“I understand the worries people have about immigration. I understand the concerns about what is happening to people’s neighbourhoods and I understand the fears that people have,” he said.
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ΩΩWe are in a very typical situation here: as sovereign wealth vanishes and governments begin to raise interest rates on sovereign debts, as banks resume collapsing, governments collapse. And the people of nearly every sort end up trying to get rid of economic refugees. Since all collapses are not even or coincide exactly in time, economic refugees float around the planet at all times.
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ΩΩBut when too many countries go into trouble at the same time, expelling aliens becomes more attractive, rapidly. In the UK, they were flooded with legal aliens thanks to the new EU rules. But this is causing rising resentment and if the government reduces welfare to natives, this will explode into race riots, language riots, etc. This happens all the time and should be expected.
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ΩΩThe recent surge in wealth at the top was directly connected to international labor pools. That is, firing one’s home workers in G7 nations and hiring aliens or transferring work to aliens was the road to riches. This is now backfiring. In the US, we are told that 30% of the manufacturing jobs lost in the last 2 years will remain lost…forever! If this doesn’t wake up Americans, I wonder what will.
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ΩΩDuring the debt bubble years, a flood of illegal aliens poured into the country. They kept labor costs a lot lower than if there was no such flood. Competition for jobs favored illegals due to lower overhead, no medical insurance costs, easy to hire and fire, not complaints, etc. This semi-slave labor undercut free labor just as much as slave labor in pre-Civil War south impoverished labor in the northern states.
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ΩΩAfter the Civil War, the oligarchs let in a flood of aliens from mostly Europe but this wasn’t as explosive as the slave issue since the opening of the West funneled much of this new low cost labor into vacant lands after the natives were ethnically cleansed.
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The law that turned Arizona into a pariah state – Americas, World – The Independent
The new measure, Senate Bill 1070, instructs police across the state to stop and question anyone they “reasonably suspect” of being an undocumented immigrant. If that person cannot provide documents proving they are entitled to be in the US, they will be arrested and fined. If their immigration status cannot subsequently be confirmed, they will be swiftly deported.
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The ‘documents’ in question are driver’s licenses, I am assuming. Of course, the main target will be Mexicans and Central Americans but America teems with illegal aliens from all over the planet. The US was the main destination of illegal transfers of populations. Europe has a very, very busy time, preventing ships of economic refugees from coming in from high-birthrate nations.
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Supporters of the bill – a comfortable majority of Arizonans – believe it is the only way to deal with an estimated 460,000 foreigners estimated to be living illegally in their state. Opponents say it smacks of racism, will legitimise police harassment of the Hispanic community, and destroy a grassroots economy that relies on undocumented workers to clean Arizona’s swimming pools, mow its lawns, pick crops, and support its fast-food restaurants and neighbourhood supermarkets.
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ΩΩArizona’s government is going bankrupt. So are other governments. And the costs of illegal aliens is very high. That is, they are NON TAXED as well as needing emergency services to a very high degree due to the dangers of working conditions, life style problems and lack of funds for regular care. Part of Greece’s problem has been the high rate of tax evasion, too. A nation running deep in the red cannot afford a flood of undocumented workers who pay no taxes.
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ΩΩArizona is being hammered by the news media over this emergency action but meanwhile, the Democratic party wants to pander to illegal aliens by promising them legality. This legality never works for the simple reason, the illegals have jobs precisely because they are illegal! That is, people pay them to do work because this is an underground economy. Major corporations love to pretend they can’t help but hire illegal aliens because they need illegal aliens! These people can’t collect unemployment insurance, for example.
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ΩΩThis pleases the corporations, big time. Dangerous working conditions can continue unfixed because no illegal alien will complain. This leads to legal workers being put in danger since they also can’t complain or they will be replaced by illegal aliens. If we legalize this army of aliens, all they will do is be shifted over very forcibly to the welfare economy just like previous waves of immigrants because they will cease being useful to corporations who want illegals who have no say, no power and can be ripped off easily! And thus, the flood of illegals will resume.
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On to Goldman Sachs adds to its ranks of lobbyists:
As head of its government affairs office, Goldman has installed Michael Paese, a former top aide on the House Financial Services Committee to Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and more recently an industry lobbyist. (Frank has barred Paese from lobbying his panel for two years, longer than what ethics rules require.)
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This is the more invisible revolving door: aids to top politicians rushing off to collect their bribes. They know the legislative system in and out and will toil to warp it so it services their new bosses better and better. Of course, this is very dangerous and should be stopped dead in its tracks. But we have no mechanism to do this.
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Originally, we had the concept of ‘morals’ to prevent this sort of thing but the best tool of all, bar none, was HIGH TAXES. That is, there was no benefits to running off to con men to craft rules and regulations that make them richer at the expense of the rest of the nation. So, as our national debt ballooned, the wealth pouring into the pockets of the rich who use lobbyists who once worked in Congress has risen.
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Paese’s team includes Faryar Shirzad, a top adviser to President George W. Bush on economic affairs; Eric Edwards, a former staff director of a House Financial Services subcommittee; Joyce Brayboy, a former chief of staff for Rep. Melvin Watt (D-N.C.); Joe Wall, aide to former vice president Dick Cheney on legislative matters; Kenneth Connolly, formerly with the Senate’s environment and public works committee; Michael Thompson, who worked for Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.).
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The bank also has in place an external roster of high-powered lobbyists, including Richard Gephardt, the former Democratic House majority leader; his former aide Stephen Elmendorf, now of Elmendorf Strategies; Kenneth Duberstein, who served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff; Harold Ford Jr., a former representative from Tennessee; and Richard Roberts, a former SEC commissioner who has also served as the top aide to Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate banking committee.
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ΩΩThis is BIPARTISAN! Both parties do this 100%. Note how they happily work together for the same ends once the farce of representing different parties are dropped! Just as Bush Jr and Clinton run around the planet, kissing and cooing like best drinking buddies, so do all of these clowns. The dog and cat show in Congress is merely an attempt to line more pockets. At least, this is what the lobbyists hope.
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ΩΩAnd where do these guys get their money? Well….if you don’t tax ‘profits’ on any venture at all, you get people with lots and lots of money to spend on bribes! And if our country was solvent and rich, this wouldn’t matter so much. But we are not rich. This low tax regime has created a monstrous debt overhang which is getting worse, not better. Taxing lobbyists at a 90% rate would go a long, long ways to stopping this silliness.
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Self-Evaluations Pose New Concern After Goldman Sachs Hearing – Bloomberg.com
Wall Street employers, long concerned that their staff’s e-mails may be used against them, now have another thing to worry about: the self-evaluations employees fill out.
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At a 10-hour congressional hearing this week, senators pointed to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employees’ self-evaluations, which included boasts about making “extraordinary profits” by betting against the subprime market, as proof the company misled investors into a mortgage-linked investment.
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The fact that self-evaluations were used against Goldman employees could keep companies from being open in their own review process, hampering feedback that makes evaluations productive, said Gary Hayes, co-founder of management consulting firm Hayes Brunswick & Partners in New York.
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ΩΩAw, poor babies. They can’t boast anymore about their crimes against humanity? HAHAHA. ‘I made $1.3 billion in profits by selling sh*tty junk to orphans and widows last year!’—HAHAHA. Nope, now they have to hide these crimes from view. ‘Last year, we made immense profits and can’t tell you how we did this.’ Yup. No more pirate boasts about how many ships were looted.
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ΩΩSpeaking of corruption and looting, Israel is home base for this since there has been a general collapse in morals there thanks to legalized looting. As usual, none of this makes the news in the US, nearly all of this sort of news is blacked out in the US even though the NYT, for example, loves to gush on and on about Israel in other areas of interest. But no interest in Jewish financial scandals.
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Jerusalem Real Estate Scandal Topples Giants, Buildings Remain Standing : TreeHugger
The Holyland scandal broke in early April, and barely a day has gone by since that some new senior figure has not been implicated. Thus far, two former deputy mayors, a former mayor, the former city engineer and even former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have been named as suspects, along with a host of political cronies and the project’s developers.
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The affair has been described as the biggest corruption scandal in the country’s history, and 140 of the country’s National Fraud Squad investigators are reportedly working on the case, with all other investigations put on hold.
. The scandal, which has exposed the weaknesses of Israel’s planning system for all to see, broke at a particularly inconvenient time for current PM Benjamin Netanyahu, whose attempt to push through an already controversial reform of the planning system no longer seems like such a wise idea. Worse still, it turns out that one of the architect’s of the reform apparently used to work for the developers of Holyland.
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ΩΩThanks to AIPAC, we have no more controls on our government’s corruption and it seems that the rot is very great in Israel, too, no surprise. You can’t run a rotten system in one area and expect all others to remain pristine pure. Conflicts of interest are rife! In our own Congress, many are now terminally confused about ‘what is sovereignty and should the US have any of this mysterious thing?’
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ΩΩAlso, outside of the mostly Zionist mainstream media, there is a discussion about why Jews in the US are raging on and on about Arizona trying feebly to stop the flood of illegal aliens while in Israel, the apartheid government there controls totally and ruthlessly, all ‘aliens’ including NATIVES. Asking for ID is one of the major jobs of Israeli military and police while at the same time, Mossad steals IDs of foreigners and use these to commit murder and spy on other nations, etc.
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ΩΩThis is another disturbing yin/yang difference: the more the Jews ethnically cleanse the Holy Land, they demand open borders of all other nations so they can move about freely, all over the earth. And this would be admirable if they had open borders, too. But they do not. Nowhere in the raging debate in the US, do I see anyone in the mainstream media, comparing our open, multi-cultural, non-racist system with Israel’s extremely racist and closed system.
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ΩΩWhich brings us back to AIPAC and Congress being corrupted: one prime group for hiring illegal aliens has been ‘Kosher’ meat factories, for example. This is not accidental at all. Congress has an obligation to protect citizens of this country. And is being very laggard about this. Instead, we see grandstanding about ‘racism’ while Congress happily and with lots of money, supports ethnic cleansing so long as it benefits Jews.
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ΩΩThis is utterly insane. The economic collapse we are seeing which is growing is going to be bloody and messy and will be expressed in rising nationalism and a desire to expel aliens and this can easily slide into religious wars and extermination regimes! And the Jews lost the moral underpinnings that would have prevented this future. That is, they endorsed both ethnic cleansing and stealing or resources and using the military to expand one’s economic base and the Nazi concept of ‘Lebensraum’ is very much a Zionist belief.
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ΩΩWe shudder, thinking about the natural outcome of all of this. I have lost a lot of readers whenever I begin to talk about religion and ethnic cleansing. But wiping both off of the table top doesn’t stop the dogs from eating this off the floor! We have to confront all of this at the same time we confront the entire topic of ‘Why do we have sovereign nations, is it a good thing and should we have restrictions on wealth or power?’ These are pressing questions with no easy magical solutions. Only thing we have is history as our guide and the history of the Great Depression of the 1930’s is very ugly indeed.
Culture of Life News 
did you notice that the returns in the junk bonds are not anywhere like the 18 plus percent like the US in 1980″s more like 6 percent?
Elaine wonderfully illustrates the self-feeding system loop, whereby low corporate taxes, enables the financing of corporate lobbyists, which bankroll political pawns that promote a ravenous high debt fat diet of low capital reserve carbs and minimum exercise of regulatory muscle has weakened the national health to a point that detoxing at a moral rehab center would cause toxic shock that would kill the patient.
Financial reform, like health reform will unfortunately not cure the patient. Our attention now should be on how to avoid being underneath the sick patient when they fall over dead.
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ELAINE: Hahaha. And then we get to go on the show, ‘The Biggest Loser’! 🙂
Elaine i need your help, how i calculate when the us is bankrupt and could you tell us more about the militarization of space and the US missiles there ?
The announcement of an enhanced seigniorage agreement for Greece by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the IMF’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahnwcon is a day in economic infamy.
We are witnessing the dawning of a new age of regional fiscal, banking and economic federalism, where seiniorage for fiscal spending comes not through traditional bond market sales, but by Leaders’ Framework Agreements which supercede Treaty and Sovereign Nation Constitutional Law to manage systemic risk.
A European region of global governance was announced today German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the IMF’s managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahnwcon.
The bottom line is that in the future a strong European President and an continental investment banker will likely arise to direct fiscal, banking, investment, trade and economic activity in Europe; their word, will and way will be the law of the land.
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ELAINE: I have said in the past, the EU is really the Holy Roman Empire IV and therefore, will end up with some emperor of some sort, I am guessing. Maybe we can dig up a Napoleon or hand it over to Prince Charles? Or the royals of the Low Lands. King of Sweden? Heh. Fight wars over which one gets the throne…the good old days return.
This is really dumb. Sheer politics. Obviously you don’t need a law to tell the cops to keep an eye on things and check out potential problems. That’s not what laws are for. Laws are for proscribing harmful activity and administrating justice. Good grief.
It looks like a recipe for wasteful litigation and a catalyst for increased tensions, especially when the one “reasonably suspected” turns out to be a natural born citizen.
Without asserting any affirmative conclusions, I see attributing the failures of extremely powerful and supposedly bright people, nay, veritable economic geniuses, like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke to ‘refusing to see the obvious’ as worthy of more scrutiny. I am just not sure that absent more information that is the most likely inference. For example, at one point Greenspan actually asserted that fraud doesn’t need to be regulated because the market will sort it out. Are we really supposed to believe he is THAT stupid?
I have tried to tell you already. Do not steal from the German people! Then you are going to call them ugly names when they lash out at the thieves, but you are never going to take a look at the mirror. Or do you expect Germans to eat turnip pancakes and retire at sixty seven while you smash your credit card and enjoy your calamari, while your retirement age is sixty one? You think we haven’t been to Greece so you think we are dumb. Wrong. If you want to stay out and drink til 3 in the morning all week, why don’t you pay your own friggin bills, eh? You have got a lot of nerve talking about Lebensraum – look at where you live for instance.
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ELAINE: Who is this ‘you’? Your reflection in the mirror?
“I have said in the past, the EU is really the Holy Roman Empire IV and therefore, will end up with some emperor of some sort, I am guessing. Maybe we can dig up a Napoleon or hand it over to Prince Charles? Or the royals of the Low Lands. King of Sweden? Heh. Fight wars over which one gets the throne…the good old days return.”
I loved this comment….and really hadn’t thought of the EU this way until you wrote this. Thanks for the insight.
p.s. But who crowns this new emperor? A Pope? …Don’t think so.. Perhaps will this emperor will crown himself a la Napoleon..But you’re right…first there will be a likely fights
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ELAINE: Only if it is a young prince, would the Vatican want to ‘crown’ him. 🙂
“Holy Roman Empire IV”
Putin might want a piece of this pie.
(He’ll let someone else wear the crown, though).
I know that you are very taken with the metaphorical, so what will you call a burning 1000 square miles of ocean, as seen at night? Just how is that fire going to be put out and how is BP going to drill another well there when the ocean is on fire? Is the soot going to fly around the upper atmosphere for a year or two, or settle back in the gulf and ruin that for a few years? No one seems to want to talk about this on a national or international level. This is obviously a big problem, yet not one word about rethinking this blithe rush into drilling ever deeper. This is an accident and measures will be taken, however a seismic event, a tsunami will wash an oil platform off its mooring like a toy.
‘An unemployed insurance salesman on Thursday slashed 28 kindergarteners with a kitchen knife in Jiangsu province, critically wounding five children in the latest in a series of similar attacks at schools that have left 10 dead and dozens injured…..”This man was obviously sick,” said a 28-year-old factory worker who was at the Taixing People’s Hospital, where most of the victims were being treated. “But our society is very complicated. The economy has changed so quickly. It is hard to know where you are.”
Hundreds gathered at the hospital, as well as outside the locked gates of the school, some of them friends and family, others just curious. Everywhere, raucous debates could be overheard about what had happened and the assailant’s possible motive.
One woman at the hospital, accompanying the mother of a victim, said the school catered to privileged children. “The kids all come from families with money,” said the woman, who gave only her family name, Ji.
The first and deadliest of the recent attacks, in which eight children were killed, also took place at an elementary school said to cater to children from well-to-do families.”
Print Hu baby print, creating ever growing harmony on the Jaded Throne. No mention of anything by Coryphaeus dearest. All is well in China.
Re: This is very much like a mother saving a child from poison by drinking up all the poison, herself.
AND …….This futile business was first done by Japan.
James Petras meta-narrative “War with China? The Dangers of a Global Conflagration – Rising and Declining Economic Powers: The Sino-US Conflict Deepens” supports and supplements your excellent analysis:
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18913
The US Empire created the “hub and spokes” system whereby client states became dependent on the American domestic market for exports and Wall Street sucked in global money thru the Fiat Dollar hegemony.
Japan’s huge deficit was “quid pro quo” for being a client state to the US Empire.
Unfortunately, as you described so well, hubris and special interests from industries to Zionists wasted the US economy and civic society to the point of notional insolvency at the expense of the common good and national interests.
In summary, the on-going US implosion was the logical end point of its unsustainable system to perpetuate their Empire?
I hope the US can change direction and recovery from its present slippery slope to national misery and collateral damage for the global community.
Re incorrect: Japan’s huge deficit was “quid pro quo” for being a client state to the US Empire.
Correction to: Japan’s carry trade and consequent US huge trade deficit was “quid pro quo” for being a client state to the US Empire.
James Petras states the US has a trade with 90 countries worldwide?
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ELAINE: We have a trade DEFICIT with 90 Countries!
Now here’s an article that finally explains what Ayn Rand is all about:
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/04.10/greed.html
I have always felt disdain for my parents generation — the generation born during the thirties and early forties. I call them the “deadbeat generation”.
They were too young to remember or experience much of the Great Depression or WWII, but they always claim to know all about it. They brought us the whole “happy days” crap with its emphasis on materialism, consumer fads, and “keeping up with the Joneses”.
My grandfather never cared about “the Joneses”. He was too busy trying to get rid of useless junk hoarded by my grandmother because of pschyological trauma caused by the Depression era she grew up in. He largely failed in this endeaver, but he stayed by her all her life because he understood, even though the piles of junk made him unhappy. I know. I helped him move it around and pack and unpack it many times.
I learned from experience to hate junk. It is part of my emotional state now and there is nothing I can do to change that. Like my grandfather, I am a minimalist. I only want those things around me that I will use. I love free, open space in a way I cannot explain.
My wife is a hoarder. She grew up in Thailand. They had nothing.
I understand. Like my grandfather, I will probably just fall on my sword, but I will not be like my parents’ generation, who buy tons of useless crap and then replace it with more cheap plastic crap with no regard for what will come of it all.
Thanks for nothing, Ayn Rand. No wonder “atlas shrugged”.
News about debt crisis in Spain and Portugal are hyperbolized by UK and US media. In the rest of Europe everyone is cool. It is a fact that the PIIGS economies have big problems but only the greeks lied about the state of their finances. It’s clearly stated by european responsibles that this is an anglo-saxonic speculative attack to the euro and that if we remain united we will be able to get through this. We joke that the next nation to fall will be the biggest pig of them all, UK.
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ELAINE: Correct.
Greece will not shake anything.
Euro will prevail as long as Germany feels like paying for it. And it seems they will.
EU is mainly a peace project.
And euro is a project of the French, Germany joined in because the Euro was coupled with them being able to reunite.
Germany insisted on independent ECB though.
I guess they still would make better tanks in BMW/MB plants than in Peugeot/Citroen. Not much has changed in that department 😀 .
Elaine is a tough lady. But what price tag would you put on 65 years of peace?
Greece terms:
a government officials lose 14 month pay (2 months off)
b 3 year wage freeze
c retirement age up from 53 to 67
Pretty harsh changes and tight supervision from IMF and EU.
Greeks will learn how to manage their affairs the German way.
Who wants to be next?
Michael Krieger from Zerohedge Fund is catching onto the Chinese 50 year plan..
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/michael-krieger-last-dance
Gordon Long may have something there with this article..
http://home.comcast.net/~lcmgroupe/2010/Article-Extend_Pretend-Uncle_Sam_You_Sly_Devil.htm
“Arizona is being hammered by the news media over this emergency action but meanwhile, the Democratic party wants to pander to illegal aliens by promising them legality. This legality never works for the simple reason, the illegals have jobs precisely because they are illegal! That is, people pay them to do work because this is an underground economy.”
So true…on another website Sic Semper Tyrannis, the blogger posits a simple solution to Arizona’s…I mean U.S.’s immigration problem
He says: “De-couple residence and economic activities from citizenship between the US and Mexico. In other words we/they can live anywhere we want in the two countries, can own anything we want and take our money wherever we want. You would pay taxes in the country(s) in which you made it or lived. This would have nothing to do with citizenship. In this plan if you wanted to become a voting citizen, you would have to go through whatever process the receiving country prescribed. I suspect that few Mexicans would want US citizenship. They just want the money.”
I mostly agree with these sentiment and agree with Elaine that few if any of the companies employing illegals want them to be legal either. It is the US taxpayer that is subsidizing this illegal employment arrangement while both the illegal and his/her employer skirts taxes!
The Lizards are out to spend Germany sovereignty into oblivion.
Germany and Russia would do better to join forces and throw the Lizards out of both their countries.
The UK does not hold very much US debt; it’s all (Chinese) smoke and mirrors.
http://econompicdata.blogspot.com/2010/02/china-sells-treasuries-or-did-they.html
Yes, the UK holding of US debt is nearly all by pirates operating out of British Sovereign (THE QUEEN…the peasants of Britain are not sovereign powers!) islands.
@boom
I fear Greek bailout is the same stuff as everything else.
We are bailing out Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank etc…
Countries apparently are disposable but no bank can fail. Or the monster comes out again.
Same stuff as in the US. We will pretend that all of Greek loans are good on the balance sheets of banks.
Yup. Tis certainly true.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=asgaPkykhqNE&pos=4
The European Central Bank said it will accept all Greek government debt as collateral when lending to banks, suspending its minimum credit-rating threshold for the crisis-plagued economy.
Let it rain here in Europe for a change 😉 .
Wonder how long this can go on?
Wow, JT. All of this last decade’s worth of debt bubble is being sucked down by the G7 central banks!
This article might explain why it was necessary for the central banks everywhere to suck down all the debt and/or have it backed by government guarrantees:
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/05.10/confessions.html
I have doubts about the source in this article, but I think the premise rings true. No one wants to be known for bringing the party to an end. That is how selfish and delusional we have become. No one can face the truth now, and no one will be allowed to show it to us.