Liberalism, Realpolitik and How It Is That People Murder One Another By the Million, But Feel Badly About Doing So

In his latest work "On China," Henry Kissinger provides a concise definition of realpolitik: most wars result, he says, from a failure by one or more of the parties to a dispute to understand the underlying power relationships.

Or more explicitly, every state is prepared to rob, pillage, rape, enslave or utterly destroy any other state, its people, treasures, and institutions, whenever a profitable opportunity occurs.

This is the fundamental characteristic of human society. Throughout human existence, men have lived as members of a tribe, a clan, a nation or an empire. It was the conflict among groups during the early stages of human development, when groups were small, that drove the development of human language and intelligence.

Tribes with leaders of exceptional intelligence, energy and charisma tended to outwit or outfight their neighbors, and thus had the best chance of survival and expansion. Because the tribal leader fathered a disproportionate number of a tribe's progeny, his intellectual attributes tended to be perpetuated and spread through the creation of colonies to occupying the territory of defeated rivals.

This mode of existence required a dual code of behavior: within the tribe, honesty, kindness and mutual aid; among tribes, relentless treachery, brutality and exploitation.

Hence, today, as rivals for the U.S. Presidency compete for inter-tribal psychopathic cred, we repeatedly hear that "all options are on the table," i.e., we'll nuke anyone, if we can get away with it.

In times past, this state of affairs was generally accepted as both right and natural. All foreigners were evil bastards to be mugged whenever possible.

Today, as the money power seeks to create a global system in which mankind will be divided between a ruling set, and a mass of subordinate and essentially domesticated humans to be bred, culled, and brainwashed as best serves the elite, inter-tribal denigration is harmful to the smooth running of the empire. Hence tribal loyalties are condemned as racism.

Anti-racism is now a project to destroy every national, racial, cultural and religious heritage: the destruction to be carried out, as necessary, with nukes, napalm, anti-personnel mines and toxic gases.

Here is the fly in the smooth unguent of liberal morality: to be anti-racist, we must destroy all those who seek to preserve their own race; to be pro-diversity, we must destroy all diversity by mongrelizing the World's human population; to show religious tolerance we must be intolerant of all who believe theirs to be the true faith.

Somehow, even through the miasma of self-congratulatory humbug that engulfs the liberal mind, something about this seems, well, not quite morally sound.

Birth Control, Canadian Style: Or how one Western nation is committing suicide

With a fertility rate of 1.36, versus the replacement rate of 2.1, Vancouver's existing population will decline by three quarters in just three generations as they are replaced by people from elsewhere.

Vancouver, like the great cities of Western Europe, now makes largely sterile those it sucks in to power the economic machine: they work, die with few if any descendants, and are replaced, mainly by those of another race and culture.

This is evolution in progress. The Western nations are dying at the hands of a machine of their own construction, replacing themselves with the people of the Third World.

And as the Western peoples destroy themselves, so also is Western Civilization destroyed. Thus, insists Rowan Williams the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury, Sharia law in Britain is inevitable.

Which makes one wonder: is this really the expression of the democratic will? Do the people of the West consciously and deliberately wish for their own extinction? Or are the European peoples victims of a traitorous elite that accepts the genocide of their own people as the price of global power?

To oppose this genocide is, by some, called racism. Yet those who come from the Third World to the West should be aware: they likely will also be made largely sterile by the machine as were the Europeans they have replaced: they have been summoned to serve the machine, ultimately to be replaced, not by their own posterity, but by who ever may provide the cheapest labor. For, as the owners of the machine understand, immigrants are cheaper than citizens raised and educated at home, and are more easily controlled than an indigenous population with a sense of national identity and a belief in the Western tradition of human and civil rights.

If resistance is to be anything but futile, the nations of the Earth, Black, White, Red, Yellow and Brown, must join in opposition to the globalist agenda. Even then, the chance of avoiding assimilation -- the reduction of mankind to the status of a domesticated animal to be bred, culled, and indoctrinated at the will a deracinated globalist elite -- will be less than fair.

See also: How the West destroys its own

The Numero: Beyond Gold and Fractional Reserve Banking

In reponse to my report of a dialog between a gold bug and an apologist for the US Federal Reserve, Tom Sullivan commented, and I paraphrase:

we need a currency whose value can not be easily manipulated. Neither gold nor fiat currency as managed by the World's central banks meet that requirement.

What monetary system, then, can meet that requirement?

Here I outline the most elegant possible solution to that challenge.

The Numero: A Monetary Unit Based Upon the Cardinal Numbers

A Numero, pronounced with emphasis on the second syllable, is a unit of currency designated by a unique whole number. If you "own" the Number 1, you have a unit of currency. To own the Number 1, you must have an account with the monetary authority or a bank acting as the agent of the monetary authority, which registers your ownership of the Number 1.

Additional units of currency are created by the use of additional cardinal, or counting, numbers up to a published total based on a country's existing stock of money (or in economist speak, M2), which for the United States is currently around $10 trillion. Thus, the ownership of every single number, i.e., each distinct Numero, would be recorded, the information held in a geographically distributed, nuclear-attack-hardened, and highly redundant electronic archive.

Although a bank statement would normally show only the total of Numeros owned by an account holder, the identity and ownership of each Numero, whether in hand or loaned, would be on record. Thus, the total quantity of money would always be public knowledge, and any attempt to inject units of currency with identity numbers that exceeded the authorized total of Numeros in circulation, or which duplicated the unique identifying numbers of existing units of currency, would be recognized as counterfeit and rejected by the bank system.

Because a number is not a physical thing, there will be no physical Numeros or cash. All payments will be made by means of a cash or credit card, requiring highly reliable verification of the user's ID, for example, by means of a retinal scan or some other form of bio-identification.

Converting From an Existing Currency to the Numero

Converting funds from US dollars or Renmimbi or Euros to Numeros is a conceptually simple process. Each unit of the old currency will be converted to Numeros at the current rate of exchange with, for the sake of argument, the US dollar.

Thus, for Americans, the transition will involve only a change in name of the unit of currency, while bank balances and amounts borrowed or loaned remain quantitatively the same. For those holding currency other than the US dollar, the transition will involve a change in the quantity of currency units, owned, loaned or borrowed. Holders of the British pound, for instance, would find the quantity of Numeros they owned approximately 1.58 times (at the current exchange rate) the number of pounds owned previously.

As more than one country adopted the Numero, we would have the beginnings of a global currency that facilitates trade by eliminating the need for currency markets, foreign exchange bureaux, or currency hedging operations.

Money Created by Fractional Reserve Banking

With the Numero, money is neither created (except under very specific conditions) nor destroyed. So what about the money created by fractional reserve banking, which goes out of existence when a loan is repaid?

There are several possibilities. One is that loan repayments would be made to the Central Bank via the lending bank. The Central Bank would then lend this money back to the commercial banks at a rate of interest that keeps all the money in circulation. For example, if there is a tendency for private sector debt deleverage, something of which the Central Bank would be immediately aware, interest rates would fall. Conversely, if loan capital was in short supply, the central bank rate would rise.

In addition to loans from the Central Bank, commercial banks would be free to borrow at interest from depositors to support their lending operations, but such loans would be restricted to the amount borrowed from depositors, not some indefinite multiple, as under the existing system of fractional reserve banking.

Alternatively, money presently in existence as a result of fractional reserve banking operations, could at the time of repayment, be distributed by the Central Bank among all citizens in proportion to the quantity of Numeros they already own. The implications of this are interesting but it would require a diversion of too great length to include it in this brief outline.

What About the Pennies?

If you buy an item for a dollar ninety-nine, how do you make change?

Just as you do now, using pennies or cents, each of which will itself be a unique cardinal number preceded by a symbol indicating it to be a cent not a Numero.

Those with goods to sell will carry a float of pennies, which will be bought and sold by the Central Bank at the rate of 100 to the Numero.

As with the quantity of Numeros, the quantity of pennies will be publicly known and fixed, and the identity of the owner of each penny registered.

The Numero and International Trade

The Numero would bring to international trade the stabilizing function that gold once served.

A country running a trade deficit would experience a decline in the amount of currency in circulation, which would drive down prices and wages (see discussion of adjusting wages while maintaining full employment here), thereby increasing its international trade competitiveness, which in turn would lower its trade deficit. Conversely, a country running a trade surplus would experience an increase in currency in circulation which would drive up prices and wages, thereby reducing its international trade competitiveness and hence its trade surplus.

Changing the Money Supply

If for some reason it were deemed necessary to change the money supply, this could be accomplished by the simple expedient of incrementing or decrementing the number of Numeros registered to each individual in proportion to the number of Numeros already owned.

But there is no obvious reason why the quantity of money need change over time, provided there is flexibility in prices and wages to accommodate changes in the availability of goods, services and labor. In time, with a fixed quantity of money, the World would grow used to the idea that allowing bankers to create money without limit according to their own perceived advantage or the political advantage of their political masters is always unnecessary and usually harmful to the public wellbeing.

The Impact of the Numero on the Incidence of Financial Fraud and Other Crimes

Because the legitimate ownership of every Numero will be known to the financial authorities, financial fraud, counterfeiting, tax evasion, the vending of illegal drugs, trading in slaves, money laundering, illegal political campaign contributions, bribery and the financing of terrorism will become virtually impossible without prompt detection and apprehension of the criminals concerned.

Is the US Fed Truly Evil? A Dialog Between a Goldbug and a Bank Apologist

In response to an earlier post about the operations of the US Federal Reserve, Harry raised the following question, which I paraphrase: Is not the Federal Reserve the creature of the monied interest, and if so, how does it serve that interest?

In answer, I have to admit that I don't know. However, I gained some insight into the question from the following dialogue between an advocate of gold as money (Goldbug), and a defender of the Fed (Fed Apologist).

Goldbug: Gold has been money for thousands of years and it has always held its value.

The price of an ounce of gold today will buy a suit fit for a United States senator, two thousand years ago, an ounce of gold would have bought a toga fit for a Roman senator. But in the span of the mere 99 years since the passing of the Federal Reserve Act, the United States dollar has lost 96% of its value.

It's time to return to gold, and time to abolish both the Fed with its freedom to print limitless quantities of fiat currency and the fractional reserve banking system that allows sociopathic banksters to print their own money. We will then once again have sound money that does not rob widows and orphans of their means of existence or deny savers the rewards of thrift.

Apologist: It is true that the dollar has lost much of its value since 1913, but to put that in perspective, 99 years exceeds the normal span of a man's life, and a devaluation of 96% in almost 100 years amounts to an inflation rate of only 3.1% per year, which, according to the economists, is almost ideal.

Moderate inflation is necessary as a stimulus to economic expansion. Without it, people will be inclined to hoard money, so driving the economy into a recession or depression for want of demand.

But, under the wise monetary policy set by the Federal Reserve to promote maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates, US GDP per capita has increased in constant dollars from around $10,000 per person in 1913 to more than $48 thousand today.

Goldbug: That's all twaddle and bunkum, the idea that ...

Apologist: Wait a minute. Let me finish. When you talk of abolishing fiat money and fractional reserve banking, you display your ignorance of the history of money. There never was, what shall we call it, a golden age, when gold was the only medium of exchange -- at least not in the last thousand years or more.

Chinese merchants during the 8th Century Tang Dynasty used bills of exchange, or promissory notes, to finance trade, as did the Arabs of the tenth century and, a little later, the merchants of Europe. Even though backed by gold, the quantity of such paper could, and was, expanded far beyond the gold monetary base. And governments issued coins, whether of gold or other metals, with a face or fiat value far in excess of the value of the metal of which the coins were minted. For example, in the early 16th Century, Henry VIII of England doubled the money supply over a period of around 20 years by debasing the coinage, thereby creating one of the greatest bouts of inflation in England's history.

Goldbug: Yes, yes, we know that where there's a will to rob the citizenry of the value of their labor, the government will find a way. But the use of gold as money should severely limit the ways of government and bankster theft. If a bank loses all its money in reckless speculation, there will be no bailouts with freshly printed cash from the Fed because any fresh money must have a base in real money, which is to say gold, which cannot be conjured out of thin air, but is essentially fixed in quantity.

Apologist: So now you acknowledge that fractional reserve banking is a necessity, but bankers should be held more closely accountable for their mistakes? If so, then we are in complete agreement. The financial meltdown of 2008 exposed weaknesses in the system of bank regulation and the need to impose stricter discipline on bankers who may be so highly motivated by the existing system of remuneration as to take undue risks with their shareholders' capital.

Goldbug: In no way are we in agreement. Far from it. I do not concede a necessity for fractional reserve banking. What we need is a system that combines the stability of gold with a cashless, digital currency one hundred percent backed by gold. Such systems already exist: Gold Money, for example. All that's needed is to establish such a system on a nation-wide and international basis with secure, distributed gold storage and an equally secure, distributed computerized administration.

Under such a system, physical cash would not exist. All payments would be by the use of a cash card employing highly secure bio-identification (e.g., a retinal scan). Payments would instantaneously transfer the registration of the specified quantity of gold from one account to another.

Apologist: So under that system, how could the US economy continue to function? At present, consumption accounts for 73% of the US economy, and most of that consumption is financed with credit.

With no bank credit creation, there'd be no economy!

Goldbug: What you mean is, there'd be no Fed- and bankster-induced booms and busts. There would still be credit. But it would be based on real money. Thus, if you had cash, which is to say gold, surplus to your immediate requirements, you could lend it to a bank at interest, thereby providing the bank with funds for car loans, mortgages, etc.

Apologist: But under the system you propose, the quantity of credit would be totally inadequate to the need. Moreover, the quantity of money would be fixed, not by the needs of the economy, but by the amount of gold, a purely accidental quantity. Under such an arrangement, there would be persistent deflation as the economy grew. That is to say there would be deflation if the economy grew.

But in fact, the economy would likely go into a never ending depression as people hoarded money as its value rose, the effect of which would be to make the value of money rise even further.

Goldbug: If Americans have such an insatiable appetite for consumption that under the Fed's "wise" monetary policy they borrowed their brains out during the housing boom, why are we to believe that in the absence of credit, they will refuse to spend even what little cash they actually have. In fact, one can assume just the reverse, that as debt is greatly reduced, so also will be the tendency to save.

Furthermore, we know that the Great Depression resulted from the failure of Fed monetary policy. The monetary expansion during the Twenties, which the Fed failed to check, resulted in the Great Crash, which caused a collapse in money supply, which the Fed also failed to check. Only a World war, it seems, and the near total destruction of the industrial base of all of America's competitors, was sufficient to restore American prosperity.

Apologist: It cannot be denied that the Fed made mistakes in the Twenties and Thirties, but that was due to inadequate information and the primitive state of economic models of the era. Today, the Fed is much better equipped to handle booms and busts as it has demonstrated since the credit crisis of 2008 by bailing out the World's banking system with an infusion of $16 trillion, all of which, incidentally, has been repaid.

Goldbug: Oh well done! The Fed saved the World from a disaster of its own making. It was the Fed that allowed credit to expand without limit, until a true Ponzi economy was achieved, when money was borrowed primarily not to finance consumption or investment but to invest in assets that were rising in price because people were borrowing money to invest in assets that were rising in price.

The Fed created this mother of all bubbles by driving the Fed Funds rate from 6.5% in 2000 to a low of 1% three years later, with Alan Greenspan claiming all the while that you can't recognize a bubble before it's burst. Well Ol' Al must have had his suspicions about a bubble since he set about deliberately sticking a pin in the economy with 17 consecutive Fed Funds rate hikes from 1% in 2003 to a high of 5.25% in June 2006, when the property crash and the consequent global financial meltdown, began.

During the early years of this century, bank deregulation, predatory lending, mortgage derivatives combined with Greenspan's injection of low interest stimulant, drove America's private indebtedness to an insane all-time high in excess of 300% of GDP.

And you congratulate the Fed for saving the World from the inevitable bust. LOL.

And we're nowhere near out of the woods yet. Unemployment according to the metrics of the 1930's is still as high as during the Great Depression. Black youth unemployment approaches 90% and folks think blacks are especially prone to crime: no, they're especially prone to unemployment in a system that educates black youth poorly and then denies them the right to work for less than the minimum wage.

Apologist: You're just ranting. The Fed has nothing to do with black education, which I agree is deplorable in its failure to prepare the average black youth for productive employment. And the Fed has nothing to do with minimum wage laws, which I agree are damaging in their impact on those at the margin of employability.

Goldbug: But as for the Fed's role in the creation of booms and busts, I note that you have nothing to say.

Apologist: Far from it. I was just pointing out ...

At which point, I fell asleep and can, therefore, report no more of the conversation. However, the comments of others would be appreciated.

Qantitative Easing and Central Bank Profits: Don't No Bloggers Know Nuthin' No How?

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) The Federal Reserve and its district banks said Tuesday it earned $77.4 billion last year, down from $81.7 billion in 2010 but the second-highest level in the central bank's history. The bumper earnings allowed the Fed to distribute $75.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury, also the second-highest level ever. The earnings was derived primarily from $83.6 billion in interest income on securities acquired through open market operations, from Treasury securities, federal agency and government-sponsored enterprise mortgage-backed securities, and GSE debt securities.

On this, WRH Commented:

Can you imagine what that 77 billion dollars would have done in circulation in the US, rather than as profit to a private central bank to which charges the US government interest to borrow from it?

Which is completely arse backwards.

In the operations reported, the Fed was buying stuff from anyone who was in the market to sell. The stuff purchased, which included both government and privately issued securities, earned the Fed interest that contributed to its profits of $77.4 billion. Of that profit, the Fed delivered to the US Treasury $75.4 billion, i.e., the total profit less the Fed's seemingly quite adequate operating expense of $2 billion.

So all of the Fed's supposedly outrageous net profit actually went to the US government, which promptly put it into "circulation in the US" through its massive program of deficit war-mongering and welfare spending.

And over at the Slog, we find this:

The money siphoned out of the US economy by the banks during QEs 1 and 2 – calculated against the lending they might have produced for US exporters - nets out at a deficit reduction of some $2 trillion.

Now the Slog has much to say that is eminently sensible and all that it says is said well, whether it is sensible or not, but this statement is not sensible at all.

QE and bank bailouts are not the same thing at all. Bailouts are, in fact, repayable loans backed by more or less credible collateral. And although the Fed's bank bailouts have been massive, $16 trillion, in fact, they have all been repaid (see Page 137 of the Government Accountability Office report on the US Federal Reserve).

QE is something altogether different. It consists in buying securities in the open market, usually government bonds, using "ink money", i.e., money that has been created out of thin air for the sole purpose of increasing the money supply. As indicated above, the income derived from the acquired financial instruments is turned over to the US Treasury, less the Fed's operating expenses, and used to finance the operations of government.

So, no, QE does not deny US industry capital to finance its operations. On the contrary, it injects money into the financial system that stimulates the economy through increased business investment, construction and consumption.

Afgan massacre: In the footsteps of the Nazis?

The Australian, March 21, 2012: RESIDENTS of an Afghan village near where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on US forces in the same area a few days earlier.

In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials, the residents allege that US troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.

Holocaust Encyclopedia. SERBIA, April 1941, The Axis Occupation of Yugoslavia: Germany established a military occupation administration in Serbia, and an indigenous administration and police force nominally supervised by a puppet Serb government... By the end of summer an uprising, based in Serbia and Bosnia and initiated by the Communist-led Partisan Movement and by the Serb nationalist Cetnik Movement of Draza Mihailovic, had inflicted serious casualties upon German military and police personnel. Hitler ordered that, for every German death (including those of ethnic Germans in Serbia and the Banat), German authorities were to shoot 100 hostages.

Wikipedia.org The Panjwai shooting spree: The Panjwai shooting spree (or Kandahar massacre) occurred in the early morning of Sunday, 11 March 2012, when sixteen civilians were killed and five wounded in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Among the dead were nine children, four men, and three women, of whom eleven were from the same family. Some of the corpses were partially burned. United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, age 38, was taken into custody by U.S. military authorities as the primary suspect.

United States authorities said the killings were the act of a single soldier, while some eyewitnesses reported seeing multiple soldiers. On 15 March, an Afghan parliamentary probe team made up of several members of the National Assembly of Afghanistan announced that up to 20 American soldiers were involved in the killings.

Rawa News: Probe team: Women sexually assaulted before killing in Panjwai The Wolesi Jirga’s, or lower house of Parliament, delegation investigating the Kandahar shootings by US troops said besides killing 16 civilians, the soldiers sexually assaulted them.

So has the US Army gone one step beyond that of the Nazi Reich, not only killing hostages in retaliation for US combat deaths, but raping them first then mutilating and burning the corpses?

Is Blogger Driving You Crazy?

Have just spend an hour figuring out why Blogger's admin. "quick edit" button disappeared from my blog.

After wading through a mass of complex and totally irrelevant advice from the well-meaning and apparently clueless, I found an explanation of the problem and a simple solution at Deepak Kamat's StramaXon blog, which Kamat describes as "A Blogger and Web design help blog."

StramaXon offers what looks to be most helpful advice on many issues that must sometimes drive programming-illiterate Blogger users crazy. This is a resource worth book-marking.

Third World Wages Coming to a Factory or Workshop Near You

Commenting on my little rant about British Budget Baloney, Roderick Russell makes the point that:

In Canada we can compete in export markets with the third world, at the things that we do well, where the requirement is for a highly educated and skilled work force and capital intensity. Indeed in Canada we have the extra advantage of huge natural resources to exploit.

This is absolutely true, but it supports rather than negates my argument that mass unemployment in Europe and America is due to competition from cheap Third World labor and that the recovery of full employment will not likely be achieved without the imposition of Third World wages on a large part of the Western workforce.

As Roderick Russell asserts, Canada competes well with the Third World in natural resources which make up an overwhelmingly large share of Canada's exports. Like Russia and Australia, Canada has a vast storehouse of natural wealth, which means that a significant proportion of Canada's rather small workforce can get decent wages in the capital intensive production of the resources upon which the World's industrial economy depends.

In other words, Canadian labor has a monopoly in the exploitation of a huge natural resource base, which greatly enhances wages. If Canada were to allow "guest workers" from the Third World to work in Canada's resource industry at Third World wages -- as Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute proposed many years ago as a way to develop the oil sands economically -- Canadian wages would be headed sharply downward, as they are in in the US and Europe.

But that means, simply, that Canadian labor is somewhat sheltered from low-wage Third-World competition. And yet despite such protection, the Canadian labor market is not immune to the effects of competition from low-wage Third-World nations.

A few years ago Canada was the largest exporter of car parts to the US. Then we were overtaken by Mexico. Now Mexico has been overtaken by China. Furthermore, most of the industrial and technology products that Canada exports are re-exports, things snapped together or stitched up with parts or fabric made with cheap labor abroad. This has caused huge long-term damage to Canada's industrial sector.

Thirty years ago Canada had a highly diversified industrial economy. Then with NAFTA, jobs began going South. The Janzen swimwear factory in Vancouver, to take one local example, moved to Mexico to take advantage of wages below the British Columbia minimum wage.

With the GATT agreement, we came into competition with cheap labor everywhere. Sawmills and pulp mills were dismantled in British Columbia and moved to places like Indonesia and the Philippines. That's capital disinvestment in the resource industry and is one of the factors accounting for declining real wages throughout British Columbia's once mighty forest-based industry.

Declining wages are a reality in the high-tech world also. Computer science grads who, in the 80's and 90's could expect to start work at $80,000 or more a year were suddenly in surplus. The local computer science school went from being a a training ground for the brightest Canadian geeks to a school for students mainly from Asia.

America's best hope for economic recovery seems to depend on the oil and gas industry, which through new technology may make America once again energy self-sufficient. With natural gas in the US selling at less than $3.00 per million btu's American industry has an energy cost advantage over Asia, which in part counteracts the wage differential.

But in addition to the impact of a developing energy cost advantage, the rise in American unemployment has been limited in recent years by declines in real wages, whereas in Britain and the rest of Europe real wages have risen.

Yet, still, black youth unemployment in America is around 90% and youth unemployment overall is approaching 50% as it is in Britain and most of the rest of Europe. And the longer young people remain unemployed the greater becomes the loss of workforce skills.

There's no doubt that unusually high unemployment in America and Europe can be reduced by lowering wages. In fact, unemployment is less high in America that it would otherwise be because of a booming underground economy that employs millions, many of them illegal immigrants, at less than minimum wage and often under conditions that fail to meet statutory workplace health and safety standards.

So yes, mass unemployment can be beaten, and is being beaten in some degree, by the adoption of Third World wages and working conditions. There may be other alternatives as I have spelled out elsewhere, but there seems zero interest in such solutions.

Huge trade deficits induced by stimulus spending will hasten the Third-Worldization of wages in the West by precipitating substantial currency realignments. The sooner this happens the better chance Western nations have of retaining manufacturing workforce skills and the critical mass of engineering and software firms necessary to a revival of manufacturing industry.

British Budget Baloney

Britain's finance minister is due to present a budget. Much of the chatter this non-event evokes concerns the need for fiscal responsibility, curbing deficits, thinking even about paying down debt.

But this is twaddle.

Western economies are mired in debt because Keynesians avow the absurd belief that deficit spending during a depression, as now prevails throughout most of Europe, will restore full employment in open economies with a minimum wage of five, ten, or twenty times the basic wage paid throughout most of the third World.

This is fuddle duddle and bunkum, but it means that debt is not, according to the official line, the problem, it is the solution.

But the more Britain and other Western nations stimulate, the more cash will flow offshore for the purchase of very cheap foreign-made stuff, and the more the trade deficit will balloon. Unemployment will hardly be touched except through unsustainable expansion in the public sector and the retail distribution of mainly imported goods including the foreign made components that make up most of the added value of domestically built cars, computers and other high-tech products.

In fact, unless we are to assume that governments are run by dolts and morons (a possibility that cannot be entirely excluded), driving up the trade deficit must be the objective, as it is the inevitable result, of US and European policies of fiscal stimulus.

At some point, as trade deficits explode, the Renminbi:dollar peg will fail and the mighty dollar and the already sinking Euro will plunge in value relative to the currencies of Third World nations with trade surpluses. At that point, all the wonderfully cheap stuff and all the wonderfully cheap offshore services provided by four billion third-worlders employed, heretofor, at a small percentage of Western wages will suddenly become unaffordable expensive in the West.

The sooner this happens the better it will be for the tens of millions of unemployed Americans and Europeans. In the meantime, take a look at corporate profits: they're at all time highs, reflecting the low cost of offshore labor and the depression of wages in the West due to high unemployment and mass third-world immigration.

So, yes, the budget to be introduced by Britain's Chancellor, George Osborne, will fail totally to address the problem of budget and trade deficits, but a Chancellor's gotta appear to be doing something.

Meantime, folks should get used to the fact that to compete with the Third World, Third World wages are necessary and therefore inevitable.

And what that means is that if you're not one of the one percent, your standard of living will soon be a whole lot lower.

Ten Self-Evident Facts About Obama

Image source

The following is an abbreviated version of a blog post by Saman Mohammadi, via Poor Richards Blog. For the full story, follow either of the above links.

1. President Obama is a puppet who is owned by the parasitic financial community.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

2. President Obama is dedicated to the overthrow of America's constitutional republic.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

3. President Obama is a proponent of the fraudulent endless war on terror because he wants to use the global chaos to finalize the covert establishment of a global fascist government.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

4. President Obama is the new face of imperialism in Africa, and is militarizing the continent under the political cover of humanitarianism.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

5. President Obama is motivated to help Israel attack Iran and start World War III.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

6. President Obama is pursuing policies of de-industrialization and coercive population control against America, and other developed nations.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

7. President Obama is trying to disarm the American people with fear-mongering tactics, and using back-door tricks to get around public opinion and Congress.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

8. President Obama is destroying self-sufficient and independent communities inside the United States to prevent active economic and political resistance against the criminally hijacked federal government, multinational corporations, and Agenda 21.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

9. President Obama is impeding the economic recovery of the United States and advancing the financial oligarchy's criminal plan to bankrupt the country totally and set up a military dictatorship.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

10. President Obama is waging a total war against humanity for the benefit of his Satanic Globalist Overlords.

This statement needs no explanation. It is self-evident.

Madness was not the reason for Afghanistan massacre

Robert Fisk

The Independent, March 17, 2012: I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.

"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are." ...

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That explains it then. Obarmy and NutterYahoo are clinically insane

States of Madness: A good case can be made that Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and American
President Barack Obama are clinically insane.

By Saman Mohammadi

It turns out that the propagandist behind the KONY 2012 campaign is a raving lunatic. But what about the propagandists behind the OSAMA 2001 campaign that brainwashed the planet into thinking that Osama Bin Laden did the 9/11 attacks? Aren't they also raving lunatics like Jason Russell of the KONY 2012 fraud?

Anyone who has seriously studied the psychopathy of the state terrorists and totalitarian propagandists who did the 9/11 attacks knows that they are total nutcases. They are capable of orchestrating mass murder on a large scale, all the while presenting a straight face to the public as if they're not completely insane war criminals. 

In the immediate hours and days after the September 11 attacks, propagandist chiefs Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, all appeared on television to put out their twisted narrative that Islamic extremists were responsible for the tragedy, without providing any evidence for their assertions.

The videos that are linked above are of Wolfowitz on PBS, Netanyahu on NBC, and Barak on BBC. Every interview is worth watching. If you are interested in human psychology, history, cultural anthropology, sociology, and media studies, then you will find greater value in this archival footage.

Wolfowitz shared a brief glimpse into his totalitarian vision for America in his interview with PBS's  Margaret Warner. He talked about fighting a "broad and sustained campaign," and said the American people were willing to suffer huge casualties because there was a "different mood" in the country after 9/11. Speaking on the attacks he said: "It's massive. And I think that focuses the mind. It makes you think in a different way. It makes you think anew." (5:26 - 5:33). This type of language is rooted not in objective observations of reality, but motivated by radical political beliefs about what kind of society America should be.

Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Netanyahu, Barak, and the other criminal 9/11 conspirators were all determined to transform American and Western public thinking after the 9/11 attacks in a radical and subversive way. And the Western media, which is dominated by state intelligence agencies, was fully on board with the secret totalitarian agenda to brainwash the global public and turn 9/11 into a global myth to awaken the god of war.

II. Ghosts of the CIA: The Mystifying Propaganda Power of Images of Osama Bin Laden And Joseph Kony

Ghosts of the CIA like Osama Bin Laden and Joseph Kony are used to scare Americans into supporting, and, in fact, demanding U.S. military action in resource-rich countries such as Afghanistan and Uganda.

CIA trained terrorists are compared with Adolf Hitler, but the propaganda falls apart because there is no sense of proportion and balance. Comparing Hitler with Kony and Bin Laden is like comparing the Sun of Evil in the 20th century with its distant shadows in the 21st century. Hitler was a Flood of Death during storm season, while Bin Laden was a light drizzle of blood on a sunny day. And he didn't even commit the crime. Shadow elements in the CIA and Mossad did.

Cartoon characters like Osama and Kony are easy to hate because the media and government say they are the bad guys, but there are bigger monsters to slay in this world. Most experts believe that Osama Bin Laden died shortly after the false flag September 11 attacks in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan due to a kidney disease, not on May 1st, 2011, in Pakistan.

News of Bin Laden's original death in late 2001/early 2002 was suppressed in the global media because it would've dampened public enthusiasm for the war in Afghanistan and for the war on terror more generally.

III. It's A Mad, Mad World, Just Ask Obama

President Obama has politically exploited the lie that he killed Bin Laden at almost every political opportunity. On Wednesday, March 14, Steve Watson reported in an article called, "Obama Plays Bin Laden Card In Re-election Effort":

"The Obama 2012 campaign has launched it’s reelection campaign by drawing on the mythical version of events played out last year following the supposed assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

The campaign will release a 17 minute video later this week, narrated by hollywood actor Tom Hanks, as an opening salvo in the struggle to win a second term for the president."

Barack Obama is clearly a mad politician and a psychological basket case. But Obama is only the tip of the psycho iceberg. Top Western and Israeli political leaders are psychopathic. Harrison Koehli wrote about the personality traits of psychopaths in his article on March 17, 2010, called, "Ponerology 101: The Psychopath's Mask of Sanity," saying:

"Until the publication of Hervey Cleckley's landmark book The Mask of Sanity in 1941 (along with its subsequent editions), there wasn't much agreement on what exactly psychopathy is. The term had come to describe individuals whose emotional life and social behavior were abnormal, but whose intellectual capacities were undisturbed. In contrast to psychotics whose grip on reality is clearly disturbed, as in paranoid schizophrenia, psychopaths are completely sane. They have a firm grip on reality, can carry on a conversation, and often appear more normal than normal. But at the same time, while talking to you about the weather or the economy, they may be deciding the best way to con you out of your life savings or perhaps get you to a secluded location where they can rape or murder you.

However, while psychopaths may be intellectually aware that their actions grossly violate the limits of normal human behavior, they lack the emotional engagement with others that normally acts as an inhibitor of anti-social acts, like calculated aggression, intentional intimidation, pathological lying and emotional manipulation. In the course of his (or her, as probably one in four psychopaths is female) development, the psychopath's inability to feel and thus identify with the emotions of others blocks the development of a "moral sense" that allows normal individuals to care for others and treat them like thinking and feeling beings. Psychopaths just don't care. To them people are things, objects. When they're no longer useful they can be discarded or destroyed without a second thought."

It is not just lying politicians like Obama, Netanyahu, Clinton, Blair, and Bush who exhibit the traits of psychopathy. Most Goldman Sachs and Wall Street executives are probably psychopaths, too. And even top news executives and anchors at Fox News, CNN, and other state propaganda stations are probably suffering from some type of clinical brain damage. Does anyone think that 24/7 blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are sane? These people are totally nuts.

After 9/11, America and Western civilization took a nosedive into crazy land. Power possessed demons like Netanyahu, Barak, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Obama took over the planet. As Silver Surfer pointed out in this tweet, "this planet is a fucking #madHouse!!"

Crazy demons like Obama and Netanyahu who answer to their master the Great Satan desire war, chaos, and total destruction. They are agents of the power of Darkness and Hell.

American scholar and theologian Roland Mushat Frye wrote in his book, "God, Man, And Satan":

"So, on his journey towards the seduction of man, Satan courts Chaos, Milton's brilliant personification of anarchy and disorder, with the promise that he will "reduce" the created cosmos "to her original darkness and your sway" (II, 983-84). His power cannot enable him ever to destroy creation, but his perversions of it are precisely in the direction of atomism and anarchy, the reduction of harmony, the extension of discord and decay." ("God, Man, And Satan: Patterns of Christian Thought and Life in Paradise Lost, Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Great Theologians." Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey. 1960. Pg.27-28).

If the Great Satan has his way, Iran will be bombed back to the stone age. Both Obama and Netanyahu are preparing to woo their mind controlled flocks to accept an illegal war against Iran based on false pretenses. Philip Weiss wrote on March 15 that, "Israel will attack Iran– and Obama gave tacit approval."

The only counter-attack that global civil society has against a catastrophic world war is public education and massive de-brainwashing of America, Israel, and the West. The truth is a powerful force for good. And it is the most powerful force that we have in the global battle against endless war and totalitarianism.

During the middle of World War II, the White Rose group wrote six leaflets to wake up the people of Germany and inspire them to overthrow their totalitarian state. What they wrote applies to us today. In their first leaflet, they wrote:

"If everyone waits until the other man makes a start, the messengers of avenging Nemesis will come steadily closer; then even the last victim will have been cast senselessly into the maw of the insatiable demon. Therefore every individual, conscious of his responsibility as a member of Christian and Western civilization, must defend himself as best he can at this late hour, he must work against the scourges of mankind, against fascism and any similar system of totalitarianism."

We must take these words to heart as America and the West descend further into madness and apocalyptic chaos. All it takes to expose and expel the demons of war out of America, Israel, and the West is excavating the truth and making their crimes against humanity public. They are only safe in the shadows.

The ludicrous notion that 20-year old soldiers from the bottom of western society can win hearts and minds of Afghan tribesmen

By Eric Margolis

March 17, 2012: News of the massacre by an American soldier of 16 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children, made me reflect on the 14 wars and colonial conflicts I’ve covered. Horrible but not surprising.

It illustrates what I call the Iron Laws of Colonial Warfare:

Pick a good pretext to invade a country that you covet. France invaded Algeria in 1830 after its ruler supposedly flicked the French ambassador with a fly whisk. During the 19th century colonial era, Britain and France provoked incidents, then claimed their invasions were to bring the light of Christianity and western civilization to Africa and Asia. There was the notorious Gulf of Tonkin incident that sparked the Vietnam War. During the Bush era, spreading democracy was the claim.

Today’s pretext du jour is humanitarian rescue missions. Oil-rich Libya was a prime example. Britain, the US and France stirred up a revolt in Benghazi, then intervened militarily.

Divide et Imperia (divide and conquer) as the Romans said. Pick a disgruntled or rebellious minority, favor them against the majority, making them your allies in colonial rule. Good examples: Tajiks and Uzbeks in Afghanistan who first backed the Soviets, then Americans, against majority Pashtun. Tamils in Sri Lanka, favored by the British Empire; or Christian Ambonese in Indonesia used by the Dutch to enforce their brutal rule.

Build a native mercenary army. Imperial Britain used Gurkhas and sepoys in India; the French used Senagalese troops in North Africa; the US employed tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan. Britain’s Indian Raj was made possible by scores of cooperative princes. The Soviets ruled Eastern Europe through local communists and their security forces.

Denounce all those opposing foreign rule as: religious fanatics; terrorists; savages; bandits (favorite Soviet term). Western media dutifully denounced independence leaders as "mad mullahs;" "arch-terrorists;", "Hitler on the Nile (Nasser)" or today’s favorite, "Hitler in Tehran."

The longer your occupation army remains, the more it will first despise, then hate the local population, regarding them as savage and sub-humans.

Collective punishments of civilians by angry, frustrated, fearful foreign troops will become the norm. Atrocities will increase. Think of Vietnam’s Mai-Lai massacre, the infamous Amritsar massacre in India, India’s repression in rebellious Kashmir, Japan’s savagery in China, the US marines at Falluja, or Russians in Chechnya.

Colonial occupations increasingly rely on brutality and intimidation, then torture and secret executions. France’s Army was deeply corrupted by its crimes in Algeria and lost its honor. The United States is repeating this terrible precedent in Afghanistan. Italy used concentration camps and poison gas to subdue Libya in the 1930’s. The USSR killed 1.5 million Afghans. All colonial wars are dirty.

Colonial troops find themselves surrounded by a hostile civilian population, under attack from all sides, betrayed even by their nominal native allies. They become increasingly brutalized, vindictive and prone to drug use and rape. Surprise attacks, booby traps, mines and other explosive devices cause widespread fear and depression.

Russia now suffers a lethal heroin epidemic from its 10-year occupation of Afghanistan. The use of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan is spreading back to US law enforcement. Many former soldiers who served in these third world neo-colonial wars return home to join police forces and government agencies.

A sense of betrayal dominates. The Soviet’s supposed local Communist Afghan allies often kept secret links with the mujahidin resistance and warned them of impending Red Army operations. Today, many members of the US-installed Afghan government secretly cooperate with Taliban and its allies.

Foreign occupation and garrisons inevitably spread corruption, prostitution, junk culture, and venereal disease. The foreign troops increasingly keep to fortified bases, sallying out to take reprisals and show the flag. The notion that 20-year old soldiers from the bottom of western society can win hearts and minds of Afghan tribesmen is one of the most ludicrous myths of our times.

Occupying armies quickly transform themselves into colonial forces: lightly armed, mobile police units. When a real war comes, they are not ready to fight a modern opponent. In 1914, Britain’s imperial forces were slaughtered in the trenches of Flanders. The US has reconfigured its army for colonial warfare. But its next war may be with China or North Korea.

Source: EricMargolis.com

UK Gov. Takes Firm Stand Against Display of Christian Faith at Work

Telegraph, March 12, 2012: In a highly significant move, ministers will fight a case at the European Court of Human Rights in which two British women will seek to establish their right to display the cross.

It is the first time that the Government has been forced to state whether it backs the right of Christians to wear the symbol at work.

A document seen by The Sunday Telegraph discloses that ministers will argue that because it is not a “requirement” of the Christian faith, employers can ban the wearing of the cross and sack workers who insist on doing so.

The Government’s position received an angry response last night from prominent figures including Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury.

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Sort of makes you inclined to believe all those wacky conspiracy theories about the World being run by Satanists and extra-terrestrial lizards. Come to think of it, Cameroon does look a bit weird.

Yes, he's a reptile, alright. But, no, that's David Cameron's boss.

Coventry blues: A trip to the multicultural Midlands

Theodore Dalrymple

The Spectator, 3 March 2012: He who would see England’s future should be separated for a while from the better parts of London and sent (literally, not metaphorically) to Coventry. There, amid the hideous and dilapidating buildings of a failed modernism, he will see precincts with half the shops boarded up, where youths in hoodies skateboard all day along the walkways, the prematurely aged, fat and crippled unemployed occupy themselves in the search for cheap imported junk in such shops as remain open, and the lurkers, muggers and dealers wait for nightfall.

I stayed four nights in Coventry, in a hotel whose nearest architectural equivalent was the hotel in which I had once stayed in Makhachkala, in ex-Soviet Dagestan. At reception, there were three notices:

SAFE KEYS ARE NOT HELD ON THE PREMISES OVERNIGHT

IMPORTANT NOTICE: NO CASH IS KEPT ON THESE PREMISES OVERNIGHT

THE HOTEL DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY ITEMS LEFT IN THE HOTEL

Thus encouraged, and in need of a drink, I went to the bar called Rogues. At the entrance was another notice: no hoodies or tracksuits. no shorts or baseball caps.

Someone had applied the theories of Lombroso to modes of dress, no doubt correctly.

In the bar, a large screen relayed football and loudspeakers pop music. This meant that anyone who wanted to make himself heard — and there were plenty who did — had to shout. There is nothing quite like shouting to reveal the banality of what is being said.

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Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs

By GREG SMITH

New York Times, March 14, 2012: TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. ...

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Mish: Wall Street Pimps and Whores Story Extends Far Beyond Goldman Sachs
Forbes: Greg Smith isn't a whistleblower
ZeroHedge: Goldman Sachs reassure themselves
ZeroHedge: Goldman Sachs reassures their clients

Civilizational Collapse: The West Versus the Hypercapitalist Entity

The other day, I wrote of "the self-hating racism of those experiencing civilizational collapse."

Afterwards, I began to wonder what exactly "civilizational collapse" is, and whether that really is what is happening to the West?

Here I attempt to answer those questions.

But first, what is a civilization?

Many definitions have been offered, but none seems to have been generally accepted.

Yet no one doubts that the term "civilization" as applied to the way of life of a community has meaning. Here, then, I offer the following definition, which corresponds closely with the ideas of the American Historian, Carroll Quigley, author of  The Evolution of Civilizations.

Civilization, n.

A multiplicity of ways of life constrained and perpetuated by institutions of government, law, religion, education, war, medicine, production and entertainment, by conditions of climate and geography, and by inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, ethics, superstition and prejudice.

The central role of institutions in shaping and perpetuating the ways of life that constitute a civilization means that civilizations are coincident with political jurisdictions or states, although many states may share the same basic civilization.

If that is civilization, what is "civilizational collapse?"

The dynamics of civilizational transformation follow one of two courses: evolutionary or revolutionary.

Evolutionary change results most often from the emergence of new institutions serving new functions or performing old functions in different ways, or through the corruption of institutions, which then cease to perform their intended purpose well or at all.

Revolutionary transformation usually follows a period of decline due to the failure or corruption of one or more of the institutions comprising the social infrastructure. The immiseration and impoverishment that such decline brings about may result in a violent transformation of the institutions of government, which, in turn, may lead to wholesale reconstruction of other social institutions.

Because the decline or corruption of institutions tends to weaken the war-making power of the state, civilizational decline leads to the eventual subjugation of the state by another, and the wholesale transformation of its institutions under the direction of the conqueror.

This was is how the British and other European empires transformed much of the world, how the United States transformed the civilization of Japan after World War II and how the United States, today, is attempting to transform Iraq, Afghanistan and many other countries.

What we see, then, is that Western civilization, which is to say the civilization originating in Europe as a successor to the civilizations of Rome and ancient Greece, which in 1914 extended its influence over most of the globe, is after the catastrophe of the World Wars, once again asserting its influence globally.

Why then talk of civilizational collapse just as Western civilization again aspires to universal domination?

As the Western states seek to project increasing power throughout the Middle-East, Africa and Asia, their own institutions have been infiltrated, and taken captive, by an alien power that I will call the "hypercapitalist entity."

This power, comprising an informal confederation of several hundred business corporations, now owns the governments, the media, and directly or indirectly many other social institutions throughout the West.

It is this entity, the money power, that has transformed the West from a collection of proud, dynamic and competitive nations that regarded individual liberty, democracy and the rule of law as among its highest attainments, into propagandized, humiliated and intimidated units of an increasingly tyrannical globalist empire.

The drive for global empire in the service of the money power has corrupted virtually all the institutions of Western civilization. Governments are democratic only in name; the rule of law gives way to a regime of universal surveillance, detention without charge or trial and assassination by remote control; Christianity, which provided the moral underpinnings of Western government and law, is publicly reviled and officially trivialized; education has become a channel for the indoctrination of a once free people; medicine is complicit in the mass slaughter of healthy children in utero and the institutionalization of euthanasia; the outsourcing of services and the off-shoring of production has robbed tens of millions in the West of their livlihood; the entertainment industry makes fiction into history; the news media make heroes and role models of corporate psychopaths, war criminals and porn stars, while promoting racial, cultural and national self-denigration, and stuffing our immortal souls with gossip, envy and greed; and the state, through taxation and legislation, systematically undermines the family, the essential institution for the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, faith, and ethics.

Western civilization has been largely destroyed from within. Should the West triumph in the domination of the World, it will be a hollow victory, for the people will have been subjugated by a tiny, hidden and criminal elite, who regard humanity, themselves apart, as animals to be bred, culled, and ruthlessly managed as any other domestic creature.

The triumph of the West will mean the death of humanity as we know it.

Life in America on Two Dollars a Day. Or Why American Poverty Will Soon Match That of the Third World

A catchier title might have been Life on Two Dollars a Day: The Third Worldization of America. But one must try always to be accurate, and the Third World was defined by Mao Tse Tung by distinction from the first two worlds: America and its tributaries, the so-called Free World (a term now hardly ever used -- I wonder why), and the Soviet Empire. So although America may come to look like the Third World, it will never be part of the Third World -- at least, not until another country becomes Number 1.

However, that the U.S. is beginning to look like the Third World is confirmed by the latest poverty statistics that show the number of American families with an income of less than two dollars per person per day more than doubled between 1996 and 2011, from 636,000 to 1.46 million. Note, those are households, not people, and the number of children, alone, who were in extremely poor households rose from 1.4 million to 2.8 million between 1996 and 2011.

These income figures exclude benefits in kind such as food stamps and charitable assistance. Still, a cash income of barely sixty dollars a month plus food and a few hand-me-down garments donated via a community church is hardly enough to enjoy the American way of life, as that term has come to be understood.

How is it that a country with a per capita GDP of $48,100 has a such a large and growing number of extremely poor citizens?

The answer may be complex, but a critical factor is globalization, a momentous transformation of the World's economy set in motion by the 1994 GATT agreement, which opened the West to competition with the teaming masses of Asia where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.

The result, a tsunami of cheap stuff from the Rest to the West: from shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax to cabbages and kings (bronze sculptures, thereof), which wiped out a million Western manufacturing companies and tens of millions of Western manufacturing jobs.

As we've spelled out elsewhere, the unemployment problem will be solved, if not sooner in the way we propose, then later through natural processes of impoverishment and falling expectations.

What this means is that income differentials in the West between the 1 percent and the 99 will be about what we see today in Calcutta or Shanghai, not the relatively egalitarian distribution that all of us who grew up in the West during the early post war period took to be a natural, necessary and permanent economic arrangement.

Barbgate: How Western elites opened the gates and what to do about it

Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571, at which the Spanish, 

Venetian and Papal fleets, led by Don Juan of Austria defeated
the Turkish fleet, at Lepanto, near Navpaktos in the  Gulf of 
Corinth. Painting by Sebastian de Caster. Source.

The Slog, or evidence-based bollocks deconstruction (John Ward, Prop.), not only offers among the most entertainingly written political commentaries, but raises real questions never to be seen in the MSM. On occasion, it even attempts the subversive task of answering the questions it raises.

Today, the SLOG poses a question about the ongoing, and ever accelerating decline of the West with such clarity that I have been able to answer it, not only with authority, but with finality and extreme simplicity.

The question, in brief, and stripped of all puns, riddles and scintillating allusions is this:

Europeans, having borrowed their brains out in a many-nation property boom, are now experiencing horrendous debt deflation and mass unemployment.

So, asks the Slog: WTF do we do now? (I paraphrase.)

To which I responded:

You pose the right question, the necessary prerequisite to the right answer, which I am happy to provide.

The reason for mass unemployment in the west is in plain sight. It is the 1994 GATT agreement that opened the Western nations to unrestricted free trade with the rest of the World, which is to say with the teeming masses of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.

The reason for the 1994 GATT round is obvious. "Wages plus profits, together, are always the same," as David Ricardo tirelessly repeated. In other words, cheap Asian labor = max western-owned multinational corporate profits.

In the short term, the resultant mass unemployment can be avoided through mass indulgence in debt, to fuel property booms, retail mall construction and the consumption of wonderfully cheap Chinese stuff. But at the point now reached, the cost of debt service approaches total income and the bubbles burst.

There are thus, now, only two ways mass unemployment in the West can be eliminated. One is by a return to protectionism, which is out of the question, given that we are ruled by corporate-owned governments, e.g., the Golden Sacks, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, wholly-owned-subsidiary, Barak O'Bomber. The other is through wage convergence between the West and the Rest. That's what governments are working on now.

The Germans are doing rather well in this environment (a) by making Germany Europe's center for snapping together components made by cheap labor elsewhere, and (b) by disciplining the workforce, for example, by requiring the unemployed to take -- what do they call them -- mini-jobs, which provide a few hours of work a week for a few tax-free Euros, which provides some on the job work experience and lowers the unemployment rate.

The rest of Europe wants to adjust the easy way, by debasement of the currency. The Brits are going at it full bore, with six hundred billion newly minted and freshly printed quid in the pipeline fueling the mother-of-all government deficits.

The terminally discredited MerKozy want the ECB to follow the same route. Unfortunately, this would contravene the German constitution. Still, what's a constitution, in the post-
George-Wunfinger-Bush era? Only a goddam piece of paper.

But government "stimulus" spending is a bad idea.

Government spending generates wasteful boondoggles such as windmills that pay the British Prime Minister's father-in-law a thousand quid a day, while generating energy at ten times the cost of that from gas turbines, with little or no net saving in carbon emissions.

What's needed is a full employment policy implemented by means of a job subsidy program.

How does that work?

Easily: the Government auctions job subsidies equal to the full minimum wage. There could be an E-Bay style online auction. Employers bid competitively for the subsidies (for new hires). So if the minimum wage is five Euros, or whatever, an hour, the work year is 2000 hours, and on average subsidies sell for half the minimum wage, each subsidy will cost the Gov. five K a year.

Which means a million jobs will cost five billion. So to create, the approximately six million jobs, full- or part-time, that are required in the UK, the program would cost a total of under thirty billion a year, which is practically less than peanuts, for a government that has 120 billion to spend on land-owning friends and relatives -- I mean windmills.

Postscript:
There is a comment at the Slog, providing a mass of facts and figures confirming my claim that German prosperity depends in large part on snapping together components made with cheap labor elsewhere.

What these data show is that Germany prospers by adding value, through design, assembly, packaging and marketing, to goods made in cheap labor areas, which are exported to high-wage markets. In some cases, German companies "export" directly from abroad, "the made in Germany" label being strictly a book-keeping attribute.

The success of Germany's export model depends on international domination in a zero sum game. By definition, this means that Germany's success cannot be emulated by Germany's trade partners.

Michael Rivero, Political Commentator, Explains the God Particle and the Epoxy Theory of the Creation

Atom smasher.

Yesterday, I wrote about Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physicist who believes his knowledge of physics and its applications enables him to predict the evolution of terrestrial civilization and its political transformation.

Today, I draw attention to Michael Rivero, a political commentator who believes his knowledge of the uses and abuses of power enables him to interpret the latest findings from the world of experimental physics.

The following quote suggests to me that Rivero's claim is the more credible.

The Big bang is not science. It is religion disguised as science.

The claimed Big Bang is inconsistent with Einstein's theory of General Relativity. But the religiously deranged segment of society are unwilling to accept that those child molesters in the funny-looking robes might just be fibbing about a life in Heaven after a lifetime of slavery here on Earth. So there is a great desire to find a magical way around the paradox between Einstein and the theory of a Supreme Moment of Creation (without actually using the "G" word) and that desire now focuses on the Higgs Boson, a mythical construct that allows the universe to be created without any mass at all, thereby evading the unpleasant problems of gravity wells and escape velocities exceeding that of light itself.

It's a lot like epoxy cement. God creates two tubes (one of which contains the Higgs Boson) and tosses them into the universe where the tubes mix to make normal matter with mass and gravity, but not until everything is safely spread out so that the gravity produced by the epoxy, I mean the normal matter, doesn't suck it all back into a black hole.

There have been several claims of having found the Higgs, all of which proved premature, and scientists are always claiming to be on the verge of finding it, their excitement not unlike small children ready to open their Christmas gifts.

But here is the problem. With their latest machines and the energies they are running at, should something pop out that looks like a Higgs Boson (hard to detect because it must be massless to escape the singularity of the proposed Big Bang) there is no proof that it existed before that moment.

Particle Physicists like to joke that studying matter with accelerators is like smashing two mechanical watches together and then figuring out what the watch looked like as the gears fly out. But if you smash those watches together hard enough, individual teeth may fly off the gears and be mistaken for new pieces of the watch even though they never existed as a separate components prior to that collision.

So there is a real risk that physicists may look at a broken tooth from a gear and see a Higgs Boson, because that is what they so dearly want to see, and as Climategate proved, scientists are as biased by their desires as anyone else.

Source (which includes "A pictorial history of really expensive (and failed) attempts to connect with the gods!)

Flake, Fake, Fantasist or Shill? No. 43: Prof. Michio Kaku

Our glorious future, as a Type 1 civilization. (Image source)

Michio Kaku is the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York.

He is also an advocate of globalism, which he says, will transform Earth's mishmash of lowly competing civilizations, which he terms collectively a Type Zero civilization, to a Type 1 civilization.

This transition, he tells us, will be a splendid thing, which makes him feel privileged to be alive as it occurs.

But what is this Type 1 civilization to which Kaku looks forward with such delight?

Here's his explanation:

A Type 1 civilization has harnessed its planetary power. They control earthquakes, the weather, volcanoes, they have cities on the ocean. Anything planetary, they control.

A Type 2 civilization is stellar. They've exhausted the power of the planet, and they get their energy directly from their mother star. ... They use the power of the sun to energize their huge machines. Eventually, they exhaust the power of a star, and they go galactic. They harness the power of billions of stars within a galaxy.

Now for example Buck Rogers would correspond to a Type 1 civilization, a planetary civilization. Star Trek and the Federation of Planets that colonize a few star systems, would correspond to a Type 2 [civilization]. And the Empire, of Star Wars, would correspond to a Type 3 civilization.

Now what are we, on this scale? We are Type Zero. We don't rate on this scale. ... But we can calculate when we will attain Type 1 status. In about a hundred years.

So let's get this straight.

Kaku's telling us we're about to mutate from a rubbish world of competing petty and worthless civilizations to the glory of a Type 1 civilization as defined by a classification of civilizations of which there is not a single known example in the entire universe, our own paltry effort here on Earth being off the bottom of the scale.

Ah, but his classificatory scheme is admirably illustrated by examples drawn from the sci-fi fantasy movies. Who will not be satisfied with that?

What's more, Kaku tells us we can calculate almost exactly when we will take the first step up the ladder of heretofore non-existent civilizations.

But can we? Um, well apparently not, for what Kaku offers in verification of his prediction is not calculation but that trusty source of knowledge, the MSM:

Every time I read the newspaper, I see evidence of this historic transition from Type Zero to Type 1.

O.K., so we just need to take a daily newspaper and we'll be clued in on the most important event in the history of mankind. Like:

PROTEST FEAR: G-8 MOVED OUT OF CHICAGOLAND...
GODFATHER 'SURPRISED'...
Netanyahu: Israel 'reserves right' to strike Iran...
REPORT: Israel has already made decision...
HERE WE GO AGAIN: Obama moves to aid Syrian 'rebels'...
Secret Meth Lab Sparked Fatal Fire at Ohio Nursing Home... (Headlines source)

To quote just today's headlines.

But, wait, we're reading the wrong headlines, Kaku tells us:

I read the newspaper and I see evidence of this everywhere. What is the European Union? The European Union has been formed to oppose Nafta, that is the United States, Canada and Mexico. But why? Because we're seeing the beginnings of a Type 1 economy. Huge planetary trading blocks are the beginnings of a Type 1 economy.

Oh, yeah?

Well, O.K., no.

The EU arose out of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, a litle bit ahead of the 1994 Nafta agreement in opposition to which Kaku claims the EU was formed.

And the term "planetary trade block" is self-contradictory. A planetary economy requires global free trade. Trade blocks, are what prevent trade being free and global.

But let's not quibble.

Type 1 Culture. (Image source)

Not only are we to have a Type 1 economy and a Type 1 language, "probably English," we are to have a Type 1 culture.

This Type 1 culture will be characterized, so he says, by the universal recognition of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Madonna (Madonna? or Madonna's crotch, which is surely better known than her face).

Then he says:

Some people don't want it. They fear this transition, because this transition is to a planetary civilization tolerant of many cultures. These are the terrorists.

Wait a minute, didn't he just talk about integration, and the creation of a global culture? So where's the tolerance for many cultures? Those who seek to preserve their national identity, their race, their culture and their religion under the onslaught of globalization are the folk's Kaku calls terrorists.

Murderous intolerance, it seems, the accepted standard of totalitarian empires, is to be the new tolerance. Although some correctly call it genocide

Kaku offers no reason to suppose that global governance will promote the technological advancement of human civilization. History suggests that it was competition among the nation states, first in Western Europe, then globally, that drove the recent acceleration in technological innovation, not imperialism.

Rome sank into decadence and stagnation, as did the Turkish Empire, the Soviet Union and all the other empires that ever were. Only the American empire remains, and that sinking, punch-drunk, into a financial swamp, ever more at risk of a peasant revolt.

So why will a global empire not stagnate too, the people distracted with bread and circuses or food stamps and TV, while the culture degrades to a cult of foot binding, calligraphy and the study of ancient literature, or if America is the inspiration, Madonna's crotch, breast enhancement and Christmas cleansed of the baby Jeusus and beginning in June.

Kaku, who, by implication, labels me a terrorist and thus, presumably, a legitimate target for assassination by drone or other means, talks, so it seems to me, like a mouthpiece for a fascist global empire, a charlatan spouting pseudoscience in the service of totalitarianism: an example of the total corruption of science by politics as occurs under all totalitarianisms.

But how do you rate him: flake, fake, fantasist, charlatan or shill? Comments welcome.