Monday, June 11, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Ending This Depression Now
A central argument of Paul Krugman's book, End This Depression Now, is that calls for the imposition of austerity by heavily indebted governments are based on the mistaken belief that governments and individuals must respond to indebtedness in the same way. This is the fallacy of composition, the belief that what is true of individuals is necessarily true of the class to which those individual belong. To say that atoms are colorless, cats are made of atoms, therefore cats are colorless, is an example of such fallacious reasoning. [Actually, atoms are not colorless, they're just too small to see.]
Refuting such logic, Keynsians point out that, unlike individuals, governments may in some circumstances improve their finances through increased expenditure. If, for example, a government increases expenditure during a period of high unemployment in such a way as to stimulate investment, unused labor and capital will be re-employed, thereby generating increased output and tax revenue. [Actually, this is no less true of individuals or households. If you get a bank loan, invest in a truck and a ladder and spend the weekends cleaning gutters and washing windows, then you may improve your household budget.]
But to suggest that boosting the government deficit in Greece, for example, would be a solution to the government's insolvency is utterly daft. The Greek government, to name one of many governments in a similar situation, has bankrupted itself by over-investing in the public sector while failing to make taxpayers shoulder the full cost of the services -- many of doubtful value -- thus provided. Any arrangement to enable corrupt politicians, Greek or otherwise, to continue buying votes by overpaying and over-staffing the bureaucracy will only worsen a country's financial difficulties.
In any case, the problem for Greece and most other Western nations is not that there is a need for a wee bit more investment in productive sectors of the economy. The problem is that the West has been priced out of too many markets by four billion Third Worlders working for pennies an hour. The solution to that problem is either to give everyone in the West a 60 to 80% pay cut or to return to a closed market protected by tariffs. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to stop importing Third Worlders to the West to take what job opportunities exist from the least competent section of the Western work force.
Of the alternatives, tariffs and a return to protectionism are totally unacceptable to the Bilderbergers and others of the monied interest who dictate the course of affairs. Cutting wages sharply, immediately and across the board, though a perfectly effective solution, presents certain political difficulties. So we appear to be in for a long grinding down of expectations in the West. But give it a generation or so, and we may be as willing as the Chinese to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for three hundred bucks a month.
By that time, unfortunately, much of our workforce will be essentially without skills due to years of enforced idleness. By then it will be the formerly low-wage, Third World nations that will have the industrial workforce skills, the technology and the capital to dominate the high-wage manufacturing sector of the World economy.
So although our economic problem is not theoretically insoluble, it is effectively insoluble because of the self-serving control of the plutocratic elite and the pathetically blinkered vision of the elite-owned economists at the Ivy League universities and elsewhere who are, with few exceptions, incapable of articulating novel solutions to novel problems.
The West is being beaten at its own game. The West achieved the first the industrial revolution and profited mightily from it. The Rest have now launched their own industrial revolution and are eating our lunch. The Western nations have gone from a position of overwhelming competitive superiority into a competitive decline that is accelerating because the leadership will neither acknowledge, nor deal with, what is happening.
To restore competitiveness we need austerity throughout the public sector, meaning wage cuts for public sector workers, and cuts to welfare, healthcare, pensions and education, the money saved to be returned to the private sector through tax cuts. In particular, the corporation tax must go. Higher net profits will mean more investment. The income tax must also be cut to bring offshore wealth home to be taxed -- moderately -- and invested at home.
Then, to make the least skilled of the Western workforce more competitive with workers in the Third World, employers must be provided with wage subsidies. Sold by competitive auction, such subsidies would cost less than welfare and the other costs associated with unemployment, including the costs of increased crime increased policing and an increased prison population.
The number of subsidies offered would be adjusted to achieve full employment. That way, Western workers would be available once again make to shoes and shirts and car parts for one another at a competitive price, rather than living a demoralized or degraded existence on welfare or by crime because the jobs that should be theirs by right have been outsourced to the Third World.
See also:
Canspeccy: State-Financed Capitalism and the End of Western Hegemony
Refuting such logic, Keynsians point out that, unlike individuals, governments may in some circumstances improve their finances through increased expenditure. If, for example, a government increases expenditure during a period of high unemployment in such a way as to stimulate investment, unused labor and capital will be re-employed, thereby generating increased output and tax revenue. [Actually, this is no less true of individuals or households. If you get a bank loan, invest in a truck and a ladder and spend the weekends cleaning gutters and washing windows, then you may improve your household budget.]
But to suggest that boosting the government deficit in Greece, for example, would be a solution to the government's insolvency is utterly daft. The Greek government, to name one of many governments in a similar situation, has bankrupted itself by over-investing in the public sector while failing to make taxpayers shoulder the full cost of the services -- many of doubtful value -- thus provided. Any arrangement to enable corrupt politicians, Greek or otherwise, to continue buying votes by overpaying and over-staffing the bureaucracy will only worsen a country's financial difficulties.
In any case, the problem for Greece and most other Western nations is not that there is a need for a wee bit more investment in productive sectors of the economy. The problem is that the West has been priced out of too many markets by four billion Third Worlders working for pennies an hour. The solution to that problem is either to give everyone in the West a 60 to 80% pay cut or to return to a closed market protected by tariffs. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to stop importing Third Worlders to the West to take what job opportunities exist from the least competent section of the Western work force.
Of the alternatives, tariffs and a return to protectionism are totally unacceptable to the Bilderbergers and others of the monied interest who dictate the course of affairs. Cutting wages sharply, immediately and across the board, though a perfectly effective solution, presents certain political difficulties. So we appear to be in for a long grinding down of expectations in the West. But give it a generation or so, and we may be as willing as the Chinese to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week for three hundred bucks a month.
By that time, unfortunately, much of our workforce will be essentially without skills due to years of enforced idleness. By then it will be the formerly low-wage, Third World nations that will have the industrial workforce skills, the technology and the capital to dominate the high-wage manufacturing sector of the World economy.
So although our economic problem is not theoretically insoluble, it is effectively insoluble because of the self-serving control of the plutocratic elite and the pathetically blinkered vision of the elite-owned economists at the Ivy League universities and elsewhere who are, with few exceptions, incapable of articulating novel solutions to novel problems.
The West is being beaten at its own game. The West achieved the first the industrial revolution and profited mightily from it. The Rest have now launched their own industrial revolution and are eating our lunch. The Western nations have gone from a position of overwhelming competitive superiority into a competitive decline that is accelerating because the leadership will neither acknowledge, nor deal with, what is happening.
To restore competitiveness we need austerity throughout the public sector, meaning wage cuts for public sector workers, and cuts to welfare, healthcare, pensions and education, the money saved to be returned to the private sector through tax cuts. In particular, the corporation tax must go. Higher net profits will mean more investment. The income tax must also be cut to bring offshore wealth home to be taxed -- moderately -- and invested at home.
Then, to make the least skilled of the Western workforce more competitive with workers in the Third World, employers must be provided with wage subsidies. Sold by competitive auction, such subsidies would cost less than welfare and the other costs associated with unemployment, including the costs of increased crime increased policing and an increased prison population.
The number of subsidies offered would be adjusted to achieve full employment. That way, Western workers would be available once again make to shoes and shirts and car parts for one another at a competitive price, rather than living a demoralized or degraded existence on welfare or by crime because the jobs that should be theirs by right have been outsourced to the Third World.
See also:
Canspeccy: State-Financed Capitalism and the End of Western Hegemony
Friday, June 8, 2012
Ron Paul, Bilderberg and the New World Order
A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. Cicero, 42 B.C.The Bilderberg Group, founded in 1954 by the likes of ex-Nazi Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, David Rockerfeller, Dean Rusk, who was both a top official of the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the Rockerfeller foundation, provides the very rich and their political adjuncts the chance to get together in private to discuss how to rule the World in the interests of the very rich and their political adjuncts.
Among members of the Bilderberg's steering committee is the youthful, gay, billionaire, Peter Thiel, who just happens to be Ron Paul's largest presidential election campaign contributor.
A connection between Ron Paul and Bilderberg should be no surprise. Peter Thiel is a libertarian and like most very rich people hates the income tax, the corporation tax, welfare, healthcare and publicly funded education. Ron Paul, as his supporters ought to know, is if not very rich, at least a multimillionaire and a libertarian who would like to scrap the income tax, the corporation tax, welfare, healthcare and publicly funded education.
So what's the fuss about Ron Paul being backed by Bilderberg-steering-committee member Thiel?
Probably, although I have not seen this articulated clearly, the reaction is due to the apparent inconsistency between Ron Paul's avowed opposition to the American war for global empire and the Bilderberger's ideological closeness with the imperialistic Council on Foreign Relations.
However, the difference is not fundamental. The American drive for global empire aims at the creation of a world safe for very rich people, which means global governance owned by very rich people. Bilderbergers share this objective with the most insanely warlike NeoCons. As a libertarian, Ron Paul shares this objective.
Although Paul may sincerely disagree with the present US approach to the destruction of the democratic nation state, including the United States, as the fundamental unit of political power, he is not opposed to the overriding goal, which is the creation of a world without borders, where the nations states, their identities, their distinctive cultures and their religious traditions are to exposed to the impact of unrestricted human migration, and flows of capital, goods and services.
The libertarians, like the Bilderbergers, the CFR and the Trilateral Commission are united in a campaign for universal genocide and the mongrelization of humanity. National cultures and religious traditions are to be trashed in the process and replaced by a universal culture consisting in little more than a byproduct of the commercial system.
The emergence of this World, the New World Order, announced by George H.W. Bush in 1991, will inevitably lead to the division of humanity into two species, the Eloi and the Morlocks of HG Wells dystopian novel the Time Machine, i.e., an elite class, the Eloi, living completely apart from the slave class, the Morlocks.
It will be a simple matter to genetically engineer both classes to (a) prevent inter-class breeding and (b) to give each of the resultant species the appropriate characteristics: beauty, longevity, etc. for the Eloi, servility, and brevity of existence for the Morlocks, who will have only what physical or mental powers they require to fulfill their allotted tasks.
As this genocidal scheme unfolds, most of the existing wonderful human physical and cultural diversity will be trashed. Whether, as Wells predicted, the Eloi will become decadent and feeble minded remains to be seen. More likely, they will break into competing tribes, engaged in a furious technological competition to breed the most useful slaves, including intellectual slaves, and to advance their own path to human perfection.
Wells predicted this development in the year 802,701 AD, in which estimate he seems to have been about eight hundred thousand years out.
So Paulists beware: you may get what you wish for.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
State-Financed Capitalism and the End of Western Hegemony
According to the CIA World Factbook, the United States has the World's largest economy with a GDP of $15.0 trillion, unless that is, you count the EU economy (GDP, $15.4 trillion) as a single entity. The US is followed closely by China (GDP $11.3 trillion), if you measure GDP on the basis of purchasing power parity, with India a long way behind at $4.4 trillion, the same as Japan.
The numbers seem to suggest that despite the extraordinary dynamism of the Asian economies, the West, with its Asian ally Japan, is still comfortably on top of the heap economically, and thus presumably, in technology and military power.
Things look rather different, however, if you consider rates of investment and growth. China, again according to the CIA, invested 54% of GDP in 2011, versus 18% in the European Union and 12% in the US. Converting those percentages to dollar amounts at purchasing power parity shows that China's total investment was $6.1 trillion in 2011, one third more than that of the US and the EU combined.
What does this mean for the future? The answer depends on how investments in China and the West are deployed. On the one hand, China, it is said, is a highly corrupt country where investment capital is channeled via government-controlled bank lending into all kinds of unprofitable businesses and infrastructure boondoggles, the loans being rolled over indefinitely, with new loans being made to cover business losses and infrastructure project overruns.
In the West, on the other other hand, we are supposed to have the most efficient and incorruptible capital markets, so our relatively low investment rate is more than sufficient to maintain competitiveness with China. Trouble is that China's economy grew at the astonishing rate of 9.2% in 2011, according to the CIA, whereas America's grew by only a paltry 1.5% in the same year, albeit a great improvement over the contraction of 3.5% in 2009.
A difference in growth rate of 8% in economies of comparable size, means a doubling of the one versus the other within a mere 9 years. Let me put that another way: in less than a decade, China's economy could be twice as large as that of the US, and equal to that of the US and the EU combined.
If the CIA and the US administration are not worried about that, then Western global hegemony will surely end sooner than later.
And even if the CIA and the US administration are thinking about it, what can they do about it?
One possibility is to emulate China, by redirecting 30 or 40% of the nation's GDP from consumption to investment.
But how?
China, it appears, ensures a massive rate of capital investment in two ways. First, through direct control of major industrial concerns, income from which can be reinvested, rather than paid out, in whole or in part, as dividends to investors, as would be the case with privately owned companies. Second, by printing renminbis, thereby imposing an inflation tax on workers, which can be directed through state-controlled banks into private or public investments. Such arrangements, we may call state-financed capitalism.
How, in the West, can a similar result be achieved? After the failure of the Soviet Union and Britain's post-war experiments with state ownership of the means of production, there is no faith in the West in the capacity of the state to run anything sufficiently well to generate consistent profits for new investment. Which leaves money printing and the inflation tax as the only apparent means to institute a system of state-financed capitalism in the West.
So how is the inflation tax to be deployed to this end?
One way is to print money and give it to those who will invest it. Europe's large scale investment in windmills and solar power is an example of this method in action. The result is to despoil the landscape with thousand of highly unprofitable windmills that do little to lift the GNP.
Backstopping banks and other entities that engage in risky financial engineering with massive public bailouts is another method of injecting capital into the private sector. But in this case the aim is merely to make up losses rather than to generate new profits, so the impact on the GDP must be limited.
Last, but not least, the Western states can use money printing to hold interest rates at or below the inflation rate. That is what they are doing and have vowed to continue doing. The result is essentially the same as that achieved by the Government of China. For those who wish to invest, capital is essentially free. The cost of borrowing is less than the rate of currency depreciation.
In the US, cheap credit in the early years of the millenium led to a property bubble, i.e., a consumption boom. However, since the property crash, the chief beneficiaries of cheap credit in the US appear to be corporations with plans for investment.
The risk remains, however, that cheap money will increasingly flow into the stock market, creating a financial bubble that will have the effect of directing resources into consumption, not productive investment. The creation of a climate of fear about investment must help prevent this. So bring on the crash books and wind-up the frenzy for "physical gold," the price of which can be deflated by financial manipulation at anytime to further enrich the financial corporations.
A further benefit of large scale money printing is that it makes it more difficult for China and other cheap labor exporters to the West to maintain their virtual currency peg against the dollar and the Euro. In other words, it allows Western wages to more rapidly approach parity with those of the Rest. Such wage reductions, create opportunities for import substititon in the West and hence promote investment. They also increase corporate profits, which increases the availability of capital for investment.
How successful this Western version of state-financed capitalism will be remains to be seen, but several major obstacles to its success are evident. One is the attitude of worker entitlement bred of decades of liberal-leftist propaganda, which generates huge resistance to economic adjustment to reality as abundantly demonstrated in Greece. Another is the attitude of ruling elites in the West who maintain a genocidal contempt for their own people, preferring to replace the indigenous working class with Third World immigrants less attuned than the native population to the rights of man. Such a neo-feudalist approach to leadership will result in increasing social unrest.
In view of these difficulties, it seems probably that rather than kickstarting a new round of investment, innovation and economic growth in the West, the Western version of state-financed capitalism will lead to more not less off-shoring and outsourcing of jobs and production, with a consequent reduction, not increase, in the economic output of the West. Moreover, it seems unlikely that the social conflict that current policy generates will be indefinitely contained. Instead, the US/EU seem headed for internal disintegration and a transition to a treasonous form of plutocratic tyranny.
The numbers seem to suggest that despite the extraordinary dynamism of the Asian economies, the West, with its Asian ally Japan, is still comfortably on top of the heap economically, and thus presumably, in technology and military power.
Things look rather different, however, if you consider rates of investment and growth. China, again according to the CIA, invested 54% of GDP in 2011, versus 18% in the European Union and 12% in the US. Converting those percentages to dollar amounts at purchasing power parity shows that China's total investment was $6.1 trillion in 2011, one third more than that of the US and the EU combined.
What does this mean for the future? The answer depends on how investments in China and the West are deployed. On the one hand, China, it is said, is a highly corrupt country where investment capital is channeled via government-controlled bank lending into all kinds of unprofitable businesses and infrastructure boondoggles, the loans being rolled over indefinitely, with new loans being made to cover business losses and infrastructure project overruns.
In the West, on the other other hand, we are supposed to have the most efficient and incorruptible capital markets, so our relatively low investment rate is more than sufficient to maintain competitiveness with China. Trouble is that China's economy grew at the astonishing rate of 9.2% in 2011, according to the CIA, whereas America's grew by only a paltry 1.5% in the same year, albeit a great improvement over the contraction of 3.5% in 2009.
A difference in growth rate of 8% in economies of comparable size, means a doubling of the one versus the other within a mere 9 years. Let me put that another way: in less than a decade, China's economy could be twice as large as that of the US, and equal to that of the US and the EU combined.
If the CIA and the US administration are not worried about that, then Western global hegemony will surely end sooner than later.
And even if the CIA and the US administration are thinking about it, what can they do about it?
One possibility is to emulate China, by redirecting 30 or 40% of the nation's GDP from consumption to investment.
But how?
China, it appears, ensures a massive rate of capital investment in two ways. First, through direct control of major industrial concerns, income from which can be reinvested, rather than paid out, in whole or in part, as dividends to investors, as would be the case with privately owned companies. Second, by printing renminbis, thereby imposing an inflation tax on workers, which can be directed through state-controlled banks into private or public investments. Such arrangements, we may call state-financed capitalism.
How, in the West, can a similar result be achieved? After the failure of the Soviet Union and Britain's post-war experiments with state ownership of the means of production, there is no faith in the West in the capacity of the state to run anything sufficiently well to generate consistent profits for new investment. Which leaves money printing and the inflation tax as the only apparent means to institute a system of state-financed capitalism in the West.
So how is the inflation tax to be deployed to this end?
One way is to print money and give it to those who will invest it. Europe's large scale investment in windmills and solar power is an example of this method in action. The result is to despoil the landscape with thousand of highly unprofitable windmills that do little to lift the GNP.
Backstopping banks and other entities that engage in risky financial engineering with massive public bailouts is another method of injecting capital into the private sector. But in this case the aim is merely to make up losses rather than to generate new profits, so the impact on the GDP must be limited.
Last, but not least, the Western states can use money printing to hold interest rates at or below the inflation rate. That is what they are doing and have vowed to continue doing. The result is essentially the same as that achieved by the Government of China. For those who wish to invest, capital is essentially free. The cost of borrowing is less than the rate of currency depreciation.
In the US, cheap credit in the early years of the millenium led to a property bubble, i.e., a consumption boom. However, since the property crash, the chief beneficiaries of cheap credit in the US appear to be corporations with plans for investment.
The risk remains, however, that cheap money will increasingly flow into the stock market, creating a financial bubble that will have the effect of directing resources into consumption, not productive investment. The creation of a climate of fear about investment must help prevent this. So bring on the crash books and wind-up the frenzy for "physical gold," the price of which can be deflated by financial manipulation at anytime to further enrich the financial corporations.
A further benefit of large scale money printing is that it makes it more difficult for China and other cheap labor exporters to the West to maintain their virtual currency peg against the dollar and the Euro. In other words, it allows Western wages to more rapidly approach parity with those of the Rest. Such wage reductions, create opportunities for import substititon in the West and hence promote investment. They also increase corporate profits, which increases the availability of capital for investment.
How successful this Western version of state-financed capitalism will be remains to be seen, but several major obstacles to its success are evident. One is the attitude of worker entitlement bred of decades of liberal-leftist propaganda, which generates huge resistance to economic adjustment to reality as abundantly demonstrated in Greece. Another is the attitude of ruling elites in the West who maintain a genocidal contempt for their own people, preferring to replace the indigenous working class with Third World immigrants less attuned than the native population to the rights of man. Such a neo-feudalist approach to leadership will result in increasing social unrest.
In view of these difficulties, it seems probably that rather than kickstarting a new round of investment, innovation and economic growth in the West, the Western version of state-financed capitalism will lead to more not less off-shoring and outsourcing of jobs and production, with a consequent reduction, not increase, in the economic output of the West. Moreover, it seems unlikely that the social conflict that current policy generates will be indefinitely contained. Instead, the US/EU seem headed for internal disintegration and a transition to a treasonous form of plutocratic tyranny.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
U.S. Financial Collapse Is At Hand -- Or Not?
Yesterday we argued that the United States Government had no reason to destroy the US dollar through hyperinflationary money printing. But Paul Craig Roberts, Deputy Secretary to the US Treasury under Ronald Reagan, suggests that no reason for destroying the US dollar is required. Federal Reserve incompetence, US megalomania, and Wall Street greed have combined to create a situation in which the dollar will almost certainly lose its World reserve currency status and in the process much of its value.
Roberts' analysis begins with this question:
In addition, Roberts asserts, the US banks are keeping up the price of US Treasuries by selling interest rate swaps:
A bond crash will cause a dollar crash because the Fed will be obliged to print dollars to buy up the bonds dumped. Trillions of these newly printed dollars will go to foreign sellers of US assets who will dump them on the foreign exchange markets, thus driving down the dollar's value.
In addition, Roberts suggests, it is not within US power to determine when a trickle of funds out of the bond market turns to a flood.The US, he says, is in the hands of foreign creditors who can unleash a tidal wave of US-dollar-denominated asset sales if sufficiently provoked.China, for example, could drop $2 trillion in US assets.
But, as Roberts admits, dumping US dollar assets will cost China dear, as those assets will lose much of their value before they have all been sold.What's more, dumping US dollar assets will drive down the US dollar renminbi exchange rate, thereby destroying China's largest export market and driving China into recession, if not a socially destabilizing depression.
As for the US banks, they can exit the US bond market without setting off a collapse provided that the Fed buys up the bank-owned bonds for its own portfolio. The dollars that the Fed needs to buy the paper will come back to it as the banks pay down the zero-interest Fed loans with which the bonds were initially purchased.
While, for all I know, the US plan for global financial hegemony may result in the mother-of-all financial collapses, I don't see that that is by any means certain or even likely. By maintaining zero interest rates the US Fed is enabling America's largest corporations to acquire control of much of the World's business, agricultural and real estate assets at zero cost. And if something goes wrong in the process and the dollar collapses in a new gigantic financial crisis, the US will come out of it, as Nazi Germany did after the great inflation, with a vastly more competitive, highly capitalized industrial sector well placed to capture an increased share of World markets.
Roberts' analysis begins with this question:
How can the Federal Reserve maintain [as it has promised to do for several years more] zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits?The answer, Roberts gives, is that it cannot do so for very long:
It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.That the policy is feasible for the time being Roberts attributes to transient factors such as the current focus on the Euro and European sovereign debt and fear among private investors of the equity market, plus collusion by US banks, which "can borrow from the Federal Reserve at zero interest rates and purchase 10-year Treasuries at 2%, thus earning a nominal profit of 2%".
In addition, Roberts asserts, the US banks are keeping up the price of US Treasuries by selling interest rate swaps:
The big banks are positioned to make the Fed’s policy a success. JPMorganChase and other giant-sized banks can drive down Treasury interest rates and, thereby, drive up the prices of bonds, producing a rally, by selling Interest Rate Swaps (IRSwaps).But everyone, including the US banks, Roberts asserts, have an interest in getting out of Treasuries ahead of the crowd when the exodus will become a deluge. What that means is that US Treasuries are bound to crash sooner or later and and, when they do, they will take the dollar with them.
A financial company that sells IRSwaps is selling an agreement to pay floating interest rates for fixed interest rates. The buyer is purchasing an agreement that requires him to pay a fixed rate of interest in exchange for receiving a floating rate.
The reason for a seller to take the short side of the IRSwap, that is, to pay a floating rate for a fixed rate, is his belief that rates are going to fall. Short-selling can make the rates fall, and thus drive up the prices of Treasuries.
A bond crash will cause a dollar crash because the Fed will be obliged to print dollars to buy up the bonds dumped. Trillions of these newly printed dollars will go to foreign sellers of US assets who will dump them on the foreign exchange markets, thus driving down the dollar's value.
In addition, Roberts suggests, it is not within US power to determine when a trickle of funds out of the bond market turns to a flood.The US, he says, is in the hands of foreign creditors who can unleash a tidal wave of US-dollar-denominated asset sales if sufficiently provoked.China, for example, could drop $2 trillion in US assets.
But, as Roberts admits, dumping US dollar assets will cost China dear, as those assets will lose much of their value before they have all been sold.What's more, dumping US dollar assets will drive down the US dollar renminbi exchange rate, thereby destroying China's largest export market and driving China into recession, if not a socially destabilizing depression.
As for the US banks, they can exit the US bond market without setting off a collapse provided that the Fed buys up the bank-owned bonds for its own portfolio. The dollars that the Fed needs to buy the paper will come back to it as the banks pay down the zero-interest Fed loans with which the bonds were initially purchased.
While, for all I know, the US plan for global financial hegemony may result in the mother-of-all financial collapses, I don't see that that is by any means certain or even likely. By maintaining zero interest rates the US Fed is enabling America's largest corporations to acquire control of much of the World's business, agricultural and real estate assets at zero cost. And if something goes wrong in the process and the dollar collapses in a new gigantic financial crisis, the US will come out of it, as Nazi Germany did after the great inflation, with a vastly more competitive, highly capitalized industrial sector well placed to capture an increased share of World markets.
The Real Crash -- Postponed
Crash books are fun. One gets to gloat over the losses of dopes who invested in Tech stocks, social media, read estate or whatever it is that's going to crash and leave you in the position to cash your "physical gold" and buy up cool real estate, yachts, whatever, for pennies on the dollar.
Peter Schiff's latest, The Real Crash, America's Coming Bankruptcy---How to Save Yourself and Your Country, follows up on his Crashproof. How to Profit from the Coming Collapse. The "coming collapse," being, we learn from The Real Crash, yet to come. That's the great thing about writing crash books, if events prove you wrong, just advance the crash date and rewrite, as Batra did with his The Crash of the Millenium, Surviving the Inflationary Depression, an update on The Great Depression of 1990. Who knows? One day you might get it right.
Which is not to say that these books are worthless. Batra is no mean economist and well worth a read. Schiff's latest is of some interest. The crash yet to happen does not loom large. Instead, the book consists mainly of chapters setting forth a libertarian position on diverse topics including: why the US income tax is (a) a bad thing, and (b) unconstitutional; why college education is (a) absurdly overpriced, and (b) a bad bargain for most students; and why social security is a scam.
As for the crash, Schiff, like most crashologists, anticipates a hyperinflationary destruction of savings and the disruption of trade and industry as the result of incontinent government deficit spending financed by money printing. In short, Schiff predicts that the US Government, in collaboration with the US Federal Reserve, is about trash the dollar.
But trashing the national currency overnight is not a thing to be done lightly. The destruction of savings violently antagonizes a large part of the population, thus creating a potentially revolutionary situation. The case of Wiemar Germany illustrates the point. Middle class resentment over the destruction of all savings during the hyperinflation of 1920-23 created an environment in which a nationalistic "savior" was bound to thrive. Adolph Hitler made full use of the opportunity.
Wiemar Germany is also instructive of the conditions that may cause a democratic government to destroy the currency. Germany financed its participation in WW1 largely through borrowing. After the war, Germany was obliged by the Versailles Treaty to pay gigantic war reparations to the victors, payments to be made in gold. These bills were unpayable, so the government did what may have seemed the only thing possible: it printed money.
The results of the consequent inflation were threefold. First, it freed the government of its obligation to holders of government bonds, the people who had financed the war: they were left holding bonds redeemable by the government with worthless paper. Second, it freed industry, which needed to retool for export rather than war, to slough off their creditors with worthless paper. Third, it effectively cut wages to the subsistence level.Workers received a barrow-load of paper money, which by the time it was wheeled to the store, barely sufficed to purchase a basket of groceries.
Thus Germany's great inflation was not the result of irrational or irresponsible government action. It was a necessary result of the terms imposed on Germany by the victors of World War 1. The consequences, Hitler and World War 2, can be blamed on the stupidity and vindictiveness of the Allies, whose view was well expressed by Eric Campbell-Geddes, Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, 1917-1919, when he said "We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak."
Other hyperinflations have had different causes. For example, in Zimbabwe, the Government of the tyrant Robert Mugabe engineered a hyperinflation with the sole apparent objective of impoverishing the middle class, whose wealth was transferred to Robert Mugabe and his cronies. The project was a success because Mugabe was and remains an absolute dictator.
America's position is very different from that of either Wiemar Germany or Mugabe's Zimbabwe, and if anyone wishes to convince the world that the US is about to embark on a dollar-destroying hyperinflation, they need to explain why. That reckless money printing will be undertaken by the US Government out of, well, recklessness, seems highly unlikely.
Peter Schiff's latest, The Real Crash, America's Coming Bankruptcy---How to Save Yourself and Your Country, follows up on his Crashproof. How to Profit from the Coming Collapse. The "coming collapse," being, we learn from The Real Crash, yet to come. That's the great thing about writing crash books, if events prove you wrong, just advance the crash date and rewrite, as Batra did with his The Crash of the Millenium, Surviving the Inflationary Depression, an update on The Great Depression of 1990. Who knows? One day you might get it right.
Which is not to say that these books are worthless. Batra is no mean economist and well worth a read. Schiff's latest is of some interest. The crash yet to happen does not loom large. Instead, the book consists mainly of chapters setting forth a libertarian position on diverse topics including: why the US income tax is (a) a bad thing, and (b) unconstitutional; why college education is (a) absurdly overpriced, and (b) a bad bargain for most students; and why social security is a scam.
As for the crash, Schiff, like most crashologists, anticipates a hyperinflationary destruction of savings and the disruption of trade and industry as the result of incontinent government deficit spending financed by money printing. In short, Schiff predicts that the US Government, in collaboration with the US Federal Reserve, is about trash the dollar.
But trashing the national currency overnight is not a thing to be done lightly. The destruction of savings violently antagonizes a large part of the population, thus creating a potentially revolutionary situation. The case of Wiemar Germany illustrates the point. Middle class resentment over the destruction of all savings during the hyperinflation of 1920-23 created an environment in which a nationalistic "savior" was bound to thrive. Adolph Hitler made full use of the opportunity.
Wiemar Germany is also instructive of the conditions that may cause a democratic government to destroy the currency. Germany financed its participation in WW1 largely through borrowing. After the war, Germany was obliged by the Versailles Treaty to pay gigantic war reparations to the victors, payments to be made in gold. These bills were unpayable, so the government did what may have seemed the only thing possible: it printed money.
The results of the consequent inflation were threefold. First, it freed the government of its obligation to holders of government bonds, the people who had financed the war: they were left holding bonds redeemable by the government with worthless paper. Second, it freed industry, which needed to retool for export rather than war, to slough off their creditors with worthless paper. Third, it effectively cut wages to the subsistence level.Workers received a barrow-load of paper money, which by the time it was wheeled to the store, barely sufficed to purchase a basket of groceries.
Thus Germany's great inflation was not the result of irrational or irresponsible government action. It was a necessary result of the terms imposed on Germany by the victors of World War 1. The consequences, Hitler and World War 2, can be blamed on the stupidity and vindictiveness of the Allies, whose view was well expressed by Eric Campbell-Geddes, Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty, 1917-1919, when he said "We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak."
Other hyperinflations have had different causes. For example, in Zimbabwe, the Government of the tyrant Robert Mugabe engineered a hyperinflation with the sole apparent objective of impoverishing the middle class, whose wealth was transferred to Robert Mugabe and his cronies. The project was a success because Mugabe was and remains an absolute dictator.
America's position is very different from that of either Wiemar Germany or Mugabe's Zimbabwe, and if anyone wishes to convince the world that the US is about to embark on a dollar-destroying hyperinflation, they need to explain why. That reckless money printing will be undertaken by the US Government out of, well, recklessness, seems highly unlikely.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
The American way of war: sabotage, subversion, terror
By Sharmine Narwani
The Sandbox, May 25, 2012:
But most of us have not had the pleasure of leafing through this truly revelatory blueprint that shows how America wages its dirty wars. These are the secret wars that have neither been approved by Congress, nor by the inhabitants of nations whose lives – if not bodies – are mauled by the directives on these pages.
A quote from President John F. Kennedy in 1962 opens the document. These few lines illustrate a core Washington belief that US forces have the right to destabilize, infiltrate, assassinate, subvert – all in service of questionable foreign policy objectives, with no evident consideration of a sovereign state’s preparedness or desire for change:
Read More
See Also:
US, Israel wrote Stuxnet, officials say
The Sandbox, May 25, 2012:
The intent of U.S. [Unconventional Warfare] UW efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish U.S. strategic objectives…For the foreseeable future, U.S. forces will predominantly engage in irregular warfare (IW) operations.So begins the 2010 Unconventional Warfare (UW) Manual of the US Military’s Special Forces. The manual attached here (TC 18-01) is an interim publication, developed to address the definition of Unconventional Warfare and some other inconsistencies in UW Doctrine. The new UW document (ATP 3-05.1) is in the initial draft and not yet available, though sources tell me it is unlikely to differ much from TC 18-01.
But most of us have not had the pleasure of leafing through this truly revelatory blueprint that shows how America wages its dirty wars. These are the secret wars that have neither been approved by Congress, nor by the inhabitants of nations whose lives – if not bodies – are mauled by the directives on these pages.
A quote from President John F. Kennedy in 1962 opens the document. These few lines illustrate a core Washington belief that US forces have the right to destabilize, infiltrate, assassinate, subvert – all in service of questionable foreign policy objectives, with no evident consideration of a sovereign state’s preparedness or desire for change:
There is another type of warfare—new in its intensity, ancient in its origin—war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It preys on unrest.
Read More
See Also:
US, Israel wrote Stuxnet, officials say
Saturday, June 2, 2012
The Wages of Liberalism Are National Self Destruction
What's Really Behind Europe's Decline? It's The Birth Rates, Stupid
By Joel Kotkin
Forbes, May 30, 2012: The labor demonstrators, now an almost-daily occurrence in Madrid and other economically-devastated southern European cities lambast austerity and budget cuts as the primary cause for their current national crisis. But longer-term, the biggest threat to the European Union has less to do with government policy than what is–or is not–happening in the bedroom.
In particular, southern Europe’s economic disaster is both reflected — and is largely caused by — a demographic decline that, if not soon reversed, all but guarantees the continent’s continued slide. For decades, the wealthier countries of the northern countries — notably Germany — have offset very low fertility rates and declining domestic demand by attracting migrants from other countries, notably from eastern and southern Europe, and building highly productive export oriented economies.
Read More
By Joel Kotkin
Forbes, May 30, 2012: The labor demonstrators, now an almost-daily occurrence in Madrid and other economically-devastated southern European cities lambast austerity and budget cuts as the primary cause for their current national crisis. But longer-term, the biggest threat to the European Union has less to do with government policy than what is–or is not–happening in the bedroom.
In particular, southern Europe’s economic disaster is both reflected — and is largely caused by — a demographic decline that, if not soon reversed, all but guarantees the continent’s continued slide. For decades, the wealthier countries of the northern countries — notably Germany — have offset very low fertility rates and declining domestic demand by attracting migrants from other countries, notably from eastern and southern Europe, and building highly productive export oriented economies.
Read More
Friday, June 1, 2012
What intelligent readers!
Lew Rockwell posted a link to this "Readability Calculator," which tests document readability and offers authors advice on how to rewrite to improve the readability of their text.
Ever anxious to make readable this heretofore unreadable blog, I submitted the text of a recent post for evaluation with the following results.
Test Document Readability
But no, apparently this is really tough to read.
Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :
So what's the real problem here? That some people use words of more than one syllable, and sentences of more than twenty words, or that even after a dozen years of education many people struggle to understand a simple sentence? Or is it just that the readability calculator is a joke?
Here's what the calculator said about Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :
Ever anxious to make readable this heretofore unreadable blog, I submitted the text of a recent post for evaluation with the following results.
Test Document Readability
Number of characters (without spaces) : 1,150.00.Which makes it look pretty readable, eh? I mean, less than an average of five characters per word, less than 20 words per sentence, less than two syllables per word.
Number of words : 232.00
Number of sentences : 12.00
Average number of characters per word : 4.96
Average number of syllables per word : 1.73
Average number of words per sentence: 19.33
But no, apparently this is really tough to read.
Indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading
Gunning Fog index : 15.66Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text
Coleman Liau index : 11.84So, congrats if you managed to read that post. But here's where we need to improve:
Flesch Kincaid Grade level : 12.40
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 11.58
SMOG : 14.18
Flesch Reading Ease : 40.62
List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :
Meantime, those slimy limey liars at the BBC use emotional images and moralistic statements to trump rational analysis and convince us without evidence that the government of Syria is guilty of crimes against humanity.I think what they're really saying is that without more than a dozen years of formal education the average person has difficulty understanding a sentence with a conditional clause or parenthetic phrase.
Canada, as the CBC slavishly reports, does not question the US line that President Assad of Syria is a monster "killing his own people," who by implication must be bombed out of power by US/NATO.
Yet it hardly makes sense for Assad, however psychopathic he may be, to provide US/NATO the justification they so desperately want to bomb him out of power.
So what's the real problem here? That some people use words of more than one syllable, and sentences of more than twenty words, or that even after a dozen years of education many people struggle to understand a simple sentence? Or is it just that the readability calculator is a joke?
Here's what the calculator said about Abe Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:
List of sentences which we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text :
- It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
- Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
- It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Who are the Bilderbergers?
The Bilderberg meetings were instituted in 1954 in response to
So who are these people?
The official list of participants in this year's meeting includes the following Canadians.
Carney, Mark J., Governor, Bank of Canada
Clark, W. Edmund, Group President and CEO, TD Bank Group
McKenna, Frank, Deputy Chair, TD Bank Group
Prichard, J. Robert S., Chair, Torys LLP
Redford, Alison M., Premier of Alberta
Reisman, Heather M., CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.
Wright, Nigel S., Chief of Staff, Office of the Prime Minister
By category, that's three bankers, one elected and one former elected politician, one top bureaucrat, one politically connected law firm and one Zionist business exec who serves on the Bilderberg Steering Committee.
If you don't belong to any of those groups your concerns may not be considered a common problem of critical importance.
See also:
Unicornpoo: Speaking of the Bilderberg Conference
... the belief that leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on common problems of critical importance...The implication is that policy in the Western World is to a large degree driven by informal discussion and consensus formed through private meetings among mainly unelected members of the elite.
So who are these people?
The official list of participants in this year's meeting includes the following Canadians.
Carney, Mark J., Governor, Bank of Canada
Clark, W. Edmund, Group President and CEO, TD Bank Group
McKenna, Frank, Deputy Chair, TD Bank Group
Prichard, J. Robert S., Chair, Torys LLP
Redford, Alison M., Premier of Alberta
Reisman, Heather M., CEO, Indigo Books & Music Inc.
Wright, Nigel S., Chief of Staff, Office of the Prime Minister
By category, that's three bankers, one elected and one former elected politician, one top bureaucrat, one politically connected law firm and one Zionist business exec who serves on the Bilderberg Steering Committee.
If you don't belong to any of those groups your concerns may not be considered a common problem of critical importance.
See also:
Unicornpoo: Speaking of the Bilderberg Conference
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tony Blair, JP Morgan, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Iraq War
On May 28, while giving evidence to the Leverson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press following the News International phone hacking scandal, Tony Blair was accused by a protester of receiving payoffs from JP Morgan for his role in launching the Iraq war (20 seconds into the video).
On the face of it the charge may seem bizarre, but JP Morgan, the Iraq War, and Tony Blair are not without connections. They are connected by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
Tony Blair is a member of the CFR.
The CFR serves as a most influential think tank to the US Department of State.
The CFR has been a staunch promoter of the NeoCon program of wars for global empire.
Representatives of JP Morgan organized the creation of the CFR in 1917, as the nominally independent American satellite of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table group, a secret organization intent on the creation of a global empire to perpetuate and extend Anglo-Saxon culture and control:
Tony Blair was a key enabler of the Iraq war, which he says he would have pursued even in the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
So is it so far-fetched to claim that JP Morgan paid Tony Blair millions in directors fees as a reward for his role in launching the Iraq War?
Blair stated at the Leverson Inquiry that he at no time discussed Iraq with JP Morgan. But why would that have been necessary? Blair played his role in launching the Iraq war, the payoffment followed.
That is how the money power exercises influence in politics. To make the payment in advance of performance, or to make it contingent upon a prior agreement, would be a criminal offense. Doing it the other way around is perfectly legal, just as effective, and standard practise.
See also:
Tony Blair personally earning millions from Iraq war contacts
On the face of it the charge may seem bizarre, but JP Morgan, the Iraq War, and Tony Blair are not without connections. They are connected by way of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
Tony Blair is a member of the CFR.
The CFR serves as a most influential think tank to the US Department of State.
The CFR has been a staunch promoter of the NeoCon program of wars for global empire.
Representatives of JP Morgan organized the creation of the CFR in 1917, as the nominally independent American satellite of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table group, a secret organization intent on the creation of a global empire to perpetuate and extend Anglo-Saxon culture and control:
Tony Blair was a key enabler of the Iraq war, which he says he would have pursued even in the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
So is it so far-fetched to claim that JP Morgan paid Tony Blair millions in directors fees as a reward for his role in launching the Iraq War?
Blair stated at the Leverson Inquiry that he at no time discussed Iraq with JP Morgan. But why would that have been necessary? Blair played his role in launching the Iraq war, the pay
That is how the money power exercises influence in politics. To make the payment in advance of performance, or to make it contingent upon a prior agreement, would be a criminal offense. Doing it the other way around is perfectly legal, just as effective, and standard practise.
See also:
Tony Blair personally earning millions from Iraq war contacts
The United States of Atrocity?
Who murdered more than 100 children and civilian adults in Houla, Syria, slitting their throats or blasting them with shot guns?
Canada, as the CBC slavishly reports, does not question the US line that President Assad of Syria is a monster "killing his own people," who by implication must be bombed out of power by US/NATO.
Yet it hardly makes sense for Assad, however psychopathic he may be, to provide US/NATO the justification they so desperately want to bomb him out of power. Which raises alternative explanations, as discussed by Alistaire Crooke a former British Intelligence officer.
Aangirfan explicitly attributes the Houla atrocity to US run death squads: CIA DEATH SQUADS DID HOULA MASSACRE - REPORTS.
And here is Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, writing in August 2011, on The Pentagon Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria. And, today, SYRIA: Killing Innocent Civilians as part of a US Covert Op. Mobilizing Public Support for a R2P War against Syria.
Meantime, those slimy limey liars at the BBC use emotional images and moralistic statements to trump rational analysis and convince us without evidence that the government of Syria is guilty of crimes against humanity.
And the scoundrels use fake photographic evidence to support the lie.
But then what can one expect from mouthpieces of the allies of the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst--Israel.
See also:
Aangirfan: WITNESSES TO HOULA; CIA'S ARAB SPRING
Stephen Gowans: Houla Atrocity: Reaching Beyond the Evidence
Tony Cartalucci: Syria and the Machiavellian Power Game
Aangirfan: HOULA MASSACRE - 'KILLERS' NAMED
Aangirfan: HOULA SURVIVOR
How the American invasion has driven out of Iraq most of the few remaining speakers of Aramaic, the the ancient language of the Jews and of early Christians.
Pepe Escobar: Panetta, we're ready to attack Iran
Canada, as the CBC slavishly reports, does not question the US line that President Assad of Syria is a monster "killing his own people," who by implication must be bombed out of power by US/NATO.
Yet it hardly makes sense for Assad, however psychopathic he may be, to provide US/NATO the justification they so desperately want to bomb him out of power. Which raises alternative explanations, as discussed by Alistaire Crooke a former British Intelligence officer.
Aangirfan explicitly attributes the Houla atrocity to US run death squads: CIA DEATH SQUADS DID HOULA MASSACRE - REPORTS.
And here is Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, writing in August 2011, on The Pentagon Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria. And, today, SYRIA: Killing Innocent Civilians as part of a US Covert Op. Mobilizing Public Support for a R2P War against Syria.
Meantime, those slimy limey liars at the BBC use emotional images and moralistic statements to trump rational analysis and convince us without evidence that the government of Syria is guilty of crimes against humanity.
And the scoundrels use fake photographic evidence to support the lie.
But then what can one expect from mouthpieces of the allies of the second worst human rights abuser on the planet and the sole enabler of the worst--Israel.
See also:
Aangirfan: WITNESSES TO HOULA; CIA'S ARAB SPRING
Stephen Gowans: Houla Atrocity: Reaching Beyond the Evidence
Tony Cartalucci: Syria and the Machiavellian Power Game
Aangirfan: HOULA MASSACRE - 'KILLERS' NAMED
Aangirfan: HOULA SURVIVOR
How the American invasion has driven out of Iraq most of the few remaining speakers of Aramaic, the the ancient language of the Jews and of early Christians.
Pepe Escobar: Panetta, we're ready to attack Iran
Panetta regurgitated the same old fallacy perpetrated ad infinitum, since at least 2006, by the neo-cons, the Israel lobby and US corporate media, according to which Iran is about to build a nuclear bomb like … tomorrow. "We will do everything we can to prevent Iran from developing a weapon", Panetta said. Once again, it doesn't matter that the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, plus 17 US intelligence agencies have stressed this is not the case.
Monday, May 28, 2012
The United States of Autocracy
In a column for yesterday's Washington Post, Johnathan Turley, Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University, gave ten reasons why America is no longer a free country:
In addition to which, there's the President's claimed -- and exercised -- right to bomb anyone, anywhere, anytime, just as he thinks fit without a declaration of war by the United States Congress.
And the determination of the United States Government to prevent states such as Arizona enforcing immigration law.
And the President's decision to force health insurance on American citizens whether they want it or not.
And the use of executive authority to give airline travelers the option of being irradiated with X-rays or sexually humiliated by blue-rubber-gloved groping goons.
And the Presidents declaration, by implication, without aid of any court decision, that the killing of Trayvon Martin was a hate crime.
See also:
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Obama the Assassin
Tools of Tyranny: Judge Napolitano talks to Lew about the government’s plans for you
NY Times on Obama the Assassin
- President Obama has claimed, as President George W. Bush did before him, the right to order the killing of any citizen considered a terrorist or an abettor of terrorism. ...
- Under the law signed last month, terrorism suspects are to be held by the military; the president also has the authority to indefinitely detain citizens accused of terrorism. ...
- The president now decides whether a person will receive a trial in the federal courts or in a military tribunal, a system that has been ridiculed around the world for lacking basic due process protections. ...
- The president may now order warrantless surveillance, including a new capability to force companies and organizations to turn over information on citizens’ finances, communications and associations. ...
- The government now routinely uses secret evidence to detain individuals and employs secret evidence in federal and military courts. It also forces the dismissal of cases against the United States by simply filing declarations that the cases would make the government reveal classified information that would harm national security ...
- The world clamored for prosecutions of those responsible for waterboarding terrorism suspects during the Bush administration, but the Obama administration said in 2009 that it would not allow CIA employees to be investigated or prosecuted for such actions. ...
- The government has increased its use of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has expanded its secret warrants to include individuals deemed to be aiding or abetting hostile foreign governments or organizations. ...
- Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration has successfully pushed for immunity for companies that assist in warrantless surveillance of citizens, blocking the ability of citizens to challenge the violation of privacy. ...
- The Obama administration has successfully defended its claim that it can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review. ...
- The government now has the ability to transfer both citizens and noncitizens to another country under a system known as extraordinary rendition, which has been denounced as using other countries, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, to torture suspects. The Obama administration says it is not continuing the abuses of this practice under Bush, but it insists on the unfettered right to order such transfers — including the possible transfer of U.S. citizens. ...
In addition to which, there's the President's claimed -- and exercised -- right to bomb anyone, anywhere, anytime, just as he thinks fit without a declaration of war by the United States Congress.
And the determination of the United States Government to prevent states such as Arizona enforcing immigration law.
And the President's decision to force health insurance on American citizens whether they want it or not.
And the use of executive authority to give airline travelers the option of being irradiated with X-rays or sexually humiliated by blue-rubber-gloved groping goons.
And the Presidents declaration, by implication, without aid of any court decision, that the killing of Trayvon Martin was a hate crime.
See also:
Judge Andrew Napolitano: Obama the Assassin
Tools of Tyranny: Judge Napolitano talks to Lew about the government’s plans for you
NY Times on Obama the Assassin
American bankruptcy, intellectual and financial
By Stephen Strauss
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity"
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
Friday, May 25, 2012
Niall Ferguson: The Failure of the European Union and the Decline of the West
Niall Ferguson quotes from today's Globe and Mail:
The european core, which is really Germany, reaps the benefit of the weak Euro. But in the less productive periphery austerity is being inflicted. This is nothing less than the disintegration of Europe.Or what we said in: The Euro: A Weapon of Economic Mass Disruption
On the economic integration of Europe:
Ultimately, it was a conspiracy by the European elite against their electorates.As we also said in: The Facist New World Order.
On Europe's insignificance on the World stage:
Every now and then the Americans try to whip Europe into shape via NATO, but over all, Europe is enormously invisible in the international arena.All of which suggests that Europe's leadership is fundamentally incompetent, dishonest and dangerous. Ferguson calls that pusillanimity -- "Latin, for weakness or vacillation of spirit. It's a nice word for cowardice or, in the vernacular, lack of balls. Pusillanimity of leadership is one of the big problems of our time."
In an interview with Michael Posner for the Globe and Mail, Ferguson points out that it is globalization, i.e., free trade with four billion third worlders earning pennies an hour, that is impoverishing low-skilled european workers, a point we have made, as for example in : What's Wrong With Europe and What Needs to Be Done About It.
It is good to see that despite the silence on this issue by all politicians and virtually all economists, I am not the only person pointing out the elephant in the room.
However, it is not just the low-skilled in the West who have suffered economically from globalization. For the first time ever, most unemployed Americans are college educated, and more than half of all people younger than 25 in the U.S. with bachelor's degrees are unemployed or under-employed.
Among older workers, competition from India and other developing nations has hardly helped computer programmers find well paid work in Europe and the US. And the hundreds of thousands of machinists and other skilled workers in Detroit who lost their job during the last several decades can in most cases blame unrestricted low-wage competition first from Mexico, then from China and other developing regions of the Third World.
The only point in the interview on which I disagree with Ferguson concerns the literary non-entity and settler in Britain from the Indian sub-continent, who implied in a review of Ferguson's work that Ferguson is a "racist." This, says Ferguson, was "malicious and defamatory" and he does not intend to take it "sitting idly."
I think this is a totally unproductive line to take, indeed counterproductive. Ferguson should just tell the lying fucker to eat shit and then forget about it. To deny such spurious charges only spreads the libel and diverts energy from useful endeavors.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Aliens R Us
Colonizing the Galaxy: The Fermi Paradox
There are millions, if not billions, of other worlds within our galaxy where life, including intelligent life, might have evolved at some point during the last several billion years. Such a time scale provides any intelligent life form plenty of time to colonize the galaxy. So why hasn't it already reached Earth. That is Fermi's Paradox.
This list of possibilities is not exhaustive.
It assumes that extra-terrestrials would be identifiable as such with blue skin, three eyes, two pairs of hands or a coating of green slime.
However, to colonize the galaxy thoroughly means establishing oneself on highly diverse worlds, with different atmospheres, g forces, daylengths, etc.
This would be an enormous challenge and rather pointless if sub-intelligent life forms already exist on habitable planets. In that case, one need only engineer some member of the native fauna, preferably one already possessed of binocular vision and an opposable thumb, so that it acquires one's own, i.e., an alien, mental capacity.
What would that kind of take over look like?
After hundreds of millions of years of dimbulb critters like Tyranosaurus rex, the rhinoceros, the three-toed sloth, the snail darter and the cockroach, there would emerge, in merely an instant of geological time, a species of vastly superior intelligence that rapidly appropriated the resources of the entire planet, created a high-tech civilization and then either destroyed itself through internecine nuclear conflict, or embarked on the colonization of the galaxy.
Should it follow the latter course, the native life form with an alien intelligence would be surprised to find that the task of galactic conquest had already been accomplished by a pre-existent civilization. It would be even more surprised to find that they are us.
First published at the CanadianSpectator.ca February 25, 2007
Atheists for a Religious Society
I support the Church, not as a pillar within, but as a buttress without.
In times of fear or perplexity I pray to God and it helps. It helps a lot.
Winston S. Churchill
 | |
| Then the LORD brought down fire and brimstone (Source) |
There is no question that any educated person today is vastly more knowledgeable, if less wise, than King Solomon. For the great majority of those who lived before the modern age, education as we understand it was non-existent, as were the multiple and readily accessible sources of knowledge that we take for granted. What people in times past knew, they knew almost entirely from personal experience or from what other people, mostly people as ignorant as themselves, told them.
In such a world, what was not to believe about an extra-terrestrial ape with magical powers and the vanity, arrogance, and cruelty of the local lord or petty prince? People are afflicted by plagues, they are struck by lightning, crushed in the rubble of houses shattered by earthquakes, starved when their crops are destroyed by a swarm of locusts. If, then, a tribal chief or elder says he was addressed by a voice from a burning bush unconsumed by the fire, which explained such disasters as punishment for disloyalty, for failure to keep the Sabbath holy, for coveting a neighbor's house, or wife, for lying, stealing, or committing adultery, why would you not believe it? For no reason, apparently, since religion has been universally accepted by mankind as far back in time as we have knowledge.
Today, the circumstances of the potential believer are very different. We are raised with the understanding that whatever happens has a material cause and that whatever we seek to have happen must be initiated through the arranged occurrence of necessary causal prerequisites.
Everything that happens, we believe, is just physics.
Yet few of us could give a satisfactory account of Newton's laws of motion, let alone the workings of a cell phone, so we are not physicists, just believers in physics. We have faith in physics. And having faith in physics, we accept the word of the high priests of physics who tell us what can be done by physics and what cannot. And what cannot be done by physics, so we are told, is the creation of the Universe by an ape with magical powers. In fact, according to physics, magic is whatever is inconsistent with physics, which means that the religion of the magical ape is, in principal, false.
Thus the scientific revolution has brought about a transformation in our understanding of the world and, with that change, a transformation in our moral universe.
So long as mankind believed in the ape magician with a proprietorial interest in human affairs, morality was fixed, independent of human desire or belief, and enforced by belief in the most extreme system of Hellish punishment and Heavenly reward. Thus, until the modern age, religious belief provide a rigid matrix for the control of human behavior that operated internally, controlling the behavior of the individual through control of his beliefs and emotions.
Having abandoned religion for physics, we are now free to do as we please except insofar as we are subject to an ever broadening array of state-enforced external controls achieved through video surveillance, X-ray scans, body searches and an increasingly Stasi-like systems of spying.
David Hume, who was the first to clearly explain the physics approach to knowledge, was among the first to grasp how faith in physics would transform morality. "Honesty," he said, is the best policy, "but the wise knave will take advantage of every exception."
To those of us brought up in the West during the early post-Christian era, the significance of David Hume's analysis of morality was not particularly shocking. Most of us knew of the Golden Rule and, to many of us there is no phrase in the New Testament that is unfamiliar. Thus we internalized, in some degree, the moral precepts of Christ in early childhood, and though we were later taught to ridicule them, we mostly believed that the residue of Christian moral feeling within our hearts was universal.
But among those socialized as Christians but taught to ridicule Christianity, few socialized their own children in the Christian tradition with anything like the rigor with which they themselves had been so indoctrinated. Thus over a period of several generations, Western society has undergone a transformation from one in which many, especially of the ruling elite, were imbued with the values of saintly virtue to one imbued with the virtues of the intelligent psychopath. We may say "I feel your pain," but why would we, except for hypocritical public display, have the slightest concern for your suffering, particularly if we profit by it?
To most intelligent atheists, whether they be psychopaths, or tenderhearted individuals brought up with the psychopath's moral code, the consequences of this progressive transformation of society, from one regulated by self control to one in which behavior must be subject to continual external control seems, at best, to lack charm, and at worst, to be headed for tyranny, or collapse, or quite likely tyranny followed by collapse.
It is time, therefore, to ignore foolish intellectuals such as the late Christopher Hitchens or the even more foolish evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who seek popular acclaim by pointing out the obvious physical inconsistencies and impossibilities of the various religious creeds, and instead turn to the question of what role religion has played in the evolution of humanity and whether the continuation of humanity as it has flowered in the West is possible under a regime of unenlightened atheism.
Religions are not all equal. Religion is one of the factors that differentiate societies and determine their prospects of survival. The importance of religion thus depends not on its truth as physics, but its impact on the physics of survival of tribes, nations and civilizations.
How religion may serve society in the modern age is a fascinating question and it is ultimately a physics question, since the survival of human groups depends on the control of human behavior, and human behavior is a matter of psychology, which in turn depends on neurological physiology, all of which resolve to matters of physics.
It is time, then, for those committed to the faith of physics to apply their minds to broadening that faith in ways that make it compatible with human survival, and with a reversal of the present decline of Western civilization.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
The Fascist New World Order
To understand what the New World Order is to be, one must understand the term Fascism, which is used as widely as it is misunderstood. In particular, it is usually conflated with National Socialism or Nazism from which it differs in fundamental ways.
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| Flag of Fascist Italy |
The present-day conflation of Fascism with Nazism is surely not accidental as it serves to mask the fascist character of the globalist imperative. Contrary to the nationalist ideal, the New World Order, as advocated by the Rhodes-Milner group in Great Britain in the early decades of the last century and by the NeoCons of the United States since George H.W. Bush's declaration of the New World Order before a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1991, requires the destruction of the nation states, and the racial groups that those states represent. Thus, the objective is not the superiority of one nation over all others*, but the destruction of all nations and the subordination of all peoples to the control of an undemocratic system of global governance. This is not National Socialism or Nazism but anti-nationalism, and closely akin to Soviet Communism except in its collaboration with, rather than through the destruction of, the Money Power, which is what makes it distinctively fascist.
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| Raphael Lemkin |
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| United Nations flag |
These objectives can be achieved only by totalitarian means, including the denial of free speech (political correctness), the denial of democracy (hackable voting machines, propaganda administered through the state-controlled education system, government infiltration of the Internet, and a compliant and mendacious corporate media), and eugenics (state funded mass abortion, euthanasia, promotion of non-reproductive sex, and the fostering of contempt for family values).
This is the complete antithesis of democracy. It is government of the people by hidden forces that seek to reduce the people to the status of domesticated animals, to be bred, herded, culled, and indoctrinated as the government sees fit. The New World Order marks the end of humanity as a collection of free men and women and its transformation to a colonial species where a hidden power, of which the people know little or nothing, controls, exploits and as it deems fit, ends the lives of every individual.
* Some might argue that the New World Order is, in fact, more Nazi than fascist; i.e., that the goal is the domination of the World by Israel and the Jewish people as ordained by the Torah, for which reason Jewish nationalism and racism is tolerated in the name of anti-racism. This seems a reasonable hypothesis, although one that is difficult to evaluate. The assumption that the New World Order is a Jewish conspiracy inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whether they be a forgery or otherwise, is consistent with the behavior of the state of Israel and the utterances of a significant minority of powerful Jews. Notwithstanding that possibility, it should be acknowledged that the majority of ordinary Jews are every bit as manipulated and deceived as the rest of us, while many of them, and quite possibly the majority, oppose Israel's brutal nationalism.
Michael Wolff: The Facebook Fallacy
Technology Review, May 22, 2012: For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.
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