This Depression Created and Perpetuated by Keynesian Economists

Maynard Keynes obtained a doctorate from Cambridge University for a thesis entitled A Treatise on Probability. In it, he argued that the probability that the cover of a book you have not seen is black is exactly 50%. How so? Because either the cover is black or it is not. Since you know nothing else, the probability of it being either one or the other must be 50%.

To convince the Cambridge dons of that, whether correct or not, one had to be a smart fellow. Keynes was. Following WW1 he wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which convinced many that the Versailles Treaty which concluded the Great War was unfair to Germany, a perception that did much to consolidate support in the 1930's for Britain's policy of German appeasement.

Most importantly, Keynes figured out the cause of the 1930's Great Depression. Business was bad, so business laid off workers and axed plans for new investment. Laid off workers spent almost nothing at all, so business got worse. The result? a vicious cycle of reduced consumption leading to reduced hiring and investment leading to reduced consumption.

The solution? Government deficit spending financed by borrowing the funds capitalists were hoarding for lack of investment opportunity. Nazi Germany provided the first verification of Keynes' theory which, as Keynes noted in the Preface to the German edition of his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was "easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state".

Hitler brooked no delay in setting the wheels of German industry humming with the construction of autobahnen, Volkswagens, tanks and Stuka dive bombers financed with ingenious Erzatz money devised by finance minister Hjalmar Schacht. The rearmament boom in response to Germany's aggressive stance, first in Britain and later in America, verified the counter-cyclical efficiency of deficit government spending.

Thus vindicated, Keynesianism became the basis for post-war economic management throughout the West. If business was bad, governments had to do whatever was necessary to stimulate employment and consumption. Thus did capitalism triumph intellectually over communism. Not only did capitalism not impoverish the masses, as was fundamental to Marxist theory, it in fact could survive only by ensuring that the masses continually consumed more and more.

So why does the Keynesian solution no longer work? What went wrong? The 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now embodied in the World Trade organization (WTO), is what went wrong. The WTO, opens the West to unrestricted competition from four billion Third Worlders working for pennies an hour under what by Western standards are conditions of gross exploitation tantamount to slavery.

The impact of global free trade, or globalization, has been gradual. In 1994, the Third World lacked the capital, the technology and the trained workforce to constitute a great threat to Western industry. But following the GATT agreement, things changed rapidly. Western corporations worked diligently to develop manufacturing bases and service centers throughout the Third World to exploit cheap Third World muscle and brain power.

For the West, the most significant results of globalization have been twofold. First a huge increase in profits of globalized corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, and Apple, which have seen their market capitalization increase ten-fold or more over the last decade during which they have out-sourced and off-shored more and more manufacturing and service work from the West to the Rest. Second, a slump in investment and hiring in the West. Hence the Second Great Depression

Image source.

How have Western Governments responded to this undermining of Western prosperity? With bubbles and Third-Worldization.

Financial deregulation created an explosion of financial innovation including a derivatives bubble that, at ten times the size of the World's GDP, is still expanding. The result has been an increase in financial industry profits from less than 20% of domestic US profits in 1990 to to 45% in 2002.

Following the bust in the tech sector and stagnation in the stock market, which occurred at the turn of the century, financial industry profits stagnated, but real estate and real-estate-linked finance became the engine of Western economic expansion. Fueled by low interest rates, property boomed throughout Europe and the United States, then busted, taking much of the finance industry with it.

Throughout the bubble economy era, Western governments have pursued an aggressive policy of Third Worldization, or national self-genocide through mass immigration. The United States has tens of millions of illegal, mainly Hispanic immigrants, contrary to the wishes of most Americans, while Western Europe is flooded with Asians, Africans, Middle Easterners and East Europeans (most of them good people, no doubt), with the full connivance of the ruling elites in London, Paris, etc.

The policy of Third Worldization of the West serves both to discipline the indigenous people by subjecting them to massive competition from energetic, immigrants eager for work even at minimum or sub-minimum wages that far exceed what they could earn at home, and to complete the Bilderberger-Liberal-Left plan for global governance and the destruction of the nation state.

Now that the finance and real estate economies are busted, Western governments continue with the project of Third Worldization, Britain for example, absorbing a near record 550,000 immigrants in the first nine months of 2011. In addition, they have fallen back on the old policy standby, Keynesianism, which is to say subsidies for windmills, electric cars, and solar panels, plus food stamps and welfare paid for with money either freshly printed, or borrowed in large part from the the developing Third World and the oil states.

The results are as you'd expect. Third Worldization is going well, and leading to massive unemployment, since as Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang -- no that's not an English name -- points out, for every low-skilled Englishman in need of a job, there's a more competent immigrant ready to take whatever job he might otherwise have had. Meantime, the Keynesian "stimulus" spending does little for the unemployed, but instead pulls in more shoes and shirts and computers and car parts from the Third World, where wages have risen from about 3% of those in the West in 1994 to about 5% of those in the West today.

Keynesians like to quote Keynes' retort to a questioner who charged him with changing his position: “when the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do, sir?” It's time for Keynesians to take Keynes' advice and review the facts that now prevail. The West is in a depression not for lack of demand but for lack of competitiveness. That means stimulus spending on more school teachers, on roads and bridges, windmills and solar panels is counter-productive. It makes the West less competitive, not more so, thus further reducing the incentives for investment and hiring in the West. 

What Keynes would recommend now, would be quite different from the prescription of the Keynesians. His advice would be to end mass immigration, eliminate tax disincentives to investment, i.e., the corporation tax, and cut consumption spending, particularly wasteful government programs many of which contribute nothing to the public welfare -- in America the TSA's blue-gloved goons and the entire apparatus of Homeland Security comes to mind, not to mention the war for global empire.

In the meantime, to mop up surplus labor, the necessary solution is either a tariff, or as I have advocated, state-funded wage subsidies distributed by competitive auction, which would eliminate unemployment at less than the cost of welfare, while providing a huge affordable labor resource to Western entrepreneurs. Once again workers in America and Europe could then make stuff for one another, instead of being dependent for almost every manufactured product on the slave plantations of the Third World.

The European Atrocity You Never Heard About

By R.M. Douglas

In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia and other European countries after World War II by order of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.

Hoover Institution Archives, June 11, 2012: The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his patient. The doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen to death.

Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that "she was frozen to the floor with her own blood." Other than temporarily stanching the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her, and he never learned whether she had lived or died. When the train made its first stop, after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were put back on board to continue their journey. A further 42 passengers would later succumb to the effects of their ordeal, among them Loch's wife.

An estimated 500,000 people died in the course of the organized expulsions; survivors were left in Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves.

During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around entire populations like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape the demographic profile of Europe according to their own preferences. What was different about the deportation of Loch and his fellow passengers, however, was that it took place by order of the United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly two years after the declaration of peace.

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland....

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Clueless Krugman?

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner, and a Professor or economics at Princeton University. He is also a blogger and, in his book End This Depression Now, the proclivities of the blogger show. The derisive partisanship, the "of course" this and "of course" that, the breezy self-reference to "yours truly", the typographical emphasis of statements that remain to be demonstrated, and the occasional resort to the one-sentence paragraph all combine to give the work a bloggishness that detracts from an argument that Krugman is perfectly well able to present in plain unaffected English.

But presented in plain English the argument would hardly fill a book, for in essence, all that Krugman is saying is that the Obama administration failed to provide an adequate Keynesian antidote to the contraction in demand that has driven the US economy and that of much of the rest of the Western World into depression.

That antidote is massive government deficits and stimulus spending. The Obama administration did enact the American Recovery and Reinvestment act, a stimulus package of $787 billion, but, says Krugman, this was "far too small."

So what exactly does Krugman want to End This Depression Now? He wants a multi-trillion-dollar Federal government deficit to be financed by borrowing and money printing, which will deliver cash to the States to enable rehiring of laid off public sector employees, to finance infrastructure such as more and better roads and bridges for the diminishing number of cars actually driven in America, and to provide debt relief to homeowners in the hope, presumably, of restarting house price inflation and all the stimulative economic consequences that could have.

To demonstrate the workability of his scheme for rebooting the economy with a flood of borrowed or printed money, Krugman draws a parallel with the United States following WW2. At that time, returning war vets borrowed to buy houses, cars, etc. and the economy boomed with the growth in consumer debt. But the analogy is absurd. In 1945 America was the workshop of the World supplying the tools and materials that the countries devastated by war needed to restore their shattered economies. At the same time the quantity of private debt in the US was abnormally low.

Image source

Today, the situation is totally different. First, because Americans are loaded to the eyeballs with debt, which they are desperately trying to shed and succeeding at the rate of about a trillion dollars a year. Second, because America is no longer industrially supreme. On the contrary, America is losing jobs by the tens of millions as manufacturing, IT and many other services are off-shored and out-sourced to the Third World where wages are small fraction of wages in the US.

So Krugman offers a time when Americans were pre-eminently creditworthy and prosperous due to the abundance of well paid jobs in productive industries as a parallel to today when Americans are mostly not creditworthy, having lost 40% of their net worth since the housing market peaked, and who's best hope of a job is in the public sector feeling up passengers at the airport or some other occupation adding only very questionably to the real wealth of the nation.

Amazingly, Krugman totally ignores the elephant in the room, which is the tremendous competitive weakness of the West versus the Rest, i.e., four billion Third Worlders earning pennies an hour, which was mandated by the 1994 GATT agreement. For example, the index to Krugman's book contains no entry for "globalization;" no reference to "trade deficit" only one reference to the "balance of trade" (that concerning the balance of trade among Eurozone nations); and no references to "outsourcing," "off-shoring," or mass immigration.

Krugman thus altogether fails to acknowledge the most prominent cause of  the present economic crisis in the West, i.e., the competitive failure of the West against the Rest. Oddly, he does recognize competitive failure of the Southern European states as a cause of financial crisis within the Eurozone and he acknowledges that a solution to the Eurozone crisis can only come from either wages cuts in the failing economies or what would be equivalent in terms of real incomes, a breakup of the Eurozone to allow the non-competitive states to adopt independent currencies that can be devalued until national competitiveness is regained.

But for some reason Krugman is unable to see that the crisis of the Eurozone is precisely analogous to the crisis of the West in competition with the Rest. To maintain that these crises are not comparable because the Western states have their own currencies that can be devalued against currencies of Third World competitors overlooks the fact that the Western currencies are not being devalued against those of the industrializing Third World, or at least not sufficiently rapidly to provide the necessary relief to the Western workforce. And the reason that the US dollar, for example, is not being devalued sufficiently rapidly is that competitor nations are hoarding those currencies. Japan and China, for example, between them hold around $2 trillion in US Treasury bonds.

Those foreign held dollars represent tens of millions of lost US jobs. At minimum wage, those $2 trillion unspent dollars earned through sales of goods and services to the US represent the loss of approximately one hundred million man years of labor at the minimum wage. Enough, in other words, to provide every unemployed American a job for three or four years.

This is the issue that Krugman does not discuss, either because he is clueless, or because he knows that the truth about globalization, which as a liberal he must support, if known to the people would set off a revolution.

But if Krugman's argument is irrelevant, what then is the way to end the depression now? The answer is exactly that which Krugman offers in the case of the Eurozone crisis. Specifically, he mentions two options. One is an across the board wage cut, undertaken in the manner I outlined here, which would restore competitiveness to the West and make it possible once again for Americans and Italians and people throughout the West to make shoes and shirts and car parts and computers for one another, thereby regaining and enhancing their industrial skills and hence the value of their labor.

The other option is to force a devaluation of Western currencies, which in turn will force China, Japan, the oil states and other nations that have hoarded paper denominated in Western currencies to spend the cash fast before it loses much, say 50 to 90%, of its value.Ultimately, that spending will stimulate demand for goods and services in the West.

In fact, Option 1 is the official but unacknowledged policy. Wages are to be ground down during a long-drawn out depression during which the plight of the Western worker will be greatly exacerbated by a mass influx of Third Worlders with no tradition of civil rights or the rule of law and who are generally more capable than the least competent members of the native workforce. This is the genocidal liberal policy of globalization, which necessitates the destruction of the the nations of the World as racial, cultural or religions entities -- Israel apparently excepted. 

To be fair to Krugman, it must be acknowledged that his preferred means of ending the depression would have the combined effects of forcing a devaluation of Western currencies and driving down wages in the West as a result of the price inflation caused by massive government deficit spending and money printing. This is not an efficient solution, however, since the deficit spending would mostly go on more government of which the Western nations already have more than they can afford. The danger in Krugman's solution is thus that it would lead to massive social unrest while achieving little if anything in the way of increased Western competitiveness.

Why Germany Can't Fix the Euro Crisis

By HANS-WERNER SINN
New York Times, June 12, 2012: ALTHOUGH Europe may seem far away from the economic life of the average American, the fate of the euro zone weighs heavily on the United States economy. Pension funds have invested in bonds issued by southern European states, while banks and insurance companies have underwritten a sizable fraction of the credit-default swaps protecting investors against default.

 It’s no wonder, then, that President Obama is urging Germany to share in the debt of the euro zone’s southern nations. But in doing so, he and others overlook several critical facts.

For one thing, such a bailout is illegal under the Maastricht Treaty, which governs the euro zone. Because the treaty is law in each member state, a bailout would be rejected by Germany’s Constitutional Court.

Moreover ...

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America's Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery

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Via WRH

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

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.

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.

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:

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).

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.

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 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.

Jeremy Scahill Charges Barak Obama With Mass Murder

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.

The American way of war: sabotage, subversion, terror

By Sharmine Narwani

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.

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See Also:


US, Israel wrote Stuxnet, officials say

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.

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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

Number of characters (without spaces) : 1,150.00.
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

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.

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 : 15.66

Approximate representation of the U.S. grade level needed to comprehend the text

Coleman Liau index : 11.84
Flesch Kincaid Grade level : 12.40
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 11.58
SMOG : 14.18
Flesch Reading Ease : 40.62

So, congrats if you managed to read that post. But here's where we need to improve:

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.

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.

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.

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.

So come on, Abe, you can do better than that! Come to think about it though, what about that Readability Calculator sentence containing the words "we suggest you should consider to rewrite to improve readability of the text"? "Consider to rewrite to improve..."? Is stringing verbs together in the infinitive form really the way to improve readability? LOL.

Who are the Bilderbergers?

The Bilderberg meetings were instituted in 1954 in response to

... 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

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

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

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.

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:

1. 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. ...
2. 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.  ...
3. 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. ...
4. 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. ...
5. 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 ...
6. 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. ...
7. 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. ...
8. 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. ...
9. 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. ...
10. 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. ...

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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

Business Insider, May 27, 2012: Yeats' lines aptly describe our current age of political mediocrity. As we consider our politicians, we can hardly say that they're our best. And the worst of them are full of passionate intensity, with passions driven by ideology, rather than fact-based analysis.

The United States has been in decline relative to other countries for the last 30 years. On key metrics, we've fallen behind our peer group of industrialized countries, such as the UK, France, Germany, and Japan.

Am I exaggerating? Well, according to the Corruption Perception Index, we rank 24th in the world (only slightly better than Qatar) for public sector corruption. We rank 25th (way behind our peer group) in the OECD for math scores among 15-year-olds.

Over the past 30 years, our national debt has grown from about 30 percent of GDP to about 100 percent, and will become much worse based on current trends. In a recent survey of 10,000 Harvard Business School Alumni, "66 percent of respondents see the U.S. falling behind emerging economies." It is difficult to find many encouraging metrics.

If the above statistics don't convince you, visit the New Delhi International Airport, then compare it with our JFK or Newark International Airports. In many areas, our infrastructure is an embarrassment, already inferior to that of many third world countries.

These facts (and many others) have escaped Romney, Santorum and our current group of Republican leaders. Obama and the Democrats aren't doing significantly better at confronting these challenges.

In the 19th century, America aggressively compared itself against the world, and aspired to be "best in class." We were an early adopter of kindergarten because we saw evidence that it would improve educational outcomes. In 1862, the U.S. was suffering through the Civil War, but Congress still had the foresight to pass the Land Grant Colleges Act, which created some of our finest universities. This investment was made because it was important for our country's growth, and the U.S. clearly lagged behind Europe in college and university education.

Today, many of us suffer from what Thorstein Veblen called "trained incapacity" and John Dewey described as "occupational psychosis." We filter the world through our own ideological training, believing only what fits our story. Or, as Stephen Colbert, cultural commentator and 2008 Peabody Award winner commented:

'It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all... What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?... Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.'

Many Americans still have an almost cult-like belief that America is the greatest nation on earth. They systematically reject evidence suggesting we have significant room for improvement.

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