The meaning of life is to be the best human being you can, to be human, to be the best human and experience all the emotions, the fear, the love, the jealousy, the hate, the passion, its about passion, so whatever you do, do it with passion. - C.Veitch
An economist who actually makes sense...first couple of clips from over a year ago. Still 100% accurate
And here is Michael Hudson on June 25th 2010
Hudson's latest article, published June25 2010, which unfortunately makes a lot of sense
Europe’s Fiscal Dystopia: The “New Austerity” Road to Neoserfdom Somebody must take a loss on the economy's bad loans – and bankers want the economy to take the loss, to "save the financial system." From the financial sector's vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy. Government social spending (on everything apart from bank bailouts and financial subsidies) and disposable personal income are to be cut back to keep the debt overhead from being written down. Corporate cash flow is to be used to pay creditors, not employ more labor and make long-term capital investment.
“There were cages of people screaming for water, and male officers could see women going to the washroom.” He says he and his fellow inmates were given Styrofoam cups when they asked for toilet paper.
Somebody must take a loss on the economy's bad loans – and bankers want the economy to take the loss, to "save the financial system." From the financial sector's vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy. Government social spending (on everything apart from bank bailouts and financial subsidies) and disposable personal income are to be cut back to keep the debt overhead from being written down. Corporate cash flow is to be used to pay creditors, not employ more labor and make long-term capital investment. http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2010/06/europes-fiscal-dystopia-new-austerity.html
So, the world's elites have decided to focus all their efforts on generating another Great Depression. Their cunning plan is to destroy their countries in order to save them: http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003326.html#more
the current sovereign debt crisis is about something much more interesting: it's another battle in a war for dominance between "our" integrated, impersonal global economic system and traditional nation-states. At issue is whether a nation-state serves the interests of the governed or it serves the interests of a global economic system. Who's winning? The global economic system, of course http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/05/the-decline-of-the-west.html
How's That Recessioney, Oily Thing Working Out For Ya? Let's be honest: We live in stunningly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously absurd political times. Here's the story in a nutshell: A far-right predatory overclass has spent the last thirty years undoing the hard-fought gains of the mid-twentieth century, which had produced a robust middle class and vastly more economic and social justice in America than the country had ever known before. These regressives used every kind of deceit imaginable to persuade unsophisticated voters to choose candidates whose real agenda was to assist their plutocratic puppetmasters in fleecing the very same people who voted for them.
The most powerful nations in the world met recently at the G-20 in Toronto and managed to agree on only one thing of significance: the need to reduce deficits, “half by 2013.” Implied by the statement is the need to lower deficits via “austerity,” meaning eliminating or reducing social programs.
Why does every mainstream political pundit or corporate CEO fanatically agree that reducing deficits is the most important thing to do now? Let Obama explain:
“… if financial markets are skittish and don't have confidence in a country's fiscal soundness, that is also going to undermine our recovery."
Apparently, the most important policy for the world economy cannot be said in plain English. What does Obama mean? Essentially, he is saying that “financial markets” should determine how wealth is distributed and how the economy is directed.
As I have explained in the past, what constitutes a “bubble” can be understood as the result of perpetuated myths or distortions of the truth. When one believes something to be true, they behave in accordance with that belief; when that belief becomes exposed as fraudulent, whatever effort they had put forward up to that point is lost and any effort they had planned on putting forth in the future needs to be redirected to some new project. The example I had previously used was a child writing letters to Santa and then finding out Santa is not real. After such information comes to light the behavior of the child changes and he no longer writes wish lists to Santa. In the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, distortions in the interest rate result in misallocations of capital towards less productive ends. When those ends are discovered to not be as productive as alternatives, the structure of production needs to be realigned. But as I’ve described it, the theory can be applied to a broader social context beyond just basic production. The State is such a bubble: it is perpetuated primarily by faith in its unique legitimacy. Bubbles burst; in the case of the State, how does that occur? States destroy community
DUBLIN — As Europe’s major economies focus on belt-tightening, they are following the path of Ireland. But the once thriving nation is struggling, with no sign of a rapid turnaround in sight. Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.
I guess this is what happens to people who never hear the word "no."...Note: the lobby's next big move will come when it starts telling the US government that Iran sanctions have failed and it's time to allow Israel to attack. And, as Yogi Berra famously said, it'll be déjà vu all over again
Gaza blockade 'easing' is a facade However, the fact of the matter is that this ‘easing' of the blockade is another in a long line of Israeli methods of pacifying the so-called international community and providing a facade for further illegal activities.
A military strike against Iran would be "incredibly destabilizing" to the region said the US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen.
But, while the attack on Iran will be seen by the world as the main event, the real purpose for the war will be happening on Israel’s doorstep.
At the same time as Iran is being attacked, Israel, using the excuse of pre-empting retaliation for attacking Iran, will attack both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza and then move to occupy south Lebanon up to the Litani River and the Gaza Strip. Israel will also likely fully occupy the West Bank.
This is the scenario that the US and Israel would prefer to see happen; a quick overwhelming move against all of Israel and America’s enemies that concludes with the defeat of the Iranian regime and, thus, regime change, together with the demise of Hezbollah and Hamas. This then will give the Israelis a free hand in creating a Greater Israel that ultimately includes the Gaza Strip, south Lebanon up to the Litani River, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. It will also provide the US with an even stronger ally in the Middle East and also a neutered enemy.
One need only think about how our government would react if a state or group launched unprovoked “targeted” attacks on major military and energy facilities to see how foolish this is. It wouldn’t matter to our government if the attack was “targeted” or not, and it wouldn’t matter to the American public what absurd rationalizations the attackers used to justify what they were doing. If a foreign military started bombing Sandia and LANL and assorted military bases throughout the Southwest and declared ahead of time that it would do this, I doubt that Washington would respond with a shrug. “Oh, they’re only attacking our nuclear labs and military facilities–that’s all right, then!” Americans would not respond to this by casting blame on their government for inviting attack, but would instead become excessively deferential to whatever course of action the government proposed and would mute whatever other criticisms of the government they may have had in the past. We would be fools to think that Iranians would respond differently.
The quickening, pace and speed of incoming austerity fascism is horrifying. The audacity, fraud, deceit and complicity of our supposedly democratically elected representatives - of the people by the people, is, at the moment, beyond my comprehension. I thought I had seen it all, but this is beyond disgusting.
This G20 meeting in Toronto was yet another watershed moment for me personally. It demonstrated, and to anyone paying attention, that no one was safe anywhere in the world.
It showed that police power and laws are only to be enforced when suited. This was a watershed moment in Canadian history. It showed you have no rights, you have nothing, police/state power is absolute, and don't you forget it.
I am disgusted, repulsed, ashamed to be a Canadian. But where else would I be? The US is corrupt, Britain is a defacto police state, where should I go? The world is becoming an all seeing eye just as George Orwell predicted.
Naomi Klein discusses the failures of the G20 summit with CBC's Evan Solomon.
June 28, 2010 Watch the program.
Synopsis: Not all of us who are fighting in the streets here in Toronto are despondent, but a great many of us are. I am. We are experiencing in our neighborhoods what brown people have experienced for centuries around the world at our hands. It has come home to roost. I woke this morning from a dream of Kanada, and I was weeping uncontrollably. Our children are attacked by troops openly in the streets, openly in so-called “free speech zones.” We chant, “the world is watching,” but as we are beaten back from the neighborhoods in which we have lived for two hundred years by troops who may not even be Canadian, we see football on the TV’s. Is anyone watching us? My ten-year-old was almost fucking killed when he was attacked by police in a free-speech zone. My fourteen-year-old and I were chased for two hours. Does anyone out there care? My friend in California recommends TOSCA-style action. Could we have TOCA here—take over Canada? I feel nothing but despair. My friends are being dragged off to left and right, and the world watches football. I began the weekend juggling for the troops, holding out flowers, but I end hunted and in tears, paranoid and sad. It feels like the end. We are still free, but barely holding on. Why do they hate us so much?
Toronto Police attack peaceful protesters and journalistsJune 26, 2010
Toronto, Ontario -- After a large march and rally against the meeting of the G20, police attacked a crowd of peaceful protesters in Queens Park. The following clip shows police attacking and arresting protesters. At 1:02, video journalist Brandon Jourdan is thrown to the ground and beaten by police while shooting video.
On today's (June 26, 2010) episode of Fox News' Cashin' In, Fox Business employees Cheryl Casone and Tracy Byrnes and regular FBN guest Jonathan Hoenig came up with a radical idea to solve America's national debt problem: Raise taxes on the poor!
BODO, Nigeria — Big oil spills are no longer news in this vast, tropical land. The Niger Delta, where the wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates. The oil pours out nearly every week, and some swamps are long since lifeless.
Oil leak may be 19 times larger than BP and US government say
"I'm having a Katrina flashback," said the Bay St. Louis Democrat after an aerial survey of the Mississippi Sound and barrier islands Saturday morning. "I haven't seen this much incompetence since Michael Brown was running FEMA." Brown was the FEMA director who was fired for a faulty response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005
If civilization can survive the cynical path it’s on, future historians will identify three great cons that were played out upon the world during this time; the fractional-reserve central-banking system, the war on terrorism and Israel. All three are equally dangerous to the future of mankind, are presented with equal deception, and emanate from the same source.
President George W. Bush argued in 2004 that the best way to grow the U.S. economy was by waging war, according to former Argentine Prime Minister Néstor Kirchner.
Kirchner, in a meeting with Bush, suggested that the United States replicate the successful nation-building strategy it implemented at the end of World War II.
"And he stood up from his chair and got angry. He told me, 'A Marshall plan! No! That's a crazy idea from the Democrats. What needs to be done here, and the best way to revitalize the economy is -- the United States has grown based on wars,' he told me. That's what he told me," Kirchner recounted.
Bush added, said Kirchner, that "all the economic growth that the U.S. had had, had been based on the different wars it had waged."
The former Argentine leader, whose wife now heads the country, made the comments in an interview with Oliver Stone for his upcoming documentary "South Of the Border."
The charge startled even Oliver Stone. "War? He said that?" Stone asked Kirchner, who was among a wave of progressive leaders elected in Latin America over the last decade.
"He said that, word for word," Kirchner assured Stone.
Stone followed up: "Is he suggesting that Latin America should go to war?"
No, said Kirchner. "Well, he was talking about the United States, never said South America. That the United States -- that it was a misunderstanding of the Democrats, that all the economic growth that the U.S. had had, had been based on the different wars it had waged."
The Kirchner interview is done through a translator and the subtitles on the screen don't exactly match what Kirchner was saying, but more closely reflect how his comments were being translated at the time. The Huffington Post had three separate native Spanish speakers translate Kirchner's remarks. His comments above are the result of those translations.
If Kirchner is accurately relaying the comments, that would make Bush the highest-ranking public official to state outright that war is and has been good for the American economy.
Welcome to the age of rage – riots and revolutions will be the reaction to the next stage of the new world order
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Top historians, social and financial analysts are warning that the draconian austerity measures currently being prepared by governments in the west will cause riots and even revolutions as people react with fury in response to their jobs, savings, basic public services, pensions and welfare money being seized by the financial terrorists who caused the economic collapse in the first place.
British historian Simon Schama is a creature of the establishment and he makes it clear whose side he is on at the end of his recent column for the Bilderberg-controlled Financial Times entitled, The World Teeters on the Brink of a New Age of Rage. However, the fact that he is an elitist at heart only makes Schama’s predications all the more alarming. This is someone on the inside who is painfully aware of the fact that the imminent attempt on behalf of the globalists to enforce so-called “austerity measures” on the people of the west, which in reality is a euphemistic term for the next leg of the new world order, is not just going to cause riots and mass social unrest, but it could even lead to revolution if the elite allow the situation to spiral out of their control.
A Pendulum Swing Toward Austerity, by Tyler Cowen, Commentary , NY Times: “The Road to Serfdom,” the critique of socialism written 65 years ago by ... Friedrich von Hayek, was recently No. 1 in nonfiction sales at Amazon.com. Many people, including ... Glenn Beck, have contended that growth of government power has, indeed, set us on such a road today. But ... the expansionary phase of big government is coming to an end, and quickly.
In the last few years, we have seen ... huge financial bailouts, a $787 billion stimulus plan and legislation for near-universal health insurance coverage. But the policy mood in Washington is now much more modest: no second major stimulus is forthcoming and ... a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions is unlikely to move forward. ...
If any financial policy idea is taking a major place on the American and global stages, it is fiscal austerity. ... In the United States, we face rising health care costs and pension problems in state governments, with no clear long-run solution for bringing the books into balance.
Oligarchs are seizing more overt control in most countries in the world, the worldwide economy is on course for another - even bigger - train wreck, countries are cracking down on freedom and becoming more tyrannical, we are in a permanent state of war (and see this), and companies like BP are destroying our natural resources without any checks and balances.
But as Andrew Gavin Marshall points out, the elites are actually terrified of the mass political awakening which is occurring worldwide.
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is waging an epochal battle behind the scenes for control of US monetary policy, struggling to overcome resistance from regional Fed hawks for further possible stimulus to prevent a deflationary spiral.
Fed watchers say Mr Bernanke and his close allies at the Board in Washington are worried by signs that the US recovery is running out of steam. The ECRI leading indicator published by the Economic Cycle Research Institutehas collapsed to a 45-week low of -5.7 in the most precipitous slide for half a century. Such a reading typically portends contraction within three months or so.
As recovery starts to stall in the US and Europe with echoes of mid-1931, bond experts are once again dusting off a speech by Ben Bernanke given eight years ago as a freshman governor at the Federal Reserve.
Entitled "Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn’t Happen Here", it is a warfare manual for defeating economic slumps by use of extreme monetary stimulus once interest rates have dropped to zero, and implicitly once governments have spent themselves to near bankruptcy.
The speech is best known for its irreverent one-liner: "The US government has a technology, called a printing press, that allows it to produce as many US dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost."
Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.
Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.
Rob Johnson on TRNN
As the world waits for the decisions to roll out from the G20 summit, Rob Johnson discussed fiscal austerity with the Real News Network. “If it wasn’t so tragic I would say it was humorous,” he started out. But tragic it is. A lot of it all comes back to banks: why are deficit numbers so high? The financial crisis, caused by big banks. Who does fiscal austerity benefit, when it risks killing economic recovery? Those who hold treasury bonds at 0% interest — big banks. “Finance is supposed to be a servant to commerce, [the] economy, [and] social goals. Well the servant’s servant has become the master’s master. And it’s time to reinvert that,” Rob says.
President Carter Could Be Prosecuted for Monitoring Fair Elections in Lebanon
June 21, 2010, Washington and New York – Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to criminalize speech in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the first case to challenge the Patriot Act before the highest court in the land, and the first post-9/11 case to pit free speech guarantees against national security claims. Attorneys say that under the Court’s ruling, many groups and individuals providing peaceful advocacy could be prosecuted, including President Carter for training all parties in fair election practices in Lebanon. President Carter submitted an amicus brief in the case.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the majority, affirming in part, reversing in part, and remanding the case back to the lower court for review; Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor. The Court held that the statute's prohibitions on "expert advice," "training," "service," and "personnel" were not vague, and did not violate speech or associational rights as applied to plaintiffs' intended activities. Plaintiffs sought to provide assistance and education on human rights advocacy and peacemaking to the Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey, a designated terrorist organization. Multiple lower court rulings had found the statute unconstitutionally vague.
Said CCR Cooperating Attorney David Cole, “We are deeply disappointed. The Supreme Court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists. In the name of fighting terrorism, the Court has said that the First Amendment permits Congress to make human rights advocacy and peacemaking a crime. That is wrong.”
Sunday, June 27, 2010 at 10:05PM 
