A Day in the Life: 8/8/9
Prez
Free Americans Reaching Out to Amerika's Huddled Masses
Yearning to Breathe Free
Via
<pr...@usa-exile.org>
August 8, 2009
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Near the bottom of this in the letters-to-the-editor section
you'll find a link to a 10-minute Alex Jones video in which he says
there's "an eighty per cent chance" that sometime this autumn or
winter there'll be unleashed on all of us a sophisticatedly mutated
flu virus which will kill enough of us to provide an excuse for
mandatory vaccinations killing more of us than the flu.
I give this around a sixty-five per cent chance. Our best hope
is that they miscalculated in their lab(s) and the current virus
won't mutate viciously enough or quickly enough to provide the
excuse. In which case they have still been successful because
they'll have frightened the sheeple into even more thoroughly
obedient behavior.
So how do we deal with their quite skillful scenarios for
frightening us? Hindus and Buddhists have a deity--Manjushri--who
sometimes specializes in dealing with fear and anger, but we
Occidentals have no context for dealing with it efficiently.
Psychotherapy fails because it focuses on the mind instead of the
nervous system. Neurotherapy is in its infancy.
Yours for waking to the quantum ether,
Keith Lampe, Ro-Non-So-Te,
Ponderosa Pine
Transition Prez
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Fiat Money Created Out of Thin Air: The Bank Bailouts are
Unconstitutional
by Bob Chapman
Global Research, August 8, 2009
The International Forecaster
The starting point for all analysis of the ongoing bailout orgy that
is currently being used in crony capitalist fashion to transfer
wealth from our middle class to the financial elites and their
transnational conglomerates is whether these bailouts are authorized
by the US Constitution. The answer is a resounding NO!
Nothing in the Constitution could ever be interpreted in any manner
that would in any way allow the conversion of our quasi-capitalist
republic into a police state, which is the last thing our Founding
Fathers had in mind.
How can our government simply hand over fiat money created out of
thin air, which in itself totally violates the provisions in our
Constitution dealing with the issuance of money, to whoever they deem
to be too-big-to-fail? The very idea of such targeted bailouts
violates every precept upon which our nation was founded, and our
Constitution in no way allows the bailout of any private person or
business entity, especially where this creates special privileges to
be given to a chosen few "anointed" entities at the expense of our
citizens in general. Regulation of interstate commerce does not mean
doling out crony capitalist bailouts, which amount to nothing short
of the implementation of feudalism under the Puppet Master oligarchs
of our Shadow Government. Regulation would mean fining and jailing
these criminals and allowing them to fail so better run companies can
acquire their assets via liquidation to be supervised by regulators.
You reap what you sow in this nation. You do not reap profits for
yourself and have everyone else pay for your losses. That is pure
poppycock detritus.
But where is our redress? We have a President who is a usurper
pushed into office by the Puppet Masters in another violation of our
Constitution that limits the Presidency to natural born citizens, we
have a bogus Congress beholden to the Puppet Masters for the filling
of their campaign coffers in a political system where elective
offices are bought and sold based on wealth instead of ability and
integrity, and we have a Kangaroo Court System where the judges know
not to bite the hands that appointed them, lest their skeletons be
released from their closets or worse. Our regulators, who are in on
almost every scam and public rip-off (i.e. the Madoff debacle), look
the other way or issue chump change fines without requiring any
accountability. The only redress left now are forceful public
demonstrations, and if the President and Congress still turn a deaf
ear, then there is always the Second Amendment, which is the option
which we predict will eventually be used to create a change in our
government from total corruption back to public service. Obama
wanted "change," and that is what the American people are going to
give him, not what he is going to give us. And let's also make that
perfectly clear to the Illuminati, whose boots Obama daily licks like
a slobbering dog.
When the subprime/credit-crunch debacles first unfolded, we took the
position that there should absolutely be no bailouts because such
things are illegal, unfair, immoral and flagrantly unconstitutional.
You do not mess with private contract rights, or dole out special
privileges to a chosen few on a whim, lest you become known as just
another Banana Republic. We are a nation of laws and legal
precedents. You don't throw out hundreds of years of legal precedent
by subordinating secured bondholders to unsecured creditors, all with
the blessing of our Supreme Kangaroo Court and its nine numbskulls,
who are appropriately dressed like Darth Vader, and then expect any
other nation in the world to take you seriously. Our nation has lost
any modicum of credibility and integrity, and the only nations who
continue to deal with our government are the ones whose governments
are even more criminal than ours is and/or who are caught in a
"dollar trap." This fact alone is enough to kill the bond markets.
This total disregard of the law and of legal precedents creates
tremendous risk in the minds of foreign investors, and that means
higher interest rates, and lower bond values, both public and
private. And never mind the coming hyperinflation! We deserve to
have the dollar lose its reserve status and to have our treasuries
rated as "junk" bonds based on the actions of our leaders alone, much
less the state of our economy. No contract is sacred anymore. They
just make up the rules as they go along.
When we recommended against bailouts, we initially were referring to
the subprime borrowers who lied on their applications and never
should have been given mortgages in the first place. Bailing out
failed financial institutions was the farthest thing from our mind
because it was simply unthinkable. Instead, we have seen subprime
borrowers given token help and watched in horror as the failed
Illuminist financial institutions were given the key to Goldman Sachs
South and its Treasury Department. We watched slack-jawed as the
United States of America became the "Crony Capitalist Bailout
Nation." If anyone is going to be bailed out, it should be the
taxpayers and not the elitist transnational corporations and
financial institutions who park their foreign profits offshore and
don't pay any taxes on those profits! COME ON!!!
But the bailouts of "anointed" Illuminist companies have served one
purpose very well. They have provided us with the smoking gun that
proves the existence of the Illuminist agenda which we discuss in
every issue of the IF. What do we mean by that? As Joan Rivers
would say: "Let's talk."
Let us first say that the only sensible solution to all the ongoing
debacles, other than an immediate purging of the economy which is
what we recommended because it would minimize the pain of financial
excess and maximize the speed of recovery, would have been to correct
the defaults that were causing the various real estate and other
credit derivatives to lose value. The defaults could have been
corrected by making the loans current or even by paying them off
altogether.
The math is totally obvious. Anyone with a high school diploma, a
calculator and Internet access could have figured it out. Yet
apparently the people with 1600 combined SAT scores, Ivy League
diplomas and many years of Wall Street experience apparently could
not figure this out. Do you really believe that? If so, you are
incredibly naive. You probably also believe that the psychopathic
leverage, moronic lending standards and outlandish ratings on bonds
and derivatives were the product of mistakes, greed and poor
judgment. Again we say: COME ON!
Yes, the underlings were simply doing as they were told to get their
million dollar bonuses even though they knew that what they were
doing seemed very imprudent, but the people at the top, from the
upper tier of the Illuminist cabal, knew exactly what they were
doing. The top dogs created the framework for the underlings to work
in. That framework was intentionally and fatally flawed by maniacal
leverage, rampant fraud and total lack of any meaningful regulation.
Even a minor problem could be magnified into a major issue via
excessive leverage. And any major problem could, by that same
excessive leverage, be magnified into a catastrophic financial
meltdown that would destroy the US economy, and even the world
economy. You have to kill off the old system utterly, so you can
install your fascistic police state and one world government in the
ensuing chaos, and that is exactly what is happening right under your
nose, right before your very eyes. Does God have to club you over
the head from His throne in Heaven to get you to take notice? Get a
freaking clue, America!!!
Now, let's look at some numbers. According to mortgage loan
servicers handling 64% of all first liens, they were managing $34
million loans totaling $6 trillion dollars of which two thirds were
prime loans. That would make the average mortgage somewhere in the
area of $175,000. If we add in the other 36% of first liens, and
assuming the same overall average principal for these loans, we would
have a total of about 53 million first liens with an average of
$175,000 per mortgage. The TARP money was 700 billion dollars. That
means we could have completely paid off 4 million mortgages, or cut 8
million mortgages in half whose borrowers would then be able to
easily refinance with their high newfound equity. And Realty Trac
tells us that from 2005 to 2008, inclusive, about 7.5 million
properties had foreclosure notices of default, orders of foreclosure
and/or notices of sale served/filed against them. There is a lot of
double counting there because multiple filings could affect the same
properties in different years and not all properties go to
foreclosure, but it does give us an outside/maximum figure for loans
in serious default. All those mortgages could have been cut in half
with the TARP money and saved from foreclosure, and refinanced down
to affordable payments.
What would such a bailout have meant for America? Bear Stearns would
still be here, Lehman Brothers would still be with us, AIG and the
insurers would have manageable claims and still have decent ratings,
all the subprime lenders would be solvent, all the Wall Street legacy
investment banks and commercial banks would still be functioning and
would not have become penny stocks, municipal bonds would be selling
like hot cakes, the Dow might be past 14,000, most people would still
have their jobs, pensions would be flush, the real estate market
would still be sledging along, and the world economy would still be
humping. And we haven't even touched the $787 billion of pork from
the stimulus plan, or the two trillion dollars that the Fed doled out
to both foreign and domestic banks and that is still unaccounted
for! With those funds we could have paid off everyone's general
purpose credit cards (one trillion), cut another 8 million mortgages
in half (700 billion), and still had over a trillion left over to
take care of the defaulted car loans, student loans, commercial
mortgages and future residential mortgage defaults! Even the
foreign banks could have been saved!
Why would this be so? Because if the defaults were cured, the de-
leveraging of the big commercial and investment banks, which were,
and still are, leveraged at a rate of about 50 to 1, would not have
become necessary, at least not right away. This need to de-leverage
to absorb losses when they occur by banks that are leveraged at 50 to
1 is what makes a trillion dollar problem into a 50 trillion dollar
problem, and this is where we are headed when the Derivative Death-
Star ignites and/or banks are forced to mark-to-market again. All
this pain could have been avoided by the curing of loan defaults.
Would it have been fair to bail out the liar loans? Of course not.
This drips of moral hazard. But would you rather bail out the
bankster-gangsters instead? Is it more fair to do what our
government has done for the criminals on Wall Street? Heaven forbid!
And besides, the bailout of the liar loans would have automatically
bailed out the bankster-gansters in any case!!! Do you mean to tell
us that the geniuses of corporate America, Wall Street and Goldman
Sachs South could not figure this out? Again we say: COME ON!!!
But it gets even better. We are told by our government bean counters
that they think it will take about $24 trillion to bail out the so-
called too-big-to-fail banks. So let's have some fun with this
money. In the private sector, we have $13.8 trillion in household
debt, $11.1 trillion in business debt, and $17.2 trillion in debts of
financial institutions. We could take the $24 trillion and totally
pay off all household and business debts.
That means the financial institutions would collect all that money
and use it to pay off their debts as well. The whole system could
have been de-leveraged and the derivatives canceled by regulators.
Would we have hyperinflation as a result of all this bailing out? Of
course! And some deflation as well. But would you rather go into
hyperinflation debt free, or in hock up to your ears? You're going
to get hyperinflation whether you get bailed, or the banks get
bailed. And if you get bailed, the banks automatically get bailed.
And for those banks that were totally careless, they would get to
fail and be absorbed by the thousands of good banks who would jump at
the chance.
Large amounts of pain are being inflicted on you needlessly while the
criminal Illuminati and their nefarious bankster-gangsters get bailed
out, thus sucking all your blood out like a vampire squid wrapped
around the face of humanity, as Goldman Sachs was recently described
by Matt Taibbi. This is why all the efforts to cure defaulted loans
have been half-hearted at best, and non-existent at worst. The
Illuminati know that this is the best cure for the sheople, so we
most certainly can not have that. Else, how could they form their
Orwellian one world police state of feudality and become lords of the
universe over their future serfs? This whole bailout bonanza for
financial criminals is the smoking gun. This is irrefutable evidence
that the leaders of corporate America, Wall Street and Goldman Sachs
South are venomous traitors who want to enslave you and put you and
your posterity into bondage forever!
The percentage of occupied living units in the US that were owned as
opposed to being rented was about 62% in 1960. All the shenanigans
with Fannie and Freddie and the loosening of loan standards so that
anyone breathing could have a mortgage has caused that home ownership
percentage to fluctuate in an upward trend with the ebbs and flows of
various real estate bubbles since that time, with a peak of almost
69% in 2005. If we were to trend back to 1960's 62% ownership, some
five million owners would have to become renters again. We see this
as inevitable, and it may get much worse as we move into the most
disastrous state of the US economy in our nation's entire history.
With long-term unemployment at over 20%, which could double if the
Illuminati have their way with the ridiculous bailouts of bankster-
gangsters, and with hyperinflation on its way, we could see the
percentage of home ownership easily drop to 55%, or even less. We
also see prices for housing potentially reverting back to the levels
that existed at the beginning of the 1990's, which is before
profligate expansion of money and credit by the Fed began in earnest
as the totally criminal Clinton Administration got underway in 1993.
That wild-eyed monetary expansion by the Fed has distorted asset
values across the board, and has grown worse with time to cover over
the destruction of our economy via free trade, globalization, off-
shoring, outsourcing and both legal and illegal immigration.
[snip]
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VIDEO: Murder, Inc?
Blackwater accused of murder in 'crusade to eliminate Muslims'
by Keith Olberman and Jeremy Scahill
MSNBC Broadcast August 04, 2009 - See Part 2 Below Broadcast August
05, 2009
Transcript For August 04, 2009
OLBERMANN: The slaughter of civilians for sport, weapons smuggling,
destruction of evidence, wholesale corruption and finally murder. In
our third story on the COUNTDOWN, a full-fledged criminal enterprise
executed by the military contractors known formally as Blackwater,
according to the sworn testimony of two of its employees. "The
Nation's" Jeremy Scahill, who broke the story, joins us in a moment.
The details come straight from two sworn affidavits filed late last
night by persons who identities have been sealed to protect their
identity, men who have previously cooperated with federal prosecutors
in the criminal inquiry into Blackwater. From John Doe number two, a
former member of Blackwater's management team, quoting the affidavit,
"it appears that Mr. Erik Prince, Blackwater's founder, and his
employees murdered or had murdered one or more persons who had
provided information or were planning on providing information to the
federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct. On several
occasions after my departure from Mr. Prince's employ, Mr. Prince's
management has personally threatened me with death and violence."
John Doe number two also stating that Mr. Prince, pictured here,
smuggled unlawful weapons into Iraq, including sawed-off, semi-
automatic machine guns with silencers and illegal hand grenades. The
affidavit also says that Prince, quote, "views himself as a Christian
crusader eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe. To
that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who
shared his vision of Christian supremacy. Many of these men used call
signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought
the crusades. Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that
encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. Going to Iraq
to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game."
Striking similar allegations made in the affidavit of John Doe number
one, a former U.S. marine who worked for Blackwater in Iraq. He
alleges that incidences of unjustified deadly force were initially
videotaped and watched in a session called a Hot Wash. Blackwater,
now known as XE Services, spelled XE, maintains that Mr. Prince and
the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and performed their duties
on behalf of their employer, the State Department.
Joining me now, as promised, the contributor to "The Nation Magazine"
and author of "Blackwater, the Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army," Jeremy Scahill. Good to see you. Thanks for coming in.
JEREMY SCAHILL, "THE NATION": Thanks for having me back, Keith.
OLBERMANN: As horrific as all this sounds, it's just part of what you
described in the piece today. Flesh it out for us.
SCAHILL: Obviously to hear the term murder and Blackwater in the same
sentence is no great surprise, particularly to people who have been
following the history of this company. It's been at the center of
some of the worst violence of in Iraq, killing civilians repeatedly.
Five of its men are going to be tried on manslaughter charges for the
Nisr (ph) Square Massacre in Baghdad in September '07. Another one
pled guilty.
The Congress is investigating. The IRS is investigating. This is a
scandal-plagued company.
What is explosive about what's happened here-and you just went
through some of the most explosive of these details-is that you have
two former Blackwater officials. I have learned from sources that's
John Doe number two was actually in Blackwater management and was
privy to some of the inner workings of the company.
Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, remains the sole owner of the
company, no matter that he stepped down as CEO and founder of the
company. He micro-manages every aspect of Blackwater's operations and
that's been well known.
On the Christian supremacist angle, let's remember that Erik Prince
viewed Blackwater as a neo-crusader force and has from the beginning.
This is a guy who comes from the powerhouse of the radical religious
right. His father was a major bank roller and gave the seed money to
Gary Bauer to start the Family Research Council, James Dobson, Focus
on the Family.
And then we have his force employed in Iraq as part of a war against
a Muslim nation that George Bush characterized as a crusade. What we
have here, Keith, is a confirmation from insiders at Blackwater that,
in fact, Erik Prince did have a neo-crusader agenda, and, most
explosively, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of
individuals who were intending to or did cooperate in the federal
government's criminal investigation of Blackwater.
This is deadly serious.
OLBERMANN: To the murder in a second. But you mentioned something in
here that strikes an obvious question. How could the Bush
administration's State Department have missed this crusader element
here, or was that what they were looking for?
SCAHILL: Missed it? I think it was considered a plus in the Bush
White House. Remember, Keith, what we had here was the Bush
administration essentially create a force that acted as an armed wing
of the administration, not subject to the military command, not
subject to the Uniformed Code of Military Justice, that reported
directly to George Bush's secretary of state and then to the president.
These were his men, his private force in Baghdad. And the allegations
that they were running around shooting Iraqis as part of a war to
eliminate Islam globally, as is actually what one of these
individuals said, is extremely disturbing to anyone who believes in
any semblance of Constitution, law or human rights.
OLBERMANN: Some specifics, to what you know about them. This is a
strong term murder in court documents. This is under oath. This is
not somebody throwing something up against a wall to see if it will
stick. Are we talking about something related to the 2007 Baghdad
Massacre or something here?
SCAHILL: It's unclear but I will tell you what I do know about this,
Keith. The fact of the matter is that these individuals, in these
sworn depositions, provided those depositions to lawyers, Susan Burke
and the Center for Constitution Rights, that are suing Blackwater on
behalf of Iraqis killed by Blackwater operatives in Iraq. They are
suing them in civil litigation.
What we do know is that these same individuals say that they gave
this identical information to the federal government, one of them in
Grand Jury testimony, as part of the on-going criminal investigation.
When I called the Justice Department and asked specifically, are you
investigating Erik Prince on allegations that he was involved with
murder, the Justice Department interestingly said that they would not
confirm or deny any action that they may or may not be taking against
uncharged individuals.
Erik Prince, according to the lawyers suing Blackwater, could be
eligible for murder charges in both Virginia and the state of North
Carolina under this existing law. That's the argument they're making
in their motion that was filed late last night in the Eastern
District of Virginia.
OLBERMANN: Jeremy Scahill, who has been the watchdog on Blackwater,
now Xe, of "The Nation," who brought this story to everyone's
attention today. Great thanks for doing so and great thanks for
coming in.
SCAHILL: Thank you, Keith.
Update - MSNBC Broadcast August 05, 2009
========================================================================
=====
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
Partners In Crime
By Zeyad
WARNING
Video contains disturbing Images and should only be viewed by a
mature audience
PM Maliki has stepped in to cover up for his partners in crime once
more, and all public debate of the incident has been stifled. Iraqis
seem to have been shocked by the brutal crime and its implications
but nothing more than that. Continue
Our Suicide Bombers
Thoughts on Western Jihad
By John Feffer
In America's first war against Islam, we were the ones who introduced
the use of suicide bombers. Indeed, the American seamen who perished
in the incident were among the U.S. military's first missing in
action. Continue
Arab Generosity, Israeli Intransigence
By Hasan Abu Nimah
There are no indications that the current American peace efforts are
likely to produce any results. The Americans have, despite much
persistence, lost the first and only round. Continue
Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Companies?
By John Perkins
The big companies are determined to stop what they call a bleftist
revoltb in this hemisphere. In throwing out Zelaya they are sending
frightening messages to all the other presidents who are trying to
raise the living standards of their people.b Continue
Manufacturing Consent For An Attack On Iran?
There Is a Military Option on Iran
By Chuck Wald
U.S. Air Force and Naval forces could do serious damage to Tehranbs
nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails. Continue
Manufacturing Consent For An Attack On Iran?
Israel will attack Iran by end of 2009: Bolton
Video Interview
Former US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, says a military strike
against Iran will be the only way for Israel to shield itself, before
Iran develops its nuclear weapons program. Continue
Books That Counter Our "Training" To Make War
By John Pilger
These are extraordinary times. Flag-wrapped coffins of 18-year-old
soldiers killed in a failed, illegal and vengeful invasion are
paraded along a Wiltshire high street. Victory in Afghanistan is at
hand, says the satirical Gordon Brown. Continue
The Century of the Self
How politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-
consumer society.
Must Watch Video
Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of
the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world
full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's
belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's
ultimate goal. Continue
bWell What If There Is No Tomorrowb&
By Kurt Osterhoff
So what goes into the making of a contemporary American
revolutionary? What turns an ordinary law abiding, relatively sedate
and insular, American Idol watching couch potato into an informed and
committed citizen prepared to incur risk and make meaningful
prolonged personal sacrifice aimed at reclaiming our country? Two
things: truth and suffering. Continue
The World Needs A Breather From The US.
By Mike Whitney
The $13 trillion the Fed has committed to the financial system since
the beginning of the crisis --via loans and outright purchases of
mortgage-backed garbage and US sovereign debt--was never authorized
by Congress. In fact, the Fed stubbornly refuses to even identify
which institutions got the "loans", how much the loans were worth,
what kind of collateral was accepted for the loans, or when the loans
have to be repaid. Continue
The Expiring Economy
By Paul Craig Roberts
Tent cities springing up all over America are filling with the
homeless unemployed from the worst economy since the 1930s. While
Americans live in tents, the Obama government has embarked on a $1
billion crash program to build a mega-embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan,
to rival the one the Bush government build in Baghdad, Iraq. Continue
We Need More Protest to Make Reform Possible
By Peter Dreier
Why is there so little protest in response to these hard economic
times? Continue
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NOTE: This one is snipped because it's quite long but you can reach
it at <http://www.alternet.org/politics/141819/
is_the_u.s._on_the_brink_of_fascism/>. -- kl, pp
Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism?
By Sara Robinson, Campaign for America's Future. Posted August 7, 2009.
There are dangerous currents running through America's politics and
the way we confront them is crucial.
All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives
watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist
rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and
violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself
powers only demanded by history's worst dictators. With each new
outrage, the small handful of us who'd made ourselves experts on
right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried
readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we
there yet?
And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and
Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our
maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of
reassurance. "Wellll...we're on a bad road, and if we don't change
course, we could end up there soon enough. But there's also still
plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don't worry.
As bad as this looks: no -- we are not there yet."
In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied
on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world's
pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In
a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton
argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements
isn't by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather,
he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a
set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance
that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms
together. According to our reading of Paxton's stages, we weren't
there yet. There were certain signs -- one in particular -- we were
keeping an eye out for, and we just weren't seeing it.
And now we are. In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's
suddenly everywhere. It's odd that I haven't been asked for quite a
while; but if you asked me today, I'd tell you that if we're not
there right now, we've certainly taken that last turn into the
parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist
American future now looms very large in the front windshield -- and
those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we
got here, what's changing now, and what's at stake in the very near
future if these people are allowed to win -- or even hold their ground.
What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so
long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's
fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by
revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:
"Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended
to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which
liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline."
Elsewhere, he refines this further as
"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory
cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of
committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective
collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties
and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal
restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
.
Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate
scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to
here.
From proto-fascism to the tipping point
According to Paxton, fascism unfolds in five stages. The first two
are pretty solidly behind us -- and the third should be of particular
interest to progressives right now.
In the first stage, a rural movement emerges to effect some kind of
nationalist renewal (what Roger Griffin calls "palingenesis" -- a
phoenix-like rebirth from the ashes). They come together to restore a
broken social order, always drawing on themes of unity, order, and
purity. Reason is rejected in favor of passionate emotion. The way
the organizing story is told varies from country to country; but it's
always rooted in the promise of restoring lost national pride by
resurrecting the culture's traditional myths and values, and purging
society of the toxic influence of the outsiders and intellectuals who
are blamed for their current misery.
Sara Robinson is a Fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, and a
consulting partner with the Cognitive Policy Works in Seattle. One of
the few trained social futurists in North America, she has blogged on
authoritarian and extremist movements at Orcinus since 2006, and is a
founding member of Group News Blog.
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From: paul illich <paul_...@hotmail.com>
Date: August 7, 2009 3:15:51 PM GMT-05:00
Subject: [bluegreenearth] fwd: The Second Wave Of The Depression -
Hyperinflation Likely [rense]
http://www.rense.com/general87/hyper.htm
The Second Wave of the Depression:
Hyperinflation Likely
By Webster Tarpley
8-6-9
Washington DC --- The second wave of the world economic depression is
coming soon. Larry Summers, the economics czar of the Wall Street
puppet regime currently in power in Washington, recently confessed to
the Financial Times in an unguarded moment: "I don't think the worst
is over ...." A few weeks earlier, Jacques Attali, who served in the
1980s as the main economics adviser to French President Mitterrand,
told an audience at the International Economic and Financial Forum
(FIEF) in Paris that the world might well soon face a "planetary
Weimar" in the form of a hyperinflationary depression similar to the
German events of 1922 to 1923.
During the last world economic depression, the first wave came in the
form of the famous New York Stock market crash of October 1929. But
this was only the beginning, and hardly the main event. The world
depression of the 1930s was made irreversible by the British
bankruptcy of September 1931, when the Bank of England ceased gold
payment. At that time, the vast majority of international trade was
financed by pounds sterling bills of exchange drawn on London. When
the British Pound began to float through a series of competitive
devaluations, the lack of a stable reserve currency -- and not the US
Hawley- Smoot tariff -- strangled world trade, thus making that
depression as severe as it was. British default in turn undermined
the US banking system, setting the stage for the banking panic which
ravaged the United States in 1932 and 1933, to the point that not a
single bank in the country was still operating by the time Franklin
D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March of 1933. The United
States would almost certainly have been lashed by additional waves of
depression had it not been for the banking triage implemented by the
Roosevelt administration during the bank holiday, and for other New
Deal measures which succeeded in mitigating the Depression. Other
countries, notably Germany, went into a permanent depression which
was expressed in a series of military campaigns which aimed at the
economic looting of the other countries of Europe. Whatever the
ideological fanatics of the discredited Austria and Chicago schools
of economic analysis may claim, there is no automatic business cycle
capable of lifting the modern world out of serious economic
disintegration. The depression will end when adequate New Deal style
policies are implemented, and not before, as I show in my new book,
the second edition of Surviving the Cataclysm.
TODAY: BETWEEN 1929 AND 1931
Today, therefore, we are so to speak in the trough between the
October 1929 wave (which corresponds to the derivatives crisis and
banking panic of 2008) in the September 1931 wave, which this time
around is highly likely to take the form of a hyperinflationary
dollar crisis, or in other words a hyper stagflation and depression
of the world economy radiating out from Wall Street and the City of
London. What then might be the leading characteristics of the next
wave of the current world economic breakdown crisis?
The next wave is likely to involve a worldwide dollar panic. Using
ballpark figures, we can say that there are about $4 to $5 trillion
sloshing around the world in the form of hot money, U.S. Treasury
securities, Euro dollars, and various forms of zeno-dollars. Japan
has about a trillion, China almost $2 trillion, and so forth. It is
naturally very unwise for a developing country like China to hold so
many dollars rather than using them to purchase needed infrastructure
and capital goods, and the Chinese leaders are now very uncomfortable
with their own foolish decision, which was of course taken under
heavy US pressure. But the point is that this $4.5 trillion overhang
is by its very nature exceedingly unstable. Every country that holds
large sums of dollars or US treasury bonds is nervously eyeing every
other such country to see if they show signs of bolting for the exit.
Up to now, so far as we know, no large holder of dollars has
attempted to reduce its exposure to the battered greenback by dumping
these dollars on the international market. If anyone did so, would
cause a true universal financial panic which would create chaos and
mayhem not just in the United States and Great Britain, but in the
vast areas of the rest of the world as well. This is concretely how
hyperinflation could now very well arise: if one or more US creditor
nations attempts to abruptly lighten up on dollars, the value of the
US currency could undergo a catastrophic collapse, and that would
spell runaway hyperinflation on the US domestic front.
WORLD DOLLAR PANIC IMMINENT?
We need to recall that the value of a modern currency is not
determined inside the country, but rather on the international
foreign exchange markets. This is where the fatal vulnerability of
the US dollar is located. In the ruined form of the Bretton Woods
system which has prevailed for almost 40 years since Nixon's colossal
historical vandalism of August 15, 1971, the US has emerged as the
only country with a permanent license to finance imports by simply
printing more of its own currency and sending those banknotes
overseas. Every other country has to manufacture and export something
that others want to buy in order to earn the necessary foreign
exchange to pay for its own imports. The US license to print has made
this country the buyer of last resort and the dumping ground for the
unsold junk of the world, leading in the process to high permanent
unemployment here. There are many signs that this inherently
unworkable arrangement has now reached the breaking point.
INTERNATIONAL CURRENCY RELATIONS, NOT MONEY SUPPLY, ARE THE KEY
Ms. Ellen Brown, who apparently supports the doctrines of the social
credit movement of the 1930s, has recently argued that deflation is
now on the agenda, and that hyperinflation can be ruled out. She
bases this analysis on the fact that the private credit markets in
this country have largely collapsed, and on the contention that the
M1 and M2 money parameters have either declined or increased only
slightly. But all of this is beside the point. The Federal Reserve
and the Treasury have so far provided almost $13 trillion of new
loans to banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, and other
purely financial institutions. This is being done in an effort to
bailout the $1.5 quadrillion world derivatives bubble, of which
something like two thirds or more, meaning one quadrillion dollars,
can be located inside the dollar zone. The world depression started
when this derivatives bubble went into reverse leverage, meaning that
super losses instead of super profits were generated at the apex of
the speculative pyramid, as seen in the case of $3 trillion AIG hedge
fund located in London. The Obama regime is engaged in an hysterical
attempt to restart derivatives production in the form of
securitization, i.e. the creation of more and better asset backed
securities derivatives. At the same time, the Obama regime has
cynically and deliberately driven the Detroit automakers into
bankruptcy, destroying hundreds of thousands of the few remaining
industrial jobs here in the United States. This means that US
industrial production continues in drastic decline. The mere mention
of production reminds us that the assorted Austrian, Chicago, and
social credit schools are predominantly or exclusively concerned with
money and banking, and pay little or no attention to industrial,
agricultural, and infrastructural production, meaning of course that
they neglect the creation of those tangible physical use values,
capital goods, and related forms of real wealth upon which human
existence depends. With bailouts increasing and all forms of
commodity production declining, we have the classic situation of far
too much money chasing too few goods. Internal pressure towards
hyperinflation comes from the fact that the bailout and public debt
lending, on top of the bloated, fictitious, and exponentially growing
mass of kited derivatives, are all charges which must be added to the
prices of commodity production. Add this to the more important factor
of looming dollar panic in the international exchanges, and the
preponderance of the evidence points towards hyperinflation.
Helicopter Ben Bernanke got his name from his famous recipe of
throwing bales of dollars out of helicopters onto the lawns of
bankers to stimulate the economy out of a depression, and this
reminds us that the profile of the Anglo-American financial
leadership from Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Mervyn King to
Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke is decidedly hyperinflationary. Ms.
Brown's belief that hyperinflation is impossible is therefore mistaken.
The German 1923 hyperinflation was generated internationally, not
within Germany, as a campaign of economic warfare by Britain and
France against theior defeated rival. Germany had signed the Rapallo
agreements with Soviet Russia, creating an economic combination which
was more than a match for the Anglo-French. To abort the potential of
Rapallo by creating chaos in the German economy, the Anglo-French
systematically destroyed the value of the German Reichsmark on the
international exchanges, taking advantage of the Versailles
reparations system and the French occupation of the industrialized
Ruhr area. The mark went down every day when the London exchange rate
was announced. Today, it is the enormous international dollar
overhang which threatens to annihilate the US greenback.
The one way deflation might actually come about is if someone like
the self-professed Austrian school ideologue Ron Paul were to take
power. Ron Paul's "libertarian" alternative to Obama's continued
bailouts of Wall Street is evidently an immediate deflationary crash,
which he asserts will be followed by an automatic recovery. Ron Paul
is a modern representative of the so-called liquidationist school to
which 1920s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon belonged. Mellon
demanded the liquidation of stocks, bonds, real estate, and labor.
German Chancellor Heinrich BrC<ning, another liquidationist, savagely
cut German unemployment benefits (Ron Paul's "nanny state") at the
height of the Depression, helping to bring on the debacle of January
1933. Liquidationists tend to be people who have money and who
believe they will continue to have money even after an all-out crash,
when they will be able to buy up distressed assets and desperate
unemployed workers for rock-bottom prices and cash in. But
liquidationism obviously cannot be a solution to depression of the
entire society.
The recent meetings of the leaders of the expanded G-8 countries in
L'Aquila, Italy were marked by a growing awareness that the US
dollar, because of the criminally irresponsible policies of the Wall
Street financiers who have dominated the Bush and Obama
administrations, can no longer play the role of the single world
reserve currency. Russian President Medvedev showed off a sort of
future world coin to try to prod the Obama regime in the direction of
serious world monetary reform, which is of course the urgent task
before everyone. Naturally, finance oligarchs like Summers, Geithner,
and Bernanke want to continue to play the role of world currency
dictators, and not be forced to negotiate the end of Anglo-American
hegemonism. The world needs to go towards a new pro-growth world
monetary system in which the euro, the yen, the dollar, the ruble,
the Chinese currency, a possible Latin American monetary unit, and a
possible Arab monetary unit would all be included. It will be
important to make the transition toward such a new system as orderly
as possible, since a catastrophic collapse of the dollar in the short
term would be to no one's advantage, and would rather represent a
sure path to universal ruin. World economic growth rates under the
1944 to 1971 Bretton Woods system were the highest in recorded
history before or since. This was accomplished through statism and
dirigism in the form of narrow bands of isolation among the
currencies, combined with gold settlements of surpluses and deficits
among the nations, which provided an indispensable reality principle
to restrain the hyperinflationary tendencies of the Anglo-Americans.
The new world monetary system should include the abolition of the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in their current
forms, since these institutions have strangled the economic progress
of the developing sector. Rather, the goal of the new monetary system
should be to restart the export of high technology capital goods of
the most modern type from Europe, Japan, and the United States
towards the impoverished countries of Africa, South Asia, and certain
parts of Latin America.
THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD STOP BORROWING AND START LENDING
Here in the United States, we need to wipe out the derivatives bubble
with the help of a 1% Tobin tax or securities transfer tax, on all
speculative financial transactions, including futures, options,
stocks, bonds, commodities, foreign exchange, and so forth. A
California Tobin tax would solve the state budget crisis. The top 16
Wall St. banks are zombie institutions that need to be seized and
liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy at once, with all of their
derivatives going into the shredder. Foreclosures on homes, farms,
and businesses should be banned outright for five years or for the
duration of the depression, which ever lasts longer. To provide a
credit supply, the Federal Reserve should be seized and nationalized,
and used as a vehicle to issue 0% Federal credit for productive
activities only, not for speculation. To revive credit demand, state
and local governments could then take out 0% Federal loans for such
long overdue projects as the construction of 1,000 hospitals, the
building of 50,000 miles of modern maglev rail systems, and 100
fourth-generation, high temperature, pebble bed nuclear reactors,
plus the rebuilding of water systems and the interstate highway
network. Idled auto plants should be reconverted for these purposes.
Science drivers in the fields of space exploration and colonization,
high energy physics, and biomedical research should also be fully
funded in this way to provide technological modernization. The social
safety net needs to be expanded and developed, with larger Social
Security pensions for a generation whose 401(k)s and IRAs have been
largely destroyed, along with increased Medicare and Medicaid
benefits for those whose insurance companies are insolvent, like AIG
and The Hartford, which have been devastated by derivatives
speculation. These are quite simply the requirements for the
maintenance of human civilization in this part of the world. Until
measures like these are carried out, the United States and the world
will continue to sink deeper into the bottomless pit of economic
depression.
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US Unemployment Rate
Already at 20%
by Anthony Mirhaydari
Global Research, August 7, 2009
investment-blog.net/
Really, how hard is it to find a job? Was Junebs horrid numbers, in
which 467,000 people lost their jobs compared to 345,000 in May, a
one-time fluke? Or does it mean that all those Wall Street economists
who believe the economic recovery is starting are dead wrong?
Not to scare you, but the situation is actually worse than it seems.
Over the years, the government has changed the way it counts the
unemployed. An example of this is the criticized Birth-Death Model
which was added in 2000. The model is designed to account for the
birth and death of businesses and the resultant lag in survey data.
Unfortunately, the model doesnbt work that well during economic
contractions (like we have now) and consistently overstates the
number of jobs being created each month.
John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics specializes in removing
these questionable tweaks to the governmentbs statistical data to
better align current numbers with the methodology used to gather
historical data. After reviewing the data, Williams believes that
bthe June jobs loss likely exceeded 700,000.b David Rosenberg of
Gluskin Sheff notes that the fall in the number of hours worked in
June (to a record low of 33 per week) is equivalent to a loss of more
than 800,000 jobs.
There are similar issues with the way the unemployment rate is
measured. The headline rate only jumped from 9.4% to 9.5% because of
a drop in the number of people in the workforce. The more inclusive
bU-6b3 measure of unemployment, which includes discouraged workers,
jumped from 16.4% to 16.5%. But even this doesnbt adequately capture
the situation on the ground: Back in the Clinton Administration, the
definition of discouraged worker was changed to only include those
that had given up looking for work because there were no jobs to be
had within the last year.
By adding these folks back in, Williambs SGS-Alternate Unemployment
Measure rose to a jaw-dropping 20.6%. Separately, the Center for
Labor Market Studies in Boston puts U.S. unemployment at 18.2%. Any
way you cut the numbers, the situation is very bad. According to
David Rosenberg, one-in-three among the unemployed have been looking
for a job for more than six months and still canbt find one.
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Glaciers a Canary in the Coal Mine of Global
Warming
By Shelby Lin Erdman
CNN Radio
(CNN) -- U.S. scientists monitoring shrinking glaciers in Washington
and Alaska reported this week that a major meltdown is under way.
o?<
The Gulcana glacier in Alaska is one of three glaciers considered a
benchmark by the U.S. Geological Survey.
o?<
A 50-year government study found that the world's glaciers are
melting at a rapid and alarming rate. The ongoing study is the latest
in a series of reports that found glaciers worldwide are melting
faster than anyone had predicted they would just a few years ago. It
offers a clear indication of an accelerating climate change and
warming earth, according to the authors.
Since 1959, the U.S. Geological Survey, which published the study on
its Web site, has been tracking the movements of the South Cascade
glacier in Washington and the Wolverine and Gulcana glaciers in
Alaska. The three glaciers are considered "benchmarks" for the
conditions of thousands of other glaciers because they're in
different climate zones and at various elevations.
"These changes are taking place in Washington State and Alaska in
three different climate regimes," said Edward Josberger, the lead
researcher on the study with the USGS Washington Water Science Center
in Tacoma, Washington. "So we feel it's definitely something going
on, probably on a global scale, and of course, if you look at other
such measurements around the world and put it all together, yes,
glaciers are retreating and retreating rapidly."
In a telephone interview with CNN, Josberger called the unprecedented
glacial melt the "canary in the coal mine."
The half-century record contains measurements of the amount of snow
that has fallen on the glaciers each winter and on how much ice has
melted off each summer. The data give scientists a sense of whether
the glacier is getting more "healthy" or losing mass, Josberger said.
They also indicate what's happening to mountain glaciers in other
parts of the world, the scientist said.
"We feel it's definitely the signature of global change and climate
warming," Josberger said.
The melt of glaciers is resulting in higher sea levels and affecting
ecosystems and the rivers that emanate from these glaciers, Josberger
said. "In terms of water supply available for people, Anchorage is
fed by two glacially fed lakes. There are some very strong impacts
that could happen."
The rate at which a glacier melts depends on its thickness and mass
and, of course, on the temperature. Even small changes in temperature
of only one to two degrees can have a significant impact on the
environment, according the the National Weather Service.
"We've been using this 50-year record to interpret the changes or the
response of glaciers to climate change," Josberger said. "Basically,
in the past 10, 15 or 20 years these three glaciers are wasting away.
The melting has far exceeded the amount of snow that falls on them in
the winter, so they're retreating far up valley. And this retreat is
taking place all over the Pacific Northwest and Alaska."
For example, Washington's South Cascade glacier has lost half its
volume since 1960 and is predicted to lose half its current volume in
100 years.
And, if the canary analogy proves true, the ice retreat is likely
occurring all over the world, too, he said.
Glacier melt will likely continue and, as it does, sea levels around
the world are expected to continue rising. And that could affect
people in low-lying coastal communities, forcing them from their
homes and further inland, experts say.
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Letters to the Editor
From: Bob <xon...@yahoo.com>
Date: August 7, 2009 11:22:23 PM GMT-05:00
To: Pr...@usa-exile.org
Subject: Forced Vaccinations
Prez-
Looks like this forced vaccination is more of a threat than I
originally thought. Who wants to live in their depopulated fascist
paradise anyway? Better we should stop them now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl-TnHQALzc&feature=channel_page
-Bob
=======================
From: Bob <xon...@yahoo.com>
Date: August 7, 2009 7:49:43 PM GMT-05:00
To: Prez <Pr...@usa-exile.org>
Subject: Re: A Day in the Life: 8/7/9
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/the-public-option-in-
bank_b_252161.html
From Ellen Brown's article:
"Theory and Practice: The Proof Is in the Pudding
A bank charter brings with it the privilege of creating "credit"
simply as an accounting entry on the bank's books. The flaw in the
private banking scheme is that banks create the principal portion of
their loans but not the interest, which is continually drawn off the
top as profit. New borrowers must continually be found to take out
new loans to create this extra profit, making private banking
effectively a pyramid scheme; and like any pyramid scheme, it has
mathematical limits. Today, those limits appear to have been reached.
Personal and national debts have gotten so large relative to incomes
that it is no longer possible to maintain the fiction of solvency. We
soon won't have the money even to pay the interest on our existing
debts, let alone to incur new ones. Public banking does not suffer
from that flaw, because interest is not drawn out of the system but
is returned to the public coffers.. Public banking is thus
mathematically sound and sustainable."
My response:
I think public banking with fractional reserve lending is no more
sustainable than private banking. In both cases the interest is
returned to the system by being either spent or invested. The
continual shortfall in the money supply with respect to the overall
debt created by charging interest on loans and paying it on deposits
is what is responsible for the ponzi scheme reality of our currently
accepted banking system. Perhaps we should have only equity
participation to incentivize credit, and have no interest whatever
payable on deposits, but rather, service charges, with deposits
actually retained and not invested. Add precious metal backing for
currency and we have the beginning of a sustainable, non-exploitative
financial system.
As a side note, a metal backed currency system would require the
seizure by world governments of the gold stolen from them by the
secret owners of the worlds central banks. If those parties retained
that gold and silver, they would be able to seize all other wealth in
the world through pump and dump schemes relative to various national
economies similar to those that they have used in the past (also
known as "the business cycle", from the Rockefeller Foundation funded
Chicago school of economics, the monetarists.) The gold from Fort
Knox was given over to the Federal Reserve in the 1930's as
"security" for America's repayment of principal AND interest on money
we printed and GAVE to the Fed to lend back to America. This
arrangement was either fraudulent or facilitated through bribery or
extortion, and certainly wouldn't pass the "reasonable man" standard
often used to rule on the enforceability of contracts.(No reasonable
man would enter into such a contract, in the absence of duress.)
-Bob Roper
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From: Rick Davis <rda...@yin.or.jp>
Date: August 7, 2009 8:53:42 PM GMT-05:00
Subject: News links, August 8, 2009
Pakistan: bIndustry to collapse due to massive load sheddingb
Demos continue against loadshedding in Pakistan
Baitullah Mehsud probably killed with his wife and bodyguards in
missile attack two days ago
Comment: His second death! And when will he be killed for the third
time?
Gazprom Sees First LNG Cargos To US In Winter
Gazprom Will Ship Gas to Asia in Bid to Curb Reliance on Europe
Biden had it right: Rural Russia is dying of poverty, neglect
UK: Banks take the blame as 33,000 people are declared insolvent
Personal banking cost rises by B#200
General Sir David Richards: Afghanistan will take 40 years
Kuwait becomes net gas importer
"The countrybs decision to turn to LNG, a costly source of fuel, is
a result of a severe gas supply crunch that has led to a shortage of
electricity and made power cuts a fixture of summer months."
Swiss Seek Pope's Blessing To Stop Glacier Melting
Heinberg: Temporary Recession or the End of Growth? (good but long)
Japan: JAL Says It Will End, Cut Flights On 10 Intl Routes
JAL's net loss in April-June expands to Y99.04 bil
Korea's Gold Holdings Far Below Those of Advanced Economies
UAE banks seek cash recovery
Dubai Real Estate Down 50% From Peak
Rotting seaweed gives off lethal fumes on French beaches
"Intensive agricultural practises are being blamed for pumping
excessive nitrates into the water system and causing the seaweed to
die and drift ashore."
More Canadians not paying bills, study finds
Clinton vows to support Somalia's government
Venezuela to buy Russian arms, tanks: Chavez
Sustainable Agriculture: Perennial Plants Produce More; Landscape
Diversity Creates Habitat For Pest Enemies
US: Florida Bay's ecology on the brink of collapse
Natural Gas Falls Most in Two Months on Bulging Stockpiles
US coal production must drop more
Comment on gas and coal: Not a good way to obtain cash for
investment! Note also crashing profits of oil companies.
US Cushing oil hub capacity nears 50 mln bbl
Why all the storage capacity?
From Dreamliner to lost military deals, problems nag Boeing
Dismal Unemployment Situation In Chart Form
Recession's job losses may take years to recoup
U.S. food stamp list tops 34 million for first time
Farmers can't make a living farming
About that debt... Why Another Stock Market Collapse Could Be Imminent
How to Get Cancer: Move to the United States
The Never-Ending Waves of Debt
Recession means fewer babies; US births fell 2 pct
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