Bank failures: Towards an « Icelandation » of the banking crisis’ management
In the face of this shock, our team estimates that most countries, including the United States, will approach management of the crisis in an “Icelandic style”, i.e. not to bail out the banks and to let them collapse (16). We have already had a glimpse with the liquidation of the Irish bank IBRC which has given many people ideas: “How Ireland liquidated its banking albatross in one night” headlined La Tribune (17) admiringly. This possibility seems to increasingly be the solution in the event of the banks backsliding, for the following reasons: first, it seems much more effective than the 2008-2009 bailout plans judging by Iceland’s recovery; second, countries don’t really have the means to pay for new bailouts anymore; finally, one can’t deny that it must be a big temptation for leaders to get rid in a popular fashion of part of the debts and “toxic assets” which encumber their economy.
Billionaires control the political conversation by staying hidden and paying others to promote their brutal agendas
Conspiracies against the public don't get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change. While inflicting untold suffering on the world's people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.
The two organisations – the Donors' Trust and the Donors' Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression of many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama's cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they're seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.
I’ve identified 16 of these game-over situations facing America today, situations from which there is the possibility of no recovery — not the certainty, but the possibility. As I was working on that article though, looking especially what it would take to reverse each trend, I realized it’s really only one story writ 16 times on 16 separate canvasses.
It’s the story, in other words, of worldwide billionaires and the one thing they’re doing — monomaniacly making money while telling each other tales of their Randian goodness.
America’s 16 deadlines
As I said, I see 16 individual, though interlinked, processes in the country today that have potential game-over, irreversible end-points. You may think there are more, or you may think some could be merged, but I think that’s tweakage, “in the noise,” not a useful distinction. For our purposes, this list is good enough.
Here they are, numbered in no particular order, but grouped:
Like the horsemeat scandal in Europe this report on fake pharmaceuticals shows what happens when appropriate regulation is not maintained, because industries capture the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, and the Congress is in the pocket of those industries as well. Once again we face the bitter fruit produced by anti-regulations forces. The t! ruth is we have become a thoroughly corrupted nation and, until we find the strength to speak truth to power it will only continue.
The risks of fake and flawed medicines have leapt from developing nations to Western supply chains, thanks to gaps in oversight of drug wholesalers, lax law enforcement, and ineffective tactics for tracking drugs as they change hands, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute of Medicine.
‘It’s distressing to see vividly just how huge a problem it is in the United States,” said Larry Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor and World Health Organization adviser who led the study. ‘It’s more lucrative to traffic in illegitimate drugs than cocaine or heroin,” he said.
The Russian system is beginning to decay. It cannot sustain the crumbling status quo, nor can it be certain of finding a new incarnation for itself. The only real questions are what stage of decay the system is in, whether the agony of its final demise has already started, and, if so, how long it will last.
To be sure, the system still has some resources, if not to revive itself, then to draw out its death, and that survival instinct could take a nasty, even bloody, form.
The Future of the Russian Matrix
The system can still reproduce itself through regime change and the emergence of a new Leader, who will personify authoritarian rule.
It can't be excluded that the forces who present themselves as “liberal,” declaring the need to “influence” the system from within and supporting “partial” changes, will try to highjack the protest movement and reestablish personalized power under liberal slogans.
Most certainly, any new attempt to breathe life into the rotting Matrix will necessarily involve coercion in order to preserve its power.
Prospects for Change
For the first time in its long history, Russian society is ready to free itself from the stifling embrace of the Russian system and of the political regime that is its engine, and to accept new rules of the game.
It is true that only a minority is ready to publicly stand up for a state based on the rule of law. It is more important, however, that the idea of the new order is not rejected by the vast majority of Russians, and they are ready to accept it, if it is offered to them.
At this point, however, the demoralized and corrupt Russian ruling elite is not ready for any change that will endanger its monopoly and its corporate and personal interests.
For its part, the Russian opposition, still weak and fragmented, has so far failed to present society with a viable agenda for an exit solution.
However, there is no doubt that Russia's moment of truth is fast approaching. The question is whether the confluence of several specific factors will occur in the same time frame and in the not too distant future. These factors include:
public pressure on the regime;
the consolidation of the non-system opposition;
the split of the ruling elite, with its pragmatic part joining the opposition;
the power structures' reluctance to defend the old order; and
the creation by the opposition of a “road map” for the transition to the new rules of the game that will include Constitutional reform and a new state structure.
Failure to reach these goals will deepen the rot and/or implosion of the system and the state.
Read rest of report.
Phi Beta Iota: Carnegie has written a perfect self-description of the USA. They will never admit this, and no one in a position of power is capable of actually connecting to the truth even if the US intelligence community were capable of presenting the truth — as Daniel Ellsberg lectured Henry Kissinger:
The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
