Paul Craig Roberts: Collapse at Hand – and ONE THING an Honest Government Could Do To Make It All Right

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, General Accountability Office, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Office of Management and Budget

Collapse At Hand

Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and quantitative easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain 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? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued.

In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. 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.

The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Collapse at Hand – and ONE THING an Honest Government Could Do To Make It All Right”

2012/06/042012/06/04

John Steiner: Joseph Stiglitz on 1% Problem and 1% Solution

03 Economy

The 1 Percent's Problem

Why won’t America’s 1 percent—such as the six Walmart heirs, whose wealth equals that of the entire bottom 30 percent—be a bit more . . . selfish? As the widening financial divide cripples the U.S. economy, even those at the top will pay a steep price.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz,

Vanity Fair 02 June 12

Let’s start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for decades. We’re all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won’t run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth―that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets.

Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.)

Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, “There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.”

Continue reading “John Steiner: Joseph Stiglitz on 1% Problem and 1% Solution”

2012/06/032012/06/03

Mini-Me: Obama Moves To Crush Poland After Global Genetic Disaster Revealed

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Key Players

Huh?

Obama Moves To Crush Poland After Global Genetic Disaster Revealed

By: Sorcha Faal

A Ministry of Foreign Affairs report circulating in the Kremlin today states that United States President Obama has undertaken a campaign to “crush” the nation of Poland after its government this past week officially banned the planting of Monsanto’s MON810, a genetically-modified (GM) variety of maize (corn) that produces its own built-in Bt insecticide in every kernel and is held to be responsible for the global collapse of bee populations and the catastrophic killing of all bat species in North America.

To understand Obama’s anger against Poland and his ties to the most dangerous food ever known to man we can read as reported by Ronnie Cummins, Founder and Director of the Organic Consumers Association:

President Obama knows that agribusiness cannot be trusted with the policy and regulatory powers of government. On the campaign trail in 2007, he promised:

“We'll tell ConAgra that it's not the Department of Agribusiness. It's the Department of Agriculture. We're going to put the people's interests ahead of the special interests.”

But, starting with his choice for USDA Secretary, the pro-biotech former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack (who in a stunning reversal greenlighted Monsanto’s genetically modified alfalfa without testing), Obama has let Monsanto, DuPont and the other pesticide and genetic engineering companies know they'll have plenty of friends and supporters within his administration.

President Obama has taken his team of food and farming leaders directly from the biotech companies and their lobbying, research, and philanthropic arms.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Obama Moves To Crush Poland After Global Genetic Disaster Revealed”

2012/05/302012/05/30

Chuck Spinney: Global Moral Downside of Privatizing US Military Support

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military

In the late 1980s, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the Pentagon began to privatise many of the military's support services that had traditionally be done soldiers, sailors, and airmen — laundries, dining halls, security guards, cleaning latrines, some supply functions, etc. It was argued at the time that this would save money and free up troops for combat duties, thus increasing the tooth-to-tail ratio of our military forces. According to this logic, fact that we were fielding an army that could not feed itself or wash its own laundry was deemed to be a cost-effective contributor to combat power. Of course, the only real result was to transfer another large part of the defense budget to the defense contractors and open up vast new opportunities for price gouging.

It is an undeniable fact that, despite a massive move to privatization of support functions by the Pentagon, the tooth-to-tail ratio continued to get worse during the 1990s and in the subsequent decade, the daily cost per unit of deployed combat power, be it troops marching in the mud, flying hours, ship steaming hours, or tank miles driven, etc continued to increase at a rate much faster than the overall defense budget increased.<

As a result, two relatively low-tempo, small wars (compared to Korea or Vietnam) — i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan — have now cost more than any war America has fought, save WWII (in inflation adjusted dollars). Privatization — the neoliberal panacea for all things according to the adherents of the Chicago School of economics — may have created bloated profits for the MICC, fomented the rise of private armies, like Blackwater, and increased the corruption that naturally takes place among war profiteers, but the result has been a disaster for our nation.<

The below article in Le Monde Diplomatique is a good, albeit disgusting, example of how the privatization of public enterprise works in the real world of America's permanent war economy.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Global Moral Downside of Privatizing US Military Support”

2012/05/272012/05/27

Owl: US Government Criminality from Local to National

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government

Government larceny and criminality just never ends, it seems to be increasing, especially against those who can least to afford to defend themselves against it:

Another Way to Kill Small U.S. Farmers: Seize Their Bank Accounts on Phony Charges

The farmers, Randy Sowers and his wife Karen, made deposits totaling more than $295,000 from May 2011 to February 2012, but each transaction was less than $10,000. Now they are being accused of “structuring,” a violation of federal currency reporting requirements, as the feds are accusing them of deliberately depositing money in increments of less than $10,000 in an attempt to evade Currency Transaction Reporting requirements. The dairy farmer's “crime” stems from his weekly sales at local farmers' markets. The sales averaged about the same amount each week and, dutifully, the Sowers deposited them. They'd reportedly never even heard of the Bank Secrecy Act or “structuring,” but that was of no interest to the feds—the consistency of the amount the Sowers deposited, always less than $10,000, raised red flags to the feds, who claimed that this was indicative of a crime. The government promptly seized about $70,000 from the bank account, then issued a warrant for the seizures. The raid on the Sowers was conducted by an agency created in 2009 to go after money-laundering criminals. The agency started out with a bang by seizing $1.2 billion from a real money launderer, but it appears that what it's interested in now is making criminals out of small business persons, including small farmers.

But small business people are not the only targets of government and corporate predators. Poor people are too, as evidenced in this Mother Jones article:

How Corporations and Local Governments Use the Poor As Piggy Banks

Continue reading “Owl: US Government Criminality from Local to National”

2012/05/24

Koko: Canadian Tar Sands Up Close and Personal

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government

Koko sad.

The Canadian Oil Sand Mines Refused Us Access, So We Rented This Plane To See What They Were Up To

Robert Johnson

Business Insider, 18 May 2012

When reaching out to Alberta oil sands companies before a trip to Canada last month, I thought all of them mined oil the same way — they don't.The open mining most people think of when they picture the oil sands is just one way of extracting crude from the ground, but it is without a doubt the most dramatic. And we had to see it.

Check out the pictures >

After being refused a mine tour and any type of access to a mining site or equipment, Business Insider rented a plane that I used to see everything I could of the mines on my own.

Restricted to flying no lower than 1,000 feet above the ground, I spent nearly two hours leaning out the window of a small Cessna 172 with a long lens, snapping pictures and trying to keep warm.

The oil sands hold up to two trillion barrels of oil spread over more than 54,000 square miles, making it the second largest oil deposit in the world after Saudi Arabia.

The amount of energy spent recovering that oil and the pollution created in refining it is immense and the impact on the environment profound.

Check out the pictures >

Read full article and see high-resolution photographs.

2012/05/242012/05/24

Eagle: 100 Million Americans Without Jobs

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, General Accountability Office, Government, Office of Management and Budget

100 Million Americans Without Jobs

by Gekko

The national unemployment rate gets lots of attention, and lately more attention has been paid to the workforce participation rate since more Americans have given up looking for a job, but we can also see that an astounding 100 million Americans don’t have jobs.

Specifically, these are people who are part of the civilian over-16 non-institutional population who are either unemployed or not part of the workforce. According to the April jobs report, the number of jobless American stood at 100.9 million.

That’s an all-time record and it’s an increase of 26.2 million over the last 12 years. It’s as if we absorbed the entire adult population of Canada and not a single person had a job.

The numbers are staggering. The jobs-to-population ratio peaked 12 years ago. If we were to have the same ratio today, we would need 15.3 million more jobs, or 23.7 million fewer people.

(Note: The chart above is the Civilian Over-16 Non-Institutional Population minus the seasonally adjusted Civilian Workforce.)

Source

Phi Beta Iota: As a number, that is almost precisely half the eligible voters in the USA.