The system is “out of control” because corruption has put so much sand in the gears as to make nature grind to a halt in pain. Seeds that commit suicide is a man-made threat to humanity.
The non-violent antidote to this tsunami of corruption across all forms of organization (including “think tanks” that are nothing more than intellectual prostitutes, and media “empires” that use news holes to anchor weapons of mass deception) is Open-Source Everything. Transparency, Truth, & Trust. From local to global, humanity needs to begin the Long March that begins with rejecting all goods, services, and regulations that are crimes against humanity. We do that with True Cost Economics, total Transparency, and individual virtue: do not buy crap from evil doers. It will take 25 years to undo the damage that has been done to the Republic. 2012 is an opportunity to achieve electoral reform sufficient to take the White House and create a swing vote center in both houses of Congress. Open Seeds and Open Government and Open Society are one public away.
Farmers are taking a stand against Monsanto, launching a landmark lawsuit against the mega corporation for widespread genetic contamination.
The farmers are concerned that Monsanto’s aggressive agenda to genetically alter the planet will ultimately result in a severe threat to the organic integrity of farms worldwide. It is not hard to believe that many ‘organic’ farms have already been contaminated with GMO crops, as nearly 93% of soybeans are now admittedly genetically modified.
The Public Patent Foundation originally filed the lawsuit in March of 2011 in a case known as Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto.
The organization launched the suit in the name of the very individuals and organizations threatened by Monsanto’s widespread GMO crops: family farmers, farming organizations, and seed businesses.
The intent of the case is to dispute Monsanto’s patents on GMO seeds and ultimately safeguard farmers from Monsanto’s own vicious lawsuits.
In fact, between 1997 and 2010, Monsanto actually filed 144 lawsuits against American family farmers. In addition, another 700 were settled out of court for unknown amounts. Monsanto has an agenda to take out American family farms and dominate the agricultural industry with their own mutant seeds. This is the same kind of practice that Monsanto operates outside of the United States as well, driving thousands of poor farmers to suicide by ruining their family farming practices.
The first phase of the case began yesterday on January 31, 2012. More than 50 farmers and plaintiffs have gone to Manhattan to listen to verbal debates surrounding Monsanto’s attempts to dismiss the lawsuit.
You can take action now by voicing your opposition to Monsanto and their corrupt practices. Your submissions are reportedly to be shared with farmers around the globe who will ultimately play a vital role in the determination of whether or not Monsanto will be able to continue its mass manipulation of the food supply.
If you have any money and you want to understand the lies that “your” government tells you with statistics, subscribe to John Williams shadowstats.com.
John Williams is the best and utterly truthful statistician that we the people have.
The charts below come from John Williams Hyperinflation Report, January 25, 2012. The commentary is supplied by me.
Here is the chart of real average weekly earnings deflated by the US government’s own measure of inflation, which as I pointed out in my recent column, Economics Lesson 1, understates true inflation.
This chart (below) shows the behavior of inflation as measured by “our” government’s official measure, CPI-U (bottom line) and John Williams measure which uses the official methodology of when I was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. The gap between the top and bottom lines represents the amount of money that was due to Social Security recipients and others whose income was indexed to inflation that was diverted by the government to wars, police state, and bankers’ bailouts.
This next chart shows the gains that gold and the Swiss franc have made against the US dollar. The Swiss franc is the top line and gold is the bottom. When gold and the Swiss franc rise, the dollar is falling. Notice that during President Reagan’s first term, when I was in the Treasury, gold and the Swiss franc dropped, that is, the dollar rose in purchasing power. Obviously, the supply-side policy that Reagan implemented strengthened the US dollar. It was only with the advent of the Bush policy of endless trillion dollar wars, reaffirmed by Obama, that the US dollar and economy collapsed relative to gold and hard currencies.
The recent drop in the Swiss franc is due to the Swiss government announcing that the country’s exports could not tolerate any further run up in the franc’s value, and that the Swiss central bank would print new francs to accommodate future inflows of dollars and euros. In other words, Switzerland was forced to import US inflation in order to protect its exports.
Here is nonfarm payroll employment. As you can see, the US economy has been in recession for four years despite the easiest monetary policy and largest government deficits in US history.
Here is consumer confidence. Do you see a recovery despite all the recovery hype from politicians and the financial media?
Here is housing starts. Do you see a recovery?
Here is real GDP deflated according to the methodology used when I was in the US Treasury.
Here is real retail sales deflated by the traditional, as contrasted with the current, substitution-based, measure of inflation.
These graphs courtesy of John Williams make it completely clear that there is no economic recovery. In place of recovery, we have hype from politicians, Wall Street, and the presstitute media. The “recovery” is no more real than Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” or Iranian “nukes” or the Obama regime’s phony story of assassinating last year an undefended Osama bin Laden, allegedly the mastermind of Islamic terrorism, left by al Qaeda to the mercy of a US Seal team, a man who was widely reported to have died from renal failure in December 2001, a man who denied any responsibility for 9/11.
A government and media that will deceive you about simple things such as inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth, will lie to you about everything.
Phi Beta Iota: Here is the paraphrase as reported previously, from Ellen Seidman, former member of the National Economic Council:
CIA reports only focus on foreign economic conditions. They don't do domestic economic conditions and so I cannot get a strategic analysis that compares and contrasts strengths and weaknesses of the industries I am responsible for. On the other hand, Treasury, Commerce, and the Fed are terrible at the business of intelligence — they don't know how to produce intelligence.[1]
When you add a lack of integrity across the board to basic incompetence on the part of both consumers and producers of intelligence, you end up with lies that neither patriotic nor helpful.
[1] Seidman was speaking to the Open Source Lunch Club on January 1, 1994. Her observations were subsequently reported in OSS Notices 94001 dated February 21, 1994
Last Friday (January 27) the US Bureau of Economic Analysis announced its advance estimate that in the last quarter of 2011 the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.8% in real inflation-adjusted terms, an increase from the annual rate of growth in the third quarter.
Good news, right?
Wrong. If you want to know what is really happening, you must turn to John Williams at shadowstats.com.
What the presstitute media did not tell us is that almost the entire gain In GDP growth was due to “involuntary inventory build-up,” that is, more goods were produced than were sold.
Net of the unsold goods, the annualized real growth rate was eight-tenths of one percent.
And even that tiny growth rate is an exaggeration, because it is deflated with a measure of inflation that understates inflation. The US government’s measure of inflation no longer measures a constant standard of living. Instead, the government’s inflation measure relies on substitution of cheaper goods for those that rise in price. In other words, the government holds the measure of inflation down by measuring a declining standard of living. This permits our rulers to divert cost-of-living-adjustments that should be paid to Social Security recipients to wars of aggression, police state, and banker bailouts.
When the methodology that measures a constant standard of living is used to deflate nominal GDP, the result is a shrinking US economy. It becomes clear that the US economy has had no recovery and has now been in deep recession for four years despite the proclamation by the National Bureau of Economic Research of a recovery based on the rigged official numbers.
• U.S. Hyperinflationary Great Depression Moves Ever Closer
• U.S. Government and the Federal Reserve Effectively Have Destroyed Global Confidence in the U.S. Dollar
• Systemic-Solvency and Economic Crises Have Not Abated
• Precursors to Ultimate Dollar Disaster Are in Place; 2014 Remains the Outside Timing for Same
Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with lead pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.
The workers were enraged enough to kill Regency’s president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast. Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours after the police left the factory.
. . . . . .
India’s factory workers are the lowest paid within the big four emerging markets. Per capita income in India is under $4,000 a year, making it the poorest country in the BRICs despite its relatively booming economy.
. . . . . . .
Once news of Murali’s death spread, the factory workers allegedly destroyed 50 company cars, buses and trucks and lit them on fire. They ransacked the factory. Residents joined hands with around 600 workers, while others were enroute to Chandrashekhar’s house.
Phi Beta Iota: A very famous experiment in the 1970's added one rat at a time to an empty aquarium, and found that at the same point each time, there was a crowding “tipping point” at which the rats would begin eating each other. The world is ready to explode. The resource split between the 1% and the 99% is unsustainable.
Most discussions of possible United States military operations in the Persian Gulf, should Iran try to prevent maritime traffic from going through the Strait of Hormuz, generally say that while it would not be a cakewalk, it would not be an enormously difficult task either.
But that conventional wisdom is wrong, according to a recent report issued by an independent, non-profit public policy research institute in Washington DC. The report found that the traditional post-Cold War US military ability to project power overseas with few serious challenges to its freedom of action may be rapidly drawing to a close.
. . . . . . .
It stressed that “a Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region”.
Phi Beta Iota: Two themes are emerging in the open source world. First, the depth and breadth of Israel's clandestine agreements with its Arab neighbors is not clearly understood–a National Intelligence Estimate is required, but the collection, processing, and analysis capabilities are simply not there, and the management will to do this as a multinational task is not there either. Second, as the US loses its ability to actually project force, the finance of war is being replaced by the theater of war, such that oil prices can still be manipulated, but at a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears previously mobilized – financial fraud on the cheap, as it were.
Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers.
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Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.
Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?
Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.
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Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.
Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.
Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.
Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: System D is completely separate from straight forward black crime (organized crime) or white crime (Goldman Sachs et al). What this really means is that governments have lost all legitimacy and two thirds of the global economy now considers governments to be at best a meddling (and costly) nuisance and at worst the enemy to be defeated by any means necessary. Governments brought this on themselves.
