
Don’t listen to the ruling elite: the world economy is in real trouble

Don’t listen to the ruling elite: the world economy is in real trouble
The amount of money sent by migrants in the U.S. to their home countries exceeded $432 billion in 2015, which is larger than official development assistance and more stable than private capital flows to these countries. See Remittances: Background and Issues for Congress, updated May 9, 2016.
Tip of the Hat to Secrecy News and Steven Aftergood.

HuffPost Facebook Video: 3D Underwater Farming Could be the Future of Food
Two comments of note:

PANAMA PAPERS HEIST BY CIA-NSA AIMED AT BERLIN, BRICS, ALBA, …
In Summary: The CIA routinely betrays and abuses German interests. The last straw is the Snowden revelation of NSA intercepts of every email out of the Chancellor’s office and eavesdropping on their phone conversations by bugging optical fiber. Germany retaliates by shutting down the joint Wharpdrive project for monitoring communications on the super-fast DE-CIX network and then expelling the Berlin CIA station chief. CIA Munich then bribes a BND file clerk to steal the Mossack Fonseca archives. After vetting the legal papers for Agency spooks, the archive is trucked to CIA-controlled Suddeutsche Zeitung, to put a stick in Merkel’s eye on her home turf. MossFon is redacted to target the leaders of the BRICS group and ALBA alliance. Read more.

How Austerity Has Crippled the European Economy – In Numbers
Thomas Fazi, Social Europe, 31 March 2016
Europe’s post-crisis response – consisting of a combination of fiscal austerity, neoliberal structural reforms and expansionary monetary policies – has unambiguously failed. In early 2016 – eight years after the outbreak of the financial crisis – the eurozone’s overall real GDP was still below the pre-crisis peak (March 2008). The Greek economy was 27.6 per cent smaller. Spain’s was 4.5 per cent smaller. Portugal’s was 6.5 per cent smaller. Even those countries with above-average eurozone growth were not performing very well: Germany, for example, was only 5.5 per cent larger than it was in March 2008, while France was only 2.7 per cent larger. Meanwhile, most of the world has returned to, or surpasses, pre-crisis GDP levels.
The Great Ponzi Scheme of the Global Economy
So we’ve turned the post-war economy that made America prosperous and rich inside out. Somehow most people believed they could get rich by going into debt to borrow assets that were going to rise in price. But you can’t get rich, ultimately, by going into debt. In the end the creditors always win. That’s why every society since Sumer and Babylonia have had to either cancel the debts, or you come to a society like Rome that didn’t cancel the debts, and then you have a dark age. Everything collapses.