You laugh, but that could be a side-effect. Consider:
The Capitol Police just murdered an unarmed mother fleeing her car on foot, declared her child “unharmed,” and received the longest standing-ovation in Congress since Osama bin Laden's Muslim sea burial. Try holding your breath until Congress takes the standing ovation back, and you'll wish your were in the “Holy Land” having your house sprayed with “Skunk” artificial sewage by the Israeli military or in Old Town Alexandria tasting the air of the authentic raw sewage across the river until it's “treated” and spread on farms in the exurbs for the benefit of we the people.
Why are young people in America so frustrated these days? You are about to find out. Most young adults started out having faith in the system. They worked hard, they got good grades, they stayed out of trouble and many of them went on to college. But when their educations where over, they discovered that the good jobs that they had been promised were not waiting for them at the end of the rainbow. Even in the midst of this so-called “economic recovery”, the full-time employment rate for Americans under the age of 30 continues to fall. And incomes for that age group continue to fall as well. At the same time, young adults are dealing with record levels of student loan debt. As a result, more young Americans than ever are putting off getting married and having families, and more of them than ever are moving back in with their parents.
It can be absolutely soul crushing when you discover that the “bright future” that the system had been promising you for so many years turns out to be a lie. A lot of young people ultimately give up on the system and many of them end up just kind of drifting aimlessly through life. The following is an example from a recent Wall Street Journal article…
“Heroin trafficking is the lubrication that keeps the wheels of Western politics moving as intended.”
It was only a week ago that the US government released Eric Harroun, a former soldier who had been fighting with foreign backed al-Qaeda terrorists and the CIA against the Assad government in Syria.
This week, former Army sergeant Joseph Hunter and a group of other veterans, one from Germany’s armed forces, were arrested for much the same thing, offering “security services” for Colombian drug cartels.
Were worldwide press censorship to ease, the public would learn that America’s drone program is used more for maintaining control of drug production and distribution than terrorism. In fact, according to Russian officials, heroin from Afghanistan, all produced and exported under unspoken but very public approval of US officials, killed over one million people last year.
A car chase that began when a driver tried to breach a White House security barrier ended near the U.S. Capitol, with a confrontation that included shots fired and one Capitol Police officer injured.
The inability of the media and politicians to focus on the real issues never ceases to amaze.
The real crisis is not the “debt ceiling crisis.” The government shutdown is merely a result of the Republicans using the debt limit ceiling to attempt to block the implementation of Obamacare. If the shutdown persists and becomes a problem, Obama has enough power under the various “war on terror” rulings to declare a national emergency and raise the debt ceiling by executive order. An executive branch that has the power to inter citizens indefinitely and to murder them without due process of law, can certainly set aside a ceiling on debt that jeopardizes the government.
The real crisis is that jobs offshoring by US corporations has permanently lowered US tax revenues by shifting what would have been consumer income, US GDP, and tax base to China, India, and other countries where wages and the cost of living are relatively low. On the spending side, twelve years of wars have inflated annual expenditures. The consequence is a wide deficit gap between revenues and expenditures.
Under the present circumstances, the deficit is too large to be closed. The Federal Reserve covers the deficit by printing $1,000 billion annually with which to purchase Treasury debt and mortgage-backed financial instruments. The use of the printing press on such a large scale undermines the US dollar’s role as reserve currency, the basis for US power. Raising the debt limit simply allows the real crisis to continue. More money will be printed with which to purchase more new debt issues needed to close the gap between revenues and expenditures.
The supply of dollars or dollar denominated assets in foreign hands is vast. (The Social Security system’s large surplus accumulated over a quarter century was borrowed by the Treasury and spent. In its place are non-marketable Treasury IOUs. Consequently, Social Security is one of the largest creditors to the US government.)
If foreigners lose confidence in the dollar, the drop in the dollar’s exchange value would mean high inflation and the Federal Reserve’s loss of control over interest rates. It is possible that a drop in the dollar’s exchange value could initiate hyperinflation in the US.
The real crisis is the absence of intelligence among economists and policymakers who told us for 20 years not to worry about the offshoring of US jobs, because we were going to have a “New Economy” with better jobs.
Earlier today, former National Security Agency (NSA) Senior Executive Thomas Drake addressed a special Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) created by the European Parliament to investigate spying efforts by the United States and EU countries. Addressing specially-appointed Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), Drake spoke as a former NSA crypto-linguist who witnessed what he describes as a “persistent surveillance state” that was “born during the first few critical weeks and months following 9/11.”
Drake, a whistleblower, was the subject of a federal criminal leak investigation and faced a potential 35 years under a 10-felony count indictment, including five counts under the Espionage Act. In 2011, the federal government dropped all charges against Drake.
By Michael Snyder, on October 3rd, 2013
