Apocalypse (Greek: Apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil”) is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today the term is often used to refer to the end of the world, which may be a shortening of the phrase apokalupsis eschaton, which literally means “revelation at the end of the æon, or age.[1]”
The unraveling of the US and global financial system should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, doubted the news headlines over the past decade, or plunged into an odyssey of self- and world-discovery by reading books, studying history, or seeking the truth behind the cultural myths that cocoon Americans into the notion that they live in the world’s beacon of democracy and freedom. The most surprising factor is that people who have created the crisis think that they can continue the scam by stealing another $850,000,000,000 overtly through the bailout, and even larger amounts covertly, to keep the game going for the world’s wealthiest people at the expense of everyone else.
In the past, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Rome fell when a small percentage of the population controlled nearly all of the wealth. [2] Today, the rich have never been richer nor the poor poorer. The concentration of wealth has been achieved by conquest, as well as by one of the most powerful tools of empire: money.
John, a few yrs back you were posting doubts about the official explanations (both Norad and Nist have changed their stories) of 9/11, but not in a long time. I can imagine many reasons to abandon the discussion, like not upsetting some of your readers, but I just wanted to point out that back then the debate was dominated by speculation, but that in recent years the Truth movement has been professionalized by such orgs as Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (some 1500 members risking their careers), Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Scholars for 9/11 Truth, etc., as well as peer-reviewed scientific articles. I'd be interested in your thoughts on the subject nowadays.
• The “entitlement programs” have an unfunded liability of greater than $104 trillion. Your share is $367,000. (Every man, woman and child owes the same.)
• At the end of 2009, $3.2 trillion of the $12.9 trillion National Debt was spent, but never on the government's general budget. Where did 3.2 Trillion dollars go?
• In 2010, the federal government is borrowing 52 cents of every dollar that it spends on general operations. Just to balance the budget, spending will have to be cut by 52%.
• Over the next four years, the federal government needs to borrow at least $3.9 trillion and the world is basically running out of money for us.
Washington, meanwhile, doesn't want to sound the economic alarm. The White House and most Democrats want Americans to believe the economy is on an upswing.
Republicans, for their part, worry that if they tell it like it is Americans will want government to do more rather than less. They'd rather not talk about jobs and wages, and put the focus instead on deficit reduction (or spread the lie that by reducing the deficit we'll get more jobs and higher wages).
I believe the Bowles Simpson recommendations represent, to too large an extent, a set of unprincipled political compromises that would lead to a weaker America — with slower growth and a more divided society.
We now have an economy in which five banks control over 50 percent of the entire banking industry, four or five corporations own most of the mainstream media, and the top one percent of families hold a greater share of the nation’s wealth than any time since 1930. This sort of concentration of wealth and power is a classic setup for the failure of a democratic republic and the stifling of organic economic growth.
The government has nearly convinced the public they have everything under control, when that’s far from the case. In fact, everything could go downhill fast. Here are ten all-too-likely scenarios I look at in my book, It Takes a Pillage:
1. The actual bailout has quietly ballooned to $16 trillion dollars (not including over $3 trillion set aside for money market funds), most of it given out with no strings attached. Wall Street firms could continue to tout the myth that ‘talent’ must be paid for – now with stupid sums of bonus money, funded by the American People.
2. The stock market, which has rallied substantially since the government started giving out free money to the banking industry, could tank on the realization that if that money needed to be paid back any time soon, the banks wouldn’t be good for it.
3. Because bigger is better still seems to be Fed policy, JPM Chase could acquire Bank of America – Merrill Lynch, creating one of the largest, federally subsidized banking firms in the world.
4. Because the bigger just can’t help getting badder, JPM Chase could also acquire Citigroup, and we’d be living with a monopoly economy.
5. We could sink into the delusion that the Obama administration has actually done something to restrain Wall Street, lulling us into a false sense of security. Then the remaining big banks will screw us again.
6. Congress could continue to ignore history and never reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act. That act made banks smaller, more specialized, easier to regulate and less expensive to bail out. Repealing it lead to this mess, and there’s barely a whisper heard in Washington of bringing it back.
7. As a Fed approved bank holding company, Goldman Sachs could buy a lot of small banks just to get access to all the money in savings and checking accounts to gamble with. Plus they’d have that great $250,000 FDIC guarantee they get per account. This would make them the biggest bank in the country.
8. Every bank and government agency with access to some aspect of a federal bailout could max out their subsidies chips at once – pushing the full bailout cost to over $26 trillion.
9. Many mid-sized and smaller banks didn’t need a bailout and have been better at allowing consumers access to credit. The largest banks, flush with federal funding and a poor record of helping average Americans, could buy them all up.
10. The Fed could continue to operate in secrecy, despite multiple moves by Congress to push for a full audit of its largesse. Right now, only the Fed knows what the real worst case scenarios might actually be.
Wars cannot be won with precision bombings alone. NATO's air war against Serbia is often touted as a success, but even that took longer than predicted and the cease-fire terms were unchanged.
By Andrew Cockburn
No one following the record of air power as an instrument of national whim should be surprised that Moammar Kadafi's army remains apparently uncowed, even driving Libyan rebels back in headlong retreat despite an onslaught of NATO bombs and missiles. In fact, history is repeating itself in more ways than one.
The very first bombing raid ever occurred almost 100 years ago on Nov. 1, 1911, when an Italian airman hand-dropped four 4.5-pound bombs on forces defending Tripoli against Italian invaders. This momentous event went down well with the press: “Italian Military Aviator Outside Tripoli Proves War Value of Aeroplane,” headlined the New York Times. But it had little effect on the fighting, thus commencing a pattern of disappointment that has recurred with monotonous regularity in subsequent conflicts, irrespective of advances in technology. Precision bombing, touted as an instrument of victory in World War II and Vietnam, turned out to be anything but, leaving the wars to be decided by foot soldiers on the ground.
A bit more on that story we brought you earlier about the horrific killings in Afghanistan which followed lunatic Pastor Terry Jones' Qu'ran-burning stunt.
Those reactionaries within our own society who are pushing the Clash of Civilizations are mirror-images of the terrorists that inspire their hyperbolic fear; they're just as xenophobic, just as irrational and, ultimately, are just as great a threat to our security. Both have to be challenged aggressively before they give birth to another, even bloodier generation of culture warriors.
This latest spasm of bloodletting seems like a perfect example. Radical Cleric Terry Jones burns some Qu'rans in an intentional provocation, extremists in Afghanistan kill some people, which ultimately emboldens people like Terry Jones, and so on. A vicious cycle, with the vast majority of people in the middle.
But over at the must-read UN Dispatch, Una Moore, an international development professional based in Afghanistan, says that there's a lot more going on with this attack:
Many aspects of the Libyan situation remain unclear: the scope of the mandate given to UN member states by Security Council Resolution 1973, the broader aims of the intervention, how many civilians have been killed and by whom, and who the rebels represent. One thing, however, seems clear: the international intervention is considered to be legal. International lawyers have agreed with the UK government’s advice that Security Council Resolution 1973 ‘provides a clear and unequivocal legal basis for the deployment of UK forces and military assets to achieve the resolution’s objectives’. Legal experts have been quick to suggest that Resolution 1973 gives authority for any action thought necessary not only to protect civilians, but to protect areas inhabited by civilians.
If today’s Western leadership is really ready, in the words of William Hague, to support the people of the Middle East in their ‘aspirations for a better future’, it will need to do more than use international law to target its enemies while protecting its friends. In rejecting their authoritarian leaders, the current wave of Arab revolutionaries is also rejecting the international system that has profited from their existence. As the US declares yet again that Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorists while bombs rain down on Libya, as protesters continue to be killed in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and as the numbers of people detained continue to grow, the idea that Nato is working to support the freedom fighters of this Arab spring rings increasingly hollow. The bombing of Libya in the name of revolution may be legal, but the international law that authorises such action has surely lost its claim to be universal.
