Realizing that they needed to rely on others, these businessmen took a new tack: using generous financing to enlist sympathetic clergymen as their champions. After all, according to one tycoon, polls showed that, “of all the groups in America, ministers had more to do with molding public opinion” than any other.
Phi Beta Iota: The 1% actually believe in “survival of the fittest” and earnestly consider most humans to be less than human, mere animals to be exploited as is their God-given right. Religions that regard others as heathen–this includes the Catholic, Islamic, Jewish, and Mormon religions–that “do not count,” are as corrupt as the governments they join in serving the 1%. Sluts lack integrity. It's time we stop following sluts, be they securlar or sanctimonious.
The “big story” of the U.S. economy is that we have substituted expansion of debt for meaningful increases in productivity.
For the past 30 years, the U.S. economy has become increasingly dependent on explosive debt expansion for its “growth” rather than on meaningful rises in meaningful productivity. Growth is in quotes because growth based on secular increases in productivity–that is, the same investment of labor and capital produces goods and services of greater value–is qualitatively different from “growth” based on a pyramiding of debt.
The most surprising thing about the recent downgrading of nine Eurozone countries by S&P is that anyone is surprised to hear that the government debt of any of these countries is risky!
The eurozone debt crisis returned with a vengeance on Friday as Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, downgraded France and Austria – two of the currency zone’s six triple A rated countries – as well as seven nations not in that top tier, among them Italy and Spain.
S&P, under political fire since it announced a review or eurozone debt in December, gave 14 of 16 countries – including France, Italy and Spain – a negative outlook, which it said meant a one-in-three chance for each country of a further downgrade this year or next.
It seems as though it is only a matter of time before they each fall to bankruptcy, no matter how many bailouts they can muster. It's almost enough to make us change our logo. But, we've always said the euro would fall before the US dollar. The dollar will be the last in what will be a crescendo of currency collapse.
What the students of the Austrian School (aka real economics) have understood since the turn of the 20th century was that this was the inevitable result of the pursuit of the socialist utopia where humans would not have a worry in the world, cared for from cradle to grave by the all knowing state.
The modern Welfare/Warfare state was born in the in late nineteenth-century Imperial Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck – his intention was clear from the outset:
“My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare”
Bet you never saw that quote in your government run schoolbooks. Frideric Howe, an admirer of the german systeml wrote that under that system, “The individual exists for the state, not the state for the individual.”
We are now witnessing the end result of the institutions of bribery and theft that swept the rest of the world in the first half of the 20th century.
Phi Beta Iota: Where the libertarians and the advanced cybernetics, collective intelligence, and systems theory people come together is in the recognition that “management” or “command and control” do not scale. Bottom up agility that can only be achived by having the greatest intelligence “on the edges” is the only means of achieving resilience in complex systems. Those of us who saw the death of the state in 1970's (Richard Falk a leading light) made the cardinal mistake of thinking that something BIGGER was needed–world government. Now we recognize that we must reverse a century of increasingly corrupt centralization of power; that the preconditions of revolution are created by the overconcentration of power, wealth, corruption, and evil.
European Intelligence & Security Informatics Conference (EISIC 2012)
The Premier European Conference on Counterterrorism and Criminology
Odense, Denmark August 22-24, 2012 http://www.eisic.org, http://www.eisic.eu
Co-sponsored by IEEE Computer Society
National Science Board Report: US Losing R&D Jobs To Asia The United States is losing ever more jobs and becoming ever less competitive as our universities are cut back and companies move R&D jobs to Asia. We lost 687,000 high-tech manufacturing jobs lost since 2000. Universities cut back 20% on public research. 85% of growth in R&D employment by American companies occurred abroad.
Since the drug war has become so unpopular with the electorate, instead of politicians actually changing the drug laws, the Department of Defense seeks to reduce and conceal the real costs by transferring the “dirty work” to private contractors to do what “U.S. military forces are not allowed or not encouraged to do.
The BBC (in Spanish) is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense is delegating the war on drugs to private mercenary companies. Of those companies, the increasingly infamous organization previously known as Blackwater is said to have received several multimillion-dollar government contracts for “providing advice, training and conducting operations in drug producing countries and those with links to so-called “narco-terrorism” including Latin America.” The “no bid” contracts, issued under the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office's $15 billion dollar budget, are described as “non-specific” and are said to be “juicy” for the private contractors. The Pentagon says “the details of each cost in very general contracts do not go through bidding processes.”
An unnamed analyst says “the responsibility of the public and national security changing from a state's duty to be a private business…has become the trend of the future.”
Although parts of the drug war have been privatized for years, the BBC reports this “transfer” of responsibilities is an attempt to placate those looking for Pentagon budget cuts in an election year.
Is this statistic a watershed mark of our decline into socialism, a totally reasonable outcome from the Great Recession, or, somehow, both things at the same time?
A record-high 49% of the population lived in a household receiving some type of government benefit in the second quarter of 2010, according to Census data reported by the Wall Street Journal. Most of this group received so-called “means tested” benefits like food stamps, subsidized housing or Medicaid. Many are also benefiting from unemployment insurance spending, which has quadrupled since the downturn.
