The Confidence Fairy Was A No-Show (Killing the Euro!); Same Demented Regime But It's A Wonderful Life - Vote for BRAD MILLER!

A word to the wise: When so-called Dumbya said the Constitution was just a piece of paper, he hadn't come up with that odd piece of information out of nowhere. I always assumed that anything Bush said (or mis-said) was something he had heard many times before from people who had impressed him as people who knew what was what (so to say) and what was to come. I haven't changed my mind (as you will confirm after reading today's essay).

Yes, the confidence fairy is back in all her/his/its glory! (Or vanished glory, whichever telling you prefer.)

Paul Krugman shares the inside dope on why Europe is now going down. And if you've been reading Krugman and my other favorite econ profs, you'd know they've been warning the austerity boosters about this exact situation being the logical outcome of their vengeance taking on the victims of the brnksters frauds for a very long time.

And don't let those last yelps out of the American stock market get to you.

It's all over but the shouting.

Can the euro be saved? Not long ago we were told that the worst possible outcome was a Greek default. Now a much wider disaster seems all too likely.

True, market pressure lifted a bit on Wednesday after central banks made a splashy announcement about expanded credit lines (which will, in fact, make hardly any real difference). But even optimists now see Europe as headed for recession, while pessimists warn that the euro may become the epicenter of another global financial crisis.

How did things go so wrong? The answer you hear all the time is that the euro crisis was caused by fiscal irresponsibility. Turn on your TV and you’re very likely to find some pundit declaring that if America doesn’t slash spending we’ll end up like Greece. Greeeeeece! But the truth is nearly the opposite.

Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending in Europe as a whole. And their efforts to fix matters by demanding ever harsher austerity have played a major role in making the situation worse.

The story so far: In the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, Europe, like America, had a runaway banking system and a rapid buildup of debt. In Europe’s case, however, much of the lending was across borders, as funds from Germany flowed into southern Europe. This lending was perceived as low risk. Hey, the recipients were all on the euro, so what could go wrong?

For the most part, by the way, this lending went to the private sector, not to governments. Only Greece ran large budget deficits during the good years; Spain actually had a surplus on the eve of the crisis.

Then the bubble burst. Private spending in the debtor nations fell sharply. And the question European leaders should have been asking was how to keep those spending cuts from causing a Europe-wide downturn.

Instead, however, they responded to the inevitable, recession-driven rise in deficits by demanding that all governments — not just those of the debtor nations — slash spending and raise taxes. Warnings that this would deepen the slump were waved away. “The idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, then the president of the European Central Bank.

Why? Because “confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery.”

But the confidence fairy was a no-show.

Wait, there’s more. During the years of easy money, wages and prices in southern Europe rose substantially faster than in northern Europe. This divergence now needs to be reversed, either through falling prices in the south or through rising prices in the north. And it matters which: If southern Europe is forced to deflate its way to competitiveness, it will both pay a heavy price in employment and worsen its debt problems. The chances of success would be much greater if the gap were closed via rising prices in the north.

But to close the gap through rising prices in the north, policy makers would have to accept temporarily higher inflation for the euro area as a whole. And they’ve made it clear that they won’t. Last April, in fact, the European Central Bank began raising interest rates, even though it was obvious to most observers that underlying inflation was, if anything, too low.

And it’s probably no coincidence that April was also when the euro crisis entered its new, dire phase. Never mind Greece, whose economy is to Europe roughly as greater Miami is to the United States.

At this point, markets have lost faith in the euro as a whole, driving up interest rates even for countries like Austria and Finland, hardly known for profligacy. And it’s not hard to see why.

The combination of austerity-for-all and a central bank morbidly obsessed with inflation makes it essentially impossible for indebted countries to escape from their debt trap and is, therefore, a recipe for widespread debt defaults, bank runs and general financial collapse.

I hope, for our sake as well as theirs, that the Europeans will change course before it’s too late. But, to be honest, I don’t believe they will. In fact, what’s much more likely is that we will follow them down the path to ruin.

For in America, as in Europe, the economy is being dragged down by troubled debtors — in our case, mainly homeowners. And here, too, we desperately need expansionary fiscal and monetary policies to support the economy as these debtors struggle back to financial health. Yet, as in Europe, public discourse is dominated by deficit scolds and inflation obsessives.

So the next time you hear someone claiming that if we don’t slash spending we’ll turn into Greece, your answer should be that if we do slash spending while the economy is still in a depression, we’ll turn into Europe. In fact, we’re well on our way.

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Tyler Durden over at ZeroHedge is making a lot of sense to me today. Give him (them) a few minutes of your attention. I think it's almost uncanny how we cover the same territory (and I do not know him (them) except through the movie character he/they've adopted to ensure anonymity).

[BREAKING NEWS: It's A Wonderful Life is on NBC now!]

(Everybody into the pool!)

The SDR: The Same Demented Regime

It’s fascinating to watch things play out as we rapidly approach the final rounds in the end game of the great game.  The great game is of course the never-ending global struggle for power and dominance.  The current entrenched powers that be have been in their positions for a very long time and they have no intention of giving up that role.  What the moral and decent percentage of humanity need to understand in no uncertain terms is that these folks and their minions have no conscience.  They could care less how many starve to death, get blown to bits in war or waste their lives away in front of the television set watching Snookie on the Jersey Shore.  In fact, I am certain that they totally get off on these things.

Degrading humanity into an animal-like state clearly appears to be their aphrodisiac.  Notice how the media encourages people to go out and trample each other for a $2 waffle maker on Black Friday.  The scenes of people running into Wal-Mart or Best Buy in the early morning hours when they should be at home with their families having conversation after Thanksgiving dinner reminds me of scenes of cattle being shuffled into a sorting pen.  Actually if you look at this video the cattle appear much more civilized (just go a minute and a half in). 

I think the second step after one sees the insane matrix we are trapped in is to free yourself from it mentally and emotionally.  It is the mental and emotional control that they are really after.  That is the most powerful and effective tool of control so don’t give them the satisfaction.

Try to buy local and support your communities.  It may cost more but in that case just buy less.  You will feel good about it.  More specifically, anything encouraged by the mainstream media, like spending money you don’t have on superfluous items made in China with slave labor and sold to you at a giant tax dodging corporation should be avoided if possible.

With that out of the way, on to the main topic of this paragraph.  The good ol’ SDR.  I will tell you one thing right now.  When TPTB progress to talking about IMF rescues and SDRs we are the end of the line, boys and girls.  This is the LAST play they have in the conventional playbook.  For those that are unaware, this is what the SDR is according to the IMF itself:

The SDR is an international reserve asset, created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement its member countries' official reserves. Its value is based on a basket of four key international currencies, and SDRs can be exchanged for freely usable currencies. With a general SDR allocation that took effect on August 28 and a special allocation on September 9, 2009, the amount of SDRs increased from SDR 21.4 billion to around SDR 204 billion (equivalent to about $328.3 billion, converted using the rate of August 31, 2011).  For an SDR factsheet go here: http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/sdr.htm.

So here is what I think they may try to do.  The guys who really pull the strings, whoever they may be, absolutely understand everything.  They know fiat money that they can create and distribute at will is the source of total power and they will never willingly give that up.  They also have known for a long time that the fiat dollar reserve floating exchange rate system was inevitably going to blow up on itself.  It has become readily apparent since 2008 that we are at that fork in the road, which is why the whole SDR concept has gotten more play.

It seems that the intent of TPTB is to somehow shift the SDR into the world’s reserve asset.  The purpose of this might be to devalue all of the world’s major Western currencies at once while also shifting the blame away from sovereign governments and Central Bankers.

At the very least, it would be a way to achieve a massive stealth devaluation of the U.S. dollar.  For example, if the SDRs were suddenly declared the world’s reserve asset and were therefore needed to conduct global trade in commodities for example, the dollar’s purchasing power would plunge.

We could no longer just create dollars out of thin air and directly buy the world’s resources.  We might need to exchange our national currency into the new reserve asset (SDRs) to then buy things.  So there would be direct and drastic consequences if we continued to great create unlimited dollars, just like all other countries around the world face today.  While this is actually the way it should be, the problem is that this is a bankster plan at the highest levels.

First, they would introduce this SDR and then once faith in national Western currencies’ purchasing power cratered and faith was lost, TPTB would use that as an excuse to eliminate all national currencies and move to a global fiat currency that they, of course, control the distribution of.

Problem, reaction, solution.  This is the central planning bankster’s ultimate wet dream.  Remember this is exactly what they have done with the euro. It is no secret that they knew from the beginning that the euro currency in its current form would blow up.  That was part of the calculation.

Once the crisis hit, they would then consolidate power in a Euro fiscal Union with centralized control of everything.  If they pull that off successfully the next stop will be the global currency, with the bait being the SDR.  This should be quite transparent at this stage if you are paying attention.

Will it Work?

So above I have outlined what I think is the ultimate prize of TPTB.  In this paragraph I want to address whether I think their demented plan for world government and world currency can or will be achieved.  My answer is NO.  First of all, they are having a hard enough time with Europe.  Sure they have installed their little puppet technocrats into positions of power in Greece and Italy but all indications point to the fact that this is taking a lot longer than they want.  Time is NOT on their side.

I say this because every day people become more informed and more upset about the “agenda.”  To some extent they do need people to be asleep sheep in order to pull off this giant power grab and more importantly to keep it in place for an extended period of time.  It is my belief that they must pull off the consolidation of Europe first and then move along to the U.S.

However, let’s say for the sake of argument that they panic and attempt to go straight to the SDR.  What do you think they reaction is going to be when the public is told that all of a sudden there is a new digital global resevre currency called Special Drawing Rights that is created by the IMF and oh by the way a slice of bread costs $20.

All hell will break loose.  Although very few people have an in depth understanding of how the global monetary ponzi scheme system works, an increasingly large number now get that it is rooted in bankster fraud and have had enough.

Good luck trying to issue SDRs and devlauing the dollar.  It’s a non-starter.  That said, the one way they still might try would be to crash the entire markets into oblivion (remember central bankers have TOTAL power to do this at this stage).  That way they would get people begging for central bank printing.  This would then destroy the national currencies and then they would come in with the global currency solution.  Just something to bear in mind . . .

So this is where it gets dangerous.  If I am correct in my logic above they might realize that they have exhausted their conventional options.  This means the playbook shifts to the unconventional.  This probably means war.  This is why the rhetoric is heating up against Iran right now.  If they cannot get their way via conventional means I believe they have no problem whatsoever in wiping out a vast percentage of the world’s population to get their way.

That is why I put up the quotes at the top.  People need to undertand and understand right now that any global conflict will not be for the reasons we are told.  It will be The Powers That Be (TPTB) way of resetting things and shifting blame away from where it belongs; them the control freak central planners.  We are close to the end of the road and the choices for the power structure are now increasingly limited thus they are likely to move to more desperate measures.

Police State/Crony Capitalism Headlines

These clowns know we increasingly know what we are up to therefore they are putting on the clampdown behind the scenes in many ways.

Indefinite Detention:  Gotta love how this old fascist John McCain quotes John Adams in supporting a bill that allows indefinite detention of American citiziens WITHOUT a trial (it passed).  http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/195889-sens-paul-mccain-cla... As I have been writing for years, Congress and the elite see all citizens as potential terrorists for calling them out on their crimes.

Time Magazine:  Ever wonder why Americans seems so braindead?  The media.  Check out the cover story by region.  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601111205,00.html 

Hank Paulson:  Another crony capitalist crook that robbed Americans continues to be a free man.  Why?  He worked at Goldman Sachs of course.  Check out how he passed along inside info to his fellow Goldman crony capitalist friends.  The game is totally rigged.  http://news.businessweek.com/article.asp?documentKey=1376-LVDZC507SXKX01...

Do you own an Android?:  I am sure this makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/30/security-researcher-android-softwa...

Notary who blew whistle on foreclosure fraud found dead:  Hmmmm…  http://www.mynews3.com/content/news/local/story/Notary-who-blew-whistle-...

And to end on a positive note for something good people can still promote and volunteer their services in order to really change this world (and organize your own recovery measures if one of the above belongs to you) . . . from Down with Tyranny:

I was on the phone with some friends back East Monday and we were talking about working on a primary campaign against corrupt ConservaDem Joseph Crowley of Queens. Crowley is a Rahm-like bag man for the New Dems whose modus operandi is basically to go to corporate lobbyists and agree to get progressive legislation buried or watered down in return for the pay-offs that have led to inside-the-caucus political power for himself. I would describe him as a mini-Steny Hoyer without the charm. His lifetime ProgressivePunch crucial vote score is a mediocre 83.53 but it's his behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing that makes him such an odious character.

In 1999 he was one of the movers and shakers on the Democratic side who backed ending Glass-Steagall for Wall Street. And, although that was one of the primary reasons for the collapse of the financial system and the ensuing catastrophe for the economy, Crowley hasn't blinked. The Finance Industry has rewarded him handsomely for selling out his Queens constituents in Woodside, Jackson Heights, East Elmhurst and College Point and the ones who live in neighborhoods in the East Bronx like Throggs Neck, Morris Park, Co-op City and Pelham Parkway, people who would never think of voting for a Republican - but who, in effect -  get much of the same greed-and-selfishness agenda.

Since he sold out his constituents in the debate over Glass-Steagall, the Finance Industry has funneled a hefty $3,229,109 directly into his political career in the form of legalistic bribes. He's used that money to build up his own political power inside the Democratic Party, exactly what Wall Street wanted him to do with it.

But one of the guys on the call remembered a particularly horrible vote by Crowley - Bush's Bankruptcy Act, S 256. It passed the House on April 14, 2005, 302-126. Most Democrats voted against it and every single Republican voted for it. But 73 Democrats, mostly the worst Blue Dogs and corporate whores, voted with the Republicans to give it that glowing "bipartisan" patina.

Joseph Crowley, a Member of the House Ways and Means Committee, where he regularly undermines the interests of the 99%, is one of the Democrats who was not subsequently defeated for reelection after crossing the aisle that day to vote with the GOP, with Wall Street and with the 1% against American working families. Instead he managed to worm his way into the House Leadership and is now the Democrats' Chief Deputy Whip and a Vice-Chairman of the DCCC.

The bill, whose purpose was to make it more difficult for consumers to file bankruptcy, was originated in the Senate and the lead sponsor was deranged Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley. It was co-sponsored by a gaggle of Republican corporate whores like Jim DeMint, Orrin Hatch, Jeff Sessions and David Vitter (who, during the debate, was talking on his cell phone with a high priced call girl about what color diapers he would be wearing that night) as well as by two of the sleaziest corporate Dems in the upper chamber, Ben Nelson and Tom Carper. The banksters spent millions in lobbying and bribes (campaign "contributions") and it was widely considered their greatest victory against the American people at the time.

Yes, douche bags play guitar too

Sleazy legislators like Crowley who supported it parroted the banksters' lies that passage would reduce losses to credit card companies, who would then pass on the savings in the form of lower interest rates. The first half was true; credit card company losses decreased. But the rates charged to customers not only didn't decrease, they increased while the insatiably greedy credit card company profits went through the roof, a cut of which was given to the corrupt Members of Congress (like Crowley).

Pelosi led the progressives against the bill. Hoyer led the conservative and corrupt Democrats in favor. There were no Democratic tribunes for working families who voted for the bill - but most of the dreck in the Democratic caucus, like Hoyer and Crowley, did.

The other day I used this bill as an example of why North Carolinians who have to decide between redistricted David Price (who voted with the Republicans against working families) and Brad Miller (who, as always, voted to protect working families and against this bill, should choose Miller. Here are some of the noteworthy Democrats who crossed the aisle that fateful April day:

Melissa Bean (IL), the Chamber of Commerce's favorite Democrat, defeated for reelection 

Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), George Bush's favorite Democrat, retiring next year 

Leonard Boswell (Blue Dog-IA), with minimal support from the base, he's likely to be defeated in 2012 

Allen Boyd (Blue Dog-FL), defeated for reelection 

Dennis Cardoza (Blue Dog-CA), retiring next year 

Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN) 

Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA) 

Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX) 

Harold Ford, Jr (Blue Dog-TN), defeated in a Senate run, now a bank lobbyist 

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (Blue Dog-SD), defeated for reelection 

Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)

Steve Israel ("ex"-Blue Dog-NY), current DCCC chair, recruiting conservative candidates just like himself 

William Jefferson (LA), sentenced to 13 years in prison for bribery 

Ron Kind (WI), New Dem slime, almost exact replica of Crowley 

Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT) 

Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC) 

Bob Menendez (NJ) 

Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN) 

Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR), retiring next year

Crowley is also on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and he was one of the 81 Democrats who voted to authorize Bush to attack Iraq.

126 Democrats (and 6 Republicans) voted against the unprovoked aggression, which turned out to be one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blinders in American history - costly for the taxpayers, but very profitable for the arms industry, which, of course, has rewarded Crowley very nicely. With their biggest bucks reserved for Republicans, arms dealers have bestowed a tidy $82,500 on Crowley for his support of their business interests.

Crowley has never had a serious opponent for reelection and, in fact, he was selected congressman in a very sleazy backroom deal with his predecessor, Tom Manton, who announced his retirement after the filing deadline and then, as head of the Queens Democratic Party, handed Crowley, a former staffer and a crony, the Democratic nomination.

Crowley doesn't live in Queens; he lives in Virginia with his family. He badly needs a primary from someone who does live in Queens (or the Bronx) and who is more than just a Democrat in name.

Staving off Pottersville for another little while.

Did Congress Have A Clue? Let's Make FED Accountable! (Reich, Baker and Kucinich On Crooks Galore at U.S. Treasury)

I just love the way some people express themselves in addition to really agreeing with their premises. This essay embraces the ideals and solutions (calculated logically from those ideals) shared by Robert Reich, Dean Baker and Dennis Kucinich concerning the financial decisions that the people of the U.S. must make (and soon). These are men with a depth of understanding and empathy with those who have been left by the wayside by the political philosophy that has run this country into the ground for the last 30 years. They understand that the fraudulent much-touted issue of the huge deficit needing immediate correction is the agenda of the 1%. They are also such decent men that they never shout "Bullshit!" at the asses who spout it constantly.

The Rebirth of Social Darwinism

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want? I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

It was an era when the nation was mesmerized by the doctrine of free enterprise, but few Americans actually enjoyed much freedom. Robber barons like the financier Jay Gould, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, controlled much of American industry; the gap between rich and poor had turned into a chasm; urban slums festered; women couldn’t vote and black Americans were subject to Jim Crow; and the lackeys of rich literally deposited sacks of money on desks of pliant legislators.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin to America and twisted him into a theory to fit the times.

Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner’s writings but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the 19^th century.

To Sumner and his followers, life was a competitive struggle in which only the fittest could survive – and through this struggle societies became stronger over time. A correlate of this principle was that government should do little or nothing to help those in need because that would interfere with natural selection.

Listen to today’s Republican debates and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. “Civilization has a simple choice,” Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It’s either “liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest,” or “not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.”

Sound familiar?

Newt Gingrich not only echoes Sumner’s thoughts but mimics Sumner’s reputed arrogance. Gingrich says we must reward “entrepreneurs” (by which he means anyone who has made a pile of money) and warns us not to “coddle” people in need. He opposes extending unemployment insurance because, he says,  ”I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing.”

Sumner, likewise, warned against handouts to people he termed “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Mitt Romney doesn’t want the government to do much of anything about unemployment. And he’s dead set against raising taxes on millionaires, relying on the standard Republican rationale millionaires create jobs.

Here’s Sumner, more than a century ago: “Millionaires are the product of natural selection, acting on the whole body of men to pick out those who can meet the requirement of certain work to be done… It is because they are thus selected that wealth aggregates under their hands – both their own and that intrusted to them … They may fairly be regarded as the naturally selected agents of society.” Although they live in luxury, “the bargain is a good one for society.”

Other Republican hopefuls also fit Sumner’s mold. Ron Paul, who favors repeal of Obama’s healthcare plan, was asked at a Republican debate in September what medical response he’d recommend if a young man who had decided not to buy health insurance were to go into a coma. Paul’s response: “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks.” The Republican crowd cheered.

In other words, if the young man died for lack of health insurance, he was responsible. Survival of the fittest.

Social Darwinism offered a moral justification for the wild inequities and social cruelties of the late nineteenth century. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim the fortune he accumulated through his giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest.” It was, he insisted “the working out of a law of nature and of God.”

Social Darwinism also undermined all efforts at the time to build a nation of broadly-based prosperity and rescue our democracy from the tight grip of a very few at the top. It was used by the privileged and powerful to convince everyone else that government shouldn’t do much of anything.

Not until the twentieth century did America reject Social Darwinism. We created the large middle class that became the core of our economy and democracy. We built safety nets to catch Americans who fell downward through no fault of their own. We designed regulations to protect against the inevitable excesses of free-market greed. We taxed the rich and invested in public goods – public schools, public universities, public transportation, public parks, public health – that made us all better off.

In short, we rejected the notion that each of us is on his or her own in a competitive contest for survival.

But make no mistake: If one of the current crop of Republican hopefuls becomes president, and if regressive Republicans take over the House or Senate, or both, Social Darwinism is back.

Time to Retake Politics from the One Percent in Both Political Parties

Dean Baker

The country is still celebrating the inability of the supercommittee to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it is important to move on from this victory to retake control of the political debate from the 1 percent.

As it stands, the 1 percent are insisting that the country genuflect over the non-problem of the budget deficit, at a time when tens of millions of workers are unemployed or underemployed, millions of people are facing the loss of their homes and tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with little other than their Social Security to support them.

The deficit is the agenda of the 1 percent. There is no reason that the rest of us should be concerned about budget deficits when the rest of the country is struggling with the economic disaster created by the greed and incompetence of the 1 percent.

This is not a statement of morality, it is a statement based on economic reality. Budget deficits can be a problem when an economy is near full employment and the deficit can be pulling resources away from private investment, thereby slowing growth. However it is not a problem with large numbers of unemployed workers and vast amounts of excess capacity.

This is what the financial markets are telling us every day as interest rates on long-term government bonds hover near 2.0 percent. If deficits were really crimping the economy we would be seeing interest rates of 6 or 7 percent, or even higher.

The deficit hawks do not have an economic case to support their argument, just money and influence.

In the longer term the deficit hawks can point to projections of outsized deficits, which they invariably attribute to Social Security and Medicare. The first part of this story is completely untrue.

Under the law, Social Security is financed from its designated tax. It therefore cannot contribute to the deficit unless Congress changes the law. (The payroll tax credit in 2011, which was replaced with general revenue, is an exception to this rule.)

According to the most recent projections from the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security benefits will be fully funded through the year 2038. After that date, if Congress does nothing to increase revenue, then the program would pay a bit more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits. (This would still be about 10 percent more than current retirees receive since benefits are projected to rise by approximately 1 percent a year.)

The real story of the soaring long-term deficits is exploding Medicare costs, which are in turn driven by our broken health care system.  We already pay more than twice as much per person for our health care as the average for other wealthy countries, with little to show in the way of outcomes. This gap is projected to continue to grow in the years ahead.

To anyone who looks at the facts, the obvious answer to our deficit problem is fixing the health care system. This is difficult to do given the enormous political power of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, highly paid medical specialists and the other members of the 1 percent who profit from the waste in the system as it exists now.

If we can’t immediately change the system then why not take advantage of the gains from trade? If we change rules to make it possible for Medicare beneficiaries to buy into the health care systems in other countries or make it easier for patients to have medical procedures done at far lower cost elsewhere, it should be an enormous win-win offering gains that could be in the trillions of dollars.

And what free-market fundamentalist can argue against the principle of giving people a choice?

In fact, conservatives and self-described free traders run screaming from the idea of opening medical care to trade. They want trade that will lower the wages of auto workers and textile workers by putting them in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world; they hate trade when it threatens to reduce the income of the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry and others in the 1 percent.

It’s time to expose the lies for what they are. The 1 percent has rigged the deck over the last three decades to accomplish the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. These are not people who care about budget deficits or free trade or free markets. They care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.

They have been fighting this class war for 30 years. It is long past time that the rest of us started fighting back.

Kucinich: Federal Reserve Has Captured Control of our Government

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for the U.S. Federal Reserve to be reformed after Bloomberg reported the central bank secretly loaned nearly $8 trillion to financial institutions from 2007 to 2009.

Tens of thousands of documents obtained by Bloomberg under the Freedom of Information Act showed that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion in profits thanks to the low-interest loans. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley accounted for $4.8 billion of that total.

“Remember the great debate we had here over the 700 billion in TARP funds?” he said on the House floor Tuesday. “There was no debate over the 7.7 trillion the Fed gave the banks.”

“Did Congress have a clue?” he continued. “There is another game going on way over our heads, and our constituents are struggling while the banks with the help of the Feds have captured control of our government.”

“Now the rating services are threatening us, if we don’t come up with a deal they’ll downgrade U.S. debt. Could the threat to our national sovereignty be any clearer?”

Kucinich has proposed legislation, called the National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, that would incorporate the Federal Reserve within the United States Treasury and thereby make it accountable to Congress.

Watch video below:

11 - 29 - 2011

SAIC Banks Billions from the Top Secret America, Millions to Put DHS in an Asylum

How many examples of greed and corruption must you see before you act?

The Terrorism Industrial Complex a.k.a. "Top Secret America" may sound like tin foil hat conspiracy to some, but many of you will remember it as the name of an extensive investigation by the Washington Post, whose editors' intro says: "[This] is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks... When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it."

Short of storming the Beltway, the American people may never learn just how much of their money has been pillaged, plundered and simply wasted in the name of "national security" since 9/11, but our research suggests it could easily be an amount that exceeds not only the billions in bailout bucks given to the Banksters since 2008 but the trillions paid to the War Profiteers since 2001. In fact, just as the money being squandered on militarily useless F-22 and F-35 fighter jets will probably exceed our $1.3 trillion federal deficit (see our previous reports), the often untraceable trillions poured into the post-9/11 "too big to fail", "war on terrorism", "homeland security" and "black ops" troughs by our corporate-owned politicians and well-lobbied bureaucrats might easily approximate our $15 trillion national debt.

One of the hundreds of "security contractors" feeding at those troughs is SAIC - formerly Science Applications International Corporation. Headquartered in McLean VA, SAIC is "a Fortune 500 scientific, engineering, and technology applications company working in national security, energy and the environment, critical infrastructure, and health". The company's 46,000+ employees serve the Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal government agencies. SAIC had revenue of $11.1 billion for its fiscal year 2010.

Since 1995 SAIC has contributed over $3.8 million to political campaigns, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, with Barack Obama and John McCain being the top recipients. That amount is eclipsed by the more than $24 million they've invested in lobbying since 1997. And over that same period, SAIC's penalties for federal contractor misconduct have far exceeded their pay-to-play payola: SAIC paid a $24.9 million settlement for rigging bids on General Services Administration (GSA) contracts, $5 million to the Air Force for false claims and defective pricing, and all told over $32 million for a dozen different instances of government fraud, ethics and other violations. Of course, all their penalties and payola combined is chump change compared to the more than $63 billion in defense, security and other federal contracts SAIC has bagged over the past ten years.

Apparently its all forgive and forget at the GSA, because just last week they awarded SAIC a $5 billion telecom systems contract - forgiving their history of bid-rigging, and forgetting that the City of New York recently demanded a $600 million refund on the botched and corruption-riddled "CityTime" system that SAIC installed for them.

SAIC will also be getting at least a $90 million bite out of the $4 billion or so that's been budgeted to relocate the Department of Homeland Security to what was once St. Elizabeths Hospital, an insane asylum. Conceived in the Mad Hatter days of Bush-Cheney, the megabucks DHS relocation boondoggle is yet another fiscal insanity that has continued unaffected by any imagined wave of "Change" in 2008. SAIC's piece is to implement a "secure and scalable" IT infrastructure.

. . . False flag op or not, there can be no debate that since 11 September 2001 trillions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to beat the boogeymen, real or contrived. Has it been worth it? Do you think Americans are "safer" today than we were ten years ago? If so, has any security gained been worth the cost, and the personal privacy and freedoms lost?

 

Please read it all if you can stomach it.

Of course, you're paying for that stomach already.

There is a bit of good news however. Seems that young people are discovering the actual world of work: doing well by doing good.

Amid fears of high youth unemployment creating a “lost generation,” there is suddenly a bright spot: Apparently, fewer young people are going to work in the industry that destroyed our economy.

That’s the word from the New York Times, which reports that since 2008, “the number of investment bank and brokerage firm employees between the ages 20 and 34 fell by 25 percent,” as banks have laid off young people and slowed college recruiting.

For young Wall Streeters, this is a bummer. But for society as a whole, it’s cause for celebration because it may finally allow America to counter the destructive Gordon Gekko-ization of youth culture.

Recall that in recent years, up to a third of kids at elite universities have entered finance-related jobs. Such a mass shift in career preferences is, to put it mildly, alarming. A country whose best and brightest begin avoiding occupations that add value to society (doctors, engineers, etc.) in favor of vapid get-rich-quick gigs is a country that has stopped investing in itself and started mortgaging its future.

In light of that, Wall Street’s youth layoffs raise a bigger question: Why have so many more kids been pursuing careers in finance?

Part of it is greed, as a 2010 Higher Education Research Institute report found a record-high three-quarters of freshmen said being “very well-off financially” was their top objective. Not surprisingly, many graduate with speculation and usury in their plans.

Such a mind-set, though, hasn’t emerged in a vacuum — it tracks two larger greed-driven trends.

The first is a change in the American Dream from a middle-class aspiration to an “MTV Cribs”-style fantasy. In that shift, we began portraying Wall Street fat cats as idols — the Great Men to be worshiped in our media and consulted by presidents. Taking cues from the larger culture, kids have naturally tried to follow in the idols’ footsteps.

Simultaneously, the American economy changed from producing tangible assets to now more often generating paper profits for bankers. The numbers, as recounted from economist Simon Johnson, tell that tale: “From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits … last decade, it reached 41 percent.”

This metamorphosis was no force of nature — it was the result of bank-owned politicians deregulating and subsidizing the finance industry, turning it into a monster swallowing an outsize share of national wealth. That, in turn, prompted an employment shift, which included young people.

“When banks get 25 percent to 30 percent on credit cards, and 500 or more percent on payday loans, capital flees from honest pursuits, like auto manufacturing,” author Thomas Geoghegan wrote in Harper’s magazine. “We set up the incentives to keep our best and brightest out of Detroit … (They) went off to work at AIG.”

Those incentives highlight the final part of the youth story: need.

Today, the average undergraduate matriculates with $25,000 in student debt. That burden compels kids to base career moves on where they can get the richest the quickest so as to pay off their loans. In an economy that has privileged finance, that often means heading to Wall Street.

Now, though, that career path may be closed — and even if it’s only temporarily closed, the reprieve is significant.

Read the entire articles!

Seriously, Folks, It Turns Out that Linda Katehi, Greek Chancellor of UC-Davis Spent Her Student Days Just Like Dumbya Did - Not Being Involved Unless Negatively

Is democratic governance becoming discredited?

A fair reading of what is ongoing now may indicate that that is a very valid question. And one being asked every day more and more as we see the results of government owned by the monied interests and not the people actually paying for their privileges.

LPS Foreclosure Fraud Whistleblower Found Dead (Updated) - 11/29/2011

New York Fed Brownshirt Jason Barker Urges Police to Crack Skulls of #OWS - 11/29/2011

Does Anybody Who Gets It Believe Central Banks Did All That Much Yesterday? - 12/01/2011 - Yves Smith

Former Award Winning Chase Banker Describes Predatory Mortgage Lending Practices - 12/01/2011 - Yves Smith 

(H/T Skippy)


Turns out that University of California - Davis Chancellor Katehi and our own much-venerated G. Dumbya Bush have a whole lot of educational background in common, although perhaps she studied a mite more than he did.

Perhaps, but then who trusts these Ivy Leaguers anymore to have studied at all?

Thanks to the EU, bankers, and UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi, university freedom for Greece’s students has taken a huge, dark step backwards.

Here you can read a translation of the report co-authored by UC Davis’ Linda Katehi – the report which brought about the end of Greece’s “university asylum” law.

What’s particularly disturbing is that Linda Katehi was the only Greek on that commission. Presumably that would give her a certain amount of extra sway – both because of her inside knowledge, and because of her moral authority among the other non-Greek committee members. And yet, Linda Katehi signed off on a report that provided the rationale for repealing Greece’s long-standing “university asylum” law. She basically helped undo the very heart and soul of Greece’s pro-democracy uprising against the junta.

I mean, really, how much more do you need to do to prove your cred to the powers-that-be who give out all the gold? Bush and Paulson only turned the rest of the Treasury over to the Fed before they left office. She's making them look like pikers. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism tells the tale.

How UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi Brought Oppression Back To Greece’s Universities

11/27/2011

Yves here. Reader "sidelarge" raised the issue yesterday in comments, of UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi’s role in abolition of university asylum in Greece. The story is even uglier than the link he provided suggests.
 
By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The eXiled

A friend of mine sent me this link claiming that UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, whose crackdown on peaceful university students shocked America, played a role in allowing Greece security forces to raid university campuses for the first time since the junta was overthrown in 1974. (H/T: Crooked Timber)

I've checked this out with our friend in Athens, reporter Kostas Kallergis (who runs the local blog “When The Crisis Hits The Fan”), and he confirmed it – Linda Katehi really is the worst of all possible chancellors imaginable, the worst for us, and the worst for her native Greece.

First, some background: Last week, The eXiled published two pieces on Greece’s doomed struggle against global financial institutions — an article on how the EU and Western bankers essentially overthrew the nearly-uppity government of prime minister George Papandreou, and replaced it with a banker-friendly “technocratic” government that includes real-life, no-bullshit neo-Nazis and fascists from the LAOS party, fascists with a banker-friendly fetish for imposing austerity measures.

One of those fascists, Makis “Hammer” Voridis, spent his early 20s “hammering” non-fascist students for sport. Voridis was booted out of Athens University law school after ax-bashing fellow law students who didn’t share his fascist ideology. Today, Makis Voridis is the Minister for Infrastructure in the “technocratic” government.

Imagine Lt. John Pike in leather and an 80s hairdo, carrying a homemade ax rather than a pepper spray weapon, and you have Makis “Hammer” Voridis.
We also published a powerful and necessary history primer by Greek journalist Kostas Kallergis on the almost-holy significance of the date November 17 in contemporary Greek history.

On that day in 1973, pro-democracy students at the Athens Polytechnic university were crushed by tanks and soldiers sent in by the ruling junta dictatorship, which collapsed less than a year later, returning democracy to Greece. With CIA backing, the generals in the junta overthrew Greece’s democracy in 1967, jailed and tortured suspected leftists (meaning students and union leaders), and even went the extra-weird-fascist mile by banning the Beatles, mini-skirts, long hair, along with Mark Twain and Sophocles.

The student rebellion at the Polytechnic, and its martyrdom, became the symbol for Greeks of their fight against fascism and tyranny, something like the briefcase man at Tiananmen Square, or the slaughtered rebels of the Boston Tea Party.

That is why, as soon as the junta was overthrown and democracy restored in 1974, Greece immediately banned the presence of army, police or state security forces on university campuses.

This so-called “university asylum” law turned Greece’s university campuses into cop-free zones of “political asylum,” where no one could interfere in the students’ rights to dissent against the government.

Athens Polytechnic uprising against junta: Try to find Linda Katehi in this photo

Today, thanks in part to UC Davis chancellor “Chemical” Linda Katehi, Greek university campuses are no longer protected from state security forces. She helped undo her native country’s “university asylum” laws just in time for the latest austerity measures to kick in. Incredibly, Katehi attacked university campus freedom despite the fact that she was once a student at the very center of Greece’s anti-junta, pro-democracy rebellion – although what she was doing there, if anything at all, no one really knows.

Here’s the sordid back-story: Linda Katehi was born in Athens in 1954 and got her undergraduate degree at the famous Athens Polytechnic. She just happened to be the right age to be a student at the Polytechnic university on the very day, November 17, 1973, when the junta sent in tanks and soldiers to crush her fellow pro-democracy students. It was only after democracy was restored in 1974–and Greek university campuses were turned into police-free “asylum zones” – that Linda Katehi eventually moved to the USA, earning her PhD at UCLA.

Earlier this year, Linda Katehi served on an “International Committee On Higher Education In Greece,” along with a handful of American, European and Asian academics. The ostensible goal was to “reform” Greece’s university system. The real problem, from the real powers behind the scenes (banksters and the EU), was how to get Greece under control as the austerity-screws tightened.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that squeezing more money from Greece’s beleaguered citizens would mean clamping down on Greece’s democracy and doing something about those pesky Greek university students. And that meant taking away the universities’ “amnesty” protection, in place for nearly four decades, so that no one, nowhere, would be safe from police truncheons, gas, or bullets.

Thanks to the EU, bankers, and UC Davis chancellor Linda Katehi, university freedom for Greece’s students has taken a huge, dark step backwards.
Here you can read a translation of the report co-authored by UC Davis’ Linda Katehi – the report which brought about the end of Greece’s “university asylum” law.

What’s particularly disturbing is that Linda Katehi was the only Greek on that commission. Presumably that would give her a certain amount of extra sway–both because of her inside knowledge, and because of her moral authority among the other non-Greek committee members. And yet, Linda Katehi signed off on a report that provided the rationale for repealing Greece’s long-standing “university asylum” law. She basically helped undo the very heart and soul of Greece’s pro-democracy uprising against the junta.

And perfect timing too, now that one of Greece’s most notorious pro-junta fascists is a member of the new austerity government.

 

Popular Greek cyber-graphic: “Bread. Education. Freedom*”

One more thing: Kallergis did a search in the Greek language of Linda Katehi’s interviews to see what she had to say about her experience at the Polytechnic in 1973, what she remembered of it, and how it affected her. What he found was troubling to say the least.

The interview in Greek with Linda Katehi can be found here at this American Greek site. Our man in Athens, Kostas Kallergis, picked out two specific questions about November 17, 1973, and Linda Katehi’s answers–if you can call these answers. Here are the questions and answers, with Kallergis’ translations and comments, which he provided to The eXiled:

Σπουδάσατε σε περίοδο έντονης πόλωσης στην πολιτική στην Ελλάδα και πολλοί συμφοιτητές σας δεν έμειναν αδρανείς. Εσείς αναμειχθήκατε στα πολιτικά πράγματα;
-Φυσικά, όπως όλοι άλλωστε. Πως να σε αφήσουν αδιάφορο όλες αυτές οι αναταραχές;

Q: “You studied during a very politically polarized period in Greece and many of your fellow students did not stay still/dormant. Did you get involved in the political developments?”
Linda Katehi: “Of course, as everybody else. How could that upheavel leave you indifferent?”

Kallergis comments: “Katehi is offered an opportunity to give an account of her political activities of that time, and yet she only replies with a vague, very general answer. It seems very odd.”

Second question:
Δραστηριοποιείστε πολιτικά;
-Ποτέ δεν έχω αναμειχθεί στα πολιτικά.

Q: Are you involved in politics now?
Linda Katehi: I have never been involved in politics.

Kallergis comments: “I guess you can see the contradiction… they are both from the same single interview.”

She’s the right goon for the right time: As Yasha Levine reported two years ago, UC students have been battling against rapacious austerity measures jacking up their fees in order to pay back Wall Street bankers who bet and lost UC pension funds. That’s a big reason why UC students are fed up and Going Occupy. And “Chemical” Katehi’s answer is the sort of answer banksters like hearing: Stomp out dissent and squeeze every last drop of juice out of them that you can.

You always expect your monsters to look like monsters and talk like monsters; but the best, most effective vehicles for evil are always these anti-matter humans, these hollow voids, the “nothing person” that the great Russian writer Yuri Trifonov described so mercilessly and perfectly in House on the Embankment.

For more on “Chemical” Linda Katehi, watch this stunning silent protest by UC Davis students (H/T Lee Fang):



Also, watch Linda Katehi telling ABC’s Good Morning America that she refuses to resign, claiming, “The university needs me.”



Indeed, just like Greece. How can anyone live without you people.

Naked Capitalism