Friday, August 31, 2007

The True Economic Picture

The True Economic Picture

“Most workers have relatively little to show in terms of real wage and income gains over this recovery. The real wage of the typical male worker, for example, is up only 1% since 2000 and not at all since 2003. Even a broader measure like real average compensation has risen less than 1% per year and has barely budged since 2003. As of 2006, the median income of working-age families (those headed by someone less than 65) was down -4.2% in real terms over the cycle, a loss of -$2,375 (2006 dollars). Poverty, at 12.3%, remains 1.0 percentage point above its 2000 trough. Though productivity growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, this business cycle has been reasonably rich in terms of efficiency gains, and these gains have generated considerable wealth. The problem is, of course, the narrow extent to which the gains have been shared. Inequality data bear this out, showing the classic "staircase" pattern to wage growth, as higher-wage workers saw greater gains.” Economy's Gains Fail to Reach Most Workers' Paychecks by Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp195

A new report from the Economic Policy Institute to be released in the next few days shows that despite happy talk and fudged numbers of the Bu$h administration, real wages for working folks have flat-lined and despite record profits on the ownership side, workers are faring very poorly. Production efficiencies have increased, productivity is up as are profits but working class folks’ pay checks have not kept pace. “As of Labor Day 2007, the economic recovery that began in 2001 is six years old, and the economy has consistently expanded over this period. Productivity growth, though slower of late, has been particularly strong, and after a long, slow start, employment has been consistently growing, albeit slower than past recoveries.
But most American workers have not shared in the growth and prosperity they have been helping to create. Surely, one measure of the success of an economic growth period is how much of that growth finds its way into workers' paychecks. In a period of sharply rising inequality, however, this is no ‘slam dunk.’ In fact, as much of the data in this brief reveal, many workers' wages have been stagnant for a number of years, after adjusting for inflation, particularly those at the middle and lower end of the pay scale. For example, while productivity is up nearly 20% since 2000, the real median hourly wage is up 3% overall and 1% for men, with none of this growth occurring over the three-and-a-half years since 2003. At the top of the wage scale—at the 95th percentile—real wages are up 9%.” http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp195.
For the past several years the US has had the dubious distinction of experiencing a “jobless recovery”. Employment has not kept pace with production or profits. “Until the end of 2003, the United States had been experiencing a ‘jobless’ recovery, with employment stagnating at levels well below those in 2000. A widespread perception has arisen that a major culprit behind the dearth of jobs was the growing practice of U.S. firms to relocate part of their domestic operations to lower-wage countries abroad. ‘Offshoring’ presumably caused a reduction in U.S. output and a corresponding loss of jobs. In fact, after the 2001 recession, U.S. domestic production rose substantially, but output per worker—productivity—jumped so sharply that instead of rising, employment declined. That is the real cause of the jobless recovery. Had GDP growth been accompanied by a continuation of earlier rates of productivity growth, there would have been some 2 million more private sector jobs than there were at the end of 2003.” Offshoring, Import Competition, and the Jobless Recovery by Charles L. Schultze http://www.brookings.edu/comm/policybriefs/pb136.htm
The employment picture has been erratic and to make matters worse, wages and the standard of living for most working US residents has declined in the face of record private sector profits for the owners, corporations and CEOs. But the Bu$h administration does its best to camouflage this reality and keep it from Joe and Jane Sixpack. “With the real wages and salaries of American civilian workers lower than 5 years ago, with their debts at all time highs, with the prices of their main asset--their homes--under pressure from overbuilding and fraudulent finance, and with scant opportunities to rise for the children they struggled to educate, Americans face a dim future. Indeed, their plight is worse than the official statistics indicate. During the Clinton administration, the Boskin Commission rigged the inflation measures in order to hold down indexed Social Security payments to retirees. Another deceit is the measure called ‘core inflation.’ This measure of inflation excludes food and energy, two large components of the average family’s budget. Wall Street and corporations and, therefore, the media emphasize core inflation, because it holds down cost of living increases and interest rates. In the second quarter of this year, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a more complete measure of inflation, increased at an annual rate of 5.2 per cent compared to 2.3 per cent for core inflation. An examination of how inflation is measured quickly reveals the games played to deceive the American people. Housing prices are not in the index. Instead, the rental rate of housing is used as a proxy for housing prices. More games are played with the goods and services whose prices comprise the weighted market basket used to estimate inflation. If beef prices rise, for example, the index shifts toward lower priced chicken. Inflation is thus held down by substituting lower priced products for those whose prices are rising faster. As the weights of the goods in the basket change, the inflation measure does not reflect a constant pattern of expenditures. Some economists compare the substitution used to minimize the measured rate of inflation to substituting sweaters for fuel oil.” The Return of the Robber Barons By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts08022007.html
But you don’t need me to tell you this. A stroll into any supermarket or your stop at any gas station will reveal just how bad things really are. The cost of living for us is going up all the time. People call it “inflation” thinking the rising cost of living is inflation when inflation is really an increase in the amount of money in circulation. The US central bank (The Federal reserve System, a group of privately owned banks) sets the money, credit and interest policies we live by; not the US Congress or US Treasury. So the economic mess we find ourselves in now is the result of Fed (and their buddies at the private equity and investment banks) policies. “The crisis is entirely the work of Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, whose “cheap money” policy caused a speculative frenzy in the real estate market which sent home prices through the stratosphere. In fact, the bubble originated in 2001 when Greenspan lowered interest rates to a meager 1% and ignited a refinancing boom as well as a sudden up-tick in home sales. Now, after 17 straight interest rate increases, the bubble is quickly losing steam and the effects are being felt from sea to shining sea. Rest assured, the sudden downturn in the housing market is just the first gust from an impending tornado. By the end of 2007, America’s match-stick economy will look like the rubble strewn landscape of New Orleans 9th Ward. Greenspan has been the biggest player in this pre-Depression operetta. He kept the printing presses whirring along at full-tilt while the banks and mortgage lenders devised every scam imaginable to put greenbacks into the hands unqualified borrowers. ARMs, ‘interest-only’ or ‘no down payment’ loans etc. were all part of the creative financing boondoggle which the kept the economy sputtering along after the ‘dot.com’ crackup in 2000. It worked like a charm, too. Aided by the Fed’s cheap money policy, the housing market sizzled. In just 6 years the total value of real estate jumped from $11 trillion to $21 trillion! (“From 2001 through 2005, outstanding mortgage debt rose 68% from $5293 billion to $8888 billion”) It’s the biggest expansion of debt in history and it was all engineered by seductively low interest rates. Greenspan executed the swindle with the adroitness of a carnival huckster; luring millions of buyers to the real estate gold rush. Now, many of those same buyers are stuck with enormous loans that are about to reset at drastically higher rates while their homes have already depreciated 10% to 20% in value. This phenomenon of being shackled to a ‘negative equity mortgage’ is what economist Michael Hudson calls the ‘New Road to Serfdom’; paying off a mortgage that is significantly larger than the current value of the house. The sheer magnitude of the problem is staggering.” The Fed’s role in the Housing Crash of ‘07 By Mike Whitney http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article16104.htm
All this was done purposefully. Why, you ask? Well this is how the game is rigged and they have done this many times over the years in the past. This is ongoing class warfare. Race is not a major factor, it is working class white folks will take the brunt of this. This time the ruling oligarchy wants to cripple the working class and reduce the vast majority of us to wage peons, debt slaves and surfs. “Now the real estate bubble has burst: property owners can't sell their homes or refinance them. They can't pay their mortgages so the banks foreclose and the house is sold on the courthouse steps. Within days they receive an eviction notice and they're out on the street. Since 2006, vacant dwellings have increased by more than 40% for existing homes and more than 20% for new homes. The personal tragedy these people face is overwhelming and heartbreaking. Since private banking interests created the scam of the ‘Federal’ Reserve System in 1913, seizing control of American financial powers, their ability to lend money at usurious interest rates has meant that they feed on American debtors. Until recently, they've been content to reap huge profits through ordinary money-lending means--as outlined below: But reaping huge profits through interest wasn't enough for them; they decided they'd not only make money on interest but loot workers of their hard-earned savings and income--and then financially destroy them: foreclose and keep the property for sale to another sucker.” Economic Cannibalism http://www.new-enlightenment.com/econ_crash.htm
This is the real deal. Read material from Websites like: http://www.epinet.org/ , http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/ http://www.theinternationalforecaster.com/ and http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=home . Once you start reading, don’t panic or get discouraged. Keep your head and learn as much as you can, you will need this knowledge to survive the rough times heading our way. View current events from this perspective and don’t go for the okey-doke. Think for yourself and prepare for the worse case scenario, it going to be a bumpy ride. The silver lining in all this is, it might (and the operative word here is might) force us to get our collective act together so we survive the coming collapse of the US economic and political system.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The Ruling Elites Attack on Organized labor Is Class Warfare

The Ruling Elites Attack on Organized Labor, Is Class Warfare

As AmeriKKKans pause to celebrate Labor Day the last holiday of the Summer before returning to work (those who jobs), school and a sense of regimen, the ruling elites are cranking up their ongoing attacks on organized labor and escalating class warfare in AmeriKKKa. Over the last twenty-five years, corporatist elites and their politician sock puppets really took the offensive undermining the influence of organized labor. A prime example among many is when Reagan decertified the Professional Air Traffic Controllers union (PATCO) and dared organized labor to support the Air Traffic Controllers. “AUGUST 3 marks the 20th anniversary of one of the toughest battles in organized labor’s recent history--the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981. With his busting of the 17-month strike, Republican President Ronald Reagan sent a message to the labor movement that he and his big business backers were in charge. It was Act One in what would be a decade of unprecedented greed for Corporate America at the expense of U.S. workers. Yet despite their defeat, the 13,000-strong air traffic controllers union demonstrated inspiring militancy, unity and determination--conducting an illegal strike against a popular president with little support from other unions... PATCO was one of the few unions, along with the Air Line Pilots Association, to endorse Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. But when Reagan won the White House in 1980, it was Corporate America, not his union endorsers, that he was eager to prove himself to. While Reagan launched the attack on PATCO, the previous administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter prepared the ground. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under Carter conducted a management campaign of harassment against union controllers. And 12 months before the government’s contract with PATCO was set to expire, Carter formed a ‘Management Strike Contingency Force’ to prepare for a walkout--including the use of scabs.” When air traffic controllers took on Ronald Reagan Lessons of PATCO http://www.socialistworker.org/2001/374/374_10_PATCO.shtml
The Professional Air Traffic Controllers were a working class union that ironically supported Ronald Reagan in his run for president in 1980. True to his class interests and those of his handlers and supports, Reagan shafted the union when it came time to negotiate a new contract in 1981. “On the first day of the strike on August 3, 85 percent of union controllers went out. More than 6,000 flights out of a daily load of about 14,000 were immediately canceled. Two days later, Reagan fired the striking controllers. During the walkout, the FAA was able to keep air traffic at 70 percent of pre-strike levels, largely thanks to its scabbing operation. But the administration also depended on something controllers hadn’t anticipated--total disregard for public safety. According to the union, 481 near misses were reported in the first year of the strike--compared to 10 reported in the 10 years before the walkout. The Reagan administration used everything in its arsenal to teach PATCO--and every other union--a lesson. Militants were arrested, jailed and fined. Some PATCO members with federal mortgages lost their homes. Others were denied when they tried to adopt children. The union was fined millions of dollars, and its $3.5 million strike fund was frozen. Eventually, the government succeeded in decertifying PATCO.” When air traffic controllers took on Ronald Reagan Lessons of PATCO http://www.socialistworker.org/2001/374/374_10_PATCO.shtml
What Reagan started subsequent administrations escalated, even Democratic administrations. “The Clinton administration's new budget was taking more money from ordinary people, in the form of both a very regressive tax hike and a cut in social services, and handing it back over to the corporations. The Clinton administration was picking up where the Reagan-Bush administrations had left off. It should be mentioned that this budget package was a Democratic Party production from beginning to end. Since the Republicans were a minority in Congress, they had the luxury of appearing to oppose the unpopular measures, and no Republicans voted for it. The Senate passed the legislation only after Al Gore, as Vice President, cast the deciding vote. With this legislation behind him, Clinton then put Al Gore in charge of a new commission called Reinventing Government (REGO), which they claimed would make government operations more efficient and save the taxpayer money. In fact, REGO was set up to do what bosses in the private sector had been doing: downsize the work force, either through speed-up or contracting out the work to companies that paid lower wages and benefits. Under Gore's Reinventing Government commission, over 350,000 government jobs were cut. One union, the American Federation of Government Employees, lost 100,000 members. But it didn't ‘save’ ordinary taxpayers one cent in their tax bills.
Finally, it should be noted that the Clinton administration and Democratic Congress broke one of the Democrats' main campaign promises to organized labor by failing to pass even a weak and watered down version of an anti-permanent striker replacement bill. But the Clinton administration did fire off a warning shot at the union apparatuses. From the moment Clinton took office, his Justice Department had supported a Virginia judge's effort to impose a 60-million-dollar fine, the highest ever, on the United Mineworkers union (UMWA) for a grueling seven-month strike carried out by 17,000 coal miners against Pittston Coal in 1989. Pittston itself had agreed to drop the fine as part of its strike settlement with the union. But this did not daunt the Justice Department, which sent its lawyers in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to argue for imposing the fine. Even the conservative Supreme Court ruled against the Virginia judge and the Justice Department, throwing the fine out. But obviously, the Clinton administration used this case as a warning to union officials of what they could expect in the event of other hard-fought battles.
In the 1996 election, the AFL-CIO's support of the Clinton-Gore ticket proved decisive in their victory over the Republicans. But it didn't take long for Clinton to show what this effort had earned the unions. In 1997, he carried out two big attacks against organized labor. In February 1997, the Clinton administration invoked the Railway Labor Act, the same act he had used against the railroad unions the year before, to stop the pilots at American Airlines from going on strike. This was the first time in 30 years a president had invoked that act against airline employees. Breaking the pilots' strike set a precedent throughout the airline industry. It helped to hold in check the employees at other airlines who were pushing to recoup years of concessions and takeaways now that the airline industry was generating big profits. In another confrontation with organized labor, the Clinton administration took on the Teamsters after they organized a successful strike at UPS (United Parcel Service) in August 1997. The UPS strike was a little different than other strikes of the period. Not only had it been somewhat better organized, but it also managed to bring out a bigger proportion of the rank-and-file. Since some of its demands focused on curtailing the use of temporary and part-time workers, it also raised the general problem of fighting against the growing use of low-wage labor. Thus, it had taken on a significance that went beyond the fight at UPS. The fact that the UPS strike ended with a settlement somewhat favorable to the workers seemed to be a small breakthrough, and it raised the possibility that other workers might be encouraged to carry out strikes of their own. First and foremost, the Teamsters themselves had two big nationwide contracts coming up, the Teamsters Master Freight Agreement and the Car Haulers. But three days after the UPS settlement, with the support of the Clinton Justice Department, the government monitor in charge of overseeing the Teamsters announced that she was invalidating the election of the Teamster president, Ron Carey, who had led the UPS strike, under charges of corruption. The elections in question had taken place eight months before but the government monitor discovered corruption only after the Teamsters at UPS went on strike and won! Carey was not only removed from office, but eventually barred from running for office again and then even from membership in the Teamsters.” USA - The Clinton Legacy - Eight Years of Attacks Against the Working Class and Poor http://www.the-spark.net/csart282.html
Bill Clinton was able to be elected using a revamped “Southern Strategy” crafted by right wingers (who called themselves “Centrists” ) in the Democratic Leadership Committee. They essentially tricked the old line, core constituency of the Democratic Party: organized labor, civil rights groups, “progressives”, the women’s and homosexual rights movements into believing they were in their corner when in actuality except for universal health care, the Clinton’s had a right wing agenda that was the antithesis of their core constituency’s. As a result, organized labor has seen a steady decline in membership and influence since the Reagan years. “U.S. union membership rolls have slipped to the lowest point in nearly a century. Only 8% of the private sector work force today is unionized. The loss of union jobs is far out-pacing the modest membership gains from newly organized workplaces. Past union wage, benefit and workplace regulatory gains are being drastically eroded by a relentless offensive of unchecked employer concession demands. Organized labor wins few political victories and has only marginal impact on public policy... In 1981, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan fired all the nation's striking Air Traffic Controllers (PATCO), one well-known union leader was quoted to the effect that ‘maybe the leaders of that union really didn't know how to conduct themselves in collective bargaining.’ And, in spite of this most openly provocative and intentional act against workers, the leaders of American labor sat on their hands as the bell tolled ominously across the land. Over the past twenty-five years, workers have either witnessed or been directly on the receiving end of a mind-numbing series of defeats in high-profile contract struggles. Each defeat only added to the collective rise of cynicism and reduced expectation across the nation's entire workforce. The rare victory might shine briefly like a firefly in the night but then lionize into a black hole of bureaucratic complacency as the next round of defeats rolled in.” U.S. Labor in Crisis: The Current Internal Debate and the Role of Democracy in Its Revitalization by Jerry Tucker http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/tucker210705.html
Celebrating Labor Day has become a cruel joke. The ruling elites are off somewhere laughing themselves silly watching an ignorant public lionize the triumph of organized labor knowing full well US unions are on life support and they (the elites) are about to pull the plug. Not only is organized labor about to be wiped out so is the US working/ middle class. Watching folk celebrate “Labor Day” is like watching people reshuffle the deck chairs on a sinking ship already listing precariously in the ocean thinking that will improve their situation. Organized labor is not organized, it disjointed and impotent. They can’t even save themselves as unions let alone save jobs, save their benefits or improve working conditions. By failing to support PATCO in 1981, organized labor sowed the seeds of their own destruction. “UNION LEADERS had a chance to show what solidarity was all about. But they passed it by. AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland denounced Reagan’s attack on PATCO. But he also sent a letter to AFL-CIO affiliates, discouraging them from taking any type of strike action in solidarity...William Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and a self-described ‘socialist,’ could have dealt a serious blow to Reagan. If IAM members who serviced the planes had walked out, airports across the country would have been shut down. But Winpisinger refused to call out IAM members, citing the IAM’s no-strike clause with the airlines. Other union leaders never mobilized the solidarity that they could have--with a few saying that PATCO got its just desserts for supporting Reagan.” Lessons of PATCO. http://www.socialistworker.org/2001/374/374_10_PATCO.shtml
For the corporatist fascists, breaking PATCO was just the beginning. It was merely a spoke in the larger wheel of class warfare and union leadership failed to grasp its’ significance. So today the power elites are much further along in their agenda. The only good thing about celebrating Labor Day is, maybe a few people will actually become conscious and energized and use it as a launching pad to resurrect a moribund union movement. Maybe they will be able to revive its legacy of collectivist activism, confrontation and resistance. If not, it will be one more unimportant holiday celebrated by a soulless, cowardly, beaten down and defeated US populous.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The Mass Media and Michael Vick

The Mass Media and Michael Vick

“In 2006, pet-abuse.com found 122 suspected dogfighting cases nationwide (114 with pit bulls), but that number only represents a fraction of cases. Many police departments don’t report dogfighting, and many cities don’t announce that they have confiscated dogs because owners have been known to break in and steal them back. Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, says at least 40,000 people are actively involved in the industry, not including spectators. He calls it the modern day equivalent of the fights in the Roman Colosseum: ‘It comes from the same dark place in the human spirit.’” http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19836601/site/newsweek/

Michael Vick’s guilty plea on charges of felony animal abuse is the rage of the corporate mind control apparatus. Based upon the amount of energy, air time and exposure the mainstream media has spent chronicling Michael Vick, you would think his actions were on the same par as Alberto Gonzales’ resignation, the worsening US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the escalating credit and financial crisis. In fact in some mediums Michael Vick’s woes have pushed those stories into the background. What’s up with that? Is the media saying an immature professional athlete’s poor judgment, skewered values and ostentatious lifestyle are so important to the overall culture of this country they deserve taking almost half the air time on the television and cable news networks? With all that is going on in the world can the US media honestly say (with a straight face) the Michael Vick story is that important?
Or is there another agenda at work here? Is Vick getting this attention because he is a dark skinned man of African descent who happens to be a highly paid professional athlete? Is the media not so subtly playing the “race card” creating a hot button issue by exploiting deep seated psychological biases against black males to distract us from all the corruption, malfeasance, criminality and treachery being done by white males at the highest levels of the US government? Does the US media really care about animal abuse? If you do some independent research you will discover dog fighting is big business in AmeriKKKa across all ethnic and socio-economic lines. “The culture of dogfighting is as diverse as America itself. Dogfighters come from virtually all walks of life and engage in the blood sport at vastly different levels. Some fighters operate on a national or even international level within highly clandestine networks. These fighters are professionals that breed generations of skilled ‘game dogs,’ take a great deal of pride in the lineage of their dogs and charge tremendous stud fees to breed their champions. They publish trade journals for distribution to dogfighting enthusiasts around the world. The journals, with names like Your Friend and Mine, Game Dog Times, The American Warrior, and The Pit Bull Chronicle, include information on recent fights including the winners and losers, and advertisements for training equipment and puppies. One of the largest and most widely recognized, The Sporting Dog Journal, circulates over 10,000 copies worldwide. Because the professional fighters are so geographically dispersed, they also utilize the internet to communicate with one another. The “cyber-dogmen” maintain websites that to the untrained eye appear to be networks of breeders or ‘game dog’ fanciers. They often go so far as to publish legal disclaimers on the websites, maintaining that they do not condone dogfighting and the information should be ‘viewed as fiction’ and utilized ‘for entertainment purposes only.’ The Websites typically include specific information on the lineage of the dogs, historic accounts of dog-fighting that glorify anonymous, deceased, or ‘retired’ dog-men, and message boards for enthusiasts to discuss everything from buying and training champion fighting dogs to veterinary tips on treating wounded dogs. Professional fighters are wealthy and experienced, often investing thousands of dollars on buying and training their dogs, and on transport to the fight venues. The fights are extremely well organized and difficult for law enforcement to find. Participants and spectators are often not told where the venues are until moments before the fight. ‘Gaining access to these circles is extremely hard,’ says Eric Sakach, Director of the West Coast Regional Office of the Humane Society of the United States.” Dog Fighting Detailed Discussion http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ddusdogfighting.htm#s6
Dogfighting is widespread in many urban areas in AmeriKKKa. My question is, if it is so widespread and prolific why all the fuss about Michael Vick? Vick is just one guy involved in the reprehensible “sport” of dogfighting. My take on all this is, the media is using Michael Vick as a diversion and scapegoat. I certainly don’t condone what he did but in the overall scheme of things, which is worse, dogfighting or creating a financial house of cards Ponzi scheme where millions of people will lose their homes and investments? Which is worse dogfighting or lying to the nation to rationalize the invasion of several countries in the name of a totally bogus War on Terror? Which is worse Vick lying about his involvement in a dogfighting operation or Bu$h-Cheney and Congress lying about 9-11?
I think most sane people would acknowledge what Michael Vick did is reprehensible and he definitely should be held accountable and responsible for it, but at the same time they would have to admit what Bu$h and Co. are doing is far more worse, far more dangerous and impacts far more people! Yet why aren’t Congress and the masses of AmeriKKKans demanding Bu$h and Cheney be held accountable and sent to jail!!
The media knew Michael Vick painted himself into a corner when he pleaded “not guilty” several weeks ago when it came to light abused dogs and dog remains were found on his estate. Folks pretty much knew Vick was facing an uphill fight when he was indicted in a federal court in Richmond Virginia. When his co-defendants plead guilty it was just a matter of time before Vick’s story fell apart and he was exposed. So why all the coverage, why the fuss about him but no such coverage or fuss about numerous Bu$h’s lies about WMD, the corporate corruption rampant in this country or the real costs of the phony war on Terrorism? Does this make any sense to you?
I realize sports are a major media diversion/distraction in this country along with the lifestyles of “celebrities” and the sexual proclivities of politicians and athletes. The media deliberately focuses so much time, air and print space on these topics while eschewing serious analysis about what is really going on in the world. But we don’t have to go for the okey-doke. Don’t allow the media and their talking heads to divert your attention, keep you hooked on programming that only offers the lowest and basest levels of thought and consciousness. Don’t allow the media to establish your values and priorities or define your reality.
Michael Vick will get his just deserts in all this. He brought this on himself, which is extremely unfortunate because so many people looked up to him due to his athletic prowess. But just because you can run and throw a football doesn’t mean you are above the law. Just like because someone was handed the US presidency doesn’t make them and their cronies above the law! Most of all we can’t allow the corporate media to set a bogus agenda, construct our view of reality or frame what we think is important on an issue like this.

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Monday, August 27, 2007

The Game Is Rigged

The Game Is Rigged So The Ruling Classes Get Richer As We Get Poorer

“Living standards for the working and middle class and the urban poor have declined substantially over the past thirty years (1978-2006) to a point where one can point to a burgeoning crises. While real hourly wages in constant 2005 dollars have stagnated, health, pension, energy and educational costs (increasingly borne by wage and salary workers) have skyrocketed. If extensions in work time and intensification of work place production (increases in productivity) are included in the equation, it is clear that living (including working) conditions have declined sharply. Even the financial press can write articles entitled: “Why Ordinary Americans have Missed Out on the Benefits of Growth” ( FT November 2, 2006 p.11)...The impact of the policies of the financial ruling class on both the manufacturing and service sectors transcends their profit skimming, credit leverage on business operations and management practices. It embraces the entire architecture of the income, investment and class structure. The growth of vast inequalities between the yearly payments of the financial ruling class and the medium salary of workers has reached unprecedented levels. The financial elite receives something in the range of a ratio of 500 up to 1000 times that of an average worker, depending on how narrowly or broadly we conceive of the financial ruling class.” Who rules America? James Petras http://www.petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1689&more=1&c=1

As the meltdown of the US and global economy proceeds unabated, one could be forgiven if he or she innocently thought this was a case of Cosmic Justice or Karma for the financial elites, that it served them right for what they’ve done to working class and poor people around the world with their greedy predatory policies. However the fact of the matter is, while some of the investment bankers and financial capitalists are being hit hard by the ripple effects of the so called Subprime/credit collapse, percentage-wise it is working folks who will bear the brunt of the crisis. Yes Bear Sterns, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, their mortgage subsidiaries and hedge funds are really taking major hits and losses on this; but don’t forget the pension funds, 401Ks and mutual funds of ordinary working folks are also heavily invested in their portfolios and products. A billionaire can afford to lose a few million or even a few hundred million, but Joe and Jane Sixpack who have negative savings as it is, can’t afford to have their 401K or defined benefit pensions wiped out like the suckers who lost all their money when they went for the Enron okey-doke!
Not only are working folks losing their homes through loan defaults, foreclosure and eviction, their retirement “nest eggs” as also being wiped out. The problem is the impact of this crisis is so huge because the Wall Street Bankers cleverly lumped all kinds of home and commercial loans together with other products like bonds and resold them around the world, no one really knows just how extensive the defaults will be and who will suffer the most. But one thing is for sure the big boys made their money off of all this. “While the ‘hedge fund’ speculators receive the highest annual salaries, the private equity executives can equal their hundreds of millions payments through deal fees and special dividend payments from portfolio companies. This was especially true in 2006 when buyouts reached a record $710 billion dollars. The big bucks for the private equity bosses comes from the accumulating stake executives have in portfolio companies. They typically skim 20% of profits, which are realized when a group sells or lists a portfolio company. At that time, the payday runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The subset of the financial ruling class is the ‘junior bankers’ of private equity firms who take about $500,000 a year. At the bottom rung are the ‘junior bankers’ of publicly traded investment houses (‘Wall Street’) who average $350,000 a year. The financial ruling class is made up of these multi-billionaire elites from the hedge funds, private and public equity bankers and their associates in big prestigious corporate legal and accounting firms. They in turn are linked to the judicial and regulatory authorities, through political appointments and contributions, and by their central position in the national economy. Within the financial ruling class, political leadership does not usually come from the richest hedge fund speculators, even less among the ‘junior bankers’. Political leaders come from the public and private equity banks, namely Wall Street - especially Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and others. They organize and fund both major parties and their electoral campaigns. They pressure, negotiate and draw up the most comprehensive and favorable legislation on global strategies (liberalization and deregulation) and sectoral policies (reductions in taxes, government pressure on countries like China to ‘open’ their financial services to foreign penetration and so on). They pressure the government to ‘bailout’ bankrupt and failed speculative firms and to balance the budget by lowering social expenditures instead of raising taxes on speculative ‘windfall’ profits.” Who rules America? James Petras http://www.petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1689&more=1&c=1
The financial elites weld power by influencing the political process thereby rigging the whole socio-economic system, keeping the poor out of the loop and at their mercy. “First, wealth can be seen as a ‘resource’ that is very useful in exercising power. That's obvious when we think of donations to political parties, payments to lobbyists, and grants to experts who are employed to think up new policies beneficial to the wealthy. Wealth also can be useful in shaping the general social environment to the benefit of the wealthy, whether through hiring public relations firms or donating money for universities, museums, music halls, and art galleries...
There's a much deeper power story that underlies the self-dealing and mutual back-scratching by CEOs now carried out through interlocking directorates and seemingly independent outside consultants. It probably involves several factors. At the least, on the worker side, it reflects an increasing lack of power following the all-out attack on unions in the 1960s and 1970s, which is explained in detail by the best expert on recent American labor history, James Gross (1995), a labor and industrial relations professor at Cornell. That decline in union power made possible and was increased by both outsourcing at home and the movement of production to developing countries, which were facilitated by the break-up of the New Deal coalition and the rise of the New Right (Domhoff, 1990, Chapter 10). It signals the shift of the United States from a high-wage to a low-wage economy, with professionals protected by the fact that foreign-trained doctors and lawyers aren't allowed to compete with their American counterparts in the direct way that low-wage foreign-born workers are.” Who Rules America Power In America Wealth Income and Power by G. William Domhoff September 2005 (updated December 2006) http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Like all pyramid schemes, the game is rigged, the fix is in so those at the top get the most. This current collapse is designed to further rob the poor and give to the rich via the massive foreclosure sales that will take properties (homes) from working folks and allow certain groups to acquire them at fire sale prices at pennies on the dollar. “Economic collapse is one of the final stages of the cabal's overall policy of cultural devastation. Many of their earlier phases of contrived collapse have been largely unseen or ignored by most Americans. But the final economic breakdown--now in its first stages with the bursting of the housing bubble and the collapse of the dollar--are realities U.S. citizens can no longer turn a blind eye to, because many Americans are literally being thrown out on the street through foreclosure and eviction. Through real estate shell games, the super-rich have looted at least $10-$15 trillion from workers. ‘Buy a house with a low interest loan,’ they lied to the workers, ‘and it will rise in value indefinitely.’ Workers were swindled into buying property with interest-only loans--or other predatory financing--deluded into believing that with their increased property value they could later refinance to pay off the balloon payments and sky-rocketing mortgages...
The 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) was a massive restructuring of federal bankruptcy laws which punishes middle-class debtors and awards increased payouts of as much as $4 billion a year to their creditors, mainly banks and credit card issuers. The cannibal corporations spent $40 million and eight years lobbying Congress for legislation that makes it virtually impossible for individuals to escape debt repayment. The 500-page bill was largely written by bank and credit card lobbyists. The law imposes a two-stage means test on bankrupt debtors that will reduce the number permitted to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 7, which provides for liquidation of most debts, and force more debtors to file under Chapter 13, which requires significant repayment.” Political-Economic Cannibalism http://www.new-enlightenment.com/econ_crash.htm
Onerous debt is another form of slavery. Most AmeriKKKans are in debt up the wazoo. But we cannot blame anyone but ourselves. Our predicament is based upon our own gullibility, crass materialism, and our total ignorance of the power of compound interest! We have become debt slaves and wage peons to the fascist financial and corporatist oligarchy that run this country. This is modern day serfdom. Their plan is to transfer as much of if not all of the private wealth and resources of the world into their hands by making humanity poorer and poorer. Their policies have the US on the brink of psychological, moral and financial collapse. Perhaps this too is part of their plan. “The paradox is that some of the most wealthy and powerful beneficiaries of the ascendancy of finance capital are precisely the same class of people who are financing their own self-destruction. While cheap finance fueling multi-billion dollar mergers, acquisitions, commissions and executive payoffs, heightened militarism operates on a budget plagued by tax reductions, exemptions and evasions for the financial ruling class and ever greater squeezing of the overburdened wage and salary classes. Something has to break the cohabitation between ruling class financiers and political militarists. They are running in opposite directions. One is investing capital abroad and the other spending borrowed funds at home. For the moment there are no signs of any serious clashes at the top, and in the middle and working classes there are no signs of any political break with the two Wall Street parties or any challenge to the militarist-Zionist stranglehold on Congress. Likely it will take a catastrophe, like a White House-backed Israeli nuclear attack on Iran to detonate the kind of crisis which will provoke a deep and widespread popular backlash of all things military, financial and made in Israel.” Who rules America? James Petras http://www.petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1689&more=1&c=1
As I stated in the beginning of this essay, this could be Cosmic Justice, our Karma; the inevitable consequences of our ignorance, greed and hubris. At any rate unless we change our values, alter our ways of doing business and consciously thwart their plans to enslave the world by getting out of debt as soon as we can (if we can) , they will get richer while we get poorer, more depraved and indebted with every passing day.

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

Make Change With Your Spending Habits

Make Change Through Your Spending Habits

“Since the only languages spoken by CorpoGov are money, and power, perhaps money is our ultimate option for influence. Consumer spending represents an enormous bulk of the American economy—in itself a clear indication of how far CorpoGov has sunk our country. Our backbone of manufacturing base with all of its good jobs has been outsourced to lands of cheap labor and lax regulation. Many goods we depend upon are not even made in America anymore...evidenced by how few things in our mega stores are not made in China. Of course the issue is very complicated, but how complicated is demanding that we get back some of the millions of good jobs outsourced for profit’s sake? Everything from terminating endless war to transcending fossil fuels to recapturing our government from the elite—not complicated demands. All that might be left to give us any real voice are our spending decisions. We still have great power to influence CorpoGov, all we lack is information and coordination, and time.” The Power But Not The Sense Rand Clifford http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_rand_cli_070821_the_power_2c_but_not_t.htm

All but the most comatose and somnolent AmeriKKKans realize the Bu$h administration long ago crossed the line of decency into total corruption, debauchery and hubris. When the US Supreme Court handed the presidency to George W. Bu$h the stage was set for the full fledged Nazification of this country. The Bu$h cabal came in with an agenda for global domination and hegemony. See the blue prints for their plan to bum rush the world at http://www.newamericancentury.org/. 9-11 gave them the pretext they wanted to launch their fascist Global War on Terrorism and implement a police state at home. The illegal intervention in Haiti, the unwarranted invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and their proxy war in Columbia, sponsored invasion of Somalia are all part of their insane plan to dominate the resources and people of Earth. Even AmeriKKKans who get their news from Fox, MSNBC and CNN know the country is on the precipice of moral and fiscal collapse due to the machinations and schemes of these psychopaths. It would be easy to say this is the result of inept frat boys playing emperor but the more you look at it the more you see it is all deliberate!
Fascism AmeriKKKan style is in our faces big time. Only the most brain dead and fearful fail to see it. Bu$h has made dissent illegal and is just waiting for any pretext to institute the martial law lock-down of AmeriKKKa. They did a dry run on martial law, the use of mercenaries to disarm citizens and forced displacement during Hurricane Katrina and they saw that they could get away with it. Bu$h has been spying on innocent AmeriKKKans for years, in violation of the FISA law, an impeachable offense. Not just one or two or a few hundred, but millions of AmeriKKKans have been spied upon, personal data collected and stored all in violation of the law. The Congress has complicity in these crimes because they have failed to do their duty and reign in Bu$H for his abuses of power. It is now ominously clear the common man and woman can no longer count on their elected representatives on the national level to save the country from escalating wars abroad and dictatorship at home.
What can we do? Is there a solution? Will we go out like the Italians and Germans who blindly followed Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler over the cliff into national ruin? Is there hope? The answer is yes only when we begin to think for ourselves. The fascists already have their concentration/detention centers up and running. They have a program to turn our clergy into spies and informants. They have thought of everything, everything that is except the power of the human spirit. Although the Iraqi and Lebanese liberation fighters have demonstrated to the world that you can stymie and defeat a superior equipped force, AmeriKKKans by in large are too fat and complacent to go that route. Plus back in the ‘80's and ‘90's the ruling elites targeted the white militia movement with the government assaults on Ruby Ridge, Waco and the bogus Oklahoma City bombing forcing many to disband or go underground. As Black people we have no serious security force to protect us unless you count the FOI. And they don’t even think or function in those terms. So “revolution” and guerrilla resistance are not viable or serious options for us at this time.
The only real weapon we have is our money. We can bring the empire to its knees by voting with our wallets and pocketbooks! The best thing about it is they can’t put us in detention camps for not spending our money! Even with their sophisticated tracking and surveillance (they can track you using your own GPS devices) system they can’t do a thing about us not spending our money. Since money is their prime objective prolonged selective patronage can be very effective. We saw just how effective such a strategy can be in Montgomery Alabama when unarmed, poor and working class Black folks brought the city to its knees just by refusing to ride the buses for three hundred eighty one days! Imagine if we decide we would not spend one dime in any retail store, Online or for any service connected to the warmongers? Imagine if we were astute enough to identify the worst perpetrators of human rights violations and stopped supporting them financially. What impact could we have? It’s safe and effective as an old commercial used to say. Think about this, seriously. Our time is running out as well as our options because the Bu$h-Cheney cabal are determined to make AmeriKKKa the twenty-first century version of Nazi Germany. All that stands between us and them at this point is the little bit of money we have in our possession and how we use it

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Friday, August 24, 2007

The Supreme Irony

The Supreme Irony

“‘The fundamental question is, will the government respond to the demands of the people,’ the President said. ‘And if the government doesn’t . . . respond to the demands of the people, they will replace the government. That’s up to the Iraqis to make that decision, not American politicians... ‘The Iraqis will decide,’ Bush insisted. ‘They have decided they want a constitution. They have elected members to their parliament and they will make the decisions just like democracies do.’” George W. Bu$h talking about Iraqis replacing the Malaki government.

If the above quote by George W Bu$h our wanna be dictator wasn’t so pathologically hypocritical, it would be funny. It’s almost like we live in a Twilight Zone/Bizzaro World where wrong is promoted as right, war is peace, down is up, colonialism is sovereignty, and craziness is sanity. In a delusional milieu such as this, George W Bu$h can easily urge the Iraqi people to replace their government at his behest, in the name of “democracy” and “self determination”. Five years ago the United States illegally invaded Iraq, deposed that country’s government, fired and disbanded its’ army and allowed their national treasures to be looted and stolen. Like the imperialists they are, they set up an AmeriKKKan viceroy, L. Paul Bremer, to run the country until they could establish a quisling government that would be totally subservient to US interests and whims. They thought they could pull it off because had just done the same thing in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan they set up Hamid Karzai a former CIA operative by rigging the election so he would become that nation’s first “democratically” elected president. Karzai was their man because he had a long history of co-operating with the CIA and US oil interests.
“According to Afghan, Iranian, and Turkish government sources, Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, was a top adviser to the El Segundo, California-based UNOCAL Corporation which was negotiating with the Taliban to construct a Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline from Turkmenistan through western Afghanistan to Pakistan. Karzai, the leader of the southern Afghan Pashtun Durrani tribe, was a member of the mujaheddin that fought the Soviets during the 1980s. He was a top contact for the CIA and maintained close relations with CIA Director William Casey, Vice President George Bush, and their Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) Service interlocutors. Later, Karzai and a number of his brothers moved to the United States under the auspices of the CIA. Karzai continued to serve the agency's interests, as well as those of the Bush Family and their oil friends in negotiating the CentGas deal, according to Middle East and South Asian sources.
When one peers beyond all of the rhetoric of the White House and Pentagon concerning the Taliban, a clear pattern emerges showing that construction of the trans-Afghan pipeline was a top priority of the Bush administration from the outset. Although UNOCAL claims it abandoned the pipeline project in December 1998, the series of meetings held between U.S., Pakistani, and Taliban officials after 1998, indicates the project was never off the table.” Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Bush Oil Team by Wayne Madsen http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAD201A.html
To some it may come as a shock Hamid Karzai was not just some guy the local yokels plucked out of nowhere and selected to be their leader. Karzai was the Bu$h Crime Family’s man in waiting, just as Ahmed Chalabi was their puppet to be for Iraq. The Bu$h team had planned for Chalabi to be their boy in Baghdad once they toppled Saddam Hussein but things didn’t work out the way they planned. So they had to regroup and pretend they were for open elections and “democracy”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem for Bu$h and Co. is their old models aren’t working in Iraq.
Following the defeat of Germany ad Japan in WWII, the US went in, wrote their constitutions and imposed the type of government they wanted on the conquered people of those two countries. They did it in the name of “democracy” and “progress”. That became their MO around the world. The Bu$h administration had just done it in Afghanistan. For Iraq they planned a straight up subservient colony but they were forced to arrange for elections once the powerful Shia clerics demands for free and open elections put the occupation forces (who were unsuccessfully facing a mounting insurgency already) in an even more perilous position if Bu$h and Co. refused the popular Shia clerics. The Bu$hites were forced to relent, so they did what they do best, they rigged the elections in Iraq just like they did in the US and Afghanistan.
But that isn’t working in Iraq. The puppet regime of Malaki was supposed to pass an oil revenue sharing law that would allow Western, (mainly US and British oil consortiums) free reign and access to Iraq’s oil; one of the primary reasons the US invaded the country in the first place. But the Iraqi parliament is dragging its feet and taking its time. So Bu$h is getting impatient with Malaki and his cabinet and he is signaling he wouldn’t be upset if the Iraqi people (read CIA) got rid of their prime minister. George W. Bu$h has the audacity to say he would respect the wishes of the Iraqi people. Here is a man who is openly reviled and held in contempt by over two thirds of US citizens because he refuses to do what we want, end the occupation! In a clear example of his delusional state Bu$h has the unmitigated gall to suggest some other country’s government respect the will of their people when he and the warmongers on both sides of the aisle openly defy the will and wishes of the AmeriKKKan people by continuing the occupation in Iraq !!!
Bu$h is waging an imperialist crusade, a bogus war on terror to expropriate and plunder the natural resources of Iraq. The US populous is totally opposed to this policy; but Bu$h and Co could care less. The Democrats who were swept into office in 2006 with a mandate to end the war and bring the troops home have sold us out and are now collaborating with the Bu$hites to keep the war going. Sure they mouth platitudes about the Iraqis not holding up their end of the bargain and cutting off the funds, but this is typical white boy BS. If Iraq is a “free country”, theoretically they should be able to take any action they choose and do whatever they perceive to be in their best interests; not those of US oil companies!
Remarks by Bu$h and his bi-partisan cohorts threatening the Malaki government demonstrate just how unfree Iraq really is! The supreme irony is Bu$h, is such a pathological liar he can utters words like these with a straight face, “The Iraqis will decide,” Bush insisted. ‘They have decided they want a constitution. They have elected members to their parliament and they will make the decisions just like democracies do.” Bush: Fate of Iraqi government rests with Iraqis President stops short of fully endorsing embattled al-Maliki http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20380228/
Yet Bu$h circumvents the US Constitution and blatantly disobeys the law of the land with impunity. The fix is in, Bu$h knows the Democrats aren’t going to impeach him. The Democrats punked out big time! The majority of AmeriKKKans decided their elected representatives should end the war and bring the troops home. But true to their hypocrisy the warmongers totally ignore the will and wishes of the AmeriKKKan people. They are determined to do what they (and their corporate campaign contributors ) want: wage perpetual war and bring the world to the brink of WW IV.
They also covet Iraqi oil. The last thing the Republican NeoCons and their and Democratic co-conspirators want is a free and independent Iraq. True to their Bizzaro World/Twilight Zone orientation, they camouflage their real intent by spouting words like national security, freedom, liberty and self-determination. That is the supreme irony.
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Imagine If...


Imagine If...

“Can the anti-war movement in America join forces with anti-war movements in Europe, Asia and around the world? Can we organize planetary boycotts of industries that pollute our children's air and water, and of corporations that poison our bodies and minds? Are Americans big enough, wise enough, to internationalize their problems or must we turn everything over to our overseers - our politicians and the lobbyists and media barons they serve and service? Can we remand war criminals like Bush and Cheney, Kissinger and the like to the International Court in the Hague and other international judiciary bodies, or must we resort once again to the tired formulations of impeachments, pardons and the same ugly crimes reappearing, somewhat reconstituted, somewhere down the road?” The Empire Without Clothes by Gary Corseri http://www.dissidentvoice.org/, August 8, 2007

As AmeriKKKa morphs into a totally fascist police state and global empire the natural reaction to resist being its next victim is motivating people around the world to take action to counter US hegemony. We can see it in international events. Unlike AmeriKKKans who were brainwashed by watching Rambo and James Bond movies into believing the Anglo-AmeriKKKan-Israeli axis is invincible, the rest of the world who have a stake in maintaining their own sovereignly know that the US is really a paper tiger. Over the last forty years the only wars AmeriKKKa has won are the proxy wars they fought in places like Afghanistan (where the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan created Osama bin-Laden and “al Queda”) parts of South America and East Timor. Of course they also lost their share of proxy wars too, like in Angola and the 2006 Lebanon war. AmeriKKKa’s invasion of Iraq following its attack on Afghanistan and its illegal intervention in Haiti has convinced most of the world AmeriKKKa is a predatory/rogue nation. “With America's image declining in many parts of the world, favorability ratings for the United States continue to trail those of other major countries. In Europe, as well as predominantly Muslim countries, the U.S. is generally less popular than Germany, France, Japan, and China. However, the U.S. fares somewhat better in Asia; in fact, Indians rate the U.S. higher than Germany, France, or China and only slightly below Japan. However, America's favorability rating has dropped 15 points in India since last year...Nearly five years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, international support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism continues to wane. Outside of the U.S. only two countries - India and Russia - register majority support for the war on terror, and it remains particularly unpopular in predominantly Muslim countries, although support has risen eight points since last year among Pakistanis, whose government is a key partner in efforts to combat Al Qaeda. Among several of America's traditional allies, support has fallen steeply since 2002, and it has virtually collapsed in two countries, Spain and Japan. In the former, the percentage who favor U.S. efforts against terrorism now stands at 19%, down from 63% in 2003, while among Japanese it has tumbled from 61% in 2002 to 26% today.” America's Image Slips, But Allies Share U.S. Concerns Over Iran, Hamas http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?PageID=825
Imagine if all the peace loving people in the world decided to support peace by refusing to buy products manufactured or sold by corporations involved in human rights violations, global pollution or war? Imagine if the people of the world spent as much time discovering and studying who the multinational corporations are that formulate, fund and execute the policies of perpetual war and ecological devastation as we do following our favorite sports team/player or celebrity. Imagine if people were committed enough to peace, human rights, economic justice and personal empowerment to act with conscience and conviction by deliberately boycotting every store and every product made or sold by warmongers, polluters and sweat shop operators? What impact would that have on economic and political policy? What implications would it have on our sense of self-esteem, empowerment and accomplishment?
We are not powerless beings. We don’t have to sit back passively and acquiesce to multinational corporatist fascism (also known as Globalism). We don’t have to go out like the Italians and Germans in the 1930's who blindly followed Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler, both of whom rose to power through trickery, deceit and coercion. History shows that neither man nor their fascist programs were challenged due to fear, or a mind set and values that resonated with their program. The question we have to ask ourselves is, does the New World Order globalist program resonate with our values? How we see ourselves and our vision of the world? Do we even have a vision for the world?!
Do you feel comfortable with the direction the US is headed? Most AmeriKKKans as brain washed and mentally comatose as this culture has become, intuitively know something is wrong, they know the country is not headed in the right direction. “Washington - Most US voters think the country is on the wrong track and remain deeply unhappy with President George Bush and Congress, but still feel good about their finances and optimistic about the future, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday. Eighteen months before Bush leaves the White House, nearly two-thirds of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction and give the president negative marks for his job performance. An even bigger majority, 83 percent, say the Democratic-controlled Congress is doing only a fair or poor job - the worst mark for Congress in a Zogby poll.” Americans feel system is broken By John Whitesides http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=3&art_id=nw20070718125956671C294725 The question is, what, if anything are we going to do about it?
What can we do? We can begin to take a serious look at how and where we get our information and perspectives on things. If you are reading this it is safe to say you are not being mesmerized by Fox news CNN, PBS, ABCNBCCBS or any of the other corporate propaganda mind control organs. Think for yourself. Think about voting and acting with your wallet. While the ruling elites clearly don’t care about people nor morality, they do care about bottom line profits and we can greatly influence those. In July consumer spending was down because folks just didn’t have the money to spend as their wages stagnate and inflation shrinks their paychecks even more. But imagine if we decided to be proactive and selective in our spending? What would our world look like? Imagine if we boycotted and staged general strikes in protest of the economic and political polices of the ruling elites and their flunkies in Congress? How would that change things, if at all? Imagine if we were unafraid of retaliation by the state, what would we do, what could we accomplish? The fascists can’t lock us all up for selective patronage, or for not spending our money! Nor can their flunkies in the media ignore us if we act en mass, organize and galvanize across ethnic and class lines. The elites can only win by keeping the masses divided, cannibalizing each other, ignorant and disorganized. Once we get organized and become unified on purpose will have the last word given our access to instant media via the Internet.
All is not lost, we can fight back using the non-violent, tried and proven tactics of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr unless we are too disorganized, cowardly and lame to challenge obvious psychopaths and their genocidal policies. If that is the case, ultimately we will get exactly what we deserve.

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Friday, August 17, 2007

Bu$h and Congress Expand Warrantless Spying

Bu$h and Congress Expand Warrantless Spying on AmeriKKKans

“This past Saturday, Congress approved legislation expanding the ability of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government suspects terrorists may be involved. The legislation, which expands the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was negotiated between the White House and lawmakers in response to a federal court ruling this summer determining that the NSA's past eavesdropping had violated the law. Mike McConnell, the retired Navy admiral who was appointed last January as the nation's second director of national intelligence, told Congress that the ruling drastically reduced the ability of the NSA to track terrorists, while Bush warned that, because of the ruling, the government was ‘missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country.’ The fear of Democratic leaders that their party might be further accused of being soft on terrorism apparently prompted them to vote for the new FISA legislation -- handing new unilateral surveillance powers to the executive branch while significantly diminishing judicial oversight. Civil liberties groups and lawmakers opposed to the legislation believe the changes will make it easier for the government to spy on U.S. citizens, because the more loosely defined FISA statute now allows warrantless surveillance of people communicating with others who are ‘reasonably believed to be outside the United States.’ During the House debate last Saturday night, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., described the bill as an enormous loophole that will grant the attorney general the ability to ‘wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances.’” America under surveillance By Tim Shorrock http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/09/domestic_surveillance/

The corporate mind control apparatus has downplayed the significance of recent legislation that will allow the federal government to spy on all AmeriKKKans without warrants or judicial oversight. The corporate media is in cahoots with and share the class interests, values and agenda of the ruling elites and their sock puppets like George W Bu$h. Now please be clear on this, the Big Brother police state is here and has been in full effect for decades . However the recent cave in by the spineless go along Democrats has merely extended and expanded what Bu$h and Co were doing illegally and made it legal despite ample evidence Bu$h and Co cannot to be trusted to do the right thing, nor can they be trusted to set the tone and tenor of abiding by existing laws or defending and upholding the US Constitution. Bu$h and Co. came into office with a set agenda and knew full well the AmeriKKKan public would be resistant to their agenda absent some catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbor. “The threat posed by US terrorism to the security of nations and individuals was outlined in prophetic detail in a document written more than two years ago and disclosed only recently. What was needed for America to dominate much of humanity and the world’s resources, it said, was ‘some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor’. The attacks of 11 September 2001 provided the ‘new Pearl Harbor’, described as ‘the opportunity of ages’. The extremists who have since exploited 11 September come from the era of Ronald Reagan, when far-right groups and ‘think-tanks’ were established to avenge the American ‘defeat’ in Vietnam. In the 1990s, there was an added agenda: to justify the denial of a ‘peace dividend’ following the cold war. The Project for the New American Century was formed, along with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute and others that have since merged the ambitions of the Reagan administration with those of the current Bush regime.” “A New Pearl Harbor” Two years ago a project set up by the men who now surround George W Bush said what America needed was “a new Pearl Harbor.” Its published aims have, alarmingly, come true. By John Pilger New Statesman December 16, 2002 http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/nc-pilger.html
9-11 gave the Bu$h cabal, their supporters and acolytes the pretext they needed, their ideal “opportunity of the ages” to enact their agenda of: perpetual global warfare coupled with economic/military hegemonic empire and a sham democratic police state at home. “To prepare the ground for the PNAC-like ideas that were circulating in the Hard Right, various wealthy individuals and corporations helped set up far-right think-tanks, and bought up various media outlets – newspapers, magazines, TV networks, radio talk shows, cable channels, etc. – in support of that day when all the political tumblers would click into place and the PNAC cabal and their supporters could assume control. This happened with the Supreme Court's selection of George W. Bush in 2000. The ‘outsiders’ from PNAC were now powerful ‘insiders,’ placed in important positions from which they could exert maximum pressure on U.S. policy: Cheney is Vice President, Rumsfeld is Defense Secretary, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense Secretary, I. Lewis Libby is Cheney's Chief of Staff, Elliot Abrams is in charge of Middle East policy at the National Security Council, Dov Zakheim is comptroller for the Defense Department, John Bolton is Undersecretary of State, Richard Perle is chair of the Defense Policy advisory board at the Pentagon, former CIA director James Woolsey is on that panel as well, etc. etc. (PNAC's chairman, Bill Kristol, is the editor of Rupert Murdoch's The Weekly Standard.) In short, PNAC had a lock on military policy-creation in the Bush Administration. But, in order to unleash their foreign/military campaigns without taking all sorts of flak from the traditional wing of the conservative GOP – which was more isolationist, more opposed to expanding the role of the federal government, more opposed to military adventurism abroad – they needed a context that would permit them free rein. The events of 9/11 rode to their rescue. (In one of their major reports, written in 2000, they noted that ‘the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing even – like a new Pearl Harbor.’) After those terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration used the fear generated in the general populace as their cover for enacting all sorts of draconian measures domestically (the Patriot Act, drafted earlier, was rushed through Congress in the days following 9/11; few members even read it), and as their rationalization for launching military campaigns abroad.” A PNAC Primer: How We Got Into This Mess by Bernard Weiner June 2, 2003 http://www.antiwar.com/orig/weiner6.html.
Since 9-11 most sane and astute AmeriKKKans have come to see the Bu$hites for what they are: pathological liars, scheming psychopaths out to bankrupt AmeriKKKa and replicate Nazi Germany on these shores. As deluded as the Bu$hites are, they realize most AmeriKKKans loath them for what they have done to this country. Even the rigged opinion polls show Bu$h and Cheney with subterranean approval ratings especially as the Iraq occupation worsens. Joe and Jane Sixpack see the callousness of the Bu$h administration for the families of fallen soldiers, how they ignore the suffering of the innocent men women and children of Iraq, Afghanistan and US victims of Hurricane Katrina. AmeriKKKans now see the value of their homes sinking and their spending power shrinking, they hear the distant rumblings of panic on Wall Street and they are starting to fear for their futures. The Bu$hites know this and they are fearful the masses will move on them. Hence their need to expand their ability to spy on and monitor ordinary AmeriKKKans. Of course they are not going to come out and tell us they plan to replicate Nazi Germany here, so they say they are doing it to “protect” us. They say these laws and surveillance powers are needed tools in their bogus global war on terrorism to enhance “security”. “The United States is expanding the use of spy satellites for domestic surveillance, turning its ‘eyes in sky’ inward to counter terrorism and eventually for law enforcement, US officials said Wednesday. Authorized by US intelligence chief Michael McConnell in May and managed by the Department of Homeland Security, the change will allow more federal and local agencies to tap into satellite imagery and related intelligence products, they said. It also will expand the kind of intelligence that can be made available to include measurement and signature intelligence, which is used to identify and track targets by their particular physical characteristics, they said.” U.S. will use 'eye in sky' for domestic surveillance. http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/3168 “We are told our president has issued orders for the FBI to begin recruitment of more than 15,000 paid informants to begin spying on fellow American citizens. These informants supposedly will seek out terrorist, foreign spies and in criminal investigations. They will collect data on US citizens, pry into phone records and computer files and use black bag secret breaking and entering techniques. This news comes on the heels of the top domestic general in the US Air Force General Victor Renuart, who heads US Northern Command calling for tripling of troops on American soil to battle alleged phantom sleeper cells, and Mr. Bush’s new executive order outlawing all opposition to the Iraq War under threat of confiscation of all property and imprisonment for life. This is exactly what the NKVD, KGB and Stasi did in Communist countries.” Train Wreck of the Week - July 28 2007 http://www.theinternationalforecaster.com/trainwreck.php?Id=182
The US corporate media is downplaying the significance of this. This is par for the course, the corporate media’s goal is not to inform us, question or challenge the agenda of the ruling elites. The elites and their sock puppets like Bu$h use the media to keep our dull and benighted neighbors fearful, because they know fear is a powerful tool. They also use the media as a source of disinformation, propaganda (do some research on Operation Mockingbird) and as a means to desensitize us to the violence AmeriKKKa does around the world through TV shows like 24, The Unit etc which glorify violence and US fascist terrorism. The NeoCon’s stooges in the media are even calling for another 9-11 so they can “unite” the country to rally around Bu$h’s insane policies. This is the type of mentality we are faced with. As domestic skepticism towards Bu$h’s policies and resistance to US corporatist fascism grows, the ruling elites must spy on us and keep track of us for their own safety. This why they are now planing to use U 2 Spy Planes domestically because more and more AmeriKKKans are waking up to the NeoCons lies and tricks. More and more ordinary AmeriKKKans are getting a sinking feeling in the pit of their stomachs. Any sane person looking at AmeriKKKa today intuitively knows things are not good and they know they are going to get worse before they get better. The really sharp folks know conditions will not get better on their own! Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again with the same people, expecting things to turn out differently. The only way things will be different is when enough sane, peace and freedom loving people decide to make things different. That is why Bu$h and his fascist minions are spying on us, to prevent that from happening.

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Thursday, August 16, 2007

US Housing/Debt Crisis Is Much Deeper Than Media Says

US Housing/Debt Crisis Is Much Deeper Than The Media Says

“Subprime borrowers are no longer just low-income borrowers. They include high-income borrowers whose incomes and collateral value do not provide sufficient reserve for sudden changes in market conditions. A subprime borrower is one who over-borrows beyond prudent standards. The extra risk-premium value thus taken out of the mortgage sector contributes to the increase in liquidity to feed the debt market further, pushing the low credit standard of subprime lending further down. Once prime-credit customers have borrowed to their full credit limits, growth can only come from lowering credit standards, turning more prime borrowers into subprime borrowers. This is the structural unsustainability of CDO securitization, irrespective of the state of the economy, since risk of default is shifted from the state of the market to the direction of the market. Any slight turn in market direction will set off a downward-spiral crisis. The initial upward phase of this cycle is euphoric, like any addiction, but the pain will come as surely as the sun will set in the downward phase. Not many economists or regulators have yet focused on this structural defect of CDO securitization. The recent congressional hearings on subprime mortgages completely missed this obvious structural flaw.” US Economy: Liquidity boom and looming crisis by Henry C.K. Liu Global Research, May 9, 2007 Asian Times Online http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5592

The corporate media has made it seem like the subprime mortgage fiasco is the fault of people with low incomes and weak credit histories. To be sure many of the people who were induced by the Bu$h administration “home ownership” mantra, mortgage brokers and banks to jump on the housing bandwagon were folks who fit this profile: limited or stagnant incomes, poor credit histories and a lack of understanding of the intricacies of compound interest. These folks were the ones taking the early hits in the US real estate meltdown. “Several studies have used HMDA data to analyze whether specific racial and ethnic groups receive a disproportionate share of subprime loans. Because HMDA data does not specifically identify subprime loans, most of these studies have approximated which loans were subprime by using annual lists of predominately subprime lenders published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A 2000 joint report by HUD and the U.S. Department of Treasury explored the relationship between subprime lending and neighborhood racial composition. Relying on HMDA data, the study reported that subprime lending accounted for 51 percent of all refinance loans in predominately African-American communities in 1998, compared to only nine percent in predominately white neighborhoods. The study also found that these disparities persisted even when controlling for neighborhood income. A 2002 national study by the Center for Community Change analyzed the proportion of borrowers receiving subprime refinance loans by race and ethnicity and found pervasive disparities among African- American, Latino and white borrowers. In addition, the authors found that disparities persisted within income categories and actually increased as income went up. Specifically, while lower-income African-American borrowers were 2.4 times as likely to receive a loan from a subprime lender as lower-income white borrowers, upper-income African-American borrowers were 3.0 times as likely to receive such loans as upper-income white borrowers. At the same time, lower-income Latino borrowers were 1.4 times as likely to receive a subprime loan as lower-income white borrowers, and upper- income Latinos were 2.2 times as likely to receive such loans as upper-income whites.” Unfair Lending: the Effect of Race and Ethnicity on The Price of Subprime Mortgages http://www.responsiblelending.org/pdfs/rr011-Unfair_Lending
While statistically more people of color were steered to the higher priced mortgages and given loans they really couldn’t afford, we were not the only ones suckered into signing for loans at higher rates. “The subprime market is intended to provide home loans for
people with impaired or limited credit histories. In addition to lower incomes and blemished credit, borrowers who get subprime loans may have unstable income, savings, or employment, and a high level of debt relative to their income. However, there is evidence that many families who receive subprime mortgages could qualify for prime loans, but are instead ‘steered’ into accepting higher-cost subprime loans. As shown in Figure 1 below, in a short period of time subprime mortgages have grown from a small niche market to a major component of home financing. From 1994 to 2005, the subprime home loan market grew from $35 billion to $665 billion, and is on pace to match 2005’s record level in 2006. From 1998 to 2006, the subprime share of total mortgage originations climbed from 10 percent to 23 percent. Over most of this period, the majority of subprime loans have been refinances rather than purchase mortgages to buy homes. Subprime loans are also characterized by higher interest rates and fees than prime loans, and are more likely to include prepayment penalties and broker kickbacks” Losing Ground: Foreclosures in the Subprime Market and Their Cost to Homeowners http://www.responsiblelending.org/pdfs/foreclosure-paper-report
Obviously millions of subprime loans were not issued only to Black and Brown people. There are an awful lot of Euro-Americans and other folks who were steered to these high rate and high fee loans. What’s more, the Fed, the banking and finance systems repackaged these loans bundled them and resold them globally as collateralized debt. The Fed’s policies of extremely low interest rates, massive infusion of worthless paper money and their wink and nod towards predatory lending and exotic loans is what brought on the current economic catastrophe. The crisis is spreading to other markets within the economy and the whole world is feeling the shocks and tremors of instability and anxiety. “The Fed started inflating the housing bubble in earnest around 2001, after the collapse of the dot.com bubble, which failed with the stock market decline of 2000-2002. Then, over a trillion dollars of wealth, including working peoples’ retirement savings, simply vanished. Also according to mortgage specialists, it was in March 2001, two months after George W. Bush became president, that a ‘wave of intoxicated fraud’ started. Mortgage companies began to be instructed, by the creditors/lenders, on how to package loan applications as ‘master strokes of forgery,’ so that completely unqualified buyers could purchase homes. There could not have been a sudden onset of industry-wide illegal activity without direction from higher-up in the money chain. It could not have continued without reports being filed by whistleblowers with regulatory agencies. Today the government is prosecuting mortgage fraud, but they certainly had to know about it while it was actually going on. The bubble was coordinated from Wall Street, where brokerages ‘bundled’ the ‘creatively-financed’ mortgages and sold them as bonds to retirement and mutual funds and to overseas investors. Portfolio managers were directed to buy subprime bonds as other bonds matured. It’s the subprime segment of the industry that has now collapsed, triggering, for instance, the recent highly-publicized demise of two Bear Stearns hedge funds. And it’s not just lower-income home purchasers who are affected. The Washington Post has reported that for the first time in living memory foreclosures are happening in Washington’s affluent suburban neighborhoods in places like Fairfax, Loudon, and Montgomery Counties.” The Crashing U.S. Economy Held Hostage Our Economy is on an Artificial Life-support System by Richard C. Cook http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6239
The AmeriKKKan middle class and working class families are taking major hits on this. Most of the default and foreclosures are from members of the working and middle classes but effects of the mortgage collapse are spreading to global markets. “FRANKFURT: Fresh signs of trouble for U.S. mortgage lenders and ripple effects even across the Pacific unleashed a massive sell-off in Asian markets Wednesday. But the losses were more modest in Europe and on Wall Street as the U.S. Treasury Secretary cautioned against panic. The tumbling markets around the Pacific Rim underscored how quickly something that was regarded as a smart financial innovation a year ago can turn into a source of global instability. Lenders in the United States sold their subprime mortgages - loans made to less credit worthy buyers - on to investment banks, who repackaged them as bonds and peddled them worldwide. Now that the housing bubble is bursting in the United States, defaults on the underlying mortgages are rising and the impact is being felt around the globe, even though economic growth elsewhere is solid. A warning Tuesday from one subprime lender, American Home Mortgage Investment, that it could face liquidation preceded the Asian rout. Then Bear Stearns, which saw two of its hedge funds collapse last month, said it had barred investors from pulling money out of a third fund while it evaluates how to best emerge from the crisis. Fanning the flames was an announcement by Standard & Poor's that it was considering lowering its credit rating on several funds dealing in affected securities.” Ripple effects from U.S. mortgage crisis hit Pacific Rim By Carter Dougherty http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/01/business/stocks.php
Only massive infusions of money and credit by central banks around the world have forestalled massive panic. Even with all that, global markets are still very anxious and seem to be unconsolable. “A major global recession initiated by a collapse in U.S. house prices will probably usher in the chronic deflation we've been forecasting. Crude oil and other commodity prices will nosedive along with all fears of inflation. This deflation of 1% to 2% annual declines in major price indices will be the good deflation of tech-led, productivity-soaked excess supply, much like the late 1800s and the 1920s when concentrations of new technology propelled supply faster than demand increased. Nevertheless, a complete breakdown in housing and stubborn mortgage debt burdens could spawn the bad deflation of deficient demand, as in the 1930s in the U.S. and in Japan more recently, as consumer spending becomes moribund.” The Coming Collapse in Housing by John Mauldin http://www.safehaven.com/article-6329.htm
That report was written in 2006 but few took heed to John Mauldin’s analysis. The mainstream media tended to suppress or debunk such thinking. So much the pity. Now we are on the precipice of a major global economic collapse! Don’t go for the okey-doke the crisis is deeper than we are being told and it is far more extensive than just Black and Brown folks with poor credit histories.

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Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The Current Economic Collapse Is Deliberate

The Current Economic Collapse Is Deliberate

“The mighty wheels of commerce have rusted in place. Nothing is moving. Only the sense of panic continues to grow. Trillions of dollars poisonous CDOs need to unwind, but the banks cannot put them up for bid for fear that they’ll only get pennies on the dollar. This is what a slow-motion train-wreck looks like. The Fed’s cheap credit won’t help either. At best, it’ll just buy a little time before the true value of these bonds is established and trillions of dollars in market capitalization vanish into cyber-space. Banks, equities, hedge funds, insurance companies and pension funds are all in line to suffer major losses. The irony, of course, is that the Federal Reserve created this mess by lowering interest rates to 1% and flushing trillions of dollars into the economy. That cheap money created a series of lethal equity-bubbles in housing, credit, stocks and bonds which are quickly falling to earth. Expanding the money-supply might be a short-term fix, but it’s really just throwing more gas on the fire. Why add hyper-inflation to the long-list of existing problems? The volatility in the stock market is a red herring. We should be paying attention to the underlying problems which are just now beginning to surface. The banks have been originating loans and bundling them off to Wall Street to avoid the normal reserve requirements. Now they’ve been 'caught short' and don’t have adequate funding to cover their bets. If the Fed doesn’t help out, we’ll see at least one or two major bank closures.” Stock Market Brushfire; Will there be a run on the banks? by Mike Whitney http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6534

Once more and again the banking elites and their sock puppets who determine policy for credit and money have rigged the game in their favor so that in the coming collapse (and one is coming sooner or later) they and their cronies will be able to gobble up real estate, resources, companies and business at pennies on the dollar. Plus they will also be the ones who determine exactly how the US will get out of the mess its in, either through a general default, the creation of a consolidated North American economy or via perpetual wars and a domestic police state to control all the wage peons and debt slaves their policies have created. None of this is new. Crashes, depressions and economic downturns don’t happen by accident, nor are they spontaneous and unplanned. They happen because of actions by a select group of financiers and bankers who have the political influence to execute their plans, programs and agendas. “Greenspan has successfully piloted the nation into virtual insolvency. In fact, the parallels between our present situation and the period preceding the Great Depression are striking. Just as massive debt was accumulating in the market from the purchase of stocks ‘on margin’, so too, mortgage debt between 2000 and 2006 soared from $4.8 trillion to $9.5 trillion. In both cases the ‘wealth effect’ spawned a spending spree which looked like growth but was really the steady, insidious expansion of debt which generated economic activity. In both periods wages were either flat or declining and the gap between rich and working class was growing more extreme by the year. As Paul Alexander Gusmorino said in his article, ‘Main Causes of the Great Depression’: ‘Many factors played a role in bringing about the depression; however, the main cause for the Great Depression was the combination of the greatly unequal distribution of wealth throughout the 1920's, and the extensive stock market speculation that took place during the latter part that same decade’. The same factors are at work today except that the speculation is in real estate rather than stocks. Just as in the 1920’s the equity bubble was not created by wages keeping pace with productivity (the healthy formula for growth) but by the expansion of personal debt. Also, one could buy stocks without the money to purchase them, just as one can buy a $600,000 or $700,000 house today with zero-down and no monthly payment on the principle for years to come. The current account deficit ($800 billion) could also weigh heavily in any economic shake-up that may be forthcoming.” US Housing Market Crash to result in the Second Great Depression http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article383.html
Make no mistake there will be problems galore despite the recent infusion of massive amounts of worthless paper money and credit to prevent a run on the stock market, banks, and hedge funds around the world. The day of reckoning is upon us but the shysters who operate the stock market Ponzi scam, are trying vainly to forestall the obvious consequences of their criminality. “A crash is unavoidable because the policies were designed to create a crash. It’s that simple. The Federal Reserve is a central player in a carefully considered plan to shift the nation’s wealth from one class to another. And they have succeeded. Nearly 4 million American jobs have been sent overseas, the country has increased the national debt by $3 trillion dollars, and foreign investors own $4.5 trillion in US dollar-backed assets. While the Fed has been carrying out its economic strategy; the Bush administration has deployed the military around the world to conduct a global resource war. These are two wheels on the same axel. The goal is to maintain control of the global economic system by seizing the remaining energy resources in Eurasia and the Middle East and by integrating potential rivals into the American-led economic model under the direction of the Central Bank. All of the leading candidates—Democrat and Republican---belong to secretive organizations which ascribe to the same basic principles of global rule (new world order) and permanent US hegemony. There’s no quantifiable difference between any of them. The impending economic crisis is part of a much broader scheme to remake the political system from the ground-up so it better meets the needs of ruling elite. After the crash, public assets will be sold at firesale prices to the highest bidder. Public lands will be auctioned off. Basic services will be privatized. Democracy will be shelved.” Stock Market Meltdown by Mike Whitney http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6467
I was doing some research on the 1929 Stock Market Crash and trying to locate the findings of the Pecora Commision that investigated the 1929 Stock Crash. You can see a brief synopsis of the Commission at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecora_Commission but you will be hard pressed to locate or the results of the Commission’ investigation. I saw something a while ago about how in 1928 and ‘29 the large Wall Street investment bankers made it easy for massive stock market speculation and rigged the stock market so things would appear to be going well when in reality, the economy was unraveling. The Pecora Commission findings obviously have been suppressed and flushed down the memory hole ala what George Orwell wrote about in his novel 1984.
Like 1929, the current economic unraveling is another of the ruling elites’ rip offs ala the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980's and the Dot.com pump and dump scheme of the 1990's. Is there a silver lining I all this? In a way. Be glad the bankers' sock puppet George W. Bu$h wasn’t able to privatize Social Security. If Bu$h and his cronies had been successful in their attempt to get the Wall Streeters hands on the Social Security funds we would be in real doo doo! As things unravel even further the government will move to initiate a “bailout” of favored bankers (given the size of the collapse a true bailout is virtually impossible.). The US government will simultaneously clamp down on Joe and Jane Sixpack as the AmeriKKKan public wakes up and finds they are in debt up to their eyeballs with no way out and immigrants are taking the last of their good paying jobs. But in the meanwhile many pension funds, 401K funds and stock and bond portfolios of the ordinary folks will take major hits due to the mortgage collapse and the ripple effect in the hedge and derivative funds. Once the public awakens from their media induced coma, all hell will break loose. There may even be runs on mutual funds as well as banks. The government will have to act to quell the outrage and the police state will ratchet up to the point martial law and “homeland security” will make Stalin, Hitler and their totalitarian regimes look like Nirvana!!
For Black folks this piece may not mean much because we aren’t involved in the US economy that tough. We don’t have a lot of stocks or bonds, some of us may be into mutual funds but they will take a hit also! We will however, be swept up in the resulting drama, chaos, panics, hyperinflation and fascist police state. We will have to find ways to barter amongst ourselves, share goods and services and provide the basics for survival. It will not be pretty. None of this has occurred by accident it has all been planned and executed by the ruling elites. Whatever happens no matter how bad things may get, don’t panic. We have the intelligence to save ourselves we just have to wake up and see what is happening. Pay attention to what is going on even though we are not an integral part of the system. Free your mind the rest will follow.

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