Detroit’s Collapse Reveals the Awful Dystopia that the United States Is Becoming

The big question is whether Detroit’s bankruptcy and likely further decline is a fluke or whether it tells us something about the dystopia that the United States is becoming. It seems to me that the city’s problems are the difficulties of the country as a whole, especially the issues of deindustrialization, robotification, structural unemployment, the rise of the 1% in gated communities, and the racial divide. The mayor has called on families living in the largely depopulated west of the city to come in toward the center, so that they can be taken care of. It struck me as post-apocalyptic. Sometimes the abandoned neighborhoods accidentally catch fire, and 30 buildings will abruptly go up in smoke.

Detroit had nearly 2 million inhabitants in its heyday, in the 1950s. When I moved to southeast Michigan in 1984, the city still had over a million. I remember that at the time of the 1990 census, its leaders were eager to keep the status of a million-person city, since there were extra Federal monies for an urban area of that size, and they counted absolutely everyone they could find. They just barely pulled it off. But in 2000 the city fell below a million. In 2010 it was 714,000 or so. Google thinks it is now 706,000. There is no reason to believe that it won’t shrink on down to almost nothing.
The foremost historian of modern Detroit, Thomas J. Sugrue, has explained the city’s decline. First of all, Detroit grew from 400,000 to 1.84 million from 1910-1950 primarily because of the auto industry and the other industries that fed it (machine tools, spare parts, services, etc.) From 1950 until now, two big things happened to ruin the city with regard to industry. The first was robotification. The automation of many processes in the factories led to fewer workers being needed, and produced unemployment. (It was a trick industrial capitalism played on the African-Americans who flocked to Detroit in the 1940s to escape being sharecroppers in Georgia and elsewhere in the deep South, that by the time they got settled the jobs were beginning to disappear). Then, the auto industry began locating elsewhere, along with its support industries, to save money on labor or production costs or to escape regulation.
The refusal of the white population to allow African-American immigrants to integrate produced a strong racial divide and guaranteed inadequate housing and schools to the latter. Throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, you had substantial white flight, of which the emigration from the city after the 1967 riots was a continuation. The white middle and business classes took their wealth with them to the suburbs, and so hurt the city’s tax base. That decrease in income came on top of the migration of factories. The fewer taxes the city brought in, the worse its services became, and the more people fled. The black middle class began departing in the 1980s and now is mostly gone.

Other observers have suggested other concomitants of the decline, like poor city planning or the inability to attract foreign immigrants in sufficient numbers. I suspect that the decline of Detroit as a port is important somehow to the story (only one of the four old locks at Sault St. Marie lets big ships come down to the lower Great Lakes and therefore to Detroit any more. A new, big [pdf] modern lock is being built to accommodate larger vessels, but it will be a decade before it opens. Some observers point out that Detroit would make sense as a Midwest hub port for international shipping containers if its harbor was expanded and linked by rail to the cities of the region, but I suspect the new lock at the Soo is a prerequisite.
Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Shocking Things Wall Street Financiers Say Off the Record About Their Bloated, Corrupt Industry

“A particularly troubling and consistent finding throughout the survey is that Wall Street’s future leaders–the young professionals who will one day assume control of the trillions of dollars that the industry manages—have lost their moral compass, accept corporate wrongdoing as a necessary evil and fear reporting this misconduct.”
In a shocking new survey commissioned by the Labaton Sucharow law firm, Wall Street insiders say that breaking the law, screwing your clients and covering up crimes is a way of life on Wall Street. The shock is not that cheating is going on. We all know that. The shock is that these financiers would actually admit it on a survey. This should tell us that the Wall Street culture is so brazenly corrupt, so confident of not getting caught, so certain that a passive public won’t fight back that those surveyed didn’t even bother to lie about the fact that they were living, breathing sociopaths.

Here are some of the key findings of this sample of 250 traders, portfolio managers, investment bankers, hedge fund professionals, financial analysts, investment advisors, asset managers and stock brokers.

Catch me if you can!

“24% of financial services professionals likely would engage in insider trading to make $10 million… if they wouldn’t get arrested.  That figure surges to 38% for individuals with 10 years or less in the industry.”

Screw your clients.

“28% of financial services professionals feel that the financial services industry does not put clients’ interests first.”

They do it, so we have to do it too.

“More than half of respondents–52%–felt it was likely that their competitors have engaged in unethical or illegal activity to gain an edge in the market; 24% felt employees at their own company likely have engaged in misconduct to get ahead.”

Guess what? We still are cheating.

“Misconduct is still widespread in the financial services industry; 23% of respondents  indicated that they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace.”

To rise in a criminal organization, you have to be a criminal.

“Looking at seniority, 36% of respondents with 10 years or less experience in the industry believed financial services professionals may have to engage in misconduct to get ahead.”

The boss loves it when you cheat.

“17% of respondents felt that if leaders of their organization suspected that a top performer was earning large profits from insider trading, they likely would ignore the problem. More alarming, 15% of professionals in the industry believed that if leaders of their organization learned that a top performer had engaged in insider trading, they were unlikely to report that crime to law enforcement or regulatory authorities.”

(Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Weil comes to Wall Street’s defense by calling the survey a “worthless smear” because it’s not a scientific sample. But “scientific” or not, he has no explanation at all for why sizable percentages of these 250 respondents are so ethically challenged.)

Are the big banks and hedge funds criminal enterprises?

Given the attitudes of our financial elites, you would expect bad things to happen. The list of high crimes and misdemeanors is mind boggling, and growing every day.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Why Did the Fed Refuse to Heed Warnings About Fraudulent Mortgage Lenders?

Real regulators are vital to a nation. They can stop crises in their tracks — or they can let a them explode on an unsuspecting public. The Federal Reserve was warned by many different people, including appraisers, prosecutors, and industry players that the mortgage industry was rife with fraud. Why didn’t they listen?

The Appraisers’ Warning of the Lenders’ Fraud Epidemic
A very large number of appraisers have tried to combat home lenders and their agents who were deliberately extorting them to inflate appraisals.  When cheaters prosper, the markets drive honest firms and professionals out of business, something economists call “Gresham’s dynamic.” Honest appraisers tried to block this dynamic:
“From 2000 to 2007, [appraisers] ultimately delivered to Washington officials a petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers…it charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition, lenders were ‘blacklisting honest appraisers’ and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets” (FCIC 2011: 18).

There is a “recipe” by which fraudulent mortgage lenders (purchasers) optimize their reported (albeit fictional income); promptly making their controlling officers wealthy through modern executive compensation.  That recipe requires the massive origination (purchase) of bad loans, and inflating appraisals makes bad loans appear to be good loans and helps hyper-inflate bubbles.
The device lenders typically used to ensure the endemic inflation of appraised values was to blacklist honest appraisers. The fraudulent lenders took what had once been a very good practice, refusing to use appraisers who inflated appraisals or were simply incompetent, and perverted it into an instrument of extortion and fraud by blacklisting appraisers who refused to aid their fraud schemes by inflating appraisals.
We worked closely with appraisers and their professional bodies interested in preventing fraud when we regulated the S&L industry.  The Bank Board’s appraisal standard (R-41c) was considered the platinum standard for professional home appraisals.  The appraisers determined to stamp out appraisal fraud were the only professionals that supported our effort to crack down on the roughly 300 S&L control frauds.  The “Big 8” audit firms, the legal profession, and economists were impassioned opponents of our efforts to reregulate the industry and to hold the senior officers running the control frauds accountable.
The FBI’s Warnings of the Fraud Epidemic and the Financial Crisis it Would Create
In September 2004, Chris Swecker, the FBI official charged with responsibility for mortgage fraud, began warning publicly that an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud was developing.  Swecker predicted that it would cause a financial “crisis” if it were not contained.
Representatives of the Borrowers Warned the Fed about Endemic Mortgage Fraud
I will make this topic the subject of an entire article.  My conclusion from reading the transcripts of several hearings on mortgage abuses that Congress mandated the Fed to conduct is that representatives of nonprime borrowers overwhelmingly opposed the loans, typically explaining that they were frequently fraudulent and predatory.  ACORN was one of these groups warning the fed about nonprime loans.
State Prosecutors Warned the Fed about Endemic Mortgage Fraud
“Over the last several years, the subprime market has created a race to the bottom in which unethical actors have been handsomely rewarded for their misdeeds and ethical actors have lost market share…. The market incentives rewarded irresponsible lending and made it more difficult for responsible lenders to compete”
“[Many originators invent] non-existent occupations or income sources, or simply inflat[e] income totals to support loan applications. Importantly, our investigations have found that most stated income fraud occurs at the suggestion and direction of the loan originator, not the consumer” Miller, T. J., Iowa Attorney General (August 14, 2007).
Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Tensions Rise as Walmart Refuses to Pay "Living Wage"

(Photo: Walmart / Flickr)Washington, DC - Proponents of a proposed higher “living wage” requirement for workers at large retailers here in Washington are stepping up their campaign, urging the city’s mayor to sign pending legislation into law.
Dozens of other U.S. cities have enacted similar laws, which increase minimum wages at those businesses covered by the legislation by around 50 percent. Yet the legal battle here has garnered national attention because it appears to be aimed at one company in particular – Walmart.
“We want him [Mayor Gray] to remember that he was elected by the citizens and not by Walmart.” — Reverend Graylan Hagler of Faith Strategies
“We will give the mayor our support if he has the backbone to sign the bill,” Reverend Graylan Hagler, president of Faith Strategies, a religious group here that has led demonstrations in support of the living wage bill this week, told IPS.
“To cave in to the threat of this corporation is to send a mixed message to the public that somehow corporations can come in and damage our sense of self-respect.”

Walmart, which has been criticised for years for paying its employees and suppliers notably low rates, had previously announced plans to build six stores in the Washington area, its first stores in the city. But it also warned that it would halt those plans on at least three stores (three others are under construction) if the living wage legislation were passed.
“This is a difficult decision for us – and unfortunate now for most D.C. residents – but the council has forced our hand,” Walmart spokesperson Steve Restivo said in a statement.
Last week, the Washington city council passed the so-called Large Retailer Accountability Act, and sent it on to Mayor Vincent Gray. The bill requires all indoor stores of 75,000 square feet or larger, and with a parent company that has a gross revenue of at least one billion dollars, to pay their employees a minimum of 12.50 dollars an hour, minus benefits.
After the vote, Walmart made its threat to pull out of the area.
“With the passage of the Large Retailer Accountability Act, any future plans for retail expansion in the city must be revisited,” stated a letter from the company.
“Arbitrary conditions that subject our stores to rules that other employers, including countless competitors, are not equally subjected to unfairly distort the marketplace and are cause of grave concern.”
Since the vote, several other large retail stores that may be affected by the law – including Autozone, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Macy’s, Target and Walgreens – joined Walmart in opposition to the act.
In 2012, Walmart was sued by three female workers in Tennessee on behalf of female employees in four other southern states, claiming that the company pays women less than men and blocks promotions for female workers. The case was eventually thrown out by the Supreme Court.
Citizen values
The wage fight in Washington is part of a longstanding, and still building, push-and-pull in the United States.
The city of Chicago approved a similar bill seven years ago, and the city alderman who sponsored the bill, Joe Moore, said Walmart made the same kinds of threats – refusing to open stores while the legislation was even being considered. Then-mayor Richard Daley ultimately vetoed the legislation and Walmart subsequently opened several stores in the city.
New York State, too, raised its minimum wage in March, but only after the state allowed tax subsidies to stores that hire seasonal employees, including Walmart.
Here in Washington, the fight now is to try to ascertain what the residents – and voters – of the city may want.
“We want him (Mayor Gray) to remember that he was elected by the citizens and not by Walmart,” Hagler told IPS. “I think the mayor is smart enough and analytical enough to come around and do the right thing.”
Yet according to a poll carried out by Walmart, some 73 percent of DC residents in areas supposedly getting a store said they were in favour of Walmart.
For his part, Mayor Gray has previously promised his home ward hundreds of new jobs, with a new Walmart store in that area offering an obvious anchor for this pledge. According to many analysts, including Hagler, the mayor is now hesitant to take those jobs away.
“I’ve got to look at the full impact of the (living wage) bill,” Gray told reporters recently. “Everybody has looked at it from the perspective of Walmart, but it’s bigger than Walmart.”
Corporate bullying
According to some analysts, the impacts of a living wage are less dramatic for either side of this equation than is currently being admitted.
A study done by the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkley, for instance, found that if Walmart raised its minimum wage to 12 dollars an hour, and wanted to retain its profit margin, retail prices would only rise by around 1.1 percent.
“The notion that this (living wage law) is going to undermine Walmart’s business is so dramatically absurd,” David Cooper, an economic analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, told IPS.
Walmart has a history of driving out small regional competitors and undercutting their prices, while paying their workers so little that they can barely survive without public assistance, according to Cooper.
“DC has been a thriving and growing location for business, and Walmart would do great business even if they have to pay their workers more,” he says. “It would be a shame for the mayor to cave to what amounts to corporate bullying.”
Republished with permission from: Truth Out

The U.S. Government Will Borrow Close To 4 Trillion Dollars This Year

The Economic Collapse – by Michael Snyder
When you add maturing debt to the new debt that the federal government is accumulating, the total is quite eye catching.  You see, the truth is that the U.S. government must not only borrow enough money to fund government spending for this year, it must also “roll over” existing debt that has reached maturity.
Of course the government never actually pays any of that debt off.  Instead, it essentially takes out new debts to cover the old ones.  So the U.S. government is actually borrowing far more money each year than most Americans realize.   
For fiscal year 2013, the U.S. budget deficit will be about $845 billion, but on top of that the government will also have to borrow about 3 trillion dollars to pay off old debt that is maturing.  Overall, the U.S. government will borrow close to 4 trillion dollars this year, and that number will likely be even higher next year.  That is not going to cause a crisis as long as interest rates stay super low, but if interest rates begin to rise substantially, the game will change dramatically.
When the government borrows money, it has to pay it back someday.  Back in the old days, the federal government used to issue lots of debt that would not mature for a very long time.  But in recent years things have been very different…

In order to fund the government, the Treasury Department periodically auctions Treasury securities with various maturities ranging from 30-day Treasury bills to 30-year Treasury bonds, with 2-3-5-7-year and 10-year Treasury notes in between. It used to be that the bulk of Treasury borrowing was done in the longer-term instruments with maturities of at least 10 years.
In more recent years, however, this trend has shifted more toward shorter-term Treasury securities. There are pros and cons to both strategies. Generally speaking, the shorter maturities are considered more risky since short-term interest rates can vary frequently. Shorter-term maturities obviously have to be rolled over much more often. That raises the risk that there might not be enough buyers when the government needs them.

At this point, the average maturity of outstanding government debt is only 65 months, and only about 10 percent of all Treasury debt matures outside of a decade.
So what does that mean?
It means that the federal government must constantly roll over massive amounts of debt.  Once again, this is not too much of a problem as long as interest rates stay super low, but as John Cochrane pointed out, if rates start rising back to “normal” levels things could get quite hairy very quickly…

Here’s the nightmare scenario: Suppose that four years from now, interest rates rise 5 percent, i.e. back to normal, and the US has $20 trillion outstanding. Interest costs alone will rise $1 trillion (5% of $20 trillion) – doubling already unsustainable deficits! This is what happened to Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Don’t think it can’t happen to us. It’s even more likely, because fear of inflation – which did not hit them, since they are on the Euro – can hit us.

Sadly, those running things appears to be quite clueless.  For example, retiring U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann recently asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke why the national debt has remained frozen in place for 56 straight days even though we have been borrowing lots of money.  Bernanke seemed to have no idea how to answer that question…

As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, Bachmann asked how there could be no increase reported in the total debt when the government is racking up about $4 billion a day in new debt.
“After nearly 10 years as the head of the Federal Reserve, Chairman Bernanke could not answer my question today in Financial Services Committee,” Bachmann told WND.
She wondered if there’s a political motive.
“I asked whether the Treasury Department was cooking the federal government’s books as it was reported that the Feds debt balance sheet remained at $16,699,396,000,000 for 56 days straight, presumably so the Treasury Department wouldn’t officially register that once again the Congress had exceeded its legal borrowing limits.”

For the moment, the federal government is able to recklessly borrow and spend money and investors are rewarding this behavior with super low interest rates.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs is completely and totally unsustainable.  At some point global financial markets will begin to behave rationally, and when that happens it is going to mean a tremendous amount of pain for the United States.
Over the past decade, the U.S. government has added more than 11 trillion dollars to the national debt at a time when the U.S. economy has been steadily declining.  Anyone that thinks that we can continue to pile up more debt like this indefinitely does not know what they are talking about.
The following are some more statistics about the U.S. national debt for you to consider…
-Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars.  Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars.
-During Obama’s first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
-The U.S. national debt is now more than 23 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.
-If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
-If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
-If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
-Some suggest that “taxing the rich” is the answer.  Well, if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
-If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.
-The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.
-At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
-The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.
-The U.S. national debt is now more than 37 times larger than it was when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard.
-The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.
-Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that the U.S. government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilities in the coming years that we are counting on our children and our grandchildren to pay.  Kotlikoff speaks of a “fiscal gap” which he defines as “the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue”.  His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.
For the moment everything is fine because interest rates are incredibly low and the mockers in the “deficits don’t matter” fan club are having a field day.
But what is going to happen when interest rates return to rational levels?
How will the U.S. government be able to borrow the trillions of dollars that it needs to borrow every single year?
That is why it is so important to watch interest rates.  When they start skyrocketing, big trouble is ahead.

Worldwide Unemployment Crisis: There Are 93 Million Unemployed Workers In G20 Nations

Did you know that the total number of unemployed workers in G20 counties is now up to 93 million and that it is increasing with each passing day?  You see, the truth is that the United States is not the only one dealing with a systemic unemployment crisis.  This is literally happening all over the planet.  So what is causing this crisis?  Is there any hope that it will be turned around?  Well, unfortunately there are several long-term trends that have been developing for decades that have played a major role in bringing us to this point.  First of all, the giant corporations that now totally dominate the global economy have figured out that they can make a lot more money by replacing expensive workers that live in major industrialized nations with workers that live in nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages.  So it isn't really a huge mystery why there is such a huge problem with unemployment in the western world.  If you were running a giant corporation, why would you want to hire workers that will cost you 10 to 20 times as much as other workers?  A worker is a worker, and over the past decade we have seen a massive movement of jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.  In addition, large corporations are also trying to completely eliminate as many jobs as they can by using technology.  If a corporation can get a computer or a machine or a robot to do a task more cheaply than a human worker can do it, then why would that corporation want to continue to rely on human labor?  And of course we have seen an overall weakening of the economies of the western world in recent years as well.  This has been particularly true in the United States.  As these long-term trends intensify, the worldwide unemployment crisis is going to get even worse.
In fact, the director general of the International Labor Organization is fully convinced that unemployment is going to continue to rise in G20 nations.  Just check out what he told CNBC on Friday...

Unemployment will likely soar further in the group of 20 major economic powers without immediate action, Guy Ryder, the director general of the International Labor Organization told CNBC on Friday, comparing the jobs crisis to the 2008-2009 financial crisis and warning it needs to be tackled urgently.
"We have gone backwards. It is quite alarming to see...that unemployment has not gone down, in fact it's gone up," Ryder told CNBC at the G20 finance ministers' meeting in Moscow.
He said 93 million people were currently unemployed in the G20.

And when those living in G20 nations lose their jobs, they tend to stay out of work for a very long time.  In fact, 30 percent of unemployed workers in G20 countries have been out of work for one year or longer.
Major industrialized nations all over the planet are no longer able to produce enough jobs for their people.  In many "wealthy nations" the unemployment rate has already risen well up into double digits.  Just consider the following numbers...
-The unemployment rate is above 25 percent in South Africa.
-The unemployment rate in France recently hit a 15 year high.
-The unemployment rate in Italy is up to 12.2 percent, which is the highest in 35 years.
-The unemployment rate in the eurozone as a whole is up to an all-time high of 12.2 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Poland is 13.2 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Ireland is now 13.6 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Portugal has rocketed up to 17.7 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Greece is currently sitting at 26.9 percent and it is being projected that it will soon hit 30 percent.
-The unemployment rate in Spain is even worse than in Greece.  The unemployment rate in Spain is a staggering 27.2 percent.
Sadly, it looks like things are not going to be getting better any time soon.  In fact, global business confidence is now the lowest that it has been since the last recession.
So what about the United States?
Well, it is true that our official numbers do not look quite as bad as much of the rest of the world.  But the official unemployment rate in the U.S. has been at 7.5 percent or higher for 54 months in a row.  That is the longest stretch in U.S. history.
But at least it is not in double digits yet.
Things could be worse.
However, that does not mean that we are doing well either.
The mainstream media is attempting to convince us that everything is just fine because the unemployment rate has been "going down", but when you take a deeper look at the numbers that is not exactly an accurate assessment of our situation.
As the New York Times recently pointed out, the decline in the unemployment rate can almost entirely be accounted for by a decline in the labor participation rate...

Let’s take a step back. Lots of people lost jobs during the Great Recession. In the aftermath, the great surprise has been how few are looking for new jobs. Labor force participation, the share of adults working or trying to find work, has stagnated at about 63.5 percent, almost three percentage points below the pre-recession level.
The unemployment rate has dropped almost entirely because of this decline in labor force participation. In other words, it has not fallen because people are finding jobs. It has fallen because fewer people are looking for jobs.

To get a more accurate picture of what is really happening with employment in America, you need to look at the employment-population ratio.  It is a measurement of the percentage of the working age population that is actually working.  As you can see, the percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job has been declining since the year 2000...

As you can see, there has been no employment recovery.
When the mainstream media tells you that the employment numbers for June were "great", that is not being honest.  The truth is that the unemployment rate rose in 28 U.S. states and it only declined in 11 states during June, and as I mentioned yesterday, the U.S. economy actually lost 240,000 full-time jobs last month.
So no, things are not getting better, and the unemployment problems in the United States and in Europe are likely going to continue to get worse in the years ahead.
That is very bad news for most of us, because the only thing that most of us have to offer in the marketplace is our labor.  If the value that is placed on our labor is continually declining, then that puts us in a very difficult position.
It is almost as if we have all been drafted to play a very twisted game of musical chairs.  Each time the music stops, more chairs (jobs) are being pulled out of the game.
You might be doing okay for the moment, but what is going to happen when the music suddenly stops one day and your chair gets pulled out of the game?
That is something that you might want to start thinking about.

Michael Hudson Says Game Over for Our Post-Feudalistic Economy; and Detroit’s Second Chance

Michael Hudson Says Game Over for Our Post-Feudalistic Economy; and Detroit’s Second Chance

Europe delivers a blow to Israeli settlers

By Uri Avnery
On my 70th birthday, I received a gift from Yitzhak Rabin: he signed the document recognizing the existence of the Palestinian people, after many decades of denial. He also recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as its representative. I had demanded this, almost alone, for many years.
Three days later, the Oslo agreement was signed on the White House lawn.
This week I received another gift of similar magnitude, obviously in anticipation of my 90th birthday, which is due in less than two months.
No less an institution than the European Union has declared what practically amounts to a total boycott of the settlements, 15 years after Gush Shalom, the peace organization to which I belong, had issued a call for such a boycott.

The meaning and merits of the boycott

The European decision says that no Israeli institution or corporation which has any direct or indirect connection with Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights will receive any contract, grant, prize or suchlike from the EU or any member state. To assure compliance, every contract between Israelis and the EU will contain a paragraph stating that the settlements are not part of Israel.
A friend of mine sent me a message consisting of one word: mabrouk (congratulations, in Arabic).

Many enterprises in the settlements did not go there for ideological reasons… but because the Israeli government gave them (stolen) land for free, as well as all kinds of grants, exemption from taxes and other incentives.

If all this sounds a bit megalomaniac, please make allowances. I am just happy.
When we decided to organize our boycott in 1998, we had several interconnected aims in mind.
A boycott is an eminently democratic instrument, a form of non-violent resistance.
Every single individual can decide for himself or herself whether to join the boycott or not…
Many enterprises in the settlements did not go there for ideological reasons – capitalists are not generally known for their ideological fervour – but because the Israeli government gave them (stolen) land for free, as well as all kinds of grants, exemption from taxes and other incentives. It made economic sense for a corporation to sell their very high-priced site in Tel Aviv and get free land in Ariel. A boycott may counterbalance these gains.
Contrary to getting out into the streets and joining a demonstration, not buying something in the supermarket is a private affair. In a demonstration, one may get tear-gassed, water-cannoned or clubbed. One exposes oneself and may be put on a list somewhere or even dismissed from a government job.
Everybody can boycott. One doesn’t need to join an organization, sign a petition, identify oneself. Yet one has the satisfaction of doing something useful, in accordance with one’s convictions.
But our main purpose was conceptual. For decades, successive Israeli governments have striven to eradicate the Green Line from the map and the minds of the people. The main aim of the boycott was to reinstitute the real borders of Israel in the public mind.
We distributed many thousands of copies of the list of settlement enterprises, all on request.
The Israeli government paid us the unique compliment of enacting a special law that penalizes all calls for a boycott of the settlers’ products. Every person who feels harmed by such a call can demand unlimited compensation, without having to prove any actual damage. This could amount to millions of dollars.
We asked the Supreme Court to strike down this law, but the court has been dragging its feet for several years already, obviously afraid of passing judgment.
Yet while we were doing this, the European Union did the opposite. It practically helped to finance the settlements – the very settlements it declared illegal.

European schizophrenia

Actually, the new measures are not new at all. The agreement between the EU and Israel exempts Israeli products from European customs, as if Israel were a European country. Israel is already a participant in the European football league, the Eurovision Song Contest and other events and organizations. Israeli universities receive huge research grants from Europe and take part in European scientific projects.
All these agreements are in principle restricted to Israel proper and do not apply to the settlements. Yet for decades, the Brussels super-government had consciously closed both its eyes.
I know, because I myself travelled to Brussels years ago to protest against this practice, explaining to commissioners, officials and parliamentarians that they are in practice encouraging the settlements and inducing companies to relocate there. I was given to understand that they sympathize with our stand but are powerless, because several European countries, such as Germany and the Netherlands, block all attempts in the EU to act against apparent Israeli interests.
It seems that this obstacle has now been overcome. So I am happy.

Zionists of the left and right united

In Israel, the government received the news with consternation. Just a few days earlier, they could not have dreamed that this was possible.
In Israel, the European Union is an object of ridicule. Secure in the knowledge that we have absolute control of US policy, we could treat the EU with contempt, though it is our major trading partner. A large share of Israeli exports, including military equipment, goes there.
Government leaders are now sputtering with rage. Not one single politician has dared to speak in favour of the European decision. Right and left are united in condemning it. Binyamin Netanyahu declared that only Israel would decide where its borders were, and this only in direct negotiations. Never mind that he has obstructed significant direct negotiations for years.

Not one single [Israeli] politician has dared to speak in favour of the European decision. Right and left are united in condemning it.

Naftali Bennett, the minister of economy, who also happens to be the chief representative of the settlers, rejected the decision out of hand. Only a few days before, this political genius (and self-declared “brother” of Ya’ir Lapid) had announced that there was absolutely no pressure on Israel.
Lapid himself voiced his opinion that the European step was a “miserable decision”.
Bennett now proposes to punish Europe by stopping all EU humanitarian projects in the West Bank. (Recalling the joke about the Polish nobleman whose Jew had been beaten up by another nobleman and who threatened: “If you don’t stop beating my Jew, I shall beat your Jew!”)
But the most telling argument marshalled by Israeli leaders was that the European decision was undermining the valiant efforts of John Kerry to start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
This is the height of chutzpah. For months now, Netanyahu and his government have been doing everything possible to prevent the hapless Kerry from achieving his goal. Now they use his fruitless efforts as a fig leaf for the settlements.
The Labour Party’s Shelly Yachimovich, the official “leader of the opposition”, contented herself with repeating the call for negotiations. No hint of criticizing the settlers, for whom she has publicly declared her sympathy.
As usual in such situations, Israeli public opinion started a search for those to blame. But there is no one around.
Israel has no foreign minister, only a deputy, who happens to be one of the most extreme right-wingers in the Knesset. The last minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is facing trial for corruption, and the job is being kept open for him. Netanyahu obviously believes that no judge would dare to convict the fearsome Lieberman, after the attorney-general has already shrunk back from indicting him on the most severe charges.
With no minister (officially, the prime minister is filling the vacuum) and a demoralized foreign service, there could be no prior warning…

A devastating blow against thieves

The term “boycott” was coined in 1888 in a situation not dissimilar from ours now. It was about foreign domination, land and settlers.

The EU boycott of the settlements and their supporters will have a major economic impact. No one knows yet how much. But the moral effect is even more significant.

In Ireland, then under British occupation, there was a famine. Charles Boycott, the agent of an absentee English landlord, evicted local tenants who were unable to pay the rent. An Irish nationalist leader called on his countrymen not to attack Boycott physically, but to shun him. All his neighbors stopped all dealings with him, working for him or speaking with him. Boycott became the word for ostracizing.
The EU boycott of the settlements and their supporters will have a major economic impact. No one knows yet how much. But the moral effect is even more significant.
Even if massive Israeli-American pressure thwarts or at least postpones the European action, the moral blow is already devastating.
It tells us: The settlements are illegal. They are immoral. They inflict a huge injustice on the Palestinian people. They prevent peace. They endanger the very future of Israel.
Thank you, Europe!

Worldwide social activism demanding change

By Graham Peebles
Change is afoot. Confronted with state corruption and corporate greed, abuse of human rights, environmental chaos and extreme levels of economic and social injustice, the people, overwhelmingly the young, are taking to the streets demanding change and a new political/economic system that is inclusive and just.
With growing unity and confidence, people throughout the world are expressing their collective will and crying out for freedom, justice and equality, and to be listened to – not only by governments, but also by international institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and central banks. These are enormously powerful global bodies which influence and fashion economic frameworks that affect the lives of billions of people. Divisive, ideologically-rooted policies designed to serve the interests of corporations and multinational companies are causing suffering and anxiety among millions of people in developed and developing countries.

A system dominated by “the market” that places profit and reward above the wellbeing of people and the health of the planet must be fundamentally changed.

The scale and breadth of recent protests is unprecedented: people who in many cases have been suppressed for many years are awakening, demanding participation and social justice. The young are leading the charge, seeing clearly the need for a new way of living, one that observes human rights and allows and encourages freedom of expression, and new inclusive political systems free from the ideological constraints of the past.
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control”. These are rights which under the present unjust system are reserved for those who can afford them.
A system dominated by “the market” that places profit and reward above the wellbeing of people and the health of the planet must be fundamentally changed. It is such radical, commonsense demands that animate many of those marching in the streets and occupying the squares of some of the world’s great cities.

“The people have awakened”

Brazil is the latest country to witness mass protests. Enraged by increases in public transport costs, millions took to the streets in June 2013, marching in over 100 cities across the country, in peaceful protests, an outpouring of simmering resentment and anger at widespread social injustice, lack of participation in the decision making process and years of government corruption. Add to that the poor essential public services – health care and education, denied funds while the government is spending millions on major sporting events.
Such issues are found not only in Brazil, but in many countries throughout the world. “The feeling that took so many people to the streets is not only Brazilian, it’s not only Turkish [referring to protests in Turkey in June], it is global. It’s bigger than a president, the government”, a protestor told the Guardian newspaper. Elaborating, she added that the protests are “about an order, a system, our global system. The fact is that we don’t feel represented. We don’t have a voice”.
The present global political and economic system, an outdated construct designed by elites for elites, has fuelled staggering levels of inequality with enormous wealth and control resting in the hands of less than 1 per cent of the population.
Branko Milanovic, a leading World Bank economist, says “the bottom 77 per cent receive only 20 per cent of the world’s income”, and “a little more than 5 per cent of the world’s population receives 40 per cent of total world income”. In the United States, the 400 richest people “control more wealth than the bottom households combined, that’s 150 million people”. This is a staggering and shameful statistic from the the richest nation on earth. While 50 million US citizens rely on food stamps and languish in poverty, the US government  somehow manages to spend 1 trillion dollars on it’s armed forces – more than the military expenditures of the rest of the world combined.
In addition to the vast income disparity, there is the unjust, unequal distribution of the world’s resources, including food and water. Commonsense dictates that these resources should be shared equitably among the people of the world based on need, not on the size of ones wallet. Under the present system, however, the USA, which has 5 per cent of the world’s population, usurps and wastes 25 per cent of the world’s natural resources and produces a staggering 30 per cent of pollutants. It is a madness that has created tremendous resentment and anger among billions of people.

“We” replaces “I”

There are arguably two major movements that exemplify the current trend of global unrest and transformation: the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.

The Occupy movement

Occupy began in New York in September 2011 and by early October it had fuelled protests and occupations in 95 cities across 82 countries, including 600 communities in the US. It is based on social unity, is not ideologically driven and is leaderless – a criticism levelled at it by its detractors, enmeshed as they are in the past and unable or unwilling to imagine there may be an alternative way of working and organising society than the authoritarian, personality driven model. The people involved, Noam Chomsky says, “are not in it for themselves. They’re in it for one another, for the broader society and for future generations.” This shift in consciousness is key. Occupy promotes social responsibility and equality; it looks to the wellbeing of the group in contrast to the success of the individual at the expense of the group. This  quality can be found in Brazil’s protests: “we replaced I… we made the world listen that here beats a green and yellow heart full of hope and idealism, but before that love”, Tatyana Alves, one of the many protestors, told the Guardian.

The Arab Spring

The Arab Spring of 2011 brought the collapse of repressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, where rulers were forced from power. People power has also erupted in Syria and Bahrain, where force has been used to suppress the calls for change, with terrible consequences. In Egypt the social revolution started in 2011 has been re-ignited recently with huge demonstrations throughout the country. With an estimated turnout of as high as 17 million, these are Egypt’s largest protests since the 2011 revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. Angry and bitterly disappointed by “democratically-elected” President Muhammad Morsi’s year in office, the people ousted him and forced what is being described as a “people’s military coup”.
In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, one of the protestors, Carmen Bedawi, expressed the view of many, telling the Guardian: “The 2012 elections were unfair. The Muslim Brotherhood distributed oil and water to the poor people – they bought their loyalty. The cabinet was all Muslim Brotherhood and his [Morsi’s] clan.” The people have no faith in politicians and have lost patience with their duplicity. All too often they promise much when seeking office, and once enthroned deliver little or nothing.
Unity is both the key and the aim of the movement for change. “The people have revolted, they did not know how politics worked, they have learned in the last two years and now they do. And they are united”, said Carmen Bedawi. No government can stand indefinitely against the people of a nation, when they are united.

Global people power

The epidemic of social activism has seen demonstrations throughout the world. This is but a random taste of the scale of this unprecedented movement.

• Angola, 2001: workers go on strike in defiance of IMF-prescribed economic reforms.
• South Korea, 2000, 20,000 people protest against globalisation and in 2001 up to 50,000 demonstrate against restructuring plans proposed by the IMF.
• Zambia, 2002: thousands take to the streets to protest against food shortages, again caused by the IMF’s policies.
• Russia, 2011: an estimated 100,000 anti-Putin pro-democracy protestors marched through Moscow.
• Hungary, 2012: 100,000 people march in Budapest, protesting against anti-democracy legislation in the new constitution.
• Kenya, 2011: the “Unga [maize flour] revolution” starts; one activist tells IRIN ,“It’s high time people wake up.”
• Nigeria, 2012 thousands protest against increases in fuel and food prices, showing that “Nigeria is coming together as a family”, as one protestor said.
• Nepal, 2001: protests against World Bank policies.
• Uruguay, 2003: huge protests against IMF-imposed reforms, which almost bankrupt the country.
• Spain, 2002: over half a million people protest against the globalization and corporatization of Europe, and in 2011 the “Real Democracy Now” movement sees thousands march in 60 cities against austerity and government incompetence.
• Japan, 2011: tens of thousands attend anti-nuclear rallies in Tokyo and other cities.
• USA, 2001: 200,000-plus take to the streets to protest against IMF and World Bank policies and militarism, and in 2011, the ground breaking Occupy movement is born
• Papua New Guinea, 2001: weeklong protests against IMF/World Bank- imposed austerity.
• Greece, 2010 onwards: Greece aflame with demonstrations against European Central Bank (ECB) conditional loans – or bailout packages with their harsh austerity measures.
• Ethiopia, 2012: 10,000 mainly young people march in Addis Ababa demanding the release of political prisoners and an end to state corruption.
• Czech Republic, 2000: 50,000 protest at IMF and World Bank meetings in Prague,

The list is long and seemingly endless. It is a worldwide movement, a true democratic awakening, with people rising up against a range of unjust governmental and extra-government policies. Purification is a primary factor of this new movement and a quality of the times. Buried and ignored for too long, injustice, corruption, greed and dishonesty in all areas of life – large or small – are being brought to the surface.
The diseased, many-headed hydra of suppression, control and fear is being exposed and slain in the clear light of day, as the people of the world demand change, crying out for freedom, justice and the right to live decent, dignified lives free from fear.

The U.S. Government Will Borrow Close To 4 Trillion Dollars This Year

Source: Michael Snyder, Guest Post

When you add maturing debt to the new debt that the federal government is accumulating, the total is quite eye catching.  You see, the truth is that the U.S. government must not only borrow enough money to fund government spending for this year, it must also "roll over" existing debt that has reached maturity.  Of course the government never actually pays any of that debt off.  Instead, it essentially takes out new debts to cover the old ones.  So the U.S. government is actually borrowing far more money each year than most Americans realize.  For fiscal year 2013, the U.S. budget deficit will be about $845 billion, but on top of that the government will also have to borrow about 3 trillion dollars to pay off old debt that is maturing.  Overall, the U.S. government will borrow close to 4 trillion dollars this year, and that number will likely be even higher next year.  That is not going to cause a crisis as long as interest rates stay super low, but if interest rates begin to rise substantially, the game will change dramatically.

When the government borrows money, it has to pay it back someday.  Back in the old days, the federal government used to issue lots of debt that would not mature for a very long time.  But in recent years things have been very different...

In order to fund the government, the Treasury Department periodically auctions Treasury securities with various maturities ranging from 30-day Treasury bills to 30-year Treasury bonds, with 2-3-5-7-year and 10-year Treasury notes in between. It used to be that the bulk of Treasury borrowing was done in the longer-term instruments with maturities of at least 10 years.
In more recent years, however, this trend has shifted more toward shorter-term Treasury securities. There are pros and cons to both strategies. Generally speaking, the shorter maturities are considered more risky since short-term interest rates can vary frequently. Shorter-term maturities obviously have to be rolled over much more often. That raises the risk that there might not be enough buyers when the government needs them.

At this point, the average maturity of outstanding government debt is only 65 months, and only about 10 percent of all Treasury debt matures outside of a decade.
So what does that mean?
It means that the federal government must constantly roll over massive amounts of debt.  Once again, this is not too much of a problem as long as interest rates stay super low, but as John Cochrane pointed out, if rates start rising back to "normal" levels things could get quite hairy very quickly...

Here’s the nightmare scenario: Suppose that four years from now, interest rates rise 5 percent, i.e. back to normal, and the US has $20 trillion outstanding. Interest costs alone will rise $1 trillion (5% of $20 trillion) – doubling already unsustainable deficits! This is what happened to Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Don’t think it can’t happen to us. It’s even more likely, because fear of inflation – which did not hit them, since they are on the Euro – can hit us.

Sadly, those running things appears to be quite clueless.  For example, retiring U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann recently asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke why the national debt has remained frozen in place for 56 straight days even though we have been borrowing lots of money.  Bernanke seemed to have no idea how to answer that question...

As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke testified before the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, Bachmann asked how there could be no increase reported in the total debt when the government is racking up about $4 billion a day in new debt.
“After nearly 10 years as the head of the Federal Reserve, Chairman Bernanke could not answer my question today in Financial Services Committee,” Bachmann told WND.
She wondered if there’s a political motive.
“I asked whether the Treasury Department was cooking the federal government’s books as it was reported that the Feds debt balance sheet remained at $16,699,396,000,000 for 56 days straight, presumably so the Treasury Department wouldn’t officially register that once again the Congress had exceeded its legal borrowing limits.”

For the moment, the federal government is able to recklessly borrow and spend money and investors are rewarding this behavior with super low interest rates.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs is completely and totally unsustainable.  At some point global financial markets will begin to behave rationally, and when that happens it is going to mean a tremendous amount of pain for the United States.
Over the past decade, the U.S. government has added more than 11 trillion dollars to the national debt at a time when the U.S. economy has been steadily declining.  Anyone that thinks that we can continue to pile up more debt like this indefinitely does not know what they are talking about.
The following are some more statistics about the U.S. national debt for you to consider...
-Back in 1980, the U.S. national debt was less than one trillion dollars.  Today, it is rapidly approaching 17 trillion dollars.
-During Obama's first term, the federal government accumulated more debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
-The U.S. national debt is now more than 23 times larger than it was when Jimmy Carter became president.
-If you started paying off just the new debt that the U.S. has accumulated during the Obama administration at the rate of one dollar per second, it would take more than 184,000 years to pay it off.
-If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
-If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.
-Some suggest that "taxing the rich" is the answer.  Well, if Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
-If the federal government used GAAP accounting standards like publicly traded corporations do, the real federal budget deficit for 2011 would have been 5 trillion dollars instead of 1.3 trillion dollars.
-The United States already has more government debt per capita than Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or Spain does.
-At this point, the United States government is responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
-The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.
-The U.S. national debt is now more than 37 times larger than it was when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard.
-The U.S. national debt is now more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created.
-Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff is warning that the U.S. government is facing a gigantic tsunami of unfunded liabilities in the coming years that we are counting on our children and our grandchildren to pay.  Kotlikoff speaks of a "fiscal gap" which he defines as "the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue".  His calculations have led him to the conclusion that the federal government is facing a fiscal gap of 222 trillion dollars in the years ahead.
For the moment everything is fine because interest rates are incredibly low and the mockers in the "deficits don't matter" fan club are having a field day.
But what is going to happen when interest rates return to rational levels?
How will the U.S. government be able to borrow the trillions of dollars that it needs to borrow every single year?
That is why it is so important to watch interest rates.  When they start skyrocketing, big trouble is ahead.



UK borrowing £500m higher than 2012

UK govt. borrowing hits £12b in June, up £500m on last year

UK government public sector borrowing has increased to £12.4 billion in June, up £500 million on the same month last year, The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has reveled.
The amount of borrowing, excluding distortions such as bank bailouts and quantitative easing (QE) cash transfers, hit £12.4 billion which marks a slight rise from the £11.9 billion in June last year, the ONS said.
The current public borrowing seems to be another blow to the British Chancellor George Osborne™s plans to reduce budget deficit, as it suggests he is making no headway in bringing the deficit down in 2013-14.
œThese disappointing figures show that our stalled economy has led to deficit reduction grinding to a halt,” Shadow Treasury minister Chris Leslie said.

The Labour MP added that Osborne is borrowing billions of pounds to pay for œthe costs of his economic failure”.
Earlier in June, the opposition accused the British government of failing to reduce the amount of public sector borrowing.
MOS/HE

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Funky Friday: More than $32 billion in Microsoft stock value wiped out

Shares suffer biggest one-day percentage sell-off since 2000 as investors fret over weak demand for Microsoft's latest Windows operating system and Surface tablet.

When it came to Microsoft, it was "sell."

(Credit: Getty Images)

The weekend can't start soon enough for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who watched as investors drove down the company's stock by more than 11 percent Friday after a disappointing earnings report raised questions about demand for the latest Windows operating system as well as the Surface tablet.
The stock finished at $31.40, off $4.04 for the day. The percentage decline -- which wiped out more than $32 billion in stockholder value -- was the biggest slide in Microsoft's stock since the year 2000. More than 245 million shares traded hands compared with the 90-day average trading volume of 50 million.
On Thursday afternoon, Microsoft announced its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings and the report again raised questions about the CEO's bigger strategy. On the surface -- no pun intended -- the company posted decent numbers. Microsoft's net income was $4.96 billion, compared with a $492 million loss during the year-ago quarter. Revenue rose 10 percent to $19.9 billion. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the earnings were about 9 cents shy of Wall Street expectations.
The report also triggered new worries as sales by the Windows division fell almost 6 percent from the year-earlier period. Microsoft also took a $900 million write-down related to unsold inventory of its Surface tablet. It also fed the flames about the CEO's ability to navigate the company successfully into the post-PC era.
Earlier in the day, Nomura Securities' Rick Sherlund, an analyst who has followed Microsoft since the 1980s, put out a note to clients that bluntly questions the chances for success of a recent corporate reorganization that Ballmer announced last week. That move calls for the elimination of the current five Microsoft business units along with merging all three Microsoft operating systems into a single division. Also, marketing and business strategy decisions will get centralized in cross-company groups. The hoped-for upshot will be a more agile and responsive tech company. But Sherlund took a dim view of the reshuffle after going through the latest numbers.
"The recent reorganization does not fix the tablet or smartphone problem," he said. "The devices opportunity just received a $900 million hardware write-off for Surface RT and investors may not even like the idea of wading deeper into this territory."

How Whites Took Over America

Watch this short cartoon and listen to the Hasbara Neocon projection expressed by the British colonial officers. 'Humanism' seems to be a pre-text for genocide. Eventually, the indigenous  people are destroyed in the name 'liberal ethics' and even 'anti racism.' It is obviously there to remind us of the Zionist crime in Palestine.
This anti immigration/anti diversity film deserves attention - it contends that 'liberal tolerance' is actually inherently intolerant. This issue is becoming a priority, so it seems.

MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry: "Detroit is what happens when government is too small"

TEDxPannonia 2011 - Prof. Franz Hörmann - Society 2.0 - Entering a World...

Is America a Free Country?

“America does not have a functioning democracy – Jimmy Carter on NSA

by Justin Raimondo

ANTIWAR.COM

Jimmy Carter is making waves: “America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time,” he told a meeting of the American Bridge, held in Atlanta, when asked about Edward Snowden’s exposure of Washington’s secret global surveillance system. Looks like the only outlet that covered the meeting was Der Spiegel, but word is spreading and it won’t be long before the Usual Suspects start ranting about what a flake Carter is, and that he should shut up already and go lock himself in his presidential library. But think about it: for a former President to say this is unprecedented in modern times.
The NSA spying scandal, he went on to tell his audience, is subverting democracy around the world: he warned that one consequence of the Snowden revelations will be increasing suspicion of American online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, both of which he characterized as major factors energizing pro-democracy movements abroad.
Carter’s previous statements about the Snowden affair were mildly supportive: he told CNN he thought “the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive,” and that Snowden’s bringing the secret surveillance of Americans “to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.” Yet this new statement goes way beyond that: it is a sweeping condemnation of the current regime. That a former US President would say such a thing has got to be the scariest public pronouncement I’ve heard since the Watergate era. What’s even scarier: Carter is right.
America is no longer a democracy in the sense we have traditionally meant it. This is really the essence of what Snowden has revealed. The various surveillance programs he’s exposed – PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” Tempora, the telephony “meta-data” dragnet, etc. – are all tools necessary for the construction of what can only be called a police state.
An authoritarian regime has no way to measure public discontent except in this manner: since there is no free media, no political pushback to the regime’s depredations, and no way to discover what people really think, the only way to track – and crush – dissent is by spying on the population. The Soviets and their allies did this – and now it is the turn of their American successors.
Oh, but how can you say that? – I can hear the objections before they’re even vocalized. After all, America has free elections, a free (unregulated) media, and all the accouterments of a Western liberal democracy.
Except all of the above is mostly untrue.
Sure, America has elections, but how democratic are they, really? There are only two political parties in this country, and both of them are privileged by the state over all other political entities and parties: they get automatic ballot status, while other parties must jump over the most onerous hurdles to be listed on the ballot. “Third” parties are effectively outlawed. Hardly what one might expect of a nation so zealous to export “democracy” to the rest of the world, but then lack of nerve was never an American shortcoming.
Given this electoral duopoly, it is quite easy for the political Establishment to manage the system and make sure it doesn’t go “out of bounds” in nominating – or, worse, electing – a candidate dubbed too “extreme” by the Powers That Be, and so duly labeled by our compliant media. Which brings me to the “free” media question….
There is no censorship of the media in the US – because it isn’t necessary. The media censors itself quite willingly. More than that: as the Snowden affair has shown, the “mainstream” media is even more fanatical than US government officials about shutting down dissent. It was David Gregory, you’ll note, and not the Attorney General, who demanded Glenn Greenwald give a reason why he shouldn’t be arrested along with Snowden. None other than longtime respected reported Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post, echoed Gregory’s remarks. And of course there’s the minor league pundits, like MSNBC’s Joy Reid – on the “left” side of the spectrum – alongside neocons like Bill Kristol and some of the more unhinged among the Fox News crowd, who have been calling for Snowden’s head from Day One.
This is not to say there aren’t voices of dissent in America – there are. But there are similar voices in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and I don’t hear anybody hailing that country as a bastion of liberal democracy. Russia, too, has an uncensored media, and for precisely the same reason we do – because official censorship is redundant. The media self-censors without even being asked.
Okay, there’s an imprecise formulation up there: “for precisely the same reason” isn’t very … precise. The reason we stand virtually alone in the world in having a media uncensored by government is this document we call the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to speak freely. However, this right has been abridged over the years to the point that it can be violated by government officials almost at will: the WikiLeaks case proves that beyond any doubt.
The Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers is an important part of that generalized assault on the Constitution because tyranny requires one big ingredient in order to take root and metastasize: secrecy.
There are two views of the process by which the US government created a vast surveillance apparatus that scoops up virtually all data transmitted over fiber optic cables in the US and abroad. There’s the naïve liberal view, which says it was a gradual and largely undirected process that eventually got out of hand and created the infrastructure of an American police state by accident. It was all a big mistake!
This view makes zero sense, and should be dismissed out of hand. The reason: the dirty deed was done in the dark. Not even members of Congress knew about it, and those who did were forbidden from telling their constituents the truth. They could only drop hints, here and there, ambiguous warnings that Big Brother is bigger than anyone imagined. It took Snowden to unveil the face of the Leviathan for all to see.
The other view of this is mine: that the whole procedure was (and is) part of a deliberate plan, a long term project by our wise rulers to ready themselves for the day when their power confronts a serious challenge. No, I’m not talking about the American state defending itself against a terrorist attack, or any kind of external threat – I mean a homegrown threat, one perhaps provoked into action by an economic crisis or some other cathartic event.
Anybody who thinks PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” Tempora, or any similar outrages against liberty still be to exposed have anything but a tangential relation to our government’s “war on terrorism” is living in a fool’s paradise. Sure, we want to spy on foreigners, as our European allies have discovered to their chagrin, but don’t kid yourself: the real purpose of the Panopticon is spying on the American people. READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE : ANTIWAR.COM

BREAKING: Chinese media says there has been an explosion at Beijing airport

An explosion at the arrival hall of Beijing’s Capital International Airport shocked travellers and may have killed one person, according to messages and photos posted by several different witnesses on China’s popular social media platform Weibo.
The strong explosion occurred at about 6.24pm on Saturday at Terminal 3 of the Beijing airport, according to these accounts.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1287064/breaking-news-explosion-beijing-airport-one-may-be-dead-witnesses
Pictures:
https://twitter.com/ska_kongshan/status/358533507389218816/photo/1
https://twitter.com/exosarang/status/358542936427880448/photo/1
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BPnOTBWCYAAAfbm.jpg
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2013-07/20/c_132558572.htm
Wheelchair user blasts Beijing airport, injures himself

A man in a wheelchair was responsible for an explosion that rocked Beijing Capital International Airport, Chinese media said. He allegedly attempted to blow himself up to protest a brutal police beating that left him disabled, Twitter reports claimed.
The suspect behind the blast in the arrivals hall of terminal three of the Beijing airport has reportedly been identified as Ji Zhongxing from Shangdong, CCTVNews reported. The Sina Weibo microblog of state broadcaster China Central Television said a man detonated a package of black gunpowder used to make firecrackers just outside the international arrivals exit.
Local media quoted by the South China Morning Post said the man was rushed to hospital. His condition remains unknown.
http://rt.com/news/beijing-airport-china-explosion-362/
Man in a wheelchair detonates small device at Beijing International Airport terminal
There has been an explosion at Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal 3, with a man in a wheelchair apparently detonating a device.
Photos posted on China’s Weibo microblogging site showed a dark-haired man waving a white package in the air before the blast.
Later images showed the wheelchair on its side with officials treating a man on the floor.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23388448#TWEET828242
NEWSMAN

Gold And Silver – When[?] Precious Metals Bottom Is Irrelevant To Your Financial Health

by Michael Noonan
As ardent as Precious Metals, [PMs], buyers are, a good many of them do not comprehend
their importance.  Everyone agrees they are resoundingly better than any fiat currency, as
history has amply proven.  However, few consider the why PMs are so anathema for all
central bankers.
There was a time in this country when gold and silver were the coin of the realm.  Actually,
they still are!  The Coinage Act of 1792 has never been repealed, and that means, by law,
gold and silver are, [read section 20], the current money of account of the United States.
There is a very potent message within that Act, and like we said last week, Knowledge is
not of value, using it is.
Here is what not enough people know, even in the PM community: The qualities within a
gold coin are title, rights, and interest.  When gold was used to purchase anything, all title,
rights, and interest transferred from the gold coin to whatever was purchased.  It was paid
in full.
By contrast, thanks to the Rothschilds, the genesis for the entire Western world’s financial
system, central bankers have replaced ALL title, rights, and interest in whatever you buy
with commercial debt instruments, liens.  All Federal Reserve Notes are evidences of debt.
They are not “dollars,” even though the word is printed on them, and the Federal Reserve
has admitted as much.  Federal Reserve Notes, [FRNs] are commercial debt instruments,
and they are issued by the privately owned corporation, The Federal Reserve.
Debt is not money.  It never was and never will be.  The lie has been sold to the public, and
the public has bought it, in its entirety.  As an aside, if you have not yet looked up cognitive
dissonance, this would be a good time.  What is a FRN?  It is not Federal; it is issued by a
private corporation.  Look up Federal Reserve in any government blue pages in the phone
book.  It ain’t there.  You will find it closer to Federal Express in the white pages.
There are no reserves backing a FRN.  It is the same as monopoly money.  Each have the
same intrinsic value.  One is believed [cognitive dissonance, again] to be of value, the other
is known as play money.  A few know the truth and see the two as equal.
It is not a note.  There is no promise to pay anyone anything at anytime.  Any questions?
Debt is a lien, so whenever you use FRNs to buy anything, whatever you purchase carries
with it a lien.  This is why when you purchase a house or a car, the government keeps real
title, and all you get is an equitable title, usage, like a rental because you pay annual rent
back to the government.  Whenever you sell your house or car, the lien transfers with it.
No matter what you “buy,” a house, a car, furniture, equipment, etc, the lien of 100% goes
along with it, because you used a FRN, and all title, rights, and interest fully belongs to the
creditor, the Federal Reserve.  Also, for the privilege of using a FRN debt instrument, you
get to pay a tax on them.  [Enter IRS]
With gold and silver, you paid in full for whatever you bought, and you received all rights,
title, and interest.  The government has no claim against you.  You do not need the
government because you are dealing with coin of the realm that gives you absolute right,
title, and interest.  Can you better understand why Socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt
ran the scam he did for the New World Order to have all “persons” turn in their gold, an
order issued by Executive Order.  Few knew that Executive Orders only applied to those
within the  employ of the federal government!  Of course, the federal government did
nothing to dissuade those who falsely believed otherwise, and still do.
Why are gold and silver so important to your financial health, and why are they so fiercely
opposed by governments?  Three words:  Rights, Title, Interest.  By stripping people of
their most accessible form of wealth, they became dependent upon the government.  How
many people are dependent upon Social Security, [another scam], Medicare, and now the
largest growing segment, Food Stamps?
If you have wealth, and gold and silver are forms of wealth, [no matter how anyone would
say otherwise], you do not need fiat; you do not need the government.  However, the
government needs you!  By taking away your wealth and leaving you only with debt, you
are caught up in their web.
The above explanation has been the primary reason why the New World Order has taken
over each Western country’s currency, replacing all gold and silver backed lawful currency
with [worthless] paper fiat.  As Chuck Colson, then Special Counsel to Nixon back in the
1970s, was quoted as saying, “When you’ve got them by the [financial] balls, their hearts
and minds will follow.”  Guess where the New World Order has you?
Think about this when you next use your credit card, or fiat FRNs.  Prior to the 1930s,
Americans used coin of the realm, and  United States Notes, [actually issued by the US]
that were backed by gold and silver, with a promise to pay metal specie if one wanted to
have their lawful money so redeemed.  Now, thanks to fiat, the United States has slipped
into Third World status, just not yet recognized by the masses.  It is going to continue to
get worse.

The above issue has now been compounded by the growing concern that central bankers
have little to no gold left, even though they have been leasing, releasing, and scamming
everyone with their previously unquestioned practices.  There are numerous “stories”
relating this latest ongoing scam, so we need not dwell any further on it.
There are two situations going on.  Some express it as “the price of gold, or the gold price.”
We do not know what that means?  What is the price of gold, if not the gold price?  Having
some clever form of expression will never resolve the problem.
One more time.  Buying and holding physical gold and silver gives you rights, title, and all
interest, aka full ownership.  Acquiring them during theses tumultuous times is your best
form of wealth protection moving into an increasingly uncertain future.  If you want to
attach physical ownership  to the paper prices that are fully controlled by central bankers,
you can, but it misses the point for your future financial well-being.
If you choose to play the lien game and deal in fiat, with a lien attached to everything you
have, that, too, is a choice with a guaranteed certainty of uncertainty for the future.  There
is one thing on which almost all can agree, the central bankers are not about to give up
their uber-wealthy fiat scam, and if they cannot meet their obligations to make delivery on
physical PMs, they will [forcefully] buy people off and keep their game alive.
How long can they keep their game going?  Longer than most expect.   For that view of
artificial reality, we turn to the charts.
There is no evidence of a change in trend.  That means gold can still go lower, possibly
move sideways, and have occasional rallies, a natural feature of all bear markets.  Know
that it takes time to turn a trend around.  If you keep a focus on what the intrinsic value
of gold and silver offer, [rights, title, interest], you may feel less pressure to have price
turn around to the upside and more secure in your holdings.  At current low prices,
opportunity is so ripe.

Mention was made that rallies are a normal feature of any bear market, and it is possible
gold may break through the immediate resistance area of 1,300, as we show on the daily
chart.  If you look at late June, when price declined under 1,300, there was a brief two-day
rally that failed.
Compare those two trading days then with the last seven now.  Price is not reacting away
from that resistance.  We often state that the how of a price reaction, or lack of one, is the
market’s way of telling us what is likely to happen.  It appears that buyers are absorbing
sellers defending 1,300, and it may give way, next week.
The two strongest volume days in July did not result in any downside follow through, and
that, in itself, is a message.  You will read more and more articles touting how gold and
silver have bottomed.  They have not, at least according to price behavior as determined by
actual buyers and sellers in the market.
One has to suspend reliance on the natural order of supply and demand in the PMs, for
now, until the unnatural forces of faux supply, pretend non-existent interest of demand
by central bankers plays itself out.

We can say with certainty that there has been greater buying than selling at the lows in
both metals, and that shows clearly in the silver weekly chart.  We do not know how much
is simply short-covering, still a positive sign, and how much may be actual new longs being
accumulated by smart money.

The daily silver is similar to but not as strong as gold.  Still, evidence is growing to expect
some sort of rally.  Until we see the how and the extent of any rally, there can be no change
in the assessment that the trend remains down.
We have been urging our readers each and every week, buy physical gold, physical silver,
price is not the issue.  Having it is!  Perhaps now you better understand why.  In addition
to buying either or both, we also continue to advocate holding it personally.  If you do not
hold it, you do not own it.  Your financial health depends on it.