Who is Maurice Strong?

Maurice Strong, the Father of America’s Destruction (Crime, Inc. mack daddy)
Richard Salbato

Locust: he is a very bad man. Glenn beck has it wrong, they surround us, look up the book: starving the monkeys, the book Glenn beck does not want you to read.

The book Glenn Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh’s personality management doesn’t want you to see.

Starve the Monkeys Who Eat Away At Your Life
An Individualist’s Guide to Fighting Modern Progressives
They’ve just gotten started…

More on what you came to look for.

Rothschild, Rockefeller, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Goldman Sachs, Mayor Daley, William Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Saudi Arabia, China and the United Nations equals Barak Obama.

When we look at what has happened to the American dream, the American Constitution, the American economy in the past 12 months, it seems that there is a deliberate plan to completely destroy the entire American way of life and even the country as we know it.

When you look at the national debt, the bail outs of the banks, the fake stimulus bill, the health care bill, the coming cap and trade, the loss of jobs at the same time government workers have increased wages by 100% and more, and the exposed lies about Global Warming and Obama’s birth and mother, we can only conclude it is a master plan to destroy America.

But I have had a problem finding out who is behind all these obvious changes, which are against the will of the people. In order to trace “why” and “father” of these problems, I have had to go back 50 years and found the organization and man behind all this and the front man behind Barak Obama.

His name is Maurice Strong, born in Canada, lived in New York, and now exiled in China, but still the power behind Obama and the liberal House and Senate of America. To start to understand this man and his influence read his statement below to a group of reporters.

“In order to save the planet, the group [GIM] decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about? This group of world leaders [GIM] forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse.”

Maurice Strong – regarding Generation Investment Management LLP

George Soros and his Canadian sidekick, Kyoto architect Maurice Strong, are the brains behind the likes of Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev and Barak Obama, all who belong to the above and the “Chicago Climate Exchange” which will make billions on climate change.

Barrack Hussein Obama is the one out in front talking about “Change we can believe in”, but the senator from Illinois is only the latest puppet.

We already know from the Internet that Soros has gone a long way to bankroll Obama’s campaign, but not so well known is that Soros worked in conjunction with Maurice Strong to saturate the American automobile market with the China-produced Chery.

“Like the bad guys in a spy movie, Soros and Strong teamed up on the Chery, a sort of poor man’s made-in-China vehicle, with which they hope to flood the U.S. market next year.”

Strong has been saying all along that China would someday soon replace the U.S. as world economic leader.

Described in countless media write-ups as a cross between the Wizard of Oz and Dr. No, the Canadian oil billionaire was the Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on the environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro where the unveiling of Agenda 21 took place and subtly began to change the world as the rest of us know it.

“With little media monitoring, Strong and Gore are cashing in on the lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.”

“Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.

“Gore buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C.”, of which he is both chairman and founding partner.”

“In order to save the planet, the group [GIM] decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”

“This group of world leaders [GIM] forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse,” Strong told the reporter in painting his so-called fantasy scenario.

“It’s February. They’re all at Davos. These aren’t terrorists. They’re world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world’s commodities and stock markets.

They’ve engineered, using their access to stock markets and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world’s stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the rest of the world leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can’t close…

Two weeks ago, financial analyst Jim Rogers said the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made America more communist than China!

“This is welfare for the rich,” he said. “This is socialism for the rich. It’s bailing out the financiers, the banks, the Wall Streeters.

Even ex-president Putin, just today, said as Russia rid itself of Marxism, America is embracing it.

The world’s second richest man, worth some $44 billion, gave 85% of his wealth in July of 2006 to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The lion’s share of the Gates foundation goes into United Nations sanctioned projects. Make that the fomenting for One World Government anti-American United Nations.

As Henry Ford once said:

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. The one aim of these financiers is world control by the creation of inextinguishable debt.” Welcome to One World Government.

Not only has it slipped in through the back door, it is right here about to keep you awake at night.

Obama, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, Chicago Climate Exchange Judi McLeod Canadian Free Press

“While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

*snip*

We are not going bankrupt, we are already bankrupt

Maurice Strong is someone you should know. After all, he’s a major player in the bureaucratic move towards one world government.

Who is Maurice Strong?

“THE survival of civilization in something like its present form might depend significantly on the efforts of a single man,” declared The New Yorker. The New York Times hailed that man as the “Custodian of the Planet.” He is perpetually on the short list of candidates for Secretary General of the United Nations. This lofty eminence? Maurice Strong, of course. Never heard of him? Well, you should have. Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of “global governance” that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans’ lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the “indispensable man” at the center of this creeping UN power grab.

Among the hats he currently wears are: Senior Advisor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Senior Advisor to World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Chairman of the Earth Council; Chairman of the World Resources Institute; Co-Chairman of the Council of the World Economic Forum; member of Toyota’s International Advisory Board. As advisor to Kofi Annan, he is overseeing the new UN reforms.

Yet his most prominent and influential role to date was as Secretary General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development –the so-called Earth Summit — held in Rio de Janeiro, which gave a significant push to global economic and environmental regulation.

“He’s dangerous because he’s a much smarter and shrewder man [than many in the UN system],” comments Charles Lichenstein, deputy ambassador to the UN under President Reagan. “I think he is a very dangerous ideologue, way over to the Left.”

“This guy is kind of the global Ira Magaziner,” says Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute. “If he is whispering in Kofi Annan’s ear this is no good at all.”

The following is Maurice Strong’s biography from Yale University. Again, you’ll see he’s a key player in the UN, World Bank, and Earth Council among many others.

Speaker Biographical Information – Maurice Strong

Mr. Maurice Strong serves as Senior Advisor to both the Secretary-General of the United Nations and to the President of the World Bank. He is also Director of the World Economic Forum Foundation, Chairman of the Stockholm Environment Institute and of the Earth Council. Since 1999 he has been President and Rector of the United Nations University for Peace (Universidad para la Paz) in Costa Rica.

Mr. Strong is perhaps most well-known for the role he played in organizing the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (Earth Summit), where he served as Secretary-General. At Rio, he challenged the governments of the developed world to extend significant financial aid—over $600 billion— to the developing world as reparation for a century of industrial development and the environmental degradation. As Director of the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, Mr. Strong successfully placed global environmental issues on the international agenda for the first time. The conference in Stockholm has come to be known as the first Earth Summit.

Obama helped fund the Chicago Climate Exchange, which Al Gore and Maurice Strong cashed in on!

Chicago Climate Exchange

In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”

The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.

The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.

For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.

Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”

The real agenda is World Socialism …

Maurice Strong and Agenda 21

The UN has devised a plan where upon they take from the rich (you and I and anyone else in the world that works for a living) and give to the poor (those countries who refuse to elevate themselves due to corrupt governments, societal concerns, etc..) Just like “Oil for Food” however, the real plan is just to steal our money and institute a mafia like system to bully us into cooperation.

Agenda 21

Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.

Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, and the Statement of principles for the Sustainable Management of Forests were adopted by more than 178 Governments at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) held in Rio de Janerio, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992.

No tin-foil hats needed. This is all happening right out in the open.

Globalist Socialism

[T]he Commission on Global Governance, founded in 1992 at the suggestion of former West German Chancellor and socialist Willy Brandt. Maathai worked on the CGG alongside Maurice Strong, Jimmy Carter and Robert McNamara. The group’s manifesto, “Out Global Neighborhood,” calls for a dramatic reordering of the world’s political power – and redistribution of the world’s wealth.

Most importantly, the CGG’s proposals would phase out America’s veto in the Security Council. At the same time, it would increase UN authority over member nations, declaring, “All member-states of the UN that have not already done so should accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court.” It asks the UN to prevail upon member governments to enact proposals made by wide NGOs – such as the Green Belt Movement. “Our Global Neighborhood” also suggested creating a 10,000-man “UN Volunteer Force” to be deployed at the UN’s approval on infinite peacekeeping missions everywhere (except Iraq).

In its economic section, the report calls for the international taxation of multinational corporations and for a worldwide carbon tax. A new international “Economic Security Council” would assure the world’s economic growth takes place according to “sustainable development” principles. The IMF would be given the ability to interfere in the economic policies of member nations “to ensure that domestic economic policies in major countries are not…damaging to the rest of the international community.” Call it pre-emptive regulation.

World governance, global taxes, UN authority … This is serious stuff folks.

Maurice Strong Pushes Incremental, Radical Action to Achieve Global Government

MaximsNewsNetwork, a UN news outlet posted an interview with Maurice Strong on October 14, 2009, in which power-behind-the-throne chieftain and current Chinese national Maurice Strong talks about the Copenhagen conference. In the interview Strong stated- among other things- that “What is necessary is a global system of governance through which the nations of the world cooperate to address issues which none can deal with alone.”

The truth about environmentalism. In their own words …

Environmentalism Is Racism

• Merton Lambert, former spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation: “The world has a cancer, and that cancer is man.”
• Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund: “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
• Maurice Strong, U.N. environmental leader: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
• Ted Turner, CNN founder, UN supporter, and environmentalist: “A total population of 250–300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

No representation …

Kyoto Protocol compiled by un-elected global bureaucrats

THE Kyoto Protocol was the work of thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians. But no one person is more responsible for it than a Canadian named Maurice Strong.

Strong organized the UN first-world environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 and has never stopped pressing for a world where UN resolutions would be enforced as law all over the Earth.

Strong went on to chair the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio and to become senior adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary general. Not bad for a kid from Oak Lake, Manitoba, who dropped out of school at age 14.

But Strong is different than other social butterflies who flit from one UN conference to the next. He is a powerful businessman, who has served as president of such massive energy companies as Petro-Canada and Ontario Hydro, and on the board of industrial giant Toyota.

He is a huge political donor, not just here in Canada, but to both the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. as well.

Maurice Strong is a very dangerous man. He and the rest of his one world government cohorts must be stopped.

Woman still suffers lingering effects of assault, but attacker released early

Woman still suffers lingering effects of assault, but attacker released early

Violent attack shattered lives – chicagotribune.com

In the photo, Jennifer Hall sits beside her boyfriend, Joe Hoffman. Her hair cascaded down both sides of her face and her lips were parted in a half-smile. It was Aug. 25, 2008, her 36th birthday.

“My hair was down to my waist for 20 years,” she said. “I woke up bald — no teeth, 85 staples in my head — out of a drug-induced coma.”

Two hours after the photo was taken, Hall and Hoffman were attacked by a homeless man, Derrick King, near Wabash Avenue and Roosevelt Road, after telling him they didn’t have any cigarettes. King and a second person then beat, stomped and kicked Hall unconscious, she said.

When King, 48, pleaded guilty this October to two criminal charges in the attack and was sentenced to three years in prison, Hall and Hoffman thought he wouldn’t be able to harm anyone else — at least for a while.

But just 18 days after that plea, state records show, King was paroled as part of the early-release program that Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday called “a big mistake.” And the next day, King allegedly threatened another woman, near the same place he attacked Hall, yelling, “Remember the couple who got beat real bad for not giving a cigarette? That was me,” police said.

Arrested again, King is back in prison after being charged with assault. Despite the three-year sentence for the attack on Hall, King was released from prison after receiving credit for serving a little more than 13 months in Cook County Jail. He was one of more than 1,700 inmates released from Sept. 16 to Dec. 13 under the Department of Corrections’ accelerated Meritorious Good Time Program.

Meanwhile, the last year has been difficult for Hall.

She moved from the South Loop because she was afraid to walk the streets. She separated for a time from her boyfriend. She can walk and talk, she said Wednesday, but her jaw still falls out of joint, she still has seizures, and nerve damage prevents full use and feeling in her left foot.

“It’s been hard on me. It’s been hard on (Hoffman). It’s been hard on our families,” said Hall, 37. “But apparently it wasn’t hard enough on Derrick King.”

Hall and Hoffman had celebrated Hall’s birthday Aug. 25, 2008, at a nearby restaurant before heading to a Jewel-Osco at Roosevelt and Wabash, when King and Joyce Burgess came up to them and asked for cigarettes, Hoffman told the Tribune last year.

After telling King they had no cigarettes, the couple started to walk away. Burgess then attacked Hall from behind and knocked her to the ground, said Hoffman, 38. When Hoffman tried to help Hall, King attacked him, then attacked Hall, who was fighting Burgess, Hoffman said.

King ran over and kicked Hall in the head and face, knocking out her teeth, Hoffman said. Hall lost 20 of her teeth, according to a Web site she and Hoffman later set up to ask for help with her medical bills.

On Wednesday, Hall said surgeons later told her that her heart stopped twice while they operated on her after the attack. “He killed me two times,” she said.

Burgess, 40, also was charged with two counts of robbery in the attack against Hall and Hoffman but is serving time in Lincoln Correctional Center, records show.

King initially was charged with attempted murder, robbery and assault, but through a plea deal was only convicted of the two counts of robbery; the other charges were dropped. Hall and Hoffman weren’t entirely satisfied with the agreement but accepted it, though it meant, Hall said, that King “basically got a slap on the wrist for stealing a cell phone.”

When they learned of the Oct. 20 attack on the other woman, they were outraged — first that no one told them he was out, and that he served a little more than two weeks of his sentence.

“When I first heard about the attack, I went off on the state’s attorney. I just went off the wall,” Hoffman said, telling an assistant state’s attorney, “Why is (King) … on the street? He didn’t even serve half of his sentence.”

Said Hall: “I’m angry with everyone over this. I don’t think anybody is doing their job correctly. I’m upset with every aspect of this as a whole, and I just want to move on.”

Note:

It is NOT a matter of giving time to these savages, or to our people as well, but the social implications, i.e., letting Fathers raise their families and neighborhoods Looking out for one another; depending on the ‘authorities’ is misleading, and creates a superficial, and cowardly lot, so that the Authority can dictate what is good and what is bad, rather than letting ourselves reign supreme.

Predators and scoundrels would not last long, as is natural, if the body-politic were free to ‘set precedent’ once again.

__________________

If you treat a man as he is, he will remain as he is; if you treat him as he ought to be and could be, he will become as he ought to be and could be.

~ Goethe ~

The Basics of Starting to Prepare

by Robert

Long term survival means you need a three part system. You need (1) Water, (2) Food, and (3) Security. most people only prep for two of the three or one of the three. I know too many “preppers” that say “all that I need is my AR-15 and a ton of ammo,” but the issue with that is obvious: you will have to turn into a bad guy and steal or kill for the other two. I also know guys who say they “will hoard a 90-day supply of food and water, and my neighbors will help me keep my stuff.” Right, because your neighbor is the guy with a gun and no food or water. You need all three in combination, or none of them matter.

Another thing to consider is in a SHTF situation how are you going to do some common things? Let’s take a few things and look at how we are going to deal with them in the future. First, are you going to bug in or are you going to bug out. Well, a lot of this depends on what is the SHTF scenario. Take for instance a dirty bomb attack and you live within the danger zone, or the danger zone where the winds are taking the fall out to. In this situation it is obvious you need to bug out. On the other hand what if the same dirty bomb hits, but it is far enough away to impact others, but only impacts you in Electricity, Water, and other utilities. In this situation I would say you need to bug in.

So you have similar things happening, but totally different outcomes. What I am trying to say is you need to be prepared for all types of bugging situations. You need a good 72-hour bag for each person, a first aid kit for either each person(level 1) or a first aid kit level 2 for your family(also, you need to think about taking some first aid classes to go with the tools). I mean what good is it to have a suture kit and bags of intravenous fluid, but not know how to use them? You also might consider a bugout kit for the vehicle you are using, and that also brings up the question, what makes a good bugout vehicle? Now I am not going to tell you the best vehicle, because the area you live in determines a lot of this, but more than likely an older SUV with a carburetor and points will usually be a good choice, for a few reasons. You will be able to haul more gear(including food and water), you can haul more people, most are four-wheel drive, and the carburetor and point systems are the only sure way to avoid the pitfalls of an EMP.

Continuing the bugout scenario, consider where are you going. Practice the route, all times of the day and night. Know alternate routes to get there, and map these out. Consider alternate locations, you never know where a disaster man-made or natural will occur. Store the gear you need at the locations, that way if you are en route and have to ditch the vehicle you can grab your 72 bag, hike the rest of the way, and know that when you get there, you can live.

Do not count on the generosity of others. There will be a few people that will help you, but for the most part civilization will be, well, uncivilized! Don’t think my neighbor has a place I have heard about, or, I can go stay with my mom or kids. If this is not what you, and they, have planned then they do not have enough for you and them. (Another thing to consider is it takes approximate 2,000 plus calories to live, but in a high stress situation you need more than that, some times a lot more.) So do have a plan, don’t rush into things. Think out as many possibilities as you can and plan for all of them. You can not have every possible thing in your possession, but you can account for as a bunch.

A word about bug-out-bags, first aid kits and gear. Stock them with what you think you will need for a real world problem. As things in your life or the world change, change the items in the bags. For instance, in summer you may not need a wool sweater, but in winter you might. If you live in Arizona you probably will not need a winter parka, but if you live in Colorado you more than likely will. Be smart when you are prepping, again this is a lot of common sense, but using common sense when you are calm and only preparing for the situation is easier than throwing a bunch of junk together when you a scared because the Chinese have landed on the Pacific coast. Also, one more thing about vehicles. You need to always make sure and maintain your BOV, seems simple, but how bad would it be if you have not driven it in three months and go to start it and the battery is dead, or having to head out at night and the headlights being burned out, think!

Now, onto bugging in. If you decide it will be safer for you and yours to stay in place, then do it! You need to be able to assess the situation and make an informed decision. So now you have decided to bug in and the power is out, natural gas is gone or worse, on fire at the transfer station, Now what? How are you going to cook that three months worth of food? Did you think to buy a propane system and propane? Did you think of a solar oven? there are hundreds of things to think of. When you where putting your food and water stores together, did you get all of the meds you and your family will need for the next 90 days, a multivitamin supplement for each of you, and did you go over all of this with your spouse of another responsible person if you are to get injured or become ill?

This is not a complicated thing, but it does take preparation. You need to go over this over and over, until you and everyone you are bugging in with know it backwards and forwards…

If you live in the mountains [or a northern climate], did you think of how to heat in a grid-down situation? You live in New Mexico, did you think of how to have enough water to work in the heat? there are so many small things to think of, you need to really plan for your area and for your own personal needs. I can tell you a hundred things to look at, but most of them will fit me and my family, but may be totally wrong for you and yours.

A thing that I did not think about until recently, communication. If the SHTF then more than likely you will not have a working cell phone. Did you plan on it? Did you buy a CB or ham radio? Do you have a way to power them? There are [photovoltaic] solar panels, generators, and wind turbines. So many options, but what is right for you? It all depends.Wind is great if you live in Kansas, but solar is better if you live in Florida. As a prepper I can tell you ideas, and problems, but you need to come up the best solution for you.

There a hundred things to consider, rain barrels for extra water for cleaning or boiling for drinking and cooking, food and water for your pets, fuel for the generator,vehicle, and cooking appliances, and so many more. We over the next few weeks and months will hit as many of these as we can. If you have a question, ask, I will get you the answers. We will learn this all together.

A few things all of us need to think about is long term food, water, and security.

( a little note: the point of all of this is to survive. This seems obvious, but if you make it through what ever happens and can go past your 72 hour kit, your three month supply of food and water, or if you are very ambitious, make it through the one year mark, and you die because you have no skills to thrive after, then what is the point of all of the prep? One thing you need to consider doing outside of the prep most people teach about is learning to live without technology. Growing your own food, hunting for your own meat, and a trade or skill to barter. In most SHTF scenarios the government will have failed or collapsed and the money you have will be useless. So if you are a stock trader for a living, then learn a trade or skill that will be useful in a market that doesn’t need a banker. The point is to live on, and take care of those in your family and hopefully help others around you.

May God bless you and yours. In Christ’s Love, – Brother Robert

PIIGS Win. Bankers Win. Voters Lose.

by Gary North
by Gary North
Recently by Gary North: How To Run a Federal Budget Surplus

The politicians of Northern Europe buckled. The PIIGS chuckled.

The Greeks played the Henry Paulson card magnificently. “If you don’t lend us enough money to meet interest payments, we’ll have to default. There will be a crisis. Woe, woe, woe.”

The politicians pretended to play hardball for less than three weeks. Then they folded. Let us review the timetable.

The Greek government first asked for $60 billion in euros on April 23. That was a Friday.

On Monday, April 26, the European Central Bank assured the world that there was no threat that the Greek crisis would spill over to other European countries. Bloomberg reported:

“There is no economic cause for a contagion discussion,” ECB Governing Council member Ewald Nowotny said in an interview in Washington. Concern that Greece’s woes could spread to other indebted euro-area countries has been pushing up borrowing costs of nations including Portugal and Spain. The countries’ budget deficits as a share of gross domestic product were more than three times the European Union limit of 3 percent last year.

“Of course Spain is not Greece,” ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said April 23 after meeting with Group of 20 finance chiefs. . . .

That indicated one of two things: (1) central bankers lie without conscience when facing a crisis, or (2) central bankers do not know what is happening in front of their collective noses.

The next day, April 27, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Greek sovereign debt to junk status, and downgraded Portugal’s debt by two notches.

On April 28, S&P downgraded Spain’s debt one notch. Spain’s Minister of Finance howled. No cause! No cause!

On May 2, northern politicians announced that Greece would get at least $145 billion in euro loans over a three-year period. This was over double the amount Greece had asked for on April 23.

On May 3, the European Central Bank said that it would not lend to Greece. It said it would lend to banks that offered Greek government debt as collateral. This was perceived as resistance.

On May 5, Greek rioters set fire to a bank. Three people inside are killed.

On May 6, England held national elections. The outcome was a nation with a hung House of Commons. Over the weekend, there was no resolution to the problem.

On Sunday, May 9, Merkel’s party lost a regional election. Her party will lose the upper house as a result. On May 9, after an all-day meeting, the EU and IMF representatives announced a $960 billion bailout of the PIIGS. Merkel announced that the upper house will approve the loan package on May 11.

Also on May 9, the Federal Reserve System announced an emergency policy of providing dollars to central banks, to stem the run-up of the dollar.

Mission accomplished. The PIIGS won.

WHY DID THE ESTABLISHMENTS CAPITULATE?

The euro zone was facing a domino effect. European banks hold at least $236 billion in Greek debt. Greece was about to default. The banks were about to face another crisis.

The ECB tried to resist, but Standard & Poor’s had begun the downgrading process. Sarkozy and Merkel spoke out against this. There is now talk that Europe, meaning the EU, will create its own credit-rating service. Why? Because the EU wants to control the ratings. Its leaders do not want to be dependent on American credit-rating services, which are beyond EU political pressures.

The crisis did threaten the profitability of the banks. The ECB finally faced the reality that it had denied on April 26. This was a systemic crisis.

The currency speculators had been shorting the euro. The hatred of currency speculators among national leaders is total. Central bankers hate them just as much. Their decisions call to the attention of the public the weakness of a threatened currency. They reveal that the politicians are lying.

The EU, ECB, and IMF joined together to stop the currency speculators. They agreed to a bailout that was 15 times greater than the $60 billion Greece had originally requested. The media dubbed this “shock and awe.”

You may remember how well shock and awe worked in Iraq. We are still there.

Already, columnists are writing articles about the possibility that this bailout will not be enough.

The Establishment has only two policies: deficits and monetary inflation. This is basic Keynesianism. Both were invoked on May 9.

Markets rallied. European bank stocks rose by over 10% as soon as the market opened. It was clear that the banks were the main winners.

The threat was always mainly a threat to banks. Banks had loaded up on Greek debt. Why? Because of higher interest rates. Why had there been higher interest rates? Because there was more risk of default.

Bankers trust governments. They trusted the Greek government to meet its next interest payment on May 19. On April 23, the Greeks began playing the Hank Paulson card. The banks saw the possibility of a default. Bank shares started falling. So, bankers got to work. They, too, played the Paulson card. The S&P downgrades added credibility to the scenario. There was a threat of a systemic breakdown.

The bankers’ solution is the tried and true strategy of moral hazard, described by Walter Bageot in the late 19th century. The banks are bailed out by politicians and central banks. Losses are transferred to the taxpayers by way of bailouts and currency depreciation. The day of reckoning is postponed.

For the first time in Western history since the late nineteenth century, a few million voters are beginning to catch on. They don’t understand fractional reserve banking, but they understand when politicians raise the national debt to bail out people who cannot pay their interest on time.

Voters in Germany resisted. This accomplished nothing. As they were going to the polls, Merkel was selling them out to the PIIGS and the banks that trusted the PIIGS, especially French banks, which own a third of Greek debt.

It is beginning to dawn on a minority of voters that the political game is rigged in favor of big banks. It has taken a century for this to begin to register. This is a threat to Establishments everywhere. This was the #1 secret that the Establishments have attempted to conceal.

TAX REVOLT? NOT YET.

The Establishments for a century have used the greed of the voters to create a money tree for bankers. Here is how it has worked, ever since the years just prior to World War I.

The politicians promise the voters revenue from the rich. The voters are promised government jobs, government support for labor unions, and old age pensions. The welfare state grows.

The politicians refuse to raise taxes enough to meet these commitments. They use “pay as you go” accounting.

The governments run debts. Investors buy these debts, because they are guaranteed by the government. The debts are seen as risk-free.

Wars break out. Governments then run larger deficits. These debts are never repaid. They always increase. Old debts are rolled over.

The governments keep selling promises to voters. The voters keep believing they will be paid off someday.

When tight times hit, central banks buy government debts with fiat money. They roll over these debts. The debts grow.

Any threat of default threatens the commercial banks. When a crisis arrives, governments and central banks bail out the largest commercial banks.

The voters do not revolt because they are up to their elbows in personal debt. They have no savings. They rely on government promises. They do not want a default.

Keynesianism is an economic system that praises government debt as the source of stability and long-run prosperity. Original Keynesianism argued that government debt could be reduced in boom years. It has never happened anywhere. Politicians raise the debt load, year by year. The debt grows.

The voters dare not stage a tax revolt, because they might threaten the solvency of the government. The government might cut back on welfare spending for the aged and for the unemployed.

This is a daisy chain of promises (debt), all resting on taxation.

Government writes IOU’s. Banks and insurance companies buy these IOU’s. The government writes more IOU’s. In a crisis, the central bank buys these IOU’s. The voters grouse, but they do not revolt.

Whenever the voters say no to bailouts, the politicians ignore them. They know that the voters do not really want to cut spending.

Banks want more government debt to buy. Governments want more debt to buy more votes. The voters want to believe that the promises will be kept.

It’s a ménage à trois of seduction. Each participant promises to love two others forever. Bankers promise to buy the government’s IOU’s. Governments promise not to default. Bankers promise depositors they can withdraw their money at any time. The government guarantees the depositors that their deposits are insured (in the United States – not Europe). Voters promise to keep voting for the party that forks over the most welfare to their special interest groups.

As the madam in charge, the central bank promises the governments to serve as lender of last resort. It promises bankers low interest rates. It promises voters to act in the interest of voters to keep down inflation and keep employment high.

The arrangement is now breaking down. The level of debt is creating opportunities for currency speculators to expose the lies of governments and central bankers. There are huge profits at stake in this showdown.

ROLLOVER AND FIAT MONEY

The game is the rollover of debt. In 1980, there was a low-budget movie, Rollover, with Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda. It dealt with the rollover of Arab oil money. It had the basic scenario correct. The threat really did exist in 1980. But the Federal Reserve let interest rates climb, and the prices of oil and gold fell. The day of reckoning was deferred.

The threat has reappeared. This time it is not Arab oil money. This time it is the unthinkable: sovereign debt defaults. The stakes are far higher. The agencies of the bailout now need bailing out.

Because the entire credit structure rests on the continuation of the rollover of sovereign debt, the Greek crisis, which began on April 23, escalated into a trillion-dollar guaranteed bailout within three weeks. The ECB said “no problem” on April 26. On May 9, it completely capitulated.

Compare this with the United States, from the first weekend of September to the middle of October. Paulson nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in early September. A week later, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. On October 3, Congress voted the $700 billion bailout. That was three weeks.

If the system is reliable, why do these crises keep happening? If there was a solution to the bad debt problems in late 2008, why did there have to be a $960 billion bailout this week?

It is the rollover problem. That was what took down Bear Stearns. That was what took down Lehman Brothers. In just days, these two giants could not find buyers for their debt. They had leveraged themselves by 30-to-one on the assumption that the rollover would continue forever. It didn’t.

This is the threat to the European banking system. When a sovereign nation defaults, it calls into question the continuation of the rollover. That calls into question the entire world economy.

Everything rests on lines of credit: promises. These promises can be broken at any time, for any reason. The debtor just stops paying. When a national debtor stops paying, the dominoes begin to fall.

The dominoes were ten days from the first toppling: May 19. The politicians, the central bankers, and the IMF decided on Sunday that the risk was too great. They paid off the G-PIIG. They sent a message to the other PIIGs that the trough would be filled up with euros, just as every PIIG knew it would be.

The voters can protest, but if they are unwilling to get their snouts out of the government troughs, they can expect no relief. I do not think they are ready to do this. So, the rollovers will continue. The level of sovereign debt will rise.

As for cutbacks in Greek spending, ho, ho, ho. As for austerity in Southern Europe, ha, ha, ha. Once you owe the banks up north a trillion dollars, you will get the politicians up north to sell more debt, so that you can meet your interest payments to their banks, and then sell more debt at low rates.

Debt will rise. That is the inescapable reality of moral hazard. Bank profits will go on, because bank losses are transferred to sovereign governments. Nothing has changed. The same old system rolls on.

POLITICAL GRIDLOCK

It has come to England. It is about to come to Germany. In 2011, it is likely to come to the United States. At that time, there will be no spending cuts, but there will be resistance to any further expansion of programs. The debts never fall lower. The built-in spending will be sufficient to keep the deficits high.

The United States annual budget deficit to GDP ratio is around 10. In Greece, it is 14. It has been around 6 in northern Europe, excluding Ireland and Great Britain. It will now rise because of the bailouts. The Greek debt disease has spread to the north. That was the price of keeping the Greek default disease from spreading through the south.

The gridlock will slow down the extension of the debt a little, but the built-in increases in old age spending are enough to guarantee another crisis. The banks in Europe are still highly leveraged. They are not writing down these debts. The result is continuing vulnerability.

The speed of the crisis indicates that the next crisis will take even more money to paper over. Political gridlock will make it harder next time to persuade the politicians to put their careers on the line for the sake of the banks. The ECB will have to intervene as the lender of last resort. It will resist, but its job is to save the large banks. The large banks will again need saving.

The size of the bailout indicates that the leaders really did panic over the weekend. The markets moved higher on the assumption that an extra trillion dollars of government debt will be no problem. There will be buyers. The PIIGS will get their rollover money from the banks, because the banks have gotten the go-ahead guarantees from the more solvent north.

CONCLUSION

We see no solution. We only see political kick-the-can. The politicians believe that rising government debt is forever. It can rise without meaningful cost. There will always be buyers. The banks and insurance companies trust the promises of the politicians, who write IOU’s on behalf of the voters.

When the voters resist, the central banks come to the rescue. They play demure briefly. They say “this time, but never again.” But they always capitulate.

The day a major central bank really does stabilize money is the day that the dominoes really will fall. The rollovers will at last end.

It will not be because debt is too big to roll over. It is never too big to roll over. It will end only because central bankers see that monetary inflation will undermine the national currency through hyperinflation. That will threaten their pensions. Their pensions are funded, for the bank has the power to fund them. But if the money is worthless, the central bankers will lose. If they cease inflating, they will win. They will have money to spend in a time of depression and deflation.

That is not today. With short-term rates under 1%, and consumer prices not rising, the central banks are not facing an immediate crisis. When the next one arrives, they will do whatever is necessary to keep the rollovers going.

The welfare state is going bust. The level of sovereign debt guarantees this. The politicians will take on as much debt as it requires to keep the rollovers going.

May 12, 2010

Gary North [send him mail] is the author of Mises on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com. He is also the author of a free 20-volume series, An Economic Commentary on the Bible.

The Making of a Warmonger

The Making of a Warmonger

by David Gordon
by David Gordon
Recently by David Gordon: Bomb Power

William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker of a Movement. By Lee Edwards. ISI Books, 2010. 223 pages.

Lee Edwards has written a very useful book. He is a longstanding conservative activist and intends to celebrate William F. Buckley as the founder of the political movement to which he adheres. For Edwards, Buckley’s “vision of ordered liberty shaped and molded and guided American conservatism from its infancy to its maturity, from a cramped suite of offices on Manhattan’s East Side to the Oval Office of the White House, from a set of ‘irritable mental gestures’ to a political force that transformed American politics.” (p.191) But this book discloses a great deal that supports Lew Rockwell’s verdict that the “‘conservatism created by William Buckley . . . gave us the most raw and stupid form of imperial big government one can imagine.’” (p.175) Edwards, by the way, calls Rockwell an “ultralibertarian,” in the same way leftists used to call those on the Right “ultraconservatives.”

Buckley, Edwards tells us, began as a follower of the libertarian Albert Jay Nock; and Nock’s disciple, Frank Chodorov, guided his early writing. (To Edwards, Nock is an “archlibertarian.” Whether there is a difference between “arch” and “ultra,” Edwards does not disclose.) Edwards mentions Nock’s “radical antistatism” but he tells us next to nothing about the views of Nock and his great follower. From Edwards’s account, one might imagine that Nock wished merely to curtail the New Deal. In fact, of course, Nock condemned the “political means,” i.e., the State, as of its nature predatory. Edwards also ignores completely Nock’s views on foreign policy. Nock opposed militarism and interventionism and his Myth of a Guilty Nation was an early revisionist classic.

Despite Buckley’s early exposure to Nock, his fundamental premise thrust libertarianism aside. Buckley stated this premise early in his career: “[I]n his January 1952 essay in Commonweal Buckley wrote that given the ‘thus-far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union. . .we have got to accept Big Government for the duration.’” (p.53) Buckley here expressed no mere passing thought. Putting into action his belief in a crusade against Communism, he had after graduation from Yale joined the CIA for a brief period from 1950–51. Though he ostensibly left that agency, ex-CIA agents, as we shall soon see, played a major role in National Review.

Edwards mentions three other writers, besides Nock, as “seminal” influences on Buckley’s political thinking. Each of these was a determined enemy of Nock’s libertarianism. The first of these, Willmoore Kendall, taught Buckley political science at Yale. (Edwards, by the way, is probably wrong that “Kendall taught the young conservative [Buckley] to read with the close attention to the text that the political philosopher Leo Strauss advocated.” [pp.34–5]. Kendall’s Straussian period came later than Buckley’s time at Yale.) Kendall rejected with scorn natural rights. Instead, he followed Rousseau: for him, the general will was the “deliberate sense of the community,” in America best incarnated in Congress. He attacked John Stuart Mill on freedom of opinion and called for the imposition of a public orthodoxy. His position would have justified the Athenians in executing Socrates, an implication he readily acknowledged. It will come as no surprise that he too had been a CIA agent.

James Burnham, the major influence on Buckley’s approach to foreign policy, managed the difficult feat of being worse than Kendall. Edwards tells us that Burnham, after his break with Leon Trotsky, “published [in 1941] The Managerial Revolution, which described the emergence of a new and unelected ruling elite, the managerial class, and its profound implications for Western society. In subsequent books, Burnham argued that the Soviet Union was the most advanced managerial regime and sought global power through subversion, aggression, and intimidation – an argument that Buckley fully endorsed.” (p.42)

Edwards’s account of Burnham grievously misleads the reader by what it omits. Someone who gained his knowledge of Burnham from Edwards would naturally think that Burnham opposed rule by the managerial elite just described. In fact, Burnham celebrated this elite. In a notable review, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” George Orwell denounced Burnham as an incipient totalitarian, fascinated by power, who could barely conceal an admiration for Hitler and Stalin. Edwards notes that Burnham was a consultant to the CIA, but he does not tell us that in The Struggle for the World (1947), Burnham proposed a preventive nuclear war against the Soviets.

Whittaker Chambers, “the fourth seminal influence on Buckley’s political thinking” (p.61), also vehemently opposed libertarianism. For Chambers, Ludwig von Mises was a superficial and dogmatic thinker; and in a notorious review of Atlas Shrugged, he said: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber – go!” (Edwards fails to quote this.) Like Burnham, this vest-pocket Dostoyevsky saw the world in apocalyptic terms.

As if this were not enough, two other early editors of National Review, Frank S. Meyer and Willi Schlamm, also favored preventive nuclear war.

If Buckley betrayed the libertarianism he had learned from Nock, he showed himself an apt pupil of his other mentors. Like Meyer, he was willing to risk nuclear annihilation to overthrow communism: better dead than red. “In May 1983. . .Buckley delivered a lecture at a Catholic college on ‘moral distinctions and modern warfare.’ A central proposition of his remarks: “To venerate life is to attach to it first importance. Surely if we were to do that, any talk of war, just or unjust, prudent or imprudent, limited or unlimited, provoked or unprovoked, would be an exercise in moral atavism.’” (p.145). In other words, when thinking about war, do not rate preserving life too highly. So much for the just war tradition.

Buckley and war had an elective affinity. “Following Tet [in 1968], Buckley called for the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam as a way to bring the war to a swift end, a radical course of action that even Barry Goldwater, the alleged wild-eyed bomb thrower, had never suggested.” (p.111). Buckley was here nothing if not consistent. “In the first half of 1982, Bill Buckley, intractable anti-Communist, pressed the Reagan administration to declare war on Cuba because ‘it is difficult to think of a measure that would give greater heart to the entire anti-communist defense enterprise.’” (p.141)

But what of those who declined to join Buckley and Burnham in the struggle for the world? These remnants of the Old Right had to be purged. Murray Rothbard thought that the Cold War could be ended through peaceful negotiation. Buckley could not tolerate such views at his journal. Peace? Who ever heard of such nonsense!

Edwards misstates the reason for Buckley’s dispute with Rothbard. He says, “Buckley treated laissez-faire economist Murray Rothbard and ‘his merry anarchists’ more gently [than he treated Rand], but no less firmly, stating that their antistatism collided with conservatives who recognize that the ‘state sometimes is, and is today as never before, the necessary instrument of proximate deliverance’ from Communism.” (p.79) But Rothbard’s challenge to Buckley over the Cold War did not center on anarchism. Rather, he opposed Buckley’s reckless bellicosity. Buckley, echoed by Edwards, sought to portray Rothbard and his followers as head-in-the clouds utopians. In point of fact, the Rothbardians had a realistic perception of the dangers of nuclear adventurism.

The dominant theme of Buckley’s politics, as we have seen, was the need for a Big State to combat communism. But he was hardly a paragon of classical liberal virtue on domestic policy, either. In his Four Reforms, which Edwards calls “an intriguing and too-little-known work” (p. 123), Buckley suggested a radical Constitutional reform. He proposed “that the Fifth Amendment be repealed.” (p.124) So much for civil liberties! He also suggested a “voluntary” year of national service for high school graduates. Edwards neglects to inform his readers of the considerable pressures contemplated in Buckley’s scheme to make sure that the “voluntary” decisions of the graduates went the “right” way.

Murray Rothbard, as usual, has the best comment on Buckley’s brand of conservatism. The theoreticians of National Review “transformed the Right from a movement that, at least roughly, believed first of all in individual liberty (and its corollaries: civil liberties domestically, and peace and ‘isolation’ in foreign affairs) into a movement that, in fact glorifies total war and the suppression of civil liberty.” (Confidential Memo to the Volker Fund, “What Is to Be Done?” July 1961)

May 12, 2010

David Gordon [send him mail] is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for LRC. He is the author, most recently, of The Essential Rothbard. See his Books on Liberty. See also his Books on War.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

The Best of David Gordon

Whiteout

By J.R. Dunn

The American left is celebrating its hope for racially transforming America. Recently the Census Bureau published a demographic prediction that if current trends continue, America’s “whites” (actually Europeans — the sole meaningful identifier, since there exists no actual race or ethnicity termed “whites”) will become a minority by mid-century — most reports read “2050″, though the figures themselves suggest sometime during the 2040s.

As with everything having to do with race, this report has been subject to all kinds of distortion. From the left-wing point of view, white decline comprises a perfect Hegelian opposition — whites vs. everybody else –+ and it has been promoted as such. A process occurring over decades became a revolutionary, if not apocalyptic event. “Minority status” was transformed into the “downfall of the whites”, in much the same sense as occurred in Rhodesia or South Africa. Barack Obama was presented as a symbol of this event, the same as he is with everything else. The tea parties and other signs of a centrist resurgence were painted as the white reaction to coming extinction on the American scene, with much reference to nonexistent white supremacists.

The overall narrative goes something like this: the inevitable decline of the white race will be matched by the rise of a new “humane” American culture, consisting of all the gentler and kinder races and represented by our Dear Messiah. Whites will react with violence and hysteria, as has been seen so often at tea party rallies, and must be controlled by cool heads among the “majority” population — such paragons as Eric Holder, Henry Louis Gates, and Rev. Jeremiah Wright being examples — so that the shift to the new civilization of diversity will go as painlessly as possible.

The best that can be said for this thesis is that has been generally ignored. But since it has found fertile soil in the media and academia, it might be worthwhile to kick it around a bit.

The first problem is one of definition. Under the multicultural dispensation, Hispanics get to be considered “nonwhite”, as members of that global, monolithic “superminority” defined only by its opposition to the European ascendancy. In the real world, it’s not that simple. (To say the least — I know a student, half Columbian and half Syrian, who was denied a number of grants because Columbians are not the “right” kind of Latin.) No matter where they are from — countries as varied as Guatemala on one hand and Argentina on the other — the one thing common to Latins is the belief that all are heirs of the Iberian diaspora of the late Renaissance, one of the most explosive events of modern history. This is true whatever other ethnic strains, Indian, West African, or even Japanese, may be present. A Hispanic is somebody with cultural roots in Spain. And the last time I looked, Spain was in Europe.

Secondarily, we have the question of demography. I have pointed out previously on AT that this is a frail reed on which to base any argument. The record clearly shows that the easiest way to lose a bet is to put it down on a demographic prediction. There are too many factors involved, interacting in ways that are little understood, many of them involving that most contrary product of nature, the human animal.

The demographic case for the whiteout thesis is based on the assumption that immigrants will continue breeding according to their home patterns, which is demonstrably untrue (almost all immigrants adapt within a generation or two the host country’s reproductive pattern, which in the U.S. is that of bare replacement), and that immigration will continue at the unusually high levels of the past half-century, which is just as unlikely. A few more Faisal Shahzads, a few more shootings on the southern border, and that door will slam firmly shut. Arizona has pointed the way. Despite media and political overreaction (and perhaps in direct defiance of it) such laws reinforcing the legal status quo concerning illegal immigration are the wave of the future.

These factors in and of themselves will push white minority status well into the 22^nd century. If, in fact, it ever occurs — my own conviction is that, thanks to exogamy and interbreeding, we’re headed for a mixed people with contributions from all races but in which Caucasian genetic traits will be — sorry, but this is scientifically the case — dominant. We’re all going to be a little European in days to come.

But even it did happen exactly as the multicultural left hopes, the whiteout is unlikely to fulfill their dreams of a utopia of diversity.

The left-wing fantasy concerning a white minority was perhaps most harmlessly voiced in the joke floating around at the time of Obama’s inauguration. Immediately afterward, loudspeakers across the country were supposed to blare out: “All white people please report to the cotton fields.”

That was a good one. And like all good ones, it embodied a larger truth (the better the joke, the more potent the truth it contains, in my experience), in this case, a very harsh one. The leftist attitude involving race is one of retribution, an eye for eye in the pure Old Testament sense. We’ve seen this in many racial policies in recent decades, including forced bussing, which was designed not to improve the state of black students so much as to punish whites. We can also point to affirmative action, seemingly designed to make as many people as resentful as possible. (Consider: when an unqualified minority applicant is given a position ahead of fifty whites, he’s actually only beaten out the man who would have been given the job otherwise — but, under the current system, all fifty disappointed applicants are embittered.)

Leftists look at the possibility of a white minority through the same vindictive lens. The tables will be turned, the first will be last, and a harsh price will be exacted for the crimes committed by the ancestors of modern European-Americans, exactly as if the casualties of the Civil War and the massive spending of the 20^th-century welfare state had never occurred. Yet another example of humanist, tolerant liberalism in action.

Of course, no such thing would occur. It presupposes that the other minority groups, Latins and Asians, would go along with the joke. Another aspect of the leftist dream is that all “minorities” instinctively work together as members of an oppressed class. I recall a futuristic novel in which a revolt against whitey was carried out by black military figures, Latino street gangs, and Chinese and Hindu computer geeks. It will come as no surprise to learn that the author was Canadian. (To be fair, the unquestionably partisan de la droite Jean Raispail made a similar error in his otherwise impressive The Camp of the Saints.)

But would Latins and Asians really show such lack of self-interest in favor of a wispy ideal of universal diversity? It’s certainly not the case today, and is unlikely to become so in the future. Racial animosities between blacks on one hand and Latins and Asians on the other tend to be extreme — consider the actions of the Korean merchants during the LA riots. There’s little doubt that these tensions would grow even more ferocious in a “diverse” future.

Oddly enough, it’s the “racist” Europeans who keep the peace under current circumstances. We play the role of “senior tenant” in American society, laying down the rules and breaking in the newcomers. That is unlikely to change. Even under minority status, white Europeans will be looked upon as the dealmakers, the tiebreakers, the ones viewed by other groups as a moderating influence. In other words, much the same position as we hold today.

But above all, the multicultural stance presupposes that all social advances of the past century and a half since the day that a nation went to war to free the enslaved are utterly empty and meaningless. The sad truth is that liberals believe exactly that.

But of course, they are not meaningless. Our way of life works. Despite all its past errors and failings, the United States is not and has never been a Sudan, a Serbia, or a Northern Ireland. (So asserts this descendant of Armagh.) There is little chance that it ever will be. This country is based on the premise that certain aspects of human nature — love of freedom, yearning for peace, hope of a place to stand — are universals, not limited by race, creed, or background. There is nothing in this country’s record to suggest otherwise. Despite the vicious dreams of the multiculturalists, the grand experiment will continue to unfold.

The New Secessionists

May 11, 2010

by Chris Hedges

(Editor’s note: Yet another writer from the Main Stream Media discovers the sagacity and logic of secession.)

Acts of rebellion which promote moral and political change must be nonviolent. And one of the most potent nonviolent alternatives in the country, which defies the corporate state and calls for an end to imperial wars, is the secessionist movement bubbling up in some two dozen states including Vermont, Texas, Alaska and Hawaii.

These movements do not always embrace liberal values. Most of the groups in the South champion a “neo-Confederacy” and are often exclusively male and white. Secessionists, who call for statewide referendums to secede, do not advocate the use of force. It is unclear, however, if some will turn to force if the federal structure ever denies them independence.

These groups at least grasp that the old divisions between liberals and conservatives are obsolete and meaningless. They understand that corporations have carried out a coup d’état. They recognize that our permanent war economy and costly and futile imperial wars are unsustainable and they demand that we take popular action to prevent citizens from being further impoverished and robbed by Wall Street speculators and corporations.

“The defining characteristic of the Second Vermont Republic is that there are two enemies, the United States government and corporate America,” Thomas Naylor, who founded Vermont’s secessionist movement, told me when I reached him by phone at his home 10 miles south of Burlington. “One owns the other one. We are not like the tea party. The underlying premise of the tea party movement is that the system is fixable.”

As reported by Christopher Ketcham in a recent issue of GOOD magazine, Naylor points to the nation’s decline. The secessionist leader notes, in Ketcham’s words, “Of all the western democracies, the United States stands near dead last in voter turnout, last in health care, last in education, highest in homicide rates, mortality, STDs among juveniles, youth pregnancy, abortion, and divorce. …”

The nation, he says grimly, has trillions in deficits it can never repay, is beset by staggering income disparities, has destroyed its manufacturing base and is the planet’s most egregious polluter and greediest consumer of fossil fuels. With some 40 million Americans living in poverty, tens of millions more in a category called “near poverty” and a permanent underclass trapped by a real unemployment rate of 17 percent, there is ample tinder for internal combustion. If we do not undertake a dramatic reversal soon, he asserts, the country and the global environment will implode with catastrophic consequences.

The secessionist movement is gaining ground in several states, especially Texas, where elected officials increasingly have to contend with secessionist sentiments.

Texans and Vermonters want the USA to look like this

“Our membership has grown tremendously since the bailouts, since the tail end of the Bush administration,” said Daniel Miller, the leader of the Texas Nationalist Movement, when I spoke with him by telephone from his home in the small town of Nederland, Texas. “There is a feeling in Texas that we are being spent into oblivion. We are operating as the cash cow for the states that cannot manage their budgets. With this Congress, Texas has been squarely in their cross hairs, from cap and trade to the alien transfer and exit program. So many legislative pieces coming down the pike are offensive to people here in Texas. The sentiment for independence here is very high. The sentiment inside the Legislature and state capital is one of guarded optimism. There are scores of folks within state government who are supportive of what we are doing, although there is a need to see the public support in a more tangible way. This is why we launched our Let Texas Decide petition drive. We intend to deliver over a million signatures on the opening day of the [state legislative] session on Jan. 11, 2011.”

Miller, like Naylor, expects many in the tea party to migrate to secessionist movements once they realize that they cannot alter the structure or power of the corporate state through electoral politics. Polls in Texas show the secessionists have support from about 35 percent of the state’s population, and Vermont is not far behind.

Naylor, who taught economics at Duke University for 30 years, is, along with Kirkpatrick Sale and Donald Livingston, one of the intellectual godfathers of the secessionist movement. His writing can be found on The Second Vermont Republic website, on the website Secession News and in postings on the Middlebury Institute website. Naylor first proposed secession in his 1997 book “Downsizing the USA.” He comes out of the “small is beautiful” movement, as does Sale. Naylor lives with his wife in the Vermont village of Charlotte.

The Second Vermont Republic arose from the statewide anti-war protests in 2003. It embraces a left-wing populism that makes it unique among the national movements, which usually veer more toward Ron Paul libertarianism. The Vermont movement, like the Texas and Alaska movements, is well organized. It has a bimonthly newspaper called The Vermont Commons, which champions sustainable agriculture and energy supplies based on wind and water, and calls for locally owned banks which will open lines of credit to their communities. Dennis Steele, who is campaigning for governor as a secessionist, runs Radio Free Vermont, which gives a venue to Vermont musicians and groups as well as being a voice of the movement. Vermont, like Texas, was an independent republic, but on March 4, 1791, voted to enter the union. Supporters of the Second Vermont Republic commemorate the anniversary by holding a mock funeral procession through the state capital, Montpelier, with a casket marked “Vermont.” Secessionist candidates in Vermont are currently running for governor, lieutenant governor, eight Senate seats and two House seats.

“The movement, at its core, is anti-authoritarian,” said Sale, who works closely with Naylor and spoke with me from his home in Charleston, S.C. “It includes those who are libertarians and those who are on the anarchic community side. In traditional terms these people are left and right, but they have come very close together in their anti-authoritarianism. Left and right no longer have meaning.”

The movement correctly views the corporate state as a force that has so corrupted the economy, as well as the electoral and judicial process, that it cannot be defeated through traditional routes. It also knows that the corporate state, which looks at the natural world and human beings as commodities to be exploited until exhaustion or collapse occurs, is rapidly cannibalizing the nation and pushing the planet toward irrevocable crisis. And it argues that the corporate state can be dismantled only through radical forms of nonviolent revolt and the dissolution of the United States. As an act of revolt it has many attributes.

“The only way we will ever stop these wars is when we stop paying for them,” Naylor told me. “Vermont contributes about $1.5 billion to the Pentagon’s budget. Do we want to keep supporting these wars? If not, let’s pull out. We have two objectives. The first is returning Vermont to its status as an independent republic. The second is the peaceful dissolution of the empire. I see these as being mutually complementary.”

“The U.S. government has lost its moral authority,” he went on. “It is corrupt to the core. It is owned, operated and controlled by Wall Street and corporate America. Its foreign policy is controlled by the Israeli lobby. It is unsustainable economically, socially, morally, militarily and environmentally. It is ungovernable and therefore unfixable. The question is, do you go down with the Titanic or do you seek other options?”

The leaders of the movement concede that sentiment still outstrips organization. There has not been a large proliferation of new groups, and a few old groups have folded because of a lack of leadership and support. But they insist that an increasing number of Americans are receptive to their ideas.

“The number of groups has not grown as I hoped it would when I started having congresses,” said Sale, who addresses groups around the country. “But the number of people, of individuals, of websites and the number of libertarians who have come around has grown leaps and bounds. Many of those who were disappointed by the treatment of Ron Paul have come to the conclusion that they cannot have a Libertarian Party or a libertarian Republican. They are beginning to talk about secession.”

“Secessionists have to be very careful not to be militaristic,” Sale warned. “This cannot be won by the gun. You can be emphatic in your secessionism, but it won’t happen by carrying guns. I don’t know what the tea party people think they are going to accomplish with guns. I guess it is a statement against the federal government and the fear that Obama is about to have gun control. It appears to be an assertion of individual rights. But the tea party people have not yet understood how they are going to get their view across. They still believe they can elect people, either Republicans or declared conservatives, to office in Washington and have an effect, as if you can escape the culture of Washington and the characteristics of government that has only gotten bigger and will only continue to get bigger. Electing people to the House and Senate is not going to change the characteristics of the system.”

The most pressing problem is that the movement harbors within its ranks Southern secessionists who wrap themselves in the Confederate flag, begin their meetings singing Dixie and celebrate the slave culture of the antebellum South. Secessionist groups such as the Southern National Congress and the more radical League of the South, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a “racist hate group,” openly embrace a return to uncontested white, male power. And this aspect of the movement deeply disturbs leaders such as Naylor, Sale and Miller.

What all these movements grasp, however, is that the American empire is over. It cannot be sustained. They understand that we must disengage peacefully, learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, or see an economic collapse that could trigger a perverted Christian fascism, a ruthless police state and internecine violence.

“There are three or four possible scenarios that will bring down the empire,” Naylor said. “One possibility is a war with Iran. Another will see the Chinese pull the plug on Treasury bills. Even if these do not happen, the infrastructure of the country is decaying. This is a slower process. And they do not have the economy fixed. It is smoke and mirrors. This is why the price of gold is so high. The economy and the inability to stop the wars will alone be enough to bring us down. There is no escape now from our imperial overstretch.”

Chris Hedges is a columnist for Truthdig.com. In addition to writing a weekly original column for Truthdig, he has also written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Adbusters, Granta and Foreign Affairs. His most recent book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009)

Copyright 2010 Truthdig.com.

Coming World Economic Collapse

Derivatives + Coming World Economic Collapse

To get it in proper perspective, imagine this entire global financial crisis as a single damp firecracker popping.

Now imagine a similar failure in derivatives as the detonation of a 50 megaton Tsar Bomba over every major city on earth.

The effect will be the same.

If derivatives fail, that’s basically the entire planet that will be busted broke.

DEBORCHGRAVE: Stock market time bomb?

Arnaud de Borchgrave

Even the world’s most savvy stock-market giants (e.g., Warren E. Buffett) have warned over the past decade that derivatives are the fiscal equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) – potentially lethal. And the consequences of such an explosion would make the recent global financial and economic crisis seem like penny ante. But generously lubricated lobbyists for the unrestricted, unsupervised derivatives markets tell congressional committees and government regulators to butt out.

While banks all over the world were imploding and some $50 trillion vanished in global stock markets, the derivatives market grew by an estimated 65 percent, according the Bank for International Settlements. BIS convenes the world’s 57 most powerful central bankers in Basel, Switzerland, for periodic secret meetings. Occasionally, they issue a cry of alarm. This time, derivatives had soared from $414.8 trillion at the end of 2006 to $683.7 trillion in mid-2008 – 18 months’ time.

The derivatives market is now estimated at $700 trillion (notional, or face, value, not market value). The world’s gross domestic product in 2009: $69.8 trillion; America’s, $14.2 trillion. The total market cap of all major global stock markets? A mere $30 trillion. And the total amount of dollar bills in circulation, most of them abroad: $830 billion (not trillion).

One of the Middle East’s most powerful bankers conceded recently that even after listening to experts explain the drill, he still does not understand derivatives and therefore doesn’t trust them and won’t have anything to do with them. And when that weapon of mass destruction explodes, he explained, “Our bank’s customers, from all over the world, will be saved from the disaster.”

What’s so difficult to understand about derivatives? Essentially, they are bets for or against the house – red or black at the roulette wheel. Or betting for or against the weather in situations in which the weather is critical (e.g., vineyards). Forwards, futures, options and swaps form the panoply of derivatives. Credit derivatives are based on loans, bonds or other forms of credit. Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives are contracts that are traded and privately negotiated directly between two parties, outside of a regular exchange.

All of this is unregulated. What happens between two parties – notably hedge funds – is like what happens between two individuals who bet on the final score of a football or baseball game. Congressional committees have been warned time and again about “ticking time bombs” and “financial weapons of mass destruction” – to no avail, demonstrating that both the U.S. government and the U.S. Congress are dysfunctional. The need for constitutional reform comes up frequently in Washington think-tank discussions, only to end with the observation that Democrats and Republicans would never agree on anything that momentous.

On May 16, 2006, for example, Richard T. McCormack, vice chairman of Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch and former undersecretary of state for economic and agricultural affairs, told a Senate Banking hearing on derivatives and hedge funds in 2006, when the derivatives industry was in the $300 trillion range, “the increasing internationalization of finance and investment suggests the need for an ever-more-global approach to monitoring potentially dangerous problems.”

Derivatives played a key role in camouflaging the multibillion-dollar Enron scam in 2001. Similarly, the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund debacle of 1998 almost slayed the global monetary system. Yet its trading losses was a mere $5 billion. But this derivative-driven collapse seriously threatened the soundness of financial markets.

When the Russian ruble suddenly nose-dived without warning, LTCM found itself exposed with more than $1 trillion in foreign-exchange derivatives. It couldn’t pay. The New York Federal Reserve Bank organized a consortium of companies (Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers) to buy out LTCM and cover its debts. LTCM shareholders were wiped out, but none of the creditors took losses. LTCM was a hedge fund with just 200 employees, but without the New York Fed’s intervention, it would have caused a crash felt around the world.

Mr. McCormack pleaded with congressional banking experts to correct any structural or technical problems that could increase the likelihood of systemic risk in the event of future shock to the financial system, such as the Russian default (i.e., debacle) in 1998. No response.

On Feb. 28, 2006, when he was president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner outlined challenges to financial stability posed by derivatives. No response.

The 2007 U.S. subprime mortgage global disaster was also derivatives-driven – and provoked the biggest financial and economic disaster since the Great Depression.

Mr. McCormack, then a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, explained to the Banking Committee how Italy had secured entrance into the euro by purchasing exotic derivatives that “obscured the true financial condition of the country until after they were admitted” to the new European common currency. No reaction.

The same thing happened with Japan when some banks “purchased derivative instruments, which disguised the actual catastrophic state of their balance sheets at the time.” No action.

Today’s massive new derivatives bubble is driving the domestic and global economies, far outstripping the subprime-credit meltdown.

Hopefully not belatedly, Congress is considering legislation to curb the use of derivatives and other methods that artificially boost returns. But 13 members of Congress or their wives used derivatives to magnify their daily moves. And one measure proposed by Sen. Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas Democrat, would bar banks from trading in derivatives. This, in turn, would push almost $300 trillion beyond the reach of regulators. Derivatives would become still more opaque. Some say abolish derivatives trading in the U.S. and push it offshore.

The now-bloody Greek tragedy over its debt crisis is echoing through the Federal Reserve and the halls of Congress. Greece’s public debt exceeds 100 percent of its economy versus 90 percent (at $13 trillion) for the United States. If you add unfunded U.S. liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the long-term shortfall is $62 trillion, or about $200,000 for each American. At least that’s the estimate of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. And Peter Peterson himself says he’s now in the business of promoting awareness about public borrowing.

With probable trader error plunging the Dow Jones into a 1,000-point tailspin and back up in 16 minutes, economic and financial prognostication made astrology look respectable. Could Greece be a harbinger of ugly things to come for the rest of the world? Prominent investor Marc Faber, hedge fund manager Jim Chanos and Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff told Bloomberg China’s economy will slow and possibly “crash” within a year as the nation’s property bubble is set to burst.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

The World Economy is Beginning to Unravel

May 12, 2010

We have unhappily been predicting a catastrophic economic collapse for a year now. We have also been predicting that state secessions would be borne out of that collapse. Gerald Celente predicts it will occur before the end of 2010.

Look at what’s happening in Europe, as the European Union member states and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have ponied up $962 BILLION in paper money loans to prevent the collapse of Greece. What they didn’t tell you is that Ireland, Spain and Portugal are also teetering on the edge of collapse.

This newest infusion of counterfeit money only kicks the can further down the road…another way of saying that it buys some time. None of the fundamental causes for this insolvency, which is massive socialistic government spending, have been changed or fixed. And, as you’ve seen in the Greek riots, the people demand their bread and circuses. They are not interested in the massive spending cuts that the Greek government should make to save their own skin.

Even though it has taken about 80 years, the economics philosophy of John Maynard Keynes is being proven wrong before our eyes. Counterfeiting (central banking) and fractional reserve banking only serve to impoverish nations, not create wealth. But you do understand that the criminals that infest the political class in nearly ALL nations embraced Keynesianism because it allows them to grow the government under the radar.

And, governments will NEVER reject Keynesianism…even if they go bankrupt and repudiate their sovereign debt.

You cannot fix the government criminals. You have to kick them to the ashheap of history and start over.

But what should you be doing for yourself and your family on an individual basis…RIGHT NOW? This is about SURVIVAL, not convenience.

First thing I recommend is to keep cash out of your bank and in a safe at home. When banks start declaring “holidays” or simply shutting down, you’ll be shit out of luck (SOL) if you want to get your money out of the bank. ATMs might also quit working, as well as credit machines at merchants and gas stations. If you have your paycheck automatically deposited into your bank account, remove the cash the same day.

Second…stop all automatic debits on your bank account. If you have some creditor, like your house payment or car payment that drafts your bank account each month, stop it and pay them by check or money order. This way, you control the amount of money in your account, and auto drafts won’t hit, causing big overdraft fees. Sure, its less convenient. But you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Third…stop using debit cards and only use cash. That will force you to spend smarter, but will also force you to stop keeping cash in the bank.

Fourth…convert cash into gold and silver coins and keep them in a safe at our home.

Gerald Celente of Trend Research Institute talks about the huge one-day “correction” in the Dow Jones Industrial Average this week.

Listen to Celente on this video. He says that he has 80% of his investments in gold, and a mix of currencies as his cash position. He says that it is insanity to be in the stock market now…what he calls a “rigged game.” He says that wealth preservation is king right now.

Investing in equities…even bonds…is OVER for the foreseeable future. You need to protect your cash positions and your wealth over the next 1-5 years. Forget return on investment…concern yourself ONLY with wealth preservation.

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Gerald Celente is founder and director of The Trends Research Institute, author of Trends 2000 and Trend Tracking (Warner Books), and publisher of The Trends Journal. He has been forecasting trends since 1980, and recently called “The Collapse of ’09.”