Where unreality meets reality, Taboo is common knowledge, and what is to come…
December 17, 2010 Leave a Comment
This is the image promoted by America’s foremost “Christian university.”
Apparently, at Liberty, their Blacks don’t steal (see 2:04).
Jerry supported LU’s outreach to “da hood.”
December 17, 2010 Leave a Comment
The PVV, an anti-immigrant party in the Netherlands, recently won the elections and participated in the negociations that led to a new government. As a result, this party has had an important direct influence on immigration policies. More indirect influence on policies have been achieved by anti-immigrant parties, which have recently gained 29 percent of the votes cast in Switzerland, 22 percent in Norway, 17 percent in Austria, 14 percent in Denmark and 5.7 percent en Sweden. (In the 2008 federal elections in Canada 6.9 percent of the vote went to the Green party and 18.2 percent to the NDP). In Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel caused a stir around the world when recently she said “Multiculturalism in Germany has failed”.
What is behind the growing public support of anti-immigrant parties and concern over multiculturalism in Europe? The ruling elites argue that the current economic crisis has activated the ever latent populist, extreme-right, racist and anti-Islam views held by a minority of the population. These elites expect that the anti-immigrant parties will lose support and the critics of multiculturalism will be silent once economic prosperity is returned. The validity of this assertion is doubtful in the light of the fact that anti-immigrant parties in Europe prospered well before the 2008 economic crisis.
A more plausible explanation of the growth in anti-immigrant sentiments in Europe is the public’s perceived threat to the very essence of their national identity and a sense of belonging, which are anchored in their cultural, social, religious and economic institutions. The threat is seen to emanate from immigrant communities that fail to integrate into the societies of their host countries and often challenge existing institutions, all encouraged by official policies of multiculturalism.
For example, the viability of Scandinavia’s generous social programs is threatened by practices of some immigrants who do not adhere to the traditional behavioural norms. Muslim minorities in several countries are demanding the selective application of Sharia laws, the acceptance of honour killings and head scarves for women. Practices of civil society, like queuing for services sometimes are disregarded by some immigrants. In Central and Western Canada, a number of criminal gangs dominated by members of immigrant communities engage in much publicized violence.
In several European countries the growth of anti-immigrant parties has prompted some changes in immigration and multicultural policies. In Canada, Jason Kenney, the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration released a new citizenship guide with very similar goals.
These new policies require immigrants to know or learn their host countries’ languages and to accept existing national laws, institutions and values rather than demand changes to accommodate their own cultural norms. The granting of citizenship will become conditional upon meeting these and other requirements.
These new policies basically represent a repudiation of multiculturalism, which had been created with the expectation that it would end strife and wars. I believe that this repudiation has a deep root. The need of human beings to belong to and unite behind a common culture, institutions and values is part of human nature. This need is hard-wired because of its survival value during evolutionary history. It cannot be overcome by government policies and coercion aimed at its elimination.
The world’s experience with policies designed to create socialist and communist utopias provides an interesting historic parallel. These policies were based on the notion that selfish behaviour of individuals operating in a capitalist free market system created income inequalities, economic crises, environmental degradation and other alleged pathologies. Policies to create these utopias ended in the face of persistent selfish behaviour that, like the need to unite behind a common culture is deeply embedded in human nature and is hard-wired because of its evolutionary survival value.
Canada has been spared the political turmoil that in Europe resulted from the creation and success of anti-immigrant parties. However, the public’s desire to preserve Canada’s culture, institutions and values has been growing and undoubtedly has played a role in the recent federal government’s issue of the citizenship guide for immigrants.
Some concerned Canadians are not satisfied with this guide and have created the organization Canadians for Immigration Policy Reform, which lobbies for more changes to current immigration policies and maintains a website to present facts and analysis of the issues. The government ignores at its own risk the public’s desire for the further modification of multicultural policies for the protection of Canada’s culture, institutions and values.
December 17, 2010 Leave a Comment
There is so much to write about right now (thanks to everyone sending in stories). So many stories are time sensitive and need to be addressed (there will be a lot of posts the next three days), but one story needs to be tackled first.
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| Don’t ride the bus in Seattle |
Seattle is no stranger to Black people attacking people on buses (or jaywalking). But a new video and story has surfaced that shows a danger that can no longer go unnoticed:
Newly released security video from a Seattle city bus shows an attack on a pregnant woman by five teenage girls, who were later arrested for assault.
A pregnant teen says she feared for her baby when she and her boyfriend were attacked by a group of four girls and a woman on a Seattle Metro bus last month.
It was all captured on the bus’ security camera.
Police say Jessica Redmon-Beckstead, 17, was riding on the packed bus in the city’s Belltown neighborhood during the evening rush hour Nov. 19 when a 19-year-old woman, three 16-year-old girls and a 14-year-old girl came on board.
Surveillance video shows that, just 34 seconds after the girls got on, one of them grabbed the MP3 player Jessica and her boyfriend, Jason Decoste, were listening to. When they resisted, they were beaten and kicked by the five suspects, police say.
Redmon-Beckstead says she turned around again and was struck in the eye and began bleeding profusely. It wound up requiring six stitches to close, authorities say.
Jessica mentioned twice that she was pregnant and said she didn’t want to fight them, but says one of them made the comment, “Well, nobody hit her in the stomach.”
Investigators add that, as the attack was occurring, three of the girls stole items from the boyfriend’s pockets.
The attack continued until the bus pulled over. The bus driver called police. The victims were able to escape, police say.Metro Police say they tracked down three of the alleged attackers about a half-hour after the incident. They say they arrested the other two days later.
Investigators say the 19-year-old, Ayana Sharee Cain, was charged with assault and has since bailed out of jail. The other four girls were charged in juvenile court with second degree robbery. Three remain in custody while the fourth is on electronic home monitoring, police say.
All five suspects have prior arrests, authorities add.
Where is Epic Beard Man when you need him? Why is the entire bus participating in the same non-intervention mindset that was sadly present when Kitty Genovese was murdered? Will the day ever come when someone says what millions have thought and dreamed for someone to finally say (Enough…)?
We at SBPDL read virtually every story, study, and book possible on race and crime in the United States.
Our friends at Thugreport.com have vividly provided the finest aggregate of the face of criminality in America and yet still people are afraid of mentioning the unmentionable.
This unprovoked attack on a bus in Seattle will go down the memory (as so many other stories have been forced down) save for a select group of people who remember such horrors as Knoxville and Wichita. The full-onslaught of decade old stories of lynchings, draggings and other assorted behavior are constantly brought up and alluded to in an effort to make Disingenuous White Liberals (DWL) cry and flame the fires of white guilt are nothing –absolutely nothing — compared to what is transpiring in major cities on a nightly basis.
The Crazies live among us, all around us. Where are you Epic Beard Man? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
December 17, 2010 1 Comment
Black Run America (BRA) is on the precipice of finally introducing a line of credit for Black people without a limit.
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| $48 Billion to stimulate inner-city spending! |
After successfully passing legislation awarding more than $1 billion to imaginary Black farmers, those elected to represent their constituents are mulling over passing a bill to award a stunning $48 billion to be redistributed in inner cities:
Click to download Cleaver’s appropriations list
Rep. Cleaver has proposed a $48 billion earmark.
When absurdity gives way to hilarity, you must be talking about politics.
In the midst of a colossal global concern for the economic stability of our great nation, Emanuel Cleaver, Missouri’s 5th Congressional District representative, has one small earmark on his wish list that deserves some attention.
Cleaver has listed a new earmark — one of several — and he promises to “fight for every one.” But this is a whopping $48 billion package that must go down as the grandaddy of all earmarks.
Proposed by a gentleman named Lamar Mickens, president of the not-for-profit Quality Day Campus, the $48 billion earmark would funnel money into the inner cities to give money to the poor and thereby produce a much larger consumer class to buy the goods and services produced in this country.
Just call this redistribution on steroids.
Cleaver’s office says this of the proposal:
“The Epicenter is a proposed estimated $48 billion (Phase One) mass scale urban reclamation project for combating, reducing, reversing and/or eliminating poverty within under served communities by utilizing mass scale economic redevelopment to bring about stability and self reliance.”
OK. So the idea is short of specifics.
Currently Mickens operates this massive proposal out of his home but with Cleaver’s help, this earmark could put him on the road to success.
Cleaver provides a link to a Mickens “manifesto” where a lengthy agenda is outlined — but again with no specifics other than the rich should provide money to the poor so that the poor will have more money to spend.
This earmark would go to help Black people, that economically disadvantaged group who suffer from income inequality and high rates of unemployment; Reparations by any other name.
It has been calculated that cumulative Black buying power in the United States is around $913 billion, meaning that the $48 billion earmark would represent 5 percent of Black peoples combined monetary clout.
We at SBPDL find the purported estimate of Black buying power specious and will report more on that at a later date.
With Foot Locker on the verge of going out of business, the increased buying power of inner-city dwelling Black people could save the struggling store. How many other industries would benefit from this redistribution of wealth? One Dave Chappelle famously (or infamously) parodied what would happen if Black people ever received reparations:
[breaking news report following the distribution of slavery reparations]
News Reporter: So, what do you plan to spend your money on.
Tron: [In fake, quivering voice] I’m going to re-invest it in the community.
News Reporter: Well, that’s…
[cut off]
Tron: Psyche. I’m gonna spend it before y’all honkies change yo minds.
In that episode, we also see:
Tron becomes the world’s richest man, along with stock rising in fried chicken and KFC merging with Fubu. Note – this is the first time we hear Donnell Rawlings yell, “I’M RICH BIATCH!”
That Mr. Cleaver’s $48 billion earmark hasn’t been laughed out of the halls of Congress yet illustrates the power of BRA. One can only wonder at the potential lengths of the lines that will develop if the bill passes. Will we see a repeat of the fiasco in Atlanta, when 30,000 Black people lined up to get on a waiting list for Section-8 housing?
Perhaps a rumor could be started in major city that the bill has already passed, as when 50,000 Black people lined up in Detroit for stimulus checks that were non-existent.
At a time when the money is running out, Congress can be looked upon to dramatically boost the buying power of Black people. Remember, in entitlement America the head of a household of four making minimum wage has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.
With single Black mothers having a median net worth of just $5 (consider that 72 percent of Black babies are now born out-of-wedlock) one can only imagine how this $48 billion could significantly improve the state of inner-cities. After all, quadrillions have been spent trying to improve the inner-city schools that have turned out the intellectual titans who comprise the populations of these major cities.
Basically, it is time for the government to issue the 36 million Black people (12 percent of the US population) a Black card. No need for food stamps anymore, as this card will serve as a credit card (with no limit). Black students who get free lunches at school can use their card freely to engorge themselves more than they already do.
Black Friday would be everyday, thanks to the advent Black card. The stigma of the welfare queen would be gone forever. Child support could be paid.
One can only marvel at the direction the United States is heading.
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?d=ww2010.weblog&i=e101215#e101215
A clear-cut division, an ideological axis, is forming among the the countries of northeast Asia, because North Korea is complicating relations between the U.S. and China, according to an editorial in South Korea’s JoongAng Daily.
South Korea, the U.S. and Japan are on one side, while China backing North Korea are on the other.
A lynchpin of the new arrangement is the sudden decision by Japan to substantially strengthen its armed forces. That decision was spurred by a several events in the past year — the North Korean attack on the South Korean warship Cheonan last spring, the North Korean artillery shelling of the South Korean Yeonpyeong Island, and China’s overreaction to Japan’s arresting of a Chinese fishing boat captain in the summer. In addition, China became extremely aggressive in 2010, claiming sovereignty over a huge swaths of international waters in the South China Sea and East China Sea.
Japan’s era of postwar pacifism is coming to an end, according to an analysis in the Guardian. In the next few days, Japan will announce a new National Defense Program involving sophisticated new weaponry, mobile rapid-response units and closer security alliances with friendly countries.
It will include a “dynamic defence capability” specifically tasked with deterring Chinese incursions around Japan’s disputed southern islands. Defensive alliances will be with the US, Australia, India and even South Korea, stressing military integration and interoperability.
These moves are engendering a great deal of anxiety in the South Koreans. Japan colonized Korea for the first half of the last century, and Japan’s military used Korean “comfort women” during World War II. After the war, Japan became a purely defensive country, depending on America’s military umbrella for its protection.
But now, as the survivors of WW II have disappeared and memories are fading, the U.S. is encouraging Japan to take more responsibility for its own defense, and Japan is becoming more militaristic again.
Although Japan and South Korea are closely aligned against the dual threats posed by China and North Korea, Japan’s colonization of Korea still stirs passion, according to an analysis in the LA Times. One South Korean military analyst is quoted as saying, “Many Koreans still recall the brutality of Japanese colonization, so it’s still not possible to talk of better military ties with Tokyo. We will not accept any military involvement with Japan, no matter what the outside threat.”
And yet, military involvement between Japan and South Korea is one of the new proposals. In particular, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan raised hackles when he said, “We need to carefully proceed in consultations with South Korea about whether they would let in aircraft from Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.” The idea of Japanese aircraft over South Korean airspace is anathema to the South Koreans.
While Japan’s government appears to be increasingly assertive in dealing with external threats, South Korea’s government gives the appearance of being increasingly chaotic.
Just at the time that South Korea needs a coherent military strategy to deal with the threat from the North, the Army Chief of Staff was forced to resign on Tuesday, because of charges of corruption in a real estate deal, according to Arirang.
The South Koreans simply have not come to terms with the two North Korean military attacks this year. The look weak because they didn’t respond, but if they respond they’ll start a major war. Amid the chaos and anxiety in South Korea is the understanding that if North Korea stages another military attack, then they may have no choice but full-scale war.
Moscow is braced for new ultra-nationalist race riots on Wednesday. RFERL
A poll shows that 69% of Palestinians support signing a peace treaty with Israel, and that Hamas is losing support in favor of Fatah. Palestine News Network
Revelations by Wikileaks show that Middle Eastern states, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates, do not crack down on terrorist activities in their own countries, for fear that it would lead to reprisal attacks and greater domestic instability, and that they have financial links that fund terrorist activities in India. This supports the expectation, that I’ve described in the past, that in the coming Clash of Civilizations world war, China will be allied with Pakistan and the Sunni Muslim states, while America will be allied with Japan, South Korea, India and Iran. Institute of Peace & Conflict Studies (IPCS)
The Stuxnet computer worm is still crippling Iran’s nuclear program. It appears increasingly likely that Iran was the target of the virus, and it’s apparently been very successful. Stuxnet is so out of control that it may take another year for the Iranians to eliminate it. Fox News
China is taking advantage of Europe’s debt problems to greatly expand its influence on Europe, with large-scale investments and purchases of government bonds issued by highly-indebted states. Spiegel
The Obama administration has concluded that North Korea’s nuclear technology is significantly more advanced than Iran’s. NY Times
Germany and France appear to be backing down from their previous opposition to a Europe-wide “fiscal union.” The proposal will be debated at an EU summity on Thursday and Friday. EurActive
In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas, the death toll from drug-related violence for 2010 has just surpassed 3000. Associated Press
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 15-Dec-10 News — Ideological axis: S. Korea + Japan vs N. Korea + China thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (15-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
Russian riot police were forced to shut down a section of central Moscow on Monday evening, to head off a threatened new racial riot.
The move was made because of a tip-off that ethnic Russian football (soccer) fans were planning to face off with migrants, mainly from the Muslim North Caucasus region, according to Ria Novosti.
Early last week, football fan Yegor Svirido was shot dead in a fight between football fans and migrants. A 26 year old man, Aslan Cherkessov, 26, from the North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, was accused of the murder and arrested.
A massive race riot broke out on Saturday during a memorial rally for Svirido, involving 5000-7000 ethnic Russians. 30 people were injured. According to the VOA account:
“On Monday, Russians looked in shock at the images of last weekend’s violence in downtown Moscow: hundreds of young men raising their right arms in stiff-armed Nazi salutes against the red brick walls of the Kremlin; young men in black hoods attacking riot police with chunks of ice, burning flares, glass bottles and steel rods; five young men from Caucasus, blood streaming down their faces, cowering behind policemen who rescued them from nationalist attackers.”
President Dmitry Medvedev said on Monday that the perpetrators would be punished, and that “everything is under control,” according to Reuters. Medvedev said the following:
“Actions aimed at inciting racial, ethnic or religious hatred and enmity are particularly dangerous: They threaten the state’s stability. The latest events in Moscow — the pogroms, the attacks on people — must be prosecuted as crimes and those responsible, punished.”
In his Twitter feed, he added, “In Moscow and Russia, everything is under control. We will deal with everyone who stirred up trouble. Have no doubt!”
Actually, analysts have plenty of doubt, as xenophobia and violence by ethnic Russias against people of “non-Slavic appearance” from Central Asia and the Caucasus has been increasing.
Historically, the Caucasus region is one of the most violent on earth, because of the interethnic wars, and because it’s one of the major regions (along with the Crimea and the Balkans) where fault line wars have been fought between the Muslim civilization and the Orthodox Christian civilization. The great forces that have lead to these wars over the centuries appear to be rising again.
Here’s something I heard from an analyst on Bloomberg tv on Monday morning:
“This is the time of year everyone’s brushing up their forecasts, what they expect for next year.And WOW, are people waxing optimistic! I mean, you have everyone talking about what a great year 2011 is going to be.
In fact Goldman Sachs said it’s going to be a superb backdrop for equities. You have the average forecast up 11% for 2011. If we were to hit that, that would be three years in a row of gains. That hasn’t happened in a decade. So people are feeling very, very good about stocks these days.”
What she forgot to mention is that what happened a decade ago is the collapse of the dot-com bubble after three years of bubble growth in the stock market. These analysts are supposed to be experts, but it never occurs to them that if there was a big bubble a decade ago, then there might be a big bubble today.
I’m still amazed that throughout 2004-2007, all we heard on CNBC and read in WSJ was that there was no housing bubble. Today, everybody talks about the housing bubble in 2004-2007. These experts on CNBC have no idea what’s going on until it’s too late.
On Monday evening, on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly said the following:
“I say this: When Republicans take control of the House in January, they should put forth immediately legislation that cuts federal spending by 25% over the next three years.It’s simple. The Feds have to stop spending so much money. If the Republican party leads the way in containing Federal spending, the folks will notice, and the unemployment extension will not mean very much down the road.
Again, the country needs a 25% federal spending cut over the next three years. 8 and 1/3 each year. It’s gonna be painful but it has to be done. Of course many Democrats will oppose that, perhaps including President Obama.
That will set the stage for the election of 2012. But for now, we need this tax compromise, so pass it.”
Can anyone imagine the Congress doing anything like this? This is based on the same fantasy as the previous comment — that there’ll be a huge recovery next year, and so there’ll be plenty of money sloshing around, and no problem cutting federal spending by 25%.
Today on TV I also heard a couple of analysts talk about an impending banking crisis in Europe, and another analyst talk about China’s bubble bursting. But these are just voices in the wilderness. And anyway, so what? Those things are happening in other countries, and have nothing to do with us.
Russia’s foreign minister has expressed “deep concern” about North Korea’s ability to enrich uranium and produce nuclear weapons. AFP.
America’s unsuccessful attempt to bribe the Israelis by promising a squadron of fighter planes in return for a 90 day extension of the West Bank settlement freeze shows how out of touch with reality all sides in the Mideast are, according to columnist Thomas Friedman. His advice is that the U.S. should pull out of the negotiations, and let the Israelis and Palestinians figure it out themselves. As I recall, that’s the conclusion that President Bush reached, but he was then criticized for not being a leader in the Mideast. NY Times
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 14-Dec-10 News — Medvedev warns that nationalist pogroms are destabilizing Russia thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (14-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
A suicide bomber shouted something in Arabic and blew himself up in Stockholm, Sweden, on Saturday, according to the Stockholm News.
There were two explosions, and investigations showed that an unexploded backpack was full of nails. Terrorists often pack nails with explosives in bombings in order to increase the number of casualties.
Although the suicide bombing occurred in the middle of a busy shopping street in central Stockholm, only two bystanders suffered minor injuries. The only person who was killed was the suicide bomber himself.
The news reports do not indicate whether the failure to kill other people was intentional or accidental, or whether the police even know. Under the assumption that it was intentional, this is something that we’ve seen before.
I’ve quoted this before. According to a July, 2007, study by the Jamestown Foundation entitled “The Taliban Fedayeen: The World’s Worst Suicide Bombers?”:
“An analysis of the attacks carried out in the last two years reveals a curious fact. In 43% of the bombings conducted last year and in 26 of the 57 bombings traced in this study up to June 15, the only death caused by the bombing was that of the bomber himself. Astoundingly, approximately 90 suicide bombers in this two year period succeeded in killing only themselves. This number exceeds 100 when you factor in those who succeeded in killing only one person in addition to themselves. There was one period in the spring of 2006 (February 20 to June 21) when a stunning 26 of the 36 suicide bombers in Afghanistan (72%) only killed themselves. This puts the kill average for Afghan suicide bombers far below that of suicide bombers in other theaters of action in the area (Israel, Chechnya, Iraq and the Kurdish areas of Turkey). Such unusual bomber-to-victim death statistics are, of course, heartening for both coalition troops—who have described the Afghan suicide bombers as “amateurs”—and the Afghan people—who are usually the victims of the clumsy bombings.These statistics also represent a uniquely Afghan phenomenon that warrants investigation.”
Afghanistan is in a generational Recovery era, having gone through a massive crisis civil war in the 1990s, and so there’s little desire among the survivors for further killing.
The same kind of thing has occurred in the Iraq war. Iraq is in a generational Awakening, and Iraqis have refused to become suicide bombers, forcing al-Qaeda in Iraq to import suicide bombers from Saudi Arabia and other countries in a generational Crisis era. (See the 2007 article, “Iraqi Sunnis are turning against al-Qaeda in Iraq.”)
There are many possible reasons why the Stockholm suicide bomber failed to kill anyone but himself. He may have been incompetent, or he may have miscalculated. But it’s also possible that he grew up during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s or the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s and has no desire to inflict on other people the kind of horrific violence that he saw as a child.
Update: Late news is that the suicide bomber has been identified as Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, a 29 year old who was born in Baghdad, and left Iraq in 1992, according to the Telegraph. He grew up traumatized and surrounded by bloody violence in the Iran/Iraq war, and it’s quite possible that, at the last minute, he simply didn’t want to inflict that trauma on other people, even the infidels.
Since World War II, Japan has avoided rebuilding its military, and instead has depended on the United States military to provide an umbrella of protection. However, Japan’s military is about to release a new set of guidelines that will increase Japan’s military capabilities, with particularly emphasis on threats posed by North Korea and China. Washington Post
After last week’s collapse of the Obama administrations Mideast peace plan, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is ordering Israelis and Palestinians to stop “demonizing” each other and to make “real progress” on their disagreements in the next few months. Bloomberg
Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev called for tough action against the thousands of football (soccer) fan rioters who clashed with police in Moscow on Saturday. The riots were triggered by the death of an ethnic Russian in a fight with men from ethnic minorities from the North Caucasus republic of Kabardino-Balkaria. Members of the North Caucasus’s numerous ethnic minorities are afraid of further reprisals from ethnic Russians. Ria Novosti
Ethnic riots continued in Moscow on Sunday. Associated Press
Bankers and brokers hoping to make millions of dollars from carbon dioxide derivative securities had their hopes dashed on Saturday when then the climate change conference in Cancun ended without mandating the use of the “global carbon market.” Reuters
Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has survived numerous sex and money scandals, including alleged liaisons with girls under 20 years old. But part of his ruling coalition has turned against him, and he’s facing a vote of no confidence on Tuesday. Reuters
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 13-Dec-10 News — Suicide bomber in Stockholm, Sweden, fails to kill anyone but himself thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (13-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
The Reuters report on Saturday’s close of the climate talks in Cancun is “Climate Talks End With Modest Deal and Standing Ovation.”
Actually, the “modest deal” was pretty much totally meaningless. The main element of the deal was the establishment of a $100 billion “Green Climate Fund,” and everyone is supposed to donate money to this fund. I’ve reported on others of these funds, including disaster funds and funds for Africa, and they’re all pretty much a joke. The $100 billion figure gets the headline, and then the fund is forgotten the next day.
But no matter. “Cancún has done its job,” said UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. “The beacon of hope has been reignited and faith in the multilateral climate change process to deliver results has been restored.”
And the delegates gave themselves a standing ovation for doing such a brilliant job.
Delegates from 139 nations signed the agreement, but not Bolivia. Bolivian President Evo Morales was the most theatrical of the politicians attending the Cancun conference, according to the Guardian. His entourage includes 15 colourfully dressed, bowler-hatted indigenous Aymara, an admiral in gold braid, teams of advisers and white-coated bodyguards, Mayan priests and ambassadors.
According to Morales, “It’s easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger. People here in Cancún have no idea what it is like to be a victim of climate change.”
Whether accidentally or by plan, there was other big news from Bolivia this weekend. Morales has just signed a law nationalizing Bolivia’s pension funds, and lowers the retirement age from 65 to 58, according to the BBC.
This is the reversal of a previous change. Bolivia privatized pension funds 13 years ago after a state-run system collapsed. Whether in Cancun or Bolivia, the inmates are running the asylum.
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 12-Dec-10 News — Climate talks end with standing ovations thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (12-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
Violence in Haiti continued for a fourth day, fueled by extreme poverty, racial divisions, devastation from January’s earthquake, and spreading cholera.
The violence was triggered on Tuesday by the announcement of election results that eliminated Michel Martelly, a popular carnival artist, from the runoff election to be held in January, according to the Guardian.
It’s widely believed that vote-rigging was used to eliminate the popular Martelly, in favor of two other candidates who are considered to be closer to the establishment.
Haiti’s population consists of two major groups — the dark-skinned “noirs” or blacks, the descendants of slaves imported from Africa by the French colonizers in the 1700s, and the light-skinned “mulattoes,” resulting from intermixing of French and slave bloods. The mulattoes are a market-dominant minority: under 5% of the population, but controlling over 50% of the nation’s wealth. The two winning candidates are perceived to favor the mulatto élites, while Martelly is thought to favor the noirs.
With Haiti deep into a generational Crisis era, it’s quite possible that the current violence will spiral into full scale civil war. That has been prevented so far, however, by the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces and by massive international food aid.
The spread of cholera appears to have leveled off on Friday, but experts are saying that an intensive vaccination program must be instituted to control the deadly disease, according to Reuters.
A lot of popular anger has been leveled at the U.N. peacekeeping forces for apparently introducing the cholera into Haiti for the first time in decades. A new report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, seems to confirm those accusations, according to the LA Times. According to the report, the cholera strain in Haiti is one which has previously been seen only in Asia, where it’s a particularly virulent strain that has displaced the milder forms of cholera in that region. It’s now believed likely that the cholera strain was introduced into Haiti by peacekeeping forces from Nepal or another Asian country.
Haiti is expected to dominate a meeting to be held on Monday of North American foreign ministers, according to the Toronto Star.
Of particular concern is that fact that billions of dollars in aid money has been contributed to Haiti, but people are still living in tent cities, indicating that the money is being wasted on corruption, and is not reaching the people who need it. Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the senate committee responsible for funding foreign aid, is calling for a freeze on US aid to Haiti’s government, according to AFP. Leahy also wants to deny travel visas to government officials, until a fair election outcome has been shown.
Meanwhile, with the violence increasing, the U.S. has reissued a travel warning recommending all U.S. citizens reconsider nonessential trips to Haiti, according to AP. Canada has closed its embassy until further notice.
Al-Qaeda has failed for years in its objective to drive the United States forces out of the Middle East, but now al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), headquartered in Yemen, is trying the reverse. In the new strategy, AQAP will “harness America’s manic need to act” by continuously provoking America to meddle into Yemen’s domestic affairs. They expect that this will alienate Yemen’s government from its people, thus setting the stage for a domestic al-Qaeda coup. International Relations and Security Network (ISN)
New poll shows that Afghanistan public opinion is turning sharply against US forces. Global Post
On Thursday, Pakistani newspapers carried stories about Wikileaks revelations that American officials were accusing India of genocide in Kashmir and of supporting Islamist terrorists. However, an investigation shows that the Pakistani newspapers were duped, as the leaked cables were faked. Guardian
France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel joined forces on Friday to oppose the “euro bond” proposal that we reported on yesterday. However, both leaders said that they were committed to “do everything to guarantee financial stability in the euro zone.” NY Times
China’s policy of “neutrality” in the armed confrontations between North and South Korea has resulted in damage to China’s strategic interests: both Koreas have put their armed forces under top-level alert, the US 7th Fleet has been mobilized just outside of China’s territorial waters, Japan’s government is on alert, and everyone perceives China as favoring North Korea. However, China is afraid of confronting North Korea, for fear of destabilizing the country. S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS)
Taiwan has begun mass production of a long-range cruise missile that could reach mainland Chinese cities. WSJ (Access)
China’s inflation surged to a 20 month high of 5.1% in Novemeber, thanks to massive amounts of stimulus money pushing up food prices. Associated Press
China plans to shift its monetary policy stance from relatively loose to ‘prudent’ next year. China Securities Journal
This week’s debates between the administration and congress over taxes makes is clear that the US deficit is going to continue to skyrocket, no matter which side “wins,” increasing the likelihood that the US will default at some point. This is causing a selloff of US Treasury bonds, causing yields (interest rates) to rise. This will make it even harder to get credit, and more expensive to get a home mortgage. WSJ (Access)
Pretty women are far less likely than plain women to get a job interview, according to a study. The reason, according to the study, is jealousy, since most most candidate screeners are women. Executive Health
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 11-Dec-10 News — Violence continues for fourth day in Haiti thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (11-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
As the European financial crisis continues to grow, it’s complicated by personal animosities between the politicians in two major camps.
Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, who heads the euro-group of finance ministers, is the leader of the camp who want Europe to join together into a big “fiscal union.” This would make all the eurozone countries at least partially liable for all other countries’ debts. Juncker has put forth a “euro-bond” proposal to implement this. The proposal would allow the EU to issue bonds that all countries would guarantee.
Juncker’s main opponent, both personally and politically, is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who does not want Germany to end up being forced to bail everyone else out, which is how the “fiscal union” concept is being interpreted by the German people. Merkel rejected the euro-bond proposal, and Juncker accused her of doing so without even looking at it. Merkel has proposed letting countries default, if forced to by too much debt.
This disagreement has poisoned Europe, according to an analysis in Der Spiegel (Translation). “It is a paradoxical situation – the euro currency, which is actually supposed to bind Europeans together, is increasingly splitting the continent apart.”
The result of this poisoned atmosphere is that the formerly strong German financial markets have suddenly started weakening in the last couple of weeks, as measured by bond yields, according to Reuters.
German debt has long been considered the safest in Europe, and this has been reflected in very low yields (interest rates) on German bonds. But German 10-year bonds have been selling off rapidly in the last couple of weeks, pushing yields up substantially.
Here are some euro crisis graphics from Reuters:
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The top graph shows the annual debt and the gross debt for each country. Luxembourg looks pretty good, while Greece and Ireland look particularly bad.
The bottom graph is interesting from the point of view of the current Washington debate over taxes. Ireland has been successful in attracting industry because of their very low corporate tax rate — 12.5% — and they’ve fighting like mad against demands to raise it in return for a bailout. The USA, on the other hand, has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Not great for a country that’s supposed to have so attractive to entrepreneurs.
2010 has been a big year for mortgage defaults and foreclosures, and Zillow Inc. has determined that U.S. home values have fallen by a total of $1.7 trillion dollars this year, according to Bloomberg.
The housing bubble was the most visible factor in creating the huge credit bubble of the mid-2000s decade, and is now the most visible factor in removing money from the economy.
Israel and Turkey are hashing out the final details of the exact phrasing to be used in Israel’s apology for its raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla last spring, resulting in the deaths of nine Turkish citizens. Israel is likely to offer hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to the families of the victims. Haaretz
In three weeks there will be the two-year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza strip. Many analysts have been concerned all year that a renewal of that war could begin at any time, but an analysis by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) indicates that the Hamas military has been deterred by the result of the last war, but that Hamas has obtained advanced weapons systems in preparation for the next war. Jerusalem Post
Five myths exposed by Wikileaks. They include: the myth of Islamic solidarity, the myth of US solidarity with India, the myth of genuine Chinese friendship with India. Bahukutumbi Raman.
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 10-Dec-10 News — Personal conflicts poison Europe as euro-crisis grows thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (10-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
As we reported yesterday, the Mideast peace process has collapsed after the Obama administration has admitted that its entire strategy had failed. The administration had put a great deal of its prestige into a plan to bring the Israelis and Palestinians together to agree to a two-nation peace plan, and the effort is now at a dead end.
Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit says that the discussions should now shift to an “end game for a Palestinian settlement,” according to Haaretz. “The Americans have been informing all of us that their efforts did not succeed,” he said. “They wanted to reach a moratorium on settlement activities with Israel. That came to an end now.”
Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas plans to meet with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Thursday, and then go to an emergency meeting of the Arab League next week, according to the Jerusalem Post.
The main purpose of these meetings will be to decide whether to ask the United Nations Security Council for an international mandate to create a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 borders of Israel.
This option has been gathering support in recent weeks, as several Latin American states have taken steps to recognize just this solution, as we reported yesterday.
It’s hard to know how far this proposal will go. It’s been pretty obvious for months that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis want any sort of “peace process” to go forward, but simply want to avoid being blamed for any failure. But this proposal for a unilateral declaration could take on a life of its own.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, nothing has changed in the Mideast since I made my first major prediction on this subject in 2003. (See “Mideast Roadmap – Will it bring peace?”) The Arabs and the Jews will be re-fighting the bloody war that took place after the partitioning of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel — by United Nations mandate. Any unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state on pre-1967 borders would create extremely tense stalemate that could lead quickly to war.
The announcement of election results favoring the party of president Rene Preval has given the appearance of a stolen election in Haiti and triggered widespread violence on Wednesday, according to the Montreal Gazette.
For a number of years, Haiti has been one of the poorest countries on earth, with many neighborhoods strewn knee high in garbage, and the squalid stagnation got much worse after the catastrophic earthquake on January 12 of this year.
And now, cholera has spread to every part of the country, according to the LA Times. More than 91,000 people have gotten sick, and over 2,000 have been killed. In some cases, death occurred within two hours of falling ill from the disease.
In the past few years, I’ve reported on violence in Kenya, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). In each of those cases, I was able to predict that the violence would fizzle out because these countries were in generational Recovery, Awakening or Unraveling eras.
But no such prediction can be made of Haiti, which is well into a generational Crisis era. The violence in Haiti could easily spiral into full scale civil war, and frankly the only thing stopping it is the presence of U.N. peacekeeping forces, and injections of massive international aid.
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Earlier this year, a confrontation was growing with China on one side, and with the US< Vietnam and other Asian countries on the other side. (See “24-Jul-10 News — US confronts China on South China Sea claims.”) Widespread opposition by countries in the region have caused China to step back a bit. China’s position hasn’t fundamentally changed, but lately the Chinese seem to be a bit more “open-minded.” Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
North Korea has released a report defending the its artillery attack on Yeonpyeong island last month, killing four people, including two civilians. The North Koreans do not recognize the Northern Limit Line (NLL) that separates North Korean and South Korean sea waters, and claim that Yeonpyeong Island is actually North Korean territory. I guess they’re saying that therefore they can kill as many civilians on the island as they want. Reuters
A suicide bomber struck a market in northwest Pakistan on Wednesday, killing more than 10 people. VOA
Pakistan is developing a close alliance with Sri Lanka, now that the Sri Lankan civil war with the Tamil Tiger rebels has ended. Pakistan has accused India of fomenting the Tamil Tiger rebellion, and now sees Sri Lanka as a counter-balance to India in Asian politics. Sri Lanka, Pakistan and China all have close ties with one another, and would be expected to be allied with one another in the “Clash of Civilizations” world war. Bahukutumbi Raman.
A new Russian law on the restitution of religious property was largely written to benefit the Russian Orthodox Church, whose property was confiscated and destroyed during the Bolshevik Revolution. However, under the terms of the law, Russia’s Muslims are also going to demand return of properties confiscated from them in the past. These demands will stir anger and xenophobia among ethnic Russians. Paul Goble
About 50 European Muslim and Jewish faith leaders met in Brussels on Monday to urge better protection of religious minorities in Europe and to establish closer ties. European Jewish Press
(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 9-Dec-10 News — Violence and cholera spread in Haiti thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (9-Dec-2010) Permanent Link
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/
Selling government debt is a gigantic confidence game. For decades, investors all over the globe have gobbled up massive amounts of U.S. debt at incredibly low interest rates because they believed that it was a certainly that they would be paid back and be able to make a little bit of profit on top of it. Unfortunately, things have changed. Confidence is U.S. Treasuries is dying, and if confidence in U.S. government debt completely collapses at some point we could literally be looking at financial Armageddon. Why is that so? Well, when the world totally loses faith in U.S. Treasuries, interest rates on U.S. Treasuries will have to keep going up until enough investors are found to buy them. But much higher interest rates will mean much higher interest on the national debt and thus much higher federal budget deficits. That will erode confidence in U.S. Treasuries even further. In the end, a vicious cycle of eroding confidence and higher interest rates could ultimately lead to hyperinflation as the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve flood the system with endless amounts of paper money to try to keep the system solvent.
Faith in U.S. Treasury bonds is absolutely critical if the world financial system is going to continue to operate in a stable manner. In the post-World War 2 era, U.S. Treasuries have been largely viewed as the absolutely safest investment out there. So if there comes a point when the market for U.S. Treasuries completely collapses, it is going to cause unprecedented financial chaos. The worldwide derivatives market, which is already highly unstable, would almost certainly implode. Credit markets all over the globe would seize up. Global trade would quickly grind to a standstill.
This isn’t going to happen overnight (hopefully). Rather, the loss of confidence in U.S. Treasuries is something that is likely to take months or even years to play out. But once that confidence is gone, it is not something that will be able to be rebuilt easily.
Think of it this way – once you drive a car off a cliff, is it easy to reconstruct it?
Of course not.
Well, that is where we are headed with U.S. Treasuries.
The Federal Reserve is flooding the system with new dollars, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress seem poised to pass a new tax deal which does not include corresponding spending cuts which will cause U.S. government budget deficits to become even more bloated, and there is a tremendous lack of faith both in U.S. political leaders and in the Federal Reserve at this point.
The rest of the world is losing faith that the U.S. government is going to be able to handle all of the debt that it has accumulated. We may be approaching a “tipping point” soon.
The following are 10 signs that confidence in U.S. Treasuries is dying….
#1 The financial community is extremely concerned that the tax deal that Barack Obama is pushing is going to dramatically increase U.S. government budget deficits over the next two years. On Monday, Moody’s warned that if Barack Obama’s tax deal with the Republicans becomes law, it will increase the likelihood that Moody’s could soon be forced to slash the rating of U.S. government debt.
#2 Already there are signs that some bond investors are looking for the exits. Last week, U.S. Treasuries suffered their largest two day sell-off since the collapse of Lehman Brothers back in September 2008.
#3 The yield on 10-year Treasury bonds set a six-month high on Monday before pulling back a bit. Most analysts believe that Treasury yields are going to push significantly higher in coming weeks.
#4 This trend of rising yields has been going on for a while. In fact, yields on 10-year Treasury bonds have been steadily rising since October 7th.
#5 Even before the recent tax deal was announced there were already troubling signs regarding the growth of U.S. government debt. The U.S. government budget deficit rose to $150.4 billion in November, which was the largest November budget deficit ever recorded.
#6 It is not just the new tax deal that has investors around the globe spooked. The truth is that the rest of the globe reacted very negatively to the new round of quantitative easing that the Federal Reserve announced back in November. The Federal Reserve is flooding the system with liquidity and the rest of the world is not amused.
#7 The American people have less faith in the Federal Reserve and in the financial system than at any other point in recent memory. For example, a new Bloomberg National Poll has found that a majority of Americans now want the Federal Reserve to either be held more accountable or to be abolished entirely.
#8 Investors all over the globe are starting to wake up and realize that America’s debt problem is unsolvable. David Bloom, the currency chief at HSBC, raised eyebrows when he recently stated that “if yields are rising because people think America’s fiscal situation is unsustainable, then its Armaggedon.”
#9 There is also a growing feeling among investors that the Federal Reserve simply does not care about the danger of inflation, and this is making bondholders very nervous. Stephen Lewis of Monument Securities recently put it this way….
“There is a feeling that the Fed doesn’t care about inflation – in fact, wants more of it – and that is certainly not in the interest of bondholders.“
#10 Over the next 12 months, the U.S. government is going to be rolling over trillions of dollars in debt along with all of the new borrowing that it is going to be doing. In fact, the U.S. government is somehow going to have to find a way to finance debt that is equivalent to 27.8 percent of GDP in 2011.
For years our politicians have told us that “deficits don’t matter”, but the truth is that they do matter. The national debt of the United States is now the biggest debt in the history of the world by far, and yet most Americans do not seem to grasp the absolute financial horror that we are facing as a nation.
In the end, debt is always painful. It can be a lot of fun to run out and buy a beautiful new house, a couple of brand new cars and to run your credit cards up to the max, but eventually it catches up with you. Well, the same thing is now happening to us on a national level.
We are getting to the point where eventually we are not even going to be able to service the debt that we have already piled up. Once that happens we can either declare national bankruptcy or we can try to hyperinflate our way out of trouble.
Meanwhile, the once great U.S. economic machine is dying as well. The only reason we have been able to survive with all of this debt as long as we have is because of how powerful our economy has been.
But over the past couple of decades, the big global corporations that now dominate our economy have shipped thousands of factories and millions of jobs overseas.
The mighty economic machine which is supposed to provide funds to pay off all of this debt is being dismantled right in front of our eyes.
There was no way in the world that U.S. government debt was going to be sustainable even if our economy remained vibrant and healthy. The sad truth is that U.S. government debt is approximately 13 times larger than it was just 30 years ago.
But now that the “real economy” is dying a savage death there is simply no hope that this thing is ever going to turn around. The only thing left to do is to take bets on when the implosion is going to happen.
All of this “great tax cut debate” nonsense going on in Washington D.C. right now is just a bunch of incompetent politicians running around rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Perhaps these tax cuts will provide enough of a short-term economic boost to get many of them re-elected in 2012. Meanwhile, our long-term economic problems continue to get a lot worse.
It has become quite obvious that Barack Obama is completely clueless about the economy, and what is even sadder is that the “highly educated” Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, seems almost equally as clueless.
Unfortunately, Americans have become so dumbed-down that they don’t even realize that their leaders are incompetent. In fact, as sad as it is to say, most Americans you will meet on the street probably cannot even tell you what U.S. Treasuries are.
Let us hope and pray that investors around the globe continue to have at least some confidence in U.S. Treasuries for at least a little while longer. When “financial Armageddon” finally does happen, it isn’t going to be pleasant for any of us.
So enjoy these happy economic times while you still have them, because at some point things are going to get a whole lot worse.
Guess what? Unemployment is up again! That’s right – even though Wall Street is swimming in cash and the Obama administration is declaring that “the recession is over”, the U.S. unemployment rate has gone even higher. So are you enjoying the jobless recovery? The truth is that there should not be any talk of a “recovery” as long as the “official” unemployment rate remains at around 10 percent and the “real” unemployment continues to hover around 17 percent. There are millions and millions of American families that are living every day in deep pain because of the lack of jobs. Meanwhile, there are all of these economic pundits that are declaring that we are just going to have to realize that chronic unemployment is the “new normal” and that if other nations can handle high rates of unemployment then so can we. The most optimistic economists are projecting that we can perhaps get the unemployment rate down to around 8 percent by 2012. On the other hand, there are many economists that are convinced that things are going to get even worse.
If you have never been unemployed, it can be hard to describe how soul-crushing it can be. As the bills pile up and the financial obligations mount, the pressure can be debilitating. Being unemployed for an extended period of time can easily plunge you into depression and grind your self-worth away to almost nothing. After getting rejected dozens of times (or even hundreds of times), many Americans simply give up. There are countless marriages and countless families that are being ripped to shreds by financial pressure even as you read this. When the money is gone and there is no job in sight it can be a really, really empty feeling.
Of course there is a whole lot more to life than money, but it can be difficult to tell that to someone who can barely sleep at night because of the intense pressure to find a job.
The vast majority of Americans have at least one family member or close friend that is looking for work right now. Times are really, really tough and unfortunately the long-term outlook is very bleak. We should have compassion on those who are out of work right now, because soon many of us may join them.
The following are 25 unemployment statistics that are almost too depressing to read….
#1 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. unemployment rate for November was 9.8 percent. This was up from 9.6 percent in October, and it continues a trend of depressingly high unemployment rates. The official unemployment number has been at 9.5 percent or higher for well over a year at this point.
#2 In November 2006, the “official” U.S. unemployment rate was just 4.5 percent.
#3 Most economists had been expecting the U.S. economy to add about 150,000 jobs in November. Instead, it only added 39,000.
#4 In the United States today, there are over 15 million people who are “officially” considered to be unemployed for statistical purposes. But everyone knows that the “real” number is even much larger than that.
#5 As 2007 began, there were just over 1 million Americans that had been unemployed for half a year or longer. Today, there are over 6 million Americans that have been unemployed for half a year or longer.
#6 The number of “persons not in the labor force” in the United States recently set another new all-time record.
#7 It now takes the average unemployed American over 33 weeks to find a job.
#8 When you throw in “discouraged workers” and “underemployed workers”, the “real” unemployment rate in the state of California is actually about 22 percent.
#9 In America today there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone. In fact, there are now approximately 5 unemployed Americans for every single job opening.
#10 According to The New York Times, Americans that have been unemployed for five weeks or less are three times more likely to find a new job in the coming month than Americans that have been unemployed for over a year.
#11 The U.S. economy would need to create 235,120 new jobs a month to get the unemployment rate down to pre-recession levels by 2016. Does anyone think that there is even a prayer that is going to happen?
#12 There are 9 million Americans that are working part-time for “economic reasons”. In other words, those Americans would gladly take full-time jobs if they could get them, but all they have been able to find is part-time work.
#13 In 2009, total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined in the United States.
#14 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time that less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
#15 The United States has lost at least 7.5 million jobs since the recession began.
#16 Today, only about 40 percent of Ford Motor Company’s 178,000 workers are employed in North America, and a big percentage of those jobs are in Canada and Mexico.
#17 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.
#18 Earlier this year, one poll found that 28% of all American households had at least one member that was looking for a full-time job.
#19 In the United States today, over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.
#20 The United States has lost a staggering 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#21 As the employment situation continues to stagnate, millions of American families have decided to cut back on things such as insurance coverage. For example, the percentage of American households that have life insurance coverage is at its lowest level in 50 years.
#22 Unless Congress acts, and there is no indication that is going to happen, approximately 2 million Americans will stop receiving unemployment checks over the next couple of months.
#23 A poll that was released by the Pew Research Center back in June discovered that an astounding 55 percent of the U.S. labor force has experienced either unemployment, a pay decrease, a reduction in hours or an involuntary move to part-time work since the economic downturn began.
#24 According to Richard McCormack, the United States has lost over 42,000 factories (and counting) since 2001.
#25 In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.
But this is what we get for creating the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. For decades we have been digging a deeper hole for ourselves by going into increasingly larger amounts of debt. In America today, our entire economy is based on debt. Even our money is debt. We were fools if we ever thought this could go on forever.
Just think about it. Have you ever gone out and run up a bunch of debt? It can be a lot of fun sitting behind the wheel of a new car, running your credit cards up to the limit and buying a beautiful big house that you cannot afford.
But in the end what happens?
It always catches up with you.
Well, our collective debt is starting to catch up with us. There is a sea of red ink on every level of American society. It is only a matter of time before it destroys our economy.
If you think that things are bad now, just wait. Things are going to get a whole lot worse. A horrific economic collapse is coming, and it is going to be very, very painful.
This October, millions of Americans are going to watch horror movies and read horror stories because they enjoy being frightened. Well, if you really want to be scared, you should just check out the real horror story unfolding right before our eyes – the U.S. economic meltdown. It seems like more bad news for the U.S. economy comes out almost every single day now. Unfortunately, things are about to get a whole lot worse. The mainstream media has been treating “Foreclosuregate” as if it is a minor nuisance, but the truth is that the lid is about to be publicly lifted on years and years of massive fraud in the U.S. mortgage industry, and this thing has the potential to cause economic chaos that is absolutely unprecedented. Over the past several days, expert after expert has been coming forward and warning that this crisis could completely and totally paralyze the mortgage industry in the United States. If that happens, it will be essentially like pulling the plug on the U.S. economic recovery.
Not that there was going to be a recovery anyway. The truth is that economic statistic after economic statistic has been pointing to incredible trouble for the U.S. economy.
For example, the U.S. government just announced that the U.S. trade deficit went up again in August. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. trade deficit was $46.3 billion during August, which was up significantly from $42.6 billion in July.
So how much coverage did this get in the mainstream media?
Well, just about none.
We have gotten so used to horrific trade deficits that it isn’t even news anymore.
But these trade deficits are absolutely killing our economy.
How long do you think that the U.S. economy can keep shelling out 40 or 50 billion more dollars than we take in every single month?
If you look at the countries around the world that have become very wealthy, almost all of them have gotten that way by trading with the United States.
Meanwhile, many of our once great manufacturing cities are turning into open sewers.
Every single politician in the United States should be talking about the trade deficit.
But hardly any of them are.
Is it because Americans have all become so dumbed-down that we don’t understand these things anymore, or is it because we are so distracted by the various forms of entertainment that we are addicted to that we just don’t care?
But the trade deficit is not the only economic statistic that is getting worse.
According to the Department of Labor, for the week ending October 9th the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims was 462,000, which represented an increase of 13,000 from the previous week.
We have an unemployment epidemic going on in this country, but what did the mainstream media do in response to this news?
They yawned. Instead, many of the “financial experts” were busy talking about how wonderful it is that the Stock Market is going up, up, up.
Well, as one reader recently reminded me, if you want to evaluate an economy by how much the stock market is going up, then the economy of Zimbabwe has had an absolutely wonderful decade!
The truth is that the stock market is not a good barometer for what is actually going on.
What is really happening is that the U.S. economic system is literally coming apart at the seams.
Yet another piece of really bad economic news that just came out is that the number of home repossessions by banks set a new all-time record during the month of September. The record total of 102,134 bank repossessions was the first time ever that bank repossessions climbed over the 100,000 mark for a single month.
The good news is that bank repossessions are about to come to a screeching halt.
The bad news is that it is because the U.S. mortgage industry is about to become completely and totally paralyzed by this foreclosure fraud crisis.
The following are three basic points to remember about this foreclosure mess….
A) Massive Fraud Was Committed At Every Stage By The Mortgage Industry
In a previous article entitled “Foreclosure Fraud: 6 Things You Need To Know About The Crisis That Could Potentially Rip The U.S. Economy To Shreds“, I attempted to describe just how widespread the fraud in the mortgage industry has been….
The truth is that there was fraud going on in every segment of the mortgage industry over the past decade. Predatory lending institutions were aggressively signing consumers up for mortgages that they knew they could never repay. Many consumers were also committing fraud because a lot of them also knew that they could never possibly repay the mortgages. These bad mortgages were fraudulently bundled up and securitized, and these securitized financial instruments were fraudulently marketed as solid investments. Those who certified that these junk securities were “AAA rated” also committed fraud. Then these securities were traded at lightning speed all over the globe and a ton of mortgage paperwork became “lost” or “missing”.
Finally, when it came time to foreclose on these bad mortgages, a whole lot more fraud was committed. Thousands upon thousands of foreclosure documents were “robo-signed”, but the truth is that investigators are starting to discover a lot of things about these mortgages that are a lot worse than that.
B) Nobody Really Knows Who Owns Or Who Has The Right To Foreclose On Millions Upon Millions Of Mortgages
The legal rights to millions of U.S. mortgages has been scrambled so badly that it might actually be impossible to fully sort this mess out. In particular, MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) has created a paperwork nightmare that may never be able to be completely remediated.
On a previous article, a reader named William left a comment that did a great job of describing the very serious problem that we are now facing because of MERS….
MERS – potentially the most serious problem because it affects who really owns the loans. Securitization mandates that loans be transferred into REMIC trusts within a strict timeframe. Late transfers are not allowed. In spite of the supposed “ease” of transfer through MERS, it now appears that perhaps 60% of US loans were never properly transferred. Absent remedial legislation, it is impossible to do so now. And the former owners may be out of business or bankrupt. So how do we get these loans to the trust beneficiaries who were supposed to own them? This is no simple paperwork correction. The train has left the station, with no more to follow.
C) Unprecedented Chaos Is Going To Erupt As Faith In The Mortgage System Completely Dies
So what is going to happen as a result of all of this fraud and confusion in the mortgage industry? Well, basically everybody is going to sue everybody. It is going to be absolute mayhem.
Charles Hugh Smith recently put it this way….
Real estate attorneys can rejoice: everyone will get sued, in every court in the land. Banks will get sued, title insurance companies will get sued, realtors will get sued, foreclosure mills will get sued, MERS will get sued, and so on. The attorneys general of the states will all sue the banks and mortgage mills, claiming billions in damages.
Meanwhile, virtually nobody will want to buy any house that has been foreclosed on in the past ten years or so until this mess is sorted out (which could take years and years).
Meanwhile, title insurance companies are going to avoid foreclosures like the plague.
Meanwhile, all of the investors that have been propping up the housing market by buying foreclosures are going to be fleeing the market in droves.
Meanwhile, the financial world is going to be trying to figure out which U.S. lending institutions are still solvent. The value of most mortgage-based assets is now totally up in the air.
Meanwhile, millions more homeowners across the United States will be emboldened to quit making payments on their mortgages as they realize that those holding their mortgages may not have the legal right to foreclose on them.
And that is where the true horror of this entire situation may lie. What is going to happen if millions upon millions of Americans holding underwater mortgages look at this situation and decide that they really don’t have to be afraid of the threat of foreclosure any longer?
If a massive wave of homeowners suddenly decides to simply quit paying their mortgages, it would basically wipe out nearly the entire mortgage industry.
That would likely mean more government bailouts, more government control, much higher mortgage rates and eventually a serious crash in housing prices.
This crisis is incredibly complicated and it has a ton of moving parts, so it is extremely difficult to describe accurately. But the reality is that this mess has the potential to hurt the U.S. real estate market much more than “subprime mortgages” ever did.
Hopefully this crisis will not be “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for the U.S. economy, but with each passing day this thing looks even more horrifying.
One way or another, real estate law in the United State is going to be changed forever as a result of this crisis. It is going to be extremely interesting to see how all of this plays out.
Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government have tried everything that they can think of to stimulate this dead horse of an economy but nothing has worked. The Fed has slashed the federal funds rate to record low levels, mortgage rates have been pushed to all-time lows and the U.S. government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars in an effort to get the economy going. But despite all these of these extraordinary efforts, the U.S. economy continues to just lie there like a dead corpse. Never before have the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government done more to try to stimulate the economy and never before have their efforts produced such poor results. Home sales continue to set new record lows, more than 14 million Americans continue to be unemployed, foreclosures continue to soar, personal bankruptcies continue to soar and an increasing number of Americans continue to sign up for food stamps and other anti-poverty programs. All of the things that once worked so well to stimulate the U.S. economy seem to be doing next to nothing here in 2010, and the American people are becoming increasingly frustrated by economic problems that just keep getting worse.
Once upon a time, a big drop in mortgage rates would get Americans running out to buy homes in big numbers. But that is just not happening this time.
As you can see from the chart below, mortgage rates are at ridiculously low levels right now. The average rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 4.32 percent this week. That is the lowest it has ever been since Freddie Mac began tracking mortgage rates back in 1971.
These low rates have motivated millions of Americans to refinance their existing home loans, but sales of new and existing loans remain at record low levels. In fact, the number of Americans refinancing their homes is now at its highest level since May 2009, but the U.S. housing crisis just continues to get worse. Despite these record low mortgage rates, existing home sales declined 27 percent during the month of July and new homes sales dropped to the lowest level ever recorded in July.
So if Americans are not buying houses when mortgage rates are this ridiculously low, what in the world is going to cause a turnaround in the U.S. housing market?
The Federal Reserve has sure been trying to do what it can to resuscitate the U.S. economy. For decades, a drop in the federal funds rate could always be counted on to give the economy a jump start. But the Fed has dropped the federal funds rate almost to zero for quite some time now and it has done next to nothing to get things moving again.
So is the Federal Reserve out of ammunition? Well, let’s just say that they have used up all of their “best” ammunition. The Fed has been telling us since March 2009 that the federal funds rate will remain between zero and 25 basis points “for an extended period” of time, but the U.S. economy doesn’t seem to care.
Of course Ben Bernanke insists that the Fed is not out of ammunition and that everything is going to be okay, but at this point there is just not a lot left of Bernanke’s fading credibility.
The U.S. government tried to do their best to help the economy by passing stimulus bill after stimulus bill, but it just has not helped much. The government spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on some of the most wasteful things imaginable, and while the massive injection of cash may have helped temporarily stabilize the economy, it has not brought about the “recovery” that our politicians were hoping for.
Now the pendulum has swung the other way in Congress and there is very little appetite for more economic stimulus spending. But if the economy was not recovering when the government was throwing giant piles of money at it, what is going to happen as the economic stimulus totally dries up?
Already there are signs that the U.S. economy is in big, big trouble. General Motors announced this week that U.S. sales in August fell 24.9% to 185,176 vehicles from 246,479 vehicles in August 2009.
But don’t let up and down sales reports fool you. One month they may be down and the next month they may be up a bit. The important thing is to keep your eyes on the truly disturbing long-term trends.
Thanks to the nightmarish U.S. trade deficit, far more wealth leaves the United States each month than enters it. That means that the United States is getting significantly poorer each month. As I noted yesterday, the United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States. That is not sustainable and China is going to continue to bleed us dry for as long as we allow it to continue.
In addition, the United States continues to go into more debt every single month. Each month the U.S. national debt gets bigger, state governments go into more debt and local governments go into more debt.
So what we have is a nation that is getting poorer and that is going into more debt month after month after month.
We are on the road to economic hell, and the American people don’t even realize it because things are still relatively good – at least for now.
But as the economy continues to unravel, is there anything that the folks over at the Federal Reserve can do?
Well, yes there is. It is called “quantitative easing” and the Fed has already indicated that they are going to start doing it again. Essentially, quantitative easing is when the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air and starts buying things like U.S. Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities and corporate debt.
But isn’t there a good chance that this could cause inflation?
Well, yes.
But “Helicopter Ben Bernanke” seems determined to live up to his nickname. Anyone who thinks that Bernanke is going to just sit there and do nothing is delusional. At some point he is going to fire up his helicopter and start showering the economy with money.
And the reality is that feeding massive quantities into the economy will create more economic activity. However, it will also come with a price.
Someday soon, you may wake up to newspaper headlines that declare that our economy is growing at a 10% annual rate, but what they won’t tell you is that the real rate of inflation will be running about 15 or 20 percent at the same time. In fact, the U.S. government will probably try to convince us that the “official” rate of inflation is only about 5 or 6 percent.
The cold, hard truth is that the U.S. economy is going to continue to get worse. Whether it will be a deflationary decline or an inflationary decline depends on the boys over at the Fed. But it is going to be a decline.
Meanwhile, millions of American families are hanging on by their fingernails and are hoping in vain for the great economic recovery which is never going to come.
Do you want to see something truly frightening? Just check out the 3 charts posted further down in this article. These charts prove that we are now in the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. As Americans have enjoyed an incredibly wonderful standard of living over the past three decades, most of them have believed that it was because we are the wealthiest, most prosperous nation on the planet with economic and financial systems that are second to none. But that is not even close to accurate. The reason why we have had an almost unbelievably high standard of living over the past three decades is because we have piled up the biggest mountains of debt in the history of the world. Once upon a time the United States was the wealthiest country on the planet, but all of that prosperity was not good enough for us. So we started borrowing and borrowing and borrowing and we have now been living beyond our means for so long that we consider it to be completely normal.
We have been robbing future generations blind for so long that it doesn’t even seem to bother most people anymore. We have become accustomed to living in debt. We go into massive amounts of debt to get an education, we go into massive amounts of debt to buy a home, we go into massive amounts of debt to buy our cars, and we even pile up debt to buy holiday gifts and to purchase groceries.
Just check out the chart posted below. It shows the total credit market debt owed in the United States. In other words, it is a measure of what everyone owes (government, businesses and consumers).
30 years ago, total credit market debt owed was less than 5 trillion dollars. Today, it is over 50 trillion dollars. Total credit market debt is now at a level equivalent to about 360 percent of GDP. This is what has been fueling the great era of ”economic prosperity” that we have been experiencing….
So what is the answer to this problem?
The truth is that there is not an easy answer under our current system. The only way that the U.S. economy continues to “grow” is if the debt bubble continues to “expand”.
If our leaders allowed the debt bubble to “pop” and the U.S. economy went into a deleveraging cycle, it would mean that we would start living far below our means for an extended period of time and it would spawn a deflationary depression that would make the Great Depression look like a Sunday picnic.
Most Americans are in no mood to take that kind of hard medicine.
Do you really think that the American people are going to vote in politicians who tell them that it is time to live below our means and that we are going to have to experience a standard of living far below what our parents experienced in order to pay for all the debt that they racked up?
No, that is clearly a dog that isn’t going to hunt.
The American people want to hear that better times are ahead.
One way to give the American people “better times”, for the short-term at least, is to crank the debt spiral back up.
By introducing another huge flood of paper money into the economy, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government are hoping that banks will start lending again and that U.S. consumers will start going into more debt again. Already, as you can see from the chart below, U.S. household debt has started to sink just a little bit. But considering the fact that approximately 70 percent of our GDP is generated by U.S. consumer spending, that is not good news for “economic growth” statistics.
Three decades of “economic expansion” have been fueled by consumer debt that has spiralled completely out of control. Over the past 30 years, total U.S. household debt has gone from less than 2 trillion dollars to almost 14 trillion dollars….
So where did the housing bubble come from? It came from Americans going into insane amounts of debt that they could not afford. The truth is that only the top 5 percent of all U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
Not only that, but Americans are going into staggering amounts of debt in order to pay for their educations. Total student loan debt in the United States is climbing at a rate of approximately $2,853.88 per second, and today Americans owe an all-time record of more than $849 billion on student loans, which is actually more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.
The truth is that American families are stretched thinner financially than they ever have been in the post-World War 2 era. According to a poll taken last year, 61 percent of Americans ”always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck. That was up significantly from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
Many Americans have come to the absolute breaking point. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 – a 32 percent increase over 2008.
But remember, approximately 70 percent of our GDP is generated by U.S. consumer spending, so without more consumer spending there won’t be more economic growth.
So, instead of Obama and the Federal Reserve encouraging Americans to get out of debt and to save money, they are trying to get the American people to spend even more money and to go into even more debt because they desperately need positive “economic growth” figures.
The worst offender of all when it comes to debt, of course, is the U.S. federal government. Over the last 30 years, the U.S. national debt has gone from about 1 trillion dollars to almost 14 trillion dollars….
This is the largest single debt in the history of the world.
So just how big is one trillion dollars?
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.
Yet somehow the U.S. government has accumulated a debt that is well over 13 trillion dollars.
Unfortunately, it keeps getting worse month after month after month.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. national debt is rapidly closing in on 14 trillion dollars and and will climb to an estimated $19.6 trillion by 2015.
Should we all throw a big party when it crosses the 20 trillion dollar mark?
I can just hear the theme song now….
“I’m going to party like I’m 19.99 trillion in debt!”
But the cold, hard reality is that we are in far, far more trouble than what the official government numbers tell us.
In a recent article, Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff analyzed the financial condition of the U.S. government, and he summarized the horror we are facing by making the following statement….
“Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt.”
After carefully going over Congressional Budget Office data, Kotlikoff came to the conclusion that the U.S. government is now facing a “fiscal gap” of $202 trillion dollars.
Now how in the world did that happen?
Well, it turns out that we have made promises to future generations that we cannot possibly even come close to keeping.
Social Security and Medicare are fiscal nightmares that are far more immense than anything that U.S. government has ever faced before.
According to an official U.S. government report, rapidly growing interest costs on the U.S. national debt together with spending on major entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before a single penny is spent on anything else.
That is just 9 years away.
When people speak of the financial situation of the U.S. government being “unsustainable”, they aren’t kidding around.
The truth is that the U.S. government has been running gigantic Ponzi schemes which are about to collapse.
Take the Social Security shell game for example. Back in 1950, each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by approximately 16 workers. Today, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 workers. By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two workers for each retiree.
So exactly how is that supposed to work?
For much more on the coming Social Security nightmare, please see an article that I posted earlier this year: 22 Statistics About America’s Coming Pension Crisis That Will Make You Lose Sleep At Night.
Sadly, Professor Kotlikoff is not exaggerating in the least when he proclaims that the U.S. government is bankrupt.
At our current pace, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that U.S. government public debt will hit 716 percent of GDP by the year 2080.
Public debt at a level of 100 percent of GDP is supposed to be an absolute nightmare scenario.
Needless to say, the whole thing is going to come crashing down long, long before we ever get to 2080.
We have been living far, far beyond our means for decades, and it has been the greatest party in the history of the world.
But it is time to turn out the lights because the party is over.
As the first of the 80 million Baby Boomers have begun to retire, it has become increasingly apparent that the United States is facing a pension crisis of unprecedented magnitude. State and local government pension plans are woefully underfunded, dozens of large corporate pension plans either have collapsed or are on the verge of collapsing, Social Security is a complete and total financial disaster and about half of all Americans essentially have nothing saved up for retirement. So yes, to say that we are facing a retirement crisis would be a tremendous understatement. There is simply no way that we can keep all of the financial promises that we have made to the Baby Boomer generation. Unfortunately, the crumbling U.S. economy simply cannot support the comfortable retirement of tens of millions of elderly Americans any longer. The truth is that we are all going to have to start fundamentally changing the way that we think about our golden years.
Once upon a time, you could count on getting a big, fat pension if you put 30 years into a job. But now pension plans everywhere are failing. State and local governments are cutting back and are raising retirement ages. A majority of Americans have even lost faith in the Social Security system, which was supposed to be the most secure of them all.
The reality is that we are moving into a time when there is not going to be such a thing as “financial security” as we have known it in the past. Things have fundamentally changed, and we are all going to have to struggle to stay above water in the economic nightmare that is coming.
Part of the reason we have such a gigantic economic mess on the way is because we have promised vastly more than we can deliver to future retirees. When you closely examine the numbers, it quickly becomes clear that a financial tsunami is about to hit us that is going to be so devastating that it will change everything that we know about retirement.
The following are 22 statistics about America’s coming pension crisis that will make you lose sleep at night….
Private Pension Plans And Retirement Funds
1 - One recent study found that America’s 100 largest corporate pension plans were underfunded by $217 billion at the end of 2008.
2 – Approximately half of all workers in the United States have less than $2000 saved up for retirement.
3 – According to one recent survey, 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything at all to retirement savings.
4 – The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation says that the number of pensions at risk inside failing companies more than tripled during the recession.
5 – According to another recent survey, 24% of U.S. workers admit that they have postponed their planned retirement age at least once during the past year.
State And Local Government Pensions
6- Pension consultant Girard Miller recently told California’s Little Hoover Commission that state and local government bodies in the state of California have $325 billion in combined unfunded pension liabilities. When you break that down, it comes to $22,000 for every single working adult in California.
7 – According to a recent report from Stanford University, California’s three biggest pension funds are as much as $500 billion short of meeting future retiree benefit obligations.
8 – In New Jersey, the governor has proposed not making the state’s entire $3 billion contribution to its pension funds because of the state’s $11 billion budget deficit.
9 – It has been reported that the $33.7 billion Illinois Teachers Retirement System is 61% underfunded and is on the verge of total collapse.
10 – The state of Illinois recently raised its retirement age to 67 and capped the salary on which public pensions are figured.
11 – The state of Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time ever.
12 – In New York City, annual pension contributions have increased sixfold in the past decade alone and are now so large that they would be able to finance entire new police and fire departments.
13- Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the combined pension liability for all 50 U.S. states. What they found was that the 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they only have $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds. That is a difference of 3.2 trillion dollars.
Social Security
14 – According to one recently conducted poll, 6 out of every 10 non-retirees in the United States believe that the Social Security system will not be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.
15 – A very large percentage of the federal budget is made up of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare that cannot be reduced without a change in the law. Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama’s 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf.
16 – 35% of Americans over the age of 65 rely almost entirely on Social Security payments alone.
17 – According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes in 2010. That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016. The Social Security deficits are projected to get increasingly worse in the years ahead.
18 – 56 percent of current retirees believe that the U.S. government will eventually cut their Social Security benefits.
19 - In 1950, each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers. In 2010, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 U.S. workers. By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two U.S. workers for each retiree.
20 – The shortfall in entitlement programs in the years ahead is mind blowing. The present value of projected scheduled benefits surpasses earmarked revenues for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare by about 46 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.
21 – According to a recent U.S. government report, soaring interest costs on the U.S. national debt plus rapidly escalating spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every single dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019. That is before a single dollar is spent on anything else.
22 – Right now, interest on the U.S. national debt and spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent of GDP. By 2080, those combined expenditures are projected to eat up approximately 50 percent of GDP.
Locust: I smell the distinct smell of burning flesh, that’s welfare/entitlement flesh. smells good, can’t wait. Let the mud’s riot when their checks stop coming, I have plenty of ammo.
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
For those who have read about or vaguely remember the stolid British tribe of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, which held out in its “finest hour,” last week brought a disgusting sight.
Mobs in Parliament Square set fire to the statue of 19th century statesman Lord Palmerston and urinated on the statue of Winston Churchill. Charlie Gilmour, son of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, was swinging by a rope from the Cenotaph that memorializes the 700,000 British dead of the Great War.
At night, hundreds of these anarchists peeled off to appear on Regent Street as the Rolls-Royce carrying the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, Camilla Parker-Bowles, entered. The Rolls was pounded with boots, bottles, sticks, fists and paintballs, as the mob howled “Tory scum!” and “Off with their heads!”
A sign was pushed through an open window into Camilla’s side. So precarious was the situation, Charles’ security detail was close to drawing guns to protect the first in line to the throne.
What was the mob protesting? Tuition increases for students who pay less for college than the parents of American students. In Parliament, the ruling coalition’s 83-vote margin, after defections, was cut by three-fourths on the vote to raise the tuition fees.
And Europe is only at the beginning of this age of austerity.
Across the Irish Sea, the 50,000 protesters have departed from the General Post Office where the Rising of 1916 took place. But the government’s budget to meet the demands of the European Union for a bailout of Ireland passed in the Dail by just five votes, 82-77.
This is “the budget of a puppet government … doing what they have been told to do by the IMF, the EU Commission and the European Central Bank,” said Michael Noonan, the probable finance minister in a new government after coming elections.
Noonan said Dublin’s letters to the IMF and European Central Bank read as though the government had been “waterboarded” into signing them.
Irish rage at having to suffer to save Europe’s bondholders of Irish banks, the anarchy in England, riots in France to protest a rise in the retirement age to 62, the violence that wracked Greece, the precarious condition of Portugal and Spain, the anger of Germans at having to bail out their profligate EU partners—raise the question:
Can Europe’s welfare states be downsized without violence surging, governments falling and populists coming to power who will default on debts rather than force the masses that elected them to suffer to save the bank investors?
Can European democracy deal with the gathering storm?
Is not a national default and a collapse of banks across Europe inevitable? And could such a collapse be contained in Europe when America’s big banks are all transnational institutions?
And America is not without her own crises.
This weekend, the New York Times reported on affluent Nassau County on Long Island: “Now, with its bonds suddenly downgraded and a state oversight agency preparing to seize its checkbook and credit cards, Nassau is on the verge of a full-fledged fiscal crisis.”
California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are facing historic deficits, as the stimulus money that enabled them to survive 2009 and 2010 runs out.
Illinois is facing a shortfall of $15 billion, a third of the state budget. California is being compared to Spain. A default by either could do to the credit rating of states what a default by Italy or Spain would do to the European Monetary Union.
Now the U.S. government is moving again in a direction opposite of where the people voted to go on Nov. 2.
The deficit is not shrinking, but growing. Even before the Barack Obama tax compromise—price tag $857 billion—the 2011 deficit is surging.
In November alone, the U.S. government spent $150.4 billion more than it took in. For the first two months of FY 2011, which began Oct. 1, the feds spent $585.7 billion and took in $294.9 billion, a deficit for just one-sixth of the fiscal year of $290.8 billion.
Spending is approaching 200 percent of revenue.
Obama’s deficit for the first quarter of 2011 alone will be the same size as the largest annual deficit George W. Bush ever ran. Michael Feroli of JPMorgan Chase projects the 2011 deficit at $1.5 trillion, after $1.4 trillion in 2009 and $1.3 trillion in 2010.
And the bond markets are flashing warning signals.
After Obama’s tax deal was announced, U.S. government bond prices tanked. Some folks are getting out to get into stocks. Others think U.S. bonds just became a riskier investment.
U.S. cities and states and the U.S. government, as well as the governments of Europe, are facing a crisis of confidence. Can their elected politicians reassure investors who bought their bonds in good faith that those bonds are still worth what they cost?
Or should bondholders bail out before they are burned?
We may be entering a crisis of democratic capitalism.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
There’s a new Thor movie coming out soon. It’s based on a comic book that’s roughly based on Norse mythology (which means that it will feature bearded men wearing helmets and carrying spears and mead horns; don’t expect Asatru). Predictably, after Black Muslims have been brought into Sherwood forest and a Hollywood casting director was fired for refusing to cast non-White hobbits, Odin’s pantheon is thoroughly multiculti.
The Canadian Immigration Report website has a rundown.
The first trailer for Thor was recently released, and true to reports a few months ago, will prominently feature an African as Heimdall. Ironically “the whitest of the gods” in Norse mythology, a minor furor erupted when the role was given to Afro-British actor Idris Elba, immediately setting comment boards aflame and prompting the creation of a Facebook page.
Although the film is undoubtedly based on the popular Marvel comic book series, Northern European mythology has enjoyed an important revival in recent years and this multiethnic take on the kingdom of Asgard has left many fans aghast. While it is true that modern iterations of Norse mythology have taken liberties such as painting Thor’s traditional red beard a more appealing blond, a good number of fans of the series appreciate having a foot firmly planted in the established tradition of the mythical tales. Reinventing a multiracial Norse canon is deeply insulting to an already wounded and dying European culture.
See stills from the trailer below.
Hogun, Thor’s Asian buddy invented by Marvel and having no roots in Norse mythology
Heimdall, the “Whitest” god
How many minorities can you spot?
I certainly understand why conscious Westerners would be angry and dismayed. First they take our countries away—and now our gods! (The Norse deities simply aren’t universal—they’re for the white man alone.)
Still, pagans can take some solace in the fact that Odin & co. have retained more of their dignity than the Lord God. The fiery, sublime, unknowable, and, eventually, merciful God of the Bible has, in modern America, undergone a Morgan-Freemanization and been rendered a laid-back, wise uncle in the sky who wants all people to live up to their potential. Odin and Thor, on the other hand, here portrayed by Anthony Hopkins and the robust Chris Hemsworth, have remained badass.
With regard to race, the Canadian Immigration report mockingly photoshops a poster of Roots with a White face as Kunta Kinte to highlight the outrage.
Yes, there is a double standard, but it’s far more ironic than the Roots analogy implies.
I remember reading, a number of years back, about an ideological debate in the theater world over casting Black actors in the Classic works. The controversy wasn’t about heavy-handed political statements—such as the Othello production in which the Moor was White and everyone else Black (oooh…)—but meritocratic, “color blind” casting (and not ghettoizing Black actors as slaves and Moors.) The winning argument was that it doesn’t matter if there weren’t any Blacks in Shakespeare’s time; his plays are masterpieces of poetry and drama—universal in their appeal and significance.
Most would agree. (Even an avowed White Nationalist might not object to Soprano Jesse Norman’s interpretations of Wagnerian heroines; she was no mere “diversity hire.” Note as well that Thor was directed by Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh.)
The real double standard is that while a black man can perform Hamlet or Wotan, a white man can simply not be cast in comparable roles in A Raisin in the Sun or Porgy Bess. Indeed, if a White were cast in a leading role, the performance would come off as a bizarre, insulting minstrel show.
Much like multiculturalists presume that it is only Western nations that shall become omni-racial Universal Societies, it is only Western art that is applicable to all. White culture is supreme. Other races’ cultures are just local color.
I’m not writing this as a defense of Thor, or even of “color blind” casting. I’m simply pointing out how so much of left-wing, multiculti discourse is based on implicit White supremacism.
Locust: Boycott the movie. Don’t even go to the movies any more, stay home spend the money on ammo.
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
“What you talking about Willis? “
Or Not?
Is the black brain the same as the white brain? Number of Neurons in the Black brain (200 million fewer neurons) has nothing to do with intelligence. Does IQ mean anything? Well according to guilty white males, it means nothing.
December 15, 2010 1 Comment
Remember the left-wing mantra “only whites are serial killers.” Time and time again, this is proven to be completely absurd. Not only are blacks nine time more likely to commit murder than whites, but they are also substantially more likely to commit serial killings. Of course you never see movies and documentaries about the black ones.
December 15, 2010 1 Comment
The total cost of deporting every illegal alien would be a bargain basement deal compared to the annual cost of taking care of illegals.
On December 3, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Nelson Peacock, responding to request from several U.S. Senators, including Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), wrote: “Our conservative estimate suggests that ICE would require a budget of more than $135 billion to apprehend, detain and remove the nation’s entire illegal immigrant population.”
In July 2010, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) released the results of a study which examined the costs of illegal immigration at the federal, state and local levels. The study found that U.S. state and local governments shell out $84.2 billion annually in various services (law enforcement, schools, social services, etc.), with California taxpayers alone, spending $21 billion on illegal aliens every year.
The same study found that $29 billion is spent every year in federal funds on illegal aliens.
So, while it would cost a one-time fee of about $135 billion to deport every single illegal alien in the country, it is actually a bargain considering the fact that it already costs us $113 billion annually to keep them here.
In other words, the mass deportation would pay for itself in a little over a year.
Incidentally, in 2007, the DHS estimated the cost of deporting all illegal aliens to be approximately $94 billion.
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
View from the Right
The passing scene and what it’s about viewed from the traditionalist politically incorrect Right.
More Great Stuff:
Diana West for Wikileaks
Libertarianism and statism: the secret alliance
Switzerland is considering repealing incest laws, as “obsolete”
“Conservatve” website proposes annexing Mexico
MacDonald
The cultural and demographic threat more pressing than Islam, cont.
Objectivist ethics versus objective value
Fatherless children, including among low-income whites, are far more common in America than Europe
VFR and Islam
The Islam innocence factory keeps churning out new products
Remember the 58 Catholics killed in a Baghdad church in November? The Jews did it.
Britain blamed for Muslim terrorist in Sweden
Judge finds the individual mandate unconstitutional
Swedish PM changes tune, says bomber’s message must be taken “seriously”—but does he mean it?
Muslim would-be terrorist mass killers becoming as common as black muggers
Another translation of the bomber’s audio message
The Swedish government doesn’t want to know who attempted to commit terrorist mass murder in Sweden
Christians again fleeing the country that America liberated and democratized
The best interpretation so far of Obama’s aborted press conference with Clinton
The unchanging reality of Islam, and the unchanging reality of Robert Spencer’s inadequate take on Islam
One in three South African men admits committing rape
How did rioters manage to attack Prince Charles’s car and assault Camilla?
C.S. Lewis, Palin’s intellect, and affirmative action
The fascist, Islamophobic America brought out by Wikileaks is really … hyper-liberal, Islam-loving America
Richard Nixon’s private views of ethnic groups
Reach out and assault/kill someone
Obama hands over podium of White House press room to former President Clinton, and leaves
The racial tax man—have the taxes he’s taken over the last fifty years ever been added up?
Paul Weston in Israel on Islam
Wilders in Israel on Islam
Beyond decadence
Liberal journalist makes fun of Palin for saying she gets inspiration from C.S. Lewis
Geller on Muslims’ failure to assimilate
Sen. DeMint opposes the tax deal
The perpetual moral fit that is liberalism
If Ronni Chasen’s murder was a “robbery gone bad,” then robbery is not bad
Unprincipled Obama haters
The philosophers of the Beverly Hills Police Department expand on the meaning of the Chasen murder
The big meaning of Assange?
Police identify Chasen’s killer
The year white-run academia lost its nerve and surrendered to black thugs and revolutionaries
The cultural and demographic threat more pressing than Islam
More Derb-featism
On the Pope’s bizarre approval of male prostitutes who use condoms
The ultimate solution to modern womanhood’s most pressing problem: dehydration
How have I followed thee after pledging to reverse thee? Let me count the ways.
Numbers USA urges phone calls against DREAM Act
Neocons for amnesty
Assange—the leftist enemy of America who has been victimized by the leftist enemies of men
The ominous parallels
Figuring out American Thinker
More lib advice for Barry
DREAM Act fight reaches its climax
More on the background of Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be killer of hundreds of white liberals in Portland, Oregon
Great news: Incoming Republican House aims to repeal the law requiring everyone to switch to compact fluorescent bulbs
Julian Assange has been arrested in London
BNP on Israel’s African refugee problem
Africans are flooding into Israel via Egypt; some Israelis call for openness, some call the refugees an existential threat to the Jewish state
Islam on Nature and Nature’s Anti-god
VFR
How Assange has paralyzed U.S. relations with other countries
Europe’s heart begins to beat, its brain begins to think, its tongue begins to speak
Good news from Sen. Kyl: the Democrats’ lame-duck sabotage of America will fail, period
Sabaditsch-Wolff on Islam and the West
The Internet version of the Unabomber
The good guys meeting in Israel
December 15, 2010 Leave a Comment
Why we don’t copy Israel’s airport security practices
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017899.html
We’re deeper in liberal madness than ever–is there any end to it?
Outrage is spreading over the naked body scan and grope regime, even as the conservative blogger Allahpundit tells us to grow up and acknowledge its necessity.
Meanwhile, has a single Republican politician or a single prominent conservative commentator pointed out that the way to make the naked body scan and grope regime unnecessary is to profile possible terrorists in airports, as the Israelis do?
I’m not aware of one.
We are so far gone, that not only (it goes without saying) will not a single prominent person in America argue that we should start removing sharia-believing Muslims from this country; and not only will not a single prominent person in America argue that we should stop importing unassimilable peoples (such as Somali Muslims) into this country; but not a single prominent person will even argue that we should profile airplane passengers and limit special security measures to those who are likely to pose a risk. It doesn’t even occur to anyone to raise the question. Thus has the anti-American, pro-Islamic airport security regime that was initiated by the calamitous George W. Bush taken over the American mind.
Think of the absurdity of it: An African Muslim and al Qaeda agent named Abdul Mutallab flew into the U.S. and tried to blow up the plane he was on with an explosive sewn into his underclothing, and as a result of that event the U.S. authorities now view all airline passengers–including ourselves, including even airline pilots!–as equally likely as Abdul Mutallab to be carrying explosives sewn into their underclothing.
Lydia McGrew writes at her blog:
So: Because we will not stop Muslim immigration, because we will not profile passengers, everybody now, including children, must be willing either to have a photo taken of his naked body (through the clothes, by an X-ray machine), which photo will be viewed by a government agent, or must be willing to be touched all over, including in the genital area, by a government agent.
Are we insane? The government must have a warrant to search your house. Vile criminals, drug lords, et. al., can have evidence withheld from use against them in court if it was collected without a warrant, and the apparent motivation for this is to discourage police from doing “dreadful” things like looking through a window without a warrant or searching a car trunk without a warrant. But the TSA can take (with a potentially cancer-causing machine) and view a picture of your naked body without a warrant, and if you refuse, can touch your entire body, including your private parts, full palm on, without a warrant. This, as the price one pays simply for engaging in normal travel in an ostensibly free country.
This is police state territory. What would those who wrote the Fourth Amendment (that’s the unreasonable search and seizure one, by the way) say about this? What would Patrick Henry say? “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!”
I am not in the least amused by the fact that on an ostensibly “conservative” blog site we are being told to get over our problems with having our children touched in this manner because we would presumably prefer this over their being blown up by terrorists. The stupidity of this response–again, from an ostensibly conservative source–is beyond belief. It involves the assumption that everybody, including children, must be subjected to these invasive and inappropriate measures if anybody, including children, is to be safe. This is just wrong. I am appalled by the Allahpundit article.
(For the record: If, which heaven forbid, I ever were in a situation where I had to fly with a child and the child were selected for the screening, I would have the child accept the machine screening, despite knowing the type of image it would produce. To the child it would not seem like anything untoward was happening, and hence it would be far less traumatic for the child than the “enhanced pat-down.” But it is a terrible choice to make, and at this time I am determined–even more than I already was–to avoid traveling by air with children in response to these new, outrageous procedures, for as long as they are in place.)
Two days ago, I pointed out that there is an obvious alternative to the insane naked-body-scan-and-genitalia-grope security regime that our government has imposed on us in the nation’s airports. The Israelis, who are the number one terrorism target in the world, carefully question each passenger, and if his answers raise any questions, they take him aside for closer scrutiny.
Why, then, does the U.S. not adopt a similar approach? Last January I suggested a possible reason:
How the Israelis protect civilian airlinersThey do it, not through gnostic magical operations, as all other Western countries do, but through the rational use of human intelligence, which includes, inter alia, ethnic profiling. Daniel Pipes tells how Israeli security in 1986 as a result of intelligent questioning of a 32 year old Irish woman boarding an El Al flight at Heathrow became suspicious of her and discovered that she was carrying four pounds of plastic Semtex explosive in her carry on.
It occurs to me that the reason the U.S. would balk at the Israeli approach is not just that it involves some ethnic profiling of passengers, but that the people doing the screening of passengers must be highly intelligent. Since this would mean that virtually none of the screening personnel would be black or nonwhite Hispanic, Israeli-type screening is out of the question for America–or, rather, it will be out of the question for America until whites reassert their natural leadership position in this country and throw out the idea that all racial groups must be proportionally represented in every area of life. (See my article where I explain how America can undo the fatal mistakes that led to the system of nonwhite racial privileges under which we now live.)
In short, American racial diversity, combined with the American commitment to racial group equality of outcome in all professions, combined with the entrenched system of nonwhite minority privileges which is the actual and inevitable consequence of our commitment to racial group equality of outcome in all professions, requires the government to have low-IQ airport security agents, which precludes security measures which require intelligence, which in turn assures that the government, in order to protect us from our mass murdering Muslim enemies, must subject us to perverted and humiliating security measures.
Commentators such as the blogger “Allahpundit” support the naked body scan because, they say, there is no alternative to it. Indeed, it will be impossible to throw out the naked body scan unless there is a perceived, practicable alternative. But can you imagine today’s mainstream conservatives and tea partiers proposing the Israeli way, given the factors I’ve laid out above? Can you imagine conservatives pushing for a reformed, highly trained, high-IQ Transportation Security Administration in which virtually none of the airport agents will be black or Hispanic? I can’t.
But who knows? The naked-body-scan-and-grope regime is so outrageously offensive that it could just possibly turn out to be the Achilles heel of the liberal regime itself.
December 14, 2010 Leave a Comment
http://mcself.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/is-tsa-lying-about-anonymous-scanners/naked-scanner1/
The federal government’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has promised the general public that no one can be identified from a photo taken by the new TSA scanner that can see through clothing. But is that the truth?
The photo above supposedly was taken by one of the TSA scanners according to several web sites I found it on.
The second photo is the negative of that photo. Much more of the subjects private parts can be observed in the second photo. Could an expert at Photoshop sharpen up the facial features in order to identify the person?
According to CBS News, the third photo is another of the government scanner photos, and it is quite obvious that identifying much in the photo would be difficult.
i
The fourth photo is a copy of the third photo and has been “doctored” on an Internet web site that allows you to adjust your photos. The subject’s “junk” is much clearer on the fourth photo than on the third, although I am not sure why he has two belly buttons. Could a PhotoShop expert identify this man by doctoring the photo? It seems that the TSA photos may not anonymous after all. What may happen is an unethical TSA agent will make a copy of the naked photo of someone famous and sell it. The “nekkid” photo will then hit the Internet and the TSA will have to back pedal big time. Nothing is what it appears to be, not yet anyway.
December 14, 2010 Leave a Comment
The Art of Strategic Citizenship
by Takuan Seiyo
Consider the judo throw.
First, it’s hazushi. Subtly, you test your opponent in small, almost imperceptible actions: a touch here, a tiny pull there. You watch his moves, reflexes and recovery ability. You bide your time, looking for the opening. Your intuition is at work here, not your strength or technique. When the right moment comes, you convert the opponent’s slightest error into tipping him off balance.
Then, it’s tsukuri. That is when preparedness meets opportunity. You now have to have acquired the skill and the speed to convert your opponent’s momentary imbalance into control of his momentum. Using techniques involving pulling, tripping, twisting, spinning, hoisting, you now load the opponent for the throw.
Lastly, you apply the kinetic energy equation you have built. The opponent is at your mercy now; it’s up to you whether to kill or just to give him a tumble. You throw accordingly. That is kake.
And that is the mechanics of Reality. Whatever one thinks of the ways of the world, however ideal one’s plans for improving upon gravity, it’s useless unless one has a death wish. The master judoka2 must respect the laws of physics. So must all men in order to protect themselves from the grappling arts of political foes — above all their own government and the ruling elite’s values it embodies.
Consider now the testicular hold that America’s Transportation Security Agency has on you. Since the off-balancing and loading stages were executed years ago with little opposition, your opponent has all the choices now. His current array of kake is that you expose your privates to pornexrays, or to groping and searching, or to jail and a fine of $11,000.
You were hoisted already in the first term of Dubya “Miss me yet” Bush. Instead of addressing the real causes of the 9/11 terror attack, i.e. the fanatical nature of Islam, the ill-advised flow of Muslims to the United States, the corrupted functioning of PC-obsessed CIA and FBI, the Bush Administration just threw enormous gobs of money at the misidentified problems which it deliberately disassociated from the Muslim presence in the West.
They built a giant new bureaucracy, DHS [Number of employees: 200,000+, Primary mission: “Diversity”]. Between 2002 and 2009, federal funding for homeland security increased by 259%, from $19.5 billion to $70 billion3. Much of that for salaries to people who confiscate toothpaste and breast milk at America’s 450 commercial airports, or who host receptions to celebrate Ramadan.
In addition to the direct costs, indirect costs of this to the economy have been over $4 billion a year.
The time for swatting your opponent’s hands grabbing you for a throw was between November 2001 and November 2002. It was then that the TSA and DHS behemoths were created. By now, the Bushbama regime has left you with just the option of not flying if you wish to live free.
The TSA theater of insanity now on stage nationwide eschews the real objects of its pursuit in order to chase after their trailing shadow. By the time they have seized the shadow, the foe is ahead of them and doing something else. They ban little old ladies’ nail files because of terrorists’ box cutters, but the terrorists have already moved on to flammable liquids. Wise to flammable liquids, they stand the world’s travelling population in a long supplicants’ line with little shampoos in little nylon baggies — but the terrorists have already moved on to exploding underpants. When they have spent billions to peek or feel under everyone’s underpants, the terrorists will have already moved on to anal suppositories. By the time they stick a probe into every flying anus, the terrorists have already moved on to buses and trains. When they have “secured” buses and trains, Allah’s troops will have already moved to department stores and exploding private cars.
To protect against terrorists you have to define them truthfully. You have to stop importing the entire socio-cultural category that fits the definition. Those already imported are readily containable when you have stopped lying as to who they are. What we have in place instead is a system to enslave the citizenry of the United States under the yoke of their own government. The terrorists have won, as Drudgereport.com advised recently in a caption below this photo:
The terrorists have won
This is a symbolic apotheosis of Multiamerica demented: a federal authority empowering a Newamerican Muslim woman in a Muslim headtowel and uniform of a TSA cop to search a White Oldamerican Catholic nun for Muslim terrorist weapons that we refuse to link to Muslims. A TSA that employs illegal aliens to protect Americans from terrorism by illegal aliens (legal ones too), and deploys rapists (here and here) to search for PETN in the body crevices of Mormon girls. But if you find it objectionable, you are 45 years late.
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