Thursday, November 19, 2009

An American War Crime That Has No End

Depleted Uranium
The Biggest American Censored News Story

The Most Ignored & Covered Up
by Mass Media News Story ...

Hundreds of Thousands of American Troops
Contaminated, dying, and disabled from Depleted
Uranium by American Arms.


Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under US military law.



America’s Big Dirty Secret

Depleted Uranium weapons are called "Dirty" because much of the uranium-235 isotope useful for nuclear power fuel and weapons has been separated. "Depleted" does not mean that its biological hazards have been made less harmful or reduced one iota.

DU burns on impact, converting the uranium into lots of particles that are easily inhaled and can cause lung cancers. Uranium-238 has a half-life roughly as long as the Earth has been in existence. DU tipped weapons are the real "dirty bombs" and are a war crime to manufacture and use.

Radiation emitted by DU (Depleted Uranium) threatens the human body because, once DU dust has been inhaled, it becomes an internal radiation source; international radiation protection standards, the basis of expert claims that DU is harmless, deal only with external radiation sources; Dirty DU Uranium from reactors, recycled for use in munitions, contains additional highly toxic elements, such as plutonium, 1.6 kilogrammes of which could kill 8 (eight) billion people.

In a French TV documentary on Canal+ in January 2001, a team of researchers presented the results of an investigation into a gaseous diffusion recycling plant in Paducah, Kentucky, USA. According to the lawyer for 100,000 plaintiffs, who are past and present plant employees, they were contaminated because of flagrant non-compliance with basic safety standards; the entire plant is irrevocably contaminated, as is everything it produces. *Read More

American War Crimes
Depleted Uranium Videos

Iraq conspiracy - Illegal DEPLETED URANIUM Videos

Iraq War Crimes Videos
US Weapons Causing Iraqi Birth Defects







Depleted Uranium Videos are
extremely scarce here are a few more

See the Videos ...
*Contaminated with Depleted Uranium
*Depleted Uranium Problem
*Depleted Uranium Secrecy
*Depleted Uranium Study

Military Secrecy

The vast majority of servicemen and women in the U.S. military, and likely in the armed forces of other countries which are developing or have obtained depleted uranium munitions, are unaware of the use and dangers of depleted uranium munitions, or of the protective clothing and procedures which can minimize or prevent serious short-term exposures.

The following military DU training videos
sat on shelves seldom shown
*Depleted Uranium Hazard Awareness
*Standard DU Army Training Video

The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue.



The last Iraq war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves.




In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren’t telling us?




Children of the Gulf War Photo Exhibit
Warning - Extreme Graphic Violence
*Save the War Children
*Children of the Gulf War



From Gulf War I, fully 75% of our fighting men who were on the ground are now dead, dying, or sick from Depleted Uranium. There are reports that the Pentagon is preventing American soldiers from writing home to complain about the variety of illness afflicting them because of the deadly combination of Depleted Uranium and Toxic Vaccinations.



The Pentagon is said to be threatening to muster out soldiers who complain, thus cutting off their medical care after they get out. However, when these men do return home and they are very ill from D.U. contamination, the Pentagon is refusing to *admit that these men are sick with D.U.!

THE PENTAGON IS DENYING MEDICAL CARE
FOR VETERANS STRICKEN BY
DEPLETED URANIUM (D.U.) CONTAMINATION!



Denial At the Top
of the Administration

Former Head Of Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project Says Thousands Of Troops Are Sick and Dying From Illegal DU Use and the Military's Failure To Admit Responsibility.

Maj. Rokke said his warnings as well as warnings from many other experts were not only dismissed by the military, but also by every other bigwig on Capital Hill, including President Clinton, Senator John Kerry and every other member of Congress, all very much aware of his position since he even addressed the 2000 Fall Congressional Coalition Leadership at its quarterly breakfast in Washington D.C.




Read parts of the book ...
*How the Pentagon Radiates Soldiers & Civilians with DU Weapons

It is happening again to a new generation of veterans. Some of today's soldiers were in day care centers in 1991 when Dick Cheney first authorized the wholesale use of radioactive munitions. It is happening again despite the fact that 70% of all Gulf War I veterans are on medical disability fifteen years after the end of the first war against Saddam Hussein.

We are witnessing the same symptoms of radioactive poisoning today as fifteen years ago. We are hearing the same denial of reality from Donald Rumsfeld's Department of Defense (DOD). What's worse is that, since 1998, veterans are eligible for free health care for only the first two years after being demobilized. After that, an ailing veteran has to prove his or her illness is service-connected. In the next article we'll describe what that burden has meant to ailing Iraq vets.


Read On ...
*GI's Beware

A special report published by eminent scientist *Leuren Moret
naming depleted uranium as the definitive cause of the Gulf War Syndrome has fed a *growing scandal about the continued use of uranium munitions by the US Military.

The Veterans Administration acknowledged a third of all living Gulf War veterans, 181,996 were collecting *service-related disability pensions. Now the same thing is happening to veterans of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."



Civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq and occupying troops have been
*contaminated with astounding levels of radioactive depleted and non-depleted uranium as a result of post 9/11 United States’ use of tons of uranium munitions. Researchers say surrounding countries are bound to feel the effects as well.

The Pentagon used its radioactive arsenal mainly in the *urban centers, rather
than in desert battlefields as in 1991. Many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people
and U.S. soldiers, along with British, Polish, Japanese and Dutch soldiers sent to join the occupation, will suffer the consequences.

The real extent of injuries, chronic illness, long-term disabilities and genetic birth defects won't be apparent for five to 10 years.



While officially, only 467 soldiers were wounded during the first Gulf War, according to Terry Jemison at the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), of the more than 592,560 discharged personnel who served there, at least 179,310 - one third - are receiving disability compensation and over 24,760 additional cases were pending as of September 2004. Cancer, respiratory diseases and horrible birth defects have been widespread inIraq even after Gulf War I and are bound to increase.

Read more ...
*Uranium Munitions Are Weapons of Mass Destruction

This number of disabled veterans is shockingly high. Most are in their mid-thirties
and should be in the prime of health. Before sending troops to the Gulf region, the
military had already sifted out those with disabilities or chronic health problems
from asthma, diabetes, heart conditions, cancers and birth defects.



In 2003 scientists from the *Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) studied urine samples of Afghan civilians and found that 100% of the samples taken had levels of non-depleted uranium (NDU) 400% to 2000% higher than normal levels. The UMRC research team studied six sites, two in Kabul and others in the Jalalabad area.

The civilians were tested four months after the attacks in Afghanistan by the United States and its allies.

*NDU is more radioactive than depleted uranium (DU), which itself is charged with causing many cancers and severe birth defects in the Iraqi population, especially children over the past ten years. Four million pounds of radioactive uranium was dropped on Iraq in 2003 alone. Uranium dust will be in the bodies of our returning armed forces.



Conducted at the request of The News, as the U.S. government considers the cost of $1,000 per affected soldier prohibitive, the test found that four of the nine men were contaminated with high levels of DU, likely caused by inhaling dust from depleted uranium shells fired by U.S. troops.

Most American weapons (missiles, smart bombs, dumb bombs, bullets, tank shells, cruise missiles, etc.) contain high amounts of radioactive uranium.

Depleted or non-depleted, these types of weapons, on detonation, release a radioactive dust which, when inhaled, goes into the body and stays there.
It has a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Basically, it’s a permanently available contaminant, distributed in the environment, where dust storms or any water nearby can disperse it. Once ingested, it releases subatomic particles that slice through DNA.



UMRC’s Field Team found several hundred Afghan civilians with acute symptoms of radiation poisoning along with chronic symptoms of internal uranium contamination, including congenital problems in newborns.

Local civilians reported large, dense dust clouds and smoke plumes rising from the point of impact, an acrid smell, followed by burning of the nasal passages, throat and upper respiratory tract.

Subjects in all locations presented identical symptom profiles and chronologies. The victims reported symptoms including pain in the cervical column, upper shoulders and basal area of the skull, lower back/kidney pain, joint and muscle weakness, sleeping difficulties, headaches, memory problems and disorientation.



At the Uranium Weapons Conference held October 2003 in Hamburg, Germany, independent scientists from around the world testified to a huge increase in birth deformities and cancers wherever NDU and DU had been used.

Professor Katsuma Yagasaki, a scientist at the Ryukyus University, Okinawa calculated that the 800 tons of DU used in Afghanistan is the radioactive equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The amount of DU used in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs.

At the Uranium Weapons Conference, a demonstration by British-trained oncologist Dr. Jawad Al-Ali showed photographs of the kinds of birth deformities and tumors he had observed at the Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra just before the 2003 war.

Cancer rates had increased dramatically over the previous fifteen years.



In 1989 there were 11 abnormalities per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000— an increase of over a thousand percent. In 1989 34 people died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths. The 2003 war has increased these figures exponentially.

At a meeting of the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held December 2003 in Tokyo, the U.S. was indicted for multiple war crimes in Afghanistan, among them the use of DU.



Leuren Moret, President of Scientists for Indigenous People and Environmental Commissioner for the City of Berkeley, testified that because radioactive contaminants from uranium weapons travel through air, water, and food sources, the effects of U.S. deployment in Afghanistan will be felt in Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China and India. Countries affected by the use of uranium weapons in Iraq include Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, and Iran.

Veterans groups blame depleted uranium contamination as a factor in Gulf War syndrome, the term for a host of ailments that afflicted thousands of vets from that war.



"Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time," said Dietz, who retired in 1983 after 33 years as nuclear physicist. "In the long run ... veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem."

Shocking report reveals local troops to be victims of America's high-tech weapons

Read more ...
*Troops victims of America's high-tech weapons

Depleted uranium, which does not occur in nature, is created as a waste product of uranium enrichment when some of the highly radioactive isotopes in natural uranium, U-235 and U-234, are extracted.



In the Gulf War, Army brass did not warn soldiers about any risks from exploding DU shells. An unknown number of G.I.s were exposed by shrapnel, inhalation or handling battlefield debris.

"A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust," ... "And the health impact is worrisome for the future."

When DU shells explode, they permanently contaminate their target and the area immediately around it with low-level radioactivity.

Birth defects may stem from his father's Gulf War service. But like many other families, American Vets face official stonewalling--and a frightening future.




The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

More Bombs Dropped On Iraq
than were used in WW II


At least 300 million grams of depleted uranium were deposited on central and southern Iraq during the Gulf War and subsequent bombings, over 100 million times the 0.023 gram maximum exposure dose permitted for workers in nuclear industry.

Depleted uranium, because of its unique ratio of U-235 to U-238, can be readily identified and has been found in the urine of exposed individuals as long as 10 years after exposure.

During the brief Gulf War, thousands of tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq, more than were used throughout World War II. By systematic intent, all electric power generating facilities, water treatment and pumping plants, sewage treatment facilities, and communication centers were bombed.



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Friday, November 13, 2009

Pros & Cons of Kickstarting Capitalism



Whenever the economy stumbles, politicians and interest groups commonly argue that government spending should be increased. Based on a theory known as Keynesianism, this increase is supposed to boost economic performance.


Yet the notion that bigger government leads to more growth is both theoretically unsound and empirically false.

This strange theory was first put forth back during the 1930s, when America was suffering from a deep downturn.

An economist named John Maynard Keynes argued that the economy could be boosted if the government borrowed money and spent it.

According to this Keynesian approach, this new spending would put money in people’s pockets, and the recipients of the funds would then spend the money. This would, according to the theory, prime the pump as the money began circulating through the economy.

Watch This First

See the Complete series ...
*The New World Order Is Not New

The Keynesians also said that some tax cuts — particularly lump-sum rebates — could have the same impact since the purpose is to have the government borrow and somehow put the money in the hands of people who will spend it.

So is this the right recipe to boost a flagging economy? Keynesian theory sounds good, and it would be nice if it made sense, but it has a rather glaring logical fallacy. It overlooks the fact that, in the real world, government can’t inject money into the economy without first taking money out of the economy.

Money Government Puts In Economy's Right Pocket Is Money First Removed From Economy's Left Pocket ...

Put more bluntly, Keynesianism only looks at one-half of the equation. It conveniently ignores the fact that any money that the government puts in the economy’s right pocket is money that is first removed from the economy’s left pocket. As such, there is no increase in what Keynesians refer to as aggregate demand.

The bottom line is that Keynesianism doesn’t boost national income, it merely redistributes it.


The people who lend the money to government generally are not the same people who get money in their pockets because of the new spending or tax rebates, but that’s not important. The Keynesian theory is based on the notion that there will be an increase in overall spending power, yet that clearly is not the case.

Some advocates of this theory get a bit more creative and say that Keynesianism works because it increases consumer spending rather than the money sitting idle.

But money that is unspent by consumers does not sit idle. It winds up in the banking system someplace and is used to finance investment spending.

Stimulus Programs Increase Consumption No Increase In Economic Output ...

So-called stimulus programs, at best, shift how national income is used so that more gets consumed rather than invested, but at noted earlier, there is no increase in overall economic output.

It is worth noting that government could finance new spending through inflation. Thankfully that option doesn’t seem to be on the table since almost all politicians now realize that it would be foolish to mimic the disastrous policies of basket-case economies such as Argentina and Zimbabwe.

The real-world evidence also confirms that Keynesianism is a failure. Indeed, it was a failure even before Keynes published *The General Theory in the mid-1930s. More recently, George W. Bush gave out so-called rebate checks in 2001 and 2008, yet there was no positive effect in either case. And Bush certainly was a big spender, yet that didn’t work either.

Not that this should be a big surprise. *Surveys of the academic literature reveal that even left-wing international bureaucracies are producing research showing that bigger government hurts economic performance by misallocating national resources.

The American Recession - Depression Experience

What is even more interesting is that if you look at the GDP output for the era, the US recovered by 1936-37 (including the pre-1927 growth rate) and was then hit with the price tag for all the New Deal starting in 1938 which caused a recession.

Combine that with the unemployment figures, however, and you get the result of each person employed being more productive, which is one of the effects of getting rid of inefficient businesses: those that survive or start-up with new manufacturing methods employ fewer people, but produce more goods at a lower cost.

When you get to WWII the New Deal retirement system kicks in just as the economy needs every worker of older age that it can get: from that you get the temporary tax benefit to private firms to offer health insurance, which was previously a ‘perk’ to high paid employees and executives.

That temporary relief became a permanent problem, so that we now spend more today, per person and adjuste for inflation, than our grand parents did on health care.

It isn’t that procedures are too expensive, it is that health care is subsidized which sets a minimum floor of pricing due to insured payments and government encouraging increases in payments through the government run health benefits plans.


It isn’t that so many people are uninsured (and what an awful way to pay for something) but that so many *are*. Insurance only works if a pay-out happens rarely - and that is not the case with health insurance… but then learning that subsidies cause over-use of whatever is being subsidized is something politicians love to ignore, across the political spectrum.

In spite of all the circumlocution and commotion by President Roosevelt, the 1930s President never came close to ending the depression economy. The massive deficit spending of World War II did end the depression economy and set it upon the road to postwar prosperity.

Consider World War II from an economic viewpoint. It was a huge public works operation financed by unprecedented deficit spending. It commandeered the productive capacity of this country and then destroyed this production in the battlefield. Why didn’t this bankrupt the country?

Theoretically, an operation like that should have bankrupted the country like a closed system business operation would have been bankrupted. (Fortunately, free-market capitalism at the macroeconomic level is open system.)

One can only imagine the derision and criticism had anyone of stature, in the 1930's, proposed such a program to end the depression economy. But there’s no denying that World War II deficit spending did do it.

Until one has a theoretical framework that can satisfactorily explain why World War II, not only did not bankrupt the country, but was the key factor in economic recovery — all one can do is bewail the problem without offering any solutions that will work *Open system perspective.

Its republicans, not democrats you need to convince of the truthfulness of this thesis. Its republicans who have been spending down the treasury for the past decade. That’s the whole reason they got their asses kicked in the past two elections. If we can’t depend on republicans to exercise some fiscal responsibility, then what are they good for?

Its the only reason that I tolerate all their incessant moralizing, their over-dependence on religion for their politics and their unending desire to get involved in the affairs of my bedroom. If they can’t control themselves when it comes to the budget, then they’re worthless. Which is exactly why they got their asses kicked. There are 700 billion reasons why they should be fired.

The depression didn’t end until 1946 or so. Ask anyone who lived through the war, or read any available history, and you will find that the citize4ns at home still didn’t have much. Rationing and scarcicty were still the order of the day. Aggregate cash flow numbers mean nothing.

The situation only got fixed when the wartime and other depression-era controls were lifted and after many trade limitations were listed.

We might also remember that the US could also sell to the rest of the world as many other countries could not because they were lying in ruins after the war.

In short, all WWII did was kill many millions of people, ruin the psyches of millions more, destroy untold amounts of wealth, and set economic progress back by a decade or more.

During WW-II, there was massive increase in destructive consumption, but also a massive increase in capital investments, the net result was a stagnant economy for the individual.

After the war, the capital investment was already in place, and the destructive consumption ceased. Individual productivity, forced upon the economy by manpower shortages, and amplified by the capital investment, rose to unprecedented heights.

We were able to sell our production for a profit instead of blowing it up.


The Fools Running The Federal Reserve

The half of Mr. Paulson’s 700B TARP funds which he’s already spent shoring up banks, including the one where he used to work, seems to have been vaporized already by short sellers. Too bad Mr. Cox is a fool on the subject of short selling and uptick rules. Maybe we should ask Robert Mugabe to take over at the Treasury, but then they seem to be following his policies anyway…print money.

After all, my fellow Republicans seem to have vaporized more wealth through ineptitude than Mugabe has by design. For what they’ve lost they might have purchased Uganda lock stock and barrel. Now the Democrats are going to try to outdo the present crop of nitwits. Throw money at the Big Three, now there’s a novel idea. Amtrack only managed to sublimate 13B in a decade. GM and Ford will easily go better in a quarter, or maybe even a month if they really work at it.

Ultimately, it was the increase in worker productivity, enabled by capital investment that ended the Great Depression.

Let us see how well worker productivity fares with stimulus checks drawn at the expense of capital investment this time around.

It has never worked before, but I hear that since the right people are in charge now, it is bound to work this time.

The only thing that is known to truly work is to lower taxes and help small business create jobs. Reagan had it right.

The Stock Market approves because capital starts to filter down into the economy, the government approves because they receive more revenue from increased production and consumer spending, and the people approve because they get to go back to work.

Government welfare programs don’t kickstart anything, they only seem to prolong a recession; FDR proved that! The prewar economy was characterized by excess supply side capacity versus demand (farmers dumping milk, killing livestock and burning fields).

The war economy was precisely opposite: due to war, more demand than supply thus rationing: so it is true the citizens still didn’t have much. But there was full employment with wandering hobos shanghaied off the streets to work in factories. The private economy greatly improved their equity position and when the war was over, with price controls lifted, there was a burst of inflation due to pent-up demand.

During deflation, when money supply is in a collapsing spiral due to debt deleveraging, the result is currency values soaring relative to other assets — the marketplace is saying that there is a shortage of dollars. This is nothing more than an imbalance in the supply/demand equation.

It is so simple to solve this problem that it seems to defy comprehension. Print money and introduce this cash flow into the private economy through tax rebates or cuts.

This would be just the same as if the US treasury owned a mine, with a shaft of solid gold, for use in an emergency such as this. If this doesn’t seem like it’s possible that the value ascribed to dollars is real those dollars could be buried and recovered through mining with the purpose of installing real value to the asset.

It is just as important to create money for price stability as it is to stop printing money for inflation.

The government can indeed create an asset to which the marketplace will ascribe full value. And this would not be a liability to be paying off with future cash flow.

The only thing the conservatives can offer is the inevitability of financial collapse in severe economic downturn from excess credit expansion. Just try selling this load of pessimism to the electorate. This is the conservatives’ Achilles heel in the current crisis.

The political party that allows this to happen will be tossed out of office and wander in the political wilderness for the next 40 years, if it doesn’t destroy the party.

Conservatives should (posthaste) support large rebate like cash flow into the private economy until asset prices stop declining and housing prices start levitating. At this point to crisis will be over because toxic mortgages will be tradeable.

Otherwise, the big government political class will offer the World War II argument for huge public sector spending that won’t end like it did when World War II was over.

This could end up to be a permanent entrenchment of liberal/leftist European-style ruling political class which would destroy our dynamic entrepreneurial economy. It’s much better to have this money in the private economy for investment and consumer demand — for much greater multiplier effect. This allows the economy to grow in the direction it ought to.

Unemployment remained very high throughout the 1930s and overall output did not get back to the 1929 level until World War II. But why did WWII end the depression? Oh, because government spending increased aggregate demand. That put the unused capacity of the nation to work.

Under serious recession/depression conditions deficit spending is indicated. The problem becomes it is addictive.

Fiat money inflation (temporarily) benefits only those who are first to get the new currency - the politicians and their friends. From there, as the purchasing power of the dollar declines, each successive receiver and holder of dollars gets successively more shortchanged for his past real labor and savings. This is why counterfeiting - whether legalized or not is always morally wrong; it’s theft!

Fiat does not create real sustainable, stable, reliable value; only production of real, not fiat, goods and services can create real wealth.

The Root of the Problem

This is the root problem of the mainstream modern economics profession: virtually no economist studies the root of economics - production and trade by individuals and corporations. They’re too busy studying consumption for the statistic folly of concocting ever more impossible schemes to centrally “plan” and manage” the flow of billions of individual trades.

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others… Destroyers seize gold and leave its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. [like the FED] Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced.

Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked ‘Account overdrawn. We need to return to free banking and privately issued, competing currencies.

Then the quality of our money would be restored and its value would again be objective - set by millions of individual traders every day instead of by the whims of 12 Fed governors every 6 weeks.

Of course, the statistics demand a monopoly on the issue of currency because if they had to compete with REAL money, they be out of business in a week and their giant looting scheme would be over.

Under a free market, only reckless fools would take Federal Reserve IOU Nothings in payment for their hard work. Abolish the Fed.

What the government should be doing, is borrowing now, whilst the economy heads to recession, and increase spending in order to bolster consumer spending and investment, but then be taking the money out of the economy in the good times, the boom.

This way the two extremes of the standard boom and bust economic cycle are softened and the standard of living can still increase over time with recessions being shallower and shorter, and booms not being so dramatic and, increasing inflationary pressure.

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Saturday, November 7, 2009

The Real American Unemployment Rate Coverup

America's Economic Meltdown

The entire global financial structure is becoming uncontrollable in crucial ways its nominal leaders never expected. Instability is increasingly its hallmark….Contradictions now wrack the world’s financial system, and if we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, it may very well be on the verge of serious crisis.

Americans have dumped trillions of their hard-earned savings into risky hedge funds which have only been in existence for a short period of time. No one knows what the future holds for these “flash-in-the-pan” investments.

The credit derivative market was almost nonexistent in 2001, grew fairly slowly until 2004 and went into the stratosphere, reaching $17.3 trillion by the end of 2005.

That’s right; a whopping $17.3 trillion, enough to sink the entire economy if the market takes a nose dive.

This whole idea of re-selling debt is a relatively new phenomenon and fraught with peril. Hedge funds can bundle together a slew of Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) and make a handsome profit, but when the housing market starts listing, the investor is trapped on a sinking ship with little hope of recouping his losses.


"Deregulation"
Double Speak For Raising the Risk

Deregulation is characterized in the business-friendly media as a way of lifting the burdensome restrictions on the free flow of capital. This is nonsense. Deregulation is, in fact, the removal of the laws which traditionally protect the public from the hucksters and scam-artists who create lofty-sounding investments which are nothing more than Ponzi-schemes.

Deregulation has gravely undermined the long-term prospects for western capitalism to succeed. By removing the safeguards to investment, the business and banking communities have created what many call “casino capitalism,” an anarchic structure with few protections that is hurling the markets toward a system-wide meltdown.

Similar problems plague the sagging real estate market. In recent years a buyer could pick up a house with no down payment, an “interest-only” loan, a low ARM, and be reasonably certain that the next year it would increase 20 to 30% in value. This allows the buyer to refinance his home, use his “presto-equity” as discretionary income, and begin the cycle all over again next year.

With wages stagnating since the 1970s, the increase in home equity has been the preferred method for most Americans to “get ahead”. Housing prices have steadily increased since the 1980s and skyrocketed in the last 5 years. This has created a feeding-frenzy for low interest loans and attracted millions of speculators and (traditionally) unqualified applicants to the real estate gold rush.

It’s been a great deal for the banks, too. Mortgages make up the bulk of the bank loans in America, more than $400 billion last year alone. If it wasn’t for the steady stream of mortgages many banks would have seen negative growth in the last decade.


Now that housing prices are flattening out and expected to fall (precipitously) the easy money has dried up and many over-leveraged homeowners are facing the dismal prospect of having to pay off an asset that is quickly losing its value. Economist Michael Hudson calls this phenomenon “negative equity”, that is, when the current value of the house falls beneath the amount that one has to pay on his mortgage. It is a predicament which now faces an estimated 30 million Americans who are drowning in red ink and skittering towards a life of indentured servitude.

The magnitude of the housing bubble is shocking and unprecedented. According to the Federal Reserves own figures, “The total amount of residential housing wealth in the US just about doubled between 1999 and 2006 up from $10.4 trillion to $20.4 trillion.”

(Times Online) This tells us that the Fed had a clear idea of the size of the equity balloon their low interest policies were creating, but decided not to take corrective action. It also tells us that there will be no “soft landing”.

When the market begins to fall, no one knows when it will hit bottom. $10 trillion is more than a “little froth”, as Greenspan opined; it is an earth-shaking, economy-busting catastrophe that will put millions at risk of foreclosure, bankruptcy and ruin.




The Real American Unemployment Rate

The unemployment rate in the U.S. is misleading. It only shows people looking for work, not people who have given up looking or are off unemployment benefits. Include these people in the unemployment rate!

The real unemployment rate is 23%

The federal government claims the unemployment rate hovers around 5.5% But the government’s “unemployment rate” statistic is a propaganda device. It does not count as “unemployed” people who are “not in the labor force.”

According to economist Richard DuBoff, participation in the labor force by working-age males has been drifting downward for more than 40 years. Therefore, the government’s official “unemployment rate” is an increasingly misleading statistic.

*According to the government’s own statistics, the civilian non-institutional population of United States males, age 16 and over, was 107.7 million people. Of those 107.7 million males, 14.7 million were estimated to be age 65 or over. Therefore, the number of men between 16 and 64, which traditionally constitutes this nation’s workforce, was 93 million.



Of those 93 million men, the government admits that 4.4 million of them are unemployed. And when I say unemployed, I mean utterly and completely inactive. The government considers someone “employed” if they work as little as one hour a week. People who do not even work one hour a week are still considered “employed” if they are “temporarily absent” from work.

But in addition to the 4.4 million men who are officially “unemployed” the government admits that 28.7 million men over 16 are “not in the labor force.” Subtracting from this 28.7 million the estimated 11.9 million men 65 and over belonging to that group, results in 16.8 million men between the ages of 16 and 64 who are “not in the labor force.”

Adding the 4.4 million officially unemployed to the 16.8 million who are factually unemployed yields a total of 21.2 million unemployed men between the ages of 16 and 64.

These 21.2 million unemployed men of working age represent almost 23% of the 93 million working age men in the United States.



The Sinking of American Labor

Americans are facing new kinds of poverty and unemployment. Previously, poverty and unemployment in America were more or less cyclical. Today, they are becoming permanent structural features of this society.

A whole new social class of people is being created here - people whose labor is simply no longer needed in the economy because of technological change. Economic productivity has created a large, permanent class of those whom society cannot use and does not respect.

While the experts predict a glowing future for those maximum twenty percent of the U.S. population who will earn their bread by manipulating information in highly specialized ways, they are silent about prospects for the remaining eighty percent.

The United States has already become a society with a obscenely prosperous minority at the top, a downwardly mobile working class in the middle, and a marginalized so-called "underclass" at the bottom.




References ...
*Made In the U S A not
*The Great Unemployment Cover-up and the Looting of America



Profits of Doom

In a paper he prepared for a recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston conference, Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist, estimates that the entry of China, India and the former Soviet bloc roughly doubled the number of workers in the market economy, from 1.46 billion to 2.93 billion.

Since those countries brought little capital with them, the number of workers in the system shot up while the amount of capital increased very little. As the law of supply and demand might suggest, when labor is abundant and capital scarce, the returns to labour tend to fall and those to capital rise.

In addition, the idea that only low-skilled factory workers have anything to fear from globalization has turned out to be a myth. The former Soviet bloc already has many highly educated workers (the Soviets, remember, beat the Americans into space) and the less developed countries are pouring investment into higher education.

“Indonesia, Brazil, China, India - name the country - have more than doubled university student enrollments in the 1980s and 1990s,” Freeman says. China is investing particularly heavily in science and engineering and “by 2010 it will graduate more PhDs in science and engineering than the US”.

... the developing world has inconveniently departed from the script that said it would specialize in low-tech goods. “China has moved rapidly up the technological ladder, has greatly increased its high-tech exports and has achieved a significant position in research in what is purported to be the next big industrial technology - nanotechnology,” Freeman says. “Over 750 multinational firms have set up R&D facilities in China.”

So globalization is not just about a few blue-collar factory workers in the west losing their jobs and everyone else being better off. Because of plummeting telecom charges, all kinds of middle-class, white-collar jobs once thought of as non-tradeable - not just in telemarketing and call centers but in accountancy, medical diagnostics and information technology - have started moving to the developing world.

“Firms threaten to move facilities to lower-wage settings or to import products made by low-wage workers if their current workforce does not accept lower wages or working conditions, to which there is no strong labour response,” Freeman says.

“We are in the process of creating a global market without a global social contract.” We take it for granted that the west must have its child labour laws, workplace safety regulations and so on, but in the global market, no such rules apply.



TV5_studija_4x (250 x 286) (65 x 74)



How jobs are vanishing from America

The real rate of unemployment in the United States is the product of conscious planning. That planning is demonstrated by an intelligent coordination of various federal government policies. Most of these policies have been implemented in the last twenty-five years. These policies can be summarized as follows:

1. Federal Trade Policy

Starting with NAFTA and continuing with the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade, the federal government began to eliminate tariffs on imports. Without the tariffs, prices for imports manufactured with cheaper foreign labor undercut prices for products that were made in America. In order to compete, America’s manufacturers had to lay off American workers and hire workers in foreign countries. They did.

2. Federal Monetary Policy

American workers could still make many products that were superior to those made by foreign workers. If foreigners could afford to buy them, American workers would keep their jobs.

But foreigners couldn’t afford to buy American made products if the American dollar remained overvalued compared to other countries’ currencies.

Since first taking office in 1987, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s “strong dollar policy” overvalued the dollar relative to other nations’ currencies, especially that of Red China’s.

So, even without tariffs, most foreigners can’t afford to buy goods made in America.

3. Federal Immigration Policy

If the federal government didn’t allow massive legal and illegal immigration from Third World countries, there would be more and higher-paying jobs for American citizens.

But the federal government did decide to allow mass immigration, and there aren’t more or higher paying jobs for American citizens.

4. Federal Antitrust Policy

If the federal government enforced the antitrust laws so that American companies couldn’t consolidate using “mega-mergers”, those companies would still have to compete against each other. In order to compete against each other, each company would have to hire American workers. In order to compete for workers, the companies would have to pay higher wages and salaries.

But the Republicrats seldom enforce antitrust laws. The Department of Justice (sic) routinely approves mega-mergers, knowing that the whole point of the merger is to increase profits by laying off workers.

5. Federal Tax Policy

The more you tax something, the less of it you get. The federal government collects Social Security payroll taxes from American employers who hire American employees. Over the past twenty-five years, those taxes have doubled. The federal government is planning a further a increase in payroll taxes, supposedly to “save social security.” The real effect will be spur American employers to outsource jobs to foreign countries.

6. Federal Environmental Policy

Federal environmental policies are shutting down land-based production in the United States. This means a reduction in the number of jobs available in those sectors of the economy: farming, logging, mining, etc.



Shift In Economic Power

On the economic plane, realising that economies of scale matter, particularly as sources of consumer markets, countries will gravitate towards the formation of larger trading blocs. In particular Europe will gravitate towards a bigger trading bloc which will include much of Eastern Europe; North and South America will become much more integrated; and Asia will also move towards a much more unified economic bloc.

A shift in economic power from the western world, where it has resided for the past 300 years, to the east, particularly India and China, where over 40% of humanity reside. This shift in economic power will invariably be immediately followed by a shift in political power. This shift in economic and political powers from the west to the east will have many consequences.

The 21st century is an interesting century in the sense that humanity will be able to create machines that will ultimately perform - without much human intervention - tasks that are traditionally performed by human beings. This process is called automation.

It can therefore be expected that machines, without any human intervention, will manufacture an entire car on a much larger scale than is presently the case. The effect of this on the labor market, and in particular on unemployment, will be far reaching.

Simply put, those with enough capital to acquire this capacity *will ultimately control economies of scale without much participation of the masses of people. This will ensure that the fundamental rule of international capitalist economy that says that the gap between the rich and the poor keeps widening will intensely govern societies unless there is a major shift towards socially oriented societies.



Why jobs are vanishing from America

Public opinion polls routinely report that the dearth of jobs is the number one issue among voters.

The Republicrats are keenly aware that jobs are vanishing from America. They want us to think they are doing something about it. The Congress recently granted a tax amnesty to multinational corporations, but decided to call it the “Jobs Creation Act.”

But in fact, as the foregoing demonstrates, the Republicrats are doing everything possible to undermine work opportunities for American citizens. Why?

As is obvious for most of us, the Republicrats no longer represent the interests of American citizens. The reelection rate for Congressional incumbents hovers around 98%. Incumbents have a huge advantage because they are in a position to solicit bribes.

Republicrats take their orders from a global elite that bankrolls their perpetual reelection. Having fewer and lower paying jobs in America serves a number of items on that elite’s agenda. That agenda revolves around creating the conditions for global government.

FEWER JOBS=LOWER STANDARD OF LIVING

Obviously, fewer and lower paying jobs for Americans will result in Americans having a lower standard of living.

Elites believe that a uniform standard of living for all the peoples of the world is a precondition to global government.

This goal requires that countries with lower standards of living be raised and that countries with higher standards of living be lowered.

After W.W.II, the United States had the highest standard of living in the world. In order to make global living standards uniform, the American standard of living has to be lowered.

Some find it hard to believe that government is trying to lower the standard of living. Yet the idea of equalizing national standards of living was being discussed almost sixty years ago.

Back in 1947, the great Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek expressed skepticism about the “great deal of muddleheaded talk about planning to equalize standards of life” throughout the world.

Von Hayek, who won a Nobel prize in 1974, scoffed at the notion that ”European races would voluntarily submit to their standard of life and rate of progress being determined by a World Parliament.”

It’s looking like he overestimated us.

Europe Will Lead

Europe has what I call "transformative power," the power to change countries from within. First of all, the EU is not a superstate or an empire; it’s a sort of decentralized club. It has developed the biggest single market in the world, and it can offer other countries trade and aid and all the carrots that major powers have been able to dangle in the past.

Secondly, the EU projects power not by threatening to invade other countries but by threatening to exclude them from its benefits—either from being members of the club or from being engaged with the club in some way.

And thirdly, the power of the EU is embedded in law. To join the European club you have to adopt 80,000 pages of laws, stored in 34 volumes, which govern everything from human rights and the protection of minorities to the composition of tomato ketchup. And that sort of legal power allows you to transform not just the regimes in other countries but the whole of their societies.

Read more ...
*Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century

FEWER JOBS=LOWER BIRTH RATE

Elites realize that unemployment lowers the birthrate. Younger people who are jobless believe they can’t afford to have children. So they don’t.

For example, the European nations with the highest youth unemployment rates also have *the lowest birthrates. A recent study concluded that Australia’s perilously low birth rate was caused by fear of unemployment.

Lowering the birthrate in the nations of Europe and North America has been a primary objective of elite planners since the end of W.W.II. This depopulation imperative accounts for their coordinated and intense effort to legalize abortion and homosexuality in those countries.

In countries that have higher standards of living, lowering the birthrate reduces the number of people who are born into that higher standard of living. That makes it easier for elites to equalize standards of living around the world, since there are relatively fewer people whose standard of living needs to be lowered.

The jobs that are vanishing from America do not disappear. Most of them are being moved to China and India, two nations on track to become the political and economic powers of the 21st Century.

Is it a coincidence that elites are moving the productive capacity of the United States?



Conclusion

More than just American jobs is at stake. Global elites and their federal government lackeys are doing everything possible to destroy America.

For any part of our nation to be salvaged, we will have to abandon “politics as usual” and prepare to fight and survive.

*The Real Unemployment Rate Petition

American Unemployment Videos


Frontlines

U.S. Trade Policy and Job-Destroying Treaties, WTO & NAFTA

No Jobs for Middle Class

Nine 2 Five: The Other Side [DCTV Youth]

Originally Posted on Thursday, March 27, 2008

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