Elites Estatic At Davos While America Goes Bankrupt

Elaine Meinel Supkis

All the real financial news is terrible but of course, the rich dudes at Davos are all upbeat because they all have golden parachutes like the loser who was fired by Home Depot. I wish I got $210 million every time I flubbed! Our military that learned nothing from Nam want $70 billion (yes, billion) more, too. Bankruptcy looms.

&hearts Yet another major buyer of our IOUs we peddle has decided they don't want to hold so many dollars anymore.

By Will McSheehy

Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Kuwait, the third-largest Arab oil producer, may abandon the dinar's peg against the dollar in favor of a basket of currencies to help minimize economic harm after the dollar declined.

``We might go to a basket for an interim period,'' Bader al- Humaidhi, Kuwait's finance minister, told reporters today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. ``The dollar fell a lot against the euro last year, but if we'd been linked to a basket we wouldn't have suffered'' as much.

The dollar is going to hell in a hand basket all right. This is ridiculous. Several years ago, readers at other sites used to argue with me about free trade and the dollar. They were fooled into believing the best tool to deal with trade imbalances was to devalue the dollar. All my warnings about the downside of such policies fell on deaf ears.

The childishness of most monetarists is astonishing. They really think no one can add 2+2 or figure out what compound interest is. They thought the Chinese who invented a lot of the fiscal tools we are now abusing, would be fooled by us. How clever.

I worked with the Chinese back when they first wanted to learn about capitalism. What impressed me was how swiftly they learned. Nothing had to be explained three times! Like the British imperialists just before WWI, we think no one wants our massive Titanic financial ship to sink! We are the big empire! Everyone is doing business with us!

Well, this is why these sorts of wars happen: hubris plus weakness=war. Two minor wars in the Balkans and one minor war in South Africa paved the way for the big one in 1914. We must remember that devaluing a currency after handing over, recklessly, a tremendous amount of this currency, is a supremely hostile action.

Right now, we are screaming at North Korea for 'counterfeiting' our dollars. But by devaluing it deliberately so we can cheat everyone who has sold us stuff is counterfeiting too! People expect value when they accept our currency. To then maliciously make it worth 50% less is theft and grounds for violence.

&hearts Our side of this mess is revealed in the increasing amount of money we must spend in order to suppress rebellions against our co-dependency spheres.

UPI: Adding 30,000 soldiers to the U.S. Army will cost about $70 billion over six years, a top U.S. general said Tuesday.

Lt. Gen. Stephen M Speakes, the Army deputy chief of staff for programming, materiel integration and management, said the number is an estimate of what bringing the Army up to 547,000 soldiers will cost between 2009 when the effort will start and 2013, when the permanent endstrength is expected to be achieved. The Army now has about 512,000 troops.

This looming $70 billion is on top of the $120 billion the Pentagon wants for the two failing wars and on top of all that is $500 billion for the entire Pentagon global/space machine of death. This is almost $700 billion A YEAR! An astonishing figure. Of course, the Daddy Warbucks of the world are making out like bandits!

&hearts They think everything is hunky-dory!

DAVOS, Switzerland (AFP) - The world economy is set for another year of strong growth, a panel of experts has predicted in Davos, reflecting the upbeat mood of business leaders here about prospects for 2007.

The first debate Wednesday kicked off the four-day World Economic Forum in bright form, with the dominant view that global expansion would continue this year despite a predicted slowdown in the US economy.

Laura Tyson, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said 2007 could be another fairytale year but cautioned that "the big bad wolf was hiding in the forest" in the medium term.

Across the planet, the 'fairytale year' is actually the Witch and the Gingerbread house and we are going to be eaten by her or maybe Goldilocks and the three Bears will come home and spank us. Or maybe Little Red Riding hood, she pulls back the covers and is eaten by the wolf.

This cluelessness to the mess these clowns are creating infuriates me because they know perfectly well their looting expeditions are going to sink the entire world's economy as the inevitable readjustment is done as the dollar's nose-dive destroys everything around it.

The main currency of the world going under is very significant. It is a sign our empire is fatally weak and will keel over dead. The Chinese know this.

&hearts Also at Davos, the ruling elites are fretting about the Chinese and the Indians.

Davos, January 25: India and China grabbed the early spotlight at the World Economic Forum in Davos as delegates debated, with both anticipation and concern, the growing economic clout of the two Asian giants.

The titles of the seminars on offer at the annual gathering of global movers and shakers hinted at the feeling of suspicion and sense of threat which both nations arouse in many Western politicians and business leaders.

They want to exploit the workers of these countries but they don't want these countries to gain power after we industrialize them. At Davos, they assured each other, industrializing these countries doesn't mean they are gaining power at our own expense. This whistling past the graveyard of previous empires shows the integrity of these clowns: none.

The Indian and Chinese representatives at Davos assured these fools that neither wants war. I, too, would rather win via economic judo! But it is hilarious to hear India, a land that has gone to war a number of times during my own lifetime, talking about how they never go to war. And China, lying about never invading anyone. Tibet? Naw.

&hearts They are nervous about food and with Bush announcing we will spin grain into gas which means the price of grain will go up.

BEIJING, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- China faces the possibility of a 4.8 million ton grain shortage in 2010, almost 9 percent of the country's grain consumption, according to the Study Times, a newspaper affiliated to the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

If the prediction is accurate, the country will significantly undershoot its grain security target according to which domestic supplies must make up 95 percent of needs.

We must keep a certain amount of grain in stock, too. During the oil crisis under Nixon, thanks to rainy winters and a warm spring, the corn crop in the Midwest was infected by a virus and a lot of it was destroyed and the world suffered a dearth of corn. If we don't keep the equivelent of 50 days of grain in stock at the least, a bad harvest could lead to starvation even here in America! This is why we can't use up everything producing gasoline which we really don't need because we have made many foolish choices when it comes to our automobile culture.

&hearts And our car culture is dying.

By NICK BUNKLEY
Published: January 25, 2007

DEARBORN, Mich., Jan. 25 — The Ford Motor Company had the worst year in its history in 2006, losing $12.7 billion and suffering sharp erosion of its share of the United States auto market.

To put this in perspective, $12 billion is one and a half month's of spending in Iraq! Namely, this huge, gigantic number is peanuts when we look at our war that is bankrupting the entire USA. We can't lose the equivalent of the entire cost of downsizing the last of our industries... on a monthly basis without very bad consequences! And of course, the Chinese, Kuwaitis and Japanese are funding all this.

&hearts So a tremour on Wall Street.

By Nick Godt, MarketWatch
Last Update: 4:30 PM ET Jan 25, 2007

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- U.S. stocks closed sharply lower Thursday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffering its worst day of the year so far, as investors were shaken by a sell-off in the bond market, which sent long-term interest rates to five-month highs and fueled jitters about the housing market and the economy.

In addition, a raft of homebuilders - Beazer Homes USA (BZH :44.37, -2.64, -5.6% ) , Ryland Group Inc. (RYL :53.63, -2.34, -4.2% ) and Meritage Homes Corp. (MTH : 44.18, -1.67, -3.6% ) - all issued downbeat forecasts for the housing market this year.

The reality of the housing collapse is just beginning to sink in. Namely, never, ever in our history was a major re-adjustment like what we are seeing here today, quick and 'soft'. All housing collapses lead to financial freeze-ups as banks cease to lend money unless it is very, very secure. No more funny-money loans! On the mega-scale, this goes double for countries! The USA needs such huge cash infusions every day to keep afloat, even a small drop off, and this isn't going to be small, can drop us into bankruptcy.

As Americans rush to buy Japanese cars, our own industries are eclipsed and our underbelly is exposed more and more to foreign domination and our attempts at dominating foreigners is now so hideously expensive it is destroying our economy and our government.

So time for Bush to launch a new scheme to take money from the poor and give it to the rich at Davos as he stumps for changing health care insurance tax laws.

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Comments

[larry, dfh]

I was in Indiana the fall after the summer of the blight. I knew several people who worked on de-tasselling gangs: 4 rows of detassled corn, one row of pollinator. The farmers were panicked. That's one of the reasons I dislike GMO's: when everyone's growing the exact same stuff, a blight can wipe out everything. It's slowly happening with soybeans right now, the crops can tolerate 'Round-up', but not the blight that is slowly moving up from the Gulf. Ignoring the crop libraries that the natives developed over millenia is another example of the hubris you mentioned.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Thanks for the mention, Larry, yes, there is a blight moving up in soy. Ditto super-weeds with the GM cotton, for example! And yes, variety is important! This goes for cows, sheep, tomatoes and humans.

The more the merrier, I say. This is why I did things like raise wild turkeys or different varieties of chickens, just for example.