October 12, 2007
Elaine Meinel Supkis
Once again, the Seven Dwarves attack the Chinese Dragon. Now we are supposed to be worried about inflation in China and China's stock market making records the same week the US stock market is making records while inflation rages here. Hmmmm.....glass houses, meet boulders falling from heaven! The New York Times discovers the not-so-secret LDP plans to starve the Japanese people to death. I have been talking about this for a long time, by the way. And Europe is screaming about the rising value of the euro but is totally unable to stop this because they aren't a nation with one leadership or someone like Hu or Wen or Putin running things.
China's next central-bank governor may fare no better than incumbent Zhou Xiaochuan in cooling the world's fastest-growing major economy.Zhou, who has been in office five years, is likely to be given a new job after next week's Communist Party congress, economists predict. Whenever he leaves, his successor will inherit a monetary policy blunted by an undervalued currency, a jump in foreign investment and surging stocks. The People's Bank of China is also constrained by a lack of independence.
HAHAHA. Poor, poor China has a booming stock market! Whaaaa! Unlike Japan which has an anemic stock market, China is up and up! And America: the market fell a tiny bit, around 8% and Cramer was shrieking, 'There is BLOOD in the streets! My friends are losing their JOBS!' So Bernanke dropped interest rates well below the real rate of inflation. The stock market shot up to new highs instantly. All the shrieking, bleeding speculators were pig-happy. So of course, the news media must talk about how stupid the Chinese are for letting their stock market hit new highs?
HAHAHA. Seriously, the underhanded, evil campaign to make me laugh to death is on track!
The writer of this story obviously doesn't understand communist China at all. The government has no influence over the central bank? Liiiiiiiiiiike here? Under Republican Presidents, the right wing heads of our Federal Reserve that has few reserves always drop rates below the rate of inflation. Why did we have inflation soar under Nixon so badly, he desperately tried to have Wage/Price Controls? All the Fed had to do was raise interest rates. President Ford fought inflation by issuing buttons that said 'Fight Inflation Now!' No one in the central bank did anything until Jimmy Carter became President.
Then rates rose...fast. Higher and higher. Inflation faded and then died. Reagan came into office and once again, rates fell behind the real rate of inflation and desperate savers were forced to go to risky savings and loans offering higher CD rates or they speculated in stocks and we had the great stock crash of 1987 and the Savings & Loans scandal as well as other speculator scandals that sent con men to prison but also destroyed the savings of many elderly people like the Silverado mess.
Clinton became President and suddenly the Fed had to keep inflation under control again. Due to outsourcing picking up like mad, our economy did well. NAFTA and the Most Favored Nation status being given to China opened the floodgates for more imports but iinflation fell. The looting of Russia's natural resources also drove down the price of many commodities and raw materials as well as the all-important energy costs.
The very same week Bush was sworn into office, promising huge tax cuts, Greenspan dropped interest rates. The price of energy was rising by the hour already and inflation was picking up due to the growth of China's industrial base. Putin just took over Russia one year earlier and was beginning the present rise of Russia's ability to 'price' things by controlling production and trade. And Greenspan DROPPED rates over and over again BEFORE 9/11. The very inflationary tax cuts were passed and Bush began to build up the military and government spending was already rising rapidly. After 9/11, Greenspan dropped rates to the cellar even as energy inflation raged.
Then we went to war. This cost us a fortune and taxes continued to be cut. Interest rates were still way below the rate of inflation but starting in late 2004, an alarmed Fed began to raise rates. The climb in rates was due not to controlling the economy but due to a near-total collapse in savings due to the ridiculously low rates. And inflation took off, of course and the only solution was to outsource faster than the rate of inflation so our trade deficit went from a mere $5 billion a year at the beginning of Nixon's reign to a horrific $800+ billion under Bush and Greenspan's 1% reign.
So time to accuse China that has a trade surplus and doesn't have $9 trillion in government debts, of being a fiscal basket case! We saw how our own central bank played outrageous interest rate games in order to keep our non-capitalist, mega-corporate monstrosity of an economy limping along. The US, under this regime, has gone from a manufacturing giant into a manufacturing midget. Our economy has a huge GNP but what are we producing?
70% of our GNP is service/sales. We count as 'GNP' things like selling Chinese imports. The entire idea of using the GNP to determine the health of an economy is anti-capitalistic since it doesn't track the value of sales related to the building of value-added activities. Walmart's value-added activities increase the trade deficit too much so it must be viewed as a negative, not a positive. This is why the entire concept should be revised.
Refusing to revise this old chestnut statistical methodology is deliberate. Due to computers, one can easily create a much more viable and useful gage of economic health but they don't want to do this. The obfuscation of economic reality is pleasing to the people who want to imagine that China is a country that needs guidance and pity.
The economies of eastern Europe are vulnerable to a reversal of the surge of private capital that has poured into emerging markets in recent years, the International Monetary Fund says in its latest World Economic Outlook analysis, published today.
*snip*
The sections of the IMF report released today do not include its estimates for global growth. However, reports originating in the Italian media suggest the IMF has cut its estimate for world growth next year from 5.2 per cent to 4.8 per cent, with US growth revised down from 2.8 per cent to 1.9 per cent.These reports say the IMF has revised eurozone growth down from 2.5 per cent to 2.1 per cent, with the biggest reduction in Spain. UK growth is cut from 2.7 per cent to 2.3 per cent and Japan from 2 per cent to 1.7 per cent. By contrast, the IMF reportedly shaved its forecast for China only by a fraction and left its forecast for India unchanged.
Poor China. They will grow more than us, more than Europe. But due to Europe and the US collapsing, they won't grow quite as fast. So I suppose, we should weep for them. But what about us? Can we inflate our own way out of our economic contraction? Will Bernake's magic save us from the realities of inflation and declining economic GDP?
China's inflation is accurately gaged by the same clowns who REFUSE to apply the same standards here! For example, I see a million headlines in the West yelling, 'China's FOOD inflation is increasing!' But even as this happens here here, they don't say a peep. Inflation of energy and food which have both gone up in tandem as they always do since food production requires a lot of energy, the refusal to include these important things in our own statistics is a cheap lie. And inflation in both have been relentlessly upwards for the entire reign of Bush the Monkey King.
We cannot celebrate our own stocks going up while yelling at China to stop going up, too. We can't lie about inflation while attacking China for having inflation. If China's inflation is bad and the yuan must be made stronger than what the fucking hell is going on here in America? We are trying to weaken the dollar for trade advantage and this is causing energy inflation as the OPEC/Russia confederation retaliates by raising the cost of energy and this is who's fault?
China? HAHAHA, again.
In a thin notebook discovered along with a man’s partly mummified corpse this summer was a detailed account of his last days, recording his hunger pangs, his drop in weight and, above all, his dream of eating a rice ball, a snack sold for about $1 in convenience stores across the country.Kitakyushu was declared to have a “model” welfare policy.
“3 a.m. This human being hasn’t eaten in 10 days but is still alive,” he wrote. “I want to eat rice. I want to eat a rice ball.”
FINALLY the major media has noticed something nasty in Japan: the Japanese are literally starving their people to death. I have written a lot about all this but few people read me so this is 'news' to anyone who is out of the inside loop of things. The basic statistics put out by the Bank of Japan clearly shows how the government has suppressed spending drastically for the last 15 years. Wages have fallen badly, part-time work has risen from 10% of the force to 35% of the work force. Material costs have risen relentlessly but labor costs have collapsed.
Just four months ago, I wrote about parents of school children complaining that school lunches were being debased and their children were losing calories just so a few more yen could be squeezed out of so many stones. All this, so the Bank of Japan can claim there is no inflation! This disgusting LPD policy pleases Toyota that uses lots of robots and has outsourced many factories to the US, China, India and other lands. Profits from exporting or from outsourced factories soar to the HIGHEST ON EARTH. Japan doesn't export nearly as much as China but their PROFITS are higher!
Look at yesterday's headlines in Japan! From the Nikkei:
Stocks: Nikkei Soars On Moody's Japan Debt Rating UpgradeTOKYO (Kyodo)--Tokyo stocks closed sharply higher Thursday, sending the benchmark Nikkei index to a two and a half month high after an upgrade of Japan's sovereign debt rating encouraged investors to snap up a wide range of equities.
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Fukui: Uncertainty Over Global Economy ContinuesTOKYO (Dow Jones)--Bank of Japan Gov. Toshihiko Fukui said Thursday that uncertainty over the world economy continues, suggesting the BOJ is unlikely to raise rates in the near future.
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Sony Financial Gains Modestly On Better Mkt MoodTOKYO (Dow Jones)--Sony Financial Holdings Inc. (8729) rose modestly Thursday in Japan's biggest initial public offering of the year, helped by improved sentiment amid receding concerns about the recent credit market turmoil.
The story about the man who, in financial despair, strangled his wife and threw himself and his children off the balcony of their tiny apartment didn't make the news here. The ownership of new cars has been dropping in Japan for 5+ years. While the entire planet enjoyed a buying spree/stock boom, Japan's own middle and lower classes bought less and less and car ownership declined. This is utterly ridiculous since the businesses owned by Japanese corporations shot up and up! There is a grave disconnect here.
The US is in the same fix except for one tiny difference: in Japan, the .5% interest rates are for savings and getting loans is very hard if you are a worker so the real rate of LOANS is around 9%+ a year while for Toyota, it is below 2%. In America, the cheap loans were for everyone with a sneaky proviso: it would start as a low loan and the, when the workers go deep into debt, shoots up suddenly! So we had a big boom in buying but that is ending now as more and more workers bump up against the invisible glass ceiling and suddenly find their cheap loans aren't cheap anymore.
It’s going to be a much more expensive winter for households that depend on heating oil, the government predicted Tuesday, while those that use natural gas should experience only moderate price increases.Heating oil customers will pay an average of $319, or 22 percent, more this winter than last in large part because of soaring crude oil prices, the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration estimated. Natural gas customers are forecast to pay $78, or 10 percent, more for heat between October and March.
So bankruptcies here are skyrocketting. The solution being talked about by our rulers is to imitate Japan: starve the excess population to death. This is why Bush vetoed health care for children. This is why Reagan wanted to count ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches. This is why the Fed won't count food and fuel as inflationary items and malilciously leaves them out of the accounts which is why we get totally fake inflation figures. This is so seniors on SS won't get raises and this will end up starving them to death as they run out of funds. Dog food, anyone?
Note the heating story above: in past Republican rule time periods, people have literally frozen to death due to lack of heat as well as starving to death. Since world energy prices have risen, the GOP has cut funds for home heating assistance. They won't increase it by 22% this year. Instead, spending on our oil wars has increased by 22% a year.
The euro rallied against the dollar, sterling and the yen on Thursday, and mixed messages from eurozone politicians and policymakers did little to slow its progress.The European Central Bank was busy trying to talk the currency down. In a press conference, Jean-Claude Trichet, the bank's president, said disorderly moves were undesirable for growth and that markets should be aware of the risks of one-way currency bets - hinting of the dangers of the carry trade.
Why don't they put messages in bottles? 'Dear Dragon, please stop buying euros and holding them in your huge FOREX reserves? We want to spend money and we don't want to imitate you!" Or how about, 'Dear Miz Japan, are you really stabbing us in the back? Are you using euros to keep the value of the yen down?' Or to the US: 'Dear Miz Liberty, we know you want a weak dollar but could you raise interest rates to the real rate of inflation? Thanx.'
No one talks money up or down. We all know that there are two forces at work: interest rates and FOREX HOLDINGS. The West absolutely refuses to understand the 'FOREX' part of the equation. Yet this is obvious: the countries that control huge FOREX reserves have 'sovereign wealth' and can also control the value of currencies. Countries exporting oil all want strong currencies and manufacturing countries seeking trade advantage want weak currencies and together, the biggest players in this game are using their FOREX reserves to set the trade value of currencies all over the planet.
Europe has huge reserves, too, if you add them all up. But it is fake. No one controls these reserves in total and thus, can't buy or sell currencies on the open markets to manipulate the value of the euro. So unlike Japan or China, they have to use hot air, instead. Eventually, even the dumbest banker and stupidest politician will figure this out. Either all the EU nations combine their FOREX reserves and hands them over to Germany or they will continue to be the fall guy in this global currency game.
And we all know how allergic they are about handing over everything to Germany. It won't happen. The euro will probably fail when individual countries flee it in order to weaken their own currency for trade purposes.
The more French president Nicolas Sarkozy attacks the European Central Bank and the strong euro, the more he is criticized in the European media, by European finance ministers, European Union officials and the ECB itself. The critics are right. The fundamental reason behind France’s current economic weakness is its lack of competitiveness even in other euro-zone economies where the euro is not a factor.But Sarkozy has a point. A perfect storm is forming in the foreign exchange markets that threatens to catapult the euro to levels that will make even the euro-zone’s most efficient exporter—Germany—unable to compete in world markets. If German exporters can’t compete at 1.50 euros to the dollar, what chances do French exporters have?
The euro is gaining ground for several reasons. A precipitating factor is that the Federal Reserve has had a dramatic change of heart about the strength of the US economy. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is now extremely concerned that the economy’s housing market and mortgage problems will cause a recession unless interest rates are aggressively cut even if this means taking some risks with inflation.
*snip*
The perfect storm is forming because both Europe and America, for different reasons, are following monetary policies that encourage the euro to rocket to dangerous levels.The anti-inflation hawks in Frankfurt are not at all happy with Bernanke’s aggressive 50 basis point cut and the promise of more to come. It gives comfort to ECB critics like Sarkozy, and otherwise puts pressure on them to drop the central bank’s inflationary bias because of its effect on the euro.
If everyone else refuses to recognize real inflation, Europe has no choice but to join them. The US is the biggest criminal here: we are the world's #1 GNP nation and we are the world's biggest consuming nation. So if we refuse to correctly gage inflation, this causes a gross deformity within global markets. Japan's staunch refusal to have free trade or to consume even as it is the #2 economy is also deforming world trade. China is taking advantage of both Japan and the USA's desire to have fake economies. Europe could do the same but they would first have to do what China and Russia are doing: have a true central government and to make certain it is made up of staunch communists. HAHAHA.
I am convinced that the only people on earth who truly understand capitalism are communists who have clearly seen the problems of proletariate ideology. They have created---I watched them figure this out in real time---the weaknesses of liberal capitalism and have welded all of this liberal capitalist stuff onto their own central-controlled government systems. Unlike the fascists, they understand the need to keep the workers alive and somehow, happy. This is why the fine arts always flourish under communistic rule, for example. Artists, poets, classical music, chess playing, go playing, etc, enjoy status and support as the communist government seeks the trappings of royalty.
China is issuing its latest 5 year plan. You can bet, elements of this plan are aimed at strengthening China's relative position vis a vis the rest of the world. It also strengthens their military without having to sell war bonds to potential enemies and rivals. Unlike the US. Europe is a big entity but much of their trade is between themselves and the strong euro is rapidly killing the weaker members. So as it grows, it resembles more a classic bubble or ponzi scheme than a political power. The fact that they can't control the relative value of their currency while their trade partners ruthlessly do this themselves, to their great advantage, is proof the EU system is a failure.
Either they let the Germans or the Russians take it over. If they don't, it will end in a muddled mess when the US turns desperate and decides to dump all our inflation into Europe (right now, we are trying to get China to do this while at the same time, trying to get China to INCREASE inflation!).
The Bank of Korea will probably leave interest rates unchanged at a six-year high for a second month tomorrow as a stronger won and fallout from the U.S. housing recession risk cooling economic growth.
South Korea, being smaller and weaker and with a much smaller FOREX reserve than China, Russia and Japan, has seen their currency rise against the yen and the yuan and is being hammered by this. They cannot stop 'inflation' because if they do the right thing while the US, Japan and China are all doing the exact opposite, well...this is the whole problem. The world's #1, #2 and #3 economies are all working day and night via interest rates and playing FOREX games, to depress the value of their currencies and to lie about inflation! Each uses slightly different tools and degrees of methodology to do this but the end result is plain as day: they all want to drop the value or suppress the rise in value of their currencies! This is a potential deflationary force which will spring into action if the US slided into a recession and price cutting is coupled with a drop in use of raw materials and sales of manufactured items: a classic depression.
The secretive hedge fund industry has made a big step towards increasing transparency and improving risk controls with UK plans for the first voluntary industry code of conduct.
*snip*
Apart from increased transparency for the public through better disclosure of information about managers on their websites – many of which contain nothing except the corporate logo – the plan sets out three main standards to protect investors.
Voluntary? HAHAHA. And the first person who flicks on the lights in those dark hell caves will be destroyed. Then no one else will do it. Indeed, the paradox here is, the minute one pirate reveals where he hides his treasure chest, the others will RAID it! So no one will do this.
How they 'make their money' is a dark secret. They all have tricky schemes which they hatch continuously. They refine or drop schemes when they lose money or come into the news and everyone sees what is going on and either apes them or goes after them to arrest them. So they need this darkness, this is where money is created out of thin air. The last thing they desire is some snoop coming in and writing about them or demanding they answer questions.
Thus, the 'voluntary' part of this news story.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the world's biggest securities firm, said its holdings backed by pools of bonds and loans dropped 53 percent in the third quarter, the second consecutive decline amid a global credit contraction.The ``fair value'' of retained interests in collateralized debt obligations and loan obligations was $1.77 billion at the end of August, down from $3.79 billion three months earlier, the New York-based firm said in a regulatory filing. Investments in mortgage-backed securities fell 16 percent.
This money that vanished was part of the 'magic money' world that comes out of deep caves. It can 'appear' and 'disappear' in a flash. It is used to buy things that are quite real but when it vanishes, this means a lot of future real things that one could buy if one is a magician are not going to be bought. This causes the value of assets the wizards bid on like artwork, fancy houses, expensive, fast cars, yachts, etc, to drop and this means 'no inflation'...hahaha.
Actually, this causes depressions as prices fall, profits fall and the ability to make new magic money is gone since this rests entirely on piling up debts in every possible corner and crevice of an economic system. This emphatically includes government spending. Raising taxes merely moves magic money from the magicians to the government officials and thus, reduces both the bidding up of assets the wizards lust for (this includes prostitutes and trophy wives) and increases the power of the governments but wizards hate paying taxes which is why I get to write about all those Elizabethan islands that operate as tax shelters.
The global credit contration is IN THE US/EU EMPIRE. It is NOT in China. Note the top story. The US and EU are both very worried that China's credit is growing, see? Bad thing! Bad! Naughty dragon, how dare it do this? But of course, we want to do this again. Only this requires somewhere one can find someone who can take on more debts. And the vast majority of the world's debts are now in the US/EU empire. Which teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
STEVE KEEN: The biggest level of debt in our history - and I'm talking over 150 years - and interest rates which have put the debt burden that that causes on repayments to be so high, that people are now under more financial stress than they have been at any time since the absolute peak of the Great Depression.ASHLEY HALL: Now that increase that we've just experienced, that I mentioned in New South Wales, comes at a time when there's been changes to the rules which are skewing these figures as well.
STEVE KEEN: That's right. They in fact made the figures in June worse than they should be and reduced the ones in September because people were rushing through a number of agreements to get them in before the new rules came into effect that made it more difficult to take these procedures through. So in fact we're likely to see a blip up again. Even though we had a 12 per cent increase over last September, it's probable the next quarter will show a more substantial increase because of the artificial suppression of the numbers in this quarter.
OK: Australia, part of the US/UK empire, is doing exactly the same things the US and UK are doing: piling on tons of debt, lying about inflation and excess government spending. Like the US, the Aussies prepared for this mess by making it much harder to declare bankruptcy. This pleases the lenders who lent money to people who shouldn't have gotten loans in the first place, they needed pay raises, not loans. And this is all due to the government lying about inflation. Anyway, the Aussie loan entities hope that if one can't go bankrupt, the loans won't go bad and all will be well.
But this stops the magicians from making more money magically since bankrupts paying off old loans can't get new loans! Worse, they can't buy stuff since they can't 'charge it'. This means the GNP drops, people get fired and the economy contracts and we get a depression. Time to yell at China for having a boom, right?
The Monetary Authority of Singapore will allow the Singapore dollar to appreciate in an effort to stem inflation amid fast economic growth.The central bank’s move to tighten monetary policy on Wednesday came as the government estimated that gross domestic product in the July-September period rose 9.4 per cent from a year ago, although growth slowed to 6.4 per cent from the previous quarter on an annualised, seasonally adjusted basis.
Singapore is caught in the same trap as everyone else. Since China's trade with Europe and Asia flows past or through Singapore, this brings a boom to that small entity which is kind of like Hong Kong: a tax haven. The rock is inflation and the hard place is rising value of a currency leads to problems with trade. This is ratchetting upwards rapidly as more and more nations struggle to cope with a contracting world trade situation.
Alistair Darling's proposals had been billed as offering tax cuts to millions with an eye-catching announcement that the inheritance tax threshold would be doubled for couples.But those claims began to unravel after analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies showed that by 2012 millions of households will be facing an annual tax bill of more than £20,000, an increase of around £50 a week.
The revelation has echoes of Gordon Brown's final budget as Chancellor last March when his pledge to cut income tax masked a series of proposals that saw many middle class families facing higher bills.
England's ruling elites have fostered, protected and used a host of tax havens. The majority of tax havens including Hong Kong were once British colonies. All are geographically isolated. And taxes in England are a mess thanks to these stupid things which are now dropping the tax rate on speculators and corporations to 0% in a global bidding war between themselves. This has the potential to cause a global credit collapse as desperate governments raise taxes on the least capable in order to keep the red ink under some control.
These tax havens have drained so much wealth from governments, the only nations with sovereign wealth are oil pumping nations and China. All hail the Dragon! And how dare it have a boom! Kill the Dragon!
Alistair Darling has suffered a ferocious backlash from his own business advisers over his decision to raise the rate of capital gains tax (CGT) paid by entrepreneurs and their staff by 80pc.
No one wants to pay taxes. But the US/UK empire wants wars and loves spending half a trillion on wars and this is bankrupting us and all attempts at taxing will fall on the working classes and the small businesses that can't run off to tax havens. And the refusal to consider tax havens to be hostile powers is sinking all the mighty navies of the world's biggest empire!
Spain did this. When they had their many Armadas, they ruled the Seven Seas. But their wars, their bad business practices and above all, their need to live beyond their means, all this led to them going into one bankruptcy after another. By 1600, the future tax revenues for 50 years was pledged to the early banks in Amsterdam and Italy. By 1700, it was 100 years of future taxes and by 1800, Spain was being ravaged by armies and the empire fell apart. By 1900, Spain was falling into a civil war and was one of the poorest nations in Europe. This trajectory is very vile and quite obvious and we can see the dangers here. When the US discussed the creation of the dollar, they still refered to the Spanish gold coin as the world's premier currency. Not the British pound. A century later, everyone compared their currencies to the British currencies. But today, the supposed powerhouse is the dollar only it hasn't been since 1974.
We've got a window now of about ten weeks or so where we should really see a big increase in shipment volumes as we get ready for Christmas. We have not seen that, and that's a concern. Last year's inventory buildup for Christmas was lower than historical standards, and the season ended up okay - not terrible. This year you have some easy comparisons, so you would expect to see more of a preholiday inventory buildup, but we have not seen that. Maybe it's coming later. Maybe it's not coming.
Like in the Great Depression, the first sign of trouble came before the stockmarket hit its peak: roll on/roll off numbers were dropping fast. This was due not to happy days in America but to a collapse in world trade due to Germany refusing to pay France and England more money because of rising unrest (Herr Hitler at work) in Germany as the working class was joined by the middle class, agitating for a cessation in payments. So this news is serious news and thus, ignored by the headline writers who are trying to goose our stock market upwards while yelling at China for having a rising stock market.
BBC staff are bracing themselves for "savage" job losses in news and programme-making under cost-cutting plans to be unveiled by the corporation next week.As many as 2,800 posts – at least 12 per cent of the BBC's 23,000 workforce –could be cut when the director general, Mark Thompson, presents his proposals to save billions of pounds to the BBC Trust. Mr Thompson is seeking budget cuts of 6 per cent in each of the next five years to make up a £2bn shortfall between the licence fee settlement and the funds he had wanted.
The Queen wanted heads and got them. But also, all agencies as well as businesses, are being forced to contract as they try to cope with real inflation and falling revenues. This emphatically includes tax revenues. The BBC has an awesome news service and thus, is a prime target to attack since the last thing many people want is real news. At least, many people seeking to evade reality. For some reason, this news service of mine attracts a handful of readers. I seem to be giving bad news all the time but this is because the good news is blasted everywhere and so I must constantly look on the other side of the news. This is the only way to balance things.
Thus, when they talk about how cutting interest rates below the rate of inflation will re-inflate the stock market bubble, I have to point out the obvious downside of this ponzi scheme. Thus, the stream of 'bad news' here. Like being a mother warning children about bad teeth when they want to drink soda pops.
The BBC will contract just like all the news media: support is collapsing for reporters in difficult places or commentators who aren't relentlessly upbeat about things the rulers want they to be upbeat about (rising speculation: good, heath care for children: bad). Everyone is now using the same AP stories. The same commentators appear everywhere. Anne Coulter is in trouble because she attacked the Jews this week and will probably be driven out of business now but Rush continues to ooze onwards. Cramer can run around screaming, 'There is BLOOD in the streets!' but I won't be allowed to say a thing about anything in the main stream media. Ah well.
Mexico's former president, Vicente Fox, made an astounding admission last night on CNN's Larry King Live when he acknowledged the plan for a NAFTA single currency, a "euro-dollar" as King labeled it.Fox also vowed to help unite the Americas beyond a trade agreement, following what he described as "a new vision, like we are trying to do with NAFTA".
The comments follow Fox's appearance on The Daily Show in which he advocated the creation of a North American Union based on the model of the European Union.
I said the EU is weak. So will this thing become weak. The US wants Canada and Mexico for two things: raw materials including most especially, energy, and cheap labor in the south. The voting power base will be all in the US. The needs of our whacky military economy will suck down and destroy Mexico and Canada. The ruling elites of Mexico want this because this keeps them in power, they fear revolution. Canada is another story. They are part of the UK Commonwealth and the UK has been slithering into the US empire for a long time. So Canada is being dragged in, too. Will they accept this loss of sovereignty to a nation famous for overspending and wild international military adventures?
I strongly suggest Canada read up on the history of the Spanish Main.
Culture of Life News Main Page
Hello Elaine,
“70% of our GNP is service/sales. We count as 'GNP' things like selling Chinese imports. The entire idea of using the GNP to determine the health of an economy is anti-capitalistic since it doesn't track the value of sales related to the building of value-added activities.”
Your comments are well taken about the phony GDP [Gross Domestic Product], which used to be called the GNP [Gross National Product] when there were Sovereign Nations on this Earth instead of the various economic plantations all lumped into the “New World Order”.
GDP is statistical poop worth absolutely nothing to the overwhelming majority of Americans, simply trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Yet it is the benchmark of value in the vacuum of values that we know as the Culture of Death.
“Poor China. They will grow more than us, more than Europe. But due to Europe and the US collapsing, they won't grow quite as fast. So I suppose, we should weep for them. But what about us? Can we inflate our own way out of our economic contraction? Will Bernake's magic save us from the realities of inflation and declining economic GDP?”
No, the FED simply provided the monetary liquidity needed by the financial systems to allow their inside traders to cash-out of their positions and move into safer currencies/investments/stuff.
Phony money, chasing phony values of useless stuff that won’t improve the lives of the average man, woman or child. So who cares?
There is a whole new Order of the world coming and it behooves people of integrity to anticipate this new paradigm by leaving the dying Culture of Death, not looking back.
“And Europe is screaming about the rising value of the Euro but is totally unable to stop this because they aren't a nation with one leadership or someone like Hu or Wen or Putin running things.”
“This is why the fine arts always flourish under communistic rule, for example. Artists, poets, classical music, chess playing, go playing, etc, enjoy status and support as the communist government seeks the trappings of royalty.”
Naturally, in our all too human perspective the sky is often falling. Today [12 October, 2007] Europe has no leader to save it. But as I’ve said before in this column;
“Europe today lives in the twilight of Fatima and the shadow of the Great Monarch.”
Kindest regards,
PFO
Posted by: PFO | October 12, 2007 at 04:55 PM
Barbarossa comes to mind.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | October 13, 2007 at 08:26 AM
Bush Administration plans to grow the U.S. government's emergency petroleum reserve, through open-market purchases, to a total of 1.5 billion barrels, an amount that would take us 6 years to fill at 5M barrels a week.
http://www.cattlenetwork.com/content.asp?contentid=162182
Posted by: jill | October 13, 2007 at 08:31 AM
Thanks, Jill. The Oil corporations are celebrating along with the Arabs. And inflation will soar like an eagle!
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | October 13, 2007 at 12:38 PM
Hello Elaine,
You have got the date right - June 22nd. - but you are about 140 years off.
Kindest regards,
PFO
Posted by: PFO | October 13, 2007 at 03:06 PM