Culture of Life Financial News

Bill For Stupid War Rises: $91 Billion! Insane.

2006-03-10T05:35:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as they discuss draconian cuts to social services and education, Congress and Bush continue to lavish hundreds of billions on their illegal war in Iraq. Meanwhile, consumer confidence is dropping, oil is going up in price, trade deficit yawns ever greater, Congress still hasn't voted for an even higher debt ceiling, they plan to raise it to $9 trillion bucks.

From Army Times:

The House Appropriations Committee approved a $91 billion emergency spending bill late Wednesday that covers wartime and natural disaster costs and includes extra money for the Army and Marine Corps, who have complained about being shortchanged by the White House. It also includes trouble for President Bush.

I like the "and natural disasters" part because it is so stupid. I blogged here about hurricane Katrina and how everyone in DC was salivating over another $250 billion in red ink that they could spend here in America, fixing stuff that will be utterly destroyed this coming summer. Then reality in the form of some rather angry Chinese lenders threw cold water on that scheme. So now we are back to using unbudgeted "emergency funds" to pay for that stupid war in Iraq while we kick out children living in hotels who are refugees from hurricane Katrina.

Just think about this for a minute.

At the top of the Army Times website is this ad:

The INDEPENDENCE® iBOT® 4000 Mobility System is unlike any mobility device. Its combination of unique, innovative functions allows you to go places and do things not possible with any other single mobility device.

Power across sand, gravel, grass and other uneven terrain, climb stairs with or without assistance, go up or down curbs as high as 5”, or easily rise to an “eye-level” position.

Isn't this pathetic? Should be a warning to anyone dreaming of joining the military. This chair is for profoundly disabled people who can't scoot around using their arms because they probably have no arms or are so banged up they can't have the strength to use their arms, even!

This is what our money is paying for: transforming healthy, young, vibrant people into quadrapedics. And then squeezing them because we can't pay for a bunch of people who lost life's lottery, this is the GOP attitude.

Lawmakers also found a way to provide extra money to the Department of Veterans Affairs for health care costs related to the war. They agreed to a bipartisan amendment — pushed by Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Tex. — that allows $275 million set aside to replace the New Orleans VA hospital destroyed by Hurricane Katrina to be used for health care expenses if it isn’t spent on hospital construction or design.

Note how they have to raid Peter's funds to pay Paul's mutilated body! Also note it was a Democrat pushing for this. Republicans would love to spend money building a hospital that will be destroyed by a hurricane in due time! They and their buddies in Kellogg, Root and Brown specialize in suctioning up public funds this way! It is also a very strange thing to do, building this hospital, since there are very few vets hanging around New Orleans right now who are sick or disabled since much of the population has been scattered to the four winds.

The really disgusting thing is, much of this money will be spent overseas. Even as our rulers scramble to cover the bills as Congress refuses to debate the terrible budget deficits that can be cured ONLY by raising taxes on the rich, this parody of a government thinks no one will notice the easy solution to this fiscal riddle (hint: taxing the rich the way they were taxed under Clinton, you bozos!).

Pentagon comptroller Tina Jonas told the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday that the Defense Department needed the supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan operations — $67.5 billion of the House committee bill — by no later than April 30 to avoid disrupting peacetime programs to pay for war-related costs. Meeting that deadline already was going to be difficult because the Senate Appropriations Committee doesn’t plan to start writing its version of the bill until the last week of March, leaving one month for full Senate passage and for a compromise.

Of that $67.5 billion for the quagmires, not one penny is for the fancy wheelchairs our soldiers need after being blasted to smithereens in this stupid quest for the Grail with Holes.

Meanwhile, back in the hinterlands, a place called "the USA", consumer confidence is dropping like Bush's popularity polls:From AP:

Consumer confidence dropped in early March as people fretted about the economy's performance and their own financial fate in the months ahead.

The RBC CASH Index, based on results from the international polling firm Ipsos, showed confidence at 86.2 in early March.

That was down considerably from February's reading of 96.1 — a 16-month high. But it was in the ballpark with consumers' feelings about economic conditions in March of last year, when the index stood at 84.2.

As interest rates rise and as inflation rages, people are getting scared. And the weather is getting pretty scary, too. Spring is here, She is already mowing down homes and killing people. Mother Nature's temper is heating up along with the rest of the ecosystem. The angrier She gets, the worse for us. No one can be as murderous as She when She loses it. Ask the creatures who died when the habitat became nearly unbearable back during the Permian extinction!

That other barometer of stormy weather, the Dubai Port Deal, continues to blow at hurricane force winds. The latest scheme for this shows how our traitors in the White House operate. From the BBC:

Dubai Ports World (DPW) is to transfer its US ports business to a "US entity" to end a row over its takeover of P&O.

While DPW has not explicitly said it will sell the subsidiaries responsible for the ports, the White House is suggesting this will be the end result.

Shall we have a contest to name this entity? The guys who will be the front company? That will sort of own the company but be totally beholden to the sheiks who funded bin Laden. Well, I nominate Halliburton and Carlyle. Both are also intimately entwined with the bin Ladens and the Sheiks and Bush is a great kisser and lord only knows what services he provides in private! He certainly loves to talk about how men look "fabulous" while carrying his doggie like a purse and rubbing bald heads in public and the kissing and hand holding of the real rulers? Ack. The least this clown could do is give gays civil rights for crying out loud.

Then I could praise him for something, anything.

"All of the other terminals on both coasts are run by foreign-owned companies, so it is not clear who is going to take over," said Sidney Levine, a maritime economist.

And trade experts said the outcome will set a damaging precedent for other Middle Eastern companies planning to invest in the US.

"This will send a chilling signal," said Daniel Griswold, director of the Cato Institute's Centre for Trade Policy Studies.

This is all so ridiculous. The media and the political traitors don't want to talk about how even our very ports are now out of our control. How damaging this is. How we are reaping zero benefits from this out of control "free trade". How this is destroying our infrastructure, our economy, our very lives.

Consumers are terrified at the rising interest rates. They want to live like kings while going bankrupt like kings. All kings go bankrupt because no one can say no to them which is why England, for example, had many a literal battle to rein in the king such as the famous one that led to the Magna Carta, just for example! Not to mention the American Revolution which was over trade and tax matters! If our ancestors were willing to fight and die so they could control their ports, control their industries, geeze in jumping crickets, why are we throwing all this away?

Well, we are burning the Constitution. So maybe it doesn't matter any more. Serfs are up!

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Washington Pest

Trade Deficit Sets Yet Another New Record--Reckless Spending Is Destroying America

2006-03-09T17:23:00.003-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yet again, this last month's trade deficit is horrendous. Grinning moronically, our pundits and rulers assure us this is a good thing, no one, especially a very angry China is going to chop our silly heads off, are they? And the Japanese and Saudis won't shove us into wars they want us to fight for them? Gads. Are we doomed.

Note that socialist, non-oil exporting Germany and cheap yen Japan are at the top of the positive trade flow list here. And America at the bottom absolutely dwarfs all the other red ink nations, we are several hundred billion greater than the deficits of all other countries put together.

From the NYT:

The nation's trade deficit widened to another record in January, the government reported today, as the strengthening American economy attracted a surge of imported cars, household goods and petroleum products.

Text: U.S. Trade Report
Americans imported $68.5 billion more in goods and services than they exported at the start of the year, up 5.3 percent from December, the Commerce Department said. It exceeded the previous record in October, when the deficit swelled to $67.8 billion.

A 3.5 percent jump in imports in January appear to reflect the sharply higher consumer spending during the month and rising price of oil, gasoline and other energy products. Automobile and car parts imports increased 5.3 percent during the month and the country spent 4.3 percent more on petroleum-based imports.

Amazing, isn't it? I warned everyone about this last month.

In turn, since interest rates are still (as always these days) below the rate of inflation and the interest offered for "saving" money is woefully behind the rate of inflation, no one saves and everyone spends as fast as possible and combined together, this increases importation of goods that have been scrubbed of inflationary forces and voila, we have a trade deficit of nearly a trillion unsustainable dollars.

Aesop's Ant and Grasshopper Story is one we easily misinterpet. The ant plans ahead for bad times and works in concert with other ants (this is the important part) to insure the ant community can live through the winter of hard times. The grasshopper doesn't cooperate with anyone and happily hops about, stuffing its face and living hand to mouth. Then it dies in winter. Just call it a libertarian or Republican.

Ahem. Even the NYT admits that the Boeing contracts are being counted in a big way to "balance" our trade only it barely makes a dent, doesn't it? Maybe the nuclear contracts for India will save us!

The Chinese are buying fewer factories from us so that part of the trade balance isn't doing very well, is it? Could it be, we are running out of factories to dismantle? Geeze. Here is a graph showing foreign ownership of American debts and other goodies.

It ain't pretty.

Like our trade deficit, in the exact same timeframe, starting in 1983 under Herr Ronald "Give me $2.5 million, please, Japan!" Reagan. He made a neat deal with Japan. To make our inflation disappear, the Japanese would soak up the red ink our government began to grind out that year to pay for the Laffer Curve tax cuts. Once this system was set up, it ran awfully nice, for FOREIGN POWERS. Others piggybacked into the system. I even explained how it worked to the Chinese so they could grasp what "traitor" means. They are in absolute awe of the propaganda machine that kept Reagan in power and popular even until this traitor's death.

No one has been able to pull our country out of this nose dive. Clinton and Rubins gave it a shot but hit so much flack, they had to give it up. This is because the bait: cheap interest below inflation and exporting of said inflation is just jim dandy for nearly everyone even as the downside to all this becomes increasingly obvious to even Republican right wingers. But like crack addicts on cheap speed, we can't drop the pipe or stop injecting.

You know what happens to crack/speed freaks. The become violent and end up dead.

Oh, and a peek at the Cato Institute of Deranged Right Wingloons: From the Cato dudes:

America’s chronic trade deficit continues to set new records, both for its sheer size in nominal terms and for its share of an expanding gross national product. The record deficit is fueling worry that it could hurt U.S. industry, destroy jobs, burden future generations, and cause the current economic expansion to end in a “hard landing.” But those worries rest on a fun-damental misunderstanding of the causes and consequences of the U.S. trade deficit.

In November 2000 the congressionally appointed Trade Deficit Review Commis-sion issued its final report, The U.S. Trade Deficit: Causes, Consequences and Recom-mendations for Action. The report reflected the views of a sharply divided commission, with Democratic-appointed members warning of the dangers of the deficit while Republican-appointed members empha-sized its more benign nature.

Economic theory and experience demonstrate that trade deficits are driven primarily by macroeconomic factors, in particular investment flows, and not by allegedly unfair trade barriers or declining industrial competitiveness.

This is the sort of insane tripe our rulers read to each other lest they feel a twinge of guilt. The headline of this article is hilarous: "America's Record Trade Deficit--A Symbol of Economic Strength". Truly, this is deep inside Orwellian Language Use.
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Washington Pest

Japan Raising Interest Rates At Home---Just Joking

2006-03-09T11:58:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Japan grandly announces they will raise interest rates at home someday when the moon falls and pigs fly. Of course, we are all supposed to watch the yuan and worry about China's financing, right? Right. Pay no attention to the Three Card Monte Player.

From Associated Press:

The Bank of Japan on Thursday abandoned the super-easy monetary policy it has kept for five years, saying it will gradually raise interest rates and start to cut the excess cash in the banking system amid signs of economic recovery.

But the central bank sent a clear message that the transition will be slow, saying benchmark interest rates will remain near zero for some time and that it will only gradually reduce the amount of liquidity in the banking system over several months.

"Interest rates will stay at zero for some time, then stay extremely low and go through an adjustment period," Bank of Japan Gov. Toshihiko Fukui said a press conference. "It's up to the economy how much and when."

I used to work for a German corporation on 43rd St and Park Ave in Manhattan and I took the subway to work and thus, passed through Time Square and 42nd Street a lot. Lots of Japanese tourists and lots of three card Monte players littered the landscape. I suppose, in their youth, some of the Japanese bankers were exposed to this game.

Whenever a police car passes by, you can observe how quickly these games disperse. Sidewalk card games are both illegal and fraudulent for some very good reasons.
Scenario

Two or more people are standing around a cardboard box on a busy street trying to win money by choosing the correct card out of the three cards shuffled.

You notice that someone seems to be winning; this person is usually working with the dealer to lure people in. People who work these scams know that it will be less suspicious to plant a women or someone in a business suit in the game.

The shuffler will purposely lose the first few rounds to get you to bet more money.

At this point, if you take your wallet out, someone may grab it and run -OR- it will be pick pocketed as you watch the game.

If by some fluke you win, you may be followed and mugged.
How to avoid this
The hand is quicker than the eye and these are pros. Don't play - YOU CANNOT WIN!

From the official NY police warning. The Japanese bankers are very anxious that no one who can influence economic events notice the sleigh of hand going on here. Our rulers, the traitors driving us all into economic slavery, also want to hide the card and pick our pockets. Between these two, we are being fleeced, you notice. I hope.

The Japanese successfully got Bush and Condi and much of our government to join them in attacking China's influence on our financial markets. The Japanese, like myself, noticed that China has rapidly caught up with Japan and now has as large a foreign reserve as Japan. They don't have the same, smooth interface between the industrial bosses and the government which exists soley for their own purposes but Japan had to throw a spanner into the spokes of the Chinese financial machine before it begins to run over Japanese feet.

Which are firmly planted on our necks.

These manipulations have finally been noticed by people who aren't just my readers so Japan has to throw some sand into our eyes, thus the promise to raise interest rates they charge only themselves, someday, maybe, when they feel good and ready. This is so stupid. They aren't loaning US money at this rate, only themselves. This is an unfair trade practice since our businesses must pay much more to get loans, just for one example. The other is the pathetic yen, kept ridiculously cheap deliberately by currency manipulations that are hostile to our own country. The Chinese know we can't muscle them because we can't get Japan's boot off our own necks. If we do enough reforms to fix the obvious currency imbalances, this would mean an end to the program of sucking out American industry and replacing it with cheap American labor assembling products for Asian owners here at home.

Get the drift? No unions, no high pay, no profits. Just Mexican-style labor relations. And guess what? The Mexicans don't love us for doing this to them, do they?

So why are we allowing this? Ask our politicians. Ring their door bells and ask to visit them, face to face. Tell them you want to stop the Japanese from making the yen too cheap.
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Washington Pest

GOP Tax Cutters Want To Slit America's Throat

2006-03-07T13:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The GOP, after blatantly lying about tax cuts and war, now want us to follow their bitter Trail of Tax Tears to the obvious end: the deaths of millions of Americans. They won't recind a single tax cut to the rich. They think they can drink our blood, our sweat and our tears.

From the NYT:

With Congress heading into a politically perilous budget season, influential House conservatives plan this week to propose an austere alternative spending plan that would pare more than $650 billion over five years, balance the budget and drastically shrink three cabinet agencies.

Of course, 100% of the cuts come at the expense of the young, the old and the middle aged. Anyone who isn't very rich or very strong or both. This Terminator Budget was the GOP plan from day one: to drive up the debt until draconian cuts eliminate "excess population." These same clowns are now on the warpath to force women to have babies. This is for war purposes only. Any woman wanting to stay alive past 50 will need at least three sons so the one who dies in war and the one worked to death won't matter, she will be supported by the remaining son, this is exactly how the Third World works with an insanely high birthrate and of course, high death rate.

"We can't be all things to all people when it comes to spending the taxpayers' money," Mr. Bush said at a ceremony installing a new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

For the most part, the men paying Bush big bucks to rule over us don't want to share a thin dime with us. And his words are a declaration of war against the poor, the elderly, the sick.

Even with all this stuff, the numbers are a total disaster. First, the government and the media have lied consistently from 2000 onwards. They always include our Social Security money in the debt calculations so the extra $200 billion a year doesn't show up. So when the deficit is supposedly "only" $350 billion it acutally is over $500 billion. Looking at the debt ceiling which has to be raised nearly every year, Bush's tax cuts and wild military spending has cost us an extra $2.5 TRILLION.

The draconian, deadly cuts the GOP right wing Nazis want don't work at all. $650 billion divided by 5= $130 billion. OK, at no time has the deficit, under Bush and the GOP been less than $300 billion, often over that. So this leaves yet another $130+billion that has to be cut if Americans don't want to tax the extremely wealthy. Not one Republican is calling for restoring taxes to the sane level they were at under Clinton. This just isn't in their vocalulary.

Starve the poor? Yup. Let the elderly die in the gutter? Check! No schooling for our kids? Gotcha!

Under the proposal, expected to be introduced by Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, and Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, military spending would continue to rise, administration tax cuts would be protected and Social Security would be spared. But many other programs and foreign aid would be greatly scaled back.

We spend over $2 billion a week in Iraq. Our coming war with Iran won't come cheap, either, since they plan to strike back by cuttting off oil to the coalition of Neo-nazi states. This is going to send all of us who use oil into the poorhouse but will make Bush's supporters extremely rich, they can't wait.

From the Washington Post:

Democrats hope to use the upcoming congressional debate over raising the debt limit to highlight what they see as the failings of the administration's economic program with its emphasis on sweeping tax cuts.

An actual default on the debt, a situation when the government misses making payments to current bondholders, is a doomsday scenario considered highly unlikely given what it would do to the government's credit rating.

It is expected that after intense debate, Congress will approve an increase in the current $8.18 trillion debt limit by perhaps $781 billion.

If the Democrats want "an intense debate" they could use my many cartoons on this subject. Maybe that might penetrate thick skulls. Or not.

Giving Bush $781 billion will simply mean he and his buddies will pocket the entire amount, in general, in less than a year. Since our budget deficit has tracked the trade deficit very closely---and that was nearly a trillion last year!---I expect the budget deficit to do the same.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said last week that under President Bush the total of the deficits has increased by $3 trillion, a 40 percent increase from where the national debt _ the total of previous deficits _ stood when Bush took office in January 2001.

Now this interestes me because the supposed raise since Bush stole the election in 2000 is supposed to be $2.4 Trillion red ink. I suspect the amount is very much closer to his than my conservative account.

Treasury officials, briefing congressional aides last week, said that the government will run out of maneuvering room to keep from exceeding the current limit sometime during the week of March 20.

Deliberately starting a war with Iran fixes this! The need for increasing the insane amount we waste on our imperial/private military machine will be self evident as everyone is herded into the cattle pen to be shipped off to do or die.

Rationing, pinning down the population, "sacrifices" will be the order of the day as the men ruining our lives scream we must do these destructive things or the Iranians will destroy America. This is why I am expecting war. Note that at all times, our rulers pretend they don't have to consult with anyone including Congress over matters of war or peace or spying on Americans.

The government net is far and wide thanks to seemingly unlimited funding for spying on Americans. From Scripp's Howard:

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

These actions aren't for catching "terrorists" for any logical thinking immediately shows the stupidity of this. People going on terrorist binges run UP bills, not pay them off! If you aren't going to be around to pay, why pay up?

Of course, this is to catch drug dealers for the nasty, pointless, stupid, unconstitutional war against people consuming garbage means funding a giant police state which is now utterly out of control and is rapidly morphing into a punitive police state that, in classic fashion, will bleed the country dry. This happens to all military empires and will kill our own empire.

Click here to see the Concord Coalition graph for the budget deficit.One line of this graph, the one supposing Bush and the GOP get all their tax cuts (seems no limit to these buggers!) what the projecting deficit will be in 2024: -$850 billion a year! Well, actually, this is assuming the numbers are not fake for today and the deficit is only $350 billion and not $500 billion which is what it actually is.

Drawing a line from $500 billion, the projection is much worse at $1.3 trillion a year, a hopelessly unsustainable amount.

Things are tipping over now. From Market Watch:

U.S. stocks traded lower Tuesday afternoon in a market concerned about rising interest rates, with the technology sector pacing the decline after a disappointing sales outlook from Texas Instruments.

Once again, the stock market is floundering and it is obvious why. The entire economy, this pathetic "Martha Steward" fix our homes economy is now on its last red ink legs. Fueled by public and private loans lent at ruinous rates thanks to foreign governments lending us money, this is suddenly drying up as it always happens in such cases.

On Monday, the yield on the benchmark 10-year note reached its highest level since June 2004, the month during which the Federal Reserve began putting in place what's been a program of steady, quarter-point rate hikes.

Concerns about rates intensified after St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole, widely considered to be hawkish on inflation, said the Fed may have to "step a little harder on the brake."

See the trap? Inflation was supposed to be caused by high wages. Not oil. This stupid lie was repeated by zillions of stupid "economists" and politicians until they convinced themselves of this. Worse, they pretended they controlled interest rates. Worse, they let China know we are now at their mercy by demanding China change their currency to suit us and when China refused, we asked for more loans! Hahaha. Talk about dumb.

Now, as the housing boom goes boom, the Fed is going to "put on the brakes harder"? Um, won't that cause our pretty little car to crash? Or is there a wall or cliff straight ahead? Skidding sideways into it or off it won't save us, will it?

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Washington Pest

Flat World Free Trade Traitors Screaming At Americans While Selling Our Security To Enemies

2006-03-06T17:05:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as the major media pushes for the destruction of America by sucking all our jobs, all of them, to hostile or potentially hostile lands, the negotiators writing treaties and trade issues openly end up working for foreign powers that plan to strip us clean of everything we own. Arrest them all. Or at least, force them to move to the countries they really represent like Dubai.

From the Washington Post:

Globalization scares people. Security threats scare people. By fusing these fears during the Dubai ports flap, demagogues have had a field day. Now, having demonstrated this formula, the demagogues are poised to strike again. Their next target will be arriving soon, in the person of President Hu Jintao of China.

For a fear monger with a club, next month's Chinese state visit is a self-teeing golf ball. China accounts for more than a quarter of America's astonishing trade deficit, and the country has become a proxy for all globalization anxieties: It's painted as a low-wage threat and simultaneously a high-science threat, a piratical menace to technology patents and simultaneously a challenge to America's scientific preeminence. Meanwhile, China constitutes a security threat, too: It's spending billions on an arms buildup, and lying about the real numbers. If demagogues can turn a tiny ally such as Dubai into a villain, you can bet they'll do the same for China.

Dubai is a rat's nest, it is our Casablanca circa WWII, corrupt, leaches, buying Americans and using them to influence us.

For example, one of the negotiators of the Dubai port business is now working for...DUBAI. From Raw Story:

A British security firm headquartered in Dubai has won lucrative contracts for U.S. security in Iraq and the United States, providing security in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and training Iraqi port security officers under the Coalition Provisional Authority, RAW STORY has found.

The firm, the Olive Group, is largely comprised of ex-British intelligence officers. While a British company, its main headquarters are in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates city that caused a stir when it was revealed that the Emirates were set to take over control of 21 U.S. ports. Olive was founded in 2001.

The revelation that a Dubai-based firm provides security consulting for myriad U.S. operations at home and abroad shows the increasing tendency of the U.S. government to privatize security efforts. It comes on the same day that the Drudge Report discovered that a foreign company handles security at an Indianapolis airport.

And more and more of our security is being farmed out by "Homeland Security" which is run by a dual citizen from the Middle East, to the Middle East itself. Evidently, the people defending us want to make money from our enemies and they are bending their massive wills to convince Americans that Dubai is our "ally" and that working for a sheik rather than America is OK.

This sort of childish talk is at the root of our increasing defeat at home and overseas.

The firm’s attorneys are Baker, Botts, LLP – a lawfirm where former Secretary of State to President George H. W. Bush is a partner. Baker Botts opened an office in Dubai last year.

Our government serves rank traitors who are in the pay or want to be in the pay of foreign powers. This is the most serious breech of America's defences since...the founding of this nation! The collective treason on so many levels by so many men is astonishing as well as destructive. Note that our nation is falling to its knees!

I just learned that one of the negotiators of the India nuke deal is now working for India! Asian Times:

Keeping with the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy, the deal was cooked by a handful of senior officials (one of whom is now a lobbyist for the Indian government) and never reviewed by the departments of State, Defense or Energy before it was announced with a champagne toast by Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Congress was never consulted. Republican committee staff say the first members heard about it was when the fax announcing the deal came into their offices. Worse, for the president, this appears to be another give away to a foreign government at the expense of US national-security interests.

Amazing, isn't it? Everyone in our empire, everyone running it, is for sale. Our enemies are sniffing around our defenses and these TRAITORS are handing over our joint security, lock, stock and gun barrel. This is truly the biggest, most idiotic absurdity ever in the history of humanity. Bush still enjoys totally undeserved support for "defending America" which is the result of cynical propaganda foisted upon the trusting public.

The Indian leaders and press are crowing about their victory over the United States. For good reason: President Bush has done what Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and his own father refused to do - break US and international law to aid India's nuclear-weapons program. In 1974, India cheated on its agreements with the United States and other nations to do what Iran is accused of doing now: using a peaceful nuclear energy program to build a nuclear bomb. India used plutonium produced in a Canadian-supplied reactor to detonate a bomb it then called a "peaceful nuclear device". In response, president Richard Nixon and Congress stiffened US laws and Nixon organized the Nuclear Suppliers Group to prevent any other nation from following India's example.

Bush has now unilaterally shattered those guidelines, and his action would violate the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) proscription against aiding another nation's nuclear-weapons program. It would require the repeal or revision of several major US laws, including the US Nonproliferation Act. Nor has he won any significant concessions from India. India refuses to agree to end its production of nuclear-weapons material, something the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China have already done.

As I noted when the media was crowing about Bush selling the Indians everything including the kitchen sink for a handful of headlines, I noted this was a tremendous failure, his "deals" makes America significantly weaker and he has increased their ability to hollow out the white collar workplace here in America, this alone is reason to arrest Bush and charge him with treason.

Selling our jobs to other nations is treason! Destroying millions of American's lives and futures is treason. Making our country dependent upon foreigners who aren't even allies is treason. Sending our sensitive work to aliens is treason. We will discover the down side of all this when the world unites to kick us out of the commodities markets which they will do, this is the PLAN.

Bush violated numerous treaties when he signed diplomatic understandings with India not to mention Pakistan, actually, JAPAN, too as well as clever China who has us by the throat!

Guess what? The bond market is going crazy. Right after our government claimed future interest rates will be LOWER than present ones, this fiction collapsed today sending the Stock Market pin wheeling into space. Bernanke will print more money, gods know how much, it is now officially hidden from us, no more M3 stats! Rats! Anyway, he is a traitor, they are all traitors. They think their jobs will never be shipped overseas. Fools. Their jobs can dissappear in a wink. Anyone's can! Ask Hitler!

Negroponte, on the the architects of this treasonous disaster is having a good old time, just like his bosses, goofing off while selling us into slavery. From the Public cq.:

On many a workday lunchtime, the nominal boss of U.S. intelligence, John D. Negroponte, can be found at a private club in downtown Washington, getting a massage, taking a swim, and having lunch, followed by a good cigar and a perusal of the daily papers in the club’s library.

“He spends three hours there [every] Monday through Friday,” gripes a senior counterterrorism official, noting that the former ambassador has a security detail sitting outside all that time in chase cars. Others say they’ve seen the Director of National Intelligence at the University Club, a 100-year-old mansion-like redoubt of dark oak panels and high ceilings a few blocks from the White House, only “several” times a week.

Surely Negroponte needs a comfort zone, forced as he is to spends hours in the witness chair in front of congressional committees, fielding hot potatoes on subjects over which he has no control — the NSA’s warrantless surveillance, domestic spying by secret military intelligence units, paying newspapers in Iraq to run pro-U.S. stories.

He doesn't care. Wolfowitz got to escape America and relocate into Europe. They all plan to jump ship when the time is ripe.

World markets are shaking as if the San Andreas is about to blow, which it is. They smell blood in the water, they know the Chinese, tremendously angry about our wimpy response to the Taiwan challenge when they pretty much ditched even the fiction of reunification. Taiwan is the knife pointed at China's belly and they won't let us get away with pretending we have no control over this situation.

The Chinese planned from day one to use the financial tools against us. The fact that the only way we can gain "influence and allies" is to bribe people and sell off more American realestate, jobs, businesses, security, everything, is a sign our ship is sinking fast.

The fake loans going for less than the rate of inflation thanks to the Chinese and Japanese bankrolling it is falling apart. The dollar has risen against the yen and the yuan thanks to the need to go to China and Japan and pay increasingly ruinious interest rates for more loans.

This takes me back to the free traders: if they can't see our ship is sinking I would like to drop them off, the rats they are, in India and China and let them do business there. I know, they won't last more than 24 hrs.

Better still, arrest them all.

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Ma Bell Rebuilds Monopoly Powers

2006-03-05T21:26:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Thanks to our stupid emperor, Bush, we have all these entities forming huge monopolies and cartels all so they can exploit us. My phone bill shot up this month and it comes as no surprise that Ma Bell's tentacles are reaching into my pocketbook.

From the NYT:

As a result, consumers already buying services from AT&T, BellSouth and Cingular are unlikely to be affected directly. But the purchase would give AT&T more firepower to fight Comcast and other cable television companies that are quickly moving into the phone business.

A union between AT&T and BellSouth had been long rumored because of their mutual stake in the fast-growing wireless industry. In a statement this afternoon, AT&T's chairman and chief executive, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., called the deal "a next logical step" and asserted that the merger "will strengthen Cingular through unified ownership and a single brand."

Mr. Whitacre added, "No partnership between two independent companies, no matter how well run, can match the speed, effectiveness, responsiveness and efficiency of a solely owned company."

Bullshit. I must have spent half of my waking hours fighting Ma Bell back when she was a monopoly. Every time I moved and I moved a lot, I had nonstop battles over billing, service and in general, a rotten time. I hated the phone company.

Once, I bought a roominghouse which had a Bell payphone in the lobby. They wouldn't let me keep it but they wouldn't take it and we fought over that phone for about a year.

I remember these guys because they charged an arm and a leg for touch tone phones. The wretches. And color? Whoo hoo. Pay up, bud! You owned nothing, the wires, the phones, everything was "rented." Which is why I had continuous battles with them every time I moved.

When Ma Bell was broken up, I was estatic. And gloomy. I knew, thanks to lobbyists working like termites deep inside the superstructure of DC, they would reassemble this monster and unleash it upon us customers and lo and behold, here it is, acoming!

They hate the net because many of us no longer use any telephones to communicate, we use the net. I pay a lot for my highspeed DSL service and I use it a lot so it is worth it but geeze. Ma Bell lusts for some scheme to make lots of money on my use, I remember the bad old days when people were charged by the hour for internet service in some places!

This was a movie I loved back in '67 when it was made: The President's Analyst. The joke in the movie was the power that controlled the President was AT&T. Having alread a hate/hate relationship with AT&T at that early date, I laughed myself sick watching this film. Highly recommend it.
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Pricewaterhouse Projections Shows China Beating US And Europe By 2050

2006-03-05T09:26:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Analysts at Pricewaterhouse project that China will "dwarf" all G7 nations by 2050 based on present trends. This comes as no surprise to me but it does leave out the effects of the Hubbert Oil Peak. Probably, thanks to all businesses wanting to squeeze out inflation, the relocation of all factories to China will probably happen much faster, I am guessing, twice as fast.

From the BBC:

China's economy is projected to grow so fast that it could outstrip all developed nations by 2050, a report by Pricewaterhouse says.
The Asian giant's economy is set to double in size between 2005 and 2050, according to the report.

As with other developing countries, a key driver for China's rapid growth is its younger, cheaper workforce, it argues.

Throughout history, the Chinese peasants have had a reputation for hard work. This is why immigrants from Europe, pouring into America during the 19th century, were violently hostile to any Chinese incursions. Building the railroad through the Sierras, though, was so terrifyingly brutal, Asian immigration was loosened to allow some workers in. But even this caused a wave of fear in the European community which has a much more laid-back attitude towards hard work.

Factories with a sullen, slow moving, often overweight workforce that feels hard labor stinks will be beaten in competition with factories working at full speed with motivated, fast moving workers. At first, we prided ourselves on using robots to finesse the work and speed production but that wasn't sufficient.

The quality of the labor force matters. This is why people claiming we will move factories from China to wherever are foolish. These factories ain't leaving Asia so fast. In most other countries, the peasants know toil and hardship but for some reason, don't have the work ethic of the Chinese (or the mountain free farm folk, for that matter!) Cultural differences do matter. The desire for perfectionism plus the desire to log long hours to build up surpluses equals dynamic cultures.

Ancient Egypt hit upon this nexus and made some of the greatest human works of art and building. For a brief while, the ancient Greeks honed a very dynamic culture build on the base of freeholding peasants, multi-tasking like crazy. Often such cultures deteriorate and the populace grows lazy and abusive such as the free farmers of ancient Rome who lost their culture of hard work nearly immediately.

The wide American farmlands used to be the nursery of hard working, intelligent, get-up-and=go workforce but the padded life of imperialism has caused a huge deterioration in the work ethic and ability to think and organize. Flaccid and weak, the work force stands agape as their lifestyles and futures slip away to greener pastures.

Even the smallest moves away from this looming disaster can't seem to motivate the workers in America. They seem bent on some easy trick to get out of the trap, namely, gambling. Gambling has exploded across the country and now is probably the chief form of "entertainment" except anyone going to any casino knows the people there are hard at work, trying to con their way to a lazy lifestyle.

There is little pleasure or joy.PwC is basing its analysis on forecasts for economic growth on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP).

This figure defines the size of an economy by adjusting for local costs.

While China's economy is currently 18% the size of the US's in dollar terms, it is 76% as big on a PPP basis.

One reason we are going bankrupt is because we want to keep up purchasing power via various tricks and strategems. One is to ship out all possible jobs to China so we can tap cheap labor. The other is to not pay as we go but wrack up ruinous debts. The third is to gamble. I will note, 90% of the businesses being rebuilt in the Gulf that hire more than 20 people are virtually all entertainment or gambling ventures.

By 2050, PwC believes, it could be 43% bigger than the US by PPP - although it would still lag when measured in terms of dollar size.

By 2050. we will be, relative to China, twice as poor. Think about this! Will the Chinese relocate factories here at that point?

I seriously doubt it. For they know the other side of the deal: if you move your businesses out, the country collapses. The Chinese understand this quite well. They listen to Western economists but they also listen to other voices and they are most anxious Americans don't figure out this riddle so they won't say anything outloud just yet, but you can bet, they will trumpet it in the end: "Gotcha!"

Meanwhile, our own benighted economists can't put 2+2 together. Beholden to the mythology that free trade=eternal wealth without working much, they puzzle over the signs of American fiscal collapse. From AP:

Now that America's savings rate has been negative for an entire year, a first since the Great Depression, the question is whether we're a spendthrift nation on its way to the poor house or whether we're looking at the wrong numbers when we calculate savings.

The personal savings rate is, essentially, the amount of after-tax income left once household bills are paid. Maybe it's $75 for a household, maybe it's $7,500, but as a percentage of income, it's declining. The personal savings rate used to be 10 percent of disposable income from 1974 to 1984, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It fell to 4.8 percent by 1994, and was negative for all of 2005. As of January, the personal savings rate was minus 0.7 percent.

Idiots like Bernanke boasted that China was in a savings glut so we didn't need to save, they would work hard and foot our bills forever and forever! This childish idea is a sign of mental rot that has killed all previous empires that decided to pretend reality is fake.

Instead of being alarmed and fixing our savings deficit by pegging interest rates at a realistic level that would attract savings, our government did the exact opposite making our fiscal situation much worse over the short run and the long run for we don't have too many more years to run this scam because the basis of it, China lending us cheap dollars, is predicated only on the Chinese secret plan to suck up all major American industries and then spit us out. They only have the auto and aerospace industries left and are making great ground on both, quite rapidly.

Some economists say that's far-fetched. They argue the personal savings figures are artificially low, since the numbers don't include increases in assets such as equities and homes. Yale University economics professor William D. Nordhaus made that argument in 2002 congressional testimony, saying that once assets were included, the savings rate for the 1990s would have been a robust 25 percent.

This is pure bullshit. I always warn people not to bank on the value of their homes because it is only worth what someone wants to pay for it and you can't tell until the day arrives that you try to sell it. So it can appear to be worth $500,000 but when the economy goes bad and you want the money to retire and no one can buy it for more than $150,000, then you are screwed, big time. This is why I view the value of my homes I build and design as homes until I sell. Then, if the market is right, I can make some good money.

Baby boomers will be dumping a huge number of unwieldy houses into a declining market when they retire. Since everyone wants to move to the hurricane/drought/overheating zones, this means a train wreck especially since the need for a playground/goof off culture will increase hugely, I see no "work ethic" appearing on any horizon. In China, the elderly raise the grandkids, for example.

Here, they run away as far as possible. I know that I had to raise my children while working long hours. It was very difficult.

In a dead market, all the equities and stocks assembled for good times will jointly lose value if there are no buyers. This is why depressions happen and why merely saving up isn't enough. One has to be vigilant like a hawk to prevent social/economic problems to accumulate and sink one's own ship.

Already, more warning signs are flashing. From the NYT:

Along much of the East and West Coasts, home buyers and home sellers are engaged in a stare-down.

Many buyers, having heard that the real estate market is a bubble in danger of popping, are refusing to offer the asking price on a house, convinced that it will soon drop. But many sellers are not blinking either, thinking that offers will improve when the weather does and biding their time until then.

As a result, the housing market is now in a deeply confusing state, with average prices still rising even though homes are taking much longer to sell and the number on the market has soared. Sometime soon — probably in the spring, the peak sales season — one side or the other will have to capitulate, many economists and industry executives predict.

Instead of rushing to close, everyone is playing the waiting game. Guess who prevails!

The buyers. Always. I used to lecture people about "the pie in the sky and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." To illustrate this, I have many stories of people I have known who put a property on the market. As prices go up, they raise their price. Then, in a panic, they drop them as prices drop but never quite catch up until they sell at the very bottom for a great loss. Homebuyers know the relative value of a property to the last penny. If one doesn't bag a buyer pretty quickly, the property is either overpriced or unsellable.

I usually had a property for sale for less than one week. Price it right, people will bid up the price! So I let them set the price, in the end, but the lower price always lures more than one, often as many as ten, bidders.

The fact that buyers are waiting means prices will fall and fall since the longer you wait, the greater the benefit. All buyers know, instinctively, when they have the upper hand. Sellers seldom go to house openings. When I sell, I go all over kingdom come, checking out the competition. This is very salutory.

In Buxton, Me., a suburb of Portland, Geof and Cheri Toner put their three-bedroom Cape Cod-style house on the market for $379,900 late last year, shortly before moving to Raleigh, N.C., for Mr. Toner's job. They have received only one offer — for $350,000, which they rejected — and recently reduced the price to $374,900.

Mr. Toner said he assumed that more buyers would look at the property as the weather warmed up. In the spring, they would not have to wonder whether snow covered up flaws in the lawn or the roof. He expects that the eventual buyer will be a transplant from elsewhere in New England who is willing to pay significantly more than $350,000.

Only one offer in several months? And the little greedy family turned it down? This is hoping some little green guy with a pot of gold will slide down a rainbow and buy their place? Fools.

General rule of thumb: if there is only one offer within the first week, take it.

Many real estate agents argue that people like the Toners are doing the right thing and that the market will not slump as it did a decade ago. The job market is now improving. The interest rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage remains just 5.79 percent, according to Bankrate.com. And the number of homes on the market remains far lower than in the early 1990's, relative to sales volumes, despite the recent increases.

Most realestate agents are fairly young and many operated only in the hot up and up climate. Whenever the market collapses, many agents turn in their badges and seek someone else to skin. Right now, the market is filled with people who have virtually no idea how to sell in a hard market or how to advise families selling in a hard market.

The pros are already bailing out. They need to unload the last of their value added land to someone, anyone and already, they are beginning to panic, feeling in their bones, if they don't unload by June, they are cooked. Once the market turns down for good, it slides very quickly into red ink territory.

Acting as if grooming and building private homes is a sustainable industry in a global economy is sheer stupidity. Our houses can't be shipped (I hope) to India or China. The relative value of these houses hinge on our jobs not being shipped out. Yet this is what we are doing.

Alas. During my childhood, the mansions of the twenties littered the landscape. They were called "White Elephants."

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Bush Is Boeing Salesman And Works For Corporate Headquarters Outsourcing White Collar Jobs

2006-03-03T10:46:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bush blandly tells white collar workers that they will have fabulous new jobs if all their work is outsourced to India. India cheers him for saying this, after all, they pay zero American taxes on their labor so they can undercut competition in America! Whoopee! Meanwhile, our aerospace industry is interested in selling jets since this is all we have left to sell that is labor intensive capitalism. This leads to arming India and Pakistan. Also, Bush surrenders totally on the nuclear bomb issue, of course.

From Reuters:

President Bush met with Indian entrepreneurs and toured an agricultural university during a four-hour trip to the southern city of Hyderabad today, when he said that the United States should welcome rather than fear competition from India.

President Bush watched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice walk through a receiving line at a state dinner in New Delhi Thursday. The president is on his first visit to India, and is to continue on to Pakistan tonight.

"People do lose jobs as a result of globalization and it's painful for those who lose jobs," Mr. Bush said at meeting with young entrepreneurs at Hyderabad's Indian School of Business, one of the premier schools of its kind in India. Nonetheless, the president said, "globalization provides great opportunities.

Shorter Bush: "I don't feel your pain."

Globalization does give great opportunities....for people who are traitors. The job losses are not being replaced with fabulous new jobs that pay more and do more, this is an across the board dissipation of the core of America's industrial and technological base. It has very dire downsides such as the demoralization of any American wanting to make a career in the sciences. You can't get work! No one wants to hire an American anymore. Even at lower pay. Because you are a citizen, you have some bare protections whereas green card workers can be fired and deported the minute they irritate the bosses.

So they never strike, never go looking for a better job, they give no hassles. The proliferation of these workers has downsides including the garbled language problems as more and more people do technical work and can't speak or write English very well.

Just like in the Roman empire, this fuels a spiral to the bottom. Education fails, multilingualism without comprehension causes the imperial tongue to deteriorate into exclusive sub-languages such as happened to the Roman empire deteriorating into Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, etc.

"The classic opportunity for our American farmers and entrepreneurs and small businesses to understand is there is a 300 million-person market of middle class citizens here in India, and that if we can make a product they want, that it becomes viable," Mr. Bush said at the business school.

Oh, yeah, we are going to see what small farmers and small businesses exporting to India? Huh?

Worse, this would merely undermine Indian farmers. But then, Europe's farmers are exporting food but they do this under European export umbrella organizations and even this is dicey, note how Danish food is now being boycotted by a billion people! Indians have no reason to want to buy American produce any more than the Japanese who also protect their farmers and exclude foreign produce especially American.

What are we going to sell India? Beef? Like, their is a huge market for eating holy cows? Huh?

In Japan, beef is consumed, it is very expensive and we can't import beef there.

Mr. Bush returned to New Delhi later in the day to deliver an outdoor evening speech at the city's Purana Qila, a 16th century fort built by the Afghan conqueror Sher Sha Suri. In the speech, billed as the major address of Mr. Bush's trip to India, Mr. Bush spoke of the "natural partnership" between the United States and India, including the major nuclear pact that he and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India announced in New Delhi on Thursday.

The pact, which fills in the broad outlines of a plan that was negotiated in July, would help India satisfy its huge civilian energy needs while allowing it to continue to develop nuclear weapons.

Argh. So what Bush accomplished was the total surrender of America! We boycotted India, refusing to sell military stuff, because India build nukes! And we are threatening Iran for trying to emulate India? Huh?

This craven surrender is being trumpetted as some sort of victory. It is logical for India to arm itself with nukes just like it makes rational sense for Iran, even more so than India, to do the same. But we have to reconfigure the entire nonprolifieration treaty nonsense. Obviouisly, in a world destabilized by America's imperial wars, all nations must arm themselves with nukes as swiftly as possible. This won't stop WWIII but at least levels the playing ground, doesn't it?

In a horrible way.

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No More Global Savings Glut, Bernanke! Interest Rates Shoot Up World Wide

2006-03-02T08:16:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The USA sucks up around 80% of all possible international funds of various sorts. This is to pay for the half trillion in government red ink and near trillion in trade deficits. In return, we printed money at an accelerated rate and now inflation is beginning to rage across the planet. Interest rates are shooting up and investment funds are vaporizing.

From the BBC:

The European Central Bank (ECB) looks set to raise interest rates in the light of rising inflationary pressures in the eurozone.
Economists are betting on a quarter percentage point rise in the cost of borrowing to 2.50% on Thursday.

The euro is the strongest currency right now so they don't have to defend it by raising interest rates alot.

Japan defends the yen by deliberately weakening it which is why their interest rates remain at a totally insane 0%. This is ridiculous since inflation is now raging in Tokyo according to on the street accounts. Even the prostitutes have figured out the dollar isn't worth what it was so even their prices are now climbing.

From Rense.com:

One by one, the eurozone, the Swedes, the Swiss and now even the Japanese, are turning off the tap of ultra-cheap credit that has flushed the global system for the past year, keeping the ageing asset boom alive.

The "carry trade" - as it is known - is a near limitless cash machine for banks and hedge funds. They can borrow at near zero interest rates in Japan, or 1pc in Switzerland, to re-lend anywhere in the world that offers higher yields, whether Argentine notes or US mortgage securities.

Arguably, it has prolonged asset bubbles everywhere, blunting the efforts of the US and other central banks to restrain over-heating in their own countries.

The Bank of International Settlements last year estimated the turnover in exchange and interest rates derivatives markets at $2,400bn a day.

"The carry trade has pervaded every single instrument imaginable, credit spreads, bond spreads: everything is poisoned," said David Bloom, currency analyst at HSBC.

"It's going to come to an end later this year and it's going to be ugly, even if we haven't reached the shake-out just yet," he said.

All countries are exposed but none as much as the USA. Our rulers keep lying to us and claiming, the budget deficit is "only" 6 to 7% of our GNP which is of course, a very dangerous level but untutored people reading this information seldom realize what would happen if we can't get 7% of our GNP in the form of hard cash.

Crash/tinkle!

Since our GNP is so huge, this 7% is also huge! And since America has outsourced/outsized potential taxpayer's jobs, this means we can't fill this yawning gap by taxing the middle class. The rich can't be taxed at all since they rule us and they intend to keep things this way and besides, they squirrel away their money in off shore accounts, anyway. Since Americans can't tax the people with the money, this means cutting the budget by $500 billion not in ten years but next year. This is impossible unless our government either cuts the military to near zero or kills off most Americans who are dependent upon the government functioning.

There were early signs of panic this week when the Icelandic krone crashed 8pc in two days, setting off dominoes in high-yielding currencies of New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Hungary and Brazil.

The debacle was triggered when the rating agency Fitch downgraded Iceland's sovereign debt, a move that would not normally rattle markets.

The only reason our debt isn't being downgraded is because there are many things America can sell off. We are already hard at work, selling off our ports, our forests, our minerals, our people.

Most of the world is now tightening, with no sign of a fresh credit window opening to keep the game going. This is new. Japan has had the tap on continuously as the trade exploded over the past five years, while America itself became the source of funds after it slashed rates to 1pc at the end of the dotcom bubble, and held them there until June 2004.

Between illegal drug dealers and the explosion in derivative trades, the "dark matter" money will melt away like ice in a heat wave when the various governments crack down on currencies.

Already, the USA is frantically changing the color and design of its currency in preparation of squeezing out the drug trade money yet again. Not to mention gross counterfit monies.

American consumer credit depends very heavily on foreign money pouring in. Interest rates on houses were ridiculously cheap and the mortgages were bundled and resold to hedge funds and overseas investors seeking stable shelter for their money, little understanding how this particular shelter has a very leaky roof.

Namely, when the dominos start to fall in America, people will cease paying for their grossly over inflated in value homes and abandon them, this has happened in the past, can happen at any time. It is no coincidence that all gold rushes in history coincide with world wide depressions. Such as the all famous on in California, the banking systems of the world collapsed in 1848 and the rush was in 1849. Ditto the Alaskan rush.

Take a good look at this. These people, mostly city dwellers, hiking up a mountain in winter. The stream of humanity pouring into the dangerous backlands of Alaska to claw gold from rivers and streams was the result of a terrible depression. Just like the Great Depression, the side effects reverberated for a while, translated into a world war.

Just like many analysts refuse to see ahead, one has to focus on what will happen in ten years.

Just like the housing bubble bust. It doesn't happen instantaneously, everywhere. It takes time to pop. Once it is underway, it is nearly impossible to stop. Ditto currency problems. Under Clinton and Rubins, they stopped several currency collapse waves, most spectacularily in Asia. We have fools and liars running things now. Bernanke isn't a liar, his is just a Brownie level type idiot. An innocent who can't think straight, drunk on his new powers.

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New York Times Reporter Wonders If Anyone Remembers The Last Housing Bust

2006-03-01T15:15:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Some young whelp of a reporters looks at the stats of the last Bush housing bust and says, "Who remembers it? No one!" Well, buddy boy, I remember it vividly because I lost $100,000 thanks to that! And I am still pissed off about why.

From the NYT:

YOU remember the great real estate crash of the 1990's, don't you?

In New York, inflation-adjusted prices dropped almost a third in less than a decade. The fall was even worse in Los Angeles, and it wasn't pretty in Boston, San Francisco or Washington, either. Thousands of families were forced into much smaller homes. Many have never lived as well as they did in those giddy pre-crash years. It was a painful preview of what the dot-com meltdown of 2000 would bring.

What? You don't remember any of this? You think I just made up those numbers about plummeting house values?

I didn't. The real estate crash really happened. The median house price in the New York area fell 12 percent from 1988 to 1995, which is nearly 33 percent in inflation-adjusted terms.

My husband got injured at work right in the middle of this mess. I had to use all resources while waiting for the courts to hear his several cases. This took years!

And so I sold my house in a very down market, lost my equity, lived in a tent, YES, A TENT, you moron! While the courts ran through the case, we won, we now have a house which has zero debts because I am like Scarlett O'Hara, nevermore!

Indeed.

I know what true suffering is, how it feels to fall all the way to the bottom, visiting food pantries, for god's sake. My son's school raised money to buy him shoes, for example. I had to sell our flock of sheep, too. All sorts of things. Thank goodness, in summer, I had a garden and chickens and ducks! And turkeys. So we had pretty good food, in summer.

In winter, I melted snow on the woodstove for water.

This idiot thinks no one sold their homes during that crash! Many families lost jobs, they had to relocate, often to other communities, seeking work. They, too, lost big time. The pain of every crash hurts people. My grandparents didn't even notice the Great Depression but all around them, people suffered. They weren't so brain dead as to imagine this was no big deal.

Why does the Times hire idiots like this? For shame, for shame. Is the mental illness afflicting most of their editorial opinion writers seeping into the entire newspaper?

Heh. Obviously.

All our pundits are screaming at us to not worry about the hostile sheiks of the UAE running our vital port systems! They don't care if we lose housing value, no one will notice! The home ATM machine shutting down won't translate into millions of people losing jobs!

Here is a much better article, head and shoulders above the garbage in the New York Times: From AP:

Consumers, lured out to the stores by the warmest January in more than a century, spent at a rapid clip that outpaced their incomes. However, construction activity slowed to the slowest gain in seven months, indicating the nation's housing boom is easing.

The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that personal spending shot up by 0.9 percent, the strongest gain in six months, while incomes rose by a solid 0.7 percent.

But in a separate report, the department said that construction spending rose by a tiny 0.2 percent in January, the weakest gain in seven months and far below the 1 percent increase Wall Street had been expecting.

A big reason for the slowdown was a tiny 0.1 percent increase in private home building, far lower than the 0.9 percent surge in December. Economists believe housing, which has been setting sales records for five straight years, is set to slow this year. Sales of both new and previously owned homes fell in January despite the unusually warm weather.

Oh oh, the pesky popping ballon noise! People spent money like drunken sailors because the entire media system was screaming at them to spend and the amount was greater than ever before only because of INFLATION. If the rise in spending was pro-rated with the rise in prices then the trend would be clear to even clowns: spending had to go up since costs went up. And the dollar is worth less.

Once the dour effects of the loss of free money via going steeply into debt at a cheap interest rate will be gone. Only the nightmarish 24%+ credit card loans will remain.

Economists say that this is exactly the wrong time for the savings rate to dip into negative territory with the impending retirement of 78 million baby boomers.

Part of the reason for the dip is that Americans who own homes felt more wealthy in recent years given the huge increases in home values. That spurred them to spend more of their paychecks since their net worth was increasing with their rising home values.

However, the Federal Reserve reported last week that even with the rise in home values, Americans' net worth rose over the past three years at the slowest pace in more than a decade, reflecting in part reduced investments in the stock market since the bursting of the Internet stock bubble at the beginning of the decade.

People's net worth could barely stay afloat even with the tremendous increase in value of their homes? This is terrible news. Income down, the house balloon barely able to make up the difference and now, that gone, we face ruthless cutting of people's incomes, lock outs, give backs, bankruptcies and the entire sheebang of a depression which happens when a government cuts back on the inflation ruthlessly by slashing the money available for workers and not taxing the rich.

Yes, all depressions come because the rich don't have to re-invest their money in capitalist ventures, they put it in "safe" havens and to keep it valuable, need a depression so the dime stowed away in bonds can make money while doing absolutely nothing.

Ie: buying America's government debts and forcing us to pay them back while they pay no taxes.

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American Police State Wants $100 Million For Prisons In Iraq

2006-03-01T11:12:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

$100 million for yet another prison in Iraq while our government is cutting funds for everything possible here at home, even things like port security, all is secondary. We can't rebuild New Orleans but we can build prisons even as prisons in Afghanistan riot and as Iraq is literally blowing up and burning to the ground around us, this is the only thing we are building in Iraq this year...a prison.

From Reuters:

The U.S. State Department is winding down its $20 billion reconstruction program in Iraq and the only new rebuilding money in its latest budget request is for prisons, officials said on Tuesday.

"This is the one bit of construction we will be doing -- $100 million for additional bed capacity for the Iraqi legal system," he said.

So, the people of Iraq are rioting due to lack of prisons? And today, in court, they are accusing Saddam of running too many prisons due to revolts in Iraq? This level of insanity can't last much longer, can it?

I read today that an agency that tracks money going to welfare programs is being cut back. It only costs $7 million and Bush is saying it is too expensive even if it gets good information (a real no-no in Bushland!). Cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, cuts to vets health care, cuts to school loans, cuts everywhere but plenty of money for war and prisons so we can bring freedom to the Iraqis which seems to consist of locking them up in jail cells!

Meanwhile, our oil infrastructure isn't doing so hot, is it? From the NYT:

The shortages, amounting to 6 percent of the country's domestic production, have worsened a global picture of razor-thin margins of supply, playing a central part in keeping oil prices around $60 a barrel.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged 167 offshore platforms and 183 pipelines, shut down production for weeks and pushed prices to their highest levels since the fall of the shah of Iran led to the oil shock of the early 1980's. Nineteen movable well-drilling rigs snapped from their moorings and drifted, some as far as 60 miles.

By contrast, Hurricane Ivan, rated as one of the most severe storms in the gulf when it struck in 2004, destroyed just 7 platforms in shallow waters and damaged another 24 structures and 102 pipelines.

This belated story is one of the many "missing stories" from the last six months. I am glad the NYT finally noticed this. Of course, they fail to mention hurricane Dennis. Oil Platform Collapsing.

This is what the Titanic sinking looks like, energy-wise. Exxon/Mobile claim the hurricane didn't do this. So what did it? Sharks? Beach bums? Ecoterrorists? Bin Laden?

Well, whoever did this, if they can't fix it, this will be a major blow. The platform costs over a billion dollars to build, about what we spend a week in Iraq trying to pump oil there.

Gads. This world has gone daft, hasn't it?

Train carrying oil was blown up just yesterday in Iraq. And Americans killed, too. I passed by a website with a photo of this but can't find it now...it certainly isn't in American news! Nor is this platform collapse! You would imagine this would rate some level of interest but there is zero on the mainstream media but tons of talk about it on the net, on forums and blogs like mine which is where breaking news goes!

Bet it will make the news when the turtles carrying bottles arrive some day.

This was my story and I was the ONLY person to blog it that day, about the damage from Dennis that didn't hit the USA, only Mexico (we ignore Mexico!). Already, production was down before the bigger hurricanes blew in.

We need $100 million a month in refittting America for better energy use, solar panels on every roof, everywhere. Much more wind energy systems. Better house design. Building more prisons? NO! No....NO!

Mother Nature plans to slit our throats. We still refuse to sign any Kyoto type accords. From the BBC:

The global scientific body on climate change is expected to report soon that emissions from humankind is the only explanation for major changes on Earth.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formerly said greenhouse gases were "probably" to blame.

Its next draft report will be sent to world governments next month.

The BBC has learnt the report will state that greenhouse gas emissions are the only explanation for changing patterns of weather across the globe.

So we are doing what?

Frantically looking for oil, frantically trying to pump oil, frantically putting Iraqis in prison so we can pump their oil. All this is not only futile, it is insanity.

And these prisons won't change what is happening in Iraq as it disintigrates. From the WP:

With sectarian violence rampant since last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, the families have become symbols of an emerging trend in Iraq: the expulsion of Shiites from Sunni towns.

New, deadly attacks -- many of them apparently retaliatory sectarian assaults -- surged Tuesday, with 66 people killed, according to Iraqi police. The decision to lift a curfew in Baghdad on Monday appeared to have opened the way for a resumption of intense bombings, including explosions at three Shiite mosques that killed at least 19 people. Some of Tuesday's other victims included 23 people killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad as they waited in line to buy kerosene; five Iraqi soldiers killed in a car bombing in the capital's Zayona district; and one U.S. soldier killed by small-arms fire west of the capital, authorities and news agencies said.

Once a society gets to this point, prisons are pointless. The Russians tried this with Afghanistan and Chechnya and even leveling these lands only makes it worse.

The reason Russia is doing well today is entirely because of the sales of oil. They are like Saudi Arabia. If we left Iraq alone, they would be spending money the same way Russia is and they have no nukes despite the lies told by Powell.

Indeed, we need to put people in prison: the neo cons and the Bush gang. Rumsfeld. They all need to be arrested. And put on trial with Saddam.

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Maoists Increase Fighting In India--Bush Visits Afghanistan Secretly

2006-03-01T07:21:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Maoist battles beginning to rage in India don't make the news here. A poll I read said India has a positive view of the USA, at least, those who own phones which is about 15% of the population, namely, the upperclasses. 45% of them want to relocate into America, by the same poll. Meanwhile, Bush sneaks into Afghanistan like Gollum sneaking into Mordor, praises everyone and then runs for the exit, still secret, yess, Precioussss. Arrival in India greeted with riots.

From the Australian:

MAOIST rebels have set off a landmine under a truck in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, killing 55 people and wounding at least 20 who belonged to a government-backed anti-Maoist group, police say.

The attack came on the eve of a visit to the country by US President George W. Bush and was one of the worst single acts of violence by Maoists in the past three decades.

Analysts said the attack showed New Delhi could ill-afford to take the growing Maoist threat lightly, saying that the rebels posed a bigger danger than Kashmiri Islamist militants.

Time and again, throughout history, unhappy peasants=danger to rulers. One can squeeze peasants to an amazing degree, they seem so placid, until they explode.

Once peasants decide to fight back, all hell breaks loose and even killing many of them still can fail if they are determined.

This is why China is suddenly switching direction. The Chinese rulers fear the peasants who are increasingly vocal as well as unhappy. And willing to die, fighting. In stark contrast to America where the workers and peasants (landless, of course) are stupified.

From AP:

Tens of thousands of Indians waving black and white flags and chanting "Death to Bush!" rallied Wednesday in New Delhi to protest a visit by President Bush.

Surindra Singh Yadav, a senior police officer in charge of crowd control, said as many as 100,000 people, most of them Muslim, had gathered in a fairground in central New Delhi ordinarily used for political rallies.

"Whether Hindu or Muslim, the people of India have gathered here to show our anger. We have only one message — killer Bush go home," one of the speakers, Hindu politician Raj Babbar, told the crowd.

Of course, our propaganda machine won't focus on all this. Bush won't see it. His bubble insures this. American triumphalism mustn't be irritated with any sense of reality, can it? Bush can't visit much of America without first locking down everyone which is why he hasn't walked the streets of any city here in years and years.

I detailed in the past how the military and SS lock down the few small communities he visits, forbidding anyone of looking out of windows or being on roofs, nor may anyone walk the streets or drive a car if Bush is visiting. When he went to Europe, riots raged so he had to lock down whole countries.

From WP:

President Bush made an unscheduled visit to Kabul Wednesday to rally U.S. troops in Afghanistan and praise the embattled Afghan leader Hamid Karzai at a time of rising violence from the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists.

After a brief, four-hour visit Bush was expected to land in New Delhi Wednesday night for two days of high-level talks about India's nuclear program and its booming economy.

At a joint news conference with President Karzai, Bush expressed his hope that the U.S. and India could reach an agreement for the cooperative development of nuclear power to help fill the energy gap in India and fuel its rapid economic development.

We want to sell them technology as well as Boeing Aircraft. And military equipment, our chief export item these days. Bunker buster bombs. For a country screaming about Iran building nuclear power plants, this tactic of extending India's plants after they secretly build nukes using materials from present plants, is really bizarre except Americans aren't supposed to think about this matter much. This is why the media propaganda is hyper focused on raising hysteria about Iran while ignoring India! This hypocricy concerning WMD is what is killing all forms of diplomacy. We are so crass about it!

Afghanistan is falling apart. This is why Bush had to sneak in and sneak about. The riots over the cartoons have died down but this isn't because the Afghanis have suddenly seen the light and have decided to love us. If Bush appeared in public there, he would be rent limb from limb.

Meanwhile, back in India, we are letting India suction out white collar jobs at a fabulous rate. This is great for India but not so great for us. Wages in America are dropping, job opportunities for college graduates are under the gun, this is a long term problem for us, getting worse by the hour.

The Indians working in white collar jobs aren't doing this on behalf of Indians but on behalf of American corporations who need to prevent inflation from showing up at home, this is another scheme for printing dollars and shipping them overseas.

Bush won't push to stop this, he is in India to encourage it! So far from celebrating, we might as well slit our throats espcially those of us who are in the "information age" employment systems.

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Fake "Lock Outs" Fueling Worker's Wage Deflation

2006-03-01T06:25:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Yet another union unilaterally "locked out" except there is no real lock down. In the old days, factories closed. Today, a "lock out" simply prevents unionized workers from entering, scabs come in easily. Ergo: all companies are now simply eliminating the union workers, ruthlessly.

From AP:

AK Steel locked out nearly 2,700 hourly workers after their contract expired without a new agreement early Wednesday, and will use temporary workers to continue filling orders, a company spokesman said.

AK Steel Holding Corp. and its union workers disagreed over the company's demand that it be able to reduce the work force, freeze pensions and require employees to pay more of their health costs, among other issues.

Union members had recently voted to allow union leaders to authorize a strike if negotiations failed.

Salaried employees and temporary replacements will allow the company to continue meeting customers' needs for now, said company spokesman Alan McCoy.

This is in Ohio. Ohio voted for Bush, votes for GOPers all over the place, the voters there sneered at Democrats who supported unions. Well, the birds will come home to eat the carcasses. As businesses prevent inflation by dropping wages and benefits, this squeezes the workers mercilessly. Up until this year, the reckless tax cuts plus below the rate of inflation loans kept America happy and pleased with this magic money making machine that allowed us to live trillions of dollars beyond our means.

Now the brutal work of depressing worker's wages across the board begin in ernest, world-wide. All businesses must reduce "costs" and they can't do a thing about energy costs but they can cut wages which is ridiculously easy in this "free trade" environment. All one has to do is move the factory, threaten to move it or suddenly shift business goals, giving an excuse to drop workers off the cliff.

All depressions start with depressing wages.

To cover the near trillion dollar trade deficit, our government conjoured out of thin air an extra trillion dollars to squirrel away overseas. Ergo=global inflation since the dollar is the chief currency in the world. Europe is in a panic, their strong currency, thanks to Germany being allergic to inflation, is proving to be much more attractive than the dollar if one is selling energy which is what the Americans are desperately trying to devalue by spending fake money for it.

The plight of American unions is going to reverberate across the planet. In America, foolish voters in the deep south thought they were oh-so-clever when they undercut unions by passing "right to work" laws that caused many unionized businesses to relocate to where they didn't have to pay good wages. Because many industries were still unionized up north, the semi-slave labor states' workers enjoyed fairly decent wages in a low-cost environment, the dollar in the south buying more than one in the formerly prosperous north.

But as the unions expire up north and wages go south, the ruthless cost cutting is biting much harder on southern wage earners who are being undercut by foreign labor.

Hither to, all this was masked by cheap loans. Workers were given easy credit which they collectively ran up to its limit, desiring a nice lifestyle even in the teeth of declining wages. This is now being withdrawn because there is no more room for debt to grow once the value of housing begins to stall and then drop.

And drop, it will. Just like in the 1920s which saw the same sort of activity! The money from trade will still slosh around the planet but it will be of decreasing value and already, Iceland has been rocked by a collapse of their currency's value, like the USA, they run a trade deficit with the world, so they have to attract investors willing to buy their currency. This is causing ripples across the investment universe.

But it is but a tiny stone dropped into the currency cauldron.

From Joongang Daily:

With the local currency strengthening sharply against the U.S. dollar, Korea's export companies are screaming here and there. Changes in the won-dollar rate are linked directly to the exporters' gains and losses. When the companies exchange their dollar-denominated export earnings to the Korean currency, they lose money in proportion to the won's appreciation.

The won rose by 4.1 percent against the American currency during 2004 and surged 11.75 percent last year. And the local currency's value has jumped nearly 5 percent already this year. At the end of 2003, the dollar was worth about 1,200 won. Now, the dollar is worth only 960-970 won. So if a company now exports goods worth $1, the won earnings will be lower by 240 won than the won it earned in 2003. Expand that value to $10 billion, and the lost revenue amounts to 2.4 trillion won because of the currency appreciation. It is a wonder that Korean companies were able to keep on raising export volume with such a handicap.

As the dollar sinks in value, it becomes harder and harder to maintain the fiction that the dollar is strong. Japan still manages this because their corrupt American/Japanese mutual suicide pact remains nearly totally hidden from view, this being a deliberate machination. Poor Korea can't conceal a trillion useless dollars nor do they have the political power of buying American politicians in order to conspire at keeping a nifty trade imbalance going. Japan's "depression" coincided with a strong yen vis a vis the dollar thanks to Clinton and Rubin balancing the budget. The Japanese couldn't buy American political debts!

Now, it is a tidal wave. Too much of a good thing, though, since the GOP has decided to print infinite amounts of dollars and even Japan can't absorb this flow. Enter China. They happily took on this task so they could have a lever of control over American foreign policy.

Because the GOP and Bush are stupid, they don't understand this so they irritate the Chinese who are tremendously irritated this week because of Taiwan shutting down all talks on reunification. So the Chinese expect the Americans to twist arms in Taiwan on their behalf which isn't happening so they will twist our currency tail.

And this will cause a cascade of events because the dollar can't exist as a currency except if everyone claps their hands and believes in Tinkerbell who is tinkering with the value of the dollar by concealing the M3 figures, figuring that people are really stupid and won't notice the printing presses running at Mach 10 speed.

Everyone in the upper echelons may laugh at me and my silly cartoons but just remember.

Cassandra was always right.

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Stocks Down, Housing Stalling, Energy Unstable, Asia Unstable: Bad News Bears Down

2006-02-28T16:44:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

All the Pollyannas predicting a boffo year with America printing infinite money thanks to the Feds hiding the M3 funds from prying eyes, we are going to shop until we drop, there is no limit, everything is coming up roses. Yeah, right. Have to fool investors so the rich and unload their Enron stocks. Now, there are tremors of fear. Duh.

From Marketplace:

U.S. stocks fell sharply in late-afternoon trading Tuesday after Google Inc's chief financial officer warned of slowing growth at the Internet company with a number of weak economic reports further undermining sentiment.

"The main impetus behind the sell-off was the news from Google," said Al Goldman, chief market strategist at AG Edwards. "Google has been a market superstar and when you pull out the rug from underneath it, it creates a wet blanket on the whole mood of the market."
Goldman said the disappointing economic data did little to help sentiment.
"But the good news here is that the impact of a specific news item, i.e. one company, usually goes away quickly. We're looking at this pullback as a buying opportunity.

As if the loonies who bid up Google stock to insane levels are now solely responsible for the sudden cold water? How about the cold, literally? It has barely broken zero here on my mountain for a week and looks to be very cold for the foreseeable future since the cold spot that used to sit over Europe has shifted to our part of the universe, as I expected.

Last month, I waved my Cassandra arms and yelled about the foolish shopping spree America did when they thought all winter would be warm, I even told the story of the ant and the grasshopper but the hoppers were to happy, popping around, laughing, to notice ants like myself.

I like the mixed metaphors. "You pull the rug...and it creates a wet blanket." Well, the rugs being pulled are all those people in the hurricane zone giving up on their homes, one by one. Rotted rugs, indeed. The impact of this hasn't shown up in statistics because the banks held off calling in the mortgages for fear of a collapse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are already circling the toilet, being investigated for fishy business practices, this is going to hit them very hard, by this time, next year, the vast majority of homeowners who lost their homes will be declaring bankruptcy.

If we get more hurricanes like this, but hitting different communities, Florida and the East Coast, anyone? How about a replay of the hurricane, unnamed, that hit in 1938? And of course, the inevitable earthquakes that are due to level parts of the West Coast? Well, we have no grace, no excess funds for any of this! The money collected by our government and the generosity of fellow Americans and sheiks seeking influence after the hurricanes last summer is running dry. Soon, many of the victims putting tons of money into the economy, paying for housing, hotels and food, etc, is going to abruptly end and a whole slew of people will end up living in refrigerator boxes. So this stream of funds will end.

Congress is madly cutting money that is used in America, prefering to spend on overseas wild adventures, so this money buying power is ending rapidly, too. The $250 billion in hurricane spending our rulers yapped about last fall has fallen to a grudging $7.5 billion which is what? 4%? I mean, the amount is pathetic in comparison with the dream amounts. And our government can't even afford this since they asked for another $80 billion for six more months of the Iraq Meathead Mystery Tour?

I blogged how Snow, the guy who sold us down the riverfront to the UAE, this traitor is confiscating Federal worker's pension funds to keep the government going until the GOP figures out how to raise the debt ceiling to $9 trillion which is an amazing number, it is well inside what I would call "the RED zone." Which is where our deaths lie, for, to pay our debts, we will cast many Americans overboard.

From AP:

The economy, which stubbed its toe in the final quarter of 2005, is probably back on firm footing in the opening quarter of this year despite a cooling housing market and somewhat skittish consumers.

After digesting the latest batch of economic reports, released Tuesday, analysts predicted that economic activity is rebounding nicely in the January-to-March quarter and will grow by at least a 4.5 percent rate. For all of 2006, the economy will log another year of solid — though slower — growth, they said.

"The economy is doing pretty well now in terms of momentum," said Brian Bethune, economist at Global Insight.

These people are barking insane. The entire "economy" has been soley a faith-based affair involving foisting massive debts onto the future for today's goofy spending on McMansions and McDonalds. This childish spending spree was encouraged by Bush and his gang, after 9/11, he told everyone to go to Disneyland and go shopping and this would defeat the terrorists.

Who are using bombs and guns. They went shopping, too. Unfortunately for us.

Look as I can, I see no good economic news anywhere. The ability to ship out inflation is hitting a wall now because it takes more and more a bite, the energy costs of transporting goods, compared to when oil was $20 a barrel. This is translating into inflation. The rich will continue to bid up top properties and art work and other things they want, their mega-toy spending spreee will go for another year but the economy can't float on that boat.

Mr. & Mrs. Middle America won't be able to access their Home ATM machines anymore. This will cause a collapse of spending. There is no soft landing. Like any thing that is flying high, when it stalls out and begins to decline, that isn't the point of most pain! From Boston.com:

The Gulf Coast has not rebounded from Hurricane Katrina's blows. It had 12 casinos before the storm made landfall in August and a 13th was about to open. But the coast is on its way to recovery. As it turns out, it was holding the ace card all along. Now, perhaps more than ever, people want to gamble.

''The numbers have been off the charts," said Larry Gregory, executive director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. ''I was absolutely in shock when I saw the numbers. It was absolutely amazing."

Gaming in Mississippi is typically a $2.8 billion industry, and even with 12 of its 30 casinos out of commission for nearly four months after the storm, gaming revenues still topped $2.4 billion last year. Inland casinos that were spared actually saw double-digit percentage increases in revenue in the last quarter of 2005. Then came what Gregory called the real shocker.

The three casinos that opened in Biloxi -- the IP Hotel & Casino on Dec. 22, the Isle of Capri on Dec. 26, and the Palace Casino Resort on Dec. 30 -- took in $14.5 million by year's end, more than seven times what the entire Gulf Coast casino industry typically makes in a week.

And this is where it all ends. A debased economy, everyone gambling their last bucks hoping to rake in the loot. Despair and fear feeding the frenzy. Casinos are a blight on an economy. They are totally nonproductive. They sap the soul, they eat family financing, they weaken the will to work. Get rich quick and do it having fun! This is a con game, a rip off that should be outlawed. And it is now the fastest growing segment of our economy, another deadly sign.

Our economic plane is at the stall point. The way down is very far and we won't feel too much pain-----Until we plow into the earth. This particular flight might end up with many of our cities being destroyed in a major war which our rulers might desperately wage as things fall apart. Like, a nuclear with with China and Russia or bin Laden gets his paws on Pakistan's nukes.

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Washington Pest

Bush's Long Range Budget Sees Huge Cuts In Vet Health Care Funding!

2006-02-27T19:47:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as this week alone, over 20 USA soldiers are blown up, many of them killed but the survivors in very sad shape, the 15,000 severely injured and the 100,000+ suffering psychological damage, what with most of Desert Storm I soldiers sick or dying thanks to DU weapons dust, not to mention all the Vietnam war vets to WWII vets using the services, the Bush plan is to cut staff and reduce service.

From Associated Press:

At least tens of thousands of veterans with non-critical medical issues could suffer delayed or even denied care in coming years to enable President Bush to meet his promise of cutting the deficit in half — if the White House is serious about its proposed budget.

After an increase for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing by leaps and bounds, White House budget documents assume a cutback in 2008 and further cuts thereafter.

In fact, the proposed cuts are so draconian that it seems to some that the White House is simply making them up to make its long-term deficit figures look better. More realistic numbers, however, would raise doubts as to whether Bush can keep his promise to wrestle the deficit under control by the time he leaves office.

The long range plan is for most Americans to have reduced lives. The baby boomers dare not be retired, the plan for us boomers is to die swiftly after being flushed out of the work system. It is worse for our children. They can be replaced by the army of displaced peasants across the planet so marching them into the teeth of death rapidly so they die of overwork and disease before age 55 is just fine with our rulers who intend to extend their own lives tremendously thanks to modern science.

Isn't that a fun world?

Of course, like the rulers in the Middle Ages, once disease and disorder are raging outside the castle walls, Mother Nature has an infinite number of ways of spreading the fun. More importantly, when the replacement peasants (barbarian) become restive, they can and have killed off the upper classes. This has happened over and over in history.

Why our rulers want this is laughable. Bush and his buddies have various hidey holes set up so they can hide from the rage of the masses. Bush thinks, once he has bankrupted America, he can found a thing like the "Hoover Institute" which is a hotbed of hothead idiots, well, he will get his funding from the UAE sheiks, won't he?

We spend a fortune on our military and today, Bush has been trying to plug the dike with Republican govenors who are upset about him stealing various state's National Guard units and stripping all units of equipment and men. From Associated Press:

President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered private assurances to the nation's governors over plans to make cuts to the National Guard, but some governors said Monday they were still worried.

Republican and Democratic governors said discussions are just beginning on Guard units, the backbone of state emergency and homeland security response.

"No, there's no sense of hugs, handshakes and cut the cake," said Republican Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. "At least now, we're talking."

Governors went into closed-door meetings with Bush, and later with Rumsfeld and top military leaders, unified in their opposition to administration budget plans that state leaders had warned would reduce the planned force levels for the Guard. The state-controlled citizen soldiers have been heavily used by the federal government in Afghanistan and Iraq.

All 50 govenors protested this hijacking of our local defenders and shipping them off to very distant, nay, hopelss missions. Now, thanks to fake promises Bush has no intention of fulfilling, they are backing off even though not one troop has been returned to their proper postions. So, we will have the United Emirates running America while our troops are running around over there? Eh? What is this?

Bush's 2007 budget submission would support a Guard of about 333,000 citizen soldiers — the current level — rather than the 350,000 authorized by Congress. It also proposes to pay for 188,000 Army Reserve troops rather than the 205,000 authorized by Congress.

Once again, Bush is budget cutting at the bottom, not the top.

Halliburton, despite being cited for cheating all of us, is getting a whopping $250 million dollars even though reporters have uncovered scams like driving empty trucks back and forth in Iraq just to run up milage as if they were taxi drivers milking foreign visitors at Kennedy Airport.

(Gov. Vilsak of Iowa) He and other governors have repeatedly asked why the administration would tinker with the Guard when the states rely on it so heavily and the nation has put such an emphasis on homeland security.

"The reality is we cannot keep this nation safe by keeping the states less safe," Vilsack said.

BINGO! Everything Bush is doing now is guarunteed to increase our danger! Duh! I wish we could tap his phone. Bet he called the bin Ladens, pleading with them, "I need another one!" The anthrax attacker who only attacked Democrats, the media and a photo editor who ran pictures of Jenna half naked, drunk, he is still available but I doubt he can pull another trick, it got too hot for him when the anthrax was traced back to a top secret military base.

Which takes us back to the military. Are they doing all this so we have an insurrection? So the miltiary is so angry, they take over the White House in a coup? To stop Bush? I can see that.

What is going on here? All I know, our system is in tatters, the hurricane season is creeping closer by the day and earthquakes will inevitably destroy a lot of places on the west coast because tectonic plate movements insure this, the Pacific Plate is very busy, very many 6+ earthquakes this year, all along every front of it except for the west coast of North America.

Well, death, doom and destruction. The Bush trifecta.

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Washington Pest

France Defends Its Own Industries While Wanting Free Trade Elsewhere

2006-02-27T13:16:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Here is an amusing example of a country that doesn't cave into "free traders". France. Once again, they decide national control is more important than selling everything off and firing French workers.

From Reuters:

Gaz de France (GAZ.PA) and Suezoutlined a deal to create Europe's second largest energy utility on Monday in a government-brokered move seen as a lightning French response to designs on Suez by Italy's Enel.

A statement issued by both companies after a weekend of intense political and boardroom activity sketched out a ``merger of equals'' that will see Gaz de France privatized with the state left holding a blocking minority and Enel shut out of Suez.

Further details of the deal -- including the politically crucial question of which company will have the upper hand in the new 72 billion euro combination -- were left vague ahead of talks between the French government and skeptical unions.

Of course, the unions are skeptical. Across the globe, the free traders and international bankers are desperate to break all unions, destroy the power of all workers to fight for wages and benefits. We are all supposed to degrade our condition so we are all peasants or slaves.

Capital must have total freedom while labor have only slavery. This is exactly what the 1984 doublespeak motto, "Slavery is Freedom" is all about. Money, which has no living beings attached, must be free but in order for it to exist, it must chain living humans into penury and perpetual labor or it loses value.

As Marx noted, labor=value. And the capitalists working with financial entities know their money is nothing but worthless paper unless it can harness the labor of billions and "grow".

Finance Minister Thierry Breton and the heads of the two companies were holding talks with trade unions on Monday morning to try to break down their opposition.

The unions are rightfully fearful of any merger, even one designed to "save" the energy company from foreign control. This is because all mergers=people losing jobs. Since mergers involve exchanges of money, this has to be paid for and the only method is via labor concessions.

Plans for the alliance have angered Italy and could alarm the European Commission because of concerns that France's stated policy of ``economic patriotism'' goes against the spirit of free movement of capital.

The merger plan is widely seen as a defensive mechanism to stave off any takeover bid by Enel, although French officials deny building a fortress against foreign takeovers.

France is part of the European Union and uses the euro. Yet they are understandably nervous of losing all control of their own country yet they will happily buy similar things in the USA or neighbors like Belgium, in Europe. These vacillations are typical of all "free traders" who want freedom to invade other people's systems but want to do it from a fortress of solitude.

Like Japan. This is 100% what Japan is all about. Securely locking their own borders while exploiting free trade in other countries. Even after years of detailing this, the USA still is unable to retaliate even slightly because the red ink caused by Japan and now China's trade surplusses means we can't financially retaliate except via one method only: closing our ports!

Instead of handing them over to the Chinese and the UAE.

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Bush Selling Off Huge Tracts Of National Forest Lands

2006-02-27T11:46:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

After selling off our ports and our factories, Bush turns back to decimating our national treasures. He plans to auction off public lands to the highest bidders. This, after letting oil companies off of paying royalties in the Gulf of Mexico! Eventually, all of America will be sold to people who hate us.

From News Journal Online:

From almost any public-minded perspective, President Bush's plan to sell off up to 300,000 acres in the national forest system and 500,000 acres within the Bureau of Land Management is a mistake. From some vantage points, it looks like an outright scam.

Once this land falls into the hands of developers, it can never be reclaimed. And the Bush administration's excuse -- that it would use the money from the sale of forest land to temporarily fund a federal rural-school program -- doesn't hold water. The sale would produce enough revenue to make up a deficit from federal timber sales for six years. But the administration is phasing out the rural-school program, not saving it.

The plan is to have no public lands, no public services, everything "privatized" and sold to the highest bidder which isn't the average American, most Americans can't buy much of anything anymore except by going steeply into debt. So the buyers will be individuals with deep pockets. Like the sheiks of the UAE.

It is totally bizarre, the excuse for this rip-off, "funding rural schools". Rural schools are rapidly closing due to lack of a natural resource: students. The true reason for these sales is exposed by the fact that the Feds claim they will resell the lands to the county or state where they lie! Well, if the states or counties have the funds to buy this land, why can't they fund their own rural schools with that money instead of spending it on buying federal lands? Hmmm?

Of course, this is all a Potemkin front plan like all the others.

Since writing my earlier articles, I notice the right wing editorials and scream machines are working full blast to shame Americans who are upset about selling our ports to Arab Sheiks who have a recent history of coddling and assisting attackers of America, namely, the 9/11 attacks. None of these editorials or screamers mention 9/11. It is spooky how Bush and the GOP suddenly have forgotten 9/11 and the date has literally disappeared off their collective calendars.

Take note of the individuals doing this. These are traitors. They misused the 9/11 attacks to misdirect us into attacking Iraq and now the same people are screaming at us to not be upset about Dubai. Well, way back in the stone age, on 9/11/1, we wondered why Bush protected the bin Laden clan, the Saudis and the UAE. None of these entities were questioned or examined. Even today, it is VERBOTEN for Americans to read even one page of the 9/11 Commission Whitewash Report concerning the Saudis or the UAE.

If Bush and his traitors want us to hand over American ports to these people, then they should release not only this material but reappear in public to under go questioning, under oath this time, about 9/11 and why Bush just sat there in that classroom and how all of these clowns knew Atta was leading the attack within hours of it happening.
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Free Trade=Sevitude For American Citizens

2006-02-27T10:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Once again, the whole world is joining in with the traitors running America to scream at us that we need "free trade" and our shores should be open wide to whoever wants to loot or control America. Any citizen who falls for this deserves to wear the slave's iron collar being forged via IOUs and pay cuts.

From the Independent:

Lucrative opportunities taken away on a political whim; the danger of being locked up by an over-mighty government agency; the brick wall of protectionism - the business community expects to do battle with all these things in an emerging market.

Yet this suddenly seems to be a description of doing business in that most developed of all markets, the United States of America.

In the UK, in the cash-rich Gulf states and in fast-growing India, different incidents in the past week have made people ask the same question: is it worth doing business with the US?

Critics say the outcry over the £3.9bn acquisition of P&O by Dubai Ports World, which will transfer the running of five US ports to a state-controlled Middle Eastern company, has exposed the US Congress at its xenophobic worst. But it has also revealed more starkly than ever the protectionist tide that is waxing in America under the guise of national security.

The acquisition was due to close this Thursday, but DP World has had to delay completing the deal as it faces a protracted Congressional and legal fight to keep hold of the US contracts, which account for 6 per cent of the business it is buying.

My, how the British power elite screams! They were allowed to buy our ports because they were supposedly our allies in dominating the planet. Of course, they pay zero dollars in American taxes, our British colony, that is, except for some offshore amounts which are little more than small potato tribute to keep Americans from thinking these are really bad deals we are making.

The UAE is some ally. Far from being a colony, even, they roll in wealth because of oil and they are happily buying up whole segments of America. This is because we eat 24% of the world's oil so we can tool around in SUVs that we don't own but are owned by finance institutions and we live in houses we don't own, being up the river of mortgages, on a raft without a paddle.

All of America is for sale! This fire sale is due to our trade deficit which yawns every wider and the more free trade we have, the wider the red river runs and we passed three quarter trillion in red ink last year on trade and this year are heading towards a trillion. This is impossible.

Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, says it has been a profoundly depressing episode, and one that could have lasting repercussions if it derails a planned free-trade deal between the United Arab Emirates and the US. "These are not societies given to a lot of rhetoric - they are not going to hold a press conference and call off negotiations," he explains. "But what would happen is that things would slow down - forms of co-operation would not happen any more."

The National TRAITOR Trade Council is crying? Well boo, f**king hoo. This clown gets paid to work day and night at destroying our nation. He sleeps in a fancy bed in a fancy house in a fancy neighborhood and drives a fancy car and has fancy health care. Of course, he wants to hand us over to our enemies. They pay him very well for this.

The "other societies" that don't talk but withhold money are a fancy way for Mr. Fancy Pants to describe the oil sheiks and kings who are not our allies in anything. They are our OWNERS. And they own Mr. Fancy Pants and this is why Bush kisses them on the lips and holds their hands, he is their jockey slave who rides camels for them.

What is this "co-operation" the trade traitor is talking about? We are dying for them in the Middle East. They hated and feared Saddam and they hate Iran. So they push us secretly into wars while pretending to hate Christians and Jews. This fake game isn't fooling their populaces anymore, witness the near destruction of the top oil refinery in the world. It is only a matter of time that the outraged populace takes these men down. And us, with them.

When a firestorm of protest threatens to drive a Middle Eastern company out of the US, it is only business sense to look for opportunities elsewhere. The Dubai government has begun to build up a modest aerospace industry, launching a components business that might, one day, mean it is less reliant on the US for aircraft. Its new airport management business is targeting contracts in India.

See what I mean?

Even as these beasts snarl at us to shut up and let them rule us, they already, ALREADY are working hard at undermining us! Our sole, last, remaining item we sell overseas that is still made here in America is aircraft and already, TODAY, they are building factories which hire ONLY semi-slave foreign labor, owned by them, to build aircraft that will undersell ours since the laborers will come from Bangladesh.

China is doing this, too. Everyone is doing this! This works! Thanks to our insane "free traders" here at home, we have been completely crippled.

Perceived discrimination in other areas might also damage America's economic future. The head of chip maker Intel, Craig Barrett, has complained repeatedly that the US is losing out on international talent because of the tightening of immigration laws after 9/11, which led to lots of hi-tech engineers losing their work permits. Intel, Microsoft and others are channelling investment into India that might otherwise have stayed in the US.

The issue flared up again last week when a prominent Indian scientist was refused a visa for the US because of concern that his work had chemical weapons applications. The case of Goverdhan Mehta, who is president of the International Council for Science, a Paris-based group of national scientific academies, has caused a storm in India.

Good grief. So, the intelletuals of India want to take away American jobs and we are putting up some small barriers? Well. Cry me the river Ganges!

We have an army of high-tech engineers who were undercut by these characters. We are so demoralized, few Americans even bother enrolling in engineering classes in fields dominated by invaders from India brought in by traitors who wanted cheaper labor. It cost a lot to get a degree. And then when one can only get a very cheap job, it means never being out of debt! And for what?

The rage building in America as citizens discover they are on a sinking ship and the rats have eaten the hull so badly it is swiss cheese is going to lead to a big explosion of rage, particularily when the bills for all the trillions in debt, over three trillion during the Bush insanity, when this is presented to us, we will be flabbergasted.

Everyone wants the gravy train to continue. Particularily those who are forging the iron ring of slavery around our necks. They are tremendously afraid that we might call a halt to this but first we have to change, ourselves. No more oil wasting. I am for energy controls that prevent people from wasting energy. This is a national emergency.

We have to swiftly eliminate all foreign bases. Pull back our military to our home base. And then cut oil imports by 50%. Think we can't do this?

It isn't hard, if we have to. But who wants to stop the party? We are supposed to sell each other McMansions and burgers! This will make us rich and powerful. Ask Bernanke!
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Bernanke Says Keeping Inflation Low By Shipping Our Money (and manufacturing jobs!) To China Creates Jobs Here

2006-02-26T09:15:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I warned everyone that Bernanke is an idiot. He celebrates the destruction of our manufacturing base, claiming that shipping jobs to China to scrub inflation due to energy hikes creates jobs here in America. Alas, the jobs created are also not "inflationary" since no one can ask for or get pay raises! Great. Sounds like a depression.

Ben Bernanke, in his first public speech as Federal Reserve chairman, laid out a scholarly case Friday that keeping inflation low and stable tends to foster economic growth and jobs.

This sensibility — now largely a consensus view — marked an evolution in economic thinking, Bernanke said in remarks at Princeton University in New Jersey.

A bunch of white males in their pretty ivory treehouse. Oh, how very happy they are! One reason not one of the liberal economic bloggers who know me via my comments at their sites (I really no longer bother with them, they are so out of touch with reality!) don't quote me at all is because of my ferocious attacks on their fraternity.

Well, I predicted from my very first article about Bernanke that he would be both insane as well as ill-informed. He is going to finish us off. We are so very doomed thanks to this idiot.

"Central bankers, economists and other knowledgeable observers around the world agree that price stability contributes importantly to the economy's growth and employment prospects," he said. "But that view did not always command the support it does today."

Well, he better consult with me! Or read this story of mine!

Price stability exists? What the farking hell? I see none, none at all!

All fundamental prices are going up and up and up in dollar value. The M3 figures show the government printed up more than $700 billion dollars out of thin air and this matches, nearly, our trade deficit. These dollars didn't drive up the price of cars or planes because of oversupply keeps prices down and since most people had to pay cash for these things, there was less demand despite the flood of new dollars but...the big but!---this $700 billion has come home to roost in the form of loans which have shot through the roof.

More Americans are deeper into debt. The inflation beast moved into our livingrooms and we greeted it with joy for it said, "Feed me and I will make you rich!" So we played this merry-go-round and now the money is stopping because the dollar is losing value on all fronts and not due to excessive production, either, but due to excessive creation of dollars ...BY THE FED ITSELF!

The only way to hide this severe deterioration of over 50% value, our trading partners who all run surpluses vis a vis the USA have conspired to feed us our own money back into our system via home loans. This is coming to an end, though, for finanical and political reasons.

China, for example, is now switching direction. It will continue to feed the American beast a tiny bit more until they get their aerospace factories humming then they will dump us. Already, after our government nixed American aerospace ventures in China, forcing them to eat the inflation at home which is killing their profits despite frantic efforts to kill the unions and reduce wages by 50%, Airbus of Europe has decided to build factories in China to rid them of inflation and viola!

China doesn't need us anymore. Kiss the "no inflation" miracle ta-ta.

Here is an example of the great jobs Greenspan and Bernanke have created thanks to their stupid "no inflation" policies:From the Sun Herald of Duluth:

When Lisa Koch asked several people at a Chicago soup kitchen to complete a survey of the people who eat there, she got a surprising response: "They asked how long it would take because they had to get back to work after lunch."

A national survey of people eating at soup kitchens, food banks and shelters found that 36 percent came from households in which at least one person had a job. In the Chicago area, it was 39 percent.

"Even though the economy might be changing, it isn't creating the kinds of jobs that allow people to make ends meet," said Koch of the Greater Chicago Food Depository.

More than 25 million Americans turned to the nation's largest network of food banks, soup kitchens and shelters for meals last year, up 9 percent from 2001, says the report by America's Second Harvest.

Isn't it pathetic? Alms for the poor! Alms for the poor! Of course, smug, silly Bernanke doesn't care, at no time in his besotted life did he have to worry his pretty little bearded face over things like job instability and low pay and give backs. Every seven years, a year's holiday. Huzzah! Pip pip and all that.

The surveys were done before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. After the hurricanes, demand for emergency food assistance tripled in Gulf Coast states, according to a separate report by the group.

The new report, being released today, found that 35 percent of people seeking food came from households that received food stamps. Cousin said the numbers show that the government program, while important, is insufficient.

Thank the GOP for that! They have been cutting food stamps ruthlessly.

Many workers from the Deep South are still shattered by the hurricanes and have no jobs because even though their jobs are available in New Orleans, there is no housing or infrastructure for them. This is driving them literally insane. From Agence France Presse:

It has been six months since he stood guard in the lobby of the hotel his wife managed, using the flashlight mounted on his shotgun to fend off looters who rattled at the glass doors as his daughters slept uneasily upstairs.

Six months since he carried a man who had been savagely beaten to the Convention Center, only to be told by police that there was nothing they could do but let the man die.

Six months since his faith in his country was shattered.

But he has not been able to let go of the fear. And the anger. And the pain.

"I don't go out of my house a lot," he said as he sat behind his computer, his once muscle-bound frame softened by the loss of 28 pounds (13 kilograms). "I can't stand to be in crowds. It makes me very nervous."

His wife is working but he isn't. And she makes nearly no income beyond what covers their barest necessities. The landlord wants rent on an unihabitable house merely because they parked their FEMA trailer there. No one is fixing anything because it is unfixable. I know, I restore old buildings. After a flood, they have to be stripped to the studs!

And in New Orleans, that isn't enough. For it is a termite heaven there and even if the wood looks like it is dry, it isn't and the bugs love wood that is wet in the core. They eat it up in no time flat. All the flooded houses, even if rebuilt, are doomed to fall apart rapidly thanks to termites.

It is like our economy. Termites busily eating away the foundation. Dry rot in the attic and the roof has holes in it and the next hurricane is filing her fingernails right now, over Africa. When the prevailing winds west begin to blow in the Sahara, as the earth shifts past the equinox, we are going to see much more devastation this year, much more.

Already, there was a report today that the fish in North Carolina suddenly scrambled up from the deep because of lack of oxygen, beaching themselves by the thousands just like they did all summer long in the Gulf. A bad sign, that. And it is still February!

Speaking of fish floundering ashore! From Energy Bulletin:

Bourse Director Sven Arild Andersen is fed up with Norwegian oil having to be traded in London and wants to have a commodities and energy bourse in Norway.

The Bourse Director believes that Norway already has the prerequisites for building up a Norwegian or Scandinavian energy bourse.

"This would in such case compete with the bourse in London. Why not have the ambition to outcompete the British petroleum bourse," says Sven Arild Andersen.

"Here, you could trade crude oil, natural gas contracts and establish derivatives for these products."

"In addition, we must set up a larger financial industry around this, as important in other large markets and employ many people. And which are important for the competencies that are needed beyond the extraction itself of oil and gas," says Andersen.

In Euros.

We invaded Iraq for this very thing. We are already snarling at Norway, demanding they kow tow to the mighty dollar and to obey us in our crusade against the Muslim world. But here they are, yet another country dropping the oil dollar.

This is fatal to us. We know the dollar is essentially worthless, it lost over 50% of its real value this year and will drop even more, next year, since our trade deficit totally stinks, due to the need to export our jobs to hide inflation! Gack.

Venezuela is mulling doing this and if Norway and Iran do it, Venezuela will, too. This leaves only the corrupt kings and sheiks of the Gulf kingdoms, supporting the dollar. Already, Putin has said, Russia is very happy to switch over to euro pricing!

Once China declares this, boom!

The Chinese already have extended business deep into the European Union. Soon, they won't need us as customers or rather, we can buy but only via euros! We stupidly let the euro soar in value, we laughed that this would make us billionaires but not in the sense of Weimar billionaires.

Well, that was a dumb idea. We fixed nothing by letting the euro soar and now we will literally pay the Pied Piper of Hamlin.

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Sec. Snow Stealing Pension Funds To Keep Government Running!

2006-02-16T17:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Sec. Snow has unilaterally decided he can raid Federal pension funds for an extra $68 billion so the GOP government can continue to lose money all over the planet earth. He plans to pay back these funds when Congress raises the debt ceiling to $9 TRILLION. Of course, to do this, he has to visit China and beg. The Chinese are laughing to death even as I blog this.

From Marketwatch:

The U.S. Treasury acted Thursday to avoid hitting the national debt limit and said it's "imperative" Congress raise the debt ceiling by the middle of March.

Treasury is suspending reinvestment in the so-called "G-Fund," an investment vehicle for a federal employees' retirement system. The action will free up $65.266 billion, a Treasury spokeswoman said.

"Without this action we would reach the debt limit today," spokeswoman Brookly McLaughlin said Thursday.

Congress and the Bush administration have been negotiating an increase in the current $8.18 trillion debt limit. On Wednesday Treasury said it would suspend sales of state and local government non-marketable securities.

Time to bring back Bernanke and have a big kissy-kissy session! Wait! We will see those tax cuts cut out of the budget! No! We must cut taxes to the rich or they might flee to Tokyo again!

Or Paris! Wait, old Europe is in trouble! They will live on various tropical islands that are going under water thanks to global warming.

"Once I am able to make the G-Fund whole, the effect on the G-Fund and its beneficiaries will be the same as if this temporary action had never taken place," Snow wrote to Frist.

Meanwhile, with the federal budget deficit projected to reach $423 billion in 2006, both Republicans and Democrats have so far balked at raising the debt limit.

And to make the fund "whole" he is going to punch another hole in the hold of USS Titanic. As the red ink pours in, we have to balance things by shipping more dollars out. Japan's government is up to their own eyeballs in debt trying to suction up as much of our debt as possible. This is why our stockmarket is up today, whoo hoo! Money is going to just rip-roar into America because Bernanke and his gang won't raise interest rates much because Chinese workers are cheap! Cheap, I tell you! Very cheap!!!! And they loan us money, to boot!!!! CAN'T BEAT THAT!!!!

Glub. From Charlotte:

Syria has switched the primary hard currency it uses for foreign goods and services from the U.S. dollar to the euro in a bid to make it less vulnerable to pressure from Washington.

The decree signed by Syrian Prime Minister Naji al-Otari on Monday ordered government bodies and public-sector companies to use euros to pay for foreign transactions, including payment for exports.

The head of the state-run Commercial Bank of Syria, Dureid Dergham, was quoted as saying Tuesday that the switch to euros was "important and necessary in light of the current U.S. threats against Syria, and the ensuing complications in banking procedures and transfer operations to Syria from U.S. and European banks."

Step by step, everyone is tip toeing away from our currency. Like all landslides, it starts with a few stones rolling down the hill. No landslide happens slowly, only the beginning is slow.

When they do happen, it is like a lightning bolt. From the LA Times:

In an unexpected breakthrough in negotiations with Louisiana officials, the Bush administration announced Wednesday that President Bush would ask Congress for an additional $4.2 billion to help the state repair and rebuild homes battered by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Federal support for housing reconstruction, which has been the subject of protracted negotiations between Washington and local officials, is considered a prerequisite for wider recovery because it opens the way for thousands of displaced people to return to New Orleans and surrounding areas.

Santy Claus is still alive! Whoo hoo. So, even as we smack up against the fourth debt ceiling under Bush's rule, he says, aw, what the heck, another $5 billion more or less, the Chinese will give it to me after I insult them some more!" Condi wants to spend money proselytizing Iran about democracy even though, unlike Egypt or Saudi Arabia, they actually have elections that are only barely slightly crummier than our own! Stick to buying shoes, you slut.

As for student loans: nope. Those get paid back and the kids go on to earn real money. Can't have that. And health? Die, bitches!

Meanwhile, Pelosi, head of the Democrats, is calling the budget busting bill Congress just weaseled through in the middle of the night after twisting arms, by one vote, she says it is unconstitutional and I would say, our Founding Fathers would agree, despite Scalia calling our Constitution a dead document and we must channel only Alexander Hamilton to find out if it is OK to do things as if this were Nazi Germany or worse, Italy under Mussolini. From AP:

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"Republican leaders chose to ignore House rules, precedent and even the Constitution itself" in sending the politically charged measure to the White House, said Pelosi, D-Calif.

She said the legislation was defective because it had cleared the two houses in different forms, and added that Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., "knew full well this was an invalid bill."

Republicans, citing an 1894 court precedent, say the measure is valid because top House and Senate leaders put their own signatures on the bill before it was sent to the White House.

On a party-line vote, Republicans shelved the call for an investigation, and Hastert's office did not respond directly to Pelosi's charges.

Of course, they will do whatever they want. Who cares if everything wrought by the GOP is a flaming wreck? No one cares! No one ever expected the dikes to fail last year, or terrorists attack the WTC, or anything.

Clueless. I once was with this religious leader of a cult. He suddenly said, "I can drive with my eyes closed," and shut his eyes. I hit him on the side of the head and grabbed the steering wheel and we had a brief tussle which involved me nearly strangling him while stomping on his foot, trying to brake the car (I succeeded, otherwise I would be a ghost typing here using an ouija board instead of an Apple). Yes, I was only a teenager but even then, I understood psychotic lunatics when I see them and certainly, someone has to stomp on the feet of these clowns driving our collective car off the cliff.
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Kyrgyzstan Wants Lots Of Money From Neo-Soviet America

2006-02-16T08:16:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The neo con fantasy that Ronnie Reagan defeated the Soviets because the arms race weakened them allows them to get America sucked into the exact same mess that killed the Soviet Union. They bled to death from a thousand wounds. One big one was, their factories made stuff no one wanted to buy (General Motors, anyone?). Another was their colonial wars/colonial outposts were a huge financial drain on them. Particularily in Afghanistan and all the other Stans. Ahem.

From the BBC:

Kyrgyzstan is seeking a huge increase in the rent it earns from the US for a military base inside the country.

President Kurmanbek Bakiev said the annual rent should rise from $2m to $207m, according to a Russian paper.

We have four airbases there. We have been closing air bases here in America, several in New York, for example, for several years. Atta and his gang leisurely flew over much of NY state, flying across to Albany, entering the Albany radar space and then flying down the Hudson Valley, and not a single fighter craft flew nearby to check things out. This is because virtually all our aircraft are off in Soviet territory, patrolling the Iron Curtain states!

Of course, we expect Putin to be pleased we are doing this and he would be except we make snarly noises to him and to China rather frequently so he is not very appreciative at all and in fact, wants us to stop. Why we are doing this is where the issue of insanity arises.

The sole reason we can give in public is "to defend liberty and democracy". Oops. Alas, there is none there to defend. And our attempts and making some in neighboring countries by dropping bombs on the pitiful tents harboring terrorist peasant families barely ekeing out a living herding sheep, is a failure.

One thing the former Soviet rulers of these various "stans" are good at is palming money. And twisting arms for more money. Wasting money. Graft and corruption are their tools and they know how to open a vein and bleed it ruthlessly which brings us back to why the Soviet state lost the Cold War: they went bankrupt clinging to these very same "stans".

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Bernanke Says Economy Is "On Track" And I Say, To Hell

2006-02-15T16:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Bernanke told Congress what they wanted to hear: everything is coming up roses and the economy is "on track" and we are going to grow and grow and the Chinese can't sink our ship since they "only" hold around a quarter of a trillion plus in government bonds (!!!!!) so they can't deep-six us. I suppose this is part of the war plan to make the Chinese laugh to death?
And no one mentioned "Japan".

From Associated Press:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, delivering his first economic report to Congress, declared Wednesday that the economy has snapped smartly out of an end-of-year lull, although inflation and other risks remain. He left the door open to higher interest rates in the future.

Recent economic barometers on jobs, production, retail sales and other business activity in January "suggests that the economic expansion remains on track," Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee. The expansion, he said, does have "a lot of staying power."

OK, gang, what exactly are we "expanding"?

Well, the trade deficit. Walmart and other box stores are expanding. Alas, most of what they sell is manufactured in Chinese factories. Hmmm. There are more construction jobs last year but that seems to be going on the fritz now. Real Estate Agents! Yes! 009 himself! He will save the economy from Goldfinger!

Of course, Congress and Bernanke refused to say what track we are on, didn't they? They just said, we were on "it". "It" seems to be the track leading to a third world nation status. The only factory jobs created this year were in Japanese assembly spots set up to keep a good throttle hold on our market. Our car companies did near zero business in Japan. We sold a lot of cars in...China! The place we have decided to fight! Talk about stupid.

Well, maybe we could export real estate agents, lawyers (shot up ones are going to be sold at a discount), has-been politicians, K Street lobbyists and TV preachers. Then we might, just might save America!

For a slightly more realistic, downbeat assesment of this crazy hearing, from the NYT:

In an generally upbeat assessment of the economy, the Federal Reserve's new chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, told members of the House of Representatives that the Fed may have to raise interest rates a bit further to assure that inflation does not flare up.

Noting the difficulty of predicting the course of the economy, Mr. Bernanke said: "Nevertheless, the risk exists that, with aggregate demand exhibiting considerable momentum, output could overshoot its sustainable path, leading ultimately — in the absence of countervailing monetary policy action — to further upward pressure on inflation."

RED ALERT!!!

Danger: completely stupid economist with great powers running into competely corrupt politicians! How on earth will "output" cause inflation? Output was supposed to be "manufactured stuff" and he is using it to describe people buying things merrily because there is tons of money running around, purchased via cheap, below inflation rate loans! And this will cause inflation, all right, in HOUSING. Which is exactly what has been going on so far! And which is excatly what is wrong with everything! The Fed deliberately turned our homes into ATM machines so we can churn out money to our heart's content and of course, buy stuff which never showed any inflation because the Chinese pegged the yuan to the dollar and the Japanese do this even more outrageously.

Inflation won't happen because people want to buy stuff, it happens because the irresponsible Fed is upping the money amounts while not backing it with anything and the only reason this worked so far is because the Chinese government needs to entrap us by selling us IOUs which they plan to collect in a horrible way since the game we are playing, "Let's see who consumes all the planet's resources" is a very deadly game which will end when everyone decides to cull the world's population just like Hilter decided to do way back in 1933 with his "Lebensraum" program.

Investors have been eagerly anticipating Mr. Bernanke's remarks to see how and if the Fed changes, even slightly, any of its philosophical or policy positions. Some analysts have questioned Mr. Bernanke's commitment to fighting inflation because of past remarks and studies he has done on the risks of falling prices. As he has done in the past, Mr. Bernanke said he "maintain continuity" with the "Greenspan era." Another topic of abiding interest among investors and Fed watchers is the housing market, which was described last year by Mr. Greenspan as "frothy."

But Mr. Bernanke has inherited a markedly different situation. Instead of worrying about the excesses of housing, he provided assurances that the housing market was not in danger of falling off a cliff. He noted a slowdown in sales, rising number of unsold homes on the market and weakening confidence among home builders and buyers. He added, though, that mortgage interest rates have only risen moderately.

A lot of people are making fortunes on the present, crippled, dangerous track. They don't want the gravy train to stop. They don't want it shuttled off to another route. They don't care if I am walking along the roadbed, swinging a red lamp, waving my arms. Who is this odd female? Best to ignore her.

And yes, I once did walk along a real train track, waving a red lamp because a violent thunderstorm did wash out the roadbed. The train stopped, by the way. So it didn't make the news.

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China Is Very Loud About Helping Peasants/Stopping America

2006-02-15T13:04:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Chinese peasants made life difficult for the Chinese rulers. It is very simple. They didn't quietly leave their pitiful farms and surrender, they fought back, hard. People were killed. The government snapped and growled. Now they grovel. One can be imprisoned in America for suggesting anyone do what Chinese peasants did. It is called "insurrection". But it worked, didn't it?

From Xinhua net:

Chinese President Hu Jintao Tuesday asked provincial and ministerial heads to attach importance and take concrete actions to boost rural development.

"Building a socialist new countryside is a major historic mission set by our Party," Hu Jintao, who is also the general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, told a seminar on building a socialist new countryside.

He asked all CPC members and the whole nation to work jointly to make the drive "a project for the people" that truly benefits the vast number of farmers.

Members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin, Wu Guanzheng, Li Changchun and Luo Gan also attended the opening ceremony chaired by Zeng Qinghong, a members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, vice Chinese president and president of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee.

Hu said that in building a well-off society in an all-round way in China, the most arduous tasks are in the countryside. To accelerate China's modernization, it is imperative to properly handle the relationships of industry and agriculture and urban and rural areas.

Maybe they will act like Republicans and weasle out of this. Maybe they won't. I know some Chinese history and I am betting they are sweating bullets (stay away from Cheney! I warned you all!) concerning the rising wave of rage building deep inside China. This can overturn them in a flash and they know it. So they are trying to co-opt this power by assauging it which is appropriate, it is better than our government which is slapping us in the face while giving Chinese money to Iraqi or Iranian corrupt cronies in the name of democracy! Gack.

Speaking of which, our bankers, the Chinese, are giving our dictator his latest marching orders and he better obey or a certain dam filled with a trillion American debts will suddenly collapse. From Xinhua net:

China has called for the international community to remain sober-minded, patient and flexible when trying to resolve the Iran nuclear issue, said the Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Jianchao at a regular news conference here Tuesday.

China encourages all parties to do more to increase trust and avoid any actions that may worsen the issue, Liu said.

He told reporters that China is concerned with the latest development of the Iran nuclear issue. There are still enough room to resolve the issue under the framework of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the international community should not abandon diplomatic efforts, he said.

Regarding the scheduled nuclear talks between Russia and Iran on Feb. 16, Liu said China hopes the talks will be held on time and achieve positive outcome.

In other words: North Korea. Remember that place? Oooh, we were so going to fix it our way! And quess who is control of that place now?

China.

And more: we have zero control, we pissed the Chinese off who, for a small fee, arranged not only a peace treaty for us but a trade deal. Now it is a no-go with us on the outside.From Xinhua net:

"We concede that China is running a relatively big trade surplus with the United States, but they shouldn't politicize the issue," Cheng, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, or parliament, told a China-U.S. business forum.

China revalued the yuan by 2.1 percent in July, scrapped the currency's decade-old peg against the dollar and set it free to float within tightly managed bands. To Washington's frustration, the yuan has since risen by less than 0.8 percent.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao reaffirmed China's determination to continue with reform of the yuan -- code for eventually letting it float more freely -- but said Beijing would dictate the pace of change.

"China will push forward the reform according to the development of the situation and the principle that is most favorable to the international economy and China's economy," he told a regular news briefing.

Note, not for the American economy but for China's economy. Namely, we can't ask China to be Mexico for us. They are lining up with Venezuela which we attack verbally nonstop on every venue. I recently read a paper here that called the democratically elected popular government in Venezuela, "a regime" as if it were like the USA which has really no proper way of voting for President anymore, not even the fiction of one man, one vote.

I just heard Barnake say that China doesn't hold enough fiscal resources in dollars to hurt us if we decide to commit suicide and get involved in a big financial dust-up with them. He is, like everyone involved in running America off the cliff, insane. He also claims our enconomy is just great and doing great. This is also totally insane. Well, the Chinese just might laugh to death. Seems the Mulims are laughing to death.

And if we are doing so fine and dandy, why are all the programs helping peasants being cut here? What gives, guys? Either things are hunky dory and there is zero reason to cut my son's school loans or we are a sinking ship. Which is it?

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Condi Wants $75 Million For Democracy Propaganda For Iranians Holed Up In America

2006-02-15T10:43:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as the Bush clowns savage aid for students and even cut student loans for Americans, they want to pour $75 million more dollars into producing crappy propaganda, most of this money will feed Iranians living here, just like we spend many millions on propaganda for Cuba that mostly feeds rightwing Cubans camped out in Florida. This is ridiculous. If anyone wants democracy, they know how to do about doing it, just don't copy America, we don't have a democracy anymore.

From the New York Times:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is asking Congress for $75 million in an emergency spending bill to support U.S. efforts to build democracy in Iran, Bush administration officials said Wednesday.

The money, to be included in a supplemental 2006 budget request the White House is expected to send to Congress as early as this week, will be used for radio and satellite television broadcasting and for programs to help Iranians study abroad, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because Rice had not yet announced the request.

Sweet. So, my son will not be able to finish college so some Iranians who have family here in America can go to school here in his place.

I really appreciate this. NOT. How dare they? Who are these monsters placing total strangers and foriegners to boot, over the welfare of my 100% American son who was born here and raised here and intends to live here? What?

Cut, cut, cut goes the great Bush scissors but the cloth cut gets handed over to foreigners?

From The Northern Light:

In an effort to lower the national deficit, President Bush is looking to student borrowers to help foot the bill.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved the Deficit Reduction Act on Feb. 2 in a 216-214 vote without the assistance of a single Democrat. Bush signed the bill into law Feb. 8, 2006 and said his budget for 2007 will eliminate federal programs that have performed poorly.

The budget cuts aim to decrease this year’s federal deficit by $39 billion, which represents a sizeable chunk of the nearly $400 billion deficit the White House is projecting in 2006, due in large part to the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina.

Not one Iranian student will go home. This program is a hidden Trojan horse to enrich Iranian families already here. They will run the TV and radio stations, they will decide who gets the scholarships (guess who!) and so on. And meanwhile, we strangle the American populace.

We still have to go to China for money and we are signing those IOUs in our name and we will have to pay them and it isn't for us! The truly gargantuan IOUs for the stupid wars we are losing are already devastating health, education and welfare programs at home. These wars of "democracy and freedom" are like a giant hurricane screaming across America, tornadoes smashing people's homes, the dikes threatening to collapse and a tidalwave of red ink will bust out of China to drown all of us.

For the Chinese aren't happy with us at all now and we told them in no uncertain terms, they are our future enemies and we want to disarm them and steal from them so they stand there, at the sluice gates of a trillion in red ink, calculating when to turn the wheel, open the gates and drain out all that red ink.

And we are all in New Orleans.

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Washington Post Writer Thinks Europe Is Losing the Economic Race and America Is Winning????

2006-02-15T09:36:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It is amazing to me that anyone can understand anything anymore. The Washington Post hands over the editorial pages, like the NYT does, to total idiots who don't know or understand basic economic facts or any facts at all. Here is a typical example.

From the Washington Post:

By Fareed Zakaria
Tuesday, February 14, 2006; Page A15

Cartoons and riots made the headlines in Europe last week, but a far less fiery event, the publication of an academic study, may shed greater light on the future of the continent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), headquartered in Paris, released a report, "Going for Growth," that details economic prospects in the industrial world. It is 160 pages long and written in bland, cautious, scholarly prose. But the conclusion is clear: Europe is in deep trouble. These days we all talk about the rise of Asia and the challenge to America, but it may well turn out that the most consequential trend of the next decade will be the economic decline of Europe.

Yeah. Europe, who runs a collective as well as individual trade surpluses with America, are stumbling, while America, deep in the red on nearly every level, bad economic data up the yin-yang, is triumphant. Gads. Talk about insane. I see no other explanation for this. This week, I blogged the news that Europe is hitting us for...Protectionism! Whoo hoo.

It's often noted that the European Union has a combined gross domestic product that is approximately the same as that of the United States. But the E.U. has 170 million more people. Its per capita GDP is 25 percent lower than that of the United States, and, most important, that gap has been widening for 15 years.

OK, what happened in the last 15 years?

Oh! The European Union has grown! It added some really poor countries that used to be Soviet states. So if you average things out, it looks as if the Europeans have gotten poorer! Isn't that cute? Like as if we suddenly took over Mexico (I know, we run the joint secretly), our statistics would stink, too.

In March 2000, E.U. heads of state agreed to make the European Union "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010." Today this looks like a joke. The OECD report goes through the status of reforms country by country, and all the major continental economies get a B-minus. Whenever some politician makes tiny, halting efforts at reform, strikes and protests paralyze the country. In recent months reformers such as Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Jose Manuel Barroso in Brussels and Angela Merkel in Germany have been backtracking on their proposals and instead mouthing pious rhetoric about the need to "manage" globalization. E.U. Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson's efforts to liberalize trade have been consistently undercut. As a result of the European Union's unwillingness to reduce its massive farm subsidies, the Doha trade expansion round is dead.

The European farm policies are wonderful. They prevent mega farms from taking over everything like we have here. The family farm has been utterly destroyed in America thanks to the big corporate entities.

I applaud the European farmers for fighting back unlike the farmers here who, probably because few owned the same farm for more than a generation, didn't give hoot about losing the farm but the Europeans owning farms dwellt there often for a hundred or more generations! I had a girlfriend in Germany, Beate, whose family farm house was 500 years old and the family lived there since the end of the Roman empire. I couldn't picture them throwing this all aside and leaving.

America was settled by second sons. The first son got the land, the second had to find his own homestead. So they colonized like crazy.

And I haven't even gotten to the demographics. In 25 years the number of working-age Europeans will decline by 7 percent, while those older than 65 will increase by 50 percent. One solution: Let older people work. But Europe's employment rate for people older than 60 is low: 7 percent in France and 12 percent in Germany (compared with 27 percent in the United States). Modest efforts to allow people to retire later have been met with the usual avalanche of protests. And while economists and the European Commission keep proposing that Europe take in more immigrants to expand its labor force, it won't. The cartoon controversy has powerfully highlighted the difficulties Europe is having with its immigrants.

What a stupid, right wing tool this clown is. I wish the gods would make this lazy man work in Walmart when he is 65 years old! The fact that we force the elderly to work isn't something to celebrate!

It is a sign we are heading towards third world status! DUH!

Its dwindling defense spending weakens its ability to be a military partner of the United States, or to project military power abroad even for peacekeeping purposes. Its cramped, increasingly protectionist outlook will further sap its vitality.

The decline of Europe means a world with a greater diffusion of power and a lessened ability to create international norms and rules of the road. It also means that America's superpower status will linger.

Is "projecting power" helping us? I see rising fury, rising hate, boycotts, embargoes caused by American aggression. I see more and more people secretly working to undermine us because they fear our power and our very nasty rulers, one of whom just showed himself to be a psychopath quite openly, trying to hide the fact that he carelessly shot a friend, nearly killing him! Shock and awful!

Why should Europe be our military partner? This makes zero sense. We are abusing our power by attacking the wrong people like invading Iraq and we are going around, threatening war with Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, everyone. Our demented howls of rage are now deafening. We run a gigantic budget deficit which is $500 billion in the red which matches our military budget which happens to be around half a trillion, too! Far from making us strong, this has destroyed our ability to project power or do anything since we constantly have to beg the Chinese and Japanese for spare change!

Europe doesn't do that.

So, who is going to get the last laugh here?
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Giddy With Joy, Americans Spend Money Like There Is No Tomorrow

2006-02-15T08:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Thanks to the lopsided weather patterns this year, tremendous cold and snow blanketed Europe and Asia while it was springtime for us in January. Now, the cold zone is slipping over us. Temperatures near zero on my farm this coming week. Recklessly, Americans spent money in an insane carnival of consumption, thinking there would be no winter at all.

From the New York Times:

Shaking off a middling holiday shopping season and fears of higher heating bills, Americans spent freely in January, the government reported yesterday, providing reassurance that the economy is beginning the new year with fresh strength.

Buoyed by the unexpectedly robust spending data and a drop in oil prices, investors sent stocks higher across the board. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index rose 1 percent, to 1,275.53, and the Dow Jones industrial average closed above the 11,000 level again, climbing 1.3 percent, to 11,028.39. Crude oil prices dipped below $60 for the first time since late December.

"The momentum going into 2006 is clearly healthy," said Anthony Chan, chief economist at J. P. Morgan's private client services group. "We will be able to withstand weaker growth for the rest of the quarter and almost not miss a heartbeat."

All the data is dire. I see no ray of light at all. The wild spending we indulged in last month was foolish in the extreme. It was insanity.

The hidden inflation plays out these days in a new form. Unlike in past eras when unions contended for pay raises and so this made things more expensive so inflation was obvious, now it is shipped to China who takes out the "high wage" element from the nexus and thus, squeezes out inflation. In turn, since interest rates are still (as always these days) below the rate of inflation and the interest offered for "saving" money is woefully behind the rate of inflation, no one saves and everyone spends as fast as possible and combined together, this increases importation of goods that have been scrubbed of inflationary forces and voila, we have a trade deficit of nearly a trillion unsustainable dollars.

Aesop's Ant and Grasshopper Story is one we easily misinterpet. The ant plans ahead for bad times and works in concert with other ants (this is the important part) to insure the ant community can live through the winter of hard times. The grasshopper doesn't cooperate with anyone and happily hops about, stuffing its face and living hand to mouth. Then it dies in winter. Just call it a libertarian or Republican.

The grasshopper imagines the Chinese ants will pity it and feed it when hard times happen. The Chinese assure us that they, themselves, come first and the handouts we are getting right now won't be there. We refuse to understand this and hop around happily, eating everything in our path.

From the Bible which few Republicans ever read:

1 When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream: He was standing by the Nile, 2 when out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. 3 After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile and stood beside those on the riverbank. 4 And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows. Then Pharaoh woke up.
5 He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk. 6 After them, seven other heads of grain sprouted—thin and scorched by the east wind. 7 The thin heads of grain swallowed up the seven healthy, full heads. Then Pharaoh woke up; it had been a dream.

First book in the Bible, too. Genesis. What is so difficult about understanding this story? As a child, I thought the dream was painfully obvious and the writers of the Bible were pulling our legs by pretending the sophisticated Egyptians who pretty much invented agriculture couldn't figure out the business of storing seeds?

This was the whole point for growing grain in the first place!

Anyway, the point is only 6,000+ years old and what ails us? We can't figure this out? We have vast grain stores and are actively planning to wantonly turn it into fuel by burning it or distilling it. This is because the great bounty of oil makes growing corn ridiculously easy and seemingly cheap. But when the oil becomes dear in price, kiss corn goodbye!

Mother Nature isn't finished with Winter yet. She is now very lopsided thanks to global warming and the disorder the oceans are in with the melting ice changing salinity and the rate of flow. But bored with plummelling Asia, She is lifting her skirts and coming back to us.

Remember November? It was like January. Brrr. I work outside so I am hyper aware of the weather! Then mid December to now, ridiculously warm, like mid to late spring. Seeing this, people decided to spend money they set aside for fuel, spend it all on junk and fun stuff! Whoohoo.

Now Mother Nature is blanketing us with snow and in the next days, she will be blasting us with ferocious winds and extreme cold. I have seen Marches here when the temperature seldom climbs above zero. I suspect we just might have that this year.

Barnanke is going to tell Congress today that he plans to "control inflation" and if this means higher interest rates, our fragile grasshopper economy will collapse. If he calls for cheap loans so we can continue to eat merrily, this means our society will collapse. What a fine choice.

He will choose "society will collapse" because the GOP want to stay in power as long as possible.

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USA, In A Panic, Starts Trade War With China

2006-02-14T13:05:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The trade deficit yawning ever deeper, in a panic, the USA decides to attack trade from China, ignoring totally trade issues with Japan who is a greater danger to us, I believe. Alienating 1/4th of the planet while placating 1/16th is a very stupid plan. China is ready to bop us on the nose in this spat.

From Washington Post:

The Bush administration on Tuesday announced it will step up enforcement of U.S. trade laws governing China, following a top-to-bottom review of America's trading relationship with the Asian giant.

The increased enforcement will be led by a new chief counsel for China trade enforcement within the office of U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman.

Portman announced a number of steps during a news conference in which he released a 29-page report detailing the findings of a six-month review of America's economic relationship with China.

This, on top of the Pentagon report which basically declares war on China is going to ratchet up tension between China and the USA. China, unlike Japan, actually is our inflation sink, keeping prices down on many common domestic items. Most of what they ship here are low grade stuff. Japan and Korea send mostly high value stuff like automobiles. Because China is very big, they can produce lots of little things which add up but Japan, by far and away, gets much more bang for their buck and their trade surplus with us nearly doubled this last year and they wickedly drove down the value of the yen to record levels in the last ten years.

The Chinese, unlike the Japanese, are eager customers for high value items. Like jets. From Xinhua net:

Of the 863 operating civil planes in China by November 2005, 534 are from Boeing company of the United States, a senior Chinese civil aviation executive said here Tuesday.

"Calculated according to the catalogue price, China has spent nearly 40 billion U.S. dollars on purchasing planes from the United States," said Li Jiaxiang, president of the China National Aviation Holding Company, at the China-US Business Forum opened here Tuesday.

He said that growth in China's civil aviation industry has contributed tremendously to development of Sino-US economic and trade relations. "The greatest beneficiary is the US plane manufacturing business," said Li.

"China purchases a large number of plane engines, aero-electric equipment, accessories and advanced navigating devices each year and enjoys maintenance service provided by U.S. companies," said Li.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of employees of China's airplane companies have received various forms of professional training in the U.S., which have brought more profits to the U.S. aviation field, Li said.

"The growth of China's civil aviation has provided hundreds of thousands job opportunities to the U.S. aviation industry, which proves that the two nations have win-win economic and trade relations," said Li.

This article, spat out by the official powers that be in China on their official website is an official shot across our stupid prows. Or shall I update this with, a load of buckshot across our eyebrows.

It is a sharp reminder of who buys what. And if we think any of those 70+ Boeing contracts will be fulfilled, well, I predicted this won't come to fruition because of increasing friction. For we are in a head to head battle over who gets to suck up all that oil and the only way we can win this is to kill lots and lots and lots of people. Like, world war levels of killing. We can't entice the Muslim world to hand it over so we lord it over them.

From NYT:

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has moved to postpone by two years elections for thousands of local government positions initially scheduled for April, turning away from a promise made during his recent presidential race to promote democratic practices, Egyptian political analysts and political leaders said today.

The move was widely seen in Egypt as an effort to preserve the governing National Democratic Party's monopoly on power at a time when its grip has begun to falter. It also was seen as an effort to block the banned Muslim Brotherhood, which made unprecedented gains in recent parliamentary elections, from promoting an independent candidate for president in 2011.

Forget the freedom and democracy stuff. We don't want that. And in Pakistan, this: From the BBC:

Pakistani security guards have shot dead two protesters in Lahore during unrest over Western newspaper cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.
The shots were fired by guards at a bank as crowds attacked buildings, including US fast-food outlets.

We want them to buy our stuff but we tell them to stuff a sock in their mouths and shut up. Note, no one is burning Chinese businesses...yet.

Like with the Great Depression, all nations will turtle up. Even though our rulers want to range across the planet making deals and sticking knives in our ribs, when populations get fed up and start revolutionizing and rioting, well, the elites have to have a world war! That will fix things!

The biggest international workers' meeting happened in....1914, mid July, to be exact. All ruling elites wanted a small conflict to bring their workers in line and were pleased to watch that famous meeting dissolve into nationalist yells for war and splitting up.

Later, the Russian royals were shot dead and Lenin took over Russia. The war didn't work so hot, did it?

When launching wars, the thing to remember is, once the trigger is pulled, you don't know who gets plastered in the face with buckshot.

America runs a deficit with the world because we have interlocking fiscal conspiracies to create a totally fake currency whose value is pretend every bit as the ruble was pretend, back in the Soviet Union, only this is the whole world doing this. Holders of our dollars are rapidly buying up all of our important infrastructures and systems and factories. This is why not one factory job has been created in excess of those lost in the last...since we hit the Hubbert Oil Peak here in 1972. Even our military/industrial giants are being purchased by foreigners.

And we haven't even begun to balance the budget. I read the other day that Africa is losing $180 billion a year. This money flows to our Treasury. It is part of the tidalwave of dollars churning around the planet. So, we get all this money and are deep in the hole? This is insane! Impossible.

From Associated Press:

NEW YORK - Stocks moved higher Tuesday, gathering momentum as oil prices fell close to the $60 level and a retail sales report showed that consumers are indeed willing to spend. The Dow Jones industrials were up nearly 100 points.

Broader indexes also advanced even as investors nervously awaited testimony starting Wednesday from new Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

The Commerce Department said retail sales outside of autos rose by the largest amount in more than six years. And crude oil futures fell amid expectations that a U.S. supply report will show higher crude inventories. A barrel of light crude was quoted at $60.45 a barrel, down 79 cents, in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Every bobble in oil prices sends waves of irrational euphoria through the markets. Like, we will soon see endless seas of oil in the future, once again, prices will drop and drop and there will be no inflation because we will send all that money to China to be woven into gold and shipped back here, cheap.

And cheap loans! It seems everyone, saving not even a penny, are banking on cheap loans stretching from here to the distant horizons. Only we are heading into a serious trade war with everyone.

From USA Today:

Trade tensions escalated between the United States and Europe Monday after the World Trade Organization ruled that the U.S. had not gone far enough to end illegal tax breaks to big American exporters.
European trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson threatened to impose sanctions on U.S. goods unless the U.S. came into compliance with the WTO ruling within three months.

See? Europe is mad at us and we are mad at them and the Muslims are burning down our businesses and the Emirates are buying up our sea ports and China is sewing up all oil future contracts with many nations who hate us.

So it is time to shop, America! Buy more stuff from China! Cheap! Hurry now, it ain't gonna last much longer. As I said in the past, our fake prosperity will end the day the Chinese decide to ring down the curtain on us.

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America's Main Ports Sold To United Emirates--Some of the 9/11 Attackers Came From There

2006-02-14T06:44:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

America has let domestic control over shipping slip more and more until it is now nearly totally gone. Now we are letting control of our ports slip into potentially hostile hands, one by one. Letting the UAE take over our ports is pure insanity. After all, some of the 9/11 attackers came from there. None were Iraqis.

From The State:

A company in the United Arab Emirates is poised to take over significant operations at six American ports as part of a corporate sale, leaving a country with ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers with influence over a maritime industry considered vulnerable to terrorism.

The Bush administration considers the UAE an important ally in the fight against terrorism since the suicide hijackings and is not objecting to Dubai Ports World’s purchase of London-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co. The $6.8 billion sale is expected to be approved Monday.

The British company is the fourth largest ports company in the world, and its sale would affect commercial U.S. port operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia.

Anyone who claims Bush didn't want us attacked on 9/11 can go jump in a lake. Just like bin Laden's clan is very close to the Bushes, all the oil Sheiks and Kings love Bush and he literally kisses up to them, fawning on them, loving them, couldn't wait to court them after they attacked us on 9/11.

What the hell is going on? Is it sane for the country that imports more stuff than the entire world put together, can't we even own our own ports? Huh? This is what rich America is all about? Huh? Why in heaven's name are we handing over the keys to our front door to people who have attacked us only four years ago? Our rulers assure us, their kissy-kissy buddies in the UAE won't attack us, themselves.

But the fact is, they will control our ports and our security. And they don't do the paperwork or processing information, their employees do this! And who knows who will let what slip into our main ports! We can't tell nor see nor know since all this will be run outside of America. In a foreign language few of us can read!

Gads.

We handed over America's security to a dual citizen who never ever appears in public and who showed depraved indifference when thousands of Americans were dying and still seems pretty psychopathic even now. Like Cheney and Bush. Where do these guys come from (shudder)?

Secondly, this news shows what I have been illustrating: as we go deeper and deeper into debt, as our country frecklessly spends whatever we can scrape up on gee gaws and gagets and goofing around, the world is buying up our assets, our properties, everything. This is a yard sale from hell. We are sticking little cardboard tags on the family car, the livingroom, the oak tree in the front yard. All, so we can redecorate the kitchen!

Shipping experts noted that many of the world’s largest port companies are not based in the United States, and they pointed to DP World’s strong economic interest in operating ports securely and efficiently.

DP World said it won approval from a secretive U.S. government panel that considers security risks of foreign companies buying or investing in American industry.

Why are we at the mercy of foreign shippers? Isn't that bizarre! We not only have a gigantic trade deficit with the world, we don't make one thin dime on transporting all this junk! Amazing.

And the secretive panel: Carlyle, anyone? Who are these clowns? I want names! Who are these traitors?

Arrest them all.
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Muslim Boycotts of All Things Dane Are Wrecking Danish Exporters

2006-02-11T08:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The boycott of Danish goods has gathered steam and is drawing real blood now. This is a very popular boycott, not one sponsored by the rulers of the greater mass of Muslims but is genuinely from the grass roots. The Danish Prime Minister is bemused by all this but remains unrepentant.

From the Washington Post:

The Arla Foods plant in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which produces cheese and flavored yogurt drinks, sits idle and the company's 800 employees in the country have been sent home because of a Middle East boycott of Danish goods, following a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

"It took us 40 years to build up our business in the Middle East, and five days to bring it to a total stop," said Astrid Nielsen, spokeswoman for the Danish company here. She said suspending operations at the Riyadh plant, the company's regional base, and a near-total boycott of the company's products have cost Arla about $1.7 million a day since Jan. 28.

The boycott of Danish goods, propelled by Muslim leaders and imams preaching in mosques, has brought exports of Danish products to the Middle East and North Africa to a virtual standstill. It has scuttled a flow of goods to the region that was worth about $1 billion in the first 10 months of 2005, according to government statistics.

Eventually, this will extend to boycotting everything from the European and American alliance. We worked hard to draw Europe into our latest imperialist ventures and this is biting back, hard. The Europeans do much more trade with the Muslim world than we do, simple relative distance as well as shared past from the earlier colonial days.

Ghandi's famous nonviolent actions wouldn't have bothered the Brits one bit except one of his top tools he used was the boycott. This got the British rulers very angry and it is what got him put in prison. Martin Luther King's favorite tool wasn't nonviolent being beaten up type things, it was...boycotts! This and only this makes others stop what they are doing and forces them to change! They don't care about anyone singing "We shall overcoooooome." They worry about "We shall not BUY."

If the Danish Prime Minister had condemned mocking Allah and apologized and then made some nice gesture like saying, "Invading Muslim lands is a bad idea and we call upon America to withdraw all troops from the Middle East," then there would have been no boycott.

The fury that all this has unleashed always lurked below the surface waiting for something to trigger it. One can't boycott everything which is why only one item at a time or one country is selected for a demonstration of collective power. For example, Ghandi, a lawyer and very smart, pondered for some time before selecting salt as the first item to be boycotted. This lead to his famous "March to the Sea" to use seawater to make salt instead of buying it from the imperial government.

Whatever one thinks about Muslim society such as the restrictions on civil rights for women and others, blungeoning them over the head is a whacked way to change anything. Liberalism spreads because it is the logical and sane way to do things, one sets examples, one organizes, one reaches out.

I have spent years, reaching out to Muslim women. I have even had the honor of being invited into a Mosque once to talk about all this. I used to bring my children with me on these ventures. In NYC, I spoke with and to more than one Muslim group. Building bridges is a delicate operation and one that we should all be doing, not burning bridges.

The Muslims are burning their bridges with us only because we are using them to march in and steal stuff!

Just like with India or China: when we work together, we get along.

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Oil Companies Didn't Bother Paying $500 Million In Fees (Chump Change To Them)

2006-02-11T08:04:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

I warned everyone, having two oilmen from Texas running America=high energy costs and terrible service. Here is yet another tale told of men bold. Refusing to pay up the money owed, the little pittance they pay for bidding on exploring and exploiting natural resources owned by all Americans, they spit in our collective eyes. Unlike Venezuela. Our press spends a lot of time, demonizing Venezuela because the oil money flows to the people there, not like here.

From the NYT:

More than three dozen energy companies fell nearly $500 million behind last year on royalty payments the federal government says they owed for oil and gas extracted from public territory, according to Interior Department documents released Thursday.

While most of that money was later turned over after the government demanded payment, almost $60 million remains in dispute.

The companies, which included major producers like Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips, had claimed lucrative government incentives for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico even though the incentives were not supposed to be available if market prices climbed above certain "threshold prices."

They are so rich, they have an army of lobbyists as well as running the state of Texas which is their political base from which they can launch attacks on the rest of America, they are so arrogant, they wrote into the laws all sorts of goodies so they can have their cake and eat us, too, the cannibals.

Flush with money, this triggered a provision in the bills they passed which basically gave them our natural resources for FREE! Now they have to pay a pittance to our government and they didn't bother nor did the GOP Texans ask. This situation was allowed to flow like black gold until recently when the Democrats finally got the nerve to attack these criminals directly, demanding hearings on this and other issues. Suddenly, they had to cough up the money.

This is akin to a cat coughing up a small hairball. Like the cat, hacking away, they made a lot of noise about how this was akin to communism, etc. Finally, they grudgingly passed the bucks and you can bet, they will pass laws changing all this so things revert to them paying nothing again!

Anyone who wonders why America is going bankrupt doesn't have to look very far.

Meanwhile, the Fed needs new members and of course, the "Brownieization" continues. From Bloomberg:

Bush's nomination of the 35-year-old White House aide -- a lawyer by training who would become one of only two members of the Fed's seven-member board of governors without a Ph.D. in economics -- has been greeted by criticism and bewilderment by some former Fed officials and economists. They point to his political connections and inexperience, and say the White House could have found a better-known, more qualified choice.

``Kevin Warsh is not a good idea,'' said former Fed Vice Chairman Preston Martin, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982. ``If I were on the Senate Banking Committee,'' which must approve Fed nominees, ``I would vote against him.''

Actually, in my opinion, all the members of this board from retiring Greenspan on down, are all either insane, arrogantly mendicious or just plain out of touch with reality and naive about international politics and, well, maybe we should include historians on that panel?

Actually, a housewife who isn't in debt. Like me! Hey! I'll happily join! Imagine their meetings with me in the room. "We have to kill inflation." Me: "Not by killing the American breadwinner! What you are suggesting is outsourcing even more jobs! Are you insane?" Them: "But free trade is good!" Me: "Are you Chinese? Japanese? Why are you in this room with me? You should go home."

Yeah, right. Well, they are, collectively, the authors of the death of America. Their mindset is set on esvicerating our country fatally and they won't shift their positions until the world shakes them down off their chairs. They have been 100% wrong about everything for a long, long time. Even when Clinton appointed saner people like Rubin to the board and even after he raised taxes and began to balance the budget and things began to look up, even then, our trade deficit with the world continued to worsen.

Even when the world price of oil collapsed when the Soviet Union broke OPEC by undercutting their prices, we ran a trade deficit. Only in the very last year of Clinton running things did the trade deficit really began to improve and much of that was due to oil selling at $12 a barrel. Since Bush took over and Greenspan ran things by himself, everything went haywire and personal and national debts shot through the roof and our trade deficit shot up to amazing levels, we went from near zero trade deficit pre-Hubbert Oil Peak in America to a mere $10 billion deficit in the Carter era, due entirely to importing oil which he fretted about and our media screamed about the trade deficit, even under Clinton, the deficit in trade wasn't that hideous, under $100 billlion a year, under Bush, the climb has been very, very steep. From less than $100 billion to nearly a trillion dollars in just five short years!

Why hasn't the Fed resigned, enmass, in disgust? Why do they cooperate with the Japanese/American corporate conspiracy to dump all inflation into Japanese vaults using fake IOUs? Why do they pretend they are damping down inflation by using interest rates when this isn't happening at all? Why can't they analyze and critisize their boss?

Hahaha. They won't. They will rubber stamp whatever schemes our present rulers concoct and keep a zipped lip since they are all academics who get showered with goodies and praise if they put their collective OK on obvious criminal actions that are betraying America to former enemies, future enemies.

Sigh. Arrest them all. Like John Law who went to France, sold the corrupt and venal royalty on goofy get rich schemes and then everything went bankrupt.
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Trade Deficit Nearly A Trillion Dollars, Deficits With Nearly All Countries!

2006-02-10T10:24:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Nearly a trillion in red ink. Our real budget deficit is half a trillion (excluding Social Security funds). Our savings rate is negative. These numbers matter, a lot. Like Gulliver, tied down by a trillion loans, we are pinned to the ground and will never rise again. I can't see any way of turning this around, safely.

Business Week:

The U.S. trade deficit soared to an all-time high of $725.8 billion in 2005, pushed upward by record imports of oil, food, cars and other consumer goods. The deficit with China hit an all-time high as did America's deficits with Japan, Europe, OPEC, Canada, Mexico and South and Central America.

The Commerce Department reported Friday that the gap between what America sells abroad and what it imports rose to $725.8 billion last year, up by 17.5 percent from the previous record of $617.6 billion set in 2004.

It marked the fourth consecutive year that America's trade deficit has set a record and was certain to spark increased debate in Congress over President Bush's trade policies. Since mid-2000 the country has lost nearly 3 million manufacturing jobs and Democrats blame the administration's policy of emphasizing free trade agreements.

We run this deficit with nearly farking everyone! This is a currency problem from hell. The last 15 years, repeatedly, our government has sold 30 year bonds at a rate that is the same as a 1 year bond which is ridiculous. Go to the bank and ask them to give you a loan for 20 years that is the same rate as a 1 year loan! They will kick you unceremoniously out the door.

The reason why we can do this impossible thing, repeatedly, is because our "buyers" who happen to be nations running trade deficits with us, want us flush so we keep the trade deficits growing and voila! Each year, they grow and grow. LIke Jack's little beansprout grows to the clouds and up there is this angry giant, right?

No sane nation allows itself to get this out of whack. Note how, in my graph, the last surplus we ran was when the Hubbert's Oil Peak occured here in America. Since then, we import more and more oil. This is very bad on every level. On top of this, to mask the inflation caused by importing increasing amounts of oil, we have to export our industry to cheaper lands. This way, there is no inflation.

This is now a ruthless process. All industry must vacate America as swiftly as possible because anyone who doesn't will lose in the American marketplace where the cheapest goods triumph.

The near collapse in our pension system is just one sign of our declining status. We will be third world people in due time, this is the only "solution" to all these plunging numbers. To make things cheaper, we have to become cheaper. Cheep cheep, everyone!

My daughter has experienced this first hand. Greyhound buses have become worse and worse as the management struggles with high fuel costs. Her last trip, for she won't commute on them after this, the bus caught on fire, the driver limped along with fire engines and cops surrounding it, they had to wait in the freezing cold on a thruway for a new bus, it was the final straw after many bad bus experiences due to cheap drivers who didn't know anything to failing equipment. Sort of like NASA is turning into a mess.

Anyway, this is our future. Third world buses that wheeze along, barely, overloaded with passengers, beggar children running around, pleading for food and dead bodies on sidewalks.

God Bless America.
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China Tracks Down And Are Extraditing Numerous Bank Embezzlers

2006-02-09T09:56:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

China is working to extradite around 4000 corrupt bank officials all over the world. They have already gotten ahold of several in the USA. At the official news site of the Communist Chinese government, they explain the stark fact that these crimes will be punished with a bullet to the back of the head.

From Xinhua net:

Chinese officials and law experts on Thursday applauded to a U.S. indictment against two ex-Chinese bank managers, which they consider a warning to over 4,000 corrupt Chinese officials that flee abroad.

"It's a progress in China's efforts to call back fleeing corrupt officials," said Liu Wenzong, law professor of Foreign Affairs College. "They might notice the United States is no longer an ideal refugee."

Last week, Xu Guojun and Xu Chaofan, two former managers at the Bank of China's Kaiping branch in the southern province of Guangdong, and their wives and one other relative were charged in Las Vegas with 15 counts of racketeering, money laundering and fraud.

For a long while, many western nations used all sorts of excuses for no cooperating with China on running down and returning these criminals. We acted as if we were Brazil in the bad old days. This sort of "It's OK to steal from other banks" ethos can't be leveraged anymore now that China has many treaties and agreements with all other first and second world nations. They are now concentrating on third world nations as I have detailed here.

This is part of the world wide push for diplomacy and legitamacy Hu and Wen have crafted. They intend to close all possible loopholes that are exploited by dishonest executives. Note that the very tardy, elephantine-slow trial of big Bush supporter, Ken Lay and his gang are only just going to trial and these creeps won't pay much of a price for destroying the economy of California for a year, tipping America into steep debt thanks to their screwing around with California's power grid and why aren't we arresting Exxon's executives for price gouging? Heh.

Anyway, the Chinese are very strict.

The three former managers of Kaiping fled to Canada and the United States via Hong Kong in late 2001 as they were suspected to be responsible for massive loss of the state-owned bank.

Yu was sentenced to 144 months in prison in a federal court in Las Vegas in February 2004 over money laundering, entering the United States with forged documents, and immigration fraud.

He was returned to China two months later on China's promise to exempt him from death. Before Yu, China's suspects of severe economic crimes had never been sent back from the United States through former law procedure.

According to Chinese laws, grave economic crimes could lead to a bullet in the back of the neck. To avoid death, thousands of corrupt officials have fled abroad, especially the United States, where they could also lauder the embezzled funds.

So, he won't be executed, he will get to serve a life sentence in a Chinese labor camp. Guess which is more merciful?

But then, we coddle rich criminals. We find it very hard to even slap them on the wrist. But then, look at our government! Seems having a criminal record on one's resume means moving higher up the hierarchy.

As for "grave economic crimes," looking at all the stats of our rapidly deteriorating economic system, a certain someone should be happy he toiled to destroy the USA and not China.
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Long Range Economic Indicators Are All Pointing To Disaster

2006-02-08T14:32:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Despite all the economic pundits pretending oil has little to do with prosperity or stocks, the DOW went up today based entirely and only on the news that oil is slightly cheaper than in December. Alas, this is due to a 44% hike in imported oil! The graph above clearly shows how, after the first oil crisis, when Reagan started tax cutting when oil prices soared, our collective economic good health has deteriorated in dangerous ways, making our country vulnerable to foreign powers as our economy dies.

From the Northern Trust Company, Mr. Kasriel:

On the day that Ben Bernanke, the nominee for the next Fed chairman, appears before the Senate Banking Committee for his confirmation hearing, it is only fitting that his predecessor's legacy be reviewed. Although it is true that under Alan Greenspan's command of the Fed the U.S. economy has experienced unusually low volatility, this low volatility may turn out to have been a Faustian bargain. That is, the low volatility was achieved by increasing the indebtedness of the U.S. economy, especially the household sector, to record levels. And increasingly, the debt is owed to foreign entities, not ourselves. The final chapter on Greenspan's legacy will not be written until we see how this indebtedness issue is resolved.

Collective home asset equity extraction has averaged, over a 50 year span, around zero since the people using their homes for second mortgages and other debt instruments have been balanced by people paying off their mortgages. It is not uncommon, before 2000, to see most people competely paying off the last of a mortgage by the time they retire, if not much earlier.

Now, it is the reverse. We have gone from zero to -$280.3 billion last year. This is way off the historic scale.

Here is another chart, based on Mr. Kasriel's fine research. Unlike him, he notes only when Greenspan took over, I note the much stronger correlation between tax cutting and shooting up debts that accompany each cycle. I remember the excuse for the first Reagan/Bush tax cuts: many middle and lower classes were, due to hyperinflation, shoved into higher tax catagories and wanted relief with some justification. But upon getting this surprising hike in income, they seem to have run off and used it to corral more loans. I know how this works, they say, "Hey, my take-home pay is now $600 a week! I can afford a second mortage for $35,000! Imaging what I could buy with that loot!" and so many merrily ran up big debts.

The public budget then ran up huge debts due to lack of tax revenues and so the twin cycle of destruction, rising personal and public debt, was born, for we managed to keep an even keel fiscal/personal culture for fifty years, now that was completely destroyed and is now in total ruin.

Clinton raised taxes and Greenspan raised interest rates and thanks to Russia suddenly entering the oil selling market, forcing OPEC prices down, we had a great economy. Despite few Americans being able to run up huge debts, there was a lot of business and a great deal of investment in infrastructure/corporate building. Now, just like at the beginning of the Reagan/Bush reign before, we have steep oil price hikes and inflation beginning to rage. Our trade deficit stinks because this is one of the few ways we can reduce overhead caused by oil inflation so it seems as if inflation is low but it is not for instead of seeing worker's wages inflating we are seeing them deflate just like the three year period leading up to the Great Depression!

From Marketwatch:

"Demand (for more oil) seems to be holding up OK, despite relatively high gasoline prices at the pump," Shankar said, pointing out that a surge in product imports -- up 44% on a year-ago basis -- is "clearly helping bolster product stocks in the U.S."

Motor gasoline inventories were up 2.8 million barrels, the American Petroleum Institute said in a separate report also released Wednesday.

"The strong build in gasoline coupled by the fact that every major product has inventories above the high end of their average range for this time of year will add to the recent bearish sentiment," said James Williams, an economist at WTRG Economics.

Far from being good news, this shows starkly how facts that are horrible are seen as great by standard economic pundits. Namely, we import much more oil now right when even oil soaked Bush admits we are "oil addicts"! And just because everyone has decided to purchase oil no matter what, it being hard to change SUVs mid-stream, this means Americans are going to buy more and more what? Any idea?

I know the answer to that riddle!

More debt.

This last year, every time corporations have cheated oil inflation by destroying America's working class/middle class, investors have celebrated and Bush is heady with joy, they think all of this terrible stuff will end up with America ruling the planet.

Look at my top chart. Foreigners are rapidly buying up our assets! No sovereign nation can be sov-anything if they are insolvent!
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Thanks To Manipulating The YEN, Toyota Dominates World Markets

2006-02-07T09:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Japanese, master manipulators of currencies and closed markets, boast that they are near to total domination of world auto markets thanks to total penetration of American auto markets, thanks partly to ineptitude on part of American corporate executives, the oil crisis and super cheap yen. All economic pundits that watched the yuan closely while ignoring the yen should hang their heads in shame.

From the New York Times:

A weak yen boosted Toyota's profits by 14 percent at the end of last year, as Japan's largest automaker moved within striking distance of overtaking General Motors this year for the title of world's largest automaker.

The weakening of the yen over the last year, from 106 to the dollar to 117 during the October to December quarter, provided $1.1 billion of Toyota's operating profits of $4.1 billion for the period. Net profits jumped 34.1 percent, $3.4 billion. The profits largely benefited from a one time effect of a recalculation of Toyota's holding in former UFJ Holdings after the bank's merger to form the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

What a surprise---to everyone but me. I am glad the NYT is finally noticing that the Japanese "lend/lease/strangle America" game is killing us. Of course, the article won't go on to the obvious next points, how the Japanese now own our foreign policy, our trade policy, everything, because we have to go to them ever few months, hat in hand, to beg for them to buy more bonds, to extend us more credit, to give us alms.

Do they want our industrial base strong?

Haha. And who bombed Hiroshima?

They don't want a reaction here which is why they prop up our dying industries and install factories here to do the final assembly of stuff they produce. They don't like us, they think we are lousy workers, fat and poorly educated, but we are customer number one so they cleverly keep us toddling along even as they lay on one chain around our necks after another. This is why their foreign policy is even more belligerent than ours!

From Xinhua net:

China on Sunday voiced strong indignation over the remark of Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso, who credited Taiwan's current high education standard to Japan's colonial rule.

"We are shocked by and express our strong indignation over the Japanese foreign minister's remark of overtly glorifying invasion history," Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said.

The elevation of the arrogant racist, Aso, was a slap in American as well as Chinese faces. This man is unrepentant about using slave labor during WWII and this includes using American soldiers as slaves. Why we tolerate him and Koizumi elevating war criminals as gods baffles me but not very much since it is very simple.

We sold our souls to the devil so we can drive around like lunatics, puffed up, imagining we rule the world when we can't even control our own trade or our own borders.

And the reason I am not published in America concerning this matter, not linked by ANY leftist economic blogs is very simple: they all think free trade=wealth while not understanding that free trade, when one party always has to ask for a loan, isn't free at all.

It comes at an increasingly steep interest rate and the principle isn't being paid off at all. We are all in the grip of a loan scheme that means perpetual slavery. Who wants to hear that? We want to think, owning Japanese cars makes us rich and powerful.
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Toyota Races Towards Number One World Wide
It All Falls Apart
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If The Democrats Don't Get Some Power This Election, Much More Social Programs Will Be Destroyed

2006-02-06T20:00:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The budget for this year was passed and it was all guns and little butter. Next year's budget is due to be thrown into the same guillotine and more chops off of social services and other necessities and more guns, lots more guns, especially many more military bases overseas in former Soviet States and in Muslim countries that hate our guts.

From the Washington Post:

President Bush today proposed a $2.8 trillion budget for fiscal 2007 that would cut billions of dollars from domestic programs ranging from Medicare and food stamps to local law enforcement and disease control, while extending most of his tax cuts beyond their 2010 expiration date.

Under the plan, a budget deficit -- expected to reach $423 billion this year -- would fall to $183 billion by 2010, more than meeting his goal to cut the deficit in half by 2009. But it would rise again to $205 billion in 2011, reflecting the cost of the extensions in the president's tax cuts.

It will fall to "only" $205 billion if we have no deep recession which we will have, or severe inflation which we will get or high interest rates which are creeping in rapidly. Well, the entire burden of "balancing the budget" will come from axing any and all programs that service the American people.

All those red state warmongers who think guns are cool better learn how to play Russian Roulette with a fully loaded handgun set on automatic fire.

As the rich get richer and the poor discover they are slated for death or, if "immigrants", KRB concentration camps, the rest of us will be kept in line by promises of fighting to steal all the oil, diamonds and gold in the world. We will all get to play Siegfried and go into Fafner's cave and kill the dragon for the Ring der Nibelungen and of course, star in the opera, "Götterdämmerung," aka, "the End of Times" or "Bevis and Butthead win the Trifecta."

This disgusting plan to plead poverty even as we thump our Pentagon kettle drum all over the planet, means many Americans will die. Yes, die. Already, they are fixing things so people using oxygen tanks will have to pay cash for the privilage of breathing. No more free ride for them! No, no.

Even as Cheney hauls an entire operating room around the world with himself, he has to kick granny out of her own wheelchair and suck up all her air cause he can't get enough for himself, poor baby.

"We have set clear priorities that meet the most pressing needs of the American people while addressing the long-term challenges that lie ahead," Bush said in his budget message. "The 2007 Budget will ensure that future generations of Americans have the opportunity to live in a Nation that is more prosperous and more secure."

Why does anyone think, being up to the eyeballs in debt for the foreseeable future will make us rich? This is ridiculous. And if balancing the budget was so important, they could do that tomorrow by returning the tax rate to the Clinton levels which was just fine, thank you.

The budget, for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, is a tall order for a Congress facing a difficult election year. Defense spending would rise 6.9 percent, from $411 billion to $439 billion. Homeland security spending would rise by 3.3 percent.

But all other operations of government would fall by $2.2 billion, or 0.5 percent.

The plan looks OK if you forget the inconvenient fact of inflation. Despite pitching inflation tables to not reflect reality, it still shows significant inflation. Since all government agencies have to budget for energy to run their vehicles, buildings, offices, etc, just that element alone is going to take out a huge bite, it already has.

So now it is time to hate Venezuela. They use their oil for themselves. They don't let the big Texas oil buddies of Bush seize all the profits and run off to Aruba to get lost.
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Like The Ferry On The Red Sea, Bush Ignores The Raging Economic Fires

2006-02-06T15:09:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The American Ship of State is exactly like the one in the news this week. It caught on fire, the captain ignored pleas to turn it around or call for help, he told everyone, it was under control then when it sank, killing nearly everyone, he took off first in his own liferaft!

From the Wilderness:

China has resolved to shift some of its foreign exchange reserves -- now in excess of $800 billion -- away from the U.S. dollar and into other world currencies in a move likely to push down the value of the greenback, a high-level state economist who advises the nation's economic policymakers said in an interview Monday.

As China's manufacturing industries flood the world with cheap goods, the Chinese central bank has invested roughly three-fourths of its growing foreign currency reserves in U.S. Treasury bills and other dollar-denominated assets. The new policy reflects China's fears that too much of its savings is tied up in the dollar, a currency widely expected to drop in value as the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits climb.

In recent years, the value of the dollar has been buoyed by major purchases of U.S. Treasury bills by Japan, China and oil-exporting countries -- a flow of capital that has kept interests rates relatively low in the United States and allowed Americans to keep spending even as debts mount. Some economists have long warned that if foreigners lose their appetite for American debt, the dollar would fall, interest rates would rise and the housing boom could burst, sending real estate prices lower.

This all was from the Washington Post. Goodie gum drops. They now notice the obvious only because I read Chinese Commie papers, I know the real slush fund is one trillion bucks! And this was their goal. They now have us over a barrel of oil.

From Associated Press:

Russia's foreign minister warned against threatening Iran over its nuclear program Monday after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reportedly agreed with a German interviewer that all options, including military response, remained on the table.

Oil prices rose after Iran ended all voluntary cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, saying it would start uranium enrichment and bar surprise inspections of its facilities. Traders fear the dispute could disrupt supplies from OPEC's second-largest oil producer.

Russia absolutely 100% delights in high oil prices. Unlike the USA, they are a net exporter of oil. Why aren't they eating all their oil like we did? Hmm.

Every Russian isn't tooling around in SUVs, boasting about how big and bad they are. The Russians are happy with high oil prices. The Chinese aren't so oil dependent so they can afford to bid up the price of oil. We are stuck in a ferry filled with SUVs that is on fire and sinking.

The government certified housing loan entity, Fannie Mae, hasn't filed the official yearly financial report all corporations traded on Wall Street must file. From MSNBC:

Fannie's accounting problems also are under investigation by its regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, as well as other federal agencies. The regulator's report is expected by the end of the first quarter.

Due to the investigations and lack of financial reports, Fannie had warned the continued listing of its stock on the New York Stock Exchange was at risk.

But the Securities and Exchange Commission, in a recently posted decision dated Jan. 19, approved a NYSE proposal that allows the exchange to decide in rare circumstances that a company that has failed to file timely financial results remains suitable for continued exchange listing because of its position in the market.

So, coincidental with the elimination on reporting the M3 numbers which shows us how many dollars the Fed prints (ie, the real inflation indicator!) Fannie Mae can't show its underwear anymore because she ain't a virgin, she's been raped.

This is yet another fire burning merrily.

From Marketwatch:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that next year's budget Pentagon request at $439 billion, while the biggest discretionary piece of the U.S. budget for 2007, is historically a smaller percentage of U.S. gross domestic product at 3.7% to 3.8% than it has been in the past. "It is a relatively modest portion of every dollar but it is something that does underpin the freedom, the opportunity and the prosperity that exist for the American people," Rumsfeld said during a Webcast budget briefing on Monday.

As our budget sinks in the Red Ink Sea, Rummy lies about his contribution to the many fires that now are overwhelming our ship. The military budget is gigantic, is is the exact same size as our budget deficit and it is for junk we don't need and that couldn't protect us on 9/11 or hurricane season because nearly the entire kit and kaboodle is overseas! And alot of the miltary procurment spending is there, too! This is how we get "allies" who are really parasites.

The pros are getting very nervous and eyeing the life rafts. From Marketwatch:

"It's a nervous market," said Michael Metz, chief investment strategist at Oppenheimer & Co. "We're getting mixed signals on the economy, and on corporate profits with some big headline disappointments."

Reflecting this nervousness, Prudential chief investment strategist Ed Keon slashed his recommended equity weighting to 55% from 100%, citing unfavorable economic and inflation data, concerns over earnings growth and political tension in Iran.

Well, instead of putting out the fires, the insane captain ordered the crew to throw barrels of oil on it. Naturally, the flames now roar.

From the NYT:

Frustrated relatives of passengers aboard an Egyptian ferry that sank Friday stormed into the offices of the ship's owners earlytoday, looting the place and demanding that the company and the government provide information about of their loved ones.

Again and again. Angry poor people in all sorts of places are showing tremendous anger. Washington, DC is as quiet as a Jr. High School first period. Zzzzzz.

I think we are all in for a very rude awakening but by then, the captain will have rowed to shore and is with daddy Bush, talking about going fishing in their latest speed boat, purchased with funds from Carlyle.

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Robert Stein, A Neo Con Con-man, Indited For Stealing Millions In Iraq, Has a Long Arrest Record Just Like Bush

2006-02-02T19:53:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

We let the Supreme Court and the GOP and the media conspire to foist upon America a man with an arrest record longer than his arm, much of which has been scrubbed or in the case of insider trade, white washed. So it is no surprise to me so see all his choices for underlings, filled with obvious criminals aside from the Iran/Contra criminals his father pardoned. Arrest them all, they are all thieves.

From the New York Times:

It's sad just how predictable it was that the reconstruction of Iraq would be marred by fraud, dishonesty and profiteering. Last week Robert Stein Jr. was charged in federal court with a slew of crimes allegedly committed while he was a financial officer for the American occupation authority in Iraq. The affidavit in the case says that Mr. Stein accepted over $200,000 a month to steer contracts to an American businessman whose companies often did poor work and sometimes did no work at all.

The case is a painful reminder of the absolute dearth of planning for rebuilding Iraq after the war. According to reporting by James Glanz in The Times, Mr. Stein was convicted of a fraud-related felony in 1996 and also fired from a job in 2002 for falsifying payroll records and invoices. The American government then sent him to help oversee construction projects in Hilla and the Shiite holy city of Karbala, with $82 million in taxpayer funds.

Like Ken Lay or Abramoff, Bush surrounds himself with criminals. If not already criminals, they turn into such thanks to the rank imperial corruption which slithers like a snake around DC.

These traitors just merely steal, they produce absolutely nothing and many Americans and other humans DIE thanks to them and their 'incompetence' is to themselves, "Great job, Brownie" sort of lunacy is dangerous to the USA and this is beyond "one bad apple" sort of garbage, this is rotten to the core apples.

Every single enterprise Bush and his gang of fellow criminals attempts ends up looting the public purse which is why, when they cut necessary services to American citizens, they have the gall to demand more money for an obviously corrupt war and for tax cuts for rich people.

Just like the criminal who had his daughter fested at her Bat Mitzah by spending several million dollars, money gained suspiciously, selling "bullet proof vests" to our military that were inadequet, these traitors are interested only in seeing how much money they can charge to the American taxpayer in the form of IOUs which will be charged to us all at some onimous, future date.

Can we survive three more years of this level of incompetence and criminality? I don't think so.

Arrest them all. And kick the media to the curb for enabling this.
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$34 $40 billion Cut From America's Services But $70 Billion More For 9 Months More War!

2006-02-02T13:45:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Even as Congress brutally cuts vital services to many Americans, basically throwing them to the wolves, they turn around the very next day and shower twice as much money on our futile war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Arrest these traitors!

From Associated Press:

The White House has told Congress to expect requests for about $70 billion in additional funding for the ongoing budget year for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and $18 billion more for hurricane relief, a Senate GOP aide says.

The details of the requests are not finalized but President Bush's budget for 2007, to be submitted next week, will reflect the totals for planning purposes, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Another $2.3 billion to combat avian flu is also expected.

The funding for Iraq is in addition to $50 billion approved in December and should be enough to conduct the war through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

For all the non-math wizzes out there, this means the stupid wars are costing us over $120 a year. This is an amazing amount of money for running after barely armed civilians! More soldiers were blown up today or sniped. Bush was able to gag Cindy Sheehan but she now has five, six, seven more fellow Gold Star Mothers.

The weeping and wailing of these parents has been heavily muffled by huge blood gifts from the dictator who pays them all a pretty penny for losing loved ones and so the heart is softened, the voices stilled by this little pot of gold which is like the end of the rainbow for fiscally stressed families.

Just like the 9/11 families were soothed by a million dollars each.

As I pointed out in this article here, the slashing of funds to Americans won't make a whit of difference in stemming the hemmoraging of red ink. So long as our wrists are slit by war coupled with unfair tax cuts to the rich, this deadly bleeding will accelerate. And the GOP plan is to pretend we have no more funds for Americans and that good Americans should quielty die in some out of the way place so the fat, treasonous, corrupt pigs can continue feasting on the corpse that was America.
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216-214, Right Wing GOP Congress Cuts Aid to Elderly, Students, Farmers, Poor

2006-02-01T21:50:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

After giving Ted Stevens his $250 million for a fake bridge to nowhere and more tax cuts for the rich, Congress stems the tidalwave of red ink by voting $40 billion to Americans here at home who need it. Meanwhile, the war in Iraq gets $100 billion a year! All it brings them is death and it is now going to kill Americans at home, too.

The bill would cut the growth of education spending by more than $16 billion between 2006 and 2010, and make reductions in the spending on Medicaid and Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly, as well. Republicans cast it as an important step toward restraining programs that, they said, would gobble up the entire federal budget if left unchecked.

But with the Senate taking up a tax-cutting measure at the same time, Democrats sounded what will be a prominent election year theme: that Republicans were cutting taxes for the rich at the expense of services for the poor. And at a time when Congress is consumed by a lobbying scandal, Democrats also complained bitterly that the measure was written without them, behind closed doors with the help of paid representatives from the drug and insurance industries.

"This is a product of special interest lobbying," said Representative John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, who is the longest-serving member of the House, "and the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber as we consider it today."

Well, America? What gives? Will we let Diebold fake yet another "election"? Will the media attack nonstop, any Democrat who threatens corporate rule? Or will be they lay off, now that they have their tools in the Supreme Court ready to strike down any measures that help American citizens?

Guess what! They still want more tax cuts, more monopolies. Waiting for this seven headed beast to be satiated is a fool's errand.

Americans thought they would never have to pay for the fake war on terror. Well, the bills are now coming due and Americans will die. If one doesn't have money for "co-payments," one is up the river Styx without a paddle on a one way trip to Davy Jone's locker.

Score yet another victory for "the Devil is Death, Death is Death" (Skull and Bones chant) Bush.
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Now the Google Balloon Pops, Fewer Bubble Opportunities Rise

2006-02-01T13:45:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

There is still funny money out there and plenty of fools willing to part with it. Just like all the previous manias, the Google mania collapses rapidly. The price was bid up on the IPO to insane heights and now that sober reality sets in, the price collapses, dragging down the stockmarket which is running on fumes anyway. Like America itself.

From Associated Press:

Google Inc.'s rapid financial growth decelerated in the fourth quarter as the online search engine leader's profit fell below analyst expectations for the first time since its August 2004 initial public offering.

Tuesday's disappointing financial report rattled previously bullish investors, causing Google's stock price to plunge by more than 12 percent in a backlash that wiped out $16 billion in shareholder wealth.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company said its net income nearly doubled from the previous year to $372.2 million during the final three months of 2005.

Things are going just fine at Google but the demands of the vastly inflated stocks meant vastly insane profits must pour into the pockets of the investors which is a demented belief.

Just like the dying housing market, it doesn't matter how good something is, if the market has grossly overbid prices, they collapse suddenly and disasterously. When this happens, it can drag down entire economies, nay, countries and even the entire world, if the bubble is bad enough.

The amount of shareholder wealth shed by Google during extended trading exceeds the current market value of General Motors Corp.

For the most part, the energy giants are keeping the stockmarkets seemingly afloat even though their very success spells doom for all others who must consume, at some level, the ever increasing costs of buying from energy companies.

Meanwhile, our government continues its head long plunge into the abyss. From AP:

The government expects to borrow a record $188 billion in the January-March quarter, even more than it anticipated three months ago, the Treasury Department announced Monday.

The total will surpass the old mark of $146 billion set in the first quarter of 2004, a year in which the federal budget deficit hit an all-time high in dollar terms of $413 billion.

And you can thank Alan Greenspan for this! He is the ultimate enabler. He is the one who made debt cheaper than inflation and thus encouraged this insane binge of spending, he didn't yell when Bush cut taxes, he thought it was great.

And the GOP goes from one disaster to another. In the news is the Democratic party is quietly pulling in more money than the Republicans this time around, now that Abramoff isn't funnelling multimillions in funny money and the other K Streeters see the writing on the wall and are now anxious to purchase Democrats instead of Republicans.

Where do we fit in this puzzle? We don't. At least, so long as we are quiet.
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$60 Billion Boost From the Feds Finished
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Deflating Working Wages Plus Currency Turmoil Leads To Great Depressions

2006-02-01T09:14:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Economists seem to be puzzled by the obvious. If workers lose wage values due to even "slight" inflation, after several years of this, business collapses and a depression sets in.

From Angry Bear:

In its last meeting with Alan Greenspan at the helm, the FOMC decided today to raise interest rates (i.e. the Federal Funds rate) yet again. See Mark Thoma for analysis of the accompanying statement.

Despite David Altig's response to my worry that the Fed might overshoot (I think David and I differ more in our assessment of inflation risk than in our analysis of what happened in 1995 - inflation probably seems to be a less pressing problem right now for me than for him) I remain concerned that monetary policy may be becoming too tight for a slowing economy with stable inflation.

I suppose the writer at Angry Bear, Kash, might not be troubled by raging inflation in the cellar but I certainly am since, thanks to my husband's disability, we live on a "fixed" income which is supposed to keep up with the rate of inflation but ever since the Feds redesigned how they gage inflation, we fall further and further behind and only due to my ability to do things like logging and chainsawing trees, can I beat inflation by not using any fossil fuels at all at this point.

Inflation is roaring in the lower levels. Workers aren't merely falling behind, the real inflation rate is over 10% a year since food and fuel eat up a much greater share of the dollar for people at the sub $40,000 level. This has happened before! During the Roaring Twenties, worker compensation began a slow collapse. Workers tapped into cheap financing to buy things, buy stocks, buy properties. This meant money still flowed about, sloshing through one bubble after another. When the real estate bubble began to collapse, money fled to the stock market for one last, final bubble.

Recovering from this required murdering about one third of the inhabitants in Europe and Asia as well as destroying nearly every major city and sinking most of the ships at sea. Only because untouched America could grind out endless planes and ships, were the various empires able to limp along. Despite this, it still took us all 25 long years before reaching the DOW Jones levels of 1929! And then we shot past it because worker compensation was shooting up faster than the rate of inflation.

The oil crisis when we hit the Hubbert Oil Peak began a long period of inflation which workers fell behind more and more. This was solved by creating cheap credit via the Japanese who wanted to dominate our markets. So, we surrendered to Japan and made them our bankers. As worker's wages fell more and more behind, they were told that tax cuts will fix things. Each tax cut bouyed up the hopes of the workers because the government also increased red ink spending greatly each time.

This will lead to a currency disaster greater than the inability of England to generate funds when Germany collapsed, pulling down all the world's banks into the Great Depression.

Every company today is reducing working compensation. Mostly by outsourcing but also by ruthlessly eliminating previous wage gains sometimes by over 50%! This is accelerating as the currency collapses.

Greenspan raised interest rates not because he wanted to but because his policies have caused such mayhem, savings have already collapsed to levels not seen since the great banking crisis of 1933! This alone should make one's hair stand on end!

The housing bubble is busting. From No More Miser:

The number of foreclosure notices filed against Massachusetts homeowners last year reached their highest level since the housing bust of the early 1990s, as homeowners fell behind on their mortgages and lenders began the process of taking back the properties.

It's happening, in part, because our national housing pyramid scheme, whereby we all agree that prices will go up forever and thus we can all buy whatever house we want, even if we can't afford it, knowing it will inevitably be worth more in the future, is starting to break down:

... Homeowners who stretched their finances to the limit to buy a home found it more difficult to make their payments on variable-rate mortgages as interest rates rose, but they were less able to refinance their loans at more attractive rates -- or sell and pay off their debts -- because the value of their homes fell or remained flat.

All across the country, desperate people are trying to juggle rising fuel costs, dropping wages, rising property taxes, and are failing since they can no longer go to the Home ATM machine and have it spit out more loot. Once this process sets in, it feeds itself.

After utterly destroying America, Greenspan moves on to England, he will happily increase their problems, too. From BBC:

Former US central bank chief Alan Greenspan has agreed to become an honorary adviser to the UK Treasury.
The announcement by Chancellor Gordon Brown comes less than seven hours after Mr Greenspan's near 19-year tenure as Federal Reserve chairman ended.

Mr Brown said his new adviser would help the Treasury in the UK develop its thinking in areas relating to global economic change.

England is already way down the road of ruin. They are so feeble now, they can't even pay 5% of the costs of occupying Afghanistan nor even 1% of the cost of occupying Iraq. The North Sea oil rigs are in classic Hubbert Oil Peak decline. This is why they invaded, unlike us, they and all of Europe consume Iraqi oil, along with Japan, our present owners. The Japanese don't mind us running up a huge bill, I think they can absorb another trillion or so before collapsing, too.

But they can't do it at $500 billion a year. This is too much which is why we are suddenly talking about balancing the budget. But not too seriously since Bush is pushing for more tax cuts. The Democrats are muzzled on all this because they want to keep on spending on social welfare which is good but not good since an Argentina-style collapse will mean no social services, anyway.

No one, absolutely no one dares talk about tax hikes. The rich who own the media, won't allow a peep about it without a lion's roar attack from the army of whores working there. And the working class can't handle even slight tax increases since they are being hammered by inflation.

So everyone is waiting passively for the dominoes to fall and they are falling increasingly fast.
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65% Worker Dissatisfaction With Jobs And Investors Fearful of Future

2006-01-31T10:37:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The media trumpets the notion that the economy is doing great but according to Marketwatch, readers fear total catastrophe this year. This contridiction is easily traced. For we have been in debt so long and so deeply, we think it will be the eternal status quo. This is why Congress and the Feds are sleeping at the wheel as we drive off the economic cliff.

From Marketwatch:

Recently we asked readers about 20 possible triggers that could cause "Meltdown '06." We hit a nerve, got 445 responses, read all of them and tallied the scores. Only 2% of you are optimists. The others used colorful terms to describe the network of triggers that makes up our unpredictable economy and markets: Perfect storm, tsunami, avalanche, dominoes, house-of-cards.

Time for me to put together all my economic cartoons illustrating what is really happening, isn't it? Why was Mr. Farrell of Marketwatch surprised to get so many negative responses, indeed, freaked out responses? It isn't due to just my blog.

Rational thinkers know some simple facts. "That which goes up must come down", "The higher they rise, the harder they fall," "Brilliant sunsets are followed by big blows," "Easy come, easy go," "A fool and his money are soon parted," and a host of other chestnuts that never lose their relevance. Going back to before the Roman Empire, there have been plenty of stories told about these same things. Jesus, in the Bible, talked all the time about interest rates, the rich, debts and stewardship. Obviously, 2,000 years ago, people figured out these simple fiscal concepts to the degree that popular preachers could talk about them and be understood.

So why the sudden stupidity here in America? At the top levels?

From the Washington Post:

However, as Sept. 11 illustrated, Greenspan's legacies include a Fed full of battle-tested veterans who helped him calm the markets and steer the U.S. economy through the 1987 stock market crash, the international currency crises of the 1990s and two recessions, according to analysts and other observers.

Greenspan and his band of robbers didn't guide us through anything. 1987, we capitulated to the Japanese and launched the deadly "Japan soaks up excess debts, stabilizes the dollar by removing inflationary dollars from world markets and we will surrender in the trade wars and let Japan have one-way trade with us." What a fricking victory that was.

The currency collapses in the '90s was all Rueben's hard work with Clinton and the Democrats. The Republicans wanted currency collapse!

Ruebens isn't only gone, he is one of the top voices in the wilderness, bewildered by the developing mess.

The Mad Hatter continues his Mad Tea Party. From AP:

President Bush will renew his call for personal accounts within Social Security and ask Congress to renew tax cuts and curb the growth in benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid in his 2007 budget request next week, according to administration officials.

Democrats will fight for more spending and the compromise will be, everyone will spend on everything yet again. This has been the compromise for the last five years. To prevent any pain no matter how slight, everyone has agreed to simply charge more and more debt.

Greenspan's great trick has been a one trick pony: go to China and Japan, hat in hand. Our entire government does this to such a degree, we have ceased to have any Asian policy at all. It is all written in script we can't read.

The working class is getting antsy. Reuters:

Economic growth coupled with increasing employment options have led 65 percent of U.S. workers recently to consider launching some sort of job search, according to a survey released on Monday by salary consulting firm Salary.com.

The survey of 14,000 workers and almost 400 human resources managers also revealed that bosses haven't caught up with the changing mind-set of employees who are enjoying more options.

"The economy getting better has opened a door of opportunity to consideration," Bill Coleman, Salary.com's vice president for compensation, told Reuters.

Isn't this article insane? As always, the media has to prop up things no matter how they teeter on the edge of the cliff. In normal times, people don't look for a different job, they demand pay raises for the jobs they have.

Only they can't! Why? Well, no one is offering higher compensation otherwise why would 80% of America's workers be lagging simple inflation? In good times, wages can drive inflation, workers demand more but because more money is in the system and being spent, sellers can charge more and get it.

This isn't happening at all.

Wages are dropping behind inflation. People are going steeply into debt to make up the difference. Sellers are desperate, cutting prices, cutting labor, cutting corners in a race against time. I don't see people getting better jobs, and the fact that a whopping 65% of workers in this survey are very unhappy and dream of a better paying job is scary. Where are the jobs? If 65% of the jobs are awful enough for workers to want to leave them, are they all going into the 35% good jobs? I doubt that.

Congress is in session. The rush to eat the last dishes of the Great American Post WWII Feast will feature us scrambling over each other to ram more food into our mouths, slithering across the fine china, dispensing with using forks and knives, we cram it all in, fat bulging, and then the table will collapse under our weight.
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Only Once in the Last 100+ Years Have Americans Not Saved Anything At All--1932/1933

2006-01-30T16:38:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The only time Americans were unable to save any money at all, collectively, was when the entire banking system collapsed around the entire world. This singularily bad event, a cascade of bad credit and defaulting on loans, began during WWI when all the major empires of the world went in debt to the USA to fund that massive kill-fest.

Associated Press:

Americans' personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005, something that hasn't happened since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to finance the purchases of cars and other big-ticket items.

The Commerce Department reported Monday that the savings rate fell into negative territory at minus 0.5 percent, meaning that Americans not only spent all of their after-tax income last year but had to dip into previous savings or increase borrowing.

Each item, standing alone, doesn't signal disaster but when everything is aimed the same way, it is a disaster. The trade deficit, the savings deficit, the budget deficit all at once.

With employment growth strong now, analysts said that different factors are at play. Americans feel they can spend more, given that the value of their homes, the biggest asset for most families, has been rising sharply in recent years.

But analysts cautioned that this behavior was risky at a time when 78 million Americans are on the verge of retirement.

"Americans seem to have the feeling that it is wimpish to save," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York. "The idea is to put away money for old age and we are just not doing that."

So why aren't we all saving anything? Inflation is raging, it has been raging for quite a while, in the area of necessities. This inflation has hit us all very hard. Inflation in things we can put off buying has been nonexistant because it can still be outsourced. Namely, energy, being at the base of the economic pyramid, the thing that literally powers the higher levels, is a negative force here, it drives inflation, and if we export jobs frantically to cheaper labor venues, the lowers the price, squeezing out the inflation from energy but at the cost of destroying our labor compensation which means, since our personal finances are way below this deflated inflation, it still is running at a rate greater than we earn.

Sigh, this means, simply, there is such great inflation, we can't keep up even when it is reduced to only 3%. For our incomes are -2% or worse! The solution to this was to reduce taxes and reduce other things until we got a situation whereby everyone is on an escalator down while energy is on an elevator shooting up to the 100th floor!

Interest rates, set ridiculously low, below the rate of inflation, meant that aggressive savers like myself, are hammered as the government confiscates my money faster than I can squirrel it away. When they were paying me 1.7% for my hard earned cash when inflation was roaring along at over 3%, this hammered me hard. At least I could keep up with this ridiculous inflation but only by cutting lots of firewood and spurning using any other form of energy to heat my home, for example. And of course, purchasing a gas miser car, my only purchase this year.

People living in the lower 1/3 of the economy are suffering from a 10% inflation rate with virtually nothing to protect them. These are the people paying 23+% in interest rate on unsecurd loans. The general population is paying over 5% loans on their properties which is still, in the lower classes, below the rate of inflation but not enough to make up the steady erosion in income. From the NYT:

Millions of low-income people would have to pay more for health care under a bill worked out by Congress, and some of them would forgo care or drop out of Medicaid because of the higher co-payments and premiums, the Congressional Budget Office says in a new report.

The Senate has already approved the measure, the first major effort to rein in federal benefit programs in eight years, and the House is expected to vote Wednesday, clearing the bill for President Bush.

In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Bush plans to recommend a variety of steps to help people obtain health insurance and cope with rising health costs. But the bill, the Deficit Reduction Act, written by Congress over the last year with support from the White House, could reduce coverage and increase the number of uninsured, the budget office said.

Over all, the bill is estimated to save $38.8 billion in the next five years and $99.3 billion from 2006 to 2015, with cuts in student loans, crop subsidies and many other programs, the budget office said. Medicaid and Medicare account for half of the savings, 27 percent and 23 percent over 10 years.

Sigh. With 3% inflation every year, cuts will have to be draconian just to make up the difference. Deflating balloon, meet inflating money machine!

The Great Depression is very misunderstood by people. Money lost value because no one had enough. So everyone had to drop prices to accomodate the lack of sales and to make a profit, had to drop wages over and over again. This proved to be a world deathspiral that was ended by a very nasty war and the confiscation or destruction of about 20 million people's lives and homes (conservatively, actually, the destruction was much greater). Britain was the world-girdling empire which has to confiscate not only all the savings of Britain in order to pay for the moronic mess of WWI, they had to go into debt to the USA. And had so little economic excess left at the end of the war, they had to force Germany to pay "reparations" which Germany got, in the form of loans from the USA.

When Germany defaulted due to the lack of excess income due to persistent inflation which, at one point, shot up to infinity, France and England's currencies collapsed. This then spread across to America, thanks to the bubbles we created, anticipating easy, eternal flow of funds from England to America via Germany.

Back then, the pound was the world's currency and all others were weighed against it.

We are in a similar but maybe worse situation here. We are more and more like Weimar Germany, owing money to anyone and everyone as we try to keep up the fiction that there is no inflation and we can live like kings on pure nothingness. I don't see much hope about this since we are not being told the truth. The fiscal manipulations are keeping the truth at bay, but not for long.

The fact that no one in our government, not a soul, is yelling about us going over the debt limit is like Sherlock Holmes' "The dog that didn't bark" story. Namely, they are all in collusion on this deception. I remember when Ross Perot made a big thing about budget deficits when it was 50% less than today. Now, he is silent, thanks to the huge tax cuts he got.

Bush is going to start the really nasty budget cutting now. There is no more easy credit left. They all know this. Nervously, they sift their shifty eyes back and forth. The budget deficit has to be dropped to $0 really really REALLY fast and they can't do it. They want to drop taxes even more on the rich because even the rich are not keeping ahead of inflation except at the very tippy top of the pinnacle: about 2000 people live in that rarified world. The top people at Exxon which reported a profit of over $10 billion this year, Chevron, all the oil companies, rolling in dough, Bill Gates and who else? I really wonder.

Most, though, are losing ground, thanks to higher and higher oil prices. They want tax cuts, more benefits, more loans, more everything.

It isn't coming anymore. Or, the price will just be too high. One thing that has struck me, is the fiction that the need for loans from China, "off shore banks" (um, wow, Enron loans!) and Japan have already carried a very steep pricetag. It is just, outside my poor blog, no one who understands this are saying a peep.

Time to go skiing at Davos! Whoopee. Note how many Democrats are there, having fun.
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America Is BANKRUPT--Shot Over Debt Ceiling Illegally

2006-01-30T10:11:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Normally, when we approach the debt ceiling, warnings go out, the press talks about it, Congress debates "Democrats tax and spend" and everyone makes a big hoo-haw. Even under our dictator, Bush, they had this ritual. The Feds had to pull strings to limp along until the new ceiling was passed. Now, dead silence as we sail over the limit and into outerspace.

From Financial Sense University:

In a shocking development, the Treasury Department website is openly stating that as of January 24, 2006 our national debt stood at $8,185.3 billion and on January 26th at $8,190.5 billion.

Yet the US national debt ‘ceiling’, the maximum amount of debt the US government may hold at any one time, stands at $8,184 billion – a full $5.5 billion less. Although called upon by John Snow, Congress has not yet passed an expansion of the debt ceiling and so the US government is now operating in technical default.

You may recall that when last the debt ceiling was approached in the months surrounding the 2004 elections, the Treasury department furiously employed every accounting trick in the book (and then some) to avoid breaching the limit. They even went so far as to take the unprecedented step of borrowing $14 billion from the Federal Financing Bank to cover up the shortfall.

The entire facade of pretending Congress controls the public purse has collapsed. Along with advise and consent on appointments as our dictator unilaterally appoints people to top positions during Congressional snooze fests and presidential "comments" negating implimenting laws passed by a GOP Congress, as Congress prepares to pass a pro-Executive power stooge and Greenspan hands over the Fed to an idiot who is naive at best, we go over the debt limit with zero consequences aside from the Chinese rubbing their hands so hard with glee, they set their palms on fire.

Here are the stats: From the government's own site:

Current Amount

01/26/2006 $8,190,567,748,779.48

Current
Month

01/25/2006 $8,181,906,259,395.82
01/24/2006 $8,185,315,076,347.87
01/23/2006 $8,174,270,999,692.73
01/20/2006 $8,175,743,292,992.87
01/19/2006 $8,176,948,650,558.59
01/18/2006 $8,173,852,299,316.96
01/17/2006 $8,170,524,286,973.93
01/13/2006 $8,158,672,995,833.87
01/12/2006 $8,159,084,910,068.58
01/11/2006 $8,161,933,710,814.20
01/10/2006 $8,165,647,324,627.69
01/09/2006 $8,160,257,013,544.35
01/06/2006 $8,161,507,578,194.35
01/05/2006 $8,160,320,491,591.57
01/04/2006 $8,165,858,995,532.37
01/03/2006 $8,153,881,581,212.99

The flood of red ink has turned into a tsunami. And the tsunami is with a catagory 5 fiscal hurricane.

Many Democrats as well as Republicans were not in DC worrying their silly little pin heads over the Alito appointment. They were in Davos, scheming about world economics, playing games, playing footsie with the real rulers. The Swiss military kept French farmers and Korean workers and German machinists far away. It was terrifically cold, too, so the demonstrators were indoors. Meanwhile, our rulers and our so-called representatives spent most of their time conspiring with each other and the Saudi Royals at how to stop Hamas!

A tiny organization in a non-existent state! A very small people with no army, no navy, no airforce. Locked in a sweltering ghetto built by European and American Zionists. These people have consumed most of the time and energy of the great and powerful at Davos. Why?

Well, the game plan is for the Apocalypse to come and clean the earth of most humans. They will claim, it was accidental. No one knew that a big hurricane would swamp the poor in New Orleans! No one could guess that terrorists would attack the World Trade Center over and over again despite them not only sayng they would do it, but actually doing it more than once!

No one ever expected the Iraqis to resist our invasion. And no one expected the revolutionaries that are crawling out of the woodwork all over the Muslim world to attack oil/gas facilities! And no one expected American debts to shoot through the roof! No one expects the coming World Wide Depression and World Wide War!

This is because humans hate facing reality. Our Ice-age brains built in this mechanism that creates optimism despite the facts on the ground. Unfortunately, it has a very nasty side effect: delusions lead to insane actions that terminate lifeforms.

I will note here, I didn't want to scare people about the asteroid but have changed my mind: you better be terrified of it. Even if it misses, sometimes, they hit and they have hit in the recent past, while humans were very much homo sapiens, walking this earth. They hit continents humans didn't live on, back then. Not now! Gads.

On with the show.
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Rich People Now Own 60% of Wealth, Unions Lose More Pay

2006-01-29T06:57:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Republican Robbing the Hood has already concentrated 60% of the wealth into the hands of 1% of the population! The GOP wants more tax cuts for them and more wage concessions from workers. This will lead to the collapse of the government.

From the New York Times:

In 2003 the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, up from 53.4 percent the year before, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the latest income tax data. The top group's share of corporate wealth has grown by half since 1991, when it was 38.7 percent.

In 2003, incomes in the top 1 percent of households ranged from $237,000 to several billion dollars.

For every group below the top 1 percent, shares of corporate wealth have declined since 1991. These declines ranged from 12.7 percent for those on the 96th to 99th rungs on the income ladder to 57 percent for the poorest fifth of Americans, who made less than $16,300 and together owned 0.6 percent of corporate wealth in 2003, down from 1.4 percent in 1991.

This is 100% due to tax cutting and free trade. Right now the very rich are meeting in Davos, trying desperately to extend more free trade so they can freeboot the planet and leave us all in debt and destruction.

This insane program might be interrupted by an asteroid strike or summer of nonstop hurricanes or something.

The deliberate program of extending deceptively cheap loans to the hardpressed middle class then strangling them by reducing income is how the middle class has been killed in the past in many other eras. Namely, after the first flush of imperial wealth, the working class and farmers have to compete more and more with slave labor brought in or used from afar by the ruling elite. If workers protest, they are either killed or lured into the military and used to watch over the slaves for a small remittance or shipped to rebellious colonies far away even as a tidalwave of new slaves are brought in to depress wages even more.

Small farmholds disappear and are replaced by huge estates serviced by slaves toiling for the ruling class.

Our Founding Fathers feared this but their feeble barriers to this collapsed day one thanks to the fact that many of them owned slaves who toiled on huge estates while the masters tried to create a democracy. The tensions leading to the Civil War were fueled partly by rage of the working class trying to compete with slaves. Luckily for the working class, slaves aren't motivated to work hard.

The NYT article doesn't address the vital issue of debts. So here is my second pyramid of power showing what happens if the housing boom, produced by cynical money manipulations between China, Japan and America:

If the cheaper than inflation loans disappear (and they will!), this is the good scenario. The bad one is, the base, already pretty unstable, collapses and the bottom 2/3rds pancakes into extreme poverty. This can happen. That would lead to very explosive political actions not too different from Germany 75 years ago. Already, inflation is eating the lower classes alive, actually, the illness has spread to 80% of America's workers. There is no unrest only because of the super cheap loans extended to homeowners willing to go into hock up to the eyeballs.

In banking collapses, the money saved by thrifty people evaporates, quite literally. Namely, the government seizes it by fiat. They also will seize all valuables in bank vaults "in a national emergency" when they need funds for the IMF or someone. This is where the famous "keeping your money in your matress" comes from. Literally, people who keep money aside at home end up being the only ones with money.

Almost no one is alive today who remembers the "bank holiday" we enjoyed the second year of the Great Depression. Literally, there was no money. Hitherto, one could exchange dollars for gold. This was made illegal, a new currency was launched that was not redeemable for gold and any gold in circulation was squirrelled away in the huge vaults at Fort Knox, under heavy guard.

Thanks to our WWII victory, we relaxed and trusted fiat paper but this collapsed in the Vietnam war failure. Once again, the government began to suction money out of bank accounts. I remember this really well, it really pissed me off and is the sole reason Nixon was driven out of office.

Thus, Bretton Woods I which reestablished the dollar at half its value.

Reagan's tax cuts caused another collapse and Bretton Woods II when we set up the Japanese buying our debts/American dollar keeps value since it flows out and never comes back, the debts being turned over and over.

Clinton started us on the road to solvency which is why Bush was favored by the real rulers who liked the idea of all wealth flowing to them while all debts flow to the working class.

This liberalization effort without a socialist base has caused the financial situation of the working class to collapse. From the New York Times:

The bad news is that the figure stood at 7.8 percent — less than a third of the rate of the early 1970's.

Even worse for labor, the rate of unionization has further to fall, according to most labor economists and experts in industrial relations. "In the immediate future, unions will carry on shriveling in the private sector," said Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard.

While union leaders attribute the weakness to everything from insufficient organizing vigor to a hostile political environment, unions, in a way, are victims of their own success. They have obtained better wage and benefit packages for workers, and in an increasingly competitive business world, that is working against them. Businesses in some competitive industries cannot afford unions.

So why did we drop our trade barriers---remember, Japan has gigantic trade barriers to this day!---and end up on this treadmill down? Workers love cheap stuff, they feel they can buy more of whatever if it is cheap. So they were conned into dropping trade barriers. Lowering prices didn't last long because the government cut taxes to the rich and immediately cranked out money for them, this caused inflation and the only way to "fix" it is to either cut wages at home or ship industry to cheap labor sites.

Now the spiral is a death spiral. Workers were lured to their deaths by promises of tax cuts which made them feel rich....for a year. As soon as they pocketed their lucky windfalls and happily voted for their tormentors to take over, we now live in a spiral to hell as the workers struggle to make ends meet, going deeper and deeper into debt. Under Bush, debts ballooned, tripling and now quadrupling in size.

Mr. Bryson said that even in the private sector, there were still industries in which competition was modest and corporations could raise prices without fear of losing markets to rivals. On economic grounds, these industries would seem prime candidates for union expansion.

What kind of businesses are we talking about? Hospitals would be one place to look. Energy companies would be another. Or why not an even bigger prize? Perhaps the labor movement should forget about cars and focus instead on a company that has crushed much of its competition: Wal-Mart.

Incredible. Organize hospitals? Hahaha. I remember what happened to any striking nurses.

There is a company that moves strikebreaker nurses from facility to facility. Unlike longshoremen, nurses aren't murderous or have deals with the Mafia to enforce strike picket lines. So every strike, without exception, was brutally broken by the hospitals. So there are no nurses who can wrest concessions from anyone. Indeed, the pressure to lower overhead in the medical field is extremely intense just like it is, everywhere.

Unsurprisingly, Bush's response to all this is totally insane.

The White House said it did not believe that the 2003 tax cuts had much influence on wealth shares. It also said that since wealth is transitory for many people, a more important issue is how incomes and wealth are influenced by the quality of education.

"We want to lift all incomes and wealth," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman. "We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap."

Indeed. An education gap.

It certainly is, but not in the way these clowns think! The working class has been hit by a tidal wave of propaganda for 100 years and many can't think their way out of a paper bag at this point which is why the government and the rulers spent billions re-educating everyone to hate socialism and love the very rich. As I have pointed out, the well educated upper middle class lost relative value to the top 1%. And the well educated, too, is very deep in debt and very dependent upon the home value ATM machine cranking out money magically. Once that fails, they, too, will fall into the abyss.
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At Davos, The Chinese Warn Us Our Credit Is Near Limit

2006-01-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The Chinese at Davos, the World Economic Forum, warn us the credit limit has been reached and we are in for a world of hurt now. And that Bernanke is not competent. I agree.

From Reuters:

Ben Bernanke is poised to take over at the U.S. Federal Reserve next week just as financial markets are heading into a very volatile period for which he is untested, senior bankers said on Wednesday.

Dealers and investors worry that Bernanke, known as a sophisticated academic and inflation targeter, is more focused on fighting consumer inflation than current dangers of markets awash with cheap cash and a sharp U.S. dollar drop, they said.

I remember when his appointment was announced. Stocks went up, many economy bloggers thought this was Jim Dandy and here I was: Bernanke Will Continue Same Policies Until We Die. Haha. Seems like more than one foreign banker is screaming this today in Davos! Do they read me or what? Like, Cassandra hits again!

Then there was this article: Fed Chief Will Be Foolish Bernanke. Again, the things I pointed out about him seem to be exactly that which is irritating bankers in important places like China.

Zhu Min, executive assistant president of Bank of China, one of China's top four banks, said markets are extremely sensitive to Bernanke's succession. "You have a very, very vulnerable financial economy. I expect to see volatile markets," he said.

translation: "Foreign devils, we have you by your throats and we will now start tormenting you by dumping dollars on international markets when we bid up the price of oil when you bomb our ally, Iran." Of course, he is well trained to be polite and obscure but still threatening.

Zhu said his background left markets uncertain about how Bernanke would respond to the challenges they face.

Masses of cheap credit left in markets despite 19 months of Fed rate tightening -- which now has been joined by other major central banks -- presents a huge vulnerability, he said.

Excess liquidity is the key issue confronting financial markets today, not consumer inflation, he and Roach said.

The concern is that, if the Fed tightening cycle is nearing its peak, what happens if a financial shock occurs and markets do not need the usual Fed response of pumping in more money, given this excess liquidity, Zhu said.

"People have no idea where there is a shock absorber. That is why you will have market volatility," Zhu said.

I am not a people so I happen to know where the shock absorbers are and they ain't here in America, they are over in places like China. And the shock absorber there is rapidly morphing into a shock giver, namely, they aren't going to soak up all the excess currency we crank out forever. The limit is rapidly approaching.

A hallmark of Greenspan's era was to slash interest rates to soften the blow of financial market crises. Mostly recently the Fed cut rates to 1 percent after the 2000-2002 high technology stock crash. Since June 2004, it has tightened rates to 4.25 percent and is signaling that hikes are nearing an end.

All B.S. The interest rates were dropped to Japanese levels with the permission of Japan who got very significant concessions from us, note that their markets have stayed locked shut like there is no such thing as trade while ours gapes wide open! We did the same deal with China, too, and both soaked up an amazing $2 TRILLION in red ink. This is a very significant sum of money. We were able to then party like there was no tomorrow and not pay for our collapsing stockmarket. We even used the credit extended to us to run up huge debts in housing and consumer purchases.

We are utterly addicted to charging these two countries and promising to pay next Tuesday we forgot there is an upper limit. Well, we are getting really near it and there is no sign we are taking it seriously. The Chinese are about satiated and are now turning inwards to resecure their own empire. Meanwhile, Bush is suggesting cutting the National Guard, cuttting all social programs, gutting much of our interior systems, New Orleans isn't gettting rebuilt, no one is preparing for the inevitable huge hurricanes that are lurking in super warm oceans, just waiting for the sun to creep a little more to the north.

This is my earlier cartoon about the new Fed ~~thief~~ chief. A quote from the article:

Professor Barnanke invented the "Global Glut" to explain why hostile foreign governments are offering us seemingly unlimited loans. He thinks they are doing this because America is a good investment. I say, they are setting a trap.

A childish man. Bet he falls for those Nigerian e-mail scams!

From one of my first articles about this guy:

We are all taught that saving is good -- indeed, Americans are often chided for spending too much and saving too little. But what if the problem of today's global economy is that people elsewhere -- in Europe, Asia and Latin America -- are saving too much and spending too little? Former Princeton University economist Ben Bernanke argues that this is precisely the case. He calls it "the global savings glut."

This article is hilarious. The economist who came up with this latest excuse for our irresponsible economics reminds me of small children when they are doing something very naughty. "He MADE me do it," the child whines while pointing to usually a smaller and younger child. Good mothers seldom are impressed with this sort of reasoning.

There is no "global glut in savings". There are many billion and millionaires who squirrel massive amounts of money out of country so it won't be taxed or traced. We see how they operate like at the trial of the CEO of Tyco. he wails, "I didn't know where the money came from or where it went, the kids over there made me lose all that money and bankrupt my company!" Of course, the kids over there were all in his pay and under his supervision.

And then there was this cartoon from last November. I wish America would change course but it is too much fun, shopping until we drop.
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Failing Fiat Currency: Now Middle Eastern Oil Exporters Want Unified Currency Like a Euro

2006-01-27T15:56:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Using the American dollar as the "fiat" currency of the world off of which all other currencies are measured, is beginning to shake at the base. As we exploited our powerful position just like all previous empires exploited their control over currency matters, we begin to cheat everyone, tempted to cut corners so we can rake in goods with increasingly worthless script. This is why no currency stays on top for more than 100 years no matter how big the empire.

From the Middle East Forex:

The Gulf states hope to reach agreement on the principles of a monetary union next year and press ahead with preparations for a single currency along the lines of the euro, Bahrain Monetary Agency Governor Rasheed Al Maraj said in an interview released yesterday. He told the Financial Times Deutschland in an interview to be published today but released in advance:

"We are in the process of drawing up the convergency criteria. Our aim is to reach agreement on the details by 2006."

As is the case in the euro area, countries wanting to join the single Gulf currency would have to fulfil certain economic conditions.

And so it goes. Iran is opening a bourse where it will trade energy using only euros as the fiat currency. This is because the euro has been more valuable than the dollar. The Japanese keep the yen artificially cheap by buying up much of the excess paper money America merrily prints. This is becoming rapidly more and more difficult to do since paper printing can, as Germany proved in the mid 1920s, easily printed into infinity.

Obviously, the oil selling nations are getting annoyed with our tendency to float our curreny on their oil. Right now, they suckered us into providing them with full military protection from each other and whoever, but this expensive project projecting our power is now pulling us under.

Despite the impending collapse of American fiat supremacy, Wall Street is acting as if we are in the old system whereby the entire planet has to prop us up, financially, if they want to keep our currency valuable so they can use it instead of euros. From Money.CNN:

"The market is ignoring higher oil prices and focusing on the good earnings over the last few days, especially from Microsoft and the other techs," said Peter Cardillo, chief market analyst at S.W. Bach & Co.

Investors may have also taken comfort from a weaker-than-expected gross domestic product growth (GDP) report, in that it played into hopes that the Federal Reserve can end its rate-hiking campaign sooner rather than later.

See? The obviously onimous bad news is good news because we will simply make interest rates way below the rate of inflation. Americans aren't saving anything, anymore, because interest rates are ridiculous, thanks to the world buying up frantically all our red ink in the hope of keeping our paper script with some value! So we imagine this nifty theft of goods will continue, unabated, forever.

I don't know the exact date when this will collapse but the two places to look are the Middle East and China and I see storm clouds over both places.

Thanks to the Japanese, Greenspan could pretend that interest rates are like a gas pedal, you press down and drive them higher, the car slows down (a preverse car!) and if you let up and drop interest rates, the car speeds up! Whoopee! Everyone bought into this ridiculous idea. So, to keep the economy afloat when it was sinking, he set interest rates so the economy could boom...When there was no economic reason to create a boom. This boom will bust us all because it pulled everyone and everything into a vast, gigantic pit of debts that are now nearly impossible to climb out of, like the gravity pool of a black hole.

From Associated Press:

The economy grew at only a 1.1 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter of last year, the slowest pace in three years, amid belt-tightening by consumers facing spiraling energy costs.

Even with the feeble showing from October through December, the economy registered respectable overall growth of 3.5 percent for all of 2005 — a year when business expansion was undermined by devastating Gulf Coast hurricanes.

This "growth" means mostly buying foreign goods. Period. We went on a buying binge which is why our trade deficit shot through the roof, going over $800 billion this year! This is impossible to sustain.

The purchase of energy in particular, isn't good news. That grew, a lot, in dollar denomination. But we didn't use more energy, everyone, absolutely everyone, is frantically trying to cut back and this causes a side boom in energy-efficiency purchases which will peter out as the money runs out for the lower classes can't buy energy efficiency or energy soon enough!

I am so lucky I own an extensive woods and heat my home with it.

Relations with Canada and Mexico, our neighbors and nearest trade partners, deteriorates as our own situation deteriorates. From AP:

It has been a trying week for Mexico-U.S. relations: a tense border confrontation between U.S. agents and apparent drug traffickers, a Mexican group's offer to print maps of the Arizona desert for illegal migrants and an exchange of terse diplomatic notes.

The administration of Mexican President Vicente Fox has its share of quarrels with other countries, but this promised to be one of the trickiest — involving the country's northern neighbor and largest trading partner at a time when the U.S. Congress is debating immigration reform.

For Mexico, migration to the United States is a mainstay of the economy; U.S. officials, on the other hand, see the issue in terms of national security and border safety.

The GOP is getting very nervous about the coming two elections because they just might be run out of office if the Democrats can get their act together (gads!). They know, the average American is very aware that their jobs bring in less and less because bosses can hire illegal aliens under the table and this is undermining wages in many industries such as home construction.

So, just like in the twenties when we shut down immigration from Europe to a great degree and eliminated it from Asia, the race to protect the Homelands will now begin to pick up steam. And we will discover the flat world isn't flat at all, it is very round.
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Thanks to Media Propaganda, Polls Say Americans Believe Both Parties Are Corrupt

2006-01-27T10:11:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

For the last three weeks, the media whores, K Street enablers, all, have succeeded in muddying the waters so much, most Americans now believe both parties are equally corrupt and equally benefit from this corruption. The graph above clearly shows this is a false belief deliberately created by the GOP and media owners.

From Americablog:

Talk about out of control! The GOP has tripled the number of projects and almost doubled the spending since they took control of the House. I guess when you make so many promises to wealthy donors there's going to be a price and the bill is left with the American taxpayer. I always hear about the fiscal conservatives in the GOP but they sure as hell don't seem to be around.

The bloggers on the left have noticed the bellowing of the beasts working for media owners. As always, when the media wants something, they get it.

The media benefits from all this corruption in several ways. They get to form monopolies, for example, we see this right now as WB and UPN merge, it is becoming a vast, heaving beast, fewer and fewer independently owned anythings left at this point.

This massive beast eats most campaign contributions. So they have a double vested interest in keeping corrupt politicians afloat. This is why they are so lax about the Abramoff story, indeed, openly and cheerfully lying about the facts of the matter. The huge firestorm over the Washington Post's open lying about Democrats getting even one dime from Abramoff forced them to back down on their contention that the Democrats got bribed, too, but they hid this as much as possible from view so all the bloggers know this and our audience knows this but 90% of America hasn't heard a peep about it. The original story was unchanged, they didn't edit it nor mention it on the front page.

The only story that made the news out of this spat was the usual, "Bloggers are rude, they are nasty, they hurt us, we need blogger ethics." Oh, how very clever of the media whores.

Keeping people confused, confounded and corrupt is the sole reason the major media exists. IF and when they tire of Bush, they will suddenly turn on him, all of them, just like Nixon. Right now, they are happy as bugs in one's bed in Manhattan. Slurping up the red juice, smacking their lips and sucking harder. This is why the tidal wave of red ink is now a historic tsunami and everyone stands around, wondering if this is OK, oh, look, the sea is retreating and we can pick up fish instead of using nets! Run out onto the beach, everyone!

From the NYT:

The poll also signaled concern for Republicans as they prepare to defend their control of the House and the Senate in midterm elections this November. Investigations into Congressional corruption are taking a toll as the elections approach: 61 percent of Americans now hold an unfavorable view of Congress, the highest in 10 years.

This finding holds particular peril for Republicans as the party that has been in charge. More than half of the respondents said they believed that most members of Congress would exchange votes for money or favors.

Republicans were seen as more likely to be unduly influenced by lobbyists. And the Republican Party is now viewed unfavorably by 51 percent of the nation, its worst rating since Mr. Bush took office. By contrast, 53 percent said they held a favorable view of Democrats.

The telephone poll was conducted with 1,229 adults, starting Friday and ending Wednesday. Its margin of sampling error was plus or minus three percentage points.

The usual still holds: everyone hates Congress but loves their Congress critters because they bring home pork and pork has been ladled out with a vengence under GOP domination. The downside of this pork is totally invisible. Interest rates are still way behind the rate of inflation so one can happily pile on endless debts because it makes more sense than saving. The Chinese and Japanese aren't calling in their chips....To our minds, they really are, but it is carefully hidden from view, as readers of this blog are aware.

The pork continues, the latest rip off is a lunatic scheme to "save money for healthcare." From the NYT:

When it comes to medical benefits, millions of Americans already have a health insurer. Soon, many will also have a debit card and a bank tied to their medical plan.

Banks, credit unions and money management firms are now quietly positioning themselves to become central players in the business of health care, offering 401(k)-type accounts to cover future medical expenses.

This is a scheme to eliminate all health care insurance. Instead, we "save money" for our medical care. Say, you have a heart attack and your account has only $25,000 in it. The operation costs $150,000. So while lying on your stretcher, you sign an IOU for the remainder.

Oh, la,la,la! I just can't wait! If we come to this, well, this is called "the Great Die-off." This is when bankrupt America tells us all to go to hell in a handbasket, only the very rich will get medical care and the rest of us can die young, isn't that sweeeet?

Why do Americans even contemplate such a bizarre, stupid system? We are saving nothing as it is, we are negative savings! And we are going to park $25,000 in health savings accounts? And what if we tap them and then little Mary gets luekemia? Debt time? Sell the house? Sell the car? Kill the kid?

If we fall for this scam, we deserve what happens next. The NYT poll shows 60% support for a full health care system, ie, we all have good health insurance. Support for the single payer plan was impossible when we had 40% unionized labor but now it looks like GM is going under with a $10 billion red ink year, they are demanding no more health insurance for their workers and huge pay cuts so even these people who have been content to watch fellow Americans suffer from lack of insurance are now feeling the cold wind blowing off the glaciers and are beginning to think, maybe national coverage would be a wonderful thing, no?

This would be expensive but still cheaper than the Iraq war. But then, we are supposed to be afraid of all those Iraqi terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Another Bush/media whore production that has gone totally out of control.
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Unions Think Hari-Kari Won't Kill Them...All Unionized INDUSTRIES Are Rapidly Killing Off Labor's Gains

2006-01-24T09:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Unions think the only thing is to keep older members happy, not fighting the Free Trade Death Machine. Clinton betrayed the unions and they betrayed him. Now, no one wants to help unions, not even they, themselves, it seems. No one wants to lead the charge and talk about international worker's alliances like pre-WWI labor organizers recognized as a life and death issue.

From the Chicago Tribune:

This underworld is now the reality, or a disheartening look into the near future, for thousands of workers as the industrial Midwest undergoes the most wrenching economic transformation since the bad old Rust Belt days of the 1970s.

With the forces of globalization leading companies to slash costs, move out of the country or go under, workers who don't bring a clear competitive advantage to work every day are vulnerable to having their pay cut.

At this moment the risk is clearest in the auto parts industry, where Delphi Corp. has filed for bankruptcy court protection, and its chairman, Robert "Steve" Miller, has threatened to cut wages from $27 an hour to as low as $9.50.

But look at any number of industries where American factory hands are competing against the Chinese or the Cambodians, whether in textiles or furniture or appliances, and the fallout is the same: The standard of living for the Americans slips.

"For the United States, it's the end of labor as we once knew it," Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote recently.

This is a most excellent article. A must-read. It is all so pathetic, too. Reading about all these atomized, small people, desperately trying to cling to the sides of the various liferafts being launched off the sinking American Economic Titanic! And those inside the rafts, beating them off with the oars, fellow workers, hoping to row at least their own carcasses to that far shore, damn everyone else.

A version of this new reality is taking place in Decatur, where Caterpillar Inc. introduced hundreds of new hires last year. Job creation was the good news. The bad news: Starting wages were cut to $10 an hour from $20.

The result is that Caterpillar and Decatur have become a laboratory of sorts for witnessing the impact of wage cuts. Working and living side by side are Caterpillar employees doing the same kind of work for different wages. The lucky ones are paid according to the old scale.

Classic divide and conquer. The "lucky" workers are set in a conspiracy against the newer, more servile, more helpless, workers. Instead of uniting across the globe, we can't even unite within the same work stations.

Workers are trained in America to not blab about pay. Everyone hides their pay stubs from each other as they try to sneak bids past the others, making themselves valuable at the expense of all the others. This is a dog-eat-dog style of capitalism, the kind the bosses love. It is hell for workers. This is why, in old days, workers playing this game were quietly punished by either falling into boiling metal vats or being accidentally run over or other unfortunate "accidents" or failing that, shot dead at home.

For it was a war, a full scale war, fighting for union rights. Every OSHA rule, every union contract was stained with blood. The entire history of labor organizing has been the chronicle of one raging battle after another. Then, most unions won, thanks to the Democrats. We had a brief time of plenty and happiness.

Now, it is near full nightime, the wolves are howling at the door and the remains of the labor movement lean against it to keep the wolf out and yelling, "Eat my weaker co-workers!"

This disgusts me.

Smith doesn't talk about his lifestyle with new hires at work because "I try not to rub their noses in it." He is a reserved person, but he has no hesitation in sharing his thoughts on what's happened at factories like his.

See? He is a privilaged worker, a pet of the boss, he is bitter about this but instead of doing something, he ducks out the door and after licking the bosses' boots, he runs back to his pretty kennel to entertain himself and not think about what is going to happen to his children, all of whom are going to college, hoping to escape the funnel that is sucking down wages across the entire spectrum.

80% of the employed this year lost ground as wages fall behind inflation.

From Seattle PI:

One short test drive and Army Spc. Todd Strange is gushing "Oh, sweet! I love it!"

He's been home from Iraq a little over 30 hours and already he's trading in his little 2001 Dodge Neon for a muscle car - a 2006 Mustang GT, V-8 engine, price tag $26,320.

"I'm buying the car to show off, pretty much," admits Strange, 26, of St. Louis.

Business has been booming in this southeast Georgia town since just after Christmas when thousands of 3rd Infantry Division troops from neighboring Fort Stewart began returning from a yearlong tour in Iraq and finding their bank accounts flush with combat pay, tax breaks and bonuses.

Just like with Nazi Germany, if workers play Russian Roulette, the survivors who don't lose arms, legs or their sanity can go on big shopping sprees when they come home! The public purse is open to them and to only them.

All other workers get steadily stripped of whatever they earn. And the more we indulge our soldiers, the worse all the other things will be. This very expensive war is what is partially fueling record red ink, all of which has to be paid for by allowing our creditors destroy the shredded remains of our industrial base. Sweet, isn't it?

This is a Haloscan patch repair job, the comments work on any new postings but not on this one. Thank you for being patient.
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Cowed American Workers Vacate Winchester Factory So It Can Be Shipped Off To Japan

2006-01-21T12:32:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

How pathetic are we? Well, the right wing, Second Amendment, We are Number One guys at Winchester were told this month, the factory is closing and moving to Japan, sorry, stupid buddies, we don't need no stinking American workers, tough titties, die. Interesting. They just walked home, dejected. Not like the French or Italian workers. They know how to fight. Heck, ditto, Chinese peasants.

From the New York Times:

Come spring, the Winchester rifle, immortalized as the gun that won the West and rode into the sunset with John Wayne, will be made in Portugal and Japan.
*snip*
But workers leaving the factory on Wednesday, resigned to losing their jobs, were bitter about the plant's closing.

"It's depressing, said David Pallanti, 58, who has worked here for 14 years, packing guns. "Who's going to hire someone 58, 60 years old?"

Dressed in blue jumpsuits, with their names emblazoned in red above the breast pocket, Jim Close, 44, and Donald Harris, 39, are metal finishers at the factory. Each man has two children. They have worked here for 6 and 10 years, respectively.

On a break during their shifts, they stood next to the entrance of the plant under a moody, wind-swept sky, near a sign that reads: "Through these gates pass the greatest craftsmen who make the world famous Winchester firearms."

The message left Mr. Harris cold. "That's just a sign now," he said, before heading back in to work where he pours acid on steel to rustproof the guns. "It used to mean something."

Baaaaaa. Mooooooo. Like dumb animals led to the slaughter, the American worker patiently bows to the bosses, as the bosses drive off in their mega limos to their mega jets to fly to Aruba and sail their mega yachts, the American worker is left holding a bag of shit.

As I keep saying, the workers in say, South Korea, go bezerk if anyone messes with them. They will travel to far ends of the earth, even America, to make a point. They will even shed blood.

The peasants of China have resorted to open battle, fighting the rulers, forcing them to change. Here is an example. From Xinhua net:

More than 7,000 officials have withdrawn their investment in mines amid a nationwide crackdown, said Chinese government here Friday.

The Ministry of Land and Resources said that 2,325 people, either government officials or company officials in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have retracted stakes in the non-coal mines, among whom 707 faced criminal liabilities.

Earlier statistics from the Ministry of Supervision showed that nearly 5,000 officials have taken their investment out of the coal mines. Friday's figure brought the total number to more than 7,000.

Forcing officials to withdraw investment in mines is widely regarded as an important step to curb frequent mine accidents. Investigation showed that a large number of accidents occurred because unlawful and unsafe mines were given a green light to operate by local governments after officials obtained stakes in the mines.

As K Street and insider trading in top GOP legislative offices, for example, should be cleaned thusly, too. By fiat. Geeze. We know, the GOP runs America, all they have to do is what Hu and Wen are doing, namely, executing corrupt officials and forcing the others to turn their pockets inside out! Heh.

Yeah. Bring on DeLay!

Anyway, this would have never ever happened if the Chinese people acted like American workers. They actually fought, quite literally, with weapons, like, F-I-G-H-T. Ever go to a football game? Isn't this what cheerleaders scream?

2nd Amendment fiends like to yap that guns make our people powerful. Well, only after we can buy them from the Japanese and Chinese, that is. And then, we can't use them for anything, of course. Power, as Benjamin Franklin knew, grows out of the barrel of the pen, for the pen is mightier than the sword! And American workers penned themselves in by listening to and consuming right wing propaganda set out by rich people who want sheep and cows for workers, not people who can fight, like F-I-G-H-T back.

To fight back, one needs to form alliances and join in other people's battles. This means forming big unions like internationals since unions can't gain power unless they have allies across the planet because of free trade and flat earth and the New World Order which means the mega millions order us around.

Boo.

Well, I believe, even cowed, helpless, pathetic American workers might wake up some fine day and grasp the truth: they are doomed unless the FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT back! Like real time fighting, not WWW fighting, not fake displays of Rambo rot, nope, the real, honest thing.

Gads. Are we men or mice?
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Washington Pest

$60 Billion Boost From Feds Finished, Stock Market Super Decline On Bad News

2006-01-20T20:19:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Unlike the Nikkei, there was no need to shut down trading but the gloomy day at the end of a dangerous week means more trouble next week. Bin Laden only attacks financial or diplomatic centers so Wall Street has lots to be gloomy about. Not to mention all that red ink which is like Lady Macbeth's manicure job.

Marketwatch:

U.S. stocks closed sharply lower Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average turning negative for 2006 and posting its biggest one-day loss since March 2003, after oil prices hit a four-month high and General Electric Co. and Citigroup Inc. disappointed with their fourth-quarter earnings.

10,667.39, -213.32, -2.0%) closed down 213 points at 10,667.39, its lowest level in two months. The blue-chip index is down 50 points from its 2005 close and is 2.7% lower on the week.

The Nasdaq Composite Index ($COMPQ:

2,247.70, -54.11, -2.4%) slumped 54 points, or 2.4%, to 2,247, the worst one day performance for the tech-rich index since September 2003. The Nasdaq is down 3% on the week.

The S&P 500 Index ($SPX:

1,261.49, -23.55, -1.8%) dropped 23 points to 1,261 and is down 2% on the week.

"The market was overdue for a short term pullback and a combination of rising energy prices and some high profile earnings misses have provided the catalyst," said Michael Sheldon, chief market strategist at Spencer Clarke LLC.

Well, I would assume that Bush yapping about bringing WWIII down upon our heads and then immediately, old blow em up bin Laden joins in along with his number #2 sidekick and about 10,000 #3 side kicking Rockettes, all chiming in that war is an excellent outcome and we should all brace ourselves to howl at the moon. Warrrrooooo.

Well, Bush's Most Excellent Adventure is going to be fun! This is where we yell that we want to shut down a major oil pumping country and thus, disarm them, too. Well, today, the world announced they are ending their subsidizing the American oil monster, to keep us afloat, they gave us their oil reserves so we could motor around in our SUVs, sneering at everyone.

Well, world oil prices are climbing and the oil pumping nations are ceasing their headlong pumping, the Chinese already assured the Saudis that they don't have to drop world oil prices, China has a fricking trillion dollars in petro pennies so they can keep the price up and don't mind it one bit, even. So there!

The Saudis nearly went bankrupt during the nineties and they bought off all the unrest by raising the funds flowing to families there so they don't want to see oil prices collapse, they are afraid commerce will collapse but China assured them today that this won't happen, China is very happy to sign futures contracts covering the cost of oil at a higher price than the cheapskate Americans who want it below $21 a barrel, the Chinese said, the present price is perfectly OK.

Ahem. Our entire culture depends on cheap fossil fuels. Note how we are not struggling to formulate alternatives to this.

I was driving around last week when it was below zero, every house I passed at night, without exception, had no curtains closed over any windows. Windows, no matter what kind, are energy losers. Yet no one wanted to bother keeping out the cold. I have many windows on my passive solar house and you can bet, I have heavy curtains drawn at night in winter!

This la-de-dah attitude is going to be the death of us all. Instead of spending money on fine curtains, etc, we spend money on fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, we cook the books in the Iraqi "elections". From the BBC:

raq's Shia-led United Iraqi Alliance has won the country's parliamentary elections, but failed to obtain an absolute majority.
The alliance took 128 of the 275 seats - 10 short of an outright majority. Kurdish parties have 53 seats and the main Sunni Arab bloc 44.

The Shias will now be expected to form a coalition government.

A number of Sunni politicians have alleged fraud, and international observers criticised irregularities.

Those who do not accept the results will have two days to appeal before they are certified as definitive.

Shades of the USA! Well, we can't complain they got what we don't have!

Obviously, the Shiites won a resounding majority which is why the data wasn't released for over a month! A month! During which the Sunni rioted and raged. So now, the books were cooked so the Shiites have to get an alliance with someone. As if this is going to stop the meltdown which is already raging like a Texas grass fire in winter.

We can't attack Iran unless we stabilize the Iraqi oil supply. Or our fake front stock market will be hammered brutally as well as the American people running around, screaming for Bush to be tarred and feathered over high fuel costs. Already, the grumbling is getting pretty loud. The American Home ATM machines are shutting down, one by one, as interest rates rise, inflation rages and of course, starting yesterday, everyone was getting their new minimum payment credit card bills. Oh my god.

Even the stupids advising people to buy, buy, buy in the stockmarket can't disguise that turkey. It is bigger than the float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
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Iran Moves Financial Assets Out of Europe And To China

2006-01-20T12:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Iran moves swiftly to rearrange currency and asset markets in preparation for confrontation with America. We aren't going to win this particular fight.

From the BBC:

Iran has started moving its foreign exchange reserves out of Europe in a bid to shield the country from the threat of sanctions, reports suggest.
Iran's central bank governor said the country had begun withdrawing assets from European banks, the Iranian Students News Agency reported.

Most wars begin as financial rearrangements. In this case, Iran has a very powerful sponsor who is helping them along. The BBC won't say who it is but I know who it most likely is: China.

China is playing a very delicate game of Go, one smart move after another. Here is their busy week so far: From Xinhua net:

Saudi Arabian Ambassador designate to China Saleh Alhegeian said here Friday that King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz's forthcoming China tour will be a visit worth expecting.
*snip*
In 2005, the two-way trade volume rocketed 59 percent year on year to 14.5 billion U.S. dollars, about five times that of 2000.

Saleh said the visit will become a new milestone in developing the friendly relations between China and Saudi Arabia.

As two important nations in the world, China and Saudi Arabia will open new areas of cooperation and continue to strengthen exchanges in diplomacy, economy and trade, said Saleh.

"The closer contacts and cooperation between the two countries will surely exert a great influence on international society," he added.

Note how many Muslims China is killing in the Middle East. Zero.

And China is busy in Europe, as always, too. From Xinhua net:

Chinese President Hu Jintao told visiting Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis Friday that China-Greece relations are in the "best" period of time since the two countries forged diplomatic ties 33 years ago.
*snip*
"We are willing to join hands with Greece to expand bilateral pragmatic cooperation in various fields, and promote further development of Sino-Greek all-round strategic partnership." Hu said.

Noting Greece-China relations progressed quite well, Karamanlis said Greece sticks to the one-China policy and opposes "Taiwan Independence".

Frantically building bridges, the Chinese now roam the planet, plunking down their stones as they move systematically from place to place.

At home, they fret about the monumental task at hand, dealing with a long legacy of poverty in the peasant class, the fruits of capitalism have, like in many other countries, laid waste to the countryside due to pollution, loss of young hands to work the fields and inflation.

From Xinhua net:

China is striving to become a dairy production power in the world in 20 years through larger investment and technology upgrading.

Liu Yanhua, vice minister of Science and Technology, said here Friday, "In the past five years, the country has invested 150 million yuan (18.5 million U.S. dollars) in developing key technologies in the dairy industry."

We had price supports here in America for the small dairy farmer, placed in the Great Depression when money was tight, this has been removed and in my own community, we went from 20 active farms to exactly 1 that is about to fold, too. The flat world model we are adhering to is killing us.

For example, I have bees. The price of honey has collapsed because of imports and worse, diseases from mites are killing hives and to replentish is expensive except last year, when my last hive was long dead, wild bees flew in and recolonized it for free and so far, are doing fine. But I used to get more for my wool, my honey, my eggs. All depressed by imports and this is ravaging all farmers across the planet, it is all so strange to deal with. Like factory workers, we are being chased from pillar to post.

Finally, the old yuan kidding me news. From Xinhua net:

People's Bank of China Assistant Governor Ma Delun said the market is determining the yuan's exchange rate, rejecting U.S. criticism that the government keeps the currency artificially weak to spur exports, the Bloomberg reported.

Ma said currency policy wasn't to blame for the U.S. trade deficit. "Workers' pay in China is 1/33rd of that of a U.S. worker," Ma said in an interview in Shanghai on Jan. 18. "The U.S. has to accept this global reallocation of industries."

Senators Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, are sponsoring legislation in Congress that would impose tariffs on imports from China unless the yuan is allowed to appreciate more rapidly.

The U.S. government estimates the trade deficit with China widened to $185 billion in the first 11 months of 2005, up 25.4 percent from a year earlier. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Jan. 6 that he's "not at all satisfied" with China's currency policy.

The yuan's value has risen 0.5 percent against the dollar since a decade-old peg ended in July, compared with a 3.4 percent jump in Korea's won and 4.8 percent advance in Thailand's baht.

OK, countries that are not running huge trade surpluses with the world and who don't own lots of American currency and IOUs are rising in value while the two countries running the biggest world surpluses and owning the most American money are declining or barely blipping in value?

HAHAHAHAHA.

This is too funny. The world's top currency can't be the one that is driving deep into debt. This is obvious now that the system is totally broken and is a failure and our attempts at fixing it by going to war against only oil pumping nations is a failure, too, and bin Laden is going to laugh himself to death. Gads.

Pathetic.
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Washington Pest

Japan Finds Another Excuse To Lock Out American Beef

2006-01-20T10:48:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Like the Hime (Japanese for "princess") and the Pea, Japan keeps out foreign trade by being super picky and finding endless reasons why foreign goods can't enter their fortress. This is a direct slap in our faces because we lost WWII and now are owned by the Japanese. At least the Chinese allow some trade!

From Associated Press:

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said on Friday Japan would halt all imports of U.S. beef after a recent shipment was found to possibly contain material considered at risk for mad cow disease.

"This is a pity given that imports had just resumed," Koizumi told reporters. "I received the agriculture minister's report over the telephone with his recommendation that the imports be halted and I think it is a good idea."

When asked by a reporter if this meant that all U.S. beef imports would be stopped, Koizumi answered, "Yes."

Banzai! The Emperor lives! Die, gaijin! Time to cheer at the war shrine. Grind American faces into the dirt, laughing.

You see, Japanese farmers have great power because Japan's rulers won't redistrict according to population so the rural districts which are very conservative as well as loaded with the elderly who are conservative even more than usual rural populations and on top of this, the need to keep out as much foreign goods as possible is what the Japanese miracle is all about: round earth for them, flat earth for us.

Free trade for us and locked doors for them. And so of course, we run a massive $75+billion trade deficit with them. Since they have graciously decided to collect many of our IOUs and our magic money machine can grind away merrily so long as it is translated into debts sent to Japan, we have zero power over Japan. Zero.

Like, we are rapidly turning into their slaves. This won't be pretty since they are "nice" to us only because it is useful right now but whenever we demand anything, the chain is pulled, our rations are taken away and we are sent back into our dog kennel to rethink our bad behavior.

Bush's stupid visit to Asia which showed the clever Asians exactly how moronic we are, was a massive failure for us. Bush was reduced to saying openly that he hoped Japan would at least buy our beef which is much cheaper than their domestic beef but then sighed that it probably wouldn't happen. Enraged industrialists forced American negotiators to go back to Japan and ask for some token from the Emperor who granted this: he would allow some beef in.

Exaulting in this boon from our masters, we ran home, collected the cows and shipped them over.

As always, the Japanese found some flaws in the delivery and shut their doors. Skiis or shoes, cameras or cows, no matter what one makes, it has fatal flaws for the Japanese who can only have the very best, what a shocker. Of course, the free trade fools ignore all this harsh reality and go around, working for the Japanese, trying to get all world markets opened to Japanese sharks while we get locked out of more and more markets, struggling to sell for less than the Chinese who are busy prying open Japan which is why Japanese troops are working on invasion exercises in San Diego this week.

As I pointed out earlier, the plan is for us to fight the Chinese for the Japanese in the latest round of WWII which will be called "WWIII--the American/Japanese Co-prosperity Sphere Disaster".
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Squeezed Between a Rock and a Hard Place: 80% of America's Workers Fell Behind Inflation This Year

2006-01-19T10:47:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Nearly every worker below the $100,000 pay level lost ground this year, thanks to inflation as indexed by the government which doesn't cover the real losses since it grossly understates the rising costs of health, food and energy.

From the Baltimore Sun via AP:

The average American worker got squeezed in 2005 between the biggest rise in energy prices in 15 years and wages that failed to keep up with inflation.

As a result, hourly earnings after adjusting for inflation fell by 0.5 percent in December compared with what workers were earning in December 2004, the Labor Department reported yesterday.

Workers did see their wages rise last year. It was just that the Consumer Price Index rose at a faster pace - 3.4 percent for the 12 months ending in December, the department said.

The 0.5 percent drop in inflation-adjusted hourly earnings last year followed a 0.7 percent fall in 2004 for the 80 percent of the U.S. work force that is employed by the private sector in nonsupervisory jobs.

Well, just a few days ago, Uncle Scrooge Sam printed up another extra $60 billion for Wall Street making inflation worse and the need to print up an extra $250 billion this year to pay for Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma will set us irreversably upon the path of hyper inflation.

As I note over and over, workers are being forced to absorb all the pain of inflation, every drop of this poison will be purified by their blood and sufferings. And they intend to get blood from rocks, these creeps. They have every intention of cutting still more upper class taxes while imposing the tax burden on the poor and unlucky.

Gov. Pataki, of NY, is, for example, raising taxes on cigarrettes and beer to pay for more tax cuts in income taxes! This is typical for they know the barely sentient population that consumes this stuff and who pay a significant toll in their slender incomes to buy these addictive items, hardly vote and hardly complain even as the screws tighten on their miserable few pleasures.

Sin taxes are very popular with the ruling elite because they already pay a lot for their pleasures and they don't mind this since their happiness lies with megayachts and expensive cars and high class call girl/fashion models. So paying 10% more doesn't bother them in the least.

The GOP keeps trying to pop the VAT, value added tax, instead of taxing income and investments as if investments like property or stocks aren't "value added"! Anyway, they hope to do what the French aristocracy managed to do in 1783: cease paying taxes, drive the government into bankruptcy from meddling in civil wars in the New World and prolific personal spending on luxuries.

What happened next? Heh. I happen to know.
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Panic Forces Nikkei To Stop Trading, World Bourses Nervous As Bad Economic News Shoots Higher

2006-01-18T12:34:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

It isn't just one Backdoor Livedoor action that is roiling world stockmarkets. The futile and dangerous move of pumping an extra $60 billion dollars into the American stockmarket by the fools running the Feds is fueling dangerous currency/trade/market forces. Like a hurricane over warm waters, the forces at work here are ratchetting upwards rapidly.

From Marketwatch:

A plunge in Tokyo so severe that the market had to close early further unsettled investors. The decline is an extension of losses triggered Tuesday by a probe into Japanese Internet company Livedoor. .

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU:
10,841.35, -54.97, -0.5%) were just off a morning low of 10,831.32, down 57 points at 10,839.33.

The Nasdaq ($COMPQ:
2,273.50, -29.19, -1.3%) tumbled to a two-week low, sliding 29 points to 2,273, hurt by a broad decline in technology stocks.

The S&P 500 Index ($SPX:
1,274.86, -8.07, -0.6%) dropped nearly 8 points to 1,275.

Wednesday's weak batch of earnings raised questions about what to expect from the bulk of companies still set to report results, according to John Hughes, managing director at Epiphany Equity Research.

"You've haven't really had any good earnings reports just yet and after the big run-up, you're going to have a lot of people questioning whether or not there is valid, fundamental support," he said.

Good hellish grief. I know only a few people bother reading my blog but this is just plain ridiculous.

Panics classically begin when one or three or ten companies are discovered to be Enrons and they tip a tipsy market over the edge into true fatal hysteria only when certain conditions are ripe for a bad fall and if we ain't there yet, we will be very, very soon.

From Marketwatch;

The consumer price index fell a surprising 0.1% in December as energy prices continued to fade from the spike in September, the Labor Department reported Wednesday. Read the full report.

The CPI fell 0.6% in November.

Core prices - which exclude food and energy prices - rose 0.2%, as expected, for the third month in a row.

Economists were estimating that the CPI rose 0.2% in December, according to a survey conducted by MarketWatch. See Economic Calendar.

In 2005, the CPI increased 3.4%, not much different from the 3.3% increase in 2004. It was the largest year-over-year gain since the 3.4% increase in 2000.

Core prices rose 2.2% in 2005, matching 2004's gain.

"Inflation seems to have weathered the storm of rising energy prices," said Robert Brusca, president of FAO Economics.

Good hellish grief again. They need to believe this idiotic fairy tale so badly, they repeat it to each other on a daily basis.

Word price of fossil fuels jumped yet again this week based on the coming war in Iran, the war in Iraq that we are losing very badly now, the revolt in Nigeria, and the refusal to conserve oil in America. All this is sending prices through the roof during an extremely warm winter! How's that for bad news? And if anything goes wrong? To the moon, Alice!

I dig through the Japanese news and they have no analysis of what is happening, just describing the woes of only one company. But they are bound to America, they are part of us and the American/Japanese balancing act is a mutal death trip. One trips, the other dies.

The Chinese are beginning a big withdrawal based on the fact they must spend more money at home fixing the peasant base or die, themselves. All their wonderful schemes will fail if 700,000,000 peasants storm their palaces. Being hyper aware that this is a very real possibility, they will no longer feed the American deficit beast and will concentrate on homespending even if this means losing American markets which won't really bother them in the end since our market is nearly tapped out.

And why is that?

Well, the new credit card bills haven't come in the mail until right about...today! It is the second half of the month and the first 4% bills are arriving at 150 million mailboxes in America and 75 million of these letters will give some very hard-pressed people heart attacks. The first effect will be a screeching halt to spending as they frantically thrash about, looking for some solution. Then the howls will begin. If Americans have any guts or spine left, that is. Will we be as loud as the very noisy peasants of China? Dock workers of Europe? South Americans?

Are we mice or men and women?

From NBC:

The White House is refusing to reveal details of lobbyist Jack Abramoff's visits with President George W. Bush's staff.

According to Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Abramoff had "a few" such meetings. But the spokesman won't say when or with whom. Nor will he say which interests Abramoff was representing -- or how he got access to the White House.
Abramoff pleaded guilty two weeks ago to mail fraud and tax evasion charges in an influence-peddling scandal that's involved a dozen-plus members of Congress.

Abramoff was also a top fundraiser for Bush's re-election campaign -- and attended two holiday receptions at the White House.

Earlier McClellan promised a "thorough" report on the lobbyist's meetings with White House staff. But now he says he won't go beyond previous comments.

As usual when markets verge on depressions, the ruling class makes things worse by being venal, corrupt and illegal. And this is no exception. Bush is a corrupt clown, a criminal with a long arrest history, a coward and should be arrested and impeached and thrown in jail.

He had Greenspan throw some money at this developing problem without heeding the fact that the very worst thing one could do when a tornado of inflation is beginning to form is throw in more fake money. If inflation dies it will be because people will be dying, dying for lack of food, medicine, housing, jobs. Strangling this self-created inflation to keep the Wall Street/Housing bubbles inflated will kill lots and lots of living human beings. Make no mistake.
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As We Suspected, Most Bankruptcies Are Impossible To Pay Off

2006-01-17T08:46:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The increasingly draconian bankruptcy laws the credit card companies have gotten through Congress aren't giving them the desired results: more loot. Of course, they get money at 2.5% interest and then reloan it for 25-30% interest but we aren't supposed to notice this gigantic profit for them. They want every penny plus a pound of flesh.

From the Washington Post:

The counseling agencies say most debtors are in such deep financial trouble that they cannot qualify for a debt-management plan.

"Typically, consumers are too far gone when they get to us," said Ivan L. Hand Jr., president and chief executive of Money Management International Inc. (MMI), the nation's largest credit-counseling organization.

Well, duh. People usually try and try before giving up. When someone's disability or illness prevents them from crawling forwards, they need some sort of remedy which is why high interest rates are charged in the fricking first place!

In Japan, the stockmarket is down because interest rates to the companies there rose to a whopping 1.4%! So what the heck is going on? Eh?

Any usurous lender charging over 21% interest deserves to get zero help in a court of law. They want to make risky loans, well, the principle us usually covered in just one year! If the interest rate didn't exist. So they might lose some profit but they seldom lose the money they put out and since scofflaws are usually less than 10%, the profits are absolutely stunningly gigantic, so big, they can lavish many millions on lobbying and bribing politicians and huge pay rewards to the executives, etc.

Who do you think are buying those megayachts, anyway?

The vampires and vipers running America told us, through their mealy mouthpiece, Bubble Boy Bush, to go shopping right after 9/11. And even this last winter, in the run up to Xmas, they were screaming at us to go shopping. They wailed that we should go shopping. They got downright nasty anyone daring to call Xmas a fraud, they were so fearful people might stop shopping like crazy.

Now they expect a flood of bankruptcies directly connected with all this shopping they demanded. And so they frown at the victims of this mega-brainwashing that runs 24/7 on TV, on the internet, on radio, on billboards, on every possible medium and surface: go shopping, buy this stuff! They want us to be stern like me and not go shopping, not buy stuff and to pay off all our debts and live virtuous lives shoveling snow and manure and tending the garden and hunting animals in the snow....Heh.

They hate me. Precisely because I am not part of all these little schemes. Whipsawing people and then blaming them for being cut in two: this is the reality of modern corporate (hello, Hillary!) America.
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Dangerous Milestone: China Is Even With Japan, We Owe Them A Trillion Dollars, Too!

2006-01-16T00:01:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

As headlined above, our debts to Japan are now equalled by China and this happened very swifty! More: China moves into more African nations and gets a firm grip on Cuba. Our foreign policy is in tatters, our empire in tatters, we are beggars at Asia's gates and Asia is growing rapidly, far faster than predicted.

From AP:

China's foreign currency reserves have risen to $818.9 billion, up 34 percent from the same period one year ago, state media reported Monday.

At this growth rate, China's reserves could reach $1 trillion this year, surpassing Japan's as the world's biggest.

The central bank said reserves rose by $208.9 billion from 2004, newspapers reported.

Analysts estimate that three-quarters of China's reserves are held in U.S. Treasury bonds.

OK. Who is winning this game of International Go? The USA or China? Know any Mandarin? If you are young, consider taking classes in this very important language because those who can understand what the bosses are saying will prosper.

From AP:

Japan's benchmark stock index fell Monday morning, ending a three-day tech rally that lifted the index more than 2 percent. The dollar slipped against the yen.

The benchmark Nikkei 225 index dropped 148.89 points, or 0.90 percent, to end the morning session at 16,306.06 points.

Ah, I was right. The Nikkei goes down when the value of the dollar drops. The Japanese try and try to soak up all the American red ink but they can't and the value of the yen slips the leash and rises vis a vis the dollar. Meanwhile, the Chinese aggressively buy American debts and keep the yuan even lower than the yen, they saw how, raising the value of their currency, was punished by Bush so they are continuing with the original plan first cooked up way back in 1987, to suck in American red ink and keep the yuan pegged to the dollar at a rate they want so they can remove all industrial processes from America or better yet, own the means of production here as well as the debts.

Voila. You win, we lose the Great Game of International Go.

From AP:

In a worst-case scenario, foreigners who finance the U.S. budget and trade deficits would sour on U.S. investments and unload their holdings. The prices of U.S. stocks and bonds could plunge. Interest rates, including those for mortgages, could soar. A financial crisis could confront the country.

Economists are troubled by the prospects of budget deficits as far as the eye can see and want to see them trimmed. But the size of the current budget deficits, while unwelcome, do not signal that a crisis is imminent, they said.

An important barometer is the size of the federal debt — now about $8 trillion — relative to the overall economy, as measured by gross domestic product. Under that measure, this debt accounts for around 63.2 percent of GDP, Bethune said.

"Generally speaking, when it is over 75 percent of GDP, then the yellow flag goes out. I would say 95 percent of GDP and over is definitely a red flag," Bethune said.

This is why we are losing. Reading these fools makes for bitter laughter. It isn't merely how deep in debt nor what percentage of business it is, the problem is, we are very indebted to two extremely dangerous entities: Japan, a terrible former foe who still smarts from the defeat of WWII and who intends to be top dog and China, an open foe who claims they want peace but also wants a good piece of the pie and who is a very bitter foe of Japan who invaded China in WWII!

I see nasty storm clouds here. Going into debt to two very angry, possibly violent entities who both want to see us under their heels is beyond stupid, it is called TREASON.

China continues the relentless game of Go. True, they have peasant uprisings, the most recent just yesterday, the peasants are on the warpath, but don't let that fool us into thinking their external initiatives aren't flowing ahead full steam at our expense. From Xinhuanet:

China became Cuba's second-largest trading partner after Venezuela in 2005. Chinese exports to Cuba grew 95 per cent in the first 10 months of 2005 to over US$500 million, while imports rose 17 per cent to US$200 million, according to Yang Shidi, China's commercial counsellor in Havana.

Our stupid blockade isn't exactly a blockbuster. It is now officially a bust. Soon, Cuba will be thriving for it is a great base for Chinese operations! A huge stone in their favor. We could have reapproached Cuba when Russia fell but just like we drove Putin into Hu and Wen's arms, so we drove Castro there, too. As well as Venezuela and Iran!

From Xinhuanet:

China's moves to secure crude oil supplies in Africa for its growing economy do not threaten U.S. energy needs, a senior U.S. State Department official said Friday, the Reuters reported.

The United States and China are both looking to Africa to help diversify their oil supplies.

China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, is visiting six African nations to increase China's diplomatic and economic presence in the region.

China's top offshore oil producer agreed recently to pay $2.3 billion for a stake in a Nigerian oil and gas field, its largest-ever overseas acquisition.

Kow tow, senior US Condi Department of Incompetency. Seriously, despite her sharp, expensive high heeled boots and her shop until she drops dressing, this vastly incompetent woman will go down in diplomatic history as the anti-Kissinger of all time. Far from plotting and scheming like Bismark or Metternicht, this woman will be seen as everyone's fool, the bimbo of byzantine negotiations.

From Xinhuanet:

More vehicles were sold in China last year than in Japan, making China the world's second-largest auto market after the United States with almost 6 million units sold, the People's Daily said Friday.

China intends to displace us on every level, this is quite natural. Healthy, even. For them, anyway.

Why we are assisting them by refusing to fund our own government is another story. The only explanation I can come up with is, our rulers are stupid traitors and should be arrested and I include the owners of the Wall Street Journal. The Chinese auto market is huge and without rebates, special loans and leases! Ours limps along, driving our entire coutnry into debt, just one more debt item amoungst many.

And a note here: Starting this month, all minimum credit cards payments are DOUBLING. So if you pay $1000 a month, it will be $2,000 a month! I don't see this game lasting much longer. What will we do when 40% of America has to now tighten their belts another ten notches on top of high fuel bills? Gads.
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Super Rich Buy Superyachts and Supermodels Thanks To Bush Tax Cuts

2006-01-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

The disasterous Bush tax cuts which he wants to extend eternally are increasing the deficit fatally while the very rich buy superyachts, supermodels and supereverything. They also buy politicians, too. This must stop.

From the NYT:

WHETHER it's providing a helicopter pad or installing jade-inlaid marble in the master bedroom, William S. Smith III has grown accustomed to satisfying every request from his custom-yacht customers - except when it comes to finding places where they can park their outsized boats.

James Edward Bates for The New York Times

Many megayachts have grown so big - sometimes as long as a football field - that their very size rules out docking at most marinas, which don't have large enough slips to accommodate them. To combat the crunch, Mr. Smith, vice president of Trinity Yachts in Gulfport, Miss., one of the top custom yacht builders in the world, has begun to design vessels based strictly on where the owners plan to take them.

Big cars, big houses, big yachts. Yup. And for America, big debts.

From the same issue of the NYT:

The White House acknowledged on Thursday that the budget deficit would climb back above $400 billion this year, erasing the brief improvement last year and complicating President Bush's vow to cut the deficit in half by 2009.

Joel Kaplan, the White House deputy budget director, predicted that the government's shortfall would climb to more than $400 billion in 2006 from $319 billion in 2005, largely because of relief efforts tied to Hurricane Katrina.

What relief for Katrina? Seems that river of money has dwindled to a tiny rivulet, hasn't it? The tax cuts have produced what?

Wall to wall debts, an ocean of red ink, a deterioration of the American infrastructure, all this so the rich can float their boats.

The reckless, wanton waste of collective resources on junk like mega-yachts and carports with crystal chandeliers is why, when the bills come due, we will see some really ugly stuff happen here. Far from spending money on capitalist ventures that bring a better life to the working classes, the new money boys spend it all on toys. This is why business is actually declining, so far as capitalist industrialization is concerned. We moved our factories to China which is now suffering from vast amounts of pollution and environmental degradation. The profits of moving business to China where the workers have few rights, no freedom of speech or assembly and a government willing to supress them coupled with the American government's refusal to tax these profits means the very rich get to buy all the junk the New York Times advertises.

The article about the yachts is full of wonder and some envy but it isn't condemned, it isn't connected to the red ink article. They run seperately without comment.

You will not see raging editorials in our media yelling for taxes on the rich to be restored! Yet the entire mess is due entirely to the corrupting influence of the very rich via lobbyists and a vote counting system that is run by right wingers who jigger the vote totals.

Here is a typical GOP example, Gov. Romney of Mass:From Boston.com:

He also said he would continue to travel occasionally on corporate aircraft, as he did in December when he flew to an RGA meeting in California on a Gulfstream jet owned by Pfizer Inc., the New York-based pharmaceutical firm. Massachusetts is currently debating a health care overhaul, although Romney said Pfizer is not a party to the deliberations.

"I'm not going to propose to you a new series of laws," he said. "But I can say the best efforts in campaign finance reform to date seem to have driven money into secret corners, and it's had unintended consequences."

Romney said groups like the RGA and its equivalent, the Democratic Governors Association, are designed to be funded by corporations. He also noted the aircraft travel is reported to the IRS, as are cash and other in-kind donations.

"It's not a form of corporate largesse," he said. "It's a form of corporate contribution."

Haha, isn't he a laugh? How about "It's a form of bribery"?

This was all on the heels of the GOP trying to pretend to be not so corrupt:

Days after calling on his party to exhibit higher ethical standards, Gov. Mitt Romney said the Republican Governors Association would divest $500,000 in contributions it received from a donor entwined in the investigation of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The Abramoff scandal is really the above the water line iceberg that is ripping the guts out of the USS Titanic. The subterranean part is very much bigger than the illegal, immoral little swindle operation run by a criminal. The fact is, the GOP's "fundraising" skill are entirely simply them working for people who bribe them into destroying all public financing, trade and civil services, corrupting them fatally so the very rich can buy superyachts and supermodels.

This is why they are all, every one of them, sitting here today, on the sidelines, rubbing their fat hands with glee as America slides ever swifter down the slope to bankruptcy.
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Wall Street Booms, Middle Class On Edge of Cliff, Unhappiness Greater Last Ten Years

2006-01-11T16:04:00.000-05:00

By Elaine Meinel Supkis

Three news stories in one day, two detailing how the middle class is falling behind while the first one is about how the very rich are making money like crazy, as fast as Greenspan can crank out M3 funds. Meanwhile, inflation rages below decks.

From the New York Times:

Wall Street bonuses are expected to have hit a record $21.5 billion in 2005 from $18.6 billion in 2004 as investment banks reaped record earnings, New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi said Wednesday.

Last year's bonuses beat the record of $19.5 billion set in 2000 at the peak of the equities boom, Hevesi said during a conference call with reporters.

Booming merger and underwriting activity, as well as a stock market rebound, helped revenues rise by almost 50 percent in the first three quarters of last year.

Singing, "We're In The Money!" is fun. Only this is funny money. The fundamentals get worse and worse and this year, right off the cliff but everything is still coming up roses as long as Greenspan and his crew keep pumping in more dollars, after all, Wall Street has a nifty plan: to prevent all this stash from causing inflation, they will squeeze workers very very hard! As all workers loose their pensions, pay raises, inflation indexes, health plans, their very jobs, why, there won't be any inflation and this printing of money and then showering it on Wall Street can continue forever and forever.

This insane plan has a flaw. It all depends on Americans being able to buy stuff. Lots of stuff.

So far, they have colluded with China and Japan to create a vast sea of red ink, both in our government, our military/industrial complex and in personal and real estate loans. Using this kitty courtesy of our traders who want to dominate our domestic markets, we have been on a buying spree that is about to end because you can loan the middle class only so much money before they go belly up.

From Harvard Magazine:

During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities. Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can reduce a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months.

Middle-class families have been threatened on every front. Rocked by rising prices for essentials as men’s wages remained flat, both Dad and Mom have entered the workforce—a strategy that has left them working harder just to try to break even. Even with two paychecks, family finances are stretched so tightly that a very small misstep can leave them in crisis. As tough as life has become for married couples, single-parent families face even more financial obstacles in trying to carve out middle-class lives on a single paycheck. And at the same time that families are facing higher costs and increased risks, the old financial rules of credit have been rewritten by powerful corporate interests that see middle-class families as the spoils of political influence.

Elizabeth Warren's fine article is a must-read. She explains many things troubling the middle class but does leave out one huge element.

Namely, once women went into the workforce, both parents in a family could afford a much bigger house and much nicer cars and everyone upgraded a lot. I made a lot of money buying houses, fixing them up, yuppie style, ending with the planting of a host of rose bushes as a final flourish and then selling for a lot more money. Everyone wanted to live in a fine mansion.

Here is me talking about the biggest mansion we lived in, it was horrifically huge. "We had many stained glass windows, a huge staircase with 5' wide cherry steps, the central hall was 14'x 45' with oak pillars that were in the Corithian style, each 2' in diameter, six of them, the double/double front doors were stained glass and beveled glass with art nuveau ornate brass fictures, the front porch had 10 giant doric columns, a carriage entrance, the basement was so big, kids rode two wheeled bikes down there in winter, two kitchens, butler's pantry, another staircase for the servants, parqet floors with many designs, bay windows 20' long, a fireplace the size of a small room....and it was impossible to live in! I had to work so hard! Tending it was a nighmare for me!"

Well, it sold for a lot of money because everyone has a romance about such things. But you need a gardener or five for the groomed acre, a cleaning lady who understands fine wood floors and how to polish oak panelling. You need a butler for the pantry and two cooks for the two kitchens and a maid, to say the least, as well as a nanny if you have kids!

Of course, the cars come next: everyone and their sister bought gas guzzlers during the easy years! Huge, honking, gigantic Titanics of suburbia. Now they are sinking. And pulling down more than one family! I drove my little gas misers to and from the hulking mansion to the sneers of my richer neighbors. But even today, I have a gas miser and am quite content with it.

Americans most certainly did go on a wild binge. It did benefit me, I sold my various houses to them, but no one is to blame but themselves, they voted for tax cuts so they could have more money and I used to warn people, "Better to pay more taxes and have a booming ecomony than to cut taxes and find out you cut your own throat!"

Well, slice away, America! The loans used for this useless buying spree will come due. I just recieved in the mail yet another solicitation for loans, unsecured, I could get one for a lousy 24.5%! Whoo hoo. Ain't I lucky! If this isn't a sign that inflation is going to roar along, I don't know what is!

Those of us who squirrel away money are getting very nervous. All the bonds and such we normally would like to buy are not good thanks to the Japanese who don't care if the interest rate is 0% so long as they can keep their yen cheap, they buy. So we can't get the government to issue bonds with a realistic interest rate which I would peg, at this point, at around 7% to make up for not only inflation but we do have to get some benefit, in return! Or why bother?

But our government sells these to future enemies. People who aren't American get to buy this up and lard on even more frustrating our attempts at curbing this wild spending.

Meanwhile, unhappiness is on the rise. From Yahoo:

Overall, the percentage who reported at least one significant negative life event increased from 88% to 92%. Most of the problems were related to increased incidents of illness and the inability to afford medical care; mounting bills; unemployment; and troubled romantic relationships.

This study says it has gotten worse in the last ten years but this is a lie.

It is specifically the last five years, things have gone quite badly. As inflation rages, all systems have worked day and night to eliminate good jobs, good benefits, good anything. The consequences of all this is, people feel a cold chill blowing down their necks.

This winter has been shockingly warm, insanely warm, dangerously warm but one thing it did was prevent hideous fuel bills due about now! This grace of the Goddess won't have a good ending, though, for this means this summer will be ferocious. Not to mention tornado season this year.

Smart people don't plan on warm winters to work out things on a budget! One has to put aside money for winter even in winter, next year, a volcano could blow and plunge us into deep cold! This grasshopper mentality that seems to afflict America will be our doom.
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