Podcast Powered By Podbean Download this episode (right click and save) Dr. Seth Shostak: Intelligent life on other planets? Dr. Ray Kurzweil: Will the robots one day take over? Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB) | Embed
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (0.0KB) | Embed
What is Michelle Bachmann wearing?
By Danny Schechter
Author of the Crime Of Our Time
And so it came to pass, as predicted, projected, and warned about, that the economy is about to tank again. No less an authority than Nouriel Roubini, once dismissed as “Dr. Doom” for his accurate predictions of the financial crisis in 2007 and 20088, is shaking his head and pointing his finger again.
In intellectual circles, there’s more and more talk about the fall of America. Even Noam Chomsky who wrote some of his 150 books about the rise of the American empire sees the handwriting on the wall.
The wags at the New York Times are monitoring what looks like an impending collapse. On one page, you read: “Data released on Friday leaves little doubt that the European economy is losing momentum before most countries have even recovered to the level of output they had in 2008, when the recession hit.”
Closer to home, the newspaper fears a “double dip” and says, “few cushions left for a new crisis.”
MSNBC reports: “As the debate rages on about whether the U.S. economy is headed for a douple-dip, one expert says another recession is all but guaranteed, and there’s nothing that can be done to prevent it. (emphasis mine.)
“Paul Gambles, Managing Director of financial advisory and asset management firm MBMG Group said the bond market, which is the most reliable indicator, has been pointing to a slowdown since at least April or May.” He says the deeper problem predated this Administration and has been ongoing for at least a decade.
You would think the captains of industry would be battening down the proverbial hatches, stabilizing the ship and getting out the life boats instead of supporting policies and politicians who believe that chaos offers the only way forward.
To quote the House Speaker Mr. Boehner about some of his colleagues, “A lot of them, believe “enough chaos” would make opponents yield.”
Where is the sense of national urgency beyond the bitter partisan divide?
In response, the president may yet discover some backbone, before he loses support from what’s left of his liberal base. Over the years, he has ceded so much of his power through compromise that some of his supporters believe he is a Republican at heart, that is, if he has a heart.
His most clever comment of late is a play on “Obamacare.”
Visions Green, August 2011 http://visionsgreen.com/blog/2011/06/13/fukushimas-ocean-radiation-more-than-original-reports/ So, top scientists in the field of Marine Chemistry, have done the testing and research and the result is not good. Fukushima’s poison radiated water spewn into the pacific ocean will cause malformations in ocean life as well as the resulting food chain [ that’s …
TheEconomicCollapse.com
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/10-signs-that-economic-riots-and-civil-unrest-inside-the-united-states-are-now-more-likely-than-ever
You should let the video footage of the wild violence that just took place in London burn into your memory because the same things are going to be happening all over the United States as the economy continues to crumble. We have raised an entire generation of young people with an “entitlement mentality”, but now the economy is producing very few good jobs that will actually enable our young people to work for what they feel they are entitled to. If you are under 30 in America today, things look really bleak. The vast majority of the good jobs are held by people that are older, and they aren’t about to give them up if they can help it. It is easy for the rest of us to tell young Americans to “take whatever they can”, but the reality is that there is intense competition for even the most basic jobs. For instance, McDonald’s recently held a “National Hiring Day” during which a million Americans applied for jobs. Only 6.2% of the applicants were hired. In the old days you could walk down to McDonald’s and get a job whenever you wanted to, but now any job is precious. The frustration among our young people is palpable. Most of them feel entitled to “the American Dream” and they feel like the system has failed them. Unfortunately, many of them are already turning to violence. But the economic riots and the civil unrest that we have already seen are nothing compared to what is coming. Americans are angry, and as the economy continues to collapse that anger is going to reach unprecedented heights.
Ninety-two percent.
That’s how many of the foreclosures on bankrupt families in and around New York City had no proof the creditors had the right to foreclose.
In a three-month investigation, the New York Post—a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch and usually better known for its salacious headlines than its investigative journalism—found that in nearly all of the foreclosure proceedings, “banks have attempted to steamroll their way over sometimes-outgunned homeowners,” booting them out of their homes even if they didn’t have proper documentation that gave them the right to do so.
The Post went through more than 150 Chapter 13 bankruptcy filings from June of last year, pulled a random sample, and:
A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only and ignorant with its ignorance. Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age. —Henry David Thoreau
Throughout human history societies have been informed and instructed by the superstitions of their age. For thousands of years we believed a single person—a king, a pharaoh, a high priest— should have life and death power over us. Any other social structure was unthinkable. We believed the gods that brought drought could be appeased only by animal and, sometimes, human sacrifice.
Today these superstitions seem ridiculous. How could thinking people ever have believed such preposterous notions?
But here we are. August 2011. And the zeitgeist has given birth to a new superstition. One that will bewilder future generations as much as the belief in the absolute power of pharaohs or drought reflecting the anger of the gods does ours.
Published on Monday, August 15, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/15/president-obama-reelection-economic-policy
by Dean Baker
A front page story in Sunday’s New York Times gave the country the bad news. President Obama is no longer paying attention to economists and economics in designing economic policy. Instead, he will do what his campaign people tell him will get him re-elected, presumably by getting lots of money from Wall Street.
The article said that President Obama intends to focus on reducing government spending and cutting programmes like social security and Medicare. This is in spite of the fact that: “A wide range of economists say the administration should call for a new round of stimulus spending, as prescribed by mainstream economic theory, to create jobs and promote growth.”
by Mike Adams, NaturalNews.com http://www.naturalnews.com/033307_Obamacare_unconstitutional.html (NaturalNews) The 11th circuit appeals court ruled today that Obama’s health care mandate — which forced Americans to purchase an insurance product that many did not want or need — was unconstitutional and that Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in passing such a law. The …
International Business Times, Sunday, August 14, 2011 9:28 AM EDT
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/197537/20110814/world-bank-head-warns-markets-heading-to-new-danger-zone.htm
The loss of market confidence in economic leadership in key countries like the United States and Europe, coupled with a fragile economic recovery have pushed markets into a new danger zone, something that policymakers have to take seriously, the head of the World Bank said on Sunday.
Speaking at the Asia Society dinner in Sydney, Australia, Robert Zoellick also said the global economy was going through a multi-speed recovery, with developing countries now the source of growth and opportunity.
“What’s happened in the past couple of weeks is there is a convergence of some events in Europe and the United States that has led many market participants to lose confidence in economic leadership of some of the key countries,” he said.
“I think those events combined with some of the other fragilities in the nature of recovery have pushed us into a new danger zone. I don’t say those words lightly … so that policymakers recognize and take it seriously for what it is.”
McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: August 15, 2011 06:13:28 PM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/08/15/120763/long-term-unemployment-wreaks.html
WASHINGTON — Lisa Banks feels hopeless. She’s lost an essential part of her identity: Her status as a proud full-time employee is gone.
Ever since the 44-year-old Germantown, Md., resident was laid off from her job as an administrator for a federal contractor in May 2009, she’s sent out hundreds of resumes, but only had four interviews. She says she’s depressed enough to try to seek out psychological help. But no luck there either: She doesn’t have insurance to pay for it.
“I’ve worked all my life. I’ve been a decent person,” she said. “(But now) I feel as if I’m invisible. Like I’m not worth anything to society anymore.”
by Mike Adams, NaturalNews
http://www.naturalnews.com/033318_government_agents_Rawesome_Foods.html#ixzz1V7rz34nb
(NaturalNews) The Rawesome Foods raid that took place August 3, 2011, is being publicly described by many as an act of “government terrorism” against innocents (http://www.naturalnews.com/033258_R…). And yet there has been very little information published about the names of the government instigators who masterminded these armed raids and oversaw the pillaging of Rawesome Foods and the destruction of tens of thousands of dollars worth of food.
Today, NaturalNews is publishing the names of five government agents who masterminded this raid and / or took part in the raid. This is all part of a campaign to protest these acts of government tyranny by sending emails, making phone calls, sending letters and otherwise making it very clear to these agents that We the People will not tolerate this kind of treatment.
As always, if you send emails to these people, keep the following important points in mind:
By Prof. James K. Galbraith
Global Research, August 15, 2011
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26033
In early January 2009 two White House-bound economists — Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein — predicted that if the stimulus bill were passed, unemployment would peak at 8% by midyear and then start coming down. If there were no stimulus, they said, joblessness might hit 9% and not peak until 2010.
Romer and Bernstein had the risky job of hyping policy, but they weren’t alone in their optimistic views. Forecasters at the Congressional Budget Office, the Federal Reserve and most private banks all thought that the economy had a natural tendency to right itself, sooner or later. What it needed, the activists urged, was a push.
Well it’s now obvious that the push didn’t do the job. Even with it, unemployment is higher than the Romer-Bernstein worst case. The optimistic forecasts now look embarrassing, ranking right up there alongside Irving Fisher’s 1929 comment that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau.”
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Impending-Demise-of-Gl-by-michael-payne-110815-712.html
|
August 15, 2011 By michael payne Globalism, which has enriched Corporate America, has been an absolute disaster for U.S. manufacturing and the American worker. But, as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. So let’s make an objective analysis and a prediction of how globalism, the darling of the free traders and transnational corporations, will cease to be the driving force of the world’s commerce. What exactly is globalism? Generally defined it is a “socio-economic system dedicated to free trade and free access to markets.” It’s an innovative form of international commerce whereby nations think of marketing with a world view rather than their own national view. Trade between nations has been going on for centuries but under globalism and the evolution of gigantic transnational corporations, it has become far more intensive and much more sophisticated. Think of the monumental volume of products and raw materials that are exchanged day in and day out between nations via air transport and ocean shipping; the enormous trade that goes on between the U.S. and China and Japan, albeit most of the traffic is for exports to America rather than exports by America; the volume is staggering. |
By Simon Johnson – Aug 14, 2011
The U.S. has a fiscal crisis, but not the one that everyone is talking about. Standard and Poor’s proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the U.S. still has the world’s preeminent reserve currency. When shocks hit — and investors have no idea who or what might be next in line for a downgrade — they buy U.S. government securities.
Downgrades don’t usually have this effect. For example, if S&P or other rating companies downgraded France, that would set off a crisis within the euro region — pushing up interest rates on French government debt, undermining euro-area banks, and perhaps putting pressure on the fabric of the European Union itself. With a one-notch downgrade of the U.S. government, on the other hand, S&P inadvertently managed to lower the U.S.’s borrowing costs, both at the federal level and for homeowners who refinanced their mortgages.
The killing of Osama Bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a “doomsday mechanism” for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger military budget.
None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.
Consider this my contribution to a future 12-step program for national security sobriety.