Monday, June 22, 2009

America is bankrupt the national debt has tripled in one year to $15 trillion‏

newsviewsnolose@yahoogroups.com on behalf of dick.mcmanus


A Protest is Described As "Low-Level Terrorism" in a DoD Training Manual
The ACLU has written to the DoD regarding its Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual Refresher Training Course, which advises personnel that political protest amounts to "low-level terrorism". According to the document, all DoD personnel are required to complete the course on a yearly basis.

An example of material in the training course:

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.

Attacking the Pentagon
IEDs
Hate crimes against racial groups
Protests ("protests" is the correct answer to this test question )

The ACLU points out that although in and of itself the classification of protest as terrorism is deeply disturbing, it is even more alarming when viewed in the context of the Pentagon's long term efforts to crack down on organized dissent.
The surveillance and pre-emptive arrest of protesters, on charges of "domestic terrorism", at last year's RNC by the FBI is also cited by the ACLU.

http://revolutionradio.org/2009/06/15/dod-training-manual-describes-protest-as-%e2%80%9clow-level-terrorism%e2%80%9d/#comment-12446

May 27, 2009 Even the 9/11 Commissioners themselves now say that they don't believe the government's version of 9/11. For example:

  • The Commission's co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation"
  • The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry - said "At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/05/psychologists-weigh-in-on-911.html

Most economists expect the economy to continue bleeding jobs for the foreseeable future.

Most of the country aren't likely to regain their pre-recession employment levels until at least 2012 and 112 communities won't recover until 2014 or later. Seattle is in the 2012 group of areas of the US.

Of the 6 million jobs lost since the recession began 18 months ago, nearly 4 million were eliminated between November and April. The six-month freefall included a record four straight months with more than 600,000 job losses.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/69823.html

Some of the facts that should be plain that clearly show that economic collapse are coming:
1. 15% of all subprime mortgages were foreclosed in May with foreclosure rates climbing. Alan M. White of the Valparaiso Law School.
2. The Federal Reserve needs to "borrow up to $3.25 trillion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. Bloomberg
3. China has agreed to buy only 200 billion of Treasury T Bills (sold to finance the debt) total next year, while the oil exporting nations and the rest of the world have agreed to buy 300 billion total. This leaves over 2 trillion dollars that domestic investors will have to buy to float the deficit of the fiscal year that starts September 30th. Congressional Budget Office (After private investors had their private investments taken by the Government and the Unions in the Chrysler and General Motors deal, the experts say that the vast majority of the T Bills will not be sold, meaning the Government will have to print the money monetizing the debt)

5. Democrats in Congress hid a $100 billion bail out of the world's credit system by the International Monetary Fund, tucking it into the war supplemental intended for operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, according to lawmakers' aides quoted in a Reuters report.

6. "I will tell you what the problem is," Collin Peterson (Democratic Chairman of the Agriculture Committee) told the New York Times, "they (the banks) give three times more money than the next biggest group. It's huge the amount of money they put into politics. The banks run the place (US Congress)."

10. "The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s." This is three times the actual Bush deficit in spending in the first 100 days of President Obama's Presidency. Bloomberg

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread473087/pg1

A New Age of Neo-feudal Debt Bondage - Dr. Michael Hudson's analysis of the financial crisis

2009-04-12: US national debt tripled in one year, from $5 - $15 trillion, and according to some economists like John Williams, it's much higher under GAAP accounting - including unfunded liabilities around $65.5 trillion, an amount exceeding world GDP through FY 2008, meaning America is bankrupt. Williams also puts unemployment at 19.8% by reengineering it to include discouraged and involuntary part-time workers and excluding fictitious birth-death rate ratio inclusions. In America, one-third of home mortgages are in "Negative Equity;" that is, "the mortgage exceeds the (property's) market price pledged as collateral." Nearly half the American population has no net worth, and the gulf between richest and the rest is unprecedented.

Predator banks want to prolong the game as long as possible, grab all the wealth they can, force debtor nations to sell state enterprises at distress prices, then get new business by lending to investors who buy them on the cheap.

http://www.spartacuslives.org/node/20896

Dr. Michael Hudson: The Fed has turned "maintaining order" into a euphemism for consolidating power by the financial sector and the FIRE sector generally (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) over the "real" economy of production and consumption. Its leaders see their job as being to act on behalf of the commercial banking system to enable it to make money off the rest of the economy. It acts as the Board of Directors to fight regulation, to support Wall Street, to block any revival of anti-usury laws, to promote "free markets" almost indistinguishable from outright financial fraud, to decriminalize bad behavior – and most of all to inflate the price of property relative to the wages of labor and even relative to the profits of industry.

The Fed's job is not really to impose the Washington Consensus on the rest of the world. That's the job of the World Bank and IMF, coordinated via the Treasury (viz. Robert Rubin under Clinton most notoriously) and AID, along with the covert actions of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy. You don't need monetary policy to do this – only massive bribery. Only call it "lobbying" and the promotion of democratic values – values to fight government power to regulate or control finance across the world. Financial power is inherently cosmopolitan and, as such, antagonistic to the power of national governments.

The problem is that none of this appears in the academic curriculum. And the silence of the major media to address it or even to acknowledge it means that it is invisible except to the beneficiaries who are running the system.

Source a Mike Whitney article

http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/235930319-how-the-chicago-boys-wrecked-the-economy-dr-michael-hudson

Iraq, an unprecedented fall in the water levels of the Tigris and Euphrates

15 Jun 2009 Swarms of snakes are attacking people and cattle in southern Iraq as the Euphrates and Tigris rivers dry up and the reptiles lose their natural habitat among the reed beds. Doctors in the area say six people have been killed and 13 poisoned. The plague of snakes is the latest result of an unprecedented fall in the level of the water in the Euphrates and the Tigris.

The collapse in the water levels of the rivers has been swift, the amount of water in the Euphrates falling by three-quarters in less than a decade. In 2000, the flow speed of the water in the river was 950 cubic metres per second, but by this year it had dropped to 230 cubic metres per second.

Iraq has appealed to Turkey to open the sluice gates on its dams. "We need at least 500 cubic metres of water per second from Turkey, or double what we are getting," says Abdul Latif Rashid, the Iraqi Minister of Water Resources. "They promised an extra 130 cubic metres, but this was only for a couple of days and we need it for months." His ministry is doing everything it can, he says, but the most important decisions about the supply of water to Iraq are taken outside the country – in Turkey, Syria and Iran. "In addition there has been a drought for the last four years with less than half the normal rainfall falling," says Mr Rashid.

Large parts of Iraq that were once productive farmland have already turned into arid desert. The Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture says that between 40 and 50 per cent of what was agricultural land in the 1970s is now being hit by desertification. Drought, war, UN sanctions, lack of investment and the cutting down of trees for firewood have all exacerbated the crisis.

But centuries of irrigating the land without draining it properly has led to a build-up of salt in the soil, making much of it infertile. Lack of water in the rivers has speeded up the salinisation, so land in central and southern Iraq, highly productive 30 years ago, has become barren.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/as-iraq-runs-dry-a-plague-of-snakes-is-unleashed-1705315.html

Peak Soil Investment:

Jun 12, 2009: According to the Economist, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and China have been "quietly" buying more than $20 billion worth of farmland.

2008 was one of the top three crop production years in history. The sharp rise in crop prices over the past few years sent farmers around the world into full production mode. The past two years were exceptional. Even though, demand still outstripped supply and food riots broke out around the world. An average year will see about 1% to 2% growth – maximum.

The value of farmland has fallen drastically around the world. In the past year, the only major crop producing to see the value of its farmland rise is in the United States. Everywhere else is showing a completely different picture.

Comment: Why? Because it is a very limited resource and food prices will rise as food shortages increase.

http://wallstreetpit.com/5019-peak-soil-investment-this-quiet-land-grab-is-just-beginning

On 9 February 2004, Abu Musab al Zarqawi was a painful thorn in the side of the Jordanian authorities, an Islamist radical who was determined to overthrow the royal family. But he was nothing to do with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically rejected attempts by Bin Laden to recruit him, because he was not interested in targeting the West.

US propaganda would have us believe he was a member of the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership.

Soon after the propaganda was published, US General Mark Kimmitt in Baghdad, lied to the in answer a questions from The New York Times stating, "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to
this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose
fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and,
within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

Comment: Is lying to the press by a US General, treason - is lying to WE THE PEOPLE, to the sovereign?

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22824.htm

While many analysts say he is using the Iraqi insurgency as a springboard to expand his operations, others argue his influence has been exaggerated.

In the run-up to the Iraq war in February 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Zarqawi was an associate of Osama Bin Laden who had sought refuge in Iraq.

Intelligence reports indicated he was in Baghdad and - according to Mr Powell - this was a sure sign that Saddam Hussein was courting al-Qaeda, which, in turn, justified an attack on Iraq.

But some analysts at the time contested the claim, pointing to Zarqawi's historical rivalry with Bin Laden.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3483089.stm

Israeli minister wants sanctions on US - Anti-Americanism in Israel

June 9, 2009: "In a sign of growing concern in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government over U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East policies, Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled proposed Israeli sanctions on the U.S . in a letter to cabinet ministers on Sunday.

"In the 11-page letter, obtained by the Jerusalem Post from a minister on Monday, Peled recommends steps Israel can take to compensate for the shift in American policy, which he believes has become hostile to Israel."

But in the interim," the Post reports, "the minister suggests reconsidering military and civilian purchases from the U.S., selling sensitive equipment that the Washington opposes distributing internationally, and allowing other countries that compete with the U.S. to get involved with the peace process and be given a foothold for their military forces and intelligence agencies."

The irony of someone "reconsidering military and civilian purchases" which are being made, or will be made, with our money is a real hoot - but the laughs are just starting!

There's just one conceivable answer to the suggestion that Israel should start "selling sensitive equipment that Washington opposes distributing internationally": when did they ever stop? The Israelis have been stealing U.S. technology and selling it to the Chinese - for one example - for years, much to Washington's chagrin. So does this mean they're going to be doing it openly, instead of sneaking around and doing it on the sly?

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/06/09/anti-americanism-in-israel/

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