Posted by smeddum on October 18, 2010
Monday October 18 2010
‘WE were on the brink of bankruptcy,” said the UK chancellor George Osborne yesterday as he tried to defend his draconian package of spending cuts and tax rises which will be revealed in detail on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Drive to Global War, Financial crisis, UK economy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 18, 2010
18th October, 2010
Meaford’s St. Vincent Euphrasia Elementary School(SVE) elected Parent Council announced in a media release on Friday that its parents have voted to turn off the school’s WiFi transmitters, and connect to the internet with hard-wires.
Posted in Ecological and Public Health Crisis | Tagged: EM radiation health hazard | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 17, 2010
Good analysis except that where their are debtors there are creditors and so the idea of a conference “to multilaterally default on debt” lacks sense. In fact, the debtor nations have to renegotiate their debt with their creditors: they can’t pay their debt so they have to offer something else, a change in policy which essentially ends America, the empire, and begins America, the sovereign nation state
Bob Chapman
17th October, 2010
Today’s great debate basically between the US and Europe is – should the Fed go full bore by implementing a second quantitative easing? In part it is a moot point, because they have been doing just that in the repo market for four months without letting anyone know what they were up too. Their mandate is to reduce inflation and create full employment. Real inflation is 7% and unemployment is 22-3/4%. The Fed for three years has concentrated on bailing out Wall Street, banking, insurance and transnational conglomerates. Little has been done to fulfill their mandated mission. The main recipients of their largess, of course, are the firms that actually own the privately owned Fed.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: End of empire | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 17, 2010
Damned if we cut, damned if we don’t. There is no alternative: Britian needs to fundamentally change its relationship with the rest of the world, especially our creditors, if we are to begin to emerge from this crisis.
London : British trade unions are making a last minute appeal against the scale of public spending cuts due to be announced by the government next week by calling on MPs to speak out about the damage they will cause to the country. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis, UK economy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 17, 2010
Posted in Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 17, 2010
David Walker, the former Comptroller of the United States from 1998 until 2008, has been warning politicians, the media, and the American public for over a decade that we are off course and headed for disaster. In August 2007, before the financial system meltdown of 2008, Mr. Walker declared:
The US government is on a “burning platform” of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon. There are striking similarities between America’s current situation and the factors that brought down Rome, including declining moral values and political civility at home, an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government. The fiscal imbalance meant the US was on a path toward an explosion of debt. With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiraling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks. Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an unsustainable path. Our very prosperity is placing greater demands on our physical infrastructure. Billions of dollars will be needed to modernize everything from highways and airports to water and sewage systems.
Three years have passed since Mr. Walker sounded the alarm and issued his dire warning. The National Debt in August 2007 was $8.9 trillion. Today it stands at $13.6 trillion, a 53% increase in just over 3 years. It took 205 years as a country to accumulate $4.7 trillion of debt. We’ve added $4.7 trillion in the last 38 months. It doesn’t appear that anyone in government heeded Mr. Walker’s warnings. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: Burning platform, Cash for Clunkers, Catastrophe, Consumer debt, David Walker, debt, home prices, Middle East, peak oil, Savings rate, Stimulus, TARP, war | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 17, 2010
Interview with Thomas Geoghegan
Terrence McNally
14th October, 2010
While the bad news of the Euro crisis makes headlines in the US, we hear next to nothing about a quiet revolution in Europe. The European Union, 27 member nations with a half billion people, has become the largest, wealthiest trading bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the world’s economy — nearly as large as the US and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than either the US, China or Japan.
Posted in Battle for Europe | Tagged: bailout real economy | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 17, 2010
Charter 80 calls aims to
“create conditions for the development of privately-owned banking.”
This really is the crux of the matter : China may have privatized large areas of the economy but they have kept control of the credit system and of capital flows. This is the key to China’s success as we have seen in their counter-crisis investment programme directing capital into infrastructure and the real economy. The conflict today, as for the last three hundred years, is between real wealth creation in sovereign nations and parasitic, extractive, imperialist exploitation.
For more on the CIA and Tiananmen Square see Thierry Meyssan’s excellent article.
12th October, 2010
By Stephen Gowans
Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident who was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has been hailed as a champion of human rights and democracy. His jailing by Chinese authorities for inciting subversion of the state is widely regarded as an unjust stifling of advocacy rights by a Chinese state intolerant of dissent and hostile to ”universal values”. But what Western accounts have failed to mention is that Charter 08, the manifesto Liu had a hand in writing and whose signing led to his arrest, is more than a demand for political and civil liberties. It is a blueprint for making over China into a replica of US society and eliminating the last vestiges of the country’s socialism. If Liu had his druthers, China would: become a free market, free enterprise paradise; welcome domination by foreign banks; hold taxes to a minimum; and allow the Chinese version of the Democrats and Republicans to keep the country safe for corporations, bankers and wealthy investors. Liu’s problem with the Communist Party isn’t that it has travelled the capitalist road, but that it hasn’t traveled it far enough, and has failed to put in place a politically pluralist republican system to facilitate the smooth and efficient operation of an unrestrained capitalist economy. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Multipolar world | Tagged: China, Communism, democracy, human rights | Leave a Comment »
Posted by smeddum on October 17, 2010
Posted in Financial crisis | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 16, 2010
M.K.Bhadrakumar
16th October, 2010
Joy erupted within the establishment in New Delhi late on Tuesday evening as news arrived from New York regarding India’s election to a non-permanent two-year Asian seat in the United Nations Security Council. A dutiful media ecstatically tagged along. The infectious excitement was not without good reason.
Posted in Multipolar world | Leave a Comment »
Posted by seumasach on October 16, 2010
Ellen Brown
15th October, 2010
Looming losses from the mortgage scandal dubbed “foreclosuregate” may qualify as the sort of systemic risk that, under the new financial reform bill, warrants the breakup of the too-big-to-fail banks. The Kanjorski amendment allows federal regulators to pre-emptively break up large financial institutions that—for any reason—pose a threat to U.S. financial or economic stability.
Posted in Financial crisis | Tagged: fight foreclosures | Leave a Comment »
In These New Times 