Brown DOES do God as he calls for new world order in sermon at St Paul's
By James Chapman
Last updated at 7:03 PM on 31st March 2009
Comments (15) Add to My Stories
Divine strength: Gordon Brown, in St Paul's Cathedral, talking about faith and the global economy
Gordon Brown today made an overtly religious call for a new world order based on the 'deep moral sense' shared by all faiths.
Making the first speech by a serving Prime Minister at St Paul's Cathedral in London, Mr Brown quoted from scripture as he said people could come together to forge a new 'global society'.
The world economy and society should be rebuilt around a Zulu word for hope - themba - which also stands for 'there must be an alternative', the Prime Minister suggested.
It was an extraordinary break from his predecessor Tony Blair, whose spin doctor Alastair Campbell, famously declared that 'we don't do God'.
At Westminster it was also seen as high risk for a Government mired in allegations of sleaze to put morality and faith at the centre of its political and economic message.
Mr Brown, asked about his decision to discuss religion so openly, declared: 'I think politicians have got to be very careful that they don't turn out to try to be bishops.
'But what we do and what we say reflects the views that we have, the belief we hold, the faith we were brought up in and the faith we believe in.'
Mr Brown, whose father was a minister in the Church of Scotland, is not a regular churchgoer, but aides said last night that he believed in God.
The Prime Minister, on a platform with his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd and the Bishop of London Richard Chartres, admitted unsupervised financial markets had 'crossed moral boundaries'.
He said market forces should be replaced by those of the 'heart' because it was now clear they could 'become the enemy of the good society'.
'We can now see that markets cannot self-regulate but they can self destruct,' he added.
Critics said Mr Brown undermined his high moral tone by injecting some low politics into his address. He claimed those that would 'do nothing' and let the recession 'run its course' - his traditional attack on David Cameron - 'demean our humanity'.
The Prime Minister also raised eyebrows by claiming he had been arguing for 'some time' that there are limits to markets.
Mr Brown, with Australian PM Kevin Rudd in the historic cathedral, in the week that world leaders meet for the G20 summit
For more than a decade, Labour enthusiastically championed the 'light touch' regulation of the City now blamed for letting bankers take massive risks.
Speaking to a congregation of 2,000 faith leaders, charity workers, City leaders and schoolchildren, Mr Brown again dodged calls for him to apologise for his role in the financial crisis.
'I have always said I take full responsibility for my actions,' he declared. 'But I also know that this crisis is global in source and global in scale.
'I believe that unsupervised globalisation of our financial markets did not only cross national boundaries - it crossed moral boundaries too.'
The Prime Minister said financial institutions and markets must in future operate around the 'enduring virtues' of everyday life.
'Our financial system must be founded on the very same values that are at the heart of our family lives,' he said.
The Prime Minister argued that through all faiths, traditions and heritages runs a 'single powerful modern sense demanding responsibility from all and fairness to all'.
The quoted the Christian doctrine of 'do to others what you would have them do unto you' and highlighted similar principles in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism.
'They each and all reflect a sense that we share the pain of other, and a sense that we believe in something bigger than ourselves - that we cannot be truly content while others face despair, cannot be completely at ease while others live in fear, cannot be satisfied while others are in sorrow,' he said.
'We all feel, regardless of the source of our philosophy, the same deep moral sense that each of us is our brother and sisters' keeper... we cannot and will not pass by on the other side when people are suffering and when we have it within our power to help.'
The Prime Minister called for religious leaders, business chiefs, charities, universities and schools to 'begin a conversation, a national debate, as serious as any we have entered into in my lifetime, about the shape of the economy and the society we have now to renew'.
He said that the word themba, coined by African campaigners and short for 'there must be an alternative', conveyed 'everything that must guide us today'.
'While it was an acronym, it was also the Zulu word for the most important thing that humans can have - hope,' he added.
'Themba - the confidence, conviction and certainty that where there are problems there are always solutions, and we do not need to accept the defeatism of doing nothing.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Geithner’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’: The Entire Global Financial System is at Risk
When the Solution to the Financial Crisis becomes the Cause
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, March 30, 2009
Email this article to a friend
Print this article
US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has unveiled his long-awaited plan to put the US banking system back in order. In doing so, he has refused to tell the ‘dirty little secret’ of the present financial crisis. By refusing to do so, he is trying to save de facto bankrupt US banks that threaten to bring the entire global system down in a new more devastating phase of wealth destruction.
The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model. Yet, one might say, won’t this eventually help the problem by getting the banks back to health?
Not the way the Obama Administration is proceeding. In defending his plan on US TV recently, Geithner, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who previously was CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, argued that his intent was ‘not to sustain weak banks at the expense of strong.’ Yet this is precisely what the PPPIP does. The weak banks are the five largest banks in the system.
The ‘dirty little secret’ which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. What Geithner is desperately trying to protect is that reality. The heart of the present problem and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives, most especially so-called Credit Default Swaps.
In 2000 the Clinton Administration then-Treasury Secretary was a man named Larry Summers. Summers had just been promoted from No. 2 under Wall Street Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be No. 1 when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Vice Chairman of Citigroup. As I describe in detail in my new book, Power of Money: The Rise and Fall of the American Century, to be released this summer, Summers convinced President Bill Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law which opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some $5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton.
One significant law was the repeal of the 1933 Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited mergers of commercial banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs. A second law backed by Treasury Secretary Summers in 2000 was an obscure but deadly important Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That law prevented the responsible US Government regulatory agency, Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC), from having any oversight over the trading of financial derivatives. The new CFMA law stipulated that so-called Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, such as those involved in the AIG insurance disaster, (which investor Warren Buffett once called ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’), be free from Government regulation.
When the Solution to the Financial Crisis becomes the Cause
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, March 30, 2009
Email this article to a friend
Print this article
US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has unveiled his long-awaited plan to put the US banking system back in order. In doing so, he has refused to tell the ‘dirty little secret’ of the present financial crisis. By refusing to do so, he is trying to save de facto bankrupt US banks that threaten to bring the entire global system down in a new more devastating phase of wealth destruction.
The Geithner Plan, his so-called Public-Private Partnership Investment Program or PPPIP, as we have noted previously is designed not to restore a healthy lending system which would funnel credit to business and consumers. Rather it is yet another intricate scheme to pour even more hundreds of billions directly to the leading banks and Wall Street firms responsible for the current mess in world credit markets without demanding they change their business model. Yet, one might say, won’t this eventually help the problem by getting the banks back to health?
Not the way the Obama Administration is proceeding. In defending his plan on US TV recently, Geithner, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who previously was CEO of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, argued that his intent was ‘not to sustain weak banks at the expense of strong.’ Yet this is precisely what the PPPIP does. The weak banks are the five largest banks in the system.
The ‘dirty little secret’ which Geithner is going to great degrees to obscure from the public is very simple. There are only at most perhaps five US banks which are the source of the toxic poison that is causing such dislocation in the world financial system. What Geithner is desperately trying to protect is that reality. The heart of the present problem and the reason ordinary loan losses as in prior bank crises are not the problem, is a variety of exotic financial derivatives, most especially so-called Credit Default Swaps.
In 2000 the Clinton Administration then-Treasury Secretary was a man named Larry Summers. Summers had just been promoted from No. 2 under Wall Street Goldman Sachs banker Robert Rubin to be No. 1 when Rubin left Washington to take up the post of Vice Chairman of Citigroup. As I describe in detail in my new book, Power of Money: The Rise and Fall of the American Century, to be released this summer, Summers convinced President Bill Clinton to sign several Republican bills into law which opened the floodgates for banks to abuse their powers. The fact that the Wall Street big banks spent some $5 billion in lobbying for these changes after 1998 was likely not lost on Clinton.
One significant law was the repeal of the 1933 Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited mergers of commercial banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs. A second law backed by Treasury Secretary Summers in 2000 was an obscure but deadly important Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. That law prevented the responsible US Government regulatory agency, Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC), from having any oversight over the trading of financial derivatives. The new CFMA law stipulated that so-called Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives like Credit Default Swaps, such as those involved in the AIG insurance disaster, (which investor Warren Buffett once called ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’), be free from Government regulation.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Children of Older Parents Do Less Well in Cognitive Tests
Labspaces
Children of older fathers perform less well in a range of cognitive tests during infancy and early childhood, according to a study published this week in the open-access journal PLoS Medicine. In contrast, the study finds that children with older mothers gain higher scores in the same tests – designed to measure the ability to think and reason, including concentration, learning, memory, speaking and reading skills.
The age at which men and women are having children is increasing in the developed world, but whilst the "biological clock" – the effect of increasing maternal age on reduced fertility – is widely-discussed, the consequences of increased paternal age are not as well known. Recent evidence demonstrates a link between older fathers and specific health problems in their children, including birth deformities and cancer, as well as neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. This new study by John McGrath, of the Queensland Brain Institute, University of Queensland in Australia, and colleagues, investigates the link between a father's age and their child's general cognitive ability, by reanalyzing an existing dataset of 33,437 children born between 1959 and 1965 in the United States. This data formed part of the US Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP), which tested each child in the dataset at 8 months, 4 years and 7 years of age with a number of widely-used intelligence scales – including assessments of sensory discrimination and hand-eye coordination, conceptual and physical coordination, and at 7 years reading, spelling and arithmetic ability.
Crucially in their reanalysis of this dataset, McGrath and colleagues adjusted their study to take into account socio-economic factors. They used two models: one that focused on physical factors including the parents' age, and a second that indexed social factors such as maternal and paternal education and family income. They found that the older the father, the more likely the child was to have lower scores on the various tests used by the CPP – with the exception of one measure of physical coordination. The researchers also grouped the children by their mother's age and found that in contrast, the older the mother the higher the scores of the child in the cognitive tests.
Previous researchers have suggested that the children of older mothers may perform better because they experience a more nurturing home environment; if this is the case, this study suggests that children of older fathers do not necessarily experience the same benefit. The researchers advance several hypotheses as possibilities to explain the association between advanced paternal age and children's cognitive ability, including genetic and social arguments. Unlike a woman's eggs – which are formed when she herself is in the womb – a man's sperm accumulates over his lifetime, which previous studies have suggested can mean increased incidence of mutations in the sperm at an older age. However, as emphasized in an expert commentary on the findings by Mary Cannon (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) – who was uninvolved with the study – genetic and social factors can operate in conjunction. "New explanatory models are needed that can encompass socio-cultural and interpersonal factors as well as biological variables", she argues. Given the trend towards older maternal and paternal ages in the developing world, policy-makers may want to consider promoting an awareness of the risks to children that this study associates with delayed fatherhood.
###
Public Library of Science: http://www.plos.org
Bogeymen of the C02 hoax losing ground
Bogeymen of the C02 hoax losing ground
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, March 30, 2009
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. Eric Hoffer
James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), and Andrew Weaver, lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, made statements clearly designed to frighten people.
Both men are politically active in climate change and at the forefront of the attempt to convince the world that CO2 is a problem. Their remarks are intended to scare people by threatening impending doom – nothing new - except there is increasing urgency and fear because their message is failing. As Andrew Weaver summarized, ”All those fossil fuel emissions need to be eliminated. And we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and maintaining human civilization as we know it.”
Hansen increases urgency for action claiming we are on the verge of a tipping point, defined as follows. “Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming.”
We’re reaching a tipping point, but it’s not the one Hansen anticipates. We’re close to the point where the public and politicians realize they have been totally deceived about the nature and cause of climate change. Even before a shift to concern about the economy polls showed a growing shift in public opinion.
Weaver is also troubled by his own definition of dramatic change occurring. He wrote in a March 24 article, in the Vancouver Sun, “There are many depressing things about being a climate scientist these days. The emerging data is going from bad to worse and the political leadership is still acting as if we have all the time in the world to deal with global warming.”
Yes, it’s depressing but because people are not fooled any more and politicians are not acting as Weaver expects. And yes, emerging data is going from bad to worse, but only because it shows CO2 is not causing warming.
Other remarks by both men indicate their fear. For example, Hansen said, “The democratic process doesn’t seem to be working.”
It’s a bizarre comment ...
By Dr. Tim Ball Monday, March 30, 2009
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. Eric Hoffer
James Hansen, head of NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), and Andrew Weaver, lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, made statements clearly designed to frighten people.
Both men are politically active in climate change and at the forefront of the attempt to convince the world that CO2 is a problem. Their remarks are intended to scare people by threatening impending doom – nothing new - except there is increasing urgency and fear because their message is failing. As Andrew Weaver summarized, ”All those fossil fuel emissions need to be eliminated. And we must do so quickly if we are to have any chance of stabilizing the climate and maintaining human civilization as we know it.”
Hansen increases urgency for action claiming we are on the verge of a tipping point, defined as follows. “Tipping points can occur during climate change when the climate reaches a state such that strong amplifying feedbacks are activated by only moderate additional warming.”
We’re reaching a tipping point, but it’s not the one Hansen anticipates. We’re close to the point where the public and politicians realize they have been totally deceived about the nature and cause of climate change. Even before a shift to concern about the economy polls showed a growing shift in public opinion.
Weaver is also troubled by his own definition of dramatic change occurring. He wrote in a March 24 article, in the Vancouver Sun, “There are many depressing things about being a climate scientist these days. The emerging data is going from bad to worse and the political leadership is still acting as if we have all the time in the world to deal with global warming.”
Yes, it’s depressing but because people are not fooled any more and politicians are not acting as Weaver expects. And yes, emerging data is going from bad to worse, but only because it shows CO2 is not causing warming.
Other remarks by both men indicate their fear. For example, Hansen said, “The democratic process doesn’t seem to be working.”
It’s a bizarre comment ...
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Economic Meltdown: The "Dollar Glut" is What Finances America's Global Military Build-up
Economic Meltdown: The "Dollar Glut" is What Finances America's Global Military Build-up
by Prof. Michael Hudson
Global Research, March 29, 2009
I am traveling in Europe for three weeks to discuss the global financial crisis with government officials, politicians and labor leaders. What is most remarkable is how differently the financial problem is perceived over here. It's like being in another economic universe, not just another continent.
The U.S. media are silent about the most important topic policy makers are discussing here (and I suspect in Asia too): how to protect their countries from three inter-related dynamics: (1) the surplus dollars pouring into the rest of the world for yet further financial speculation and corporate takeovers; (2) the fact that central banks are obliged to recycle these dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the federal U.S. budget deficit; and most important (but most suppressed in the U.S. media, (3) the military character of the U.S. payments deficit and the domestic federal budget deficit.
Strange as it may seem and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy the "dollar glut" is what finances America's global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America's expanding military empire effective "taxation without representation." Keeping international reserves in "dollars" means recycling their dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military.
To date, countries have been as powerless to defend themselves against the fact that this compulsory financing of U.S. military spending is built into the global financial system. Neoliberal economists applaud this as "equilibrium," as if it is part of economic nature and "free markets" rather than bare-knuckle diplomacy wielded with increasing aggressiveness by U.S. officials. The mass media chime in, pretending that recycling the dollar glut to finance U.S. military spending is "showing their faith in U.S. economic strength" by sending "their" dollars here to "invest." It is as if a choice is involved, not financial and diplomatic compulsion to choose merely between "Yes" (from China, reluctantly), "Yes, please" (from Japan and the European Union) and "Yes, thank you" (Britain, Georgia and Australia).
It is not "foreign faith in the U.S. economy" that leads foreigners to "put their money here." This is a silly anthropomorphic picture of a more sinister dynamic. The "foreigners" in question are not consumers buying U.S. exports, nor are they private-sector "investors" buying U.S. stocks and bonds. The largest and most important foreign entities putting "their money" here are central banks, and it is not "their money" at all. They are sending back the dollars that foreign exporters and other recipients turn over to their central banks for domestic currency.
When the U.S. payments deficit pumps dollars into foreign economies, these banks are being given little option except to buy U.S. Treasury bills and bonds which the Treasury spends on financing an enormous, hostile military build-up to encircle the major dollar-recyclers China, Japan and Arab OPEC oil producers. Yet these governments are forced to recycle dollar inflows in a way that funds U.S. military policies in which they have no say in formulating, and which threaten them more and more belligerently. That is why China and Russia took the lead in forming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) a few years ago.
Here in Europe there is a clear awareness that the U.S. payments deficit is much larger than just the trade deficit. One need merely look at Table 5 of the U.S. balance-of-payments data compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and published by the Dept. of Commerce in its Survey of Current Business to see that the deficit does not stem merely from consumers buying more imports than the United States exports as the financial sector de-industrializes its economy. U.S. imports are now plunging as the economy shrinks and consumers are now finding themselves obliged to pay down the debts they have taken on.
Congress has told foreign investors in the largest dollar holder, China, not to buy anything except perhaps used-car dealerships and maybe more packaged mortgages and Fannie Mae stock the equivalent of Japanese investors being steered into spending $1 billion for Rockefeller Center, on which they subsequently took a 100% loss, and Saudi investment in Citigroup. That's the kind of "international equilibrium" that U.S. officials love to see. "CNOOK go home" is the motto when it comes to serious attempts by foreign governments and their sovereign wealth funds (central bank departments trying to figure out what to do with their dollar glut) to make direct investments in American industry.
So we are left with the extent to which the U.S. payments deficit stems from military spending. The problem is not only the war in Iraq, now being extended to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is the expensive build-up of U.S. military bases in Asian, European, post-Soviet and Third World countries. The Obama administration has promised to make the actual amount of this military spending more transparent. That presumably means publishing a revised set of balance of payments figures as well as domestic federal budget statistics.
The military overhead is much like a debt overhead, extracting revenue from the economy. In this case it is to pay the military-industrial complex, not merely Wall Street banks and other financial institutions. The domestic federal budget deficit does not stem only from "priming the pump" to give away enormous sums to create a new financial oligarchy. It contains an enormous and rapidly growing military component.
So Europeans and Asians see U.S. companies pumping more and more dollars into their economies, not only to buy their exports in excess of providing them with goods and services in return, and not only to buy their companies and "commanding heights" of privatized public enterprises without giving them reciprocal rights to buy important U.S. companies (remember the U.S. turn-down of China's attempt to buy into the U.S. oil distribution business), and not only to buy foreign stocks, bonds and real estate. The U.S. media somehow neglect to mention that the U.S. Government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars abroad not only in the Near East for direct combat, but to build enormous military bases to encircle the rest of the world, to install radar systems, guided missile systems and other forms of military coercion, including the "color revolutions" that have been funded and are still being funded all around the former Soviet Union. Pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills adding up to tens of millions of the dollars at a time have become familiar "visuals" on some TV broadcasts, but the link is not made with U.S. military and diplomatic spending and foreign central-bank dollar holdings, which are reported simply as "wonderful faith in the U.S. economic recovery" and presumably the "monetary magic" being worked by Wall Street's Tim Geithner at Treasury and Helicopter Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve.
by Prof. Michael Hudson
Global Research, March 29, 2009
I am traveling in Europe for three weeks to discuss the global financial crisis with government officials, politicians and labor leaders. What is most remarkable is how differently the financial problem is perceived over here. It's like being in another economic universe, not just another continent.
The U.S. media are silent about the most important topic policy makers are discussing here (and I suspect in Asia too): how to protect their countries from three inter-related dynamics: (1) the surplus dollars pouring into the rest of the world for yet further financial speculation and corporate takeovers; (2) the fact that central banks are obliged to recycle these dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the federal U.S. budget deficit; and most important (but most suppressed in the U.S. media, (3) the military character of the U.S. payments deficit and the domestic federal budget deficit.
Strange as it may seem and irrational as it would be in a more logical system of world diplomacy the "dollar glut" is what finances America's global military build-up. It forces foreign central banks to bear the costs of America's expanding military empire effective "taxation without representation." Keeping international reserves in "dollars" means recycling their dollar inflows to buy U.S. Treasury bills U.S. government debt issued largely to finance the military.
To date, countries have been as powerless to defend themselves against the fact that this compulsory financing of U.S. military spending is built into the global financial system. Neoliberal economists applaud this as "equilibrium," as if it is part of economic nature and "free markets" rather than bare-knuckle diplomacy wielded with increasing aggressiveness by U.S. officials. The mass media chime in, pretending that recycling the dollar glut to finance U.S. military spending is "showing their faith in U.S. economic strength" by sending "their" dollars here to "invest." It is as if a choice is involved, not financial and diplomatic compulsion to choose merely between "Yes" (from China, reluctantly), "Yes, please" (from Japan and the European Union) and "Yes, thank you" (Britain, Georgia and Australia).
It is not "foreign faith in the U.S. economy" that leads foreigners to "put their money here." This is a silly anthropomorphic picture of a more sinister dynamic. The "foreigners" in question are not consumers buying U.S. exports, nor are they private-sector "investors" buying U.S. stocks and bonds. The largest and most important foreign entities putting "their money" here are central banks, and it is not "their money" at all. They are sending back the dollars that foreign exporters and other recipients turn over to their central banks for domestic currency.
When the U.S. payments deficit pumps dollars into foreign economies, these banks are being given little option except to buy U.S. Treasury bills and bonds which the Treasury spends on financing an enormous, hostile military build-up to encircle the major dollar-recyclers China, Japan and Arab OPEC oil producers. Yet these governments are forced to recycle dollar inflows in a way that funds U.S. military policies in which they have no say in formulating, and which threaten them more and more belligerently. That is why China and Russia took the lead in forming the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) a few years ago.
Here in Europe there is a clear awareness that the U.S. payments deficit is much larger than just the trade deficit. One need merely look at Table 5 of the U.S. balance-of-payments data compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and published by the Dept. of Commerce in its Survey of Current Business to see that the deficit does not stem merely from consumers buying more imports than the United States exports as the financial sector de-industrializes its economy. U.S. imports are now plunging as the economy shrinks and consumers are now finding themselves obliged to pay down the debts they have taken on.
Congress has told foreign investors in the largest dollar holder, China, not to buy anything except perhaps used-car dealerships and maybe more packaged mortgages and Fannie Mae stock the equivalent of Japanese investors being steered into spending $1 billion for Rockefeller Center, on which they subsequently took a 100% loss, and Saudi investment in Citigroup. That's the kind of "international equilibrium" that U.S. officials love to see. "CNOOK go home" is the motto when it comes to serious attempts by foreign governments and their sovereign wealth funds (central bank departments trying to figure out what to do with their dollar glut) to make direct investments in American industry.
So we are left with the extent to which the U.S. payments deficit stems from military spending. The problem is not only the war in Iraq, now being extended to Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is the expensive build-up of U.S. military bases in Asian, European, post-Soviet and Third World countries. The Obama administration has promised to make the actual amount of this military spending more transparent. That presumably means publishing a revised set of balance of payments figures as well as domestic federal budget statistics.
The military overhead is much like a debt overhead, extracting revenue from the economy. In this case it is to pay the military-industrial complex, not merely Wall Street banks and other financial institutions. The domestic federal budget deficit does not stem only from "priming the pump" to give away enormous sums to create a new financial oligarchy. It contains an enormous and rapidly growing military component.
So Europeans and Asians see U.S. companies pumping more and more dollars into their economies, not only to buy their exports in excess of providing them with goods and services in return, and not only to buy their companies and "commanding heights" of privatized public enterprises without giving them reciprocal rights to buy important U.S. companies (remember the U.S. turn-down of China's attempt to buy into the U.S. oil distribution business), and not only to buy foreign stocks, bonds and real estate. The U.S. media somehow neglect to mention that the U.S. Government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars abroad not only in the Near East for direct combat, but to build enormous military bases to encircle the rest of the world, to install radar systems, guided missile systems and other forms of military coercion, including the "color revolutions" that have been funded and are still being funded all around the former Soviet Union. Pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills adding up to tens of millions of the dollars at a time have become familiar "visuals" on some TV broadcasts, but the link is not made with U.S. military and diplomatic spending and foreign central-bank dollar holdings, which are reported simply as "wonderful faith in the U.S. economic recovery" and presumably the "monetary magic" being worked by Wall Street's Tim Geithner at Treasury and Helicopter Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve.
Experts On Third World Banana Republics: The U.S. has Become a Third World Banana Republic
Experts On Third World Banana Republics: The U.S. has Become a Third World Banana Republic
Who are the leading experts on third world banana republics?
Probably those at the International Monetary Fund with years of experience lending money to corrupt regimes after their excess became so out of hand that they needed emergency assistance.
Today, two top IMF officials said that the U.S. has become a third world banana republic.
First, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, says recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform, and calls the U.S. a banana republic. In his essay "The Quiet Coup" (which includes sections like "Becoming a Banana Republic"), Johnson writes:
Who are the leading experts on third world banana republics?
Probably those at the International Monetary Fund with years of experience lending money to corrupt regimes after their excess became so out of hand that they needed emergency assistance.
Today, two top IMF officials said that the U.S. has become a third world banana republic.
First, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, says recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform, and calls the U.S. a banana republic. In his essay "The Quiet Coup" (which includes sections like "Becoming a Banana Republic"), Johnson writes:
VW To Launch 258 MPG- Car - Cost $600 US
VW To Launch 258 MPG
Car - Cost $600 US
http://www.caradvice.com.au/25172/volkswagen-introduces-worlds-most-economical-car/
The Civil Heretic
The Civil Heretic
Eugene Richards for The New York Times
The Whimsical Gaze Dyson still travels widely, giving talks at churches and colleges, reminding people how dangerous nuclear weapons are.
NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF
Published: March 25, 2009
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
Eugene Richards for The New York Times
The Whimsical Gaze Dyson still travels widely, giving talks at churches and colleges, reminding people how dangerous nuclear weapons are.
NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF
Published: March 25, 2009
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Princeton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as “a pompous twit,” “a blowhard,” “a cesspool of misinformation,” “an old coot riding into the sunset” and, perhaps inevitably, “a mad scientist.” Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred “carbon-eating trees,” whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that “perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers.” Dyson’s son, George, a technology historian, says his father’s views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
VIDEO: The Solution to the Economic Crisis. Credit as a Public Utility:
VIDEO: The Solution to the Economic Crisis. Credit as a Public Utility:
by Richard C. Cook
Global Research, March 28, 2009
by Richard C. Cook
Global Research, March 28, 2009
(NaturalNews) Dr. Sherry Tenpenny speaks out against the dangers of vaccines in an exclusive audio interview published today on NaturalNews.com.
NaturalNews Publishes Revealing Interview with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Author of "Saying No to Vaccines"
Friday, March 27, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Key concepts: Vaccines, NaturalNews and Health
Email this article to a friend Printable Version FREE Email Newsletter
Articles Related to This Article:
• The great thimerosal cover-up: Mercury, vaccines, autism and your child's health
• Study "Disproving" Mercury-Autism Link Published in Journal with Financial Ties to Vaccine Manufacturers
• CNN Helps Autism Debacle Blow Up in Government's Face; Vaccine-Autism Link No Longer in Question
Support NaturalNews advertisers - Advertise with NaturalNews
Sign the Health Revolution Petition
Join the call for genuine health freedom in America. End FDA tyranny and Big Pharma corruption. Watch the video and sign the petition here.
(NaturalNews) Dr. Sherry Tenpenny speaks out against the dangers of vaccines in an exclusive audio interview published today on NaturalNews.com. Author of the book Saying No to Vaccines (www.SayingNoToVaccines.com), Dr. Tenpenny is a well-informed, vocal opponent of mandatory vaccination policies and a well-respected educator on health freedom and vaccine exemption strategies for concerned parents.
The exclusive interview with the Health Ranger is available as an audio MP3 file on NaturalNews at: http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Po...
In the interview, Dr. Tenpenny discusses:
• The startling truth about dead animal materials used in the making of vaccines.
• How many vaccines actually CAUSE the very diseases they claim to prevent!
• Why vaccines are being pushed to treat symptoms caused by other vaccines.
• How drug companies use medical quackery and fear tactics to push vaccines.
• Why the idea that vaccines eliminate infectious disease is a medical myth.
• How vaccines damage the immune system and can cause autism.
• Why most children are given more than 100 different vaccines within the first six years of their life.
• The shocking truth about how one doctor said children can be given as many as one thousand vaccines without any side effects at all!
• How parents can protect their children from vaccines in any state or country.
• Why doctors are so easily seduced by the vaccine pushers, and how you can protect yourself (and your children) from ignorant physicians.
• The true history of vaccines and why vaccines became a favored form of Big Pharma quackery.
Get informed now
Don't you deserve to know ALL the facts on vaccines? Doctors, drug companies and health authorities only tell you one side of the story -- the Big Pharma side. But there's another side that you're not allowed to learn: The real world side of the story.
In the real world, you see, injecting children with DNA fragments harvested from diseased animals seems utterly senseless. In the real world, the human immune system is an amazing system of biotechnology that doesn't need chemical assistance to function properly. In the real world, teenage girls are dropping dead within hours after receiving HPV vaccine injections.
Drug companies don't want you to know these facts, but intelligent, concerned parents everywhere are getting informed!
Inform yourself now by listening to this exclusive interview with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny: http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Po...
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no financial ties with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, her book or her website (www.SayingNoToVaccines.com). This information is provided solely for the purpose of educating parents and saving the lives of children. Vaccines are not the answer! Children need vitamin D, sunlight, real food and real physical activity. A healthy child needs no vaccines, period!
The healthiest children in America right now are home-schooled, non-vaccinated, well-nourished children with intelligent, informed parents.
Friday, March 27, 2009 by: Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Key concepts: Vaccines, NaturalNews and Health
Email this article to a friend Printable Version FREE Email Newsletter
Articles Related to This Article:
• The great thimerosal cover-up: Mercury, vaccines, autism and your child's health
• Study "Disproving" Mercury-Autism Link Published in Journal with Financial Ties to Vaccine Manufacturers
• CNN Helps Autism Debacle Blow Up in Government's Face; Vaccine-Autism Link No Longer in Question
Support NaturalNews advertisers - Advertise with NaturalNews
Sign the Health Revolution Petition
Join the call for genuine health freedom in America. End FDA tyranny and Big Pharma corruption. Watch the video and sign the petition here.
(NaturalNews) Dr. Sherry Tenpenny speaks out against the dangers of vaccines in an exclusive audio interview published today on NaturalNews.com. Author of the book Saying No to Vaccines (www.SayingNoToVaccines.com), Dr. Tenpenny is a well-informed, vocal opponent of mandatory vaccination policies and a well-respected educator on health freedom and vaccine exemption strategies for concerned parents.
The exclusive interview with the Health Ranger is available as an audio MP3 file on NaturalNews at: http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Po...
In the interview, Dr. Tenpenny discusses:
• The startling truth about dead animal materials used in the making of vaccines.
• How many vaccines actually CAUSE the very diseases they claim to prevent!
• Why vaccines are being pushed to treat symptoms caused by other vaccines.
• How drug companies use medical quackery and fear tactics to push vaccines.
• Why the idea that vaccines eliminate infectious disease is a medical myth.
• How vaccines damage the immune system and can cause autism.
• Why most children are given more than 100 different vaccines within the first six years of their life.
• The shocking truth about how one doctor said children can be given as many as one thousand vaccines without any side effects at all!
• How parents can protect their children from vaccines in any state or country.
• Why doctors are so easily seduced by the vaccine pushers, and how you can protect yourself (and your children) from ignorant physicians.
• The true history of vaccines and why vaccines became a favored form of Big Pharma quackery.
Get informed now
Don't you deserve to know ALL the facts on vaccines? Doctors, drug companies and health authorities only tell you one side of the story -- the Big Pharma side. But there's another side that you're not allowed to learn: The real world side of the story.
In the real world, you see, injecting children with DNA fragments harvested from diseased animals seems utterly senseless. In the real world, the human immune system is an amazing system of biotechnology that doesn't need chemical assistance to function properly. In the real world, teenage girls are dropping dead within hours after receiving HPV vaccine injections.
Drug companies don't want you to know these facts, but intelligent, concerned parents everywhere are getting informed!
Inform yourself now by listening to this exclusive interview with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny: http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Po...
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no financial ties with Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, her book or her website (www.SayingNoToVaccines.com). This information is provided solely for the purpose of educating parents and saving the lives of children. Vaccines are not the answer! Children need vitamin D, sunlight, real food and real physical activity. A healthy child needs no vaccines, period!
The healthiest children in America right now are home-schooled, non-vaccinated, well-nourished children with intelligent, informed parents.
Friday, March 27, 2009
UN and IMF Back Agenda For Global Financial Dictatorship
UN & IMF Back Agenda For Global Financial Dictatorship
Frog march to new world reserve currency system continues apace
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, March 27, 2009
Both the IMF and the United Nations have thrown their weight behind proposals to implement a new world reserve currency system to replace the dollar as part of the acceleration towards a global financial dictatorship, in the same week that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told CFR globalists that he was “open” to the idea.
As we reported yesterday, Timothy Geithner initially renounced a Chinese and Russian proposal to supplant the dollar with a new global currency, but he later told CFR elitists, who have consistently lobbied for a global currency as part of a wider agenda for global government, that he was “open” to the idea. Indeed, before Geithner was appointed by Obama when he was still president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he argued for a new global central banking system shortly after attending the 2008 Bilderberg meeting.
Now the U.N. and the IMF have thrown their weight behind the move and reports indicate that the matter will be a major point of discussion at the upcoming G20 conference, with officials having initially dismissed speculation that a global currency would be on the agenda.
“A UN panel of expert economists pressed Thursday for a new global currency reserve scheme to replace the volatile, dollar-based system and for coordinated steps by rich countries to stimulate their economies,” reports AFP.
“A new Global Reserve System — what may be viewed as a greatly expanded SDR (Special Drawing Rights), with regular or cyclically adjusted emissions calibrated to the size of reserve accumulations, could contribute to global stability, economic strength and global equity,” the panel said.
In addition, “IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that talks on a new global reserve currency to replace the US dollar were “legitimate” and could take place “in the coming months,” according to the report.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
As we have repeatedly warned, the introduction of a new global currency system is a key cornerstone in the move towards global government, centralized control and more power being concentrated into fewer hands.
The swift and ruthless exploitation of the economic meltdown on behalf of globalists and central banks who caused the problem in the first place revolves around their drive for a global monetary union, which is a directive coming from the very inner core of the CFR and the Bilderberg Group.
The Federal Reserve is already is a private organization and as such unaccountable to the American people. A global central bank, which is effectively what a new global reserve currency system will create, will establish a de facto financial dictatorship which will wield power over the economies of every country on the planet with no accountability whatsoever.
The ruling elite resolved long ago to force a global currency down our throats. In fact, a global currency is at the very core of their plan to dominate the world. Control money and you control the destiny of states, you eliminate national sovereignty. “The control of money and credit strikes at the very heart of national sovereignty,” A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America once observed.
As Georgetown professor and CFR historian Carroll Quigley noted, the goal of the banking families and their minions consists of “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole… controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”
In 2007, Robert Mundell, “the father of the euro,” noted that “international monetary reform usually becomes possible only in response to a felt need and the threat of a global crisis.”
That very crisis arrived shortly after, providing the elite with the perfect opportunity to ram through a massive program of financial centralization by posing as the saviors - when they created the problem in the first place.
The very actions of the elite will continue to worsen the financial crisis, providing the necessary political capital for them to institute what they had planned all along - a new global currency for the global government that they plan to implement thereafter.
Frog march to new world reserve currency system continues apace
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, March 27, 2009
Both the IMF and the United Nations have thrown their weight behind proposals to implement a new world reserve currency system to replace the dollar as part of the acceleration towards a global financial dictatorship, in the same week that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told CFR globalists that he was “open” to the idea.
As we reported yesterday, Timothy Geithner initially renounced a Chinese and Russian proposal to supplant the dollar with a new global currency, but he later told CFR elitists, who have consistently lobbied for a global currency as part of a wider agenda for global government, that he was “open” to the idea. Indeed, before Geithner was appointed by Obama when he was still president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he argued for a new global central banking system shortly after attending the 2008 Bilderberg meeting.
Now the U.N. and the IMF have thrown their weight behind the move and reports indicate that the matter will be a major point of discussion at the upcoming G20 conference, with officials having initially dismissed speculation that a global currency would be on the agenda.
“A UN panel of expert economists pressed Thursday for a new global currency reserve scheme to replace the volatile, dollar-based system and for coordinated steps by rich countries to stimulate their economies,” reports AFP.
“A new Global Reserve System — what may be viewed as a greatly expanded SDR (Special Drawing Rights), with regular or cyclically adjusted emissions calibrated to the size of reserve accumulations, could contribute to global stability, economic strength and global equity,” the panel said.
In addition, “IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that talks on a new global reserve currency to replace the US dollar were “legitimate” and could take place “in the coming months,” according to the report.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
As we have repeatedly warned, the introduction of a new global currency system is a key cornerstone in the move towards global government, centralized control and more power being concentrated into fewer hands.
The swift and ruthless exploitation of the economic meltdown on behalf of globalists and central banks who caused the problem in the first place revolves around their drive for a global monetary union, which is a directive coming from the very inner core of the CFR and the Bilderberg Group.
The Federal Reserve is already is a private organization and as such unaccountable to the American people. A global central bank, which is effectively what a new global reserve currency system will create, will establish a de facto financial dictatorship which will wield power over the economies of every country on the planet with no accountability whatsoever.
The ruling elite resolved long ago to force a global currency down our throats. In fact, a global currency is at the very core of their plan to dominate the world. Control money and you control the destiny of states, you eliminate national sovereignty. “The control of money and credit strikes at the very heart of national sovereignty,” A.W. Clausen, president of Bank of America once observed.
As Georgetown professor and CFR historian Carroll Quigley noted, the goal of the banking families and their minions consists of “nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole… controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.”
In 2007, Robert Mundell, “the father of the euro,” noted that “international monetary reform usually becomes possible only in response to a felt need and the threat of a global crisis.”
That very crisis arrived shortly after, providing the elite with the perfect opportunity to ram through a massive program of financial centralization by posing as the saviors - when they created the problem in the first place.
The very actions of the elite will continue to worsen the financial crisis, providing the necessary political capital for them to institute what they had planned all along - a new global currency for the global government that they plan to implement thereafter.
This Crisis Is Way Bigger Than Dead Banks and Wall Street Bailouts
By James Galbraith, Washington Monthly. Posted March 23, 2009.
Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than anyone has so far admitted. Tools
EMAIL
PRINT
51 COMMENTS
Share and save this post:
AlterNet Social Networks:
Also in Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace
AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right
Matt Taibbi
Stop the Madness: Bernie Sanders Tries to Block Appointment of Latest Wall Street Insider
Amy Goodman
9 Reasons Obama's Fiscal Plan Fails Both Markets and Taxpayers
Joseph Stiglitz
The Real AIG Scandal: How the Game Is Rigged at Wall Street's Casino
Lucy Komisar
Powerful Banks and Government Handouts to the Rich: It's Time for Protest
Zephyr Teachout
We Need to Regulate the Financial Instruments That Took AIG Down
George Soros
More stories by James Galbraith
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace RSS Feed
Main AlterNet RSS Feed
Advertisement
Barack Obama's presidency began in hope and goodwill, but its test will be its success or failure on the economics. Did the president and his team correctly diagnose the problem? Did they act with sufficient imagination and force? And did they prevail against the political obstacles -- and not only that, but also against the procedures and the habits of thought to which official Washington is addicted?
The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind that program, and there may not be one, until the first report of the new Council of Economic Advisers appears next year. We therefore resort to what we know about the economists: the chair of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers; the CEA chair, Christina Romer; the budget director, Peter Orszag; and their titular head, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. This is plainly a capable, close-knit group, acting with energy and commitment. Deficiencies of their program cannot, therefore, be blamed on incompetence. Rather, if deficiencies exist, they probably result from their shared background and creed -- in short, from the limitations of their ideas.
The deepest belief of the modern economist is that the economy is a self-stabilizing system. This means that, even if nothing is done, normal rates of employment and production will someday return. Practically all modern economists believe this, often without thinking much about it. (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it reflexively in a major speech in London in January: "The global economy will recover." He did not say how he knew.) The difference between conservatives and liberals is over whether policy can usefully speed things up. Conservatives say no, liberals say yes, and on this point Obama's economists lean left. Hence the priority they gave, in their first days, to the stimulus package.
But did they get the scale right? Was the plan big enough? Policies are based on models; in a slump, plans for spending depend on a forecast of how deep and long the slump would otherwise be. The program will only be correctly sized if the forecast is accurate. And the forecast depends on the underlying belief. If recovery is not built into the genes of the system, then the forecast will be too optimistic, and the stimulus based on it will be too small.
Consider the baseline economic forecast of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency lawmakers rely on to evaluate the economy and their budget plans. In its early-January forecast, the CBO measured and projected the difference between actual economic performance and "normal" economic performance -- the so-called GDP gap. The forecast has two astonishing features. First, the CBO did not expect the present recession to be any worse than that of 1981-82, our deepest postwar recession. Second, the CBO expected a turnaround beginning late this year, with the economy returning to normal around 2015, even if Congress had taken no action at all.
With this projection in mind, the recovery bill pours a bit less than 2 percent of GDP into new spending per year, plus some tax cuts, for two years, into a GDP gap estimated to average 6 percent for three years. The stimulus does not need to fill the whole gap, because the CBO expects a "multiplier effect," as first-round spending on bridges and roads, for example, is followed by second-round spending by steelworkers and road crews. The CBO estimates that because of the multiplier effect, two dollars of new public spending produces about three dollars of new output. (For tax cuts the numbers are lower, since some of the cuts will be saved in the first round.) And with this help, the recession becomes fairly mild. After two years, growth would be solidly established and Congress's work would be done. In this way, the duration as well as the scale of action was driven, behind the scenes, by the CBO's baseline forecast.
Why did the CBO reach this conclusion? On depth, CBO's model is based on the postwar experience, and such models cannot predict outcomes more serious than anything already seen. If we are facing a downturn worse than 1982, our computers won't tell us; we will be surprised. And if the slump is destined to drag on, the computers won't tell us that either. Baked into the CBO model we find a "natural rate of unemployment" of 4.8 percent; the model moves the economy back toward that value no matter what. In the real world, however, there is no reason to believe this will happen. Some alternative forecasts, freed of the mystical return to "normal," now project a GDP gap twice as large as the CBO model predicts, and with no near-term recovery at all.
Considerations of timing also influenced the choice of line items. The bill tilted toward "shovel-ready" projects like refurbishing schools and fixing roads, and away from projects requiring planning and long construction lead times, like urban mass transit. The push for speed also influenced the bill in another way. Drafting new legislative authority takes time. In an emergency, it was sensible for Chairman David Obey of the House Appropriations Committee to mine the legislative docket for ideas already commanding broad support (especially within the Democratic caucus). In this way he produced a bill that was a triumph of fast drafting, practical politics, and progressive principle -- a good bill which the Republicans hated. But the scale of action possible by such means is unrelated, except by coincidence, to what the economy needs.
Three further considerations limited the plan. There was, to begin with, the desire for political consensus; President Obama chose to start his administration with a bill that might win bipartisan support and pass in Congress by wide margins. (He was, of course, spurned by the Republicans.) Second, the new team also sought consensus of another type. Christina Romer polled a bipartisan group of professional economists, and Larry Summers told Meet the Press that the final package reflected a "balance" of their views. This procedure guarantees a result near the middle of the professional mind-set. The method would be useful if the errors of economists were unsystematic. But they are not. Economists are a cautious group, and in any extreme situation the midpoint of professional opinion is bound to be wrong.
Third, the initial package was affected by the new team's desire to get past this crisis and to return to the familiar problems of their past lives. For these protgs of Robert Rubin, veterans in several cases of Rubin's Hamilton Project, a key preconception has always been the budget deficit and what they call the "entitlement problem." This is D.C.-speak for rolling back Social Security and Medicare, opening new markets for fund managers and private insurers, behind a wave of budget babble about "long-term deficits" and "unfunded liabilities." To this our new president is not immune. Even before the inauguration Obama was moved to commit to "entitlement reform," and on February 23 he convened what he called a "fiscal responsibility summit." The idea took hold that after two years or so of big spending, the return to normal would be under way, and the costs of fiscal relief and infrastructure improvement might be recouped, in part by taking a pound of flesh from the incomes and health care of the old.
The chance of a return to normal depends, in turn, on the banking strategy. To Obama's economists a "normal" economy is led and guided by private banks. When domestic credit booms are under way, they tend to generate high employment and low inflation; this makes the public budget look good, and spares the president and Congress many hard decisions. For this reason the new team instinctively seeks to return the bankers to their normal position at the top of the economic hill. Secretary Geithner told CNBC, "We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we'd like to do our best to preserve that system."
But, is this a realistic hope? Is it even a possibility? The normal mechanics of a credit cycle do involve interludes when asset values crash and credit relations collapse. In 1981, Paul Volcker's campaign against inflation caused such a crash. But, though they came close, the big banks did not fail then. (I learned recently from William Isaac, Ronald Reagan's chair of the FDIC, that the government had contingency plans to nationalize the large banks in 1982, had Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil defaulted outright on their debts.) When monetary policy relaxed and the delayed tax cuts of 1981 kicked in, there was both pent-up demand for credit and the capacity to supply it. The final result was that the economy recovered quickly. Again in 1994, after a long period of credit crunch, banks and households were strong enough, even without a stimulus, to support a vast renewal of lending which propelled the economy forward for six years.
The Bush-era disasters guarantee that these happy patterns will not be repeated. For the first time since the 1930s, millions of American households are financially ruined. Families that two years ago enjoyed wealth in stocks and in their homes now have neither. Their 401(k)s have fallen by half, their mortgages are a burden, and their homes are an albatross. For many the best strategy is to mail the keys to the bank. This practically assures that excess supply and collapsed prices in housing will continue for years. Apart from cash -- protected by deposit insurance and now desperately being conserved -- the American middle class finds today that its major source of wealth is the implicit value of Social Security and Medicare -- illiquid and intangible but real and inalienable in a way that home and equity values are not. And so it will remain, as long as future benefits are not cut.
In addition, some of the biggest banks are bust, almost for certain. Having abandoned prudent risk management in a climate of regulatory negligence and complicity under Bush, these banks participated gleefully in a poisonous game of abusive mortgage originations followed by rounds of pass-the-bad-penny-to-the-greater-fool. But they could not pass them all. And when in August 2007 the music stopped, banks discovered that the markets for their toxic-mortgage-backed securities had collapsed, and found themselves insolvent. Only a dogged political refusal to admit this has since kept the banks from being taken into receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation -- something the FDIC has the power to do, and has done as recently as last year with IndyMac in California.
Geithner's banking plan would prolong the state of denial. It involves government guarantees of the bad assets, keeping current management in place and attempting to attract new private capital. (Conversion of preferred shares to equity, which may happen with Citigroup, conveys no powers that the government, as regulator, does not already have.) The idea is that one can fix the banks from the top down, by reestablishing markets for their bad securities. If the idea seems familiar, it is: Henry Paulson also pressed for this, to the point of winning congressional approval. But then he abandoned the idea. Why? He learned it could not work.
Paulson faced two insuperable problems. One was quantity: there were too many bad assets. The project of buying them back could be likened to "filling the Pacific Ocean with basketballs," as one observer said to me at the time. (When I tried to find out where the original request for $700 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program came from, a senior Senate aide replied, "Well, it's a number between five hundred billion and one trillion.")
The other problem was price. The only price at which the assets could be disposed of, protecting the taxpayer, was of course the market price. In the collapse of the market for mortgage-backed securities and their associated credit default swaps, this price was too low to save the banks. But any higher price would have amounted to a gift of public funds, justifiable only if there was a good chance that the assets might recover value when "normal" conditions return.
That chance can be assessed, of course, only by doing what any reasonable private investor would do: due diligence, meaning a close inspection of the loan tapes. On the face of it, such inspections will reveal a very high proportion of missing documentation, inflated appraisals, and other evidence of fraud. (In late 2007 the ratings agency Fitch conducted this exercise on a small sample of loan files, and found indications of misrepresentation or fraud present in practically every one.) The reasonable inference would be that many more of the loans will default. Geithner's plan to guarantee these so-called assets, therefore, is almost sure to overstate their value; it is only a way of delaying the ultimate public recognition of loss, while keeping the perpetrators afloat.
Delay is not innocuous. When a bank's insolvency is ignored, the incentives for normal prudent banking collapse. Management has nothing to lose. It may take big new risks, in volatile markets like commodities, in the hope of salvation before the regulators close in. Or it may loot the institution -- nomenklatura privatization, as the Russians would say -- through unjustified bonuses, dividends, and options. It will never fully disclose the extent of insolvency on its own.
The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil. Ultimately the losses fall on the public anyway, since deposits are largely insured. There is no chance that the banks will simply resume normal long-term lending. To whom would they lend? For what? Against what collateral? And if banks are recapitalized without changing their management, why should we expect them to change the behavior that caused the insolvency in the first place?
The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis -- an integrated, long-term economic threat -- rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That's the thinking.
But the plumbing metaphor is misleading. Credit is not a flow. It is not something that can be forced downstream by clearing a pipe. Credit is a contract. It requires a borrower as well as a lender, a customer as well as a bank. And the borrower must meet two conditions. One is creditworthiness, meaning a secure income and, usually, a house with equity in it. Asset prices therefore matter. With a chronic oversupply of houses, prices fall, collateral disappears, and even if borrowers are willing they can't qualify for loans. The other requirement is a willingness to borrow, motivated by what Keynes called the "animal spirits" of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a slump, such optimism is scarce. Even if people have collateral, they want the security of cash. And it is precisely because they want cash that they will not deplete their reserves by plunking down a payment on a new car.
The credit flow metaphor implies that people came flocking to the new-car showrooms last November and were turned away because there were no loans to be had. This is not true -- what happened was that people stopped coming in. And they stopped coming in because, suddenly, they felt poor.
Strapped and afraid, people want to be in cash. This is what economists call the liquidity trap. And it gets worse: in these conditions, the normal estimates for multipliers -- the bang for the buck -- may be too high. Government spending on goods and services always increases total spending directly; a dollar of public spending is a dollar of GDP. But if the workers simply save their extra income, or use it to pay debt, that's the end of the line: there is no further effect. For tax cuts (especially for the middle class and up), the new funds are mostly saved or used to pay down debt. Debt reduction may help lay a foundation for better times later on, but it doesn't help now. With smaller multipliers, the public spending package would need to be even larger, in order to fill in all the holes in total demand. Thus financial crisis makes the real crisis worse, and the failure of the bank plan practically assures that the stimulus also will be too small.
In short, if we are in a true collapse of finance, our models will not serve. It is then appropriate to reach back, past the postwar years, to the experience of the Great Depression. And this can only be done by qualitative and historical analysis. Our modern numerical models just don't capture the key feature of that crisis -- which is, precisely, the collapse of the financial system. If the banking system is crippled, then to be effective the public sector must do much, much more. How much more? By how much can spending be raised in a real depression? And does this remedy work? Recent months have seen much debate over the economic effects of the New Deal, and much repetition of the commonplace that the effort was too small to end the Great Depression, something achieved, it is said, only by World War II. A new paper by the economist Marshall Auerback has usefully corrected this record. Auerback plainly illustrates by how much Roosevelt's ambition exceeded anything yet seen in this crisis:
[Roosevelt's] government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
In other words, Roosevelt employed Americans on a vast scale, bringing the unemployment rates down to levels that were tolerable, even before the war -- from 25 percent in 1933 to below 10 percent in 1936, if you count those employed by the government as employed, which they surely were. In 1937, Roosevelt tried to balance the budget, the economy relapsed again, and in 1938 the New Deal was relaunched. This again brought unemployment down to about 10 percent, still before the war.
The New Deal rebuilt America physically, providing a foundation (the TVA's power plants, for example) from which the mobilization of World War II could be launched. But it also saved the country politically and morally, providing jobs, hope, and confidence that in the end democracy was worth preserving. There were many, in the 1930s, who did not think so.
What did not recover, under Roosevelt, was the private banking system. Borrowing and lending -- mortgages and home construction -- contributed far less to the growth of output in the 1930s and '40s than they had in the 1920s or would come to do after the war. If they had savings at all, people stayed in Treasuries, and despite huge deficits interest rates for federal debt remained near zero. The liquidity trap wasn't overcome until the war ended.
It was the war, and only the war, that restored (or, more accurately, created for the first time) the financial wealth of the American middle class. During the 1930s public spending was large, but the incomes earned were spent. And while that spending increased consumption, it did not jumpstart a cycle of investment and growth, because the idle factories left over from the 1920s were quite sufficient to meet the demand for new output. Only after 1940 did total demand outstrip the economy's capacity to produce civilian private goods -- in part because private incomes soared, in part because the government ordered the production of some products, like cars, to halt.
All that extra demand would normally have driven up prices. But the federal government prevented this with price controls. (Disclosure: this writer's father, John Kenneth Galbraith, ran the controls during the first year of the war.) And so, with nowhere else for their extra dollars to go, the public bought and held government bonds. These provided claims to postwar purchasing power. After the war, the existence of those claims could, and did, establish creditworthiness for millions, making possible the revival of private banking, and on the broadly based, middle-class foundation that so distinguished the 1950s from the 1920s. But the relaunching of private finance took twenty years, and the war besides.
A brief reflection on this history and present circumstances drives a plain conclusion: the full restoration of private credit will take a long time. It will follow, not precede, the restoration of sound private household finances. There is no way the project of resurrecting the economy by stuffing the banks with cash will work. Effective policy can only work the other way around.
That being so, what must now be done? The first thing we need, in the wake of the recovery bill, is more recovery bills. The next efforts should be larger, reflecting the true scale of the emergency. There should be open-ended support for state and local governments, public utilities, transit authorities, public hospitals, schools, and universities for the duration, and generous support for public capital investment in the short and long term. To the extent possible, all the resources being released from the private residential and commercial construction industries should be absorbed into public building projects. There should be comprehensive foreclosure relief, through a moratorium followed by restructuring or by conversion-to-rental, except in cases of speculative investment and borrower fraud. The president's foreclosure-prevention plan is a useful step to relieve mortgage burdens on at-risk households, but it will not stop the downward spiral of home prices and correct the chronic oversupply of housing that is the cause of that.
Second, we should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.
That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.
This suggestion is meant, in part, to call attention to the madness of talk about Social Security and Medicare cuts. The prospect of future cuts in this modest but vital source of retirement security can only prompt worried prime-age workers to spend less and save more today. And that will make the present economic crisis deeper. In reality, there is no Social Security "financing problem" at all. There is a health care problem, but that can be dealt with only by deciding what health services to provide, and how to pay for them, for the whole population. It cannot be dealt with, responsibly or ethically, by cutting care for the old.
Third, we will soon need a jobs program to put the unemployed to work quickly. Infrastructure spending can help, but major building projects can take years to gear up, and they can, for the most part, provide jobs only for those who have the requisite skills. So the federal government should sponsor projects that employ people to do what they do best, including art, letters, drama, dance, music, scientific research, teaching, conservation, and the nonprofit sector, including community organizing -- why not?
Finally, a payroll tax holiday would help restore the purchasing power of working families, as well as make it easier for employers to keep them on the payroll. This is a particularly potent suggestion, because it is large and immediate. And if growth resumes rapidly, it can also be scaled back. There is no error in doing too much that cannot easily be repaired, by doing a bit less.
As these measures take effect, the government must take control of insolvent banks, however large, and get on with the business of reorganizing, re-regulating, decapitating, and recapitalizing them. Depositors should be insured fully to prevent runs, and private risk capital (common and preferred equity and subordinated debt) should take the first loss. Effective compensation limits should be enforced -- it is a good thing that they will encourage those at the top to retire. As Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut correctly stated in the brouhaha following the discovery that Senate Democrats had put tough limits into the recovery bill, there are many competent replacements for those who leave.
Ultimately the big banks can be resold as smaller private institutions, run on a scale that permits prudent credit assessment and risk management by people close enough to their client communities to foster an effective revival, among other things, of household credit and of independent small business -- another lost hallmark of the 1950s. No one should imagine that the swaggering, bank-driven world of high finance and credit bubbles should be made to reappear. Big banks should be run largely by men and women with the long-term perspective, outlook, and temperament of middle managers, and not by the transient, self-regarding plutocrats who run them now.
The chorus of deficit hawks and entitlement reformers are certain to regard this program with horror. What about the deficit? What about the debt? These questions are unavoidable, so let's answer them. First, the deficit and the public debt of the U.S. government can, should, must, and will increase in this crisis. They will increase whether the government acts or not. The choice is between an active program, running up debt while creating jobs and rebuilding America, or a passive program, running up debt because revenues collapse, because the population has to be maintained on the dole, and because the Treasury wishes, for no constructive reason, to rescue the big bankers and make them whole.
Second, so long as the economy is placed on a path to recovery, even a massive increase in public debt poses no risk that the U.S. government will find itself in the sort of situation known to Argentines and Indonesians. Why not? Because the rest of the world recognizes that the United States performs certain indispensable functions, including acting as the lynchpin of collective security and a principal source of new science and technology. So long as we meet those responsibilities, the rest of the world is likely to want to hold our debts.
Third, in the debt deflation, liquidity trap, and global crisis we are in, there is no risk of even a massive program generating inflation or higher long-term interest rates. That much is obvious from current financial conditions: interest rates on long-maturity Treasury bonds are amazingly low. Those rates also tell you that the markets are not worried about financing Social Security or Medicare. They are more worried, as I am, that the larger economic outlook will remain very bleak for a long time.
Finally, there is the big problem: How to recapitalize the household sector? How to restore the security and prosperity they've lost? How to build the productive economy for the next generation? Is there anything today that we might do that can compare with the transformation of World War II? Almost surely, there is not: World War II doubled production in five years.
Today the largest problems we face are energy security and climate change -- massive issues because energy underpins everything we do, and because climate change threatens the survival of civilization. And here, obviously, we need a comprehensive national effort. Such a thing, if done right, combining planning and markets, could add 5 or even 10 percent of GDP to net investment. That's not the scale of wartime mobilization. But it probably could return the country to full employment and keep it there, for years.
Moreover, the work does resemble wartime mobilization in important financial respects. Weatherization, conservation, mass transit, renewable power, and the smart grid are public investments. As with the armaments in World War II, work on them would generate incomes not matched by the new production of consumer goods. If handled carefully -- say, with a new program of deferred claims to future purchasing power like war bonds -- the incomes earned by dealing with oil security and climate change have the potential to become a foundation of restored financial wealth for the middle class.
This cannot be made to happen over just three years, as we did in 1942-44. But we could manage it over, say, twenty years or a bit longer. What is required are careful, sustained planning, consistent policy, and the recognition now that there are no quick fixes, no easy return to "normal," no going back to a world run by bankers -- and no alternative to taking the long view.
A paradox of the long view is that the time to embrace it is right now. We need to start down that path before disastrous policy errors, including fatal banker bailouts and cuts in Social Security and Medicare, are put into effect. It is therefore especially important that thought and learning move quickly. Does the Geithner team, forged and trained in normal times, have the range and the flexibility required? If not, everything finally will depend, as it did with Roosevelt, on the imagination and character of President Obama.
By James Galbraith, Washington Monthly. Posted March 23, 2009.
Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than anyone has so far admitted. Tools
51 COMMENTS
Share and save this post:
AlterNet Social Networks:
Also in Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace
AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right
Matt Taibbi
Stop the Madness: Bernie Sanders Tries to Block Appointment of Latest Wall Street Insider
Amy Goodman
9 Reasons Obama's Fiscal Plan Fails Both Markets and Taxpayers
Joseph Stiglitz
The Real AIG Scandal: How the Game Is Rigged at Wall Street's Casino
Lucy Komisar
Powerful Banks and Government Handouts to the Rich: It's Time for Protest
Zephyr Teachout
We Need to Regulate the Financial Instruments That Took AIG Down
George Soros
More stories by James Galbraith
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace RSS Feed
Main AlterNet RSS Feed
Advertisement
Barack Obama's presidency began in hope and goodwill, but its test will be its success or failure on the economics. Did the president and his team correctly diagnose the problem? Did they act with sufficient imagination and force? And did they prevail against the political obstacles -- and not only that, but also against the procedures and the habits of thought to which official Washington is addicted?
The president has an economic program. But there is, so far, no clear statement of the thinking behind that program, and there may not be one, until the first report of the new Council of Economic Advisers appears next year. We therefore resort to what we know about the economists: the chair of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers; the CEA chair, Christina Romer; the budget director, Peter Orszag; and their titular head, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. This is plainly a capable, close-knit group, acting with energy and commitment. Deficiencies of their program cannot, therefore, be blamed on incompetence. Rather, if deficiencies exist, they probably result from their shared background and creed -- in short, from the limitations of their ideas.
The deepest belief of the modern economist is that the economy is a self-stabilizing system. This means that, even if nothing is done, normal rates of employment and production will someday return. Practically all modern economists believe this, often without thinking much about it. (Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said it reflexively in a major speech in London in January: "The global economy will recover." He did not say how he knew.) The difference between conservatives and liberals is over whether policy can usefully speed things up. Conservatives say no, liberals say yes, and on this point Obama's economists lean left. Hence the priority they gave, in their first days, to the stimulus package.
But did they get the scale right? Was the plan big enough? Policies are based on models; in a slump, plans for spending depend on a forecast of how deep and long the slump would otherwise be. The program will only be correctly sized if the forecast is accurate. And the forecast depends on the underlying belief. If recovery is not built into the genes of the system, then the forecast will be too optimistic, and the stimulus based on it will be too small.
Consider the baseline economic forecast of the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency lawmakers rely on to evaluate the economy and their budget plans. In its early-January forecast, the CBO measured and projected the difference between actual economic performance and "normal" economic performance -- the so-called GDP gap. The forecast has two astonishing features. First, the CBO did not expect the present recession to be any worse than that of 1981-82, our deepest postwar recession. Second, the CBO expected a turnaround beginning late this year, with the economy returning to normal around 2015, even if Congress had taken no action at all.
With this projection in mind, the recovery bill pours a bit less than 2 percent of GDP into new spending per year, plus some tax cuts, for two years, into a GDP gap estimated to average 6 percent for three years. The stimulus does not need to fill the whole gap, because the CBO expects a "multiplier effect," as first-round spending on bridges and roads, for example, is followed by second-round spending by steelworkers and road crews. The CBO estimates that because of the multiplier effect, two dollars of new public spending produces about three dollars of new output. (For tax cuts the numbers are lower, since some of the cuts will be saved in the first round.) And with this help, the recession becomes fairly mild. After two years, growth would be solidly established and Congress's work would be done. In this way, the duration as well as the scale of action was driven, behind the scenes, by the CBO's baseline forecast.
Why did the CBO reach this conclusion? On depth, CBO's model is based on the postwar experience, and such models cannot predict outcomes more serious than anything already seen. If we are facing a downturn worse than 1982, our computers won't tell us; we will be surprised. And if the slump is destined to drag on, the computers won't tell us that either. Baked into the CBO model we find a "natural rate of unemployment" of 4.8 percent; the model moves the economy back toward that value no matter what. In the real world, however, there is no reason to believe this will happen. Some alternative forecasts, freed of the mystical return to "normal," now project a GDP gap twice as large as the CBO model predicts, and with no near-term recovery at all.
Considerations of timing also influenced the choice of line items. The bill tilted toward "shovel-ready" projects like refurbishing schools and fixing roads, and away from projects requiring planning and long construction lead times, like urban mass transit. The push for speed also influenced the bill in another way. Drafting new legislative authority takes time. In an emergency, it was sensible for Chairman David Obey of the House Appropriations Committee to mine the legislative docket for ideas already commanding broad support (especially within the Democratic caucus). In this way he produced a bill that was a triumph of fast drafting, practical politics, and progressive principle -- a good bill which the Republicans hated. But the scale of action possible by such means is unrelated, except by coincidence, to what the economy needs.
Three further considerations limited the plan. There was, to begin with, the desire for political consensus; President Obama chose to start his administration with a bill that might win bipartisan support and pass in Congress by wide margins. (He was, of course, spurned by the Republicans.) Second, the new team also sought consensus of another type. Christina Romer polled a bipartisan group of professional economists, and Larry Summers told Meet the Press that the final package reflected a "balance" of their views. This procedure guarantees a result near the middle of the professional mind-set. The method would be useful if the errors of economists were unsystematic. But they are not. Economists are a cautious group, and in any extreme situation the midpoint of professional opinion is bound to be wrong.
Third, the initial package was affected by the new team's desire to get past this crisis and to return to the familiar problems of their past lives. For these protgs of Robert Rubin, veterans in several cases of Rubin's Hamilton Project, a key preconception has always been the budget deficit and what they call the "entitlement problem." This is D.C.-speak for rolling back Social Security and Medicare, opening new markets for fund managers and private insurers, behind a wave of budget babble about "long-term deficits" and "unfunded liabilities." To this our new president is not immune. Even before the inauguration Obama was moved to commit to "entitlement reform," and on February 23 he convened what he called a "fiscal responsibility summit." The idea took hold that after two years or so of big spending, the return to normal would be under way, and the costs of fiscal relief and infrastructure improvement might be recouped, in part by taking a pound of flesh from the incomes and health care of the old.
The chance of a return to normal depends, in turn, on the banking strategy. To Obama's economists a "normal" economy is led and guided by private banks. When domestic credit booms are under way, they tend to generate high employment and low inflation; this makes the public budget look good, and spares the president and Congress many hard decisions. For this reason the new team instinctively seeks to return the bankers to their normal position at the top of the economic hill. Secretary Geithner told CNBC, "We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we'd like to do our best to preserve that system."
But, is this a realistic hope? Is it even a possibility? The normal mechanics of a credit cycle do involve interludes when asset values crash and credit relations collapse. In 1981, Paul Volcker's campaign against inflation caused such a crash. But, though they came close, the big banks did not fail then. (I learned recently from William Isaac, Ronald Reagan's chair of the FDIC, that the government had contingency plans to nationalize the large banks in 1982, had Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil defaulted outright on their debts.) When monetary policy relaxed and the delayed tax cuts of 1981 kicked in, there was both pent-up demand for credit and the capacity to supply it. The final result was that the economy recovered quickly. Again in 1994, after a long period of credit crunch, banks and households were strong enough, even without a stimulus, to support a vast renewal of lending which propelled the economy forward for six years.
The Bush-era disasters guarantee that these happy patterns will not be repeated. For the first time since the 1930s, millions of American households are financially ruined. Families that two years ago enjoyed wealth in stocks and in their homes now have neither. Their 401(k)s have fallen by half, their mortgages are a burden, and their homes are an albatross. For many the best strategy is to mail the keys to the bank. This practically assures that excess supply and collapsed prices in housing will continue for years. Apart from cash -- protected by deposit insurance and now desperately being conserved -- the American middle class finds today that its major source of wealth is the implicit value of Social Security and Medicare -- illiquid and intangible but real and inalienable in a way that home and equity values are not. And so it will remain, as long as future benefits are not cut.
In addition, some of the biggest banks are bust, almost for certain. Having abandoned prudent risk management in a climate of regulatory negligence and complicity under Bush, these banks participated gleefully in a poisonous game of abusive mortgage originations followed by rounds of pass-the-bad-penny-to-the-greater-fool. But they could not pass them all. And when in August 2007 the music stopped, banks discovered that the markets for their toxic-mortgage-backed securities had collapsed, and found themselves insolvent. Only a dogged political refusal to admit this has since kept the banks from being taken into receivership by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation -- something the FDIC has the power to do, and has done as recently as last year with IndyMac in California.
Geithner's banking plan would prolong the state of denial. It involves government guarantees of the bad assets, keeping current management in place and attempting to attract new private capital. (Conversion of preferred shares to equity, which may happen with Citigroup, conveys no powers that the government, as regulator, does not already have.) The idea is that one can fix the banks from the top down, by reestablishing markets for their bad securities. If the idea seems familiar, it is: Henry Paulson also pressed for this, to the point of winning congressional approval. But then he abandoned the idea. Why? He learned it could not work.
Paulson faced two insuperable problems. One was quantity: there were too many bad assets. The project of buying them back could be likened to "filling the Pacific Ocean with basketballs," as one observer said to me at the time. (When I tried to find out where the original request for $700 billion in the Troubled Asset Relief Program came from, a senior Senate aide replied, "Well, it's a number between five hundred billion and one trillion.")
The other problem was price. The only price at which the assets could be disposed of, protecting the taxpayer, was of course the market price. In the collapse of the market for mortgage-backed securities and their associated credit default swaps, this price was too low to save the banks. But any higher price would have amounted to a gift of public funds, justifiable only if there was a good chance that the assets might recover value when "normal" conditions return.
That chance can be assessed, of course, only by doing what any reasonable private investor would do: due diligence, meaning a close inspection of the loan tapes. On the face of it, such inspections will reveal a very high proportion of missing documentation, inflated appraisals, and other evidence of fraud. (In late 2007 the ratings agency Fitch conducted this exercise on a small sample of loan files, and found indications of misrepresentation or fraud present in practically every one.) The reasonable inference would be that many more of the loans will default. Geithner's plan to guarantee these so-called assets, therefore, is almost sure to overstate their value; it is only a way of delaying the ultimate public recognition of loss, while keeping the perpetrators afloat.
Delay is not innocuous. When a bank's insolvency is ignored, the incentives for normal prudent banking collapse. Management has nothing to lose. It may take big new risks, in volatile markets like commodities, in the hope of salvation before the regulators close in. Or it may loot the institution -- nomenklatura privatization, as the Russians would say -- through unjustified bonuses, dividends, and options. It will never fully disclose the extent of insolvency on its own.
The most likely scenario, should the Geithner plan go through, is a combination of looting, fraud, and a renewed speculation in volatile commodity markets such as oil. Ultimately the losses fall on the public anyway, since deposits are largely insured. There is no chance that the banks will simply resume normal long-term lending. To whom would they lend? For what? Against what collateral? And if banks are recapitalized without changing their management, why should we expect them to change the behavior that caused the insolvency in the first place?
The oddest thing about the Geithner program is its failure to act as though the financial crisis is a true crisis -- an integrated, long-term economic threat -- rather than merely a couple of related but temporary problems, one in banking and the other in jobs. In banking, the dominant metaphor is of plumbing: there is a blockage to be cleared. Take a plunger to the toxic assets, it is said, and credit conditions will return to normal. This, then, will make the recession essentially normal, validating the stimulus package. Solve these two problems, and the crisis will end. That's the thinking.
But the plumbing metaphor is misleading. Credit is not a flow. It is not something that can be forced downstream by clearing a pipe. Credit is a contract. It requires a borrower as well as a lender, a customer as well as a bank. And the borrower must meet two conditions. One is creditworthiness, meaning a secure income and, usually, a house with equity in it. Asset prices therefore matter. With a chronic oversupply of houses, prices fall, collateral disappears, and even if borrowers are willing they can't qualify for loans. The other requirement is a willingness to borrow, motivated by what Keynes called the "animal spirits" of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a slump, such optimism is scarce. Even if people have collateral, they want the security of cash. And it is precisely because they want cash that they will not deplete their reserves by plunking down a payment on a new car.
The credit flow metaphor implies that people came flocking to the new-car showrooms last November and were turned away because there were no loans to be had. This is not true -- what happened was that people stopped coming in. And they stopped coming in because, suddenly, they felt poor.
Strapped and afraid, people want to be in cash. This is what economists call the liquidity trap. And it gets worse: in these conditions, the normal estimates for multipliers -- the bang for the buck -- may be too high. Government spending on goods and services always increases total spending directly; a dollar of public spending is a dollar of GDP. But if the workers simply save their extra income, or use it to pay debt, that's the end of the line: there is no further effect. For tax cuts (especially for the middle class and up), the new funds are mostly saved or used to pay down debt. Debt reduction may help lay a foundation for better times later on, but it doesn't help now. With smaller multipliers, the public spending package would need to be even larger, in order to fill in all the holes in total demand. Thus financial crisis makes the real crisis worse, and the failure of the bank plan practically assures that the stimulus also will be too small.
In short, if we are in a true collapse of finance, our models will not serve. It is then appropriate to reach back, past the postwar years, to the experience of the Great Depression. And this can only be done by qualitative and historical analysis. Our modern numerical models just don't capture the key feature of that crisis -- which is, precisely, the collapse of the financial system. If the banking system is crippled, then to be effective the public sector must do much, much more. How much more? By how much can spending be raised in a real depression? And does this remedy work? Recent months have seen much debate over the economic effects of the New Deal, and much repetition of the commonplace that the effort was too small to end the Great Depression, something achieved, it is said, only by World War II. A new paper by the economist Marshall Auerback has usefully corrected this record. Auerback plainly illustrates by how much Roosevelt's ambition exceeded anything yet seen in this crisis:
[Roosevelt's] government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
In other words, Roosevelt employed Americans on a vast scale, bringing the unemployment rates down to levels that were tolerable, even before the war -- from 25 percent in 1933 to below 10 percent in 1936, if you count those employed by the government as employed, which they surely were. In 1937, Roosevelt tried to balance the budget, the economy relapsed again, and in 1938 the New Deal was relaunched. This again brought unemployment down to about 10 percent, still before the war.
The New Deal rebuilt America physically, providing a foundation (the TVA's power plants, for example) from which the mobilization of World War II could be launched. But it also saved the country politically and morally, providing jobs, hope, and confidence that in the end democracy was worth preserving. There were many, in the 1930s, who did not think so.
What did not recover, under Roosevelt, was the private banking system. Borrowing and lending -- mortgages and home construction -- contributed far less to the growth of output in the 1930s and '40s than they had in the 1920s or would come to do after the war. If they had savings at all, people stayed in Treasuries, and despite huge deficits interest rates for federal debt remained near zero. The liquidity trap wasn't overcome until the war ended.
It was the war, and only the war, that restored (or, more accurately, created for the first time) the financial wealth of the American middle class. During the 1930s public spending was large, but the incomes earned were spent. And while that spending increased consumption, it did not jumpstart a cycle of investment and growth, because the idle factories left over from the 1920s were quite sufficient to meet the demand for new output. Only after 1940 did total demand outstrip the economy's capacity to produce civilian private goods -- in part because private incomes soared, in part because the government ordered the production of some products, like cars, to halt.
All that extra demand would normally have driven up prices. But the federal government prevented this with price controls. (Disclosure: this writer's father, John Kenneth Galbraith, ran the controls during the first year of the war.) And so, with nowhere else for their extra dollars to go, the public bought and held government bonds. These provided claims to postwar purchasing power. After the war, the existence of those claims could, and did, establish creditworthiness for millions, making possible the revival of private banking, and on the broadly based, middle-class foundation that so distinguished the 1950s from the 1920s. But the relaunching of private finance took twenty years, and the war besides.
A brief reflection on this history and present circumstances drives a plain conclusion: the full restoration of private credit will take a long time. It will follow, not precede, the restoration of sound private household finances. There is no way the project of resurrecting the economy by stuffing the banks with cash will work. Effective policy can only work the other way around.
That being so, what must now be done? The first thing we need, in the wake of the recovery bill, is more recovery bills. The next efforts should be larger, reflecting the true scale of the emergency. There should be open-ended support for state and local governments, public utilities, transit authorities, public hospitals, schools, and universities for the duration, and generous support for public capital investment in the short and long term. To the extent possible, all the resources being released from the private residential and commercial construction industries should be absorbed into public building projects. There should be comprehensive foreclosure relief, through a moratorium followed by restructuring or by conversion-to-rental, except in cases of speculative investment and borrower fraud. The president's foreclosure-prevention plan is a useful step to relieve mortgage burdens on at-risk households, but it will not stop the downward spiral of home prices and correct the chronic oversupply of housing that is the cause of that.
Second, we should offset the violent drop in the wealth of the elderly population as a whole. The squeeze on the elderly has been little noted so far, but it hits in three separate ways: through the fall in the stock market; through the collapse of home values; and through the drop in interest rates, which reduces interest income on accumulated cash. For an increasing number of the elderly, Social Security and Medicare wealth are all they have.
That means that the entitlement reformers have it backward: instead of cutting Social Security benefits, we should increase them, especially for those at the bottom of the benefit scale. Indeed, in this crisis, precisely because it is universal and efficient, Social Security is an economic recovery ace in the hole. Increasing benefits is a simple, direct, progressive, and highly efficient way to prevent poverty and sustain purchasing power for this vulnerable population. I would also argue for lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to (say) fifty-five, to permit workers to retire earlier and to free firms from the burden of managing health plans for older workers.
This suggestion is meant, in part, to call attention to the madness of talk about Social Security and Medicare cuts. The prospect of future cuts in this modest but vital source of retirement security can only prompt worried prime-age workers to spend less and save more today. And that will make the present economic crisis deeper. In reality, there is no Social Security "financing problem" at all. There is a health care problem, but that can be dealt with only by deciding what health services to provide, and how to pay for them, for the whole population. It cannot be dealt with, responsibly or ethically, by cutting care for the old.
Third, we will soon need a jobs program to put the unemployed to work quickly. Infrastructure spending can help, but major building projects can take years to gear up, and they can, for the most part, provide jobs only for those who have the requisite skills. So the federal government should sponsor projects that employ people to do what they do best, including art, letters, drama, dance, music, scientific research, teaching, conservation, and the nonprofit sector, including community organizing -- why not?
Finally, a payroll tax holiday would help restore the purchasing power of working families, as well as make it easier for employers to keep them on the payroll. This is a particularly potent suggestion, because it is large and immediate. And if growth resumes rapidly, it can also be scaled back. There is no error in doing too much that cannot easily be repaired, by doing a bit less.
As these measures take effect, the government must take control of insolvent banks, however large, and get on with the business of reorganizing, re-regulating, decapitating, and recapitalizing them. Depositors should be insured fully to prevent runs, and private risk capital (common and preferred equity and subordinated debt) should take the first loss. Effective compensation limits should be enforced -- it is a good thing that they will encourage those at the top to retire. As Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut correctly stated in the brouhaha following the discovery that Senate Democrats had put tough limits into the recovery bill, there are many competent replacements for those who leave.
Ultimately the big banks can be resold as smaller private institutions, run on a scale that permits prudent credit assessment and risk management by people close enough to their client communities to foster an effective revival, among other things, of household credit and of independent small business -- another lost hallmark of the 1950s. No one should imagine that the swaggering, bank-driven world of high finance and credit bubbles should be made to reappear. Big banks should be run largely by men and women with the long-term perspective, outlook, and temperament of middle managers, and not by the transient, self-regarding plutocrats who run them now.
The chorus of deficit hawks and entitlement reformers are certain to regard this program with horror. What about the deficit? What about the debt? These questions are unavoidable, so let's answer them. First, the deficit and the public debt of the U.S. government can, should, must, and will increase in this crisis. They will increase whether the government acts or not. The choice is between an active program, running up debt while creating jobs and rebuilding America, or a passive program, running up debt because revenues collapse, because the population has to be maintained on the dole, and because the Treasury wishes, for no constructive reason, to rescue the big bankers and make them whole.
Second, so long as the economy is placed on a path to recovery, even a massive increase in public debt poses no risk that the U.S. government will find itself in the sort of situation known to Argentines and Indonesians. Why not? Because the rest of the world recognizes that the United States performs certain indispensable functions, including acting as the lynchpin of collective security and a principal source of new science and technology. So long as we meet those responsibilities, the rest of the world is likely to want to hold our debts.
Third, in the debt deflation, liquidity trap, and global crisis we are in, there is no risk of even a massive program generating inflation or higher long-term interest rates. That much is obvious from current financial conditions: interest rates on long-maturity Treasury bonds are amazingly low. Those rates also tell you that the markets are not worried about financing Social Security or Medicare. They are more worried, as I am, that the larger economic outlook will remain very bleak for a long time.
Finally, there is the big problem: How to recapitalize the household sector? How to restore the security and prosperity they've lost? How to build the productive economy for the next generation? Is there anything today that we might do that can compare with the transformation of World War II? Almost surely, there is not: World War II doubled production in five years.
Today the largest problems we face are energy security and climate change -- massive issues because energy underpins everything we do, and because climate change threatens the survival of civilization. And here, obviously, we need a comprehensive national effort. Such a thing, if done right, combining planning and markets, could add 5 or even 10 percent of GDP to net investment. That's not the scale of wartime mobilization. But it probably could return the country to full employment and keep it there, for years.
Moreover, the work does resemble wartime mobilization in important financial respects. Weatherization, conservation, mass transit, renewable power, and the smart grid are public investments. As with the armaments in World War II, work on them would generate incomes not matched by the new production of consumer goods. If handled carefully -- say, with a new program of deferred claims to future purchasing power like war bonds -- the incomes earned by dealing with oil security and climate change have the potential to become a foundation of restored financial wealth for the middle class.
This cannot be made to happen over just three years, as we did in 1942-44. But we could manage it over, say, twenty years or a bit longer. What is required are careful, sustained planning, consistent policy, and the recognition now that there are no quick fixes, no easy return to "normal," no going back to a world run by bankers -- and no alternative to taking the long view.
A paradox of the long view is that the time to embrace it is right now. We need to start down that path before disastrous policy errors, including fatal banker bailouts and cuts in Social Security and Medicare, are put into effect. It is therefore especially important that thought and learning move quickly. Does the Geithner team, forged and trained in normal times, have the range and the flexibility required? If not, everything finally will depend, as it did with Roosevelt, on the imagination and character of President Obama.
Bilderberg Meeting in Greece 2009
PLUTOCRATS TO MEET IN GREECE
AFP on the trail of Bilderberg group: Site near Athens, Greece, is verified to be scene of 2009 globalist coven
By James P. Tucker, Jr.
Bilderberg will return to its 1993 crime scene when it attempts to meet secretly in Vouliagmeni, Greece, May 14-17. Bilderberg will return to the grounds of Nafsika Astir Palace hotels in Vouliagmeni, 20 miles outside Athens, and meet behind guards at the Westin Nafsika.
High on the Bilderberg agenda will be how to manipulate the global economic crisis for their selfish interests. They will pressure both European and North American nations to pull back from “protectionism” in the later meetings of heads of state. Since the international financiers and high officials of government see themselves as “citizens of the world” and scorn “nationalism,” their only loyalty is bankrolls, not their country. They love free trade, essential for world government.
Thus, they are determined that the United States and other nations refuse to impose tariffs that would equalize competition at the water’s edge. They want to continue shipping U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas where cheap labor may be exploited. They want to continue importing products made by slave labor in China and Africa, underselling domestic products.
Bilderberg, a secret elitist group that meets each spring at posh resorts protected by armed guards, uniformed police, sometimes the host nation’s military plus a brigade of private, plain-clothes guards, tries hard to keep its deliberations secret. But, with help from the European media and with inside sources, their mischief is always revealed to this newspaper.
Bilderberg has a dutiful son in President Barack Obama who will be told to press ahead with the North American Union, which is to be expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere into an “American Union” similar to the European Union. Ultimately, with creation of an “Asian-Pacific Union,” the world is to be divided into three great regions for the administrative convenience of a global government of the UN. Following orders, Obama has a platoon of Bilderberg luminaries in his administration.
But Bilderberg has had problems for years in trying to impose its will on the globe. When meeting in Greece 19 years ago, it was celebrating President Bill Clinton’s promise to sign the Rio Treaty on global warming, which would have surrendered U.S. wealth and sovereignty to international bureaucrats.
Clinton, who attended Bilderberg in 2001 and was elected president in 2002, did sign the Rio Treaty but a test vote in the Senate showed ratification would be overwhelmingly rejected. It is still pending and Bilderberg boys are depressed.
AFP editor James P. Tucker Jr. is a veteran journalist who spent many years as a member of the “elite” media in Washington. Since 1975 he has won widespread recognition, here and abroad, for his pursuit of on-the-scene stories reporting the intrigues of global power blocs such as the Bilderberg Group. Tucker is the author of Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary: One Man’s 25-Year Battle to Shine the Light on the World Shadow Government. Bound in an attractive full-color softcover and containing 272 pages—loaded with photos, many never published before—the book recounts Tucker’s experiences over the last quarter century at Bilderberg meetings. $25 from AFP. No charge for S&H in U.S.
AFP on the trail of Bilderberg group: Site near Athens, Greece, is verified to be scene of 2009 globalist coven
By James P. Tucker, Jr.
Bilderberg will return to its 1993 crime scene when it attempts to meet secretly in Vouliagmeni, Greece, May 14-17. Bilderberg will return to the grounds of Nafsika Astir Palace hotels in Vouliagmeni, 20 miles outside Athens, and meet behind guards at the Westin Nafsika.
High on the Bilderberg agenda will be how to manipulate the global economic crisis for their selfish interests. They will pressure both European and North American nations to pull back from “protectionism” in the later meetings of heads of state. Since the international financiers and high officials of government see themselves as “citizens of the world” and scorn “nationalism,” their only loyalty is bankrolls, not their country. They love free trade, essential for world government.
Thus, they are determined that the United States and other nations refuse to impose tariffs that would equalize competition at the water’s edge. They want to continue shipping U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas where cheap labor may be exploited. They want to continue importing products made by slave labor in China and Africa, underselling domestic products.
Bilderberg, a secret elitist group that meets each spring at posh resorts protected by armed guards, uniformed police, sometimes the host nation’s military plus a brigade of private, plain-clothes guards, tries hard to keep its deliberations secret. But, with help from the European media and with inside sources, their mischief is always revealed to this newspaper.
Bilderberg has a dutiful son in President Barack Obama who will be told to press ahead with the North American Union, which is to be expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere into an “American Union” similar to the European Union. Ultimately, with creation of an “Asian-Pacific Union,” the world is to be divided into three great regions for the administrative convenience of a global government of the UN. Following orders, Obama has a platoon of Bilderberg luminaries in his administration.
But Bilderberg has had problems for years in trying to impose its will on the globe. When meeting in Greece 19 years ago, it was celebrating President Bill Clinton’s promise to sign the Rio Treaty on global warming, which would have surrendered U.S. wealth and sovereignty to international bureaucrats.
Clinton, who attended Bilderberg in 2001 and was elected president in 2002, did sign the Rio Treaty but a test vote in the Senate showed ratification would be overwhelmingly rejected. It is still pending and Bilderberg boys are depressed.
AFP editor James P. Tucker Jr. is a veteran journalist who spent many years as a member of the “elite” media in Washington. Since 1975 he has won widespread recognition, here and abroad, for his pursuit of on-the-scene stories reporting the intrigues of global power blocs such as the Bilderberg Group. Tucker is the author of Jim Tucker’s Bilderberg Diary: One Man’s 25-Year Battle to Shine the Light on the World Shadow Government. Bound in an attractive full-color softcover and containing 272 pages—loaded with photos, many never published before—the book recounts Tucker’s experiences over the last quarter century at Bilderberg meetings. $25 from AFP. No charge for S&H in U.S.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Examiner Editorial: Expanded Americorps has stench of authoritarianism
Opinion
Examiner Editorial: Expanded Americorps has stench of authoritarianism
Examiner Editorial 3/26/09
With almost no public attention, both chambers of Congress in the past week advanced an alarming expansion of the Americorps national service plan, with the number of federally funded community-service jobs increasing from 75,000 to 250,000 at a cost of $5.7 billion. Lurking behind the feel-good rhetoric spouted by the measure’s advocates is a bill that upon closer inspection reveals multiple provisions that together create a strong odor of creepy authoritarianism.
The House passed the measure overwhelmingly, while only 14 senators had the sense and courage to vote against it on a key procedural motion. Every legislator who either voted for this bill or didn’t vote at all has some serious explaining to do.
Last summer, then-candidate Barack Obama threw civil liberties to the wind when he proposed “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the regular military. The expanded Americorps is not quite so disturbing, but a number of provisions in the bill raise serious concerns.
To begin with, the legislation threatens the voluntary nature of Americorps by calling for consideration of “a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people.” It anticipates the possibility of requiring “all individuals in the United States” to perform such service, including elementary school students.
The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service,” while establishing “campuses” that serve as “operational headquarters,” complete with “superintendents” and “uniforms” for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And, it calls for the creation of “a permanent cadre” in a “National Community Civilian Corps.”
But that’s not all. The bill also calls for “youth engagement zones” in which “service learning” is “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.”
This updated form of voluntary community service is also to be “integrated into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula” at all levels of schooling. Sounds like a government curriculum for government-approved “service learning,” which is nothing less than indoctrination.
Now, ask yourself if Congress members who voted for this monstrosity had a clue what they were voting for. If not, they’re guilty of dereliction of duty. If they did, the implications are truly frightening.
62 Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post a comment:
Email:
(This will not be displayed or shared. Privacy Policy)
Display Name:
Comment:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reader Comments:
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Oh you poor, scared conservatives. The world has moved on and you're still scrabbling and screaming about conspiracies from the excrement-laden mud. Enjoy your wallowing."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Previous poster - you well demonstrate your ignorance. Hope you enjoy your time doing mandatory service. Unfortunately, the type of re-educating you will receive is not what you need. Go wallow yourself, loser!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
TJY: ""Conservative"?? The SF Examiner is considered a liberal rag"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
JamesJ: "All Hail Obama! All Hail the State!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
JamesJ: "All Hail Obama! All Hail the State!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Brad: "Oh you poor, foolish liberals. You are following the annointed one and helping him to destroy the United States. I hope you enjoy the new world that you are in the process of creating. We conservatives tried to warn you of your folly but, of course, you wouldn't listen."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Learned from history: "I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that this will be the next Young Communist league. But I can agree that spending an additional $3 billion on a program with no measurable goals is not a good idea when we are looking at over $1 trillion per year in deficits."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Learned from history: "I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that this will be the next Young Communist league. But I can agree that spending an additional $3 billion on a program with no measurable goals is not a good idea when we are looking at over $1 trillion per year in deficits."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
tskier: "Can you say Nazi Youth Squad?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
JDW: "Dear mothers and fathers, Wait until the bus pulls up to your house to take your children to a camp that most likely will not allow you to visit let alone provide a curriculum. Already, the many public schools allow the gay community to come in to spew their indoctrination, and the courts have ruled that they are allowed to keep their curriculum from you. Some courts have even ruled that the school does not need to inform you, or even allow your children to opt out. I can’t wait to see the uniforms; will they be brown, or white with a red sash, or will OBAMBI get creative? You had better wake up America. CHANGE WE CAN REALLY BELIEVE IN!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
no freedom without risk: "Of course this will be built upon the ACORN template. The "leaders" will all be leftists. There will be required "training" where the young will be indoctrinated into liberalism and intimidated into leftist philosophy. This is simply a plan to indoctrinate the ones missed by the public school system and academia."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Good Ole Paul: "Chains we can believe in."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Good Ole Paul: "Chains we can believe in."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Judith Rubin: "Joanna, This article is from a traditionally liberal paper from San Francisco. It is frightening! I just read an even scarier one from the UK talking about Obama, community organizing, his thug Rham Emanuel and the formation of an army to compete in size with the US Military and funded in the same way. All Youth are to go to "camps" to "learn". This is the way the Nazi's got started. Our youth are also to be wearing uniforms. Bad things are happening under the radar and we all fiddle while Rome burns. Just had a call from a Black banker friend and he's just as alarmed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Timothy L. Pennell: "Obama is a MARXIST. He's a SOCIALIST. He's just doing what ALL Marxists, and Socialists do. They have STREET GANGS, to do their 'Dirty Work'. We used to call them 'BROWN SHIRTS'. Now they're just called 'Volunteers'. Like the 'Volunteers' that were bussed up to Connecticut, from one of the Hell Holes in NYC, to TERRORIZE the AIG folks, and their FAMILIES. Like KRISTALNACHT. The Service Employees Union put that one together. This is why they want to ELLIMINATE the secret ballot for Unionization. More Unions, more BROWN SHIRTS. Like Venezuala. Look at the bright side. When your own kids turn you in, for 'Unpatriotic Remarks' toward our 'Dear Leader', they'll look sharp, in their Brown Shorts, and RED Bandanas. See? There is a bright side,"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Timothy L. Pennell: "Obama is a MARXIST. He's a SOCIALIST. He's just doing what ALL Marxists, and Socialists do. They have STREET GANGS, to do their 'Dirty Work'. We used to call them 'BROWN SHIRTS'. Now they're just called 'Volunteers'. Like the 'Volunteers' that were bussed up to Connecticut, from one of the Hell Holes in NYC, to TERRORIZE the AIG folks, and their FAMILIES. Like KRISTALNACHT. The Service Employees Union put that one together. This is why they want to ELLIMINATE the secret ballot for Unionization. More Unions, more BROWN SHIRTS. Like Venezuala. Look at the bright side. When your own kids turn you in, for 'Unpatriotic Remarks' toward our 'Dear Leader', they'll look sharp, in their Brown Shorts, and RED Bandanas. See? There is a bright side,"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Kat: "Heil Obama! It will be just like the draft. All you middle-class liberals will find a way to exempt your own kids, while letting everyone else do the dirty work. Have you no idea of how these kinds of programs have played out in other countries? Read some history."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
PGR88: "When I come to power, I will use Americorp to enforce social morality, especially in places like SF. That's what youth are good at. I am glad the pieces are all being put together for me now."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
La Lydia: "I, for one, welcome our new Marxist overlords."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
dmzrn: "O-bots are too stupid for words."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Smith: ""The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L. Shirer. Read it. We are there."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Colorado: "So is Obama going to send his troops to your house to hold you at gunpoint to force you to join his Americorps? You know this is the same administration who wants to tax your contributions to charity. You would think that the Messiah would want people to give. He just wants to take, thats his objective. Can't stand the guy."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Rocky: "The person who posted this.... "Oh you poor, scared conservatives. The world has moved on and you're still scrabbling and screaming about conspiracies from the excrement-laden mud. Enjoy your wallowing." IS AN IDIOT!!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Rocky: "The person who posted this.... "Oh you poor, scared conservatives. The world has moved on and you're still scrabbling and screaming about conspiracies from the excrement-laden mud. Enjoy your wallowing." IS AN IDIOT!!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Mame: "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. This is exactly what happened in Germany under Hitler."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Dwall: "Go by a copy of Marc Levin's brillant book: "Liberty and Tryanny: A Conservative Manifesto". This will explain the open assault on our Liberty from these Statists in our midsts so that we can defend ourselves from their tryanny of taxation and liberal hypocrisy."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
RobertP: "Just one question; will the ObamaJugend wear brown or black shirts?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Will members wear brown shirts? At least Hitler had been a corporal, before organizing a paramilitary."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Will members wear brown shirts? At least Hitler had been a corporal, before organizing a paramilitary."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
oatka: "I've heard this before (dad was from Germany): "“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly, ‘Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community’.” - Adolf Hitler""
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
tri: "I spent my childhood in a Communist country, and boys and girls, this is how it starts: you're there doing "community work" and your kids are somewhere else being indoctrinated...you end up being irrlelvant in your kid's life because you no longer have the same values or speak the same language...and that 's just the effect it has on your family!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Terence Clark: "Its seems we are building a new group of brown shirts or hitler youth groups. Instead they are Obama youth. Whats next reeducation camps for the people who object to this."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Niall: "The Examiner is owned by conservative Christian Philip Anshutz. For this reason alone is it scorned by the liberal loonies in SF."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
CitizensArrestCitizensArrest: "Yes, the world is coming to an end and it is those danged liberals. For sure."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Jon Groseth: "I have known people who, as young people growing up in Germany in the 30s and 40s, were members of the Hitler Youth Corps. This looks like the same kind of thing. Is this Speaker Pelosi's idea?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
SFLiberal13: "I am a very liberal democrat. Frankly this goes against any liberals beliefs. This is just plain scary. I gotta say I supported Obama but now I am having some major reservations. Where is the transparency. Gitmo is still open and we are staying in Iraq indefinitely???? Also why did he appoint the entire Clinton WH Staff? Not the Hope or Change I voted for!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
AmericorpsAlum: "Ladies and Gentlemen, put down the koolaid. Americorps is the furthest thing from an authoritarian takeover that I can imagine. Listen; I spent the last ten months as an Americorps member. I traveled the country with a team of college aged folks, and we did volunteer work. None of our tasks were outlined by the federal government. We were loaned out to non-profits, and ALL of our work came from them. The federal oversight of our work was minimal; our superiors only wanted the barest essential numbers to prove that the program was "getting things done." 5,000 invasive blackberry plants pulled. 60 tons of mulch moved. 6 schools painted. 175 community members engaged in service. americorps is a blank check from the federal government to non-profit organizations in the form of free labor. It is the opposite of an authoritarian work corps, because the government does not create the projects. Calm down. Ask questions."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Kim S: "Sounds just like Hitler! Is that what our Great United States is turning into? What happened to our rights/freedoms? All those that voted blindly should be fired!!!! Impeach them all!!!! IMPEACH IMPEACH IMPEACH"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Kim S: "Sounds just like Hitler! Is that what our Great United States is turning into? What happened to our rights/freedoms? All those that voted blindly should be fired!!!! Impeach them all!!!! IMPEACH IMPEACH IMPEACH"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Woody: "BOTH the Republican-conservatives and the Democrat-liberals have managed to "change" our country, especially since November 1963. Arguing about which of these 2 apparently colluding sides is better plays into their game."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
phineas: "If the multinationals hadn't "globalized" all those US jobs into oblivion, endeavours like this wouldn't get off the ground.... If this goes awry, we can all thank the outsourcers....Ain't globalization great?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "Being "forced" to volunteer is ludicrous. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude...shall exist within the United States." (see 13th Amendment) I, for one, and my family will not participate in this lunacy. Do NOT get on the bus if you do not want to. This is unconstitutional. Tell them to go to hell and be prepared to take your case to the Supreme Court if need be."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "Just Say No to Fascism. Be a peaceful resistor to unjust laws. Let the thugs take the first punch to make you conform. (Take a lesson from the Civil Rights Movement.) This will expose their tyranny for what it is and we'll unite as a free people in defense of liberty."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
weirdone: "SFLiberal13: Glad to see your waking up to the truth, would have been better if you had looked at this Marxist before the election though; he is doing exactly what he said he would do. Welcome to the “Brave New World.” "War Is Peace." "Freedom is Slavery." "Ignorance is Strength." Orwell During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Orwell"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
weirdone: "SFLiberal13: Glad to see your waking up to the truth, would have been better if you had looked at this Marxist before the election though; he is doing exactly what he said he would do. Welcome to the “Brave New World.” "War Is Peace." "Freedom is Slavery." "Ignorance is Strength." Orwell During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Orwell"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Very Conerned: "YAY. We all have front row seats for the show, brought to you by the elite marxist zionist banking oligarchs to a sports stadium near you. Baaaaah. Thank God i'm in Ireland and not in America. Anyway, as Rahm put it, at least a million of you are already terrorists so the government has to protect the elites interests from you, the Goyim. In God they trust, but which god."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
George: "Come on up to Canada if you don't want to join the Mussolini - I mean Obama - blackshirts. We're about 10-15 years behind you so you can buy some breathing space while you figure out how to take back your country."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Juven: "I would not serve in Obama's army and my children will not either--they are already aware of the incredible treason this Obama guy is bringing to this country. He lies about everything-- Eric Holder says no more raids by the DEA and what happens less than a week later? Another raid. No end to Gitmo, renaming and mindless rhetoric seems to be the Obama method; not much different than our last monster-- Bush. New boss, same as the old."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Richard: "Goerge what a wonderful invitation, I for one may take you up on that."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Cookie: ""Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I never thought I'd be writing those words about Americans who never learned or don't remember the atrocities committed by the Nazi's and their brown-shirted youth corps. The similarities are too frightening to consider."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
xbjllb: "Two words: Hitler Youth. And I'm a lifelong Democrat before you go hurling the repug comments."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Bill H: "Great. Obama is making para-military groups to either enslave the USA or to fight with the various militia groupd that will rise to fight our march to socialism. I wonder which side the regular military and national guard take when the civil war starts?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "OUR FORE FATHERS DIED FOR OUR FREEDOM AND LIBERTIES. IT SEEMS THEY DIED IN VEIN. ARE WE GOING TO FIGHT?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "our fore fathers died for our freedom and liberties. it seems they died in vein. when are we going to fight?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Mom: "Tchr,Wm Ayers, did a good job w/ indoctrination of his friend, Obama."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Tina: "This sort of "service" is also required in Isreal."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "If it gets the thug minded youth off the street selling drugs and doing drivebuy shooting then how bad can it really be. Hell I woud drive some of them over to the camps myself."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
bebe: "Will the elites insist on a straight-armed "Heil" gesture to complement the thuggish mindset? They'll think of something new, perhaps, although they themselves have oftentimes been photographed/filmed displaying that very gesture. We will soon be overrun by brownshirts...ah! It is true then; Hitler lost the battle , but the NAZI's won the war. Rahm, (dual Israeli-US citizenship) has been salivating for this since day one and now Congress has whorishly acquiesced. The NAZI's adhere to their tried-and-true patterns, eh? How infuriating to know the brain-washed and/or desperate masses will be, once again, fooled into goose-stepping their way into another dictatorship. Yours for 911Trurth"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
bebe: "Hey AmericorpsAlum, you are the one who should be asking questions! 911Truth"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "The House and Senate are lapdogs, along with the MSM. This bill received no publicity. Don't also let HR 825 slip by without a fight. Google it, YouTube it, get informed, talk it up, get outraged, inform your local farmers, and fight it or we are all screwed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "The House and Senate are lapdogs, along with the MSM. This bill received no publicity. Don't also let HR 825 slip by without a fight. Google it, YouTube it, get informed, talk it up, get outraged, inform your local farmers, and fight it or we are all screwed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Brian Is Getting Impatient: "These terms "liberal" and "conservative" cast nothing but confusion. Why use language that has simply been deployed against you!? You have been divided and you have been conquered. The fish is already in the boat, and most of you are still arguing about what kind of fish it is and what kind of bait was used. Very useful. They intend to dominate liberals and conservatives alike, don't you all know that?"
Examiner Editorial: Expanded Americorps has stench of authoritarianism
Examiner Editorial 3/26/09
With almost no public attention, both chambers of Congress in the past week advanced an alarming expansion of the Americorps national service plan, with the number of federally funded community-service jobs increasing from 75,000 to 250,000 at a cost of $5.7 billion. Lurking behind the feel-good rhetoric spouted by the measure’s advocates is a bill that upon closer inspection reveals multiple provisions that together create a strong odor of creepy authoritarianism.
The House passed the measure overwhelmingly, while only 14 senators had the sense and courage to vote against it on a key procedural motion. Every legislator who either voted for this bill or didn’t vote at all has some serious explaining to do.
Last summer, then-candidate Barack Obama threw civil liberties to the wind when he proposed “a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded” as the regular military. The expanded Americorps is not quite so disturbing, but a number of provisions in the bill raise serious concerns.
To begin with, the legislation threatens the voluntary nature of Americorps by calling for consideration of “a workable, fair and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people.” It anticipates the possibility of requiring “all individuals in the United States” to perform such service, including elementary school students.
The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service,” while establishing “campuses” that serve as “operational headquarters,” complete with “superintendents” and “uniforms” for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And, it calls for the creation of “a permanent cadre” in a “National Community Civilian Corps.”
But that’s not all. The bill also calls for “youth engagement zones” in which “service learning” is “a mandatory part of the curriculum in all of the secondary schools served by the local educational agency.”
This updated form of voluntary community service is also to be “integrated into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics curricula” at all levels of schooling. Sounds like a government curriculum for government-approved “service learning,” which is nothing less than indoctrination.
Now, ask yourself if Congress members who voted for this monstrosity had a clue what they were voting for. If not, they’re guilty of dereliction of duty. If they did, the implications are truly frightening.
62 Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Post a comment:
Email:
(This will not be displayed or shared. Privacy Policy)
Display Name:
Comment:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reader Comments:
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Oh you poor, scared conservatives. The world has moved on and you're still scrabbling and screaming about conspiracies from the excrement-laden mud. Enjoy your wallowing."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Previous poster - you well demonstrate your ignorance. Hope you enjoy your time doing mandatory service. Unfortunately, the type of re-educating you will receive is not what you need. Go wallow yourself, loser!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
TJY: ""Conservative"?? The SF Examiner is considered a liberal rag"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
JamesJ: "All Hail Obama! All Hail the State!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
JamesJ: "All Hail Obama! All Hail the State!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Brad: "Oh you poor, foolish liberals. You are following the annointed one and helping him to destroy the United States. I hope you enjoy the new world that you are in the process of creating. We conservatives tried to warn you of your folly but, of course, you wouldn't listen."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Learned from history: "I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that this will be the next Young Communist league. But I can agree that spending an additional $3 billion on a program with no measurable goals is not a good idea when we are looking at over $1 trillion per year in deficits."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Learned from history: "I don't know if I necessarily agree with the idea that this will be the next Young Communist league. But I can agree that spending an additional $3 billion on a program with no measurable goals is not a good idea when we are looking at over $1 trillion per year in deficits."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
tskier: "Can you say Nazi Youth Squad?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
JDW: "Dear mothers and fathers, Wait until the bus pulls up to your house to take your children to a camp that most likely will not allow you to visit let alone provide a curriculum. Already, the many public schools allow the gay community to come in to spew their indoctrination, and the courts have ruled that they are allowed to keep their curriculum from you. Some courts have even ruled that the school does not need to inform you, or even allow your children to opt out. I can’t wait to see the uniforms; will they be brown, or white with a red sash, or will OBAMBI get creative? You had better wake up America. CHANGE WE CAN REALLY BELIEVE IN!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
no freedom without risk: "Of course this will be built upon the ACORN template. The "leaders" will all be leftists. There will be required "training" where the young will be indoctrinated into liberalism and intimidated into leftist philosophy. This is simply a plan to indoctrinate the ones missed by the public school system and academia."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Good Ole Paul: "Chains we can believe in."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Good Ole Paul: "Chains we can believe in."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Judith Rubin: "Joanna, This article is from a traditionally liberal paper from San Francisco. It is frightening! I just read an even scarier one from the UK talking about Obama, community organizing, his thug Rham Emanuel and the formation of an army to compete in size with the US Military and funded in the same way. All Youth are to go to "camps" to "learn". This is the way the Nazi's got started. Our youth are also to be wearing uniforms. Bad things are happening under the radar and we all fiddle while Rome burns. Just had a call from a Black banker friend and he's just as alarmed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Timothy L. Pennell: "Obama is a MARXIST. He's a SOCIALIST. He's just doing what ALL Marxists, and Socialists do. They have STREET GANGS, to do their 'Dirty Work'. We used to call them 'BROWN SHIRTS'. Now they're just called 'Volunteers'. Like the 'Volunteers' that were bussed up to Connecticut, from one of the Hell Holes in NYC, to TERRORIZE the AIG folks, and their FAMILIES. Like KRISTALNACHT. The Service Employees Union put that one together. This is why they want to ELLIMINATE the secret ballot for Unionization. More Unions, more BROWN SHIRTS. Like Venezuala. Look at the bright side. When your own kids turn you in, for 'Unpatriotic Remarks' toward our 'Dear Leader', they'll look sharp, in their Brown Shorts, and RED Bandanas. See? There is a bright side,"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Timothy L. Pennell: "Obama is a MARXIST. He's a SOCIALIST. He's just doing what ALL Marxists, and Socialists do. They have STREET GANGS, to do their 'Dirty Work'. We used to call them 'BROWN SHIRTS'. Now they're just called 'Volunteers'. Like the 'Volunteers' that were bussed up to Connecticut, from one of the Hell Holes in NYC, to TERRORIZE the AIG folks, and their FAMILIES. Like KRISTALNACHT. The Service Employees Union put that one together. This is why they want to ELLIMINATE the secret ballot for Unionization. More Unions, more BROWN SHIRTS. Like Venezuala. Look at the bright side. When your own kids turn you in, for 'Unpatriotic Remarks' toward our 'Dear Leader', they'll look sharp, in their Brown Shorts, and RED Bandanas. See? There is a bright side,"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Kat: "Heil Obama! It will be just like the draft. All you middle-class liberals will find a way to exempt your own kids, while letting everyone else do the dirty work. Have you no idea of how these kinds of programs have played out in other countries? Read some history."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
PGR88: "When I come to power, I will use Americorp to enforce social morality, especially in places like SF. That's what youth are good at. I am glad the pieces are all being put together for me now."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
La Lydia: "I, for one, welcome our new Marxist overlords."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
dmzrn: "O-bots are too stupid for words."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Smith: ""The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L. Shirer. Read it. We are there."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Colorado: "So is Obama going to send his troops to your house to hold you at gunpoint to force you to join his Americorps? You know this is the same administration who wants to tax your contributions to charity. You would think that the Messiah would want people to give. He just wants to take, thats his objective. Can't stand the guy."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Rocky: "The person who posted this.... "Oh you poor, scared conservatives. The world has moved on and you're still scrabbling and screaming about conspiracies from the excrement-laden mud. Enjoy your wallowing." IS AN IDIOT!!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Rocky: "The person who posted this.... "Oh you poor, scared conservatives. The world has moved on and you're still scrabbling and screaming about conspiracies from the excrement-laden mud. Enjoy your wallowing." IS AN IDIOT!!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Mame: "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. This is exactly what happened in Germany under Hitler."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Dwall: "Go by a copy of Marc Levin's brillant book: "Liberty and Tryanny: A Conservative Manifesto". This will explain the open assault on our Liberty from these Statists in our midsts so that we can defend ourselves from their tryanny of taxation and liberal hypocrisy."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
RobertP: "Just one question; will the ObamaJugend wear brown or black shirts?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Will members wear brown shirts? At least Hitler had been a corporal, before organizing a paramilitary."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "Will members wear brown shirts? At least Hitler had been a corporal, before organizing a paramilitary."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
oatka: "I've heard this before (dad was from Germany): "“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly, ‘Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community’.” - Adolf Hitler""
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
tri: "I spent my childhood in a Communist country, and boys and girls, this is how it starts: you're there doing "community work" and your kids are somewhere else being indoctrinated...you end up being irrlelvant in your kid's life because you no longer have the same values or speak the same language...and that 's just the effect it has on your family!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Terence Clark: "Its seems we are building a new group of brown shirts or hitler youth groups. Instead they are Obama youth. Whats next reeducation camps for the people who object to this."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Niall: "The Examiner is owned by conservative Christian Philip Anshutz. For this reason alone is it scorned by the liberal loonies in SF."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
CitizensArrestCitizensArrest: "Yes, the world is coming to an end and it is those danged liberals. For sure."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Jon Groseth: "I have known people who, as young people growing up in Germany in the 30s and 40s, were members of the Hitler Youth Corps. This looks like the same kind of thing. Is this Speaker Pelosi's idea?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
SFLiberal13: "I am a very liberal democrat. Frankly this goes against any liberals beliefs. This is just plain scary. I gotta say I supported Obama but now I am having some major reservations. Where is the transparency. Gitmo is still open and we are staying in Iraq indefinitely???? Also why did he appoint the entire Clinton WH Staff? Not the Hope or Change I voted for!"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
AmericorpsAlum: "Ladies and Gentlemen, put down the koolaid. Americorps is the furthest thing from an authoritarian takeover that I can imagine. Listen; I spent the last ten months as an Americorps member. I traveled the country with a team of college aged folks, and we did volunteer work. None of our tasks were outlined by the federal government. We were loaned out to non-profits, and ALL of our work came from them. The federal oversight of our work was minimal; our superiors only wanted the barest essential numbers to prove that the program was "getting things done." 5,000 invasive blackberry plants pulled. 60 tons of mulch moved. 6 schools painted. 175 community members engaged in service. americorps is a blank check from the federal government to non-profit organizations in the form of free labor. It is the opposite of an authoritarian work corps, because the government does not create the projects. Calm down. Ask questions."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Kim S: "Sounds just like Hitler! Is that what our Great United States is turning into? What happened to our rights/freedoms? All those that voted blindly should be fired!!!! Impeach them all!!!! IMPEACH IMPEACH IMPEACH"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Kim S: "Sounds just like Hitler! Is that what our Great United States is turning into? What happened to our rights/freedoms? All those that voted blindly should be fired!!!! Impeach them all!!!! IMPEACH IMPEACH IMPEACH"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Woody: "BOTH the Republican-conservatives and the Democrat-liberals have managed to "change" our country, especially since November 1963. Arguing about which of these 2 apparently colluding sides is better plays into their game."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
phineas: "If the multinationals hadn't "globalized" all those US jobs into oblivion, endeavours like this wouldn't get off the ground.... If this goes awry, we can all thank the outsourcers....Ain't globalization great?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "Being "forced" to volunteer is ludicrous. "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude...shall exist within the United States." (see 13th Amendment) I, for one, and my family will not participate in this lunacy. Do NOT get on the bus if you do not want to. This is unconstitutional. Tell them to go to hell and be prepared to take your case to the Supreme Court if need be."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "Just Say No to Fascism. Be a peaceful resistor to unjust laws. Let the thugs take the first punch to make you conform. (Take a lesson from the Civil Rights Movement.) This will expose their tyranny for what it is and we'll unite as a free people in defense of liberty."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
weirdone: "SFLiberal13: Glad to see your waking up to the truth, would have been better if you had looked at this Marxist before the election though; he is doing exactly what he said he would do. Welcome to the “Brave New World.” "War Is Peace." "Freedom is Slavery." "Ignorance is Strength." Orwell During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Orwell"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
weirdone: "SFLiberal13: Glad to see your waking up to the truth, would have been better if you had looked at this Marxist before the election though; he is doing exactly what he said he would do. Welcome to the “Brave New World.” "War Is Peace." "Freedom is Slavery." "Ignorance is Strength." Orwell During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." Orwell"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Very Conerned: "YAY. We all have front row seats for the show, brought to you by the elite marxist zionist banking oligarchs to a sports stadium near you. Baaaaah. Thank God i'm in Ireland and not in America. Anyway, as Rahm put it, at least a million of you are already terrorists so the government has to protect the elites interests from you, the Goyim. In God they trust, but which god."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
George: "Come on up to Canada if you don't want to join the Mussolini - I mean Obama - blackshirts. We're about 10-15 years behind you so you can buy some breathing space while you figure out how to take back your country."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Juven: "I would not serve in Obama's army and my children will not either--they are already aware of the incredible treason this Obama guy is bringing to this country. He lies about everything-- Eric Holder says no more raids by the DEA and what happens less than a week later? Another raid. No end to Gitmo, renaming and mindless rhetoric seems to be the Obama method; not much different than our last monster-- Bush. New boss, same as the old."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Richard: "Goerge what a wonderful invitation, I for one may take you up on that."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Cookie: ""Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I never thought I'd be writing those words about Americans who never learned or don't remember the atrocities committed by the Nazi's and their brown-shirted youth corps. The similarities are too frightening to consider."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
xbjllb: "Two words: Hitler Youth. And I'm a lifelong Democrat before you go hurling the repug comments."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Bill H: "Great. Obama is making para-military groups to either enslave the USA or to fight with the various militia groupd that will rise to fight our march to socialism. I wonder which side the regular military and national guard take when the civil war starts?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "OUR FORE FATHERS DIED FOR OUR FREEDOM AND LIBERTIES. IT SEEMS THEY DIED IN VEIN. ARE WE GOING TO FIGHT?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "our fore fathers died for our freedom and liberties. it seems they died in vein. when are we going to fight?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Mom: "Tchr,Wm Ayers, did a good job w/ indoctrination of his friend, Obama."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Tina: "This sort of "service" is also required in Isreal."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
: "If it gets the thug minded youth off the street selling drugs and doing drivebuy shooting then how bad can it really be. Hell I woud drive some of them over to the camps myself."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
bebe: "Will the elites insist on a straight-armed "Heil" gesture to complement the thuggish mindset? They'll think of something new, perhaps, although they themselves have oftentimes been photographed/filmed displaying that very gesture. We will soon be overrun by brownshirts...ah! It is true then; Hitler lost the battle , but the NAZI's won the war. Rahm, (dual Israeli-US citizenship) has been salivating for this since day one and now Congress has whorishly acquiesced. The NAZI's adhere to their tried-and-true patterns, eh? How infuriating to know the brain-washed and/or desperate masses will be, once again, fooled into goose-stepping their way into another dictatorship. Yours for 911Trurth"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
bebe: "Hey AmericorpsAlum, you are the one who should be asking questions! 911Truth"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "The House and Senate are lapdogs, along with the MSM. This bill received no publicity. Don't also let HR 825 slip by without a fight. Google it, YouTube it, get informed, talk it up, get outraged, inform your local farmers, and fight it or we are all screwed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
HogansHero: "The House and Senate are lapdogs, along with the MSM. This bill received no publicity. Don't also let HR 825 slip by without a fight. Google it, YouTube it, get informed, talk it up, get outraged, inform your local farmers, and fight it or we are all screwed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTED Mar 26, 2009
Brian Is Getting Impatient: "These terms "liberal" and "conservative" cast nothing but confusion. Why use language that has simply been deployed against you!? You have been divided and you have been conquered. The fish is already in the boat, and most of you are still arguing about what kind of fish it is and what kind of bait was used. Very useful. They intend to dominate liberals and conservatives alike, don't you all know that?"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)