The buck stops here.
Cogent and shattering analysis in a number of places by Richard C. Cook of the financial Armageddon. I’ve commented on various sections, interspersed throughout Cook’s article.
“Train-wreck” doesn’t even begin to describe what is starting to happen to the U.S. today with the financial crisis, an onrushing depression, and the failure of George W. Bush’s war policy as he is faced down by Iran and the Russian bear.
But in an even broader sense, the West, as a civilization, after a century of world war and the utter failure of global finance capitalism, may have reached its limits.
If you watched the video in yesterday’s post, you would have seen that debt growth is reaching the asymptote. It’s unsustainable and we are running out of resources to loot. When the sums being discussed are in the trillions, you know that we left Kansas a very long time ago.
Those with a vested interest in the status quo dismiss any suggestion that something is wrong. This includes Donald Luskin, author of an article in the Washington Post on Sunday, September 14, titled: “A Nation of Exaggerators: Quit Doling Out That Bad Economy Line.”
Luskin writes, “The relentless drumbeat of pessimism in the media and on the campaign trail” is “a virus.”
He continues: “Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.”
Continue reading, and you find out who Luskin is: a campaign adviser to John McCain.
Why aren’t there heads on spikes yet?
Are these people inhabiting any kind of reality? I woke this morning to find that my bank, the Halifax, had been bought by Lloyds TSB for over £12BN. Can anyone imagine for even a moment that such a monumental event would have been allowed by any government a year ago? A monster has been created in the aftermath of a Jacobean tragedy and these amoral monsters are telling me that everything is OK.
Each and every one of my friends knows that things are bad. Some of my friends cannot sleep at night. (I have no such trouble, fortunately. Insha’Allah is one of the greatest blessings ever afforded to a Muslim. Now I know why I experienced poverty in the past. I thank my Creator for that lesson!)
We know that “where you stand depends on where you sit”—and who pays you for advice. So is a catastrophic meltdown coming?
If so, probably a majority of the people in the world are thinking: “Serves them right.” For the last 500 years, the West has been striding across the globe, armed to the teeth with firearms, warships, bombers, and—more recently—depleted uranium, enforcing the “white man’s burden” by enslaving nations and peoples and confiscating everything of value—ranging from art objects to gold to oil—that can be carried away.
It’s not a “chippy paki” that said that - Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform will be published soon by Tendril Press. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age , called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years .”
Truth comes out when the chips are down and when there’s nothing to lose, or gain.
The financiers behind it all have also used the diabolically clever practice of creating money “out of thin air” to put the natives everywhere into debt, and, when that has proven insufficient, of doing the same to their own populations.
All this is rationalized by various brands of racism, cultural superiority, social Darwinism, historical determinism, “dominion of the Elect,” “God’s chosen people,” etc. Or, simply, “might makes right.”
Some call it “The New World Order.”
Blimey, anyone would think this guy was a conspiraloon. Are you reading Ms. Norfolk? (because you’re not from London, not like me and my friends, who so are). Don’t like it? Sue me!
You brand a few decent people who had the temerity to question whether the government was telling the truth with the tag “conspiraloon” and now you must be so confused to observe that the whole world is a conspiraloon, leaving only you, a fawning band of Islamophobes and mendacious racists and the murderers in power that you so blindly and loyally support. Now who’s out on a limb?
I’m proud to be a conspiraloon if it means agreeing with Woodrow Wilson, or Richard Cook, or even Jesus Christ or Muhammad (peace be on them, yes even Wilson and Cook!) And I am so proud to be a Londoner, to be tolerant to be patient and so in every respect, nothing like you at all.
So today, we Americans, denizens of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” victors in two world wars, bearers of “democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq, allies of the brave Israelis who hold high the banner of Judeo-Christian values among the ungrateful Palestinians—well, we Americans owe our own bankers almost $70 trillion at most recent count. With the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, we owe holders of bad housing loans, including the governments of China, Korea, and Japan, another few trillion.
$70 TRILLION OF DEBT OWED TO BANKERS!
Cancel all of the debt. (It’s only numbers) and let’s see some heads on spikes, like the good old days. What’s it going to take for there to be a revolution? How long will we let these usurist, murdering thieves loot us and kill us and worst of all, divide us against each other while we try to spend our way out of indentured, indebted servitude?
The bluster of Kissinger, Brzezinski, the Kristols, the Christian fundamentalists, and their paid-off politicians and media millionaires notwithstanding, America—indeed, the entire West—has been found out, perhaps even checkmated on the world stage.
Maybe now would be a good time for me to learn Russian. Or Chinese. Or Persian?
The Bush/Cheney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have blackened America’s name forever.
People of the world are not stupid. As I’ve repeatedly said, America is just another empire. America is an idea. There are people who have hijacked the idea, but America was actually loved by many for a long time. That love will come back if the Americans just turn up and get rid of the impostors who are destroying the world. Usurist, thieving Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Warburgs and the rest.
Iran has called our bluff. In Israel the gap between rich and poor is increasing as much as in the U.S. According to an article by Ian S. Lustick, the Palestinians have stood up to the Israelis to the point where more Jews are emigrating from that country than are moving in, and where those who remain are increasingly huddling around Tel Aviv as a safe haven. (Ian S. Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall: ‘Israel and the Middle Eastern Muck’,” Middle East Policy , Vo. XV, No. 3, Fall 2008.)
If Israel tries any funny stuff with its neighbours, its neighbours, including Iran, have the ability to level Tel Aviv in the same way that the murdering Zionaxis levelled the whole of Iraq. And in the wasteland that will remain, nobody will come to build a ferris wheel. They’ll be coming to build homes for the Palestinians. Let the Europeans make amends for what they did to the Jews in the 30s and 40s.
In the 1990s, the European bankers used U.S. and NATO forces to dismember Yugoslavia so George Soros and the Rothschilds could gobble up Balkan resources. But that strategy is failing in the Caucasus, where the Russians fought back against the genocidal attack by Dick Cheney’s poodle, Mikheil Saakashvili, the New York-trained attorney the CIA got elected as the president of Georgia.
I’m afraid I know very little about the Caucusus, I forgot much of my ‘O’ level History and even that didn’t cover the region very well. I had no idea that Saakashvili was a New-York trained attorney though, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was the CIA that got him elected. The CIA is great at getting all kinds of oppressive scumbags into power so that they can steal the resources of an entire nation. Somalia, Iran (Mossadegh), Indonesia (Suharto), Nicaragua and the list goes on and on and on.
And now the people of Ukraine, the “Little Russians,” realizing what the West has in store for them, are rushing back into the Slavic fold and may be only a year or so away from reuniting with their “Great Russian” cousins across the border.
A friend of mine who knows the region well assures me that this is indeed the case. I’m not learned enough to know what the truth is here.
I’m going to back off now for a few paragraphs; I don’t want to interrupt the best bit of writing here.
What is telling is to watch the Western financier press, chiefly the Washington Post and the New York Times , fume about Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and his “authoritarian” manner. An example is the article by Times correspondent Ellen Barry on Putin’s September 11 press conference in Moscow. She wrote, “In three-and-a-half hours, in tones that were alternatively pugilistic and needy, Vladimir V. Putin tried to explain himself.”
I’m sorry, Ms. Barry. You and your editors may think your writing is cute, but Vladimir Putin is the foremost figure on the world stage today. He will remain so after George W. Bush leaves the White House disgraced.
Putin is heir to an epochal movement of patriots who began in the 1970s to take back Russia from within. It started with a base of operations within the KGB and the Orthodox Church, led to Gorbachev’s glasnost in the 1980s, and culminated in the Second Russian Revolution of 1991. At that point, the Western financiers gleefully rushed in to support an assault from the Russian “oligarchs” who were looting Russia of everything it owned.
The oligarchs were the shock troops of a financier assault that had already begun to overlap in the West with the Russian Mafia. Cheered on by the Washington Post and aided by academic advisors from places like Harvard, this international syndicate nearly destroyed Russia during the 1990s. But when Putin was appointed interim president by Boris Yelstin in 1999, and after winning the presidential election of 2000 in his own right, he began to fight back.
From the mid-1970s to today, thousands of Russian gangsters, along with many hard-line Bolsheviks/Stalinists, were allowed to emigrate. Many settled in the U.S. and are here today, and many more settled in Israel. In fact, one reason the price of condos in New York, Miami, Tel Aviv, and elsewhere has inflated so much reportedly is the flood of cash from racketeering.
The crooks have allied themselves with the Colombian drug cartels and have heavily infiltrated the world’s financial systems, even setting up their own banks for laundering money and speculating in the commodities markets.
Today, Putin is cleaning out the remaining gangster class. His efforts reached a milestone in January with the arrest in Moscow of Semion Mogilevich, called “the world’s most dangerous man.”
Putin has declared that the world will not be governed in a “unipolar” manner; i.e. by the U.S. military as the police force for the global financiers. This does not mean Russia has to be our enemy. In fact the world would be much better off, and much safer, if we joined with Russia as allies in keeping the peace.
For more on how the oligarchs were allowed to destroy Russia and just what a thug Yeltsin was, I recommend Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”. More learned readers should see fit to point me towards better resources.
What I learned was that Russia’s so-called “reforms” led to the impoverishment of 72 million people in only 8 years! And by 1996, 25% of Russians, that’s over 37 million people, lived in poverty described as “desperate” and by which time also there were 715,000 homeless children in Russia, though UNICEF put this figure as high as 3.5 million children.
The country was basically looted and pillaged by these oligarchs, but how was this possible given just how wealthy Russia was? Well guess what. It needed terror. From the torching of parliament (turning the Whitehouse into the Blackhouse - Reichstag anyone?) to the invasion and brutal repression of Chechnya to the total suspension by Yeltsin of any form of democracy. Indeed, Yeltsin’s “privatisation” minister, Anatoly Chubais stated quite brazenly that “In order to have a democracy in society there must be a dictatorship in power.”
I haven’t even scratched the surface of what happened in Russia and it would take me years of research to become knowledgeable.
It boils down to this. Rich, greedy, corporatist, usurist thieves suspend democracy by creating a terror diversion and then proceed to rob a nation of its liberty, its resources and its common wealth. As a friend says so eloquently and figuratively (of course!) - “HEADS ON SPIKES!”
But to do that our system would have to change, because finance capitalism is far too unstable to coexist with other nations as equals. It must either grow or die, because it always needs new victims to pay the interest on its usury practices and to finance its speculative balloons. As a last resort, it needs the kind of financial institution bailouts being engineered by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, where the only remaining stopgap is borrowing from public funds and adding to the national debt.
Once economic growth stops, as has now happened, and all the bubbles to restart it have blown up, as has also happened, the end really is nigh. Especially if the host—the U.S.—is bankrupt.
What is coming at us today isn’t just another downturn. If people like McCain adviser Donald Luskin doubt it, maybe, instead of writing campaign propaganda, they should ask the fired CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stockholders of Lehman Brothers, whose shares have dropped ninety percent in less than a year, and the millions who are losing their homes.
Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are calling for “change.” Well, if I were standing on a beach with a 100-foot tsunami roaring in my direction, I would call for change too. Except I would not be standing around arguing about the meaning of the words “lipstick on a pig.”
By Richard C. Cook
http:// www.richardccook.com
HEADS ON SPIKES.
I just had a quick look at my Blogger account. There were 144 comments stored up in there for moderation from the days when Blogger was the home of Suspect Paki. I’ll come back to those later.I also came across a blog I had started about my adventures in Second Life. The first entry, dated November 29th 2006 read as follows:
