Filed under: Big Banks, DEBT, deindustrialization, despotism, detroit, devaluation, Dictatorship, Economic Collapse, economic crisis, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Fascism, ghost town, global warming cult, Great Depression, Greenback, housing market, Inflation, middle class, real estate, US Economy | Tags: collapse of detroit, death of detroit, detriot extinction
Detroit family homes sell for just $10
London Telegraph
March 12, 2010
Family homes in Detroit are selling for as little as $10 (£6) in the wake of America’s financial meltdown.
The once thriving industrial city has suffered a dramatic decline following the global economic crisis.
According to Tim Prophit, a real estate agent, the crisis has led to a unprecedented portfolio of homes, but they are failing to sell.
He said there were homes on the market for $100 (£61), but an offer of just $10 (£6) would be likely to be accepted.
Speaking on a BBC 2 documentary, Requiem for Detroit, to be screened on Saturday, Mr Prophit said: “The property is listed by the city of Detroit as being worth $35,000 (£22,000), but the bank know that is impossible to ask.
The Death of Detroit (Pictures of an Economic Disaster)
Filed under: aristocrats, bailout, bank bailout, Bank of England, bankruptcy, bernanke, Big Banks, Carbon Tax, Co2, co2 tax, Credit Crisis, DEBT, depopulation, depression, despotism, devaluation, Dictatorship, Dollar, dollar drop, dollar dump, Economic Collapse, economic crisis, economic depression, Economy, Empire, environmental taxation, Eugenics, Fascism, Federal Reserve, GDP, global currency, global economy, global elite, global government, Global Warming, Great Depression, Greenback, hyperinflation, imf, Inflation, internationalist, main street, malthusian, malthusian catastrophe, middle class, New World Order, NWO, obama deception, oligarchy, One World Government, Population Control, Propaganda, ruling class, SDRs, single currency, slavery, Stock Market, Taxpayers, third world, US Economy, Wall Street, webster tarpley, World Bank, world currency, world government
America’s Impending Master Class Dictatorship
cryptogon.com
January 23, 2010
Holy shit, this one will scorch your eyeballs!
Forget my excerpts. Click through and read the whole thing. Highly recommended.
Via: Kitco:
Thanks to the endless barrage of feel-good propaganda that daily assaults the American mind, best epitomized a few months ago by the “green shoots,” everything’s-coming-up-roses propaganda touted by Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke, the citizens have no idea how disastrous the country’s fiscal, monetary and economic problems truly are. Nor do they perceive the rapidly increasing risk of a totalitarian nightmare descending upon the American Republic.
One stark and sobering way to frame the crisis is this: if the United States government were to nationalize (in other words, steal) every penny of private wealth accumulated by America’s citizens since the nation’s founding 235 years ago, the government would remain totally bankrupt.
According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent report on wealth, America’s private net worth was $53.4 trillion as of September, 2009. But at the same time, America’s debt and unfunded liabilities totaled at least $120,000,000,000,000.00 ($120 trillion), or 225% of the citizens’ net worth. Even if the government expropriated every dollar of private wealth in the nation, it would still have a deficit of $66,600,000,000,000.00 ($66.6 trillion), equal to $214,286.00 for every man, woman and child in America and roughly 500% of GDP. If the government does not directly seize the nation’s private wealth, then it will require $389,610 from each and every citizen to balance the country’s books. State, county and municipal debts and deficits are additional, already elephantine in many states (e.g., California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York) and growing at an alarming rate nationwide. In addition to the federal government, dozens of states are already bankrupt and sinking deeper into the morass every day.
…
It is estimated that the top 1% of Americans control roughly 40% of the nation’s wealth. In other words, 3 million people own $21,400,000,000,000.00 ($21.4 trillion) in net private assets, while the other 305 million own the remaining $32,000,000,000,000.00 ($32 trillion). 77,000,000 (77 million) Americans (the lowest 25%) have mean net assets of minus $2,300 ($-2,300.00) per person; they live from paycheck to paycheck, or on public assistance. The lower 50% of Americans own mean net assets of $27,800 each, about enough to purchase a modest car. Obviously, it would be impossible to retire on such an amount without significant government or other assistance. Meanwhile, the richest 10% of Americans possess mean net assets of $3,976,000.00 each, or 143 times those of the bottom 50%; the top 2% control assets worth more than 1,500 times those in the bottom 50%. When you combine these facts with Wall Street’s typical multi-million dollar annual bonuses, you get an idea of wealth inequality in America. Historically, such extreme inequality has been a well-documented breeding ground for totalitarianism.
If the government decides to expropriate (steal) or commandeer (e.g., force into Treasuries) America’s private wealth in order to buy survival time, such a measure will be designed to destroy the common citizens, not the elite. Insiders will be given advance warning about any such plan, and will be able to transfer their money offshore or into financial vehicles immune from harm. Assuming that the elite moves its money to safety, there would then be $120,000,000,000,000.00 ($120 trillion) in American debt and liabilities supported by only $32,000,000,000,000.00 ($32 trillion) in private net worth, for a deficit of $88,000,000,000,000.00 ($88 trillion). In that case, each American would owe $285,714.29 to balance the country’s books. (Remember to multiply this amount by every person in your household, including any infant children.)
If the common people suspect that something diabolical was in the works, a portion of the $32 trillion in non-elite wealth could be evacuated as well prior to a government expropriation and/or currency devaluation, resulting in less money for the government to steal. What these statistics mean is that it is absolutely impossible for the government to fund its debt and deficits, even if it steals all of the nation’s private wealth. Therefore, the government’s only solutions are either formal bankruptcy (outright debt repudiation and the dismantling of bankrupt government programs) or unprecedented American monetary inflation and debt monetization. If the government chooses to inflate its way out of this fiscal catastrophe, the United States dollar will essentially become worthless. You can be absolutely certain that a PhD. in economics, such as Dr. Bernanke, is well aware of these realities, despite what he might say in speeches. For that matter, so are Chinese schoolchildren, who, when patronized by Treasury Secretary Geithner about America’s “strong dollar,” laughed in his face. One day, perhaps America’s school children will receive a real education so that they, too, will know when to laugh at absurd propaganda.
…
These deficits and debts are now so gargantuan that they have become surreal abstractions impossible even for sophisticated financiers to begin to comprehend. The common citizen has absolutely no idea what these numbers mean, or imply for his or her future. The people have been deluded into thinking that America’s arrogant, egomaniacal, always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt fiscal witch doctors and charlatans, including Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Geithner and Ponce de Bernanke, have discovered a Monetary Fountain of Youth that endlessly spits up free money from the center of earth, in a geyser of good will toward the United States. Unfortunately, this delusion is false: there is no Monetary Fountain of Youth, and contrary to the apparent beliefs of the self-deified man-gods in Washington, D.C., the debt and deficits are real, completely out of control, and 100% guaranteed to create catastrophic consequences for the nation and its people.
When government “representatives” deliberately sell into slavery the citizens of a so-called free Republic, they have committed treason against those people. This is exactly what has happened in the United States: the citizens have been sold into debt slavery that they and their descendants can never escape, because the debts piled onto their backs can never, ever be paid. Despite expensive and sophisticated brainwashing campaigns emanating from Washington, claiming that America can “grow” out of its deficits and debt, it is arithmetically impossible for the country to do so. The government’s statements that it can dig the nation out of its fiscal hole by digging an even deeper chasm have become parodies and perversions of even totally discredited and morally disgusting Keynesianism.
The people no longer have elected representatives; they have elected traitors.
The enslavement of the American people has been orchestrated by a pernicious Master Class that has taken the United States by the throat. This Master Class is now choking the nation to death as it accelerates its master plan to plunder the people’s dwindling remaining assets. The Master Class comprises politicians, the Wall Street money elite, the Federal Reserve, high-end government (including military) officials, government lobbyists and their paymasters, military suppliers and media oligarchs. The interests and mindset of the Master Class are so totally divorced from those of the average American citizen that it is utterly tone deaf and blind to the justifiable rage sweeping the nation. Its guiding ethics of greed, plunder, power, control and violence are so alien to mainstream American culture and thought that the Master Class might as well be an enemy invader from Mars. But the Master Class here, it is real and it is laying waste to America. To the members of the Master Class, the people are not fellow-citizens; they are instruments of labor, servitude and profit. At first, the Master Class viewed the citizens as serfs; now that they have raped and destroyed the national economy, while in the process amassing unprecedented wealth and power for themselves, they see the people as nothing more than slaves.
Know Your Enemy-The Oligarchs
Filed under: AIG, bailout, bank bailout, bankergate, Big Banks, central bank, corruption, Credit Crisis, DEBT, deception, despotism, Deutsche Bank, devaluation, Dictatorship, Dollar, dollar collapse, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, end the fed, Federal Reserve, geithner, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Greenback, hyperinflation, Inflation, main street, Merrill Lynch, middle class, obama bailout, obama deception, scandal, SEC, Société Générale, Taxpayers, Tim Geithner, Wall Street
SEC Orders AIG Info Sealed Until November… 2018!
Business Insider
January 12, 2010
Good news. It looks as though we’ll be getting access to secret data on the bailout of AIG and its counterparties.
The bad news: We’re going to have to wait until November of 2018, according to Matthew Goldstein at Reuters.
- In May, the SEC approved a request by AIG to keep secret an exhibit to a year-old regulatory filing that includes some of the details on the most controversial aspect of the AIG bailout: the funneling of tens of billions of dollars to big banks like Societe Generale, Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) and Merrill Lynch.
The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, in granting AIG’s request for confidential treatment, said the “excluded information” will not be made public until Nov. 25, 2018, according to a copy of the agency’s May 22 order.
The SEC said the insurer had demonstrated the information in the exhibit, called Schedule A, “qualifies as confidential commercial or financial information.” More
By then, Wall Street will have significantly recycled many people (and probably some more firms) and perhaps the American public just won’t care about how Tim Geithner helped bail out a gigantic black hole of a firm, upon which so many ostensibly rock solid firms had their foundation.
Filed under: Big Banks, central bank, Credit Crisis, DEBT, depression, despotism, Dictatorship, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, Great Depression, housing bubble, housing market, hyperinflation, Inflation, job market, main street, middle class, mortgage crisis, Stock Market, unemployment, US Economy, Wall Street
No Jobs for The Next Ten Years?
Daily Bell
December 30, 2009
The decade ahead could be a brutal one for America’s unemployed – and for people with jobs hoping for pay raises. At best, it could take until the middle of the decade for the nation to generate enough jobs to drive down the unemployment rate to a normal 5 or 6 percent and keep it there. At worst, that won’t happen until much later – perhaps not until the next decade. The deepest and most enduring recession since the 1930s has battered America’s work force. The unemployed number 15.4 million. The jobless rate is 10 percent. More than 7 million jobs have vanished. People out of work at least six months number a record 5.9 million. And household income, adjusted for inflation, has shrunk in the past decade. Most economists say it could take until at least until 2015 for the unemployment rate to drop down to a historically more normal 5.5 percent. And with the job market likely to stay weak, some also foresee another decade of wage stagnation. Even though the economy will likely keep growing, the pace is expected to be plodding. That will make employers reluctant to hire. Further contributing to high unemployment is the likelihood of more people competing for jobs, baby boomers delaying retirement and interest rates edging higher. All this would come after a decade that created relatively few jobs: a net total of just 464,000. By contrast, 21.7 million new jobs were generated between 1989 and 1999. – Huffington Post
Dominant Social Theme: It’s looking grim?
Free-Market Analysis: There are a lot of statistics cited in this article but like many articles with a mainstream tone, most of them are besides-the-point or shed little illumination about what is going on. First of all the jobless rate in America is closer to 20-30 percent, we figure, when you throw in everyone who wants to work but can’t find work, even part-time work. And second, we distrust the other unemployment figures cited in this article. Finally, we look in vain for a reason as to why all this is happening. Can we find it somewhere else in the body of the article? Here’s some more:
That’s mainly because the economy’s recovery, sluggish by historical standards, isn’t expected to regain its vigor over the next few years. As a result, companies will be in no rush to ramp up hiring. Other analysts think the economy will recover the jobs wiped out by the recession by 2013 or 2014 but that the unemployment rate will stay high. They note that the healing economy will cause more people to stream back into the labor force, vying for too-few jobs.
In addition, baby boomers whose retirement accounts have shrunk could put off retiring and stay in the work force longer. That would leave fewer positions available for the unemployed. Other contributing forces – businesses squeezing more work from employees they still have and relying more on part-time and overseas help – have intensified. And record-high federal budget deficits and the threat of inflation could drive up interest rates, which could hobble growth and restrict job creation. All those factors could combine to keep unemployment high.
“It will be the mother of all jobless recoveries,” predicts economic historian John Steel Gordon. On the other hand, it’s possible some technological innovation not yet envisioned could generate a wave of jobs. Yet at the moment, most economists aren’t betting that any such breakthroughs will rescue the labor market.
The last time the jobless rate reached double digits, in the early 1980s, it took six years to bring it down to normal levels.
Unemployment hit a post-World War II high of 10.8 percent at the end of 1982 as the country was emerging from a severe recession. The rate fell to around 5 percent in 1988. It took less than two years for the number of jobs to return to its pre-recession level. In this recovery, the economy is far more fragile. Hard-to-get credit is exerting a drag. Wounds from the banking system’s worst crisis since the Great Depression will take years to fully heal. People and companies, scarred by the crisis, are likely to restrain borrowing, spending and investing.
From our perspective this article does what all such articles do, it describes what’s going on without explaining anything. You can read the whole article, and you’ll never come up with a reason why 20 percent or more of America is unemployed. Is it because people are lazy? They don’t want jobs even though they pretend they do?
We would write the article differently. We would start by explaining that for the past 100 years America’s manufacturing might has been disintegrating even though the country has looked relatively healthy. But the combination of the income tax and central banking, introduced in the ‘teens, has robbed the country of its industrial muscle. Many big companies have moved away rather than be subject to the income tax. And employees have given up productive trade and agricultural jobs to chase after the latest Fed-stimulated bubble. The tech sector looked attractive in the 1990s, and the mortgage business was great during the 2000s. But neither business lasted because they weren’t real. They were the chaff of central bank monetary stimulation.
The income tax and central banking have hollowed out American industrial capacity. This is the reason that jobs will not return to America – and the world – for a long time. It wasn’t enough by the way that all this happened over a period of nearly 100 years now, but every time there’s a cyclical bust, the West stimulates – throws good money after bad that only prolongs the agony by confusing the market signals that the economy would otherwise present to rational investors.
Conclusion: Deprived of market signals, investors have a hard time determining what’s an efficient business and what is not. They’ve decided, with considerable reason, that too-big-too-fail banks are probably a good investment. Well, this may be so, but it does nothing for the larger economy. Putting good money after bad into these large fiat-money sinkholes only retards real innovation and sets the economy up for another bout of inflationary bleeding and boom-bust madness. What’s needed is a return to a private market gold-and-silver standard that will provide real feedback to those who want to purchase equity in winning entrepreneurial companies. See, it’s not hard to explain, but for some reason, the story just doesn’t get told, certainly not in the mainstream press.
Filed under: Afghanistan, Africa, civil unrest, DEBT, depression, despotism, Dictatorship, Dissent, Economic Collapse, economic depression, Economy, Empire, famine, global economy, Great Depression, hyperinflation, Inflation, Iran, malthusian, malthusian catastrophe, middle east, Ordo Ab Chao, Pakistan, Protest, recession, riot, third world, US Economy | Tags: 2010 forecast, 2010 predictions
2010 could be a year that sparks unrest
Economist.com
December 31, 2009
IF THE world appears to have escaped relatively unscathed by social unrest in 2009, despite suffering the worst recession since the 1930s, it might just prove the lull before the storm. Despite a tentative global recovery, for many people around the world economic and social conditions will continue to deteriorate in 2010. An estimated 60m people worldwide will lose their jobs. Poverty rates will continue to rise, with 200m people at risk of joining the ranks of those living on less than $2 a day. But poverty alone does not spark unrest—exaggerated income inequalities, poor governance, lack of social provision and ethnic tensions are all elements of the brew that foments unrest.
