THE ECONOMY & YOU # (Daily Updated Videos & Articles)

2012 US Elections: Obamney vs. Rombama - War, economic collapse and poverty await Americans no matter who they vote for
by Tony Cartalucci
August 25, 2012

War, economic collapse, and personal devastation await Americans no matter who they vote for - and what we should do instead.

A vote for Obama will bring war with Syria, Iran, and eventually Russia and China. The economy will continue to suffer in order to bolster the interests of off-shore corporate-financier interests, while the collective prospects of Americans continue to whither and blow away. A vote for Romney, however, will also bring war with Syria, Iran, and eventually Russia and China. The economy will also continue to suffer in order to bolster the interests of off-shore corporate-financier interests, while the collective prospects of Americans continue to whither and blow away. Why?

Because the White House is but a public relations front for the corporate-financier interests of Wall Street and London. A change of residence at the White House is no different than say, British Petroleum replacing its spokesman to superficially placate public opinion when in reality the exact same board of directors, overall agenda, and objectives remain firmly in place. Public perception then is managed by, not the primary motivation of, corporate-financier interests.

It is the absolute folly to believe that multi-billion dollar corporate-financier interests would subject their collective fate to the whims of the ignorant, uninformed, and essentially powerless voting masses every four years. Instead, what plays out every four years is theater designed to give the general public the illusion that they have some means of addressing their grievances without actually ever changing the prevailing balance of power in any meaningful way.

The foreign policy of both Obama and Romney is written by the exact same corporate-financier funded think-tanks that have written the script for America's destiny for the last several decades.

CONTINUE: [link to globalresearch.ca]

Billion-euro whistleblower
24 August 2012

Hervé Falciani is the 40-year-old computer technician who provided several European governments access to files listing the names of the thousands of their citizens evading taxes via bank accounts at HSBC's Swiss affiliate. Arrested in Barcelona in late July, he is awaiting extradition to Switzerland. Excerpts.
Manuel Altozano

He did not have to look far to find them. They were there, on his computer screen, the one he worked at for six years at HSBC's Geneva headquarters.

Hervé Falciani was responsible for upgrading client databases in one of the world's largest banks and the information to which he had access in October 2006 was priceless. The data, protected by Switzerland's sacrosanct secrecy laws, concerned millionaire depositers' accounts left to blossom over the course of years thanks to covert transfers and financial flows of doubtful, but untraceable, origins.

CONTINUE: [link to www.presseurop.eu]

Trillions Stashed in Offshore Tax Havens
by Stephen Lendman
August 25, 2012

A new Tax Justice Network (TJN) USA report reveals an estimated $21 - $32 trillion of hidden and stolen wealth stashed largely tax-free secretly.

Titled "The Price of Offshore Revisited," it explains what financial insiders know but won't discuss. Many of them have their own hidden wealth.

TJN describes a "subterranean" systemic "economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole." The higher estimate above exceeds US GDP twofold.

It's mind-boggling. It's hard imagining a tiny percent of privileged elites control this much wealth secretly. It's worse knowing it's largely tax free. It's appalling that governments let them get away with it.

Wall Street and other major banks manage it. Their business is fraud and grand theft. Private banking operations yield huge profits. Keeping funds secreted tax free attracts rich clients. Private capital globally is attracted. It's welcome from anyone, "no questions asked."

Government policies protect them. Societal costs are huge. Tax justice is absent. Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley once said only little people pay taxes. TJN's report bears her out.

A vast "global offshore industry" is explained. It's largely tax-free. It's controlled by the world's richest, most powerful elites. Estimating amounts secreted takes tedious data mining.

Previous estimates relied more on rough judgments. TJN used several methods. They include available data sources, estimation methods, and core assumptions. They're open to peer review and public scrutiny.

CONTINUE: [link to globalresearch.ca]

Thanks Roxy for always keeping us "in the know."
Anyway to beat the system?

I'm afraid it's too late, unless 'we' are prepared to start a revolution much like the French Revolution.

What I do know is that TPTB are pretty convinced the 'end' is near, as they don't make any attempt to even try to fix the financial system.

Whilst capitalism may well be showing its late stage crisis profile, I am not sure that we have quite arrived there in terms of a complete shift away from this mode of resource usage. For one, the level of political consciousness is still inclined to view capitalism as warranting repair. Whereas this is what capitalism is, objectively. No matter who tinkers with capital's processes, it will always devolve to this style of wealth consolidation with all the characteristics of cronyism.

Until we arrive, collectively, as a species, at some critical mass in the way we understand this system and its natural propensities, we will continue to attempt to repair it, and each new incarnation (if you can call it "new") will generate even more acute troughs of crises than the one before.

The Great Recession and its Implications: Tax the Rich or Privatize the State?
by Shamus Cooke
August 27, 2012

The Great Recession and its possible continuance has brought the issue of privatization to the forefront of American politics. But most Americans aren't even aware that this debate is happening, because the media and politicians aren't using the word "privatization;” instead less threatening substitutes are used to ram through a corporate agenda that aims to massively transform public resources into corporate profit.

The mass privatization frenzy is the corporate solution to the budget crises occurring on the city, state, and national level — crises caused by the recession that the banks and corporations created themselves, and are now positioning themselves to benefit from again, beyond the infamous bailouts.

The effects of the recession will continue for years, and the already slowing economy is exacerbating these effects, most notably the bankrupting of government budgets. Politicians from the Democratic and Republican parties both holler that "there is no money,” and therefore massive cuts have to be made to public services, while public employees must either be laid off or have their wages destroyed.

But another corporate solution to this corporate-caused problem is now proceeding full speed ahead: Urban Infrastructure Banks. Under this scheme, the funding of publicly-run infrastructure — roads, bridges, public buildings, etc. — will be taken out of the public realm and transferred to the corporations, who will fund these projects as long as they profit from them.

CONTINUE: [link to globalresearch.ca]

Excellent article Roxy. Illustrates the central paradox of capital...with each crisis, the cause is applied as the remedy leading to an even more acuter next crisis and so on and so forth.

On a practical level, the complete destruction of the common impulses that equip all beings with the basic tools for survival marks humankind for a transformation of the likes we are not really equipped for and at best, we can only speculate as to what will emerge. If the self-obsessed elites are anything to go by, the future looks grim indeed.

Is There Going To Be A Stock Market Crash In The Fall?
Michael Snyder, Contributor
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Activist Post

Is the stock market going to crash by the end of this year? Are we on the verge of major financial chaos on a global scale? Well, this is the time of the year when investors start getting nervous. We all remember what happened during the fall of 1929, the fall of 1987 and the fall of 2008. However, it is important to keep in mind that we do not see a stock market crash in the fall of every year. Some years the stock market cruises through the months of September, October, November and December without any problems whatsoever. But this year conditions certainly seem to be right for a "perfect storm" to develop.

Technical indicators are screaming that a stock market decline is imminent and sources in the financial industry all over the world are warning that a massive crisis is on the way. What you are about to read should alarm you. But it is not a guarantee that anything will or will not happen. When Ben Bernanke gives his speech at the Jackson Hole summit on Friday he could announce to the rest of the world that the Federal Reserve has decided to launch QE3 and that the Fed will be printing up trillions of new dollars. If that happened global financial markets would leap for joy. So it is always a dangerous thing when anyone out there tries to tell you that they can "guarantee" what is about to happen in the financial world.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

American Middle Class Being Compressed Out of Existence
by Charles Scaliger
Wednesday, 29 August 2012

The record is becoming clearer and clearer: The Great Recession and its persistent aftermath have dealt the American middle class a blow from which it may take a generation to recover. For the last decade, household incomes have been declining steadily, according to a new report by Sentier Research, a respected Washington-area think tank.

Much of the damage has been done since the official end of the Great Recession. From June 2009 to June 2012, median household income fell 4.8 percent, to just under $51,000. This represents a continuation of the middle-class hollowing out that has been underway since the beginning of the last decade. The Great Recession itself caused median household income to decline by 2.6 percent, and since January 2000, when it stood at more than $55,000, household income has declined by 8.1 percent.

Worse still is the two decades-old erosion of median net worth. American households’ net worth has declined from an all-time 2007 high of $126,400 to a mere $77,300 only three years later — roughly what it was all the way back in 1992, at the beginning of the ‘90s tech stock boom. In other words, America has lost an entire generation’s worth of economic growth courtesy of the Great Recession, and isn’t likely to regain it in the foreseeable future.

CONTINUE: [link to thenewamerican.com]

The middle class is a Cold War myth. With the fall of the progressive forces of scientific socialism, there is nothing restraining the capitalist from fully implementing cost efficient capitalism, one which marries consumerism with global labour cost standardisation (benchmarked in low cost zones such as China and India.)

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital - How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
by: Matt Taibbi
August 29, 2012

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

CONTINUE: [link to www.rollingstone.com]

Morgan Stanley is Insolvent – Only a Matter of Time Before Total Financial Collapse
Susanne Posel, Contributor
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Activist Post

The fall of the House of Morgan has begun as stock prices on the global market at Morgan Stanley (MS) begin to fall on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

According to Rick Wiles: “I’m hearing rumors that another major financial house is going to implode. In fact, the name I’ve been given is Morgan Stanley. It’s going to be put on the sacrificial alter by the financial elite.”

MS, technically speaking, is classified as insolvent based on mark-to-market valuation. By selling off non-core assets, MS has been able to “reduce its European exposure” through the manipulation of hedge funds and allocation of funds to failing financial corporations. Some mainstream media outlets tout that the Federal Reserve Bank will come in and assist MS in their insolvency and that MS “just isn’t going out of business anytime soon.”

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

18 Indications That Europe Is An Economic Black Hole That Will Suck The Life Out Of The Global Economy
Michael Snyder, Contributor
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Activist Post

Summer vacation is over and things are about to get very interesting in Europe. Most Americans don't realize this, but much of Europe shuts down for the entire month of August. I wish we had something similar in the United States. But now millions of Europeans are returning from their extended family vacations and the fun is about to begin.

During August, economic conditions continued to degenerate in Europe, but I figured that it wouldn't be until after August that the European debt crisis would take center stage once again. And as I wrote about last week, if there is going to be a financial panic, it typically happens in the fall.

The stock market has seen quite a nice rally over the summer, and many investors are nervous that we could see a significant "correction" very soon. The month of September has been the absolute worst month for stock performance over the past 50 years, and it has also been the absolute worst month for stock performance over the past 100 years as well. Of course that does not guarantee that anything is going to happen this year. But things in Europe continue to get worse. Unemployment rates are spiking, manufacturing activity is slowing down, housing prices are crashing and major financial institutions are failing. What is happening in Europe right now appears to be an even worse version of what happened to the United States back in 2008.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Central Banks are the Real Target for West's Imperial Wars
Brandon Turbeville
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Activist Post

With any move made by the globalist controllers and their surrogates of the Anglo-American NATO strong arm, it is safe to assume that there is rarely only one reason for the implementation of any given plan. Thus, the wars of conquest and aggression raging in the Middle East, “Eurasia,” and Africa are by no means working toward one purpose alone.

Ever since the invasion of Afghanistan eleven years ago, a small but increasing number of brave journalists, researchers, and activists have been decrying the real reasons for the destruction of entire nations and the tragic loss of life imposed by the hands of NATO and other Anglo-American forces such as the puppet regimes located in the same regions as the target countries. Among these vassal states are the remnants of feudal monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and others.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

The Permanent Unemployment Economy
By James Hall
September 05, 2012

The official underreporting of the unemployment statistics is a well-known fact. The cavalier dismissal of the systemic dismantling of the market economy by the Obama administration is undeniable. Notwithstanding, the lack of living wage jobs is not simply a partisan issue. Ever since the adoption of the globalist free trade betrayal, the national suicide of the free enterprise economy has continued. Transiting skilled employees into government dependents is an overt component of the “New Age” of reduced wealth and servitude for the ordinary American.

Consider the logic of the consequences of off shoring our manufacturing base. Once the jobs are gone, the prospects for good paying substitution jobs become rare. Without the ability to sell value added products generated from meaningful margins, affording generous pay scales of a prosperous middle class is impossible.

CONTINUE: [link to www.globalresearch.ca]

This article speaks of confusion of epic proportions. On the one hand, speaking of the market economy, and on the other, construing this paradigm from a simplistic nationalism.

Then decrying the globalising of the capital that outflows from this market for the loss this brings to premium cost labour...when the market, for being private, constantly seeks options for settling within lower labour cost zones (as a consequence of the natural withering of the state (or market driven state minimilisation.))

The final tragedy is in failing to recognise that these are the early days in the standardisation of global living standards for the labouring classes, whilst ensuring both their continued capacity to deliver labour surplus as well as their continued ability to transform this surplus as consumer.

Spinning Bad Financial News Into Good
Paul Craig Roberts, Contributor
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Activist Post

Friday’s payroll jobs report says that 96,000 new jobs were created in August and that the unemployment rate (U.3) fell from 8.3% to 8.1%. As 96,000 new jobs are not enough to keep up with population growth, the decline in the U.3 unemployment rate was caused by 368,000 discouraged job seekers giving up on finding employment and dropping out of the work force as measured by U.3.

Discouraged workers are not included in the U.3 measure of unemployment, which makes the measure useless. The only purpose of U.3 is to keep bad news out of the news. the U.3 unemployment rate only measures those who have not been discouraged by the inability to find a job and are still actively seeking employment.

The government produces another unemployment measure, U.6, which includes people who have been discouraged by the inability to find a job and have been out of the work force for less than a year. This measure of unemployment is 14.7%, a number that would get attention if reported.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

The eurocisis is also an oilcrisis
Sven Giegold, Member of the European Parlement for the German Greens, explains the relation between the current economical crisis and the rising price of oil.

10 Shocking Quotes About What QE3 Is Going To Do To America
Michael Snyder, Contributor
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Activist Post

Ready or not, QE3 is here, and the long-term effects of this reckless money printing by the Federal Reserve are going to be absolutely nightmarish. The Federal Reserve is hoping that buying $40 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities per month will spur more lending and more economic activity. But that didn't happen with either QE1 or QE2. Both times the banks just sat on most of the extra money.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

Gap Between Rich and Poor is Widening: The US Poverty Report and Obama’s “Economic Recovery”
By Andre Damon and Barry Grey
September 16, 2012

The poverty report released Wednesday by the US Census Bureau is another shattering refutation of the Obama Administration’s claims to be overseeing an economic “recovery” and working to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.

The report revealed that the ranks of those classified by the government as poor remained at record highs in 2011, while the gap between rich and poor widened further. Some 46.2 million people remained below the official poverty line in 2011, the highest number in more than half a century. The 15.0 percent poverty rate, essentially unchanged from 2010, was the highest since 1983.

The impact of poverty is particularly devastating for the young. One in five American children was poor in 2011. The poverty rate of young adults age 25-34 living with their parents, based on their own income alone, was 43.7 percent.

All of these figures grossly underestimate the real level of poverty, since the government’s poverty threshold, set at an annual income of $23,021 for a family of four, is absurdly low.

The Census data showed that median household income, adjusted for inflation, fell by 1.5 percent from the previous year. The figure was 8.1 percent lower than in 2007 and 8.9 percent lower than its peak in 1999. The income of the typical US family in 2011 fell for the fourth straight year and sank to levels last seen in 1995.

CONTINUE: [link to www.globalresearch.ca]

Confusing Money for Value
Dan and Sheila Gendron, Contributors
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Activist Post

You should have seen us when we wore Rolexes, big diamonds and the latest fashions. You should have seen our 3000 sq. ft. house that required a full-time housekeeper and gardeners, not to mention the electric, phone and water bills. You should have seen my long, weekly manicured fingernails and perfectly coiffed hair. You should have seen the Cadillacs we drove. It was the image of monetary wealth – unfortunately, all too often confused with real value.

You wouldn't have known we were people who could be happy in a one-bedroom cinderblock house in which we must keep a fire going in order to stay warm. That is, of course, unless you chose to look under the surface. All that opulence never impressed us, even though it was never bought on credit but with money we had worked our buns off to make. It was just a tool we used to get ourselves to our goal – a self-sufficient, off-grid survivalist retreat.

Our first house in the wilderness was a 16' by 32' plywood shack, finished only well enough to be livable, not aesthetically pleasing. It didn't take much of our funds and we chose not to put a lot of money into it at the time. We knew we were going to build another someday (it happened a mere 2 years later). But that plywood shack had VALUE. It kept us warm and protected from the weather and gave us the freedom to finish other projects.

CONTINUE: [link to www.activistpost.com]

The Bubble Economy and Debt Deflation - Incorporating the Rentier Sectors into a Financial Model
By Dirk Bezemer and Michael Hudson
September 16, 2012
michael-hudson.com
As published in the World Economic Association’s World Economic Review Vol #1.

Now that the Bubble Economy has given way to debt deflation, the world is discovering the shortcoming of models that fail to explain how most credit creation today (1) inflates asset prices without raising commodity prices or wage levels, and (2) creates a reciprocal flow of debt service.

ABSTRACT
Current macroeconomics ignores the roles that rent, debt and the financial sector play in shaping our economy. We discuss the Classical view on rents and policy responses to the rentier sector in the 19th century. The finance, insurance & real estate sector is today’s incarnation of the rentier sector. This paper shows how financial flows can be conceptually and statistically studied separately from (but interacting with) the real sector. We discuss finance’s interaction with government and with the international economy.

1. Introduction
Now that the Bubble Economy has given way to debt deflation, the world is discovering the shortcoming of models that fail to explain how most credit creation today (1) inflates asset prices without raising commodity prices or wage levels, and (2) creates a reciprocal flow of debt service. This debt service tends to rise as a proportion of personal and business income, outgrowing the ability of debtors to pay – leading to (3) debt deflation. The only way to prevent this phenomenon from plunging economies into depression and keeping them there is (4) to write down the debts so as to free revenue for spending once again on goods and services.

By promoting a misleading view of how the economy works, the above omissions lead to a policy that fails to prevent debt bubbles or deal effectively with the ensuing depression. To avoid a replay of the recent financial crisis – and indeed, to extricate economies from their present debt strait-jacket that subordinates recovery to the overhang of creditor claims (that is, saving the banks from taking a loss on their bad loans and gambles) – it is necessary to explain how credit creation inflates housing and other asset prices, while interest and other financial charges deflate the “real” economy, holding down commodity prices, shrinking markets and employment, and holding down wages in a downward economic spiral. We are dealing with two price trends that go in opposite directions: asset prices and commodity prices. It therefore is necessary to explain how credit expansion pushes asset prices up while simultaneously causing debt deflation.

CONTINUE: [link to www.globalresearch.ca]

The Federal Reserve Is a Cartel
G. Edward Griffin discusses the trajectory of the US dollar and the country's political direction with Casey Research Chief Metals & Mining Strategist Louis James during the recently concluded conference, Navigating the Politicized Economy.