Source:  Institute for Political Economy  

The Fiscal Cliff Is A Diversion: The Derivatives Tsunami and the Dollar Bubble

by Paul Craig Roberts

The “fiscal cliff” is another hoax designed to shift the attention of policymakers, the media, and the attentive public, if any, from huge problems to small ones.

The fiscal cliff is automatic spending cuts and tax increases in order to reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount over ten years if Congress takes no action itself to cut spending and to raise taxes. In other words, the “fiscal cliff” is going to happen either way.

The problem from the standpoint of conventional economics with the fiscal cliff is that it amounts to a double-barrel dose of austerity delivered to a faltering and recessionary economy. Ever since John Maynard Keynes, most economists have understood that austerity is not the answer to recession or depression.

Regardless, the fiscal cliff is about small numbers compared to the Derivatives Tsunami or to bond market and dollar market bubbles. (more…)

Source:  Asia Times

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world’s population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn’t. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came. (more…)

Sources:  see list below  

The Obama Administration has openly announced their intent to bring back the Assault Weapons Ban that was “law” for ten years, but this time Senator Dianne Feinstein isn’t  just restricting new weapons & ammo purchases, but seeking legislation to require arms be turned in and private sales be barred. Simultaneously, the Obama Administration is helping to revive the United Nations Small Arms Treaty, which will undermine the sovereignty of the 2nd Amendment by putting international control over the flow of weapons and civilian ownership, inevitably affecting gun rights inside the U.S. (more…)

Source:  France 24 News

Iran Missiles

AFP – Iran could launch a pre-emptive strike if Israel prepares to attack it, a senior Revolutionary Guards commander told broadcaster Al-Alam on Sunday, a day after his boss warned that conflict was inevitable.

Should Israel and Iran engage militarily, “nothing is predictable… and it will turn into World War III,” Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh told Iran’s Arabic-language television network. (more…)

Source:   The Economic Collapse

Printing away the future

OPINION

The Federal Reserve Is Systematically Destroying Social Security And The Retirement Plans Of Millions Of Americans

By Michael Snyder

Last week the mainstream media hailed QE3 as the “quick fix” that the U.S. economy desperately needs, but the truth is that the policies that the Federal Reserve is pursuing are going to be absolutely devastating for our senior citizens.

By keeping interest rates at exceptionally low levels, the Federal Reserve is absolutely crushing savers and is systematically destroying Social Security.

Meanwhile, the inflation that QE3 will cause is going to be absolutely crippling for the millions upon millions of retired Americans that are on a fixed income.  Sadly, most elderly Americans have no idea what the Federal Reserve is doing to their financial futures. (more…)

Source: Intelhub

OPINION

Hunger is no game for world's poor

Food prices are rising, and consumers are feeling it. Rising food prices aren’t only hitting America, they are happening around the world. Costs have gone up 10 percent between June and July alone, with corn, soybeans, and wheat reaching record prices.

This outpaces the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s estimate of a 6 percent increase.

Rising Food Prices and Vulnerable Populations

While we may all see small changes in the grocery store and in grocery bills, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim says countries reliant on imported grains, especially “Africa and the Middle East are particularly vulnerable.”

The World Bank attributes the price jump mainly to the American heatwave and drought in Eastern Europe, which has hurt corn and soy in the US and wheat in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.

Use of corn in the production of ethanol in the U.S.—accounting for up to 40 percent of corn crop—has also been blamed for the price jump.

But of course this isn’t the beginning of rising food prices. Costs have been going up for some time now; you can see a food price index we covered around just last Thanksgiving.

The food index count, which is an overall score reflecting the total price of the top 6 food commodities, rose to 215 in December of 2010 — up from 90 in the year 2000. Sugar spearheaded the spike, hitting only 2 points away from the 400 mark in December of 2010.

Rice is the only staple that has actually decreased in price (by 4 percent).

G20 Unsympathetic to Those in Need

“We cannot allow these historic price hikes to turn into a lifetime of perils as families take their children out of school and eat less nutritious food to compensate for the high prices,” Jim Yong Kim added.

The World Bank is pushing governments to protect at-risk communities, but the G20 group of leading economic powerhouses is waiting until the USDA reveals September estimates for the year’s harvest.

Aid group Oxfam decries the “wait and see” approach, but likely to little avail.

Monsanto and Subsidized Farmers

There’s some epic irony at work when Mother Nature wreaks havoc on genetically modified corn, soy, and beet root which have been slowly poisoning consumers for the last decade.

Unfortunately, her work also hurts organic farmers trying, as we all are, to desperately make a living.

Millions worldwide will go hungry as food prices rise, but crop insurance will help out subsidized farmers—many of them being the very ones growing Monsanto crops endorsed by the US government.

And who pays for up to 60 percent of insured crops, including GMO and pesticide-riddled varieties? The average taxpayer. So, we have that to think about, too, when we pay a little more for our daily bread.

Additional Sources:

BBC

Natural News

Time

This article originally appeared on NaturalSociety.com

Source:  zero hedge

Drowning in Debt

by Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog,

If you haven’t heard yet, the United States of America just hit $16 trillion in debt yesterday. On a gross, nominal basis, this makes the US, by far, the greatest debtor in the history of the world.

It took the United States government over 200 years to accumulate its first trillion dollars of debt. It took only 286 days to accumulate the most recent trillion dollars of debt. 200 years vs. 286 days. This portends two key points:

1. Anyone who thinks that inflation doesn’t exist is a complete idiot;
2. To say that the trend is unsustainable is a massive understatement. (more…)

Source:  Zero Hedge

A key sticking point in the ongoing presidential debate is what happens to US tax rates, either for just those making over an arbitrary $250,000/year, aka “the rich”, or for everyone. To put this debate into perspective, here is a chart that shows how over the past 20 years the US funding needs (demonstrated previously here), have been met in terms of the only two components of US funding – tax revenue and debt issuance.

Some highlights: (more…)

Source:  Alt Market 

OPINION:

by Brandon Smith

Has The Perfect Moment To Kill The Dollar Arrived?

The idea of “collapse”, social and financial, comes with an incredible array of hypothetical consequences ranging from public dissent and martial law, to the complete disintegration of infrastructure and the devolution of mankind into a swarm of mindless arm chewing cannibals.  In an age of television nirvana and cinema overload, I have found that the collective unconscious of our culture has now defined what collapse is based only on the most narrow of extremes.  If they aren’t being hunted down by machete wielding looters or swastika wearing jackboots, then the average American dupe figures that the country is not in much danger.  Hollywood fantasy has blinded us to the tangible crises at our doorstep.

The reality is that collapse is not a singular event, but a process.  It is a symphony of doom, composed of a series of exponentially more powerful crescendos.  If the past four years since the implosion of the derivatives bubble have proven anything, it is that catastrophe has the ability to drown a nation slowly like a river of molasses, rather than sweep it away like a flash flood.  That said, almost every recorded collapse of modern societies in the past century has been preceded by a primary trigger event; a moment in which the mathematical certainty of failure becomes clear, even if the psychological certainty is muddled. (more…)

Source:  New Atlantis

by Robert Zubrin

There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity. The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Following this pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of the capacity of human ingenuity to develop new resources, Malthus advocated oppressive policies that led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland.

While Malthus’s argument that human population growth invariably leads to famine and poverty is plainly at odds with the historical evidence, which shows global living standards rising with population growth, it nonetheless persisted and even gained strength among intellectuals and political leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its most pernicious manifestation in recent decades has been the doctrine of population control, famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 antihumanist tract The Population Bomb has served as the bible of neo-Malthusianism. In this book, Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the American government adopt stringent population control measures, both domestically and for the Third World countries that received American foreign aid. (Ehrlich, it should be noted, is the mentor of and frequent collaborator with John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.)

This full, stunning essay can be read here:  http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-population-control-holocaust

Source:  Reuters

Iran has threatened to destroy U.S. military bases across the Middle East and target Israel within minutes of being attacked, Iranian media reported on Wednesday, as Revolutionary Guards extended test-firing of ballistic missiles into a third day.

Israel has hinted it may attack Iran if diplomacy fails to secure a halt to its disputed nuclear energy program. The United States also has mooted military action as a last-resort option but has frequently nudged the Israelis to give time for intensified economic sanctions to work against Iran.

“These bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands (Israel) are also good targets for us,” Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, commander of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, was quoted by Fars news agency as saying.

Haji Zadeh said 35 U.S. bases were within reach of Iran’s ballistic missiles, the most advanced of which commanders have said could hit targets 2,000 km (1,300 miles) away.

“We have thought of measures to set up bases and deploy missiles to destroy all these bases in the early minutes after an attack,” he added.

It was not clear where Haji Zadeh got his figures on U.S. bases in the region. U.S. military facilities in the Middle East are located in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Turkey, and it has around 10 bases further afield in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.

full story here

Source: WND

Just days after the breakdown of talks with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, the deputy chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards announced that there soon will be war – and that Allah will ensure his forces are victorious.

Gen. Hossein Salami, in a televised interview, boasted that, “Iran has complete control of all the enemy’s interests around the world and is on a path to reach equivalency with world powers.” The commander emphasized that Iran’s nuclear program is irreversible, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Salami said war is inevitable, and the Iranian forces are ready. (more…)

Source:  Canada Free Press

The relentless encroachment of socialism upon America’s economic, cultural and governmental landscape is like a bad dream to most red-blooded Americans. When society changes it can seem like the ineluctable drift of evolution or chance. But in the case of America’s ongoing continued expansion of government powers, spiking taxes, and shrinking military, it’s all part of a planned elitist push into socialism. And one need not believe in secret conspiracies when contemplating this shift. In fact, for those paying attention, it was all outlined long ago by the Fabian Socialist society, and other groups such as the Frankfurt School, as explained below. (more…)

Source:  SPPI

by Dennis Ambler

The peaceful President Obama….

US foreign military sales already a record 50 billion dollars, up 70% from 2011 — MercoPress

“Speaking in Washington this week about how the US State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs is engaging with allies and partners to expand the defence trade, the US official cited some key data in the 655 Report released last week, which is an annual report of defence articles and services that were authorized for export.

The report focuses on direct commercial sales, and it showed that there was a more than 10 billion dollars increase in Fiscal Year 2011 in items authorized for transfer. In 2011, the Directorate for Defence Trade Controls, which is part of the Political-Military Bureau, processed more than 83,000 licenses, the most ever.

He said the State Department was going to continue to press and advocate for US arms sales, adding that additional sales are expected in FY13 from countries like India. ”We’ve made tremendous progress in the relationship (with India) over the last decade. We went from nearly zero sales to about 8 billion dollars in arms sales to India,” 

One has to wonder what Pachauri has to say about that?

There are some pretty weird people out there and we have all the politicians over in Rio, like Hillary Clinton, posturing about sustainability and here they are selling arms to poor, developing nations, who at some point may use them against the West.

Source:  NRO

Legally, President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard Nixon. (more…)