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Obama To Americans: You Don't Deserve To Be Free - Forbes - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...2 Obammunism Statism Ayn-Rand-Libertarian
shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • We radical capitalists say that it was the regulatory-welfare state that imploded in 2008. You may disagree, but let’s argue that out, rather than engaging in the Big Lie that what failed was laissez-faire and individualism. The question is: in the messy mixture of government controls and remnants of capitalism, which element caused the Great Depression and the recent financial crisis?
  • By raising that question, we uncover the fundamental: the meaning of capitalism and the meaning of government controls. Capitalism means freedom. Government means force.
  • Suddenly, the whole issue comes into focus: Obama is saying that freedom leads to poverty and force leads to wealth. He’s saying: “Look, we tried leaving you free to live your own life, and that didn’t work. You have to be forced, you have to have your earnings seized by the state, you have to work under our directions–under penalty of fines or imprisonment. You don’t deserve to be free.”
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  • As a bit of ugly irony, this is precisely what former white slave-owners said after the Civil War: “The black man can’t handle freedom; we have to force him for his own good.” The innovation of the Left is to extend that viewpoint to all races.
  • Putting the issue as force vs. freedom shows how the shoe is on the other foot regarding what Obama said. Let me re-write it: there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The government will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just pile on even more regulations and raise taxes–especially on the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the losers are protected by more social programs and a higher minimum wage, if there is more Quantitative Easing by the Fed, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle up to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle up, well, that’s the price of the social safety net. Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our intellectuals’ collectivism and Paul Krugman’s skepticism about freedom. That’s in Harvard’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the Soviet Union. It’s not what led to the incredible booms in India and China. And it didn’t work when Europe tried it during over the last decades. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this statist theory.
  • Obama’s real antagonist is Ayn Rand, who made the case that reason is man’s basic means of survival and coercion is anti-reason. Force initiated against free, innocent men is directed at stopping them from acting on their own thinking. It makes them, under threat of fines and imprisonment, act as the government demands rather than as they think their self-interest requires. That’s the whole point of threatening force: to make people act against their own judgment.
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"Crisis At The Border" Is Yet Another Example Of "Blowback." - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39068.htm war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy immigration Honduras coup El-Salvador Guatemala
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • If you’re reading this, you probably follow the news. So you’ve probably heard of the latest iteration of the “crisis at the border”: tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants. Even if you’ve followed this story closely, you probably haven’t heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on a dangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it’s like, check out the excellent 2009 film “Sin Nombre.”) NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous “coyotes” (human smugglers) for “lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay.” True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law.
  • The sad truth is that this “crisis at the border” is yet another example of “blowback.” Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.’ simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region. More recent cases include U.S. support for Islamist insurgents in Libya and Syria, which destabilized both countries and led to the murders of U.S. consular officials in Benghazi, and the rise of ISIS, the guerilla army that imperils the U.S.-backed Maliki regime in Baghdad, respectively. Confusing the issue for casual American news consumers is that the current border crisis doesn’t involve the usual Mexicans traveling north in search of work. Instead, we’re talking about people from Central American nations devastated by a century of American colonialism and imperialism, much of that intervention surprisingly recent. Central American refugees are merely transiting through Mexico.
  • “The unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States are leaving behind mainly three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The first two are among the world’s most violent and all three have deep poverty, according to a Pew Research report based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information,” reports NBC News. “El Salvador ranked second in terms of homicides in Latin America in 2011, and it is still high on the list. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the poorest nations in Latin America. Thirty percent of Hondurans, 17 percent of Salvadorans and 26 percent of Guatemalans live on less than $2 a day.” The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That’s because, in 2009, the United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. “Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades,” The Guardian noted at the time. “During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.”
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  • Honduras wasn’t paradise under President Manuel Zelaya. Since the coup, however, the country has entered a downward death spiral of drug-related bloodshed and political revenge killings that crashed the economy, brought an end to law, order and civil society, and now has some analysts calling it a “failed state” along the lines of Somalia and Afghanistan during the 1990s. “Zelaya’s overthrow created a vacuum in security in which military and police were now focused more on political protest, and also led to a freeze in international aid that markedly worsened socio-economic conditions,” Mark Ungar, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York, told The International Business Times. “The 2009 coup, asserts [Tulane] professor Aaron Schneider, gave the Honduran military more political and economic leverage, at the same time as the state and political elites lost their legitimacy, resources and the capacity to govern large parts of the country.” El Salvador and Guatemala, also narcostates devastated by decades of U.S. support for oppressive, corrupt right-wing dictatorships, are suffering similar conditions.
  • Talk about brass! The United States does it everything it can to screw up Central America — and then acts surprised when desperate people show up at its front gate trying to escape the (U.S.-caused) carnage. Letting the kids stay — along with their families — is less than the least we could do.
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U.S. Dropped 23,144 Bombs on Muslim Countries in 2015 | Global Research - Centre for Re... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5500921 war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy bomging stats Iraq Syria Afghanistan Pakistan Yemen Somalia
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Council of Foreign Relations resident skeptic Micah Zenko recently tallied up how many bombs the United States has dropped on other countries and the results are as depressing as one would think. Zenko figured that since Jan. 1, 2015, the U.S. has dropped around 23,144 bombs on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all countries that are majority Muslim. The chart, provided by the generally pro-State Department think tank, puts in stark terms how much destruction the U.S. has leveled on other countries. Whether or not one thinks such bombing is justified, it’s a blunt illustration of how much raw damage the United States inflicts on the Muslim world:
  • It does not appear to be working either. Despite the fact that the U.S. dropped 947 bombs in Afghanistan in 2015, a recent analysis in Foreign Policy magazine found that the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any point since 2001. The U.S. has entered its 16th year of war in Afghanistan despite several promises by the Obama administration to withdraw. In October of last year, President Obama reversed his position and decided to keep American troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2017. The last four U.S. presidents have bombed Iraq, and that includes the current one since airstrikes were launched on Aug. 7, 2014. The war against ISIS was originally framed as a “limited,” “humanitarian“ intervention. Since then, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has insisted it will be a “30-year war” and the White House has spoken vaguely of a “long-term effort” in both Iraq and Syria. Another red flag Zenko noted was the complete lack of civilian deaths being tallied as a result of those 23,144 bombs. Remarkably, they also claim that alongside the 25,000 fighters killed, only 6 civilians have “likely” been killed in the seventeen-month air campaign. At the same time, officials admit that the size of the group has remained wholly unchanged. In 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated the size of the Islamic State to be between 20,000 and 31,000 fighters, while on Wednesday, Warren again repeated the 30,000 estimate. To summarize the anti-Islamic State bombing calculus: 30,000 – 25,000 = 30,000.
  • So after more than 20,000 bombs, the U.S. Defense Department only cops to the deaths of six civilians. This is a position largely accepted by the media, which rarely asks who is actually being extinguished by the airstrikes in Syria and Iraq. In October, 30 civilians died after the U.S. bombed a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The incident is still being investigated, but it has already been revealed that many elements of the original story were either false or deliberately misleading.
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U.S. Wages Have Fallen EVERY Quarter of the 'Recovery' - Jeff Nielson | Sprott Money - 0 views

www.sprottmoney.com/...the-recovery-jeff-nielson.html economy U.S. stats
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • For 6 ½ long years, we have been bombarded with the mythology known as “the U.S. economic recovery” by the mainstream media. Exposing this fantasy is simple, since the gulf between myth and reality has grown to such absurd proportions.There is no better starting point than the farcical claim by Barack Obama that “10 million new jobs” have been created during this non-existent recovery. In fact, the U.S. government’s own numbers show that the total number of employed Americans has fallen by more than 3 million over that span, in spite of the population growth over those past 6 ½ years.
  • Updated, the U.S. civilian participation rate has now fallen to a 36-year low, and as the chart clearly shows, it has fallen at a faster rate since the start of this mythical recovery.The lie: “10 million new jobs created”. The fact: more than 3 million jobs lost. This is a reality-gap of 13 million jobs, or exactly 2 million jobs per year. The U.S. economy hasn’t been “creating” 1.5 million new jobs per year. It’s been losing roughly ½ million jobs every year of this fantasy-recovery.Then we have the “heartbeat” of the U.S. economy, its velocity of money. A chart of this heartbeat shows that it has plummeted far lower than at any other time in the 56-year history of this data series. This doesn’t merely show a dying economy, it shows a dead economy.
  • As for the supposed “GDP growth” over this 6 ½ year span, falsifying this statistic requires nothing more than lying about the rate of inflation. Here again, the lie is obvious. The U.S. (and other Western governments) pretend that inflation is near-zero, while in the real world, food and housing prices have been soaring at the fastest rate in our lifetime over the past 10 – 15 years.Then we have U.S. energy consumption. Again the picture is clear. Overall U.S. energy consumption peaked in 2007 and has been falling since then, while official gasoline consumption has been plummeting for several years. Growing economies use more energy. Shrinking economies use less energy. Case closed.All this is old news to regular readers, however. What has been less easy to document in any sort of definitive way has been the fall in U.S. wages. The problem is that to express wages meaningfully, we must use “real dollars”, i.e. we must adjust these wages for inflation. With the U.S. government only providing nominal data about U.S. wages, and consistently lying about the actual inflation rate; we have lacked the data to make any conclusive statement.A recent boast by the U.S. government/Corporate media (i.e. another false claim) has now provided us with a clearer picture here, going back to the beginning of this imaginary recovery. In trying to downplay the absence of any wage-growth in the U.S. in Q2 of this year; the propaganda machine made this claim:…That is down from a 2.6 percent increase in the first quarter [of 2015], which was the biggest in 6 ½ years. [emphasis mine]
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  • The claim is that nominal wages in the U.S. rose at the fastest rate “in 6 ½ years” in the first quarter of 2015, i.e. the highest rate during the entire pseudo-recovery. Now let’s discount that number with the (real) rate of inflation, in order to get a real-dollar number for U.S. wages.
  • Thus the U.S. government itself has now provided us with a definitive picture on U.S. wages. During Q1 of this year, the high-water mark for U.S. wage “growth” during the entire Recovery; U.S. wages were still falling. Ipso facto, U.S. wages have been falling every quarter of this recovery.Now we begin to see the whole truth in the U.S. labour market, versus the absurd, official claim of lots of “new jobs” and “rising wages”. U.S. employment has been falling, not rising, every quarter, every year. U.S. wages have been falling, not rising, every quarter, every year. But that picture is still incomplete.The total number of hours worked by the Working Poor is also falling, and in 18 out of 20 of the U.S.’s industrial sectors, total number of hours worked is still lower than during the so-called Great Recession. This is also reflected in the fall in the percentage of full-time employees.
  • To summarize: since the beginning of the imaginary U.S. economic recovery, there are millions fewer Americans who are now employed. Their wages have been falling for every quarter of the “recovery”, and they are also working fewer hours. Growing economies create more jobs; shrinking economies lose jobs. Strong economies have rising (real) wages; weak economies have falling wages. Once again we see the supposed U.S. recovery is pure mythology.However, with respect to the destruction of the U.S. standard of living, to truly appreciate what has been done to the U.S. population (and the populations of nearly all of the Corrupt West), we must look at the picture over a much longer term. In the 40 years before the beginning of this imaginary recovery, the wages of the Average American fell by roughly 50% (in real dollars).
  • Now the descent of the majority of the U.S. population to Third World status becomes crystal clear. From 1970 to the beginning of 2009 (i.e. the current “recovery”), U.S. wages fell roughly 50%. Then came the mythical Recovery, and U.S. wages have continued to fall, quarter after quarter after quarter. The Great Recovery has been worse than the Great Recession which came before it.What do we call it when a nation experiences a “great recession”, and then the economy continues to crumble at an even faster rate after that, year after year? We call it a Greater Depression.Shrinking economy. Losing jobs. Falling wages. Declining energy consumption. No “heartbeat”. Has anything been left out, in describing this U.S. economic Armageddon? Certainly.The U.S. government is obviously bankrupt. The U.S. dollar is obviously worthless. The U.S. economy has been run completely into the ground. When the current, assorted bubbles are deliberately popped (almost certainly in 2016, or late-2015), and Old-Man Buffett goes on a massive shopping spree with the $60+ billion he is now currently hoarding; there will be nothing left but economic rubble. And Milton Friedman will be smiling, from (way) down in his final, resting place.
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The Purchase Of Our Republic | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...purchase-our-republic
shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government. Today I am publishing a comprehensive and important guest essay, The Purchase of Our Republic, by longtime correspondent Y. Falkson.
  • Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc.  However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite. Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. Below I hope to begin to outline some of the underlying dynamics and trends that have evolved in recent decades and led us so far from what we once were. As fun as it would be, the answer is not some evil conspiracy by the Illuminati, but rather the unfortunate result of three long term and mutually reinforcing components that have been attacking the fundamental roots of the structure of our Republic. The first is the increased concentr
  • ation of corporate and private wealth. Both of which are quickly yelled down in the media as anti-free market and class war hysteria. The second is the use of this wealth to capture all three branches of government in order to ensure the continued extraction of capital from the many and to the few.The rich might have climbed the ladder because they earned it, but they have then purchased government to pull up the ladder behind them. The consequence of the first two components is a democracy in name only that represents the very few.
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  • 1. Faux Capitalism = Wealth Consolidation / Income Inequality
  • While there is no true beginning to the story, we can start with the incredible build up and concentration of wealth among corporations in recent decades. The USA now boasts a cartel-like set of corporate titans in almost every industry. It goes beyond, but certainly includes, our Too Biggerer To Fail banks, merged from what was 37 banks in 1995 into a Frankenstein’s monster like 5 (Citigroup, JP Morgan-Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs). In agriculture, Monsanto alone controls over 85% of all corn and soy bean crops, four companies control 83% of the beef market, 66% of the hog market and 58% of the chicken market. So while shopping at the grocery store might appear to be the manifestation of capitalism at its finest, it doesn’t take much digging to look behind the curtain to see how little competition truly exists.
  • When the average American goes to pick up some groceries, they are shopping at Walmart and buying something from P&G that is mostly made of Monsanto corn. Is that true choice? The same story plays out with our news and media (and other industries) where we have gone from 50 companies in 1983 to the big 6 which control over 90% of all media. Is choosing to watch one of 30 news channels, all of which are owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) a real choice? This is not capitalism and they are not competing, not in the true sense of the word. Along with this consolidation of corporations in recent decades, their senior leaders have taken up a larger and larger piece of the pie at the expense of their employees. In particular, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950. Unsurprisingly, Walmart is both the largest employer in the country and the worst CEO pay offender with a ratio of over 1000:1. This is at a time where worker productivity has increased significantly, something that historically correlated with increased pay. But no more. It’s a new twist on the old Soviet saying “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”, but now it’s closer to “we do all of the work and they pretend to pay us”.
  • Private Wealth: As a consequence of the royal tribute we pay to the C-suite class these days, we have likely surpassed the pre-Depression Roaring Twenties in terms of inequality.
  • This, amazingly, has only accelerated since the crisis in 2008 in thanks to bailouts, Quantitative Easing and other gifts from Congress and the Fed. The wealthy 1% and in particular the .01% have now grown their fortunes to levels that tax comprehension and even their ability to spend it (the decisions by a few billionaires such as Bill Gates to essentially donate his fortune is a tacit acknowledgement that our current system over provides wealth to a select few).
  • So what is an incredibly wealthy capitalist CEO of a mega-corporation do once they control their industry and have essentially limitless wealth? Well in a competitive market, the only way to go from the top is down and the only thing that can make that happen is competition. Consequently, competition must be avoided whenever possible.
  • To squash or prevent competition, the oligopolies and oligarchs target their resources on the one place that can make competition illegal, our government.Something to keep in mind the next time you see a corporate billionaire grandstanding about the importance of “Free Markets” when their strategy is quite the opposite. As this capture of the government has taken place we have essentially shifted from capitalism and to crony capitalism. So we now have industries that have mastered the art of faking capitalism by turning our government into one that fakes democracy. This government takeover took time, but the purchase of all 3 branches of government has almost been completed by 2014. You don’t have to take my word for it, luckily that has now been empirically proven in an analysis of over 20 years of government policy where the clear conclusion was that policy makers respond solely to those in the top 90th percentile and essentially ignore the large majority of Americans.
  • 2. Wealthy Purchase of Government Institutions / Elections
  • Purchase of the Executive Branch:
  • Let’s take a step back and take a glimpse at how the government was purchased, beginning with the executive branch. In 1980, Reagan’s election cost less than $300 million. When Bush beat Kerry in 2004, it cost almost 3x times as much, almost $900 Million. 4 years later, the 2008 election cost a record $1.3 Billion. It was in this election where Obama hammered the final nail in the coffin for government funded for elections. Obama, more so than any other candidate in recent decades had the widespread support of millions of small donors, but in the end I guess it wasn’t enough. So when Obama “leaned to the green”, it forever set the precedent that you can’t win without the backing of our nation’s oligarchs. Consequently, the money has only gushed in since as the cost of Obama’s reelection in 2012 skyrocketed to an unfathomable $7 billion. Needless to say this is slightly above the rate of inflation. Our Presidents are now preselected exclusively by a tiny fraction of Americans can have the money to fund what has become necessary for a legitimate run. Summary: Candidates spend years courting the super-rich to build up a multi-billion dollar war chest. Only those who succeed can actually run a campaign that an average American will be aware of. Then Americans get to choose one of the pre-selected “candidates”. No wonder voter turnout is so low… Executive branch, check!
  • – Note that media corporations benefit doubly as they can use their cash to fund elections, but are also the beneficiary of all that money as it is used for campaign spending.
  • Purchase of the Legislative Branch:
  • The process has progressed similarly in Congress. In 1978, outside groups spent $303,000 on congressional races. In 2012 that was up to $457,000,000. That is over 1,500 times the level in 1978. It would be funny, if it was so blatant and terrifying. By many accounts, our “leaders” in Congress spend 50% or more of their time working the phones or fundraisers rather than trying (and failing) to actually do the “people’s business”. Let’s also take a minute to appreciate the hypocrisy of anyone that pretends that the money doesn’t influence our government. Businesses do not give to politicians for charity. This is a payment for services that has proven exceedingly reliable and profitable. The ROI for money invested in purchasing Congressman is what CEO dreams are made of. No wonder the incentive is to invest in Congress rather than R&D or marketing. There are very few places in the world or times in history where you can find ROI’s in the thousands, or even the tens of thousands.
  • Review: Congressmen beg for money to get elected, make sure to vote the way your benefactors would like, consequently get more money to get elected again. If at any point they do lose or quit, they take the big payday to work for those who have been paying them all along. Legislative Branch, Check!
  • In addition, increasingly those who work on Congress (and regulators) were previously employed by these large corporations or expect to work there later. A recent example is Chris Dodd who left the Senate the head lobbyist for Hollywood at the MPAA, the guys behind SOPA and PIPA, but there are many many others.
  • Judicial Branch Endorsement of the Purchase of Government:
  • Last but not least, we have the enabling Judicial Branch. It only took a few purchased presidents to ensure the appointment of a majority of “free market” and “pro-business” judges. For instance, and disgracefully, Clarence Thomas was once legal counsel for Monsanto, but has not once recused himself from any cases involving Monsanto and always votes in their favor. These radicals have now fully endorsed and enabled the influx of money used to purchase the other branches. Specifically, 2 major decisions have completely opened the floodgates, Citizens United and McCutcheon. The first allowed unlimited contributions of corporate money into elections and brought us the notorious declaration that “corporations are people” and that “money is free speech”. This was more recently followed up with the private wealth equivalent in McCutcheon. In this ruling, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of his majority opinion (presumably with a straight face) “… nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials or political parties”. And with this, the Supreme Court has fully endorsed both major sources of immense wealth to purchase our elections and consequently our government. Review: The rich fund Presidential elections, Presidents nominate “business-friendly” judges and then the bought Congress approves their nominations. New judge then votes to ensure even more money is allowed to purchase elections. Judicial Branch, CHECK!
  • 3. A Faux Republic Dependent Upon the Funders and Not the Voters
  • The Founder’s Hope and the Sad Reality:
  • Acknowledging where we are as a country, it is often helpful to look to where we started for some perspective. Unsurprisingly, this type of problem was not overlooked back in the 18th century. In 1776, James Madison stated that his goal was to design a republic in which “powerful interest groups would be rendered incapable of subdoing the general will”. Madison hoped, perhaps naively, that factions would be thwarted by competing with other factions. Sadly, we are now in a time where factions (aka wealthy special interests) subdue the will of the people and ensure the government responds to them alone on those issues where they have a “special interest” and consequently asymmetric stakes in the game (Charles Hugh Smith). As a result, these groups essentially collude to allocate their resources to their own issues, but do not “thwart” or compete with other factions as they do the same. It’s a pretty great system, as long as you’re one of the wealthy few who can use their money to drown out the poor and voiceless many. And just like that, what was once a Republic has become a corrupt shell of its past self. All the signs are still there; votes, elections, campaigns, branches of government, etc., but behind the scenes the only ones represented are those who can afford to be heard.
  • Summary: This massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government, or as Dick Durban once stated, “frankly they [the banks in this case] own the place”. If money = free speech, then those with all the money, have all the free speech.
  • What Might Help? Now that I have likely and thoroughly depressed the reader, let’s bounce around some ideas for what can be done. As stated in the beginning, this is not an unknown problem and many people are promoting a number of ways to fix or at least ameliorate the problem. I will briefly describe just a few which I think provide some direction any of us could easily implement or support.
  • Change the Rules: Laurence Lessig of Harvard Law has put forward a visionary proposal for re-writing the way that campaigns are financed in his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It. Put simply, he would like to empower every voter with a stipend, say $150 per election to give to whatever candidate or candidates they prefer. If you would like to accept this money, you would need to forgo any other contributions or support (one would hope including the indirect PAC kind). This would actually provide even more money than is used in current elections, but would effectively democratize the funding process. While there would still be a “funding election” that takes place before the actual election, the funding would not be unequally provided. Lessig’s work has only begun, as this sort of bill or likely constitutional reform is nearly impossible to achieve, but he has undertaken and I assume will continue to implement many brave and creative ways of bringing about the change all American’s should support. Most recently he has suggested we begin to fund, ironically enough, a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. It would be funded with the solitary goal of changing how money impacts our elections. Please support them here: www.mayone.us/
  • Change Our Day-to-Day: At the more micro level, Charles Hugh Smith believes that we will inevitably see our overly centralized and inefficient system erode away as it is replaced by more resilient, local and efficient businesses and societies outside of the current system. With that in mind, he recommends that “all anyone can do is the basic things--lower our energy footprint, stay healthy and avoid unnecessary medications and procedures, support local businesses, organic food growers, etc. In other words, what we can do is support local businesses that are part of the emerging economy rather than support corporate cartels.” Your Vote Does Matter: Do you live in Ohio, Florida or New Hampshire? Probably not. Despite what we are told every 4 years, there are actually states outside of the “swing states”, and even more surprising, the very large majority of Americans live in those states where your “vote doesn’t matter”. New Yorkers an Californians all know their state will turn Blue no matter who the candidates are and either don’t vote at all, or often vote for the Blue team in order to feel like they are on the winning side.
  • The truth is that if you see the election as Red vs. Blue, you vote probably doesn’t matter. But here is the trick, if all the people who think their vote didn’t matter decided to vote for whom they might actually believe in, then their votes just might matter.
  • What if all the growing number of “Independents” (who usually still vote Blue), chose to vote for a third party? What if a third party candidate won a state like New York or California? What if that candidate was one whose primary promise to the voters was to champion a change to the role of money in government (perhaps in line with what Lessig proposes)? Would you vote for such a person?I would argue you should. If California alone (with 55 electoral votes) were to vote for a 3rd party that would likely prevent either Red or Blue candidate from winning the requisite 270 electoral votes.
  • Think about the message that would send to both parties. I would predict that both sides would start to bend over backwards for an endorsement from that 3rd party and they would have to get it by taking up the same primary cause for reforming money in government. Consequently, at the root of our corrupted system which is perpetually ignored as both sides might suddenly become the big issue of the election. Then maybe we might begin to turn things around.
  • Sources: Charles Hugh Smith (oftwominds, Surivival+, etc.), Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, Econned), Laurence Lessig (Republic Lost, multiple TED Talks), Matt Taibbi (blog at Rolling Stone and now at The Intercept), Zero Hedge, John Robb, Max Keiser, Clay Shirky (Cognitive Surplus), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited), George Orwell (1984), Michael Lewis, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow), James Richards (Currency Wars), Han Joon Chang (23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism) and Joseph Stiglitz (Mismeasuring Our Lives) 
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321energy :: The Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History :: Bob Moriarty - 0 views

www.321energy.com/...moriarty081008.html financial-crisis obama-socialism wealth-transfer redistribution-of-wealth banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Nov 09
     
    Bob Moriarty from 321 Energy provides a brief explanation of the fundamentals -  excerpt: I've made it clear for a year that I believe we have entered what will be the most serious depression in history. It also will involve the greatest transfer of wealth in history. There are two basic classes of assets. There are paper assets and real assets. An ounce of gold is a real asset. A copper mine is a real asset. A house is a real asset. An oil field is a real asset. Over the counter derivatives now total over $596 trillion dollars, (click here [pdf]) ten times the size of the world economy. Those are paper assets, their value is derived from some other asset. That derivative size is what is going to destroy the world's financial system, it's all fraud. A mortgage is a paper asset. A T-Bill or T-Bond is a paper asset. A $100 bill is a paper asset. It's pretty easy to see that a $500,000 mortgage on a house now worth $250,000 isn't worth very much. Latest figures show 9.6 million homes in the US have negative equity. How many of those loans are going to be paid back? According to an ex-Fed Director, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are bankrupt. They were leveraged 65-1. For those comforted by the thought of the FDIC bailing you out should the banking system fail entirely, you need to realize the FDIC is leveraged at 130-1. We are told that the collapse of Washington Mutual alone could bankrupt the FDIC. In a depression, no real assets appear or disappear. Paper assets, on the other hand, turn to vapor. But the ownership of real assets will change as the real assets move from weak hands into strong hands.
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The coming collapse of Iran sanctions - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...201322584515426148.html iran sanctions european union China WTO foreign policy blunders
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Western policymakers and commentators wrongly assume that sanctions will force Iranian concessions in nuclear talks that resume this week in Kazakhstan - or perhaps even undermine the Islamic Republic's basic stability in advance of the next Iranian presidential election in June.  Besides exaggerating sanctions' impact on Iranian attitudes and decision-making, this argument ignores potentially fatal flaws in the US-led sanctions regime itself - flaws highlighted by ongoing developments in Europe and Asia, and that are likely to prompt the erosion, if not outright collapse of America's sanctions policy.       Virtually since the 1979 Iranian revolution, US administrations have imposed unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Republic. These measures, though, have not significantly damaged Iran's economy and have certainly not changed Iranian policies Washington doesn't like. 
  • Secondary sanctions are a legal and political house of cards. They almost certainly violate American commitments under the World Trade Organisation, which allows members to cut trade with states they deem national security threats but not to sanction other members over lawful business conducted in third countries. If challenged on the issue in the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism, Washington would surely lose.  
  • Last year, the European Union - which for years had condemned America's prospective "extraterritorial" application of national trade law and warned it would go to the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism if Washington ever sanctioned European firms over Iran-related business - finally subordinated its Iran policy to American preferences, banning Iranian oil and imposing close to a comprehensive economic embargo against the Islamic Republic.   In recent weeks, however, Europe's General Court overturned European sanctions against two of Iran's biggest banks, ruling that the EU never substantiated its claims that the banks provided "financial services for entities procuring on behalf of Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programmes". 
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  • On the other side of the world, America is on a collision course with China over sanctions. In recent years, Beijing has tried to accommodate US concerns about Iran. It has not developed trade and investment positions there as rapidly as it might have, and has shifted some Iran-related transactional flows into renminbito to help the Obama administration avoid sanctioning Chinese banks (similarly, India now pays for some Iranian oil imports in rupees). Whether Beijing has really lowered its aggregate imports of Iranian oil is unclear - but it clearly reduces them when the administration is deciding about six-month sanctions waivers for countries buying Iranian crude.  
  • However, as Congress enacts additional layers of secondary sanctions, President Obama's room to manoeuver is being progressively reduced. Therein lies the looming policy train wreck.  
  • If, at congressional insistence, the administration later this year demands that China sharply cut Iranian oil imports and that Chinese banks stop virtually any Iran-related transactions, Beijing will say no. If Washington retreats, the deterrent effect of secondary sanctions will erode rapidly. Iran's oil exports are rising again, largely from Chinese demand.
  • Once it becomes evident Washington won't seriously impose secondary sanctions, growth in Iranian oil shipments to China and other non-Western economies (for example, India and South Korea) will accelerate. Likewise, non-Western powers are central to Iran's quest for alternatives to US-dominated mechanisms for conducting and settling international transactions - a project that will also gain momentum after Washington's bluff is called.   Conversely, if Washington sanctions major Chinese banks and energy companies, Beijing will respond - at least by taking America to the WTO's Dispute Resolution Mechanism (where China will win), perhaps by retaliating against US companies in China. 
  • Chinese policymakers are increasingly concerned Washington is reneging on its part of the core bargain that grounded Sino-American rapprochement in the 1970s - to accept China's relative economic and political rise and not try to secure a hegemonic position in Asia.   Beijing is already less willing to work in the Security Council on a new (even watered-down) sanctions resolution and more willing to resist US initiatives that, in its view, challenge Chinese interests (witness China's vetoes of three US-backed resolutions on Syria).  In this context, Chinese leaders will not accept American high-handedness on Iran sanctions. At this point, Beijing has more ways to impose costs on America for violations of international economic law that impinge on Chinese interests than Washington has levers to coerce China's compliance.   As America's sanctions policy unravels, President Obama will have to decide whether to stay on a path of open-ended hostility toward Iran that ultimately leads to another US-initiated war in the Middle East, or develop a very different vision for America's Middle East strategy - a vision emphasising genuine diplomacy with Tehran, rooted in American acceptance of the Islamic Republic as a legitimate political order representing legitimate national interests and aimed at fundamentally realigning US-Iranian relations.  
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Feb 13
     
    Keep in mind that Iran has the military power to close the Straits of Hormuz, thereby sending the West into an economic depression as the world's oil supply  suddenly contracts. 
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Iraq joins Iran in opposing U.S.-led military strike in Syria - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html war & peace Syria Iraq Iran WMD
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Iran won Iraqi support for its efforts to oppose a U.S.-led military strike on Syria during a visit to Baghdad on Sunday by the new Iranian foreign minister, highlighting how close the two countries have grown since U.S. forces withdrew in 2011. Speaking during his first visit abroad since he was appointed last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javed Zarif warned that U.S. intervention in Syria risks igniting a regionwide war.
  • “Those who are short-sighted and are beating the drums of war are starting a fire that will burn everyone,” Zarif said during a news conference.Standing alongside him, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said all of Syria’s neighbors, including Iraq, would be harmed by American involvement in Syria’s two-year-old conflict. “What I can say conclusively is that Iraq will not be a base for any attack, nor will it facilitate any such attack on Syria,” Zebari told reporters after holding talks with Zarif.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Sep 13
     
    This would be funny if the consequences of war were not so horrible. Viewing the situation through a very big telescope from Mars, we begin with the Neocons and Zionist Israelis hijacking the U.S. military to invade and conquer Iraq, and thereby break the OPEC oil monopoly by pumping more oil from Iraq and selling  oil cheap on the market. But Big Oil, recognizing the threat to its profits if oil supply is increased and the prices depressed, hires James Baker, chief of White House staff under Reagan and Bush I. Baker has a short meeting with Bush Jr. and the Neocon/Zionist Israeli dream of breaking OPEC and restoring cheap oil is abruptly terminated. The Iraq War is no longer about changes in the oil supply and prices. But  the Neocons in the Bush II administration are stuck with the war they started. They waffle and delay, with the theater of Saddam Hussein's capature and execution, until Barack Obama comes into office, push for a "surge" to save the war effort, then when that fails reluctantly collaborate in U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Their efforts to maintain a covert military presence hiding under the cover of the world's largest U.S. Embassy comes to a screeching halt when the new Iraqi government they had installed refuses to immunize U.S. soldiers and citizens from criminal prosecution. The U.S. exits Iraq. Now the Iraq government that the Neocon/Israeli Zionists installed aligns itself with Iraq and Syria against the U.S. military strikes on Syria that Israel wants. Iraq and Syria had been the two major remaining obstacles to Israeli hegemony and empire in the Mideast.   Then the Neocons/Israeli Zionists changed Iraq from a secular state to a Shia Muslim state with a for-all-pracitical-purposes-independent Kurdish state in the north. Now suddenly, those two major obstacles become three, as Iraq moves farther from the U.S. and closer toward Shia Iran and secular Syria, because of a sequence of events the Neocon/Israeli Zionists had set in motion ag
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The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic (May 2009) Must read! - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...imf-advice financial-crisis obama-socialism obama-soros imf Banksters
shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Apr 09
     
    The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government-a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.
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Banks pushing for repeal of credit unions' federal tax exemption - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

articles.latimes.com/...fi-credit-union-taxes-20130706 banksters credit-unions Congress Obama lobbying Competition
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Credit unions have been snatching customers from banks amid consumer frustration over rising fees and outrage over Wall Street's role in the financial crisis.Now banks are fighting back by trying to take away something vital to credit unions — their federal tax exemption.With fast-growing credit unions posing more formidable competition to banks, industry trade groups are pressing the White House and Congress to end a tax break that dates to the Great Depression. "Many tax-exempt credit unions have morphed from serving 'people of small means' to become full-service, financially sophisticated institutions," Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Assn., wrote to President Obama last month."The time has come to abolish this exemption," Keating said in the letter, which was part of a blitz that included print and radio ads in the nation's capital.
  • Bankers long have complained the tax break is an unfair advantage for large credit unions. Now they see an opportunity to get rid of it as lawmakers begin work on a major overhaul of the tax code that is aimed at eliminating many corporate exemptions and lowering the overall tax rate.The exemption cost $1.6 billion this year in taxes avoided and would rise to $2.2 billion annually in 2018, according to Obama's proposed 2014 budget.In a 2010 report on tax reform, the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board said eliminating the exemption would raise $19 billion over 10 years and remove the credit unions' "competitive advantage relative to other financial institutions" in the tax code.Credit unions said the effort to take away their tax exemption was simply an attempt to stifle competition and remove one of the only checks on bank fees for consumers.And it comes as some in Congress are pushing to loosen regulations on credit unions so they can expand their business further, including legislation that would lift a cap on the amount of money they can lend to businesses.The tax exemption is crucial to credit unions, which by law can't raise capital through public stock offerings the way that banks can, said Fred R. Becker Jr., president of the National Assn. of Federal Credit Unions, a trade group with about 3,800 federally chartered members."They'll have to convert to banks, which is what the banks want," he said. "Then they'd have, for lack of a better term, a monopoly."
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13
     
    So instead of competing on quality and service, banksters aim to eliminate the competition grown by disgruntled bankster customers. Unfortunately, corporate lobbying of government officials is exempt from the anti-trust laws, a consequence of (in my opinion, ill-considered) judicial recognition of a corporate First Amendment right of petition. So once again, we have legal fictions acquiring human rights. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 (1819) (Marshall, C. J.). ("A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it"). May a corporate charter permissibly bestow the rights of citizenship on an imaginary being? According to latter-day justices of the Supreme Court, corporations have First Amendment rights even if it doesn't say so in the corporate charter. See for example, Citizens United v. Federal Election Com'n, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010) (chilling effect on "people" used to justify finding a First Amendment right of wholly imaginary corporations). 
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Bail-In and the Financial Stability Board: The Global Bankers' Coup | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...lity-board-global-bankers-coup banksters G20 Financial-Stability-Board must-read
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Ellen H. Brown (WoD) : On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring. Perhaps what prompted his intervention was the unanticipated $40 drop in the price of oil. As financial blogger Michael Snyder points out, that drop could trigger a derivatives payout that could bankrupt the biggest banks. And if the G20’s new “bail-in” rules are formalized, depositors and pensioners could be on the hook. The new bail-in rules were discussed in my last last article entitled “New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Depositors AND Pensioners.” They are edicts of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an unelected body of central bankers and finance ministers headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Where did the FSB get these sweeping powers, and is its mandate legally enforceable?
  • Those questions were addressed in an article I wrote in June 2009, two months after the FSB was formed, titled “Big Brother in Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty.” It linked the strange boot shape of the BIS to a line from Orwell’s 1984: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” The concerns raised there seem to be materializing, so I’m republishing the bulk of that article here. We need to be paying attention, lest the bail-in juggernaut steamroll over us unchallenged. The Shadowy Financial Stability Board Alarm bells went off in April 2009, when the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) was linked to the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) signed onto by the G20 leaders in London. The FSB was an expansion of the older Financial Stability Forum (FSF) set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity by the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The chair of the FSF was the General Manager of the BIS. The new FSB was expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU).
  • Formally called the “Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors,” the G20 was, like the G7, originally set up as a forum merely for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. What set off alarms was that the new Financial Stability Board had real teeth, imposing “obligations” and “commitments” on its members; and this feat was pulled off without legislative formalities, skirting the usual exacting requirements for treaties. It was all done in hasty response to an “emergency.” Problem-reaction-solution was the slippery slope of coups. Buried on page 83 of an 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the US Obama administration was a recommendation that the FSB strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. It sounded like a worthy goal, but there was a disturbing lack of detail. What was the FSB’s mandate, what were its expanded powers, and who was in charge? An article in The London Guardian addressed those issues in question and answer format:
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  • For three centuries, private international banking interests have brought governments in line by blocking them from issuing their own currencies and requiring them to borrow banker-issued “banknotes” instead. Political colonialism is now a thing of the past, but under the new FSB guidelines, nations could still be held in feudalistic subservience to foreign masters. Consider this scenario: the new FSB rules precipitate a massive global depression due to contraction of the money supply. XYZ country wakes up to the fact that all of this is unnecessary – that it could be creating its own money, freeing itself from the debt trap, rather than borrowing from bankers who create money on computer screens and charge interest for the privilege of borrowing it. But this realization comes too late: the boot descends and XYZ is crushed into line. National sovereignty has been abdicated to a private committee, with no say by the voters. Marilyn Barnewall, dubbed by Forbes Magazine the “dean of American private banking,” wrote in an April 2009 article titled “What Happened to American Sovereignty at G-20?”: It seems the world’s bankers have executed a bloodless coup and now represent all of the people in the world. . . . President Obama agreed at the G20 meeting in London to create an international board with authority to intervene in U.S. corporations by dictating executive compensation and approving or disapproving business management decisions.  Under the new Financial Stability Board, the United States has only one vote. In other words, the group will be largely controlled by European central bankers. My guess is, they will represent themselves, not you and not me and certainly not America.
  • Are these commitments legally binding? Adoption of the FSB was never voted on by the public, either individually or through their legislators. The G20 Summit has been called “a New Bretton Woods,” referring to agreements entered into in 1944 establishing new rules for international trade. But Bretton Woods was put in place by Congressional Executive Agreement, requiring a majority vote of the legislature; and it more properly should have been done by treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote of the Senate, since it was an international agreement binding on the nation. “Bail-in” is not the law yet, but the G20 governments will be called upon to adopt the FSB’s resolution measures when the proposal is finalized after taking comments in 2015. The authority of the G20 has been challenged, but mainly over whether important countries were left out of the mix. The omitted countries may prove to be the lucky ones, having avoided the FSB’s net.
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Cynics, Step Aside: There is Genuine Excitement Over a Hillary Clinton Candidacy - The ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ment-hillary-clinton-candidacy Auction 2016 Hillary Wall-St. Israel-lobby War-Party neocons
shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • It’s easy to strike a pose of cynicism when contemplating Hillary Clinton’s inevitable (and terribly imminent) presidential campaign. As a drearily soulless, principle-free, power-hungry veteran of DC’s game of thrones, she’s about as banal of an American politician as it gets. One of the few unique aspects to her, perhaps the only one, is how the genuinely inspiring gender milestone of her election will (following the Obama model) be exploited to obscure her primary role as guardian of the status quo. That she’s the beneficiary of dynastic succession – who may very well be pitted against the next heir in line from the regal Bush dynasty (this one, not yet this one) - makes it all the more tempting to regard #HillaryTime with an evenly distributed mix of boredom and contempt. The tens of millions of dollars the Clintons have jointly “earned” off their political celebrity - much of it speaking to the very globalists, industry groups, hedge funds, and other Wall Street appendages who would have among the largest stake in her presidency - make the spectacle that much more depressing (the likely candidate is pictured above with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at an event in September).
  • But one shouldn’t be so jaded. There is genuine and intense excitement over the prospect of (another) Clinton presidency. Many significant American factions regard her elevation to the Oval Office as an opportunity for rejuvenation, as a stirring symbol of hope and change, as the vehicle for vital policy advances. Those increasingly inspired factions include: Wall Street Politico Magazine, November 11, 2014 (“Why Wall Street Loves Hillary”):
  • The Israel Lobby Foreign Policy, Aaron David Miller, November 7, 2014 (“Would Hillary Be Good For the Holy Land?”):
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  • Interventionists (i.e., war zealots) New York Times, June 15, 2014 (“Events in Iraq Open Door for Interventionist Revival, Historian Says”):
  • Old school neocons New York Times, Jacob Heilbrunn, July 5, 2014 (“The Next Act for Neocons: … Getting Ready to Ally With Hillary Clinton”?):
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 14
     
    Glenn Greenwald serves some satire about Hillary Clinton's 2016 candidacy.
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Tomgram: John Feffer, On the Verge of the Great Unraveling | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/..._verge_of_the_great_unraveling war & peace Middle-East refugees Europe Islamaphobia
shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The figures are staggering. In what looks like a vast population transfer from a disintegrating Greater Middle East, nearly 200,000 refugees passed through Austria in September alone. About half a million desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have arrived in Greece since 2015 began (those, that is, who don’t die at sea), and the numbers are only expected to rise. Seven hundred children a day have been claiming asylum somewhere in Europe (190,000 between January and September 2015). And at least three million refugees and migrants from the planet’s war and desperation zones are expected to head for Europe in 2016. Under the circumstances, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that, once the first upbeat stories about welcoming European crowds had died down, the truncheons and water cannons came out in some parts of the continent and the walls began to go up. Nor, I’m sure, will you be shocked to learn that an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim fervor is now gripping parts of Europe, while far-right parties are, not coincidentally, on the rise.  This is true in France, where Marine Le Pen’s virulently anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European-Union National Front is expected to make significant gains in local elections this winter (and Le Pen herself is leading early opinion polls in the race for the presidency), while in “tolerant” Sweden a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties is garnering more than 25% of the prospective vote in opinion polls. In Poland, an extreme party wielding anti-refugee rhetoric just swept into power. And so it goes across much of Europe these days.
  • All of this (and more) represents a stunning development that could, sooner or later, reverse the increasingly integrated nature of Europe, raise walls and barriers across the continent, and irreversibly fracture the European Union, while increasing nationalistic fervor and god knows what else. In the United States, in a somewhat more muted way, you can see similar developments in what’s being talked about here as an “outsider” election, but is, in fact, significantly focused on keeping outsiders separated from insiders. (Just Google Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and immigrants, and you'll see what I mean.) Isn’t it strange how we always speak of the “tribal” when it comes to Africa or the backlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but never when it comes to our world? And yet, if these aren’t, broadly speaking, “tribal” responses, what are?
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 15
     
    The refugee situation in Europe has Obama reeling from European leader backlash, pressuring him to join forces with Russia to bring the U.S.-Saudi-Turkey-Qatar Middle East wars to an end. 
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Being sick in France ; French social security ; retirement in France - 0 views

www.understandfrance.org/...Sick.html sick in france healthcare financial-oligarchs finacial-crisis OBAMA Banksters banksters
shared by Joseph Skues on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • the system is very efficient : the administrative cost of the health system is around 4,5% (for US private insurance companies : 10 to 13%) and 1,2% for the retirement system (vs. around 10% for most pension funds). The health system reimburses very quickly (after four days).
  • 22 Euros
  • "three best symbols of the French nation" are the flag, the health and the Marseillaise
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  • each regional organization (Caisse) is managed by a board composed 50/50 of representatives of labor unions on one side, employers associations on the other side, with the State playing the role of a referee
  • it is not accurate to call it a "socialized
  • when a family is expecting a child, it gets approximately 2,000 Euros in three installments (the first two of them corresponding to a mandatory medical visit, the third to the birth) ; then the family receives a monthly allowance till the child is 20 (for two children or more, around 100 Euros/month/child) ;
  • minimal pension (in the range of 750 Euros/month) to any person who has worked 40 years
  • For the French, it is just unthinkable that, if you lose your job, you also lose your health plan
  • This is a typical example of what the French call their "social model" and one of the few where, in my opinion, the USA could learn something from the French experience. Read my opinion about it "Socialized medicine : give me a break".
  • all companies, whatever their size, must provide their staff with an annual visit to a doctor ; in big companies it is a in-house doctor, in small companies an external doctor who comes for the annual controls
  • (otherwise, you'll be reimbursed a little less)
  • SOS Medecin tel. 01 47 07 77 77 : very reasonably priced (around 70 Euros) and efficient, a doctor in your house in less than an hour
  • Basic tips for tourists you can see any doctor (they also make house calls for a small supplement) for a cost of around 22 Euros ($ 30) but you will not be reimbursed by Social Security if you are not part of the French Social Security system you can be treated by any French hospital in case of emergency (they will talk about money AFTER treating you...) you can buy certain drugs over the counter in a pharmacy but a lot of them require a doctor's prescription ; don't be surprised if you do not find US drug brand names, you are in another country ! If your French isn't good, there are two hospitals with English-speaking staff : the American Hospital, 63 blvd Victor Hugo 92202 Neuilly, Tel. 33-(0)1 46 41 25 25 ; Email : patient@ahp-paris.com the British Hospital, 3 rue Barbès 92300 Levallois Tel. 33-(0)1 46 39 22 22 Public or private ? For a serious case, it is often wiser to go to a public hospital, especially a CHU (Centre Hospitalo-Universitaire). In case of a (real) emergency call SAMU (this is a day and night emergency service tel. 15) or les pompiers (fire-brigade) who provide 24 hour-emergency service (tel. 18). Useful numbers for emergencies (other than 15) :
  • The World Health Organization (WHO) has ranked the health system of its 191 member countries and France tops the list for providing the best overall health care (UK ranks 18 and USA ranks 37) (source : International Herald Tribune June 21,2000).
  • Health coverage by Social Security ("Sécurité Sociale") is mandatory and paid both by the employee (1/4) and the employer (3/4).
  • In the USA the Emergency staff is a driver whose job is to take you as fast as possible to the hospital, whatever your condition, in a fast ambulance. In France, the SAMU team includes a MD whose job is to do as much as he can before taking you to the hospital in a more heavily-equipped ambulance. Both ways have their pros and cons, but dont be horrified if you see an ambulance NOT moving....
  • DID YOU KNOW THAT....? In France, the maternity leave is 16 weeks minimum (of course paid 100% of the salary!), plus one month minimum if the baby is breast-fed ; "paternity" leave is two weeks ; new mothers spend 3 to 6 days in the hospital.
  • To related pages : a column of the Health system (#2), an American article on the French health system (#3), etc....
  • French doctors are not very different from American doctors, except they make much less money (three or four times?) and are probably much more accessible, less protected by a dragon-secretary.
  • All expenses are paid by the company and of course the employee does not pay a cent. The 20-minute visit includes whatever check-up seems appropriate (heart, eyes, stress, depression...). The doctor cannot prescribe medecine but can prescribe a visit to the doctor is something new that is wrong or needs a more thorough check is detected.
  • You have to pay ONE Euro more (not reimbursable) for every visit to the doctor
  • The system is threefold : Health, Family and Retirement, each of them has different structures and financing ; each of them is financially autonomous (no taxpayer's money -
  • The system is threefold : Health, Family and Retirement, each of them has different structures and financing ; each of them is financially autonomous ( no taxpayer's money
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