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"CAMBRIDGE - The US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has just delivered the bad news that the national debt is now rising faster than GDP and heading toward ratios that we usually associate with Italy or Spain. That confirms my view that the fiscal deficit is the most serious long-term economic problem facing US policymakers. A decade ago, the federal debt was just 35% of GDP. It is now more than double that and projected to reach 86% in 2016. But that's just the beginning. The annual budget deficit projected for 2016 is 5% of GDP. If it stays at that level, the debt ratio would eventually rise to 125%. Support Project Syndicate's mission Project Syndicate needs your help to provide readers everywhere equal access to the ideas and debates shaping their lives. LEARN MORE Even that projection assumes that interest rates on the national debt will rise slowly, averaging less than 3.5% in 2026. But if the US debt ratio really is on the fast track to triple-digit levels, investors in the US and abroad may rightly fear that the government has lost control of the budget process. With debt exploding, foreign bondholders could begin to worry that the US will find a way to reduce its real value by stoking inflation or imposing a withholding tax on all government bond interest. In that case, investors will insist on a risk premium: higher interest rates on Treasury debt. Higher interest rates, in turn, would increase the deficit - and thus the future level of the debt ratio - even more. The high and rising level of the national debt hurts the US economy in many ways. Paying the interest requires higher federal taxes or a larger budget deficit. In 2016, the interest on the national debt is equal to nearly 16% of the revenue from personal income tax. By 2026, the projected interest on the national debt will equal more than 31% of this revenue, even if interest rates rise as slowly as the CBO projects. Foreign investors now own more than half of net government debt, and

Nice article written by Ron Kilmartin and published to the Bay Area Patriots Group listmail.  Republished here for the purposes of Diigo bookmarking. Ron compares the Obama tyranny methods to those used by Hitler to subjugate the German people and take over the German Republic.  His observations are based on the historical work of William L. Shirer, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". excerpt: Over the past year I have been reading a few pages a day of William L. Shirer's history of Nazism, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - Nearly 1200 pages and I have finally finished. It is a masterpiece of journalism history based on Shirer's own observations beginning in the 1920s. It is centered of course on Adolf Hitler, his cronies, and his generals. As I read this I began mentally comparing it with our current leader and our current administration's edicts  from the EPA and other agencies. I found that there are many similarities between Hitler's rise to power and Obama's, as well as the tyranny of the Nazi administration. So I decided to write up my comparative observations, as given below. It is not that Obama is following a path to Nazism, but that he seems to be following a path to a tyranny that is all his own: racist, anti-rich,  pro-socialist, anti-industry, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, , anti-Israel,  pro-Islam, anti-Constitution, anti-First Amendment anti-Second Amendment, anti-Fourth Amendment, anti-Tenth Amendment and anti-America, to name a few of the tyrannical tenants of Obamunism. There are many other historical examples of tyrannical leaders besides Hitler, but for now he will do just fine as a model tyrant, and Shirir's tomb provides a ready means of comparison. ...........

"Our examination of the future of public debt leads us to several important conclusions. First, fiscal problems confronting industrial economies are bigger than suggested by official debt figures that show the implications of the financial crisis and recession for fiscal balances. As frightening as it is to consider public debt increasing to more than 100% of GDP, an even greater danger arises from a rapidly ageing population. The related unfunded liabilities are large and growing, and should be a central part of today's long-term fiscal planning. "It is essential that governments not be lulled into complacency by the ease with which they have financed their deficits thus far. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the path of future output is likely to be permanently below where we thought it would be just several years ago. As a result, government revenues will be lower and expenditures higher, making consolidation even more difficult. But, unless action is taken to place fiscal policy on a sustainable footing, these costs could easily rise sharply and suddenly. "Second, large public debts have significant financial and real consequences. The recent sharp rise in risk premia on long-term bonds issued by several industrial countries suggests that markets no longer consider sovereign debt low-risk. The limited evidence we have suggests default risk premia move up with debt levels and down with the revenue share of GDP as well as the availability of private saving. Countries with a relatively weak fiscal system and a high degree of dependence on foreign investors to finance their deficits generally face larger spreads on their debts. This market differentiation is a positive feature of the financial system, but it could force governments with weak fiscal systems to return to fiscal rectitude sooner than they might like or hope. "Third, we note the risk that persistently high levels of public debt will drive down capital accumulation, productivity growth and lon

"America Is Exhibiting All of the Signs of a Failing Empire Posted on October 10, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog The American Empire Is Quickly Declining Consummate insider Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson - former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and now distinguished adjunct professor of Government and Public Policy at William & Mary - notes that the U.S. is exhibiting all of the signs of a failing empire, including: Relying on massive military force (and using gigantic complexes to support it) as the be-all and end-all of power, and belittling diplomacy Maintaining standing armies, instead of disbanding military forces between wars Using more mercenary forces than citizen troops Spending disproportionately large amounts of blood and treasure in order to counter threats on the status quo … which simply exacerbates the threat against the empire Going ethically and morally bankrupt Ending up up having bankers and financiers end up running the real power Suffering great hiccups in finance and trade The leaders no longer really believe in or follow the ideals of the founders"

The 1 hour-25 minute video talk is well worth listening to. Col. Wilkerson is now a professor who has deeply studied the decline of empires. He speaks from deep knowledge both as a former insider and as a scholar about the state of the American Empire. But notice that the linked page has two copies of the same talk embedded. Don't bother watching both unless you want to hear it twice. :-)

After 13 years, 2 wars and trillions in military spending, terrorist attacks are rising sharply. So what is it we've been paying for, again?

The Central Banksters of the World are printing money as fast as possible, and using this paper to buy up tons of GOLD.  Rather than lending to productive businesses, the Banksters are using their fiat paper volumes to buy up hard assets, with land, precious metals, and controlling positions in asset rich productive or leading commodity enterprises.  This is not going to end well for those left holding paper when it all crashes. "If you didn't take our warnings or strategies seriously before, I hope now you can see that we have been right: The authorities mean to print their bad sovereign debts away through an ongoing and massive inflation. Just how big is this inflation likely to be? When you look at the world's largest external debt positions, two economic areas appear as outliers: the European Union ($16 trillion) and the U.S. ($14.7 trillion). Even on a per-capita basis, the external foreign debts of the U.S. are enormous ($50,000 per person). Many countries in the European Union are in an even more precarious position. France has $74,000 in external debt per person. Germany has $57,000. These countries obviously have much to gain by printing the currency necessary to repay their obligations. I estimate we'll see at least another doubling of the monetary base in both the U.S. and the ECB. The question is how these nations' creditors will respond. In response... the West's creditors are piling into the one reserve asset no one can print: gold. Since the beginning of quantitative easing in America, Russia has almost doubled its holdings of gold, buying 500 tons. China bought 454 tons during the same period. And it's not only America's economic and military rivals who obviously no longer trust the U.S. dollar or the euro. In the last year, Switzerland's central bank has quietly increased its holdings of gold by nearly 25%. We are approaching the moment of a global paper currency collapse: In the second quarter of this year, central banks around the world

"When Barack Obama leaves the White House tomorrow, he leaves with his worst dreams unrealized. Still, what he leaves behind is awful. Thank goodness he'll be gone. The very day after Obama was elected in 2008, I predicted in this space that his team would steal the Senate by hook and crook (see: Al Franken); nuke the filibuster at least for judicial nominees; liberalize voting laws (or enforcement thereof) to make fraud easier while charging opponents with "vote suppression"; drum up spurious allegations of civil rights violations; punish anti-abortion protesters; enact "copious new regulations, especially environmental, to be used selectively to ensnare other conservative malcontents"; invasively use the IRS to harass conservative organizations; and tacitly encourage civil unrest in furtherance of Obamite goals. All those predictions of course came true. Obama and company also waged bureaucratic war against independent inspectors general; tried their hardest (even illegally) to hobble fossil fuels industries; evaded Congress's intent by sending cash and uranium to a near-nuclear-ready Iran; fumbled and stumbled while veterans suffered virtually criminal neglect; wasted hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on projects that were not "shovel-ready" and did not create many jobs; oversaw an economy in which the workforce participation rate dropped to historically low levels while real median household income also fell and personal debt rose, and in which food stamp rolls grew to a number larger than the population of Spain; horrendously politicized the Justice Department; and saw race relations worsen for the first time in decades. In what should have been treated by the media as major scandals (or more major than the media represented them), the Obama administration encouraged illegal gun-running to Mexican cartels, with untold numbers of resultant deaths; failed to provide adequate security before or rescue during the Benghazi tragedy; provide

I've been reading Paul Craig Roberts since high school, when i used to clip his backpage columns in NewsWeek magazine. These days, you have to go to his blog to get the truth. But what a truth it is! Incredible, forceful but presented only as PCR can do. His wake up call to America is not about Republicans or Democrats. It's about our liberty and the all out assault our government, socialist and conservatives alike, has launched on the Constitution. Amerika! This is what it comes to. It's also why i'm a libertarian. Read it and weep. Excerpt is from the 9/11 section. excerpt: In a real investigation, the 9/11 evidence would not have been illegally destroyed, and the investigation would have been conducted by experts, not by government agencies assigned a cover-up and by political hacks. The NIST report is abject nonsense. It explains nothing. It is a fabricated computer simulation of a non-event. The co-chairmen and legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission later wrote books in which they stated that information was withheld from the commission, the military lied to the commission, and the commission "was set up to fail." Yet, these astounding admissions by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission had no impact on Congress, the presstitute media, or the public. All heads were in the sand. Please, whatever you do, don't make us emotional weaklings face the facts. More than one hundred firefighters, police, first responders, and building maintenance personnel report hearing and experiencing scores of explosions in the twin towers, including powerful explosions in the sub-basements prior to the collapse of the towers. Distinguished scientists, authors of many peer-reviewed scientific papers, report finding unreacted nano-thermite in the dust from the towers, tested it for its explosive and high-heat producing ability, and reported the unequivocal results. Seventeen hundred architects and engineers have testified in a petition to Congress that the th

For a detailed and fully referenced study of how 9-11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow's conflict of interest and how he kept Commission members in the dark and sabotaged the Commission report, see http://tinyurl.com/6tdfc56

More great charts, this time courtesy of the US Treasury Department. The charts use select areas of measurement to show a slowly improving economy, with the private sector leading the way. What the charts don't show or discuss is that the Obama economy has been assisted by $3 Trillion in Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel "quantitative easing", and the $5 Trillion in debt that Obama spending has racked up. Throw in the secret $16.1 Trillion the Federal Reserve pumped into the international bankster system, and the question becomes, "Where is all this money going? And why isn't the economy jumping?" The numbers are staggering. One chart provided by Treasury shows a successful TARP program where the Banksters have paid back in full the massive bailout funds. One has to wonder though, are they paying back the taxpayer bailout with newly generated profits? Or are they simply using freshly printed Federal Reserve dollars ($19.1 Trillion by the Federal Reserve's count), passed to them at zero interest? The shell game Obama, the ruling establishment, and the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel have been playing may be running out of steam. We're now in the money laundering stage where Banksters and trading partners like China are dumping their digital-ions of dollars for real property, corporate assets and hard currencies. The St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Cartel says as much in their most recent economic study. From the article: ....... The nation's debt load has grown to the point where the U.S. is now threatened with bankruptcy but the economy is not likely to grow fast enough to reduce the need for additional government borrowing. Empirical studies have shown a strong correlation between high levels of debt and reduced economic growth which results in decreased government revenue as explained below.......... An essay published by the St. Louis Federal Reserve on the Federal debt poised the question, "Too Little Revenue or Too Much Spe

Part ONE "by David Stockman Remarks To The Committee For The Republic, Washington DC, February 2014 (Part 1 of 6 Parts) [From David Stockman's Contra Corner.] Flask in hand, Boris Yelstin famously mounted a tank outside the Soviet Parliament in August 1991. Presently, the fearsome Red Army stood down-an outcome which 45 years of Cold War military mobilization by the West had failed to accomplish. At the time, the U.S. Warfare State's budget- counting the pentagon, spy agencies, DOE weapons, foreign aid, homeland security and veterans--was about $500 billion in today's dollars.  Now, a quarter century on from the Cold War's end, that same metric stands at $900 billion. This near doubling of the Warfare State's fiscal girth is a tad incongruous.  After all, America's war machine was designed to thwart a giant, nuclear-armed industrial state, but, alas, we now have no industrial state enemies left on the planet. The much-shrunken Russian successor to the Soviet Union, for example, has become a kleptocracy run by a clever thief who prefers stealing from his own citizens. Likewise, the Red Chinese threat consists of a re-conditioned aircraft carrier bought second-hand from a former naval power--otherwise known as the former Ukraine. China's bubble-ridden domestic economy would collapse within six weeks were it to actually bomb the 4,000 Wal-Mart outlets in America on which its mercantilist export machine utterly depends. On top of that, we've been fired as the world's policeman, al Qaeda has splintered among warlords who inhabit the armpits of the world from Yemen to Somalia and during last September's Syria war scare the American people even took away the President's keys to the Tomahawk missile batteries.  In short, the persistence of America's trillion dollar Warfare State budget needs some serious "splainin". The Great War and Its Aftermath My purpose tonight is to sketch the long story of how it all happened, starti

Incredible.  Since 2009, the Fed has been pumping $85 Billion per month into the Wall Street hedge funds of it's member banks.  Economist Paul Craig Roberts noticed some funny business the past few months regarding the Fed's numbers.  It turns out that while the Fed has been trying to convince the world that they are tapering off on their $85 Billion per month debt printing spree, the truth is just the opposite.  They have increased the debt spree to $112 Billion per month; with the help of a secret money laundering operation involving Belgium! Incredible!

Keep in mind that ISIL is a U.S. creation. And that just about everything that CIA and NSA do violates the laws of the nation in which they act and is antithetical to our form of government.   

"During 2015 the attack on bullion prices has intensified, driving the prices lower than they have been for years. During the first quarter of this year there was a huge upward spike in the quantity of precious metal derivatives. If these were long positions hedging the banks' Comex shorts, why did the price of gold and silver decline? More evidence of manipulation comes from the continuing fall in the prices of gold and silver as set in paper future markets, although demand for the physical metals continues to rise even to the point that the US Mint has run out of silver coins to sell. Uncertainties arising from the Greek No vote increase systemic uncertainty. The normal response would be rising, not falling, bullion prices. The circumstantial evidence is that the unregulated OTC derivatives in gold and silver are not really hedges to short positions in Comex but are themselves structured as an additional attack on precious metal prices. If this supposition is correct, it indicates that seven years of bailing out the big banks that control the Federal Reserve and US Treasury at the expense of the US economy has threatened the US dollar to the extent that the dollar must be protected at all cost, including US regulatory tolerance of illegal activity to suppress gold and silver prices."

Gee, the wealth concentration is accelerating. Why might that be?

Excerpt: After 2000, the national push toward home ownership intensified in three dimensions, leading to a doubling of housing prices in just five years' time. First, the Federal Reserve Board's interest-rate policy drove down the cost of borrowing money to unprecedented lows. Second, a common conviction arose that home ownership should be available even to those who, under prevailing conditions, could not afford it. Finally, private agencies charged with determining the risk and value of securities were exceptionally generous in their assessment of the financial products known as "derivatives" whose collateral resided in the value of thousands of mortgages bundled together. The rating agencies understated the risks from these bundled mortgages by assuming that home prices were simply going to rise forever. When the housing bubble burst in 2006, the damage to the financial system pushed the global economy into the worst contraction since the Great Depression. In the midst of the pain and suffering that have accompanied financial collapse and economic contraction-over $15 trillion in wealth has been lost by American households alone while, to date, more than 6 million job losses have boosted the unemployment rate to 9.4 percent-much of the blame has been placed on unregulated financial markets whose behavior is said to have revealed a terrible flaw in the foundation of capitalism itself. This was a market failure, we are told, and the promise of capitalism has always been that the self-correcting mechanisms built into the system would preclude the possibility of a systemic market failure. But the housing bubble only burst after government subsidies pushed house prices up so fast that marginal buyers could no longer afford to chase prices even higher. A bubble created by rigged financial markets and a government-sponsored obsession with home ownership is not a result of market failure, but rather, a result of bad public policy. The belief that home ownership,

Porter discusses inflation and the disastrous impact the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel is having on the wealth of Americans.  An interesting chart he provides is the one pricing the Stock Market in GOLD.  Everything should be priced and evaluated in terms of GOLD instead of Federal Reserve paper.  The world would be a better place. there are only two repubican presidential candidates calling for an end of the Bankster Cartel; Ron Paul and Rick Perry.  The rest are with Obama, deep in the Bankster pocket.  Very sad.  But then, the Occupy Wall Street movement is camped out on Wall Street, while the Tea Party movement is Occupying the heart of the Bankster criminal empire - the Federal Reserve Banks.  Both movements seem to be protesting the same criminal Bankster problem.  But OWS has been fooled by the ol "nothing up my sleeve" illusion. excerpt: Here's the fact: America's standard of living is falling at a faster pace today than at any time since the Great Depression. Specifically, the real median income is down 9.8% since the fall of 2008. Additionally, Americans have lost roughly $5.5 trillion in asset value, or about 8.6% of their wealth. When you talk about a depression, what you're really talking about is a collapse in the standard of living. That's what's happening today, right now, in our country. But people continue to go about their lives as though nothing is happening. Certainly, our politicians don't want to draw attention to the problem. Instead, they are behind the campaign to "paper over" these losses with schemes like "quantitative easing." These schemes do nothing to make our economy more productive. They're designed instead to make prices rise so people (hopefully) won't notice how poor they're becoming. If you've been reading my newsletters since 2008, none of this is a surprise to you. I've been warning month after month, year after year, that the government's efforts to paper over our bad debts won't work. And they won't work for tw

Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.