Barna poll shows adults
develop their own beliefs
Posted: January 16, 2009
11:40 pm Eastern
By Bob Unruh
WorldNetDaily
Half of Americans who call themselves "Christian" don't believe Satan exists and fully one-third are confident that Jesus sinned while on Earth, according to a new Barna Group poll.
Another 40 percent say they do not have a responsibility to share their Christian faith with others, and 25 percent "dismiss the idea that the Bible is accurate in all of the principles it teaches," the organization reports.
Pollster George Barna said the results have huge implications.
"Americans are increasingly comfortable picking and choosing what they deem to be helpful and accurate theological views and have become comfortable discarding the rest of the teachings in the Bible," he said.
"Growing numbers of people now serve as their own theologian-in-residence," he continued. "One consequence is that Americans are embracing an unpredictable and contradictory body of beliefs."
The results are a dramatic departure from the nation's foundings, when leaders held prayer meetings in the halls of Congress and attributed to Almighty God the victory in the Revolutionary War.
Barna noted the millions of people who describe themselves as Christian and believe Jesus sinned, or those who say they will experience eternal salvation because they confessed their sins and accepted Christ as their savior, "but also believe that a person can do enough good works to earn eternal salvation."
Barna's private, non-partisan, for-profit research group in Ventura, Calif., has been studying cultural trends since 1984. For this study, the organization randomly sampled 1,004 adults across the continental U.S. The study has a margin of error of 3.2 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
For the study, "born-again Christians" were defined as people who said they had made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that was still important in their life today and who also indicated they believed that when they die they will go to heaven because they had confessed their sins and had accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. The results highlight the significant shift in beliefs held by Americans, the study said.
"For much of America's history, the assumption was that if you were born in America, you would affiliate with the Christian faith," the report said. Now however, "half of all adults now contend that Christianity is just one of many options that Americans choose from and that a huge majority of adults pick and choose what they believe rather than adopt a church or denomination's slate of beliefs."
Fifty percent of Americans believe Christianity no longer has a lock on people's hearts. Two-thirds of evangelical Christians (64 percent) and three out of every five Hispanics (60 percent) embraced that position, making them the groups most convinced of the shift in America's default faith.
In contrast, the poll showed the importance of belief was growing along with the number of options about what to believe.
"By an overwhelming margin – 74 percent to 23 percent – adults agreed that their religious faith was becoming even more important to them than it used to be as a source of objective and reliable moral guidance."
Forty percent of respondents who do not affiliate with Christianity confirmed the increasing influence of their beliefs.
The result "underscored the fact that people no longer look to denominations or churches to offer a slate of theological views that the individual adopts in its entirety," the report said.
By a margin of 71 percent to 26 percent adults "noted that they are personally more likely to develop their own set of religious beliefs than to accept a comprehensive set of beliefs taught by a particular church," the report said.
Nearly two-thirds of "born again Christians" adopted that stance.
"In the past, when most people determined their theological and moral points of view, the alternatives from which they chose were exclusively of Christian options - e.g., the Methodist point of view, the Baptist perspective, Catholic teaching, and so forth," Barna noted. "Today, Americans are more likely to pit a variety of non-Christian options against various Christian-based views. This has resulted in an abundance of unique worldviews based on personal combinations of theology drawn from a smattering of world religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam as well as secularism."
Verse:
John 3:16; Jn 3:16; John 3
Keyword:
Salvation, Jesus, Gospel
With Operators:
AND, OR, NOT, “ â€
Showing posts with label Endtimes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Endtimes. Show all posts
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Monday, January 12, 2009
U.S. pledges $700K to rebuild Babylon
Associated Press - 1/12/2009 9:25:00 AMBookmark and Share
WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States has pledged $700,000 to help preserve and restore ancient Babylon.
In a news release, the U.S. State Department says "'The Future of Babylon' project exemplifies the American people's commitment to the preservation of human heritage and their respect for the cultural heritage of Iraq."
The State Department says the funding will allow the World Monuments Fund and Iraq's Board of Antiquities and Heritage to plan for Babylon's "conservation, study and tourism."
In the Bible, Isaiah prophesies that Babylon "will never be inhabited, nor will it be settled from generation to generation."
WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States has pledged $700,000 to help preserve and restore ancient Babylon.
In a news release, the U.S. State Department says "'The Future of Babylon' project exemplifies the American people's commitment to the preservation of human heritage and their respect for the cultural heritage of Iraq."
The State Department says the funding will allow the World Monuments Fund and Iraq's Board of Antiquities and Heritage to plan for Babylon's "conservation, study and tourism."
In the Bible, Isaiah prophesies that Babylon "will never be inhabited, nor will it be settled from generation to generation."
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Kissinger: Obama primed to create 'New World Order'
Policy guru says global upheaval presents 'great opportunity'
Posted: January 06, 2009
9:07 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
WorldNetDaily
Henry Kissinger
According to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former secretary of state under President Nixon, conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of "a New World Order."
Kissinger has long been an integral figure in U.S. foreign policy, holding positions in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. Author of over a dozen books on foreign policy, Kissinger was also named by President Bush as the chairman of the Sept. 11 investigatory commission.
Kissinger made the remark in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange, after Burnett asked him what international conflict would define the Obama administration's foreign policy.
Read "Hope of the Wicked," where author Ted Flynn reveals the greatest deception in modern history – corporations, foundations and governments converging to bring about a New World Order.
"The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously," Kissinger responded. "You have India, Pakistan; you have the jihadist movement. So he can't really say there is one problem, that it's the most important one. But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It's a great opportunity, it isn't just a crisis."
The phrase 'new world order' traces back at least as far as 1940, when author H.G. Wells used it as the title of a book about a socialist, unified, one-world government. The phrase has also been linked to American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, whose work on establishing the League of Nations pioneered the concept of international government bodies, and to the first President Bush, who used it in a 1989 speech.
"A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment," said Bush before a joint session of Congress. "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: A new era … in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony."
The phrase "New World Order" causes alarm for many Americans, particularly those concerned about an international governing body trumping U.S. sovereignty or those that interpret biblical prophecy to foretell the establishment of a one-world government as key to the rise of the Antichrist. Conspiracy theorists, too, have latched on to the phrase, concerned that powerful financial or government figures are secretly plotting to rule the world.
Kissinger's ties to government and international powers – as well as his use of the phrase – have made him suspect in the eyes of many who are wary of what "new world order" might actually mean.
"There is a need for a new world order," Kissinger told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose last year, "I think that at the end of this administration, with all its turmoil, and at the beginning of the next, we might actually witness the creation of a new order – because people looking in the abyss, even in the Islamic world, have to conclude that at some point, ordered expectations must return under a different system."
As WND reported, Kissinger was also part of last year's super-secret Bilderberg Group, an organization of powerful international elites, including government, business, academic and journalistic representatives, that has convened annually since 1954.
According to sources that have penetrated the high-security meetings, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.
CNBC's Haines concluded the Kissinger interview by asking, "Are you confident about the people President-elect Obama has chosen to surround him?"
Kissinger replied, "He has appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields."
Posted: January 06, 2009
9:07 pm Eastern
By Drew Zahn
WorldNetDaily
Henry Kissinger
According to Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former secretary of state under President Nixon, conflicts across the globe and an international respect for Barack Obama have created the perfect setting for establishment of "a New World Order."
Kissinger has long been an integral figure in U.S. foreign policy, holding positions in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. Author of over a dozen books on foreign policy, Kissinger was also named by President Bush as the chairman of the Sept. 11 investigatory commission.
Kissinger made the remark in an interview with CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" hosts Mark Haines and Erin Burnett at the New York Stock Exchange, after Burnett asked him what international conflict would define the Obama administration's foreign policy.
Read "Hope of the Wicked," where author Ted Flynn reveals the greatest deception in modern history – corporations, foundations and governments converging to bring about a New World Order.
"The president-elect is coming into office at a moment when there is upheaval in many parts of the world simultaneously," Kissinger responded. "You have India, Pakistan; you have the jihadist movement. So he can't really say there is one problem, that it's the most important one. But he can give new impetus to American foreign policy partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It's a great opportunity, it isn't just a crisis."
The phrase 'new world order' traces back at least as far as 1940, when author H.G. Wells used it as the title of a book about a socialist, unified, one-world government. The phrase has also been linked to American presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, whose work on establishing the League of Nations pioneered the concept of international government bodies, and to the first President Bush, who used it in a 1989 speech.
"A new partnership of nations has begun, and we stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment," said Bush before a joint session of Congress. "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective – a new world order – can emerge: A new era … in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony."
The phrase "New World Order" causes alarm for many Americans, particularly those concerned about an international governing body trumping U.S. sovereignty or those that interpret biblical prophecy to foretell the establishment of a one-world government as key to the rise of the Antichrist. Conspiracy theorists, too, have latched on to the phrase, concerned that powerful financial or government figures are secretly plotting to rule the world.
Kissinger's ties to government and international powers – as well as his use of the phrase – have made him suspect in the eyes of many who are wary of what "new world order" might actually mean.
"There is a need for a new world order," Kissinger told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose last year, "I think that at the end of this administration, with all its turmoil, and at the beginning of the next, we might actually witness the creation of a new order – because people looking in the abyss, even in the Islamic world, have to conclude that at some point, ordered expectations must return under a different system."
As WND reported, Kissinger was also part of last year's super-secret Bilderberg Group, an organization of powerful international elites, including government, business, academic and journalistic representatives, that has convened annually since 1954.
According to sources that have penetrated the high-security meetings, the Bilderberg meetings emphasize a globalist agenda and promote the idea that the notion of national sovereignty is antiquated and regressive.
CNBC's Haines concluded the Kissinger interview by asking, "Are you confident about the people President-elect Obama has chosen to surround him?"
Kissinger replied, "He has appointed an extraordinarily able group of people in both the international and financial fields."
Friday, December 26, 2008
The Federal Reserve Abolition Act
Stephen Lendman
Global Research
December 25, 2008
On June 15, 2007, Ron Paul introduced HR 2755: Federal Reserve Abolition Act. There were no co-sponsors, no further action was taken, and the legislation was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and effectively pigeonholed and ignored.
Creating the Federal Reserve System to let bankers and not the government control the price and amount of fiat money debased the currency and is the root cause of today’s financial problems.
It’s a bold and needed measure to “abolish the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks, to repeal the Federal Reserve Act, and for other purposes.”
The bill provides for management of employees, assets and liabilities of the Board during a dissolution period, and more as follows:
– it designates the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to liquidate Fed assets in an orderly and expeditious manner;
– transfer them to the General Fund of the Treasury after satisfying all claims against the Board and any Federal reserve bank;
– assume all outstanding Board and member bank liabilities and transfer them to the Secretary of the Treasury; and
– after an 18-month period, submit a report to Congress “containing a detailed description of the actions taken to implement this Act and any actions or issues relating to such implementation that remain uncompleted or unresolved as of the date of the report.”
On November 22, “End the Fed” protests were held in 39 or more cities nationwide (including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC), but you’d hardly know it for lack of coverage. Attendee demands were simple and emphatic:
– end a private banking cartel’s illegal monopoly control over the nation’s money supply and price;
– return that power to the US Treasury as the Constitution mandates;
– end a fiat currency system backed by the waning full faith and credit of the government; and
– return the country to a sound, hard currency monetary system.
“End the Fed! Sound Money for America!” is their slogan, and writer and US policy critic Webster Tarpley puts it well:
“….the privately owned central bank….has been looting and wrecking the US economy for almost a hundred years. We must end a system where unelected, unaccountable cliques of bankers and financiers loyal to names like Morgan, Rockefeller, and Mellon set interest rates and money supply behind closed doors, leading to de-industrialization, mass impoverishment, and a world economic and financial depression of incalculable severity.”
In theory, the Fed was established to stabilize the economy, smooth out the business cycle, manage a healthy, sustainable growth rate, and maintain stable prices. In fact, it failed dismally. It contributed to 19 US recessions (including the Great Depression) and significantly to the following equity market declines that accompanied them as measured by the Dow or S & P 500 average - the S &P’s inception was 1923; it became the S & P 500 in 1957:
– 40.1% (Dow) from 1916 - 1917;
– 46.6% (Dow) from 1919 - 1921;
– the 1929 (Dow) crash in two stages - 47.9% in 1929 followed by a strong, temporary rebound; then - 86%; an 89% peak to trough total from October 1929 to July 1932;
– 49.1% (Dow) from 1937 - 1938;
– 40.4% (Dow) from 1939 - 1942;
– 25.3% (S & P) from 1946 - 1947;
– 19.8% (S & P) in 1957;
– 26.8% (S & P) from 1961 - 1962;
– 19.3% (S & P) in 1966;
– 32.7% (S & P) from 1968 - 1970;
– 45.1% (S & P) from 1973 - 1974;
– 20.2% (S & P) from 1980 - 1982;
– 32.9% (S & P) in 1987;
– 19.2% (S & P) in 1990;
– 18.8% (S & P) in 1998;
– 49.1% (S & P) from 2000 - 2002; and
– about 50% (S & P) and counting (excluding a bear market rebound) from October 2007.
The Fed is also directly responsible for monetary inflation and the decline in the US standard of living since its year end 1913 inception and especially since the 1970s. From the late 18th century to 1913, virtually no inflation existed under the gold standard except during times of war. Using government data, it now takes over $2000 to equal $100 of pre-Fed purchasing power. In other words, a 1913 dollar is worth about a nickel today.
At that time, a dollar was defined as 1/20 of an ounce of gold or about an ounce of silver. The Fed then changed the standard away from precious metals to the full faith and credit of the government. Ever since (except for periods such as the 1930s) inflation eroded the currency’s value and (more than ever) continues to do it today.
It’s why one analyst calls the dollar “nothing more than a popular symbol for the tangible substances it once represented - gold and silver.” Its true value represents the world’s waning confidence in America’s ability to honor its debt obligations, and with good reason.
Under the Federal Reserve System (besides inflation), we’ve had rising consumer debt; record budget and trade deficits; a soaring national debt; a high level of personal and business bankruptcies; today, millions of home foreclosures; high unemployment; the loss of the nation’s manufacturing base; growing millions in poverty; an unprecedented wealth gap between the rich and all others; and a hugely unstable economy now lurching into crisis mode.
In a November 24 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Hong Kong-based author and equity strategist Christopher Wood believes “The Fed Is Out of Ammunition.” With trillions in personal wealth erased, “there is little doubt that we are witnessing a classic debt-deflation bust at work, characterized by falling prices, frozen credit markets and plummeting asset values.”
He notes how “over-investment and over-speculation” on borrowed money got us here. Today, the Fed can control the supply of money but not its velocity or the rate it turns over. The current collapse set it in reverse with no signs of an impending turnaround.
Wood believes monetary and fiscal measures won’t work. There are no easy solutions - “not as long as politicians and central bankers (won’t) let financial institutions fail,” and let market forces wash out excesses over time.
The Fed and Treasury will spend trillions of dollars to correct things, “but will merely compound (the problem) by adding debt to debt.” The current crisis will end up “discrediting mechanical monetarism - and with it the fiat paper-money system….The catalyst will be foreign creditors fleeing the dollar for gold. That will in turn lead to global recognition of the need for a vastly more disciplined global financial system” with gold very likely playing a part.
Absent a hard money currency has led to the kind of monetary madness that Nouriel Roubini calls “crazy” policy actions - an explosion of quantitative easing in the trillions with no end of it in sight.
Roubini: “The Fed Funds rate has been abandoned…as we are already effectively at (zero interest rates) that signal a liquidity trap….Even (a sharp) fall in mortgage rates….will be of small comfort to debt burdened households as only those (that) qualify for refinancing will be able to” net out a “modest” monthly mortgage saving of about $150.
The Fed’s “desperate policy actions….will eventually lead to much higher real interest rates on the public debt and weaken the US dollar (the result of a) tsunami of implicit and explicit public liabilities and monetary debt.” It will get foreign investors to “ponder the long-term sustainability of the US domestic and external liabilities,” and why not. They keep growing exponentially, and with nothing restraining a runaway Fed, dollar debasing may continue to the point where no one will want to hold them. It’s gotten some analysts to recommend moving a portion of savings out of them into gold - the ultimate safe haven in times of crisis.
Abolish the Fed and Return the Nation’s Money Creation Power to Congress Where It Belongs
Ron Paul has been in the vanguard of the Abolish the Fed movement, and on September 10, 2002 on the House floor said:
“Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy. In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people….”
“It is time for the Congress to put the interests of the American people ahead of the special interests. Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy.”
“Abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a constitutional system (as mandated) will enable America to return to the type of monetary system envisioned by our nation’s founders: one where the value of money is consistent because it is tied to a commodity such as gold….I urge my colleagues (to co-sponsor) my legislation to abolish the Federal Reserve.”
Paul introduced his legislation in the 106th, 107th, 108th, and 110th Congresses. Each time, it died in committee. On November 22, he attended the End the Fed rally in Houston and addressed the crowd.
He called the current economic crisis as bad or worse than in the 1930s and said: “we know who caused it. It was the Federal Reserve that gave us all this trouble.” He explained that we had a “free ride for decades because we’ve had a system that was devised where the dollar could act as if it were gold.”
Not after August 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window, ended the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, and no longer let dollars be backed by gold or converted into it in international markets. A “new economic system” was created. It let us “spend beyond our means, live beyond our means, print money beyond our means,” and it caused our current dilemma.
We created “an appearance of great wealth. But it was doomed to fail,” and it became apparent in the past year: “the failure of the dollar reserve standard that was set up in August of 1971. It has ended. The only question” is what will replace it?
There’s all kinds of talk, including setting up a new international fiat currency “with the loss of US sovereignty in total. We have to stop this move towards one world government and a one world currency.” Otherwise our freedom and Constitution will be lost. When it was written, it contained prohibitions.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress alone the right to coin (create) money and regulate the value thereof. The founders also wanted gold and silver to be legal tender, not fiat money, nor should there be a central bank. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot constitutionally delegate this power to another body. By creating the Federal Reserve System in 1913, Congress violated the Constitution it was sworn to uphold and defrauded the American public. Today’s crisis is the fruit of its action, but watch out.
“The writing is on the wall, and the end of this system” approaches. “They cannot patch it up, they can’t up it back together again. They know it and we know it. The only argument is what is it going to be replaced with?”
For now, “Central banks in the West especially have been dumping gold to artificially lower (its price) to pretend the dollar is of great value. They’re still doing it, but they’re running out of time (and) out of gold.” It’s shifting to stronger economic powers, ones who’ve been saving money, loaning it back to us, “and are ready to buy up America if we continue to do this. So it is a contest (between fiat) money and hard money, and that is such an important issue.” It reflects what Daniel Webster once said:
“There can be no legal tender in this country….but gold and silver. This is a constitutional principle….of the very highest importance.” Gold, however, wasn’t the original monetary system standard. Silver was, the silver dollar, and only a constitutional amendment can change it.
Paper currency as well, whether backed by gold or not, wasn’t the hard money authorized by the Constitution. Honest money is honest weights and measures of silver and gold. Federal Reserve Notes are paper fiat debt obligations. Fiat currency of any kind is a mechanism of wealth transference from the public to a privileged elite - through inflation and loss of purchasing power. It creates debt for the many and wealth for the few, especially when a private banking cartel controls it.
Our existing monetary system combines money, credit and debt into a dishonest system of empty promises in exchange for future ones. There is no eventual payment, only unfulfillable assurances to new generations that will be forced to pay for the debt now accumulated. It’s a moneychangers dream - ever-expanding debt and a continuing interest rate stream, masquerading as wealth creation for the people. It’s in fact a system of bondage and indebtedness benefitting the few at the expense of the many, a modern-day feudalism. It’s how an elite 1% got to own 70% of the nation’s wealth.
In the 1920s, Josiah Stamp, Bank of England president said:
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen (today a computer keyboard) they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”
Creating the Federal Reserve System to let bankers and not the government control the price and amount of fiat money debased the currency and is the root cause of today’s financial problems. A return to honest gold and silver weights and measures is needed. The Constitution states that nothing but these metals are money and that paper bills of credit (like Federal Reserve notes) aren’t allowed. Even ones backed by gold as the Constitution doesn’t grant Congress the power to be bankers. It may only coin (create) and borrow money, not loan it out or give it away - and certainly not to bankers at the expense of the public interest.
Further, the Constitution contains no provision allowing Congress to enact legal tender laws. Article I, Section 10 forbids the individual states from making “anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts.” However, US Code, 31 USC 5103, establishes US coins and currency, including Federal Reserve notes, as legal tender and has been used to debase the currency ever since - the way Gresham’s Law works: bad (or debased) money drives out good (the kind with little difference between its nominal and commodity values).
For example, until 1964, US coins (except pennies and nickels) contained 90% silver. Starting in 1965, dimes and quarters were converted to their current nickel - copper composition. Half-dollars (now produced in limited quantities) had 90% silver. It then dropped to 40% in 1965 and by 1971 all US coins (except pennies and commemorative mintings) contained nickel and copper and no silver - a good example of debasing. As for paper currency, it’s just paper.
Under a private banking cartel’s control, it’s been misused, stolen, and corrupted the way New York Times columnist Floyd Norris suggests in his November 24 article headlined: “Another Crisis, Another Guarantee.” First the banks, then the auto companies, and who knows who’s next in line for theirs. “As the nation’s obligations rise into the trillions, at some point investors (and the public) may begin to question whether a government running huge deficits can also credibly promise that the dollar will not lose its value.” How can there be any faith and credit left when it’s vanishing and the Fed and Treasury operate like giant hedge funds.
It got UK-based Eclectica Asset Management chief investment officer, Hugh Hendry, concerned enough to say: “All (US) financials will be owned by the government in a year. I bet you. It’s not good,” but it’s coming. US taxpayers will be “paying for this for a long time,” and it’s deeply concerning considering the amount of money creation - with no end in sight as problems keep mounting and limitless amounts keep being thrown at them.
On November 25 the Financial Times associate editor, Wolfgang Munchau, also worries about the Fed’s “weapon of mass desperation” (so-called quantitative easing); focusing only on deflation and risking a currency crisis. He calls it a flawed, dangerous and shocking oversight - the possibility of “a mass flight out of dollar assets (at some point) and a large rise in US market interest rates, followed by a huge recession.”
A Bloomberg.com November 24 headline highlights the problem: “US Pledges Top $7.7 trillion to Ease Frozen Credit,” and it might as well have said there’s plenty more where that came from if needed. With another $800 committed to two new loan programs the total reached $8.5 trillion, according to Bloomberg or nearly 60% of US 2007 GDP of $14 trillion, and the numbers keep rising exponentially because the problems continue to mount.
Bloomberg puts it in perspective saying “the (current) commitment dwarfs (TARP and puts) Federal Reserve lending last week (at) 1900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis,” and with the added $800 billion it’s about 2100 times pre-crisis levels.
In addition, the Fed refuses to identify recipients of about $2 trillion of emergency handouts or what troubled assets (if any) it’s accepting as collateral. Call it lending or spending. They’re public tax dollars being spread around like confetti and debasing it all as a result.
The Free Lakota Bank
On November 21, this writer discussed how Lakotahs are treated in an article titled “Fate of Lakotahs Highlights America’s Failed Native American Policies.” On November 24, the following press release and follow-up information announced:
“People of Lakota Launch Private Bank for Only Silver and Gold Currencies.” All deposits are “liquid, meaning they can be withdrawn at any time in minted rounds. Some may confuse our economic system with isolationism….which it is not. Since we currently produce much more than we consume, we have the right to decide what medium of exchange to accept for our effort. And so we accept only value for value. Across our great land, over thousands of tribes and merchants participate in our system of trade. We invite others to trade with us and bring value back into our transactions.”
This is the world’s first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that accepts only silver and gold currencies for deposit. The Lakotas “invite people of any creed, faith or heritage to unite in an effort to reclaim control of wealth. It is our hope that other tribal nations and American citizens recognize the importance of silver and gold as currency and decide to mirror our system of honest trade.”
The bank states that it issues, circulates and accepts for deposit “only AOCS - Approved silver and gold currencies.” It calls paper not real money but “merely a promise to pay - a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Since we deal only in real money, we do not participate in any central bank looting schemes.” When corruption is rewarded and “honesty becom(es) self-sacrifice….you may know that your society is doomed.” Even as victims of adversity, Lakotas are working to prevent it.
End the Fed
Privatized money control is the single greatest threat to democratic freedom. As former lawyer, economist, academic, and Canadian prime minister (from 1935 - 1948) William Lyon Mackenzie King once said:
“Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile….Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes (its) laws….Usury once in control will wreck any nation,” and indeed it has, far more now than ever.
It worried Thomas Jefferson enough to call banking institutions “more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies” at a much simpler time in our history. The right to create and control money belongs to the people through their elected representatives. For the past 95 years, powerful bankers accountable to no one have had it. They effectively run the country (and own it), and unless We the People change things, we’ll continue to be victimized by economic tyranny and the eventual political kind that’s coming.
Global Research
December 25, 2008
On June 15, 2007, Ron Paul introduced HR 2755: Federal Reserve Abolition Act. There were no co-sponsors, no further action was taken, and the legislation was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and effectively pigeonholed and ignored.
Creating the Federal Reserve System to let bankers and not the government control the price and amount of fiat money debased the currency and is the root cause of today’s financial problems.
It’s a bold and needed measure to “abolish the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks, to repeal the Federal Reserve Act, and for other purposes.”
The bill provides for management of employees, assets and liabilities of the Board during a dissolution period, and more as follows:
– it designates the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to liquidate Fed assets in an orderly and expeditious manner;
– transfer them to the General Fund of the Treasury after satisfying all claims against the Board and any Federal reserve bank;
– assume all outstanding Board and member bank liabilities and transfer them to the Secretary of the Treasury; and
– after an 18-month period, submit a report to Congress “containing a detailed description of the actions taken to implement this Act and any actions or issues relating to such implementation that remain uncompleted or unresolved as of the date of the report.”
On November 22, “End the Fed” protests were held in 39 or more cities nationwide (including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC), but you’d hardly know it for lack of coverage. Attendee demands were simple and emphatic:
– end a private banking cartel’s illegal monopoly control over the nation’s money supply and price;
– return that power to the US Treasury as the Constitution mandates;
– end a fiat currency system backed by the waning full faith and credit of the government; and
– return the country to a sound, hard currency monetary system.
“End the Fed! Sound Money for America!” is their slogan, and writer and US policy critic Webster Tarpley puts it well:
“….the privately owned central bank….has been looting and wrecking the US economy for almost a hundred years. We must end a system where unelected, unaccountable cliques of bankers and financiers loyal to names like Morgan, Rockefeller, and Mellon set interest rates and money supply behind closed doors, leading to de-industrialization, mass impoverishment, and a world economic and financial depression of incalculable severity.”
In theory, the Fed was established to stabilize the economy, smooth out the business cycle, manage a healthy, sustainable growth rate, and maintain stable prices. In fact, it failed dismally. It contributed to 19 US recessions (including the Great Depression) and significantly to the following equity market declines that accompanied them as measured by the Dow or S & P 500 average - the S &P’s inception was 1923; it became the S & P 500 in 1957:
– 40.1% (Dow) from 1916 - 1917;
– 46.6% (Dow) from 1919 - 1921;
– the 1929 (Dow) crash in two stages - 47.9% in 1929 followed by a strong, temporary rebound; then - 86%; an 89% peak to trough total from October 1929 to July 1932;
– 49.1% (Dow) from 1937 - 1938;
– 40.4% (Dow) from 1939 - 1942;
– 25.3% (S & P) from 1946 - 1947;
– 19.8% (S & P) in 1957;
– 26.8% (S & P) from 1961 - 1962;
– 19.3% (S & P) in 1966;
– 32.7% (S & P) from 1968 - 1970;
– 45.1% (S & P) from 1973 - 1974;
– 20.2% (S & P) from 1980 - 1982;
– 32.9% (S & P) in 1987;
– 19.2% (S & P) in 1990;
– 18.8% (S & P) in 1998;
– 49.1% (S & P) from 2000 - 2002; and
– about 50% (S & P) and counting (excluding a bear market rebound) from October 2007.
The Fed is also directly responsible for monetary inflation and the decline in the US standard of living since its year end 1913 inception and especially since the 1970s. From the late 18th century to 1913, virtually no inflation existed under the gold standard except during times of war. Using government data, it now takes over $2000 to equal $100 of pre-Fed purchasing power. In other words, a 1913 dollar is worth about a nickel today.
At that time, a dollar was defined as 1/20 of an ounce of gold or about an ounce of silver. The Fed then changed the standard away from precious metals to the full faith and credit of the government. Ever since (except for periods such as the 1930s) inflation eroded the currency’s value and (more than ever) continues to do it today.
It’s why one analyst calls the dollar “nothing more than a popular symbol for the tangible substances it once represented - gold and silver.” Its true value represents the world’s waning confidence in America’s ability to honor its debt obligations, and with good reason.
Under the Federal Reserve System (besides inflation), we’ve had rising consumer debt; record budget and trade deficits; a soaring national debt; a high level of personal and business bankruptcies; today, millions of home foreclosures; high unemployment; the loss of the nation’s manufacturing base; growing millions in poverty; an unprecedented wealth gap between the rich and all others; and a hugely unstable economy now lurching into crisis mode.
In a November 24 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Hong Kong-based author and equity strategist Christopher Wood believes “The Fed Is Out of Ammunition.” With trillions in personal wealth erased, “there is little doubt that we are witnessing a classic debt-deflation bust at work, characterized by falling prices, frozen credit markets and plummeting asset values.”
He notes how “over-investment and over-speculation” on borrowed money got us here. Today, the Fed can control the supply of money but not its velocity or the rate it turns over. The current collapse set it in reverse with no signs of an impending turnaround.
Wood believes monetary and fiscal measures won’t work. There are no easy solutions - “not as long as politicians and central bankers (won’t) let financial institutions fail,” and let market forces wash out excesses over time.
The Fed and Treasury will spend trillions of dollars to correct things, “but will merely compound (the problem) by adding debt to debt.” The current crisis will end up “discrediting mechanical monetarism - and with it the fiat paper-money system….The catalyst will be foreign creditors fleeing the dollar for gold. That will in turn lead to global recognition of the need for a vastly more disciplined global financial system” with gold very likely playing a part.
Absent a hard money currency has led to the kind of monetary madness that Nouriel Roubini calls “crazy” policy actions - an explosion of quantitative easing in the trillions with no end of it in sight.
Roubini: “The Fed Funds rate has been abandoned…as we are already effectively at (zero interest rates) that signal a liquidity trap….Even (a sharp) fall in mortgage rates….will be of small comfort to debt burdened households as only those (that) qualify for refinancing will be able to” net out a “modest” monthly mortgage saving of about $150.
The Fed’s “desperate policy actions….will eventually lead to much higher real interest rates on the public debt and weaken the US dollar (the result of a) tsunami of implicit and explicit public liabilities and monetary debt.” It will get foreign investors to “ponder the long-term sustainability of the US domestic and external liabilities,” and why not. They keep growing exponentially, and with nothing restraining a runaway Fed, dollar debasing may continue to the point where no one will want to hold them. It’s gotten some analysts to recommend moving a portion of savings out of them into gold - the ultimate safe haven in times of crisis.
Abolish the Fed and Return the Nation’s Money Creation Power to Congress Where It Belongs
Ron Paul has been in the vanguard of the Abolish the Fed movement, and on September 10, 2002 on the House floor said:
“Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy. In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve’s inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people….”
“It is time for the Congress to put the interests of the American people ahead of the special interests. Abolishing the Federal Reserve will allow Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over monetary policy.”
“Abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a constitutional system (as mandated) will enable America to return to the type of monetary system envisioned by our nation’s founders: one where the value of money is consistent because it is tied to a commodity such as gold….I urge my colleagues (to co-sponsor) my legislation to abolish the Federal Reserve.”
Paul introduced his legislation in the 106th, 107th, 108th, and 110th Congresses. Each time, it died in committee. On November 22, he attended the End the Fed rally in Houston and addressed the crowd.
He called the current economic crisis as bad or worse than in the 1930s and said: “we know who caused it. It was the Federal Reserve that gave us all this trouble.” He explained that we had a “free ride for decades because we’ve had a system that was devised where the dollar could act as if it were gold.”
Not after August 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window, ended the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement, and no longer let dollars be backed by gold or converted into it in international markets. A “new economic system” was created. It let us “spend beyond our means, live beyond our means, print money beyond our means,” and it caused our current dilemma.
We created “an appearance of great wealth. But it was doomed to fail,” and it became apparent in the past year: “the failure of the dollar reserve standard that was set up in August of 1971. It has ended. The only question” is what will replace it?
There’s all kinds of talk, including setting up a new international fiat currency “with the loss of US sovereignty in total. We have to stop this move towards one world government and a one world currency.” Otherwise our freedom and Constitution will be lost. When it was written, it contained prohibitions.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
Article I, Section 8 gives Congress alone the right to coin (create) money and regulate the value thereof. The founders also wanted gold and silver to be legal tender, not fiat money, nor should there be a central bank. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress cannot constitutionally delegate this power to another body. By creating the Federal Reserve System in 1913, Congress violated the Constitution it was sworn to uphold and defrauded the American public. Today’s crisis is the fruit of its action, but watch out.
“The writing is on the wall, and the end of this system” approaches. “They cannot patch it up, they can’t up it back together again. They know it and we know it. The only argument is what is it going to be replaced with?”
For now, “Central banks in the West especially have been dumping gold to artificially lower (its price) to pretend the dollar is of great value. They’re still doing it, but they’re running out of time (and) out of gold.” It’s shifting to stronger economic powers, ones who’ve been saving money, loaning it back to us, “and are ready to buy up America if we continue to do this. So it is a contest (between fiat) money and hard money, and that is such an important issue.” It reflects what Daniel Webster once said:
“There can be no legal tender in this country….but gold and silver. This is a constitutional principle….of the very highest importance.” Gold, however, wasn’t the original monetary system standard. Silver was, the silver dollar, and only a constitutional amendment can change it.
Paper currency as well, whether backed by gold or not, wasn’t the hard money authorized by the Constitution. Honest money is honest weights and measures of silver and gold. Federal Reserve Notes are paper fiat debt obligations. Fiat currency of any kind is a mechanism of wealth transference from the public to a privileged elite - through inflation and loss of purchasing power. It creates debt for the many and wealth for the few, especially when a private banking cartel controls it.
Our existing monetary system combines money, credit and debt into a dishonest system of empty promises in exchange for future ones. There is no eventual payment, only unfulfillable assurances to new generations that will be forced to pay for the debt now accumulated. It’s a moneychangers dream - ever-expanding debt and a continuing interest rate stream, masquerading as wealth creation for the people. It’s in fact a system of bondage and indebtedness benefitting the few at the expense of the many, a modern-day feudalism. It’s how an elite 1% got to own 70% of the nation’s wealth.
In the 1920s, Josiah Stamp, Bank of England president said:
“Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen (today a computer keyboard) they will create enough deposits to buy it back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits.”
Creating the Federal Reserve System to let bankers and not the government control the price and amount of fiat money debased the currency and is the root cause of today’s financial problems. A return to honest gold and silver weights and measures is needed. The Constitution states that nothing but these metals are money and that paper bills of credit (like Federal Reserve notes) aren’t allowed. Even ones backed by gold as the Constitution doesn’t grant Congress the power to be bankers. It may only coin (create) and borrow money, not loan it out or give it away - and certainly not to bankers at the expense of the public interest.
Further, the Constitution contains no provision allowing Congress to enact legal tender laws. Article I, Section 10 forbids the individual states from making “anything but gold and silver coin a legal tender in payment of debts.” However, US Code, 31 USC 5103, establishes US coins and currency, including Federal Reserve notes, as legal tender and has been used to debase the currency ever since - the way Gresham’s Law works: bad (or debased) money drives out good (the kind with little difference between its nominal and commodity values).
For example, until 1964, US coins (except pennies and nickels) contained 90% silver. Starting in 1965, dimes and quarters were converted to their current nickel - copper composition. Half-dollars (now produced in limited quantities) had 90% silver. It then dropped to 40% in 1965 and by 1971 all US coins (except pennies and commemorative mintings) contained nickel and copper and no silver - a good example of debasing. As for paper currency, it’s just paper.
Under a private banking cartel’s control, it’s been misused, stolen, and corrupted the way New York Times columnist Floyd Norris suggests in his November 24 article headlined: “Another Crisis, Another Guarantee.” First the banks, then the auto companies, and who knows who’s next in line for theirs. “As the nation’s obligations rise into the trillions, at some point investors (and the public) may begin to question whether a government running huge deficits can also credibly promise that the dollar will not lose its value.” How can there be any faith and credit left when it’s vanishing and the Fed and Treasury operate like giant hedge funds.
It got UK-based Eclectica Asset Management chief investment officer, Hugh Hendry, concerned enough to say: “All (US) financials will be owned by the government in a year. I bet you. It’s not good,” but it’s coming. US taxpayers will be “paying for this for a long time,” and it’s deeply concerning considering the amount of money creation - with no end in sight as problems keep mounting and limitless amounts keep being thrown at them.
On November 25 the Financial Times associate editor, Wolfgang Munchau, also worries about the Fed’s “weapon of mass desperation” (so-called quantitative easing); focusing only on deflation and risking a currency crisis. He calls it a flawed, dangerous and shocking oversight - the possibility of “a mass flight out of dollar assets (at some point) and a large rise in US market interest rates, followed by a huge recession.”
A Bloomberg.com November 24 headline highlights the problem: “US Pledges Top $7.7 trillion to Ease Frozen Credit,” and it might as well have said there’s plenty more where that came from if needed. With another $800 committed to two new loan programs the total reached $8.5 trillion, according to Bloomberg or nearly 60% of US 2007 GDP of $14 trillion, and the numbers keep rising exponentially because the problems continue to mount.
Bloomberg puts it in perspective saying “the (current) commitment dwarfs (TARP and puts) Federal Reserve lending last week (at) 1900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis,” and with the added $800 billion it’s about 2100 times pre-crisis levels.
In addition, the Fed refuses to identify recipients of about $2 trillion of emergency handouts or what troubled assets (if any) it’s accepting as collateral. Call it lending or spending. They’re public tax dollars being spread around like confetti and debasing it all as a result.
The Free Lakota Bank
On November 21, this writer discussed how Lakotahs are treated in an article titled “Fate of Lakotahs Highlights America’s Failed Native American Policies.” On November 24, the following press release and follow-up information announced:
“People of Lakota Launch Private Bank for Only Silver and Gold Currencies.” All deposits are “liquid, meaning they can be withdrawn at any time in minted rounds. Some may confuse our economic system with isolationism….which it is not. Since we currently produce much more than we consume, we have the right to decide what medium of exchange to accept for our effort. And so we accept only value for value. Across our great land, over thousands of tribes and merchants participate in our system of trade. We invite others to trade with us and bring value back into our transactions.”
This is the world’s first non-reserve, non-fractional bank that accepts only silver and gold currencies for deposit. The Lakotas “invite people of any creed, faith or heritage to unite in an effort to reclaim control of wealth. It is our hope that other tribal nations and American citizens recognize the importance of silver and gold as currency and decide to mirror our system of honest trade.”
The bank states that it issues, circulates and accepts for deposit “only AOCS - Approved silver and gold currencies.” It calls paper not real money but “merely a promise to pay - a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Since we deal only in real money, we do not participate in any central bank looting schemes.” When corruption is rewarded and “honesty becom(es) self-sacrifice….you may know that your society is doomed.” Even as victims of adversity, Lakotas are working to prevent it.
End the Fed
Privatized money control is the single greatest threat to democratic freedom. As former lawyer, economist, academic, and Canadian prime minister (from 1935 - 1948) William Lyon Mackenzie King once said:
“Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile….Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes (its) laws….Usury once in control will wreck any nation,” and indeed it has, far more now than ever.
It worried Thomas Jefferson enough to call banking institutions “more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies” at a much simpler time in our history. The right to create and control money belongs to the people through their elected representatives. For the past 95 years, powerful bankers accountable to no one have had it. They effectively run the country (and own it), and unless We the People change things, we’ll continue to be victimized by economic tyranny and the eventual political kind that’s coming.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Kissinger Calls For New International System Out Of World Crises
Posted By aaron On December 19, 2008 @ 3:21 pm In Featured Stories
Says global necessities should foster an “age of compatible interests”
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
December 19, 2008
Bilderberg luminary Henry Kissinger has repeated his routine call for a new international political order, stating that global crises should be seen as an opportunity to move toward a borderless world where national interests are outweighed by global necessities.
Speaking with Charlie Rose earlier this week, Kissinger cited the chaos being wrought across the globe by the financial crisis and the spread of terrorism as an opportunity to bolster a new global order.
"I think that when the new administration assess the position in which it finds itself it will see a huge crisis and terrible problems, but I can see that it could see a glimmer in which it could construct an international system out of it." Kissinger said, referring to the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations.
The former National Security advisor and Secretary of State compared the current world climate to the period immediately following the second world war, which led to the creation and empowerment of global bodies such as the UN and NATO.
"If you look back to the end of the second world war, many people now think that the period between the end of 1945 and 1950 was in many ways the most creative period or one of the most creative periods of foreign policy, but it started with chaos and fear of Russian invasion of Europe and governments that were very weak." Kissinger stated.
"The new administration is really coming into office at a strange period in this sense," he continued. "It looks like a period of horrendous crisis all over the world. And we ourselves are in a severe crisis financially, but at the end of it our relative position in the world is actually stronger than it has been in the sense that Russia, China, India all have strong reasons to contribute to a quiet international environment because of the preoccupation they must have with their domestic affairs."
"They do not wish and have good reasons not to wish for an international atmosphere of crisis. So Paradoxically, this moment of crisis is also one of great opportunity." Kissinger commented.
Interviewer Charlie Rose, who has previously listened to Kissinger’s calls for a new world order, recognized the direction the conversation was taking and urged Kissinger to elaborate:
"When you talk about a new structure, I’m not sure, you’ve used the term new world order, what is it? Is it simply a world order that is defined by new interest and new mutuality of interest?" Rose asked.
"That’s certainly how you have to start. I know the view that you start by converting the whole world to our political philosophy. I don’t think that can be done in one or two terms of an administration. That is an historic process that has its own rhythm." Kissinger replied.
"There are so many elements in this world at the moment that can only be dealt with on a global basis, and that’s unique," Kissinger continued. "Proliferation, energy, environment, All of these issues necessitate a global approach, so you don’t have to invent an international order. So every country has to mitigate its pure national interests by the global necessities, or define it’s national interests by global necessities But it cannot push its own technically selfish interests only by throwing its own weight around." he stated.
Kissinger also related that he has been struck by how much the move toward a new global order has been enhanced by the recent crises.
"The jihadist crisis is bringing it home to everybody, that international affairs cannot be conducted entirely by drawing borders and defining international politics by who crosses what borders with organized military force." he said.
"This has now been reinforced by the financial crisis, which totally unexpectedly has spread around the world. It limits the resources that each country has for a foreign policy geared to an assertion of its own pure interests."
Kissinger claimed that the key players in international politics, India, China, Russia, America, Europe, should recognize they have parallel concerns and work together to forge what he termed an "age of compatible interests".
"I’m not saying that leaders will be up to all the opportunities that I may perceive but I think they can start moving in that direction and I’m actually fairly hopeful that we will be moving in that direction." Kissinger said.
Says global necessities should foster an “age of compatible interests”
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
December 19, 2008
Bilderberg luminary Henry Kissinger has repeated his routine call for a new international political order, stating that global crises should be seen as an opportunity to move toward a borderless world where national interests are outweighed by global necessities.
Speaking with Charlie Rose earlier this week, Kissinger cited the chaos being wrought across the globe by the financial crisis and the spread of terrorism as an opportunity to bolster a new global order.
"I think that when the new administration assess the position in which it finds itself it will see a huge crisis and terrible problems, but I can see that it could see a glimmer in which it could construct an international system out of it." Kissinger said, referring to the transition between the Bush and Obama administrations.
The former National Security advisor and Secretary of State compared the current world climate to the period immediately following the second world war, which led to the creation and empowerment of global bodies such as the UN and NATO.
"If you look back to the end of the second world war, many people now think that the period between the end of 1945 and 1950 was in many ways the most creative period or one of the most creative periods of foreign policy, but it started with chaos and fear of Russian invasion of Europe and governments that were very weak." Kissinger stated.
"The new administration is really coming into office at a strange period in this sense," he continued. "It looks like a period of horrendous crisis all over the world. And we ourselves are in a severe crisis financially, but at the end of it our relative position in the world is actually stronger than it has been in the sense that Russia, China, India all have strong reasons to contribute to a quiet international environment because of the preoccupation they must have with their domestic affairs."
"They do not wish and have good reasons not to wish for an international atmosphere of crisis. So Paradoxically, this moment of crisis is also one of great opportunity." Kissinger commented.
Interviewer Charlie Rose, who has previously listened to Kissinger’s calls for a new world order, recognized the direction the conversation was taking and urged Kissinger to elaborate:
"When you talk about a new structure, I’m not sure, you’ve used the term new world order, what is it? Is it simply a world order that is defined by new interest and new mutuality of interest?" Rose asked.
"That’s certainly how you have to start. I know the view that you start by converting the whole world to our political philosophy. I don’t think that can be done in one or two terms of an administration. That is an historic process that has its own rhythm." Kissinger replied.
"There are so many elements in this world at the moment that can only be dealt with on a global basis, and that’s unique," Kissinger continued. "Proliferation, energy, environment, All of these issues necessitate a global approach, so you don’t have to invent an international order. So every country has to mitigate its pure national interests by the global necessities, or define it’s national interests by global necessities But it cannot push its own technically selfish interests only by throwing its own weight around." he stated.
Kissinger also related that he has been struck by how much the move toward a new global order has been enhanced by the recent crises.
"The jihadist crisis is bringing it home to everybody, that international affairs cannot be conducted entirely by drawing borders and defining international politics by who crosses what borders with organized military force." he said.
"This has now been reinforced by the financial crisis, which totally unexpectedly has spread around the world. It limits the resources that each country has for a foreign policy geared to an assertion of its own pure interests."
Kissinger claimed that the key players in international politics, India, China, Russia, America, Europe, should recognize they have parallel concerns and work together to forge what he termed an "age of compatible interests".
"I’m not saying that leaders will be up to all the opportunities that I may perceive but I think they can start moving in that direction and I’m actually fairly hopeful that we will be moving in that direction." Kissinger said.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Smiley-Face Fascism ethics
Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is an eye-opener. We’ve been taught that fascism is a foreign-born ideology that spawned the political aspirations of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In reality, fascism has had a long history in America. The political philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are textbook examples of fascism. Do you find this hard to take? Here’s what Goldberg says on the subject:
Wilson revered [Otto von] Bismarck as much as Teddy Roosevelt or any of the other progressives did. . . . Bismarck’s motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving people the sort of thing they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle class dependent upon the state. The middle class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy but an alternative. . . . As Wilson put it, the essence of progressivism was that the individual “marry his interests to the state.”
The type of fascism that was being promoted by these early American “Progressives” is what we might call today “smiley-face-fascism” in that there are no jack-booted troops marching through the streets or calls for the suspension of habeas corpus. Bismarck’s social policies are very much like our own and those of anther fascist.
William L. Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes that Bismarck’s policies gradually made the German people “value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.”
Between 1883 and 1889 Bismark put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though it was organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. Sound familiar?
Hitler took full advantage of the German state of mind and Bismarck’s early progress in turning the nation into a model of socialist reform. Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.”
It was Hitler’s social security policies and promises that got him elected to office.
Hitler was not alone in his admiration of Bismarck and what he was able to accomplish. FDR borrowed Bismarck’s socialist agenda and created what is now known as the Social Security System. Bismarck said that “the State must take the matter in hand, since the State can most easily supply the requisite funds. It must provide them not as alms but in fulfillment of the workers’ right to look to the State where their own good will can achieve nothing more.”
Roosevelt and his admirers agreed. P. J. O’Brien, writing in Forward with Roosevelt, links Bismarck’s social policies with those of Roosevelt: “[The quotation by Bismarck] might have been lifted out of a speech by President Roosevelt in 1936, but the Iron Chancellor uttered it in 1871.”
Some people understood the implications of what Roosevelt was attempting to do. “Roosevelt was branded as an agent of the Reds [Communists] for voicing similar opinions.”
The State became the savior of the people, and the social policies of the New Deal became holy writ:
There’s a massive confusion at the core of our politics. Against all evidence, everyone expects government to guarantee economic growth and higher living standards. It can’t. Even the New Deal failed to pull the nation out of the Depression. World War II did that by boosting factory production. But the expectation of government as economic miracle worker is deeply entrenched, and politicians pander to it. For the past three decades, presidents have used the language of economics to rationalize deficits and, in the process, reward their supporters.
Wars, of course, are anomalies and should not be used as standards for economic policy. World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the war in Iraq have done much to hide the negative effects of government spending on the overall economy. Coupled with military spending, government social programs expanded beyond anything FDR could have imagined. Our nation, contrary to liberal social spenders, is not reaping the excesses of the ReaganBush years. We are reaping the whirlwind of the massive interventionism of New Deal liberalism that even Conservatives are afraid to criticize for fear of being thrown out of office
In Edward Bellamy’s widely read socialist fantasy novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887, a Rip Van Winkle character goes to sleep in the year 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to discover a changed world. His twentyfirst century companions explain to him how the utopia that astonishes him emerged in the 1930s from the hell of the 1880s. “That utopia involved the promise of security ‘from cradle to grave’—the first use of the that phrase we have come across—as well as detailed government planning, including compulsory national service by all persons over an extended period.”
Bellamy’s fiction became much of the world’s reality in twentiethcentury socialism. Bellamy believed that “human nature is naturally good and people are ‘godlike in aspirations . . . with divinest impulses of tenderness and selfsacrifice.’ Therefore, once external conditions are made acceptable, the Ten Commandments become ‘wellnigh obsolete,’ bringing us a ‘second birth of the human race.’”
Bellamy managed to mix the perversions of socialism, secularism, and New Age philosophy into one impossible world.
Goldberg’s book is a real eye-opener. It’s depressing to read, but it’s a needed antidote to politicians—on the left and right—who are appealing to the State to save us. He warns us not to fall for the religionists who are nothing more than Bismarck with a clerical collar.
This article was posted: December 16th, 2008
Footnotes:
[1] Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Random House, 2007), 96.
[2] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 96, note.
[3] Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 96, note.
[4] Quoted in P. J. O'Brien, Forward with Roosevelt (Chicago: John C. Winston Co., 1936), 84.
[5] O'Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85.
[6] O’Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85.
[7] Robert J. Samuelson, “Rhetoric Over Reality,” Newsweek (March 1, 1993), 31.
[8] Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 93.
[9] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regnery/Gateway, [1983] 1989), 190.
Wilson revered [Otto von] Bismarck as much as Teddy Roosevelt or any of the other progressives did. . . . Bismarck’s motive was to forestall demands for more democracy by giving people the sort of thing they might ask for at the polls. His top-down socialism was a Machiavellian masterstroke because it made the middle class dependent upon the state. The middle class took away from this the lesson that enlightened government was not the product of democracy but an alternative. . . . As Wilson put it, the essence of progressivism was that the individual “marry his interests to the state.”
The type of fascism that was being promoted by these early American “Progressives” is what we might call today “smiley-face-fascism” in that there are no jack-booted troops marching through the streets or calls for the suspension of habeas corpus. Bismarck’s social policies are very much like our own and those of anther fascist.
William L. Shirer, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, writes that Bismarck’s policies gradually made the German people “value security over political freedom and caused them to see in the State, however conservative, a benefactor and a protector.”
Between 1883 and 1889 Bismark put through a program for social security far beyond anything known in other countries at the time. It included compulsory insurance for workers against old age, sickness, accident and incapacity, and though it was organized by the State it was financed by employers and employees. Sound familiar?
Hitler took full advantage of the German state of mind and Bismarck’s early progress in turning the nation into a model of socialist reform. Hitler remarks in Mein Kampf, “I studied Bismarck’s socialist legislation in its intention, struggle and success.”
It was Hitler’s social security policies and promises that got him elected to office.
Hitler was not alone in his admiration of Bismarck and what he was able to accomplish. FDR borrowed Bismarck’s socialist agenda and created what is now known as the Social Security System. Bismarck said that “the State must take the matter in hand, since the State can most easily supply the requisite funds. It must provide them not as alms but in fulfillment of the workers’ right to look to the State where their own good will can achieve nothing more.”
Roosevelt and his admirers agreed. P. J. O’Brien, writing in Forward with Roosevelt, links Bismarck’s social policies with those of Roosevelt: “[The quotation by Bismarck] might have been lifted out of a speech by President Roosevelt in 1936, but the Iron Chancellor uttered it in 1871.”
Some people understood the implications of what Roosevelt was attempting to do. “Roosevelt was branded as an agent of the Reds [Communists] for voicing similar opinions.”
The State became the savior of the people, and the social policies of the New Deal became holy writ:
There’s a massive confusion at the core of our politics. Against all evidence, everyone expects government to guarantee economic growth and higher living standards. It can’t. Even the New Deal failed to pull the nation out of the Depression. World War II did that by boosting factory production. But the expectation of government as economic miracle worker is deeply entrenched, and politicians pander to it. For the past three decades, presidents have used the language of economics to rationalize deficits and, in the process, reward their supporters.
Wars, of course, are anomalies and should not be used as standards for economic policy. World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the war in Iraq have done much to hide the negative effects of government spending on the overall economy. Coupled with military spending, government social programs expanded beyond anything FDR could have imagined. Our nation, contrary to liberal social spenders, is not reaping the excesses of the ReaganBush years. We are reaping the whirlwind of the massive interventionism of New Deal liberalism that even Conservatives are afraid to criticize for fear of being thrown out of office
In Edward Bellamy’s widely read socialist fantasy novel Looking Backward, 2000–1887, a Rip Van Winkle character goes to sleep in the year 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 to discover a changed world. His twentyfirst century companions explain to him how the utopia that astonishes him emerged in the 1930s from the hell of the 1880s. “That utopia involved the promise of security ‘from cradle to grave’—the first use of the that phrase we have come across—as well as detailed government planning, including compulsory national service by all persons over an extended period.”
Bellamy’s fiction became much of the world’s reality in twentiethcentury socialism. Bellamy believed that “human nature is naturally good and people are ‘godlike in aspirations . . . with divinest impulses of tenderness and selfsacrifice.’ Therefore, once external conditions are made acceptable, the Ten Commandments become ‘wellnigh obsolete,’ bringing us a ‘second birth of the human race.’”
Bellamy managed to mix the perversions of socialism, secularism, and New Age philosophy into one impossible world.
Goldberg’s book is a real eye-opener. It’s depressing to read, but it’s a needed antidote to politicians—on the left and right—who are appealing to the State to save us. He warns us not to fall for the religionists who are nothing more than Bismarck with a clerical collar.
This article was posted: December 16th, 2008
Footnotes:
[1] Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Random House, 2007), 96.
[2] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 96, note.
[3] Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 96, note.
[4] Quoted in P. J. O'Brien, Forward with Roosevelt (Chicago: John C. Winston Co., 1936), 84.
[5] O'Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85.
[6] O’Brien, Forward with Roosevelt, 85.
[7] Robert J. Samuelson, “Rhetoric Over Reality,” Newsweek (March 1, 1993), 31.
[8] Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 93.
[9] Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Washington, DC: Regnery/Gateway, [1983] 1989), 190.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Sunday, December 14, 2008
8 really, really scary predictions
Dow 4,000. Food shortages. A bubble in Treasury notes. Fortune spoke to eight of the market's sharpest thinkers and what they had to say about the future is frightening.
Nouriel Roubini
Known as Dr. Doom, the NYU economics professor saw the mortgage-related meltdown coming.
We are in the middle of a very severe recession that's going to continue through all of 2009 - the worst U.S. recession in the past 50 years. It's the bursting of a huge leveraged-up credit bubble. There's no going back, and there is no bottom to it. It was excessive in everything from subprime to prime, from credit cards to student loans, from corporate bonds to muni bonds. You name it. And it's all reversing right now in a very, very massive way. At this point it's not just a U.S. recession. All of the advanced economies are at the beginning of a hard landing. And emerging markets, beginning with China, are in a severe slowdown. So we're having a global recession and it's becoming worse.
Things are going to be awful for everyday people. U.S. GDP growth is going to be negative through the end of 2009. And the recovery in 2010 and 2011, if there is one, is going to be so weak - with a growth rate of 1% to 1.5% - that it's going to feel like a recession. I see the unemployment rate peaking at around 9% by 2010. The value of homes has already fallen 25%. In my view, home prices are going to fall by another 15% before bottoming out in 2010.
For the next 12 months I would stay away from risky assets. I would stay away from the stock market. I would stay away from commodities. I would stay away from credit, both high-yield and high-grade. I would stay in cash or cashlike instruments such as short-term or longer-term government bonds. It's better to stay in things with low returns rather than to lose 50% of your wealth. You should preserve capital. It'll be hard and challenging enough. I wish I could be more cheerful, but I was right a year ago, and I think I'll be right this year too.
Nouriel Roubini
Known as Dr. Doom, the NYU economics professor saw the mortgage-related meltdown coming.
We are in the middle of a very severe recession that's going to continue through all of 2009 - the worst U.S. recession in the past 50 years. It's the bursting of a huge leveraged-up credit bubble. There's no going back, and there is no bottom to it. It was excessive in everything from subprime to prime, from credit cards to student loans, from corporate bonds to muni bonds. You name it. And it's all reversing right now in a very, very massive way. At this point it's not just a U.S. recession. All of the advanced economies are at the beginning of a hard landing. And emerging markets, beginning with China, are in a severe slowdown. So we're having a global recession and it's becoming worse.
Things are going to be awful for everyday people. U.S. GDP growth is going to be negative through the end of 2009. And the recovery in 2010 and 2011, if there is one, is going to be so weak - with a growth rate of 1% to 1.5% - that it's going to feel like a recession. I see the unemployment rate peaking at around 9% by 2010. The value of homes has already fallen 25%. In my view, home prices are going to fall by another 15% before bottoming out in 2010.
For the next 12 months I would stay away from risky assets. I would stay away from the stock market. I would stay away from commodities. I would stay away from credit, both high-yield and high-grade. I would stay in cash or cashlike instruments such as short-term or longer-term government bonds. It's better to stay in things with low returns rather than to lose 50% of your wealth. You should preserve capital. It'll be hard and challenging enough. I wish I could be more cheerful, but I was right a year ago, and I think I'll be right this year too.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Swat Team conducts food raid in rural Ohio
December 4, 2008
See also Community Policing & Training an army of world servers
Note: The report below was not written by me (Berit), but I did add these quotes:
"Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement. The 1980s and 1990s have seen marked changes in the number of state and local paramilitary units, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament." --Cato Institute (more information below)
"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." --Barack Obama, "Obama's Civilian National Security Force"
"At the World Food Programme we have recognized what a valuable tool food aid can be in changing behaviour. In so many poorer countries food is money, food is power....." --Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the World Food Program, "The UN Plan for Food and Land"
On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM. The team was aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another team, a “good cop” team that tried to befriend the family. The Stowers family has run a very large, well-known food cooperative called Manna Storehouse on the western side of the greater Cleveland area for many years. [Update]
There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of them identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly suspicious-looking. Agents began rifling through all of the family’s possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family’s personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional rights.
Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for a 3rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the nation’s private food supply.
This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control, hot-to-trot ODA agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario. Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat unregulated and unmonitored food.
One blogger familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:
“Interestingly, I believe they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an undercover ODA official came to their little store and claimed to have a sick father wanting to join the co-op. Both the owner and her daughter-in-law had a horrible feeling about the man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op and notified him by certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be part of it. They refused and gave him names of other businesses and health food stores closer to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there yesterday as part of the raid.”
The same blog also noted that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has been chastised by the courts in several previous instances for its aggression, including trying to entrap an Amish man in a raw milk “sale,” which backfired when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal interpretation of “give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away” (Matthew 5:42)
The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef in an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down by a county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College’s student food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about eating organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had joined the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in bulk from the national organic food distributor United, which services buying clubs across the nation. The sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently contacted the Ohio Department of Agriculture. After the first contact by state ODA officials, Manna Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter requesting assistance and guidelines for complying with the law. This letter was never answered. Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate the coop, as described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team showed up!
Food cooperatives and buying clubs have been an active part of the American landscape for over a generation. In the 1970s, with the rise of the organic food industry (a direct outgrowth of the hippie back-to-nature movement) food coops started up all over the country. These were groups of people who freely associated for the purpose of combining their buying power so that they could order organic food items in bulk and case lots. Anyone who was part of these coops in the early era will remember the messy breakdown of 35 pounds of peanut butter and 5 gallon drums of honey!
These buying clubs have persisted and flourished over the years due to their ability to purchase high quality organic foods at reduced prices in bulk quantities. Most cooperatives have participated greatly in the local agrarian economies, supporting neighborhood organic farmers with purchases of produce, eggs, chickens, etc. The groups also purchase food from a number of different local, regional and national distributors, many of them family-based businesses who truck the food themselves. Some of these food cooperatives have become large enough to set up mini-storefront operations where members can drop in and purchase items leftover from case lot sales. Manna Storehouse had established itself in such a manner, using a small enclosed breezeway attached to their home. It was a folksy place with old wooden floors where coop members stopped by to chat and snack on bags of organic corn chips.
The state of Ohio boasts the second largest Amish population in the country. Many of the Amish live on acreages where they raise their own food, not unlike Manna Storehouse, and sell off the extras to neighbors and church members. There is a sense of foreboding that this state crackdown on a longstanding, reputable food cooperative operation could adversely impact the peaceful agrarian way of life not only for the Amish, but homeschoolers and those families living off the land on rural acreages. It raises the disturbing possibility that it could become a crime to raise your own food, buy eggs from the farmer down the road, or butcher your own chickens for family and friends – bustling activities that routinely take place in backwater America.
The freedom to purchase food directly form the source is increasingly under attack. For those who have food allergies and chemical intolerances, or who are on special medical diets, this is becoming a serious health issue. Will Americans retain the right to purchase food that is uncontaminated by pesticides, herbicides, allergens, additives, dyes, preservatives, MSG, GMOs, radiation, etc.? The melamine scare from China underscores the increasingly inferior and suspect quality of modern processed institutional foods. One blog, commenting on the bizarre and troubling Manna Storehouse situation, observed that:
“No one is saying exactly why. At the same time the FDA says it is safe to eat the 40% of tainted beef found in Costco's and Sam's all over the nation. These farm raids are very common now. Every farmer needs to fully equipped [sic] for the possibility of it happening to them. The Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund was created just for this purpose. The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that will put all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or milk will only be allowed in commercial farms, even the organic ones.” December 3, 2008 7:09 PM
"The police paramilitary units also conduct training exercises with active duty Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. State and local police departments are increasingly accepting the military as a model for their behavior and outlook.... The problem is that the mindset of the soldier is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer. Police officers confront not an 'enemy' but individuals who are protected by the Bill of Rights. Confusing the police function with the military function can lead to dangerous and unintended consequences...." (Diane Cecilia Weber, Cato Institute, "Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in Police Departments")
Seems U.S. forgot to tell Navy Seabee Chad Stowers the Real War Is being fought here...and he’s the enemy: "When officers from the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio arrived last Monday at the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in LaGrange with weapons drawn and trained on Katie Stowers and her children, along with her in-laws, there was one member of the family missing. Katie’s husband, Chad, is a U.S. Navy Seabee, helping in construction projects in the midst of combat in Iraq. He’s been there, separated from his family, for the last five months, supposedly protecting our rights from abuse—the sort of abuse that appears to be taking place on an ever-more-frequent basis at farms and food outlets around the country."
Since globalist leaders plan to control food and supplements, water, physical and mental health, energy, and "human settlements" – and as the unthinkable global standards and surveillance system are being implemented -- they will obviously need paramilitary forces to control the unhappy masses.
The Stowers family has been financially devastated by this atrocity. They have not broken any law -- no charges have been filed -- yet they have lost all of their own personal food for the coming year. If you would like to help them, the contact information is posted on their website: www.mannastorehouse.com
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid? ...
Though an army may encamp against me, My heart shall not fear;
Though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident."
Psalm 27:1-2
See also Community Policing & Training an army of world servers
Note: The report below was not written by me (Berit), but I did add these quotes:
"Over the past 20 years Congress has encouraged the U.S. military to supply intelligence, equipment, and training to civilian police. That encouragement has spawned a culture of paramilitarism in American law enforcement. The 1980s and 1990s have seen marked changes in the number of state and local paramilitary units, in their mission and deployment, and in their tactical armament." --Cato Institute (more information below)
"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." --Barack Obama, "Obama's Civilian National Security Force"
"At the World Food Programme we have recognized what a valuable tool food aid can be in changing behaviour. In so many poorer countries food is money, food is power....." --Catherine Bertini, Executive Director of the World Food Program, "The UN Plan for Food and Land"
On Monday, December 1, a SWAT team with semi-automatic rifles entered the private home of the Stowers family in LaGrange, Ohio, herded the family onto the couches in the living room, and kept guns trained on parents, children, infants and toddlers, from approximately 11 AM to 8 PM. The team was aggressive and belligerent. The children were quite traumatized. At some point, the “bad cop” SWAT team was relieved by another team, a “good cop” team that tried to befriend the family. The Stowers family has run a very large, well-known food cooperative called Manna Storehouse on the western side of the greater Cleveland area for many years. [Update]
There were agents from the Department of Agriculture present, one of them identified as Bill Lesho. The search warrant is reportedly suspicious-looking. Agents began rifling through all of the family’s possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family’s personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional rights.
Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for a 3rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the nation’s private food supply.
This same type of abusive search and seizure was reported by those innocents who fell victim to oppressive federal drug laws passed in the 1990s. The present circumstance raises the obvious question: is there some rabid new interpretation of an existing drug law that considers food a controlled substance worthy of a nasty SWAT operation? Or worse, is there a previously unrecognized provision(s) pertaining to food in the Homeland Security measures? Some have suggested that it was merely an out-of-control, hot-to-trot ODA agent, and, if so, this would be a best-case scenario. Anything else might spell the beginning of the end for the freedom to eat unregulated and unmonitored food.
One blogger familiar with the Ohio situation has reported that:
“Interestingly, I believe they [Manna Storehouse] said a month or so ago, an undercover ODA official came to their little store and claimed to have a sick father wanting to join the co-op. Both the owner and her daughter-in-law had a horrible feeling about the man, and decided not to allow him into the co-op and notified him by certified mail. He came back to the co-op demanding to be part of it. They refused and gave him names of other businesses and health food stores closer to his home. Not coincidentally, this man was there yesterday as part of the raid.”
The same blog also noted that the Ohio Department of Agriculture has been chastised by the courts in several previous instances for its aggression, including trying to entrap an Amish man in a raw milk “sale,” which backfired when it became known that the Amish believe in a literal interpretation of “give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away” (Matthew 5:42)
The issue appears to be the discovery of a bit of non-institutional beef in an Oberlin College food service freezer a year ago that was tracked down by a county sanitation official to Manna Storehouse. Oberlin College’s student food coop is widely known for its strident ideological stance about eating organic foods. It seems that the Oberlin student food cooperative had joined the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in order to buy organic foods in bulk from the national organic food distributor United, which services buying clubs across the nation. The sanitation official, James Boddy, evidently contacted the Ohio Department of Agriculture. After the first contact by state ODA officials, Manna Storehouse reportedly wrote them a letter requesting assistance and guidelines for complying with the law. This letter was never answered. Rather, the ODA agent tried several times to infiltrate the coop, as described above. When his attempts failed, the SWAT team showed up!
Food cooperatives and buying clubs have been an active part of the American landscape for over a generation. In the 1970s, with the rise of the organic food industry (a direct outgrowth of the hippie back-to-nature movement) food coops started up all over the country. These were groups of people who freely associated for the purpose of combining their buying power so that they could order organic food items in bulk and case lots. Anyone who was part of these coops in the early era will remember the messy breakdown of 35 pounds of peanut butter and 5 gallon drums of honey!
These buying clubs have persisted and flourished over the years due to their ability to purchase high quality organic foods at reduced prices in bulk quantities. Most cooperatives have participated greatly in the local agrarian economies, supporting neighborhood organic farmers with purchases of produce, eggs, chickens, etc. The groups also purchase food from a number of different local, regional and national distributors, many of them family-based businesses who truck the food themselves. Some of these food cooperatives have become large enough to set up mini-storefront operations where members can drop in and purchase items leftover from case lot sales. Manna Storehouse had established itself in such a manner, using a small enclosed breezeway attached to their home. It was a folksy place with old wooden floors where coop members stopped by to chat and snack on bags of organic corn chips.
The state of Ohio boasts the second largest Amish population in the country. Many of the Amish live on acreages where they raise their own food, not unlike Manna Storehouse, and sell off the extras to neighbors and church members. There is a sense of foreboding that this state crackdown on a longstanding, reputable food cooperative operation could adversely impact the peaceful agrarian way of life not only for the Amish, but homeschoolers and those families living off the land on rural acreages. It raises the disturbing possibility that it could become a crime to raise your own food, buy eggs from the farmer down the road, or butcher your own chickens for family and friends – bustling activities that routinely take place in backwater America.
The freedom to purchase food directly form the source is increasingly under attack. For those who have food allergies and chemical intolerances, or who are on special medical diets, this is becoming a serious health issue. Will Americans retain the right to purchase food that is uncontaminated by pesticides, herbicides, allergens, additives, dyes, preservatives, MSG, GMOs, radiation, etc.? The melamine scare from China underscores the increasingly inferior and suspect quality of modern processed institutional foods. One blog, commenting on the bizarre and troubling Manna Storehouse situation, observed that:
“No one is saying exactly why. At the same time the FDA says it is safe to eat the 40% of tainted beef found in Costco's and Sam's all over the nation. These farm raids are very common now. Every farmer needs to fully equipped [sic] for the possibility of it happening to them. The Farmer To Consumer Legal Defense Fund was created just for this purpose. The USDA just released their plans to put a law into action that will put all small farmers out of business. Animals for the sale of meat or milk will only be allowed in commercial farms, even the organic ones.” December 3, 2008 7:09 PM
"The police paramilitary units also conduct training exercises with active duty Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. State and local police departments are increasingly accepting the military as a model for their behavior and outlook.... The problem is that the mindset of the soldier is simply not appropriate for the civilian police officer. Police officers confront not an 'enemy' but individuals who are protected by the Bill of Rights. Confusing the police function with the military function can lead to dangerous and unintended consequences...." (Diane Cecilia Weber, Cato Institute, "Warrior Cops: The Ominous Growth of Paramilitarism in Police Departments")
Seems U.S. forgot to tell Navy Seabee Chad Stowers the Real War Is being fought here...and he’s the enemy: "When officers from the Lorain County Sheriff’s Office in Ohio arrived last Monday at the Manna Storehouse food cooperative in LaGrange with weapons drawn and trained on Katie Stowers and her children, along with her in-laws, there was one member of the family missing. Katie’s husband, Chad, is a U.S. Navy Seabee, helping in construction projects in the midst of combat in Iraq. He’s been there, separated from his family, for the last five months, supposedly protecting our rights from abuse—the sort of abuse that appears to be taking place on an ever-more-frequent basis at farms and food outlets around the country."
Since globalist leaders plan to control food and supplements, water, physical and mental health, energy, and "human settlements" – and as the unthinkable global standards and surveillance system are being implemented -- they will obviously need paramilitary forces to control the unhappy masses.
The Stowers family has been financially devastated by this atrocity. They have not broken any law -- no charges have been filed -- yet they have lost all of their own personal food for the coming year. If you would like to help them, the contact information is posted on their website: www.mannastorehouse.com
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid? ...
Though an army may encamp against me, My heart shall not fear;
Though war should rise against me, in this I will be confident."
Psalm 27:1-2
Blair says that Palestinians and Israelis Reached a Secret Agreement
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has stated publicly that Palestinian and Israeli negotiators have reached a secret agreement.
In an interview with the leading Palestinian daily Al Quds, Blair stated that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have resolved differences between them, although he was careful to note that this agreement has not been signed. When pressed by the Palestinian reporter about the failure of the Annapolis process which began last year, Blair stated the following: "The continuous meetings between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and [Israeli leader] Olmert as well as the continuous negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli teams has produced an agreement." Blair said that he respects the choice of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders not to divulge details and therefore he would not give any further details.
Tony Blair who represents the Quartet Committee for Peace in the Middle East praised the courage of US President George Bush for his public pursuit for an agreement on a Palestinian state before the end of his term. Leaders of the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority are in the last months of their terms in office. President Bush's last days in office is January 20th, Olmert has resigned and new elections are slated for February 2009, and the legal term of Mahmoud Abbas is due to expire January 9th. Blair praised President Elect Obama saying that he worked closely with General Jones who Obama choose as national security advisor.
In an interview with the leading Palestinian daily Al Quds, Blair stated that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have resolved differences between them, although he was careful to note that this agreement has not been signed. When pressed by the Palestinian reporter about the failure of the Annapolis process which began last year, Blair stated the following: "The continuous meetings between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and [Israeli leader] Olmert as well as the continuous negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli teams has produced an agreement." Blair said that he respects the choice of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders not to divulge details and therefore he would not give any further details.
Tony Blair who represents the Quartet Committee for Peace in the Middle East praised the courage of US President George Bush for his public pursuit for an agreement on a Palestinian state before the end of his term. Leaders of the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority are in the last months of their terms in office. President Bush's last days in office is January 20th, Olmert has resigned and new elections are slated for February 2009, and the legal term of Mahmoud Abbas is due to expire January 9th. Blair praised President Elect Obama saying that he worked closely with General Jones who Obama choose as national security advisor.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Fed Pledges Top $7.4 Trillion to Ease Frozen Credit (Update1)
By Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.
“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”
Too Big to Fail
Bloomberg News tabulated data from the Fed, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and interviewed regulatory officials, economists and academic researchers to gauge the full extent of the government’s rescue effort.
The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.
William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the two programs are unlikely to lose money. The bigger risk comes from rescuing companies perceived as “too big to fail,” he said.
The government committed $29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns Cos. by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and $122.8 billion in addition to TARP allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group Inc., once the world’s largest insurer. Yesterday, Citigroup Inc. received $306 billion of government guarantees for troubled mortgages and toxic assets. The Treasury Department also will inject $20 billion into the bank after its stock fell 60 percent last week.
“No question there is some credit risk there,” Poole said.
Exposure
Congressman Darrell Issa, a California Republican on the Financial Services Committee, said risk is lurking in the programs that Poole thinks are safe.
“The thing that people don’t understand is it’s not how likely that the exposure becomes a reality, but what if it does?” Issa said. “There’s no transparency to it so who’s to say they’re right?”
The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world’s companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average through Friday is down 38 percent since the beginning of the year and 43 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500 fell 45 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 49 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The Nikkei 225 Index has fallen 46 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 57 percent from its most recent peak of 18,261.98 on July 9, 2007. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is down 78 percent, to $53.31, on Friday from its peak of $247.92 on Oct. 31, 2007, and 75 percent this year.
‘Snookered’
Regulators hope the rescue will contain the damage and keep banks providing the credit that is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.
Most of the spending programs are run out of the New York Fed, whose president, Timothy Geithner, is said to be President- elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Treasury Secretary.
The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There’s a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it’s all going to fall on the taxpayer.”
New Deal
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government’s current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.
The 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler consisted of bond guarantees, adjusted for inflation, of $4.2 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report.
The commitment of public money is appropriate to the peril, said Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. and a former economist at the New York Fed. U.S. financial firms have taken writedowns and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to Bloomberg data.
“This is the worst capital markets crisis in modern history,” Harris said. “So you have the biggest intervention in modern history.”
Federal Lawsuit
Bloomberg has requested details of Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral.
Collateral is an asset pledged to a lender in the event a loan payment isn’t made.
“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”
The Fed should account for the collateral it takes in exchange for loans to banks, said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Chicago-based Northern Trust Co. and a former research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
“There is a lack of transparency here and, given that the Fed is taking on a huge amount of credit risk now, it would seem to me as a taxpayer there should be more transparency,” Kasriel said.
$4.4 Trillion
Bernanke’s Fed is responsible for $4.4 trillion of pledges, or 60 percent of the total commitment of $7.4 trillion, based on data compiled by Bloomberg concerning U.S. bailout steps started a year ago.
“Too often the public is focused on the wrong piece of that number, the $700 billion that Congress approved,” said J.D. Foster, a former staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The other areas are quite a bit larger.”
The Fed’s rescue attempts began last December with the creation of the Term Auction Facility to allow lending to dealers for collateral. After Bear Stearns’s collapse in March, the central bank started making direct loans to securities firms at the same discount rate it charges commercial banks, which take customer deposits.
In the three years before the crisis, such average weekly borrowing by banks was $48 million, according to the central bank. Last week it was $91.5 billion.
Lehman Failure
The failure of a second securities firm, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., in September, led to the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, or MMIFF. The two programs, which have pledged $2.3 trillion, are designed to restore calm in the money markets, which deal in certificates of deposit, commercial paper and Treasury bills.
“Money markets seized up after Lehman failed,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in New York and a former aide to Fed chief Paul Volcker. “Lehman failing made a lot of subsequent actions necessary.”
The FDIC, chaired by Sheila Bair, is contributing 20 percent of total rescue commitments. The FDIC’s $1.4 trillion in guarantees will amount to a bank subsidy of as much as $54 billion over three years, or $18 billion a year, because borrowers will pay a lower interest rate than they would on the open market, according to Raghu Sundurum and Viral Acharya of New York University and the London Business School.
Bank Subsidy
Congress and the Treasury have ponied up $892 billion in TARP and other funding, or 12 percent.
The Federal Housing Administration, overseen by Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steven Preston, was given the authority to guarantee $300 billion of mortgages, or about 4 percent of the total commitment, with its Hope for Homeowners program, designed to keep distressed borrowers from foreclosure.
Most of the federal guarantees reduce interest rates on loans to banks and securities firms, which would create a subsidy of at least $6.6 billion annually for the financial industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg comparing rates charged by the Fed against market interest currently paid by banks.
Not included in the calculation of pledged funds is an FDIC proposal to prevent foreclosures by guaranteeing modifications on $444 billion in mortgages at an expected cost of $24.4 billion to be paid from the TARP, according to FDIC spokesman David Barr. The Treasury Department hasn’t approved the program.
Automakers
Bernanke and Paulson, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, have also promised as much as $200 billion to shore up nationalized mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The FDIC arranged for $139 billion in loan guarantees for General Electric Co.’s finance unit.
The tally doesn’t include money to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC. Obama has said he favors financial assistance to keep them from collapse.
Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee Nov. 18 that the $250 billion already allocated to banks through the TARP is an investment, not an expenditure.
“I think it would be extraordinarily unusual if the government did not get that money back and more,” Paulson said.
‘We Haircut It’
In his Nov. 18 testimony, Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee that the central bank wouldn’t lose money.
“We take collateral, we haircut it, it is a short-term loan, it is very safe, we have never lost a penny in these various lending programs,” he said.
A haircut refers to the practice of lending less money than the collateral’s current market value.
Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC.
“If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.”
“Mark to market” means adjusting the value of an asset, such as a mortgage-backed security, to reflect current prices.
Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.
‘Wells Fargo Notice’
Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said.
“The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said.
The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said he was angry that banks used the money for acquisitions.
“The only purpose for this money is to lend,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “It’s not for dividends, it’s not for purchases of new banks, it’s not for bonuses. There better be a showing of increased lending roughly in the amount of the capital infusions” or Congress may not approve the second half of the TARP money.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net; Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.n
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.
When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.
“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.”
Too Big to Fail
Bloomberg News tabulated data from the Fed, Treasury and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and interviewed regulatory officials, economists and academic researchers to gauge the full extent of the government’s rescue effort.
The bailout includes a Fed program to buy as much as $2.4 trillion in short-term notes, called commercial paper, that companies use to pay bills, begun Oct. 27, and $1.4 trillion from the FDIC to guarantee bank-to-bank loans, started Oct. 14.
William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said the two programs are unlikely to lose money. The bigger risk comes from rescuing companies perceived as “too big to fail,” he said.
The government committed $29 billion to help engineer the takeover in March of Bear Stearns Cos. by New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. and $122.8 billion in addition to TARP allocations to bail out New York-based American International Group Inc., once the world’s largest insurer. Yesterday, Citigroup Inc. received $306 billion of government guarantees for troubled mortgages and toxic assets. The Treasury Department also will inject $20 billion into the bank after its stock fell 60 percent last week.
“No question there is some credit risk there,” Poole said.
Exposure
Congressman Darrell Issa, a California Republican on the Financial Services Committee, said risk is lurking in the programs that Poole thinks are safe.
“The thing that people don’t understand is it’s not how likely that the exposure becomes a reality, but what if it does?” Issa said. “There’s no transparency to it so who’s to say they’re right?”
The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $23 trillion, or 38 percent, of the value of the world’s companies and brought down three of the biggest Wall Street firms.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average through Friday is down 38 percent since the beginning of the year and 43 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The S&P 500 fell 45 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 49 percent from its peak on Oct. 9, 2007. The Nikkei 225 Index has fallen 46 percent from the beginning of the year through Friday and 57 percent from its most recent peak of 18,261.98 on July 9, 2007. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is down 78 percent, to $53.31, on Friday from its peak of $247.92 on Oct. 31, 2007, and 75 percent this year.
‘Snookered’
Regulators hope the rescue will contain the damage and keep banks providing the credit that is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy.
Most of the spending programs are run out of the New York Fed, whose president, Timothy Geithner, is said to be President- elect Barack Obama’s choice to be Treasury Secretary.
The money that’s been pledged is equivalent to $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. It’s nine times what the U.S. has spent so far on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. It could pay off more than half the country’s mortgages.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Bob Eisenbeis, chief monetary economist at Vineland, New Jersey-based Cumberland Advisors Inc. and an economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years until January. “The backlash has begun already. Congress is taking a lot of hits from their constituents because they got snookered on the TARP big time. There’s a lot of supposedly smart people who look to be totally incompetent and it’s all going to fall on the taxpayer.”
New Deal
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, when almost 10,000 banks failed and there was no mechanism to bolster them with cash, is the only rival to the government’s current response. The savings and loan bailout of the 1990s cost $209.5 billion in inflation-adjusted numbers, of which $173 billion came from taxpayers, according to a July 1996 report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.
The 1979 U.S. government bailout of Chrysler consisted of bond guarantees, adjusted for inflation, of $4.2 billion, according to a Heritage Foundation report.
The commitment of public money is appropriate to the peril, said Ethan Harris, co-head of U.S. economic research at Barclays Capital Inc. and a former economist at the New York Fed. U.S. financial firms have taken writedowns and losses of $666.1 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to Bloomberg data.
“This is the worst capital markets crisis in modern history,” Harris said. “So you have the biggest intervention in modern history.”
Federal Lawsuit
Bloomberg has requested details of Fed lending under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act and filed a federal lawsuit against the central bank Nov. 7 seeking to force disclosure of borrower banks and their collateral.
Collateral is an asset pledged to a lender in the event a loan payment isn’t made.
“Some have asked us to reveal the names of the banks that are borrowing, how much they are borrowing, what collateral they are posting,” Bernanke said Nov. 18 to the House Financial Services Committee. “We think that’s counterproductive.”
The Fed should account for the collateral it takes in exchange for loans to banks, said Paul Kasriel, chief economist at Chicago-based Northern Trust Co. and a former research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
“There is a lack of transparency here and, given that the Fed is taking on a huge amount of credit risk now, it would seem to me as a taxpayer there should be more transparency,” Kasriel said.
$4.4 Trillion
Bernanke’s Fed is responsible for $4.4 trillion of pledges, or 60 percent of the total commitment of $7.4 trillion, based on data compiled by Bloomberg concerning U.S. bailout steps started a year ago.
“Too often the public is focused on the wrong piece of that number, the $700 billion that Congress approved,” said J.D. Foster, a former staff member of the Council of Economic Advisers who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “The other areas are quite a bit larger.”
The Fed’s rescue attempts began last December with the creation of the Term Auction Facility to allow lending to dealers for collateral. After Bear Stearns’s collapse in March, the central bank started making direct loans to securities firms at the same discount rate it charges commercial banks, which take customer deposits.
In the three years before the crisis, such average weekly borrowing by banks was $48 million, according to the central bank. Last week it was $91.5 billion.
Lehman Failure
The failure of a second securities firm, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., in September, led to the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility and the Money Market Investor Funding Facility, or MMIFF. The two programs, which have pledged $2.3 trillion, are designed to restore calm in the money markets, which deal in certificates of deposit, commercial paper and Treasury bills.
“Money markets seized up after Lehman failed,” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in New York and a former aide to Fed chief Paul Volcker. “Lehman failing made a lot of subsequent actions necessary.”
The FDIC, chaired by Sheila Bair, is contributing 20 percent of total rescue commitments. The FDIC’s $1.4 trillion in guarantees will amount to a bank subsidy of as much as $54 billion over three years, or $18 billion a year, because borrowers will pay a lower interest rate than they would on the open market, according to Raghu Sundurum and Viral Acharya of New York University and the London Business School.
Bank Subsidy
Congress and the Treasury have ponied up $892 billion in TARP and other funding, or 12 percent.
The Federal Housing Administration, overseen by Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Steven Preston, was given the authority to guarantee $300 billion of mortgages, or about 4 percent of the total commitment, with its Hope for Homeowners program, designed to keep distressed borrowers from foreclosure.
Most of the federal guarantees reduce interest rates on loans to banks and securities firms, which would create a subsidy of at least $6.6 billion annually for the financial industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg comparing rates charged by the Fed against market interest currently paid by banks.
Not included in the calculation of pledged funds is an FDIC proposal to prevent foreclosures by guaranteeing modifications on $444 billion in mortgages at an expected cost of $24.4 billion to be paid from the TARP, according to FDIC spokesman David Barr. The Treasury Department hasn’t approved the program.
Automakers
Bernanke and Paulson, former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, have also promised as much as $200 billion to shore up nationalized mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The FDIC arranged for $139 billion in loan guarantees for General Electric Co.’s finance unit.
The tally doesn’t include money to General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC. Obama has said he favors financial assistance to keep them from collapse.
Paulson told the House Financial Services Committee Nov. 18 that the $250 billion already allocated to banks through the TARP is an investment, not an expenditure.
“I think it would be extraordinarily unusual if the government did not get that money back and more,” Paulson said.
‘We Haircut It’
In his Nov. 18 testimony, Bernanke told the House Financial Services Committee that the central bank wouldn’t lose money.
“We take collateral, we haircut it, it is a short-term loan, it is very safe, we have never lost a penny in these various lending programs,” he said.
A haircut refers to the practice of lending less money than the collateral’s current market value.
Requiring the Fed to disclose loan recipients might set off panic, said David Tobin, principal of New York-based loan-sale consultants and investment bank Mission Capital Advisors LLC.
“If you mark to market today, the banking system is bankrupt,” Tobin said. “So what do you do? You try to keep it going as best you can.”
“Mark to market” means adjusting the value of an asset, such as a mortgage-backed security, to reflect current prices.
Some of the bailout assistance could come from tax breaks in the future. The Treasury Department changed the tax code on Sept. 30 to allow banks to expand the deductions on the losses banks they were buying, according to Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers tax and accounting analyst who teaches at Columbia University Business School in New York.
‘Wells Fargo Notice’
Wells Fargo & Co., which is buying Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia Corp., will be able to deduct $22 billion, Willens said. Adding in other banks, the code change will cost $29 billion, he said.
“The rule is now popularly known among tax lawyers as the ‘Wells Fargo Notice,’” Willens said.
The regulation was changed to make it easier for healthy banks to buy troubled ones, said Treasury Department spokesman Andrew DeSouza.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said he was angry that banks used the money for acquisitions.
“The only purpose for this money is to lend,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “It’s not for dividends, it’s not for purchases of new banks, it’s not for bonuses. There better be a showing of increased lending roughly in the amount of the capital infusions” or Congress may not approve the second half of the TARP money.
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net; Bob Ivry in New York at bivry@bloomberg.n
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Food scarcity hits 11 pct of U.S. households-gov't
Reuters, Monday November 17 2008
By Charles Abbott
WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Some 36.2 million Americans struggle to get enough food to eat and one-third of them go hungry from time to time, the government said on Monday in a survey that was taken before this year's economic downturn.
Antihunger groups said hunger has worsened since the government's survey of 45,600 households at the end of 2007. They want Congress to increase food stamp benefits, at least temporarily, in an economic stimulus package this week.
Overall, 11.1 percent of U.S. households, or 36.2 million people, were food insecure during 2007, up from 10.9 percent, or 35.5 million people in 2006, the Agriculture Department said.
Food insecurity is defined as having difficulty obtaining enough food to meet basic nutritional needs.
USDA said 4.1 percent of households, or 11.9 million people -- classified as "very low food security" -- had to cut back on meals or skip them occasionally. The rate has climbed steadily for a decade from 3.7 percent and 3.8 million people in 1998.
"That's where the bigger growth is coming from," said Jim Weill of the Food Research and Action Center. He said U.S. poverty data and other reports show a rising portion of people among the worst-off Americans.
With the Thanksgiving holiday next week, FRAC and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities urged an increase in food stamp benefits. Food stamps help poor people buy food. At latest count, a near-record 29.5 million Americans received food stamps.
Stacy Dean of the Center on the Budget, said food stamp enrollment increased by 2 million people in the first eight months of this year.
"If the data we are reviewing today reflected food insecurity data from the last 12 months, it would be even more shocking," said Vicki Escarra of Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks.
USDA said the typical "food secure" American household spent 35 percent more on food than households with problems acquiring enough food. Food-insecure households compensate by eating less varied diets, enrolling in the food stamp program or turning to charities.
"These households at some time during the year had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to lack of resources," said USDA.
In the worst-off households, people ate less or their eating patterns were "disrupted."
"On average, households classified as have very low food security experienced the condition in seven months of the year, for a few days in each of those months," said USDA.
Food insecurity rates were highest in the South, among minority groups, among poor people and in households headed by a single woman with children. (Reporting by Charles Abbott; Editing by David Gregorio)
By Charles Abbott
WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (Reuters) - Some 36.2 million Americans struggle to get enough food to eat and one-third of them go hungry from time to time, the government said on Monday in a survey that was taken before this year's economic downturn.
Antihunger groups said hunger has worsened since the government's survey of 45,600 households at the end of 2007. They want Congress to increase food stamp benefits, at least temporarily, in an economic stimulus package this week.
Overall, 11.1 percent of U.S. households, or 36.2 million people, were food insecure during 2007, up from 10.9 percent, or 35.5 million people in 2006, the Agriculture Department said.
Food insecurity is defined as having difficulty obtaining enough food to meet basic nutritional needs.
USDA said 4.1 percent of households, or 11.9 million people -- classified as "very low food security" -- had to cut back on meals or skip them occasionally. The rate has climbed steadily for a decade from 3.7 percent and 3.8 million people in 1998.
"That's where the bigger growth is coming from," said Jim Weill of the Food Research and Action Center. He said U.S. poverty data and other reports show a rising portion of people among the worst-off Americans.
With the Thanksgiving holiday next week, FRAC and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities urged an increase in food stamp benefits. Food stamps help poor people buy food. At latest count, a near-record 29.5 million Americans received food stamps.
Stacy Dean of the Center on the Budget, said food stamp enrollment increased by 2 million people in the first eight months of this year.
"If the data we are reviewing today reflected food insecurity data from the last 12 months, it would be even more shocking," said Vicki Escarra of Feeding America, a network of 200 food banks.
USDA said the typical "food secure" American household spent 35 percent more on food than households with problems acquiring enough food. Food-insecure households compensate by eating less varied diets, enrolling in the food stamp program or turning to charities.
"These households at some time during the year had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to lack of resources," said USDA.
In the worst-off households, people ate less or their eating patterns were "disrupted."
"On average, households classified as have very low food security experienced the condition in seven months of the year, for a few days in each of those months," said USDA.
Food insecurity rates were highest in the South, among minority groups, among poor people and in households headed by a single woman with children. (Reporting by Charles Abbott; Editing by David Gregorio)
Friday, November 14, 2008
Ex-Hitler youth issues dire warning to America
'Every day brings this nation closer to Nazi-style totalitarian abyss'
Posted: November 13, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON – Because it has abandoned moral absolutes and its historic Christian faith, the U.S. is moving closer to a Nazi-style totalitarianism, warns a former German member of the Hitler Youth in a new book.
"Every day brings this nation closer to a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss," writes Hilmar von Campe, now a U.S. citizen, and author of "Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America."
Von Campe has founded the national Institute for Truth and Freedom to fight for a return to constitutional government in the U.S. – a key, he believes, to keeping America free.
"I lived the Nazi nightmare, and, as the old saying goes, 'A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument,'" writes von Campe. "Everything I write is based on my personal experience in Nazi Germany. There is nothing theoretical about my description of what happens when a nation throws God out of government and society, and Christians become religious bystanders. I don't want to see a repetition. The role of God in human society is the decisive issue for this generation. My writing is part of my life of restitution for the crimes of a godless government, of the evil of which I was a part."
Von Campe grew up under the Nazis, served in the Hitler Youth and fought against the Red Army in the Yugoslavian theater as a tank gunner in the German army. He was captured at the end of the war and escaped five months later from a prisoner of war camp in Communist Yugoslavia.
"It took me a long time to understand and define the nature of National Socialism," says von Campe. "And, unfortunately, their philosophy continues to flourish under different labels remaining a menace to America and free human society."
He writes: "The most painful part of defining National Socialism was to recognize my own moral responsibility for the Nazi disaster and their crimes against humanity. It boiled down to accepting the truth that 'as I am, so is my nation,' and realizing that if every German was like me, it was no wonder that the nation became a cesspool of gangsters. This realization is as valid today for any person in any nation as it was then, and it is true for America and every American now."
Von Campe's message is that political freedom and democratic rules alone are not sufficient to govern humanity justly.
"Democratic procedures can be subverted and dishonest politicians are like sand in the gearbox, abundant, everywhere and destructive," he writes. "What I see in America today is people painting their cabins while the ship goes down. Today in America we are witnessing a repeat performance of the tragedy of 1933 when an entire nation let itself be led like a lamb to the Socialist slaughterhouse. This time, the end of freedom is inevitable unless America rises to her mission and destiny."
Von Campe says he sees spiritual parallels among Americans and his childhood Germany.
"The silence from our pulpits regarding the moral collapse of American society from within is not very different from the silence that echoed from the pulpits in Germany toward Nazi policies," he explains. "Our family lived through the Nazi years in Germany, an experience typical of millions of Europeans regardless of what side they were on. We paid a high price for the moral perversions of a German government, which excluded God and His Commandments from their policies. America must not continue following the same path to destruction, but instead heed the lessons of history and the warning I am giving."
Specifically, von Campe warns Americans their political leaders are on the wrong footing, "denying our cultural and traditional roots based on our unique Constitution and Christian orientation as a nation. Christians don't understand their mission."
Posted: November 13, 2008
1:00 am Eastern
WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON – Because it has abandoned moral absolutes and its historic Christian faith, the U.S. is moving closer to a Nazi-style totalitarianism, warns a former German member of the Hitler Youth in a new book.
"Every day brings this nation closer to a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss," writes Hilmar von Campe, now a U.S. citizen, and author of "Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America."
Von Campe has founded the national Institute for Truth and Freedom to fight for a return to constitutional government in the U.S. – a key, he believes, to keeping America free.
"I lived the Nazi nightmare, and, as the old saying goes, 'A man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument,'" writes von Campe. "Everything I write is based on my personal experience in Nazi Germany. There is nothing theoretical about my description of what happens when a nation throws God out of government and society, and Christians become religious bystanders. I don't want to see a repetition. The role of God in human society is the decisive issue for this generation. My writing is part of my life of restitution for the crimes of a godless government, of the evil of which I was a part."
Von Campe grew up under the Nazis, served in the Hitler Youth and fought against the Red Army in the Yugoslavian theater as a tank gunner in the German army. He was captured at the end of the war and escaped five months later from a prisoner of war camp in Communist Yugoslavia.
"It took me a long time to understand and define the nature of National Socialism," says von Campe. "And, unfortunately, their philosophy continues to flourish under different labels remaining a menace to America and free human society."
He writes: "The most painful part of defining National Socialism was to recognize my own moral responsibility for the Nazi disaster and their crimes against humanity. It boiled down to accepting the truth that 'as I am, so is my nation,' and realizing that if every German was like me, it was no wonder that the nation became a cesspool of gangsters. This realization is as valid today for any person in any nation as it was then, and it is true for America and every American now."
Von Campe's message is that political freedom and democratic rules alone are not sufficient to govern humanity justly.
"Democratic procedures can be subverted and dishonest politicians are like sand in the gearbox, abundant, everywhere and destructive," he writes. "What I see in America today is people painting their cabins while the ship goes down. Today in America we are witnessing a repeat performance of the tragedy of 1933 when an entire nation let itself be led like a lamb to the Socialist slaughterhouse. This time, the end of freedom is inevitable unless America rises to her mission and destiny."
Von Campe says he sees spiritual parallels among Americans and his childhood Germany.
"The silence from our pulpits regarding the moral collapse of American society from within is not very different from the silence that echoed from the pulpits in Germany toward Nazi policies," he explains. "Our family lived through the Nazi years in Germany, an experience typical of millions of Europeans regardless of what side they were on. We paid a high price for the moral perversions of a German government, which excluded God and His Commandments from their policies. America must not continue following the same path to destruction, but instead heed the lessons of history and the warning I am giving."
Specifically, von Campe warns Americans their political leaders are on the wrong footing, "denying our cultural and traditional roots based on our unique Constitution and Christian orientation as a nation. Christians don't understand their mission."
Monday, November 10, 2008
Blair urges Obama 'healing role'
Tony Blair says he believes President-elect Barack Obama can help the US to play a "healing role" in the world.
The ex-UK prime minister predicted that the euphoria surrounding Mr Obama's US election win would be "somewhat blown away by the realities of government".
But while "it's in the nature of things that expectations... get disappointed" Mr Obama had the "intelligence and the sensitivity" to fulfil many of them.
He told the BBC he remained "totally committed" to his Middle East role.
On BBC Radio 4's the World this Weekend he said he had spoken regularly to Mr Obama over recent months about the situation in the Middle East, where Mr Blair is an envoy for the "quartet" of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN.
'Hard choices'
Mr Blair said that in his conversations with Mr Obama, he had been struck by how he was a "very thoughtful and intelligent person who understands that after the euphoria is somewhat blown away by the realities of government - because that's just the way it happens - there are some very hard choices and decisions to make."
I am absolutely committed to working at it for as long as it takes
Tony Blair on his work as Middle East envoy
He continued: "He's also someone who has a genuine vision of how America can play a healing role in the world and has also some real sensitivity to the fact that people want America to do that."
Mr Blair cited the Middle East and climate change as two areas where President-elect Obama could have a great impact.
The former Labour leader - who was elected prime minister on a landslide in 1997 - said that there was nothing more important than getting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved.
"I think it is possible to do it and I am absolutely committed to working at it for as long as it takes."
Mr Blair also praised his successor Gordon Brown's leadership - and said he was pleased for both Lord Mandelson "and the country" that the former cabinet minister had been brought back to the government.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/7718667.stm
The ex-UK prime minister predicted that the euphoria surrounding Mr Obama's US election win would be "somewhat blown away by the realities of government".
But while "it's in the nature of things that expectations... get disappointed" Mr Obama had the "intelligence and the sensitivity" to fulfil many of them.
He told the BBC he remained "totally committed" to his Middle East role.
On BBC Radio 4's the World this Weekend he said he had spoken regularly to Mr Obama over recent months about the situation in the Middle East, where Mr Blair is an envoy for the "quartet" of the US, Russia, the EU and the UN.
'Hard choices'
Mr Blair said that in his conversations with Mr Obama, he had been struck by how he was a "very thoughtful and intelligent person who understands that after the euphoria is somewhat blown away by the realities of government - because that's just the way it happens - there are some very hard choices and decisions to make."
I am absolutely committed to working at it for as long as it takes
Tony Blair on his work as Middle East envoy
He continued: "He's also someone who has a genuine vision of how America can play a healing role in the world and has also some real sensitivity to the fact that people want America to do that."
Mr Blair cited the Middle East and climate change as two areas where President-elect Obama could have a great impact.
The former Labour leader - who was elected prime minister on a landslide in 1997 - said that there was nothing more important than getting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolved.
"I think it is possible to do it and I am absolutely committed to working at it for as long as it takes."
Mr Blair also praised his successor Gordon Brown's leadership - and said he was pleased for both Lord Mandelson "and the country" that the former cabinet minister had been brought back to the government.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/uk_politics/7718667.stm
Brown to Call for New Global Financial System
Monday , November 10, 2008
LONDON —
Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown will push for a new international financial system that updates the Bretton Woods agreement in a speech to be delivered Monday evening.
Brown will call for the reforms at the G20 summit to be held in Washington next weekend.
"The British Government ... will begin to begin a new Bretton Woods with a new IMF that offers, by its surveillance of every economy, an early warning system and a crisis prevention mechanism for the whole world," Brown will say at his speech at the annual Lord Mayor's banquet in London.
Brown will also say the U.S and Europe must provide the leadership for the creation for a new international order.
"The trans-Atlantic relationship has been the engine of effective multi-lateralism for the past 50 years. I believe the whole of Europe can work closely with America to meet the great challenges which will test our resolution and illuminate our convictions," he will say.
Brown's calls for a reformed IMF will echo calls by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University. Stiglitz told a U.N. General Assembly panel on the global financial crisis last month that the system created at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which established the international monetary protocols governing trade, banking and other financial relations among nations, needs to be updated.
Brown has already discussed IMF reforms with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and has called on countries such as China and the oil-rich Persian Gulf states to fund the bulk of an increase in the International Monetary Fund's bailout pot.
Brown will also say the world faces five major challenges — to promote democracy, fight terrorism, strengthen the global economy, tackle climate change and resolve conflict.
LONDON —
Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown will push for a new international financial system that updates the Bretton Woods agreement in a speech to be delivered Monday evening.
Brown will call for the reforms at the G20 summit to be held in Washington next weekend.
"The British Government ... will begin to begin a new Bretton Woods with a new IMF that offers, by its surveillance of every economy, an early warning system and a crisis prevention mechanism for the whole world," Brown will say at his speech at the annual Lord Mayor's banquet in London.
Brown will also say the U.S and Europe must provide the leadership for the creation for a new international order.
"The trans-Atlantic relationship has been the engine of effective multi-lateralism for the past 50 years. I believe the whole of Europe can work closely with America to meet the great challenges which will test our resolution and illuminate our convictions," he will say.
Brown's calls for a reformed IMF will echo calls by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University. Stiglitz told a U.N. General Assembly panel on the global financial crisis last month that the system created at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which established the international monetary protocols governing trade, banking and other financial relations among nations, needs to be updated.
Brown has already discussed IMF reforms with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel and has called on countries such as China and the oil-rich Persian Gulf states to fund the bulk of an increase in the International Monetary Fund's bailout pot.
Brown will also say the world faces five major challenges — to promote democracy, fight terrorism, strengthen the global economy, tackle climate change and resolve conflict.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The 2008 land grab for food and financial security
Grain
October 29, 2008
Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. "Food insecure" governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snapping up farms all over the world to outsource their own food production and escape high market prices. Private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, are eyeing overseas farms as an important new source of revenue. As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatised and consolidated by foreign companies in some of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries. A new report from GRAIN examines 100 cases of agricultural land grabbing — whether for food or simply for profit — that have exploded this year.
Saudi Arabia and China are just two nations out buying farms, from Sudan to Cambodia, to satisfy their own food needs. In these cases, governments, sometimes through sovereign wealth funds, are negotiating rights to foreign land — whether by purchase, concession or lease — so that their corporations can come in and produce food to export back home. In return, they are offering oil contracts, soft loans, infrastructure projects and development funds. The food-hungry land grabbers include China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Those giving up their land, in exchange for the oil deals or investments, include the Philippines, Mozambique, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan, Uganda, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe.
Investing in farms abroad to produce food for a tight world market is also, apparently, a hot way to make money these days. Throughout this year, an army of investment houses, private equity managers and hedge funds have been out purchasing farmland throughout the world. The plan is to capitalise on low land costs and high food prices wherever fertile farmland is available, such as in Ukraine, China, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil and Kazakhstan. The money-hungry land grabbers include familiar names such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock and Louis Dreyfus, but there are plenty of others. And they are getting help from agencies like the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who are pressing target countries to change their laws and make stronger land ownership by foreigners possible.
While political leaders and UN bodies are trying to "manage" the potential backlash, farmers’ organisations, opposition parties, human rights groups and others are challenging and resisting these deals. But much more needs to be done to stop this massive sell-out of the very basis of food sovereignty.
===============================
GRAIN, "Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security", GRAIN briefing, October 2008, (11 pp) + Annex (11 pp). Available at:
http://www.grain.org/go/landgrab
October 29, 2008
Today’s food and financial crises have, in tandem, triggered a new global land grab. "Food insecure" governments that rely on imports to feed their people are snapping up farms all over the world to outsource their own food production and escape high market prices. Private investors, hungry for profits in the midst of the deepening financial crisis, are eyeing overseas farms as an important new source of revenue. As a result of both trends, fertile agricultural land is being swiftly privatised and consolidated by foreign companies in some of the world’s poorest and hungriest countries. A new report from GRAIN examines 100 cases of agricultural land grabbing — whether for food or simply for profit — that have exploded this year.
Saudi Arabia and China are just two nations out buying farms, from Sudan to Cambodia, to satisfy their own food needs. In these cases, governments, sometimes through sovereign wealth funds, are negotiating rights to foreign land — whether by purchase, concession or lease — so that their corporations can come in and produce food to export back home. In return, they are offering oil contracts, soft loans, infrastructure projects and development funds. The food-hungry land grabbers include China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Korea, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. Those giving up their land, in exchange for the oil deals or investments, include the Philippines, Mozambique, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan, Uganda, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe.
Investing in farms abroad to produce food for a tight world market is also, apparently, a hot way to make money these days. Throughout this year, an army of investment houses, private equity managers and hedge funds have been out purchasing farmland throughout the world. The plan is to capitalise on low land costs and high food prices wherever fertile farmland is available, such as in Ukraine, China, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil and Kazakhstan. The money-hungry land grabbers include familiar names such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock and Louis Dreyfus, but there are plenty of others. And they are getting help from agencies like the World Bank, its International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, who are pressing target countries to change their laws and make stronger land ownership by foreigners possible.
While political leaders and UN bodies are trying to "manage" the potential backlash, farmers’ organisations, opposition parties, human rights groups and others are challenging and resisting these deals. But much more needs to be done to stop this massive sell-out of the very basis of food sovereignty.
===============================
GRAIN, "Seized: The 2008 land grab for food and financial security", GRAIN briefing, October 2008, (11 pp) + Annex (11 pp). Available at:
http://www.grain.org/go/landgrab
RAND Lobbies Pentagon: Start War To Save U.S. Economy
Paul Joseph Watson & Yihan Dai
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 30, 2008
According to reports out of top Chinese mainstream news outlets, the RAND Corporation recently presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.
A fierce debate has now ensued in China about who that foreign power may be, with China itself as well as Russia and even Japan suspected to be the targets of aggression.
The reports cite French media news sources as having uncovered the proposal, in which RAND suggested that the $700 billion dollars that has been earmarked to bailout Wall Street and failing banks instead be used to finance a new war which would in turn re-invigorate the flagging stock markets.
The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.
Current directors of RAND include Frank Charles Carlucci III, former Defense Secretary and Deputy Director of the CIA, Ronald L. Olson, Council on Foreign Relations luminary and former Secretary of Labor, and Carl Bildt, top Bilderberg member and former Swedish Prime Minister.
Carlucci was chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1989-2005 and oversaw gargantuan profits the defense contractor made in the aftermath of 9/11 following the invasion of Afghanistan. The Carlyle Group has also received investment money from the Bin Laden family.
Reportedly, the RAND proposal brazenly urged that a new war could be launched to benefit the economy, but stressed that the target country would have to be a major influential power, and not a smaller country on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.
The reports have prompted a surge of public debate and tension in China about the possibility that a new global conflict is on the horizon.
China’s biggest media outlet, Sohu.com, speculated that the target of the new war would probably be China or Russia, but that it could also be Iran or another middle eastern country. Japan was also mentioned as a potential target for the reason that Japan holds the most U.S. debt.
North Korea was considered as a target but ruled out because the scale of such a war would not be large enough for RAND’s requirements.
The reported RAND proposal dovetails with recent comments made by Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and others, concerning the “guarantee” that Barack Obama will face a major “international crisis” soon after taking office.
It also arrives following a warning from Michael Bayer, chairman of a key Pentagon advisory panel, who echoed the statement that the next administration will face an international crisis within months of taking office.
One would hope that good people, or at least sane people who don’t wish to start a global nuclear war, will oppose the RAND proposal, such as top the military generals who threatened to quit if Bush ordered an attack on Iran. Admiral William Fallon, the head of US Central Command, quit in March last year as a result of his opposition to Bush administration policy on Iran.
Translations from Chinese provided by Yihan Dai.
SOURCES
Sohu.com - http://news.sohu.com/20081030/n260330741.shtml
Ifeng.com - http://news.ifeng.com/mil/4/200810/1029_342_851523.shtml
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, October 30, 2008
According to reports out of top Chinese mainstream news outlets, the RAND Corporation recently presented a shocking proposal to the Pentagon in which it lobbied for a war to be started with a major foreign power in an attempt to stimulate the American economy and prevent a recession.
A fierce debate has now ensued in China about who that foreign power may be, with China itself as well as Russia and even Japan suspected to be the targets of aggression.
The reports cite French media news sources as having uncovered the proposal, in which RAND suggested that the $700 billion dollars that has been earmarked to bailout Wall Street and failing banks instead be used to finance a new war which would in turn re-invigorate the flagging stock markets.
The RAND Corporation is a notoriously powerful NGO with deep ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex as well as interlocking connections with the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations.
Current directors of RAND include Frank Charles Carlucci III, former Defense Secretary and Deputy Director of the CIA, Ronald L. Olson, Council on Foreign Relations luminary and former Secretary of Labor, and Carl Bildt, top Bilderberg member and former Swedish Prime Minister.
Carlucci was chairman of the Carlyle Group from 1989-2005 and oversaw gargantuan profits the defense contractor made in the aftermath of 9/11 following the invasion of Afghanistan. The Carlyle Group has also received investment money from the Bin Laden family.
Reportedly, the RAND proposal brazenly urged that a new war could be launched to benefit the economy, but stressed that the target country would have to be a major influential power, and not a smaller country on the scale of Afghanistan or Iraq.
The reports have prompted a surge of public debate and tension in China about the possibility that a new global conflict is on the horizon.
China’s biggest media outlet, Sohu.com, speculated that the target of the new war would probably be China or Russia, but that it could also be Iran or another middle eastern country. Japan was also mentioned as a potential target for the reason that Japan holds the most U.S. debt.
North Korea was considered as a target but ruled out because the scale of such a war would not be large enough for RAND’s requirements.
The reported RAND proposal dovetails with recent comments made by Joe Biden, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and others, concerning the “guarantee” that Barack Obama will face a major “international crisis” soon after taking office.
It also arrives following a warning from Michael Bayer, chairman of a key Pentagon advisory panel, who echoed the statement that the next administration will face an international crisis within months of taking office.
One would hope that good people, or at least sane people who don’t wish to start a global nuclear war, will oppose the RAND proposal, such as top the military generals who threatened to quit if Bush ordered an attack on Iran. Admiral William Fallon, the head of US Central Command, quit in March last year as a result of his opposition to Bush administration policy on Iran.
Translations from Chinese provided by Yihan Dai.
SOURCES
Sohu.com - http://news.sohu.com/20081030/n260330741.shtml
Ifeng.com - http://news.ifeng.com/mil/4/200810/1029_342_851523.shtml
Sunday, October 26, 2008
The Standard of Living Bubble (And Why It’s About to Go Pop!)
Karen De Coster
Taki’s Magazine
October 26, 2008
Our representatives in Washington, alongside the easy-credit Federal Reserve and its Wise Leader, “Helicopter Ben,” have essentially subsidized a rash of misguided investments and profligate spending-sprees by consumers who’ve bought into the illusion of endless prosperity. Everyone knows about the Housing Bubble. Well, get ready for the even bigger Standard of Living Bubble, whose bursting is now upon us.
Because real wages have not been rising, the growth in consumer spending could only have been financed through borrowed money. Debt, which allows consumers to have cash on hand that hasn’t been earned or saved, has given Boobis Americanus the ability to live beyond his means, at least for a little while. And a great many have taken up this “pay later” lifestyle, accumulating a great many houses, cars, and other things.
A favored form of debt for funding extraneous purchases has been the home equity line. During the housing bubble, homes became virtual ATMs. Whereas home equity was once used for purposes of improving the home for the long-term, it became a source of quick cash for reckless buyers eager to turn their home into an instant showplace. First there’s the actual house, then comes the Martha Stewartization, followed by the furniture, the landscaping, the lighting, the additions, the appliances, and on and on.
The government’s mantra since the days of the New Deal has been the “right to own a home.” In the modern version of “the American Dream,” a starter home is treated as a humiliation, as everyone has the right to own a great, big home in an esteemed neighborhood, and preferably one of new construction and with all the bells and whistles. The term “being house poor” used to be a negative connotation. During the bubble it became a bragging right.
Even worse, home equity has been funding the purchase of everyday consumer durables, especially those items that tend to be discretionary in nature. Home equity has funded the kind of purchases that should be funded from earned, saved monies. A perpetually (and rising) line of credit induces consumers to “bite” at the availability of easy money at low rates, and thus they take the cash and spend their way to a perceived prosperity.
For the average person, “things” have become identical to wealth. They equate the accumulation of “stuff” with “being loaded.” Accordingly, everybody has been well-heeled in these bubble times. The availability of debt at bargain rates and the glory of immediate accumulation due to debt quickly erodes the values and common sense of people.
Some of the more pompous—and truly false—signs of prosperity can be seen within the automobile bubble. With the onset of the have-pulse-will-loan credit market, auto consumers have been bypassing common sense for a bloated sense of reality. Everyone deserves the biggest, the best, and the most custom vehicle they could dream up—and one’s income shouldn’t mater. People with mediocre wages purchased Escalades, Lexus SUVs, and other luxury-type vehicles, with many of these cars costing far more than the purchasers earned in a year. Additionally, the roads are now littered with brand new cars that have expensive aftermarket wheel sets, tires, boom-boom stereo systems, and gaudy-but-costly custom trim. In fact, stock, solid-transportation vehicles are no longer sufficient for the spoiled masses enjoying an overdrawn standard of living. Debt has funded the majority of these extravagant purchases, yet we call it “prosperity.”
Auto consumers have not been compelled to pay market rates for their cars because they lease perpetually at discounted rates or get ultra-incentives from automakers desperate to keep the assembly lines moving with the UAW gang breathing down their necks. Leases have been a financial disaster for the auto companies, but the wild impulses of buyers, fueled by below-market interest rates, propped up that racket long enough so that Lexus and Mercedes dealers were popping up in wholly middle-class neighborhoods. Both Chrysler and General Motors have discontinued or cut back their unworkable lease programs. Additionally, buyers have not been required to put substantial down payments on new vehicle purchases. Cars have come on the cheap, with pushed-down interest rates, no down payments, and terms extending the payment plan to six or seven years.
Accordingly, with the housing market imploding and the entire banking system resting on wilted stilts, Americans are left with a devalued dollar, escalating costs of living, a massive federal bailout of Wall Street’s derelict financial management, and the nationalization of some of the country’s largest banks. The standard-of-living squeeze has made its way to Main Street, slowing down the spend-o-rama of the middle class, as retail sales numbers are starting to hit the skids.
The bursting of this bubble and its unwinding could result in some unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. People—especially younger folks—who have been reared on the splendiferous way of life that debt offers, will be resistant to changes which will require lower time preferences (longer term views) and more careful planning in terms of shuffling around priorities. As Main Street endures a stifling credit crunch; inflation; increasing interest rates; scores of home foreclosures; cut-off of home equity lines; a job market squeeze; soaring federal, state, and local taxes; and the inability to manipulate low-interest credit cards to cover shoddy financial decisions, there will be restlessness amongst the masses, especially from those people who have never had to live within their bona fide financial means.
Some of this anxiety has been witnessed already, as lenders who are taking back homes in foreclosure have been dealt some vile vengeance from bitter homeowners who take to vandalizing their homes before they vacate the premises. This problem is said to be present in almost half of all foreclosure cases nationwide. The response from lenders has been to take the most economical path and actually pay the vacating ex-homeowner to refrain from leaving behind a trail of destruction as leaves his property.
The worst part of the contraction will clobber Main Street with a shortage of the consumer credit that became an addiction for so many individuals. The price we pay will be oodles of socialistic legislation aimed at containing the fallout in order to further sustain the fictitious prosperity a bit longer. Central planners act on the notion that the unhappy reality of hitting bottom can be delayed indefinitely. Thus the cycle of fiction will be lengthened, turning a headache into a migraine, and perhaps even worse.
The central planners in Washington, along with the Federal Reserve, planned and fueled an unsustainable standard of living across the country, from the neighborhoods of McMansions to the ghettos. The impending bust will affect us all, regardless of whether or not we partook in any of those easy-credit orgies sponsored by our leaders in Washington.
Taki’s Magazine
October 26, 2008
Our representatives in Washington, alongside the easy-credit Federal Reserve and its Wise Leader, “Helicopter Ben,” have essentially subsidized a rash of misguided investments and profligate spending-sprees by consumers who’ve bought into the illusion of endless prosperity. Everyone knows about the Housing Bubble. Well, get ready for the even bigger Standard of Living Bubble, whose bursting is now upon us.
Because real wages have not been rising, the growth in consumer spending could only have been financed through borrowed money. Debt, which allows consumers to have cash on hand that hasn’t been earned or saved, has given Boobis Americanus the ability to live beyond his means, at least for a little while. And a great many have taken up this “pay later” lifestyle, accumulating a great many houses, cars, and other things.
A favored form of debt for funding extraneous purchases has been the home equity line. During the housing bubble, homes became virtual ATMs. Whereas home equity was once used for purposes of improving the home for the long-term, it became a source of quick cash for reckless buyers eager to turn their home into an instant showplace. First there’s the actual house, then comes the Martha Stewartization, followed by the furniture, the landscaping, the lighting, the additions, the appliances, and on and on.
The government’s mantra since the days of the New Deal has been the “right to own a home.” In the modern version of “the American Dream,” a starter home is treated as a humiliation, as everyone has the right to own a great, big home in an esteemed neighborhood, and preferably one of new construction and with all the bells and whistles. The term “being house poor” used to be a negative connotation. During the bubble it became a bragging right.
Even worse, home equity has been funding the purchase of everyday consumer durables, especially those items that tend to be discretionary in nature. Home equity has funded the kind of purchases that should be funded from earned, saved monies. A perpetually (and rising) line of credit induces consumers to “bite” at the availability of easy money at low rates, and thus they take the cash and spend their way to a perceived prosperity.
For the average person, “things” have become identical to wealth. They equate the accumulation of “stuff” with “being loaded.” Accordingly, everybody has been well-heeled in these bubble times. The availability of debt at bargain rates and the glory of immediate accumulation due to debt quickly erodes the values and common sense of people.
Some of the more pompous—and truly false—signs of prosperity can be seen within the automobile bubble. With the onset of the have-pulse-will-loan credit market, auto consumers have been bypassing common sense for a bloated sense of reality. Everyone deserves the biggest, the best, and the most custom vehicle they could dream up—and one’s income shouldn’t mater. People with mediocre wages purchased Escalades, Lexus SUVs, and other luxury-type vehicles, with many of these cars costing far more than the purchasers earned in a year. Additionally, the roads are now littered with brand new cars that have expensive aftermarket wheel sets, tires, boom-boom stereo systems, and gaudy-but-costly custom trim. In fact, stock, solid-transportation vehicles are no longer sufficient for the spoiled masses enjoying an overdrawn standard of living. Debt has funded the majority of these extravagant purchases, yet we call it “prosperity.”
Auto consumers have not been compelled to pay market rates for their cars because they lease perpetually at discounted rates or get ultra-incentives from automakers desperate to keep the assembly lines moving with the UAW gang breathing down their necks. Leases have been a financial disaster for the auto companies, but the wild impulses of buyers, fueled by below-market interest rates, propped up that racket long enough so that Lexus and Mercedes dealers were popping up in wholly middle-class neighborhoods. Both Chrysler and General Motors have discontinued or cut back their unworkable lease programs. Additionally, buyers have not been required to put substantial down payments on new vehicle purchases. Cars have come on the cheap, with pushed-down interest rates, no down payments, and terms extending the payment plan to six or seven years.
Accordingly, with the housing market imploding and the entire banking system resting on wilted stilts, Americans are left with a devalued dollar, escalating costs of living, a massive federal bailout of Wall Street’s derelict financial management, and the nationalization of some of the country’s largest banks. The standard-of-living squeeze has made its way to Main Street, slowing down the spend-o-rama of the middle class, as retail sales numbers are starting to hit the skids.
The bursting of this bubble and its unwinding could result in some unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. People—especially younger folks—who have been reared on the splendiferous way of life that debt offers, will be resistant to changes which will require lower time preferences (longer term views) and more careful planning in terms of shuffling around priorities. As Main Street endures a stifling credit crunch; inflation; increasing interest rates; scores of home foreclosures; cut-off of home equity lines; a job market squeeze; soaring federal, state, and local taxes; and the inability to manipulate low-interest credit cards to cover shoddy financial decisions, there will be restlessness amongst the masses, especially from those people who have never had to live within their bona fide financial means.
Some of this anxiety has been witnessed already, as lenders who are taking back homes in foreclosure have been dealt some vile vengeance from bitter homeowners who take to vandalizing their homes before they vacate the premises. This problem is said to be present in almost half of all foreclosure cases nationwide. The response from lenders has been to take the most economical path and actually pay the vacating ex-homeowner to refrain from leaving behind a trail of destruction as leaves his property.
The worst part of the contraction will clobber Main Street with a shortage of the consumer credit that became an addiction for so many individuals. The price we pay will be oodles of socialistic legislation aimed at containing the fallout in order to further sustain the fictitious prosperity a bit longer. Central planners act on the notion that the unhappy reality of hitting bottom can be delayed indefinitely. Thus the cycle of fiction will be lengthened, turning a headache into a migraine, and perhaps even worse.
The central planners in Washington, along with the Federal Reserve, planned and fueled an unsustainable standard of living across the country, from the neighborhoods of McMansions to the ghettos. The impending bust will affect us all, regardless of whether or not we partook in any of those easy-credit orgies sponsored by our leaders in Washington.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
France's Sarkozy emerging as leading figure
President Nicolas Sarkozy heads to Asia this week to broach the idea of bringing India and China together with G-8 nations in a 'Bretton Woods II' framework of economic rules.
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 22, 2008 edition
Paris - A year ago, France's new president raced around Europe looking frenetic. Nicolas Sarkozy's wife had left him, critics pointed to a lack of discipline and a royal style of rule – a man who moved but didn't shake – and his popularity nosedived.
This week Mr. Sarkozy worked with President Bush to set up a series of meetings to reform the global economy, and he's now off to Asia to broach the idea of bringing India and China together with G-8 nations in a "Bretton Woods II" framework of economic rules. This comes just weeks after he moved with alacrity to broker a cease-fire deal to end the Georgia-Russia war.
Critics still point to Sarkozy's proclivity to turn politics into a show and to unashamedly take credit whenever possible. Yet in the space of a summer he has consolidated his power and blended substance with showmanship, and is now winning praise as a crisis leader in a more multipolar world.
"I think today that everyone, even those who had misgivings, acknowledge that [Sarkozy] not only has great political energy, but also exceptional leadership qualities," commented José Manuel Barroso, the EU chief who accompanied Sarkozy to Camp David this weekend.
The French president's peripatetic style is proving useful for a major crisis with multiple elements – which plays into his ability to do many things at once.
He's been blessed with good political winds: with Russia's invasion of Georgia, and with US world stock at an ebb, it is Europe's hour at a time when the EU presidency is held by France.
Europe boldly took the lead in response to the global financial crisis by offering a plan devised by Gordon Brown and, later, Sarkozy that recapitalized banks to aid the economy.
While the White House moved quickly to propose a $700 billion bailout, it finally adopted Europe's plan to address liquidity and agree to a series of Bretton Woods-style meeting after the US presidential elections on Nov. 4.
Sarkozy has quickly adopted a bully pulpit for Europe and its traditionally more measured approach to markets. In Strasbourg Tuesday, speaking to the European Parliament, he stated that Europe "must carry the idea of a new foundation of global capitalism. What happened [with toxic assets and derivatives that created a credit crisis] was a treason of the values of capitalism," he said. "The market economy itself is not called into question."
France moved this week to lend 10.5 billion euros ($14.12 billion) to six banks to boost their capital reserves.
Man of action
"He can walk into a crisis and take action. That's what a leader does; it's what Sarkozy is good at," says a former French political consultant to the prime minister's office. "He chases down an answer, he doesn't let it go. The 27 EU nations need someone who gets an agreement. We are in a crisis, and he stayed calm amid serious market fear. With no crisis, it might be a different story."
Sarkozy has had issues with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose aides complained that Sarkozy would step in and steal headlines and the hard-earned thunder of a German leader who did her homework when Germany led the EU in 2007.
But German newspapers, such as the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and German analysts have praised quick French action in mediating between Russia and Georgia, and point to Sarkozy's good faith bargaining in the final hours of the crucial Lisbon Treaty to unify Europe last year, where he and Ms. Merkel achieved a historic agreement.
"He's become more of a diplomat and political manager than a personality show," argues Henning Riecke of the Berlin-based German Council of Foreign Relations.
There's been some back and forth between the British and French press over who deserves the lead position in Europe on the credit crisis, Gordon Brown – who Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said "saved the world" with his plan – or Sarkozy. But the spat doesn't appear to be originating at the top.
Cool in a crisis?
It was as a cool crisis manager that Sarkozy first came to broad attention in France.
As mayor of the tony Paris suburb of Neuilly in 1993, Sarkozy faced a hostage situation where a man calling himself the "human bomb" entered a nursery school with a rifle and explosives.
Sarkozy went directly into the school, negotiated with the disturbed man, and walked out surrounded by the children.
The police later shot the man; but no one had seen a politician act like this before.
Still, a year ago after a hard-fought campaign, Sarkozy looked like the incredible shrinking president.
His marriage had collapsed, he faced strikes by transport workers that shut down France's subway system, and efforts to create a "tax shield" for wealthy French citizens was deeply unpopular in a country where vanishing "purchasing power" was on many French lips.
Monsieur 'bling bling'
Sarkozy was criticized for lavish vacations, for garish "bling bling" tastes, for putting his personal life in front of the media as he courted supermodel Carla Bruni, whom he later married. His approval rating fell from 65 to 32 percent.
A rude epithet by Sarkozy to a critic at a farm show outside Paris was posted on YouTube in February. Even in July, hopes for a glorious French presidency of the EU that would bring a ratification of the Lisbon Treaty looked dashed, as Ireland refused to ratify it. He faced pressure in August after a Taliban attack killed nearly a dozen French troops.
Yet what the presidents of Denmark and Luxembourg have called Sarkozy's "intensity" in negotiating with Moscow, and with Washington in pushing a European model of reform – has put Sarkozy's approval up to 49 percent.
Even columnists like Jean Quatremer, for the left-wing Liberation, not a bastion of Sarkozy support, have been feeling pride in the president's achievements: "Apart from the British," Quatremer wrote this week, "who have always had a hard time acknowledging positive developments from the continent in general, and France in particular, everyone is seduced by Sarkozy's activism and ability to compromise."
"A lot of this moment could be as in the past, public relations and spin" says a long time Parisian commentator, pointing out that in Sarkozy's negotiations with Russian President Medvedev last month, both men emerged with dramatically different accounts of what had been decided. "We'll have to wait and see."
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 22, 2008 edition
Paris - A year ago, France's new president raced around Europe looking frenetic. Nicolas Sarkozy's wife had left him, critics pointed to a lack of discipline and a royal style of rule – a man who moved but didn't shake – and his popularity nosedived.
This week Mr. Sarkozy worked with President Bush to set up a series of meetings to reform the global economy, and he's now off to Asia to broach the idea of bringing India and China together with G-8 nations in a "Bretton Woods II" framework of economic rules. This comes just weeks after he moved with alacrity to broker a cease-fire deal to end the Georgia-Russia war.
Critics still point to Sarkozy's proclivity to turn politics into a show and to unashamedly take credit whenever possible. Yet in the space of a summer he has consolidated his power and blended substance with showmanship, and is now winning praise as a crisis leader in a more multipolar world.
"I think today that everyone, even those who had misgivings, acknowledge that [Sarkozy] not only has great political energy, but also exceptional leadership qualities," commented José Manuel Barroso, the EU chief who accompanied Sarkozy to Camp David this weekend.
The French president's peripatetic style is proving useful for a major crisis with multiple elements – which plays into his ability to do many things at once.
He's been blessed with good political winds: with Russia's invasion of Georgia, and with US world stock at an ebb, it is Europe's hour at a time when the EU presidency is held by France.
Europe boldly took the lead in response to the global financial crisis by offering a plan devised by Gordon Brown and, later, Sarkozy that recapitalized banks to aid the economy.
While the White House moved quickly to propose a $700 billion bailout, it finally adopted Europe's plan to address liquidity and agree to a series of Bretton Woods-style meeting after the US presidential elections on Nov. 4.
Sarkozy has quickly adopted a bully pulpit for Europe and its traditionally more measured approach to markets. In Strasbourg Tuesday, speaking to the European Parliament, he stated that Europe "must carry the idea of a new foundation of global capitalism. What happened [with toxic assets and derivatives that created a credit crisis] was a treason of the values of capitalism," he said. "The market economy itself is not called into question."
France moved this week to lend 10.5 billion euros ($14.12 billion) to six banks to boost their capital reserves.
Man of action
"He can walk into a crisis and take action. That's what a leader does; it's what Sarkozy is good at," says a former French political consultant to the prime minister's office. "He chases down an answer, he doesn't let it go. The 27 EU nations need someone who gets an agreement. We are in a crisis, and he stayed calm amid serious market fear. With no crisis, it might be a different story."
Sarkozy has had issues with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose aides complained that Sarkozy would step in and steal headlines and the hard-earned thunder of a German leader who did her homework when Germany led the EU in 2007.
But German newspapers, such as the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and German analysts have praised quick French action in mediating between Russia and Georgia, and point to Sarkozy's good faith bargaining in the final hours of the crucial Lisbon Treaty to unify Europe last year, where he and Ms. Merkel achieved a historic agreement.
"He's become more of a diplomat and political manager than a personality show," argues Henning Riecke of the Berlin-based German Council of Foreign Relations.
There's been some back and forth between the British and French press over who deserves the lead position in Europe on the credit crisis, Gordon Brown – who Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said "saved the world" with his plan – or Sarkozy. But the spat doesn't appear to be originating at the top.
Cool in a crisis?
It was as a cool crisis manager that Sarkozy first came to broad attention in France.
As mayor of the tony Paris suburb of Neuilly in 1993, Sarkozy faced a hostage situation where a man calling himself the "human bomb" entered a nursery school with a rifle and explosives.
Sarkozy went directly into the school, negotiated with the disturbed man, and walked out surrounded by the children.
The police later shot the man; but no one had seen a politician act like this before.
Still, a year ago after a hard-fought campaign, Sarkozy looked like the incredible shrinking president.
His marriage had collapsed, he faced strikes by transport workers that shut down France's subway system, and efforts to create a "tax shield" for wealthy French citizens was deeply unpopular in a country where vanishing "purchasing power" was on many French lips.
Monsieur 'bling bling'
Sarkozy was criticized for lavish vacations, for garish "bling bling" tastes, for putting his personal life in front of the media as he courted supermodel Carla Bruni, whom he later married. His approval rating fell from 65 to 32 percent.
A rude epithet by Sarkozy to a critic at a farm show outside Paris was posted on YouTube in February. Even in July, hopes for a glorious French presidency of the EU that would bring a ratification of the Lisbon Treaty looked dashed, as Ireland refused to ratify it. He faced pressure in August after a Taliban attack killed nearly a dozen French troops.
Yet what the presidents of Denmark and Luxembourg have called Sarkozy's "intensity" in negotiating with Moscow, and with Washington in pushing a European model of reform – has put Sarkozy's approval up to 49 percent.
Even columnists like Jean Quatremer, for the left-wing Liberation, not a bastion of Sarkozy support, have been feeling pride in the president's achievements: "Apart from the British," Quatremer wrote this week, "who have always had a hard time acknowledging positive developments from the continent in general, and France in particular, everyone is seduced by Sarkozy's activism and ability to compromise."
"A lot of this moment could be as in the past, public relations and spin" says a long time Parisian commentator, pointing out that in Sarkozy's negotiations with Russian President Medvedev last month, both men emerged with dramatically different accounts of what had been decided. "We'll have to wait and see."
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