What Economic Problem, You Ask?

B’Man: I feel like I am screaming at the top of my lungs to totally deaf and blind people. They can’t hear me, nor can read my lips. Maybe they view me as the crazy preacher-type on the street corner screaming doom and gloom?

But I believe I have a pulse on what is happening to a certain sector of business in the SE USA. My business is set up to call specifically on manufacturing in the SE USA. If you read anything I write about, you understand that I am seeing American companies dry up and blow away or move out of country (furniture has been hard hit, along with American automakers). Many folks who work (worked) in these factories know exactly what I’m talking about. Good jobs are scarce and even harder to obtain nowadays.

There is an influx of foreign manufacturers coming in (transportation costs are getting high combined with our labor force getting cheaper to hire). If you are swift on your feet, you will find products that these foreign companies like and try yo sell them, but by and large they prefer their country of origin (if Japanese automaker, they try to buy Japanese products to manufacture with… understandably). But Americans lose.

Stephen Pizzo writes about the financial side and how many Big Banks in the world see the US as on the very brink of financial failure and doom. These sources ain’t just some redneck crying wolf, ya’ll:

Freedom: Nothing Left to Lose?

by Stephen Pizzo

Fortis Bank predicts US Financial market meltdown within weeks
(Fortis is a large bank and insurer in the Netherlands and Belgium.)

28th of June, 9:10
BRUSSELS/AMSTERDAM - Fortis expects a complete collapse of the US financial markets within a few days to weeks. That explains, according to Fortis, the series of interventions of last Thursday to retrieve € 8 billion.

“We have been saved just in time. The situation in the US is much worse than we thought”, says Fortis chairman Maurice Lippens. Fortis expects bankruptcies amongst 6000 American banks which have a small coverage currently. But also Citigroup, General Motors, there is starting a complete meltdown in the US”

And,

Royal Bank of Scotland Warns of Global Crash
Financial Times of London

The Royal Bank of Scotland has advised clients to brace for a full-fledged crash in global stock and credit markets over the next three months as inflation paralyses the major central banks.

“A very nasty period is soon to be upon us - be prepared,” said Bob Janjuah, the bank’s credit strategist.

A report by the bank’s research team warns that the S&P 500 index of Wall Street equities is likely to fall by more than 300 points to around 1050 by September as “all the chickens come home to roost” from the excesses of the global boom, with contagion spreading across Europe and emerging markets.

“The Fed is in panic mode. The massive credibility chasms down which the Fed and maybe even the ECB will plummet when they fail to hike rates in the face of higher inflation will combine to give us a big sell-off in risky assets,” he said.”

And,

Barclays: “US central bank accused of unleashing an inflation shock that will rock financial markets.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Business Editor, Financial Times

“Barclays Capital has advised clients to batten down the hatches for a worldwide financial storm, warning that the US Federal Reserve has allowed the inflation genie out of the bottle and let its credibility fall “below zero”…

…

Simmons says market forces driving crude to $600
Press/Journal/ UK. 1 July 2008: The chairman of energy investment-banking firm Simmons and Company International has predicted that oil prices could double or more within a few years.

Matt Simmons said that in his view oil was “dirt cheap at $140 a barrel”, and with supplies having peaked and demand growing prices were bound to go higher.

He said: “It is not beyond the pale of imagination to see oil at $300, $400, $500 or even $600 a barrel within a relatively short time, much less than 20 years. It is not speculators who are driving oil prices. It’s simply about supply and demand.”

…

B’Man: We are treading very dangerously on the “cliff” Stephen mentions in the article (you should go read the entire thing) and we aren’t really hearing any warning about this from the media and the Fed (or the American banking institutions, in general). Do you think that the rest of the world is crying wolf or that most of America is dumbed down and oblivious to what is about to happen?

US Industrial Production Fell .7% in April

According to the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. economic reports released Thursday are keeping recession worries afloat, showing continued weakness in the labor market and a struggling manufacturing sector.” The Federal Reserve announced on Thursday that “industrial production plunged a sharp 0.7 percent in April, as output of motor vehicles and parts plummeted 8.2 percent.” Production had risen “0.2 percent in March and dropped 0.7 percent in February.” While “output at the nation’s technology firms increased 1 percent in April, with computers rising 0.5 percent,” industrial production “[e]xcluding motor vehicles and parts” fell “0.6 percent, reflecting decreases in output of business equipment, appliances, furniture, and other goods.”
        The fall in industrial production was “more than double [that which] economists had expected,” the Washington Post reports. “Manufacturing output dropped 0.8 percent, with half of that decrease coming from large cutbacks in auto production.” And even though the drop surpassed economists’ predictions, they “said the manufacturing slump would have been more severe had it not been for the decline in the value of the dollar, which has helped boost exports to record levels, offsetting some of the weakness in domestic demand.”

B’Man: So many coincedences happen that fit right into the New World Order’s dictate. We lose production in the US because US manufacturers are getting the stuff we use here made elsewhere. At the same time, the dollar loss causes exports to go up in certain industries.

Lose-lose, except for Big Money, who will not lose, even when they did lose (think Bear Stearns and every other prop the government gives Big Business when they give us $600).

José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco

By Greg Palast

Monday April 21, 2008

(for TomPaine.com)

Psst!  George Bush has a secret. 

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three:  the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons: 
First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics.  Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership:  The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.
 
The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda.   More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible:  The North American Competitiveness Council. 

Never heard of The Council?  Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors:  the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe. 

And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party?  Their term is “harmonization.”

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel.  Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries.  Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

Take for example, pesticides.   Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat.  Solution:  “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s. 

Can they do that?  Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?”  Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can.  At any rate, he does.

The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.”  Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment.  Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada.  Not so.  Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.

 
Say what?

As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products.  That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet.  Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.

Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians.  She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate).  Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.  

I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans.  Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of  Debbie Does Dallas.  “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.  

Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”
There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right.  They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears.  The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
 
They’re wrong, of course.  The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically.  The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.  

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner.  The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures.  A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly. 

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales:  self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo.  There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council.  Get used to it.

Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote.  “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.”  So, they’ll skip the voting stuff.  Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.

Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate?  The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure.  But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”

***********
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse:  Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild.   Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports for BBC on RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles

Make a donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund and receive a DVD of  the untold story of the drowning of New Orleans, Big Easy to Big Empty, made for Democracy Now! at http://www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org. 
 
Note:  On May 1, in New York, Palast will speak at the international conference of the victims of Barrick Gold mining operations, the Canadian-American company whose board members included the former Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney and the former President of the United States, George Bush Sr.  Information soon at www.GregPalast.com

The REAL State of the Union: Are Things More Expensive or Is Our Dollar Worth Less?

How Big Money-Big Banking Ruined America

Since I am no financial analyst, nor expert, just a redneck who pays attention because his small business is being affected so horribly by these factors (and many others), I cannot adequately explain what is happening to our financial system, which is on the brink of failure. Money discussions have become so worded with bullshit, intentionally, that normal people (not affiliated with the industry) are as much at a loss as if we were listening to Aristotle describe any of his theories in Greek.

I have tried to simplify any discussions here, mainly because I am simple and I want to share with others like me what is happening (especially you rednecks from the SE I love… “love thy neighbor as thyself”) to this country and our way of life.

I was turned on to Brasscheck TVby my friend Manila Ryce at The Largest Minority(unwittingly, but thanks, buddy) and I subscribed to their feeds. This morning I found this animated video by Paul Grignon that lays out the history of banking and how it became what it is today).

It is 47 minutes long, so I created a link at my YouTube channel which is more easily digested in smaller chunks (and I get you to visit my channel, as well… lol). Here is BuelahMan’s permalink to the video series, Money As Debt.

From Brasscheck TV’s page containing this video (I suggest you visit them and check out all their videos)

One of the last things John F. Kennedy did before he was assassinated was declare his intention to reform the central banking system of the United States.No connection between these two events?

 And this:
 

Congressman Louis McFadden, Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee from 1927-33, opposed the Federal Reserve System. There were three reported attempts on his life before he finally died of “heart failure.” Here’s what he said about the Federal Reserve from the floor of Congress:“Mr. Chairman, we have in this Country one of the most
corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed.

The Fed has cheated the Government of these United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the Nation’s debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Fed has cost enough money to pay the National debt several times over.

This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our Government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the mal-administration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.”

There is no doubt that this has been recognized as a major issue, even before we formed as a nation. As a matter of fact, some of our Founding Fathers were perfectly educated to this and they tell us:

The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the PRIME reason for the Revolutionary War.–Benjamin Franklin from his autobiography

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation. - John Adams

Not only the “Founding Fathers”, but many other early leaders and great individuals understood the dangers of allowing Bankers to get this control. You can see from Brasscheck TV’s Kennedy quote, some folks have been murdered when associating themselves as fighting these forces (or against them). I, too, wonder if all of these are coincidental?

Government, possessing the power to create and issue currency and credit as money and enjoying the right to withdraw both currency and credit from circulation by taxation and otherwise, need not and should not borrow capital at interest [from the private banking system or their affiliates] as a means of financing government work and public enterprise. The government should create, issue and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying owner of consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity. - President Abraham Lincoln’s Monetary Policy (1865)

Whoever controls the volume of money in our country is absolute master. - James Garfield

As the video asks, “Could it all happen by accident… or is it all a conspiracy?”

That is the $6 Million Question. There has been conspiracies regarding this subject for a very long time. Very seldom has anyone admitted to being a part, but there have been some exceptions to the secrecy:

“For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will.
If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” - David Rockefeller from his autobiography ‘Memoirs’

“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto determination practiced in past centuries.” David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address before that organization in June 1991.

If nothing else, take the time to watch the video for a great explanation into Big Banking and how it could very well ruin this wonderful country.

Save The Banks: Please Give From The Bottom Of Your Pockets

Oh, I’m sorry, you already did…

Killing The Dollar

Socialized Healthcare, Socialized Bailout? Only when you are rich…

Attaturk put up a great post today that describes how the Big Money fools expect (and GET) a hand-out, yet us, the ones who are bailing these Big Money asshats out, can’t get healthcare that would take away profits from the useless health insurance companies. We can’t get a decent “bail-out” for those bogus loan deals (those of us who may have been bitten… I’m a lucky one).

The thing that amazes me is that when I travel around the SE and speak with engineers and managers and educated people, they can’t seem to grasp this. The brainwashing is so deep, that they cannot understand that it is only the Big Money corrupt rich folks, a very minute few, who gain, while the rest of us suffer in the long run.

Universal Health Care is socialism! Somewhere a white guy is complaining about welfare queens, and our $12 billion a month occupation is a battle against a foe so dangerous they always lose (especially upper management) yet can never be defeated. Because freedom rocks, and capitalism rolls.

For years now we’ve been told that socialism is the worse thing ever, it’s like a million Hitlers on roller skates, topless and singing Wagner in a new Stephen Sondheim play presented as a viral video on You Tube.

Unless, of course, you are the archetype of capitalism, then socialism is awesome!

Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.

The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard…

It’s just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are “too big to fail,” because they could bring us all down with them.

Enter the federal government, the institution to which the wealthy are not supposed to pay capital gains or inheritance taxes. Good God, you don’t expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?

Thank goodness while the economy sinks at our feet and we dump monopoly money into occupations that don’t accomplish crap our media focuses on the important things, like whether a black man is just too damned scary to preserve such admirable policies.