Less healthcare, but Greece is still buying guns

From The Independent.


As Greece is forced by European leaders to abandon a referendum to allow the people the chance to vote on its latest bailout conditions, the country is preparing for yet another dose of austerity.

The conditions of the next €130bn rescue package will be severe, yet there is an elephant in the room: the extent to which the German but also the French military industries rely on Greece.

The small, crisis-hit nation, whose prime minister, George Papandreou, narrowly survived a vote of confidence on Friday, buys more German weapons than any other country. Some Greeks want to know why it is that France and Germany are demanding cuts in pensions, salaries and public services, but the buying of arms is allowed to continue unabated.

Yanis Varoufakis, professor of economics at Athens University, says: "When Greek hospitals are running out of bandages, the only bit of the budget not being attacked by the EU and IMF is military expenditure."

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

From Prison Planet.

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.

With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.

Washington has revived the Great Power Game and is vying with China. Whereas China brings Africa investment and gifts of infrastructure, Washington sends troops, bombs and military bases. Sooner or later Washington’s aggressiveness toward China and Russia is going to explode in our faces.

Where is the money going to come from to finance Washington’s African Empire? Not from Libya’s oil. Big chunks of that have been promised to the French and British for providing cover for Washington’s latest war of naked aggression. Not from tax revenues from a collapsing US economy where unemployment, if measured correctly, is 23 percent.
With Washington’s annual budget deficit as huge as it is, the money can only come from the printing press...

...In the few opening years of the 21st century, Washington has destroyed the US Constitution, the separation of powers, international law, the accountability of government, and has sacrificed every moral principle to achieving hegemony over the world. This ambitious agenda is being attempted while simultaneously Washington removed all regulation over Wall Street, the home of massive greed, permitting Wall Street’s short-term horizon to wreck the US economy, thus destroying the economic basis for Washington’s assault on the world.

Will the US collapse in economic chaos before it rules the world?

Read article in full.

40 Trillion & Ticking: Global Debt Clock

US Default Inevitable: Fund Manager

From CNBC

A U.S. default isn't a matter of "if" but "when," David Murrin, chief investment officer at Emergent Asset Management, told CNBC.

"It's inevitable that the U.S. will default—it's essentially an empire which is overextended and in decline—and that its financial system will go with it," he said.

The question is: Does the U.S. default when it is forced to by the outside world, probably the Chinese, or does it take the option to default on its own terms in such a way that it may have a strategic advantage, Murrin said.

Marc Faber has a slightly different view:

“I don’t think the US will default in terms of not paying the interest on its debt. They will though default via a falling dollar as Bernanke begins printing more money,” Faber said.

“They will get an agreement or fiddle around with the debt ceiling,” Faber said.
“I disagree with the bond bulls that are basing their case on a deflationary environment. In such an outcome tax revenues would collapse and stocks would fall heavily.”

Faber predicts that 1,370 points was the high for the S&P 500 index in 2011 and told CNBC that if stocks fall another 10 or 20 percent from here, another round of quantitative easing is inevitable.

“The risk is not to hold gold. Whilst there is the potential for 10 percent downside in the short term over the next 5 to 10 years the gains will be big. Or put another way, the purchasing power of paper money will fall," Faber said.

“Cash is very risky asset except in times of major market corrections,” he added.

The Essence Of The Banking Industry

From Max Keiser

It's a brilliant business...if you're a genocidal maniac.

The Corporate Mugging of America

The politicians left and right are largely fooling themselves or at least fooling the population that cutting a few billion dollars here or there will solve our debt problem. It is a charade. As Nomi Prins says:

"Much of the debt problem, most of the debt problem, arguably all of the debt problem has happened because of this imparting of debt to bailout Wall Street, to subsidize the financial system, to go back and forth between the Fed who buys the debt, the treasury increases the debt, the Fed buys the debt, and has a sort of back and forth ball going between them which only decreases our value as a nation, our entire you know, book, our balance sheet as a nation, and the Fed will continue to do this. We know that when June comes along the fed is going to go from QE2 to QE whatever..."

Of course our biggest industry, which is the war and empire industry, the death industry, is also another state financed and furnished industry which ends up costing us more then it is worth. Corporations like GE are paying little or no tax, while the government baffoons try to soak out more money from unions, entitlement cuts, or with increased taxes for the middle class to pay for their bailing out of the Wall Street and corporate war machine. The status quo in America cannot continue successfully, but it will most likely continue, possibly leaving America, and perhaps the world in ruin.

Standard & Poors Cuts U.S. Outlook to Negative Because Both Parties Keep Throwing Money at Endless Wars, Endless Bailouts and a Ponzi Financial System

From Washington's Blog

The real problem is that both Democrats and Republicans want to fund endless wars, give endless bailouts to the too big to fail banks and corporations, and perpetuate the expensive Ponzi scheme of printing money out of thin air...

Read more.

On the Edge with Jerry Robinson

From Max Keiser.

Jim Rogers: Dollar will be debased gold and silver to hit new highs

From India Info Line


Daily Bell: What about the wars America is prosecuting and its military stance generally? Affordable? Supportable?

Jim Rogers: Well it is certainly not affordable. America has got troops in over 100 countries and it is just making enemies and not helping America's standing in the world. As for supportable of course not! How can anybody justify America now getting involved in Libya? I mean if America is going to support opposition to everybody in the world we don't like, America is soon going to be totally bankrupt, even more bankrupt. Why are we supporting the guy in Yemen and not the guy in Libya? I can see absolutely no intellectual, philosophical, or even political justification for what we are doing.

Daily Bell: Can the US sustain the war in Afghanistan for another three years? Will it have success in Westernizing that country?

Jim Rogers: No, look at the size of Afghanistan; I don't think the guys in Washington have a clue how big it is. Sure, we can stay there for three years and spend huge amounts of money, human lives, and we are making our situation worse not better. So we can stay there, but it is only driving us further and further into problems.

Daily Bell: Is Pakistan being destabilized as a result?

Jim Rogers: It's been destabilized. We are making more and more enemies in Pakistan every day and this is giving more psychological support to the enemies. They have someone else to rail against, more reasons to rail against the US. Pakistan seems to be more and more unstable. They have nuclear weapons; they have a lot of people who don't like the US, and they have a lot of people who don't like India.

Pakistan is one of the ten largest countries in the world population wise, and it's in a very strategic area, I hope it's not going to happen; I hope they're not going to destabilize further, but this is how big wars start. People aren't worried, and then all of a sudden, everybody's in over their head.

Daily Bell: Some say the US is trying to surround China. Is there more military tension between the US and China these days? Is that a bad thing?

Jim Rogers: I don't know there's more military tension between China and the US these days. The US is in Pakistan, but the Pakistanis have been allies of the Chinese for a long time. If Pakistan is becoming more destabilized, then they are not going to be an ally of the US against China I assure you. No one in Pakistan is going to say, let's support the US against China.

Everybody knows the US is becoming weaker and weaker geo-politically and militarily. If Venezuela and Colombia went to war tomorrow, there's nothing the US could do. We're over-extended in every way. I think our real position is even weaker than it appears. We may be talking a good game, but China is developing on it's own, and since I don't see that they are doing anything that threatens the US militarily, I am perplexed with this question.

Politicians may be railing more and more about China, but that's a verbal encirclement of China, not a military one. China is the richest country in the world now and we are the largest debtors in the world. That accounts for verbal attacks. Pressuring China militarily won't change the equation.

Daily Bell: Where is gold headed? Silver?

Jim Rogers: Everything I have told the world about gold and silver is going to continue to happen. Eventually gold will be a couple of thousand dollars an ounce, and probably much higher, as currencies become more debased, who knows how high. Silver will definitely reach new highs. As I have said, the US dollar is in serious trouble, and will be debased a great deal in the future, and eventually will be problematical itself. So gold and silver will be measured by the US dollar but I hope there will still be some sound currencies no matter what happens.

Government shutdown averted, fiscal crisis assured!

From Max Keiser

Max Keisers part from ZMF

From Max Keiser

America must brace itself for turbulence

From The Financial Times.

By Peter Orszag


America is experiencing the hard slog of recovering from the financial crisis. Prospects have turned more positive over the past two months. But a year ago growth was picking up too – and then it stalled, at about the same time Greece’s fiscal problems infected the global economy. The question now is whether a home-grown fiscal crisis could derail this year’s rebound.

Some analysts have reached dramatic conclusions, suggesting the near-certainty of hundreds of billions of dollars in government defaults within the US over the next 12 months. Such predictions will undoubtedly turn out to be substantially overblown. Yet the rejection of one extreme is not the affirmation of the other. International investors would be wise to pay close attention to fiscal trends within the US...

...The bottom line is that there may well be US public debt tremors this year, both during federal debate over raising the debt ceiling and with at least a limited number of crises in local and city governments. The bigger problem, though, lies beyond 2011, as the unsustainability of the federal government’s fiscal trajectory becomes increasingly clear. I hope it does not ultimately require a crisis to restore fiscal sustainability at the federal level, but I fear it will.


The writer is a vice-chairman of global banking at Citigroup and former director of the US Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama


Read Article in Full.

Max Keiser Telling it Like It Is...

Ratigan: “The big TARP lie”

From MaxKeiser.com

Germany Was Right When It Called Our Financial Policy “Clueless”

From Prison Planet.

It’s never a good thing when another country calls your financial policy clueless. It’s particularly bad if that other country is one of the world’s leading economies, and if it also happens to be right.

US defense spending bringing down an empire

From RT.

With US debt skyrocketing to $13.5 trillion, the rallying cry from Washington is to cut spending. But many politicians refuse to address defense spending.
Defense spending accounts for 58 percent of the discretionary pie, more than a trillion dollars a year all-in, or almost half of what the entire rest of the world spends combined.
With the US relying on countries like China to fund its wars and military bases around the world, even members of the Washington establishment are saying the US is bringing on its own demise as an imperial power through excessive spending it can no longer afford.

The Tipping Point has Arrived

From Zerohedge.

I believe we have finally breached the tipping point in the socio-political landscape of the United States of America. There will be no going back from here. Everyone on all levels of society including the elites must make a choice. Will you stand for real reform and an end of the feudalistic rule of the oligarchs and their paid-off puppets that line the streets of Washington D.C., or will you keep your mouth shut and play the old and dying game in the context of a completely different cultural environment?

While many will disagree with what I am about to say, I believe the oligarchs and the Federal Reserve have already lost...

U.S. is currency war's "tomb maker": China economist

From Reuters.

The United States fired the first shot in the currency war and the rest of the world must be on guard for its deliberate strategy to devalue the dollar, a Chinese economist said in an official newspaper on Thursday.

Max Kaiser - US Dollar Likely to Lose 50% Value in Near Future

An old video, but Max makes some good points.

MaxKaiser.com