Happy Holloween: Scary Actual U.S. Government Debt

The Globe And Mail - Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.

Prof. Kotlikoff says: “The IMF is saying that, to close this fiscal gap [by taxation], would require an immediate and permanent doubling of our personal income taxes, our corporate taxes and all other federal taxes.

“America’s fiscal gap is enormous – so massive that closing it appears impossible without immediate and radical reforms to its health care, tax and Social Security systems – as well as military and other discretionary spending cuts.”

He cites earlier calculations by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that concluded that the United States would need to increase tax revenue by 12 percentage points of GDP to bring revenue into line with spending commitments. But the CBO calculations assumed that the growth of government programs (including Medicare) would be cut by one-third in the short term and by two-thirds in the long term. This assumption, Prof. Kotlikoff notes, is politically implausible – if not politically impossible.

One way or another, the fiscal gap must be closed. If not, the country’s spending will forever exceed its revenue growth, and no one’s real debt can increase faster than his real income forever.

Prof. Kotlikoff uses “fiscal gap,” not the accumulation of deficits, to define public debt. The fiscal gap is the difference between a government’s projected revenue (expressed in today’s dollar value) and its projected spending (also expressed in today’s dollar value). By this measure, the United States is in worse shape than Greece.

Prof. Kotlikoff is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. He is the author (or co-author) of 14 books: Jimmy Stewart Is Dead (2010), his most recent book, explains his recommendations for reform.

He says the U.S. cannot end its fiscal crisis by increasing taxes. He opposes further stimulus spending because it will simply increase the debt. But he does suggest reforms that would help – most of which would require a significant withering away of the state. He proposes that the government give every person an annual voucher for health care, provided that the total cost not exceed 10 per cent of GDP. (U.S. health care now consumes 16 per cent of GDP.) He suggests the replacement of all current federal taxes with a single consumption tax of 18 per cent. He calls for government-sponsored personal retirement accounts, with the government making contributions only for the poor, the unemployed and people with disabilities.

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie. Here is an economist who speaks plainly, as the legendary straight-shooting film star Jimmy Stewart did for an earlier generation.

But Prof. Kotlikoff’s economic genre isn’t the Western. It’s the horror story – “and scarier,” one reviewer of his book suggests, than Stephen King.

Obama Fires Back At AIDS Protesters to Go Heckle The GOP

The Hill - President Obama deflected heckling by AIDS protesters during a Saturday rally, suggesting they take up their cause with "the other side" that's opposed to funding.

A group of people interrupted Obama's speech before 9,000 in Connecticut chanting "Fund Global AIDS."

The president was quick to respond to the chorus of protesters saying, "You’ve been appearing at every rally we’ve been doing. And we’re funding global AIDS. And the other side is not. So I don't know why you think this is a useful strategy to take."

Obama was in Bridgeport as part of a four-state swing during the final days before the midterm elections, stumping for Rep. Jim Himes, who is in a tight re-election race, and the state attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who is seeking the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Chris Dodd, who is retiring.

"I think it would make a lot more sense for you guys to go to the folks who aren’t interested in funding global AIDS and chant at that rally," Obama said. "Because we’re trying to focus on figuring out how to finance the things that you want financed, all right?"

That led to chants of "Obama, Obama" as the crowd stirred and the president tried to calm emotions as the protesters were escorted out of the rally.

"It's very important to remember that an issue like global AIDS is very important," Obama said. "And the question we’ve got is which party is most likely to actually fund it in ways that help people around the world."

He then added that it will be difficult to move forward on many issues until "we get the economy fixed, unless we can put people back to work, unless folks feel more confident about the future."

"It’s going to be hard to move forward on all these initiatives."

Democract Election Fraud Running Rampant

Sher Zieve - Arizona and Colorado are reporting massive voter fraud perpetrated by the Marxist groups Mi Familia Vota and One Vote Arizona. Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce writes: “I also understand that these 2 groups have signed up 20,000 states wide and they have requested that 45,000 be put on the permanent early ballot. If 65% of these last minute registration forms in Yuma are invalid, which may be more as they are still checking the rest, then what is the percentages of invalid in Maricopa, Pima and other counties?”

Aided by Socialist Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) and a George Soros funded group, WND advises that poll watchers are being threatened with, amongst other things, Obama’s DOJ: “Houston Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was seen inside the polling location electioneering and threatening to turn a poll-watcher’s name to the Department of Justice for voter intimidation.” Note: It appears that Michele Obama is not the only Marxist Democrat who is now allowed to illegally electioneer.

Kelly Shackelford of Liberty Institute says “All these attacks are clearly an attempt to bully and silence a group of volunteer citizens who are just trying to keep the election process honest.”

Voting machines in Nevada are being reported for automatically checking Harry Reid’s name. The Washington Examiner reports: “Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid’s name was already checked. Ferrara said she wasn’t alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

‘Something’s not right,’ Ferrara said. ‘One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time—that’s wrong’.” Note: Oh and by the way, guess who is the official technical organization for the voting machines. Why, it’s Obama’s bought and paid for SEIU! I was very serious when I wrote my column “Obama & Co Election Fraud may be Worst in US History.” With even members of the now Marxist-run Congress illegally and openly intimidating voters, this is worse than it has ever been. Myriad other reports of early voting fraud are coming in from across the country.

Again folks—and I cannot stress this enough—We-the-People MUST vote in unprecedented numbers in order to counter the all-out attack now being waged against us by Dictator-in-Chief Obama’s government. Our would-be slave masters are proving the point—beyond any and all doubt or question—that they WILL do anything and stop at nothing to stay in power in order to bleed every last drop of resources, blood, freedoms and liberty from us. It’s now or never.

“If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions”—Thomas Jefferson

Massive voter fraud in Arizona and Colorado:
Soros group launches attack on poll watchers—with help from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX):
Houston Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee Electioneering And Harassing Poll Watchers:
Nevada voting machines automatically checking Harry Reid’s name; voting machine technicians are SEIU members
Obama & Co Election Fraud may be Worst in US History:

Angle Campaign Attorney: Reid Intends To Steal This Election If He Can't Win It

Jon Ralston - So says Cleta Mitchell, the same woman who tried to get Scott Ashjian, the Tea Party of Nevada candidate out of the race, in an astonishing fundraising letter:

As Sharron Angle's campaign attorney, I am sorry to report that the Democrats and their cronies are up to their same old tricks, of trying to manipulate the election in hopes of skewing the results in their favor.

Two days ago, the Democratic Secretary of State announced that voters can be provided "free food" at "voter turnout events." Harry Reid has been offering free food and, according to other reports, some Democratic allies such as teachers' unions are offering gift cards in return for a vote for Reid.

Before we were even able to document the reported infractions to report to the authorities, the Democrat Secretary of State slammed the door shut on preventing this behavior and issued a public statement permitting these ACORN-style tactics. THESE are the kinds of shenanigans that can turn this race.

Harry Reid intends to steal this election if he can't win it outright. As a result, we need to deploy literally dozens of election law attorneys and poll watchers to combat these tactics at a cost of nearly $80,000. That's over and above our current budget. We need to raise $80,000 and we need to do it RIGHT NOW, because even as I am writing this, Harry Reid and his Machine are trying to steal this election. I'm sorry that we have to come to you yet again and ask for you to reach deep and contribute, but we must.

Understand, EVERYTHING we have worked for in the last year could be destroyed by dirty tricks and criminal acts in the next 8 days. As Sharron's first line of defense on these matters I am absolutely committed to making sure this won't happen.

What Harry Reid is doing is clearly illegal. Nevada law (NRS 293.700) provides that, “A person who bribes, offers to bribe, or use and other corrupt means, directly or indirectly, to influence any elector in giving his or her vote or to deter the elector from giving it is guilty of a category D felony and shall be punished as provided in NRS 193.130.”

We've seen evidence of this sort of voter 'enticement' by groups such as ACORN - where, in 2008, two ACORN workers in Milwaukee were accused of offering pre-paid gasoline cards or restaurant gift cards to people in exchange for registration.

John Fund wrote in his book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, cited reports from the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader (South Dakota) and the election in 2004, where certain residents were quoted saying that "people on the streets were saying you go vote, they would give you gas money, $10, maybe a pack of cigarettes..."

Now, this week in Las Vegas, at our election hotline, we received reports that some teachers' union representatives were offering Starbucks cards to people to get them to vote for Harry Reid. It is even more disturbing and may be possible that they are using their influence and authority as educators to entice students on behalf of Reid.

Here’s the bottom line: when the powerful are threatened, they will do anything to retain their position. It's clear now that Harry Reid's campaign is even willing to skirt the laws of Nevada to do it.

Is there any question that they will do the same on Election Day?

Will you help us raise this $80,000 today? With it we can fight the election-stealing tactics of Harry Reid and his corrupt cronies.

The right to vote is a precious one - and it carries with it somber responsibilities. The Democrats' willingness to allow voters to be enticed with a promise of any thing of value is a debasement of the process- and it may just destroy everything we've worked for.

Please send an urgent contribution so our work will not be in vain. We’re going to win this race as long as we don’t let Harry Reid steal it. Can you help us today?

American Job Losses Permanent

Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the U.S. economy and millions of American lives, globalism’s advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter’s discredited finding of several years ago that jobs offshoring by U.S. corporations increases employment and wages in the U.S.
At the time I exposed Slaughter’s mistakes, but economists dependent on corporate largess understood that it was more profitable to drink Slaughter’s Kool-Aid than to tell the truth. Recently the U.S. Chamber of Commerce rolled out Slaughter’s false argument as a weapon against House Democrats Sandy Levin and Tim Ryan, and the Wall Street Journal had Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, regurgitate Slaughter’s claim on its op-ed page on October 12.

I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.

Cohen told the Journal’s readers that “the fact is that for every job outsourced to Bangalore, nearly two jobs are created in Buffalo and other American cities.” I bet Buffalo “and other American cities” would like to know where these jobs are. Maybe Slaughter, Cohen, and the Chamber of Commerce can tell them.

Last May I was in St. Louis and was struck by block after block of deserted and boarded up homes, deserted factories and office buildings, even vacant downtown storefronts.

Detroit is trying to shrink itself by 40 square miles. On October 25, 60 Minutes had a program on unemployment in Silicon Valley, where formerly high-earning professionals have been out of work for two years and today cannot even find part-time $9 an hour jobs at Target.

The claim that jobs offshoring by U.S. corporations increases domestic employment in the U.S. is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated. As I demonstrated in my syndicated column at the time and again in my book, How The Economy Was Lost (2010), Slaughter reached his erroneous conclusion by counting the growth in multinational jobs in the U.S. without adjusting the data to reflect the acquisition of existing firms by multinationals and for existing firms turning themselves into multinationals by establishing foreign operations for the first time. There was no new multinational employment in the U.S. Existing employment simply moved into the multinational category from a change in the status of firms to multinational.

If Slaughter (or Cohen) had consulted the Bureau of Labor Statistics nonfarm payroll jobs data, he would have been unable to locate the 5.5 million jobs that were allegedly created. In my columns I have reported for about a decade the details of new jobs creation in the U.S. as revealed by the BLS data, as has Washington economist Charles McMillion. Over the last decade, the net new jobs created in the U.S. have nothing to do with multinational corporations. The jobs consist of waitresses and bartenders, health care and social services (largely ambulatory health care), retail clerks, and while the bubble lasted, construction.

These are not the high-tech, high-paying jobs that the “New Economy” promised, and they are not jobs that can be associated with global corporations. Moreover, these domestic service jobs are themselves scarce.

But facts have nothing to do with it. Did Slaughter, Cohen, the Chamber, and the Wall Street Journal ever wonder how it was possible to have simultaneously millions of new good-paying middle class jobs and virtually the worst income inequality in the developed world with all income gains accruing to the mega-rich?

In mid-October Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs puppet Tim Geithner gave a speech in California in the backyard, or former backyard, of 60 Minutes’ Silicon Valley dispossessed upper middle class interviewees in which Geithner said that the solution is to “educate more engineers.”

We already have more engineers than we have jobs for them. In a recent poll a Philadelphia marketing and research firm, Twentysomething, found that 85% of recent college graduates planned to move back home with parents. Even if members of the “boomeranger generation” find jobs, the jobs don’t pay enough to support an independent existence.

The financial media is useless. Reporters repeat the lie that the unemployment rate is 9.6%. This is a specially concocted unemployment rate that does not count most of the unemployed. The government’s own more inclusive rate stands at 17%. Statistician John Williams, who counts unemployment the way it is supposed to be counted, finds the unemployment rate to be 22%.

The financial press turns bad news into good news. Recently a monthly gain of 64,000 new private sector jobs was hyped, jobs that were more than offset by the loss in government jobs. Moreover, it takes around 150,000 new jobs each month to keep pace with labor force growth. In other words, 100,000 new jobs each month would be a 50,000 jobs deficit.

The idiocy of the financial press is demonstrated by the following two headlines which appeared on October 19 on the same Bloomberg page:

· “Dollar Index Appreciates as Geithner Supports Currency Strength”

· “Geithner Weak Dollar Seen as U.S. Recovery Route”

To keep eyes off of the loss of jobs to offshoring, policymakers and their minions in the financial press blame U.S. unemployment on alleged currency manipulation by China and on the financial crisis. The financial crisis itself is blamed by Republicans on low income Americans who took out mortgages that they could not afford.

In other words, the problem is China and the greedy American poor who tried to live above their means. With this being the American mindset, you can see why nothing can be done to save the economy.

No government will admit its mistakes, especially when it can blame foreigners. China is being made the scapegoat for American failure. An entire industry has grown up that points its finger at China and away from 20 years of corporate offshoring of U.S. jobs and 9 years of expensive and pointless U.S. wars.

“Currency manipulation” is the charge. However, the purpose of the Chinese peg to the U.S. dollar is not currency manipulation. When the Chinese government decided to take its broken communist economy into a market economy, the government understood that it needed foreign confidence in its currency. It achieved that by pegging its currency to the dollar, signaling that China’s money was as sound as the U.S. dollar. At that time, China, of course, could not credibly give its currency a higher dollar value.

As time has passed, the irresponsible and foolish policies of the U.S. have eroded the dollar’s value, and as the Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar, its value has moved down with the dollar. The Chinese have not manipulated the peg in order to make their currency less valuable.

To the contrary, when I was in China in 2006, the exchange rate was a little more than 8 yuan to the dollar. Today it is 6.6 yuan to the dollar – 17.5% revaluation of the yuan.

Paul Craig Roberts - The U.S. government blames the U.S. trade deficit with China on an undervalued Chinese currency. However, the Chinese currency has risen 17.5% against the dollar since 2006, but the U.S. trade deficit with China has not declined.

The major cause of the U.S. trade deficit with China is “globalism” or the practice, enforced by Wall Street and Wal-Mart, of U.S. corporations offshoring their production for U.S. markets to China in order to improve the bottom line by lowering labor costs. Most of the tariffs that the congressional idiots want to put on “Chinese” imports would, therefore, fall on the offshored production of U.S. corporations. When these American brand goods, such as Apple computers, are brought to U.S. markets, they enter the U.S. as imports. Thus, the tariffs will be applied to U.S. corporate offshored output as well as to the exports of Chinese companies to the U.S.

The correct conclusion is that the U.S. trade deficit with China is the result of “globalism” or jobs offshoring, not Chinese currency manipulation.

An important point always overlooked is that the U.S. is dependent on China for many manufactured products including high technology products that are no longer produced in the U.S. Revaluation of the Chinese currency would raise the dollar price of these products in the U.S. The greater the revaluation, the greater the price rise. The impact on already declining U.S. living standards would be dramatic.

When U.S. policymakers argue that the solution to America’s problems is a stronger Chinese currency, they are yet again putting the burden of adjustment on the out-of-work, indebted, and foreclosed American population.

Obama Meets With Left-Wing Bloggers

Huffington Post Reports: The invitees fall more under the rubric of ideological or issue-oriented activists as opposed to online reporters, though the names are familiar to most political junkies. An administration official confirmed that Joe Sudbay of AMERICABlog; Duncan Black ("Atrios"), who runs the site Eschaton; Barbara Morrill, who writes for the DailyKos; Jon Amato, who is the founder of Crooks and Liars; and Oliver Willis, who runs an eponymous site, spoke with the president on Wednesday.

Obama's outreach on Wednesday could be about ginning up enthusiasm in the closing days of the election. But it also seems likely to be an effort at pre-scripting the online narrative about the election's fallout.

Emphasis added. Obama continues to make his priorities clear. And they don't mesh well with the priorities of the majority of Americans.

What was that John Thune said on Saturday?

President Obama has been running around the country trying to reelect Democrat members of Congress.

But if the conversations I’ve had with voters are any indication, the president should spend less time campaigning to save the jobs of Democrats in Congress, and more time trying to create jobs for the American people.

Nevada Voting Machines Automatically Check Sen. Harry Reid Name; Voting Machine Techs Are SEIU Members

Clark County is where three quarters of Nevada's residents and live and where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's son Rory is a county commissioner. Rory is also a Democratic candidate for governor.

Since early voting started, there have been credible reports that voting machines in Clark County, Nevada are automatically checking Harry Reid's name on the ballot:

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

"Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."

Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said there is no voter fraud, although the issues do come up because the touch-screens are sensitive. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they make a selection at any time.

Now there's absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet), but it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle -- nearly all of that on Democrats. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is formerly the SEIU's top lobbyist, and former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent visitor to the White House last year.

Just in Nevada, the SEIU has given a lot to groups that are heavily vested in the state -- in just one prominent example, the SEIU gave $500,000 to the Patriot Majority PAC, which has spent $1.3 million against Reid's opponent Sharron Angle. They've and have dropped large sums directly on candidates:

NV-3


Joe Heck (R)


Oppose


$140,000.00

NV-3


Dina Titus (D)


Support


$344,984.00

NV-Senate


Sharron E. Angle (R)


Oppose


$225,000.00

Now the county voting technicians aren't unique here -- many of Clark County's employees are also represented by the SEIU. But it is worth mentioning, the SEIU is hyperpoliticized and has seen its fair share of corruption. (It certainly seems more questionable than Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer with Republican ties that was at the center of many conspiracy theories on the left during the Bush administration.)

Unions increasingly have a major financial stake in election outcomes, both as a matter of their own election expenditures, and as a function of what they stand to gain if their legislative agenda is enacted. Should they really be responsible for tabulating the votes? That's certainly something voters ought to think long and hard about.

Millions Of Unemployed Americans Now Live As Serfs

Economic Collapse - Most Americans still do not understand just how bad the economic horror we are facing really is. Today, millions of Americans are living as paupers in the land that their foreathers built even as America’s infrastructure is literally being sold out from under their feet by corrupt politicians. The “official” unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months, and today it takes the average unemployed American about 35 weeks to find a job. However, the “official” unemployment rate is misleading, because it does not include workers that have quit looking for work or that have had their hours cut back to part-time. According to 60 Minutes, when you add those “discouraged workers” and “underemployed workers” into the equation the actual rate is about 17 percent, and in the state of California the actual rate is about 22 percent. Meanwhile, foreign nations are using sovereign wealth funds to buy up staggering amounts of U.S. infrastructure. America is quite literally for sale in 2010. All across the United States, highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters are being gobbled up by foreign powers. We have shipped massive amounts of wealth and jobs to other nations, and now those very same countries are turning around and buying huge amounts of U.S. infrastructure with the gigantic piles of dollars that they have accumulated.

Widespread long-term chronic unemployment was something that America was never supposed to see again. Our leaders promised us that the U.S. financial system was so strong that we would never have another “Great Depression” in our lifetimes. But then the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Unprecedented numbers of Americans started losing their jobs and the U.S. Congress did something that it had never done before. Congress decided to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to 99 weeks.

Doing that has cost U.S. taxpayers approximately $100 billion dollars to this point, but we were promised that it was a “temporary” fix and that it would give displaced U.S. workers a chance to find new jobs.

Surely any industrious American worker could get another job within 99 weeks, right?

Wrong.

Today, there are at least 1.5 milion “99ers” – those Americans that have completely exhausted all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and that still do not have jobs.

Sadly, as bad as that number sounds, it is likely to keep growing. Today, over one-third of all unemployed Americans have already been unemployed for at least one year. If this trend continues, we are going to end up with millions of “99ers”.

60 Minutes recently did a report on some of these “99ers”. Many of them are very highly educated and very highly qualified. If you have not seen this 60 Minutes report yet, you have got to take few minutes to sit down and watch it. This video is so shocking that many of you will have your jaws on the floor by the time you finish watching it….



So is there much reason for these “99ers” to be optimistic?

No, not really.

In fact, there are some indications that unemployment in America is actually getting worse. Gallup’s measure of unemployment, which is not adjusted for “seasonal factors”, exhibited a sharp increase in the month of September. According to Gallup, unemployment has increased from 8.9% in July to 9.3% in August and to 10.1% in September.

In addition, the seasonally-adjusted “Alternate Unemployment Rate” compiled by Shadow Government Statistics also indicates that unemployment in the U.S. is going up once again. The Alternate Unemployment Rate calculated by SGS reflects estimated “long-term discouraged workers”, which the U.S. government stopped keeping track of back in 1994….

But it is not just the massive number of Americans that are completely unemployed that we need to be concerned about. The truth is that more Americans than at any other time in recent history are working part-time jobs because that is all they can find. The number of Americans working part-time jobs “for economic reasons” is now the highest it has been in at least five decades.

Meanwhile, sovereign wealth funds from nations such as Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait, Libya, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates are buying up highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters from coast to coast.

So exactly what is a sovereign wealth fund?

Well, just think of it as a huge mountain of state-owned money that roams about the countryside looking for assets to gobble up.

In a recent piece for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi described some of the U.S. infrastructure assets that these sovereign wealth funds are buying up….

A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.

It turns out that U.S. politicians have figured out that they can help solve their budget problems by selling off or leasing out pieces of infrastructure. Foreign nations with money to burn have been glad to come in and start buying a lot of this infrastructure up. Today, it is estimated that the rest of the world currently owns several trillion dollars more of America than America owns of the rest of the world. Later on in his article, Taibbi noted that the trend toward selling off pieces of infrastructure only seems to be accelerating….

At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn’t nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.

Sadly, both the number and the value of major acquisitions made by sovereign wealth funds approximately doubled during the first half of 2010.

Instead of being the “land of the free”, we are rapidly becoming the “land that has been leased out to foreign nations”.

So where in the world did these sovereign wealth funds get all this money?

Well, they got it from us of course.

Every single month, the United States buys massive amounts of oil from the Middle East and massive amounts of cheap plastic crap from China. The rest of the world buys a bunch of stuff from us too, but not nearly as much as we buy from the rest of the world.

So every single month tens of billions of dollars that used to belong to the American people ends up in the hands of foreigners. Now some of that money is returning to this country and is being used to buy up our infrastructure.

Many of these highways and toll roads that are being sold off had already been completely paid for. Can you imagine the frustration of the taxpayers in many of these areas when they realize that a road that they have already completely paid for with their tax dollars has been sold out from underneath them?

Another place that all these U.S. dollars held by foreigners is going is into U.S. Treasuries. In fact, the federal government very much encourages this. After all, we have to finance our exploding debt somehow.

In essence, first we made some folks in the Middle East and in Asia incredibly wealthy, and now we are asking them to please lend that money back to us so that we can continue living far beyond our means.

Today, the national debt of the United States is rapidly approaching 14 trillion dollars. An increasing percentage of this debt is owned by foreigners.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and we are rapidly becoming enslaved to the rest of the world.

This is national economic suicide, but our politicians have become so addicted to debt that there doesn’t seem to be much hope that things can be turned around any time soon.

If You Print A Trillion, I'll Print A Trillion

The Daily Bail: Enough is never enough for Paul Krugman – and other instances of behavior leading the world toward high inflation and political instability.

* "The stimulus has failed. How should one interpret the result? If you were Paul Krugman, you would say it wasn't enough.

* "Of course, if 20 percent of GDP in budget deficit and another round of QE still don't work, he would say not enough again. You can never prove Krugman wrong. Such a smart fellow."

---

QE: The Numberless Oblivion by Andy Xie

The world seems full of smoke ahead of a world currency war. The weapon of choice is quantitative easing, a.k.a. QE. If you print a trillion, I'll print a trillion. Of course, he and she will too. No change in exchange rates after a trillion? Let's do it again, QE2. If you listen to people like Geithner, the end of the world is quite near. Rich people everywhere are buying gold for a little peace of mind, not just the Chinese. They are literally trucking it by the ton or two home. When currency values vanish in a QE melee, at least the rich have the gold to stay rich.

If you listen to American pundits, politicians or government officials, it's all China's fault. China is far from perfect. Its currency policy certainly isn't. But it is not the cause for the world's ills. The U.S. is by far the biggest source of uncertainty and the initiator of the QE war. Its elite created the biggest financial bubble since 1929, even removing regulations designed to prevent it, and left the U.S. economy in shambles after its burst. The same people want to find a quick cure to hold onto their power. Unfortunately, there is no quick cure.

The U.S. has cut interest rates to zero and run up the budget deficit to 10 percent of GDP. It's a shock-and-awe Keneysian policy. But, after a few quarters of strong growth, the economy is turning down again, and the unemployment remains close to 10 percent. And this figure would be much higher, close to 20 percent like Spain's, if it included the underemployed and those who have stopped looking for work.

* The stimulus has failed. How should one interpret the result? If you were Paul Krugman, you would say it wasn't enough. Of course, if 20 percent of GDP in budget deficit and another round of QE still don't work, he would say not enough again. You can never prove Krugman wrong. Such a smart fellow.

The second interpretation is that it takes time for the economy to heal. No economy recovers so quickly after a bubble that big. During this prolonged and massive bubble, resources have become so misallocated that it takes time for regeneration. In particular, when the labor market is misallocated, it just can't correct itself quickly. Hence, when an economy is in a misallocated state, a stimulus kicks up growth through its own power but can't get the multiplier effect for the economy to sustain growth beyond.

The third interpretation is that it's China's fault. Yes, China's exports to the U.S. rose sharply during its stimulus-inspired pickup, i.e., the stimulus partly went to China. But, whose fault is it? Apple makes all the iPhones in China, because it costs under US$ 20 each, even after the massive wage increase for Chinese workers. Apple's gross margins are 30 times the processing cost that goes to China. Maybe Apple is an extreme example. But, the fact is that China's exports to the US are American goods that retail for 3-4 times of the factory-gate prices. American companies want to make the goods in China to satisfy the stimulus-inspired demand.

People like Geithner would argue that China should raise the currency to force American companies to move production back to the U.S. I suppose that that is how the whole yuan appreciation idea may work. But, at what exchange rate would the American companies want to do it? American wages are ten times China's. Should China increase its currency value ten times?

Of course, the American pundits wouldn't put it that way. They would talk about China's trade or current account surplus and the rising forex reserves, the prima facie evidence of currency manipulation. I don't want to deny that the rising forex reserves are a problem that China must tackle with. But, it is a separate issue from the US economy. The solution isn't yuan appreciation either.

Everybody knows China has a massive savings rate of around half of its GDP. It's a simple equation that the current account surplus is equal to savings minus investment. If the current account surplus is a problem, it is either insufficient investment or excessive frugality. China's investment is over 40 percent of GDP. Even casual observers would find China's investment too much. Are Chinese people too frugal? The household income is probably under 40 percent of GDP. How could they be the source of the gigantic savings?

The problem is China's political economy. The government sector raises money through taxes, fees, monopoly franchises and high property prices. The property sales were 14 percent of GDP. If the price is normalized, i.e., halved, the household sector would have 7 percent of GDP more. The household savings rate is roughly one third. That would boost domestic demand by nearly 5 percent, wiping away the whole current account surplus.

China's education and healthcare systems are quite scary to the people. They are very creative at squeezing the household sector. The teachers need gifts on holidays. There are lots of holidays. Hospitals eye patients on how much money they can be squeezed out of and provide services accordingly. China's household sector is squeezed, punched upon and kicked at everyday. For the masses it is a joke that they have too much money to fund the current account surplus.

China's current account surplus is mainly due to its political economy. The gray income is vast, possibly 10 percent of GDP. Such money normally goes offshore. But, because the dollar is weak and China's property market is sizzling, the money stays in China and goes disproportionately into the property market. Unless the gray income is reduced through anti-corruption campaigns, the current account surplus won't go away.

The current account surplus is half of the forex reserve story. The other half is hot money. Overseas Chinese are the main source. Chinese property and the dollar are their most important foreign assets. As the dollar weakens, they have poured money into China, especially into the property market. Hedge funds and other speculators have also poured money in through buying offshore Chinese assets. Hot money into emerging economies is always a bubble. I can't recall an exception. This one will prove the same.

I think China's currency is overvalued. China's money supply has exploded in the past decade, rising from 12 to 70 trillion yuan. No currency has not experienced depreciation after a such a prolonged bout of money growth. China's industry has risen tremendously to justify part of the growth. But, a massive amount is in the overvalued property market. When it normalizes, the money flows out and the currency depreciation pressure happens. We should see this within two years.

What is right isn't important for now. What is politically expedient is. Americans want a quick cure for its economic difficulties. It wants to devalue the dollar to achieve it. If it could force China to increase its currency value, then the yen, euro, and all the others would go up in tandem. The U.S., one fourth of the global economy, could export out of its problem.

The problem is that all the others won't follow this program. China could not move up its currency value too much. Otherwise, it would trigger hot money outflows, a total collapse of its property market and the banking system with it. China is between a rock and a hard place. It is trying to achieve a soft landing of its property market by incremental tightening steps while the currency appreciation expectation keeps the hot money from leaving. The combination may support a multi-year gradual adjustment, giving the banking system time to raise capital.

Japan isn't in a position to appreciate the yen much. Its industries have lost competitiveness to Germany's or even the U.S.'s. Its industries haven't had a global hit product for years. Germany and the U.S.'s auto industries are gaining over Japan's. It's hard to see how the yen could go up a lot. The BoJ is vulnerable to political pressure. It doesn't have a good track record. If it lets the yen to destroy Toyota, Honda, etc., it's hard to see how it could remain independent. Hence, it will resort to QE to hold down the yen.

The euro is surging by default. The ECB seems to still be talking like the Bundesbank. But, its position can't last through the next sovereign debt crisis. When the euro is high, some economy, not Germany or France, will get into a crisis mode. It may join the QE crowd too.

The UK doesn't need persuasion to embrace QE. It is like a big Hong Kong, all about stir-frying stocks and properties. When the bubble bursts, it doesn't have much else to do. Devaluing the currency seems to be the only way out.

Korea is small but always tries to join the big leagues. It is big in automobile, electronics and petrochemicals. Its government doesn't need convincing to watch over the exchange rate. Recently, it has been "investigating" financial institutions for undesirable practices in the currency market.

The mild Brazil is fired up too. Over the past decade, it allowed the market to double its currency value. Brazilian people are grateful for the low inflation as a result. But its growth rate is quite low, not good enough for a developing economy, leaving alone the vaunted status of one of the BRICs.

It seems that nobody wants to appreciate. Most major economies will do something to keep their currencies down. That is checkmate for the U.S. Without devaluation benefits on rising exports, QE just leads to inflation, first through rising oil prices. The American people are suffering from declining housing prices and high unemployment. If the gasoline price doubles from here, the country may not be stable. How would the elite react? Probably more of the same.

The world is heading towards high inflation and political instability. Another global crisis is a matter of time. The first sign would be a collapsing treasury market. The Fed is controlling the yield curve through its QE program. It would be irrational for other investors to play the game. The only reason to stay in is that the Fed won't let the market fall. But, the underlying value is evaporating with rising money supply and the inflationary consequences. When all the investors realize this, they will all run for the exits. The Fed won't be able to stop the stampede. If it prints enough money to take over the whole market, people with freshly minted dollars would surely want to convert the money into other assets. The dollar would collapse too.

The world seems on course to another crisis in 2012.

The same people who caused the last crisis are still in charge. They'll get us into another. Iceland is taking its ex-prime minister to court for causing the banking crisis. Worse fates await the people who are causing the next crisis. China used to chop off the heads of its failing ministers at the capital's vegetable market. Maybe we should bring back the practice and globalize it.

We Are All Bigots Now In America

David Stokes - The firing of Juan Williams by National Public Radio (NPR), alleging that he was guilty of bigotry during a recent appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s FoxNews Channel television program, is another case of political correctness mixed with demagoguery run amuck.

Here are the “horrific” words that did him in:

"Look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

Frankly, there’s nothing bigoted in the statement—not at all. If there is, then we are all bigots now, and maybe that’s the point National “Passive-Aggressive” Radio is trying to make. Williams’ remark was not only a reflection of common sense; it’s common sense that’s widely shared. I find myself feeling the same way on occasion. A family member who recently flew to Detroit told me that after the plane was airborne, a man in “Muslim garb” (you know it when you see it) got up and bowed down in the aisle for some reason. Everyone who saw it was uncomfortable and it is doubtful anyone slept for the remainder of the flight.

It was clearly an aircraft filled with bigots.

The problem is that the people at NPR suffer from the same disorder as do Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, and a growing multitude of naïve Americans. They fail to acknowledge the clear Muslim threat to America and our way of life. And when someone dares to mention the “M” word, some liberals are like 6-year olds with hands over their ears and yelling, “Blah, Blah, Blah, I Can’t Hear You!”

But it’s worse than childish behavior on their part; it’s willful ignorance.

Of course, whenever the issue of the Muslim connection to Islamism (like hydrogen’s connection to water) is mentioned, the knee-jerk response by some is to say something akin to, “Well, you can’t condemn all Christians because of what Timothy McVeigh did.” In fact, Juan Williams, who remains a liberal, but one clearly with a brain and who is transparent about his feelings on things even when they run counter to the liberal line, actually made that leap on O’Reilly’s show. But slack should be cut, because he learned the hard way that even if you try to temper a potentially negative statement about Islam with a dose of tortured moral equivalency, it is never enough to assuage the women on The View or those who worship at similar altars. Never mind the fact that if Islamists ever do get a foothold in America—in a way commensurate with their vision—programs like The View will be cancelled and replaced with a wild and crazy program called The Sharia Show. Liberals think themselves enlightened every time they bash Christianity and defend Islam, but they are really helping the darkness creep over our nation. And unlike Niemoeller’s “and then they came for me” moment, the Islamists will go after “enlightened” liberals first and the individual reaction will be the same, “Wait, I was on your side!”—The mantra of dupes.

Here is a very important distinction between what those on Sept. 11th did, along with the Fort Hood shooter, and others would have done elsewhere if not prevented. They attempted or did what they did IN THE NAME OF ISLAM (emphasis on purpose). Timothy McVeigh did not proclaim “Jesus Is Lord” when he blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In fact, truth be told McVeigh was a professed agnostic who said he worshipped science!

The attacks nine years ago that killed 3,000 Americans were not just done by people who happened to have grown up in a Muslim country, but they were done IN THE NAME OF ISLAM (emphasis, again, on purpose). When Nidal Hasan climbed onto the table last year at Fort Hood, he cried, “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah Is Great”) before opening fire. He was not a nut who happened to be Muslim; he did what he did because he was Muslim. This distinction must be made again and again because it is clear that some Americans simply don’t get it and others have long since lost interest.

Islam was the reason for the Sept. 11th attacks and every attack or attempt since, according to those who planned, funded, and implemented them—without exception. And no one involved took time or cared to make a distinction between “their” Islam and the kind some others profess to believe.

As for NPR, its extrinsic media role in America is once again glaringly apparent. Proudly (arrogantly) portraying itself as a voice of objectivity, the slant of most of the news elements shared on its member stations is decidedly to the far left. In fact, they have been looking for a reason to throw Juan Williams under the proverbial bus for a long time. His sin? He appears regularly on FoxNews. Liberals, who decried perceived “guilt by association” in the 1950s, seem to have embraced the methodology these days.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.” But of course, this is exactly the case with NPR. Our tax dollars support it. Not all of it, but a significant portion (some estimates are as high as 16 percent of the network’s revenue). Created in a day and age long before cable television, satellite radio, YouTube, and whatnot, the idea was to provide another media option among few others.

But is NPR really even needed today? If so, let the market determine the issue. Let the stations continue to beg for money to regularly save the stations (as is the case right now, bummer of a timing issue with the Williams imbroglio, huh?) and if the money runs out, let them die. A nation without NPR is much preferred to one where my tax dollars support a propaganda arm of the American left. Better yet, let George Soros just fund the whole thing. He already gives them a boatload of cash. And we all know that he is all about objectivity.

Hey wait, with all the charges leveled from the White House recently about “foreign money” and politics, isn’t Soros from a whole other country—or planet?

Forced Abortions: Dream Of The Scientific Elite

Today’s harrowing story about a pregnant woman in China who was brutally beaten and abducted by state goons before being forcibly injected with a drug to kill her unborn baby serves as a stark reminder that the current White House science czar, John P. Holdren, advocated the creation of a “planetary regime” that would carry out similar draconian measures in America as part of the eugenicist zeal to reduce world population.

36-year-old Xiao Aiying was eight months pregnant when twelve government officials entered her house, brutally beating and kicking her in the stomach before dragging her kicking and screaming to a state hospital. Her crime? She had conceived a second child and failed to pay the mandatory $40,000 dollar fine for breaking China’s notorious one child policy.

Aiying was held down and forcibly injected with drugs to kill the baby. The woman, “who was filmed in hospital with large bruises on her arms and her dead child still inside her, said: “I have had this baby, feeling it moving around and around my belly. Can you imagine how I feel now,” reports the Daily Mail.

The vast majority of people would find such a story repulsive, but if White House science czar John P. Holdren and a legion of like-minded eugenicists are allowed to implement their autocratic population control measures, forced abortion could be coming to America. This is the dream of the scientific elite who have indoctrinated the globe to embrace the sick religion of eugenics and population control.

In his 1977 book Ecoscience, Holdren explicitly advocated forced abortion. Holdren’s co-author was Paul Ehrlich, famous for his spectacularly inaccurate predictions about how overpopulation would destroy the environment.

On page 837, Holdren and his co-authors write, “Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

On page 786, Holdren explains how single mothers should have their babies taken away by the government; or failing that be forced to have abortions.

“One way to carry out this disapproval might be to insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone. If a single mother really wished to keep her baby, she might be obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it. Adoption proceedings probably should remain more difficult for single people than for married couples, in recognition of the relative difficulty of raising children alone. It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.”

To prevent women from conceiving in the first place, Holdren advocates poisoning the water supply with sterilant drugs, so long as it doesn’t harm livestock.

From page 787-8, ““Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

On pages 786-787, Holdren introduced the idea of a mandatory implant that prevents women from getting pregnant until they receive government permission to do so.

“The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

Screenshots of all these excerpts can be viewed here.

As we have thoroughly documented, the overpopulation myth is a completely discredited pseudo-science. Cited by advocates of population control as a sick justification, in reality it is merely the front for an elitist drive to thin the human surplus so that we may be more easily enslaved and ruled by the “planetary regime” that Holdren calls for on pages 942-943.

As we revealed in a report last month, the true agenda behind fanning the flames of fears about overpopulation is to reduce living standards globally, by preventing the third world from ever becoming economically prosperous, while also eviscerating the middle classes of western nations.

A leaked UN blueprint concerning the need to re-energize the move towards global government outlined a plan to re-brand global warming as “overpopulation” as a means of dismantling the middle classes by discouraging them from having children.

The fact that after having advocated measures which could just as easily have come from the warped mind of someone like Nazi monster Dr. Joseph Mengele, Holdren is now overseeing geo-engineering projects focused around spraying the atmosphere with dangerous sulphur particles, the threat is clear. We literally have mad scientists who want to abduct pregnant women and kill heir babies in charge of scientific policy and the multi-billion dollar budget that goes with it.

How John Holdren is still being paid with taxpayer money to craft environmental and public health policies when he has openly advocated forced abortion and illegal mass sterilization programs is a damning indictment of how the inmates are running the asylum.

Is it time to make Bernie Madoff Treasury Secretary?

Why don’t we put Charlie Manson in charge of education?

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

How about hiring Kim Jong-Il as a foreign ambassador?

NPR "Nutty" Ombudsman Tries To Justify Juan Williams Firing

Sister Toldjah - Expected nothing less, but still worth mentioning. From NPR Ombudsman Alicia Walker:

Williams’ appearances on Fox News, especially O’Reilly’s show, have caused heartburn repeatedly for NPR over the last few years. Management said he’s been warned several times that O’Reilly is a professional provocateur and to be careful.

In early 2009, Williams said on O’Reilly of Michelle Obama: “She’s got this Stokely Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing going. If she starts talking . . . her instinct is to start with this blame America, you know, I’m the victim. If that stuff starts to coming out, people will go bananas and she’ll go from being the new Jackie O. to being something of an albatross.”

After other inflammatory comments on Fox, in April 2008 NPR changed Williams’ role from news correspondent (a reporting job) to news analyst. In this contract position, he was expected to report, think quickly and give his own analysis – while carefully choosing his words on any given subject.

One reason he was fired, according to Vivian Schiller, NPR’s CEO, is that the company felt he wasn’t performing the role of a news analyst:

“News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that’s what’s happened in this situation,” said Schiller in an email to NPR member stations, some of which are upset about Williams’ firing.

“As you all well know,” she continued, “we offer views of all kinds on your air every day, but those views are expressed by those we interview – not our reporters and analysts.”

In 2008, I received 378 emails complaining about remarks Williams made on Fox – but I heard very little about his comments on NPR. My February 2009 blog post on the Stokely Carmichael incident drew 216 comments – many asking why NPR put up with Williams’ dual role.

In fact, since I became Ombudsman in October 2007, no other NPR employee has generated as much controversy as Williams.

That said, Williams provided a valuable voice on NPR. His long experience as a journalist and background as an authority on the Civil Rights movement enabled him to offer insights that often enriched the network’s reporting.

Ultimately, however, it seems management felt he had become more of a liability than an asset. Unfortunately, I agree.

It can’t be overlooked that this episode is occurring in a toxic political environment where people are quick to take sides and look for hidden motives. I fear some will look for racial motivations in NPR’s decision to fire Williams, who is African-American and one of the few black male NPR voices.

It’s not about race. It’s also not about free speech, as some have charged. Nor is it about an alleged attempt by NPR to stifle conservative views. NPR offers a broad range of viewpoints on its radio shows and web site.

Instead, this latest incident with Williams centers around a collision of values: NPR’s values emphasizing fact-based, objective journalism versus the tendency in some parts of the news media, notably Fox News, to promote only one side of the ideological spectrum.

The issue also is whether someone on NPR’s payroll should be allowed to say something in one venue that NPR would not allow on its air. NPR’s ethics code says they cannot.

Right. So an NPR “journalist” would be fired on the spot for wishing Jesse Helms would get AIDS and die, and an NPR “humorist” would be fired on the spot for saying that the “evaporation of 4 million [people] who believe” in the doctrine of Rapture “would leave the world a better place”, right? Wrong.

And her assertion regarding “NPR’s values emphasizing fact-based, objective journalism”?? I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. Read this 2003 piece from a prior NPR ombudsman on NPR “legal affairs correspondent” Nina Totenberg’s opinion on George W. Bush and Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. First, Totenberg’s remarks:

NINA TOTENBERG: The problem in Iraq is also that I think that the administration doesn’t want to really fess up that there are some serious, serious problems that maybe even they didn’t do everything perfectly. I mean, now they’ve got this guy who was the head of the intelligence section in the Defense Department who is being quoted as telling various groups while he’s in uniform that this is a Christian crusade against Muslims who –

GORDON PETERSON: You’re talking about Boykin, Gen. Boykin.

TOTENBERG: Gen. Boykin, and this is terrible. This is seriously bad stuff for us.

COLBERT KING: And the other thing about Boykin, he got it wrong. He said, God put George Bush in the White House. It’s the Supreme Court that did it.

TOTENBERG: The Supreme Court put George Bush in the White House.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: There were 5,000 yentas in Palm Beach who couldn’t read the ballot. If that was not an act of providence, nothing is…

TOTENBERG: I hope he’s not long for this world, because you can imagine –

PETERSON: You want a hit out on this guy or what? What is this, The Sopranos?

TOTENBERG: No, no. I mean, in his job. In his job, in his job, please, in his job.

Uh huh. NPR’s ombudsman at the time, Jeffrey Dvorkin, argued that NPR journalists cross a fine line and risk their credibility as “objective” reporters of the news when they appear on opinion shows:

There is a danger whenever NPR reporters appear in other media that do not have the same standards of journalism. NPR risks its own reputation by lending its own legitimacy to any media that may practice a different standard of journalism.

The overabundance of opinion, instead of reporting, in the broadcast media is growing, and some NPR listeners fear NPR has increasingly become part of that culture.

NPR journalists should be speaking, as well as writing and appearing, in other media. It is good for NPR and for its journalists, but when they do it, they should maintain NPR standards.

Some inside NPR might construe this as restricting their ability to engage in outside work. NPR may need to reinforce with its journalists that they have a choice between outside punditry or inside reporting.

But Totenberg, and other liberal “journalists” who work for NPR who are proper liberals apparently are excluded from having to make that choice.

Also noted with interest is how Walker, their current ombudsman, notes that it was Williams’ appearances on Fox News that caused NPR so many “headaches.” Hmmm, so his appearances expressing his opinions on other TV/radio programs did not? Gee, I wonder who would have such huge issues with Williams expressing his opinions on Fox? Couldn’t be the wealthy liberal elite-funded Media Matters gang, could it? You darn well betcha it is. As my co-blogger Anthony noted yesterday, they’re now after Fox News contributor and NPR correspondent Mara Liasson.

Basically Alicia Walker confirmed not only what many conservatives, including yours truly, were saying yesterday about the real reason Williams’ was fired: Because he appeared on Fox News and didn’t always toe the proper liberal line. Williams’ himself wrote about this at the Fox website yesterday (via):

Years ago NPR tried to stop me from going on “The Factor.” When I refused they insisted that I not identify myself as an NPR journalist. I asked them if they thought people did not know where I appeared on the air as a daily talk show host, national correspondent and news analyst. They refused to budge.

This self-reverential attitude was on display several years ago when NPR asked me to help them get an interview with President George W. Bush. I have longstanding relationships with some of the key players in his White House due to my years as a political writer at The Washington Post. When I got the interview some in management expressed anger that in the course of the interview I said to the president that Americans pray for him but don’t understand some of his actions. They said it was wrong to say Americans pray for him.

Later on the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis President Bush offered to do an NPR interview with me about race relations in America. NPR management refused to take the interview on the grounds that the White House offered it to me and not their other correspondents and hosts. One NPR executive implied I was in the administration’s pocket, which is a joke, and there was no other reason to offer me the interview. Gee, I guess NPR news executives never read my bestselling history of the civil rights movement “Eyes on the Prize – America’s Civil Rights Years,” or my highly acclaimed biography “Thurgood Marshall –American Revolutionary.” I guess they never noticed that “ENOUGH,” my last book on the state of black leadership in America, found a place on the New York Times bestseller list.

This all led to NPR demanding that I either agree to let them control my appearances on Fox News and my writings or sign a new contract that removed me from their staff but allowed me to continue working as a news analyst with an office at NPR. The idea was that they would be insulated against anything I said or wrote outside of NPR because they could say that I was not a staff member. What happened is that they immediately began to cut my salary and diminish my on-air role. This week when I pointed out that they had forced me to sign a contract that gave them distance from my commentary outside of NPR I was cut off, ignored and fired.

Gotta love that “liberal tolerance”! And speaking of, Michael Barone makes an interesting point along those lines:

Reading between the lines of Juan’s statement and those of NPR officials, it’s apparent that NPR was moved to fire Juan because he irritates so many people in its audience. An interesting contrast: while many NPR listeners apparently could not stomach that Williams also appeared on Fox News. But it doesn’t seem that any perceptible number of Fox News viewers had any complaints that Williams also worked for NPR. The Fox audience seems to be more tolerant of diversity than the NPR audience.

Heh! That ought to make a few heads spin at Media Matters HQ. ;) I love it. And I’m anxiously awaiting more on what Williams has to say as a “former insider” about NPR’s behind-the-scenes practices. Clearly, he’s treating what happened to him as an opportunity to engage in a little “pay back.” What he’s already revealed pretty much confirms what we already know about NPR. Anything else will just be icing on the cake.

As Mid-Term Election Nears, NAACP Declares The Tea Party Movement Racists

It appears the NAACP is drinking the SPLC and ADL kool-aid. The organization has released “Tea Party Nationalism,” a joint project with the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. The report attempts to link the Tea Party movement to white supremacists.

“The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties’ self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government,” reads the report’s introduction. “Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues.”

Ben Jealous, NAACP CEO, told the Huffington Post that his organization has no problem with the Tea Party movement as a whole. “We have no problem with the Tea Party existing,” he said. “We have no problem with the Tea Party expressing its views in the great debates in our great democracy. We do, however, have a problem when prominent Tea Party members who have direct ties to organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens, are allowed to use Tea Party events to recruit people for those white supremacist groups.”

Democrats and the corporate media have long insisted the Tea Party movement is racist. On March 20, Democrats launched a misleading propaganda offensive claiming Tea Party protesters in Washington spat on Missouri Democrat Emanuel Cleaver and hurled racial epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus as they walked to the Capitol to cast a vote on Obama’s authoritarian health care bill. As Infowars.com reported at the time, Cleaver was not assaulted and there was no evidence of racial epithets directed at members of Congress.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security and the Missouri Information Analysis Center authored reports claiming the patriot movement contains white supremacist elements. The MIAC report leaked to Alex Jones claims members of a “rightwing” militia movement organized in the 1990s — generally in response to the Oklahoma City bombing and the events at Waco — “continuously exploit world events in order to increase participation in their movements. Due to the current economical and political situation, a lush environment for militia activity has been created” and supposedly exploited by “constitutionalists” and “white supremacists,” the latter an oft-employed canard used to demonize activists as dangerous and potentially violent lunatics.

The NAACP continues this process of political demonization. In July, the organization offered a resolution to its members condemning the Tea Party movement. The resolution stated that members of the movement have “displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically” and added its “racist elements” are a “a threat to progress.” The “Tea Party Nationalism” report represents the next phase of a concerted effort to demonize the patriot movement.

In September, the NAACP partnered with Think Progress, Media Matters and New Left Media to launch Tea Party Tracker, a site set up to monitor “racism and other forms of extremism in the Tea Party movement.”

Think Progress is closely linked to the globalist George Soros. Media Matters for America was founded by former MoveOn consultant Tom Matzzie and Clintonite John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. CAP is linked to George Soros through Morton H. Halperin, the director of Soros’ Open Society Policy Center.

The NAACP report was created by the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which is funded, in part, by the Firedoll Foundation. The paper was written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind. Mr. Zeskind has made a career out of issuing clarion calls around the exaggerated threat posed by white supremacists. In June of 2009, he warned that the white nationalist organization Stormfront was planning to infiltrate and take over the Tea Party movement. According to Zeskind, a “constellation of anti-tax, anti-immigrant, and Christian right activists and Republican conservatives are gathering their forces. Expect white nationalists to put their own star in this sky. ”

As the case of Hal Turner revealed, the government largely runs the white supremacist movement. The FBI compromised the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations in the 1960s and has used them since to demonize the patriot and constitutionalist movements. The Southern Poverty Law Center, according to an FBI memo, was engaged in an undercover shenanigans at the white supremacist compound at Elohim City and may have played a part in the Oklahoma City bombing, long ago revealed as a false flag attack designed to usher in a raft of police state legislation proposed by the Clinton administration.

In April, we reported on attempts by those vehemently opposed to the Tea Party movement participating in the political process to sabotage Tea Party rallies and events. “With the establishment desperate to engender and exploit violence which will be used to demonize the Tea Party movement as an extremist mob, so-called anarchists are now openly declaring their intentions to pose as Tea Party members and stage violence in order to discredit populist grass roots organizations,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson.

“Law-abiding Tea Partiers are apparently being infiltrated and made to look extreme,” Andrew W. Griffin of the Oklahoma Watchdog wrote on April 15. “Growing evidence points to provocateurs that bring to mind the protests of the Vietnam War era and COINTELPRO.”

The foundation “progressives” are desperate to portray the Tea Party movement as nativst and racist, especially now as the important mid-term elections enter the home stretch. The NAACP report, penned by a man who has made a career out of exploiting a racist movement in large part controlled by the government, will fortunately be dismissed as a cynical ploy by millions of Americans determined to take back their government from the globalists and career politicians.

Juan Williams Was Fired Because He's A Black Man

Riehl World View - People will think I'm kidding by saying Juan Williams was fired because he's a black man; but I'm not. Big Journalism is all over the story, scroll down for more.

He continued: “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

What Juan Williams did is very similar to why the Left hates Sarah Palin, other conservative women and conservative homosexuals. He played against the progressive stereotype of himself, revealing a balanced and too candid humanity within. For a moment, in essence, he became too real.
As he said, “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country."

Well, if Juan Williams is impacted by the behavior of Muslims, then progressives - and NPR is that, can't lecture white America that their concerns are based on hate, religious intolerance, bigotry or xenophobia. Juan Williams didn't drop his mask and reveal any Islamophobia last night on Fox. What he did was rip the mask off the tactics NPR and other progressives, including the liberal media, use to lecture America and prevent an honest discussion of the threat from Islam.

He was, only in that sense, not fired for who he is, he was fired because of what NPR is - a public corporation in need of the majority of Americans agreeing to pull its plug.

Time Magazine: Prospect Of Civil War In The U.S. "Doesn't Seem That Far Off"

With protesters in France entering a seventh day of strikes and demonstrations against draconian austerity measures, many political observers in the U.S. are now wondering how long it will be before similar scenes unfold on American streets, with even Time Magazine now conceding that the prospect of a civil war in the States “doesn’t seem that far fetched”.

To be clear, Stephen Gandel’s article entitled Will the Federal Reserve Cause a Civil War? largely dismisses the possibility that the Fed’s upcoming November 3rd meeting, during which Ben Bernanke is expected to announce a fresh round of money printing, will prompt national uproar, but it doesn’t exactly debunk the notion of longer term social dislocation as a backlash to the crumbling economy, as many are now forecasting.

As we highlighted yesterday in a piece that was later picked up by the Drudge Report, it’s only a matter of time before Americans are hit with almost identical austerity measures to those that have caused the French to set up fuel blockades, stage running battles with riot police, halt air and rail travel, and virtually shut down some areas of the country.

The question remains – how will Americans react if the Obama administration pushes ahead with its plan to seize all private 401(k) pensions, which will be swallowed up by the Social Security Administration under the banner of mandatory Guaranteed Retirement Accounts? How will Americans react to the upcoming announcement that the Federal Reserve will further eviscerate the value of the dollar by purchasing junk assets from big banks at exorbitant prices with money printed out of thin air?

Time Magazine, which as a guardian of the establishment would normally be expected to disparage the potential of mass civil disobedience, actually lends the notion some spotlight by linking to a Zero Hedge story which paraphrased economic forecaster David Rosenberg, who warns that the Fed’s plan for more quantitative easing, “positions US society one step closer to civil war if not worse.”

The article also features a quote from a Washington’s Blog piece which warns that the Fed’s policies could lead to the very destruction of the republic.

“In a very real sense, Bernanke is throwing Granny and Grandpa down the stairs – on purpose. He is literally threatening those at the lower end of the economic strata, along with all who are retired, with starvation and death, and in a just nation where the rule of law controlled instead of being abused by the kleptocrats he would be facing charges of Seditious Conspiracy, as his policies will inevitably lead to the destruction of our republic.”

Lending the notion credence, Gandel writes, “With the Tea Party gaining followers, the idea of civil war over economic issues doesn’t seem that far-fetched these days.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Even Time Magazine is now conceding that the current economic course of the nation could lead to outright civil war and revolution.

Gandel finishes the article by leaving the prospect of widespread civil unrest as an open question.

“So it seems clear what the Fed is likely to do,” he writes. “How the economy, the militias and the rest of us react is up in the air. The count down is on. T minus 15 days to Fedamageddon. See you there, hopefully.”

Of course, people like Gerald Celente and a host of other economic forecasters have been predicting civil unrest, food riots and tax rebellions for the past two years, but to have Time Magazine seriously entertain the notion of civil war in the United States is a shocking reminder of just how close to the precipice we now stand.

Numerous forecasters, governments, spy agencies, and international bodies are predicting mass riots and unrest in response to a worsening economic picture.

In November 2008, right as the economic implosion was unraveling, the U.S. Army War College released a white paper called Known Unknowns: Unconventional ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development. The report warned that the military must be prepared for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States,” which could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health emergencies” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” The “widespread civil violence,” the document said, “would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.”

A British Ministry of Defence report struck a similar tone when it predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

How Americans will react to what many see as a make or break moment for the US economy, the Fed’s announcement on November 3rd, largely depends on how well they understand the fact that their financial future and that of their children now hangs in the balance like never before.

As the Economic Collapse Blog points out, QE2 represents the biggest bank robbery in history, and is nothing less than another huge transfer of wealth from American taxpayers to big banks. The money Bernanke prints out of thin air, which will further devalue the greenback and every dollar earned or saved by American citizens, will be used to purchase large quantities of “troubled assets” from U.S. banks at well above market price. Small banks will be allowed to wither and die, whereas the huge megaliths will collect mountains of free money at the expense of hard working Americans.

The long term impact of the Fed buying these toxic junk assets with money printed out of thin air will be an inflationary holocaust that does nothing to rescue the US economy but everything to depreciate the very real assets of the American taxpayer.

We are already on the road to serious inflation and the Federal Reserve has not even fired up the money hoses yet. So what is going to happen after they pump trillions more into the economy?

Printing more money and giving it to the banks is not going to solve our economic problems. It is just going to make them worse.

But unfortunately, American voters get no say about any of this. Our national monetary policy is in the hands of an unelected central bank that does pretty much whatever it wants.

If as many Americans were aware of what the Federal Reserve is about to do with their financial future as are knowledgeable about the intricacies of Dancing with the Stars, then the “civil war” that even Time Magazine is now presenting as a justifiable response to the crisis would be a very plausible prospect.

As it stands, according to the majority of voters in our poll on Prison Planet.com, Americans will react to the situation not by organizing fuel blockades, marching in the streets and shutting down the country, but by scratching their butts and flipping the TV channel.

Fironia, Whitman Leading In California Races?

This goes in the opposite direction than other polls seen in the last few weeks, especially in California’s gubernatorial race, where Jerry Brown had begun to create a lead against Meg Whitman in other polls. Wilson Research Strategies, which does a lot of polling for Republicans, sees it differently. Last night, they released results of their California survey showing Whitman and Carly Fiorina with narrow leads over Brown and Barbara Boxer, respectively:

Carly Fiorina currently leads by three points against Barbara Boxer in the race for United States Senate from California.

U.S. Senate Ballot
Total Fiorina 46%
Total Boxer 43%
Total Other Candidates 5%
Undecided 6%

Meg Whitman leads by one point in the race for Governor of California.

Governor’s Ballot
Total Whitman 45%
Total Brown 44%
Total Other Candidates 4%
Undecided 7%

Conclusions
Republicans currently hold narrow leads in California’s top two statewide races this fall, though both remain very competitive.

Wilson claims its margin of error is 3.5%, which means that their Senate findings would almost be outside the MOE … almost. However, Wilson doesn’t produce any crosstab or sample data, which usually helps to check the assumptions of the pollster, especially with likely-voter models. (PPP is taking a lot of flack, for instance, about presuming a better Democratic turnout in some races than in 2008 while giving Dems leads in tight races.) Their methodology also seems somewhat unorthodox, as explained on their website:

WRS selected a random sample of likely general election voters from the California voter file using Registration Based Sampling (RBS). RBS is an innovative method of stratifying samples based on a set of demographic and behavioral characteristics. The sample for this survey was stratified based on age, gender, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, and geography. This methodology allows us to avoid post-survey “weighting” which can reduce the reliability of survey results.

Respondents were contacted by phone via a live telephone operator interview October 13-14, 2010. The study has a sample size of n=800 likely voters. The margin of error is equal to ±3.5% in 95 out of 100 cases.

So it’s a randomly selected sample of voters derived from … handpicking? Weighting creates its own issues, of course, but all pollsters weight results in likely-voter products. It’s the method and assumptions of the weighting that makes a difference. CBS routinely discloses its weighting results, which usually show them taking a somewhat-unrepresentative sample and making it ridiculously unrepresentative. If Wilson is sifting its potential sample by known characteristics before making the calls, it’s still weighting the sample — it’s just weighting it before the calls. I’m not sure that it’s any more or less accurate method than traditional weighting, and in any case Wilson isn’t disclosing the sample composition or the crosstabs of results.

I’d like to believe that both Fiorina and Whitman have jumped out to leads, but we’ll probably need to see some further polling to corroborate it. On the other hand, with Barbara Boxer having memory losses on her tax-hike position on the campaign trail like this, perhaps that lead for Fiorina might be realistic after all:

Since it was approved by Congress in February 2009, unemployment has risen from 12.4 percent to 14.2 percent in the county and 10.2 percent to 12.4 percent statewide, Fiorina said.

“Borrowing is not working. It is failing,” she said. “We have to realize simply throwing taxpayer money at a problem isn’t helping it.”

She supports extending Bush-era tax cuts, set to expire Jan. 1, to everyone, while Boxer supports extending the cuts to all except wealthy Americans.

A Boxer campaign worker said Boxer hasn’t decided if she would support extending the tax breaks to those with an annual income of $250,000, but does support eliminating them for those who make over $1 million and businesses that outsource jobs overseas.

Really? Boxer seemed pretty certain about it almost two weeks earlier:

Fiorina wants the federal government to extend Bush-era tax cuts for everyone. But Boxer sides with Obama, who supports extending the tax cuts for individuals making less than $200,000 and married couples making less than $250,000.

But three weeks before that, Boxer had a different plan:

Some Democrats favor a higher threshold, saying residents in places with a high cost of living should be protected. Among them, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said this week she supports extending the cuts for anyone who makes less than $1 million annually.

“I think millionaires can pay more, but most of our Californians really need this tax relief to continue,” said Boxer, who faces a tough re-election fight against conservative Republican Carly Fiorina.

In April 2009, though, when Boxer put her vote on the line, it was to hike taxes at the $250,000 level. On April 23, 2009, Boxer said this on the Senate floor:

Madam President, I listened to Senator Grassley’s remarks, and I have been in conference with folks who have read this budget line by line. It is important for me to say something as someone who represents the largest State in the Union. As I look at this budget and it is how one looks at it-I see it as a boon to small business. I don’t see one specific tax increase aimed at small business. Yes, if an individual is over $250,000 a year, for all of us in that category, the tax breaks will expire. But to say that all small businesses are hit hard is an argument that doesn’t hold up, in my eyes.

Six days later, Boxer voted for a conference report that, among other issues, would have extended all the tax rates except for those making more than $250K per year, just as she had stated the week prior.

So which is it? Apparently, Boxer herself doesn’t know. That’s not leadership; it’s an attempt to hoodwink voters in California.

Will Americans Follow France Example of Civil Unrest

Paul Joseph Watson - How will Americans react when the government begins to impose the same austerity measures that are causing riots, street battles, fuel blockades and other assorted chaos in France? Will we witness mass civil unrest or will the sleeping middle classes continue to scratch their butts and watch Dancing with the Stars?

Back in June we forecast that the imminent onset of so-called austerity measures, which in reality represent nothing more than an elevated phase of government-run looting of the taxpayer, would herald an “age of rage,” leading to “riots and even revolutions as people react with fury in response to their jobs, savings, basic public services, pensions and welfare money being seized by the financial terrorists who caused the economic collapse in the first place.”

Four months later and citizens of one of the most prosperous countries in the world with the highest standard of living have shut down France after six days of strikes and protests in response to government plans to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67.

Undoubtedly, there are two different protests occurring in France. The more violent scenes are the work of the rent-a-mob anarchist youths who couldn’t care less about pensions but will waste no opportunity to don black hoods and pointlessly smash up shop windows in demonstrations against “capitalism,” when in reality government seizure of pensions has all the hallmarks of command and control socialism and nothing to do with true free market capitalism.

These youths are more concerned about their welfare checks being cut, but they won’t garner the sympathy of the rest of the French people by taking baseball bats to Starbucks forecourts in mocked up media stunts. The legitimate protests and the ones that genuinely hurt the establishment and put the idiot anarchists to shame are being run by French workers, truck drivers, and union leaders, and enjoy the support of around 70% of the population.

Over a thousand gas stations have now run out of fuel across France, with strategic reserves set to last just a few weeks. Flights and trains have been disrupted, organized slowdowns have snarled highway traffic. The French are showing Americans how it should be done, by uniting peacefully to shut down an entire country. This is genuine people power – the French are sending a message to the establishment that they will no longer play ball until the looting stops.

Will the rent-a-mob anarchists stage similar violent riots in America or will the middle classes embrace a much more legitimate backlash in the same vein as the union protesters in France?

With the Obama administration set to seize private 401(k) pensions and turn them over to the Social Security Administration, how long will it be before Americans stir from their slumber and realize that their economic future and also that of their children is in immediate peril?

When will Americans begin to understand that the onset of another government bailout in the form of QE2 represents the biggest bank robbery in history?

Just how distracted, dumbed-down, fat and lazy has the American middle class become to prevent them from realizing a threat when they see it?

British historian Simon Schama predicts not only widespread civil unrest in America, but even a potential revolution if the elite allow the situation to spiral out of their control. Schama notes that Obama will have to ditch “misplaced obligations of civility” and become an authoritarian enforcer in order to emerge successful against the rising tide of Constitutionalist rage that will be directed against the coming austerity fascism.

As we documented in our article, the kind of public spending cuts, tax increases, salary caps, and retirement crackdowns that are now about to be implemented outstrip anything we’ve witnessed before in modern history.

If the American middle class reacts to this total banker takeover by collectively scratching their butts and flipping the TV channel, the country as we know it is probably gone for good.

However, if Americans follow the example of the French and send a clear signal to the elite that they will refuse to participate in a rigged game, then a true revolution that will restore both political and economic freedom and prosperity will be set in motion.

With Americans buying silver to protect their savings and guns to protect themselves in record numbers, it seems that the message is at least getting through to some of the people, but until we see mass walk-outs, blockades and other acts of non-violent mass civil disobedience, the establishment will continue to move forward with onslaught after onslaught of financial pillaging.

Watch Alex Jones and Max Keiser discuss the French riots and the sleepwalking American middle class.

We’re running a poll on Prison Planet.com asking the question, How Will Americans React To Austerity Fascism? Let us know what you think by placing your vote.

National Debt Up $3 Trillion On Obama Watch

Protein Wisdom - Reached for comment, Michele Obama blamed the skyrocketing national debt on “gun-crazed white people and cheeseburgers, and probably more than a little bit of Jesus.”

For the first time in my life, I’m really proud of my country.

Harry Reid: "Obama is Like A Trapped Chilean Miner"

This might surprise you, but I agree with Harry Ried that Obama is like a trapped miner — both are in dangerously over their heads and begging for cigarettes:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has compared President Barack Obama to a trapped Chilean miner.

In a speech to supporters in Las Vegas on Sunday night, Reid said that when Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House he found himself in a “hole so deep that he couldn’t see the outside world.

“It was like the Chilean miners, but he, being the man he is, rolled up his sleeves and said ‘I am going to get us out of this hole,’” Reid said at an “Early Vote GOTV” event.

It’s worth noting for Harry that the leader in saving the Chilean miners was a conservative.

From Spuddser in comments: “I guess that would be an apt comparison if the Chilean miners had all grabbed their shovels and started digging downward to get out of the hole.”