Who Has The Crystal Ball?

By Paul Craig Roberts
November 03, 2010 "Information Clearing House" 


-- My conservative and Republican acquaintances believe that the “liberal media” is destroying America. When I ask them to identify the liberal media, the usual reply is, “all of it!” I ask them about Fox “News,” CNN, and point out that the TV networks are no longer independent but parts of large corporate conglomerates and that all
of the “liberal” news anchors have been fired or died off.

At that point my acquaintances fall back on the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I remind them that the invasion of Iraq would not have been possible without the New York Times leading the way. Judith Miller filled that newspaper with the neoconservative/Bush regime propaganda that was orchestrated to make the public accept US aggression toward Iraq. The Times later sort of apologized and Miller departed the paper.

That left the Washington Post, apparently long a CIA asset, as the “liberal media” that is destroying America, until on October 31 the paper’s long-time pundit, David Broder, wrote that Obama should spend the next two years disarming the Republicans and renewing the economy by orchestrating a showdown with Iran. Going to war with Iran, “the greatest threat to the world,” would simultaneously unite Republicans with Obama and restore the economy. By following Broder’s prescription, Obama “will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.”

Here we have the “liberal” Broder at the “liberal” Washington Post advocating the neoconservative’s desired war with Iran.

The irony deepens. My acquaintances regard Obama as a Marxist and a Muslim. It does not occur to my acquaintances that the military/security complex and Wall Street would not put a Marxist in the White House, or that AIPAC would not put a Muslim in the White House, or that a Muslim would not have chosen a dual Israeli citizen as his chief of staff and staffed up his government with Jews friendly to Israel, or that a Muslim would not have renewed the war in Afghanistan and started new ones in Pakistan and Yeman, or that, if a Muslim, Obama would be averse to slaughtering Muslims in behalf of the neocons’ world hegemony agenda.

Chris Hedges writes in Truthdig:

“The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators. It keeps the world neatly divided into a left and a right. The phantom left functions as a convenient scapegoat. The right wing blames it for moral degeneration and fiscal chaos. The liberal class uses it to call for ‘moderation.’

The corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.”

But that’s America. The people simply cannot put two and two together. Thinking is not an activity of the American public.

Indeed, Americans are incapable of thought on any subject.

Consider the latest bomb scare initially blamed on a young pro-American female student in Yemen who luckily was released before she was tortured and raped. Allegedly, bombs disguised as printer ink modules passed through lax cargo security and were on their way to blow up something. Everyone immediately endorsed the story. UPS pilots urged US officials to tighten cargo screening worldwide. The US has sent a team into Yemen to take over security.

Somehow the security services that were unable to foil the 9/11 plot were able to penetrate this plot before it succeeded.

Consider the timeliness of the foiled plot. British Airways Chairman Martin Broughton and other European officials recently accused the US of making inane demands on airport passengers, such as removing their shoes and separate examinations of laptop computers. Broughton even declared: “Europe should not have to kowtow to the Americans every time they want something done to beef up security on US bound flights.”

The owner of London’s Heathrow Airport agreed. The European Union has challenged the US requirement for European passengers to have online checks before boarding flights bound for the US, declaring the requirement a “burdensome measure.”

Miraculously, a plot is exposed that brands British Airways, London’s Heathrow, and the EU as “soft on terrorism security.”

Or what about this motive? The Obama regime wants to send CIA hunter-killer teams into Yemen to murder people suspected of hostility to America. CIA drones would be used to blow up suspects despite the proven fact that the CIA drones used in Afghanistan and in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty mainly kill innocent people.

Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh said that he opposes America’s violation of his country’s sovereignty, but, alas, it was the Yemeni President’s lax air cargo security that let the bombs through. So his protests, too, are discredited by the lax security that enabled the printer ink plot. Unless US forces are in Yemen eliminating terrorists, the world is not safe.

Americans never ask the old Roman question, “who benefits?”

Consider, for example, the “underwear bomber.” How likely is it that Al Qaeda, allegedly having successfully outwitted all 16 US intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, NORAD, airport security, the Pentagon, and the security agencies of all US allies including Israel and brought down the World Trade towers and successfully attacked the Pentagon itself, would choose as a sequel blowing up a mere airliner with an underwear bomb, a shoe bomb, and a shampoo/toothpaste/underarm deodorant bomb? Having acquired the stature associated with 9/11, blowing up an airliner is a big comedown in prestige. It conveys the image of a washed-up Al Qaeda.

Again, who benefits? The most obvious beneficiary of the underwear bomber is the corporation that manufactures the full body scanners that show people as if they are naked. Obviously, the machines were already produced and awaiting a contract. Without the underwear bomber and the hype and fear the media generated over the new threat, it is unlikely the government could have succeeded with such massive violation of personal privacy.

It would be interesting to know what company manufactures the body scanners and what its relationship is to the US and Israeli governments. But these questions never occur to Americans or to the “liberal media.”

As a member of the Congressional staff during the 1970s, both House and Senate and committee and member staffs, I learned that except for rare occurrences, the legislation that Congress passes and the President signs is written either by executive agencies or by lobbyists. Congress did not write the PATRIOT Act. It was written in advance of 9/11 awaiting its opportunity. President Bush’s National Security Advisor, Condi Rice, is on record saying that no one ever suspected such an event as 9/11 with terrorists using hijacked airliners as missiles against the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Why then was the voluminous PATRIOT Act sitting waiting?

Whose crystal ball read the future and had the PATRIOT Act drafted in advance?

Whose crystal ball foresaw the underwear bomber and had the full body scanners ready to be deployed?

Are these amazing coincidences or orchestrated events?

The EU's New Tool To Solve Crises Is Actually Causing One

The Business Insider : The European Union has agreed to a new crisis resolution mechanism that will allow states to default within the eurozone.
The impact has been a significant widening of credit spreads between the PIIGS and Germany, even though the details are not yet finalized.

Denial: The Haze Over Europe

Portuguese sovereign debt yields rise sharply

The PIIGS Crisis Is Back: Here Are 4 Key Things To Think About

Unemployment Benefits Are About To Expire For 4 Million Americans

From The Business Insider:

You may have heard before about how there was a coming wave of unemployed Americans who would all lose their extended unemployment benefits en masse.

Well, it's finally happening, as shown by Monday's personal income data for September, which fell 0.1% rather than rose. Much more is to come.

Free Exchange:

And so what we're seeing is the first big bulge of jobless workers exhausting their benefits. Over the next few months, that bulge will become a wave. Things will become significantly worse next month whenexisting benefits expire. By April, nearly 4 million jobless Americans will have run out of benefits.

Optimists will say that waves of unemployed will be now forced to become less picky about jobs and simply earn an income, which will bring down unemployment:

The Casey Mulligans of the world are likely ecstatic about this turn of events; the disappearance of a major disincentive to find new work has vanished, and so employment should rise rapidly between now and the spring. If all of the newly benefit-less workers find new jobs, the unemployment rate will drop a good two percentage points.

Skeptics will say however that the unemployed haven't been too picky, and that there just aren't enough jobs, even low paying ones, to absorb them:

If most of those falling off the rolls of benefit recipients can't find new jobs, then the demand impact of benefit exhaustion—the blow to consumption—will swamp the boost to the economy from the lucky few who are able to find work. The drag on personal consumption growth will slow recovery, making life hard for other jobseekers.

American austerity begins.

Join the conversation about this story »
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Related:

36 Ind. unemployment officers to have armed guards

The utter Fraud Started At the Very Top: With Government Leaders in USA and the power behind the power...

From Geofinancial: 

Can anyone doubt that this climate change from the rule of law to the rule of fraud is a monumental shift?

The government's entire strategy now - as during the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are.

But it is not only a matter of covering up fraud that has already happened. The government also created an environment which greatly encouraged fraud.

Here are just a few of many potential examples:

• The government-sponsored rating agencies committed massive fraud (and see this)

• The Treasury department allowed banks to "cook their books"

• Business Week wrote on May 23, 2006:

"President George W. Bush has bestowed on his intelligence czar, John Negroponte, broad authority, in the name of national security, to excuse publicly traded companies from their usual accounting and securities-disclosure obligations."

• Regulators knew of and allowed the use of debt-hiding accounting tricks by the big banks 
  

• Tim Geithner was complicit in Lehman's accounting fraud, (and see this), and pushed to pay CIA/AIG's CDS counterparties at full value, and then to keep the deal secret. And as Robert Reich notes, Geithner was "very much in the center of the action" regarding the secret bail out of Bear Stearns without Congressional approval. William Black points out: "Mr. Geithner, as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since October 2003, was one of those senior regulators who failed to take any effective regulatory action to prevent the crisis, but instead covered up its depth"

• The former chief accountant for the SEC says that Bernanke and Paulson broke the law and should be prosecuted

• Freddie and Fannie helped to create the epidemic of mortgage fraud

• The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an "epidemic" of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud. Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen

• Bernanke might have broken the law by letting unemployment rise in order to keep inflation low

• Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy, when they were not

• Arguably, both the Bush and Obama administrations broke the law by refusing to close insolvent banks

• Congress may have covered up illegal tax breaks for the big banks

• Of course, deregulation by Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Phil Gramm and many other high-level politicians and regulators also helped to grease the skids for fraud

Economist James K. Galbraith wrote in the introduction to his father, John Kenneth Galbraith's, definitive study of the Great Depression, The Great Crash, 1929:

The main relevance of The Great Crash, 1929 to the great crisis of 2008 is surely here. In both cases, the government knew what it should do. Both times, it declined to do it. In the summer of 1929 a few stern words from on high, a rise in the discount rate, a tough investigation into the pyramid schemes of the day, and the house of cards on Wall Street would have tumbled before its fall destroyed the whole economy. In 2004, the FBI warned publicly of "an epidemic of mortgage fraud." But the government did nothing, and less than nothing, delivering instead low interest rates, deregulation and clear signals that laws would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. There followed every manner of scheme to fleece the unsuspecting ....

This was fraud, perpetrated in the first instance by the government on the population, and by the rich on the poor.
***
The government that permits this to happen is complicit in a vast crime.

In other words, the fraud started at the very top with Greenspan, Bush, Paulson, Negroponte, Bernanke, Geithner, Rubin, Summers and all of the rest of the boys.

As William Black told me today:

In criminology jargon: they created an intensely criminogenic environment. I have no knowledge whether the national security aspects played any role, but the anti-regulatory dogma was devastating.....

WARS Are sold to the sheeple like Coke or Tooth Paste in USA and Israel....

White House chief of Staff Andrew Card famously said - in explaining why the Bush administration delayed until September 2002 to make its case for war in Iraq:

From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

War is - indeed - marketed just like soda or toothpaste.

In fact, the government hired some of the top public relations experts to sell the Iraq and other wars. See this and this.

As the head of Santa Clara University's Center for Applied Ethics wrote in 2003:

Am I the only one who's queasy that the Bush Administration has quite publicly announced plans to sell us on war with Iraq the same way a soda pop company might hype a new soft drink?

Everyone knows that truth is the first casualty of war.

Countries need to lie about their enemies in order to demonize them sufficiently so that the people will support the war.

That is why intelligence "failures" - such as the following - are so common:

• The U.S. Navy's own historians now say that the sinking of the USS Maine -- the justification for America's entry into the Spanish-American War -- was probably caused by an internal explosion of coal, rather than an attack by the Spanish.

• It is also now well-accepted that the Gulf of Tomkin Incident which led to the Vietnam war was a fiction (confirmed here).

• And two lies were used to justify the 1991 Gulf TV War: the statement that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies and the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)(technically, the statement about Kuwaiti babies did not come from the U.S. government, but from a public relations firm hired by the government).

That is also why governments from around the world have used false flag incidents for thousands of years to sell their people on whatever wars they wish to launch.Of course, the demonization process is catapulted far and wide by the mainstream media. Indeed, the corporate media is instrumental in spreading the lies so as to support war....

The nation is suffering from social dementia and the demographics show that in our near future more people will be losing their minds than losing jobs, homes, and health care.

Elections are not going to cure that....

Unlike the 'trickle down' theory of wealth, greed and corruption really do trickle down.....

The government that allowed private banking to control our money at all is responsible. The original nit wits who squeaked it in and the endless parade of babbling idiots who promote genocidal usury. Let's just all cheat!

Mathematically Perfected Economy(TM)

Only the big corporations play to gain by war.
They sell weapons, machinery and food to allies and enemies. Antony Sutton criticized and denounced big corporations and Wall Street that helped fund Hitler and Stalin....

SCO: the real thing NWO you never heard about

From FinanceAndEconomics 3 November 2010

by Alasdair Macleod             

One thing is certain: gold is not part of the old economic order, which is comprised of the US, UK, Euroland, and Japan. The new economic order is different, embodied in the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) with its members, observer states and affiliate nations. Those interested in the future course of precious metal and commodity prices should take the trouble to understand the significance of the SCO. The SCO is already driving prices in commodity markets, and this transfer of power from the old to the new economic order is of tectonic magnitude, but the pace is far from tectonic, more like volcanic.

The driving forces behind the SCO are China and Russia, both large gold producers. Gold will have a role in the SCO, but what it is has yet to be disclosed. However, we do know that the SCO’s other participants are also buyers of gold.  Their actions are either freakish coincidence, or there is a hidden agenda to include gold in the SCO’s new financial order.  This point was rammed home this week when Iran announced it had also accumulated gold, indicating the quantity to be about 340 tonnes.

I have written about the SCO before, and the link is here.  Iran and India are just two of the nations that have observer status and attend the SCO meetings. They are privy to discussions and strategic planning, including plans to defend its members from the old economic order’s ongoing financial crisis. This is why we should regard Iran’s gold purchases as an important signal and why we may be mistaken to dismiss India’s purchase from the IMF as just opportunistic. The gold purchases of the SCO’s participants follow a clear pattern and look like an early indication of an emerging new financial, as well as economic order.

The reasons why the SCO’s participants are adding to their gold holdings should also be considered in the light of the West’s continuing and possibly deepening financial crisis. China, for example, has ended up being exposed as the largest single holder of US dollars and debt, having accumulated this position through currency intervention. To the extent that this is regarded as the price of a successful economic plan, China’s dollars are therefore expendable: the value of the dollar has been important for fixing terms of trade, but not as a store of value in China’s foreign reserves. Put yet another way, if you value precious metals and important commodities, you will not regard dollars as your store of value. 

The same must apply to other paper currencies, which explains why China’s flirtation with the euro was brief. And not only is China adding to her own gold reserves, she is also happy for her people to buy gold and silver. Russia hoards all the gold she mines. The other SCO members are acquiring gold, admittedly in smaller amounts, or have ample stocks in the ground. The message is clear: the long-term success and stability of the SCO will be based on sound money, or at least money more sound than the fiat currencies of the West. And this being so, it makes sense to place a lower value on trade with the West, because the West pays for goods by just printing the money.  It has become more important for SCO participants to use worthless dollars to position themselves for the future than continue to finance the West’s profligacy. This is why the SCO is the future for Asia and promises to become the biggest economic bloc ever seen.

Reading the English version of the Bishkek Treaty of 2007 one is struck how similar many of the objectives are to those in the Treaty of Paris in 1951, which marked the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community. The crucial difference is the SCO does not seek long-term political unification, but the co-ordination of common security and economic development.  This means that laws will continue to be decided at national level, so the over-regulation and central bureaucracy that emasculates business in the EU and America should be avoided.

The SCO’s structure is therefore less political and more flexible.  This is how China will co-exist with India, India with Pakistan and Russia with her former stans. It is intended to defuse the border disputes of the past by allowing common interests to overtake them.  The SCO will represent about half the world’s population, the largest grouping imaginable, making Europe and America look like two-bit players.

So where does this leave the old economic order with respect to the new? If we think we have financial leverage with all those dollars and Treasuries owned by Asians, it is more limited than we think.  Furthermore, forget the idea that China will protect her dollar interests by buying more Treasuries: her dollars are more likely to be spent on natural resources and precious metals. If we think China is dependant on trade with the West, any such dependency is limited and temporary, since China sees the West as merely a stepping-stone into her own economic block: the SCO.  If we think China is dependant on the West’s financial system, she has her own plans to extricate herself.

This new economic order’s official languages are Chinese and Russian, and it is these two nations who dominate the SCO. Both are major gold producing nations, and both can see how the West’s fiat currencies are destined for collapse. Between them, they are resource-rich.  Russia is second only to Saudi Arabia as an oil producer, and thanks to the post-communist liberation of her economy, she has surplus grains and timber.

Russia, under Putin and Medvedev, is now strong again.  She learned the lesson of the risks of taking salt with the West’s financial system in the crisis of 1998.  Since then, she has become progressively more independent from the West’s financial troubles, and presumably will wish to keep it that way.  All her future alliances will be on her own continent and under her own control, which is why the SCO is important to her.  She naturally turns to China to protect herself from the West; a tendency enhanced by China’s own economic prospects relative to those of the old capitalist economies.

As the old economic order collapses, the SCO’s observer and affiliate states will apply for full membership, and others will soon be knocking on the door. Will they include Turkey, who has been continually denied membership of the Christian EU? Will they include some of the Central European states, who have tasted EU regulation and bureaucracy? Will they include Afghanistan, Iraq, or even Saudi Arabia, disillusioned by worthless dollars and American imperialism?

Time will tell; but the attractions of a supranational SCO seem certain to include a sounder currency than the dollar, euro, pound or yen; if only because all SCO parties are accumulating gold.  Those of us who myopically think gold has run too high too fast and are praying for a buying opportunity on a pull-back, should not forget that there are six SCO member states, four observer nations, and two dialogue partners also buying the dips.  And if Iran is telling the truth about its purchases, they are clearing Western markets out of the physical.

So if you want to buy a stake in the new economic order, while shorting the old, buy gold.

 

3 November 2010

 www.financeandeconomics.org

How Western Powers May Have Blown It

From The Daily Bell, Wednesday, November 03, 2010 – by  Staff Report:

QE2 risks currency wars and the end of dollar hegemony ... As the US Federal Reserve meets today to decide whether its next blast of quantitative easing should be $1 trillion or a more cautious $500bn, it does so knowing that China and the emerging world view the policy as an attempt to drive down the dollar. The Fed's "QE2" risks accelerating the demise of the dollar-based currency system, perhaps leading to an unstable tripod with the euro and yuan, or a hybrid gold standard, or a multi-metal "bancor" along lines proposed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s. China's commerce ministry fired an irate broadside against Washington on Monday. "The continued and drastic US dollar depreciation recently has led countries including Japan, South Korea, and Thailand to intervene in the currency market, intensifying a 'currency war'. In the mid-term, the US dollar will continue to weaken and gaming between major currencies will escalate," it said. – UK Telegraph


Dominant Social Theme: The US, especially, must take more care – and grow more responsible.


Free-Market Analysis: We have been examining in these past few days, the future of money and have offered our clairvoyant feedbackers and larger audience a perspective that is not focused necessarily on an imminent US economic meltdown. That is not to say it won't happen, but we have detected a certain level of promotional zeal that makes us a tiny bit uncomfortable. Everywhere we look right now, it seems the media – even the mainstream media – are filled with conversation about the untenable situation of the dollar.
We do not deny this, of course. We have spent the better part of two years (and eight years before that) documenting the demise not only of the dollar but of the larger Anglo-American elite that has spent at least a century attempting to create one-world governance through the use of wars, horrible fear-based promotions and corrupt global vehicles of command and control.
Let us begin at the beginning however, with the regime of George W. Bush. (Unhappy thought.) This Republican president could have reduced spending, cut social programs and generally enacted a fiscally conservative administration that would further have enhanced the dollar's standing in the world. Instead, from the outset, President Bush pushed for expanded social programs and more and more power for the US$3 trillion per year Leviathan; he even tried at one point to extend federal power directly into church programs. After 9/11 and without any precedent or even real justification, the US attacked both Afghanistan and Iraq in wars that will probably cost US$2 trillion or more before they are done – and those are only the direct costs.
Under Bush, the various money schemes of the Anglo-American elite were left strictly alone. The Clinton Democrats had left a "surplus" and it would have been possible, perhaps, to start to undo the entire system, including the Fed's endless waves of money printing, without crashing it. But this was not Bush's agenda, nor the agenda of those around him.
As a result, Bush questioned neither the US graduated income tax nor the Federal Reserve which kept rates so absurdly low under Alan Greenspan that an ever-increasing monetary bubble was all-but-assured. When the bubble finally popped, Bush approved of the TARP program of US$700 billion and then, under Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve began pumping out trillions and trillions to bail out preferred lenders and chosen bankers not only in the US but abroad as well.
Our point here is not to rehearse the psychotic war-mongering and over-spending of George Bush but to point that Bush was able to do what he did without demure from the establishment wise men in both the US and Britain. This means to us that there was a level of de facto acceptance of his actions. The totality of his insane actions (mirrored in fact by Tony Blair in Britain) may not have been entirely pre-determined but they were not apparently unwelcome either.
And this brings us back to the issue of whether the Anglo-American elite has actively sought a worldwide economic meltdown and, if so, whether they expected what they are now dealing with. We have suggested on many occasions that the elite may have wanted a depression but that the global crisis has spiraled out of control. We base this assumption on what seems to be a high level of desperation affecting elite actions at the moment.
Yes, we can see this mechanism manifested in the lengths that the elite-controlled EU and Federal Reserve are willing to go to try to ensure the viability of the remnants of the current system. In the EU, the leading Eurocrats are willing once again – and in the hot spotlight of euro-condemnation – to revise the Lisbon Treaty without a vote so as to configure it in such a way that it provides necessary leeway to "handle" the ongoing crisis. In the US, the Federal Reserve is preparing to pump yet MORE money into the economy – perhaps trillions more – to try to kick-start employment and entrepreneurship. The elite is seemingly terrified of spiraling frustration in the US and Europe and increased civil unrest.
The Fed's determination to pump trillions more into the US economy (and thence the world's) can be seen within this context as a desperate gambit to salvage elite ambitions regarding global governance. It is desperate (and rash) because the dollar remains the world's reserve currency and US monetary policy thus inevitably has a tremendous impact on other currencies and countries. Whenever the dollar moves (down) other economies, in fact even the largest, have to react.
The US wants to inflate away dollar debts and cannot do so if everyone else joins in the game. Thus it has turned to the G20 and to an expanded and empowered IMF to twist arms and basically intimidate other countries into going along. (See Telegraph article excerpted above.) But as we have pointed out that day is probably long past. China and the rest of the BRIC countries will likely do what they want, though still paying lip-service to the demands of the American behemoths.
The Telegraph article lists several outcomes of the continual debasement of the dollar. The IMF and other countries could agree on an IMF-administered bancor. Alternatively, there is the concept of a "hybrid gold standard" (whatever that means) or merely more of what is taking place now – a continual appreciation of credibility for other currencies, especially the yuan, while the dollar sinks.
Those who stop by the Bell may recognize some of these projections as we have mentioned them from time to time. In fact, an IMF bancor is probably unrealistic because the BRICs won't tolerate a further Anglo-American presidium. And other "solutions" are not likely to empower the Anglo-American axis, either. Of course we are aware of the argument that money power merely moves along with economic and military power wherever it needs to go. We find this argument dubious. Western money power has a locus: Washington DC, Brussels, Tel Aviv and most importantly London's City.
The idea that Western elites can merely transfer their operations and headquarters to Beijing and continue business as usual among the Han is dubious from our point of view. There is also the possibility of China's imminent, or quasi-imminent collapse. The country's real estate is so inflated that entire CITIES are being built on speculation (as we have noted) and we have long-questioned the staying power of the current Chinese communist governments once the economy inevitably implodes.
We are left with a (tentative) conclusion that we have already enunciated – that the Western elites in their pride, greed and arrogance may have started a conflagration that they cannot control. Perhaps if the Internet had not come on the scene to reveal their machinations, it would have been possible to manipulate the world's economies more effectively and to intimidate, in secret, those who needed to be brought along. But it's very hard to run a monetary and military conspiracy under the white-hot glare of a technological and electronic spotlight. Allies shy away and potential enemies are emboldened.
What will happen next? Generally it does not seem to us that the elites will be able to create the necessary global currency they have sought and apparently are seeking, at least not in the short term. To us, anyway, this always seemed a long-term project and the ramifications of speeding it up (as the elite seem to be doing) are puzzling to say the least. Haste does not necessarily increase the potential for success.
Another possibility is that the Anglo-American elite muddles along with an eroding dollar while China and Europe and other BRIC countries gradually attempt to co-opt the dollar's reserve status. Good luck with this however, as the dollar's strength is that it purchases oil and Saudi Arabia in particular would have to be "flipped," which American military power may preclude. Reserve currencies, generally, are treated in academic textbooks as both ancient and amiable. In fact the Anglo-American axis had to level the known world with its murderous military might to impose the hierarchy of the dollar and other Western economic mechanisms (the IMF, etc.). It is not so easy to end this kind of "reserve."
Is it possible of course that the world returns to a de-facto gold standard and that there is some cooperation here between all the major powers. This may be a possibility, but it would end (at least in the short term) the Anglo-American dream of world dominance. Alternatively, the economic environment may simply continue to unravel. Gold and silver will go much higher in a fairly unconstrained environment as the Anglo-American grasp on events, both monetary and military, continues to erode. This might presage the evolution of a fairly unregulated free-banking environment complete with a privately evolving gold and silver standard (alongside real bills as well).
The last time this sort of economic destabilization occurred (in the 1930s), panic set in as it has now. It was only via World War II that the world's economies were rescued and set on track for renewed growth. But a world war is infinitely more difficult to come by these days. With that option at least partially precluded (we think it is anyway, though a war with Iran is always a possibility) and with the truth-telling of the Internet continuing to expose every power elite machination literally in real time it is very difficult to tell what is going to happen next. Of course, as we wrote yesterday, we don't know if there will be a dollar meltdown (and a metals melt up) sooner – or later. Perhaps one will occur after the US elections as the shorts come under increased pressure. Timing is a lot harder to calculate than trends.


Conclusion: What we do know is that the Western power elite is a stubborn and powerful force and that it has plenty of levers to pull that can still influence economies immensely in the West and around the world. As we were finishing this article, a feedbacker sent us a link to an announcement that the Fed is apparently about to hold a major conference at Jekyll Island, commemorating the secret meeting held 100 years ago that created of the Fed. (This just after initiating its controversial QE2 program.) The elite may be losing control, and may be increasingly panicked about it. But these kinds of tin-eared, self-congratulatory occurrences (such as the reported, upcoming Fed meeting) make us wonder increasingly if the powers-that-be have fully grasped the magnitude of what has been unleashed.