[WTF] Deadlier Than Scanners: TSA To Spread Flesh-Eating Bacteria

(It's a freaking depopulationist conspiracy!):

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com - November 25, 2010

Now that the TSA’s new pat down procedures include reaching inside people’s clothing and directly touching their skin and genitals, communicable diseases are set to soar, with doctors warning of a new wave of infections that will pose a greater risk to public health than any statistical probability of being a victim of terrorism.

The TSA’s new pat down procedures threaten to unleash an epidemic of communicable diseases, presenting a threat more deadly than the radiation travelers will be exposed to if they pass through a naked body scanner. This will undoubtedly lead to thousands of deaths of people with weak immune systems in the long term.

The controversy again highlights the fact that the body scanner and pat down procedures, through the spread of infectious diseases like flesh-eating bacteria, will kill more people than they will protect through the speculative prevention of any terror attack.

Necrotizing fasciitis, commonly known as flesh-eating bacteria, can be spread from one person to another through close contact or inadvertently touching the wound of a person who is infected. The likelihood of this occurring now that the TSA have been given free reign to directly grope passengers under their clothing has greatly increased. The disease can be spreadthrough contact with weakened skin, like a bruise, blister, or abrasion, or merely through minor openings in the skin such as a paper cut or a pin prick.

Cases of flesh-eating bacteria are on the increase and the disease has a 20 per cent death rate.

Syphilis, lice, gonorrhea, ringworm, chlamydia, staph, strep, noro and papilloma viruses are also going to be readily transferred to travelers since TSA agents do not change gloves between each pat down. Now that screeners are literally touching genitalia, the risk of transmitting sexual diseases will skyrocket.

While people are told to wear flip-flops in the gym or at the swimming pool to prevent infections transmitted via bare feet, the TSA makes people remove their shoes and walk through areas loaded with germs with no protection.

“There is no doubt that bacteria (staph, strep, v.cholerae etc.) and viruses (noro, enteroviruses, herpes, hepatitis A and papilloma viruses) can be spread by contaminated vinyl or latex gloves,” Dr. Thomas Warner of Wisconsin told World Net Daily.

A pulmonary critical care physician from Connecticut added, “That doesn’t make sense that they’re not changing gloves.”

“Anything can be transmitted. If there are open wounds and they [TSA agents] are not aware, there’s syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia, lice, ringworm.”

“As screening procedures get stricter and more passengers opt for pat-downs instead of graphic X-rays, the likelihood of bacteria being spread increases, Patrick Schlievert, a microbiology and immunology professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, told MSNBC.

Charles Gerba, a microbiology professor at the University of Arizona, found norovirus, MRSA and influenza virus on the trays that travelers handle before they are subject to pat downs, while self-checkout kiosks were also loaded with germs from thousands of people pushing the same buttons every day.

The TSA and the Centers For Disease Control has failed to respond to growing concerns about TSA gropers spreading infectious diseases.

As we have previously highlighted, the menace of global terrorism has been labeled the greatest threat to western civilization since communism and yet swimming pools, peanuts and lost deer kill more Americans every single year.

As Ohio State University’s John Mueller concludes in a report entitled A False Sense Of Insecurity, “For all the attention it evokes, terrorism actually causes rather little damage and the likelihood that any individual will become a victim in most places is microscopic.”

Americans are not only sacrificing their liberty when submitting to invasive and humiliating grope downs at the hands of the TSA, they are in fact putting themselves at a greater health risk statistically of catching a fatal disease than they would ever face from being a victim of terrorism.

—

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.
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Related:

Doctors sound TSA germ alert

Scientists: TSA X-ray machines May Cause Testicle Cancers in Men and Breast Cancer in Women

Memo to Ireland: "Tell the EU and the IMF to 'Shove It'"

By Mike Whitney
November 24, 2010 "Information Clearing House" 


-- Imagine that Yasser Arafat had succeeded in ending Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Now imagine that 10 or 15 years later, new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, agreed to hand over control of his country's budget to the IMF so his people's future would be controlled by outsiders. Do you think Palestinians would praise Abbas as a patriot or denounce him as a traitor?

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen is Mahmoud Abbas. He's caved in to the demands of foreign capital and transferred control over the nation's budget to the EU and the IMF. Here's an excerpt from a November 24, article in Reuters:

"Ireland's teetering government will announce plans on Wednesday to cut welfare spending sharply and raise taxes to help pay for the country's catastrophic banking crisis and meet the terms of an international bailout.

The four-year plan to save 15 billion euros is a condition for an EU/IMF rescue under negotiation for a country long feted as a model of economic development that has become the latest casualty in the euro zone's emergency ward.

Prime Minister Brian Cowen told parliament no final figure had been agreed for financial assistance, "but an amount of the order of 85 billion (euros) has been discussed.

The finance ministry said the austerity plan would be published at 1400 GMT and posted on the official government website." (Reuters)

This is a black day for Ireland. The Irish people will now face a decade or more of grinding poverty and depression thanks to their venal leaders. As soon as the ink dries on the IMF loans, the second occupation of Ireland will begin, only this time there won't be armored cars and Paramilitaries in fatigues, but nerdy-looking bureaucrats trained in the art of spreading misery. In fact, the loans haven't even been signed yet, and already IMF officials are urging the government to cut jobless benefits and the minimum wage. They're literally champing at the bit. They just can't wait to get their hands on the budget and start slashing away.

And don't believe the hype about European unity or saving Ireland. My ass. This is about bailing out the banks. The bondholders get a free ride while workers get kicked to the curb. Here's a clip from the Financial Times that spells it out in black and white:

"According to data compiled by the Bank of International Settlements, the three largest creditors to the Irish economy at the end of June...were Germany to the tune of €109bn, the UK at €100bn and France at €40bn. These sums amount to 2 per cent of France’s gross domestic product, 4.5 per cent of Germany’s GDP, and 7 per cent of British GDP."

See? Another bank bailout. Ireland is being asked to cut to social services, slash wages, renegotiate contracts, and dismantle the welfare state so that undercapitalized banks in France and Germany can get their pound of flesh. But, why? They're the ones who bought the bonds. No one put a gun to their head. They knew they could lose money if Irish banks went south. That's the risk they took. "You pays your money, and you takes your chances." Right? That's how capitalism works.

Not any more, it doesn't. Not while Cowen's in charge, at least. The Irish PM has decided to bail them out; make the bondholders "whole again." But who made Cowen God? Who gave Cowen the right to hand over his country to the IMF?

No one. Cowen is a rogue agent kowtowing to international capital. After he finishes his work in Ireland, he'll probably join globalist Tony Blair on the French Riviera for a little hobnobbing with the tuxedo crowd.

It's revealing to watch the way Cowen works, as though the interests of foreign bankers mean more to him than those of his own people. For example, the Green Party withdrew from the government last night calling for new elections, but even though the government is in a shambles, the slippery Taoiseach wants to stay in power long enough to push through a new 4-year budget that will leave Irish workers on the brink of destitution. Who is Cowen working for anyway?

This is from the Irish Times:

"Opposition parties have today stepped up pressure on the Government as it seeks to push ahead with passing next month's budget.

Fine Gael again called for an immediate general election and said the four-year budgetary plan should only be implemented by a Government which has a proper mandate....

"What is best for the country is that the negotiation about a programme for four years be done by a government which has four years to serve, that has a mandate from the public so that it has the authority and the credibility to not only develop and negotiate it but to implement it. I think that is in Ireland's best interest," he said. ("Opposition steps up pressure", Charlie Taylor, Irish Times)

The prospective belt-tightening measures will include the firing of 28,000 public employees, a boost in property taxes, a 10 percent cut in welfare benefits, and higher taxes on low-wage workers. Cowen believes that taxing low income families is preferable to making billionaire bondholders eat their losses. The whole thing stinks to high-heaven.

Is there a way out for Ireland? Economist Mark Weisbrot thinks so. Here's what he thinks should happen:

"The European authorities and IMF can loan Ireland any funds needed in the next year or two at very low interest rates....Once these borrowing needs are guaranteed, Ireland would not have to worry about spikes in its borrowing costs like the one that provoked the current crisis....The European authorities could scrap their pro-cyclical conditions and, instead, allow for Ireland to undertake a temporary fiscal stimulus to get their economy growing again. That is the most feasible, practical alternative to continued recession.

Instead, the European authorities are trying what the IMF... calls an "internal devaluation". This is a process of shrinking the economy and creating so much unemployment that wages fall dramatically, and the Irish economy becomes more competitive internationally on the basis of lower unit labour costs." ("There is another way for bullied Ireland", Mark Weisbrot, The Guardian)

It's all de rigeur for the IMF. It wouldn't be an IMF program unless someone was starving. That's the benchmark for success.

Ireland doesn't need structural adjustment programs when low interest funding and fiscal stimulus can bring the economy back to life. This is politics not economics. The EU and IMF are using the crisis to push through their own agenda. Their real goal is to crush the unions, shred the social safety net, and roll back the gains of the Progressive Era.

The Irish people are left with no choice but to resist. Presently the Cowen government is collapsing. Bravo. Now it's off to the barricades to see if the damage can be undone. Ireland needs to withdraw from the EU and start fresh. It'll be a bumpy road at first, but there's no other way. Economist Dean Baker sums it up like this in an article in The Guardian. Here's what he said:

"Even a relatively small country like Ireland has options. Specifically, they could drop out of the euro and default on their debt....Like Ireland, Argentina had also been a poster child of the neoliberal crew before it ran into difficulties.

But the IMF can turn quickly. Its austerity programme lowered GDP by almost 10% and pushed the unemployment rate well into the double digits. By the end of the 2001, it was politically impossible for the Argentine government to agree to more austerity. As a result, it broke the supposedly unbreakable link between its currency and the dollar and defaulted on its debt.

The immediate effect was to make the economy worse, but by the second half of 2002, the economy was again growing. This was the start of five and a half years of solid growth, until the world economic crisis eventually took its toll in 2009." ("Ireland should 'do an Argentina", Dean Baker, The Guardian)

The Irish people didn't struggle through centuries of famine and foreign occupation so they could be debt-peons in the EU's corporate Uberstate. Like Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said, "We don't need anyone coming in to run the place for us. We can run it ourselves." Right. Tell the EU plutocrats to take their Utopian Bankstate and shove it.

Haiti: One More Shameful UN Betrayal

Cholera is just the latest disaster to be linked to the UN in Haiti – and the election won't change the nature of the mission

by Peter Hallward

Global Research, November 25, 2010

Guardian - 2010-11-23

Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti last month. The evidence is overwhelming and many experts (including the head of Harvard University's microbiology department, cholera specialist John Mekalanos) made up their minds to that effect several weeks ago. Poverty and a lack of rudimentary infrastructure compels much of Haiti's population to drink untreated water, but there has been no cholera there for decades. Haitians have no experience with – and therefore little resistance to – the disease. All the bacterial samples taken from Haitian patients are identical and match a strain endemic in southern Asia. Cholera broke out in Nepal over the summer, and in mid-October a new detachment of Nepalese UN troops arrived at their Haitian base in Mirebalais, near the Artibonite river. A few days later Haitians living downstream of the base started to get sick and the disease spread rapidly throughout the region. On 27 October, journalists visited Mirebalais and found evidence that untreated waste from UN latrines was pouring directly into an Artibonite tributary. By early November, Mekalanos couldn't see "any way to avoid the conclusion that an unfortunate and presumably accidental introduction of the organism occurred" as a result of UN troops. Mekalanos and others also refute UN claims that identification of the source should be a low public health priority. Probably as a result of UN negligence, more than 1,200 people are already dead and 20,000 infected, and the toll is set to rise rapidly over the coming weeks. So is the number and intensity of popular protests against this latest in a series of UN crimes and misadventures in Haiti in recent years, which include scores of killings and hundreds of alleged rapes. Rather than examine its role in the epidemic, however, the UN mission has opted for disavowal and obfuscation. UN officials have refused to test Nepalese soldiers for the disease or to conduct a public investigation into the origins of the outbreak. Rather than address the concerns of an outraged population, the agency has preferred to characterise the fresh wave of protests as a "politically motivated" attempt to destabilise the country in the runup to presidential elections on 28 November. Protesters have been met with tear gas and bullets; so far at least three have been killed. So far, in fact, so normal. The truth is that the whole UN mission in Haiti is based on a violent, bald-faced lie. It says it is in Haiti to support democracy and the rule of law, but its only real achievement has been to help transfer power from a sovereign people to an unaccountable army. To understand this requires a little historical knowledge. The basic political problem in Haiti, from colonial through post-colonial to neo-colonial times, has always been much the same: how can a tiny and precarious ruling class secure its property and privileges in the face of mass destitution and resentment? The Haitian elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation and violence, and only quasi-monopoly control of violent power allows it to retain them. This monopoly was amply guaranteed by the US-backed Duvalier dictatorships through to the mid 1980s, and then rather less amply by the military dictatorships that succeeded them (1986-90). But the Lavalas mobilisation for democracy, which began in the 1980s, threatened that monopoly and with it those privileges. In such a situation, only an army can be relied upon to guarantee the security of the status quo. Haiti's incompetent but vicious armed forces, established as a delegate of US power, dominated the country for most of the 20th century. After surviving a brutal military coup in 1991, Haiti's first democratically elected government – led by president Jean-Bertrand Aristide – finally demobilised this hated army in 1995; the great majority of his compatriots celebrated the occasion. Lawyer Brian Concannon recalls it as "the most important step forward for human rights since emancipation from France". In 2000, Aristide was re-elected, and his Fanmi Lavalas party won an overwhelming majority. This re-election raised the prospect, for the first time in modern Haitian history, of genuine political change in a situation in which there was no obvious extra-political mechanism – no army – to prevent it. The tiny Haitian elite and their allies in the US, France and Canada were threatened by the prospect of popular empowerment, and took elaborate steps to undermine the Lavalas government. In February 2004, Aristide's second administration was overthrown in another disastrous coup, conducted by the US and its allies with support from ex-Haitian soldiers and rightwing leaders of the Haitian business community. A US puppet was imposed to replace Aristide, in the midst of savage reprisals against Lavalas supporters. Since no domestic army was available to guarantee "security", a UN "stabilisation force" was sent in at the behest of both the US and France. The UN has been providing this substitute army ever since. At the behest of the US and its allies, it arrived in Haiti in June 2004. Made up of troops and police drawn from countries all over the world, it operates at an annual cost that is close to twice the size of Aristide's entire pre-coup budget. Its main mission, in effect, has been to pacify the Haitian people, and make them accept the coup and the end of their attempt to establish genuine democratic rule. Few Haitians are likely to forget what the UN has done to accomplish this. Between 2004 and 2006, it participated in a campaign of repression that killed more than a thousand Lavalas supporters. It laid siege to the destitute pro-Aristide neighbourhood of Cité Soleil in 2005 and 2006, and has subsequently contained or dispersed popular protests on issues ranging from political persecution and privatisation to wages and food prices. In the last few months the UN has also kept a lid on the growing pressure in the capital, Port-au-Prince, for improvement in the intolerable conditions still endured by about 1.3 million people left homeless after January's earthquake. Today, cholera or no cholera, the UN's priority is to ensure that next week's elections go ahead as planned. For Haiti's elite and their international allies, these elections offer an unprecedented opportunity to bury the Lavalas project once and for all. The political programme associated with Lavalas and Aristide remains overwhelming popular. After six years of repression and infighting, however, the political leadership of this popular movement is more divided and disorganised than ever. Fanmi Lavalas itself has simply been barred from participation in the election (with hardly a whisper of international protest), and from his involuntary exile in South Africa, Aristide has condemned the ballot as illegitimate. Many if not most of the party's supporters are likely to back its vigorous call to boycott this latest masquerade, as they did in the spring of 2009, when turnout for senate elections was less than 10%. This time around, however, half a dozen politicians associated with Lavalas have chosen to run as candidates in their own name. They are likely to split the vote. Haiti's people will be deprived of what has long been their most powerful political weapon – their ability to win genuine elections. Since it is almost guaranteed to have no significant political impact, this is one election that might well achieve its intended result: to reinforce the "security" (and inequity) of the status quo, along with the many profitable opportunities that a suitably secured post-disaster Haiti continues to offer international investors and its business elite. "This will be an election for nothing," says veteran activist Patrick Elie. Properly managed, it may even provide an opportunity for rightwing presidential candidates likeCharles Baker to pursue the goal that has long been at the top of their agenda: restoration, with the usual "international supervision", of Haiti's own branch of the imperial army. And if that comes to pass, then when the UN eventually leaves Haiti its departure may only serve as a transition from one occupying force to another, reversing decades of popular sacrifice and political effort. In the meantime, though, it looks as if the UN may soon have more opportunities than ever before to fulfil its mission in Haiti.

Peter Hallward is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Peter Hallward

A conspiracy-theory celebrity just proved that he is not up to fractions

Check the math in this post by David Icke:


"The population of the Republic of Ireland is less than 4.5 million.


The size of the bail-out of the country is estimated at 85 billion euros, and then some, plus the 50 billion already spent to bail-out the Irish banks, which makes a total of something like 135 billion euros.


So to rescue the deeply corrupt Irish banks, the government is negotiating a 'saviour package' of nearly 20 million euros for every Irish citizen - more like 30 million if you include the 'money' already spent to save the Irish banks that, well, didn't save them.


For a fraction of that they could let the evil banks collapse - good riddance - and make every Irish citizen a euro millionaire - total cost: 4.5 billion.


If this was done, do you think it might stimulate the Irish economy, er, just a little bit?..."

The insult after the injury: Pay rises all round on EU gravy train: Extra £3,000 a year for MEPs after judges' ruling

From EUReferendum:


As they award themselves a pay rise, we see demonstrated exactly how a government behaves when restraints are missing. MEPs will see their salaries rise from £81,401 to £84,412 while van Rompuy takes home almost £12,000 on his £320,000 salary. Baroness Ashton sees her pay increase by more than £11,000 to almost £325,000.

The pay rises come as a result of the EU commission taking a case to the ECJ, seeking (successfully) to set aside a veto imposed by the Council of Ministers on increased salaries. Commission officials are included in the settlement, as indeed are ECJ judges, who now get back pay to July 2009 and interest.

And when their carcases litter the streets of Brussels and elsewhere, slaughtered by populations which have finally had enough, the verdict will be the worst case of collective suicide in EU history. These people have lost the will to live.
________


Related:

Portugal grinds to a halt in general strike protesting austerity measures

Burning with anger: London streets in flames again as 25,000 go on rampage in new student fees riot

In Whitehall, protesters looted a police van and set off a smoke bomb inside it

R.I.P, Homo Economicus: On the End of Ubiquitous Poverty and the Beginning of Universal Abundance

From ZeroHedge, by Free Radical :

“I draw the conclusion that, assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not – if we look into the future – the permanent problem of the human race.” – John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, 1930, [author’s emphasis]

There have of course been some “important” wars (though in truth they were, and remain, mere installments in aLong War that is by no means over).  And there has of course been an “important” increase in population (the abreaction, for the most part, of the premodern underbrush that was uprooted amid the modern nation-state’s relentless campaign of unification, centralization, and consolidation).  But let us give Keynes his due for imagining a time, in the not-too-distant future, when “the economic problem” – which is to say, the scarcity that impels all economic endeavor – will at long last have been solved, and universal abundance is at hand.  Let us do so, however, with no illusions about who the man was, fully acknowledging that he was “a charming but power-driven statist Machiavelli, who embodied some of the most malevolent trends and institutions of the twentieth century” – so malevolent, in fact, that one is left to wonder what Keynes might have had to do with the fact that, eighty years later, a solution to “the economic problem” seems more out of reach than ever.

After all, standardizing for population growth since 2005, the chart below would now indicate that fully 5.5 billion people live on less than ten dollars a day, while nearly a billion live on less than a dollar a day:

And while America’s poor appear to be quite well off by world standards, the fact is that they now represent nearly 14% of the U.S. population and that their numbers are skyrocketing, as the real unemployment rate surges toward 25%:

And not surprisingly, food stamp use is also skyrocketing:

Which is to say that Americans in general are an ugly mix of Stanley Johnsons so buried in debt that their toys have either already been taken from them or soon will be,  their spending now in freefall, as it returns to its historically sustainable level (after, in all likelihood, overshooting it):

All of this happening as income inequality rises to extremes not seen since 1929:

But this was to be expected, after all, as the fascism inherent in the U.S. banking system reaches its apotheosis in the privatization of profits and socialization of losses, such profiteering, regardless of how it manifests itself, being standard operating proce-dure for the state.  For while it “is almost universally considered an institution of social service,” the state is really nothing more than “the systematization of the predatory pro-cess over a given territory.”  Why?  Because

… the state cannot even exist without committing the crimes of extortion and robbery, which states call taxation; and as a rule, this existential state crime is but the merest beginning of its assaults on the lives, liberties, and property of its resident population.

And simply put, these assaults – whether perpetrated by the U.S. fascialist state or variations upon this theme elsewhere around the world – have so impoverished the masses (why else would they be the masses?) that to contemplate an imminent solution to “the economic problem” admittedly seems absurd.
Nonetheless, let us return to Keynes meditation thereon and, in particular, to his observation that the historically “slow rate of progress, or lack of progress, was due to two reasons – to the remarkable absence of important technical improvements and to the failure of capital to accumulate.”  For surely this is so, not just because the state’s “predatory process,” century after century, has so hampered capital accumulation as to stunt technological advance but because, in the last century, the state’s predations were fully systematized.  And they were systematized in no small part because of Keynes’ absurd belief that “there are no intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital.”  For just as there is not (there never was, nor will there ever be) any genuine capital accumulation that is not the result of savings – specifically, the saving of productive work of one form or another – so is there an inherent limit to capital.  And as savings are nothing other than deferred consumption, it is clear that one cannot simultaneously consume that which one defers the consumption of, which is to say, one cannothave one’s cake and eat it too.
This is precisely what Keynesianism attempts to do, however, facilitated by the attendant notion that money is not a good used as a medium exchange but simply a medium of exchange that, being irredeemable for any good, can accordingly be generated without limit.  No wonder, then, that with both capital and money thus unhinged from economic reality, governments, in thrall to this alchemical fantasy – would systematically plunder their countries’ economies to the point of grinding them to a halt:

A major part of the growth in the last 100 years and especially in the last 40 years has been built on an unsustainable build-up of debt levels. These debt levels will continue to swell for another few years until the coming hyperinflation in the West leads to a destruction of real asset values and a debt implosion.

We have hell to pay for the sins of Keynesianism, in other words, the only question being what level of hell we descend to.  And as this is largely a function of how long the journey takes, it is in turn a function of how “successful” governments’ extend and pretend policies are, meaning that the longer they delay the onset of economic reality, the deeper into hell we will descend.
So again, under the circumstances – that is, given governments’ unremitting deter-mination to exacerbate the devastation that their Keynesian folly has already caused – how can we even contemplate a solution to “the economic problem,” much less postulate an imminent solution?

We begin by considering what our lives would be like if we hadn’t been subjected not only Keynesianism but to its indispensable precondition – that is, if we had lived all this time within the liberating confines of sound money, which by definition has two complementary and vitally important aspects: (1) “It is affirmative in approving the market's choice of a commonly used medium of exchange,” and (2) “It is negative in obstructing the government's propensity to meddle with the currency system.”  And since gold has manifested these two aspects for over five thousand years, we assert without equivocation that a sound monetary system is a 100-percent-reserve gold standard that accordingly “secure[s] the economic system against the evils both of inflation and of de-flation/depression.”

And let us also assert that however beneficial this twofold security would be, such a monetary system would do much more than that.  For “the typically modest increase in the quantity of money and volume of aggregate spending that takes place under a gold standard is accompanied by actually falling prices [author’s emphasis],” the greater production and supply of a good (or service) being a result of the greater efficiency that is expressed as Total productivity = Output quality and quantity / Input quality and quantity.  That is to say, as input quality rises and input quantity falls, both output quality and quantity rise, resulting in the increased productivity that is reflected in the ability to offer the same product (or service) for less or, alternatively, a better product (or service) for the same price.
And we have of course been experiencing this very phenomenon for many decades now, as the cost of computing power has fallen precipitously, the industry’s productivity increasing in accordance with what has come to be known as Moore’s Law:

The computer/electronics industry, in other words, has accomplished what the rest of the economy has not – i.e., an increase in productivity sufficient to offset government-induced inflation – the point being that in a truly sound-money economy, the gain in purchasing power would be across-the-board.  That is, increased productivity would result, over time and in all sectors of the economy, in falling prices that would not be deflationary for the simple reason that they would not be the result of a monetary contraction, the difference between the two being all the difference:

What this means is not only that in a sound-money economy, prices would fall as productivity rises; it also means that in an increasingly computer-driven, nano-technological, sound-money economy – where computing power rises as machine size falls – productivity would grow exponentially, not only driving prices down at a similar rate but ultimately driving them to the vanishing point , which is to say, to zero. 
For example:

We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we’ll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we’ll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Let’s say that by “extremely inexpensive,” we’re talking about the solar equivalent of dollar-a-gallon gasoline in 2030.  We are then talking about a less than one-cent-gallon equivalent seven doublings later and less than atenth of a cent three doublings after that, meaning that by 2050 the world’s energy needs would be met at virtually no cost. And simply put, to apply this same logic to the economy as a whole is to understand how “the economic problem” stands to be solved and how universal abundance therefore stands to be achieved.  Not eons from now, not millennia, not centuries, but decades.

While Keynes had only a faint notion of this hyper-productivity dynamic, we can at least give him his due for imagining that it wouldn’t be long before man would be “faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”  For that “science and compound interest” are nothing other than the exponential growth in technology that, aided and abetted by sound-money’s inherent price-reducing proclivity, do in fact have the power to free man “from pressing economic cares.”

Unfortunately, however, we must also give Keynes his due for helping to postpone that day, his contempt for what he perceived as a barbarous relic leading to FDR’s confiscation of the people’s gold in 1933 and thus the end of what remained of the gold standard in the United States (the world gold standard ending in the Nixon Shock of 1971).  For with no further restraint on the international banking cartel, the full fury of the stealth taxwould be loosed upon the world and vast swaths of its people (most notably the American people) sold into debt slavery, the supreme irony being that “the economic problem” could well have already been solved, had a sound monetary system been in place during the near-century that the cartel’s foremost member has held sway.  For the pseudo-productivity of much of the U.S. economy would have been genuinely so, as would the rest of the world’s.  And the wars that could not have otherwise been funded would not otherwise have been fought, nor would our socially debilitating welfare programs have had the wherewithal to entrench themselves, the combined depredations of which have sapped incalculable amounts of humanity’s time, talent, energy, and imagination.
Even so, such is the ordinary man’s inborn ingenuity that despite those depreda-tions, he may yet find himself, in 2030, confronting the fact that “his real, his permanent problem” isn’t a problem at all.  For what Keynes didn’t envision is that the ordinary man a century later, having decades before begun to internalize his machines, would be quite extraordinary, empowering himself to the point of not only boldly going where no man has gone before but of becoming what no man has ever been before.  No longer having to struggle with the problems of tired oldhomo economicus, that is, a vibrant young homo abundus would be charting a course that would have been beyond his predecessor’s wild-est dreams.
But as those dreams may yet be shattered, we will postpone further examination of homo abundus until we’ve taken full measure of “the predatory process,” beginning with my next submission: “The Twin Pillars of Civilization.”

Eurointelligence Daily Briefing - 25 November 2010: eurozone is facing a colossal crisis, with most of the action still to come

Irish bond spreads up, Portuguese spreads up, Spanish spreads up, euro down

• The markets give the dumps down to the Irish budget, and question the country’s solvency;
• IMF disagrees with EU and ECB over Ireland’s crisis strategy, preferring a tougher line on creditors, and softer fiscal line;
• Ireland has extended its blanket guarantee for the banking sector;
• Mohamed El Erian says the eurozone is facing a colossal crisis, with most of the action still to come;
• we have discovered a reliable crisis metric: the number of No Crisis speeches by ECB board members;
• Angela Merkel vows to press ahead with her bail-in plan, insisting on the primary of politics (and displaying once more a failure to understand what is going on in the bond markets);
• German business confidence reaches a post-unification high;
• the euro, meanwhile, continues to fall and fall.

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This is the Daily Briefing from www.eurointelligence.com
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VIDEO - Sir Evelyn de Rothschild On The Global Financial Crisis And The Absolute Necessity Of Protecting Billionaire Bank Bondholders

Another famous economist full of hot air who does not know what he is talking about discovered by the Mogambo Guru

Economics Professor Ignores Fiat Money Failures

By The Mogambo Guru, from The Daily Reckoning

11/23/10 Tampa, Florida – Unfortunately, it is not only Robert Zoellick of the World Bank that has notoriously turned against a gold standard, but The DailyBell writes about similar sentiments from Nouriel Roubini, university professor, in their article “Roubini: Here’s Why a Gold Standard Won’t Work.”
Naturally, I can’t believe my eyes! The fact is that the gold standard is the only system that HAS worked all through history, and you would think that Mr. Roubini would know that! Wow!
I mean, look at the mess the world is in as a result of the use of a monstrously abused fiat dollar in the hands of the evil Federal Reserve, especially since 1971 when Nixon severed the dollar’s tie to gold by refusing to pay foreign central banks for their excess dollars with gold, as France was doing.


The Daily Bell summarizes Mr. Roubini’s opinions as, “A gold standard would just make business cycles more extreme, according to economist Nouriel Roubini… What’s more, a gold standard would make central banks unable to fight inflation or deflation, much less do anything to combat persistent unemployment.”
At this, I have to laugh! A fixed money supply will “make business cycles more extreme”? How in the hell would THAT work without some dumb fractional-reserve expansionist crapola in the banks, a fraud of bankers and banking that has absolutely nothing to do with gold?


And as for inflation, a gold standard would prevent inflation (absent banking and government frauds), and so nobody would have to “fight inflation” in the first place.
And as for unemployment, that’s easy to solve; as it is just a function of wages, benefits and taxes. Abolish the minimum wage and let wages and benefits drop to market-clearing slave-labor levels of $2 an hour, and jobs will start appearing everywhere, flooding into this country.


But we were not discussing how my boss has recently computed my value to the company to be a miniscule $2 per hour, while my cost to the company is much more than that, but that Mr. Roubini erroneously thinks that a world with “A fixed exchange regime, even if it is not a gold standard” is somehow so bad that (take his word on it) it “just doesn’t work.”
Apparently stung by my harsh criticism, he offers the reasoning that (get a load of this!) in a world with a gold standard, “monetary policy by definition instead of being countercyclical becomes procyclical.”
What? Hahaha! I laugh the Scornful Laugh Of The Mogambo (SLOTM), as (firstly) I am astonished to hear him say that monetary policy should always be countercyclical, and secondly that he is apparently unaware that the stability of the gold money supply is inherently countercyclical!


That’s the beauty of the gold standard! That’s the whole point of the gold standard! Overall prices don’t get far out of line, inflation-wise, and they soon revert back to “normal” as prices adjust back downward after being artificially pushed upward by a previous expansion of the money supply through the expedient of bankers lying and cheating and acting like greedy scumbags.


I thought, as a professor of economics, he would know these things!
I guess that means he does know that it’s the ugliness of the expansion of fiat money that is the real evil, the Federal Reserve using the creation of new money to be alternatively countercyclical when the cycle turns down and then again to be procyclical when the cycle turns up, the result being a terrifying, constant monetary expansion accompanied by the resultant constant, simmering inflation in prices that makes the general level of misery gradually worse and worse.
And growing worse exponentially, too, which means that one day soon prices will, for the first time, double in one day.


This, for your information, is the alarming part of the Daily Bell article where I suddenly flashed back to a panic state, like when I was in high school, and I thought that I was being given a test for which I was not only completely unprepared, but had actually forgotten all about, as the Bell went on, “The interviewer could then have asked Roubini what was the dividing line between classical and neo-classical economics.”
I gotta tell ya; I had no idea what was the dividing line between classical and neo-classical economics! I didn’t even know there WAS a dividing line! I was instantly in a panic!
In a flash of desperation, my brain instantly composed my answer, which was, “The dividing line between classical and neo-classical economics is a fascinating one, and one that has long intrigued many of the great thinkers in economics throughout history, although I can’t think of any right now except Ludwig von Mises, who was sort of the founder of the Austrian school of economics and whose brilliance is gloriously at mises.org, and who is the only one who was warning against this kind of monetary stupidity as practiced by the Federal Reserve creating so much money, and the tragic inflationary and bubble consequences of such despicable monetary excesses, such as rivalries creating a dividing line between classical and neo-classical economics.”
From there, I would have continued for a few paragraphs of other famous dividing lines, such as between the Yankee North and the Confederate South, the division between the Hatfields and the McCoys, cops and robbers, men and women, and how those relativly sharp distinctions make defining an actual dividing line between classical and neo-classical economic thought more of a qualitative exercise describing a continuum of theoretical advancements, and without a right or wrong answer.


I was breathing a sort of sigh of relief at having at least SOMETHING to put down as my answer, when I suddenly realized that it wasn’t a test question at all! In fact, they answered their own essay question by noting that the dividing line is the development of “marginal utility,” which they say “changed the nature of economics forever.”
I was just going to look up “marginal utility” in the Mogambo Big Book Of Economic Stuff (MBBOES) when again the Bell comes through for those of us who are intellectually challenged, and explains that, “Marginal utility explains how the consumption of goods and services becomes less satisfying as they are consumed; in doing so, it emphasizes how only the free-market itself can determine the prices of these units.”
This explanation shows their hopelessly pedantic nature, as the better explanation of “marginal utility” is, “The difference between how the first candy bar tastes versus how the 15th candy bar tastes after you have just consumed 14 of them, one after the other, gorging yourself like some gluttonous pig devouring the contents of the Halloween candy bowl that was meant for the Trick or Treaters.”


In their conclusion, The Daily Bell makes the hopeful note that “It would seem to us that the interviewer is aware that there is an alternative view and is eager to solicit it. It is very possible that it is becoming more fashionable for ‘mainstream’ financial journalists to acknowledge Austrian economics as a sign of a certain level of sophistication in their craft.”
They say this because they have noticed this elsewhere, mainly in “the friendly reception that hard-money proponent Congressman Ron Paul often receives in mainstream financial interviews. Honest money seems to be coming back into vogue after a 100-year hiatus. We dearly hope this is a developing trend.”
So do I! And that is yet another reason, as if you needed another reason in addition to the other trillions and trillions of reasons, to buy gold, silver and oil in response to the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve, an investment decision that is so obvious that even to think of it is to giggle with delight, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

The Mogambo Guru
for The Daily Reckoning

The Mogambo Guru

Richard Daughty (Mogambo Guru) is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the writer/publisher of the Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an avocational exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning , and other fine publications.