On this Web Exclusive panel interview, Lauren Lyster moderates a debate between Mike Shedlock and Joe Weisenthal, two bloggers who represent different sides of the ideological spectrum when it comes to gold, currency, and fiat money. Joe has attacked the gold standard in the past, and most recently in his article titled, "Ben Bernanke Murders the Gold Standard." In his article, Joe attacks the gold standard for, what he believes, is its contribution to monetary and interest rate "volatility." He also criticizes the wasted time and effort needed to extract the yellow metal from the ground, which ends up right back under ground in vaults. Mish, on the other hand, rips in to Joe's argument in his own post titled "Ben Bernanke: Inflationaist Jackass, devoid of common sense, and clueless about trade, debt, history and gold." One of Mish's points is that "stability is destabilizing," and that artificially dampening volatility only increases it in the long term. He also directly challenges Joe Weisenthal's position on gold, and finds value in it as a way of restraining government spending.
You can read more of Mish's stuff at global economic analysis (or just google "mish") and Joe Weisenthal writes regularly at business insider. Both are regular guests to the show, and a pleasure to have on the program! Follow us @ http://twitter.com/laurenlyster http://twitter.com/coveringdelta
From The Daily Bell, Tuesday, March 27, 2012 – by Staff Report
Spain's economy contracts as recession fears grow ... The Spanish economy has shrunk for the first time in two years, increasing fears the country could be heading for a recession. The country's economy shrank by 0.3% in the three months to December, after stagnating in the previous quarter. Household spending fell by 1.1% from the previous quarter, while spending by public bodies dropped by 3.6%. The country has the highest jobless rate in the EU, with almost one in four people out of work. Spain's unemployment figure passed the five million mark in the last quarter of 2011. Figures showed 5.3 million people were out of work at the end of December, up from 4.9 million in the third quarter. The downbeat fourth-quarter economy figures come even before the impact of new austerity measures unveiled last month by new Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. – BBC
Dominant Social Theme: Austerity is tough but builds character.
Free-Market Analysis: Did you hear that about half of Europe is in recession or headed that way? We can see from the above excerpt that Spain is certainly headed that way. Greece, Portugal and Ireland are also in various forms of economic collapse.
Call it recession, depression or simply cataclysmic economic conditions. But one way or another Southern Europe is in a terrible state. Greece is in a meltdown; half the young people in Spain aren't working and Portugal and Ireland aren't far behind.
Heck, let's just call it a continental depression. And one that is as unnecessary as it is terrible. The elites that set up the European Union by subterfuge bribed the Southern government PIGS with funds.
This is no different than the way the tag team of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund act. The World Bank lends money to dictators and then hauls in the IMF to make the suffering citizens pay the bill.
The strategy is doubly delicious because the "banks" get blamed for what is essentially a top-end elite plot.Capitalism and the mechanical process of paying interest are blamed while the planners behind it all remain unscathed.
When things get too bad, other tried and true formulas are pushed to the fore. It's all been done before, after all. The apparent dynastic families that are trying to set up world government are seemingly pushing ahead with this scheme via economic depression and war – as they have in the past.
We can see this same formula in use in the 1930s. First came a great money-printing euphoria in the 1920s, then a central-banking-caused depression and finally a world war. The war is generated during the depression as people grow angry and are ready to lash out at any perceived enemy.
Not only this, but a war allows the government to renounce its debts and put the entire economy on a command-and-control footing where young men are dragooned into military service to work for a dollar a day. Companies are commandeered to make military equipment. The depression is short-circuited by the government's state of emergency.
Yes ... we can see this sort of paradigm taking shape now if we look hard. And within this context austerity makes sense. Those whom the elites wish to manipulate must first be made destitute and miserable.
Only then will war and state dirigisme seem attractive or at least tolerable. Surely there were many individuals during the Great Depression that found war to be an attractive alternative to the prospect of starving slowly to death. This is likely the plan. It seems evident and obvious to us, as we've pointed out numerous times, that the Western powers-that-be are setting up a kind of Islamic crescent in the Middle East. Almost every country that has been destabilized was secular and will now emerge with an Islamic government. Step by step, the West is creating an "Islamic threat."
In the meantime, the creation of an economic collapse continues apace. It is the elite's economy, after all. A tiny group of people now control the world's central banks. And through money printing they have so distorted the world's economy that it will take years, if not decades, to recover.
Within this context, the power elite continually aggravates the situation by pressing ruined civilizations to give up more wealth and treasure. It is a sub-dominant theme of sorts, that Europe needs to struggle through austerity to come out stronger and leaner.
What is also true is that these public promotions are patient based and focus on the hapless citizen as a passive observer. Just yesterday we pointed out how articles often refer to the average citizen as a patient, and elite central bankers as doctors.
And then there is the metaphor of the punchbowl that treats people as partygoers. And now we have the European metaphor of consumer as lazy weakling with central bankers seen as administering strong, severe medicine ... austerity.
Always, people are presented as lazy, sick, lackadaisical or ne'er do wells staying at the "punch bowl" too long. Always, the current system is presented as stern, sorrowful, wise but merciless. It is a parent/child relationship with the self-appointed elites playing the role of omnipotent father figure.
The propaganda is relentless and contemptuous. In fact, he hundreds of millions of Europeans are not children. And the handful of bankers and Brussels bureaucrats supervising their demise are not their fathers.
Step back and look at the "big picture." An economic depression is being foisted on the Western world and the world at large. Once the BRICs collapse, the world's economy is finished. There will likely be no "recovery," not in the short term anyway.
And so bang the drums of war. For war seems an inevitability. The one difference between now and the 1930s is the Internet and what we call the Internet Reformation.
Many more people are aware of the manipulations that we've presented above and written about numerous times along with the rest of the alternative media. The Renaissance and Reformation changed the context of the world after the advent of the Gutenberg Press. The Internet is doing so again.
Conclusion: Nothing is preordained. Time and the action of individuals – human action – will tell the tale.
Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.
The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.
In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.
Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.
America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?
The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power. The US Constitution has been extracted in the interests of the Security State, and Americans’ incomes have been redirected to the pockets of the 1 percent. That is how the American Empire functions.
The New Empire is different. It happens without achieving conquest. The American military did not conquer Iraq and has been forced out politically by the puppet government that Washington established. There is no victory in Afghanistan, and after a decade the American military does not control the country.
In the New Empire success at war no longer matters. The extraction takes place by being at war. Huge sums of American taxpayers’ money have flowed into the American armaments industries and huge amounts of power into Homeland Security. The American empire works by stripping Americans of wealth and liberty.
This is why the wars cannot end, or if one does end another starts. Remember when Obama came into office and was asked what the US mission was in Afghanistan? He replied that he did not know what the mission was and that the mission needed to be defined.
Obama never defined the mission. He renewed the Afghan war without telling us its purpose. Obama cannot tell Americans that the purpose of the war is to build the power and profit of the military/security complex at the expense of American citizens.
This truth doesn’t mean that the objects of American military aggression have escaped without cost. Large numbers of Muslims have been bombed and murdered and their economies and infrastructure ruined, but not in order to extract resources from them.
It is ironic that under the New Empire the citizens of the empire are extracted of their wealth and liberty in order to extract lives from the targeted foreign populations. Just like the bombed and murdered Muslims, the American people are victims of the American empire.
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This Paul Craig Roberts article first appeared at his websiteInstitute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books including The Tyranny of Good Intentions and How the Economy Was Lost. _____-
Over the last 10 years researchers have developed a decent narrative of the whos and whys of 9/11.
Where we continue to spin round and round chasing our tails is with the hows. That's by design.
Some of us are just curious in a scientific way so the hows will always be relevant.
I'm not in the business of trying to convince anyone of certain viewpoints so I'll just link this new emagazine by Jeff Prager and anyone interested can take it how they will.
At 247 pages and very detailed it's not an easy read but there are lot of excellent photos that make the downloads worthwhile even if you don't or can't take the time to read it. Since it's free, the only cost is in time.
Mr. Prager has been variously described as one of the best 9/11 researchers ever to a disinfo shill. I'll leave it to each individual to make up their own mind. Input would be appreciated.
9/11 was a Zionist, Mossad, CIA, NeoCon Conspiracy. If you don't get it I probably can't help you but I promise, I'm going to try.
In The Beginning ... Fine tuning geopolitics using dead civilians - from the America Nuked preface
Unlike aristocrats capitalists are not tied to a country or to the maintenance of a country. Capital is disloyal and mobile – it flows to where the most growth can be found, as it flowed from Holland to Britain, then from Britain to the USA, and most recently from everywhere to China. Just as a copper mine might be exploited and then abandoned, so under capitalism a whole nation can be exploited and then abandoned, as we see in the rusting industrial areas of dying America and already dead Britain. And we see capital flowing to Africa, Iraq, Kazakhstan and many other countries in the form of resource extraction; oil, gases, minerals, water, agricultural, manufacturing – even human resources are usurped for capital gains.
This detachment from country and people leads to a different kind of geopolitics under capitalism, as compared to aristocracy. A king goes to war when he sees an advantage to his nation in doing so. Historians can ‘explain’ the wars of pre-capitalist days, in terms of the aggrandizement of monarchs and nations.
A capitalist stirs up a war in order to make profits, and in fact our elite banking families have financed both sides of most military conflicts since at least World War One and before. Hence historians have a hard time ‘explaining’ World War 1 in terms of national motivations and objectives. Explaining it and any other wars since means admitting the mass murder of millions under the disguise of war. Propaganda still works, even in the alleged enlightened, intellectual and learned 20th and 21st centuries.
In pre-capitalist days warfare was like chess, each side trying to win. Under capitalism warfare is more like a casino, where the players battle it out as long as they can get credit for more chips, and the real winner always turns out to be the house – the bankers who finance both sides of the war (with the corporations that make the bullets and bombs) and they decide who will be the last man standing. Not only are wars the most profitable of all capitalist ventures; the most profitable of all human endeavors, but by choosing the winners, and managing the reconstruction, the elite banking families are able, over time, to tune the geopolitical configuration to suit their own interests and gobble up even more currencies and resources. Gold, silver, oil, gas, timber, minerals, agriculture, water, cheap labor (humans) ... these are their currencies. Nations and populations are but pawns in their games. Millions die in wars, infrastructures are destroyed, and while the world mourns, the bankers are counting their winnings and making plans for their postwar reconstruction investments. It doesn’t really matter who wins although that’s decided well in advance. What matters is how much money is loaned to whom and what the price for those loans really is in terms of lost lives; murders for capitalism, essentially. The spoils matter.
From their position of power, as the financiers of governments, the banking elite have over time perfected their methods of control. Staying always behind the scenes, they pull the strings controlling the media, the political parties, the intelligence agencies, the stock markets, and the offices of government. And perhaps their greatest lever of power is their control over currencies. By means of their central-bank scam, they engineer boom and bust cycles, and they print money from nothing and then loan it at interest to governments. The power of the banking elites is both absolute and wholly concealed ... much like the explosives in the Twin Towers ... wholly concealed. As an anarchist I’m opposed to capitalism and all of its components. While capitalism is an absurdity I’ve made it a point to include integrity and accuracy within these pages in spite of the capitalists urge to suppress it.
