YOU AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET – PART ONE

From The Burning Platform, 1st April 2012 

“Human history seems logical in afterthought but a mystery in forethought. Writers of history have a way of describing interwar societies as coursing from postwar to prewar as though people alive at the time knew when that transition occurred.” – Strauss & Howe - The Fourth Turning

 

Watching pompous politicians, egotistical economists, arrogant investment geniuses, clueless media pundits, and self- proclaimed experts on the Great Depression predict an economic recovery and a return to normalcy would be amusing if it wasn’t so pathetic. Their lack of historical perspective does a huge disservice to the American people, as their failure to grasp the cyclical nature of history results in a broad misunderstanding of the Crisis the country is facing. The ruling class and opinion leaders are dominated by linear thinkers that believe the world progresses in a straight line. Despite all evidence of history clearly moving through cycles that repeat every eighty to one hundred years (a long human life), the present generations are always surprised by these turnings in history. I can guarantee you this country will not truly experience an economic recovery or progress for another fifteen to twenty years. If you think the last four years have been bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Hope is not an option. There is too much debt, too little cash-flow, too many promises, too many lies, too little common sense, too much mass delusion, too much corruption, too little trust, too much hate, too many weapons in the hands of too many crazies, and too few visionary leaders to not create an epic worldwide implosion. Too bad. We’ve experienced horrific Crisis periods three times in the last 250 years and winter has arrived again exactly as forecasted by Strauss & Howe in 1997. The linear thinkers will continue to predict a recovery that never arrives. We have awful trials and tribulations, dreadful sacrifices of blood and treasure, and grim choices awaiting our country over the next fifteen years. Linear thinkers will scoff at such a statement as they irrationally view the world as a never ending forward progression towards a glorious future. History proves them wrong. We stand here in the year 2012 with no good options, only less worse options. Decades of foolishness, debt accumulation, and a materialistic feeding frenzy of delusion have left the world broke and out of options. And still our leaders accelerate the debt accumulation, while encouraging the masses to carry-on as if nothing has changed since 2008. Sadly, millions of lemmings want to believe they will not drown in the sea of un-payable commitments. Truth is a scarce resource on the planet today.

“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Entire populations taking comfort in their illusions transcends centuries. This is because all humans are driven by their emotions and react to events and danger in a predictable manner depending on their stage of life. Strauss & Howe in their 1997 opus – The Fourth Turning – utilized decades of studying generational dynamics to anticipate when our next Crisis would arrive and what core elements would precipitate it:

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe - The Fourth Turning

The American people are mentally ensnared by their decades of indoctrination from propagandists in government and on Wall Street, spoon fed to them by the corporate mainstream media. Many are afflicted with the diseases of normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance.  Normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. The American people are mentally incapable of accepting the facts of our impending economic collapse. They somehow are able to convince themselves these facts as normal:

• We’ve increased our national debt by $5.6 trillion in the last three and a half years. It took from 1789 until 2000, two hundred and eleven years, to accumulate the first $5.6 trillion of debt.
• Our average annual deficit from 2000 through 2008 was $190 billion. Our average annual deficits since 2008 have been $1.3 trillion. Our deficits never exceeded 4% of GDP prior to 2008, but now they exceed 9%.
• The national debt will reach $20 trillion by 2015 and if interest rates normalized to the same level they were in 2007 (5%), annual interest expense would be $1 trillion, or 45% of current tax revenue.
• There are 242 million working age Americans and 100 million of them are not working. But don’t concern yourself. The Federal government reports that only 13 million of these people are actually unemployed. The other 87 million are just kicking back and living off their accumulated riches.
• The economic recovery has been so great that the 7.5 million people added to the Food Stamp rolls since the recession officially ended in December 2009 isn’t really an indication of severe stress among the 99%. Only 46.5 million Americans (15% of the population) need food stamps to survive.
• The unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security exceed $100 trillion and cannot possibly be honored, leaving future generations to fend for themselves.

   

• Our leaders have fought two undeclared wars of choice since 2001 that have resulted in 6,400 unnecessary soldier deaths, 47,500 badly wounded, $1.3 trillion of borrowed treasure, with unfunded liabilities of at least $2 trillion more, and we are itching for more of the same with our coming war with Iran. A bankrupt empire still trying to police the world is the ultimate act of hubris.
• After causing a worldwide financial collapse in 2008 with their extreme risk taking, tangibly fraudulent mortgage schemes, and reckless pillaging of their clients and the American people, Wall Street used their complete systematic capture of our political and economic system to shift $8 trillion of toxic debt from their books onto the backs of American taxpayers. They have since become even more flagrant in their disregard for human decency by using the hundreds of billions in free money funneled to them by Ben Bernanke to take even bigger risks and pay themselves grander bonuses. Total unregulated derivatives (real WMD) outstanding now exceed $700 trillion.
• Since 2001 the Federal government has used fear to assume unprecedented and unconstitutional powers over the citizens of this country. They can now use surveillance to monitor your phones calls, emails, and websites visited, without warrants. You can be imprisoned without charges for as long as the government decides you are a threat. TSA agents molest little old ladies and children trying to fly on airplanes. The President can take over the entire economy through presidential decree. Predator spy drones can eliminate suspected terrorists whenever a general gives the command. An order for 30,000 spy drones to be flying over U.S. cities should make you feel safe. The $2 billion NSA Utah Data Gathering Center (code name Stellar Wind) will be able to intercept and store every electronic signal on the planet by 2013. Sacrificing liberty for perceived safety and security isn’t working out too well for the American people.

Anyone with an ounce of critical thinking skill would conclude our current situation is far from normal. We’ve become a cognitive dissonant nation. We convince ourselves the best way to solve a debt problem is to create more debt. We believe we are made safer by attacking foreign countries. We have convinced ourselves it makes sense for Too Big to Fail Wall Street banks that create systematic financial risk to get even bigger, after their fraudulent frenzy of greed virtually crashed our economic system. We actually believe the two party political system offers us a choice, when both parties genuflect to Wall Street, gratify corporate special interests, fight never ending wars, and spend money they don’t have.  We choose to believe government statistics that claim inflation is running at 3%, when our everyday reality attests it to be 10%. We trust the Federal Reserve to maintain price stability even though their policies have resulted in a 97% depreciation in the U.S. dollar since 1913. We believe the future will be bright, even though 60% of workers have less than $25,000 in total savings.

In the ultimate example of cognitive dissonance the majority of Americans scorned and ridiculed the young people being beaten, maced and arrested for protesting the rampant criminality of the Wall Street 1%ers while supporting a billionaire banker bailout, 0% interest rates that punish senior citizens and savers while encouraging further debt accumulation, and not be outraged that not one criminal banker has gone to jail. They somehow are able to observe the data in the table below and still believe that America offers equal opportunity to everyone.

Americans have thus far been unable to deal with the reality of our desperate circumstances. They remind me of people who see the ocean recede from the shoreline and curiously venture out where the sea had flowed to pick up trinkets and pretty shells with no sense of what is truly happening. The deadly 20 foot high tsunami headed their way will be a complete shock when they are swept away in a torrent of bad debt and worthless currencies.  We are about to enter phase two of this Fourth Turning Crisis still in denial and terribly unprepared for the frightful trials that await our nation. It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before, just like clockwork. William Strauss and Neil Howe were able to document turnings in Anglo-American history dating back to the 15^th century. The life cycles of human beings and the moods of generations at different stages of their lives are consistent across time, resulting in predictable responses to events during a particular time frame. Fourth Turnings are a time of Crisis, danger and vulnerability. The Crisis periods in modern history are as follows:

• War of the Roses (1459 – 1487), Late Medieval Saeculum
• Armada Crisis (1569 – 1594), Reformation Saeculum
• Glorious Revolution (1675 – 1704), New World Saeculum
• American Revolution (1773 – 1794), Revolutionary Saeculum
• Civil War (1860 – 1865), Civil War Saeculum
• Great Depression & World War II (1929 – 1946), Great Power Saeculum
• Millenial Crisis (2008 – ????), Millenial Saeculum

Using a seasonal analogy, the Crisis is the wintry bitter dark era, where deadly blizzards rage and the citizens are pushed to the brink. In retrospect the three previous American Crisis periods seem easy to predict, but one year prior to their onset NO ONE could have predicted the epic sacrifices and horrific casualties of war to follow. In 1772 there were few people expecting America to declare independence and fight an eight year war for independence. In 1859 virtually no one expected the election of Abraham Lincoln as president and an ensuing war that would kill 700,000 American men. In 1928 no one imagined the stock market losing 89% of its value, an eleven year depression, and a world war resulting in over 60 million deaths. History is only logical in afterthought. The mystery of forethought is where we find ourselves today.

In a recent article, Neil Howe provided insight into why he believes the current Fourth Turning began in 2008, sixty-two years since the end of the Depression/WWII Crisis, which was sixty-four years after the Civil War Crisis, which was sixty-six years after the American Revolution Crisis:

“I believe the catalyst occurred in 2008. The year 2008 marked the onset of the most serious U.S. economic crisis since the Great Depression. It also marked the election of Barack Obama, which could yet turn out to be a pivotal realignment date in U.S. political history. In fact, if I had to give the catalyst a month, I would say September of 2008. The global Dow was in free fall. Banks were failing. Money markets froze shut. Business owners held their breath.” – Neil Howe – Dating the Fourth Turning

Howe uses the term catalyst to describe the trigger or event that initiates the Crisis. Strauss and Howe determined that a Crisis progresses through four stages during its life cycle, as described below:  

• A Crisis era begins with a catalyst – a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood.
• Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy – a new counter-entropy that reunifies and reenergizes civic life.
• The regenerated society propels toward a climax – a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and birth of the new.
• The climax culminates in a resolution – a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates the winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order.

We have countless valleys to cross and mountains to ascend before reaching our ultimate destination. There are no guarantees the outcomes will be positive or that the nation as we know it will even exist. It is certain that in twenty years the social order of this country will not resemble what exists today. The transformation could be positive or negative, depending upon whether we make the right choices during this Crisis.

 

“The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.”  – Strauss & Howe - The Fourth Turning

The World Bank Is Hopeless and Changing Leaders Won't Help

From The Daily Bell, Monday, April 02, 2012 – by Staff Report

 

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Hats off to Ngozi ... A golden opportunity for the rest of the world to show Barack Obamathe meaning of meritocracy ... When economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it. In appointing its next president, the bank's board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria's Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. – Economist


Dominant Social Theme: The World Bank is a great institution. We just need the right person to run it.


Free-Market Analysis: The World Bank is a part of a kind of "tag team" with theInternational Monetary Fund. The World Bank lends money to dictators and sundry thugs and then when these unsavory individuals abscond, the IMF is hauled in to make the people pay.


The process enriches Western corporations and ultimately creates more control for the Western power elite that has constructed the globalist echelon to begin with. The UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the International Criminal Courtand many other internationalist entities are hopelessly corrupt and evidently were designed to be so.


Every part of the globalist government-in-waiting deals with other governments, and all the corruption this entails. The entire elitist mechanism is focused on providing a variety of bureaucrats with fiat money-from-nothing in order to first distort developing world economies and then collapse them.
This basic mechanism has been documented endlessly by the Internet's alternative media, and choosing an African to run the World Bank won't change an iota of the larger corrupt system.


That doesn't stop the Economist, a leading mouthpiece of the power elite, from making the case that by switching the titular head from a Western person to an African person will somehow make a difference in what the World Bank is and what it was intended to be. Here's more from the article:


The World Bank is the world's premier development institution. Its boss needs experience in government, in economics and in finance (it is a bank, after all). He or she should have a broad record in development, too. Ms Okonjo-Iweala has all these attributes ... She has not broken Nigeria's culture of corruption—an Augean task—but she has sobered up its public finances and injected a measure of transparency. She led the Paris Club negotiations to reschedule her country's debt and earned rave reviews as managing director of the World Bank in 2007-11. Hers is the CV of a formidable public economist ...


Ms Okonjo-Iweala is an orthodox economist, which many will hold against her. But if there is one thing the world has discovered about poverty reduction in the past 15 years, it is that development is not something rich countries do to poor ones. It is something poor countries manage for themselves, mainly by the sort of policies that Ms Okonjo-Iweala has pursued with some success in Nigeria.


For almost 70 years, the leadership of the IMF and World Bank has been subject to an indefensible carve-up. The head of the IMF is European; the World Bank, American. This shabby tradition has persisted because it has not been worth picking a fight over ... The rest of the world should rally round Ms Okonjo-Iweala. May the best woman win.


We can see in these excerpts many of the dominant social themes of the elite – the fear-based propaganda that is used to frighten mostly Western middle classes into giving up wealth and power to internationalist institutions like the UN, World Bank, etc.


There is, of course, the code phrase, "orthodox economist." No doubt this means that Ms. Okonjo-Iweala is aKeynesian, someone who believes that government can eradicate poverty by printing a lot of paper money.


This is simply not feasible. People cannot put themselves in control of monopoly money printing without, over time, printing too much of it.


The result is the debasement of the currency and the distortion of the economy as those who print the money also tend to fund increasingly illegitimate forms of economic development. There is a reason the world is overbanked and that people cannot find jobs.


We can also note the hoary promotion of governmental "transparency." Ironically, there is even an international entity devoted to encouraging transparency in government – founded by a former executive of the World Bank!


Transparency does nothing really to foster better government. The problem is government itself, which has a monopoly on force and which, by definition, excludes itself from competition.


Competition is the most important tool of the Invisible Hand that regulates commerce. Without competition and marketplace results, the people running government are free to do as they choose and pursue whatever nonsensical initiatives they choose.


Government also provides a control methodology for the elite families that apparently run the world's central banksand seek world government. The control mechanism that is used is called mercantilism. This is the process of passing laws and regulations that benefit one's personal private interest at the expense of others.


But there is even more to the World Bank's brief that benefits the power elite and its one-world conspiracy. This conspiracy has various elements that mostly involve scarcity memes. The idea is that the world is running out of things and only strong government action can ameliorate the subsequent problems.


This agenda – the presentation of false scarcity memes and subsequent World Bank solutions can be seen in various criteria that the World Bank has enshrined as its "goals." These are actually United Nation goals, but the World Bank is part of the UN and thus enforces its mandates. 


The "Millennium Development Goals" are intended to be "realized" (whatever that means) by 2015, and the World Bank proclaims its commitment to "achieving MDG goals" on its website, WorldBank.Org. MDG has eight goals. Each one of these items involves government bureaucracy at the local, national and international level.


Basically, the World Bank's enunciation of problems tracks the elite's phony promotional regime closely. More specifically, the goals are:
Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger:
Achieve Universal Primary Education:
Reduce Child Mortality
Promote Gender Equality
Improve Maternal Health:
Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria, and Other Diseases
Ensure Environmental Sustainability
Develop a Global Partnership for Development


Start at the beginning. When it comes to eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, the World Bank is hopeless. Wikipedia, for instance, points out that, "Africa's poverty ... is expected to rise, and most of the 36 countries where 90% of the world's undernourished children live are in Africa. Less than a quarter of countries are on track for achieving the goal of halving under-nutrition."


This is entirely indefensible. The West and NATO have spent up to US$2 trillion in the past decade prosecuting an apparently phony war on terror, while irradiating parts of the Middle East with depleted uranium weapons.


The World Bank meanwhile, run by the same Western interests that run NATO, has been in business for well over a half-century – and yet African poverty is on the rise. This is because the World Bank's stated intentions have nothing to do with its reality.


Most of the other goals of the World Bank are similarly perverse. Universal public schooling is a disaster wherever it has been tried, but the World Bank is intent on inculcating it in developing countries.


The promotion of gender equality and the campaign to empower women is merely an additional effort to create a "battle between the sexes" that weakens traditional society and makes it easier for Western elements to exploit the resultant social tensions. Female emancipation should come from the society itself, not be imposed from the outside.


On and on. The goals sound laudable, but in practice the result is exploitative. The intention to ensure environmental sustainability is especially questionable as is the emphasis on greenhouse gases.


There is no sure scientific evidence that the world is warming or that human beings are the cause of the possibly non-existent warming. But the World Bank will be used to distort economies as it pursues this chimera. The end result will be to make societies poorer not richer.


In fact, the World Bank is an evidently destructive entity. Its approach encourages bureaucracy by channeling funds through the very governments it decries as corrupt and un-transparent. Its policies then enshrine impoverishment and social tension.


This is entirely in keeping with the REAL agenda of the World Bank that involves maintaining poverty in developing countries and establishing ever-more corrupt governmental entities that will be responsive to the elite agenda of world control.


Conclusion: It doesn't matter who leads the World Bank. Only private enterprise can lift people out of poverty. Government can't do it, and the World Bank is in any case actually configured to do the opposite of its stated intentions.

Oh Canada! Imposing Austerity on the World’s Most Resource-rich Country

by Ellen Brown  Global Research, April 1, 2012 Web of Debt Even the world’s most resource-rich country has now been caught in the debt trap.  Its once-proud government programs are being subjected to radical budget cuts—cuts that could have been avoided if the government had not quit borrowing from its own central bank in the 1970s.  On March 29 in Ottawa, the Canadian House of Commons passed the federal government’s latest round of budget cuts and austerity measures.  Highlights included chopping 19,200 public sector jobs, cutting federal programs by $5.2 billion per year, and raising the retirement age for millions of Canadians from 65 to 67.  The justification for the cuts was a massive federal debt that is now over C$ 581 billion, or 84% of GDP.    An online budget game furnished by the local newspaper the Globe and Mail gave readers a chance to try to balance the budget themselves.  Possibilities included slashing transfer payments for elderly benefits, retirement programs, health benefits, and education; cutting funding for transportation, national defense, economic development and foreign aid; and raising taxes.  An article on the same page said, “The government, in reality, doesn’t have that many tools at its disposal to close a large budgetary deficit. It can either raise taxes or cut departmental program spending.” It seems that no gamer, lawmaker or otherwise, was offered the opportunity to toy with the number one line item in the budget: interest to creditors.  A chart on the website of the Department of Finance Canada titled “Where Your Tax Dollar Goes” showed interest payments to be 15% of the budget—more than health care, social security, and other transfer payments combined.  The page was dated 2006 and was last updated in 2008, but the percentages are presumably little different today. Penny wise, Pound Foolish Among other cuts in the 2012 budget, the government announced that it would be discontinuing the minting of Canadian pennies, which now cost more than a penny to make.  The government is focusing on the pennies and ignoring the pounds—the massive share of the debt that might be saved by borrowing from the government’s own Bank of Canada.  Between 1939 and 1974, the government actually did borrow from its own central bank.  That made its debt effectively interest-free, since the government owned the bank and got the benefit of the interest.  According to figures supplied by Jack Biddell, a former government accountant, the federal debt remained very low, relatively flat, and quite sustainable during those years.  (See his chart below.)  The government successfully funded major public projectssimply on the credit of the nation, including the production of aircraft during and after World War II, education benefits for returning soldiers, family allowances, old age pensions, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway project, and universal health care for all Canadians.    The debt shot up only after 1974.  That was when the Basel Committee was established by the central-bank Governors of the Group of Ten countries of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which included Canada.   A key objective of the Committee was to maintain “monetary and financial stability.”  To achieve that goal, the Committee discouraged borrowing from a nation’s own central bank interest-free, and encouraged borrowing instead from private creditors, all in the name of “maintaining the stability of the currency.”  The presumption was that borrowing from a central bank with the power to create money on its books would inflate the money supply and prices.  Borrowing from private creditors, on the other hand, was considered not to be inflationary, since it involved the recycling of pre-existing money.  What the bankers did not reveal, although they had long known it themselves, was that private banks create the money they lend just as public banks do.  The difference is simply that a publicly-owned bank returns the interest to the government and the community, while a privately-owned bank siphons the interest into its capital account, to be re-invested at further interest, progressively drawing money out of the productive economy.       The debt curve that began its exponential rise in 1974 tilted toward the vertical in 1981, when interest rates were raised by the U.S. Federal Reserve to 20%. At 20% compounded annually, debt doubles in under four years.  Canadian rates went as high as 22% during that period.  Canada has now paid over a trillion Canadian dollars in interest on its federal debt—nearly twice the debt itself.  If it had been borrowing from its own bank all along, it could be not only debt-free but sporting a hefty budget surplus today.  That is true for other countries as well. The Bankers’ Silent Coup Why are governments paying private financiers to generate credit they could be issuing themselves, interest-free?   According to Professor Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University, it was all part of a concerted plan by a clique of international financiers.  He wrote in Tragedy and Hope in 1964: The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank . . . sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. In December 2011, this charge was echoed in a lawsuit filed in Canadian federal court by two Canadians and a Canadian economic think tank. Constitutional lawyer Rocco Galati filed an action on behalf of William Krehm, Ann Emmett, and COMER (the Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform) to restore the use of the Bank of Canada to its original purpose, including making interest free loans to municipal, provincial and federal governments for “human capital” expenditures (education, health, and other social services) and for infrastructure.  The plaintiffs state that since 1974, the Bank of Canada and Canada’s monetary and financial policy have been dictated by private foreign banks and financial interests led by the BIS, the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), bypassing the sovereign rule of Canada through its Parliament. Today this silent coup has been so well obscured that governments and gamers alike are convinced that the only alternatives for addressing the debt crisis are to raise taxes, slash services, or sell off public assets.  We have forgotten that there is another option: cut the debt by borrowing from the government’s own bank, which returns its profits to public coffers.  Cutting out interest has been shown to reduce the average cost of public projects by about 40%.  Game over: we win. Ellen Brown is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute, http://PublicBankingInstitute.org.  In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com and http://EllenBrown.com  The Public Banking Institute’s first conference is April 26th-28th in Philadelphia.

Global Research Articles by Ellen Brown