The economy

[Michael]

Good-Bye: Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
March 24, 2010

Editor: When Paul Craig Roberts gave us permission to post this article, he indicated to Alex Jones that it would probably be his last. Regular readers of PCR’s outstanding columns will be disappointed to hear that he is bowing out for the time being. Alex will discuss the reasons behind this on tomorrow’s show. Roberts has also told us that he will probably appear as a guest on The Alex Jones Show later next week to expand on why he has decided to “sign off,” as he puts it in the following article.

There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.

Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.

Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded “anti-American,” “anti-semite” or “conspiracy theorist.”

Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.

Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.

Truth is inconvenient for ideologues.

Today many whose goal once was the discovery of truth are now paid handsomely to hide it. “Free market economists” are paid to sell offshoring to the American people. High-productivity, high value-added American jobs are denigrated as dirty, old industrial jobs. Relicts from long ago, we are best shed of them. Their place has been taken by “the New Economy,” a mythical economy that allegedly consists of high-tech white collar jobs in which Americans innovate and finance activities that occur offshore. All Americans need in order to participate in this “new economy” are finance degrees from Ivy League universities, and then they will work on Wall Street at million dollar jobs.

Economists who were once respectable took money to contribute to this myth of “the New Economy.”

And not only economists sell their souls for filthy lucre. Recently we have had reports of medical doctors who, for money, have published in peer-reviewed journals concocted “studies” that hype this or that new medicine produced by pharmaceutical companies that paid for the “studies.”

The Council of Europe is investigating the drug companies’ role in hyping a false swine flu pandemic in order to gain billions of dollars in sales of the vaccine.

The media helped the US military hype its recent Marja offensive in Afghanistan, describing Marja as a city of 80,000 under Taliban control. It turns out that Marja is not urban but a collection of village farms.

And there is the global warming scandal, in which NGOs. the UN, and the nuclear industry colluded in concocting a doomsday scenario in order to create profit in pollution.

Wherever one looks, truth has fallen to money.

Wherever money is insufficient to bury the truth, ignorance, propaganda, and short memories finish the job.

I remember when, following CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan issued executive orders preventing the CIA and U.S. black-op groups from assassinating foreign leaders. In 2010 the US Congress was told by Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, that the US now assassinates its own citizens in addition to foreign leaders.

When Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that US citizens no longer needed to be arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of a capital crime, just murdered on suspicion alone of being a “threat,” he wasn’t impeached. No investigation pursued. Nothing happened. There was no Church Committee. In the mid-1970s the CIA got into trouble for plots to kill Castro. Today it is American citizens who are on the hit list. Whatever objections there might be don’t carry any weight. No one in government is in any trouble over the assassination of U.S. citizens by the U.S. government.

As an economist, I am astonished that the American economics profession has no awareness whatsoever that the U.S. economy has been destroyed by the offshoring of U.S. GDP to overseas countries. U.S. corporations, in pursuit of absolute advantage or lowest labor costs and maximum CEO “performance bonuses,” have moved the production of goods and services marketed to Americans to China, India, and elsewhere abroad. When I read economists describe offshoring as free trade based on comparative advantage, I realize that there is no intelligence or integrity in the American economics profession.

Intelligence and integrity have been purchased by money. The transnational or global U.S. corporations pay multi-million dollar compensation packages to top managers, who achieve these “performance awards” by replacing U.S. labor with foreign labor. While Washington worries about “the Muslim threat,” Wall Street, U.S. corporations and “free market” shills destroy the U.S. economy and the prospects of tens of millions of Americans.

Americans, or most of them, have proved to be putty in the hands of the police state.

Americans have bought into the government’s claim that security requires the suspension of civil liberties and accountable government. Astonishingly, Americans, or most of them, believe that civil liberties, such as habeas corpus and due process, protect “terrorists,” and not themselves. Many also believe that the Constitution is a tired old document that prevents government from exercising the kind of police state powers necessary to keep Americans safe and free.

Most Americans are unlikely to hear from anyone who would tell them any different.

I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times. Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American “mainstream media.”

For the last six years I have been banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in the New York Times appeared in January, 2004, coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles Schumer representing New York. We addressed the offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was launched. No such thing could happen today.

For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.

The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.

America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based.

These trillion dollar wars have created financing problems for Washington’s deficits and threaten the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency. The wars and the pressure that the budget deficits put on the dollar’s value have put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. Former Goldman Sachs chairman and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is after these protections for the elderly. Fed chairman Bernanke is also after them. The Republicans are after them as well. These protections are called “entitlements” as if they are some sort of welfare that people have not paid for in payroll taxes all their working lives.

With over 21 per cent unemployment as measured by the methodology of 1980, with American jobs, GDP, and technology having been given to China and India, with war being Washington’s greatest commitment, with the dollar over-burdened with debt, with civil liberty sacrificed to the “war on terror,” the liberty and prosperity of the American people have been thrown into the trash bin of history.

The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.

[Chris Fleming]

[Chris Fleming]

Wondering this: is there a method in which an entire country can declare bankruptcy and just write off all of its debts?

I mean, the US is basically at the debt saturation point--the point in which all money a country takes in goes to just servicing its debt. If this country were a person, that person would be unable to make even the minimum payments on the credit cards.

Our situation is such that I don't think even such a thing would help, as the basis of our entire society is entitlement programs. That money has to come from somewhere, and there is none.

[chud]

Time to update this thread.
Things are accelerating.

Wall Street Journal - Heading Off the Entitlement Meltdown: click

The CBO's other, more realistic 'alternative baseline,' which assumes Congress continues current policies, projects new debt of $10 trillion over the next decade, followed by $100 trillion over the subsequent two decades. Consequently, the CBO simply stops calculating the national debt after 36 years. Apparently its models cannot conceive of a functioning economy.

[klonk]

Stein's Law was an off the cuff formulation referring to a specific situation, but I take it to be a universal principle of economic behavior. When applied to the case to which he applied it, it was vaguely humorous, in a dry academic way. Applied to the situation above it is more frightening than funny.

From Wikipedia:

Stein was the formulator of "Herbert Stein's Law," which he expressed as "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop," by which he meant that if a trend (balance of payments deficits in his example) cannot go on forever, there is no need for action or a program to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord.[2] It is often rephrased as: "Trends that can't continue, won't."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Stein#Philosophy

[chud]

Time for another update:

The Humungous Depression

We are not in a recession. We are in a depression, and have been since the turn of the century ___

Economic depressions unfold slowly, which obscures their analysis, although they are simple to understand. Governments and central banks turn recessions into depressions, which are preceded by unsustainable expansions of debt untethered from the real economy. The reduction and resolution of excess debt takes time, and governments and central banks usually act counterproductively, retarding necessary adjustments and lengthening the adjustment, and consequently, the depression.

If one dates the beginning of a depression from the beginning of the unsustainable expansion of debt that preceded it, then the current depression began in 1987. Newly installed chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan quelled a stock market crash, flooding the financial system with fiat liquidity. It was a well from which he and his successors would draw repeatedly. Throughout the 1990s he would pump whenever it appeared the market and the US economy were about to dump. In 1999, he pumped because the Y2K computer transition might adversely affect the economy and financial system (it didn’t).

If one dates the beginning of a depression from the time when the benefits of debt are, in the aggregate, outweighed by its burdens, the depression began in 2000, with the implosion of the fiat-credit fueled, high-tech and Internet stock market bubble. Unsustainable debt and artificially low interest rates lower the rate of return on productive investment and saving, increasing the relative attractiveness of speculation. Central bankers and their minions refer to this as “forcing investors out on the risk curve,” crawling way out on a limb for fruitful returns. They have no term for when markets saw off the branch, as they did in 2000 and again in 2008.

Most people don’t see 2000 as the beginning of a depression, but Washington and Wall Street cloud their vision. Stock markets were once essential avenues for raising capital and valuing corporations. Since central bankers’ remit was broadened to their care and feeding, stock markets have become engines of obfuscation. The “wealth effect” supposedly justified solicitude for markets: a rising stock market would increase wealth, spending, and economic growth. For seven years a rising market has coexisted with an anemic rebound and one hears little about the wealth effect anymore. The stock market is the preeminent symbol of economic health, so keeping it afloat has become a political exercise. Sure, central bankers and governments know what they’re doing, just look at those stock indices.

Let’s look at those stock indices. They are measured in fiat debt units, the entirely elastic quantity of which is in the hands of governments and central banks. What if stock indices are valued in a less ephemeral currency, say gold, aka “real money”? By that measure, the DJIA divided by the price of an ounce of gold reached its all-time high of about 41 ounces in May 1999, or just before the depression began. That ratio collapsed to under 7 ounces in September 2011, and currently stands at about 14. If you paid for the Dow in 1999 with gold, you’ve lost 65 percent on your original investment.

There is a general awareness that real family incomes have gone nowhere since the turn of the century; it’s often offered as a reason for the Trump and Sanders ascendancies. Other, less well-known indicators have also deteriorated or declined. What David Stockman defines as “breadwinner” jobs in construction, manufacturing, white-collar professions, governments, and full-time private services, which on average pay more than $50,000 per year, peaked in January 2001 and are still about 3 percent below that peak. The growth in employment since 2001 has been in lower paying part-time jobs, restaurants, retail, medical services, and education, which explains the stagnation in incomes. Two other important measures—labor hour inputs and real net investment—have gone nowhere since 2001. An economy in which hours worked and real investment are not growing is an economy that is not growing.

The US economy has been losing altitude for sixteen years. While debt monetization and interest rate suppression have fueled housing and equity booms, they can’t mask the underlying deterioration. President Obama will be the first president to have presided over an economy that never achieves 3 percent annual growth. That’s by government figures, which must be taken with a shaker of salt. Employment statistics are especially dubious. To the public, they are right behind the stock market as an economic indicator. They are subject to a variety of pertinent criticisms, including their seasonal adjustments and the birth-death model of new business formation, which continues to add to employment although, sadly, more businesses are currently dying than are being born. The government also has a vested interest in understating inflation. Many of the benefits it pays are indexed to inflation, and interest rates on government debt incorporate an inflation premium. Understating inflation overstates the growth of real GDP, probably third on the list of statistics to which the public pays attention.

The Great Depression was not a straight downhill run. There were multiple, widely hailed “recoveries” and stock market rallies, but in 1938 the economy was in worse shape than when Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and the government was bigger, more intrusive, and more in debt (the same can be said about the government since 2000). Depressing it is to contemplate how government turning a recession into the Great Depression, but consideration of what Japan has done since its stock market topped out in 1989 can leave one pondering the choice of pills, noose, or handgun.

The Japanese have copied every page of the Keynesian and monetarist playbooks: government debt, public works spending, and regulatory expansion, and central bank monetization of assets and interest rate suppression. Multiple recoveries have been punctuated by multiple contractions. Capitalism has remarkable recuperative powers, but screw with an economy long enough and you not only prevent recuperation, you do lasting damage. Japan and Europe—also beset by persistent economic idiocy—have shown little growth or innovation for decades, leaving the economic idiots responsible muttering about supposed, self-exculpatory, secular stagnation. As the US economy glide paths into zero-and-below-land, Washington, Wall Street, and the Ivy League’s best are muttering the same thing.

Nothing is more telling than birthrates, and in Europe, Japan, and the US, birthrates are below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per couple. When planned, having babies expresses confidence in the future. The Japanese buy more adult than baby diapers, illustrating the demographic crunch and falling dependency ratios (the ratio of able-bodied and employed workers to the population requiring outside support), which understandably increases pessimism and further decreases birth rates among the young.

They see a bleak future and they’re not wrong. The global economy hit stall speed with the commodities crash in 2014 and another rendezvous with terra firma looms. Never has the world been more in debt. True recovery won’t happen until most of it has been repudiated and written off. The current depression is already longer than the Great Depression. By the time it’s over, economic historians will be calling it the Humongous Depression.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/ ... epression/

[yeniseri]

It seems so simple that I am surprised people are bamboozled on who caused the economic malaise we see today: Here's why:
1. The Rust Belt is a visible objective feature of the economy.....The US auto industry refused to listen to the whims of the citizenry so the people sought out those vehicles providing what they wanted, whether real or imaginery...so Japanese cares became the vogue. When that fell through, the auto industry began moving manufacturing to other parts of USA (south and Mexico) and that meant loss jobs to the NE Corridor. Isn't it simple enough to say corporation refused to invest in USA thereby allowing for job loss and lowered social and economic parity with the rest of the developed 1st World?

2. From a manufacturing high of 34% to 5% now, though a simple 29 point loss, that translated to a 88% loss of revenue, which when dollarized means US lost a bunh of change to cheap foreign labout and the allowing of illegals to be recruited to come to USA. If people cannot see this is the main issue, then no POTUS will ever change this dynamic when the people are fooled into thinking otherwise. Ecomomic policies on both sides propped up by law is responsible for this...............

[Steve James]

It's capitalism. As long as policies favor profits over people, there'll be those who do not benefit from "the economy," but who are in fact the fodder for the economy. It's hard to get a minimum wage law passed because they'll say it'll put people out of work. Yeah, it will --because there won't be as much profit. It's the same with unions, which are now often seen as problems, not protections.

Afa production and manufacturing, apart from home building and construction, what does the US produce that USAmericans buy? It'd be nice to say that deporting all immigrant labor would help, but I think that 1/2 of the immigrants have jobs that Americans don't want --or we'd see them lining up morning's at the Home Depots-- and the other 1/2 are jobs that Americans are not qualified to do because their in the sciences or engineering. Shucks, we have immigrants teaching those disciplines. Maybe the only good thing is that, generally, they stay here.

One solution would be for us to make the things we buy here.