A Lie That Serves the Rich — the truth about the American economy

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Craig Roberts, John Titus, and Dave Kranzler

The labor force participation rate has declined from 66.5% in 2007 prior to the last downturn to 62.7% today. This decline in the participation rate is difficult to reconcile with the alleged economic recovery that began in June 2009 and supposedly continues today. Normally a recovery from recession results in a rise in the labor force participation rate.

The Obama regime, economists, and the financial presstitutes have explained this decline in the participation rate as the result of retirements by the baby boomers, those 55 and older. In this five to six minute video, John Titus shows that in actual fact the government’s own employment data show that baby boomers have been entering the work force at record rates and are responsible for raising the labor force participation rate above where it would otherwise be. http://www.tubechop.com/watch/3544087

It is not retirees who are pushing down the participation rate, but those in the 16-19 age group whose participation rate has fallen by 10.4%, those in the 22-14 age group whose participation rate has fallen by 5.4%, and those in the 24-54 age group whose participation rate is down 2.5%.

The offshoring of US manufacturing and tradable professional service jobs has resulted in an economy that can only create new jobs in lowly paid, increasingly part-time nontradable domestic service jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, and ambulatory health care workers. These are not jobs that can support an independent existence. However, these jobs can supplement retirement incomes that have been hurt by many years of the Federal Reserve’s policy of zero or negative interest rates. Those who were counting on interest earnings on their savings to supplement their retirement and Social Security incomes have reentered the labor force in order to fill the gaps in their budgets created by the Fed’s policy. Unlike the young who lack savings and retirement incomes, the baby boomers’ economic lives are not totally dependent on the lowly-paid, part-time, no-benefits domestic service jobs.

Lies are told in order to make the system look acceptable so that the status quo can be continued. Offshoring America’s jobs benefits the wealthy. The lower labor costs raise corporate profits, and shareholders’ capital gains and performance bonuses of corporate executives rise with the profits. The wealthy are benefitting from the fact that the US economy no longer can create enough livable jobs to keep up with the growth in the working age population.

The clear hard fact is that the US economy is being run for the sole benefit of a few rich people.

Fighting Back Against Western Sanction

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: NEO

While the impact of sanctions leveled against Russia is being debated, one fact is perfectly clear; the dangerous interdependence cultivated by the concept of “globalization” leaves nations vulnerable amid a global order dominated by hegemonic special interests that use such interdependence as a weapon.

Two rounds of sanctions have been leveled against Russia targeting Russian banking, arms manufacturing, and oil industries. Even as the sanctions are marketed to the world as Russia “paying a price” for its role in “destabilizing” Ukraine, Russia has been busy cultivating ties and expanding markets that are increasingly found outside the West’s spheres of influence and therefore, beyond the reach of these sanctions. Russia is also looking inward to diversify its markets and seek socioeconomic independence.

Instead of viewing the sanctions as an impassable obstacle requiring capitulation to Wall Street and London, Russia has viewed them as a challenge to sever reliance on unstable markets. More so, Russia’s quest for alternative markets is a means of applying its own form of pressure back upon the West. While the West attempts to portray the sanctions as “cutting off Russia,” the restrictions do at least as much to isolate the West itself.

Multipolar World Vs Western Hegemony

In a unipolar world, supranational geopolitical blocs like the EU (European Union), the African Union, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and regional free trade agreements serve to consolidate and open up the collective socioeconomic potential of the planet to those at the top of this international order. Currently, this constitutes the special interests on Wall Street, in the city of London, and among the special interests converging in Brussels. Interdependence is intentionally cultivated among the various members of individual blocs and between supranational blocs themselves. This ensures that leverage is constantly maintained over each individual national entity, making individual nations incapable of sidestepping collective initiatives of the blocs they are a part of.

In the European Union, this can be clearly seen as individual nations benefiting from ties with Moscow are attempting with limited success to rebel against broader EU sanctions against Russian industries.

The use of sanctions across several supranational blocs, including North America, the EU, and to a lesser extent, the West’s proxies in nations like East Asia’s Japan, had at one point critically threatened those nations targeted by them. Nations like Iran or Cuba who have suffered under Western sanctions for decades are clearly behind because of them. Behind, but not out.

As technology enables each individual nation to procure wealth on its own it once depended on trade with other nations for, the impact of sanctions is diminishing. The impact of sanctions is also undermined by a growing alternative international order outside of the West’s unipolar paradigm. BRICS, the nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, constitute the leading edge of the rise of the developing world. No longer satisfied with subservience to the Wall Street-London global order, nor eager to find themselves entangled beneath another global empire led by another global superpower, these nations are attempting to redefine international relations in more traditional, multilateral terms.

Becoming self-sufficient economically while redefining international ties in a less interdependent manner, appears to be the defining aspect of the emerging multipolar world BRICS is attempting to create. The creation of international trade outside the traditional framework of the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and other institutions created by the West, for the West, has gradually eroded the impact of sanctions, penalties, and monopolies empowered by Western domination over international finance and global trade.

More to Do

While Russia seems to be taking Western sanctions in stride, the fact that the United States and Europe are targeting Russia in the first place is a warning to all members of BRICS as well as to developing nations around the world. In the capitals of nations residing outside the Wall Street-London international order, the possibility that any one of them could be next should be at the center of economic planning and the future of their respective foreign policy.

Creating alternative markets outside this international order could be a short-term stop gap. In Russia’s case, growing ties with China in terms of energy exports ensures a lasting alternative market for Russian natural gas that is set only to grow in the future as the West attempts to cutoff and isolate both Moscow and Beijing.

Seeking to create economic opportunities and progress domestically could be a more long-term and lasting solution. Russia’s decision to ban the import of food products from nations targeting it with recent sanctions gives BRICS an opportunity to expand in the void left by European, American, and Australian agricultural industries. It also gives an opportunity for Russian producers to expand their operations domestically. In the immediate aftermath of Russia banning imports from the West, stocks in Russia’s agricultural industry soared. While such spikes are more due to speculation than an actual jump in value, the fact that these producers now have an incentive to expand may create long-term value to justify investor confidence today.

But rather than waiting for sanctions to begin disrupting the socioeconomic status quo of a nation residing outside Western hegemony, a disruption the sanctions are designed specifically to create, why shouldn’t BRICS and other developing nations begin the process of developing their domestic markets and alternative international trading regimes beforehand?

If Russia, the largest nation geographically, the ninth most populous, and with one of the most formidable conventional and nuclear military forces on Earth, can be targeted for sanctions aimed to cripple its economy, then any nation can be targeted. Russia, with its resources and leadership is able to cope and adapt to these sanctions and even perhaps come out stronger in spite of them. Other nations might not weather such adversity so gracefully. Across BRICS and other nations in the developing world, a concerted effort must be made to move away from the interdependence of globalization and back toward greater multilateral trade regimes and greater domestic economic self-sufficiency.

Ulson Gunnar is a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Detroit Cronies Sucking Money out of City to build Red Wings’ Stadium

Posted on August 19, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: Collapse.com and Reason

Though I am usually not a fan of infographics/datagraphics, Reason just published the below graphic which details the horrible deal that the city of Detroit is getting by building this new arena. We see these kinds of deals being struck all around the country as politicians think that any sports team will be a boom to the local economy. What really ends up happening is that the owners of the teams get richer at the expense of the taxpayer.

These programs rarely net a positive result to the local economy. Most economists recognize research that has been done that shows that teams and new arenas do not increase entertainment spending in the region but just divert it from elsewhere that it would be spent. Ultimately, Detroit, a city that is dying already, stands to lose jobs and lose money on this investment and it just might be the straw that breaks the Detroit camel’s back.

Sources

The Risky Economics of Sports Stadiums

Pro Sports Stadiums Don’t Bolster Local Economies, Scholars Say

General information about the Stadium proposal

Debunking the Economic Case for Sports Stadiums

Bukowski on Quitting a Soul-Sucking Job to Become a Full-Time Writer

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Tomorrow marks the birthday of working class poet and author Charles Bukowski (he would have been 94). Bukowski’s creativity had been stifled for most of his adult life as a wage slave until at age 49 he seized an opportunity to break free. Bukowski showed his gratitude to his benefactor, Black Sparrow Press, by publishing most of his subsequent major works with them while supporting countless other independent presses across the country with numerous poetry and short story submissions. He also wrote a letter of thanks to John Martin, owner of Black Sparrow Press in 1986, (also containing thoughts on modern life many of us can relate to) featured in the following article:

Bukowski’s Letter of Gratitude to the Man Who Helped Him Quit His Soul-Sucking Job and Become a Full-Time Writer

By Maria Popova

Source: Brain Pickings

“To not have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”

“Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,” Charles Bukowski wrote in his famous poem about what it takes to be a writer, “don’t do it.” But Bukowski himself was a late bloomer in the journey of finding one’s purpose, as his own “it” — that irrepressible impulse to create — took decades to coalesce into a career.

Like many celebrated authors who once had ordinary day jobs, Buk tried a variety of blue-collar occupations before becoming a full-time writer and settling into his notorious writing routine. In his mid-thirties, he took a position as a fill-in mailman for the U.S. Postal Service. But even though he’d later passionately argue that no day job or practical limitation can stand in the way of true creativity, he found himself stifled by working for the man. By his late forties, he was still a postal worker by day, writing a column for LA’s underground magazine Open City in his spare time and collaborating on a short-lived literary magazine with another poet.

In 1969, the year before Bukowski’s fiftieth birthday, he caught the attention of Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin, who offered Buk a monthly stipend of $100 to quit his day job and dedicate himself fully to writing. (It was by no means a novel idea — the King of Poland had done essentially the same for the great astronomer Johannes Hevelius five centuries earlier.) Bukowski gladly complied. Less than two years later, Black Sparrow Press published his first novel, appropriately titled Post Office.

But our appreciation for those early champions often comes to light with a slow burn. Seventeen years later, in August of 1986, Bukowski sent his first patron a belated but beautiful letter of gratitude. Found in Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978–1994 (public library), the missive emanates Buk’s characteristic blend of playfulness and poignancy, political incorrectness and deep sensitivity, cynicism and self-conscious earnestness.

August 12, 1986

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don’t think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don’t get it right. They call it “9 to 5.” It’s never 9 to 5, there’s no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don’t take lunch. Then there’s overtime and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there’s another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, “Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors.”

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: “Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?”

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

“I put in 35 years…”

“It ain’t right…”

“I don’t know what to do…”

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I’m here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I’ve found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: “I’ll never be free!”

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I’m gone) how I’ve come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

Complement with Bukowski’s “so you want to be a writer,” then revisit this essential compendium of advice on how to find your purpose and do what you love and the spectacular resignation letter Sherwood Anderson wrote when he decided to quit his soul-sucking corporate job and become a full-time writer.

WikiLeaks Cables Reveal U.S. Gov’t Planned To “Retaliate and Cause Pain” On Countries Refusing GMOs

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Arjun Walia

Source: Collective Evolution

Studies that link Genetically Modified (GM) food to multiple human health ailments are not the only thing that has millions of people questioning the production of GM food. The fact that previously classified secret government documents show how the Bush administration developed ways to retaliate against countries that were refusing to use GM seeds is another. If documents regarding our food are required to be concealed from the public domain, something is not right, and it’s great to have an organization like WikiLeaks shed some light into the world that’s been hidden from us for so many years.

Targeting Certain Countries

The cables reveal that the State Department was lobbying all over the world for Monsanto, and other major biotech corporations. They reveal that American diplomats requested funding to send lobbyists for the biotech industry to meet with politicians and agricultural officials in “target countries.” These included countries in Africa, Latin America and some European countries.

A non-profit consumer protection group called Food & Water Watch published a report showing the details of the partnership between the federal government and a number of biotech companies who have pushed their GMO products on multiple countries for a number of years.

“The United States has aggressively pursued foreign policies in food and agriculture that benefit the largest seed companies. The U.S. State department has launched a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology, often over the opposition of the public and government, to the near exclusion of other more sustainable, more appropriate agricultural policy alternatives. The U.S. State department has also lobbied foreign governments to adopt pro-agricultural biotechnology politics and laws, operated a rigorous public relations campaign to improve the image of biotechnology and challenged common sense biotechnology safeguards and rules – even including opposing laws requiring the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods.” (source)

HERE is one cable (out of many) from Morocco.

HERE Is a 2008 cable that summarizes a French documentary called “The World According to Monsanto which attacks the U.S. biotech industry and the fact that Monsanto and the U.S. Government constantly swap employees and positions, below is a excerpt from the cable:

Corporations Dictate Government Policy

“The film argues that Monsanto exerted undue influence on the USG. Former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman is interviewed saying he had felt that he was under pressure and that more tests should have been conducted on biotech products before they were approved. Jeffrey Smith, Director, Institute for Responsible Technology, who is interviewed says that a number of Bush Administration officers were close to Monsanto, either having obtained campaign contributions from the company or having worked directly for it: John Ashcroft, Secretary of Justice, received contributions from Monsanto when he was re-elected, as did Tommy Thompson, Secretary of Health; Ann Veneman, Secretary of Agriculture, was director of Calgene which belonged to Monsanto; and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, was CEO of Searle, a Monsanto subsidiary; and Justice Clarence Thomas was a former lawyer for Monsanto.”

This is one example (out of many) that clearly show how giant corporations pretty much dictate government policy. When it comes to these food corporations, they are responsible for forcing independent agriculturists to go out of business, controlling the world’s seed supply and forcing farmers to become dependent on their seed. Monsanto and corporations like them have created this seed, and have prevented farmers from seed saving and sharing, which results in a dependence on Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds.

“The state department sent annual cables to ‘encourage the use of agricultural biotechnology,’ encouraging every diplomatic post worldwide to ‘pursue an active biotech agenda’ that promotes agricultural biotechnology, encourages the export of biotech crops and foods and advocated for pro-biotech policies and laws.” (source)

“The US Department of State is selling seeds instead of democracy. This report provides a chilling snapshot of how a handful of giant biotechnology companies are unduly influencing US foreign policy and undermining our diplomatic efforts to promote security, international development and transparency worldwide. This report is a call to action for Americans because public policy should not be for sale to the highest bidder.” – Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch Executive (source)

One of the most revealing cables is from 2007, with regards to French efforts to ban a Monsanto GM corn variety. HERE is a cable that shows Craig Stapleton, former ambassador to France under the Bush administration, asking Washington to punish the EU countries that did not support the use of GM crops:

“Country team Paris recommends that we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits. Moving to retaliation will make clear that the current path has real costs to EU interests and could help strengthen European pro-biotech voices.” (see source in above paragraph)

The U.S. government was not only working for the biotech industry, they were also threatening other governments who did not comply. Think about that for a moment. Over the years the United States government and Monsanto have collectively pushed their GMO agenda upon the rest of the world. Why? Do you really think it is to help feed the world? This could easily be done if we came together and pooled our resources. The entire planet could easily be fed organic food, and it could be done for free.

The World’s Resistance To GMOs

The past two years alone has seen millions of people from across the globe gather to show their opposition towards Monsanto and similar corporations. The “March Against Monsanto” is clear evidence of this. The people of the world are starting to see through the veil that’s been blinding the masses for years, and our food industry is one small, but large and important area where the veil is being lifted.

Activism and awareness has contributed to the banning of GMO products and the pesticides that go with them in multiple countries across the planet, it’s time for North America to follow suit.

Corporatism Stifles Innovation

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By James Hall

Source: BATR.org

For an economy to grow and create actual wealth, innovation is a bedrock component in the development of enhanced prosperity. Prosperity is an intriguing concept. Simply making and accumulating money falls short of establishing a successful economic model. This recent report illustrates a prime example. Facebook stock soars, as company briefly passes IBM in market value. “By most measures, Facebook is dwarfed by IBM: With about 7,000 employees, ten-year-old Facebook is on track to garner $12 billion in sales this year. The 103-year-old IBM has more than 400,000 workers and sold almost $100 billion of computer hardware and software in 2013.”

Is Facebook a shining star of innovation? Or is it the product of a society, which has given up on working towards a successful economy, whereby a prosperous middle class partakes in the engine of continued and shared affluence? Conversely, is IBM an innovated inventor, or is it a dinosaur of a previous era?

However, you answer such questions, Edmund Phelps in an opinion article, Corporatism not capitalism is to blame for inequality argues that tangible innovation is in decline.

“Innovation tailed off between 1940 and about 1970, while the top decile’s share of wealth and income began rising in the 1970s.

The causation runs the other way: losses of dynamism have tended to sharpen wealth inequality because it hits workers of modest means more than it hurts the wealthy. Developing new products is labour-intensive. So is producing the capital goods needed to make them. These jobs disappear when innovation stalls.”

An explanation of The Rise and Fall of Western Innovation, addresses the plight of economic reality. “It is undeniable that the U.S. economy is not delivering the steadily improving wages and living standards the nation’s residents expect.”

“Mass Flourishing is meant to be Edmund Phelps’s chef d’oeuvre, the capstone to a half century of research into the sources of national wealth.

A decline in the pace of innovation threatens prosperity, in the U.S. and everywhere else.

The main cause of this decline, according to Phelps, is corporatism—the inevitable tendency of businesses, workers, and other interests to band together to protect what they have. In modern economies, he says, corporations, unions, and other interests turn government into an agency for forestalling change and preserving the status quo.”

The noted economic expert and academic Robert J. Shiller, in his article, Why Innovation Is Still Capitalism’s Star, provides a critique of “Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change”.

“Professor Phelps discerns a troubling trend in many countries, however, even the United States. He is worried about corporatism, a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society, he says, people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while, he says, but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.”

Jared Bernstein does not agree as stated in a response to Professor Shiller in ‘Does the Government Stifle Innovation? I Don’t See It (To the Contrary…)’. “My points are that a) many important innovations have involved government support somewhere along the way, and b) while one could and should worry about waste in this area, I’ve not seen evidence, nor does Shiller provide any, of stifling. …”.

Well, that viewpoint sure sound like Obama’s infamous endorsement of a government corporatism model, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

When examining the way corporate transnational businesses operate in the real world, their lack of internal in-house innovation is notorious. These gigantic corporatist carnivores excel at mergers and accusations in the quest of monopolization of markets. In these endeavors, their best friend is government cronyism and favoritism.

The essay, Blaming Capitalism for Corporatism, makes an important point.

“In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals’ economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the “public good.”

Here within dwells the essential dilemma, defining the genuine “Public Good“. Government often acts according to Mr. Bernstein’s idea of progress, especially in technological terms. Focus on the notion – “economically important” – and the language filter that translates into a benefit for the Corporatocracy matrix.

“While “entrepreneurial culture” will always be essential, many innovations that turned out to be economically important in the US have government fingerprints all over them. From machine tools, to railroads, transistors, radar, lasers, computing, the internet, GPS, fracking, biotech, nanotech—from the days of the Revolutionary War to today—the federal government has supported innovation often well before private capital would risk the investment.”

Corporatism invents methods of greater control and market dominance for select elitist beneficiaries. When government provides seed money to fund research projects, pure science is seldom the objective. As examined in the essay, How Government Did (and Didn’t) Invent the Internet, Harry McCracken writes: (I’m even prepared to believe that if the Internet hadn’t been invented at DARPA, the private sector would have stepped in and done the job. But we’ll never know for sure, since it was invented at DARPA.)

Thus, the paradox most people are unable to see beyond the guise of “so called” progress. Is government involvement or outright development of transhumanist futuristic technology a valid form of innovation or is it the terminal scourge of central planning and a controlled economy? Surely, under such a system, the “Mass Flourishing” of sharing the wealth, will no longer be an issue among the “useless eaters”, designated for extinction.

– See more at: http://www.batr.org/corporatocracy/073014.html#sthash.RFUeioGh.dpuf

The Stealing of America by the Cops, the Courts, the Corporations and Congress

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It’s not good at much else.” —Author Tom Clancy

Call it what you will—taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures, foreclosures, etc.—but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is theft.

We’re operating in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where instead of Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves stealing from the rich to feed the poor, you’ve got the government and its merry band of corporate thieves stealing from the poor to fatten the wallets of the rich. In this way, the poor get poorer and the rich get richer. All the while, the American Dream of peace, prosperity, and liberty has turned into a nightmare of endless wars, debilitating debt, and outright tyranny.

What Americans don’t seem to comprehend is that if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, without your having much say about it, you have no true rights. You’re nothing more than a serf or a slave.

In this way, the police state with all of its trappings—from surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT team raids, truancy and zero tolerance policies, asset forfeiture laws, privatized prisons and red light cameras to Sting Ray guns, fusion centers, drones, black boxes, hollow-point bullets, detention centers, speed traps and abundance of laws criminalizing otherwise legitimate conduct—is little more than a front for a high-dollar covert operation aimed at laundering as much money as possible through government agencies and into the bank accounts of corporations.

The rationalizations for the American police state are many. There’s the so-called threat of terrorism, the ongoing Drug War, the influx of illegal immigrants, the threat of civil unrest in the face of economic collapse, etc. However, these rationalizations are merely excuses for the growth of a government behemoth, one which works hand in hand with corporations to profit from a society kept under lockdown and in fear at all times.

Indeed, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the real motivating factor behind erecting a police state is not to protect the people, but to further enrich the powerful. Consider the following costly line items, all part of the government’s so-called quest to keep us safe and fight terrorism while entrenching the police state, enriching the elite, and further shredding our constitutional rights:

$4.2 billion for militarized police. Almost 13,000 agencies in all 50 states and four U.S. territories participate in a military “recycling” program which allows the Defense Department to transfer surplus military hardware to local and state police. In 2012 alone, $546 million worth of military equipment was distributed to law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

$34 billion for police departments to add to their arsenals of weapons and equipment. Since President Obama took office, police departments across the country “have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.” While police departments like to frame the acquisition of military surplus as a money-saving method, in a twisted sort of double jeopardy, the taxpayer ends up footing a bigger bill. First, taxpayers are forced to pay millions of dollars for equipment which the Defense Department purchases from megacorporations only to abandon after a few years. Then taxpayers find themselves footing the bill to maintain the costly equipment once it has been acquired by the local police.

$6 billion in assets seized by the federal government in one year alone. Relying on the topsy-turvy legal theory that one’s property can not only be guilty of a crime but is also guilty until proven innocent, government agencies have eagerly cashed in on the civil asset forfeiture revenue scheme, which allows police to seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the cops keeps the citizen’s property. Eighty percent of these asset forfeiture cases result in no charge against the property owner. Some states are actually considering expanding the use of asset forfeiture laws to include petty misdemeanors. This would mean that property could be seized in cases of minor crimes such as harassment, possession of small amounts of marijuana, and trespassing in a public park after dark.

$11,000 per hour for a SWAT team raid on a government dissident. The raid was carried out against Terry Porter, a Maryland resident who runs a welding business, is married with three kids, is outspoken about his views of the government, and has been labeled a prepper because he has an underground bunker and food supplies in case things turn apocalyptic. The raiding team included “150 Maryland State Police, FBI, State Fire Marshal’s bomb squad and County SWAT teams, complete with two police helicopters, two Bearcat ‘special response’ vehicles, mobile command posts, snipers, police dogs, bomb disposal truck, bomb sniffing robots and a huge excavator. They even brought in food trucks.”

$3.8 billion requested by the Obama administration to send more immigration judges to the southern border, build additional detention camps and add border patrol agents. Border Patrol agents are already allowed to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. As one journalist put it, “The surveillance apparatus is in your face. The high-powered cameras are pointed at you; the drones are above you; you’re stopped regularly at checkpoints and interrogated.” For example, an American citizen entering the U.S. from Mexico was subjected to a full-body cavity search in which she was subjected to a variety of invasive procedures, including an observed bowel movement and a CT scan, all because a drug dog jumped on her when she was going through border security. Physicians found no drugs hidden in her body.

$61 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, one of the most notoriously bloated government agencies ever created. The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers and sub-agencies—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”

$80 billion spent on incarceration by the states and the federal government in 2010. While providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, it’s a gold mine to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have to maintain a 90% occupancy rate for at least 20 years. This has led to the phenomenon of overcriminalization of everyday activities, in which mundane activities such as growing vegetables in your yard or collecting rainwater on your property are criminalized, resulting in jail sentences for individuals who might otherwise have never seen the inside of a jail cell.

$6.4 billion a year for the Bureau of Prisons and $30,000 a year to house an inmate. There are over 3,000 people in America serving life sentences for non-violent crimes. These include theft of a jacket, siphoning gasoline from a truck, stealing tools, and attempting to cash a stolen check. Most of the non-violent offenses which triggered life sentences were drug crimes involving trace amounts of heroin and cocaine. One person imprisoned for life was merely a go-between for an undercover officer buying ten dollars’ worth of marijuana. California has more money devoted to its prison system than its system of education. State spending on incarceration is the fastest growing budget item besides Medicaid.

93 cents an hour for forced, prison labor in service to for-profit corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. What this forced labor scheme has created, indirectly or not, is a financial incentive for both the corporations and government agencies to keep the prisons full to capacity. A good portion of the 2 million prisoners in public facilities are forced to work for corporations, making products on the cheap, undermining free laborers, and increasing the bottom line for many of America’s most popular brands. “Prison labor reportedly produces 100 percent of military helmets, shirts, pants, tents, bags, canteens, and a variety of other equipment. Prison labor makes circuit boards for IBM, Texas Instruments, and Dell. Many McDonald’s uniforms are sewn by inmates. Other corporations—Microsoft, Victoria’s Secret, Boeing, Motorola, Compaq, Revlon, and Kmart—also benefit from prison labor.”

$2.6 million pocketed by Pennsylvania judges who were paid to jail youths and send them to private prison facilities. The judges, paid off by the Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation, which specializes in private prisons for juvenile offenders, had more than 5,000 kids come through their courtrooms and sent many of them to prison for petty crimes such as stealing DVDs from Wal-Mart and trespassing in vacant buildings.

$1.4 billion per year reportedly lost to truancy by California school districts, which receive government funding based on student attendance. The so-called “solution” to student absences from school has proven to be a financial windfall for cash-strapped schools, enabling them to rake in millions, fine parents up to $500 for each unexcused absence, with the potential for jail time, and has given rise to a whole new track in the criminal justice system devoted to creating new revenue streams for communities. For example, Eileen DiNino, a woman serving a two-day jail sentence for her children’s truancy violations, died while in custody. She is one of hundreds of people jailed in Pennsylvania over their inability to pay fines related to truancy, which include a variety of arbitrary fees meant to rack up money for the courts. For example, “[DiNino’s] bill included a laundry list of routine fees: $8 for a “judicial computer project”; $60 for Berks constables; $40 for “summary costs” for several court offices; and $10 for postage.” So even if one is charged with a $20 fine, they may end up finding themselves on the hook for $150 in court fees.

$84.9 million collected in one year by the District of Columbia as a result of tickets issued by speeding and traffic light cameras stationed around the city. Multiply that income hundreds of times over to account for the growing number of localities latching onto these revenue-generating, photo-enforced camera schemes, and you’ll understand why community governments and police agencies are lining up in droves to install them, despite reports of wide scale corruption by the companies operating the cameras. Although nine states have banned the cameras, they’re in 24 states already and rising.

$1.4 billion for fusion centers. These fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance and intelligence efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on “flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.”

In sum, the American police state is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle, meant to keep the property and the resources of the American people flowing into corrupt government agencies and their corporate partners. For those with any accounting ability, it’s clear that the total sum of the expenses being charged to the American taxpayer’s account by the government add up to only one thing: the loss of our freedoms. It’s time to seriously consider a plan to begin de-funding this beast and keeping our resources where they belong: in our communities, working for us.

The Political Dimension of Breakdown

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Reid Mukai

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab

This article claims that scientists have discovered an energy-efficient way to make biofuels. This brings up an often-overlooked point that there is nothing we can do under our current techno-industrial regime that requires fossil fuels. Anything we can do currently with fossil fuels we can theoretically do without them – power cars, generate electricity, make plastics, and so forth. There are substitutes – for example, ethanol and biodiesel in place of gas, corn for plastics, solar panels for electricity, and the like. We simply cannot do them on the scale we do now, because we would be limited by the earth’s solar budget. Fossil fuels were essentially “free” energy in so far as the EROI was so high because the sunlight that had created them occurred over the course of millions of years a long time ago. But to say that the techno-industrial system will cease to function with decreasing quality fossil fuels or net energy is simply not correct. It will simply decrease in scale. But that’s a different problem.

That’s also why the price issue never made sense to me. The argument is that the lower EROI of unconventional oil will cause the price of fuel to rise and the industrial economy to crash. So oil gets more expensive. So? Lots of things get more expensive, and the economy adapts. Oil was probably a lot cheaper fifty years ago than today. Well, we had an exploitative capitalist economy then, and we have one now. Nothing’s really changed. When something gets more expensive, it simply means that less people have access to it. Yes, the economy contracts, but so what? If it contracts slowly enough, no one will notice thanks to creeping normalcy.

Two recent stories about Detroit should illustrate this point. One is that thousands of people have been cut off from running water for delinquent bills. What has not been shut off, however, is water to the golf courses, businesses and sports fields, even though their bills are also delinquent:

Welcome to Detroit’s water war – in which upward of 150,000 customers, late on bills that have increased 119 percent in the last decade, are now threatened with shut-offs. Local activists estimate this could impact nearly half of Detroit’s mostly poor and black population – between 200,000 and 300,000 people.

“There are people who can’t cook, can’t clean, people coming off surgery who can’t wash. This is an affront to human dignity,” Charity said in an interview with Kate Levy. To make matters worse, children risk being taken by welfare authorities from any home without running water.

Denying water to thousands, as a sweltering summer approaches, might be bad enough in itself. But these shut-offs are no mere exercise in cost-recovery.

The official rationale for the water shut-downs – the Detroit Water Department’s need to recoup millions – collapses on inspection. Detroit’s high-end golf club, the Red Wing’s hockey arena, the Ford football stadium, and more than half of the city’s commercial and industrial users are also owing – a sum totalling $30 million. But no contractors have showed up on their doorstep.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/true-north/2014/jun/25/detroits-water-war-a-tap-shut-off-that-could-impact-300000-people

Second, this story points out that while services and pensions are slashed for working people, billionaires are still enjoying taxpayer-funded subsidies:

As U.S. states and cities grapple with budget and pension shortfalls, many are betting big on an unproven formula: Slash public employee pension benefits and public services while diverting the savings into lucrative subsidies for professional sports teams.

Detroit on Monday made itself the most prominent example of this trend. Officials in the financially devastated city announced that current and future municipal retirees had blessed a plan that will slash their pension benefits. On the same day, the billionaire owners of the Detroit Red Wings, the Ilitch family, unveiled details of an already approved taxpayer-financed stadium for the professional hockey team.

http://www.ibtimes.com/detroit-other-cash-strapped-us-cities-states-slashing-pension-benefits-while-subsidizing-1635660

There’s some idea that things will fall apart for everyone. They won’t. Things will keep chugging along for the rich and powerful in their air-conditioned sports luxury boxes and their golf courses and their gated communities; it’s just the people on the outside who won’t have access to jobs, adequate shelter, health care, decent food, or running water. Industrial society, however, will keep chugging along, even with $200.00 a barrel oil, because the pain and suffering can just be pushed down to those lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. We’ve already seen this with jobs – the workforce participation rate is down to what it was in the late 1970’s and this is rationalized as “the new normal.” No doubt not having access to healthcare and running water will be also rationalized as “the new normal” at some point in the not-to-distant future. There are still plentiful high-paying jobs for those with the “right” skills, and those skills mainly consist of having the right parents or knowing (or sucking up to) the right people. And if you’re not on the inside, it will be rationalized as “your own fault.”

People overlook the political dimension of collapse. Too often peak oil was used as an excuse for doing nothing. “What’s the use when it will all collapse anyway?” the argument went. “The economy will collapse and we’ll all be even anyway,” they thought. The slate will be wiped clean. The dollar will collapse and we’ll all be on an even footing once again trading with gold nuggets or something.

But the stories from Detroit show that even in a collapse situation, the elites will keep resources – water, oil, money, etc. – flowing to themselves even as they deprive them from the rest of us. Politics will appropriate the remaining resources, however scarce, and keep them flowing to the elites. Technology and industry may be deprived from us, but it will not be deprived from them, because there will always be some way to power industrial civilization within the earth’s solar budget for a certain ever-shrinking segment of the population. In that sense, collapse will never happen. For a certain segment of people, though, it has happened already. Just ask Detroit.

If we use collapse as some sort of excuse to not fight back politically, we will be left without, but rest assured, the elites will not. Not only will it not happen, but we will be as lambs to the slaughter.

BONUS: Who Bled Detroit Dry? (Vice):

The Water and Sewage Department has claimed some residents could pony up if they really wanted to but were simply mooching off the city.

This was a view shared by the surly cabdriver who gave me a lift into town from the airport. The city is “going to shit” he said before making the sinking sound of a bomb landing with his lips. The citizens of Detroit are, by and large, slovenly idiots—the kind of people who keep going back to the convenient store for cans of beer instead of buying the whole six-pack, he explained. The cabby had lived in the city for 35 years after immigrating from Iraq, but, he told me, these days “Detroit is worse than Baghdad.”

And certain statistics back him up. Baghdad actually has both a lower unemployment rate and a lower murder rate than Detroit.

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After the Crash

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Category Archives: Economics

Fighting Back Against Western Sanction

Detroit Cronies Sucking Money out of City to build Red Wings’ Stadium

Corporatism Stifles Innovation