Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing. It is so frightening because it is so final; much like death, there is simply no coming back. Rather than a physical death, normalcy bias represents the death of reason and simple observation. It is the death of the mind and cognitive thought instead of the death of the body.

Ever since the derivatives collapse of 2008 the public has been regaled with wondrous stories of recovery in the mainstream to the point that such fantasies have become the “new normal”. These are grand tales of the daring heroics of central bankers who “saved us all” from impending collapse through gutsy monetary policy and no-holds-barred stimulus measures.

Alternative economists have not been so easy to dazzle. Most of us found that the recovery narrative lacked a certain something; namely hard data that took the wider picture into account. It seemed as though the mainstream media (MSM) as well as the establishment was attempting to cherry-pick certain numbers out of context while demanding we ignore all other factors as “unimportant.”

We just haven’t been buying into the magic show of the so called “professional economists” and the academics, and now that the real and very unstable fiscal reality of the world is bubbling to the surface, the general public will begin to see why we have been right all these years and the MSM has been utterly wrong.

Mainstream economists have done absolutely nothing in the way of investigative journalism and have instead joined a chorus cheerleading for the false narrative, singing a siren’s song of misinterpreted statistics and outright lies drawing the masses ever nearer to the deadly shoals of financial crisis.

Why do they do this? Are they part of some vast conspiracy to mislead the public?

Not necessarily. While central banks and governments have indeed been proven time and again to collude in efforts to cover up financial dangers, most economists in the media are simply greedy and ignorant. You have to remember, they have a considerable stake in this game.

Many mainstream economists tend to have sizable investment portfolios and they base their careers partly on the successes they garner in the annual profits they accumulate playing the equities roulette. They also have invested so much of their public image into their pro-market and recovery arguments that there is no going back. That is to say, they have a personal interest in using their positions in the media to engineer positive market psychology (if they are able) so that their portfolios remain profitable. Not to mention, their professional image is at stake if they ever acknowledge that they were wrong for so long about the underlying health of the real economy.

This atmosphere of deluded self interest also generates a cult-like collectivist attitude. There is a lot of mutual back scratching and mutual ego stroking in the MSM; a kind of inbred conduit of regurgitated arguments and unoriginal talking points, and people in the club rarely step out of line because they not only hurt their own investment future and career, they also hurt everyone in their professional circles. Meaning, no more cocktail party invitations to the Forbes rumpus room…

This is not to say that I am excusing their self interested lies and disinformation. I think that many of these people should be tarred and feathered in a public square for attempting to dissuade the public from preparing in a practical way for severe economic instability. I do not think they see themselves as being responsible to the people who actually take their nonsense seriously and their attitude needs adjustment. I am only explaining how it is possible for an entire profession of supposed “experts” to be so wrong so often. Mainstream financial analysts WANT to believe their own lies as much as many in the public want to believe them.

Like I said, normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing.

One of the root pieces of disinformation in the mainstream that feeds all other lies is the disinformation surrounding falling global demand. MSM pundits cannot and will never fully admit to the cold hard reality of collapsing demand within the global economy. If they are forced to admit to falling demand, then the facade of a steady or recovering U.S. economy crumbles.

I covered the facts behind falling global demand for raw goods and consumer goods last year in part one of my six-part article series, ‘One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes.’ The hard evidence and numbers I presented have only become more important in recent months.

For example, U.S. inventories are building and freight shipments are declining in the U.S. as retailers cite falling demand for goods as the primary culprit. Official retail sales numbers for the holiday season of 2015 have come in flat. When one takes into account real inflation in prices, consumer sales are actually far in the negative. According to the more accurate methods the U.S. government used to use in their calculations of CPI in the 1980’s, we are looking at annual price inflation rate of around 7%. Price inflation does not necessarily equal improved sales.

Energy usage has been crushed since 2008. Despite a growing population and supposedly a growing economic system, oil consumption in 2014 according to the World Economic Forum dropped to levels not seen since 1997.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening and it is the opposite of mainstream projections for oil consumption made back in 2003. This is why inventories and storage for oil across the globe are reaching capacity in a manner never seen before. American demand for oil is not growing exponentially as expected because Americans cannot afford to support such growth anymore. Falling energy demand at these extreme levels is an undeniable indicator of a failing economic system.

Of course, mainstream economists in their desperation to keep market psychology rolling forward and the equities casino producing profits seek to spin this problem as an “oversupply” issue rather than a demand issue. And this is where the disparity in their arguments begins to bleed through.

Here is the problem presented in the mainstream; what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did falling demand lead to oversupply and thus a fall in prices? Or, is demand remaining steady and is overproduction the cause of falling prices? Yes, let’s confuse the issue instead of looking at the obvious.

As already linked above, it was falling demand which came first in 2008, and demand which continues to fall in relation to past trends. Have producers failed to reduce oil production to match falling demand? Yes. But this does not change the fact that oil demand today is well below levels needed to sustain the kind of economic growth markets have come to expect. Mainstream economists attempt to distract by hyper-focusing on supply, or twisting the discussion into an either/or scenario. Either it is a supply problem, or it is a demand problem, and they assert it is only a supply problem. This is not reality.

In fact, both can and often do exist at the same time, though one problem usually feeds the other. Falling demand does tend to result in oversupply in any particular sector of the economy. The bottom line, however, is that in our current crisis demand is the driving force and supply is a secondary issue. Supply is NOT the driving force behind the volatility in oil markets. Period.

This same chicken and egg distraction rears its ugly head in discussions on shipping markets as well.

The mainstream claim that the historic implosion of the Baltic Dry Index is nothing more than a problem of “too many ships” operating in the cargo market has been throttled, dissected and debunked so many times that you would think that it is surely dead. But the lie just will not die.

Mainstream propaganda houses like The Economist and Forbes continue to produce articles on a regular basis which deny the issue of falling demand for raw goods and claim that oversupply of vessels is the root cause of the BDI losing around 98 percent of its value since its highs in 2008.

I haven’t seen any of these articles offer actual stats or evidence to back their claims that oversupply of ships is the culprit and that demand is not a legitimate issue. But beyond that, why does the mainstream seem so hell bent on dismissing the BDI as a reliable economic indicator? Well, because shipping rates fall when demand falls, thus, when the BDI falls, it signals a lack of global demand. This is a fact they refuse to accept. When the BDI falls by 98 percent since the 2008 highs preceding the derivatives crisis, this signals a disaster in the making.

So, let’s stamp out the “too many ships came first” disinformation once and for all, shall we?

Shipping companies like Maersk Lines have already publicly admitted that falling global demand is the core problem behind falling rates and that supply is a secondary driver. They view the current financial crisis to be “worse than 2008”.

The fact that the largest shipping company in the world is warning of falling demand does not seem to be having any effect on the mainstream talking heads, though.

So, what do major shipping companies do when demand is falling and too many ships are operating on the market? Do they field those ships anyway and drive rates down even further? No, that makes no sense.

What companies do is either leave ships idle in port or scrap them. According to BIMCO (Baltic And International Maritime Council), 2015 was the busiest year since 2012 for the scrapping of older ships to make way for new arrivals. This process of scrapping ships or storing them idle destroys the argument that too many ships are driving falling rates in the BDI. In fact, as chief shipping analyst Peter Sand of BIMCO stated last year:

“The increase in Capesize scrapping comes at a much needed time for the market. Looking at the development so far this year the fleet growth has actually been negative, with a reduction of 0.8 %.”

I hope the garbage peddlers at Forbes and The Economist caught that — NEGATIVE growth of ship supply, not massive over-growth of ship supply. The scrapping increase was also across the board for other models of ships, not just the Capsize, and the increase of cargo capacity by new ships has been negligible. Yet, shipping rates continue to plummet to historical lows. Only falling demand, as Maersk Lines admits, explains the crash of the BDI in light of this information.

China in particular has been offering considerable incentives to those companies that do scrap older ships, to the point that some are even scrapping semi-new ships in order to cash in.

Now, this is not to say there is not an “oversupply” of ships. There are indeed many ships within cargo fleets that are not in operation. But again, this is because demand has declined so completely that even with increased scrapping and idling, shipping companies cannot keep up. Falling demand OCCURRED FIRST, and oversupply is nothing more than a symptom of this root problem.

So, mainstream hacks, can we please put the “too many ships” nonsense to rest and get on with a real discussion on obvious issues of demand? Stop focusing on the symptoms and examine the cause for once.

These are just a few of the hundreds of fundamental problems plaguing the global economy today, and they are all problems that the mainstream continues to ignore or dismiss out of hand. Which brings us to the now accelerating volatility in stock markets.

Stock markets are crashing, there is no other way to paint it. They are crashing incrementally, but crashing nonetheless. When you have violent swings in equities and commodities between 5 percent and 10 percent a day, then something is very wrong with your economy and has been wrong for some time. If global consumption and demand were really steady or growing, then you would not see the kind of systemic backlash in the financial system that we are now seeing. If companies listed on the Dow were making legitimate profits due to a healthy consumer base and enjoying solid expansion, stocks would not be increasingly volatile. If investors and mainstream analysts actually looked at the real numbers in demand (among other things), then the strange behavior in markets would be easy for them to understand. They will not look at such numbers until it is too late.

Instead, markets have chosen to chase headlines, and here is where the ugly circle of normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance completes itself. There are no positive indicators within the fundamentals today to energize market faith or market investment. So, investors and algorithmic trading computers track news headlines instead. The MSM hacks now have the power (along with central banks and governments) to create massive stock rallies with one or two carefully placed news tags, such as “Russia To Discuss Oil Production Cuts With OPEC.”

Market speculators and trading computers jump on these headlines without verifying if they are true. In most cases, they end up being false or just hearsay from an “unnamed source.” And so, the markets then crash further down into the abyss, waiting for the next headline to bolster activity even for a day.

The sad truth is, if any of these headlines turned out to be legitimate, their effect would still be meaningless in the long run as the overwhelming weight of the fundamentals continues to topple poorly placed optimism. Now that the investment world no longer has the certainty of central bank intervention as a useful tool, they don’t know if bad news is good news or if good news is bad news. The fact that the system is moving into a death spiral without the psychological crutch of central bank stimulus measures should tell you all you need to know about the supposed recovery since 2008.

No society wants to admit economic failure or economic sabotage, and this is why the con-game is able to continue in the face of so much concrete truth. Ultimately, the market trends and economic trends will flow into the negative. In the meantime, expect massive market rallies, rallies which will then disintegrate in a matter of days. And, whatever happens, never take what mainstream economists say very seriously. They have failed the public for long enough.

The glorification of Antonin Scalia

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Tom Carter

Source: WSWS.org

The sickening tributes across the official US political and media spectrum to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, are a barometer of the putrefaction of American democracy.

The universal deference towards Scalia from what passes for the “liberal” faction of the establishment is particularly repulsive. The statements of the Democratic presidential candidates, the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders no less than Hillary Clinton—echoing similarly sycophantic drivel from the likes of the New York Times—are monuments to political cowardice.

One would say these people lack the courage of their convictions if they had any convictions to lack!

They have sprung into action to join their Republican counterparts in hailing Scalia as a towering figure in American jurisprudence. Virtually every description of the deceased justice includes the words “brilliant” and “intellectual.” One is reminded of the programmed acclamation of Sergeant Raymond Shaw recited by his brainwashed fellow soldiers in the film The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Sanders took time off from his hollow calls for a “political revolution” to demonstrate his political obeisance to the ruling class, declaring, “While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

Clinton praised Scalia as “a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

President Obama called Scalia a “towering legal figure.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat hailed Scalia for “putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism,” and for his “combination of brilliance, eloquence, and good timing.”

No one dares say what needs to be said. The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

In one case last year, Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car. According to Scalia’s reasoning, it was not deadly force because the officer claimed to have been aiming at the car, not the person in the car.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this method—absurdly described in the media as “constitutional originalism”—was the 2000 Supreme Court decision Scalia engineered to halt the counting of votes in Florida and hand the White House to the loser of the election, Republican candidate George W. Bush.

The 5-4 decision to steal the election all but acknowledged its own speciousness when it declared that the justifications it advanced could not be applied to any future cases. In his separate concurring opinion, Scalia declared that the Constitution did not give the people the right to elect the president.

At the time of the theft of the 2000 elections, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the counting of votes, and the acceptance of that ruling by the Democrats and the entire political establishment, demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency for democratic rights within the American ruling class. The reaction to Scalia’s death is a measure of the further erosion of democratic sentiment in the ruling elite.

Scalia personified the decay of bourgeois democracy in the United States over a protracted period of time. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, he flourished and exerted increasing influence in the decades of political reaction, militarism and Wall Street criminality that ensued, continuing without a hitch under Obama. Not only in the anti-democratic substance of his rulings, but also in his methods and bearing, he embodied the promotion by the ruling elite of backwardness, prejudice and outright cruelty.

He was corrupt and made no bones about his corruption, proudly voting to remove limits on corporate bribes in elections and flaunting his private outings with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was a party in a case before the court. He was a bully, making a practice of baiting and harassing lawyers who came before him.

Throughout his career, Scalia consistently advocated positions that can only be described as barbarous and fascistic. Fittingly, his last judicial act was to deny a stay of execution. He was a figure who relished the power and trappings of the state, openly defending torture and internment camps.

Scalia worked tirelessly to break down constitutional and democratic limits on state power, infiltrating fascistic doctrines into Supreme Court jurisprudence. His theory of executive power, according to which the American president has unlimited and unreviewable powers for the duration of the “war on terror,” resurrects Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine in all but name.

Scalia’s mere presence on the court testified to the advanced decay of American democracy. That decay is linked, on the one hand, to the extreme growth of social inequality, accompanied by the rampant parasitism and criminality of the ruling class, and on the other hand to unending war, which has its domestic reflection in the build up of the repressive state apparatus that Scalia championed.

The bitterness of the disputes over his replacement is a reflection of the importance of his role in American politics over three decades during which the political establishment shifted violently to the right.

The deference shown to such a figure from all quarters of the political establishment should be taken as a warning by the working class. The ruling elite fears above all the growth of social opposition and class struggle. It exalts the legacy of Scalia because it is preparing police state methods to defend its power and property against an insurgent working class.

Tap runs brown in Louisiana’s impoverished northeast

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Reid Mukai

With infrastructure funds going unspent, residents have lack of drinking supplies and iron sediment flowing from pipes

By Lauren Zanolli

Source: Al Jazeera

ST. JOSEPH, Louisiana – “I’m scared to take a bath,” said Ethel Strum, who lives in St. Joseph, a community of barely 1,000 people in northeast Louisiana.

She turned on the tap in the bathroom sink of her tidy one-story home and the water flowed clear for a second before fading to a milky brown. In her kitchen, a few cases of bottled water, which she uses for everything from brushing her teeth to cooking, are stacked on the table.

“I drive to Newellton to shower. It’s a 20-minute drive but I can do it in 12,” she laughed.

But talking about the town’s water issues makes her visibly upset. Among the many problems are frequent outages, water thick with iron sediment from the aging pipes, and poorly communicated boil-water advisories. “Water should be free until it’s fixed,” she said.

Strum can’t even wash her car with town water because it leaves a rust coating. Despite minimal use, she says she has received high bills and has to buy 20 cases of bottled water every month.

While state officials and the EPA have deemed the water safe to drink, virtually no one risks it. Most here do not even use tap water to cook or brush teeth, and many, especially children, bathe with bottled water. Lots of residents spend several hundred a month on store-bought water.

To add to the mounting frustration, $6 million of state funds allocated to St. Joseph for water line repairs in 2013 are still being withheld because the town’s mayor, Edward Brown, has failed several times to turn in a mandatory financial audit on time. New Governor John Bel Edwards said this week his office was working with the town of St. Joseph and the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) to fast track the allocation of at least some of that money to start system repair work. Mayor Brown said he expects to file the overdue audit by the end of February.

“What we’ve experienced here is policy failures that have allowed these communities to fall through the cracks,” said St. Joseph resident Garrett Boyte, drawing a comparison to the disaster in Flint, Michigan.

Boyte, along with colleagues in the Servant Leadership Corps of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, have sought to attract public attention on the issue through a recent social media push and an online petition to the Obama administration for federal assistance to St. Joseph. The effort has just over one-tenth of the 100,000 signatures it needs by Feb. 19 to reach its goal. The group notes, however, that with no evidence of lead contamination, the situation in St. Joseph is considerably less dire than in Flint.

Nevertheless, the town’s water woes illustrate a more slow-moving and commonplace catastrophe: failing infrastructure in small, impoverished communities that cannot afford to replace their systems, leaving residents with limited resources to cope on their own.

Established in 1834, St. Joseph lies squarely in the so-called Black Belt, a term coined by Booker T. Washington at the turn of the century to refer to the swath of dark, fertile soil that spans much of the American south. It has evolved to describe the largely black, poor communities that have been in decline since the mechanization of farming drove out small farmers, with no industry to replace it.

The town is the seat of Tensas Parish — one of the state’s poorest, with 34 percent of residents living in poverty and a median household income of around $27,000 (compared to $45,000 statewide). The least populous parish in the state, over half of its population is African-American. Unemployment in St. Joseph is likely higher than the official parish average of 9 percent, and the town’s poverty is written in its shoddy roads and houses in dire need of repair.

St. Joseph’s decaying water distribution system, installed in the 1930’s, is the main cause of the town’s water problems. “Over time, these old cast iron pipes that convey the water, they deteriorate and start to crack and leak,” said Davis Cole, a Baton Rouge-based civil engineer working on the redesign of St. Joseph’s water system. Leaks cost the town money; according to Mayor Brown, the system loses 50 percent of its water. And with resources already stretched thin, long-term repairs are out of reach. “This is typical of communities probably all over the U.S., especially poor communities,” Cole said.

The water’s rusty tint comes from naturally occurring iron and manganese sediment in the underground well that has built up in the water lines over the years. Every time the system has to be shut down for repairs, and then restarted, sediment is injected into the water flow. The problem started to become obvious over a decade ago, according to residents, but has gotten progressively worse. The water main reportedly broke four times last month alone.

While the state does monthly bacterial tests, the last detailed analysis of St. Joseph’s water was in 2013. It showed 32 times the EPA-recommended level of iron and 9 times that of manganese, according to an analysis by the local Sierra Club. But the EPA considers these contaminants to have merely “aesthetic” affects on the water. They are not regulated by the EPA or the state.

The state’s official approval of the water quality is of little comfort to most residents here. “We don’t know what’s in that water. They say it’s rust but there are so many ‘what if’s’,” said Marie, a grandmother and lifelong resident of St. Joseph who declined to give her real name because of the sensitivities around local politics.

“Who’s more important: the people or the paperwork?” asked Marie, implying that the audit issue was to blame. “Get the water straight and then work on that. It’s not the community’s fault, don’t make it hard on us.”

Iron contamination and aging infrastructure are not uncommon problems in the region. Dr. Jimmy Guidry, state health officer at the Department of Health and Hospitals, confirms that water discoloration caused by iron is a common complaint across the state. “There are probably several hundred water systems that deal with this,” Guidry said, out of approximately 1,360 local water systems in Louisiana.

“As a physician, I’m not going to tell you a lot of iron in your system is not going to affect your health,” Guidry said, when asked about the long-term effects of high iron exposure. “But that’s not something we regulate.” In light of renewed attention on the issue, he said the DHH would be looking again at an iron and manganese water rule that was legislated in 2014.

Of more pressing concern to Guidry was replacing St. Joseph’s decrepit water pipes, which pose a risk of bacterial contamination every time they break. Many Louisianans have been on high alert for water contamination after a brain-eating amoeba was found in four separate water systems last year.

Guidry also noted that frequent leaks in the St. Joseph water main present another threat — they have started to erode the nearby levee. The Mississippi River has swelled to record heights in some areas this winter following heavy rainfall.

“I understand their urgency to [fix the water color]. That will take time,” said Dr. Guidry. “The urgency to get their system back to where they are not at risk of contamination is most important to me.” He said that if they receive approval for two grants totaling around $600,000, the most-needed repairs on the town’s storage tank and water pipes could begin in a matter of weeks.

However, he noted that even with a full revamp of the system, which is planned once an additional $2 million in funding is secured, the brown water of St. Joseph might not disappear. “It may not get rid of it completely, because it doesn’t address the treatment part,” he said. While there are expensive chemicals and filters that can get rid of iron discoloration, “for a poor community, it’s not an easy option to address the iron,” he added.

“If you were born after 2000 in this parish, you were always taught not to drink that water,” said Rosalie Bouobda, who moved to St. Joseph two years ago as a consultant for the Servant Leadership Corps of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana. That group has been meeting with state and local officials about the water issue for the past two years. “Children are taught not to deal with [the water]. It’s a reflex to them…They’ve never known clean water.”

Bouobda, along with Garrett Boyte, who started posting pictures of the muddy water on Twitter, has been instrumental in garnering attention beyond social media. But many lifelong residents of St. Joseph have been reluctant to speak out, either because of a fatalistic sense that nothing will change, or out of deference to local politics in a town where so many people are related to each other.

“They just accept it as a fact of life, their water is dirty and there is nothing they can do about it,” Boyte says of people’s perceptions.

For St. Joseph, dirty water may be as much a fact of life as high unemployment and failing schools.

“It’s like nobody cares. That’s how people in this town feel,” Michael Thomas, Jr., a 25-year old father of two, said. His apartment in a small subsidized housing complex stands across from the overgrown ruins of a long-abandoned Tensas Rosenwald High School, one of many built in the early 20^th century with funds from Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, to educate African-Americans in the South.

“We gotta boil the water just to wash the babies,” he said. “If I could afford it, I’d move.” He said he spends as much as $300 every month on bottled water.

Sitting nearby, Kristi McWilliams, 23, and John Jackson, 24, echoed Thomas’ frustration. “I think about moving all the time, but we don’t have the jobs or the money,” said McWilliams.

“There is more they could be doing,” said Jackson of state officials. “They could drop the water bill. Water should be cheaper in the stores.”

Some residents, like Ann South, an elderly woman who recently suffered a stroke and a heart attack, were frustrated by the disparities with other communities. “Around the lake there is no water problem,” she said, referring to the more affluent, largely white area around Lake Bruin nearby. “Who in the world do we have to talk to about helping my people in St. Joseph?”

Others, like Ethel Strum, were more sharply critical of Mayor Brown’s role in the water crisis. “The Mayor – he’s doing nothing!” she said. Valerie and Chip Sloan, a white couple who own a large house by the levee, claims that Mayor Brown has kicked them out of multiple town hall meetings for asking questions about the water, and that he has ignored their Freedom of Information Act requests for data on town finances.

“There are residents who have spoken out and they are retaliated against, either by the community at large or someone from the city,” added Boyte.

For his part, Brown, the town’s first African-American mayor, says his hands are largely tied on the water issue. “The state of Louisiana is testing this water and is saying that it is safe. And for me to overrule, [the Department of] Health and Hospitals or EPA … I don’t have that expertise, and no one in this town does,” he told Al Jazeera.

He says that with a budget of around $1.5 million – including a $500,000 general fund and around $1 million in water and gas sales – he is left with around $50,000 a year. That would leave little cash for infrastructure upgrades.

As for the lapsed financial audits that have delayed water system funding, Brown says that after an audit firm pulled out mid-audit in 2013, the town was forced to file late. With various lawsuits looming over the town since then, he says he has struggled to find an audit firm that will take on his case.

Brown also points to tight oversight from legislative auditors closely monitoring the town, in light of its failure to comply with financial audit rules. He says state law requires him to cut off utility connections after two months of missed payments and that, in the past, he has been issued a citation by auditors for granting extensions to individuals. Now, he turns off about 10-15 utility connections per month, including houses where he knows there are children and elderly people.

“You tell me what the state cares about the people in this town,” said Brown. “Did they care about people in Flint? They care about them now.”

Should Taxpayers Be Subsidizing Obscene Salaries?

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Adnan Al-Daini

Source: Dissident Voice

An article in the Guardian on bosses’ pay by the director of the High Pay Centre, Deborah Hargreaves, presents the disparity between bosses’ pay and the average wage in the UK thus:

“Chief executives in the FTSE 100 companies took home £4.96m in 2014 compared with average wages of £27,645. And, if anything, the pay gap is getting wider. A typical incentive award for a top boss increased by 50% of salary compared with the previous year, while workforce wages were up by £445. Bosses’ remuneration has risen from around 47 times average wages in the 1990s to around 180 times today.”

The pay gap shown by the above figures will be even wider if the salaries of bosses are expressed as a multiple of the median wage instead of the average wage. The average wage is skewed towards the top, thus most workers will earn below the average. The median wage is a better measure as it means half of the workers will earn below it and the other half above it.

Free-market ideologues would argue that salaries are fixed by market forces, and questioning such a disparity in income is tantamount to the politics of envy and interference in the freedom of markets. Such an argument is not really sustainable.

A company is a joint enterprise, and for it to be successful all its employees need to feel valued and justly rewarded. Such a disparity in income sends the wrong message to the many people who are working hard to make the company successful. It will lead to dissatisfaction and low morale amongst the workforce, and will eventually negatively impact the success of the company. A good boss will not accept such an obscene disparity in income between himself and his employees. Such salaries have become a virility symbol for bosses to compete with each other. It shouts – I am more important than you; just look at the size of my package!

If the wages paid by a company to its poorest employees are so low that it requires the state to top up their wages to provide them with the basics of life, then inflated salaries paid to the bosses are effectively being subsidized by the taxes we pay. It is a transfer of wealth from the many to the very few at the top. How can that be right? Where is the free-market in such practices?

If the income distribution is more equitable, the subsidy by the state to the low paid will be reduced, leaving more money for the government to spend on the NHS, infrastructure, police etc., things that are necessary for a civilized, functioning society.

Surely, then, that gives our elected government the right to enact laws and regulations to fix maximum salaries of bosses as a multiple of the lowest wage in that particular company. This will incentivize the bosses to increase the pay of their poorest employees to increase their own pay. The multiple should be certainly much lower than the figures quoted above.

Our taxation system needs to be overhauled to reflect the huge disparity in incomes; it is too narrowly set. Currently, we have a tax-free allowance of £10,600 and then a jump to 20% up to £42,385 then 40% up to income of £150,000, and a tax rate of 45% on income above £150,000.

A more progressive taxation system would start at a much lower rate and continue to rise incrementally well beyond the 45%. I am not a tax expert, so I leave it to those with the expertise to set the rates in such a way that we as a society ensure that the wealth of the nation is more equitably distributed.

Fairness and justice are the pillars on which successful, happy societies are built. The present system that siphons so much wealth to the top 1% to the impoverishment of the rest is neither fair, nor just. Failure to take action will result in the whole of society becoming the poorer; we will all suffer rich and poor.

Adnan Al-Daini (PhD, Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East. Read other articles by Adnan.

The Popular Myth of Democracy in America

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Stephen Lendman

Source: SteveLendmanBlog

No nation in world history promised more and delivered less to its citizens and people worldwide. None more greatly threatens world peace – putting humanity’s survival up for grabs like never before.

None did more harm to more people globally over a longer duration. None matches the menace it represents – a presstitute media supported fascist gangster state willing to risk destroying planet earth to own it, run by a bipartisan criminal class.

From inception, America was always run by the people who own it, as first Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay explained.

John Adams believed power belonged exclusively to the rich, well-born and able. Today it’s about monied interests in charge – deciding who holds all top positions in government, elected and appointed.

People have no say whatever. Ignore electoral politics, intended solely to deceive – manipulating people to believe new bums are more worthy than current ones.

Voting is a waste of time, accomplishing nothing. Duopoly power rules.

America is a one-party state with two wings, indistinguishable from each other on issues mattering most – militantly pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist no matter what names and faces hold top positions.

Police state laws enforced by powerful security forces at the federal, state and local levels assure wealth and privilege interests are exclusively served at the expense of public welfare.

Elections are farcical, exercises in theater, not democracy. Candidates for the nation’s top offices are cardboard cutouts of each other, distinguishable only by their disingenuous rhetoric – promises made, forgotten and broken once in office.

The public interest be damned. People are used, not served, deceived to believe politicians represent them.

Embedded power runs America, politicians serving entrenched interests exclusively, chosen for that reason. Ordinary people thinking their enfranchisement matters are living in a fantasy world.

Government of, by and for the people is the grandest of grand hoaxes. Media scoundrels perpetuate the myth with all the familiar slogans and high-minded posturing.

Jimmy Carter was right last summer calling America an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery…a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”

Republicans and Democrats operate by the same corrupted standards. “(U)nlimited) money” serves their interests at the expense of constituents they represent.

America’s system is too debauched to fix. It’s too late for tinkering around the edges.

A complete makeover is needed – a popular revolution, replacing oligarchy with grassroots democracy for the first time in the nation’s history, freed from money control.

Today is the most perilous time in world history. We have a choice.

Accept the status quo, its endless wars, oligarch control over the greater good, unprecedented wealth disparity between rich and all others, along with harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers and risk of potential humanity destroying nuclear war – or refuse any longer to tolerate a system responsible for so much harm and misery to so many people worldwide.

Survival depends on choosing wisely. What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind do you want your children to inherit?

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

A Critical Update on the Failing Global Economy

Posted on February 14, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Phillip J. Watt

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The matrix-media will have us believe that the global economy is only experiencing a temporary glitch and that everything will be fine, however that is simply an outright lie. After several decades of saturating the world with unbacked currency and mountains of debt, the can we’ve been kicking has finally run out of road.

As you would know, stocks are plummeting across the globe and since their peak in around mid 2015, individual regions have lost 10-40% in stock value. In total, on the 20th of January the MSCI global stock market index reflected that the world’s markets had officially entered a bear market, which is 20% or more. This is just the beginning, too.

The exceptionally poor start to stocks in 2016 has somewhat been driven by ‘fears’ about China’s economic troubles, but really it is because many of the fundamentals of the global economy are extremely weak. For example, oil, which sustains the financial health of many countries and industries, has crashed over 70% in the last 2 years, whilst the Baltic Dry Index, which measures the amount of raw materials being shipped around the planet, is at a record low of 298 (to put this into context, just before the great recession of 2008 is was over 11,000).

More examples are that in early 2016, North Atlantic cargo shipping almost came to a halt and the U.S. orders in the trucking industry “for Class 8 trucks – the big rigs that haul freight on North American highways – plunged 48% from a year ago”. Furthermore, the retail sector is falling apart, with tens of thousands of job cuts and shop doors closing at an alarming rate.

For a deeper analysis of the data which scream that we’re steam-rolling towards a long over-due debt reset, which might even end in a sustained global depression such as that of the 1930′s, read “22 Signs That The Global Economic Turmoil We Have Seen So Far In 2016 Is Just The Beginning”.

OFFICIAL REPORTING IS FALSE

Given the ‘faith’ that stakeholders need to have in this economic system to keep it from imploding, the governmental data and the mainstream media cannot be truthful in what they report to the world, otherwise news of doom would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s ridiculous to design an economic model in this way, yet regardless of the epic failure of Keynesian economics and the Wall Street casino, any investor who doesn’t recognize this by now is unfortunately in line for some serious financial loss.

To solidify the point, all official numbers in the U.S. and elsewhere are manipulated; shadow stats have made that abundantly clear. For example, real unemployment in the U.S. is above 20% and many of those who are actually working are in low-paying, part-time jobs.

Further to the true state of the labor market in America, many university graduates are working in hospitality or an unrelated field. Something like half of all under 25 yr olds still live with their parents or grandparents. Labor participation rates are at the lowest level in 38 years. Over 45 million people are on food subsidies and poverty and homelessness is increasing not just in America, but all around the globe.

Brazil, Canada, Russia and other countries are already in recession, amplified by the collapse of oil and commodity prices. Unofficial figures suggest the US is too. Canada in particular has seen massive inflation in food and other necessities, so it is likely that we can expect that to emerge in other countries as well.

This shit is really getting serious.

WHO IS AT FAULT?

Unfortunately, the masses don’t yet understand that most central banks around the world are private companies owned by private families i.e. the oligarchs. Essentially, this and the other banking organisations that they own is a century-old scam that robs the people of their riches.

Simply, the U.S. Government has effectively been taken over by an oligarchy, as evidenced by this Princeton University study in 2014. It’s no surprise then that this small group of so-called elites benefited from the largest transfer of wealth in human history, which happened in the 2008 GFC.

The 1%, particularly the 0.1%, economically prospered from the illegal, unethical and unprecedented bank bailouts, whilst the 99% suffered with losses in superannuation, savings, homes and employment. Many also lost their lives due to overdose, suicide and other self-abuse, which was due to their loss of livelihood and economic independence brought about by the global monetary scam.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The recovery from the GFC of 2008 never occurred, particularly for the main street economy (the real economy, not the Wall street economy). It’s happening all over again because unlike Iceland, there were no incarcerations for the fraudulent bankers and no serious revolution to the banking and finance sector.

This time though, it appears the shadow order (who have monopolized the banking and corporate sectors and effectively control western foreign and domestic policy) are not quite ready for another recessionary/depressionary round because they don’t yet have all their mechanisms in place to offer ‘the solution’ (i.e. global currency, trade agreements and governance).

They’ve got processes such as High Frequency Trading that prop up stocks by buying them back with the money they manifest from nothing (Plunge Protection Teams). They’ve been in overdrive trying to keep it afloat, but to no avail, because the real economy is drying up. As mentioned, global trade is tanking and many businesses are either going into liquidation or laying off thousands of workers each, so it’s easy to imagine that we’re going to hear about a major corporation going bust any day now.

This might just be the black swan event that ‘officially’ triggers the next crisis.

History indicates what will likely happen next: war. When a superpower and their economic hegemony is in collapse (such as the end of petrodollar and the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency), going to war can distract the populace from the true reasons of an economic crash and the associated suffering that emerges as a result. Essentially, the blame can be shifted to foreign entities.

This is why a high probability exists for a massive false flag to occur over the coming weeks/months to convince the masses to go to war with Russia, China and/or Iran. Saudi Arabia and Iran’s tensions are high right now so they might use that platform; it may in fact be orchestrated for this aim.

In the very short term, however, expect more dramatic policy measures, such as more mass money creation (QE) and even negative interest rates by the Federal Reserve (just like they’ve recently done at Japan’s central bank). They might even attempt widespread bank bail-ins, as already implemented in Italy, Portugal and Cyprus.

As explained in this Reuters article:

“so-called bail-ins typically mean wiping out creditors’ investments, slashing their value or converting them into shares in the bank. Uninsured depositors could get caught along with professional investors”.

In other words, they’re once again planning to steal the hard-earned cash of the little guy, but instead of doing it via tax-funded bail-outs as they did in 2008, they’re going to do it directly by commandeering the financial assets that people house in banks.

Yet, no matter what they do in the short term, they cannot stop the massive bubbles in debt, derivatives (over 1.5 quadrillion dollars), real estate, stocks, and bonds from inevitably popping. It might happen tomorrow or it might hold off for another year, yet regardless of the exact timing, any one of these or other triggers could easily send the global economy into a severe and sustained global depression.

Preparing accordingly, therefore, is nothing short of wise.

WHAT TO DO NEXT?

The potential for it to get seriously ugly over the coming months and years is very real, so both individually and collectively, we should be taking this very seriously.

Whatever does happen though, I do feel it will be in our collective favor. Their matrix of control is crashing; so many more people are now aware of the agenda to create a global governance, as well as the propaganda narratives they convey through the mainstream media that they either own or control.

In other words, we need to accept that all ‘official truths’ are a farce and they’ve been unarguably exposed and documented for the world to see as clear as day. Excitingly, the mainstream ‘truths’ are even beginning to be viewed by the masses as the bullshit of a pathological liar.

To prepare financially, many alternative economists recommend to exit all high risk investments such as stocks. For example, do you know where your superannuation is invested? There will no doubt be massive swings in stocks in the coming weeks, but the risk is high that they will continue to decrease at the least, and dramatically crash at the worst.

Also, to prepare physically, have you secured food and water insurance? Just like we get insurance for our health, car, home contents etc., in these times we should do the same with our basic necessities. I’m sure those in Canada are wishing they stocked up on essential goods because now they’re spending all their hard earned cash on just surviving.

For a deeper discussion on how to prepare, read “70 Tips That Will Help You Survive What Is About To Happen To America”.

FINAL THOUGHTS

These are exciting times because the western world is waking up to the lies and deceptions they’ve been force-fed (much of it is of course common knowledge in places like Russia and parts of Europe etc.). The mainstream narrative in every way you could possibly imagine is a complete fabrication to elicit your consent, especially for war. Yet, even though all of this is driving the awakening needed for humanity’s evolution, there are real risks for all of us.

Organizing our lives in as many self-sufficient ways as possible is simply being street smart. Arming ourselves with the right information is not just for the benefit of ourselves, but our family, friends and community as a whole. And of course, don’t feed the fear machine; we’re electro-magnetic beings in an electro-magnetic universe and how we think and feel does ripple out into the waters.

Make sure it’s worthy energy.

And remember, the banking sector is the head of the snake. This is the fundamental control mechanism of the powers-that-will-no-longer-be that we need to disassemble, because everything else of importance will naturally follow suit. For further information on how to create a better world for our personal future, as well as the future of humanity, see the articles linked below.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Phillip J. Watt lives in Australia. His written work deals with topics from ideology to society, as well as self-development. Follow him on Facebook or visit his website.

Saturday Matinee: Struggle

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Reid Mukai

From MentalRev Productions:

Struggle is a case study of the 2004 Presidential Election in Ohio, the deciding swing state which delivered the presidency once again to George W. Bush. Diligently researched by the key contributors to the film, Struggle is a bold film that challenges the legitimacy of that Presidential Election and brings the entire US electoral process into question.

This gripping documentary is filmed with a mix of expert testimony and first-hand accounts of voters whose votes were suppressed or manipulated, and community members who protested for election reform and justice in the State and National Capitals. This informative, engaging and tense film is told from a grass roots perspective, from the ground up, without the filters of mainstream media framing the dialogue. Filmed with a handheld style that reflects the intensity of the moment, this film identifies the practices of Individual and State entities to silence protest and manipulate elections in the United States.

This film was made without the resources of mainstream media or a highly funded political campaign. This is a grass roots film that speaks truth to power, with your help we will magnify that voice and demand free and fair elections for all Americans.

https://vimeo.com/50791629

Zika: Why Biotech is Imperative to National Security

Posted on February 12, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

When we think of national security, we think of tanks, jets, missile defense systems and more recently, information space. But what about the realm of the microscopic, the biological or the genetic?

Whether you think biotechnology, genetics and microbes constitute another plane upon the modern battlefield or not is irrelevant. Someone else already does, and they have a head start on the rest of the world.

Genotype Specific Bioweapons

The Project for a New American Century or PNAC for short, penned a particularly unhinged policy paper in 2000 titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century.”

In it, among many other things, it specifically writes:

Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare on air, land, and sea will be vastly different than it is today, and “combat” likely will take place in new dimensions: in space, “cyber-space,” and perhaps the world of microbes.

…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.

Advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes sound like the stuff of science fiction, and even if it were developed, it would be by the “bad guys,” right?

Wrong. As a matter of fact, the Western-backed apartheid government in South Africa in the 1980’s under Project Coast, attempted to create genotype specific bioweapons aimed at sterilizing the nation’s black women. PBS Frontline’s article, “What Happened in South Africa?” would recount:

In 1998 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission held hearings investigating activities of the apartheid-era government. Toward the end of the hearings, the Commission looked into the apartheid regime’s Chemical and Biological Warfare (CBW) program and allegations that it developed a sterility vaccine to use on black South Africans, employed toxic and chemical poison weapons for political asssassination, and in the late 1970s provided anthrax and cholera to Rhodesian troops for use against guerrilla rebels in their war to overthrow Rhodesia’s white minority rule.

While South Africa’s entire CBW program was abhorrent, what is particularly frightening is the use of South Africa’s national vaccination program as a vector for infecting black women with viruses meant to sterilize them. Now that vaccination programs are being pushed globally, there lies the danger that such weapons could be used against entire regions of the planet.

PBS would elaborate further on the CBW program, stating that the South African government:

Developed lethal chemical and biological weapons that targeted ANC [African National Congress] political leaders and their supporters as well as populations living in the black townships. These weapons included an infertility toxin to secretly sterilize the black population; skin-absorbing poisons that could be applied to the clothing of targets; and poison concealed in products such as chocolates and cigarettes.

PNAC’s dream of genotype specific bioweapons then, is not some far-off science fiction future, it is something that has been pursued in earnest for decades, and apparently by interests aligned to the West, not enemies of it.

Zika and GM Mosquitoes

Though it is so far impossible to confirm a link between the two, it is troubling nonetheless to see the mosquito-transmitted Zika virus spreading in Brazil precisely from where GM (genetically modified) mosquitoes were released several years ago.

A 2012 entry in Nature titled, “Brazil tests GM mosquitoes to fight Dengue,” would report:

Scientists in Brazil say an experiment to reduce populations of the dengue-carrying Aedes aegyptimosquito, by releasing millions of genetically modified (GM) insects into the wild, is working.

More than ten million modified male mosquitoes were released in the city of Juazeiro, a city of 288,000 people, over a period of time starting a year ago.

The US CDC (Center for Disease Control) would report that Zika virus cases in northeast Brazil were first officially recognized in early 2015, with international hysteria finally reached early this year. The cases seem most concentrated in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, upon the borders of which the city of Juazeiro lies.

What could have happened between 2011 and 2016 that might have led to this development? Could the GM mosquitoes designed to stamp out dengue have mutated in some unpredictable way? And could this experiment have caused the Zika virus itself to mutate in an unpredictable way? It already has mutated once, allowing it to spread among humans more prolifically.

Or what if GM mosquitoes supposedly meant to wipe out dengue were serving as a vector for something else entirely? We can only imagine the sort of stories, excuses and feigned ignorance the South African government would have conjured had its genotype specific bioweapons worked, and black women began turning up sterilized in huge numbers after receiving their “vaccines.”

Mosquitoes as a Vaccine Vector

Using mosquitoes as a vector to deliver engineered genetic material to humans as a sort of involuntary, inescapable “vaccine” is already a reality. The London Telegraph in its article, “Genetically modified mosquitos could be used to spread vaccine for malaria,” reported in 2010 that:

Experts believe “flying vaccinators” could eventually be a radical new way of tackling malaria.

The new approach targets the salivary gland of the Anopheles mosquito.

Scientists in Japan have engineered an insect producing a natural vaccine protein in its saliva which is injected into the bloodstream when it bites.

The “prototype” mosquito carries a vaccine against Leishmania, another potentially fatal parasite disease spread by sand flies.

And if mosquitoes can naturally deliver viruses, and scientists can alter what mosquitoes carry and infect hosts with, it is possible to engineer viruses to deliver virtually anything into targeted populations much in the same way viruses are re-engineered into vectors in labs today through a process called gene therapy. In the wrong hands, this technology and these techniques could become terrifying weapons.

For those in the middle of the Zika virus hysteria, perhaps it already has.

How Could They? Why Would They?

To answer “how could they possibly do something so diabolical?” we need only think back to 2003 and recall how the United States intentionally lied to the world, then between its initial invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, killed upward to a million people. This includes several thousand of its own soldiers and civilians, many of whom it appears were killed by militants armed and funneled into the country by the United States’ closest regional allies, with the US’ resolute backing.

To answer “why” American and European special interests seek to render any particular population sick, weak and they and/or their offspring incapable of perpetuating a viable civilization, PNAC itself sums it up quite clearly:

The United States is the world’s only superpower, combining preeminent military power, global technological leadership, and the world’s largest economy. Moreover, America stands at the head of a system of alliances which includes the world’s other leading democratic powers. At present the United States faces no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.

A population racked with birth defects, diminishing health and IQs and a lack of physical vitality constitutes the enemy every hegemon throughout history has dreamt of facing both on the battlefield and upon the grand chessboard of geopolitics.

Whether the Zika outbreak is linked to some insidious biowarefare program, an experiment gone wrong or simply the forces of nature, it showcases the danger biology can pose and reminds us of what greater dangers may yet await us if we do not properly prepare and protect ourselves.

Domestic Biotech is Imperative to National Defense

It has been almost painful to watch the rest of the world attempt to catch up to the United States and Europe in the information war. For decades the West dominated information warfare without contest.

Only now have nations like Russia, China, Iran and others finally caught up and in some cases exceeded Western capabilities. Only now are nations finally investing seriously in information and cyber warfare capabilities. Only now does it seem that nations realize the folly of depending on others for both information, and information technology.

Russia recently decided to switch to local computer processor manufacturers to run on all computers used for official business. This is because foreign corporations making processors imported into the Russian Federation had been apparently compromised on the factory floor with the cooperation of these foreign corporations by US intelligence agencies.

We can easily imagine the danger of having US intelligence agencies getting into Russia’s IT infrastructure through these backdoor passes. It doesn’t take much imagination to think about the trouble US intelligence agencies could cause if they could get inside Russia’s human, natural and agricultural genomes.

Developing a viable domestic biotech industry is not only a matter of economic prosperity, but clearly also a matter of vital national security. Foreign corporations should no better be able to access a nation’s “genetic code and files” than it can its computer code and files. After all, genetic information is not entirely unlike digital information.
Brazil and other nations that have invited foreign biotech corporations to meddle with their human, natural and agricultural genomes are likened to those nations who hand their vital infrastructure over to foreign interests only to find out through Wikileaks years later the sort of invasive spying, abuses and other means of self-serving treachery this access has been exploited for.

Let’s not wait for Wikileaks to tell us 10 years from now just how bad the nations of the world had been infiltrated and exploited through biotechnology before we recognize this industry as absolutely vital to national security and begin investing in it domestically, rather than outsourcing it overseas.

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

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: State Crime

Tap runs brown in Louisiana’s impoverished northeast

With infrastructure funds going unspent, residents have lack of drinking supplies and iron sediment flowing from pipes