Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change. ~ Malcolm X
Sure, American politicians have been bought and paid for by the Wall Street giants. See this,this and this.
And everyone knows that the White House and Congress – while talking about cracking down on Wall Street with strict regulation – have actually watered down some of the most important protections that were in place.
For example, Senator Cantwell says that the new derivatives legislation is weaker than the old regulation. And leading credit default swap expert Satyajit Das says that the new credit default swap regulations not only won’t help stabilize the economy, they might actually help to destabilize it.
But the U.S. is not being sold out in a vacuum.
On March 1, 1999, countries accounting for more than 90 per cent of the global financial services market signed onto the World Trade Organization’s Financial Services Agreement (FSA). By signing the FSA, they committed to deregulate their financial markets.
Both liberals and conservatives have long lamented that Americans have not been bearing their fair share of the costs of the U.S. Empire’s longstanding imperialist escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That’s ridiculous.
Consider the ever-increasing debt that is being added to each person’s balance sheet. Each American currently owes $40,000, which is his individual share of the debt that the U.S. government owes its creditors. Like it or not, the federal government, through the IRS, wields the authority to collect that money from you and everyone else.
On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to allow the feds to go $1.7 trillion deeper in debt. According to an article in the Washington Post, that amounts to an increase of $6,000 per person. That will increase the amount you owe to $46,000. If you have a family of four, your share of the government’s debt will be $184,000.
Suppose the IRS decided to collect that money from you. How easily could you pay them?
President Barack Obama’s 2011 fiscal budget projection was released Monday for initial debate and eventual approval. There are some obvious winners and losers in purely budgetary terms. Education, small businesses, stimulus projects, air travel, and other areas go extra funding. Big banks, the NASA Moon program, and moves to curtail climate change got less funding.
Usually the “winners” and “losers” in the budget are pretty cut and dry, but one area is always less easily categorized. The Pentagon and Department of Defense saw a 3.4 percent increase in the 2011 fiscal outlook, but it remains to be seen whether this is a good or a bad thing for the U.S.
In this time of financial upheaval and massive fiscal deficits so-called “spend thrift” politicians are clamoring to cut spending in virtually every direction. However very few, including the current Obama administration, seem willing to pull the plug on America’s inflated defense budget.
But first, I want to tell you about Mississippi’s infant mortality rate. The rate of infant mortality is the number of infants who are born alive but die before their first birthday, per 1,000 live births. In other words, if infant mortality is 5, that means that 5 of every 1,000 babies in that population will not survive the first year of life.
According to the CIA World Factbook, the estimated infant mortality rate in the United States for 2009 is 6.22, which is high for an industrialized democracy. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the infant mortality rate in Mississippi is 11.4. Only Florida is worse, at 14.1. By contrast, the infant mortality rate for Washington and Minnesota is 5.1.
Now, here’s where Iran comes in — according to the Times of London, last October “five top Iranian doctors, including a senior official at the health ministry in Tehran, were quietly brought to Mississippi” to advise Mississippians how to lower their infant mortality rate.
Rob Hurlbut was standing on the platform of the San Diego Trolley when he saw a group of armed security guards tackle a man for smoking a cigarette.
He began shooting video with his digital SLR, prompting a female guard to tell him he was not allowed to take photos.
Hurlbut continued shooting as three guards struggled to handcuff the man with one of them driving his knee into the man’s face.
The guards would tell the man to stop resisting but the man wasn’t resisting. He was, in fact, telling the guard that he was trying to cooperate, but they were hurting him.
As Hurlbut continued shooting, a couple of the guards positioned their bodies around the melee on the ground in an attempt to prevent him from filming it.
The guards finally handcuffed the man and walked him off. Hurlbut followed behind him with his camera.
One of the guards pointed at him and said, “Go over and get that guy right there.”
Another guard said, “Stop him from taking our picture.”
Here’s an O.K. video featuring Hernando de Soto, on shantytowns and the global countereconomy:
I say that the video is just O.K. because it’s a good introduction to the situation (which is important and interesting, and which de Soto has done a lot of really fascinating work on), but it flounders around with some weak reformist platitudes when it comes to figuring out what to make of the situation, and where to go from it. In the presence of a massive exercise of countereconomic industry and ingenuity, De Soto rightly sees that government paper mazes and the government force which back them up have constrained extralegal workers — marginalizing their livelihoods, burning out their homes and property, and excluding them from access to sustaining and stabilizing resources like capital, credit, and reliable arbitration of disputes. Extralegal workers have responded by creating their own parallel cities and institutions through which they can produce non-statist alternatives — proudly unauthorized homes, neighborhoods, cities, informal microcredit, contracts, and ad hoc private mediation. It has allowed the poorest and most marginalized and exploited people in the world to build thriving parallel metropolises up from nothing, sometimes numbering in the millions of people, through their own labor and creativity out of little more than cardboard and scrap wood.
This may be the only place you ever hear what I’m about to say, so let me say it up front: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) may be the most honest member of the United States Congress. Per CNSNews.com:
When CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance — a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill — Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
Pelosi’s office provided the usual “interstate commerce clause” cover later, but the moment provided a peek into the mind of a typical American politician.
The claim that then-President George W. Bush referred to the US Constitution as “a goddamned piece of paper” has been credibly called into question, but there’s a generous dollop of verisimilitude in that claim. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t, but it’s hard to believe that he didn’t at least think it.
