Shipping Our Economy, Our Jobs And Our Prosperity To China

As the U.S. economy continues to implode, large American corporations are investing billions upon billions of dollars in China. But all of this investment comes at a price. Over the past several decades, hundreds of factories and manufacturing facilities that would have been constructed in the United States, along with millions of decent paying jobs, have ended up going to China instead where labor is so much cheaper. In the process, China has become a massive economic powerhouse, while once thriving manufacturing cities in the United States such as Detroit are now rusted-out corpses. In fact, China’s economy has grown so rapidly that it is being projected that in 2010 China will replace Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Not only that, but China has already overtaken Germany and is now the biggest exporter of goods in the entire world. But none of this growth in communist China would have been possible without all of the globalism and free trade that U.S. politicians from both parties have been pushing on us for the last 40 years. When they were selling us on the benefits of “free trade” they didn’t tell us that we would end up shipping our economy, our jobs and our prosperity over to China.

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Court’s Dual Standards on Free Speech

A majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court seems to believe in free speech for corporations when it comes to influencing elections, but not so much for actual people trying to end wars. 

Five months after the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that the First Amendment guarantees corporations the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in political campaigns, the Court issued a ruling making the First Amendment less sacrosanct when it comes to private citizens advocating for peaceful conflict resolution.

In a 6-3 ruling on June 21, the Court upheld a federal law that criminalizes giving “material support,” including providing “expert advice,” to groups that have been designated by the State Department as terrorist organizations.

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Number One in War

No End in Sight

US law officially proclaims Memorial Day “as a day of prayer for permanent peace.”

However, the US is much closer to permanent war than permanent peace. Corporations are profiting from wars and lobbying politicians for more. The US, and the rest of the world, cannot afford the rising personal and financial costs of permanent war.

No doubt, the USA is number one in war. This coming year the US will spend 708 billion dollars on war and another $125 billion for Veterans Affairs – over $830 billion. In a distant second place is China which spent about $84 billion on its military in 2008.

The US also leads the world in the sale of lethal weapons to others, selling about one of every three weapons worldwide. The USA’s major clients? South Korea, Israel and United Arab Emirates.

Our country has 5 percent of the world’s population but accounts for more than 40% of the military spending for the whole world.

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“Things Are Never Going To Get THAT Bad”

Our recent article, “20 Things You Will Need To Survive When The Economy Collapses And The Next Great Depression Begins“, has drawn some intense criticism from those who believe that the U.S. economy is so strong that it could never completely and totally collapse. In fact, this blog is being accused of officially going off the deep end. Why? It’s not because we are pointing out that the economy is bad. After all, according to a recent Pew Research national poll, 88 percent of Americans rate national economic conditions as only fair or poor. No, rather it is because we are projecting the eventual complete and total collapse of the U.S. economy. There still seems to be a belief among a large number of Americans “that things are never going to get THAT bad”. But they are going to get that bad. It's just that most people do not realize it yet.

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Collapse of the Standard of Living in the USA

Studies Reveal Declining Living Standards and Increasing Anger

A series of recent studies conducted by the Pew Research Center shed new light on the scope of the economic crisis in the US and the level of hostility the majority of the American population holds for the US government.

Released in March, before the passage of the Obama administration’s health care legislation, a survey entitled “Health Care Reform—Can’t Live With It, or Without It” indicates that 92 percent of Americans give the national economy a negative rating. No fewer than 70 percent of the respondents report having suffered job-related and financial problems in the past year, an increase from 59 percent the year before. Fifty-four percent report someone in their home has been without a job and looking for work in the past year, up from 39 percent in 2009.

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How ‘Free Market’ Snookers Americans

Editor’s Note: The Big Lie being sold to rank-and-file Tea Partiers is that “big government” is the great threat to their freedoms, not the unrestrained power of corporations, many of which are quietly funding the right-wing movement that seeks to block even modest government efforts to protect the people from corporate excesses.

Deceived by the Right’s massive messaging machine, the Tea Partiers and other middle-class conservatives are, in effect, serving themselves up as modern-day serfs to corporate power, a point underscored in this guest essay by Don Monkerud:

Although some Americans worry about the growing power of the government, few understand the real power that controls their everyday lives.

Private monopolies determine the brand of breakfast cereal we eat, the type of car we drive, where we bank, the medical treatment we receive, the fashion of our clothes, and the kind of toothbrush we use, in addition to the beer we drink, the health insurance we buy, and what we feed our pets.

Under the guise of "the free market," conglomerates merged and bought up smaller companies, until, today, they dominate their respective markets in every commodity offered for sale in the U.S.

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America’s Invisible Homeless and Hungry

The most enduring images of the Great Depression from 1929 through to the beginning of World War II for America in 1941 were those of homeless people, hobo camps, and of soup kitchens to feed the hungry.

During the Reagan years, the media was filled with stories of the homeless as if to refute any improvement in the economy under a conservative president. These days, however, as America’s national debt and deficit continues to spiral out of control, the poor and the hungry remain largely unseen and, most significantly, largely unreported.

About the only thing one can find on the White House website with regard to homelessness are statements about the way “green jobs” will solve the problem. The first stimulus package, however, increased the amount of money that the nation’s food banks received in 2009 so someone involved understood America has a problem.

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Global Sweatshop Wage Slavery

In its mission statement, the National Labor Committee (NLC) highlights the problem stating:

“Transnational corporations (TNCs) now roam the world to find the cheapest and most vulnerable workers.”

They’re mostly young women in poor countries like China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Haiti, and many others working up to 14 or more hours a day for sub-poverty wages under horrific conditions.

Because TNCs are unaccountable, a dehumanized global workforce is ruthlessly exploited, denied their civil liberties, a living wage, and the right to work in dignity in healthy safe environments. NLC conducts “popular campaigns based on (its) original research to promote worker rights and pressure companies to end human and labor abuses. (It) views worker rights in the global economy as indivisible and inalienable human rights and (believes) now is the time to secure them for all on the planet.”

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A Suicide Attack on the IRS

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

~ Arthur Miller

The recent suicide attack made by a man who crashed his plane into a Texas building housing IRS offices raises questions that neither the mainstream media nor other establishment voices will dare to examine. Such a frontal assault on the state – like suicide bombers in the Middle East – must not be seen as an indictment of political systems. The media will go into its obligatory “damage control” mode and marginalize the man – Joe Stack – as a “kook,” a “terrorist,” or an “extremist,” another threat whose example can be turned to the benefit of the state. His lengthy, but inelegant, written statement explaining his anger at the government was quickly labeled a “diatribe,” a “rant,” and a “rambling screed,” to discourage others from reading his words and having their thinking infected thereby. Far safer to have this man thought of as “insane,” for what rational person would want to give his writing serious attention?

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A Medical Doctor’s Open Letter Opposing the McCain Sponsored Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA)

Dear Senator McCain:

Though I am a resident of New York, not Arizona, I suggest that someone in your staff reads my letter very carefully as I believe you are unwittingly sponsoring a bill with potentially onerous consequences, one that might if I read the information about it properly, lead to the death of hundreds of my patients fighting advanced, terminal cancer. I do not think, if I am correct in my interpretation, that you would want their death on your conscience.

As some background, I am a registered Republican, and in the past have donated many thousands to Republican causes including your re-election, even when it became clear to me the Party, including you, had strayed significantly from its mission of limited government, deficit reduction, and ultimately, protection of individual liberty. In terms of my professional activities, I am a former journalist (Time Inc), currently a physician and cancer researcher, who educated at three Ivy League schools (Brown undergraduate, Columbia post grad, Cornell for medical school). I finished a fellowship in cancer immunology under Robert A. Good, for ten years President of Sloan-Kettering, and the most published author in the history of medicine. Under Dr. Good’s direction, 29 years ago I began researching the use of diet, nutrients, and proteolytic enzymes against advanced cancer.

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