Sunday, August 29, 2010

The national debt and the runaway humongous deficits are the single biggest threat to US national security

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/214352-Gates-Foundation-Invests-in-Monsanto-at-the-Expense-of-Small-scale-African-Farmers

The national debt and the runaway humongous deficits in USA are the single biggest threat to US national security....after the utter corruption to the core...which is beyond redemption....

WTO, where governments collude in private against their domestic pressure groups....I have Been hearing rumors that administration is striking a deal with the Chinese to sell parts of the San Joaquin Valley to the Chinese as repayment of debt.... Must be nice work selling America off the special interests one parcel at a time.

Yes, that's how it's done. I must sound like a broken record by now...our economy was broken cleverly and deliberately. Banks tied their nooses. Psy ops were run. Various groups were stirred up. False flags were run. War and collapse and murder in the streets came in a roaring inferno. The elites and UN came in and decided how to divide and resettle us and did exactly that. The country finally was broken to pieces and sold to special interest one parcel at a time, parts in wholesale global auction. Pay very close attention to this description and see the evolution here. It is the Soros and Illuminati way of doing things. Yes, I see it here. Very clearly. As you stated, too. America 2010 is feeling more and more like 1990 Yugoslavia 5 minutes before midnight and everyone felt it dying and being destroyed....
I do believe that I will one more time look back on a country where I once lived that no longer exists. This time, it will be called USA.


Global Collapse of the Fiat Money System: Too Big To Fail Global Banks Will Collapse Between Now and First Quarter 2011

The economy is collapsing faster than the Arctic glaciers, Barry is flying killer drones over Yemen, Agfhanistan is a mess with 7 new dead overnight, BarryCare helpfully increased the rolls of Medicaid to 50 million and going stronger than Hurricane Danielle in destruction, Obama says he is tired of plastering his fake CIA/birth certificate... to his forehead any longer, the Beck rally was disappointingly not racist enough...to properly mine it for political propaganda fodder(Link here), California students get first federal tracking devices (yes, it's true, Link here....there are TPTB to talk about and dragons to slay and pretty pics of Dear Leader to post here today...and CIA/MOSSAD/MI6/DGSE/BND/CSIS.... etc., shenanigans continue unabated worldwide...

Excellent summary of the coming tax increases - should please all the O'pologists....:


http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=287


http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.php?action=printable&tid=616140

http://www.currentconcerns.ch/index.php?id=1096

In February 2009, the head of U.S. intelligence - Dennis Blair - said that the global financial crisis was the largest threat to America's national security. All of America's intelligence agencies apparently agreed.

The same month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - Admiral Mullen - also agreed.

Now, Mullen is focusing on a specific economic threat. Specifically, Mullen is focusing on the debt:

The national debt is the single biggest threat to national security, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tax payers will be paying around $600 billion in interest on the national debt by 2012, the chairman told students and local leaders in Detroit.

“That’s one year’s worth of defense budget,” he said, adding that the Pentagon needs to cut back on spending.

But at least war is good for the economy, right? At least spending on defense will help the economy recover and climb out of this pit of debt, no?

Actually, no.

Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said that war can be very bad for the economy. For example, in 2003, Stiglitz wrote:

War is widely thought to be linked to economic good times. The second world war is often said to have brought the world out of depression, and war has since enhanced its reputation as a spur to economic growth. Some even suggest that capitalism needs wars, that without them, recession would always lurk on the horizon.

Today, we know that this is nonsense. The 1990s boom showed that peace is economically far better than war. The Gulf war of 1991 demonstrated that wars can actually be bad for an economy.
Stiglitz has said that this decade's Iraq war has been very bad for the economy. See this, this and this.

And as the New Republic noted last year:

Conservative Harvard economist Robert Barro has argued that increased military spending during WWII actually depressed other parts of the economy.

Also from the right, Robert Higgs has done good work showing that military spending wasn't the primary source of the recovery and that GDP growth during WWII has been "greatly exaggerated."

And from the left, Larry Summers and Brad Delong argued back in 1988 that "five-sixths of the decline in output relative to the trend that occurred during the Depression had been made up before 1942."

As I noted in January:

All of the spending on unnecessary wars adds up.

The U.S. is adding trillions to its debt burden to finance its multiple wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.

Two top American economists - Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff - show that the more indebted a country is, with a government debt/GDP ratio of 0.9, and external debt/GDP of 0.6 being critical thresholds, the more GDP growth drops materially.

Specifically, Reinhart and Rogoff write:

The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies...
Indeed, it should be obvious to anyone who looks at the issue that deficits do matter.

A PhD economist told me:
War always causes recession. Well, if it is a very short war, then it may stimulate the economy in the short-run. But if there is not a quick victory and it drags on, then wars always put the nation waging war into a recession and hurt its economy.
You know about America's unemployment problem. You may have even heard that the U.S. may very well have suffered a permanent destruction of jobs.

But did you know that the defense employment sector is booming?

As I pointed out in August, public sector spending - and mainly defense spending - has accounted for virtually all of the new job creation in the past 10 years:
The U.S. has largely been financing job creation for ten years. Specifically, as the chief economist for BusinessWeek, Michael Mandel, points out, public spending has accounted for virtually all new job creation in the past 10 years:

Private sector job growth was almost non-existent over the past ten years. Take a look at this horrifying chart:

longjobs1.gif

Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.

It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years. Take a look at this chart:

longjobs2.gif

Over the past 10 years, the private sector has generated roughly 1.1 million additional jobs, or about 100K per year. The public sector created about 2.4 million jobs.

But even that gives the private sector too much credit. Remember that the private sector includes health care, social assistance, and education, all areas which receive a lot of government support.

***

Most of the industries which had positive job growth over the past ten years were in the HealthEdGov sector. In fact, financial job growth was nearly nonexistent once we take out the health insurers.

Let me finish with a final chart.

longjobs4.gif

Without a decade of growing government support from rising health and education spending and soaring budget deficits, the labor market would have been flat on its back.

Indeed, Robert Reich lamented this month:
America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military.
Back to my January essay:
Raw Story argues that the U.S. is building a largely military economy:

The use of the military-industrial complex as a quick, if dubious, way of jump-starting the economy is nothing new, but what is amazing is the divergence between the military economy and the civilian economy, as shown by this New York Times chart.

In the past nine years, non-industrial production in the US has declined by some 19 percent. It took about four years for manufacturing to return to levels seen before the 2001 recession -- and all those gains were wiped out in the current recession.

By contrast, military manufacturing is now 123 percent greater than it was in 2000 -- it has more than doubled while the rest of the manufacturing sector has been shrinking...

It's important to note the trajectory -- the military economy is nearly three times as large, proportionally to the rest of the economy, as it was at the beginning of the Bush administration. And it is the only manufacturing sector showing any growth. Extrapolate that trend, and what do you get?

The change in leadership in Washington does not appear to be abating that trend...[121]
So most of the job creation has been by the public sector. But because the job creation has been financed with loans from China and private banks, trillions in unnecessary interest charges have been incurred by the U.S.And this shows military versus non-military durable goods shipments:



[Click here to view full image.]

So we're running up our debt (which will eventually decrease economic growth), but the only jobs we're creating are military and other public sector jobs.

PhD economist Dean Baker points out that America's massive military spending on unnecessary and unpopular wars lowers economic growth and increases unemployment:
Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.
A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP. This was roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq War.

Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending. Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased. Construction and manufacturing were especially big job losers in the projections, losing 210,000 and 90,000 jobs, respectively.

The scenario we asked Global Insight [recognized as the most consistently accurate forecasting company in the world] to model turned out to have vastly underestimated the increase in defense spending associated with current policy. In the most recent quarter, defense spending was equal to 5.6 percent of GDP. By comparison, before the September 11th attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that defense spending in 2009 would be equal to just 2.4 percent of GDP. Our post-September 11th build-up was equal to 3.2 percentage points of GDP compared to the pre-attack baseline. This means that the Global Insight projections of job loss are far too low...

The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million. In other words, the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run.
The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has also shown that non-military spending creates more jobs than military spending.

So we're running up our debt - which will eventually decrease economic growth - and creating many fewer jobs than if we spent the money on non-military purposes.
As I wrote last month:

It is ironic that America's huge military spending is what made us an empire ... but our huge military is what is bankrupting us ... thus destroying our status as an empire.

Even Admiral Mullen seems to agree:

The Pentagon needs to cut back on spending.

“We’re going to have to do that if it’s going to survive at all,” Mullen said, “and do it in a way that is predictable.”

Indeed, Mullen said:
For industry and adequate defense funding to survive ... the two must work together. Otherwise, he added, “this wave of debt” will carry over from year to year, and eventually, the defense budget will be cut just to facilitate the debt.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates agrees as well. As David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post in May:

After a decade of war and financial crisis, America has run up debts that pose a national security problem, not just an economic one.

***

One of the strongest voices arguing for fiscal responsibility as a national security issue has been Defense Secretary Bob Gates. He gave a landmark speech in Kansas on May 8, invoking President Dwight Eisenhower's warnings about the dangers of an imbalanced military-industrial state.

"Eisenhower was wary of seeing his beloved republic turn into a muscle-bound, garrison state -- militarily strong, but economically stagnant and strategically insolvent," Gates said. He warned that America was in a "parlous fiscal condition" and that the "gusher" of military spending that followed Sept. 11, 2001, must be capped. "We can't have a strong military if we have a weak economy," Gates told reporters who covered the Kansas speech.

On Thursday the defense secretary reiterated his pitch that Congress must stop shoveling money at the military, telling Pentagon reporters: "The defense budget process should no longer be characterized by 'business as usual' within this building -- or outside of it."


Forecasting the development of the crisis.....

So far and even in the first world financial crisis, the attempts at a solution of the world financial bubble have not been sufficient to eliminate the crisis potential. More than half of the toxic waste products and the public debts, notably in the US, remain unsolved and are still to be corrected. So we have to reckon with a second stage of the crisis (“double dip”).
A next drastic correction of the dollar is overdue. Confidence in the dollar has been shaken due to the mass manipulation by the FED and the American high street banks. Presently the dollar is only accepted because the Americans have brought about a Euro-crisis and so shaken confidence in the Euro as well. But this diversionary tactic will not help for long. The US are not only overly indebted but also threatened with insolvency. Because of their international war and import obligations the US need, after all, more than 360 billion dollars inflow from all over the world or glut of money from the FED to just stay solvent. If this inflow comes to a standstill, insolvency and probably currency reforms are due.
Indeed, the US have already twice been able to utilize mega-crises of their country for economic recovery by means of their participation in world wars, by selling the output of their military production and by afterwards commandeering the spoils of war (German gold, German patents, occupation costs). This could inveigle the current government to try the same method again. After all, war preparations against Iran are already made, only an 9/11 is still missing.
So a currency reform, which is in itself necessary, could be deferred by war for a while, but afterwards it would be all the stronger.
In Europe we got off lightly – though not at all cheaply – in the first banking crisis and might have been well on track for correction, had not the Greek crisis inveigled politicians for a second time to assume bank debts to be paid by their tax payers and to assume mutual liability for ailing states in the EU (transfer union).These extremely irresponsible schemes of fiscal policy have taken place in the last months. In one country, we have postponed and replaced state bankruptcy, but by doing this we have brought other countries to a level of indebtedness, that might no longer be manageable by public saving or inflation.
Now it appears that the alleged “European Solidarity” is being misused by the lazy, the unreliable and the criminal elements to exploit the hardworking, the reliable and the upright people. The euro zone might break apart partly or wholly because of this, maybe even the European Union.
Had Greece been allowed to unwind by means of insolvency (state bankruptcy), this would have been the more solid, the simpler, and the cheaper way. Our politicians’ bustle has not solved the problem; it has only passed on the damage from the banks to the tax payers – mostly the German ones. Thus in the next two years we will witness dramatic financial conflicts in Europe, possibly also a Euro-currency reform together with or followed by the US. Yet maybe a short and painful operation like a currency reform is still better and cheaper than a longer crisis period. A currency reform might even spare us recession or even depression which will otherwise be sure to come.•.....

On International Trade imbalance and WTO....

More deft diplomacy’ envisioned by many for so long... is NOT going to balance the global trade imbalances any more than King Kanube could stop the tides from coming in.

All nations act according to what they perceive to be in their best interest at any given point in time.

China and Germany will continue their export machine operating at full speed since that is the only way they can assure employment for their workers.

The time has to come when the countries with huge trade deficits such as US and Europe (minus Germany) have to say enough is enough and no more and hence send WTO to dustbin of history. Deft diplomacy can not solve a problem when national economic interests are at stake for both - China and Germany with trade surpluses on one hand and US and EU (minus Germany) with trade deficits on the other.

Diplomatic talks about China’s ever increasing trade surpluses has been around for a long time without any tangible concrete action that reverses the trend.

Only way out is for US and EU to look after their own national economic interests before it is too late to be able to do anything about it....

As for the USA....

The sheeple will never connect the dots even if your local paper says they just sold all the city, county and state land to the feds because they were broke.

This land is your land. This land was my land. This land is THEIR land now.

http://cofarmbureaublog.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/leaked-memo-uncovers-administration-land-grab/]Leaked Memo Uncovers Obama Land Grab


The CLEAR Act of Another Federal Land Grab


White House Land Grab


Admin document reveals big change in federal land mgmt (colossal land grab by executive fiat?)


Federal Land Grab Will Bypass Congress


Excellent preparedness post for the Aware:

Final Survival Preparations


Those with faith in the USG, don't bother.....

http://publicintelligence.net/doj-terrorism-and-criminal-extremism-terms-and-concepts-guide/

THE ORIGINAL BANKSTER EXPOSE!


It's the 15th anniversary of " The Money Masters - How International Bankers Gained Control of America ". We can only imagine what would have happened if 10's of millions of Americans had seen this instead of just 10's of thousands . Still, it's a 'must watch' if you've never seen it.

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