HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Scare a liberal and VOTE FOR CONSERVATIVES ON ELECTION DAY!

Taking A Vacation, Dear Sound Of Cannons Readers..........

Hey all, we're going to take a little break for some much needed R&R.  We may get some random postings in, but we'll be largely dormant until the first weekend in November.  Be sure to have a safe Halloween holiday and keep track of your children.  ALSO: Vote in your local elections.  While many people consider them meaningless, they're so important nowadays.  ELECTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES!  If smarter voters had stopped the likes of Barry Soetoro and Elizabeth Warren at the local levels, we wouldn't be dealing with these socialist libtards right now.  So stack your local posts with conservatives and libertarians......you could save your country in the process.

The US Is Fast Becoming a Third World Police State

As a P.T. (often referred to as perpetual traveller, permanent tourist or prior taxpayer), I have travelled to nearly 100 countries.  During those travels there has always been one defining moment, upon entry into a country, which shows that the country is what is generally thought of as a “third world country”.
It is the moment when, upon arrival, you are charged a fee to enter the country.  The reason generally being that the government of the country has so destroyed the economy and/or they have so little understanding of what creates wealth that they think that the way to make their country prosperous is to charge a fee upon entry rather than allowing people to enter freely and transact, trade and spend their money in the economy.  Either that or the government is so desperate for money that it uses this as a significant source of revenue.
They have this in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bolivia and numerous other similar countries.  And now, they have it in the US.
The US has long-used “visa application fees” to bilk money from people in countries like Thailand as a way to raise money but now the US has announced that they are going to charge a $5.50 fee to Canadians upon entering the US.
The fee is ludicrous and counterproductive for many reasons.  Not least of which is making it five dollars and fifty cents, ensuring that payment of the transaction will take twice as long as normal to make the extra change.  Canadians who are one of the only large groups of people still bringing some economic activity into the US will both be turned off by having to pay to enter the US but also by the extra long lines to enter as they make change for this fee.
Not to mention the hilarity of calling it an “inspection fee”.  Does this mean that if we would not like to be inspected then we don’t have to pay?
CHECKPOINTS POPPING UP EVERYWHERE IN THE US
Checkpoints have recently gone up in Flint, Michigan and TSA VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams have spread our across Tennessee to stop drivers and “check their documents”.
As well, at the recent Libertopia conference I attended in San Diego I met three young freedom-lovers who told me that on their drive from Phoenix to San Diego they encountered three different checkpoints.
HARD TO GET IN – EVEN HARDER TO GET OUT
I have just returned from the US and, as usual, I had to make it through a plethora of government people to get out.
Luckily, I didn’t try to leave via one of the airports, like Boston Logan where the TSA has begun to conduct “chat-downs” where TSA goons will slime their way through crowds in the airport and chat with you!  Should you refuse to chat with them you will be taken away for extra-screening!
However, I did go for my standard TSA patdown and, as is becoming more and more common, when you walk down the gangplank to the airplane there are a number of other government people hiding around the corner who stop you and ask if you are taking more than $10,000 with you.  I snapped a photo of them on my way down.

As I walked down the runway, one of the men with guns told me, “go to the third man down, he can take care of you there.”  Oh, is that what they are doing, taking care of us?  It doesn’t feel that way.
CHRONIC NERVOUS SYSTEM DISORDER INJECTIONS ALSO NOW AVAILABLE
Things in the US just get more and more bizarre.
As though all the government harassing isn’t enough, as I was about to leave the San Diego airport I spotted this “H1N1 vaccination station”.

H1N1 (remember the Swine Flu hoax?) has been shown to be nearly harmless yet still to this day, in the USA, there are places offering to give you H1N1 vaccinations.  Those vaccinations, by the way, have been proven to cause chronic nervous system disorders.  I, tragically, had this hit very close to home last year when my mother, unbeknownst to me, got talked into taking a Swine Flu vaccine shot.  A few days later and she couldn’t walk anymore.  She still, to this day, cannot walk.
THE POLICE STATE CONTINUES
The photos coming out of the US continue to look like something you’d see in a country like North Korea or in the old Soviet Bloc.
This photo, from a small gathering of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Phoenix, shows that not only the police outnumbered the protesters but showed the level of intimidation and force used against just a few people sitting in a park.  Their crime?  They were there after “curfew”.  I’ve been searching my copy of the US Constitution for any reference to curfew but have yet to find anything.

MY DAYS VISITING THE US ARE NUMBERED
I have already stated that I will never bring my family to the US until I see major changes and the TSA stop their radiation baths and groping.  However, it is now getting very close to the point where I will stop going altogether.
For anyone who has their eyes open and are paying attention, the writing is on the wall as to what is going to happen in the US.  All it will take is another 9/11 event or for the US Government to default on its debts or for the dollar to enter hyperinflation and the US will be locked down like a prison.

In many ways, it already is.
For those who live in the US, it is imperative to begin making moves now to protect yourself.  Action items like attaining a foreign passport, moving your assets outside of the country and owning precious metals are just some of the things that all rational people in the US should be doing now.

PETER SCHIFF: Obama’s College Tuition Plan Will Prop Up Bloated Schools

President Obama yesterday announced a plan that will ensure students are able to commit to higher levels of federally backed student loans.
By limiting student obligations to repay, and by passing more of the repayment burden onto taxpayers, colleges and universities will be able to continue to raise tuitions at a rate that outpaces nearly every other cost center in the American economy.
The move will come as a great relief to an education establishment increasingly concerned that students might no longer be able to afford skyrocketing tuition rates.
The AP reported today that state support for higher education has fallen 23% after accounting for inflation over the last ten years, even as tuitions have risen 5.6% faster than CPI. This gap has been bridged by a whopping 57% increase in federal student loans over the same time period due to the increased cost of tuition and number of student enrollment.
The Obama plan limits repayment obligations on those federal loans to just 10% of “discretionary income” which it defines as total income above 150% of the federal poverty level – currently translating to about $16,000 for an individual, or $33,500 for a family of four.
The plan also limits the term of obligation to 20 years. These terms represent a substantial easing and acceleration of the terms in Obama’s “Pay as You Earn Plan,” which was just announced last year (see my April 2010 response to that plan).
That plan, which was scheduled to begin in 2014, represented the first time the government had imposed any limits on repayment obligations. It had capped repayments at 15% of discretionary income for 25 years.
Assuming that a successful college graduate would earn, on average, $80,000 per year over the course of the 20-year obligation period, the repayment burden under the new plan will total somewhere around $4,500 per year, or $90,000 for the life of the loan. A less successful graduate who earns say $50,000 per year, on average over the 20-year obligation period, would have a repayment burden of just $1,500 per year, or just $30,000 over the life of the loan.
Any loan amounts above those totals will be forgiven.  As a result, students need not fear the inability to repay large loans. They need not worry about future interest rate increases, which could raise their payments. More importantly, students will feel diminished pressure to obtain high paying jobs. In fact, the less a graduate earns, the greater the amount of loan forgiveness.
For the majority of students, who don’t become very high earners, it will make little difference if loan amounts are $90,000, $180,000 or even more. As the repayment burden will be capped to a percentage of average income, loan repayments will be the same for any loan beyond a certain threshold.  These policies could remove all barriers for larger and larger loans, which will then allow universities to charge higher and higher tuitions. This will permit them to maintain their bloated administration infrastructures and will allow them to continue loading up their campuses with even fancier facilities such as gymnasiums, performing arts centers, food courts, and health centers.
The day of reckoning in which the higher education system would have had to offer programs that fit into the budget of average Americans has been postponed, if not entirely eliminated. Of course the losers in this new arrangement will be American taxpayers who will be on the hook for the unpaid balances. Recently, college loan debt passed credit card debt as the largest, non-mortgage, source of debt in the United States.
The balance of these unpaid student loans will be thrown onto the pile of America’s escalating unfunded debt. Of course, the moral hazard implicit in the program means these liabilities will now pile up even faster. In addition, the program substantially increases the interest rate risk to which taxpayers are already over-exposed due to the short maturities of the national debt. The higher student loan interest rates rise, the larger the unpaid balances that taxpayers will be forced to assume.
Obama’s move is likely to set off a student loan forgiveness arms race in which politicians may continue to ease and cap loan repayment obligations. With nearly a trillion dollars of outstanding college debt rapidly increasing, debt forgiveness for the young could be the political equivalent of protecting social security for the elderly.
If college students were willing to rack up this much debt under the assumption they would have to actually pay it back, imagine how much debt they will be willing to amass now that they realize they do not?  As a result, expect college tuition increases to not only continue but to accelerate.  In a way, Obama would be turning higher education in to a third-party payer system (not too dissimilar from our current health care system – which is also characterized by outsized cost increases).
Under this new system, colleges might charge whatever they want because their customers simply turn the bill over to the U.S. taxpayer who has no say in the transaction. Under such a system what incentive would a kid have to live at home and go to a community college? Why not attend the most expensive university that taxpayer money will allow? I suppose Obama was so impressed with how this dynamic works with health care that he decided education could use some of the same medicine.

The Triumph of America’s Supranational Emergency State

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the destruction of the American Constitution. On October 26, 2001, the Bush administration and U.S. Congress passed the Patriot (Traitor) Act and used the false flag 9/11 attacks to sell it to the American people.
The prediction that the Traitor Act would help the U.S. National Security State completely take over American society has come true. Useless government agencies like the TSA, FBI, IRS, DEA and CIA have been given carte blanche to spy on Americans and crush dissent.
In the last few years, illegal TSA checkpoints have been set up across America to control the movement of people and create a false sense of security in the public mind. Their intent is to get Americans to slowly conform to the new totalitarian society in which government officials treat people like mindless cattle and monitor the individual’s every move.
It is wrong to call America’s totalitarian beast “a National Security State.” It does not provide security and it is not even national. A more fitting term is “Supranational Emergency State.” Let me explain.
America’s Emergency State depends on national emergencies like the 9/11 attacks to strengthen its authority and justify its unconstitutional powers. America has been in a state of national emergency since September 23, 2001, when President Bush issuedExecutive Order 13224 to declare a national emergency.
National Emergency rhetoric is Washington’s version of the religious rhetoric used by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both types of rhetoric have the same function: keep the people dumb and afraid, which is what self-serving politicians, government officials and religious tyrants all desire.
“National Emergency” conjures up feelings of panic and fear. The thought of Emergency signals to the survival instinct in us, “There is no time to think. Just listen to authority and follow the herd, and you will be safe.”
In this state of mass anxiety, the people can be easily manipulated and exploited by the psywar specialists in the U.S. shadow state. They regularly utilize the strategy of fear to whip up the American people into a highly emotional and warlike state.
The tyrants in Tehran have a much easier time at achieving the same psychological effects in Iranian society because they use religion. Also, unlike America, Iran’s national existence is truly threatened by foreign powers so they are more justified in employing mass psychology tactics against the people.
But the U.S. Supranational Emergency State has no justification for what it is doing to the American people. The purpose of its national emergency rhetoric is to keep the American people in an unwarranted state of fear, justify the violation of individual rights, mobilize public support for military invasions of other countries, expand executive power, and defend state secrecy laws as well as the CIA’s censorship of the truth.
The rhetoric of national emergency also supports the dominant ideology of the day which is counter-terrorism.
The ideology of counter-terrorism cannot be maintained without the periodic announcement by the federal government that it “foiled a dangerous terrorist plot against America,” or that, “the FBI captured a group of terrorists.” This government tactic helps to keep alive the fear of terrorism and reinforces the popular belief in the ideology of counter-terrorism.
False Flag Terrorism is the most fundamental government strategy in the West’s war of terror. For the Anglo-American shadow state, there is nothing like dead bodies on American soil. The mass murder of innocent people is a sight of much pleasure for the killers in the Israeli, British and American shadow governments.
There are more peaceful ways to wield the psychological weapon that is national emergency rhetoric. For example, power-craving politicians, government officials and the state-run media use the threat of national disasters such as a hurricane to scare the American people beyond any reasonable measure and invoke their own authority which is totally illegitimate.
But there is a rationale behind all the orchestrated madness. The state managers of terror in America, Israel and the West are not building a supranational emergency state for no reason. The shadow CIA, shadow MI6 and other state intelligence agencies are building a global police state to contain social unrest, popular uprisings and urban riots. They anticipated the global political awakening and movements like Occupy Wall Street, and planned ahead of time to destroy resistance to their policies.
Their new global authoritarian regime won’t be announced to the global public until it is completely constructed and ready to go. At which point, it will pretty much announce itself.
Do you see the genius of not telling people about a world government until the point of no return has been reached? The sociopathic elite tower above mass reality. They are in tune with the cosmos, not CNN or football.
There are deep philosophical reasons why Western governments and the establishment media treat the people like they are not even there. In their minds the people don’t even exist. Informed media puppets and government officials obviously know that the deeper agenda includes the mass extermination of the global population.
Since this is the global agenda, why bother telling the people about anything? They are going to die anyway, so let them enjoy their last few years on Earth. This attitude explains why there is so much entertainment on television while the truth is blacked out.
There is a faint hope that an organized global resistance will emerge, but all the odds are set against us. A lot of so-called activists and reformers still avoid discussing 9/11 truth. Their activism is a joke. If they are afraid of a social taboo then they can’t be counted on to resist tyranny.
Resistance to the illegitimate supranational emergency state will be crushed with guns, concentration camps, torture, government thugs, mercenaries, bioweapons, state terror, military checkpoints, and media propaganda.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters have yet to realize that the evil mass murderers who control Washington and Wall Street will not give up power easily. They want blood and violence. And they have a brainwashed army of goons who are ready to crack skulls and kill people who disobey government commands.
They are also in the process of starting a third world war to distract the people of the world from the real struggle for economic justice, freedom and the future of mankind.
The global chaos and dynamic instability that will result from a world war will be used by the satanic architects of the global regime to sell their nightmarish world government to the remaining world population.
Before we reach that point, however, global martial law will be declared by governments. Read Paul Joseph Watson’s 2010 article, “PDD 51 & New Executive Order Give Obama Dictator Power,” about how this global policy will be implemented in America.
I’ll finish by reminding you that we are all in the middle of a total war that is being waged between the dark forces of Satan and the civilizing angels of God.
The souls of men and women everywhere are up for grabs.
So prepare for the epic mental and spiritual battle that is ahead, and fight back, or risk being slaughtered by Satan’s new global dictatorship.

From 7 Billion People To 500 Million People – The Sick Population Control Agenda Of The Global Elite

The United Nations has officially designated October 31st as 7 Billion Day.  On that day, the United Nations estimates that the population of the earth will hit 7 billion for the very first time.  But instead of celebrating what a milestone 7 billion people represents, the UNPF is focusing instead on using October 31st to raise awareness about “sustainability” and “sustainable development”.  In other words, the United Nations is once again declaring that there are way too many people on the planet and that we need to take more direct measures to reduce fertility.  In recent years, the UN and other international organizations have become bolder about trying to push the sick population control agenda of the global elite.  Most of the time organizations such as the UN will simply talk about “stabilizing” the global population, but as you will see in this article, there are many among the global elite that are not afraid to openly talk about a goal of reducing the population of the world to 500 million (or less).  To you and I it may seem like insanity to want to get rid of more than 90 percent of the global population, but there is a growing consensus among the global elite that this is absolutely necessary for the good of the planet.
As we approach October 31st, dozens of articles are appearing in newspapers all over the globe that are declaring what a horrible thing it is that we are up to 7 billion people.
In fact, it surely is no accident that the United Nations put 7 Billion Day on the exact same day as Halloween.  Perhaps they want to highlight how “scary” it is that we have 7 billion people on the planet, or perhaps they are trying to send us a message by having 7 Billion Day occur on the same day as “the festival of death”.
In any event, it seems like way too much of a coincidence that 7 Billion Day just happens to fall on the same day as Halloween.
Today, “sustainable development” has become one of the key buzzwords that those in the radical environmental movement love to use, but most Americans have no idea that one of the key elements of “sustainable development” is population control.
So what precisely is considered to be an ideal population for the earth by those pushing “sustainable development”?
Well, of course there is much disagreement on this issue, but many are very open about the fact that they believe that the earth should only have 500 million people (or less) on it.
For example, the first of the “new 10 commandments” on the infamous Georgia Guidestones states the following….

“Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

CNN Founder Ted Turner would go even farther….

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Dave Foreman, the co-founder of Earth First, says that reducing our population down to 100 million is one of his three main goals….

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

Sadly, this kind of garbage is even being taught at major U.S. universities.  For example, Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Austin Eric R. Piankaonce wrote the following….

I do not bear any ill will toward people. However, I am convinced that the world, including all humanity, WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us.

Mikhail Gorbachev thinks that reducing the global population by 90 percent would be just about right….

“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”

But most of the time, the way that the global elite speak of population control is much more “politically correct”.  They tend to use terms such as “sustainable development” and “reduction of fertility rates” and “quality of life” when discussing the need to reduce our population.
As 7 Billion Day has approached, there have been articles popping up in major publications all over the globe that are advocating increased population control measures.  Of course in the western world such measures are always framed as being “voluntary”, but that is the way that they always introduce things like this.  Once enough people get on board with the “voluntary” population control measures they will become “mandatory”.
So now that you are aware of some of the buzzwords that are used, check out what has been written on some of the biggest news websites in the world recently….
Jeffrey D. Sachs, the director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, recently said the following in an article for CNN….

“The arrival of the 7 billionth person is cause for profound global concern. It carries a challenge: What will it take to maintain a planet in which each person has a chance for a full, productive and prosperous life, and in which the planet’s resources are sustained for future generations?
“How, in short, can we enjoy ‘sustainable development’ on a very crowded planet?”

For Sachs, one of the “keys” to sustainable development is the “stabilization” of the global population….

“The second key to sustainable development is the stabilization of the global population. This is already occurring in high-income and even some middle-income countries, as families choose to have one or two children on average. The reduction of fertility rates should be encouraged in the poorer countries as well.”

In a recent article for the Guardian, Roger Martin stated that all of the problems that humanity is facing would be easier to solve if less people were running around the planet….

“…all environmental (and many economic and social) problems are easier to solve with fewer people, and ultimately impossible with ever more.”

He also says that if we reduce the population, it will mean better lives for all the rest of us….

“On a finite planet, the optimum population providing the best quality of life for all, is clearly much smaller than the maximum, permitting bare survival. The more we are, the less for each; fewer people mean better lives.”

But is that really the case?
Of course not.
There has been tremendous human suffering all throughout history.  If we eliminated 90 percent of the global population it would not suddenly usher in some kind of “golden age”.
But many among the global elite are truly convinced that we are spoiling “their planet” and they don’t want so many of us around anymore.  Thanks to technology, they only need a few hundred million people to run their system, and they view the rest of us as “useless eaters”.
This all may sound quite bizarre to many of you, but this is the kind of stuff that is being taught in colleges and universities across the western world.
In fact, you are starting to see an increasing number of people in the western world actually suggest that we adopt a “one-child policy” such as China has.  For example, the following is from an opinion piece that appeared in the National Post….

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The author of the opinion piece believes that such a “one-child policy” would reduce the global population to 3.43 billion by 2075….

The intelligence behind this is the following:
-If only one child per female was born as of now, the world’s population would drop from its current 6.5 billion to 5.5 billion by 2050, according to a study done for scientific academy Vienna Institute of Demography.
-By 2075, there would be 3.43 billion humans on the planet. This would have immediate positive effects on the world’s forests, other species, the oceans, atmospheric quality and living standards.

This is the kind of stuff that a lot of these people sit around and think about all day long.
They are obsessed with death and with reducing the population as rapidly as possible.  They see us as a “plague” that is ravaging the planet, and they believe that by getting rid of us they would actually be saving the earth.
Due to public opinion, population control advocates have to tread lightly in the western world.  But where they can get away with it, they are not afraid to be very forceful.
I have already discussed the horrific one-child policy in China.  As the Epoch Times recently noted, enforcement of this policy can be absolutely brutal….

“Pregnant women lacking birth permits are hunted down like criminals by population planning police in China and forcibly aborted.”

If you don’t believe something like this can ever happen in the western world, you might want to think again.
Limitations on child births are already showing up in popular television shows.  For example, a new show on Fox called Terra Nova portrays the future of the earth as a living hell due to overpopulation.  People in the future can hardly breathe the air due to overwhelming pollution and a strict “two-child policy” is rigidly enforced.
The family featured in Terra Nova is able to go through a portal to a prehistoric world that is 85 million years in the past.  In this “new world”, humans have set up a wonderful new socialist society where everyone is provided for and where “green technology” is helping them to avoid making the “mistakes” of the past.
Unfortunately, socialist utopias such as the one portrayed on Terra Nova only exist in works of fiction.
Instead, what happens most of the time in real life is that the “good intentions” of social planners devolve into absolute tyranny when put into practice.
For example, just check out what a recent National Geographic article said happened when social planners in India tried to aggressively reduce birth rates in India in the 1970s….

The Indian government tried once before to push vasectomies, in the 1970s, when anxiety about the population bomb was at its height. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay used state-of-emergency powers to force a dramatic increase in sterilizations. From 1976 to 1977 the number of operations tripled, to more than eight million. Over six million of those were vasectomies. Family planning workers were pressured to meet quotas; in a few states, sterilization became a condition for receiving new housing or other government benefits. In some cases the police simply rounded up poor people and hauled them to sterilization camps.

How would you feel if you were rounded up and hauled off to a sterilization camp?
Sterilization programs (most of the time they are “voluntary”) are in full force all over the globe.  Much of the time they are sponsored and funded by the United Nations.  The global elite are absolutely obsessed with getting women to have less babies.
That is one reason why abortion is so very important to them.
Recently, Al Gore made the following statement regarding population control….

“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women. You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.

The elite love to use terms such as “fertility management” and “family planning”, but what they really intend is for there to be less pregnancies and more abortions so that the population will not grow as quickly.
They certainly do not intend to empower women to have more children.
This agenda was also very much reflected when the March 2009 U.N. Population Division policy brief asked this shocking question….

“What would it take to accelerate fertility decline in the least developed countries?”

Now who in the world gave the UN the right to be trying to “accelerate fertility decline” for women in poor countries?
But to many in the global elite, trying to get women to have less babies makes all the sense in the world.  In a recent editorial for the New York Times entitled “The Earth Is Full“, Thomas L. Friedman made the following statement….

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

These people honestly and truly believe this stuff.
Unfortunately, this agenda is even represented in the highest levels of our own government.
Barack Obama’s top science advisor, John P. Holdren, once wrote the following….

“A program of sterilizing women after their second or third child, despite the relatively greater difficulty of the operation than vasectomy, might be easier to implement than trying to sterilize men.
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

Holdren also believes that compulsory abortion would be perfectly legal under the U.S. Constitution….

“Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

The following are 8 more quotes that show the mindset that a lot of these population control advocates have….
#1 Microsoft’s Bill Gates….

“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

#2 U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg….

“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

#3 David Rockefeller….

“The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.”

#4 Jacques Cousteau….

“In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day.”

#5 Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh….

“If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”

#6 David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club….

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license … All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

#7 Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger….

“The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

#8 Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger. Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. Page 12….

“Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

When you believe that the earth has way too many people, human life becomes cheap, and abortion becomes a way to get rid of undesirables.
According to a recent article in the Daily Mail, thousands of “abnormal” babies are now being selectively aborted in the UK each year….

Thousands of pregnancies were aborted last year for ‘abnormalities’ including 500 for Down’s syndrome, new figures reveal.
In total, there were 2,290 abortions for medical problems with the foetus, with 147 performed after 24 weeks.

In a world that is “overpopulated”, babies that are not “perfect” become more “disposable” than ever.
In fact, the truth is that the population control agenda and the “abortion rights movement” have been inseparably linked for decades.  Those that are obsessed with “overpopulation” view abortion as a very necessary method of birth control, and one of their main goals is to expand access to “reproductive health care” to as many women around the globe as possible.
But in the end, our “voluntary” actions are not going to be nearly enough to reduce the population and most population control advocates realize that.  Many of them are openly calling for a “benevolent” global authority to take charge to lead us through the “necessary” transition that is ahead.
In a previous article, I described the type of world that the radical population control advocates see for our future….

Imagine going to sleep one night and waking up many years later in a totally different world.  In this futuristic world, literally everything you do is tightly monitored and controlled by control freak bureaucrats in the name of “sustainable development” and with the goal of promoting “the green agenda”.  An international ruling body has centralized global control over all human activity.  What you eat, what you drink, where you live, how warm or cold your home can be and how much fuel you can use is determined by them.  Anyone that dissents or that tries to rebel against the system is sent off for “re-education”.  The human population is 90 percent lower than it is today in this futuristic society, and all remaining humans have been herded into tightly constricted cities which are run much like prisons.

This is the endgame for the radical green agenda.  In order to save the earth, they feel as though they must dramatically reduce our numbers and very tightly control our activities.
But is that the kind of a future that anyone would actually want to live in?  Would anyone actually choose to live in a future where bureaucrats micromanage our lives for the good of the environment?
Personally, I think that the 7 billion people on earth would do just fine if they were given a lot more liberty and freedom to live their own lives as they see fit.
But letting people decide how to run their own lives is anathema to those that have bought into the population control agenda of the global elite.
They actually believe that they are smarter than all of the rest of us and that they need to tell us what to do for the good of humanity and for the good of the planet.
This patronizing approach should truly sicken all freedom-loving Americans.
So what do you think of the population control agenda of the global elite?

Four Items on Obama’s New Student Loan Plan

Isn’t this just four things?
1. An additional unconstitutional move
2. A tax on current and future taxpayers
3. Yet another bailout
4. Political vote-getting move for 2012
President Obama on Wednesday is launching a new plan to lower the cost of paying back student loans for millions of borrowers – the latest installment in his bid to move a jobs agenda that bypasses a gridlocked Congress.
At nearly $1 trillion, federal and private student loans now exceed US credit-card debt, posing a formidable repayment burden for many borrowers at a time of near-double digit unemployment.
The plan, to be implemented by executive authority alone, allows some 1.6 million students to cap their loan payments at 10 percent of their discretionary income starting in 2012. It also forgives the balance of student loans after 20 years of payments. Current law allows students to limit loan payments to 15 percent of income, forgiving debt after 25 years of payments, though few students are aware of this option
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In a related move, the US Department of Education, which now administers all federal education loans, is giving borrowers the option of consolidating federal and private loans at reduced rates.
“College graduates are entering one of the toughest job markets in recent memory, and we have a way to help them save money by consolidating their debt and capping their loan payments,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. “And we can do it at no cost to the taxpayer.”
Even before the official rollout of the program at a rally in Denver, House Republicans challenged how the president could move forward without congressional approval.
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"The president is about to announce a major change in the program that we have not yet acted on in the Congress,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R) of North Carolina, who chaired an oversight hearing on Tuesday. “What authority does the department have?”
“I can’t answer that question,” said witness James Runcie, the Education Department’s federal student aid chief operating officer. “Whatever we’re told to do in terms of implementation and execution, we’ll optimize and do what’s in the best interest of borrowers and students.”
Part of the answer appears to be a move made by the Democrat-controlled Congress in March 2010. It ended taxpayer subsidies to private banks for student loans, meaning that the Education Department alone was responsible for handing out government money for such loans. That means the $60 billion set to go to private banks for student loans during the next 10 years is now tabbed for the Education Department.
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Congress directed the Education Department to use that savings to expand Pell grants for low-and moderate income students to attend college. But many House Republicans who still oppose the move they say it has made the Department of Education one of the largest banks in the nation, largely unaccountable to Congress.
“This is another example of the Obama administration making changes to federal education policy behind closed doors,” said GOP committee spokeswoman Alexandra Sollberger in an e-mail. “We are disappointed that the Department of Education chose not to engage committee members prior to announcing this plan to the press.”
Republican critics also note that the Education Department charges 6.8 percent for loans that cost much less, “creating a pretty big slush fund for the government,” said Rep. John Kline (R) of Minnesota, who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, at Tuesday’s hearing.
He tabbed federal borrowing for the program “at less than 1 percent” – yielding a large profit.
Education Department officials dispute that view. “Right now Direct Loans reduce the deficit,” says Education Department spokeswoman Jane Glickman. “I wouldn’t call it slush.”
The 10-year interest rate is dictated to the department by the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB), added Ms. Glickman in an e-mail. “In yesterday’s market, the 10-year rate was between 2 and 2.5. In the OMB projections, it is more like 3 for 2011.
The burden of some $1 trillion in outstanding student loans – up from $500 billion just five years ago – is a hot issue in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Students struggling with loans they can’t afford to repay blame the federal government for stripping away consumer protections
“Every fundamental consumer protection has been specifically removed by our Congress for student loans,” says Alan Collinge at the Zuccotti Park protest site in New York on Sunday.
“It’s led to horrible outcomes for the borrowers,” he adds. “The political will to crack down doesn’t exist.”
President Obama said in a statement on Tuesday: “Steps like these won’t take the place of the bold action we need from Congress to boost our economy and create jobs, but they will make a difference."
Unlike mortgage or credit-card debt, student loans can’t be eliminated through bankruptcy proceedings. With a sputtering economy, the investment in college doesn’t always pay off for students. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press" on Sunday, GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul called federal student loans a “failed program,” because it enabled colleges and universities to inflate costs.

In Praise of Credit Checks

It was maybe third grade when the schoolyard was abuzz with a terrible thing. It was called the "permanent record." If you did something bad enough, it would go on the permanent record. And then a one-day slip up would turn into a deep scar, a mortal sin that would last forever and permanently reduce your chances to make it in life.
We imagined some suited committee reaching deep into the file and discovering that we had loosened someone's fingers as they tried to climb the monkey bars, or that we bonked someone on the back with an eraser full of chalk, or that we started a dinner-roll fight in the lunchroom, or that we put a firecracker down the sink in the restroom.
Whatever the sin, if it went on the permanent record, it would never go away.
Probably there was no such thing. Or maybe there was and no one cared. For my part, I realized the dream of every public-school kid when, in the fifth grade, the entire school burned down — and my first thought was: so much for the permanent record!
But as we reach adulthood, we begin to realize that something like the "permanent record" does exist. It is called the credit report. Its assembly and maintenance involves no police, no bureaucrats, no government offices, no one paid by the taxpayer. It is unconcerned about your looks, your politics, your preferences, or your associations. It is entirely private, and it judges only one thing. It is put together because interested parties need to know.
You want to rent an apartment? Check the credit report. Want a car loan? We'll soon know how reliable you are. Want electricity to your home? You are not going to get it unless there is a reasonable expectation that you are going to pay for it. And the way to discover that is to examine your past.
Credit reports aren't perfect, and everyone has a story about some mistake. But the key point is that, because they are private, there is an incentive structure in place to fix errors and improve reporting. They strive to be as accurate as possible, because this is what lenders want. And it turns out that every detailed study has shown them to be incredibly accurate — and very good at dispute resolution.
And so, if you missed a payment on some bill, it's noted. If you skipped out on a lease, it is noted. If you bailed out of an obligation to pay a monthly payment on a car, and the car ends up being repossessed, it is there in black and white.

"The credit report links cause and effect in a beautiful way, rendering one of the oldest moral principles known to man into a convenient score that is attached to you and you alone."

Sure, it is a bit creepy. It's how we imagine it will be once we approach the pearly gates. All will be known. Our good looks, smile, and charm count for nothing. We will have to provide an accounting, blow by blow. The BS detector will be fully functional. By comparison, the breathalyzer is nothing. That kind of makes anyone bite the lip a bit.
And yet, think of it. No one comes to arrest you. There is no violence. You are not thrown in debtor's prison. No one puts a scarlet letter on you. All that a negative report can do is cause you not to be trusted with credit again. This is entirely reasonable. And there are ways to fix the problem. You can pay into a card account that debits cash rather than extending credit. And it is absolutely the case that every possible creditor is cheering for you to get your life in order. They want to extend credit. They want to do business. They have a direct interest in shaping up your moral character.
On the other hand, if you do the right thing and meet all your obligations as your contract them, you are handsomely rewarded. The more you behave, the more people trust you. The more certain it becomes that you will pay what you owe, the more people are going to extend you credit.
The truly wonderful thing about this system is that it is entirely private and results from the voluntary interaction of human beings in the marketplace. No one is forced into it. But if you choose to be part of the credit system, you must behave. You must do the right thing. You must not steal from others, which is what it really means not to pay your bills. The credit report is nothing other than a report on whether you tend to do what is right or what is wrong.
Thus is there no point in cursing the system or decrying it as an invasion of your life. The credit report is the best friend of the responsible in the same way that it is the worst enemy of the irresponsible. In other words, it tells the truth, and the truth can be good or bad for you depending on what is true.
I've rarely heard this system credited for raising the moral level of society. But surely it does. Yes, people should do the right thing whether or not there is a reward or punishment associated with an action. People should pay their bills even if failure to do so does not end up on the permanent record. But the inner drive to virtue can only take us so far. It is better to have systems in place that provide incentives to behave, with rewards for doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing.
This is what the credit-reporting system provides. In this, it is more effective than sermonizing, lectures, books on building character, advertising campaigns, or even surveillance. The credit report links cause and effect in a beautiful way, rendering one of the oldest moral principles known to man into a convenient score that is attached to you and you alone.

It so many ways, this system is a creature of capitalism, and it works beautifully. And compare it with the ghastly system created by the state, the elaborate apparatus to make sure that the government has forced us to cough up the maximum amount of wealth they say that we owe. One system tries to prevent thievery while the other system tries to make thievery more efficient. I can't imagine a better contrast in how institutions deal with human beings and the effect of those institutions on who we are and the choices we make.
This is just one example of the general principle: private markets reward good behavior and make us better people; public bureaucracies do the opposite.

Dangerous Political Naifs

Being well past the age of 50 and having spent nearly all my adult life as an academic economist, I seize the privilege of doing what so many other economists of my age and rank do—namely, offer unsolicited speculations about what is right and what is wrong with modern economics.
First, something that is right.

With one major exception (discussed below), the typical economist, when doing economics (and regardless of political bent), doggedly avoids ad hominem explanations. That is, economists don’t explain observed reality as resulting from specific human personalities or personality traits. Instead, economists (try to) identify the constraints and opportunities that confront decision-makers and then explain patterns of human activities as being predictable outcomes of the ways that individuals—any individuals—respond to identified constraints and opportunities.

This avoidance of ad hominem explanations is the source of one of the most important lessons that economists teach: greed explains nothing. Because greed—or, more accurately, “self-interestedness”—is largely unchanging across time, no observed changes in the economy can be explained by it.

Greed can’t explain rising fuel prices, for example, given that fuel sellers (and also fuel buyers) are just as greedy when prices are lower as they are when prices are higher. Likewise with booms and busts. Because people’s greed remains constant something else must explain booms and busts. And so too for any other economic phenomena you care to name—everything from the fact that Americans are richer than Armenians to the fact that, say, big-box retailers’ market shares are growing while those of mom-’n’-pop retailers are shrinking.

Of course the particular constraints and opportunities identified by economist Doe as being most relevant for explaining some phenomenon often differ from those identified by economist Jones for explaining the same phenomenon. Doe, for example, might identify an increase in the rate of growth of the money supply as the most crucial factor for explaining an observed boom and bust, while Jones identifies an easing in government regulation of banks as the crucial factor. But neither Doe nor Jones explains the boom and bust as caused by the likes of greed or ignorance.
Economists’ refusal to use always-popular (and often half-baked) romantic notions about human behavior to explain economic phenomena goes a long way toward making economics a genuine science, and it accounts for much of whatever good economists have managed to bestow on society.

What’s Wrong

Turning now to something that is wrong with economics, much of the harm that economists inflict on society is a direct result of the one area in which economists too often embrace such ad hominem explanations: analyzing government involvement in the economy.
Despite a long-established tradition in economics of studying the “public” sector using the same analytical tools that we use to study the private sector—and despite two founders of this Public Choice tradition being awarded Nobel Prizes (George Stigler in 1982 and James Buchanan in 1986)—far too many economists persist in sloppy, unanalytical ad hominem thinking about government.
For too many economists government is assumed to be able to escape many of the constraints that unavoidably bind and trip up people in the private sector. Asymmetric information, moral hazard, and adverse selection, as well as confirmation bias and the legions of other alleged “irrationalities” identified by behavioral economists, are just some of the “imperfections” economists find in markets and then too frequently simply assume can be dealt with effectively by government.
Overlook here the fact that many of the problems alleged to be unavoidable in the private sector are in fact handled quite well by human beings acting without government who exhibit far more ingenuity than the typical economist believes is possible in private-sector settings. (It’s notable that Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, isn’t a professor of economics but instead of political science. She won the prize in 2009 for her work showing how creative people in private settings often overcome obstacles—such as free-rider problems—that most economists naively assume can be overcome only by government.)

Unanalytical Assumptions

Focus instead on economists’ bizarre stumble into an unanalytical assessment of government. That stumble goes like this: “Omigosh! There’s an imperfection in this private-sector market! My textbooks and the many refereed journal articles I’ve read and written make quite clear—with lots of difficult mathematics—that this market will therefore fail. My textbooks and journal articles also imply, and in many cases explicitly state, the conclusion that the government—and only the government—can solve the problem. Models prove this conclusion.”
Such stumbling is common. From today’s insistence that America needs more stimulus spending, through the support that many economists express for the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to economists’ overwhelming belief that countries need central banks, too many economists unscientifically reach their conclusions about the alleged efficacy of government intervention without first asking how the information available to government officials, and how the incentives these officials face, will affect government decision-making.
In short, economists mysteriously conclude that desirable public-sector outcomes follow from the praiseworthy intentions that economists assume motivate most public officials.
Nowhere does this mystery run more deeply than in fiscal policy. Even if it were true that increased government spending can hasten an economy’s escape from a recession, the large number of economists who today endorse such spending is discouraging. Seldom do these economists inquire into the incentives facing government officials in charge of spending. The assumption is that these officials will spend the money in ways sure to promote the public interest. Also, seldom do these economists inquire into the information asymmetries and other constraints that might hamper even well-meaning officials’ efforts to carry out fiscal policy effectively.
Save for the relatively few economists steeped in Public Choice economics, the typical economist today remains a political naif—and a dangerous one at that. He is bloated with unjustified confidence in models which show that if government officials behave in the public interest and if these officials are immune to the same decision-making quirks and knowledge limitations that afflict decision-makers in private markets, then government can perform all manner of marvels. This economist then uses his authority to support interventions that are utterly unjustified by genuine scientific standards.
It’s shameful.

Economists more bleak about US economy

 Fewer U.S. companies expect to hire new workers in coming months, as business economists grow increasingly pessimistic about the overall economy's growth in the coming year.

Nearly 85 percent of economic experts surveyed expect the economy to grow at a meager 2 percent or less over the next 12 months, according to the National Association for Business Economists. In July only 23 percent of the survey's respondents predicted such slow growth.
Additionally, the number of companies that plan to hire more workers fell from 42 percent to 30 percent, while the number of companies laying workers off rose. The group reports that 13 percent of respondents have reduced their staff, up from 8 percent in July.
One-fifth of the economists say the European debt crisis has hurt sales, with the average estimate around 10 percent, and 30 percent expect the squeeze to continue into the first quarter of 2012.
The quarterly survey includes the views of 70 economists for private companies and trade groups who are NABE members. The data are reported by broad industry group.
About one-quarter of respondents reported increased profitability since the last quarter, compared with 16 percent who reported declines. Companies that reported improved profit margins include those in the food, transportation, utilities, information and communications sectors.
On Sunday, European leaders yet again put off tough decisions which economists say are needed to save the continent from its debt crisis. Earlier in the weekend officials said the leaders were nearing agreement on slashing Greece's debts and strengthening the continent's banks, many of which are awash in Greek bonds.

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New bubble to collapse economy?

Don’t know what a derivative is? It’s OK, we aren’t 100% sure either – but what we do know is that there is no way the $1.5 Quadrillion derivatives bubble can be a good thing considering how its SIGNIFICANTLY smaller than the ENTIRE GLOBAL ECONOMY! Glenn breaks down the problem and what it could mean on radio today.
Michael Snyder on ZeroHedge explains:

Most people have no idea that Wall Street has become a gigantic financial casino. The big Wall Street banks are making tens of billions of dollars a year in the derivatives market, and nobody in the financial community wants the party to end.
The word “derivatives” sounds complicated and technical, but understanding them is really not that hard. A derivative is essentially a fancy way of saying that a bet has been made. Originally, these bets were designed to hedge risk, but today the derivatives market has mushroomed into a mountain of speculation unlike anything the world has ever seen before. Estimates of the notional value of the worldwide derivatives market go from $600 trillion all the way up to $1.5 quadrillion.
Keep in mind that the GDP of the entire world is only somewhere in the neighborhood of $65 trillion. The danger to the global financial system posed by derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet once called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”. For now, the financial powers that be are trying to keep the casino rolling, but it is inevitable that at some point this entire mess is going to come crashing down. When it does, we are going to be facing a derivatives crisis that really could destroy the entire global financial system.

How big is 1.5 quadrillion?
1.5 quadrillion inches gets you to the moon and back 50,000 times.
1.5 quadrillion people would fill the entire Earth 250,000 times.
“I just wanted the point out I’ve never seen the word ‘quadrillion’ used in a legitimate story, ever, unless it’s used to describe the distance in space.,” Glenn said.
Glenn explained that the experts are now saying the derivatives bubble, which is significantly bigger than the $65 Trillion global economy, could collapse.
“The good thing, though, is the experts who estimate the size of financial problems always overestimate.  They always think they’re too big and then later are surprised at how small they are,” Glenn joked.

'Unknown territory' for Europe if summit fails: France

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has told ruling party lawmakers that failure at Wednesday's eurozone summit could "tip the European continent into unknown territory," sources at the meeting said.

"We are living in crucial times. If the summit is a failure, this could tip the European continent into unknown territory," the sources from the ruling UMP party quoted the prime minister as saying during the meeting.
"Pressure does not stop growing on the eurozone and the whole of the global economy," the sources quoted him as saying. "It is undeniable that the forecasts for global economic growth are undergoing brutal falls."
"If the results of the European summit are positive, the pessimism (on growth rates) will abate," he said.
"An agreement must be found with Germany," he said. He also denounced press reports that Paris was following Berlin's lead in dealing with the eurozone crisis, saying: "I remind you that the initiatives (to deal with the crisis) are French."
His remarks, which were confirmed by sources in Fillon's office, came as Europe's leaders scrambled Tuesday to convince banks to take massive losses on Greece's debt, and shield Italy from falling victim to the crisis, on the eve of a decisive summit.
Little more than 24 hours before EU leaders gathered for their second summit in three days, calls came from afar in Japan and Australia for Europe to seal a lasting defence against its debt crisis as markets slid in cautious trade ahead of the crunch talks.

Nicely Said.................

"Specie [gold and silver coin] is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level; because, having intrinsic and universal value, it can never die in our hands, and it is the surest resource of reliance in time of war." - Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Wayles Eppes, 1813

EU Leaders Throw Europe a Plutonium Life Preserver

EU Leaders Throw Europe a Plutonium Life Preserver
The euro system was doomed from inception for fundamental reasons; trying to conjure up "something for nothing" solutions will fail catastrophically, and soon.
As Europe flails helplessly in the waves of insolvency, its leadership has tossed it a life preserver. Too bad it's plutonium, and will take Europe straight to the bottom. Plutonium is of course one of the most toxic materials on the planet, and the "rescue" cooked up by the EU leadership is the financial equivalent of plutonium.
Stripped of propaganda and disinformation, the "rescue" boils down to this: something for nothing. Sound familiar? Isn't "something for nothing" what inflated the bubbles which have popped so violently? The EU "rescue" conjures something for nothing in two ways:
1. The financial alchemist's favorite magic: leverage. Take a couple hundred billion euros in cash, leverage it up with various magic (unlimited power is now at your fingertips!) and voila, you can suddenly backstop 1 trillion euros of banking-sector losses, all with illusory money. Something for nothing.
2. "Guarantees" to cover the first 20% of loan losses. This is being presented as the equivalent of 100% guarantees, because it is inconceivable that losses could exceed 20%. In other words, the credulous buyer of at-risk Euroland bonds is supposed to be reassured enough to load the wagon because 20% of the bond is backstopped.
This is something for nothing because the EU leadership is explicitly claiming the at-risk portion--80% of every bond--is somehow "safer" because the first 20% will be paid by EU taxpayers.
In essence, the EU is claiming that its illusory "something for nothing" magic will turn lead into gold. Abracadabra....oh well, close; it's heavy, it's metallic--oops, it's plutonium.
The leadership is resorting to Cargo Cult incantations and legerdemain because the alternative is to raise the 1 trillion euros in cold hard cash needed to bail out the first wave of failed banks and underwater bondholders by raising taxes and cutting budgets, i.e. austerity. (Recall that the total bill will be at least 3 trillion euros, so 1 trillion is just a down payment.)
Raising cash the hard way is politically unacceptable in both France and Germany, not to mention every other nation in the EU, so the political lackeys of the banking sector and bondholders are cravenly substituting a "something for nothing" magic show which they hope will fool the global bond market.
Note to EU lackeys: there is no free lunch. Leverage is plutonium, not gold, and guaranteeing the first 20% of bonds that are doomed to lose 40%-75% is not terribly appealing to anyone not influenced by the ECB's mind tricks. ("These are not the euros you're looking for; move along.")
No wonder France was so anxious for the ECB to crank up the euro printing press: they wanted-- just like everyone else involved--something for nothing.
The best way to understand the EU's current situation is to imagine an astoundingly dysfunctional family of deep-in-denial-addicts, screaming co-dependent parents, and grown-up grifters acting like spoiled brats, all trapped in a rat-infested, flooded flat that's had the gas turned off for lack of payment--and there's a plutonium life preserver glowing in the knee-high water. Admittedly, this analogy is imperfect, but it does capture the essential psychology of the end-game being played out.
A slightly more formal model for understanding the increasingly unstable dynamics of the EU is the post-colonial "plantation" model I've described here before. The key characteristics of the Colonial Model of Capitalism are:
1. Low cost labor and low-value materials flow from the periphery (colonies) to the Empire (center), which then ships high-value, high-profit finished goods back to the colonies.
2. The colonies must buy the high-value finished goods on credit that is issued and controlled by the Imperial center.
Hmm--doesn't this sound like the relationship of Germany to the European periphery? The euro cemented this co-dependency: Germany had the most efficient production, and once the euro raised the cost of production in the periphery nations, then of course nobody could beat Germany's cost advantages. The euro actually lowered Germany's cost of production in terms of foreign exchange rates while raising the costs in periphery nations that were previously able to lower their cost of production via currency devaluations.
Having surrendered that mechanism to access the deep credit markets of the center, then they had no choice but to buy the high-margin finished goods from Germany, as nobody else could make the same goods for the low German price.
These booming high-profit German exports of finished goods to the European periphery generated vast surpluses of capital that were then loaned to the periphery to enable their further purchases of German goods. Why risk the heavy investment costs of production in the periphery when Germany had the lowest costs of production and was willing to loan the buyers the cash needed to keep buying?
It's the classic mercantilist-consumer co-dependency on a gigantic scale, with low-cost credit fueling both increased consumption and production. As long as the credit flowed in vast torrents of low-cost, easy to borrow money, the co-dependency looked like a "virtuous cycle." Debt junkies eventually have to start servicing their debts, of course, and that's when the ugly realities of colonial dominance become visible.
Germany casts itself in this melodrama as the wronged party, the industrious craftsfolk churning out high-quality goods who have somehow been lured into pouring hard-earned cash down various ratholes to save nefarious EU banks--including their own.
But setting aside the melodrama for a moment, let's ask: how many German goods would have been imported by the EU periphery if those nations had been forced to pay cash for everything from the start? Precious little is the answer; the cash--in the form of actual surpluses available to spend on imports--would have run out immediately after the euro was launched.
In other words, the debt orgy enabled not just carefree consumption, it also enabled vast German exports to the Eurozone. Now we start seeing how the once-mutually beneficial co-dependency has become toxic: now that the periphery's debtors have become debt-serfs, German exports to the periphery are contracting.
This helps explain why even the supposedly prudent Germans are seeking something for nothing as the painless answer to an intrinsically unstable and self-destructive system. When it all implodes, German exports to the periphery will be a shadow of their past glory, and the surpluses which enabled the leveraged orgy of credit will dwindle. (Germany's other big export markets, China and the U.S., are also contracting.)
Sovereign currencies are the only mechanism for discounting differences in credit worthiness and production costs. The euro was established as the currency equivalent of gold, holding the same value in every member country. But the mercantilist/quasi-colonial model requires credit to flow from the center to the periphery, and that is precisely what has happened in the EU.
In the colonial model, the colonists are indebted and poor. The net value of their labor flows to the Imperial center as interest payments, and the banks at the center set the cost of money and the terms--naturally.
This co-dependency based on credit flowing from the mercantilist center to the periphery is both exploitative and systemically unstable. Now that the ontological instability of the euro is being revealed, the dysfunctional family members are blaming each other and desperately trying to conjure up something for nothing to bail themselves out of a system which was doomed to implode from its very inception.
All the complexity and confusion distills down to this: the EU leadership needs something for nothing to save the EU, but there is no free lunch. There is only one solution to the exploitation, the illusory leverage, the crushing debts: massive write-offs of all the bad debt everywhere in the EU. And since debt is someone else's asset, then that means writing down the assets, too. The only way to clear the insolvency is to write off 3 trillion euros of debt-based assets and re-enable sovereign currencies. Anything else is simply more tiresome melodrama.