IS MONSANTO KILLING US?

Monsanto Roundup weedkiller and GM maize implicated in ‘shocking’ new cancer study

19 Sep 2012 | By Elinor Zuke

The world’s best-selling weedkiller, and a genetically modified maize resistant to it, can cause tumours, multiple organ damage and lead to premature death, new research published today reveals.

In the first ever study to examine the long-term effects of Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, or the NK603 Roundup-resistant GM maize also developed by Monsanto, scientists found that rats exposed to even the smallest amounts, developed mammary tumours and severe liver and kidney damage as early as four months in males, and seven months for females, compared with 23 and 14 months respectively for a control group.

“This research shows an extraordinary number of tumours developing earlier and more aggressively – particularly in female animals. I am shocked by the extreme negative health impacts,” said Dr Michael Antoniou, molecular biologist at King’s College London, and a member of CRIIGEN, the independent scientific council which supported the research.

GM crops have been approved for human consumption on the basis of 90-day animal feeding trials. But three months is the equivalent of late adolescence in rats, who can live for almost two years (700 days), and there have long been calls to study the effects over the course of a lifetime.

The peer-reviewed study, conducted by a team of researchers at the University of Caen, found that rats fed on a diet containing NK603 Roundup resistant GM maize, or given water containing Roundup at levels permitted in drinking water, over a two-year period, died significantly earlier than rats fed on a standard diet.

Up to half the male rats and 70% of females died prematurely, compared with only 30% and 20% in the control group. Across both sexes the researchers found that rats fed Roundup in their water or NK603 developed two to three times more large tumours than the control group. By the beginning of the 24th month, 50-80% of females in all treated groups had developed large tumours, with up to three per animal.

By contrast, only 30% of the control group were affected. Scientists reported the tumours “were deleterious to health due to [their] very large size,” making it difficult for the rats to breathe, [and] causing problems with their digestion which resulted in haemorrhaging.

The paper, published in the scientific journal Food and Chemical Toxicology today, concluded that NK603 and Roundup caused similar damage to the rats’ health, whether they were consumed together or on their own. The team also found that even the lowest doses of Roundup, which fall well within authorised limits in drinking tap water, were associated with severe health problems.

“The rat has long been used as a surrogate for human toxicity. All new pharmaceutical, agricultural and household substances are, prior to their approval, tested on rats. This is as good an indicator as we can expect that the consumption of GM maize and the herbicide Roundup, impacts seriously on human health,” Antoniou added.

Roundup is widely available in the UK, and is recommended on Gardeners Question Time. But this also represents a potential blow for the growth of GM Foods.

With the global population expected to increase to nine billion by 2050, the UN has said that global food production must increase by 50%. And a consultation led by DEFRA entitled Green Food Project recommended as recently as 10 July 2012 that GM must be reassessed as a possible solution.

Some 85% of maize grown in the US is GM, while 70% of processed foods contain GM ingredients without GM labelling. In the UK and Europe GM maize is not consumed directly by humans but is widely used in animal feed without the requirement for GM labelling.

Antoniou said there could be no doubting the credibility of this peer-reviewed study. “This is the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats.”

Led by Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, the researchers studied 10 groups, each containing 10 male and 10 female rats, over their normal lifetime. Three groups were given Roundup – developed by Monstanto – in their drinking water at three different levels consistent with exposure through the food chain from crops sprayed with the herbicide.

Three groups were fed diets containing different proportions of Roundup resistant maize at 11%, 22% and 33%. Three groups were given both Roundup and the GM maize at the same three dosages. The control group was fed an equivalent diet with no Roundup or NK603 containing 33% of non-GM maize.

A spokesman for Monsanto said: “We will review it thoroughly, as we do all studies that relate to our products and technologies.”

Watch the video: experts discuss the significance of the findings

QUOTES OF THE DAY – HUXLEY ON WAR, HISTORY & TRUTH

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
Aldous Huxley

 

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley

 

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley

 

 Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley

 

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Aldous Huxley

 

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley

 

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Aldous Huxley

 

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley

 

 

 

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Aldous Huxley

 

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley

 

 The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley

 
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
Aldous Huxley

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Aldous Huxley

 

ARE YOU SEEING WHAT I’M SEEING?

Is it just me, or are the signs of consumer collapse as clear as a Lowes parking lot on a Saturday afternoon? Sometimes I wonder if I’m just seeing the world through my pessimistic lens, skewing my point of view. My daily commute through West Philadelphia is not very enlightening, as the squalor, filth and lack of legal commerce remain consistent from year to year. This community is sustained by taxpayer subsidized low income housing, taxpayer subsidized food stamps, welfare payments, and illegal drug dealing. The dependency attitude, lifestyles of slothfulness and total lack of commerce has remained constant for decades in West Philly. It is on the weekends, cruising around a once thriving suburbia, where you perceive the persistent deterioration and decay of our debt fixated consumer spending based society.

The last two weekends I’ve needed to travel the highways of Montgomery County, PA going to a family party and purchasing a garbage disposal for my sink at my local Lowes store. Montgomery County is the typical white upper middle class suburb, with tracts of McMansions dotting the landscape. The population of 800,000 is spread over a 500 square mile area. Over 81% of the population is white, with the 9% black population confined to the urban enclaves of Norristown and Pottstown.

The median age is 38 and the median household income is $75,000, 50% above the national average. The employers are well diversified with an even distribution between education, health care, manufacturing, retail, professional services, finance and real estate. The median home price is $300,000, also 50% above the national average. The county leans Democrat, with Obama winning 60% of the vote in 2008. The 300,000 households were occupied by college educated white collar professionals. From a strictly demographic standpoint, Montgomery County appears to be a prosperous flourishing community where the residents are living lives of relative affluence. But, if you look closer and connect the dots, you see fissures in this façade of affluence that spread more expansively by the day. The cheap oil based, automobile dependent, mall centric, suburban sprawl, sanctuary of consumerism lifestyle is showing distinct signs of erosion. The clues are there for all to see and portend a bleak future for those mentally trapped in the delusions of a debt dependent suburban oasis of retail outlets, chain restaurants, office parks and enclaves of cookie cutter McMansions. An unsustainable paradigm can’t be sustained.

The first weekend had me driving along Ridge Pike, from Collegeville to Pottstown. Ridge Pike is a meandering two lane road that extends from Philadelphia, winds through Conshohocken, Plymouth Meeting, Norristown, past Ursinus College in Collegeville, to the farthest reaches of Montgomery County, at least 50 miles in length. It served as a main artery prior to the introduction of the interstates and superhighways that now connect the larger cities in eastern PA. Except for morning and evening rush hours, this road is fairly sedate. Like many primary routes in suburbia, the landscape is engulfed by strip malls, gas stations, automobile dealerships, office buildings, fast food joints, once thriving manufacturing facilities sitting vacant and older homes that preceded the proliferation of cookie cutter communities that now dominate what was once farmland.

Telltale Signs

 

 

I should probably be keeping my eyes on the road, but I can’t help but notice the telltale signs of an economic system gone haywire. As you drive along, the number of For Sale signs in front of homes stands out. When you consider how bad the housing market has been, the 40% decline in national home prices since 2007, the 30% of home dwellers underwater on their mortgage, and declining household income, you realize how desperate a home seller must be to try and unload a home in this market. The reality of the number of For Sale signs does not match the rhetoric coming from the NAR, government mouthpieces, CNBC pundits, and other housing recovery shills about record low inventory and home price increases.

The Federal Reserve/Wall Street/U.S. Treasury charade of foreclosure delaying tactics and selling thousands of properties in bulk to their crony capitalist buddies at a discount is designed to misinform the public. My local paper lists foreclosures in the community every Monday morning. In 2009 it would extend for four full pages. Today, it still extends four full pages. The fact that Wall Street bankers have criminally forged mortgage documents, people are living in houses for two years without making mortgage payments, and the Federal Government backing 97% of all mortgages while encouraging 3.5% down financing does not constitute a true housing recovery. Show me the housing recovery in these charts.

Existing home sales are at 1998 levels, with 45 million more people living in the country today.

New single family homes under construction are below levels in 1969, when there were 112 million less people in the country.

Another observation that can be made as you cruise through this suburban mecca of malaise is the overall decay of the infrastructure, appearances and disinterest or inability to maintain properties. The roadways are potholed with fading traffic lines, utility poles leaning and rotting, and signage corroding and antiquated. Houses are missing roof tiles, siding is cracked, gutters astray, porches sagging, windows cracked, a paint brush hasn’t been utilized in decades, and yards are inundated with debris and weeds. Not every house looks this way, but far more than you would think when viewing the overall demographics for Montgomery County. You wonder how many number among the 10 million vacant houses in the country today. The number of dilapidated run down properties paints a picture of the silent, barely perceptible Depression that grips the country today. With such little sense of community in the suburbs, most people don’t even know their neighbors. With the electronic transfer of food stamps, unemployment compensation, and other welfare benefits you would never know that your neighbor is unemployed and hasn’t made the mortgage payment on his house in 30 months. The corporate fascist ruling plutocracy uses their propaganda mouthpieces in the mainstream corporate media and government agency drones to misinform and obscure the truth, but the data and anecdotal observational evidence reveal the true nature of our societal implosion.

A report by the Census Bureau this past week inadvertently reveals data that confirms my observations on the roadways of my suburban existence. Annual household income fell in 2011 for the fourth straight year, to an inflation-adjusted $50,054. The median income — meaning half earned more, half less — now stands 8.9% lower than the all-time peak of $54,932 in 1999. It is far worse than even that dreadful result. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1989. When you understand that real household income hasn’t risen in 23 years, you can connect the dots with the decay and deterioration of properties in suburbia. A vast swath of Americans cannot afford to maintain their residences. If the choice is feeding your kids and keeping the heat on versus repairing the porch, replacing the windows or getting a new roof, the only option is survival.

US GDP vs. Median Household Income

All races have seen their income fall, with educational achievement reflected in the much higher incomes of Whites and Asians. It is interesting to note that after a 45 year War on Poverty the median household income for black families is only up 19% since 1968.

real household income

Now for the really bad news. Any critical thinking person should realize the Federal Government has been systematically under-reporting inflation since the early 1980’s in an effort to obscure the fact they are debasing the currency and methodically destroying the lives of middle class Americans. If inflation was calculated exactly as it was in 1980, the GDP figures would be substantially lower and inflation would be reported 5% higher than it is today. Faking the numbers does not change reality, only the perception of reality. Calculating real median household income with the true level of inflation exposes the true picture for middle class America. Real median household income is lower than it was in 1970, just prior to Nixon closing the gold window and unleashing the full fury of a Federal Reserve able to print fiat currency and politicians to promise the earth, moon and the sun to voters. With incomes not rising over the last four decades is it any wonder many of our 115 million households slowly rot and decay from within like an old diseased oak tree. The slightest gust of wind can lead to disaster.

Eliminating the last remnants of fiscal discipline on bankers and politicians in 1971 accomplished the desired result of enriching the top 0.1% while leaving the bottom 90% in debt and desolation. The Wall Street debt peddlers, Military Industrial arms dealers, and job destroying corporate goliaths have reaped the benefits of financialization (money printing) while shoveling the costs, their gambling losses, trillions of consumer debt, and relentless inflation upon the working tax paying middle class. The creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of the individual income tax in 1913, along with leaving the gold standard has rewarded the cabal of private banking interests who have captured our economic and political systems with obscene levels of wealth, while senior citizens are left with no interest earnings ($400 billion per year has been absconded from savers and doled out to bankers since 2008 by Ben Bernanke) and the middle class has gone decades seeing their earnings stagnate and their purchasing power fall precipitously.

 

The facts exposed in the chart above didn’t happen by accident. The system has been rigged by those in power to enrich them, while impoverishing the masses. When you gain control over the issuance of currency, issuance of debt, tax system, political system and legal apparatus, you’ve essentially hijacked the country and can funnel all the benefits to yourself and costs to the math challenged, government educated, brainwashed dupes, known as the masses. But there is a problem for the 0.1%. Their sociopathic personalities never allow them to stop plundering and preying upon the sheep. They have left nothing but carcasses of the once proud hard working middle class across the country side. There are only so many Lear jets, estates in the Hamptons, Jaguars, and Rolexes the 0.1% can buy. There are only 152,000 of them. Their sociopathic looting and pillaging of the national wealth has destroyed the host. When 90% of the population can barely subsist, collapse and revolution beckon.

Extend, Pretend & Depend

As I drove further along Ridge Pike we passed the endless monuments to our spiral into the depths of materialism, consumerism, and the illusion that goods purchased on credit represented true wealth. Mile after mile of strip malls, restaurants, gas stations, and office buildings rolled by my window. Anyone who lives in the suburbs knows what I’m talking about. You can’t travel three miles in any direction without passing a Dunkin Donuts, KFC, McDonalds, Subway, 7-11, Dairy Queen, Supercuts, Jiffy Lube or Exxon Station. The proliferation of office parks to accommodate the millions of paper pushers that make our service economy hum has been unprecedented in human history. Never have so many done so little in so many places. Everyone knows what a standard American strip mall consists of – a pizza place, a Chinese takeout, beer store, a tanning, salon, a weight loss center, a nail salon, a Curves, karate studio, Gamestop, Radioshack, Dollar Store, H&R Block, and a debt counseling service. They are a reflection of who we’ve become – an obese drunken species with excessive narcissistic tendencies that prefers to play video games while texting on our iGadgets as our debt financed lifestyles ultimately require professional financial assistance.

What you can’t ignore today is the number of vacant storefronts in these strip malls and the overwhelming number of SPACE AVAILABLE, FOR LEASE, and FOR RENT signs that proliferate in front of these dying testaments to an unsustainable economic system based upon debt fueled consumer spending and infinite growth assumptions. The booming sign manufacturer is surely based in China. The officially reported national vacancy rates of 11% are already at record highs, but anyone with two eyes knows these self-reported numbers are a fraud. Vacancy rates based on my observations are closer to 30%. This is part of the extend and pretend strategy that has been implemented by Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, the FASB, and the Wall Street banking cabal. The fraud and false storyline of a commercial real estate recovery is evident to anyone willing to think critically. The incriminating data is provided by the Federal Reserve in their Quarterly Delinquency Report.

The last commercial real estate crisis occurred in 1991. Mall vacancy rates were at levels consistent with today.

The current reported office vacancy rates of 17.5% are only slightly below the 19% levels of 1991.

As reported by the Federal Reserve, delinquency rates on commercial real estate loans in 1991 were 12%, leading to major losses among the banks that made those imprudent loans. Amazingly, after the greatest financial collapse in history, delinquency rates on commercial loans supposedly peaked at 8.8% in the 2nd quarter of 2010 and have now miraculously plummeted to pre-collapse levels of 4.9%. This is while residential loan delinquencies have resumed their upward trajectory, the number of employed Americans has fallen by 414,000 in the last two months, 9 million Americans have left the labor force since 2008, and vacancy rates are at or near all-time highs. This doesn’t pass the smell test. The Federal Reserve, owned and controlled by the Wall Street, instructed these banks to extend all commercial real estate loans, pretend they will be paid, and value them on their books at 100% of the original loan amount. Real estate developers pretend they are collecting rent from non-existent tenants, Wall Street banks pretend they are being paid by the developers, and their highly compensated public accounting firm pretends the loans aren’t really delinquent. Again, the purpose of this scam is to shield the Wall Street bankers from accepting the losses from their reckless behavior. Ben rewards them with risk free income on their deposits, propped up by mark to fantasy accounting, while they reward themselves with billions in bonuses for a job well done. The master plan requires an eventual real recovery that isn’t going to happen. Press releases and fake data do not change the reality on the ground.

I have two strip malls within three miles of my house that opened in 1990. When I moved to the area in 1995, they were 100% occupied and a vital part of the community. The closest center has since lost its Genuardi grocery store, Sears Hardware, Blockbuster, Donatos, Sears Optical, Hollywood Tans, hair salon, pizza pub and a local book store. It is essentially a ghost mall, with two banks, a couple chain restaurants and empty parking spaces. The other strip mall lost its grocery store anchor and sporting goods store. This has happened in an outwardly prosperous community. The reality is the apparent prosperity is a sham. The entire tottering edifice of housing, autos, and retail has been sustained by ever increasing levels of debt for the last thirty years and the American consumer has hit the wall. From 1950 through the early 1980s, when the working middle class saw their standard of living rise, personal consumption expenditures accounted for between 60% and 65% of GDP. Over the last thirty years consumption has relentlessly grown as a percentage of GDP to its current level of 71%, higher than before the 2008 collapse.

If the consumption had been driven by wage increases, then this trend would not have been a problem. But, we already know real median household income is lower than it was in 1970. The thirty years of delusion were financed with debt – peddled, hawked, marketed, and pushed by the drug dealers on Wall Street. The American people got hooked on debt and still have not kicked the habit. The decline in household debt since 2008 is solely due to the Wall Street banks writing off $800 billion of mortgage, credit card, and auto loan debt and transferring the cost to the already drowning American taxpayer.

The powers that be are desperately attempting to keep this unsustainable, dysfunctional debt choked scheme from disintegrating by doling out more subprime auto debt, subprime student loan debt, low down payment mortgages, and good old credit card debt. It won’t work. The consumer is tapped out. Last week’s horrific retail sales report for August confirmed this fact. Declining household income and rising costs for energy, food, clothing, tuition, taxes, health insurance, and the other things needed to survive in the real world, have broken the spirit of Middle America. The protracted implosion of our consumer society has only just begun. There are thousands of retail outlets to be closed, hundreds of thousands of jobs to be eliminated, thousands of malls to be demolished, and billions of loan losses to be incurred by the criminal Wall Street banks.

The Faces of Failure & Futility

My fourteen years working in key positions for big box retailer IKEA has made me particularly observant of the hubris and foolishness of the big chain stores that dominate the retail landscape.  There are 1.1 million retail establishments in the United States, but the top 25 mega-store national chains account for 25% of all the retail sales in the country. The top 100 retailers operate 243,000 stores and account for approximately $1.6 trillion in sales, or 36% of all the retail sales in the country. Their misconceived strategic plans assumed 5% same store growth for eternity, economic growth of 3% per year for eternity, a rising market share, and ignorance of the possible plans of their competitors. They believed they could saturate a market without over cannibalizing their existing stores. Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowes have all hit the limits of profitable expansion. Each incremental store in a market results in lower profits.

My trip to my local Lowes last weekend gave me a glimpse into a future of failure and futility. Until 2009, I had four choices of Lowes within 15 miles of my house. There was a store 8 miles east, 12 miles west, 15 miles north, and 15 miles south of my house. In an act of supreme hubris, Lowes opened a store smack in the middle of these four stores, four miles from my house. The Hatfield store opened in early 2009 and I wrote an article detailing how Lowes was about to ruin their profitability in Montgomery County. It just so happens that I meet a couple of my old real estate buddies from IKEA at a local pub every few months. In 2009 one of them had a real estate position with Lowes and we had a spirited discussion about the prospects for the Lowes Hatfield store. He assured me it would be a huge success. I insisted it would be a dud and would crush the profitability of the market by cannibalizing the other four stores. We met at that same pub a few months ago. Lowes had laid him off and he admitted to me the Hatfield store was a disaster.

I pulled into the Lowes parking lot at 11:30 am on a Saturday. Big Box retailers do 50% of their business on the weekend. The busiest time frame is from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm on Saturday. Big box retailers build enough parking spots to handle this peak period. The 120,000 square feet Hatfield Lowes has approximately 1,000 parking spaces. I pulled into the spot closest to the entrance during their supposed peak period. There were about 70 cars in the parking lot, with most probably owned by Lowes workers. It is a pleasure to shop in this store, with wide open aisles, and an employee to customer ratio of four to one. The store has 14 checkout lanes and at peak period on a Saturday, there was ONE checkout lane open, with no lines. This is a corporate profit disaster in the making, but the human tragedy far overrides the declining profits of this mega-retailer.

As you walk around this museum of tools and toilets you notice the looks on the faces of the workers. These aren’t the tattooed, face pierced freaks you find in many retail establishments these days. They are my neighbors. They are the beaten down middle class. They are the middle aged professionals who got cast aside by the mega-corporations in the name of efficiency, outsourcing, right sizing, stock buybacks, and executive stock options. The irony of this situation is lost on those who have gutted the American middle class. When you look into the eyes of these people, you see sadness, confusion and embarrassment. They know they can do more. They want to do more. They know they’ve been screwed, but they aren’t sure who to blame. They were once the very customers propelling Lowes’ growth, buying new kitchens, appliances, and power tools. Now they can’t afford a can of paint on their $10 per hour, no benefit retail careers. As depressing as this portrait appears, it is about to get worse.

This Lowes will be shut down and boarded up within the next two years. The parking lot will become a weed infested eyesore occupied by 14 year old skateboarders. One hundred and fifty already down on their luck neighbors will lose their jobs, the township will have a gaping hole in their tax revenue, and the CEO of Lowes will receive a $50 million bonus for his foresight in announcing the closing of 100 stores that he had opened five years before. This exact scenario will play out across suburbia, as our unsustainable system comes undone. Our future path will parallel the course of the labor participation rate. Just as the 9 million Americans who have “left” the labor force since 2008 did not willfully make that choice, the debt burdened American consumer will be dragged kicking and screaming into the new reality of a dramatically reduced standard of living.

Connecting the dots between my anecdotal observations of suburbia and a critical review of the true non-manipulated data bestows me with a not optimistic outlook for the coming decade. Is what I’m seeing just the view of a pessimist, or are you seeing the same thing?

A few powerful men have hijacked our economic, financial and political structure. They aren’t socialists or capitalists. They’re criminals. They created the culture of materialism, greed and debt, sustained by prodigious levels of media propaganda. Our culture has been led to believe that debt financed consumption over morality and justice is the path to success. In reality, we’ve condemned ourselves to a slow painful death spiral of debasement and despair.

“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” – Chris Hedges

order non hybrid seeds

TORA TORA TORA

In case you hadn’t noticed, this Fourth Turning just happened to turn up a few notches on the intensity scale in the last week. For those who are hoping for a positive outcome and rational people to come to their senses – So Solly. Fourth Turnings are a bitch.

Meanwhile In Beijing: “For The Respect Of The Motherland, We Must Go To War With Japan”

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durdenon 09/15/2012 12:23 -0400

Anti-US protests sweeping across the entire Muslim world (which are continuing today), besieging, attacking and burning down US embassies, are not the only thing that the central banker policy vehicle known as “the markets” have to ignore in the coming days and weeks. Cause here comes China: “Thousands besiege Japan’s embassy in Beijing over Tokyo’s assertion of control over disputed islands in East China Sea.” And China is not happy: “For The Respect Of The Motherland, We Must Go To War With Japan.” Sure enough, where would the US be if the focal point of this escalation in militant anger – the Senkaku Islands – was not merely the latest expression of Pax Americana, and America’s national interests abroad.

We already discussed the inevitable implications of the meaningless populist agitation over the contested Senkaku Islands. Here it is playing out in real time:

Protests in China are growing over Japan’s assertion of control of disputed islands.

 

Thousands of Chinese besieged the Japanese embassy in Beijing on Saturday, hurling rocks, eggs and bottles with protests reported in other major cities over the territorial dispute in the East China Sea.

 

Paramilitary police with shields and batons barricaded the embassy, holding back and occasionally fighting with slogan-chanting, flag-waving protesters who at times appeared to be trying to storm the building.

 

“Return our islands! Japanese devils get out!” some shouted.

 

One of them held up a sign reading: “For the respect of the motherland, we must go to war with Japan.”

 

The protests were not confined in Beijing. In Shanghai, streets around the Japanese consulate, in the were cordoned off on Saturday even as hundreds of police allowed a small groups of people in at a time to protest.

 

“The Chinese government has not done much to quell the inflamed passions of its citizens,” Al Jazeera’s Marga Ortigas reported from Hong Kong on Saturday.

 

Protesters are also calling for a widespread boycott against Japanese businesses and products.

 

Liu Gang, a migrant worker from the southern region of Guangxi, said: “We hate Japan. We’ve always hated Japan. Japan invaded China and killed a lot of Chinese. We will never forget.”

 

Japanese media are also reporting that large anti-Japan protests were held in the Chinese cities of Xian, Changsha, Nanjing and Suzhou.

 

Kyodo news agency said protesters attacked a dozen Japanese restaurants in Suzhou.

 

Sino-Japanese ties have long been plagued by China’s bitter memories of Japan’s military aggression in the 1930s and 1940s and present rivalry over resources and regional clout.

 

Relations between the two countries, whose business and trade ties have blossomed in recent years, chilled in 2010, after Japan arrested a Chinese trawler captain whose boat collided with Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the Japanese-controlled islands of Senkaku, called Diaoyu in China.

 

Anti-Japanese sentiment surfaced anew in the last few weeks after the Japanese government purchased the islands from their private owners.

 

Though Japan has controlled the islands for decades, China saw the purchase as further proof of Tokyo’s refusal to negotiate.

 

In response to Japan’s purchase, China on Friday sent six surveillance ships into what Japan says are its territorial waters.

And that’s how “escalation” always begins.

areas disputed in China, Japan, and Koreas

LLPOH’s Short Story: Responsibilities Employers Take for Employees

I cop a lot of flak for comments I make re employees, and the fact that I believe – in fact I know – that there is a significant number of people who, in a modern economy, are effectively unemployable. I base my comments on my experiences running businesses, both as an employee myself, and as an employer. I generally find that the people objecting to my comments are not employers, but employees, and most commonly government employees. Below, I am listing some of the responsibilities I have toward my employees, in hope of explaining why there are some people that are simply unemployable.

Responsible to pay wages:

Each week, I am responsible for meeting payroll. By payroll I mean wages and benefits. I am responsible for putting the pay in their banks, and for paying garnishments, child support, etc.
My weekly payroll is in the neighbourhood of $150,000. Failure to meet payroll is not allowed. I cannot skip a week because cash flow is a bit tight, no matter what might happen that might negatively affect my ability to meet payroll (customers not paying me on time, computer crashes, etc.). Not meeting payroll is not an option.
I am also responsible for sorting out all of the issues that occur re employees receiving their pay. Last week, come payday, I received two calls from irate wives when their husbands pay was not in their accounts. These wives were not happy. I investigated immediately – it took me away from other, money-making duties. What I found in both cases was that the families had changed their bank accounts without advising us. So their pay went into the ether. Not my fault. I then had to advise the irate wives that we did send their pay, that it was their own fault for not advising us of the changed bank accounts, and it would take a few to several days to sort out and for them to receive their pay, as we have to wait for the banks to return the money to us from the ether. Of course, I was abused and cursed, and they demanded I send their money forthwith. This I did not do. I am not a bank, and I am not responsible for their mistakes. I do have a long memory, and I do not appreciate being abused.
And there are times when employees die. This makes for ticklish situations. The bereaved families of course want their loved one’s final pay, holiday money, etc. They are in grief, and need to pay for funeral costs, etc. And I have to tell them that I cannot release the money to them until cleared to do so by the appropriate legal authority. It is heart-wrenching. Why cannot I release the money? Because I have no idea who has claim on it, and if I release the money to the wrong party, I am liable for its loss. For instance, I had a case where an employee had a wife and kids, and was not divorced. He lived with a girlfriend, with more kids by her, and they shared his account. The girlfriend wanted the money owed. The estranged wife of course wanted the money as well. If I had released the money to either of them without legal authority, I would have taken a big chance.

Responsible to be Tax Collector:

I am responsible for collecting and paying my employees taxes – federal and state, and social security, etc. I must calculate the tax, withhold the tax, and forward the tax on time to the appropriate agencies. God forbid I do this late, as the penalties are significant. And, should my employee owe the taxman money at the end of the year, I get the pleasure of being abused for failing to withhold enough.

Responsible for the Output of the Employee and for Keeping the Employee Working:

Everything I make and sell is priced, and the labor content is calculated down to the second. That is the same for a $30 product or a $3000 product. Each minute worked costs me around $1. Every minute lost costs me money – the same $1. If an employee takes a ten minute bathroom break, it costs me $10. If they arrive to start work at 7, and don’t get started until 7:10, it costs me $10. If they leave for lunch 2 minutes early, and do not start back until 2 minutes after the lunch break ends, it costs me $4. If I or my supervisors need to explain their work to them, it costs me $2 per minute – $1 for them, and $1 for the supervisor. I estimate that each worker loses the better part of an hour per day to these factors – and I have over 100 employees. Therefore the lost time costs me $6000 per day. Some of this is factored into the cost of the product. But not all. $6000 per day times 220 days per year = $1.3 million dollars lost each year for lost time. I take lost time very seriously – very seriously indeed. Employees that lose excess time are simply not tolerated. Employees that take excessive time to train, retrain, or instruct cost me money – a lot of money. I cannot afford it.

Responsible for the Continued Improvement of the Productivity of the Employee:

This is similar to the above, but somewhat different. Each employee must be able to produce more next year than this year. The target is a minimum of 2.5% improvement each year, in order to keep up with wage growth, and foreign competition. I must provide the means for each employee to produce more each year – be it equipment, training, plant layout, etc. If I cannot generate this 2.5%+ improvement each year, I will go broke. My employees must be capable of adapting to the changes that are required to achieve this improvement. If they cannot adapt, or cannot help me achieve the improvement, or take too long to train in order to achieve the improvement, I simply cannot employ them.

Responsible for the Quality of Output of Each Employee:

I am responsible for the quality of the product and of the work for each employee. Any mistakes made cost me money – in rework or scrap if the mistakes are caught in-house, or in costs associated with warranty if caught outside the plant. Each minute of rework costs me $1. Scrap costs me both material and labor. Faulty products that escape the plant cost me huge amounts – in general it costs me 10 times the sell price if a part leaves the plant faulty. A faulty $100 part costs me $1000 in warranty cost. I require that my employees be able to follow all quality procedure – written of course in order to maintain my quality accreditation – and to be able to notify me of issues as they arise. If they cannot do these things, I cannot employ them.

Responsible for the Safety of Each Employee:

I am required by law to maintain a safe workplace. There are written safety procedures that must be followed. There are written procedures with respect to handling of materials and chemicals. I pay huge sums of money insuring against workplace accidents and injury, and each claim drives these costs up. I cannot employ people that are incapable of following the procedures and of using good judgement in their work activities so as to minimize the risks associated with work. I am also responsible for any injuries that occur owing to extreme stupidity. Injuries associated with stupidity are the norm and not the exception.

Responsible for Making Sure Employees Adhere to EPA Laws:

This is self-explanatory. What is not so evident is the number of times that employees breach the laws intentionally so as to make their jobs easier (easier to dump chemicals down the drain as opposed to moving them to the designated disposal sites, etc.). Also, stupidity plays a factor – such as the time an employee failed to turn off a tap to a large chemical container, and allowed a major spill to occur. The lost chemicals were worth several thousands of dollars, but fortunately we caught the spill just before it reached the sewers.

Responsible for the Mistakes Employees Make:

Again, this is self-evident, and includes damage to equipment, erroneous or poor communication with customers and other employees, bad general decision making, etc.. What is not so self-evident is how varied the mistakes can be. Here is a good example of a mistake that cost me a lot of money, and had the potential to send me broke:

I have a system in place that ensures that customers receive invoices daily, and that allows me to track exactly that the invoices are indeed received by the customer. The reason is simple – the only reason I am in business is so that I get paid, and the business can only survive if I manage cash flow well. Both of those things depend on me invoicing my customers accurately and timely.

Two of my most senior managers took it upon themselves to change this system. They decided to implement a system that would send invoices electronically to the customers, and so save around $3000 per year in paperwork and handling costs. They implemented the system without my knowledge. The system failed – and the electronic transmissions did not occur. The managers did not follow-up to ensure that the system was working – they implemented the system, congratulated each other for a job well-done, and walked away. The invoices never reached the customers. The customers of course did not tell us they were not getting invoices – it is not in their interests to do so. The clerks involved are evaluated on how slowly they can pay out money, not on how fast.

Due to the lag-time between issuance of invoice and payment of invoice, the fact that the invoices were not received was not discovered for approximately 6 weeks. During this time, we were getting paid as usual, for invoices issued previously, and I did not know the system had changed. Then one day the money owed did not come in. I immediately asked why. At that point I discovered that they had changed the system, had failed to follow up that it was working, and that the invoices had never been issued to the customer.

I now had a $1.5 million cash flow problem. And I was not happy. The customer was very happy, of course – they hadn’t been invoiced for 6 weeks. A $1.5 million cash flow problem was created because two senior people had made a very bad mistake in order to save $3000. It is a mistake they will not repeat here.

The business survived, I met payroll every week, despite this enormous hole in cash flow, etc., but it was not a good situation.

The long and the short of it is, I cannot tolerate many mistakes from employees. They cost me money and would send me broke.

There are many more responsibilities I take by employing people, but will not go further with the list. What I hope becomes evident when going through the above is that I must have competent employees in order to stay in business. They must be able to work independently; they must be able to read and understand complex procedures; they must be able to determine risk and avoid it; they must have a good work ethic; they must be able to independently come up with ideas to improve productivity and must be receptive to change; they must be able to focus on detail; they must make few mistakes; they must run their daily lives well in order to not overly burden me with garnishments, child-support payments, failure to report bank account changes, etc.; in short, they must be intelligent people that help me make money.

I am not alone in this – every employer trying to make money needs employees with the same attributes. But the fact is, a significant percentage of potential workers do not have these attributes – they cannot read well or understand complex written instruction, they require too much supervision, they are unable to predict the outcome of their actions, they have uneven personal lives, they waste time, etc. I simply cannot employ these people and make a profit by so doing, and to employ them brings too much risk to my business re safety, EPA. Very few profit seeking employers can employ them. I have classified this group of functionally unemployable as those with IQs below 85 – that is of course arbitrary, and overly generalized. However, the fact is, using the IQ scale; it is from that group that the highest percentage of unemployable will be found. I simply cannot fully organize my business around people that cannot read, act independently, and reason.

I do not think I am being harsh – I am being realistic. Laws and the competitive environment make me responsible for my employees on a great many levels, and there are many risks with employing people. I must minimize the risks if I am to keep my company solvent. The belief that all people have a right to employment and a reasonable standard of living is noble, but it is unrealistic and unachievable.

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR 2013 FICA CHANGES?

Aside from today’s latest Fed tinkering by enacting QE3 at the expense of savers and potentially throwing further fuel onto the inflationary fires down the road (yay for all you readers holding gold today though!), you can rest assured that by the end of the year, we will see further changes to the current FICA tax limits and rates.  The FICA income cap itself is set automatically by the so-called government inflation measures (although many politicians are calling for an increase to that cap to soak the rich more), but from a rate standpoint, we’re currently enjoying a so-called “payroll tax holiday” which may be further mutated as a result of political pandering come election season.  Since the FICA tax rate and the cap have a direct impact on most working Americans, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Find out what’s in store for Next Year’s FICA Limits and Rates.

REMEMBER THE DROUGHT?

Time for some more dot connecting. The crop situation ccontinues to worsen. The corn and soybean crops will be the lowest in decades. The prices you pay in the supermarket lag because food producers generally hedge their prices for six months. The rising prices will not fully hit your pocketbook until 2013. The high price for feed has forced ranchers to slaughter cattle and pigs sooner than normal, creating a glut and lowering prices short term. The price of meat will soar next year.

The world is already a powderkeg, with the Middle East on the verge of explosion, Europe falling into an abyss, and China in the midst of a shadowy leadership transition with an imploding economy. The U.S. is the biggest exporter of corn and soybeans in the world. Higher prices and lower supply will cause starvation in many countries around the globe. Nothing like desperation and lack of food to set off the powderkeg. Combine that with our elections, the fiscal cliff and the debt limit and you’ve got the makings of the next nasty phase of this Fourth Turning.

But at least the stock market is soaring and Bennie will provide QE3 tomorrow. Party on Garth.

Government Lowers Crop Yield Forecast Again

By
Published: September 12, 2012

WASHINGTON — The Agriculture Department on Wednesday slightly lowered its estimates of corn and soybean yields from its forecast last month as record heat continued to batter crops in the Midwest, making it likely that farmers will bring in one of the lowest harvests in years.

The new estimates, which are published monthly, mark the third report in a row in which the department has lowered its forecasts for this fall’s harvest of corn and soybeans.

The new data suggested that customers would pay more at the grocery store next year as the price of corn and soybeans —  major ingredients in processed food, animal feed and biofuels —  rise to record levels.

The corn crop yield is expected to be 122.8 bushels an acre, the lowest in 17 years, and corn prices are projected to reach a record $7.20 to $8.60 a bushel, the report said. A month ago, the government said that the yield would be 123.4 bushels an acre. Jerry Norton, an analyst with the Agriculture Department, said the forecast for corn production was generally within the range of expectations. “It’s unlikely that we will see any big changes from here on,” Mr. Norton said. “A lot of the effects of the drought are reflected in what came out today.”

The corn crop for this year had been projected to hit a record 15 billion bushels, as farmers had planted the most acreage in nearly 70 years.

But as record heat set in, projections of a bumper crop were cut.

Remnants of Hurricane Isaac brought much-needed rainfall to a large portion of the country last week, including parts of the Midwest, but the rain will have little effect on the corn crop, which had already been damaged because of the record heat.  About 52 percent of the corn crop is currently rated in poor or very poor condition, unchanged from a week earlier, according to the Agriculture Department. The report said soybean production is expected to be 2.634 billion bushels — 58 million bushels below last month’s government estimate. Soybean prices are expected to be $15 to $17 a bushel, unchanged from last month, the government said.

Rice production was one of the few bright spots in the report. Farmers are expected to harvest a record 7,334 pounds per acre, up 138 pounds from last month’s estimate.

The United States is the world’s largest exporter of corn and soybeans. The report said exports of both crops would be substantially lower than last year, which could have a devastating effect on countries, including China and Mexico, that depend heavily on American exports. The government estimated that corn exports would be 50 million bushels lower because of drought conditions and competition from cheaper South American supplies. Soybean exports are down 55 million bushels largely because of the drought, the report said.

Eric Munoz, a senior policy adviser with Oxfam, said the reduction in exports for corn and soybeans means American food aid will reach fewer people. “It’s certainly a danger since several developing countries that get food aid are dealing with limited supplies and rising prices,” Mr. Munoz said.

Because of higher feed cost, the report said beef and poultry production is expected to increase this year as livestock producers cull or sell their herds. But prices for beef and poultry are expected to rise 4 to 5 percent next year.  Eggs, milk and pork production are expected to decline because of the increase in feed prices.

The new estimates from the Agriculture Department are based on surveys of farmers and its own inspections. The report provides the most authoritative view yet of crop damage since the drought began in May.

OBAMACARE IN ONE SENTENCE FROM A DOCTOR

Dr. Barbara Bellar Candidate for Illinois State Senate, District 18 sums up Obamacare in one sentence. Please go to my website and contribute to my campaign. I am running against the Chicago Machine and I could use your financial help! Go to electbellar.com or send your checks to Citizens to Elect Barbara Bellar – PO Box 557766, Chicago, IL 60655.

WHO’S RUNNING CHINA?

Some weird shit going on in China. Who’s in control? Their economy is imploding and there appears to be a power struggle going on for the top spot. Fits nicely into the Fourth Turning Crisis scenario.

 

The China Post
Media speculate Xi injured in accident
10 September 2012

There were a series of media reports saying that Chinese Vice President and presumptive future top leader Xi Jinping was injured in a traffic accident, barring him from some public functions.

Xi and He Guoqiang, who supervises discipline affairs in China, have been receiving medical treatments at Beijing’s 301 Military Hospital after they were injured in two separate road accidents on the evening of Sept. 4, according to reports of Boxun, a U.S.-based citizen news website.

There were also reports in Hong Kong media about the accidents, sparking speculation and rumors that they were assassination attempts.

Xi, aged 59 and a new-generation leader in China, has been widely tipped to take over the top Communist post from General Secretary Hu Jintao at the Communist Party Congress expected to take place in October this year. Xi is also expected to take over national presidency in next March.

But there were rife rumors after Xi canceled a public appearance for a meeting with visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sept. 5.

There were also unconfirmed reports that Xi was suffering from a painful spinal cord problem.

The media cited internal Beijing sources claiming that Xi was involved in a mysterious car accident in Beijing.

His vehicle was sandwiched by jeeps and Xi was said to have passed out during the collision before being rushed to Beijing’s 301 Military Hospital with injuries.

According to the source, He Guoqiang, the secretary of the Commission for Discipline Inspection, was involved in a separate road accident on the same night when a truck traveling at high speed hit his car from behind, causing it to turn over.

He also was rushed to the 301 Military Hospital and was said to be in a more critical condition.

There were rumors that the perpetrators could be military officers and supporters of Bo Xilai, former commerce minister and Chongqing party boss, who has been in detention for investigation concerning unspecified “serious discipline violations” since March.

Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was given a suspended death sentence last month for her role in murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. Bo was believed to have helped cover up the crime.

General Liu Yuan, political commissar of the General Logistics Department of the People’s Liberation Army of China, was reportedly to have personally coordinated the medical treatment for Xi and tightened security at the military hospital.

Liu, son of former Chinese President Liu Shaoqi, who was persecuted by ex-Communist leader Mao Zedong, was once thought to be among the senior military officers that have built close ties with Bo, son of another former Chinese Communist leader.

But Liu was thought to have ceded relations with Bo because of his close relations with Xi, who is expected to treat Liu as one of his own men in the influential military sector…

EPIC WORLDWIDE FAIL

Nothing like a little Kunstler on a Monday morning to make you want to slit your wrists. This is a longer than normal depressingly accurate assessment of the world. Did you actually think this Fourth Turning would get better?

Zeitgeist Failure

By James Howard Kunstler
on September 10, 2012 8:28 AM

     In an age of gross zeitgeist dysfunction — when untruth, delusion, and deception rule – politics is mere advertising, which is to say surface shimmer playing on the public’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. The trouble at this moment in history is that the American public’s wishful fantasies are inconsistent with the circumstances that reality offers to us and the choices for action that they present.

     President Obama’s historical role will be seen as a wish-fulfillment totem for late 20th century progressive liberalism – the first black president. The Democratic Party apotheosized the genial young lawyer with his appealing family in order to demonstrate the triumph of social justice, which was their great struggle of the era. Evidence of that is the striking divergence from the get-go between Mr. Obama’s Hope and Change advertising and his sedulous defense of pervasive racketeering at the highest levels of polity once in office. Otherwise, you must decide whether he was a tool of the giant banks, or a dupe-made-hostage to them, or simply too clueless to understand what was required in 2009 – namely the break-up and reorganization of the banks plus hearty prosecution of their executives for massive swindling (along with reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act). I voted for him in 2008, by the way, since the wish-fulfillment motif moved me, and also because of the horrifying McCain-Palin opposition. 

     In office, then, Mr. Obama quickly proved to be a different breed of porpoise than the voters bargained for. He let the Wall Street privateers run amuck another four years, aided with colossal infusions of conjured-out-of-nothing “money” from the Federal Reserve. He let loose the demons of a high-tech totalitarian “security” state with every sort of electronic surveillance, citizen data-mining, and drone spying that innovation allowed. He stood silent like a Banana Republic store mannequin after the supreme court decided that corporations could buy elections (he could have pushed  loudly for legislation or even a constitutional amendment to redefine corporate “personhood”). And of course, he continued to prosecute the absurd war in Afghanistan where, after nine years, US forces are unable to accomplish the only aims of being there: to control the terrain and to moderate the behavior of the people who live there.

     Hence, the appalling spectacle of the Democratic convention last week, with its odor of ideological bankruptcy, stale rhetoric, and empty promises. The party seeks only validation of its cherished fantasy: the social justice of reelecting the first black president. And all it really has to offer is cheerleading to that end – with some social justice table-scraps tossed to the lesser totems of social justice politics: women, assorted ethnic minorities, and gays. 

     Meanwhile, the “advanced nations” of industrial civilization all spiral into coordinated disintegration, especially in the realm where economy meets finance. Economy is about what we actually do to stay alive: make things, trade things, grow things, run things. Finance is supposed to be about maintaining the flows of accumulated wealth to support these things we do – with a modest service charge for the financiers who do the work. But in the great divorce of truth from reality in our time, finance is only about pretending to maintain these “capital” flows. In fact, it has degenerated into a set of looting operations, swindles, frauds, and political dodges, and it is on the verge of blowing up.

     There’s a fair chance that global finance (and trade) will blow up this season leading to the US elections. The nations of Europe are stuck in an intractable predicament. The European Union can’t control the fiscal operations (taxing and spending) of its sovereign members, and it only pretends to be able to lend them the money to cover the interest payments on their previous loans. That shuck-and-jive is now headed for a climax. But the situation is not materially different in the USA and Japan. In one way or another, they are bankrupt, too, as are probably most of their commercial banks. China’s banks are certainly a fiasco, since they are government-run, with no independent accounting oversight whatsoever. China does have a big cushion of US Treasury holdings, huge stockpiles of industrial metals and cement, and many new tons of recently-acquired gold. But they are also hostage to the bankrupt West’s lost appetite for “consumer” goods, and tens of millions of laid-off Chinese factory workers could foment political upheaval in a delicate time of regime transition coming later this year.

     The antics of the ECB, the US Federal Reserve, and all the other central banks in conjuring ever more money-out-of-nothing draws us toward that event horizon where faith is lost in a faith-based money system. The only question really is whether wealth destruction (deleveraging, debt default) out-paces currency destruction (inflation). My own guess continues to be that wealth destruction wins that contest, with massive unpayable debt sucked into a black hole, and then all the advanced industrial nations waking up one oddly warm morning to find their standards of living destroyed.

     As a political matter in the face of all this, the big question is how we will reorganize daily life – the activities of a whole culture – to comport with the reality of a compressive contraction in economic reality. It also includes the shape and content of the consensus we construct to explain to ourselves what is happening. The obvious epic failure of the two major parties in the USA to even begin this necessary work may propel this country into an historic political convulsion to attend the financial implosion. Imagine, for instance, if the failure of international banks leads to the rapid paralysis of trade supply lines and then to empty shelves in American supermarkets.

     People complain about “the size and burden of government,” but our problems extend to the size and burden of everything, beginning with the number of human beings now vying to occupy the planet and moving to the size and scale of every activity supporting them. Truthful political leadership would engage in preparing the public for a long “to do” list of necessary tasks – from the return to Main Street economies that will follow the inevitable collapse of WalMart to the reorganization of food production when agri-biz style farming fails from scarcities of cheap oil, phosphates, and capital for revolving loans. Include also the rebuilding of transportation networks not based on cars and airplanes and the painful reconstruction of a monetary and banking system based on the rule of law.

      This is the true work of the future: the rebuilding of these systems. All the blather about “jobs” from the presidential convoys is based on looking backward to a way of life that is ending: the age of giant everything, especially corporations. The days of cubicle serfdom are numbered. Useful, gainful work in the decades ahead will be much more about how you fit into your local community.  The word “job” may even become obsolete – a curious artifact of the industrial past. Which party is preparing young people for local agriculture and all the value-added activities around it? Which party understands that the national chain-store model of trade is doomed and Main Streets all over America will have to be re-activated? Which party understands that we’re in the twilight of mass motoring and commercial aviation? And what are they doing to prepare for the implications of that?

     The two doddering parties want to promise more of what we’ve already got in a world that doesn’t have anymore of that to give. The result is likely to be that we will go through all the noisy motions of the 2012 elections only to find ourselves plunged into a political crisis possibly worse than the Civil War.

 

Sidebar on  How “Smart” We Think We Are

 

      TV commercial seen during the Women’s finals of the US Tennis Open:

      Cadillac is bragging that they have replaced the old dashboard knobs and toggles with a “smart” iPad-type control system. Has a car company ever done something so fucking stupid? The whole point of knobs and toggles is that you can keep your eyes on the road while adjusting things by feel. An iPad you actually have to look at to see what you’re tapping on. Expect a colossal death toll from buyers of the latest Cadillacs in the next couple of years. I suppose there’s poetic justice in the automobile age winding down on a note of such supernatural idiocy.

TROUBLE IN SOCK CITY

Hold onto your socks, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. It really isn’t as complicated as the morons and numbskulls in the MSM and government want you to believe. It’s simply the boom and bust cycle playing out as it has done for centuries. The average American is significantly poorer than they were in 2005. Their net worth has plummeted. If they’ve stayed employed, their real wages have declined. Millions have lost their jobs and are either unemployed or under-employed.

Americans buying cheap shit produced in China, using credit, was what made the world go round. Well guess what? When Americans were forced to scale back on buying shit, the rest of  the world got kicked in the balls. Anyone who thinks the Chinese economy will keep chugging along without Americans and Europeans buying their socks, toxic dog food and rubber dog shit, is living a dream.

China has hit the proverbial wall at 100 mph. The casualties are many. The government will keep reporting fake economic numbers and the U.S. MSM will dutifully report them with a straight face. This will continue until this sand castle of hope, built on a foundation of socks, crumbles into the hamper of history.

So Solly. 

 

Sock City’s decline may reveal an unravelling in China’s economy

The hosiery business has been good to the entrepreneurs of Datang, who rode out the 2008 crisis and recovered. But now business is slowing again – and experts fear that may presage a hard landing for the whole country

WORKER AT SOCKS FACTORY

A worker at a sock factory in Yiwu, China. But after years of brisk business, Zhejiang province is now facing an economic slowdown. Photograph: Eugene Hoshiko/AP

The foolish man built his house upon sand; the wise man built his house on a rock. The ambitious entrepreneurs of Datang chose a sturdy nylon and wool foundation. “People always need socks,” points out Xu Leile, whose company clothes the feet of the British and US armies, European hikers and pampered pet dogs.

Thanks to Xu and hundreds more like him, “Sock City” – north-west of Tie Town, east of Sweater Town – epitomised China‘s economic success story. The obscure settlement in eastern Zhejiang province became an export-driven boomtown, producing as much as a third of the world’s sock supply and thriving even through the financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent global recession.

Last year, Datang made roughly two pairs of socks for every person on earth. Long and short, Argyle or polka-dotted, they cram the stores of the nearby wholesale market. In Xu’s spacious new factory, the shelves are stacked with huge reels of red, blue and orange thread. But ask Xu about the future and he grimaces. “I’m very worried. This year is much worse than 2008-9,” he says.

The biggest of his rivals to have gone under in May – the Anli Sock Group, which produced 60m pairs of socks annually – could prove to be “the Lehman Brothers of Datang”, according to Fan Jianping, chief economist of the State Information Centre.

Failures such as Anli’s and a slew of disappointing data in recent weeks are raising fears far beyond China that a slowdown in the world’s second largest economy is turning into a hard landing. In the face of Europe’s woes and the weak US recovery, Chinese growth has become more important than ever: the ripples are already being felt globally, with commodities analysts blaming tumbling prices on falling demand from China.

The country’s premier, Wen Jiabao, has issued repeated warnings about the economy, saying growth is under pressure and exports need support. Last week’s announcement of approval for infrastructure projects, which some estimate to be worth 1tn yuan (£99bn), appears to be an indication of just how alarmed authorities have become about the largely investment-driven economy.

Until now, they have taken a series of milder measures, such as cutting the reserve ratio requirement and reducing interest rates, mindful of the painful hangover that resulted from the huge 4tn yuan stimulus they adopted to stave off the last crisis. That inflated property prices again and left a legacy of massive local government debt and questionable loans and infrastructure projects.

China’s economy saw second-quarter growth of 7.6% year-on-year: enviable to US or European eyes, but the lowest rate in three years, and the sixth straight quarter of slowing growth. Export growth slid to 1% in July – the lowest rate for three years, bar January, which was skewed by the lunar New Year holiday – and earlier this week, the official factory purchasing managers’ index fell to 49.2 – the first time since November that it had dropped below the 50 barrier separating expansion from contraction.

“We should be very worried,” says Anne Stevenson-Yang, co-founder of Beijing-based J Capital Research. “The economy has been in a hard landing since the fourth quarter of last year, but seems to have been helped by the consumer economy … That’s now down as well.”

Most analysts are more optimistic, at least for now. While growth has fallen from a peak of 11.9% in the first quarter of 2010, when there were concerns about overheating, the decline is far less steep than last time, when it plummeted from a peak of 14.8% in the second quarter of 2007 to a low of 6.6% in early 2009.

But Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight warns: “More of the indicators we are looking at are showing strain and weakness. It’s nowhere near what we were looking at four years ago, but nonetheless pretty ugly.

“There are huge stockpiles of coal at Qinhuangdao; steel factories in Hebei are over capacity; in retail, auto dealers have two, three, four months’ more stock than they are used to.”

Cranes still tower over construction sites, but no one is working in them, says Yu Wankun, the sales manager for SANY Excavators in Jiangsu, the neighbouring province to Zhejiang.

“I feel like a blossoming summer has suddenly turned into a dull winter,” he laments. “In 2008, we didn’t feel the crisis at all. This year, we do feel the crisis has really struck. The government’s stimulus created a bubble. But many local governments are in debt now and the central government’s financial support has stopped.”

The knock-on effects hit people hard when exports started falling in May, says Xiao Zhou, boss of another Datang firm. “A lot of sock companies started doing real estate in Jiangsu – they went bust because of the property market, not because of sales,” he says.

Back in the sock factory, Xu says 73 clothing firms have gone under this year, with some leaving behind debts of billions of yuan. Things have not been so bad since 2003, when foreign buyers stayed away because of the Sars crisis. Usually Xu goes to the US once a year; this time, he has made three trips – but one major customer halved its usual $5m order anyway. Sales to civilian customers are down by at least a fifth.

It is a sign of the times that his firm, Huazhong, considers the boom in sales to the Syrian army as a rare bright spot. “Last year they bought 870,000 pairs. This year it’s 960,000 already,” he says. Few might imagine that camouflage or khaki ribbed socks came in so many varieties, but French, Singaporean and Saudi Arabian soldiers have proved exacting customers.

But Datang also has its strengths. Smart entrepreneurs have moved away from piling high and selling cheap to targeting foreigners. Xu decided early on to focus on high-quality products and military sales, which he hoped would prove more stable and more lucrative. Though his company has dabbled in producing woolly hats, lacy tights and dog booties, Xu’s latest target is the medical market, with products such as support stockings. Others in Datang have focused on domestic consumers or sought new markets in rival developing countries.

The rise in Chinese purchases and the increase in trade to the Middle East should also help to offset problems elsewhere, says Hou Zhiping, general manager of the city’s hosiery market.

So far, there is little sign of rising unemployment – admittedly a trailing indicator – which might fuel fears of social unrest. At the labour market in nearby Yiwu, a recruiter for the Xialaite sock company grumbled about the difficulties of finding enough employees.

Geoff Crothall of China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based group supporting mainland workers, says there have been noticeably more layoffs than last year, especially in Zhejiang and Guangdong, “but nothing like 2008-9, when 20m workers were laid off … I don’t think there’s a huge number of unemployed migrant workers wandering around.”

Recruiters in those provinces had previously complained of severe labour shortages, he points out, and opportunities in migrants’ home provinces have improved: “Recently it was reported that, for the first time, there were more rural labourers from Sichuan working within the province than outside it.”

Beijing’s push to develop inland areas has also had some success, as Crothall points out: while Zhejiang’s economy grew 5.2% in the first half of 2012, down from 12.1% in the same period last year, western areas like Sichuan, Chongqing, Shaanxi and Guizhou all saw rates of above 16%, according to official figures.

But growth is now slowing in those regions, too – and because their economies are so much smaller, they have less effect on the overall situation. “You would have to triple Xinjiang’s economy to have an impact on the national picture … If you can’t fix Guangdong, you can’t fix China,” says Thornton.

Yet, says Patrick Chovanec of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, the outlook is not uniformly negative: “This is an economic adjustment and, in the long run, will be good for China and the world, but it doesn’t mean it won’t be painful.”

Officials and analysts have long warned that the Chinese economy is unsustainable; that the years of double-digit growth were fuelled by investment and exports, and that rebalancing and reform were desperately needed.

A powerful editorial in Caixin, the country’s most influential business magazine, raised fears that local governments were ignoring the centre’s cautious approach and instead attempting another major stimulus that would crowd out smaller private enterprises, deter competition and increase distortions in the system.

Continuing to pursue high-speed growth, fuelled by government investment, will mean that “growth will fall; discrimination will become pervasive, and rent-seeking and corruption rampant; our society and environment will be pushed to their limits; and development cannot be sustained. The mass protests, riots and environmental disasters we have seen are just some of the consequences of this distorting growth model. They are a warning,” it said.

“If we continue to hanker for economic ‘miracles’, we must be prepared to pay a high price in future.”

 

Additional research by Cecily Huang and Kathy Gao

SUBPRIME AUTO NATION

Have you heard the news? Auto sales are booming. Total sales for the month of August were 1,285,202 vehicles, according to Autodata Corp, the highest monthly sales figure for any August since 2007, when 1.47 million autos were sold in the United States. Year to date auto sales have totaled 9.7 million and are on track to reach 14.5 million. Between 2006 and 2007, auto sales ranged between 16 million and 18 million. They crashed below 10 million in 2009. The Keynesians running our government have pulled out all the stops to restart this engine of consumer spending. First they wasted $3 billion of taxpayer funds on the Cash for Clunkers debacle. Almost 700,000 perfectly good cars were destroyed in order to keep union workers happy.  This Keynesian brain fart distorted the used car market for two years, raising prices for cars needed by the working poor. After that miserable failure, they realized the true secret to selling vehicles is to give them away to anyone that can scratch an X on a loan document, with 0% interest for 60 months, financed by Federal government controlled banking interests. Add in some massive channel stuffing and presto!!! – You’ve got an auto sales boom.

General Motors sales are up 3.7% over 2011. Ford Motors sales are up 6% over 2011. The Obama administration continues to tout their saving of the U.S. auto industry with their bailout in 2009 that saved unions and screwed bondholders. If this strong auto recovery is not an illusion, how do you explain the two charts below? General Motors stock is down 42% since 2011. The highly proclaimed success story called Ford Motors has seen their stock collapse by 50% since 2011. This is surely a sign of tremendous success and anticipation of soaring profits for these bastions of American manufacturing dominance.

Chart forGeneral Motors Company (GM)

Chart forFord Motor Co. (F)

This is America, land of the delusional and home of the vain. The appearance of success is more important than actual success. The corporate mainstream media dutifully reports the surge in auto sales is surely a sign the economy is recovering and the consumer has finished deleveraging and is ready to spend again. The government propaganda machine proclaims the surging auto sales are due to their wise and forward thinking policies (like the Chevy Volt). Luckily for them, there are millions of gullible Americans who believe the storyline and are easily convinced that driving a $30,000 new car, financed over seven years, makes them a success. The decades of Bernaysian marketing propaganda has worked its magic on the government educated, math challenged citizenry. There are only two things that matter to the non-thinking auto buyer (renter) – the monthly payment and what the next door neighbor and his coworkers will think. Buying a fuel efficient car they can afford, paying it off in three or four years, and driving it for ten years, while saving the monthly car payment, is what a practical, rational thinking person would do. The fact that only 20% of the 9.7 million vehicles sold this year have been small cars and the average sales price of new cars sold is now $31,000 proves Americans are still living in a delusional fantasyland of cheap gas and monthly payments for eternity.

As gas prices surpass $4 per gallon across the country, somehow 4.7 million of the 9.7 million vehicles sold in 2012 have been pickups, vans, crossovers or SUVs. Three of the top eight selling vehicles are pickups. Luxury vehicle sales are booming, with Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Land Rover and Audi showing double digit percentage sales gains over 2011. We’ve entered a recession, gas prices are approaching all-time highs, job growth is pitiful, and Americans continue to buy luxury gas guzzlers on credit. This will surely end well.

The average payment on a new car in 2012 is $461. For used cars, the average monthly payment is $346. Today, 77% of new car purchases are financed. About half of all used vehicles involve financing. Of those cars financed, 89% are through a loan vs. 11% with a lease. A critical thinking person might wonder how a country with 4 million less employed people than we had in 2007, median household net worth down 35%, and real wages lower than they were in 2007, could be experiencing an auto boom. The answer is a government/corporate/banker/media effort to funnel taxpayer funds to deadbeats across the land in a fruitless attempt to create a facade of recovery. Our governing elite are convinced that more debt peddled to the masses is the path to recovery for an economy that imploded due to excessive debt peddled to the masses in the first place. Essentially, it comes down to who benefits from the peddling of debt. It isn’t the masses, as they become enslaved in the chains of debt and monthly payments in perpetuity. Debt peddling benefits Wall Street bankers, politicians, and mega-corporations selling crap to the masses.

The storyline being sold to the vegetative dupes (watching Honey Boo Boo) that occupy space in this delusional paradise we call America, by the corporate media, is that consumers have deleveraged and are ready to resume their “normal” pattern of spending money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need. Of course, the facts always seem to get in the way of a good yarn. Consumers have never deleveraged. Consumer credit outstanding is at an all-time high of $2.58 trillion. The decline from $2.55 trillion in 2008 to $2.4 trillion in 2010 was NOT deleveraging. It was the Wall Street Too Big To Fail banks taking a big dump on the American taxpayers. They passed their bad debts to you through TARP, the Federal Reserve buying their toxic “assets”, and ZIRP. 

Revolving credit (credit card) debt peaked at just above $1 trillion in 2008 and “declined” to $850 billion during 2010.  The media storyline is that you buckled down and paid off your credit cards, therefore depressing consumer spending and creating a recession. Sounds convincing except for the fact that it’s a load of bullshit. The Federal Reserve’s own data proves it to be false. Your friendly Wall Street banks have written off $213 billion of credit card debt since 2008 and passed the bill to the few remaining taxpayers in this country. For the math challenged, this means that consumers have actually INCREASED their credit card debt by $68 billion since 2008. The bad news for our Chinese crap peddling mega-retailers is that the significantly poorer average middle class American household is using their credit cards to pay their property tax bills, IRS bills, and utility bills in order to survive.  

Credit Card Charge-off in Dollars 2005 – 2011 — Not Seasonally Adjusted:

Year Dollar Amount
2011 $46,017,459,671
2010 $75,090,106,350
2009 $83,179,901,000
2008 $53,506,353,600
2007 $38,149,440,000
2006 $32,111,934,400
2005 $40,634,994,400
Year & Quarter Dollar Amount
2012Q1 $8,772,385,443

 

The category of debt that barely budged in the 2009 collapse was non-revolving credit. It stayed in the $1.5 trillion range in 2009 and has since surged to over $1.7 trillion in 2012. What could possibly have made this debt skyrocket by $200 billion when the GDP has only grown by 12% over the same time frame? You guessed it – your corporate fascist friends in Washington DC and on Wall Street. Non-revolving debt consists of auto loan debt of $663 billion and student loan debt of approximately $1 trillion. Student loan debt has shot up by $300 billion since 2008. This student loan debt is being distributed, like candy by a pedophile, from the Federal government in an effort to artificially hold down the unemployment rate.

Approximately $500 billion of the student loan debt is held directly by the Federal government, up from $100 billion in 2008. The Feds guarantee the majority of the remaining student loan debt. Can you think of a more subprime borrower than a 40 year old former construction worker getting a liberal arts degree from the University of Phoenix, sitting at his computer in his underwear scratching his balls, and paying with a $10,000 Federal student loan from you? This fraudulent attempt to obscure the true employment situation will end in tears for the borrowers and the American taxpayer. It’s tough to make a loan payment without a job. The student loan bailout is just over the horizon and will cost you at least $300 billion. Delinquencies are already off the charts.

        

When has offering low interest debt in ample portions to people without jobs, income or assets ever backfired before? The bankers and politicians that control this country seem to be a one-trick pony. They will never admit that debt is the problem and reducing it the solution. The real solution would make them poorer, so their solution is to pour gasoline on the fire with more debt at lower interest rates to more people. The addict will keep injecting more poison into their system until sudden death. The bankers and politicians know we are a car-centric society and appeal to our vanity and poor math skills to keep the game going.     

During the first quarter of this year, total U.S. car loans totaled $52.5 billion. That’s 49% higher than the same period in 2009. Also during the first quarter, the average amount financed on new vehicles rose by $589, to $25,995, and for used cars by $411, to $17,050. Furthermore, buyers are stretching out payments for longer terms: The average length of new- and used-vehicle loans jumped a full month during the first three months of this year, to 64 and 59 months, respectively. The surge in auto sales is being completely driven by doling out more loans for a longer time frame to deadbeat borrowers. Subprime auto loans now make up 45% of all car loans and the vast majority of all used car loans.  They have even created a category called Deep Subprime. Borrowers classified as “deep subprime” (i.e. those with Vantage scores below 600) account for 10.7% of auto loans. You can also classify them as loans that will never be repaid.

 

Two thirds of all car sales are for used cars, so the fact that 37% of all new cars are being sold to subprime borrowers is exacerbated by the ridiculous lending practices for used cars. The fine folks at Zero Hedge have provided the outrageous data and a chart that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt what awaits the American taxpayer – another bailout. Zero Hedge has already revealed the GM fake recovery by detailing their channel stuffing over the last two years. Now they’ve dug up more dirt on why car sales are surging. What could possibly go wrong providing loans for more than the value of the asset to people with a history of not paying their debts?

  • Subprime borrowers received 56.46% of loans on used cars in the quarter, up from 52.70% a year earlier.
  • The average loan-to-value on new cars was 109.55%
  • The average used car loan-to-value ratio rose to 126.62%
  • 77% of Subprime Auto Loans are for a period greater than five years

It’s amazing how many cars you can sell when you aren’t worried about getting paid. This is the beauty of a fiat currency, a printing press, and a taxpayer available to pick up the tab after the drunken party gets out of hand. The chart below provides the details of our superhighway to disaster. The percentage of used car loans to prime borrowers is now at an all-time low, while the percentage of loans to subprime borrowers is near all-time highs reached just prior to the 2008 crash. When lenders cared about being paid back in the early 2000’s, they rarely made loans longer than five years. Today, more than 77% of all subprime used car loans are longer than five years and average FICO scores are now well below 600. Just to clarify – if your FICO score is below 600 – YOU ARE A DEADBEAT.

When you start to connect the dots, things that didn’t seem to make sense begin to crystallize. This is all part of the master plan concocted by Bernanke, Geithner, Obama and the Wall Street Shysters. The auto section of my local paper now makes sense. Offers of 7 year financing at 0% interest and monthly lease offers of $150 to $200 for brand new cars now are understandable. The newer model BMWs, Cadillac Escalades, Volvos, and Jaguars I see parked in front of the low income luxury gated townhome community in West Philadelphia now makes sense. A pizza delivery guy driving a new Lexus is now explainable.   

The master plan is fairly simple. The Federal Reserve lends money to the Wall Street banks for 0% interest. These banks then turn around and provide credit card debt at 13% interest, new & used car loans to prime borrowers at 5% interest, and new & used car loans to subprime borrowers at 16%. When you can borrow for free, you can take a chance that a significant number of your borrowers will default. Essentially, Ben Bernanke is screwing the prudent savers and senior citizens by paying them 0.15% on their savings in order to subsidize the bankers that destroyed the country so they can make auto loans to the same people who took out the zero percent down interest only no doc mortgage loans in 2005. In addition, Wall Street knows the Bernanke Put is still in place. If and when these subprime loans explode in their faces again, Bennie, Timmy and Obamaney will come to the rescue with your tax dollars. Its heads you lose, tails you lose, again.    

 The chart below is like a who’s who of TARP recipients. The top 20 auto lenders control half the market. And look at the leader of the pack. Our friends at Ally Bank are the market share leader. You remember Ally Bank – they conveniently changed their name from GMAC (also known as Ditech – biggest subprime mortgage lender) after losing billions and being bailed out by you. They still owe you $11 billion and are 85% owned by the U.S. Treasury. No conflict of interest there. You have the biggest auto lender on earth controlled by the Obama administration. Do you think they have an incentive to make as many loans as humanly possible to help Obama create the illusion of an auto recovery? The only downside is for the American taxpayer when we have to eat billions more in Ally/GMAC losses. This insolvent excuse for a lending institution has been extremely aggressive in the subprime auto lending market and has forced the other wannabes – Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Capital One and Bank of America – to lower their lending standards. Does this scenario ring a bell? 

top_20_car_lenders_market_share

We’ve become a subprime auto nation, addicted to easy debt, living lives of hope, delusion and minimum monthly payments. Storylines about economic recovery, fraudulent government statistics showing lower unemployment, feel good propaganda from the corporate mainstream media, and a return to easy money debt fueled spending does not constitute a real recovery. Until the bad debt is purged from the system and saving takes precedence over spending, the country will stagger and ultimately fall under the weight of its immense debt. We are lost in a blizzard of lies. This subprime fueled engine of recovery will propel the country into the same canyon of reality we entered in 2008. The crack up boom approaches.

 

survival seed vault

 

A Stucky Poll: What do you like or don’t like about TBP?

First of all, what my intent is NOT about. This is not about Administrator, the great things he has done. This is not a “tribute” thread. Leave direct references to him out of it, if possible.

WHAT PROMPTED ME TO START THIS THREAD

To a lesser degree, this post from a newbie, Alan McCracken:

“I wanted to drop a note before I deleted your blog from my favorites for good. I’m taking advice from the Silver Shield and am dumping toxic people and things . I agreed with virtually everything that you wrote about financially and politically. I was willing to overlook the racist crap because it didn’t directly affect me. Then comes the gays and other fringe freaks comment. When you attack people for who they are and not what they do or say, YOU LOOSE ALL CREDIBILITY. We are around you at most times. Be careful since we might “convert” you, asshole.”

To a much, much greater degree, this comment from Big Dog, Muck About.

“My conclusion, maybe it’s time I moved along and leave the arguing and bickering and stupidity to the late Boomers, tattoo’d Millenniums and just bow out.”

What we have here are two people fed up with TBP; one left for sure, another might. Both are just too fed up with the bullshit; the name calling, the slurs, the bickering and stupidity.

Admin’s general stance has been that if you want to leave, then do it and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, no one cares. But, I know he does care, not always, but often. He was sad when Smokey and I left at the same time. I’ll bet he’s at least a little sad Howard doesn’t post here anymore. I know he’ll be sad if Muck About leaves, as will I. I don’t care much when a Newbie leaves. I am almost always sad when a Big Dog leaves, even if I didn’t agree with their views. People leave for all kinds of reasons. I just hope we can stop or slow down the reason being …. us.

WHO and WHAT THIS IS ABOUT

This is about all of you, and me. Long timers, often known as Big Dogs, and newbies alike. It’s mostly about We, the People; what we post, how we post, how we interact. What turns you on. What turns you off. It’s pretty wide open.

You can be general; “I hate dopplegangers.” Or, you can be specific; “I hate Stucky’s doppleganging habits”. I do realize naming names can turn this thread into a real shitfest. But, we like that too! Or, don’t we? Anyway, let’s be real. If you simply say, “I hate dopplegangers”, we all can figure out that it’s mostly Stucky we’re talking about. Might as well be specific in the first place.

This can also be about policies. Some might say there are no policies here, that it’s wide open. Well, “wide open” is a policy, is it not? I don’t want to make more work for Admin, and he may not even have the time or inclination to implement new policies. And that’s fine. Policy comments are a good way to “get things off my chest”. For example, I think we need a Banning Policy. Posters who attack a family member should be banned. It doesn’t need to be permanent; maybe 1 week, 1 month, or such.

WHAT I HOPE THIS ACCOMPLISHES

1)- “laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.”

Metaphorically speaking, I think a lot of us here are “crying alone”. I am hoping there some catharsis if we can cry together. Get things off our chest.

2)- If nothing else, to restore sanity to my TBP life. The level of shit flinging has been unreal this past week, especially the tone, which has traversed from “fun” to downright vile and mean. I’ve been throwing around words I normally abhor; cunt and nigger, and even wishing people were aborted. I wrote (but won’t submit) something called’ Stucky’s Grand Apology and Fuck You Tour” — about using the power of hate to thrive and motivate.

Ms Freud rarely reads this site, but I forgot to close the TBP window when I went to bed. The “Should we be Optimistic / Pessimistic” shitfest thread was open. She gets up earlier than I do. She read it. I get up, do my thing in the bathroom, go to the kitchen, say “Good Morning”, and she responds, “What the fuck has gotten into you?” She only uses the f-word every 6 months, so she was a bit overdue. She was aghast, asked me to explain myself. I told her about Stucky 2.0, how I was going to fling shit nonstop, fight hate with hate, that I was joining the Dark Side, that being nice was just to fucking hard. She laughed, literally, and said, “What a crock of bullshit.” She was overdue on that word too. But, she’s also correct. It just isn’t me. I can count on one hand the number of enemies I’ve made in my real life. I tried real hard to be something I’m not. I just can’t continue down that road.

3)- I am hoping for better understanding and maybe some changes in behavior.

No, I’m not so dumb to believe we’ll all be holding hands around the campfire singing Kumbaya. I honestly don’t want to hate SAH. I let my emotions get the better of me. I should have done a MUCH better job trying to understand her, to find some common ground, instead of only differences. If people say they really hate doppleganging, I doubt I’ll cut it out altogether. But, I’m will to curtail it, if it means TBP will be a better place. That kind of thing.

4) – To stress that for us TBPers there is more that unites us, than divides us. The 3 shitfest threads I participated in the past week — Boomers, Creation, Truthers — don’t amount to a pimple on an elephant’s ass in the big scheme of things. We are so fucked as a people and nation, and we’re (me) getting too sidetracked by the incidentals.

5)- I hope no more Big Dogs leave.

6)- To issue a sincere and heartfelt apology. To SAH for calling you a despicable name and wishing you dead. I was wrong. To Colma for calling you a despicable name, and shitting all over your post. I was wrong. (I might even try to like Bad Religion). To everyone else who was turned off by my bullshit and whom I may have offended, I’m sorry. I hope we have a “Do Over” button.

WILL THE MILITARY SHOOT YOU DOWN LIKE DOGS? – OPEN THREAD

There seems to be a notion among  intellectuals that the U.S. Military would never conduct military operations against the citizens of the United States. I find that laughable, as the list below proves. American troops have been used against civilians since the inception of our country. Those in power will use everything at their disposal to retain that power, including using troops to slaughter Americans that choose to dissent. The persistent “training exercises” taking place in and around U.S. cities is not a coincidence. Those in power know our economic situation is tenuous and a collapse is on the horizon. I believe that National Guard and Federal troops will fire on Americans when ordered to do so. What do you think? 

 

  • The Whiskey Rebellion, or Whiskey Insurrection, was a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791, during the presidency of George Washington. Farmers who sold their grain in the form of whiskey had to pay a new tax which they strongly resented. The tax was a part of treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton‘s program to pay off the national debt. On the western frontier, protesters used violence and intimidation to prevent federal officials from collecting the tax. Resistance came to a climax in July 1794, when a U.S. marshal arrived in western Pennsylvania to serve writs to distillers who had not paid the excise. The alarm was raised, and more than 500 armed men attacked the fortified home of tax inspector General John Neville. Washington responded by sending peace commissioners to western Pennsylvania to negotiate with the rebels, while at the same time calling on governors to send a militia force to suppress the violence. With 15,000 militia provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Washington rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency. The rebels all went home before the arrival of the army, and there was no confrontation. About 20 men were arrested, but all were later acquitted or pardoned. The issue fueled support for the new opposition Democratic Republican Party, which repealed the tax when it came to power in Washington in 1801.

 

  • The New York City draft riots (July 13 to July 16, 1863; known at the time as Draft Week[2]) were violent disturbances in New York City that were the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history.[3] President Abraham Lincoln diverted several regiments of militia and volunteer troops from following up after the Battle of Gettysburg to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly working-class men, primarily ethnic Irish, resenting particularly that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared the draft.[4][5] Initially intended to express anger at the draft, the protests turned into an ugly race riot, with the white rioters attacking blacks wherever they could be found. At least 100 black people were estimated to have been killed. The conditions in the city were such that Major General John E. Wool, commander of the Department of the East, stated on July 16, “Martial law ought to be proclaimed, but I have not a sufficient force to enforce it.”[6] The military did not reach the city until after the first day of rioting, when mobs had already ransacked or destroyed numerous buildings, including public buildings and homes of abolitionist sympathizers, many black homes, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, which was burned to the ground. The children were not harmed.[7] The exact death toll during the New York Draft Riots is unknown, but according to historian James M. McPherson (2001), at least 120 civilians were killed. At least eleven black men were lynched.[20] Violence by longshoremen against black men was especially fierce in the docks area.[7] 

 

  • The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, sometimes referred to as the Great Upheaval, began on July 14 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, United States and ended some 45 days later after it was put down by local and state militias, and federal troops.

 

  • The Pullman Strike was a nationwide conflict between the new American Railway Union (ARU) and railroads that occurred in the United States in summer 1894. It shut down much of the nation’s freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit. The conflict began in the town of Pullman, Illinois, on May 11 when nearly 4,000 employees of the Pullman Palace Car Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages. Under instruction from President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, US Attorney General Richard Olney (formerly a lawyer for a railroad) dealt with the strike. Olney obtained an injunction in federal court barring union leaders from supporting the strike and demanding that the strikers cease their activities or face being fired. Debs and other leaders of the ARU ignored the injunction, and federal troops were called up to enforce it.[9] While Debs had been reluctant to start the strike he now threw his energies into organizing it. Debs not only ignored the federal court injunction he instead called a general strike of all union members in Chicago, but it was opposed by Samuel Gompers, head of American Federation of Labor, and other established unions, and failed.[10] City by city the federal forces broke the ARU efforts to shut down the national transportation system Thousands of United States Marshals and some 12,000 United States Army troops, commanded by Nelson Miles took action. President Cleveland wanted the trains moving again and his legal basis was his constitutional responsibility for the mails. His lawyers also argued that the boycott violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and subsequent deaths of workers led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. Property damage exceeded $80 million.

 

  • The Bonus Army was the popular name of an assemblage of some 43,000 marchers—17,000 World War I veterans, their families, and affiliated groups—who gathered in Washington, D.C., in the spring and summer of 1932 to demand immediate cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Its organizers called it the Bonus Expeditionary Force to echo the name of World War I‘s American Expeditionary Force, while the media called it the Bonus March. It was led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant. Many of the war veterans had been out of work since the beginning of the Great Depression. The World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924 had awarded them bonuses in the form of certificates they could not redeem until 1945. Each service certificate, issued to a qualified veteran soldier, bore a face value equal to the soldier’s promised payment plus compound interest. The principal demand of the Bonus Army was the immediate cash payment of their certificates. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time, visited their camp to back the effort and encourage them.[1] On July 28, U.S. Attorney General William D. Mitchell ordered the veterans removed from all government property. Washington police met with resistance, shots were fired and two veterans were wounded and later died. Veterans were also shot dead at other locations during the demonstration. President Herbert Hoover then ordered the army to clear the veterans’ campsite. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the infantry and cavalry supported by six tanks. The Bonus Army marchers with their wives and children were driven out, and their shelters and belongings burned.

 

  • The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street riot, was a civil disturbance in Detroit, Michigan, US that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar then known as a blind pig, on the corner of 12th (today Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount streets on the city’s Near West Side. Police confrontations with patrons and observers on the street evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in United States history, lasting five days and surpassing the violence and property destruction of Detroit’s 1943 race riot. To help end the disturbance, Governor George W. Romney ordered the Michigan National Guard into Detroit, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in Army troops. The result was 43 dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed.

 

  • The Kent State shootings—also known as the May 4 massacre or the Kent State massacre[2][3][4]—occurred at Kent State University in the U.S. city of Kent, Ohio, and involved the shooting of unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard on Monday, May 4, 1970. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others, one of whom suffered permanent paralysis.[5] Some of the students who were shot had been protesting against the American invasion of Cambodia, which President Richard Nixon announced in a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.[6][7]