By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.

America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.

We have been in a steady economic decline for decades. The Canadian political philosopher John Ralston Saul detailed this decline in his 1992 book “Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.” David Cay Johnston exposed the mirage and rot of American capitalism in “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill),” and David C. Korten, in “When Corporations Rule the World” and “Agenda for a New Economy,” laid out corporate malfeasance and abuse. But our universities and mass media, entranced by power and naively believing that global capitalism was an unstoppable force of nature, rarely asked the right questions or gave a prominent voice to those who did. Our elites hid their incompetence and loss of control behind an arrogant facade of specialized jargon and obscure economic theories.

The lies employed to camouflage the economic decline are legion. President Ronald Reagan included 1.5 million U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine service personnel with the civilian work force to magically reduce the nation’s unemployment rate by 2 percent. President Bill Clinton decided that those who had given up looking for work, or those who wanted full-time jobs but could only find part-time employment, were no longer to be counted as unemployed. This trick disappeared some 5 million unemployed from the official unemployment rolls. If you work more than 21 hours a week — most low-wage workers at places like Wal-Mart average 28 hours a week — you are counted as employed, although your real wages put you below the poverty line. Our actual unemployment rate, when you include those who have stopped looking for work and those who can only find part-time jobs, is not 8.5 percent but 15 percent. A sixth of the country is now effectively unemployed. And we are shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the 1929 crash.

The consumer price index, used by the government to measure inflation, is meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low the government has been substituting basic products it once measured to check for inflation with ones that do not rise very much in price. This sleight of hand has kept the cost-of-living increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The New York Times’ consumer reporter, W.P. Dunleavy, wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from $400 a year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase. California economist John Williams, who runs an organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back in the 1970s, inflation would be 10 percent.

The corporate state, and the political and intellectual class that served the corporate state, constructed a financial and political system based on illusions. Corporations engaged in pyramid lending that created fictitious assets. These fictitious assets became collateral for more bank lending. The elite skimmed off hundreds of millions in bonuses, commissions and salaries from this fictitious wealth. Politicians, who dutifully served corporate interests rather than those of citizens, were showered with campaign contributions and given lucrative jobs when they left office. Universities, knowing it was not good business to challenge corporatism, muted any voices of conscience while they went begging for corporate donations and grants. Deceptive loans and credit card debt fueled the binges of a consumer society and hid falling wages and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

The Obama administration, rather than chart a new course, is intent on re-inflating the bubble. The trillions of dollars of government funds being spent to sustain these corrupt corporations could have renovated our economy. We could have saved tens of millions of Americans from poverty. The government could have, as consumer activist Ralph Nader has pointed out, started 10 new banks with $35 billion each and a 10-to-1 leverage to open credit markets. Vast, unimaginable sums are being placed into these dirty corporate hands without oversight. And they will use this money as they always have — to enrich themselves at our expense.

“You are going to see the biggest waste, fraud and abuse in American history,” Nader warned when I asked about the bailouts. “Not only is it wrongly directed, not only does it deal with the perpetrators instead of the people who were victimized, but they don’t have a delivery system of any honesty and efficiency. The Justice Department is overwhelmed. It doesn’t have a tenth of the prosecutors, the investigators, the auditors, the attorneys needed to deal with the previous corporate crime wave before the bailout started last September. It is especially unable to deal with the rapacious ravaging of this new money by these corporate recipients. You can see it already. The corporations haven’t lent it. They have used some of it for acquisitions or to preserve their bonuses or their dividends. As long as they know they are not going to jail, and they don’t see many newspaper reports about their colleagues going to jail, they don’t care. It is total impunity. If they quit, they quit with a golden parachute. Even [General Motors CEO Rick] Wagoner is taking away $21 million.”

There are a handful of former executives who have conceded that the bailouts are a waste. American International Group Inc.’s former chairman, Maurice R. Greenberg, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday that the effort to prop up the firm with $170 billion has “failed.” He said the company should be restructured. AIG, he said, would have been better off filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection instead of seeking government help.

“These are signs of hyper decay,” Nader said from his office in Washington. “You spend this kind of money and do not know if it will work.”

“Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,” Nader added. “That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities and serfs with a 21st century nomenclature.”

We will not be able to raise another 3 or 4 trillion dollars, especially with our commitments now totaling some $12 trillion, to fix the mess. It was only a couple of months ago that our expenditures totaled $9 trillion. And it was not long ago that such profligate government spending was unthinkable. There was an $800 billion limit placed on the Federal Reserve a year ago. The economic stimulus and the bailouts will not bring back our casino capitalism. And as the meltdown shows no signs of abating, and the bailouts show no sign of working, the recklessness and desperation of our capitalist overlords have increased. The cost, to the working and middle class, is becoming unsustainable. The Fed reported in March that households lost $5.1 trillion, or 9 percent, of their wealth in the last three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in the 57-year history of record keeping by the central bank. For the full year, household wealth dropped $11.1 trillion, or about 18 percent. These figures did not record the decline of investments in the stock market, which has probably erased trillions more in the country’s collective net worth.

The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last 10 years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China, the oil-rich states and other international investors stop buying treasury bonds the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, who we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft and abandoned outside the gates.

In the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment benefits, just when it’s never been harder to find a job.

Congress extended unemployment aid twice last year, allowing people to draw a total of up to 59 weeks of benefits. Now, as the recession drags on, a rolling wave of people who were laid off early last year will lose them.

Precise figures are hard to determine, but Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute, estimates that up to 700,000 people could exhaust their extended benefits by the second half of this year.

Some will find new jobs, but prospects will be grim: Layoffs are projected to go on, and many economists expect the jobless rate, already at 8.5 percent, to hit 10 percent by year’s end.

“It’s going to be a monstrous problem,” Vroman said.

U.S. employers shed 663,000 jobs in March, and the jobless rate now stands at its highest in a quarter-century. Since the recession began in December 2007, a net total of 5.1 million jobs have disappeared.

Those who know that their unemployment aid is about to run out are counting the days, taking on odd jobs, moving in with relatives and fretting about the future.

Read entire article

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Recall the Geithner Bank Plan in a nutshell: private investors will partner with the government to buy those “toxic” assets off of struggling “zombie banks.” The buyers would put about 7 percent of the purchase price down, and the Treasury Department would match that with another 7 or so percent. Then the FDIC would offer government-backed loans for the remainder.

If the assets were to recover their value and turn a profit down the road, the investors would split the profits with the government. But if they don’t – if their values continue to tank, and it’s entirely likely many will — then you and I and everyone else we know who pays taxes will be on the hook for the lion’s share of the losses.

In other words, we’re letting bargain-hunters pick up the “troubled assets” that are burdening a number of financial institutions for pennies on the dollar, and limiting their downside risk if it doesn’t turn out well. It’s a pretty sweet deal for those investors. And, as I wrote when Geithner first announced the plan, it’s also pretty much the definition of “moral hazard.”

That background is important in order to understand just how incredibly infuriating this report from The Financial Times is:

US banks that have received government aid, including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, are considering buying toxic assets to be sold by rivals under the Treasury’s $1,000bn (£680bn) plan to revive the financial system.

The plans proved controversial, with critics charging that the government’s public-private partnership - which provide generous loans to investors - are intended to help banks sell, rather than acquire, troubled securities and loans.

[...]

Participating in the plan as a buyer could be complicated for Citi, which has suffered billions of dollars in writedowns on mortgage-backed assets and is about to cede a 36 per cent stake to the government.

Citi declined to comment. People close to the company said it was considering whether to take part in the plan as a seller, buyer or manager of the assets, but no decision had yet been taken.

[...]

Goldman and Morgan Stanley have large fund management units and have pledged to increase investments in distressed assets.

This week, John Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, told staff the bank was considering how to become “one of the firms that can buy these assets and package them where your clients will have access to them”.

Goldman and JPMorgan did not comment, but bankers said they were considering buying toxic assets.

Get it? We first pumped tens of billions of dollars into these institutions via the TARP, set up another program to aid them further by offering investors the opportunity to purchase the “shitpile” on their books with sweet federal subsidies, and they then turn around and now they’re essentially going to buy the assets back with taxpayer-backed loans.

FT again:

Critics say that would leave the same amount of toxic assets in the system as before, but with the government now liable for most of the losses through its provision of non-recourse loans.

Administration officials reject the criticism because banking is part of a financial system, in which the owners of bank equity — such as pension funds — are the same entities that will be investing in toxic assets anyway. Seen this way, the plan simply helps to rearrange the location of these assets in the system in a way that is more transparent and acceptable to markets.

What mumbo-jumbo — “banking is part of the financial system.” Thanks, but there’s a difference between pension funds and the financial institutions who have taken boatloads of public cash because they were deemed “too big to fail.”

But the obviousness of Big Finance’s rip-off may get in the way of its success. The Financial Times warns, “public opinion may not tolerate the idea of banks selling each other their bad assets …”

JANE WARDELL
Associated Press
April 2, 2009

Prime Minister Gordon Brown says leaders at the G-20 summit have agreed to give $1 trillion to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to help struggling nations around the world.

Brown also says the 20 countries at the summit will enact common policies to crack down on tax havens, regulate hedge funds, and rebuild trust in the financial system to “prevent a crisis such as this from happening again.”

He says the G-20 nations will also give emerging powers a greater say in the world economy.

Brown did not outline any new fiscal measures but says that the stimulus packages already announced by major nations have already been the biggest in history.

Carlos Cruz has a strategy for surviving the worst global recession in 60 years: pay less in taxes and pass the savings along to customers.

“I’m declaring half as much as I used to,” said Cruz, 29, who runs a painting business in Madrid. “Prices have fallen by 30 percent and customers will choose you for a difference of as little as 50 euros ($67.70),” said Cruz, an Ecuadorian who has lived in Spain since 2001.

The production of goods and services that are lawful, though not declared, may grow the most as a proportion of total output since 2000, according to Friedrich Schneider, a professor at Austria’s Johannes Kepler University of Linz.

The shift, measured by tax analysts and economists using surveys, money-supply data and anecdotal evidence, is caused by businesses going off the books to cut costs and workers taking informal jobs to survive rising unemployment. It offers a buffer against the ravages of the crisis and may help explain why the slowdown hasn’t prompted more social unrest.

Read article

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars
April 2, 2009

According to Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon, the Euro was helped created by the Bilderberg Group in the 1990’s. He admitted this in an interview to the EUobserver online newspaper on March 16 2009.

While talking about his expectations of the EU-summit on March 19 and the G20-meeting in London two weeks later, he comments:

Belgian viscount and current Bilderberg-chairman Étienne Davignon

‘These two meeting are going to be important because of what (the media) will say- is it a lot of jaw-jaw and everything will get worse? Or maybe it’s the beginning of a realisation that the world will no longer be the same and we are going to do something about it.’

After this he brings the annual Bilderberg-meetings into the conversation, saying something that was considered a ‘conspiracy theory’ for the past couple of decades, but is now confirmed by none other than the current chairman of the secretive group. Here is the actual quote from the article:

‘A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group- an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr. Davignon- could also ‘improve understanding’ on future action, in the same way it helped create the Euro in the 1990s, he said.’

The article concludes with Davignon’s assessment that:

‘People understand confusedly that there is a change (in the air). (…). But no government will satisfy the reactions of the people. They have the greatest reticence and cynicism against everybody who holds responsibility.’

It looks like the agents provocateurs — otherwise known as anarchists — are having their way in London as the G20 commences. From a blog covering the protests posted at the Guardian:

The “hardcore” protesters have broken through police lines and have made their way to an unboarded HSBC branch on Queen Victoria Street, says Guardian reporter Paul Lewis. An anarchist flag has been raised on an office block opposite the branch, he adds. The Press Association reported a fight on the same street between two men — one wearing a suit — which was broken up by police.

Smashing up banks and beating up guys in suits will do nothing to stop the bankers from looting the wealth of billions of people and engineering the collapse of the world economy in order to usher in their world “super-currency” and world government.

G20 Riot

As the photo here shows, the “anarchists” are grist for the corporate media. One lone “anarchist” takes out a bank window while dozens of cameras whirl and click to catch the action.

It’s all an orchestrated sideshow to the G20 criminal confab designed to discredit legitimate protests. There is little coverage of the actual protesters as the corporate media rushes to photograph agents provocateurs smashing windows at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The Guardian comments on the fact the “anarchists” and the corporate media are working with the state in order to discredit legitimate protest:

On Twitter, Snufkin21 says Stop the War protesters booed the media present “for hyping up the G20 violence”. The huge media presence has been criticized by a number of people on Twitter who believe it’s encouraged extreme elements to “play to the gallery”.

George Monbiot offers a blog entry on the cops and their “force majeure” at the summit:

The trouble-makers are out in force again. Dressed in black, their faces partly obscured, some of them appear to be interested only in violent confrontation. It’s almost as if they are deliberately raising the temperature, pushing and pushing until a fight kicks off. But this isn’t some disorganized rabble: these people were bussed in and are plainly acting in concert. There’s another dead giveaway. They are all wearing the same slogan: Police.

The cops “have a powerful interest in exaggerating threats and, perhaps, an interest in ensuring that sometimes these threats materialize,” writes Monbiot. “This could explain what I’ve seen at one protest after another, where peaceful demonstrations turn into ugly rucks only when the police attack. The wildly disproportionate and unnecessary violence I’ve sometimes seen the police deploy could scarcely be better designed to provoke a reaction.”

This “powerful interest in exaggerating threats” serves the bankers and their minions now gathered in London. It is critical they completely discredit the opposition and have their handmaiden media tool portray the legitimate opposition as crazed and violent anarchists.

It is basically a “strategy of tension” of the sort used by the Italian Gladio operation, designed to blame murderous violence on leftists. In Italy, this strategy worked like a charm as large numbers of Italians fell for the bait and blamed socialists and communists for the violence.

The staged violence will give the British state an excuse to further limit civil liberties and arrest activists, especially now as sincere and legitimate demonstrators and activists are beginning to organize in opposition to the largest and most audacious bankster rip-off in recorded history.

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, April 1, 2009

World Bank President and Bilderberg elitist Robert Zoellick openly admitted the plan to eliminate national sovereignty and impose a global government during a speech on the eve of the G20 summit.

Speaking about the agenda to increase not just funding but power for international organizations on the back of the financial crisis, Zoellick stated, “If leaders are serious about creating new global responsibilities or governance, let them start by modernising multilateralism to empower the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank Group to monitor national policies.”

In other words, give global institutions the power to regulate national policy as part of the creation of global government.

APTOPIX Britain Robert Zoellick

What Zoellick is outlining is essentially the end of national sovereignty and the reclassification of national governments as mere subordinates to a global authority that is completely unaccountable to the voting public of any country.

The more cynical amongst us would call this a global dictatorship. Zoellick couches the plan in flowery rhetoric of helping the poor and alleviating poverty, but as we have documented for years, the global elite’s goal of world government has little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with creating a global fascist state.

Zoellick, former Executive Vice President of Fannie Mae and advisor to Goldman Sachs, is a top elitist who was intimately involved in the Enron scandal and the 2000 presidential election debacle. He was also a signatory to the Project For A New American century document that called for invading Iraq as part of implementing a brutal world empire in 1998. He was later a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush.

As to be expected, Zoellick is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. He also attended the annual invitation-only conferences of the Bilderberg Group in 1991, 2003, 2006 and 2007.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown will use the G20 summit in London to extend an olive branch to China, offering them a central role in the construction of a new world order and a global government, according to reports.

“Brown will hold talks with Hu Jintao, China’s president, following discussions with Barack Obama, amid signs that developing countries see the G20 summit as a chance to impose a new world order and end the era of Anglo-European dominance,” reports the Guardian.

Under the proposal, China will vastly increase its IMF funding in return for more voting rights.

A central focus of the G20 summit will be the proposal to supplant the dollar with a new global currency. Both the IMF and the United Nations threw their weight behind the implementation of a new global reserve currency system to replace the dollar, in the same week that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told CFR globalists that he was “open” to the idea.

China and Russia brought the issue to the forefront of this week’s G20 when they jointly called for a new global reserve currency a week ago.

Brown has consistently called for global regulation of the financial system as a means towards global governance. In a speech at St Paul’s Cathedral in London yesterday he again called for a new “global society”.

Dozens of Ontario police and code enforcement officers descended upon the homeless encampment known as Tent City early Monday, separating those who could stay from those to be evicted.

Large, often confused, crowds formed ragged lines behind police barricades where officers handed out color-coded wristbands. Blue meant they were from Ontario and could remain. Orange indicated they had to provide more proof to avoid ejection, and white meant they had a week to leave.”

Many who had taken shelter at the camp — which had grown from 20 to more than 400 residents in nine months — lacked paperwork, bills or birth certificates proving they were once Ontario residents.

“When my husband gets out of jail he can bring my marriage certificate; will that count?” asked one tearful woman.

Another resident, clearly confused, seemed relieved to get a white band — not understanding it meant she had to leave.

Pattie Barnes, 47, who had her motor home towed away last week, shook with anger.

“They are tagging us because we are homeless,” she said, staring at her orange wristband. “It feels like a concentration camp.”

Read entire article

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, March 26, 2009

In a near complete reversal of his comments on Tuesday, when he told a Congressional hearing that there were no plans to move towards a global currency to supplant the dollar, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner sought to please the elitist CFR by assuring them that he was “open” to the notion of a new global currency system.

Geithner’s two-faced reversal is another shining example of how much contempt Obama administration front men have for the American people - assuring them one day that the dollar will remain while the next pandering to their globalist puppet masters the CFR as the move towards a global monetary union accelerates.

As we reported yesterday, Obama, Geithner and Bernanke on Tuesday publicly defended the dollar and denounced proposals by China and Russia to supplant the greenback with a new global currency, and yet the very policies of the Obama administration, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve are creating the perfect storm for the dollar’s death and its replacement with a new international reserve currency.

“Would you categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar and going to a global currency as suggested by China?” a lawmaker asked Treasury Secretary Geithner on Tuesday.

Geithner immediately responded, “I would.”

However, just a day later, Geithner told the CFR in a speech that he was “open” to the Chinese proposal to replace the dollar with a new international reserve system.

In response, “The dollar fell 1.3 per cent against the euro as headlines saying `Geithner open to SDR currency` flashed across traders screens,” reports the Financial Times.

“I haven’t read the governors proposal. He’s a very thoughtful, very careful distinguished central banker. I generally find him sensible on every issue,” said Geithner, before adding, “We’re actually quite open to that suggestion  you should see it as rather evolutionary rather building on the current architecture rather than moving us to global monetary union.”

However, any move away from the dollar and towards an international reserve system, including the use of “special drawing rights”

Geithner Regulation

a synthetic multinational currency maintained by the IMF, cannot be defined as anything other than a move towards a global monetary union.

The continued use of the dollar as a reserve currency, he added, “depends..on how effective we are in the United States…at getting our fiscal system back to the point where people judge it as sustainable over time.”

By that standard then, the dollar is a dead duck.

The moderator of the CFR forum later gave Geithner a chance to reverse his comments, nervously sensing that he’d let the cat out of the bag.

Geithner’s comments to the CFR are noteworthy because the CFR itself has constantly lobbied for the end of the dollar and its replacement with a new global currency as part of a wider agenda to establish global governance.

In May 2007, Benn Steil, the director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote an article for the CFR’s influential Foreign Affairs magazine entitled The End of National Currency, in which he wrote that, “the world needs to abandon unwanted currencies, replacing them with dollars, euros, and multinational currencies as yet unborn.”

Steil wrote that “countries should abandon monetary nationalism” and “produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.” In the article, he argues that unneeded currencies should first be replaced by the dollar or the euro, but that even these currencies were just a temporary solution for an ultimate goal of a world monetary union. World Net Daily featured Steil’s comments in a piece entitled Goodbye U.S. dollar, hello global currency.

Paul Volcker, former Fed Chairman, has also called for a world monetary union, famously stating, “A global economy requires a global currency.”

Volcker’s replacement Alan Greenspan has also badmouthed the dollar’s position as the world reserve currency, arguing that it should be replaced by the euro and also encouraging Arab countries to abandon their dollar pegs, which would be disastrous for the greenback.

Groups like the Single Global Currency Union have also received support from NGO’s and other influential policymakers in the pursuit of creating a global currency as part of a wider agenda to implement “global governance”.

In addition, White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee refused to rule out the introduction of a global currency in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer earlier this week.

Treasury Secretary Geithner has played a leading role in the wholesale looting of the greenback, announcing this week that the printing presses will be cranked to the tune of at least another $1 trillion to buy more “toxic assets” from the sagging balance sheets of failing institutions - again, all at the expense of the taxpayer who will pay for it with rampant tax hikes and runaway inflation on fuel and food later down the road.

Geithner’s double-dealings are nothing less than traitorous. While publicly downplaying the demise of the dollar and the birth of a global currency, his every action is greasing the skids for that very scenario to unfold. In the meantime, he’s careful to assure the anti-American fifth column Council on Foreign Relations, who have vehemently lobbied for a global currency, that the agenda for a world monetary union, a key cog in the pursuit of world government, is right on track.