Nervous Old Male by Frans de Waal
It rather is the hesitant or fearful alpha male who avoids looking straight at the other, sidesteps him as if nothing happened, ducks when objects fly, and just hopes that the other will give up and go away. This may work, but also signals weakness. One day, the challenger will pick up courage and do something more drastic, such as hitting the old guy’s back. If the latter still tries to ignore his challenger after this, he’s toast.
A shattering moment in America’s fall from power by John Gray
China in particular was hectored relentlessly on the weakness of its banking system. But China’s success has been based on its consistent contempt for Western advice and it is not Chinese banks that are currently going bust. How symbolic yesterday that Chinese astronauts take a spacewalk while the US Treasury Secretary is on his knees.
Wall Street Pirates Won’t Get Unconditional Bailout by Bob Chapman
Slick Willie Clinton did more to tear down our military than any other President in recent history, and now we all know why, in spades. When you are the President tasked by the Illuminati with setting them up to make mega-profits through their military-industrial complex and illicit drug trade, via planned wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, and the initiation of a phony, so-called “War on Terror,” the first thing you do is downsize the US military mightily so that all the fighting and support can be privatized, thus paving the way for mercenaries and contractors to do the same work as our soldiers at ten times the cost.
Now Is The Time — There Is Hope by Michael Ruppert
If Rothschilds and Rockefellers are taking the same side it is because the entire economic paradigm is threatened. There is good reason to believe it. The Dow has lost almost 10% in just two days. The bailouts are lining up at the door before the Fed goes bankrupt; before our government goes bankrupt.
51 Things You Can’t See On Google Maps by IT Security
But for all of the places that Google Maps allows you to see, there are plenty of places that are off-limits. Whether it’s due to government restrictions, personal-privacy lawsuits or mistakes, Google Maps has slapped a “Prohibited” sign on the following 51 places.
In response to John Gray’s piece:
sleat
Sep 28 08, 2:01am
Its not as simple as that. Firstly, there is no way America can ever repay its debts, and if the holders of Treasury Bonds were to try to recall their loans, the bond market would collapse and their holdings would be worthless. So, because those debts cannot be repaid, they in a real sense, do not exist. However because China and the other big creditors know this, they are much more likely now to purchase American assets rather than fund a government that has very little control over its own financial future.
But, China and all of the emerging economies are dependent on the US consumer market. Not only is it huge, but it is utterly undiscriminating. Americans will buy anything, even things that have no purpose. China regards a large part of its Treasury Bill holdings as the unrecoverable cost of keeping the American consumer market intact.
Now, the emerging economies cannot afford a sudden collapse in that market. They have to allow totally bankrupt consumers to continue to get access to credit so that they can buy in the frenzied and crazed fashion that exists nowhere outside America. Exactly how this will be achieved is not entirely clear, but China and the others will have to accommodate American credit while they diversify their markets. This diversification is already under way, of course. While the US couldnt see what was coming, China could and did. One way or another, it will spur an uncontrollable wave of inflation which will take many Americans out. Neither the US Government nor the Chinese will care about that. The greedy go to the wall, and the stupid and the greedy go even quicker.
The poor in America and elsewhere will be the true victims, and it will be ugly. The crooks who spurred this financial melt-down will take billions in personal wealth with them to their tax havens. US corporations have long since stopped being American. They will happily transfer from New York to Dubai or Mumbai, or Shanghai. The exodus is already under way. And because American insfrastructure is now among the weakest in the OECD, foreign investors will cease operating plants in the US as soon as it is clear that the US market is drying up.
So, it will be a slow change, because the merging world cannot afford and will not permit a rapid one. America’s main problem is that although it is defeated all the time, it refuses to accept that reality. In the American psyche, winning, at any expense, even the brains of children splattered against the wall, is all that matters. Meantime, Americans will continue strutting and threatening to kick butt, waving their pathetic little flags. So sad !
iruka
Sep 28 08, 4:31am
Is that the same American economy that sits on top of the worst-educated population in the OECD, and that survives by importing boffins it will soon be unable to afford…the same American economy that has forgotten how to manufacture anything of any quality…the same American economy that has survived for the last 20 years on top of a series of financial bubbles…?
But I’m not sure it was specifically financial deregulation that is the cause of the spectacular fall we are about to witness- but rather the loss of manufacturing capability, the general decline, moral and intellectual, of the American population, and the wilful dependence on the mystical power of the US dollar itself and the empire intertwined with it. And aren’t these all consequences of a surrender of authority to capital that goes well beyond the deregulation of the financial sector? The financial sector is delivering the final blow only because, as in Britain, it has become overwhelmingly dominant in an economy that doesn’t do much else. It took Korea decades to figure out how to make a television as well as the Japanese. It sure won’t take nearly as long for the money keeping America and Britain afloat to drift elsewhere.
I suspect that cooperation, decency and common sense will count for more in the decades to come than ‘industry, inventiveness and sheer bloody determination’ . And don’t these last-mentioned represent, in any case, a pretty tiresome and in fact downright degenerate set of values upon which base a civilisation…civilisation being, as many Americans seem to have forgotten (or perhaps they’ve just never been told) both the precondition and the point of having an ‘economy’. It’s not just about the cheap gas!!