White collar crime is the dirtiest as it works on the people labouring to build assets and then uses constrictive measure to remove those assets for a fraction of the cost, where the greater unwashed then fights in frustration not against the instigators – the bankers – but the marginalised, be they black, immigrants or even bikie gangs.

It is easy for them as they hire armies, mercenaries and police to take the brunt of the rage and turn the populace against each other.

Professor Carroll Quigley, an insider groomed by the international bankers, revealed this plan in 1966, writing in Tragedy and Hope: ‘The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences’.

This article titled ‘Deficit terrorists’ is from http://www.opednews.com/articles/DEFICIT-TERRORISTS-STRIKE-by-Ellen-Brown-100618-289.html.

Last week, England’s new government said it would abandon the previous government’s stimulus program and introduce the austerity measures required to pay down its estimated $1 trillion in debts. That means cutting public spending, laying off workers, reducing consumption, and increasing unemployment and bankruptcies. It also means shrinking the money supply, since virtually all “money” today originates as loans or debt. Reducing the outstanding debt will reduce the amount of money available to pay workers and buy goods, precipitating depression and further economic pain.

The financial sector has sometimes been accused of shrinking the money supply intentionally, in order to increase the demand for its own products. Bankers are in the debt business, and if governments are allowed to create enough money to keep themselves and their constituents out of debt, lenders will be out of business. The central banks charged with maintaining the banking business therefore insist on a “stable currency” at all costs, even if it means slashing services, laying off workers, and soaring debt and interest burdens. For the financial business to continue to boom, governments must not be allowed to create money themselves, either by printing it outright or by borrowing it into existence from their own government-owned banks.

Today this financial goal has largely been achieved. In most countries, 95% or more of the money supply is created by banks as loans (or “credit”). The small portion issued by the government is usually created just to replace lost or worn out bills or coins, not to fund new government programs. Early in the twentieth century, about 30% of the British currency was issued by the government as pounds sterling or coins, versus only about 3% today. In the U.S., only coins are now issued by the government. Dollar bills (Federal Reserve Notes) are issued by the Federal Reserve, which is privately owned by a consortium of banks.

Banks advance the principal but not the interest necessary to pay off their loans; and since bank loans are now virtually the only source of new money in the economy, the interest can only come from additional debt. For the banks, that means business continues to boom; while for the rest of the economy, it means cutbacks, belt-tightening and austerity. Since more must always be paid back than was advanced as credit, however, the system is inherently unstable. When the debt bubble becomes too large to be sustained, a recession or depression is precipitated, wiping out a major portion of the debt and allowing the whole process to begin again. This is called the “business cycle,” and it causes markets to vacillate wildly, allowing the monied interests that triggered the cycle to pick up real estate and other assets very cheaply on the down-swing.

The financial sector, which controls the money supply and can easily capture the media, cajoles the populace into compliance by selling its agenda as a “balanced budget,” “fiscal responsibility,” and saving future generations from a massive debt burden by suffering austerity measures now. Bill Mitchell, Professor of Economics at the University of New Castle in Australia, calls this “deficit terrorism.” Bank-created debt becomes more important than schools, medical care or infrastructure. Rather than “providing for the general welfare,” the purpose of government becomes to maintain the value of the investments of the government’s creditors.

England Dons the Hair Shirt

England’s new coalition government has just bought into this agenda, imposing on itself the sort of fiscal austerity that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has long imposed on Third World countries, and has more recently imposed on European countries, including Latvia, Iceland, Ireland and Greece.

Deficit hawks point ominously to Greece, which has been virtually squeezed out of the private bond market because nobody wants its bonds. Greece has been forced to borrow from the IMF and the European Monetary Union (EMU), which have imposed draconian austerity measures as conditions for the loans. Like a Third World country owing money in a foreign currency, Greece cannot print Euros or borrow them from its own central bank, since those alternatives are forbidden under EMU rules.

Greece is stuck in the debt trap, but the UK is not a member of the EMU. Although it belongs to the European Union, it still trades in its own national currency, which it has the power to issue directly or to borrow from its own central bank. Like all central banks, the Bank of England is a “lender of last resort,” which means it can create money on its books without borrowing first.

The “deficit terrorists,” however, will have none of this obvious solution, ostensibly because of the fear of “hyperinflation.” A June 9 guest post by “Cameroni” on Rick Ackerman’s financial website takes this position. Titled “Britain Becomes the First to Choose Deflation.”

Hyperinflation or Deflation?

The dreaded threat of hyperinflation is invariably trotted out to defeat proposals to solve the budget crises of governments by simply issuing the necessary funds, whether as debt (bonds) or as currency. What the deficit terrorists generally fail to mention is that before an economy can be threatened with hyperinflation, it has to pass through simple inflation; and governments everywhere have failed to get to that stage today, although trying mightily. Cameroni observes:

“[G]overnments all over the globe have already tried stimulating their way out of the recent credit crisis and recession to little avail. They have attempted fruitlessly to generate even mild inflation despite huge stimulus efforts and pointless spending.”

In fact, the money supply has been shrinking at an alarming rate. In a May 26 article in The Financial Times titled “US Money Supply Plunges at 1930s Pace as Obama Eyes Fresh Stimulus,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

“The stock of money fell from $14.2 trillion to $13.9 trillion in the three months to April, amounting to an annual rate of contraction of 9.6pc. The assets of institutional money market funds fell at a 37pc rate, the sharpest drop ever.

“‘It’s frightening,’ said Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research. “The plunge in M3 has no precedent since the Great Depression. The dominant reason for this is that regulators across the world are pressing banks to raise capital asset ratios and to shrink their risk assets. This is why the US is not recovering properly,’ he said.”

Too much money can hardly have been pumped into an economy in which the money supply is shrinking. But Cameroni concludes that since the stimulus efforts have failed to put needed money back into the money supply, the stimulus program should be abandoned in favor of its diametrical opposite — belt-tightening austerity. He admits that the result will be devastating:

“[I]t will mean a long, slow and deliberate winding down until solvency is within reach. It will mean cities, states and counties will go bankrupt and not be rescued. And it will be painful. Public spending will be cut. Consumption could decline precipitously. Unemployment numbers may skyrocket and bankruptcies will stun readers of daily blogs like this one. It will put the brakes on growth around the world. . . . The Dow will crash and there will be ripple effects across the European union and eventually the globe. . . . Aid programs to the Third world will be gutted, and I cannot yet imagine the consequences that will bring to the poorest people on earth.”

Hyperinflation, however, is a bogus threat, and before we reject the stimulus idea, we might ask why these programs have failed. Perhaps because they have been stimulating the wrong sector of the economy, the non-producing financial middlemen who precipitated the crisis in the first place. Governments have tried to “reflate” their flagging economies by throwing budget-crippling sums at the banks, but the banks have not deigned to pass those funds on to businesses and consumers as loans. Instead, they have used the cheap funds to speculate, buy up smaller banks, or buy safe government bonds, collecting a tidy interest from the very taxpayers who provided them with this cheap bailout money.

Seeking Solutions

The alternative to throwing massive amounts of money at the banks is not to further starve and punish businesses and individuals but to feed some stimulus to them directly, with public projects that provide needed services while creating jobs. There are many successful precedents for this approach, including the public works programs of England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, which were funded with government-issued money either borrowed from their central banks or printed directly.

The Chinese have done better, expanding their economy at over 9% throughout the crisis by creating extra money that was mainly invested in public infrastructure.
The EMU countries are trapped in a deadly pyramid scheme, because they have abandoned their sovereign currencies for a Euro controlled by the ECB. Their deficits can only be funded with more debt, which is interest-bearing, so more must always be paid back than was borrowed.

The EMU model is mathematically unsustainable and doomed to fail unless it is modified in some way, either by returning economic sovereignty to its member countries, or by consolidating them into one country with one government.

A fourth possibility would be for member countries to set up publicly-owned “development banks” on the Chinese model. These banks could issue credit in Euros for public projects, creating jobs and expanding the money supply in the same way that private banks do every day when they make loans. Private banks today are limited in their loan-generating potential by the capital requirement, toxic assets cluttering their books, a lack of creditworthy borrowers, and a business model that puts shareholder profit over the public interest.

Unlike the EMU countries, the governments of England, the United States, and other sovereign nations can still borrow from their own central banks, funding much-needed programs essentially interest-free. They can but they probably won’t, because they have been deceived into relinquishing that sovereign power to an overreaching financial sector bent on controlling the money systems of the world privately and autocratically.

Be it 1,000 (as BP first stated) then 5,000 barrels a day – then they were ‘capturing’ 5,000 barrels a day yet camera footage sees tonnes of oil spewing out – but when we burn 86 million barrels a day, it is micro, yet the macro effect on the ‘world’ economy is sending considerable ripples of concern outwards from the Gulf of Mexico.

Can you imagine the pressure some 1,400 metres down, forcing the oil – like a stood on toothpaste tube – out at a great rate of knots; and the ecological damage. For too long, the British, Dutch and American oil companies made other countries absolute shit holes, is this just nature’s karma?

It’s funny in a way how Wall Street is lower as the energy sector takes a hit on New York stock markets. Apparently the Yanks have announced a criminal investigation into BP’s oil disaster and the USA administration has announced a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.  How will Halliburton fare is a question I would like to know, with former vice president Dick Cheney in there, thick as thieves (fitting terminology ?).

While of micro and macro economics and slippery slopes, the Poms have suggested to the Greeks that they pull the pin on the Euro to save themselves (borrowing all that money and devaluing there stuff will increase the debt); one must ponder as to the motive/s or agenda as the Poms ‘lend/buy’ USA bonds to support a worthless Greenback; by making the Euro shaky, will ‘investors’ be that stupid to ditch the Euro – which is dropping like a leaf – or the USA$ – which is like a mill-stone around the world’s neck, by force rather choice.

Chinese manufacturing has slowed and being concerned about the economic outlook, are reluctant to buy; the US manufacturing sector and construction spending has improved, but is going from depression to a recession – temporarily – a real improvement or just fanciful thinking?

The Aussie $ is down against the Greenback at 82.88 US cents; 56.64 UK pence and 67.89 euro cents with gold at $US1,224.30 an ounce while oil is down to $US71.85 a barrel.  Whatever your thoughts, remember we are all going down the slippery slope and the best has been and gone; enjoy what you have because it will never be cheaper …

One thing is for sure, eventually all will have gone off; and so too does the world’s countries, as each is systematically set up, money is pumped in to promote an air of new era of financial well-being and then the money runs out and debt-markers are called in to be paid

It happens on a micro as well as macro basis, which brings to mind Wide Bay Bricks, a successful brick manufacturer that was offered additional funds by the bank to grow the business.

New kilns were built extra land bought and a massive build up of stock; however, little did Wide Bay Bricks know that the bank would eventually ‘decide’ that they wanted the debt to asset ratio improved, and called on Wide Bay Bricks to reduce the debt.

Coincidentally, at that time a national brick manufacturer – that had been suffering a loss of market share over the preceding years – decided to have a sale of bricks; sales rep’s for the national brick manufacturer signed up builders of future contracts (for an unknown period) at massively reduced prices. Obviously other plants of this national brick manufacturer around the country would take the slack, otherwise they would have gone out of business real quick.

Wide Bay Bricks had largely dealt built up its market share by competitively pricing its bricks, it had acres and acres of bricks, but nobody to sell the number they needed to sell, to sell to. They couldn’t enter the next nearest markets because they didn’t have a name presence there and the bank sent the receivers in. Now you probably know how this ends, the bank who had shut their client down then facilitated the funds for their other client – the national brick manufacturer – to buy the newly refurbished brick plant and any losses suffered in selling the bricks at a loss were soon made up when the controlled the market.

The following article replicates what is happening on a sequential order known of volatility of any given country dependant on political sell-out, manipulation and resource potential, either in material or labour resource.

“And taxes on labor now are about to be jacked up to pay off the public debts resulting from the asset-price inflation and financial wreckage that property tax cuts have helped cause. This is the cause of national debts. Governments have run into debt as a result of un-taxing the wealthy in general, not just real estate.”

Excellent article about how the banksters are coming home to pillage entire nations in Europe now…

http://michael-hudson.com/2010/05/euro-bankers-to-greecethe-wealthy-won%E2%80%99t-pay-their-taxes-so-labor-must-do-so/

The wealthy won’t pay their taxes, so labor must do so.

Riddle: How are the Greek rioters like America’s Tea Party movement?
Answer: Both reject government being taken over by the financial oligarchy to shift the tax burden onto labor.

The difference is that the Tea Partiers have lost faith in government. This is just what the financial oligarchy wants, of course. Giving up hope of gaining electoral control to pursue a fair fiscal agenda, the Tea Partiers have abandoned the centuries-long fight for reform to make governments better by giving them the power to check predatory finance and wealth. Sliding to the right wing of the political spectrum and acting mainly out of frustration, they have succumbed to a utopian desire simply to shrink a government that they see acting adversely to their interests.

Financial lobbyists are using the Greek crisis as an object lesson to warn about the need to cut back public spending on Social Security and Medicare. This is the opposite of what the Greek demonstrators are demanding: to reverse the global tax shift off property and finance onto labor, and to give labor’s financial claims for retirement pensions priority over claims by the banks to get fully paid on hundreds of billions of dollars of recklessly bad loans recently reduced to junk status.

Bank lobbyists know that the financial game is over. They are playing for the short run. The financial sector’s aim is to take as much bailout money as it can and run, with large enough annual bonuses to lord it over the rest of society after the Clean Slate finally arrives. Less public spending on social programs will leave more bailout money to pay the banks for their exponentially rising bad debts that cannot possibly be paid in the end. It is inevitable that loans and bonds will default in the usual convulsion of bankruptcy.

Greek labor is not yet so pessimistic as to give up the fight. What it recognizes that its American counterparts do not is that somebody will control the government. If labor – the demos – loses its spirit, power will be relinquished to foreign creditors to dictate public policy by default. And the more the bankers’ interest is served, the worse and more debt-burdened the economy will become. Their gain is bought at the price of domestic austerity. Scheduled payouts by Greek pension funds and government social spending programs must be to replenish German and other European bank capital.

This worldview already has been delivered to Europe’s northernmost periphery, where it has elicited a fiscal masochism that banks hope to see in Greece. Having fallen on their swords, Baltic governments would be jealous and even resentful to see Greece rescue its economy where they themselves failed to repudiate arrogant creditor demands. “Seen from the eastern rim of the European Union, the looming austerity drive in crisis-afflicted Greece reads like old news,” writes Nina Kolyako.

“For almost two years, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have brought in repeated draconian measures, slashing public spending and hiking taxes to try to dig themselves out of a hole. ‘We learned the lessons very painfully, heavily and effectively, that you need to look after the fiscal situation very carefully,’ Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius told AFP in a recent interview.

‘We understood very clearly that fiscal consolidation was the only way for us to survive.’”

Capitulating in a classic Stockholm syndrome (literally to Swedish banks in this case), Lithuania’s government dutifully tightened the screws so much that GDP plunged by over 17 percent. A similar plunge occurred in Latvia. The Baltics have slashed public-sector employment and wages, imposing poverty rather than the Western European levels of prosperity (and progressive taxation to foster a middle class) that was promised after the Baltics achieved their independence from Russia in 1991.

After Latvia’s parliament imposed austerity in December 2008, popular protest in January brought down the government (as a similar protest did in Iceland). But the result was merely another neoliberal “occupation regime” run on behalf of foreign banking interests. So what is unfolding is a Social War on a global scale – not the class war envisioned in the 19th century, but a war of finance against entire economies, against industry, real estate and governments as well as against labor. It is happening in the usual slow motion in which great historical transitions occur. But as in military conflicts, each battle seems frenetic and spurs wild zigzagging on the world’s stock and bond exchanges and currency markets.

All this is great news for computer program traders. The average commitment of funds lasts only a few seconds these days as financial markets are buffeted up and down by vast credit waves blown by the storms sweeping today’s financially overheating planet.

The coming economic dystopia

The Greek crisis shows how far the “European idea” has shifted from 1957 when the six-member European Economic Community (EEC) was formed. At U.S. prodding, Britain and Scandinavia created the rival seven-member European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Even so, the promise of Euroland – at least before Maastricht and Lisbon – was to elevate labor to middle-class prosperity, not to impose IMF-type austerity programs of the sort that devastated Third World countries.

The message to indebted economies is stark: “Drop dead.” And they are obediently committing economic suicide (emulating Japan in the 1985 Plaza Accords) to endorse the Washington Consensus – the class war of finance against labor and industry.

Political, social, fiscal and economic power is being transferred to the EU bureaucracy, its financial controllers in the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF, whose austerity plans and related anti-labor programs direct governments to sell off the public domain, land and subsoil wealth, public enterprises, and to commit future tax revenues to pay creditor nations. This policy already has been imposed on “New Europe” (the post-Soviet economies and Iceland) since autumn 2008. It is now to be imposed on the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).

No wonder there are riots!

For observers who missed Iceland and Latvia last year, Greece is the newest and so far the largest battlefield. At least Iceland and the Baltics have the option of re-denominating loans in their own currency, writing down their foreign debts at will and taxing property to recapture for the government the revenue that has been pledged to foreign bankers.

But Greece is locked into a European currency union, run by unelected financial officials who have inverted the historical meaning of democracy. Instead of the economy’s most important sector – finance – being subject to electoral politics, central banks (the designated lobbyists for commercial and investment bankers) have been made independent of political checks and balances.

In truly Orwellian fashion, right-wingers in Europe and the United States (such as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke) call this the “hallmark of democracy.” It actually is the stamp of oligarchy, stripping away control over the economy’s credit allocation – and hence, forward planning – while giving high finance a stranglehold over public spending programs.

Iceland, Latvia and now Greece are the opening shots in the resulting global campaign to roll back the great democratic reform program of the 19th century and the Progressive Era: taxation of land and the “unearned increment” of price gains for real estate, stocks and bonds, and subordination of the financial sector to the needs of economic growth under democratic direction.

This doctrine was still being followed by the post-1945 era of progressive taxation that saw the 20th century’s greatest rise in living standards and economic growth. But most countries have reversed the fiscal trend since 1980. Tax collectors have “freed” income from public obligation only to see it pledged to banks for higher loans to bid up property prices.

Houses, office buildings and entire companies are worth whatever banks will lend. So populations (and corporate raiders) have responded to the pro-financial tax shift by borrowing to buy houses (and companies) before prices recede even further out of reach.

And taxes on labor now are about to be jacked up to pay off the public debts resulting from the asset-price inflation and financial wreckage that property tax cuts have helped cause. This is the cause of national debts. Governments have run into debt as a result of un-taxing the wealthy in general, not just real estate.

Following Western governments in shifting the fiscal burden off property and finance onto labor over the past few decades, Greece’s government is politically unable or unwilling to tax the wealthy, or even well-to-do professionals.

But neoliberals blame it and other debtor governments for not selling off enough public land and enterprises to make up the gap. Tax-deductible interest charges make privatizations on credit tax-exempt, so governments will lose the user fees they formerly received – while populations pay higher “tollbooth” charges for hitherto public services.

Just as the U.S. Government has done, it has issued bonds to finance the deficit resulting from these tax cuts. The buyers of these bonds (mainly German banks) are demanding that Greek labor (and now German taxpayers as well) should bear the burden of tax shortfalls. German and other European banks and bondholders are to be repaid at the social cost of drastic cutbacks in pensions and social spending – and if possible, by more privatization sell-offs at distress prices.

The riots in Greece have erupted because labor understands what most journalistic reporting shies away from confronting. Growth in real wages has slowed (and has stopped cold in the United States since about 1979). Home ownership has been achieved at the cost of new buyers taking on a lifetime of mortgage debt. And the post-Soviet economies won their political freedom from Russia, only to find themselves insolvent today, dependent on IMF and EU direction of their economies to obtain the loans to pay their foreign bankers that loaded down their housing, public enterprises, industry and families with debt.

Bondholders and financial speculators have ganged up to demand EU, IMF and US support for them to take their gains before the financial game crashes.

The grab can be done most quickly by shrinking economies under IMF-style austerity plans.

Unemployment is to rise while driving economies even further into debt – not only public debt as shrinking markets lead to falling tax revenue, but also foreign debt as import dependency increases.

Creditors are to be paid by letting them appropriate the economic surplus, in the form of debt service at the expense of new capital investment, infrastructure spending, public social spending and rising living standards. Economically, the Greek uprising is a revolt against the policy of sacrificing prosperity to pay foreign creditors in this way.

At the political level, the fight is to save Greece from being turned into an anti-state. The classical definition of a “state” or government is the ability to levy taxes and issue money.

But Greece has relinquished its fiscal authority to the EU and IMF, which are telling it to violate what political theorists list as the Prime Directive of any government: to act in the long-term national interest. The Greek government is being directed to act on behalf of bank capital, and indeed, that of foreign countries to engage in asset stripping, not to promote long-term growth.

At issue is whether nations will be run by creditors or by popular aims to reap the benefits of economic growth. An oligarchic push for IMF-EU loans to bail out foreign banks and bond speculators at the expense of Greek labor (the intended taxpayers of the future) aims at making labor rather than finance capital take the loss of government arrears resulting from un-taxing wealth. The aim is to enable foreign banks to avoid having to pay the price for acting as enablers in draining the domestic market. Government policy is to be taken out of the hands of voters and subordinated to the IMF and EU acting as instruments of international finance.

This creates a state of affairs in which neither Greece nor the EC are “states” or “governments” in the traditional political sense. The EU and IMF bureaucracy is not elected. And at the point where their foreign-dictated financial plan succeeds, the economy’s capital will be stripped and social democracy will collapse.

Bailout costs Merkel
On Sunday, May 9, German voters expressed their anger at the government’s role in bailing out German bankers (euphemized as bailing out “Greece”) at the expense of German taxpayers. The European Central Bank [ECB] is not creating free euro-money but is billing national governments.

The Social Democrats overtook Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Winning only just over a third of the vote – a bit less than the Social Democrats (and down over 10 percentage points from the last election, of which 4 points were lost just in the last week when the bailout package was promoted by Ms. Merkel) – the CDU lost its majority in Germany’s upper house.

Many German voters may have wondered whether taxing the poor to pay the rich to engage in usury was really as “Christian” as the party claimed to represent. Or maybe they were concerned that Germany’s tax collector is to pay nearly $30 billion as its share in the bailout of bankers – not all of whom are beloved in Germany, even when they are German. And some no doubt saw the game as a financial deception by the banking sector’s compliant politicians.

The deception
Europe’s financial lobbyists used the crisis as an opportunity to promote a broad series of bailouts. For Swedish and Austrian banks, the EU approved a €60bn extension of the balance-of-payments facility already put in place to help Hungary, Romania and Latvia keep current on their debts to Austrian and Swedish banks respectively. To circumvent the Eurozone’s no-bailout principle, this special bailout law is based on Article 122.2 of the EU treaty permitting loans to governments in “exceptional circumstances.”

If we give Ms. Merkel credit for understanding the economics at work, then we must accuse her of lying through her teeth. The Baltic debt problem is chronic and structural, not “exceptional.” Ms. Merkel also must know that she is being deceptive in pretending to help Latvia by extending loans that the EU limits explicitly to support the lat’s exchange rate, not for domestic development. The foreign exchange is to cover the cost of Latvians paying mortgages in euros to Swedish banks, and of Latvian consumers buying food and manufactures that EU governments subsidize while leaving the Baltics in a state of economic and financial dependency.

Latvia thus is being victimized, not helped. The aim is to give Swedish banks a little more time to keep collecting payments on loans that are going to go bad in due course. Foreign exchange spent in facilitating private debt service to foreign banks becomes a national debt, to be paid by Latvian taxpayers.

This EU loan thus is an exercise in naked neo-colonialism.

Will the belated shift of German voters to back the Social Democrat red-green coalition with the Green and Left parties do much to stem matters? Probably not. Greek President Papandreou acquiesced in the cave-in despite being head of the Socialist International. So the question is whether Greece really is checkmated, destined to see its public spending, pensions, health care, schooling and living standards rolled back in the way that the Baltics have experienced. They have been an experiment in neoliberal central planning. If they are an example of what the future is to bring, the world will soon see a wave of Greek emigration, Baltic-style.

That evidently is what stock markets around the world anticipated when they soared on Monday morning at the news of Europe’s trillion-dollar bailout.

What really was bailed out is the principle that economies should be stripped so that finance capital may rule.

But the fight surely is not yet over. It will escalate for the remainder of the 2010s, because it is nothing less than an attempt to roll back the history of the 19th and 20th century’s struggle to replace the power of vested property and financial interests with principles of progressive taxation and public enterprise.

Is this where Western civilization really is supposed to be leading? Confronted by parliaments controlled by aristocracies, the 19th-century reformers sought to take them over on behalf of democracy. Classical political economy was a reform program to tax away the “free lunch” of land rents, monopoly rents and financial interest extraction. John Maynard Keynes celebrated this program in his gentle term, “euthanasia of the rentiers.”

But the vested interests have fought back. Calling social democracy and public regulation “the road to serfdom,” they are trying to set Europe’s economies on the road to debt peonage. Making an end-run around national elected governments to impose the Washington Consensus, IMF and EU institutions have gained fiscal and economic control over governments and their tax policies to cut taxes on wealth – and borrow from it to finance the resulting fiscal deficits.

America’s Tea Partiers and anti-tax rebels have given up the fight to reform governments. Squeezed by debt from which they see no escape, they demand lower taxes – and are willing to see the highest brackets become the major beneficiaries in an even more regressive tax shift. Faced with the corruption of Congress by lobbyists acting on behalf of the vested interests, they reject government itself and seek safety in local gated communities.

They see Congress and parliaments throughout the world losing autonomy to the IMF, the EU and other Washington Consensus organizations seeking to impose austerity and shift the tax burden onto labor and industry, off property and off predatory finance.

The only way to prevent a regressive tax shift and debt squeeze is to gain control of governments on behalf of the spirit of classical economic and Progressive Era reforms. At least, that is what Greek labor is rioting for. Someone must control government, and if democratic forces withdraw from the fight, the financial sector will tighten its trip.

Last week is still only the beginning of how this drama will play out. The response by the post-Soviet economies, which have retained their own currencies, is to come this summer and autumn.

At the top of the heap in examples is the USA; however, in a blatant display of ignorant arrogance, the Liberal Party is openly selling itself; this is not to suggest that the Labor Party is any different (except it usually stabs many of its blinker viewed supporters in the back, a la the Nurses Union).

In Victoria, businesses are invited to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Liberal Party in exchange for exclusive access to senior federal and state politicians, including leaders Tony Abbott. Forget about ethics of political fund-raising, you can buy your way into functions or even better have private briefings with members of the state and federal Liberal shadow cabinets. These meetings are intended to fill the Liberal party’s election campaign funding for federal and state elections.

The Age newspaper obtained an invitation which suggests an initial registration fee of $4000 per individual and a business sending five people would pay $20,000 and they could be entitled to private briefings with federal and state shadow ministers of their choice. The wording ominiously says ‘you will have the opportunity to benefit from individual briefings with federal and state shadow ministers as well as the chance to share ideas on policy’ and that Tony Abbott and Mr Baillieu along with their shadow ministers will be in attendance and available for scheduled meetings’.

It apparently invites companies to nominate three state and three federal shadow ministers for ‘individual’ get-togethers. Mr Baillieu, who last year pledged to ‘combat the networks of power and influence’ behind the Brumby government and promised ‘the highest standards of probity, transparency and integrity’ from his own side, yesterday did not respond to questions about his attitude to such events.

Liberal state director and former Howard government adviser Tony Nutt would neither confirm nor deny whether today’s forum included exclusive sessions with shadow ministers. Nor would he release a list of companies attending or detail meetings between companies and MPs. ‘There are electoral laws; we are fully compliant with electoral law; we also conduct our fund-raising in an ethical manner’ said Mr Nutt in a brief statement.

Under Howard government amendments to the Electoral Act, only political contributions over $11,000 must be disclosed to the Australian Electoral Commission. There is no requirement for political parties to reveal details of the exclusive, cash-for-access meetings. Other states such as New South Wales have their own disclosure requirements, but Victoria does not.
Victorian Deputy Premier Rob Hulls hit out at the Liberals last night saying, ‘the Labor Party has strict probity arrangements governing all our fund-raising activities, unlike the hypocritical opposition who do not have such arrangements and are the only remaining party taking money off tobacco companies’.

Mr Hunt said he supported a move to public funding of elections and a complete ban on donations from companies, unions, organisations and individuals. But he said that as long as Labor enjoyed ”rivers of gold” from the union movement, his party would always need to seek financial support from business.

Last year The Age revealed how the ALP had raised funds by selling exclusive access to Premier John Brumby and his ministers at an annual ”business forum” organised by the party’s money-spinning arm, Progressive Business.
That forum has been cancelled for 2010 and state Labor has ceased offering exclusive one-on-one meetings in return for contributions. But The Age believes the federal ALP conference still features exclusive paid-for meetings between business and MPs. Labor in Victoria also continues to hold corporate fund-raisers including a dinner this week with Melbourne’s business elite at the Toorak home of Andrew Fox, son of trucking and logistics magnate Lindsay Fox.

Queensland Labor Premier Anna Bligh – in a token gesture – last year banned ministers from attending fund-raising events; NSW Labor government barred donations from developers and last year, former Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett accused Labor of corrupting the democratic system by selling access to ministers. he said ‘the professionalism of selling time has risen to such a level that it has corrupted the democratic process; it corrupts the principle that all people are equal before the law’.

The unfortunate reality is that Liberal or Labor corporate government translates into continued corporate access to public monies; nary a policy comes out of government that hasn’t been a seed planted by a would-be corporate benefactor.

Like a well accomplished conman, America is borrowing money to maintain a lifestyle it can’t afford and treading the world stage like it rules the world; those it can’t crush, it buys off and those suffering from earthquakes they offer money and asssistance while their own are doing it tough.

They started a massive anti Toyota campaign not to assist people, but to try and punish the Japanese who have pumped almost USA$1 trillion into the USA economy which would otherwise already collapsed. American car manufactureres have long had a poor reputation for finish, quality and safety, yet Toyota – now the biggest car manufacturer in the world must suffer for their success and America’s failure.

So Bill Clinton is a ‘patron’ for Haiti and his wife Hillary Clinton is in Chile offering hundres of millions in aid and President Obama’s plan is a $50M advertising campaign in Pakistan to raise awareness and build a brand for America. The goal is to raise awareness of projects aimed at reversing anti-American sentiments, and a substantial amount will be spent on media, especially private TV channels, to reduce tension and bring Pakistan-US relations back on the right path.

The Pakistan media will be asked to report on the Obama administration’s plan for $1.45 billion in aid for Pakistan this year, funding water, energy and other projects as well as a media campaign to counter extremist views, according to Reuters.

Houston, I think you’ve got a problem back home !

The Americans just don’t seem to get it; they believe they can buy the Pakistani people at the same time as reduce the ability of al Qaeda and other extremists to influence public perceptions and attitudes; they feel they that support for the government will establish a more secure, prosperous and lasting state. Military spending in the region for some 10 years and costing anywhere up to USA$20 $10 billion has not been effective at building better relations with Islamabad … well hello !

The realy funny part is the Obama administration plans to help Pakistan’s democratic government meet budget shortfalls and deliver services to a population increasingly angry about economic and security troubles, yet it doesn’t have it’s own house in order; is it any wonder the USA is doomed; those financially attached to the USA will be dragged down.

Like any relationship, when the negatives out-weigh the positives, its time to call it a day; of course the family law court and other legal jurisdictions see the more vengeful side of a wronged one seeking retribution, sometimes well above what one might considered a balanced response, but be that as it may, the reality is that the American people will pay.

The neo-cons (Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney to name just there) were all about expolitation, a more efficient team of conscious-free thieves looking to self interest and largely protected by a system that is based on taking other people’s possessions and calling them your own.

Just like the League of Nations and now United Nations, the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund), all structured to rip resources from friend or foe (the former usually became the latter, which is pretty much this article).

The problem with all things is that they only can go so far before the skyward growth runs out of fuel; in this case, borrowing so heavily from the future that now that the future is here, it can’t be paid for and on top of that, the future looks like there are no new resources to plunder to maintain growth … and so we start the fall back; ohh there will be attempts to forestall payment demanded now, but the downward slide, the plunging back to solid ground is inevitable and no safe, delicate well crafted landing. Paul Farrell of MarketWatch makes some obvious predictions and we Aussies should look for similar tell-tale signs of unwellness in the corporate structure that is Australia today.

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. Retire? You can fuggetaboutit if the new Global Debt Time Bomb is detonated by any one of 20 made-in-America trigger mechanisms; yes, 20. And yes any one can destroy your retirement because all 20 are inexorably linked, a house-of-cards, a circular firing squad destined to self-destruct, triggering the third great Wall Street meltdown of the 21st century, igniting the Great Depression II that George W. Bush, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson and now President Obama have simply delayed with their endless knee-jerk, debt-laden wars, stimulus bonanzas and bailouts.

Is the deficit a national-security threat ?  WSJ’s Jerry Seib previews his column in tomorrow’s Journal in which he writes the federal budget deficit has become so large, it’s time consider it a natural-security threat. Plus, the News Hub provides a February market outlook and also discusses the findings of a new autism study.

Wow, what an epic Hollywood blockbuster this will make: You know the drama, can’t miss the warnings. The financial press is flooding us with plot lines … a Forbes cover story focuses on a “Global Debt Bomb: How It Could Wreck Your Life” … Leaders at the World Economic Forum on Swiss Mt. Davos fear another global meltdown will trigger mass rebellions … The Economist calls the plot a “Global Asset Bubble,” with cheap money fast driving up asset prices.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek is adding jet fuel to the ticking time-bomb in: “After the Stimulus Binge, a Debt Hangover: Trillions of dollars have been spent keeping the global economy afloat. But now fears about the Great Recession are giving way to worries about something else: The Great Reckoning” when massive debts come due. Then the debt bomb explodes “and the results won’t be pretty for investors or elected officials.”

Forbes discovered the trigger mechanism in “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” by economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff: The “90% ratio of government debt to GDP is a tipping point in economic growth.” For 800 years “you increase it over and beyond a high threshold, and boom!” Well guess what? “The U.S. government-debt-to-GDP ratio is 84%.” Soon, Ka-Booom! Depression. Kiss your retirement goodbye.

The financial press and economists try to navigate a fog to find a trigger, but there’s not just one, but many triggers, all linked in a lethal network. What triggers this firestorm ? Thre are 20 economic weapons of mass destruction triggering a ticking Global Debt Time Bomb

1. Federal Budget Deficit Bomb. The Bush/Cheney wars pushed America deep into a debt hole. Federal debt limit was just raised almost 100% with Obama’s 2010 budget, to $14.3 trillion vs. $7.8 trillion in 2005. The Congressional Budget Office predicts future deficits around 4% through 2020. Get it? America’s debt at 84% of GDP will soon pass that toxic 90% trigger point.  [How far has kRudd's government gone into debt after taking over with surplus ... $140 billion ?]

2. U.S. Foreign Trade Bomb. Monthly deficits actually dropped from $50 billion per month to roughly $35 billion. But the total continues climbing as $400 billion is added each year. Foreigners now own $2.5 trillion of America, with China holding over $1.3 trillion in Treasury debt.  [How much foreign currency is invested in Australia and is this why the Federal Reserve wants to keep interest rates high to ensure the $'s stay invested un Australia ?]

3. Weakening U.S. Dollar as Foreign Reserve Currency Bomb. Fear China and other currencies will replace dollar as main foreign reserves. The dollar’s fallen: The main index measuring dollar strength has gone from 120 at the Clinton-to-Bush handoff to below 80 today.  [While our $ slides in value, its more a consequence of monetary exchange rate manipulation by the Amercians than our $ being worth less, however, the higher the debt and with interest rates rising, what proportion of our GDP should go to servicing a debt that was called a stimulus package ]

4. Cheap Money Bomb: Credit Ratings Down, Rates Up. Economists at S&P, Fitch and Moody’s were totally co-conspirators of Fat Cat Bankers, misleading investors before meltdown: Soon, debt up, ratings down, interest rates soar.  [Australian banks have long told porkies about their losses and corporations effectively bleeding Aussie investors is on the rise]

5. Global Real Estate Bomb. Dubai Tower, new “world’s tallest building” is empty. BusinessWeek warns that China’s housing collapse could be worse than America’s. Plus the U.S. commercial real estate bubble is now $1.7 trillion, a “ticking time bomb” bloating 25% of bank balance sheets.  [ Australia has some of the highest priced real estate in the world and we are very primarily dependant on the sale of resources; when they run out ?]

6. Peak Oil and the Population Bomb. China and India each need 500 new cities. The United Nations estimates world population exploding 50% from 6 billion to 9 billion by 2050: Three billion more humans demanding more automobiles, exhausting more resources to feed their version of the gas-guzzling “America Dream.”   [Australia is over-populated already, yet corporations drive us closer to the cliff of food and water shortages, ably assisted by local, state and federal governments]

7. Social Security Bomb. We have no choice; eventually we must either cut benefits or raise taxes. Politicians hate both, so they’ll do nothing. Delays worsen solutions. Without action, by 2035 Social Security and Medicare benefits will eat up the entire federal budget other than defense.  [As the aging population depends on social security payments - paid for over the last 50 years and squandered by successive governments - and super funds record successive losses not only in negative returns but lost capital]

8. Medicare: A Nuclear Bomb. Going broke faster than Social Security. Prescription drug benefit added an unfunded $8.1 trillion. In 5 years estimates rose from about $35 trillion to over $60 trillion now.  [The medical system - that Rudd said he would take over - is in melt-down, with administration staff outnumbering doctors and nurses]

9. Health-care Insurance Bomb. Burden increasingly shifted to employees. Costs rising faster than inflation. Recent Obamacare plan would have cost $90 billion annually, paid to Big Pharma and insurers.  [Private health funds are increasing their rates, forcing many back under the medicare system]

10. State and Local Government Budget Bombs. Deficits of $110 billion in 2010, $178 billion in 2011on top of more that $450 billion in underfunded state and municipal employee pension funds.  [Each State or Territory in Australia is in financial trouble and mismanagement is rife]

11. Underfunded Corporate Pensions Bomb. From $60 billion surplus in 2007 to $409 billion deficit in 2009. And a whopping 92% of the pension plans of companies are now underfunded. Defaults are guaranteed by taxpayers.

12. Consumer Debt Bomb. Americans are still living beyond their means. Even with a downturn, consumer debt rose from about $2.3 to $2.5 trillion. Fat Cat Bankers love it — yes love making matters worse by gouging cardholders and mortgagees, blocking help in foreclosures and bankruptcies.  [Australians owe more money than even the average American, so our time will likewsie come]

13. Personal Savings Bomb. Before the 2008 meltdown savings rate dropped from about 10% in the early 1980s to below zero. Now it’s increasing, slowing retail recovery. Today, government’s the big “unsaver.”  [Seccessive federal governments have penalised savers for so long in Australia - even taxing Super contributions - that saving is a rarety in OZ]

14. War and Military Defense Deficits. Costs of Iraq and Afghanistan wars — $200+ billion annually, $3 trillion minimum, with massive long-term costs for veteran medical care, equipment renewal, recruitment.  [Barnaby Joyce was right in asking why we send money overseas instead of looking after our own; but then again it was the LNP that sent our troops to Iraq on a false war and Afganstan and other trouble spots]

15. Homeland Insecurity Bomb. Security at airports, seaports, borders, vulnerable chemical plants all increase budgets. [The growing refugee situation is world-wide, so its only natural more people will wnat to life herem as we boast how great it is here]

16. Fed/Treasury Bailout Bombs. Tax credits, loans, cash and purchase of toxic assets from Wall Street banks estimated at $23.7 trillion as new debt was shifted from too-big-to-fail Fat-Cat banks to taxpayers. [Guaranteeing Australian banks just meant protecting them from their bad business decisions]

17. Insatiable Washington Lobbyists Bombs. Paulson, Goldman, Geithner, Morgan and Wall Street banks, through their lobbyists and former employees working inside now have absolute power over government spending. Democracy and voters are now irrelevant in America’s new corporate-socialism.  [Corporate government is likewise well entrenched in Australia]

18. Shadow Banking: The Derivatives Bomb. Wall Street wants no regulation of this $670 trillion, high-risk, out-of-control casino that’s highly leveraged versus the $50 trillion total GDP of all nations. We forget that derivatives almost destroyed global economies in 2008-09, finally will by 2012.

19. Dysfunctional Two-Party Political Bomb. Polarized partisanship increasing: Every day both parties show zero interest in cooperating for the public good. Instead they fight viciously, resisting everything and anything proposed by opponents. Only goal: Score political points, make the other side look bad. [Australian politicians, are you paying attention ?]

20. The Coming Populous Rebellion Bombs. Nobody trusts anyone in authority. For good reason. So immediate gratification, short-term betting and a lack of long-term perspective wins for individual investors, consumers and taxpayers as well as Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America CEOs. Today: “Doing what’s right for the common good and country” is just empty political rhetoric.  [Crime is rising in Australia as people can't take ot anymore; the bombing of TIO is a sign of things to come, where the system will not help the individual because the association betwixt government and corporation is too inter-twined ]

As the chorus of the Beatles tune: “Head in a cloud … The fool on the hill, sees the sun going down … a thousand voices talking perfectly loud. But nobody ever hears him, or the sound he appears to make … And the eyes in his head, see the world spinning round …’

Historians and behavioral economists tell us most investors are blind optimists. Investors cannot see bubbles from inside their bubble. Nor Fat Cat Bankers from inside their mega-bonus-bubble. Nor politicians from inside the beltway bubble.  Why? The optimist’s brain filters out bad news. They know their dreams of prosperity will come true. Then, when they finally do see that the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train, it’s always too late.

The Great Depression is coming soon and yet, your mental filters are working, blocking warnings of a bomb…

Given that most intelligent fund managers must know of Peak Oil, rising fuel costs and reducing road trips resulting in toll tunnel businesses going bust, why would they be looking to waste over a billion $’s to buy into a consortium of toll related companies ?

Who will benefit from this ‘investment’ of people’s future retirement funds? One might reasonably suggest the fund managers themselves, because their members will not.
Future Fund intends to purchase a share of Transurban; putting between $1bn and $1.5bn into the bid, in an unprecedented deal in which it could end up with between 15 and 25% of Transurban (who owns Citylink in Melbourne, the Hills M2 in Sydney and has stakes in the M7, M4, the Westlink M7 and the Eastern Distributor in Sydney and investments in two toll roads in Virginia in the USA).  

Have we not already seen the stupidity where the transference of superannuation funds bails out failing companies … how can this corporate theft continue, unless condoned by corporate government itself.

Mr Murray claims this as a quantum leap in investment strategy for the fund – already partly managed by corporate manglers AMP, Citi and UBS – .and it would always need someone to manage an asset for it, but there were various ways of going about it.

He is alleged to have said ‘we are interested in the company because we are interested in infrastructure’; what a profoundly ignorant investment strategy !

Corporate government has blood sucked every spectrum of the gravy train, effectively squandering pensions and now superannuation funds, so the suggestion of the Future Fund having a long-term goal of having 30% of its assets in infrastructure and property will see the current fund size of $64bn easily drop by 90% within the next 10 years.

So if you are salary sacrificing, think again because at the end of the day, what you have in your pocket may well be all that you will have to survive on.

The IMF wants to ‘loan’ Haiti $100 million (of course with restrictions that helped put the country where it is today … bankrupt) and the USA is offering help with $100 million dollars (again conditional to American companies winning contracts for work and ripping even more money out of the place), but if the USA is as helpful to Haiti as it is/was to its own citizens in New Orleans, then ‘god help them’ because based on the combined efforts of their burauracy, various government agencies and armed forces etc, they are further doomed.

Beware of Bankers and or the USA bearing gifts; as one wag said, ‘there’s nothing like a banker for kicking someone when they’re down’.  The following is a overview of how ‘helpful’ countries have been to Haiti over the last 200 years or so…….

Since a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Tuesday (killing tens of thousands of people) there’s been a lot of well-intentioned chatter and twitter about how to help Haiti. Folks have been donating millions of dollars to Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti (by texting “YELE” to 501501) or to the Red Cross (by texting “HAITI” to 90999) or to Paul Farmer’s extraordinary Partners in Health, among other organizations. I hope these donations continue to pour in, along with more money, food, water, medicine, equipment and doctors and nurses from nations around the world. The Obama administration has pledged at least $100 million in aid and has already sent thousands of soldiers and relief workers. That’s a decent start.

But it’s also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice–about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?

Haiti’s vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor–by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF’s extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti’s slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage–external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that’s right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, “by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments.”

It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum–valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d’etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.

Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, “by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US.” During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this “charity” came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti’s agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti’s dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.

A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is “a veritable graveyard of development projects.”

So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti’s debt (that’s the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti’s IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF’s rapid credit facility, which doesn’t impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.

Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti’s future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that’s money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank’s shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB’s loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB’s donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB’s bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB’s triple-A credit rating.

Finally, although the Obama administration temporarily halted deportations to Haiti, it hasn’t granted Haitians temporary protected status (TPS), which would save them from being deported back to the scene of a disaster for as long as 18 months, allow them to work in the US and, crucially, send money back to relatives in Haiti. In the past, TPS has been given to countries like Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 after Hurrican Mitch, but it has never been extended to Haitians, even after the 2008 storms, presumably because immigrations officials fear a mass exodus from Haiti.

But decency, as well as fairness, should trump those fears now. As Sunita Patel, an attorney with CCR, told me, “We have granted TPS to El Salavador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan following natural disasters. To apply different rules here would fly in the face of the administration’s efforts to build good will abroad.”

(UPDATE: It has just been announced that the Obama administration has granted Temporary Protected Status to Haiti. This is a great relief to Haitians in the US and a victory for those who pressured the administration to do so.)

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/517494

This record credit binge largely fuelled by the first-home buyer’s grant means every adult, on average, owes more than $74,000.

We now owe more per person than the average American; the USA was known as credit capital of the world, but there household debt stands at just under $50,000 per person.

Mortgages account for almost 90 per cent of annual GDP, up from 17 per cent in 1990. The remainder is taken up with $45 billion on credit cards and more than $90 billion on personal debts.

The Reserve Bank figures show personal debt now equates to 100.4% of Australia’s annual GDP, one of the highest ratios in the developed world.

It means we are living way beyond our means and eroding our children’s future.

Like America, or financial headache is going to get worse. We’ve just passed the peak spending season yet the Reserve Bank data applies to October’s debt levels only, not counting two months of First Home Owner Grant fuelled mortgage activity and the government’s stimulus.

A Fujitsu Consulting monthly survey of 10,000 families shows the typical household is paying about 39%t of its income on debt repayments and ‘stressed households’ will be paying 41% and ‘severely stressed’ households will pay about 43% of their household income.

Despite the positive commnets by ‘economists’ about grwoth, the reality is that 2010 may well see a slowdown in Australia’s economic growth and a contraction as stimuli peters out.

Stupidly, the Reserve Bank will try to fool the market by raising the cash rate; the ensuing credit crunch further dampening banks profitability and credit ratings.

Therefore, if borrowers have borrowed to the hilt, then howe can banks look to lending money if the borrower’s budget is already super tight.

According to Ted Rall, the USA has Blood on Their Hand.

You’d think Haiti would be loaded. After all, it made a lot of people rich. So how did Haiti get so poor?

Despite a century of American colonialism, occupation, and propping up corrupt dictators?

The CIA even staged coups d’état against every democratically elected president they ever had …

An earthquake isn’t just an earthquake, if the same 7.0 tremor hit San Francisco it wouldn’t kill nearly as many people as in Port-au-Prince. ‘Looking at the pictures, essentially it looks as if (the buildings are of) breezeblock or cinderblock (besser block) construction; what you need in an earthquake zone is metal bars that connect the blocks so that they stay together when they get shaken’ notes Sandy Steacey, director of the Environmental Science Research Institute at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland; ‘in a wealthy country with good seismic building codes that are enforced, you would have some damage, but not very much’.

When a pile of cinderblocks falls on you, your odds of survival are long. Even if you miraculously survive, a poor country like Haiti doesn’t have the equipment, communications infrastructure or emergency service personnel to pull you out of the rubble in time. And if your neighbors get you out, there’s no ambulance to take you to the hospital–or doctor to treat you once you get there.

Earthquakes are random events. How many people they kill is predetermined. In Haiti this week, don’t blame tectonic plates. Ninety-nine percent of the death toll is attributable to poverty.

So the question is relevant. How’d Haiti become so poor?

The story begins in 1910, when a U.S. State Department-National City Bank of New York (now called Citibank) consortium bought the Banque National d’Haïti–Haiti’s only commercial bank and its national treasury–in effect transferring Haiti’s debts to the Americans. Five years later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered troops to occupy the country in order to keep tabs on “our” investment.

From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines imposed harsh military occupation, murdered Haitians patriots and diverted 40 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product to U.S. bankers. Haitians were banned from government jobs. Ambitious Haitians were shunted into the puppet military, setting the stage for a half-century of U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The U.S. kept control of Haiti’s finances until 1947.

Still–why should Haitians complain? Sure, we stole 40 percent of Haiti’s national wealth for 32 years. But we let them keep 60 percent.

Whiners.

Despite having been bled dry by American bankers and generals, civil disorder prevailed until 1957, when the CIA installed President-for-Life François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Duvalier’s brutal Tonton Macoutes paramilitary goon squads murdered at least 30,000 Haitians and drove educated people to flee into exile. But think of the cup as half-full: fewer people in the population means fewer people competing for the same jobs!

Upon Papa Doc’s death in 1971, the torch passed to his even more dissolute 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. The U.S., cool to Papa Doc in his later years, quickly warmed back up to his kleptomaniacal playboy heir. As the U.S. poured in arms and trained his army as a supposed anti-communist bulwark against Castro’s Cuba, Baby Doc stole an estimated $300 to $800 million from the national treasury, according to Transparency International. The money was placed in personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere.

Under U.S. influence, Baby Doc virtually eliminated import tariffs for U.S. goods. Soon Haiti was awash predatory agricultural imports dumped by American firms. Domestic rice farmers went bankrupt. A nation that had been agriculturally self-sustaining collapsed. Farms were abandoned. Hundreds of thousands of farmers migrated to the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince.

The Duvalier era, 29 years in all, came to an end in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to whisk Baby Doc to exile in France, saving him from a popular uprising.

Once again, Haitians should thank Americans. Duvalierism was “tough love.” Forcing Haitians to make do without their national treasury was our nice way or encouraging them to work harder, to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Or, in this case, flipflops.

Anyway.

The U.S. has been all about tough love ever since. We twice deposed the populist and popular democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The second time, in 2004, we even gave him a free flight to the Central African Republic! (He says the CIA kidnapped him, but whatever.) Hey, he needed a rest. And it was kind of us to support a new government formed by former Tonton Macoutes.

Yet, despite everything we’ve done for Haiti, they’re still a fourth-world failed state on a fault line.

And still, we haven’t given up. American companies like Disney generously pay wages to their sweatshop workers of 28 cents an hour.

What more do these ingrates want?

Ted Rall is the author of the new book “Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?,” an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America’s next big foreign policy challenge.

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