On the Evidence, Stimulus Programs Aren’t Working

by Bill Bonner

For whatever reason, the French newspaper, Liberation, chose to recall a grim event last week. On February 4, 1912 Franz Reichelt, also known as the ‘flying tailor,’ put on his contraption – a homemade outfit designed to work like a parachute – went up to the first observation level of the Eiffel Tower, hesitated…then stepped over the rail and jumped.

Alas, he did not fly. Nor even float. He fell “like a stone,” the paper reported.

Immortality was achieved, but not the way he had hoped. His stunt was captured by the new motion picture technology of the time. That silent film inspired the very popular Jackass videos, which show people engaged in reckless acts of mischief and mortality.

But we do not have to go to YouTube to enjoy the Jackass genre. We have only to read the news. All over the world the authorities are strapping on their absurd parachutes…and climbing to very high places. In Europe, banks borrowed 442 billion euros last month from the European Central Bank. Much of it is lent back to European governments. In America, stimulus funds are used to fix public toilets, as well as to repair Wall Street’s balance sheets. Trillions of dollars have been put at risk in these adventures – $23 trillion in the United States alone. And yet, despite the most daring experiment in stimulus ever, by the end of June, the British economy was 5.6% smaller than it had been a year before, paralleling the decline that followed the crash of ’29. As for the United States…we await the figures…

On the evidence, stimulus programs aren’t working. In fact, where they are tried the most they work the least. For proof, we go to Stimulation Nation itself. From America last week came news that new house sales had finally turned up. They were up 11% in June, according to the papers. That was the monthly figure. According to the annual numbers, they were down 21% from the year before – at the second lowest since they began counting in 1963. And since the population is much bigger than it was 52 years ago, this was relatively the worst June in history for new house sales. And now that the economy is in a slump, the rate of new household formation has been cut in half. Faced with lower incomes and worsening jobs prospects, people are less eager to set up new households – reducing the demand for new houses.

Continue Reading

The Ron Paul Video that Fox News Banned

Reason TV interviews Peter Schiff – Video

Calling All College Students – Study Hacks

College is coming right up and it’s time to get ready. Check out Study Hacks.

Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

by Jeremy Scahill, August 05, 2009

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-U.S. Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince’s private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the U.S. State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

Continue Reading

U.S. Recession Worst Since Great Depression, Revised Data Show

By Bob Willis

Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) — The first 12 months of the U.S. recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated, reflecting even bigger declines in consumer spending and housing, revised figures showed.

The world’s largest economy contracted 1.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the last three months of 2008, compared with the 0.8 percent drop previously on the books, the Commerce Department said yesterday in Washington. Gross domestic product has shrunk 3.9 percent in the past year, the report said, indicating the worst slump since the Great Depression.

Continue Reading

Christians Largely Mum on Torture

by Ray McGovern, August 01, 2009
Email This | Print This | Share This | Comment | Antiwar Forum

Anyone harboring doubts that the institutional Church is riding shotgun for the system, even regarding heinous sin like torture, should be chastened by the results of a recent survey by the Pew Research Center.

Who but the cowardly crew leading the “Christian” churches can be held responsible for the fact that many of their flock believe torture of suspected terrorists is “justified?”

Those polled were white non-Hispanic Catholics, white Evangelicals, and white mainline Protestants. A majority (54 percent) of those who attend church regularly said torture could be “justified,” while a majority of those not attending church regularly responded that torture was rarely or never justified.

I am not a psychologist or sociologist. But I recall that one of the first things Hitler did on assuming power was to ensure there was a pastor in every Lutheran and Catholic parish in Germany. Why? Because he calculated, correctly, that here would be a force for stability for his regime.

Thus began another horrid chapter in the history of those professing to be followers of Jesus of Nazareth but had forgotten his repeated admonition, Do not be afraid.

Continue Reading

From Iraq to Afghanistan, US Wars Not Going According to Plan

by William Pfaff, July 24, 2009

PARIS — Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was in Washington this week to consult with Barack Obama and American military and political officials, three weeks after the Status of Forces Agreement concerning U.S. forces in Iraq came into effect.

On the same day, in Iraq, tension was reported to be increasing between the Americans, whose combat forces were supposed to evacuate Baghdad and other cities at the end of June, and the Iraqi military and security forces, who were supposed to take over the Americans’ responsibilities.

American commanders complain that the Iraq authorities have greatly reduced the number of joint patrols, supposed to continue, and in other ways “clearly are signaling that we are no longer wanted” — according to an American officer quoted in The Wall Street Journal. Iraqi commanders have told the Americans no longer to run patrols, and not to conduct raids on suspect locations, without coordinating them with the Iraqis.

A foreign diplomat in Baghdad has said that the Iraqis are determined to show that they are now in charge, in the run-up to national elections next year. Robert Gates, the U.S. Defense secretary, says that the situation is not bad. However, attacks have sharply increased in recent days, and some observers insist that the Shiite- and Kurdish-dominated government must do more to reconcile the former ruling Sunni minority if sectarian conflict is not to break out again.

Continue Reading

Obama’s Free Lunch Is Over

by Philip Giraldi

I am one of those conservatives who has been inclined to cut President Barack Obama some slack on foreign policy and national security issues.  I believe that he inherited a “worst possible” international situation with the United States universally hated, two wars being lost and a third one waiting in the wings, an “ally” in Israel with an elected government that was both racist and heedless of the national interest of its great benefactor, and anti-American populism on the march everywhere in Latin America.  To be sure, Obama has moved quickly to change the “tone” of the conversation, restoring civility with many of America’s neighbors and friends.  He has demonstrated that he is serious about a Palestinian state and has established the principle that it is better to negotiate with adversaries than to start preventive wars.

All of that granted however, President Obama has failed to carry out the change that he promised when he was running for office.  If one assumes that he won the presidency due to the votes of people who wanted an end to wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and who wanted a rollback of legislation that has enabled the government to spy on its own citizens and lock them up without appeal, then he has been a complete disappointment.  Every feature of the Bush Administration security and surveillance state remains in place, including secret prisons, military tribunals, arbitrary arrest, and monitoring of citizens.  Iraq continues to simmer with no end in sight and AfPak, as the other expanding war is now called, is exploding even though a growing body of opinion appreciates that it is a conflict that cannot be won.  Under Obama, missile strikes from predator drones have actually increased, killing more insurgents but also many more civilians and shaking an already unstable Pakistan.

Continue Reading

Obama’s War Signals – Iran in the crosshairs

by Justin Raimondo

Only Richard Nixon, whose political career was launched and sustained by an ostensibly militant anti-communism, could have traveled to China, and – with conservative support – effected a de facto strategic alliance with a country long considered an implacable enemy. This Nixon-to-China meme is regularly invoked as aphoristic evidence that we must expect the unexpected, and it comes to mind when considering the prospects of an impending military conflict with Iran: it occurs to me that only Barack Obama, who won the White House in large part due to his opposition to the Iraq war, could take us to war with Iran, and rally liberals and much of the left behind it.

Oh, I can hear the outraged howls of protest from the Obama cult, but consider:

The president has already set a September deadline for Iran to respond to our as-yet-informal proposal to negotiate over the completely phony nuclear issue – an oddly confrontational approach to opening the first on-the-record high level talks with the Islamic Republic since the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

The nuke issue is phony because our own intelligence community, speaking through the CIA, determined “with high confidence” the Iranians gave up their nuclear weapons program in 2003. Yet Obama has repeatedly said Iran is working to develop nuclear weapons. The great sigh of relief we all breathed when the CIA assessment was made public last year – effectively blocking any last-minute attempt by the Bushies to strike Iran in the waning days of Dubya’s reign – gives way to new anxieties.

The evidence that Obama is ramping up the US effort to encircle and eventually strike at Iran is building: added deployments to Afghanistan and our increasing intervention in Pakistan can always be attributed to the vagaries of the Af-pak front, but one can’t blame the Iranians from looking at it differently. The US military presence, to the south and the east, is looming larger. This, in tandem with an apparent hardening of the US stance – e.g. the “muscularity” of Hillary Clinton’s most recent peroration – can only be seen by Tehran as prefiguring war.

Continue Reading

Older Posts »