having fully wrecked world's econ, central bankers

The Velocity of Money Is Coming, Along With Big Price Inflation?

Tuesday, May 01, 2012 – by Staff Report

Ben Bernanke

Bernanke: Be Humble! ... "Humble" is typically not an attribute associated with the Federal Reserve (Fed), especially in light of the trillions of dollars recently printed. Yet, in his latest press conference Fed Chairman Bernanke called for humility: we must be humble in setting monetary policy! The problem is, Bernanke's definition of the word "humble" appears to be something entirely different from what – in our humble opinion - common sense might expect. – Axel Merk/Merk Funds
Dominant Social Theme: "We are humble because we are aware of the great monetary forces at work and will do all we can to triumph over them. Thank you. I am Ben Bernanke."
Free-Market Analysis: Axel Merk of Merk Funds is out with another good analysis of the tremendous monetary inflation now inherent in the Western dollar reserve system and its eventual impact.
We have always argued ... wait. Sooner or later there will be tremendous price inflation.
Does Merk agree? He is troubled, at least by the language that US Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke is using in calling for "humility" and points out that Bernanke's sense of it and a normal person's is not the same.
This is, in fact, a kind of elite dominant social theme, in our view. It is the presentation of a fear-based meme that only top money minds like Bernanke's can successfully manage what's going on.
It is a kind of promotion as well, for what Bernanke and other central bankers are doing these days is nothing more than a kind of damage control. Today, having fully wrecked the world's economies, central bankers want to appear "humbled" by the forces they have so destructively manipulated.
The idea may be to create "order out of chaos" – to build a fully globalized monetary system with a worldwide IMF money – and a worldwide central bank (also perhaps the IMF) as well.
But if there is actually occurring a take-down of the world's economy by happenstance or on purpose, it is not necessarily prudent to proclaim it! Better to maintain "humbleness" – and that is the key word that Bernanke seems to have seized on, and that Merk has presented to us within his larger analysis.
The use of the word happened this way ... Bernanke was asked at his recent press conference discussing the latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) statement to contrast the US and Japanese experiences regarding current and past economies.
Bernanke (Merk explains) argued that the US avoided the Japanese experience because ... "We acted aggressively and preemptively to avoid deflation." According to Merk, Bernanke focused on the humility (whatever that means) of a move to recapitalize banks. He suggested ...
"... that we will avoid some of the problems that Japan has faced. That being said, I think, it's always better to be humble and just to avoid being too confident, and we need to continue to maintain strong monetary policy support to make sure that the economy continues on a recovery path and returns to a more normal situation."

The current system is not a monetary system per se but a kind of looting

The system we have currently is not a monetary system per se but a kind of looting. It is based on the dollar reserve system itself that instructs the Saud family to trade oil for dollars and nothing else.
That is, the system is built on force, especially since the early 1970s when President Richard Nixon abrogated the last of the gold standard, though this is not widely acknowledged. "Market forces" are said to be in play. They are not, or at least not as advertised.
Merk's big point, from our perspective, is one we agree with. The system IS flooded with money and eventually that money will circulate.
It is the CIRCULATION that begins the process of price inflation. And then, gradually, monetary velocity makes things worse.
But of course people have to be in the mood to borrow. Bernanke has effectively slowed if not halted the re-leveraging process by propping up a financial system that should have crashed long ago.
Bernanke's humbleness is nothing of the sort. It is the arrogance of an elite representative who believes he can lie about money markets and everybody will believe him.
He has propped up a shattered system, turned what would have been a minor crisis in 2008 into a spiraling world depression and then has not been truthful with people about the way money really works.
The problems will really begin when people feel like using more money. But by the time they get around to doing that a worldwide depression may have set in.
Alternatively, price inflation will finally spike and Bernanke will raise rates hard, though Merk thinks the top of the rate raise cycle is only 6 percent today, versus over 20 percent in the 1970s, the last time we went through such a bear-market monopoly-fiat money cycle.
There is nothing humble about what Bernanke is doing or has done. He's playing around with the lives and savings of billions. It's impossible for a handful of good, gray men to manage a global economy of tens of trillions. It cannot be done.
Conclusion: It is arrogant to try, and it seems to us even more arrogant to speak of humbleness while doing so.

May Day Protests Across Globe

Workers across the globe carried out strikes and marches to demand better labor conditions on Tuesday, while Occupy Wall Street launched the Spring phase of its movement in New York. Protesters marched all over Manhattan, chanting "get a job" at bankers. Several were arrested on the Lower East Side, and others as the group moved on the Williamsburg Brudge. Meanwhile, thousands of workers in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan marched for pay hikes, saying that their pay has not been on par with global consumer prices. Greek workers, subject to harsh austerity cuts in the wake of a European Union bailout, also planned rallies for Tuesday.

Read it at New York

Why Are Conservatives Petrified of Sexual Freedom?

Right-wingers seem to have a deep-seated fear of women's sexual rights.

April 30, 2012  |  

 

 

There’s a tendency among prominent anti-choicers to speak elliptically of their beliefs, knowing that straightforward statements of hostility to sex and women’s rights tend to run ordinary people off. But occasionally one of them gets a little slack and ends up saying to the public at large the sort of things they usually try to say only to each other. That’s how Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant ended up saying on the radio recently, “[T]he true hypocrisy is that [liberals’] one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb.”
This is like saying that the only reason policymakers and public health professionals want to ensure access to emergency rooms to treat victims of accidents and traumatic health events is because they like people to become victims of accidents and traumatic health events.
The question that comes to mind for the non-idiotic when contemplating a statement like Bryant's is, “Does he really believe that garbage? Does he really think that abortion is some amazingly pleasurable experience that pro-choicers do for no other reason than to do it?” I’m going to go out on a limb and say no, that Bryant is lying here about what he thinks pro-choicers believe. The reason I can say that with some assurance is that everything else in his entire rant was a lie. Bryant made this statement in the middle of an extended claim that new and pointless restrictions on abortion in Mississippi are about protecting women’s health. Literally no one actually believes this. Both anti and pro-choicers know that the new restrictions are about shutting down abortion access in Mississippi, which actual experts in women’s health routinely point out is bad for women. Since every other word in Bryant’s speech was a lie, it’s safe to say that his claim to believe that pro-choicers are all about "abortion parties" is also a lie. Pure B.S. is the lingua franca of the anti-choice movement.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn anything from this sort of right wing fantasizing. While Bryant doesn’t literally believe that pro-choicers want to abort every pregnancy, I do think this statement reveals the utter terror and hatred of feminism, particularly of feminist demands for women’s sexual liberation, that is at the heart of the anti-choice movement. Knowing that “abort/kill children” is hysterical anti-choice code for “have sex on your own terms without apology” helps translate Bryant’s nonsensical rant to one that actually makes sense and gets to the heart of what he’s actually saying. It is, in fact, true, that most progressives want to make sure that every woman can have sex on their own terms without apology.
That shouldn’t seem so terrifying to conservatives, but it clearly is. It has been terrifying to conservative forces throughout history and across cultures, so there’s no real reason to be surprised or skeptical that we have that problem in the United States. By ensuring access to safe, legal abortion, the government ensures women have a right to sex without facing unwanted consequences. That kind of validation of women’s right to be free, independent human beings is and always has been what this war is over, which is why anti-choicers have to create this elaborate code language to talk about their views. In this country in 2012, it’s just politically unfeasible to state outright that you think it’s better to keep the patriarchal boot on women’s necks.
This is why I doubt that Republican Party leaders are going to be able to put a lid on the overflow of misogyny we’ve been witnessing for the past couple of years now know as the War on Women. It’s hard to say in the short term why these past couple of years have seemed like the breaking point for reactionaries, causing them to lose all sense of what they look like when they pass pervy trans-vaginal ultrasound laws, attack access to contraception, and fight to kill the Violence Against Women Act. But if you step back and look at the big picture, why they’re so upset seems crystal clear: All their worst fears about feminism are coming to pass.
The hope of conservatives who rose up against feminism in the seventies is that they would be able to kill it off. All other concerns were secondary; they knew that the social effects of feminist victories wouldn’t be felt for decades after the initial waves of legal reform and widespread social agreement that women do deserve equality. Well, even though they did major damage to feminism, they did not, in fact, kill it. What they feared has come to pass: Women are making exactly the gains feminists of the second wave hoped they would: Rape and domestic violence rates are down, contraceptive use is up, women are delaying marriage and childbirth, more women are going to college than ever in history, women are popping up in leadership roles in government and media, and heterosexuality is becoming less compulsive. Any fool can see that most of this wasn’t possible without women gaining control over their reproductive systems. Realizing they’re losing, conservatives are making a big last stand to turn back the clock by taking this critical control away. The fear of female sexuality feels hysterical, primal even, but if you’re dedicated to patriarchy, it actually makes perfect sense to fear letting women control their own sex and reproductive lives. Even though it’s politically damaging to the Republican Party to let this outrageous war on women continue, for conservatives, giving up right now feels like losing forever.
This leaves feminists in an ambiguous position. On one hand, the absolute panic on the right over women’s rights should remind us that we are the ones in the right, and we are the ones who are winning the culture war, regardless of how many backlash-y pieces news magazines may run. But on the other hand, the tide of history is creating massive desperation on the right. Clearly, they are willing to do anything to turn back women’s gains, which is why any adherence to basic honest was abandoned years ago. That kind of desperation can be very dangerous, and we should not underestimate its power.

Amanda Marcotte co-writes the popular blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments.

Fascist America: Have We Finally Turned The Corner?

The author offers one of her periodic assessments of America's potential to go fascist. And the news is better than it's been in years.

May 1, 2012  |  

 

Photo Credit: JoelInSouthernCA

America has never been without fascist wannabes. Research by Political Research Associates estimates that, at any given time in our history, roughly 10-12 percent of the country's population has been bred-in-the-bone right-wing authoritarians -- the people who are hard-wired to think in terms of fascist control and order. Our latter-day Christian Dominionists, sexual fundamentalists and white nationalists are the descendants -- sometimes, the literal blood descendants -- of the same people who joined the KKK in the 1920s, followed Father Coughlin in the 1930s, backed Joe McCarthy in the early '50s, joined the John Birch society in the '60s, and signed up for the Moral Majority in the 1970s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s.  

Given its rather stunning durability, it's probably time to acknowledge that this proto-fascist strain is a permanent feature of the American body politics. Like ugly feet or ears that stick out, it's an unchanging piece of who we are. We are going to have to learn to live with it.

But it's also true that this faction's influence on the larger American culture ebbs and flows broadly over time. Our parents and grandparents didn't have to deal with them much at all, because the far-right fringe was pushed back hard during the peak years of the New Deal. It broke out for just a few short years in the McCarthy era -- long enough to see the rise of the Birchers -- and then was firmly pushed back down into irrelevance again.

Ukraine: Torture

Jailed former minister: Pressure on Ukraine intensifies

30 April 2012 Last updated at 23:28 GMT Help

Ukraine is under growing pressure from Europe over the treatment of its jailed former prime minister who is serving seven years in jail for abuse of office.
Yulia Tymoshenko says she has been beaten in prison, which the authorities deny.
Five European presidents have said they will not attend a summit in Ukraine next month, and Germany's chancellor may boycott any football matches played there during Euro 2012, as Jonathan Josephs reports.

Nicaragua: Sandinista Figure Dies

Tomas Borge served as ambassador to Ecuador and Peru in later years

Continue reading the main story

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The last surviving founder of the left-wing Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, Tomas Borge, has died aged 81.

Borge helped to create the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1961.
In 1979, the Sandinista revolution overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza and Borge served as interior minister in the new government of Daniel Ortega.
US President Ronald Reagan saw the revolutionaries as a threat and backed the right-wing Contras in the civil war that followed.
An estimated 30,000 people died in the fighting which lasted a decade and wrecked the country's economy.
'Transcendental figure' Borge was born into a poor family and dedicated himself to the struggle against the Somoza family, which had run Nicaragua for 40 years.
He received military training in Cuba before he helped to found the Sandinista movement.

Tomas Borge became interior minister after the revolution.

The organisation was named after Augusto Cesar Sandino, who fought against US intervention in Nicaragua in the 1930s.
Borge became the powerful interior minister in the Ortega government of the 1980s, where he imposed censorship on the media and was accused of human rights violations.
However, he denied accusations that he was responsible for expelling and harassing clergymen during the war.
The Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990.
Congressman Jacinto Suarez was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying Borge was "a transcendental figure in Nicaraguan history".
But the news agency also quoted Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Bella, who said of Borge's later life: "After 1990, I have the sense he gave up his revolutionary ideas... He ended up a tragic-comic figure".
Borge's final years saw Daniel Ortega return to government - he won presidential elections in 2006 and again in 2011.
Borge was admitted to hospital earlier this month for a lung infection and underwent surgery.