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Page added on February 20, 2016
The US Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover
The US economy died when middle class jobs were offshored and when the financial system was deregulated.
Jobs offshoring benefitted Wall Street, corporate executives, and shareholders, because lower labor and compliance costs resulted in higher profits. These profits flowed through to shareholders in the form of capital gains and to executives in the form of “performance bonuses.” Wall Street benefitted from the bull market generated by higher profits.
However, jobs offshoring also offshored US GDP and consumer purchasing power. Despite promises of a “New Economy” and better jobs, the replacement jobs have been increasingly part-time, lowly-paid jobs in domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses and bartenders.
The offshoring of US manufacturing and professional service jobs to Asia stopped the growth of consumer demand in the US, decimated the middle class, and left insufficient employment for college graduates to be able to service their student loans. The ladders of upward mobility that had made the United States an “opportunity society” were taken down in the interest of higher short-term profits.
Without growth in consumer incomes to drive the economy, the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan substituted the growth in consumer debt to take the place of the missing growth in consumer income. Under the Greenspan regime, Americans’ stagnant and declining incomes were augmented with the ability to spend on credit. One source of this credit was the rise in housing prices that the Federal Reserves low inerest rate policy made possible. Consumers could refinance their now higher-valued home at lower interest rates and take out the “equity” and spend it.
The debt expansion, tied heavily to housing mortgages, came to a halt when the fraud perpetrated by a deregulated financial system crashed the real estate and stock markets. The bailout of the guilty imposed further costs on the very people that the guilty had victimized.
Under Fed chairman Bernanke the economy was kept going with Quantitative Easing, a massive increase in the money supply in order to bail out the “banks too big to fail.” Liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve found its way into stock and bond prices and made those invested in these financial instruments richer. Corporate executives helped to boost the stock market by using the companies’ profits and by taking out loans in order to buy back the companies’ stocks, thus further expanding debt.
Those few benefitting from inflated financial asset prices produced by Quantitative Easing and buy-backs are a much smaller percentage of the population than was affected by the Greenspan consumer credit expansion. A relatively few rich people are an insufficient number to drive the economy.
The Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy was designed to support the balance sheets of the mega-banks and denied Americans interest income on their savings. This policy decreased the incomes of retirees and forced the elderly to reduce their consumption and/or draw down their savings more rapidly, leaving no safety net for heirs.
Using the smoke and mirrors of under-reported inflation and unemployment, the US government kept alive the appearance of economic recovery. Foreigners fooled by the deception continue to support the US dollar by holding US financial instruments.
The official inflation measures were “reformed” during the Clinton era in order to dramatically understate inflation. The measures do this in two ways. One way is to discard from the weighted basket of goods that comprises the inflation index those goods whose price rises. In their place, inferior lower-priced goods are substituted.
For example, if the price of New York strip steak rises, round steak is substituted in its place. The former official inflation index measured the cost of a constant standard of living. The “reformed” index measures the cost of a falling standard of living.
The other way the “reformed” measure of inflation understates the cost of living is to discard price rises as “quality improvements.” It is true that quality improvements can result in higher prices. However, it is still a price rise for the consumer as the former product is no longer available. Moreover, not all price rises are quality improvements; yet many prices rises that are not can be misinterpreted as “quality improvements.”
These two “reforms” resulted in no reported inflation and a halt to cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients. The fall in Social Security real incomes also negatively impacted aggregate consumer demand.
The rigged understatement of inflation deceived people into believing that the US economy was in recovery. The lower the measure of inflation, the higher is real GDP when nominal GDP is deflated by the inflation measure. By understating inflation, the US government has overstated GDP growth.
What I have written is easily ascertained and proven; yet the financial press does not question the propaganda that sustains the psychology that the US economy is sound. This carefully cultivated psychology keeps the rest of the world invested in dollars, thus sustaining the House of Cards.
John Maynard Keynes understood that the Great Depression was the product of an insufficiency of consumer demand to take off the shelves the goods produced by industry. The post-WW II macroeconomic policy focused on maintaining the adequacy of aggregate demand in order to avoid high unemployment. The supply-side policy of President Reagan successfully corrected a defect in Keynesian macroeconomic policy and kept the US economy functioning without the “stagflation” from worsening “Philips Curve” trade-offs between inflation and employent. In the 21st century, jobs offshoring has depleted consumer demand’s ability to maintain US full employment.
The unemployment measure that the presstitute press reports is meaningless as it counts no discouraged workers, and discouraged workers are a huge part of American unemployment. The reported unemployment rate is about 5%, which is the U-3 measure that does not count as unemployed workers who are too discouraged to continue searching for jobs.
The US government has a second official unemployment measure, U-6, that counts workers discouraged for less than one-year. This official rate of unemployment is 10%.
When long term (more than one year) discouraged workers are included in the measure of unemployment, as once was done, the US unemployment rate is 23%. (See John Williams, shadowstats.com)
Fiscal and monetary stimulus can pull the unemployed back to work if jobs for them still exist domestically. But if the jobs have been sent offshore, monetary and fiscal policy cannot work.
What jobs offshoring does is to give away US GDP to the countries to which US corporations move the jobs. In other words, with the jobs go American careers, consumer purchasing power and the tax base of state, local, and federal governments. There are only a few American winners, and they are the shareholders of the companies that offshored the jobs and the executives of the companies who receive multi-million dollar “performance bonuses” for raising profits by lowering labor costs. And, of course, the economists, who get grants, speaking engagements, and corporate board memberships for shilling for the offshoring policy that worsens the distribution of income and wealth. An economy run for a few only benefits the few, and the few, no matter how large their incomes, cannot consume enough to keep the economy growing.
In the 21st century US economic policy has destroyed the ability of real aggregate demand in the US to increase. Economists will deny this, because they are shills for globalism and jobs offshoring. They misrepresent jobs offshoring as free trade and, as in their ideology free trade benefits everyone, claim that America is benefitting from jobs offshoring. Yet, they cannot show any evidence whatsoever of these alleged benefits. (See my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West.)
As an economist, it is a mystery to me how any economist can think that a population that does not produce the larger part of the goods that it consumes can afford to purchase the goods that it consumes. Where does the income come from to pay for imports when imports are swollen by the products of offshored production?
We were told that the income would come from better-paid replacement jobs provided by the “New Economy,” but neither the payroll jobs reports nor the US Labor Departments’s projections of future jobs show any sign of this mythical “New Economy.”
There is no “New Economy.” The “New Economy” is like the neoconservatives promise that the Iraq war would be a six-week “cake walk” paid for by Iraqi oil revenues, not a $3 trillion dollar expense to American taxpayers (according to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) and a war that has lasted the entirety of the 21st century to date, and is getting more dangerous.
The American “New Economy” is the American Third World economy in which the only jobs created are low productivity, low paid nontradable domestic service jobs incapable of producing export earnings with which to pay for the goods and services produced offshore for US consumption.
The massive debt arising from Washington’s endless wars for neoconservative hegemony now threaten Social Security and the entirety of the social safety net. The presstitute media are blaming not the policy that has devasted Americans, but, instead, the Americans who have been devasted by the policy.
Earlier this month I posted readers’ reports on the dismal job situation in Ohio, Southern Illinois, and Texas. In the March issue of Chronicles, Wayne Allensworth describes America’s declining rural towns and once great industrial cities as consequences of “globalizing capitalism.” A thin layer of very rich people rule over those “who have been left behind”—a shrinking middle class and a growing underclass. According to a poll last autumn, 53 percent of Americans say that they feel like a stranger in their own country.
Most certainly these Americans have no political representation. As Republicans and Democrats work to raise the retirement age in order to reduce Social Security outlays, Princeton University experts report that the mortality rates for the white working class are rising. The US government will not be happy until no one lives long enough to collect Social Security.
The United States government has abandoned everyone except the rich.
In the opening sentence of this article, I said that the two murderers of the American economy were jobs offshoring and financial deregulation. Deregulation greatly enhanced the ability of the large banks to financialize the economy. Financialization is the diversion of income streams into debt service. When debt service absorbs a large amount of the available income, the economy experiences debt deflation. The service of debt leaves too little income for purchases of goods and services and prices fall.
Michael Hudson, who I recently wrote about, is the expert on finanialization. His book, Killing the Host, which I recommended to you, tells the complete story. Briefly, financialization is the process by which creditors capitalize an economy’s economic surplus into interest payments to themselves. Perhaps an example would be a corporation that goes into debt in order to buy back its shares. The corporation achieves a temporary boost in its share prices at the cost of years of interest payments that drain the corporation of profits and deflate its share price.
Michael Hudson stresses the conversion of the rental value of real estate into mortgage payments. He emphasizes that classical economists wanted to base taxation not on production, but on economic rent. Economic rent is value due to location or to a monopoly position. For example, beachfront property has a higher price because of location. The difference in value between beachfront and nonbeachfront property is economic rent, not a produced value. An unregulated monopoly can charge a price for a service that is higher than the price that would bring that service unto the market.
The proposal to tax economic rent does not mean taxing you on the rent that you pay your landlord or taxing your landlord on the rent that you pay him such that he ceases to provide the housing. By economic rent Hudson means, for example, the rise in land values due to public infrastructure projects such as roads and subway systems. The rise in the value of land opened by a new road and in housing and commercial space along a new subway line is not due to any action of the property owners. This rise in value could be taxed in order to pay for the project instead of taxing the income of the population in general. Instead, the rise in land values raises appraisals and the amount that creditors are willing to lend on the property. New purchasers and existing owners can borrow more on the property, and the larger mortgages divert the increased land valuation into interest payments to creditors. Lenders end up as the major beneficiaries of public projects that raise real estate prices.
Similarly, unless the economy is financialized to such an extent that mortgage debt can no longer be serviced, when central banks lower interest rates property values rise, and this rise can be capitalized into a larger mortgage.
Another example would be property tax reductions and legislation such as California’s Proposition 13 that freeze in whole or part the property tax base. The rise in real estate values that escape taxation are capitalized into larger mortgages. New buyers do not benefit. The beneficiaries are the lenders who capture the rise in real estate prices in interest payments.
Taxing economic rent would prevent the financial system from capitalizing the rent into debt instruments that pay interest to the financial sector. Considering the amount of rents available to be taxed, taxing rents would free production from income and sales taxation, thus lowering consumer prices and freeing labor and productive capital from taxation.
With so much of land rent already capitalized into debt instruments shifting the tax burden to economic rent would be challenging. Nevertheless, Hudson’s analysis shows that financialization, not wage suppression, is the main instrument of exploitation and takes place via the financial system’s conversion of income streams into interest payments on debt.
I remember when mortgage service was restricted to one-quarter of household income. Today mortgage service can eat up half of household income. This extraordinary growth crowds out the production of goods and services as less of household income is available for other purchases.
Michael Hudson and I bring a total indictment of the neoliberal economics profession, “junk economists” as Hudson calls them.
20 Comments on "The US Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover"
makati1 on Sat, 20th Feb 2016 8:27 pm
“The US Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover”
The headline says it all. Now, bring on the denials, Americans.
theedrich on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 3:11 am
Fairly good summary by JCR. It also helps that he has reiterated the fact that the percent of workers discouraged for less than one-year is 10%, and that of the long-term (more than one year) discouraged workers is 23%. This certainly shows the miserable effects of the “economic rent” (or differential taxation and interest payments based on increased mortgages/debt from differences in environs).
But more important even than this is the pervasive lying and euphemization accompanying QE, ZIRP, exploitation of the dollar’s status as global reserve currency, and other snares. Hiding the truth has always been a major tool of governments, but it has now reached intolerable levels. It is now so sophisticated that discovering almost any nefarious thing the cosmic powers are doing requires teams of Ph.D.s and expertise far beyond the reach of the average TV-hypnotizee.
Ditto, of course, for the massive, stealthy importation of ThirdWorld parasites. All kinds of businesses and affluent types are able to bribe their congressmen to stop implementation of the immigration laws. Anyone who points out the enormous burdens (for crime, education, medical services, etc.) is conveniently demonized as “racist,” “mean-spirited,” etc. — and now even, for good measure, with the help of the Pope, “un-Christian.”
Meanwhile the national demographic and physical infrastructure is being corroded from within. Illegal (“hard-working”) Mexicans have now taught our lower classes how to spray-paint graffiti on every available, unguarded vertical surface. Latino narcotraffickers are physically destroying the White (not to mention the Negro) population with drugs at warp speed. The establishment politicians and their ministries of propaganda speak sedatively of “being civil” and promote nostalgic nostrums and necrophilia for a bygone unicorn America with their emetic blather about “coming together” and other cloying drivel.
All of this, and more, leads to one conclusion only: the United States is finished.
Apneaman on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 3:52 am
So it’s those dirty little brown people who are responsible for graffiti as well eh? Not something the great mighty whitey high brow civilizations of the past would ever partake in. Far too culturally advanced for that sort of low level nonsense.
Archaeologists in Greece Find Some of the World’s Oldest Erotic Graffiti
About 2,500 years ago, ancient Greeks were boasting of their sexual conquests in long-lasting graffiti
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/erotic-graffiti-found-greece-180951979/?no-ist
What can we learn from Roman graffiti?
Sifting through ancient Roman graffiti for a new book, Harry Mount found its prevailing themes – sex, wine, money, politics – movingly familiar.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10336768/What-can-we-learn-from-Roman-graffiti.html
Douchy the cheerypicking amature historian. You’re right about one thing – the US is finished, but illegal immigration was a drop in the bucket. You did not need any help. A loser is a loser is a loser and modern cultures get the governments and elites they deserve.
I’m so glad you dropped by douchy. The pain and anguish and suffering that you feature in your comments is like a schadrenfraud orgasam to me. Nothing drips my dopamine more than listening to the worst sorts of sub human monkey people (you) suffering every waking moment. God I hope you live the longest so you can suffer the most watching everyone of your worst fears pan out day after day after day -no stopping it. Wouldn’t Hillary getting elected be like an extra kick in the face to yous guys? Fuck I hope it happens and the PC party gets kicked up to a whole other notch just for you. I am amused.
bug on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 6:49 am
Ap, well said
joe on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 7:53 am
Good article, concerning too from a commentator at a time when US writers are usually at their most positive and hopeful. All I can say is things look bleak.
Hold on, wait, Big Business was to A.Ize 50% of white collar jobs in 10-15 years. Watch this space guys, you aint seen nothing yet!
Wonder how they will pay for 30-50% unemployment.
Now that really will be like ancient Rome.
ghung on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 10:07 am
I don’t know what the bulls are smoking: Stockman
” Anyone who believes that the global economy isn’t crashing must be delirious, according to David Stockman.
The former director of the Office of Management and Budget argues that a rapidly deteriorating economic environment is going to send stocks and oil prices spiraling even lower than they already have.
“I think your traders are smoking something stronger than what I can legally buy here in Colorado,” Stockman said Thursday on CNBC’s “Futures Now.”
The S&P 500 has fallen 6 percent year to date, and crude oil has plunged more than 17 percent. However, Stockman still sees a long way to go. He expects the S&P 500 to drop to 1,300 before making any new highs, and sees oil falling below $20…..
…. “Everywhere trade is drying up, shipping rates are at all-time lows,” he said. “There is a recession that’s going to engulf the entire world economy, including the United States.”….
Contributing to the turmoil is the ineptitude of central banks, he said. While Stockman doesn’t expect the Federal Reserve to adopt a negative interest rate policy, he said monetary policymakers have exhausted all other options.
“They should have the good graces to resign. They are lost. None of this is helping the economy,” he said….
marmico on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 10:41 am
Despite promises of a “New Economy” and better jobs, the replacement jobs have been increasingly part-time, lowly-paid jobs in domestic services, such as retail clerks, waitresses and bartenders.
What a crock of shit that the doom porn tribe cooks.
Compare leisure and hospitality, a low paying employment sector and professional and business services, a high paying sector along 2 dimensions- employment growth and hourly wage growth indexed to the December 2007 business cycle peak.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=3wOv
Not much difference from an employment or hourly wage perspective for the two sectors which combined represent ~30% of the private sector labor force.
Northwest Resident on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 10:48 am
“I don’t know what the bulls are smoking: Stockman”
Probably the same thing marmico is smoking — or mainlining. Whatever it is, it has GOT to be some powerful, mind altering, hallucination producing shit.
onlooker on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 11:22 am
Yeah NR, it is called wishful thinking.
Northwest Resident on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 11:38 am
onlooker — That must be it. Wishful thinking — mix it into your tea or smoke it in your bong, either way just sit back and enjoy the temporary euphoric feeling of “all is well”. Better yet, tune in to your favorite MSM news channel and fantasy trip to the bleach blond babes babbling about how great the stock market is performing. Pure ecstasy!
But now, back to the real world:
Panic Below The Surface: “Banks Are Selling Energy Loans At Cents On The Dollar To Ensure Their Own Survival
Reality is going to bite for the wishful thinking crowd — which seems to be just about everybody.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-21/panic-below-surface-banks-are-selling-energy-loans-cents-dollar-ensure-their-own-sur
shortonoil on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 12:20 pm
“The US Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover”
The headline says it all. Now, bring on the denials, Americans.”
“The World Economy Has Not Recovered And Will Not Recover”
Now bring on the denials inhabitants of Plant Earth.
We are all going down the tubes on this one!
george on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 2:59 pm
Soylent green is people.
Davy on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 6:22 pm
“China’s Yuan Bears Predict More Trouble Ahead”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-21/yuan-bears-who-beat-hedge-funds-to-the-trade-see-pain-spreading
“Asianomics Group Ltd.’s Jim Walker, who predicted the yuan’s four-year advance would end a month before the currency peaked in January 2014, is forecasting a U.S. recession and says 10-year Treasury yields will plunge to all-time lows.
”There’s a storm of troubles coming,” Pal, a former hedge-fund manager at GLG Partners whose clients now include pension plans and sovereign wealth funds, said in a phone interview from the Cayman Islands. ”The risk of a very bad outcome in 2016 and 2017 remains the highest probability.”
“He predicts gold will surge more than 60 percent to $2,000 an ounce this year as investors flock to haven assets.”
makati1 on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 7:29 pm
Short, true, but the Us has a lot farther to fall than the rest of the world. And at least 50% of the world’s population will not even notice the change. When you have never had anything, nothing is just another day. Who cares what electric costs if you have never had it? Ditto, gasoline or oil or a phone or…
Apneaman on Sun, 21st Feb 2016 8:17 pm
mak, I don’t where you get that 50% number from, but it sounds kinda high to me. I truly do not know any numbers of the amount of people who do not rely on any material inputs from industrial civ or so little that it would not be noticeable. One thing I am sure of is that the poorest of the world are already getting hit by the consequences of AGW, ocean acidification and all around environmental destruction. Traditional farming, animal husbandry and nomadic living relies on a stable climate and environment even more than modern methods, so I fail to see how traditional peoples will fare better as things deteriorate since they are already doing worse than rich fat fucks whose version of poverty does not include not eating. Not yet. Agriculture happened when it did because of a transition to a more favorable climate. Surely it was also a response to population increases and the hunting extinction of the megafauna, but it still could not take place like it did during an ice age. If the only issue was peak oil then maybe I could see them doing better, but it’s kinda hard to grow crops traditionally or any way when the reliable glacier and snow pack meltwater is disappearing at a pace none of the ultra conservative (wishful thinking?) climate models predicted. Just as bad is the salt water intrusion into the delta farm land where many traditional farmers still live. That is/was some of the most productive farmland in history and most of it will be completely under the sea in 20 – 30 years. In addition there are the ever increasing drought and deluge cycles that will only become harsher. Sadly, the people who contributed the least to the cancer will be the first to go. Maybe we will have a couple pop festivals and telethons to feed the starving third worlders, but soon most of the privileged peoples of the world, including so called liberals and progressives, will join with the Trumpeters and be screaming to build walls. Bangladesh is on the front line of saltwater intrusion into their crop lands and their neighbour, India’s response has been wall building. The rest, the west will soon follow.
Dhaka: Climate refugees and a collapsing city
With multiplying impacts of climate change – increasing floods, cyclones, and drought – thousands of climate refugees are migrating to Dhaka. And the city, well beyond its carrying capacity, is bursting at the seams.
“To delve beneath the apparent reasons – overpopulation, waterlogging and congestion – is to reveal a major underlying cause: unsustainable levels of climate-induced displacement and migration.
And the problems are washing up along Bangladesh’s 700 kilometers of low-lying coast. Rising sea levels and cyclones heighten the risk of flooding, while riverbank erosion and seawater intrusion are set to have a devastating impact on the nation’s population.”
http://www.dw.com/en/dhaka-climate-refugees-and-a-collapsing-city/a-18861592
Hundreds of Bangladeshis getting killed at border with India
Driven from their homes by poverty and climate change, Bangladeshis are heading to India, but are being blocked by a 3,000-km fence.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/04/01/hundreds_of_bangladeshis_getting_killed_at_border_with_india.html
Davy on Mon, 22nd Feb 2016 6:47 am
One nation having it better or worse than another is shallow thinking. It is even difficult to classify by wealth class. This is going to be about millions of local in relation to their risk factors of climate, population levels, and global logistics adapting to decay.
The rich when they fall will fall the hardest. Rich lifestyles are not sustainable and resilient and have the furthest to fall but that must be qualified by other factors. Often the rich are better placed in the feed trough because of location and needs of the whole. It is easy to acclimate to having more. Acclimating to hard labor and deprivation is not going to be easy for those rich who have never know deprivation.
The existing poor are near the breaking point already. They are already stressed. We no longer have subsistence farming that is not exposed to global civilization decay and or collapse. Most all subsistence farming has a global attachment exposer. Those attachment are with impute needs and marketing of what little they grow. Local based industry is nearly gone. Even the poor buy flip-flops made in Asia. The worst exposure is the nearness to large unsupportable populations that could collapse and spread that collapse to the surrounding countryside.
The important exposure for all to consider is going to be the location to risks of geographic sustainability. Climate and support logistics need to be put in context of the nearness to overpopulation. Climate exposure is in regards to climate change and climate exposure from economic decay. Many locals are positioned in harsh environments and only supportable by a complexed global system. Many of these areas will get a double dose of danger from a failing global system and climate instability.
We can say anywhere with a large population densities are in danger. Population densities must then be characterized by sustainability per consumption demands. A 1MIL population city that is highly dependent on consumption levels may be more exposed than 3MIL with lower consumption needs. You can go further with sociopolitical stability with population makeup.
We then must consider the global pecking order. As globalism decays it will be those critical nodes that maintain access to vital resources and networks that avoid the worst in the beginning. Those that are not critical to the survival to the whole will be discarded and let to fail by the necessity of triage. Eventually globalism will have fallen to a point where we will break to regional and local arrangements. If man survives the initial crash and the dust settles we will have systematically broke to a new stable position of activity post global and likely mostly postindustrial. This new place is likely to be only transitory because we have so far to go until we are truly sustainable to our surroundings. There will likely still be global connections after the initial breakdown of globalism but they will not be vital as many are today.
Trying to claim one nation or continent is better than another is jingoism. All nations and local are at risk for an unknown set of factors that are going to combine and lead to decay and dysfunctions of all locals. The manner of decay influenced by the degree and duration of descent is unknown. The time frame is unknowable except that the timer is counting down. Certainly luck will play a part for certain locals worse than others. We know the variables of risk and we know the direction we are heading. If you are at risk you still may have time to adjust. It takes a decade to relocate and reskill. We may have a decade but just barely.
Davy on Mon, 22nd Feb 2016 6:58 am
“India caste unrest: ‘Ten million without water’ in Delhi”
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35627819
“More than 10 million people in India’s capital are without water despite the army regaining control of its key water source after protests, officials say. Keshav Chandra, head of Delhi’s water board, told the BBC it would take “three to four days” before normal supplies resumed to affected areas.”
Davy on Mon, 22nd Feb 2016 7:02 am
“Beijing raises ‘red alert’ pollution threshold in new attempt to combat smog”
https://www.rt.com/news/333221-china-pollution-alert-threshold/
“Starting this March, the country will employ a uniform average measurement for both the capital and its surrounding areas. A red alert will also be imposed if the average air quality is at 200 for four days straight, 300 for at least two days, or 500 for a single day.”
JuanP on Mon, 22nd Feb 2016 7:35 am
Paul Craig Roberts seems to be one of the very last smart, decent, and honest Ameicans left in this world. I wish I could disagree with him, but I can’t.
We must do everything within our power to destroy these parasites in a non violent way before they kill us and completely destroy the economy. We must earn less and spend less, volunteer and work pro bono, barter, avoid paying taxes to the US government, default on our loans, file for bankruptcy, make our purchases during sales tax holidays, produce a surplus and give it away to people in need, and stop producing biological offspring to keep feeding the machine.
In today’s world, you are with us or against us, there is no neutral position. If you are not doing everything within your power to destroy the system in a non violent wayand doing these things everyday then you are part of the problem, not the solution, and the world would be better off without you and yours.
Sterilize yourself and sterilize your children while you still can. If you don’t sterilize yourself you lose the right to bitch about this shit when your children and their children starve to death. Carpe diem, get a vasectomy today!
joe on Mon, 22nd Feb 2016 8:43 am
Politics is changing. The fact that half of senior government officials can oppose a sitting Prime Minister in a Brexit vote shows just how little Cameron achieved in his efforts to get political aid from Europe. Last weekend he got 25 countried with different agendas to agree to anything is because no serious reform was agreed and no votes need to the held in the other states.
Canada pulls out of active war against ISIS even though its a NATO operation, reset relations with Cuba and Iran. Its obvious Americas position is weaker, its just Trumpists and Clintonites that cant see it. Turkey would never have dared support isis if the US was to be feared and Russia would never have dared support Assad the way it has if the US was strong. Now countries all over the world want nukes, because America got beat in a serious global policing operation one too many time. Heck, the Taliban still goes strong despite being the nest in which 9-11 was first hached. Islamic extremism has gone from thousands of jihadis to hundreds of thousands. Its only Americas military and current politicans that think America is strong.
Rubio wants to be a child of Regan. Sadly theres no working class left to gut Rubio, Reganomics has done its work. Go ask China to send the jobs back so that working class white men can cry about black ladies in cadilacs. Oh guess what two things dont exist Rubio working class whites and good cadilacs, most people want cars made in South Korea or Japan or Germany. White men are either in bad paying service industry roles whether blue or white collar, or they dont work, just like Regans mythical black women. At least Trump wont pretend, he will show Americas weakness by becoming very violent. I always say, jihadis always vote Republican.