If you think for a moment the present crisis is just another business cycle, a phase we must go through, think again.
• 533,000 jobs lost in the month of November alone while the figures for December are no less promising
• The recent string of bank failures and the resulting credit crunch
• Industrial giants like Ford and General Motors on the verge of bankruptcies and government’s frantic attempts at rescue
• Unprecedented daily swings in the Dow Jones and other market indicators
• The plummeting of oil futures and the corresponding drop of prices at the pump
• Reports of labor unrest in conjunction with business closures (such as of Republic Windows and Doors in North Side Chicago)
• The folding of such icons of the publishing world as the Chicago Tribune
• The rise of modern-day piracy
This bullet list is nowhere near complete; and I’m certain you could modify it at will, as almost daily we’re being treated to tidbits of news and information that only yesterday would have made our heads spin. One thing, however, is beyond dispute: the situation we’re facing defies all comparisons. Even the Great Depression of 1929 was, relatively speaking, a local phenomenon. The present crisis is global in every conceivable dimension because of worldwide trade-agreements, the interconnectedness of the markets, and geopolitics. To my thinking, it signifies nothing less than a general loss of confidence in the West and its bankrupt economic policies. For better or worse, raw capitalism, rampant and unchecked, has hijacked the institutions of liberal democracy; and the entire world is falling apart at the seams.
I’ve long since stopped listening to conservative talk-show hosts for a variety of reasons, but occasionally a sound byte can’t escape me. Glenn Beck had it right the other day when he said:
"Unlike the contestant in More-On Trivia that couldn't find the downside of printing money, there is always a price to be paid. The dot-com bubble burst. We cured it with a housing bubble. It burst. We're curing that with a money bubble. It's the last bubble. When this one bursts, there ain't anything left because our money will be worthless. Indeed, once the “money bubble” is burst, there’ll be no place to hide!"
In her Solari blog, Catherine Austin Fitts writes: "People often ask whether I am concerned about inflation, deflation, peak oil, or a global financial meltdown . . . . [But] the risk scenario I weight most heavily is not listed above. I call it the “Slow Burn.” She then goes on to explain what she means by “Slow Burn”:
"The “slow burn” is a political culture and economy managed through principles of economic warfare in which insiders systematically protect themselves and centralize control and ownership of resources by using:
Article comments
1 - bliffle
Good article.
Fraud is the new industrialism.
However, in the course of creating the new Financial-Industrial empire in order to fleece naive citizens, The Masters Of The Universe have trained some peons in the intricacies of fraud, and then found it necessary to layoff those same trained peons. frustrated in their attempts to find semi-legitimate employment, some of these peons have turned to what they know best: fraud.
These peons threaten to turn fraud into a cottage industry by their free-lancing. For example, my foster daughter was recently defrauded of her entire paycheck when she deposited it in her bank. Strange. How could that happen? Well, this is how: she recently had received a missive that claimed she had won a lottery (a lottery she knew nothing about) for $5000, and a check was enclosed. She had deposited the check, preferring to believe in a windfall rather than suspecting a fraud. Subsequently, the check bounced, as a counterfeit or NSF. But the fraudsters took advantage of frailties in the banking system that allowed them to reach into her account and transfer her legit money to a covert account. She protested to the bank, which simply stonewalled her, discontinued her account and told her to get lost. So did the next bank she went to, to open a new account.
This fraud demonstrates pretty sophisticated knowledge of the banking system and the account reconciliation system in Banking. It has poor security and depends on complexity and that knowledge is sparse. But the banking system is certainly frail and subject to all kinds of fraud.
So, many potential fraudsters are set loose in society as the Fraud-Industrial system finds it necessary to devour their own peons to fully realize their destiny.
Will we soon be threatened by a Fraud Bubble?
2 - Roger Nowosielski
Thanks for incisive comments. Look forward to yet another article in the series, "Mr. Obama's Stimulus Plan," soon to appear on my own website and, hopefully, this one as well, concerning the likelihood that we're facing yet another scheme - and "bubble" - in the making. These people never give up!
3 - Cindy D
Roger,
Thanks for this excellent article. I also went to your blog, where I found a number of other interesting articles.
This regards the one on prisons. It was interesting to have the history on the first private corporate prison. I was wondering if you came across this Pew study yet? Some selected quotes from the Pew article:
Washington, DC - 02/28/2008 - For the first time in history more than one in every 100 adults in America are in jail or prison...
...many inmates are low-level offenders or people who have violated the terms of their probation or parole.
...the most recent U.S. Department of Justice data (2006) found that while one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, the figure is one in nine for black males in that age group.
...one in every 53 adults in their 20s is behind bars...
...prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime, or a corresponding surge in the nation’s population at large. Instead, more people are behind bars principally because of a wave of policy choices...
In November, a number of news articles (WSJ, for example) reported that increases in jailing of illegal immigrants is a large boon to the prison profit.
Sorry, I did not address the article above you wrote. Later I will have more time to do that.
Cindy
4 - Roger Nowosielski
Thank you for your comments, Cindy. No, I wasn't aware of the Pew study you mention, but I'm glad you pointed it out. All my info concerning "the prison industry" had come from Catherine Austin Fitts' website - and I will make it a point to forward it to them.
By the way, you might want to check that site yourself for lots of eye-opening insights. Ms Fitts was once a bona fide member of the Wall Street elite until she'd slowly come to realize the extent to which fraud and corruption have become embedded in everyday practices and ways of "doing business," merging Wall Street & Washington into one as it were. The "prison industry" was just one of Ms Fitts' examples.
I look forward to more of your comments. Thanks to online magazines like Blogcritics, there's a viable forum for exchanging ideas and perhaps coming together on some of the important issues and ailments which of late are besetting our society. We may make a difference yet! (See, for example, "The Future of Blogging" in the "Sci/Tech" section.)
Roger
5 - Ruvy
This was a very interesting article, Roger. I guess one has to be optimistic; you sound much like a popular writer of the 1920's, Frederick Lewis Allen, in some of your writing conclusion.
About 35 years ago, a man, Paul Erdman, wrote a series of books predicting such a financial meltdown. The one that comes to mind is "The Crash of 1979".
But today, in the meltdowns we see, there are no sexy girls in Swiss chalets to be had. We just appear to be headed for very hard times, and a reintroduction for all of us to the children of Aphrodite, the goddess of sex - Panic and Terror.
Terror is almost an old friend already. His brother, Panic, is not.
6 - Dr Dreadful
I remember Erdman. He was lucky he was writing fiction. He seemed to come up with a new novel on the same subject every couple of years after whatever financial disaster he'd predicted in his previous one failed to materialize.
7 - Roger Nowosielski
Thanks for interesting comments, guys - I mean Ruvy and Dr Dreadful. I'm certainly gonna look these fellows (i.e., Erdman & Allen)up.
Apropos fiction, I'm toying with the idea of writing an Ayn Rand type of novel (I've written two already, yet to be published)- with a modern-day John Galt type of hero (& disciples of course)and the Internet (or some other clandestine network) as the only means of communication and rebuilding the society from scratch as it were. She was a true visionary, it turns out, to have addressed some of her concerns as far as sixty years ago. The kind of scenario(s) she envisages is/are much more probable today. (See, for example, "Setting Matters Straight," parts I & II, on my own weblog.)
I don't, by the way, look forward to "the meltdown," but I think it's an unavoidable consequence of a system that's on a verge of breakdown. And when that happens, I'm afraid the truth will be stranger than fiction.
PS: I mean "guys" in the generic sense. One can never be certain of gender identity on the Internet. Not that it matters!
8 - Ruvy
Roger,
PS: I mean "guys" in the generic sense. One can never be certain of gender identity on the Internet.
My wife gives me permission to tell you that I'm the man of the house.
Erdman's writing seems turgid considering the out-dateness of his work. It was a lot more exciting in the mid-'70's.
Frederick Lewis Allen (I had the name wrong the first time) wrote "Only Yesterday: a Popular History of the 1920's", and was a writer for Atlantic Magazine.
Some of your prose and his looked remarkably similar, particularly at the conclusion of your article. From Allen's final chapter:
You can read (or perhaps download) the book from the link I provided.
As a writer looking at this particular juncture of history, I strongly suggest to you the book "A Century of War", by George Engdahl. Sheikh Zaki Yamani, the Energy Minister for "Saudi" Arabia in 1973, wrote that Engdahl's analysis most closely came to the actual truth of the events occurring that led to the tripling of oil prices in 1973. That is high praise.
In reading the book myself, I sensed that Engdahl had caught the true pulse of events as they reflected themselves in my own life from the 1960's till now.
Looking at your last name, I suspect you celebrate Christmas rather than Hanukkah, so I wish you a merry Christmas from the cold hills of Samaria in Israel, along the Patriarch's Road (the Nazareth Trail) in the mountains north of Jerusalem.
9 - Roger Nowosielski
Thanks Ruvvy for your detailed response. I'll definitely look these guys up.
For your information, I am part Jewish, although having been raised in Poland, I'm rather foreign to Jewish ways and culture. Have graduated from high school in Netanya, as a matter of fact, and still have relations in Tel Aviv. As far as I am concerned, all roads lead to Rome, so I am not hung up on religious differences. We have far more important issues on the burner - like the future of humanity, culture and way of life.
So Happy Holidays to you and yours.
RN
PS: You might want to look at my own website for a couple of excerpts from my two novels. I'd be interested to hear what you think.
10 - bliffle
Fraud? I think we will shortly see a boom in the fraud industry as laid-off workers seek remunerative freelance income.
Last time we went thru massive layoffs everyone I knew went into the real estate business, and look what happened. Lots of churning, some fortunes made, then lost.
It's the American Way.
I can just see infomercials in the wee hours: "Carlton Sheets shows how you can profit in the booming fraud industry with No Money Down!"
There'll be a fraud boom, new fraudsters will be defrauding each other. They'll be flipping fraud schemes.
Then a fraud bubble will make everyone broke again.
11 - Sabine K McNeill
Dear Roger and commentators,
Having surfed across your blog, I thought that this might be a 'safe haven' for expressing what I think is next: the World Bank acting as global Central Bank with a www dot single global currency dot org - at 2% inflation. That's Cassandra speaking, but you can to to the website yourself.
After I put a link to it on my blog, I got an email from somebody related to them who wanted to do 'business' with me, i.e. pay me $12 per link which would last for ever and allow the other end change what my link refers to any time...
So I thought I better refrain from giving them attention. But maybe there is a difference between 'internet exposure' and e-attention.
I've been on Ms Fitts' list for a while, too. I know more about the system than I ever wanted to know. And I strongly believe and feel that the 'crisis' is designed, planned and steered. What baffles me is that it is possible. Who pulls which institutional strings?
But I guess I don't really want to know. I feel I'm courageous enough talking to the 'enemy' in the UK, the only hope I have, for I live 6 tube stops away from the 'political entertainment' in Westminster.
Keep writing, everybody, and thanks for reading!
Sabine
12 - Jet
comentators?
13 - Jet
If a commentator had a child, would it be a commentator tot?