Who Destroyed the Middle Class? An Amoral Financial Oligarchy

BURNING PLATFORM | JUNE 20, 2012

“Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.” – Charles Ferguson – Predator Nation

The Federal Reserve released its Survey of Consumer Finances last week. It’s a fact filled 80 page report they issue every three years to provide a financial snapshot of American households. As you can see from the chart above, the impact of the worldwide financial collapse has been catastrophic to most of the households in the U.S. A 39% decline in median net worth over a three year time frame is almost incomprehensible. Even worse, the decline has surely continued for the average American household through 2012 as home prices have continued to fall. Median family income plunged by 7.7% over a three year time frame and has not recovered since the collection of this data 18 months ago. Even more shocking is the fact that median household income was $48,900 in 2001. Families are making 6.3% less today than they were a decade ago. These figures are adjusted for inflation using the BLS massaged CPI figures. Anyone not under the influence of psychotic drugs or engaged as a paid shill for the financial oligarchy knows that inflation is purposely under reported in order to keep the masses sedated and pacified. The real decline in median household income is in excess of 20% since 2001.

The destruction of the blue collar jobs has been underway since the early 1970s. And the relentless decline in real blue collar wages has followed a bumpy downward path for decades. Sadly, the average person doesn’t understand the insidious destruction caused to their lives by the Federal Reserve generated inflation, as they actually believe their wages today are higher than they were in 1973. The reality is the oligarchy has used foreign wage differentials and the perceived benefits of globalization to ship manufacturing and now service jobs to Asia while using their captured mainstream media to convince the average American that this has been beneficial to their lives. Using one of their 15 credit cards to buy cheap foreign goods made by people who took their jobs was never so easy. I wonder if the benefits of being able to buy cheap Chinese electronics, toxic dog food, and slave labor produced igadgets outweighed the $2.3 trillion increase in consumer debt, 27% decline in real wages, 7 million manufacturing jobs lost since the mid-1970s, 46 million people on food stamps, $15 trillion increase in the National Debt since 1978, and a gutted decaying industrial base.

Not only have the oligarchs gutted our industrial base, resulting in enormous job losses among middle aged industrial workers, but they are now in the process of impoverishing the youth of this country by sucking them into crushing college debt with the false promise of decent paying jobs when they graduate with a degree in feminist studies from the University of Phoenix. The fabricated mantra that a college education guarantees a good paying job and a better future is not borne out by the facts. There are over 4,800 institutions of higher learning in this country, with only about 50 considered elite. There are another few hundred top notch institutions, with a few thousand mediocre schools and hundreds of for profit on-line diploma mills exploiting the easy Federal government debt to lure millions into their profit scheme of bilking unemployed naïve middle aged dupes and eventually the American taxpayer. The average student loan debt per student is $29,000. Student loan debt outstanding has risen from $200 billion in 2000 to over $1 trillion today. The Federal Government is blowing another bubble. They are the issuer, regulator and guarantor of these loans. They are making the loans with teaser rates to the ultimate in subprime borrowers – students without jobs going for worthless degrees at mediocre schools. The taxpayer is on the hook for the billions in loses that will surely follow. The payoff for this quadrupling of debt has been an 8% real decline in wages for college graduates since 2000. The monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and bipartisan fiscal policies of our government have led to this dreadful job market for the middle class.

The mainstream media dutifully reported a few key highlights from the Federal Reserve report and moved onto more important issues like Snooki’s pregnancy and the octomom’s new porno gig. We certainly couldn’t expect business journalists at Bloomberg, CNBC, NYT, or CNN to actually analyze the data, produce an intelligent dialogue of the causes, and reach a conclusion that the affluent and influential on Wall Street and in Washington DC caused the average family in this country to endure tremendous hardship while the oligarchy plundered and pillaged the countryside, stuffing their pockets with ill-gotten gains. Each of the ideological camps within the oligarchy trot out the usual suspects to blame the other ideological camp, while doing nothing to change the existing paradigm. Krugman and Carville are assigned the task of blaming Republican policies and dogma for the demise of the middle class. Obama and his minions already had their press release prepared, blaming George Bush and claiming the median family has made tremendous strides since he assumed command in2009. Mitt Romney (worth $250 million), whose pocket change exceeds the annual median household income of $45,800, feels the pain of the average American family and proposes a tax decrease for billionaires and less overbearing regulation on the honorable Wall Street banks in order to help the average family. It’s nothing but Kabuki Theater as the characters play their assigned parts in this elaborate display. Gary Wills cuts right to the chase:

“Yet while the rest of the populace was suffering, the rich just got richer. In 2009 and 2010, years in which millions were unable to find work, the top one percent reaped 93% of the ‘recovery’ income, and corporations are making more than they ever did. And the Republicans can still propose even further cuts in the taxes of ‘job creators’ whose only job creation has been for their own lawyers and lobbyists.”

What you will not receive from the corporate mouthpieces in the mainstream media is an explanation of where the money went, who stole it and why it happened. The theme from the media is the loss in net worth and decade long decline in household income was unavoidable and due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. This is a false storyline perpetrated by those who have stolen your money. It’s been a bipartisan screw job and it was initiated by Clinton, Rubin, Gramm and Leach, who deregulated the banking system in 1999 by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, but made it clear the Greenspan Put would always be in place to protect the banks from their own recklessness, greed and hubris. As a result, Wall Street could go ahead and take irresponsible financial system destroying risks in pursuit of vast riches, knowing they could count on the unlimited checkbook of Uncle Sam if things went south, and that’s exactly what happened. Heads they won, tails you lost. It’s good to own the politicians, regulators, and media.

Dude, Where’s My Net Worth?

“Sometime around the year 2010, Xers will hit a hangover mood like that of the Lost in the early 1930s and the Liberty in the late 1760s: a feeling of personal exhaustion mixed with a new public seriousness. The members of this forty- and fiftyish generation will fan out across an unusually wide distribution of personal outcomes, reminiscent of a night at the bingo table. A few will be wildly successful, others totally ruined, and the largest number will have lost a little ground since the days of Boomer midlife.” – Strauss & Howe – Generations – 1991

Neil Howe and Bill Strauss wrote their first generational theory book six years prior to their epic Fourth Turning prophecy. It appears they nailed it. Generation X households saw their net worth crushed, with a 54% loss in three years. The Baby Boomer households also took a beating in this banker engineered financial collapse. The Silent generation has survived this downturn relatively unscathed. Most of the Silents traded down from their primary residence at or near the top of the housing boom. As Neil Howe points out:

“Most sold or annuitized their financial assets at a much better moment in the history of the Dow. Even if they didn’t, they are more likely than Boomers or Xers to be getting retirement checks from defined-benefit corporate or government plans that are unaffected by the market.”

The Millenials and late Xers did not lose much because they didn’t have much to lose. Most did not own a house or stocks. As the economy continues to deteriorate the generational tension builds. The Silents and Boomers, who vote in large numbers, have not and will not vote for anyone who attempts to reform our entitlement system and make it economically viable over the long-term for young people just entering the job market.

The false storyline about the 2007 through 2010 being an aberration in the long term path to prosperity for the average American family is refuted by the following chart.

This chart paints a long-term picture of generational inequality that has been going on over the last three decades. Over three decades the Silent generation has seen their median real net worth increase by 133%, while GenX has seen their median real net worth decrease by 55% compared to the same age cohort in 1983. Only those 55 and over have seen a real improvement in their net worth over the last 27 years. Considering this period encompassed a seventeen year bull market and the GDP grew from $3.5 trillion to $15.7 trillion, a 450% increase, a few bucks should have trickled down to the average household. Even on an inflation adjusted basis, GDP has risen 125% since 1983. Evidently the economic policies supported by both parties across decades have not floated all boats – just the yachts. Age is only part of the equation. Class is the other piece. There is a class war being waged and the Buffett, Dimon, Blankfein, Romney, Clinton, Koch and the rest of the ultra-wealthy oligarchs are winning. We are now in the midst of a Fourth Turning and the corrupt, dysfunctional, amoral social order will be swept away before the climax of this Crisis.

“Through the Third Turning and into the initial stages of the Fourth, the Silent will prosper, Boomers will cope with declining expectations, and Gen-Xers will get hammered. Throughout history, we have argued, inequality both by class and by age reaches its apogee entering the Crisis era. Indeed, part of the historical purpose of the Crisis is to tear down dysfunctional institutions, vacate positions of entitlement and privilege, rectify the inequality, and create a tabula rasa on which the rising generation can build something new.” – Neil Howe

The reason for the epic collapse of middle class net worth is quite simple when viewed from a 10,000 foot elevation. The great descent in net worth was primarily due to the bursting of the Federal Reserve created real estate bubble. The Case Shiller Home Price Index plunged 28% between 2007 and 2010. The wealth destruction was concentrated among the working middle class because their homes accounted for the vast majority of their household net worth. For the wealthy, housing is a fraction of their vast net worth, while for the lowly poor; homeownership is now only a dream. Of course, between 2000 and 2007 anyone that could fog a mirror was encouraged by George Bush, Barney Frank, the National Association of Realtors, Alan Greenspan, and Wall Street shills to “own” a home. With home prices having fallen an additional 7% since 2010, the middle class has seen a further decline in their net worth. Meanwhile, Ben Bernanke’s ZIRP, QE1, QE2, Operation Twist, and the upcoming “Operation Screw the Middle Class Again” have succeeded in expanding the net worth of millionaires, billionaires and the bonuses of Wall Street bankers, while destroying the fragile finances of little old ladies and middle class risk adverse savers.

Once you dig into the details beneath the thin veneer of Bernaysian obfuscation, you realize the corporate mainstream media storyline of middle class decline has a veiled storyline of a powerful, connected 1%, enriched at the expense of the middle class.

In Part 2 of this three part series I will examine who stole your net worth and in Part 3 why they stole your net worth. Part 4 will require pitchforks, torches and a guillotine.

Greece must default, dump euro

by Peter Morici
UPI
September 13, 2011

European efforts at economic integration haven’t delivered sustainable prosperity in poorer nations like Greece and Portugal. Instead, these have left Mediterranean governments teetering on bankruptcy and at the mercy of Germany and other rich states that exploit European unity to live well at the expense of their poorer brethren.

The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which considerably harmonized product and safety regulations and methods of taxation across Europe, was supposed to remove untold barriers to growth. It didn’t, because it didn’t moderate European labor laws and social programs that discourage individual ambition and investment.

The euro, created in 1999, floats against the dollar and yen and its value reflects an average of the competitiveness of its entire membership. This leaves higher productivity economies like Germany with an undervalued currency and trade surpluses and lower productivity economies like Greece with an overvalued currency and in constant need to borrow from foreign investors.

With Maastricht and the euro, German manufactures and technology became more valuable in a more integrated European market. However, Greece, Portugal and others aren’t able to use their lower labor costs to capture assembly plants to the degree, for example, that the U.S. South attracts automotive and high-end electronics manufacturing.

Moreover, Germany and other rich states continue subtle forms of protection that discourage outsourcing even to other EU member states and this frustrates the EU single market promise to more effectively equalize employment opportunities and prosperity between the prosperous core and southern Europe.

Affluent Germany, unburdened by an obligation to share tax revenues with poorer EU states, provides generous pensions, gold-plated employment security and jobless benefits and the shortest workweek on the planet. Meanwhile, governments in Greece and other poorer EU states struggled to keep up and borrowed extensively from banks in Germany and France and other rich countries to keep up.

Now unable borrow anymore in private markets, Greece and other poorer governments are forced to seek emergency loans and concessions from richer states and private creditors. They are being compelled by Germany and others to slash government spending and social benefits, dramatically raise taxes and sell off public assets.

None of this will work, because the private sectors of these economies are so dependent on government spending to maintain employment that austerity will only cause more layoffs among both private businesses and public agencies, thrust their economies into deep recessions and significantly reduce, rather than enhance, their governments’ capacity to tax and pay interest on their debts.

Moreover, to service their restructured debts, poorer governments must pay richer governments and foreign creditors in euros and this will require their economies to accomplish significant trade surpluses by developing new export industries. This would require Germany and the rich countries to let manufacturing activities and jobs migrate south that they heretofore have blocked from moving to lower-wage economies.

With a single currency, building new export industries would require rather substantial cuts in Greek and other poorer country wages and for the Germans and others to relinquish subtle forms of protection that guarantee them higher wages and favorable trade balances.

It is doubtful Greeks are willing to let their economy sink to Third World status to perpetuate the myth of European unity. As important, the Germans too much like lecturing the world about the virtues of Teutonic thrift and efficiency to let go of mercantilism, and to let debtor nations accomplish trade surpluses and obtain the euro needed to repay their debts.

If Greece had its own currency, it would still have had to reduce government spending, increase taxes and cut wages but not by nearly as much as richer EU states and the ECB now demand because Greece could also devalue its currency against those of richer EU economies to make its exports more competitive, accelerate growth and increase debt servicing capacity.

In the end, necessity will trump pan-Europeanism. The Greeks will default on their debt and, if they are smart, eventually dump the euro.

Peter Morici is a professor at the Smith School of Business, University of Maryland School, and former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission.

Sustainable Development: Genocide turned into a Necessity

By LUIS MIRANDA | THE REAL AGENDA | APRIL 30, 2011

Often times, we hear sustainable development and sustainability were originated in the early 70′s and strengthened through the 80′s and 90′s. During any given research effort, most publications allege that the concern to maintain natural resources as tools for current and future generations was born in 1972, when a United Nations Conference in Sweden brought forward three principles: the interdependence of human beings and the natural environment, the links between economic development, social development, and environmental protection and the need for a global vision and common principles. Credit for developing those principles is given to the World Commission on Environment and Development of 1987.

The United Nations is the main enactor of Eugenics, a policy initiated by the founders of the Nazi movement.

Common wisdom portrays the collectivist view that sustainability and sustainable development with policies and initiatives to protect the environment from humanity’s abuses and with this to promote the benefit of the masses. Nowadays, the protection of the environment has become the most luminous spear carried by anyone and everyone, independent of race, social status, age or religion. In fact, environmentalism has become in itself the religion of choice for many. The environmentalist support for sustainability is almost inherently rooted in our lives; more than we even think. It has been applied to economics, construction, community planning, agriculture, security, natality and so on.

Countless meetings were arranged in the past 50 years in order to convince the masses that no future was complete without a sustainable approach to human existence. First, the Club of Rome came up with documents like “Limits of Growth” and “A New Path for World Development” which have as their bastion the movement to globalize the planet and social engineer everything from social values to employment, trade, demographics, politics, economics and so on; all in an effort to deindustrialize the planet and turn it into what predecessor organizations -League of Nations- wanted. Along with think-tanks like the Club of Rome, other equally prominent organizations operate in order to bring a new social, economic and developmental order into place. The United Nations, a child of the globalists who founded the League of Nations with the intention of ‘ending conflict’, has its own list of pro-deindustrialization branches and documents. For example, the United Nations Environment Programme for Development (UNEP), preaches the principles of failed green policies and green economies. The United Nations Conference on Environmental Development of 1992, better known as the Earth Summit, promotes plans like Agenda 21, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity which intend and are slowly achieving Kurt Waldheim’s ecofacist dream to depopulate the planet.

Where did modern environmentalism originate?

Although there is plenty of documentation regarding how false environmentalism is linked to the so called “green wing” of the Nazi Party, no one gets into that history in depth. Main line historians and environmentalists usually decide to ignore it and the public that is bamboozled into believing the dogmas of modern genocidal ecology does not know about it. Pertinent questions to ask regarding the Nazi origins of the green movement is, What is its inspiration? What were the goals it wanted to achieve? How did the murdering ideology of the National Socialist Party gave in to what is in appearance an unheard love for nature?

Germany was not only the place where the genocidal policy of sustainability was born, but it was also the land where it became reality. The Nazi germans and its followers adopted many of the green policies we see in modern societies and brought them to prominence. Science and the study of creatures and their environments were first talked about in Germany during the years that preceded the Nazi rise to power. The genocidal nature of environmentalism originated from a demented love for nature. (1)

Nazi thinkers and some predecessors were sure humans had to be equaled to plants, animals and insects in order to have balance in the world. These train of thought has been seen in modern environmentalist minds such as Bolivian president Evo Morales and the promoter of the Gaia theory, James Lovelock, who believe that massive amounts of people must die in order to gain natural balance. Recently, author and environmentalist Keith Farnish used one of his books to call for acts of sabotage and environmental terrorism like blowing up dams and destroying cities to return the planet to its form before the Industrial Revolution occurred. Along with Farnish, other highly respected so-called scientists like NASA’s Dr. James Hansen endorsed this line of thought.

Ernst Moritz Arndt

One of the fathers of what we call today environmentalism is Ernst Moritz Arndt. Together with Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Arndt had infinite hatred for the Enlightenment. Both were well-known for their extreme nationalistic views which they used to advance the ideals of the welfare state. These two men, but mainly Arndt was identified as the first ecological thinker. Arndt wrote on an 1815 article that “When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important — shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity.” (2) What separated Arndt’s environmentalist ideas from those of others was that he closely blended his thoughts on respecting nature with xenophobic discourses and entangled them with the very existence of the Germans and Germany. While he defended the environment in most of his writings, he also called for racial purity and damned other races such as the Jews and the French. It was that love for nature and hatred towards the Jews what would later guide the persecution and murder of those who were not Arians.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, a graduate from Arndt’s school of thought made sure his teacher’s work did not wastefully dissipate. In an article dated 1853, Riehl showed his strong opposition to industrialism and said: “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.” (3) He opposed any type of urbanization while using anti-Semitism to approve of peasantry and its way of life. Both Riehl’s and Arndt’s ideas were later adopted by the völkisch movement, which was a mixture of nationalistic populism and mad love for nature. The leaders of the völkischs advocated a move back to the simplicity of living off the land while blaming urban living and rationalism for the environmental destruction. (4) At the core of the hatred was an old but meaningful element that had driven antisemitic groups like the völkischs for a long time: The Jewish people. Why? The Jews were the middle class of the time, and the apparent sick love for nature and the environment included an equally sickening hatred for anyone and anything that endangered that thought or way of life. (5)

After establishing their long sought relation between antisemitism and love towards nature, the völkischs extended their prejudice through the 19th and 20th centuries. The anti-industrialization, anti-jewish type of speech rooted itself along with racial purity and Arian superiority just in time for the rise of the Nazi Party’s trip to power.

Nazi ecology and the link to racism

In 1867, Ernst Haeckel, a German zoologist first used the term “ecology” and linked it to the study of creatures and their environments. Haeckel was heavily influenced by social Darwinism to a point that he became the father of a kind of social Darwinism known as “monism”. He founded the German Monist League, an organization guided by völkisch principles. Haeckel as well as Riehl and Arndt believed in racial superiority and were strongly opposed to social mixing. In addition, he also approved of racial eugenics. His thoughts were the base for what later would be known as the anti-semitic National Socialism in Germany. Indeed, Haeckel became a prominent speaker on racism, nationalism and the german model of imperialism. (6) Towards the end of his life, Haeckel became a member of the Thule Society, an organization that later served as the political base for the creation of the Nazi Party. (7) Haeckel, as the creator of ecology, Riehl and Arndt as his predecessors and other thinkers such as Willibald Hentschel, Wilhelm Bölsche and BrunoWille, get all the credit for tightly threading environmentalism to national socialism, racism, anti-Semitism and the political environmental that we all know took over Germany pre and post World War I.

One of the most revealing facts about ancient and current ecological authoritarianism is the belief by sponsors of this view that humans must be encapsulated in “biological categories” and “biological zones” over which an iron fist technocratic authority must rule. Haeckel said that civilizations and nature should be governed by the same laws. The origin of this way of thinking is a reactionary anti-humanist thought. The Monists, believed humans although not themselves- were insignificant when compared to the greatness of the environment. Similar ideas are seen in modern initiatives sponsored by the Club of Rome, The Carnegie Foundation, The United Nations, NASA, as well as some colleges and universities that are funded by globalists who endorse eugenics for the sake of cleansing the planet. Take for example the text of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversitywhich has been named as the politics and religion of modern environmentalism. Among other goals, the Convention intends to “reorganize” Western civilization by excluding all human activity from 50 percent of the American continent. It wants to divide the land into “bioregions” with “buffer zones” and “corridors”. Under this plan, humans will live in tightly guarded and heavily monitored areas, from which they can never leave. This green globalist agenda is promoted by the United Nations since 1992, when it was officially presented during the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The same policies will be implemented in Asia, Africa and Europe.

Ernst Haeckel

Writings from the Carnegie Foundation also commit treasure to the implementation of policies like Agenda 21 and the Convention on Biodiversity. The foundation has expressed pride on ancient practices that resembled mass murder by the powers that be in an effort to cleanse the lands from undesirable people. The Carnegie Institution touted the work of Emperor Ghengis Khan and “validated his work as a “green emperor” due to the fact his actions included the murder of 40 million people. According to its writings, this helped lower carbon emissions and keep the planet cool.

Monists used their anti-humanist sentiment together with the völkisch ideas to discriminate against progress, urbanism and those who thought differently. On his Lebensgesetze (Laws of Life),biologist Raoul Francé, wrote that natural order determines social order. He said racial mixing was unnatural. He is up until today an acclaimed founder of contemporary eco-fascism for “pioneering the ecological movement.” (8) Francé also promoted an alleged connection between environmental purity and ‘racial’ purity. Francé and his disciples claimed that a change from peasant life to modernism would mean the degradation of the race and that the cities were diabolical and inorganic. (9)

By the early years of the twentieth century an ‘ecological’ argumentation, saturated with right-wing political content, had become somehow respected within the culture of Germany. During the turbulent period surrounding World War I, the mixture of ethnocentric fanaticism, regressive rejection of modernity and genuine environmental concern proved to be a very deadly mixture.

The Nazi Environmentalism in Action

Some people see it as a contradiction that modern eugenicists although still pushing for Nazi-style environmentalism also belong to the technocratic corporate elites. This is not a surprise because the elites that supported the Third Reich were also industrialists who, as it usually happens, controlled many segments of the population and the thinking classes. This practice has always born fruits because it guarantees complete control, no matter what the outcome is. Men like Fritz Todt, a heavy weight of the National Socialist movement in Germany as well as Albert Speer, his successor after 1942, were involved in the construction of infrastructure such as the Autobahn, one of the largest projects in the history of engineering in Germany. Todt wanted to build the Autobahn in a way that benefited his class the most, but that at the same time promoted and maintained certain sensitivity towards nature. (10)

“Todt demanded of the completed work of technology a harmony with nature and with the landscape, thereby fulfilling modern ecological principles of engineering as well as the ‘organological’ principles of his own era along with their roots in völkisch ideology.” (11) Just as it happened with Arndt, Riehl and Darré, Todt and his partners had an endless and inseparable bond to völkisch nationalism. Todt said once: “The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence.” (12) One of Todt’s aides, Alwin Seifert, was the Reich’s advocate for the Landscape. In discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemical agriculture. He criticized Darré as too moderate, and “called for an agricultural revolution towards ‘a more peasant-like, natural, simple’ method of farming, ‘independent of capital’.” (13)

The prominent place that nature had within the Nazi Party helped enact the massive industrial and military advancement that enabled Hitler to bully the rest of Europe for a while. The most radical initiatives were created and carried out as they always received the seal of approval by the highest officers of the Nazi state. Another influential member of the Reich was Chancellor Rudolph Hess, who was the green wing’s strong point within the party. Hess’s power in the governmental institutions of the National Socialist regime as he was Hitler’s personal assistant. Many even consider him the Führer’s most trusted man.Hess became a member of the Nazi party in 1920 and rapidly made his way up to the top. He was the second man in the waiting list to take power if Hitler and/or Göring were unable to take on the duty. Any and all new laws that were approved by the government were had to go through Hess’ hands first, before being enacted.

In the photo: Adolf Hitler, Göring and behind him, Rudolph Hess.

In the early thirties, a complete series of laws and ordinances were passed under Hess’ sponsorship. One of those ordinances which closely hits home today is the the foundation of the nature preserves. But perhaps the most successful accomplishment of Nazi environmentalism in Germany was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz. This nature protecting law established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and “natural monuments” and restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. Similar policies have been written now under United Nations Agenda 21 and the Convention on Biodiversity. Just as it happens with these two documents, the Nazi required local officials to ask for permission to higher authorities before making any alterations in the countryside.Along with the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz, the most important contribution that the Nazis made to modern eugenics and false environmentalism was to integrate mainstream environmentalism into the Nazi enterprise.

Sustainable Development Today

Page 350 of the Global Biodiversity Assessment Report says that livestock such as cows, sheep, goats and horses are not sustainable. People and organizations that support sustainable development claim that animals humans should stop eating meat, because animals pollute the environment. The complete program of sustainability is based on an effort to change human behavior to states that ordinarily humans would not approve or enjoy. This changes in human behavior are mostly brought upon by instigating fear. Fear of global warming, climate change, natural disasters, wars, famine, droughts and so on.

What kinds of things does sustainable development actually want to do? Sustainability and changes in human behavior are not only related to environment, agriculture and pollution. It is a complete package of reforms that will ultimately change societal behavior at a global scale. It is common to find educational programs that sponsor and teach children how to prepare in order to live in a sustainable world. But when the tactics do not work successfully, the globalists in charge of the sustainable agenda, the foundations and organizations financially supported by globalist corporations resort to fear tactics.

Along with the educational systems, the sustainable agenda also acts directly in the economies, health care systems, farming, social and cultural affairs as well as public safety. In the last 50 years we have seen a run to create alliances between corporations and the government, which has resulted in the corporate controlled governmental systems or corporate fascism we all live under. On private property, new ordinances and laws continue to end the right to buy and maintain any kind of land without the auspices of the authorities. That is why property taxes are charged to property owners even though money was paid when the purchase of such land occurred. Under the guidelines of Agenda 21 and the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, the largest masses of lands, namely national parks, natural reserves and conservation areas have been signed to the United Nations.

The obesity pandemic that ravages the planet up until today, brought upon by massive propaganda campaigns paid for by the food industry was the tool to bring along laws and directives that basically allow the government to tell people what they can eat or drink. In the United States, school principals and boards now do not allow parents to pack their children’s lunches and snacks. In the meantime, new regulations introduced through Codex Alimentarius ban the sale and use of natural supplements and the plantation of food crops in small and medium sized farms, while allowing big agricultural corporations to pollute the environment with genetically modified plants and animals. These kind of policies have caused the suicide of hundreds if not thousands of Indian farmers who have gotten in debt to purchase Monsanto’s genetically engineered pesticide ready corn and cotton seed. Since farmers signed their lives away to Monsanto, crop yields have been significantly lower, and the soils have been completely depleted of all nutrients.

In the social and cultural aspects, political correctness has been massively adopted and dissent is seen as a form of racism and terrorism. Immigration policies have gone from mildly protecting private property and the rights of the individual to sponsoring open borders, fake free-trade agreements that destroy industry and production in the west costing the jobs of millions of people across the continents. Religious criticism of homosexuality and other practices or ways of living is labeled as homophobic, while deep religious beliefs are seen as extremist. Mobility in urban areas has also been touched by the fake environmentalist policies first thought out by the Nazis. Oil speculation and price manipulation by the OPEC cartel makes the cost of transportation to rise exponentially. The same has happened with food prices. Car pooling as well as bus and train commuting is encouraged in order to reduce CO2 pollution, while the elites that beg for the end of industrialization live in lavish palaces and fly around the planet in their fuel-guzzling private jets and yachts.

When it comes to societal safety, the governments, also under policies of sustainable development continue to work on laws to step over the constitutions of the sovereign states they claim to represent and defend. Freedom of speech, freedom of movement and the rights to privacy are continuously violated with the establishment of a techno-military industrial complex that monitors everyone’s moves, financial records, behaviours, health, habits, politics, religious beliefs and so on, all in the name of security.

What is the ultimate goal of the current sustainable development policies? Population reduction. Sustainable Development is indeed a plan to be applied for the length of human existence. It is a plan created by someone else to apply it to you, your children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The belief behind the supposed need to massively reduce the planet’s population is Thomas Malthus’ mistaken idea that population growth outpaces food availability. He thought overpopulation occurred due to reductions in mortality rates and that the world would be out of food by 1890. He then recommended to kill the poor, the old and the sick, and leave the rest to die of hunger. Malthus’ ideas were picked up more recently by Paul Earlich in 1968. Earlich said that irresponsible reproductive behavior would leave the planet with no food in the 1970′s. This imaginary crisis has proven false every time the globalists schedule another date for it to happen. Calculations of the Population Research Institute reveal that today the world’s population can live comfortably with enough food in an area the size of the American state of Texas.

The truth is that at the current natal rate, many countries in Europe and Asia are experiencing the problems related to an aging population which is not being properly replaced by new citizens. In North, Central and South America, governments struggle to support their traditional welfare systems due to the fact that more people are retiring and less people are contributing to the coffers of the central governments, social security and health care programs. Ironically, population growth will become stable naturally -that is it will stop growing and begin to decrease- once the sum of all humans gets to about 9 billion. Learn more about the science of population growth here.

Well, so what if there is enough land mass to leave? Is there enough food for everyone? If you are a believer of only ‘official’ information an statistics, it so happens that the very own United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation as well as the World Food Programme agree that there is currently enough food on the planet to feed everyone. The problem is, not everyone has access to food. Why? Several reasons. Price speculation, using food such as corn and sugar cane to produce inefficient fuels and of course artificially created food scarcity. Modern cultivation techniques would even allow to plant crops in the most arid areas of Africa. Many believe that the giant continent may be able to feed the whole world if such techniques are applied with due diligence. So, why are more people going hungry everyday? Simply put, poverty, conflict and poor agricultural infrastructure in countries where those hungry people live. War is one of the main causes of crop destruction. And who are the sponsors of war and conflict? The military industrial complex controlled by the same globalists who want us to be green and friendly to the environment. Reducing the number of people on the planet would not solve an overpopulation problem, if it existed. That is just another fear tactic used by the globalists who up until today perpetuate the Nazi dream. For a detailed explanation on how the United Nations hides its eugenics programme under supposed initiatives to promote reproductive health, end poverty and decrease the appearance of disease, watch the four-part report (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)

Sources for this article include:

(1) Raymond H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871-1971

(2) Der Begriff des Volksgeistes in Ernst Moritz Arndts Geschichtsanschauung, Langensalza, 1914.

(3) Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Feld und Wald, Stuttgart, 1857, p. 52.

(4) George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, New York.

(5) Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, New York, 1975, pp. 61-62.

(6) Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, New York, 1971, p. xvii.

(7) Gasman’s thesis about the politics of Monism is hardly uncontroversial; the book’s central argument, however, is sound.

(8) See the foreword to the 1982 reprint of his 1923 book Die Entdeckung der Heimat, published by the far-right MUT Verlag.

(9) Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology, p. 101.

(10) Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th Century, p. 197.

(11) Karl-Heinz Ludwig, Technik und Ingenieure im Dritten Reich, Düsseldorf, 1974, p. 337.

(12) Quoted in Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, München, 1984, p. 220.

(13) Dominick, “The Nazis and the Nature Conservationists”, p. 529.

Obamacare Would Reduce Employment by 800,000 Workers

The Weekly Standard

Testifying today before the House Budget Committee, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf confirmed that Obamacare is expected to reduce the number of jobs in the labor market by an estimated 800,000. Here are excerpts from the exchange:

Chairman [Paul] Ryan: “[I]t’s been argued…that the new health care law will create jobs and increase labor force participation. But if I recall from your analysis, it was quite the opposite. Is that not the case?”

Director [Douglas] Elmendorf : “Yes.”…

[…]

Rep. [John] Campbell: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, we’ll — and Dr. Elmendorf — and we’ll continue this conversation right now. First on health care, before I get to — before I get to broader issues, you just mentioned that you believe — or that in your estimate, that the health care law would reduce the labor used in the economy by about 1/2 of 1 percent, given that, I believe you say, there’s 160 million full-time people working in ’20-’21.  That means that, in your estimation, the health care law would reduce employment by 800,000 in ’20-’21. Is that correct?

Director Elmendorf: Yes. The way I would put it is that we do estimate, as you said, that…employment will be about 160 million by the end of the decade.  Half a percent of that is 800,000.

Some Big Lies of Science

Global Research

“[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”– Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

The maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on Pinter’s “vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed.”

Modern science as modern medicine have been used to subdue the global population.

Therefore, the main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities, and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. This includes establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of “interpreting” reality.

In fact, the scientists and “experts” define reality in order to bring it into conformity  with the always-adapting dominant mental tapestry of the moment. They also invent and build new branches of the tapestry that serve specific power groups by providing new avenues of exploitation. These high priests are rewarded with high class status.

The Money Lie

The economists are a most significant example. It is probably not an accident that in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century the economists were the first professional analysts to be “broken in,” in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in universities. The academic system would from that point on impose a strict operational separation between inquiry and theorizing as acceptable and social reform as unacceptable [1].

Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a self-image of importance despite this fatal limitation on their societal relevance, with verbiage such as: The truth is our most powerful weapon, the pen is mightier than the sword, a good idea can change the world, reason will take us out of darkness, etc.

So the enterprise of economics became devoted to masking the lie about money. Bad lending practice, price fixing and monopolistic controls were the main threats to the natural justice of a free market, and occurred only as errors in a mostly self-regulating system that could be moderated via adjustments of interest rates and other “safeguards.”

Debt

A debt-based economy to enslave the people was established after the appearance of fractional reserve banking.

Meanwhile no mainstream economic theory makes any mention of the fact that money itself is created wholesale in a fractional reserve banking system owned by secret private interests given a licence to fabricate and deliver debt that must be paid back (with interest) from the real economy, thereby continuously concentrating ownership and power over all local and regional economies.

The rest of us have to earn money rather than simply fabricate it and we never own more when we die. The middle class either pays rent or a mortgage. Wage slavery is perpetuated and degraded in stable areas and installed in its most vicious varieties in all newly conquered territories.

It is quite remarkable that the largest exploitation scam (private money creation as debt) ever enacted and applied to the entire planet does not figure in economic theories.

Economists are so busy modeling the ups and downs of profits, returns, employment figures, stock values, and the benefits of mergers for mid-level exploiters that they don’t notice their avoidance of the foundational elements. They model the construction schedule while refusing to acknowledge that the terrain is an earthquake zone with vultures circling overhead.

Meanwhile the financiers write and re-write the rules themselves and again this process does not figure in macroeconomic theories. The only human element that economists consider in their “predictive” mathematical models is low-level consumer behaviour, not high-level system manipulation. Corruption is the norm yet it does not figure. The economies, cultures and infrastructures of nations are wilfully destroyed in order to enslave via new and larger national debts for generations into the future while economists forecast alleged catastrophic consequences of defaulting on these debts…

Management tools for the bosses and smoke and mirrors for the rest of us – thank you expert economists.

The Medicine is Health Lie

We’ve all heard some MD (medical doctor) interviewed on the radio gratuitously make the bold proposal that life expectancy has increased thanks to modern medicine. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Life expectancy has increased in First World countries thanks to a historical absence of civil and territorial wars, better and more accessible food, less work and non-work accidents, and better overall living and working conditions. The single strongest indicator of personal health within and between countries is economy status, irrespective of access to medical technology and pharmaceuticals.

It’s worse than that because medicine actually has a negative impact on health. Medical errors (not counting misattributed deaths

Modern medicine forgot about the power of natural cures and decided to create artificial toxic alternatives.

from correctly administered “treatments”) are the third leading cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer, and there is a large gap between this conservative underestimate in the number of medical error deaths and the fourth leading cause of death [2]. Since medicine can do little for heart disease and cancer and since medicine has only a small statistical positive impact in the area of trauma interventions, we conclude that public health would increase if all MDs simply disappeared. And think of all the time loss and stress that sick people would save…

One of the most dangerous places in society is the hospital. Medical errors include misdiagnoses, bad prescriptions, prescriptions of medications that should not be combined, unnecessary surgery, unnecessary or badly administered treatments including chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and corrective surgeries.

The lie extends to the myth that MDs anywhere near understand the human body. And this well guarded lie encourages us to put our faith in doctors, thereby opening the door to a well orchestrated profit bonanza for big pharma.

The first thing that Doctors Without Borders (MSF) volunteers need to do in order to contribute significantly in disaster zones is to “forget their medical training” and get to work on the priority tasks at hand: water, food, shelter, and disease propagation prevention; not vaccinating, or operating, or prescribing medication… Public health comes from safety, stability, social justice, and economic buying power, not MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) units and prescription drugs.

These bone heads routinely apply unproven “recommended treatments” and prescribe dangerous drugs for everything from high blood pressure from a sedentary lifestyle and bad nutrition, to apathy at school, to anxiety in public places, to post-adolescence erectile function, to non-conventional sleep patterns, and to all the side effects from the latter drugs.

In professional yet nonetheless remarkable reversals of logic, doctors prescribe drugs to remove symptoms that are risk indicators rather than address the causes of the risks, thereby only adding to the assault on the body.

It’s unbelievable the number that medicine has done on us: Just one more way to keep us stupid (ignorant about our own bodies) and artificially dependent on the control hierarchy. Economically disadvantaged people don’t die from not having access to medical “care” – They die from the life constraints and liabilities directly resulting from poverty. How many MDs have stated this obvious truth on the radio?

Environmental Science Lies

Exploitation via resource extraction, land use expropriation, and wage slavery creation and maintenance are devastating to indigenous populations and to the environment on continental scales. It is therefore vital to cover up the crimes under a veil of expert analysis and policy development diversion. A valued class of service intellectuals here is composed of the environmental scientists and consultants.

Environmental scientists naively and knowingly work hand in hand with finance-corporate shysters, mainstream media, politicians, and state and international bureaucrats to mask real problems and to create profit opportunities for select power elites. Here are notable examples of specific cases.

Freon and Ozone

Do you know of anyone who has been killed by the ozone hole?

The 1987 Montreal Protocol banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is considered a textbook case where science and responsible governance lead to a landmark treaty for the benefit of the Earth and all its inhabitants. How often does that happen?

At about the time that the DuPont patent on Freon(TM), the most widely used CFC refrigerant in the world, was expiring the mainstream media picked up on otherwise arcane scientific observations and hypotheses about ozone concentration in the upper atmosphere near the poles.

There resulted an international mobilization to criminalize CFCs and DuPont developed and patented a replacement refrigerant that was promptly certified for use.

A Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded in 1995 for a laboratory demonstration that CFCs could deplete ozone in simulated atmospheric conditions. In 2007 it was shown that the latter work may have been seriously flawed by overestimating the depletion rate by an order of magnitude, thereby invalidating the proposed mechanism for CFC-driven ozone depletion [3]. Not to mention that any laboratory experiment is somewhat different from the actual upper atmosphere… Is the Nobel tainted by media and special interest lobbying?

It gets better. It turns out that the Dupont replacement refrigerant is, not surprisingly, not as inert as was Freon. As a result it corrodes refrigerator cycle components at a much faster rate. Where home refrigerators and freezers lasted forever, they now burn out in eight years or so. This has caused catastrophic increases in major appliance contributions to land fill sites across North America; spurred on by the green propaganda for obscenely efficient electrical consumptions of the new appliances under closed door (zero use) conditions.

Sun over-exposure as well as artificial tanning are dangerous, not sun exposure.

In addition, we have been frenzied into avoiding the sun, the UV index keeps our fear of cancer and our dependence on the medical establishment alive, and a new sun block industry a la vampire protection league has been spawned. And of course star university chemists are looking for that perfect sun block molecule that can be patented by big pharma. And as soon as it is, I predict a surge in media interviews with skin cancer experts…

Acid Rain on the Boreal Forest

In the seventies it was acid rain. Thousands of scientists from around the world (Northern Hemisphere) studied this “most pressing environmental problem on the planet.” The boreal forest is the largest ecosystem on Earth and its millions of lakes were reportedly being killed by acid from the sky.

Coal burning plants spewed out sulphides into the atmosphere causing the rain to be acidic. The acid rain was postulated to acidify the soils and lakes in the boreal forest but the acidification was virtually impossible to detect. Pristine lakes in the hearts of national parks had to be studied for decades in attempts to detect a statistically significant acidification.

Meanwhile the lakes and their watersheds were being destroyed by the cottage industry, agriculture, forestry, mining, over fishing and tourism. None of the local and regional destruction was studied or exposed. Instead, scientists turned their gaze to distant coal burning plants, atmospheric distribution, and postulated chemical reactions occurring in rain droplets. One study found that the spawning in aquarium of one fish species was extremely sensitive to acidity (pH). Long treatises about cation charge balance and transport were written and attention was diverted away from the destruction on the ground towards a sanitized problem of atmospheric chemistry that was the result of industrialization and progress rather than being caused by identifiable exploiters.

As a physicist and Earth scientist turned environmental scientist, I personally read virtually every single scientific paper written about acid rain and could not find an example of a demonstrated negative impact on lakes or forests from acid rain. In my opinion, contrary to the repeated claims of the scientist authors, the research on acid rain demonstrates that acid rain could not possibly have been the problem.

This model of elite-forces-coordinated exploiter whitewashing was to play itself out on an even grander scale only decades later with global warming.

Global Warming as a Threat to Humankind

In 2005 and 2006, several years before the November 2009 Climategate scandal burst the media bubble that buoyed public opinion towards acceptance of carbon credits, cap and trade, and the associated trillion dollar finance bonanza that may still come to pass, I exposed the global warming cooptation scam in an essay that Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation called “one of the best essays on greenhouse myth-making from a left perspective” [4][5][6].

My essay prompted David F. Noble to research the question and write The Corporate Climate Coup to expose how the media embrace followed the finance sector’s realization of the unprecedented potential for revenues that going green could represent [7].

Introductory paragraphs from Global Warming: Truth or Dare? are as follows [4]:

“I also advance that there are strong societal, institutional, and psychological motivations for having constructed and for continuing to maintain the myth of a global warming dominant threat (global warming myth, for short). I describe these motivations in terms of the workings of the scientific profession and of the global corporate and finance network and its government shadows.”

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.”

Other passages read this way [4]:

“Environmental scientists and government agencies get funding to study and monitor problems that do not threaten corporate and financial interests. It is therefore no surprise that they would attack continental-scale devastation from resource extraction via the CO2 back door. The main drawback with this strategy is that you cannot control a hungry monster by asking it not to shit as much.”

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middle class. Nobody else cares about global warming. Exploited factory workers in the Third World don’t care about global warming. Depleted uranium genetically mutilated children in Iraq don’t care about global warming. Devastated aboriginal populations the world over also can’t relate to global warming, except maybe as representing the only solidarity that we might volunteer.”

“It’s not about limited resources. [“The amount of money spent on pet food in the US and Europe each year equals the additional amount needed to provide basic food and health care for all the people in poor countries, with a sizeable amount left over.” (UN Human Development Report, 1999)] It’s about exploitation, oppression, racism, power, and greed. Economic, human, and animal justice brings economic sustainability which in turn is always based on renewable practices. Recognizing the basic rights of native people automatically moderates resource extraction and preserves natural habitats. Not permitting imperialist wars and interventions automatically quenches nation-scale exploitation. True democratic control over monetary policy goes a long way in removing debt-based extortion. Etc.”

And there is a thorough critique of the science as band wagon trumpeting and interested self-deception [4]. Climategate only confirms what should be obvious to any practicing scientist: That science is a mafia when it’s not simply a sleeping pill.

Conclusion

It just goes on and on. What is not a lie?

Look at the recent H1N1 scam – another textbook example. It’s farcical how far these circuses go: Antiseptic gels in every doorway at the blink of an eye; high school students getting high from drinking the alcohol in the gels; out datedness of the viral strain before the pre-paid vaccine can be mass produced; unproven effectiveness; no requirement to prove effectiveness; government guarantees to corporate manufacturers against client lawsuits; university safety officers teaching students how to cough; etc.

Pure madness. Has something triggered our genetically ingrained First World stupidity reflex? Is this part of our march towards fascism [8]?

Here is another one. Educators promote the lie that we learn because we are taught. This lie of education is squarely denounced by radical educators [9][10].

University professors design curricula as though the students actually learn every element that is delivered whereas the truth is that students don’t learn the delivered material and everyone only learns what they learn. One could dramatically change the order in which courses are delivered and it would make no measurable difference in how much students learn. Students deliver nonsense and professors don’t care. Obedience and indoctrination are all that matter so the only required skill is bluffing. Students know this and those that don’t don’t know what they know, don’t know themselves [8][9][10].

Pick any expert opinion or dominant paradigm: It’s part of a racket.

We can’t know the truth because the truth is brutal.

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He was trained as a physicist and practiced physics, Earth sciences, and environmental science, areas in which he was funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. [See www.academicfreedom.ca]

Notes

[1] “No Ivory Tower – book” by Ellen W. Schrecker.
[2] Radio interview with Dr. Barbara Starfield: CHUO 89.1 FM, Ottawa; January 21, 2010.
[3] Nature 449, 382-383 (2007).
[4] “Global Warming: Truth or Dare? – essay” by Denis G. Rancourt.
[5] “Questioning Climate Politics – Denis Rancourt says the ‘global warming myth’ is part of the problem”; April 11, 2007, interview in The Dominion.
[6] Climate Guy blog.
[7] “The Corporate Climate Coup – essay” by David F. Noble.
[8] “Canadian Education as an Impetus towards Fascism – essay” by Denis G. Rancourt.
[9] “Pedagogy of the Oppressed – book” by Paulo Freire.
[10] “The Ignorant Schoolmaster – book” by Jacques Rancière.

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