Global economic situation for liveaboard cruising yachties

[Bamby]

The American Self Immolation, Truly a Sight to See

As my readers know, I am a fan of economics and of history, as well as politics, a combination that forms some very interesting cycles to research, discuss and argue on. None is so interesting than the death of great nations, for here there is always the self destruction that comes before the final breakups and invasions. As they say: Rome did not fall to the barbarians, all they did was kick in the rotting gates.

It can be safely said, that the last time a great nation destroyed itself through its own hubris and economic folly was the early Soviet Union (though in the end the late Soviet Union still died by the economic hand). Now we get the opportunity to watch the Americans do the exact same thing to themselves. The most amazing thing of course, is that they are just repeating the failed mistakes of the past. One would expect their fellow travelers in suicide, the British, to have spoken up by now, but unfortunately for the British, their education system is now even more of a joke than that of the Americans.

While taking a small breather from mouthing the never ending propaganda of recovery, never mind that every real indicator is pointing to death and destruction, the American Marxists have noticed that the French and Germans are out of recession and that Russia and Italy are heading out at a good clip themselves. Of course these facts have been wrapped up into their mind boggling non stop chant of "recovery" and hope-change-zombification. What is ignored, of course, is that we and the other three great nations all cut our taxes, cut our spending, made life easy for small business...in other words: the exact opposite of the Anglo-Sphere.

That brings us to Cap and Trade. Never in the history of humanity has a more idiotic plan been put forward and sold with bigger lies. Energy is the key stone to any and every economy, be it man power, animal power, wood or coal or nuclear. How else does one power industry that makes human life better (unless of course its making the bombs that end that human life, but that's a different topic). Never in history, with the exception of the Japanese self imposed isolation in the 1600s, did a government actively force its people away from economic activity and industry.

Even the Soviets never created such idiocy. The great famine of the late 1920s was caused by quite the opposite, as the Soviets collectivized farms to force peasants off of their land and into the big new factories. Of course this had disastrous results. So one must ask, are the powers that be in Washington and London degenerates or satanically evil? Where is the opposition? Where are the Republicans in America and Tories in England?

The unfortunate truth here is: the Republicans and Tories are the Mensheviks to the Democrat and Labour Bolsheviks. In other words, they are the slightly less radical fellow travellers who are to stupid to realize that once their usefulness is done, they will go the very camps they will help send the true opposition to. A more deserving lot was rarely born. Of course half of the useful idiots in the Bolshevik groupings will go to those very same camps.

One express idiocy of Cap and Trade in America will be the approximately additional $.19 per liter of gasoline, which is a rather very large increase in taxation, however indirectly. Of course this will not only hit the American working serfs in the pocket at fuel up, but will hit them in everything they buy and do, as America has almost no real rail to even partially off set the cost of transporting goods.

But how will this work itself out? Very simple and the chain of events has been worked out often enough.

First, the serfs will start to scream at the cost of fueling up and the cost of all their goods. The government, ever anxious not to take responsibility, will single out the petroleum factories and oil companies for gauging the people. They will make demands for them to cut prices, which of course means working for a loss. When plants start to close down or move overseas, they will be called racketeers and saboteurs. Their facilities will be nationalized so that the government can show them how to do things properly. Shortages will follow as will show trials and that's as long as the USD holds up and foreign nations are still willing to sell oil and gasoline for other than gold, silver and other hard resources.

When food goes up, and it surely will, as the diesel the farmer uses goes up as well as his fertilizers, the government will scream that the farmers are hording, thus undermining the efforts of the enlightened. There will be confiscations of all feed crops while the farmers will get production quotas to meet or have their land nationalized again. Do not believe me? Look at the people running your governments and ask yourself: would they rather take some one's land or admit that they screwed up and ruined everything? After a point, only the corporate farms will remain, food by oligarch, just a like the factory farms. There will be plenty of dissidents to work them.

This will of course spread from industry to industry and within a rather short order, you will be living the new fractional dream, that is a fraction of what you have now. But on the bright side, for once, your children, working for government/oligarch run joint ventures, will be able to compete adequately with the Chinese, to feed the demands of Europe and Latin America. But that will take at least a generation or two first along with a cultural revolution or two.

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/109977-0/

[Boston]

The government, ever anxious not to take responsibility, will single out the petroleum factories and oil companies for gauging the people. They will make demands for them to cut prices, which of course means working for a loss.

speaking of Russia's fall I gotta wonder if this writer ever wrote propaganda for the communist state, that was quite a set up leading to this ridiculous notion

the energy companies are making record profits and capping wells and reducing production to keep prices as high as possible, no one is even remotely suggesting they be nationalized
the only fall in prices as I think we can all agree was short term and did little but reduce the supply side costs and hardly the dented the corporate profit margins ( corporations responded to the low prices at the well by buying up as much as they could store )
it was speculators that got the brunt of the loss, certainly not the energy companies.

that an equating the fall of Rome to some form of energy crisis within the empire is just laughable; Rome fell for a number of reasons but oil and gas wasn't one of them

sorry for the bad review but that was one complete fairy tail
poorly researched and patronizing of an ignorant public
while there can be some similarities found in the fall of the soviet union, none were accurately compared to the fall of the USA,

the one thing I did like was the equal blame it placed on both republicans and democrats; surely both should hang together from the white house portcullis for all to see.

Best
B

oh hey Mas
no worries mate
all in good fun

cheers
B

I agree, Bos, but the core is that, not as you said, "equating the fall of Rome to some form of energy crisis", but that Rome rotted from the inside. Also, they will not nationalize the oil companies - they have already left to Zug, with its low taxation. In all, I tend to be a little less down on industry and WAY more down on government.
McSniffin' - I know where your heart is - and it is in sound territory. You will not be banned for saying something about Obama - this is not CNN, ABC, PMSNBC, New York Times, nor any other state media. I have to comment on the "duel" thing tho, while we're on the subject of fantacy. It is.
Landlubber, It is a leftist propaganda that "wars are profitable". Think about it - almost all of our expendable stuff is made by FNHerstal http://www.fnherstal.com/ , the US government is not spending vast amounts of money to support this company in Belgium. The big company doing a lot of work in Iraq, the name escapes me...Schlumberger maybe, no it seems it started with an "H". "Halliburton" it is, is losing money. One of only two companies in the world that could possibly do that work (the other is the French company, Schlumberger), and they are losing money!
Speaking of Halliburton, Did you see Dick Cheney kick Obama's ass AGAIN? http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2...tan-policy/?hp ...And I found the vid on the NYT wesite!

[mgriffin]

Ya' know, I could give a shite less about which way America goes. I am moving to some other country as soon as I'm 18. Maybe british columbia or russia or europe, somewhere where I can take a piss of my porch without getting in trouble, where it's very sparsely populated.

[masalai]

mgriffin,
and where the only "social services" are the ones you provide for yourself and a few neighbours, else, because you were seen/perceived as a bringer/giver of "largess" and if you don't share, they kick you out and let your development fall to rack & ruin... Try Canada's wilderness (bit too cold for me)...

It is sometimes called "pay your dues" or taxation, or social responsibility... What goes around comes around, somehow, eventually...

http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayGsd.php "U.S. Bullion Banks Pile In on the Short Side Again Yesterday" They are still at it, fcuk the FED and associates.... let the market do it's own thing or suffer longer... and harder... The six linked items at the end of the report should also be read as they show the depth of corruption, stupidity and whatever else you may wish to call the "NY push" - - hang them by the testicles from the front of the NY FED building would be a good start... http://www.futures.tradingcharts.com/cotcharts/GD and http://www.fgmr.com/hyperinflation-w...r-21-2009.html and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/e...n-history.html and http://www.gata.org/node/7922 and the pdf file is attached below...

A cheeky response may be to buy 99.99% gold bullion from Perth Mint using borrowed US$ (paper fiat money), watch the crash or the US$ and rapid rise to true value in gold bullion, whilst all the "paper gold" (GLD) investors get fleeced... and those still holding US$ (paper fiat money), find they have a good supply of cheap patterned green wallpaper...

[masalai]

http://financialsense.com/fsu/editor...2009/1022.html
http://financialsense.com/fsu/editor...2009/1022.html
http://financialsense.com/fsu/editor...2009/1022.html "A 28% Plunge In Our (USA) Standard Of Living "
http://financialsense.com/fsu/editor...2009/1022.html
http://financialsense.com/fsu/editor...2009/1022.html "the world is not going to end"
http://www.gata.org/node/7924 "Montreal conference to include GATA favorites"
and Fanie has been busy again http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/ope...tml#post309090

[hoytedow]

Boston, I guarantee if Obama gets the chance, he will Hugo Chavez our oil industry.

[masalai]

I agree hoytedow, - - - Under instructions from the "financiers" - FED et-al...

Just in ... http://www.caseyresearch.com/displayCdd.php?id=256 "Beautiful Burnout"

http://financialsense.com/index.html "Key Former Leaders Suffer Hangover After Dow 10,000 Party"

[Boston]

beyond all the hyperbole its clear Obummer is as much or more of a stooge as any other president before him. Dam lucky to get elected in the first place and his popularity waning he is hardly in a position to dictate to the corporate oligarchy. Take his treatment of health care for example. The unwashed masses elected Obummer based on his ludicrous promises of free everything. Anyone remember his promise of a college education to any and all comers, or his promise of free health care. But what is he pushing now, a system of forced single payers. Unbelievable, forcing another unfunded mandate on the working public. The insurance companies are gearing up ( and gone public with there plans ) to raise prices dramatically while at the same time getting ready to deny billions in new claims. Any other country have that kind of public mandate to buy your own insurance or pay stiff penalties at tax time with absolutely no guarantees of receiving vital health care? Talk about a captive audience and does anyone really think corporate insurance isnt going to take advantage of that by raising prices exactly as they are threatening to do now, and what controls are being suggested to put a halt to the price fixing and gouging there? none that I can see, and thats just the health insurance industry. If Obummer cant even make a few health insurance companies sit and bark on command what is it that makes anyone think he can command the richest and most powerful corporate entities the world has ever seen, roll over and play stupid? No way is he any other than a cheap fast talking thief just like the vast majority of politicians before him. Just like Reorge he is probably asking permission from someone to so much as take a leak.

I got an article of my own kicking around if you want a good read folks, found it on CNN durring the elections and saved it, it clearly supports one of my long standing theories of politics that has never failed to prove itself over time "the biggest piece of **** always rises to the top"

In his first race for office, seeking a state Senate seat on Chicago's gritty South Side in 1996, Obama effectively used obscure election rules to eliminate his Democratic competition.

As a community organizer, Obama had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed some (pretty shady) Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers.

The move denied each of them, including incumbent Alice Palmer, a longtime Chicago activist, a place on the ballot. It cleared the way for Obama to run unopposed on the Democratic ticket in a heavily Democrat district.

"That was Chicago politics," said John Kass, a veteran Chicago Tribune columnist. "Knock out your opposition, challenge their petitions, destroy your enemy, right? It is how Barack Obama destroyed his enemies back in 1996 that conflicts with his message today. He may have gotten his start registering thousands of voters. But in that first race, he made sure voters had just one choice.
Obama's challenge was perfectly legal, said Jay Stewart of the Chicago's Better Government Association. Although records of the challenges are no longer on file for review with the election board, Stewart said Obama is not the only politician to resort to petition challenges to eliminate the competition.
"He came from Chicago politics," Stewart said. "Politics ain't beanbag, as they say in Chicago. You play with your elbows up, and you're pretty tough and ruthless when you have to be. Sen. Obama felt that's what was necessary at the time, that's what he did. Does it fit in with the rhetoric now? Perhaps not.
The Obama campaign called this report "a hit job." It insisted that CNN talk to a state representative who supports Obama, because, according to an Obama spokesman, she would be objective. But when we called her, she said she can't recall details of petition challenges, who engineered them for the Obama campaign or why all the candidates were challenged.
But Will Burns does. Now running himself for a seat in the Illinois legislature, Burns was a young Obama volunteer during the presidential candidate's first race.
Burns was one of the contingents of volunteers and lawyers who had the tedious task of going over each and every petition submitted by the other candidates, including those of Alice Palmer.
"The rules are there for a reason," Burns said.
He said that challenging petitions is a smart way to avoid having to run a full-blown expensive race.
"One of the first things you do whenever you're in the middle of a primary race, especially in primaries in Chicago, because if you don't have signatures to get on the ballot, you save yourself a lot of time and effort from having to raise money and have a full-blown campaign effort against an incumbent," Burns said.
Burns said he believed that Obama did not enjoy using the tactic to knock off Palmer.
"It was not something he particularly relished," Burns said. "It was not something that I thought he was happy about doing.
But Obama did it anyway, clearing the field of any real competition. Obviously he was more concerned about being elected than being honestly elected.
Obama's staff would not comment on what the senator thinks about that petition challenge now. Instead, they referred CNN to this 2007 comment made by Obama to the Chicago Tribune.
"To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," the senator is quoted as saying in the Tribune. "My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be.

But in that same newspaper story, Obama praised Palmer.
"I thought she was a good public servant," he said.
Palmer, who has campaigned for Clinton, told CNN that she did not want to be part of this story.
Obama supporters claim that Palmer has only herself to blame because she indicated she would not run for the 1996 state Senate and instead aimed for Congress. After losing in that bid, she returned to running for the state Senate seat, a move Obama supporters claim amounted to reneging on a promise not to run.
But Palmer supporters, who did not want to be identified, said that she never anointed Obama as her successor and that the retelling of the story by Obama supporters is designed to distract from the fact he unscrupulously muscled his way into office.
One other opponent who Obama eliminated by challenging his petitions, Gha-is Askia, said he has no hard feelings today about the challenge and supports Obama's presidential aspirations.

But back at the time he was running for state Senate, Askia said, he was dismayed Obama would use such tactics.

"It wasn't honorable," he said. "I wouldn't have done it.
He said the Obama team challenged every single one of his petitions on "technicalities.
If names were printed instead of signed in cursive writing, they were declared invalid. If signatures were good but the person gathering the signatures wasn't properly registered, those petitions also were thrown out.
Askia came up 69 signatures short of the required number to be on the ballot.
Kass, the Chicago Tribune columnist, said the national media are naive when it comes to Chicago politics, which is a serious business.
He said they have bought into a narrative that Obama is strictly a reformer. The truth, Kass says, is that he is a bare-knuckled politician. And using petty rules to win his first office is part of who Obama is.
"It's not the tactics of 'let's all people come together and put your best ideas forward and the best ideas win,' " Kass said. "That's the spin; that's in the Kool-Aid. You can have some. Any flavor. But the real deal was, get rid of Alice Palmer.
"There are those who think that registering people to vote and getting them involved in politics and then using this tactic in terms of denying Alice Palmer the right to compete, that these things are inconsistent. And guess what? They are. They are inconsistent. But that's the politics he plays.
.

Obummer went on to accomplish absolutely nothing in his time as state senator
in his time as a us junior senator he was equally unsuccessful
Obummer introduced only two bills in his short and uneventful play as us senator
one changing the name of a post office
failed
the other a bill to help support democracy in DRC ( denocratic republic of congo )
failed miserably

the man couldnt organize the name change of a post office but by some miracle is going to take on the biggest multinational corporations in the world?

in a nut shell the man has previously accomplished nothing and based on that past performance it seems more likely that he continue in that pattern than that he suddenly becomes an effective avenue of change for the better. Personally I had previously felt like "give the man a chance" but after his incredibly bad performance on the one most important issue facing the USA today ( health care ) Im think hang the bastard right there in the middle, between the senators and congressmen

my ever so humble opine
love
B

[masalai]

http://www.gata.org/node/7925 "New Jersey pays Goldman millions for swaps on redeemed bonds" .......The mind fuckin' boggles with amazement at the level of stupidity......
http://www.gata.org/node/7926 points to "2009_Winter_Warning_Volume_10_issue_1.pdf" attached below -- -- -- -- How does that Shakespearian quote go "Now is the winter of our discontent" - methinks one will know the true meaning of that phrase all too soon...

[masalai]

Obummer has accomplished what he has been told to do/say, else another Kennedy-esq departure? Big money politics just concentrates the money in one place - Then it becomes worthless, as no one else has any and everything collapses....

[masalai]

When this is aired publicly by pbs, all hell should break loose - I am reading the synopsys here http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl.../synopsis.html - bloody hell, let the blood run in the streets someone posted a link the other day but I could not download, and now the server is too busy or being wiped clean... download while you can... Here it is the individuals are NAMED, and the dumb politicians fell in to line because they are just ****** UP DUMB STUPID SHITS... and if they deny that then they are complicit and accomplices of the BIGGEST fraud EVER... either way they all deserve to be hung drawn and quartered or something equally gruesome...

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Copied from pbs.org - do watch the video.....
"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

In The Warning, veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk unearths the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.

"I didn't know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton's powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group -- former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin -- convinced him that Born's attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."

Born's battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President's Working Group vehemently opposed regulation -- especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.

"I walk into Brooksley's office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She's hanging up the telephone; she says to me: 'That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, "You're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."... [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'"

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. "Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming," Kirk says. "Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves."

Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one.

"It'll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps," Born warns. "There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience."




_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ What a good piece of investigative journalism
Just finished watching the documentary and praise goes to the PBS team in showing the world a very courageous and honest woman who deserves ALL the Nobel awards.... Watch this and you will see and understand how big and all pervasive this culture of fraud is in "wallstreet" and complicit politicians & bureaucrats - - and needs to be cleaned out with ultimate prejudice....

[masrapido]

Originally Posted by hoytedow

Boston, I guarantee if Obama gets the chance, he will Hugo Chavez our oil industry.

So the price should then go down to 20 centavos per litre. How is that a bad thing?

[Bamby]

Thanks Mas that PBS link was a good one, i enjoyed watching it. I also lifted it and posted it in another couple sites for others to view. But you know what Mas I'm beginning to believe too many American people are bought in to this mess and system. Many have actually bought into this BS and figure they'll be OK with their investment and so what if their neighbor get screwed. As long as the money people are making big money the hell with the working stiffs who will actually pay the bill with higher taxes, and so what uncle sam will bail them out again and again after all the working class is expendable.

I see they are at it again with commodities and driving up the cost of Oil and everything else they can. But hell they are using public pension funds (taxes) to fund a lot of their efforts. So when they steal that money through mutilation of the markets, the taxpayer will again haft to pay out for the losses.

In short I think we're screwed big time here IMO.

Only a devout communist could not see the problem with a government stealing a corporation. It's just something taught here and I guess it's why we have such a problem with Obama, for example - Stealing is wrong.