Lizz Winstead noticed that “The pope has 1.7 Billion Catholic followers and 27,000 twitter followers.”
How might the Vicar of Jesus Christ communicate his diabolical assignments to the 1.7B Catholics in the world if they refuse to use an efficient medium like Twitter? He must need a miracle.
Christine Lagarde, currently the Minister for Economic Affairs, Finance and Industry in President Nicolas Sarkozy‘s center-right government, will soon become the first women to lead the International Monetary Fund. Her statement on her appointment:
“The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund has just selected me to succeed Dominique Strauss-Kahn as Managing Director for a five-year term, starting on July 5. I am deeply honored by the trust placed in me by the Executive Board. I would like to thank the Fund’s global membership warmly for the broad-based support I have received. I would also like to express my respect and esteem for my colleague and friend, Agustín Carstens.
“The IMF has served its 187 member countries well during the global economic and financial crisis, transforming itself in many positive ways. I will make it my overriding goal that our institution continues to serve its entire membership with the same focus and the same spirit. As I have had the opportunity to say to the IMF Board during the selection process, the IMF must be relevant, responsive, effective, and legitimate, to achieve stronger and sustainable growth, macroeconomic stability, and a better future for all.”
As the person who has received the honor of replacing Dominique Strauss-Khan, Ms. Largarde has an opportunity to replenish the aura of an institution revered by everyone.
Cristine Legarde walks the red carpet
A photo taken from the June 28, 2011 demostration:
June 28, 2011 Athens Demonstration
Michael Hudson provides a brief case study of this kind of war craft while describing the Greek crisis:
The fight for Europe’s future is being waged in Athens and other Greek cities to resist financial demands that are the 21st century’s version of an outright military attack. The threat of bank overlordship is not the kind of economy-killing policy that affords opportunities for heroism in armed battle, to be sure. Destructive financial policies are more like an exercise in the banality of evil — in this case, the pro-creditor assumptions of the European Central Bank (ECB), EU and IMF (egged on by the U.S. Treasury).
As Vladimir Putin pointed out some years ago, the neoliberal reforms put in Boris Yeltsin’s hands by the Harvard Boys in the 1990s caused Russia to suffer lower birth rates, shortening life spans and emigration — the greatest loss in population growth since World War II. Capital flight is another consequence of financial austerity. The ECB’s proposed “solution” to Greece’s debt problem is thus self-defeating. It only buys time for the ECB to take on yet more Greek government debt, leaving all EU taxpayers to get the bill. It is to avoid this shift of bank losses onto taxpayers that Angela Merkel in Germany has insisted that private bondholders must absorb some of the loss resulting from their bad investments.
Popular protest in Greece
The bankers are trying to get a windfall by using the debt hammer to achieve what warfare did in times past. They are demanding privatization of public assets (on credit, with tax deductibility for interest so as to leave more cash flow to pay the bankers). This transfer of land, public utilities and interest as financial booty and tribute to creditor economies is what makes financial austerity like war in its effect.
I am sure it is difficult to produce a Hollywood epic of Greek farmers struggling to survive a blow that begins and ends with a stroke of a pen.
I also do not believe it wrong to identify this kind of elite economic activity as a kind of primitive or original accumulation. I believe it is uncontroversial to assert that the European Bankers and their allies in the United States want to restructure the Greek economy in order to exclude some in Greece from the material benefits they have had in the past and to accumulate capital by exploiting the political, legal and economic conditions in Greece, Europe and the world at large. This manner of capital accumulation may rightly be characterized as a kind of looting, that is, as an expropriation meant, in part, to change the character of economic exploitation in Greece. It is an instance of primitive or original accumulation because it will likely end with a new economic regime in Greece, a regime that will reflect the political capacities and economic requirements of some finance capitalists.
Hudson gives this advice to the Greek people who have been excluded from the elite bargaining over Greece’s future:
The most effective tactic is to demand a national referendum on whether to accept the ECB’s terms for austerity, tax increases, public spending cutbacks and selloffs. This is how Iceland’s president stopped his country’s Social Democratic leadership from committing the economy to ruinous (and legally unnecessary) payments to Gordon Brown’s Labour Party demands and those of the Dutch for the Icesave and even the Kaupthing bailouts.
Use of the direct democratic mechanism is the best feasible and effective path to block this attack on Greece and its people. Revolution is the only rational alternative to the victims of this looting effort if the institutions of a modern democracy were to fail to secure the rights and well-being of the Greek people. Resignation and suffering combine to provide the irrational alternative.
Chad Stone, the chief economist for The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, informs us that “…the Bush-era tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — including their associated interest costs — account for almost half of the projected public debt in 2019 (measured as a share of the economy) if we continue current policies.”
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
This debt projection is instructive, although, as Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney, also members of The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, point out, “Some lawmakers, pundits, and others continue to say that President George W. Bush’s policies did not drive the projected federal deficits of the coming decade — that, instead, it was the policies of President Obama and Congress in 2009 and 2010. But, the fact remains: the economic downturn, President Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years ….” The debt projection may be instructive, but only those willing to evaluate the facts of the matter and then soundly draw conclusions from their evaluations will learn something pertinent about America’s economic predicament.
I guess the Washington elite along with their finance capital paymasters are not among those individuals capable of learning anything about the economy they regulate.
CNBC reports:
The New York Fed is refusing to tell investigators how many billions of dollars it shipped to Iraq during the early days of the US invasion there, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction told CNBC Tuesday.
The Fed’s lack of disclosure is making it difficult for the inspector general to follow the paper trail of billions of dollars that went missing in the chaotic rush to finance the Iraq occupation, and to determine how much of that money was stolen.
The New York Fed will not reveal details, the inspector general said, because the money initially came from an account at the Fed that was held on behalf of the people of Iraq and financed by cash from the Oil-for-Food program. Without authorization from the account holder, the Iraqi government itself, the inspector general’s office was told it can’t receive information about the account.
The problem is that critics of the Iraqi government believe highly placed officials there are among the people who may have made off with the money in the first place.
The New York Times provides this report on the Fed and its plans:
And at the end of June, the Federal Reserve finished its work and rested.
The nation’s central bank said Wednesday that it would complete the planned purchase of $600 billion in Treasury securities next week as scheduled, and then suspend its three-year-old economic rescue campaign, leaving in place the aid it already is providing but doing nothing more, for now, to bolster growth.
“The economic recovery is continuing at a moderate pace, though somewhat more slowly than the committee had expected,” the Fed said in a statement. “The committee expects the pace of recovery to pick up over coming quarters and the unemployment rate to resume its gradual decline.”
Shadow States compares the official U3 and U6 unemployment rates to its adjusted rate:
Shadow Stats and Official Unemployment Rates
I think it is rather clear that the Federal Reserve Bank, the Obama administration and the current Congress have not done enough to address the employment problem in the United States. Nor, it seems, do they intend to do much about this human disaster.
Complacent and vicious — that’s the American way of government when it comes to providing for common folk.
The Keystone Research Center reports that:
Total nonfarm employment in Pennsylvania fell in May by just over 14,000 jobs, according to a new report from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. This is an abrupt reversal from March when the state added 23,000 jobs and highlights that monthly state-level payroll data are volatile and should be viewed with some caution.
Taking into account May’s poor performance, the Commonwealth has added an average of just over 7,700 jobs a month since December. This remains a healthier pace of job growth than in the recovery from the 2001 recession. Still, Pennsylvania is more than 230,000 jobs short of full employment.
This is Pennsylvania’s job’s deficit:
Pennsylvania’s jobs deficit, or the difference between the number of jobs Pennsylvania has and the number it needs to regain its pre-recession employment rate, is 235,200. That number includes the 130,900 jobs Pennsylvania lost plus the 104,300 jobs it needs to keep up with the 1.8% growth in population that has occurred in the 41 months since the recession began.
Sadly, Pennsylvania’s unemployment record has been a good one during the Great Recession. Yet what comfort might the un- and under-employed gain from this knowledge? Little to no comfort, I would guess.
George Carlin died on this day in 2008. This bit remains one of my favorites:
Maral Ghanma tweeted this gem:
An American ship called The Audacity of Hope is sailing to Gaza to break the blockade. Ship is obviously not full of bullshit like the book.
