From Economists Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, writing in VOX:
The tragedy of the Eurozone appears unavoidable, but it reflects far greater risks that will spread to Japan, the US, and other advanced economies.
Through our financial systems, we have created enormous, complex financial structures that can inflict tragic consequences with failure and yet are inherently difficult to regulate and control. We are at the behest of our politicians and financial sectors to prevent them from creating dangers. Yet around the world, our political and financial systems have aligned to build these dangers rather than suppress them.
The continuing crisis in the Eurozone merely buys times for Japan and the US. Investors are seeking refuge in these two countries only because the dangers are most imminent in the Eurozone. Will these countries take this time to fix their underlying fiscal and financial problems? That seems unlikely.
The lesson from all these troubles is clear: the relatively recent rise of the institutions of complex financial markets, around the world, has permitted the growth of large, unsustainable finance. We rely on our political systems to check these dangers, but instead the politicians naturally develop symbiotic relationships that encourage irresponsible growth.
The nature of ‘irresponsible growth’ is different in each country and region – but it is similarly unsustainable and it is still growing. There are more crises to come and they are likely to be worse than the last one.
The latest numbers are in, and they’re bad. They’re so bad that Brazil is telling other Latin American countries to reorient their economies away from Europe — and Denmark’s doing the same thing. China’s thinking similar thoughts, and Japan’s economy is stalling as well. And the Slovenian economy is suffering and nearing bailout territory.
New warnings about the new More Europe banking regulatory scheme are sounded and the notion is threatening to create new divisions, Deutsche Bank sees dark, chaotic times ahead, the IMF is set to cut forecasts again, the new eurobank headquarters is way over budget, Spain’s divisions are growing deeper, and the Portuguese are angry. Italy’s in contraction, and Monti’s begging unit help to save Fiat jobs — though he won’t yet ask for a bailout.
The Irish economy’s stagnant, Germany’s leading carmarker won’t make its projections, Merkel’s calling on an old ally to sell Germans on her scheme, and French Apple Store workers hacve called a strike for the day of the new iPhone debut.
Eurozone scores worst numbers in three years
Despite all that austerity and all those bailouts, the common curfrency zone’s economic numbers are bad and rapidly getting worse.
From Moran Zhang of International Business Times:
Euro zone private sector economic activity contracted at the fastest rate since June 2009, defying hopes that the aggressive new policy from the European Central Bank would help reignite growth in the single currency bloc.
Europe’s troubles continued to hit exporters around the world. Thursday’s purchasing managers indexes, which survey thousands of companies worldwide every month, showed Chinese factory activity shrank for an 11th month in September, while Japan’s exports tumbled for a third month in a row in August. Things aren’t looking any better for the U.S., where factory activities suffered its weakest quarter in three years.
“The overall message is that things haven’t changed much from last month. Our forecast that the euro zone recession will only deepen from here and that growth in China will slow further suggests that the outlook for U.S. manufacturers isn’t very rosy,” Paul Dales, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics, said in a note.
Markit expects a 0.6-percent contraction in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), meaning a return to recession marked by two consecutive quarters of shrinking economic output.
The British researchers said they had hoped a recent announcement by the European Central Bank (ECB) to start buying the debt of struggling eurozone members might have lifted business confidence.
However, business sentiment had taken a “turn for the worse,” adding to the “most gloomy” outlook since early 2009.
According to the PMI index, French business activity has suffered a particularly sharp downturn in September, with Europe’s second biggest economy likely to shrink by as much as 0.6 percent after zero growth in the first two quarters of 2012.
By contrast, the German PMI reading showed the country’s manufacturing sector climbing to a six-month high, with the service sector breaching the 50-point mark, which separates economic growth from contraction.
Eurozone private sector business activity declined for an eighth straight month in September, hitting its gloomiest patch in three years as French activity plunged, a survey showed Thursday.
The closely-watched Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), a survey of 5,000 eurozone businesses compiled by Markit research firm and a key forward-looking indicator, came in at 45.9 points, down from 46.3 in July.
Any reading below 50 indicates contraction in activity.
Taken together with previous months the data suggested “the worst quarter for three years,” Chris Williamson, Markit chief economist said in a statement.
He tipped a 0.6 percent contraction in gross domestic product for the quarter, which would confirm a return to recession.
No surprise here. When your biggest customers are hard up for cash and worried about the future, they’re not that interested in buying more stuff.
From Andy Bruce of Reuters:
The huge economic uncertainty in Europe has had a pronounced impact on export-reliant economies like China, where manufacturing contracted again in September.
European Union and Chinese leaders are meeting in Brussels on Thursday leaders to try to bridge growing differences over trade and find common ground on tackling Europe’s debt crisis.
The China manufacturing PMI inched up in September to 47.8 from August’s nine-month low of 47.6, suggesting the world’s second-largest economy remains on track for a seventh quarter of slowing annual growth.
“In order to convert hopes into reality and avoid an outright hard landing, the Chinese authorities have to step up again their accommodative efforts on both the fiscal and the monetary side,” said Nikolaus Keis, economist at UniCredit.
And it’s not just China, as Ben McLannahan of Financial Times reports [via MISH’S Global Economic Trend Analysis]:
Japan recorded another steep fall in exports in August, highlighting the vulnerability of the nation’s finances amid persistently high imports of fuel.
Thursday’s government data showed that shipments slipped almost 6 per cent from a year earlier to Y5tn ($64bn), the third monthly fall in a row, while imports were 5.4 per cent lower at Y5.8tn. The resulting trade deficit of Y754bn was among the widest since last March, when the Fukushima crisis led to the staggered closure of the country’s nuclear reactors.
Adjusted for seasonal variations, Japan has recorded trade deficits in each of the 18 months since the earthquake and tsunami, after decades of more or less uninterrupted surpluses.
A report on Slovenia’s accelerating economic crisis from Deutsche Welle:
Banking regulatory scheme poses dangers
A major plank in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s More Europe agenda, the transfer of banking oversight in the eurozone from individual nations to the European Central bank in Frankfurt could further divide the European Union.
That’s the opinion of the man who’s currently the EU’s top banking regulator.
From John O’Donnell of Reuters:
Plans to create a European banking union risks a supervisory split between countries in the euro zone and those outside, Europe’s top bank regulator said on Wednesday, warning of his concerns about the latest plan to tackle the financial crisis.
Last week, the European Commission unveiled plans for the European Central Bank to supervise all euro zone banks as an initial step towards a banking union, a proposal that has divided opinion within the euro zone and worried neighbouring states who fear their banks will be indirectly affected.
Speaking to lawmakers in the European Parliament, Andrea Enria, the chairman of the European Banking Authority, warned that the Continue reading →
Americans have witnessed firsthand the devastating impacts of Big Box stores on local communities.
Big Boxes are devastating, destroying local businesses, replacing decent community-based full-time benefits-paying jobs with part-time work and no benefits [Wal-Mart workers are provided with food stamp applications when they get their jobs].
It was the Big Box that inflicted the first lethal blow on American community newspapers, long before the Internet delivered the coup de grace, phenomena we witnessed first-hand.
The reason: Big boxes destroyed local merchants, the advertising backbone for community papers, and were then capable of dictating their own advertising rates, further starving the papers of cash.
By the time the Internet came along, community journalism was already reeling.
As one study of Wal-Mart’s impacts on Iowa communities discovered:
[T]he average superstore cost other merchants in the host town about $12 million a year in sales (as of 1995), while stores in smaller towns nearby also suffered substantial revenue losses. These sales losses resulted in the closure of 7,326 Iowa businesses between 1983 and 1993, including 555 grocery stores, 291 apparel stores, and 298 hardware stores. While towns that gained a Wal-Mart store initially experienced a rise in overall retail sales, after the first two or three years, retail sales began to decline. About one in four towns ending up with a lower level of retail activity than they had prior to Wal-Mart’s arrival. Stone attributes this to Wal-Mart’s strategy of saturating regions with multiple stores.
The arrival of the Big Box would devastate India’s community merchants, the backbone of a venerable economic system and create immense economic and social dislocation.
First, a video report from euronews:
And the stories, first from Deutsche Welle:
A wave of strikes has hit India, with shops and businesses closing across the country. The demonstrators oppose the government’s decision to allow foreign retailers such as Walmart and Tesco to enter the Indian market.
>snip<
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the controversial reforms last week, which would allow the world’s three largest retailers – Walmart, Carrefour and Tesco – to invest in India’s supermarket sector. The reforms would also allow foreign investment in aviation and the sale of minority stakes in four state-run companies. The government has also hiked diesel fuel prices by 12 percent in a bid to reduce its budget deficit.
Schools, shops and government offices were shut in some Indian states on Thursday as protesters blocked road and rail traffic as part of a one-day nationwide strike against sweeping economic reforms announced by the government last week.
Many shops and businesses nationwide have closed to protest the reforms
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as well as several regional and leftist parties called the nationwide strike. Protesters demonstrated through the city of Kolkata in West Bengal state, blocking national highways and railways. Activists from the BJP and its allies also gathered at trains stations in Bihar state in north India, forcing train service there to stop.
The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) had forecasted that 50 million people would participate in the protest, with large demonstrations planned in the capital New Delhi and scores of other cities.
Many small business owners and workers fear that the arrival of largescale supermarket chains will lead to drastic job losses as India’s supply chains and shopping habits are transformed.
“Multinational companies will destroy the economic and social fabric Continue reading →
From atop a Global Post story, reporting of the return to the public eye of Vice President Xi Jinping after an unexplained absence that fuelled many a headline:
Chinese leader makes appearance, temporarily dashing hopes for speculative headlines
A superb interview by RT’s Marina Portnaya of veteran New York Times and CBS journalist Jere Van Dyke on the Taliban, the Afghan War, and the deeper political and cultural context of a war the U.S. can never win — in part because the war is being fought against forces the U.S. itself created.
Van Dyke, a graduate of the University of Oregon and a military veteran, was held captive by the Taliban for 45 days, then released without explanation.
The takeaway: The war against the Taliban is something very different than is portrayed so glibly by American politicians, and one that could never be won, as so many other empires found at great cost.
We’re also very impressed with Portnaya, a young journalist whose sharp skills are growing ever-keener.
Her first question, asking Van Dyk what the war on terror looks like through the eyes of the Taliban, drew this response: “No one has ever asked me that. Very, very good question, very interesting question.” Coming from a journalist with Van Dyk’s credentials, that’s high praise indeed.
Known as “The Land of Clouds” of India, Meghalaya, is the Indian state sandwiched between Assam and Bangladesh. It’s also the wettest place on earth, averaging in places 272 inches a year, turning timid streams into raging rivers in the blink of an eye, and making stream crossing a perilous project. But the land’s people came up with a unique solution, the living bridge.
So enjoy this delightful BBC video story of a craft passed down from generation to generation, using nature to solve a crisis created by nature.
Here in the U.S., it’s the driest year in the last half-century and the hottest year ever recorded, a double whammy that’s leading to widespread crop failure and raising the specter, when combined with crops shortages in other countries, of massive unrest in the world’s poorer lands.
Dry weather is also cutting down on harvests in Africa, as the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction reports:
More than two-thirds of Africa’s population lives in rural areas and depend on rain-fed agriculture and pasture, making them highly vulnerable to bouts of extreme dry weather, says ARC, noting that there have been 132 recorded droughts in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990.
This year, drought is causing a crisis in the Sahel, affecting an estimated 18 million people in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Sudan. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says overall Sahelian cereal production is 26 per cent lower than last year, with countries like Chad losing as much as half its cereal crops.
Only a year ago, drought in the Horn of Africa led to a severe food crisis for 10 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda. Britain’s Department for International Development, a major aid provider, says one year after famine was declared 2.5 million people in Somalia — the hardest hit country in the region — are still at risk of chronic food shortages.
And then there’s the Indian subcontinent, where Agence France-Presse reports that the annual monsoon rains arrived late this summer, and they’ve been yielding much less moisture:
The much-romanticised annual downpour that normally sweeps in at the start of June in the far south of the country is a lifeline for. . .about two thirds of the 1.2-billion population who depend on agriculture for their incomes.
But the rains have been so poor that some farmers have decided not to sow crops, spelling more bad news for a slowing economy buffeted by its worst power crisis this week following massive blackouts.
>snip<
Haryana, along with neighbouring Punjab state, is known as the “bread basket” of India, the source of over 60 per cent of food grains such as wheat, maize, rice and pulses that are grown annually.
It has been one of the worst affected this year with 65 per cent less rain than the long-term average, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in New Delhi.
Nation-wide, the monsoon has been more than 20 per cent below its average, sparking fears of drought among farmers who remember vividly the failure of 2009, when India suffered its worst drought in nearly four decades.
The situation has reached extreme levels here in the U.S., breadbasket to the world. Hardest hit has been corn, where demand is driven not only by livestock and human consumption but by the federal ethanol mandate.
Here’s a status report on the drought from Bloomberg’s Brian K. Sullivan:
The two worst levels of drought now grip nearly one-fourth of the lower 48 states, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported.
About 24.1 percent of the region was suffering extreme or exceptional drought in the week ended Aug. 7, up from 22.3 percent in the previous period and 18.3 percent last year, according to the monitor, based in Lincoln, Nebraska.
While there has been some improvement in drought conditions in the Midwest, that wasn’t the case in the Great Plains, Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln said in an accompanying analysis.
>snip<
The drought has helped push corn prices to a record. World food prices have surged 6.2 percent as dryness has also gripped Russia and below-average monsoon rains fell in India.
The primary corn and soybean agriculture areas in the U.S. had their sixth-driest April-July growing season in records dating back to 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.
For an idea of the extent of the crisis, here’s the latest edition of the U.S. Drought Monitor:
Heat wave breaks all previous records
By itself, drought would be bad enough, but then there’s record-breaking heat engulfing the American grain belt.
From Sam Nelson and Deborah Zabarenko of Reuters:
In the throes of a historic drought in the United States, a government agency said on Wednesday that it broke a heat record in July that had stood since the devastating Dust Bowl summer of 1936.
Reeling from widespread crop damage in July, Midwest farmers found some comfort on Wednesday in forecasts for rain over the next 10 days, a prospect that could take the edge off rising grain prices and concerns of food inflation worldwide.
The scorching month of July turned out to be the hottest month in the continental United States on record, beating the hottest month recorded in July 1936, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
The January-to-July period was also the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, and the warmest 12-month period, eclipsing the last record set just a month ago. It was the fourth time in as many months that U.S. temperatures broke the hottest-12-months record, according to NOAA.
“July was a pretty interesting month because there were two different things at play,” Jake Crouch, a climatologist at the agency’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said in an interview. “We saw very warm daytime temperatures over a large part of the country related to the ongoing drought, just as in 1936. When soils are dry, especially during the summer, it drives the daytime temperatures up. But this is a very local effect.”
“On the other side, at the national level, we have also seen very warm nighttime temperatures, and that is part of a long-term trend we’ve seen across the contiguous U.S. over the past several decades,” he said. “The hotter days increase the amount of moisture the lower atmosphere can hold, and this means it doesn’t cool off as much at night anymore.”
“This clearly shows a longer-term warming trend in the U.S., not just one really hot month,” Mr. Crouch said.
The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 213 points in July 2012, as much as 12 points (6 percent) up from June, but still well below the peak of 238 points reached in February 2011. The July surge of the Index followed three months of decline. The sharp rebound was mostly driven by a jump in grain and sugar prices, and more modest Continue reading →
The big news today was Draghi’s non-announcement, but things have been busy elsewhere.
Spain sold some bonds, but it cost them more, while there’s still regional dissent from the latest round of austerian cuts demanded at a time when unemployment soars and the numbers of destitute steadily swells.
From Greece, we’ve got more meetings with the Men in Black, another bit of praise from the IMF boss, some contemplated image doctoring [plus a list of countries that say they’re not Greece], and a bankster busted.
From Cyprus, we’ve got an austerity memorandum in the making plus another bond downgrade, while Britain keeps hands of the priming pump, and a pair offshore giants are taking European hits.
Spanish bonds soar again
Even before Mario Draghi’s less-than-sterling pronouncement Thursday, the market had voted — and the outcome was less than enthusiastic when it came to buying bonds from the country voted most-likely-to-get-the-next-bailout.
From The Independent’s Ciaran Giles:
Spain successfully sold 3.1 billion euros in medium- and long-term bonds today but at a sharply higher cost, another sign that the country is struggling to convince sceptical investors that it won’t need a bailout.
The auction came hours ahead of a European Central Bank meeting at which Spain hopes some measures might be announced that might ease the pressure on its borrowing costs.
The Treasury sold 1.04 billion euro in 10-year bonds at an average interest rate of 6.65 per cent, up from 6.4 per cent in the last such auction July 5. Spain’s 10-year bonds have been fetching similar yields on the secondary market for several months now.
The Treasury also auctioned 1.02 billion euro in four-year bonds at a rate of 5.97 per cent, up from 5.54 per cent. It also sold 1.06 billion euro in two-year bonds on a yield of 4.77 per cent.
Unwilling to impose the newest round of harsh austerity measure on its citizens, the government of Andalusia still held out on the eve of Thursday’s ECB events in Frankfurt.
From El País:
Andalusia on Wednesday continued to rebel against the austerity measures imposed by Finance Minister Cristóbal Montoro and appealed to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to reconsider the debt ceiling imposed on the region, which it claimed would force it to cut basic services.
The Socialist premier of Andalusia, José Antonio Griñán, said the cap on its debt levels of 13.2 percent of GDP for next year meant it could not draw up the regional budget for 2013 without closing schools and hospitals, which would imply having to sack 60,000 workers.
The debt ceiling imposed on Andalusia involves a cut of 1.9 percentage points from current levels, and means that the region will have to cut planned debt issues by 2.7 billion euros, equivalent to a reduction of 10 percent in spending.
“For us, the primary objective is education and any cut in resources impoverishes Spain,” Griñán said.
The regional premier complained that the central government has prioritized taking on debt of up to 100 billion euros from Europe to recapitalize the country’s banks rather than maintaining spending on education and health.
“The privatization of public services is not a saving,” Griñán said. “That’s a lie; it’s an ideological decision.”
Asturias and the Canary Islands voted against the council’s demands. The Basque region also raised heckles.Regional spending was the main reason why Spain last year missed its deficit targets under EU rules: Andalucia and Catalonia between them have a GDP of €346 billion, or 32 percent of the country’s total economy.
Andalucia’s Grinan renewed his attack on the government on Wednesday.
He said at a press conference in Seville, the Andalucian capital, that he would challenge Madrid’s demands in Spain’s Constitutional Court if need be.
The Socialist also fired a political broadside against conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
“This [the proposed cuts] could close 19 hospitals, all of the Andalucian health service, or get rid of 60,000 public workers, one in four of the local governments workforce,” he said at the press event, according to local news agency Europa Press.
“We are taking resources away from health care and education to save the banks, that is intolerable.”
The parallels to the 1930s are growing stronger, with an impoverished state increasingly unable to meet the basic needs of its citizens.
From ANSAmed:
Spain is increasingly poor, the Red Cross said today. The number of people who sought the help of the humanitarian organization for food, clothes or other needs were 100,000 more compared to 2010, according to the Spanish brand of the Red Cross.
The Spanish Red Cross assisted one million people in dire financial conditions due to the crisis only in 2011, the organization said in its ‘social vulnerability’ report released today. Some 82 percent of those Continue reading →
Former New York Times Mideast bureau chief Chris Hedges, fired for speaking out against the invasion of Iraq, talks with Bill Moyers about the devastating impacts of raptor capitalism, the collapse of news media, and much more.
The program notes:
There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.
“These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We’re talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It’s the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”
The broadcast includes images from Hedges’ collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an “unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed.”
A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters — and I’ve seen them in all sorts of news organizations — are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.
A stunning 1974 Peter Davis documentary about the Vietnam War that won the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, event though the film’s distributor blocked U.S. distribution, forcing the producers to rent a Los Angeles theater for the one-week showing to make the film eligible for award consideration.
The film’s title derives from President Lyndon Johnson’s oft-repeated declaration that that victory in Vietnam depended on winning hearts and minds, something neither he nor Richard Nixon could do either in Asia or the U.S.
The most stunning single sequence features an interview with Gen. William Westmoreland, who led the war effort from 1968 to 1972. He told Davis “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
The film is a powerful reminder of American imperial hubris, and especially timely given this bit of recent of news from the Associated Press that hints of a war to come,
The Army Times headlined it “Va. Army mortuary unit deploys to Middle East”:
More than 40 soldiers from Fort Lee are deploying to Kuwait and Afghanistan.
Officials at the Army base near Petersburg say the soldiers from the 111th Quartermaster Company left Wednesday for an at least six-month deployment.
The soldiers are part of one of the Army’s only two active duty mortuary affairs units.
Looks like Uncle Sam is getting ready to win more hearts and minds, an operation that inevitably requires morticians and body bags.
The island nation’s been hit with a double whammy, the enormous costs of the 11 March 2011 earthquake [including the Fukushima nuclear disaster] combined with the global financial collapse.
Now comes a major downgrade for three of the nation’s banks, and for a chilling reason.
From the London Telegraph:
Fitch has cut the credit rating of three of Japan’s biggest banks over concerns about Tokyo’s ability to support the financial sector, after the nation’s sovereign debt rating was also cut.
The ratings agency lowered its rating by one notch to “A-” from “A” – the seventh highest on a 22-rating scale – for Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Mizuho Financial Group (MHFG), and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group.
In the same statement, Fitch said it also lowered its rating for Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank to the same level as the major banks, AFP reported
“The downgrade…reflects the government’s weakened financial ability to support the banking system as indicated by the downgrade of [Japan's sovereign rating],” Fitch said in a statement.
With symptoms of decline already evident in China and India and both Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership and a European free trade agreement on the table, things are about to get really interesting in Japan.
Yep, the North Korean leader has done the unthinkable. He’s ripped off Disney — or so the global media giant claims.
They’ve got proof, too, as shown in this SkyNews clip taken from the state television network:
Deutsche Welle reports on the reaction:
Mickey Mouse and his partner Minnie, Winnie the Pooh and his exuberant pal Tigger and other western cartoon staples danced and sang on stage at the behest of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, with footage from the show shown on state television.
The isolated Korean government apparently did not seek approval from Disney, whose intellectual property featured heavily in a display that would have been unthinkable under former leader Kim Jong Il.
“The Walt Disney company did not license or authorize the use of its characters,” Disney spokeswoman Zenia Mucha said. The live show was complemented by footage from famous Disney movies like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Dumbo” shown on a big screen at the back of the stage.
In this photo released by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and distributed in Tokyo by the Korea News Service on Monday, July 9, 2012, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, center right, and others clap as they watch performance by North Korea’s new Moranbong band in Pyongyang, North Korea, Friday, July 6, 2012.
The US State Department was similarly displeased, with spokesman Patrick Ventrell saying on Tuesday that Pyongyang should honor intellectual property rights. Ventrell also said, however, that owing to the lack of diplomatic ties to North Korea, Washington would not be able to raise the issue as it would with many other countries.
North Korea better watch out, given Disney’s massive clout. After all, every time Mickey Mouse is about to go out of copyright, the Magic Kingdom crowd manages to get new laws and international treaties extending the reach of copyright and trademark terms.
An important documentary by Scott Noble. The Power Principle exposes the hidden agenda driving American foreign policy over the last seven decades and its gruesome consequences.
Historian Michael Parenti calls the film “A gripping, deeply informative account of the plunder, hypocrisy, and mass violence of plutocracy and empire; insightful, historically grounded and highly relevant to the events of today.”
In an interview for Soldiers for the Cause, a veterans group supporting the Occupy movement, filmmaker Noble outlines the theses advanced in his documentary:
The Cold War was not just a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States; the real struggle was between American corporations and the Third World.
Top policy planners in the US and other Western nations were acutely aware that the Soviet Union had a conservative foreign policy. You can see this in numerous declassified documents.
Nevertheless, the American government engaged in what can only be described as a campaign of terrorism against the American people, constantly invoking the “Soviet Menace” to justify military spending and war.
The United States does not have a free press.
The Pentagon is a Keynsian Mechanism.
The American government was responsible for genocide during the Cold War.
The Empire is similar to the mafia.
Corporate interests are inextricably wed with military policy.
American imperialism is not of recent vintage.
Elites deceive themselves as well as the public.
The US is not exceptional. It is behaving pretty much as powerful states always have.
Western elites supported fascism prior to, during and after WWII.
A WWIII scenario is almost inevitable unless the American public wakes up – and fast.
An Introduction to the Empire; Iran – Oil and Geopolitics; Guatemala – the “merger of state and corporate power”; The Congo – Neocolonialism; Grenada – “The Mafia Doctrine”; Chile – “libertarianism with a small l”; Globalization: Consequences.
1945: Grand Area Strategy; Fascism: a “rational system of the plutocracy”; Case Studies: the Greek Communists; The Italian Communists; the Spanish Anarchists; Fascism’s Western backers; Trading with the Enemy; Fascism as “preservation of civilization”; the Cold War and “A Century of Fear”.
The Power Principle – II: Propaganda
The program notes:
The Soviet Menace?; Case Studies: El Salvador, Nicaragua; Propaganda: Self-Deception and blowback; The “International Communist Conspiracy”; Declassified Documents; NSC 68; The Pentagon as Keynsian Mechanism; The Military Industrial Complex; The War against the Third World; Shifting rationales; What is imperialism?; Case Study: Haiti; “War is a racket”.
Fear-based conditioning – The War of the Worlds, The Triumph of the Will; World view Warfare; The Russians are coming; Television: The “perfect propaganda medium”; Soviet vs. American propaganda; Hollywood and the Pentagon; Psywarriors and the media; Operation Mockingbird; The Pentagon Pundits; Project Revere; The Bomber Gap; “scare the hell out of them”.
The Power Principle – III: Apocalypse
The program notes:
Mutually Assured Destruction; MAD men – Curtis Lemay and the super hawks; MAD men – Hermann Kahn and the Rand Corporation; Over flights as provocation; Cuba: the “danger of a good example”; terrorism against Cuba; “Unconventional warfare”; the Cuban Missile Crisis and the “man who saved the world”.
Why did the Soviet Union collapse?; Gorbachev: a “more violent, less stable world”; the Pentagon’s New Map; Did Ronald Reagan end the Cold War?; The Brink of Apocalypse: Able Archer; The betrayal of Russia; The expansion of NATO; Yugoslavia and Libya; the Yeltsin coup; Living standards in the former Soviet Union; A third way?
From Calculated Risk, a history of job recoveries in all the recessions post World-War II. The chart does not compare salaries and benefits paid workers who land those “recovered” jobs:
From Gavyn Davies’ macroeconomic blog at Financial Times, the Institute for Supply Management’s Purchasing Managers Index [defined here], one of the leading indicators of the status of the economy:
And while there’s no chart, there are some numbers in another economic indicator, reported by Erik Wasson of The Hill:
The confidence of the nation’s business leaders in the future of the economy has dropped dramatically, according to a new survey by the Conference Board.
More CEOs surveyed view the economy negatively than positively. Only 17 percent viewed the economy positively in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 67 percent in the first quarter.
Only 20 percent expect an improvement in six months, down from 59 percent.
The survey polls 800 CEOs whose companies are members of the Conference Board. Typically, 80 to 100 CEOs respond, the group says. The results from the new survey are from May and June.
Japan faces the same risks that plague financially-embattled European states, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda warned Saturday, days after he pushed through a divisive tax bill to chip away at the country’s mountainous debt.
Noda’s statement comes a day after leaders from the 17 countries sharing the euro struck a deal to direct emergency measures at Italy and Spain and boost the ailing economy.
“Countries like Italy and Spain have made desperate efforts” towards financial recovery, Noda said.
“But once markets start looking into a country’s fiscal condition and considers its government has no ability to enforce disciplined management, what would happen? We need to think about it very hard.” he told a forum in Tokyo.
Kozo Kiyota, a University of Yokohama social scientist and fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry [RIETI], cites research showing that “On the question of whether income inequality is worsening in Japan, the answer is statistically evident. In every statistic, the trend toward widening disparity can be discerned since the middle of the 1990s.”
While the reasons for the growing disparity are multifold, they could only be exacerbated by the kind of economic crisis now confronting Europe. The Japanese economy has been stagnating, and businesses have been expecting worse for months.
If debt finally sinks a staggering economy, there are lots of assets for the looters to grab.
An illuminating and chilling interview by Sam Seder of Majority Report with Harvard Law grad Lori Wallach from Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch on the rights-destroying secret provisions of Barack Obama’s TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership [previously].
The proposed agreement bans “Buy American” laws, fair trade laws, and a whole host of other regulations designed to protect the environment and save citizens from rapacious banksters, as well as creating a secret tribunal system privatizing enforcement of the treaty and elevating corporations to the status of sovereign citizens. Presiding over the tribunal will be private sector corporate attorneys.
In other words, the Trans-Pacific Partnership combines the worst of NAFTA with the new corporate rights bestowed by Citizens United, the ruling that transferred ultimate control of the American political system to corporate sponsors.
Here are some of the law’s secret provisions, from an Global Trade Watch news release [PDF] issued earlier this month:
Although the TPP has been branded a “trade” agreement, the leaked text of the pact’s Investment Chapter shows that the TPP would:
limit how U.S. federal and state officials could regulate foreign firms operating within U.S. boundaries, with requirements to provide them greater rights than domestic firms;
extend the incentives for U.S. firms to offshore investment and jobs to lower-wage countries;
establish a two-track legal system that gives foreign firms new rights to skirt U.S. courts and laws, directly sue the U.S. government before foreign tribunals and demand compensation for financial, health, environmental, land use and other laws they claim undermine their TPP privileges; and
allow foreign firms to demand compensation for the costs of complying with U.S. financial or environmental regulations that apply equally to domestic and foreign firms.
>snip<
The TPP offered an opportunity to develop a new model of trade agreement that could deliver the benefits of expanded trade without unduly undermining signatory nations’ domestic public interest policies or establishing special privileges for foreign corporations. President Barack Obama and countless members of Congress campaigned on fixing these investment rules to better protect the public interest. But Public Citizen’s analysis of this text shows that the U.S. positions do not reflect any of the changes that candidate Obama pledged when he recognized the threats posed by the NAFTA-style investment provisions in trade agreements.
Barack Obama is giving us lots of Change™ without any of the Hope™.
Anyone who still thinks Obama is a liberal suffers from a serious case of endocrectocraniality.
