The recession is over

The depression has only begun.

Edward Harrison
The Big Picture -

This is an updated version of a post I wrote about two-and-a-half months ago over at Credit Writedowns. When I wrote it, I had been looking for bullish data points as counterfactuals to my bearish long-term outlook. I found some, but not nearly enough.

Early this year, I wrote a post “We are in depression”, which called the ongoing downturn a depression with a small ‘d.’ I was optimistic that policymakers could engineer a fake recovery predicated on stimulus and asset price reflation – and this was bullish for financial shares if not the broader stock market. But, we are witnessing temporary salves for a deeper structural problem.

So my goal was to find data which disproved my original thesis. But, I came away more convinced that we are in a tenuous cyclical upturn. This post will discuss why we are in a depression, not a recession and what this means about likely future economic and investing paths. I pull together a number of threads from previous posts, so it is pretty long. I have shortened it in order to pull all of the ideas into one post. So, please read the linked posts for background as I left out a lot of the detail in order to create this narrative.

Let’s start here then with the crux of the issue: debt.

Deep recession rooted in structural issues

Back in my first post at Credit Writedowns in March 2008, I said that the U.S. was already in a recession, the only question being how deep and how long. The issue was and still is overconsumption i.e. levels of consumption supported only by increase in debt levels and not by future earnings. This is the core of our problem – debt.

I see the debt problem as an outgrowth of pro-growth, anti-recession macroeconomic policy which developed as a reaction to the 1970s lost decade trauma in the U.S. and the U.K.. The 70s was a low growth, high inflation ride that generated poor market returns. The U.K. became the sick man of Europe and labor strife brought the economy to its knees. For the U.S., we saw the resignation of an American President and the humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis.

In essence, after the inflationary outcome that many saw as an outgrowth of the Samuelson-Keynesianism of the 1960s and 1970s, the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1990s ushered in a more ‘free-market’ orientation in macroeconomic policy. The key issue was government intervention. Policy makers following Samuelson (more so than Keynes himself) have stressed the positive effect of government intervention, pointing to the Great Depression as animus, and the New Deal, and World War II as proof. Other economists (notably Milton Friedman, and later Robert Lucas) have stressed the primacy of markets, pointing to the end of Bretton Woods, the Nixon Shock and stagflation as counterfactuals. They point to the Great Moderation and secular bull market of 1982-2000 as proof. This is a divisive and extremely political issue, in which the two sides have been labeled Freshwater and Saltwater economists (see my post “Freshwater versus saltwater circa 1988”).

However, just as the policy of the 1950s to the 1970s was not really Keynesian ( see what Richard Posner says about Keynes’ General Theory and you will see why), the 1980s-2000 was not really an era of ‘free markets.’ I call it deregulation as crony capitalism. What this has meant in practice is that the well-connected, particularly in the financial services industry, have won out over the middle classes (a view I take up in “A populist interpretation of the latest boom-bust cycle”). In fact, hourly earnings peaked over 35 years ago in the United States when adjusting for inflation.

The 1970s was a difficult period in which the U.K. and the U.S. saw jobs vanish in key industrial sectors. To stop the rot and effectively mask the lack of income growth by average workers, a new engine of growth had to be found. Enter the financial sector. The financialization of the American and British economies began in the 1980s, greatly increasing the size and impact of the financial sector (see Kevin Phillips’ book “Bad Money”). The result was an enormous increase in debt, especially in the financial sector.

This debt problem was made manifest repeatedly during financial crises of the era. Not all of these crises were American – most were abroad and merely facilitated by an increase in credit, liquidity, and international capital movement. In March 2008, I wrote in my third post on the US economy in 2008:

From the very beginning, the excess liquidity created by the U.S. Federal Reserve created an excess supply of money, which repeatedly found its way through hot money flows to a mis-allocation of investment capital and an asset bubble somewhere in the global economy. In my opinion, the global economy continued to grow above trend through to the new millennium because these hot money flows created bubbles only in less central parts of the global economy (Mexico in 1994-95, Thailand and southeast Asia in 1997, Russia and Brazil in 1998, and Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in 2001-03). But, this growth was unsustainable as the global imbalances mounted.

Eventually, the debt burdens became too large and resulted in the housing meltdown and the concomitant collapse of the financial sector, a problem that our policymakers should have foreseen and the reason my blog is named Credit Writedowns. Make no mistake, the housing and writedown problems are only symptoms; the real problem is the debt – specifically an overly indebted private sector (note the phrase ‘private sector’ as I will return to this topic).

This is a depression, not a recession

When debt is the real issue underlying an economic downturn, the result is either Great Depression-like collapse or a period of stagnation and short business cycles as we have seen in Japan over the last two decades. This is what a modern-day depression looks like – a series of W’s where uneven economic growth is punctuated by fits of recession.

A garden-variety recession is merely a period of recalibration after businesses get ahead of themselves by overestimating consumption demand and are then forced to cut back by making staff redundant, paring back inventories and cutting capacity. Recessions can be overcome with the help of automatic stabilizers like unemployment insurance to cushion the blow.

Depression is another event entirely. Back in February, I highlighted a blurb from David Rosenberg which summed up the differences between recession and depression pretty well.

Recessions are typically characterized by inventory cycles – 80% of the decline in GDP is typically due to the de-stocking in the manufacturing sector. Traditional policy stimulus almost always works to absorb the excess by stimulating domestic demand. Depressions often are marked by balance sheet compression and deleveraging: debt elimination, asset liquidation and rising savings rates. When the credit expansion reaches bubble proportions, the distance to the mean is longer and deeper. Unfortunately, as our former investment strategist Bob Farrell’s Rule #3 points out, excesses in one direction lead to excesses in the opposite direction.

The day after I highlighted Ray Dalio’s version of this story which added some more color. Notice the part about printing money and devaluing the currency if the debt is in your own currency.

… economies go through a long-term debt cycle — a dynamic that is self-reinforcing, in which people finance their spending by borrowing and debts rise relative to incomes and, more accurately, debt-service payments rise relative to incomes. At cycle peaks, assets are bought on leverage at high-enough prices that the cash flows they produce aren’t adequate to service the debt. The incomes aren’t adequate to service the debt. Then begins the reversal process, and that becomes self-reinforcing, too. In the simplest sense, the country reaches the point when it needs a debt restructuring…

This has happened in Latin America regularly. Emerging countries default, and then restructure. It is an essential process to get them economically healthy.

We will go through a giant debt-restructuring, because we either have to bring debt-service payments down so they are low relative to incomes — the cash flows that are being produced to service them — or we are going to have to raise incomes by printing a lot of money.

It isn’t complicated. It is the same as all bankruptcies, but when it happens pervasively to a country, and the country has a lot of foreign debt denominated in its own currency, it is preferable to print money and devalue…

The Federal Reserve went out and bought or lent against a lot of the debt. That has had the effect of reducing the risk of that debt defaulting, so that is good in a sense. And because the risk of default has gone down, it has forced the interest rate on the debt to go down, and that is good, too.

However, the reason it hasn’t actually produced increased credit activity is because the debtors are still too indebted and not able to properly service the debt. Only when those debts are actually written down will we get to the point where we will have credit growth. There is a mortgage debt piece that will need to be restructured. There is a giant financial-sector piece — banks and investment banks and whatever is left of the financial sector — that will need to be restructured. There is a corporate piece that will need to be restructured, and then there is a commercial-real-estate piece that will need to be restructured.

The Fake Recovery

So where are we, then? We are in a fake recovery that could last as long as three or four years or could peter out very quickly in a double dip recession. You may have seen my April post on the fake recovery. Read it. I won’t cover that ground here. However, I will highlight how I came to believe in the fake recovery and how asset prices have played into this period (the S&L crisis played out nearly the same way). I see writedowns as core to the transmission mechanism of debt and credit problems to the real economy via reduced supply and demand for credit. Again, this is why my site is called Credit Writedowns.

In March, at the depths of the downturn I wrote:

The problem is the writedowns. You see, if you get $30 billion in capital from the government, but lose another $40 billion because of credit writedowns and loan losses, you aren’t going to be lending any money. To me, that says the downturn will only end when the massive writedowns end, not before.

The U.S. government has finally realized this and is now moving to stem the tide. Their efforts point in four directions:

1. Increase asset prices. If the assets on the balance sheets of banks are falling, then why not buy them at higher prices and stop the bloodletting? This is the purpose of the TALF, Obama’s mortgage relief program and the original purpose of the TARP.
2. Increase asset prices. If assets on the balance sheet are falling, why not eliminate the accounting rules that are making them fall? Get rid of marking-to-market. This is the purpose of the newly proposed FASB accounting rule change.
3. Increase asset prices. If asset prices on the balance sheet are falling, why not reduce interest rates so that the debt payments which are crushing debtors ability to finance those assets are reduced? This is why short-term interest rates are near zero.
4. Increase asset prices. If asset prices on the balance sheet are falling, why not create Public-Private partnerships to buy up those assets at prices which reflect their longer-term value? This is what Geithner’s Capital Assistance Program is designed to do.

So I lied, there is only one direction the government is headed: increase asset prices (or, at least keep them from falling). Read White House Economic Advisor Larry Summers’ recent prepared remarks to see what I mean. (Summers on How to Deal With a ‘Rarer Kind of Recession’ – WSJ)

I was more on target in my thinking here than I could have known. The mark-to-market model died and mark-to-make believe began. It was then that I knew a recovery was likely to take hold. And it was going to be bullish for bank stocks and the broader market. What you should realize is that, despite the remaining problems in credit cards, commercial real estate or high yield loans, limiting credit growth, the changes instituted by government definitely have meant 1. that banks will earn a shed load of money and 2. that house price declines have stalled, underpinning the asset base of lenders. This necessarily means an end to massive writedowns, a firming of banks’ capital base, and a reduction in private sector deleveraging. And the recent brouhaha over Citi’s favorable tax deal in exiting TARP should tell you the government will stop at nothing to keep accounting favorable for the big banks.

As for the recent asset-based economic reflation, be under no illusion that these measures ‘solve’ the problem. The toxic assets are still toxic and banks are still under-capitalized. But increased asset values and the end of huge writedowns has underpinned the banks and led to a rise in the broader market in a feedback loop that has been far greater than I could have imagined at this stage in the economic cycle.

The double dip or the economic boom?

So what’s next? A lot of the economic cycle is self-reinforcing (the change in inventories is one example). So it is not completely out of the question that we see a multi-year economic boom. Higher asset prices, lower inventories, fewer writedowns all lead to higher lending capacity, higher cyclical output, more employment opportunities and greater business and consumer confidence. If employment turns up appreciably before these cyclical agents lose steam, you have the makings of a multi-year recovery. This is how every economic cycle develops. This one is no different in this regard.

Now, I have turned slightly more dour of late and see a double dip as more likely in the medium-term. Longer-term, things depend on government because we are in a balance sheet recession. Ray Dalio and David Rosenberg make this case well in the previous quotes I supplied, but it was a post about Richard Koo from Prieur du Plessis which originally got me to write this post. His post, “Koo: Government fulfilling necessary function” reads as follows:

According to Koo, American consumers are suffering from a balance sheet problem and will not increase consumption until their personal finances are back in order. The banks are not lending mainly because nobody wants to borrow and, furthermore, the banks want to build their own balance sheets (raise cash) and get rid of toxic garbage…

Again, when asked what would happen if the government cuts back on its fiscal stimulus, Koo replies: “Until the private sector is finished repairing its balance sheets, if the government tries to cut its spending, we’re going to fall into the same trap Franklin Roosevelt fell into in 1937 (a crushing bear market) and Prime Minister Hashimoto fell into in 1997, exactly 70 years later.

“The economy will collapse again and the second collapse is usually far worse than the first. And the reason is that, after the first collapse, people tend to blame themselves. They say, ‘I shouldn’t have played the bubble. I shouldn’t have borrowed money to invest – to speculate on these things.’

I wrote last November that if government stops the support, recession is going to happen.

The U.S. economy cannot possibly work itself out of the greatest financial crisis in some 70-odd years in a mere 4 years and then expect to raise taxes on the middle class without a major recessionary relapse.

So, when you hear policy makers talking about reducing the deficit as soon as possible, what you should think is 1938 and continued depression.

Right now, if you listen to what President Obama is likely to do, you know that the government prop for the economy is going to be taken away. Get ready because the second dip will occur. It will be nasty: unemployment will be higher and stocks will go lower than in 2009. I The question now is one of timing: when will the government stop propping up the economy? The more robust the recovery, the quicker the prop ends and the sooner we get a second leg down.

So to recap:

1. A depression was borne out of high levels of private sector debt, the unsustainability of which became apparent after a financial crisis.
2. The effects of this depression have been lessened by economic stimulus and government support.
3. Government intervention led to a reduction in asset price declines, which led to stock market increases, which led to asset price stabilization and more stock market increases and eventually to asset price increases. This has led to a false sense that green shoots are leading to a sustainable recovery.
4. In reality, the problems of high debt levels in the private sector and an undercapitalized financial system are still lurking, waiting for the government to withdraw its economic support to become realized
5. Because large scale government deficit spending is politically unpalatable and unsustainable over the long-term, expect a second economic dip within three to four years at the latest.

Why is government spending key?

The government plays a crucial role here because of the huge private sector indebtedness. In the U.S. and the U.K., the public sector is not nearly as indebted. So while, the private sector rebuilds its savings and reduces debt, the public sector can pick up the slack. Marshall Auerback says it best in a recent post:

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. As a matter of national accounting, the domestic private sector cannot increase savings unless and until foreign or government sectors increase deficits. Call this the tyranny of double entry bookkeeping: the government’s deficit equals by identity the non-government’s surplus.

So, if the US private sector is to rebuild its balance sheet by spending less than its income, the government will have to spend more than its tax revenue. The only other possibility is that the rest of the world stops saving on a massive scale — letting the US run a current account surplus. But that is highly implausible and socially undesirable, since it means we export our economic output, rather than consume it domestically. And if the government deficit does not grow fast enough to meet the saving needs of the private domestic sector, national income will decline, which, given the size of the private sector’s debt problem, will generate a huge debt deflation.

This is the foundation of modern monetary theory. Would that the IMF and the G20 understood these basic facts.

If the private sector is a net saver, the public sector must run a deficit. The only other way to prevent the government from running a deficit when the private sector is net saving is to run huge current account surpluses by exporting your way out of recession – what Germany and Japan tried in the 1990s and in this decade.

However, I must admit to having a preternatural disaffection for large deficits and big government which is what Koo and Minsky advise respectively. It is this knee-jerk aversion to what is viewed as fiscal profligacy which makes it likely that the government prop will be taken away inducing another downturn.

So, what does this mean for the American and global economy?

1. The private sector (particularly households) is overly indebted. The level of debt households now carry cannot be supported by income at the present levels of consumption. The natural tendency, therefore, is toward more saving and less spending in the private sector (although asset price appreciation can attenuate this through the Wealth Effect). That necessarily means the public sector must run a deficit or the import-export sector must run a surplus.
2. Most countries are in a state of economic weakness. That means consumption demand is constrained globally. There is no chance that the U.S. can export its way out of recession without a collapse in the value of the U.S. dollar. That leaves the government as the sole way to pick up the slack.
3. Since state and local governments are constrained by falling tax revenue (see WSJ article) and the inability to print money, only the Federal Government can run large deficits.
4. Deficit spending on this scale is politically unacceptable and will come to an end as soon as the economy shows any signs of life (say 2 to 3% growth for one year). Therefore, at the first sign of economic strength, the Federal Government will raise taxes and/or cut spending. The result will be a deep recession with higher unemployment and lower stock prices.
5. Meanwhile, all countries which issue the vast majority of debt in their own currency (U.S, Eurozone, U.K., Switzerland, Japan) will inflate. They will print as much money as they can reasonably get away with. While the economy is in an upswing, this will create a false boom, predicated on asset price increases. This will be a huge bonus for hard assets like gold, platinum or silver. However, when the prop of government spending is taken away, the global economy will relapse into recession.
6. I believe this dynamic will induce a Scylla and Charybdis of inflationary and deflationary forces, forcing central bankers to add and withdraw liquidity in a manic way. The likely volatility in government spending and taxation gives you the makings of a depression shaped like a series of W’s consisting of short and uneven business cycles. The secular force is the D-process and the deleveraging, so I expect deflation to be the resulting secular trend more than inflation.
7. Needless to say, this kind of volatility will induce a wave of populist sentiment, leading to an unpredictable and violent geopolitical climate and the likelihood of more muscular forms of government.
8. From an investing standpoint, consider this a secular bear market for stocks then. Play the rallies, but be cognizant that the secular trend for the time being is down. The Japanese example which we are now tracking is a best case scenario.

That’s my thesis. What’s your view?

Former head of CDC lands lucrative job as president of Merck vaccine division

Mike Adams
NaturalNews -

You've heard it before, how the pharmaceutical industry has a giant "revolving door" through which corporations and government agencies frequently exchange key employees. That reality was driven home in a huge way today when news broke that Dr. Julie Gerberding, who headed the CDC from 2002 through 2009, landed a top job with Merck, one of the largest drug companies in the world. Her job there? She's the new president of the vaccine division.

How convenient. That means the former head of the CDC was very likely cultivating a relationship with Merck all these years, and now comes the big payoff: Heading up a $5 billion division that sells cervical cancer vaccines (like Gardasil), chickenpox vaccines and of course H1N1 swine flu vaccines, too.

So what's the problem with all this? The problem is that private industry and government health offices such as the CDC or FDA should never be so cozy. When they are, it creates an environment of collusion between Big Government and Big Pharma. We've already seen this with the government-led push for swine flu vaccines that are manufactured (and sold) by drug companies like Merck.

You might even say that the CDC already functions as the marketing division of the pharmaceutical industry. It was the CDC that pushed so hard for swine flu vaccines, even amid the obvious realization that swine flu was no more dangerous than seasonal flu. To this day, the CDC still hasn't bothered to recommend vitamin D for the prevention of either seasonal flu or swine flu. It remains heavily invested in the lucrative vaccine approach -- an approach that just happens to financially benefit the very corporations that are hiring ex-CDC employees like Dr. Gerberding.

How to triple your salary by selling out to industry

Getting a job offer from Big Pharma, by the way, is one of the most-desired career paths for many CDC employees (and FDA workers, for that matter). It's easy to accomplish it, too: Just operate in your government position as if you were a Big Pharma lackey. If you produce enough good business for the drug industry, sooner or later they'll offer you a lucrative position that doubles or triples your government salary (or even better).

Now, I don't want to lump all CDC employees in this same pathetic group, because there are indeed a great many bright, honest scientists working at the CDC who do excellent work tracking pandemics and trying to save lives. They are overshadowed, however, by those ambitious profit seekers who see their CDC job as merely a stepping stone for a far better-paying job at a major drug companies. And by any measure, Dr. Gerberding just cashed in big.

Her actual salary at Merck hasn't been publicly released yet, but given that she's heading up a $5 billion vaccine industry, it's probably not chump change. I'd bet she's now making at least ten times the salary of the President of the United States (and probably a lot more).

So now, Dr. Gerberding's new job involves the incessant promotion of yet more vaccines -- a job not very different from the one she held at the CDC, come to think of it. More vaccines for more diseases afflicting more people... it's just another day at Merck, where the world is never so healthy that it doesn't need one more mandatory vaccine.

As a special bonus to Merck in all this, Dr. Gerberding has a wealth of contacts not merely throughout the CDC, but also at the World Health Organization. When you're the former head of the CDC, the top public health officials of the world are literally just one call away. But starting today, that call is a commercial, corporate-sponsored call, not a public health call. There's a huge difference.

Does Dr. Gerberding suffer from an "ethics deficiency?"

My question in all this is whether Dr. Gerberding has any real ethics when it comes to issues like vaccines and public health. If she does have such ethics, why would she accept a job with a company that has been engaged in outright scientific fraud? (http://www.naturalnews.com/027582_M...)

Why would she go to work for a company that maintained a "hit list" of doctors to attack and "neutralize?" This is true -- it came out in recent court documents (http://www.naturalnews.com/027116_M...).

Why would she take a job with a company that has a pattern of threatening doctors who speak out against its drugs? (http://www.naturalnews.com/026420_M...)

Why would she be okay with the idea of working for a company that commits scientific fraud by hiding documents showing its drugs to be dangerous? (http://www.naturalnews.com/024072_Z...)

Why would she feel okay about working for a company that dumps chemicals and vaccine waste products into the public water system? (http://www.naturalnews.com/023124_w...)

Why would she want to collect a paycheck from a company that has been caught hiring ghost writers to pen "independent" science papers submitted to science journals, when they were actually crafted by Merck? (http://www.naturalnews.com/023052_M...)

Why would she feel comfortable representing a company that committed blatant scientific fraud with its Vytorin cholesterol drug study? (http://www.naturalnews.com/022485_s...)

Maybe Dr. Gerberding is fine with all this. Maybe she has really "flexible" ethics. Or maybe she suffers from an "ethics deficiency" -- an epidemic disease for which Merck apparently has no vaccine at all.

In any case, she's now allied herself with a company engaged in so many repeated acts of fraud that in my opinion all its executives should be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Those executives will now include Dr. Gerberding, it seems.

Did the CDC cover Merck's back?

You might say, though, that she hasn't done anything yet for Merck. But check this out: As a previous NaturalNews story explains, when a fourteen-year-old girl named Jessica died following a cervical cancer vaccine injection (made by Merck), the CDC covered for Merck and pointed the finger at the girl's birth control pills.

Care to guess who was heading the CDC at the time of this maneuver? Dr. Julie Gerberding, now a top Merck executive.

You pat my back and I'll pat yours.

For years, under the lead of Dr. Gerberding, the CDC has maintained a rather bizarre position that Merck's vaccines are so safe that all side effects should be dismissed outright. This is explained in a Dallas Morning News article (http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon...), among other places.

The CDC, in other words, has been running defense for Merck for many years, downplaying vaccine side effects and insisting that Merck's vaccines are safe. Now that the president of Merck's vaccine division and the former chief of the CDC are one and the same, it brings up obvious questions of whether there was some level of ongoing collusion between the CDC and Merck and how deeply Dr. Gerberding might have been involved.

Some of the word games played by Dr. Gerberding demonstrate amazing Clintonian-like speech patterns designed to deflect blame from Merck's vaccines. Listen to this exchange where Dr. Gerberding indirectly admits that vaccines can cause autism (or as she says, "Autism-like symptoms," which is exactly the same thing, as the symptoms define the disease in the first place). Watch it yourself in this segment on YouTube -- this is a must see video segment on the link between vaccines and autism:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dh-n...

Who else is on the Merck team at the CDC?

That the CDC's chief would be offered one of the very top jobs at Merck now makes me wonder just how deep the culture of collusion between Merck and the CDC really goes. How many other CDC employees are in line for future job offers from Merck -- and what might they do in order to win those jobs?

There's a solution to all this, of course: Pass a law that bans employees of the CDC, FDA, FTC, EPA or USDA from ever working for pharmaceutical companies. The people who run the regulatory agencies and public health offices should never be allowed to leap into employment at the very same companies they were once regulating. There's just too much risk of cross-contamination of influence, which is why we have the corruption and collusion problems we're seeing today with the FDA, FTC and CDC, all of which seem to be operating as marketing extensions of the pharmaceutical industry.

As long as the revolving door remains wide open between Big Pharma and Big Government, there will be a strong tendency towards corporate collusion that betrays the people whom government is supposed to serve. Instead of our government serving the People, in other words, it increasingly exists to serve the interests of Big Business. And big business doesn't get much bigger than Big Pharma.

After all, inventing fictitious disease, creating pandemic panics, then selling questionable patented drugs to gullible consumers is a lucrative business model. And now the official job of the former head of the CDC is to make sure it all stays that way. So roll up your sleeves, folks: There's a vaccine with your name on it, and Dr. Gerberding is here to make sure Merck sticks it to ya.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.naturalnews.com/023792_H...

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon...

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS...

Trail of Afghanistan's drug money exposed

Julien Mercille
Asia Times -

As United States President Barack Obama and his advisors debated future troop levels for Afghanistan - which resulted in the decision to send an additional 30,000 troops - a new report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) muddied the water on one of the most important issues in the debate - the effects of Afghanistan's drug production.

The report, entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium," gives the false impression that the Taliban are the main culprits behind Afghanistan's skyrocketing drug production. It also implies that drugs are the main reason why the Taliban are gaining in strength, absolving the United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency.

In fact, the United States and its Afghan allies bear a large share of responsibility for the drug industry's dramatic expansion since the invasion. Buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reduced levels of drug production would have little effect on the insurgency's vigor.

The following annotation rebuffs some of the report's main assertions, puts in perspective the Taliban's role in the opium economy and highlights US/NATO responsibility for its expansion and potential reduction.

Taliban insurgents draw some US$125 million annually from drugs, which is more money than 10 years ago, [and as a result] the perfect storm of drugs and terrorism, that has struck the Afghan/Pakistani border for years, may be heading towards Central Asia. A big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources.

These claims are supposed to make us shudder in the face of an impending narco-terrorist seizure of a large chunk of the world's energy resources. UNODC states that a decade ago the Taliban earned $85 million per year from drugs, but that since 2005 this figure has jumped to $125 million. Although this is pitched as a significant increase, the Taliban play a more minor role in the opium economy than UNODC would have us believe and drug money is probably a secondary source of funding for them. Indeed, the report estimates that only 10-15% of Taliban funding is drawn from drugs and 85% comes from "non-opium sources".

The total revenue generated by opiates within Afghanistan is about $3.4 billion per year. Of this figure, according to UNODC, the Taliban get only 4% of the sum. Farmers, meanwhile, get 21%.

And the remaining 75%? Al-Qaeda? No: The report specifies that it "does not appear to have a direct role in the Afghan opiates trade," although it may participate in "low-level drugs and/or arms smuggling" along the Pakistani border.

Instead, the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers - in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade.

The New York Times recently revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother, has long been on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) payroll, in addition to his probable shady dealings in drugs. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as US and NATO forces have long supported warlords, commanders and illegal militias with a record of human-rights abuses and involvement in narcotics. A former CIA officer said, "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade." According to a New York University report, General Nazri Mahmad, a warlord who "control[s] a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium industry," has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team.

UNODC insists on making the Taliban-drugs connection front-page news while not chasing with the same intensity those supported by Washington. The agency seems to be acting as an enabler of US/NATO policies in Afghanistan.

When I asked the UNODC official who supervised the report what percentage of total drug income in Afghanistan was captured by government officials, the reply was quick: "We don't do that, I don't know."

Instead of pointing a finger directly at the US/NATO-backed government, the report gives the impression that the problem lies mostly with rotten apples who threaten an otherwise well-intentioned government.

But the roots of Afghanistan's upsurge in drug production since 2001 are directly related to US policies and the government that was installed in the wake of the invasion. The United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, in alliance with anti-Taliban warlords and drug lords, showering them with millions of dollars and other forms of support. The empowerment and enrichment of the warlords with whom the US allied itself enabled them to tax and protect opium traffickers, leading to the quick resumption of opium production after the hiatus of the 2000 Taliban ban.

To blame "corruption" and "criminals" for the state of affairs is to ignore the direct and predictable effects of US policies, which have simply followed a historical pattern of toleration and empowerment of local drug lords in the pursuit of broader foreign policy objectives, as Alfred McCoy and others have documented in detail.

Impunity for drug lords and warlords continues: a US Senate report noted in August that no major traffickers have been arrested in Afghanistan since 2006, and that successful prosecutions of significant traffickers are often overturned by a simple bribe or protection from above, revealing counter-narcotics efforts to be deficient at best.

Identifying drugs as the main cause behind Taliban advances absolves the US/NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency: their very presence in the country, as well as their destructive attacks on civilians account for a good deal of the recent increase in popular support for the Taliban.

In fact, buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reducing drug production would have only "minimal impact on the insurgency's strategic threat". The Taliban receive "significant funding from private donors all over the world", a contribution which "dwarfs" drug money. Although the report will be publicized by many as a vindication of calls to target the opium economy in order to weaken the Taliban, the authors themselves are not convinced of the validity of this argument.

Of the $65 billion turnover of the global market for opiates, only 5-10% ($3-5 billion) is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems. The rest is laundered through legal trade activities and the banking system.

This is an important claim that points to the enormous amounts of drug money swallowed by the world financial system, including Western banks.

The report says that over the last seven years (2002-2008), the transnational trade in Afghan opiates resulted in worldwide sales of $400-$500 billion (retail value). Only 5-10% of this is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems (such as hawala). The remainder is laundered through the legal economy, and importantly, through Western banks.

In fact, Antonio Maria Costa was quoted as saying that drug money may have recently rescued some failing banks: "Interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities", and there were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way". "At a time of major bank failures, money doesn't smell, bankers seem to believe," he wrote in UNODC's 2009 World Drug Report (emphasis in original).

Afghanistan has the world monopoly of opium cultivation (92%), the raw material for the world's deadliest drug - heroin, [which is] causing up to 100,000 deaths per year.

Tobacco is the world's deadliest drug, not heroin, and kills about five million people every year. According to the World Health Organization, if present tobacco consumption patterns continue, the number of deaths will increase to 10 million by the year 2020. Some 70% of these will be in developing countries, which are the main target of the tobacco industry's marketing ploys. So why does the Taliban get more flak than tobacco companies?

The report estimates there are 16 million opiate users across the world, with the main consumer market being Europe, valued at $20 billion. Europeans are thus the main source of funding for the Afghan drug industry and their governments share a significant part of responsibility for failing to decrease demand and provide more treatment services within their own borders. Lowering drug use in Europe would contribute significantly to reducing the scale of the problem in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the report notes that NATO member Turkey is a "central hub" through which Afghan opiates reach Europe. Perhaps NATO should direct its efforts towards its own members before targeting the Taliban.

Some Taliban networks may be involved at the level of precursor procurement. These recent findings support the assertion that the Taliban network is more involved in drug trafficking than previously thought.

Yes, the Taliban surely take a cut out of the precursor trade (the chemicals needed to refine opium into products like heroin and morphine).

However, Western countries and some of their allies are also involved: The report identified "Europe, China and the Russian Federation" as "major acetic anhydride sources for Afghanistan". For instance, 220 liters of acetic anhydride were intercepted this year at Kabul airport, apparently originating from France. In recent years, chemicals have also been shipped from or via the Republic of Korea and UNODC's 2008 Afghan Opium Survey pointed to Germany as a source of precursors.

It is unclear what the total value of the Afghan trade in chemical precursors is, but from the report's data it can be inferred that the retail value of just one precursor, acetic anhydride, was about $450 million this year. Part of that money goes back to Western chemical corporations in the form of profits. Tighter safeguards should be in place on these products.

Areas of opium poppy cultivation and insecurity correlate geographically. In 2008, 98% of opium poppy cultivation took place in southern and western Afghanistan, the least secure regions.

UNODC associates drugs with the Taliban by pointing to the fact that most poppy cultivation takes places in regions where the Taliban are concentrated. Maps show "poppy-free" provinces in the north and a concentration of cultivation in the southern provinces, linking the Taliban with drugs.

It is true that cultivation is concentrated in the south, but such maps obscure the fact that there is plenty of drug money in the north, a region over which the Afghan government has more control. For instance, Balkh province may be poppy-free, but its center, Mazar-i Sharif, is awash in drug money. Nangarhar was also poppy-free in 2008, although it still remains a province where a large amount of opiates is trafficked.

Some Western officials are now implying that political elites in northern Afghanistan are engaging in successful counter-narcotics while the southern drug economy expands. But the fact is that although the commanders who control northern Afghanistan today may have eliminated cultivation, none have moved against trafficking. Most of them continue to profit from it, and some are believed to have become millionaires.

Spy Drones To Enforce CO2 Regulations

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, December 21, 2009

President Barack Obama has said that spy drones will be used to enforce CO2 emission regulations, while British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has outlined plans for the European Union to police compliance with carbon-cutting targets.

The final Copenhagen Accord included the provision that a global “governance structure” would be set up to control taxes on CO2 emissions and this is already starting to take shape after Gordon Brown announced that he is drawing up plans with French President Sarkozy for the EU to become a global warming policeman.

“Mr Brown and French President Nicholas Sarkozy now are working proposals for a “European monitoring organisation” that will oversee every country’s actions on emissions,” reports the Telegraph.

“I will work with President Sarkozy for a European organisation that will monitor the transparency that is being achieved not just in Europe and our own countries, but in every country around the world,” said Brown, adding, “I think people deserve for there to be international reporting at the highest standards of what is being done.”

In addition, President Barack Obama said that satellite technology would be used to check if countries like China are living up to their promises to cut CO2, a move that has been termed “eco-spying”. New advancements allow drones to monitor greenhouse gas emissions over a certain geographical area.

“We can actually monitor what takes place through satellite imagery and so forth, so I think we are going to have a pretty good idea of what people are doing,” said Obama.

“It is hoped that the use of satellite imagery will increase pressure on every country to do their part once targets are eventually in place,” according to the Telegraph.

While this will inevitably pose highly problematic geopolitical flash points in the short term, specifically with regard to U.S. satellites snooping on China, one can only imagine the long term implications of such measures on an individual level.

Governments are already announcing laws to track and trace every mile we travel via black boxes in our cars.

In future, is every business going to be assigned its own individual spy drone to monitor and report on its CO2 emissions?

In a wider sense, this is all geared towards further crushing any notion of border integrity or national sovereignty in pursuit of a global government authority to rule over all countries, zealously enforcing draconian CO2 reduction targets that will bankrupt richer countries while completely devastating the third world, leading to untold poverty and millions more deaths as a result of skyrocketing food prices.

Dred Scott Redux: Obama and the Supremes Stand Up for Slavery

I'm not even going to warn the neocons anymore. I don't care. It's just staring at them right in the face, and they can't get the idea out of their heads that only Muslim jihadists are terrorists. I can't get them to see that the government's new definition of "terrorist" is whoever they decide they feel like labeling a terrorist, at which point whichever poor soul they've chosen as their victim essentially ceases to be human and has no rights under any constitution or international accord. And the tragedy is, many of these imbeciles are so-called tea party activists and wanna-be libertarians of the Glenn Beck stripe (read: neocons), who think they're waging a battle for liberty when in fact they're shilling for Nazism. So when they're engaging in low level terrorism, and they're scooped up by the thought police and never heard from again, it will likely never occur to them that they helped facilitate the very policy that led to their own demise, because they were too naive and ignorant of history to think that their government might actually do something of the sort.

I hope there are people out there who have more patience, and maybe are more persuasive than I, who can get through to maybe a handful of these people. Knock yourself out. You're a better person than I. I can't be bothered anymore. Let them be tossed into camps. Let them be tortured. They asked for it.

Empire Burlesque -

While we were all out doing our Christmas shopping, the highest court in the land quietly put the kibosh on a few more of the remaining shards of human liberty.


It happened earlier this week, in a discreet ruling that attracted almost no notice and took little time. In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.

Here's how the bad deal went down. After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

This extraordinary ruling occasioned none of those deep-delving "process stories" that glut the pages of the New York Times, where the minutiae of policy-making or political gaming is examined in highly-spun, microscopic detail doled out by self-interested insiders. Obviously, giving government the power to render whole classes of people "unpersons" was not an interesting subject for our media arbiters. It was news that wasn't fit to print. Likewise, the ruling provoked no thundering editorials in the Washington Post, no savvy analysis from the high commentariat -- and needless to say, no outrage whatsoever from all our fierce defenders of individual liberty on the Right.

But William Fisher noticed, and gave this report at Antiwar.com:



In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal Monday to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees’ lawyers charged Tuesday that the country’s highest court evidently believes that "torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use."

...Channeling their predecessors in the George W. Bush administration, Obama Justice Department lawyers argued in this case that there is no constitutional right not to be tortured or otherwise abused in a U.S. prison abroad.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By agreeing, the court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court, which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – a statute that applies by its terms to all "persons" – did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law.

The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that "torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants."



The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of "national emergency." And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.

And yet this is what Barack Obama -- who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer -- has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution. They can't even been sued for, in the specific case under review, subjecting uncharged, indefinitely detained captives to "beatings, sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, extreme hot and cold temperatures, death threats, interrogations at gunpoint, and threatened with unmuzzled dogs."

Again, let's be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand -- in court -- that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities. Nothing to answer for, nothing meriting punishment or even civil penalties. What's more, in championing the lower court ruling, Barack Obama is now on record as believing -- insisting -- that torture is an ordinary, "foreseeable consequence" of military detention of all those who are arbitrarily declared "suspected enemy combatants."

And still further: Barack Obama has now declared, openly, of his own free will, that he does not consider these captives to be "persons." They are, literally, sub-humans. And what makes them sub-humans? The fact that someone in the U.S. government has declared them to be "suspected enemy combatants." (And note: even the mere suspicion of being an "enemy combatant" can strip you of your personhood.)

This is what President Barack Obama believes -- believes so strongly that he has put the full weight of the government behind a relentless series of court actions to preserve, protect and defend these arbitrary powers. (For a glimpse at just a sliver of such cases, see here and here.)

One co-counsel on the case, Shayana Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights, zeroed in on the noxious quintessence of the position taken by the Court, and by our first African-American president: its chilling resemblance to the notorious Dred Scott ruling of 1857, which upheld the principle of slavery. As Fisher notes:



"Another set of claims are dismissed because Guantanamo detainees are not ‘persons’ within the scope of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act – an argument that was too close to Dred Scott v. Sanford for one of the judges on the court of appeals to swallow," he added.

The Dred Scott case was a decision by the United States Supreme Court in 1857. It ruled that people of African descent imported into the United States and held as slaves, or their descendants — whether or not they were slaves — were not protected by the Constitution and could never be citizens of the United States.



And now, once again, 144 years after the Civil War, we have established as the law of the land and the policy of the United States government that whole classes of people can be declared "non-persons" and have their liberty stripped away -- and their torturers and tormentors protected and coddled by authority -- at a moment's notice, with no charges, no defense, no redress, on nothing more than the suspicion that they might be an "enemy combatant," according to the arbitrary definition of the state.

Barack Obama has had the audacity to declare himself the heir and embodiment of the lifework of Martin Luther King. Can this declaration of a whole new principle of universal slavery really be what King was dreaming of? Is this the vision he saw on the other side of the mountain? Or is not the nightmarish inversion of the ideal of a better, more just, more humane world that so many have died for, in so many places, down through the centuries?

Obama: We Can't Treat Tax Dollars Like "Monopoly Money"

Chairman Obama is fortunate the vast majority of Americans can't be troubled to learn about economics or the effects of government intervention in the market. They don't know or care to know what the Fed is, that is has free reign to create the people's money out of thin air, which it then loans back to us, at interest, or where their tax dollars really go.

And so Obama, the actor, the marionette, reads from the teleprompter that "we can't continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences," unbeknownst to the proles democrats in the congress are looking to raise the debt ceiling by another $2 Trillion. And Obama, who might as well be given an Academy Award to sit on his mantle next to his Noble War Prize, can say we can't continue to treat the hard earned tax dollars of the American people like Monopoly money, he can be sure that the overwhelming majority of Americans don't know that their tax dollars don't provide a single solitary service, that 100% of their income tax goes directly to the interest on the national debt. And they surely aren't aware that all the massive amounts of debt being accrued now is either on loan from China and other nations, or printed up out of thin air, debasing the currency and causing prices to rise, so that we're paying taxes due to the monetary inflation of a private, unelected cartel of banksters - the Federal Reserve.

So the Chairman stands there, looking solemn, and paints himself as the good guy. He feels your pain. He knows what must be done. Unfortunately what he's saying and what he's doing are a total contradiction. And more unfortunate than that: barely anyone notices.

More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to accelerated growth of certain tree species

Don't be so gullible, McFly. Carbon dioxide is not a poison, not pollution. It's life. If there were no carbon dioxide, we would all be dead. Don't let doublethink take over and rationalize the absurd. They are literally telling you are a pollutant. Can you see the forest for the trees?

NaturalNews -

Scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota at Morris have found that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have led to the rapid growth of certain tree species. The quaking aspen, a popular North America deciduous tree, has seen a 50 percent acceleration in growth over the past 50 years due to increased CO2 levels.

Trees are necessary climate regulators since they process carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Humans process oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, working harmoniously with natural plant life to maintain proper atmospheric composition. Since natural forests represent about 30 percent of the earth's surface, they are highly effective at segregating greenhouse gases.

The quaking aspen is a vibrant, dominant tree found in both Canada and the United States. It is considered to be a "foundation species", meaning that it helps dictate the dynamics of the plant and animal communities that surround it. Roughly 42 million acres in Canada and 6.5 million acres in Wisconsin and Minnesota are composed of aspen trees.

Elevated levels of CO2 will naturally lead to increased plant growth since CO2 is a precursor to plant food. Tree-ring analyses verified that aspen trees have been growing at an increasingly accelerated pace over the years because of this phenomenon.

Because accelerated growth was not seen in other tree species like oak and pine, scientists admit they will have to further investigate the issue. Similarly, drier regions where the trees were found did not experience the same rapid growth rates as those found in the wetter regions.

Comments by Mike Adams

An interesting side effect of increased carbon emissions by human activity is that plants will grow more quickly. CO2 is to plants as oxygen is to humans, so the more CO2 is in the atmosphere, the more quickly many plants can grow.

Of course, plants produce oxygen as the "waste" product of their respiration, and that's a poison to other plants, so there's a natural balancing effect that keeps oxygen and CO2 levels in balance over the long haul.

This is why greenhouse gases are called "greenhouse gases", by the way -- because they turn the planet into a really effective greenhouse where plants grow like crazy. Of course, the clear-cutting of rainforest in the Amazon (and elsewhere) kills any chance of those regions taking part in that accelerated plant growth. Even in a high-CO2 environment, human beings can destroy plant life with bulldozers.

It's interesting that plants and humans breathe the same air but extract very different chemical elements from it: Humans need oxygen while plants need carbon dioxide. For both species to survive, the air needs to contain both chemicals in balance. Currently, the oxygen content of the air is roughly around 20% (and falling).

Sources for this story include:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea...

New research: natural exposure to everyday germs may protect kids from disease as adults

Wash your hands compulsively after every contact with anything - food, other people, door knobs, hand rails, etc. Don't hug anyone. Don't shake hands or high-five. And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't kiss anyone! Wear masks. Stay indoors, out of the sunlight, which boosts your immune system better than any vaccine could. And if you get depressed, because sunlight is a natural anti-depressant, take a pill that makes you more sick. Get vaccines that destroy your immune system. And above all else, panic - there are germs everywhere and it's only a matter of time before you become deathly ill, unless you do exactly what the government tells you.

Natural News -

Gone are the days when play time for kids often meant getting dirty making mud "pies", splashing in mud puddles and creeks, and climbing trees -- and when children washed their hands, mostly just before a meal, it was with plain soap and water. Modern day parents often take pride in keeping their little ones squeaky clean and as germ-free as possible, dousing them with antibacterial soaps and hand sanitizers. But new Northwestern University research suggests that normal exposure to everyday germs is a natural way to prevent diseases in adulthood.

The study, published in the December 9th edition of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, is the first to investigate whether microbial exposures early in life affect inflammatory processes related to diseases in adulthood. Remarkably, the Northwestern study suggests exposure to infectious microbes in childhood may actually protect youngsters from developing serious illnesses, including cardiovascular diseases, when they grow into adults.

"Contrary to assumptions related to earlier studies, our research suggests that ultra-clean, ultra-hygienic environments early in life may contribute to higher levels of inflammation as an adult, which in turn increases risks for a wide range of diseases," Thomas McDade, lead author of the study, said in a statement to the media. McDade is associate professor of anthropology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.

He added that humans have only recently lived in super clean environments and it could well be time to put down the antibacterial soap. That's because the new research suggests that inflammatory systems need a reasonably high level of exposure to common everyday germs and other microbes to develop and work properly in the body.

"In other words, inflammatory networks may need the same type of microbial exposures early in life that have been part of the human environment for all of our evolutionary history to function optimally in adulthood," stated McDade.

The Northwestern University researchers specifically studied how environments early in life might affect production of C-reactive protein (CRP), a protein that rises in the blood due to inflammation, in adulthood. Research concerning CRP, which is an important part of the immune system's fight against infection, has primarily focused on the protein as a possible predictor of heart disease. Scientists previously have mostly conducted CRP research in affluent settings, including the U.S., where there are relatively low levels of infectious diseases.

McDade and colleagues were interested in what CRP production looks like in the Philippines where residents have with a high level of infectious diseases in early childhood compared to Western countries. However, compared to Western countries, the people of the Philippines have relatively low rates of obesity (which is associated with CRP) and cardiovascular diseases.

How the research was conducted

The research team worked with data from a longitudinal study of Filipinos which began in the 1980s with 3,327 Filipino mothers in their third trimester of pregnancy. The mothers were interviewed about breast feeding and care giving and their households were assessed for socioeconomic levels, hygiene (including whether homes included domestic animals) and how many people lived in the home.

Researchers also visited with the mothers after their babies were born and then every two months for the first two years of the children's lives. From that point on, the researchers followed up with the children every four or five years until the research subjects were approximately 22 years of age. During this entire period, records were kept on the children documenting their height and weight and any infectious diseases they contracted.

Blood tests revealed Filipino participants in their early 20s had CRP concentrations on average of .2 milligrams per liter -- that's about five to seven times lower than the average CRP levels for Americans of the same age.

"In the U.S we have this idea that we need to protect infants and children from microbes and pathogens at all possible costs," McDade concluded. "But we may be depriving developing immune networks of important environmental input needed to guide their function throughout childhood and into adulthood. Without this input, our research suggests, inflammation may be more likely to be poorly regulated and result in inflammatory responses that are overblown or more difficult to turn off once things get started."

For more information:
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscen...

New Study Admits the Obvious: Swine Flu is Overhyped

NaturalNews -

An international team of researchers, headed by Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health, released a preliminary report that suggests a milder "pandemic" than the early reports in Mexico were made out to be. The 4% death rate attributed to H1N1 in March and April was found to have been a misleading estimate. The estimate was culled not from infections in the population as a whole, but from serious cases involving hospitalization. This significantly reduces the death rate.

The study group calculated the number of people with flu-like symptoms against those who sought medical care, those who were hospitalized, those who were assigned to intensive care units, and those who died. They used a telephone survey conducted in the Milwaukee and New York City areas to get their initial flu data and medical records for the rest.

About 1 in 70 of those reporting flu symptoms to a health care provider required hospitalization. 1 in 400 required admittance to the ICU and 1 in 2,000 with H1N1 symptoms died.

Using the telephone survey as their total population number with flu symptoms, they estimated that 1 in 600 people might be hospitalized, which is 7 to 9 times lower than other estimates including that of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

On average, about 36,000 people in the U.S. will die from influenza (seasonal flu). The majority of those are older people of retirement age. Given the controversy surrounding the CDC's handling of Swine Flu case counting nationally, counting every flu case as H1N1 and with many areas mis-diagnosing by the use of faulty or unverified tests, the new numbers are likely more accurate.

In the Spring, the CDC estimated a death rate of 2% and went into full panic for a pandemic. The new Lipsitch study puts the number well below that at 0.048%. As of September 11, 2009, the World Health Organization estimates the total number of infections, world wide, to be 209,000 and the total number of deaths to be 3,205. Or about a 0.15% death rate.

The study was completed in September in anticipation of the fall resurgence that might happen. PLos Medicine released the study to the public on December 7, publishing officially on December 8. The study was funded by the UK Medical Research Council, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and others.

Resources:
The Severity of Pandemic H1N1 Influenza in the United States from April to July 2009: a Bayesian Analysis

Ten Swine Flu lies told by the main stream media

Swine Flu peaks out before vaccines even make it into widespread distribution

Swine Flu Deception and Disinformation Exposed

Wave of sickness and disease now striking Baby Boomers

Explaining the eugenics agenda to the unawakened, inevitably the point is made that people are living longer than ever - how can it be that the elite are trying to kill people if this is so? Not so fast. Like almost every aspect of reality when you're plugged in, it's a lie. Quality of life is deteriorating, not improving. They know why, because it's by their design.

NaturalNews -

Research is now showing that today's "baby boomers", the generation currently eclipsing age 60, is the first generation to be less healthy than the generation before them. Those in this age group are more susceptible to debilitating diseases than in years past, stemming primarily from poor diet and lack of proper exercise.

Professor Teresa Seeman, a researcher from the University of California, examined those today in their 60s, 70s, and 80s and compared her findings to people from the same age groups examined ten years ago. She came to the startling conclusion that about one in five people in their 60s today requires assistance in accomplishing daily activities. This number is 50 percent higher than it was a decade ago.

A common theme that emerged from the research is that technological advancements have played a significant role in creating poor health. As Americans have generally been weaned off of physical labor and instead placed in front of computer screens throughout the years, the level of physical activity among the population has dropped significantly.

The lack of effective exercise was emphasized by a 50 percent increase over the last ten years in people in their 60s having trouble performing simple activities such as walking a quarter-mile or climbing a small set of stairs. There was also a 40 percent increase in study subjects having trouble bending their knees to crouch, kneel, or get up from a chair.

Significant societal and technological advancements that were of great benefit to the Baby Boomers when they were younger is proving to be their downfall in their current stage of life. Those in this age group are fatter and weaker than previous generations were at the same age, and they are more susceptible to chronic ailments that severely curtail their quality of life.

Experts recommend the obvious, mainly an improved diet and increased physical activity. They also warn the current younger generations to become disciplined in living a healthy lifestyle now in order to help offset the things that are currently plaguing their parents and grandparents.

Dr. Ian Campbell, general practitioner and medical director of the charity Weight Concern, expressed concern over the growing reliance on pharmaceutical drugs rather than on lifestyle changes as the appropriate remedy for the problem. He recommends a more preventive approach in dealing with illness.

Perhaps the conditions of economic turmoil in America will drive the younger generations back to the fields where physical labor and nutritious bounty are sure to help undo some of the damage that's been done by a convenient, technology-driven lifestyle.

Sources for this story include

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...

What Is a Right?

Andrew Napolitano
Campaign for Liberty -

In the continually harsh public discourse over the President's proposals for federally-managed healthcare, the Big Government progressives in both the Democratic and the Republican parties have been trying to trick us. These folks, who really want the government to care for us from cradle to grave, have been promoting the idea that health care is a right. In promoting that false premise, they have succeeded in moving the debate from WHETHER the feds should micro-manage health care to HOW the feds should micro-manage health care. This is a false premise, and we should reject it. Health care is not a right; it is a good, like food, like shelter, and like clothing.

What is a right? A right is a gift from God that extends from our humanity. Thinkers from St. Thomas Aquinas, to Thomas Jefferson, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to Pope John Paul II have all argued that our rights are a natural part of our humanity. We own our bodies, thus we own the gifts that emanate from our bodies. So, our right to life, our right to develop our personalities, our right to think as we wish, to say what we think, to publish what we say, our right to worship or not worship, our right to travel, to defend ourselves, to use our own property as we see fit, our right to due process -- fairness -- from the government, and our right to be left alone, are all rights that stem from our humanity. These are natural rights that we are born with. The government doesn't give them to us and the government doesn't pay for them and the government can't take them away, unless a jury finds that we have violated someone else's rights.

What is a good? A good is something we want or need. In a sense, it is the opposite of a right. We have our rights from birth, but we need our parents when we are children and we need ourselves as adults to purchase the goods we require for existence. So, food is a good, shelter is a good, clothing is a good, education is a good, a car is a good, legal representation is a good, working out at a gym is a good, and access to health care is a good. Does the government give us goods? Well, sometimes it takes money from some of us and gives that money to others. You can call that taxation or you can call it theft; but you cannot call it a right.

A right stems from our humanity. A good is something you buy or someone else buys for you.

Now, when you look at health care for what it is, when you look at the US Constitution, when you look at the history of human freedom, when you accept the American value of the primacy of the individual over the fleeting wishes of the government, it becomes apparent that those who claim that healthcare is a right simply want to extend a form of government welfare.

When I make this argument to my Big Government friends, they come back at me with... well, if people don't have health insurance, they will just go to hospitals and we will end up paying for them anyway. Why should that be? We don't let people steal food from a supermarket or an apartment from a landlord or clothing from a local shop. Why do we let them take healthcare from a hospital without paying for it? Well, my Big Government friends contend, that's charity.

They are wrong again. It is impossible to be charitable with someone else's money. Charity comes from your own heart, not from the government spending your money. When we pay our taxes to the government and it gives that money away, that's not charity, that's welfare. When the government takes more from us than it needs to secure our freedoms, so it can have money to give away, that's not charity, that's theft. And when the government forces hospitals to provide free health care to those who can't or won't care for themselves, that's not charity, that's slavery. That's why we now have constitutional chaos, because the government steals and enslaves, and we outlawed that a long time ago.

Climate summit showcases new world order

Publication after publication, world leader after world leader announce it, and still the proles deny its existence. It's very possibility. No American leader would consent to the destruction of our sovereignty! That's Britain's problem. Europe. Other people. Not us. We're different. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Toronto Star -

COPENHAGEN–If the talks that resulted in an imperfect deal to combat global warming provided anything here, it was a glimpse into a new world order in which global diplomacy will increasingly be shaped by the United States and emerging powers, most notably China.

Friday's agreement, sources involved in the talks said, boiled down to U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao personally hammering out a pact they could live with, even if many other nations could not. Wen even squelched his own negotiator's protests.

What Obama heralded as a "breakthrough" – after getting India and other rising powers to sign on – was decried by some leaders as too little, too late. The leaders of Europe, Japan and other countries at the summit were largely left to rubber-stamp the deal. The Swedish prime minister's office dubbed it "a disaster."

Ever since the concept of a Group of Two was proposed this year by former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, it has been pooh-poohed by both American and Chinese officials. China hated the notion of addressing the world's problems alongside the United States because it put too much responsibility on a country that has done very well rising in the shadows. Many U.S. officials opposed it on the grounds that the best way to influence China was through multinational partnerships.

More than anything else, critics said, Friday's climate agreement reflected the domestic political realities in Washington and Beijing. Both nations, the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, remain more cautious than, say, the governments of Europe about establishing a strict set of international rules to combat global warming. Not coincidentally, the agreement allows nations to set their own emission reduction targets and provides no deadline for signing a binding international accord.

As such, the deal may portend how issues from world trade to nuclear proliferation will be negotiated in the years ahead, with China leading a caucus of rising powers on one side and the United States on the other.

"The mark is being stamped on a new political world," said Duncan Marsh, who directs international climate policy for the Nature Conservancy. Said Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defence Fund: "Coming into this conference, it was about 193 countries, and coming out of it, it clearly came down to a conversation between the leaders of those two superpowers."

Orville Schell, a longtime China watcher who is director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, said the erratic dance between China and the United States is another example of how the bilateral relationship is at a tipping point. China is becoming a major player, albeit reluctantly, and the United States, with similar uneasiness, is making room for China at the table of world leadership.

"We're not exactly partners, but we're much more equals," Schell said. "The Chinese miss the idea that there's some grander, stronger authority. They are not used to this role of actually helping to fashion and form things."

The fate of any future global climate change treaty will now effectively rest in the hands of the two largest emitters – the United States and China. For at least the next several years, the lack of a binding international treaty may result in a piecemeal response to the problem, with action being taken largely on a national and regional level.

Gordon Brown calls for new group to police global environment issues

We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent. -- Paul Warburg

You can deny the establishment of a world government all you want, but it's there, and denying it won't make it go away. The New World Order has arrived, and the Hegelian fraud it's being established under is global warming. Grow up and squad up. Or die. Those are your choices.

Times of London -

A new global body dedicated to environmental stewardship is needed to prevent a repeat of the deadlock which undermined the Copenhagen climate change summit, Gordon Brown will say tomorrow.

The UN’s consensual method of negotiation, which requires all 192 countries to reach agreement, needs to be reformed to ensure that the will of the majority prevails, he feels.

The Prime Minister will say: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down those talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries. One of the frustrations for me was the lack of a global body with the sole responsibility for environmental stewardship.

“I believe that in 2010 we will need to look at reforming our international institutions to meet the common challenges we face as a global community.” The summit failed to produce a political agreement among all the countries. Delegates instead passed a motion on Saturday “taking note” of an accord drawn up the night before by five countries: the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa.


Despite being the first world leader to join the summit, Mr Brown was excluded from the key meeting where the compromise was decided.

Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, admitted today that the results of the Copenhagen conference were “disappointing” because of the absence of agreement on emissions targets or a deadline for turning the accord into a legally binding treaty.

Mr Miliband pointed the finger of blame at China for resisting a legal agreement and its rejection of a proposal for 50 per cent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Efforts to give legal force to the commitments in the Copenhagen accord came up against “impossible resistance from a small number of developing countries, including China, who didn’t want a legal agreement”, he said.

Challenged over accusations that the agreement reached in Copenhagen failed to protect poor people in developing countries, Mr Miliband said: “The eventual outcome was disappointing. But the idea that walking away from agreement would have been better for people facing climate change is frankly ridiculous.

“I think we can protect and help those people’s lives and indeed protect them from climate change through this agreement.

“The fact is that we have got fast-start finance of $10 billion a year flowing as a result of this agreement.” He said it was important that countries had agreed for the need to make emissions cuts, even though they had failed to commit to specific targets.

“We won’t know the precise shape of [the national emission targets] until the beginning of February, and we are going to have to push for them to be higher.

“Even though there were things we didn’t achieve, the fact is we have got for the first time developing countries coming together and saying that they are going to reduce emissions, and the finance is flowing.”

Mr Miliband rejected claims that Britain and the European Union were “sidelined” by their absence from a meeting at which President Obama and the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa thrashed out the basic shape of the accord.

“I don’t think that was the meeting that in the end decided the agreement,” he said. “The big decisions took place in a group of about 30 countries in which President Sarkozy, Chancellor Merkel and Gordon Brown were represented.”

In the accord

• Agreement that “deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science”

• “Long co-operative action” needed to keep the global temperature increase below 2C

• Rich countries should submit proposals for economy-wide emission reduction targets for 2020 to the UN by January 31

• By the same date, developing countries should produce plans to cut the rate of growth of their emissions

• There should be international monitoring of any emission cuts in developing countries that are funded by rich countries

• A reassessment of the accord by 2015 to check whether emission reductions are on track to keep the temperature increase below 2C

• Consideration in 2015 of strengthening the goal to 1.5C

Not in the accord

• Emission targets, either for 2020 or 2050

• A date by which global emissions should peak

• Any deadline for turning the accord into a binding treaty

• A commitment on how much of the climate protection funding would be additional to existing overseas aid pledges

• Agreement on an international body to verify the emissions reported by each country

David Rockefeller's eugenics agenda

It should be noted - and the elite are fully aware of this - that population in industrialized nations will always be stunted, ie the birth rate will always be considerably below the rate of replacement. In other words, if a two child per woman birthrate is necessary to maintain population - no growth or decline - then industrialized nations will always be considerably lower. It is only in the third world that you see birth rates at 3 or 4 children per woman. Therefore it stands to reason that the best and most humane way to "control population" is to allow third world nations to industrialize, rather than impoverishing them, as the elite so love to do.

No, when the elite speak of population control, they are speaking of grotesque methods of the worst criminals throughout history - Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. Forced sterilization. Compulsory abortion. Infanticide. And genocide by facilitating famine. If they truly wanted population control, they would free the third world. They want to wipe these people out, first by depriving them of resources they need to sustain themselves and to develope their economies and infrastructures, and then to rob them what lands and resources they have. This is the agenda, and almost without fail anyone who is truly wealthy (most people you are trained to consider "wealthy" are really simply middle class...when I say "wealthy" I mean "wealthy" like Mr Rockefeller, who is a quadrillionaire), will be knee deep in this genocidal plot. Sounds crazy? It is. Just don't be so naive to think that only people who live in the gutter are crazy. They're normal compared to these people. Don't let the leer jet and the $5,000 suit fool you.

Weapon of Monetary Destruction

Lew Rockwell -

In an extended propagandistic interview in Time magazine, Ben Bernanke is finally asked the crucial question:

Q: So, I'm a fringe economics type, I'm not personally, but I'm saying a reader picks up TIME Magazine, and they see this and they go, oh, my God, Ben Bernanke, low interest rates caused this whole thing. He's just an extension of that devil man, Alan Greenspan. Low interest rates, this is the whole cause. What's your bullet answer to that?

A: It's hard to give a bullet answer.

Q: Myth-busters answer.

A: Monetary policy in the early part of this decade was accommodated for good reasons. There was a recession in 2001, there was the jobless recovery, inflation was very low. Keeping interest rates low to get the economy back on track was a reasonable thing to do. I think there are a lot of forces that led to the crisis, a whole range of things were relevant there. I don't think that monetary policy was a particularly important source of the crisis.

By way of review, the Fed has only one distinct power: the capacity to create money out of thin air. In the end, and despite all its other powers, this is the one that matters. So if you are interviewing the Fed governor, one would think that this would be the central question: what did you do with the money-creating power to bring about this situation?

This is not a "fringe concern." This was a central issue in all 19th century debates on money. It was the primary concern before Keynes within the economic profession. The belief that money manipulations spawns booms and busts was the conventional wisdom even into the 1940s. As late as 1973, F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for his work demonstrating the point.

To be sure, what matters is not whether this is a fringe issue but whether it is true. In fact, the point is so true that it is apparently the great taboo issue about which one is never supposed to ask the head of the Fed. We aren't supposed to ask the wizard about any possible downside to his powers.

What's even more interesting is that Bernanke doesn’t quite say that monetary policy didn't cause the boom-bust. What he says is that there were "good reasons" for injecting hallucinogenic drugs into the economic bloodstream. Then he goes on to say that the results were not "particularly important." We are supposed to trust his answer.

At least he does admit that the Fed was "accommodative" – in the same way that the drug dealer accommodates a daily habit. The economy was running on debt, but desperately wanting to cleanse itself of its problem. The Fed intervened to prevent the inevitable. And so the inevitable got worse and came anyway. That's the short history. And from this we can know the future: the next time will be even worse. This is the nature of the state and its affiliated institutions: to learn nothing from mistakes and to screw things up even more the next time.

What about Bernanke's history of the early 2000s? He mentions the recession of 2001 and the "jobless recovery" (what about today's jobless green shoots?). What he doesn't mention, and what very few people have pointed out, is the impact of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

After the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit, the mood in Washington was total shock and horror. Bush claimed at the time that he was determined to do whatever it took to show those terrorists that they couldn't hurt our economy. We will be strong in the face of these attacks!

Here is what Bush said immediately after 9/11:

I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy. Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity. They did not touch its source. America is successful because of the hard work, and creativity, and enterprise of our people. These were the true strengths of our economy before September 11th, and they are our strengths today.

Of course, Washington doesn't have any magical ability to make the economy strong, to cause prosperity to appear as a way of showing terrorists what's what. The Fed is the only weapon in town for these purposes. And so the Fed went to work for the central state, as it always does. You can see the evidence here.

Now, this action, like everything else the state does, caused unforeseen results. They thought they would create a boom but now we are all paying the price. Osama bin Laden must be laughing. If Washington had done nothing at all after 9/11/01, either in domestic or foreign policy, the world would be much more peaceful and prosperous today.

There'll be nowhere to run from the new world government

Janet Daley
London Telegraph -

There is scope for debate – and innumerable newspaper quizzes – about who was the most influential public figure of the year, or which the most significant event. But there can be little doubt which word won the prize for most important adjective. 2009 was the year in which "global" swept the rest of the political lexicon into obscurity. There were "global crises" and "global challenges", the only possible resolution to which lay in "global solutions" necessitating "global agreements". Gordon Brown actually suggested something called a "global alliance" in response to climate change. (Would this be an alliance against the Axis of Extra-Terrestrials?)

Some of this was sheer hokum: when uttered by Gordon Brown, the word "global", as in "global economic crisis", meant: "It's not my fault". To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of "global agreements" reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational "legally binding agreements", what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous "democratic deficit" of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

But, you may say, however dire the political consequences, surely there is something in this obsession with global dilemmas. Economics is now based on a world market, and if the planet really is facing some sort of man-made climate crisis, then that too is a problem that transcends national boundaries. Surely, if our problems are universal the solutions must be as well.

Well, yes and no. Calling a problem "global" is meant to imply three different things: that it is the result of the actions of people in different countries; that those actions have impacted on the lives of everyone in the world; and that the remedy must involve pretty much identical responses or correctives to those actions. These are separate premises, any of which might be true without the rest of them necessarily being so. The banking crisis certainly had its roots in the international nature of finance, but the way it affected countries and peoples varied considerably according to the differences in their internal arrangements. Britain suffered particularly badly because of its addiction to public and private debt, whereas Australia escaped relatively unscathed.

That a problem is international in its roots does not necessarily imply that the solution must involve the hammering out of a uniform global prescription: in fact, given the differences in effects and consequences for individual countries, the attempt to do such hammering might be a huge waste of time and resources that could be put to better use devising national remedies. France and Germany seem to have pulled themselves out of recession over the past year (and the US may be about to do so) while Britain has not. These variations owe almost nothing to the pompous, overblown attempts to find global solutions: they are largely to do with individual countries, under the pressure of democratic accountability, doing what they decide is best for their own people.

This is not what Mr Brown calls "narrow self-interest", or "beggar my neighbour" ruthlessness. It is the proper business of elected national leaders to make judgments that are appropriate for the conditions of their own populations. It is also right that heads of nations refuse to sign up to "legally binding" global agreements which would disadvantage their own people. The resistance of the developing nations to a climate change pact that would deny them the kind of economic growth and mass prosperity to which advanced countries have become accustomed is not mindless selfishness: it is proper regard for the welfare of their own citizens.

The word "global" has taken on sacred connotations. Any action taken in its name must be inherently virtuous, whereas the decisions of individual countries are necessarily "narrow" and self-serving. (Never mind that a "global agreement" will almost certainly be disproportionately influenced by the most powerful nations.) Nor is our era so utterly unlike previous ones, for all its technological sophistication. We have always needed multilateral agreements, whether about trade, organised crime, border controls, or mutual defence.

If the impact of our behaviour on humanity at large is much greater or more rapid than ever before then we shall have to find ways of dealing with that which do not involve sacrificing the most enlightened form of government ever devised. There is a whiff of totalitarianism about this new theology, in which the risks are described in such cosmic terms that everything else must give way. "Globalism" is another form of the internationalism that has been a core belief of the Left: a commitment to class rather than country seemed an admirable antidote to the "blood and soil" nationalism that gave rise to fascism.

The nation-state has never quite recovered from the bad name it acquired in the last century as the progenitor of world war. But if it is to be relegated to the dustbin of history then we had better come up with new mechanisms for allowing people to have a say in how they are governed. Maybe that could be next year's global challenge.

Euthansia by Taser?

Will Grigg is on this like a fly on stink.

Will Grigg
LRC Blog -

Roughly thirty years ago, when the program still displayed the occasional flicker of satirical genius, “Saturday Night Live” broadcast a sketch entitled “The Mercy Killers.”


The segment depicted two orderlies played by Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray who prowled the halls of a hospital looking for opportunities to display their twisted sense of compassion by granting a “dignified” death to people who hadn’t requested their services.

“Another dignified death,” pronounces Aykroyd’s character after one patient, who had struggled valiantly while being smothered with a pillow, finally succumbs to suffocation.

“The people we help can never thank us,” muses the orderly as he and his partner leave the room. “All we can expect is that maybe someday, someone will write a song about us.”

Cue voice-over as Bill Murray — in full, cheese-dripping “Nick the lounge-singer” glory — warbles the theme song:

They kill not because they want to
Because they think it’s right to
In some cases
Have mercy on them and someday they may
Have mercy on you
The mercy killers
Have mercy on you
The mercy killers!

Perhaps someone will compose a ballad in honor of the Florida police officers who fatally electrocuted Preston Bussey III, a mentally disturbed 41-year-old man, early Saturday morning.

The Rockledge police officers were called to the hospital at around 2 a.m. to “help” subdue Bussey, who was described as “combative.” Bussey, who had been involuntarily admitted for psychological examination, “had apparently self-inflicted wounds and was bleeding from his extremities,” reports Florida Today.com.

This suggests that Bussey had attempted to commit suicide, and the police — without any apparent prompting from the victim — did what they could to help.

“Several police officers unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Bussey to follow a doctor’s directions,” continues the report. “Bussey refused, and after repeated warnings to comply `two officers then deployed their electronic control devices [Tasers].’”

It’s worth noting in passing that those implements of electro-schock torture are now referred to as “control devices” — not as “non-lethal” weapons for use in dealing with armed or otherwise potentially dangerous suspects.

Shortly after being “subdued,” Bussey stopped breathing, and died after unsuccessful attempts to revive him. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement and Brevard County Medical Examiner’s Office are “looking into the cause of death,” perpetrating the familiar post-Tasing charade in which some explanation other than electrocution is sought for the needless death of a helpless person.

Bush Spending: The Final Cut

I know you neocon automatons think it was all the democrats' fault...

Cato Institute -

In November, the Congressional Budget Office released final budget numbers for fiscal year 2009. The numbers allow us to take a final look at the Bush administration’s record on spending from a statistical point of view.

The following three charts show annual average real (or constant dollar) outlays during the tenures of recent presidents. Presidents were in office for either 4 or 8 budget years, except JFK (3 years), LBJ (5 years), Nixon (5 years), and Ford (3 years).

The last year of spending that President George W. Bush was responsible for was fiscal 2009. The CBO says that outlays that year were $3.522 trillion. However, $108 billion was spending from the 2009 economic stimulus package, according to the CBO, which Bush was not responsible for. So I have assigned Bush responsibility for spending $3.414 trillion in 2009.

Spending in Bush’s first year (FY2001) was $1.863 trillion, thus he presided over an 83-percent increase in overall federal spending–defense, domestic, entitlements, and interest. By contrast, total spending under eight years of President Clinton increased just 32 percent. These are simply the overall nominal increases.

Now let’s look at the real annual averages. Figure 1 shows the average increase in total spending under recent presidents. The biggest spenders were Ford, LBJ, and Bush II. Of course, presidents share spending power with Congress and it’s easier for presidents to control discretionary spending than entitlement spending. Nonetheless, the results in these charts reflect the general spending approach taken by the presidents quite well. For example, Bush II was instrumental in adding the Medicare drug benefit, and by 2009 this program was adding more than $60 billion a year to federal spending.



Figure 2 shows total federal spending without interest payments. Presidents have the least discretionary control over interest. The biggest spenders by this measure are again Ford, LBJ, and Bush II. Note that Bush’s record by this measure is worse than in Figure 1. That is because Bush lucked out with low interest payments due to low interest rates on the federal debt and the relatively low level of federal debt because of four years of surpluses under President Clinton.



Figure 3 is the most interesting chart. Here I have taken out both interest and defense spending from the total. So it includes domestic discretionary spending and so-called entitlement spending. In other words, this is mainly welfare state spending. By this measure, the five mid-century presidents had an awful record. These were the years of massive creation and expansion of federal subsidy programs for the elderly, the states, farmers, and many other groups.

The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan represented a revolt against the rapidly expanding welfare state, and for two decades the Republican Party seemed somewhat interested in slowing the growth in nondefense spending. Reagan’s record in Figure 3 of just 1 percent real growth over eight years was very impressive, at least relative to any other president in the last half century.

What about Bush II? Figure 3 shows that he was the biggest domestic spender since Ford. He set the stage for the current Obama adminstration, which seems devoted to the idea that increased government spending is the solution to all of society’s problems even though we are already running the largest budget deficits since World War II.