October 29, 2013, OpEdNews

Ignored Reality Is Going To Wipe Out the Human Race

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

The Federal Reserve could not care less about the US population. The Fed was established for the purpose of protecting and aiding banks. Currently, the Fed, as if America were a Banana Republic which America appears to be becoming, is printing one thousand billion dollars per year in order to support the banks and to finance the federal deficit.
Source: Paul Craig Roberts

To inform people is hard slugging. Everything is lined up against the public being informed, or the policymakers for that matter. News is contaminated by its service to special interests and hidden agendas. Many scientists or their employers are dependent on federal money. Even psychologists and anthropologists were roped into the government's torture and occupation programs. Economists tell lies for corporations and Wall Street. Plant and soil scientists tell lies for agribusiness and Monsanto. Truth tellers are slandered and persecuted. However, persistence can eventually win out. In the long-run, truth sometimes emerges. But not always. And not always in time.

I have been trying to inform the American people, economists, and policymakers for more than a decade about the adverse impacts of jobs offshoring on the US economy. The word has eventually gotten out. Last week I was contacted by 8th grade students competing for their school in CSPAN's StudentCam Documentary Contest. They want to interview me on the subject of jobs offshoring for their documentary film.

America is a strange place. Here are eighth graders far ahead of the economics profession, the President, the Congress, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and the financial press in their understanding of one of the fundamental problems of the US economy. Yet, people say the public schools are failing. Obviously, not the one whose students contacted me.

Is it too late? I know much, but not all. So this is not the final word. I think it might be too late. When skilled jobs are sent abroad, the skills disappear at home. So do the supply chains and the businesses associated with the skills. Things close down, and abilities are lost. Why take a major in college for a job that is offshored? A culture disappears.

But we can start them back up, right? Perhaps not. When a First World country exports its technology and know-how abroad to a Third World country in order to benefit from lower cost labor, how does the First World country get the work back? Living standards and the cost of living in Third World countries are much lower than in First World countries. The populations of First World countries cannot pay their mortgages, car payments, student loans, medical care, and grocery bills with the wages of Third World countries.

When First World wages drop, mortgage, car, credit card, and student loan payments do not drop. Americans cannot live on Chinese, Indian, and Indonesian wages. Once the technology and know-how is transferred, the low-wage country has the advantage in the absence of tariff protection.
For America to revive, our economy would have to be walled off with high tariffs, and subsidies would have to be provided in order to recreate US industry and manufacturing. But many corporations now produce offshore, and America is broke. The government has been $1 trillion dollars in the hole each year for the last 5 years.

Jobs offshoring diminished the US tax base. When a job is sent abroad, so is that job's contribution to US GDP and tax base. When millions of jobs are sent abroad, US GDP and tax base cannot support government spending levels. To the extent that there are any replacement jobs, they are in lowly paid domestic services, such as waitresses, bartenders, retail clerks, and hospital orderlies. These jobs do not provide a tax base or consumer spending power comparable to manufacturing jobs and tradable professional services such as software engineering and information technology.

Republicans and increasingly Democrats, as both parties are dependent on the same sources of campaign contributions, blame "entitlements." By entitlements they mean welfare.
In fact, entitlements consist of Social Security and Medicare. Entitlements are funded by the payroll tax, approximately 15% of payroll. The fact that a person pays the payroll tax all his working life is why the person is entitled to Social Security and Medicare if they live to retirement age. Welfare, such as food stamps and housing subsidies, are a small part of the federal budget and are not entitlements.

Every since President Reagan was betrayed three decades ago by Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, both of whom sold out to Wall Street and raised the Social Security payroll tax above what was needed to pay Social Security benefits in order to protect Wall Street's stock and bond portfolios from exaggerated deficit fears, Social Security payroll tax revenues have exceeded Social Security payments. As of today, Social Security revenues exceed payments to beneficiaries by an accumulated $2 trillion. The money was used by the federal government to pay for its wars and other spending programs. The Social Security Trust Fund holds non-marketable IOUs from the Treasury. These IOUs can only be made good from an excess of tax revenues over expenditures or by the Treasury selling $2 trillion in bonds, notes, and bills and paying off its IOUs to the Social Security Trust Fund. This is not going to happen.

The Federal Reserve could not care less about the US population. The Fed was established for the purpose of protecting and aiding banks. Currently, the Fed, as if America were a Banana Republic which America appears to be becoming, is printing one thousand billion dollars per year in order to support the banks and to finance the federal deficit.

This is bad news for Americans, as it means that their fiat money is being created at a far greater rate than the demand for the dollar. The implication for our future is a drop in the dollar's value. As there are no jobs, a drop in the dollar's value means high inflation on top of unemployment and double the misery of the Great Depression.

As bad as this is, it is minor compared to the destruction of the planet's environment. Online information shows that the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem is in crisis after the BP spill and use of Corexit, a dispersant used to hide, not clean up, the spilled oil.

The Fukushima catastrophe has hardly begun. Yet already the radioactive water pouring into the Pacific Ocean has made fish dangerous to eat unless a person is willing to accept a higher risk of cancer.

Fukushima has the potential of making Japan uninhabitable and of polluting the air, water, and soil of the US with radioactivity. Yet the crisis is seldom mentioned in the US media. In Japan the government just passed a law that could be used to imprison Japanese journalists who report truthfully on the dire situation.

Take the time to familiarize yourself with the online information about Fukushima... According to the presstitute media, Americans face threats from Iran and Syria and from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden. The real threats are simply not in the news.
If you search Fukushima, you will find information that the presstitute media hides from you. See here for example.

There are a number of other threats to the environment on which our lives depend. One is the effort to extract more productivity from the soil by use of GMOs. Monsanto has altered the genes of several crops so that the crops can be sprayed with RoundUp to eliminate weeds. The results have been to deplete the soil of nutrients, to destroy the micro-biology of the soil so that new plant diseases and funguses are activated, and to produce superweeds that require heavier doses of the glyphosate in RoundUp. The heavier dose of RoundUp worsens the aforementioned problems. US agricultural soil is losing its potency.

Now we come to chemtrails, branded another "conspiracy theory." However, the US government's efforts to geo-engineer weather as a military weapon and as a preventative of global warming appear to be real. The DARPA and HAARP programs are well known and are discussed publicly by scientists. See Search Chemtrails and you will find much information that is kept from you. Also, see here and here.

Some describe chemtrails as a plot by the New World Order, the Rothchilds, the Bilderbergers, or the Masons, to wipe out the "useless eaters." Given the amount of evil that exists in the world, these conspiracy theories might not be as farfetched as they sound.

However, I do not know that. What does seem to be possibly true is that the scientific experiments to modify and control weather are having adverse real world consequences. The claim that aluminum is being sprayed into the atmosphere and when it comes to earth is destroying the ability of soil to be productive might not be imaginary. Those concerned about chemtrails say that weather control experiments have deprived the western United States of rainfall, while sending the rain to the east where there have been hurricane level deluges and floods.

In the West, sparse rainfall and lightening storms without rain are resulting in forests drying out and burning down. Deforestation adversely affects the environment in many ways, including the process of photosynthesis by which trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen. The massive loss of forests means more carbon dioxide and less oxygen. Watershed and species habitat are lost, and spreading aridity further depletes ground and surface water. If these results are the consequences of weather modification experiments, the experiments should be stopped.

In North Georgia where I spend some summers, during 2013 it rained for 60 consecutive days, not all day, but every day, and some days the rainfall was 12 inches -- hurricane level -- and roads were washed out. I received last summer four automated telephone warnings from local counties not to drive and not to attempt to drive through accumulations of water on the highways.

One consequence of the excess of water in the East is that this year there are no acorns in North Georgia. Zilch, zero, nada. Nothing. There is no food for the deer, the turkeys, the bear, the rodents. Starving deer will strip bark from the trees. Bears will be unable to hibernate or will be able only to partially hibernate, forced to seek food from garbage. Black bears are already invading homes in search of food.

Unusual drought in the West and unusual flood in the East could be coincidental or they could be consequences of weather modification experiments.

The US, along with most of the world, already had a water problem prior to possible disruptions of rainfall by geo-engineering. In his book, Elixir, Brian Fagan tells the story of humankind's mostly unsuccessful struggle with water. Both groundwater and surface water are vanishing. The water needs of large cities, such as Los Angeles and Phoenix, and the irrigation farming that depends on the Ogallala aquifer are unsustainable. Fagan reminds us that "the world's supply of freshwater is finite," just like the rest of nature's resources. Avoiding cataclysm requires long-range thinking, but humanity is focused on immediate needs. Long-range thinking is limited to finding another water source to deplete. Cities and agriculture have turned eyes to the Great Lakes.

Los Angeles exists because the city was able to steal water from hundreds of miles away. The city drained Owens Lake, leaving a huge salt flat in its place, drained the Owens Valley aquifer, and diverted the Owens River to LA via aqueduct. Farming and ranching in the Owens Valley collapsed. Today LA takes water from the Colorado River, which originates in Wyoming and Colorado, and from Lake Perris 440 miles away.

Water depletion is not just an American problem. Fagan reports that "underground aquifers in many places are shrinking so rapidly that NASA satellites are detecting changes in the earth's gravity."
If the government is experimenting with weather engineering, scientists are playing God when they have no idea of the consequences. It is a tendency of scientists to become absorbed by the ability to experiment and to ignore unintended consequences.

Readers have asked me to write about Fukushima and chemtrails because they trust me to tell them the truth. The problem is that I am not qualified to write about these matters with anything approaching the same confidence that I bring to economic, war and police state matters.

The only advice I can give is that when you hear the presstitute media smear a concern or explanation as "conspiracy theory," have a closer look. The divergence between what is happening and what you are told is so vast that it pays to be suspicious -- cynical even -- of what "your" government and "your" presstitute media tell you. The chances are high that it is a lie.

A Natural Ease ( By Ven. Lama Gendun Rinpoche )

Buddha In His Youth (Redon)

Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already present, in open relaxation and letting go. Don't strain yourself; there is nothing to do nor undo. Whatever momentarily arises in the body-mnd has no real importance at all, has little reality whatsoever. Why identify with, and become attached to it, passing judgement upon it and ourselves. Far better to simply let the entire game happen on its own, springing up and falling back like waves--- without changing or manipulating anything--- and notice how everything vanishes and reappears, magically, again and again, time without end. Only our searching for happiness prevents us from seeing it. It's like a vivid rainbow which you pursue without ever catching, or a dog chasing its own tail. Although peace and happiness do not exist as an actual thing or place, it is always available and accompanies you every instant. Don't believe in the reality of good and bad experiences; they are like today's ephemeral weather, like rainbows in the sky. Wanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain, As soon as you open and relax this tight fist of grasping, infinite space is there---open, inviting and comfortable. Make use of this spaciousness, this freedom and natural ease. Don't search any further. Don't go into the tangled jungle looking for the great awakened elephant who is already resting quietly at home in front of your own hearth. Nothing to do or undo, Nothing to force, nothing to want and nothing missing--- Emaho! Marvelous! Everything happens by itself!

 

Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower, but is already present, in open relaxation and letting go. Don't strain yourself; there is nothing to do nor undo. Whatever momentarily arises in the body-mnd has no real importance at all, has little reality whatsoever. Why identify with, and become attached to it, passing judgement upon it and ourselves. Far better to simply let the entire game happen on its own, springing up and falling back like waves--- without changing or manipulating anything--- and notice how everything vanishes and reappears, magically, again and again, time without end. Only our searching for happiness prevents us from seeing it. It's like a vivid rainbow which you pursue without ever catching, or a dog chasing its own tail. Although peace and happiness do not exist as an actual thing or place, it is always available and accompanies you every instant. Don't believe in the reality of good and bad experiences; they are like today's ephemeral weather, like rainbows in the sky. Wanting to grasp the ungraspable, you exhaust yourself in vain, As soon as you open and relax this tight fist of grasping, infinite space is there---open, inviting and comfortable. Make use of this spaciousness, this freedom and natural ease. Don't search any further. Don't go into the tangled jungle looking for the great awakened elephant who is already resting quietly at home in front of your own hearth. Nothing to do or undo, Nothing to force, nothing to want and nothing missing--- Emaho! Marvelous! Everything happens by itself!

Happiness cannot be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already present,
in open relaxation
and letting go.

Don't strain yourself;
there is nothing to do nor undo.
Whatever momentarily arises
in the body-mnd
has no real importance at all,
has little reality whatsoever.
Why identify with, and become
attached to it,
passing judgement upon it
and ourselves.

Far better to simply
let the entire game happen on its own,
springing up and falling
back like waves---
without changing
or manipulating anything---
and notice how everything vanishes and
reappears, magically, again and again,
time without end.

Only our searching for happiness
prevents us from seeing it.
It's like a vivid rainbow which you
pursue without ever catching,
or a dog chasing its own tail.
Although peace and happiness
do not exist
as an actual thing or place,
it is always available
and accompanies you every instant.

Don't believe in the reality
of good and bad experiences;
they are like today's
ephemeral weather,
like rainbows in the sky.

Wanting to grasp the ungraspable,
you exhaust yourself in vain,
As soon as you open and relax this
tight fist of grasping,
infinite space is there---open, inviting
and comfortable.

Make use of this spaciousness, this
freedom and natural ease.
Don't search any further.
Don't go into the tangled jungle
looking for the great
awakened elephant
who is already resting quietly at home
in front of your own hearth.

Nothing to do or undo,
Nothing to force,
nothing to want
and nothing missing---

Emaho! Marvelous!
Everything happens by itself!

October 28, 2013, OpEdNews Our Invisible Revolution   By Chris Hedges If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police -- to get them, in essence, to defect -- nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Source: Truthdig Shutterstock   "Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?" the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay "The Idea Is the Thing." "If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them." Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden. It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public's imagination. Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable. "Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot 'make' a real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle," Berkman wrote. "It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is." Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an alternative to corporate tyranny -- as attempted by the book "Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA" and the website Popular Resistance -- is, for me, paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is finished. An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a nearly total loss of faith in the ideas -- in our case free market capitalism and globalization -- that sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And once enough people get it, a process that can take years, "the slow, quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and violent," as Berkman wrote. "Evolution becomes revolution." This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites, once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil servants and police -- to get them, in essence, to defect -- nonviolent revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their adversaries. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote. "And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists, seek to keep our uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try. Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and protection. They should have spent a little less time studying management in business school and a little more time studying human nature and human history. They are digging their own graves. Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward, as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete. The "consent of the governed" is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country. Democratic politicians speak in the familiar "I-feel-your-pain" language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate power. The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of dissent -- as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy movement -- are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state. "... [M]any ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as wrong and evil," Berkman wrote in his essay... "Thus the ideas of the divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that they had 'outlived' their 'usefulness' and therefore they 'died.' But how did they 'outlive' their 'usefulness'? To whom were they useful, and how did they 'die'? We know already that they were useful only to the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings and revolutions."

Another Word To Dharma Practitioners- From Anam Thubten Rinpoche

" The method of transcending is maintaining what meditators call 'awareness'... the miracle, the function of awareness, is that it actually burns down all of our silly concepts, each and every moment... Having awareness and practicing awareness means we are always ready to transcend, to let go of all beliefs, all concepts, and all thoughts in each and every moment. Once awareness is achieved then awareness is self-sustained... That's why it becomes effortless.

Whenever we believe that we have a problem, whenever we believe that we are real, the mind is actually lying to us, and deceiving us with a mistaken belief. Ego is tricking us into believing in an unreal illusory entity. Therefore our practice should be the constant work of being aware and transcending and eradicating all of our concepts and limiting ideas.

We just get rid of all of our concepts... Get rid of them in a single moment without even taking the time to meditate, without taking the time to analyze them. Transcend all limiting concepts as soon as they arise... The idea is simply let go of them...

The key is at our disposal. Now we have to open the door to the palace of great awakening."

(Anam Thubten, No Self, No Problem, Shambala Publications)