News and Views you don't have to lose:
News and Views you don't have to lose:
The following is from Michael Ruppert's From the Wilderness (FTW) newsletter. This article constitutes FTW's third-ever economic warning to its subscribers.
Ten per cent chance of avoiding economic "Armageddon."
On November 23rd the Boston Herald reported on a shocking statement made by Stephen Roach, the chief economist for investment banking giant Morgan Stanley. "Roach met selected groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity. His prediction: America has no better than a 10 per cent chance of avoiding economic "Armageddon." Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, "it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public." Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 per cent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual Armageddon." The core of Roach's analysis is the simple fact that, in order to keep the US economy afloat and maintain even moderate faith in the dollar, it must secure $2.8 billion dollars a day in foreign direct investment (FDI), largely through the purchase of Treasury notes to service its bubble economy. Other sources have placed the required FDI at $4 billion per day. What is the sense of this as the Bush administration raised the US debt ceiling by 800 billion on November 19th and continues to pull the rug out from under the dollar while at the same time cutting taxes and increasing spending? There were warning signs that these well-publicized moves were dangerous for Americans and their wallets more than two months ago when, on September 9th, the routine daily T-Bill auction at the US Treasury opened and no one showed up to buy.
Source: Marshall Auerback - one of FTW's favorite economic analysts - writing for Prudent Bear (<http://www.prudentbear.com>www.prudentbear.com) on Nov 16th reported:
Suppose they had a U.S. Treasury bond auction and everybody stayed home?
We had a variant on that theme a few months ago. During a routine sale of U.S. Treasury bonds in early September, one of the essential pillars holding up the economy suddenly disappeared. Foreigners, who had hitherto been regularly buying nearly half of all debt issued by the U.S. government stayed home on September 9th. "Thoughts of panic flickered out there," said Sadakichi Robbins, head of global fixed- income trading at Bank Julius Baer. To be sure, the foreigners returned in force at the next Treasury auction, and Sept. 9 was quickly dismissed as an aberration. But the episode demonstrated something we have repeated on these pages ad nauseum: the extent to which the US remains dependent on the kindness of strangers in terms of sustaining its very way of life. We have posited the notion that a buyers' strike, a foreign creditors' revulsion, could arrive as a sudden thunderclap of financial crisis--spiking interest rates, swooning stock market and crashing home prices, a scenario which will not seem so absurd if we have a few more days like September 9th. In the midst of these developments - common knowledge in Wall Street's boardrooms - Reuters reported on November 15th that bonuses for Wall Street executives were set to jump by 10% to 15% this year. Almost simultaneously, the New York Times reported on November 21st, "Soaring Interest Compounds Credit Card Pain for Millions." The latter story revealed that in recent months credit card companies have unilaterally increased (in some cases doubled) interest rates on credit card debt without notice. The net result has been drastic increases in minimum monthly payments and interest rates that have soared in some states to as high as 28%. What would you do if your monthly minimum on one card went from $460 to $780 dollars? Most Americans today cannot dig out from that kind of debt and this is a sure indicator that the weight of a major economic meltdown will be placed on the shoulders of consumers instead of corporations - at first. Consumers will never be able to dig out when the economy collapses. As Catherine Austin Fitts points out, lenders have an obligation to exercise diligence to see that borrowers are able to repay loans before making them. What is happening is that lenders are at one and the same time encouraging people to borrow while systematically undermining - universally - their ability to repay those loans. Americans are still being encouraged to borrow and spend when they should be being warned to cut back and decrease debt. The main reason is because soon - in the blink of an eye - the world is going to stop underwriting this binge-bubble economy and there will be no safety net for those weighed down by debt. Why? It's called a wealth transfer. It happened in the Great Depression and FTW described it thoroughly in its http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/economyethnic_cleansing_usa.html
analysis of the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central LA in the 1980s. The trillions stolen from the US Treasury, looted by stock manipulations and derivative-based investment bubbles, will be available to buy back our devalued assets at pennies on the dollar after the collapse. This is the sickness of America's (and the world's) governing economic paradigm. This is also a sickness that is rushing the world toward the kind of war that spreads beyond human control very rapidly: World War I on steroids and amphetamines.
PRELUDE TO WAR - Dumping the Dollar According to a Plan -
Iran in a Bubble
What has happened since November 2nd is that the entire world has been telegraphing a clear intent to stop providing America with its FDI subsidy. What has also been telegraphed is the administration's encouragement of this. The dollar will have to crash. But when? How far? The rest of the world has realized that military confrontation with theUS is not practical. Yes, it is true that the US military cannot wage a global war on many fronts. It is having a hard enough time holding its own in Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be no invasion of Iran. China has just signed a $200 billion investment agreement with its government http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK06Ak01.html
(Asia Times, Nov. 6th).
India, Germany and Russia are signing oil and gas deals with Iran hand over fist. This is global insurance for Iran, which plans to open an oil futures trading bourse priced in Euros in 2005. The US (Britain and Israel) cannot afford to attack hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese, Russian, Indian, German and other foreign investments. It will not. There are as yet no volunteers from among the other nations to suffer the carnage necessary to break the US military's back in an open firefight. But there are non-violent ways to fight the Empire which are in fact precursors to military confrontations. At some point the Empire will resort to what it knows, maybe in the Ukraine, maybe in Africa, maybe in Latin America. At some point after that, unless something is done, the safeties will come off nuclear and biological weapons. The unthinkable will become a rational option. All of that may take less than a year. In the meantime the trick for the rest of the world is how to get out of the dollar before it plummets and thus protect foreign currency holdings. Catch 22? Maybe not. Many countries are now signaling that they are willing to take a little shot in order to give the US a very big one. That's what November 2nd told Wall Street, the Treasury and the Fed. And - according to a November 29th AP story reprinted in Forbes -China's Central Bank has now moved in to try and manage the dollar's decline by buying and selling them through its four largest banks. The likely intent is to allow all the other nations aligning with this plan to get out safely with minimal losses. Only China has currency reserves (approximately US $175 billion) and an economy big enough (even as Peak Oil is just beginning to hit home) to underwrite the switch and make it palatable to those taking the risk. It appears that since November 2nd the rest of the world feels it has much less to lose. They are correct. The oil and gas supplied by Iran are essential to the survival of many countries. But China is also facing increasingly frequent blackouts due to energy shortages. If it is going to move on the dollar it must move before its economy slows and the US, Koreans, Europe, Japan, Canada, and the rest of the industrialized world start to shut down their factories there and withdraw their investments. In short, China must strike at the dollar while China stands a chance of winning. It will never have a better opportunity than right now.
A FLOOD OF BREAKING NEWS
Warnings have recently been issued that Medicare, Medicaid and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation may soon be insolvent (see Crossing the Rubicon).
Climate change and the possibility of a climatological collapse have accelerated as the Arctic ice cap is receding faster than anticipated. Publications from the Christian Science Monitor to Al Jazeera are publicizing reports from scientific institutes that the change is accelerating and even causing glaciers to melt in the Himalayas. The savage irony of this is that the oil industry is cheering this on because it will open up a Northwest Passage for shipping which will make it even easier to extract the few hundred million barrels of oil in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge and open up sea lanes for faster transport of oil from Russia and Norway over the pole.
The Wall Street Journal reported on November 29th that China is
acquiring submarines at a breakneck pace and this is causing alarm all over Southwest Pacific.
The World Trade organization has just slapped the US with first-ever punitive sanctions that may cost up to $150 million per year for illegally protecting US steel makers from competition.
Warnings of a bird flu epidemic that could kill seven million people in the next year are being circulated by the WHO and major governments around the world.
Russia has announced that it will stop pegging the ruble to the dollar and Russian bonds have just been upgraded to investment grade by major rating agencies like Fitch; Standard and Poor's has announced it may follow suit.
All nuclear weapons research contracts held by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and the University of California have just been transferred to the University of Texas.
Housing Bubble -- On Nov. 16, according to the Associated Press, Fannie Mae, currently under investigation for cooked books, admitted a possible $9 billion loss from derivatives as it auditor KPMG refused to sign off on its accounting sheets.
The Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) is mounting a diplomatic effort against Myanmar (Burma), allegedly over human rights reforms. But this happens just on the heels of an announcement that China is seeking to build a pipeline through Burma to the Indian Ocean to shorten tanker routes and avoid potentially troubled waters in the straits of Malacca and the South China Sea.
Guerilla insurgencies and US military involvement are spreading throughout Latin America as the US is pushing governments there to change their laws and procedures to permit more aggressive suppression of dissent, mislabeled as terrorism.
In Africa investment dollars from a multitude of countries including the US, Europe, China, India and around the world are flooding the continent as political instability, strikes, guerilla revolts and coup attempts have been reported in at least eight countries in the last three months. This will, of necessity, be the subject of an upcoming FTW series.
The Ukraine, a geostrategically vital pivot nation is becoming a battleground between the Bush and Putin regimes as Russia urgently seeks to extend its regional influence into Europe and keep open pipeline routes for Caspian oil to the Black Sea and its vital ports. Without Ukraine in its sphere of influence, Russia will revert to being only an Asian power instead of an Asian and a European power. The dispute over the recent election results by Viktor Yankuovych (pro-Moscow) and Viktor Yushchenko (pro-US) may lead to civil war and partition of the country. Do not be surprised if the Ukrainian conflict leads to a military confrontation between NATO and Moscow. The stakes are that high (watch for a coming article by Larry Chin of the Online Journal on this important subject).
As the US cuts back on troop deployments in South Korea, both halves of the divided peninsula have signaled an interest in reunification. This is a prelude to a strategic US withdrawal from the peninsula for the simple reason the US cannot, in today's world, possibly hope to defend it. The same might also be true for Taiwan if things get dicey. Recent massive US Naval exercises involving seven carrier battle groups not far from Taiwan (Operation Summer Pulse) revealed the importance of a region which includes oil deposits so small that International Energy Agency Chief Claude Mandil basically called them insignificant. How nervous would a US withdrawal from Korea make Japan? Taiwan?
At what point will the line be drawn when the nukes come out? These are all questions that need to be answered. I could not help but chuckle when I heard a recent announcement that "small but significant" oil discoveries had recently been made in theFalkland Islands (those grains of sand near Antarctica, for which Britain went to war with Argentina in 1982) and in Bosnia where hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed during the 1990s. Coincidence?
IMMEDIATE ADVICE Take this to heart as if your welfare depended upon it. Do it as if the crisis was upon you today. These are only immediate steps. FTW is about to undergo a major reorganization so that we may bring you better real-time information and more solutions or options as they become available.
1. Curtail all unnecessary spending.
2. Reduce credit card balances.
3. Get to know and become friends with your neighbors on all sides.
4. Keep (at least) a week's worth of cash and food in your home.
5. Look at your residence and ask yourself what you could do to improve it if there were no heat and no electricity. Start preparing for both. Look at your insulation (if you own), your windows, curtains (a great source of heat loss) and roof.
6. Buy physical gold, not paper gold. I am convinced that we will see gold reach at least $600 per ounce in 2005. It's a great way to hedge against a falling dollar.
These steps may not seem like much on paper. But when the deluge comes they will give you a head start that may save your life. Michael C. Ruppert Publisher/Editor http://www.fromthewilderness.com
Commentary by Stuart Heady
One of the things Rupert proposes is that the neocons are not interested in averting a crisis, but are instead working to quicken it. They also are working to prepare for it. Hidden behind the veneer of red-white-and-blue salesmanship would seem to be a strategic gamesmanship that is actually pretty savvy from a Machiavellian perspective. When you listen for this, you realize that Bush isn't lying, but is speaking in code to an audience that the pundits pretend to be clueless about. The wealthy are seen as the people who deserve the most to survive, because their gene pool represents the best and most gifted among the human race. Wealth really is a determinant of virtue. People are tied in knots over the misinterpretation of what "values" really means. Bush and the neocons must really be controlling the urge to laugh at all that. From an elitist survival standpoint, it makes sense to shift the resources to the lifeboats only the wealthy will have access to. Everyone else can drown, and this will end up making the human race stronger. Flush the weak genes down the toilet. The United States has less than 6% of the world's people, but consumes over 20% of the resources of the planet. Billions of people are looking to improve their standard of living. Many of these people are barely surviving, and have a long way to go to reach the standard of living that people in suburban America are used to. What will happen as the peak oil phenomenon takes hold is that the struggle between the aspirations of the billions for better lives and the US Military used as an agent to keep the balance in favor of American luxury will intensify greatly. The neocons know this and have been working on this at least since the Nixon administration. Kissinger had authored a memo predicting a die-off of 2 billion. Bush is not listening to anything except a core group of people working on a survival agenda beyond peak oil - and it isn't for us. When are progressives going to wake up and develop a useful counter-strategy? As far as I can tell we are waiting around for the Republicans to save us.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
The following is from Michael Ruppert's From the Wilderness (FTW) newsletter. This article constitutes FTW's third-ever economic warning to its subscribers.
Ten per cent chance of avoiding economic "Armageddon."
On November 23rd the Boston Herald reported on a shocking statement made by Stephen Roach, the chief economist for investment banking giant Morgan Stanley. "Roach met selected groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a group at Fidelity. His prediction: America has no better than a 10 per cent chance of avoiding economic "Armageddon." Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, "it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public." Roach sees a 30 percent chance of a slump soon and a 60 per cent chance that "we'll muddle through for a while and delay the eventual Armageddon." The core of Roach's analysis is the simple fact that, in order to keep the US economy afloat and maintain even moderate faith in the dollar, it must secure $2.8 billion dollars a day in foreign direct investment (FDI), largely through the purchase of Treasury notes to service its bubble economy. Other sources have placed the required FDI at $4 billion per day. What is the sense of this as the Bush administration raised the US debt ceiling by 800 billion on November 19th and continues to pull the rug out from under the dollar while at the same time cutting taxes and increasing spending? There were warning signs that these well-publicized moves were dangerous for Americans and their wallets more than two months ago when, on September 9th, the routine daily T-Bill auction at the US Treasury opened and no one showed up to buy.
Source: Marshall Auerback - one of FTW's favorite economic analysts - writing for Prudent Bear (<http://www.prudentbear.com>www.prudentbear.com) on Nov 16th reported:
Suppose they had a U.S. Treasury bond auction and everybody stayed home?
We had a variant on that theme a few months ago. During a routine sale of U.S. Treasury bonds in early September, one of the essential pillars holding up the economy suddenly disappeared. Foreigners, who had hitherto been regularly buying nearly half of all debt issued by the U.S. government stayed home on September 9th. "Thoughts of panic flickered out there," said Sadakichi Robbins, head of global fixed- income trading at Bank Julius Baer. To be sure, the foreigners returned in force at the next Treasury auction, and Sept. 9 was quickly dismissed as an aberration. But the episode demonstrated something we have repeated on these pages ad nauseum: the extent to which the US remains dependent on the kindness of strangers in terms of sustaining its very way of life. We have posited the notion that a buyers' strike, a foreign creditors' revulsion, could arrive as a sudden thunderclap of financial crisis--spiking interest rates, swooning stock market and crashing home prices, a scenario which will not seem so absurd if we have a few more days like September 9th. In the midst of these developments - common knowledge in Wall Street's boardrooms - Reuters reported on November 15th that bonuses for Wall Street executives were set to jump by 10% to 15% this year. Almost simultaneously, the New York Times reported on November 21st, "Soaring Interest Compounds Credit Card Pain for Millions." The latter story revealed that in recent months credit card companies have unilaterally increased (in some cases doubled) interest rates on credit card debt without notice. The net result has been drastic increases in minimum monthly payments and interest rates that have soared in some states to as high as 28%. What would you do if your monthly minimum on one card went from $460 to $780 dollars? Most Americans today cannot dig out from that kind of debt and this is a sure indicator that the weight of a major economic meltdown will be placed on the shoulders of consumers instead of corporations - at first. Consumers will never be able to dig out when the economy collapses. As Catherine Austin Fitts points out, lenders have an obligation to exercise diligence to see that borrowers are able to repay loans before making them. What is happening is that lenders are at one and the same time encouraging people to borrow while systematically undermining - universally - their ability to repay those loans. Americans are still being encouraged to borrow and spend when they should be being warned to cut back and decrease debt. The main reason is because soon - in the blink of an eye - the world is going to stop underwriting this binge-bubble economy and there will be no safety net for those weighed down by debt. Why? It's called a wealth transfer. It happened in the Great Depression and FTW described it thoroughly in its http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/economyethnic_cleansing_usa.html
analysis of the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central LA in the 1980s. The trillions stolen from the US Treasury, looted by stock manipulations and derivative-based investment bubbles, will be available to buy back our devalued assets at pennies on the dollar after the collapse. This is the sickness of America's (and the world's) governing economic paradigm. This is also a sickness that is rushing the world toward the kind of war that spreads beyond human control very rapidly: World War I on steroids and amphetamines.
PRELUDE TO WAR - Dumping the Dollar According to a Plan -
Iran in a Bubble
What has happened since November 2nd is that the entire world has been telegraphing a clear intent to stop providing America with its FDI subsidy. What has also been telegraphed is the administration's encouragement of this. The dollar will have to crash. But when? How far? The rest of the world has realized that military confrontation with theUS is not practical. Yes, it is true that the US military cannot wage a global war on many fronts. It is having a hard enough time holding its own in Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be no invasion of Iran. China has just signed a $200 billion investment agreement with its government http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FK06Ak01.html
(Asia Times, Nov. 6th).
India, Germany and Russia are signing oil and gas deals with Iran hand over fist. This is global insurance for Iran, which plans to open an oil futures trading bourse priced in Euros in 2005. The US (Britain and Israel) cannot afford to attack hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese, Russian, Indian, German and other foreign investments. It will not. There are as yet no volunteers from among the other nations to suffer the carnage necessary to break the US military's back in an open firefight. But there are non-violent ways to fight the Empire which are in fact precursors to military confrontations. At some point the Empire will resort to what it knows, maybe in the Ukraine, maybe in Africa, maybe in Latin America. At some point after that, unless something is done, the safeties will come off nuclear and biological weapons. The unthinkable will become a rational option. All of that may take less than a year. In the meantime the trick for the rest of the world is how to get out of the dollar before it plummets and thus protect foreign currency holdings. Catch 22? Maybe not. Many countries are now signaling that they are willing to take a little shot in order to give the US a very big one. That's what November 2nd told Wall Street, the Treasury and the Fed. And - according to a November 29th AP story reprinted in Forbes -China's Central Bank has now moved in to try and manage the dollar's decline by buying and selling them through its four largest banks. The likely intent is to allow all the other nations aligning with this plan to get out safely with minimal losses. Only China has currency reserves (approximately US $175 billion) and an economy big enough (even as Peak Oil is just beginning to hit home) to underwrite the switch and make it palatable to those taking the risk. It appears that since November 2nd the rest of the world feels it has much less to lose. They are correct. The oil and gas supplied by Iran are essential to the survival of many countries. But China is also facing increasingly frequent blackouts due to energy shortages. If it is going to move on the dollar it must move before its economy slows and the US, Koreans, Europe, Japan, Canada, and the rest of the industrialized world start to shut down their factories there and withdraw their investments. In short, China must strike at the dollar while China stands a chance of winning. It will never have a better opportunity than right now.
A FLOOD OF BREAKING NEWS
Warnings have recently been issued that Medicare, Medicaid and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation may soon be insolvent (see Crossing the Rubicon).
Climate change and the possibility of a climatological collapse have accelerated as the Arctic ice cap is receding faster than anticipated. Publications from the Christian Science Monitor to Al Jazeera are publicizing reports from scientific institutes that the change is accelerating and even causing glaciers to melt in the Himalayas. The savage irony of this is that the oil industry is cheering this on because it will open up a Northwest Passage for shipping which will make it even easier to extract the few hundred million barrels of oil in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge and open up sea lanes for faster transport of oil from Russia and Norway over the pole.
The Wall Street Journal reported on November 29th that China is
acquiring submarines at a breakneck pace and this is causing alarm all over Southwest Pacific.
The World Trade organization has just slapped the US with first-ever punitive sanctions that may cost up to $150 million per year for illegally protecting US steel makers from competition.
Warnings of a bird flu epidemic that could kill seven million people in the next year are being circulated by the WHO and major governments around the world.
Russia has announced that it will stop pegging the ruble to the dollar and Russian bonds have just been upgraded to investment grade by major rating agencies like Fitch; Standard and Poor's has announced it may follow suit.
All nuclear weapons research contracts held by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories and the University of California have just been transferred to the University of Texas.
Housing Bubble -- On Nov. 16, according to the Associated Press, Fannie Mae, currently under investigation for cooked books, admitted a possible $9 billion loss from derivatives as it auditor KPMG refused to sign off on its accounting sheets.
The Association of Southeast Asian nations (ASEAN) is mounting a diplomatic effort against Myanmar (Burma), allegedly over human rights reforms. But this happens just on the heels of an announcement that China is seeking to build a pipeline through Burma to the Indian Ocean to shorten tanker routes and avoid potentially troubled waters in the straits of Malacca and the South China Sea.
Guerilla insurgencies and US military involvement are spreading throughout Latin America as the US is pushing governments there to change their laws and procedures to permit more aggressive suppression of dissent, mislabeled as terrorism.
In Africa investment dollars from a multitude of countries including the US, Europe, China, India and around the world are flooding the continent as political instability, strikes, guerilla revolts and coup attempts have been reported in at least eight countries in the last three months. This will, of necessity, be the subject of an upcoming FTW series.
The Ukraine, a geostrategically vital pivot nation is becoming a battleground between the Bush and Putin regimes as Russia urgently seeks to extend its regional influence into Europe and keep open pipeline routes for Caspian oil to the Black Sea and its vital ports. Without Ukraine in its sphere of influence, Russia will revert to being only an Asian power instead of an Asian and a European power. The dispute over the recent election results by Viktor Yankuovych (pro-Moscow) and Viktor Yushchenko (pro-US) may lead to civil war and partition of the country. Do not be surprised if the Ukrainian conflict leads to a military confrontation between NATO and Moscow. The stakes are that high (watch for a coming article by Larry Chin of the Online Journal on this important subject).
As the US cuts back on troop deployments in South Korea, both halves of the divided peninsula have signaled an interest in reunification. This is a prelude to a strategic US withdrawal from the peninsula for the simple reason the US cannot, in today's world, possibly hope to defend it. The same might also be true for Taiwan if things get dicey. Recent massive US Naval exercises involving seven carrier battle groups not far from Taiwan (Operation Summer Pulse) revealed the importance of a region which includes oil deposits so small that International Energy Agency Chief Claude Mandil basically called them insignificant. How nervous would a US withdrawal from Korea make Japan? Taiwan?
At what point will the line be drawn when the nukes come out? These are all questions that need to be answered. I could not help but chuckle when I heard a recent announcement that "small but significant" oil discoveries had recently been made in theFalkland Islands (those grains of sand near Antarctica, for which Britain went to war with Argentina in 1982) and in Bosnia where hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed during the 1990s. Coincidence?
IMMEDIATE ADVICE Take this to heart as if your welfare depended upon it. Do it as if the crisis was upon you today. These are only immediate steps. FTW is about to undergo a major reorganization so that we may bring you better real-time information and more solutions or options as they become available.
1. Curtail all unnecessary spending.
2. Reduce credit card balances.
3. Get to know and become friends with your neighbors on all sides.
4. Keep (at least) a week's worth of cash and food in your home.
5. Look at your residence and ask yourself what you could do to improve it if there were no heat and no electricity. Start preparing for both. Look at your insulation (if you own), your windows, curtains (a great source of heat loss) and roof.
6. Buy physical gold, not paper gold. I am convinced that we will see gold reach at least $600 per ounce in 2005. It's a great way to hedge against a falling dollar.
These steps may not seem like much on paper. But when the deluge comes they will give you a head start that may save your life. Michael C. Ruppert Publisher/Editor http://www.fromthewilderness.com
Commentary by Stuart Heady
One of the things Rupert proposes is that the neocons are not interested in averting a crisis, but are instead working to quicken it. They also are working to prepare for it. Hidden behind the veneer of red-white-and-blue salesmanship would seem to be a strategic gamesmanship that is actually pretty savvy from a Machiavellian perspective. When you listen for this, you realize that Bush isn't lying, but is speaking in code to an audience that the pundits pretend to be clueless about. The wealthy are seen as the people who deserve the most to survive, because their gene pool represents the best and most gifted among the human race. Wealth really is a determinant of virtue. People are tied in knots over the misinterpretation of what "values" really means. Bush and the neocons must really be controlling the urge to laugh at all that. From an elitist survival standpoint, it makes sense to shift the resources to the lifeboats only the wealthy will have access to. Everyone else can drown, and this will end up making the human race stronger. Flush the weak genes down the toilet. The United States has less than 6% of the world's people, but consumes over 20% of the resources of the planet. Billions of people are looking to improve their standard of living. Many of these people are barely surviving, and have a long way to go to reach the standard of living that people in suburban America are used to. What will happen as the peak oil phenomenon takes hold is that the struggle between the aspirations of the billions for better lives and the US Military used as an agent to keep the balance in favor of American luxury will intensify greatly. The neocons know this and have been working on this at least since the Nixon administration. Kissinger had authored a memo predicting a die-off of 2 billion. Bush is not listening to anything except a core group of people working on a survival agenda beyond peak oil - and it isn't for us. When are progressives going to wake up and develop a useful counter-strategy? As far as I can tell we are waiting around for the Republicans to save us.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit for research and educational purposes. MY NEWSLETTER has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is MY NEWSLETTER endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewsViewsnolose
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