Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1405290 Comments:2390
But seriously, we have really reached a pretty grim point when the court that is supposed to be protecting our rights under the Constitution, and the president, who is supposed to uphold and defend that document, collude in saying that once a person has been taken into custody by police, she or he really has no rights. The 4th Amendment about being "secure in your person"? Forget it. The cops can now strip you, grope you, check your butthole and humiliate you all they want, even if you are innocent of any charge. And by the way, they can lock you up with hardened convicts and hold you after they do that, until you get a lawyer or post bail. No "cruel and unusual punishment"? Well, I think most people would agree that getting stripped and intimately searched by some leering cop when you hadn’t done anything would qualify as punishment, and it certainly is cruel, so the Eighth Amendment is in the toilet too. (We already knew the First Amendment -- the one about freedom of speech and assembly and the right to petition over grievances -- was toast. Just ask Mayor Mike Bloomberg or any of the other mayors who ordered the brutal crushing of dozens of Occupation encampments over the past half year.)-stephen lendman blog
Their business model is grand theft. They're crime families, not legitimate enterprises. They make money by stealing it. They wreck economies, communities, and households. Corrupt politicians let them. They're bribed to go along. As bad as things are, they're getting worse.
On April 5, The New York Times headlined, "Obama Signs Bill to Promote Start-Up Investments," saying:
Surrounded by complicit lawmakers and industry crooks, Obama signed the JOBS Act. He called it a "potential game changer." The Times article went along with the charade.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net
It’s possible that the current hype about oil ‘shortages’ and reserve-tapping is designed to both push its price up and nip any panicky market selling in the bud. (See Slogpost last week on the oil ‘price’ scam).
Looking back now to laugh out loud at the pathetic confidence of 2006, by comparison what we have in the West today is a much greater dilution of currencies than most people expected, far more notional obligations than most people realised, and collapsed house values about to fall off a cliff. House prices continue to head south in the States; and no US economic recovery has ever been managed without a recovery in the domestic property market. All of us are left with a dearth of confidence, the unhappy victims of a profusion of confidence tricksters.
So, what most people in their right minds recognise is that we’re going to have stagflation in the West – that is, flat or declining economic output alongside rising living costs. And economically, we have what you might call an investment gap: less real-value money to stimulate economies, and less oilco money going into tapping reserves.
Unless somebody can find a way to plug the gap that doesn’t involve can-football, we will spiral into the worst slump the world has ever witnessed….one in which nobody buys or sells anything, every sovereign is bankrupt, no asset is worth even a row of beans, society breaks down, and the neighbours will be on the barbecue just as soon as we can raise the £5.5M for a bag of charcoal.
Under this scenario, a ‘Global Spring’ takes place…with all the unpleasant consequences that we’ve seen in North Africa. Because when you indulge in believing Friedmanite bollocks about wealth trickling, what happens is an ever-broadening concentration of wealth in a few hands. And when you let bankers invent money to enrich themselves at no advantage whatsoever to the real economy, the other 93% get wiped out financially. And both those things make any kind of meaningful economic recovery impossible.
