Independent observers knew it long ago. Today’s global economic crisis provides added confirmation. In 2008, a staunch champion of the system expressed second thoughts. More on him below.

An ideology based on inequality, injustice, exploitation, militarism, and imperial wars eventually self-destructs or gets pushed.

Growing evidence in America and Europe show systemic unaddressed problems too grave to ignore. They remain so despite millions without jobs, savings, homes or futures.

Imagine nations governed by leaders letting crisis conditions fester. Imagine voters reelecting them despite demanding change. OWS aside, one day perhaps rage will replace apathy in America. The latest jobs report alone provides incentive enough to try and then some.

On May 4, the Labor Department reported 115,000 new jobs. It way overstated the true number. Official figures belie the dire state of things. At most, two-thirds the headline total were created. Even that’s in doubt.

Most were low-pay, part-time, or temp positions with few or no benefits. Decades ago, workers would have avoided them. Today, there’s no choice.

The report also showed economic decline. Expect much worse ahead. In 2008, Main Street Americans experienced Depression. It rages today. Poverty’s at record levels. Real unemployment approaches 1930s numbers. Dire conditions are worsening.

Announced job cuts are increasing. Hiring plans are down. Compared to year ago levels, they’re off 80%. Income is stagnant for those lucky to have work. The private diffusion index measuring growth fell sharply month-over-month.

The unemployment rate decline reflects discouraged workers dropping out. They want jobs but can’t find them. The Labor Department considers them non-persons. They’re not counted to make official figures look better.

Moreover, the broad based Household Survey showed employment dropping 169,000. It was the second consecutive monthly decline. The Labor Department uses a “population and payroll concept adjusted” calculation. Doing so tries to compare monthly payroll and household figures.

The measure plunged 495,000 in April after dropping 418,000 in March. The calculation represented the largest back-to-back decline since late 2009.

At 63.6%, America’s labor force hit its lowest level since September 1981. Since then, population totals grew from 229 million to about 312 million today. The state of the nation today reflects lots of people facing few jobs, and no policy to create them.

The employment/population ratio stands at 58.4%. Alone, it represents a shocking testimony to failure. So do other data. Long-term unemployment remains near record levels. Credit deleveraging continues. Housing’s in its worst ever depression. Prices keep falling. Inventories of unsold homes are huge. Foreclosures are at epidemic levels.

State and local downsizing continues. Personal income suffers. Conditions are bad and worsening.

On May 4, Pimco’s Mohamed El-Erian headlined his Financial Times article “Confirmed: America’s jobs crisis,” saying:

“Friday’s US jobs data sound a warning that should be heard well beyond economists and market watchers.”

Americans with jobs have poor ones. Wage growth is stagnant. Purchasing power can’t keep up with inflation. For ordinary Americans, secular income headwinds blow at gale force strength.

Crisis conditions today make “a mockery of the published unemployment rate of 8.1 per cent….The economic implications are clear.” At a time, Europe’s recession deepens, America’s declining.

Risks are increasing. A “potential (austerity caused) year-end ‘fiscal cliff’ (may) suck out some 4 per cent of GDP in purchasing power, and do so in a disorderly fashion.”

Instead of addressing crisis conditions responsibly, political Washington campaigns for reelection, and plans huge domestic budget cuts when stimulus help is needed.

Main Street Americans are pushed to the edge. Potential “social consequences” suggest “the possibility….of a lost generation.”

Unemployed teenagers “face the risk of going from being unemployed to becoming unemployable.” Today’s reality is bleak. It reflects “a multi-faceted unemployment crisis that politicians, both in America and Europe, are failing to comprehend, unite around, and respond to.”

“I worry greatly that facts on the ground will unfortunately warrant future analyses to be even more disheartening.”

Alan Greenspan’s Too Late to Matter Mea Culpa

As Fed chairman for nearly two decades (1987 – 2006), he engineered today’s crisis. Some call him the Maestro of Misery for good reason. Those benefitting most sing his praises. In 2008, he had second thoughts.

A longtime Ayn Rand disciple, he strayed noticeably in October 2008 House testimony. Her libertarian views influenced his. She championed regulatory free markets. So did Greenspan. He practiced what she preached.

Perhaps House Oversight and Government Reform Committee members couldn’t believe their ears. He acknowledged his worldview failure, saying:

“You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 yeas or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

While trying to have it both ways, he admitted his faith in regulatory free markets was shaken, saying:

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

“The Federal Reserve had as good an economic organization as exists. If all those extraordinarily capable people were unable to foresee the development of this critical problem…we have to ask ourselves: Why is that? And the answer is that we’re not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in advance.”

In his book “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country” William Grieder called Greenspan one of “the most duplicitous figures to serve in modern American government.”

He used “his exalted status as economic wizard (to) regularly corrupt the political dialogue by sowing outrageously false impressions among gullible members of Congress and adoring financial reporters.”

His ideology was hokum. Somehow he managed a Columbia doctorate without its dissertation requirement. His economic consulting firm flopped. It faced liquidation. He closed shop to join the Fed after serving earlier in the Reagan, Nixon and Ford administrations.

His background in government got him his job. His inability to forecast made him a perfect Fed choice. So did his reliability to serve monied interests over populist ones.

Saying he got it wrong after the fact hardly matters. Where was he when it counted. In 2006, Bernanke replaced him. He made a bad situation worse. Since 2008, he more than tripled the Fed’s balance sheet from about 6% of GDP to 20%.

His day of reckoning approaches. Perhaps in future congressional testimony, he’ll address his own shortcomings. Doing it when it counts matters. After the fact turns memoirs into best-sellers.

His cross to bear and Greenspan’s could fill volumes. Millions their policies harmed won’t line up to buy them.

How can they? They’re broke, on their own, out of luck, and unreceptive to hear defrocked Fed chairmen say they’re sorry. If so, they’d have done it right in the first place.

image above: Thomas Malthus

A new round of calls for punishing austerity and depopulation strategies have sprung up in the wake of a Royal Society report ringing the alarm on the so-called overpopulation crisis. The report, entitled “People and the Planet” was published on April 26th and followed up by a flurry of articles by the usual suspects dutifully parroting the society’s dire warnings about the future of humanity in a crowding world. Paul Ehrlich was even trotted out to chastise the Society for not going far enough in their report, instead intimating that 5 billion people would have to disappear from the face of the earth for the population to be at a “sustainable” level.

The irony is that this is the same Paul Ehrlich who was crying wolf about the “Population Bomb” 45 years ago and was proven wrong on almost every prediction he made at the time. In 1968 Ehrlich predicted that “hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death” in the 1970s, but he was wrong. In 1969 he predicted that “smog disasters” were going be killing 200,000 people per year in cities like New York and L.A. by the mid-70s, but he was wrong. Also in 1969 he actually claimed he “would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Last we checked, England is still here. In 1975 he envisioned that “food riots” in America in the 1980s would lead to the dissolution of Congress, another prediction that failed to come to pass. The next year he argued that “Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” Wrong again.

By 1980, economist Julian Simon had grown weary of listening to the doom and gloom of those who, like Ehrlich, continued to predict one disaster scenario after another in the name of this supposed overpopulation crisis. He offered a wager to anyone who was willing to take him up on it that the price of any given raw material would be lower on any given future date than it was at the time. Paul Ehrlich took him up on the wager, and the two drafted a futures contract obligating Ehrlich to buy $1000 worth of copper, chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten from Simon in 1990 at 1980 prices. By the time the contract matured, the prices had fallen and Ehrlich was forced to cut Simon a check for $576.07. Simon offered a further $20,000 wager with the added incentive that Ehrlich could pick whatever resources and whatever time frame he wished, but Ehrlich had learned the valuable lesson not to put his money where his mouth was.

Despite a career of failed arguments and predictions that never came true, Ehrlich won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and is still treated as a venerated, knowledgeable figure on the subject of population. The problem, of course, is that adherents of his particular brand of doomsaying are inclined to believe these predictions of doom because it affirms their Malthusian worldview. Thomas Malthus was an employee of the British East India Company who hit upon the idea that food production increases arithmetically while population increases exponentially. Thus, argued Malthus in his infamous 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” it was a mathematical certainty that the world was on a crash course for demographic disaster. The problem for Malthus and his acolytes, however, is that they have in each and every generation failed to understand that the question of population and resources is not a zero-sum game. In each and every generation since Malthus first wrote his treatise, human ingenuity has developed technologies and techniques that have helped to expand the arable land for farming and agriculture and increased the number of crops that can be grown in each acre, even as the number of people required to work that land has fallen. Every generation a new crop of Malthusians emerge to argue that this time the expansion of the food supply will fail and the world will be plunged into chaos, and in each and every generation the predicted apocalypse has failed to arrive. Worse yet for those who argue so strenuously for the Here we are over 200 years later and the Malthusians of our own time continue to argue that the same disaster that has failed to arrive for two centuries is now just around the corner.

Unfortunately we don’t have to dig very deep to see the dark side of this Malthusian bent.  In 1969, Ehrlich stated that if voluntary birth control methods did not curb population growth fast enough for his liking, governments might have to consider “the addition of a temporary sterilant to staple food or to the water supply.” In 1972 UN climate guru Maurice Strong argued that governments should license couples to have children. In 1977, Obama “science czar” John Holdren co-authored with Ehrlich a tome called “Ecoscience” that mused once again about the possibility of forced abortions and sterilants in the water supply as a way of curbing population growth. In 2002, the editor of the Earth Island Institute’s online magazine lamented the introduction of electricity to Africa. The Malthusian philosophy is the perfect false front for an ideology that bemoans economic development and technological progress.

Interestingly, even the UN’s own population and fertility estimates show that overpopulation is not the real problem. The UN is projecting a world population of 9 billion by 2050 and a leveling off after that point. The global fertility rate (children per couple) was 4.95 in 1950-1955. It was 2.79 in 2000-2005. It is expected to be 1.63 in 2095-2100. To put that in perspective, the replacement fertility rate that would be required to maintain the population at current levels is projected to be 2.1 in developed countries and as high as 3.4 in developing countries due to higher child mortality rates. With a global fertility rate of 1.63 by the end of the century, the human race will be essentially breeding itself out of existence.

Quite contrary to the projections of the Malthusians, the very real danger to the economy and the species itself is the very real demographic shift that happens in a shrinking population. This phenomenon is referred to as demographic winter and has been understood by demographers for decades. Population is still growing because of high fertility rates in previous generations and longer life spans, but declining fertility rates will turn into population decline in a number of nations within the century should these trends hold. The countries of the developed world, with their fertility rates already in decline, will be the first to experience the effects of this transition. Countries like Greece, Russia, Taiwan, Lithuania, South Korea and others that already have a fertility rate below 1.5 and little influx of immigrants are either already declining in population or are expected to within a decade.

Japan is one of the countries on the forefront of this decline. Having some of the longest-lived people on the planet and ranking 202 out of 220 countries and regions for fertility rates, Japan is already starting to cope with the effects of a rapidly aging population. The Japanese government is increasingly turning to politically painful measures just to try to keep the country’s massive social security program going. Accounting for 29 percent of its $1.12 trillion dollar 2012 budget, the cost of taking care of Japan’s pensioners is only going to increase as more and more of the post-war boomer generation begin to come up for retirement. The workers per retiree ratio is falling across the majority of the globe, with Japan falling from 9.1 workers per retiree in 1965 to a projected worker/retiree parity in 2050. In effect, by the middle of the century each Japanese worker will be asked to pay for the retirement of one of their elders. This is of course completely untenable, but the political will to make changes to the system is utterly lacking, especially since the majority of the population is retired or retiring in the near future and is unlikely to vote themselves out of an entitlement system they have spent their life paying into. Instead, the Japanese Prime Minister du jour, Yoshihiko Noda, is trying to rally the country around tax hikes that are explicitly aimed at making up social security shortfalls.

The situation, while perhaps more acute in Japan, is common to countries across the developed world, including the United States. No one entering the work force today expects there to be a social security system of the kind that exists today by the time they reach retirement, but there is no way to put the brakes on a system of unfunded liabilities that today’s retirees spent their life “paying into.” Reforming the system seems a politically quixotic quest, and is the ultimate Catch-22 inherent in the program itself since the moment of its inception under FDR in the 1930s. A population suffering from the effects of the Great Depression was promised a program that would take care of them in old age. Now during our current ongoing depression, what little social security payouts that the boomers have inherited after a lifetime of paying in is being inflated away into nothing by Helicopter Ben and the quantitative easing crew. Europe is even worse, with retirees and pensioners committing public suicide in places like Greece rather than subject themselves to a life of picking through garbage in the wake of Eurocrat-dictated austerity measures.

Other economic effects of the greying population will begin to make themselves felt in the coming years, as well. Real estate and stock market declines are inevitable in a society with an increasing number of aging retirees cinching up the purse strings and fewer young couples buying houses or investing in the markets.  Declines in saving rates, outputs per capita and living standards are all likewise projected as inevitable in a world of shrinking population. Given the immensity of the problems generated by this demographic transition, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the Malthusians have placed the problem of the “population bomb” on its head: the real “Population Bomb” of the 21st century is not the problem of too many people, but too few.

The Malthusians tend to argue that their end goal is that imagined state of “sustainability” by which the economy of the future will not be predicated on growth, but instead will be a static system that will maintain itself via renewability. Whatever one thinks of the viability or desirability of such a system, the stark fact is that such a system is impossible in the paradigm of declining fertility rates. In fact, in order to achieve sustainability, the human race would have to find a way to reverse the fertility decline. It’s an irony that aging doomsayers like Ehrlich and Holdren may not live long enough to behold come to fruition in their lifetime, but to achieve the very goals they claim to be aiming toward, there may be only one hope for the human species: Bring on the babies.      

“The world belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader, kings or religious leaders. . . . Each country belongs essentially to their own people.” Dalai Lama

At times, something seemingly insignificant, when thought about deeply, reveals truths that the establishment seeks to keep hidden, the most important of which is the real purpose of a nation’s existence. Most Americans, for instance, believe that America exists for their benefit and they expect the nation’s institutions to serve their needs. But astute observers know that history proves otherwise even though the Constitution clearly states what the nation was established to do.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Notice that the phrases, “promote business” and “protect property” do not appear in this paragraph, but “promote the general Welfare” does.

In fact the Constitution to this day contains nothing about Capitalism or any other economic ideology. The document is completely neutral as Justice Holmes, dissenting in Lochner v New York writes:

“[A] Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the state or of laissez faire. It is made for people of fundamentally differing views, and the accident of our finding certain opinions natural and familiar, or novel, and even shocking, ought not to conclude our judgment upon the question whether statutes embodying them conflict with the Constitution of the United States.”

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has enshrined laissez-faire Capitalism in constitutional law for much of its history, and Justice Powell made it quite clear in his writing that he considered that to be the Court’s primary function.

The disingenuousness of the practice has made obvious injustice legal and the American people into mere means to serve the system’s nefarious goals. Whenever and wherever necessary, the people must suffer to preserve the system. The practice violates the Constitution on two accounts: it establishes injustice rather than justice and hinders rather than promotes the general welfare.

To see how this works, consider this simple business claim that most readers will have heard or read numerous times in various forms: An executive of a local electricity provider went on television recently complaining about people stealing electricity by tampering with meters. He said the theft costs honest customers thousands of dollars in higher electricity costs and should be stopped. The same claim is made by merchants about shoplifting and automobile insurance companies about insurance fraud. The claim is accepted silently; I have never heard of anyone questioning it. So let’s look at it carefully to see what can be learned from it.

The electric company sells electricity at a published rate of usage. If honest customers are being charged for the losses the company experiences because of thieves, the company isn’t losing any money. Why are they complaining? What’s happening is that the company is charging honest people for the actions of the dishonest. That’s neat for the company but it’s hardly just. If a person’s home is burglarized, the person can’t get back the loss from those honest people who had nothing to do with the burglary. What companies are allow to do is steal back what they have lost from honest people. If that were made into a general legal principle, it would read something like, you may steal from the innocent what others have stolen from you. Of course, the judicial system contains no such principle, but it acts as if it does when a business is involved.

To protect ourselves from theft, ordinary people must buy theft insurance. Why aren’t companies required to buy it or else tolerate the losses? Is it because the system exists to protect the property of businesses but not the property of ordinary people? How many people seeking office who flat out told their constituents that do you believe would be elected?

But it’s even worse. Remember, the electric company has built the expected losses into its current rate. What do you believe happens when the expected losses fail to materialize? Does the electric company rebate its customers the losses they have been charged for that didn’t happen? Sure it does!

So this seemingly innocent story that everyone accepts silently hides two common vendor forms of theft that are protected by the legal system whose justices have enshrined an economic bias into law because they have subverted the Constitution from the goals the founding fathers wrote into it to the almost exclusive promotion of laissez-faire Capitalism. There are countless other similar unjust business practices that are similarly protected by the system.

Capitalist countries everywhere are similarly unjust and exploitive. The nations that make up the European Union are now twisting themselves into contortions so that creditors can be protected by inflicting actual physical and economic pain on their citizens. But when people must not only suffer but be sacrificed to preserve the system, the only moral conclusion is that the system does not deserve to be preserved.

Until the system is discarded, the Dalai Lama’s claims are false. The world does not belong to humanity. It belongs to thieving Capitalists who are protected by biased legal systems. And because the legal systems embody thousands of these little seemingly obvious injustices, changing it is virtually impossible. Underhanded Capitalism picks the pockets of common people during every economic transaction. People, you cannot win! Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, the sixteenth century Dutch humanist, called lawyers jackals. Today these wolves are allowed to delineate right from wrong. Try calling that progress!

You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda”, but “exercise”, “drill”, “wave”, “initiative” and “organisation”: all proscribed words. The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming western democracy.

What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with “terror suspects”. Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to “cruel and unusual punishment”. One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free, they go — along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces 10 years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the internet.

As the law is politicised and Americanised, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating “terrorism” on the internet, Appeal Court judges in London ruled that “acts… against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes” were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

What are you going to do about it?

The prognosis is clear now: the malignancy that Norman Mailer called “pre fascist” has metastasized. The US attorney-general, Eric Holder, defends the “right” of his government to assassinate American citizens. Israel, the protege, is allowed to aim its nukes at nukeless Iran. In this looking glass world, the lying is panoramic. The massacre of 17 Afghan civilians on 11 March, including at least nine children and four women, is attributed to a “rogue” American soldier. The “authenticity” of this is vouched by President Obama himself, who had “seen a video” and regards it as “conclusive proof”. An independent Afghan parliamentary investigation produces eyewitnesses who give detailed evidence of as many as 20 soldiers, aided by a helicopter, ravaging their villages, killing and raping: a standard, if marginally more murderous US special forces “night raid”.

Take away the videogame technology of killing – America’s contribution to modernity – and the behaviour is traditional. Immersed in comic-book righteousness, poorly or brutally trained, frequently racist, obese and led by a corrupt officer class, American forces transfer the homicide of home to faraway places whose impoverished struggles they cannot comprehend. A nation founded on the genocide of the native population never quite kicks the habit. Vietnam was “Indian country” and its “slits” and “gooks” were to be “blown away.

The blowing away of hundreds of mostly women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 was also a “rogue” incident and, profanely, an “American tragedy” (the cover headline of Newsweek). Only one of 26 men prosecuted was convicted and he was let go by President Richard Nixon. My Lai is in Quang Ngai province where, as I learned as a reporter, an estimated 50,000 people were killed by American troops, mostly in what they called “free fire zones”. This was the model of modern warfare: industrial murder.

Like Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan is a theme park for the beneficiaries of America’s new permanent war: Nato, the armaments and hi-tech companies, the media and a “security” industry whose lucrative contamination is a contagion on everyday life. The conquest or “pacification” of territory is unimportant. What matters is the pacification of you, the cultivation of your indifference.

What are you going to do about it?

The descent into totalitarianism has landmarks. Any day now, the Supreme Court in London will decide whether the WikiLeaks editor, Julian Assange, is to be extradited to Sweden. Should this final appeal fail, the facilitator of truth-telling on an epic scale, who is charged with no crime, faces solitary confinement and interrogation on ludicrous sex allegations. Thanks to a secret deal between the US and Sweden, he can be “rendered” to the American gulag at any time. In his own country, Australia, prime minister Julia Gillard has conspired with those in Washington she calls her “true mates” to ensure her innocent fellow citizen is fitted for his orange jump suit just in case he should make it home. In February, her government wrote a “WikiLeaks Amendment” to the extradition treaty between Australia and the US that makes it easier for her “mates” to get their hands on him. She has even given them the power of approval over Freedom of Information searches – so that the world outside can be lied to, as is customary.

What are you going to do about it?