Robert Wenzel
EconomicPolicyJournal.com

"Troubled Wall Street" (Corbis Images)

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a speech before the the Annual Meeting of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council in Providence, Rhode Island. In the speech, he warned about the current state of the government finances. His conclusion, the situation is dire and "unsustainable".

It is remarkable that mainstream media has given this speech no coverage. I repeat, the central banker of the United States says in his own words:

Let me return to the issue of longer-term fiscal sustainability. As I have discussed, projections by the CBO and others show future budget deficits and debts rising indefinitely, and at increasing rates. To be sure, projections are to some degree only hypothetical exercises. Almost by definition, unsustainable trajectories of deficits and debts will never actually transpire, because creditors would never be willing to lend to a country in which the fiscal debt relative to the national income is rising without limit. Herbert Stein, a wise economist, once said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."9 One way or the other, fiscal adjustments sufficient to stabilize the federal budget will certainly occur at some point. The only real question is whether these adjustments will take place through a careful and deliberative process that weighs priorities and gives people plenty of time to adjust to changes in government programs or tax policies, or whether the needed fiscal adjustments will be a rapid and painful response to a looming or actual fiscal crisis.

This is as close as you are ever going to see a central banker admit that his country's financial situation is so dire that it could breakup at any time.

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Stephen Lendman

Long planned, the current economic storm erupted violently in late 2007. It wasn't by accident. It was engineered years back, so financial racketeers could profit from wrecking global economies and destroying their middle class, including America's.

On February 1, 2009, former high-level Wall Street and government insider, Catherine Austin Fitts, explained it an article headlined, "Financial Coup d'Etat," saying:

A global financial cabal "engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble; illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the US; and used 'privatization' as a form of piracy - a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder....Clearly, there was a global financial coup d'etat underway," its magnitude overwhelming and incomprehensible to most people, as planned.

Many trillions of dollars have been stolen, shifted from public to elitist private hands - by far, the greatest ever wealth transfer in history, a global heist, sucking capital out of one country after another, including America. It's an ongoing "de-moderniz(ation)" process, transforming Western countries into third world ones - in real time, in plain sight, yet few people understand.

In stark terms, Fitts says it's more than just "a process designed to wipe out the middle class. This is genocide (by other means) - a much more subtle and lethal version than ever before perpetrated by the scoundrels of our history texts."

It's a government-business cabal for enormous profits through "legislation, contracts, regulation (or lack of it), financing, subsidies," and massive handouts to Wall Street favorites. Carefully rigged for powerful elitists, the public is so cleverly harmed that few understand what's happening - literally that their livelihoods, welfare and lives are being destroyed in real time. The America older generations knew no longer exists, the dream of millions wiped out, and it's also happening throughout Europe.

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Bill van Auken

[Codename: Operation Enduring Turmoil - Zionist Neocon Plans for Pakistan and rest of the World. Read this document to understand the game plan]

"Following the strategy dictated by his generals, Obama, just like his predecessor in the White House, is attempting to exploit US military superiority to offset American capitalism’s long-term economic decline. This course is producing regional and global instability that threatens to drag the people of Pakistan and the entire world into a far bloodier conflagration."

The week-old standoff between Washington and Islamabad over US military attacks inside Pakistan and the blocking of a vital NATO supply line in retaliation underscores the growing threat that the nine-year-old war in Afghanistan is spiralling out of control.

A dramatic escalation of US attacks on Pakistan set the stage for the sharp deterioration in relations over the past week. September saw 22 missile strikes by CIA drones against Pakistani targets, a record number since the attacks began.

The Pakistani government and intelligence services have tolerated and collaborated in the drone attacks, but the US military carried out a qualitative escalation of the assault on Pakistan last week, staging a series of cross-border raids by US helicopter gunships based inside Afghanistan.

While the first of these raids claimed the lives of scores of Pakistanis described by Washington as “militants”—and by residents of the area as local tribesmen—the last killed three members of the Pakistani military’s Frontier Corps and blew to pieces a border post.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top US military commander in Afghanistan, defended this attack as an act of “self defense.” It was nothing of the sort. The US military sent its attack helicopters across the border hunting for targets. If there was any act of self defense, it was by the Frontier Corpsmen, who apparently fired shots to warn the helicopter that it had crossed the border in violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.

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Chris Sands
Le Monde Diplomatique

On 7 October 2001, the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began. Barely a month later, Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance. It was, it seemed to observers at the time, a short and relatively painless conflict. A new type of war that relied on using proxy local militia commanders and the power of the American air force appeared to have been fought with ease. No sooner had the world been made to take notice of the Taliban than they were defeated.

Today, that first autumn after 9/11 has long faded into memory for the people of Afghanistan. At best, it conjures up the same kind of sad emotions as an old photograph. At worst, it feels like a sham: a bitter prologue to yet another story of occupation and bloodshed. Much of what has happened since can be traced to that early period, when the war was painted just in black and white. Even then, victory was not certain and the boundaries between right and wrong, good and evil, were never clear-cut.

The questions being raised about the conflict now could, and should, have been asked at the very start. The seeds of the Taliban’s resurgence and the corruption of the Karzai administration were planted immediately, when many of the US troops who later died here were only children.

Relying on the Northern Alliance certainly meant that few US citizens were initially put in harm’s way in a country known for its hatred of foreign invaders. But it also demonstrated a profound or wilful ignorance of another aspect of Afghan history: the same militia commanders financed and supported by Washington in 2001 were already systematic human rights abusers whose actions had helped inspire the original formation of the Taliban movement.

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