Our Collapsing Economy and Currency

Paul Craig Roberts

Is the “fiscal cliff” real or just another hoax? The answer is that the fiscal cliff is real, but it is a result, not a cause. The hoax is the way the fiscal cliff is being used.

The fiscal cliff is the result of the inability to close the federal budget deficit. The budget deficit cannot be closed because large numbers of US middle class jobs and the GDP and tax base associated with them have been moved offshore, thus reducing federal revenues. The fiscal cliff cannot be closed because of the unfunded liabilities of eleven years of US-initiated wars against a half dozen Muslin countries–wars that have benefitted only the profits of the military/security complex and the territorial ambitions of Israel. The budget deficit cannot be closed, because economic policy is focused only on saving banks that wrongful financial deregulation allowed to speculate, to merge, and to become too big to fail, thus requiring public subsidies that vastly dwarf the totality of US welfare spending.

The hoax is the propaganda that the fiscal cliff can be avoided by reneging on promised Social Security and Medicare benefits that people have paid for with the payroll tax and by cutting back all aspects of the social safety net from food stamps to unemployment benefits to Medicaid, to housing subsidies. The right-wing has been trying to get rid of the social safety net ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt constructed it, out of fear or compassion or both, during the Great Depression.


Permission Slips Instead of Rights

Eric Peters


Always Bow Low To Your Feudal Lord. - Are large parts of the
world moving backwards in time? Millions of people are be-
coming modern Serfs or indentured servants to Corporations
or Governments.

Free men do not beg permission. They insist that their rights be respected. Come what may.

Our slavery is ingenious because it’s so very subtle. Most people not only don’t see (much less feel) their shackles – they get angry when someone calls attention to them. Most people, in other words, still imagine themselves to be free. This despite the obvious fact that they must first beg – and obtain – permission before they may exercise any of their former natural rights.

Even the elemental right to choose your spouse, for instance, is no longer a natural right; the state demands the couple seek its permission to marry. Exactly as feudal lords once demanded of their serfs. And serfs we have become.

One reason to do it officially – that is, to beg the state’s permission – is simply to have the legal standing in case, for example, your spouse falls ill. An officially anointed husband (or wife) has specific legal rights that a non-sanctioned (by the state) “partner” does not. And of course, there is the issue of taxes and the disposition of property following the death of a spouse.

The concealed carry handgun permit is exactly similar to the marriage permit. They are both usurpations of natural rights in that they force you to beg permission to exercise your (former) natural rights – and strictly define and delimit how you may exercise these ex-rights. It is the same as regards now-conditional property rights, the former right to travel freely, to speak (and even write) freely… and on and on. These things are now privileges that require permission.

As noxious as all that is, the alternative is even worse: Fail to get permission and your rights disappear completely, insofar as any obligation of the state to respect or even acknowledge them. To put a finer point on it, you can expect to be punished for any attempt to exercise your former natural rights.


Bradley Manning: I just thought I was going to die in that cage

Naomi Spencer


Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, center, is heavily guarded as he is led
out of a courthouse in Fort Meade, Md.
(Photo: © N/A)

Private Bradley Manning took the stand Thursday at an Army pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, to speak on his lengthy pre-trial detention. It is the first public statement from the accused whistleblower in over two years.

The 24-year-old private, accused of the largest leak of government and military documents in history, has been imprisoned without conviction for 917 days.

“I was in a pretty stressed situation,’ Manning told the court, describing the days after his May 2010 arrest. He was kept for weeks in a “segregation tent” at Camp Arifjan, an Army installation in Kuwait. “I had no idea what was going on with anything. I was getting very little information,” he said.

As his isolation deepened, Manning said, “I began to really deteriorate. I was anxious all the time about not knowing anything, days blend into night, night into days. Everything became more insular.” He said he was filled with thoughts of death in his confinement: “My world just shrunk to Camp Arifjan, to that cage,” Manning testified. “I just thought I was going to die in that cage. And that’s how I saw it—an animal cage.”

Conditions were appalling. At one point, Manning fainted from the heat and dehydration. Guards prevented any interactions with other detainees, refusing to take him out of his cell, and denied him access to a phone to call his family. “I didn’t have a good understanding of the reasons,” Manning said. “Someone tried to explain to me but I was a mess. I was starting to fall apart.”

Several times a day, guards did a “shakedown” of his cell, ripping apart everything. Manning’s lawyer, David Coombs, asked him if he had any memory of a breakdown he suffered on June 30, 2010, which Coombs described as “screaming, babbling, banging his head against the cell.” Manning stated, “I knew I had just fallen apart, everything is foggy and hazy at that point.”


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