“The World Is A Business”

4 Minute Video Clip From The Movie “Network” (1976)

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bye-laws of of business.

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The U.S. Economy: Designed to Fail

by Richard C. Cook

President Barack Obama showed a great deal of gumption in standing before Congress last night delivering his first speech to the joint assembly. All the trappings of power were on display as members of the House and Senate, the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, the Cabinet, and the VIP guests hugged and waved at each other, radiant in their tailored attire only two nights after the Hollywood stars put on their own show on Oscar night.

Too bad neither the president, nor Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi applauding on the podium behind him, nor the jubilant Democrats with their solid majorities, nor the grumpy Republicans slouching in the minority across the aisle, know what they are doing as economic extinction stares the United States of America in the face.

Yes, it’s that bad. The day after the speech the Dow-Jones dropped to 7,271, almost 50 percent off its October 2007 high, with no bottom in sight. According to the Washington Post, the Big Three automakers are now facing a “bottom-up” collapse of their component supply lines if their vast network of suppliers doesn’t receive new federal loans within a week. Worldwide the situation is just as bad. The U.N.’s International Labour Organization reports:

“What began as a crisis in finance markets has rapidly become a global jobs crisis. Unemployment is rising. The number of working poor is increasing. Businesses are going under.”

President Obama’s speech was long on resolve but short on substance. He assured the nation:

“We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

But accomplishing this depends entirely on one thing: more federal deficit spending to serve as the economic engine in an economy where bank lending has dried up because businesses and consumers can no longer repay their loans.

Unfortunately, the deficit is approaching the breaking point.

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U.S. rattled as Mexico drug war bleeds over border

By Tim Gaynor Tim Gaynor – Sun Mar 1, 10:37 am ET
PHOENIX (Reuters) – Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it with gunfire and execute a man.

Armed kidnappers snatch victims from cars and even a local shopping mall across the Phoenix valley for ransom, turning the sun-baked city into the “kidnap capital” of the United States.

Violence of this kind is common in Mexico where drug cartel abductions and executions are a daily feature of a raging drug war that claimed 6,000 lives south of the border last year.

But U.S. authorities now fear that violent crime is beginning to bleed over the porous Mexico border and take hold here.

“The fight in Mexico is about domination of the smuggling corridors and those corridors don’t stop at the border,” Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said.

Execution style murders, violent home invasions, and a spiraling kidnap rate in Phoenix — where police reported an average of one abduction a day last year linked to Mexican crime — are not the only examples along the border.

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Nation’s Food System Nearly Broke, John Kinsman

February 26, 2009
John Kinsman
The Capital Times, Madison, WI

As our government enacts a stimulus package and President Barack Obama announces bold initiatives to stem home mortgage foreclosures, disaster threatens family farmers and their communities.

The government’s response to plummeting commodity prices and tightening credit markets leads to the basic question: Who will produce our food? This is a worldwide crisis. U.S. policy and the demand for deregulation at all levels — from food production to financial markets — contribute greatly to the global collapse. The solution must be grounded in food sovereignty so that all farmers and their communities can regain control over their food supply. This response makes sense here in Wisconsin and was the global message from the 500+ farmer leaders at the Via Campesina conference in Mozambique in October.

Many U.S. farmers are going out of business because they receive prices equal to about one half their cost to produce our food. How long could any enterprise receiving half the amount of its input costs stay in business? As an example, dairy farmers in the Northeast and Midwest must be paid between 30 and 35 cents per pound for their milk to pay production costs and provide basic living expenses. Until 1980, farmers received a price equal to 80 percent of parity, meaning that farmers’ purchasing power kept up with the rest of the economy. Unfortunately, a 1981 political decision discontinued parity, and today the dairy farmers’ share is below 40 percent.

“Free trade” and other regressive agricultural policies have decimated farms. We are now a food deficit nation dependent on food imports, often of questionable quality.

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Nothing More Than Inflation, Voodoo Finance And Smoke And Mirrors

By Bob Chapman
Posted: February 28 2009

Inflation and voodoo finance, smoke and mirrors, what destroyed our industrial base, negative GDP the reality, our economy now has been sacrificed by elitist manipulation, the policy bubble has now busted, the days of open ended expansion are now over, the list of problem banks soars, gold remains as the only real currency

The so-called greatest economic boom in history, which supposedly took place in the United States from the end of the early 1980’s recession to 2007, was nothing but an exercise in inflation and voodoo finance. It was a smoke and mirrors bull market based on Alice in Wonderland economics. The air is now being let out of the balloon as the man behind the curtain, the Fed Chairmen of that era, mainly ardent Illuminist Paul Volcker, and especially Mr. Bubbles, bonehead Alan Greenspan, are now being revealed to us as the Great Oz, who in the fairytale movie turned out to be a carnival barker and balloon rider from Kansas. How utterly appropriate. So, how low will we now go? Will it be all the way down to the Dow 1,000 of the early 1970’s? Will we ride our way down to the Dow 2,000 of the late 1980’s? Or will it be down to the Dow 3,000 of the early 1990’s? Already, the past 12 years of gains has gone up in smoke, and this is just the beginning.

During this so-called boom period, our industrial base was destroyed by free trade, globalization, off-shoring, outsourcing, and both legal and illegal immigration, and we went from being the greatest creditor nation on earth to being the greatest debtor nation on earth during the Bush-Clinton-Bush triple whammy! By what definition is that a boom?! A mighty nuclear wind, generated by the thermonuclear explosion of fraudulent weapons of mass financial destruction devised by the Puppet Masters who own Wall Street, has blown away the smoke and shattered the mirrors, laying bare the fraud and deceit perpetrated against the American public and the people of the world, a boom based on snake oil salesmanship by our government marionettes, corporate sociopaths and megalomaniacal, satanic trillionaire psychopaths, the Illuminati, who are sacrificing our economy, and other developed and emerging nation-state economies around the globe, on the alter of world government.

The tide of economic tomfoolery has gone out, and the fraud and malfeasance of our government, Wall Street and corporate America have been laid bare.

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