America R.I.P.
During the second half of the 20th century the United States was an opportunity society. The ladders of upward mobility were plentiful, and the middle class expanded. Incomes rose, and ordinary people were able to achieve old-age security.
In the 21st century the opportunity society has disappeared. Middle class jobs are scarce. Indeed, jobs of any kind are scarce. To stay even with population growth from 2002 through 2011, the economy needed about 14 million new jobs. However, at the end of 2011 there were only 1 million more jobs than in 2002. http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cesbtab1.htm
Only 426,000 of these jobs are in the private sector. The bulk of the net new jobs consist of waitresses and bartenders and health care and social assistance. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over the 9 years, employment for waitresses and bartenders increased by 1,188,000. Employment in health care and social assistance increased 3,087,000. These two categories accounted for 1,000% of the net private sector job growth.
As for manufacturing jobs, they not only did not grow with the population but declined absolutely. During these nine years, 3.5 million middle class manufacturing jobs were lost.
Over the entire nine years, only 48,000 new jobs were created for architects and engineers.
In the 21st century the US economy has been able to create only a few new jobs and these are in lowly paid domestic services that cannot be offshored, such as waitresses and bartenders.
The lack of jobs, especially high value-added, high productivity jobs, is the reason real median household income has declined and the distribution of income has worsened. Without rising real household income, there cannot be a consumer economy.
In the early years of the 21st century, the Federal Reserve substituted a rise in consumer debt to drive the economy in place of the missing rise in consumer incomes. Low interest rates drove up housing prices, and people refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity. The Federal Reserve kept the economy alive by loading up consumers with debt that housing prices and consumer incomes would soon be unable to support.
When debt and real estate prices reached unsustainable levels, the bubble popped, and the ongoing financial crisis was upon us.
The cause of all of the problems is the offshoring of Americans’ jobs. When jobs are moved offshore, consumers’ careers and incomes, and the GDP and payroll and income tax base associated with those jobs, go with them. When the goods and services produced for American markets by offshored labor are brought into the US to be sold, the trade deficit rises, and downward pressure is put on the dollar, pushing up domestic inflation. (On October 12, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reported that “third-quarter wholesale inflation jumped to an annualized 6.2%.”)
Jobs offshoring is driven by Wall Street, “shareholder advocates,” the threat of takeovers, and by large retailers, such as Walmart. By cutting labor costs, profits go up.It is that simple. However, as a result of sending American jobs to cheap labor countries, US consumer incomes go down. The end result is to destroy the domestic consumer market. What would have been US consumer income growth becomes instead profit growth for US corporations.
Keynesian economists use in their textbooks the example of how the aggregate effect of individual saving could be the opposite of the effect intended by the individuals. Whereas each saver seeks to improve his position by building wealth, in the aggregate saving could exceed investment, resulting in a decline in aggregate demand and a fall in income for all. Offshoring has the same logic. Each corporation can expect to gain more profits from moving US jobs offshore, but the aggregate effect is a fall in American consumer incomes and a reduction in the American consumer market.
I have told this story many times. But policymakers, the media, and economists seem unable to connect the dots.
Jobs offshoring has substantial implications for Social Security and Medicare. The US has the least adequate social safety net of any developed country. The two major components of the US social safety net are Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. Social Security and Medicare are financed by a payroll tax. The combined tax is 15.3% of payrolls. For the past quarter of a century the Social Security portion of the payroll tax has built up a surplus of over $2 trillion. Recently, the Medicare portion began running in the red.
Right-wing Republicans, free market ideologues, and the left-wing have all indoctrinated themselves with incorrect beliefs about Social Security and Medicare. The right-wing claims that a safety net financed with 15.3% of payrolls is a “Ponzi scheme” and an “unfunded liability.” If that is the case, then so are veterans benefits, military pensions, and federal pensions, all of which are financed by the income tax, the basis for the payroll tax.
The left-wing claims that the rich do not pay high enough payroll taxes, because the income subject to Social Security payroll tax is capped at about $110,000. But the benefits are also capped. Social Security is not supposed to be an income redistribution scheme from rich to poor, and it is not supposed to be a pension system for the rich. The pension paid is supposed to correlate with the pre-retirement income level of the retiree. Those who had higher wages or salaries and consequently paid more in payroll taxes receive a larger Social Security check than those who had lower wages and salaries and paid less payroll taxes, although there is favoritism toward the lower income earners who receive proportionally more in respect to their payroll taxes than higher income earners.
There is no cap on income subject to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax. Moreover, Medicare charges a Medicare Part B premium that is deducted from the Social Security monthly check. In addition, there is a further Part B premium based on retirement age income. For example, someone working beyond retirement age and making $250,000 per year pays about $3,800 in Medicare Part B premium in addition to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax of about $7,500. The annual premium he pays for his “free” Medicare for which he has paid all his working life with a payroll tax is about $11,300.
Moreover, Medicare by itself is insufficient coverage. To actually have medical coverage, those covered by Medicare have to purchase a supplementary private policy to cover the large gaps in Medicare. Depending on the range of coverage, a supplementary policy costs approximately $100 to $300 per month.
As the person making $250,000 per year is likely to go for the most coverage, he will be paying about $14,900 (excluding deductions and co-payments) per year for his “free” Medicare. This is despite having paid the Medicare payroll tax each year of his working life. A person who made $250,000 in taxable income per year for 30 years would have paid $217,500 into Medicare at the current Medicare payroll tax rate.
The right-wing’s notion that Social Security and Medicare are handouts, part of the welfare state’s bread and circuses, and the left-wing’s idea that the rich get a free ride are equally untrue.
(Note: $250,000 is the politicians’ dividing line between the rich and the rest of us. For a person making $50,000 a year, an income five times larger can seem rich. However, a $250,000 annual income leaves a family or person far distant from the lifestyle of the rich. Upper middle class incomes are generally associated with high-tax, high-cost urban areas in states with high income taxes. After federal income and payroll taxes, state income and sales taxes, and property taxes, what appears to many as a large income disappears. In New York City, the federal income tax will take about 25% of the $250,000, New York state will take about 9%, and New York City will take about 3.65%. The combined city and state sales tax is 8.875%. The property tax is high. The conclusion is that in New York City a $250,000 income is reduced to $125,000 or thereabouts. Those who claim “the rich don’t pay taxes” are not talking about $250,000 incomes.)
Social Security and Medicare have served the country well. They protect the individual from his own mistakes, from crooked and incompetent money managers, and from financial crises, and they protect society from the moral dilemma of confronting large numbers of fellow citizens who through fault or no fault of their own cannot provide for their livelihood and medical care. After the financial scandals and crisis of the past five years, it is a stretch to believe that any but the astute can manage their personal wealth, whether small or large, in today’s situation of unregulated financial markets, zero interest rates, currency uncertainty, and highly complex investment instruments with computers programmed with mathematical models dominating equity trades.
The argument that conceptually a person could do better by investing his payroll taxes in the stock market is a poor basis for old age security policy. The person can do better as long as he or she doesn’t fall into the hands of a Bernie Madoff or a Goldman Sachs, doesn’t receive zero interest on his bonds because the Federal Reserve has to bail out the “too big to fail banks,” doesn’t experience a decline in currency value due to monetization of enormous federal deficits, and doesn’t experience a bear market as he approaches retirement.
The right-wing ideologues who try to scare old age security out of existence go on and on about rising medical costs, about an aging population living longer, declining birthrates and a worsening ratio of workers to retirees, about people learning to rely on handouts rather than their own means, and about Washington’s rising unfunded liabilities.
Scare projections are designed to scare, and most are untenable. For example, longevity was a product of rising incomes, good diet, and antibiotics. Today only the upper crust have rising incomes. Antibiotics are wearing out from abuse and rising immunity of bacteria. Diet is compromised in ways still poorly understood as a result of GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, pumping chicken, pork, and beef full of antibiotics and hormones and feeding the animals GMO grains and also possibly infected animal byproducts, and pumping our water full of fluoride. A variety of destructive activities and behaviors are causing ecological damage. Longevity might have been a short-term benefit of irreproducible conditions considering the mounting ecological damage and the rise of superbugs, stress, and tainted food and water production.
The projection of an aging population might also be wrong. Clearly, the post-World War II baby boomers are aging, but do the projections take into account the legislated 1965 immigration increases plus the illegal influx from Mexico and points south of young people with high birth rates? How can it be that a country with allegedly 30 million illegal immigrants, whose children born in the US are citizens, has a declining birth rate? How do we know that the illegal population will not continue to increase?
There are so many Spanish speaking people in the US today that if a person calls any of his utility companies, whether telephone, Internet, water, electricity, TV, or any of his credit card companies, or his bank, he has to select English or Spanish. Obviously, as
anti-immigration sites make clear, the US population is changing in its national origin, and there appears to be no sign of an aging Hispanic population. How many old Spanish speaking people do you see in the US compared to the young?
When confronted with this apparent fact, the response is: “why will the Hispanics pay for the aging white population?” The answer is: because they are in the same payroll tax system and the taxes will be withheld from their wages and salaries just as they are from everyone else’s.
It is possible that if Hispanics in the US have suffered years of hostility, accusations, and hatred from “the ice people,” once Hispanics are sufficiently numerous to control the legislature, assuming one still exists, or to take over the executive branch, the only seat of power, they may in retribution cut off the aging whites. But if so, the whites will have brought it on themselves.
Whatever the scare projections that are mustered to undermine the public provision of old age security, the real financial danger is never mentioned. The only significant financial danger to Social Security and Medicare is the offshoring of American jobs and GDP. A country without a job base is without a payroll tax base. If the only jobs that the 21st century “world’s only superpower” economy can create are for waitresses, bartenders, and health care and social assistance (hospital orderlies and practical nurses), payroll tax revenues will be less than if the US still had 20 million workers and rising in well-paid manufacturing jobs instead of 11 million.
Regardless of Medicare’s financing, the death knell for the elderly was the legality of abortion. If the yet to be born are an insufferable burden, imagine the cost of the elderly. As far as the state is concerned, once you stop producing income and payroll tax revenues for the state, it is time for you to die. Washington would rather enact euthanasia than to pay back the $2+ trillion in the Social Security trust fund that Washington spent, leaving only non-marketable IOUs in the account.
Readers might think that Americans would never stand for death by injection for the elderly once the qualified age is reached. But why would they not? They have accepted millions of aborted babies, and Americans, including the elderly, have stood for Washington’s murder, maiming and displacement of millions of Muslim men, women, and children in 7 countries over the past 11 years and are yet to show any signs of remorse for their complicity in mass murder. Next month tens of millions of Americans will vote for Mitt Romney who believes Obama isn’t killing Muslims fast enough.
The new “Obamneycare” health legislation does have “death panels.” They are not called that, and they do not make formal decisions to terminate lives. But it comes to almost the same thing. Various panels, committees, or bureaucratic departments are empowered to make decisions about “effective care.” It has long been known that most health care costs are associated with the last year of life. Cost and age will be elements in determining standards of care. The greater the weight assigned to cost, the more care will be withheld. In effect, the “effective care” panel is a “death panel.”
Prior to the advent of the new “health care” system, Medicare and or hospitals are already shifting costs to Medicare patients. To avoid penalties and fraud allegations for “medically unnecessary hospitalizations,” rather than formally admit Medicare patients as inpatients, hospital administrators classify them as outpatients “under observation.”
According to a Brown University analysis of Medicare records in 2007, 2008, and 2009, the ratio of Medicare observation patients to those admitted as inpatients rose by 34 percent.
Being classified an outpatient under observation eliminates medicare coverages, especially for post-operative or post-accident rehabilitation care, leaving Medicare patients with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars (AARP Bulletin, October 2012).
Other costs are being shifted to doctors and to hospitals. Medicare pays fixed prices for each covered procedure or test, and these prices can be as low as half of the billed prices. During a period when costs incurred by providers of health care have been rising, Medicare has been cutting the amounts it pays providers.
As the payroll tax is commingled with general tax revenues, Social Security and Medicare payroll tax collections can be diverted to other purposes and, thus, are always subject to competing budgetary demands, such as the previous 11 years of gratuitous wars and the bailouts of “banks too big to fail,” or to deficit reduction demands as the government consistently overspends all revenue sources.
A national health service is the only way to control health costs and provide the population with health care coverage. A national health system takes the many levels of profits out of the system and also reams of compliance and liability costs. A national health system can coexist with a private system for those who can afford it or whose employers are sufficiently profitable to provide it.
As Jarad Diamond reveals in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, societies fail, if not because of their moral bankruptcy, then because their rulers are only capable of short-term thinking. The future is beyond their interest. The US offshored its economy, because it worked short-term for corporate executives (rewarded with multi-million dollar performance bonuses), Wall Street (rewarded with profits), shareholders (rewarded with capital gains), and politicians (rewarded with corporate and Wall Street campaign contributions).
Incompetent free market economists confused jobs offshoring with free trade. They said the country would and was benefiting by giving its manufacturing, industrial, and tradable professional service jobs to China and India, that the US was ridding itself of “dirty fingernail jobs” and would soon be flush with highly paid high-tech jobs and highly paid financial service jobs.
None of these promises or predictions were true. Nowhere in the government’s jobs statistics are there any of these promised replacement jobs. The economists who provided cover for the destruction of the US economy were rewarded by the corporations with speaking fees, grants for their university departments, and newspaper columns paid for by corporate advertisers. Those few who told the truth were expelled from the corporate media that Bill and Hilary Clinton allowed to be monopolized (for campaign contributions, of course).
The future of old age security in the United States has been lost, because the job base has been given away to foreigners in order to maximize incomes in the short-run for the few decision-makers.
The misrepresentation of jobs offshoring as free trade has destroyed the prospects of cities, counties, and states along with those of unions and millions of Americans who once had a secure future. It has destroyed the prospects of class after class of university graduates burdened with student loans who expected to step into the jobs that have been offshored or filled by H-1B visa holders from abroad.
The American work force has been forsaken by the corporations and by Washington, and this means that Social Security and Medicare have also been forsaken.
As I predicted in the early years of this new century, “the United States will be a third world country in 20 years.” We might get there even sooner as Washington exhausts what little is left of American wealth in gratuitous wars in service to Israel and the US Military/Security Complex, in unaffordable military buildups in futile hopes of establishing hegemony over China and Russia, and in negative interest rates from the Federal Reserve’s effort to drive up the book value of debt instruments on the balance sheets of financial institutions.
In 1817 Percy Bysshe Shelly forecast America’s future:
“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stampt on these lifeless things,
The hand that mockt them and the heart that fed:
On the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Writing in the October 15 online CounterPunch, John V. Walsh, relying on charts prepared by economics professor Mark J. Perry at the University of Michigan and blogger John Hunter, concludes that it is a myth that US manufacturing is in decline.
Walsh says that the loss of US manufacturing jobs is due to automation, not to offshoring. Think about this for a moment. Perry’s graph on which Walsh relies shows the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment to be a 21st century experience. However, automation has been around for a long time. The notion that its effect on employment only showed up recently needs an explanation that is not provided. The steep drop in US manufacturing employment that began in 2000 does correspond with the date at which jobs offshoring began to bite hard.
Why does automation not also affect Chinese manufacturing, especially as most of the Chinese manufacturing technology came from the US as US corporations offshored their production for the US market? If Chinese manufacturing is not up to date with automation, like the US is assumed to be, how do the Chinese, even with cheap labor, undersell US automated factories? How did Chinese manufacturing employment increase in a mere four years by an amount equal to the total manufacturing employment in the US?
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis shows only 11.2 million full time US manufacturing jobs in 2010. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows 11.7 million US manufacturing jobs in 2011, down from 15.3 million in 2002.
In contrast, China, an industrial and manufacturing backwater for most of my life, had 112 million manufacturing jobs in 2006. In a mere four years (2002-2006), the increase in China’s manufacturing employment was as large as today’s total employment in US manufacturing. As long ago as 2006, China’s manufacturing employment was about 10 times the current US manufacturing employment. The Chinese population is about 4 times larger than the US population, but China’s manufacturing population is proportionately greater–10 times larger. Indeed, Chinese manufacturing employees almost equal the total number of employees in all occupations in the US (Manufacturing and Technology News, December 15, 2009).
Obviously, something is wrong with Walsh’s article or the graphs on which he relied.
America’s manufacturing prowess cannot be found in the statistical data. The US is primarily an exporter of Agricultural commodities. The US imports almost twice the amount of manufactured goods as it exports. Indeed, according to the US Census Bureau Statistical Abstract of the US http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1308.pdf US imports of manufactured goods are 5.5 times larger than US imports of crude oil and 4 times larger than all imports of mineral fuel. Yet, we hear about energy dependency, not manufacturing dependency.
As of 2010 the “superpower” US economy still had a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts and a small $6 billion surplus in scientific instruments, but that is about all.
In ADP equipment and office machinery, the US exported $22.2 billion in 2010 (latest information at time of writing), down from $44.6 billion in 2000. US imports in 2010 of ADP equipment and office machinery were $113.5 billion, or 5.1 times exports.
The US cannot even make its own clothes and shoes. In 2010 footwear imports are 28.7 times exports. Clothing imports are 24.6 times exports.
Electrical machinery exports were $77 billion; imports were $120 billion.
Exports of power generating machinery were $33 billion; imports were $42 billion.
Exports of television, VCRs were $21.5 billion; imports were $137 billion.
US exports of vehicles was $88 billion; imports were $179 billion.
US news reports of thousands upon thousands of discharged US workers never cite their replacement by automation. The news story is always that the plant is being closed and the jobs moved abroad. Any review of America’s former manufacturing centers verifies this. Boarded up plants and cities and towns in decline are the remains of America’s formerly world dominant manufacturing economy.
The loss of the US post-war trade surplus in manufacturing has left the US with a huge trade deficit. The charts on which Walsh relied left him unaware of the fact that China has a large trade surplus with the US, and the US has a large trade deficit not only with China but with the world.
The fact that the US has to import not only manufactured goods, but also high-technology products from China, an inconceivable outcome during the second half of the 20th century, is powerful testimony to the decline of the US as a manufacturing powerhouse.
It took some doing to obscure the facts and to present the US as a rival to China in manufacturing prowess. How did it happen?
The fault might lie in the way statistical information is collected and presented. Apple, for example, is a US corporation. It reports its worldwide earnings to the IRS. Its manufacturing is counted as US manufacturing as it is a US corporation. However, Apple doesn’t produce a single computer in the US. They are produced in China. The employment that Apple reports is in China. The Chinese are employed by an American company, but they are not Americans. The Chinese incomes that Apple provides do not support the American consumer market or provide the tax base for cities and states. The Chinese incomes do not provide ladders of upward mobility or careers for Americans.
The wages Apple pays are in China. The consumer incomes and GDP that it generates are in China. When Apple’s computers come back to America to be sold they come in as imports. But Apple’s manufacturing and employment are reported as the output and employment of an American company.
When statistics and the methods by which they are compiled were put into effect, countries did not offshore their production for their domestic markets. Foreign investments were made for selling abroad, not for selling in the home market. With the advent of offshoring, counting the employment and output of US firms that are producing abroad for their domestic market as an indication of the strength of US manufacturing is very misleading. Apple, for example, has done more to boost China’s GDP than to boost America’s GDP. This is true of every US corporation that offshores its production for US consumers.
In recent years the percentage of the work forces of large US corporations that is foreign sourced has risen rapidly. Some of the overseas hiring reflects traditional foreign investment in which a company builds abroad in order to sell abroad, but much of the hiring reflects offshored production for US markets.
The US has been able to survive the large trade deficits produced by jobs offshoring, because the US dollar is the world reserve currency. Being the world reserve currency, the US does not have to earn foreign currencies with exports in order to pay for its imports. However, as these trade deficits persist and the buildup of foreign holdings of dollar paper assets rises, there is a diminishing willingness of foreigners to trade real goods and services for financial assets denominated in a fiat currency whose value is diminishing with the ever-growing supply.
Thus, the basic notion of globalism–that a country’s corporations can produce goods and services in any country for home markets–is false.
Walsh is correct that China is not to blame for the decline in US manufacturing. Offshoring is to blame, and, thus, the blame lies with US corporations, policymakers, and the economists and financial media who shill for “globalism.” The decision was made to sacrifice the US economy to the short-term profits of the few. A country so poorly led can do nothing but decline.
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During remarks that she made for the 15th Anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of a new program that according to Clinton will now become the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy. This new program is known as the Global Health Initiative, and it is being incredibly well-funded at a time when the U.S. government is drowning in debt. According to Clinton, 63 billion dollars will be spent by the U.S. to prevent pregnancies and to improve “family planning” services around the globe over the next six years. In other words, the new centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy is all about eugenics and population control.
The following is an excerpt from Clinton’s remarks….
In addition to new funding, we’ve launched a new program that will be the centerpiece of our foreign policy, the Global Health Initiative, which commits us to spending $63 billion over six years to improve global health by investing in efforts to reduce maternal and child mortality, prevent millions of unintended pregnancies, and avert millions of new HIV infections, among other goals. This initiative will employ a new approach to fighting disease and promoting health.
You see, whenever the global elite want to launch another new eugenics operation, they announce it as a great “humanitarian program” that will save millions of lives. But their real goal is to control the population and prevent millions of lives from being born.
This was also reflected in Clinton’s remarks about the United Nations Population Fund. The United Nations Population Fund has been promoting abortion, forced sterilization and radical population control measures around the globe for decades, and Hillary Clinton was super excited to talk about how the U.S. government recently renewed funding for that organization….
This year, the United States renewed funding of reproductive healthcare through the United Nations Population Fund, and more funding is on the way. (Applause.) The U.S. Congress recently appropriated more than $648 million in foreign assistance to family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide. That’s the largest allocation in more than a decade – since we last had a Democratic president, I might add. (Applause.)
Read More: howtohelpsavetheenviornment.com
According to two subsequent documents put out by the World Bank, its guidelines dictate that in order to qualify for World Bank lending, sovereign nations must implement population reduction objectives as outlined by the World Bank and UN Population Fund. If they refuse, lending will be withdrawn.
Already pre-tested and implemented in Yemen and Niger, these guidelines are destined for global implementation within the next decade, says the World Bank.
In the World Bank’s Reproductive Health Action Plan 2010-2015, published in April of 2010, the Bank speaks of Millennium Development Goal number 5 (or MDG5), which stands for “Reproductive Health” (or RH).
As we know, this is eugenics-new-speak for population control. As pro-death globalist professor John Cleland argued at a 2006 gathering in the company of like-minded individuals from the United Nations Population Fund, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, the European Commission, the World Bank and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
“It does this cause no service at all to continue to shroud family planning in the obfuscating phrase “sexual and reproductive health”. People don’t really know what it means. If we mean family planning or contraception, we must say it. If we are worried about population growth, we must say it. We must use proper, straightforward language. I am fed up with the political correctness that daren’t say the name population stabilization, hardly dares to mention family planning or contraception out of fear that somebody is going to get offended. It is pathetic!”
The 2010 report put out by the World Bank however, chooses to use this deceptive phrase continually. And, from its dark point of view, it is right to do so- for the resistance against this 21st century eugenics grows steadily. The Bank, just like the UN, has no choice but to cloak itself in deceptive language so as not to raise too much suspicion as they move forward:
“(…) a renewed global consensus on the need to make progress on MDG5, together with greater attention to gender issues within and outside the Bank is refocusing attention on RH and offering an unprecedented opportunity to redress the neglect of the previous decade. Notable among these developments is that in 2007 the UN fully incorporated RH within the MDG framework.”
Apart from all the available evidence of a global push for population reduction, The term Global Consensus alone proves it:
“The Global Consensus”, says the report, “recognizes that MDGs 4 & 5 will not be reached without country leadership and the prioritization of reproductive, maternal, and newborn health at country level. The Global Consensus proposes a five point plan that includes: (i) political, operational, and community leadership and engagement; (ii) a package of evidence-based interventions through effective health systems along a continuum of good quality care, with a priority on quality care at birth; (iii) services for women and children free at the point of use if countries choose to provide them; (iv) skilled and motivated health workers in the right place at the right time, with supporting infrastructure, drugs, and equipment; and (v) accountability for results with robust monitoring and evaluation.”
Speaking of a global consensus. It was Klaus Töpfer, 1996 Bilderberg attendee and former Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) who in the year 2000 admitted to an “international consensus” on worldwide population control. During a speech given in Berlin in the beginning of the new millennium, Töpfer stated outright:
“Most people and policymakers are unaware that there is an international consensus that grounds population policy in human rights and development, emphasizing building the capacities of women to manage their own lives.”
According to a recent report released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2011 had the lowest birth rates on record. Across the board, infiltrating all races in the US, less children are being born. Since 2007, 4.3 million Americans have had fewer babies; either due to the economy or social credo.
Mainstream media blame the financial crisis of 2008 as being the causation due to “economic stress”.
Social conditioning provides in parenting magazines that the over-all cost of raising a child has risen to the point of “just being too expensive to consider.” The immediate needs of children are not the concern of would-be parents. It is the pressure of saving for future events such as college tuition, extra-curricular activities, insurance, etc . . . The social constraints that have nothing to do with the actual child are intimidating people out of having children.
As a popular trend, couples are “opting out” and being supported by society who buys into the overpopulation myth.
Distorting genetic genome research, father’s are being blamed for passing down genetic mutations in their DNA to their children and a number of eugenicists are calling for a pre – screen test to be administered to determine whether or not a child would be born who would be a medical or financial burden to their parents and/or society.
Professors of molecular biology , molecular and human genetics, and pharmacology at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have deciphered a birth-control pill for men by manipulating sperm with the use of a drug called JQ1. This drug blocks the proteins essential for sperm production and drastically lowering sperm counts, JQ1 is now being slated for human trials.
Read More: occupycorporatism.com
2012-10-16 13:03:39
October 17, 2012
ACA: The More You Know, the More You Hate
By Deane Waldman
Everyone remembers Nancy Pelosi's famous words about the Affordable Care Act (ACA): "We have to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what is in it." Since January 2010, when the ACA was signed into law, we have gradually discovered what's in it. What we are finding is not what we want and certainly not what was advertised.
Every expansive promise made by the president for his signature legislation has been shown to be smoke and mirrors. Though touted as healthcare reform (change for the better), the ACA is more accurately described as Obama's Act of Healthcare Exacerbation (change that makes things worse).
A new study by the Pioneer Policy Institute in Massachusetts adds number 10 to the list (below) of reasons why Americans hate the ACA.
1. First, there was the way ACA was rammed down our throats. Arm-twisting, phony statistics, bribery, for-show executive orders, deferred implementation, and outright lies were all used to get the ACA passed against the will of We The People, even with a Democrat-controlled Congress.
2. Then there is a mandate that absolutely wasn't a tax until SCOTUS said it wasn't commerce. Therefore, it had to be a tax -- on the middle class, no less.
3. The ACA would cover all Americans who had no health insurance -- i.e., 45 million...until the president discovered that 12-15 million of those uninsured Americans were illegal residents. Presto! Forty-five million instantly became 30 million.
4. Illegal residents weren't covered, then maybe they were, and now they are exempt, for sure. Illegals are the leading users of ERs, where they receive mandated-but-uncompensated care: free to them but costing roughly $2,500 per year per tax-paying family.
5. The ACA will save money, promised Nancy Pelosi with a broad smile. In fact, the ACA will cost one to 2.7 trillion dollars. That is more than has been spent so far on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. That is money -- dollars we don't have -- which the ACA will spend on bureaucracy, not on patient services.
6. "Health exchanges will save money through the use of free market forces." Yet the government (ACA) controls both supply and demand, making the market in healthcare totally controlled -- the opposite of "free."
7. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor," promised President Obama over and over. Not true. Under the ACA, doctors cannot afford to care for Medicare- and Medicaid-covered patients. So even though your doctor wants to care for you, if you have government insurance coverage, your doctor cannot "keep" you.
8. Exemptions: if the ACA is good for us, why are there over 1,400 exemptions granted, including foro Congress and the White House, various unions and selected businesses, 40% of the uninsured (per J. Gruber of MIT), and Muslims? Why is one religious group exempt? Aren't all Americans equal under the law regardless of "race, religion, or country of national origin"?
9. The IPAB (Independent Payment Advisory Board) is in fact the "death panel" that Sarah Palin was lampooned over. By establishing what it won't pay for, the IPAB makes those treatments unavailable. If you need a therapy deemed "not cost-effective," you die...by government decision.
10. Now we have an addition to this list: another disingenuously titled component of the ACA called the "Cadillac Tax," which is a con, a scam in savior's clothing.
The Cadillac Tax is an excise tax: one levied on the amount of business done. The ACA penalizes (taxes) insurance plans where health benefits exceed $10,200 for an individual and $27,500 for a family. If you think these are benefits needed only by billionaires and members of Congress, you haven't seen hospital bills for having a baby or removing a gallbladder, much less for heart surgery.
The Cadillac Tax level of coverage applies to any profession that has robust healthcare benefits, like construction workers, teachers, police, and most public workers. Indeed, it is estimated that over half of all individuals having private, employer-provided insurance plans will be subject to this tax rather than only the "super, gold-plated Cadillac" top one percent, as asserted by the president.
The Pioneer Policy Institute has calculated the average cost of the excise tax on a middle school teacher ($2,081 per year), a police patrol officer ($5,391 per year), and a small business owner ($8,690 per employee per year). Nationally, business leaders say this last is a huge damper on economic growth. The ACA excise tax is quite clearly a middle-class tax, not "Cadillac" at all, and a job-killer to boot.
Dr. Seuss said, "The more that you read, the more things you will know." The more we read and learn about the ACA -- a bill that was supposed to "protect" us, that was advertised as "affordable," and that absolutely wasn't a tax -- the more things we learn to hate. (That's Dr. Seuss' least favorite word in the English language.)
Deane Waldman, M.D., MBA is emeritus professor of pediatrics, pathology, and decision science; adjunct scholar a for New Mexico think-tank called the Rio Grande Foundation, and the author of Uproot US Healthcare as well as Not Right! (January 2013).
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/aca_more_you_know_more_you_h...
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Oct. 16, 2012, 12:03 a.m. EDT
Doomsday Cycle targets America next
Commentary: Warning: Money + politics = ticking time bomb
Why? Because America’s “financial infrastructure makes it possible to borrow a great deal relative to the size of an economy ... far more than is sustainable relative to growth prospects.”
Worse, “the expectation of bailouts has become built into the system,” from Treasury and the Fed. Unfortunately, what’s owed is far “more than can ultimately be paid,” and growing fast.
From a behavioral-economics standpoint, our financiers are now so totally addicted to these unrealistic expectations and delusions they cannot see the risks from inside the “thought bubble” we’re trapped in. Johnson and Boone see into our warped reality in three key areas:
1. Politicians ... only see “great opportunities” and reelections. Politicians are obsessed with power, government as an opportunity “to buy favor and win re-election,” as “repeated bailouts have become the expectation not the exception.”
2. Financiers ... sees only “easy money and great fortune.” “The complexity and scale of modern finance make it easy to hide what is going on. The regulated financial sector has little interest in speaking truth to authority; that would just undercut their business. Banks that are ‘too big to fail’ benefit from giant, hidden and very dangerous government subsidies. Yet despite repeated failures many top officials pretend that ‘the market’ or ‘smart regulators’ can take care of this problem.”
3. Voting public ... see too little, “until it is too late.” “The issues are abstract and lack the personal drama that grabs headlines,” as becomes ever clearer in the debates, cable reports and political ads. Worse, our policy leaders are in conflict and “complicit in the schemes of big banks and politicians. The real costs of bailouts are disguised, millions of jobs lost, lives ruined, balance sheets damaged — and for what, exactly? The public is baffled and our leaders are driven by greed, selfishness and denial.
Doomsday recycling ... targeting America, Japan, euro zone
Johnson and Boone warn, the entire world is being swept up in this historic shift: “Over the past four centuries, financial development has strongly supported economic development. The market-based creation of new institutions and products encouraged savings by a broad cross-section of society, allowing capital to flow into more productive uses.”
But since the 1980s “our financial development has gone badly off-track,” thanks to their alliance with politicians” resulting in “irresponsible public policy.”
Johnson and Boone see Japan on a “long march to collapse”: an aging population, declining population, slowing growth, and a debt-to-GDP ratio that’s skyrocketed from about 70 to over 200 in the past 30 years.
“The symptoms are different in the U.S.” but the impact will be the same: collapse. The 2008 crisis increased debt by 50%. Banks got bailouts, now too-big-to-fail. That created an army of lobbyists and “pro-bailout” politicians. After each new crisis, politicians promise it’ll “never happen again ... but still it happens, again and again.”
And “with each crisis, the financial risks are getting larger ... more unaffordable.” Soon we will “run out of enough savers to buy the bonds needed to bail out the system” and “suffer the ultimate collapse.”
Johnson and Boone see “no sign that the euro zone will emerge from crisis any time soon.”
The euro zone is a magnet for 17 nations, drawn to the ECB liquidity window, which “converts unattractive government and bank-issued securities into highly liquid collateral ... at low interest rates.” Banks love it.
But its “easy to understand how the system got abused and why it will be so difficult ever to make it safe,” loaded now with risky derivatives that ballooned from nothing in 1998 to 19 times the entire GDP of the euro zone, a ticking time-bomb.
America + Japan + euro zone are a ticking time-bomb to collapse
The “Japanese can’t control their public finances ... the U.S. can’t control its too-big-to-fail banks” ... plus pile on the “complexity of merging 17 regulators and 17 national governments into a system where someone else can be made responsible for bailing out the intransigents.” Unfortunately our system has become “crisis-prone” a “financial and regulatory nightmare” posing “great dangers to global financial stability.”
“The tragedy of the euro zone appears unavoidable,” warn Johnson and Boone, with “far greater risks that will spread to Japan, the U.S., and other advanced economies.”
The run-up to the 2008 meltdown is replaying and we’re in denial: “We have created enormous, complex financial structures that can inflict tragic consequences with failure and yet are inherently difficult to regulate and control.” And yet, we naively assume our political systems will “check these dangers,” even as our leaders “develop symbiotic relationships that encourage irresponsible growth.”
This is self-deceptive: “There are more crises to come and they are likely to be worse than the last one.” The world is now controlled by a doomsday conspiracy where “political and financial systems have aligned to build these dangers rather than suppress them.”
And unfortunately, the conspiracy will not wake up and voluntarily “fix their underlying fiscal and financial problems ... until it is too late.” Yes, too late. World markets and the global economy must first collapse.
26 things to get done before the global debt collapse
Mike Adams
Natural News
Oct 17, 2012
The time between today and the day the global debt collapse reaches our shores is finite. The U.S. national debt clock shows a nation spiraling into financial oblivion. When Ron Paul says “Americans should be panicking” over the Fed’s new QE unlimited policy of infinite money creation, he was actually holding back. In reality, Americans should have been protesting in the streets… everywhere!
But instead, they’re going to deny reality, vote in the upcoming election, and pretend that whoever occupies the Oval Office has both the intention and the power to make any real difference. That belief is delusional, as is the belief that the national debt somehow doesn’t really matter.
The delusions are, of course, leading us all directly into a head-on collision with history, where the global debt collapse unfolds at a quickening pace and becomes “real” for hundreds of millions of people in North America who have so far escaped the reality of the financial collapse happening across Europe. Before that day comes, here are 26 things you might want to get done.
26 things to get done before the global debt collapse
See a holistic dentist and get the mercury removed from your mouth.
Buy some hardcopy books so you have something to read when the power grid fails.
Move your money out of the big globalist banks.
Bury your gold and silver. Use an appropriate container to protect from moisture and don’t forget to tell someone else where you’ve buried things, just in case you don’t make it.
Get the heck out of the city and learn some country living skills.
Pay off as many assets as you can so you have a clear title to anything you don’t want the banks to seize.
Get right with God or whatever spiritual focal point you practice.
Wrap up needed apologies or forgiveness. Don’t allow regrets to burden you in a time of crisis.
Make color copies of all your important documents, then store them in a safe place. (BTW, a bank’s safe deposit box is NOT a safe place. Those will all be looted.)
Get off prescription meds. Any dependence on prescription drugs is a death wish in a collapse scenario.
Stock up on diatomaceous earth (DE) to protect your garden vegetables. The stuff stores forever.
Stock up on extra glasses or contact lenses if you might need them.
Get fit, you’ll need to be more fit if you hope to survive.
Take out some cash and start saving nickels. Why? Because nickels are actually still worth a nickel in terms of what they’re physically made of.
Learn to use shortwave radio, or better yet get a radio operator’s license.
Learn and practice basic gardening skills.
Learn how to raise chickens, goats or other small animals.
Buy a premium-quality set of basic gardening tools, even if you don’t yet garden.
Get training on how to use your firearms. When you really need them, there won’t be time to practice. If you want to practice on your own, buy the new book by Joe Nobody, entitled, “The Home Schooled Shootist” and start using it.
If you own rifles, sight them all in and use threadlock on anything that might work itself loose in a firefight. You don’t want your gear falling apart when you need it most.
Plant some figs, aloe vera or other low-maintenance food-producing plants. Do it now to give these plants as much time as possible to start producing food.
Stock up on salt, colloidal silver and other hard-to-get items that you’ll routinely need.
Spend more time outdoors to get used to sunlight exposure.
Store away an emergency seed kit.
Get a reliable guard dog who can help provide protection for your family and property.
Buy extra pairs of socks. You can never have too many pairs of quality socks. And you absolutely do not want to have to make them yourself later on.
Obviously, this list can go on forever, but these 26 things should be at the top of your “preparedness to-do list.” Bang out as many as you can while staying healthy, informed, well stocked and as far away from high density population areas as possible. The cities will suffer the most in almost any conceivable debt collapse scenario, so take advantage of the relative tranquility that exists right now to move out of the city and get squared away out in the country.
Trust me, you’ll be glad you did very, very soon. In terms of timelines, many smart people think we are on the verge of a sudden global debt collapse. Others think we’re heading into a “slow collapse” that could accelerate over the next 2-3 years. Some people believe a lot is riding on the upcoming election, and what I’m hearing is that if Romney gets elected, many Obama supporters are going to riot in the streets. Whereas if Obama gets re-elected, U.S. business owners may very well revolt against the failed economic policies Obama has so far pursued. Either way, it’s not a pretty picture. Either way, you need to get prepared now for the inevitable.