Before You Vote, Know That "It's NOT The Economy Stupid!"

The Presidential candidates are remarkable in their ability to convince Americans that the economy and taxes are the biggest issues at stake on November 6th.  The reality is that regardless of which candidate wins, the economy will react to global market forces similarly.  Demanding that the candidate focus on "creating jobs" in the private industry is based on a pipe dream.

For men, this election is really about seeing the Supreme Court (and other federal courts) continuing to be occupied by Sonya Sotomayors and Elena Kagans who have been programmed since undergraduate school to advance the feminist legal agenda.  Keep in mind that for every feminist Justice on the US Supreme Court, there are hundreds more working as judges in the Federal District Courts, and Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal.  The President appoints ALL federal judges, so keep that in mind before you actually vote.

This election is really about ending the fiscally parasitic wars that sap the strength from this nation, and kill off or maim thousands of our best and brightest men.

This election is really about a Department of State that finances with your dollars male circumcisions, women's health clinics, micro-finance loans for female businesses, and other discriminatory feminist initiatives that Hilary Clinton oversees.

This election is really about allowing the Obama-signed FATCA law to remain intact so that internationally-minded men like you and me are prevented from legally storing wealth abroad.  FATCA is so onerous, that many foreign banks are now beginning to refuse new American clients!  This benefits the US federal government so wealth stays here.

This election is really about immigration amnesty which would allow undocumented immigrants to be permitted to stay thereby deflating wages and displacing native-born American workers.

This election is really about getting America back to where men were men, or moving America forward to where men are indistinguishable from women.

The choice is yours, but don't let anyone tell you the candidates represent the same interests or that this election is all about the economy.

Vote to reignite manhood in America!  No excuses.........

New Book: Why America Failed

Morris Berman has been a critic of America's current downward spiral.  In the below link, he talks about it in depth.  I feel he is right on the mark at a time when most Americans are oblivious to what is going on.

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/WhyAmer

American Exceptionalism Has Become American Deceptionalism

By Paul Rosenberg

From the dawn of the colonial era, long before they even had a national identity, Americans have always felt they had a special role in the world, though the exact nature of American exceptionalism has always been a matter of some dispute.
Many have taken it to be a special religious destiny, but Alexis de Tocqueville, the first to consider it systematically, affirmed the exact opposite: "a thousand special causes ... have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects." Ironically enough, the exact term "American exceptionalism" was first used by Joseph Stalin, in order to reject it.  And yet, for 70 years American exceptionalism has been most prominently and consistently associated with imperialism ("benevolent", of course!), via the phrase "the American Century". It was coined by Time-Life publisher Henry Luce in February, 1941, 10 months before Japan's Pearl Harbour attack drew the US into World War II. The history of Luce's coinage provides a depth of resonance for a recent twist: a not uncommon, but particularly telling juxtaposition of four Time magazine covers from around the world this week.

In three editions - Europe, Asia and South Pacific - Time magazine's visually hot, tumultuous cover featured a gasmask-protected Egyptian protester, upraised fist overhead with a chaotic street background behind. The headline: "Revolution Redux". Not so in the exceptional American edition. There, the visually cool, wanna-be New Yorker-ish cover was a text-dominated cartoon against a light gray background: "Why Anxiety is Good For You."  Clearly, Time is whistling past the graveyard. As mostly Democratic mayors clamp down hard on Occupy Wall Street outposts across the land, it's obvious that the US' political class is having none of it. They do not believe that anxiety is good for them and they are doing their darnedest to keep a lid on things. Agitated citizens out in the streets are bad enough. Pictures of agitated citizens are simply too much.
Once upon a time, those pictures coming from a Third World dictatorship in a (hopefully) democratic transition would have been comfortably distant, even reassuring - exotic, other, subsumed in history, striving to become more like us, the transcendent ones at the "end of history."  That, after all, was part of the message of Luce's "American Century". But nowadays, everyone knows that the differences between Zuccotti Park and Tahrir Square are increasingly less significant than their similarities. They are matters of degree more than kind. There is no such place as "outside of history" anymore. Those making history know it, and those fighting history know it just as well.

Democratic mayors to the 99 per cent
In the US, the message from the mayors is simple: You've made your point. Now go to your room and shut up. We've got a lawn to keep up, and you've spoiled it. America's "grown-ups" as the political class likes to think of itself, have never had much patience when it comes to the "children", as its mere citizens are known. And yet, America's democratic revolutionary origins are at the very centre of a radically different vision of what American exceptionalism is all about.

The situation in Los Angeles is particularly exemplary. Although city officials welcomed Occupy LA at first, for weeks on end Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and others have been saying it's time to leave. Villaraigosa - like Obama - is a former progressive organiser turned neo-liberal politician. He was a teacher's union organiser when I first met him in the 1980s, as part of a progressive precinct network aimed at getting disaffected progressive voters to the pols.

Also within the coalition's core was the LA National Lawyers Guild's executive director. When Villaraigosa first took office in 2006, his first big battle was against the teacher's union he used to work for. He took them on with the backing of billionaire real estate developer and education "reformer" Eli Broad. Five years later, as he faces off against Occupy LA, the current NLG executive director, James Lafferty, is one of his major opponents.

With no sense of irony, Villaraigosa thought Thanksgiving weekend was the perfect time for an eviction. "It's clear that this mayor cares more about dead grass than a dead economy," Lafferty responded at an Occupy LA press conference. "The 99 per cent that have been thrown out of their homes, jobless, without proper healthcare and all the rest seem to be less important to him than that lawn."

America's exceptional democracy
As indicated above, the idea of American exceptionalism was always a contested one. But it's hard to deny that the New World in general was seen as a land of opportunity, and the American colonies were the place where the most opportunity was seen for people to actually settle in significant numbers. Yet, the way most people managed to get to this new land of opportunity and freedom was through indentured servitude, and when that failed to provide enough labour, the African slave trade was "Plan B".
The land itself came courtesy of the earliest stages of America's centuries-long series of genocidal wars. And when the American Revolution came, it was lead in large part by slaveholder advocates of freedom - men like Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry, whose influence only expanded as the new nation was established.
Although their primary arguments were grounded in universalist appeals, the actual rights-holding subjects of their political system were a relatively tiny minority of well-to-do white males. The promise of rights-based liberal democracy was intoxicating to all, but forbidden to most. Equality was for gentlemen only. And yet, those excluded would not be denied. Scattered state and local battles coalesced into a national abolitionist movement by the 1830s, which in turn spawned a women's rights movement in the 1840s.

In Europe, the US example spawned the French and Polish revolutions, followed by more than a century of struggles in which the example of the US' existence powerfully transformed the Old World in combination with Europe's own internal modernising forces.
And even though the United States itself embarked on an imperialist course sparked by the Spanish-American War in 1898, its example as the first anti-colonial revolutionary regime inspired colonial revolutionaries as well. It was no accident that Ho Chi Minh approached Woodrow Wilson for his support at Versailles after World War I, before turning to communism as his second choice in seeking to rid his country of French colonialism.

From exceptionalism to deceptionalism
But the US had a hard time keeping up with itself, or with the world that it helped create. The European welfare state was a direct response to popular demands for a better, more just, less arbitrary life, demands that were sparked in part by the very existence of the US as an alternative.
As the US itself became more like Europe - more industrialised, more urbanised, less composed of small farmers and more composed of urban workers - the resistance to learning from European advances became increasingly irrational, and at odds with American pragmatism. Our political system lagged behind as well, lacking the fluidity and inventiveness that made parliamentary systems the dominant form of democracy elsewhere around the world.

This perverse refusal to learn from others who have been inspired by us in the political realm is strikingly at odds with Americans' grassroots improvisatory traditions. From food to music to everything in between, Americans have always adopted diverse influences, mixed them together and made them their own, based on the sole criteria of what works.  Yet, with far too few exceptions, we Americans have spectacularly failed to do this in the realms of economics and politics, where powerful elites have emerged to repeatedly stifle the US' spirit of ingenuity. Not only that, they have successfully blinded us as well. Under the growing influence of the 1 per cent, American exceptionalism has become American deceptionalism: a perverse refusal to see what others have done - often inspired by our own earlier examples - and use that knowledge to continue advancing ourselves.

The US' patch-work welfare state is the prime example of this dysfunction. But our lack of industrial policy is even more bizarre, given that we used to believe in it so. Indeed, the same could be said about the welfare state as well. Universal public education was an American idea - outside the South, of course - before catching on elsewhere around the globe. What's more, most of the US was homesteaded through a subsidised process of free or cheap land, supported by public infrastructure - or, in the case of railroads, publicly-subsidised infrastructure.

But when it came to an industrial welfare state, suddenly, everything changed. It's not so hard to understand why: the original industrial workforce was largely immigrant and culturally "other" - Irish at first, then central and southern European, predominantly Catholic or Jewish. It was not until the Great Depression pushed the US economy to the wall that we began to even partially catch up with Germany, which had created its welfare state half a century earlier.  Even then, it took another 30 years for us to add universal health care, but only for senior citizens. The results of creating Medicare were dramatic: Within a decade, American seniors went from being the age-group with the highest poverty rate to the lowest. But that was nearly 50 years ago, 130 years after Germany established its universal healthcare system. Since then, conservative resistance to America's welfare state has stiffened dramatically. Cultural differences between whites of European descent are nothing compared differences with people of colour - which moved dramatic to the fore as legal segregation was finally being dismantled.

Welfare in the US
A 2001 paper from the Brookings Institute, "Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?" found a direct correlation between welfare state spending and the size of minority populations - the more minorities, the lower the levels of spending. This held true both internationally (comparing more than 60 different countries) and nationally (comparing all 50 states). The paper did not argue that racial animosity was the sole reason for the US' fragmented and under-sized welfare state. It also cited the US' backwards political institutions - such as our lack of proportional representation - which in turn have roots in our history and geography.  The report stated, "Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor."

Among other things, the report offered comparisons across time, which showed the US lagging decades behind Europe throughout the 20th century. The size of subsidies and transfers in the US in 1970 was roughly the same as that in the European Union in 1937. US figures in 1998 roughly matched the EU in 1960.
While American conservatives have long been hysterical about the welfare state in the US, two major points need to be stressed.

First: German conservatives established the first comprehensive welfare state, under Chancellor Bismarck in the 1880s. Second, the American welfare state is the smallest and least comprehensive in the Western world. While American conservatives denounce the welfare state for supposedly strangling capitalism, Germany's welfare state has been crucial to its long-term prosperity, even as the US' incomplete welfare state has harmed us considerably. For example, without a national system, healthcare costs built into American cars were a crucial factor leading up to the bankruptcy crisis of 2009.

Nearly a half-century after Medicare, the US was finally ready to take a modest half-step forward toward expanding healthcare coverage. But President Obama's approach was so compromised, and so poorly argued that it's now opened the doorway for a massive reversal that could actually eliminate Medicare - a major decimation of the US' welfare state that would plunge millions of seniors into abject poverty, deprive them of healthcare and subject them to premature death.

Grand bargains
Obama is obsessed with trying to strike a series of "grand bargains" with conservatives, even though they keep rejecting him. As a consequence, he repeatedly begins his negotiations with positions that conservatives have supported in the past, hoping they will support those positions again. At the same time, he refrains from making energetic arguments for the liberal position.
As a result, his stimulus programme was roughly 40 per cent tax cuts (even though they're less effective in creating jobs than direct spending is) in a vain attempt to get Republican support. And when it came to health care, his approach was based on Republican proposals from the 1990s, developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation. It was the same foundation used by Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts.  Obama never used the popularity, efficiency and overall success of Medicare to argue for a government-centered approach, either an immediate full-fledged socialisation, aka "Medicare for all", or a gradualist approach - a public option for those currently without private insurance. Indeed, Obama collaborated with conservative Democrats in the Senate - most notably Max Baucus - to silence those who advocated for these approaches.  Medicare-for-all advocates were reduced to shouting from the audience and getting arrested, despite representing a substantial body of public opinion. Support for the more gradual public-option approach hovered around 60 per cent or more throughout the year-long legislative process. And yet, these proposals - tried and true in the rest of the industrialised world - could not even get a serious hearing.

Such is the power of American deceptionalism: No one else's experience in the world matters to the American political system.  Less than two years after Obama's Republican healthcare plan passed, its very modesty is being used against it. Although it did involve considerable long-term cost reductions, it was nothing remotely close to reducing costs to full-fledged welfare state levels. For example, calculations by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research show that, for example, if we Americans could get our per-capita health-care costs down to the level of most central European nations, we would have a budget surplus of around 10 per cent in 2080, rather than the current projected deficit of over 40 per cent.
By ignoring the example of other countries, the American political class has spun itself off into an alternate reality in which nothing short of catastrophically bad choices remain. (The situation of global warming denialism is an instructive parallel, in which facts have become entirely irrelevant.) And so, fuelled by an obsession with long-term deficits decades in the future, and ignoring the sky-high level of the unemployed, the US congress may well be about to drift toward abolishing Medicare as its so-called "solution".

Of course, Republicans like Congressman Paul Ryan, who originated the plan, won't come right out and say that. And neither will Democrats, now rumoured to be thinking of joining them in search of yet another "grand bargain". Ryan and company say they want to "save" Medicare by replacing it with a voucher system. As one wag put it, it's like killing my dog named Spot, and giving me a cat named Spot instead, then telling me you haven't killed Spot. But a variety of studies have stripped all the pretense away.

Most significantly, the vouchers ("premium support" in Orwellian Newspeak) would come nowhere near to paying the cost of health insurance for seniors, and the shortfall would only grow more severe over time. So instead of the government going broke, the people would. That's the anti-government Republican plan! But at least the plan would keep the private insurance companies making money hand over fist as they deny you coverage.  And since they're private companies, that counts as a win, according to the rules of American deceptionalism. Even if there is no real competition involved, and Adam Smith would have a heart attack if he saw what was being done in his name.

I've concentrated here on healthcare as a key welfare state component. But the same pattern of delusionary grand bargaining can be seen wherever you care to look. Consider "education reform". "America's schools are failing!" we're told. We have to privatise, voucherise, give parents more choice - that alone can save us.
But none of this is supported by evidence, certainly not the evidence of other countries, whose systems are more centralised and less privatised than those of the United States. The US accounts of nearly half of military spending worldwide. The only folks whose overspending ever came close to us was the Soviet Union, and we sure didn't learn anything from them. On the drug war? Don't even think of thinking about it!

The list could be extended indefinitely. There is not a single area in which Republicans won't condemn anything foreign just for being foreign (unless, for some reason they like it, the way Michele Bachmann likes Chinese slave labour). And there's not a single area where Democrats won't be defensive about thinking outside the box that Republicans have put them in.

If all this leaves you feeling anxious, relax. After all, as Time will tell you, "Anxiety is good for you!"
 
Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News

Observations of American Society From A Recent Returnee

As some might be aware, I was not living in the US for 8 straight years. I have recently returned to spend the next year and I've taken note of some things are quite different:

Positive changes:

-The younger generation of females (25 and below) seems to be rejecting the feminist hatred of the previous generation. This is encouraging, but we are not out of the woods. They still enjoy and partake in female social privilege, but they are less aggressive about it.

-People seem a bit less materialistic than before. This is surely due to the recessionary economy and it needs to translate into a higher regard for knowledge, experience, and relationships with family/friends. We are not there yet.

-There seems to be more ethnic tolerance than ever before. Tolerance does not equate with affinity mind you, but there is a a greater ease with people who are different in most cases. It is yet to be seen whether this is just a more covert hostility or genuine capitulation to changing demographics.


Negative changes:

-There is larger paranoia about men in the US.  I was talking with an attractive bartender and a decent-looking bar patron in Baton Rouge. We were chatting about travel and at one point the bartender remarked that she would love to travel more but she would never travel alone since it is so dangerous out there. The patron agreed with her and remarked that she never leaves the hotel unless her boyfriend is along. I believe this paranoia is self-imposed and derives from the guilt of female privilege in America. In other countries, women 10 times hotter than these two walk the streets alone at night even in areas considered high crime.

-There is a foolish arrogance in American men like never before. Coming off as confidant even in the face of ignorance is very prevalent. Think back to the government officials who balked that a 9/11 scenario could ever happen in the US, or the fools that believe the US is the greatest country in the world for virtually everything, or the dolts that believed our economy will never flounder in crisis because we are in the USA.

-Women here are more fat and unattractive as ever. Hard economic times contributes to a decrease in a population's beauty due to poorer dietary habits and less favorable living conditions. I am aghast at how decent-looking men resort to such unsightly creatures in the US now.

-There are far more immigrants in the landscape than ever before. High-end places that were once WASP and Jewish are now largely Asian, Indian, and White now. On the lower end, there are far more people of third-world origin all around. While this might be a negative in the larger sense, it may be a blessing in disguise as third world nations are the least feminist. This may be the last hope for overcoming feminist orthodoxy in America!

-Crude informality is the norm now. It is rare for young people to have common courtesy and respect for elders in the US. Everything is informal and nothing is sacred nowadays. These flash mobs and wilding youths in Philadelphia will be a recurring and spreading phenomenon as the children of wayward children are coming of age.

-Before we used to rail against the entitlement mentality of females. Now males exhibit this mentality to a lesser degree. This is most obvious in the area of employment. Young people walk around pining for employment, but they refuse to take a job that is "beneath them."  If you are unemployed, there is no job that is beneath you, none. For this reason, the unemployment rate remains high at 9%. People are seeking the job that they think they deserve, not the job that they need. This will change when things get worse however.

-There is also a greater overall lack of sophistication of the US population regarding politics and economics. Most Americans do not know what the Federal Reserve does. Most Americans do not know what the President's role in the economy is, yet a President is elected or re-elected almost solely on the state of the economy. A President can certainly not "create jobs" other than hiring more federal employees. A President CAN assist Congress in creating an economic environment for jobs to be created, but he cannot "create jobs" like most Americans expect. If the unemployment rate dips 5% during the next year, it will not have been because of the President's creating jobs.

-Foreigners are beating native-born Americans at their own game. The children of many immigrant groups are developing financial, educational, and social savvy that our children are failing to develop due to their inability to delay gratification. Look at the freshmen classes of our Ivy League institutions. They are increasingly immigrant, and more power to them.

Conclusion: The world is passing by the US before our eyes. Our people are poorly educated or trained, our children child care castoffs, and our adults are resting in the laurels of former American preeminence. Change is inevitable in a society, especially one a fluid as the US. Simply willing your way to remain at the top without the requisite effort is a prescription for failure as a society. We are failing.

Reflections on the Impossibility of Government

By Fred Reed - July 30, 2011

God it's wonderful—really diverting in a macabre sort of way, at least if you have a diseased sense of humor and enough Padre Kino red. Which I do. As I write the world's only delusional superflower, perennially in love with itself, navel-gazing as narcissistically as ever, ignorant, self-indulgent, gurbling like an insane relative in the attic and fondling electro-trinkets from Japan, is broke. Yes, we see a beautiful dive from the high board, two somersaults and a half-twist, into the Third World. And so richly deserved.

Congress, a collection of whores, con-men, and penny-ante sharpers from East Jesus, Nebraska, ponders the Great Question: Default now, and admit manfully to being the economic lepers everyone else already knows we are? Or raise the debt ceiling, keep spending like a spoiled Swarthmore sophomore with daddy's credit card, and collapse a bit later?

It's just lovely. The World’s Greatest Economy holding out the begging bowl to China. “Alms? Alms for the poor?” Maybe I don't have enough Padre Kino after all. Maybe there isn't enough.

On the lobotomy box, congressmen come and go, not talking of Michelangelo, like mayflies but without the brains, calling each other names. They seem to think that they are in an off-year election. I mean, it's only the future of the country. What, me worry? What if a huge cosmic flyswatter came down on Cap Hill and turned them into barely historical smears? How the hell do you start a cosmic flyswatter?

The Republicans want to protect the wars, the rich, and the military companies. The Democrats want to protect the entitlements. Well, ok, I guess killing Afghans matters more than feeding Granny in Spokane. Unless of course you are Granny. Who really cares? I mean, how many “defense” contracts does she have?

But actually the Dems have the best of the argument of national security. Entitlements are our friend. Welfare is the price we pay for not having the cities burn. Mailbox money is our protection, not gaudy aircraft carriers like the USS Thundertrinket, zooom-kerpow.

It's the Empire, stupid. You want spending cuts? Easy, if you don't want to rule the world for three more years before going down history's cloaca. Pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Japan, and NATO tomorrow. Pull out. Pull out. Coitus interruptus. Stop wasting precious engineering talent and non-existent money on pointless funsy weapons of no utility: the F35, the Airborne Laser.

Come to think of it, don't bother. It's too late. The only sensible answer is cheap Mexican red. The US really is poised to enter Central America. You know, continental drift. It can't be stopped. South Korea and Finland among others are far more advanced in their internets. Health care in America is first-priced and second-rate. The country is thirty-third in infant mortality. Schooling would be pathetic if we could raise it to that level, the universities largely farces. The Russians and Chinese have manned space programs; we don't. Industry flees Gringolandia or has fled. The great moiling gerbiltry out there hasn't figured it out. Wait.

I hear babbling about “the recovery.” Which recovery is that? There ain't none, boys and girls. There won't be one. We are not in a temporary recession or correction or what have you. We are going poor. The last dance just finished, and the band is leaving.

And it is self-inflicted. There is, I grant you, a pleasing monumentality about truly phenomenal stupidity. A certain brilliance is needed to be so witless. In this sense the American political system is a work of genius, relying on the principle of Sufficient Ditz-Rabbitry.

You don't need to fool all of the people all of the time. Enough of the people, enough of the time is entirely adequate. Lincoln knew this but, being a politician, didn't point it out. Here is the basis of what Americans believe to be a democracy. Curious: Mexicans know they have a corrupt government, but Americans don't. In the US, books are written about the scams and cons and rips practiced on the public. Few read them, though, and those who do already know what is in them. Enough of the people, enough of the time. If the talking heads on the blinking hamster-diverter don't talk about the swindles, the rubes never know.

The country is in fact ruled by the interlocking directorates of Wall Street, Washington, and the media, Triamese twins joined at the head and aimed at sucking money from the easily fleeced. We're not talking Senior Civics and the Federalist Papers. It's straight drain-the-dullards. And it works. Boy does it.

Can you name anything in America today that is not a disguised fraud? Credit cards are not a convenience, but a way of luring suckers into borrowing crippling amounts of money at usurious interest. The sub-prime circus was carefully designed to do just what it did. There's the student-loan racket, and Big Pharma: A tiny bottle of ophthalmic salt water from Bausch & Lomb, called Muro, costs $23 in Washington, and about $6 in Mexico. That's our government, fixing prices that weren't broken. Pure Third World.

I dunno. What's going to happen when what's left of the cream-flow dries up? Maybe it's the Padre Kino, but...in the last depression of '29, most of the country was rural or close. People, many of them, lived on farms, and didn't need much money.

Today most of the population is utterly dependent on remote mechanized farms winch are dependent on supplies of gasoline and chemicals and then on trucks to take the crop to cities that, if the foregoing chain broke down, could not possibly support themselves. The discovery that food doesn't really come from Safeway will astonish.

I guess I'm paranoid, and no real unrest and disruption could really occur. I guess. I mean, probably. I think. And that's a good thing, because with so many people dependent on entitlements, to the extent that they can't eat without them, and everything dependent on intricate systems that can't handle chaos—hooboy. Think: What happens to skyscrapers if there's no electricity for elevators?

I say invest in drug cartels. Some say gold, but you can't smoke gold. When times get bad people want booze, grass, crack, scag, crank, Oxys, and maybe shrooms for the more advanced. Investment is low, and governmental interference has proved minimal.

I hope I'm crazy. I'd better be.

A Man Is An Unmitigated Fool To Marry

By now most are aware that Jennifer Lopez's and Mark Anthony's marriage is ending. Given the fact that Jennifer is a known kook when it comes to her love life, few men acknowledge the fact that marriage in general is a losing proposition.

In our current recessionary economy, why would a man want to take on a wife and kids to while most jobs teeter on the edge of insecurity? Why would a man want to sign up for a second full time job when most employed men already work more than any men in the world. Why would a man want to participate in the great "buying things" spree that is marriage so that he is a debt slave all of his life?

I know that there are many reasons for men to still willingly slide down the marriage road to ruin in spite of all the evidence staring them in the face.
Parents from a pre-feminist era are culprits that inculcate their sons with the marriage=success mentality.

Hollywood imagery is the next reason. Hollywood never shows the wife gaining weight and smelling up the bathroom after unloading a pile of bowel movement matter. Hollywood never shows the wife's bad breath, her hysterics, her spendthrift habits, or anything else but mythical bliss.

But the primary culprits are women themselves. Anyone with half a brain knows that when a man is in love or infatuated with a women, his normal logical thought process is suspended. Have you ever listened to the lyrics to "When A Man Loves A Woman?" It is women that bamboozle most men at their most vulnerable to their detriment.

It is high time for men to wake up to this marriage scam that dooms them to misery beyond reversal. On the other hand, the Mark Anthony's of the world are superb examples to the younger men of what NOT to do.

The IMPERIAL SUICIDE of America

By Bill Bonner

Now, what we see is the whole kit-and- kaboodle of life in the US giving way to desperation, delusion and an irresistible impulse to commit imperial suicide. The economy turns sour. The military becomes malignant. Households are corrupt, bankrupt and dependent. Even the churches sing their hallelujahs to Caesar now.

What's "imperial suicide?" It's what empires do. If no other empire arises to kill them...they kill themselves. China will probably eventually crush the US militarily. But that is far in the future. The US can't wait. It lets the zombies run wild.

At home, Congress debates a "debt ceiling" measure, as if it made any difference. They've raised the ceiling 93 times since they first imposed a debt ceiling 94 years ago. What are the odds that they will hold the line this time?

Zilch. Instead, they'll continue borrowing and spending until the nation goes broke. Count on it.

The US economy was a free-market success story for a hundred years...from the end of the US War Between the States to the end of the Vietnam War. It was the richest, fastest-growing, most innovative, most competitive, and most admired economy in the world. But then, in 1971, Richard Nixon replaced a more-or-less solid dollar, vaguely backed by gold, with a pure paper dollar, backed by nothing but the good intentions of government employees.

As the money went, so went the nation. Our friend and colleague Byron King opines:
The problem with the US over the last 40 or 50 years is that there's too much free money...

We raise three generations of population who are untied from the basics of monetary education - millions of minds poisoned by Economics 101 in universities across the land. "Elastic currency," courtesy of the Fed.

Media & political classes are no smarter than the dummies who walk the land, so they make policy based on "free" money from the Fed... Deficits don't matter.

Currency circulates and inflates the general price levels... People learn to live with it. Even make a virtue of it, doing things like "buy as much house as you can afford; the market will rise and you'll make money." That kind of idiocy.

There's all this excess currency sloshing around the economy, leading to people doing stupid things like drugs, too much alcohol, divorce (Cherchez les femmes), food (obesity), theft, etc...

"Wars cost much silver," wrote Sun Tzu. [Lack of money] kept a lot of nations out of a lot of trouble over the years. Not any more. Who needs silver when you can just print up bricks of paper cash and fly it over to Iraq and such.

Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the term American Exceptionalism... yep, we're exceptional. That's for sure. More prisoners in jail than anywhere else. We fight longer wars than anyone else...and don't win. We give more welfare to more idle people than anywhere else on earth...and we're proud of it.

There's so much money that we don't know how to say no. No limits. Just raise the debt ceiling...spend until you can't spend any more. Then spend some more.

Well, there are no limits until there are limits. Per Ayn Rand... "You can avoid reality. But you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

In the space of 40 years the US lost its winning ways. Real, hourly wages stopped growing in 1973. Stock prices, in real terms, peaked out in '99...about the same time that real, per capita private sector growth came to a halt. The number of full time jobs topped out about two years later...and housing hit its peak in 2007.

Abroad, US armed forces continue to squander the most magnificent advantage that a military has ever had. The Pentagon spends 7 times as much as the next biggest spender. And it doesn't even have a worthy opponent. Where does it get the money? It borrows from the Chinese!

And what does it do with all that money? It engages in pointless, blood sucking zombie wars. Its three current engagements alone are expected to cost $4 trillion, according to the latest independent estimates - about as much as its trade deficit over the last 10 years.

Ask your neighbors. What strategic advantage does the US gain from fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya? They will have no good answer. Probably some claptrap about 'fighting terrorism' is the best they will be able to do; that's what they were told on TV.

A 94-year-old retired Army colonel came over to our house for the 4th of July festivities. A Silver Star winner in WWII, veteran of the Korean War too...we asked what he thought of the Pentagon's strategy in North Africa and the Middle East.

"I am disgusted," he replied. "Those guys just don't know what they're doing. We have no business getting involved in these things...especially in Libya. They're just traps. I have arguments about it when I go into the VA hospital. The young guys - you know, they're in their '80s - are in favor of these wars. Wave the flag. Rah rah...let's go in and do the job. Teach them a lesson... That sort of thing.

"But real war is not a football game. And nobody learns anything...except not to do it again."

Who - with the exception of a 94-year-old veteran - objects to squandering the national treasure, blood and honor on these wars? Almost no one. Why not? Because they've all drunk deeply from the intoxicating cup of imperial power. An ordinary nation fights wars to protect itself. An empire fights wars because that is what an empire does. And it continues fighting until it finally beats itself.

Why didn't Rome pull back its troops from the Rhine or Anatolia or North Africa...in order to protect its homeland from the barbarians? Why didn't Alexander retire to Macedonia, while he still had breath? Why didn't the Germans retreat to the banks of the Oder when they still had the means to resist the Soviet onslaught?

Why doesn't the US bring home its troops, cut its spending, balance its budget and protect its future? Ha...ha...you know the answer. Because the system has been taken over by zombies...people who want to see the spending continue, no matter what the cost. Zombie wars. Zombie social spending. And zombie finance.

And every time we look at it, we see more evidence. California, the West Coast Greece, is going broke. Any guess why?

America’s WASP Rot

By Henry Allen, Published: June 17

I know why America is falling into a cataclysm of debt and can’t get out.

I know because I’ve seen the cataclysm before on a smaller but no less poignant scale while growing up in New England. A Boston friend calls it WASP rot: a squalor of doom and debt that prompts the best sort of people to spit sarcasms at each other during cocktail hour, to weep and rage the way Congress is doing as the debt limit looms on Aug. 2. Of course, losing a summer house isn’t losing a war or America defaulting on its debts. Yet to me, at least, the feeling is oddly the same. I worry that America is becoming a character in a story by John Cheever or F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My ancestors arrived early in North America, founded towns, fought at Bunker Hill, built railroads and cornered markets. But that day was long done when I was growing up. We were not unusual — in so many families, the money had been made, the money had been spent.

What made these families exceptional, the way America is exceptional, is that they believed that standards had to be maintained at all costs, a moral obligation, even though there never seemed to be much difference between the material and the moral. Houses in the right neighborhoods, alumni donations and keeping one’s word all seemed to have the same value.

As John Kennedy said in 1961, quoting John Winthrop’s speech to the Puritans aboard the Arbella: “We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.” To maintain the city, he’d say later, we had to “pay any price, bear any burden.”

If the trust fund played out or Aunt Cornelia turned out to be broke when she died, the rotting WASPs believed they had no choice but to bear the burden of borrowing to maintain their place in the world.

There was nothing wildly luxurious in their spending, no polo ponies or pearls, just the obligatory private schools, Bloody Mary brunches at the Inn, station wagons with yachting flags, silver wedding presents, lots of dogs, the whiskey. They borrowed from banks and relatives to keep the city shining. They borrowed against their houses. They sold Aunt Cornelia’s breakfront. They ignored bills and they despaired.

Imagine a cocktail hour.

“I hate living like this,” says a wife — we’ll call her Martha. She rattles the ice in her glass.

“Do we have any choice?” asks her husband — we’ll call him George. “Do you really want to pull Ted out of Dartmouth? Do you want to move into an apartment?”

“I could get a job,” Martha says. “I could manage a bookstore, like when you met me. It’s odd — we were poorer then, but we seemed so much richer.”

“We didn’t have money, but we did have a future,” says George. “Freshen up that drink for you?”

The conversation usually goes this way: proposals for impossible cuts in spending are met by equally impossible refusals to make them. Slash Medicare? Stop saving oppressed foreigners from tyranny? Raise taxes? The rock and the hard place. It’s a question of standards.

“We have to face the facts,” says Martha.

“I’m so goddam sick of the facts,” says George.

“If your brother would come to his senses, we could sell Seely’s Cove,” Martha says, referring to a summer house with porches and a mossy roof and photo albums from the days when men wore neckties as they sailed.

“We have to sell it or put a new roof on it, but Buell is happy just to let it molder,” George says. “He says keeping it in the family is a matter of principle.”

“You could call Tom about getting another loan from the bank. “

“We’re at the point where we’re just using loans to pay off other loans.”

This is what the American government is doing, too. Whether the problem is summer places or wars, sailboats or health care, the despair and folly feel the same. So does the decline in power and prestige, and the poig­nant denial of decline, prompted by the fear that if we don’t live and spend a certain way we’ll cease to be us — we’ll lose our place in the world.

Cheever writes: “Where had they lost their competence, their freedom, their greatness? Why should these good and gentle people . . . seem like the figures in a tragedy?”

It’s WASP rot. They drop out of the country club. The drinking eases the pain. They don’t pull Ted out of college; he quits and says he wants to be a chef. The daughter ends up living with a jazz musician who beats her.

It’s as if they, and the United States, have lost their luck.

As for America, magical ideas float through the media: Sell the gold in Fort Knox. Sell the federal government’s land to the Chinese. Maybe the Wampanoag Indians could turn the city upon a hill into a casino resort.

The troops may come home, not because of casualties or futility but because they cost too much. We might have to impoverish the old and ignore the poor and sick, not on the principle that we’re creating welfare dependency but because they cost too much. How sad. How vulgar.

I know the ending of George and Martha’s story, but I won’t depress you with it. I have no idea what will happen to America. It’s impossible to imagine Americans starving to death or the Chinese owning Yellowstone. Next thing, we’d be tossing the bodies of veterans into common graves, though this has already happened at Arlington National Cemetery.

Well-trained in situations like this, I try not to think about it, the goddam facts of it all. Freshen up that drink for you?

Henry Allen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000, was a Post editor and reporter for 39 years.

America: The Grim Truth

Looks like the word is getting out.  Read this one young man's account of The Decline of America.

http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.  If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.
I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick. 

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:
Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.
If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).
Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do? You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.
You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

America Is An Over-Indebted, Profligate, Spoiled Nation In Decline

You can't borrow your way out of a debt problem.

That's the key message from Charles Ortel of Newport Value Partners.

The U.S. and other developed countries have lost the discipline they once had and are now trying to borrow and spend their way out from under the mountains of debt they accumulated in recent years. In the process, they're prolonging the agony and moving closer to defaulting.

The U.S., at least, won't actually default, says Ortel, but as our situation worsens, the value of credit default swaps (insurance against default) should rise. So Ortel continues to recommend CDSs to his clients.

5-year credit default swaps on U.S. soverign debt currently trade for about 25 basis points (which means it costs $25K per $10M of notional value). How does that compare to other countries or states?

• Japan = 72 bps
• United Kingdom = 56 bps
• Germany = 21 bps
• California = 177 bps
• New York = 85 bps

And as for the stock market?

No good news there. Ortel sees the DOW eventually heading back down to the 5,000-6,000 level, below the lows of earlier this year.

What will pull the nation out of this state of decline?

DISCIPLINE.

Instead of rewarding government workers with ever larger salary and benefits packages, we should fire whole swaths of them. Instead of borrowing more to spend on "stimulus," we should get out of the way and let the private sector do its thing.

In the meantime, about all investors can safely own is gold.