As the U.S. military continues to waste an enormous amount of energy and resources patrolling the streets of Iraqi cities and digging goat herders out of the caves of Afghanistan, a very real threat to the national security of the United States is developing and very few people even seem concerned about it. It is called the START Treaty, and Barack Obama is desperately trying to ramrod it through the lame duck session of Congress. Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to the terms of the treaty back in April, and two-thirds of the U.S. Senate must vote for it in order for the treaty to become law. So what is so bad about the treaty? Well, for starters, it almost totally defangs the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal that has protected us for the past six decades, it puts serious restrictions on the ability of the United States to develop any kind of missile defense and it puts the U.S. military at a very significant strategic disadvantage. (Read More...)
U.S. Economy
It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like 1930
An increasing number of economists, world leaders and financial columnists are beginning to acknowledge that our current economic crisis bears a striking resemblance to what was going on about the time the Great Depression of the 1930s started. Just like the “Roaring 20s”, the American people over the last couple of decades have been getting into massive amounts of debt in pursuit of the American Dream. But just like the early 1930s, we are now experiencing a severe credit crunch and the process of deleveraging this gigantic mountain of debt promises to be at least as painful as the deleveraging that took place throughout the 1930s. It seems like almost everyone is using words like “double dip” and “recession” now, and a lot of analysts are even starting to utter even more dreaded words like “deflation” and “depression”. Even the Federal Reserve, usually one of the biggest cheerleaders for the economy, is now saying that the U.S. economic system may not recover for another five or six years. If that is what the Federal Reserve is admitting to, then how bad are things really? The truth is that it really is beginning to look a lot like 1930 out there. (Read More...)
22 Statistics That Prove That The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and “free trade” that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the “global economy” would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough. The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool. (Read More...)
Banking System Collapse: Wake Up America Your Banks Are Dying
U.S. banks are being shut down by federal regulators at a staggering pace this year, and yet most Americans seem completely oblivious to it. In fact, federal officials have already shut down 81 U.S. banks this year, which is about double the number that were shut down at this time last year. So why aren’t more people upset about this? Well, part of the reason is because the FDIC is doing it very, very quietly. The bank closings for each week are announced every Friday, which means that they pass through the news cycle over the weekend almost unnoticed. For example, banks in Nebraska, Mississippi and Illinois with total deposits of almost $2.3 billion were shut down by federal regulators on Friday. So did you hear about it before now? If not, why not? Shouldn’t the fact that we are experiencing a banking system collapse be headline news? But most Americans are more than happy to remain blissfully ignorant of what is going on. In fact, most Americans seem far more interested in what is happening on American Idol or Dancing With The Stars. But when the American Dream starts dying for tens of millions of Americans as the economy collapses perhaps more people will start to care. (Read More...)
Guess What America? Your Cities And States Are Flat Broke
Now that the economic boom times of the earlier part of the decade are over, cities and states across America are going bust. In fact, for a growing number of local governments throughout the United States, there is no getting around the fact that “flat broke” accurately describes the situation that they are facing. For many of these cities and states that are on the verge of bankruptcy, the American Dream is quickly turning into the American Nightmare. Unlike the federal government, which can ask the Federal Reserve to print up some more money when they get into trouble, state and local governments have nowhere to go when the well runs dry. They either have to raise taxes or cut spending. But in many areas of the country, services have already been cut to the bone and people are already being taxed into oblivion. So what can be done? Well, many of these state and local governments are just going to have to cut spending even deeper, squeeze even more taxes out of their residents, or go to the federal government for a handout. (Read More...)
50 Statistics About The U.S. Economy That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
Most Americans know that the U.S. economy is in bad shape, but what most Americans don’t know is how truly desperate the financial situation of the United States really is. The truth is that what we are experiencing is not simply a “downturn” or a “recession”. What we are witnessing is the beginning of the end for the greatest economic machine that the world has ever seen. Our greed and our debt are literally eating our economy alive. Total government, corporate and personal debt has now reached 360 percent of GDP, which is far higher than it ever reached during the Great Depression era. We have nearly totally dismantled our once colossal manufacturing base, we have shipped millions upon millions of middle class jobs overseas, we have lived far beyond our means for decades and we have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world. A great day of financial reckoning is fast approaching, and the vast majority of Americans are totally oblivious. (Read More...)
Economic Austerity Measures: Bitter Financial Medicine For Nations That Have Been Living Beyond Their Means
Over the past several decades, most of the major industrialized nations have been borrowing and spending unprecedented amounts of money. This has enabled them to greatly stimulate their economies, and has allowed hundreds of millions of people to live fabulous lifestyles. But there is a problem when nations try to live beyond their means for decades. A big problem. The problem is called debt. Right now the world is facing a sovereign debt crisis that threatens to throw the entire globe into a very, very deep recession. In fact, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King recently called this the worst financial crisis in history. While that might be a bit dramatic (at least at this point), the reality is that the situation in the financial world is becoming very, very serious. You see, debts have to be paid back eventually. All over the globe, national governments are trying to deal with debt and interest on debt that has piled up so dramatically that they don’t know what to do about it. For example, the United States is in a complete mess. The U.S. national debt is scheduled to soon surpass 13 trillion dollars. To get an idea of how big that is, if you went out and spent one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars. It would take you more than 403,000 years to spend 13 trillion dollars. Are you starting to get the picture? This gigantic debt that the U.S. government has accumulated is about to turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare. It is literally impossible for the United States to ever pay the national debt off, and as it continues to explode it will increasingly become a crushing load that the U.S. economy can simply not support. (Read More...)
11 Points Of Comparison Between Life In The United States And Life Under Hitler From A Woman Who Has Experienced Both
Have you ever heard of Kitty Werthmann? She was a child when Adolf Hitler took control of her beloved country of Austria and stripped away their freedoms, and she is now speaking out about the chillingly similar loss of freedoms that we are currently experiencing in the United States. It is often said that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it”. So, perhaps we should listen very carefully to what Kitty Werthmann has to say. She has been there. She has lived through it. The truth is that when you do sit down and compare what happened under the Nazi regime and what is happening in the United States today, the parallels are absolutely shocking. The American Dream is not guaranteed for us or for our children. Freedom must be guarded. If not, it will be taken away. In fact, our freedoms are already being stripped away at blinding speed, and once they are gone they are incredibly difficult to get back. (Read More...)