$1 Trillion Fix: US Government goes Kamikaze

While US Treasury Secretary Henry 'Kamikaze' Paulson seeks Congress permission to spend a further $700 billion of taxpayer's money to chase after bad debts, Bloomberg reports that public borrowing will soon go over $1 trillion and that this will crush the US Dollar.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan to end the rout in U.S. financial markets may derail the dollar's three-month rally as investors weigh the costs of the rescue.

The combination of spending $700 billion on soured mortgage-related assets and providing $400 billion to guarantee money-market mutual funds will boost U.S. borrowing as much as $1 trillion, according to Barclays Capital interest-rate strategist Michael Pond in New York. While the rescue may restore investor confidence to battered financial markets, traders will again focus on the twin budget and current-account deficits and negative real U.S. interest rates.

Bloomberg, 'Dollar May Get `Crushed' as Traders Weigh Up Bailout', 22/09/08

It's all complete madness and exposes a panicking government that has no idea what to do in the face of the impending collapse that many of us in the global blogging fraternity have been warning about for years now. And neither the US or UK governments appear to be looking at any longer term strategies than trying to bail out a rapidly-sinking Titanic showing us all how incapable and incompetent they and their so-called neoliberal 'free market' chums really are.

Meantime both Russia and China are beginning to talk of setting up an alternative, global monetary system. They will, no doubt, soon find allies in other parts of the world such as Venezuela and South America. The Russians and French have taken the first steps towards a pan-European security pact.

Congressman Ron Paul (R) has described 'Kamikaze' Paulson's move to be akin to giving a drug addict yet another fix. Here's his take on events:

China & the West: A Story of Converging Authoritarianism at War with the People

China forsook Mao's socialism (really state capitalism) for unfettered 'neoliberalism' and the worship of market forces ruled over by a surveillance state. As Naomi Klein has observed there is a curious convergence between what is happening in China and in the West. The two are moving closer together.

But this is not taking place without resistance from the grassroots. China has its dissidents as does the US and Europe. That you don't hear about them through state-controlled mainstream media (MSM) doesn't mean they don't exist and that a battle is not going on.

Books like Red State Rebels provide us with an insight into the battle going on against the creeping fascism of the US corporate state. Europeans would do well to educate themselves with such books and to ask themselves exactly what lies behind the confrontations such as those we saw recently (on the Net at least) at the Democratic and Republican conventions.

And in China? These videos will give you a clue:

The New Left in China



The New Left in China, Pt II



Protest Movement Growing in China



Protest Movement Growing in China, Pt II



China's authoritarian Capitalism: A Global Trend?



China security tech supplied by US companies

And the Gold Medal for China-bashing goes to ...

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4506/

Great article on the bellicose China-bashing currently going on courtesy of the West's media-whores.

Bush, Putin and WW III?
Aijaz Ahmad on the Russian-Iranian handshake (2 of 3)



Link

Ha, Ha, Ha, America

To watch Video click here on Link

What in the hell is this? Apparently, it's some sort of hybrid music video/documentary/comedy/Chinese propaganda thing featuring electro beats and an arrogant text narrator who taunts our weak American work ethic. Equal parts mesmerizing, hysterical and humiliating, this video is a sure sign that our American empire is on the ropes

Britain's Ministry of Defence forecasts the Growth of a Revolutionary Middle Class

My quasi-apocalytpic post was apparently an understatement if the MoD's vision of the future is to be taken at face value. (Original report in PDF here). The report describes a world in thirty years time, based on current probabilities:

Marxism

"The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx," says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest". Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the "sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism".

Pressures leading to social unrest

By 2010 more than 50% of the world's population will be living in urban rather than rural environments, leading to social deprivation and "new instability risks", and the growth of shanty towns. By 2035, that figure will rise to 60%. Migration will increase. Globalisation may lead to levels of international integration that effectively bring inter-state warfare to an end. But it may lead to "inter-communal conflict" - communities with shared interests transcending national boundaries and resorting to the use of violence.

Population and Resources

The global population is likely to grow to 8.5bn in 2035, with less developed countries accounting for 98% of that. Some 87% of people under the age of 25 live in the developing world. Demographic trends, which will exacerbate economic and social tensions, have serious implications for the environment - including the provision of clean water and other resources - and for international relations. The population of sub-Saharan Africa will increase over the period by 81%, and that of Middle Eastern countries by 132%.

The Middle East

The massive population growth will mean the Middle East, and to a lesser extent north Africa, will remain highly unstable, says the report. It singles out Saudi Arabia, the most lucrative market for British arms, with unemployment levels of 20% and a "youth bulge" in a state whose population has risen from 7 million to 27 million since 1980. "The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in the whole region] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment ... are unlikely to be met," says the report.

Islamic militancy

Resentment among young people in the face of unrepresentative regimes "will find outlets in political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces", the report warns. The effects of such resentment will be expressed through the migration of youth populations and global communications, encouraging contacts between diaspora communities and their countries of origin.

Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain, and may increasingly be targeted at China "whose new-found materialism, economic vibrancy, and institutionalised atheism, will be an anathema to orthodox Islam".

And so on and on, a veritable smorgasbord of climate destruction, terrorism, urban dislocation, monstrous inequalities, flash mobs, computer chips implanted in the brain, new weapons permitting the long-range application of lethal force etc. Suspend, if you will, your disbelief at some of the more extreme or garish predictions. Such reports reflect the extent to which the state engages in far-sighted social and economic analysis to understand the challenges it is likely to face, which sort of belies the constant barrage of official impressions that everything is likely to be hunky-dory. This is the sort of world the British state is presumably planning for.

Text and Article from Lenin's Tomb