Despite a non-stop barrage of overly optimistic press releases based on phony statistics, ongoing coverups of fraud, and tea readings, the economy is closer to complete collapse this Christmas than it was at this time last year. The truth that the spinmeisters dare not [...]
In “Obama’s Big Sellout,” Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi says “the president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway” which could ultimately cost taxpayers $23.7 trillion. “And while the government continues to dole out big money to big [...]
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say [...]
“The American economy is broken, ruined by the greed and irresponsibility of fabulously wealthy corporate chieftains and their shabby acolytes and enablers in government,” writes Bob Herbert in the New York Times. He’s watching the Thanksgiving Day parade and thinking about all the kids in the crowd. “While Wall [...]
AlterNet sees “15 Signs American Society Is Coming Apart at the Seams”: 1) Inequality of wealth unprecedented, 2) DOW hits 10,000 and big banks bailed out with taxpayer money give billions in bonuses, 3) Middle class collapsing, 4) While older workers lost big chunk of 401k needed for retirement, [...]
“It was drizzling lightly in late October when . . . untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal,” reports the NY Times. “It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,” said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s [...]
A few days ago, “The Paradise Imperative” appeared as a comment on my “Contact” page. It was purportedly an essay by William H. Kötke, author of such works as The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future, and Garden [...]
“Financial innovation” is just Wall Street code for “gambling in the shadowy $670 trillion global derivatives market,” says Paul Farrell, in Marketwatch. Wall Street is “spending millions on lobbyists to kill financial-regulation reforms” because it “rakes in billions of dollars annually from their ‘financial weapons of mass destruction,’ as [...]
Time magazine reports that “in September, the European Commission recommended that the E.U. support a temporary suspension of the global trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna . . . . At current fishing rates, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) estimates that Atlantic bluefin that spawn in the Mediterranean could disappear [...]
Survival+
Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation
By Charles Hugh Smith
CreateSpace, October, 2009, $19.95 hardcover
Should some future archeologist stumble across a copy of Survival+ while rummaging through the detritus of Western civilization, he will have found a veritable Rosetta Stone, unlocking [...]
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species reports that “17,291 species out of the 47,677 assessed species are threatened with extinction.” This includes “21% of all known mammals, 30% of all known amphibians, 12 per cent of all known birds and 32% of all known gymnosperms (conifers and cycads).” [...]
350.org reports, “On 24 October, people in 181 countries came together for the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history. At over 5200 events around the world, people gathered to call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis.” The number 350 refers to [...]
Are humans smarter than yeast? That question has become a catch phrase among environmentalists, increasingly posed not in jest but in earnest. It’s the title of an eight minute YouTube video by Dan Chay, but Dave Bice explains its meaning more concisely: “Yeast [...]
Project Censored has released its “Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010.” The list, compiled annually by sociology students at Sonoma State University, represents news that has been repressed by political, economic, and/or legal pressure on the mainstream media. Here are the stories the MSM has been intimidated into quashing [...]
“From a technical perspective, the recession is very likely over at this point.” So said Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on September 15th, 2009 (MarketWatch). What he failed to mention is that, from a real-life perspective, the Depression is well underway. Bernanke’s “technical” [...]
I’ve experienced a “heart incident.” Politicians sometimes use that sort of imprecise language because their media advisers warn them that admitting to having had a “heart attack” would cost them votes. But in my case, the ambiguity of the word “incident” is warranted by [...]
I’m baaack. Haven’t written a lick in months. I’ve been bummed out that millions of Americans, including my brother, are out of work, and that the government is lying about it (double their unemployment percentages; it’s closer to 18% than 9%). And I’m angry that instead of prosecuting the [...]
In this post, I share what I’ve learned in battling back from hacking and spamming attacks to regain control of my website and make it secure. This brings to mind the wider issue of the internet’s vulnerability, which I will address in follow-up posts.
During the last [...]
“Earth 2100,” ABC’s two-hour “journey through the next century to explore what might be our worst-case scenario,” aired on Tuesday, June 2, 2009. Through a graphic novel format, the program follows generations of an American family during a 21st century in which “the ‘perfect storm’ of population growth, dwindling [...]
In “The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold” (The Nation, May 26, 2009), Andy Kroll writes, “That $700 billion bailout has since grown into a more than $12 trillion commitment by the US government and the Federal Reserve. . . . Seven months in, the bailout’s impact is unclear. . . [...]
“Global warming will be twice as severe as previous estimates indicate, according to a new study published this month in the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society,” reports USAToday. ” The research, conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), predicts a 90% probability that worldwide [...]
“. . . Our economy, indeed our entire civilization, is based on an obviously false assumption that we can have growth without limits. Even if we were able to restart the economic engine and push the pedal to the floor, we would not get far before we ran out of [...]
“The purpose of the Wall Street financial system is to help well-connected Ivy League grads form business-to-business and business-to-government patronage networks for mutual personal enrichment. Any benefits to the real economy are purely incidental.” (Comment on Grasping Reality With Both Hands)
“It’s time to set aside the myth of the [...]
The Earth is experiencing its sixth mass extinction. An estimated 30,000 species are disappearing each year, three or more every hour of every day. By 2050, up to 50 percent of all species could be gone. The most recent of five previous mass [...]
Science Magazine reports that converting biomass to ethanol fuel for vehicles powered by internal combustion engines is much less efficient than burning biomass to generate electricity for batteries of electric vehicles. The same acre of switchgrass, for example, could propel an electric powered car 7,000 miles further than a [...]
You’re ready for “The Big One,” right? Earthquake? Hurricane? Flu pandemic? Terrorist or military attack? Whatever The Big One conjures up in your mind, no matter how much you’d prefer to avoid thinking about it, you’re better off confronting it now, when you have the most time and resources to [...]
Will it be a fast crash or a slow crash? Whether people are talking about Western civilization, the economy, the environment, or a relationship, once they start seeing signs it’s in trouble, they wonder how long it will take to collapse. The debate between [...]
“Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos,” reports Scientific American. “Such ‘failed states’ can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and refugees. Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming are placing severe limits on food production. Without massive and [...]
The worldwide average lifespan of a human is about 66 years (64 for males and 68 for females). During that average human’s life, say from 1943 to 2009, the total population has grown from about 2.2 billion to about 6.7 billion. Three hundred [...]
. . . The latest ice shelf to break away from the continent of Antarctica is the Wilkins. This 6,200 square mile sheet of ice, about the size of Jamaica, had been connected to land by an ever-shrinking bridge of ice that finally melted this week. Scientists report that the [...]
Look up “scam” in the dictionary and you will see something like this: “A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle.” That’s an apt definition of the marketing of ethanol as an alternative to petroleum fuel. Ethanol producers receive tax breaks and subsidies that add [...]
. . . Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and other financial institutions have announced first quarter profits. The market surged upward and some expressed the opinion that the economic crisis is over! But nothing has changed. All the toxic mortgage-backed securities, collateralized-debt obligations, and other fraudulent paper [...]
. . . Made a few changes to truthalyzer.com. Sorry if you visited during reconstruction and stumbled over the tools and debris. Now that things have been cleaned up, I hope you find the new magazine format (”The Morning After” theme) easier on the eyes and more convenient to use. [...]
Tim Geithner, Secretary of the Treasury, and others are “covering up” the massive frauds perpetrated by investment bankers. So said William K. Black on Bill Moyers Journal, April 3rd edition. Black should know. Now an academic at the University of Missouri, he was the head [...]
The recent stock market uptick, which Nouriel Roubini has termed the proverbial “dead cat bounce,” will not put millions of Americans back to work. Bloomberg reports, “More than 3.1 million jobs were eliminated last year and the unemployment rate jumped in February to [...]
“The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted,” Winston Churchill is said to have quipped.
That’s true, but it’s also true that Americans can be trusted to do NOTHING, certainly not the right thing, and [...]
This guy here. Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, the big investment firm that created all those mortgage backed securities and exotic financial derivatives that have blown up in our faces. This guy who has made billions of dollars from our misery. It’s his fault, [...]
Two of the nearly 1,000 satellites above the Earth collided on February 10th, adding about 500 pieces of debris to the approximately 17,000 that are large enough to track, as well as another 10,000 smaller bits of flotsam and jetsam to the many thousands already [...]
“On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment. . . . In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” (The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939)
“I [...]
Barack Obama’s “Plan to Change Washington” noted with disdain that “Secrecy Dominates Government Actions: The Bush administration has ignored public disclosure rules and has invoked a legal tool known as the ’state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out [...]
Speaking yesterday with a “sense of urgency” about his proposed economic recovery package, President Obama said, “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” We are so used to hearing our economic situation described as a “crisis,” that word no [...]
“We will not apologize for our way of life,” said Barack Obama in his inauguration address. Many found this choice of words disturbing, reminiscent as it was of former VP Dick Cheney’s oft-quoted line, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” That’s the sort of [...]
The rate of unemployment in the month of December, 2008, was 7.2 percent, or 8 million, according to the U.S. Department of Labor report issued today. As usual, the data in this report has been cooked by government statisticians to hide the real jobless rate, which is [...]
In 2007 I became convinced the stock market was ready to decline, so I acted decisively to preserve my hard-earned money. Of all the things I did, the most dramatic was to short the financial sector by making a sizeable investment in UltraShort Financials ProShares [...]
AP reports, “GMAC Financial Services . . . loosened its tight lending standards . . . the first time that a financial institution has said it will use money from the $700 billion bank bailout to offer more affordable credit to consumers.” Since loose lending standards were a major contributor [...]
