The Silent Super Power

[Nur]

20 Signs That The Economic Collapse Has Already Begun For One Out Of Every Seven Americans

 

By Economic Collapse Blog

 

September 19, 2010 "Economic Collapse Blog" - -For most Americans, the economic collapse is something that is happening to someone else. Most of us have become so isolated from each other and so self-involved that unless something is directly affecting us or a close family member than we really don't feel it. But even though most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbors at this point, it is quickly becoming undeniable that a fundamental shift is taking place in society. Perhaps you noticed it when two or three foreclosure signs went up on your street. Or perhaps it got your attention when that nice fellow down the street lost his job, and he and his family seemingly just disappeared from the neighborhood one day. The Census Bureau made front page headlines all over the nation this week when they announced that one out of every seven Americans was living in poverty in 2009. Every single day more Americans are getting sucked out of the middle class and into soul-crushing poverty.

 

Unfortunately, most Americans don't really care because it has not affected them yet.

 

But this year, millions more Americans will discover that the music has stopped playing and they are left without a seat at the table.

 

Meanwhile, neither political party has a workable solution. They just like to point fingers and blame each other.

 

The Democrats blame Bush for all the poverty and advocate expanding programs for the poor. Not that there is anything wrong with a safety net. But the "safety net" was never meant to hold 50 million people on Medicaid and 40 million people on food stamps. The number of Americans on food stamps has more than doubled since 2007. So do we just double it again as things get even worse?

 

The truth is that welfare programs are only short-term solutions. Unfortunately, the Democrats do not understand this. What Americans really need are good jobs.

 

The Republicans are so boneheaded that they don't even like to talk about poverty because they think it is a "liberal issue". Some conservative commentators have even been so brutally cold as to mock the "99ers" (those who have been unemployed so long that even their extended federal benefits have run out).

 

Instead of showing some compassion and being the party of the American worker (as they should be), the Republicans are often very uncompassionate and they allow the Democrats to be "the party of the poor" by default.

 

Both political parties need a big wakeup call. There is a tsunami of poverty sweeping the United States, and somebody better wake up and do something about it. More handouts will help people get by in the short-term, but there is no way that the federal government can financially support tens of millions more poor Americans.

 

How long is it going to be before the "safety net" simply collapses under the weight of all this poverty?

 

The path we are on is not sustainable.

 

The economy is falling apart, and somebody better wake up and do something before even more Americans find themselves drowning in poverty.

 

The following are 20 signs that the economic collapse has already begun for one out of every seven Americans.....

 

#1 The Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in 51 years of record-keeping.

 

#2 In the year 2000, 11.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty. In 2008, 13.2 percent of Americans were living in poverty. In 2009, 14.3 percent of Americans were living in poverty. Needless to say the trend is moving in the wrong direction.

 

#3 In 2009 alone, approximately 4 million more Americans joined the ranks of the poor.

 

#4 According to the Associated Press, experts believe that 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

 

#5 The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

 

#6 Today the United States has approximately 4 million fewer wage earners than it did in 2007.

 

#7 Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many as were receiving it in 2007.

 

#8 U.S. banks repossessed 25 percent more homes in August 2010 than they did in August 2009.

 

#9 One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

 

#10 There are now 50.7 million Americans who do not have health insurance. One trip to the emergency room would be all it would take to bankrupt a significant percentage of them.

 

#11 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor.

 

#12 There are now over 41 million Americans on food stamps.

 

#13 The number of Americans enrolled in the food stamp program increased a whopping 55 percent from December 2007 to June 2010.

 

#14 One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

 

#15 California's poverty rate soared to 15.3 percent in 2009, which was the highest in 11 years.

 

#16 According to an analysis by Isabel Sawhill and Emily Monea of the Brookings Institution, 10 million more Americans (including 6 million more children) will slip into poverty over the next decade.

 

#17 According to a recently released Federal Reserve report, Americans experienced a $1.5 trillion loss in combined household net worth in the second quarter of 2010.

 

#18 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.

 

#19 Median U.S. household income is down 5 percent from its peak of more than $52,000 in 1999.

 

#20 A study recently released by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College University found that Americans are $6.6 trillion short of what they need for retirement.

 

How anyone can look at those numbers and think that things are about to "get better" absolutely boggles the mind.

 

It is time to wake up.

 

Things are not going to get better.

 

Things are only going to get worse.

 

The United States is rapidly becoming a nation where poverty is absolutely rampant.

 

As poverty continues to spread, crime will not be far behind.

 

Meanwhile, the international community wants to impose a global tax on us so that they can "redistribute" even more of our wealth around the world.

 

The following was just reported by CNSNews.com....

 

A group of 60 nations will meet next week at the United Nations to push for a tax on foreign currency transactions as a way to generate revenue to meet global poverty-reduction goals, including “climate change” mitigation.

 

Well isn't that great? As American descends into poverty, the rest of the world is pushing for a global tax that will drain us of wealth even more.

 

It is just a tax on foreign currency transactions, but history has taught us that once taxers get their foot in the door they always go for more eventually.

 

Sadly, it is not just the United Nations that is discussing a global tax. In fact, the IMF and the World Health Organization have both been very open about the fact that they want to impose global taxes of their own.

 

Not that we aren't taxed enough already. We already pay dozens of different kinds of taxes each year, and 2011 is already being dubbed as "the year of the tax increase".

 

But most Americans don't have any more to give. Most Americans can barely make it from month to month. More Americans than ever are slipping into poverty.

 

What a mess we have on our hands.

 

Do any of you have any suggestions for how we should go about fixing all of this?

[Nur]

Collapsing America

 

By Linh Dinh

 

September 13, 2010 "ICH" -- All governments lie, kill and misuse public funds, but these calculated habits are amplified manifold during wars. We’re in two now, aiming for a third. Japan, whose land we’re still occupying 65 years after Hiroshima, has just announced sanctions against Iran beyond what the U.N. mandated. South Korea swiftly followed suit. It’s surprising to see these two countries so in sync, until one remembers that they have become American cheerleaders for decades. Rah, rah, bomb Tehran! A murderous chorus is rising, yet again. Countries that aren’t our client states can be counted with two hands, even those missing fingers from an exploding grenade.

 

Universal outrage has been drummed up over the case of an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death for adultery. She’s also implicated in the murder of her husband, for which she may be hanged. This second, more serious crime has been left out of many news stories. America also executes, but it doesn’t stone, especially for a bit of ticklish fun on the side. We inject, electrocute, gas, hang and shoot our condemned. We’re more humane that way. Forever bureaucratic, we pay attention to procedural niceties.

 

Our objection, then, is not to capital punishment, but to certain methods. Stoning is barbaric. We don’t stone, period, except during one of our serial wars, where we will stone entire communities back to the Stone Age. But that’s war, buddy. We also use phosphorous and cluster bombs, plant landmines that will last generations. To rectify and avenge the stoning of one woman, someone we don’t really care about, whose name we can’t even pronounce, we’ll flatten Iran, maybe by Thanksgiving.

 

The United States is concerned about women worldwide. It is touched and outraged by one Afghan woman, Aisha, whose nose was sliced off by her Taliban husband. To defend her honor, it has killed hundreds of thousands of her brothers and sisters. To protect her, it has destroyed her country. It’s the principle that matters. We care about the individual, at least those who are useful to our agendas. It’s the masses we don’t give a flying whoopee about. How can we not raise our voices, for example, when an imprisoned prostitute — hardly a criminal, really, even less so than adulterer — is left in a cage, to be baked to death for at least four hours in 107-degree heat? Her captors ignored her pleas for water. They wouldn’t even allow her to use the bathroom, so she soiled herself before passing out. She was still alive, however, when finally taken to the hospital, where doctors allowed her to die. Incredibly, no charges have been filed. Such barbarity and judicial callousness deserve our fullest condemnations, except that hardly anyone has heard of Marcia Powell, 48, who died in an Arizona prison in May of 2009. The mainstream media ignore her, because her abject death cannot be exploited for political purposes. We’re not trying to bomb Arizona.

 

Needing to kill, a government will lie before, during and after splattering blood. Eschewing subtlety, it prefers to speak in slogans and clipped, cartoonish sentences. They hate us for who we are. We must fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here. We’re trying to root out the bad guys. Adopting this lingo, many Americans are dubbing the community center and mosque near Ground Zero a “jihad mosque” or a “victory mosque.” In Lower Manhattan last week, I saw a man carrying a sign, “EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT ISLAM I LEARNED ON 9/11.” Another displayed a caricature of “IMAM OBAMA.” There was an effigy of a tied up Palestinian, complete with keffiyeh, with this placard, “OBAMA: With a name like HUSSAIN we understand. Bloomberg: what the f@&k is your excuse?”

 

Totalitarianism always breeds idiocy. Lies that go unchallenged lead to more preposterous lies. Idiocy is also the manure from which totalitarianism rises. On September 11, 2001, the entire world saw America symbolically imploded, but our actual collapse is ongoing. It is relatively gradual, unlike the three, yes, three, World Trade Center buildings that tumbled onto their own foot prints. For the last nine years, we have endured an unending stream of lies and idiocy, none more grotesque than the official explanation to what happened that tragic day.

 

Despite being lied to repeatedly, almost daily, Americans are strangely gullible to incoherent, even ridiculous narratives dished up by their government. Brainwashed by the bromide that their nation is always a force for good, anywhere, worldwide, Americans can’t imagine that Washington could be complicit in the murder of its own citizens. Ignored is the fact that it has done so many times before, and since, 9/11. Using false pretexts to invade Iraq, our government has caused the death of over four thousand Americans, more than the number who perished on 9/11.

 

I don’t know what happened that day, but it makes no sense to me that World Trade Center #7 fell down without being hit by anything. It makes no sense to me that it collapsed exactly the same way as the twin towers, as if imploding. It makes no sense that the passport of Satam al Suqami, one of the alleged hijackers, could be found on the ground, when entire skyscrapers were being pulverized. I also don’t understand how no military jets could intercept any of the three planes that hit their targets that day. The first tower was struck at 8:46AM, the Pentagon at 9:40AM, nearly an hour later, with no effective response from our vaunted military. I used to take buses to and from the Pentagon Transit Center. I knew the building wasn’t very tall, so it struck me as weird how an airliner could hit it from the side. Why fly parallel to the ground, nearly shaving it, to strike such a low target? Why not just dive into it? There are red flags all over this incident, yet many sane, reasonable people will become completely unhinged at the slightest suggestion that the official version doesn’t add up. Our government lies all the time, but when it comes to this one incident, we shouldn’t question anything? Even National Review, of all places, pointed out visa irregularities among the alleged hijackers, how they could enter the U.S. without the proper paperwork.

 

After Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, his family refused to believe the official explanation. They fought and fought until an assassination conspiracy trial was scheduled in 1999. Presented with extensive evidences, a jury concluded that, yes, the federal, state and local governments all had a hand in Dr. King’s murder, and that James Earl Ray was not the shooter. The King family did what any sane, loving family would do. Coretta Scott King explained, “We had to get involved because the system did not work. Those who are responsible for the assassination were not held to account for their involvement […] It has been a difficult and painful experience to revisit this tragedy, but we felt we had an obligation to do everything in our power to seek the truth.”

 

On September 11, 2001, someone stabbed America. She’s being murdered right now. As Americans, we need to get to the heart of this, because this madness and deceit are perpetuating themselves. If we don’t have the courage and clarity to confront this evil, we won’t regain our sanity or move forward. We might as well be dead. We’re dying. As with the King murder and so much else, you cannot expect the system to convict itself. It will lie and lie until the truth hardly matters.

 

http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/

[Nur]

Sleeping Giant Wakes Up

 

By Yvonne Ridley

 

January 27, 2010 "ICH" -- The Arab world’s sleeping giant has finally woken from its slumber after years of being drugged and mugged by the West.

 

Having witnessed -- and experienced –- first-hand the brutality of the Egyptian and Tunisian police and their undercover stooges, I can tell you that the uprisings of the masses took real courage.

 

Over the years, dictator Hosni Mubarak has traded on their fear, using some of the foulest methods of intimidation imaginable.

 

But like their counterparts in Tunisia, the Egyptian people are losing their fear and tearing away the chains of oppression.

 

The pharaoh’s police state is now teetering after a second day of protests.

 

Whatever the outcome over the next few weeks, I think it is clear that America and Britain can no longer manipulate and control the politics -- or lack of it -- in the Middle East.

 

Washington’s silence over the weeks of civil unrest on the streets of Tunisia was almost deafening, so when Barack Obama chose to congratulate the uprising only after Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s plane was in the air, his message of support rang hollow. On Tuesday, he urged the Egyptian authorities to show restraint.

 

The world’s most powerful man’s weasel words tripped from his lips as blood was shed on the streets of Cairo, Asyut, Alexandria, Mansura, Tanta, and Aswan as the people faced down hundreds of thousands of uniformed and plain-clothes thugs using water cannon and teargas.

 

The truth is the scenes of civil unrest from Tunis to Cairo speak volumes about U.S. and Western interference as much as the actions of the tyrants they have bankrolled and supported.

 

All of them have seriously underestimated ordinary Arabs. The brutality of tyrants has been allowed to go on for countless decades and the silence of the Western powers today exposes their own deep-seated racism and double standards toward the people.

 

Is the blood of an Arab worth less than that of an American? It’s a rhetorical question and we all know the shameful answer.

 

With the exception of Iraq (and let’s not go down the road of who created and supported Saddam), all of the governments in the Middle East are identified by their Western-installed family dynasties, sham democracies, and rigged elections, punctuated by extreme reaction to any signs of dissenting voices.

 

While these leaders have lived a life of luxury bordering on obscene, they’ve carried out their orders from Washington, London, Paris, and beyond without question -- and this goes for the corrupt Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) and his Palestinian Authority. If ever there was a dictator-in-the-making, it’s this odious man.

 

As Robert Fisk pointed out a few days back, the emergence of The Palestine Papers is as damning as the Balfour Declaration. The right of return for millions of Palestinians, for instance, was traded and eroded beyond measure.

 

From the West Bank to Gaza and the refugee camps beyond, Abu Mazen sold his people down the river. And the fact that Hillary Clinton’s predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, saw no problem in moving the Palestinians halfway across the world to settle in South America exposes the real contempt U.S. administrations have for the Arab people, not to mention those living in Latin America.

 

And why? For Israel, a festering pustule not the size of a South African game park, squatting in the Middle East. The creation of this nuclear-powered Frankenstein and the determination to force it on Arabs will turn out to be America and Britain’s biggest mistake ever.

 

But it’s not just the U.S. to blame. Britain under Tony Blair was a prime mover in overseeing the brutalization of the Arab world.

 

The UK’s intelligence service, MI6, drew up plans to help the Palestinian Authority crush the Islamic political movement Hamas and resistance groups in the West Bank.

 

Documents -- part of nearly 1700 transcripts and emails leaked to the Al Jazeera network documenting more than a decade of Israeli-Palestinian talks -- shed light on a little-known role played by British security services in shoring up the corrupt PA’s security apparatus. It was all done on Blair’s watch.

 

The West has bribed, bullied, and cajoled Arab leaders into accepting the vile Zionist regime, to the detriment of their own people, and this is now coming back to haunt them.

 

The movement of the masses isn’t just about oppression under tyrants, it is also about the creation and maintenance of Israel and the unconditional support it is given by the West and the West’s puppet leaders in the region.

 

Well, the sleeping giant has finally woken up, and when the people start to lead, their leaders will and are becoming irrelevant.

 

Israel’s biggest ally Mubarak must now be planning an exit strategy, wondering where he can flee to -- or even if he can rely any more on his Western puppet masters. They all turned their back on Ben Ali, didn’t they?

 

In Lebanon, America’s friends are folding as a prime minister is appointed who will support Israel’s archenemy Hezbollah, and from the West Bank to Gaza, Hamas is seen as the peoples’ choice. The Muslim Brotherhood is being re-energized in Egypt, where it has been robbed of election victories over the years. They would be the ruling party if free and fair elections had ever been allowed.

 

And in the coalition unity government of Tunisia, alliances may well be made with returning and previously banned Islamic political parties.

 

It’s only a matter of time before the rest of the tyrants come tumbling down like a pack of cards.

 

The game is up. It is over.

 

The Arab world is going to start to choose its own leaders. We in the West might not like the choices of the people, but we should respect their wishes.

 

Western leaders have a great deal to think about in the coming weeks as the Arab people decide how to shape their future in the Arab world.

 

But the first thing to do is send Air Force One around the region to collect all the dictators, tyrants, and despots on the U.S. payroll and take them back to Washington.

 

Like pet poo in New York’s Central Park, you have to take responsibility for the mess your dogs make.

 

British journalist Yvonne Ridley is also the European President of the International Muslim Women's Union