U.S. Lags Peers in Life Expectancy

Wall Street Journal
Louise Radnofsky

Americans die younger and have more illnesses and accidents on average than people in other high-income countries—even wealthier, insured, college-educated Americans, a report said Wednesday.

The study by the federally sponsored National Research Council and Institute of Medicine found the U.S. near the bottom of 17 affluent countries for life expectancy, with high rates of obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease and arthritis, as well as infant mortality, injuries, homicides, teen pregnancy, drug deaths and sexually transmitted diseases.

"The [U.S.] health disadvantage is pervasive—it affects all age groups up to age 75 and is observed for multiple diseases, biological and behavioral risk factors, and injuries," said the report's authors, who are public-health and medicine academics recruited by the government panels.

The shorter life expectancy for Americans largely was attributed to high mortality for men under age 50, from car crashes, accidents and violence. But the report also said U.S. women's gains in life expectancy had been lagging behind other well-off countries.

The authors offered a range of possible explanations for Americans' worse health and mortality, including social inequality. They also described criticisms including limited availability of contraception for teenagers, community designs that discourage physical activity such as walking, air pollution and access to firearms, as well as individual behaviors such as high calorie consumption.
The U.S. health-care system wasn't spared criticism, with authors describing it as fragmented, lacking sufficient primary-care physicians and posing financial barriers to millions of Americans who lack insurance or are unable to afford out-of-pocket medical costs.

But the chairman of the panel of authors, Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the report showed that health outcomes were determined "by much more than health care."

"Our health as Americans is only partly aided by having a very good health-care system," he said. "Much of our health disadvantage comes from factors outside of the clinical system and outside of what doctors and hospitals can do."

The Obama administration has aimed to improve Americans' health by expanding insurance coverage through the 2010 Affordable Care Act, while Republicans have pushed for giving the private sector a greater role in managing health care through changes to such programs as Medicare.

Public health has received relatively little attention from lawmakers, despite campaigns by high-profile figures such as first lady Michelle Obama on childhood obesity and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on smoking, gun control and the sale of high-calorie beverages.

"The political environment on health is so wrapped up right now around implementation of health reform that we need to have the space to have this larger conversation and for people to understand that having health insurance is necessary but not sufficient to close this gap," said Jeff Levi, head of the Trust for America's Health, a public health advocacy group. He wasn't involved in the study.

The new report noted that average life expectancy for American men, at 75.6 years, was the lowest among the 17 countries and almost four years shorter than for Switzerland, the best-performing nation.

American women's average life expectancy, 80.8 years, was second-lowest among the countries and five years shorter than Japan's, which had the highest expectancy.
The report's authors were particularly critical of the availability of guns, writing: "One behavior that probably explains the excess lethality of violence and unintentional injuries in the United States is the widespread possession of firearms and the common practice of storing them [often unlocked] at home."

The authors noted that Americans who lived past age 75 had higher survival rates compared with similar countries, and Americans overall had better rates of surviving cancer and strokes. They also said the U.S. better controls high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking rates and use of alcohol than many other nations.

The report didn't directly consider U.S. health in the context of spending on care, but noted that America's low outcomes were striking given that U.S. per capita health spending exceeds that of other countries.

'US dollar will collapse in 2013'

The second great depression deepening across the globe

PressTV
Webster Tarpley

 

In Charles Dickens’ celebrated short story A Christmas Carol (1843), the Malthusian miser and London stock exchange speculator Ebenezer Scrooge is told by the ghost of his deceased partner Jacob Marley that “it is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and traveled far and wide” for the purpose of doing good works of charity and thus alleviating human suffering.

In this spirit, let us briefly examine the economic condition of humanity at the close of 2012.

Our finding is sadly that the ongoing world economic depression continues to increase the needless privations of the vast majority of the inhabitants of this planet. The great scourges of mankind remain poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, disease, unemployment, homelessness, inadequate sanitation, low social mobility, and exclusion -- and many of these are getting worse.

27,000 children die each day from needless poverty

The tragic condition of humanity is perhaps most dramatically reflected in the fact that between 22,000 and 27,000 children die each day due to poverty, largely in the form of starvation, malnutrition, and diseases like diarrhea which can be cured for a few pennies. The upper end of this range corresponds to one needless childhood death caused by poverty every three seconds. Total needless childhood deaths from poverty, these data suggest, must be approaching at least 10 million per year - a yearly total which by itself rivals any of the great genocides of world history. Of the 2.2 billion children who live in today’s world, one billion live in poverty. This is the estimate from the most recent United Nations Human Development Report.

And these figures only include children. Estimates for total daily avoidable mortality, including children, suggest a level of 40,000 to 50,000 fatalities per day -- for a yearly hecatomb of over 18 million deaths.

We need look no further for the severest condemnation of the existing economic systems of the world, including especially the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the international system of privatized central banks, and similar entities.

Three billion people on less than $2.50 per day

These deaths occur in the world in which about a billion people try to survive on less than one dollar per day. 2.6 billion people or 40% of the world’s population are struggling to subsist on less than two dollars a day. It is a world in which a total of 3 billion people or 50% of the world total must try to get along on less than $2.50 per day. For all the talk of a growing middle class made possible by globalization, 80% of humanity receives less than $10 per day. At the other end of the scale, the most prosperous 20% of the world’s population account for 75% of total world income, and this distribution becomes even more extreme when permanent assets are considered.

Almost a billion malnourished worldwide

Closely correlated with needless death and needless immiseration is the problem of world hunger. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome, there are in 2012 some 925 million persons experiencing hunger and malnutrition. Some 578 million of the hungry live in the Asian and Pacific countries, followed by 239 million malnourished in sub-Saharan Africa. Even in the developed countries, the FAO lists 19 million hungry. We should recall that, in the United States, some 50 million people rely on food stamps for their survival, meaning that they may have as little as $1.50 to spend per meal and per person.

The FAO’s world hunger estimates are very likely too low. This agency assumes that world hunger was about at its current level in 2008, and then rose to over one billion people in 2009, before returning to approximately the 2008 level in 2010. but this may turn out to be wildly optimistic, and perhaps deliberately so.

Another big factor in economic immiseration is the current high level of world unemployment. Here the statistics are even sketchier. The CIA assumes a world unemployment rate of 9.1%. The United Nations International Labor Organization (ILO) sets this rate at about 6% -- meaning about 200 million current jobless -- but at the same time concedes that in many developed countries - such as the United States and the nations of the European Union - the combined figure for unemployment and underemployment is in the neighborhood of 30%. These are depression levels by any reckoning.

Especially dramatic is the situation of youth unemployment. According to the ILO, almost 70 5 million young people between the ages of 15 and 24 were unemployed, yielding a global youth unemployment rate of 12.7%, up one full percentage point from pre-depression levels. Young people are currently three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. In Greece and Spain, 50% of youth are jobless.

Eurozone slumps back into recession after austerity cuts

Output drops across single currency bloc as economists warn of no early end to crisis

The Independent
Ben Chu

The eurozone has double-dipped back into its second recession in three years, official figures confirmed yesterday – and analysts warned economic pain across the single currency will continue well into 2013.

Output across the 17-member bloc fell by 0.1 per cent over the third quarter of 2012, following a 0.2 per cent decline in the second quarter, according to Eurostat.

The picture across the Continent was uneven with France and Germany both eking out 0.2 per cent growth between July and September, while The Netherlands and Austria showed declines. Meanwhile, the crisis-hit states of Spain, Italy and Portugal, which have been in recession all year, shrank once again. Protesters in all three countries took part in anti-austerity demonstrations on Wednesday.

Economists predict weakness among the currency bloc's southern states to drag Germany and France into recession too in the coming months, with most expecting Europe's dominant economy to register negative growth in the fourth quarter of the year.

The European Commission has forecast that the bloc will shrink by 0.4 per cent over the course of 2012 and expand just 0.1 per cent in 2013.

The slowdown is making it more difficult for eurozone member states to hit their targets under the Fiscal Compact, which compels them to bring deficits down to 3 per cent of GDP.

The European Commission, which polices the Compact, showed some signs of flexibility on deficit reduction this week when the EU economic commissioner, Olli Rehn, said that Spain would not be required to make more cuts this year to compensate for being thrown off course by recession. But he added that Brussels would "look at every country case by case".

Paul De Grauwe of the London School of Economics said that the latest downturn had been brought on by the drastic spending cuts already enacted in southern Europe.

"We are getting into a double-dip recession which is entirely self-made," he said. "It is a result of excessive austerity in southern countries and unwillingness in the north to do anything else."

Steen Jakobsen, the chief economist at Saxo Bank, agreed, saying: "This was totally expected because of austerity policies combined with world growth slowing down and a fall in activity in Germany and the Netherlands."

Separate figures this week showed the Greek economy shrank at an annual rate of 7.2 per cent in the third quarter, up from 6.3 per cent in the previous three months. The International Monetary Fund yesterday reiterated its call for the European Central Bank and the European Union to write off more of the country's debt.

"The IMF has done what it needs to do in the context of its framework," the fund's spokesman William Murraysaid. "Clearly there has to be other actions taken to reach debt sustainability."

Athens' public debt is expected to hit 190 per cent of GDP next year. Greece is facing a sixth-successive year of contraction in 2013.

There was, however, a flicker of good news for Ireland yesterday as the Fitch credit rating agency upgraded its outlook for the country's BBB sovereign bonds, citing its success in cutting the deficit and return to capital markets.

UK Parliament Votes Down Increased Funding to EU

Funding for the European Union has sparked a rebellion in the British Parliament.

Prime Minister David Cameron's own Conservative backbenchers dealt him the worst defeat since he took power in 2010.

Eurosceptic Tories joined forces with the opposition and voted for cutting the UK's cash flow to Brussels.

Mark Pritchard believes the EU is inefficient and that Britons should get the chance to vote on whether to stay part of it...

RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air

It Begins: Ecuador Demands Repatriation Of One Third Of Its Gold Holdings

Zero Hedge

Tyler Durden

One week ago, when we reported the news that the Bundesbank had secretly pulled two thirds of its gold from London years ago, we said the following:

... Germany has done nothing wrong! It simply demanded a reclamation of what is rightfully Germany's to demand.

And here is the crux of the issue: in a globalized system, in which every sovereign is increasingly subjugated to the credit-creating power of the globalized "whole", one must leave all thoughts of sovereign independence at the door and embrace the "new world order." After all this is the only way that the globalized system can create the shadow cloud of infinite repoable liabilities, in which we currently all float light as a binary feather, which permits instantaeous capital flows and monetary fungibility, and which guarantees that there will be no sovereign bond issue failure as long as nobody dares to defect from the system in which all collateral is cross pledge and ultra-rehypothecated... for the greater good. Until the Buba secretly defected that is.

And this is the whole story. Because by doing what it has every right to do, the German Central Bank implicitly broke the cardinal rule of true modern monetary system (never to be confused with that socialist acronym fad MMT, MMR or some such comparable mumbo-jumbo). And the rule is that a sovereign can never put its own people above the global corporatist-cum-banking oligarchy, which needs to have access to all hard (and otherwise) assets at any given moment, on a moment's notice, as the system's explicit leverage at last check inclusive of the nearly $1 quadrillion in derivatives, is about 20 times greater than global GDP. This also happens to be the reason why the entire world is always at most a few keystrokes away from a complete monetary (and trade) paralysis, as the Lehman aftermath and the Reserve Fund breaking the buck so aptly showed.

We are confident that little if anything will be made of the Buba's action, because dwelling on it too much may expose just who the first country will be (or  already has been) when the tide finally breaks, and when it will be every sovereign for themselves. Because at that point, which will come eventually,not only Buba, but every other bank, corporation, and individual will scramble to recover their own gold located in some vault in London, New York, or Paris, or at your friendly bank vault down the street, and instead will merely find a recently emptied storage room with humorously written I.O.U. letters in the place of 1 kilo gold bricks.

It appears that the story, which has refused to go away, was not covered sufficiently fast, and precisely the worst case scenario - at least for the "asset-lite" status quo - is slowly but surely starting to materialize. From Bloomberg:

Ecuador’s government wants the nation’s banks to repatriate about one third of their foreign holdings to support national growth, the head of the country’s tax agency said.

Carlos Carrasco, director of the tax agency known as the SRI, said today that Ecuador’s lenders could repatriate about $1.7 billion and still fulfill obligations to international clients. Carrasco spoke at a congressional hearing in Quito on a government proposal to raise taxes on banks to finance cash subsidies to the South American nation’s poor.

So yesterday: Germany... today: Ecuador... tomorrow: the World?

Because while Ecuador, with its 26.3 tonnes of gold, may be small in the grand scheme of gold things, all it takes is for more and more banks to join the bandwagon and demand delivery in kind from official repositories (i.e., New York and London), and the myth that is the overcollateralization of hard money by central banks will promptly come to an abrupt, bitter and, likely, quite violent end.

Hurricane Sandy Offers Insight on How to Prepare

Natural Society

Hurricane Sandy has cleared entire grocery outlets of their essential items like water, shut off power from hundreds of thousands of homes, and incited gangs to call for the looting for local stores and wealthy homes. But it is nothing compared to a major disaster. Sure, Hurricane Sandy is projected to cost anywhere from $80 to $100 billion in damages, but it does not really compare to the reality of greater meltdown incidents.

The reality is that other major disaster scenarios that threaten the lives of many could lead to a response that is overwhelmingly more severe. Whether economic, nuclear, biological or otherwise, individuals will respond much differently when two circumstances arise surrounding such a situation:

There is no preemptive warning to prepare for the circumstances yet to be encountered.

There is direct harm presented towards individuals and their families. But where does Hurricane Sandy fit into all of this? Hurricane Sandy is extremely important as it is a ‘beta test’ of sorts to show how people will respond during a time of perceived crisis. Given that Hurricane Sandy does not pose a very real threat to the lives of citizens (directly), this response is of course much lighter than in the more life-threatening collapse situations. That said, store shelves have still been emptied of all essential items (particularly water, which was the first thing to go a few days ago), looters are conspiring to pick their targets, and millions face the reality of long-term power outages.

My video below details how many stores are even posting notices of their short supply to deter looters, riots over essential items like water, and other issues:



In other words, Hurricane Sandy gives you a glimpse into not only how a collapse scenario will function, but what you will require. I encourage you to read our information on how to prepare for not just Hurricane Sandy but any disaster in addition to the article on how to preserve your food without electricity. But at a glance, the key items that will immediately disappear or become highly challenging to find in a real collapse scenario include:

Fresh water: Water bottles, gallon jugs, and likely even access to nearby springs will be protected by certain groups.

Water-containing beverages: All types of juice, soda, milk, just about anything to quench thirst.

Firearms: Handguns, rifles, and shotguns will be most in demand however it’s likely even BB guns and airsoft will be purchased or looted for protection or otherwise.

Canned foods: Expect stores to sell out of long-term storable foods as soon as word of disaster hits.

Sugar and coffee: Items like sugar, coffee, spices, salt, and pepper will essentially be a new form of currency in the event of a meltdown. The bartering system of days past will be reinvigorated through the trade of once-cheap products like these in exchange for even major things like vehicles, weapons, and water.

Thankfully, you can be prepared. By purchasing a high quality water filtration device alone, you will be ahead of 99% of the population. The best options are either a gravity-based filtration system (that works using gravity instead of pressure provided by electricity), or an atmospheric water generator that is solar powered or can run reasonable fine on a generator. With either of these options, you will be able to address the most challenging issue of obtaining fresh water supply for you and your family. This alone may be enough of a barter tool to generate excess food and perhaps even weapons.

That said, it is important to begin stockpiling foods that you will be able to eat without electricity. Many foods exist that store for nearly forever, but it is still wise to eat from your storage each month and replace accordingly to achieve optimum freshness and subsequent taste. After all, you want to attempt to retain the most comfort in a collapse scenario through your foods to ensure that you and your family do not suffer from serious panic-induced hardships.

Hurricane Sandy presents a unique scenario in which we can understand how society will respond to disaster in highly-populated urban areas after being used to a ‘regular’ lifestyle for virtually the last several decades. Through this, it also brings widespread attention to just how necessary it is to ensure that you obtain and maintain the essential supplies needed for the survival of you and your family in a much more serious situation that could threaten the lives of the average citizen.

Just by taking minor steps into improving your preparedness kit and action plan, you can make a major different in not only your own life but the lives of many others.

Iran Issue, a US Election Stratagem

Iran Review
Afsaneh Ahadi
Expert on Strategic and US Affairs

Iran’s nuclear issue has been a focus of attention for both the Republican and Democrat candidates during 2012 election hustings. In fact, Iran was among issues to which both rival candidates have paid special attention since the beginning of election campaigns. As election campaigns close to their end, the two rivals are paying even higher attention to Iran and how to deal with it. The focus on Iran has been so intense that other foreign policy issues have been discussed by presidential hopefuls in the light of Iran issue and the candidates use it to barrage each other’s positions. The Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, and his Democrat rival who is also the incumbent US president, Barack Obama, have been trying throughout their election debates and also in their other public addresses to depict Iran as a major threat to national security of the United States.

Although a similar trend has been rife in previous US presidential elections, during the current campaigns, both candidates are trying to draw more public attention to Iran issue, by putting too much emphasis on and giving urgency to Iran issue. In fact, the only way to get the American voters believe that there is an issue in the country’s foreign policy which is more pressing than economic issues is to aggrandize the threat posed by that issue to the United States national security. This is being done while the American people’s concern about gravity of their country’s economic situation is growing and various opinion polls have shown that economic programs offered by both candidates have been treated coldly by the American people. A comparison between the impressions made on the American people by either candidate’s economic program clearly proves that none of them have been considered attractive by the general public. In a recent poll conducted by the Gallup Institute, 48 percent voted for Obama while 47 percent took sides with Romney’s economic program.

At any rate, the main issue which is of utmost urgency to both rival candidates is to attract the so-called ‘swing’ votes which are cast by people in a number of states whose final vote cannot be forecasted up to the eleventh hour. Traditionally, a certain part of the US population votes for Democrat candidates, while another part supports the Republicans and their candidates. However, there is also a part of the population with no special allegiance for either party in some US states, which are known as ‘swing states.’ Such undetermined votes account for about 23 percent of all votes during this year’s presidential polls, which is quite considerable. As a result, both candidates are doing their best to win the votes of this part of the population.

Therefore, stressing on the critical nature of an issue and reiterating the necessity of taking a serious stance on it will be a good ploy in order to put a cap on the weak performance of a candidate in other fields. Iran is now in the center of the crisis theme chosen for this year’s presidential elections in the United States. This is quite similar to what happened during the US presidential polls in 1980. At that time, due to hostage taking crisis related to the American diplomats in Tehran, the American people paid special attention to political stances of both candidates.

Although the Americans saw Iran threat more tangible then, the ongoing negative propaganda against the Islamic Republic has once more brought the alleged Iran threat to the fore. As a result, the republican candidate is accusing Obama of having adopted futile and ineffective policies in order to stop Iran’s nuclear activities and is calling for a more serious treatment of Iran which may even include a military option. Polls conducted so far show that despite too much emphasis, which has been put on the serious nature of Iran’s nuclear energy program, the American people are not in favor of a military option against Iran and the beginning of a new war. This is truer taking into account that the American people are currently grappling with a major economic crisis and they believe that the main cause of the crisis is their country’s engagement in two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Therefore, the Republican candidate is trying to show that sanctions have not been of enough effect against Iran and have failed to produce a major impact on the Islamic Republic. Therefore, he has called for further escalation of sanctions against Iran. Romney has already questioned Obama’s position of considering the capability to build nuclear weapons as the red line for Iran’s nuclear energy program, and believes that any form of nuclear capability in Iran will pose a serious threat to security of both Israel and the United States.

Many experts believe that any sudden development in relation to Iran’s nuclear issue can have a great impact on the situation of the US presidential candidates and even a development with an ephemeral effect can be consequential. Perhaps this is why a few days before the last election debate between Obama and Romney, the New York Times daily reported that the United States and Iran have reached an agreement to launch direct talks and the negotiations are to be started following the US presidential election. Although the report was rejected by both the Iranian and American officials, in short term, it can leave its mark on the US presidential contest in favor of Obama and can improve his standing compared to his Republican rival. The Republican candidate, on the other side, has noted that any kind of negotiations with Iran will be ineffective and has slammed Obama for showing unacceptable weakness in the face of Iran. Critics believe that despite international sanctions against the Islamic Republic, Iran’s nuclear program in ceaselessly progressing. On the other hand, experience has shown that even in the case of direct talks between the two sides, they are very probable not to achieve any clear-cut result just in the same way that direct talks between the United States and North Korea over the latter country’s nuclear program failed to produce a tangible result.

Portland, Oregon Prepares For Pre-Election Anti-Austerity Protest

CounterCurrents
Shamus Cooke

On November 3rd Portland community and labor groups will declare "enough is enough" by organizing a first for the U.S. — a large demonstration against government austerity cuts.

The protest takes aim at the governmental policy of austerity — where public deficits on a city, state, and federal level are being addressed by “cuts only" budgets, resulting in continued de-funding of education, health care, transportation, and other vital public services, combined with an attack on public sector workers.

The pre-election date of the protest is no accident, but an intentional action that, in part, aims to bring awareness to the post-election cuts slated to “fix” the national deficit. Although Democrats and Republicans are still wrangling over a specific dollar amount of cuts, they do agree that at least $4 trillion in cuts — including social programs like Medicare, education and likely Social Security — are "necessary" ($4 trillion is Obama's proposal; Paul Ryan's is $6 trillion).

Nearly all politicians claim there is no alternative to austerity cuts, which in Portland have caused devastation to public schools and other social services.

The alternative solution to austerity is obvious: budget deficits should be fixed by taxing the corporations and the wealthy, who have benefited for decades from a bi-partisan policy of lower tax rates, while working people have seen property, liquor, and other regressive taxes levied against them. These pro-corporate policies are in large part the cause of the current deficit, the recession — caused by the big banks — is another cause.

Giant protests against austerity in Europe have attracted hundreds of thousands and evolved into citywide general strikes, thanks in large part to the active participation of the European labor movement. In Portland, the anti-austerity demonstration is endorsed by locals from Service Employees International Union, Communication Workers of America, Letter Carriers, Laborers, Jobs With Justice, and other community groups including Occupy Portland.

If the Portland protest is large enough it will have succeeded in educating the community about the special interest, pro-corporate agenda behind the national and local austerity cuts, while also showing practical alternatives to austerity: making the rich and corporations pay for the crisis they created.

Ideally, the Portland demonstration will be the beginning of a working-class coalition of labor and community groups with the potential of growing into a powerful European-like movement capable defeating not only city and state austerity budgets, but working with other cities to change social policy on a national level.

Economists agree that the economic downturn shows no signs of real recovery, ensuring that austerity will remain an issue that threatens the livelihoods of all working people for years to come. Better to start fighting it now!

The protest begins 1pm, at Portland's Holladay Park on November 3rd.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org) He can be reached at Shamuscooke@gmail.com

Republicans, Democrats attacking Americans in bipartisan push for savage austerity

PressTV
Webster Tarpley

By all indications, the US ruling class of Wall Street financiers is determined to follow Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain down the road to drastic austerity. The financiers of lower Manhattan are thus ignoring the evidence offered by these other countries showing that austerity policies reduce employment, lower production, cause severe mass privation, introduce powerful elements of chaos into society, and actually increase the government budget deficits in future years -- meaning that austerity fails even in its own terms.

Since the 1930s, it has been widely recognized that a policy of deflation with severe cuts in government spending and in expenditures for social services will plunge a country deeper into depression. Once the depression has hit, usually as the result of the collapse of a speculative bubble like the $2 quadrillion derivatives mania of 2000-2008, the private economy shrinks rapidly, leaving government spending as the principal form of economic activity. If the government budget is nevertheless cut, this lowers the overall rate of economic activity; working people paying taxes are turned into recipients of public assistance, and the budget deficit grows rapidly. The classic case is the German government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning in 1930-32, whose brutal austerity policies shrank the national economy by about 25% over the course of two years, but still could not prevent the German budget deficit from growing.

Despite all this, there is today a consensus between Wall Street and Washington that draconian austerity must be imposed in the United States. This will be the case no matter whether Obama or Romney wins the upcoming election. Romney has been very open about his determination to rule in the name of the top 1% of financiers and oligarchs, while imposing hardships and sacrifices on the rest of the population. Obama is somewhat more discreet, but he also has clearly signaled his desire for a sweeping austerity program to be agreed on by the two major US parties as soon as possible, probably before the end of this year.

Observers have noted that Obama and Biden, in their three debates held so far with their Republican rivals, have never mentioned the traditional Democratic Party platform planks of raising the minimum wage; preserving the funding of the food stamp program (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program of the US Department Of Agriculture) which keeps some 50 million Americans alive; maintaining and extending unemployment insurance payments to the jobless; or making it easier for trade unions to organize.

Obama and Biden ignore waitress moms

This failure by Obama and Biden to even mention these concerns of lower middle class working people and the working poor does not represent astute politics. On the one hand, it is true that the Democratic Party has almost entirely lost its earlier base of support among white male workers. But the Democratic Party still has a sizable constituency of working women, often single mothers, who have no college education. These are the so-called “waitress moms,” for whom the economic issues are very important. But the Democratic Party ignores them, since promises of this type might get in the way of delivering the austerity demanded by Wall Street.

Intelligent trade unionists have not forgotten that, when the entire state of Wisconsin was gripped by a de facto general strike against the fascist Governor Walker in February-March 2011, Obama refused to lift a finger to help them. Obama could have sent in Vice President Biden, who pretends to be a populist, to support the strikers. He could have sent Attorney General Eric Holder to frighten the Walker gang with the prospect of federal indictments. He could have sent Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to investigate violations of the labor law. Obama could even have gone to Wisconsin himself, something he had promised to do in his 2000 campaign. But Obama did nothing. Nor did he help unions and other residents in Ohio, who were able to fight off a union busting campaign by their own fascist Governor Kasich, or in Indiana, where a union busting plan largely succeeded, or in Michigan, where the fascist Governor Snyder has kicked out the democratically elected mayors and city councils and replaced them with austerity dictators in cities like Benton Harbor, Flint, Pontiac, and Ecorse, and in the Detroit public schools.

Obama needs the members of trade unions to mobilize in his support during the final phases of his reelection campaign, but he offers nothing in return but killer cuts. When Obama ran for president the first time, he promised to institute a reform known as Card Check, which is simply a way to facilitate the establishment of union representation in workplaces. But Obama never did anything to get this law through Congress, and he has not mentioned it for years.

The ideological atmosphere in Washington, DC is heavily in favor of severe austerity, reflecting the elite consensus. Many news commentators are demanding that Obama implement the recommendations of the so-called Simpson-Bowles Commission, which favored three dollars worth of cuts in entitlements and the social safety net compared to one dollar in increased revenue, with only a tiny fraction of the latter coming from taxes on the super-rich. Former Senator Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chair of this commission, is no humanitarian, but is on record saying he hates senior citizens and also that he hates his own grandchildren, among others. Simpson Bowles is often called the cat food commission, since the entitlement cuts it demands would reduce many elderly people to eating cat food because of their poverty. In the first presidential debate, Obama endorsed the murderous program of Simpson-Bowles.

In the United States Senate, an effort for savage austerity supported by an alliance of both major parties is being mounted by the Gang of Eight, sometimes called the Crapo Commission by its critics in honor of the reactionary Idaho Mormon Senator Mike Crapo who is one of its prominent members. Crapo is joined by Republicans Alexander, Coburn, and Chambliss, plus Democrats Bennett, Warner, Durbin, and Conrad in discussions over how to flay the American people alive.

The essential unifying ideology of the Democratic Party is the defense of the progressive economic reforms of the New Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society. Depending on the specific program, polls show that between 65% and 80% of the American people want these social programs preserved in their current form, with no cuts. But Obama and other leaders see the Democratic Party as a confederation of social groups, each of which wants to practice its own brand of identity politics. By pandering to each of these forms of particularism and parochialism, postmodern Democrats like Obama hope to sell out the traditional entitlements and still survive politically. But it is quite possible that a massive betrayal by Obama of his own base on these issues would lead to a permanent weakening of the Democratic Party, conceivably a fatal one.

During the current pre-election phase, Obama is pretending to take a principled position on the coming austerity deal, sometimes referred to as the “Grand Bargain.” According to the Washington Post of October 18, Obama is sending out word to the Congress that he will veto any December-January budget deal that does not contain some tax increase on the rich. This posturing is hollow, for at least three reasons. First, Obama would be more than willing to barter a tiny tax hike on the super-rich for massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare. These cuts would leave the luxuries of the superrich untouched, but would cut deeply into the amenities of the middle class and the necessities of the working poor. Secondly, the Obama White House refused to say whether this veto threat will apply in case Obama loses the election. The implication is that, if he becomes a one term president, Obama will want to secure his place in history - as an austerity enforcer, given his neoliberal mentality -- at the expense of the weakest, oldest, sickest, and most defenseless elements of US society. A third problem is that the cowardly Obama has surrendered so many times that few take his threats seriously now. “Some Republicans, noting that the president has backed off demands for higher taxes twice in the past, are skeptical that he will stand firm now,” commented theWashington Post.

Another group which Obama has sold out is the college students who did so much to put him into the White House in 2008. Two thirds of the US college graduates of 2011 were groaning under student loan debt, with an average of $26,000 per bachelor’s degree student, plus more for advanced degrees, and much more for degrees in law and medicine. The student loan burden has now topped $1 trillion, about as much as consumer and credit card debt. Student loan debt is interfering with the normal process of human life, since the indebted young people are less likely to find apartments of their own, less likely to get married, and less likely to have children.

Because the US government is operating under multiple states of emergency, a real president could easily use the existing provisions of the Defense Production Act to declare a five-year freeze on all payments of interest and principal on these crippling student loans. He could use the same law to impose a 10% ceiling on all interest rates in the United States, thus reviving the usury laws of the pre-Volker era. But Obama is determined to serve Wall Street to the bitter end, even if the financiers are now channeling significantly more money to Romney than to the current tenant of the White House.

US Imperialism Unleashed: Descent into Barbarism

Global Research
Ben Schreiner

The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet

With signs of a global economic downturn mounting, US aggression across the Middle East and North Africa ratchets up. And once again, US imperialism stands poised to swing open the gates of Hell.

The choice presently confronting humanity, then, is one between imperialism on the one hand, and the struggle against imperialism on the other. 

Global Capitalism Imperiled

According to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook report released last week, the “risks for a serious global slowdown are alarmingly high.” The report projects the world economy to expand just 3.3 percent this year and 3.6 percent in 2013—both projections down from the IMF’s July forecast. As Joseph Davis, chief economist at the Vanguard Group, cautioned to the Wall Street Journal, “The odds of a global recession are not fully appreciated.”

Indeed, for as the Financial Times reports, the Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery, the Brookings Institution-Financial Times index of the world economy, finds severe problems “in both advanced and emerging markets.”

“The global economic recovery,” Brookings’ senior fellow and index creator Eswar Prasad warned, “is on the ropes.”

And though in its latest report the IMF continued to peddle the harsh elixir of austerity for the depressed economies of the euro zone periphery, the Fund also came to tacitly acknowledge the limits of austerity.

“The IMF now says global efforts to slash deficits and debt may have hurt growth because they occurred too quickly and too widely,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

But with the limits of austerity as a means of resolving the present crisis apparent, the last remaining card for the capitalist elite to play in their attempt to regenerate global capitalism appears to be in unleashing the forces of “creative destruction” wrought by military aggression. As Henryk Grossman warned in his Law of Accumulation, “The destructions and devaluations of war are a means of warding off the immanent collapse [of capitalism], of creating a breathing space for the accumulation of capital.”

It is thus out of the need to renew the impetus for capital accumulation that the iron fist of US imperialism gains free rein once more across the full spectrum of what American neo-conservatives deem the “arc of instability.”

US Imperialism on the March

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon is readying military strikes in Libya in retaliation for the September attack on the US compound in Benghazi. As the paper reports, “The top-secret Joint Special Operations Command is compiling so-called target packages of detailed information about the suspects.”

“Potential military options could include drone strikes, Special Operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden and joint missions with Libyan authorities.”

The Times goes on to report that the Pentagon is also rushing to train and equip a 500 member Libyan commando force to be used to combat “Islamic extremists” within the country.

At the same time, the Pentagon has reportedly dispatched a task force of 150 military “planners” and “specialists” (i.e., special operations troops) to a Jordanian military base along the Jordan-Syria border. Speaking at a NATO conference in Brussels last week, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta claimed that the task force was sent to help Jordan “monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria.”

The specter of chemical weapons has been increasingly used as a pretext by the Atlantic powers to threaten military intervention into Syria. As President Obama declared in August, the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces would be a “red line,” which would force him to change his “calculus” on intervention.

“Once again, Western powers are digging deep for excuses to intervene militarily in another conflict-torn Middle East country,” an editorial in the state-run Xinhua news agency of China read in response to Obama’s threat.

Sure enough, as the New York Times reported, discussions have already taken place over using the Jordanian-stationed US task force to help establish a buffer zone within Syrian territory.

(In addition to the deployment of troops along the Jordan-Syria border, CIA operatives are presently active along the Syria-Turkey border, facilitating the flow of arms to rebel forces. Meanwhile, a recent report in the Los Angeles Times noted that the US military is currently using aerial surveillance drones to monitor Syrian chemical weapon stockpiles.)

Of course, the stepped up targeting of Syria cannot be decoupled from the joint Israel-US campaign against Iran. After all, as hawks Michael Doran and Max Boot argue in a New York Times op-ed, the first reason American intervention in Syria is now merited is because it “would diminish Iran’s influence in the Arab world.”

The road to Tehran, we see, may very well lead through Damascus; although, the urge to fly non-stop to Tehran may just prove too strong to resist.

Marching Toward Tehran

With Iran clearly in mind, the US and Israel are set to begin a massive three-week joint missile and air defense exercise later this month. The exercise, Business Week reports, will include 3,500 US personnel and 1,000 members of the Israel Defense Forces, making it the largest joint military exercise held between the two nations. The planned war game also occurs amid mounting speculation of a looming strike against Iran.

According to a report in Foreign Policy by David Rothkopf, the US and Israel are actively planning a joint “surgical strike targeting Iranian enrichment facilities.” Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and Editor-at-Large of Foreign Policy, cites his source as stating that “the strike might take only ‘a couple of hours’ in the best case and only would involve a ‘day or two’ overall.”

"Legalized Plunder of the American People" - G. Edward Griffin

Reality Check: Is This The End of The Petro-dollar?

Austerity-weary Lithuania ejects government: exit poll

Reuters
Andrius Sytas and Christian Lowe

Lithuanians voted out their government in an election on Sunday, an exit poll showed, in a taste of what may await other European leaders forced by the financial crisis to implement unpopular austerity measures.

An ex-Soviet state of about three million people, Lithuania crashed hard when the crisis hit four years ago. It made tough budget cuts in response and is now returning to economic health - but too late for voters fed up with belt-tightening.

An exit poll read out on national television after voting finished suggested Lithuanians had thrown out center-right Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius in favor of a coalition of left-leaning opposition parties who promise to soften the austerity.

One of the likely leaders of the coalition told Reuters he would cushion vulnerable sections society from market forces, but would not throw away prudent economic policies.

"We are going to continue austerity in Lithuania, if we are in government," Algirdas Butkevicius, head of the Social Democrats, said in an interview at his party headquarters after the exit poll came out.

He said his party intended to keep next year's deficit at the same level as the one projected by the government in power now. "Our fiscal deficit I think will be in the next year about 2.5 percent of GDP (gross domestic product)," he said.

The Baltic Sea nation jumped quickly to implement austerity measures and is held up by euro zone countries as a model of how to respond to the crisis. It is a bellwether for governments in Greece, Spain, Ireland and elsewhere, who are being forced to make similar swinging cuts.

The RAIT/BNS exit poll gave the biggest share of the vote, 19.8 percent, to the Labour Party. The center-left Social Democrats, likely coalition partner for Labour, were second with 17.8 percent and the prime minister's Homeland Union was in third place on 16.7 percent.

The final shape of the next government will not be clear until talks take place on forming a coalition. It may come down to a second round, to take place in two weeks, which will settle races in local districts where no candidate had a clear lead.

But it appeared very unlikely on Sunday that the prime minister would be able to stay in power, after voters held him accountable for the tough decisions he took to drag Lithuania out of crisis.

"What kind of crisis management are we talking about?" asked Alfonsus Spudys, 78, on his way out of a polling station earlier on Sunday in the capital, Vilnius. "They scythed people down ... and now they are saying they handled the crisis really well."

Before the financial crash in 2008, Lithuania was booming. Scandinavian banks provided cheap credit which let the country buy more than it sold and over-heated the real estate market.

When the crisis struck, the banks stopped lending. Economic output dropped by 15 percent in 2009. Unemployment shot up. Thousands of young Lithuanians went abroad to seek work.

Kubilius, elected after the crisis began, cut pensions and public sector wages. To save money, only every third street lamp in Vilnius was lit, and fuel for police cars was rationed.

This discipline helped the economy rebound. Gross domestic product grew 5.8 percent last year, one of the fastest rates of any European Union economy. The budget deficit has been tamed.

TOUGH MEDICINE

But many Lithuanians now say the price was too high, even though institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have heaped praise on the country's leaders.

"If the IMF was voting then he (the prime minister) would be re-elected," said Kestutis Girnius, who teaches at the Institute for International Relations and Political Science in Vilnius.

"But the IMF does not live in Lithuania, and they could not live on a Lithuanian salary."

The most likely outcome, analysts say, is that a ruling coalition will be formed between Labour, which is led by Russian-born businessman Viktor Uspaskich, the Social Democrats and the smaller Order and Justice Party.

These parties have said they will ease the pain of austerity by increasing the minimum wage, making the rich pay higher income tax than the poor and launching job creation schemes.

However, economists say the country's still-delicate finances dictate that whoever is in government will have to stick, for the most part, to the existing austerity program.

Cities Clash in Battle to Land Conventions

Weak Economy Heightens Competition; Venues Splash Out Sweeteners, Freebies

Wall Street Journal

The AABB, a medical-industry association focused on blood transfusion and 
cell therapy, holds an expo in Boston earlier this month.

BOSTON—Rivalry between cities isn't limited to sports teams.

Across the country, cities are duking it out like never before over conventions, vying to host everyone from the Barbershop Harmony Society to the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry.

Convention-center officials in Boston say they were on track recently to snag a green-building trade show when they got muscled out by Atlanta.

Atlanta lured the group for its 2019 show by offering free rent at its Georgia World Congress Center, said James Rooney, executive director of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority. He estimated comparable space in Boston would have rented for about $500,000. "At the last minute, they swooped in," Mr. Rooney said.

Georgia's capital city won because it "presented the best value proposition," said Mark Vaughan, chief sales officer for the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau. He added that he was surprised by Mr. Rooney's comments but declined to comment about sweeteners offered to the group, U.S. Green Build, which also is mum on the details. The Georgia World Congress Center also declined to comment.

The nation's slow-growing economy has hurt attendance. With budgets tight, companies and associations aren't holding as many conventions or sending as many employees or members to them. And a glut of convention space has sharpened the competition among cities.

"If you get one of these events, you're talking about $20 to $30 million in spending in the local economy," Boston's Mr. Rooney says.

Between 2000 and 2011, convention-center exhibit-hall space expanded by 35% nationally while attendance fell 1.7% in the same time, said Heywood Sanders, a professor of public administration at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and an expert on convention centers. Attendance is down 5% since 2007.

Douglas L. Ducate, president and chief executive of the Dallas-based Center for Exhibition Industry Research, has been in the business since 1968. "It's more competitive today than at any time in my career," he says.

Groups such as CEIR predict moderate growth over the next several years. But the European economic turmoil has hurt many U.S. exporting firms that often hold trade shows and conventions. And industries such as home-building, that traditionally host many shows, are still struggling.

City convention bureaus are undercutting each other with offers of freebies and incentives, such as free banners, breaks on rent and donations to a trade organization's charity. "It's been going on for years, but not at the magnitude that it is today," said Mr. Vaughan in Atlanta.

Some convention centers have added casinos or theaters. In Nevada, the Reno-Sparks Convention and & Visitors Authority is aiming to lure bowling conventions with its sprawling bowling alley only open to convention-goers. "We have the Taj Mahal of bowling," said Christopher Baum, the authority's president.

Mr. Ducate said conventions as a modern industry arose in the 1960s as highways and jet travel made multi-day gatherings economically feasible. The business model that evolved was to build large convention centers as loss leaders, paid for by local government bonds, which thenwere paid off primarily by hotel-occupancy taxes, Mr. Ducate said. The notion was that conventions would generate enough local business to eventually pay for themselves.

Deborah Sexton is president and CEO of the Chicago-based Professional Convention Management Association, an organization of about 6,300 meeting planners and convention and facility managers. "Many cities take this business for granted because it's been coming for years," she said. "It's only when you lose it that you realize its importance."

Business and leisure travel nationally has rebounded since the recession, but travel for conventions, trade shows and similar events, hasn't come back as strongly, said R. Mark Woodworth, president of a hotel market-research company and a member of the board of the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau.

"In the past, where you might have two or three cities [bidding in] any given year, we're now up to four to six cities wanting to bid. It shows you the cities are hungry," said Dick Holmes, convention director for the American Legion. The group recently picked the Kentucky International Convention Center for its 2017 annual gathering after convention officials in Louisville offered free rent and free office space—and agreed to pay all costs for the organization's annual patriotic parade.

Louisville convention center officials declined to say what they gave the group, but Mr. Holmes estimates the perks add up to more than $300,000 in value. In return, he said, the city gets thousands of "guys and gals" who stay in hotels, dine out, take tours and "might have an adult beverage or two."

Mr. Sanders, the University of Texas professor, predicts the glut of convention space will only get worse, because a number of cities continue to push expansions. He blames cities' hired consultants, who he said predict "all these people are going to come and do wonderful things to your economy."

"But the problem is they aren't coming anymore, because there are lots of other convention centers ... that desperately want that business," he said. "So Atlanta steals from Boston, Orlando steals from Chicago and Las Vegas steals from everywhere."

Write to Jennifer Levitz at jennifer.levitz@wsj.com and Cameron McWhirter atcameron.mcwhirter@wsj.com

Threat of a Complete Financial Meltdown: IMF Report Points to Growing Instability

World Socialist Website
Nick Beams

Four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the latest Global Financial Stability Report published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) makes clear that the threat of a complete meltdown of the international financial system remains. And the dangers of such an event are increasing.

The report, issued earlier this week, began by noting that risks to financial instability had increased since the previous report last April and that “confidence in the global financial system has become very fragile.”

The main risk to financial stability was a further deterioration in the euro area crisis, but “rising imbalances elsewhere are also a cause for concern.”

The report pointed to the increasing fragmentation of the euro zone, which could set off a massive withdrawal of capital from the weaker economies, as well as from central and eastern Europe. Such a withdrawal would push record unemployment levels even higher. There was now a “wedge” between the euro zone periphery and the core.

The crisis arises from the imbalances that were built into the euro zone from the outset. For the so-called periphery economies, adopting the euro as the common currency meant that they could no longer rely on a fall in the value of their national currencies to maintain their export markets. Hence, they increasingly suffered from a balance of payments deficit.

However, this was covered by an influx of capital from the stronger economies, in particular Germany. The inflow of capital boosted demand and provided valuable markets for German exports, setting up a virtuous circle. Now a vicious circle has replaced it, as capital flows in the other direction. “Liquidity in the core economy banks,” the report noted, “is not being recycled to the periphery but is instead being deposited at core central banks or in relatively safe government bonds.”

Bank bailouts have been accompanied by the imposition of austerity programs and recession, leading to a further withdrawal of funds.

The IMF report also warned that the corporate sector could become “an additional force in this pernicious feedback loop” as sovereign downgrades pulled investment grade corporate debt toward junk status.

The report’s forecasts were made on the basis of what the authors called a baseline scenario. This assumed that European policymakers would move to closer economic and political integration, establish a single supervisory mechanism for the financial system and take action to close the gap between the high interest rates in the periphery and the very low rates in core countries, such as Germany.

Unless these measures were carried out—and that is far from likely, given the growing conflicts among the European powers—then the eurozone would slide into a “weak policies scenario”.

That scenario would bring a rapid worsening of the financial crisis. The forces of fragmentation would become “entrenched” and the capital problems of banks would increase, posing a “far-reaching threat to the global financial system and the global economic outlook.”

So far as policy prescriptions were concerned, the IMF demanded an intensification of the attacks on the working class. One of the key elements of any recovery program had to be the implementation of “growth-friendly fiscal consolidation”.

Such a thing does not exist. “Fiscal consolidation” is a euphemism for budget cuts, the impact of which is to reduce demand—either through cuts in social services or by the cutting of public sector jobs—leading to a further economic contraction, followed by demands for more cuts.

At the same time, finance capital demands that real wages be reduced and the exploitation of workers intensified. Accordingly, the IMF called for “wide-ranging … structural and institutional reforms” in order to “strengthen competitiveness and narrow external imbalance.”

What this means is that, given that the countries running a balance of payments deficit cannot devalue their currency, they must carry out what is termed an “internal devaluation” in order to lower their costs, above all wages, and thereby become competitive on international markets.

The history of such “internal devaluation” was the subject of a comment by Financial Timescolumnist Martin Wolf, published on Wednesday. He pointed out that when the UK carried out such a regime between the wars, economic output in 1938 was barely above what it had been in 1918. “High unemployment,” he noted, “was the mechanism for driving nominal and real wages down.”

This is the program to be now applied across Europe.

While focusing attention on Europe, the IMF report also commented on the worsening situation in both Japan and the United States, two of the major pillars of the world economy.

Sovereign credit risk was an important “challenge” to stability in the US, with an already weak economy facing slow growth and inadequate demand. In addition, a “fiscal cliff” posed “near-term risks.” That is, the series of tax increases and spending cuts due to come into effect at the end of the year could, if implemented, cut US economic growth by as much as 2 percentage points.

The report warned that the present problems in the euro region were a “cautionary tale” for Japan, given its high public debt and the heavy investment by banks in government bonds.

The crisis has had contradictory effects. On the one hand, Japan has become a beneficiary of “safe-haven” inflows as a result of the crisis in Europe. These inflows have pushed the yields on government bonds to near-record lows, facilitating easy financing of the national public debt.

On the other hand, the foreign capital inflow has pushed up the value of the yen, thereby weakening Japanese exports and impacting on domestic production.

The increasing investment by domestic Japanese banks in government bonds could be sowing the seeds for future problems. If, for any reason, the yields on Japanese bonds started to rise (that is, there was a fall in bond prices) then the banks would incur a capital loss on their assets. And as the experience of Europe has shown, this can rapidly lead to the onset of a full-blown financial crisis.