New figures show 3.04 million unemployed
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
- George W. Bush,
Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
Imagine being prescribed a course of pills made of sugar and paste. They contain no active ingredients that could possibly alter the course of your illness, let alone make you better. And yet you do get better. The dummy pills work a strange kind of magic. There is in fact a great body of evidence to suggest that placebo or dummy treatments can sometimes work as well or even better than real medicines. Patients on placebos can even experience side-effects that mimic real drugs.
Nor is it just a matter of the patient responding to the illusion of treatment- objective measurements of symptoms such as blood pressure and post-operative swelling have found real physical changes. A report by England's House of Lords Science and Technology Committee in 2000 found that: "The placebo effect is not just an imagined experience but can positively improve objective biological measures of health."
This is the effect that the Republican Party were hoping for when they held their recent convention in New York and began to sugar coat the profile of their esteemed leader-George W. Bush.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the 107th Mayor of the New York City, compared Bush with Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. If you recall, Mr. Giuliani was the Major of New York at the time of 9/11 and did such a good job at adding courageous resolve to the situation that he became Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2001. The article that accompanied this accolade revealed that the traumatic events of the time made him identify with Churchill and the people of London during the Blitz in 1940 who had to keep up their spirit during a sustained bombing campaign and impending defeat by what appeared to many as an unstoppable enemy.
At the convention, Giuliani passed on the mantle of Churchill to George W., who, when the 9/11 attacks came, disappeared from the nation's radar for hours and didn't return to Washington until it was determined he wouldn't be in danger. (Churchill, on the other hand, appeared on the streets when the bombs rained down on London in order to bolster the spirit of the people).
While the great and the good lauded plaudits on their leader, other records were being set on the streets outside the virtual world inhabited by the leaders of the masses. As the Hollywood star 'The Terminator' praised the "character and leadership" of President Bush and stated that "America is back," five thousand people protesting against high job losses formed a three-mile unemployment line in Manhattan. During the seven days that the convention lasted, more than 1,760 arrests were made, a record for a U.S. political convention.
According to Bloomberg, on each day that passes the United States spends $2 billion it doesn't have. Each day, the Republican government adds about $1 billion to the debt of the world's No. 1 economy and the U.S. consumer spends $1 billion more than he or she earns, with spending rising eight times faster than income.
The Daily Reckoning (www.daily-reckoning.com) estimates that 80 percent of all the savings of everyone on the planet are needed just to keep the U.S. afloat.
So far the pre-eminence of the USA has been unquestioned, as the dollar has been the reserve currency of the World and the Fed has acted as a lender of last resort. But the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value since the Fed was set up in 1913 and has further to fall as the debt burden amassed by the most profligate country in history can never be repaid.
Recently Alan Greenspan has warned the politicians that there is a need to reform Social Security and Medicare, that the benefits promised to the masses by succeeding governments can never be fulfilled, but which politician is going to tell America's voters that they will get less than they expected?
Within the not too distant future all those foreign holders of U.S. paper will wish they had never heard of dollars. It may turn out to be like lending money to Argentina in the 1980's or to Germany in the
early '20's or Russia before WWI, but this time the effects will be far greater.
On Friday, September 3, The Independent,
a daily paper in the UK, featured an article entitled "Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards". Some of the revelations were that, according to the UN, there are 191 countries in the World and the U.S. military is ensconced in 130 of them. Before the invasion of Iraq, 43 percent of the entire world's military spending was spent by the U.S. in "defending their freedom".
Although the largest simultaneous protest in World history occurred on February 21, 2003, with an estimated 10 million individuals participating, the policy of the "pre-emptive" strike against a one time ally went ahead.
In April 2003, the White House estimated that the actual monthly cost of the U.S. military presence in Iraq would be about $2 billion. According to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in 2004 the actual cost is $4billion per month. In 2000 Vice President Dick Cheney stated that his policy as CEO of the Halliburton oil services company was that "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq". To date, a total of $4.7 billion of contracts has been awarded to Halliburton in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the escalating costs of the "rebuilding" of those countries have not yet surfaced. Just to illustrate a point, the Independent mentions that a $15 million contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq was completed by an Iraqi firm for the princely sum of $80,000, financed from Saddam's confiscated funds after delays prevented the American firm from starting it. This huge disparity between the virtual reality created by the USA and funded by debt and market forces will soon unravel. They always have. Cycles repeat.
- George W. Bush,
Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004
Imagine being prescribed a course of pills made of sugar and paste. They contain no active ingredients that could possibly alter the course of your illness, let alone make you better. And yet you do get better. The dummy pills work a strange kind of magic. There is in fact a great body of evidence to suggest that placebo or dummy treatments can sometimes work as well or even better than real medicines. Patients on placebos can even experience side-effects that mimic real drugs.
Nor is it just a matter of the patient responding to the illusion of treatment- objective measurements of symptoms such as blood pressure and post-operative swelling have found real physical changes. A report by England's House of Lords Science and Technology Committee in 2000 found that: "The placebo effect is not just an imagined experience but can positively improve objective biological measures of health."
This is the effect that the Republican Party were hoping for when they held their recent convention in New York and began to sugar coat the profile of their esteemed leader-George W. Bush.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, the 107th Mayor of the New York City, compared Bush with Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill. If you recall, Mr. Giuliani was the Major of New York at the time of 9/11 and did such a good job at adding courageous resolve to the situation that he became Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 2001. The article that accompanied this accolade revealed that the traumatic events of the time made him identify with Churchill and the people of London during the Blitz in 1940 who had to keep up their spirit during a sustained bombing campaign and impending defeat by what appeared to many as an unstoppable enemy.
At the convention, Giuliani passed on the mantle of Churchill to George W., who, when the 9/11 attacks came, disappeared from the nation's radar for hours and didn't return to Washington until it was determined he wouldn't be in danger. (Churchill, on the other hand, appeared on the streets when the bombs rained down on London in order to bolster the spirit of the people).
While the great and the good lauded plaudits on their leader, other records were being set on the streets outside the virtual world inhabited by the leaders of the masses. As the Hollywood star 'The Terminator' praised the "character and leadership" of President Bush and stated that "America is back," five thousand people protesting against high job losses formed a three-mile unemployment line in Manhattan. During the seven days that the convention lasted, more than 1,760 arrests were made, a record for a U.S. political convention.
According to Bloomberg, on each day that passes the United States spends $2 billion it doesn't have. Each day, the Republican government adds about $1 billion to the debt of the world's No. 1 economy and the U.S. consumer spends $1 billion more than he or she earns, with spending rising eight times faster than income.
The Daily Reckoning (www.daily-reckoning.com) estimates that 80 percent of all the savings of everyone on the planet are needed just to keep the U.S. afloat.
So far the pre-eminence of the USA has been unquestioned, as the dollar has been the reserve currency of the World and the Fed has acted as a lender of last resort. But the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value since the Fed was set up in 1913 and has further to fall as the debt burden amassed by the most profligate country in history can never be repaid.
Recently Alan Greenspan has warned the politicians that there is a need to reform Social Security and Medicare, that the benefits promised to the masses by succeeding governments can never be fulfilled, but which politician is going to tell America's voters that they will get less than they expected?
Within the not too distant future all those foreign holders of U.S. paper will wish they had never heard of dollars. It may turn out to be like lending money to Argentina in the 1980's or to Germany in the
early '20's or Russia before WWI, but this time the effects will be far greater.
On Friday, September 3, The Independent,
a daily paper in the UK, featured an article entitled "Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards". Some of the revelations were that, according to the UN, there are 191 countries in the World and the U.S. military is ensconced in 130 of them. Before the invasion of Iraq, 43 percent of the entire world's military spending was spent by the U.S. in "defending their freedom".
Although the largest simultaneous protest in World history occurred on February 21, 2003, with an estimated 10 million individuals participating, the policy of the "pre-emptive" strike against a one time ally went ahead.
In April 2003, the White House estimated that the actual monthly cost of the U.S. military presence in Iraq would be about $2 billion. According to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in 2004 the actual cost is $4billion per month. In 2000 Vice President Dick Cheney stated that his policy as CEO of the Halliburton oil services company was that "we wouldn't do anything in Iraq". To date, a total of $4.7 billion of contracts has been awarded to Halliburton in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the escalating costs of the "rebuilding" of those countries have not yet surfaced. Just to illustrate a point, the Independent mentions that a $15 million contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq was completed by an Iraqi firm for the princely sum of $80,000, financed from Saddam's confiscated funds after delays prevented the American firm from starting it. This huge disparity between the virtual reality created by the USA and funded by debt and market forces will soon unravel. They always have. Cycles repeat.
