Tag Archive for economy

Oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Trade Deal

We have been told by our nation’s leaders that the never ending free trade agreements being drafted and approved in secret are great for America.  However, the reality is that these trade deals have all been at the expense of America.  The free trade deals have all but obliterated American jobs and industry and are being written by global corporations concerned solely with the bottom line of their most senior executives.  Most of us can at least remember Ross Perot’s famous “sucking sound” comment in reference to the disastrous effect the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would have on our economy.  He was laughed at then by Bush 1, but we aren’t laughing now as our battered economy barely maintains a pulse and Perot was proved correct.  Today we are being faced with the face tracking of the most egregious deal yet, the TPP, which will utterly destroy the last vestiges of American industrial power and ultimately bring down our economy.

As I warned over a year ago (see article), the TPP will utterly finish off what little remains of American industry and global dominance.  For those still willing and able to take the fight to Congress, now is the time to oppose this rotten deal that has been done in complete secrecy at your expense.  Even worse, the Republican controlled Congress has sold you out by aiding and abetting President Obama to get this deal passed without public scrutiny.  These traitors are accomplishing this by voting to cede Congress’ constitutional authority to approve trade deals to the sole discretion of the President.  So much for checks and balances John Boehner.  I have said it many times, if you think for a second that a Republican controlled government is any different and will stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law you are badly mistaken.  The difference between Democrats and Republicans is generally just semantic now and it would be better to refer to the parties more accurately as the communist party and the socialist party respectively.  Aside from a very few hold outs, Congress is completely bought and sold and you will pay the price for it if your apathy prevents you from action.  However you can find a way, raise hell with your elected leaders and demand that Congress retain their authority to review trade deals and that the TPP is stopped. Read more

Walmart’s Staggering Profit Drop is the Canary in the Coal Mine for US Economy

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February 20, 2014:  Today the world’s largest retailer posted a staggering 21 percent drop in fourth quarter profit and.  Walmart quickly blamed bad weather and cuts to food stamps, but this is a weak excuse at best.  Even Walmart doesn’t seem to buy their excuses because they slashed their profit forecast for the rest of the current year.  Per Walmart’s rationale, the cut would only be justified if they expected more snow this summer!  A closer look reveals a much direr situation in the US economy.  As the world’s largest retailer, a near quarter drop in profit is the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the US retail market.

Contrary to the endless spin vomited by the US mass media and Obama White House, the economic reality is grave.  The US economy never recovered and is about to fall off another, much larger cliff.  As a result of inflation, un/underemployment, high taxation, suffocating regulation, sky high food and fuel costs, centralized economic planning, massive debt, and an industrial base that has gone overseas, the US economy is now in shambles.  For the majority of Americans, they have witnessed over the last decade a near total destruction of their wealth and a rapidly deteriorating standard of living.  Americans no longer have the disposable income they enjoyed just six years ago and as a result are not spending money.  This fact has been demonstrated by repeatedly bad retails sales numbers that go much further back than any snowstorms can justify this winter.  As a result, the retail sector of our economy is suffering the initial brunt of the next wave of collapse.  The result of this will be a tidal wave of retail stores shuttering store fronts this year.  Already there are historic levels of vacant retail space in the US and this datum point is set to rapidly rise.

Consider that Wal-Mart earned $4.43 billion in the quarter that ended Jan. 31, 2014, which was over a BILLION dollars less than its posted $5.6 billion earnings for the same quarter just a year earlier.  A billion dollar difference!  The weather and food stamps simply are not sufficient to justify this near one quarter loss in profit.  For starters, let’s dispatch the snowstorm myth.  Every winter, including last winter brought cold weather and snowstorms that spread across the country.  Demolishing the food stamp myth is even easier.  First, if the majority of shoppers at Walmart are welfare and food stamp recipients, our country has already gone over the edge and no longer has a productive middle class.  This stat alone would spell disaster for the US.  Second, and more specific to dismantling the Walmart alibi, the amount of people and thus the overall amount of money paid out in food stamps actually increased over the period.  That would mean their profit from food stamp recipients should have gone up now down.  Furthermore, even though the food stamp programs’ overall $80 billion annual budget was only cut by about $4 billion, Walmart seems to think it alone endured over a billion dollar loss as a result.  Only a fool could conjure this type of math knowing full well that would represent well over 100% of what has allegedly been cut to date in payouts from the program.

Walmart’s excuse for the collapse in profits is a pure lie to placate stockholders and the real data are far scarier.  Illustrative of this fact is that Wal-Mart itself reports that its stores, which account for about 60 percent of its business, recorded their fourth consecutive quarter of revenue declines at stores that have been open at least a year.  This revenue report undeniably shows that revenues were dropping long before any snowstorms or cuts to food stamps.  No business, not even Walmart can withstand near 25% quarterly drops in profit for long.

What we are witnessing now is the collapse of retail, which will ripple throughout the economy in the form of job losses, higher unemployment, and even less income.  This will undermine government tax revenues, kill manufacturing, pop the housing bubble, and cripple the overall economy.  As we have been warning, the next, much bigger, economic collapse is nearing and you need to prepare.  Woe be the economist that shrugs off consistent reports of massive retail losses; especially, when they are coming from the world’s largest retailer.

 

By Guiles Hendrik

February 20, 2014

All rights reserved.

The stage is set for final economic liquidation of the United States: Detroit request 50,000 immigrants

What does a corrupt and dysfunctional government due with its constituents after it has sucked every last drop of blood from them?  Replace them of course.  Detroit is not liquidating its population in the sense of Mao or Stalin, but even a quick study of Detroit’s demographics will reveal it has undergone a mass exodus.  Detroit, the once vibrant industrial city is now no longer able to pay its bills, which has led to bankruptcy and an inability to maintain its infrastructure.  As the lights permanently go dark and packs of wild dogs roam the streets, entire portions of Detroit have been turned into gangland ghettos reminiscent of the prescient 1987 film RoboCop.  To “fix” the problem our “enlightened” elites created, Detroit’s government is planning to import 50,000 new workers (slaves) to Detroit.  However, what they aren’t telling you is that their idea of a “fix” and your idea of a “fix” are radically different and you are not going to like it.  The elite fix will be the final act in the economic liquidation of the United States…or in layman’s terms, an engineered economic collapse. The collapse of Detroit wasn’t destined.  It could have been averted if responsible fiscal policies had been instituted and a total takeover of the political system by unions and global corporations prevented.  However, this was not to be.  The marriage between government and big business was allowed to occur without protest and was actually welcomed much like President Obama’s dictatorial declarations in his 2014 State of the Union address.  Soon though, greed took control of Detroit as handouts became preferred over earned paychecks.  It wasn’t long after that the powerhouses of American industry lost their competitive edge.  As one business after another closed its doors, Detroit was stripped of its vital tax revenues it had reliably pilfered from the middle class and left with massive debts to cover the costs of the remaining non-productive elements within the city.   ’s huge and now growing debt became a time bomb with a short fuse that sealed its economic destruction.  In the wake of Detroit’s demise, the city has left an older generation of workers stripped of their pensions and retirements and a younger generation of unemployed.  As for its industry, well, it of course left the US. The propaganda pipedreams sold to the people of Detroit were simply dressed up lies that are designed to appeal to the masses, the “working classes,” the average hardworking Americans, but are pure economic poison designed only to solidify the status quo of the elites at the expense of competitive businesses and true economic growth.  This type of snake oil appears in many ways such as a minimum wage.  These policies sound great in the near term because they claim to insulate and protect jobs, but are doomed to fail over the longer term because they strip away a company’s need and or ability to be competitive in the true global market.  Without the need to compete, laziness and apathy creep into a business.  Innovation, research, and development are shelved because they detract from maximizing profits.  Instead of building better products and operating more efficiently, companies found it easier to simply control the market bureaucratically.  As this incestual, economic disease metastasized throughout government, laws were passed to further “protect” the “established” businesses and enrich the elites.  This biased the market against new and competitive businesses making it impossible for them to compete and killed any residual business initiatives.  As a result, only large, non-competitive, and highly inefficient businesses that could afford to buy politicians were left.  Of course this system was flawed, but by the time the Detroit woke up to realize the market was a global one, more competitive industries at home and abroad put the Motor City out of business.  This self-destructive economic cycle ultimately killed the host…the hard working middle class of Detroit.  Once the middle class were decimated, the tax revenues collapsed and Detroit effectively became economically insolvent. Elites tend to like to keep and expand their power and wealth.  As soon as the elites realized they no longer could maintain the status quo within the United States, they took their businesses overseas where they could find cheap labor to exploit for maximum profit.  This is often a result of centralized economic controls associated with leftist economic policies and unions that favor such things as an artificially high minimum wage and unmanageable pension plans.  These policies make it impossible for even a healthy company to compete against lean companies with low overhead.  As such, with the help of fancy marketing to the public and highly paid lobbyists, “fair” trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were passed.  The trade deals were written and designed to benefit the proverbial 1% and not the middle class.  The real effect would be to destroy national borders and tip the balance of “fairness” against the US worker.  The elites knew this meant that the American standard of living would plummet as industry and jobs flowed out, but not into the US.  This Machiavellian decision was made because America was becoming a saturated, stagnant market with high overhead costs due in no small part to union demanded benefits, high taxes, and oppressive government regulations.  In order to expand profits, the companies needed access to the global market and the fastest growing segments of the world population, such as in Asia.  NAFTA and the current, emerging, and highly secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement have and will, respectively, decimate the living standard in the US. Detroit’s demise should be a warning to anyone that believes globalist policies will lead the US to new levels of economic prosperity.  These same mechanisms that brought down Detroit are at work and in advanced stages now across the entire US.  BOTH political parties are to blame for this.  The Republican President George H.W. Bush signed into law the NAFTA and Democratic President Obama has unrelentingly forced a radical socialist/Marxist agenda upon the US to complete the globalist designs oft referenced by the former President Bush as the “New World Order.”  President Obama is also nearing completion of the super-secret TPP agreement with China, which if NAFTA is any indicator, will be catastrophic for the US economy.  Nonetheless, even without the foreign trade sellouts agreements, the economic and regulatory policies of the progressive left alone will be enough to crush the last remaining vibrant elements of the US economy.  The bottom line is centrally planned economies have never worked historically anywhere in the world and will not work in the US. So one may ask what does importing 50,000 immigrants have to do with helping Detroit.  The answer is it won’t help you and it won’t help Detroit; it will help the 1%.  The elites and their paid politicians have set the stage for the perfect storm of economic collapse in the US.  Detroit is the first pilot test.  Detroit will get a temporary boost of cheap labor that will be sold to the public as a way to produce tax revenue and rejuvenate the city’s ailing population.   However, it will further disenfranchise American workers, increase domestic unemployment, and diminish the US standard of living.  The guest workers will not be paying taxes because their income will be below the taxable limit, but they will certainly benefit from social welfare programs such as free healthcare, food stamps, subsidized housing, and welfare.  This will be a huge net loss financially for Detroit and the US, but that doesn’t matter to the globalists expecting windfall profits and living abroad.  In exchange for the sellout, the bought politicians get a readymade pool of new constituent votes via “amnesty” and more campaign donations from the global corporations to keep them in power.  In the end it will only be the wealthy elites of the global corporations that increase their profits, which from their offshore perches and beach front mansions in Monaco seem like a good idea.  The overriding premise of this is that cheap labor increases the profit margin of big globalist corporations allowing them to put anyone else not enjoying the same type of special favors out of business.  The paradox of this logic was noted ironically by Karl Marx in that if no one has money to buy the goods, the capitalist system will collapse.  However, that is the future and this is the now. So how does this perfect storm work?  Global corporations will have a new pool of what amounts to domestic slave labor that maximizes their profits.  They accomplished this by lobbying (paying off) politicians to pass amnesty, not enforce border security, and approve the 50,000 work visas for Detroit.  Detroit will be the first city to undergo this transnational corporate takeover.  This will put more Americans out of work because other “good” businesses paying legitimate wages can’t compete.  As the American workers lose their jobs and remain unemployed, non-Americans will be brought in to assume those American jobs, which will further increase the pool of under or unemployed.  Tax revenues will plummet as social welfare and public service costs sky rocket.  This will spread to more cities and put more and more people out of work.  As more cities collapse like Detroit, they will be next in line for “help” and will receive hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers.  As each city falls, the global corporations will continue to transition their workforce to cheap labor and continue to increase their profit margins.  Bought politicians will look the other way and proclaim the benefits of diversity.  This business model is only possible because our once free Republic has been turned into a complete social welfare state.  As such, the burden of paying a living wage is no longer on the corporations, but on you the taxpayer.  You, the dwindling middle class worker, will be responsible for paying the immigrant workers’ healthcare (Obamacare), food stamps, welfare, education/tuition, costs for municipal services, and housing subsidies to name some of the major welfare programs.  This burden will be unsustainable for a solvent country.  Thus finite, it will lead to the final economic collapse of the US even as key stocks soar from record corporate profits.  There simply will not be enough tax paying workers to support the welfare state leviathan and just as Detroit collapsed as its tax revenues to payouts went negative, so too will the US. To complete this logic, one must ask then what good it does the companies to collapse the US economy.  To understand, one must remember the corporations are “global.”  They don’t operate in a world of boundaries and borders.  Their practices are parasitic and predatory and operate for maximum profit now.  That means as our nation is bled of every last cent and economically destroyed, they will just move on to a new market like they did in Detroit.  The money the corporations make will be used to dominate the next emerging market and the cycle will continue with the American worker now the cheap labor supporting the more advanced economies in other parts of the world.  This leaves you stuck with the debt, poverty, and the tyranny of near absolute dependence on the government.  This dependence equates to government control (by the very same bought politicians that got you in this situation), which means you are no longer free and ruled by a corrupt elite.  You are now a slave and the globalists control you.

By Guiles Hendrik

January 30, 2014

All rights reserved.

Image © Albert Duece

The Final Presidential Debate: Lies, Truth, and the Collapse of US Foreign Policy

President Obama and Mitt Romney find it amusing you believe anything they say.

At first it might be hard to decide what candidate for president to believe, but the answer in truth is easy.  NEITHER.  Both have been part of the lies and corruption too long to provide any real positive substance to the debate.  Beyond more of the same political spin on old failed policies, you will hear no new ideas, many excuses, lots of finger pointing, and most importantly, no real strategy that departs from the failings of at least the last 11+ years.

For almost four years President Obama has continued many of the Bush-era policies while adding his own flavor of failure.  Libya is just one of the most recent examples of an Obama owned foreign policy disaster as the return of four dead Americans can attest.  By arming and supporting known jihadists, he set the stage for greater bloodshed throughout Africa and the Middle East.  Even worse, Obama also quietly sold American sovereignty down the river to push an internationalist agenda.  By allowing the United Nations Security Council and not Congress to be the single authoritative body to send Americans to war and placing Americans under foreign command without objection, Obama intentionally set a new precedent in international law that further erodes American sovereignty.  Obama just recently was stating how Al Qaeda was decimated, but unfortunately for him and his propaganda machine, reality reared its ugly head all across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.  To illustrate his colossal failure in the Middle East and beyond it is worthwhile to highlight some key events from just a couple short weeks in September.  During this very short timeframe a US diplomatic motorcade was blown to pieces in Peshawar, Pakistan wounding an American diplomat, four Americans to include an Ambassador were assassinated in Libya, numerous NATO forces were killed and wounded in Afghanistan by “friendly” troops and the Taliban, our embassies and consulates were attacked and torched in countries like Egypt and Sudan, Syria continued to deteriorate, and bomb blasts ripped through Iraq to name just SOME of the major events that affected Americans.  Moving beyond our unending wars with Islam, Japan and China moved closer to war, Russia reinforced units with elite combat troops on the border with Georgia, North Korea threatened America and South Korea with a nuclear attack, and the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant continued to release massive amounts of radiation…again, to just identify a few highlights.  On the economic front a near imminent disaster is facing Europe that will certainly collapse the global economy and take the US down with it.  Further, the US debt has spiraled past 16 Trillion and is picking up speed with no end or even cuts in sight for spending.  The true magnitude of the impending economic disaster will only be seen after the election and the temporary Band-Aids placed on the world economy to support President Obama’s re-election fall away.  No Mr. President, Al Qaeda is not on the run, we are.  No Mr. President, the world is not safer.  No Mr. President, our debt and spending have not decreased.  No Mr. President, our economy has not recovered.  No Mr. President, you do not deserve another term!

As for Romney, this is a man with no foreign policy credentials.  He is the man who somehow managed to already offend even the British before he was in the U.K. for a day.  This is a man who has already kissed the ring of Netanyahu and sworn allegiance to a foreign power in exchange for political support.  This is a man who thinks the policy era of George Bush was a success and should be brought back.  So much so, his advisors and potential appointees are all Bush-era retreads reshuffled.  To think America would allow Bush-era policy “experts” back into the White House after what we already lived through and expect anything to improve is simply beyond comprehension and must be put squarely in the court of idiocy.  In respect to Romney’s stated Middle East policy, war mongering would be an understatement.  Even though Romney is nothing more than a well-endowed draft dodger, he apparently thinks nothing of putting your sons and daughters lives in danger as he plots an even more disastrous round of wars with Syria and Iran for Israel’s security.  I guess he didn’t get the memo regarding how “well” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq went.  Nonetheless, he seems to think he can start a war with Iran and that somehow will benefit America although I would challenge him to justify this argument in the upcoming debates.  Further, he somehow believes that by giving more tax dollars to the incredibly over funded Department of Defense and starting a war with Iran he can simultaneously balance the budget.  In one of the rare cases of Bill Clinton being right, Romney’s numbers just don’t add up.  As a purported businessman, Romney must know this flaw in his arithmetic so it is fair to conclude he is stupid or lying to the public.  Beyond the Middle East, Romney has also managed to pick a premature fight with Russia and risks restarting the Cold War.  If Romney can’t even understand the consequences of wars in the Middle East, he is woefully unprepared to take on the likes of Russia and China in strategic policy.

America, your candidates chosen for you by the elites will not return peace and prosperity as they claim.  Instead, you will get greater debt, a worse economy, unending bloody and costly wars, and further destruction of your freedom and liberties at home.  We have seen both parties’ policies and they are abject failures, ignore the rule of law, and trash the Constitution.  Neither is acceptable.  Only by ditching the two very unqualified candidates and their establishment parties en masse can America hope to avert total disaster during the next four years.  The Democrats and Republicans do not represent your best interests unless of course you are an extremely wealthy donor, financial institution, or mega corporation.  Whether you disagree or agree, you, the citizens of the United States of America, will get the government you collectively deserve come November so choose wisely.

 

Below are links to a few recent articles illustrating the US strategic failure in Afghanistan:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/10/21/al-qaeda-in-afghanistan-is-attempting-comeback/

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/10/06/insurgents-kill-2-us-troops-in-eastern-afghanistan-bombs-kills-2-afghan/?intcmp=obinsite

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/10/13/blasts-in-southern-afghanistan-kill-2-afghan-policemen-3-intelligence-officers/?intcmp=obinsite