Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[Jahn]

True, Financial Times even says that the actual drop after re-levelling the market with three banks nationalised constituted 0.5%, but the overall blue-chip drop was nevertheless 76%. It says quite a bit about what the Icelandinc blue-chip index is made of.

B a n k s, eeh.

[erik]

Yeah, and no economy lives only on shylocks.
It is interesting, though, that Dubya is planning nationalisation of the Wall Street.

[erik]

Pak on the verge of collapse?

New intelligence report says Pakistan is 'on the edge'

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53926.html

By Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A growing al Qaida-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army's reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America's key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence, says a soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment.

A U.S. official who participated in drafting the top secret National Intelligence Estimate said it portrays the situation in Pakistan as "very bad." Another official called the draft "very bleak," and said it describes Pakistan as being "on the edge."

The first official summarized the estimate's conclusions about the state of Pakistan as: "no money, no energy, no government."

Six U.S. officials who helped draft or are aware of the document's findings confirmed them to McClatchy on the condition of anonymity because NIEs are top secret and are restricted to the president, senior officials and members of Congress. An NIE's conclusions reflect the consensus of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.

The NIE on Pakistan, along with others being prepared on Afghanistan and Iraq, will underpin a "strategic assessment" of the situation that Army Gen. David Petraeus, who's about to take command of all U.S. forces in the region, has requested. The aim of the assessment — seven years after the U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan — is to determine whether a U.S. presence in the region can be effective and if so what U.S. strategy should be.

The findings also are intended to support the Bush administration's effort to recommend the resources the next president will need for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan at a time the economic crisis is straining the Treasury and inflating the federal budget deficit.

The Afghanistan estimate warns that additional American troops are urgently needed there and that Islamic extremists who enjoy safe haven in Pakistan pose a growing threat to the U.S.-backed government of Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

The Iraq NIE is more cautious about the prospects for stability there than the Bush administration and either John McCain or Barack Obama have been, and it raises serious questions about whether the U.S. will be able to redeploy a significant number of troops from Iraq to Afghanistan anytime soon.

Together, the three NIEs suggest that without significant and swift progress on all three fronts — which they suggest is uncertain at best — the U.S. could find itself facing a growing threat from al Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups, said one of the officials.

About the only good news in the Pakistan NIE is that it's "relatively sanguine" about the prospects of a Pakistani nuclear weapon, materials or knowledge falling into the hands of terrorists, said one official.

However, the draft NIE paints a grim picture of the situation in the impoverished, nuclear-armed country of 160 million, according to the U.S. officials who spoke to McClatchy.

The estimate says that the Islamist insurgency based in the Federally Administered Tribal Area bordering Afghanistan, the suspected safe haven of Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, is intensifying.

However, according to the officials, the draft also finds that the Pakistani military is reluctant to launch an all-out campaign against the Islamists in part because of popular opposition to continuing the cooperation with the U.S. that began under Pervez Musharraf, the U.S.-backed former president, after the 9/11 attacks.

Anti-U.S. and anti-government sentiments have grown recently, stoked by stepped-up cross-border U.S. missile strikes and at least one commando raid on suspected terrorist targets in the FATA that reportedly have resulted in civilian deaths.

The Pakistani military, which has lost hundreds of troops to battles and suicide bombings, is waging offensives against Islamist guerrillas in the Bajaur tribal agency and Swat, a picturesque region of the North West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan. U.S. officials said insurgent attacks on Pakistani security forces provoked the Pakistani army operations.

The Pakistan general staff also remains concerned about what it considers an ongoing threat to its eastern border from its traditional foe, India, the draft NIE finds, according to the U.S. officials.

For these reasons, they said, the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, wants the new civilian coalition government of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to provide the military with political cover by blessing a major anti-insurgency crackdown.

However, the ruling coalition, in which President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto, holds the real authority, has been preoccupied by other matters, according to the draft NIE.

These include efforts to consolidate its power after winning a struggle that prompted its main rival, the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, to leave the ruling coalition.

Moreover, widespread anti-U.S. anger has left the coalition deeply divided over whether to unleash a major military assault on the Islamists, the U.S. officials said.

The government is also facing an accelerating economic crisis that includes food and energy shortages, escalating fuel costs, a sinking currency and a massive flight of foreign capital accelerated by the escalating insurgency, the NIE warns.

The Pakistani public is clamoring for relief as the crisis pushes millions more into poverty, giving insurgent groups more opportunities to recruit young Pakistanis.

(Warren P. Strobel and Nancy A. Youssef contributed to this article.)

[nichi]

Jen, thought you'd find interesting that there is a counter-campaign to the one you received in your email. I just received this --

Please watch the video, sign and forward. Words can't describe how disgusting it's become. Stop the Hate! Don't let McCain and Palin undo the decades spent fighting for civil rights and equality in our country.
 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: info@bravenewfilms.org
Sent: 10/14/2008 11:39:23 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: Tell McCain to End the Politics of Hate
 
 1. Watch the video 
2. Sign the petition
3. Send the video to your friends 

Dear Susan,
We'd like to talk about the pressing issues facing our country: the woeful economy, rising unemployment, the housing crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we can't talk about them because John McCain and Sarah Palin have distracted us with the politics of hate and fear.

Instead of discussing the real issues plaguing Americans, McCain and Palin have turned to fear-mongering and race-baiting, stoking the prejudices of their supporters. The situation has become so critical that we've teamed up with Color of Change to put an end to these dangerous mob scenes.

Watch the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5mdIPNB8t8
<span data-s9e-mediaembed="youtube" style="display:inline-block;width:100%;max-width:640px"><span style="display:block;overflow:hidden;position:relative;padding-bottom:56.25%"><iframe allowfullscreen="" loading="lazy" scrolling="no" style="background:url(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/U5mdIPNB8t8/hqdefault.jpg) 50% 50% / cover;border:0;height:100%;left:0;position:absolute;width:100%" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/U5mdIPNB8t8"></iframe></span></span><br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/U5mdIPNB8t8&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/U5mdIPNB8t8&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1</a>


Things have gotten so out of control that some conservatives have come forward to denounce McCain and Palin's hate-mongering. In an Op-Ed for The Baltimore Sun, Frank Schaeffer writes: "John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as "not one of us," I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence."

Here's how you can take action:

Sign the open letter calling on McCain and Palin to reject the politics of hate.
Sign up for a free video subscription and get the latest on the real McCain.
Send this video to your friends, and post it on your blogs and networking sites like Digg, where it will effectively reach those outside the choir.
Don't let McCain and Palin undo the decades spent fighting for civil rights and equality in our country.

Yours,
Robert Greenwald
and the Brave New team

------
Brave New Films is supported by members like you, please consider making a donation. You can get all our latest videos via email, RSS, iTunes or YouTube here. To stop receiving updates from us, click here. We are located at 10510 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232 and info@bravenewfilms.org.

With feelings this intense, I'm sensing a no-win situation. Either Obama will lose, and that hate-mentality will take a greater hold than it ever has.
Or Obama will win, and then have to dodge the logical outcome of all this rolling intensity.

In either case, it does not bode well.

[xero]

 Zeitgeist: Addendum

http://m1e.net/c?85760000-AgPQOLcmungug%403678743-c0Y5lTpmmUTZI

[erik]

Fishing for answers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/17/iceland-creditcrunch

Jon Henley
The Guardian,
Friday October 17 2008

Once one of the poorest, most isolated countries in Europe, Iceland shot to prosperity in the 1990s, its companies buying up everything from Hamleys to West Ham United and Saks Fifth Avenue. Now, it is on the brink of financial ruin. Where did it all go wrong? And how can it survive economic meltdown? Jon Henley reports

The fish, of course, were first. The banks didn't come until much, much later, and with them the high-interest savings accounts and insanely leveraged investment vehicles, and the marauding young men with names such as Thor and Björgólfur whose debt-driven raids on bastions of the British high street made them, for a few brief years, the stars of the global credit party.

But always, out there, were the fish. And as a shell-shocked Iceland now stares national bankruptcy full in the face, it's to the fish that it will have to return. And maybe to Björk. But more of her later.

There are no two ways about it, Reykjavik docks smell. Pay the taxi driver, in coins stamped with the image of an alarmingly large cod, open the car door and you're assailed by an overpowering stench of herring, haddock, halibut, saithe, whiting and something called deep sea redfish.

Up the stairs, in an air-conditioned office with a picture window that looks out across clear water to the looming slopes of Mount Esja,

Eggert Gudmundsson, boss of the country's biggest fishing business, HB Grandi, is in philosophical mood.

"All this, what has happened," he says, "it has not been led by that big a group of people. We are hardworking, we Icelanders, but we are also a bit excitable. We are maybe more hunters than farmers. If we see a way to make quick money, we will jump. And a lot of people, that's true, jumped. Now we are all going to have to work very hard together to get ourselves out of this. We will have to go back to what we know."

A few hundred yards away, just off Reykjavik's main shopping street, in a chaotic studio scattered with shining skulls, acrylic-coated ravens and T-shirts bearing the apposite message He Who Fears Death Cannot Enjoy Life, the artist Jón Saemundur Anderson is thinking out loud, too.

"There's shame, yes," he says, "and humiliation. And anger at the country losing so much, all because a few boys were playing around with other people's money. But this whole thing, this long big spending spree, it was just a phase, you know? It hasn't changed Iceland. This could even be good for us. Take us back to what we really are."

Palme Vidar, with the wisdom of 73 years, is equally ruminative. "This is a small country," he says. "We have always swung, between feast and famine. There have been terrible times before, too, when the sheep bubble burst and the herring fleet failed. We always hang on. And you know, we were not going in a good direction. When I was a boy, if you went to the harbour to fish and you got wet, you could not fish again until the next day, because you had only one pair of trousers. Today people have too many trousers."

There's a lot of thinking going on in Iceland these days.

In 1936, the poets WH Auden and Louis MacNeice came here for the summer. Iceland was, at that time, one of the poorest, most inward-looking and isolated countries in Europe. This bleak volcanic outcrop in the middle of the North Atlantic was, for them, "holy ground", ancient and mystical. Auden delighted in the dreamlike qualities of the landscape, but was dismayed by the insularity of the people, their life and culture.

The food was dreadful, he complained, especially the putrefied shark's meat in sour milk. The outside world seemed not to touch a population numbering fewer than 120,000 (even today, Iceland has barely 300,000 inhabitants, not much more than, say, Doncaster). Reykjavik itself, Auden moaned, was "the worst possible sort of provincial town as far as amusing oneself is concerned, and there was nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence".

He wouldn't recognise it now, that's for sure. In the clean and, for the moment, still-prosperous streets of Reykjavik, Porsches jostle for parking space with enormous new 4x4s. Designer bars, all black leather, cream walls and ironically stuffed animals, rub shoulders with concept stores piled high - really - with Icelandic fashion. Restaurants offer "modern Icelandic cuisine", which turns out to be fish cooked in an exotic and over-complicated manner, but at least looks pretty cool.

The transformation was absurdly swift. In 1943, Iceland was still a forgotten outpost of Denmark. In the 70s, it fought a series of nasty little fishing wars with Britain (and won, which might perhaps give Gordon Brown pause for thought when the lawsuits start flying - as they may well do - over his freezing of Icelandic banks' assets in the UK). It had no functioning stock market until 1990. Then, in the mid-1990s, it privatised its banks, slashed corporation tax, and a couple of Viking entrepreneurs made a shedload of money in Russia. From nowhere, Iceland suddenly topped the UN Human Development Index last year as the most developed country in the world, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development declared it, per capita, the fifth richest nation on earth. Icelandic companies owned everything from Hamleys to West Ham United to Saks Fifth Avenue. Since then, obviously, it's all gone a bit pear-shaped.

"Things just get worse every day," sighs Erla Hlynsdottir, standing, understandably bemused, outside the clapboard former restaurant from where the prime minister has just addressed the nation. "I have nothing, actually, so I've nothing to lose. But you wake up each morning and there's something else bad. First one bank's nationalised, then two, then all three. Then we ask Russia for help. Then your government says it's suing us. The stock market shuts. And now we're banging on the doors of the International Monetary Fund. How deep in this really are we?"

Pretty deep, is the answer. Iceland (or, to be fairer, a few dozen risk-happy Icelandic bankers and businessmen) has borrowed way, way too much, piling up debts worth maybe 10 times the country's entire GDP. Worse, it borrowed cheap and it borrowed abroad, which looked a good deal at the time but is now terrible, because in a global credit squeeze those debts cannot be refinanced.

The national currency, as Professor Olafur Isleifsson of the University of Reykjavik puts it, has gone "a very long way south" and won't be coming back any time soon, so even if those debts could be rolled over, there aren't enough kronur in Iceland to make the repayments.

Since the Reykjavik stock market has also sunk without trace (it reopened this week after a short closure, and instantly plunged 76%) and inflation is firmly in double-digit territory, the question is quite simply whether the government can possibly bail everyone out. At present, it seems not. An International Monetary Fund rescue package looks inescapable.

Twenty years ago, a world financial crisis might barely have touched Iceland. Today though, it is, in the economists' phrase, globally engaged. And while by a cruel irony it never even touched the toxic sub-prime stuff that proved everyone else's downfall, it is still the meltdown in microcosm: driven, like the rest of us, to the brink of ruin by profit-hungry risk-takers who had closed their eyes to the dangers of what they were doing. Iceland is suffering more than the rest of us because, proportionately, it is so much more exposed.

If a couple of banks go bust in America, observes the country's ever-courteous prime minister, Geir Haarde, "it's dramatic, but not fatal". If a couple of banks go bust in Iceland, on the other hand, "that's this country's entire financial sector disappeared". What Iceland has learned from this whole frightening experience, he wearily concludes, "is that it is not wise for a small country to take a lead in international banking".

Iceland is certainly heading for hard times. The private jets (there were once so many that a local MP fought for flight restrictions at the airport); the Range Rovers bought with baskets of Japanese yen and Swiss francs; the magnums of Veuve Clicquot and Louis Roederer in the designer bars; the foreign holidays to Mexico and Grand Bahama are history. In the newpaper small ads, desperate men are now offering up to £3,500 to anyone prepared to take their new car - and the foreign loan that paid for it - off their hands.

But this will cut deeper than that. The discount Bonus supermarket has enough imported food left for about a fortnight, and the manager is not sure quite where the foreign currency will come from to buy more. According to the Icelandic trade federation, foreign suppliers are suddenly demanding payment up front. Shipments of food, medicines and oil are being given priority, but there is a real chance that Iceland will soon be running short of such "non-essential" goods as clothes.

"It's going to be very tough for a lot of ordinary people who understand nothing of all this," says Asbjörn Jonsson, a third-generation fisherman. "People are afraid. Ordinary, cautious Icelanders invested their savings in bank stocks, thinking they'd be more secure. Now we don't know what will happen tomorrow, let alone next month. Well, we know now that money is not made in banks. It's made by real people working hard at real jobs."

Throughout these few rollercoaster months of credit crunch, stockmarket turmoil and, finally, wholesale inter-government rescue of the global financial system, economists, commentators and (mainly left-leaning) politicians have been suggesting that it would mark the end of the unbridled, deregulated capitalism unleashed in the Thatcher-Reagan years; the death of the masters of the universe and their unreal, incomprehensible "fictitious economy". Things will have to get real again.

If that's so, then Iceland might, eventually, be all right. "The fundamentals are good," is the mantra being endlessly repeated on the streets of Reykjavik, from prime minister to banker to economist to struggling small businessman to student. And it is, largely, true. At least, unlike some countries one could name, Iceland has a real economy. Finnur Oddsson, managing director of the chamber of commerce, describes it with a fluency born of much recent practice.

Iceland, he says, has spectacular natural resources: the fish, of course, but also a surfeit of green energy (the island is a world leader in geo-thermal power, heating more than 90% of its homes this way and attracting big investment from energy-intensive industries such as aluminium). The average age is just 37, unemployment currently (though maybe not for much longer) stands at 1%, and women account for 46% of the workforce.

"It's going to be a long and rocky road getting out of this," predicts Oddsson. "But longer term, Iceland is solid. For crying out loud, we're only exploiting about 30% of our energy potential right now - if we increase that, we can virtually write our own GDP."

(Tourism looks like being an increasingly important little earner, too: what with the krona now being worth half was it was in April, interest in flights to Iceland from the UK alone is up 400% in a month.)

Gudmundsson also has reason to be optimistic. "I've just come from a meeting with the company's employees," he says. "They were worried; I told them they needn't be. Look: what Iceland needs above all is a sustainable source of foreign currency, which means exports. Fish are half of Iceland's exports, and this company is 10% of Iceland's fishing business: we are responsible for one in every 20 euros Iceland earns. We're a company this country really cannot do without."

There is a big issue, all concede, in the vulnerability of the krona. Iceland's future security is, unquestionably, in the euro, but that is unlikely to happen without some form of EU membership, now being seriously envisaged in Icelandic political circles for pretty much the first time. Unfortunately, the last thing the all-important fishing industry wants is to place its well-managed stocks in the hands of the catastrophe that is EU fisheries policy.

"But something's got to change," says Helga Jónsdóttir, a literature student and part-time waitress, striding along a wind-lashed pavement to work. "This can't be allowed to happen again. We got in out of our depth, that seems plain. Maybe in this new kind of world where everything is connected we just need to be a part of something bigger. We need security."

And Björk, then? A short walk from the stench of the docks is Hotel 101, the hippest of Reykjavik's many boutique hotels, and its bar, quite the coolest in a town that, over the past 10 years, has acquired a somewhat unlikely reputation for cutting-edge culture. (The hotel, by the way, was designed by Ingibjörg Pálmadóttir, wife of Jon Asgeir Jóhannesson, whose investment outfit Baugur bought half the British high street - and now may end up in big trouble unless it can flog its debts to the boss of Bhs, Sir Philip Green, or someone like him.)

Sitting in the bar is young Charlie Strand, a half-British, half-Icelandic photographer and writer who has just published a book, Project: Iceland, chronicling the lives of some of the artists, musicians and designers in the vanguard of this unexpected flowering of far-Nordic talent. He's not altogether sure where it all comes from, he admits.

"Maybe it's because the arts are so new here, there's no tradition anyone has to follow. The landscape, nature, definitely has something to do with it: there's a kind of mental freedom here, a desire to do things your own way. There's no celebrity culture, none at all. That helps. And no one makes real money being an artist in Iceland, which says a lot about their real motivation. But it's true to say there's a very unusual level of creativity here. And there's beginning to be a big interest in it from abroad."

If Björk Gudmundsdóttir is "the grand queen of edge", Strand lists a host of other musicians following in her wake: Sigur Rós, of course, but plenty of other critically acclaimed Icelandic acts are now capable of filling a venue with knowledgeable fans almost anywhere in the world: Mugison, the dance act GusGus, rockers Minus. "There are bands here," sighs Strand, "if they were in England, seriously, they'd be millionaires, in a fortnight."

Visual artists such as Hrafnhildur Arnadóttir, the Icelandic Love Corporation and Ragnar Kjartansson are exhibiting abroad to rave reviews; young Icelandic fashion designers are now working with big name collections in Paris, Antwerp and New York, and selling far beyond the country's borders. For a place a very long way from anywhere and with about as many inhabitants as Cardiff, it is, genuinely, an accomplishment.

Can it help pull Iceland out of its present trough? Maybe not, quite yet, financially. Jón Saemundur's T-shirts are worn by the likes of Metallica, Placebo and Quentin Tarantino; his work, inspired by 14 years of living with HIV, is on display at the Icelandic National Gallery; he performed on stage this summer at Glastonbury. But he too has watched aghast in recent months as the amount he owes on his foreign-currency mortgage has doubled.

In times like this, though, he says, creativity is important. "Our culture can give us strength," he says. "We are proud people, you know, and we've been through worse. When the volcano went up, a couple of hundred years ago, people were living in holes in the ground. There was never money here, not until well after the war. We can feed ourselves, you know. We have a lot of fish."

That's all nice and sound about returning to one's roots, etc., BUT...is there ENOUGH cod left in the seas? Will they empty seas in order to restore their wealth?

They're fishing superpower, these hunter-vikings.

[Michael]

I have been trying to make sense of this crisis. Two things are becoming apparent.

First, one thing has become obvious, those 'in the know' - meaning Central bankers, IMF, big business and Government treasury officials - are very very worried. Why? Surely now with these massive credit backing moves by UK, EU and US, we should be getting back to business as usual, aside from the fact that US has been heading into recession, which it was doing before all this began... so what's news there?

The reason for the cold hand of fear over the hearts of those in the know has now been revealed. It is called CDS. Credit Default Swaps.

I won't go into the technical details, except to say this was a clever method devised by the capital markets, behind the scenes, which they thought would protect them against risky financial dealings. These financial dealings are 'assets' which get traded between large financial institutions, and in themselves are estimated to be around $10trn.

The CDS's which are also traded, and which were supposed to provide security behind these asset trades, but which instead have done the opposite, by becoming nearly worthless, are estimated at around $55trn. A market valuation more than twice the size of the combined GDP of US, Japan and EU.

A whole that size in the global financial markets, is beyond the capacity of taxpayer's funds to rescue. All governments are impotent to heal this one. That's why the faces of certain people have been drained of blood.

The second thing is what does this mean?

It means the economic paradigm, plus the architecture which has grown from it, is now defunct. It also means the political paradigm of the 'right' has now been completely discredited. This is why McCain is losing in the US elections. People know - even if not the details, they know intuitively.

The implications of this are still only beginning to dawn on people. But we are at one of those major turning points in the history of our species. We are entering a new era, in which the community is replacing the individual. This is the crisis of the 'selfish gene'.

This can be witnessed in the US elections, where Republicans can't compete on issues like the Iraq war, or the economic situation, so they are having to fall back on the old ongoing civil war within the US. The Culture war.

They think they can stir up the Red tide against the Blue revolution of the 60's. But times have changed. It's not the 60's or the 80's anymore. People are scared. Lies will no longer win elections. This is now more a moral crisis than an economic one.

We stand at the end of the beginning, and from here on, we will watch the heart of humanity being tested.

The big boogie looming over this crisis, is world government. How long will humanity put off this obvious necessity? And where will the people and the ideas and the architecture come from, which will usher in such a phase?

Personally, I sense this crisis is just the softener. The storms that are coming will be far larger.

The world of humanity is now facing two revolutions - economic and spiritual. It is truly an exciting time to be living. But the weird thing, behind all this, is that the solution for each individual hasn't changed since the dawn of time. The mind, and the techniques, and the emphasis - these shift with the ages. But the real work has been the same, and remains the same.

[Taimyr]

The world of humanity is now facing two revolutions - economic and spiritual. It is truly an exciting time to be living. But the weird thing, behind all this, is that the solution for each individual hasn't changed since the dawn of time. The mind, and the techniques, and the emphasis - these shift with the ages. But the real work has been the same, and remains the same.

I thought about this the other day. I thought even if aliens landed on Earth, this wouldn't change it, the work on self is still the same.

[erik]

Yes, billions thrown at rescue are candy money compared to gaps with the size of trillions.

Cool time indeed! Time to have guts and effect the change where there are no known recipes for success...one just has to dare!

[Jahn]

In either case, it does not bode well.

Quite similar to my feeling about America today.
Even if Barack Obama wins the (s)election it is difficult to see that it would make that promised change. A great part of the citizens see him as a potential texxorist with a hidden agenda. How fruitful is that? A colored president is perhaps just too much for a great part of the society - andthat is contra productive. Add to this a extremely vulnerable situation in finance and the national budget. It is a slope for the US people whoever that hold the steering wheel.

Whoever that will run the US, what we see now is the beginning of the US Yang cycle, Yang means contraction/concentration opposed to, widening/expansion. The US will in the short future start to withdraw from global politics and focus on their own. Meaning that they close down a lot of engagement that they have today in many many countries. Also this will lead to a recession for the world economy but in longer terms of the next 10 years.

 (Heh, this forum will not allow the word t e r r o r i s t so it transform it to tefforist, therefore you see my "texxorist")

[Jahn]

I have been trying to make sense of this crisis. Two things are becoming apparent.

First, one thing has become obvious, those 'in the know' - meaning Central bankers, IMF, big business and Government treasury officials - are very very worried. Why? Surely now with these massive credit backing moves by UK, EU and US, we should be getting back to business as usual, aside from the fact that US has been heading into recession, which it was doing before all this began... so what's news there?

The reason for the cold hand of fear over the hearts of those in the know has now been revealed. It is called CDS. Credit Default Swaps.

I won't go into the technical details, except to say this was a clever method devised by the capital markets, behind the scenes, which they thought would protect them against risky financial dealings. These financial dealings are 'assets' which get traded between large financial institutions, and in themselves are estimated to be around $10trn.

The CDS's which are also traded, and which were supposed to provide security behind these asset trades, but which instead have done the opposite, by becoming nearly worthless, are estimated at around $55trn. A market valuation more than twice the size of the combined GDP of US, Japan and EU.

A whole that size in the global financial markets, is beyond the capacity of taxpayer's funds to rescue. All governments are impotent to heal this one. That's why the faces of certain people have been drained of blood.

Very good information M. Half true and half speculation though. The central banks has one tool they always can use, in states like EU and Scandinavia it is a rare option though, "God forbidden". But one can always try to bail out debth with the painful price of  inflation, and simply printing too much money while paying the debths. Like Zimbabwe the last decade and Germany in the 1920's and many other countries last century in South America and elsewhere. I do not think any country up here will use it, and Eu will never do it, but it is a option or rather a risk if things get crazy.

The US dollar has been almost 30 percent more expensive since this spring and we have suddenly an a all time high on the Euro. That is the price to have a own currency. However, this makes our export industry cheap and secure jobs. But a low exchange rate tend to increase the inflation rate. What we (Swedes) may see in the near future is a recession (car industry, health care sector, house building etc) and low interest rates  combined with an imported inflation.

As a sidenote The Swedish Riksbank is the oldest Central Bank in the World, so we have a few more lessons than many others. But "best of all" we had a bank and real estate crisis in the early 1990's that cleaned up a lot and made new rules for loans. They wrote the other day that our banks do what they shall do, lend money to trade and industry and people that are more or less able to pay the rent for the loans. Nevertheless, Standard and Poor has lowered Swedbank from it's AA position and another large bank announced great loss of billions in bonds. However all banks are making profits and are balanced with enough liquidity so far.

The second thing is what does this mean?

It means the economic paradigm, plus the architecture which has grown from it, is now defunct. It also means the political paradigm of the 'right' has now been completely discredited. This is why McCain is losing in the US elections. People know - even if not the details, they know intuitively.

The implications of this are still only beginning to dawn on people. But we are at one of those major turning points in the history of our species. We are entering a new era, in which the community is replacing the individual. This is the crisis of the 'selfish gene'.

This can be witnessed in the US elections, where Republicans can't compete on issues like the Iraq war, or the economic situation, so they are having to fall back on the old ongoing civil war within the US. The Culture war.

They think they can stir up the Red tide against the Blue revolution of the 60's. But times have changed. It's not the 60's or the 80's anymore. People are scared. Lies will no longer win elections. This is now more a moral crisis than an economic one.

I agree completely,  and I didn't know that the situation was so infected until I saw the video in this thread.It is a right wing dinosaur that are about to die.

We stand at the end of the beginning, and from here on, we will watch the heart of humanity being tested.

The big boogie looming over this crisis, is world government. How long will humanity put off this obvious necessity? And where will the people and the ideas and the architecture come from, which will usher in such a phase?

Personally, I sense this crisis is just the softener. The storms that are coming will be far larger.

The world of humanity is now facing two revolutions - economic and spiritual. It is truly an exciting time to be living. But the weird thing, behind all this, is that the solution for each individual hasn't changed since the dawn of time. The mind, and the techniques, and the emphasis - these shift with the ages. But the real work has been the same, and remains the same.

We can make a difference, like Jen do, like E do, like V do, like L do, like you and I do and like everybody all else here can do. We can do a difference because we have a physical body, and we can talk, we can listening, we can write, encourage, explain, read and sleep and continue to be connected to our genuine part.

Our Souls count minutes in this "war of change" and we can be great assets simply by doing the things that we want to do.

[tangerine dream]

 

Our Souls count minutes in this "war of change" and we can be great assets simply by doing the things that we want to do.

[Jahn]

Zeitgeist: Addendum

http://m1e.net/c?85760000-AgPQOLcmungug%403678743-c0Y5lTpmmUTZI

So please xero, give us a 2 sentences summary why we should watch this 2 hour movie.

[Jahn]

That's all nice and sound about returning to one's roots, etc., BUT...is there ENOUGH cod left in the seas? Will they empty seas in order to restore their wealth?

They're fishing superpower, these hunter-vikings.

I am sorry Juhani, but I have no time to read your quote - what did it say. Can you make a summary or a personal conclusion of it?

[erik]

I am sorry Juhani, but I have no time to read your quote - what did it say. Can you make a summary or a personal conclusion of it?

I clenaders have discovered that their banks have been washed out and situtation is worsening day by day. They need hard currency and something real to export. Now they are remembering that they have a huge fishing industry and turning their eyes full of hope in that direction.