Tiny Beautiful Things Gone

 “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”

- Frank Zappa

A Tyrant’s Best Friend

Architect of Destruction

Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural vision needed the support of authoritarian governments.

By DEMÉTRIO MAGNOLI

This past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine published a photo essay, accompanied by a single paragraph of prose by Julie Bosman, as a hagiographic memento for the late Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The photos were all of Niemeyer’s work in Algeria: four buildings built out of 12 designs approved. Bosman’s paragraph says that Niemeyer was “a Communist who fled to France following the military takeover of Brazil in 1964.” The passing mention of Niemeyer’s communism seems somehow to suggest that this was a badge of honor, albeit one that has nothing to do with his architectural style. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In a 1920 documentary one can see Le Corbusier rubbing a thick black pencil over a wide area of ​​the map of central Paris “with the enthusiasm of Bomber Harris planning the annihilation of a German city in World War II”, wrote Theodore Dalrymple in a tasty article for City Journal. The celebrated architect, founder of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), was busy designing a delusional, totalitarian fantasy: the Plan Voisin, a geometric collection of 18 cruciform towers of offices sixty-stories high supplemented by series of residential buildings outlining superblocks. That’s Niemeyer’s achitectural template. His communism was most certainly not incidental to his style. 

The Cathedral of Brasilia, as seen from inside.

Taste is just taste, of course. You might like the Capanema Palace in Rio de Janeiro, a 1936 Niemeyer design based on a sketch by Le Corbusier (I do like it, in fact). You might like the Cathedral of Brasilia (I love it), built in 1958, or the Itamaraty Palace (it’s gorgeous), the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry erected in Brasilia in 1960. You might even like the sumptuous headquarters of the French Communist Party in Paris (I do not), or the hideous Latin America Memorial in São Paulo, or the ridiculous Contemporary Arts Museum in Niteroi. But like or dislike, love or hate, there is no intellectual justification for separating the oeuvre of Oscar Niemeyer from its doctrinal roots. Niemeyer is an heir of the Le Corbusier matrix, the founding father of an architecture of destruction wholly devoted to the aesthetic of power and to hatred for history, living public spaces and, above all, common people.

Niemeyer was certainly no naive epigone of Le Corbusier, with “big boxes on sticks” (Frank Lloyd Wright), that were “a common hallmark of the modern form” (Lewis Mumford). This Brazilian was an inventor: His contours sinuously curved the masses of concrete, giving a tropical identity to modern architecture. But look again to the photos reproduced in The NYT Magazine: Niemeyer’s compositional strategies and his narrow repertoire of forms are not derived from purported renaissance or baroque inspirations, but from the neoclassical principles which are those of Le Corbusier.  

Main façade of the Itamaraty Palace and its reflecting pool.

Furthermore, Niemeyer shared with his master the fundamental belief in the “civilizing mission” of the state—namely, the state privilege of hoarding unlimited acres of urban land to carve the city (and society) according to the ideals of the ruling elite. The two architects, Le Corbusier and Niemeyer, demand the patronage of tyrants – or, rather, tyrants with a Vision. The New York Times Magazine does not tell its readers that Niemeyer’s Algerian projects overlap with the most authoritarian stage of the Boumediene dictatorship, between 1971 and 1975.

In the Brazilian press, Niemeyer’s death in 2012 (at the age of 104), was accompanied predominantly by two types of reviews. One kind stated that his work was genius because it reflected the “humanist thought” of the unrepentant Stalinist architect. This is an abominable opinion, but a coherent one. The other kind stated that his incredible body of work should be separated from his deplorable political beliefs. This is flimsy and inconsistent criticism. The architecture of Niemeyer, as of Le Corbusier’s, is not only a derivation of his ideological leanings but also a platform for his desired alliance between the architects and the tyrants. Le Corbusier served both Stalin and the collaborationist Vichy regime. “France needs a father”, pleaded the architect shortly before the publication of The Radiant City, whose title page says: “This book is dedicated to the Authority.” Here is the key to deciphering his work, and Niemeyer’s.

The Piazza della Signoria, which has no trees, is a wonder of the dessicated human spirit. You don’t need to be a romantic, nor do you need to shed any tears for the “green”, to be repulsed by the brutality of Niemeyer’s modernism. One doesn’t need to subscribe to the whole set of principles of organic architecture to repudiate the ignominious monumentalism of the Modern Temple. “The plan shall govern. The street must disappear”, wrote Le Corbusier in 1924, pointing to the direction adopted by Niemeyer. The destructive impulse is contained in each of the architectural interventions of both designers, whether the result happens to be beautiful or, more often, not.

Niemeyer’s buildings never establish meaningful or functional relationships with the surrounding structures, which he despises because they didn’t originate from his pencil. The residual spaces between volumes never acquire identity, functioning only as belvederes for contemplating his monuments to Authority. The larger the scale of the project, the more evident his “anachronistic modernity.” “The guiding role of open spaces, with its streets, squares, meeting places and markets” is diluted in Brasilia, “in a space without limits or other function than to frame isolated and sculptural buildings.” (J. C. Durand & E. Salvatori).

Niemeyer’s aesthetics make a political statement. In Brasilia, as James Holston has emphasized, the typological contrast between public buildings (“exceptional, figural objects of monumental nature”) and residential buildings (“repeated, serial objects of trivial nature”) epitomize the regressive utopia desired by the architect. A letter by Alberto Moravia to an Italian newspaper at the time of Brasilia’s inauguration as the capital noted that the city made ​​people feel “like the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput” seeking, “in the empty sky, the threatening form of a new Gulliver.” 

Read more at:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/01/09/architect-of-destruction/

The Fallacy of Overpopulation

The Fallacy Behind The Fallacy Of Global Warming

By Dr. Tim Ball

Global Warming was just one issue The Club of Rome (TCOR) targeted in its campaign to reduce world population. In 1993 the Club’s co-founder, Alexander King with Bertrand Schneider wrote The First Global Revolution stating,

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

They believe all these problems are created by humans but exacerbated by a growing population using technology. “Changed attitudes and behavior” basically means what it has meant from the time Thomas Malthus raised the idea the world was overpopulated. He believed charity and laws to help the poor were a major cause of the problem and it was necessary to reduce population through rules and regulations. TCOR ideas all ended up in the political activities of the Rio 1992 conference organized by Maurice Strong (a TCOR member) under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The assumptions and objectives became the main structure of Agenda 21, the master plan for the 21st Century. The global warming threat was confronted at Rio through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was structured to predetermine scientific proof that human CO2 was one contribution of the “common enemy”.

The IPCC was very successful. Despite all the revelations about corrupted science and their failed predictions (projections) CO2 remains central to global attention about energy and environment. For example, several websites, many provided by government, list CO2 output levels for new and used cars. Automobile companies work to build cars with lower CO2 output and, if for no other reason than to appear green, use it in advertising. The automotive industry, which has the scientists to know better, collectively surrenders to eco-bullying about CO2. They are not alone. They get away with it because they pass on the unnecessary costs to a befuddled “trying to do the right thing” population.

TCOR applied Thomas Malthus’s claim of a race to exhaustion of food to all resources. Both Malthus and COR believe limiting population was mandatory. Darwin took a copy of Malthus’s Essay on Population with him and remarked on its influence on his evolutionary theory in his Beagle journal in September 1838. The seeds of distortion about overpopulation were sown in Darwin’s acceptance of Malthus’s claims.

Paul Johnson’s biography of Charles Darwin comments on the contradiction between Darwin’s scientific methods and his acceptance of their omission in Malthus.

Malthus’s aim was to discourage charity and reform the existing poor laws, which, he argued, encourage the destitute to breed and so aggravated the problem. That was not Darwin’s concern. What struck him was the contrast between geometrical progression (breeding) and arithmetical progression (food supplies). Not being a mathematician he did not check the reasoning and accuracy behind Malthus’s law… in fact, Malthus’s law was nonsense. He did not prove it. He stated it. What strikes one reading Malthus is the lack of hard evidence throughout. Why did this not strike Darwin? A mystery. Malthus’s only “proof” was the population expansion of the United States.

There was no point at which Malthus’s geometrical/arithmetical rule could be made to square with the known facts. And he had no reason whatsoever to extrapolate from the high American rates to give a doubling effect every 25 years everywhere and in perpetuity.

He swallowed Malthusianism because it fitted his emotional need, he did not apply the tests and deploy the skepticism that a scientist should. It was a rare lapse from the discipline of his profession. But it was an important one.

Darwin’s promotion of Malthus undoubtedly gave the ideas credibility they didn’t deserve. Since then the Malthusian claim has dominated science, social science and latterly environmentalism. Even now many who accept the falsity of global warming due to humans continue to believe overpopulation is a real problem.

Overpopulation was central in all TCOR’s activities. Three books were important to their message, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) and Ecoscience: Population, Resources and Environment (1977) co-authored with John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar, and Meadows et al., Limits to Growth, published in 1972 that anticipated the IPCC approach of computer model predictions (projections). The latter wrote

If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.

Here is what the TCOR web site says about the book.

They created a computing model which took into account the relations between various global developments and produced computer simulations for alternative scenarios. Part of the modelling were different amounts of possibly available resources, different levels of agricultural productivity, birth control or environmental protection.

They estimated the current amount of a resource, determined the rate of consumption, and added an expanding demand because of increasing industrialization and population growth to determine, with simple linear trend analysis, that the world was doomed.

Economist Julian Simon challenged TCOR and Ehrlich’s assumptions.

In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000″ – a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with – Simon countered with “a public offer to stake US$10,000 … on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”

Simon proposed,

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted – copper, tin, whatever – and select any date in the future, “any date more than a year away,” and Simon would bet that the commodity’s price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.

John Holdren selected the materials and the time. Simon won the bet.

Global warming used the idea that CO2 would increase to harmful levels because of increasing industrialization and expanding populations. The political manipulation of climate science was linked to development and population control in various ways. Here are comments from a PBS interview with Senator Tim Wirth in response to the question,“What was it in the late 80s, do you think, that made the issue [of global warming] take off?” He replied,

I think a number of things happened in the late 1980s. First of all, there were the [NASA scientist Jim] Hansen hearings [in 1988]. … We had introduced a major piece of legislation. Amazingly enough, it was an 18-part climate change bill; it had population in it, conservation, and it had nuclear in it. It had everything that we could think of that was related to climate change. … And so we had this set of hearings, and Jim Hansen was the star witness.

Wikipedia says about Wirth,

In the State Department, he worked with Vice President Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting the administration’s views on global warming. A supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol Wirth announced the U.S.’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Gore chaired the 1988 “Hansen” Senate Hearing and was central to the promotion of population as basic to all other problems. He led the US delegation to the September 1994International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo Egypt.

That conference emerged from Rio 1992 where they linked population to all other supposed problems.

Explicitly integrating population into economic and development strategies will both speed up the pace of sustainable development and poverty alleviation and contribute to the achievement of population objectives and an improved quality of life of the population.

This theme was central to Rio+20 held in June 2012 and designed to re-emphasize Rio 1992.

The Numbers

The world is not overpopulated. That fallacy is perpetuated in all environmental research, policy and planning including global warming and latterly climate change. So what are the facts about world population?

The US Census Bureau provides a running estimate of world population. It was 6,994,551,619 on February 15, 2012. On October 30, 2011 the UN claimed it passed 7 billion; the difference is 5,448,381. This is more than the population of 129 countries of the 242 listed by Wikipedia. It confirms most statistics are crude estimates, especially those of the UN who rely on individual member countries, yet no accurate census exists for any of them

Population density is a more meaningful measure. Most people are concentrated in coastal flood plains and deltas, which are about 5 percent of the land. Compare Canada, the second largest country in the world with approximately 35.3 million residents estimated in 2013with California where an estimated 37.3 million people lived in 2010. Some illustrate the insignificance of the density issue by putting everyone in a known region. For example, Texas at 7,438,152,268,800 square feet divided by the 2012 world population 6,994,551,619 yields 1063.4 square feet per person. Fitting all the people in an area is different from them being able to live there. Most of the world is unoccupied by humans

 Read the rest at:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/05/overpopulation-the-fallacy-behind-the-fallacy-of-global-warming/

Virulent racists and fiendish eugenicists still forcing their genocical agenda

UN Unveils Plot to Reduce African Population

by  Alex Newman

The United Nations and its oftentimes barbaric population-control apparatus are under fire again after releasing a deeply controversial report claiming that the African population of Kenya is too large and growing too quickly. To deal with the supposed “challenge,” as the UN and its “partners” in the national government put it, international bureaucrats are demanding stepped up efforts to brainwash Kenyan women into wanting fewer children. Also on the agenda: more taxpayer-funded “family-planning” and “reproductive-health” schemes to reduce the number of Africans to levels considered “desirable” by the UN.

Critics promptly lambasted the plot as undisguised eugenics, with some experts calling it a true example of the “war on women.” Among other concerns, analysts outraged by the report noted that the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and the establishment’s fiendish efforts to slash human populations — especially those considered “undesirable” by self-appointed guardians of the gene pool — have a long and sordid history going back decades. Today, the agenda marches on, as illustrated in the latest UN report calling for drastically reduced numbers of Kenyans.

Especially troubling is the eugenics component of the agenda, critics say. “This kind of eugenics by the United Nations and their population-control conspirators is not helping the black family but turning large poor families into small poor families,” explained Mark Crutcher, president of the U.S.-based pro-life group Life Dynamics. Crutcher is also the producer of the hard-hitting documentary Maafa21, which exposes what he calls the ongoing genocide of blacks worldwide by prominent establishment forces.

The controversial report, produced by the Kenyan government’s “population” minions and the UNFPA, claims that — despite dramatic declines in fertility over recent decades — authorities must do much more to bring the population down to “desirable” levels. Citing debunked claims about what the UN views as “too many” people supposedly resulting in a wide range of real and imagined problems, the radical document outlines numerous schemes to reduce the population. Among the suggested plots: more taxpayer-funded contraception, re-education, “empowering” women, reducing the “demand” for children, and more.

“One issue surrounds the realization of the policy objective of reducing total fertility rates from the current level of 4.6 to 2.6 children per woman by 2030,” observes the report, taking special aim at the poor. “This is because the demand for children is still high and is unlikely to change unless substantial changes in desired family sizes are achieved.” Incredibly, the document also states matter-of-factly that there is a “need for rapid decline in fertility.” Thus, the UN population-control zealots claimed, “the challenge is how to reduce the continued high demand for children.”

The more than 300-page report, dubbed “Kenya Population Situation Analysis,” does not explicitly call for abortion. However, experts say anyone versed in the UN’s deceptive bureaucratic language would see the real agenda clearly. For example, the document is packed with references to so-called “reproductive health” and “reproductive rights.” As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in a 2010 speech, “reproductive health includes contraception and family planning and access to legal, safe abortion.”

Despite occasional claims to the contrary, the Western establishment and the UN have been working fiendishly to promote abortion worldwide. The self-proclaimed goal of the UNFPA, displayed proudly on its website, is “achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning) and promoting reproductive rights.” In Communist China, the UNFPA and its co-conspirators at Planned Parenthood have even been implicated during congressional hearings in forced abortions.

Another common theme throughout the report on Kenya is the alleged “need” to prod women into delaying marriage, family, and child-bearing. Some of the proposed methods for achieving that goal include “education,” with a wide range of schemes admittedly aimed at brainwashing African women into having fewer children. “The achievement of lower fertility is complicated by differences between individual fertility preferences and desirable fertility levels,” the report explains. In other words, the UN knows better than African families.

“Investing” in what the UN calls “education” and “health,” the document continues, would “contribute to the attainment of more favorable demographic indicators.” The “favorable” outcomes the population-control zealots are seeking, according to the report, include “lower fertility through enhanced contraceptive use” and “lower ideal family size.” The document also advocates getting more women into the workforce and government-mandated changes in “gender roles” as a way to ensure fewer African births.

“Sustainable development requires Kenya to be in a position to proactively address, rather than only react to, the population trends that will unfold over the next decades,” the widely criticized UN report continues, alluding to another one of the international outfit’s controversial ploys — sustainability — to empower itself at the expense of liberty, humanity, and national independence. “Universal access to sexual and reproductive health is still being constrained by a number of factors that are economic, social and cultural. UNFPA is expected to be in the forefront in supporting implementation of the Reproductive Health Policy.”

As with coercive sterilization in India and forced abortions in China, American taxpayers are unwittingly helping to fund the radical UN efforts across Africa. Last year alone, for instance, U.S. taxpayers were forced into providing more than $30 million to the UNFPA. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), meanwhile, spent almost $11 million of public funds in 2011 on “family planning” and “reproductive services” in Kenya. By comparison, it spent $60,000 on nutrition. With the Obama administration’s slavish devotion to Planned Parenthood, the UN, and the broader population-control agenda, those numbers are expected to continue rising unless Congress puts its foot down.

Read the rest at:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/africa/item/17291-un-unveils-plot-to-reduce-african-population

Bernanke's era of anarchy to go on

Money creation out of "thin air" is a pure redistribution of wealth

By Noureddine Krichene 

A recent survey by Transparency International put Somalia top of their country ranking for corruption; very amusing indeed; that top spot is due, in part, to acts of piracy committed by Somali pirates. 

Piracy is confiscation of wealth by brute force. Money counterfeiting confiscates wealth, and so does swindling. Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 10 years in jail, simply because swindling is a crime; his victims lost their wealth that they had entrusted to him. Yet, when outgoing Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke prints every US$85 billion every month out of thin air, this act is considered a virtue - even though it is forced confiscation of wealth. It is called an economic "stimulus" in that, according to its proponents, it boosts the economy and moves it towards full employment. 

Bernanke leaves office at the end of this month following destructive years during which he spread financial chaos, mass-unemployment, inflation, confiscation, and poverty in the US and beyond. 

The United States was enjoying great prosperity before Bernanke turned it into a country of desolation. His tenure as a policy maker and Fed chairman will be seen by history as an era of fallacies and anarchy. His unorthodox money policies and near-zero interest rates helped to bring about the worst financial nightmares in the post-World War II period, destroyed US banks, and set off currency devaluation in other industrialized countries. 

Ignoring the US Constitution and thinking of money as a baby's toy, Bernanke ruled with absolute power in money destruction. Comparing 2000, just before Bernanke joined the Fed board of governors in 2002, and 2013, we can say that Bernanke deservedly won the title "Helicopter Ben". Fed credit rose from US$0.5 trillion to $4 trillion, a multiple of eight. US government debt is now at $17 trillion, compared with $3.4 trillion before his move to the Fed. Crude oil is at $100/barrel compared with $18/barrel; gold rose from $250 an ounce to $1,300 an ounce. Food prices are at least four times higher. Stock price indices shattered all records in 2013. Yet US real per-capita incomes are far less than in 2000. That is Bernanke's legacy of disorder. 

Bernanke believes in a theory that stipulates that "money helicoptering" is the key to prosperity and full-employment. So fancy is this theory that it has been marvelled at by US politicians and academics alike. And it is so fallacious that many years of injecting vast amounts of money into the economy have utterly failed to achieve full employment, merely chaos. 

If his theory were true, full-employment would have been almost instantaneous. Contrary to sciences where relations are exact, economics theories may never be confirmed by facts. In exact sciences, there is an immutable relation between temperature and mercury expansion, for instance, which enables us to measure temperature with precision. In economics, there is no such exact relationship between zero interest and full-employment. If an exact relationship existed, Bernanke would have attained full-employment many years ago. 

He only encouraged intense asset speculation and brought about financial disorder, and impoverishment. He is not alone in this, for sure - many economic theories their proponents claimed to be exact, such as communism and Keynesianism, have failed miserably and caused disasters wherever applied. Now we can add or Bernanke-ism to that roll of dishonor. 

When Somali pirates get a ransom for a ship, no doubt this money will increase demand for goods and services by the pirates; it will squeeze the demand for goods and services of those who had to pay it. Piracy employment is uncertain and piracy itself amounts to a redistribution of wealth only - not the creation of wealth.

Read the rest at:

 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-070114.html

How Savers May Be Forced To Buy Federal Debt

Some of the worst tyrannies of the 20th Century began by expropriating the property of individual citizens

By William Tucker

As still another showdown over the national debt looms, some experts are concerned that the Obama Administration is poised to begin forcing Americans to stock their retirement accounts with low-return government bonds.

Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, told Bloomberg News that his new regulatory agency was mulling a move to control the $20 trillion that Americans have invested for retirement. He specifically mentioned 401(k) plans and IRAs.

“That’s one of the things we’ve been exploring,” Cordray told Bloomberg reporter Carter Dougherty in January. Cordray’s seemingly stray comment was largely ignored by mainstream and financial media, but won the attention of fund managers and economists.

Cordray suggested that “mismanagement” of individual retirement accounts by the nation’s major financial institutions could leave investors exposed, just as those who bought subprime mortgages were left in the lurch during the 2008 housing crisis.

Cordray’s agency is already moving toward regulating 401(k)s and IRAs. In April the CFPB issued a report questioning the “senior designations” that are awarded to individual financial advisors who manage retirement accounts. “In recent years, federal and state regulators, financial industry representatives and consumer groups have been reporting that some financial advisers with senior designations are targeting older consumers and selling them inappropriate and sometimes fraudulent financial products,” warned the report.

Although four financial companies – Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Charles Schwab Corp. and the T. Rowe Price Group – handle the largest portion of individual IRAs and companies manage their employees’ 401(k)s, a small portion of financial individual retirement accounts are handled by independent financial advisers.

The April report claimed that the CFPB had jurisdiction under the 2010 Wall Street and Consumer Protection (Dodd-Frank) Act, which directed it to “make recommendations to Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on best practices.”

“CFPB will be clearly overstepping its bounds if it makes a blatant political move to present itself as a protector of senior citizens,” says Mark Calabria, director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute. “Congress chose to leave oversight for retirement products at the SEC and Department of Labor. With the creation of the CFPB, Dodd-Frank is attempting to do for the rest of consumer finance what the federal government has done to the mortgage market — to completely politicize it and subject it to twisted incentives that ultimately cost both consumers and the taxpayer.”

Michelle Muth Person, an officer in the CFPB communications office, declined to be comment on plans to regulate retirement accounts but said that CFPB has “no immediate plans” for intervening in the management of individual accounts.

Despite the reassurance, economists and industry officials are still worried. “The runaway, unaccountable regulators at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau would like to ‘protect’ the IRAs of U.S. citizens by making them into a $20 trillion ATM for the government,” says economist George Gilder.

Critics fear that the CFPB would claim regulatory authority over IRAs and self-employed person pensions (SEPPs) on the grounds that seniors aren’t capable of handling their accounts and are being defrauded by the firms that manage them.

Then it would argue that corporate stocks and bonds are too risky and funds should be instead in the one safe instrument that is the equivalent of cash –- Treasury bonds, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. Of course, the returns paid by the federal government are far lower. Treasuries pay low interest rates and when combined with inflation, usually provide a negative real rate of return over time.

For now, almost every dollar in America’s individual retirement accounts is invested in the private sector — which earns higher returns than government debt. “I wouldn’t put it past the government to go after some of that money, almost all which is invested in corporate stocks and bonds or real estate,” says Curtis De Young, founder and CEO of American Pension Services, a leading financial advisory company.

 Read the rest at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/12/23/financial-repression-from-the-obama-administration-how-savers-may-be-forced-to-buy-federal-debt/2/

The going rate for sexual assault is just 5.000

America, here’s your cruel, senseless, immoral Drug War….

By Mark J. Perry 

About six weeks ago, I reported the disturbing case of David Eckert (“America’s cruel Drug War now includes forced anal probing of innocent victims by law enforcement agencies“), who was anally raped by law enforcement officials in New Mexico and their medical accomplices in a futile search for drugs that escalated through multiple cavity searches, enemas, and X-rays, and ended up with a forced colonoscopy.

Jacob Sullum reports today in Reason (“Drug Warriors Kidnap and Sexually Assault a Woman After Getting Permission From a Dog“) on another disturbing drug search case that produced no drugs, this time of an innocent 54-year old New Mexican woman who was victimized (kidnapped, sexually/medically assaulted, and raped to be specific) by law enforcement officers and their medical professional accomplices. In a failed attempt to find drugs following a false positive alert by a dog, the victim was subjected to multiple invasive body cavity searches of her vagina, buttocks and rectum by two different doctors, a forced enema, a forced X-ray, and an forced CT scan.

Result: No contraband. Then to add insult to injury, the victim refused to sign a consent form and is now being billed $5,000, apparently the “going rate for sexual assault and gratuitous radiological bombardment” as Jacob Sullum aptly describes it.

Jacob provides all of the gory details and then ends with this insightful commentary:

This kind of abuse tends to draw attention only when the victim is “innocent,” meaning he or she is not in fact smuggling drugs. But how can any society call itself civilized when it allows human beings to be treated this way in the name of locating arbitrarily proscribed substances? Having arrogated to itself the authority to regulate what people put into their own bodies, the government ends up forcibly delving into those bodies in search of the chemicals it has anathematized. To enforce politicians’ pharmacological prejudices, the government’s agents and their medical accomplices become kidnappers and rapists. There is nothing noble or decent about this immoral crusade, and anyone associated with it ought to be ashamed of himself.

 Read more at:

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/12/america-heres-your-cruel-senseless-drug-war/

Police Claim Teen Shot Himself In Head—While Handcuffed Behind Back

We are just collateral damage in their 'war on crime'

By Anthony Gregory

If the police found a dead body in the back of your car, hands tied behind the back, with a hole in the head, and your defense was that the person shot himself, how do you think they would react?

And yet this has happened in police cars at least three times. This time, in Durhman, North Carolina, a teenager, searched, arrested, handcuffed behind his back, shoved in the back of a police car, supposedly shot himself in the head with a firearm the police apparently had failed to find. If the cops’ story is true, we have a case of a suicidal young man who could have easily made a fortune on the Vegas strip mimicking David Copperfield, or at least done well as a contortionist on a traveling circus act.

The police chief explains: “I know that it is hard for people not in law enforcement to understand how someone could be capable of shooting themselves while handcuffed behind the back. . . . While incidents like this are not common, they unfortunately have happened in other jurisdictions in the past.”

Yes, they’ve happened in other jurisdictions. Or so other police have said.

Now, one doesn’t have to be a paranoid troublemaker to suggest another possible scenario.* A good detective would consider alternatives in the case of any homicide, and if a non-police officer were found with a body in the back of his car, the presumption would probably not be suicide. Of course, it is at least possible that the cops in this case are simply lying—that they had held the gun to the boy’s head to instill fear in him, and they accidentally fired the weapon, killing him, and came up with a ridiculous story to cover it up—one so ridiculous it just might work, as it’s apparently worked before. The other possibility, which in a sane world anyone would realize is also much more likely than suicide, is that a police officer simply murdered the kid in cold blood, execution-style, for whatever reason.

If the inquiry goes as it usually does, and the officers involved simply take a little time off and come back to work in a month or so, I predict we will be seeing this kind of thing happen much more often. If all it takes to explain this away is “he must have shot himself,” any economist will tell you the incentive structure will encourage more such mystery shootings.

There will be some outrage over this, some demands for more police accountability and transparency, as there always are. But it will not result in any sort of actual change in policy or meaningful restraint of officers. For one thing, American culture is thoroughly statist when it comes to law enforcement issues. It is the one area where folks skeptical of government are most likely to cave, as respectable members of society still fear ordinary street crime more than the police state emerging around them. Modern American police forces are characterized by gangsterism and a fetishization of “officer safety” as the primary value. The rest of us are just potential collateral damage in their war on crime. And perversely enough, there exists among conservative and other circles this myth that the media are too hard on police, and so they work overtime to support their local law enforcers. In truth, of course, the mass media hardly report the daily killings, injuries, false imprisonments, rapes, burglaries, and crime sprees police are responsible for in most urban jurisdictions nationwide.

 Read more at:

http://blog.independent.org/2013/12/16/police-claim-teen-shot-himself-in-head-while-handcuffed-behind-back/

2013 has been a busy year for the apartheid dictatorship of the Castro family in Cuba

Over 30 Ladies in White Arrested Today

Over 30 members of the pro-democracy group, The Ladies in White, were beaten and arrested today, as they tried to gather for a meeting in Havana.

Just another day in Castro's Cuba.

Has the international community decided that such systemic violence against peaceful women in acceptable?

If not -- where's the outrage?

In case you missed it, here's a picture of Marina Paz, a member of The Ladies in White, being beaten and stripped of her symbolic white clothing last week:

Paul Ryan And The Republicans Are Lackeys To Democratic Party Big Spenders

The principal role of GOP in Washington is to hold the coats of Democratic spenders

By Doug Bandow

Last fiscal year Uncle Sam had some budget good news. After running $1 trillion-plus deficits four years in a row, Washington had to borrow “just” $680 billion in 2013. Victory was at hand!

True, that was the fifth highest deficit in history, 50 percent greater than the pre-financial crash record. But it’s only the taxpayers’ money, so what’s the big deal? Politicians in Washington talked about the need to start spending again. There certainly was no justification for sequestration, which imposed a shocking, brutal, horrific 2.3 percent cut in federal spending. What were legislators thinking when they approved that reduction? The government and nation almost collapsed as a result!

Now Republicans and Democrats have come together on Capitol Hill for a new budget agreement which increases both outlays and taxes. Bipartisanship in action! That the Democratic Party wants to spend more is hardly surprising. But the GOP has demonstrated yet again that its principal role in Washington is to hold the coats of Democratic spenders when they raid the Treasury.

The legislation adopted by the House drops sequestration, which actually trimmed federal outlays, and hikes spending over the next two years by $62 billion. In return, Congress promises to lower the collective deficit over the next decade by $85 billion—while spending tens of trillions of dollars. The accord raises revenue, including a very real $12.6 billion in airline taxes. There are a few spending reductions—kind of. The bulk of them are entitlement caps a decade hence, which even Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, admits are of “dubious validity.”

After all, in the same bill the House GOP voted to drop discretionary spending cuts for 2014 approved just two years ago. Yet the new entitlement caps are slated to take effect after two presidential elections and four congressional elections. Which means the reductions will never occur. The best that can be said is that the new outlays are trivial compared to Uncle Sam’s gluttonous spending binge. The increase in so-called discretionary outlays will be overwhelmed by the coming entitlement tsunami. We won’t notice the extra bloat.

The only surprise in the sell-out was the role of House Budget Committee Chairman and 2012 Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Although no radical, he nevertheless had seemed committed to a more responsible budget path. Yet he traded real current spending increases for fake future spending cuts, a standard congressional tactic running back at least to the infamous Reagan tax hike of 1983.

Of course, holding only the House means the Republican Party has to compromise, as it learned during the recent health care battle. Shutting the government to defund ObamaCare always was doomed to fail. The Democrats held both the Presidency and Senate and could not be expected to abandon their only significant domestic policy achievement of the last five years. Moreover, no Congress can bind future legislators, so at most a one-year funding pause was possible. While the public disliked the federal health care takeover, most people were not inclined to hold every agency and program hostage in a GOP-orchestrated political battle.

However, a budget fight would have been far easier. The Republicans wouldn’t have had to perform the Maori Haka while chanting death threats against government agencies. The GOP merely had to support the fiscal status quo, sequester included, unless the Democrats offered equivalent alternative cuts.

The sequester was an arbitrary and inefficient tool, but it proved to be the only practical means of restraining federal spending. As my Cato CATO +0.23%Institute colleague Chris Edwards put it before Rep. Ryan waved the white flag, “In theory, Republicans have the upper hand in budget talks because current law specifies that discretionary spending will be modestly reduced in 2014 to $967 billion. Republicans always claim that they are for spending restraint, and here they just need to hold firm on current-law budget caps to save serious money over time.” Instead, the GOP tossed away its only weapon.

Earlier this year the Congressional Budget Office highlighted the stakes: “Between 2009 and 2012, the federal government recorded the largest budget deficits relative to the size of the economy since 1946, causing federal debt to soar.” The debt-GDP ratio “is higher than at any point in U.S. history except a brief period around World War II, and it is twice the percent at the end of 2007.”

Today the national debt exceeds both $17.2 trillion and runs more than $54,000 per citizen and nearly $150,000 per taxpayer. At 100 percent of GDP the debt burden is greater than in Europe. Before the GOP cave-in the CBO figured that in the best case Uncle Sam would add $6.3 trillion more in red ink over the next decade. The annual deficit would drop to “only” $378 billion in 2015. But then deficits would begin another inexorable rise. By 2023 federal ink would be $895 billion, warned CBO. The official debt-GDP ratio would have jumped by a third. This was the agency’s optimistic estimate.
....

Read more at :

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2013/12/16/paul-ryan-and-the-republicans-are-lackeys-to-democratic-party-big-spenders/